The Stack Overflow Podcast

Observability and human intuition in an AI world

Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 -0000

In this two for one episode recorded at HumanX, Ryan is first joined by Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, to discuss how AI compresses the software development lifecycle, making observability about capturing the right telemetry. Then, Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, shares with us how AI coding increases code volume but decreases human intuition, making production operations harder than ever.

Episode notes:

Honeycomb is an observability platform that enables deep, high-dimensional exploration so you can debug unpredictable behavior with precision.

Resolve AI allows you to resolve incidents, optimize costs, and code with production context using AI that works across your code, infrastructure, and telemetry.

Connect with Christine on LinkedIn.

Connect with Spiros on LinkedIn.

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How Braze’s CTO is rethinking engineering for the agentic area

Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 -0000

Jon Hyman, co-founder and CTO of Braze, joins Stack Overflow CPTO Jody Bailey on Leaders of Code to share how he's led the company's engineering organization over nearly 15 years of growth — and how they transformed into an AI-first team in just a few months.

Jon explains some pivotal moments where his thinking shifted (watching his team ship an MCP server six weeks ahead of schedule will do that!) and talks candidly about the cultural and practical challenges of driving adoption across a 300-person engineering org. He explains how model quality, not mandates, was the key factor in winning over skeptics, and why over 60% of Braze's committed code is now AI-generated.

Jon also addresses the harder questions: how to measure AI's real business value, the surprisingly steep cost of inference at scale, why "vibe-coding your way to scale" is folly, and what comes next as autonomous agents start building features overnight.

Connect with Jon on LinkedIn.

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Connecting the dots for accurate AI

Tue, 12 May 2026 04:00:00 -0000

At HumanX, Ryan is joined by Philip Rathle, CTO at Neo4j to discuss what knowledge context means for AI agents, how limitations like stale training data make the model-only approach to agents a bad fit for enterprise environments, and how Graph RAG raises the bar for accuracy and reduces context rot by combining vectors with a knowledge graph so agents are more targeted and connected.

Episode notes:

Neo4j is a native graph database management system designed to handle complex, highly-connected data by focusing on relationships rather than tables. You can try it out for free on Aura and learn more at their Graph Academy.

Connect with Philip on LinkedIn.

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AI giveth and AI taketh CPU

Fri, 08 May 2026 04:00:00 -0000

Recorded on the floor of HumanX, Ryan is joined by AMD CTO Mark Papermaster to discuss AMD’s silicon strategy for AI borne of their long history of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing, how chipmakers are dealing the wide range of AI workloads from training to inference, and the paradox of agents both eating up all the compute and helping AMD accelerate chip innovation.

Episode notes:

Want to learn more about the topics Mark and Ryan discussed in this episode? Check out the AMD Advanced Insights podcast, a monthly show hosted by Mark.

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn.

TRANSCRIPT

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What (un)exactly do you mean by semantic search?

Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 -0000

Ryan welcomes Bryan O’Grady, Head of Field Research and Solutions Architecture at Qdrant, to discuss the differences between traditional text search engines powered by Lucene and modern vector databases, when vector search’s exact-match needs work for things like logs and security analytics and when semantic search works for user-facing discovery and non-exact results, and how Qdrant is growing into video embeddings and local-agent contexts.

Episode notes:

Qdrant offers high-performance vector search at scale with any deployment model.

Connect with Brian on LinkedIn or email the Qdrant team at support@qdrant.io.

Congratulations to user Brad Larson for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Find the tangent of a point on a cubic bezier curve.

TRANSCRIPT

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Time is a construct but it can still break your software

Fri, 01 May 2026 04:00:00 -0000

Ryan welcomes Jason Williams, senior software engineer at Bloomberg and the creator of Rust-based JavaScript engine Boa, to the show to dive into why date and time handling in JavaScript is so difficult and how the Temporal proposal aims to fix it. They explore the current flaws and issues in JavaScript that make the Date object so hard to work with, how libraries like Moment.js helped but eventually became too complex themselves, and why the Temporal proposal took nine years to complete.

Episode notes:

Temporal is a new TC39 proposed standard for JavaScript that replaces the Date object. It operates as a top-level namespace and brings a modern date/time API to the ECMAScript language.

Connect with Jason on Bluesky or at his website.

Congrats to Great Answer badge winner BrenBarn, who won the badge for their answer to rethrowing python exception. Which to catch?.

TRANSCRIPT

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Your LLM issues are really data issues

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0000

Ryan welcomes Harsha Chintalapani, co-founder and CTO at Collate and co-creator of Open Metadata, to the show to discuss why AI and LLMs struggle with real-time, structured production data. They explore how schema changes, inconsistent definitions (like “customer”), and weak governance can break both your analytics and MLs, and what companies can do to get their data AI-ready, from metadata management to observability.

Episode Notes:

Collate is a semantic intelligence platform built on a semantic metadata graph for discovery, governance, and AI observability across your data ecosystem.

Connect with Harsha on LinkedIn.

Congrats to user buttonsrtoys, who won a Famous Question badge for their question Possible to edit PDF without embedded font installed?.

TRANSCRIPT

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Lights, camera, open source!

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0000

Ryan is joined on the show by Cult.Repo producers Emma Tracey and Josiah Mcgarvie to discuss making documentaries about open-source software and the people behind the major technologies that uphold the internet. They explore why open-source projects and the people who maintain them are such interesting stories for audiences, how being outsiders has helped them tell these community stories, and what they see as the common stressors that plague all open-source projects, such as sustainability, compensation, and burnout.

Episode notes:

Cult.Repo produces documentaries and shorts about the human stories behind open-source technology. Check out their filmography on their YouTube channel.

Have an idea for an open-source community they should cover? Email the Cult.Repo team at hello@cultrepo.com.

Shoutout to user kiranvj for winning a Populist badge for their answer to What is a good way to automatically bind JS class methods?.

TRANSCRIPT

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How to get multiple agents to play nice at scale

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0000

We still need developer communities

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0000

Ryan welcomes Mike Swift, co-founder and CEO of Major League Hacking, to the show to chat about the never-ending need for software developer communities and entry points into programming; MLH’s recent acquisition of DEV and how they’re creating a place for shared knowledge, building, and publishing; and why now is the best time to be both an artisan and a builder in a world with AI software development tools.

Episode notes:

Major League Hacking is a 500k+ global member community that hosts hackathons and open-source fellowships for the next generation of developers. They recently acquired DEV, an online community for 3M+ developers to learn and share together.

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn or email him at swift@mlh.i o.

Congrats to Stellar Answer badge winner Antony Hatchkins for getting over a hundred saves on their answer to Git replacing LF with CRLF.

TRANSCRIPT

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