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 Popper chats with Keith Babo, Head of Product at Solo.io, about how the API security landscape is changing in the era of GenAI. They talk through the role of governance in AI, the importance of data protection, and the role API gateways play in enhancing security and functionality. Keith shares his insights on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, protecting PII, and the necessity of human-in-the-loop AI development.

Eira May

There are worries that GenAI systems may run out of fresh data as they scale. Synthetic data is an option, but using AI-generated data to train AI can degrade the model's performance. There may be a better solution. Can data quality overcome a loss of data quantity?

Ben Popper

On today’s sponsored episode, we chat with Ryan Ellis and Martin Best about the developer-centric features built into Unity 6, the latest release of the well-known game engine. The pair explains how Unity 6 was built to help developers enhance graphics, add multiplayer, and easily port games to an audience on the mobile web.

Ben Popper

Austin Spiegel, CTO and co-founder of Sift, tells Ben and Ryan about his journey from studying film to working at SpaceX to founding Sift. Austin shares his perspective on software development in high-stakes environments, the challenges of hardware observability, and why paranoia is valuable in safety-critical engineering. Bonus story: Austin invited Elon Musk to speak at his student club…and he came!

Eira May

Ben Popper interviews Vladislav Voroninski, CEO of Helm.ai, about unsupervised learning and the future of AI in autonomous driving. They discuss GenAI’s role in bridging the gap between simulation and reality, the challenges of scaling autonomous driving systems, the commercial potential of partial autonomy, and why software is emerging as a key differentiator in vehicle sales. Vlad spotlights the value of multimodal foundation models and how compute shortages affect AI startups.

Eira May

Ben and Ryan chat with Daniela Miao, cofounder and CTO of Momento, a real-time data platform, about real-time observability, the challenges of multi-tenancy in databases and caching, the use of WebAssembly in UI development, and the benefits of Rust.

Eira May

Crystal Xu, chief of staff at FSH Tech, explains how she works with GenAI systems like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Replit to build software through prompt engineering.

Ben Popper

We explore how our platform is evolving to support a new framework and business model, knowledge-as-a-service, and how we will incorporate this with our ongoing investment in our community.

Des Darilek

On today’s episode we chat with David Mytton, CEO of Arcjet and co-founder of Console.dev. We discuss his early work in cloud monitoring, his passion for the environment, and his love for sharing great developer tools.

Ben Popper

Socially responsible use of community data needs to be mutually beneficial: the more potential partners are willing to contribute to community development, the more access to community content they receive.

Ellen Brandenberger, Ryan Polk

The entire AI ecosystem is at risk without trust.

Ellen Brandenberger, Ryan Polk

The internet is changing once again: it is becoming more fragmented as the separation between sources of knowledge and how users interact with that knowledge grows.

Ellen Brandenberger, Ryan Polk

If you’re weary of reading about the latest chatbot innovations and the nine ways AI will change your daily life next year, this series of posts may be for you.

Ellen Brandenberger, Ryan Polk

We chat with Deedy Das, a Principal at Menlo Ventures, who began his career as a software engineer at Facebook and Google. He then dipped a toe in the startup world, spending time at the company now know as Glean. More recently he started a career as a venture capitalist, investing in AI and Infra out of the Anthology Fund, a partnership between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic.

Ben Popper

Masked self-attention is the key building block that allows LLMs to learn rich relationships and patterns between the words of a sentence. Let’s build it together from scratch.

Cameron R. Wolfe, PhD

How are developers actually using GenAI-powered coding tools now that some of the initial hype has faded?

Eira May

Founder and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal tells Ben, Cassidy, and Eira about the developer challenges he aims to solve with his new venture, Harness, an AI-driven software development platform meant to take the pain out of DevOps. Jyoti shares his journey as a founder, his perspective on the venture capital landscape, and his reasons behind his decision to raise debt capital for Harness.

Eira May

Ben chats with Gias Uddin, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto, where he teaches software engineering, data science, and machine learning. His research focuses on designing intelligent tools for testing, debugging, and summarizing software and AI systems. He recently published a paper about detecting errors in code generated by LLMs. Gias and Ben discuss the concept of hallucinations in AI-generated code, the need for tools to detect and correct those hallucinations, and the potential for AI-powered tools to generate QA tests.

Eira May

Ryan chats with Russ d’Sa, cofounder and CEO of LiveKit, about multimodal AI and the technology that makes it possible. They talk through the tech stack required, including the use of WebRTC and UDP protocols for real-time audio and video streaming. They also explore the big challenges involved in ensuring privacy and security in streaming data, namely end-to-end encryption and obfuscation.

Eira May

Ben and Ryan talk to Scott McCarty, Global Senior Principal Product Manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, about the intersection between LLMs (large language models) and open source. They discuss the challenges and benefits of open-source LLMs, the importance of attribution and transparency, and the revolutionary potential for LLM-driven applications. They also explore the role of LLMs in code generation, testing, and documentation.

Eira May

More code isn't always a good thing, but fewer bugs is.

Ben Popper

On today’s episode we chat with Mrinalini Sugosh, Dev Rel Manager CKEditor. She discusses how modern fullstack developers have to master both front and backend skills, stitch the two together, and master adjacent skills like data analysis and security compliance.

Ben Popper

On today’s episode we speak with Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who won the Google-O’Reilly Open Source award for his work on the Hudson/Jenkins project. Kohsuke began his career at Sun Microsystems. He shares insights on the balance between community-driven open source and the need to monetize through enterprise services.

Ben Popper