The Stack Overflow Podcast

Ryan sits down with Josh Triplett, member of the Rust Leadership Team at the Rust Project, to chat about how the borrow checker delivers compile-time memory safety without garbage collection overhead, why Rust consistently ranks as developers' most loved language by providing psychological safety for complex systems, and how strict compiler constraints make Rust an ideal target for AI coding agent...

Ryan is joined by Yanbing Li, Chief Product Officer at Datadog, to talk about applying observability to non-deterministic AI agents, blurring the boundaries between software development and production workflows, and navigating emerging challenges in AI security and tokenomics. Episode notes:   Datadog is an observability and security platform for cloud applications, providing real-time monito...

Ryan chats with Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst at Stack Overflow, about the results from this year’s Annual Developer Survey, including the overwhelming daily usage of AI coding assistants despite lingering developer trust issues, the critical role of well-organized documentation in providing verifiable context to mitigate AI hallucinations, and the evolving ways developers are shifting away from acti...

Ryan chats with Julien Verlaguet, CEO at Skip Labs, about finding the balance between human tolerance and tooling constraints, the spectrum of typed programming languages, and building cost-effective tooling for AI agents. Episode notes:   Skip Labs develops a programming language designed for reactive programming alongside specialized constraint-based tooling for AI agents.  Connect wit...

Ryan sits down with Div Garg, CEO at AGI Inc., to talk about running AI agents entirely on mobile devices, optimizing models for edge computing chips, and building safety mechanisms into autonomous app interactions.  Episode notes: AGI Inc. is a research lab building the world's best on-device models that allow AI to autonomously interact with millions of third-party mobile applications. Conn...

Ryan chats with David Burns, Head of Developer Advocacy and Open Source at BrowserStack, about the value of professional skepticism in an AI-driven world, applying test-driven development to agentic engineering, and why fixing flaky tests comes down to managing application state. Episode notes: BrowserStack is a software testing platform where David heads up developer advocacy and the open source...

SPONSORED BY SLACK BY SALESFORCE In this episode, Ryan chats with the GM of Slack, Rob Seaman, about how their new Code Channels feature is bringing multiplayer AI to your team chats. They discuss how most interactions with coding agents become siloed context, why a party chat with devs and agents flattens writing code and code review into a single step, and why a Slack channel might be a better d...

Ryan chats with Anush Elangovan, VP of Software at AMD, about ROCm's open-source unified toolchain for GPUs, how agentic AI is drastically lowering the barrier to entry for low-level hardware programming, and the rapid convergence of software and hardware development timelines. Episode notes:   ROCm is AMD's unified, open-source software layer and toolchain that allows developers to program o...

Ryan sits down with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO at O'Reilly Media, to talk about the role of books as user interfaces to knowledge, the power of "magic words" to extract better outputs from AI, and why human taste is becoming highly valuable as knowledge becomes a commodity.  Episode notes:  O'Reilly Media is a technology transfer company that leverages books, online learning platforms...

Ryan chats with Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law program at the University of Texas School of Law, about the legal and social impacts of data centers, the realities of workforce disruption, and regulating AI for child safety using existing consumer protection laws. Episode notes: The AI Innovation and Law program at the University of Texas School of Law explores the complex leg...

Ryan chats with Sam Curry, CSO at Zscaler, about where human intelligence sits in the new security landscape with AI, why shifting security protections closer to applications helps limit probes for vulnerabilities, and why building more resilient code infrastructure is the best way to address the vulnerabilities AI does discover. Episode notes: Zscaler is a cybersecurity company that provides clou...

SPONSORED BY IBM Ryan welcomes Markus Eisele to the program to talk about why your coding agent should be writing Java. They talk about why the long history of Java both makes for a stable language and a source of training data for AI. On top of that, they discuss how agentic Java excels by working with powerful partners: a massive ecosystem of Java libraries and agentic harnesses.  Try out B...

Episode notes:  This episode with Paypal ’s CTO Srini Venkatesan was recorded at the Ai4 conference.  Listen to our other Ai4 conversation with Greg Jennings, VP of Engineering for AI Products at Anaconda, about building secure-by-default AI coding agents here .  Connect with Srini on LinkedIn . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https:/...

Ryan chats with Greg Jennings, VP of Engineering for AI Products at Anaconda, about what it takes to build a secure-by-default AI coding agent, why prompts shouldn't be treated as strict security guardrails, and how Anaconda is using strategic acquisitions to secure the AI software supply chain. Episode notes: Anaconda is a foundational platform for Python data science and machine learning, provid...

Ryan sits down with Tim Lindholm, an early contributor to the Java language at Sun Microsystems, to chat about what it was like building one of the most popular programming languages ever at its inception, why it was strategically important for the Java team to create a cross-platform ABI to compete with Windows NT, and how applets were initially just an interesting demo.  Episode notes:&nbsp...

Ryan chats with Leo de Moura, Senior Principal Applied Scientist at AWS and the creator of the Lean language, about proving correctness in AI agents with the Lean language, how automated reasoning complements probabilistic AI models, and the use of AI for continuous code optimization. Episode notes: Lean is a functional programming language and proof assistant that allows developers to write progr...

Ryan is joined by Praveen Bodigutla, Principal AI Researcher at LinkedIn, to chat about the four-layer memory system his team built to give LinkedIn's hiring assistant a persistent, personalized state. Praveen explains why his team moved off GraphRAG in favor of a tree-structured memory for faster incremental updates and how they balance retrieval freshness, latency budgets, and access control at...

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. In this episode, Eira May and Stack Overflow Director of Platform Engineering Peter O'Connor talk with Andi Gutmans about the through...

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. Episode notes: You can learn more about Suneet’s fi...

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.  Episode notes:&n...

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.  Episode notes: Coder is a self-hosted platform that lets you sec...

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 t...

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...

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 manage...