I Haven't Opened an IDE Since November — Will Maier

Will Maier leads growth engineering at Stripe, where he's spent the last five years working across nearly every surface of the product. His background isn't CS — it's the history of science — and he's been through enough industry shifts (racking servers, the cloud transition, DevOps) to know when something really big is happening. Find us now also on YouTube: @StaffEngPodcoast In this season premiere of StaffEng, Will joins Alex and David to talk about what changed for him after November 2025, why he spent the holidays building a Lua distribution from his phone while doing laundry, and how he thinks about the organizational dynamics of AI adoption inside a large engineering org. Topics covered: Why Will hasn't opened an IDE since November — and what replaced it The psychology of AI adoption: shame, hallucinated PRs, and "AI vegans" Skills as the new packages: how improvised markdown files are changing how teams share leverage Why measuring token usage (the wrong metric) surfaced the right insights The case for making the incident report critic , not the incident report writer What the cloud and DevOps transitions teach us about where AI is headed

You can listen to I Haven't Opened an IDE Since November — Will Maier online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

I Haven't Opened an IDE Since November — Will Maier is an episode from StaffEng by David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles).

This episode is 47:03 long.

This episode was published on Mar 11, 2026.

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