"Org Designing" Your AI with Roo Code: Modes as Agents | The Roo Cast - Nov 14, 2025 Ep. 30
In this episode of Roo Cast, host Hannes Rudolph is joined by Matt Rubens, Danny, and special guest JB Brown from Smartsheet. JB, one of Roo Code's top open-source contributors, shares the inside story of how Roo Code spread like "wildfire" through Smartsheet's engineering organization. He details his motivation for becoming a significant contributor, including his "selfish" reason for building the foundation of the Roo Code Marketplace: to support a private, internal-only marketplace for Smartsheet's proprietary modes. The conversation shifts to enterprise-level AI strategy, covering Smartsheet's "focus on return, not cost" philosophy for AI spend and their unique KPIs for tracking adoption. JB shares a deep dive on moving from "perishable" single-engineer prompts to a team-based AI SDLC with shared standards. This leads to a fascinating discussion on "org designing" your AI, treating modes as a specialized "workforce" of agents, and how Roo Code's new cloud agent roadmap aligns with this future of asynchronous, "digital teammates." Resources Mentioned: Smartsheet: https://www.smartsheet.com/ GitHub: https://github.com/ Amazon Web Services (AWS): https://aws.amazon.com/ AWS Bedrock: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/ Sourcegraph: https://sourcegraph.com/ GitLab: https://gitlab.com/ Slack: https://slack.com/ CHAPTERS 0:00 - Welcome & guest intro: JB Brown 0:29 - A top community contributor 1:31 - What is Smartsheet? 2:53 - How Smartsheet found Roo Code 3:56 - AI's impact on the full SDLC 5:51 - Moving from AI silos to collaboration 7:52 - Mitigating change management concerns 9:02 - Building a team-based AI SDLC 10:05 - Standardizing shared modes 11:37 - The philosophy: Focus on return, not cost 12:52 - Contribution: Bedrock prompt caching 14:09 - The KPIs for AI adoption 16:09 - Adoption tactic: Giving teams time 17:03 - The value of understanding legacy code 18:27 - Using Sourcegraph to find, Roo to fix 19:53 - On code-base indexing 21:11 - The 'selfish' reason for the Marketplace 24:10 - Vision: The private enterprise cloud 26:14 - The need for "packages" of modes 28:40 - Key insight: Modes are agents 32:22 - Roo Code's cloud agent roadmap 33:31 - The GitLab integration blocker 34:30 - The future: Asynchronous digital teammates 36:02 - Managing agents with a "board" 38:07 - Roo's "issue-first" agent workflow 44:15 - The AI adoption curve 46:39 - The value of "terrible" auto-generated PRs 48:10 - The joy of automating mundane work 49:43 - The Roo Code Cloud roadmap 52:46 - A fun time to be in software 54:16 - Agent-based PR management 55:02 - The new status of PRs 57:01 - New models & closing remarks Welcome to Roo Cast, the official podcast of Roo Code, your AI-powered development team integrated directly into VS Code. Whether you're a solo developer, part of a startup, or contributing to open-source projects, this podcast is your resource for insights, updates, and community stories. Each week, we explore topics such as: Feature Deep Dives: Learn how to maximize Roo Code's capabilities in your workflow. Community spotlights: Hear from developers enhancing their productivity with Roo Code. Behind-the-Scenes: Exclusive insights into upcoming developments and community contributions. Live Q&A Sessions: Real-time discussions, feedback, and support from our Discord community. Subscribe now and join a community redefining software development with AI. Website: https://roocode.com/ GitHub: https://github.com/RooVetGit/Roo-Code Discord: https://discord.gg/roocode Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RooCode/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/roo-code X: https://x.com/roocode Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/roocode.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@roo.code