Beyond Coding

Patrick Akil

For software engineers ready to level up. Learn from CTOs, principal engineers, and tech leaders about the skills beyond coding: from technical mastery to product thinking and career growth. Created by Patrick Akil. Powered by Xebia

  1. 11 hr ago

    Why Coding Agents Keep Making Your Codebase Worse

    HumanLayer CEO Dexter Horthy, who coined "context engineering", on why AI agents degrade codebases over time. He breaks down a benchmark that measures AI code quality across features, and how his team ships with agents without drowning in slop. In this video, we cover: SlopCodeBench, SWE-bench and which coding benchmarks to trustToken maxing, dark factories and the "Instagram phase" of AI engineeringWhy 2-4x productivity beats chasing 100xPull requests, design docs and how engineers build taste nowDex's agentic engineering workflow: one-shots, overnight janitor bots and research-design-planFor engineers and engineering leaders adopting AI coding agents who want to know what's real and what works in teams at scale. Timestamps:00:00:00 - The Man Who Coined the Term: Context Engineering00:00:54 - SlopCodeBench: Proof AI Makes Codebases Worse Over Time00:05:49 - Background Agents and the Enterprise Friction Problem00:08:13 - Why You'll Never One-Shot a Big Feature00:11:18 - Scaling Agentic Engineering to 1,000 Engineers00:16:19 - Dark Factories, Fake Hype and Token Maxing00:19:55 - Why 2-4x Faster Beats Chasing 100x00:21:31 - Should Teams Stop Doing Pull Requests?00:24:20 - Can Deterministic Tools Replace Code Review?00:27:37 - How to Build Engineering Taste When AI Writes Code00:33:05 - Dex's Agentic Workflow: One-Shots and Janitor Bots00:35:18 - Research, Design, Plan: Shipping Big Features With Agents00:38:35 - Why Overnight Agents and Heavy Parallelism Backfire00:40:10 - Subscription Maxing vs Paying Per Token00:42:40 - Parallelize Like Poker, Not a Slot Machine Dex Horthy: https://x.com/dexhorthyDex's talks and deep dives: https://aithatworks.bold.video #AgenticEngineering #AICoding #SoftwareEngineering

    Why Coding Agents Keep Making Your Codebase Worse

  2. 23 Sept

    How Amp Ships 50 Times a Day With AI Agents

    Amp ships to production around 50 times a day with AI agents, but the change that makes their team ship faster isn't AI at all. Dario Hamidi, AI engineer at Amp, makes the case that pull requests are holding your team back, and explains what replaces them. In this video, we cover: Why Amp works without pull requests or feature branches, and how to try it with your own teamAgent permissions, approval fatigue, and building environments where you can trust agentsOrbs: remote agent execution, parallelism, and multiplayer sessionsShort-lived credentials and workload identity federation for cloud agentsTriaging 60+ bug reports a day with agents without frying your brainFor engineers and engineering leads who want to ship faster with AI agents and are ready to question the workflows they've always used. Timestamps:00:00:00 - Is It Time to Kill the Pull Request?00:00:45 - What Happens If Every PR Gets Auto-Closed Tomorrow00:05:04 - Pull Requests Were Built for Strangers, Not Teammates00:07:20 - Does Dropping PRs Hurt Quality at Scale?00:08:53 - Agent Permissions: Why No Default Makes Everyone Happy00:12:42 - Don't Juggle Knives: Building Environments You Can Trust00:14:56 - The Hidden Hard Parts of Cloud Agents00:16:39 - What's an Orb? Remote Agent Execution Explained00:19:10 - How to Give Agents Credentials Without Leaking Secrets00:22:51 - Why Orbs Live Forever (and Multiplayer Orbs)00:25:49 - The State Management Problem Nobody Talks About00:29:22 - When Will Everyone Have Remote Dev Environments?00:32:23 - Orbs That Spawn Orbs: Orchestrating Agents at Scale00:34:42 - How Dario Triages 60 Bug Reports a Day With Agents00:39:23 - Avoiding Burnout When Agents Remove the Ceiling #AIAgents #SoftwareEngineering #PullRequests

