Navigating the Future of AI Software Development with Honeycomb’s Christine Yen

Hi everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. Glad you can make it.

Um, our next guest is no stranger to text Strong tv. I always love having her on though. She's Christine Yen.

Christine, of course, is the co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. And Christine, welcome back to Tech Drunk tv. It's great to see you.

Thanks, Ellen. It's always great to be here. Thanks for having me.

A pleasure. So, you know what, Christine, not everyone watches every, I don't understand why, but not everyone watches every episode of Tech Drunk tv. Maybe they haven't seen ya on here before.

Maybe they're not familiar with Honeycomb. Why don't we start with you and transition in a honeycomb and get them up to speed? Happy to, uh, my name's Christine.

I used to be a developer today. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb. Honeycomb is an observability platform that helps you figure out why your code is not behaving the way that you expect.

That's the simplest way I know how to describe it. I love it. Can I play a therapist for a second?

Sure. Have a seat on the couch. What do you mean?

You used to be a developer, do you not consider yourself a developer anymore? Oh, Alan, uh, there was a point in time when I thought about how much more time I spend in docs and slide decks and emails and, uh, You and me both my friend, you know, I know I finally, I'm like, I've carved out some time this weekend actually to really get to go play with Claude Code. And I know part of the promise of, of these tools is like, anyone can be a developer.

So, so maybe it's just an easy way for me to get back in. But, um, you know, I think of used to be, or still like, I, I still see that as so much of my identity for why we're building honeycomb, why this is important to me. Um, I have had those experiences breaking production and having the ops team be very upset.

And then me as a developer not knowing how to interpret their graphs or how to, you know, work with their workflows. And so I think of, I certainly think of past Christine as, um, a real motivator for making sure that observability tools are accessible to everyone on the engineering team and are a real channel to bring people together. That was just the response I'm looking for.

Oh, good. Right. Goodness.

Because it, it's fine. I, I was talking to someone the other day, so I'm at the, at the end of the day, I'm a gadget boy. I just like diving into technology and playing with things up to my ears, right?

I roll up my sleeves, I want to get dirty with it, you know, and I spend so much of my time looking at financial projections and pipelines, not the kind of pipelines we'd like to look at, you know what I mean? And, and all of this stuff instead of talking to people like you or writing about things that I find really interesting. And yeah, it kind of, that's the downside of being a founder, being a CEO running a company is you have that free CEO person who's still like the little child in you, but you now you're an adult with all these other things you gotta worry about and take care of.

Um, it takes getting used to, but it, look, you're doing a great job of it. Thank You. It takes getting used to, but it's also then, you know, at least then you get that emotional satisfaction when you're like, oh my gosh, this would've helped past Christine Yen much.

Or like, yeah, you know, past Alan would be so excited that you get to nerd out on this today. Um, so I, yeah, I mean, we all change. We all grow.

Yeah. Um, yeah, I've always, I've always had in my head like the important things that you're having fun and are happy with the outcome of how you're spending your time, but agreed, now our therapy hour is getting, getting a little bit long. All right.

That's it. io, is it? That's right, yes, that's what I remember.

Um, so you can find out all about Honeycomb if you've ever watched not only Christine, but Charity or anyone else from Honeycomb here on Textron or read of articles, we where we cover them, it's all on there, but go to Honeycomb I who get smart about it. Christine brought you in today because you guys recently announced an MCP server for AI agents, which MCP servers usually are for, uh, available on the AWS marketplace. Talk to us about it.

Yeah, So I know on the surface that's a, a wild to think about it, but it feels like a pretty table stakes thing right now. Everyone's got an MCP server, you know, you take your API you make it available and readable by LLMs. Great starting point.

There's a couple different different angles that make me really excited about what it means for Honeycomb and observability first. Um, sort of from a user perspective, the team that built out the M-R-MCP server was really thoughtful about not just exposing our API but adding a bunch of different tools that LLMs will need to be able to orient themselves and navigate schemas and make connections that we are so used to the AI is doing magically. And so, you know, there's a lot of the this early exciting thinking about new ways to work with schema, new ways to work with telemetry data that secretly I'm hoping and expecting will be feedback into our UI experience because there's just a new way to think.

