Working Code

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 @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/254-claudependent/

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 agents and then throws the scores in the trash. Tim made Claude and ChatGPT argue for twelve rounds straight until they both said "ship it". 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/253-the-adversarial-agents-are-arguing-again/

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 happens when you just start building things that make you laugh. 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/252-meet-showbot/

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. The crew walks him through every trap he steps on, and a few they've been stuck in themselves. Links Ben Nadel's Blog 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/251-ben-vs-tests/

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 emergency eye surgery with a gas bubble floating around his eyeball. Links Ben Nadel's Blog Conventional Commits 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/250-stuff-things-wip-commit-messages/

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 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/249-10-years-of-tech-debt/

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" is actually the future, and the growing gap between building software and keeping it alive. Links Vibe Coding by Gene Kim & Steve Yegge - The audiobook on AI-assisted development 1Password: From Magic to Malware - How OpenClaw's agent skills became a supply chain attack surface TLDR Newsletter - Source of the "write-only code" concept 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/248-ai-all-the-way-down/

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 installing won't quietly exfiltrate your code to some server in Eastern Europe. Sound familiar? It should. We've been here before—back when passwords lived in plain text and "security" meant hoping nobody looked too hard. The hosts dig into the unsettling parallels between today's LLM plugin ecosystem and the wild west of early internet security. Links Adam's Dotfiles Blog Post - Getting his shit together with dotfiles, Brewfile, and 1Password SSH agent CF Community LLM Marketplace - Adam's community marketplace for CFML-related Claude skills Steve Yegge's Google Platforms Rant - The infamous accidentally-public Google+ post Vibe Coding by Gene Kim & Steve Yegge - The audiobook Ben's been enjoying Socket.dev - Supply chain security for npm dependencies 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/247-trust-me-bro-llm-security/

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 like his code. Same line lengths. Same method ordering. Same obsessive formatting. Nobody told it to do that. It just... knew. Meanwhile, Adam has gone full mad scientist. His "Ralph" workflow runs Claude in a loop, feeding it tasks from a JSON file while he walks away to eat dinner. When he comes back, features are done. Tests pass. The machine just keeps building. It's the kind of setup that makes you wonder why you're still manually typing commands into a terminal. Links Adam's Ralph Workflow for Claude Code - Adam's blog post with his implementation Matt Pocock's Ralph Primer Video - The workflow Adam adapted for automated iterative development Algorithm Maze Race - Tim's vibe-coded game on itch.io Pro tip: Use /resume in Claude Code to return to prior sessions 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/246-bens-feeling-the-vibe/

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 account deserves better than Chrome's autofill. Carol reveals her galaxy-brain solution to her husband constantly forgetting his master password: she just signed him into her account. He still doesn't know he doesn't have his own 1Password. 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/245-browser-passwords-youre-doing-it-wrong/

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 built hits different. 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 feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/244-ben-vs-2026/

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're not assisted by AI, but reduced to its peripheral? Meanwhile, Adam drops a perspective on humanity's place in the universe that reframes everything you thought you knew about time. That, plus Carol humbling an AI chatbot, the death of the golden age of television, and whether the books you loved as a kid were actually any good. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/243-oops-all-aftershow/

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 TLDR article suggesting that the management skills you've built—knowing what to build and what not to build—might be exactly what AI-era coding demands. Plus: December blues, mushroom tea for focus, and jQuery as peak imperative JavaScript. Links mentioned: Owning A Lucid Has Been Super Disappointing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WiQAOmESH0 Driving Xiaomi's Electric Car: Are we Cooked? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb6H7trzMfI 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/242-all-i-want-for-christmas-is-faster-builds/

How do you teach an LLM to write code you can actually trust? Carol's federal government team has been tasked with exploring unattended AI code generation, so she came to Adam and Tim for advice. Their first piece of guidance: whatever tools you pick today will be obsolete by the time you're done evaluating them. The real goal isn't adopting a specific workflow—it's building the skills to ride the wave. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/241-welcoming-our-new-robot-overlords/

Remember that you will die. That's the meaning behind "Memento Mori," and it's the theme of this week's episode. Guest Shawn Oden, joins Adam, Ben, and Tim to discuss digital death preparedness for geeks. Inspired by clearing out his grandmother's house and buying his late best friend's computers to protect his digital legacy (and potentially lost Bitcoin), Shawn advocates for documenting passwords, creating wills, setting up power of attorney, and having honest conversations with loved ones. The hosts explore practical steps like using 1Password with shared family vaults, the importance of organ donation documentation, and the philosophical tension between honoring a deceased person's wishes versus meeting the needs of those left behind. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Links & Resources In Case You Get Hit by a Bus (book) eol-dr - End of Life Digital Resources on GitHub EOL-RalphHightower - Another digital estate planning resource NOLO - Get Your Affairs in Order - Legal self-help resources Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/240-memento-mori-with-shawn-oden/

How do you stay motivated when you're stuck building features you don't understand? Carol brings a conversation she's been having with her team about feeling like a "feature factory"—churning out work without clarity on what problem they're solving or what value it adds. When every standup is "is this done?" instead of "have we made anything better?", burnout follows fast. The hosts explore the tension between customer-driven features, competitive pressure, arbitrary boss decisions, and the human need to feel connected to meaningful work. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/239-welcome-to-the-feature-factory/

What happens when your passion project becomes so successful that you have to shut it down? Advent of Code creator Eric Wastl announced he was scaling back from 25 days to 12 and removing the global leaderboard. The reason? People were feeling bad at their jobs because they couldn't solve puzzles in 45 seconds like the leaderboard speedrunners. Quiet UI launched with excitement, garnered incredible buzz, and shut down three weeks later when the demands became overwhelming. This week, the hosts explore how good intentions collide with bad behavior—where success becomes punishment, communities ruin what was made for them, and the people who just wanted to share something cool are forced to walk away. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/238-this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/

When you use ChatGPT instead of Google, you're not just getting a faster answer—you're cutting out the content creators who made that knowledge possible. In this week's episode, we explore the economics of AI search, the death of Stack Overflow, the junior developer problem writ large, and why capitalism keeps pushing moral responsibility onto individuals who have the least power to change anything. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/237-the-internet-is-eating-itself-and-were-just-watching/

In this week's episode the gather round and share what they've been up to for trunk or treat. Adam shares his waning motivation for his Jump Run side project, we explore sustainable motivation, the rewrite temptation, and whether it's okay to just... do the fun thing sometimes. Meanwhile, Tim provides a reality check on AI coding tools—he spent real hours comparing GitHub Copilot and Codex on actual work, and the results are messier than the hype suggests. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/236-trunk-or-treat/

How do you keep millions of people safe on 40 different dating sites while simultaneously figuring out what drives them to buy memberships? Sean Corfield joins Adam and Ben to discuss the surprisingly complex engineering and business challenges of observing user behavior at massive scale. Sean runs us through fraud detection and prevention (including devastating "pig butchering" romance scams), database architecture at enormous scale (700GB databases with 250M+ row tables), custom domain-specific languages for writing business rules without touching SQL, real-time scoring systems with hundreds of rules, zero-downtime deployments and schema migrations, and the constant cat-and-mouse game between scammers and detection systems. 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 Wednesday. And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media. Full show notes and transcript here: https://workingcode.dev/episodes/235-when-romance-becomes-a-database-problem/