Issue 346: Things are getting a little tense

There’s a lot of tension happening in the tech industry and we don’t mean the romantic kind. There’s tension between our old developer workflows and new ones, corporate goals and the everyday realities of devs, and, heck, there’s even tension between humans and the AI tools they use. These week we’re sitting with that tension. Hopefully it’ll help us all find a little bit of balance.

We sit down with Google’s Andi Gutmans for part two of our conversation on the economics of agentic scale—breaking down tokens, ROI, and infrastructure costs for AI-first teams. We also chat with Anaconda’s Greg Jennings on why prompts aren't enough to build secure-by-default coding agents. Maybe there’s always been tension in tech—Tim Lindholm, an early contributor to Java, shares the ups and downs of creating a programming language. Plus, we may have a way to relieve some of tension you’re feeling from untrustworthy AI outputs: the newest features being shipped in Stack Internal.

And we’re not the only ones feeling tense—so is the rest of the web. We’re taking a look at why office workers are turning against AI tools, why being boarding group one on your flight doesn’t guarantee bin space, and why health insurance vanishes the moment you're terminated. Well, one thing you can relax about is how you’ll get your knowledge this week. Time for a sigh of relief, because we have everything you need to know down in the links below.