Um, one other angle to think about it is one of the things that's become very clear as we've played with these tools and really worked with LLMs to interrogate existing services, is that there are two qualities that make an MCP server really pleasant to work with one speed, right? I think we're all sort of getting back into this habit of firing off some tricky question to an LLM and going and getting coffee and then coming back and being like, oh, are you done yet? We know the faster we can get your LLM answers to whatever sort of incremental question.

It's, it's trying to ask your service, the more effective and pleasant that interaction will be. Well, since the beginning, honeycomb has really, really optimized for speed. Uh, one of our sort of internal engineering mantras is FAST is the feature because we know that no root cause analysis, no incident response, no curious engineer wants to be sitting there for five minutes waiting for a query to finish.

We left that back in sort of the battle days, and it's translating really beautifully to having a better experience through LLMs and ncps. The second thing that really contributes to a rich MCP interaction, not just demoware, but once something that like really feels right is the richness and the depth of the data that you're working with, right? We know by now in an AI world, data is the oil that drives everything along.

Uh, and with Honeycomb, because so many of our customers have been able to send data to Honeycomb that is rich, that maps to their business, that use, that talks about their customers or talks about like aspects of the business in their words, it means that they're better able, the, the, the l even the off the shelf L LMS can do a better job of mapping an English level question to the telemetry data that they have in Honeycomb way better, uh, and much more naturally than they might with sort of a traditional more constrained observability tool. And so with that speed and that flexibility, um, it's, it's turning, playing around with something like honeycomb into a really exciting and fast experience. Absolutely.

It's just the beginning. I, I agree with you. I mean, look, it, it's changing.

com, something along, I forget the title now. Is DevOps becoming an AI first DevOps, or is AI first DevOps now the kind of norm is AI first honeycomb, I think Is honeycomb and AI first. You know, I think we are internally, we are definitely leveling up rapidly across the, across the organization in our AI use.

Um, I think this question of whether DevOps in general is becoming AI first is, is a good one. I think there's gonna be certain workflows and certain personas that reach for AI first. You know, when I think about our dog food instance, again, I'm embarrassed to admit, um, I don't know all of the fields and the schemas and the, the perfect questions to ask anymore.

But the MCP server, that translation layer makes it effortless. I'm probably gonna be an AI first honeycomb user from now on, which is, again, very scary and very exciting to think about. For engineers who are really deep in the flow, who know exactly what they're asking for, who kind of don't wanna deal with potential misinterpretation, I think that there's gonna be paths that are not AI first, and that's okay.

And the exciting part for vendors is now how do you find that balance? Who, who falls in which buckets? How do you, uh, you know, innovate in each one and then figure out the right pieces to cross port into the other?

We'll, see, I, it still blows my mind that four months ago, MCP was like a brand new thing that I know. And now it's like, it's of course, it's the standard. Everyone's doing it.

Yeah. It's wild. It's a wild world.

We limit, you know, another article by the time this interview is, is, uh, but it's another article I just finished. It's called Daddy, where Do Software Developers come from? And, um, because, you know, at the same time we're doing this, what we're saying is what we're kind of saying is, Hey, if AI could do that job better, let AI do it.

'cause that's gonna, you know, for our senior engineers, our senior developers, our senior people, they're gonna leverage ai. But then you read about, you know, Microsoft and sales. Microsoft laid off all these people.

Salesforce isn't hiring any more quote unquote junior developers if we don't train these junior developers to do the kinds of things you were just talking about, Christine, what's gonna happen when these senior developers go away is just AI do it all. And then are we at the mercy of, of what the ever the AI tells? I mean, where, where's tomorrow's developers and, and observability engineers and DevOps engineers and platform engineer, where are they coming from?

I think we as an industry have a, have some thinking to do about what fundamental skills are actually necessary to work with these ais and which skills we considered were fundamental are actually not anymore. I think it is not hard today to find someone to be like, oh, well, writing code was never the hard part of being a software engineer. Fine.

Uh, but I am hearing stories about baby startups that are hiring folks who weren't software engineers and just expect them to take LLMs and go run Vibe. Yeah. They're vibing and, And, and it, it's always the day two, day three debugging judgment pieces that are, um, that, that start to hit some road bumps.

And, uh, I think it's kind of shortsighted to do really blanket. We're not hiring, um, junior engineers anymore, but I, those companies, every company should be thinking about what are our expectations for junior engineers, for someone new coming in who has these AI agents who's sort of grown up with them over the last two years? What, Or four months?

