The Good Stuff

Intelligence Snacks 74 Normie Mode AI model rankings are easy to find. Knowing which model to use for a spreadsheet, a design task or a language lesson is harder. Andy introduces  Normie Mode , a new site that turns benchmark data into task-based recommendations that weigh capability against cost. It is an early release, and Andy wants feedback on whether the comparisons are useful to people choos...

Pete and Andy unpack a week where AI models seemed to multiply overnight: Anthropic updates, OpenAI’s cheaper models, Meta’s Muse, Grokbot, and the more interesting arrival of Jev. The big question is whether we need ever-bigger frontier models, or whether the real unlock is cheaper, faster, more specialised intelligence that can be sprinkled through workflows. The centre of the episode is Jev: a...

Pete and Andy dig into FIPS, the Free Internetworking Peering Service, and why it could make the internet feel personal again. Instead of treating your laptop and phone as viewers of cloud servers, FIPS makes devices, apps and agents first-class participants in a private, addressable network. Then the conversation pivots into AI doom, open-source regulation and whether “AI will kill us all” is rea...

Paul Itoi, founder of Stakwork, thinks the AI industry has the model wrong. Reliable enterprise AI will depend less on agents doing everything and more on workflows, shared memory and systems that can turn discovered work into repeatable software. Paul joins Pete and Andy to explore factored cognition, recursive AI systems, graph memory and Stakwork’s forthcoming open-source work. They also get in...

Back in the van by the beach, Pete and Andy explore how longer-running agents are changing the way people work. They move from sovereign infrastructure and the new Intelligence Snacks production system to AI-assisted writing, purpose-built agent workflows and the return of the interface. The conclusion: AI is less a finished consumer product than a capital good whose value comes from applying inte...

Should AI agents have wallets, and what happens when they can earn, spend, rent infrastructure and act without asking a human to approve every step? Pete and Andy sit down with Piers from Mineracks to explore the collision between AI agents, Bitcoin, Nostr and sovereign infrastructure. They get into agent payments, self-funded compute, abuse, identity, tax, cybersecurity and liability. They also e...

Hosts: Pete and Andy · Guest: Rod, founder of Shoshow What changes when one founder with a fleet of AI agents can build what once required venture capital, a technical co-founder, and a large engineering team? Pete and Andy sit down with Rod to explore the rise of the sole entrepreneur: keeping equity and control, making more bets, attacking bloated incumbents, and building deeply for small commun...

# Intelligence Snacks, Episode 67: Local Models, Private Agents, and Wingman*Hosts: Pete and Andy · Guest: Anthony*What does useful, sovereign AI look like when the frontier providers can change the rules overnight? Pete, Andy, and Anthony compare local models, private-agent appliances, and the hardware needed to keep capable AI close to home. The conversation then moves from personal automation t...

The rebrand is official, The Good Stuff is now Intelligence Snacks. The episode opens with the ColdCard hack that swept ~1,300+ Bitcoin over the weekend. A 2021 firmware bug disabled the hardware RNG and used a pseudo-random one instead. The prevailing theory - Kimi K3, released without guardrails, found the exploit. US models refused to help with offense or defense, they treated code auditing as...

After a short break, Pete and Andy return to the van for what turns out to be the final episode of **The Good Stuff**. They explain why the podcast is getting a new identity before diving into AI agents, social media, and the software stack they've been building. The conversation explores using personal AI agents to filter information instead of doomscrolling, why stepping away from the AI bub...

DPC went from AI skeptic to full "AI psychosis mode" in three months. The conversation unpacks his journey from dismissing autocomplete to building his own Rust-based coding harness called Tau, designed with Unix philosophy — composability, standard input/output, event-based architecture, and the ability to run shell extensions over SSH to different machines. An extended woodworking meta...

The conversation explores why regional SMEs face a different AI adoption gap than metro businesses. Why AI enables his advisors to get out of the office and sit at kitchen tables having real conversations. The paradox: more AI means hiring more humans, because human judgment and attention don't scale with processing power. The conversation goes deep on corporate extraction vs SME capitalism, t...

