#331: At the end of 2024, predictions were made about what 2025 would bring to the tech industry. A year later, on New Year's Eve, it's time to look back and see what actually happened. The prediction episode from January 1st covered four major topics: rug pulls from companies switching to business source licenses, the rise of WebAssembly adoption, a wave of company acquisitions, and AI becoming embedded in existing tools. Some predictions hit the mark while others missed entirely, but what emerged was something nobody fully anticipated.

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#330: In this short episode, Darin and Viktor reflect on the holiday season.

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#329: Vibe coding - the practice of casually prompting AI to generate code solutions - has become increasingly popular, but its limitations become apparent when applications need to scale beyond personal use. While AI-assisted development can be powerful for proof of concepts and small internal tools, the transition from vibe-coded solutions to production-ready applications often requires experienced engineers to rebuild from scratch.

The conversation explores three distinct levels of software development: personal tooling, internal applications, and public-facing systems. Each level demands different approaches, with vibe coding being most suitable for the first category but potentially problematic as complexity increases. The analogy of cooking illustrates this well - anyone can make a simple meal, but feeding hundreds of people requires professional expertise and proper infrastructure.

Technical debt in the AI era presents new challenges and opportunities. Traditional software engineering principles like DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and clean code practices may matter less when AI can quickly refactor and improve code. The future likely involves hybrid teams where business experts work alongside experienced engineers, with AI agents handling implementation details. Darin and Viktor examine how pair programming is evolving from developer-to-developer collaboration to human-to-AI partnerships, fundamentally changing how software gets built and maintained.

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#328: The build versus buy decision isn't as binary as most companies think. Every technology choice involves elements of both - you might use Linux (buy) but still configure and customize it extensively (build). The real question isn't whether to build or buy, but finding the right balance between the two approaches based on your company's resources, size, and unique requirements.

Companies often fall into the trap of thinking their processes are so unique that existing solutions won't work, leading to unnecessary custom development. This "not invented here" syndrome is particularly common in large enterprises that mistake their size for complexity. In reality, most businesses face challenges that have already been solved by others. The key is recognizing when you truly need a custom solution versus when you can adapt existing tools.

The decision becomes more nuanced when considering factors like maintenance costs, compliance requirements, and long-term sustainability. Building internally requires ongoing resources for updates, security patches, and knowledge retention within your team. Meanwhile, buying from vendors shifts much of this burden but introduces dependencies and integration challenges. The conversation features insights from Alex Gusev from Uploadcare, along with perspectives from hosts Darin and Viktor on navigating these complex technology decisions.

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X: https://x.com/alxgsv

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alxgsv/

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#327: When AI tools suggest putting glue on pizza, it's a harmless laugh. But when autonomous AI agents start managing your infrastructure, the stakes become much higher. The reality is that current AI technology isn't ready for unsupervised deployment in critical systems, and treating it like it is could lead to catastrophic failures.

The challenge isn't just about AI capabilities—it's about management and oversight. Most developers aren't trained as managers, yet they're being asked to supervise AI agents that need constant guidance and correction. Just like hiring a new employee, AI agents require company-specific knowledge, proper guardrails, and ongoing supervision to be effective. The same principles that apply to managing human workers—code reviews, testing, and performance evaluations—need to be adapted for AI management.

As the ecosystem around AI continues to evolve rapidly, new challenges emerge. From sleeper agents that activate on specific dates to the need for completely new approaches to technical SEO for LLMs, the landscape is changing faster than most organizations can adapt. Darin and Viktor explore these challenges and discuss practical approaches for keeping AI systems from going rogue while maintaining the productivity benefits they can provide.

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#326: Microservices architecture has evolved far beyond simple distributed systems, but most development teams are still rebuilding the same foundational patterns over and over again. Mark Fussell, co-founder of Dapr and Diagrid, explains how his team at Microsoft identified this repetitive reinvention problem and created a solution that abstracts away the complexity of service discovery, messaging, state management, and security while providing true cloud portability.

Dapr emerged from Microsoft's Azure incubations team with a clear mission: stop forcing developers to rebuild distributed systems patterns from scratch. The runtime provides standardized APIs for common microservices needs while allowing teams to swap underlying infrastructure components without changing application code. Whether using Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, or cloud-native messaging services, developers write against consistent APIs while platform teams maintain control over infrastructure choices.

The conversation covers Dapr's journey from Microsoft internal project to CNCF graduated status, the technical decisions behind its multi-language approach, and how it integrates with existing frameworks like Spring Boot and .NET. Mark also discusses Diagrid's platform play around durable workflows and the emerging role of Dapr in AI agent development. Darin and Viktor explore the practical adoption challenges, the balance between developer productivity and platform engineering concerns, and why experienced developers tend to embrace abstraction layers more readily than those building their first distributed systems.

