Working Code

They say history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, and apparently so do show topics. A year on from our episode on the value of friction, the crew are back to discuss value of struggle. The question this time: now that AI will cheerfully do the hard part for you, which struggles are worth keeping, and which you can finally hand off? Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discor...

Eighteen weeks ago Adam handed his decade-old ORM layer to an AI agent. This week he kills the whole refactor — and the feeling that comes isn't regret, it's relief. Somewhere in the grind he realized he'd only ever weighed two options, push through or admit defeat, and both assumed he had to see it to the end. This week is about sunk cost — how being partway down a road can convince y...

The promise was that AI would take the grunt work off your plate and leave you the good stuff. This week is the part no one advertised: you got into this to make things — but what comes instead is the restless guilt of sitting there with nothing to do while the agent works, and the slow realization that when it finishes, the job left for you is mostly reviewing. Follow the show and be sure to  joi...

Getting unstuck has gotten so cheap that Ben can't remember the last time he actually learned something at work — and the struggle he's skipping was where knowing the code, and caring about it, used to come from. This week is a conversation about what software craftsmanship even means anymore, when the tools are happy to do the caring for you. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discu...

This week is the quiet worry underneath all the productivity gains: that every time you hand the boring work to a machine, you're handing over a little of the curiosity that made you good at the work you care about, until one day the well of ideas just runs dry. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcode.dev  and we're  @workingcode.dev on...

Adam trained an AI on twenty years of Ben's blog, then asked Ben to pick his own words out of a lineup of forgeries. This week the hosts play a game of Ben or Bot, and you can play along too! 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 Thursday. And, if you're  fee...

What's the point of a personal wiki when AI agents have already read the entire internet? This week is about patterns for co-maintaining a personal wiki with an AI agent, and where its job ends and yours begins. 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 Thursday. And...

This week is a philosophical conversation about what you let into your head — the podcasts, the influencers, the political figures, the friends — and the difference between a snapshot you can hold at arm's length and a living relationship you're quietly being shaped by. Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcode.dev  and we're  @working...

Adam wrote a blog post this week about why AI keeps making him feel worse. This week is an honest conversation about the hypocrite's bind: needing to use the thing you recognize the harm of, and what that does to you. 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 Thursda...

"We have solved all of the world's problems." Observability past the point where more logs stop helping, continuous deployment when the customer is the federal government and the change-management board is a real room with real people in it, JSON's loose schema as a load-bearing feature rather than a quirk to apologise for, and the awkward question of who actually owns the code you...

It's 11:30 PM and you're still prompting. The code is better than anything you'd have shipped a year ago. The output is prolific, the roadmap is moving, the tooling is miraculous. So why are you still here at 11:30 PM? This week is an honest conversation about the strange shape of burnout in the AI era — the productivity that keeps compounding, the bar that keeps rising right along wit...

You spend all day steering AI through code. Then you step outside and it's steering everything else. AI is listening to therapy sessions and suggesting treatments to your therapist. Your spouse is arguing with a chatbot about where Savannah, Georgia is. You call a company for help and get handed from one AI pretending to be human to another AI pretending to be human. The crew has been noticing...

The productivity gains are real. So is the nagging feeling that something else might be happening. The crew use AI every day, and this week they sit with a question they can't quite shake: when the tool handles more and more of the thinking, what does that do to the person using it? Follow the show and be sure to  join the discussion on Discord ! Our website is  workingcode.dev  and we're ...

What if the best way to get good work out of AI is to stop being nice to it? Adam and Tim have both landed on the same uncomfortable discovery: when you pit AI agents against each other, with fake points, opposing incentives, and competing models, the output gets dramatically better than anything a single polite prompt can produce. Adam's bug-hunting pipeline hands fake rewards to sycophantic...

Tim spent a single Sunday afternoon with Claude and built Show Bot -- a sarcastic Discord bot trained on every Working Code transcript, complete with a Dungeon Crawler Carl personality, fallacy detection badges, and a talent for roasting anyone who tries to prompt-inject it. The conversation turns into a deep technical walkthrough of RAG pipelines, local models, cross-encoder reranking, and what h...

Testing sounds simple until you actually try it. Private methods that can't be reached without hacks. Dependency injection that doubles your architecture's complexity before a single assertion runs. Production code that slowly warps around your test suite instead of the other way around. Ben has spent his entire career shipping code without tests, and this week he decided to change that. T...

Do commit messages even matter anymore, or did pull requests kill them? Ben works one commit per PR and thinks the commit message  is  the PR description. Carol and Tim put all the context in the PR and treat commits as disposable breadcrumbs. Adam's somewhere in between — when he's not pushing thirty knife emojis and "nope, still not working" to QA. Meanwhile, Tim's back from...

For ten years, Adam's codebase has carried an ORM layer that everybody knew was wrong and nobody was touching. Nine hundred functions. Fifteen hundred files. The kind of job that gets solemnly nodded at in architecture meetings and quietly dies on the roadmap — every single year. So he stopped waiting for a volunteer and handed it to an AI agent instead. Claude's problem now. Follow the sh...

Ben had been riding high on vibe coding—throwaway scripts, zero attachment, pure productivity magic. Then he tried the same approach on a project he actually cares about and watched that 10x feeling crater to something closer to 10%. The bottleneck, it turns out, was never the typing. The hosts dig into what it feels like to let go of code you used to care about, whether "write-only code"...

Adam built a Claude Code skill for his Taffy REST framework and wanted to share it with the CFML community. Simple enough—create a GitHub repo, add some markdown files, done. But somewhere between "this is cool" and "anyone can install this," a familiar chill crept in. These skills are just text files. No checksums. No digital signatures. No verification that the thing you're i...

Ben's been circling vibe coding for months, kept at bay by a simple fear: what if he spends more time fighting the AI over formatting than actually building anything? What if he has to bolt on linters and test runners just to babysit the output? Then his work handed him a Claude plan, and he decided it was finally time to take the plunge. And then something unsettling happened—the code looked...

Tim stores his passwords in the browser. There, we said it. But before you grab your pitchforks, it turns out he's got an ancient password vault program backing him up—so he's not  completely  feral. Still, the hosts can't resist a good-natured intervention. What starts as a gentle roasting turns into a deep dive on password managers, shared family vaults, and why your retirement accou...

It's a new year and you've probably got a mental list of things you want to learn. But how do you decide what's worth the investment? Ben explores the difference between "just-in-case" learning and "just-in-time" learning, while grappling with AI anxiety and the fear of falling behind. Along the way, Tim shares his own struggle—turns out, saying goodbye to something you...

It's the holidays, and the Working Code crew has a gift for you: a peek behind the velvet rope. In the spirit of Captain Crunch's "Oops! All Berries," this week's episode ditches the usual format entirely. No triumphs, no fails, no structured topic—just pure, unfiltered aftershow energy. Tim unpacks Cory Doctorow's concept of "reverse centaurs"—what happens when you...

It's that time of year—each host reaches into Santa's sack of topics to see who's been naughty and who's been nice. Ben returns from visiting his employer's manufacturing headquarters in Georgia with some philosophical musings. Carol is on a mission to slash CI/CD build times. Adam has cautiously optimistic news about passkeys finally working (sometimes). And Tim reflects on a...