AI is transforming software engineering—faster than many teams can adapt. In this episode, Andi talks with Wolfgang Heider and Benedict Evert about what it really means to build “AI‑native” software, where prototypes turn into production apps in minutes.
We explore why good engineering fundamentals still matter, how multi‑agent workflows mirror traditional roles, and why testing, governance, and clarity of intent become more important—not less.
We also discuss the future of junior engineers, the risk of everyone reinventing the same solution, and why value—not code generation—is becoming the real differentiator.

Links we discussed
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wolfgangheider_productmanagement-softwareengineering-ai-activity-7425746505883607042-D1OZ
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/machines-making-wolfgang-heider-5mvsf
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-built-app-between-final-stranger-things-episodes-wolfgang-heider-5penf/
https://futurelab.studio/ora/ 
https://futurelab.studio/htmlctl/

Why do we still struggle with resilience in 2026? Is it the growing complexity of systems, the pressure to ship fast, or a lack of education around resilient design? In this episode we welcome Adrian Hornsby from Resilium Labs to explore these questions and learn about chaos, complexity, and the importance of continuous learning!
Adrian has learned his chaos engineering skills while working at AWS for many years. He shares insights from his upcoming book and his experience helping organizations embrace resilience as a continuous learning practice. We discuss:

• Why traditional chaos engineering assumptions break down when AI starts writing your code.
• The rise of AI-powered SRE agents—are they a blessing or a missed learning opportunity?
• Organizational challenges and the importance of tracking near misses.

Links we discussed
Adrians LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adhorn/
Resilium Labs: https://www.resiliumlabs.com/
Upcoming Book: https://leanpub.com/whywestillsuckatresilience

Contributing to Open Source is easier than ever - especially because contributions are needed for documentation, demos, tutorials and code. But how to get started? Where to look for "first good issues"? Is everyone welcome? What are the prerequisites?
Tune in and hear from Diana Todea, Developer Experience Engineer at Victoria Metrics, on how within a year she made it from Zero to Developer and receiving the Contributor Award for OpenTelemetry 2025 at KubeCon Atlanta. Diana shares her journey, how she started, how she found the right topic and how she keeps herself motivated. Diana is also the Co-lead of the Neurodiversity CNCF Working Group and gives us insights into the Merge Forward community. 
And don't forget: Call for Papers for Cloud Native Days Romania and Austria are open and both Diana and Andi would be glad to see your proposals!
So - what are you waiting for?

Links we discussed:
Diana's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-todea-b2a79968/ 
From Zero to Developer Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPrxpEE5GpY 
Contributor Award: https://siliconangle.com/2025/11/13/accessibility-meets-open-source-collaboration-kubeconna/ 
Her latest CNCF Blog Post: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/12/04/my-first-kubecon-cloudnativecon-a-journey-through-community-inclusivity-and-neurodiversity/
Start contributing to Open Source: https://contribute.cncf.io/contributors/getting-started/ 
Diana's Conference Talks: https://github.com/didiViking/Conferences_Talks 
Diana on Medium: https://medium.com/@dianatodea/ 
Articles on OpenTelemetry for beginners: 
https://medium.com/@dianatodea/the-unofficial-guide-to-contributing-to-opentelemetry-where-to-look-and-who-to-talk-to-9de04ae75fe0 
CNCF Merge-Forward: https://community.cncf.io/merge-forward
CNCF Neurodiversity initiative: https://community.cncf.io/neurodiversity 
Cloud Native Days Romania: https://cloudnativedays.ro/
Cloud Native Days Austria: https://cloudnativedays.at/ 

From Systems Engineer in Aeronautics via many clouds to becoming an SRE in Observability! That's the path from our guest, Alexandra Franz who is a Lead Product Engineer in SRE at Dynatrace. Tune in and learn how their team plans ahead for expected high traffic around Black Friday, Cyber Monday or the Super Bowl. We discuss how regional traffic patterns and differences in available hardware get factored in for capacity management and cost control. We also learn why global cloud outages are stressful - but - how those incidents can also be the reward for a good SRE.

Make sure to connect with Alexandra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrafranz/

If you are still treating your AI Coding Agent like a chat bot and not like a development team then this is one more reason to tune into this episode.
In his blog post series 31 Days of Vibe Coding, Jeff Blankenburg walks us through all the lessons learned when bringing an idea to life just with vibe coding. His idea was building a website for collectors of baseball cards. With now more than 950k cards from almost 10k players, he has proven that vibe coding, when done right, can truly boost the output of software engineers. 
Tune in and learn about how to effectively use Git Issues as the backlog for your AI, the importance of going through different phases in your conversation with the AI and why it is important to ask the AI the question: "Do you have any questions for me?"

Links we discussed
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffblankenburg/
31 Days of Vibe Coding: https://31daysofvibecoding.com/
Collect Your Cards: https://collectyourcards.com/
Claude: https://claude.ai/

How many people have you met that implemented distributed tracing in the early 2000s? Make it one more after you have tuned into our latest podcast with William Louth. 
William, who can't seem to escape the observability space even though he keeps trying, has a track record in the space. He is an innovator and tool builder and is currently reimagining intelligent systems by shifting the focus from data collection to meaning-making. In our conversation we learn about situational awareness and how systems should use symbols to show their current state by also taking into account everything they are aware of happening in their ecosystem.
This podcast episode has been long overdue and opens a fascinating new world beyond metrics, logs and traces!

