How to be fearlessly AI native
Ryan welcomes McLaren Stanley, Senior Principal Engineer for Amazon Stores, to discuss what it actually takes to make teams AI native, why agentic engineering is shifting code bottlenecks downstream to testing and deployment, and why robust validation is essential to build trust and enable “fearless commits.”
Episode notes:
You can learn more about how Amazon’s frontier teams became AI native on the AWS blog.
Connect with McLaren on LinkedIn.
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Your MVP doesn’t need a Kubernetes cluster
Ryan welcomes Anurag Goel, CEO and co-founder of Render, to discuss why most startups shouldn’t start by managing their Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure. They discuss how frustration with spinning up nodes at Stripes led him to build a company, a future where your application itself may allocate its own compute, and why DevOps jobs aren’t going anywhere.
Episode notes
Render calls itself the cloud for builders, intuitive infrastructure for scale.
Connect with Anurag at anurag@render.com.
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What happens to the internet when robots act like humans?
Ryan welcomes WPEngine CTO Ramadass Prabakar to the show to chat about what happens—and what we should do—when agents start acting like humans online, how our internet is evolving to serve both human and agentic experiences from the same interface, and what we can do to differentiate and protect human actions online from malicious bot activity.
Episode notes:
WP Engine hosts and manages over 5 million WordPress sites, combining enterprise-grade software, developer tools, and cutting-edge AI to support your website.
Connect with Ramadass on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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You need reliable AI context for your site reliability
Ryan is joined by Asaf Savich, Komodor’s AI Engineering Group Manager, to discuss why modern reliability work requires navigating massive cross-service context, what good context engineering actually likes when AI is integrated into site reliability, and how the work of human SREs is shifting towards strategy and AI agent management.
Episode notes:
Komodor is an autonomous AI SRE platform designed to troubleshoot, manage, and optimize Kubernetes-based cloud-native infrastructure.
Connect with Asaf on LinkedIn.
Congrats to Populist badge winner joemaller, who won the badge for answering Is there a Python equivalent to the 'which' command.
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Partnerships can keep open source sustainable
Ryan welcomes VoidZero’s Evan You and Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht back to the show to discuss Cloudflare’s recent acquisition of VoidZero and what it means for JavaScript development, how partnerships like theirs can help open-source projects stay maintained and sustainably monetized, and how Cloudflare’s distributed systems are helping to improve developer experience in Vite and beyond.
Episode notes:
VoidZero is now officially a part of Cloudflare. You can read more about the recent acquisition here.
Connect with Evan on LinkedIn and X. Check out Evan’s previous episodes on the pod for a deep dive on the evolutions of Vite and Vue.js.
Connect with Dane on LinkedIn and X. Listen to Dane’s previous episode of Leaders of Code to learn how Cloudflare is building a better internet.
Congrats to user Luis Sieira, who won a Stellar Answer badge for answering How to get the difference between two arrays in JavaScript?.
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The future of development is full-stack
Live from Snowflake Summit, Ryan talks with Snowflake’s Head of Developer Experience Umesh Unnikrishnan about the industry-wide shift from “vibe coding” for quick prototypes to agentic engineering for enterprise-ready software, how enterprises can scale governance with guardrails like human-in-the-loop approval and control layers that go beyond the underlying LLM, and why Umesh predicts all developers will become someday become full-stack builders.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at Snowflake Summit. You can learn more about CoCo and Snowflake’s other new releases on their website.
Connect with Umesh on LinkedIn or reach out to him at Umesh.Unnikrishnan@snowflake.com
Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of engineering at Snowflake, also sat down this us at this year’s Snowflake Summit to break down the five-stage framework his org used to go from "let chaos reign" to a repeatable, org-wide system for AI-assisted engineering. Listen to his episode of Leaders of Code.
Our sixteenth Annual Developer Survey is now open and we want to hear your thoughts on all things software. Take the survey now!
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Developers who move fast still need to do it together
At MS Build, Ryan is joined by Cassidy Williams, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub and former Stack Overflow Podcast host, to discuss how agentic coding is shifting dev work towards higher-level strategy while increasing decision fatigue; why human taste, community feedback, and mentorship are becoming more essential than ever for developer careers; and the new GitHub Copilot announcements coming out of Microsoft, including the new GitHub Copilot app.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. You can learn more about what they announced at the show and what’s new at GitHub here.
Listen to our other episodes recorded at Build on agentic workflows and responsible AI.
Connect with Cassidy on LinkedIn and X.
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Your AI is only as responsible as you are
Recorded at Microsoft Build, Ryan welcomes Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer for Responsible AI, about how we can build and use AI responsibly with the NIST approach, why most irresponsible AI comes from experimentation without thought of impact, and how Microsoft is researching thoughtful human/AI workflow design to reduce unnecessary escalation.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. Listen to our other episode recorded at Build on agentic workflows here.
Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn.
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Building more than just an agent harness
Live from Microsoft Build, Ryan is joined by Jay Parikh, Microsoft’s VP of AI Core, for a conversation on what enterprises need to build, deploy, and run AI agents at scale with demonstrable ROI; how Microsoft built an end-to-end agent development system that goes past just the harness; and how you can evaluate for reliability and correctness in models that get more intelligent and autonomous everyday.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. Learn more about the announcement and news from Build, including Microsoft’s new GitHub app and Foundry platform, at the Microsoft blog.
Connect with Jay on LinkedIn.
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What's left for infrastructure-as-code after AI moves in?
SPONSORED BY IBM
Ryan is joined by Rosemary Wang, Developer Advocate at IBM, to explore what infrastructure as code looks like once AI starts writing and deploying it. They discuss why guardrails still lag adoption, breaks down what it means when “anyone can deploy,” and why deep systems knowledge still matters.
Episode notes:
Try out Bob, IBM’s coding agent that Rosemary talked about in the episode.
Connect with Rosemary on X, LinkedIn, or Bluesky.
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Agent orchestration is so two-years ago
Ryan welcomes Saahil Jain, CTO of You.com, to discuss why building agents with a 2024 mindset is a mistake as modern models improve at long-horizon tasks, why heavy orchestration layers can hurt model performance more than help it, and why the 2026 competitive edge actually comes from information retrieval and unique data paired with end-to-end evaluation.
Episode notes:
You.com is an AI-powered search and productivity engine helping enterprises find information, create content, and automate complex tasks using web search APIs, multi-model AI access, and agentic intelligence.
Connect with Saahil on LinkedIn or reach out to him at saahil@you.com.
Today’s shoutout goes to user knittl for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Remove all null values.
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The good, the bad, and the AI apps
Ryan welcomes Benny Chen, co-founder of Fireworks AI, to the show to explore what actually makes an AI application good or not, how to balance qualitative signals with quantitative metrics when evaluating AI, and how open-source eval protocols and community efforts are setting the standard for AI evaluation.
Episode notes:
Fireworks AI is a cloud platform designed for developers and enterprises to run, customize, and scale open-source generative AI models.
Connect with Benny on LinkedIn.
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How do you turn AI coding chaos into a repeatable playbook?
Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of engineering at Snowflake, joins Leaders of Code at Snowflake Summit to break down the five-stage framework his org used to go from "let chaos reign" to a repeatable, org-wide system for AI-assisted engineering.
Vivek explains how Snowflake systematically rolled out coding agents across its engineering org — starting with unrestricted experimentation, then codifying what worked into a shared vocabulary of 14 "AI design patterns," from plan-in-English to fencing off parallel agents to reducing on-call toil through continuously updated skills. Vivek walks through the "inner loop" and "outer loop" of software development, explains Snowflake's internal Yegge scale for measuring how far engineers have progressed along that continuum, and shares how a three-person team used coding agents to deliver a 40x improvement on Snowflake's query compiler.
