I've built a developer platform around GitLab, and it's got some nice stuff, but it's not revolutionary.
But that's not all that relevant to the opportunity in front of them.
The opportunity, generally, exists because of their place in an industry that most folk believe will be very different a decade from now.
That belief is going to lead a lot of CTOs to try new things. When a company tries something new, it almost always picks a new vendor to work with, rather than adding complexity or risk to an existing vendor engagement.
Yes, there are other alternatives, but they are less well known, require self hosting, and/or are secondary products of companies with very broad focus.
Atlassian might be another, given how much of the rest of the software development cycle they have their hooks in, but many tech leaders have unresolved JIRA trauma. :)
Wow, I contracted in Jamnagar for Reliance building software back in 1999-2000. It was fun building a web interface to report on their IoT (not called IoT back then) devices - sensors, meters and whatnots through a CORBA/C++ interface. That was very advanced for those days.
This is not true in my experience at all. I never write such detailed spec for AI - and that is my value as the human in the loop - to be iterative, to steer and make decisions. The AI in fact catches more edge cases than I do, and can point me to things that I never considered myself. Our productivity has increased manyfold, and code quality has increased significantly because writing tests is no longer a chore or an afterthought, or the biggest one for us - "test setup is too complicated". All of that is gone. And it is showing in a decrease in customer reported issues
I don't know. I don't write detailed specs, but make it very iterative, with two sessions. One for coding and one for reviews at various levels.
Just the coding window makes mistakes, duplicates code, does not follow the patterns. The reviewer catches most of this, and the coder fixes them all after rationalizing them.
Works pretty well for me. This model is somewhat institutionalized in my company as well.
I use CC Opus 4.7 or Codex GPT 5.4 High (more and more codex off late).
Cool! We have a similar setup,connected to JIRA, but it stops at analysis and approach to solution. I'm taking inspiration from this now to take it to the next level!
I'd pay special attention to the harness that goes from plan to execute. We spent a lot of time ensuring this can produce high quality code that we feel good about in production instead of AI slop.
As for Jira, would love it if you contribute that integration to us! Someone asked for it in this thread :D
Yeah. We also use gitlab instead of github. I'll check this out later.
We also have set it up to work with multiple repos to truly understand context (we have frontend, backend, some tooling etc, an MCP server etc all in different repos).
Yes. Even without Claude design and just Claude code, it can use existing design and build out new mockups in-app, which is much easier to demo , tweak and then implement the backend (if any) - all through Claude Code (or Codex if you prefer that). We use both and are now leaning more towards Codex over Claude
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