- 1 hour 52 minutesWhy performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratori
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• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers.
• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.
—
There can be few people around who care about software performance more than today’s pod guest, Casey Muratori. He’s a programmer and videogame developer, founder of Molly Rocket, and creator of Handmade Hero – a long-running series about building a game from scratch. He also evangelizes about performance on his Substack, Computer, Enhance.
We got to know each other about three years ago, first via messages, including this one from Casey:
“Why does the industry zeitgeist place so little emphasis on software performance when there seems to be overwhelming evidence that performance is critical to their bottom line?
Like you, I run a Substack for professional programmers, but I focus exclusively on software performance. Although we are quite large by Substack standards, so a certain subset of programmers must believe performance is important, I nonetheless hear lots of dismissive excuses when I post on social media. This happens so frequently, I devoted an entire article to cataloging the extensive pro-performance evidence we already have from the world's leading software companies: Performance Excuses Debunked.
Strangely, nobody has a rebuttal to why performance is important. When I point people to this, they actually tend to agree. But the prevailing attitude nonetheless stays the same.”
I’m delighted we finally have Casey on the podcast because it’s overdue! In this episode, we discuss why software performance matters, why it’s overlooked, and how developers can get better at writing performant code. We explore why performance should be considered during design, the value of learning to read assembly & understanding how CPUs work, Casey’s critique of ‘clean code’, and why he believes testing shouldn't drive software design.
We touch on how videogame development has changed, and influential game engines. Casey also tells us why he prefers to write code by hand, not with AI, and more.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
05:17 Games at Microsoft
12:52 Building games
16:00 Why performance matters
27:12 Why you should learn to read assembly
30:36 Designing for optimization
42:51 How to get better at writing performant software
49:04 Understanding how the CPU works
55:53 Building games then and now
1:05:56 How game engines changed building games
1:10:48 Why new games compete with old games
1:13:25 GTA 6: why is it taking so long?
1:16:59 Casey’s critique of clean code
1:21:48 Casey’s take on TDD
1:24:30 What is good code?
1:27:32 What makes a good software engineer?
1:33:56 Why Casey doesn’t code with AI
1:39:01 AI’s impact on the game industry
1:44:43 AI and burnout
1:50:21 Why you should read papers
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
•Pushing software engineering limits with “napkin math” with Simon Eskildsen
•How Games Typically Get Built: prototyping, game engines, and a different type of QA
•Game Development Basics: deepdive on how game studios differ from standard software teams
•Inside Linear's Engineering Culture: building a performant product with a tiny team
•Building a best-selling game with a tiny team – with Jonas Tyroller. A two-person team built a game that sold 1M+ copies
More on premature optimization: read or watch Casey’s extended take on “premature optimization is the root of all evil”: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/theroot
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe26 August 2026, 3:59 pm - 1 hour 31 minutesFrom Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani
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• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• Google Cloud Run – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra.
• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers
—
Addy Osmani spent more than 14 years at Google, working on Chrome, DevTools, Core Web Vitals, and most recently, AI developer experience.
If you've ever opened Chrome DevTools, or optimized a page for Core Web Vitals, you’ve used software built by Addy Osmani. In this episode, I sit down with Addy and we talk about his path from building a web browser aged just 16 to becoming a director at Google. We discuss what he learned from building tools for millions of developers, Google’s engineering culture, and why he continued doing hands-on coding work as a manager. We also get into how he works with AI agents today, the risks of ‘cognitive surrender,’ his approach to ‘loop engineering,’ and why it’s good to develop skills in product management, go-to-market, and other areas.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:50 Addy’s current workflow
05:11 Addy’s path into tech
15:04 Addy’s work on jQuery
16:44 TodoMVC
21:44 Getting hired at Google and working on Chrome
27:17 Building dev tools
40:15 Core Web Vitals
45:42 Google’s engineering culture
51:03 Addy’s career trajectory at Google
57:55 The director role at Google
1:01:40 Cognitive debt and cognitive surrender
1:03:03 Working with agents
1:05:52 Loop engineering
1:12:55 The changing role of the software engineer
1:18:15 How Addy uses AI in writing
1:27:40 What’s next for Addy
1:28:47 Career advice
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Inside Google’s engineering culture
• How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
• Are AI agents actually slowing us down?
