Tabitha R.R. Powell
Technical Thought Leadership Evangelist producing content that makes complex ideas clear and engaging.
Appears in 65 Episodes
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 ...
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...
Stop “securing the model”—Secure the runtime instead
“Securing the AI model” sounds like a clean, fundable story. In practice, it’s often the wrong security target. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVit...
What actually is Model Routing? A deep dive into cost, efficiency & risk
Model routing sounds like a small architectural detail, but it’s quickly becoming the control point that determines whether AI systems are fast, affordable, and trustw...
AI traffic management: Load balancing vs model routing
AI traffic looks like an API call, but it behaves nothing like traditional API traffic. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, and Sco...
Agents go rogue: Why guardrails fail and behavior wins
AI agents bypassing controls isn’t a surprising “oops,” it’s an expected optimization outcome. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, F5's Lori MacVittie, Joel Moses, ...
If your agent buys it, you bought it: Liability in AI
If an agent breaks it, you bought it. If it buys it, you bought it. That’s not a meme anymore, it’s becoming policy. In this episode of Pop Goes the Stack, Lori MacVit...
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...