The AI Relay

Andrew connected an AI agent to an AWS account to troubleshoot a deployment error. The agent found the root cause in minutes — a specific policy ID blocking the install — and recommended a fix: exempt the policy from the rule. Andrew knew what that policy was for. If he had run the command, he would have deployed thousands of non-compliant machines across the enterprise. The AI was right. The fix...

One enterprise reportedly spent $500 million on AI in 30 days. Uber burned through its annual AI budget in four months after creating an internal leaderboard that rewarded teams for using the most AI. Jonathan saw those stories and could not let them go. But Andrew's response is not simply “enterprise should have known better.” His counterargument is that the math looks very different from ins...

If you've ever wondered why big companies seem slow to adopt the AI tools everyone's excited about — the answer probably isn't what you think. Andrew works inside enterprise AI and has been building agents there for years. Jonathan builds AI agents as an enthusiast, outside any corporate structure. In this episode they compare notes and discover they've been using the word "agent" to mean complete...

If you've been using AI seriously for a while and still feel like you're falling behind — this episode is specifically for that. Andrew and Jonathan both came into this recording tired. Not struggling-with-the-tools tired. Keeping-up-with-the-pace tired. And the conversation they had is one of the more honest things either of them has put on record about what it actually feels like to be a...

When your company talks about deploying AI agents and when you think about your own AI setup, you might both be using the word agent — but you're probably not describing the same thing at all. This episode maps out the difference between the small, task-specific agents being built inside large enterprises and the general-purpose, personality-driven agent setups that people like Jonathan are bu...

You hand it a business plan, ask what it thinks, and it tells you it's brilliant — which is almost never the honest answer. This episode is about one of the most common mistakes people make with AI: asking open-ended opinion questions and then trusting the response. Andrew breaks down three specific reasons why "what do you think?" reliably gets you a bad answer — hedging, sycophancy...

Starting a new chat and feeling like the AI has no idea who you are is one of the most frustrating parts of using these tools — but that experience is changing fast. This episode gets into how memory in AI systems actually works, from the live context window that fills and clears during a session to the persistent memory layers that platforms like ChatGPT and Claude are building behind the scenes....

Opus 4.7 is out and the internet is excited, but your workflow is running fine on 4.6 and you really don't want to break anything. This episode helps you think through when a new model release actually matters and when it doesn't. Andrew and Jonathan break down what a model update really is — it's the engine in the car, not a software update — and why a better engine doesn't always...

You're laughing at a joke a computer made, or you catch yourself genuinely irritated at a response, and then you think — wait, this is just a machine. So why does it feel like talking to a person? This episode sits with the strangeness of conversational AI and actually tries to explain it, from the uncanny valley effect to the way human language carries meaning beyond just grammar. Andrew and...

A lot of people think using AI well means knowing the right prompt formula. In this episode of The AI Relay, Andrew Signore and Jonathan Spanos unpack why that idea is becoming less true — and why clear goals, better context, and stronger judgment matter more than “magic words.” They explore how prompting used to feel like a step-by-step instruction game, and how newer AI tools are changing that b...

Most people say they “use AI,” but that can mean very different things. In this episode of ** The AI Relay **, Jonathan Spanos and Andrew Signore break down the difference between using AI as ** search **, using it as an ** assistant **, and using it as an ** agent **—and why those are not the same job. They explain, in plain English, how AI has evolved from answering questions, to helping with re...

Why does AI sometimes give a great answer—and other times make something up completely? In this episode of The AI Relay, Jonathan Spanos and Andrew Signore explain AI hallucinations in plain English for people without technical backgrounds. They break down why large language models predict words instead of “thinking” like humans, why that can lead to confident wrong answers, and what it means for...

In this episode of ** The AI Relay **, Jonathan Spanos and Andrew Signore use a practical grocery-shopping app built live with AI to show what actually leads to better results: clear context, a defined problem, a useful outcome, and everyday language that is more subtle and intentional than it first appears. Rather than treating AI like a magic trick or a search box, they break down the human side...

Most people are still using AI like a search engine. In this episode of ** The AI Relay **, Jonathan Spanos and Andrew Signore explain why that misses the bigger picture. They break down the difference between the ** AI app ** and the ** AI model **, why ** ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini ** can feel different, and why those differences matter less than most beginners think. The bigger idea is this: A...

If you've been nodding along when people talk about AI but still feel like you're missing the full picture — this is where to start. Jonathan and Andrew trace the full arc of AI from its origins to the moment it became impossible to ignore — the shift from machine learning to generative AI that gave everyone a ChatGPT or Claude account and suddenly made the technology feel personal. They d...