Breakeven Brothers

Brad’s North Carolina Cook Out mint Oreo shake review, and Ben’s Pacific Northwest work-trip update before the brothers dig into the big idea of the week: what it actually means to become “AI native” at work. Using Jason’s Codex maxxing article as the spark, Brad frames the shift from one-off ChatGPT-style prompts to long-running agent threads with memory, tools, voice input, steering, queued foll...

Episode 41 starts with a very Breakeven Brothers moment: the guys forget what episode they’re on, recap Brad’s family visit, and relive a 150-plus-game Soulcalibur gauntlet before diving into the real headline—why Brad now lives inside the Codex app. He explains what changed with GPT-5.5, why the model feels dramatically better at unblocking itself, and how that has shifted his workflow from small...

Episode 40 opens with Brad’s dirty-30 recap from Big Sur: hiking, Japanese hot baths, unlimited food, and a first falconry experience before the brothers jump into two meaningful AI releases. They break down Cursor 3’s move to a fully agent-first interface, why that changes the feel of an AI IDE, and how Google’s Gemma 4 models look in the small-model and on-device race. There’s also a practical d...

This week, the brothers dive headfirst into the world of personal AI agents, with Brad detailing his meticulous, multi-step journey of setting up OpenClaw on a virtual private server. The conversation navigates the critical balance between unlocking immense power and managing the significant security risks that come with granting AI access to personal data. From automating mundane tasks like unsub...

This week, the Breakeven Brothers dive into the practical (and sometimes frustrating) applications of AI, starting with a hilarious attempt to use AI for taxes and an experiment to recreate their famous intro jingle with Google's new Lyria 3 audio model. The results might surprise you. They also recap a flurry of major releases from the past few weeks, including OpenAI's Codex 5.3 Spark, Anthropic...

The Breakeven Brothers are back from hiatus with a huge announcement: one of the brothers has started a new role as a software engineer at OpenAI! He shares the inside scoop on the interview process, the dynamic culture, and what it’s like to be working at the epicenter of the AI revolution. This personal journey kicks off a broader conversation about career development in the age of AI, with insi...

What does the future hold? Before diving into some wild predictions, we recap a whirlwind week of AI meetups in San Francisco. We share key takeaways from the Agents Anonymous meetup at Sentry's HQ, including a fascinating talk from a Cursor engineer on solving the "long-running agents" problem and what it took to build a web browser autonomously. Then, we switch gears to the Laravel community, di...

Welcome to 2026! The new year kicks off with shocking news from the web development world as industry darlings Tailwind Labs and Laracasts announce massive layoffs, citing the disruptive force of AI. Brad and Bennett dive deep into the drama, analyzing the GitHub comments and tweets that sent shockwaves through the community. They discuss the harsh reality for businesses built on selling code or e...

In our final episode of 2025, we're taking a look back at what was dubbed 'the year of the agents' and peering into what 2026 might hold. The conversation kicks off with a deep dive into a potential paradigm shift: the rise of AI 'skills.' We explore Anthropic's big push for this new framework, contrasting it with existing tool-calling and MCP server approaches. Are skills just a more user-friendl...

The Breakeven Brothers are back after the holiday break, sharing stories from Thanksgiving travels and post-holiday shopping. Bradley kicks things off with a major announcement: the SplitMyExpenses Android app is finally live! He shares the challenging, and often frustrating, journey of navigating the Google Play Store for the first time, contrasting it with his experience on iOS and celebrating t...

Brad is back from the grind and finally has something to show for his 4 AM coding sessions: the official SplitMyExpenses iOS app is live on the App Store! He shares the entire journey, from the initial manual coding attempts to leveraging AI tools like Claude Code that dramatically accelerated his development pace and expanded the app's feature set. Ben also dives into his own coding project, deta...

The Breakeven Brothers are finally back! After another hiatus filled with cross-continental travel, surprise kitten fostering, and a whole lot of life, Bradley and Bennett jump right back into the deep end. We kick things off with stories from Brad's trip to Korea—navigating rainy weddings and constant hotel hopping—and Bennett's unexpected turn as a foster dad to a tiny kitten that wandered into...

For our dirty 30, we're unpacking some of the biggest AI news of the year, coming at you fresh on the same day it dropped. OpenAI just held their DevDay, and to say they dropped a bombshell would be an understatement. We’re giving our live, unfiltered reactions to a tidal wave of new releases that genuinely knocked it out of the park. From an App Store-like ecosystem built directly into ChatGPT to...

