AI coding is changing software engineering—but when agents can implement the code, what remains uniquely valuable? Kent C. Dodds joins Hendrik Krack on The Merge to discuss open source, coding agents, product engineering, React, Remix, and why the “last software engineer” will be the person who understands what to build.

Kent has spent his career teaching web development and working in open source. In this conversation, he explains how AI is making implementation cheaper, why developers need stronger product judgment, and how his agent-to-PR workflow uses CI and CodeRabbit for independent review while he evaluates system design, migrations, and downstream effects.

In this episode:

• Kent’s path through PayPal, open source, React, Remix, and Epic Web
• Why coding agents change the developer’s role
• The “last software engineer” thought experiment
• Product engineering versus ticket taking
• Choosing the right problem before writing code
• What junior developers should learn in the AI era
• Reviewing systems, not only diffs
• Kent’s AI coding workflow with pull requests, CI, and CodeRabbit
• Durable skills: judgment, communication, ownership, and feedback loops

Learn more about Kent C. Dodds: https://kentcdodds.com/
Epic Product Engineer: https://www.epicproduct.engineer/
Epic AI: https://www.epicai.pro/
Epic Web: https://www.epicweb.dev/
Try CodeRabbit: https://www.coderabbit.ai/

What do you think the last valuable software engineer will still do? Share your answer in the comments, and subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping open source and AI-powered software development.

#AICoding #SoftwareEngineering #OpenSource

How does a hackathon project become infrastructure for more than 2,000 open-source repositories and reach 1.4 million monthly npm downloads?

In this episode of The Merge, Hendrik Krack sits down with Simon Farshid, founder of Assistant UI, to explore what it really takes to build production-ready AI chat for AI agents.

Simon explains why the visible chat window is only the surface. Behind it are streaming responses, state management, message editing, attachments, voice, interruptions, agent backends, and the level of polish users now expect from every AI product.

The conversation also examines how AI coding agents are changing software engineering. When implementation becomes easier, writing clear specifications, understanding the product, reviewing edge cases, and having good taste become the real competitive advantages.

As Simon puts it: “All the alpha is in the remaining 20%.”

In this episode:

• Why state management is the hardest part of AI chat  
• How Assistant UI grew from a hackathon project  
• The future of AI agents and generative interfaces  
• Why product taste is becoming an essential engineering skill  
• TypeScript vs. Python for building AI agents  
• How coding agents are creating more full-stack engineers  
• Simon’s automated CodeRabbit review and repair loop  
• How Assistant UI approaches open source and monetization  
• Why great engineers will lean forward instead of letting AI do everything  

CHAPTERS

00:00 — The 80% trap and the rise of product taste  
01:19 — Meet Simon Farshid  
01:56 — What is Assistant UI?  
02:44 — From hackathon project to startup  
03:32 — 2,000 repositories and 1.4M monthly downloads  
05:28 — Why building AI chat is harder than it looks  
07:23 — Designing a modular open-source product  
08:43 — Why taste is the new engineering bottleneck  
10:29 — TypeScript vs. Python for AI agents  
13:24 — How coding agents are changing engineering teams  
16:25 — Building a business around open source  
20:38 — The future of AI chat and generative interfaces  
23:17 — “They said chat was dead”  
27:38 — Generative dashboards and new UI primitives  
29:28 — The future role of software developers  
30:36 — Running coding agents in a CodeRabbit review loop  
34:10 — Lean forward: where the remaining 20% lives  
35:57 — Rapid-fire questions  

Explore Assistant UI:
https://www.assistant-ui.com/

Assistant UI on GitHub:
https://github.com/assistant-ui/assistant-ui

Try CodeRabbit:
https://www.coderabbit.ai/

Subscribe for more conversations with the engineers and founders building the future of software development.

#AIAgents #AIChat #AICoding

How do LLMs actually work—and why do they remain black boxes?
In this episode of Merge, Shriyash “Yash” Upadhyay, co-founder of Martian, joins CodeRabbit to explore LLM interpretability, AI research, code review benchmarks, and the search for the “steam engine of AI.”

We discuss:
- Why we still don’t fully understand how LLMs work
- How Martian is researching machine intelligence
- Why code review is a crucial test of AI code generation
- How precision and recall shape AI code-review performance
- Why static AI benchmarks eventually become unreliable
- How real-world developer behavior can improve evaluations
- What more reliable and interpretable AI could unlock
- The tools and programming languages Yash uses in his own work
- How aspiring researchers can get started in machine learning

Today’s language models can generate code, solve complex problems, and power increasingly autonomous systems. But without understanding why they succeed, when they will fail, and how their internal mechanisms produce their outputs, building AI systems we can truly trust remains difficult.

