Hangar DX Podcast

Why Dropbox Built Their Own AI Coding Platform

"The tools are so powerful that people actually want to manage them themselves. Everything is just moving up a tier of thinking.'" Chris Hodges and Kevin Altschuler from Dropbox's Agentic Experience team join Ankit Jain on the HangarDX podcast to talk about why they built Nova, their internal platform for AI coding agents, instead of buying off-the-shelf. They also discuss: Why owning the harness gives you leverage over cost, model selection, and the total developer experience, What makes Nova a platform rather than a point solution? What it takes to get security and privacy teams on board when agents touch your most sensitive data Where is AI engineering headed next? Agents that watch deployments, monitor logs, and message you when something's wrong 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Nova 01:57 Overview of Nova: A New Development Platform 03:57 Challenges Faced by Developers Before Nova 08:34 Metrics for Success: Tracking Nova's Adoption 10:00 Capabilities of Nova: Tackling Toil and Flaky Tests 13:25 Comparing Nova with Existing Cloud-Based Tools 16:28 Nova as a Platform vs. Point Solutions 18:36 Experimentation with Goose and Future Directions 26:35 Building Reliable AI Systems 31:32 The Role of Orchestrators in AI Development 35:07 Future Challenges in AI Development 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Code Review Is a Taste Problem | David Poll ⁨@GitHub⁩

"It's not 'Do I read or not read the code.' It's "Does my attention get directed to where it's actually useful?'" David Poll, head of GitHub's Code & Review organization, joins Ankit Jain on the HangarDX podcast to talk about what code review actually does and why it was never really about catching bugs. Why code review is really a taste problem, not a correctness problem, and How PRDs, architecture docs, and design reviews are collapsing into the code review process, Why we might be headed toward a world with 20x more unmerged PRs, How teams can extract review decisions into institutional memory to beat AI slop with AI, about The sliding scale of not reading code and what determines where your team should land 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

How AI Broke Developer Productivity Measurement with Brian Houck(DX)

"As an industry, I feel like we've lost our minds. Teams are throwing away everything they've learned over the last many decades about how to effectively measure our engineering experiences. And we're not even just throwing it away. We're making negative progress." Brian Houck, applied scientist at DX and co-author of the SPACE framework, joins Ankit Jain on the HangarDX podcast to break down what's actually happening when engineering organizations try to measure AI's impact. Why token usage is the modern equivalent of measuring lines of code, and What his research across eight dimensions of code quality actually found, How calendar cleanup beat AI in PR throughput gains by 2x Why culture—not tech stack—predicts which organizations get the most from AI, about The case for "agent experience" as the next frontier of developer productivity 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

What Happens to Code Review When Agents Write the Code with Vanitha Kumar, Thoughtworks

Vanitha Kumar, Market Technology Director at Thoughtworks, joins Ankit Jain to talk about how code review holds up when agents are writing most of the code. In this episode, they get into: Why pre-integration is no longer the only place review should happen, and How teams decide what's even worth reviewing when a feature spans twenty markdown files, and What shifting review "left" into a teaching moment looks like in practice, plus Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Code Reviews 02:50 Evolution of Code Review Practices 05:46 The Role of Collaboration in Code Reviews 08:24 Cultural Shifts in Code Review Practices 11:12 Harness Engineering and AI in Code Reviews 16:37 The Future of Code Reviews and AI Integration 22:05 Platform Engineering in the AI Era 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

• Transcript

Multiplayer Development, AI Enablement, and the PR Review Crisis — Frances Coronel, Slack

Frances Coronel is a senior software engineer on the agentic SDLC team at Slack, where she builds AI-powered developer tooling and helps enable engineers and non-engineers alike in the agentic era. In this episode of The Hangar DX podcast,, Ankit Jain, CEO of Aviator, talks to Frances about : How Slack is shifting from solo, one-to-one development to multiplayer collaboration with agents Why overindexing on sharing custom setups is more valuable than formal enablement programs The PR review crisis that comes when your merge volume doubles and your review process doesn't change Chapters 00:00 Introduction to DevXP at Slack 01:29 Understanding DevXP and Its Evolution 06:43 The Shift to Multiplayer Collaboration 09:57 Internal Workshops and Upskilling for AI Tools 14:03 The Dashboard for Tool Discovery and Usage 18:51 Tokenmaxxing and Its Implications 21:11 Democratizing Tool Building and Standardization 25:57 Challenges in PR Review Processes 30:59 Future Focus: Enablement and System Rethinking 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Dark Factories, Cargo Cult AI, and Drunk Agents with Geoffrey Huntley

