In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Scott Hanselman about developing new software engineers when artificial intelligence agents are doing most of the work on which junior developers were trained. Hanselman suggests the software industry should adopt a preceptorship model similar to the nursing profession. Under this model, the industry needs preceptors whose sole job is to train new engineers, and these preceptors would be evaluated on how well they train people rather than how much code they ship. The use of AI agents requires experienced engineers because while they are capable of generating software features, they perform poorly at software architecture because they often miss the larger context. In addition, engineers must maintain oversight of artificial intelligence tools by acting as reviewers and coordinators to ensure that human judgment remains central to the development process.

The conversation then broadened to discuss the environment in which agentic AI should be used. When businesses prioritize short term, hyper-optimization, they neglect the longer term investments in human capital and mentorship which will make it impossible to cultivate future senior talent. Beyond that, Hanselman addressed the sociological impacts of modern development, observing that the intersection of remote work, social media, and artificial intelligence severely isolates developers. To counter this isolation and ensure healthy growth, intentional human connection and in-person interactions are vital for the next generation of users and developers of technology.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4ydBK0H

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5-week online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Programs now cover software architecture, AI engineering, and organizational architecture. Each week you join a four-hour live session with a confidential peer group of practitioners from other companies, apply frameworks from QCon talks to the decisions you're making at work, and earn an InfoQ certification. You leave with new approaches, or confirmation that the calls you're already making are the right ones. Learn more:

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Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

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In this episode, Scott Jenson, a veteran UX designer known for his work on the Macintosh, Google Maps, and Chrome examines the long-term stagnation of desktop operating systems and the limitations of current mobile and cloud-centric models. The conversation shifts toward specialised "Local-First" software, exploring how we can move beyond the "status quo" of interface design to create more intuitive, powerful, and privacy-conscious computing environments in the advent of the “LLM everywhere” era.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4gwuQwC

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5-week online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Programs now cover software architecture, AI engineering, and organizational architecture. Each week you join a four-hour live session with a confidential peer group of practitioners from other companies, apply frameworks from QCon talks to the decisions you're making at work, and earn an InfoQ certification. You leave with new approaches, or confirmation that the calls you're already making are the right ones. Learn more:

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The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

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Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom and Ola Hast discuss the evolution of their software engineering practices past continuous deployment and pair engineering. The conversation continues where it left off in the previous episode and focuses on the experiments in adopting Claude Code and the reasons why they consider it good for everything else, but not coding.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3SFb1Lu

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The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

The InfoQ Podcast: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/

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In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke to Tracy Bannon about the role of artificial intelligence in software and the attendant risks in the areas of security, software development, and society at large. While it might be reasonable to assume a certain amount of trust within a software ecosystem, the risks escalate when the boundary between two software ecosystems is crossed. Bannon emphasized that the discovery and exploitation of software vulnerabilities by AI is not a new issue, but it is just part of the evolution of cybersecurity threats. The discussion then continued to highlight that the traditional software development process was designed for humans. What the SDLC looks like in a world of agentic development has yet to be determined. Among the many challenges is testing an agent that is non-deterministic and whose behavior changes as it is tested, and reinitializing the test environment at the appropriate time.

The use of AI agents has imposed a tremendous cognitive load on software professionals because they must review the massive amount of code and documents that an AI agent can generate. For both software professionals, and the public at large, the overreliance on artificial intelligence is leading to diminishing human skills, especially in complex domains. The question is - are we outsourcing our intelligence to automated models?

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4qeyr70

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5-week online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Programs now cover software architecture, AI engineering, and organizational architecture. Each week you join a four-hour live session with a confidential peer group of practitioners from other companies, apply frameworks from QCon talks to the decisions you're making at work, and earn an InfoQ certification. You leave with new approaches, or confirmation that the calls you're already making are the right ones. Learn more:

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QCon San Francisco 2026 (November 16-20, 2026)

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QCon London 2027 (April 13-16, 2027)

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The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

The InfoQ Podcast: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/

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In this episode of the podcast, members of the InfoQ editorial staff and friends of InfoQ will discuss current trends in the cloud and DevOps domains as part of our annual trends report. These reports provide InfoQ readers with a high-level overview of key topics to watch and also help the editorial team focus on innovative technologies. In addition to the report and the trends graph available on InfoQ.com, this podcast offers a chance to hear our raw conversation and the stories shared by our expert practitioners.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4ggpO8h

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5-week online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Programs now cover software architecture, AI engineering, and organizational architecture. Each week you join a four-hour live session with a confidential peer group of practitioners from other companies, apply frameworks from QCon talks to the decisions you're making at work, and earn an InfoQ certification. You leave with new approaches, or confirmation that the calls you're already making are the right ones. Learn more:

