The Velocity Lab

Episode Summary Dave and Dan tell the origin story of App Vitals — from LiveKit AI-voice tutorials to an AI-transformation consultancy to shipping their own open-source autonomous coding agent. They unpack the 37signals philosophy that shapes how they build, how a mobile-dev side project quietly became Shipwright, and why test readiness is the real on-ramp to autonomous programming. Key Topics The...

Episode Summary Major announcement: Dave and Dan are open-sourcing Shipwright, the autonomous coding agent they've been building since November. It takes you from PRD to production deployment with no human intervention ~99% of the time — and it built itself. Across ~500 pull requests, they say they barely read a line of code. The core provocation for leaders: if a free tool can 10X your engineerin...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan pull back the curtain on the autonomous coding agent they built — an agent that lives in the cloud, takes instructions in Slack, and runs a full plan-to-deploy pipeline 24/7. In the last seven days alone, their agents opened 85 pull requests. They walk through exactly how the system works and why "build the system" beats "write the code." Key Topics Talk to your agent...

Episode Summary If AI handles the coding, then being an engineer means planning and reviewing — the work of staff and principal engineers. But that breaks the career ladder: how does anyone become senior when the junior rungs disappear? Dave and Dan dig into where senior engineers come from now, why juniors still add value on top of Claude, builders versus maintainers, and how interviewing changes...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan get candid about the most uncomfortable question in software right now: is my career still safe? Dan recounts a literal "therapy session with Claude" that exposed his 20-year sense of job security as a false one — and the two work through what to actually do about it. The throughline: AI isn't ending engineering, it's reshaping it, and the people who refuse to engage a...

Episode Summary Org-wide AI transformation keeps failing — not because the tech doesn't work, but because trying to move 200 engineers at once turns into a slog. Dave and Dan break down what they see in the field: tool sprawl, the very real fear engineers feel about being the ones disrupted, and the trap of tripling your Claude bill without shipping any faster. Their fix: skip the org-wide rollout...

Episode Summary Anthropic is taking the gloves off. The VC-subsidized era of essentially-free AI agents is ending: OAuth tokens lose Open Cloud coverage, Claude Code Max plans are getting throttled for autonomous workloads, and Dave & Dan are staring at a $200/mo → $1,000+/mo jump for their ShipRight background agents. The episode is a candid talk about what changed, why it was inevitable (the...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan dig into service readiness — the industry calls it "harness engineering" — and why testing just moved to the #1 spot of their 13 repo-readiness pillars. Before you let agents ship code in the background, the question isn't 90% coverage; it's whether anyone actually trusts the tests. They walk through the onboarding plugin that gets a repo test-ready and how test decisi...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan announce a reshaping of their AI adoption work: org-wide SDLC transformation over three months wasn't moving the needle, so they're switching to embedding in a single team — even a single repo — and unleashing agents on a big, important project. The episode doubles as free advice to engineering leaders: stop doing AI at 20%, pick one project, and crush it. Key Topics W...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan look three months down the road: autonomous coding went from "watch every line" to "Claude is basically an employee" in six weeks. They share their Anthropic wishlist, the hygiene automations that get teams onto the autonomy ladder, and the one piece of advice every executive keeps ignoring. Key Topics From watching Claude write code to planning and reviewing only — wh...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan riff on how they used Claude Code to build the entire AppVitals business — marketing site, internal SaaS replacements, time tracking, invoicing, even this podcast — and ask why non-technical entrepreneurs are out-adopting professional engineers on agentic tooling. Key Topics The three tiers of AppVitals — AI adoption work, project work, and an autonomous coding product...

Episode Summary The Velocity Lab's first-ever guest interview. Dave and Dan sit down with Brian Jones (Tahoe Digital), a non-technical founder who has built multiple AI-native businesses without writing a single line of code. He walks through his evolution from ChatGPT and Microsoft Notepad to Replit, Cursor, and now Claude Code — and shares why curiosity and persistence are now the only credentia...

Episode Summary Engineering leaders have been sitting on the same migrations for years — monolith to microservices, ORM rewrites, framework upgrades — because the cost of doing them was always 50% of the engineering org for a year. Claude makes those migrations feasible. But not as a single 12,000-line PR. Dan and Dave break down the method that turns a five-year migration into a three-month migra...

Episode Summary Generic AI PR review agents from Copilot, Gemini, and Claude are a baseline, not a finish line. Dan and Dave break down the five things senior engineers actually look for in a PR — and why a custom review skill catches issues that the stock agents miss. Key Topics The "V zero" problem — why generic GitHub PR review agents only get you so far Five things senior engineers want surfac...

Episode Summary AI transformation isn't a tooling problem. It's an organizational one. Dave and Dan dig into why bringing in AI without cutting bureaucracy, top-down processes, and the people who create them just gets you the same speed with new tools — and what to actually change so builders can build. Key Topics Why technical adoption alone won't make your engineering org faster How processes, a...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan walk through the questions a board or executive will ask about AI — from inventory and tooling to ROI, accountability, and competitive risk — and what answers actually hold up. Pro tip: if you can't answer them, your competitors probably can. Key Topics Do we have an inventory of where AI is operating in the company? — most orgs can't answer this The scattershot toolin...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan break down the upfront infrastructure work required before a single repo is ready for autonomous programming. They walk through the full prep checklist — monorepo structure, lazy-loaded docs, 90% test coverage with end-to-end tests, a dev environment that actually matches prod, canary deploys, and observability — and explain why each one is non-negotiable when you're s...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan share what they're seeing in the field this week: non-software engineers — in marketing, sales, customer service, and data — are getting massively accelerated by Claude Desktop and MCP servers. The episode centers on a real story of a single subject matter expert who built a Snowflake data tool, shared it across his entire company, and eliminated the need for one-off d...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan announce Vitals OS — App Vitals' autonomous coding pipeline built on Claude Code and their Shipwright plugin. In the past two weeks it shipped 393 pull requests, with Dave and Dan writing fewer than 10 of them. They walk through how the pipeline works, where it still needs humans, and how they plan to bring it to client codebases. Key Topics The 393 PR milestone — what...

Episode Summary A client asked Dave and Dan a deceptively simple question: "What should we call the job title for the person who leads our AI engineering transformation?" The answer surprised them — it's not a new role. It's a Principal Engineer. In this episode, they break down exactly what that means, why the best candidate hasn't written a line of code in the last six months, and how to intervi...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan share a jaw-dropping collaboration breakthrough: Claude Code's voice mode accidentally picked up Dan's suggestions over a Google Meet call, turning a routine planning session into a real-time AI pair-planning session with two people and one AI. They also react to the OpenAI source code leak, discuss the real cost of their MAX subscription, and share how Claude Code fit...

Episode Summary Dave and Dan share how they shipped 254 pull requests in 7 days using AI agents Sully and Bodhi — with only about 10 hours of human effort combined. They unpack the key unlock (getting out of the terminal and into Slack), how they accidentally broke their own planning rules and recovered, and how adding metrics and learning loops turned a chaotic experiment into a real production s...

Programming languages have always built on top of each other. With agentic coding, is the knowledge of code itself going to disappear? Dave and Dan debate whether software engineers will need to know programming languages in five years, and what harness engineering means for the future.

Claude Code updates for March 27, 2026. Dave demos voice mode in the CLI, remote control sessions from your phone while walking the dog, and the 1 million token context window that somehow still is not enough.

Why giving every engineer access to every AI tool does not work. Dave and Dan break down the scattershot approach and why you need to focus on the entire SDLC.