As The Browser Company, the team behind Arc, scales their remote-first engineering team across six different timezones, they have started to explore new ways to accelerate their code review process.
Adopting Graphite Reviewer, our high-signal AI-powered code review companion, has allowed The Browser Company to cut down on review cycles and ensure consistent high-quality code across their org without sacrificing on development velocity.
As Brian Michel, an engineer on The Browser Company’s DevEx team says, “With Graphite Reviewer I'm closing the feedback loop faster. I'm getting instant feedback and I’m able to iterate faster and produce something that is workable faster."
Code review in the world of remote work
Asynchronous development work requires more individual independence so engineers are not blocked by time zones. Graphite Reviewer allows The Browser Company to move forward with their work without relying on pinging teammates asynchronously outside of geographic-specific working hours. “I don’t have to bother my teammates who are also very busy... The fact that I haven’t had to soak up other people’s time has been wonderful,” Brian Michel shares. Graphite Reviewer steps in to provide immediate, high-quality feedback, keeping developers unblocked and productive regardless of location or time zone.
"I like the fact that I can get a review earlier and make sure something is in a mergeable state before my teammates come online and I can put it on a silver platter for them to say, yeah, I promise this is ready."
While remote work offers engineers greater flexibility, it also brings challenges, such as delays caused by teammates being in different time zones. Graphite Reviewer solves this issue by acting as a reliable teammate that’s always online, ready to review code, and ensuring your work progresses smoothly without unnecessary delays.
“It's really been, like, pairing almost. I think this helps you kind of complete that feedback loop as a single developer because you're really not alone anymore.”
Turning skepticism into trust
Like with adopting any new developer tool, initially there was a healthy dose of skepticism. Brian recalls, “To be totally honest I dismissed its first few comments.” This skepticism is to be expected with new AI-powered tools—would the feedback be accurate and relevant, or just another source of noise?
For Brian, trust was established quickly after Graphite Reviewer caught a bug that was causing one of Brian’s pull requests to fail.
“A PR I opened failed to pass CI and I went to go debug it. I started reading the comments Reviewer left because they were annotated directly on the line in the PR that was failing and I was like, wow… this thing's right.”
From there he says, “the amount of time it took to earn my trust was pretty quick.” Fostering trust in a new developer tool is extremely important and that trust can erode quickly if the tool isn’t providing value. We built Graphite Reviewer to ensure that the feedback it provides is high-signal, has a low false positive rate, and every comment is directly relevant to your codebase.
More signal and less noise
Graphite Reviewer by the numbers at The Browser Company:
2,000+ PRs reviewed
95% positive feedback rate
Since its adoption at The Browser Company, Graphite Reviewer has reviewed over 2,000 opened pull requests. Of those 2,000, the positive feedback rate on suggestions has been 95%, which speaks to the technical efficacy and value of Reviewer’s feedback.
"Graphite Reviewer strikes a really good balance between showing you where problems are and not being annoying. It’s different from other AI tools because... it actually works. It doesn’t blindly say 'hey here’s a typo', it gives well reasoned recommendations based on the context of what I’m trying to build and what I’m trying to build it in.”
In order for code review to be valuable, the review agent has to be context aware. Graphite Reviewer, powered by Anthropic’s Claude, is able to contextually understand your code and give immediate actionable feedback, before a human reviewer has a chance to take a look. This allows engineers to save time and iterate much more quickly. As Brian says, “I can publish once and know that it'll be going through because I've already fixed all the feedback from Graphite Reviewer.”
What’s next for The Browser Company?
Building on their success with Arc, The Browser Company recently started working on their second product: Dia, a smart browser that brings the power of AI tools right into the browser, where people already do their work and spend their time online.
Graphite Reviewer is helping them deliver on this vision, accelerating the “outer-loop” of the software development lifecycle by reducing review cycles and keeping their engineers unblocked.