AI is the future of the SDLC

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome, everyone, to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:10)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:13)
This week, we're talking about how the Pentagon is kickstarting their own kind of Y Combinator and looking for the next Palantir on college campuses. And Reddit's lawsuit against Anthropic for data scraping that's hitting the news. And finally, an engineer's reflection on the AI skeptics in his life that gave us both a good chuckle. Ben, what are we cracking into first?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:34)
Yeah, let's just start right at the top and talk about what's happening in the defense industry.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:39)
Yeah, so the Pentagon, the defense sector of the US is launching a major initiative to increase software startups that are incubated for the purpose of serving the military. So we're talking about startups that are funded for military purposes and incubated in a very similar way that we see startups for consumer businesses, B2B businesses, maybe historically through things like Y Combinator. It's an attempt by the government to modernize internal things on old systems. It's actually a theme we've been covering quite a bit here on Dev Interrupted. We talked recently about changes at the FAA and at airports around updating technology there. This was a really interesting shift into a tech-focused world incubated by the defense sector. So Ben, what did you think?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:26)
Yeah, I saw they were offering some startup investments for recent grads that were wanting to launch their own company that supported both the defense and the commercial sector. But I think one thing that's really important to remember whenever stories like this come out is that software engineering as a profession is still pretty young, relatively speaking. You think about other types of engineering, like civil engineering or architecture or material science. All these other types of engineering have a much more storied and established history around them.
I've previously brought up how I would love to see far more public investments into building more robust software foundations for society. I think we're increasingly heading to a world where software does end up being the ultimate defense in a lot of situations. We're all familiar with the story of how software has eaten the commercial world, and I think it's going to eat our governance systems as well, just like probably on a slower timeline, you know? And there's been a lot of modernization effort that's happening in the US federal government in the last decade or so. You know, if you are familiar at all with the Air Force, like they went through a really massive digital transformation during the COVID era that ended up then becoming a model for a lot of other organizations within the Department of Defense. And I've actually met some of the people who have started and worked for some of these more defense-oriented startups. They operate surprisingly similar to like your typical tech company. You know, the same types of people you would see in a Silicon Valley tech company with the same like approach to building software. So I think that's a great thing. I think this is probably going to be a good investment over the long term. And I hope it, I hope we see some cool companies come out of it.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:12)
Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunities to innovate, especially within the government. So I'm interested to see what comes of it. You know, related to that, you talked a bit about modernizing defense infrastructure. There's like a lot of need for it, right? Well, there was a fun tidbit that came out recently in Japan about how they modernized a part of their own social infrastructure. Maybe that's a fun news bit that kind of resonates with your own interests there, Ben, talking about the opportunities in society to improve things. Because when I read this article, all I could get was immediate flashbacks to living in Japan, where I was for two years after college. And the dreaded experience of having to order like a movie ticket or a concert ticket or buy furniture from the vending machine and the konbini was always so daunting. Because putting in my address, which was like four sets of numbers and three sets of kanji and really complex code was very hard for me on the machine. But in Japan, they've just launched a digital address system that crunches all of that hard to understand, hard to input information into a simple seven-digit code that folks can use on these types of machines living in Japan to do everyday life things like pay their bills and order concert tickets if you were me in Japan. So this was a fun tidbit that came out. It's a really great effort from a government that typically hasn't done a lot of technological innovation. Japan is actually not really known for having this type of system. So it's really great to see this quality of life improvement for everyone there.