Garbage in, garbage out: Splunk's Steve Flanders on why AI can't fix your bad telemetry

00:00 Why code was never the real bottleneck in software engineering.

06:32 How AI-generated code shifts bottlenecks to code review and production.

10:53 Garbage in, garbage out: why bad telemetry breaks AI observability.

16:35 OpenTelemetry and semantic conventions as the path to standardized data.

23:02 The chicken-and-egg problem of instrumenting code already in production.

28:47 Why iterative observability investments let you ship faster with AI.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Steve Flanders, who leads AI transformation at Splunk and wrote the book on OpenTelemetry, to talk about why AI acceleration without strong observability foundations creates more problems than it solves.

Steve and Ganesh dig into how AI-generated code moves bottlenecks downstream to code review and production failures. They also cover why badly correlated telemetry makes AI-powered observability useless, how OpenTelemetry provides the semantic conventions needed to fix that, and why the path to shipping faster with AI runs through better data hygiene, not around it.

Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1IqNLJNn46KsyEz3BdDxlC
Follow on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/braintrust-by-cortex/id1849468209