The Standup with ThePrimeagen

The crew talks about one of the biggest debates in programming right now: do lines of code actually matter? They dive into AI coding tools, developer productivity, and why measuring engineers by code output might be completely broken. Along the way they roast the viral “burned out my USB-C ports using Claude Code” tweet, share stories about gamifying developer metrics, and break down some surprisingly wild security vulnerabilities in both Windows Notepad and Notepad++. A mix of tech insight, developer culture, and plenty of chaos.

We break down the Open Claw insanity taking over Silicon Valley, including the head of AI safety accidentally nuking her own inbox, developers wiring autonomous agents directly into their lives, and the growing trend of giving AI sudo access like that’s a normal thing to do. Trash admits he’s vibe-coding secret iOS apps, including one that may or may not speedrun divorce. We debate AI personal assistants, spam calls, self-hosting myths, Mac mini bot farms, and whether anyone is actually running these models locally. We also dissect the most awkward AI summit moment of the year: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei refusing to hold hands on stage next to the Prime Minister of India. Theater kid energy meets billion-dollar rivalry. Read the Harper’s piece we reference in this episode — a deep dive into AI startup culture and the hype surrounding it: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/

Ben and Alexis join the show to talk about their new sketch comedy series, the creative chaos behind it, and what it actually takes to ship something big online. From quitting tech jobs to filming 12-hour shoot days, unreleased music videos, and creative mental breakdowns, this episode is a behind-the-scenes look at building something ambitious with friends. It’s comedy, tech, risk, and a whole lot of “just make the thing.”

We used to be gamers… and honestly, we still kind of are. In this special Standup episode, the crew skips the usual news cycle and just talks games: Terraria obsession, Slay the Spire addiction, Starcraft war stories, Pokémon Go team challenges, and the dangerous temptation of getting “back into it.” Expect chaos, nostalgia, and way too many side quests.

ssh terminal.shop This week on The Standup, the crew digs into the chaos of AI “skills,” agent tooling, and the growing security risks nobody seems to be paying attention to. From hallucinated commands spreading across GitHub to supply-chain nightmares and wild real-world examples, it’s a funny, slightly terrifying look at where AI tooling is headed. Laughs, hot takes, and a reality check for anyone letting agents run loose on their machine.

Thanks to this week's sponsor: Code Rabbit https://coderabbit.link/primeagen-vscode If you're tired of developers just replying with LGTM, then you NEED Code Rabbit. An actually useful application of AI where it can use your own rules, lints and more to provide instant feedback in your editor OR a review on Github. This week we’re joined by Luke to break down why RAM prices are exploding, how AI and hyperscalers are reshaping the hardware market, and why consumers are getting left behind. We dig into DDR5, HBM, data centers, enterprise priorities, and what all of this means for your next PC upgrade—plus a few dumb jokes and hard truths along the way.

Sam Altman’s “Worldcoin” is real… and somehow it’s even weirder than it sounds. TJ walks the crew through the orb, iris scans, “proof of human,” and the pitch for AI-funded UBI. We break down the funding, the rollout, the controversies, and why this all feels insanely ominous. Plus: classic Standup chaos, conspiracy energy, and too many jokes about where the orb shouldn’t go.

SQUASH THOSE BUGS with Sentry - the best way to monitor your bugs in production (we know you have a lot of them) and fix them with ease. Check out https://sentry.io and get started today! Casey breaks down the AWS outage in great detail with literally the coolest whiteboard demonstration you have ever seen.

Jon Blow shows up to the podcast and tells us all about the journey from Braid to his newest game, Order of the Sinking Star. We talk Jai, Braid and so much more. Hope you enjoy the episode!

We each give our best and spiciest predictions for 2026 - Amazon, AI, Tech, Hacks, and so much more are in this episode. Hope you enjoy it, and enjoy the ad from our sponsor Code Rabbit! https://trm.sh/coderabbit

Thanks to Planetscale for Open Source Santa this year! They gave us $30k to give away to open source projects we love, and so each of us picked a project we liked. We also gave some money from twitch chat, youtube chat and some final surprises! We hope you like the episode! Merry Christmas!!

