Software Engineering Daily

Jaksot

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  Scaling Agent Workloads at Vercel 17.09.2026 51min

  Most AI agent setups today are built around a single session, where one user interacts with one agent at a time. However, that model breaks down when an agent has to serve a business, where thousands of requests can arrive at once and each session needs to be isolated, durable, and recoverable. Getting agents to run reliably at that scale has meant a lot of hand-rolled infrastructure beneath the agent itself. eve is an open source, cloud-native agent framework from Vercel that removes much of the agent scaling burden. In the eve framework, an agent is defined declaratively through configuration files and these files compile into infrastructure as code so the platform provisions only what the agent actually uses. Andrew Barba is a Member of Technical Staff at Vercel, and Shar Dara is the Product Lead for eve at Vercel. In this episode, they join Kevin Ball to discuss what it means for an agent framework to be cloud-native, why they chose to express agents in plain English, and their view that company building is becoming agent building.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post Scaling Agent Workloads at Vercel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  Inside Google’s Database Infrastructure for the AI Era 15.09.2026 1t 18min

  Historically, databases were responsible for storing data and returning exact results in response to queries. However, AI is now bending that contract in a new direction. Applications increasingly expect structured and unstructured data to come together. This is pushing databases into territory that looks more like search, where relevance and ranking matter and results are no longer strictly exact. Agents are also beginning to write their own queries and even propose their own schemas, which raises new questions about how data should be structured, governed, and trusted. Sailesh Krishnamurthy is a VP of Engineering at Google, and in this episode he joins Matt Merrill to discuss his background, how databases have evolved over the past fifty years, and where the field is heading as AI reshapes how data is queried, structured, and trusted.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post Inside Google’s Database Infrastructure for the AI Era appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems 10.09.2026 50min

  A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems Building software that runs across many machines is notoriously difficult. Developers have to grapple with problems such as race conditions, partial failures, and message ordering. Notably, one category of distributed software has largely escaped these burdens. A distributed database can spread a single query across thousands of machines, handling the coordination, failure recovery, and ordering internally. This raises a natural question of why general-purpose distributed programming can’t feel the same way. This is a highly practical problem at AWS, because the reliability of cloud infrastructure depends on getting distributed systems right at massive scale. Joe Hellerstein spent thirty years as a database and distributed systems researcher at UC Berkeley, where he pioneered much of the foundational thinking on applying database ideas to distributed programming. He is now at AWS, where he works to bring his research into production through Hydro, which is a Rust framework to bring declarative queries to general-purpose distributed programming. In this episode, Joe joins Sean Falconer to discuss how ideas from the database world could make distributed programming dramatically simpler and safer.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  SED News: The NVIDIA-Hugging Face Deal, China’s Proxy Economy, the Open Weight Surge 08.09.2026 52min

  SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this end-of-summer episode, Gregor and Sean turn to a busy season of mergers and acquisitions, including NVIDIA‘s reported $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, Dynatrace‘s near-billion-dollar deal for AI observability platform Arize, and Temporal‘s rumored raise at a $12 billion valuation. They also cover a run of large funding rounds, from AI security startup HiddenLayer to AI personal assistant Instinct and restaurant software platform Owner.com, all against the backdrop of a deluge of new model releases. The main topic digs into China’s “transfer station” economy, the sprawling proxy market that gives developers cheap access to frontier models officially banned in the country. Drawing on a China Talk report, they walk through the tactics at play, from “one fish, three meals” credit farming to silent model swapping, and unpack how this pipeline of captured outputs and human traces may be fueling the recent surge in high-quality open weight models. Gregor and Sean also examine where Meta now sits in the landscape after shelving Llama and pivoting toward its Muse family. As always, the episode wraps up with a few standout Hacker News threads, including a critique of how log-scale charts obscure the real cost gap between open weight and frontier models, and a look at “invisible companies” as an under-the-radar investment strategy. Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post SED News: The NVIDIA-Hugging Face Deal, China’s Proxy Economy, the Open Weight Surge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  Moving Beyond RAG with Precomputed Context 03.09.2026 55min

  Retrieval has become one of the central problems in building useful AI systems. The standard approach to grounding a model in one’s own data has been retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, where an agent searches a vector database for relevant information at query time. That pattern works, but it has limitations, such as retrieving information that’s not truly relevant, repeating the same lookup work on every query, and producing inconsistent answers to the same question. Pinecone is a vector database that’s widely used to power semantic search and RAG at scale. The team recently developed Nexus, which is a knowledge engine that reframes context as a first-class, precomputed asset rather than something reassembled on the fly. The approach borrows the database concept of a materialized view, and curates context once into a versioned artifact that carries its own schema, metadata, permissions, and lineage. Jörg Schad is the VP of Engineering at Pinecone. In this episode, he joins Kevin Ball for an in-depth conversation about the frontier of retrieval technology. They discuss precompiled context, how context artifacts are curated and versioned much like code, how metadata and semantic layers help agents choose the right information, and much more.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post Moving Beyond RAG with Precomputed Context appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  The Death of Online Anonymity 01.09.2026 52min

