Low-Code Won’t Replace You | Camunda’s Bernd Ruecker

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:00)
Hey, Andrew, have you ever woken up in the morning and thought to yourself, I would love to get out of bed today and help Dev Interrupted make content?

**Andrew Zigler** (0:10)
Well, Ben, I think that most days when I wake up.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:14)
Yeah, well, that's great. But I also want to give our audience that opportunity. And we'll get to that in just a moment, but you've probably noticed some changes that are happening here at Dev Interrupted. You know, our goal really is just to provide the best coverage of topics that matter the most to our audience. And to that end, we've launched a new survey to gather feedback from you, our listeners. We want to know what an ideal Dev Interrupted looks like for you. And this will help us make the best content and let you influence the roadmap. But there's one extra bonus that I'm going to let Andrew share with everyone.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:53)
That's right. There's a little bit more to this too. As part of adjusting our content to make sure that we hit all the marks you want to see, we want to invite you to share your opinions on topics like developer productivity, developer experience, adopting and scaling AI. And this becomes a chance to join the conversation with us and engineering leaders that join us on this podcast about the challenges facing software engineering teams in 2025 The survey that Ben alluded to includes a section for you to indicate that interest, but even if not, we still want to hear from you. We still want to know your opinion on Dev Interrupted. It's only going to take a minute to complete, so please check out the link in the show notes. And thanks in advance for sharing your opinion with us.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:40)
Thanks, Andrew. And for our listeners out there, I'm Ben Lloyd Pearson and I'm joined today by my co-host, Andrew Zigler.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:47)
Yeah, of course. It's always great to be here. Excited to dig into today's topics. What's top of mind for you?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:54)
Yeah. So, you know, I feel like we're probably not going to get through a single episode this season without mentioning AI at least once.

**Andrew Zigler** (2:02)
Too true.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (2:03)
So, you know, the stories that have been catching my attention lately have been, you know, it seems like we're going through another round of major investments into AI infrastructure. So, you know, there's the one that made a lot of news was this new Stargate project where OpenAI has come together with a few companies to invest half a trillion dollars over four years, but we also have stories of, like, Google investing a billion dollars into Anthropic. Microsoft a few weeks ago announced an 80 billion dollar investment into their AI data centers in 2025 And then Meta invested as part of the Databricks Series J, which is an AI startup. It wasn't disclosed how much Meta specifically invested, but it was a 10 billion round overall, so somewhere under that amount. The AI hype cycle is clearly not over. And it seems like what's really beginning to emerge is that the US and China are the only two major world powers that are aggressively investing in AI infrastructure right now.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:05)
And more specifically, they're investing in controlling and creating the AI chips, because that infrastructure is useless without the chips they're built to support. And so we're going to see these world powers controlling that AI dominance by controlling the creation and production of that technology.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:22)
Yeah, it's like who can build the most hardware and then put the most like electricity behind it to train their models, you know. But it's almost, you know, what it almost feels like to me is like, there's a bit of like an arms race that's emerging here that reminds me a lot of like the Manhattan Project, the space race. And in both of those situations, previously, the US was the first nation to really reach the heights of success for both of those challenges. And it put the country in a place to dominate. So, I mean, like when I put it in that framing, like it really puts things into perspective about what's happening.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:57)
And it really shows why the next few years even can be so critical. It's still early days, there's something new every day when we wake up in this kind of development. And while it reminds us now looking back on things like the Space Race and the Manhattan Project, those projects themselves are even completely different from each other and a world full of unknowns and uncertainties every single day. And I think that's the reality of what we're currently experiencing. For example, the recent Chinese model DeepSeq R1, which uses pure reinforcement learning, is able to match OpenAI's O1 power at 95% less of the cost. And so what that tells us is there's no motes yet in the world of AI. No one is secure in terms of developing the next leading thing.