Heavybit Podcasts
Heavybit
Every Heavybit podcast in one feed: conversations with technical founders, engineers and operators about building AI and enterprise infrastructure companies, from the bottom up to the top down.
Every Heavybit podcast in one feed: conversations with technical founders, engineers and operators about building AI and enterprise infrastructure companies, from the bottom up to the top down.
Ep. #15, One Year of Progressive Delivery
Epizodai
On episode 15 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team discusses why AI makes human judgment more important than ever. Celebrating their book’s birthday, they revisit alignment, autonomy, abundance, and automation through the lens of AI agents. From evaluating models to recognizing good design, they explore what faster software creation still demands of people.
On episode 14 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team sits down with Dr. Cat Hicks, psychologist and author of The Psychology of Software Teams. Cat unpacks the “Brains in Jars” mental model, the belief that engineers are interchangeable pure-cognition units, and explains why organizations that hold it struggle to use AI well. The conversation covers learning debt, overproduction pressure, and what teams should do with the time agents save.
On episode 14 of Data Renegades, CL Kao speaks with Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB, about building databases that people actually want to use. Hannes explains how conversations with frustrated statisticians shaped DuckDB’s architecture and why useful software sometimes requires abandoning your own assumptions. They explore DuckLake, the Quack client-server protocol, and how a focus on human usability is paying off as AI agents begin choosing their own tools.
On episode 6 of Lab Notes, Amir Zohrenejad speaks with James Evans about the surprising finding that reasoning models simulate a society rather than a single brain. They dig into sycophancy and why users trust AI less but perform better when it has a point of view, the Computational Life experiments that evolved self-replicating programs from a primordial soup of code, and James’s argument that diverse novel ideas are about to become the scarcest resource on the planet.
On episode 45 of Open Source Ready, Brian Douglas and John McBride speak with Dotta about Paperclip, an open-source platform for managing teams of AI agents. They explore what happens when agents produce more work than humans can review, why permissions need to extend beyond a separate computer, and how engineering judgment changes when writing code becomes easier.
On episode 13 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team speaks with Jennifer Riggins about why faster code doesn’t automatically mean better software. They explore how AI exposes organizational bottlenecks, why psychological safety matters, and what Spotify’s growing feature set reveals about user value. Jennifer makes the case for smaller experiments, stronger feedback loops, and keeping people at the center of delivery.
On episode 60 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers speaks with Vasanth Mohan of SambaNova about when faster AI agents actually mean better work. They explore why token consumption and code volume are poor substitutes for business value, how inference latency interrupts productive workflows, and why engineering taste still matters. Sometimes the most valuable thing an engineer can produce is less code.
On episode 44 of Open Source Ready, Brian Douglas and John McBride sit down with Mikyo King to explore why an agent can fail even when its model gets things right. They discuss observing the full agent workflow, using evaluations to uncover unexpected behavior, and testing whether skills actually improve results. Along the way, Mikyo shares how Arize approaches open source collaboration as coding agents reshape the contribution process.
On episode 12 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team speaks with Steph Hippo, Platform Engineering Director at Honeycomb, about what happens when AI accelerates development beyond the pace humans can absorb. They explore safe defaults, evolving code reviews, and the feedback loops that help teams understand what they ship. Steph makes the case for reinvesting saved time in better decisions, software quality, and human connection.
On episode 59 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers speaks with Emily Long and Alex Zenla, co-founders of Edera, about rethinking the foundations of cloud and AI security. They explain how an IoT side project became an approach to workload isolation built around Xen and Rust, and why AI agents are making stronger security boundaries increasingly urgent. Along the way, they discuss complementary leadership skills, fundraising lessons, and the value of questioning the industry’s technical assumptions.
In episode 5 of Lab Notes, Amir Zohrenejad speaks with Aoden Teo, co-founder and CEO of Miso Labs, about what it will take for voice AI to become truly humanlike. They explore the limitations of today's speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines, the promise of full-duplex speech models, and the technical challenges around audio tokenization, turn-taking, emotion, reasoning, and real-time inference.
On episode 11 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team sits down with Chad Fowler to explore regenerative software and what architecture looks like when AI makes code cheap enough to continually replace. They discuss Phoenix Architecture, Pace Layers, observability, architectural constraints, and why the system itself, rather than any individual implementation, may become the real asset in an AI-native future.
