The Arjay McCandless Show

Arjay McCandless
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship

Conversations with software engineers, founders, and builders about how great software actually gets made.

Episodes

  1. Oct 22

    The Engineering Behind OpenAI's Codex | Kiriti Badam

    Kiriti was an early member of the Codex team at OpenAI and is now CTO at Level Up Labs. We go deep on the engineering behind coding agents: what a "harness" actually is and why it matters as much as the model, how compaction and prompt caching work under the hood (including the bug that paged the Codex team every night), how you evaluate an agent when the model keeps changing, and how he personally ships large features with parallel agents and automated code review. If you're into AI engineering, harness engineering, prompt engineering, or loop engineering, this one's for you. Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:32 Meet Kiriti 1:26 Prompt vs. harness 4:05 Inside a harness 6:21 Who needs harnesses 7:40 Tool search 8:40 Better harness wins 11:49 How compaction works 14:28 Server-side compaction 15:49 Evaluating harnesses 18:21 Prompt caching 21:56 Front-end taste 24:58 Monitoring live sessions 27:05 Learning from traces 30:23 Dropping in GPT-7 32:27 Leaving OpenAI 35:01 Startup vs. lab 36:32 Right-sizing models 38:42 Handwritten code? 39:47 His feature workflow 44:10 His agent setup 45:50 Code review now 48:55 Reviewing at speed 50:08 Getting good 53:12 Find Kiriti Links Kiriti on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sai-kiriti-badam/ Kiriti's Substack: https://substack.com/@kiritib Kiriti's Maven course: https://maven.com/aishwarya-kiriti/genai-system-design Free lessons on Maven: https://maven.com/search?query=kiriti+badam&tab=free-lessons Level Up Labs: https://levelup-labs.ai/

  2. Sep 18

    No Degree, No Problem. Becoming a SWE, raising funds, succeeding in SF with no degree | Sam Hall

    Sam Hall is the founder of Wafer Systems. He skipped college, taught himself how to build, landed engineering jobs through cold outreach, and eventually raised $1.5M to start his own company. We talk about breaking into software without traditional credentials, why coding interviews don’t always reflect real engineering ability, what it’s actually like to raise venture capital, and the technical challenges behind building Wafer. Follow Sam on X: https://x.com/Shmall Check out Wafer: https://wafer.systems/ Follow Wafer on X: https://x.com/WaferSystems 1:02 Meet Sam Hall 1:33 Growing up curious and discovering coding 4:00 Building rockets, drones, and an early AI project 6:51 The unpaid labor 10:43 First business 14:07 Skipping college 19:06 Cold outreach 20:09 Early startup life 22:26 Moving to California 29:09 Deciding to build a company 34:21 Building an AI-native phone from scratch 37:30 Raising a pre-seed round 39:17 Finding community 41:32 Product demo 45:09 Tech deep dive 51:26 Building through trial and error 52:36 Retrieval systems, search, and AI context 59:52 Where to find Sam and Wafer

  3. Aug 27

    Building Nanoclaw, Agent Security | Gavriel Cohen

    We get into why you can’t fully trust an agent, sandboxing and credential isolation, when agents are better than traditional software, the security problem that led Gavriel to build NanoClaw, why NanoClaw is dramatically smaller than OpenClaw, and how his team uses agents to test and review their own code. If you're building with Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, or autonomous agents in general, this one goes deep on where agentic software is headed. Timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:43 Agent security & why you can’t trust an agent 8:19 Will AI models become secure enough to trust? 11:15 Why long-running agents go off track 21:32 When to use AI agents vs. traditional software 23:25 How NanoClaw started 30:20 NanoClaw vs. OpenClaw: security, vibe coding & code size 42:49 What makes NanoClaw different 46:00 Why taste can matter more than evals 49:09 Using AI agents to review and test code

  4. Aug 2

    Becoming an AI Engineer in 2026: Interviewing, System Design, Evals | Aishwarya Reganti

    Aishwarya Reganti joins me to break down how to become an AI engineer in 2026, including the skills software engineers should learn, how AI engineering interviews are changing, and what companies actually look for when hiring. We cover system design, evals, context engineering, AI agents, production reliability, AI product sense, and why judgment matters more than simply generating code with AI. If you’re a software engineer looking to break into AI engineering, this is for you. Aishwarya's GitHub: https://github.com/aishwaryanr/awesome-generative-ai-guide Aishwarya's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/areganti/ Learn from Aishwarya directly on Maven: https://maven.com/aishwarya-kiriti/genai-system-design 0:00 Intro 2:21 What is AI Engineering? 7:51 Evals 15:05 Interviewing for AI Eng and FDE roles 18:58 AI Product Sense 23:01 Enterprise AI Use Cases & Context Engineering 32:19 When to Use AI and Why AI Systems Fail in Production 42:08 Multi-Agent Systems and Coding Agent Workflows 48:26 Breaking into AI Eng as a SWE

  5. Jul 17

    Getting your first promotion as a SWE: Brandon Nguyen

    Brandon & Arjay go into tactical details on exactly what it takes to land your first and second promotions as a software engineer in big tech

  6. Jul 3

    Venmo’s First Engineer on Startups, AI, and Selling to Google: Shreyans Bhansali

    Shreyans Bhansali was the first engineer at Venmo, the founder of Socratic, and later joined Google when Socratic was acquired, then was a co-founder of Maven. In this episode, we talk about what Venmo was actually like in the early days, we get into the story behind Socratic, how the Google acquisition happened, and what changed after moving from a startup into Big Tech. Later, we talk about AI, software engineering, and why Shreyans thinks the current AI moment feels similar to the early 2010s startup wave: obvious in hindsight, but still full of unsolved problems.

  7. Jun 20

    Jeff Escalante - Director of Software at Clerk

    This is a conversation with Jeff Escalante, who’s currently a Director of Engineering at Clerk, where he spends more than 80% of his time writing code. Before that, Jeff was an early engineer at HashiCorp, where he joined around 200 employees and stayed through the company growing to thousands of employees and eventually IPOing. During that time, he also became a prominent contributor to Next.js, which led him to join Vercel as the manager of the Next.js team, where he helped shape the roadmap for one of the most important frameworks in web development. In this episode, we talk about how Jeff broke into software engineering without a traditional CS background, how to get hired without spraying your résumé everywhere, what he’s learned from spending most of his career in dev tools, how Clerk thinks about engineering, and how AI is changing the way software engineering actually works. Hope you enjoy the first episode, and welcome to the podcast.

  • 7 Episodes

About

Conversations with software engineers, founders, and builders about how great software actually gets made.

Information

  • Creator
    Arjay McCandless
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    7
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Arjay McCandless
  • Show Website
    The Arjay McCandless Show