The New Stack Podcast

Harness Field CTO Martin Reynolds joins The New Stack to talk about what happens after coding agents start opening pull requests faster than anyone can review them. He explains how he first saw the bottleneck during early GitHub Copilot trials, the three ways enterprises are coping with the volume now, and why Harness rebuilt its Code Repository and launched AI Code Review for agent traffic. The conversation also covers GitHub's recent outages, the software delivery knowledge graph behind Harness's reviewer, and how much of the delivery pipeline should stay deterministic.


Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in coding agents:
AI coding agents can write code, Crafting wants to help them ship it
Git real: AI agents aren't just for solo developers anymore
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Traces provide a detailed view of a request’s journey through data, microservices and applications, helping SREs pinpoint where failures occur and resolve issues faster. But while tracing can reduce downtime and developer burnout, collecting every trace creates its own problems. Storing massive volumes of data is expensive, can burden the systems being monitored and makes it harder to find the information that actually matters.
The solution isn’t abandoning tracing, but being smarter about what gets retained. Head sampling captures only a portion of traces upfront, while tail sampling evaluates completed traces and keeps those most valuable for troubleshooting. Dynamic sampling goes further by filtering repetitive or nearly identical traces before they overwhelm storage.
On The New Stack podcast, Sarah Hudspeth of Chronosphere, a Palo Alto Networks company, explains how teams can build a more effective tracing strategy. She breaks down how thoughtful sampling and observability design can turn tracing from a data-hoarding problem into a practical tool for production troubleshooting.
Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in tracing:
Sampling: the philosopher’s stone of distributed tracing
How OpenTelemetry Works: Tracing, Metrics and Logs on Kubernetes
Why Synthetic Tracing Delivers Better Data, Not Just More Data
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As AI evolves from conversational chatbots to autonomous agents, CPUs are becoming an increasingly important part of the infrastructure equation. In this episode, The New Stack speaks with Bhumik Patel of Arm and Mo Farhat of Google about how CPUs act as an “air traffic controller” for agentic workloads, handling orchestration, data preparation, semantic search, vector databases, code execution and API calls alongside GPUs and TPUs. Smaller AI models, including summarizers and evaluators, can also run effectively on CPUs for specialized tasks. 

As agents increasingly generate and execute code, secure sandboxing becomes critical. Google’s gVisor and GKE Agent Sandbox provide isolation and scalable environments, with the latter supporting up to 300 sandboxes per second per cluster. The discussion also explores efficiency and cost, with Google highlighting Axion’s price-performance and energy-efficiency advantages across different workload types. Ultimately, the shift toward agentic AI is creating a more diverse compute environment where CPUs, GPUs and TPUs each play complementary roles in delivering scalable, efficient AI applications.

Learn more from The New Stack around the latest in CPUs in the world of AI agents: 

AI Agents Will Eat Enterprise Software, Just Not in One Bite 

How to ground AI agents in accurate, context-rich data 

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Doist CTO Gonçalo Silva says AI is reshaping software development, but success depends on restraint rather than rapid feature expansion. Instead of chasing every AI capability, Doist prioritizes “subtraction over addition,” removing features that fail to deliver lasting value despite development investment. After experimenting with nearly 20 AI concepts, the company found success with Ramble, an AI-powered voice task capture feature, while remaining model-agnostic through rigorous testing and evaluations. 

Internally, developers use a variety of AI coding tools rather than standardizing on one platform, while Doist OS—a companywide AI assistant with nearly 100 shared skills—helps employees across all functions work more effectively. Silva also outlined Doist’s approach to AI-powered automations, separating AI-driven workflow generation from deterministic execution to improve reliability and reduce token costs. Throughout its AI strategy, the company emphasizes purposeful features, privacy, transparency, and continuous improvement, ensuring AI enhances user productivity without compromising product quality or trust.

Learn more from The New Stack around developer productivity: 

Developer Productivity in 2025: More AI, but Mixed Results

Optimizing for Developer Productivity Creates a Winning DevEx

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As AI coding agents accelerate software development, they also create new challenges for site reliability engineers (SREs), who are increasingly responsible for debugging systems that no single human fully understands. In this episode ofThe New Stackpodcast, Sam Farid and Nate Heinrich of Chronosphere argue that AI agents should also be used for root-cause analysis, helping teams diagnose failures more quickly as model capabilities continue to improve. 

Rather than immediately purchasing a commercial solution, they recommend organizations first build an in-house AI SRE. The process of documenting systems, dependencies, and operational knowledge creates valuable context that enables AI agents to troubleshoot effectively while improving institutional knowledge. Although Chronosphere offers its own AI SRE platform, the hosts emphasize that building an internal prototype helps teams understand their needs before evaluating vendor tools. As AI-generated code becomes more common, organizations that invest in mapping their systems and leveraging AI for operations will be better equipped to reduce downtime and support increasingly complex software environments.

Learn more from The New Stack around AI SREs: 

5 ways SRE AI agents are set to augment human capabilities

The Future of AI in SRE: Preventing Failures, Not Fixing Them

AI Reliability Engineering: Welcome to the Third Age of SRE

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