Austin Parker, Honeycomb’s Open Source Director, started with a standard Honeycomb demo showing some interesting latency spikes and then ran it through an AI agent he wrote in a few days integrated with their new MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. The agent took 80 seconds, made eight tool calls, and sorted out what was going on. All for the price of $0.60 of tokens.

This is a seismic shift in how we should conceptualize observability tooling. If your product’s value proposition is nice graphs and easy instrumentation, you are le cooked. An LLM commoditizes the analysis piece, OpenTelemetry commoditizes the instrumentation piece. The moats are emptying.

This isn’t something he despairs about, however. He thinks these productivity increases will bring more software which will need more tools. Of course, we have no idea what that’s going to look like yet, but I love this positive spin. Nobody really knew what the web was going to do to the world thirty years ago, just like nobody knew what the automobile would do to the world over a hundred years ago. The question isn’t whether this transformation will happen, but what we'll build with these new capabilities.