Hangar DX Podcast

How Honeycomb Is 2Xing Its Engineers with AI

Ankit Jain — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:08:31 -0100

“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

Ankit Jain — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:38:44 -0100

"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

Ankit Jain — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:25:37 -0100

“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

Ankit Jain — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:10:17 -0100

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.

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

Ankit Jain — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:25:44 -0100

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.

We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies, or who are interested in developer productivity.

The Gap Between AI Hype and Developer Productivity

Ankit Jain — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:09:13 -0100

“How much productivity is AI actually giving your engineering teams?” is the wrong question.

In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks with Yegor Denisov-Blanch, researcher at Stanford University, about how engineering productivity is actually measured—and what the data says about AI’s impact on software teams.

Yegor shares insights from large-scale studies on developer output, why early AI productivity claims were overstated, how high-performing teams compound their gains, why some teams see no benefit at all, and what engineering leaders should (and shouldn’t) measure when rolling out AI across the software development lifecycle.

00:00 Introduction to Developer Productivity Research
06:12 Research Methodology and Expert Evaluations
10:35 Impact of AI on Developer Productivity
18:56 Invisible Contributions and Team Dynamics
24:59 Navigating Speed in Startups vs. Enterprises
26:34 The Role of AI in Productivity Gains
28:24 Measuring AI Usage and Results
30:14 Experimentation and Adaptation in AI
33:40 Understanding Ghost Engineers
38:07 Remote Work and Performance Dynamics

About Yegor Denisov-Blanch
Yegor helps software engineering teams make better decisions with data.
Currently he is a researcher at Stanford University. Previously, Yegor led digital transformation at DHL, and was a national champion Olympic weightlifter.

We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies, or who are interested in developer productivity.

How Block Deployed AI Agents Company-Wide in 2 Months

Ankit Jain — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 22:21:02 -0100

What happens when a single engineer’s side project turns into a company-wide AI platform used by every department—engineering, product, marketing, finance, customer support, and sales?

In this episode of the Hangar DX Podcast, Block’s VP of Engineering Angie Jones shares the inside story of how Block deployed AI agents across the entire organization in just eight weeks.

She reveals how an internal tool called Goose—originally built by one engineer—became one of the first-ever MCP clients, exploded as an open-source project, and evolved into a general-purpose agent powering workflows across the company.

We also dig into security and governance, adoption strategies, and practical lessons that every platform team can learn from.

00:00 Introduction to AI Transformation at Block
04:18 Building Goose: The AI Agent
08:50 Adoption Across Departments
11:59 Scaling MCP Servers
13:17 Technical Challenges with MCPs
16:33 Governance and Security of MCPs
17:35 Tool Overload and Centralization Strategies
20:09 Overcoming Cold Start Problems
23:34 Evolving Goose for Different Departments
25:58 Open-Source and Internal Development
28:05 Measuring Success in AI Initiatives
30:02 Recommendations for AI Adoption
33:19 Future Predictions and Initiatives

About Angie Jones
Angie Jones is the Vice President of Engineering, AI Tools & Enablement at Block, Inc.

She is an award-winning teacher and international keynote speaker and holds more than 25 patents for inventions in the areas of virtual worlds, collaboration software, social networking, smarter planet, and software development processes.

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

Measuring Developer Productivity at Meta

Ankit Jain — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 18:03:25 -0100

"Measuring developer productivity is fundamental now that we're observing the largest change in software engineering in a decade. I'm happy we have our traditional productivity metrics in a good place so we can better observe the effect of AI."

Moritz Beller is a software engineering researcher at Meta, and in this episode of the Hangar DX podcast, he talks to Ankit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Aviator, about how Meta came up with their foundational metric DAT - Diff Authoring Time, why time is one of the least gameable metrics, how AI-assisted development changes the meaning of “productivity,” and why investments in tooling drive far more value than surface-level optimizations.

