u/Rude-Recursion1024

Renovate's solid for the safe stuff, automerge the patch/minor bumps and forget them. But it stops at opening the MR. The hours left are the annoying kind: a major bump where tests go red, a flake blocking a clean update, lint errors the new version introduced.

We started letting an agent take a crack at those before a human sees it. It's promising but I'm nervous about an agent force-pushing fixes to real repos.

Anyone else trying this? How are you handling the breakage Renovate leaves behind, do you just eat the hours?

Hey everyone,

My apprenticeship is wrapping up and I've learned a ton. I'd already been programming on my own for almost 7 years before it, so at this point I'd say I have solid technical depth. I've been able to dig into pretty much everything: programming (my strongest area), infrastructure, and even some project management.

This isn't just a job for me. It's something I genuinely care about and I'm passionate about the work.

A bit about me: I'm from Switzerland, turning 20, and fluent in both English and German.

The problem: after a few searches, most jobs here ask for 3+, 5+, even 7+ years of experience, and these aren't even labeled "senior." So far I've been filtered out by HR for having "no experience." Has anyone been in the same spot? I'd love to hear how you handled it.

A few specific questions:

• Is fully remote realistic in this situation?
• Does anyone know companies that don't just filter on years of experience?
• Are unsolicited applications worth the effort here?

Thanks!

I was tired of having to be at my laptop to do anything useful. The interesting ideas always show up on the train, in the bus, while waiting for coffee. By the time I'm in front of a keyboard, half of them are gone, and the other half feel like work I don't want to do.

Then I read Stripe's "minions" blog post about giving agents the environment to actually run tasks for you. That was the click. The point isn't "AI writes code." The point is having something I can hand a half-formed thought to and walk away.

So I built it. Hooked it up to GitHub. The pattern that ended up working:

• I add a bot account as a collaborator on the repo
• I open an issue or comment: @ bot migrate this tailwind config to v4
• The bot picks up the assignment, runs an agent in an isolated pod, opens a PR
• I review the PR like I'd review a junior dev's work. Merge, or comment, the bot iterates

https://reddit.com/link/1tjyo9l/video/sv1tudfc7k2h1/player

Honestly, this just matches how I already work. I haven't written code from scratch in months. I review PRs. Most of you are probably in the same spot. So instead of fighting the shift, this leans into it: the producer side becomes something I tag and forget, the reviewer side stays where the judgment lives.

A few things I cared about while building it:

• Everything's an adapter. Agents, platforms, chat surfaces, sources of work, all pluggable. Today only GitHub is wired up on the platform side, and Claude + z.ai on the agent side. The architecture makes adding GitLab, Codex, Cursor, or Linear a small adapter, not a rewrite.
• Bring your own agent. The default is z.ai's Coding Plan (GLM-4.6, explicitly allowed for third-party tools, surprisingly good at code). Anthropic API keys work too. You're not locked in.

I see a lot of potential in agentic environments, orchestrators, platforms, whatever you want to call them. HMU if you're interested. Happy to nerd out on any of it! Or if you just want to try it.

I was tired of having to be at my laptop to do anything useful. The interesting ideas always show up on the train, in the bus, while waiting for coffee. By the time I'm in front of a keyboard, half of them are gone, and the other half feel like work I don't want to do.

Then I read Stripe's "minions" blog post about giving agents the environment to actually run tasks for you. That was the click. The point isn't "AI writes code." The point is having something I can hand a half-formed thought to and walk away.

So I built it. Hooked it up to GitHub. The pattern that ended up working:

• I add a bot account as a collaborator on the repo
• I open an issue or comment: @ bot please migrate this tailwind config to v4
• The bot picks up the assignment, runs an agent in an isolated pod, opens a PR
• I review the PR like I'd review a junior dev's work. Merge, or comment, the bot iterates

https://reddit.com/link/1tjv6dg/video/hi04mo53lj2h1/player

Honestly, this just matches how I already work. I haven't written code from scratch in months. I review PRs. Most of you are probably in the same spot. So instead of fighting the shift, this leans into it: the producer side becomes something I tag and forget, the reviewer side stays where the judgment lives.

A few things I cared about while building it:

• Everything's an adapter. Agents, platforms, chat surfaces, sources of work, all pluggable. Today only GitHub is wired up on the platform side, and Claude + z.ai on the agent side. The architecture makes adding GitLab, Codex, Cursor, or Linear a small adapter, not a rewrite.
• Bring your own agent. The default is z.ai's Coding Plan (GLM-4.6, explicitly allowed for third-party tools, surprisingly good at code). Anthropic API keys work too. You're not locked in.

I see a lot of potential in agentic environments, orchestrators, platforms, whatever you want to call them. HMU if you're interested. Happy to nerd out on any of it! Or if you just want to try it.