The Stack Overflow Podcast

Assaf Elovic, Head of AI at monday.com, shares insights on building AI tools people genuinely want to use. He discusses the initial failures of their chatbot and the importance of aligning user expectations with product design. Elovic emphasizes that user adoption outweighs technical perfection and explains how they revamped Monday Sidekick for better user experience. He highlights the potential of autonomous agents and voice technology, discussing how these innovations can enhance productivity while ensuring trust in automated systems.

Benjamin Klieger, the lead engineer at Groq, shares insights on AI agent infrastructure. He discusses the groundbreaking Compound agent that effectively searches the web and executes tasks quickly. Benjamin explains how Groq’s custom LPU hardware allows for lightning-fast inference, transforming a one-minute process into mere seconds. He also touches on the importance of dynamic evals and real-time datasets, critiquing traditional benchmarks for their lack of novelty. Join him as he explores the future of efficient AI agents and the metrics that define their success.

Ramprasad Rai, VP of Platform Engineering at JPMorgan Chase & Co., dives into the challenges of deploying AI in regulated environments. He emphasizes the necessity of community-driven knowledge to ground AI tools, preventing hallucinations that arise from a lack of context. Rai discusses how Stack Overflow's structured Q&A can finely tune AI models and foster trust in generated code. He highlights the importance of active learning loops to maintain institutional expertise and the potential of Stack Overflow as a vital knowledge layer for AI-driven developer tools.

Matias Madou, Co-founder and CTO of Secure Code Warrior, dives into the evolving landscape of AI in coding, emphasizing the critical thinking skills necessary for developers, especially newcomers. He highlights the potential pitfalls of AI-generated code, from common errors to the challenges of understanding AI outputs. Matias stresses the importance of robust training in security and design principles, warning against overreliance on AI that could lead to complacency. The conversation also touches on the changing role of developers as AI democratizes coding, raising new organizational risks.

Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic, dives into the intricacies of modern software systems. He discusses the complexity crisis and the need for engineers to understand lower layers of abstraction. Benders emphasizes the difference between observability and understandability, highlighting AI's dual role in complicating and aiding system management. He advocates for open telemetry for better AI visibility, and stresses the importance of demystifying AI to enhance trust and control in software development.

Ryan chats with Greg Foster, CTO of Graphite, a platform revolutionizing AI-assisted code review. They dive into the trust issues surrounding AI-generated code, emphasizing how it can lower accountability and increase security risks. Greg discusses the dangers of prompt-injection attacks and the importance of readability in code. He advocates for shorter PRs and better tooling to maintain code quality amidst rapid AI changes. Their conversation highlights that, while AI can assist, the role of security engineers remains indispensable.

Deepak Singh, VP of Developer Agents and Experiences at AWS and lead of the Kiro team, shares insights on spec-driven development in AI coding. He explains how AI has evolved from simple autocomplete to sophisticated coding agents that operate on specifications. Deepak highlights the importance of structure in software engineering, showcasing Kiro’s abilities, including project context management and task execution. He also discusses the need for critical thinking in coding education and the future roles of developers in a rapidly changing tech landscape.

Tom Moor, Head of Engineering at Linear, dives into the dynamic world of AI agents in software development. He shares insights on how context enhances agent performance and discusses the balance between AI's hype and practical adoption. Tom highlights how junior developers can leverage AI to improve their skills while collaborating effectively with these tools. He also touches on the importance of creating workflows that allow for iterative feedback and quality improvement, showcasing Linear's innovative integration of agents within team environments.

Spiros Xanthos, CEO of Resolve AI, dives into the transformative role of AI agents in incident management. He discusses how traditional runbooks are becoming outdated and how AI agents can autonomously troubleshoot complex systems, potentially saving up to 70% of engineers' time. Spiros elaborates on agents acting as on-call responders, gathering evidence across various tools, and assisting with the increasing complexity of software systems. He also touches on the evolving role of developers in an AI-driven landscape and offers insights into the future of engineering.

Natalie Rotnov, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Stack Overflow, dives into the insights from the 2025 Developer Survey. She highlights a decline in developer trust towards AI due to frustrations over nearly accurate outputs and time spent debugging. The importance of community validation is emphasized, as 80% of developers still rely on platforms like Stack Overflow. Natalie advises leaders to foster collaborative knowledge-sharing spaces and leverage Retrieval-Augmented Generation to streamline developer workflows amid pervasive tool sprawl.