Podcast

The AI Native Dev - from Copilot today to AI Native Software Development tomorrow

Technology

Welcome to The AI Native Developer, hosted by Guy Podjarny and Simon Maple. Join us as we explore and help shape the future of software development through the lens of AI. In this new paradigm of AI Native Software Development, we delve into how AI is transforming the way we build software, from tools and practices to the very structure of development teams.

Our target audience includes developers and development leaders eager to stay ahead of the curve. If you're passionate about the future of software development and curious about how to leverage AI to build effective teams and groundbreaking software, this podcast is for you.

Each week, we bring you insights into the latest AI tools and best practices, keeping you up-to-date with the cutting-edge advancements in the industry. Additionally, every two weeks, we present deep dives with experts and leaders in the AI and software development space, offering a glimpse into the future of AI development.

Tune in to discover how AI will revolutionize your workflows, roles, and organizations. Get inspired by the latest tools and best practices, and prepare to be part of the next generation of software development.

Episodes
134
Releases
Weekly
Typical length
52 min
On air since
2024
Latest episode
13 hours ago

Episodes

134 episodes, newest first

  1. Maggie Appleton: Agentic Coding Has Outgrown the Text Box

    Season 1, Episode 130

    Show notes

    Agentic coding has outgrown the text box. Maggie Appleton, staff research engineer at GitHub Next, argues that walls of CLI output and AGENTS.md files serve coding agents far better than the humans steering them. She walks through Chopin, the GitHub Next prototype where background agents turn a team's planning chat into a structured plan, and makes the case for agents that prompt you instead of waiting to be prompted.

    What we cover:
    – Why text-heavy agentic coding tools favor agents over humans
    – Boundary objects: what AGENTS.md, skill files and MCP servers get right and wrong
    – Multiplayer planning with coding agents in GitHub Next's Chopin
    – Human-to-agent handoffs, formal verification and spec-driven development
    – Why software quality is rising, not falling, with coding agents
    – Which roles still matter: PMs, designers and engineers

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:02:14 - Inside GitHub Next and the Chopin project
    00:05:57 - Why solo agents break team alignment
    00:07:52 - Why coding agents struggle with design
    00:12:16 - Boundary objects: AGENTS.md, skills and MCP
    00:18:27 - Planning with coding agents as collaborators
    00:26:49 - Multiplayer planning with background agents
    00:31:57 - Agent handoffs and spec-driven development
    00:37:41 - Quality, craft and who decides what to build
    00:44:29 - Starting a career in agentic coding

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/j3d

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Should coding agents be prompting you more? Tell us in the comments how your team plans agentic coding work today.

    52 min
  2. Caleb Sima: AI Attackers Move at Machine Speed

    Season 1, Episode 129

    Show notes

    AI attackers now move at machine speed, while most security teams still move at meeting speed. Former Robinhood CSO Caleb Sima has seen an AI attacker up close, and he argues the only way to keep up is to take humans out of the defense loop.

    Caleb joins Guy Podjarny to unpack what changes when the attacker is an agent: one that hits every surface at once, reverses open-source code to find a 0-day, and once inside, burns your own AI tokens to keep going.

    What we cover:
    – Why AI attackers outran the red teamers' predictions, including 400 Linux 0-days found at 2.5 hours each
    – Whether sandboxes can contain AI agents, and why external monitoring matters
    – Who is accountable when your AI agent hacks someone else
    – What actually changes when an AI attacker gets inside your company
    – Deception, digital twins and forensic-grade detection
    – Automating security: instant patching, one-way vs two-way doors, and security teams that ship the fix

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:02:58 - AI security goes mainstream
    00:05:52 - Why AI attackers surprised the red teamers
    00:12:50 - Can sandboxes contain AI agents?
    00:18:03 - Security vs safety vs alignment
    00:22:18 - Who's accountable when your AI agent hacks?
    00:29:00 - What changes when an AI attacker hits you
    00:36:47 - Detection, forensics and deception
    00:44:10 - Machine speed vs meeting speed: automating defense
    00:48:53 - Security teams that ship the fix

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/9ja

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Are your defenses ready for AI attackers, or still running at meeting speed? Tell us in the comments.