"A software factory is essentially a CNC machine. Without training, many people are going to cut off their hands." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Geoffrey Huntley, AI and software engineering practitioner, creator of Ralph Loop, and independent thinker on autonomous engineering, about: - Why most companies are cargo-culting AI adoption and skipping the foundational work - Designing architecture for agent maintainability and not human maintainability - Why the next programming language won't be designed for humans at all 00:00 Introduction 02:44 The Future of Software Development and Orchestrators 08:48 Reskilling for the New Era of Engineering 12:36 The Evolution of Engineering Organizations 17:38 Software Factories and Verification Challenges 21:34 Convergence of Programming Languages and Future Trends 27:10 Innovations in Programming Languages 28:29 The Role of Code Reviews in Modern Development 33:07 Knowledge Sharing vs. Code Review 39:05 Architectural Evolution and Decision Making 43:26 Maintaining Code Quality with AI 45:54 The Future of Programming Languages and Verification 48:37 The Role of Language in Programming and Tech Debt 51:41 AI's Impact on Tech Debt and Code Quality 55:45 Understanding AI Slop vs. Tech Debt 59:53 Automation and the Future of Code Management 📫 Sign up for our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

• Transcript

"We Don't Use AI to Produce Magic", Wayne Duso, 1Password

In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Wayne Duso, VP of Platform and Infrastructure at 1Password, about: - How a security-first company approaches AI adoption without compromising on privacy and trust - Why the bottleneck has shifted from writing code to planning, architecture, and verification and what that means for how engineers work - How 1Password used agents to refactor a monolith in four hours after days of upfront spec work, and what that experiment revealed https://1password.com/blog/what-we-learned-using-ai-agents-to-refactor-a-monolith 00:00 Wayne Duso's Background and Role at 1Password 02:12 1Password's Engineering Structure and Focus 03:15 AI Adoption Journey at 1Password 07:53 AI Security Considerations for 1Password 09:49 Evolution of Engineering Workflows with AI 11:55 Shifting Bottlenecks in Software Development Life Cycle 13:23 Refactoring Monolith with Agents 18:08 AI as an Amplifier in Engineering Practices 19:09 Navigating the Tools: A Pragmatic Approach 22:03 Human Oversight in AI-Driven Development 25:54 Collaboration Between Humans and Agents 27:58 Managing Specifications for Evolving Systems 30:24 The Review Process: Balancing Speed and Quality 34:09 Adoption Rates and Developer Engagement 38:29 Evolving Metrics: Measuring Impact and Productivity 42:02 Future Initiatives: From JIRA to PR Automation 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Ship to Production Without Code Review? with Jade Rubick

"Engineering teams need to be thinking about how they can get out of verifying every line of code, because otherwise they're going to be completely buried in that and will absolutely be the bottleneck." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Jade Rubick, engineering leadership advisor and coach, about: - Why traditional engineering roles are blurring and teams are feeling the squeeze between rising expectations and unchanged role definitions - How the role of verification engineer could reshape the way teams build and ship software, and - the 3 predictions for software engineering in 2027 that Jade is willing to be wrong about 00:00 Introduction and Jade's Background 02:44 Current Changes in Engineering Organization Structures 05:18 Blurring Roles and Responsibilities in Tech Teams 07:09 The Return of Coding for Engineering Leaders 10:00 Ownership and Role Evolution in AI-Driven Engineering 14:22 Automated Verification Engineers and Testing Pipelines 20:09 Reducing Verification Bottlenecks with AI 22:23 The Role and Responsibilities of Verification Engineers 25:52 Measuring Engineering Productivity in the AI Era 27:26 Predictions for AI and Engineering in 2027 30:33 The Impact of AI on Code Maintenance and Complexity 31:47 Final Thoughts and Future Outlook 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/ Replace code reviews with verified intent AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Code: Cognitive Debt and Intent Debt

"I define cognitive debt as being that understanding of what the system is doing and why, and who knows what across the team." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey, Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair, about - Why AI is amplifying the problems of poor team understanding - How cognitive debt and intent debt are the hidden risks of building fast with AI, and - Why slowing down might be the most important engineering practice in the age of agents. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Margaret's Background 02:11 Exploring the SPACE Framework vs. DORA 06:55 Subjectivity in Measuring Developer Productivity 12:15 Impact of AI on Developer Collaboration and Productivity 16:54 Understanding Cognitive and Intent Debt 22:42 Understanding Cognitive Debt in Software Development 26:36 The Impact of Intent Debt on Development 28:07 Measuring Cognitive and Intent Debt 32:20 The Role of AI in Amplifying Challenges 37:24 Balancing Speed and Understanding in Development 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/

