Mark Doble, CEO of Alexi, an AI-powered litigation platform, joins Ben to talk about GenAI’s transformative effect on the legal world. Their conversation touches on the importance of ensuring accurate results and eliminating hallucinations when AI tools are used for legal work, how lawyers (like the rest of us) can adapt to GenAI, and what Alexi’s tech stack looks like.
The complex relationship of give-and-take in the knowledge journey is untangled in the results from the latest Stack Overflow Knows survey.
The home team is joined by Kinnaird McQuaid, founder and CTO of NightVision, which offers developer-friendly API and web app security testing. Kinnaird talks about his path from school-age hacker to white-hat security expert, why it’s important to build security practices into the software development lifecycle, how GenAI is changing security testing, and what security teams need to understand about developers’ working lives.
Ben and Ryan talk all things mobile app development with Kenny Johnston, Chief Product Officer at Instabug. They explore what’s unique about mobile observability, how AI tools can reduce developer toil, and why user experience matters so much for app quality.
Wondering how to go about creating an LLM that understands your custom data? Start here.
Ben talks with Eran Yahav, a former researcher on IBM Watson who’s now the CTO and cofounder of AI coding company Tabnine. Ben and Eran talk about the intersection of software development and AI, the evolution of program synthesis, and Eran’s path from IBM research to startup CTO. They also discuss how to balance the productivity and learning gains of AI coding tools (especially for junior devs) against very real concerns around quality, security, and tech debt.
Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti, who spent many years as a technical writer for Splunk and New Relic, joins Ben and Ryan for a conversation about the evolving role of documentation in software development. They explore how documentation can (and should) be integrated with code, the importance of quality control, and the hurdles to maintaining up-to-date documentation. Plus: Why technical writers shouldn’t be afraid of LLMs.
Today’s guest is Jonathan Schneider, co-founder and CEO of Moderne and creator of OpenRewrite, an open-source automated refactoring ecosystem for source code built to help developers eliminate tech debt. He tells Ben and Ryan about the challenges of automatic refactoring, how Java continues to evolve, and what kind of impact tech debt has on software development. Jonathan also describes the transition from open-source project to startup, why clean code is so important, and the role AI plays for developers right now.
Ben and Ryan are joined by Matt Zeiler, founder and CEO of Clarifai, an AI workflow orchestration platform. They talk about how the transformer architecture supplanted convolutional neural networks in AI applications, the infrastructure required for AI implementation, the implications of regulating AI, and the value of synthetic data.
Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data, joins Ben and Ryan for a deep-dive conversation about the evolving landscape of web data. They talk through the challenges involved in data collection, the role of synthetic data in training large AI models, and how public data access is becoming more restrictive. Or also shares his thoughts on the importance of transparency in data practices, the likely future of data regulation, and the philosophical implications of more people using AI to innovate and solve problems.
Will prompt engineering replace the coder’s art or will software engineers who understand code still have a place in future software lifecycles?
Today’s guest is Logan Kilpatrick, a senior product manager at Google, who tells Ben about his journey from software engineering to machine learning to product management, all with an emphasis on reducing developer friction. They talk through the challenges of non-determinism in AI models and how Google is addressing these issues with a new feature: Grounding with Google Search. Plus, what working at the Apple Store taught Logan about product management.
Tom Occhino, now Chief Product Officer at Vercel, tells Ben about how he contributed to the development of React at Facebook and the contentious decision to make React open-source. They also talk about what community feedback has been like on Next.js 15, Vercel’s GenAI web development tool, and how Vercel is rethinking IDEs.
Here's a (brief) summary of language model finetuning, the various approaches that exist, their purposes, and what we know about how they work.
Ben welcomes Ricky Robinett, VP of Developer Relations and Community at Cloudflare, and his eight-year-old daughter Fay for a chat about how AI tools are helping new developers get started and how to encourage your kids to try coding.
Ben chats with Shayne Longpre and Robert Mahari of the Data Provenance Initiative about what GenAI means for the data commons. They discuss the decline of public datasets, the complexities of fair use in AI training, the challenges researchers face in accessing data, potential applications for synthetic data, and the evolving legal landscape surrounding AI and copyright.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
The entire AI ecosystem is at risk without trust.
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.
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.
