94 episodes · since 2025
Episodes
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S2E43
What Broke in Tech: Code Quality, AI Guardrails, and the Evolving Software Engineer
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott continue to recap Gergely Orosz's "State of the Tech Industry" talk and focus on what "broke" and "what's next. " They argue that machine-generated code is overwhelming pull requests and code review, exposing that many organizations' quality gates were implicitly built around human speed, and they discuss how 98% uptime is becoming an unacceptable norm.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E42
The State of Tech in 2026: What Changed And What Didn't
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss a Pragmatic Engineer talk on the state of the tech industry in 2026, focusing on what changed and what hasn't. They argue this is a "golden age" of building software due to AI, while acknowledging current "creative destruction" that may ultimately make the industry leaner.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E41
The Human Needs in Augmented Coding: A Conversation with Kent Beck
with Kent Beck
Brad & Scott interview software pioneer Kent Beck about his background (JUnit, test-driven development, extreme programming, Agile Manifesto, and his book "Tidy First? ") and his current focus on "augmented development" with AI, which he calls a "genie.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E40
Preparing for the Worst: Tabletop Exercises, Unit Tests, and Everything In Between
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss TaskRabbit's overnight AWS region migration from us-west-1 to us-west-2, describing the months of preparation, detailed runbook, large war-room call, minor cleanup issues, and why periodic region moves can serve as valuable "hygiene" to relearn and document complex systems while advancing disaster recovery and business continuity. They then explain tabletop exercises as structured incident-response drills designed to uncover gaps in process and documentation, sharing scenario ideas like data deletion, token leaks, cloud outages, ransomware, and internal actors, including an embezzlement case where the perpetrator joined incident response.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E39
Understanding The Fear: Adaptive Leadership in the AI Age
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss growing fear about AI among engineers and managers, framing it as an "adaptive moment" requiring leaders to disrupt old stabilizing practices. They explore concerns that AI lowers the barrier for others to change systems, increasing accountability, on-call risk, and architectural drift—problems that existed pre-AI but are now intensified.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E38
Simplifying Tech Through Empathy and Understanding with Frank Bravo
with Frank Bravo, ProLegal
Brad is joined by guest Frank Bravo, a Bay Area technologist who spent 30 years as CTO in local media, helping put a newspaper's full editorial content online in 1994, and now serves as CTO at ProLegal, a legal services startup. Frank describes modernizing an old Act!
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E37
Managing Skepticism: Balancing Tradition and Technology with AI
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss how AI is changing software engineering referencing Kent Beck's idea that AI makes much existing knowledge less useful while making a smaller portion far more valuable. They describe teams collaborating through "cohorts" of AI agents for PR review and adversarial checking, and debate whether engineers will be evaluated on agent quality versus their ability to direct and manage agents like a driver or jockey.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E36
From Academia to Industry: Scott Hanson on the Future of AI and Edge Computing
with Scott Hanson, Ambiq
Brad & Scott interview Scott Hanson, founder and CTO of Ambiq, a company focused on ultra-low-power chips for "intelligence everywhere," with 300M+ units shipped into wearables and other devices. Hansen traces Ambiq's origins with University of Michigan smart-dust research and his PhD work on subthreshold computing—running transistors at extremely low voltages for quadratic energy savings—then explains the challenges of making it manufacturable across temperature and process variation.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E35
Beyond Cost Reduction: AI in Revenue Generation and Innovation with Andy Boettcher
with Andy Boettcher, DoubleTrack
Brad & Scott interview Andy Boettcher, Chief Innovator of DoubleTrack, a boutique data and AI consultancy. Andy recounts his 33 years across systems, development, with 13 years in Salesforce, and how his career shifted into data/AI full-time after ChatGPT's 2022 release.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E34
The Hardware/Software Blend: Visionary Innovations in Health Tech with Eyebot's Jack Moldave
with Jack Moldave, Eyebot
Brad & Scott interview Jack Moldave of Eyebot, a company he co-founded nearly six years ago to make getting glasses as easy as buying shoes by enabling on-demand vision tests and prescriptions in retail settings. Jack explains Eyebot's kiosk experience in Walmart Vision Centers, including intake questions, visual acuity testing, touch-free refraction and glasses scanning, and remote review by licensed optometrists/ophthalmologists with prescriptions returned in under 15 minutes.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E33
Fast, On Time, or Fully Utilized? Choosing What to Optimize in Engineering Delivery
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss a leadership conversation where three senior stakeholders wanted different outcomes from engineering: delivering faster, maximizing utilization, or delivering on time—highlighting unclear norms and expectations in the software delivery system. The hosts argue you can't optimize all three at once, note that maximum utilization is a poor goal (systems perform better below 100% utilization), and debate prioritizing speed versus schedule.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E32
The Pace of Innovation: Systems Thinking for Faster Engineering
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott open with travel and sports talk, including World Cup rules, then pivot to Scott's change-management training on systems thinking and unspoken norms. They explore a meta-question: if non-engineering teams couldn't tell engineering to "go faster," what would they change to increase engineering throughput?
