First, there was vibe coding. Now, get ready for "vibe entrepreneurship." 

Andrew McNamara, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Shopify, joins us to explain how his team is making this new era of business a reality. He shares the vision behind Shopify Sidekick, an AI co-founder designed to empower merchants by acting as their on-demand e-commerce expert. Drawing on his 16-year journey building AI assistants, Andrew reveals what it truly takes to create an AI tool that customers can trust with their livelihood.

He shares a critical insight from his applied research background: the hardest and most important part of building production-ready AI isn't the model, but the evaluation ("eval") system. Andrew breaks down Shopify's innovative approach of using an LLM-as-a-judge to measure how well they're fulfilling user goals, not just executing features. This conversation is a definitive guide to creating high-trust AI systems and offers a powerful glimpse into the future of commerce.

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• Register now: Closing the AI gap: Exceeding executive expectations for AI productivity

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• Andrew's Talk at ICML
• Learn more about Shopify Sidekick
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Referenced in today's show:

• The Economics of Software Innovation
• “AI First” and the Bus Factor of 0
• GitLab 18.3 released with Duo Agent Platform in Visual Studio (Beta) and Embedded views

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The single biggest predictor of success with AI isn't the model you choose, it's the DevOps culture you've already built. 

Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations at GitHub - and the sixth person to ever use Copilot - joins us to explain why this surprising insight is key to the new era of autonomous coding agents. He traces the evolution of GitHub Copilot from a simple autocomplete to a powerful agent that opens its own pull requests, arguing that AI's true power is as a massive accelerant for the iterative loops high-performing teams have already perfected.

Martin explains that teams with strong guardrails for shipping quickly and safely are best equipped to leverage this AI revolution because they can trust the accelerated output. He also reveals how top teams use the key technique of custom instructions to guide Copilot toward writing the code of the future, not just mimicking the code of the past. This conversation uncovers how new agentic workflows are 'tricking' developers into improving their communication and documentation skills, providing a crucial look at the cultural foundations required to thrive in the AI-accelerated enterprise.

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• AI code review tools: 2025 evaluation guide

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• Martin's GitHub Galaxy Keynote: Watch "The AI-Accelerated Enterprise”
• GitHub Copilot:  Learn more about the tools and features
• GitHub Universe Conference: Look out for announcements for the upcoming conference
• Connect with Martin:  Martin's Social Media Hub (Martin.Social)
• Connect with Erika on LinkedIn 

Referenced in today's show:

• GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it.
• Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub ♥️
• I Tried Every Todo App and Ended Up With a .txt File
• [BUG] Claude says "You're absolutely right!" about everything · Issue #3382 
• Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises

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What's the hardest habit for a top engineer to unlearn in a leadership role? 

For Minh Nguyen, VP of Engineering at Transcend, it was breaking the "I'll do it myself" mentality. In this episode, she shares her impressive journey from individual contributor to VP at the same high-growth startup, offering a rare and honest look at this challenging transition. Drawing on her background in philosophy, Minh details the hard-won lessons of reorienting from hands-on coding to high-impact leadership, from learning to delegate to setting a clear, communicable strategy.

The conversation then shifts from personal growth to organizational design. Minh dives into the practicalities of scaling, revealing why Transcend structures teams around customer problems instead of technical stacks. She candidly discusses her experience pivoting away from a "catchall" platform team to a more effective, product-focused model. This episode is a deep dive for any leader on building a resilient, high-fidelity engineering culture that thrives under pressure, packed with invaluable insights for navigating the challenges of growth.

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• The DevEx guide to AI-driven software development
• Download: The 6 trends shaping the future of AI-driven development 

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• Connect with Minh Nguyen on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Transcend: Transcend.io
• Connect with Jennifer Riggins on LinkedIn

Referenced in today's show:

• This Start-Up’s $20 Billion Sale Died. It Came Fighting Back.
• Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives
• If you're remote, ramble
• AI promised efficiency. Instead, it’s making us work harder.
• Writing code was never the bottleneck!

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The rise of AI agents is more than a tooling upgrade - it's a fundamental rewiring of the entire developer experience, with your APIs at the very center. 

We're joined by Matt DeBergalis, co-founder and then-CTO-now-CEO (congrats Matt!) of Apollo GraphQL, to explore this massive transformation. He introduces the emerging concept of "agent experience," explaining why systems built for human developers are not ready for the unprecedented scale of AI calling APIs.

