Graphite Chat | Hacker News Reader

Graphite Chat

graphite.dev

14 pointsjordanscales6 comments

shame to see a company that was originally targeting a niche (devs that care enough to pay for a tool for stacked diffs) do a complete 180 to chase the AI bag. i have to imagine the overlap between the original users and ones interested in 'graphite chat' is miniscule.

for anyone that's looking for a no-fluff stacked diff tool to replace Graphite, i've found https://abhinav.github.io/git-spice/ to be solid

we still do stacked diffs — it's our bread and butter, and many of our existing customers, some of whom have been with us since the beginning, are finding a ton of value from both diamond comments and chat. i loved working on the CLI, i loved working on chat, and i'm excited to continue building tools that make code review less of a pain.

the core problem that stacked diffs and that adding AI to the PR page solve are the same — code reviews slow devs down and force unnecessary context switching.

stacked prs help you get around this by allowing you to manage your work in way that makes it easier to organize in an author and easier to deal with as a reviewer. AI can help you get around this by making it easier to review PRs when you open the page, and save you the context switch of going back to your editor to make a tweak that a reviewer suggests.

Graphite has always been about shortening the cycle time and reducing the amount of busy work from writing code to getting it merged, and we'll continue building features that speed up that cycle.

the best part is — you can still pay for Graphite, and you don't have to use ANY of our AI features. we're still constantly shipping improvements to our CLI, optimizing our merge queue for our larger enterprise deployments, continually working on making the PR page more modern and easier to use than GitHub's and working with the same customers that we have since the beginning to do so.

would love to hear what you think we can do better to address your needs

to be direct, there's really nothing for you to do — it's a branding issue. if i were to link graphite to any of the devs i know that are actually interested in improving their development workflow, they would immediately close out after one look at the landing page. they have zero interest in AI and certainly won't pay for it to be shoved down their throats. graphite is now perceived as an AI company first, not a developer company.

you state that users don't 'have to use ANY of our AI features' — does that mean you have an opt-out toggle that fully hides any mention of it (e.g. in your 'AI-powered PR page')? if so, how long will that stick around? how long will your core products remain unsullied once your investors start to pressure you to push AI more? these sort of concerns around long term direction keep myself and others from adopting graphite.

(views expressed in this comment are my own, not those of graphite)

we have a number of large customers that feel the same way and are fully opted out of anything AI-related.

in my experience, our foremost goal is bring graphite to more people. i have seen many cases where folks get us in the door with diamond and then begin championing stacking which leads to a ton of organic spread that it otherwise may not get.

we have seen a ton more signal that ai is the easier way to get more committed folks in the door than signal that we are losing potential customers over having it as an option. if that were not true, we probably would not have gone in this direction.

i would love for graphite-lovers to make more noise about stacking as well and see no reason it can't happen in parallel - every month i see more and more conversations about stacking happening in the wild, and more and more of them reference us directly!

One key way I use JetBrains AI or any LLM is to ask it what's wrong with my code, and get some insightful remarks that make reasonable suggestions. I havent used it to do PRs yet, since my employer has not invested in such tools, but I imagine it would help to catch big issues that we might miss and approve.

I've been using it internally for the past few weeks (employee at Graphite).

It's really nice! I normally do the same thing as you. You basically get to save the copy/paste and context-switch. The changes it suggests can be integrated into the PR immediately... it works pretty well! Especially in collaboration with Diamond.

The automatically-provided Diamond comments -> chat "plz fix this" pipeline is really productive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com