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I keep seeing the same idea in conversations about agents: Detailed specs are old-world overhead now. Give the model a rough goal, let it explore, fix what comes back, move on. It sounds efficient but it also hides the cost. A simple prompt looks cheap and tempting because it gets implementation started right away. Then the correction loops start. You review output, clarify intent, ask for changes, rerun tests, find the next gap, and do it again.

About six years ago, we ran a piece about IDEs where the gist was that IDEs were getting to be so powerful and capable that it was a marvel that anybody used Vim or Emacs like a caveman. While yes, it was a provocative article, it got a lot of developers pretty riled up. Comments came from both sides, both from folks trashing the article for not understanding how developers work and from those developers who preach the good news of Emacs all day.

July 28, 2026 You need reliable AI context for your site reliability Ryan is joined by Asaf Savich, Komodor’s AI Engineering Group Manager, to discuss why modern reliability work requires navigating massive cross-service context, what good context engineering actually likes when AI is integrated into site reliability, and how the work of human SREs is shifting towards strategy and AI agent management.

This episode was recorded at Snowflake Summit. You can learn more about CoCo and Snowflake’s other new releases on their website. Connect with Umesh on LinkedIn or reach out to him at Umesh.Unnikrishnan@snowflake.com Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of engineering at Snowflake, also sat down this us at this year’s Snowflake Summit to break down the five-stage framework his org used to go from "let chaos reign" to a repeatable, org-wide system for AI-assisted engineering.

Vivek explains how Snowflake systematically rolled out coding agents across its engineering org — starting with unrestricted experimentation, then codifying what worked into a shared vocabulary of 14 "AI design patterns," from plan-in-English to fencing off parallel agents to reducing on-call toil through continuously updated skills.

Yobi is a behavioral AI company building foundation models that predict future behavior for ad tech, marketing, and more. Connect with Frank via fportman.com or at yobi.ai. Congrats to Hooked on winning a Populist badge for their answer to Removing whitespace around a saved image. TRANSCRIPT Ryan Donovan (00:01.103) Hello and welcome to the Stack Overflow podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I'm Ryan Donovan, your host.

June 19, 2026 You don’t understand DNS like you think you do Ryan welcomes Cricket Liu, DNS expert and Chief Evangelist at Infoblox, to the show to talk all things DNS. They cover the evolution of one of the oldest DNS server implementations, BIND, and what the future holds for protected DNS configurations; the realities of security threats like DDoS and DNS spoofing; and why outages often trace back to a lack of understanding of DNS’s fundamental role.

For over fifteen years, Stack Overflow has been the world’s digital watercooler for human developers. It’s where we go when production is on fire at 2:00 AM, where we argue over the finer points of language syntax, and where we’ve collectively built the largest peer-validated technical knowledge base in software. But over the last couple of years, the nature of programming has shifted beneath our feet. AI coding agents have democratized access to building software.

Ryan first catches up with Dataiku co-founder and CEO Florian Douettea to chat serious agentic systems and why they require intentional frameworks, orchestration, governance, and reusable, documented data products. Then, 1Password’s CTO Nancy Wang returns to the show to discuss why current identity standards don’t fit the new world of agents, especially when ephemeral agent swarms make attribution to a single user difficult.

There’s no doubt that coding agents have changed how software gets built. In the past three years or so, code generators have gone from fancy autocomplete to tools that can whip up a whole application while you wait. Engineers with knowledge of best practices, pitfalls, and the language of software are able to co-create code without having to futz with semicolons and unclosed brackets. What’s in doubt is whether this change has been productive, cost efficient, or good for developers.