Dev Interrupted

After hitting a low point last year, developer job satisfaction is officially on the rise. Erin Yepis returns to the show to unpack the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, analyzing how autonomy and compensation are driving this recovery. We also cover the happiness gap between senior and junior engineers, the surprising drop in trust for AI tools, and why vibe coding is failing to catch on with professional engineers.

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When you co-create Kubernetes, you earn the right to have strong opinions on the next platform shift. This week, Ben sits down with Craig McLuckie, Co-founder & CEO of Stacklok, who is advocating for a shift in leadership mindset. He argues we need to move from asking if we can use AI to demanding to know why we can’t. Listen to hear why he believes an "AI maximalist" philosophy is the only way to survive the next cyc...

In the race to define the future of AI, what's the one advantage that truly lasts? It's not proprietary tech, argues Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD, but the sustainable speed of innovation. He explains why AMD is rejecting the "walled garden" model for its open source ROCm stack, betting that an open community flywheel is the key to victory. Listen to understand how this open strategy is designed to o...

What is "spec-driven development," and why is this structured approach the key to unlocking complex AI projects? We're joined by Amit Patel, Director of Software Development for Kiro at AWS, to explore this methodology. He explains why "vibe coding" in a chat window fails on multi-day initiatives: the AI (and the developer) loses context. Kiro solves this by turning requirements and design into a persistent...

AI is forcing engineering leaders to become part-CFO, part-governance expert, and part-business strategist. Are you ready for the shift? 

We're joined by Lake Dai, a globally recognized AI expert, professor at Carnegie Mellon, and founder of Sancus Ventures, to explore the new operating strategies required in an AI-first era. She explains why AI has evolved from a simple tool to a core business metric that leaders are held acco...

Forget top-down mandates. How do you foster organic AI adoption on a skeptical, high-performing engineering team? Loic Houssier, Head of Engineering at Superhuman, joins us to share how he did just that. He explains his strategy for overcoming cynicism, which involved leveraging a highly respected internal champion, the Chief Architect, to re-evaluate the tools and prove their potential was no longer just buzz.

Discover his team&apo...

Is your company using AI to trim your budget, or to multiply your team's impact? We're joined by Matt Culver, a senior engineering leader at Super.com, to discuss why the common view of AI as a tool for cost-cutting is a misguided "accounting mindset" that ultimately destroys trust. He argues that leaders should instead see efficiency gains from AI as a powerful opportunity to reinvest in their teams. This conve...

With massive context windows and new agent frameworks, do vector databases still matter? Ram Sriharsha, CTO at Pinecone, joins the conversation to make the definitive case that they're more critical than ever. He explains that at the core of all AI is search, and externalizing this function is non-negotiable for security, auditability, and control.

Ram offers a clear starting path for engineering leaders: begin with simple Retr...

Vibe coding is a developer's dream, but in the enterprise, it can be a nightmare of risk and shadow IT. So how do you saddle the 'wild horse' of modern AI development? Dan Fernandez, VP of Product Management, Developer Services at Salesforce, joins the conversation to share the answer: a new category his team is pioneering called Enterprise Vibe Coding. This discussion reveals how to move beyond flashy greenfield AI ...

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is evolving beyond local developer experiments and into the secure, remote infrastructure that will power the next generation of the internet. Brendan Irvine-Broque, Director of Product at Cloudflare, joins us to share a roadmap for this future. He explains how Cloudflare's "customer zero" philosophy of dogfooding their own tools provides a unique perspective on what it takes to scale...

What do you learn after spending 15 years at Apple and demoing your work directly to Steve Jobs? Ken Kocienda, Co-founder of Infactory AI and author of Creative Selection, joins us to share the answer. As a former Principal Engineer at Apple who helped create the iPhone keyboard and autocorrect, Ken discusses his incredible journey from a history major to a key figure in building technology used by billions. He explains his core ph...

What does it take to transform a brilliant AI model from a research paper into a product customers can rely on? We're joined by Elizabeth Lingg, Director of Applied Research at Contextual AI (the team behind RAG), to explore the immense challenge of bridging the gap between the lab and the real world. Drawing on her impressive career at Microsoft, Apple, and in the startup scene, Elizabeth details her journey from academic res...

AI that talks is easy, but AI that acts securely is where everything breaks down. We're joined by Alex Salazar, CEO of Arcade, to confront the massive and often underestimated gap between a flashy AI demo and a production-ready system. Drawing from his team's own pivot from building agents to building the tools that secure them, he explains why a working demo is only 1% of the journey. Alex breaks down the four "demo...

For decades, the command line has been a developer's staple. But what if its future isn't to be a better terminal, but something else entirely? 

We're joined by Zach Lloyd, co-founder of Warp, to discuss this groundbreaking shift in developer tooling, sharing his bold vision that the future for developers is neither the IDE nor the terminal, but a new kind of platform built for launching and orchestrating AI agents. Z...

First, there was vibe coding. Now, get ready for "vibe entrepreneurship." 

Andrew McNamara, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Shopify, joins us to explain how his team is making this new era of business a reality. He shares the vision behind Shopify Sidekick, an AI co-founder designed to empower merchants by acting as their on-demand e-commerce expert. Drawing on his 16-year journey building AI assistants, Andrew rev...

The single biggest predictor of success with AI isn't the model you choose, it's the DevOps culture you've already built. 

Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations at GitHub - and the sixth person to ever use Copilot - joins us to explain why this surprising insight is key to the new era of autonomous coding agents. He traces the evolution of GitHub Copilot from a simple autocomplete to a powerful agent that opens i...

What's the hardest habit for a top engineer to unlearn in a leadership role? 

For Minh Nguyen, VP of Engineering at Transcend, it was breaking the "I'll do it myself" mentality. In this episode, she shares her impressive journey from individual contributor to VP at the same high-growth startup, offering a rare and honest look at this challenging transition. Drawing on her background in philosophy, Minh details th...

The rise of AI agents is more than a tooling upgrade - it's a fundamental rewiring of the entire developer experience, with your APIs at the very center. 

We're joined by Matt DeBergalis, co-founder and then-CTO-now-CEO (congrats Matt!) of Apollo GraphQL, to explore this massive transformation. He introduces the emerging concept of "agent experience," explaining why systems built for human developers are not read...

Your AI is learning to lie to you. It's not malicious—it's just trying to be a people-pleaser. This dangerous phenomenon, known as AI sycophancy, is what happens when we train models with outdated incentives.

Dr. Tatyana Mamut, an anthropologist, economist, and the CEO of Wayfound, joins us to explain why treating AI like traditional software is a critical mistake. She provides a revolutionary playbook for building AI you ...