Software Defined Talk

This week, we discuss how normal people use AI, Alphabet's Anthropic-fueled earnings, and skills vs. agents. Plus, catching AI-cheating students with a hidden prompt.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 583

Runner-up Titles

“Do you think they named them red delicious because they knew they were delicious?”

I thought they were First World

Steal your Alpha-tier

Cory uses only 100% free-range, organic AI.

Copy, paste, go.

Stolen fruit from the poisoned tree all the way down.

It’s a different kind of cold. It’s a dry cold.

Rundown

AI IRL

How people use AI in 2026: TV, homework, the DMV

Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

Amazon confirms it’s closing key AI site in San Francisco but says work on its top models continues

Google Cloud is killing it

Skill vs. Agents

Atlas: Wiz's autonomous AI Agent for vulnerability research

Don't Build Agents, Build Skills Instead

Relevant to your Interests

Alphabet Quadruples Profit to $112 Billion, Fueled by A.I. Investments

Palo Alto Networks to Acquire Embrace, Adding Real User Monitoring to Its Observability Platform

IBM CEO Says Company Culture Was Too Slow to Change

Domo Announces Agreement to Sell Substantially All Assets and Certain Liabilities to Progress Software for $400 Million

Google Cloud is killing it

ChatGPT chats are showing up in Google Search — how to find and delete yours [Update]

2026 State of infrastructure in the agentic AI era

Stripe in Talks to Buy Buzzy AI-Model Marketplace OpenRouter

Sponsors

Signadot: making sure AI-written code actually works.

Conferences

AI Connect, Aug 22nd, 2026 - Riga, Latvia, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026

Cloud Foundry Summit, Sept. 21st to 22nd, Heidelberg, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK

WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26

25 Free Tickets

DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026

DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006

DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026, Coté keynoting.

VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026

Cloud Native Denmark, Nov 19th, 2026, Copenhagen, Coté keynoting.

SDT News & Community

Join our Slack community

Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky

Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté

Sponsor the show

Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Recommendations

Brandon: Silo Season 3

Matt: Hyperion

Coté: Cooking with Claude

This week, we discuss Bun's move to Rust, OpenAI hunting for revenue, and Stripe's bid for PayPal. Plus, Coté's Dad wisdom.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 582

Runner-up Titles

Turn off my dog

Dad Wisdom

Amazon subscription and let it fly

Dad box

Talking about modernization

Skin in the game

The ivory tower of “Things Actually Work in the Real World”

Business fortnight

No SegwaysBanking works everywhere else in the world, not America

Rundown

Rewriting Bun in Rust

OpenAI

OpenAI's No. 2 Executive to Step Down in Latest Leadership Shake-up

OpenAI's Chief Futurist Is Leaving the Company

AI Devices Are Coming. Will Your Favorite Apps Be Along for the Ride?

OpenAI Executive Kevin Weil Is Leaving the Company

OpenAI power consolidates under co-founder Greg Brockman ahead of prospective IPO

Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months

Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

OpenAI Appears to Be Missing Its Sales Goals by a Vast Margin

Stripe, Advent make $53 billion takeover offer for PayPal, sending stock soaring

Relevant to your Interests

SpaceX, AI Bubble Fears, and The Age of the Trillion-Dollar, Zero-Profit Company

Microsoft Frontier Company: AI engineering that amplifies and protects your intelligence

Building a CLI for all of Cloudflare

California founder fired for ignoring his company's own return-to-office mandate

Samsung chip division's single-year profits beat its past 40 years of profits, combined

Did a lottery winner become "the company of the future"?

Power company hikes data center bills by 30%, cuts residential electricity costs by 1.3%

Where AI Works: Slack is the Conversational Interface for Headless AI

Salesforce MCP Servers: AI, Data & Analytics for Tableau & Data 360 in Slack

IBM and Red Hat launch Lightwell to defend open-source code from AI attacks

Infoblox acquires Kentik, adding network observability to its DNS and DDI platform

Apple 'Hide My Email' Vulnerability Reveals Peoples' Real Email Addresses

House passes bill to make daylight saving time permanent

United Airlines' new upsell: Keeping other travelers out of the middle seat

Linux creator Linus Torvalds puts foot down on anti-AI comments

1Password now lets Claude sign in to websites without seeing your passwords

1Password and Anthropic Bring Secure Credential Access to Claude

forum, an accountable orchestrator for AI agents

Google continues its renaming streak by turning NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook

'Pretty revolting': LG's TV are getting huge backlash from users due to installing software

What is a micro-retirement? Inside the latest Gen Z trend

You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month

China delivers a one-two punch to America's AI dominance

Can Lenovo's World Cup AI Moment Cement Its Enterprise PC Dominance?

AI Coding Tools Deliver Speed but Not Business Value Unless Wrapped in Process:

China’s Moonshot in Talks on Pre-IPO Funds at $50 Billion Value

OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation

AI won’t fix your broken culture, but you can fix your broken culture

Oracle Is Now Down 28% in a Month. Will the 52-Week Low of $132 Hold or Fold?

IBM stock craters 23% after issuing second-quarter earnings warning

Sheetz is quitting VMware, migrating 11,000 virtual machines

Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Anthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal

AWS cloud lead Dave Brown heads to Meta - report - DCD

Amazon senior cloud executive departs after 18 years

Meta Caps Internal AI Token Spending After Costs Approach Billions in 2026

Meta Compute Launch Sends AI Compute Stocks Tumbling Globally

Agentic ransomware for automated database extortion

Dark-Moon: Autonomous AI pentesting engine

Sponsors

Signadot: making sure AI-written code actually works.