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The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

The InfoQ Podcast: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/

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Andrea Peruffo discusses the evolution of WebAssembly beyond the browser and its growing role on the server-side JVM. He covers performance advancements in Wasm runtimes, moving from interpreters to efficient JIT compilation, and explores real-world production use cases ranging from edge computing platforms to modular plugin architectures. Peruffo also announces the transition of the Chicory runtime to "Endive" under the Bytecode Alliance, detailing the shift toward foundation-governed development to ensure long-term stability and neutrality in the JVM ecosystem.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4vUwDkD

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5-week online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Programs now cover software architecture, AI engineering, and organizational architecture. Each week you join a four-hour live session with a confidential peer group of practitioners from other companies, apply frameworks from QCon talks to the decisions you're making at work, and earn an InfoQ certification. You leave with new approaches, or confirmation that the calls you're already making are the right ones. Learn more:

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Upcoming Events:

QCon San Francisco 2026 (November 16-20, 2026)

https://qconsf.com/

QCon London 2027 (April 13-16, 2027)

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The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

The InfoQ Podcast: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/

Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture

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Johannes Schickling explores how he moved beyond the traditional three-tier web stack to a local-first approach. He shares his experience transitioning from Prisma to developing Overtone—a music curation app leveraging client-side event sourcing and SQLite. The discussion highlights the trade-offs between event sourcing and CRDTs, providing actionable insights for architects weighing the complexities of local-first development.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4pDjvPr

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5-week online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Programs now cover software architecture, AI engineering, and organizational architecture. Each week you join a four-hour live session with a confidential peer group of practitioners from other companies, apply frameworks from QCon talks to the decisions you're making at work, and earn an InfoQ certification. You leave with new approaches, or confirmation that the calls you're already making are the right ones. Learn more:

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QCon San Francisco 2026 (November 16-20, 2026)

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QCon London 2027 (April 13-16, 2027)

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The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

The InfoQ Podcast: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/

Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture

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In this episode, Thomas Betts talks with Clare Liguori, the technical lead on the open source Strands Agents SDK. The conversation covers how Strands Agents has grown from a Python SDK to a full agent harness running in production. Clare shares some lessons learned from building agents at scale, shifting to a model-driven architecture, and what comes next as the LLMs that underpin agents continue to improve.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4pluNYt

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The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

The InfoQ Podcast: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/

Engineering Culture Podcast by InfoQ: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/#engineering_culture

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In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Sarah Wells about the relationship of governance to software architecture. Governance enables teams to work effectively by establishing procedures that minimize system complexity, improve security, and reduce repetitive tasks. Targeted checklists help engineers by reducing the stress over these procedures. This is especially critical in high pressure situations like critical incident response. Architecture should focus on the technical decisions that are difficult to reverse.

The conversation then shifted to exploring the relationship of governance to agentic AI software development. While AI can be very effective for writing code, building internal tools, and automating tasks, experienced engineers still need to validate tests, review outputs, establish clear architectural guidelines, and demand that the AI agents be hypercritical of their own work. With the focus on AI software development, architectural skills are at a premium. Talented individuals that demonstrate architectural skills need to be found and sponsored.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4fndHG3

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5-week online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Programs now cover software architecture, AI engineering, and organizational architecture. Each week you join a four-hour live session with a confidential peer group of practitioners from other companies, apply frameworks from QCon talks to the decisions you're making at work, and earn an InfoQ certification. You leave with new approaches, or confirmation that the calls you're already making are the right ones. Learn more:

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The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

The InfoQ Podcast: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/

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In this episode, Alex Zenla (CTO/Co-founder, Edera) challenges the "laissez-faire" attitude toward modern infrastructure. She promotes "spite-driven development", building software to solve genuine technical pain points rather than passively accepting flawed abstractions, as a philosophy of improving the world of software. The discussion touches on the fragility of the current cloud-native stack, the security risks of multi-tenant Linux kernels, and the inefficiency of repurposing consumer-grade GPUs for AI workloads. Zenla also offers a pragmatic framework for the "AI-native" engineer: treat LLMs as symbiotic assistants for deep learning, not replacements for system-level expertise.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3QZQhxc

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5-week online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Programs now cover software architecture, AI engineering, and organizational architecture. Each week you join a four-hour live session with a confidential peer group of practitioners from other companies, apply frameworks from QCon talks to the decisions you're making at work, and earn an InfoQ certification. You leave with new approaches, or confirmation that the calls you're already making are the right ones. Learn more:

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Weekly conversations with senior software leaders about how they build systems and teams, including what they'd do differently. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

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