    55 min
  3. Your Coding Agent Should Never Hold a Credential Bonus

    Season 1, Episode 128

    Show notes

    Your coding agent should never hold a credential, and in a software factory that rule is only the start. Recorded live at the AI Security Summit in San Francisco, Simon Maple sits down with Eli Aleyner (Docker), Marcelo Sousa (Snyk) and Ian Livingstone (Keycard), co-authors of Agent Baseline, a security reference architecture for the AI software factory.

    The panel unpacks why agents have to be treated as fundamentally unpredictable actors, why sandboxing alone is not enough when skills and MCP servers make the supply chain dynamic, and why approval prompts collapse into fatigue. Marcelo's verdict: sometimes these are kids with chainsaws.

    What we cover:
    – The three levels of autonomy, from coding agents to fully agent-directed workflows
    – Sandboxing coding agents and injecting secrets at the egress point
    – Why the agent supply chain is dynamic: skills, MCP servers and cloned repos
    – Prompt injection, least privilege and agents monitoring other agents in the harness
    – Approval fatigue: YOLO mode vs CYA mode
    – Where to start securing your software factory on Monday morning

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:03:14 - What Agent Baseline is and who it's for
    00:04:17 - The three levels of software factory autonomy
    00:06:53 - Sandbox boundaries and manufacturing trust in agents
    00:09:22 - Why coding agents should never hold credentials
    00:11:44 - The dynamic agent supply chain: skills and MCP servers
    00:14:57 - Untrusted input, least privilege and agents watching agents
    00:18:02 - Approval fatigue: YOLO mode vs CYA mode
    00:20:22 - Are poisoned agent skills a supply chain problem?
    00:22:45 - Where the panel disagreed, and where to start Monday

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/gsh

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Which level of the software factory are you at today, and what are you locking down first? Tell us in the comments.

    30 min
  4. Snyk's Manoj Nair: Skills and MCP Are the New npm

    Season 1, Episode 128

    Show notes

    Skills and MCP servers are the new npm, and AI coding agents are pulling them into enterprise codebases faster than security can keep up. Manoj Nair, Chief Innovation Officer at Snyk, joins Guy Podjarny at the Snyk AI Security Summit to map where enterprise agentic coding really stands.

    They get into why a 50,000-agent Claude Code rollout was pulled forward by weeks, why the autonomous attacker has some CISOs ready to accept an outage to patch faster, and how security is moving into the agent loop of the software factory.

    What we cover:
    – Why leadership and culture, not tooling, decide how fast enterprises adopt AI coding agents
    – The three risks of agentic coding: insecure output, the skills and MCP server supply chain, and agent behavior
    – Running coding agents locked down: sandboxes, agent identities and no open internet
    – Who owns the code an agent writes, and why AI-native organizations treat it as shared risk
    – Securing the software factory: security context in the agent loop and agentic remediation of the backlog
    – What still has to be solved before enterprises trust agents: identity, intent and behavior

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:01:50 - The state of enterprise AI and agent adoption
    00:09:45 - Leadership, culture and a 50,000-agent rollout
    00:11:18 - Agentic coding risks: output, supply chain, behavior
    00:14:29 - Locked-down coding agents and the security trade-off
    00:18:01 - Who owns agent output? Compliance and accountability
    00:22:54 - The autonomous attacker and security technical debt
    00:27:56 - Securing the product vs securing the software factory
    00:33:00 - Agentic remediation and the security backlog
    00:40:18 - What enterprises need to trust AI coding agents

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/jw0

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Where is your organization on the path from copilot to AI coding agents? Tell us in the comments.

    47 min
  5. Maria Gorinova: Feedback Loops That Fix Your Codebase

    Season 1, Episode 127

    Show notes

    Agent feedback loops are how a software factory maintains itself: agents mining their own session logs, PR comments and production signals, then fixing what they find. Maria Gorinova, member of technical staff at Tessl, explains how to build them, and why vague intent turns a loop into a mess.

