Podcast
Working Code
Hosted by Adam Tuttle, Ben Nadel, Carol Hamilton, Tim Cunningham · EN
Water-cooler conversation about web-development. We want to entertain, inspire, and motivate you -- or to put it another way, make your coding career more enjoyable.
38episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
266: Strugglemaxing
3d ago00:49:09Tap to summarizeThey 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.
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265: Knowing When to Stop
1w ago00:53:52Tap to summarizeEighteen 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:249: 10 Years of Tech Debt — where Adam first handed the ORM layer to an agentWith audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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264: Look Busy, Claude's Working
3w ago01:01:02Tap to summarizeThe promise was that AI would take the grunt work off your plate and leave you the good stuff. This week is the part no one advertised: you got into this to make things — but what comes instead is the restless guilt of sitting there with nothing to do while the agent works, and the slow realization that when it finishes, the job left for you is mostly reviewing.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:xkcd: "Compiling"With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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263: Intimacy with the Code
Jun 1101:06:58Tap to summarizeGetting unstuck has gotten so cheap that Ben can't remember the last time he actually learned something at work — and the struggle he's skipping was where knowing the code, and caring about it, used to come from. This week is a conversation about what software craftsmanship even means anymore, when the tools are happy to do the caring for you.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.With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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262: Zen and the Art of AI-Driven Maintenance
Jun 601:02:50Tap to summarizeThis week is the quiet worry underneath all the productivity gains: that every time you hand the boring work to a machine, you're handing over a little of the curiosity that made you good at the work you care about, until one day the well of ideas just runs dry.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 — the REST framework for ColdFusion and LuceeRest Assured by Adam TuttlePostmanEngineering ExplainedWith audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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261: The Ben Turing Test
May 2801:02:30Tap to summarizeAdam trained an AI on twenty years of Ben's blog, then asked Ben to pick his own words out of a lineup of forgeries. This week the hosts play a game of Ben or Bot, and you can play along too!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:Play "Ben's Blog or AI?" yourselfThe Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to MasterDomain-Driven Design by Eric EvansMassTransitWith audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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260: Reinventing the Wiki
May 2301:00:15Tap to summarizeWhat's the point of a personal wiki when AI agents have already read the entire internet? This week is about patterns for co-maintaining a personal wiki with an AI agent, and where its job ends and yours begins.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:Karpathy's LLM Wiki gistWith audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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259: Walling Off Your Mental Garden
May 1401:05:36Tap to summarizeThis week is a philosophical conversation about what you let into your head — the podcasts, the influencers, the political figures, the friends — and the difference between a snapshot you can hold at arm's length and a living relationship you're quietly being shaped by.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:Fritz Haber (YouTube)With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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258: On the AI of It All
May 700:57:10Tap to summarizeAdam wrote a blog post this week about why AI keeps making him feel worse. This week is an honest conversation about the hypocrite's bind: needing to use the thing you recognize the harm of, and what that does to you.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:Adam's blog post: "On the AI of It All"Impeccable StyleMental NotesWith audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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257: We Solved Everything
Apr 3001:09:29Tap to summarize"We have solved all of the world's problems." Observability past the point where more logs stop helping, continuous deployment when the customer is the federal government and the change-management board is a real room with real people in it, JSON's loose schema as a load-bearing feature rather than a quirk to apologise for, and the awkward question of who actually owns the code you wrote on a work-issued machine.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.With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.Full show notes and transcript here.
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