Links discussed
Williams LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-david-louth/
Humainary Research: https://humainary.io/research/
Humainary GitHub: https://github.com/humainary-io
Serventis Signs: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/humainary-io/substrates-api-java/refs/heads/main/ext/serventis/SIGNS.md

It started with the prompt: "Create an Uber Clone"! Several iterations and some months later Abhi presents his lessons learned when vibing a Ride Share Platform for RoboTaxis at Cloud Native Days Austria!
"Commit to one tool and go deep. Don't get distracted by all the options you have. Treat your agent like a human! Get better in expressing what you really want!", those are the many lessons learned in Abhi's journey applying the potential of the latest AI agents that are available for software engineers.
Tune into our latest episode and understand what Abhi means when he says: Context is important! Give it Macro Context and do Micro Incremental Improvements!

Links we discussed
Abhi's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhimanyuselvan/
Cloud Native Austria Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjMPHWjawxM&list=PLtLBTEzR4SqU9GwgWiaDt10-yOVIN0nzM&index=9
Cursor AI: https://cursor.com/
OpenSpec: https://openspec.dev/

Chaos Engineering is the practice to introduced controlled failures into a system with the goal to improve the overall resiliency! What started with "lets see what happens when we unplug that server" to "lets simulate network latency issues" or "lets kill critical pods and see if the system recovers gracefully" is now seeing new experiments being conducted that are identified by a new companion: AI 
In this episode we have invited Bartek Pisulak, Dir of Cloud Quality Engineering at Pegasystems, who has been educating quality engineers on AI-Augmented Chaos Testing in Practice. Tune in and learn about the how AI can improve efficiency in the 5 critical phases of a chaos experiment: Steady State, Hypothesis, Run Experiment, Verify, Improve!
To learn more about the foundational principles make sure to watch some of the conference talks from Bartek listed below:

Links discussed
Bartek's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bart%C5%82omiej-pisulak-82b94036/
Talk at Cloud Native Days Austria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUVCKNpMEz8&list=PLtLBTEzR4SqU9GwgWiaDt10-yOVIN0nzM&index=10
Talk at Porto Tech Hub: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZuEaA2PoTo
Kraken: https://github.com/krkn-chaos/krkn
ChasoEater: https://github.com/ntt-dkiku/chaos-eater

There is only one successful way to adopt new technology, and that is transformational! Sounds like a high-level consulting pitch but our industry has a track record to validate this statement. Just look at the recent web or cloud-native transformations!
Pini Reznik has been helping organizations along the current AI-Native transformational journey. And what a timing: He just published his book on From Cloud Native to AI-Native where he provides a pragmatic approach to leveraging AI from Pioneering to Gradually Scaling!
Tune in and hear from Pini why he thinks that AI projects are not failing because of bad AI, but because they approaching the problem the old and wrong way!
And, stay until the end to hear how it was to write a book about AI using AI!

Links we discussed
Pini's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pinireznik/
Link to Book: https://re-cinq.com/book
Our previous episode: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/ai-native-the-next-revolution-after-cloud-native-with-pini-reznik--67692567
Prompt Engineering Conference Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7z5XMnvYt8

Don't get stuck using AI to build faster horses. Instead, find the opportunities and rethink your software delivery processes! That, and only that, will help you increase Developer Experience and Efficiency!
This episode is all about how to measure and improve DevEx in the age of Artificial Intelligence. And with Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, we think we found a perfect guest!
Laura has been working in the dev tooling space for the past 15 years. In her current role at DX she is working on the evolution of DORA and SPACE into DX Core 4 and the DXI Measurement Framework.
In our episode we learn about those frameworks but also how tech leaders need to rethink where and how to apply AI to improve overall efficiency, quality and effectiveness! 
The key takeaways from this conversation are

• DevEx is all about the identifying and reducing friction in the end-2-end development process
• Tech Leaders need to become better in articulating technical change requirements to business
• As of today only 22% of code in git is really AI generated. Don't get fooled into believing AI is already better
• Back to Basics makes companies successful with AI. That is: proper CI/CD, testing, documentation, observability!

Here the links we discussed
Laura's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauratacho/
DX: https://getdx.com/
Cloud Native Days Austria Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ1F0-XS1l4
Engineering Leadership Community: https://www.engineeringleaders.io/

The AWS US-East problems on Oct 27th was a good reminder how depending we are on globally shared services. Built-in Resiliency is not guaranteed if systems have a hard dependency on a single region of a single vendor. Many of us have experienced systems being impacted that we use on a daily basis - some critical - some not so critical as Andi will tell you when he found out that is beloved Leberkas Pepi App didnt work!
Besides this outage we discuss lessons learned from Cloud Native Days Austria, Observability and Platform Engineering Meetups in Gdansk and Tallinn as well as giving an outline to the upcoming Cloud and AI-Native US Tour from Henrik Rexed and Andi GrabnerAll the links we discussed are here

• Leberkas Pepi: https://www.leberkaspepi.at/
• Cloud Native Austria: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cndaustria/
• Observability Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/observability-tech-community-meetup-group/
• US Tour from Henrik and Andi: https://events.dynatrace.com/noram-all-de-engineering-efficiency-tour-2025-28225/