• From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge
• Google’s engineering culture: the podcast
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe19 August 2026, 4:53 pm - 1 hour 25 minutesStop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.
• Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue
—
In 2025, it was rational to be skeptical about AI, but in 2026 it’s clear that AI is changing all of the industry, and there’s less and less place for skepticism. This take is from one of my favorite voices in software reliability and observability: Charity Majors, CTO and cofounder of Honeycomb, co-author of Observability Engineering. (Note: the second edition of Observability Engineering is out, and it’s pretty much a full rewrite of the book, I recommend grabbing it if you’re building reliable systems)
In this episode, I sat down with Charity to discuss how her thinking on AI has evolved, why she believes it is becoming a foundational part of software engineering, and what that means for how teams build, review, and ship software.
We explore how AI is changing the economics of code generation, why reliability and verification are increasingly the bottlenecks, and why the rise of non-deterministic systems requires more engineering discipline. Charity shares her views on code reviews, observability, DevOps, leadership, and why both AI skeptics and enthusiasts are getting important things right.
—
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:56 How Parse led to Honeycomb
06:00 The limits of individual productivity metrics
09:08 How Charity’s perspective on AI has evolved
13:50 Rewriting code vs. editing code
19:20 Production as a stage of development
22:14 Code reviews
26:56 Non-deterministic systems
31:11 Sensible uses of AI
37:41 The two AI camps
44:40 Why AI works so well for building software
49:42 DevOps
55:13 Modern observability
1:00:40 Handling context overload
1:01:56 What’s new in Observability Engineering’s 2nd edition
1:07:45 What effective leadership looks like
1:10:25 Engineering management: what is changing?
1:16:31 Junior engineers
1:18:01 AI fatigue
1:21:39 Book recommendations
—
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Deepdive: How 10 tech companies choose the next generation of dev tools
• Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
• When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?
• Are AI agents actually slowing us down?
• Observability: the present and future, with Charity Majors
• The third golden age of software engineering – thanks to AI, with Grady Booch
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe12 August 2026, 4:45 pm - 1 hour 23 minutesFormal methods with Hillel Wayne
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.
• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.
—
There’s a popular theory that AI will finally make formal verification mainstream because mathematical proof of correctness will be needed when machines write most or all of the code. But will this happen? Today, I’m talking with one of the best people to tackle the prediction. Hillel Wayne is a formal methods consultant, educator, and author, who’s deeply interested in software history.
In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I sit down with Hillel to compare software engineering with traditional engineering, discuss where formal methods fit into modern software development, and we explore why they are essential for some of the world's most complex systems. We cover the formal specification language, TLA+, walk through several formal verification tools, examine why distributed systems are so difficult to reason about, and look into whether AI will make formal methods accessible to more engineering teams.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:21 The Crossover Project
10:26 What software engineering does better
14:19 What traditional engineering does better
17:06 Formal methods
28:21 TLA+: what it is and demo
35:47 TLA+ at Amazon
36:59 Ways distributed systems break
39:52 Formal methods and systems thinking
45:09 The value of learning math
49:12 What TLA+ is good for and isn’t
51:39 Alloy: a declarative language for software modeling
57:42 Other formal methods tools
1:00:13 Property-based testing
1:04:20 AI and the need for formal verification
1:11:18 Logic for programmers
1:13:24 Hillel’s 2025 prediction on AI’s impact
1:20:19 Book recommendation
—
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• How to debug large, distributed systems: Antithesis
• How Big Tech does quality assurance (QA)
• Resiliency in distributed systems
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe29 July 2026, 4:22 pm - 1 hour 32 minutesContext engineering with Dex Horthy
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue.
• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers.
