The Stack Overflow Podcast

Ryan sits down with Jeff Wang, co-founder at EXA, to talk about the huge scale required to support trillions of agentic searches, the technical complexities of building custom embeddings and performant vector databases from scratch, and the need to dedupe the massive amounts of redundant content on the web to deliver high-trust answers.
Episode notes:
EXA is a full search engine built specifically for AI agents, featuring custom extraction models and vector databases designed to handle complex, trillion-scale queries without the AI slop.
Connect with Jeff (through his triage agents) by emailing him at jeff@exa.ai.
Congrats to Populist badge winner Santhoopa Jayawardhana for earning the badge on their answer to Keycloak client vs user.
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Ryan chats with Ahmad Al-Dahle, CTO at Airbnb, about deploying multi-party AI agents to tackle the uniquely gnarly problem of customer support, how a moving target of rigorous evaluations helps engineers balance latency against accuracy, and the ways in which AI coding tools demand an even higher level of judgment from software engineering teams.
Episode notes:
Learn more about how Airbnb is evolving its engineering organization to implement generative AI across the platform on their tech blog.
Connect with Ahmad on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Congrats to Famous Question badge winner techGuy for winning the badge on their answer to is WebView2 supported in the Citrix server?.
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Ryan sits down with Rakesh Kumar, professor of computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, about the astounding complexity of manufacturing modern semiconductors, the massive environmental and geopolitical footprint of AI data centers, and how AI models are rapidly shifting the future of chip design.
Episode notes:
Dive deeper into the history and future of semiconductors by checking out Rakesh's book, The Chip Age.
Learn more about Rakesh’s work at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Congrats to Necromancer badge winner Faisal Khan for winning the badge on their answer to Difference between SWIFT Interact & Fileact transmissions.
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Recorded at LDX3 by LeadDev, Ryan chats with Dan Moore, Senior Director of CIAM Strategy and Identity Standards at FusionAuth, about adapting established OAuth2 protocols for the agentic era, the security necessity of giving autonomous AI agents their own distinct identities, and how AI coding tools are shifting developers' focus toward solving core business problems.
Episode notes:
FusionAuth is an identity and access management platform that provides customer authentication, OAuth, and security solutions for developers.
This episode was recorded at LDX3. Listen to our other LDX3 conversation with engineering leaders Nivia Henry and Charity Majors.
Read Dan’s most recent piece on the Stack Overflow blog about authentication and authorization in MCP.
Connect with Dan at dan@fusionauth.io.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO at Honeycomb, for a conversation about applying the concept of immutable infrastructure to software development to treat code like cattle instead of pets, shifting the paradigm of system specifications to accommodate the rapid influx of AI-generated code, and navigating the complex ethical boundaries between system observability and human surveillance in modern technology ecosystems.
Episode notes:
Honeycomb is an observability platform that empowers engineering teams to visualize, analyze, and understand the behavior of their complex cloud systems.
Connect with Charity on her blog at charity.wtf and read her team's posts on AI norms and values on the Honeycomb blog.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.