On episode 58 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Anastasia Marchenkova. They explore what it will take to move quantum computing from promising hardware to useful, production-ready systems, including better orchestration across quantum, classical, and AI compute. Anastasia also discusses open-source infrastructure, the limits of AI automation, and her larger vision of making powerful computing and scientific tools more broadly accessible.
On episode 4 of Lab Notes, Amir Zohrenejad speaks with Junchen Jiang about why KVCache may be better understood as reusable, AI-native data rather than a temporary inference optimization. They explore how LMCache and CacheBlend can reduce redundant computation, move context across distributed inference systems, and help support increasingly complex AI agents. The conversation also covers multimodal workloads, open-source infrastructure, and the future of AI systems research.
On episode 10 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team speaks with Honeycomb co-founder and CTO Charity Majors about observability, AI, and the changing economics of software development. They explore a future where code is increasingly disposable and regenerable while architecture, constraints, production behavior, and promises to users become the durable artifacts that matter. Along the way, Charity shares her perspective on responsible AI adoption, engineering in nondeterministic systems, and why production remains the ultimate source of truth.
On episode 12 of High Leverage, Joe Ruscio sits down with Dexter Horthy of HumanLayer. They explore the promise and limitations of autonomous coding, including why today’s models excel at bounded programming tasks but struggle to account for the long-term consequences of architectural decisions. The conversation covers dark software factories, code review bottlenecks, program design, technical debt, and the continuing importance of experienced engineers.
In episode 54 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc and Benjie sit down with David Crawshaw. David shares how a weekend WireGuard experiment became Tailscale, and how a series of unsuccessful developer-tool experiments eventually became exe.dev. The conversation offers a candid look at product discovery, technical failure, cloud economics, and building infrastructure for AI agents.
On episode 41 of Open Source Ready, Brian Douglas and John McBride sit down with Phil Estes. They explore why the definition of a container remains surprisingly fuzzy, how microVM-backed sandboxes could support the next generation of AI agents, and what AI-generated contributions mean for projects like containerd. Phil also explains why the future of open source depends as much on trusted maintainers and healthy communities as it does on code.
On episode 3 of Lab Notes, Amir Zohrenejad sits down with Qizheng Zhang to explore one of the fastest-moving areas of AI research: recursive self-improvement. Together, they discuss Meta-Harness, context engineering, and why the future of AI may depend as much on the software surrounding models as the models themselves. The conversation also examines evaluation, agentic systems, and the limits of today's autonomous AI research.
On episode 57 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Navneet Kaur, founder of FemTech India and TechThrive Ventures. Together they explore why women's health innovation must extend beyond Western markets, how AI is reshaping femtech, and what founders need to understand about trust, culture, and personalization when building global healthcare companies.
On episode 8 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team sits down with Melinda Fekete to discuss FeatureOps, developer experience, and modern software delivery. The conversation covers feature flag lifecycles, runtime control, experimentation, chaos engineering, and why progressive delivery is becoming even more important in the age of AI-assisted development.
On episode 92 of o11ycast, Ray Myers joins Ken and Jess to explore how observability, reliability engineering, and formal software engineering practices are becoming even more important as AI coding agents take on larger roles in development. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for established engineering disciplines, Ray argues that techniques like continuous delivery, testing, specifications, and formal verification provide the confidence needed to safely harness AI-generated code.
On episode 2 of Lab Notes, Amir Zohrenejad sits down with Hanchen Li to explore the systems that make modern AI agents faster, more efficient, and better at learning from experience. They discuss KV Cache optimization, long-context inference, prompt learning, continual learning, and why better benchmarks may be just as important as larger models in advancing AI research.
On episode 40 of Open Source Ready, Brian Douglas and John McBride sit down with Orhun Parmaksiz to explore Ratty, his experimental GPU-rendered terminal emulator that combines traditional command-line workflows with interactive 3D graphics. They discuss the future of terminal user interfaces, how AI is accelerating developer tooling, and what recent supply chain attacks on Arch Linux reveal about the evolving security landscape for open source software.
On episode 7 of Third Loop, the Progressive Delivery team speaks with Nathen Harvey about the intersection of AI, DevOps, and user-centric software development. Together, they examine what DORA's research reveals about high-performing teams, why shipping faster doesn't automatically create more value, and how organizations can build stronger feedback loops with users. Along the way, they discuss agentic systems, platform engineering, and even AI-powered kitchen appliances.
