Founding Engineers

Find context and ship without waiting for answers.

Understand the codebase fast

I just joined. Give me an overview of the main services, how they communicate, and where the core business logic lives.

Understand why not how

I can read the code, but why was it built this way? Find the original discussion or design decision.

Find the gotchas

I'm about to modify the payment service. What are the known issues, edge cases, or things I should watch out for?

Find test patterns

How do we test integrations with Stripe? Show me existing tests and any discussions about test strategy.

Find related changes

I'm changing this function. What else in the codebase depends on it? Show me callers and related PRs.

Find the original spec

Was there a design doc for this feature? Find any planning documents, RFCs, or spec discussions.

Find environment setup

How do I set up the local development environment? Find the setup guide and any troubleshooting discussions.

Understand error handling

What's our approach to error handling and logging? Find examples and any discussions about error reporting.

Understand caching strategy

Where and how do we use caching? Find the caching patterns and any discussions about cache invalidation.

Find monitoring setup

How do I add monitoring to a new feature? Show me our observability patterns and alerting conventions.

Understand third-party integrations

How do we integrate with external APIs? Find patterns for rate limiting, retries, and error handling.

Find config management

How do we manage environment variables and config? Show me the patterns for secrets and feature toggles.

Find who to ask

Who has the most context on the checkout flow? I need to make changes and want to know who can review.

Debug without bothering anyone

This error is happening in production. Has anyone seen it before? Show me related incidents and fixes.

Understand naming conventions

Why is this service called 'hermes'? Is there a naming convention I should follow for new services?

Understand deployment

How do I deploy to staging? Walk me through the process with links to the relevant docs and scripts.

Understand feature flags

What feature flags are currently active? Which ones are safe to remove and which are still in use?

Understand data flow

How does user data flow from signup to the analytics dashboard? Map out the services and transformations involved.

Understand the monorepo

How is this monorepo organized? What packages depend on what and where should I add new code?

Learn the review process

What's expected in a PR review here? Find discussions about code review standards and what reviewers look for.

Find API conventions

What are our API naming conventions? Show me the standards for endpoints, parameters, and response formats.

Understand CI/CD

How does our CI/CD pipeline work? What checks run on PRs and how does deployment happen?

Find rollback procedures

How do I roll back a bad deployment? Find the rollback process and any past rollback incidents.

Understand the type system

What TypeScript patterns do we use? Find discussions about type safety, generics, and shared type definitions.

Decode a cryptic PR

This PR from 4 months ago has no description. What was it trying to solve? Find related discussions.

Learn the patterns

What's our standard pattern for adding a new API endpoint? Show me examples and any style guide discussions.

Trace a customer issue

A customer reported this bug. Has it been discussed before? Show me any related Slack threads or tickets.

Learn from past incidents

What incidents have we had in the past 3 months? I want to understand what can go wrong.

Get up to speed on a service

I need to work on the notification service next week. Give me everything I need to know: architecture, owners, recent changes, known issues.

Check for breaking changes

I want to change this API response format. Has anyone discussed backward compatibility requirements?

Find security patterns

How do we handle user authentication in API routes? Show me the standard pattern and any security considerations.

Find database patterns

How do we handle database migrations? Show me the process and any past issues with migrations.

Understand async patterns

How do we handle background jobs and async processing? Find the queue setup and job patterns we use.

Find performance patterns

What performance optimizations have we made? Show me discussions about query optimization and caching decisions.

Understand access control

How do we handle permissions and access control? Find the RBAC implementation and any authorization patterns.