The Stack Overflow Podcast

Ryan welcomes Saahil Jain, CTO of You.com, to discuss why building agents with a 2024 mindset is a mistake as modern models improve at long-horizon tasks, why heavy orchestration layers can hurt model performance more than help it, and why the 2026 competitive edge actually comes from information retrieval and unique data paired with end-to-end evaluation. 

Episode notes: 

You.com is an AI-powered search and productivity engine helping enterprises find information, create content, and automate complex tasks using web search APIs, multi-model AI access, and agentic intelligence. 

Connect with Saahil on LinkedIn or reach out to him at  [email protected]. 

Today’s shoutout goes to user knittl for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Remove all null values.

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Ryan welcomes Benny Chen, co-founder of Fireworks AI, to the show to explore what actually makes an AI application good or not, how to balance qualitative signals with quantitative metrics when evaluating AI, and how open-source eval protocols and community efforts are setting the standard for AI evaluation. 

Episode notes: 

Fireworks AI is a cloud platform designed for developers and enterprises to run, customize, and scale open-source generative AI models. 

Connect with Benny on LinkedIn.

Congrats to user techtabu for winning a Stellar Answer badge for answering How can I delete all local Docker images?.

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Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of engineering at Snowflake, joins Leaders of Code at Snowflake Summit to break down the five-stage framework his org used to go from "let chaos reign" to a repeatable, org-wide system for AI-assisted engineering.

Vivek explains how Snowflake systematically rolled out coding agents across its engineering org — starting with unrestricted experimentation, then codifying what worked into a shared vocabulary of 14 "AI design patterns," from plan-in-English to fencing off parallel agents to reducing on-call toil through continuously updated skills. Vivek walks through the "inner loop" and "outer loop" of software development, explains Snowflake's internal Yegge scale for measuring how far engineers have progressed along that continuum, and shares how a three-person team used coding agents to deliver a 40x improvement on Snowflake's query compiler.

The discussion also:

• Breaks down Snowflake's "focus weeks," where engineers get dedicated time to either catch up on best practices or push the frontier further.
• Explores the pioneers/settlers/skeptics framework for meeting engineers where they are in adopting AI tools, and why the shift can trigger something like the stages of grief.
• Covers how Snowflake cut release validation time from 15 days to a single day, and why more automated testing hasn't come at the cost of production stability.
• Looks ahead to a four-step maturity model for on-call and incident response, where agents may eventually take primary on-call duty.

Connect with Vivek Raghunathan on LinkedIn.

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Ryan sits down with Frank Portman, CTO at Yobi, to talk about why next-token prediction, though great for language, isn’t the right inductive bias for forecasting human behavior. They discuss how Yobi builds a “foundation model of behavior” using transformers and graph neural networks instead of chat-style LLMs, and what it takes to run millions of personalization decisions per second while keeping consumer data private.

Episode notes:

Yobi is a behavioral AI company building foundation models that predict future behavior for ad tech, marketing, and more.

Connect with Frank via fportman.com or at yobi.ai.

Congrats to Hooked on winning a Populist badge for their answer to Removing whitespace around a saved image.

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Ryan sits down with Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal, to chat about why AI coding agents have made writing code easier but running it safely in production harder, why production failures are really caused by interactions between systems and not just the code itself, and how teams can troubleshoot more effectively when traditional observability tools are not enough for agentic AI workflows.

Episode notes: 

Traversal is an AI-powered autonomous SRE for complex software systems with automatic triage alerts, root cause investigation, and incident prevention at petabyte scale. 

Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or reach out to him at  [email protected]. 

Our sixteenth Annual Developer Survey is now open and we want to hear your thoughts on all things software. Take the survey now!

Congrats to user aioobe on winning a Populist badge for their answer to Javascript a=b=c statements.

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Ryan is joined by  Jeffrey Hightower, VP of Places Data at Microsoft, and Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation, to chat about their partnership in bringing spatial data to the next generation of Microsoft tools; how Overture’s 50 organization members are creating open, standardized, and interoperable  global spatial data sets; and their solutions to the innate challenges of trying to digitally map the world. 

Episode notes: 

The Overture Maps Foundation is a free, open, and collaborative spatial data platform creating reliable and interoperable map data infrastructure. Microsoft is a founding member and part of Overture’s Steering committee. 

Connect with Amy on LinkedIn.

Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to user Cesar Canassa for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Slicing a dictionary.

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Ryan welcomes Cricket Liu, DNS expert and Chief Evangelist at Infoblox, to the show to talk all things DNS. They cover the evolution of one of the oldest DNS server implementations, BIND, and what the future holds for protected DNS configurations; the realities of security threats like DDoS and DNS spoofing; and why outages often trace back to a lack of understanding of DNS’s fundamental role. 

Episode notes:

Infoblox is a cloud-managed network services platform for core networking, combining automated infrastructure management and real-time threat intelligence.

You think this is a lot about DNS? Cricket wrote several books about it. 

Connect with Cricket on LinkedIn or email him at  [email protected]. 

Congrats to user Johannes Schaub - litb for winning a Populist badge for their answer to How do i check if a file is a regular file?.

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Recorded live at the AI Agent Conference, Ryan sits down with Apollo GraphQL CEO Matt DeBerglis to discuss how enterprises can leverage GraphQL and MCP as a structured semantic architecture to feed clean data to autonomous agents, safeguard internal microservices against unprecedented "east-west" data exfiltration risks, and rein in skyrocketing token spend by explicitly querying only the exact context required.

Episode notes: 

Apollo GraphQL lets you orchestrate APIs with a composable, declarative, self-service model. Apollo's MCP Server is now available.

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.

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Ryan welcomes Trisha Gee, a Java champion and developer productivity advocate, to explore how AI is transforming the role of IDEs and the broader developer experience; the relevance of traditional tools, muscle memory, the risks of hype; and how to adapt workflows for AI-driven development.

Episode notes:

Trisha Gee is a developer advocate and Java champion with over 20 years of software experience. 

Connect with Trisha on LinkedIn and X.

Congrats to user citelao for winning a Famous Question Badge for their question VS Code SSH keeps dropping connections, but I can SSH just fine.

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On this episode of Leaders of Code, Eric Anderson, director of engineering at Intuit, joins Stack Overflow engineering director Ben Matthews to talk about what happens to software teams when AI makes code generation seemingly free.

Eric explains how Intuit rolled out Claude Code across the entire organization, why PMs are now merging their own PRs, and what it means for engineering culture when product/engineering roles start to converge. Eric and Ben unpack the engineering skills that matter most in an AI-first industry and why the work of developing junior talent has gotten harder.

Eric also shares how he personally uses AI to manage his inbox, synthesize specs, and run promotion processes (but why he stopped letting it send emails on his behalf). 

Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.

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