Hangar DX Podcast

Nobody Needs a 50,000-Line PR with Ray Myers

"I feel this is a non-solution to a non-problem that is being given so much credence for very dubious reasons, and in general, it will be harmful.” On HangarDX, Ankit Jain talks with Ray Myers, a software developer and coding-agent expert, about why the push toward dark software factories, where agents write the code and no one reads it, is the wrong goal. They talk about: - Why dark factories are a reboot of vibe coding that still breaks down under real scale, risk, and change over time, and - Why you can get most of the value of dark factories from continuous delivery practices teams have taught for a decade, and - Why people who are telling you not to read code are actually reading the code Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Ray Myers and the concept of dark factories 04:09 What is a dark factory and its hypothetical nature 07:12 Scale, risk, and change in enterprise software 11:48 Why Ray Myers is anti-dark factory 13:27 The importance of reading code and guardrails 17:23 Leveraging guardrails and automated checks 22:25 The role of verification systems and revealing code 33:21 The limits of automation and the analogy of self-driving cars 36:51 The future of AI, automation, and human oversight in software development Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/ 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/

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Why Teams Only Pretend to Review AI Code with Dr. Michaela Greiler

"We just pretend to do code reviews. I'm wading through this large PR, and I try to understand what's going on and be smart, but the fact is that I don't really know what's going on." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Dr. Michaela Greiler, software engineering researcher and consultant, about: What code review surrender looks like on teams that never actually decided to stop reviewing How her SCOPE model moves oversight earlier, into planning, and scales it by risk, alignment, and understanding, and Why an engineer saying "I'm shipping code I don't understand" is a green flag for a team? Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/ 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/

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Uncle Bob: Humans Are Too Slow for AI-Generated Code

"My working hypothesis is that human beings are too slow when dealing with code. If we're going to move at the speed of the agents, we're all going to have to back off a little bit and maintain high-level supervision." On this episode of HangarDX, Ankit Jain sits down with Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob), co-author of the Agile Manifesto and author of Clean Code, to talk about: Why he stopped reading code, and the constraints he uses instead: unit tests, CRAP scores, mutation testing, and Gherkin, Why code review is slowing teams down, and why only humans can be responsible for what agents produce, and How a single engineer may now do the work of a team, and why Clean Code principles still apply. Note: At 17:05 Uncle Bob starts sharing his screen, so we recommend watching a video version of this episode to tget the full experience: https://youtu.be/5kCISBJwoZo Chapters 00:00 Introduction 01:48 How Uncle Bob codes today 03:12 What changed his mind about AI coding 04:52 Three constraints: unit tests, CRAP, and mutation testing 08:06 Aligning tests with intent 09:38 Gherkin and human-authored specs 11:00 Human judgment as the final arbiter 12:52 Small functions, readability, and complexity 13:20 Relaxing constraints as agents improve 13:54 Code written for agents, not humans 15:10 The future of code review and software teams 17:55 A dynamic UML tool for reviewing agent output 21:09 Architecture diagrams as a review surface 23:05 Disciplines every team needs 25:25 Why harness engineering is overrated 26:37 From harness to a single trusted agent 27:59 Are software factories doomed? 28:30 The AI exponential curve and its physical limits 29:30 Future optimizations and quantum computing 29:58 Responsibility and ownership of AI-generated code 32:26 Rewriting Clean Code for the AI era 33:30 Why Clean Code principles still apply 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Your Developers Are Building Their Own Roads. Now What?

David Curlewis, Senior Engineering Manager at Canva, joins Ankit Jain on HangarDX to talk about what happens to platform teams when AI gives every developer a bulldozer. Why platform teams should go down a layer and offer primitives instead of full highways, and How inner sourcing and a graduation model help platform teams scale without fighting their own developers, about What happens when vibe-coded dashboards go mission-critical overnight, and why outcome metrics beat volume? Chapters 00:00 Welcome to Hangar DX 01:03 David’s platform engineering background 02:13 Why AI is changing platform teams 04:04 The golden path versus AI-built roads 07:40 Platform primitives: observability, security, and MCPs 11:46 Why platform engineering is becoming a core company function 14:56 Centralization, autonomy, and maturity 20:51 Inner source as a model for shared ownership 23:17 Designing contribution guidelines for AI agents 26:50 Intent debt, cognitive debt, and keeping specifications aligned 31:00 Why companies are building their own AI platforms 32:25 Moving from code review to reliable validation 34:50 Measuring AI productivity beyond lines of code 40:06 The return of generalist engineers 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

