The Stack Overflow Podcast

Revealing the unknown unknowns in your software

Ryan welcomes Nic Benders to discuss the complexity and abstraction crisis in software development, the importance of going beyond observability into understandability, and demystifying AI's opacity for understanding and control.Episode notes:New Relic is a full-stack observability platform that helps engineers plan, build, deploy, and run software. Read their 2025 observability forecast. Connect with Nic on Linkedin or email him at nic@newrelic.com.Congratulations to user Yochai Timmer for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Reader/Writer Locks in C++. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

To write secure code, be less gullible than your AI

Ryan is joined by Greg Foster, CTO of Graphite, to explore how much we should trust AI-generated code to be secure, the importance of tooling in ensuring code security whether it’s AI-assisted or not, and the need for context and readability for humans in AI code.Episode notes:Graphite is an AI code review platform that helps you get context on code changes, fix CI failures, and improve your PRs right from your PR page. Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and keep up with Graphite on their Twitter. This week’s shoutout goes to user xerad, who won an Investor badge by dropping a bounty on the question How to specify x64 emulation flag (EC_CODE) for shared memory sections for ARM64 Windows?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Vibe coding needs a spec, too

Ryan talks with Deepak Singh, VP of Developer Agents and Experiences at AWS and lead at Kiro, about spec-driven development in a vibe coding world. They explore how AI tools have evolved from autocomplete to sophisticated agents that can write code based off of just specs, and how AWS has pioneered spec-driven development through their Kiro agent. Episode notes:Kiro is AWS’ AI IDE that brings structure to AI coding with spec-driven development. Connect with Deepak on the Kiro Discord server and read more about spec-driven development on The New Stack. We last spoke to Deepak Singh in March about how enterprise-ready agents are.Congratulations to user Whymarrh for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Git commits are duplicated in the same branch after doing a rebase. Learn more about the future of software engineering in the AI age on November 3rd, when our CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, speaks at a virtual OpenAI Forum.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Craft and quality beat speed and scale, with or without agents

Ryan welcomes Tom Moor, head of engineering at Linear, to discuss AI agents’ mixed results for productivity in the development lifecycle, the importance of context for maximizing agents’ effectiveness, and the role that junior developers need to take in a world increasingly driven by AI.Episode notes:Linear is a tool for planning and building products that streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.Connect with Tom on Twitter. This episode’s shoutout goes to user ozz, who won a Populist badge for their answer to Column width not working in DataTables bootstrap.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Your runbooks are obsolete in the age of agents

Ryan is joined by Spiros Xanthos, CEO and founder of Resolve AI, to talk about the future of AI agents in incident management and troubleshooting, the challenges of maintaining complex software systems with traditional runbooks, and the changing role of developers in an AI-driven world.Episode notes:Resolve AI is building agents to help you troubleshoot alerts, manage incidents, and run your production systems. Connect with Spiros on Linkedin or email him at spiros@resolve.ai. Congrats to user larsks for winning a Stellar Answer badge for their answer to How do I get into a Docker container's shell?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.