Owlcast

Watch the video version for the demos and screen shares: https://www.youtube.com/live/jCQx4XvrEUk

Holden Karau (Snowflake, formerly Databricks) and Lisa Cao (Databricks DevRel) joined us to dig into what it actually looks like to write Spark code with AI agents in 2026.

We worked through a real example from Holden's High Performance Spark Second Edition — a Goldilocks-style exact percentiles problem across hundreds of columns — and watched Claude Code handle it from a cold-start repo, then again with proper context and a reference solution.

Lisa walked through using a skill file to get Claude to write declarative pipelines the right way instead of hallucinating the syntax, and we talked about why local mode, Arrow UDFs, and the upcoming Python UDF transpilation work in Spark 4.3 matter for AI-assisted Spark development.

We also covered: why the "agents trying to shut you up" failure mode shows up in code generation, the case for property-based testing as a guardrail for agentic coding, Spark 3 to Spark 4 porting as a more reliable path than one-shotting Spark 4, and where agents still struggle (dependency management, Spark internals, real stack trace debugging vs. pattern matching from Stack Overflow).

Resources:

• Apache Spark: https://spark.apache.org & https://github.com/apache/spark
• High Performance Spark (O'Reilly): https://www.oreilly.com
• Spark testing base: https://github.com/holdenk/spark-testing-base
• Databricks Spark: https://www.databricks.com/spark/about
• Data + AI Summit (June 15–18, San Francisco): https://www.databricks.com/dataaisummit
• Snowflake Summit (June 1–4, San Francisco): https://www.snowflake.com/summit
• PySpark Data Sources: https://github.com/allisonwang-db/pyspark-data-sources
• PySpark SDP: https://github.com/lisancao/pyspark-sdp
• Distributed Computing 4 Kids: https://distributedcomputing4kids.com/

What's working for you when you write Spark with agents? Drop your patterns and gotchas below. And let us know what you want to see on future episodes.

Originally streamed May 13, 2026 on Vibe Check Temporal YouTube channel and you can watch the full episode at: https://www.youtube.com/live/jCQx4XvrEUk

Watch the video version for the demos and screen shares: https://www.youtube.com/live/fQGcbND0Uas

Sarah Deaton, Technical Content Engineer at Anthropic and the person who owns the Claude Code docs, joined myself and my co-host Angela Zhou (Sr Technical Curriculum Dev @ Temporal) to walk through what's new and what's underused in Claude Code. We covered Claude Design for non-designers, the difference between CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, and subagents (and when to reach for each), routines that run on schedules or GitHub events, the new rewind feature, auto mode, forked subagents, and the layers of sandboxing available for safer execution.

Topics covered:

• Claude Design for visual work, mockups, and slide decks (and the handoff into Claude Code)
• When to use CLAUDE.md vs skills vs hooks vs subagents
• Why hooks are the deterministic layer underneath the model and where teams misuse CLAUDE.md
• Slash init for scaffolding a new repo with Claude Code
• Routines: scheduled tasks plus GitHub events and API triggers
• Rewind: pulling failed attempts out of the context window without polluting the next try
• Auto mode and the classifier that gates risky actions
• Forked subagents: subagents that inherit the full conversation but keep their work isolated
• Sandboxing tiers: slash sandbox, dev containers, VMs, and Claude Code on the web

Resources:

• Claude: https://claude.ai/new
• Claude Code docs: https://code.claude.com/docs
• Claude Design: https://claude.ai/design
• Code with Claude events: https://claude.com/code-with-claude
• Session management and 1M context blog post: https://claude.com/blog/using-claude-code-session-management-and-1m-context
• Temporal AI: https://temporal.io/solutions/ai

Note: This is the audio version of a video livestream that included live coding, screen shares, and on-screen demos. For the visual content, watch the full episode on YouTube.

Originally streamed April 24, 2026 on Vibe Check Temporal YouTube channel and you can watch the full episode at: https://www.youtube.com/live/fQGcbND0Uas

Day two of Vibe Check live from Replay 2026.

Shabnam Emdadi, staff software engineer at Shopify and Temporal Constellation member, on what AI frameworks are rediscovering from distributed systems, why retries are more expensive in an LLM world, and the case for judgment over one-more-prompt addiction.

Francesc Campoy, Go expert and JustForFunc creator, on his first take on Temporal after the Go workshop, the cognitive offloading vs cognitive surrender distinction, and why software engineering still matters in production.

Vibe Check co-hosts Melissa and Shy on the Replay keynote: Melissa's robot arm demo and agents workshop, and Shy's marathon to ship 2,300 hackable conference badges, including how Codex and Claude got the firmware over the line.

Resources:

• Shopify: https://www.shopify.com
• JustForFunc: https://www.youtube.com/c/justforfunc
• Replay badge project: https://badge.temporal.io
• Temporal AI: https://temporal.io/ai

Originally published May 7, 2026 on Vibe Check Temporal YouTube channel and you can watch the full episode at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXAIQxAKW4o

Ritika Shrivastava from Ember Robotics talks about what the AI agent world is rediscovering that robotics has known for years, and where companies trip up scaling from one robot to a hundred.

Brian Douglas from Paper Compute breaks down their work on agent runtime and durable session recording, and where context engineering is heading post-MCP.

Beverly Lu from Chime walks through what it actually takes to ship AI in a regulated fintech: evals as a discipline, domain experts in the loop, and per-model harnesses.

We close with Johann Schleier-Smith from Temporal on the AI announcements from the keynote: priority and fairness, large payload storage, workflow streams, serverless workers, and where the harness conversation is heading.

Resources:

• Ember Robotics: https://emberrobotics.com
• Paper Compute: https://papercompute.com
• Chime: https://www.chime.com
• Temporal AI: https://temporal.io/ai

Originally published May 6, 2026 on Vibe Check Temporal YouTube channel and you can watch the full episode at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHHc4rDn8yY&t