Development
Building software: programming, developer tools, APIs, deployment and DevOps, and building with AI (agents, MCP servers, RAG, AI coding tools). An extra channel alongside an episode's main one, so AI engineering episodes sit in both.
#2779: The Hidden Stateful Side of Serverless GPU
How Modal, RunPod, and other platforms handle container builds, caching, and versioning under the hood.
#2776: Where Does Your Vercel Site Actually Live?
Your Vercel site lives everywhere and nowhere. Here's what's actually happening under the hood.
#2775: How to Stop Wasting 75% of Your Build Pipeline
Stop rebuilding your entire site for every single content change. Here's how debouncing and caching save time and money.
#2773: Beyond Static Fallbacks: Agentic Error Handling in AI Pipelines
From try-except blocks to planning agents that route around failures intelligently.
#2763: Do You Really Need VLANs at Home?
Is VLAN segmentation worth it for home networks, or is it just sysadmin cosplay?
#2755: How to Build AI Memory That Actually Works
Stop jumping to conflict resolution. The real challenge is getting data in and out cleanly.
#2699: Inside Android's Binder: No HTTP Here
Android's internal APIs don't use HTTP. They use Binder — a kernel-level IPC mechanism that's faster, tighter, and completely opaque.
#2693: When AI Ignores Your Style Guide
Why your AI ignores formatting instructions and how to fix it with pipeline architecture, not model swaps.
#2692: Type Safety: Static vs Dynamic, Soundness & More
Static vs dynamic, strong vs weak, and the truth about TypeScript's unsoundness. A deep dive into type theory.
#2691: The Usability Tax of Least Privilege
Is it time to let AI agents handle your API key creation and rotation? We explore the real security tradeoffs.
#2689: Why CLI Beats MCP for AI Agents Sometimes
Why a plain command-line tool can outperform a purpose-built MCP server for AI agents — and what that means for the protocol's future.
#2688: Intelligent Frame Extraction for Multimodal AI
Use multimodal AI and smart frame extraction to turn a walk-through video into an actionable decluttering plan.
#2687: When Pre-Flight Checks Help (or Hurt) Agentic AI Plugins
How to decide when a pre-flight check is worth the latency cost — and how to write good ones.
#2685: Plugin Data Storage for AI Agents
How to separate user data from plugin code across Linux, macOS, and Windows in agentic AI environments.
#2684: When Agent Skills Collide: Context Windows & Plugin Design
How to handle overlapping agent skills and whether context windows will ever make the problem go away.
#2683: MCP vs Agent Skills: Context Wars
When 12M token windows arrive, do MCP servers or agent skills win? Plus: federated access for agent teams.
#2682: Live Retrieval vs. RAG: What an Agent Actually Does
Does every AI conversation create a tiny vector store? We unpack the real tradeoffs between live document fetching and pre-indexed RAG.
#2677: Memory Layers for AI Agents: SaaS vs Self-Hosted
Zep, mem0, Letta, Graphiti, Cognee — which memory layer should you commit to for your AI agent?
#2676: Vector Database Schema Design for AI Memory Layers
Stop dumping vectors blindly. Design metadata schemas and namespaces for retrieval that actually works at scale.
#2674: Why Your Agent's Context Window Is Getting Eaten Before You Start
Stop shipping the whole toolbox to every session. A bridge plugin pattern that fetches skills on demand instead.