Affirm Retooled for Agentic Software Development in One Week

https://medium.com/@affirmtechnology/how-affirm-retooled-its-engineering-organization-for-agentic-software-development-in-one-week-1fd35268fde6

by brd529 • 3 months ago

32 24 3 months ago

medium.com

scientaster2• 3 months ago

Any bets on how long it'll take for a security breach, now that every attacker knows affirm is vibe coding 60% of PRs?

I feel like these top down mandates miss the forest through the trees -- in isolation claude code is a speedup, like how sometimes WD40 is the right tool for the job. But when applying it to everything, you end up with a sticky mess.

dotdi2• 3 months ago

The funny part is that I never heard a professional tell me I should use WD40 for a specific task. It's been developed for (W)ater (D)isplacement, it's really good for that; and it's passable at other tasks too. For DIYers, it's fine.

For professional use-cases, targeted products are preferred, whether they be lubricants, penetrating oils, rust remover, etc.

dotdi2• 3 months ago

We move money, so mistakes are costly and quality is contractually non-negotiable. We build on a twelve-year-old monorepo with structural bottlenecks: bloated test suites, manual code review, unstable CI, and deploy infrastructure not made for the pace we need.

In my experience, each single item on this list already is a major hurdle for AI agents. The unholy union of all of them together is something I couldn't personally be responsible for - period.

Working on that codebase - I'm sure - is already difficult and often frustrating. Having a horde of short-term-memory-only agents without any real institutional knowledge is a recipe for disaster. I'm sure the rollout looks great on paper, and long-term effects are - conveniently - not the scope of this article.

ziml77• 3 months ago

Headline soon: Affirm lays off 799 software developers

Headline later: Affirm data breach exposes personal details and bank information of millions of users

nlawalker• 3 months ago

I'm also waiting with bated breath for "How Affirm Retooled its C-Level for Agentic Decision Making and Execution in One Week", and the follow-up headlines from that. Any time now.

deadbabe2• 3 months ago

Affirm is on its way out anyway, so really this is one last Hail Mary to try to prop up the company, they don’t have much left to lose.

tomwojcik2• 3 months ago

I don't have a horse in this race, but I'm curious. Could you please shed some light on why they are on their way out? I'm from Poland and they seem to keep hiring here. Afaik most of their engineering department is in Poland. At the same time, I don't understand the product as credit cards are not popular here and Affirm as a product isn't available in Poland anyway.

dghlsakjg• 3 months ago

They loan money to people that have either bad understanding of money, or who no other lender will work with. A lot of their revenue also rely on discretionary spending on consumer goods (the kind of stuff that people stop buying first when things go badly).

They kept getting surprised by how many of their loans go unpaid on top of all that.

So they are lending to the riskiest consumers, and they kept underestimating the risk, though they might have fixed that. The past three quarters they have finally become profitable, but given their portfolio of risky consumer loans that are unsecured, any kind of economic downturn could really hurt them.

They aren’t really on their way out right now, but they are in a dangerous position if, say, some global economic event were to cause a massive economic shock…

Eridrus• 3 months ago

I have no opinion on Affirm as a business, but going beyond the headline, this seems pretty unimpressive.

"over 60% of our pull requests (PRs) are agent-assisted" is a pretty low bar these days.

The off the shelf tools (Claude Code/etc) are all good enough that basically every PR should probably be LLM assisted at this point.

It's good for them that they have made progress, but "assistance" is not really at the frontier of what people are trying to get to.

The real question for software engineering is: how can we get to the point where simple prompts get to production quality code without human intervention. Human review is still ok, but we want to get getting to the point where most PRs are one shot, or with the LLM proactively asking the questions that are necessary, not the human having to repeatedly re-review the same code multiple times for quality.

Of course after that the goal is taking the hands off the wheel entirely, just purely filing tickets.

So far I think we're mostly just waiting on model improvements or accepting that the code we get is garbage, but I would love to hear people's experiences taking their hands off the wheel in production settings.

postexitus• 3 months ago

Do I have to read the article before calling it bs?

anonzzzies• 3 months ago

I am confused why you would write a public article about it as a financial company. But I have many things I am confused about here; I cannot really figure what they do that requires 800 people or how 130m tx/y is anything to boast about in itself. But maybe it is fantastic; I don't know.

ookblah• 3 months ago

having tried to wrangle this on my own over months and still seeing gaps everyday i have to raise severe skepticism on this lol.

you mandate and "solve" this in a few weeks over 1:N channels and measure on a metric that nobody even fully understands yet = someone getting paid to bullshit some metrics on agentic productivity to executives. i agree with other posters, 12 months until a dumpster fire of shit reveals itself.

FWIW, i think it is the future but not in the way that'd described here.

SkyPuncher• 3 months ago

I’m in the cutting edge of agentic dev at my company, but there’s no way they could have rolled this out in a meaningful way in two weeks. I can barely get a repeatable process, let alone one that I can actually teach everyone else.

“Decide upfront” is a load of crap. I can write the “perfect” spec plan, but we always, always miss something or misunderstand something. Agents will follow a high confidence spec blindly because they think it’s the blessed pattern.

To me, it sure looks like they took a “best practice”, stuck it in the flow chart then demand everyone use it.

I see zero details about how they actually learned what their devs need, how they know devs are getting value out of this, and what problems devs are trying to solve with agentic tooling.

sharadov• 3 months ago

Are these guys public? Can I short them? Oh, even easier maybe just wager on Kalshi?

jihadjihad• 3 months ago

They raised about a billion in their IPO. They're listed on the Nasdaq [0].

0: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/afrm

maxothex• 3 months ago

Having integrated LLMs into middleware systems handling financial data, I think the skepticism here is warranted but the direction is right. The real challenge isn't the agents writing code; it is the context window around financial logic, compliance boundaries, and legacy system quirks that live in engineers' heads, not documentation.

What works: starting with isolated internal tools where mistakes are recoverable, not customer-facing payment flows. Agents excel at boilerplate and test generation but need human guardrails for business logic. Affirm's one-week timeline sounds more like executive theater than genuine transformation. The 12-month check will be more telling than the announcement.

jmount• 3 months ago

Good thing that didn't require two weeks, as that is about 14 attention spans.

giancarlostoro2• 3 months ago

Nice, this reminds me of how I do this in my spare time. My current employer is still figuring out how they want to do AI coding.

keybored• 3 months ago

The window to retool is now open, while the models are capable and the costs are low. That window will not stay open forever.

Or the window to get hooked is now? Or do they have an open model backup plan?

We believe the companies that leap will stay ahead, the ones that wait will be leapt over.

FOMO is the same as last week.

zug_zug• 3 months ago

This post covers how we got to a place where over 60% of our pull requests (PRs) are agent-assisted

Well I mean you could (and should) turn on 100% agent code-reviews, and that's a type of assistance.

The hard part is that most orgs never made disposable environments nor any meaningful local testing, so the ability to validate code doesn't break something indirectly (e.g. memory leak, hammer the prod DB, cache values with the wrong key, etc) isn't there. In my experience AI code has several subtle bugs and is deceptively dangerous (because it can look so competent in other ways).

giancarlostoro2• 3 months ago

The hard part is that most orgs never made disposable environments nor any meaningful local testing, so the ability to validate code doesn't break something indirectly (e.g. memory leak, hammer the prod DB, cache values with the wrong key, etc) isn't there. In my experience AI code has several subtle bugs and is deceptively dangerous (because it can look so competent in other ways).

There's ways to improve on this, but nobody ever wants to invest more in disposable dev environments, dev is always the wimpiest environment of them all.

Affirm Retooled for Agentic Software Development in One Week

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