Open-source, complexity & AI coding 🔧 — with Salvatore "Antirez" Sanfilippo

Today's guest is Salvatore Sanfilippo, also known as Antirez! Salvatore is the creator of Redis, an open source data store used by hundreds of thousands of developers across the world. And he's also a writer. He published the popular sci-fi novel called Wohpe, which anticipated a lot of what is happening today with AI. With Salvatore, we talked about open source — what makes a project successful and how to make it successful for its maintainers. Then we discussed how Salvatore uses AI for extremely complex coding, which makes him 5x faster than without AI. And finally, I asked him about his writing work and what is the experience of writing a novel versus a software project. 02:55 Introduction 06:47 Salvatore's life priorities 12:40 Develop an open source project in 2025 18:14 Being a generalist with AI support 19:25 Making an open source project sustainable 23:54 Complexity of modern front-end development 24:58 Big Tech, complexity and open source 30:19 Escaping the complexity loop 33:40 The rebirth of fullstack through AI 34:53 How Salvatore creates code with AI 41:16 Does AI increase code productivity? 44:14 The importance of the right prompt 47:06 Writing tests in the AI era of development 50:49 Whope, Salvatore's sci-fi novel 53:28 Writing a novel and writing code — This episode is brought to you by https://workos.com — Some show notes: • Salvatore's website: https://antirez.com/ • Salvatore's Youtube:    / @antirez   • Wohpe:   / wohpe   — You can also find this at: 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9d... 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... — For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]