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The most useful coding agents can mutate their environments by downloading packages, writing files, and connecting to services across the network. However, that freedom also presents dangers, and promises to usher in a new wave of security threats. Docker recently announced Docker Sandboxes, which give each agent its own isolated micro VM while preserving the familiar ergonomics of a container. A standard container shares the host’s kernel, but a micro VM emulates hardware and runs its own kernel, giving a stronger security boundary around code that cannot be trusted. Mark Cavage is the President and COO of Docker, and he previously worked at companies including Stripe, AWS and Oracle. In this episode, Mark joins Gregor Vand for a wide-ranging conversation that includes why agents break the immutability assumptions containers were built on, how micro VMs differ from both containers and traditional VMs, and the still-unsolved challenge of giving agents scoped, trustworthy access to sensitive services and data.Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Docker and Sandboxing AI Agents appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Golden Gate Ventures is one of Southeast Asia’s most established early-stage venture firms, having backed companies across the region since 2011. They have invested in companies that are now household names in the region. Examples include Gojek, which started as a motorcycle taxi service in Indonesia and grew into a super app spanning payments, food delivery, and logistics, and Grab, which began as a ride-hailing service in Singapore and similarly expanded across Southeast Asia into food delivery and financial services. Jeffrey Paine is a co-founder and partner at Golden Gate Ventures. In this episode, Jeffrey joins Gregor Vand to discuss how the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem has evolved, why the regional copycat model is giving way to globally ambitious technical founders, what companies like Manus and Supabase reveal about Singapore’s emerging role in the global tech landscape, and what advice Jeffrey gives founders today who want to build something that matters beyond their home market. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Startup Scene in Southeast Asia appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI agents have shown remarkable potential to function as persistent digital assistants that are capable of monitoring data, managing communications, and taking action autonomously over long periods. OpenClaw was one of the first serious attempts to fulfill that vision, connecting frontier coding agents to messaging platforms like Slack and WhatsApp and letting them run continuously in the background. However, OpenClaw largely set aside questions of security to pursue that vision, leaving credentials exposed in the agent’s environment and giving agents broad access to data and services far beyond what any given task required. NanoClaw is an open source project that takes a zero trust approach to agent orchestration. Rather than relying on instructions to constrain agent behavior, it isolates each agent in its own Docker container, keeps credentials entirely outside the agent’s environment, and enforces human-in-the-loop approval for sensitive actions. Gavriel Cohen is the founder of NanoClaw and he joins Kevin Ball to discuss the security architecture behind NanoClaw, how the agent sandbox and proxy model work in practice, how agents communicate with each other and with the host orchestration process, how the project approaches context window management and long-lived agent sessions, and more. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post NanoClaw and the Rise of Personal AI Agents appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI agents have become capable of reasoning across large amounts of data, calling tools, and taking sequences of actions autonomously. These qualities make them well suited to some of the most persistent pain points in DevOps, including the on-call engineer woken at 3 AM to diagnose an incident, the build failure that takes hours to trace back to a root cause, and the operational toil of modern software delivery. Agentic DevOps is the emerging paradigm that applies these capabilities to the full software lifecycle, with the goal of matching the velocity of modern software delivery with an equally capable operational layer. Neha Gaswamy leads Agentic DevOps at AWS and has been at Amazon for over twenty years. In this episode, she joins Matt Merrill to discuss the AWS approach to agentic DevOps, how Amazon dogfoods its own DevOps tooling, how their DevOps agent works from alarm to root cause, why determinism still matters in an agentic world, creative MCP integrations customers are building, and what the future holds for SRE engineers as agents take on more of the operational work. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Agentic DevOps at AWS appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI agents have transformed how software gets written, but the operational side of running software in production has not yet experienced a similar revolution. The same teams responsible for keeping systems healthy, investigating incidents, and managing reliability are still doing much of that work manually. Mezmo is a Production AI company that makes autonomous operations fast, efficient, and safe. Their open source project, AURA, is a declarative agent framework specifically designed for SRE and platform engineering workflows. It takes a Kubernetes-inspired approach where teams define what they want agents to do rather than scripting every step of how to do it. Andre Elizondo is the head of product at Mezmo, and he has a background in systems engineering, SRE, and observability. In this episode, Andre joins Kevin Ball to discuss what makes SRE agent workflows fundamentally different from coding agents, how AURA handles context engineering, AURA’s declarative configuration model, the spectrum of agent autonomy, and where the role of the SRE is headed as agents take on more of the operational work. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Mezmo. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introduced concepts like the MVP, the pivot, and build-measure-learn that are now so widely adopted they feel obvious. Over two decades of working with founders, CEOs, and investors, Eric has observed that some companies built on those principles eventually betray the very customers and engineers who made them great. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his attempt to answer the question of whether it is possible to build a company that resists that fate. In this episode, Eric joins Gregor Vand for a wide-ranging discussion about why so many great companies lose their way, and what software engineers and founders can do today to build or find companies that are genuinely resistant to corruption. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into the growing tension around restricted AI models, including Anthropic‘s Fable being pulled from the Claude platform days after launch. They explore what Sean calls “vibe regulations” and the risk foreign governments and enterprises face when a model they depend on can be cut off. They also cover the FT’s reporting on London’s “DeepMind mafia,” a vibe-coding clone controversy involving YC-backed Corgi and Papermark, SpaceX‘s acquisitions of Cursor and Mesh, and Anthropic’s launch of Claude Science. They also take on the latest round of the IDE wars, and explore who owns your dev toolchain, the vendor lock-in that now comes from context and memory rather than the model itself, and the widening cost gap between frontier tools and open weight models. As always, the episode wraps up with a few standout Hacker News threads. The post SED News: Restricted Models, IDE Wars, and the DeepMind Mafia appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Advanced software systems have long been more complex than any single engineer can fully understand. Observability is the established solution to this problem, but with AI agents now generating code, deploying changes, and operating autonomously, the challenge of understanding large software systems is entering a new dimension. Grafana is an open source observability platform, and one of the most widely used in the world. The company builds tools that help teams collect, visualize, and act on telemetry data across logs, metrics, and traces. They are now extending that capability into the agentic era with AI-powered investigation and monitoring tools. Anthony Woods is a co-founder of Grafana Labs. In this episode, he joins Matt Merrill to discuss how AI-generated code is straining software operations, why telemetry data volume has become as much a problem as a solution, how Grafana is adapting to a world where agents are the primary consumers of observability data, and what keeps him up at night about where the industry is headed. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Grafana’s Approach to AI-Native Observability appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Building great software always involves technical problem solving, but the best software goes beyond function. It feels fluid, coherent, and genuinely fun to use. This quality lives at the intersection of engineering and design, and very few teams know how to reliably produce it. Metalab is an engineering and design studio that has worked with some of the most successful companies in tech, including Apple, Slack, Uber, and Instacart. The studio is known for bringing together software engineering and design craft in a way that few studios can match. Wesley Yu is the VP of Engineering at Metalab, where he leads the teams that design and build digital products for early-stage companies. In this episode, Wesley joins Josh Goldberg to discuss how Metalab approaches tech stack selection for client projects, why agency work demands a bias toward boring and stable technology, how iterative development and deliberately ugly apps lead to better final products, and how AI tools are changing the boundary between design and engineering. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Building Software That People Love appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Hollower, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in development, the game recently launched to widespread critical acclaim. David D'Angelo is a lead programmer at Yacht Club Games. In this episode, David joins Joe Nash to discuss the custom C++ engine built for Mina the Hollower, how the team approached Game Boy Color art constraints and audio in a modern rendering pipeline, the game's Castlevania-inspired combat philosophy, how the open world manages saving and collision without load screens, and more. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Mina the Hollower appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Predictive modeling is a core element in modern systems, and powers capabilities such as fraud detection, loan approvals, and recommendation systems. These systems typically operate on structured, relational data stored in enterprise databases, with rows, columns, and interlinked tables. While computer vision and natural language processing have undergone a neural network revolution, the tabular data layer underpinning predictive modeling still largely relies on manual feature engineering and task-specific models. Relational deep learning proposes a new approach. It treats databases as graphs and applies transformer-style attention mechanisms directly over structured relational data. Researchers are now building foundation models for tabular data that aim to generalize across predictive tasks without painstaking feature engineering. Jure Leskovec is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and he previously served as Chief Scientist at Pinterest and was an investigator at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Most recently, he co-founded the machine learning startup, Kumo.AI. In this episode, Jure joins Sean Falconer to discuss the limitations of traditional predictive modeling, why structured enterprise data requires its own modality-specific neural architectures, how graph transformers generalize attention to relational databases, and more. The post Foundation Models for Structured Data appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Modern web development requires an ever-growing collection of tools including formatters, linters, bundlers, and plugins. Each tool typically has its own configuration, dependencies, and performance cost. As applications grow more complex, the overhead of maintaining this toolchain becomes a real burden. Biome is an open source toolchain for web projects that brings formatting and linting together in a single fast, opinionated tool. It’s built in Rust and is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Prettier and ESLint, with sensible defaults, minimal configuration, and consistent behavior across the CLI and editor environments. Biome also introduces a module graph that enables cross-file analysis, and type-aware lint rules that don’t require the TypeScript compiler. Emanuele Stoppa, known as Ema, is a Senior Systems Engineer at Cloudflare, a lead at Astro, and the creator and lead maintainer of Biome. In this episode, Ema joins Josh Goldberg to discuss the history of Biome, how linters and formatters work under the hood, what makes Biome’s architecture fundamentally different from the tools it replaces, and what’s coming next for the project and its community. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O'Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Biome and the Future of JavaScript Tooling appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most of the cryptography securing the internet today rests on mathematical problems that classical computers cannot solve in any reasonable timeframe. That assumption is now being tested. Recent advances in quantum computing have dramatically compressed timelines, and many in the industry have set a target of full post-quantum security by 2029, meaning a complete migration to algorithms designed to remain secure against quantum attacks. Bas Westerbaan is a cryptography engineer at Cloudflare, where he leads the company’s efforts to migrate to post-quantum cryptography. In this episode, Bas joins Kevin Ball to discuss how quantum computers threaten public key cryptography, what post-quantum algorithms actually are and how they work, the timeline shifts that have made quantum readiness feel so urgent, and what software engineers need to do now to prepare their systems. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Preparing for Q-Day appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Multiplayer games are among the hardest software systems to build, requiring developers to synchronize state across unreliable networks while maintaining fairness, performance, and a responsive player experience. Latency, cheating, server costs, and debugging distributed game logic all introduce complexity that single-player games never encounter. Dome Keeper is a minimalist tower defense game with roguelike elements where players must protect a fragile glass dome from relentless waves of alien attackers. The game was developed with the Godot Engine and released in 2022. More recently, the development team embarked on the challenge of adding multiplayer to the game. René Habermann is the founder of Bippinbits and the creator of Dome Keeper. Chris Ridenour is the founder of KAR Games, which is Godot focused studio that developed Drift: Space Survival. Chris is now working with the Dome Keeper team to bring multiplayer to the game. René and Chris join the show to talk about the origins of Dome Keeper, developing the game, and the process of adding multiplayer to a Godot game. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Developing Multiplayer Games in Godot appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they cover Apple‘s uncertain path beyond the iPhone. They also discuss Google‘s agentic pivot at Google I/O, a surge in DuckDuckGo traffic following Google’s default switch to AI mode, and payroll platform Remote surpassing 300 million in ARR with flat headcount. Gregor and Sean also dig into why consumer subscriptions don’t seem to correspond to actual costs, how enterprise is quietly subsidizing the AI economy, why the true moat has shifted from model quality to context management and agentic harness, and what the coming wave of token cost optimization might look like as companies start scrutinizing their AI bills. Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News including Doom running on a travel router touchscreen, a viral post asking whether AI productivity gains should translate to a day off, YouTube‘s move to automatically label AI-generated content, and SimCity 3000 running in 4K. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post SED News: Apple's AI Problem, The Real Business Model of AI, and Token Cost Reckoning appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The web has quietly become one of the most capable platforms for game development. Advances in WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebGPU have given developers tools that rival native desktop performance, while game engines like Unity and Godot have added robust web export pipelines. However, building games for the browser comes with its own set of constraints including file size, browser compatibility, and the need to quickly capture and maintain the player’s attention. Erik Dubbelboer is a Principal Engineer at Poki which is a web games platform serving over 100 million monthly users. He’s also a game developer himself, with titles including Silly Skies and Village Builder. His unusual position building developer tools that power the platform, while also shipping games on it, gives him a rare perspective on what it actually takes to succeed in web game development. In this episode, Erik joins Joe Nash to discuss the history of web games from the Flash era to today’s renaissance, how WebAssembly and WebGPU have transformed what is possible in the browser, the tradeoffs between different game engines for web publishing, and more. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Web Native Game Development appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Software engineering has developed powerful tools for observability, data management, and continuous testing, but hardware engineering has largely not kept pace. The feedback loops, tooling, and infrastructure that software engineers take for granted simply do not exist in most hardware programs. Nominal is a data platform built to help hardware organizations move at the same speed as software teams. It manages the hardware data supply chain end to end, from ingesting high-frequency sensor data off physical assets to enabling real-time control room monitoring, post-test analysis, and simulation correlation. Jason Hoch is the co-founder and CTO of Nominal, and he has a background spanning distributed data systems at Palantir and cloud infrastructure at Vercel. In this episode, Jason joins Kevin Ball to discuss why hardware engineering has lagged so far behind software in tooling and observability, the unique data challenges of working with high-frequency time series sensor data, how Nominal handles both real-time control room workflows and post-test analysis, why AI agents are transforming software development but have not yet made the same leap in hardware, and what it would take to close that gap. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Hardware Bottleneck AI Can't Fix appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Autonomous drone delivery has long been the stuff of science fiction, but ongoing advances have moved the space from experimental to operational. Zipline is one of the leading companies in this space, with drones that charge between missions and fly autonomously to deliver packages directly to customers. Kyle Madonia is the VP of Application Software and IT at Zipline, and she previously spent a decade as an engineer at SpaceX. In this episode, Kyle joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Zipline’s software stack powers end-to-end autonomous delivery, the engineering challenges of managing drone fleets at scale, and how the team approaches software releases for safety-critical systems. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Autonomous Drone Delivery at Scale appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Europe’s startup ecosystem is maturing rapidly, with companies like Revolut, Lovable, and Legora demonstrating that world-class technology businesses can be built and scaled on the continent. While the US remains the dominant force in venture-backed software as home to the largest markets, the deepest capital pools, and the most ambitious exit culture, a growing number of European founders are choosing to build at home. Edward Keelan is a Partner at Octopus Ventures, one of Europe’s largest and most active venture capital firms, where he has spent over 16 years leading the B2B software and enterprise AI fund. His portfolio spans seed through Series C, with a focus on European founders building in AI, vertical SaaS, and enterprise software. This long-view experience gives him a rare perspective on what it takes to build enduring technology companies in Europe. In this episode, Edward joins Elena Boroda to discuss what separates great founders from the rest, how AI is reshaping the software landscape and threatening established players, the state of the European startup ecosystem and what it needs to compete globally, and what engineers and founders should be thinking about as the industry enters a new era. Elena Boroda focuses on GTM for developer tools and AI startups, with experience in observability and building tools for MCP servers. She is based in Berlin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/elena-boroda Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The European Startup Scene appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

React Native is an open source framework developed by Meta that allows engineers to build mobile applications for both iOS and Android using a single JavaScript codebase. The framework bridges the gap between web development and native mobile, which lets teams ship to both platforms simultaneously without sacrificing the look and feel of a truly native app. Manjiri Moghe is a Staff Software Engineer at Coinbase, where she has spent five years building and scaling one of the world’s most demanding React Native applications. Her work spans performance optimization, reliability engineering, and the developer tooling that keeps large engineering teams moving quickly without sacrificing quality. In this episode, Manjiri joins Josh Goldberg to discuss why React Native has become the framework of choice for high-velocity mobile teams, how Coinbase measures app health, how to handle data fetching and loading in production, how AI coding agents are changing the day-to-day workflow for mobile engineers, and more. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O'Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post React Native at Scale appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Formal methods are a branch of mathematics and computer science focused on proving the correctness of systems, and they have long promised a more rigorous foundation for software. However, their complexity has kept them confined to a small community of specialists. That is now changing as agentic AI systems take on increasingly autonomous roles. The question of how to define, enforce, and verify what those agents are allowed to do has become urgent, and automated reasoning is emerging as a critical part of the answer. Byron Cook is a VP and Distinguished Scientist at AWS, a professor at University College London, and a program manager at DARPA. He founded the Automated Reasoning Group at AWS over a decade ago, where his team built the foundations behind products like IAM Access Analyzer, VPC Reachability Analyzer, and Bedrock Guardrails. In this episode, Byron joins Sean Falconer to discuss how automated reasoning works and why it scales so well with AI, the rise of neurosymbolic approaches that combine formal logic with large language models, what it means to formally specify agent behavior using temporal logic, and why the convergence of agentic AI and formal methods may represent one of the most significant shifts in how software is built and verified. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Formal Methods as Agent Guardrails appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Open source software underpins nearly every modern application, including frameworks powering the most popular websites, to the libraries securing financial backend systems. However, while open source drives collaboration and innovation at a global scale, it also faces deep challenges in sustainability, community health, and long-term maintenance. Many of the world's most critical dependencies are still maintained by just a handful of volunteers. Abby Cabunoc Mayes leads Open Source Maintainer Programs at GitHub, and Brian Muenzenmeyer is a Principal Engineer, Node.js maintainer, and author of the book, Approachable Open Source. Abby and Brian join Josh Goldberg to talk about what it means to build and sustain healthy open source projects, how maintainers can foster inclusive communities, the evolving role of open source in the workplace, and how AI is reshaping the way we collaborate. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O'Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Open Source Sustainability appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Vector search has risen to become a foundational tool in modern search and retrieval systems, including the RAG pipelines that power many AI applications. However, the demands on retrieval systems are growing more sophisticated, which is revealing the limits of relying on a single vector similarity score. Vespa is a popular open source search and data serving engine. Central to Vespa’s architecture is tensor-based retrieval, which is an approach that represents data as tensors rather than simple vectors. Tensor-based retrieval enables richer mathematical operations and more flexible ranking functions that can surmount the limitations of a single vector similarity score. Radu Gheorghe is a software engineer at Vespa with a background spanning nearly 12 years of consulting and training on Elasticsearch and Solr. In this episode, Radu joins Sean Falconer to discuss why vector similarity alone falls short in production, how tensor-based retrieval generalizes to support richer ranking functions, the trade-offs in chunking and multi-stage re-ranking architectures, and where AI search is headed next. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Vespa. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Vespa AI and Surpassing the Limits of Vector Search appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they cover Anthropic's controversial “Mythos” security model and what it means for vulnerability discovery at scale. They also discuss recent layoffs at Snap and Meta, and how AI investment pressures are reshaping hiring, organizational priorities, and the economics of big tech. Gregor and Sean then zoom out to examine the massive wave of AI infrastructure spending—hundreds of billions in capex across Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, and what it signals about the future of cloud platforms, model providers, and the engineers who build on top of them. They explore the emerging entanglement between model labs and infrastructure providers, the evolving role of engineers in an AI-native world, and the growing gap between rapid AI adoption and security readiness. Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including creative uses of AI coding tools to revive abandoned side projects, new approaches to training smaller yet highly capable models, surprising demographic data visualizations, and even the mathematics of “cheating” at Tetris. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post SED News: Anthropic's Mythos, Supply Chain Hacks, and the AI Spending Surge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI coding tools have dramatically accelerated the pace of development, and the bottleneck in the software development lifecycle has shifted to code validation and testing. However, the conventional tools and workflows that QA teams have relied on were not designed for a world where a single engineer can generate thousands of lines of code in a day. SmartBear is a software quality platform spanning test automation, API lifecycle management, and observability. The company recently launched an AI-native QA platform called BearQ, which deploys autonomous agents that explore web applications, learns their structure and behavior, and authors and maintains test cases continuously. Fitz Nowlan is the VP of AI and Architecture at SmartBear and the co-founder of Reflect, which is a web testing platform acquired by SmartBear in 2024. In this episode, Fitz joins Kevin Ball to discuss why web UI testing is uniquely challenging, how BearQ’s multi-agent architecture coordinates exploration and testing, why test data management becomes a hard distributed systems problem at scale, and what agentic development means for the future of QA. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SmartBear. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post SmartBear and Multi-Agent QA appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Artificial intelligence is transforming warfare faster than the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern it. Militaries around the world are deploying AI-powered decision support systems to identify targets, assess proportionality, and direct weapons. The gap between what is technically possible and what international law can effectively regulate is widening by the day. Yuval Shany is a law professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Oxford Ethics in AI Institute. He also served on the UN Human Rights Committee, where he first encountered the legal and ethical challenges posed by autonomous weapons systems. His research focuses on the intersection of international humanitarian law, human rights, and emerging military technologies. In this episode, Yuval joins Matt Merrill for a wide-ranging conversation. They cover topics including how close we are to fully autonomous lethal weapons, the accountability gap that AI-mediated warfare creates, and what lessons software engineers can draw from these challenges when building consequential AI systems of any kind. Matt Merrill is a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling software teams across enterprise and product-focused organizations. His background is in backend development, cloud architecture, and distributed systems design. He currently architects and delivers software products and leads a team of engineers at DEPT® Agency. You can learn more about his work at code.theothermattm.com. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Ethics of Autonomous Weapons Systems appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Open-weight models are AI systems whose trained parameters are publicly released, which allows developers to run, fine-tune, and deploy them independently rather than accessing them only through a hosted API. While closed-weight models from companies like OpenAI or Anthropic are delivered as managed services, open-weight models give organizations direct control over how the models are deployed and used. Importantly, the performance of these models is steadily improving and they've become credible alternatives for production workloads, with advantages in customization and data privacy. ​ Fireworks AI is building a platform focused on serving and customizing open-weight models at scale. The platform includes optimized inference infrastructure, multi-hardware support across NVIDIA and AMD, and reinforcement fine-tuning capabilities. ​ Benny Chen is a Co-Founder of Fireworks AI. In this episode, he joins Gregor Vand to discuss his path from Meta's ML infrastructure teams to co-founding Fireworks AI, why open-weight models are becoming increasingly competitive, how custom kernels and speculative decoding improve performance, reinforcement fine-tuning, and much more. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Open-Weight AI Models appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI coding tools have gone from novelty to core infrastructure in under three years. Today, many devs use AI daily, a substantial share of new code is AI-generated, and expectations for automation are rapidly increasing. Sonar is a company specializing in analysis of code quality and security, and they recently released a new survey – the State of Code Developer Survey. The survey provides a deep examination of how developers are using AI in real production environments, and where the real-world gaps and risks still exist. Chris Grams is the CVP of Corporate Marketing at Sonar, and Manish Kapur is the VP of Product Marketing and Developer Relations at Sonar. In this episode, they join Matt Merrill to discuss what the survey reveals about AI-assisted development, why 96% of developers still don't fully trust AI-generated code, how deterministic verification layers fit into agent-driven workflows, and what engineering leaders should prioritize as AI shifts from experimentation to production infrastructure. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Hype and Reality of the AI Coding Shift appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI agents are increasingly capable of reasoning and performing autonomous work over long periods. However, as agents take on more complex, longer-horizon tasks, keeping them supplied with the right information becomes the core engineering challenge. The industry is moving away from pre-loading context upfront toward a model where agents dynamically navigate and retrieve the data they need, when they need it. Redis is approaching context management using a context engine, which is an architecture built around four pillars: on-demand context retrieval, data that is always current, fast retrieval, and a memory layer that improves over time. In practice this means building materialized views of data with a semantic layer on top, rather than giving agents direct access to production databases. A memory system sits alongside this, extracting and compacting information asynchronously as the agent works. Simba Khadder leads AI strategy at Redis, and he previously co-founded the feature store platform FeatureForm, which was acquired by Redis in 2025. In this episode, Simba joins Kevin Ball to discuss why context has become the defining challenge in agentic AI, how context engines differ from traditional RAG architectures, how materialized views underpin reliable agent data pipelines, how memory systems can improve through async extraction and compaction, and how engineering teams need to adapt their practices as AI-driven development accelerates. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Redis. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Unlocking the Data Layer for Agentic AI with Simba Khadder appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI agents are evolving from individual productivity tools into distributed systems components inside enterprises. The next frontier is coming into focus, and it involves large-scale ecosystems of collaborating agents embedded directly into business processes. However, multi-agent architectures introduce serious challenges around orchestration, state management, trust, governance, and observability. Eric Broda is a veteran of the software industry, and he's the co-author of the new O’Reilly book, Agentic Mesh: The GenAI-Powered Autonomous Agent Ecosystem. In this episode, Eric joins Sean Falconer to discuss the architectural challenges of deploying agents as core infrastructure, how distributed computing principles apply to multi-agent systems, why trust and explainability are foundational, and what enterprises may look like as agents become full participants in business processes. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Agentic Mesh with Eric Broda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Observability emerged from the need to understand complex software systems, and involves tracking metrics, logs, and traces so engineers can detect and diagnose problems before they affect users. However, modern applications often encompass hundreds of services, containers, and dependencies, generating more observability data than dashboards and alerts alone can effectively surface. New Relic is a leading observability platform, with a history that spans the full arc of modern software operations. Today they are working to apply AI to move observability beyond passive monitoring toward active intelligence, where systems can surface what matters, reduce alert noise, and ultimately take autonomous action before problems reach engineers or users. Nic Benders is the Chief Technology Strategist at New Relic, where he has worked for 16 years. In this episode, Nic joins Lee Atchison to discuss the evolution of observability from dashboards and alerts to AI-driven intelligence, how LLMs and statistical tools work together to surface meaningful signals from massive datasets, the emerging challenge of observing AI systems themselves, and what the rise of AI means for the future of software engineering as a profession. This episode is hosted by Lee Atchison. Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His best-selling book, Architecting for Scale (O'Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments. Lee is the host of his podcast, Modern Digital Business, an engaging and informative podcast produced for people looking to build and grow their digital business with the help of modern applications and processes developed for today's fast-moving business environment. Listen at mdb.fm. Follow Lee at softwarearchitectureinsights.com, and see all his content at leeatchison.com. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post New Relic and Agentic DevOps with Nic Benders appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Mobile apps have become a primary interface for critical services, including banking, payments, and healthcare. Unlike web applications, much of the logic and intellectual property in a mobile app lives directly on the user’s device, which is an environment the developer doesn’t control. That makes mobile apps uniquely exposed to reverse engineering, runtime manipulation, and fraud. As more critical functionality shifts to mobile, the need to harden apps against sophisticated attackers continues to grow. Guardsquare builds tools to protect and test mobile applications against both static and dynamic threats. Its platform has features including layered code obfuscation, runtime application self-protection, mobile-specific security testing, threat monitoring, and API attestation. Ryan Lloyd is the Chief Product Officer at Guardsquare. In this episode, he joins Gregor Vand to discuss why mobile security differs from desktop and web security, how reverse engineering tools have evolved, the role of compiler-based obfuscation and runtime protections, common mobile app vulnerabilities, and how LLMs are reshaping the attacker landscape. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Guardsquare. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Mobile App Security with Ryan Lloyd appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, gives developers a common way to expose tools, data, and capabilities to large language models, and it has quickly become an important standard in agentic AI. FastMCP is an open source project stewarded by the team at Prefect, which is an orchestration platform for AI and data workflows. The FastMCP project builds on MCP to provide high-level, ergonomic abstractions for Python developers to rapidly build and deploy MCP servers and applications. Jeremiah Lowin is the founder and CEO of Prefect, and Adam Azzam is the VP of Product at the company. In this episode, Jeremiah and Adam join Gregor Vand to discuss the origin story of FastMCP, the three pillars of the framework, the architectural decisions behind FastMCP 3.0, and much more. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post FastMCP with Adam Azzam and Jeremiah Lowin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they cover the resurgence of ARM and CPUs as serious compute infrastructure for running local AI agents, a supply chain attack on LiteLLM that exposed API credentials across thousands of developer environments, and the arrival of OpenCode as a fully open source alternative to Claude Code and Codex. They also discuss the diverging strategies of Anthropic and OpenAI following the Pentagon contract controversy, and what it signals about where each company is positioning itself in the enterprise and government markets. Gregor and Sean then dive deep into what the AI coding boom actually means for shipping software. Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including Doom running entirely over DNS, the psychology of seafoam green in Cold War-era control rooms, a Tesla Model 3 computer assembled from salvaged crash components, and Apple’s quiet discontinuation of the Mac Pro. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post SED News: OpenCode, AI Code vs. Shipped Code, and the LiteLLM Breach appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

FreeBSD is one of the longest-running and most influential open-source operating systems in the world. It was born from the Berkeley Software Distribution in the early 1990s, it has powered everything from high-performance networking infrastructure to game consoles and content delivery networks. Over three decades, it has evolved through major architectural shifts, from symmetric multiprocessing and kernel scalability to modern storage systems and predictable release engineering. John Baldwin has spent more than 25 years working on FreeBSD as a developer, contributor, and consultant. In this episode, John joins Gregor Vand to discuss the origins of FreeBSD, how its governance model differs from other open-source projects, its role inside systems like Netflix's CDN and the PlayStation 4, the challenges of maintaining a 30-year-old codebase, and much more. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post FreeBSD with John Baldwin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Modern cloud-native systems are built on highly dynamic, distributed infrastructure where containers spin up and down constantly, services communicate across clusters, and traditional networking assumptions break down. Linux networking was designed decades ago around static IPs and linear rule processing, which makes it increasingly difficult to achieve scale in Kubernetes environments. At the same time, modifying the Linux kernel to keep up with these demands is slow, risky, and impractical for most organizations. The Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, is a Linux kernel technology that allows sandboxed programs to run safely inside the kernel without modifying kernel source code or loading kernel modules. Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native networking platform that's built on eBPF, and provides, secures, and observes connectivity between workloads in Kubernetes and other distributed environments. Bill Mulligan is a maintainer in the Cilium ecosystem and a member of the team at Isovalent, the company behind Cilium. He joins the show with Gregor Vand to discuss how eBPF works under the hood, why Cilium has become one of the most widely adopted Kubernetes networking projects, and how the future of cloud-native infrastructure is being reshaped by programmable kernels. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Cilium, eBPF, and Modern Kubernetes Networking with Bill Mulligan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Bennett Foddy is a legendary game designer known for creating wholly distinctive games such as QWOP, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and the recently released Baby Steps. He's also a former professor at the NYU Game Center, where he taught game design alongside developing his own experimental work. In this episode, Bennett joins Joe Nash to discuss his systems-driven approach to game design, why frustration and difficulty are often misunderstood, how streaming and speedrunning have reshaped how games are played and experienced, and what makes his games stand out. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Games That Push Back with Bennett Foddy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Developer tooling shapes how software gets written day to day, but the best tools often disappear into the background once they succeed. Formatting, linting, and build systems can either create friction and endless debate, or quietly remove entire classes of problems from a team's workflow. Over the past decade, the JavaScript ecosystem has wrestled with both extremes as it scaled rapidly and accumulated complexity. Prettier emerged as a response to the surprisingly human problem of engineers spending too much time debating code style instead of building software. It offers a deterministic, opinionated formatter that helped normalize automation as part of everyday development. James Long is a design and product engineer who has worked at Mozilla and Stripe, and he's the creator of Prettier. He joins the show with Josh Goldberg to talk about the origins of Prettier, why formatting debates are so emotionally charged, the technical challenges of building formatters, the realities of maintaining popular open-source tools, and how the JavaScript tooling ecosystem continues to evolve. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O'Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Prettier and Opinionated Code Formatting with James Long appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Skateboarding games have long balanced technical precision with a sense of flow and expression, but Skate Story takes the genre in a radically different direction. It has a distinct vaporwave vibe and blends fluid skate mechanics with exploration, puzzles, and an existential narrative about freedom, pain, and obsession. The game was created by indie developer Sam Eng, who previously released Zarvot for the Nintendo Switch. Skate Story launched to critical acclaim and was widely regarded as one of the best games of 2025. In this episode, Sam joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing Skate Story. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Skate Story with Sam Eng appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, has become a foundational approach to building production AI systems. However, deploying RAG in practice can be complex and costly. Developers typically have to manage vector databases, chunking strategies, embedding models, and indexing infrastructure. Designing effective RAG systems is also a moving target, as techniques and best practices evolve in step with rapidly advancing language models. Google DeepMind recently released the File Search Tool, a fully managed RAG system built directly into the Gemini API. File Search abstracts away the retrieval pipeline, allowing developers to upload documents, code, and other text data, automatically generate embeddings, and query their knowledge base. We wanted to understand how the DeepMind team designed a general-purpose RAG system that maintains high retrieval quality. Animesh Chatterji is a Software Engineer at Google DeepMind and Ivan Solovyev is a Product Manager at DeepMind, and they worked on File Search Tool. They joined the podcast with Sean Falconer to discuss the evolution of RAG, why simplicity and pricing transparency matter, how embedding models have improved retrieval quality, the tradeoffs between configurability and ease of use, and what's next for multimodal retrieval across text, images, and beyond. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post DeepMind's RAG System with Animesh Chatterji and Ivan Solovyev appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Interactive notebooks were popularized by the Jupyter project and have since become a core tool for data science, research, and data exploration. However, traditional, imperative notebooks often break down as projects grow more complex. Hidden state, non-reproducible execution, poor version control ergonomics, and difficulty reusing notebook code in real software systems make it hard to move from exploration to production. At the same time, sharing results often requires collaborators to recreate entire environments, limiting interactivity and slowing feedback. Marimo is an open-source, next-generation Python notebook designed to address these problems directly. Akshay Agrawal is the creator of Marimo and he previously worked at Google Brain. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the limitations of traditional notebooks, the design of reactive notebooks in Python, how marimo bridges research and production, and where notebooks fit in an increasingly agentic, AI-assisted development world. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Reinventing the Python Notebook with Akshay Agrawal appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI agents have taken on a growing share of software development work, so much so that the hardest problems are shifting away from code generation towards something new, context. The challenge is now contextualizing why systems work the way they do, how architectural decisions were made, and the sources of truth that exist outside of the code base. As teams adopt agentic tools, gaps or inconsistencies in context have emerged as a primary reason why software fails to meet production standards. Unblocked is a startup focused on solving this context gap. Their context engine aggregates and reasons over organizational knowledge spread across source code, pull requests, documentation, chat systems, and production telemetry. By acting as a context engine for both developers and AI agents, Unblocked aims to improve AI code quality and review, reduce interruptions, accelerate onboarding, and enable safer, more effective agentic workflows. Dennis Pilarinos is the Founder and CEO of Unblocked. Previously, he helped build Azure at Microsoft, worked at AWS, and co-founded BuddyBuild, which is a mobile CI platform acquired by Apple. Dennis joins Kevin Ball to discuss context engineering, reconciling conflicting sources nof truth, permission to wear AI systems, the shifting bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle, and what it means to be a software engineer in an increasingly agentic world. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Organizational Context for AI Coding Agents with Dennis Pilarinos appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they cover the viral rise of OpenClaw and its founder's move to OpenAI, OpenAI's exploration of ads inside ChatGPT, and Alibaba's push into agent-powered commerce during Lunar New Year. They also discuss Mistral's acquisition of Koyeb to deepen its compute stack, the growing competition between ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and what these moves signal about monetization, infrastructure, and control in the AI arms race. Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the rapid acceleration of agentic engineering. They examine how tools like Claude Code and Codex are compressing the idea-to-production cycle, what multi-agent orchestration means for software teams, whether the era of the “10x engineer” is ending, and how organizational structures may need to evolve as coding shifts from manual craft to supervised automation. Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including reverse engineering a 1990 DOS classic, a 3D reimagining of flight tracking data, old-school practical film effects using cloud tanks, and the privacy-focused GrapheneOS mobile operating system. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post SED News: OpenClaw Goes Viral, Mistral's Compute Play, and the Agent Arms Race appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI-assisted coding tools have made it easier than ever to spin up prototypes, but turning those prototypes into reliable, production-grade systems remains a major challenge. Large language models are non-deterministic, prone to drift, and often lose track of intent over long development sessions. Kiro is an AI-powered IDE that’s built around a spec-driven development workflow. It’s focused on helping developers capture intent up front, translate it into concrete requirements and designs, and systematically validate implementations through tasks, testing, and guardrails. It aims to preserve the creativity of AI-assisted development while producing software that is ready for real-world use. David Yanacek is a Senior Principal Engineer and a lead advisor on the Agentic AI team at AWS. Today, his work focuses on Kiro, frontier agents, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and AWS's operational agents. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the design of Kiro, how spec-driven development changes the way teams work with AI coding agents, and what the next generation of agentic software development might look like. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Amazon's IDE for Spec-Driven Development with David Yanacek appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Enterprise IT systems have grown into sprawling, highly distributed environments spanning cloud infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and increasingly AI-driven workloads. Observability tools have made it easier to collect metrics, logs, and traces, but understanding why systems fail and responding quickly remains a persistent challenge. As complexity continues to rise, the industry is looking beyond dashboards and alerts toward agentic AI systems that can reason about operational data, reduce toil, and take action when things go wrong. SolarWinds offers solutions to monitor, understand, and remediate issues across complex, distributed systems. The company began as a leader in network and infrastructure monitoring, and has evolved to support modern applications, cloud environments, containers, and AI workloads, with a growing focus on reducing operational toil. Krishna Sai is the Chief Technology Officer at SolarWinds. He joins the show with Sean Falconer to discuss how SolarWinds is rethinking observability in the age of AI, what it means to design agentic systems for mission-critical environments, how AI-assisted programming is reshaping engineering workflows, and why the future of operations depends on building platforms where humans and autonomous agents work together. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Engineering AI Systems for Autonomy and Resilience with Krishna Sai appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