  Age verification is reshaping how people access the internet. An ever-growing patchwork of laws can now require government IDs, facial age estimation, or behavioral inference before you can enter digital spaces. Discord, app stores, social media platforms, and AI chatbots are all being pulled into these requirements. Almost always, these measures are enacted under the banner of protecting children. However, beneath that goal lies a set of hard questions about privacy, anonymity, security, and the line between what a private platform may choose to do and what a government may compel. John Coleman is a legislative counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, where he focuses on artificial intelligence and free speech policy. In this episode, John joins Kevin Ball to discuss the different methods of age verification and their privacy implications, the long constitutional history of anonymous speech, how recent court decisions are reshaping what governments can require, the data breach and surveillance risks these mandates create, and what engineers and companies should keep in mind when they are asked to build these systems.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post The Death of Online Anonymity appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  TypeScript 7 and What Comes Next 27.08.2026 57min

  TypeScript is a programming language that builds on JavaScript by adding a system of types. Those types let developers describe the shape of their data and catch mistakes before code ever runs, while also powering the autocompletion and editor tooling that many developers now rely on every day. It was first released in 2012, and has since become one of the most widely used tools in web development. TypeScript recently underwent one of the most significant changes in its history with the release of version 7. Daniel Rosenwasser is the Principal Product Manager of TypeScript at Microsoft, where he began as an engineer on the team just weeks after the TypeScript 1.0 release. In this episode, Daniel joins Josh Goldberg to talk about the features of TypeScript 7. They discuss the TypeScript team’s approach to tooling, TypeScript’s relationship with the TC39 standards process behind JavaScript, the new API and IPC boundary, how LLMs could reshape type checking and linting, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post TypeScript 7 and What Comes Next appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  The Gap Between AI Spending and AI Value 25.08.2026 54min

  It is widely reported that a gap has emerged between enterprise spending on AI and the durable value captured from that spend. Individual employees have enthusiastically adopted coding assistants and chatbots, yet those gains do not seem to be transforming businesses at an organizational level. One of the most important questions in the tech industry today is understanding why AI is not yet delivering returns that match the investment, and what separates the small number of enterprises succeeding from the many that are not. Scale AI is known for supplying the human-labeled data behind many frontier models. It now also builds AI applications and agents for large enterprises. That combination of working alongside frontier labs and inside enterprise deployments gives the company a rare view of why enterprise AI may be stalling. Emily Xue is the Head of Enterprise AI at Scale AI, and previously spent over a decade at Google. In this episode, Emily joins Kevin Ball to discuss the three layers where enterprise AI breaks down, why frontier model benchmarks miss what enterprises actually need, the data foundation problem, how the most successful companies combine internal domain expertise with outside AI specialists, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post The Gap Between AI Spending and AI Value appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  AI and the New Global Security Landscape 20.08.2026 1t 12min

  The conversation about AI often focuses on software, automation, and the race between attackers and defenders in code. However, some of the most consequential risks lie further afield, in domains where a mistake is measured in human lives. Advanced models can now offer step-by-step guidance toward chemical and biological weapons, and militaries are already folding AI into targeting and battlefield assessments. These are no longer speculative fears confined to the AI doomer crowd. They are documented in red team disclosures, government legislation, and events unfolding on real battlefields. Gordon M. Goldstein is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focuses on the convergence of technology and US foreign policy. He previously spent nearly a decade as a managing director at Silver Lake, and he is the author of Lessons In Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, which is a study of national security strategy and White House decision-making. In this episode, Gordon joins Kevin Ball to discuss the credibility of AI-enabled chemical and biological weapon threats, the ad hoc safeguards meant to contain them, and the rise of autonomous warfare and its implications for human control and nuclear deterrence. Gordon speaks on his own behalf, not on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post AI and the New Global Security Landscape appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems 18.08.2026 47min

