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Transcript: The AI Skill I Rely On Daily — Priscila Andre de Oliveira, Sentry

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AI Engineer16m 53sTranscript ✅Added Jun 4, 2:34 pm GMT+8

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  • 0:07 — [music] » Hello everyone. Uh today I’m going to share with you how I use AI at Sentry and this queue I use the most in my day-to-day work. Um so but before we dive into that, let me tell you who I am. Uh my name is Priscilla. I’m a Brazilian-based in Vienna, Austria. I’m a mom of a 2-years-old very energetic toddler.
  • 0:37 — Uh I’m a maintainer of Verdaccio, uh an open-source NPM registry. I’m core orga- co-organizer of Vienna JS, a very traditional meetup in Vienna and we talk all about JavaScript. And uh I’m I’m a senior software engineer at Sentry. Yesterday someone told me that I don’t look like an a a uh software engineer, but guess what? I am. » [laughter] » Um So my my title my official title is senior software engineer, but I have
  • 1:08 — given me a little promotion and I am now an agent manager. Um no salary raise, but at least my reports they don’t complain. Yes, uh this was me at work uh a few wee- a few weeks ago. Uh my colleague uh Dominik Dorfmeister found it funny to see me managing a couple of agents uh and took this picture. » [clears throat] » Um Yeah, luckily I have uh three monitors, so that works pretty well.
  • 1:40 — Um this is my new reality. So the indus- uh sorry, uh this is how I feel actually orchestrating a bunch of agents. Uh yeah, it’s it’s weird, but it’s fun. And the industry is changing, right? That’s why you all are here and I’m also adapting. Uh since last year since December uh 2025, I haven’t coded anymore. I’m only prompting.
  • 2:11 — Yes, um and even this presentation was created by AI skill. I have Yeah, I didn’t do anything. Uh » [laughter] » Um So as you can see, these are some of my recent contributions to Sentry uh and I created a a few PRs together with my favorite teammate Claude. And it’s not just uh bug fixes, you know, it’s also features, refactors,
  • 2:42 — cross repositories contributions. So it’s real. It’s working. Um So and this is Sentry. Um maybe you don’t know Sentry, but we are very well known for error and performance monitoring, but we we have grown into a uh full observability platform. So we have error monitoring, we have a metrics, we have profiling, we have also uh agentic tools like uh to monitor your
  • 3:14 — agentic platforms. Um Yes, uh the code base is very complex and uh it was founded in 2010. It has 15 plus years of code. We got around 400 employees around the globe. We have 100k organizations depending on this code base working every day. And as employee I also depend on this code base working because I get my salary from it, right? So I don’t want to just uh ship slop
  • 3:45 — code. Um yeah, so it’s a serious business. And we have code as well at Sentry. Uh recently we had a hackathon uh where we could we had a few days to just uh get ourselves familiar with AI and try out new things and a lot of good projects came out of this uh week, this hackathon project. And uh we have a for example Abacus. This was created to
  • 4:15 — track uh the usage of AI internally at Sentry. Uh we have Warden. This is a a code review agent. Uh you can have it in your PRs. Um we have a Junior. Junior is a bot we have in our Slack uh and because usually people they see like uh Oh, uh I don’t like this UI. Something changed. Uh can you go fix it or why this was changed? They like to to go and share
  • 4:45 — something maybe some bug they found in Slack and then you can we can just a trigger Junior and Junior can analyze that thread and create a PR and I’ll go and fix the bug. And people are having a lot of fun with Junior. Daniel can Yeah, he loves that. And uh there is also this AI SDK testing repository. Uh this was created before this hackathon, uh but this is basically a repository where we create tests to for our AI
  • 5:15 — integrations. So and this was really weird because I started contributing to this repository and uh uh my team told me I shouldn’t code at all. I should only prompt until I would get a nice result. So it was like a a different experience. Uh but yeah, it’s working. We are using all of these tools like internally every day. And yeah, at Sentry we are going all in
  • 5:46 — AI. But quality still matters. Um So uh also at Sentry last year uh during three months uh we we used this time like a quality quarter. We used this time just to improve our code base. So remove all the any types from TypeScript for example or all the to-do because usually I don’t know if you guys have the same, but we had a lot of to-do uh do something else
  • 6:16 — at certain time and uh so we used this time to simplify code and uh have uh remove unused feature flags and really have our our code base in a in a good shape and this is very important, right? We want to that. This is uh called it technical debt. Um So and as I told you before, the code base the Sentry code base is very
  • 6:46 — complex and it’s a moving target. We have about 100 PRs merged every day. We have a four offices. Uh Sentry is fair sources. So we you can contribute to Sentry. We have also contributors. Um and we are all the time deprecating components, adding new components, adding new lint rules. Uh I don’t know, you name it. Like all the time something happens at Sentry. I’m there over six years now and I can go on vacation. I
  • 7:17 — come back and maybe my PR uh is full of conflicts and I have to solve those conflicts and I really need to understand like all the time I need to align and and understand something. It’s a daily practice. So and this is not new, right? Like uh you guys know there are the studies behind it like 70% of a uh
  • 8:09 — you you may think like you just tell AI to go explore the code base and after do something, but like maybe AI understood uh not the the correct thing, under- understood wrongly, you know? And you need to also understand because maybe you need to steer the AI to go on the correct path. You know? And yeah. So This is how I’m using AI. Uh it made me
  • 8:39 — faster, but not the way you think maybe because like before um let’s say um an incident happened and I would have to track that down. I would have to open a PR uh oh open GitHub, sorry. I go git blame and then trying to understand like where the regression happened and now I can just prompt a simple phrase and I have it in a few seconds. Or before maybe a product product decision. Um why this
  • 9:10 — changed? And then I would I don’t know uh ask this question in Slack. Maybe my colleague is in another another country, another time zone and I would need to wait for that answer in the next day and now I can just uh ask AI and I have it. So it’s been really useful and this made me really productive uh but but like it the understanding part of it like Yeah. And my prompts they kept repeating. Uh
  • 9:40 — so I had this idea to let to to let Claude analyze my cache and see uh so it analyzed it 116 sessions and it classified everything in six categories. Comprehension, modification, process, review generation, and other. And guess what? This impressed even me. Uh oops.