We finally figured out WHY AWS had their outage… Casey reveals the absolutely unhinged and crazy story. 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:54 - Caseys Intro 00:01:15 - The Setup 00:02:55 - The Story 00:08:44 - The Post Mortem 00:12:11 - The Informants 00:14:10 - The Suspect 00:15:34 - The Code 00:20:33 - The Deal 00:23:05 - The Conclusion 00:24:37 - The Debrief 00:26:40 - Google Testing Utility Failure 00:28:43 - Production Code is Forever 00:40:10 - Outro

The gang talks about the craziest onboarding ever… and why Tom is a Genius! If you're on Mac or Windows, check out tuple today! And if you're on Linux, let's just say come back and check soon 🙂 Say thanks to our sponsor by checking out https://tuple.app/prime CODE: PRIME

https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream on Twitch https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Want to order coffee over SSH? ssh terminal.shop Become Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (plus i make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis

Thanks to this week's sponsor: Code Rabbit If you're tired of developers just replying with LGTM, then you NEED Code Rabbit. An actually useful application of AI where it can use your own rules, lints and more to provide instant feedback in your editor OR a review on Github. https://coderabbit.link/primeagen-vscode Fil-C creators: https://x.com/filpizlo https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream on Twitch https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Want to order coffee over SSH? ssh terminal.shop Become Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (plus i make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:29 - Fil-C Demo 00:07:56 - Security 00:11:52 - Game Engine Use Case 00:14:20 - What cant it do 00:18:02 - Different to ASan 00:23:57 - How Fil-C works 00:36:38 - Choosing Fil-C over Rust 00:51:31 - Outro

https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream on Twitch https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Want to order coffee over SSH? ssh terminal.shop Become Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (plus i make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:23 - the issue 00:04:01 - the takes 00:09:16 - the bug 00:10:22 - AI Disclosure 00:11:42 - Prime weighs in 00:13:28 - Disclosure credit 00:14:40 - Big Sleep 00:15:24 - AI Bugs Finders vs Static Analysis 00:17:40 - Do they owe them anything at all 00:19:40 - Is this optional or worthwhile 00:23:33 - Bugs in general 00:26:08 - Triage timespend 00:27:01 - Outro

Thanks to this week's sponsor: Code Rabbit If you're tired of developers just replying with LGTM, then you NEED Code Rabbit. An actually useful application of AI where it can use your own rules, lints and more to provide instant feedback in your editor OR a review on Github. https://coderabbit.link/primeagen-vscode https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream on Twitch https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Want to order coffee over SSH? ssh terminal.shop Become Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (plus i make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:14 - Unitree Robot Security 00:02:09 - Merge Cop ep. 1 00:03:33 - Base unit robot 00:07:50 - Back to the Unitree story 00:12:07 - Robots spread virus by proximity 00:13:13 - Skynet is coming 00:15:59 - Automation for no reason 00:19:51 - Software Success 00:22:01 - Whos gonna buy these 00:24:55 - Laundry 00:26:57 - what are you going to do after robots 00:31:50 - Early adoption risks 00:37:32 - Price 00:38:22 - Band name loop holes 00:39:34 - Jelly eyeballs 00:43:40 - Outro

https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream on Twitch https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Want to order coffee over SSH? ssh terminal.shop Become Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (plus i make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis

https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream on Twitch https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Want to order coffee over SSH? ssh terminal.shop Become Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (plus i make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis 00:00:00 - Intro & Snacks 00:02:24 - AWS Outage and companies effected 00:07:54 - Insident report 00:10:22 - How do data centers work? 00:20:07 - Actual Post mortem 00:22:00 - Vibe coding brought down the internet 00:24:00 - Why is every company on US-EAST-1 00:27:00 - CDNS and cloudDBS 00:28:49 - 8sleep rant 00:35:08 - Dumb IOT devices 00:39:11 - Culture of new product companies 00:43:00 - How much is cloud storage 00:44:05 - OpenAI Browser, Atlas 00:56:00 - Outro

https://twitch.tv/ThePrimeagen - I Stream on Twitch https://twitter.com/terminaldotshop - Want to order coffee over SSH? ssh terminal.shop Become Backend Dev: https://boot.dev/prime (plus i make courses for them) This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer. Great News? Want me to research and create video????: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThePrimeagen Kinesis Advantage 360: https://bit.ly/Prime-Kinesis