North Meets South Web Podcast

In this episode, Michael shares details from a major internal platform shift at work, including the decision to completely remove an underused public JSON API and rebuild integrations around real customer needs instead of hypothetical use cases. The conversation dives deep into Laravel Passport, Sanctum, OAuth flows, request authorisation, and some tricky edge cases around testing authenticated APIs.

Jake then broadens the conversation into AI infrastructure, local model hosting, security implications of autonomous AI systems, NVIDIA hardware demand, and the future potential of photonic processors as a solution to the growing power and cooling bottlenecks facing AI workloads.

Show links

• Laravel Passport
• Laravel Sanctum
• Laravel Passport actingAs testing helpers
• PHP enums
• PHPStan
• Larastan
• Zapier
• Claude
• NVIDIA DGX systems
• Photonic processors

Michael and Jake are joined by David Hemphill to discuss David's macOS app Gent, a task runner built on the "Ralph loop" pattern for AI-powered coding workflows.

The conversation covers how Gent takes a project requirements document (PRD), breaks it into small tasks that fit within a single context window, and runs them sequentially or in parallel using copy-on-write clones and Git worktrees.

We discuss our own evolving workflows with Claude Code, including plan mode, the "Grill Me" skill for stress-testing plans, managing context windows, and the /rewind command.

Show Links

• David Hemphill
• Gent
• Ralph loop
• Conductor
• Polyscope
• Chief
• "Grill Me" skill
• Matt Pocock / AI Hero
• Solo
• The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
• Laracon

In this episode, Michael and Jake catch up ahead of Laracon and share a wild travel story involving flight changes, third-party booking headaches, and expensive rebooking.

Jake then shares a fun personal highlight: attending the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship and watching Michigan win.

The conversation shifts into development work, where Jake dives into building a centralised system for managing failed Laravel jobs across multiple applications. He explains the challenges of aggregating failed jobs without Horizon, how they built a custom package to expose APIs for inspecting and retrying jobs, and the nuances of Laravel's queue system.

They also explore ideas for turning this work into a Laracon talk, emphasising practical, experience-driven content over purely technical deep dives.

Show Links

• Laracon AU
• Laravel Horizon
• Sentry
• Dead Letter Queue

• (00:00) - Introduction and road to episode 200

In this episode, Jake and Michael dive into modern infrastructure security practices, sparked by an annual audit and the painful process of rotating AWS IAM tokens. That experience leads into a broader discussion on why long-lived credentials in GitHub Actions are risky, and how OIDC (OpenID Connect) enables a more secure, short-lived, role-based alternative.

Show links

• Scout Suite
• OpenID Connect (OIDC)
• Laravel Forge
• Laravel Horizon
• Scramble
• Claude
• LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)

In this episode, we discuss using `claude --worktree` to spin up parallel feature work, and the unexpected friction that can arise when your editor doesn’t play nicely with nested worktrees.

Jake shares his experience running multiple Claude agents in parallel and problems that surfaced in PhpStorm. Michael explains how he structures worktrees differently, avoiding those issues, and the two compare workflows between PhpStorm and Neovim.

Show Links

• claude --worktree
• Git worktrees
• PhpStorm
• Neovim
• Tmux
• LazyGit
• Using GitHub CLI in workflows
• archtechx/enums
• Arbor
• Laracon US
• Git Worktree Hub plugin for PhpStorm

Michael and Jake discuss Jake's device charging chaos, household optimisation, international power outlets, and vector embeddings.

Show links

• Gitryin
  • Magnetic 3-in-1 wireless charger
  • Desktop charging station 12-in-1
• Corona discharge
• Laracon US 
• ElevenLabs
• Daily Dose of DS (Data Science)
• Msty
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Laravel AI

Michael and Jake catch up on what’s been occupying their time lately, from AI tooling experiments to new developer workflows, before closing with a broader reflection on how new technologies are often misunderstood at first.

Show links

• OpenClaw / Clawd Bot / Moltbot
• Arbor
• AI horseless carriages

Jake and Michael return for 2026 and talk about their evolving experiences with AI; what it’s good at, what it’s not, and how it’s changing the way they work.

Show links

• OpenAI / ChatGPT
• Anthropic / Claude (Sonnet & Opus)
• OpenCode (multi-provider AI coding interface)
• Home Assistant
• Zigbee temperature sensors
• GitHub Copilot
• Ollama (local LLM runner)
• NVIDIA DGX Spark
• Amp Code
• MiniMax M2.1 model
• Software for an audience of one
• Arbor
• OpenCode Desktop has workspaces support
• Opus 4.5 is going to change everything

Michael and Jake open with retro arcade serendipity (a Mortal Kombat cabinet sighting!) and tumble into family bowling, kid-approved card games, and why tactile gadgets are back in style.

Then they pivot hard into dev-mode: shadcn/ui (and shadcn-vue), Inertia, React-ish forms, and the age-old tradeoff between “batteries-included” simplicity and modern real-time UX.

Highlights:

• Mortal Kombat cabinet & mini arcades, gift ideas for Laracon AU
• Duckpin bowling explainer and family bowling stories (plus UNO, Yahtzee, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza)
• The “analog is cool again” thread: mechanical keyboards, a Keychron board, and a retro 3D-printed mouse shell for a Logitech M185
• Dev deep-dive: shadcn docs, Inertia forms, partial reloads vs full refresh, Livewire/Alpine, and real-time updates with Pusher/Reverb

Show links

• RetroPie / Arcade1Up
• Laracon AU
• Duckpin bowling
• Keychron keyboard
• 3D-printed retro mouse shell for Logitech M185
• Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
• Inertia.js
• shadcn/ui
• shadcn-vue
• Livewire
• Alpine.js
• Pusher
• Laravel Reverb
• Axios
• fetch

Jake and Michael dive into a wide range of topics, from coding practices in Laravel to the evolving role of AI in software development. They kick things off with daylight savings and weekend updates before moving into technical discussions on authorization, policies, and form requests in Laravel.

The conversation expands to cover recent changes in middleware and controller patterns, contextual attributes in the service container, and practical approaches to request validation.

Later, the focus shifts toward AI tools like Claude, Grok, and Cursor, including their strengths, frustrations, and industry-wide adoption pressures. We reflect on the uneasy balance between developer control and AI assistance, wrapping up with thoughts on productivity, value, and what it means to let machines write code.

Show links

• Lawn Hub
• Arcade 1Up
• RetroPie
• Mortal Kombat cabinet
• Nuno's authorization on form requests
• Contextual Attributes
• Grok Code Fast 1