The discussion also:
Breaks down Snowflake's "focus weeks," where engineers get dedicated time to either catch up on best practices or push the frontier further.
Explores the pioneers/settlers/skeptics framework for meeting engineers where they are in adopting AI tools, and why the shift can trigger something like the stages of grief.
Covers how Snowflake cut release validation time from 15 days to a single day, and why more automated testing hasn't come at the cost of production stability.
Looks ahead to a four-step maturity model for on-call and incident response, where agents may eventually take primary on-call duty.
Connect with Vivek Raghunathan on LinkedIn.
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Why intent prediction needs more than an LLM
Ryan sits down with Frank Portman, CTO at Yobi, to talk about why next-token prediction, though great for language, isn’t the right inductive bias for forecasting human behavior. They discuss how Yobi builds a “foundation model of behavior” using transformers and graph neural networks instead of chat-style LLMs, and what it takes to run millions of personalization decisions per second while keeping consumer data private.
Episode notes:
Yobi is a behavioral AI company building foundation models that predict future behavior for ad tech, marketing, and more.
Connect with Frank via fportman.com or at yobi.ai.
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Code isn’t the only thing causing your production failures
Ryan sits down with Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal, to chat about why AI coding agents have made writing code easier but running it safely in production harder, why production failures are really caused by interactions between systems and not just the code itself, and how teams can troubleshoot more effectively when traditional observability tools are not enough for agentic AI workflows.
Episode notes:
Traversal is an AI-powered autonomous SRE for complex software systems with automatic triage alerts, root cause investigation, and incident prevention at petabyte scale.
Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or reach out to him at anish@traversal.com.
Our sixteenth Annual Developer Survey is now open and we want to hear your thoughts on all things software. Take the survey now!
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Oh the places you’ll go with spatial data
Ryan is joined by Jeffrey Hightower, VP of Places Data at Microsoft, and Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation, to chat about their partnership in bringing spatial data to the next generation of Microsoft tools; how Overture’s 50 organization members are creating open, standardized, and interoperable global spatial data sets; and their solutions to the innate challenges of trying to digitally map the world.
Episode notes:
The Overture Maps Foundation is a free, open, and collaborative spatial data platform creating reliable and interoperable map data infrastructure. Microsoft is a founding member and part of Overture’s Steering committee.
Connect with Amy on LinkedIn.
Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn.
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You don’t understand DNS like you think you do
Ryan welcomes Cricket Liu, DNS expert and Chief Evangelist at Infoblox, to the show to talk all things DNS. They cover the evolution of one of the oldest DNS server implementations, BIND, and what the future holds for protected DNS configurations; the realities of security threats like DDoS and DNS spoofing; and why outages often trace back to a lack of understanding of DNS’s fundamental role.
Episode notes:
Infoblox is a cloud-managed network services platform for core networking, combining automated infrastructure management and real-time threat intelligence.
You think this is a lot about DNS? Cricket wrote several books about it.
Connect with Cricket on LinkedIn or email him at cricket@infoblox.com.
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If context is king, architecture is the castle
Recorded live at the AI Agent Conference, Ryan sits down with Apollo GraphQL CEO Matt DeBerglis to discuss how enterprises can leverage GraphQL and MCP as a structured semantic architecture to feed clean data to autonomous agents, safeguard internal microservices against unprecedented "east-west" data exfiltration risks, and rein in skyrocketing token spend by explicitly querying only the exact context required.
Episode notes:
Apollo GraphQL lets you orchestrate APIs with a composable, declarative, self-service model. Apollo's MCP Server is now available.
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.
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Developers are emotionally attached to their tools
Ryan welcomes Trisha Gee, a Java champion and developer productivity advocate, to explore how AI is transforming the role of IDEs and the broader developer experience; the relevance of traditional tools, muscle memory, the risks of hype; and how to adapt workflows for AI-driven development.
Episode notes:
Trisha Gee is a developer advocate and Java champion with over 20 years of software experience.
Connect with Trisha on LinkedIn and X.
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When the cost of code approaches zero, what does engineering leadership look like?
On this episode of Leaders of Code, Eric Anderson, director of engineering at Intuit, joins Stack Overflow engineering director Ben Matthews to talk about what happens to software teams when AI makes code generation seemingly free.
Eric explains how Intuit rolled out Claude Code across the entire organization, why PMs are now merging their own PRs, and what it means for engineering culture when product/engineering roles start to converge. Eric and Ben unpack the engineering skills that matter most in an AI-first industry and why the work of developing junior talent has gotten harder.
Eric also shares how he personally uses AI to manage his inbox, synthesize specs, and run promotion processes (but why he stopped letting it send emails on his behalf).
Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.
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Creating checkpoints by gaslighting a Postgres database
Ryan welcomes Bryan Clark, director of product for Lakebase at Databricks, to discuss what happens when AI agents become the primary creators and users of databases; why agents are “sloppy” about cleaning up infrastructure; and how database branching, scale-to-zero, and centralized access control can help teams keep up with agent-driven development.
Episode notes:
Databricks Lakebase is a Postgres-compatible operational database built around fast branching, separated compute and storage, and tight integration with the Databricks lakehouse.
Connect with Bryan on LinkedIn and X.
Congrats to Populist badge winner Benjamin Merchin for earning the badge for their answer to JSX element class does not support attributes because it does not have a 'props' property.ts(2607).
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Making the OWASP top ten in the vibe code era
Ryan welcomes back Tanya Janca, now part of the OWASP Top 10 team, to discuss what changed in the latest OWASP Top 10 release, how the list shifted from “outdated components” to a broader software supply chain focus, and why they added memory safety and vibe-coding as awareness items.
Episode notes:
The OWASP Top 10 for 2025 is the latest standard awareness document for developers and web application security that represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.
Learn more about Tanya’s work at her website and her new podcast DevSec Station. You can learn how to prompt your AI for secure code with her prompt library.
Read Tanya’s articles on our blog.
Congrats to Populist badge winner Rob Kielty for winning the badge on their answer to How can I tell IntelliJ's "Find in Files" to ignore generated files?.
TRANSCRIPT
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What it takes to be a player in the international AI game
From the floor of HumanX, Ryan welcomes Songyee Yoon, managing partner at Principal Venture Partners (PVP), to chat about AI development outside the US, from the need to adapt models to local languages and culture to the challenges of the global supply-chain for things like semiconductors to how venture capital is looking at international AI companies.
Episode notes:
PVP supports early stage, AI-native companies shaping the future of how we live and work. Learn more about their work at their Substack.
Connect with Songyee on LinkedIn.
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The find out stage of AI is just supply chain and password protection
In this two-for-one special recorded at HumanX, Ryan is joined by Dataiku’s Florian Douetteau to chat about the governance, orchestration, and data requirements for serious agentic systems and 1Password’s Nancy Wang for a conversation on making agent swarms secure.
Ryan first catches up with Dataiku co-founder and CEO Florian Douettea to chat serious agentic systems and why they require intentional frameworks, orchestration, governance, and reusable, documented data products. Then, 1Password’s CTO Nancy Wang returns to the show to discuss why current identity standards don’t fit the new world of agents, especially when ephemeral agent swarms make attribution to a single user difficult.
Episode notes:
Dataiku orchestrates data stacks and lets you create analytics, models, and agents.
Florian previously appeared on this program in an episode recorded at the last HumanX conference.
1Password keeps your credentials secure through end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge architecture, and more. You can learn more about building secure agent swarms at their blog.
Nancy Wang previously appeared on the pod in March 2026.
Connect with Florian on LinkedIn.
Connect with Nancy on LinkedIn.
