
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Building the machine that builds the machine (Interview)
February 11 · 1 hr 36 min · 92.8 MB
0:00-1:36:31
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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…
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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.
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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!
He’s back to letting the AIs write code
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- 0:00Welcome to The Changelog
- 0:56Sponsor: Namespace
- 2:37Start the show!
- 3:37Over your agentic skis
- 4:33Paul's agentic journey
- 27:32Clarity in blind spots
- 28:22A real-world example
- 35:58Sponsor: Tiger Data
- 38:27Bespoke tooling
- 40:29Engineers as QA
- 43:50Code review feelings
- 44:54Two kinds of devs
- 47:29Having taste
- 49:46Who reinvents the tools
- 53:35Influx and Wasm
- 57:27New CLI, who dis?
- 1:02:16Adapting Influx
- 1:06:12Adapting culture
- 1:09:00Adapting demos
- 1:12:26Adapting team size
- 1:15:37Bespoke machines
- 1:20:22Adapting OSS
- 1:26:55Closed contributions
- 1:30:07What's next
- 1:32:19Moving to Rust
- 1:33:33Wrapping up
- 1:35:05Closing thoughts