Engineering in the Age of Agents with Yechezkel Rabinovich

Modern software platforms are increasingly composed of diverse microservices, third party APIs, and Cloud resources. The distributed nature of these systems makes it difficult for engineers to gain a clear view of how their systems behave, which can slow down troubleshooting and increase operational risk. Groundcover is an observability platform that uses eBPF sensors to capture logs, metrics, and traces directly from the kernel. Critically, GroundCover runs on a bring your own Cloud model, so all data remains within the user's own environment, which gives increased privacy, security, and cost efficiency. The company is also focused on adapting to how AI generated code is changing observability. Code can now be produced at superhuman speed, which increases the challenges for reviewing code before it enters production. This means that observability is likely to play a growing role in code validation and providing guardrails. Yaheskel Rabinovich, or Chez, is the CTO and cofounder of Groundcover. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss his journey from kernel engineering to building an eBPF powered observability company. The conversation explores the power of eBPF, the realities of observability in modern systems, the impact of AI on software development and security, and where the future of root cause analysis is headed. Kevin Ball, or Kate Ball, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in Action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Kbal on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, kbal.llc. Hey, Chez. Welcome to the show. Hey. Thank you. Nice to be here. Yeah. I'm excited to have this conversation. Let's maybe start a little bit about you. So can you give our listeners just a little bit of your background and then how you got to ground cover, where we are today? Yeah. Sure. More than a decade in software engineering, specialized in, Linux and distributed systems. So mainly worked on, kernel modules until I, got sick of it and then, kinda got in love with eBPF. Then we founded Browncover, which I'm I'm the CTO and cofounder, that's what I'm doing for the last four years. EBPF is really cool. We did another episode about that, and I hadn't been exposed before. My previous Linux background had been fifteen, twenty years ago. And then coming in and being like, wait. You mean to integrate with the kernel? I don't have to go through this arduous patch process and and kernel process. It was mind blowing. So, actually, let's maybe even start a little bit there. So how are you utilizing eBPF for ground cover? Yeah. So, as you said, after a few years with, kernel models, you kinda fall in love with the power of extending the kernel, which is very cool, but it's also very, very hard. The development cycle is so slow because any …