In this episode, Michael and Jake catch up on life and code. They talk about fatigue, seasonal shifts, lawn adventures, and the return of hay fever.

We dive into replacing a legacy Salesforce integration with Saloon, frustrations with mocks, and how Saloon fakes have improved testing workflows. Michael walks through his experiments with AI tools like Claude and opencode to prototype fake gateways - treating AI as a “junior dev” pair. The discussion covers gateway patterns, middleware, registry-based response handling, and strategies for testing Salesforce without polluting production environments.

From weeds and soil temps to software fakes and AI-driven dev, this one’s a mix of everyday life and practical engineering insights.

Show links

• LawnHub – Michael’s lawn care supplier
• Saloon (by Sam Carré) – Laravel/HTTP client package
• Salesforce – CRM platform discussed in the episode
• Mockery – PHP mocking framework
• opencode – terminal tool for AI coding (by SST’s Dax and Adam, Terminal Coffee)
• Claude – AI model used for coding exploration
• GitHub Copilot – AI coding assistant
• Stripe test cards – referenced in gateway fake analogy
• Bond for Livewire