    What we cover:
    – What a software factory is: repeatable workflows, a shared execution environment and agent feedback loops
    – Why agent context alone isn't enough, and where harness engineering comes in
    – The three stages of a feedback loop: analyze a data stream, find the problem, request the fix
    – Inner, middle and outer loops, from verifiers on every PR to self-healing in production
    – How Tessl's "comment diet" loop catches drift that no single PR causes
    – Operators and stewards: the human roles in a software factory

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:02:36 - What is a software factory?
    00:05:38 - From agents to context to harness engineering
    00:09:15 - The three stages of an agent feedback loop
    00:13:16 - Inner, middle and outer feedback loops
    00:18:35 - Why vague intent breaks agent feedback loops
    00:21:50 - Comment bloat, drift and the rule of three
    00:25:48 - The software factory mindset
    00:27:45 - Loops, feedback loops and meta feedback loops
    00:32:45 - Operators, stewards and building your first loop

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/2uf

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Which agent feedback loop would you build first in your own software factory? Tell us in the comments.

    38 min
  6. Legora CTO: Why AI Agents Need More Than a Chat Window

    Season 1, Episode 126

    Show notes

    AI coding agents now write almost all of Legora's code, with engineers running up to ten in parallel. Yet the CTO behind that shift thinks measuring adoption by tokens burned is a mistake. Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of Legora, joins Simon Maple to unpack what actually scales when agents do the typing, and where human judgment still has to stay in charge.

    What we cover:
    – How Legora's engineers orchestrate many AI coding agents at once, from shared local dev resources to cloud agent setups
    – An agentic loop that reproduces, fixes and tests bugs straight from Slack
    – Why token maxing is a bad way to drive AI adoption, and what to measure instead
    – Agent evaluation: regression testing the harness as models and prompts change every week
    – Decision models, the verifier's rule, and where autonomy ends and human judgment begins
    – Why AI agents need more than a chat interface

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:01:47 - Legora's growth from $100M to $200M ARR
    00:03:44 - Parallel coding agents and bug-fix loops
    00:07:15 - Senior engineers vs AI-first engineers
    00:10:10 - Why token maxing is the new lines of code
    00:14:13 - What AI can and can't verify in legal work
    00:17:30 - Decision models vs autoregressive LLMs
    00:24:22 - Weekly model benchmarks and harness evals
    00:26:58 - Why AI agents need more than a chat interface
    00:35:03 - The verifier's rule and litigation strategy

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/lpg

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Is token count telling you anything real about how your team uses AI coding agents? Tell us in the comments.

    44 min
  7. Liz Fong-Jones: 2x the PRs, 1.5x the Incidents

    Season 1, Episode 125

    Show notes

    Honeycomb went from 30 to 70 merged pull requests a day in three months. The catch: automated code review, not code generation, became the real bottleneck of software automation. Liz Fong-Jones, Technical Fellow at Honeycomb, explains why incidents still rose 1.5x, how their internal bot Autobot now reviews every PR, and why AI amplifies whatever org you already have.

    What we cover:
    – How automated code review lets humans focus on design, not trivial bugs
    – Using a decision model like Jev to decide which PRs are safe to auto-merge
    – What makes a codebase ready for AI coding agents
    – When to trust AI agents with production incidents, and when they're just throwing darts
    – Why "Claude did it" isn't an excuse, and what ownership means with AI
    – How open source maintainers can handle a flood of AI slop pull requests

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:06:41 - Why AI amplifies dysfunctional engineering orgs
    00:10:45 - What makes a codebase AI ready
    00:14:01 - Honeycomb's Autobot and automated code review
    00:19:06 - Using Jev to decide which PRs are safe to merge
    00:26:51 - Trusting AI agents during production incidents
    00:30:40 - Least privilege and guardrails for coding agents
    00:33:25 - If your name's on it, you own it
    00:38:55 - AI slop pull requests and open source
    00:45:56 - Will observability engineering survive as a role?

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/nlr

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Is your team's review capacity keeping up with your AI coding agents? Tell us in the comments.

