Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of the software world. Adam Stacoviak brings you in-depth interviews with the best and brightest in software engineering, open source & leadership. This is a polyglot podcast. All programming languages, platforms & communities are welcome.
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October 22, 20262 hr 0 min
Building what's next
This week I'm talking with Zeno Rocha, CEO of Resend, about scaling "boring" email to 3 million users, the secret Go rewrite behind it, and building for agents. We cover pricing.md, MCP, spam gangs, and why Resend keeps what's next for email.
October 9, 20262 hr 42 min
From zero to NanoClaw
Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw and co-founder of NanoCo, joins Adam to explain how a 40-hour weekend project became a viral open source hit and the foundation of an enterprise AI company. Gavriel describes the security concerns that led him to build a small, container-isolated alternative to OpenClaw, why he released it under the MIT license, and why the project's community and credibility are more valuable than keeping its code private. They explore the shift from writing code to architecting the environments in which agents work, NanoClaw's "skills over features" approach, the approval and governance layers required inside large companies, and a future where every worker manages agents without surrendering human judgment. They close with the technical simplicity behind NanoClaw, containers, TypeScript, SQLite, and a two-database design, and Adam's case for durable Agent Flow artifacts that keep organizational context from disappearing into chat.
September 3, 20261 hr 54 min
Forking Cal.com to closed source
This week I'm joined by Peer Richelsen, co-founder of Cal.com. What if the majority of open source repositories are already compromised and we just don't know it yet? That's the theory Peer brings to the table this week. We dig into how AI has flattened the knowledge graph to the point that a 16-year-old can vibe hack a power station just as easily as their mom can vibe code an iOS app, why the reporting culture that has kept open source safe all these years is collapsing under AI generated noise, Cal.com's move to fork its own codebase and take the sensitive parts private, and the eye opening reality that shipping "$1 of AI tokens for pennies on the dollar" is now a common startup business model.
August 25, 20261 hr 42 min
Postgres at PlanetScale
Sam Lambert is back after 4 years and he does not hold back! We cover $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the Neki "do-over" of Vitess, agents shipping schema changes through deploy requests, rolling back a 500TB table in seconds, and the very real question of whether to open source any of it. Plus: why he thinks the sleeping, lazy giants should be broken up.
July 21, 20262 hr 6 min
Canary tokens and digital tripwires
Haroon Meer is back! Haroon is the Founder of Thinkst, the ~50-person bootstrapped company behind Canary and Canarytokens — honeypots and tripwires you sprinkle inside your network and forget about until an attacker touches one. We talk about the AWS API key token attackers just can't resist trying, the real credit card token backed by an actual bank partnership, Breadcrumbs (their brand-new feature that leads intruders straight to your canaries), a live demo where a hardware Canary becomes a Synology NAS in one click, and how a company with zero outbound sales and no price increase in ten years quietly passed $22.5 million in ARR.
June 5, 20261 hr 46 min
From open source hits to OpenAI
This week I'm talking with Max Stoiber, currently working on ChatGPT's plugin directory and app platform at OpenAI. We discuss the hundreds of open source projects nobody remembers alongside the big ones like react-boilerplate and styled-components, how Spectrum became part of GitHub and eventually helped shape GitHub Discussions, the founder growth that came from building Stellate, the GraphQL cache that turned into a dual acquisition by Shopify and The Guild, and why ChatGPT apps feel like a new surface for software.
May 15, 20261 hr 54 min
MCP on Code Mode
This week I'm talking with Matt Carey about Code Mode and how most of us have been thinking about MCP all wrong. Matt works on the Agents SDK and MCP at Cloudflare — we discuss how server-side Code Mode lets one MCP server expose all ~2,500 Cloudflare API endpoints in about 1,000 tokens of context, the dynamic Worker loader that runs model-written code safely in a V8 isolate, Matt's own workflow with Claude, where memory fits into the future of agents, and his Zaggy git wrapper that keeps agents from force-pushing his repos.
April 24, 20261 hr 36 min
Exploring with agents
Today on the show I’m talking with Amelia Wattenberger — designer, data-viz veteran, ex-GitHub Next, and now designing Intent at Augment Code. What if the last 30% of any software project is about to become the hardest part you’ve ever done? That’s the argument Amelia is making today. We discuss the identity crisis developers are having as agents take over the keyboard, the epic redesign of developer tooling in this agent-first world, the arc from autocomplete to chat to CLI back to UI, why Intent treats a workspace as their core primitive not a chat thread, the tradeoffs between one-worktree-per-agent vs. one-worktree-per-task, and why she thinks prototyping just got easier but finishing got harder.
March 11, 20261 hr 42 min
From Tailnet to platform
Adam talks with Tailscale co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer David Carney about where Tailscale is headed next: TSIDP, TSNet, multiple tailnets, and Aperture. They get into clickless auth (via TSIDP), TSNet apps, multiple tailnets for isolation and control, and Aperture, Tailscale’s private AI gateway for API key management, observability, and agent security.
February 27, 20261 hr 44 min
Opus 4.5 changed everything
Burke Holland works on GitHub Copilot by day and codes with his AI agents always. Early January, Burke posted about how Opus 4.5 changed everything. We were all still buzzing from the holiday-season 2x usage bump Claude gave us, and Opus 4.5 felt like a genuine step function in capability. Burke and I get into all the details. Opus 4.5 may have started the fire, but GPT-5.3 Codex is certainly living up to the hype.
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