What if the biggest challenge in AI is not building it, but understanding how it changes underneath you?

In this episode of Agents of Dev, hosts Mitch Ashley and Brad Shimmin explore Oracle’s latest mission critical data infrastructure advancements alongside the fast evolving realities of AI systems, benchmarking, and cost management.

The discussion covers Oracle’s push toward extreme scale and high availability for global workloads, while also unpacking the hidden instability in AI systems caused by shifting APIs, model updates, and opaque pricing changes.

They also discuss why transparency is becoming essential for trust, how benchmarking AI models can mislead if not carefully designed, and why developers are increasingly relying on memory management, caching, and local models to control cost and performance.

The episode also highlights creative engineering approaches, from simple tools like curl to local AI experimentation, showing how practitioners are adapting to a rapidly changing AI landscape.

This and more on Agents of Dev.