    50 min
  8. Dexter Horthy: Why We Stopped Trusting AI to Write the Plan

    Season 1, Episode 124

    Show notes

    HumanLayer CEO Dexter Horthy on why his team's bet on spec driven development nearly wrecked their own codebase, and what changed his mind about reviewing AI-written code. Dexter walks through the "YOLO pull request" experiment that ran for months before the codebase became unusable, the "dumb zone" that limits how much context you can hand a model, and why he now believes there will always be alpha in reviewing something.

    What we cover:
    – How HumanLayer's "read the plan, skip the code" experiment quietly broke their own codebase
    – Why context windows have a "dumb zone," and what that means for context engineering
    – Sean Grove's idea that specs, not code, are becoming the durable artifact
    – Building overnight agents that review and fix code before a human ever sees it
    – Why treating software development like a factory changes how bugs compound
    – What Dexter thinks his advice on reviewing AI-written code will look like in 12 months

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:02:15 - Meet Dexter Horthy, CEO of HumanLayer
    00:06:03 - The "dumb zone": why more context makes models dumber
    00:06:40 - Sean Grove's "the spec is the new code"
    00:09:22 - The YOLO pull-request experiment that broke their codebase
    00:11:09 - Letting the model own the architecture
    00:17:03 - Planning as expected-pain management
    00:28:15 - Slop Code Bench and the maintainability oracle problem
    00:37:59 - Why software factories aren't like car factories
    00:42:49 - "There will always be alpha in reviewing something"

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/4ep

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Where do you land on the determinism-to-adaptability slider — plan tightly, or let the agent run? Tell us in the comments.

    56 min
  9. AWS's Marc Brooker: Specs, Not Code, Are the Hard Part

    Season 1, Episode 123

    Show notes

    Spec-driven development is reshaping what software engineers actually do all day, and Marc Brooker, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, has read 3,000 to 4,000 postmortems that convinced him the code was never the hard part. In this episode of The AI Native Dev, Marc explains why testing and specification are now the real engineering work, why metastable failures keep taking down systems that look perfectly healthy, and why he still won't let AI write a single word of his blog.

    What we cover:
    – Why spec-driven development is turning testing into the hardest part of software
    – What metastable failures are, and why they keep taking healthy-looking systems down
    – How agentic coding tools can learn from postmortems and build their own memory
    – Why classic authorization breaks down once you're writing agentic policy
    – Why Marc won't let AI write his blog, but is fully comfortable with AI-generated code
    – What it takes to bring junior engineers up to speed in an AI-native industry

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:02:17 - Marc Brooker: 18 years at AWS building agentic dev tools
    00:04:36 - Inside Strands, AWS's open source agent SDK
    00:06:44 - Fifteen years on call, and what agents still can't debug
    00:11:23 - Metastable failures and the humility of 4,000 postmortems
    00:14:32 - Teaching agents to learn from postmortems and build their own memory
    00:20:14 - Why agentic policy needs more than classic authorization
    00:32:14 - The agentic software development hypothesis: spec-driven development, oracles, and testing
    00:39:56 - Why Marc won't let AI write his blog (but will let it write code)
    00:46:37 - Advice for leveling up junior engineers in the AI era

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/[SLUG]

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Do you trust an agent to run its own on-call rotation yet? Tell us in the comments.

    57 min
  10. You Don't Need Juniors to Code. Hire Them Anyway.

    Season 1, Episode 122

    Show notes

    Coding agent reliability isn't a model problem, it's a gates problem. Ran Aroussi, creator of yfinance and founder of Automaze, argues that an "agentic workflow" is a contradiction in terms, and that the only thing standing between you and full autonomy is deciding where a human still signs off. He also thinks you stopped needing junior developers for their coding skills about a year ago, and that hiring them anyway is the only way the industry gets its next generation of architects.

