Software Defined Interviews - Episodes Tagged with “Ai”

Episode 125: Running D&D with AI, Determinism First, and Workflow ROI, with Michael Rishi Forrester

Software Defined Talk — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Michael Rishi Forrester does AI workforce transformation at Accenture LearnVantage, after three years at KodeKloud and about thirty years in IT before that. Whitney and Coté talk with him about running tabletop role-playing games with AI. He built his 19-year-old son a homebrew campaign on top of Lancer, the sci-fi mech game, in about 20 hours instead of the 60 to 100 it would have taken him before - and got a website, a virtual tabletop and some Discord bots out of it. What breaks is the interesting part: there was a night when every shot did one damage, because the model had quietly stopped using the dice harness and started doing the math itself.

From there it turns into an argument about where AI actually pays off at work. Michael’s position is that the ROI is at the workflow level and there is no organizational ROI to go find, that read-only work over more information than a person can hold is where it currently earns its keep, and that everything he has had success with is a bound system with a finite rule set. Whitney names the through-line: what can be deterministic should be deterministic, and if you need an LLM, scope it tightly and have it write the deterministic thing.

It ends on mantis shrimp.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

Michael Rishi Forrester’s home page on the World Wide Web.
Antiphon: The Game, the homebrew Lancer campaign - the whole story, the missions, the board, and the sea-creature capital ships.
Michael on LinkedIn, where he posts most often.
Lancer, the sci-fi mech game Antiphon is built on top of. Special Guest: Michael Rishi Forrester.

Episode 124: The Chief Therapy Officer, Job Titles as Culture Change, and AI as Spreadsheets, with Bryan Ross

Software Defined Talk — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0200

Bryan Ross is a Field CTO at GitLab, a role he describes as straddling sales, customer success, and solution architecture - or, as one of his customers renamed it, chief therapy officer, which he has since turned into a Substack. Whitney and Coté talk with him about what the job actually looks like: getting catapulted into an account by the sales team, asking a lot of questions, and finding out about four minutes in that the tech problem is a human one. He makes the case that changing job titles - sysadmin, DevOps engineer, platform engineer, now context engineer - is mostly an organization trying to change its culture without knowing how, and that the real difference is mindset: keeping a box alive versus serving one team versus building a product. There’s a long stretch on metrics, including Goodhart’s law, why every metric needs a balancing one, and why he cared more about how many VMs were being decommissioned than how many were being provisioned. Also: whether anyone actually needs to ship faster (Coté’s pharmacy doesn’t), the UK Postal Service discovering that a friendly postman beat a modernized delivery fleet on customer satisfaction, and why copying Google is usually the wrong move. On AI, Bryan’s argument is that it will end up like spreadsheets - a few experts building the macros, everyone else using and lightly tinkering with what they made - and that which model you use should be a finance and data governance decision, not a developer one. Plus the hazard of a nicely formatted report: the pastel-shading trick for spreadsheets nobody will check, and why an AI scoring something 6 out of 10 gets the same unearned benefit of the doubt.

Also, ordering pizza in Amsterdam.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

Bryan Ross’s home page on the World Wide Web, which links to everything else.
Chief Therapy Officer, Bryan’s Substack.
Bryan on LinkedIn.
Coté's list of "laws," anecdotes, and common shit people say. See also Hacker Laws. Special Guest: Bryan Ross.

Episode 123: Deming, DevOps History, AI Risk, and Critical Thinking, with John Willis

Software Defined Talk — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0200

W. Edwards Deming was a physicist, statistician, and quality theorist who taught post-war Japanese manufacturers what eventually became the Toyota Production System - and, decades later, DevOps. John Willis, one of the founders of the DevOps movement and the author of a book on Deming, walks Whitney and Coté through that lineage: Deming's system of profound knowledge (theory of knowledge, variation, psychology, and systems thinking), how it landed at Toyota, and how it threads through Lean software development into modern delivery practice. From there, the conversation turns to what the industry is getting wrong about AI: bragging about K-LOC and token counts instead of value, treating probabilistic systems with old deterministic notions of risk, and forgetting the social-technical lessons we already paid for. Along the way: VC moats and the buy-versus-build conversation inside large organizations, David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" and the ladder of inference, Jevons Paradox and whether AI gets us a three-day work week or a six-day one, and what CS students should be learning besides how to code. Also a brief detour into why John would want fifteen minutes with Bill Clinton.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

John on LinkedIn - the entry point to his author portal and writing.
John's book on Deming, Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge.
John's book on AI, Rebels of Reason.
The DevOps Handbook, which John co-authored with Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Patrick Debois.
Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems.
Steven Spear, The High-Velocity Edge.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development.
David Foster Wallace, "This is Water" commencement speech.
The 1980 NBC documentary If Japan Can, Why Can't We?.