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Why Dropbox Built Their Own AI Coding Platform

"The tools are so powerful that people actually want to manage them themselves. Everything is just moving up a tier of thinking.'" Chris Hodges and Kevin Altschuler from Dropbox's Agentic Experience team join Ankit Jain on the HangarDX podcast to talk about why they built Nova, their internal platform for AI coding agents, instead of buying off-the-shelf. They also discuss: Why owning the harness gives you leverage over cost, model selection, and the total developer experience, What makes Nova a platform rather than a point solution? What it takes to get security and privacy teams on board when agents touch your most sensitive data Where is AI engineering headed next? Agents that watch deployments, monitor logs, and message you when something's wrong 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Nova 01:57 Overview of Nova: A New Development Platform 03:57 Challenges Faced by Developers Before Nova 08:34 Metrics for Success: Tracking Nova's Adoption 10:00 Capabilities of Nova: Tackling Toil and Flaky Tests 13:25 Comparing Nova with Existing Cloud-Based Tools 16:28 Nova as a Platform vs. Point Solutions 18:36 Experimentation with Goose and Future Directions 26:35 Building Reliable AI Systems 31:32 The Role of Orchestrators in AI Development 35:07 Future Challenges in AI Development 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Code Review Is a Taste Problem | David Poll ⁨@GitHub⁩

"It's not 'Do I read or not read the code.' It's "Does my attention get directed to where it's actually useful?'" David Poll, head of GitHub's Code & Review organization, joins Ankit Jain on the HangarDX podcast to talk about what code review actually does and why it was never really about catching bugs. Why code review is really a taste problem, not a correctness problem, and How PRDs, architecture docs, and design reviews are collapsing into the code review process, Why we might be headed toward a world with 20x more unmerged PRs, How teams can extract review decisions into institutional memory to beat AI slop with AI, about The sliding scale of not reading code and what determines where your team should land 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

How AI Broke Developer Productivity Measurement with Brian Houck(DX)

"As an industry, I feel like we've lost our minds. Teams are throwing away everything they've learned over the last many decades about how to effectively measure our engineering experiences. And we're not even just throwing it away. We're making negative progress." Brian Houck, applied scientist at DX and co-author of the SPACE framework, joins Ankit Jain on the HangarDX podcast to break down what's actually happening when engineering organizations try to measure AI's impact. Why token usage is the modern equivalent of measuring lines of code, and What his research across eight dimensions of code quality actually found, How calendar cleanup beat AI in PR throughput gains by 2x Why culture—not tech stack—predicts which organizations get the most from AI, about The case for "agent experience" as the next frontier of developer productivity 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

What Happens to Code Review When Agents Write the Code with Vanitha Kumar, Thoughtworks

Vanitha Kumar, Market Technology Director at Thoughtworks, joins Ankit Jain to talk about how code review holds up when agents are writing most of the code. In this episode, they get into: Why pre-integration is no longer the only place review should happen, and How teams decide what's even worth reviewing when a feature spans twenty markdown files, and What shifting review "left" into a teaching moment looks like in practice, plus Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Code Reviews 02:50 Evolution of Code Review Practices 05:46 The Role of Collaboration in Code Reviews 08:24 Cultural Shifts in Code Review Practices 11:12 Harness Engineering and AI in Code Reviews 16:37 The Future of Code Reviews and AI Integration 22:05 Platform Engineering in the AI Era 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

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Multiplayer Development, AI Enablement, and the PR Review Crisis — Frances Coronel, Slack

Frances Coronel is a senior software engineer on the agentic SDLC team at Slack, where she builds AI-powered developer tooling and helps enable engineers and non-engineers alike in the agentic era. In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast,, Ankit Jain, CEO of Aviator, talks to Frances about : How Slack is shifting from solo, one-to-one development to multiplayer collaboration with agents Why overindexing on sharing custom setups is more valuable than formal enablement programs The PR review crisis that comes when your merge volume doubles and your review process doesn't change Chapters 00:00 Introduction to DevXP at Slack 01:29 Understanding DevXP and Its Evolution 06:43 The Shift to Multiplayer Collaboration 09:57 Internal Workshops and Upskilling for AI Tools 14:03 The Dashboard for Tool Discovery and Usage 18:51 Tokenmaxxing and Its Implications 21:11 Democratizing Tool Building and Standardization 25:57 Challenges in PR Review Processes 30:59 Future Focus: Enablement and System Rethinking 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Dark Factories, Cargo Cult AI, and Drunk Agents with Geoffrey Huntley

