Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

Ryan sits down with Tom Totenberg, head of release automation at LaunchDarkly, to discuss the perils of taking too many shortcuts in software development, how business pressures and AI code tools have contributed to dangerous corner cutting, and the importance of balancing speed with sustainability to maintain system integrity. 

Episode notes: 

LaunchDarkly is a feature management and experimentation platform that allows you to decouple software feature rollouts from code deployment so you can manage features safely and securely.

Connect with Tom on Linkedin. 

This episode’s shoutout goes to user Boris Gorelik, who won a Great Question badge for asking Removing handlers from python's logging loggers. 

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

MIT and Stanford professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland joins the show to explore the power of communities for shared knowledge and how AI could hurt or help the growth of these communities. Ryan and Sandy dive into the findings from Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI, the ethical implications of rapidly advancing technology, and AI’s potential to foster community dialogue and decision-making. 

Episode notes:

Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI explores how we can build a flourishing society by using what we know about human nature to design our technology—rather than letting technology shape our society.

Connect with Sandy on Linkedin. Check out the work he’s doing with AI at deliberation.io and Loyal Agents.

Congratulations to user Harshal for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to start search only when user stops typing?

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan sits down with Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, to talk about getting your virtual machines and Kubernetes to play nice in cloud-native environments, why VMs are still relevant in enterprise applications, and how AI can help modernize legacy systems. 

Episode notes: 

Nutanix combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking so you can run applications and manage data across on-premises datacenters, public clouds, and edge locations all on one platform. 

Connect with Dan on Linkedin and Bluesky.

Congrats to Necromancer badge winner David Ferenczy Rogožan! They won the badge on their answer to Where does adb shell mkdir create directories.

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Anil Dash, writer and former Stack Overflow board member, back to the show to discuss how AI is not a magical technology, but rather the normal next step in computing’s evolution. They explore the importance of democratizing access to technology, the unique challenges that LLMs’ non-determinism poses, and how developers can keep Stack Overflow’s ethos of community alive in a world of AI. 

Episode notes: 

Anil is a tech entrepreneur (former CEO at our sister company Fog Creek Software) and writer. You can find him at his blog anildash.com and on Linkedin. 

Check out the last time Anil was on the pod in 2020 to talk all things Glitch and Glimmer. 

Shoutout to user pgrad for winning a Lifejacket badge on their answer to Using type hint Any in Django - NameError: name 'Any' is not defined.

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan sits down with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, at AWS re:Invent to get Corey’s patented snarky take on all the happenings from the conference. They discuss whether the AI agent hype is supported by actual buyers, how startups are faring as AWS focuses on large enterprises, and how many of the new technologies coming out this year will actually be transformative. 

Episode notes:

This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events on our blog. 

Duckbill provides financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.

Connect with Corey on Linkedin and subscribe to his newsletter Last Week in AWS.

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Stack Overflow’s CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and Director of Data Science Michael Foree on the floor at re:Invent to discuss all they’ve seen and heard at the event, from the future of AI agents to the trust issues the enterprise has around AI and the impact of AI and robotics on the job market.

Episode Notes:

This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events from the floor on our blog. 

Connect with Prashanth on LinkedIn.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan talks with Wesley Yu, head of engineering at Metalab, about the evolution of interfaces in technology, the pressure that UI generated on the fly would put on your backend systems, and why AI is just the latest and fanciest in a long line of CRUD apps. 

Episode notes:

Metalab designs interfaces for top brands around the world, helping them design, build, and ship their products.

Connect with Wesley on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Congrats to Populist badge winner SiddAjmera, who won the badge for their answer to Angular FormControl check if required.

TRANSCRIPT

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Kayvon Beykpour, CEO and founder of Microscope, to dive into AI-powered code review’s potential for managing large codebases, the need for humans-in-the-loop for reviewing PRs so AI tools can efficiently and effectively debug, and how AI can increase visibility  through summarization at the abstract syntax tree level and high signal-to-noise ratio code reviews.

Episode notes:

Macroscope helps you understand your code through AI-powered code review, automated PR descriptions, and real-time status reports

Connect with Kayvon on Twitter and LinkedIn.

This week’s shoutout goes to user Jesper Grann Laursen for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Exclude Table during pg_restore. 

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Outshift by Cisco’s VP of Engineering Guillaume De Saint Marc to discuss the future of multi-agent architectures as microservices, the challenges and limitations of the infrastructure for these multi-agent systems, and the importance of communication protocols and interoperability in order to build decentralized and scalable architectures. 

Episode notes:

Outshift is Cisco’s tech incubator that pursues emerging technologies like agentic AI, quantum computing, and next-gen infrastructure. Learn more about multi-agent architecture at their open-source collective AGNTCY.

Connect with Guillaume on Linkedin. 

Today we’re shouting out a Socratic badge winner, Avraam Mavridis, who won the badge for asking well received questions on 100 separate days.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Simone Kalmakis, VP of Engineering at Viam, to dive into how her team is bridging the gap between software and robotics, the importance of abstraction layers in making robotics more accessible, and the real-world applications of robotics from lobster traps to industrial sanding robots.

Episode notes:

Viam is a robotics platform that brings modern software development tools into hardware applications. 

Connect with Simone on Linkedin. 

This week’s shoutout goes to Lifejacket winner Sergey Kalinichenko for their answer to How does this K&R code for reading an int work?.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.