Building Software in the Age of AI — a Conversation with Randy Shoup

For 30 years Randy Shoup has helped shape engineering at some of the industry’s most demanding companies - eBay, Google, Stitch Fix and WeWork among them - building highly scalable, distributed systems that serve hundreds of millions of users; today he leads engineering at CircleCI. He is also a long-time speaker and writer on how healthy engineering organizations really work: small multidisciplinary teams, autonomy and accountability, goals over solutions. He joins Ralf D. Müller for an hour on the question our whole field is circling right now: what does generative AI really change about how we build software, and what does it leave exactly where it was? One of Randy’s long-standing lines is to “model the world as it really is, not the way you would like it to be”; we carry that into the AI moment, asking where teams keep building the world they wish they had, and where Randy nods along with the current AI hype versus where he pushes back.