The Brothers are back! After a much-needed month-long break filled with wedding anniversaries, unfortunate illnesses, and a trip to Hawaii, Bradley and Bennett return to find the AI world has moved at lightning speed. They waste no time diving headfirst into a tool that has defined white-collar work for decades: Excel. With Anthropic's Claude now able to work directly with spreadsheets, is this th...

A bombshell MIT study just dropped, claiming 95% of companies get ZERO return on their AI investments. Is the hype bubble finally bursting, or is there a deeper story the headlines are missing? In this episode, we're calling BS on the doom-and-gloom narrative. Drawing from our own in-the-trenches experience building an app with AI, we break down why these studies might be flawed and reveal the mas...

The Death Star has arrived... or has it? This week, we're diving headfirst into the most anticipated AI launch of the year: OpenAI's GPT-5. After weeks of incredible hype, including some wild pre-launch marketing from Sam Altman himself, we finally got our hands on the new flagship model. We're here to give you our unfiltered, boots-on-the-ground review. Was it the mind-blowing leap in intelligenc...

It's the official mid-year reality check! We're dusting off our 2025 bingo card to see which of our wild predictions have actually come true. Did a solo founder get that billion-dollar offer? Are robot cop-dogs with machine guns a thing now? And what ever happened to Bennett's homemade salsa ambitions? We tally the points (and half-points) and laugh at what we were thinking just a few months ago....

After a surprisingly affordable and delicious trip to Vancouver, we're back and diving headfirst into the AI world's latest obsession: the talent war. Meta is swinging for the fences, reportedly dropping $100 million offers to poach top researchers from OpenAI. This has sparked a war of words, with OpenAI framing it as "stealing" and pitting their "missionaries" against Meta's "mercenaries." We br...

One year in the books! We're popping the non-alcoholic champagne to celebrate the first anniversary of the Breakeven Brothers podcast. In that time, the AI landscape has shifted from a gentle tremor to a full-blown earthquake, and in this episode, we're navigating the aftershocks. The AI arms race is escalating, with tech giants like Meta opening up their wallets for jaw-dropping nine-figure payda...

On this Michael Jordan episode (23!), we kick things off with a classic tale of a "five-minute" project gone wrong. Bradley shares his ambitious attempt at a parking lot car battery replacement that quickly turned into a 30-minute fishing expedition for a single lost part. Meanwhile, Bennett recounts a white-knuckle flight experience made even more stressful by a massive, internet-wide outage. Wha...

Guess who's finally back from an epic honeymoon adventure through Japan and Korea?! Bradley rejoins Bennett, and after a two-and-a-half-week AI news whirlwind, we've got A LOT to unpack. We're kicking things off by calling out the "Propaganda We're Not Falling For," tackling everything from overhyped agent overload and why some popular frameworks aren't cutting it for us, to whether every new AI f...

We are back with a jam-packed episode, kicking things off with everything from childhood gaming nostalgia (Oblivion, anyone?) to Brad's very exclusive Breakeven Brothers merch (bidding starts high, apparently!). But things get serious (and seriously exciting) as they dive into Brad's adventures at the DeepDishSwift iOS conference in Chicago, revealing how AI is no longer just a buzzword but a full...

Alright folks, buckle up because Episode 20 is here, and the AI world has been busy! Just like us hitting this big milestone, the pace of innovation isn't letting up. We kick things off by putting ourselves to the test with a hilarious and high-stakes game: Blind Ranking 10 AI Chat Apps. Who will reign supreme? Will we agree on the top spots, or will a surprise contender emerge from the digital sh...

What exactly is MCP (Model Context Protocol) and why is it catching fire in the AI world? We unpack this emerging standard for connecting LLMs like Claude to external data sources, discussing its origins, how it differs from previous methods, and why major tech players are suddenly paying attention. Learn the potential behind standardized AI tool integration. Explore real-world examples like conne...

Hold onto your hats, because the AI world just went into hyperdrive! This week, we try to make sense of the absolute deluge of new model releases that have dropped faster than Brad can guess Ben's secret words in our new AI Word Nerd game. From OpenAI finally cracking the code on actually usable text in images (goodbye, alien script!) to Google's confusingly named but seriously powerful Gemini 2.5...