The Stack Overflow Podcast

Ryan chats with David Burns, Head of Developer Advocacy and Open Source at BrowserStack, about the value of professional skepticism in an AI-driven world, applying test-driven development to agentic engineering, and why fixing flaky tests comes down to managing application state.Episode notes:BrowserStack is a software testing platform where David heads up developer advocacy and the open source office. Connect with David Burns on LinkedIn to check out his podcast, BrowserStack Talks. Congrats to Populist badge winner brentvatne for winning the badge on their answer to Read app.json (or exp.json) programmatically. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SPONSORED BY SLACK BY SALESFORCEIn this episode, Ryan chats with the GM of Slack, Rob Seaman, about how their new Code Channels feature is bringing multiplayer AI to your team chats. They discuss how most interactions with coding agents become siloed context, why a party chat with devs and agents flattens writing code and code review into a single step, and why a Slack channel might be a better dev environment than a terminal. Episode notes:Check out the article Rob mentioned: Learning on the shop floor.  If you want to code multiplayer, check out Code Channels.Connect with Rob by email at rseaman@slack-corp.com, on LinkedIn, or Twitter. Congrats to Populist badge winner petro.sidlovskyy for dropping a great answer on What's the best way to ensure a base class's static constructor is called?. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan chats with Anush Elangovan, VP of Software at AMD, about ROCm's open-source unified toolchain for GPUs, how agentic AI is drastically lowering the barrier to entry for low-level hardware programming, and the rapid convergence of software and hardware development timelines.Episode notes: ROCm is AMD's unified, open-source software layer and toolchain that allows developers to program on AMD's hardware accelerators. Connect with Anush on X. Congrats to Populist badge winner Blitz for winning the badge on their answer to Is there a way to view your apps dot entitlements file from your app’s IPA archive?. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan sits down with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO at O'Reilly Media, to talk about the role of books as user interfaces to knowledge, the power of "magic words" to extract better outputs from AI, and why human taste is becoming highly valuable as knowledge becomes a commodity. Episode notes: O'Reilly Media is a technology transfer company that leverages books, online learning platforms, and their new O'Reilly Expert Intelligence tool to shape both human and agentic learning.Connect with Tim on X and read his Substacks, Conversations with AI and Asimov's Addendum. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan chats with Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law program at the University of Texas School of Law, about the legal and social impacts of data centers, the realities of workforce disruption, and regulating AI for child safety using existing consumer protection laws.Episode notes:The AI Innovation and Law program at the University of Texas School of Law explores the complex legal and policy questions surrounding artificial intelligence, which Kevin also covers on his own podcast, Scaling Laws.This episode was recorded at the Ai4 conference. Listen to our other Ai4 conversation with Paypal’s Srini Venkatesan and Zscaler’s Sam Curry. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn and X. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan chats with Sam Curry, CSO at Zscaler, about where human intelligence sits in the new security landscape with AI, why shifting security protections closer to applications helps limit probes for vulnerabilities, and why building more resilient code infrastructure is the best way to address the vulnerabilities AI does discover.Episode notes:Zscaler is a cybersecurity company that provides cloud-based security solutions, zero trust architecture, and TLS inspection to help organizations securely operate in multi-tenant environments.This episode was recorded at the Ai4 conference. Listen to our other Ai4 conversation with Anaconda’s Greg Jennings and Paypal’s Srini Venkatesan. Connect with Sam Curry on LinkedIn or reach out via email at sam@zscaler.com. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SPONSORED BY IBMRyan welcomes Markus Eisele to the program to talk about why your coding agent should be writing Java. They talk about why the long history of Java both makes for a stable language and a source of training data for AI. On top of that, they discuss how agentic Java excels by working with powerful partners: a massive ecosystem of Java libraries and agentic harnesses. Try out Bob, IBM’s coding agent that Markus talked about in the episode. Connect with Markus on Congrats to Populist badge winner, Alex K, whose answer to ffmpeg usage to encode a video to H264 codec format outshined the accepted answer. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode notes: This episode with Paypal’s CTO Srini Venkatesan was recorded at the Ai4 conference. Listen to our other Ai4 conversation with Greg Jennings, VP of Engineering for AI Products at Anaconda, about building secure-by-default AI coding agents here. Connect with Srini on LinkedIn. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan chats with Greg Jennings, VP of Engineering for AI Products at Anaconda, about what it takes to build a secure-by-default AI coding agent, why prompts shouldn't be treated as strict security guardrails, and how Anaconda is using strategic acquisitions to secure the AI software supply chain.Episode notes:Anaconda is a foundational platform for Python data science and machine learning, providing secure software supply chain governance and enterprise AI infrastructure.Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and X. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan sits down with Tim Lindholm, an early contributor to the Java language at Sun Microsystems, to chat about what it was like building one of the most popular programming languages ever at its inception, why it was strategically important for the Java team to create a cross-platform ABI to compete with Windows NT, and how applets were initially just an interesting demo. Episode notes: Watch the new documentary by Cult.Repo on YouTube to learn more about the early history of Java and the people who built it.Connect with Tim Lindholm on LinkedIn.Shoutout to user gabuzo for winning a Populist badge for answering What is the standard method for generating a nonce in Python?. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan chats with Leo de Moura, Senior Principal Applied Scientist at AWS and the creator of the Lean language, about proving correctness in AI agents with the Lean language, how automated reasoning complements probabilistic AI models, and the use of AI for continuous code optimization.Episode notes:Lean is a functional programming language and proof assistant that allows developers to write programs and verify their mathematical correctness within the exact same system.Connect with Leo on LinkedIn and check out his many badges on Stack Overflow.Congrats to Populist badge winner Peter Lawrey for winning the badge on their answer to Check two float/double values for exact equality. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Praveen Bodigutla, Principal AI Researcher at LinkedIn, to chat about LinkedIn's cognitive memory agent for agentic personalization.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Andi Gutmans, head of Agentic Data Cloud at Google and co-creator of PHP, joins Leaders of Code to talk about why agentic development feels less like a break from the past and more like the next chapter of the same story.

Ryan welcomes Suneet Malhotra, Senior Manager of Test Engineering at Motorola Solutions, to chat about building end-to-end agentic SDLC pipelines using MCPs, using Cohen’s kappa to evaluate multiple LLMs-as-judges, and how you can improve requirements by shifting QA left through a specification enrichment stage immediately after the design phase.Episode notes:You can learn more about Suneet’s five-agent SDLC (and see the companion code) on his GitHub. Read the papers discussed: Cross-Layer Observability for LLM-Assisted Test Automation: A Reference Architecture and Web Feasibility Study and Cross-Layer Observability for LLM-Assisted Test Automation — Reference Implementation and Evaluation Data (v1.5.2, JSS In-Practice). Connect with Suneet on LinkedIn and see more of his work on his website. Congrats to user Sanjay for winning a Great Question badge for asking What does it mean to fork on GitHub?. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Meryll Blanchet,  Director of Engineering for Adobe Brand Visibility, to chat about Adobe’s recent acquisition of Semrush, how Adobe Brand Visibility was born from Semrush’s AI visibility product and Adobe’s LLM Optimizer, and how Adobe used a three-day internal hackathon instead of a large-scale infrastructure integration to quickly deliver value to customers. Episode notes:  Adobe Brand Visibility is a GEO software that helps companies improve their AI visibility, citations, and share of voice. You can preview the new product here.Connect with Meryll on LinkedIn. Congratulations to user patti_jane, who won a Stellar Question badge for asking Setting PATH environment variable in macOS permanently. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 development environments and AI coding agents on your own internal infrastructure. Connect with Rob on LinkedIn.Today’s shoutout goes to an Unsung Hero badge winner, user Red.Wave! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. Connect with McLaren on LinkedIn.Congrats to user o11c for winning a Populist badge for answering Pythonic way to count the number of trailing zeros in base 2.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 notesRender calls itself the cloud for builders, intuitive infrastructure for scale. Connect with Anurag at anurag@render.com. Congrats to Populist badge winner Hovercraft Full Of Eels for bringing the knowledge to How can I disable System.out for speed in Java. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 WordPress sites, combining enterprise-grade software, developer tools, and cutting-edge AI to support your website.Connect with Ramadass on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congrats to user Nama on winning a Famous Question badge for asking how to store the spinner values into database? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.