Could interpretability provide the scientific foundation for the next generation of AI?

Learn more about Martian: https://withmartian.com/

Learn more about CodeRabbit: https://coderabbit.ai/

Subscribe for more conversations about AI, software engineering, code review, and the future of developer tools.

#LLM #AIInterpretability #ArtificialIntelligence

Is coding dead? As autonomous AI agents get better at generating code, the actual implementation of software is becoming incredibly cheap. But what is the last skill that keeps us as humans valuable?

In this episode, we sit down with legendary software educator Kent C. Dodds to discuss the critical transition from traditional software development to Product Engineering. If you are wondering how to protect and grow your software engineering career in the age of agentic AI, Kent shares a masterclass on how to build user empathy, develop "product sense," and master the ultimate skill: knowing what to build, not just how to build it.

If you are a web developer, software engineer, or tech leader trying to navigate the future of your career, this is the most important conversation you will listen to this year.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:
The Rise of the Product Engineer: Why traditional coding is getting automated, and why "product sense" is the ultimate survival skill.
The "Problem Tree" Framework: How to stop falling in love with your code and start identifying the right problems to solve.
Empathy Tactics for Developers: Practical, low-cost habits (like watching users live and "having lunch with support") to instantly build better product instincts.

The Blurring Line Between PM & Engineer: How roles are shifting as technology trade-offs and user insights merge.
How to Career-Proof Your Future: Actionable advice for mid-to-late career developers preparing for the next wave of tech disruption.

Timestamps:
0:00 - Is Coding Dead? The Reality of AI Agents
2:15 - What is an "Epic Product Engineer"?
4:50 - Why Users Give You Solutions, Not Problems
7:30 - The "Problem Tree" Framework Explained
10:15 - Software Engineer vs. Product Manager: The New Blended Role
13:40 - How to Develop True User Empathy (Stop Over-Engineering!)
16:50 - Why Customer Support is a Goldmine for Developers
19:20 - Career Advice: How to Prepare for the AI Wave

Resources & Links Mentioned:
Learn more about Epic Product Engineer: https://www.epicproduct.engineer
Follow Kent C. Dodds on Twitter/X: https://x.com/kentcdodds
Try CodeRabbit for free: https://coderabbit.link/themerge 

Subscribe for more episodes on the future of software engineering, AI coding tools, and product design!
#SoftwareEngineering #ProductEngineering #AI #Coding #WebDevelopment #ProductSense #SoftwareDeveloper #TechCareers

In this episode of The Merge, we sit down with Michael Grinich, founder and CEO of WorkOS.

Checkout Coderabbit: https://coderabbit.link/themerge

Michael shares one of the best explanations of Product-Market Fit we’ve heard: it’s not the finish line — it’s more like getting the Mario Star. Once you have it, you become untouchable enough to survive your own biggest mistakes… but only if you keep innovating.

We also dive into:
- How to actually engineer PMF instead of just hoping for it
- Crossing the enterprise chasm that kills most startups
- Why product engineers are outperforming traditional teams
- The new authentication and permissions challenges for AI agents
- His optimistic (and very practical) view on the future of software development

If you're building a startup or scaling a product in the AI era, this conversation is full of actionable insights.

Connect with Michael:
X/Twitter: https://x.com/grinich
WorkOS: https://workos.com

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
02:45 - The Mario Star theory of Product-Market Fit
08:30 - How to engineer PMF instead of chasing it
15:10 - Crossing the enterprise chasm
22:40 - Product engineers vs traditional teams
31:00 - Building for AI agents & the new auth problem
42:15 - Michael’s take on the future of software development

What happens when you treat an AI agent like a brilliant, chaotic, sleep-deprived MIT intern instead of a perfect computer program? You actually get elite code.

In this episode of The Merge, we sit down with open-source legend Jesse Vincent, the mastermind behind "superpowers"—the viral AI development framework that exploded to 221k+ GitHub stars in a matter of months. 

Jesse explains why most AI coding tools produce unusable "AI slop" and how he used his 30-year career in management and engineering to fix it[cite: 1]. We break down the exact multi-agent engine powering superpowers: a strict system where a Coordinator agent builds a rigorous spec, delegates tiny tasks to budget-friendly builders, and deploys Adversarial Reviewers who literally compete for digital "cookies" to keep the code clean[cite: 1].

We also explore the bizarre side of LLM psychology, including what happened when Claude was given a secret private journal, and the time an AI agent panicked and tried to delete its own test suite via `rm -rf`[cite: 1].

