Reflections on the 2x Initiative at Honeycomb

Between early 2025 and April 2026, peak weekday PR merges to Honeycomb's main monorepo went from about 30 to about 74, and have held steady in the months since. Most of the delta came in the form of PRs that we could prove AI touched. This talk is our honest report-out from eighteen months of AI-assisted engineering, including the calibration behind that headline number, the overlapping factors we can name but can't cleanly isolate, and the practices that made throughput compound without wrecking things underneath.

AI amplifies your existing practices. A dysfunctional org gets more dysfunctional; one that already has autonomy, ownership, and feedback loops gets faster without breaking. Which shape you land in is downstream of the substrate you already have, not the models you can access.