Chaotic Commits | Software, AI, and Uncomfortable Truths

Joanne Skiles

The podcast that says the thing everyone in the room is thinking but nobody puts in the post-mortem. Chaotic Commits covers software engineering, AI, cloud architecture, and engineering leadership (not that sanitized LinkedIn version, the real one). Architecture decisions that almost broke everything. Management lessons learned the hard way. The bigger questions about who gets to build the future and what that actually means. New episodes every week. Hosted by Dr. Joanne Skiles, AWS Community Builder, engineering leader, and speaker at AWS re:Invent, AWS Summits, GHC, and more.

  1. feat: embed a stranger in your codebase

    6일 전

    feat: embed a stranger in your codebase

    I read the AWS forward deployed engineering announcement on a Tuesday morning. Palantir has been doing this for over a decade. And guess what? OpenAI does it, also Anthropic does it. A billion dollars from AWS means this is now the default way enterprise AI gets adopted at scale. But here's the question nobody asks in the sales meeting: when a vendor's engineer ships code to your production system and then goes back to their company, who owns that code on day one thousand? This episode isn't "is forward deployed engineering good or bad." It's about the incentive structure. A forward deployed engineer is optimizing for platform adoption, renewal milestones, and a good case study. Your team needs a system that's still legible in three years. Those are different goals. And if you don't name that mismatch before the engagement starts, your team will be the ones writing the postmortem. I also cover the four questions I'd ask before signing. Not a framework. Just what I'd actually say in the room. If you've ever inherited code from someone who wasn't building for your team's future, this one's for you. Topics: forward deployed engineering, enterprise AI adoption, vendor management, engineering leadership, accountability, technical debt, AWS, AI platform, Palantir Links Substack: https://chaotictoejam.substack.comBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/chaotictoejam.bsky.social

    25분
  2. feat: invented the do-while loop (already existed)

    6월 26일

    feat: invented the do-while loop (already existed)

    My teammate and I had been at the whiteboard for most of the morning. Three pages filled, two markers gone, cap on one of them missing since 9:30. We had built a loop structure that runs at least once before checking its condition. We were proud of it. We walked to our tech lead's desk and presented what we'd built. "You mean a do-while?" In unsupervised isolation, I had co-invented the do-while loop. It has existed since approximately the Eisenhower administration. This is about what happens when smart engineers work without vocabulary. Not without intelligence, without the index. The connection between a problem and the named construct that solves it. Senior engineers don't think harder. They pattern-match faster because someone built that index for them. We cover the history of parallel independent discovery, what engineering mentorship actually looks like versus leaving junior engineers at a whiteboard, and why vibe coding produces the same failure at scale: correct logic, more code than necessary, because nobody knew the name of what they were building. If you have ever worked hard to open a door that had a handle on it, this one's for you. Topics: engineering mentorship, junior engineers, early career, do-while loop, programming fundamentals, vibe coding, AI-generated code, engineering vocabulary, pattern recognition, Lockheed Martin, technical onboarding

    20분
  3. maintain: you can't vibe trust

    6월 19일

    maintain: you can't vibe trust

    An interview candidate asked me what makes our product safe from someone vibe coding a competitor. The honest answer was: nothing stops them. This episode is the full version of that answer. Vibe coding gets you a version of the thing: code that works under the conditions you tested, for users you imagined. What it doesn't get you is understanding. In consumer software, that gap is survivable. In healthcare, finance, and regulated domains, it can cost people their lives. I walk through three companies that found out the hard way: Theranos, Zenefits, and Silicon Valley Bank. I make the argument that the more dangerous failure isn't the outsider who skips the domain. It's the incumbent that stops maintaining it. Domain knowledge you stopped practicing isn't a moat. It's a story you tell about yourself. If you build software in a regulated industry, or lead a team that does, this one is for you. Topics: vibe coding, AI-generated code, engineering leadership, domain expertise, regulatory compliance, responsible AI, technical debt, software engineering ethics

    21분
  4. feat: I know they're just pixels, but can't you be nice?

    6월 12일

    feat: I know they're just pixels, but can't you be nice?

    My seven-year-old was trash-talking a Pokémon trainer. The way a seven-year-old does. And I stopped him: "I know they're just pixels, but can't you be nice?" That simple moment led to a much bigger question: What are we practicing when we interact with AI systems, chatbots, NPCs, voice assistants, and virtual characters? In this episode of Chaotic Commits, we explore what Tamagotchis, ELIZA, Roombas, Alexa, ChatGPT, and modern AI systems can teach us about human behavior, AI ethics, transparency, and the habits we build when interacting with technology. The question isn't whether AI has feelings. It's what we're practicing when we interact with increasingly human-like systems. Topics: AI ethics, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, human-AI interaction, AI transparency, anthropomorphism, responsible AI, human-in-the-loop systems, software engineering, engineering leadership, AI design, and behavioral psychology.

