
AWS for Software Companies Podcast Ep194: Measuring What Matters: A Future of Transparency, Safety and Honest Productivity with Honeycomb
Feb 17, 2026
20:16
Honeycomb Co-founder and CTO Charity Majors explains why measuring the right engineering metrics in the age of AI matters more than chasing numbers.
Topics Include:
- Charity Majors introduces Honeycomb as the original observability company for complex systems
- Honeycomb solves high cardinality problems across millions of individual customer experiences
- Their MCP tool ranked top five in Stack Overflow's most-used list
- Canva lets developers interact with production software directly from their IDE
- AI acts as an amplifier requiring strong reliability and observability foundations
- Measuring success requires multiple metrics to avoid gaming single numbers
- Honeycomb adopted Intercom's 2X productivity challenge enlisting employees to identify gains
- Writing code was never the hard part even before generative AI arrived
- Honeycomb created AI values prioritizing transparency and emotional safety for employees
- Staff tested boundaries on resources and environmental impact prompting honest discussions
- Honeycomb acquired Grok and shipped Query Assistant Canvas and MCP products
- Future concerns include AI economics shifting and AI-native developers lacking foundational expertise
Participants:
- Charity Majors – Co-Founder/CTO, Honeycomb.io
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