The home team talks about the current state of the software job market, the changing sentiments around AI job opportunities, the impact of big players like Facebook and OpenAI on the space, and the challenges for startups. Plus: The philosophical implications of LLMs and the friendship potential of corvids.

Ben and Ryan explore why configuration is so complicated, the right to repair, the best programming languages for beginners, how AI is grading exams in Texas, Automattic’s $125M acquisition of Beeper, and why a major US city’s train system still relies on floppy disks. Plus: The unique challenge of keeping up with a field that’s changing as rapidly as GenAI.

SPONSORED BY MONGODB Ben talks with Shane McAllister, lead developer advocate at MongoDB, Stanimira Vlaeva, senior developer advocate at MongoDB, and Miku Jha, director, AI/ML and generative AI at Google Cloud, about the challenges and opportunities of operationalizing and scaling generative AI models in enterprise organizations. They discuss the importance of data quality, the role of cloud providers in simplifying the deployment and management of AI models, and the challenges of...

On this episode: Stack Overflow senior data scientist Michael Geden tells Ryan and Ben about how data scientists evaluate large language models (LLMs) and their output. They cover the challenges involved in evaluating LLMs, how LLMs are being used to evaluate other LLMs, the importance of data validating, the need for human raters, and more needs and tradeoffs involved in selecting and fine-tuning LLMs.

In the wake of the XZ backdoor, Ben and Ryan unpack the security implications of relying on open-source software projects maintained by small teams. They also discuss the open-source nature of Linux, the high cost of education in the US, the value of open-source contributions for job seekers, and what Apple is up to AI-wise.

SPONSORED BY INTEL In this episode, Ben and Ryan are joined by Ria Cheruvu, an AI evangelist at Intel, to discuss the different approaches to incorporating AI models into organizations. They explore the decision tree for choosing between building your own model, delve into the ongoing challenges of maintenance and sustainability, and highlight the importance of optimizing and directing workloads.

The home team convenes to discuss the XZ backdoor attack, what great software engineers have in common, how GenAI is changing the face of drug development, and the rise of managed service providers for AI.

We sit down with Jessica Clark, a senior data scientist at Stack Overflow, to discuss how our company approaches generative AI and data quality. She discusses how we deal with risk mitigation when deploying non-deterministic systems that can produce different varying outputs to identical queries.

The home team is joined by Michael Foree, Stack Overflow’s director of data science and data platform, and occasional cohost Cassidy Williams, CTO at Contenda, for a conversation about long context windows, retrieval-augmented generation, and how Databricks’ new open LLM could change the game for developers. Plus: How will FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentence of 25 years in prison reverberate in the blockchain and crypto spaces?

Ben and Ryan talk about how tiny nations are making huge money from their domain names, the US government’s antitrust case against Apple, the implications of a four-day work week, Reddit’s IPO, and more.

SPONSORED BY DOIT In this episode, Ben and Ryan are joined by Joshua Fox, a senior cloud architect at DoIT, to discuss cloud cost optimization. They explore the importance of controlling and understanding cloud costs, the role of good architecture in cost optimization, and strategies for dealing with surprise costs.

Ben and Ryan are joined by Nick Heudecker, Senior Director of Market Strategy and Competitive Intelligence at Cribl, to discuss the state of data and analytics. They cover GenAI, the role of incumbents vs. startups, challenges of data storage and security, data quality and ETL pipelines, measures of data quality for GenAI, and Cribl’s role in the data and observability space.

Ben and Ryan are joined by Bill Harding, CEO of GitClear, for a discussion of AI-generated code quality and its impact on productivity. GitClear’s research has highlighted the fact that while AI can suggest valid code, it can’t necessarily reuse and modify existing code—a recipe for long-term challenges in maintainability and test coverage if devs are too dependent on AI code-gen tools.

Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno, tells us about his journey into software development and the creation of Node.js. He explains why he started Deno, a new JavaScript runtime. Ryan also introduces JSR, an alternative to NPM, and emphasizes the importance of security in the JavaScript ecosystem. Plus: Thoughts on the future of JavaScript, including the role of TypeScript and bridging the gap between server-side and browser JavaScript.

The home team discusses the challenges (hardware and otherwise) of building AI models at scale, why major players like Meta are open-sourcing their AI projects, what Apple’s recent changes mean for developers in the EU, and Perplexity AI’s new approach to search.

Ben talks with Ryan Polk, Chief Product Officer at Stack Overflow, about our strategic partnership with Google Cloud, the importance of collaboration between AI companies and the Stack Overflow community, and why Stack Overflow’s Q&A format is so suitable for training AI models.

Machine learning scientist, author, and LLM developer Maxime Labonne talks with Ben and Ryan about his role as lead machine learning scientist, his contributions to the open-source community, the value of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and the process of fine-tuning and unfreezing layers in LLMs. The team talks through various challenges and considerations in implementing GenAI, from data quality to integration.

SPONSORED BY INTUIT Ryan and Ben chat with Shivang Shah, Chief Architect, and Jon Fasoli, Chief Design & Product Officer, both of Intuit Mailchimp. Where we talked last time about building their generative AI operating system, this time we talk about implementing it and how all the pieces came together to make a better end user experience.

This is part two of our conversation with Roie Schwaber-Cohen, Staff Developer Advocate at Pinecone, about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and why it’s crucial for the success of your AI initiatives.

On this episode: Roie Schwaber-Cohen, Staff Developer Advocate at Pinecone, joins Ben and Ryan to break down what retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is and why the concept is central to the AI conversation. This is part one of our conversation, so tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion.

Ryan and Ben chat with Raymond Lo, AI software evangelist at Intel, about the AI PC, the software that powers AI breakthroughs, and optimizing hardware and software in unison to improve generative AI performance.

On this episode: Matt Van Itallie, Founder and CEO at Sema, a company that assesses code to improve outcomes for users, companies, and developers. Plus, friend of the show and erstwhile cohost Cassidy Williams joins the conversation.

On this home team episode: Discussions on Stack Overflow is a new feature that allows users to engage in open-ended conversations outside the site’s primary Q&A structure. The team explores deep-cut Stack Exchange questions about the nature of consciousness and the availability of corrective lenses for medieval knights. Plus: The psychology of downvoting and a recent FCC ruling on AI-generated robocalls.

We chat with Andrew Boyagi, Atlassian's Senior Developer Evangelist, about bringing great developer experience to teams and platforms with thousands of engineers. When the software sprawl gets so big you spend more time looking for answers than solving problems, it might be time to try something new.