    How Amp Ships 50 Times a Day With AI Agents

  3. 16 Sept

    How Top Engineers Still Get Hired When Most Get Ghosted

    How do top engineers still get hired in 2026 when most applicants get ghosted, 120,000 people have been laid off this year, and hiring managers say they can't find talent? A recruiter, a hiring lead, a career coach and an open source engineer explain why your resume is dead on arrival when every CV looks the same, and what actually gets you in the room instead. In this episode, we cover: Why 120,000 tech layoffs and 60,000 open engineering roles exist at the same timeWhy only 20% of LinkedIn messages get a reply, and how to write the ones that doWhy one hiring team bans AI tools in interviews and is building an agentic coding session insteadAdaptability and resilience: the two soft skills that keep you in the roomGetting hired through GitHub, referrals and open source when your CV can't stand outWhether junior engineers still have a path, and which engineering cohort is at risk in 3 to 5 yearsTitles vs scope: how to grow when your title never changesFor software engineers, students about to graduate, and anyone in tech who wants to know what recruiters and hiring managers are actually filtering on right now. Timestamps:00:00:00 - Intro: 1,000 Layoffs a Day00:00:47 - How Bad Is the Tech Job Market in 2026?00:02:05 - Why 120K Layoffs and 60K Open Jobs Don't Add Up00:03:40 - Why AI Tools Are Banned From Interviews00:06:28 - Hard Skills Get You In, Soft Skills Keep You There00:09:20 - "I'm a University Dropout": How GitHub Got Me Hired00:10:18 - CVs Are Too Good Now: Why Referrals Win00:13:04 - How to Get Your Open Source PR Merged00:15:02 - Why 80% of Your LinkedIn Messages Get Ghosted00:16:51 - How Open Source Led to a HashiCorp Job Offer00:19:15 - Is There Still a Place for Junior Engineers?00:22:00 - The Engineers Who'll Be Obsolete in 3 to 5 Years00:24:20 - Should You Contribute to Open Source at All?00:26:05 - AI Skills Required, Algorithms Still Tested00:27:54 - Stop Chasing Titles: Scope, Impact and Owning Your Career #softwareengineering #techjobs #careeradvice

    How Top Engineers Still Get Hired When Most Get Ghosted

  4. 9 Sept

    Why an Ex-Googler Bet Everything on an Open-Source Database

    Jordan Tigani helped create Google BigQuery, then got fired as Chief Product Officer on a Friday morning. He planned to hack on DuckDB to learn Rust. Investors offered to fund it before he'd decided to start a company. That company became MotherDuck In this episode, we cover: The DuckDB Labs partnership: why MotherDuck gave the open-source creators a co-founder share instead of going open-coreFrom alpha to paid product: 11 founders, 3 to 4 months to alpha, two years to something people would pay forAI on top of the data warehouse: vibe-coded dashboards (Dives), pipelines (Flights), a context layer (Guides), and why business users catch mistakes analysts missAre dashboards dead? Jordan wrote "Big Data Is Dead"; his answer on dashboards is differentCareer advice: why you shouldn't want to work on the query optimizer, and the skill Jordan says matters moreFor engineers curious about database and infrastructure companies, open-source business models, and how AI is changing who gets to ask questions of data. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:32 - Fired on a Friday: how MotherDuck accidentally started 00:04:50 - Giving DuckDB Labs a co-founder share of the company 00:07:43 - Why most open-source SaaS products are just "managed" 00:09:31 - Why VCs said yes: Snowflake, DuckDB, and BigQuery credibility 00:10:50 - The 11-person founding team that skipped the wrong designs 00:12:20 - Alpha in 4 months, beta in a year, paid in two 00:15:20 - Vibe-coded BI: Dives, Flights, Guides, and an agent harness 00:20:10 - The questions business users ask that analysts never do 00:24:14 - Are dashboards dead in the age of agents? 00:27:57 - Everybody wants to work on the optimizer (don't) 00:31:23 - The engineer superpower most engineers look down on 00:33:20 - Writing: the one skill Jordan would learn (and still hates) 00:36:05 - Does contributing to DuckDB get you hired at MotherDuck? 00:37:20 - Why a database company leaned into the duck #MotherDuck #DuckDB #SoftwareEngineering

