Pop Goes the Stack

Hi everyone! This is Lori MacVittie, host of Pop Goes the Stack. This week, we’re taking a short break to rest and recharge, spend time with loved ones, and maybe even step away from our stacks for a bit (gasp!). But don’t worry—we’ll be back soon with more: ✅ Sharp insights into emerging tech ✅ Expert takes on application delivery & security ✅ And, of course, our signature snark While we’r...

Agent skills were introduced less than six months ago, and they’ve already graduated from “handy configuration” to “supply chain artifact.” In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie talks with security expert Peter Scheffler about why skills, often packaged as YAML, are becoming portable, shareable, and dynamically loadable in ways that attract attackers fast, including skill poisoning...

What happens if AI finally writes secure code by default? In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Ken Arora take that question seriously, even if it feels like a punchline today. The premise is simple: if AI starts producing mechanically correct, vulnerability-free code at scale, the security industry doesn’t disappear. It gets forced up the stack.   They outlin...

An agent deleting a production database (and the backups) isn’t a sci-fi failure. It’s a boundary failure, and it starts with a human handing out credentials and permissions without a safe execution model to contain what happens next. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and F5's Chief Product Officer, Kunal Anand, unpack why today’s agents are either dangerously overpowered or so...

Identity used to be straightforward: authenticate a user, authorize an action, log the request, and move on. Agentic systems complicate that model because the actor isn’t always the human anymore, and when something goes wrong, responsibility can disappear into what Andrew Bud calls an “accountability vacuum.” In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie talks with Andrew Bud of iProov ab...

If you’ve been treating “garbage in, garbage out” as a metaphor, this episode turns it into a live-fire scenario. Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by Dmitry Kit to unpack what happens when AI systems ingest misinformation that looks legitimate, and why “just patch it” doesn’t work the way it does in traditional software. They start with a real experiment: researchers fabricated a fake medi...

“Just throw it in the cloud” gets complicated when the data is your meetings, your IP, and your operating context. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses talk with Michael Daugherty, founder and CEO of Quill Meetings, about why local-first AI is showing up as a serious alternative to cloud-first convenience, especially when your AI is effectively a coworker sitting in...

AI is no longer a lab tool; it’s showing up in pipelines, production systems, and the places where “seemed like a good idea” becomes a 2 a.m. incident. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by John Willis, known for his work on DevOps and Deming, to separate what’s genuinely new about AI from what looks like the same organizational patterns repeating under...

Multi-model AI isn’t a buzzword anymore, it’s how organizations are actually operating. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses dig into fresh findings from F5's State of Application Strategy Report showing companies run an average of seven models, and more than half are already orchestrating multiple models together. That’s a big shift, and it changes what “infrastruc...

GPUs get all the attention, but in inference, the real bottleneck is often memory, specifically the KV cache. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie sits down with Tim Michels to explain why inference stopped being stateless the moment long contexts, multi-turn conversations, and never-ending agents became normal. That state has to live somewhere, and too often it’s living in the mo...

Agents break the old rules of observability. Latency, throughput, and error rates still matter, but once software starts making decisions and taking actions on someone else’s behalf, the real question becomes: is it doing the right thing, and is it doing it for the right reasons?   In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and Joel “OpenClaw” Moses are joined by observability expert Ch...

Why do researchers keep describing large language models like aliens? Because in enterprise environments, they often behave like something we didn’t build and can’t fully explain. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by F5's Ken Arora to unpack the “alien autopsy” metaphor and what it reveals about operating LLMs as production systems. They dig into the u...

Prompt injection has been the headline security problem for the last year, but have we been guarding the wrong layer? Lori MacVittie is joined by cohost Joel Moses and architect Elijah Zupancic to break down why many “prompt filters” miss the real execution surface: models don’t process words, they process tokens, and attackers are increasingly targeting the tokenizer to bypass defenses. Using the...

OpenClaw is what happens when the industry looks at autonomous agents and decides they should have more autonomy, more persistence, and more chances to surprise you. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie hosts a wide-ranging discussion with F5's Joel Moses, Jason Rahm, and Kunal Anand on what makes OpenClaw different from the usual “AI assistant” narrative: agents that coordinate,...

Recorded live at F5 AppWorld 2026 in Las Vegas, this episode of Pop Goes the Stack puts Field CISO Chuck Herrin in the hot seat for a fast-moving conversation on what security leaders are really dealing with right now. Joel Moses kicks things off with the agentic AI debate: if teams bypass structured tool interfaces and let agents “just use the CLI,” what happens to authentication, observability,...

AI in production isn’t just another feature to ship. It’s a non-deterministic system that can be socially engineered, fuzzed, and pushed into failure states you won’t find with traditional testing. Recorded live in Las Vegas at F5’s AppWorld 2026, this episode of Pop Goes the Stack brings Joel Moses together with Jimmy White, F5’s VP of AI Security (via the CalypsoAI acquisition), for a practical...

Coming to you from the AppWorld show floor, Joel Moses and guest co-pilot Oscar Spencer cut through the conference polish to tackle a problem that’s quickly becoming unavoidable: identity in the era of agentic AI. When software can act on your behalf, take initiative, and even spawn other agents, “who did what” stops being a philosophical question and becomes an audit, security, and governance req...

Ops used to be a world of YAML, caffeine, and careful deploy rituals. Now it’s probabilistic models, token-based cost surprises, and reliability questions that sound more like, “Will the model mean the same thing tomorrow?” In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses dig into what happens when production expectations collide with non-deterministic AI systems, and why the n...

Programmability is experiencing a paradigm shift, and this episode explains why WebAssembly is at the center of it. F5's Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by WebAssembly expert Oscar Spencer, a longtime contributor in the space and a leader within the Bytecode Alliance, to unpack how Wasm moved from “that browser thing” to a practical foundation for modern platforms. They break down what ma...

"It's just a chat" is the most dangerous sentence in AI. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by data science expert Scott Hendrickson to break down why AI has the surface area of the sun—it touches search, analytics, SEO tags, ad tech, APIs, logs, and all the integrations people forget are even there. That’s the danger: as AI spreads across the stac...

When OpenAI discovered they could reclaim 30,000 CPU cores simply by tuning the log-forwarding agent Fluent Bit—disabling a single function that ate ~35 % of one server’s cycles—something large and systemic became undeniable. In this episode, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and observability expert, Chris Hain, break down the hidden cost of telemetry in AI-heavy architectures, why “logging is fre...

Low-code automation has grown up, and the competition is getting spicy. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by Aubrey King as they dig into the heavyweight duel between N8N and FlowFuse—two platforms promising to empower teams to automate anything without waiting for overworked developers. We cut through the marketing fluff and look at the real diff...

The capability to map brain activity to language isn’t just another UI shift—it’s a paradigm shift in how humans and machines might communicate. If you’re building systems that integrate or rely on neuroscience-adjacent tech (or even simply storing neuro-derived data), you’ll want to treat this as a strategic early warning: new input modalities, new risk surfaces, and new expectations of what “int...

Traditional reliability meant consistency. Given identical inputs, systems produced identical outputs. Costs were stable and behavior predictable. Inference reliability on the other hand is shaped by nondeterminism. Outputs vary due to stochastic generation, retraining introduces drift, and token-based billing can cause cost fluctuations. The new dimension of reliability is semantic consistency, t...

Traditional performance meant deterministic response times. Identical inputs produced near-identical execution times. Optimizations reduced latency, but variance was minimal. Insert AI inference and performance engineering has been flipped upside down. Latency depends on model size, tokenization, batching strategies, and generation settings. Identical inputs may produce different response times. T...