Nonsense

Messi Beats Ronaldo in 2026 World Cup Password Breach Data Rankings

United Airlines' new upsell: Keeping other travelers out of the middle seat

Yes, you can now order DoorDash from the command line

House passes bill to make daylight saving time permanent

Listener Feedback

Biogen hiring Associate Director, Enterprise Architecture in Triangle, NC

Tim releases a font for developers whose close-up vision isn't what it used to be

The Java Story | Official Trailer | Full Film Coming July 17th

Conferences

DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026

Cloud Foundry Summit, Sept. 21st to 22nd, Heidelberg, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK

WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26

25 Free Tickets

DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026

DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006

DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026, Coté keynoting.

VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026

Cloud Native Denmark, Nov 19th, 2026, Copenhagen, Coté keynoting.

SDT News & Community

Join our Slack community

Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky

Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté

Sponsor the show

Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Recommendations

Brandon:

entogo — Type a keyword. Go anywhere.

28 Years Later, The Bone Temple

Matt: Vacation, not micro-retirement

Coté: Wolf Hall books.

Brandon interviews Arjun Iyer, CEO & Co-founder of Signadot. They discuss how Ephemeral Environments eliminate developer toil by shifting validation earlier in the dev cycle, how Signadot's MCP server lets AI coding agents run end-to-end tests autonomously, and real-world results including Brex saving $2M in cloud spend. Plus, how Cisco bought AppDynamics for ~$4 billion the day before their IPO.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 581

Show Links

Signadot

Free Trial

Brex Case Study

Signadot Documentation Overview

Contact Arjun Iyer

LinkedIn: Arjun Iyer

Twitter: @arjuniyer_

SDT News & Hype

Join us in Slack.

Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you free laptop stickers!

Follow us: Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads and YouTube.

Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, Digital WTF, so $5 total.

Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk!

Special Guest: Arjun Iyer.

Every project has environment variables. Almost nobody manages them well. This week Brandon talks with Phil Miller and Theo Ephraim, who built varlock to fix that — bringing structure and security to the humble .env file.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 580

Show Links:

varlock.dev

varlock on GitHub

@env-spec Overview

DMNO (corporate site)

Varlock MCP Server (docs)

howtostore.food — Theo's side project on the best way to store produce

unsafeharbour.com — Phil's music label

Nautical Artifacts on Bandcamp

bumpy

Contact Phil Miller:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/themillman

Email: phil@varlock.dev

Music: unsafeharbour.com

Contact Theo Ephraim:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/theo-ephraim

Website: theoephraim.com

Twitter/X: @theozero

Bluesky: @theozero.bsky.social

Email: theo@varlock.dev

General Contact:

hello@varlock.dev

hello@dmno.dev

Varlock Community

Varlock Discord — Chat with the team and other users

GitHub Discussions — Suggestions, questions, and feature requests

varlock on GitHub — Star the project and follow updates

Varlock on X

Varlock on Bluesky

SDT News & Community

Join our Slack community

Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky

Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté

Sponsor the show

Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Special Guests: Phil Miller and Theo Ephraim.

This week, we discuss Anthropic's 18-day Fable timeout, whether AI is actually killing jobs, and OpenAI's trillion-dollar IPO problem. Plus, SoftBank's golden goose slides.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 579

Runner-up Titles

Everything is Files

It’s just about meetings

Did you do the pre-meet?

Meetings

Judgement

Let it ride

If it’s hot, turn on the AC

I don’t have time for a towel.

Headless HEB

Rundown

I was fired by Google for creating the Google Workspace CLI

Fable is Back

White House lifts export control on advanced AI model from Anthropic

Trump administration lifts restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5

OpenAI and Anthropic limit new AI models to Trump-approved customers during cybersecurity review

AI News of the Month - June 2026

AI is NOT killing jobs

Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short

AWS puts $1 billion into new AI unit to embed engineers with customers

A New Look at AI’s Impact on Jobs

The Unstoppable Force of A.I. Hype Is Meeting One Immovable Fact

Cloudflare Acquires VoidZero to Build the Future of the AI-Native Web

OpenAI Leans Toward Waiting Until Next Year for I.P.O.

SoftBank’s slides are just trolling us

The PDF of the Slides

Relevant to your Interests

The Australians fighting AI slop in open-source code

Axios Future of Cybersecurity Thought Bubble

SpaceX Is Getting Fast-Tracked Into Indexes. Ordinary Investors Could Lose Out.

News Flash: You Are the Exit Liquidity for the SpaceX IPO

Cerebras Systems Announces Strong First Quarter 2026 Results

The AI Compass

T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware

Listener Feedback

Introducing Omnigent: A Meta-Harness to Combine, Control and Share Your Agents

Conferences

WeAreDevelopers Europe, July 8-10, 2026 Berlin, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026

Cloud Foundry Summit, Sept. 21st to 22nd, Heidelberg, Coté speaking.

DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK

WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26

25 Free Tickets

DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026

DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006

DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026, Coté keynoting.

VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026

Cloud Native Denmark, Nov 19th, 2026, Copenhagen, Coté keynoting.

SDT News & Community

Join our Slack community

Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky

Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok

Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté

Sponsor the show

Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Recommendations

Brandon: Walmart+ for Grocery Delivery

Coté: Supermarkt Meerwijk Watergraafsmeer, also in Instagram