Hangar DX Podcast

"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
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"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
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🙌 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/

"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/

“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.

"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.