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E31
Method to the Madness: A CTO Framework for Systemic AI Adoption
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss how CTOs must frame narratives that help teams organize around ideas, inspired by how Scott explained his company's AI work to a non-technical friend. The hosts outline four intertwined AI workstreams: getting AI to handle increasingly complex engineering (from functions to features to systems), moving toward autonomous "dark factory" software development, scaling AI adoption through standards and systems (shifting from organic experimentation to systemic usage, like AI code review and possible security/architect review agents), and managing token spend, including discussion of token-maxing incentives, looping, and interest in local inference and vendor lock-in mitigations such as AWS Bedrock.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E30
There's A Pattern To Follow: An Interview with Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin
with Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin
Brad & Scott are honored to interview Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin, who recounts his 60+ year programming journey from a three-bit binary device and years of assembly to C, C++, and Java, to now using AI agents to code. He explains how the Agile movement emerged from the design patterns community, Extreme Programming, and the 2001 Snowbird meeting that produced the Agile Manifesto.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E29
Is Uncle Bob Right? Reading Code vs. Architecting the Future
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss how Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin—author of Clean Code and Agile Manifesto signer—sparked online controversy by saying he no longer reads the source code produced by his programming agents. They unpack his argument that strong "control systems" like automated unit and end-to-end tests, static analysis, and architecture acceptance criteria can replace line-by-line review, shifting human attention to higher-level architecture and justification.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E28
Token Maxxing and Local Inference: Navigating the Shift in AI Usage for Developers
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss token spending and the "token maxing" backlash, sparked by a GitHub Copilot budget issue and broader industry moves to optimize tokens. The hosts argues companies should focus on value and learning rather than premature token optimization, while still adding circuit breakers to prevent runaway costs.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E27
This Has Always Been A Problem: Slot Machine Devs and Growing Junior Engineers in the Age of AI
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss how managing armies of coding agents can be physically draining, likening it to context switching in flat organizations. Scott references Yuval Harari's "Sapiens," connecting the cognitive and agricultural revolutions to modern pressures.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E26
From Chaos to Control: Bringing Specification Driven Design to Vibe Coding with David Bauer
with David Bauer, Axonis AI
Brad is joined by Dr. David Bauer of Axonis AI, who shares how his background in distributed computing, startups, and the U.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E25
Introducing Skein and Beaker Stack: Using AI Agent Engineers to Ship SaaS Faster
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss Brad's experiment proving that AI can dramatically boost output for teams with strong engineering practices. Brad shares an MIT-licensed open-source SaaS template called Beaker Stack, which includes web and mobile scaffolding, CI/CD for preview/staging/production, automated setup, observability, email tooling, and Stripe-based tiered billing with feature gating.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E24
AI and the Data Swamp In Your Backyard with Ben Wilcox
with Ben Wilcox, ProArch
Brad & Scott interview guest Ben Wilcox, CTO and CISO of ProArch, a Microsoft-focused data and AI system integrator. Wilcox describes his path into system integration, from cloud transformation and building managed security services, and now focused on helping customers adopt AI securely.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E23
Pioneering Music Education with John von Seggern
with John Von Seggern, Future Proof Music School
Brad interviews John Von Seggern, founder/CEO/CTO of Future Proof Music School, about his shift from musician and online educator to building AI features using tools like Claude Code, n8n, and MCP servers. John describes the school's personalized learning approach using an AI chatbot "Cadence" integrated with student history and curriculum, hosted on LearnWorlds, and explains solving integration limits by creating an MCP server and scraping LearnWorlds pages into a mirror database for context.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E22
Removing Bottlenecks, Not People with Stephanie Sylvestre
with Stephanie Sylvestre, AvatarBuddy
Scott is joined by guest Stephanie Sylvestre, founder of AvatarBuddy, an AI company started 10 years ago to help people be the best version of themselves. Sylvestre argues for "AI plus human" rather than job elimination, and tells the story of how AvatarBuddy evolved from early research and prototypes to joining the OpenAI developer community in 2021, using teenagers for requirements and testing, and adopting curated "data vault" approaches (RAG) to improve results.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E21
Pioneer or Perish: How and When to Evolve Your Engineering Org Toward the AI Development Life Cycle
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss a high-performing engineering team that has effectively cleared its product backlog while using AI heavily, including a senior engineer who surprised Brad by running agents overnight to automatically perform fast, high-quality GitHub PR code reviews via a webhook-driven harness. The engineer built an opinionated, RAG-backed "world-class code review" skill set that pulls new PRs from selected repos, reviews them with defined criteria, and posts comments, highlighting the need to articulate engineering judgment rather than relying on gut feel.
AI-Assisted Engineering
S2E20
Navigating the Future: Gas Town and Bespoke AI Agents
Brad & Scott
Brad & Scott discuss Brad's viral LinkedIn post arguing that AI has collapsed the economics that drove generalized SaaS, enabling more bespoke software for underserved SMBs and vertical niches. They debate practical examples like a plumber-specific CRM versus highly custom workflows for a regional law firm, including concerns about long-term maintenance, fragmentation, and risk.
AI-Assisted Engineering