Dev Interrupted

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 ...

Is your team's AI strategy tailored for a fast-moving startup or a high-stakes enterprise? 

The answer could determine your success or failure. We're rejoined by Itamar Friedman, co-founder and CEO of Qodo, to break down what separates engineering teams that truly thrive with AI from those that are just experimenting, explaining why the path to success is fundamentally different for a startup that needs speed versus a larg...

Is your engineering team shipping more code but creating less business impact?

We're joined by Chris Westerhold, Global Practice Director at ThoughtWorks, to confront why engineering waste is so difficult to define and eliminate. He explains that for many teams, the issue isn't a lack of tools but a lack of a clear 'North Star' to align their efforts with real business goals, diving into why so much well-intentio...

You've bought the AI tools, but are you seeing the promised productivity gains? 

Join Dev Interrupted hosts Dan Lines and Ben Lloyd Pearson, as they break down the fundamental shift from AI coding assistants to intelligent, agentic systems. They discuss the key findings from their new guide, "The Six Trends Shaping the Future of AI-Driven Development," and challenge the common misconception that simply buying tools gu...

If you're still building products only for humans, you're already missing out on a massive new customer base: AI agents. 

Joining Dev Interrupted is Andrew Hamilton, co-founder and CTO of Layer (a first-of-it’s kind MCP agency) to unravel this monumental shift in how products will be discovered and consumed. He dives into how AI agents are rapidly evolving from developer tools to direct consumers of APIs and products, with...

What if creating a professional video for your business was as simple as a single click?

We're joined by Kabir Bedi, Head of Product for Image and Video Generation at Amazon Ads, to discuss how generative AI is making that a reality. He provides an inside look at Amazon's mission to democratize video advertising, empowering everyone from mom-and-pop shops to large enterprises with their innovative video generator that evol...

What if the traditional engineering career path is being fundamentally rewritten by AI? 

We're joined by Philipp Schmid, Senior AI Developer Relations Engineer at Google DeepMind, to explore how artificial intelligence is not just a tool, but a force reshaping engineering roles, team dynamics, and the foundational methods of skill development. Philipp, with his background at Hugging Face and now at the cutting edge with Google ...

Imagine saving as much as 75 days of work within a six-month period, all through intelligent automation.

Building on last week’s discussion about the critical shift from passive metrics to active productivity, host Ben Lloyd Pearson and LinearB co-founder Dan Lines now look forward to realities like this: 19% cycle time reduction and reclaiming significant engineering time. They move beyond common narratives surrounding AI to presen...

Are your teams feeling the intense pressure to "produce more" in an era increasingly dominated by AI?

Join hosts Ben Lloyd Pearson and Dan Lines as they unpack a major shift in how engineering organizations must now approach productivity. Dan reveals the urgent challenges he hears directly from CTOs and VPs, who are grappling with how to define their AI strategy for genuine productivity gain, accurately measure its true im...

What can ancient languages and epic poems teach us about building resilient tech and future-proof teams?

Host Andrew Zigler welcomes Matt Greenwood, Chief Innovation Officer of Two Sigma, for a conversation that uniquely blends their shared background in classical languages with over two decades of Matt’s experience at the forefront of financial technology. Matt unveils how this classical training has profoundly shaped his approach ...

What happens when the person trained to spot burnout becomes its next victim?

Kelly Vaughn is a Senior Engineering Manager at Zapier, the author of the After Burnout Substack, and a trained therapist. She joins hosts Ben and Andrew to share her incredibly candid journey of discovering burnout in herself. Kelly reveals how she (despite her professional understanding of burnout's mechanisms) found herself deep in its grip, recoun...

Still stuck in a reactive loop with incident response, only fixing problems after they happen? 

JJ Tang, Co-founder and CEO of Rootly, joins host Andrew Zigler to reveal how to shift beyond reactive, leveraging powerful AI and an often-underestimated skill in engineering: genuine customer empathy. Discover how these elements are crucial for navigating the complexities of modern infrastructure and shaping the future of incident manag...

Is front-end vs. back-end an antiquated way to structure engineering teams? With AI augmenting skills, a new model is emerging: the product engineer.

This week, Andrew sits down with Lee Robinson, VP of Product at Vercel to crack open the future of the web. As a respected educator and voice in the webdev community (check out his YouTube!), Lee shares his unique perspective on building both cutting-edge tools and high-performing team...