Working Code

Latest Episodes:

274: Bot Manners and Good Taste - Listener Questions Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

Has a year of talking to LLMs changed the way we talk to people? Great question, and you're absolutely right! And when the models write all the code, what's left for us? This week the hosts answer more listener questions.

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:

T3 Code — an app for running coding agents.
Proxmox — splits a physical machine into virtual machines and containers.
Tailscale — private network access to your machines without opening ports.
Jellyfin — self-hosted media server.
Pi-hole — network-wide ad blocker.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

273: Ethical Lines and Career Crossroads - Listener Questions Sep 10, 2026

Show notes

What would you do if your manager asked you to make the audit trail editable? Why would Carol rather be evil? And would you still want to be a software engineer in five years, or is it finally time to buy the ice cream truck? This week the hosts answer listener questions on ethical lines, career pivots, and the future of software engineering.

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:

starry-night - the syntax highlighter behind Ben's new blog API.
DEF CON - the hacking conference behind the red-teaming and social-engineering discussion.
271: Slop Is the New Clean - the earlier discussion of Uncle Bob and Matt Pocock's interview that Ben revisits.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

272: Let Me Prompt That For You Sep 04, 2026

Show notes

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.

271: Slop Is the New Clean Aug 27, 2026

Show notes

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.

270: Hot Takes on Hot Takes Aug 20, 2026

Show notes

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.

269: The AI Anxiety Draft Aug 06, 2026

Show notes

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.

268: Nobody Wants to Meet Up Anymore Jul 31, 2026

Show notes

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.

267: Prove You Are Human Jul 16, 2026

Show notes

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.

266: Strugglemaxing Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

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.

265: Knowing When to Stop Jul 02, 2026

Show notes

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: