Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
(Liz Fong-Jones) Between early 2025 and April 2026, peak weekday PR merges to Honeycomb's monorepo went from about 30 to about 74. Most of the delta came in the form of PRs that we could prove AI touched. This talk is the honest report-out from eighteen months of AI-assisted engineering: 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.
https://2026.pycon.org.au/schedule/NDWRBS/
python, pycon, australia, programming, conference, technical, developers, panel, sessions, libraries, frameworks, community, sysadmins, students, education, data, science
Videos licensed as CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
PyCon AU is the national conference for the Python programming community, bringing together professional, student and enthusiast developers, sysadmins and operations folk, students, educators, scientists, statisticians, and many others besides, all with a love for working with Python.
Licensed as CC BY-NC-SA - creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Produced by Next Day Video Australia: https://nextdayvideo.com.au
Thu Aug 27 09:15:00 2026 AEST (UTC+10) at Ballroom 3
(Liz Fong-Jones) Between early 2025 and April 2026, peak weekday PR merges to Honeycomb's monorepo went from about 30 to about 74. Most of the delta came in the form of PRs that we could prove AI touched. This talk is the honest report-out from eighteen months of AI-assisted engineering: 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.
https://2026.pycon.org.au/schedule/NDWRBS/
python, pycon, australia, programming, conference, technical, developers, panel, sessions, libraries, frameworks, community, sysadmins, students, education, data, science
Videos licensed as CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0
PyCon AU is the national conference for the Python programming community, bringing together professional, student and enthusiast developers, sysadmins and operations folk, students, educators, scientists, statisticians, and many others besides, all with a love for working with Python.
Licensed as CC BY-NC-SA - creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Produced by Next Day Video Australia: https://nextdayvideo.com.au
Thu Aug 27 09:15:00 2026 AEST (UTC+10) at Ballroom 3
