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Charity Majors

@charity.wtf
15K followers 280 following 2.1K posts

cofounder/CTO @honeycombio, co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering. I test in production and so do you. 🐝🏳️‍🌈🦄

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Reposted by Charity Majors
Hayden (he/him) @hds.cafe · 21/09/2026
I've read 3 good blog posts on this topic in the last couple of weeks. - @bcantrill.bsky.social: bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/t... - @charity.wtf: charity.wtf/p/confession... - @terriblesoftware.org: terriblesoftware.org/2026/09/10/a...
bcantrill.dtrace.org
The revolt of the reader | The Observation Deck
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 17/09/2026
lol, do our customers actually *want* to be talked at 24x7? I spend most of my time furiously unsubscribing and making other attempts to be unreachable
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 17/09/2026
okay, that's actually really very funny 🤣
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Reposted by Charity Majors
John Tyler @jcmtyler.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Saw a great talk about handcrafted code by @charity.wtf at #ldx3ny. This talk needs trigger warnings! If you're someone like me who prefers to write code by hand, this talk will force you to consider some uncomfortable questions about what you're really trying to build and why.
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Reposted by Charity Majors
Captain Capybara @vought.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Charity is one of the most clear-thinking people on this question of human interaction and ‘slop’. I’ve been banging this drum at work and no one is listening, but I’ve got precious little patience for humans who ask a machine to convey their thoughts to me.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 16/09/2026
Culture eats breakfast for strategy is a variant I had not heard before 🤣
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 16/09/2026
I love everything @bcantrill.bsky.social writes on this topic, and I had forgotten about that post. Thank you!
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 16/09/2026
Ah, I miss live tweeted recaps from the glory days of tech twitter! Here's a thread of my LDX3 talk, "what handcrafted servers taught us about handcrafted code". Thanks, Heidi!!! With a hat tip to @chadfowler.com, whose book "Regenerative Software" is now in O'Reilly prerelease.
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Dominic 🇪🇺 🏳️‍🌈 🇺🇦 @theriotnrrd.eurosky.social · 16/09/2026
My take on workslop: if your job can be done by just copying and pasting slop… why are you here, exactly? Maybe we need an update on the old sysadmin threat of “go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script”; these days, it would be “a very short prompt”.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 15/09/2026
Yes!
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 15/09/2026
Lmao this is incredible
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
Thanks Cynthia!!! Means a lot coming from you ☺️
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
Thank you!! 💕
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
and "we" is just you, as far as I can tell.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
I should think everything I've ever written would point in the opposite direction.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
I'm not a purist. I use AI to help me with structure and editing, because I tend to ramble and lose track of the narrative, or pack too many points into one post. But I will not use it to _write_. That feels like a violation, as a writer and as a reader.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
The final post on this topic comes from @bcantrill.bsky.social, two weeks before Matheus and I got ours together. (Typical Cantrill.) It is called "The revolt of the reader." bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/t... ... and now I am on my way to procure a Pangram browser plugin, by hook or by crook.
bcantrill.dtrace.org
The revolt of the reader | The Observation Deck
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
He also points out that adapting to these tools means we must be MUCH more explicit about what we want & expect. The topic of respecting each other's time (and handling mismatched expectations) is one I discussed at length in our final "AI Norms and Values" post. www.honeycomb.io/blog/ai-norm...
honeycomb.io
AI Norms & Values, Part 3 of 3: Things We Hold True
Charity Majors closes Honeycomb's AI Norms & Values series with the principles the company holds true, how it uses AI day to day, and its ethics stance on AI.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
Because the internet is a hive mind, I have already seen two more excellent pieces today on similar themes. The first is from @terriblesoftware.org, who makes a similar point: "I have my own Claude. If I'm asking you, i want to know what YOU THINK." terriblesoftware.org/2026/09/10/a...
terriblesoftware.org
AI Is Breaking This Thing We Call Trust
AI-generated work can look finished without being understood. That uncertainty erodes trust, slows reviews, and leaves colleagues doing the missing work.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
I wrote a new piece yesterday, called "Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob", about my escalating rage at AI-generated text. It includes a framework for thinking about when AI involvement is fine -- just another tool -- and when it lands as a violation. charity.wtf/p/confession...
charity.wtf
Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob
A framework for thinking about when AI involvement is additive or a violation
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
Wide events, winning again!
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
i also wrote on this topic here, charity.wtf/p/ai-enthusi...
charity.wtf
AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy
Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. Here's how to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 14/09/2026
it amazes me how people on social media just assume we didn't consider it. and talk to our people. and do all the requisite diligence one might expect.
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Reposted by Charity Majors
Mila Ardath (they/them) @ctrlspice.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Hey folks! otel-desktop-viewer 0.5.0 is out now and also the project just passed 1k stars on GitHub, so I figured I'd (re-)introduce it: ctrlspice.codes/rebuilding-o...
ctrlspice.codes
I rebuilt otel-desktop-viewer on top of DuckDB
and all I got was locally searchable traces, metrics, and logs.
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Reposted by Charity Majors
Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey.com · 02/09/2026
This is why we built @honeycomb.io Canvas. To allow you and your agents and your teammates and their agents to all get on the same page together. No matter whether they're running in your harness or ours. Try it out: canvas-playground.lizf.hny.wtf Real version is fully interactive and multiplayer.
canvas-playground.lizf.hny.wtf
Canvas investigation — read-only
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Reposted by Charity Majors
Jeremy Morrell @jeremymorrell.dev · 22/08/2026
Giving an agent read-only access to the telemetry data of a well-instrumented system and asking a question is a wild experience They are very good at this, easily better than the vast majority of engineers, and unlike engineers their attention is very cheap
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 23/08/2026
I guess that's fair. Although I see it part and parcel with all the other ridiculous hypey clickbait and irresponsible headlines, i.e. @betteridgeslaw.bsky.social. Not an actual thing actual people actually believe.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 23/08/2026
Hard same.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 23/08/2026
I used to say this but with "automation". agree.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 23/08/2026
Sticking with the whole "AI is not technology" line may prevent otherwise sympathetic, reasonable people from being receptive to your message, fwiw
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
And we should regulate this one. Tbh I'd settle for just forcing them to follow the law in the first place. All the model companies that followed copyright law got run out of business. What a terrible precedent to set.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
Who is saying we can't talk about the morality of nuclear weapons usage? Me??? I think it's important to critique AI and its harms, ideally in a way connected with reality and a sense of proportionality. But personally i am more interested in discussing how to respond than than cataloguing harms.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
Why can't "AI" be all those things and more? (Although equating AI with consciousness is hardly mainstream outside of science fiction.) It's pretty normal for a technology to have terms used and abused, applied and reapplied as marketing concepts, particularly in the early days.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
"AI isn't a technology" is a pretty strong take. While I think I see where you're going, for that sentence to be true seems to require an artificially constricted definition of the terms involved. Technology is using science and knowledge to make tools to do stuff. Sounds like AI.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
Big fan. Huge.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
no worries! sorry, i keep not getting notifications that you have replied as i am replying back to you
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
second, in whether AI is a morally neutral technology. to me this is tautological, because morality is a human construct; a hammer can't be evil, and neither can AI. other than that, i suspect we are more or less on the same side, and i'm happy to wish you well and move along.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
it seems we have two points of disagreement. first, in what we want to talk about. you exclusively want to talk about the unique harms perpetuated by AI and ML, and i think that's boring and/or fearmongering.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
i am not sure what you mean about my wanting to "discuss harms of a specific ad product". you don't have to convince me that AI perpetuates unique psychological harms. of course it does. of course we will need to develop new calluses and technology and governances to deal with it.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
part of her argument was that she doesn't like being mandated to use AI in a way that she was never told what text editor to use. i would hate that too. i told her about our mandate, and we had a really nice conversation about developer productivity. and that was that.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
i think you're over-indexing on a throwaway line of mine. i never argued that AI is identical to the cloud. i asked Katya how AI is different from the cloud, and she answered. i thought her answer was a reasonable one. i did not argue with it or counter it in any way.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
i think it's a complicated comparison that works in some ways and doesn't work in others.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 22/08/2026
understood, and no worries!
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 21/08/2026
if your conscience tells you to opt out of using AI, you should follow it. my conscience tells me to engage with it and wrestle with it and work toward civic governance.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 21/08/2026
there is no such thing as an entirely evil system or intrinsically evil tools. every human system is made up of shades of grey. and sometimes rejecting the system is the right choice, whatever the cost. i know this deeply, because i grew up with parents who rejected much of the modern world.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 21/08/2026
there are really only two options. either you reject the system entirely, or you strive to use the system to build a better system. i've written more than once about why i choose door b.
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 21/08/2026
i take all your points about the deployment of this tech under the current paradigm, and furthermore i agree. i hate shareholder capitalism, and the diminishment of human life to capital gains, and most of how AI is being sold and shopped around. so what do we do about it?
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Reposted by Charity Majors
Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) @lizthegrey.com · 21/08/2026
so uh, today is a bad day to post our list of "how we work with AI" values, right?
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 21/08/2026
(got interrupted) are you disagreeing with something i said? are you trying to state something different? it's like someone opened my door and started passionately denouncing LLMs at me. i'm not arguing, i'm asking.. what brings you to my door? what conversation are we having?
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 21/08/2026
again, i say: so what? why are you quoting these facts at me? are you trying to convince me of something? if so, what? if you are trying to convince me the system has flaws, i'm already there. i am not being condescending, pedantic, or moving the goal posts. i am asking, what is your point?
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