CTO Hour with Peter Bell: Engineering Metrics for Agentic Development Teams
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
What to track, what to ignore, and what your current metrics are hiding
Most engineering teams have already adopted agentic coding tools. But far fewer know whether those tools are actually improving outcomes. Throughput is up. So are change failure rates, PR size, and code review time. The metrics that are the easiest to collect are often the ones that mislead.
In this CTO Hour, Peter Bell and expert panelists share what leading engineering organizations are actually measuring (and what they’ve stopped measuring) to get honest signals on both AI adoption and its downstream impact.
In our quarterly CTO Hour live events, host Peter Bell and his guests discuss the challenges senior engineering leaders face—both evergreen and emergent. They’ll use real-time feedback to steer the discussion toward the topics you care about most, and leave ample time to answer audience questions. Active and aspiring senior leaders will learn valuable insights from top VPs and CTOs that will prepare you to make better-informed decisions as heads of technology.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Understand which metrics give you honest signals on both AI adoption and engineering impact, and which ones can mislead
- Keep productivity gains from masking quality problems, developer burnout, and delivery instability
- See what a lightweight measurement framework looks like in practice
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a CTO, VP of engineering, or senior tech leader trying to govern agentic tools and honestly assess their business value.
- You’ve seen adoption climb but you’re not confident your metrics are telling you the full story.
Prerequisites
- Come with your questions for Peter Bell and panelists.
- Have a pen and paper handy to capture notes, insights, and inspiration
Recommended follow-up:
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
June 1, 2026, at 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET
- Interactive discussion and Q&A (60 minutes)
Your Hosts and Guests
Peter Bell
Peter Bell is the founder and CTO of Gather.dev, the definitive global learning community for senior engineering leaders, and Dev Tool Collective, which connects the builders, buyers, and backers of next-generation developer tools. A frequent speaker and advisor on engineering leadership, developer productivity, and AI, he has led teams at Flatiron School and General Assembly and taught data science at Columbia Business School.
Charity Majors
Charity Majors is cofounder and CTO of Honeycomb. She pioneered the concept of modern observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab, where she built Second Life. She’s coauthor of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly). She loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.
Laura Tacho
Laura Tacho is a senior principal technologist, developer experience, at Amazon Web Services and coauthor of the Core 4 developer productivity metrics framework and the AI Measurement Framework. She works with Global 2000 and high-growth companies to turn developer experience into measurable business impact by improving efficiency, productivity, and team effectiveness. Laura is also an executive coach for engineering leaders, focusing on data-driven leadership and organizational readiness for AI-assisted engineering. Her flagship course on developer productivity metrics has been taken by more than 1,000 leaders worldwide.
Cat Hicks
Cat Hicks is a psychologist for the humans in tech who designs science and strategy for developers that’s shaped software practice around the world. She’s the founder and principal scientist at Catharsis Consulting, a scientific consultancy that helps software organizations transform with human-centered evidence strategies, and the author of The Psychology of Software Teams (CRC Press, 2026). Cat holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego.
Rebecca Murphey
Rebecca Murphey recently joined Honeycomb as a principal AI operations engineer. Previously, she was field CTO for Swarmia for more than three years, talking to hundreds of engineers and engineering leaders about effective engineering and how to measure it. She also led frontend platform efforts at Stripe and Indeed. Rebecca lives in Durham, NC.