The Stack Overflow Podcast

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 securely run cloud dev...

Ryan welcomes McLaren Stanley, Senior Principal Engineer for Amazon Stores, to discuss what it actually takes to make teams AI native, why agentic engineering is shifting code bottlenecks downstream to testing and deployment, and why robust validation is essential to build trust and enable “fearless commits.”

Episode notes:

You can learn more about how Amazon’s frontier teams became AI native on the AWS blog. 

C...

Ryan welcomes Anurag Goel, CEO and co-founder of Render, to discuss why most startups shouldn’t start by managing their Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure. They discuss how frustration with spinning up nodes at Stripes led him to build a company, a future where your application itself may allocate its own compute, and why DevOps jobs aren’t going anywhere. 

Episode notes

Render calls itself the cloud for builders, i...

Ryan welcomes WPEngine CTO Ramadass Prabakar to the show to chat about what happens—and what we should do—when agents start acting like humans online, how our internet is evolving to serve both human and agentic experiences from the same interface, and what we can do to differentiate and protect human actions online from malicious bot activity. 

Episode notes: 

WP Engine hosts and manages over 5 million WordPres...

Ryan is joined by Asaf Savich, Komodor’s AI Engineering Group Manager, to discuss why modern reliability work requires navigating massive cross-service context, what good context engineering actually likes when AI is integrated into site reliability, and how the work of human SREs is shifting towards strategy and AI agent management.

Episode notes: 

Komodor is an autonomous AI SRE platform designed to troubleshoot, manage,...

Ryan welcomes VoidZero’s Evan You and Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht back to the show to discuss Cloudflare’s recent acquisition of VoidZero and what it means for JavaScript development, how partnerships like theirs can help open-source projects stay maintained and sustainably monetized, and how Cloudflare’s distributed systems are helping to improve developer experience in Vite and beyond. 

Episode notes:

Void...

Live from Snowflake Summit, Ryan talks with Snowflake’s Head of Developer Experience Umesh Unnikrishnan about the industry-wide shift from “vibe coding” for quick prototypes to agentic engineering for enterprise-ready software, how enterprises can scale governance with guardrails like human-in-the-loop approval and control layers that go beyond the underlying LLM, and why Umesh predicts all developers will become ...

At MS Build, Ryan is joined by Cassidy Williams, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub and former Stack Overflow Podcast host, to discuss how agentic coding is shifting dev work towards higher-level strategy while increasing decision fatigue; why human taste, community feedback, and mentorship are becoming more essential than ever for developer careers; and the new GitHub Copilot announcements coming out of Microsoft, inc...

Recorded at Microsoft Build, Ryan welcomes Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer for Responsible AI, about how we can build and use AI responsibly with the NIST approach, why most irresponsible AI comes from experimentation without thought of impact, and how Microsoft is researching thoughtful human/AI workflow design to reduce unnecessary escalation. 

Episode notes: 

This episode was recorded at Microsoft Bui...

Live from Microsoft Build, Ryan is joined by Jay Parikh, Microsoft’s VP of AI Core, for a conversation on what enterprises need to build, deploy, and run AI agents at scale with demonstrable ROI; how Microsoft built an end-to-end agent development system that goes past just the harness; and how you can evaluate for reliability and correctness in models that get more intelligent and autonomous everyday. 

Episode notes:&nbs...

SPONSORED BY IBM

Ryan is joined by Rosemary Wang, Developer Advocate at IBM, to explore what infrastructure as code looks like once AI starts writing and deploying it. They discuss why guardrails still lag adoption, breaks down what it means when “anyone can deploy,” and why deep systems knowledge still matters. 

Episode notes:

Try out Bob, IBM’s coding agent that Rosemary talked about in the episode. 

Conne...

Ryan welcomes Saahil Jain, CTO of You.com, to discuss why building agents with a 2024 mindset is a mistake as modern models improve at long-horizon tasks, why heavy orchestration layers can hurt model performance more than help it, and why the 2026 competitive edge actually comes from information retrieval and unique data paired with end-to-end evaluation. 

Episode notes: 

You.com is an AI-powered search and productivity en...

Ryan welcomes Benny Chen, co-founder of Fireworks AI, to the show to explore what actually makes an AI application good or not, how to balance qualitative signals with quantitative metrics when evaluating AI, and how open-source eval protocols and community efforts are setting the standard for AI evaluation. 

Episode notes: 

Fireworks AI is a cloud platform designed for developers and enterprises to run, customize, and scal...

Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of engineering at Snowflake, joins Leaders of Code at Snowflake Summit to break down the five-stage framework his org used to go from "let chaos reign" to a repeatable, org-wide system for AI-assisted engineering.

Vivek explains how Snowflake systematically rolled out coding agents across its engineering org — starting with unrestricted experimentation, then codifying what worked into a shared vocabulary...

Ryan sits down with Frank Portman, CTO at Yobi, to talk about why next-token prediction, though great for language, isn’t the right inductive bias for forecasting human behavior. They discuss how Yobi builds a “foundation model of behavior” using transformers and graph neural networks instead of chat-style LLMs, and what it takes to run millions of personalization decisions per second while keeping consumer data p...

Ryan sits down with Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal, to chat about why AI coding agents have made writing code easier but running it safely in production harder, why production failures are really caused by interactions between systems and not just the code itself, and how teams can troubleshoot more effectively when traditional observability tools are not enough for agentic AI workflows.

Episode notes: 

Traversal...

Ryan is joined by  Jeffrey Hightower, VP of Places Data at Microsoft, and Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation, to chat about their partnership in bringing spatial data to the next generation of Microsoft tools; how Overture’s 50 organization members are creating open, standardized, and interoperable  global spatial data sets; and their solutions to the innate challenges of trying to digitally map the world. 

Epi...

Ryan welcomes Cricket Liu, DNS expert and Chief Evangelist at Infoblox, to the show to talk all things DNS. They cover the evolution of one of the oldest DNS server implementations, BIND, and what the future holds for protected DNS configurations; the realities of security threats like DDoS and DNS spoofing; and why outages often trace back to a lack of understanding of DNS’s fundamental role. 

Episode notes:

Infoblox is a...

Recorded live at the AI Agent Conference, Ryan sits down with Apollo GraphQL CEO Matt DeBerglis to discuss how enterprises can leverage GraphQL and MCP as a structured semantic architecture to feed clean data to autonomous agents, safeguard internal microservices against unprecedented "east-west" data exfiltration risks, and rein in skyrocketing token spend by explicitly querying only the exact context required.

Episode notes: 

...