AI Coding meets Code Health 🪄 — with Stuart Caborn

Today's guest is Stuart Caborn, distinguished engineer at loveholidays, which is an online travel agency with millions of customers around the world.

I'm talking with Stuart because his team is doing AI coding for real.

They operate an extremely complex product and technology, with each engineer deploying to production more than 80 times a month, with more than 60% of production code being written with AI, all while maintaining an absolutely elite change failure rate under 1%, and with perfect code health.

So, let's see how they pull this off.

(01:29) Introduction

(02:30) What it loveholidays?

(06:04) Sponsor break

(07:00) loveholidays' AI approach

(10:16) Code quality

(13:36) Making quality visible

(14:52) AI, MCP and top use cases

(22:19) Code health and engineers' happiness

(29:35) How was AI implemented at loveholidays

(37:01) Experimenting with AI and skills

(42:30) How to spread AI into an org

(47:31) Guardrails in dev process

(56:40) Other process changes

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Today’s sponsor is Intent by Augment. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents: it starts with the living spec that updates as agents make progress, so every task stays aligned with no manual coordination. Try it for yourself at https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent

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You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm

• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw

• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]