AI Coding Assistants
359 episodes
#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.
#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.
#6103: When AI Picks Your Spouse, Stocks, and Eggs
From $31 eggs to a ChatGPT-officiated wedding, people are handing real life decisions to machines — and publishing the results.
#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.
#6047: A Human Guest on His Own AI Podcast
Daniel built an AI podcast with cloned voices — then sat down as a guest on it. What six thousand episodes taught him about prompts.
#6040: Claude Code Subagents Can Now Spawn Subagents
Claude Code subagents can now spawn their own subagents. Here's where the depth limits come from, and why nobody actually knows where they stop.
#6037: Gemini 4 Argon: Google's Million-Token Flagship
A close read of Gemini 4 Argon's model card — a million-token window, thinking levels, implicit-only caching, and a lot of blanks.
#6036: GPT-6 Astra: A Million Tokens, No Fine-Tuning
A million-token window, ten built-in tools, a 272K pricing cliff — and no fine-tuning. What GPT-6 Astra actually offers builders.
#6035: Who Else Is Making AI Podcasts? A Survey
A survey of AI-hosted podcasts: one full match, a 730-episode run, a home NAS rig, and a graveyard of good tooling.
#6033: Progressive Skills Discovery: When Bigger Context Windows Aren't Enough
Bigger context windows were supposed to make skill discovery moot. Here's why the listing budget still bites at scale.
#6025: When Should Claude Code Start a New Session?
Long context windows don't fix stale context — they hide it. Why task boundaries, not token counts, are the real problem.
#6008: Why Codex Writes Code for a Dead API
Models don't hallucinate your API — they quote real docs from the wrong year. Here's why, and what actually fixes it.
#6002: Claude on AWS: Three Doors, One Rate Card
Same per-token price everywhere — so why buy Claude through AWS instead of Anthropic? The answer is commitments, compliance, and silicon.
#6000: 6,000 Episodes and a GPU Bill: Inside My Weird Prompts
Six thousand episodes, one human in the loop, and a Modal bill that keeps growing. A behind-the-scenes update on the podcast.
#5996: Turning 3,000 Episodes Into a Video Channel
We already own the transcripts. The missing piece is the review queue — and that's where the money actually goes.
#5940: The Missing Middle: Content APIs and ISR for a 6,000-Episode Catalog
When your catalog is too big to rebuild on every change, what has to change? Turns out the missing middle might already exist.
#5933: Form-Based Codes and the City That Feels Dead
Can a zoning document create a walkable Levantine city with real character — or does over-planning kill the spontaneity that makes cities alive?
#5927: Where Generalists Get Priced: Inside the FDE Role
A $485K median salary for a job with no clean definition — and why the résumé can't capture it.
#5912: Building Your Own CRM with AI: Where to Start
AI can't write your CRM for you — but it can remove the friction. Start with the schema, not the code.
#5869: Scraping AliExpress Specs: Selectors, Agents, or Neither?
Daniel wants to snapshot AliExpress spec sheets into his inventory system. The selector approach is already dead — here's what actually works.
#5826: The Thread That Outlived Its Authors
A Debian bug filed in 1997 got its second reply 24 years later. What happens when a conversation outlives everyone who started it?
#5817: When Agents Don't Need Your Pretty Buttons
Agents are becoming major software users — and they prefer raw command-line tools to polished interfaces. What replaces UX when your user can't see?
#5725: Why Your Smart Light's Lowest Setting Is a Lie
Dimming range is the spec nobody prints on the box — and it's the one that decides how a light actually feels to live with.