Software Engineering Daily

The rapid rise of AI has set off a flurry of legal and regulatory activity. There is no single AI law to follow. Instead, there are overlapping circles of regulation, where privacy, cybersecurity, consumer protection, employment, and IP laws all continue to apply alongside newer AI-specific rules. Europe has its EU AI Act, but the U.S. has no federal equivalent yet. In its place is an emerging patchwork of more than 150 state AI laws, and the picture shifts every few months as new legislation and guidelines arrive. For engineers and tech companies, it can feel impossible to know what applies and where the real risks lie.

Shannon Yavorsky is a data lawyer who co-leads the Cyber, Privacy and Data Innovation group and the AI practice at the international law firm Orrick. She advises companies across sectors from health technology to financial services on how to develop and deploy AI responsibly amid this evolving regulatory environment.

In this episode, Shannon joins Kevin Ball to make sense of that landscape. They discuss how to map the concentric circles of regulation that actually apply to you, the risk spectrum separating a low-stakes manufacturing tool from a high-stakes system making loan or healthcare decisions, the problem of shadow AI and why recorded meetings can become a litigation liability, how to build an AI governance program, and more.

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Over the past couple of years, companies raced to get their employees using AI, often encouraging them to lean on it as much as possible. However, as AI coding tools spread through engineering teams, many companies watched their AI bills explode. That kind of runaway cost growth can threaten a business, so the new challenge is capturing the productivity gains from AI without the spending spiraling out of control.

Databricks is a data and AI company that hit this problem early, running AI tools across thousands of its own engineers. Rather than clamp down on usage, the team built a set of practical ways to manage the cost, from taking advantage of steadily falling model prices to automatically routing each request to the cheapest model that can still do the job well.

Patrick Wendell is a co-founder of Databricks, where he leads engineering teams and has driven much of the company’s internal AI adoption. He recently wrote a viral blog post on managing AI coding costs that reached the top of Hacker News. In this episode, Patrick joins Kevin Ball to discuss why AI costs suddenly exploded, the main levers companies have to bring them under control, the trade-offs between managing costs on the server versus in the developer’s tools, and why the next big challenge is giving AI the right context about how a company actually works.

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Codebases in enterprise organizations often span hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of lines of code. In many cases, changes must follow established patterns precisely, or risk introducing costly security or operational issues. A common challenge with AI coding tools is that they struggle at this scale: LLM context windows cover only a fraction of a large codebase, and output quality degrades the longer an agent runs.

Blitzy is an autonomous software development platform for the enterprise. It starts by understanding your entire codebase, building a knowledge graph that acts as a shared source of truth. From a well-defined spec that engineers review and approve, it orchestrates specialized agents that work in parallel to build, review, and test code autonomously at scale. The result is a pull request that engineers can then review and merge

Sid Pardeshi is the CTO and co-founder of Blitzy, and he previously worked at NVIDIA. In this episode, he joins Kevin Ball to discuss why large codebases break today’s coding agents, how a knowledge graph extends what models can reason about, how a reviewable plan keeps specialized agents aligned, and where autonomous software development is headed.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Blitzy

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In recent years, the main impact of AI has been on the digital world, and most notably software engineering. However, its longer-term effect on the physical world may prove even more profound, reshaping how cars drive themselves, how factories run, and how robots move through homes and warehouses.

World models are at the center of the movement to bring AI into the physical space. These models take in observations of the current state of the world and predict what comes next, which lets a robot plan its next move or a car anticipate the road ahead. NVIDIA has been building a family of these models called Cosmos, and sits at the frontier of physical AI and robotics.

Amit Goel has been at NVIDIA for fifteen years, and he is currently the Head of Robotics Ecosystem and Edge AI Product. In this episode, Amit joins Matt Merrill to discuss what separates physical AI from digital AI, how world models plan and predict, the two-tower architecture that lets a robot reason and act at once, why training on video demanded a new data pipeline, and how any developer can start building in this space.

Free Physical AI Courses: https://nvda.ws/4xqCfo9
Cosmos: https://nvda.ws/4zJ4iRj
GR00T Teleop + LeRobot: https://huggingface.co/blog/nvidia/nvidia-isaac-teleop-and-gr00t17-in-lerobot

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Software testing is widely understood as essential to building reliable systems, and it’s one of the hardest things to get right. A fundamental issue is that tests are good at confirming the behavior a team expects, but the most damaging failures tend to hide in the edge cases no one thought to check during development. Those blind spots are only growing as AI produces more code that no human has closely reviewed.

Antithesis is a software verification company built around an approach called deterministic simulation testing. The platform runs a customer’s software in a fully controlled environment, exploring thousands of different paths through it at runtime. Crucially, the paths aren’t pre-specified and they’re not merely the expected cases. In this way, it can surface rare, damaging bugs that normal testing would never catch.

Carl Sverre is on the Red Team at Antithesis and he also leads much of the company’s AI strategy. In this episode, Carl joins Sean Falconer to discuss the Antithesis approach to software verification, why reliability tooling has been chronically underinvested, what makes stateful and distributed systems so hard to test, how deterministic simulation testing works under the hood, and much more.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Antithesis

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