Dev Interrupted

Before Backstage became the industry standard for developer portals, Spotify’s engineers relied on spreadsheets to navigate their massive microservices ecosystem.
Tyson Singer, Spotify’s Head of Technology and Platforms, joins us to trace the evolution of their internal developer experience from a necessity for order into the open-source giant Backstage and its new SaaS evolution, Portal. We dig into how they use golden paths to align autonomous squads and how their new AI Knowledge Assistant (AiKA) reduced internal support tickets by nearly 50% while protecting developer flow. Finally, Tyson shares his philosophy on sustainable innovation, explaining how to train an engineering organization to run a marathon at a sprinter's pace.
LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor
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Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.spotify.com
Spotify Portal: backstage.spotify.com
Confidence: confidence.spotify.com
Connect with Tyson: LinkedIn
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AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

In our first-ever Friday edition, Andrew and Ben dive into the viral "Ralph Loop" phenomenon and discuss how simple bash loops and deterministic context allocation are changing the unit economics of code. They also explore Steve Yegge's chaotic "Gas Town" concept for orchestrating AI agents, debate whether AI is killing the individual contributor role, and share a laugh over a creepy link generator that challenges our trust in URLs. 
LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor
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Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
Gas Town Emergency User Manual
Loom by Geoffrey Huntley
AI Killed the Individual Contributor
CreepyLink
OFFERS
Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.
LEARN ABOUT LINEARB
AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Geoffrey Huntley argues that while software development as a profession is effectively dead, software engineering is more alive—and critical—than ever before. In this episode, the creator of the viral "Ralph" agent joins us to explain how simple bash loops and deterministic context allocation are fundamentally changing the unit economics of code. We dive deep into the mechanics of managing "context rot," avoiding "compaction," and why building your own "Gas Town" of autonomous agents is the only way to survive the coming rift.
LinearB: Measure the impact of GitHub Copilot and Cursor
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Geoffrey’s Website & Blog: ghuntley.com
Build Your Own Coding Agent Workshop: ghuntley.com/agent 
Ralph Wiggum as a Software Engineer: ghuntley.com/ralph
Steve Yegge’s "Welcome to Gas Town": Read on Medium
The "Cursed" Programming Language: github.com/ghuntley/cursed
OFFERS
Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.
LEARN ABOUT LINEARB
AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Capital One operates less like a traditional bank and more like a "technology company that happens to do banking." Ameesh Paleja, EVP of Enterprise Platforms, joins the show to explain how this philosophy empowers their 14,000 technologists to innovate at the speed of a startup despite operating in a highly regulated industry.
Watch: 2026 Benchmarks Insights
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Learn more: capitalone.com/tech
Read the blog: capitalone.com/tech/blog/
Connect with Ameesh: LinkedIn | X (Twitter)
OFFERS
Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.
LEARN ABOUT LINEARB
AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

As the year draws to a close, the Dev Interrupted team reflects on a transformative year in engineering spanning the rise of RAG and vector databases to the emergence of agentic workflows. For the first time, we’re taking the conversation out of the booth and into the IDE. Head over to the Dev Interrupted YouTube channel to watch the team vibe code custom holiday cards and close out the year with some chaotic creativity.
Watch Part 2 on the Dev Interrupted YouTube channel
Follow the show:
Subscribe to our Substack 
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Leave us a Review
Follow the hosts:
Follow Andrew
Follow Ben
Follow Dan
OFFERS
Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.
LEARN ABOUT LINEARB
AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.