a16z@a16zOct 16

Engineering leaders told Grepr founder and CEO Jad Naous they spend 5 to 20% of their infrastructure budget on observability, and it's buying less and less reliability. Jad, a former a16z partner, joins a16z's Martin Casado to discuss whether AI can run production systems as well as it writes code. Grepr sits in a company's log stream, can scan a petabyte of logs a day, cuts observability costs by about 90%, and is building AI agents that use those signals to troubleshoot production issues. How AI is changing engineering at Jad's 10-person company: - A data lake feature that once took one engineer about six months took Jad 10 days - The gap between okay and great engineers on his team "just multiplied 10X" - He runs 3-4 agent sessions at once, with a "tech lead" agent reviewing every PR Why running live systems is a harder problem for AI: - Jad: AI can almost tune databases, but can't yet keep servers running on its own - Martin: every bit of code doubles the ways a program can behave, which is why humans still own systems - The real world is messier than AI's training data, self-driving took 20 years and $170B 0:55 From Stanford to a16z to Grepr 7:00 Why observability spend stopped paying off 11:00 From autocomplete to AI that trains engineers 13:10 Why AI widens the engineer skill gap 14:55 Syntax vs semantics 18:00 Inside Jad's AI workflow 22:55 Six months of work in 10 days 24:50 Can AI reason about how systems really run? 30:10 Why AI SRE tools start in the wrong place 32:30 Can AI run a distributed cluster yet? 37:35 Why engineers buy extra capacity over predicting 39:15 How AI could trace failures in production 43:45 Why AI for ops is harder than for code 49:55 Can AI do a VC's job? 52:05 Why self-driving took 20 years and $170B 57:05 Customers skipped the AI pitch for the 90% savings YouTube: https://youtu.be/blkIGLlZePg @jadtnaous @grepr_ai @martin_casado