China’s Great Firewall is often spoken about but is rarely understood. It is one of the most sophisticated and opaque censorship systems on the planet, and it shapes how over a billion people interact with the global internet, influences the design of privacy and proxy tools worldwide, and continues to evolve in ways that challenge researchers, developers, and policymakers alike. Jackson Sippe is a PhD researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder whose work focuses on uncovering how national-scale censorship systems operate. Jackson recently helped lead a groundbreaking study analyzing a previously undocumented GFW technique that quietly broke fully encrypted proxy protocols across China for more than a year. In this episode, Jackson joins Gregor Vand to discuss how the Great Firewall works at a technical level, the 2021–2023 blocking event, the popcount-based detection algorithm his team reverse-engineered, the cat-and-mouse ecosystem of censorship circumvention, and what these findings mean for the future of the open internet. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Inside China's Great Firewall with Jackson Sippe appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

LLM -powered systems continue to move steadily into production, but this process is presenting teams with challenges that traditional software practices don’t commonly encounter. Models and agents are non-deterministic systems, which makes it difficult to test changes, reason about failures, and confidently ship updates. This has created the need for new evaluation tooling designed specifically around the properties of LLMs. Comet is a platform with Roots and MLOps, to the rapidly evolving world of agent-based systems by treating prompts, tools, and workflows as optimizable components that can be evaluated and improved over time. Gideon Mendels is the co -founder and CEO of Comet. He previously worked at Google on hate speech and deception detection, and he founded GroupWise, which trained and deployed NLP models processing billions of chats. In this episode, Gideon joins Kevin Ball to discuss how agent development sits between software engineering and ML, why eVals are the missing foundation for most AI teams, prompt optimization as a search problem, and the future for continuously improving agents in production. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Comet. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Optimizing Agent Behavior in Production with Gideon Mendels appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI-assisted programming has moved far beyond autocomplete. Large language models are now capable of editing entire codebases, coordinating long-running tasks, and collaborating across multiple systems. As these capabilities mature, the core challenge in software development is shifting away from writing code and toward orchestrating work, managing context, and maintaining shared understanding across fleets of agents. Steve Yegge is a software engineer, writer, and industry veteran whose essays have shaped how many developers think about their work. Over the past year, Steve has been exploring the frontier of agentic software development, building tools like Beads and Gas Town to experiment with multi-agent coordination, shared memory, and AI-driven software workflows. In this episode, Steve joins Kevin Ball to discuss the evolution of AI coding from chat-based assistance to full agent orchestration, the technical and cognitive challenges of managing fleets of agents, how concepts like task graphs and Git-backed ledgers change the nature of work, and what these shifts mean for software teams, tooling, and the future of the industry. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development with Steve Yegge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Python 3.14 is here and continues Python's evolution toward greater performance, scalability, and usability. The new release formally supports free-threaded, no-GIL mode, introduces template string literals, and implements deferred evaluation of type annotations. It also includes new debugging and profiling tools, along with many other features. Łukasz Langa is the CPython Developer in Residence at the Python Software Foundation, and he joins Sean Falconer to discuss the 3.14 release, the future of free threading, type system improvements, Python's growing role in AI, and how the language continues to evolve while maintaining its commitment to backward compatibility. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Python 3.14 with Łukasz Langa appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Engineering teams often build microservices as their systems grow, but over time this can lead to a fragmented ecosystem with scattered data access patterns, duplicated business logic, and an uneven developer experience. A unified data graph with a consistent execution layer helps address these challenges by centralizing schema, simplifying how teams compose functionality, and reducing operational overhead while preserving performance and reliability. Viaduct is Airbnb's open-source, data-oriented service mesh and GraphQL platform built around a single, highly connected central schema. It has played a major role in scaling Airbnb's engineering organization. Adam Miskiewicz is a Principal Software Engineer at Airbnb and he worked on Viaduct. He joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about how Viaduct originated inside Airbnb, the architectural principles that shaped it, the challenges of scaling GraphQL to millions of queries per second, and why the team decided to open-source the platform. They also discuss the future of backend development in an AI-driven world and how unified data layers may influence the next generation of engineering systems. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Airbnb's Open-Source GraphQL Framework with Adam Miskiewicz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they cover Starlink's rapid rollout of free, high-speed in-flight internet, Tesla's move to deprecate Autopilot in favor of full self-driving, and Apple's reported decision to power Siri with Google's Gemini models. They also discuss Meta's $2B acquisition of Manus, Waymo's growing pains as autonomous vehicles scale, and the competitive shockwaves triggered by Google's advances in custom AI hardware. Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the state of the tech job market, examining OpenAI's decision to eliminate vesting cliffs, the escalating war for elite AI talent, and what recent layoffs really say about the future of software engineering. They explore how AI coding tools are reshaping the balance between junior and senior engineers, why fundamentals still matter, and what developers should focus on heading into 2026. Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including Doom running on wireless earbuds, the enduring appeal of wildly over-engineered side projects, and why hacking for fun still matters in an age of industrial-scale AI. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn. Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post SED News: Apple Bets on Gemini, Google's AI Advantage, and the Talent Arms Race appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.