Between early 2025 and April 2026, peak weekday PR merges to Honeycomb's monorepo went from about 30 to about 74. Most of the delta came in the form of PRs that we could prove AI touched. This talk is the honest report-out from eighteen months of AI-assisted engineering: the calibration behind that headline number, the overlapping factors we can name but can't cleanly isolate, and the practices that made throughput compound without wrecking things underneath.
AI amplifies your existing practices. A dysfunctional org gets more dysfunctional; one that already has autonomy, ownership, and feedback loops gets faster without breaking. Which shape you land in is downstream of the substrate you already have, not the models you can access.
Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with over two decades of experience. She is currently a Technical Fellow at honeycomb.io, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.
She lives in Sydney, NSW and in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly and partners. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.
