“I want to be in a position to not be the human in the loop where the role of the human in the loop is to say yes, no, and then get blamed when something goes wrong.”
Fallthrough · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Hebert, a senior SRE at Honeycomb who calls himself one of the company's biggest AI skeptics, explains what led to his blog post about embracing the code review bottleneck. He wants AI workflows that support engineers rather than substitute for them.
Transcript
…product be a poison pill for SAS. Like SAS moves fast, ships 100 commits a day or something like that. And a single tenant product ships ideally once a week. And you don't want one to slow down the other. And so there's a lot of coordination work to make both development workflows work at the same
…understanding of how we got here today, right? So that's how we got here today. We were introduced on email, and we're, I guess, we should start there. So you wrote this blog, it looks like back in July of 2026. So like five years ago in terms of AI time, right? What prompted this blog post?
I'm one of the, I guess, biggest, not naysayers of AI, but one of the people who dislikes it the most. I'm a big, big nerd about cognitive systems engineering, and I want to be in a position to, you know, not be the human in the loop where the role of the human in the loop is to say yes, no, and then get blamed when something goes wrong. I want to be involved in the development of things and whatnot. And I've been very, very vocal about what I think a good workflow would be like in terms of supporting people rather than substituting them. And the blog post came because when we started the tenant team, we knew we had to rewrite essentially the whole deployment mechanism for SAS Honeycomb into Greenfield. And AI was already good enough at that point to be doing a fairly decent job. There was an agreement on the team that it would make sense to use it for a lot of work. So for maybe close to six to nine months, we experimented a lot with deployment…
And, Reid, were you on the other side of this? Or were you in agreement with Fred? Or where did you stand on this side?
Oh, I was, I mean, in total agreement with Fred. So since I was managing two teams, I was kind of like, you know, whatever approach we want to take, I'm good with. Whatever works for the team, whatever works for this new service area. I really didn't want to get in the way. I think basically the…
What do you see broadly at Honeycomb? Like, is this vibe coding opinion learnings? Like, is it well accepted in the company? Like, are there people that are pro and against? Or where does it kind of fall at Honeycomb for you all?
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