"A software factory is essentially a CNC machine. Without training, many people are going to cut off their hands." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Geoffrey Huntley, AI and software engineering practitioner, creator of Ralph Loop, and independent thinker on autonomous engineering, about: - Why most companies are cargo-culting AI adoption and skipping the foundational work - Designing architecture for agent maintainability and not human maintainability - Why the next programming language won't be designed for humans at all 00:00 Introduction 02:44 The Future of Software Development and Orchestrators 08:48 Reskilling for the New Era of Engineering 12:36 The Evolution of Engineering Organizations 17:38 Software Factories and Verification Challenges 21:34 Convergence of Programming Languages and Future Trends 27:10 Innovations in Programming Languages 28:29 The Role of Code Reviews in Modern Development 33:07 Knowledge Sharing vs. Code Review 39:05 Architectural Evolution and Decision Making 43:26 Maintaining Code Quality with AI 45:54 The Future of Programming Languages and Verification 48:37 The Role of Language in Programming and Tech Debt 51:41 AI's Impact on Tech Debt and Code Quality 55:45 Understanding AI Slop vs. Tech Debt 59:53 Automation and the Future of Code Management 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

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"We Don't Use AI to Produce Magic", Wayne Duso, 1Password

In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Wayne Duso, VP of Platform and Infrastructure at 1Password, about: - How a security-first company approaches AI adoption without compromising on privacy and trust - Why the bottleneck has shifted from writing code to planning, architecture, and verification and what that means for how engineers work - How 1Password used agents to refactor a monolith in four hours after days of upfront spec work, and what that experiment revealed https://1password.com/blog/what-we-learned-using-ai-agents-to-refactor-a-monolith 00:00 Wayne Duso's Background and Role at 1Password 02:12 1Password's Engineering Structure and Focus 03:15 AI Adoption Journey at 1Password 07:53 AI Security Considerations for 1Password 09:49 Evolution of Engineering Workflows with AI 11:55 Shifting Bottlenecks in Software Development Life Cycle 13:23 Refactoring Monolith with Agents 18:08 AI as an Amplifier in Engineering Practices 19:09 Navigating the Tools: A Pragmatic Approach 22:03 Human Oversight in AI-Driven Development 25:54 Collaboration Between Humans and Agents 27:58 Managing Specifications for Evolving Systems 30:24 The Review Process: Balancing Speed and Quality 34:09 Adoption Rates and Developer Engagement 38:29 Evolving Metrics: Measuring Impact and Productivity 42:02 Future Initiatives: From JIRA to PR Automation 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Ship to Production Without Code Review? with Jade Rubick

"Engineering teams need to be thinking about how they can get out of verifying every line of code, because otherwise they're going to be completely buried in that and will absolutely be the bottleneck." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Jade Rubick, engineering leadership advisor and coach, about: - Why traditional engineering roles are blurring and teams are feeling the squeeze between rising expectations and unchanged role definitions - How the role of verification engineer could reshape the way teams build and ship software, and - the 3 predictions for software engineering in 2027 that Jade is willing to be wrong about 00:00 Introduction and Jade's Background 02:44 Current Changes in Engineering Organization Structures 05:18 Blurring Roles and Responsibilities in Tech Teams 07:09 The Return of Coding for Engineering Leaders 10:00 Ownership and Role Evolution in AI-Driven Engineering 14:22 Automated Verification Engineers and Testing Pipelines 20:09 Reducing Verification Bottlenecks with AI 22:23 The Role and Responsibilities of Verification Engineers 25:52 Measuring Engineering Productivity in the AI Era 27:26 Predictions for AI and Engineering in 2027 30:33 The Impact of AI on Code Maintenance and Complexity 31:47 Final Thoughts and Future Outlook 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Code: Cognitive Debt and Intent Debt