All In on Claude Code at 400-Engineer Scale with Brian Scanlan, Intercom

"You assemble a senior engineer out of hundreds of these skills. Each one is a little building block. We take the time and sweat the details on making sure they are great and almost near perfect at what they do." In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, about how Intercom set a goal of doubling engineering throughput with AI, why low-quality skills are worse than no skills at all, and how a platform team of eight is enabling 400 engineers to make all technical work agent-first. 00:00 Developer Experience and AI 03:01 Intercom's Engineering Team and AI Integration 05:49 Building a Skills Framework for Developer Productivity 08:55 Data-Driven Insights and Skill Improvement 12:05 Quality Control in Skills Development 14:40 Managing Context and Skill Overlap 18:00 Self-Improving Skills and Knowledge Systems 20:53 Ownership and Maintenance of Skills 23:43 Encouraging Adoption of AI Tools 26:52 Building Trust for Production Access 29:50 Business Continuity and Multi-Provider Strategies Brian's blog post: https://ideas.fin.ai/p/how-we-use-claude-code-today-at-intercom 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/

Are You Using AI to Go Faster in the Wrong Direction? | Steve Pereira on Flow and Engineering

"We can be in a flow state running in the wrong direction. Unless you can tie all your actions back to your strategic imperative, you might look back in five years and think: That was fun, but could I have gotten further?" In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Steve Pereira, lead consultant at Visible Value Stream Consulting and co-founder of the Flow Collective, to discuss where AI is genuinely moving the needle versus just generating more code to review, how to think about context switching and flow state when AI makes task-switching cheaper than ever, and how teams can use value stream mapping as a framework for getting AI adoption right. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Value Stream Mapping 05:20 Understanding Value Stream Mapping in Practice 08:09 The Impact of AI on Value Stream Flow 17:06 Context Switching and Flow State in Software Development 27:48 Intentionality in Context Switching and Flow State 35:07 Value Stream Mapping as a Superpower for AI Success 📫 Sign up to our email list for more podcasts, articles, events, and other updates: https://www.aviator.co/podcast ✏️ Subscribe for more videos: @Aviator-Co 🙌 Join a curated community of senior engineers and engineering leaders focused on developer experience and solving productivity challenges at scale! Check out our upcoming off-the-record online sessions where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas and share hard-earned wisdom: https://dx.community/

How Honeycomb Is 2Xing Its Engineers with AI

“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 Engineering Managers 12:59 Upskilling in the Age of AI 17:50 AI Strategy and Product Development at Honeycomb 21:38 Measuring AI Impact and Productivity 28:09 The Future of Observability and AI in Engineering About Emily Nakashima Emily serves as SVP of Engineering at Honeycomb. A former manager and engineering leader at multiple developer tools companies, including Bugsnag and GitHub, Emily is passionate about building best-in-class, consumer-quality tools for engineers. She has a background in product engineering, performance optimization, client-side monitoring, and design. About Hangar DX (dx.community) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers.

Scaling AI Adoption Across Engineering Teams with Ryan J. Salva

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.", says Ryan J. Salva, Google and GitHub dev tools veteran. Ryan also shares: How OpenAI nearly took down GitHub's servers and how that incident seeded the creation of Copilot The five stages of autonomous engineering and why most teams are stuck between stage three and four Why DevOps and SRE are the next untouched frontier of AI The three-step playbook for rolling out AI tools across large engineering teams without regressing on quality Why context, not the model, is the most important investment in AI-assisted development. About Ryan J. Salva Ryan is an experienced developer, product manager, and founder with 25 years of experience building developer tools at startups, Microsoft. GitHub, and now Google. Ryan leads product teams responsible for developer onboarding, code authoring, build and deployment systems, logging, observability, and end-to-end developer experiences. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity.