—
Knowing how LLM contexts work and how to work around context limitations – aka “context engineering” – is becoming more important for software engineers working with LLMs. Let’s look into what works and what doesn’t, today.
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I sit down with the CEO and cofounder of HumanLayer, Dex Horthy, who coined the term “context engineering”. We discuss the ideas behind this context engineering, harness engineering, loop engineering, software factories, why his approach to AI-assisted software development has evolved, and how HumanLayer is helping engineering teams automate more of the software development lifecycle without sacrificing code quality.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:35 Dex’s path into tech
05:36 Early work in platform engineering
07:30 Replicated
13:26 Metalytics
14:38 12-factor agents
20:29 Context engineering
25:40 Harness engineering
28:13 Context overload
32:47 Loop engineering
46:36 Software factories before and after AI
52:35 Automation limits
57:20 Three options for automating
1:01:02 RPI framework
1:06:18 Intentional compaction
1:13:50 Token harder vs. token smarter
1:18:46 AI slop
1:21:17 HumanLayer
1:31:11 Book recommendation
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• How Uber uses AI for development: inside look
• Are AI agents actually slowing us down?
• AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2026
• Vibe Coding as a software engineer
• AI Engineering in the real world
• How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
• The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read"
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe15 July 2026, 4:08 pm - 1 hour 18 minutesThe Pragmatic Engineer AMA
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
—
In this special “ask me anything” episode of Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I am in the hot seat facing questions sent in by subscribers that are read out by guest Volodymyr Giginiak, CTO and cofounder of Wordsmith AI, a legal tech startup (note: I’m an investor).
I tackle your questions on the software industry, AI, hiring, engineering organizations, career growth, the business model of the Pragmatic Engineer, and more. We also discuss where software engineering is headed, and I offer advice on some specific situations. Thanks to everyone who sent questions!
—
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:56 From Uber to writing
09:22 AI-native SDLC
14:00 AI and hiring
19:06 Engineers currently thriving
22:18 Junior roles
24:44 Meta’s war mode
27:54 AI at Big Tech vs. startups
36:46 Tech debt
41:36 Types of engineering managers
44:40 Measuring AI productivity
48:30 The value of CS degrees
50:53 AI at Pragmatic Engineer
56:09 Future-proofing your career
1:01:36 The EU job market
1:03:55 Making money as a creator
1:08:20 What’s next for The Pragmatic Engineer
1:09:27 Bunq and Pollen
1:13:38 Spotting trends
1:14:33 Book updates
1:15:20 Favorite books & tech products
1:17:13 What won’t change in engineering
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• State of the software engineering job market in 2026
• The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends.
• How 10 tech companies choose the next generation of dev tools
• The reality of tech interviews
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe8 July 2026, 4:38 pm - 2 hours 27 minutesHow Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.
• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.
—
Few have made as big an impact on software engineering as this week’s guest on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent Beck. He created Extreme Programming, pioneered test-driven development (TDD), co-created JUnit, and is one of the authors of the famous ‘Agile Manifesto’. But these days, he's re-examining many ideas for the age of AI, and says we’re failing to accumulate trust during this new era at the same high rate as new code is being accumulated.
In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent and I dig into his journey from discovering Smalltalk in the early days of personal computing, to helping define modern software engineering practices. We explore the origins of TDD, design patterns, Extreme Programming, and Agile – along with some lessons learned at Apple and Facebook.
