Explore the evolving world of application delivery and security. Each episode will dive into technologies shaping the future of operations, analyze emerging trends, and discuss the impacts of innovations on the tech stack.
Agentic fingerprints: Detect, debug, and control AI traffic
AI is everywhere, but success metrics and security controls haven’t quite caught up. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, hosts Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by Lee Ennis to unpack “agentic fingerprints,” the behavioral traces AI agents leave behind as they move through applications and networks. AI agents aren’t your typical bots, and they’re definitely not “fast humans.” They’re tireless, API-hungry systems that optimize relentlessly, ignore UI conventions, and can blow past policies and rate limits without even noticing.
The conversation explores how modern fingerprinting shifts from identifying a single device to recognizing workflows, cadences, and decision paths. Lee explains how patterns in form-filling, sequencing, and even language structure can help distinguish one model family from another, and why that matters for both security and governance. The team also digs into the practical upside: fingerprinting isn’t just a defensive measure, it’s a powerful debugging and improvement loop for non-deterministic systems, helping teams trace undesirable outcomes back to a few key decisions and eliminate entire branches of failure.
They close with a clear call to action: start with observability. Capture the right traces in a safe sandbox, cluster and analyze behaviors, and use the data to make AI systems more explainable, controllable, and resilient before they go fully wild in production.
13 Oct 2026
AI code quality management: Guardrails, hooks, and Open Source
AI is letting teams produce code at a pace we’ve never had to govern before, and “we’ll review it later” doesn’t scale when later arrives after thousands of lines and dozens of commits. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Elijah Zupancic tackle the operational problem behind the productivity boom: how enterprises manage AI-generated code quality without turning security and reliability into an afterthought.
They make the case that shipping low-quality software has always been a form of malpractice; AI just accelerates it. Elijah introduces the “slow AI” approach: aim for a sustainable 7–15x productivity gain by working iteratively with the model, rather than unleashing fully automated loops that generate massive amounts of code nobody understands. The episode explores practical guardrails, including using hooks in tools like Claude Code and OpenCode to automatically trigger code quality and security checks as files are written, then forcing fixes before the workflow can move forward. They also discuss bringing classic engineering metrics back into the loop, like cyclomatic complexity and maintainability indicators, and using those signals to guide the next revision.
A major thread is the open source asymmetry problem. AI-driven code generation and automated bug reports are overwhelming volunteer maintainers, while commercial users benefit disproportionately from the foundations open source provides. The group argues that the industry has to fund and support the critical projects it relies on, especially as AI accelerates both vulnerability discovery and exploit creation.
The takeaway: don’t let speed outrun accountability. Build automated validation into your daily workflow, keep humans involved enough to understand what’s being shipped, and invest in the open source “infrastructure layer” your entire stack depends on.
Get involved with Elijah's project, Big Code Analysis: https://github.com/dekobon/big-code-analysis (https://github.com/dekobon/big-code-analysis)
6 Oct 2026
AI API Security: Same toolbox, new scale and new risks
AI API security is having a moment, complete with new tools and a shiny new market label. This episode asks the uncomfortable question: is it actually a new domain, or is it classic API security under more pressure? F5's Lori MacVittie is joined by Principal Product Manager, Vinnie Mazza, for a grounded conversation about what’s genuinely changing and what’s the same problem wearing a new badge.
Vinnie’s take is that it’s a collision: old weaknesses like broken access control and deferred security maintenance are now being hit at agent scale. Organizations that never fully adopted modern authentication, strong identity practices, or zero-trust-style assumptions are feeling it harder because agents can generate huge volumes of API calls, rapidly, from inside and outside the environment. The fundamentals still apply—clients make requests, you inspect, and you decide—but the economics and timing are different.
They dig into what changes when transports evolve toward streaming and async patterns, including MCP shifting toward a streaming protocol. Faster, bidirectional flows reduce the time you have to make security decisions, while overall volume increases the likelihood that sampling-based detection misses what matters. They also revisit the split between positive and negative security models, why most organizations default to “everything is allowed unless it’s known bad,” and why that becomes more fragile as AI produces more novel behaviors.
The key theme is defense in depth with new priorities. Data loss prevention and IP protection move from “later” to front-and-center when agents can unintentionally leak sensitive internal data to external model providers. The takeaway is practical: you don’t need to panic or replace your toolbox, but you do need to adapt it for higher volume, faster change, and stronger data controls.
Who has been a guest on Pop Goes the Stack
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Peter Scheffler
Ram Poornachandran
Shaul Moav
Buu Lam
Emmet McGinnity
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
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Questions about Pop Goes the Stack
Who hosts Pop Goes the Stack?
Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses host the show. Published by F5.
How often do new episodes come out?
The show publishes weekly, based on its RSS feed.
Does Pop Goes the Stack take guests?
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