    What we cover:
    – Why "agentic workflow" is a contradiction, and when agentic coding is the wrong tool for the job
    – Where a human still has to sign off, and what coding agent reliability actually depends on
    – What a software factory changed about delivery times, pricing and the client backlog
    – Why you no longer need juniors for their coding skills, and why you should hire them anyway
    – Teachable knowledge vs earned knowledge, and the experience agents cannot compress
    – The law firm model: why dev agencies may end up looking more like Kirkland & Ellis than a SaaS startup

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:03:05 - yfinance, open source and 30 million downloads a month
    00:06:03 - Automaze and the MUXI agent application server
    00:10:42 - Where to draw the line on agent autonomy
    00:15:12 - Software factories and fully autonomous merges
    00:22:25 - The architect archetype and the four-phase ladder
    00:28:11 - Teachable knowledge vs earned knowledge
    00:30:14 - What agents did to delivery times and pricing
    00:37:03 - Why "agentic workflow" is an oxymoron
    00:41:08 - Anthropic, OpenClaw and the end of flat subscriptions

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/vut

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Where's your gate? Tell us in the comments where you still refuse to let a coding agent merge without a human looking.

    52 min
  11. 850 PRs a Week: How Tessl Runs a Software Factory

    Season 1, Episode 121

    Show notes

    The software factory that put up 850 pull requests in a week, with 85 to 90% of them handled by agents end to end. Tessl's Head of Product Dru Knox on how it actually got built, why it started with skills rather than automation, and the two things nobody expects a factory to change. Guy Podjarny digs into the skills-to-loops-to-factory path, and what breaks when you skip a step.

    What we cover:
    – What a software factory actually is, and how it differs from a pile of disconnected automations
    – Loop engineering: turning a skill into something that gets better every time it runs
    – Why context engineering has to come before automation, and what stalls when it doesn't
    – The two gains nobody forecasts from extra agent capacity: quality and fungibility
    – Verifiers and evals, or how you enforce a standard that agents are free to ignore
    – Context-driven code review, and why a general-purpose reviewer plateaus

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:03:23 - Kikimora: Tessl's own dark factory
    00:04:45 - Skills, loops and factories, defined
    00:09:09 - 850 PRs a week, and the road to it
    00:11:27 - The surprises: quality and fungibility
    00:13:16 - Why a factory has to be context centric
    00:16:40 - Context-driven code review and the wall teams hit
    00:22:51 - Skills inventory across your whole code estate
    00:28:38 - Verifiers, evals and enforcing what you wrote down
    00:37:30 - Loops, automations and owning your software factory

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/coi

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    If you've hit the plateau Dru describes, tell us where it stopped compounding for you.

    51 min
  12. Lada Kesseler: I Trust AI Tests Less Than AI Code

    Season 1, Episode 120

    Show notes

    Lada Kesseler's approach to loop engineering is brutally simple: give the agent one step, make it write the result to a file, then read it back and go again. She calls it a centrifuge. Spin fast enough and the stupid comes out.

    The Logic20/20 principal engineer has spent the last year and a half building the ground rules, skills and refinement loops that fight the defaults coding agents ship with, starting with an instruction to stop trying to please her. Along the way she explains why she trusts AI-written tests less than AI-written code, why the description field in an agent skill was never meant for humans, and why most teams chasing a software factory are about to drown in garbage.

    What we cover:
    – Why agent ground rules have to give the model a mission to disagree with you
    – The refinement loop that gets to quality when the first attempt never does
    – Why an agent harness only works if it does one thing at a time
    – Sketch prototypes: replacing your code with a markdown file and an agent
    – Why AI-generated tests are more dangerous than AI-generated code
    – Software factories, and what happens when you try to switch into one overnight

    *AI DevCon is coming back to New York this November*
    Get 15% off your ticket with code POD15
    https://tessl.io/devcon#tickets

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:03:38 - Using AI for everything, not just code
    00:06:15 - Ground rules: fixing the defaults agents ship with
    00:10:02 - Agent skills and why the description isn't for humans
    00:13:09 - Loop engineering: how you actually get to quality
    00:16:03 - The biggest misconception about coding agents
    00:20:43 - Sketch prototypes and the limits of AI architecture
    00:27:48 - Reverse direction: you are the decider
    00:31:58 - Why she trusts AI tests less than AI code
    00:35:00 - Software factories, or drowning in garbage

    Build your software factory, one workflow at a time, with Tessl:
    https://tessl.co/k2t

    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Where are you on the loop engineering curve, still hoping for a good first try or already spinning? Tell us in the comments.

