10,000 PRs a month is easy: How devex is evolving at PostHog

PostHog has significantly increased its shipping cadence, growing from 1,441 pull requests (PRs) in January to 4,725 in June, with only a 10% rise in engineering staff. This acceleration is chiefly attributed to the increased use of AI, enabling faster and more efficient development processes, such as agent-driven PRs and self-driving loops, which have risen from 20% to 70% of monorepo PRs. While the increased volume of PRs doesn't inherently equate to speedier handling, PostHog is leveraging agentic loops and custom tools to prepare PRs for human review, and has transitioned towards cloud-based development to overcome local machine limitations. Continuous Integration (CI) remains a bottleneck, with efforts focused on optimizing the CI process and reducing unnecessary test runs through advanced techniques like building abstract syntax trees. PostHog's approach prioritizes reliability over perfection, maintaining high service uptimes and using automated testing to ensure system stability. The introduction of agents like StampHog and ReviewHog for code reviews has reduced the human workload, allowing engineers to concentrate on more impactful reviews. PostHog aims to further enhance efficiency by developing agents capable of autonomously testing code, thereby reducing human involvement in routine tasks and enabling quicker adaptation to the accelerated pace of development.

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