The Stack Overflow Podcast

Two guests for the price of one! This episode has two interviews recorded at AWS re:Invent back in December. In part 1, Ryan chats with the co-founder and CEO of Inception, Stefano Ermon, about diffusion language models and how their multiple token generation compares to traditional LLMs (spoiler: they’re faster and more accurate). In the second half of the episode, Ryan and the chairman of Roomie, Aldo Luevano, dive into Roomie’s purpose built models for both physical and software AI, and how their ROI-first approach helps companies track the impact of their robotics and AI implementation. Epi...

Ryan is joined by Chris Coyier, founder of CSS Tricks and CodePen, to talk all about what the state of the art of CSS is today, including new features like variables and scroll-driven animations. They talk about the importance of accessibility in web design, how the web went from table-based layouts to modern CSS techniques, and exciting developments coming to CodePen 2.0.Episode notes:Chris built CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, and ran it for 15 years, from 2007 to 2022, before selling it to DigitalOcean.CodePen is an online community for frontend developers where...

Ryan welcomes Anthony Vinci, former senior intelligence officer and author of The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, to explore AI’s evolving role in intelligence in places like translation and image analysis, the challenges of evolving modern tech into government infrastructure, and the importance of democratized intelligence so citizens can keep themselves and loved ones safe.Episode notes:The Fourth Intelligence Revolution details how espionage practices are being transformed by a new global intelligence conflict, driven by AI and competition with China, and what everyday citizens can do to defend their privacy. Learn more at Anthony’s webs...

Ryan sits down with Michael Parker, VP of Engineering at TurinTech to discuss the newest kind of tech debt—AI-generated tech debt. They dive into the uneven productivity results of AI tools, how tech teams are evolving their roles and work in response to these massive technological shifts, and what the nervous developer can do to maintain joy in their work. Episode notes: Founded by computer and data scientists from the University College London, TurinTech automates your code optimization so you can deploy better AI models. Preview their new Artemis coding agent for free. Con...

Ryan welcomes Prakash Chandran, CEO and co-founder of Xano, to the show to discuss the intricate relationship between frontend and backend development, the potential challenges that universal frontend interfaces pose for developers, and the importance of understanding both your frontend and your backend when using AI code. Episode notes: Xano is a no-code backend platform that lets you build systems with visual logic, APIs, and modular AI components. Check out their tutorials on YouTube. Connect with Prakash on LinkedIn. User Bruno Bronosky is the winner of today’s shoutout and a Stella...

From the floor at AWS re:Invent, Ryan is joined by AWS Senior Principal Engineer David Yanacek to chat about all things AWS, from the truth behind AWS’s Black Friday origin mythos to the development of essential cloud tools like SQS and DynamoDB. Plus, how David envisions autonomous agents will ease developers' operational burdens.Episode notes:This episode was recorded live at AWS re:Invent. Listen to our other episodes from the floor with the Stack Overflow team and Corey Quinn. Keep up with the latest AWS updates, including what they’re doing...

In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow Chief of Product and Technology Jody Bailey chats with Matt Lyteson, CIO of Technology Platform Transformation at IBM, about the processes and challenges of adopting AI within an enterprise environment. They explore IBM's strategic approach to integrating AI into workflows and emphasise the importance of fostering the right behaviours among employees, particularly regarding automation and AI assistance.The discussion also:Explores what it means for a company like IBM to truly embrace AI, with Lyteson sharing strategies for integrating AI into every workflow to maximize productivity across...

Ryan welcomes back the mighty Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, for a crossover episode about all things vibe coding. They cover the ways it can really improve the software development lifecycle, the importance of keeping human judgement in software so developers can truly understand their code, and how AI can be leveraged as a learning tool…like when Scott vibe coded a simple app over lunch. Episode notes:Scott last sat down with us in 2017 to discuss his journey into tech and his advice for supporting the next generation of developers. Yo...

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 assis...

SPONSORED BY MONGODBPete 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 A...

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 shout...

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 Gorel...

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 abo...

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...

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 Linke...

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 enterp...

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 Link...

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 r...

Ryan is joined by Kayvon Beykpour, CEO and founder of Microscope, to dive into AI-powered code review’s potential for managing large codebases, the need for humans-in-the-loop for reviewing PRs so AI tools can efficiently and effectively debug, and how AI can increase visibility  through summarization at the abstract syntax tree level and high signal-to-noise ratio code reviews.Episode notes:Macroscope helps you understand your code through AI-powered code review, automated PR descriptions, and real-time status reportsConnect with Kayvon on Twitter and LinkedIn.This week’s shoutout goes to user Jespe...

Ryan is joined by Outshift by Cisco’s VP of Engineering Guillaume De Saint Marc to discuss the future of multi-agent architectures as microservices, the challenges and limitations of the infrastructure for these multi-agent systems, and the importance of communication protocols and interoperability in order to build decentralized and scalable architectures. Episode notes:Outshift is Cisco’s tech incubator that pursues emerging technologies like agentic AI, quantum computing, and next-gen infrastructure. Learn more about multi-agent architecture at their open-source collective AGNTCY.Connect with Guillaume on Linkedin. Today we’re shouting out a Socrat...