Every Engineer Is a Manager Now 🤖 — with Chris Lattner

Every Engineer Is a Manager Now 🤖 — with Chris Lattner

From Refactoring Podcast by Luca Rossi

April 3, 2026 · 59 min · Episode 60

About this episode

Chris Lattner discusses his vision for AI and computing, the future of software craftsmanship, and the impact of AI on engineering workflows.

Today’s guest is Chris Lattner , one of the most important engineers for modern computing. Chris invented key compiler infrastructure tech like LLVM and MLIR, but he’s also the inventor of the Swift language, a key contributor in bringing Google TPUs to market, and a lot more. Today he’s the founder and CEO of Modular, where he’s reinventing AI infrastructure to make software portable across GPUs and platforms. So with Chris, we talked about his vision for AI and computing. We talked about how Modular’s mission makes us closer to a future where AI is open and portable. And we talked about open source, how AI is both empowering and straining contributors, how it’s changing intellectual property, and what workflows we need to change as engineers. And finally, we discussed how AI is changing software craftsmanship, how he’s bullish about junior engineers, and a lot more. (00:00) Preview (02:11) Introduction (04:05) What is Modular? (06:13) Sponsor break (07:10) From CPU to GPU landscape (10:46) Objective-C Swift analogy (15:37) What is Modular for Chris? (17:37) The love for building (20:21) Chris' view on AI future (23:48) AI and open source (29:34) Figuring out new workflows…

People in this episode

Host: Luca Rossi

Guest: Chris Lattner

Topics covered

  • AI infrastructure
  • software portability
  • open source
  • software craftsmanship
  • junior engineers
  • intellectual property

Keywords

  • AI
  • software engineering
  • Modular
  • open source
  • junior engineers
  • intellectual property
  • LLVM
  • Swift

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Modular, Google

Products: LLVM, MLIR, Swift

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