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 the resurgence of ARM and CPUs as serious compute infrastructure for running local AI agents, a supply chain attack on LiteLLM that exposed API credentials across thousands of developer environments, and the arrival of OpenCode as a fully open source alternative to Claude Code and Codex. They also discuss the diverging strategies of Anthropic and OpenAI following the Pentagon contract controversy, and what it signals about where each company is positioning itself in the enterprise and government markets. Gregor and Sean then dive deep into what the AI coding boom actually means for shipping software.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including Doom running entirely over DNS, the psychology of seafoam green in Cold War-era control rooms, a Tesla Model 3 computer assembled from salvaged crash components, and Apple’s quiet discontinuation of the Mac Pro.
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.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsors
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.
Today’s episode of Software Engineering Daily is brought to you by Unblocked.
Your coding agents have access to your codebase, maybe you’ve even connected other tools via MCPs. But access doesn’t mean context. Agents can’t reason across MCPs, they don’t know your architectural decisions, your team’s patterns, or why the API was shaped the way it is. So agents look in the wrong place and deliver bad outputs. Then you spend time correcting—turn after turn.
Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, Slack, and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand – so they make better plans, write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops.
If you’re running Claude Code, Cursor, or any agentic workflow, Unblocked is worth a look.
Get a free three-week trial at getunblocked.com/sedaily.
