Speed Is the Only Moat 🏎️ — with Anush Elangovan

Today's guest is Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD. With Anush, we talked about how he thinks about open source as a key strategic driver in the AI era, and how his team is able to stay super fast while ensuring quality by combining their internal work with their external contributions. And then we got into a rabbit hole about how to get big companies ready for AI, how to think about human capital, and how Anush personally spends his time. And spoiler alert, he is back to doing IC work for up to 40% of his time. (00:00) Episode start (01:31) Introducing Anush Elangovan (01:39) AMD's open-source AI stack (04:08) Sponsor break (05:34) How AI contributions are reshaping open-source maintenance (08:33) From demo to production: the quality gates funnel (11:10) When agents game the system (17:10) Speed as a moat: the open-source flywheel (20:31) Agent-first development: what it really looks like (23:56) AI cleanup: getting legacy code ready for agents (28:24) The excavator analogy (31:08) The new engineers (34:12) VP doing IC work (43:28) Open-weight models, AI as electricity, and what's next - Today's episode is brought to you by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer for modern engineering teams. Get a free three-week trial at https://getunblocked.com/refactoring - 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]