Dev Interrupted

Dev Interrupted is the go-to podcast for software engineering leadership. Each week, hosts Andrew Zigler, Ben Lloyd Pearson, and Dan Lines sit down with industry experts to explore the strategies, struggles, and stories behind high-performing software teams. Paired with weekly industry news coverage, the conversations dive deep into the real challenges that define excellence in modern tech.

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Dev Interrupted

Your AI demo is a lie (and how to make it real) | Arcade’s Alex Salazar

September 09, 2025 • LinearB • Season 5 • Episode 36

AI that talks is easy, but AI that acts securely is where everything breaks down. We're joined by Alex Salazar, CEO of Arcade, to confront the massive and often underestimated gap between a flashy AI demo and a production-ready system. Drawing from his team's own pivot from building agents to building the tools that secure them, he explains why a working demo is only 1% of the journey. Alex breaks down the four "demo killers" that cause most agent projects to fail: inconsistency, security flaws, prohibitive costs, and high latency.

Alex reveals the counterintuitive solution his team discovered: the key to making non-deterministic AI reliable is to dial up determinism. Learn why giving an AI a constrained set of intention-based tools - like a calculator or a multiple-choice test - dramatically reduces errors and solves critical security challenges that plague open-ended systems. He explains why you can't just wrap existing APIs and must instead build custom, workflow-centric tools for your agents. This is an essential listen for anyone who wants to build AI that doesn't just talk, but acts securely on behalf of your users.

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