SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover Starlink’s rapid rollout of free, high-speed in-flight internet, Tesla’s move to deprecate Autopilot in favor of full self-driving, and Apple’s reported decision to power Siri with Google’s Gemini models. They also discuss Meta’s $2B acquisition of Manus, Waymo’s growing pains as autonomous vehicles scale, and the competitive shockwaves triggered by Google’s advances in custom AI hardware.
Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the state of the tech job market, examining OpenAI’s decision to eliminate vesting cliffs, the escalating war for elite AI talent, and what recent layoffs really say about the future of software engineering. They explore how AI coding tools are reshaping the balance between junior and senior engineers, why fundamentals still matter, and what developers should focus on heading into 2026.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including Doom running on wireless earbuds, the enduring appeal of wildly over-engineered side projects, and why hacking for fun still matters in an age of industrial-scale AI.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Sponsors
When things go wrong in production, do you know why in minutes… or hours?
AppSignal is the application performance monitoring tool designed for developers who want clean, actionable insights without a huge observability bill.
You get all the tools you need to fix issues before customers notice, like error tracking, performance monitoring, log management and more.
AppSignal works for teams of all shapes and sizes, from start-ups and side hustles, to SMEs and enterprise, and is especially great for teams that build with Ruby on Rails, Elixir, Node.js, and Python.
Try it free for 30 days and get 10% off your yearly plan with SED10 at www.appsignal.com/sed.
If you’re an engineering leader, you know this cycle.
Your team is focused on building product, but someone in ops needs a dashboard. Marketing needs an admin panel. Finance needs a custom workflow. The requests pile up, and you cannot get to them all.
So people start building their own solutions. Shadow IT spreads. And eventually, you are the one stuck cleaning up tools that were built with duct tape and good intentions.
Retool breaks that cycle.
Their AI AppGen platform gives teams a governed place to build the tools they need, so everything stays secure and under your control. Someone could type, “build me a customer admin panel that manages accounts from Postgres,” and they would get a real, production ready app with proper permissions built in.
Your teams get unblocked, and you do not inherit a pile of technical debt down the road.
So if you are tired of being the cleanup crew for shadow IT, head to retool.com slash se daily and see how other engineering teams are democratizing building without creating chaos.
Because honestly, we could all use a better way to handle internal tools.
Sometimes you just need Retool.
In mobile application security, ‘good enough’ is a risk.
Guardsquare uses advanced, multi-layered code hardening techniques and automated runtime application self-protection and mobile application security testing, combined with real-time threat monitoring, to deliver the highest level of mobile app security.
Discover how Guardsquare brings all these together to provide mobile app security for your Android and iOS apps without compromise at www dot Guardsquare dot com.