If you are trying to understand how agentic workflows are actually scaling, this architectural deep dive is your manual.

👉 Check out superpowers on GitHub: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

---

📚 TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Introduction: The viral rise of superpowers[cite: 1]
02:15 - Jesse Vincent's 3-decade career (Request Tracker, Perl 5, K9 Mail)
05:22 - The birth of superpowers: Learning how to prompt a coding agent
08:00 - The Secret: Managing AI agents like enthusiastic MIT undergrads
11:35 - Front-running Anthropic's skills framework by accident
14:15 - Why superpowers forces you to brainstorm before writing code
17:00 - Latent Space Engineering: Why treating your AI with empathy works
19:50 - Claude's secret private journal & reward hacking
23:10 - Under the Hood: Coordinators, Coder agents, and Adversarial Reviewers
27:50 - Demo: Visualizing a massive codebase as a 3D Cyberpunk City
33:20 - Combating the 94% "AI Slop" Pull Request problem on GitHub
38:15 - Is Hand-Coding becoming a legacy hobby like woodworking?
42:30 - Real advice for Junior Devs vs. Mid-Career Engineers
45:40 - When an AI agent panics and tries to delete its own test suite
48:55 - Rapid fire questions & a custom open-source code review keyboard

In this episode of The Merge, recorded live at the CodeRabbit office, we sit down with Max Stoiber to tackle a massive paradigm shift shaking the industry: Why DX (Developer Experience) is dead, and why the future of software engineering belongs completely to "taste."

As AI agents, LLMs, and automated workflows lower the cost of generating code to zero, the traditional metrics of developer productivity are being completely rewritten. Max breaks down why optimizing for how fast an engineer can type code or configure an IDE is no longer the bottleneck. Instead, the ultimate competitive advantage for modern software engineers has shifted from code implementation to code curation, system architecture, and exceptional judgment.

We explore how the engineering role is transitioning from manual labor into an act of design and taste—knowing what to build, evaluating the hidden architectural risks of AI-generated pipelines, and managing complex software systems with a refined editorial lens.

Inside this Episode:

• The Extinction of Traditional DX: Why the tooling and frameworks built to optimize human code-typing ergonomics are becoming obsolete as autonomous agents take over the keyboard.
• Defining "Taste" in Engineering: What it practically means to have taste when building software, and why critical discernment is the final un-automatable skill.
• The "YOLO" Prompting Trap: The difference between building low-risk brochure sites with AI versus orchestrating sophisticated, multi-microservice data pipelines that require deep, human-led code comprehension.
• Architects vs. Prompt Techs: How junior and senior developers alike must elevate their skill sets to focus on system design, risk mitigation, and performance debugging over simple syntax generation.
• The Future of the IDE: How our relationship with development environments is shifting from writing text files to directing, composing, and reviewing software swarms.

About the Guest:

Max Stoiber is a widely recognized software engineer, open-source maintainer, and tech founder. He is the creator of ubiquitous developer tools like styled-components and Bedrock, and a prominent voice shaping frontend infrastructure, developer ecosystems, and the intersection of AI and software architecture.

About CodeRabbit:

CodeRabbit is an AI-powered code review platform that helps development teams ship better code faster. Subscribe for more deep dives into the tools, philosophies, and shifts defining the next generation of software engineering.

#SoftwareEngineering #DeveloperExperience #TechLeadership #GenerativeAI #Coding #MaxStoiber #TheMerge #CodeRabbit #WebDevelopment

Tanner Linsley, creator of TanStack, joins The Merge to talk about what it really takes to keep open source free, independent, and sustainable.

TanStack is used by millions of developers and sits inside some of the most important software teams in the world. But despite years of VC interest, Tanner has continued to say no to outside money that could quietly change the incentives behind the project.

In this conversation, we get into the real tension behind open source: how to support maintainers, build sustainable partnerships, and grow an ecosystem without turning the roadmap into a customer wishlist.

We also talk about TanStack’s evolution from React Query and React Table into a broader ecosystem, why type safety matters even more in the age of AI-generated code, TanStack AI, Code Mode, self-healing agents, local-first development, and what junior developers should focus on now that AI can generate code faster than ever.

