Building the machine that builds the machine (Changelog Interviews #676)

Paul Dix joins us to discuss the InfluxDB co-founder’s journey adapting to an agentic world. Paul sent his AI coding agents on various real-world side quests and shares all his findings: what’s going to prod, what’s not, and why he’s (at least for a bit) back to coding by hand. Update: He’s back to letting the AIs write code, but with a lot more oversight. For now… Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Namespace – Speed up your development and testing workflows using your existing tools. (Much) faster GitHub actions, Docker builds, and more. At an unbeatable price. Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Featuring: Paul Dix – GitHub, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: Build the machine that builds the machine Paul dix on X: “2026: the great engineering divergence” InfluxData Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!