From PHP to team lead of agents: rethinking judgment, review, and data with Google's Andi Gutmans (Part 1)

From PHP to team lead of agents: rethinking judgment, review, and data with Google's Andi Gutmans (Part 1)

From The Stack Overflow Podcast by The Stack Overflow Podcast

August 21, 2026 · 26 min · Episode 980

About this episode

Andi Gutmans discusses the evolution of software development and the role of agents in the process.

Andi Gutmans, head of Agentic Data Cloud at Google and co-creator of PHP, joins Leaders of Code to talk about why agentic development feels less like a break from the past and more like the next chapter of the same story. This is part one of a two-part conversation. In this episode, Eira May and Stack Overflow Director of Platform Engineering Peter O'Connor talk with Andi Gutmans about the throughline between democratizing web development with PHP and democratizing software development with agents today. Andi makes the case that every individual contributor is becoming “a team lead of agents” and walks through how that reshapes code review, interviewing, and the balance of human versus agent judgment. He also explains why he thinks the biggest bottleneck left isn't the models, but the challenge of getting an organization's data into a state where agents can actually reason over it. The discussion also: Covers how Google is changing its own interview process to evaluate how candidates reason with and guide agents, rather than how well they can hand-code a solution alone. Explores the "human in the loop, agent in the loop, agent on the loop" framework for deciding where review…

People in this episode

Hosts: Eira May, Peter O'Connor

Guest: Andi Gutmans

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Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Google, PHP, Waymo

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