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In this episode, we examine how the software industry is fundamentally changing. We're joined by our expert guest, Matt Edmunds, a long-time UX director, principal designer, and Principal UX Consultant at Tiny Pixls. The episode kicks, analyzing how early AI implementation in Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) created rigid hiring processes that actively filter out the varied candidates who actually bring necessary diversity to engineering teams.

Of course we get to the world of "vibe coding", and revisit the poor LLM usage highlighted in the DORA 2025 report, exploring how professionals without traditional software engineering backgrounds are leveraging models to generate functional code.

Matt details his hands-on experience using the latest models of Claude Opus and Gemini Pro, successfully building low-level C virtual audio driver in 30 minutes drive by personal needs. We discuss the inherent challenges of large context windows, and coin the term "guest-driven development". To combat these hallucinations, Matt shares his strategy of using question-based prompting and anchoring the AI with comprehensive test files and documented schemas, which the models treat as an undeniable source of truth.

Beyond the code, we look at the broader economic and physical limitations of the current AI boom, noting that AI providers are operating at massive financial losses while awaiting hardware efficiency improvements.

• Oatmeal on hating AI Art
• Episode: DORA 2025 Report

• Warren - Book: Start With Why
• Matt - Book: Creativity, Inc.

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We dive into the shifting landscape of developer relations and the new necessity of optimizing documentation for both humans and LLMs. Melinda Fekete joins from Unleash, and suggests transitioning to platform to help get this right by utilizing LLMs.txt files to cleanly expose content to AI models.

The conversation then takes a look at the June GCP outage, which was triggered by a single IAM policy change. This illustrates that even with world-class CI/CD pipelines, deploying code using runtime controls such as feature flags is still risky. Feature flags can't even save GCP and other cloud providers, so what hope do the rest of us have.

Finally, we discuss the practical implementation of these systems, advocating for "boring technology" like polling over streaming to ensure reliability, and conducting internal "breakathons" to test features before a full rollout.

• Diátaxis - Who is article this for?
• Fern - Docs Platform
• CloudFlare - Feature Flag causes outage
• AWS - Graceful degredation
• Building for 5 nines reliability
• Episode: Latency is always more important than freshness
• Episode: DORA 2025 Report

• Warren - Show: Bosch - LA Detective procedural
• Melinda - Wavelength - Party Game

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Dorota, CEO of Authress, returns to apply the US Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity to a scandalous topic: Engineering Productivity. In a world obsessed with AI-driven efficiency, Dorota and Warren argue that software development productivity has nothing to do with manufacturing "gizmos" and everything to do with feelings. They dismantle the factory-floor mentality that equates typing speed with value, suggesting instead that the most productive work often happens while staring out a train window or disassociating in the shower.

The conversation takes a dark turn into the reality of performance reviews. If productivity is subjective, how do you decide who gets promoted? Dorota proposes the "Resentment Metric"—ignoring Jira tickets in favor of figuring out who the team has secret concerns fo. They also roast the "100% utilization" fallacy, noting that a fully utilized highway is just a parking lot, and the same logic applies to engineering teams that don't schedule downtime for actual thinking.

Ultimately, they land on a definition of productivity that would make any optimizer proud: deleting things. If the best code is no code, then the most productive engineer is the one removing waste, deleting replicas, and emptying S3 buckets. The episode wraps up with a credit-card-sized transformer (it's a tripod) and a book recommendation on why your international colleagues might be misinterpreting your silence.

• DevOps Episode: DORA 2025 Report
• Research: Happy software developers solve problems better

• Warren - Book: The Culture Map
• Dorota - GEOMETRICAL Pocket tripod