    27분
  5. raise e: the line that logged everything

    6월 5일

    raise e: the line that logged everything

    It's 8:30 PM, and I'm lying in my four-year-old's bed playing Spiderman when the text comes in. "yoo, we are logging all of tenant config in prod logs has secrets in plain text." Not test secrets. Not staging. All of the secrets. Production. In the logs. This episode is the story of that night: what raise e actually does in Python, why a valid exception handler became a production security incident, and what "log scrubbing" actually means when your logs are in a SIEM, a compliance archive, and systems your vendor manages. We cover secret rotation when you're two incidents deep in forty-eight hours, and your customers are involved. The thing I keep coming back to: logging is an architectural decision, not a default. Most teams find out they never made that decision when they're staring at a screen at 10 PM, calculating how long tenant API keys have been sitting in plain text. If you've been on-call, worked through a security incident, or built anything that handles customer secrets, this one is for you. What you log is a decision. Own it before someone else finds it. Topics: production incident, secrets in logs, Python exception handling, raise e, incident response, log scrubbing, API key leak, SIEM, compliance, on-call engineering, backend security, logging best practices, engineering leadership, tenant security

    18분
  6. scope: undefined

    5월 29일

    scope: undefined

    A manager once told me, "If you get the work done, they will want more." He meant it as advice (and was a little sarcastic too). He was wrong about what to do with it. He wasn't wrong about the dynamic. This episode is about what happens when capable engineers become the workaround. The script you run once to fix prod becomes the script you're running for 300 users two weeks later. The emergency process becomes the permanent process. Eventually, the organization concludes that we don't need the system. We have you. In this episode, I talk about scope creep at the individual level, not the project level. It's what happens because you're good at your job and you keep saying yes. But to escape, you need to know how to hold the line without just saying no. You have to build a "no" that sticks. If you've ever walked out of a meeting wondering how you became someone's permanent workaround, this is for you. Topics: engineering leadership, scope creep, technical debt, engineering culture, career advice, software engineering, setting boundaries, organizational debt, engineering management

    20분
  7. (bonus) cache miss: the search for something google won't let you find

    5월 26일 ·  보너스

    (bonus) cache miss: the search for something google won't let you find

    I want to tell you about the last time I actually enjoyed using Google. I don't remember exactly when it was. That's kind of the point. At I/O 2026, Google announced an AI-first search experience. Instead of links, you get a synthesized answer. Conversational. Efficient. And I think we just killed something important. This episode is about three connected things nobody is saying out loud: what we lose when search becomes a conversation, why the dead internet theory isn't paranoid anymore, and what AI training has to do with killing the incentive that made the open web worth building in the first place. If the AI draws its knowledge from the web, and the web stops having a reason to produce original knowledge, the whole system starts eating itself. If you've ever followed a link from a link from a link at midnight and ended up somewhere you didn't know you needed to be, this one's for you. Topics: AI search, Google I/O, dead internet theory, knowledge discovery, open web, AI training data, search engine optimization, AI accountability, transparent AI systems

    15분
  8. hotfix: everything I know about distributed systems, I learned from Costco

    5월 22일

    hotfix: everything I know about distributed systems, I learned from Costco

    Every computer science textbook explains distributed systems with boxes and arrows. I'm going to explain it with a warehouse in the suburbs where you can buy a kayak, a television, and a 48-pack of paper towels in the same trip. The membership card is your API key. The one-way entrance is your traffic ingress. The free sample person is the throttle (one per customer, retry window twenty minutes). The no-windows design is what an unobservable system feels like from the inside. The receipt check at the exit isn't verifying payment; it's output validation. The $1.50 hot dog is an SLA commitment so load-bearing that the CEO has publicly stated it will never change. And the tire center you've never used is your disaster recovery runbook. Every concept in a distributed systems course is visible at Costco on a Saturday. The parking lot is DNS. The gas station line is your permanently bottlenecked service. Kirkland Signature is vendor abstraction. This is the episode I wish someone had recorded before I sat through my first distributed systems lecture. The boxes and arrows aren't the insight. The people trying to get a rotisserie chicken on a Saturday afternoon are. Topics: distributed systems, load balancing, rate limiting, API design, SLA, observability, vendor abstraction, canary deploys, dead letter queues, DNS, capacity planning, system design

    25분
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소개

The podcast that says the thing everyone in the room is thinking but nobody puts in the post-mortem. Chaotic Commits covers software engineering, AI, cloud architecture, and engineering leadership (not that sanitized LinkedIn version, the real one). Architecture decisions that almost broke everything. Management lessons learned the hard way. The bigger questions about who gets to build the future and what that actually means. New episodes every week. Hosted by Dr. Joanne Skiles, AWS Community Builder, engineering leader, and speaker at AWS re:Invent, AWS Summits, GHC, and more.

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