Development
Building software: programming, developer tools, APIs, deployment and DevOps, and building with AI (agents, MCP servers, RAG, AI coding tools). An extra channel alongside an episode's main one, so AI engineering episodes sit in both.
#6134: Cheap Tokens, Expensive Scripts
A model with worse list prices can cost less per script — if the cache hits. The bill hides in tokens, not rates.
#6133: One Rater Is Enough: Designing Daniel's Taste Test
When the ground truth is one person's taste, agreement with strangers is the wrong bar. Stability with yourself is the right one.
#6130: Picking a Human Labeling Tool for LLM Benchmarks
Building a human review layer for LLM benchmarks? Here's what Argilla, Label Studio, Prodigy, and Potato actually cost in money and maintenance.
#6129: How to Build an AI Preference Dataset
Pairwise comparison, forced choice, or just "this one or that one" — the engineering behind collecting human preferences on AI outputs.
#6127: Haiku 5.5 at 10 Cents: What the Cheap Model Actually Does
Haiku 5.5 costs 10 cents per million input tokens. We break down where it holds up, where it fails, and whether it can write this show.
#6125: Which Env Var Wins? Cloud vs. Local Precedence
Same variable name, two values, one silent winner. Vercel and n8n go one way; dotenv goes the other.
#6124: One Vault, Two Readers: Secrets for a Home AI Gateway
One source, two readers — not two copies kept in sync. How a home AI gateway should actually get its API keys.
#6123: OAuth or a Personal Access Token for Your MCP Server?
GitHub CLI login hands your agent one long-lived token with access to everything. Fine-grained PATs can't. Which should your MCP server use?
#6119: Two Keys and a Polite No: Labeling a Claude Code Approve Button
Daniel has two spare laptop keys and wants them to say yes and no. The electronics are easy — it's the labels that get hard.
#6099: Code-First Workflow Runners: Prefect, Temporal, Dagster
Your workflow lives in git, your GUI is just a window, and your worker actually runs the jobs. Which runner wins?
#6087: Building a Podcast Graph That Doesn't Suck
Daniel wants to turn a 6,000-episode archive into a walkable graph. Turns out the hard part isn't the database — it's the pruning.
#6086: Reading Polymarket as an OSINT Feed
Polymarket's API turns prediction market prices into a live probability feed — no wallet, no trading, just reading the world's largest market.
#6069: The Whole Machine: How an Episode Gets Made, Send to Publish
The complete tour of the pipeline that makes the show, stage by stage, from the send form to publishing, including the new eight-turn batched voice decode.
#6056: Where Does Speaker Structure Belong in AI Podcast Scripts?
Label-and-parse pipelines break in ways that look like model errors but aren't. Plus what the research actually says about the format tax.
#6055: How to Fine-Tune ASR on Noisy Audio
A small noise library mixed into clean speech beats collecting hours of noisy recordings. Here's the ratio that actually works.
#6051: How to Find the AI Benchmark You Actually Need
Thousands of benchmarks, no canonical index. How Benchmark Radar and the Lighteval Tasks Explorer help — and where they fall short.
#6050: Codex vs Claude Code: What the Numbers Actually Count
Codex has more users, Claude Code has more revenue — both can be true. The difference is what each number is counting.
#6049: Claude Code by the Numbers: What's Measurable, What's Hype
Anthropic won't publish a user count. Here's what revenue, surveys, and 400K sessions actually tell us about Claude Code's rise.
#6048: Under the Hood, October 2026: Seventeen Prompt Versions and Three-Times-Faster Voices
Four weeks of pipeline changes, grounded in the code: grace periods, duplicate detection, Hilbert's rules, echo deletion, and voices nearly three times faster.
#6044: One Door for Every AI: Cloudflare MCP Portals
Cloudflare's MCP Portals put every on-prem MCP server behind one authenticated endpoint — and why service tokens can't work for ChatGPT.