    Why an Ex-Googler Bet Everything on an Open-Source Database

  5. 2 Sept

    How the Best Engineers Build a World Model (Google Earth Creator & Niantic Spatial CTO)

    Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon on how the best engineers solve problems most give up on — from a 4D model of the world to shipping research in months. He built Google Earth and ran Google Maps for over a decade, and he's been there, done that. What he's building now is harder, and it's already live for customers. Along the way: who makes it on his team and who doesn't, and the one piece of advice he'd give every engineer using AI. In this video, we cover: - The 4D model of the world: visual positioning, change detection, and treating a pile of photos like a database - Gaussian splats and real-to-sim: capturing a room and loading it into Nvidia Isaac to train robots - Turning a research idea into a production service in six months - What Google Maps taught him about building for robots instead of humans - Designing problems AI can self-check, and why token maxing is a waste For engineers and engineering leaders who want to work on problems that don't have a known answer yet — and who want to know what a CTO who's built the definitive product in his field looks for in the people he hires. Recorded at the AI4 conference 2026. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Google Earth? Been There, Done That 00:00:46 - Turning a Research Idea Into Production in 6 Months 00:02:37 - How Any Photo Gets Located Within Half a Meter 00:06:37 - The Long-Term Goal: A 4D Model of the World 00:08:37 - Treating a Pile of Photos Like a Database 00:11:58 - What Google Maps Taught Him About Training Robots 00:15:22 - Gaussian Splats Explained in Plain Terms 00:17:42 - The Unsolved Problem: Scale and Semantic Change 00:20:34 - Why Google Earth Is Good Enough 00:22:09 - Who Makes It on His Team and Who Doesn't 00:23:38 - Designing Problems AI Can Self-Check 00:26:03 - The Insights Hidden in the Physical World 00:28:18 - Digital Twins, Cities, and Ready Player One 00:31:35 - Visual Positioning When GPS Gets Spoofed 00:33:24 - Token Maxing Is Bullshit: Advice for Engineers Guest: Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial. The engineer behind Google Earth; ran Google Maps for over a decade. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianmcclendon #NianticSpatial #GoogleEarth #SoftwareEngineering

    How the Best Engineers Build a World Model (Google Earth Creator & Niantic Spatial CTO)

  6. 26 Aug

    How New Staff Engineers Build Judgment Without Years of Experience

    How do new staff engineers build judgment without the years of experience that used to come with the role? Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech, explains why the data-structures-and-algorithms foundation everyone was trained on is no longer enough on its own, and where the complexity has actually shifted now that AI writes the implementation. In this video, we cover: Why "how does AI affect engineers" is the wrong question, and what to ask insteadRehearsing multiple futures: what judgment looks like in a staff engineerThe case method: building judgment from incident reports and system design history instead of waiting years for itCognitive coordination, code review load, and the surprise ask for more meetings at staff levelTiger teams vs scaled teams, trust as architecture, and building evals from a spreadsheetSplitting planning from execution so engineers stop falling behind with agentsTaste vs judgment, and how to build both outside of softwareIf you've just made staff, or you're about to, this conversation gives you a frame for what the level actually demands now and how to grow into it faster than the old apprenticeship allowed. Recorded at the AI4 conference 2026. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - How AI Is Changing Senior Engineering Careers 00:00:41 - Why "How Does AI Affect Engineers" Is the Wrong Question 00:03:26 - What Judgment Actually Is: Rehearsing Multiple Futures 00:05:24 - Why Data Structures and Algorithms Are No Longer Enough 00:07:22 - Learning Judgment From Incident Reports Like the 2017 S3 Outage 00:11:13 - The New Staff Engineer's Core Challenge: Cognitive Coordination 00:14:48 - What Managers, Universities, and Shakespeare Each Owe You 00:17:55 - Code Review Load, Meeting Notes, and the Surprise Ask for More Meetings 00:23:59 - Trust as Architecture: Why Evals Started as a Spreadsheet 00:27:09 - Tiger Teams vs Big Teams: Product Managers Reviewing Code 00:32:39 - Why Some Engineers Can't Keep Up With Agents 00:35:46 - Local AI Champions and Splitting Planning From Execution 00:38:38 - Go Deep or Go Broad? Search in a World of Agents 00:44:12 - Taste vs Judgment: Thinking in 50 Layers Guest: Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech. Rehearshing the Future framework  If by Rudyard Kipling

    How New Staff Engineers Build Judgment Without Years of Experience

  7. 19 Aug

    Amazon AI Lead: What Differentiates The Best AI Coding Models

    How does Amazon build its agentic AI? Michael Giannangeli, Head of Product for Amazon Nova and Agentic AI, breaks down evals, RL gyms, and model routing. He also explains why the bottleneck in software has shifted away from engineering hours and what takes its place. In this video, we cover: The eval lifecycle: building from real failure modes, saturation, and why 100% means deleteRL gyms: training models on real environments like migrations, DevOps, and pen testingModel routing, cost-per-token trade-offs, and why routing isn't solvedThe agent stack of an Amazon product lead: Claude Code, Codex, and KiroAutonomous migrations, trust, and how much human-in-the-loop survivesFor engineers and product people building with AI agents who want to see how a frontier lab actually closes its feedback loops. Recorded at the AI4 conference 2026. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:36 - The Agents an Amazon Product Lead Uses Daily 00:03:36 - Why Nobody's Heard of Amazon Nova 00:04:55 - Model Costs and the Routing Problem 00:08:10 - Why Building Good Evals Is So Hard 00:10:05 - When Evals Saturate and Get Deleted 00:12:17 - Turning Real Failure Modes Into Hundreds of Evals 00:15:26 - Improving Models Without Training on Customer Data 00:18:26 - If Everyone Uses Agents, You Need Agents 00:20:22 - The Bottleneck Is No Longer Engineering Hours 00:23:20 - Ship Fast to Validate the Right Thing 00:26:44 - Staying at the Frontier Amid Constant Noise 00:29:37 - Spend 10-20% of Your Time Experimenting 00:32:54 - RL Gyms: How Models Learn From Failure 00:37:09 - Will Migrations Become Fully Autonomous? Guest: Michael Giannangeli - Head of Product, Agentic AI & Amazon Nova at Amazon #AmazonNova #AgenticAI #AIEngineering

    Amazon AI Lead: What Differentiates The Best AI Coding Models

  8. 12 Aug

    Wes Bos: How Developers Stand Out When AI Writes the Code

    AI is changing what developers build, but code alone is no longer enough to prove what you can do. Wes Bos explains why engineers need to solve problems beyond syntax, how agent workflows are reshaping software development, and what still requires human thinking. In this conversation: The limits of generative UI and AI-generated designAgent loops, harnesses, and cheaper AI modelsThe rising cost of AI coding and the case for local hardwareWhy developer education is shifting from syntax to problem-solvingPersonal branding, conferences, newsletters, and AI-generated contentFor developers navigating AI-assisted coding, this episode explores the skills and signals that still help you stand out. This podcast was recorded at JSNation, the key web dev conference. OUTLINE 00:00:00 - Code Is Not Enough for Developers 00:00:32 - Why Generative UI Still Feels Unfinished 00:04:35 - How Agent Loops Improve AI Coding 00:07:06 - When Agent Workflows Become Standard Tools 00:08:19 - Are Cheaper AI Models Good Enough? 00:10:44 - Can AI Coding Costs Stay Sustainable? 00:12:24 - What Engineers Need To Learn Now 00:14:23 - Why Fundamentals Matter Beyond Syntax 00:15:34 - How Non-Coders Are Building Production Tools 00:16:21 - Why In-Person Conferences Still Matter 00:18:11 - Personal Branding When Code Isn't Enough 00:20:37 - Can Newsletters Beat The Attention Crisis? 00:22:02 - Why AI-Generated Content Feels Insulting 00:24:12 - Use AI To Scaffold, Not Think

    Wes Bos: How Developers Stand Out When AI Writes the Code
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About

For software engineers ready to level up. Learn from CTOs, principal engineers, and tech leaders about the skills beyond coding: from technical mastery to product thinking and career growth. Created by Patrick Akil. Powered by Xebia

Information

  • Creator
    Patrick Akil
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    270
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Patrick Akil
  • Show Website
    Beyond Coding

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