Hangar DX Podcast

David Curlewis, Senior Engineering Manager at Canva, joins Ankit Jain on HangarDX to talk about what happens to platform teams when AI gives every developer a bulldozer.
Why platform teams should go down a layer and offer primitives instead of full highways, and
How inner sourcing and a graduation model help platform teams scale without fighting their own developers, about
What happens when vibe-coded dashboards go mission-critical overnight, and why outcome metrics beat volume?
Chapters
00:00 Welcome to Hangar DX
01:03 David’s platform engineering background
02:13 Why AI is changing platform teams
04:04 The golden path versus AI-built roads
07:40 Platform primitives: observability, security, and MCPs
11:46 Why platform engineering is becoming a core company function
14:56 Centralization, autonomy, and maturity
20:51 Inner source as a model for shared ownership
23:17 Designing contribution guidelines for AI agents
26:50 Intent debt, cognitive debt, and keeping specifications aligned
31:00 Why companies are building their own AI platforms
32:25 Moving from code review to reliable validation
34:50 Measuring AI productivity beyond lines of code
40:06 The return of generalist engineers
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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/
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 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
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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/
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/

"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
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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/
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/

"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
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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/
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/

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/