Essays, opinions, and advice on the act of computer programming from Stack Overflow.
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Ryan chats with Brian Alvey, CTO at WordPress VIP, about how AI agents are changing the business models of the web, what parts of how we build our sites won’t survive our current digital evolution, and why your site will always need structured content.
Andi Gutmans, head of Agentic Data Cloud at Google and co-creator of PHP, joins Leaders of Code to talk about why agentic development feels less like a break from the past and more like the next chapter of the same story. This is part one of a two-part conversation.
Ryan welcomes Suneet Malhotra, Senior Manager of Test Engineering at Motorola Solutions, to chat about building end-to-end agentic SDLC pipelines using MCPs, using Cohen’s kappa to evaluate multiple LLMs-as-judges, and how you can improve requirements by shifting QA left through a specification enrichment stage immediately after the design phase.
In this No Dumb Questions, Phoebe asks Stack’s Engineering Manager Doug Whitley and Product Manager Ash Zade everything she wants to know about AI context architecture. What exactly is it? Why is it so important? What makes for good AI context architecture? Why buy one when you can build your own?
Ryan welcomes Meryll Blanchet, Director of Engineering for Adobe Brand Visibility, to chat about Adobe’s recent acquisition of Semrush, how Adobe Brand Visibility was born from Semrush’s AI visibility product and Adobe’s LLM Optimizer, and how Adobe used a three-day internal hackathon instead of a large-scale infrastructure integration to quickly deliver value to customers.
Ryan is joined by Coder’s Rob Whiteley to chat about why tokenmaxxing isn’t proving real value and just triggering Goodhart’s Law, how release speed and PR merges can help you measure agentic outcomes with or without a human-in-the-loop, and what the democratization of skills means for junior developers and the talent pipeline.
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.”
The “find the special ones and promote their traits” approach isn’t the best or only way to drive AI adoption and productivity on an engineering team.
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.
Your semantic layer is a risk mitigation strategy. Not risk in the abstract, compliance-framework sense, but the practical, operational risk that quietly drains organizations every day.
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.
Introducing new Stack Internal capabilities as part of our upcoming platform experience. Our latest release turns your existing foundation of knowledge into enterprise memory that your people, teams, and AI agents can act on. Learn how we’re building the trust layer for enterprise AI.
The tools themselves are new and their capabilities are in constant flux. If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. But it also points to a flaw in how you use that tool, the process around it, and the way the tool reinforces the process.
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.
In this No Dumb Questions, Stack's Director of Data Science Michael Foree teaches Phoebe about AI context, context engineering, and what she can do to become a better context engineer.
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.
Signature-based detection has always known what it was looking for. Machine learning and autonomous agents are changing the question entirely, shifting from "does this match a known pattern?" to "does this actually make sense in context?"
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.
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.
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…
If you want your values to spread throughout the industry, the best thing you can possibly do is succeed and make others want to imitate you.
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…
Once again, we're asking for your help to take the temperature of software development.
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…
Designing contract-bound AI agents for high-stakes execution.
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.
Engineering teams have upgraded their tools. Have they upgraded how they work?
How attackers took twenty thousand Instagram accounts by asking Meta's AI politely, and why that failure is about to become common.
Recorded live at the AI Agent Conference, Ryan sits down with Apollo GraphQL CEO Matt DeBergalis 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…
Capacity is one of the hardest problems because it sits at the knotty, gnarled-up intersection of so many other hard problems.
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.
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.
If your coding agent has questions, Stack Overflow for Agents has answers, now in beta.
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.