Four Or four months. Like where, where do we, where do we expect them to lean in? Um, charity's got a post that she's drafting right now.

Maybe by the time this video is up, it'll be published about, uh, durable code versus disposable code. Mm-hmm. And sort of sort of playing with this idea that, uh, not only are there these two buckets of code that in the past we sort of used the same work, uh, skillset to produce.

She's like, maybe there will be a world where disposable code and durable code have entirely different workflows, entirely different skill sets, vibe, coding for disposable code for like little toy apps or things that you're not expecting to, that you kinda just want to get up and running. Awesome. Vibe code for that, for the, I don't know, airline booking systems, or, this is actually a terrible example, but I'm gonna say it anyway.

Air traffic control software that you need to be durable. I know. Mission critical.

Yeah, mission critical stuff. Like it's, it's, it is a different set of expectations and we have not been, we as an industry have not been incredibly introspective about what, what to look for in each one. Well, not only that, we're repeating the same mistake.

So I'm a security person. I've been in security 30 years long before I got involved as a a media person, right? And, um, this is the same mistake we always make when it comes to security.

We, we will, we'll get to security, we'll bolt it on. Don't worry. You know, I, I wrote in another article I wrote last week, the s in vibe coding stands for security.

There is no s in vibe coding. And, and you know, we, and we're gonna pay the price for it. Make no mistake, you know, we will all kind of pay the price until someone says, oh yeah, we should really do something about that.

Um, but, you know, bulls rush in where Wise Men Dad or Tread or whatever the saying goes, maybe there's a little of that going on here. I just, so little I am, I feel like there's so much to keep up on the, the, the, the part of, um, the set of changes we're all experiencing right now that I, I seem to not be able to get enough of is the, how is it changing our teams? How is it changing how we think about this craft?

How is it thinking about the skills that we value? Um, and yeah, I can't, I can't wait to see sort of how things shake out. Absolutely.

It's, you know, the old Irish proverb, right? May you live in interesting times. Indeed.

It certainly is interesting times and it's a great time to be a CEO, right? I mean, to really, 'cause you gotta think about, you know, if you were just a developer, old Christine, little Christine, whatever you wanna call it, you would just be thinking about how does this affect code? Or, or stuff like that.

But you gotta, you, you know, and today's Christine needs to think about all of these kind of macro things and um, You know, a secret about me, Interesting stuff. I Really like to get excited. I just, it's just, it's fun to have like new things get excited about.

And it feels like right now, everywhere I turn, there's like something cool. There's tons of hype over here, and then holy cow, this tool actually lives up to the hype. Uh, it's, it's, it's a fun time.

It's a fun time to be where we are. Me. Oh, I'm, I'm, yeah, I hear me too.

Me too. No doubt about it. But some days I wake up and just say, wow, I can't believe, I can't believe that what I lived through right now.

Like, you know, I mean, the things I'm able to do that I never dreamed Yeah, right. That I'd be able to do kind of stuff. But like, what are the implications?

And I, you know, I, I get this like, are we all gonna end up like Wally, you know, Corps running around on, on server chairs with remotes, but we'll see how it turns out. But honeycombs on top of it, that's the important thing. Um, hey, this MCP server, we mentioned it's available in the AWS marketplace in the AI agents and tools category.

Where else? I assume it's available anywhere else or No, Absolutely. It's open source.

Folks can, you know, you can host your own. We also have the hosted version, so you don't need to deal with setting up bot and all of that on your own. Um, you know, our goal with Honeycomb is always we wanna work, work where you work.

Um, and so we have the easy buttons and then we have the like set it up yourself. Cool. And it's Honey k Mayo.

Christine, it's great seeing you. If nothing else, maybe I'll see you at CubeCon in Atlanta. I guess that's November or something.

That's A, maybe that's a maybe. Uh, but May A solid. Maybe solid.

Maybe you might be sending your AI there. Who knows. Who knows what'll change by then?

It's true. Yeah. Well, let's make sure we talk before then.

Anyway, continued success at Honeycomb. You know, I forgot to ask this MCP service out now. Indeed.

All plans, including our free one. Great. Thanks for coming on.

Say hello to Charity and everyone else. Keep up the great work, Christine, always a pleasure to have you. Likewise.

Thanks so much. Alrighty. Christine Yen, co-founder, CEO at Honeycomb here on Tech Trunk tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back.