Kent explains why he believes software engineering is about far more than writing code, why no one yet knows exactly how engineers should work alongside AI agents, and how his "explore, expand, extract" framework can help engineers navigate major technology shifts.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:47 Human engineers aren’t going away
08:00 Kent's path into tech
13:50 Undergraduate and graduate studies
17:21 Kent’s first programming job
18:54 The rise and fall of Smalltalk
27:04 Working with Ward Cunningham
37:36 Design patterns
44:05 Working at Apple
51:08 CRC Cards
59:29 Testing tools in the language
1:04:22 The C3 project with Martin Fowler
1:09:54 Extreme Programming
1:16:25 Developing TDD
1:25:07 Writing the Agile Manifesto
1:30:00 Agile’s impact
1:32:40 Agile’s downside
1:37:32 The Dotcom Bust
1:44:30 Lessons from working at Facebook
1:59:44 Kent’s ‘Good to Great’ program at Facebook
2:06:07 Soft skills engineers need to learn
2:09:30 AI and the challenges of acceleration
2:15:53 Explore, expand, extract
2:22:33 What Kent is excited about
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey – co-written with Kent Beck
• TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck
• The past and future of modern backend practices
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe1 July 2026, 4:57 pm - 1 hour 29 minutesTech interviews with NeetCode
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers
• Google Cloud Run – run your code and host LLMs directly on top of Google’s scalable infrastructure, without having to worry about managing infra.
—
Navdeep Singh – oftentimes better known as NeetCode – is the creator of NeetCode.io, one of the most popular coding interview preparation platforms and YouTube channels for software engineers. Before building NeetCode full-time, he worked as a software engineer at Amazon and Google.
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Neet to discuss his path from Amazon and Google to building his own startup, why he left Amazon after just two months, what he learned at Google, and the decision to leave a stable engineering career to bet on himself. We also discuss what coding interview preparation teaches beyond passing interviews, the value of going deep on difficult problems, and why systems thinking and domain expertise remain essential engineering skills in the age of AI.
Throughout the conversation, NeetCode makes the case that learning hard things is one of the single best investments an engineer can make, helping build the judgment and expertise that remain valuable no matter how the tools change.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:57 Neet’s take on coding interviews
06:41 Getting into tech
08:56 Why Neet isn't a fan of the CAP theorem
13:12 Quitting Amazon after two months
18:22 Google vs Amazon
22:26 The origins of NeetCode
25:27 Leaving Google to go all in on NeetCode
32:02 Why Neet doesn't fix every bug
39:26 The value of coding interview prep
42:57 Systems thinking and domain expertise
47:28 Hiring at Big Tech
52:15 Tech stack at Neetcode
57:57 The NeetCode redesign contest
1:01:46 The future of software engineers
1:09:04 Hot takes: AGI, AI skill erosion, personality traits
1:22:49 “Maybe some people should just give up”
1:24:39 How to be a standout engineer
1:27:55 Book recommendation
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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Learnings from conducting ~1,000 interviews at Amazon
• How experienced engineers get unstuck in coding interviews
• The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025
• Tech hiring: is this an inflection point?
• AI fakers exposed in tech dev recruitment: postmortem
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe24 June 2026, 5:32 pm - 1 hour 14 minutesCI/CD with Robert Erez
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.
• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.
—
Robert Erez is a principal engineer at Octopus Deploy, and a longtime expert in CI/CD, deployment systems, and software delivery. Rob and I were also once colleagues on the Skype web team, working on large-scale deployments and release processes.
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Rob to discuss how teams deploy software safely and efficiently at scale. We cover Kubernetes, GitOps, platform engineering, progressive delivery, feature flags, cloud development environments, and the growing role of AI in CI/CD workflows. We also get into the tradeoffs in different deployment approaches, why self-hosted software still matters for some organizations, and the recent evolution of software delivery practices.
—
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:09 Canary deployments at Skype
05:01 Joining at Octopus Deploy
06:15 Continuous deployment
10:26 Why Kubernetes won
15:51 Kubernetes on-prem
18:50 How GitOps works
25:00 The uses and limitations of GitOps
31:04 The rise of platform teams
35:51 How AI is changing CI/CD
39:49 Progressive delivery explained
47:31 Rollbacks and roll-forwards
50:14 Feature flags
54:32 How development environments are evolving
57:40 Cloud development environments (CDEs)
1:03:45 Self-hosting CI/CD
1:09:25 Getting started with progressive delivery
1:11:15 Book recommendations
—
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower
• The past and future of modern backend practices
• Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future
• How Kubernetes is built with Kat Cosgrove
• How Linux is built with Greg KH
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe17 June 2026, 4:41 pm - 2 hours 51 minutesKubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• Buildkite – CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue
• Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers
—
Kelsey Hightower went from a self-taught technician installing DSL modems to becoming one of Google’s elite Distinguished Engineers, whom the CEO of Microsoft personally tried to recruit. Hightower’s career achievements are rooted in hard work and self-directed learning, and today he’s one of the most influential voices in modern infrastructure, through his talks, open source work, and writing.
