Refactoring Podcast

Today's guest is James Stanier, CTO at Nordhealth, former director at Shopify, an author of several books about engineering management, remote work, and more.

With James, we talked about what senior engineers will look like in the future, taking from a great article he wrote just recently, and then regarding how engineering management is changing, what's expected of managers today, and what you need to thrive.
We also talked about AI adoption in his team, in our personal respective lives, and discussed the state of remote work in 2026.

(00:00) Episode start
(01:25) Introduction
(02:05) Senior engineers in 2035
(05:11) Sponsor break
(06:45) Level of abstraction: from compilers to AI
(10:17) Excited engineers and worried engineers
(12:44) The bifurcation: vibe coders vs platform engineers
(16:51) Engineering managing role changes
(23:21) Managing time with expanding roles
(28:32) Are hierarchies flattening?
(36:25) AI adoption in James' team
(41:27) What's hard in the AI era
(44:36) AI as a personal assistant
(50:05) Remote work in 2026

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Today's episode is brought to you by Unblocked.
Unblocked is the context layer for modern engineering teams.
Get a free three-week trial at getunblocked.com/refactoring

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You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm
• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw
• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

Today's guest is Doug Peete, Chief Product Officer at Atono, with whom over the last few months we have developed a deep industry report about the state of product development.In this chat we'll go through the main findings of the report, match them to our respective experience and explore ideas about how teams can do better with product development and AI(00:00) Episode start(01:38) Introduction(02:39) Sponsor break(05:38) Frailty of planning process(10:58) Product(13:19) What needs to be done(20:38) Design reviews(26:33) How to improve requirements(27:41) Knowledge across teams(35:07) Capturing the history of a product(39:14) Enabling sharing process(47:17) New metrics in AI era(50:47) AI in product requirements and products specs-Today's episode is brought to you by Unblocked.Unblocked is the context layer for modern engineering teams.Get a free three-week trial at getunblocked.com/refactoring-
You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm
• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw
• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

Today's guests, plural, are Jean Hsu and Cate Huston.They're both extremely experienced engineering leaders and coaches, accomplished authors, and have held leadership roles at companies like Duck.co, Automattic, Medium and more. And are now running a program to help engineers and managers become, in their own words, directly responsible individuals of their careers to navigate these complicated times, to say the least. So with Jean and Cate, we talked about exploring what you want from your career, how to be intentional about it, how to use feedback to assess how you're doing, and how AI is changing and not changing the picture.(01:51) Introduction(03:39) Dealing with adverse conditions(09:45) Sponsor break(10:42) DRI your career and coaching(13:07) Career's approach(18:52) Figuring out your goal: Luca's example(30:48) Coaching for EMs vs coaching for ICs(32:23) Moving forward in your daily job(36:06) Feedbacks and culture of appreciation(41:32) Does AI change how do you think about your career?(45:42) AI pressure and AI passion
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Today’s sponsor is Intent by Augment. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents: it starts with the living spec that updates as agents make progress, so every task stays aligned with no manual coordination. Try it for yourself at https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent
—

You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm
• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw
• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

Today's guest is Stuart Caborn, distinguished engineer at loveholidays, which is an online travel agency with millions of customers around the world.

I'm talking with Stuart because his team is doing AI coding for real.
They operate an extremely complex product and technology, with each engineer deploying to production more than 80 times a month, with more than 60% of production code being written with AI, all while maintaining an absolutely elite change failure rate under 1%, and with perfect code health.
So, let's see how they pull this off.

(01:29) Introduction
(02:30) What it loveholidays?
(06:04) Sponsor break
(07:00) loveholidays' AI approach
(10:16) Code quality
(13:36) Making quality visible
(14:52) AI, MCP and top use cases
(22:19) Code health and engineers' happiness
(29:35) How was AI implemented at loveholidays
(37:01) Experimenting with AI and skills
(42:30) How to spread AI into an org
(47:31) Guardrails in dev process
(56:40) Other process changes

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Today’s sponsor is Intent by Augment. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents: it starts with the living spec that updates as agents make progress, so every task stays aligned with no manual coordination. Try it for yourself at https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent
—

You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm
• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw
• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

—
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]

Today’s guest is Chris Lattner, one of the most important engineers for modern computing. Chris invented key compiler infrastructure tech like LLVM and MLIR, but he’s also the inventor of the Swift language, a key contributor in bringing Google TPUs to market, and a lot more. Today he’s the founder and CEO of Modular, where he’s reinventing AI infrastructure to make software portable across GPUs and platforms.

So with Chris, we talked about his vision for AI and computing. We talked about how Modular’s mission makes us closer to a future where AI is open and portable. And we talked about open source, how AI is both empowering and straining contributors, how it’s changing intellectual property, and what workflows we need to change as engineers.

And finally, we discussed how AI is changing software craftsmanship, how he’s bullish about junior engineers, and a lot more.

(00:00) Preview
(02:11) Introduction
(04:05) What is Modular?
(06:13) Sponsor break
(07:10) From CPU to GPU landscape
(10:46) Objective-C Swift analogy
(15:37) What is Modular for Chris?
(17:37) The love for building
(20:21) Chris' view on AI future
(23:48) AI and open source
(29:34) Figuring out new workflows
(31:22) On licenses and copyright
(33:42) High quality software
(35:21) Coding faster with AI
(41:27) The landscape of junior engineers
(48:22) AI amplifies the good and the bad
(52:21) Modular ceremonies
(55:26) Tech debt

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Today’s sponsor is Intent by Augment. Intent is a developer workspace built for orchestrating agents: it starts with the living spec that updates as agents make progress, so every task stays aligned with no manual coordination. Try it for yourself at https://www.augmentcode.com/product/intent
—

You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm
• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw
• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

—
For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]