High Leverage

Simon Willison, veteran web developer and Django co-creator who now covers AI and LLM tooling. He discusses the 2025 tipping point when models mastered code, the shift from vibe coding to agentic engineering, how coding agents compress delivery and reshape workflows, and the trust, security, and hiring tradeoffs that follow.

On episode 8 of High Leverage, Joe Ruscio sits down with Scott Hanselman for a conversation that goes far beyond prompts and productivity gains. They talk about craftsmanship, learning by doing, the long-term talent pipeline for engineering teams, and how AI could either free people to do more meaningful work or simply accelerate existing inefficiencies. From pair programming to Star Trek economics, this episode examines the bigger human questions behind the current AI boom.The post appeared first on Heavybit.

On episode 7 of High Leverage, Joe Ruscio sits down with Peter Bell to explore how the CTO role evolves from early-stage founder to enterprise leader. They unpack what it really takes to scale AI adoption across an engineering organization, and why simply buying tools isn’t enough. The conversation dives into agentic software development, observability, context engineering, and what happens when production code is generated without direct human review.The post appeared first on Heavybit.

On episode 6 of High Leverage, Joe Ruscio sits down with Carl Lerche, Principal Engineer at AWS and creator of Tokio. Carl shares his journey from Ruby and Rails into Rust, and explains why memory safety, fearless concurrency, and async runtimes matter for modern infrastructure. The conversation dives deep into the origins of Tokio, lessons from building foundational open source software, and how Rust’s guarantees are shaping the future of systems engineering.Want 10% off your ticket to TokioConf? Use the discount code: Heavybit10The post appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 5 of High Leverage, host Joe Ruscio and special guest Eliran Mesika of GitLab pull back the curtain on company acquisitions, build vs. buy considerations, and the complex inner workings of merger agreements.

In episode 4 of High Leverage, Joe is joined by Paul Biggar, CTO and Co-Founder of Dark, to discuss the challenges of backend development, and how Dark aims to simplify them with a new, streamlined programming language.

In episode 3 of High Leverage, Joe speaks with Grant Miller, Replicated founder and creator of EnterpriseReady, on how companies are taking a new approach to running third-party applications.

In episode 2 of High Leverage, Joe meets with Corey Quinn, cloud economist and founder of the Quinn Advisory group, to discuss the realities of using cloud providers at scale.

Welcome to High Leverage, a podcast featuring discussions around scaling modern software teams through better tooling and processes. High Leverage is hosted by Joe Ruscio, Founder of Librato and General Partner at Heavybit.In the first episode of High Leverage, Joe is joined by Monitoring Weekly’s Mike Julian for a discussion on observability tools, trends, and changing landscapes.