Wealthsimple’s Engineering AI Strategy

At Wealthsimple, we believe AI isn’t just a productivity boost — it’s an inflection point for software engineering. We’ve spent months testing AI-powered development tools, refining our approach, and embedding AI principles into our engineering strategy. Here’s how we’re making AI work for us — without losing what makes our engineering culture great.

In recent months, we have tested various tools and agents to find the best AI tooling for our developer workflow.

We recognize AI as a transformative force in software development. ​ With AI tools, our developers can accelerate the development process. We incorporate AI workflows directly into our development cycle while upholding our high standards for quality and security.

Our AI Strategy starts with principles that guide our decisions about adopting AI tools in the software development lifecycle.

First Principles

Engineering Fundamentals Matter More than Ever

While AI agents introduce a new way of working, the core skills of the job remain the same. Critical thinking, problem-solving, and curiosity are vital to our work. An agentic development workflow can produce astounding results when used well, but it generates ​ ​ tremendous volumes of code.

Reading, understanding, and thinking critically about code are crucial skills, and AI-assisted coding emphasizes their importance.

AI Changes the “How,” not the “Why”

While AI-assisted coding creates a new way of writing code, we are exploring these new tools because we want to accelerate productivity with best-in-class tools. We pride ourselves on easy-to-setup development environments and quick onboarding for new engineers. We approach gen AI with the same rigour and diligence as we would any other new tool.

We use tools that accelerate engineering productivity. We share best practices and new tools that improve their development flow, and will continue to enhance developer velocity with cutting-edge tools.

Human-Friendly Codebases are AI-Friendly Codebases

A codebase with coherent design principles, clear test output, excellent docs, and informative logging is a joy for developers. Like humans, AI works best with clear, specific context.

Recently, some developers at Wealthsimple encountered AI agents inventing unrealistic solutions because of verbose and unclear test outputs. Cleaning up test logs and ensuring errors are easy to understand is key to ensuring AI agents can work effectively with the code base.

We are Maker-Owners

The choices for AI-assisted coding are abundant, and we're eager to experiment with them. Through our LLM Gateway, we enable developers to try new tools and choose the highest-quality tools to support our work.

We selected a suite of "one-click" AI-integrated IDEs that developers can choose based on their working language. This is the best way to quickly get people up and running with AI.

Our LLM Gateway serves 500 internal users daily, allowing developers to customize their setup and try out tools like Zed, Cline, Aider and others while ensuring data remains secure within our system.

Across Engineering, 85% of our developers use GitHub Copilot, and we recently onboarded half our developers to the Cursor code editor.

Keep it Simple

In true Wealthsimple fashion, we keep it simple. LLMs are powerful! But you don't need an LLM to grep a repo or revert a git commit.

Simple tools are the best tools, and we continue to use tried and trusted tools for software development. We are building out a gen AI toolchain that follows this principle to keep our development workflows simple and effective.

Conclusion

The journey ahead is promising, and will transform what we build and how we build it. ​ AI in engineering isn’t just about generating code. It’s about unlocking new ways of working.

Our AI strategy embodies our commitment to maintaining an efficient and secure software development lifecycle. We are thoughtfully integrating AI capabilities into our development practices, so our engineers have the space to focus on ​ problems that truly matter.

Written by Cassia Scheffer, Staff Software Developer

Interested in working at Wealthsimple? Check out the open roles on our team today.