Ryan is joined by Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, to discuss how AI is a tech renaissance and how these new technologies are affecting the ecommerce world. They cover the development of Sidekick, their new tool, along with the general challenges of building AI tools, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI, and what the future holds for personalized user experiences in ecommerce. 

Episode notes:  

We spoke with Shopify about how they’re building developer-focused AI products last May; you can check it out here. 

Sidekick is Shopify’s new AI assistant that combines commerce knowledge with advanced reasoning. Learn more about how Shopify is using AI agents to evolve their product taxonomy at scale on their blog.

Connect with Vanessa on Twitter. 

Congrats to user Erwin Brandstetter for winning a Great Answer badge for their answer to How to convert empty to null in PostgreSQL?.

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SPONSORED BY MONGODB

Pete Johnson, Field CTO, Artificial Intelligence at MongoDB, joins the podcast to talk about a recent OpenAI paper on the impact that AI will have on jobs and overall GDP. Pete, who reads the papers (and datasets) so you don’t have to, says that looking at AI’s impact as a job killer is a flawed metric. Instead, he and Ryan talk about how AI will be a collaborator for actual human workers, how embeddings and vectorization will move the productivity needle, and the five decisions you need to make to realize ROI on AI. 

Episode notes:

If you’re curious, read the OpenAI blog post and paper yourself. 

For those of you looking for inspiration, check out Werner Vogel’s keynote from re:Invent 2025. 

MongoDB provides a flexible and dynamic database that excels with AI data. 

Connect with Pete on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Populist badge winner Scheff's Cat for dropping a banger of an answer on error: non-const static data member must be initialized out of line.

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Ryan hosts Akamai data scientist Robert Lester on the show to discuss how the growth of AI bots affects internet traffic, the ways these AI bots differ from the original search engine optimization ones, and why you might not want to mitigate AI bots on your websites.

Episode notes:

Akamai is a CDN, full-stack cloud computing, and cybersecurity company that keeps experiences closer to users and threats further away using the world’s most distributed compute platform. 

Connect with Robert on LinkedIn and check out his AI Pulse blogs.

Today’s shoutout goes to user Evan Phoenix for winning a Populist badge for their answer to llvm ir back to human-readable source language?.

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Ryan sits down with Tom Totenberg, head of release automation at LaunchDarkly, to discuss the perils of taking too many shortcuts in software development, how business pressures and AI code tools have contributed to dangerous corner cutting, and the importance of balancing speed with sustainability to maintain system integrity. 

Episode notes: 

LaunchDarkly is a feature management and experimentation platform that allows you to decouple software feature rollouts from code deployment so you can manage features safely and securely.

Connect with Tom on Linkedin. 

This episode’s shoutout goes to user Boris Gorelik, who won a Great Question badge for asking Removing handlers from python's logging loggers. 

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MIT and Stanford professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland joins the show to explore the power of communities for shared knowledge and how AI could hurt or help the growth of these communities. Ryan and Sandy dive into the findings from Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI, the ethical implications of rapidly advancing technology, and AI’s potential to foster community dialogue and decision-making. 

Episode notes:

Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI explores how we can build a flourishing society by using what we know about human nature to design our technology—rather than letting technology shape our society.

Connect with Sandy on Linkedin. Check out the work he’s doing with AI at deliberation.io and Loyal Agents.

Congratulations to user Harshal for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to start search only when user stops typing?

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Ryan sits down with Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, to talk about getting your virtual machines and Kubernetes to play nice in cloud-native environments, why VMs are still relevant in enterprise applications, and how AI can help modernize legacy systems. 

Episode notes: 

Nutanix combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking so you can run applications and manage data across on-premises datacenters, public clouds, and edge locations all on one platform. 

Connect with Dan on Linkedin and Bluesky.

Congrats to Necromancer badge winner David Ferenczy Rogožan! They won the badge on their answer to Where does adb shell mkdir create directories.

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Ryan welcomes Anil Dash, writer and former Stack Overflow board member, back to the show to discuss how AI is not a magical technology, but rather the normal next step in computing’s evolution. They explore the importance of democratizing access to technology, the unique challenges that LLMs’ non-determinism poses, and how developers can keep Stack Overflow’s ethos of community alive in a world of AI. 

Episode notes: 

Anil is a tech entrepreneur (former CEO at our sister company Fog Creek Software) and writer. You can find him at his blog anildash.com and on Linkedin. 

Check out the last time Anil was on the pod in 2020 to talk all things Glitch and Glimmer. 

Shoutout to user pgrad for winning a Lifejacket badge on their answer to Using type hint Any in Django - NameError: name 'Any' is not defined.

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Ryan sits down with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, at AWS re:Invent to get Corey’s patented snarky take on all the happenings from the conference. They discuss whether the AI agent hype is supported by actual buyers, how startups are faring as AWS focuses on large enterprises, and how many of the new technologies coming out this year will actually be transformative. 

Episode notes:

This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events on our blog. 

Duckbill provides financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.

Connect with Corey on Linkedin and subscribe to his newsletter Last Week in AWS.

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Ryan is joined by Stack Overflow’s CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and Director of Data Science Michael Foree on the floor at re:Invent to discuss all they’ve seen and heard at the event, from the future of AI agents to the trust issues the enterprise has around AI and the impact of AI and robotics on the job market.

Episode Notes:

This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events from the floor on our blog. 

Connect with Prashanth on LinkedIn.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.

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Ryan talks with Wesley Yu, head of engineering at Metalab, about the evolution of interfaces in technology, the pressure that UI generated on the fly would put on your backend systems, and why AI is just the latest and fanciest in a long line of CRUD apps. 

Episode notes:

Metalab designs interfaces for top brands around the world, helping them design, build, and ship their products.

Connect with Wesley on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Congrats to Populist badge winner SiddAjmera, who won the badge for their answer to Angular FormControl check if required.

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