Collection · Software Engineering & Infra

Things People Say on Podcasts About Software Engineering & Infra

Software engineering craft, devtools, infrastructure, databases, and engineering leadership.

Everything worth repeating from the Software Engineering & Infra shows we follow. Updated every day — free to search and free to use, attribution included on every card.

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“Personal agents are the app that kills all software for consumption. When it comes to consuming content, buying things, it will most likely come through an operating system level agent… They don't want to visit your website. They don't want to download your app. They never wanted to do those things. They just needed an answer or a thing. They needed to snap their fingers and have it done. That's all we've been building for.” — Rachel Lee Nabors, The InfoQ Podcast “A lot of these companies will approach you and say, hey, do you want early access? And we're like, yes, please. Free tokens and early access. I'm all over that. And people are afraid to soil that relationship by actually saying what it really is, because then they don't get access next time. Same thing happens with iPhone as well. There's all these iPhone reviewers that only say good stuff and kiss Apple's butt all day long because they're afraid of getting their access revoked.” — Wes Bos, Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) “My take on it is that Bun spelled the end of Deno because Deno was the alternative to Node… But it wasn't better enough. Bun came out and Bun's just like, we're fast. We're going to put SQLite in this thing. We're going to start shoving in whatever the heck we want… You got the safe choice, which is Node. You got the crazy choice, which is Bun. And then it's like, okay, I guess I'll pick Deno because it's a little bit better than Node.” — Scott Tolinski, Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) “Throughout my career, the things that fall into the category of things I shouldn't have to do are actually where I've found the most success. And I think it's because most people won't do things they shouldn't have to do. They'll look at it and be like, I shouldn't have to do that. And then they don't. And then they don't get the benefits.” — Dave Smith, Soft Skills Engineering “The IETF takes credit for DNS. Okay. Now, one of the problems with that is that the DNS spec came out in 1983, and the first meeting of the IETF was in 1986. So, how exactly do you explain it?” — Paul Mockapetris, The Developing Dev “The DNS may be a privacy risk, but your privacy gets violated in so much more effective ways by all of this web stuff. … Most people don't realize that when an ad gets populated on their web page, 150 or more organizations have been asked, do you want to serve this ad to this person? They don't identify the person, but they can identify up to 144 characteristics of the person. So I appreciate the people who have done some stuff about DNS privacy, but your privacy is long gone by the time you worry about this.” — Paul Mockapetris, The Developing Dev “You are in a lab setting. We've set you up for success. It is not politically charged. It is not emotionally charged. Now, imagine you are in social media, doom scrolling, politically charged, emotionally charged. You're way worse at it in that situation, but they don't know it. … I don't mind you being bad at something as long as you know you're bad at it, but they're bad at it and they're confident in the wrong assessment.” — Hany Farid, Click Here “When we do an analysis and we find an inconsistent shadow or lighting or reflection or geometry, we usually get to the other end and say, okay, we found something that is evidence of manipulation or AI generation. … But when you don't, when you run the battery of tests, you get to the end and you say, well, we found no evidence of manipulation. And that's not the same as saying something is real or authentic. It's subtly but really importantly different.” — Hany Farid, Click Here “When I started doing it all, actually sim swapping and crypto and stuff, late teenager, maybe 20, I was like, damn, dude, I'm making more than people make in a lifetime, or more than their decade of a salary, and I'm making that in 10 minutes.” — Ricky Handschumacher, Darknet Diaries “Everyone is trying to make the best possible decision, both candidate and company, I think. And it feels like more signal is better there. I also feel like we're… kind of committing to a long-term relationship together. Like, are we, how dare us go out on nine dates before a proposal?” — Bryan Cantrill, Oxide and Friends “Sometimes debt is like a hiding place, you know, like people, people don't want to make the hard decisions. And so they're just going to throw some more logs on the fire. But reality is you got to, you got to make hard decisions when you're running these kind of companies.” — Scott Orn, Oxide and Friends “I think the first rule of tax optimization is don't waste money trying to optimize your taxes, right? Don't make bad decisions because you're scared of paying the government a little bit, right?” — Scott Orn, Oxide and Friends “I personally think that this is actually the greatest time in history for ZT because machines and all these AI agents, they don't have an HR department and they're not going to complain about us telling them we don't trust them.” — Chase Cunningham, CyberWire Daily “I could tell if you worked in policy around