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X: https://x.com/mfussell

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mfussell/

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#325: KubeCon NA 2025 wrapped in Atlanta with unseasonably cold weather and some significant shifts in the cloud native ecosystem. The conference showed fewer vendors backing CNCF projects on the show floor, with key concerns emerging around maintainer burnout—exemplified by NGINX Ingress being deprecated despite running on 40% of Kubernetes clusters worldwide. The event revealed a maturing ecosystem where AI moved from buzzword to operational reality, with focus shifting toward conformance standards, security policies, and enterprise readiness rather than the hype cycle of previous years.

The discussions revealed a consolidation pattern where larger corporations like AWS, Microsoft, and Google are increasingly the only ones who can sustain open source project maintenance. Startups and smaller companies face difficult choices: maintain existing revenue streams, pivot entirely to AI, or attempt both and fail at both. Meanwhile, AI adoption in the ops space remains behind other sectors, with developers emerging as the primary buyers for AI tooling—a shift that's reshaping go-to-market strategies across vendors. Platform engineering continues as a parallel major theme, focusing on operationalizing infrastructure at scale.

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X: https://x.com/wiggitywhitney

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitneylee/

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#324: Kubernetes has reached a mature state where boring releases signal stability rather than stagnation. While the platform continues evolving with features like in-place resource updates in version 1.33, the real challenge lies in optimizing AI workloads that demand significantly more resources than traditional applications. The discussion reveals how auto-scaling capabilities become crucial for managing these resource-intensive workloads, with vertical and horizontal scaling finally working together through new features that allow pod resizing without restarts.

The conversation explores the ongoing tension between cloud costs and data center investments, particularly as companies navigate uncertain AI requirements. While cloud providers offer flexibility for experimentation, the hidden costs of skilled personnel and infrastructure management often make cloud solutions more economical than initially apparent. The debate extends to startup strategies, where outsourcing infrastructure complexity allows teams to focus on core business value rather than operational overhead.

Omer Hamerman joins Darin and Viktor to examine the common misconceptions about resource allocation, arguing that developers fundamentally cannot predict CPU and memory requirements accurately. This limitation makes automated right-sizing and intelligent scaling essential for modern Kubernetes deployments, especially as AI workloads continue pushing infrastructure boundaries.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omer-hamerman/

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#323: Vibe coding - the practice of giving AI a high-level description and letting it build applications unsupervised - has become increasingly popular among non-developers looking to quickly prototype ideas. While this approach excels at rapid prototyping and getting small, focused applications running, it creates significant security risks when deployed to production without proper oversight. The fundamental issue isn't with AI capabilities, but with treating any tool - whether AI or human - as capable of understanding company context, security requirements, and production standards on day one.

The real value emerges when vibe coding serves as a bridge between business requirements and technical implementation. Rather than replacing traditional development workflows, it can accelerate the initial phases by providing working prototypes that stakeholders can interact with before formal development begins. However, moving from prototype to production requires the same rigorous processes that any new technology integration demands: security scanning, code review, compliance with company policies, and proper authentication handling.

In this episode, Darin and Viktor explore the security implications of unsupervised AI development, discussing when vibe coding makes sense, where it falls short, and how organizations might eventually integrate AI-assisted development into their existing workflows while maintaining security and operational standards.

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#322: Peer-to-peer technology represents a fundamental shift in how we think about data sovereignty and application architecture. Rather than relying on centralized servers and trusting specific endpoints, peer-to-peer systems allow users to verify data authenticity regardless of its source. This approach eliminates the traditional point-to-point communication model where data flows from a specific server to your device, instead creating networks where any peer can help distribute content while maintaining cryptographic verification.

The technology offers compelling advantages for developers and users alike. Applications built on peer-to-peer foundations can operate without ongoing infrastructure costs, scale naturally as more users join the network, and continue functioning even if the original company disappears. Development becomes simpler in many ways since everything runs locally by default, eliminating complex database configurations and external dependencies. However, challenges remain around debugging distributed systems, ensuring data persistence in small networks, and adapting traditional development workflows to this new paradigm.

In this episode, Darin and Viktor explore these concepts with Mathias Buus Madsen, co-founder of Holepunch and creator of the Pear Runtime. Mathias shares insights from building real peer-to-peer applications, including their chat app Keet, and explains how developers can start experimenting with this technology today.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathiasbuus/

X: https://x.com/mafintosh

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