The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Building the machine that builds the machine (Interview)
11 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome, friends. I'm Jared, and you are listening to The Changelog, interviews with the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. On this episode, Paul Dix joins us to discuss the InfluxDB co-founder's journey adapting to an agentic world.
Paul sent his AI coding agents on various real-world side quests and shares all his findings, what's going to prod, what's not, and why he's, at least for now, hand-coding once again. But first, a big thank you to our partners at Fly.io, the platform for devs who just want to ship. Build fast, run any code fearlessly at Fly.io.
Okay, Paul Dix, and building the machine that builds the machine on the changelog. Let's do it.
Well, friends, I don't know about you, but something bothers me about GitHub Actions. I love the fact that it's there. I love the fact that it's so ubiquitous. I love the fact that agents that do my coding for me believe that my CI, CD workflow begins with drafting TOML files for GitHub Actions. That's great. It's all great. Until, yes, until your builds start moving like molasses.
Chapter 2: How does Paul Dix utilize AI coding agents in his work?
GitHub Actions is slow. It's just the way it is. That's how it works. I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry because our friends at namespace, they fix that. Yes, we use namespace.so to do all of our builds so much faster.
namespace is like github actions but faster i mean like way faster it caches everything smartly it casts your dependencies your docker layers your build artifacts so your ci can run super fast you get shorter feedback loops happy developers because we love our time and you get fewer i'll be back after this coffee and my build finishes so That's not cool. The best part is it's drop-in.
It works right alongside your existing GitHub Actions with almost zero config. It's a one line change. So you can speed up your builds, you can delight your team, and you can finally stop pretending that build time is focus time. It's not. Learn more, go to namespace.so. That's namespace.so, just like it sounds, like it said. Go there, check them out.
Chapter 3: What challenges does Paul face with AI coding agents?
We use them, we love them, and you should too. Namespace.so. Well, friends, we're here with Paul Dix, CTO, founder of InfluxDB, longtime friend. I would say old hat wisdom, all the positive things I can say about your wisdom, Paul, but happy to have you back here on the pod. It's exciting times we're in, but also very uniquely positioned times. How are you personally feeling about things?
How are you deploying things? I think the things I'm talking about is obviously agentic coding, et cetera, et cetera. How are you doing?
I'm good, yeah. Thanks for having me back on. Definitely, like most developers, I'm excited to talk about agentic coding stuff. It's highs and lows, really. On the daily? On the weekly?
Chapter 4: How has hand-coding influenced Paul's current development process?
Minute by minute? Man, I would say for the past six months, it was mostly highs on the weekly. But then occasional setbacks when I feel like I got a little over my skis and let the agents do, you know, run a little hog wild without enough supervision. And then I had to like dial it back and, you know, yeah, fix things myself.
So I'm in the middle of one of those, uh, dial it back, uh, situations right now, but you're writing code. Is that what you're saying? You're actually writing some code, right? I am writing code. As I said before, I'm writing code by hand is like a peasant out there in the coding fields.
When you're doing that, I know it's enjoyable, but do you feel like given that you've tasted the milk and honey over the horizon, do you feel like, man, I'm kind of wasting my time? I could be moving faster. What is your feeling when you hand code like the old way, if that's the case we're saying here?
When I hand code anything at this point, I definitely feel like I'm slow. This could be faster.
Chapter 5: What insights does Paul share about agentic coding?
And the biggest thing is, obviously, this has all changed within the past year. My experience was I started using ChatGPT when 4 came out in March of 2013. I started using these tools more for coding along the way with like Copilot and all these other things and IDE completion. But I would say everything like really, really changed last year with the release of Opus 4 in the late May.
And I started using Clog code around the same time. And I know people at that point were using Cursor and their Clog code was released in what, like February or March or something like that. But so my experience... of feeling like agentic coding is an experience, which I think is qualitatively different than
you know, completion and an IDE or anything like that happened, you know, I would say in June of last year. And since then, you know, I, I basically adopted, I started using it internally and I used it essentially for like two or three weeks. And at first I was just like, is this real? Like, is this, I would like, couldn't believe how much it could actually do.
