The AI Spend Question Nobody Can Answer

How do you prove AI is shipping more features? Amos Haviv leads the Developer Workflow teams at Booking.com, supporting 4000 engineers operating 8000 repos.

Everybody is burning through their AI budget right now and almost nobody can answer what it bought them. Amos can, because his team spent four years building an event system to debug their own SDLC before AI upped the urgency.

In this video, we cover:

• Why verification is the bottleneck right now, and where it moves next
• Building an event store that separates KTLO from real feature delivery
• Why static dashboards create the metric they measure, and the cobra story behind it
• Agent cost, model routing, and why Booking ignores token maxing entirely
• Running a developer survey with a 92% response rate across 3k+ engineers
• Who should own skills and MCPs: a central platform team or the domain experts?

For platform engineers, engineering leaders, and anyone being asked to prove ROI on AI tooling this quarter.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Everyone is burning through their budget
00:00:32 - Verification Is the Bottleneck Every Team Hit
00:03:35 - 4,000 Engineers and 8,000 Repos at Booking.com
00:06:48 - Why Copying Google and OpenAI Will Break You
00:09:21 - Verification Is a Stack of Agents, Not One Review
00:13:27 - Cost Is Becoming a Bottleneck of Its Own
00:17:14 - Was the Internet a Bubble? What That Teaches Us
00:25:32 - What Working With the Frontier Labs Looks Like
00:28:26 - Debugging the SDLC With Four Years of Event Data
00:30:24 - Do Engineers Using AI Actually Ship More Features?
00:37:13 - Where to Start If You Measure Nothing Today
00:45:01 - The Cobra Effect: When a Metric Becomes a Target
00:52:23 - Everyone Is a Builder Now, and Everything Needs Support
01:01:21 - Is AI Turning Every Engineer Into a Manager?
01:03:46 - The Developer Survey With a 92% Response Rate
01:10:09 - Who Owns Skills, MCPs, and the Enterprise Harness
01:17:46 - Great Developer Experience Is High Velocity

Mentioned in the episode:
High Output Management by Andy Grove
The Sovereign Individual (1997)
The story of General Magic

Views expressed are Amos's own and do not represent Booking.com.

#AI #SoftwareEngineering #DeveloperExperience