softwareengineeringdaily.com
500 episodes listed below
Long-form interviews on AI coding agents, infrastructure, and security, plus a recurring SED News roundup.
Software Engineering Daily gives working engineers long-form conversations with builders, researchers, and product leaders shaping modern software. Its recent run moves from multi-agent QA and open-weight model infrastructure to mobile app hardening, autonomous weapons ethics, and fast-moving AI news.
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Software Engineering Daily is an interview-driven podcast about the technical and organizational sides of building software, hosted on a rotating basis by Kevin Ball, Matt Merrill, and Joe Nash, among others. Most episodes are one-on-one conversations between a host and a single guest who is closely tied to the topic, such as a company's VP of engineering or the co-architect of a technical specification. Recurring themes include AI coding agents and their downstream effects on testing and code review, AI model infrastructure and serving economics, developer tooling, cybersecurity and supply chain risk, and programming language and runtime design. A separate recurring format, SED News, pairs two co-hosts (recently Gregor and Sean) in a headlines-and-Hacker-News-style roundup of industry events rather than a single-guest interview. Guests in the available sample include a SmartBear VP discussing multi-agent QA architecture, a Fireworks AI infrastructure lead on open-weight model serving, an Unblocked founder on organizational context for coding agents, a WebAssembly co-architect on the 3.0 specification, and a Blender Studio technical artist on open-source game pipelines. Episodes run roughly 35 to 70 minutes and lean toward technical depth over general-audience accessibility, with detailed discussion of system architecture, protocols, and engineering trade-offs. The show also takes on adjacent policy and ethics questions, such as the legal and moral status of AI in military targeting decisions. Listeners who work as software engineers, engineering managers, or technical founders are the most likely audience, particularly those tracking how AI tooling is changing day-to-day development practice. Production is conversational and unscripted, built around each guest's direct expertise rather than narration or scripted segments. The show publishes frequently enough to track fast-moving developments in AI infrastructure and tooling within weeks of them occurring.
Made for: Software engineers, engineering leaders, and technical founders tracking how AI is changing coding, testing, infrastructure, and security practices.
What sets it apart: Combines deep one-on-one technical interviews with named engineers and founders alongside a distinct recurring news-roundup segment (SED News) covering the same AI-infrastructure beat.
Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Software Engineering Daily makes emerging tools legible by tracing their effects on code quality, system context, validation, and engineering responsibility.
Software Engineering Daily follows software from architecture into consequences. Guest conversations connect AI coding agents with testing, code quality, organizational context, and production risk, while other episodes widen the frame to WebAssembly and autonomous weapons.
AI coding hype meets test plans, poisoned rules files, and the awkward question of who checks the checker.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A brisk SED News roundtable on AI spending, automated feeds, and the shrinking human center of social platforms.
Software Engineering Daily's SED News format works as a fast, conversational pass through a busy AI news cycle. Gregor and Sean start with conference-season catch-up, then settle into the more interesting question underneath the headlines: what happens when social platforms use…
A practical look at how multi-agent QA tries to keep up with AI-accelerated software development.
Software Engineering Daily treats AI-assisted development as a testing problem: when code generation speeds up, validation becomes the pressure point.
A careful technology-law conversation about autonomous weapons and the engineering responsibility behind high-stakes AI.
Autonomous weapons make warfare feel uncomfortably like a software architecture problem, except the failure mode is legal, moral, and human. Yuval Shani brings the discussion down from abstraction to the decisions these systems may be asked to make: identifying targets, weighing…
A practical look at open-weight models as production infrastructure, not just model philosophy.
Open-Weight AI Models frames open weights less as ideology than as an infrastructure choice. Benny Chen, co-founder of Fireworks AI, argues that publicly released model weights are becoming credible production options because teams can run, customize, and control them directly,…
A practical look at AI coding in production, with sharp attention to verification, quality gates, and agent-specific security risks.
Software Engineering Daily treats AI coding as a production problem, not a novelty cycle. Matt Merrill talks with Sonar's Chris Grams and Manesh Kapoor about the company's State of Code Developer Survey, including the awkward gap between daily AI use and developer trust.
A practical, developer-facing look at why mobile apps need defenses beyond ordinary web security habits.
Mobile app security gets framed here as a control problem: important code and business logic often live on a user's device, where developers cannot fully govern the environment.
A practical Python 3.14 discussion that connects release-note features to how developers and libraries actually use the language.
Software Engineering Daily treats Python 3.14 less like a changelog than a look at how language features land in real code. Sean Falconer gives Langa space to explain the release manager milestone, then moves into the practical bits: formal support for free-threaded no-GIL mode,…
A grounded, developer-focused look at WebAssembly 3.0 as a standards story, not just a feature release.