Yo joins from Sovereign Engineering to talk about how AI has transformed freedom tech development since SEC-04, when Paul demoed a wallet vibed into existence in 30 minutes and blew everyone's minds. The conversation covers the euphoria wearing off, the slot machine addiction problem, why LLMs are "extremely confident, extremely good at English usage, but extremely dumb," and the com...

# The Good Stuff, Episode 61: Loop Engineering Boris (Claude Code creator) and Steinberger both tweeted this week: "I don't prompt anymore, I just build loops that prompt for me." Pete's response: they've discovered being a team leader. Loop engineering is organizational design with new hype marketing terms—triggers, processes, business rules, the stuff we've been doing f...

Pete and Andy are joined again by Deadman Oz / AM to talk through the latest AI trends, starting with the argument over whether progress is really coming from better models or better harnesses. They cover Claude Code workflows, agent orchestration, context management, reasoning models, open source local models, inference economics, and the business strategies of OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and the...

Pete and Andy unpack the recent surge in anti-AI sentiment and argue that the anger is often aimed at the wrong target. They trace the backlash through graduate job anxiety, elite AI messaging, economic stagnation, and broader distrust in institutions, then pivot into a more grounded discussion about what AI can and cannot realistically replace. Along the way they talk about cost curves, productiv...

Pete and Andy are joined by Shawn Yeager to talk about what AI does to professional services firms once the billable hour starts collapsing. The core argument is that firms in law, accounting, marketing, and similar sectors will need to move away from selling time and toward selling trust, judgment, systems, and outcomes. As AI compresses document work and routine delivery, the real value shifts t...

Pete and Andy are joined by Mark from Maple to talk about privacy in AI, why everyday users may finally be starting to care, and what it takes to build private AI products that can still compete on user experience. The conversation ranges from end-to-end encrypted AI and open source model stacks through to agent security, business control, workflow automation, and why most of today's agent hyp...

Pete and Andy dig into "unruggable productivity" and what it means to build software that respects the customer instead of trapping them inside a vendor's AI stack. They connect recent 37signals ideas to their own work on Wingman and Flight Deck, arguing for agent-friendly software, clearer work surfaces, and business systems designed around control, portability, and real workflows....

Pete and Andy ask whether AI really saves time. Their answer is mostly no, at least not in the simple sense. AI speeds up production, iteration, and experimentation, but the time saved often gets reinvested into doing more, improving quality, or expanding the scope of the work. The result is often more leverage, not less time spent. ## Chapters and Themes - `00:00-03:07` The opening question: has...

Pete's been deep in Flight Deck flows, watching agents take creative shortcuts to hit goals, impressive until you check the plumbing. The observability lesson: you need to work at all levels, not just the executive summary view. Agents are like humans, give them vague goals and they'll hit them surprisingly well, but that's not sustainable or efficient. The solution isn't more dict...

Jarrad Grigg returns for a proper van experience. The episode kicks off with Mythos skepticism—marketing spin dressed as existential threat, same playbook as GPT-2. The real concern isn't frontier models being "too powerful," it's the tiering of intelligence to highest bidders and the creeping nerf of consumer-tier models. Jarrad's been going deep on local models (Gemma 4, qu...

Happy birthday to The Good Stuff one year in. Pete and Andy dig into what happens when organisations stop being sized for humans. Jack Dorsey's Block restructuring provides the jumping-off point: if hierarchies exist because humans can only manage so much information flow, what happens when that constraint disappears? The haul pack analogy returns - those mining trucks are that size because of...

Pete and Andy break down why throwing agents at problems is the mid-curve play, expensive, unpredictable, and destined to be undercut by anyone who takes the extra step to encode their business into software. Also - why every business needs a Wingman Bob, the trifecta of skills that actually matter now, and the uncomfortable truth that agents belong in cubicles. **Key Moments:** - [01:39] Three th...

The big episode 50! Justin Moon from HRF joins Pete and Andy to talk about "AI psychosis". The crew dig into HRF's work equipping activists with encrypted tools, why code production isn't the bottleneck anymore, how civil society becomes the crucial third pillar and whether we're returning to a frontier society where willpower beats credentials. **Key Moments:** - [02:07] &qu...