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Issue 271: From embeddings to agents

We talk a lot about AI and its effects on coders. The reality is that the keywords and syntax many of us use to activate software magic might not be as important in an AI future. In the latest Leaders of Code podcast, our CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar talks to GitLab Field CTO Lee Faus about why critical thinking might be the new must-have developer skill.

There are plenty of harder tech skills that AI requires. Vector databases and embeddings have been the foundation of many GenAI advances, and we talk about it with Pinecone CEO Edo Liberty. On the other end of the AI spectrum, we talk about the thing that everybody is talking about now: agents. Deepak Singh, VP of Developer Agents and Experiences at AWS, breaks down whether these plucky little robots are ready for prime time.

Meanwhile, have you ever thought about rewriting the C++ standard library? Me either, but we have a link to someone who did. Plus Go slices, random PC crashes, homophones gone wild, and translating an artistic perspective into math.

From the blog

AI is shifting focus from syntax to critical thinking

In this episode of Leaders of Code, host Ben Popper, Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar, and GitLab Field CTO Lee Faus explore how GenAI is reshaping software development practices.

“The power of the humble embedding”

Ryan speaks with Edo Liberty, Founder and CEO of Pinecone, about building vector databases, the power of embeddings, the evolution of RAG, and fine-tuning AI models.

OpenTelemetry 2025 Trends Every Developer Should Know

Explore OpenTelemetry's latest advancements, from semantic conventions and profiling to GenAI observability. Find out how these trends are shaping smarter, scalable observability strategies for today’s complex software ecosystems.

Interesting questions

Why does my PC system crashes frequently and randomly? What could be the cause?

The perfect PC for IT support professionals: it turns itself off and on again.

Does training a neural network on a combined dataset outperform sequential training on individual datasets?

Train them separately so you can have a montage.

Is it possible to construct a sentence where any of they're / their / there could grammatically make sense?

Sure, let’s make this trio of homophones even more confusing.

Best way to publish an open-access text book

“My main priority is to have as many people as possible reading my book.”

Links from around the web

Length and capacity in Go slices

Depending on how you slice (and dice?) an array in Go, it will be handled differently behind the scenes!

Writing your own C++ standard library from scratch

Should you write something to replace a standard library? It depends. But this developer did!

Piranesi’s perspective trick

Dive deep into how one 18th-century etching master's perspective tricks are being mathematically modeled.

Create an HTML dialog when you click an image

Sometimes you want an image to be more in your face, you know?

Looking for the tools, technologies, and skills your team needs to evolve in the AI era? Stack Overflow's Industry Guide to AI has your answers.