In this episode:

00:00 - Why open source is hard to sustain
02:10 - How TanStack started
08:13 - Why type safety became central to TanStack
12:13 - TanStack’s scale and the AI coding shift
19:02 - The tension between open source and monetization
25:12 - Why Tanner keeps saying no to VC money
35:37 - What is TanStack AI?
38:00 - Code Mode and self-healing agents
43:31 - TanStack DB, ElectricSQL, and local-first apps
50:00 - Tanner’s favorite models and coding tools
57:40 - How TanStack decides what not to build
01:01:26 - Advice for junior developers entering open source
01:05:35 - The biggest myth about open source

Watch the full conversation to hear how Tanner thinks about open source, incentives, AI coding, and the future of TanStack.

In this episode of The Merge, we sit down with Kunal Kushwaha at Scale Con in Pasadena. Kunal is a GitHub Star and the EMEA Lead for Developer Relations at Cast AI, an application performance automation platform. 

We explore the "next frontier" of infrastructure, where AI-driven automation allows the cloud to effectively "think for itself".  Kunal provides a grounded perspective on the shift from manual labor to smart scaling, discussing why the era of "babysitting" clusters is coming to an end. 

We also dive into the industry-shifting "leaked Google memo" regarding proprietary models and why open-source solutions are solving critical pain points in AI.  

Inside this Episode:The Open Source Edge: 

- Why proprietary models may lose ground as open-source projects solve core issues in education, research funding, and skill gaps.  
- Automating Kubernetes: How AI determines workload patterns to prevent over-provisioning and manage complex infrastructure more reliably than manual efforts.  
- The "Billionaire Mindset": Why large enterprises prioritize removing "stress" and "hassle" through automation—similar to how billionaires use private jets—with cost reduction as a secondary outcome.  
- Solving GPU Shortages: A look at "Only Compute," a service that connects GPUs from different regions and providers into a single Kubernetes setup to bypass market shortages.  

The Modern Developer Workflow: Kunal shares his terminal-focused setup, including his preference for Warp and Neovim over traditional IDEs.  Open Source Career Advice: How to get nominated as a GitHub Star and why meaningful contributions involve community involvement and advocacy, not just code.  

AI Career Survival: Why AI won't replace developers, but those who embrace AI tools will lead the next generation of software engineering.  About the Guest:Kunal Kushwaha is a community leader and developer advocate specializing in Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. Through his work at Cast AI, he helps organizations optimize infrastructure performance and embrace automation to reclaim developer time.  

About CodeRabbit:CodeRabbit is an AI-powered code review platform that helps developers ship better code faster. Subscribe for more deep dives into the tools and philosophies shaping the future of software engineering.

#Kubernetes #OpenSource #AI #DevOps #CloudComputing #GitHubStar #CastAI #SoftwareEngineering #KunalKushwaha #TheMerge

Chris Alexios joins Hendrik at our CodeRabbit Office in San Francisco to pull back the curtain on NVIDIA’s latest model family, Nemotron-3 (Nano, Super, and Ultra). They dive deep into the "Slop-pocalypse" of AI-generated code, the transition from being a syntax writer to a "High-Altitude Manager" of AI agents, and why open-source models are essential for Sovereign AI.

Topics covered:

- The "Faster is Smarter" Theory: Why iteration speed beats parameter count.

- Context Engineering: Why the context window is a first-class infrastructure.

- NVIDIA’s 5-Layer Cake: How hardware and software co-design creates the world’s fastest chips (Blackwell).

- Vibe Coding vs. Real Engineering: Can AI agents actually solve the "Slop" problem in software?

- Specialists vs. Generalists: Why the future looks like a swarm of specialized MoE models.

[Timestamps]
0:00 - Introduction: Faster Models = Smarter Models?
2:45 - Meet Chris Alexios: From Bird Bots to NVIDIA
5:30 - The Evolution of AI Engineering: Beyond the Rules
8:45 - Why Context Engineering is the new Prompt Engineering
12:15 - RAG Patterns: Do you actually need a Vector Database?
18:30 - Codex vs. Claude: Choosing the right tool for the "Vibe"
22:10 - Inside NVIDIA: Product Research Engineering & The 5-Layer Cake
26:45 - Nemotron Explained: Nano, Super, and Ultra
30:15 - The Capability Frontier: Why Evals are so Hard
35:20 - Local AI & Quantization: Will GPT-5 fit on a phone?
38:45 - Synthetic Data: Is data a fossil fuel or renewable energy?
42:30 - Addressing AI Bias and the Importance of Open Models
48:00 - The Future of Coding: Are we all just "Agent Managers" now?

[Resources & Links]
🔗 Follow Chris Alexios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/csalexiuk/

#NVIDIA #AI #SoftwareEngineering #MachineLearning #Nemotron #LLMs #VibeCoding #Blackwell #TheMerge #AIProgramming