In our first-ever Friday edition, Andrew and Ben dive into the viral "Ralph Loop" phenomenon and discuss how simple bash loops and deterministic context allocation are changing the unit economics of code. They also explore Steve Yegge's chaotic "Gas Town" concept for orchestrating AI agents, debate whether AI is killing the individual contributor role, and share a laugh over a creepy link generator that challenges our trust in URLs. 

LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor

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• Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
• Gas Town Emergency User Manual
• Loom by Geoffrey Huntley
• AI Killed the Individual Contributor
• CreepyLink

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Geoffrey Huntley argues that while software development as a profession is effectively dead, software engineering is more alive—and critical—than ever before. In this episode, the creator of the viral "Ralph" agent joins us to explain how simple bash loops and deterministic context allocation are fundamentally changing the unit economics of code. We dive deep into the mechanics of managing "context rot," avoiding "compaction," and why building your own "Gas Town" of autonomous agents is the only way to survive the coming rift.

LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor

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• Geoffrey’s Website & Blog: ghuntley.com
• Build Your Own Coding Agent Workshop: ghuntley.com/agent 
• Ralph Wiggum as a Software Engineer: ghuntley.com/ralph
• Steve Yegge’s "Welcome to Gas Town": Read on Medium
• The "Cursed" Programming Language: github.com/ghuntley/cursed

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• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Capital One operates less like a traditional bank and more like a "technology company that happens to do banking." Ameesh Paleja, EVP of Enterprise Platforms, joins the show to explain how this philosophy empowers their 14,000 technologists to innovate at the speed of a startup despite operating in a highly regulated industry.

Watch: 2026 Benchmarks Insights

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• Learn more: capitalone.com/tech
• Read the blog: capitalone.com/tech/blog/
• Connect with Ameesh: LinkedIn | X (Twitter)

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• Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
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• AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

As the year draws to a close, the Dev Interrupted team reflects on a transformative year in engineering spanning the rise of RAG and vector databases to the emergence of agentic workflows. For the first time, we’re taking the conversation out of the booth and into the IDE. Head over to the Dev Interrupted YouTube channel to watch the team vibe code custom holiday cards and close out the year with some chaotic creativity.

Watch Part 2 on the Dev Interrupted YouTube channel

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LEARN ABOUT LINEARB

• AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

The common narrative suggests AI will make engineering leadership obsolete, but history - and the Industrial Revolution - suggests the opposite is true. Engineering executive Manoj Mohan joins the show live from ELC to argue that as code generation costs drop, the demand for high-level judgment and strategic oversight will only skyrocket. He breaks down why leaders must stop starting with models and start with customer pain points, utilizing his "3GF" framework to manage the risks

LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor

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• Connect with Manoj: LinkedIn | Substack

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• Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
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LEARN ABOUT LINEARB

• AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Is your engineering team wasting budget and sacrificing latency by pre-computing data that most users never see? Chalk co-founder Elliot Marx joins Andrew Zigler to explain why the future of AI relies on real-time pipelines rather than traditional storage. They dive into solving compute challenges for major fintechs, the value of incrementalism, Elliot’s thoughts on and why strong fundamental problem-solving skills still beat specific language expertise in the age of AI assistants.

Join our AI Productivity roundtable: 2026 Benchmarks Insights

*This episode was recorded live at the Engineering Leadership Conference.

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• Elliot Marx: LinkedIn 
• Chalk: Website | Twitter/X | Careers

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• Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
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LEARN ABOUT LINEARB

• AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

After hitting a low point last year, developer job satisfaction is officially on the rise. Erin Yepis returns to the show to unpack the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, analyzing how autonomy and compensation are driving this recovery. We also cover the happiness gap between senior and junior engineers, the surprising drop in trust for AI tools, and why vibe coding is failing to catch on with professional engineers.

LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor

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• Read the full report: 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
• Stack Overflow Blog: Read Erin’s analysis and more
• Erin Yepis: Connect on LinkedIn

OFFERS

• Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
• Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.

LEARN ABOUT LINEARB

• AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

When you co-create Kubernetes, you earn the right to have strong opinions on the next platform shift. This week, Ben sits down with Craig McLuckie, Co-founder & CEO of Stacklok, who is advocating for a shift in leadership mindset. He argues we need to move from asking if we can use AI to demanding to know why we can’t. Listen to hear why he believes an "AI maximalist" philosophy is the only way to survive the next cycle.

LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor

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• Connect with Craig McLuckie: LinkedIn
• Check out Stacklok: Stacklok Website

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• AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

In the race to define the future of AI, what's the one advantage that truly lasts? It's not proprietary tech, argues Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD, but the sustainable speed of innovation. He explains why AMD is rejecting the "walled garden" model for its open source ROCm stack, betting that an open community flywheel is the key to victory. Listen to understand how this open strategy is designed to out-innovate closed systems by empowering developers to solve everything from frontier-model challenges to the mundane, everyday problems that define the "last mile" of AI.

LinearB: Your AI productivity journey starts here

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• Follow Anush LinkedIn | X
• AMD ROCm Software: github.com/ROCm
• AMD Developer Cloud
• Learn more at: amd.com

OFFERS

• Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
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LEARN ABOUT LINEARB

• AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

What is "spec-driven development," and why is this structured approach the key to unlocking complex AI projects? We're joined by Amit Patel, Director of Software Development for Kiro at AWS, to explore this methodology. He explains why "vibe coding" in a chat window fails on multi-day initiatives: the AI (and the developer) loses context. Kiro solves this by turning requirements and design into a persistent, structured spec that acts as the agent's long-term memory, enabling it to maintain context and build sophisticated applications.

Amit shares the inside story of how his team at AWS built Kiro from scratch in under a year. He reveals their virtuous feedback loop with internal developers testing nightly builds and providing real-time feedback. This rapid iteration, which included six full revs of the spec experience, was so successful that the Kiro team famously "used the tool to build the tool," turning a multi-week feature into a two-day task. 

LinearB: Your AI productivity journey starts here

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• Learn more and try Kiro: kiro.dev
• Join the Kiro Community: Kiro Discord Channel 

OFFERS

• Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
• Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.

LEARN ABOUT LINEARB

• AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
• AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
• AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
• MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.