The Stack Overflow Podcast

Every ecommerce hero needs a Sidekick

Ryan is joined by Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, to discuss how AI is a tech renaissance and how these new technologies are affecting the ecommerce world. They cover the development of Sidekick, their new tool, along with the general challenges of building AI tools, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI, and what the future holds for personalized user experiences in ecommerce.  Episode notes:   We spoke with Shopify about how they’re building developer-focused AI products last May; you can check it out here [https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/05/30/getting-rid-of-the-pain-for-developers-on-shopify/].  Sidekick [https://www.shopify.com/magic] is Shopify’s new AI assistant that combines commerce knowledge with advanced reasoning. Learn more about how Shopify is using AI agents to evolve their product taxonomy at scale on their blog [https://shopify.engineering/product-taxonomy-at-scale]. Connect with Vanessa on Twitter [https://x.com/vlaurenlee].  Congrats to user Erwin Brandstetter [https://stackoverflow.com/users/939860/erwin-brandstetter] for winning a Great Answer badge for their answer to How to convert empty to null in PostgreSQL? [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14035883/how-to-convert-empty-to-null-in-postgresql]. TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/01/09/every-ecommerce-hero-needs-a-sidekick] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

You need quality engineers to turn AI into ROI

SPONSORED BY MONGODB Pete Johnson, Field CTO, Artificial Intelligence at MongoDB, joins the podcast to talk about a recent OpenAI paper on the impact that AI will have on jobs and overall GDP. Pete, who reads the papers (and datasets) so you don’t have to, says that looking at AI’s impact as a job killer is a flawed metric. Instead, he and Ryan talk about how AI will be a collaborator for actual human workers, how embeddings and vectorization will move the productivity needle, and the five decisions you need to make to realize ROI on AI.  Episode notes: If you’re curious, read the OpenAI blog post [https://openai.com/index/gdpval/] and paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04374] yourself.  For those of you looking for inspiration, check out Werner Vogel’s keynote [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y1G9najGiI] from re:Invent 2025.  MongoDB [https://www.mongodb.com/] provides a flexible and dynamic database that excels with AI data.  Connect with Pete on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/petecj2/]. Congrats to Populist badge winner Scheff's Cat [https://stackoverflow.com/users/7478597/scheffs-cat] for dropping a banger of an answer on error: non-const static data member must be initialized out of line [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61518284/error-non-const-static-data-member-must-be-initialized-out-of-line/61519399#61519399]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Search engine bots crawled so AI bots could run

Ryan hosts Akamai data scientist Robert Lester on the show to discuss how the growth of AI bots affects internet traffic, the ways these AI bots differ from the original search engine optimization ones, and why you might not want to mitigate AI bots on your websites. Episode notes: Akamai [https://www.akamai.com/] is a CDN, full-stack cloud computing, and cybersecurity company that keeps experiences closer to users and threats further away using the world’s most distributed compute platform.  Connect with Robert on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-lester-4a50321a7/] and check out his AI Pulse blogs [https://www.akamai.com/blog?author=robert-lester]. Today’s shoutout goes to user Evan Phoenix [https://stackoverflow.com/users/643905/evan-phoenix] for winning a Populist badge for their answer to llvm ir back to human-readable source language? [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5180914/llvm-ir-back-to-human-readable-source-language]. TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/01/06/search-engine-bots-crawled-so-ai-bots-could-run] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

The most dangerous shortcuts in software

Ryan sits down with Tom Totenberg, head of release automation at LaunchDarkly, to discuss the perils of taking too many shortcuts in software development, how business pressures and AI code tools have contributed to dangerous corner cutting, and the importance of balancing speed with sustainability to maintain system integrity.  Episode notes:  LaunchDarkly [https://launchdarkly.com/] is a feature management and experimentation platform that allows you to decouple software feature rollouts from code deployment so you can manage features safely and securely. Connect with Tom on Linkedin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-totenberg/].  This episode’s shoutout goes to user Boris Gorelik [https://stackoverflow.com/users/17523/boris-gorelik], who won a Great Question badge [https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/22/great-question] for asking Removing handlers from python's logging loggers [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7484454/removing-handlers-from-pythons-logging-loggers].  TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/01/02/the-most-dangerous-shortcuts-in-software/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

How AI is helping us build better communities

MIT and Stanford professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland joins the show to explore the power of communities for shared knowledge and how AI could hurt or help the growth of these communities. Ryan and Sandy dive into the findings from Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI, the ethical implications of rapidly advancing technology, and AI’s potential to foster community dialogue and decision-making.  Episode notes: Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050999/shared-wisdom/] explores how we can build a flourishing society by using what we know about human nature to design our technology—rather than letting technology shape our society. Connect with Sandy on Linkedin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsandypentland/]. Check out the work he’s doing with AI at deliberation.io [http://deliberation.io] and Loyal Agents [https://loyalagents.org/]. Congratulations to user Harshal [https://stackoverflow.com/users/7697425/harshal] for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to start search only when user stops typing? [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42217121/how-to-start-search-only-when-user-stops-typing] TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/30/how-ai-is-helping-us-build-better-communities] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].