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We sit down with Jaikumar Ganesh, Head of Engineering at AnyScale, to explore the intricacies of heterogeneous compute. He unpacks the growing CPU/GPU divide, detailing how ML pipelines require precise orchestration — using CPUs for data reading and writing while leveraging expensive, massive-die GPUs for chunking and embedding.

Warren brings the insight that, with AI agents rapidly changing how software is created, building is now a requirement of the business-focused team. And our guest shares how sales and marketing departments are increasingly using tools like Cursor and Claude to develop their own workflow automations. We discuss the challenges that this shift begs: what is engineering really doing for us?

JK emphasizes that the core responsibility of the engineering organization is reliability. While anyone can generate code, running stable production software requires the deep "battle scars", robust observability, and meticulous release processes that only a dedicated engineering team can provide.

That results in needing to find the right talent. But, finding the talent to maintain this critical infrastructure isn't easy, which is why JK advocates for highly creative hiring strategies. He shares incredible success stories of bypassing traditional recruiting by running hiring ads in foreign-language movies at local movie theaters and setting up booths at social food festivals to find uniquely qualified candidates.

• Warren - Archer's Don't Fire Volleys
• JK - Book: The Explorer's Gene

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In this adventure, we sit down with Dan Wahlin, Principal of DevRel for JavaScript, AI, and Cloud at Microsoft, to explore the complexities of modern infrastructure. We examine how cloud platforms like Azure function as "building blocks". Which of course, can quickly become overwhelming without the right instruction manuals. To bridge this gap, one potential solution we discuss is the emerging reliance on AI "skills"—specialized markdown files. They can give coding agents the exact knowledge needed to deploy poorly documented complex open-source projects to container apps without requiring deep infrastructure expertise.

And we are saying the silent part outloud, as we review how handing the keys over to autonomous agents introduces terrifying new attack vectors. It's the security nightmare of prompt injections and the careless execution of unvetted AI skills. Which is a blast from the past, and we reminisce how current downloading of random agent instructions to running untrusted executables from early internet sites. While tools like OpenClaw purport to offer incredible automation, such as allowing agents to scour the internet and execute code without human oversight, it's already led us to disastrous leaks of API keys. We emphasize the critical necessity of validating skills through trusted repositories where even having agents perform security reviews on the code before execution is not enough.

Finally, we tackle the philosophical debate around AI productivity and why Dorota's LLMs raise the floor and not the ceiling is so spot on. The standout pick requires mentioning, a fascinating 1983 paper titled "Ironies of Automation" by Lisanne Bainbridge. This paper perfectly predicts our current dilemma: automating systems often leaves the most complex, difficult tasks to human operators, proving that as automation scales, the need for rigorous human monitoring actually increases, destroying the very value that was attempting to be captured by the original innovation.

• Agent Skill Marketplace
• AI Fatigue is real
• Episode: Does Productivity even exist?

• Warren - Paper: Ironies of Automation (& AI)
• Dan - Tool: SkillShare

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How much do you really know about the protocol that everything is built upon? This week, we go behind the scenes with Simone Carletti, a 13-year industry veteran and CTO at DNSimple, to explore the hidden complexities of DNS. We attempt to uncover why exactly DNS is often the last place developers check during an outage, drawing fascinating parallels between modern web framework abstractions and network-level opaqueness.

Simone shares why his team relies on bare-metal machines instead of cloud providers to run their Erlang-based authoritative name servers, highlighting the critical need to control BGP routing. We trade incredible war stories, from Facebook locking themselves out of their own data centers due to a BGP error, to a massive 2014 DDoS attack that left DNSimple unable to access their own log aggregation service. The conversation also tackles the reality of implementing new standards like SVCB and HTTPS records, and why widespread DNSSEC adoption might require an industry-wide mandate.

And of course we have the picks, but I'm not spoiling this weeks, just yet...

• Episode: IPv6
• SVCB + HTTPS DNS Resource Records RFC 9460
• Avian Carrier RFC 1149

• Warren - Book: One Second After
• Simone - Recommended diving locations in Italy and Wreck diving projects