How GoodDay Scales Engineering Visibility With AI-powered Code Intelligence
As GoodDay’s AI-powered engineering output accelerated, Macroscope gave the entire team real-time visibility into code changes, without slowing developers down.
GoodDay is building an AI-powered ERP and retail operating system for Shopify brands, combining inventory management, ledgers, and merchant operations in one platform. As their 6-person engineering team began leveraging AI coding tools to accelerate development, Co-Founder and CPO Dave Wardell hit a visibility problem: the codebase was evolving faster than he could track it.
Using Macroscope’s Ask Macroscope Anything (AMA) feature* *and custom Macros, Dave and the entire GoodDay team - including Product, Design, Customer Success, and Engineering - now have a deeper understanding of their product and how it's changing.
Case study - 4 minutes
The challenge of maintaining visibility at speed
As GoodDay's engineering team began shipping at higher velocities, maintaining visibility became increasingly challenging. As CPO, Dave needed to understand what was changing in the product, both for internal coordination and external communication with customers.
Developers were fielding 2-4 hours of questions per week from Dave about recent code changes and potential impacts. On top of that, Dave spent another hour each week scanning GitHub commits to compile customer-facing release notes. Many weeks, he didn’t even publish release notes because the process was too tedious and it wasn’t clear what to include.
The codebase had expanded beyond what one product leader could track manually, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to anticipate the consequences of code changes.
“Engineers didn’t have full context for how something they were changing might affect other areas of code. The surface area became too wide for me to track.”
GoodDay needed tooling that could surface what was changing and catch breaking changes before production.
Automated oversight and instant answers
GoodDay adopted Macroscope and immediately saw an impact from two core capabilities: custom Macros for automated reporting and Ask Macroscope Anything (AMA) for on-demand answers.
Daily automated reports
Dave configured a custom Macro that runs at 5am daily, scanning recent commits and identifying potential consequences.
"That first day [the Macro] got spit out was kind of a light bulb moment.”
The Macro outputs summaries organized by project area, with risk calibration customized to Dave’s priorities, links to Linear tickets and GitHub PRs, and plain-English explanations.
Every morning, Dave reviews the Macro report and shares relevant insights with GoodDay’s #engineering channel. Instead of spending hours manually tracking changes, he gets a curated summary of what’s important.
Company-wide AMA in Slack
Dave started sharing the Macro daily reports directly with his engineering team in Slack. He then added @Macroscope to GoodDay’s #engineering channel so that he could ask questions on-demand and keep his team in the loop. Soon after, adoption of AMA spread organically. Engineers began asking @Macroscope their own code questions, and within two days, Dave opened Macroscope Slackbot access company-wide.
"It went from me dropping in these Ask Macroscope Anything responses to all of a sudden the entire team trying to use it.”
Now everyone at the company, including the Design and Customer Success teams, mentions @Macroscope in Slack whenever they have questions about the codebase or product. Non-technical team members are now able to query the codebase and get immediate answers without waiting for engineering time.
Efficiency and visibility at scale
GoodDay’s product and engineering team eliminated painful weekly overhead with Macroscope:
- Dave reclaimed 1-2 hours per week previously spent manually scanning GitHub commits and checking in with engineers to figure out what’s changing in the codebase. The daily Macro delivers what he needs automatically, and he’s able to query @Macroscope for everything else. Release notes have never been easier to compile.
- Engineers reclaimed 2-4 hours per week previously spent answering questions about code changes or the product. These questions now go to @Macroscope first.
- The team reduced ad hoc meetings and made standing huddles more efficient. Scheduled Macros and Slack AMA enables non-engineers to asynchronously understand the "why" behind what's changing in the product, without asking engineers.
Beyond time savings, Macroscope gave GoodDay proactive visibility they didn't have before. Dave can now catch breaking changes before they reach production.
"It's doing things I wasn't able to do. It's giving me insights and assurances I wouldn't have otherwise."
And non-engineers are now empowered to ask more questions than ever because they can get answers immediately. The entire team has a deeper understanding of how the product works and how it's evolving, something previously accessible only to engineers.
For AI-native teams building fast
For high-velocity startups leveraging AI tools to accelerate software development, Dave sees Macroscope as essential.
“With all the increases in AI-assisted engineering output, leaders need something to keep up with progress and provide oversight. Macroscope gives us this.”
The challenge for founders and product leaders today is maintaining oversight without adding overhead. For GoodDay, Macroscope solved that problem by automating the routine work of tracking changes and answering questions, while empowering the entire team with direct access to codebase knowledge.