On this debut episode of Lab Notes, Amir Zohrenejad is joined by Ren Wang, a researcher and PhD student at UC Berkeley, to explore the state of physical AI and why robotics has progressed differently from large language models. They discuss data scarcity, world models, simulation, dexterity, and the challenges of building robots that can reliably operate in the real world.
On episode 39 of Open Source Ready, Brian Douglas and John McBride speak with Zach Smith, creator of Kplane, about rethinking Kubernetes for an AI-driven future. Zach explains how virtualized control planes could enable isolated cluster experiences at massive scale, while the conversation explores developer experience, AI tooling, and the possibility that future AI agents may each require their own cloud.
On episode 56 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Mark Brocato, founder of Mockaroo and creator of Fabricate, to explore the evolution of synthetic data in the age of AI. Mark shares how a simple internal QA tool grew into one of the most widely used synthetic data platforms and discusses how agentic AI is transforming software development, testing, and data generation.
On episode 13 of Data Renegades, CL Kao sits down with Josh Wills to explore how AI agents are reshaping software engineering, data science, and data infrastructure. They discuss verification, benchmarking, pre-training data pipelines, multimodal AI, and why understanding a problem may matter more than writing code. Josh also shares lessons learned from decades of building large-scale data systems and his journey from management back to hands-on engineering.
On episode 6 of Third Loop, Kim Harrison, Adam Zimman, James Governor, and Heidi Waterhouse sit down with Betty Junod. Together, they explore how agentic coding tools are enabling non-developers to build software for themselves, creating a world where the ideal customer profile might be just one person. They discuss personalization, Progressive Delivery, open source, and what happens when users become builders.
On episode 53 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc Campbell and Benjie De Groot sit down with Anurag Goel. Anurag shares his journey from early employee at Stripe to founder and CEO of Render, one of the fastest-growing application platforms in cloud infrastructure. They discuss Kubernetes, platform engineering, bare metal, AI agents, and what the future of application deployment looks like.
On episode 91 of o11ycast, Ken Rimple and Jess Kerr sit down with Janaki Vivrekar. Janaki shares how Amplitude is building AI-powered analytics agents, why evaluation frameworks are becoming essential to AI product development, and how teams can use observability techniques to improve agent performance over time. The conversation explores eval-driven development, production feedback loops, and the challenges of helping AI systems reason about complex business data.
On episode 52 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc Campbell and Benjie De Groot speak with Hugo Santos. They discuss the evolution of Namespace Labs, why traditional cloud infrastructure isn't always optimized for developer workflows, and what it takes to build a vertically integrated platform for builds, testing, and developer productivity. Hugo also shares lessons learned from nearly a decade at Google and years of startup building.
On episode 38 of Open Source Ready, Brian Douglas and John McBride speak with Graham Christensen, CEO of Determinate Systems, about the evolution of the Nix ecosystem and why more organizations are embracing reproducible infrastructure. They discuss secure package management, enterprise adoption challenges, open source business models, and how AI tooling is rapidly reshaping software engineering workflows.
On episode 12 of Data Renegades, CL Kao sits down with Maxime Beauchemin to explore what happens when software teams start working alongside armies of AI agents. Max shares the thinking behind Agor, his collaborative platform for orchestrating coding agents, and reflects on how AI is reshaping engineering, product, design, and data work. They also dive into the future of agentic workflows, technical collaboration, and what human roles may look like in the years ahead.
On episode 5 of Third Loop, Heidi Waterhouse, James Governor, Adam Zimman, and Kim Harrison dig into the hype around AI-generated code and ask a deceptively simple question: if code is “free,” what does it actually cost? From token pricing and maintenance overhead to user value and developer judgment, they explore why software is never quite as cheap as it seems.
On episode 55 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Sunil Dhaliwal to explore how AI is reshaping developer infrastructure, venture investing, and computational biology. Sunil reflects on building Amplify Partners during the rise of cloud computing, why the best technical founders “live the problem,” and where he sees the next generation of AI tooling emerging. The conversation also dives into personalized medicine, AI infrastructure consolidation, and what remains fundamentally human about investing.
