Airflow's Creator on His 'Claude Code' Moment

Maxime Beauchemin, the creator of Apache Airflow and Apache Superset, joins the show to discuss his transition from data engineering to the frontier of AI. Max shares the origin stories of his massive open-source projects, detailing how Airflow was born at Airbnb out of a need for better data orchestration. He also explains his shift toward user interfaces with Superset and the founding of his company, Preset. We then shift to the future of software development. Max dives deep into his recent "Claude Code moment" and introduces Agor, his new command center for agentic workflows. Discover how his team is using persistent AI agents to automate everything from deal desks and legal reviews to automated bug bashing and QA testing. Finally, the discussion explores the tech singularity, the concept of a "software utopia," and how awesome hobbies like mountain biking and e-foiling will fit into an automated world. Agor: https://agor.live/ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro & Maxime's Background in Data 01:58 The True Origin Story of Apache Airflow at Airbnb 04:11 Why Maxime Quit Data Engineering to Build Superset 09:03 Founding Preset & The Entrepreneurial Leap at 40 11:43 The "Claude Code Moment" and the Creation of Agor 16:37 Deploying Persistent AI Agents on Slack for Internal Ops 23:18 Teaching 15-Year-Olds How to Use AI Agents 31:55 Automated Bug Bashing: How AI is Changing QA 39:36 The Singularity, Software Utopia, & E-foiling in Tahoe 43:47 Where to Find Maxime & Outro