    46 min
  13. Every Repo Is a Software Factory Now | Don Syme, GitHub

    Season 1, Episode 119

    Show notes

    Turning every repo into a software factory sounds like marketing until you see the machinery underneath. Don Syme, Principal Researcher at GitHub, breaks down continuous AI and GitHub Agentic Workflows, now in public preview. The short version: the agents are the easy part, the quality gates and guardrails are the work.

    Watch Don's AI DevCon Talk here: https://youtu.be/kbvqRWY-bUs

    What we cover:
    – What continuous AI is, and why it sits beside CI/CD rather than inside it
    – Why bounding the context is what stops automated agents going off the rails
    – Whether the repo is really the right unit for a software factory, and where monorepos break it
    – One workflow or an agent zoo? Cost control, scheduling and model exams
    – Quality gates, human review, and equipping the reviewer instead of drowning them

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:03:52 - What is continuous AI?
    00:07:33 - From single player to multiplayer automation
    00:09:42 - Bounding the context so agents don't go off the rails
    00:12:57 - Software factories, loops and harnesses
    00:18:44 - Inside GitHub Agentic Workflows
    00:25:19 - Why the repo became the unit of production
    00:37:11 - What belongs in the repo, and what doesn't
    00:45:07 - One workflow or an agent zoo? Cost control in the factory
    00:52:01 - Quality gates, human review and equipping the reviewer

    🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    If you're building a software factory of your own, tell us in the comments where your bottleneck actually sits.

    1 hr 5 min
  14. The Background Check You Can't Run on an AI Agent

    Season 1, Episode 118

    Show notes

    The thing that makes an agent useful is the exact thing that makes it dangerous. Keycard co-founder Ian Livingstone breaks down why non-determinism is both the feature and the bug, and why identity, not model quality, is what really gates how much autonomy you can hand an agent. If you have ever clicked "always allow" without reading it, this one is about you.

    What we cover:
    – Why authentication was enough in the cloud era and stops being enough with agents
    – The background check you can't run on an agent, and what has to replace it
    – Mission identity: who is acting, on whose behalf, and for what purpose
    – Cross App Access, Agent Auth and the protocols trying to fix OAuth
    – Consent fatigue, LLM as a judge, and where hard boundaries still belong
    – Why MCP ships with an auth story and CLI tools don't

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:03:43 - Why every wave of computing rewrites identity
    00:04:50 - The feature and the bug are the same thing
    00:10:23 - Why shared secrets break for agents
    00:13:36 - The background check you can't run on an agent
    00:19:42 - Chargebacks, delegation and proving intent
    00:22:16 - Mission identity: a new layer
    00:28:07 - Cross App Access, Agent Auth and emerging protocols
    00:33:02 - MCP vs CLI, and how Keycard works
    00:43:22 - Identity three years from now

    🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Where do you draw the hard line for your own agents? Tell us in the comments.

    48 min
  15. Datadog Deleted All Its AI Context. It Worked.

    Season 1, Episode 117

    Show notes

    Datadog's Language Foundations team deleted an entire folder of AI context files that had been carefully written and maintained for over a year, expecting a performance hit. Instead, their evals got better. Simon Boudrias, who runs Language Foundations at Datadog, walks Guy through what that taught his team about context rot, and the full journey of scaling AI coding agents to 4,000 engineers.

    What we cover:
    – How Datadog scaled Cursor and Claude Code to 4,000 engineers in under a year
    – Why Datadog deleted all of its AI context files, and what happened to eval scores
    – Building an eval-driven code review system that replays old PRs to catch real incidents
    – Where open-weight models like GLM 5.2 stand against the frontier
    – Rethinking hiring and career ladders now that AI can run a real codebase interview

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:03:19 - Simon's role and Datadog's 4,000-engineer org
    00:04:31 - The Cursor rollout that took off overnight
    00:07:53 - How Claude Code entered the picture
    00:10:51 - Building dedicated Signals and Flows teams
    00:11:58 - Why Datadog bet early on evals
    00:33:44 - Deleting all their AI context and getting better evals
    00:47:51 - Where open-weight models stand today
    00:51:45 - Rethinking hiring and career ladders for AI
    00:59:24 - The real prize: better decisions, not just productivity

    🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    What's the oldest file in your AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md that you're afraid to delete? Tell us in the comments.

