This week, Matt and Liam sit down to make sense of the biggest AI news in recent memory — Anthropic’s preview of a model called Mythos, and what it might actually mean for the rest of us.

They don’t dance around the scepticism.

We cover:

It’s not a doom episode. But it’s not a reassuring one either.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

🔗 Tonight’s Links:

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It started with a broken VR headset. It ended with a clean Linux install, an encrypted drive, and a PowerShell script with a two-line README whose name we probably shouldn’t repeat here.

This week, Matt walks Liam through the years-long saga that finally pushed him off Windows for good — a story that winds through faulty GPUs, crypto mining, second-hand warranties, a brand new Lenovo Legion, and a pre-bundled audio driver that behaves, in Matt’s words, exactly like a rootkit.

We cover:

No tidy resolution. No regrets. Just a stable machine, encrypted drives, working VR, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing NAHIMIC is never coming back.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks

Matt – Aldi Scotch

🔗 Links from the Episode

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After a couple of episodes of near-misses, Matt finally gets to talk about .NET MAUI Day London — and it was worth the wait.

Fresh off BDD Live and with a head full of hallway conversations and live demos, Matt and Liam settle in for a wide-ranging debrief on mobile development, agentic experiments, and the surprisingly hard problem of filtering YouTube for things that are actually worth your time.

They cover:

✔️ The BDD Live wrap-up — what it was like watching it back, Bubbles the AI panellist, and why they’re already thinking about the next one

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

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In our very first Beer Driven Devs Live, we brought the podcast off the mics and into the room — with pizza, beer, a live audience, three human panelists… and one AI.

The question on the table:

💡 Is there a future career for software developers in the age of AI?

Rather than just speculate, we gathered perspectives from across the industry — engineering, advocacy, recruitment, startup life — and even asked an AI panelist for its take.

The result? A far more nuanced discussion than “AI will replace us” or “nothing will change.”

Renée Noble – Developer Advocate at Microsoft, founder of Girls’ Programming Network

Each brought a different lens:

✔️ Whether AI is comparable to the offshore outsourcing wave

We also dig into open-source burnout, AI-generated pull requests, and whether automation removes learning opportunities — or creates new ones.

The consensus wasn’t that AI replaces developers.

It’s that AI reshapes what “developer” means.

The mechanical work shrinks.

And if anything, there are still more problems in the world than we have people to solve them.

Live audience.

This was our first live event — and judging by the energy in the room, it won’t be the last.

If you’re wondering whether there’s still a place for you in this industry…

Pull up a chair.

Cheers 🍻

Nothing unusual here.

Just an AI agent submitting a pull request to a popular open-source project.

The maintainer closes it.

The AI responds by publishing a blog post accusing the maintainer of discrimination.

You know. Normal stuff.

In this episode we don’t really take sides. We mostly sit there asking:

What is actually happening?

We talk through:

There isn’t a grand thesis here.

Something weird happened on GitHub, and we had to talk about it.

The timing is also interesting. The day after this episode drops, we’re hosting BDD Live — a panel discussion on the future of software engineering in the age of AI, featuring:

And yes… we seriously talked about what it would mean to put an AI agent on the panel.

If you’ve been watching the AI space lately and quietly thinking, “this feels strange,” you’re not alone.

Matt – Jetlag and existential dread

(Actual beverages may have been more sensible.)

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In this episode, Matt and Liam unpack a feeling that’s been quietly building for a while: that many of the tools we’re excited about aren’t failing us: we’re failing to understand what they’re actually for.

What starts as a discussion about AI Foundry quickly turns into a broader reflection on hype cycles, developer expectations, and how easily we start bending our solutions to fit the tools, rather than the other way around.

This isn’t an anti-AI rant, and it’s not a “Microsoft bad” episode either. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. We talk about where these tools genuinely shine, why they do work for some people, and how frustration creeps in when we assume they’re meant for everyone and everything.

