AI makes it possible to generate code faster than teams can understand and support it. In this episode, Honeycomb cofounder and CTO Charity Majors joined Ben to discuss how that shift changes the work of building reliable software. Charity explained how observability helps teams connect changes with outcomes, why nondeterministic systems need “more rigor, not less,” and how traces can show the decisions agents make along the way. Over their wide-ranging conversation, she and Ben also covered automatic instrumentation with OpenTelemetry, why we should think of ourselves as “owners on the loop,” the limits of AI in debugging and SRE, and broader industry concerns like the pressure AI hype places on engineering teams and why maintenance, not speed, builds “enduring value.”

About the Generative AI in the Real World podcast: In 2023, ChatGPT put AI on everyone’s agenda. In 2026, the challenge will be turning those agendas into reality.…