LLMs have read everything, but they haven't spent fifteen years at the company learning which rules actually matter. Can a model ever bring a career's worth of experience to a decision, or is human wisdom overrated to begin with? And now that every answer starts with "let me ask Claude", are we really more productive than ever, or have we all just hired a ghostwriter? This week we discuss the abdication of opinion.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Matt Pocock's skills — grill-me and Wayfinder.
• cron-job.org — the cron host Adam landed on.
• openblack — the open-source Black & White engine Tim is vibe-coding on.
• The Trevor Project — where Adam's thirty dollars from Infisical went.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Uncle Bob wrote the book on clean code, and the whole argument rests on one number: you read code ten times for every time you write it, so you'd better make it readable. His agents write it now, and he doesn't read a line. This week we discuss who clean code is for now that machines are the ones reading it.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Uncle Bob on Software Fundamentals in the Age of AI — the Matt Pocock interview the whole episode is a reaction to. Yes, he's in a bathrobe.
• Infisical — where Adam moved his secrets after a long-running agent read his .env and cheerfully told him so.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

We're back after a week off and we have some things to get off our chest. Carol's agent doesn't understand auth, Ben explores the nature of performative coding, Adam agreed that meetings are for decisions, then spent two hours writing an email to prove it, and Tim's AI is better than yours. This week we have a grab bag of hot takes and hot takes on hot takes.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Taffy — Adam's CFML REST framework, the counterexample of a public repo whose product is the API, not the source
• Subway Takes — the 100% agree / 100% disagree format the table falls into mid-meeting-takes
• Adam's dotfiles blog post — the git bare repo trick for tracking a gitignored personal CLAUDE.md, promised on air

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Worrying about AI is the easy part. Everyone already has a list. The interesting part is what lands on it, what doesn't, and why. From military use, to an AI slop takeover, to the possibility that the tools are making us stupider.

This week, the hosts respond to a question from the State of Devs survey: “Which of these general AI risks and issues are you most concerned about?”

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• State of Devs 2025 survey — the questions that set off the discussion; the survey itself is now closed
• OpenAI's Hugging Face security incident — what happened when agents escaped a constrained cyber evaluation
• LinkedIn's campaign against AI slop — the official explanation of its new reporting control
• Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl — tools for publishers to allow, block, or charge AI crawlers

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Nobody went to conferences for the talks. You went for the hallway, and for a roomful of people who'd made the same odd career bet you had. We didn't know how good we had it. COVID hit, AI is now everyone's best buddy, and now all these meetups and spaces are slowly disappearing. This week the hosts go looking for what's left of the developer hang.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Anthropic's Project Vend — the AI-run shop behind the tungsten cube story

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Tim is trying to hire remote developers, but the interviews have started to feel like one long CAPTCHA. Before he can decide who's right for the job, he has to figure out whether he's interviewing the candidate or ChatGPT. This week the hosts discuss the state of remote developer interviews in the AI era.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Mostly Technical #29: “Super Epic Crazy” — the source of the cover-letter story about most applicants missing simple instructions
• Roberto Serrano on AI fraud at Brown University — the course whose take-home exams triggered the in-class-final story

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

They say history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, and apparently so do show topics. A year on from our episode on the value of friction, the crew are back to discuss value of struggle. The question this time: now that AI will cheerfully do the hard part for you, which struggles are worth keeping, and which you can finally hand off?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ronny Chieng's Harvard Class Day speech — the "your generation's job is to kill AI" address.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Eighteen weeks ago Adam handed his decade-old ORM layer to an AI agent. This week he kills the whole refactor — and the feeling that comes isn't regret, it's relief. Somewhere in the grind he realized he'd only ever weighed two options, push through or admit defeat, and both assumed he had to see it to the end. This week is about sunk cost — how being partway down a road can convince you that you owe it the rest of the way, and how freeing it is to decide you don't.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• 249: 10 Years of Tech Debt — where Adam first handed the ORM layer to an agent

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

The promise was that AI would take the grunt work off your plate and leave you the good stuff. This week is the part no one advertised: you got into this to make things — but what comes instead is the restless guilt of sitting there with nothing to do while the agent works, and the slow realization that when it finishes, the job left for you is mostly reviewing.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• xkcd: "Compiling"

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Getting unstuck has gotten so cheap that Ben can't remember the last time he actually learned something at work — and the struggle he's skipping was where knowing the code, and caring about it, used to come from. This week is a conversation about what software craftsmanship even means anymore, when the tools are happy to do the caring for you.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

This week is the quiet worry underneath all the productivity gains: that every time you hand the boring work to a machine, you're handing over a little of the curiosity that made you good at the work you care about, until one day the well of ideas just runs dry.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Taffy — the REST framework for ColdFusion and Lucee
• Rest Assured by Adam Tuttle
• Postman
• Engineering Explained

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Adam trained an AI on twenty years of Ben's blog, then asked Ben to pick his own words out of a lineup of forgeries. This week the hosts play a game of Ben or Bot, and you can play along too!

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Play "Ben's Blog or AI?" yourself
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
• Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans
• MassTransit

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

What's the point of a personal wiki when AI agents have already read the entire internet? This week is about patterns for co-maintaining a personal wiki with an AI agent, and where its job ends and yours begins.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Karpathy's LLM Wiki gist

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

This week is a philosophical conversation about what you let into your head — the podcasts, the influencers, the political figures, the friends — and the difference between a snapshot you can hold at arm's length and a living relationship you're quietly being shaped by.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Fritz Haber (YouTube)

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Adam wrote a blog post this week about why AI keeps making him feel worse. This week is an honest conversation about the hypocrite's bind: needing to use the thing you recognize the harm of, and what that does to you.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Adam's blog post: "On the AI of It All"
• Impeccable Style
• Mental Notes

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

"We have solved all of the world's problems." Observability past the point where more logs stop helping, continuous deployment when the customer is the federal government and the change-management board is a real room with real people in it, JSON's loose schema as a load-bearing feature rather than a quirk to apologise for, and the awkward question of who actually owns the code you wrote on a work-issued machine.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

It's 11:30 PM and you're still prompting. The code is better than anything you'd have shipped a year ago. The output is prolific, the roadmap is moving, the tooling is miraculous. So why are you still here at 11:30 PM? This week is an honest conversation about the strange shape of burnout in the AI era — the productivity that keeps compounding, the bar that keeps rising right along with it, and the quiet feeling that somewhere in the last year the craft stopped feeling quite like yours.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

You spend all day steering AI through code. Then you step outside and it's steering everything else. AI is listening to therapy sessions and suggesting treatments to your therapist. Your spouse is arguing with a chatbot about where Savannah, Georgia is. You call a company for help and get handed from one AI pretending to be human to another AI pretending to be human. The crew has been noticing it everywhere, and this week they compare notes on what it actually feels like when AI stops being a tool you chose and starts being a thing that just happens to you.

Links mentioned in the show:

• hairstyles.net
• RunPee.com

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

The productivity gains are real. So is the nagging feeling that something else might be happening. The crew use AI every day, and this week they sit with a question they can't quite shake: when the tool handles more and more of the thinking, what does that do to the person using it?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

What if the best way to get good work out of AI is to stop being nice to it? Adam and Tim have both landed on the same uncomfortable discovery: when you pit AI agents against each other, with fake points, opposing incentives, and competing models, the output gets dramatically better than anything a single polite prompt can produce.

Adam's bug-hunting pipeline hands fake rewards to sycophantic agents and then throws the scores in the trash. Tim made Claude and ChatGPT argue for twelve rounds straight until they both said "ship it".

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.