InfoQ - Observability

More Incidents Don't Necessarily Mean Less Reliability

Craig Risi — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

One of the most common assumptions in engineering leadership is that a rising number of reported incidents signals declining system reliability. However, a recent article from Great Circle argues that the opposite is often true: an increase in incident counts may actually indicate that an organization's incident management culture is improving.

By Craig Risi

Presentation: Keeping ChatGPT Fast as AI Development Accelerates

Martin Spier — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Martin Spier explains how agentic workflows dramatically increase code change volume at OpenAI. He discusses the hidden systemic performance costs of rapid shipping beyond GPUs, and shares how deploying always-on AI agents automates profiling, regression detection, and continuous optimization to maintain product speed and scalability at massive global scale.

By Martin Spier

Instacart Builds Blueberry, an AI-Powered Assistant to Help On-Call Engineers Investigate Incidents

Leela Kumili — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:34:00 GMT

Instacart introduced Blueberry, an AI-assisted incident response system that helps on-call engineers investigate production issues faster. It combines AI agents, operational data, and historical incident knowledge to generate grounded root cause hypotheses in Slack. It uses parallel subagents, MCP integrations, and incident history to reduce investigation time while keeping engineers in control.

By Leela Kumili

AI Is Transforming Incident Response - But the Hardest Problems May Still Belong to Humans

Craig Risi — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how engineering teams respond to production incidents, offering the ability to summarize incident channels, analyze unfamiliar code, suggest remediation steps, generate pull requests, and increasingly assist with diagnosis.

By Craig Risi

Podcast: Culture & Methods Trends 2026: The Human Side of AI Engineering

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:00:00 GMT

This is the Engineering Culture Trends Report for 2026. Featuring a panel of QCon speakers and InfoQ contributors, they discussed AI adoption maturity and risk, the transformation of engineering team structures and roles, and the human dimensions of software development that must not be lost in 2026.

By Ben Linders, Rafiq Gemmail, Craig Smith, Vanessa Formicola, Shawna Martell, Phillip Mortimer, Yinka Omole