Podcast Archives - Software Engineering Daily

OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes

AI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, reviewed, and maintained. As large language model capabilities continue to increase, the bottleneck in software development is shifting away from code generation toward planning, review, deployment, and coordination. This shift is driving a new class of agentic systems that operate inside constrained environments, reason over long time horizons, and integrate across tools like IDEs, version control systems, and issue trackers. OpenAI is at the forefront of AI research and product development. In 2025, the company released Codex, which is an agentic coding system designed to work safely inside sandboxed environments while collaborating across the modern software development stack. Thibault Sottiaux is the Codex engineering lead and Ed Bayes is the Codex product designer. In this episode, they join Kevin Ball to discuss how Codex is built, the co-evolution of models and harnesses, multi-agent futures, Codex’s open-source CLI, model specialization, latency and performance considerations, and much more. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Production-Grade AI Systems with Fred Roma

Engineering teams around the world are building AI-focused applications or integrating AI features into existing products. The AI development ecosystem is maturing, which is accelerating how quickly these applications can be prototyped. However, taking AI applications to production remains a notoriously complex process. Modern AI stacks demand LLMs, embeddings, vector search, observability, new caching layers, and constant adaptation as the landscape shifts week to week. Increasingly, the data layer has become both the foundation and the bottleneck to AI app productionization. MongoDB has been expanding beyond its core document database into a full AI-ready database platform with integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, and AI-powered data retrieval. The company also recently acquired Voyage AI to provide accurate and cost-effective embedding models and rerankers to its users. Fred Roma is a veteran engineer and is currently the SVP of Product and Engineering at MongoDB. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about the state of AI application development, the role of vector search and reranking, schema evolution in the LLM era, the Voyage AI acquisition, how data platforms must evolve to keep up with AI’s breakneck pace, and more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by MongoDB. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Production-Grade AI Systems with Fred Roma appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Next-Gen JavaScript Package Management with Ruy Adorno and Darcy Clarke

Package management sits at the foundation of modern software development, quietly powering nearly every software project in the world. Tools like npm and Yarn have long been the core of the JavaScript ecosystem, enabling developers to install, update, and share code with ease. But as projects grow larger and the ecosystem more complex, this older infrastructure is beginning to show its limits with performance bottlenecks, dependency conflicts, and growing concerns around supply chain security. Darcy Clarke and Ruy Adorno are veterans of this ecosystem. Both spent years maintaining the npm CLI and helping guide the Node.js project, where they saw firsthand the technical debt and design tradeoffs that define modern JavaScript tooling. Now they’re building vlt, a new package manager and registry that rethinks performance, security, and developer experience from the ground up. In this episode, Darcy and Ruy join Josh Goldberg to discuss how vlt works, why they believe package management needs a server-side reboot, what lessons they’ve drawn from npm’s evolution, and how features like declarative querying, self-hosted registries, and real-time security scanning could reshape how developers build and share JavaScript in the years ahead. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Next-Gen JavaScript Package Management with Ruy Adorno and Darcy Clarke appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

WebAssembly 3.0 with Andreas Rossberg

WebAssembly, or WASM, has grown from a low-level compilation target for C and C++ into one of the most influential technologies in modern computing. It now powers browser applications, edge compute platforms, embedded systems, and a growing ecosystem of languages targeting a portable and secure execution model. Andreas Rossberg is a programming languages researcher and former member of the V8 team at Google. Andreas helped architect WebAssembly from its earliest concepts through its most recent milestone releases, including the groundbreaking 3.0 spec that introduces garbage collection, richer reference types, and major steps toward multi-language interoperability. In this episode, Andreas joins Kevin Ball to explore the history of WebAssembly, the constraints that shaped its earliest design, the major turning points in versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, and what’s coming next for WebAssembly. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post WebAssembly 3.0 with Andreas Rossberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

America Under Surveillance with Michael Soyfer

Surveillance technology is advancing faster than the laws meant to govern it. Across the United States, police departments are deploying automated license plate readers, facial recognition tools, and predictive systems that quietly log the daily movements of millions of people. These tools promise efficiency and safety, but critics argue that they represent a form of warrantless mass surveillance, and raise deep constitutional questions about privacy, accountability, and the limits of government power in the digital age. Michael Soyfer is an attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm focused on defending individual rights. His work centers on the Fourth Amendment and the growing use of surveillance technologies by local governments. Michael joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the rise of Flock Safety cameras, the Institute for Justice’s lawsuit against the City of Norfolk, how decades-old legal precedents struggle to keep up with modern technology, and what citizens, technologists, and policymakers can do to protect privacy in an era of pervasive data collection. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post America Under Surveillance with Michael Soyfer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.