Right now, a lot of engineering leaders are stuck in the same loop: rolling out AI tools only to watch their teams quietly drift back to business as usual. Andrew sits down with James Everingham, former Head of Dev Infra at Meta and current CEO of guild.ai, to discuss how to break this cycle by treating AI not just as an autocomplete tool, but as a "sentient fabric" woven directly into your software development lifecycle. They explore how replacing top-down AI mandates with impossible business challenges—like eliminating code freezes entirely—empowers developers to organically build game-changing tools like conversational onboarding agents. Finally, James breaks down why 2026 is the year of the agent and how his team is building the enterprise infrastructure needed to safely govern, audit, and scale collaborative agent workflows.

Follow the show:

Subscribe to our Substack
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Leave us a Review

Follow the hosts:

Follow Andrew
Follow Ben
Follow Dan

Follow today's guest:

Learn more about Guild: guild.ai
Follow James Everingham: LinkedIn

OFFERS

Start Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.
Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.

LEARN ABOUT LINEARB

AI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.
AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.
AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.
MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Your engineers need an AI control plane, not more tools | Guild.ai’s James Everingham

Dev Interrupted