Erik Thorelli

Erik Thorelli builds developer tools for a world where coding agents can produce changes faster than people can review them. At CodeRabbit, his work on AI code review addresses a practical problem for maintainers: how to get useful feedback on a pull request before a person has to spend time on it. He was listed as CodeRabbit’s Head of Developer Experience for AI Engineer Code 2026.

Erik previously led mobile and applied AI teams at Cisco Meraki. His open-source React Native Swipeable List preserved a component after React Native removed it from its experimental libraries. The standalone package let developers define their own swipe actions for each row and add an optional bounce to the first row so users could discover the gesture. Drawing on several long-running projects, he also taught teams how to modernize an existing React Native app while continuing to ship, from migrating to TypeScript to replacing old test tooling without losing coverage. By 2025 he was working at CodeRabbit, whose support for open source was one reason he joined.

Saving maintainers a pass through the queue

When a contributor can generate a plausible patch in minutes, the maintainer still has to work out what it does, check the edge cases, and decide whether it belongs in the project. In an essay co-written with Santosh Yadav, Erik makes the case for using automated triage to sort incoming work and initial review to give contributors actionable feedback before a maintainer steps in. That first pass can also create work of its own. In a Mastra interview, Erik singled out a small design choice: CodeRabbit can recognize another review bot on a pull request and avoid repeating its feedback.

Erik also brought the question of where human judgment belongs to Founder to Founder. He moderated a conversation between TRM Labs’ Rahul Raina and CodeRabbit’s Harjot Gill about two decisions that become more pressing as agents write more code: which changes are worth building, and what evidence a team needs before shipping them.

Designing tools for agents

Erik uses Agent Experience to ask how well software serves an agent trying to complete a task. He and Andre Landgraf started All Things Web as a San Francisco Remix meetup in 2024 and grew it into a broader web developer community. At a developer tools demo night, they gave builders a place to show what different interfaces let agents do in practice, from running command-line tools to working with MCP integrations and agent skills.