Matt argues that as the old rules of software development get re-evaluated, engineering leaders must rethink their entire stack. He presents a powerful analogy: a structured data layer like a graph is the perfect "left brain" for the "right brain" creativity of LLMs. This provides the semantic precision and guardrails needed for AI to act reliably, enabling a future where user experiences are personalized "to 11" and APIs become the core business asset. This conversation is a crucial guide for leaders on how to prepare by prioritizing higher-level system design, and why clear communication and architecture are becoming far more critical than handwriting code.

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• The DevEx guide to AI-driven software development
• Download: The 6 trends shaping the future of AI-driven development 

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• Explore Apollo GraphQL's graph infrastructure and MCP tooling: ApolloDev
• Connect with Matt on LinkedIn
• Connect with Andrew Boyagi on LinkedIn

Referenced in today's show:

• Anthropic caps Claude Code usage
• OpenAI introduces study mode
• Ready or not, age verification is rolling out across the internet
• Atlassian research: AI adoption is rising, but friction persists

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Your AI is learning to lie to you. It's not malicious—it's just trying to be a people-pleaser. This dangerous phenomenon, known as AI sycophancy, is what happens when we train models with outdated incentives.

Dr. Tatyana Mamut, an anthropologist, economist, and the CEO of Wayfound, joins us to explain why treating AI like traditional software is a critical mistake. She provides a revolutionary playbook for building AI you can actually trust, starting with how to manage AI agents like employees with clear roles, goals, and performance reviews. She then introduces the radical solution of an "AI supervisor"—an AI that manages other agents to ensure accountability. This all builds toward her vision for the "multi-sapiens workforce," where humans and AI collaborate to build the companies of tomorrow.

This is an essential guide for any leader aiming to build the culture and systems necessary to manage AI effectively.

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• Workshop: The AI upgrade to your SDLC
• The DevEx guide to AI-driven software development

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• Connect with Dr. Tatyana Mamut on LinkedIn
• Follow the latest from Wayfound on LinkedIn
• Connect with Kelly Vaughn on LinkedIn
• Kelly's Connect with Me
• Andrew's Connect with Me

Referenced in today's show:

• Replit deleted a customer’s entire production database.
• Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China’s Controversial ‘996’ Work Schedule
• I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again
• Evaluating LLMs on real long-horizon business tasks

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Is your team's AI strategy tailored for a fast-moving startup or a high-stakes enterprise? 

The answer could determine your success or failure. We're rejoined by Itamar Friedman, co-founder and CEO of Qodo, to break down what separates engineering teams that truly thrive with AI from those that are just experimenting, explaining why the path to success is fundamentally different for a startup that needs speed versus a large enterprise that must untangle bottlenecks.

Itamar reveals his vision for the evolution from "vibe coding" to a more mature "grounded coding" that relies on structured workflows and rich, automated context. He also points to the trend of dev platform teams as the future "agent keepers" who will own the holistic and safe implementation of AI. Itamar provides an actionable playbook for leaders: map your current processes, identify your biggest bottleneck, and find a specialized AI tool for that specific problem.

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• The DevEx guide to AI-driven software development
• Workshop: The AI upgrade to your SDLC

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• Learn more about Qodo qodo.ai
• Connect with Itamar Friedman on LinkedIn
• Follow AI thought leader Andrej Karpathy

Referenced in today's show:

• Announcing the real next chapter of Windsurf
• I still care about the code
• McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’
• Meta poaches even more AI talent 
• Block launches a grant program for high impact OSS contributions to goose

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Is your engineering team shipping more code but creating less business impact?

We're joined by Chris Westerhold, Global Practice Director at ThoughtWorks, to confront why engineering waste is so difficult to define and eliminate. He explains that for many teams, the issue isn't a lack of tools but a lack of a clear 'North Star' to align their efforts with real business goals, diving into why so much well-intentioned work results in wasted effort and increased friction.

Chris argues that most efficiency problems are rooted in people and processes, not technology, and why a 'systems thinking' approach is crucial for real improvement. He shares insights on balancing developer freedom with platform standardization and the leadership required to build a culture of continuous improvement. Learn why focusing on better outcomes—not just more code—is the key to unlocking your team's true potential.

