Working Code

How do you teach an LLM to write code you can actually trust? Carol's federal government team has been tasked with exploring unattended AI code generation, so she came to Adam and Tim for advice. Their first piece of guidance: whatever tools you pick today will be obsolete by the time you're done evaluating them. The real goal isn't adopting a specific workflow—it's building the sk...

Remember that you will die. That's the meaning behind "Memento Mori," and it's the theme of this week's episode. Guest Shawn Oden, joins Adam, Ben, and Tim to discuss digital death preparedness for geeks. Inspired by clearing out his grandmother's house and buying his late best friend's computers to protect his digital legacy (and potentially lost Bitcoin), Shawn advoca...

How do you stay motivated when you're stuck building features you don't understand? Carol brings a conversation she's been having with her team about feeling like a "feature factory"—churning out work without clarity on what problem they're solving or what value it adds. When every standup is "is this done?" instead of "have we made anything better?", burnou...

What happens when your passion project becomes so successful that you have to shut it down? Advent of Code creator Eric Wastl announced he was scaling back from 25 days to 12 and removing the global leaderboard. The reason? People were feeling bad at their jobs because they couldn't solve puzzles in 45 seconds like the leaderboard speedrunners. Quiet UI launched with excitement, garnered incre...

When you use ChatGPT instead of Google, you're not just getting a faster answer—you're cutting out the content creators who made that knowledge possible. In this week's episode, we explore the economics of AI search, the death of Stack Overflow, the junior developer problem writ large, and why capitalism keeps pushing moral responsibility onto individuals who have the least power to ch...

In this week's episode the gather round and share what they've been up to for trunk or treat. Adam shares his waning motivation for his Jump Run side project, we explore sustainable motivation, the rewrite temptation, and whether it's okay to just... do the fun thing sometimes. Meanwhile, Tim provides a reality check on AI coding tools—he spent real hours comparing GitHub Copilot and C...

How do you keep millions of people safe on 40 different dating sites while simultaneously figuring out what drives them to buy memberships? Sean Corfield joins Adam and Ben to discuss the surprisingly complex engineering and business challenges of observing user behavior at massive scale. Sean runs us through fraud detection and prevention (including devastating "pig butchering" romance sc...

Can you really multitask, or are you just rapidly switching between contexts and hoping your brain doesn't lose track? This week, we dig into the cognitive load of deep work, the impossibility of maintaining multiple large projects in your head simultaneously, and the ADHD patterns that shape how many of us think and work. Carol returns from the chaos of federal government planning meetings wi...

How do you resist the siren call of shiny new features when you're months into a project that really matters? Adam finds himself six weeks into a 12-week build when his boss floats a couple of juicy AI integration ideas. Ben relates this to his own tendency to get distracted by massive refactors mid-feature. They dig into strategies for staying disciplined—like using future work as motivation,...

In this week's episode the crew is back to discuss the never-ending journey of self-improvement in the tech industry, are we idiots to ignore it or maniacs to go along with it? Ben and Tim are back from CF Summit to recount there experiences where a big topic of discussion was... you guessed it, AI. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcode.de...

In this week's episode the whole crew is back, and Ben brings our attention to "good" friction. It's all too common in business to hear about reducing and eliminating friction, but some forms of friction can be positive in ways we take for granted. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcode.dev  and we're  @workingcode.dev on Bl...

Common sense isn't so common, or maybe it's a myth entirely? On this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Carol discuss common sense in programming. What may be common sense to a programmer may not be so simple to a user, and it's important, in these contexts, to deploy empathy and understanding rather than frustration. The hosts discuss this and more. A Hermeneutic of Generosity  https:...

In this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Carol dive into the nuanced world of software development as they explore the subjectivity inherent in coding. How do personal preferences, team cultures, and individual experiences shape the way code is written, reviewed, and maintained. From debates over naming conventions to the art of code reviews, we unpack the many ways that subjectivity influences...

In this week's episode, Adam, Ben, and Tim discuss the never ending rabbit hole that is implementing soft deletes in a database. What starts as a simple solution cascades into countless challenges and pitfalls, such as referential integrity, data consistency and compliance. This and other coding crimes in this week's episode. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord !...

In this week's episode, Ben, Carol, and Tim are back to discuss picking the right tool for the right job. More specifically, the value of proportionality in effort and resource allocation, questioning when it's appropriate to cut corners versus maintaining high standards, when you should stick to what you know versus learning something new, and when you should pay more attention to context...

In this week's episode, Adam asks the question: To sync or not to sync? Sparked by an exploration of a competitor's API approach, the team share their thoughts on handling long-running tasks efficiently. 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 Wednesday. And, i...

In this week's episode, the crew discuss the relevance and significance of open-source software in the age of AI. The open source community offers domain expertise, rigorous testing, responsive bug fixing, and community support. But when AI can generate code with proficiency, how does the value calculus change when deciding to install a new package, generate code with an AI, or simply do it yo...

To be a good producer you have to be a good consumer. In this week's podcast, the whole team is back to delve into the concept of 'skin in the game' in product development and how consuming your own product, known as “dogfooding”, and empathizing with users can influence the development process. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcod...

In this week's episode, Adam and Ben discuss the notion of “If I'm still telling you what to do in six months, then something went wrong”, a take heard in  a recent episode  of Lenny's Podcast. How can a company orientate itself to encourage autonomy throughout the career of an engineer? What are reasonable expectations of a junior engineer? These questions and more are discussed in to...

In this week's episode, Adam and Tim delve into Gemini CLI, a command line interface tool for AI by Google, test-driving it on real code to find its capabilities and limitations. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're  feeling the lov...

In this week's episode, the full crew is back to talk about practical replatforming. In past episodes we've discussed replatforming in a more abstract sense, but Adam has much to share about ongoing real-world replatforming at AlumniQ. When the rubber meets the road, certain realities and complexities, which may not be obvious, may affect decision-making and replatforming strategy. Follow...

In this week's episode, the team gets into it with special guest Dan Wilson, an AI & tech consultant that has recently created free and paid courses on using AI in daily workflows. They also dig into the ins and outs of creating Udemy courses and their viability in the tech space. Dan's courses: Master ChatGPT: Build AI Assistants That Know Your Business  (FREE) Generative AI for Devel...

In this week's episode, the team dives into a potluck of topics including the effective usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) by feeding their ego, the excitement of implementing feature flags in development cycles, and further developments and opportunities with Adam's side hustle app "Jump Run" the journey of building a side hustle with 'Jump Run'. Follow the show and be...

In this week's episode, the crew is back to discuss and question quickly shifting values in the world and their implications for developers. Will AI erode the importance of code craftsmanship? When old values are quickly discarded, what does that say about the legitimacy of the new values? Is human coding obsolescence the elephant in the room? Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussio...

In this week's episode, Adam puts the spotlight on Svelte, and takes us on a deep dive of Svelte features, latest developments and some of his own applications of Svelte in recent projects. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're  feel...