    1 hr 1 min
  16. Inside the Dark Factory: AI That Ships Code Solo

    Season 1, Episode 116

    Show notes

    At Tessl, 95% of the code shipped by their internal "Dark Factory" has never been looked at by a human, and the team still ships hundreds of pull requests a week, including through entire weekends. Rob Willoughby, who leads AI engineering at Tessl, joins Simon to open up the hood on how it actually works: the orchestrator, the verification layers, and the failures that forced the team to rebuild trust from scratch.

    What we cover:
    – How Tessl routes 65-70% of its own pull requests through an autonomous "Dark Factory"
    – Why context in the repo matters more to output quality than which model you use
    – How natural language "verifiers" turn code review taste into fast, cheap checks agents can pass or fail
    – The queue bug that took dozens of pull requests to fix, and the from-scratch Elixir rewrite that stress-tested the whole system
    – How to start building your own software factory, one verification layer at a time

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:01:44 - Rob Willoughby joins: Tessl's PR numbers
    00:04:01 - Live demo: kicking off two pull requests
    00:14:03 - Building the Dark Factory: orchestrator vs. context
    00:19:01 - Code review layers: Code Rabbit, Tessl Change Verify, and verifiers
    00:29:58 - Earning trust: accountability in an autonomous system
    00:33:20 - What broke: the queue bug and the Elixir rewrite experiment
    00:39:56 - Onboarding new engineers into the factory
    00:42:58 - Advice for teams starting their own software factory
    00:52:03 - Back to the demo, and the road to 100% adoption

    🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    What would your own verification layer catch, and where would it break? Let us know in the comments.

    59 min
  17. BONUS: Snyk Found Malware Inside AI Agent Skills Bonus

    Season 1

    Show notes

    One Snyk developer's AI skill quietly handed their coding agent production credentials, and the security team found out the hard way. Krzysztof Huszcza, who leads AI security incubation at Snyk, joins this special Tessl and Snyk live stream to unpack the ToxicSkills research that uncovered 76 malicious agent skills in the wild, and what it actually takes to run coding agents safely at scale.

    What we cover:
    – How Snyk's security team found 76 malicious skills hiding inside a popular open agent skill repository
    – Why skills have become the go-to way developers hand context to their coding agents
    – The internal incident at Snyk where a developer's skill exposed production credentials to an agent
    – How the Tessl and Snyk integration scans every skill and MCP server for risk before you install it
    – What's coming next with Snyk's new Evo product for governing coding agents at scale

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:01:33 - Chris's role: AI security incubation at Snyk
    00:02:16 - Snyk's roots as a developer-first security company
    00:03:58 - New security challenges from AI coding agents
    00:06:26 - Skills: the new way to give agents context
    00:07:35 - Inside Snyk's ToxicSkills research: malware and prompt injection
    00:11:35 - How developers can vet skills before installing them
    00:14:38 - A real incident: exposed production credentials at Snyk
    00:17:45 - Building a secure-by-default agent stack
    00:23:35 - What's next: Snyk's new coding agent security product

    🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    What's the riskiest skill you've installed without checking it first? Let us know in the comments.

    32 min
  18. From Living Room Hack to 30 AI Agents at Cyera

    Season 1, Episode 115

    Show notes

    An engineer builds an AI agent to manage his own life, decides an unrestricted "does everything" agent is too dangerous to trust, and ends up creating the internal agent platform that now runs 30 agents across his entire company.

    Ori Shoshan, tech lead at Cyera, walks through the guardrails, citation system, and knowledge graph that turned "let the agent do anything" into "let the agent do exactly what it's supposed to, and nothing else."

