How BabyList Accelerated AI Adoption in Engineering with Karynn Ikeda

Hosts: Alex Kessinger & David Noël-Ramos Guest: Karynn Ikeda — Former Engineering Manager → AI Enablement Program Manager at Babylist @ktikeda Karynn Ikeda shares the full arc of how Babylist adopted AI across its engineering organization — from a six-week Windsurf pilot on a single team, to company-wide Claude Code adoption and a bold initiative to onboard product managers and designers into the codebase. She discusses leadership buy-in, measuring developer sentiment over raw velocity metrics, the shift toward agent orchestration, and why the return of joy and creative empowerment may be the most important signal of all. Links & References Karynn Ikeda ( @ktikeda ) Babylist babylist.com Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's AI Memo (April 2025) Original post on X Anthropic Code Review for Claude Code claude.com/blog/code-review Claude Code code.claude.com Devin (AI coding agent by Cognition) devin.ai Cursor cursor.com Windsurf windsurf.com Lovable (vibe coding tool) lovable.dev V0 (by Vercel) v0.dev

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How BabyList Accelerated AI Adoption in Engineering with Karynn Ikeda is an episode from StaffEng by David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles).

This episode is 49:35 long.

This episode was published on Mar 20, 2026.

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