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Do you have what it takes to run AI in production?
From the floor of HumanX, Ryan Donovan is joined by Peter Salanki, CTO and co-founder of CoreWeave, to chat about what it really takes to run AI in production; the growing importance of observability, utilization, and scheduling; and Peter’s advice for avoiding the trap of over-architecting too early.
Episode note:
CoreWeave is the AI-native platform cloud that’s purpose-built for AI, combining next-generation infrastructure and intelligent tools to power the world’s most complex AI workloads.
Connect with Peter on X.
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Breaking your AI storage bottlenecks
Recorded at HumanX, Ryan sits down with Garima Kapoor and Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founders and co-CEOs of MinIO, to chat about eliminating the storage bottlenecks that leave GPUs underutilized, their partnership with NVIDIA on the new STX reference architecture, and why modern AI infrastructure is converging on S3-compatible object storage.
Episode notes:
MinIO delivers exascale performance, unifying enterprise data across edge, core, and cloud environments. Reach out to them at hello@min.io.
Connect with Garima on LinkedIn.
Connect with AB on LinkedIn.
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Pack your agentic stack in Slack
SPONSORED BY SLACK BY SALESFORCE
Ryan welcomes Jaime DeLanghe, chief product officer at Slack, to chat about how they’re preparing to integrate everybody’s agents in their chat application. They chat about the similarities between bots and agents, managing the wealth of context available in enterprise chat, and how the best agent to agent protocols might be a DM.
Episode notes:
Get started with building agents on Slack with their developer site.
Today is Slack’s Dev Day! Tune into the livestream for info on integrating agents into Slack.
Congrats to Famous Question asker arianit ax for asking change default location of .gitconfig.
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Your fridge could be a threat to national security
On the floor of HumanX, Ryan is joined by Adam Meyers, Senior VP of Counter Adversary Operations at Crowdstrike, for a deep dive on their latest Global Threat Report that tracks over 281 adversaries across nation states, e-crime, and hacktivist organizations. They discuss the new wave of phishing attacks that target identity and use social engineering, how foreign bodies are exploiting security flaws to get your information, and how you can protect yourself from attacks as AI makes both defenders and attackers smarter at what they do.
Episode notes:
Crowdstrike’s latest Global Threat Report tracks 281 known adversaries' behavior and how they’re using AI, cloud exploits, and social engineering to steal your data and attack your software.
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Observability and human intuition in an AI world
In this two for one episode recorded at HumanX, Ryan is first joined by Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, to discuss how AI compresses the software development lifecycle, making observability about capturing the right telemetry. Then, Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, shares with us how AI coding increases code volume but decreases human intuition, making production operations harder than ever.
Episode notes:
Honeycomb is an observability platform that enables deep, high-dimensional exploration so you can debug unpredictable behavior with precision.
Resolve AI allows you to resolve incidents, optimize costs, and code with production context using AI that works across your code, infrastructure, and telemetry.
Connect with Christine on LinkedIn.
Connect with Spiros on LinkedIn.
TRANSCRIPT
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How Braze’s CTO is rethinking engineering for the agentic area
Jon Hyman, co-founder and CTO of Braze, joins Stack Overflow CPTO Jody Bailey on Leaders of Code to share how he's led the company's engineering organization over nearly 15 years of growth — and how they transformed into an AI-first team in just a few months.
Jon explains some pivotal moments where his thinking shifted (watching his team ship an MCP server six weeks ahead of schedule will do that!) and talks candidly about the cultural and practical challenges of driving adoption across a 300-person engineering org. He explains how model quality, not mandates, was the key factor in winning over skeptics, and why over 60% of Braze's committed code is now AI-generated.
Jon also addresses the harder questions: how to measure AI's real business value, the surprisingly steep cost of inference at scale, why "vibe-coding your way to scale" is folly, and what comes next as autonomous agents start building features overnight.
Connect with Jon on LinkedIn.
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