The AWS Developers Podcast
Things that matter for developers
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Things that matter for developers
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What happens when you strip the model from an agent? Everything left is the harness — and engineering that harness is the new discipline every AI builder needs to master. In this episode, Romain sits down with Mike Chambers, Senior Developer Advocate for Generative AI at AWS, fresh from speaking at the AI Engineers World's Fair 2026. They dig into harness engineering — what it means, why it matters, and how it changes whether you're building or using agents. Mike introduces “slop ops” (his term for unconstrained agent deployments), explains the difference between Strands Agents SDK and AgentCo
Prime Video serves over 300 million monthly customers across 240+ territories and 8,000+ device types. Lilia Abaibourova leads the AI-native transformation there. Prime Video started early, adopting CodeWhisperer as soon as it became available in preview, progressing through Amazon Q Developer, and now using Kiro to put agentic development in the hands of engineers, product managers, and designers. Romain sits down with Lilia to trace that journey — from CodeWhisperer preview to Amazon Q Developer and now Kiro — and explore MCP as the organizational inflection point: teams run two-person pods
I keep hearing 'we're building an AI platform' from enterprises. Most are stitching together demos. Thomson Reuters has been doing AI for 30 years. I sat down with Laura Skylaki (VP AI Engineering, Thomson Reuters) at AWS Summit London — and the gap between what they're doing vs. what most companies call 'AI maturity' is striking. In this episode, Laura breaks down how Thomson Reuters built an enterprise AI platform that serves 30,000 employees across three user personas — from business users to AI creators to developers — with 16 internal services, a $200M/year AI commitment, and a healthy sk
Brenn reached out via LinkedIn to share his experience with AI-driven software development and his new book, The Delivery Gap. Romain read a copy during a business trip and found it deeply aligned with how he guides customers through their AI transformation — and discovered a few new angles worth exploring, including a convergence on cost tracking that maps directly to Amazon's internal cost to serve software metric. In this episode, Brenn — Senior Manager at Delivery Hero (one of the world's largest food delivery companies, operating in 65 countries) — breaks down why most companies fail to s
Most MCP tools today return text. But what if your agent could render a chart, a form, or a full dashboard right inside the chat? That's what MCP apps do — and they're already live on ChatGPT, Claude, and Amazon Quick. Romain sits down with Luigi Pederzani, co-founder of Manufact (the company behind mcp-use, 10K+ GitHub stars), to explore MCP apps — the first official extension of the MCP protocol that lets servers return interactive UI inside AI chat interfaces. Key takeaways: • What MCP apps are — Standard MCP returns text and actions; MCP apps let a server send back a piece of interface (a
John Sexton and Aaron Tummon from Genesys join the show to share hard-won lessons from building and operating Cloud Copilot — an agentic AI layer serving 2 million users across 21+ AWS regions. Genesys powers customer experience for brands like Virgin Atlantic, Vodafone, and HSBC, and their copilot helps admins, supervisors, and agents work more efficiently through natural language. We cover the migration from Bedrock Inline Agents to Strands Agents, multi-agent orchestration with agents-as-tools, context management strategies, cost optimization, and the testing discipline required to keep age
Tipu Qureshi — Senior Principal Engineer at AWS — joins the show fresh from the AWS Summit NYC 2026 announcements to break down how DevOps Agent is changing the way teams handle operations and release management. After 14 years across EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Support, and Networking, Tipu moved into the Agentic AI organization to build the DevOps Agent and contribute to Agent Core. We explore how the agent investigates incidents autonomously, integrates with your IDE through Kiro and Claude, and validates code changes in sandboxes before they hit production. Key takeaways: • Reactive a
Davide de Sio built KiroGraph as a personal side project to stop his AI agent from burning through credits just searching files. It turned into a community-driven, open-source MCP server that gives Kiro (and other AI agents) a semantic map of your codebase — reducing token usage by up to 80%. We dive into the architecture, security, and modules, how everything runs 100% locally, and how the AWS Community shaped the project's roadmap. Key takeaways: • Code graphs vs. grep — Tree-sitter and AST-based graph generation give AI agents a smarter navigation model, eliminating wasteful file searches.
