The Merge (by CodeRabbit)
The Merge by CodeRabbit is a podcast featuring deep conversations with legendary developers who shaped the tools we use daily. It explores how artificial intelligence is transforming software development while celebrating the creators and tools that built our foundation. Each episode includes intimate discussions about building developer tools, maintaining open source projects, and navigating the evolution of technology.
Episodes
Jev Explained: Intelligence infused 'If-Statements' for Your Code | Allie form TypeSafe AI
What is Jev AI, and how do you actually use it? TypeSafe's Allie Laabs explains how Jev works as a "smart if statement" for your code, how to find Jev-shaped problems in your app, and why coding agents still get it wrong.Recorded at CodeRabbit HQ in San Francisco during the first Jev hackathon, run by TypeSafe and the AI Collective, just 11 days after launch.Most apps use LLMs the long wa
Your Tests Pass. Can Your AI Agent Finish the Job? | Francesco Bonacci, Cua
AI agents can click, type, and operate software—but how do you know they actually finished the job? Cua co-founder and CEO Francesco Bonacci joins The Merge to discuss computer-use agents, agent evaluation, and the human judgment behind reliable automation.Hendrik Krack and Francesco explore what it takes to give AI agents computers they can work in—and how to check the results. From test
The Last Software Engineer: What AI Can’t Replace | Kent C. Dodds
AI coding is changing software engineering—but when agents can implement the code, what remains uniquely valuable? Kent C. Dodds joins Hendrik Krack on The Merge to discuss open source, coding agents, product engineering, React, Remix, and why the “last software engineer” will be the person who understands what to build.Kent has spent his career teaching web development and working in ope
All the alpha is in the remaining 20%
How does a hackathon project become infrastructure for more than 2,000 open-source repositories and reach 1.4 million monthly npm downloads?In this episode of The Merge, Hendrik Krack sits down with Simon Farshid, founder of Assistant UI, to explore what it really takes to build production-ready AI chat for AI agents.Simon explains why the visible chat window is only the surface. Behind i
We still don't understand LLMs today.
How do LLMs actually work—and why do they remain black boxes?In this episode of Merge, Shriyash “Yash” Upadhyay, co-founder of Martian, joins CodeRabbit to explore LLM interpretability, AI research, code review benchmarks, and the search for the “steam engine of AI.”We discuss:- Why we still don’t fully understand how LLMs work- How Martian is researching machine intelligence- Why code re
The Last Skill Software Engineers Need to Survive the AI Era
Is coding dead? As autonomous AI agents get better at generating code, the actual implementation of software is becoming incredibly cheap. But what is the last skill that keeps us as humans valuable?In this episode, we sit down with legendary software educator Kent C. Dodds to discuss the critical transition from traditional software development to Product Engineering. If you are wonderin
How Founders Actually Engineer Product-Market-Fit
In this episode of The Merge, we sit down with Michael Grinich, founder and CEO of WorkOS.Checkout Coderabbit: https://coderabbit.link/themergeMichael shares one of the best explanations of Product-Market Fit we’ve heard: it’s not the finish line — it’s more like getting the Mario Star. Once you have it, you become untouchable enough to survive your own biggest mistakes… but only if you k
Fixing "AI Slop": Managing Agents Like Stressed MIT Interns w/ Jesse Vincent, creator of Superpowers
What happens when you treat an AI agent like a brilliant, chaotic, sleep-deprived MIT intern instead of a perfect computer program? You actually get elite code.In this episode of The Merge, we sit down with open-source legend Jesse Vincent, the mastermind behind "superpowers"—the viral AI development framework that exploded to 221k+ GitHub stars in a matter of months. Jesse explains why m
DX is Dead: Max Stoiber on Why Software Engineering is Shifting to "Taste"
In this episode of The Merge, recorded live at the CodeRabbit office, we sit down with Max Stoiber to tackle a massive paradigm shift shaking the industry: Why DX (Developer Experience) is dead, and why the future of software engineering belongs completely to "taste."As AI agents, LLMs, and automated workflows lower the cost of generating code to zero, the traditional metrics of developer