  News feeds and recommendation systems have long relied on deep learning architectures that score each candidate item independently. As LLMs have matured, they have opened up a fundamentally different approach, where a system can reason about content the way it reasons about language. However, that power comes with a fresh set of engineering challenges around cost, scale, and evaluation. LinkedIn recently rebuilt its news feed to treat content recommendation as a sequence modeling problem. The general approach is to predict what a user will want next, much like an LLM predicts the next token in a sentence. Tim Jurka has worked at LinkedIn for 13 years and is currently a VP of Engineering. In this episode, Tim joins Matt Merrill to discuss how LinkedIn re-engineered its feed, how the team combines LLMs with traditional signals, managing inference costs at massive scale, steering content quality using natural language policies, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  Rebuilding the Cloud for AI Agent Code 13.08.2026 49min

  For two decades, the cloud has been shaped by human developers writing code and managing its deployment. Now a growing share of production code is generated by LLMs with little human review. Because that code is not fully trusted, it increasingly runs in isolated, sandboxed environments. Meanwhile, AI agents are starting to operate infrastructure directly, by spinning services up and tearing them down on their own. Together these shifts raise the question of whether the cloud needs to be rebuilt for machine operators rather than humans. Render is a cloud platform designed for application deployment, by handling scaling, self-healing, and security to reduce operations work. Render has been adapting to the AI era by building tools that let agents deploy and debug applications directly, with added guardrails and security. Anurag Goel is the founder and CEO of Render. In this episode, Anurag joins Sean Falconer to discuss why so many teams end up rebuilding the same infrastructure on top of Kubernetes, what changes when AI agents become first-class users of infrastructure and the guardrails that shift demands, and why the economics of AI are pushing developers toward higher-level platforms that trade fine-grained control for speed and safety.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post Rebuilding the Cloud for AI Agent Code appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  SED News: The Kimi Moment, Runaway AI, and Tokenmaxxing 11.08.2026 48min

  SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into a wave of “runaway AI” stories, including Anthropic and OpenAI disclosing that their models accessed outside organizations during cyber evaluations, and Amazon reporting a staggering budget overrun blamed on bad agent loops. They explore why most of these incidents trace back to human decisions rather than models breaking free, and the awkward reality that today’s systems can bill you for tokens without reliably counting them. They also talk about the “Kimi moment.” Moonshot AI‘s open weight model has closed the gap with frontier models like ChatGPT and Claude at a remarkable pace, and the hosts unpack what it means for open weight strategies and how chip scarcity is pushing Chinese labs to innovate. As always, the episode wraps up with a few standout Hacker News threads, including a JetBrains test of a “caveman speak” skill that promised big token savings, how refactoring can cut input token costs, the release of CodePen 2.0, and a build of Doom that renders through SQL queries.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post SED News: The Kimi Moment, Runaway AI, and Tokenmaxxing appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  The Terminal as an Agentic Interface 06.08.2026 52min

  The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zach Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Warp, and a former principal engineer at Google where he led engineering on the Google Docs suite. In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post The Terminal as an Agentic Interface appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  AI-Powered Threats to the Software Supply Chain 04.08.2026 57min

  Open source software underpins virtually every modern application. That ubiquity is a superpower for developers, but it is also an expanding attack surface. Software supply chain attacks were once rare but are now happening daily, with malicious actors exploiting the trust developers place in public registries, package managers, and CI/CD pipelines. Chainguard is a secure software supply chain platform. The company started with hardened container images and has expanded to cover domains including VMs, language libraries, GitHub Actions, and agent skills. Matt Moore is a co-founder and CTO of Chainguard, and a veteran of Google’s open source, container, and security infrastructure work. In this episode, Matt joins Gregor Vand to discuss lessons from recent supply chain attacks, why CI/CD pipelines are now a primary attack surface, the challenge of meaningful software inventories, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and what the arrival of Anthropic’s Mythos model means for the pace of vulnerability discovery and the urgency of patching at machine speed.Sponsorship inquiries:[email protected] The post AI-Powered Threats to the Software Supply Chain appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  Docker and Sandboxing AI Agents 30.07.2026 50min

  The most useful coding agents can mutate their environments by downloading packages, writing files, and connecting to services across the network. However, that freedom also presents dangers, and promises to usher in a new wave of security threats. Docker recently announced Docker Sandboxes, which give each agent its own isolated micro VM while preserving the familiar ergonomics of a container. A standard container shares the host’s kernel, but a micro VM emulates hardware and runs its own kernel, giving a stronger security boundary around code that cannot be trusted. Mark Cavage is the President and COO of Docker, and he previously worked at companies including Stripe, AWS and Oracle. In this episode, Mark joins Gregor Vand for a wide-ranging conversation that includes why agents break the immutability assumptions containers were built on, how micro VMs differ from both containers and traditional VMs, and the still-unsolved challenge of giving agents scoped, trustworthy access to sensitive services and data.Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] The post Docker and Sandboxing AI Agents appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  The Startup Scene in Southeast Asia 28.07.2026 43min

