Episode 22 · The Weekly Dev's Brew
Why AI Coding Made Me More Productive - And Less Happy | Dillon Mulroy
10 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Episode notes
Why did AI coding make Dillon Mulroy more productive and less happy? He stopped writing most of his own code after Claude Opus 4.5. Six months later he ships more than he ever has, still reads every line, and enjoys the work less. The small implementation hits that used to create flow are gone. The day is now one hard design problem after another, and that is more exhausting. Dillon is a principal engineer at Cloudflare. This episode answers what Cloudflare's May layoff of about 1,100 people looked like from inside, why lab-style agent loops are a poor default for most teams, and how he…
Podcast
The Weekly Dev's Brew
Jan-Niklas Wortmann · Tech & Science · English
The people building AI developer tools have stories most of us never hear. Stories of failed experiments, unexpected wins and workflows they swear by. The Weekly Dev's Brew host Jan-Niklas Wortmann pulls those stories out through honest conversations about what AI actually changes for developers and
More from The Weekly Dev's Brew All episodes →
-
E23 · 24 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 33 min
Why AI agents belong in the sandbox | Darren Shepherd
Why buy a sandbox when you can just launch a container? Darren Shepherd spent years at Rancher building on Kubernetes, so sandboxes looked dumb to him. Then he built his own coding agent to run 15 things in parallel without work-tree chaos, and the most interesting part of it turned out to be a sandboxing system. He had proved himself wrong. The sharp part is where the sandbox boundary goes. The common pattern keeps the agent loop outside and sandboxes only its tool calls. Darren calls that completely flawed, because the loop itself directs code that holds secrets and talks to external…
-
E21 · 13 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 39 min
Dex Horthy - What Actually Gets You 2-3x With AI Coding
You can't get 10x with AI coding. Not today. Dex Horthy (Human Layer) makes the case for 2-3x if you refuse to ship slop, and why a perfect spec still produces garbage if you give the model permission to skip quality. That permission is how you burn a codebase into ash. We get into context engineering, where AI coding actually fails, why PR review is the bottleneck, how to use specs without worshipping them, cheap models vs Opus, compaction and sub-agents, and what to tell a 20-year engineer who is not living on Twitter. Dex is the founder of Human Layer. https://humanlayer.dev
-
E20 · 30 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 17 min
How To Ship Real Code With AI (Not Junk) ft. David Cramer
Everyone is selling 100x developer productivity, but David Cramer runs production software at Sentry and says LLMs are not making his own work faster. We talk about what actually holds up when AI meets real codebases, security review, open source economics, and why verification beats generation.
-
E19 · 12 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 17 min
Faster Isn't Better — Mario Zechner on Everything AI Made Us Forget (creator of Pi)
Mario Zechner has watched people generate 500,000 lines of code in a week with a swarm of agents. He'll tell you exactly how that ends.Mario is the creator of Pi, the minimal, self-modifying coding agent that took off after Claude Code stopped fitting his workflow. He now builds it alongside Armin Ronacher at Earendil. This one is a grumpy, honest conversation about where AI coding is actually heading, and the places the hype quietly falls apart.We get into:- Why "code is never free," and how a lot of today's productivity just delays the bill- The case that spec-driven development is…
-
E18 · 22 May 2026 · 55 min
A Google Engineer's Honest Take on AI, Angular, and the Future of Your Career
In this episode, I sit down with Minko Gechev — Google Engineer, former Angular team lead, and one of the most thoughtful voices on AI and developer productivity.We get into why AI won't replace engineers anytime soon (and what that actually means for your career), how Google's Angular team is affected by AI, the security risks of the current AI coding wave, and the single most valuable skill developers should be building right now.If you're a developer trying to figure out where you fit in the age of AI, I hope this one helps you.Connect with Minko:X/Twitter:…
-
E17 · 19 Sep 2025 · 1 hr 11 min
Microfrontends: Cutting Through the Hype and Misconceptions (w/ Luca)
Micro-frontends promise to help teams scale development, but AWS Principal Architect Luca Mezzalira has seen some succeed and some just fall apart. In this conversation, he shares what he's learned from years of implementation work at companies like DAZN and through consulting with Fortune 500 organizations.Luca explains why micro-frontends are fundamentally different from components—something many teams get wrong from the start. He discusses the common pitfalls he encounters: teams treating them like distributed components, sharing state across boundaries, and copying architectures from…
Take it with you
The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.
