Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

Ryan welcomes Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s engineering lead on Codex, to discuss how the Codex team dogfoods Codex to build Codex, what distinguishes an agentic coding tool from a chat-based code assistant, and why they’re focusing on a safe and secure agentic SDLC rather than just code generation.

Episode notes: 

Codex CLI is a coding agent from OpenAI that runs locally on your computer. Try it now with your Free or Go ChatGPT plan. You can keep up with everything happening at OpenAI on their blog. 

Connect with Thibault on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Congrats to user kevinyu for winning a Great Question badge for Does println! borrow or own the variable?.

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Ryan is joined by Philippe Saade, the AI project lead at Wikimedia Deutschland, to dive into the Wikidata Embedding Project and how their team vectorized 30 million of Wikidata’s 119 million entries for semantic search. They discuss how this project helped offload the burden that scraping was creating for their sites, what Wikimedia.DE is doing to maintain data integrity for their entries, and the importance of user feedback even as they work to bring Wikipedia’s vast knowledge to people building open-source AI projects. 

Episode notes: 

Wikimedia.DE announced the Wikidata Embedding Project with MCP support in October of last year. Check out their vector database and codebase for the project. 

Connect with Philippe on LinkedIn and his Wiki page. 

Today’s shoutout goes to an Unsung Hero on Stack Overflow—someone who has more than 10 accepted answers with a zero score, making up 25% of their total. Thank you to user MWB for bringing your knowledge to the community!

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In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow’s Janice Manningham and Josh Zhang sit down with Cloudflare VP Will Allen to discuss the innovative pay-per-crawl model co-launched by their organizations. They explore how the rise of AI has disrupted the traditional “open versus block” internet model, creating a need for platforms to protect their content and data from commercial exploitation while maintaining community access.

The discussion also:

• Explores the future of the bot ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of putting publishers back in the driver’s seat to decide how their content is accessed and monetized.
• Explains the technical implementation of the pay-per-crawl system, which uses Cloudflare’s bot categorization and WAF rules to serve a 402 “Payment Required” message to specific crawlers.
• Highlights the strategic value of data licensing, comparing comprehensive enterprise contracts with the more flexible, programmatic pay-per-use access enabled by the new model.

Notes

• Connect with Will Allen, Janice Manningham and Josh Zhang on LinkedIn.
• Learn more about Stack Overflow Data Licensing here.

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Ryan sits down with Shireesh Thota, CVP of Azure Databases at Microsoft, to discuss the evolution of databases at Microsoft; Azure’s comprehensive portfolio that includes SQL Server, CosmosDB, and Postgres; and the challenges that come with database architecture, from the importance of cost governance and multi-cloud strategies to the future of databases when it comes to AI.

Episode notes: 

You can read all about the latest Azure database announcements from Microsoft Ignite—including updates for SQL Server, Postgres, DocumentDB, and Fabric—on their Azure blog. 

Connect with Shireesh on LinkedIn.

Today’s shoutout goes to user Guffa for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Virtual method tables. 

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Recorded last December at AWS re:Invent, Ryan welcomes CEO and co-founder of Deepgram, Scott Stephenson, for a conversation on advancing voice AI technology. They cover how Deepgram is improving speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities using deep learning to take on challenges posed by dialects and noisy environments and the moral and ethical considerations voice AI companies have to make when it comes to voice cloning and synthetic data training. 

Episode notes: 

Deepgram builds accurate, scalable, and affordable large scale voice AI for speech recognition, generation, and AI Agents.

Connect with Scott on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email him at Scott@Deepgram.com

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Ryan is joined by Professor Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton University’s AI Lab, to dive into findings from his new book The Laws of Thought, which explores the history of the philosophy, mathematics, and logic that underlie artificial intelligence, and scientists' efforts to describe our minds using mathematics. They discuss the challenges of understanding human cognition, the implications of probabilistic AI “thinking,” and where Aristotle fits into the philosophical discussions we’re having on consciousness and sentience in AI. 

Episode notes: 

The Laws of Thought details our quest to use mathematics to describe the ways we think, from its origins three hundred years ago to the ideas behind modern AI systems and how our human minds differ from the neural networks of AI. 

Connect with Tom on LinkedIn and find more of his work at the Princeton website. 

Congrats to user Andreas Rayo Kniep for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Is there a difference between the UTC and Etc/UTC time zones?.

We want to know what you're using to upskill and learn in the age of AI. Take this five minute survey on learning and AI to have your voice heard in our next Stack Overflow Knows Pulse Survey. 

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We have another two-for-one special this week, with two more interviews from the floor of re:Invent. First, Ryan welcomes Pathway CEO Zuzanna Stamirowska and CCO Victor Szczerba to dive into their development of Baby Dragon Hatchling, the first post-transformer frontier model, from how continual learning and memory will transform AI to the real-world use cases for longer LLM attention span. 

In the second part of this episode, Ryan is joined by Rowan McNamee, co-founder and COO of Mary Technology, to discuss bringing AI into the carefully governed world of litigation and how LLMs are helping lawyers manage and interpret the vast amounts of legal evidence that pass across their desks every day.

Episode notes: 

Pathway is building the first post-transformer frontier model that solves for attention span and continual learning.

Mary Technology is an AI for attorneys that turns evidentiary documents into structured, easy-to-review facts.

Connect with Zuzanna on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Reach out to Victor at his email: victor@pathway.com 

Connect with Rowan on LinkedIn.

We want to know what you're using to upskill and learn in the age of AI. Take this five minute survey on learning and AI to have your voice heard in our next Stack Overflow Knows Pulse Survey.

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Two guests for the price of one! This episode has two interviews recorded at AWS re:Invent back in December. In part 1, Ryan chats with the co-founder and CEO of Inception, Stefano Ermon, about diffusion language models and how their multiple token generation compares to traditional LLMs (spoiler: they’re faster and more accurate). In the second half of the episode, Ryan and the chairman of Roomie, Aldo Luevano, dive into Roomie’s purpose built models for both physical and software AI, and how their ROI-first approach helps companies track the impact of their robotics and AI implementation. 

Episode notes: 

Inception researches and builds diffusion language models for faster and more efficient AI.

Roomie is a robotics and enterprise AI company with an ROI-first platform that tracks how well their AI solutions are actually working. 

Connect with Stefano on LinkedIn.

Connect with Aldo on LinkedIn.

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Ryan is joined by Chris Coyier, founder of CSS Tricks and CodePen, to talk all about what the state of the art of CSS is today, including new features like variables and scroll-driven animations. They talk about the importance of accessibility in web design, how the web went from table-based layouts to modern CSS techniques, and exciting developments coming to CodePen 2.0.

Episode notes:

Chris built CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, and ran it for 15 years, from 2007 to 2022, before selling it to DigitalOcean.

CodePen is an online community for frontend developers where you can build, deploy, and show-off your code. CodePen 2.0 is their all-new IDE that is currently in private beta. 

Check out Chris’ blog and his podcast ShopTalk.

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Ryan welcomes Anthony Vinci, former senior intelligence officer and author of The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, to explore AI’s evolving role in intelligence in places like translation and image analysis, the challenges of evolving modern tech into government infrastructure, and the importance of democratized intelligence so citizens can keep themselves and loved ones safe.

Episode notes:

The Fourth Intelligence Revolution details how espionage practices are being transformed by a new global intelligence conflict, driven by AI and competition with China, and what everyday citizens can do to defend their privacy. Learn more at Anthony’s website. 

Connect with Anthony on Linkedin, Twitter, and Substack.

Populist badge winner Orez gets today’s shoutout for their answer to Break or exit out of "with" statement?.

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