HaKatze Series Intro
A Modern Joel Test for Israeli Startups
The conversation flowed alongside the tea and coffee at a cafe in Herzliya. My third interview for the startup was winding down. I thought it had gone well, though I imagined that I would need to wait a few days for feedback. That was when the interviewer, a team lead, surprised me with “So, which laptop do you want? We can go get it right now and have it ready for your first day.”
Trying to hard-close me over coffee added added a new level of discomfort to this particular recruiting process. But a different incident, from an earlier interview, actually contributed to my decision for that informal offer.
The company had chosen not to hire QA or testers, leaning instead on automation to move faster and ship features with less overhead. It was a deliberate tradeoff. Fresh off a nightmare few months at a failed startup, I firmly adopted Joel Spolsky’s Joel Test. This classic checklist uses twelve blunt yes/no questions to see if an engineering team fires on all cylinders. Lacking testers failed Rule #10, and that ultimately pushed me to decline the offer.
A dozen years have passed since that interview. Most of those years I spent in big tech; now I am back at a startup, and the day-to-day reality of a software engineer feels light-years removed from just a year ago. AI has not just supercharged the speed of coding, it has largely lifted our hands off the keyboard.
Google’s CEO said already in late 2024 that AI was generating more than a quarter of the company’s new code; reports since put that figure far higher. These days, more of my job looks like managing a small team of AI agents: assigning tasks, reviewing their pull requests, and making sure none of them go rogue and try to liquidate the production databases. Have we fully worked out which old assumptions about developer velocity, build stability, and overall code health still hold when the one typing the code is not a person?
This series is my attempt to find out. Over the next few months, I will sit down with founders and engineers at a handful of Israeli startups, and ask a version of Joel’s question. Some of the original twelve might still hold up exactly as written. Others might need rewording or a new question added next to them to cover what was not true in 2014.
References
- PocketOS had their production databases erased by AI (https://thecyberexpress.com/ai-agent-deleted-production-database-in-9-secs/)
- Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Q3 2024 earnings call, reported in Fortune, “Over 25% of Google’s code is written by AI, Sundar Pichai says,” Oct. 30, 2024 (fortune.com/2024/10/30/googles-code-ai-sundar-pichai)
- By late 2025, multiple outlets reported the figure quoted by Sundar Pichai had climbed toward 50–75% (fastcompany.com/91531519).