Build, Deploy, and Merge Queues at Scale with Jon Block

“Engineers don’t always like merge queue because they have to wait longer for their PRs to merge. But the trade-off is that the quality of those merges will be higher, and the company will have less downtime and outages,” says Jon Block, founder of LowRouchAdvisor. Using a merge queue is like wearing a seatbelt, he adds, the only responsible thing to do for large engineering organizations that ship products that matter. Jon also shares best practices and lessons learned about scaling build and deploy from his 26 years of experience. Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Scaling Repositories 01:37 Managing Repositories in Large Organizations 05:24 Monorepo vs. Multirepo: Pros and Cons 07:53 Challenges of Merge Queues and Deployment at Scale 13:02 GitHub Merge Queue Limitations and Solutions 15:36 Batching, Stability, and Deployment Strategies 19:16 Train Method of Deployment and Rollbacks 22:37 Build Systems, Bazel, and Build Avoidance 23:20 Impact of Flaky Tests and Automation 28:46 Adopting Merge Queues and Cultural Challenges 34:11 AI in Development: Opportunities and Risks 37:41 Closing Remarks and Resources About Jon Block Jon Block has spent 26 years in software engineering, nearly all of it at high-growth startups. He has served as VP of Engineering and CTO multiple times and today advises engineering organizations through his firm, Low Touch Advisors. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity. Verify AI Code AI writes code faster than humans can review it. Aviator Verify provides compliance-grade verification through spec-driven development. Ship faster with complete audit trails. https://verify.aviator.co/

Engineering Discipline in the AI Era with Dave Farley

The way that AI is changing software engineering is a bigger shift than object-oriented programming, the internet, and Agile together.", says Dave Farley, author of Continuous Delivery and Modern Software Engineering. Dave also shares why programming languages were designed to help engineers decompose problems into smaller chunks, the three fundamental problems of AI coding, why verification becomes the bottleneck in AI-assisted coding, and why engineering discipline, test-driven development, and behavior-driven development matter even more in this new era. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Productivity and Experience 02:13 Dave Farley's Journey in Software Engineering 08:23 The Impact of AI on Software Development 11:00 AI Tools and Their Role in Coding 16:39 The Importance of TDD and BDD in AI Development 20:37 Testing and Feedback Loops in AI Programming 25:30 Navigating Ambiguity in Specifications 29:29 Future of Software Architecture with AI 34:55 Adapting to AI in Software Engineering Practices 37:28 Conclusion and Future Perspectives About Dave Farley Dave is a pioneer of continuous delivery, a thought leader and expert practitioner in CD, DevOps, TDD, and software design, and shares his expertise through his consultancy, YouTube channel ‪@ModernSoftwareEngineeringYT‬ , books, and training courses. Dave co-authored the definitive book on Continuous Delivery and has published Modern Software Engineering. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity. More: https://dx.community/

Platform Engineering Is Not a Tool

One of the most common mistakes organizations make is equating platform engineering with a piece of software. Backstage is the most visible example. Teams adopt it and declare that they now “have a platform.” In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks with Ajay Chankramath, founder & CEO of Platformetrics, about what platform engineering really means in practice. Ajay discusses why platform engineering should be treated as a set of capabilities rather than a tool, how domain-driven platform engineering connects business intent to infrastructure, why “vibe coding” infrastructure with AI is risky, and how engineering leaders should think about ROI, observability, and supervised AI as adoption accelerates. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Experience and Platform Engineering 01:35 Defining Platform Engineering and Its Evolution 05:59 Backstage is not Platform Engineering 12:37 Understanding Maturity in Platform Engineering 18:21 Domain-Driven Platform Engineering Explained 26:16 The Impact of AI on Platform Engineering About Ajay Chankramath Ajay has 3+ decades of technology leadership experience and is currently the CEO of platformetrics. He is the co-author of Effective Platform Engineering. His current interests are around improving developer productivity using domain-driven platform engineering. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies, or who are interested in developer productivity.

The Gap Between AI Hype and Developer Productivity

“How much productivity is AI actually giving your engineering teams?” is the wrong question. In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks with Yegor Denisov-Blanch, researcher at Stanford University, about how engineering productivity is actually measured—and what the data says about AI’s impact on software teams. Yegor shares insights from large-scale studies on developer output, why early AI productivity claims were overstated, how high-performing teams compound their gains, why some teams see no benefit at all, and what engineering leaders should (and shouldn’t) measure when rolling out AI across the software development lifecycle. 00:00 Introduction to Developer Productivity Research 06:12 Research Methodology and Expert Evaluations 10:35 Impact of AI on Developer Productivity 18:56 Invisible Contributions and Team Dynamics 24:59 Navigating Speed in Startups vs. Enterprises 26:34 The Role of AI in Productivity Gains 28:24 Measuring AI Usage and Results 30:14 Experimentation and Adaptation in AI 33:40 Understanding Ghost Engineers 38:07 Remote Work and Performance Dynamics About Yegor Denisov-Blanch Yegor helps software engineering teams make better decisions with data. Currently he is a researcher at Stanford University. Previously, Yegor led digital transformation at DHL, and was a national champion Olympic weightlifter. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies, or who are interested in developer productivity.