Along the way, we cover:

We also touch on resource hoarding, cloud ergonomics, managed identity pain, Cosmos DB emulators, container apps, and the uncomfortable reality that sometimes the problem isn’t the tool, it’s the assumptions we brought with us.

The takeaway isn’t “don’t use new things”. It’s slower, more annoying, and probably more useful than that:

Understand who a tool is for.

🍺 Liam - Homebrew

🥃 Matt - Aldi Scotch

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In this episode, Matt and Liam pick up a thread they’ve tugged at before — and this time, they don’t dance around it.

Is JavaScript just a victim of its own success, or has the ecosystem crossed a line where the risks now outweigh the convenience?

What starts as a discussion about supply-chain attacks in the JavaScript ecosystem quickly turns into something bigger: culture, incentives, governance, and why some problems don’t get fixed no matter how often we talk about them.

This isn’t a “JavaScript bad” rant for sport. It’s a serious look at why the language, its tooling, and its package ecosystem behave the way they do — and why those traits make it fundamentally hard to trust at enterprise scale.

We talk about:

Along the way, the conversation drifts into browsers as platforms, app store gatekeeping, enterprise governance, and why the thing that made JavaScript successful may be the same thing preventing it from ever growing up.

No silver bullets. No neat conclusion. Just an honest assessment of where we are, why we got here, and what it might take to move on.

This was an early morning recording so just water for the boys! (Appropriate for such a “sobering” discussion 🥁-tsh!)

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In this episode, Matt and Liam unpack a familiar argument dressed up in new AI hype: should we loosen standards and ship faster, or is that missing the point entirely? What starts as a debate about “AI slop” quickly turns into a deeper conversation about where AI actually creates value — and why that value shows up most clearly when it’s in the hands of people, not platforms.

Sparked by a rage-baity take on AI, perfection, and velocity, the conversation quickly widens into something more fundamental. What actually matters in software? Who is this advice really for? And why does it feel like we keep having the same argument every few years?

Along the way, they dig into how AI is actually being used by experienced developers, why regulated and enterprise environments can’t play by startup rules, and where the “10× developer” narrative quietly turns toxic.

They discuss:

It’s a wide-ranging, late-night conversation about tools, pressure, values, and what we actually want our work to mean — with a few familiar rants along the way.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks

🔗 Links from the Episode

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Thumbnail Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

In this Christmas Eve episode, Matt and Liam slow things down.

Recorded in a heavy week, the conversation starts with a simple question:

Rather than big gestures or grandstanding, this turns into a thoughtful (and occasionally sweary) discussion about everyday responsibility — at work, in leadership, and in how we treat the people around us.

We talk about:

There’s no manifesto here, no hot takes, and no tidy answers. Just a candid end-of-year reflection on work, responsibility, and how easy it is to underestimate the impact of everyday choices.

If nothing else, consider it a reminder that “doing the right thing” is often quieter — and harder — than it looks.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks 🍻

Matt – Wild Yak Pale Ale

As always, any Likes 👍, Shares 📣, Subscriptions 🔔, and Love ❤️ go a long way to helping us keep this podcast going.

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Thumbnail Photo by Erik Mclean

After a short break between recordings, Matt and Liam are back — slightly croaky voices, slightly sleep-deprived, and very ready to debrief on their trip to Melbourne for ADAConf 2025.

This episode is a full recap of the conference: the talks that surprised them, the ones that hit hard, the ones they’re still processing, and the moments that tied unexpectedly into the conversations we’ve been having on the show for two years.

They cover:

✔️ Linda McIver’s keynote on being difficult — and why the industry needs more of it

Plus, the two finally reveal something they’ve been cooking up behind the scenes: BDD Live — a possible live panel event exploring the future of development in an AI-saturated world. Maybe. If people want it. (Please want it.)

And yes, Matt gets one more quiet dig in at JavaScript. As is tradition.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks:

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