"I define cognitive debt as being that understanding of what the system is doing and why, and who knows what across the team." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair, about - Why AI is amplifying the problems of poor team understanding - How cognitive debt and intent debt are the hidden risks of building fast with AI, and - Why slowing down might be the most important engineering practice in the age of agents. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Margaret's Background 02:11 Exploring the SPACE Framework vs. DORA 06:55 Subjectivity in Measuring Developer Productivity 12:15 Impact of AI on Developer Collaboration and Productivity 16:54 Understanding Cognitive and Intent Debt 22:42 Understanding Cognitive Debt in Software Development 26:36 The Impact of Intent Debt on Development 28:07 Measuring Cognitive and Intent Debt 32:20 The Role of AI in Amplifying Challenges 37:24 Balancing Speed and Understanding in Development 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/

All In on Claude Code at 400-Engineer Scale with Brian Scanlan, Intercom

"You assemble a senior engineer out of hundreds of these skills. Each one is a little building block. We take the time and sweat the details on making sure they are great and almost near perfect at what they do." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, about how Intercom set a goal of doubling engineering throughput with AI, why low-quality skills are worse than no skills at all, and how a platform team of eight is enabling 400 engineers to make all technical work agent-first. 00:00 Developer Experience and AI 03:01 Intercom's Engineering Team and AI Integration 05:49 Building a Skills Framework for Developer Productivity 08:55 Data-Driven Insights and Skill Improvement 12:05 Quality Control in Skills Development 14:40 Managing Context and Skill Overlap 18:00 Self-Improving Skills and Knowledge Systems 20:53 Ownership and Maintenance of Skills 23:43 Encouraging Adoption of AI Tools 26:52 Building Trust for Production Access 29:50 Business Continuity and Multi-Provider Strategies Brian's blog post: https://ideas.fin.ai/p/how-we-use-claude-code-today-at-intercom 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/

Are You Using AI to Go Faster in the Wrong Direction? | Steve Pereira on Flow and Engineering

"We can be in a flow state running in the wrong direction. Unless you can tie all your actions back to your strategic imperative, you might look back in five years and think: That was fun, but could I have gotten further?" In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Steve Pereira, lead consultant at Visible Value Stream Consulting and co-founder of the Flow Collective, to discuss where AI is genuinely moving the needle versus just generating more code to review, how to think about context switching and flow state when AI makes task-switching cheaper than ever, and how teams can use value stream mapping as a framework for getting AI adoption right. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Value Stream Mapping 05:20 Understanding Value Stream Mapping in Practice 08:09 The Impact of AI on Value Stream Flow 17:06 Context Switching and Flow State in Software Development 27:48 Intentionality in Context Switching and Flow State 35:07 Value Stream Mapping as a Superpower for AI Success 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/

How Honeycomb Is 2Xing Its Engineers with AI

“Our internal target is to 2X our impact with AI over one year. Unlike some more outlandish mandates, that one is both aspirational and achievable,” says Emily Nakashima, SVP of Engineering at Honeycomb. In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast, Emily shares how Honeycomb approached AI adoption at scale and why they try not to focus on metrics that can be gamed but rely more on self-reporting by developers. Emily also discusses: - Why flattening org charts is a short-term optimization that will cost companies later - How Honeycomb issued a company-wide 2X mandate and what actually happened when they did - Why the "buffet phase" of AI tool adoption is over and what a structured rollout looks like - Why self-reporting beats hard metrics when measuring AI's impact on your team - Why observability is more critical than ever in a world of non-deterministic AI-generated code - Why AI SRE tools demo well but often fall short, and what they need to actually work 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and AI 02:19 Emily's Journey in Engineering and Leadership 05:15 Navigating Career Growth in Engineering 06:28 Cultural Shifts in Engineering Management 09:50 The Evolving Role of Engineering Managers 12:59 Upskilling in the Age of AI 17:50 AI Strategy and Product Development at Honeycomb 21:38 Measuring AI Impact and Productivity 28:09 The Future of Observability and AI in Engineering About Emily Nakashima Emily serves as SVP of Engineering at Honeycomb. A former manager and engineering leader at multiple developer tools companies, including Bugsnag and GitHub, Emily is passionate about building best-in-class, consumer-quality tools for engineers. She has a background in product engineering, performance optimization, client-side monitoring, and design. About Hangar DX (dx.community) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers.

