Dave Rubinstein was recently a guest on Torc's Guidance Counselor 2.0 live stream, and we're sharing that conversation with you here. 

Listen in to this special episode to learn about how community and mentorship are more important than ever as AI adoption continues. 

In this episode, Jenna interviews Woodson Martin, CEO of OutSystems, about how AI only really assists with a portion of the software development life cycle.

They discuss:

• The areas that will still require a human touch
• The evolution of the developer role and how success should be measured differently
• The bottlenecks that still exist even with AI-assisted coding

This episode was originally broadcast in April 2024, and includes discussions that are still relevant to developers today, so we are publishing it again. 

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In this episode, SD Times Editor-in-Chief David Rubinstein discusses how cognitive fatigue is compounding the software productivity problem. 

His guest is Hans Dockter, CEO at Gradle Inc. and lead at Gradle Open Source Project. 

In this episode, Dave interviews Justin Moon, vice president of Core Product Engineering at BlackBerry QNX, providers of a real-time OS for embedded systems. 

They discuss:

• How QNX is working to close the development skills gap for SDVs
• How developers manage complexity in vehicle software designs
• The commercial challenges for autonomous vehicle hardware

In this episode, Dave interviews Mitchell Johnson, chief product development officer at Sonatype, about the notion of a Hippocratic Oath for developers, where you do no harm to the codebase, and how AI is impacting that.

They discuss:

• The responsibility a developer has to keeping their codebase healthy whenever they add a new feature
• How being able to output code faster with AI makes it harder to have visibility into how changes impact downstream systems
• How AI assisted coding may actually slow things down

In this episode, Dave interviews Angie Jones, VP of engineering for AI Tools & Enablement at the financial services company Block.

They discuss: 

• How AI is empowering a new wave of developers from non-traditional roles
• The importance of feeding AI models and agents important business context
• Block's coding agent Goose 

In this episode, Dave interviews Dave Protasowski, a member of the steering committee for Knative, about the project's recent graduation from the CNCF. 

They discuss: 

• An overview of what Knative does
• The history of the project at the CNCF
• What's in store for Knative in the future

In this episode, Jenna interviews Pia Nilsson, senior director of engineering at Spotify, about the company's decision to make its own AI tool to improve developer productivity.

They discuss:

• Why they built their own tool instead of using something that already exists
• How developers are using it day-to-day
• How AI is shaping developer culture at Spotify

Watch Spotify's webinar on October 22 to learn about the latest updates to Portal: https://info.backstage.spotify.com/webinar?utm_campaign=21639556-2025oct-webinar&utm_source=com-banner

In this episode, Jenna interviews Khachatur Virabyan, head of code quality at Aikido Security, about why code quality and security should be addressed together.

They discuss:

• The differences in definitions for code quality and security
• How clean code could still have vulnerabilities
• The impact AI coding will have on code quality and security

In this episode, Dave interviews Mark Lambert, chief product officer of ArmorCode, about how AI is influencing Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).

They discuss:

• How AI-generated code has more vulnerabilities than human-generated code
• The risks of slowing down innovation while trying to govern AI-assisted development
• Using AI agents for automated testing and security vulnerability detection

In this episode, Jenna interviews Dan Lorenc, CEO of Chainguard, about the Shai-Hulud worm that has made its way through the npm ecosystem.

They discuss:

• What Shai-Hulud is and why it's so bad
• Security measures GitHub plans to implement in npm 
• Best practices to follow to mitigate risk

In this episode, Dave interviews Alan Manuel, group VP of product management for platform and AI at Planview.

They discuss: 

• Why AI requires a different mindset than other technology adoption
• Setting realistic expectations for AI
• Why it's important to focus on the outcome, not the features

In this episode, Dave interviews Neeraj Abhyankar, vice president and practice head of Data, Analytics, and Generative AI at R Systems.

They discuss: 

• The role of AI in modernization
• The evolution of AI throughout technology history
• The importance of "human in the loop" when working with AI

In this episode, Dave interviews Andi Gutmans, VP and general manager of Data Cloud at Google.

They discuss:

• How AI can help with data management
• How AI tools have matured and are now more accessible for late adopters
• The work Google is doing with AI 

This episode originally aired 7/31/2025 on Get With IT.

In this episode, Dave interviews Judy Bossi, VP of product management at Sembi, about the importance of QA in AI integration.

They discuss: 

• Predictions for how QA will evolve alongside AI
• Ensuring executives see the business value in QA
• The challenges in ensuring security and safety when integrating AI into the software development life cycle 

In this episode, Dave interviews Burley Kawasaki, global VP of product marketing and strategy at no-code CRM platform Creatio.

They discuss: 

• The cautious adoption of AI in the workplace due to trust issues
• The need for transparency and visibility into AI decision-making processes
• How to balance innovation with security and compliance

In this episode, Jenna interviews Anant Bhardwaj, CEO and founder of Instabase, about what factors to consider before purchasing an AI tool.

They discuss:

• Why it's important to start with the problem you have and work backwards
• Making sure agentic AI fits in with the rest of the existing systems
• Planning for long-term use

In this episode originally published on Get With IT, Dave interviews Idit Levine, founder and CEO of solo.io, about kagent, a framework for running agents in Kubernetes. 

They discuss:

• Why kagent was created
• What led solo.io to open source the project and donate it to the CNCF
• Difficulties with deploying AI agents in large organizations

In this episode, Dave interviews Jenn Wei, senior vice president of product at LaunchDarkly.

They discuss:

• The importance of creating a culture for AI experimentation
• Needing to shift from building features to managing dynamic learning systems
• The role of leadership in driving innovation

In this episode, Dave interviews Brian Douglas, head of developer experience at Continue, about the importance of rules for AI tools.

They discuss: 

• How to implement rules for AI assistants
• Using rules to replace lengthy prompts
• Preventing technical debt when using AI-generated code

In this episode, Jenna interviews Wade Wegner, chief ecosystem and growth officer at DigitalOcean, about the importance of developer advocacy.

They discuss:

• The relationship among developer advocacy, developer relations, and technology evangelism
• Effective strategies for engaging with developers
• Metrics to track to know that advocacy is contributing to product growth

In this episode, Jenna interviews Dr. Manny Ahmed, co-founder and CEO of OpenOrigins, the company behind Human-Oriented Proof System (HOPrS), which can be used to determine if an image or video has been altered or is AI-generated.

They discuss:

• How it works and how it differs from other tools that try to do this
• How it can be used to address concerns around AI-generated content
• Its recent acceptance into the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust Lab

In this episode, Dave interviews Justin Cantrall, AI engineer and architect at OpenText, about specialized language models.

They discuss:

• The difference between specialized language models and large language models
• The benefits and disadvantages of choosing specialized language models
• Open weight models 

In this episode, Jenna interviews Maya Palfreyman, product marketing director at Quickbase, who leads the company's research on gray work.

They discuss:

• What gray work is and what sort of tasks qualify 
• How it affects software developers
• The impact of unaccounted gray work in planning cycles

In this episode, Dave interviews Jack Pertschuk, principal engineer for Algorithms and Platform at Pinecone. They discuss:

• What semantic search is and where it falls short
• The difference between sparse and dense vectors
• How search technology powers AI