About this episode

Emily Nakashima discusses Honeycomb's approach to AI adoption and its impact on engineering productivity.

“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…

More episodes of Hangar DX Podcast

• The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Code: Cognitive Debt and Intent Debt · May 7, 2026 · 40 min
• Are You Using AI to Go Faster in the Wrong Direction? | Steve Pereira on Flow and Engineering · April 9, 2026 · 36 min
• Scaling AI Adoption Across Engineering Teams with Ryan J. Salva · March 12, 2026 · 41 min
• Build, Deploy, and Merge Queues at Scale with Jon Block · February 26, 2026 · 37 min
• Engineering Discipline in the AI Era with Dave Farley · February 12, 2026 · 37 min
• Platform Engineering Is Not a Tool · January 29, 2026 · 37 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Hangar DX Podcast podcast page.