An honest, no-filter conversation about where developers actually stand with AI today. Warren Parad — CTO at Authress, AWS Community Builder, and host of Adventures in DevOps — brings a contrarian 'LLM realist' perspective grounded in daily use, while Romain nuances with enterprise customer observations and the data behind the hype. Together they explore why 93% of devs feel productive but only 4% of enterprises see results — and what separates those who benefit from those who don't. Key takeaways: • AI is a multiplier, not a magic wand — The DORA 2025 report confirms AI amplifies your existin
Anthropic deprecated Sonnet 3.5. Some of Xelix's pipelines migrated smoothly. Others broke — and customers noticed within hours. What separated the two? Evaluation. Paul Solomon and James Price Farr have spent 5+ years building AI systems that process millions of invoices for enterprise customers. In this episode, they share the evaluation-first framework that now saves them every time a model changes, an orchestration layer fails, or an agent picks the wrong tool. Key takeaways: • Evaluation-first, not evaluation-after — Retrofitting evaluation on an agent already in production is painful. Bu
How do you give 120+ engineers AI coding agents — and NOT break production? Ryan Cormack, Principal Engineer at Motorway and AWS Community Builder (recognized as a Renaissance Developer by Werner Vogels), shares the exact system his team uses to ship 250% more deployments while keeping quality high. In this episode, we break down the 5 quality gates that let Motorway's engineering teams move faster without sacrificing reliability: spec-driven planning to catch design issues before a single line of code is written, AI-assisted code review to verify code matches the plan, deterministic tests (un
You're using Copilot. Maybe you've tried Cursor or Claude Code. But what if that's already the tail end of the AI wave? In this episode, Romain sits down with Christian Weichel, CTO and co-founder of Ona (formerly Gitpod), to explore 'dark factories' — autonomous AI agents that pick up work, write code, open PRs, and ship fixes while you sleep. No laptop required. Chris shares how his team of ~20 engineers went from 450 open pull requests to a streamlined, auto-approving system — all while staying SOC 2 compliant. He walks through the 3 stages of AI in the SDLC (better autocomplete → software
What happens when a data scientist builds a generative AI proof of concept — and it scales to 700,000 articles and 4 billion page views? Recorded live at AWS Summit London, Romain is joined by Lewis James, Senior Data Scientist at Reach PLC — the UK's largest commercial publisher with over 120 brands including the Mirror, the Express, and OK Magazine. Lewis shares the full journey from GPT-2 experiments to a production AI publishing platform called Launchpad that now assists with 20–30% of the portfolio's daily article output. We explore how the team earned journalist trust by focusing on mund
AI agents are transforming how we write, test, and ship software — but are they actually improving the developer experience? Recorded live at AWS Summit London, Romain is joined by Tomasz Ptak — AWS AI Hero and Senior Engineer at Duco — for a candid conversation about developer experience friction in the age of AI agents. We explore what happens when teams adopt AI coding assistants without thinking about the developer workflow holistically — from context overload and broken feedback loops to the hidden costs of AI-generated code that nobody reviewed. The conversation draws on Werner Vogels' '
Recorded live at AWS Summit London, Matheus Guimaraes — Senior Developer Advocate at AWS and microservices specialist with over 25 years in tech — joins Romain to explore how agentic AI is reshaping the way we think about distributed systems architecture. From Martin Fowler's 2014 definition to agentic microservices in 2026, Matheus unpacks why the same distributed systems patterns — single responsibility, context dilution, failure modes — keep resurfacing in every new wave of architecture. The conversation covers the monolith vs. microservices debate as a deliberate architectural choice rathe
CyberArk's support team was drowning in logs. With 40+ products across SaaS and self-hosted environments, each generating logs in different formats, support engineers were spending days just preparing data before they could even start investigating a customer issue. Complex cases took up to 15 days to resolve. Moshiko Ben Abu, a Software Engineer at CyberArk — now part of Palo Alto Networks — built an AI-powered system that changed all of that. In this episode, he walks us through the full architecture: replacing manual regex parsers with AI-generated grok patterns using Amazon Bedrock and Cla
