The Root Cause Podcast

Deep dives into AI-native infrastructure, war stories from the trenches, and the future of autonomous site reliability.

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Episode 5: The Future of On-Call: Simplicity, AI, and Building Spike with Kaushik Thirthappa

In this episode of The Root Cause, Priyank Upadhyay sits down with Kaushik Thirthappa, founder of Spike.sh, to explore why simplicity is the hardest product problem in tech, the Super Mario approach to SaaS onboarding, status page transparency, and how intent-driven infrastructure will reshape on-call rotations.

September 8, 2026

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Episode 4: Happy Little Accidents | Redefining Network Automation with John Capobianco

In this episode of The Root Cause, Priyank Upadhyay is joined by John Capobianco, Head of AI and Developer Relations at Itential. John shares his incredible story of moving from grueling 12 hour shifts on an aluminum factory floor to managing network infrastructure for the Canadian Parliament. We discuss why network engineers can skip the Python line to become agent managers, the difference between Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and Skills, and how Spec-Driven Development (SDD) is replacing Test-Driven Development (TDD) in the age of LLMs.

Jul 9

Podcast

Episode 3: The Spirit of Curiosity | A Cloud Pioneer on the Coming Decade of AI Operations

In the third episode of The Root Cause, Priyank Upadhyay sits down with cloud pioneer Randy Bias, co-author of "Pets vs Cattle," to unpack why the industry pours everything into AI-assisted coding while AI-assisted operations sits wide open; and what a decade of autonomous, agent-run infrastructure actually looks like.

Jun 21

Podcast

Episode II: The Reality of AI Coding: Crucial Engineering Lessons From Inside Cursor

In this episode of The Root Cause, Priyank Upadhyay sits down with Mohit, who runs user operations and technical support at Cursor. They discuss how Mohit built and deployed a production-grade leaderboard microsite for 5,000 active users in a single week without a computer science degree, the "confetti" phenomenon of AI-generated code bloat, and how modern developers are using Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations like RubixKube to run deep SRE diagnostics directly inside their code editor.

May 27

Podcast

Episode 1: Why AI SRE is Failing and The Rise of SRI

We break down why traditional AI SRE is falling short for modern engineering teams and introduce Site Reliability Intelligence (SRI) the next evolution of autonomous incident resolution.

May 19

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