As developers, we love building things. What we don't enjoy as much is waiting: waiting for code reviews, getting blocked on merges, and the general friction that can sometimes slow down the development process.
If this resonates with you, then you'll want to hear about Graphite, a platform designed to tackle these very challenges head-on.
Graphite positions itself as an AI developer productivity platform, aiming to help engineering teams create, review, and merge smaller code changes more efficiently, stay unblocked, and ultimately ship faster.
In this post, let's find out how Graphite can help you accomplish just that.
📣 Tower 13 for Mac, currently in Beta, introduced Graphite support!
Giving Time Back to Your Engineering Team
The folks at Graphite understand a core pain point for many engineering teams: code review can be a significant time sink. In fact, they point out that many engineers spend a day or more each week either reviewing code or stuck waiting for their own reviews to come through. That's a substantial chunk of valuable engineering time!
But Graphite believes it doesn't have to be this way. The team behind Graphite has a strong background, with many founding members hailing from tech giants like Meta and Google. These companies have, in many cases, developed their own internal code review tools to optimize their engineers' workflows. The Graphite team missed the power of these internal systems, particularly the stacked diffs workflow, which they initially leveraged in an internal tool.
The internal tool proved so effective that the team decided to pivot and focus entirely on developing it into the platform we now know as Graphite. Their mission is to bring the power of stacked pull requests – the very workflow that underpins best-in-class internal code review tools like Phabricator and Critique – to every software company.
Diamond – Embracing AI
Beyond just stacked PRs, Graphite also recognized the potential of AI early on, culminating in the release of Diamond (formerly known as Graphite Reviewer).
As a codebase-aware AI code review companion, it provides developers with immediate, actionable feedback on their pull requests, significantly reducing the number of review cycles. While other AI bots hallucinate and create noisy comments, Diamond is calibrated to catch real bugs and deliver smarter, targeted feedback with fewer false positives.
Diamond allows you to:
- Merge PRs faster: Diamond automatically catches bugs and errors before human reviewers, letting your team spend less time on code review, and more time on building.
- Enforce quality & consistency: Customize Diamond with repo-specific AI prompts and regex rules to enforce best practices across your entire team.
- Keep your code private & secure: Diamond doesn't store or train on your team's code - your data remains yours.
The Results
The impact of Graphite speaks for itself. Tens of thousands of engineers at leading companies like Asana, Ramp, Tecton, and Vercel rely on Graphite daily to improve their development workflows.
Across these companies and many others, the average engineer using Graphite has seen some impressive results:
- 1.3x's the number of PRs in flight: Engineers can manage and work on more changes concurrently.
- Saves ~10 hours a week waiting to merge PRs: Less time spent blocked means more time spent building.
- Merges 26% more PRs: A more efficient review process leads to a higher throughput of merged code.
- Ships 20% more code (despite decreasing median per-PR size by 8%): Smaller, more frequent merges contribute to a higher overall shipping velocity.
These statistics highlight the tangible benefits that Graphite brings to engineering teams, translating directly into increased productivity and faster delivery cycles.
A Comprehensive Toolkit
Graphite isn't just about stacked PRs and AI; it's a comprehensive platform packed with features designed to streamline the entire software development lifecycle.
The platform includes:
- CLI tool: For seamless integration with your existing Git workflow and powerful control over stacked PRs.
- AI Code Review Companion: Providing intelligent, automated feedback directly on your pull requests.
- VS Code Extension: Bringing the power of Graphite directly into your code editor.
- Pull Request Inbox: A centralized hub for managing and prioritizing code reviews.
- Code Review Tool: Offering a focused and efficient interface for reviewing code changes.
- Workflow Automation Engine: Allowing teams to customize and automate their code review and merge processes.
- Merge Queue: Ensuring smooth and automated merging of pull requests once they're approved.
- Developer Productivity Insights: Providing valuable data and analytics to help teams understand and improve their development process.
All these components are thoughtfully designed to make the software development process as streamlined and effortless as possible.
How to Get Started with Graphite
Ready to experience the benefits of Graphite for yourself? The platform offers a free tier for small teams, making it easy to get started. Simply create your account by signing up with your email or GitHub account.
Give Graphite a try and see how it can help your team unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency in your development workflow!
