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Issue 279: Experiments in community

We're rocking the mad scientist vibe this week, experimenting in our labs (which sadly do not have enough flasks and beakers). This quarter's CEO update lays out how we're tinkering and toiling to evolve into every developer's third screen. From our researchers, we've got a roadmap update, which dives into the specific experiments that we're running and what we're trying to learn. You can even check out one of those experiments now: Coding challenges are live! XX

Turns out that we aren't the only ones trying new ways of doing things. On the podcast, Ben and Eira talk to Christophe Coenraets, SVP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, about how AI agents are changing the CRM game. When you're talking about experiments, you need to talk about safety, too. Our second podcast this week features a conversation about durable execution and making sure your microservices aren't playing in hardcore mode. XX

Enough about us—what's everybody else talking about? Well, some folks are looking at the ways that AI is changing how software is being built, while others are saying that real productivity gains come from boring old processes and tech. Yet other people don't want to leave their oven on for the 15 minutes it takes them to prep the recipe. Productivity comes in all sorts of flavors.

From the blog

CEO Update: Exploration and experimentation for bold evolution

As we envision what the ideal future version of Stack Overflow looks like, we’re committed to engaging with our community.

Durable execution: autosave for your microservices

Ryan is joined by Jeremy Edberg, CEO of DBOS, and Qian Li, co-founder of DBOS, to discuss durable execution and its use cases, its implementation using technologies like PostgreSQL, and its applications in machine learning pipelines and AI systems for reliability, debugging, and observability.

Research roadmap update, May 2025

An update to the research that the User Experience team is running over the next quarter.

Salesforce wants to do for agentic AI what they did for SaaS

Christophe Coenraets, SVP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, tells Eira and Ben about building the new Salesforce Developer Edition, which includes access to the company’s agentic AI platform, Agentforce. Christophe explains how they solicited and incorporated feedback from the developer community in building the developer edition, what types of AI agents people are building, and the critical importance of guardrails and prompt engineering.

Calling all code enthusiasts!

A new challenge is live on Stack Overflow. This is your chance to apply your knowledge, explore programming paradigms, and engage in insightful discussions about solutions.

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Interesting questions

An idea for encryption using decimal part of nx for a secret irrational x

Sometimes you learn more by being wrong.

What would you call someone who is constantly thinking of all scenarios/possibilities/outcomes?

Anxious and exhausted.

Is there a critical number density of snowflakes after which snow becomes white?

To make snow white, you need seven, right?

Why turn on the oven at the start of a recipe?

Would you rather do it wrist deep in flour?

Links from around the web

Five boring things that have a bigger impact than “AI” coding assistants on dev team productivity

It may not be all sparkly, but the boring stuff gets things done.

Zuckerberg says in response to loneliness epidemic, he will create most of your friends using artificial intelligence

Do...do these guys not understand friendship?

Manual work is a bug

Way back in 2018, Stack Overflow's own Tom Limoncelli was advocating for greater automation in workflows.

Emerging developer patterns for the AI era

How software gets built is changing as AI agents write more code.