Zeno Rocha
On The Changelog
“It's crazy how we went through the whole journey of, okay, the bottleneck are developers. We got to hire more engineers. Then the bottleneck is now PRs. … Our repo used to have like 40 or 50 open PRs at any given time. Now it has 200. … Then the bottleneck became the review process. … And then the bottleneck became the CI. … Man, the bottleneck keeps shifting, right?”
The Changelog · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Asked whether Resend is all-in on AI coding, Rocha describes how the constraint has moved through his engineering process. He admits he misses the old flow of coding alone in an IDE.
Transcript
…five different users to our linear workspace, but they are not humans. They're agents. And I have to pay for an extra seat. Like SIT-based pricing to me doesn't make any sense in this new age. I'm glad we've never did that with recent. But man, yeah. There's so many things we got to rethink.
…I don't know. Where are you at in terms of things? Are you 100% code generated in terms of you personally corporately as recent? Are you AI maximalists? Everyone can write whatever they want as long as it's with an agent. Not token maxing, but like, are you all for AI in every way to help resend?
…sometimes they're good, sometimes they're pretty bad. And that's why I haven't really unleashed to the outside world yet. And I'm trying to imagine, like, what are those other mini factories that we could build, right? Like that we can close the loop. Maybe one agent is sending the PR, the other agent is reviewing. And we do that every single day or every single hour, every single minute. But it's crazy how we went through the whole journey of, okay, the bottleneck are developers. We got to hire more engineers. Then the bottleneck is now PRs. So we start sending a lot of PRs. Our repo used to have like 40 or 50 open PRs at any given time. Now it has 200. So, okay, it's a new volume of PRs that are being open every single time. Then the bottleneck became the review process. And then we are like, okay, let's put AI on the PR. So we added Cubic, Bugbot, all these bots. We tried like all of them. And then the bottleneck became the CI.…
Yeah, you can't fight entropy. It's going to happen. Wild stuff. Yeah. A lot to a lot to dig into. I'm sure we can go even further. I know we got a few more minutes here, but one question I like to ask, especially whenever I feel like the person's got something up their sleeve, closer to the end of…
Yeah, it's hard to say one specific thing. And maybe what I will say is connected to that other point: like, you got to be challenging the way you work every single day now. Unfortunately, it kind of sucks in a way because you're getting used to one way of working. And now there's a whole new wave…
Yeah. Are you all hiring? Yes. I'm kind of hiring you doing these things. What is it like in two minutes? What is it like hiring today? Like the peaks and the valleys, and then specifically who you're trying to hire for.
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