Issue 312: Running and crawling your AI bots

We're all ears this week with three pods for your listening pleasure on everything from bots to ecommerce to ROI. Akamai data scientist Robert Lester joined us to talk about the rise in AI bots—surprisingly, they're not that much different from the search engine bots of ye olden days. Vanessa Lee from Shopify joined the show to discuss the AI renaissance and how it's changing personalized experiences in ecommerce. We've also got an episode with MongoDB's Pete Johnson this week on the secret sauce of AI ROI (spoiler alert: it's quality engineers), and why AI is not actually a job killer.

If you'd like to give your weary ears a rest, we've got plenty of stories for you from all over Stack Overflow and the web. We're scanning both ends of the timeline: check out our retrospective of the biggest updates to Stack Overflow from 2025 and a look forward at our plans for our much-beloved Q&A site in the New Year. All of these updates have us feeling pretty giddy, like the AI euphoria feeling one of the pieces this week is all about. But not everything in this issue is about the shiny and new—we've also got the age-old battle of software design vs clean code, slowing things down to 1x speed, and the joy of being terrible at something as a beginner.

Now that your eyes and ears are open, we've got a few questions for you. How loosely do you define "free software"? Can you hear that really low sound or is it just us? Does our smile look phalanx-like to you...should we go see a dentist about that? If you need answers, we have all of them and more in the links below.