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• The DevEx guide to AI-driven software development
• Workshop: The AI upgrade to your SDLC

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• LinkedIn: Chris Westerhold
• Learn more at ThoughtWorks.com

Referenced in today's show:

• Atlassian research: AI adoption is rising, but friction persists
• The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering
• Introducing pay per crawl: enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access 
• Meta poached Apple’s head of foundation models with $200M offer - 9to5Mac 
• OpenAI Poaches 4 High-Ranking Engineers From Tesla, xAI, and Meta | WIRED 

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You've bought the AI tools, but are you seeing the promised productivity gains? 

Join Dev Interrupted hosts Dan Lines and Ben Lloyd Pearson, as they break down the fundamental shift from AI coding assistants to intelligent, agentic systems. They discuss the key findings from their new guide, "The Six Trends Shaping the Future of AI-Driven Development," and challenge the common misconception that simply buying tools guarantees success by explaining why sustainable AI transformation depends less on better prompting and more on building better systems.

Dan and Ben reveal the foundational pillars required for AI adoption, from creating unified knowledge sources to modernizing your infrastructure for agentic workflows. Learn why the future lies in moving from isolated tools to fully orchestrated systems where AI agents can reason and operate across the entire software delivery lifecycle. This episode offers a strategic playbook for engineering leaders aiming to build a successful and sustainable AI strategy for 2025 and beyond.

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• Download: The 6 trends shaping the future of AI-driven development 
• Workshop: The AI upgrade to your SDLC

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Referenced in today's show:

• The Engineering Leadership Report 2025
• MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
• OpenAI Leadership Responds to Meta Offers: ‘Someone Has Broken Into Our Home’
• Grammarly to acquire email startup Superhuman in AI platform push

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If you're still building products only for humans, you're already missing out on a massive new customer base: AI agents. 

Joining Dev Interrupted is Andrew Hamilton, co-founder and CTO of Layer (a first-of-it’s kind MCP agency) to unravel this monumental shift in how products will be discovered and consumed. He dives into how AI agents are rapidly evolving from developer tools to direct consumers of APIs and products, with new standards like the MCP spearheading this transformation by effectively creating an "app store for LLMs." This evolution demands a complete rethink of product design, packaging, and user experience for an entirely new kind of user.

Andrew educates us about how successfully leveraging MCP isn't about a simple one-to-one API mapping, but about thoughtfully designing an "agent experience" based on key user workflows and providing pre-packaged capabilities. He shares insights on identifying good MCP candidates, the importance of experimentation in this fast-moving space, and how tools like Layer are defining the frontier of agent-accessible tooling.

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• The DevEx guide to AI-driven software development
• Download: The 6 trends shaping the future of AI-driven development 

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• LinkedIn: Andrew Hamilton
• Learn more about Layer: buildwithlayer.com

Referenced in today's show:

• Google Cloud donates A2A to Linux Foundation
• Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent 
• Meta poaches OpenAI researchers
• Airtable as the AI-native app

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What if creating a professional video for your business was as simple as a single click?

We're joined by Kabir Bedi, Head of Product for Image and Video Generation at Amazon Ads, to discuss how generative AI is making that a reality. He provides an inside look at Amazon's mission to democratize video advertising, empowering everyone from mom-and-pop shops to large enterprises with their innovative video generator that evolved from simply showing products to showcasing them in realistic, multi-scene lifestyle settings.

Kabir shares key insights into the engineering culture that powers this innovation, built on deep customer obsession and a dynamic, experimental mindset. He explains why bringing the entire team—including engineers and scientists—into direct conversations with users was a game-changer for their development process. Plus, listen as Kabir explains why a "learn and be curious" mindset is the key to thriving in this new landscape of AI-driven product development.

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• The DevEx guide to AI-driven software development
• Download: The 6 trends shaping the future of AI-driven development 

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• Follow Kabir on LinkedIn
• Learn more on the About Amazon Blog and the Amazon Ads Blog

Referenced in today's show:

• Meta's $100M poaching project
• “Real strength is not in poaching rather it’s in growing, retaining and respecting the people you already have.” -Mohit Malik
• “Localhost tracking” explained. It could cost Meta 32 billion.
• Cursor’s Bold Hiring Playbook: No AI in Interviews, Just Real Projects and Real People
• Writing Toy Software Is A Joy

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