AI-assisted development has quietly changed which part of the software lifecycle is hardest. Writing code is no longer the bottleneck. Understanding what the resulting system is actually doing in production is. When agents and assistants can generate whole services in an afternoon, the ability to validate change, investigate incidents and reduce risk becomes the constraint that actually decides how fast a team can ship — and that puts observability engineering squarely at the center of the conversation.
Alan Shimel talks with Liz Fong-Jones, Technical Fellow at Honeycomb, about what that shift looks like from the ground. Fong-Jones draws a sharp line between telemetry and observability that most teams still blur. Telemetry is the raw material: logs, metrics, traces describing what is happening inside a system. Observability is the broader property of being able to combine that data with human knowledge and process to actually understand the system and make better decisions. Her framing is that observability is a living quality of software — like testability or accessibility — and a team is never done with it.
They get into how AI reshapes the observability loop itself. Fong-Jones sees real leverage in agent-assisted workflows that generate instrumentation code, sift through mountains of telemetry and help engineers move through investigations faster. The point is not that AI removes human judgment from the loop. It changes where humans spend their time, pulling them off toil and toward the interpretation and decision-making that only a person can do. The second edition of the O’Reilly book Fong-Jones co-authored reflects that shift — the field has moved past arguing whether observability differs from monitoring and into how it supports AI-driven software delivery.
The bigger arc is that cloud native has become the default substrate for modern software, containers and Kubernetes are now assumed rather than debated, and OpenTelemetry sits underneath the whole picture as the standard everyone builds on. In that world, observability engineering is not a nice-to-have added on top of production. It is the thing that lets teams move faster with AI while keeping the risk of moving faster inside acceptable bounds — and the organizations that treat it as a first-class engineering discipline are the ones that get to keep shipping when everyone else is chasing incidents.
