SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer explore the major stories impacting software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the tech industry at large.
In this episode, they cover Perplexity’s offer to buy Google Chrome, the U.S. government’s significant investment in Intel, Meta’s sudden halt on AI hiring, and a reality check on what “agentic” systems can deliver today in contrast to the hype.
They also delve into notable discussions from Hacker News, including a suggestion to reduce “ghost job” postings through stricter transparency rules, an interactive Big-O explainer, and more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO in cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.Sponsors
Building agentic AI apps isn’t just about choosing the best LLM.
Agents need short-term memory, long-term recall, and lightning-fast retrieval. Without it, you’re left with clunky prototypes that never scale.
You know, Redis? The world’s fastest caching solution?
Fast data is the key to good context. And good context is essential for fast, accurate memory. It’s what makes AI agents actually work with your data.
Redis for AI. The right infrastructure. The right tools. The only way to scale.
Learn more at redis.io/genai.
Building an app often feels like a balancing act. You want to ship features fast – chat, activity feeds, moderation, video. But building them from scratch is slow and complex.
Stream provides developer-friendly APIs that let you add real-time communication without reinventing the wheel.
Why Stream?
First, developer experience. Stream has clean, open source SDKs, great docs, and you can set up a proof of concept in hours.
Second, speed to build. Experiment, prototype, or launch features quickly – no credit card required to start.
Stream also scales. Over 2,000 global apps, including Strava, Patreon, Nextdoor, Robinhood, and Peloton, utilize Stream to power in-app communication for more than a billion users.
Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise, Stream handles the hard parts so you can focus on what makes your app unique. Start today at getstream.io/podcast.