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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 with it, and the quiet feeling that somewhere in the last year the craft stopped feeling quite like yours. 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.

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 it everywhere, and this week they compare notes on what it actually feels like when AI stops being a tool you chose and starts being a thing that just happens to you. Links mentioned in the show: hairstyles.netRunPee.comFollow 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. LinksBen Nadel's BlogFollow 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.

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. LinksBen Nadel's BlogConventional CommitsFollow 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.

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.

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. LinksVibe Coding by Gene Kim & Steve Yegge - The audiobook on AI-assisted development1Password: From Magic to Malware - How OpenClaw's agent skills became a supply chain attack surfaceTLDR Newsletter - Source of the "write-only code" conceptFollow 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.

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. LinksAdam's Dotfiles Blog Post - Getting his shit together with dotfiles, Brewfile, and 1Password SSH agentCF Community LLM Marketplace - Adam's community marketplace for CFML-related Claude skillsSteve Yegge's Google Platforms Rant - The infamous accidentally-public Google+ postVibe Coding by Gene Kim & Steve Yegge - The audiobook Ben's been enjoyingSocket.dev - Supply chain security for npm dependenciesFollow 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.

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. LinksAdam's Ralph Workflow for Claude Code - Adam's blog post with his implementationMatt Pocock's Ralph Primer Video - The workflow Adam adapted for automated iterative developmentAlgorithm Maze Race - Tim's vibe-coded game on itch.ioPro tip: Use /resume in Claude Code to return to prior sessionsFollow 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.

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. LinksClaude Code - Anthropic's CLI for coding with ClaudeRalph Wiggum Plugin - Official Claude Code plugin for autonomous loopsEverything is a Ralph Loop - Geoffrey Huntley's deep dive on the technique 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.

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.

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.

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 DisappointingDriving Xiaomi's Electric Car: Are we Cooked? 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.