Inference is the new 401k matching and what we’re learning from AI-related outages

Are we heading toward a bizarre future where your engineering salary is paid in AI compute tokens instead of cash? Andrew and Ben tackle the latest tech industry shakeups, starting with Meta's acquisition of Moltbook and the controversial idea of making inference limits a core employee benefit. They also break down Charlie Guo's harness engineering playbook, the growing pains behind recent AWS AI-driven outages, and the toxic pressure to constantly run dozens of autonomous agents. Finally, they wrap up by sharing their own agentic weekend projects and debating the catastrophic risks of vibe-coding your laptop's file permissions.Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensationThe Emerging "Harness Engineering" PlaybookMeta acquired Moltbook, the AI agent social network that went viral because of fake posts“A spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools”, right on scheduleEvery minute you aren't running 69 agents, you are falling behindOFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Right now, a lot of engineering leaders are stuck in the same loop: rolling out AI tools only to watch their teams quietly drift back to business as usual. Andrew sits down with James Everingham, former Head of Dev Infra at Meta and current CEO of guild.ai, to discuss how to break this cycle by treating AI not just as an autocomplete tool, but as a "sentient fabric" woven directly into your software development lifecycle.  They explore how replacing top-down AI mandates with impossible business challenges—like eliminating code freezes entirely—empowers developers to organically build game-changing tools like conversational onboarding agents. Finally, James breaks down why 2026 is the year of the agent and how his team is building the enterprise infrastructure needed to safely govern, audit, and scale collaborative agent workflows.Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Learn more about Guild: guild.aiFollow James Everingham: LinkedInOFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Has the cost of software development officially dropped below the minimum wage? Andrew and Ben examine this economic shift alongside the rapid open-source growth and security implications of the OpenClaw project. They also explore Steve Yegge's concept of a federated wasteland for orchestrators and how the new Perplexity Computer is stepping up to act as a persistent, always-on digital coworker.Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:OpenClaw rocks to GitHub’s most-starred status, but is it safe?Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas TownsIntroducing Perplexity ComputerSoftware development now costs less than than the wage of a minimum wage workerScott Werner’s Works on My machineTraffic Jam ExplorerOFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Pausing a product roadmap for an entire month to point 700 engineers at a single goal is a significant structural shift, but it transformed monday.com. Andrew sits down with VP of R&D Sergei Liakhovetsky to uncover how fixing core infrastructure and adopting a cell-based architecture paved the way for platform scale. Sergei details the exact framework his leadership team used during their 30-day pause to launch user solutions while maintaining a strict zero-bureaucracy policy. The conversation also explores the new realities of reliability as platforms transition from being CPU-bound to heavily GPU-bound under the weight of automated agents.Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:monday magic: A tool for generating initial work solutions and boards using simple prompts.monday vibe: An app builder that allows users to create custom applications on top of the monday.com platform.Sidekick: The horizontal AI assistant/copilot that works across the entire platform to help with tasks like data management and content generation.Agent Factory: A platform for building vertical, specialized agents that can handle specific workflows and roles.Connect with Sergei Liakhovetsky on LinkedInOFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Andrew and Ben break down a busy week on the Friday Deploy, starting with the market reaction to new COBOL tools and the permissions oversights that led to recent outages at AWS. They also explore the shifting landscape of developer productivity studies, the security risks of cloud-hosted agents, and the latest cybersecurity takeaways from the International AI Safety report. Finally, they close out the episode by checking in on a retired Claude model that was given a blog.Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:IBM Didn’t Lose 13% Because COBOL DiedAWS suffered ‘at least two outages’ caused by AI tools, and now I’m convinced we’re living inside a ‘Silicon Valley’ episodeWe are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment DesignDeepfakes spreading and more AI companions’: seven takeaways from the latest artificial intelligence safety reportGreetings from the Other Side (of the AI Frontier)OFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Your keyboard is the biggest bottleneck in your engineering workflow. This week, Andrew sits down with Wispr co-founder and CTO Sahaj Garg to discuss why traditional voice dictation failed us, and how his team is rebuilding trust by using contextual models to capture a developer's raw intent rather than treating speech models as "dumb" tools that just produce literal transcripts. Together, they explore the engineering hurdles of translating a messy stream of consciousness into perfectly formatted, zero-edit artifacts that can be instantly understood by both AI coding agents and human coworkers. Finally, Sahaj shares his framework for experimenting with new tools and why surviving this era of software development requires completely reinventing yourself and your organization every three months.Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Try Wispr FlowNow on Android Connect with Sahaj on LinkedInOFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Is the traditional engineering backlog officially a thing of the past? Andrew and Ben explore the principles of outcome engineering and how continuous productivity is permanently changing how software gets built. They also examine a busy week of industry news, from Peter Steinberger joining OpenAI to the amusing and bewildering story of a hit piece written by an autonomous AI agent. Finally, the hosts break down the existential crises of Gemini 3 Pro inside a virtual village and why Meta product managers are rebranding themselves as AI builders.Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:OpenAI's acquisition of OpenClaw signals the beginning of the end of the ChatGPT eraAn AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on MeOutcome EngineeringThe Drama and Dysfunction of Gemini 2.5 and 3 ProSeveral Meta employees have started calling themselves 'AI builders'OFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

When the Ralph autonomous loop was born, Dex Horthy was "in the garden," witnessing the spark that set the AI engineering community on fire. Andrew sits down with the HumanLayer founder to discuss how to escape the "Dumb Zone" by applying his strict RPI (Research, Plan, Implement) methodology - a process that forces agents to generate intermediate design artifacts and align on architectural decisions before writing a single line of code. They also break down the brutal economics of agentic coding, recounting how Dex’s team used autonomous loops to clone six sponsor products overnight at a hackathon.Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanArticles & Talks:No Vibes Allowed: Solving Hard Problems in Complex Codebases: Dex’s viral talk from the AI Engineer World’s Fair that introduced the "Dumb Zone" concept.The AI Vampire: Steve Yegge’s reflection on burnout and agentic economics.12-Factor Agents: Human Layer’s methodology for building reliable agentic systems.Follow today's guest:Website: humanlayer.devTwitter: @dexhorthyLinkedIn: Dexter HorthyOFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Did AI agents just DDoS GitHub? Andrew and Ben are joined by Warp Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd to discuss the massive strain agentic workflows are putting on our infrastructure and why the "Monday Morning Commit Spike" is the new normal. They also dive into Steve Yegge’s reflective piece on the "AI Vampire" and the economic pressure on developers to output 10x results without 10x pay. Finally, Zach unveils "Oz," Warp's new platform designed to move agents off your laptop and into the cloud for better orchestration, security, and team collaboration.LinearB: The AI productivity platform for engineering leadersFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:GitHub: GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availabilityThe AI Vampire: Read Steve Yegge's ArticleOpen Coding Agents: Tim Dettmers/AI2 Research on Open Coding Agents (SERA)Listen to: The future of the terminal is not a terminalWarp Oz: Introducing Oz: The Orchestration Platform for Cloud AgentsBlog: Introducing Oz: the orchestration platform for cloud agentsConnect with Zach Lloyd: LinkedIn | X (Twitter)OFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Is Slack just a chat app, or is it becoming the command line for the agentic future? Andrew sits down with Kurtis Kemple, Senior Director of DevRel at Slack, to discuss the platform's evolution into an "agentic work operating system" where humans and bots collaborate in real-time. They explore the concept of "leaky prompts," how to harness unstructured chat data to drive automation, and share practical advice on how engineering leaders can start deploying their own custom agents to reclaim their time.Watch the Vibe Coding Session: If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe to the Dev Interrupted YouTube Channel to watch Andrew and Kurtis vibe code together!LinearBUnify your Copilot and Cursor impact metricsFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Slack for Developers: api.slack.comSalesforce Agentforce: Learn more about AgentforceBolt for JavaScript: Slack's FrameworkConnect with Kurtis on LinkedIn OFFERS Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free. Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era. LEARN ABOUT LINEARB AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production. AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance. AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil. MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.