The Stack Overflow Podcast

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].

Containers are easy—moving your legacy system off your VM is not

Ryan sits down with Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, to talk about getting your virtual machines and Kubernetes to play nice in cloud-native environments, why VMs are still relevant in enterprise applications, and how AI can help modernize legacy systems.  Episode notes:  Nutanix [http://www.nutanix.com] combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking so you can run applications and manage data across on-premises datacenters, public clouds, and edge locations all on one platform.  Connect with Dan on Linkedin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/danciruli/] and Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/danciruli.cloud]. Congrats to Necromancer [https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/17/necromancer] badge winner David Ferenczy Rogožan [https://stackoverflow.com/users/971141/david-ferenczy-rogo%c5%bean]! They won the badge on their answer to Where does adb shell mkdir create directories [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41480787/where-does-adb-shell-mkdir-create-directories]. TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/26/containers-are-easy-moving-your-legacy-system-off-your-vm-is-not/] 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].