How Block Deployed AI Agents Company-Wide in 2 Months

What happens when a single engineer’s side project turns into a company-wide AI platform used by every department—engineering, product, marketing, finance, customer support, and sales? In this episode of the Hangar DX Podcast, Block’s VP of Engineering Angie Jones shares the inside story of how Block deployed AI agents across the entire organization in just eight weeks. She reveals how an internal tool called Goose—originally built by one engineer—became one of the first-ever MCP clients, exploded as an open-source project, and evolved into a general-purpose agent powering workflows across the company. We also dig into security and governance, adoption strategies, and practical lessons that every platform team can learn from. 00:00 Introduction to AI Transformation at Block 04:18 Building Goose: The AI Agent 08:50 Adoption Across Departments 11:59 Scaling MCP Servers 13:17 Technical Challenges with MCPs 16:33 Governance and Security of MCPs 17:35 Tool Overload and Centralization Strategies 20:09 Overcoming Cold Start Problems 23:34 Evolving Goose for Different Departments 25:58 Open-Source and Internal Development 28:05 Measuring Success in AI Initiatives 30:02 Recommendations for AI Adoption 33:19 Future Predictions and Initiatives About Angie Jones Angie Jones is the Vice President of Engineering, AI Tools & Enablement at Block, Inc. She is an award-winning teacher and international keynote speaker and holds more than 25 patents for inventions in the areas of virtual worlds, collaboration software, social networking, smarter planet, and software development processes. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers

• Transcript

Measuring Developer Productivity at Meta

"Measuring developer productivity is fundamental now that we're observing the largest change in software engineering in a decade. I'm happy we have our traditional productivity metrics in a good place so we can better observe the effect of AI." Moritz Beller is a software engineering researcher at Meta, and in this episode of the Hangar DX podcast, he talks to Ankit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Aviator, about how Meta came up with their foundational metric DAT - Diff Authoring Time, why time is one of the least gameable metrics, how AI-assisted development changes the meaning of “productivity,” and why investments in tooling drive far more value than surface-level optimizations. 00:00 Introduction 01:04 Understanding Developer Insights at Meta 04:42 Defining Diff Authoring Time (DAT) 07:48 Evolution of DAT: From Version 1 to 6 11:17 Telemetry and Data Collection for Productivity 14:01 Challenges in Measuring Software Engineering Productivity 15:56 Impact of AI on Software Development Metrics 17:48 Case Studies: Productivity Gains from Metrics 22:26 Counterintuitive Findings in Productivity Metrics 24:43 The Challenges of Measuring Productivity 30:04 Qualitative Feedback and Developer Insights 33:28 Advice for Engineering Leaders on Data-Driven Practices 35:14 Future of Productivity Measurement in Software Engineering About Moritz Beller Moritz is a software engineering researcher at Developer Insights team at Meta, which closely partners with DevEx teams to find and scale insights that make developers more productive. His interest lies in creating and empirically evaluating tools that help developers be more productive. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity.

Software Engineering Identity Crisis with Annie Vella

“Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged.” In this episode of the HangarDX podcast, Ankit Jain, co-founder and CEO of Aviator, talks to Annie Vella about the software engineer’s identity crisis, why engineers are so attached to writing code, and how they can prepare for a rapidly evolving future. 00:00 The Identity Crisis in Software Engineering 04:52 Transitioning from Engineering to Management 09:55 The Engineer-Manager Pendulum 14:56 The Evolution of Software Engineering Roles 19:54 AI's Impact on Software Engineering 24:46 Building Trust in AI and Human Collaboration 29:34 Skills for the Future of Software Engineering 34:39 The Future of Software Engineering About Annie Vella Annie is a lifelong computer enthusiast with two decades of hands-on engineering and technical leadership experience. Currently a Distinguished Engineer at Westpac New Zealand, she focuses on resilient systems, cross-org opportunities, and quality-first engineering processes. In 2024, she began a part-time Master’s of Engineering in Software Engineering at the University of Auckland, researching the impact of AI on the profession itself. About Hangar DX (https://dx.community/) The Hangar is a community of senior DevOps and senior software engineers focused on developer experience. This is a space where vetted, experienced professionals can exchange ideas, share hard-earned wisdom, troubleshoot issues, and ultimately help each other in their projects and careers. We invite developers who work in DX and platform teams at their respective companies or who are interested in developer productivity.