00:00 Introduction
01:04 Understanding Developer Insights at Meta
04:42 Defining Diff Authoring Time (DAT)
07:48 Evolution of DAT: From Version 1 to 6
11:17 Telemetry and Data Collection for Productivity
14:01 Challenges in Measuring Software Engineering Productivity
15:56 Impact of AI on Software Development Metrics
17:48 Case Studies: Productivity Gains from Metrics
22:26 Counterintuitive Findings in Productivity Metrics
24:43 The Challenges of Measuring Productivity
30:04 Qualitative Feedback and Developer Insights
33:28 Advice for Engineering Leaders on Data-Driven Practices
35:14 Future of Productivity Measurement in Software Engineering

About Moritz Beller
Moritz is a software engineering researcher at Meta.

In 2024, she began a part-time Master’s of Engineering in Software Engineering at the University of Auckland, researching the impact of AI on the profession itself. His interest lies in creating and empirically evaluating tools that help developers be more productive.

We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity.

Software Engineering Identity Crisis with Annie Vella

Ankit Jain — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 22:29:48 -0100

“Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code.
But that identity is being challenged.”

In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Annie Vella about the software engineer’s identity crisis, why engineers are so attached to writing code, and how they can prepare for a rapidly evolving future.

00:00 The Identity Crisis in Software Engineering
04:52 Transitioning from Engineering to Management
09:55 The Engineer-Manager Pendulum
14:56 The Evolution of Software Engineering Roles
19:54 AI's Impact on Software Engineering
24:46 Building Trust in AI and Human Collaboration
29:34 Skills for the Future of Software Engineering
34:39 The Future of Software Engineering

About Annie Vella
Annie is a lifelong computer enthusiast with two decades of hands-on engineering and technical leadership experience. Currently a Distinguished Engineer at Westpac New Zealand, she focuses on resilient systems, cross-org opportunities, and quality-first engineering processes.

In 2024, she began a part-time Master’s of Engineering in Software Engineering at the University of Auckland, researching the impact of AI on the profession itself.

We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity.

Agent Experience and the Future of Web Development with Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify

Ankit Jain — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:47:44 -0100

“We're seeing the rise of a new persona that uses our products, the autonomous agent. That means we need to design for them, too. Agent Experience (AX) is about creating products that agents can navigate, integrate with, and orchestrate effectively.”

In this episode, Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, joins Ankit Jain, founder of Aviator, to unpack the next evolution in software: agent experience.

Matt, known for coining the term Jamstack, shares how AI is transforming the way we build for the web, making almost everyone a web developer. From Agent Experience (AX) to open vs. closed agent ecosystems, he explains how autonomous agents will reshape software development and why he thinks we are just entering the decade of agents.

00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and AI
03:00 The Evolution of Coding and Development
06:07 The Impact of AI on Software Development
09:59 Understanding Agent Experience (AX)
13:40 The Future of Human and Agent Collaboration
17:50 Open vs. Closed Systems in Development
21:50 Simplicity in Development Frameworks
25:31 The Role of Agents in Web Development
29:34 Predictions for the Future of Development

About Matt Billmann

Matt Billmann is CEO of Netlify, a company he co-founded in 2014. He has been building developer tools, content management systems, and web infrastructure for more than 30 years and is recognized for coining the term “Jamstack.”

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.

DevEx Is About Making the Car Faster, Not the Driver

Ankit Jain — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 19:02:43 +0000

"Let’s not worry about how fast somebody can run. Let’s assume that they will be fast if they’re in a rocket."

In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast, Shahab Malik, DevEx UX Researcher at JP Morgan Chase, discusses researching developers' needs and pain points in a 70,000-engineer organization and advocates for an enablement approach to developer productivity metrics.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and UX Research
01:59 The Role of UX Research in Developer Experience
05:21 Methodologies in UX Research
10:08 Understanding Developer Needs and Pain Points
13:59 Metrics and Measuring Developer Productivity
20:52 The Importance of System Metrics vs. Individual Metrics
27:40 Communicating Developer Experience to Leadership
32:43 The Impact of AI on Developer Experience

About Shahab Malik

Shahab Malik is a UX Researcher at JPMorgan Chase, where he focuses on Developer Experience (DevEx) within the firm’s Internal Developer Platform (IDP). With a PhD in cultural anthropology, Shahab brings both qualitative and quantitative methods to studying human behavior in complex technical environments.

