Ben talks with Eran Yahav, a former researcher on IBM Watson who’s now the CTO and cofounder of AI coding company Tabnine. Ben and Eran talk about the intersection of software development and AI, the evolution of program synthesis, and Eran’s path from IBM research to startup CTO. They also discuss how to balance the productivity and learning gains of AI coding tools (especially for junior devs) against very real concerns around quality, security, and tech debt.

Eira May

Ben welcomes Sonar CEO Tariq Shaukat for a conversation about AI coding tools’ potential to boost developer productivity—and how to balance those potential gains against code quality and security concerns. They talk about Sonar’s origins as an open-source code quality tool, the excellent reasons to embrace a “clean as you code” philosophy, and how to determine where AI coding tools can be helpful and where they can’t (yet).

Eira May

Ben and Ryan are joined by Bill Harding, CEO of GitClear, for a discussion of AI-generated code quality and its impact on productivity. GitClear’s research has highlighted the fact that while AI can suggest valid code, it can’t necessarily reuse and modify existing code—a recipe for long-term challenges in maintainability and test coverage if devs are too dependent on AI code-gen tools.

Eira May

On today’s home team episode: a new study confirms that AI isn’t putting us out of business, why tech layoffs have been good for share prices, and the programming students learning to code with Copilot.

Eira May

Ben and Ryan discuss how complex images (and maybe even interactive games) are being encoded in living cells, the latest trends in prompt engineering, and the educational benefits of gaming.

Eira May

Why replacing programmers with AI won’t be so easy.

Jared Toporek

Developers love automating solutions to their problems, and with the rise of generative AI, this concept is likely to be applied to both the creation, maintenance, and the improvement of code at an entirely new level.

Ben Popper

Ben and Ryan discuss the golden age of digital piracy, the Sisyphean task of keeping kids off the internet, and seasonal depression in AI.

Eira May

Ben talks with James Evans, cofounder and CEO of CommandBar, an AI-powered user assistance platform, about the software usability challenges CommandBar wants to address, the evolution of the company’s natural language search bar, and the future of dynamic interfaces and universal agents.

Eira May

Today’s guest is Joel Hellermark, founder and CEO of Sana, an AI-powered end-to-end learning platform. He talks with Ben and Ryan about a polymath Renaissance, what regulation might look like in the AI space, the intersection of AI and neuroscience, and why AI assistants aren’t turning into Terminators anytime soon.

Eira May

Ben talks with Doug Seven, a director of software development at AWS and the GM for CodeWhisperer, an AI-powered coding companion, about his career building dev tools and how he hopes AI will give people more bandwidth for creative work.

Eira May

The home team unpacks their complicated feelings about AI, the Beyoncé deepfake that got kpop hopes up, and the pandemic’s ripple effects on today’s teenagers. Ben, the world’s worst coder, tells Cassidy and Ceora about building a web app with an AI assistant. 

Eira May