  • 10:13 — So, 67% of my AI usage was comprehension and only 2% code generation. So, this I was very surprised. » [laughter] » So, because my prompts kept repeating, repeating, I created a skill for me. This is skill it’s locally in my computer. I could share it with someone if I wish, but I use this is for me here
  • 10:44 — and it’s called catch me up. Um that is structures those comprehension questions in two six exploration modes. Architecture, convention, feature trace, syntax, testing, and history. So, a skill is just a very detailed prompt, right? With a very clear goals. I can actually do like this here. Uh you can see how how is it. But it’s
  • 11:14 — it’s just like it’s a an MD file with human language. And I am a very visual person. I work at Sentry a lot on the front end part of it. And I like to see things to understand. So, uh this skill brings me like uh the organogram like the structure a table for me to understand. I think it helps a lot. And I can now give you a short demo.
  • 11:45 — Um Just a minute. » [clears throat] » Um By the way, this is my presentation running. » [laughter] » Oh, it’s here actually here. Um I already run this skill because I don’t know maybe I would have some issues, but
  • 12:15 — uh Do you remember that project I told you that I should only prompt and don’t code anymore? So, in the beginning I was not familiar with that project. It was a new repository for me. And I I used my skill for that. I said, I am a new Can you guys see this well? Yeah. So, I said, I am a new contributor. Catch me up on how this repository works and clarify what it simulates a Sentry envelope and
  • 12:46 — intercepts it during tests. Um I am using cloud as you can see opus uh and it gave me it gave me here a summary. And this I like this flow like how it works. Um And here also answered my question like does it simulate envelopes? No, intercepts real ones. They spawn collector. Yeah, I’m not going to read it, but this information all of this
  • 13:16 — it’s very useful. Like if I didn’t have AI, I would have to do this myself, you know. Um I mean I don’t like to to just ship something I don’t understand. If it’s a vibe coded project, that’s fine, but this is a real serious business. It’s my work. Um So, yes. This skill is helping me a lot with that and also to review PRs because maybe I’m reviewing a PR of a colleague. I have a lot of context, but not enough
  • 13:48 — to approve that PR. And I wanted to have that context. So, I use this skill to give me that. Uh okay. So, back to my vibe coded presentation. » [laughter] » So, » [clears throat] » Uh Jack Nation’s wrote a blog post called it vibe coding our way to disaster drawing on Rich Hickey’s simple made easy philosophy. He proposes three phases: research, planning, and
  • 14:19 — implementation. I think you guys also heard about it outside like even cloud code has this planning mode, right? Um so, yes. I agree with all of that, but I think it’s missing this step like you need to understand the research your agent did, you know? You need to understand that and to steer as I said maybe it’s going the wrong direction or maybe you need to explore something else and you need to have that to understand that. Then after that you can say,
  • 14:49 — “Okay, plan that for me and let’s do the implementation. Let’s go ahead.” Um So, Armin Ronacher he’s the creator of Flask and a former Sentry. Now he’s working on his own startup. Today he’s going to give a talk here by the way. He’s around. Um So, he wrote in his blog post, “When more and more people tell me they no longer know what code is in their own code base, I feel like something is very
  • 15:21 — wrong here.” And yes, I agree. Um so, what I hope you you can take away from this presentation is that the biggest unlock from AI in a large code base isn’t generation. It’s comprehension. I tracked my own usage and I was surprised. 67% of my prompts are com- comprehension and only 2% generation. Maybe you track your own AI usage as
  • 15:52 — well and you can improve it, right? Uh so, AI is the teammate who never gets tired of your questions. So, there is no dumb questions. It’s the cheapest senior engineer out there. So, just go for it. Yes, and align your mental model before you prompt because you know the code is going to flow naturally and don’t ship slop code into the code base that pays your salary. Ship keynote code.
  • 16:22 — Really. This is the term the industry is using. And yes, thank you. Um Try Sentry. This was a sponsored talk. We have a booth downstairs if you wanted to stop by to say hello. If you scan this QR code, you’re going to get a three months free trial of our business plan and I hope you enjoyed the presentation. » [applause] [applause]
  • 16:53 — [music]