Best of the Heap: First post of the past
Let's take a moment to shout out all the articles we’re seen posted so far and encourage folks reading to reach out about your own.
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Agents on a leash: Agentic AI remains mostly single-agent and monitored at work
AI’s impact on software engineering continues, and more and more of that AI is packaged as agents as results from our newest pulse survey show agentic usage has almost doubled (59%) since we last asked about it in our annual Developer Survey
Introducing the Heap, the software engineering blog for everyone
If you’ve got something you’ve been dying to share with the Stack Overflow community but don’t quite have a place to share it, we've got you.
Developers are emotionally attached to their tools
Ryan welcomes Trisha Gee, a Java champion and developer productivity advocate, to explore how AI is transforming the role of IDEs and the broader developer experience; the relevance of traditional tools, muscle memory, the risks of hype; and how to adapt workflows for AI-driven development.
Creating checkpoints by gaslighting a Postgres database
Ryan welcomes Bryan Clark, director of product for Lakebase at Databricks, to discuss what happens when AI agents become the primary creators and users of databases; why agents are “sloppy” about cleaning up infrastructure; and how database branching, scale-to-zero, and centralized access control can help teams keep up with agent-driven development.
Making the OWASP top ten in the vibe code era
Ryan welcomes back Tanya Janca, now part of the OWASP Top 10 team, to discuss what changed in the latest OWASP Top 10 release, how the list shifted from “outdated components” to a broader software supply chain focus, and why they added memory safety and vibe-coding as awareness items.
What it takes to be a player in the international AI game
From the floor of HumanX, Ryan welcomes Songyee Yoon, managing partner at Principal Venture Partners (PVP), to chat about AI development outside the US, from the need to adapt models to local languages and culture to the challenges of the global supply-chain for things like semiconductors to how venture capital is looking at international AI companies.
The find out stage of AI is just supply chain and password protection
In this two-for-one special recorded at HumanX, Ryan is joined by Dataiku’s Florian Douetteau to chat about the governance, orchestration, and data requirements for serious agentic systems and 1Password’s Nancy Wang for a conversation on making agent swarms secure.
In an AI world, the most valuable developers will be both artisans and builders
If AI is the new power tool for developers, is there still value in artisanal craft when anyone can be a builder?
Do you have what it takes to run AI in production?
From the floor of HumanX, Ryan Donovan is joined by Peter Salanki, CTO and co-founder of CoreWeave, to chat about what it really takes to run AI in production; the growing importance of observability, utilization, and scheduling; and Peter’s advice for avoiding the trap of over-architecting too early.
Dispatches from O'Reilly: The accidental orchestrator
Experiments in agentic engineering and AI-driven development.
Breaking your AI storage bottlenecks
Recorded at HumanX, Ryan sits down with Garima Kapoor and Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founders and co-CEOs of MinIO, to chat about eliminating the storage bottlenecks that leave GPUs underutilized, their partnership with NVIDIA on the new STX reference architecture, and why modern AI infrastructure is converging on S3-compatible object storage.
Coding agents are giving everyone decision fatigue
With much of a software engineer’s time moving from writing code to structuring prompts and reviewing code, the workday is getting denser and more intense. Can AI solve the problems it's causing?
Pack your agentic stack in Slack
Ryan welcomes Jaime DeLanghe, chief product officer at Slack, to chat about how they’re preparing to integrate everybody’s agents in their chat application.
Your fridge could be a threat to national security
On the floor of HumanX, Ryan is joined by Adam Meyers, Senior VP of Counter Adversary Operations at Crowdstrike, for a deep dive on their latest Global Threat Report that tracks over 281 adversaries across nation states, e-crime, and hacktivist organizations.
Observability and human intuition in an AI world
In this two-for-one episode recorded at HumanX, Ryan is first joined by Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, to discuss how AI compresses the software development lifecycle, making observability about capturing the right telemetry. Then, Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, shares with us how AI coding increases code volume but decreases human intuition, making production operations harder than ever.
Connecting the dots for accurate AI
At HumanX, Ryan is joined by Philip Rathle, CTO at Neo4j to discuss what knowledge context means for AI agents, how limitations like stale training data make the model-only approach to agents a bad fit for enterprise environments, and how Graph RAG raises the bar for accuracy and reduces context rot by combining vectors with a knowledge graph so agents are more targeted and connected.
AI giveth and AI taketh CPU
Recorded on the floor of HumanX, Ryan is joined by AMD CTO Mark Papermaster to discuss AMD’s silicon strategy for AI borne of their long history of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing, how chipmakers are dealing the wide range of AI workloads from training to inference, and the paradox of agents both eating up all the compute and helping AMD accelerate chip innovation.
How we replaced Ingress-NGINX at Stack Overflow
Ingress-NGINX had been handling our traffic routing since moving to Kubernetes, but when it was announced it would be retired, we were forced to consider a new traffic routing solution.
What (un)exactly do you mean by semantic search?
Ryan welcomes Brian O’Grady, Head of Field Research and Solutions Architecture at Qdrant, to discuss the differences between traditional text search engines powered by Lucene and modern vector databases, when vector search’s exact-match needs work for things like logs and security analytics and when semantic search works for user-facing discovery and non-exact results, and how Qdrant is growing into video embeddings and local-agent contexts.
Dispatches from O'Reilly: Fast paths and slow paths
Selective control in autonomous AI systems: Why governing every decision breaks autonomy—and how runtime control actually works at scale.
Time is a construct but it can still break your software
Ryan welcomes Jason Williams, senior software engineer at Bloomberg and the creator of Rust-based JavaScript engine Boa, to the show to dive into why date and time handling in JavaScript is so difficult and how the Temporal proposal aims to fix it.
The Worst Coder in the World goes agentic: building a leaderboard cracking AI
Agents are everywhere, so isn't it fitting that the Worst Coder in the World goes agentic? A coding newbie explores the challenges and rewards of building an agent for work—and trying to learn a few things about coding along the way.
Your LLM issues are really data issues
Ryan welcomes Harsha Chintalapani, co-founder and CTO at Collate and co-creator of Open Metadata, to the show to discuss why AI and LLMs struggle with real-time, structured production data.
Welcome to the “find out” stage of AI
AI companies are looking a little different after going through a few renewal cycles.
Lights, camera, open source!
Ryan is joined on the show by Cult.Repo producers Emma Tracey and Josiah McGarvie to discuss making documentaries about open-source software and the people behind the major technologies that uphold the internet.
Black box AI drift: AI tools are making design decisions nobody asked for
Prompts go in, output comes out, and the decisions made in between are hidden from view.
