DevOps Paradox

#369: Vibe coding is great until it isn't, and the until part usually shows up fast. Ten different ways to calculate sales tax. An agent that switches programming languages in the middle of a request. One team on NodeJS, another on Python, and nobody with a rule about either. So who's supposed to stop that?
Turns out that's a job now. Somebody has to tell the agents what they can and can't do, encode it, and then prove it held.
In this episode, we speak with Dan Fernandez, Vice President of Product for Developer Services at Salesforce, about harness engineering, what actually counts as slop, and why Heroku isn't dead.
Disclosure: Salesforce paid for Darin's travel and hotel to attend Dreamforce 2026. They did not review, approve, or influence this episode. The questions, the opinions, and the editing are ours.
 
Dan's contact information:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danfernandez/
 
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#368: You're faster with AI. Your teammates are faster with AI. More tickets closed, more deployments going out than a year ago. So why can't anybody in the building answer a simple question: are we shipping more value?
Jeff's take is that the bottleneck didn't go away, it moved. Code got cheap. Deciding what to build, why, and whether it actually worked did not. That's not an engineering problem anymore. It's a product problem.
In this episode, we speak with Jeff Keyes, Field CTO at Allstacks, about where the bottleneck went once AI made coding cheap, and why product people have to pick up the tools next.
 
Jeff's contact information:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffdkeyes/
 
YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/devopsparadox
 
Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts:
https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/
 
Slack:
https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/
 
Connect with us at:
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#367: Every few weeks another pitch lands. A company with no employees, just a founder and an army of AI agents. Zero headcount. Zero payroll. Then the AI CMO hallucinates a marketing campaign and somebody has to catch it.
Viktor runs the numbers on his own one-person operation. He can review maybe five things a night. Want a hundred a day? That is nineteen more people. The math is not kind to the pitch.
In this episode, Darin and Viktor discuss why zero-human is the new serverless, and where the humans actually go once the agents are doing the work.
 
YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/devopsparadox
 
Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts:
https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/
 
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#366: You ran npm install this morning. Maybe you ran it a dozen times. Every one of those pulled down a dependency tree you have never read, from a registry that spent years in maintenance mode, and then executed whatever preinstall and postinstall scripts happened to be in there. On your laptop. With your keys sitting on disk.
Trusted publishing, provenance, staged releases - all good, all recent, and none of it stops a package from shipping malware.
In this episode, we speak with David Mytton, CEO of Arcjet, about defense in depth for the npm ecosystem, and why seven days of patience beats most of your tooling.
 
David's contact information:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmytton/
 
YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/devopsparadox
 
Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts:
https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/
 
Slack:
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#365: A bad engineer with a laptop is much worse than a bad engineer with a calculator. Now hand that engineer AI. DORA's ROI report puts it politely - AI without engineering excellence just scales your problems.
Except it's not more of everything. It's more of whatever you were already doing, and there's a statistical chance that what you're doing is bad. Your agent already read your flaky tests and decided that's the house style.
So what do you measure now? Viktor's answer: every technical metric you've got is gamed.
 
ROI of AI-assisted Software Development report
https://dora.dev/ai/roi/report/
 
YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/devopsparadox
 
Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts:
https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/
 
Slack:
https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/
 
Connect with us at:
https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/