Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors

Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors

From The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz

August 12, 2026 · 1h 26m

About this episode

Charity Majors discusses the evolving role of AI in software engineering and its implications for development practices.

Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. • Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue — In 2025, it was rational to be skeptical about AI, but in 2026 it’s clear that AI is changing all of the industry, and there’s less and less place for skepticism. This take is from one of my favorite voices in software reliability and observability: Charity Majors, CTO and cofounder of Honeycomb, co-author of Observability Engineering . (Note: the second edition of Observability Engineering is out, and it’s pretty much a full rewrite of the book, I recommend grabbing it if you’re building reliable systems) In this episode, I sat down with Charity to discuss how her thinking on AI has evolved, why she believes it is becoming a foundational part of software engineering, and what that means for how teams build, review, and ship software. We explore how AI is changing the economics of code generation, why reliability and verification are increasingly the bottlenecks, and why…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: Charity Majors

Topics covered

Keywords

Sponsors

Antithesis, WorkOS, Buildkite

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Honeycomb

Books & works: Observability Engineering

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