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kelsey and I cover his unconventional path into tech and the lessons he’s learned during three decades in the industry. We discuss his entrepreneurial years, building a reputation through open source, the rise of containers and Kubernetes, and his time at Google during one of the most consequential periods in cloud computing.
He recounts how a job offer from a big tech giant led to the biggest raise of his career, what prompted him to slow down after years of career acceleration, and we also discuss his perspective on AI. Throughout, Kelsey keeps a simple idea front of mind: that technology is ultimately about people. Whether it’s infrastructure, leadership, careers, or AI, he argues that the goal is not to build technology for its own sake; it’s to solve meaningful human problems.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:34 Kelsey’s first job at McDonald’s
05:04 His non-traditional path into tech
11:45 Landing his first tech job with an A+ certification
15:33 His entrepreneurial years
19:45 Joining Google as a data center technician
27:48 Learning automation at a Rackspace spinoff
33:26 Moving into financial services
50:00 Building a reputation through open source
53:55 From configuration management to containers
1:08:20 The rise of Kubernetes
1:25:05 Why he almost joined NASA instead of Google
1:29:20 Defining DevRel at Google
1:38:20 Demonstrating impact at Google
1:41:20 Microsoft's offer
1:55:20 Learning how to slow down
2:06:39 Advising and investing
2:15:03 A people-first view of GenAI
2:24:27 Using AI with guardrails
2:28:26 Matching AI to the task
2:36:06 Staying relevant in the AI era
—
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Career paths for software engineers at large tech companies
• The past and future of modern backend practices
• The Staff Engineer’s Path: You’re a role model now (sorry!)
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe3 June 2026, 5:59 pm - 1 hour 20 minutesBuilding OpenCode with Dax Raad
Brought to You By:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.
• WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.
• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.
—
OpenCode is one of the fastest-growing AI developer tools around, surging in just a few months from roughly 650,000 monthly active users to nearly 8 million, and almost 1M daily active users.
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, we meet Dax Raad, co-founder of OpenCode, for a discussion about the gaps in developer tooling that led him to build OpenCode, the advantages of open source, and why taste and engineering judgment matter even more as AI becomes a core part of software development.
We also cover how OpenCode turned Anthropic’s blocking of integration with Claude Code into a massive growth lever by partnering with OpenAI and other model providers, why GPU demand is becoming a bottleneck everywhere, how come AI coding tools don’t automatically mean engineering teams move faster, and also why Dax is personally skeptical about predictions for the future of engineering and work, in general.
I found this conversation especially interesting because Dax displays a healthy skepticism toward the benefits of AI, even while building one of the most popular AI coding harnesses.
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
07:03 Dax’s path into tech
09:04 Early startup experience
13:16 Getting involved with open source
16:13 OpenCode
23:17 Anthropic banning OpenCode
30:34 From terminal to GUI
32:34 OpenCode’s business model
36:33 Why inference is profitable
39:11 GPU bottlenecks
40:54 AI hype
45:50 AI spending
48:47 Dax’s memo
55:41 Dax’s skepticism of predictions
58:58 Engineering culture at OpenCode
1:02:38 How building works at OpenCode
1:05:36 Taste and quality
1:11:32 Dax’s work setup
1:12:35 The role of engineers and EMs
1:15:50 Advice for engineers
1:18:12 Book recommendation
—
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• Real-world engineering challenges: building Cursor
• How Uber uses AI for development: inside look
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe27 May 2026, 4:07 pm - More Episodes? Get the App