The InfoQ Podcast

In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Baruch Sadogursky about software architecture in the age of agentic AI. Large Language Models can function, albeit stochastically, as reasoning machines capable of interpreting human ambiguity. With the appropriate rigorous context artifacts to control the LLM’s reasoning, software specifications can become the source of truth, while the code becomes a disposable intermediate language. These context artifacts are managed through an engineering discipline, context engineering. Unlike prompt engineering which Sadogursky likened to “voodoo incantations”, context engineering utilizes artifacts such as skills, rules, scripts, feedback, and rigorous evaluation to provide the models with clear intent on what code to write. AI Agents will ask clarifying questions to the architects and clients until the requirements are fully understood. This allows a massive “shift left” to evaluate code quality before it is even written. Testing now validates the accuracy of the specifications.

Humans are still responsible for determining the correctness of the requirements by providing the proper context, and validating the final results. Since changes over the course of time will occur, resulting in the regeneration of the code from the specifications, microservices is the best architectural paradigm to use given the current limitations on context windows for LLMs. Orchestration of the services is then done by a human architect to create the application. The architect is also responsible for managing the emergent properties of the system.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/48YWu2n

Newsletter:

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

InfoQ online certification cohorts:

Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ:

Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

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- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

Adam Bien, an independent consultant and pioneer of zero dependencies in the enterprise world of Java, highlights the benefits of consistently using standards, regardless of whether they involve Java or existing patterns. He argues that by doing so, he managed to future-proof the systems he built, preparing them for the cloud era and even for the AI-Native era.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4cFAn3g

Newsletter:

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

InfoQ online certification cohorts:

Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ:

Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

- Join a community of practitioners.

- Increase your visibility.

- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

Andy Damevin, a developer who worked on Quarkus for almost a decade, talks about Roq. A project that started as an experiment to try to see if it’s possible to build a static web site generator on top of quarkus. He touches on the rationale for choosing Java and Quarkus, how to migrate to Roq, and the platform's future.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/48Q5SoJ

Newsletter:

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

InfoQ online certification cohorts:

Online cohorts for senior engineers and architects, built around QCon talks. Join a 5-week confidential peer group to validate your approach and apply practitioner frameworks to the technical challenges you face at work. Learn more: https://certification.qconferences.com/

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ:

Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

- Join a community of practitioners.

- Increase your visibility.

- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

In this podcast, Jaromir Hamala, a seasoned Java engineer specialising in high-throughput data systems, shares his thoughts on how developers can tackle high-performance software development. He touches on the benefits of modern Java that allow writing idiomatic Java code while remaining "mechanically sympathetic", and also on his experience debugging a Linux kernel bug.

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

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

- Join a community of experts.

- Increase your visibility.

- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Matthew Liste about building and managing software platforms. Platform services act as the basis for application development, and must always be stable, secure, and scalable. Scaling these systems is particularly difficult because unknown resource contention often causes them to break. Using customer journeys, one can pinpoint the places where the system is particularly at risk. Platform engineering also requires managing limited resources, and making difficult tradeoffs about which functionality should be implemented.

The discussion also highlighted how artificial intelligence can increase the speed of development and thus increase risk, and how it interferes with the development of junior engineers who typically learn from basic tasks that now can be done by artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, platform engineering is still responsible for maintaining the stability, security, and scalability of the platform.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3PDl16i

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

- Join a community of experts.

- Increase your visibility.

- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

Viktor Peterson, part of the CISA task force working on SBOM blueprints and co-founder of sbomify, explores the shifting landscape of software supply chain security as the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) comes into force, a "GDPR moment" for the industry. Beyond mere compliance, Peterson argues that SBOMs provide significant operational value as tools for automated security audits and license management, provided they are generated using ecosystem-specific tools rather than generic scanners. He also points to providing critical security insights into the risks of weaponised code, citing recent incidents where security tools themselves became attack vectors, and emphasises the need for vendor-neutral discovery mechanisms like the Transparency Exchange API (TEA) to secure the software lifecycle.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/41eFG34

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

- Join a community of experts.

- Increase your visibility.

- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

In this episode, Thomas Betts and Adi Polak talk about the need for context engineering when interacting with LLMs and designing agentic systems. Prompt engineering techniques work with a stateless approach, while context engineering allows AI systems to be stateful.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4168Wcj

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

- Join a community of experts.

- Increase your visibility.

- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

In this podcast Michael Stiefel spoke to Lorin Hochstein about how real-world failures provide insight into how software systems actually work. Our first topic was understanding that while automated fault injection tools can introduce basic robustness into a system, they cannot replicate the understanding that comes from mitigating complicated software failures in the real world. We then pondered how do we get this information to software architects so that they can learn from failure. Ironically, in reliable systems, adding more reliability can often lead to complexity which can lead to new failures. We often focus on making our systems robust against known failure patterns, but we have not learnt how to make software systems resilient to unknown failure modes, or failures due to changes in the external world or the evolving system design.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3NVhtf3

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

- Join a community of experts.

- Increase your visibility.

- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

Are you ready for your new non-deterministic co-workers?

Autonomous agents promise to help build, operate, and run software systems, but they can also be unpredictable, chaotic, and difficult to control without the right operating model. In this episode of Next Generation Architecture Playbook, Shweta Vohra and Joseph Stein explore what changes when software systems start planning, acting, and making decisions on their own. The conversation distinguishes truly agentic use cases from traditional automation and looks at how architects and engineers should think about boundaries, orchestration, and system design in this new environment.

The episode also explores the practical realities organisations face early in adoption. These include emerging risks such as prompt injection and tool misuse, the growing need for stronger observability and explainability, and how human-in-the-loop models fit into autonomous workflows. Joseph shares lessons from building a centralised AI platform used across multiple teams and products, including the unexpected operational challenges that arise when internal adoption accelerates quickly. The discussion offers a grounded look at how enterprises can experiment with agentic systems while keeping control over risk, cost, and operational complexity.

Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/4lv6iGa

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

Upcoming Events:

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

boston.qcon.ai

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

qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. Listen to all our podcasts and read interview transcripts:

- The InfoQ Podcast www.infoq.com/podcasts/

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

- Generally AI: www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: techhub.social/@infoq

- X: x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: www.youtube.com/infoq

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Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

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www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq

Andres Almiray, a serial open-source contributor and the creator of JReleaser, discusses the project's state, noting that the tool is usable across any ecosystem, not just Java. He also touches on the Common House Foundation's mission.

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

Subscribe to the Software Architects’ Newsletter for your monthly guide to the essential news and experience from industry peers on emerging patterns and technologies:

https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter

Upcoming Events:

QCon London 2026 (March 16-19, 2026)

QCon London equips senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders with trusted, practical insights to lead the change in software development. Get real-world solutions and leadership strategies from senior software practitioners defining current trends and solving today's toughest software challenges.

https://qconlondon.com/

QCon AI Boston 2026 (June 1-2, 2026)

Learn how real teams are accelerating the entire software lifecycle with AI.

https://boston.qcon.ai

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

https://qconsf.com/

The InfoQ Podcasts:

Weekly inspiration to drive innovation and build great teams from senior software leaders. 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

- Generally AI: https://www.infoq.com/generally-ai-podcast/

Follow InfoQ:

- Mastodon: https://techhub.social/@infoq

- X: https://x.com/InfoQ?from=@

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq/

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfoQdotcom#

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/?hl=en

- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/infoq.com

Write for InfoQ: Learn and share the changes and innovations in professional software development.

- Join a community of experts.

- Increase your visibility.

- Grow your career.

https://www.infoq.com/write-for-infoq