- Building Tools for Defenders 🛡 — with Rahul Raina

Today's guest is Rahul Raina, co-founder of TRM Labs, which is a YC-backed company that works on solutions and products for security, fighting criminal networks, AI attackers, and more. 

With Rahul, we had a great chat that covered a lot of ground, starting with the tough reality of cyber defense today, and why attackers by default always have the upper hand when AI and technology improves. And then we moved to a deep dive into how the TRM team works and how they rebuild their whole product development workflow for AI, including reshuffling all the technical roles, compressing the developer process steps, and creating dedicated artifacts for human reviews.

(00:00) Episode start

(03:50) Introducing Rahul Raina

(04:08) Why AI widens the gap between attackers and defenders

(08:54) The asymmetry: attackers don't play by the rules

(17:09) Inner loop vs outer loop: where the real bottleneck is

(20:54) Redesigning the shipping framework around jobs, not roles

(24:18) How to transition people: go slow before you go fast

(34:24) What to hire for: problem solving, agency, humble craft

(42:14) How builders review work: human-readable artifacts, not code

(46:59) The harness interviews you: AI asks questions humans wouldn't

(57:20) Build tools for understanding, not just for producing code

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Today's episode is brought to you by Notion.

Learn more about Notion’s Developer Platform today at https://ntn.so/refactoring

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