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The Pragmatic Engineer

The Pragmatic Engineer

By: Gergely Orosz
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 Software engineering at Big Tech and startups, from the inside. Deepdives with experienced engineers and tech professionals who share their hard-earned lessons, interesting stories and advice they have on building software. Especially relevant for software engineers and engineering leaders: useful for those working in tech.

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Episodes
  • The third golden age of software engineering – thanks to AI, with Grady Booch

    The third golden age of software engineering – thanks to AI, with Grady Booch
    Feb 4 2026

    Brought to You By:

    • Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more.

    • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review

    • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

    —

    Every few decades, software engineering is declared “dead” or on the verge of being automated away. We’ve heard versions of this story before. But what if it’s just the start of a new “golden age” of a different type of software engineering, like it has been many times before?

    In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined once again by Grady Booch, one of the most influential figures in the history of software engineering, to put today’s claims about AI and automation into historical context.

    Grady is the co-creator of the Unified Modeling Language, author of several books and papers that have shaped modern software development, and Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM, where he focuses on embodied cognition.

    Grady shares his perspective on three golden ages of computing since the 1940s, and how each emerged in response to the constraints of its time. He explains how technical limits and human factors have always shaped the systems we build, and why periods of rapid change tend to produce both real progress and inflated expectations.

    He also responds to current claims that software engineering will soon be fully automated, explaining why systems thinking, human judgment, and responsibility remain central to the work, even as tools continue to evolve.

    —

    Timestamps

    (00:00) Intro

    (01:04) The first golden age of software engineering

    (18:05) The software crisis

    (32:07) The second golden age of software engineering

    (41:27) Y2K and the Dotcom crash

    (44:53) Early AI

    (46:40) The third golden age of software engineering

    (50:54) Why software engineers will very much be needed

    (57:52) Grady responds to Dario Amodei

    (1:06:00) New skills engineers will need to succeed

    (1:09:10) Resources for studying complex systems

    (1:13:39) How to thrive during periods of change

    —

    The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

    • When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?

    • Inside a five-year-old startup’s rapid AI makeover

    • Software architecture with Grady Booch

    • What is old is new again

    —

    Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.



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    1 hr and 17 mins
  • The creator of Clawd: "I ship code I don't read"

    The creator of Clawd: "I ship code I don't read"
    Jan 28 2026
    Brought to You By:• Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more.• Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review• WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.—Peter Steinberger ships more code than I’ve seen a single person do: in January, he was at more than 6,600 commits alone. As he puts it: “From the commits, it might appear like it's a company. But it’s not. This is one dude sitting at home having fun."How does he do it?Peter Steinberger is the creator of Clawdbot (as of yesterday: renamed to Moltbot) and founder of PSPDFKit. Moltbot – a work-in-progress AI agent that shows what the future of Siri could be like – is currently the hottest AI project in the tech industry, with more searches on Google than Claude Code or Codex. I sat down with Peter in London to talk about what building software looks like when you go all-in with AI tools like Claude and Codex.Peter’s background is fascinating. He built and scaled PSPDFKit into a global developer tools business. Then, after a three-year break, he returned to building. This time, LLMs and AI agents sit at the center of his workflow. We discuss what changes when one person can operate like a team and why closing the loop between code, tests, and feedback becomes a prerequisite for working effectively with AI.We also go into how engineering judgment shifts with AI, how testing and planning evolve when agents are involved, and which skills and habits are needed to work effectively. This is a grounded conversation about real workflows and real tradeoffs, and about designing systems that can test and improve themselves.—Timestamps(00:00) Intro(01:07) How Peter got into tech (08:27) PSPDFKit(19:14) PSPDFKit’s tech stack and culture(22:33) Enterprise pricing(29:42) Burnout (34:54) Peter finding his spark again(43:02) Peter’s workflow (49:10) Managing agents (54:08) Agentic engineering(59:01) Testing and debugging (1:03:49) Why devs struggle with LLM coding(1:07:20) How PSPDFkit would look if built today (1:11:10) How planning has changed with AI (1:21:14) Building Clawdbot (now: Moltbot)(1:34:22) AI’s impact on large companies(1:38:38) “I don’t care about CI”(1:40:01) Peter’s process for new features (1:44:48) Advice for new grads(1:50:18) Rapid fire round—The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:• Inside a five-year-old startup’s rapid AI makeover• When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?• Why it’s so dramatic that “writing code by hand is dead”• AI Engineering in the real world• The AI Engineering stack—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 54 mins
  • How AWS S3 is built

    How AWS S3 is built
    Jan 21 2026
    Brought to You By:• Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more.• Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review• WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.—Amazon S3 is one of the largest distributed systems ever built, storing and serving data for a significant portion of the internet. Behind its simple interfaces hides an enormous amount of engineering work, careful tradeoffs, and long-term thinking.In this episode, I sit down with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of Data and Analytics at AWS, who has been running Amazon S3 for more than a decade. Mai-Lan shares how S3 operates at extreme scale, what it takes to design for durability and availability across millions of servers, and why building for failure is a core principle.We also go deep into how AWS approaches correctness using formal methods, how storage tiers and limits shape system design, and why simplicity remains one of the hardest and most important goals at S3’s scale.—Timestamps(00:00) Intro(01:03) S3’s scale (03:58) How S3 started (07:25) Parquet, Iceberg, and S3 tables(09:46) S3 for developers (13:37) Why AWS keeps S3 prices low (17:10) AWS pricing tiers(19:38) Availability and durability (26:21) The cost of S3's consistency(31:22) Automated reasoning and proof of correctness (35:14) Durability at AWS scale(39:58) Correlated failure and crash consistency (43:22) Failure allowances (46:04) Two opposing principles in S3 design(49:09) S3’s evolution (52:21) S3 Vectors (1:01:16) The 50 TB limit on AWS(1:07:54) The simplicity principle(1:10:10) Types of engineers working on S3(1:14:15) Closing recommendations —The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:• Inside Amazon’s engineering culture• How AWS deals with a major outage• A Day in the Life of a Senior Manager at Amazon• What is a Principal Engineer at Amazon? – with Steve Huynh• Working at Amazon as a software engineer – with Dave AndersonAmazon papers recommended by Mai-Lan:• Using lightweight formal methods to validate a key-value storage node in Amazon S3• Formally verified cloud-scale authorization• Analyzing metastable failures• Amazon’s engineering tenets—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 18 mins
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