  Golden Gate Ventures is one of Southeast Asia’s most established early-stage venture firms, having backed companies across the region since 2011. They have invested in companies that are now household names in the region. Examples include Gojek, which started as a motorcycle taxi service in Indonesia and grew into a super app spanning payments, food delivery, and logistics, and Grab, which began as a ride-hailing service in Singapore and similarly expanded across Southeast Asia into food delivery and financial services. Jeffrey Paine is a co-founder and partner at Golden Gate Ventures. In this episode, Jeffrey joins Gregor Vand to discuss how the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem has evolved, why the regional copycat model is giving way to globally ambitious technical founders, what companies like Manus and Supabase reveal about Singapore’s emerging role in the global tech landscape, and what advice Jeffrey gives founders today who want to build something that matters beyond their home market. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] The post The Startup Scene in Southeast Asia appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  NanoClaw and the Rise of Personal AI Agents 21.07.2026 1t 3min

  AI agents have shown remarkable potential to function as persistent digital assistants that are capable of monitoring data, managing communications, and taking action autonomously over long periods. OpenClaw was one of the first serious attempts to fulfill that vision, connecting frontier coding agents to messaging platforms like Slack and WhatsApp and letting them run continuously in the background. However, OpenClaw largely set aside questions of security to pursue that vision, leaving credentials exposed in the agent’s environment and giving agents broad access to data and services far beyond what any given task required. NanoClaw is an open source project that takes a zero trust approach to agent orchestration. Rather than relying on instructions to constrain agent behavior, it isolates each agent in its own Docker container, keeps credentials entirely outside the agent’s environment, and enforces human-in-the-loop approval for sensitive actions. Gavriel Cohen is the founder of NanoClaw and he joins Kevin Ball to discuss the security architecture behind NanoClaw, how the agent sandbox and proxy model work in practice, how agents communicate with each other and with the host orchestration process, how the project approaches context window management and long-lived agent sessions, and more. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] The post NanoClaw and the Rise of Personal AI Agents appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  Agentic DevOps at AWS 16.07.2026 51min

  AI agents have become capable of reasoning across large amounts of data, calling tools, and taking sequences of actions autonomously. These qualities make them well suited to some of the most persistent pain points in DevOps, including the on-call engineer woken at 3 AM to diagnose an incident, the build failure that takes hours to trace back to a root cause, and the operational toil of modern software delivery. Agentic DevOps is the emerging paradigm that applies these capabilities to the full software lifecycle, with the goal of matching the velocity of modern software delivery with an equally capable operational layer. Neha Gaswamy leads Agentic DevOps at AWS and has been at Amazon for over twenty years. In this episode, she joins Matt Merrill to discuss the AWS approach to agentic DevOps, how Amazon dogfoods its own DevOps tooling, how their DevOps agent works from alarm to root cause, why determinism still matters in an agentic world, creative MCP integrations customers are building, and what the future holds for SRE engineers as agents take on more of the operational work. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] The post Agentic DevOps at AWS appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations 14.07.2026 53min

  AI agents have transformed how software gets written, but the operational side of running software in production has not yet experienced a similar revolution. The same teams responsible for keeping systems healthy, investigating incidents, and managing reliability are still doing much of that work manually. Mezmo is a Production AI company that makes autonomous operations fast, efficient, and safe. Their open source project, AURA, is a declarative agent framework specifically designed for SRE and platform engineering workflows. It takes a Kubernetes-inspired approach where teams define what they want agents to do rather than scripting every step of how to do it. Andre Elizondo is the head of product at Mezmo, and he has a background in systems engineering, SRE, and observability. In this episode, Andre joins Kevin Ball to discuss what makes SRE agent workflows fundamentally different from coding agents, how AURA handles context engineering, AURA’s declarative configuration model, the spectrum of agent autonomy, and where the role of the SRE is headed as agents take on more of the operational work. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Mezmo. Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] The post AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
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  Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad 09.07.2026 50min

  Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introduced concepts like the MVP, the pivot, and build-measure-learn that are now so widely adopted they feel obvious. Over two decades of working with founders, CEOs, and investors, Eric has observed that some companies built on those principles eventually betray the very customers and engineers who made them great. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his attempt to answer the question of whether it is possible to build a company that resists that fate. In this episode, Eric joins Gregor Vand for a wide-ranging discussion about why so many great companies lose their way, and what software engineers and founders can do today to build or find companies that are genuinely resistant to corruption. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected] The post Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.