If you're reading this, chances are you've probably come across Autumn, or even interacted with me on the Autumn Discord, and so you're aware I've interned at Autumn for the past 2 weeks. If you've come from somewhere else, welcome! I guess the aforementioned should give you enough context.

This blog exists more as a resource to help me get better at casual writing, rather than academic writing (which I've spent the better part of the last 2 years doing as part of high school), hence I'd like to summarize my experience working at Autumn here - I want to make it clear though, while Autumn is a Y Combinator company, this is not yet another article about ✨ interning at a YC company ✨ or ✨ day in the life at a YC company ✨. If you're looking for that, head to YouTube. This article is unique to my experience at Autumn.

My technical background

To understand a little bit of my background before I started at Autumn: I'm primarily a Python and Rust developer, with experience in both. Previously, a lot of my web development was done purely with SSR technologies, in particular, Django.

I had never really used TypeScript, or anything in the JS eco-system. The maxmimum I'd ever done with JS is just a few small JS animations on my personal websites.

TypeScript

Before my internship at Autumn, my abilities remained centered around Python and Rust with some JavaScript - I had never previously used TypeScript for a considerable project before.

Autumn however, changed this, since it was my job for 2 weeks to be using TypeScript and TypeScript only. Autumn, currently uses an Express backend with a React frontend, both written with TypeScript. Both things I had little experience with.

NextJS was particularly enjoyable - having my backend and frontend coupled so well was certainly unique - I loved it so much, it actually now powers the website you're on right now!

The first feature

The first feature I was asked to build was Usage Limits. This was no easy task. My unfamiliarity with the Autumn codebase coupled with the friction of using a new language was not fun.

However, with the "power" of Windsurf and John's help, I managed to put together a working implementation of usage limits that just about worked - John had to clean it up though. sorry for the extra work.

We certainly had some enjoyable moments, particularly when Windsurf started responding in a completely different language mid-response. Funny thing was, when we translated it, it was actually relevant content, just switched languages in between!

atmn CLI

The Autumn CLI was probably my biggest accomplishment in my two weeks at Autumn, gaining over 18,000+ views on the announcement post on X (though I'm not a person to obsess over views, it was certainly awesome to see the reach of my work).

Internally, there were probably 2.5 iterations of the CLI, initially using the ink library, which I swiftly removed since I wasn't building a TUI, I was building a CLI, that while feature packed, had a very simple interface.

I switched to using the commander, inquirer and chalk libraries quite promptly.

We decided on using OTP auth similar to how Supabase's CLI tool works to pull user's API keys. I ended up implementing API routes under Autumn's devRouter that dealt with OTP auth. The basic auth flow goes as follows:

Someone loads up the OTP page @ /dev/cli on the Autumn dashboard -> POST request to /dev/otp to generate an OTP -> User provides this OTP to the CLI tool -> CLI makes GET request to /dev/otp/:otp to get the user's API keys + other metadata.

Of course there are more details under the hood, such as caching operations. Fun fact, the OTP never hits a database. Its all stored in a Redis cache. If you're interested about the actual implementation, you can view the source code here.

P.S: If you want to try the CLI for yourself, run npx atmn@latest init in a TypeScript project!

Thanks for having me on Autumn! ❤️.