Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors

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In 2025, it was rational to be skeptical about AI, but in 2026 it’s clear that AI is changing all of the industry, and there’s less and less place for skepticism. This take is from one of my favorite voices in software reliability and observability: Charity Majors, CTO and cofounder of Honeycomb, co-author of Observability Engineering. (Note: the second edition of Observability Engineering is out, and it’s pretty much a full rewrite of the book, I recommend grabbing it if you’re building reliable systems)

In this episode, I sat down with Charity to discuss how her thinking on AI has evolved, why she believes it is becoming a foundational part of software engineering, and what that means for how teams build, review, and ship software.

We explore how AI is changing the economics of code generation, why reliability and verification are increasingly the bottlenecks, and why the rise of non-deterministic systems requires more engineering discipline. Charity shares her views on code reviews, observability, DevOps, leadership, and why both AI skeptics and enthusiasts are getting important things right.

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro

02:56 How Parse led to Honeycomb