The AI Software Engineering Revolution, feat. Anthropic | Big Tent S3E9

In this episode of Grafana's Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer (Senior Director of AI, Grafana Labs) and Tom Wilkie (CTO, Grafana Labs) sit down with Eric Burns, Field Executive Architect at Anthropic, to talk about building trust between tech and business execs, why Anthropic bet early on running across every major cloud, and what it was like watching large language models go from "interesting" to "obviously the future" in real time.

The conversation ranges from the earliest goosebumps moments of natural-language UI generation, to Claude writing better MCP servers than humans, to the very real question of whether engineers should still be reading code at all. Along the way: coding on planes, instrumenting a Zigbee mesh with Claude Code, why "recovering engineers" are getting their dopamine hits back, and whether a human reviewing an AI's code is adding value or just getting in the way.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Intro & Tom's new role as Senior Director of AI

0:56 – Meet Eric Burns, Field Executive Architect at Anthropic

2:09 – Why Anthropic bet on running across every major cloud

5:01 – Eric's path into AI — the GPT-3 "aha" moment

12:48 – Coding on planes (and the battery-bank tangent)

16:25 – Agentic use cases in observability & governance

19:39 – Systems of record vs. AI-generated integration

49:41 – Starting small with AI, then scaling up trust

56:45 – The "recovering engineer" getting the dopamine hit back
1:00:53 – Is a human reviewing code still adding value?

Links/resources:
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Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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