# Embracing AI at Empower: Beyond Code Generation February 25, 2025 [James Garrett](https://linktr.ee/jamesgarrett) Read Time: ~9 minutes At Empower, we seek individuals who challenge personal assumptions, value ownership and trust, and strive for excellence to inspire and empower their team. If this article connected with you, join our team! Empower's engineering team is redefining what it means to use "the best tools" in a world where AI isn’t just a novelty, but a game changer. In his latest post, James Garrett shows how innovative AI tools are transforming on-call support, QA, and code reviews—taking the timeless principles of the Joel Test into the future. Dive in to see how early adoption is turning everyday challenges into competitive advantages. (AI Gen) Embracing AI at Empower: Beyond Code Generation - Tilt Engineering | Spotify ## On-Call Support: From Exception to Investigation For engineers, one of the most impactful ways we've integrated AI is in our on-call incident response process. Almost 100% of engineers will tell you they’re at least slightly nervous when on call. Now, unless it’s a familiar issue, the first thing I do is review our internal run books. If those are not satisfactory, the next step is a prompt such as the following: This has significantly reduced the time to resolution and made both my on-call duties as well as assisting with unblocking release issues less stressful. ## QA Engineers: Understanding Impact at a Glance Our QA engineers have found a particularly powerful use case: rapid impact analysis of a change and its impact across multiple platforms. With Factory, the team is now empowered with prompts such as the following: This generally provides a high level executive summary of what has changed. Sometimes you’ll learn it’s a logging-only change or a new database table that isn’t referenced yet. Other times you’ll learn this change has a larger impact. ## Product Managers: From Questions to Clarity Beyond our engineering team’s use of Factory, one of the most exciting applications of [Factory](https://www.factory.ai/) is helping Product Managers understand complex technical systems. PMs can now: - Ask natural language questions about how specific features work - Generate flowcharts to visualize user journeys and system interactions - Get quick explanations of technical decisions and their business implications This capability has dramatically increased productivity in product development discussions and helped bridge the gap between technical and non-technical team members. When Factory cannot get a satisfactory answer, you can prompt it for a clean handoff. ## Automated Code Review: The Power of the Review Droid Factory’s second product, the Review Droid, operates through a `droid.yaml` configuration file in your repository, which provides natural language prompts that get run against every pull request. Our experience as a beta partner has helped shape the tool's capabilities, and we've implemented several custom checks that have become common patterns for other teams. Some key checks we've implemented include: - Enforcing coding standards such as file-scoped namespaces for new C# files - Validating that Entity Framework queries include necessary navigation properties - Checking that strings in database schemas use appropriate varchar limits This automated review process helps us maintain code quality standards while staying true to our mission to rapidly work towards making our app better for our customers every day. > Catch and correct any obvious bugs in the code that would cause the code to not function as intended. This simple command has caught numerous small bugs. ## The Evolution of "Best Tools" Reflecting back on [Joel’s Test](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/) principle of using the best tools, it’s important that companies focus on enabling their development teams to do their best work. I’m excited to see where this goes, given Empower’s dedication. ## Looking Forward As one of Factory's early partners, we've seen first-hand how rapidly AI tools can evolve and improve. Our experience has shown that early adoption and active participation in shaping these tools can provide significant competitive advantages. The key lesson I've learned is that AI's value extends far beyond code generation and it’s not about replacing people; it's about enhancing human capabilities across all aspects of software development. ### About James Garrett I'm James, a seasoned backend developer interested in crafting solutions on the C#/dotnet stack. My career in software development has spanned both startups and Fortune 500 companies with startup-like cultures. In my toolbox, JetBrains Rider, macOS, The Azure Cloud platform, and C# are my preferred environments. What keeps me excited to come to work every day is our strong team-based culture.