Lori MacVittie
Distinguished Engineer and Chief Evangelist at F5, Lori has more than 25 years of industry experience spanning application development, IT architecture, and network and systems' operation. She co-authored the CADD profile for ANSI NCITS 320-1998 and is a prolific author with books spanning security, cloud, and enterprise architecture.
Appears in 53 Episodes
AI blast radius: BOLA + MCP turned APIs into a 7,000-bot army
A developer wanted to control his robot vacuum with a PS5 controller. With Claude Code’s help, he reverse-engineered the protocol, pulled an auth token, and unintentio...
Epic AI fails: Why “useful” isn’t “correct”
AI “epic fails” aren’t just funny headlines; they’re patterns you can design against. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Buu L...
Does your chatbot code? Why guardrails fail (and how to fix drift)
Chipotle’s chatbot becoming an unofficial coding assistant wasn’t just a funny internet moment. It was a clear signal that most chatbot “guardrails” are still too shal...
The Great AI Repatriation: Why Cloud‑Only LLMs break the budget
AI isn’t “going to the cloud” the way the headlines promised. It’s going wherever the economics and the architecture force it to go, and that often means back on hardw...
Training vs Inference: Are they the same?
Training and inference get lumped together in casual AI conversations, but they behave differently enough that the distinction matters for cost, architecture, and secu...
Round Robin is Still Dumb: Load balancing has to grow up for AI inference
Round robin isn’t just “not ideal” for LLM inference. According to recent scheduling research, it’s actively harmful, because it treats inference like stateless, inter...
Mechanistic Interpretability: Debugging LLMs by reading their circuits
Mechanistic interpretability sounds academic until you try to debug a model with printf and realize there’s nothing to print. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lo...
Pop Goes the Stack will be back next week!
Hi everyone! This is Lori MacVittie, host of Pop Goes the Stack. This week, we’re taking a short break to rest and recharge, spend time with loved ones, and maybe even...
Agent Skills: The new AI supply chain risk (and fixes)
Agent skills were introduced less than six months ago, and they’ve already graduated from “handy configuration” to “supply chain artifact.” In this episode of Pop Goes...
Is AI making security obsolete?
What happens if AI finally writes secure code by default? In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Ken Arora take that question seri...
Agents deleted my work: Why agents still aren’t ready for production (Yet)
An agent deleting a production database (and the backups) isn’t a sci-fi failure. It’s a boundary failure, and it starts with a human handing out credentials and permi...
Agent identity: Closing the "accountability vacuum" with humans
Identity used to be straightforward: authenticate a user, authorize an action, log the request, and move on. Agentic systems complicate that model because the actor is...
Data poisoning: You can’t patch what an LLM “learns”
If you’ve been treating “garbage in, garbage out” as a metaphor, this episode turns it into a live-fire scenario. Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses are joined by Dmitry Ki...
Local-first AI: Keep context out of the cloud
“Just throw it in the cloud” gets complicated when the data is your meetings, your IP, and your operating context. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVitti...
DevOps meets AI agents: Risk, audit, and the Deming playbook
AI is no longer a lab tool; it’s showing up in pipelines, production systems, and the places where “seemed like a good idea” becomes a 2 a.m. incident. In this episode...
Model routing isn’t load balancing (And that’s why you’re not ready)
Multi-model AI isn’t a buzzword anymore, it’s how organizations are actually operating. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie and Joel Moses dig into f...
KV cache is the real inference bottleneck (Not GPUs)
GPUs get all the attention, but in inference, the real bottleneck is often memory, specifically the KV cache. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVittie sit...
Measuring what matters: Observability for agents
Agents break the old rules of observability. Latency, throughput, and error rates still matter, but once software starts making decisions and taking actions on someone...
Alien autopsy of LLMs: Constitutions, deception, guardrails
Why do researchers keep describing large language models like aliens? Because in enterprise environments, they often behave like something we didn’t build and can’t fu...
Why Prompt Filters Fail Against LLM Attacks
Prompt injection has been the headline security problem for the last year, but have we been guarding the wrong layer? Lori MacVittie is joined by cohost Joel Moses and...