homelessness or if you worked actually boots on the ground by whether or not you thought people had phones. And the difference was that individuals experiencing homelessness have a pretty high rate of access to phones. What they don't have is post-paid cell phones, like most of us have.” — Noah Harlan, Oxide and Friends “In order to access this system, humans have to bid for time. They essentially have to say how much in these fake dollars they're willing to pay for their job to be run… And LLMs using this thing just really don't have a sense for how much their job is worth. And we've seen evidence of the LLMs thinking that their job is worth way more than it should be, and thus preempting a bunch of human work.” — John Crepezzi, Signals and Threads “The agents are kind of amazing, and one of the things that makes them amazing is also one of the deficiencies, which is they are perpetual beginners, right? They never learn how to use the tools. They rediscover every time how to use the tools. And so you kind of have to build your whole system around them being these kind of perpetual beginners.” — Ron Minsky, Signals and Threads “Every year, the U.S. counts its homeless population and we do it on one day… But that is how many homeless people there are in America on that night. The problem is that homelessness isn't a state problem. It's a flow problem. You have new people entering homelessness every day. You've got people exiting homelessness every day. And you've got people oftentimes returning, so cycling.” — Noah Harlan, Oxide and Friends “The whole existence of AI agents has kind of broken the social contract around code review. It used to be when someone would hand you a feature, it made more sense for you to help get that thing over the line, because they put in a lot of sweat equity. And now all you need is a prompt and a dream, and you can for free create a plausible-looking problem, but it's still hard work to verify that it makes sense.” — Ron Minsky, Signals and Threads “It's just too dangerous the way that we're living right now, which is just blind installs. And trying to review it yourself is impractical. Handing it off to a coding agent, very practical, and only looking at the diffs.” — Jacob Bennett, Laravel News Podcast “We posted a meme that like Claude and ChatGPT and other tools, they will tell you you're absolutely right. But formal methods tools, they'll tell you you're absolutely wrong.” — Gabriela Moreira, The Stack Overflow Podcast “It makes people feel fearless because they feel well protected. There's a phenomenon where seatbelts made people drive faster, but unlike with cars, it's okay if you drive faster with Rust. It'll be right there for you.” — Josh Triplett, The Stack Overflow Podcast “Not particularly spicy hot take, I think no power on this earth makes vibe coding safe but everything is a spectrum in that regard.” — Josh Triplett, The Stack Overflow Podcast “I was amazed every day that I didn't get caught. Towards the end, I was looking at, you know, hundreds of documents a day. There's no legitimate business need to look at hundreds of documents a day.” — Frances Haugen, Click Here “I honestly don't know if I would tell somebody to go into CS today. Because there's also most companies at the moment are just not hiring junior engineers, too, which also feels short-sighted. At some point, everybody's going to retire out of the workforce, and who are they going to have left?” — Joy Ebertz, The InfoQ Podcast “I also have had cases where I'm like, fix this test. And the AI was like, okay, I'll delete the test. And I'm like, well, technically, we don't have broken tests now, but not what I meant.” — Joy Ebertz, The InfoQ Podcast “Sonnet has been like, okay, I'll do what you asked me to do, and nothing more. But then if you unleash a Fable or 5.5, it's going to insert its own opinion. It's going to say, I see what you did here, but I'm going to do you one better… It's the extra credit kid who's like, hey, you forgot to assign homework today, teacher.” — TJ Pitre, Shop Talk Show “If you've got 10,000 people in your organization, fast forward two years, you're going to have 100,000 agents in your organization. So every human has to become a manager of agents. And that's a big transition for people who have never done managerial work before.” — Gavriel Cohen, The Changelog “I think it doesn't really help you to have open source that's restrictively licensed. So you might as well just go all the way with MIT license and get maximum reach. I don't think the model of building an open source project and then trying to monetize your own user base works because it's so easy to host stuff. It's so easy to fork it.” — Gavriel Cohen, The Changelog “I'm okay with not looking at the code as long as you're doing other things to make sure the system is operating correctly, and that you're thinking critically about how the system needs to change and evolve. If you're just not looking at the code and you're not caring about those other things, well, then you deserve everything that's going to happen to you.” — Sam Newman, The Pragmatic Engineer “Would I use that as defense against a distributed denial of service attack? No, because then your distributed denial of service attack becomes a distributed denial of cash attack.” — Sam Newman, The Pragmatic Engineer

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Ron Minsky 3 Wes Bos 3 Dave Smith 3 Sam Newman 3 Scott Tolinski 3 Dave Rupert 2 Gavriel Cohen 2 Chris Coyier 2