Chaos Agents

In the last episode of Season 1, Sara and Becca talk with Jesse Vincent about the shift from writing code to managing AI agents. They break down how tools like Superpowers turn development into a system of planning, testing, and review, where subagents implement work and other agents validate it. The conversation explores what happens when coding becomes less about syntax and more about taste, jud...

Most people are using AI, but very few actually understand how to use it well. In this episode, Sara and Becca talk with Navarrow Wright about what is really happening with AI adoption and why the biggest barrier is mindset, not technology. They break down why prompting matters, why AI is not one-size-fits-all, and how access to these tools is more open than any previous tech shift. They also expl...

We’re joined by Louise Macfadyen, author of Designing AI Interfaces , to talk about how we actually design for AI, and why most companies are getting it wrong. We unpack “algorithmic transference” (why one bad AI experience makes you distrust all of them), the limits of the chat interface, and whether the text box is here to stay. Louise walks us through the history from command line → Google sear...

This week, Becca turns her birthday into a Twister masterclass by watching the movie with an AI “director’s commentary” running in real time (including some behind-the-scenes facts that sound… borderline illegal). Then Sara drops a mildly unhinged hot take: we might have already hit AGI—and we’ll never know it, because we don’t even agree on what “counts.” From there, we’re joined by Hayden Helm ,...

Juliet Shen (Roost, formerly Snap, Grindr, Google) joins us to break down trust & safety — aka “anything bad that happens on the internet” — and why AI is changing the game for both attackers and defenders. We talk safety-by-design (how to bake guardrails into product), the real human cost of content moderation, and where AI can actually help without pretending it solves everything. Juliet exp...

We’re joined by Meghan Heintz, founding engineer at Herd Labs, to break down where crypto and AI agents actually work. We talk prediction markets, smart contracts, wallets, rug pulls, and how AI can finally explain what happened on-chain. Then we zoom out to the human side: benchmarking and evals for agents, misinformation, the Mom Test, and what it feels like to manage coding agents instead of ju...

Becca just got back from NeurIPS, the academic AI conference that feels like an adult science fair. We dig into research on training large AI models across cheap GPUs and slow internet connections—and why that could dramatically lower the barrier to building AI. Then we’re joined by Harper Reed, CEO of 2389, for a wide-ranging conversation about code generation, coaching-based engineering teams, a...

Sara’s back from visiting her New Jersey Christian high school—where she gets hit with a genuinely spicy question: How do you reconcile AGI with faith? From there, we go straight into the bigger theme of the episode: education is getting stress-tested by AI in real time. Becca breaks down Google’s “magic cycle” — the uncomfortable lesson of inventing transformative research (Transformers, BERT) an...

Sara breaks down perceptrons (1957!) as the tiny “matrix of lights” idea that eventually became neural networks—then we jump straight into modern AI chaos. Oboe’s Nir Zuckerman walks us through the messy reality of building consumer-grade AI for education: every feature is a tradeoff between loading fast and being good, and “just use a better model” doesn’t magically solve it. We talk guardrails,...

Sara and Becca kick things off with a tour through paradigm shifts — from Thomas Kuhn to the internet to AI — and ask whether we’re living through one of those rare moments where the whole game quietly changes. Along the way, they hit horror movies, calculators in math class, Google Doc revision histories, and why it’s suddenly way easier to learn code than to pretend you never needed it. Then the...

In this episode, we unpack a wild Anthropic experiment where an AI agent named “Alex” is told it’s about to be replaced… and responds by threatening to expose an executive’s affair if anyone dares shut it down. Casual! Sara and Becca start diving into what this experiment tells us about AI “goals,” self-preservation, and why humans are so bad at recognizing sentience in anything that isn’t us. If...

In this episode of Chaos Agents , Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy sit down with Rizel Scarlett , Tech Lead for Open Source Developer Relations at Block , to talk about Goose —the open-source AI agent shaking up how developers work. From psychological safety in coding with AI to how open source is evolving in this new era, the trio dives into the wild mix of creativity, collaboration, and chaos shaping...

Chaos Agents is the AI podcast where technologists Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy try to make sense of a world moving faster than ever. Each week, they dive into the wild, funny, and sometimes weird frontier of artificial intelligence, technology, and culture —how it works, what it means, and why it matters. From coding with AI and open-source revolutions to the ethics, creativity, and chaos reshaping...