On episode 37 of Open Source Ready, Brian and John speak with Stormy Peters about the evolving relationship between AI and open source software. Together, they unpack the growing challenges maintainers face, why traditional “good first issues” may be disappearing, and how AI tools are changing the way developers contribute to projects. They also discuss open-weight models, inference costs, and why community health still matters more than lines of code.
On episode 90 of o11ycast, Ken Rimple and Jessica “Jess” Kerr speak with Cory Ondrejka. Together, they unpack the rise of agentic AI, the shifting identity of software engineers, and the growing importance of measuring real-world impact. Cory shares his concept of Outcome Engineering and how teams can adapt to a world where building is fast but validation is everything. Come find the Honeycomb team at O11yCon on May 21st! https://events.honeycomb.io/o11yConSF2026 Use discount code SFCast2026 for 20% off
On episode 9 of High Leverage, Joe Ruscio sits down with Simon Willison to unpack the rapid evolution of AI coding tools and what they mean for software development. They explore the shift from vibe coding to agentic engineering, how coding agents are reshaping workflows, and why experience still matters. The conversation dives into trust, security, and what breaks when code becomes cheap.
On episode 11 of Data Renegades, CL Kao sits down with Michael Stonebraker, legendary database pioneer and creator of Ingres and Postgres. They explore the origins of modern relational databases, why specialized systems outperform one-size-fits-all platforms, and what today’s AI hype gets wrong about enterprise data. Stonebraker also shares hard-earned lessons on startups, research, and staying relevant over five decades in tech.
On episode 8 of High Leverage, Joe Ruscio sits down with Scott Hanselman for a conversation that goes far beyond prompts and productivity gains. They talk about craftsmanship, learning by doing, the long-term talent pipeline for engineering teams, and how AI could either free people to do more meaningful work or simply accelerate existing inefficiencies. From pair programming to Star Trek economics, this episode examines the bigger human questions behind the current AI boom.
On episode 36 of Open Source Ready, Brian Douglas and John McBride sit down with Jesse Vincent. They explore how Jesse’s Superpowers project turns AI coding tools into structured, reliable development systems. The conversation dives into agent orchestration, prompt engineering, and what it takes to make AI behave like a capable software engineer.
In this episode, the hosts unpack the thinking behind the name Third Loop and what it represents. Building on ideas from their book Progressive Delivery, they explore the gap between shipping software and having it truly adopted by users. The conversation dives into feedback loops, user agency, and why modern software requires a closer relationship between builders and consumers.
On episode 54 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Vishakha Gupta to explore the hidden infrastructure challenges behind modern AI. They unpack why multimodal data systems are still fragmented, how graph and vector approaches can be unified, and what it takes to build production-ready AI pipelines. This conversation offers a systems-level perspective on scaling AI beyond prototypes.
On episode 50 of The Kubelist Podcast, Marc Campbell and Benjie De Groot sit down with Ivan Burazin to explore the rise of sandbox environments for AI agents, how Daytona enables instant, stateful compute, and why traditional infrastructure models fall short. Ivan also shares lessons from building early cloud IDEs and finding product-market fit in the AI era.
On episode 89 of o11ycast, Ken Rimple and Charity Majors are joined by Bryan Cantrill. They dive into the origins of observability, the realities behind AI productivity gains, and the tension between cloud convenience and infrastructure control. The discussion highlights how major tech shifts often look obvious only in hindsight.
On episode 2 of Third Loop, Kim, Heidi, and Adam sit down with Kent Beck. They explore how Progressive Delivery extends ideas from Agile and Extreme Programming by focusing on safer releases, feature flags, reversibility, and observability in production. The conversation also dives into AI-assisted coding, experimentation, and what it takes to ship software users can actually trust.
On episode 34 of Open Source Ready, Brian Douglas and John McBride sit down with Sunil Dhaliwal to explore how AI is reshaping open source and startup building. They discuss why technical founders still have an edge, how taste is becoming a critical differentiator, and what it takes to find product-market fit in a world of abundant software. The conversation also dives into monetization challenges and the evolving role of open source.
On episode 53 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Dr. Mehdi Nourbakhsh to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the physical and digital worlds. They discuss the origins of generative design, why many AI initiatives fail inside organizations, and how leaders can move beyond experimentation toward real adoption. Mehdi also shares practical enterprise AI use cases and his perspective on how AI can augment human decision-making.