Scaling AI Adoption Across Engineering Teams with Ryan J. Salva

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.", says Ryan J. Salva, Google and GitHub dev tools veteran. Ryan also shares: How OpenAI nearly took down GitHub's servers and how that incident seeded the creation of Copilot The five stages of autonomous engineering and why most teams are stuck between stage three and four Why DevOps and SRE are the next untouched frontier of AI The three-step playbook for rolling out AI tools across large engineering teams without regressing on quality Why context, not the model, is the most important investment in AI-assisted development. About Ryan J. Salva Ryan is an experienced developer, product manager, and founder with 25 years of experience building developer tools at startups, Microsoft. GitHub, and now Google. Ryan leads product teams responsible for developer onboarding, code authoring, build and deployment systems, logging, observability, and end-to-end developer experiences. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity.

Build, Deploy, and Merge Queues at Scale with Jon Block

“Engineers don’t always like merge queue because they have to wait longer for their PRs to merge. But the trade-off is that the quality of those merges will be higher, and the company will have less downtime and outages,” says Jon Block, founder of LowRouchAdvisor. Using a merge queue is like wearing a seatbelt, he adds, the only responsible thing to do for large engineering organizations that ship products that matter. Jon also shares best practices and lessons learned about scaling build and deploy from his 26 years of experience. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Scaling Repositories 01:37 Managing Repositories in Large Organizations 05:24 Monorepo vs. Multirepo: Pros and Cons 07:53 Challenges of Merge Queues and Deployment at Scale 13:02 GitHub Merge Queue Limitations and Solutions 15:36 Batching, Stability, and Deployment Strategies 19:16 Train Method of Deployment and Rollbacks 22:37 Build Systems, Bazel, and Build Avoidance 23:20 Impact of Flaky Tests and Automation 28:46 Adopting Merge Queues and Cultural Challenges 34:11 AI in Development: Opportunities and Risks 37:41 Closing Remarks and Resources About Jon Block Jon Block has spent 26 years in software engineering, nearly all of it at high-growth startups. He has served as VP of Engineering and CTO multiple times and today advises engineering organizations through his firm, Low Touch Advisors. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity. Verify AI Code AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Engineering Discipline in the AI Era with Dave Farley

The way that AI is changing software engineering is a bigger shift than object-oriented programming, the internet, and Agile together.", says Dave Farley, author of Continuous Delivery and Modern Software Engineering. Dave also shares why programming languages were designed to help engineers decompose problems into smaller chunks, the three fundamental problems of AI coding, why verification becomes the bottleneck in AI-assisted coding, and why engineering discipline, test-driven development, and behavior-driven development matter even more in this new era. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Productivity and Experience 02:13 Dave Farley's Journey in Software Engineering 08:23 The Impact of AI on Software Development 11:00 AI Tools and Their Role in Coding 16:39 The Importance of TDD and BDD in AI Development 20:37 Testing and Feedback Loops in AI Programming 25:30 Navigating Ambiguity in Specifications 29:29 Future of Software Architecture with AI 34:55 Adapting to AI in Software Engineering Practices 37:28 Conclusion and Future Perspectives About Dave Farley Dave is a pioneer of continuous delivery, a thought leader and expert practitioner in CD, DevOps, TDD, and software design, and shares his expertise through his consultancy, YouTube channel ‪@ModernSoftwareEngineeringYT‬ , books, and training courses. Dave co-authored the definitive book on Continuous Delivery and has published Modern Software Engineering. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity. More: https://dx.community/

Platform Engineering Is Not a Tool

One of the most common mistakes organizations make is equating platform engineering with a piece of software. Backstage is the most visible example. Teams adopt it and declare that they now “have a platform.” In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks with Ajay Chankramath, founder & CEO of Platformetrics, about what platform engineering really means in practice. Ajay discusses why platform engineering should be treated as a set of capabilities rather than a tool, how domain-driven platform engineering connects business intent to infrastructure, why “vibe coding” infrastructure with AI is risky, and how engineering leaders should think about ROI, observability, and supervised AI as adoption accelerates. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Platform Engineering 01:35 Defining Platform Engineering and Its Evolution 05:59 Backstage is not Platform Engineering 12:37 Understanding Maturity in Platform Engineering 18:21 Domain-Driven Platform Engineering Explained 26:16 The Impact of AI on Platform Engineering About Ajay Chankramath Ajay has 3+ decades of technology leadership experience and is currently the CEO of platformetrics. He is the co-author of Effective Platform Engineering. His current interests are around improving developer productivity using domain-driven platform engineering. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies, or who are interested in developer productivity.