AI and Proactive Reliability with Kolton Andrus
From Software Huddle by Software Huddle
April 8, 2026 · 55 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the implications of AI on software reliability with Kolton Andrus, focusing on the challenges and changes in engineering practices.
Today we're talking with Kolton Andrus, the Founder and CEO of Gremlin, about what happens to reliability when AI is writing most of the code. Kolton helped build the Chaos Engineering practice of both Amazon and Netflix before starting Gremlin. In our conversation we talk about scar tissue, the intuition engineers develop from being woken up at 3:00 AM to fix production outages and how AI doesn't have any of it. It generates code in an afternoon that maybe took a team previously weeks to build, but none of those painful lessons come along for the ride. We dig into why 10x more code might mean 10x more failures. The concept of reliability guardrails, think ethical guardrails, but for keeping your systems up. Why you still have to test in production no matter how good your staging environment is? How Gremlin is rethinking their product for the world where agents, not engineers, are essentially the primary users.And why we're entering a painful, narrow part of the hourglass before AI gets good enough to handle all of this on its own.
People in this episode
Host: Software Huddle
Guest: Kolton Andrus
Topics covered
- AI
- reliability
- Chaos Engineering
- software development
- production testing
- engineering intuition
Keywords
- AI
- reliability
- Chaos Engineering
- production outages
- software testing
- engineering practices
- Gremlin
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Gremlin, Amazon, Netflix
More episodes of Software Huddle
- Making Data Agent Ready with Andre Elizondo · March 27, 2026 · 52 min
- Exponential Engineers with Ashmeet Sidana · January 9, 2026 · 53 min
- Powered by Neurons with Ewelina Kurtys · September 16, 2025 · 43 min
- Lessons from Building AI Agents with Rafal Wilinski · August 12, 2025 · 1h 9m
- Building a High-Ownership Engineering Culture with Matt Watson · August 5, 2025 · 52 min
- Building CI for the age of AI Agents with Aayush Shah · July 22, 2025 · 1h 4m
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Software Huddle podcast page.