James Governor talks with Charity Majors, Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, about what AI is doing to engineering practices. Majors argues that non-determinism takes more discipline, not less, and every CEO who wants their AI cookies has to eat their broccoli first. Agents in production are finally forcing teams to do the instrumentation work they should have done years ago. They get into Chad Fowler's Phoenix architectures and the idea that the system, not the code, holds the truth about how software behaves. Also: which problems AI has genuinely solved and which it hasn't, why bragging about token spend is like driving a Hummer, and the last year of AI hype has been aimed almost entirely at individual productivity when the hard useful work is always about software development as a team sport. They discuss Honeycomb's Canvas, the company's AI-guided Observabiolity workspace. And finally they discuss the difference between performative outrage and actually artists in the AI era - and make some recommendations accordingly!

Honeycomb is a RedMonk client, but this video is free an independent content.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/charity-majors/

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:51 Nobody has any change budget left
03:15 AI is forcing the discipline conversation
05:37 Broccoli first, then ice cream
06:01 Phoenix architectures, and why code isn't the source of truth
08:47 The problems AI hasn't solved
11:30 Where determinism meets non-determinism
13:29 Token maxxing, Goodhart, and the Hummer problem
15:34 Superpowers for one vs engineering as a team sport
19:00 npmx and doing open source in public
20:41 Honeycomb Canvas, and social debugging at 2am
26:22 AI norms and values
27:42 Writing is thinking
32:25 Work you stand behind vs feedback you can't outsource
35:06 The other bitter lessons
37:33 If you support artists, support artists
43:05 Performative anger and Bluesky
44:49 Knowledge management is back
46:27 Canvas, timeline analysis, and what's next

Charity Majors on AI, Determinism, Instrumentation, & Eating Your Broccoli

The MonkCast

Charity Majors on AI, Determinism, Instrumentation, & Eating Your Broccoli