Why I Pour Over My Code
A consistent and gritty sound permeated into my room followed shortly after by the alluring smell of hot coffee. Acting as a sunday morning alarm clock that rose me earlier than expected after a late night of moving in. Immediately compelled into the kitchen, I saw some weird hour-glass looking thing filled with a light brown coffee that my roommate was pouring into one of our University of Illinois coffee cups. The swirl in the cup continued as I took the first sip of coffee from a new (to me) method called pour over coffee.
That was nearly ten years ago, well before I started leading the product team here at Dripos, back when I worked for Yum! Brands on their new in-house point of sale. Unbeknownst to me, my career in point of sale would someday collide with my continued interest in the craft of making coffee. I’ve tried lots of cool and different tools since then to expand my hobby, but there was this happy place between the fully automated coffee of a disposable cup machine and the painstaking labor of a vacuum pot. Coffee became more than the end product for me and my roommates. It was a ritual, of course, but more so, it was a craft to get creative with.
My journey with coffee was similar to my journey with software. I had used lots of programs, especially video games and messaging services, but I hadn’t really built anything until halfway through college when I changed majors from Electrical Engineering to Computer Engineering, shifting from a focus on hardware and circuits to software and math. Some time into my new major I took a class on algorithms and it had a similar effect on me as the pour over: I cared deeply about the craft as much as the product.
If you watched the Superbowl this year, you saw ads about using AI. It's gotten to the point where artificial intelligence is beyond present in our lives, coalescing into its own industry. However, if you were a software engineer anywhere in the past decade, you likely saw the shift in the industry earlier. Years ago a tool called "CoPilot" was released from Github, which was an advanced form of "tab completion". Offering context aware suggestions for what the rest of your line of code should look like. It was revolutionary, but received with some hesitation as people developed something called "the copilot pause": waiting for the slightly greyed out text of a line of code you type faster than it would take CoPilot to show the suggestion.
Since then, these tools have drastically changed, going from a fun tab completion to a zeitgeist.
I found myself in something of a crisis last year as my life completely changed. The industry I had dedicated myself to changed overnight. I had moved to New York and moved in with my longtime girlfriend and got married. During this stressful time I returned to the easiest possible way to make coffee, a Mr. Coffee Brewer. However my coffee was noticeably better than the last time I used this kind of machine more than a decade before. All that time spent making pour overs, learning about beans-to-water ratios, grinding times and settings, and blooming then steeping, had seeped its way into this craft even through a different mechanism.
Thinking about that time with the French press last year has guided my journey through this new thing called Agentic Programming and reassures me of the craft of software. Using a different tool that makes the output easier doesn't mean the output has to fall in quality, but it takes a lot of time and effort to learn how to properly use these automated tools. Coffee inspired me to look deep into any craft I partake in, and now is showing the fruits of that passion. The Dripos Product Team has been able to use Agentic Code without the drop in quality we see from many other products right now, and it’s because all of us treat the software experience like their other loved crafts.
