Jessica Kerr joins Kent by the fire to argue that AI didn't take the programmer's job, it split it in two. The part we loved, crafting code by hand, has been commoditized like IKEA furniture. What's left is harder and more human: understanding what to build, proving it works, and stewarding the living "symmathesy" of people, code, and agents all learning from each other. They get into accelerated learning, why play is a signal you're learning, the loop that "becomes a noose," and choosing excitement over fear while the ground keeps shifting.

This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

Randy Shoup set out to be an international lawyer. He studied in West Berlin when there was still a wall around it, spent a year at Stanford Law, and had what should have been the perfect summer internship on Sand Hill Road. Instead he spent it watching inventors light up whiteboards with brilliant ideas — then being told his job was just to write them down. That summer broke something open. He went back to Oracle that fall and never looked back. Kent and Randy dig into what it means to need to make things, why the people who wrote the original distributed systems playbook aren't panicking about AI wiping it clean, and how Jevons paradox explains what happens when cognition gets cheap.

This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

Michael Grinich has an unusual vantage point, his company powers enterprise infrastructure for hundreds of companies, so he sees how the AI transition is actually playing out across the industry, not just in the headlines.What he's noticing: the whole ecosystem is accelerating, not just the AI companies. And most people are misreading what kind of moment this is. Kent and Michael talk about building when the marginal cost of software approaches zero, what the Red Queen theory tells us about AI competition, how engineering leadership is quietly changing, and what drew Michael to the itchy-brained compulsion to make things in the first place.

This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.