The Tech Blog Writer Podcast - Inspired Tech Startup Stories & Interviews With Tech Leaders, Entrepreneurs And Innovators

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sit down with Yuyu Zhang to unpack a shift that many developers can feel but struggle to articulate. Yuyu's journey spans academic research at Georgia Tech, building recommendation systems that power TikTok and Douyin at global scale, and leading the Seed-Coder project at ByteDance, which reached state-of-the-art performance among open source code models earlier this year. Today, he is part of Codeck, where the focus has moved beyond AI assistance toward autonomous coding agents that can plan, execute, and verify real engineering work. Our conversation begins with a simple but revealing observation. Most AI coding tools still behave like smarter autocomplete. They help you type faster, but they do not own the work. Yuyu explains why that distinction matters, especially for teams dealing with complex systems, tight deadlines, and constant interruptions. Autonomy, in his view, is not about replacing engineers. It is about giving them back their flow. We explore Verdent, Co