About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/)
The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps engineers and senior software engineers focused on enhancing the developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and 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 to join us!

DevOps, AI, and the Future of Engineering with Patrick Debois

Ankit Jain — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 22:19:42 +0000

Patrick Debois—widely known as the “Godfather of DevOps” and co-author of The DevOps Handbook—joins Aviator CEO Ankit Jain on The Hangar DX Podcast to explore the parallels between the DevOps movement and today’s AI revolution.

In this conversation, Patrick compares AI adoption to the early chaotic days of DevOps and shares his view on how developer roles are shifting from producers to supervisors of AI-generated code, why code reviews and specs still matter, and what the four key patterns of AI Native Development are.

About Patrick Debois
Patrick Debois is often called the "Godfather of DevOps" for his pioneering role in the movement that reshaped how teams build and ship software. He is the co-author of the DevOps Handbook and principal product engineer at Humans and Code.

Patrick's work focuses on helping engineering teams become more productive with AI tooling, and delivering AI-powered products with engineering rigor and good practices.

About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/)
The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps engineers and senior software engineers focused on enhancing the developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and 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 to join us!

Everything Wrong With Developer Productivity Metrics with Adam Berry

Ankit Jain — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:19:38 +0000

"Metrics will not measure developer productivity and will not solve your engineering organization’s problems", say Adam Berry, Staff Engineer at Netflix.

Adam sits with Ankit Jain, host of The Hangar DX podcast, to discuss one of the most debated topics in engineering: developer productivity metrics.

Adam shares why metrics like the DORA4 were never meant to measure individual productivity, how trust (or lack of it) inside organizations changes the way metrics are used, and why managers often get lost in numbers instead of focusing on narrative and impact.

He explains that metrics are a feedback mechanism, the “metrics industrial complex,” and pitfalls of over-measuring, and how to design metrics from scratch.

00:00 Introduction to Developer Productivity Metrics
01:23 The Origins of Productivity Metrics
07:22 The Obsession with Metrics
10:44 Challenges in Measuring Developer Productivity
12:33 The Metrics Industrial Complex
15:38 The Role of Metrics in Understanding Delivery Performance
19:31 Designing Effective Metrics for Organizations
21:57 Understanding Quality Issues in Engineering
34:32 Measuring Code Quality and Technical Debt
39:02 Prioritizing Engineering Challenges
41:42 Future of Engineering Productivity

About Adam Berry
Adam has worked on developer tools and infrastructure throughout his career, from Eclipse plugins to service and infrastructure work; he now focuses on developer platforms as products to empower engineers and make teams and organizations drastically more effective.

About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/)
The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps engineers and senior software engineers, focused on enhancing the developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and 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.

The Future of Engineering Leadership in the Age of AI

Ankit Jain — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 07:00:00 +0000

"In the next 10-15 years, I'm either going to be a CTO cleaning up after AI, or maybe there won't be people like me anymore because we're just going to write the specs and generate the whole app from scratch every time"

In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Meri Williams, CTO at @pleo_io , about what the future looks like for engineering managers in the age of AI coding.

Meri also shares why engineering organizations can't thrive without managers, what makes a good engineering manager, how to scale tech and teams when AI writes the code, and how to prevent accruing tech debt while doing it.

00:00 The Changing Landscape of Engineering Management
10:20 Navigating Technical Debt in Software Development
19:52 The Future of Engineering Management
35:58 Adapting to AI in Engineering Management

About Meri Williams
Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organizations by working as a CTO coach and tech advisor / NED to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose.