But I was still keeping it fairly constrained. Right. I would have, I would have like a well-defined problem and I
Chapter 6: How does Paul foresee the future of software development with AI?
would say like, Hey, implement this function or write these tests or whatever. But basically after like two or three weeks, I was just like, this is magic. And I need to, at least within my company, I need to start spreading the gospel. Right. So I basically like wrote this like lengthy documents that I shared with my engineering team.
And I basically said like, all of you have to start using this. And at the time, You know, Anthropic didn't even offer any sort of like enterprise licensing for cloud code. Like if you wanted to use cloud code without, you know, paying for individual tokens. Actually, I don't even know if you can use an API key at that point. It was still like you had to pay for like a personal subscription.
I told all of my engineers, I was like, go sign up for this on your personal credit card and expense it and we'll pay for it. And I was like, if you hit the limits.
upgrade because like the experience is different if you're worried about hitting token limits versus like you don't care because if you don't care you'll feel more free to like experiment and do things and basically like it progressed from there and i have you know i have a couple of like project like hack projects that i did in the background that i could certainly talk about uh along the way and the progression basically over the last six months but basically by you know the end of last year
it seemed obvious to me that, you know, our days as developers of like handwriting code were extraordinarily limited.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of AI on open source software?
And that at that point, basically with the release of Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 Codex and probably Gemini 3, but I don't really use Gemini that much. But Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5, I have a lot of experience with. You know, my feeling was... if you're an engineer and you're writing even like 10% of the code you write by hand, you're like wasting your time and you're wasting your company's time.
And so this is basically like, you know, the end of last year, the first week or two of this year, I just hit my absolute peak of like, this is amazing and goodbye coding forever. I'm now like a manager of agents. right? A manager of, of cloud codes and codexes. And I just need to figure out how to get all these things working to maximum effect. Right. And the first thing,
The first post I wrote about this was basically on New Year's Eve, where I basically brought up Amdahl's law about performance optimization, where it's like, if you have this complex system and you optimize one component of it, the total amount of performance improvement that you see is going to be limited by the percentage that component represents in terms of the overall thing.
You know, compare that to the software delivery pipeline where code is only like one portion of it. Right. And depending on who you are, you think it's either larger or smaller as a proportion of what it takes to actually like deliver a software product to customers and put it in production and all this other stuff.
Chapter 8: What upcoming features are being developed for InfluxDB?
Right. And basically my thought then and still now really is like code's easy now, code's cheap. Like you can produce so much code, like you can produce more code than you could ever have time to review or want to put into a product or get into production or support. So what do you have to do? You have to optimize the other parts of software delivery, right?
You have to optimize how you test and verify this stuff, how you gather requirements, how you have product teams get it and validate that has the user experience that you want, how your support teams actually support it. The interesting thing.
So in the initial, I'd say like June, July, August or June, July, I was basically still in the mode where I had, you know, cloud code running and I have one session and I'm focused there. And basically what enabled me to do is do all the other kind of work that I have to do as like an executive and leader within my company, right?
It's interesting because as a CTO of a fairly established company, like still obviously a startup, but usually CTOs aren't actually writing code, but I have been for the past two years on this new version of the database. I've been very in the weeds, but I still have leadership requirements, things I need to do.
So basically in June, July, I was like, okay, I can keep these agents going and then do other stuff on the side while they're working. And then I got to the point where I'm like, okay, well, maybe I can actually run another agent at the same time and pursue a side quest.
I thought like, man, agentic coding is basically the age of the side quest because you can just like start it on something else and get it going and see what happens. And I had a number of side quests that I pursued over the last, I would say like four months, five months. And I probably churned out a few hundred thousand lines of code, which is just like insane.
None of which is going to production.
None of which is- Did you accomplish any of your side quests? Like were they accomplished?
Yeah, so that's, I mean, that's one of the problems I have right now is, so I can be more specific about a couple of these side quests.
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