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Podcast Archives - Software Engineering Daily
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SED News: OpenClaw Goes Viral, Mistral’s Compute Play, and the Agent Arms Race
Mar 300:57:08Tap to summarizeSED 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.
Transcribe →Amazon’s IDE for Spec-Driven Development with David Yanacek
Feb 2600:57:00Tap to summarizeAI-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.
Transcribe →Engineering AI Systems for Autonomy and Resilience with Krishna Sai
Feb 2400:53:15Tap to summarizeEnterprise 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.
Transcribe →Inside China’s Great Firewall with Jackson Sippe
Feb 1900:58:00Tap to summarizeChina’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.
Transcribe →Optimizing Agent Behavior in Production with Gideon Mendels
Feb 1700:52:25Tap to summarizeLLM -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.
Transcribe →Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development with Steve Yegge
Feb 1201:09:52Tap to summarizeAI-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.
Transcribe →Python 3.14 with Łukasz Langa
Feb 1000:47:00Tap to summarizePython 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.
Transcribe →Airbnb’s Open-Source GraphQL Framework with Adam Miskiewicz
Feb 500:55:45Tap to summarizeEngineering 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.
Transcribe →SED News: Apple Bets on Gemini, Google’s AI Advantage, and the Talent Arms Race
Feb 300:51:06Tap to summarizeSED 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.
Transcribe →OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes
Jan 2900:50:10Tap to summarizeAI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, reviewed, and maintained. As large language model capabilities continue to increase, the bottleneck in software development is shifting away from code generation toward planning, review, deployment, and coordination. This shift is driving a new class of agentic systems that operate inside constrained environments, reason over long time horizons, and integrate across tools like IDEs, version control systems, and issue trackers. OpenAI is at the forefront of AI research and product development. In 2025, the company released Codex, which is an agentic coding system designed to work safely inside sandboxed environments while collaborating across the modern software development stack. Thibault Sottiaux is the Codex engineering lead and Ed Bayes is the Codex product designer. In this episode, they join Kevin Ball to discuss how Codex is built, the co-evolution of models and harnesses, multi-agent futures, Codex’s open-source CLI, model specialization, latency and performance considerations, and much more. 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 OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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