WebAssembly 3.0 comes through as the next step in a long, deliberate standards effort, not a flashy platform reset. Andreas Rossberg traces how a low level target for C and C++ grew into a portable, secure runtime model used across browsers, edge compute, embedded systems, and…
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Stack Overflow's Ryan Donovan interviews founders and engineers on AI agents, protocols, and dev tools.
Michael Kennedy interviews Python maintainers on packaging, security, web tools, and AI.
Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken run down the week's Python tooling, typing, and packaging news.
Matt Stratton interviews DevOps practitioners on security, platform engineering, and trusting AI-written code.
Dennis Pilarinos, founder and CEO of Unblocked, joins Software Engineering Daily to discuss how AI coding agents are shifting the primary bottleneck in software development from code generation to organizational context.
SED News opens with a format reset.
Validation and testing have become the bottleneck.
AI is already part of military judgment, and Yuval Shani does not treat that as science fiction.
Open-weight models are getting harder to dismiss in production.
AI coding is now part of production engineering.
Mobile security starts with code running on devices developers do not control.
This episode features Jeremiah Lowin and Adam Azzam discussing the FastMCP project, an open-source framework built on the Model Context Protocol for Python developers to create and deploy AI tools and applications.
This episode of SED News discusses tech headlines including OpenCode, AI vs.
John Baldwin discusses the history, governance, and applications of FreeBSD, a long-running open-source operating system, with host Gregor Vand on Software Engineering Daily.
This episode features an interview with Bill Mulligan about how Cilium leverages eBPF technology to revolutionize Kubernetes networking and security in modern cloud-native environments.
Game designer Bennett Foddy discusses his systems-driven approach to creating challenging games like QWOP and Baby Steps, exploring how frustration and difficulty are misunderstood, and the impact of streaming and speedrunning on gaming culture.
Josh Goldberg interviews James Long, creator of Prettier, about the origins and impact of this opinionated code formatter in the JavaScript ecosystem.
An interview with indie developer Sam Eng about creating the critically acclaimed game SkateStory, blending skateboarding mechanics with exploration and existential narrative.
An interview with Google DeepMind engineers about their new FileSearch tool, a managed RAG system integrated into the Gemini API.
Interview with Akshay Agrawal about Marimo, a reactive Python notebook that addresses limitations of traditional notebooks for data science and production.
A tech news roundup covering recent headlines, a deeper topic, and hacker news highlights, hosted by Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer.
An interview discussing Kiro, an AI-powered IDE that uses spec-driven development to turn prototypes into production-ready software.
An interview with SolarWinds CTO about rethinking observability with AI and agentic systems for complex distributed environments.
A technical deep dive into how China's Great Firewall operates, including a newly documented blocking technique and its implications for internet freedom.
An interview with Comet's CEO about evaluation and optimization tools for LLM-powered applications.
Steve Yegge discusses the evolution of AI coding from chat-based assistance to full agent orchestration, covering multi-agent coordination, shared memory, and AI-driven software workflows.
Python 3.14 gets a grounded tour through the tradeoffs behind the release.
Discussion of Airbnb's open-source GraphQL platform Viaduct and its role in scaling engineering teams.
The hosts discuss tech headlines, including Starlink internet speeds, after a holiday break.
An interview with the engineering lead and product designer of OpenAI's Codex, discussing how AI coding agents are built and their impact on software development.
Discussion on the challenges of taking AI applications to production, focusing on MongoDB's AI-ready data platform and the Voyage AI acquisition.
Discussion of a new package manager and registry called Vault, rethinking performance and security for JavaScript development.
WebAssembly's roadmap sounds careful by design.
An attorney discusses the legal and privacy implications of police surveillance technologies like automated license plate readers and facial recognition.
Catherine McGarvey, SVP of Developer Experience at Capital One, discusses how her diverse background in startups, defense, and consulting shapes her approach to developer enablement, productivity, and agility at enterprise scale in a regulated financial environment.
This episode features an interview with Michael Stahnke, VP of Engineering at Phlox, discussing Nix as a tool for reproducible software systems and how Phlox enhances it with security and usability improvements.
Kai Maetzel, engineering manager of the VS Code team at Microsoft, discusses the evolution of VS Code, its role in AI-assisted programming, and the future of agentic development models with host Kevin Ball.
Dog Walk frames the episode.
Rafael Gonzaga, a principal open-source engineer at NodeSource and member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee, discusses the state of Node.js performance, benchmarking, and the balance between speed and stability in this interview.
An interview with Zach Barth about his engineering-focused puzzle games and the software development behind them.
An interview with Dan Fornes, studio lead of Aether Studios, about developing the indie fighting game Rivals of Aether 2 and his journey into game development.
An interview discussing the convergence of aviation and cybersecurity, focusing on vulnerabilities in modern aircraft systems and the need for cyber resilience.
An interview with the CEO of Socket about open source supply chain attacks and software security.
Interview with Shinji Kim, CEO of Select Star, discussing metadata management, data context, and using LLMs for SQL generation.