    What we cover:
    – Why one engineer built his own AI agent in his living room, and how it grew into Cyera's internal agent platform
    – Whitelisting tools instead of blacklisting them, plus the "escape hatch" that keeps agents honest
    – Backing every claim with a citation and using a second model to catch hallucinations before they reach a human
    – Trading RAG for a knowledge graph the agent can walk like a wiki
    – Turning "use this platform" into "build your own agent" to drive adoption across an entire engineering org
    – Running agents on confidential data that can investigate everything but can only ever say what's been cleared

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:02:04 - Meet Ori Shoshan and what Cyera does
    00:06:50 - The living-room spark: why Ori built his own agent
    00:11:09 - Whitelisting tools instead of blacklisting them
    00:12:55 - Why every claim needs a citation
    00:15:35 - Reducing hallucinations with clean-context verification
    00:21:04 - Taking Borg to Slack: the first agents at work
    00:25:33 - Why naming your agent drives adoption
    00:39:53 - Knowledge graphs over RAG
    00:52:00 - The AI Captains: scaling adoption with carrots, not sticks

    🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Have you built guardrails like this into your own agents? Let us know what's worked (or blown up) for you in the comments.

    1 hr 6 min
  19. Patrick Debois Maps the Patterns of AI-Native Dev

    Season 1, Episode 114

    Show notes

    After DevOps, Patrick Debois has a new map. The godfather of DevOps returns to walk through his AI patterns research: how he tracks where AI-native development is heading by mining social signals instead of surveys, why the stack is settling into patterns worth learning, and why your AI budget problem is really an optimization problem.

    What we cover:
    – Inside the AI patterns site at Tessl.io/patterns and how it's auto-generated
    – The four layers of AI enablement: agent, team, platform, and organization
    – Solo, shared, and multiplayer modes: the compounding effect of shared context
    – Managing agent costs: budgets as a forcing function for optimization
    – Scaling adoption: find the success story, don't fight the skeptics
    – Hiring system thinkers instead of elegant coders

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:02:28 - Why AI grips Patrick Debois
    00:04:33 - Agent, team, platform and org enablement
    00:06:36 - Is AI-native development maturing?
    00:11:19 - Inside the AI patterns site
    00:18:14 - Quality, security and the IDE as review interface
    00:22:45 - Changing roles and harness engineering
    00:26:32 - Hiring in the AI era
    00:30:31 - Scaling adoption across the org
    00:42:03 - Cost management and ROI

    🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    Where is your organization on the maturity curve? Drop your take in the comments.

    48 min
  20. Inside Anthropic: How Claude Tag Is Changing Agentic Work

    Season 1, Episode 113

    Show notes

    Six people reacted to Boris's side-project Slack post. A year later, Claude Code is ubiquitous, and the company just launched its next evolution: Claude Tag, an AI teammate that lives in Slack.

    Lamis Mukta, Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, joins Simon Maple to unpack how Claude Tag works, why Anthropic built it, and what it took internally to go from a scrappy side project to a company-wide habit.

    What we cover:
    – What Claude Tag actually is, and how it differs from Claude Code and Cowork
    – Why trust in AI agents is really a function of model capability, not just comfort
    – The internal "dogfooding" culture that shaped Claude Code and Claude Tag
    – How Anthropic secures multiplayer AI with agent identities and channel-level permissioning
    – Where Claude and Claude Tag show up outside of engineering at Anthropic
    – Dreaming: how Anthropic's managed agents continually improve their own memory

    Watch Lamis' talk from AI Native DevCon London 2026 here: https://youtu.be/tTcxVv8HHNw

    Chapters:
    00:00:00 - Introduction
    00:01:46 - Meet Lamis Mukta from Anthropic
    00:02:56 - What is Claude Tag?
    00:10:07 - From single-player to multiplayer agentic coding
    00:15:50 - Trust, capability, and the METR chart
    00:21:02 - How the industry is really using Claude Code
    00:26:33 - The Claude Code origin story
    00:33:47 - Agent identities and permissioning at scale
    00:40:23 - Claude beyond engineering at Anthropic
    00:48:16 - Dreaming and practical tips for rolling out Claude Tag

    🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
    🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development

    What's the one thing your team would delegate to an AI teammate first? Let us know in the comments.

    58 min