Why Tanner Linsley Won’t Take VC Money for TanStack
Tanner Linsley, creator of TanStack, joins The Merge to talk about what it really takes to keep open source free, independent, and sustainable.TanStack is used by millions of developers and sits inside some of the most important software teams in the world. But despite years of VC interest, Tanner has continued to say no to outside money that could quietly change the incentives behind the
Google worries about OS models: Kunal Kushwaha on Why Open Source is Killing Proprietary AI
In this episode of The Merge, we sit down with Kunal Kushwaha at Scale Con in Pasadena. Kunal is a GitHub Star and the EMEA Lead for Developer Relations at Cast AI, an application performance automation platform. We explore the "next frontier" of infrastructure, where AI-driven automation allows the cloud to effectively "think for itself". Kunal provides a grounded perspective on the shi
Why NVIDIA is Betting on Open Source and Ultra-Fast Inference
Chris Alexios joins Hendrik at our CodeRabbit Office in San Francisco to pull back the curtain on NVIDIA’s latest model family, Nemotron-3 (Nano, Super, and Ultra). They dive deep into the "Slop-pocalypse" of AI-generated code, the transition from being a syntax writer to a "High-Altitude Manager" of AI agents, and why open-source models are essential for Sovereign AI.Topics covered:- The
Claude OPUS 4.7 - Anthropic drops a new Model - David Loker (VP of AI at CodeRabbit)
Most Founders Don't Understand Open Source | Ivan Burazin (CEO, Daytona)
Most Founders Don't Understand Open Source | Ivan Dzido (Daytona)"Most people actually don't understand what they are signing off to...". In this episode of The Merge, we sit down with Ivan Dzido, CEO of Daytona, to discuss why the traditional "sandbox" is dead and why AI agents need "composable computers" instead.Ivan reveals how Daytona spins up environments in just 60 milliseconds—incl
TypeScript BEATS Python when building AI Agents (Mastra's YC Journey)
Is the era of Python-only AI over? Mastra CTO Abhi Aiyer breaks down why 1.2 million developers are shifting to TypeScript to build production-ready AI agents, the brutal realities of Y Combinator, and why the "let AI code while you go to the bar" myth is complete BS.[Main Description]We’ve always been taught: If you want to build AI, you learn Python. But as the ecosystem shifts from tra
DID GOOGLE JUST WIN THE AI RACE?
Is the "Benchmark Chasing" era over? With the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro and the specialized Deep Think mode, Google isn't just releasing a faster model—they are introducing a fundamental shift in machine reasoning for real-world developer workflows.In this episode of The Merge AI Newsroom, live from CodeRabbit’s San Francisco studio, applied AI expert Erfan Al-Hossami (ex-Stability AI, LL
From Psychologist to 12k Stars on Github: The Career Pivot You Need to Hear About!
🎙️ The Merge Episode #2: From Psychology to 12,000 Stars with Herrington DarkhomeIn this episode of The Merge, Hendrik sits down with Herrington Darkhome, the creator of ast-grep, a lightning-fast structural search and rewriting tool written in Rust.Discover how a self-taught programmer with a background in cognitive psychology went from discovering Vim on a Chromebook to becoming a core
GPT-5.3-Codex vs. Claude Opus 4.6 Comparison: Performance, Benchmarks & Agentic Coding Workflows
THE MERGE - AI NEWSROOMGPT-5.3-Codex vs. Claude Opus 4.6: Benchmarks and Best Agentic WorkflowsOpenAI and Anthropic just changed the game for February 2026. But as these models get more "agentic," the stakes for code quality have never been higher. Today on the AI Newsroom, we’re pitting GPT-5.3-Codex against Claude Opus 4.6 to see which model actually earns its keep in a production monor
After 2025: What’s Next for AI Coding in 2026 - The Merge (by CodeRabbit) - Episode1
2025 was chaos in the best way: DeepSeek cracked open the model monopoly and proved world-class open weights don't need infinite budgets. Vibe coding went mainstream - prompt your way to an app without staring at code - unlocking ideas for non-engineers but flooding repos with bugs (our data shows AI code spawns ~1.7× more issues than human-written). Agents evolved from demos to long-runn
Building iTerm2, the Popular Mac Terminal: George Nachman on Dev Tools in the AI Era | Main AI
Click here to view the episode transcript.
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