Welcome to No Dumb Questions, a column where our least technical writer asks our technical staff the simple, basic tech questions people are afraid to ask. In this first entry, Stack's Director of Ecosystem Strategy Ben Marconi teaches us the basics of MCP servers and why they matter.
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.
Selective control in autonomous AI systems: Why governing every decision breaks autonomy—and how runtime control actually works at scale.
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.
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.
AI companies are looking a little different after going through a few renewal cycles.
Prompts go in, output comes out, and the decisions made in between are hidden from view.
Chase Roossin, group engineering manager, and Steven Kulesza, staff software engineer, from Intuit join the podcast to chat about what might be the hardest problem in engineering right now: getting multiple AI agents to work together in a complex system.
Ryan welcomes Stephen Watt, distinguished engineer and VP of Red Hat’s Office of the CTO, to chat about digital sovereignty and sovereign AI.
Are you still "human-in-the-loop," or have you moved to "human-on-the-loop," overseeing a bot that’s doing the driving?
The most valuable AI tools in your enterprise stack do more than generate answers. They help developers determine which answers to trust.
Ryan welcomes Runpod co-founder and CEO Zhen Lu to discuss circumventing VC money by going straight to your community for funding, how Zhen balances founder intuition with user feedback when the community is the one backing the project, and Runpod’s journey from basement servers to global infrastructure partnerships with a software-layer approach and data-first paradigm.
Ryan sits down with Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, to chat about calm computing and how humans can take back ownership of their data and digital world.
Adoption and trust are moving in diametrically opposed directions, and that gap has real implications for organizations deciding how to spend money on software.
Ryan hosts SmartBear’s VP of AI and Architecture Fitz Nowlan to explore how we’re moving away from old assumptions about software development, the challenges of testing MCP servers as LLM-driven agents introduce non-determinism that breaks tradition, and how data locality and data construction are becoming more valuable when source code is so easy to generate.
Ryan is joined by Nancy Wang, CTO of 1Password, to discuss the security challenges local agents present, how enterprises can create robust governance of credentials through zero-knowledge architecture, and the implications of agent intent and misuse in a world where AI agents are becoming more and more integrated into everyday applications.
Coding guidelines and standards for agents need to be a little different—more explicit, demonstrative of patterns, and obvious.
Ryan is joined by Stefan Weitz, CEO and co-founder of the HumanX Conference, for a conversation on how AI has evolved in the last year.
The risk isn’t just that we’ll get lazy and become lousy at critical thinking; the risk is that we’ll outsource our judgement and lose the ability to make qualitative, moral, and interpersonal judgments altogether.
Dana Lawson, CTO of Netlify, shares her insights on leading a lean, globally distributed engineering team that powers 5% of the internet.
In February, we surveyed our users with research designed in partnership with OpenAI and found out that more developers than ever are using AI at work to learn, they are using other traditional online resources to validate but still find trust in AI a major barrier.
Ryan is joined by Jan Liphardt, CEO and co-founder of OpenMind, to chat about the rapidly evolving world of humanoid robotics and what it means for humans, why OpenMind is building an open-source operating system for robots that processes logic in natural language, and how putting Asimov’s Laws on the blockchain might be the key to robotics guardrails.
The difference between AI that impresses people in demos and AI that drives production value is context.
Ryan welcomes Kari Briski, NVIDIA’s VP of Generative AI Software for Enterprise, to the show to explore how a chip manufacturer got into the model development game.
