A Conversation with Technologist Sam Newman

For years, technologist and consultant Sam Newman has helped enterprises come to grips with sticky issues in software architecture, and he’s been thinking deeply about how AI will reshape software engineering. He joined Tim for this episode of Live with Tim O’Reilly to explore the technological and organizational changes AI is already bringing about. As Sam pointed out, it’s chaotic out there. Sam chatted with Tim about the consequences of the industry’s narrow focus on code completion rather than experimenting with where else in the software development life cycle AI might bring value; how the economics of AI are shaping up—and what that means for our systems (Sam guesses that we won’t see companies undertaking big projects like rearchitecting until they figure out how to actually make money with AI); and why you should take a model-agnostic approach to developing products built on LLMs. In their hour-long conversation they also touched on security, building data centers for AI workloads, the tools Sam’s using in his day-to-day, and the positive developments Sam’s seeing with MCP.