Building an agentic SDLC with a QA engineering mindset

Andi Gutmans, head of Agentic Data Cloud at Google and co-creator of PHP, joins Leaders of Code to talk about why agentic development feels less like a break from the past and more like the next chapter of the same story. This is part one of a two-part conversation.In this episode, Eira May and Stack Overflow Director of Platform Engineering Peter O'Connor talk with Andi Gutmans about the throughline between democratizing web development with PHP and democratizing software development with agents today. Andi makes the case that every individual contributor is becoming “a team lead of agents” and walks through how that reshapes code review, interviewing, and the balance of human versus agent judgment. He also explains why he thinks the biggest bottleneck left isn't the models, but the challenge of getting an organization's data into a state where agents can actually reason over it.The discussion also:Covers how Google is changing its own interview process to evaluate how candidates reason with and guide agents, rather than how well they can hand-code a solution alone.Explores the "human in the loop, agent in the loop, agent on the loop" framework for deciding where review actually needs to happen — and why that's fundamentally a risk-management question, not a trust-in-AI question.Uses the Waymo safety-data-versus-perception gap as an analogy for why organizations (and individuals) sometimes resist agent autonomy even when the numbers favor it.Introduces Google's "borderless lakehouse" concept and the shift from human data stewardship to agent-driven ontology building.Notes:Connect with Andi Gutmans on LinkedIn.Connect with Peter O'Connor on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Ryan welcomes Suneet Malhotra, Senior Manager of Test Engineering at Motorola Solutions, to chat about building end-to-end agentic SDLC pipelines using MCPs, using Cohen’s kappa to evaluate multiple LLMs-as-judges, and how you can improve requirements by shifting QA left through a specification enrichment stage immediately after the design phase.Episode notes:You can learn more about Suneet’s five-agent SDLC (and see the companion code) on his GitHub. Read the papers discussed: Cross-Layer Observability for LLM-Assisted Test Automation: A Reference Architecture and Web Feasibility Study and Cross-Layer Observability for LLM-Assisted Test Automation — Reference Implementation and Evaluation Data (v1.5.2, JSS In-Practice). Connect with Suneet on LinkedIn and see more of his work on his website. Congrats to user Sanjay for winning a Great Question badge for asking What does it mean to fork on GitHub?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Meryll Blanchet,  Director of Engineering for Adobe Brand Visibility, to chat about Adobe’s recent acquisition of Semrush, how Adobe Brand Visibility was born from Semrush’s AI visibility product and Adobe’s LLM Optimizer, and how Adobe used a three-day internal hackathon instead of a large-scale infrastructure integration to quickly deliver value to customers. Episode notes:  Adobe Brand Visibility is a GEO software that helps companies improve their AI visibility, citations, and share of voice. You can preview the new product here.Connect with Meryll on LinkedIn. Congratulations to user patti_jane, who won a Stellar Question badge for asking Setting PATH environment variable in macOS permanently.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 Coder’s Rob Whiteley to chat about why tokenmaxxing isn’t proving real value and just triggering Goodhart’s Law, how release speed and PR merges can help you measure agentic outcomes with or without a human-in-the-loop, and what the democratization of skills means for junior developers and the talent pipeline. Episode notes:Coder is a self-hosted platform that lets you securely run cloud development environments and AI coding agents on your own internal infrastructure. Connect with Rob on LinkedIn.Today’s shoutout goes to an Unsung Hero badge winner, user Red.Wave!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes McLaren Stanley, Senior Principal Engineer for Amazon Stores, to discuss what it actually takes to make teams AI native, why agentic engineering is shifting code bottlenecks downstream to testing and deployment, and why robust validation is essential to build trust and enable “fearless commits.”Episode notes:You can learn more about how Amazon’s frontier teams became AI native on the AWS blog. Connect with McLaren on LinkedIn.Congrats to user o11c for winning a Populist badge for answering Pythonic way to count the number of trailing zeros in base 2. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Anurag Goel, CEO and co-founder of Render, to discuss why most startups shouldn’t start by managing their Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure. They discuss how frustration with spinning up nodes at Stripes led him to build a company, a future where your application itself may allocate its own compute, and why DevOps jobs aren’t going anywhere. Episode notesRender calls itself the cloud for builders, intuitive infrastructure for scale. Connect with Anurag at [email protected]. Congrats to Populist badge winner Hovercraft Full Of Eels for bringing the knowledge to How can I disable System.out for speed in Java.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes WPEngine CTO Ramadass Prabakar to the show to chat about what happens—and what we should do—when agents start acting like humans online, how our internet is evolving to serve both human and agentic experiences from the same interface, and what we can do to differentiate and protect human actions online from malicious bot activity. Episode notes: WP Engine hosts and manages over 5 million WordPress sites, combining enterprise-grade software, developer tools, and cutting-edge AI to support your website.Connect with Ramadass on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congrats to user Nama on winning a Famous Question badge for asking how to store the spinner values into database?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 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.Episode notes: Komodor is an autonomous AI SRE platform designed to troubleshoot, manage, and optimize Kubernetes-based cloud-native infrastructure. Connect with Asaf on LinkedIn. Congrats to Populist badge winner joemaller, who won the badge for answering Is there a Python equivalent to the 'which' command.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes VoidZero’s Evan You and Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht back to the show to discuss Cloudflare’s recent acquisition of VoidZero and what it means for JavaScript development, how partnerships like theirs can help open-source projects stay maintained and sustainably monetized, and how Cloudflare’s distributed systems are helping to improve developer experience in Vite and beyond. Episode notes:VoidZero is now officially a part of Cloudflare. You can read more about the recent acquisition here. Connect with Evan on LinkedIn and X. Check out Evan’s previous episodes on the pod for a deep dive on the evolutions of Vite and Vue.js.Connect with Dane on LinkedIn and X. Listen to Dane’s previous episode of Leaders of Code to learn how Cloudflare is building a better internet. Congrats to user Luis Sieira, who won a Stellar Answer badge for answering How to get the difference between two arrays in JavaScript?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.