Ship It Conversations: Ryan Packer of BambooHR on Why CTOs Are Coding Again, Building a Software Factory, AI Straining CI/CD, Protecting HR Data, Mid-Career and Junior Engineers, and Why Every Engineer Gets a Team of Agents

This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps. In this Ship It Conversations episode, I talk with Ryan Packer about why a CTO is writing code again, what happens to CI/CD when every engineer runs a fleet of agents, and who trains junior engineers when AI can fix the bugs. Ryan is the CTO at BambooHR and a former VP of Engineering at Adobe. He's watched engineering organizations change from Omniture to Adobe to BambooHR, and he says he's spent more time coding this year than in the rest of his career combined. We start with why. Ryan will never write production code for his team again, but he wants to use the same tools and learn the same techniques they're learning, and to show an idea in working code instead of a PRD or a Slack message. He's also honest about the limits: his sandbox serves maybe a hundred people, and his team's software serves millions. Then we get into the software factory. In Ryan's own version, a customer files a bug, an agent opens the PR, tests it for security and performance, scores it, and ships it if it meets the bar. At BambooHR, pull requests are up almost 80% since the start of the year, and quality has improved by the metrics they track. The part he's most excited about is more at-bats with customers: an idea to a working prototype in a day. For platform teams, Ryan says AI has been more of a challenge than a help for CI/CD. BambooHR was already releasing hundreds of times a day, but agents do their best work when they can run and test what they build. Ten, twenty or a hundred agents per engineer means environments that spin up and down fast, with real data. We also cover protecting HR and payroll data: terms with the frontier labs, data retention, and an AI council. On careers, Ryan thinks mid-career engineers face the hardest change, and that the ones who keep learning have little to worry about. On junior engineers, he doesn't claim a perfect answer. He no longer needs them to fix bugs, so he suggests making the LLM explain its choices and using an adversarial agent that lists five things it would have done differently. We finish with every engineer managing a team of agents, small pods doing what 10 to 15 people used to, and why he expects the same or more engineers a year from now. The big takeaway: if every project in your portfolio has better than a 50% chance of success, you're not being ambitious enough. Put something in there with a 10% chance. Highlights • Why a CTO is coding again, and why his sandbox isn't production • The software factory: a customer bug to an agent PR to a tested release • Pull requests up almost 80%, with quality improving • More at-bats with customers: idea to working prototype in a day • Why AI is straining CI/CD and test environments • Protecting HR and payroll data while adopting AI • Junior engineers, adversarial agents and making the LLM explain itself • Every engineer with a team of agents, and the 10% project Links Ryan on LinkedIn · BambooHR · BambooHR careers · More episodes · On Call Brief · LMGT Awards