Writing the same book three times with Rebecca Murphey and Otto Hilska

In this special episode, former Engineering Unblocked host Rebecca Murphey returns — now at Honeycomb — alongside Swarmia CEO Otto Hilska, to talk through the third edition of Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization: what changed between editions, what didn't, and where the industry is headed.Rebecca looked at a few thousand pull requests at Honeycomb and found that somewhere in the order of 90% were unaffected by human review. Her team now has a goal of merging a quarter of all pull requests without a human reviewer by the end of the year. Otto describes the same bottleneck from the other side: what he calls the AI paradox, where individual developers 10x and the organization gets 10%.They also get into where the constraint goes next. Otto thinks quality is the under-discussed topic of this era, and that cost and ROI math needs to become standard in every engineering organization. Rebecca thinks the question has stopped being about effective software organizations and started being about effective businesses.(0:00) The AI paradox: individual developers 10x, the organization gets 10%(0:32) Introduction(1:55) Why Build needed a third edition(4:03) Why the constraint has moved beyond engineering(5:51) Non-engineers writing code(7:42) Enablement, platforms, and making it safe to build(12:06) Same fundamentals, new reality(15:25) Rethinking teams and roles(21:32) The first step for engineering leaders(26:05) Individual versus organizational productivity(30:11) Sharing AI knowledge across the organization(32:53) Developer productivity in the AI era(34:18) Constraints over code(35:03) Why one productivity metric will never work(37:23) How quality drives speed(41:29) AI costs and the ROI math(47:21) What happens to metrics when agents write the code(53:31) Rethinking code review(1:01:08) Platform teams and blast radius(1:03:36) Why change stalls(1:06:53) The next booksFollow Otto on LinkedIn Follow Rebecca on LinkedInRead Build for free on the Swarmia websiteFind the full transcript on the Swarmia website