Working Code

Hosted by Adam Tuttle, Ben Nadel, Carol Hamilton, Tim Cunningham

Episodes

Language

EN-US

About the show

Water-cooler conversation about web-development. We want to entertain, inspire, and motivate you -- or to put it another way, make your coding career more enjoyable.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

1 hr 7 min

270: Hot Takes on Hot Takes

We're back after a week off and we have some things to get off our chest. Carol's agent doesn't understand auth, Ben explores the nature of performative coding, Adam agreed that meetings are for decisions, then spent two hours writing an email to prove it, and Tim's AI is better than yours. This week we have a grab bag of hot takes and hot takes on hot takes. 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 . Mentioned in this episode: Taffy — Adam's CFML REST framework, the counterexample of a public repo whose product is the API, not the source Subway Takes — the 100% agree / 100% disagree format the table falls into mid-meeting-takes Adam's dotfiles blog post — the git bare repo trick for tracking a gitignored personal CLAUDE.md, promised on air With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

53 min

269: The AI Anxiety Draft

Worrying about AI is the easy part. Everyone already has a list. The interesting part is what lands on it, what doesn't, and why. From military use, to an AI slop takeover, to the possibility that the tools are making us stupider. This week, the hosts respond to a question from the State of Devs survey: “Which of these general AI risks and issues are you most concerned about?” 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 . Mentioned in this episode: State of Devs 2025 survey — the questions that set off the discussion; the survey itself is now closed OpenAI's Hugging Face security incident — what happened when agents escaped a constrained cyber evaluation LinkedIn's campaign against AI slop — the official explanation of its new reporting control Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl — tools for publishers to allow, block, or charge AI crawlers With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

1 hr 0 min

268: Nobody Wants to Meet Up Anymore

Nobody went to conferences for the talks. You went for the hallway, and for a roomful of people who'd made the same odd career bet you had. We didn't know how good we had it. COVID hit, AI is now everyone's best buddy, and now all these meetups and spaces are slowly disappearing. This week the hosts go looking for what's left of the developer hang. 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 . Mentioned in this episode: Anthropic's Project Vend — the AI-run shop behind the tungsten cube story With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

53 min

267: Prove You Are Human

Tim is trying to hire remote developers, but the interviews have started to feel like one long CAPTCHA. Before he can decide who's right for the job, he has to figure out whether he's interviewing the candidate or ChatGPT. This week the hosts discuss the state of remote developer interviews in the AI era. 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 . Mentioned in this episode: Mostly Technical #29: “Super Epic Crazy” — the source of the cover-letter story about most applicants missing simple instructions Roberto Serrano on AI fraud at Brown University — the course whose take-home exams triggered the in-class-final story With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

49 min

266: Strugglemaxing

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 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 . Mentioned in this episode: Ronny Chieng's Harvard Class Day speech — the "your generation's job is to kill AI" address. With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

53 min

265: Knowing When to Stop

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 you that you owe it the rest of the way, and how freeing it is to decide you don't. 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 . Mentioned in this episode: 249: 10 Years of Tech Debt — where Adam first handed the ORM layer to an agent With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

1 hr 1 min

264: Look Busy, Claude's Working

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 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 . Mentioned in this episode: xkcd: "Compiling" With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

1 hr 6 min

263: Intimacy with the Code

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 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 .

1 hr 2 min

262: Zen and the Art of AI-Driven Maintenance

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 Bluesky . New episodes drop weekly on Thursday. And, if you're feeling the love , support us on Patreon . Mentioned in this episode: Taffy — the REST framework for ColdFusion and Lucee Rest Assured by Adam Tuttle Postman Engineering Explained With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .

1 hr 2 min

261: The Ben Turing Test

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 feeling the love , support us on Patreon . Mentioned in this episode: Play "Ben's Blog or AI?" yourself The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans MassTransit With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media . Full show notes and transcript here .