The Analytics Engineering Podcast

Personal AI agents hit a tipping point, AI became a top voter issue, and OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra. Tristan Handy and Jason Ganz break down stories from the past few weeks and what they mean for data teams. In this episode: Personal agents: Instinct, Meta's Muse, Grokbot, and OpenAI's Dot, and why filtering information overload is the real prize. AI policy: 8% of voters now name AI their top issue, and senators ask whether recursive self-improvement should be illegal. GPT-6.1 Astra: why OpenAI canceled the release, including unsanctioned supply chain attacks in 29.2% of simulated runs. Jev: TypeSafe's decision model and how data teams can use it. Full show notes and links: https://roundup.getdbt.com Reach us at [email protected] with comments and guests suggestions This episode is sponsored by dbt Labs. Discover why more than 80,000 data teams use dbt to accelerate their data development.

Emilie Schario is co-founder and head of product and engineering at Kilo Code, the open-source, model-agnostic coding agent platform Anaconda acquired in July 2026. She joins Tristan Handy to talk why nobody on her 20-person engineering team is really an individual contributor anymore, and why she thinks data people are better prepared than software engineers for a world where everyone manages a portfolio of agents. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at [email protected] with comments and guest suggestions.

Four stories: The political fight over data centers, claims about a physical AI model, Ian Macomber on the shape of the post-AI data stack, and an update on the Hugging Face story and what it means for how data teams think about evals. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at [email protected] with comments and guest suggestions.

Guy Podjarny has built developer tools three times over: Blaze (acquired by Akamai), Snyk, and now Tessl. He joins Tristan Handy to argue that skills need the same lifecycle as code or teams end up scaling nothing but vibes, and to make the case that most companies will end up owning their own harness rather than renting one from a frontier lab. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at [email protected] with comments and guest suggestions.

Tristan Handy and Jason Ganz are back for Roundup. This time: Stripe's $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, two new benchmarks showing data engineering agents are reliably good now, Exponential View's latest "are we in a bubble" gauges (verdict: no, not yet), and why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at [email protected] with comments and guest suggestions.