Workflow Automation
271 episodes
#6165: Watching 20 Batch Jobs at Once
Batch APIs give you a discount, then hand you a babysitting job. Here's what actually watches a batch run — and what doesn't.
#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?
#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.
#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.
#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.
#6031: Why Two Parents Alone Can't Carry a Toddler
Daycare didn't fix it. The research says the problem isn't hours — it's fragmented hours, portable mental load, and a village that isn't there.
#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.
#5997: Counting Our Listeners, Then Planning a Cave
What Podtrac actually measures, why downloads jumped 79% while listeners stayed flat, and how long you'd need in a cave to hear it all.
#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.
#5972: AI Meeting Agents Are Becoming Stand-Ins
Bots now book follow-ups, update CRMs, and attend on your behalf. Here's what's real, what's speculative, and where the etiquette is heading.
#5950: Self-Hosting Your Search Stack: SearXNG, Crawl4AI, and the Real Bill
Can SearXNG, Crawl4AI, and an open-source aggregator really replace a commercial search API? Yes — with a very large asterisk.
#5910: Revit MCP in a VM: What Actually Works
Autodesk's official Revit MCP server is locked down and reliable-ish. The community ones execute arbitrary code on an open port. Neither runs unatt...
#5909: Connecting Postgres to Google Workspace
How a Postgres-backed app on Cloud Run talks to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets and Slides — without duplicating data.
#5908: One Database Won't Fix Your Fragmented Stack
Rita has two employees, four apps, and one fear: which database wins when they disagree? Here's the field-by-field answer.
#5870: Homebox Fork's Two Backend Scripts Need a Real Job Runner
A Homebox fork has two incremental scripts — WebP conversion and AI image enrichment — and no scheduler built to run them safely.
#5858: Routing AI Models: When 3 Rules Beat a Trained Router
A deep dive into AI model routing — and why a learned router may not beat three rules you wrote by hand.
#5844: Five of the Buggiest Software Ever Shipped
Windows ME, Sonic '06, Big Rigs, and more — the software where the bugs weren't a problem, they were the product.
#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?
#5812: One Number, Every Hard Question: Agent Session State
A shopping bot that holds one cart total turns out to contain every hard problem in agent state management.
#5811: Can an Agent Actually Place Your Order?
Agentic checkout protocols are real — Shopify, Walmart, Target. But the DIY parts live on AliExpress, which supports none of them.
#5753: Unpacking as a Warehouse Problem: Sorting vs. Tagging
Daniel's move is done but nothing's findable. The fix is a warehouse putaway problem — and his IKEA bag is the slowest possible tool.
#5643: Do Git Branches Actually Nest? AI Agents and Stacked PRs
Git branches don't nest — so what are we really doing when AI agents stack pull requests?
#5576: Lying Flat as a Tactic: The Quiet Opt-Out
Tang ping, quiet quitting, and the N-po generation — what happens when people stop donating effort they were never paid for?