We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies, or who are interested in developer productivity.

Developer Experience in the Age of AI with Chris Westerhold

Ankit Jain — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:52:31 +0000

“What’s your AI strategy’ is the wrong question for engineering leaders. A better one would be: “What are you doing to improve engineering efficiency by 15–20%?”

You don’t have to chase AI just for AI’s sake. Instead, focus on the biggest pain point, on whatever is slowing your teams down. In most orgs, it has nothing to do with needing faster typers.”

In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Chris Westerhold, Global Practice Director for Engineering Excellence at Thoughtworks, to discuss how AI is fundamentally transforming the developer experience (DevEx).

Chris talks about how AI is changing the definition of developer, engineering orgs feeling FOMO of not adopting AI tools instead of focusing on workflow pain points, AI tools adding to cognitive overload, how to evaluate the productivity gains of AI tools, and what’s the right approach to AI strategy when it comes to developer experience.

00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and AI
01:12 The Evolution of Developer Experience
04:30 Navigating Tool Proliferation in Software Development
09:35 Cognitive Load and Complexity in AI-Driven Development
18:04 Finding Focused Solutions Amidst AI Hype
20:58 Metrics and Measuring AI Impact
34:06 Developing an AI Strategy for Engineering Teams

About Chris Westerhold
Chris is a Global Practice Director for Engineering Excellence at Thoughtworks. He has over 15 years of technology experience across startups and large enterprises, with a significant focus on building scalable engineering teams, engineering metrics strategies, developer platforms, platform engineering, and technical product management. He is a vocal advocate for developer experience and is passionate about using data-driven approaches to improve it.

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.

The Limitations of Platform Engineering with Vilas Veeraraghavan and Bryan Finster

Ankit Jain — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:43:11 +0000

What Actually Is Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering is everywhere — but is it just DevOps with a new name?

In this candid conversation, Ankit Jain sits down with Vilas Veeraghavan (ex-Walmart, ex-Netflix) and Bryan Finster (platform advocate and continuous delivery expert) to break down the truth behind the hype.

🔍 In this episode:
00:00 What is Platform Engineering
05:53 DevOps is alive and well
11:51 Challenges in Platform Engineering: Adoption vs. Enablement
14:51 Standardization in Platform Engineering: The Golden Path
17:54 Measuring Success in Platform Engineering: ROI and Developer Happiness
21:00 Success and Failure Stories in Platform Engineering
25:01 The Strength of a Good Platform
27:51 Understanding Internal Developer Platforms (IDP)
35:30 The Impact of AI on Platform Engineering
44:18 Future Predictions for Platform Engineering

Augmenting Engineers With AI with Daniel Doubrovkine

Ankit Jain — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 16:25:57 +0000

"Augmenting engineers with AI wherever it makes sense so they can be more productive" is the mission of Daniel Doubrovkine and his Augmented Engineering team at Shopify.

In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Daniel about AI’s impact on software engineering and developer productivity.

He shares insights on Shopify’s AI-integrated workflows and strategies to improve the developer experience in what he calls a giant mono repo, the world's largest Ruby on Rails app. Daniel also reflects on his career path from individual contributor to management and back, and the importance of staying hands-on with code in an AI-driven future.

Chapters

00:00 AI in Software Engineering
06:36 Solving Engineering Problems With AI at Shopify
18:46 Prioritization and Planning in Developer Productivity
23:15 From IC to Manager and Back
28:52 The Individual Contributor vs. Manager Dilemma
34:44 AI is Getting Better Fast
37:30 Strategies for Successful AI Adoption in Organizations

Find more episodes at https://www.aviator.co/podcast

Measuring Cycle Time with Dr. Cat Hicks

Ankit Jain — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 19:00:00 +0000

Dr. Cat Hicks, a psychologist researching software teams, on what cycle time can and can't measure, why software metrics are hard, and why developers feel their work is invisible.