Simon Martinelli is a Java Champion, Vaadin Champion, and Oracle ACE Pro with over three decades of experience building enterprise software. In this episode, he introduces the AI Unified Process (AIUP) — a methodology he created that combines the rigor of the Rational Unified Process with modern AI-assisted development, and makes a compelling case for why specifications, not code, should be the source of truth. We explore the difference between system use cases and user stories, and why use cases — with their actors, preconditions, main flows, alternative flows, and business rules — give AI ag
What if you could combine the creative power of generative AI with the mathematical certainty of formal verification? In this episode, Danilo Poccia — Principal Developer Advocate at AWS — breaks down automated reasoning, a field of AI that has been quietly powering critical AWS services for years and is now becoming essential for production AI systems. We explore why generative AI alone is not enough for high-stakes applications, and how automated reasoning provides mathematical proof — not probabilistic guesses — that your AI agents are following the rules. Danilo traces the roots of automat
In this episode, we sit down with Shridhar Pandey, Principal Product Manager on AWS Serverless Compute, to explore how the serverless team is pioneering agent-native development. Shridhar walks us through a remarkable March 2026 where the team shipped three major capabilities in just three weeks — a Kiro Power for Durable Functions, a Kiro Power for SAM, and a serverless agent plugin now available in Claude Code and Cursor. We trace the journey from 18 months of traditional developer experience improvements — local testing, remote debugging, LocalStack integration — to the realization that AI
Join us for a fascinating conversation with Alexander 'Sasha' Lisachenko (Software Architect) and Artem Gab (Senior Engineering Manager) from inDrive, one of the global leaders in mobility operating in 48 countries and processing over 8 million rides per day. Sasha and Artem take us through their four-year transformation journey from a monolithic bare-metal setup in a single data center to a fully cloud-native microservices architecture on AWS. They share the hard-earned lessons from their migration, including critical challenges with Redis cluster architecture, the discovery of single-threade
It's a milestone — episode 200! And to mark the occasion, we're doing something we've never done before: hosting two guests at the same time. James Ward (Principal Developer Advocate at AWS) and Josh Long (Spring Developer Advocate at Broadcom, Java Champion, and host of 'A Bootiful Podcast') join Romain for a wide-ranging conversation about why Java and Spring AI are becoming the go-to stack for enterprise AI development. We kick off with Spring AI's rapid evolution — from its 1.0 GA release to the just-released 2.0.0-M3 milestone — and why it's far more than an LLM wrapper. James and Josh br
Some guests make you want to close your laptop and go build something. Linda Mohamed is one of them. In this episode, Romain sits down with Linda — AWS Community Hero, User Group Leader, Chairwoman of the AWS Community DACH Association, and independent cloud consultant based in Vienna. Linda started as a Java developer in on-premises enterprise environments. Her first AWS touch point? Building an Alexa skill for a smart home product — discovering Lambda almost by accident, and never looking back. Today she's building multi-agent AI systems, running an AI-powered video pipeline with five media
In this episode, Romain sits down with Michael Gasch, Product Manager at AWS for Lambda Durable Functions, to explore one of the most exciting launches in the Serverless space in recent years. Michael shares the full story: from the early days of Lambda and the evolution of the serverless developer experience, to the challenges developers face when building multi-step, stateful workflows — and how Durable Functions addresses them natively within Lambda. Discover the evolution of AWS Serverless and why last year was 'the year of Lambda', key launches including IDE integrations, Lambda Managed I
Mike Chambers is back — calling in from the other side of the globe — and he brought a lot to unpack. We pick up threads from our first conversation and follow them into genuinely exciting (and occasionally mind-bending) territory. We start with OpenClaw, the open-source agentic framework that took the developer world by storm. Mike shares his take on why it happened now — not just what it is — and why the timing was almost inevitable given how developers had been quietly experimenting with local agents for the past year. Then we go deep on asynchronous tool calling — a project Mike has been w
Join us for an engaging conversation with Chris Miller, an AWS Hero since 2021 and AI Software Engineer at Workato. Chris shares his journey from accidentally winning a DeepRacer competition to becoming a community leader in the San Francisco Bay Area. We dive deep into the realities of AI-assisted development, exploring multi-agent architectures, the Road to re:Invent hackathon experience, and what it's really like to be building in Silicon Valley's AI boom. Discover how Chris moved from DeepRacer champion to AWS Hero and community leader, his experience building a multi-agent imposter archit
