
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The era of the Small Giant (Interview)
January 22 · 1 hr 38 min · 141.6 MB
0:00-1:38:13
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Damien Tanner (founder of Pusher, now building Layercode) is back for a reunion 17 years in the making. Damien officially returns to The Changelog to discuss the seismic shift happening in software development. From the first sponsor of the podcast to frontline builder in the AI agent era, Damien shares his insights on why SaaS is dying, why code review is a bottleneck (and non-existent for some), and how small teams can now build giant things.
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Sponsors:
- Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
- Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.
- Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.
- 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.
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- 0:00This week on The Changelog
- 1:26Sponsor: Depot
- 3:44Start the show!
- 5:31AI Engineer (AIE) Code Summit 2025
- 9:29What is/was Pusher?
- 13:03How are today's days different?
- 15:20SaaS is dead!?
- 29:12Sponsor: Tiger Data
- 31:41No code review? What's replacing it?
- 34:33Opus 4.5 changed things (really Sonnet 4.5 first)
- 37:49Is Saas REALLY dead? Hmm...
- 42:27Inviting non-technical folks to Terminal
- 47:44What if everything was JIT?
- 51:24It's Layercode time
- 1:03:55Sponsor: Notion
- 1:06:04Set on Cloudflare workers (and TypeScript)
- 1:10:04Why not Go (or...)?
- 1:13:58Directing the interupt
- 1:16:39API vs local models - latency and reliability
- 1:26:47The era of the small giant
- 1:33:56What's next? What's over the horizon?
- 1:36:19Bye friends!
- 1:36:57Closing thoughts and stuff