Today we examine what it really means for something to be "political", and consider the situation for engineers just trying to get things done when their technology becomes a controversy.

Resources

• Why Linus is right and AI is wrong - Ray Myers
• Is it ethical to use AI? - Charity Majors
• Referenced thread from Linux Kernel Mailing List
• ⁠Software Should Work⁠⁠ conference

Hosted by Ray Myers and Liz Martinez. Find us online at ⁠⁠thecodingagency.org⁠⁠.

The industry is due for a crash course in cybersecurity as we look at the first documented AI-driven ransomware operation.

Resources

• JADEPUFFER: Agentic ransomware for automated database extortion - SysDig report
• OWASP Top 10 web application security risks
• XKCD "Exploits of a Mom" comic explained
• CVE - Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures program
• Ransomware - wikipedia article

Hosted by Ray Myers and Liz Martinez. Find us online at ⁠thecodingagency.org⁠.

Today we get our hands dirty running AI language models on our very own (and very hot) laptop!

Exploring the tradeoffs, we see how this approach addresses common AI objections including privacy and resource usage. Local AI is a promising path, though still a bit tricky to get up and running.

Concepts

• AI Ethics
• Open weight models
• Model size

References

• LM Studio
• Local LLMs are getting easier - 2026 guide by Sitepoint
• Eliza web version
• Gemma models by Google DeepMind
• Llama models by Meta
• Local AI coding is finally good enough - video by Forrest Knight
• Pydantic AI Python library including web chat UI

Hosted by Ray Myers and Liz Martinez. Find us online at thecodingagency.org.

High drama ensues as the US government forces Anthropic to take down it's new model Fable. How did we get here? In this episode, Ray and Liz unpack some of the context and put a critical eye on fear-based fundraising from top AI labs.

Concepts

• AI Ethics
• Frontier models
• Jailbreak prompts

References

• Anthropic responds to the Fable Ban
• The Claude Shutdown Is a Total Sh*tshow video by House of El
• Dear A.I. Companies, the Doom Trolling Needs to Stop op-ed by Cal Newport
• Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical by Emily Bender
• ⁠Gandalf prompt hacking⁠ game by Lakera
• Let's Fire AGI video by Ray

Hosted by Ray Myers and Liz Martinez.

For our series premier, Liz Martinez joins host Ray Myers to design and build her first app using coding agents, with some bumps along the way!

Concepts covered

• Product Requirements Document (PRD)
• Tech Stack
• Domain Modeling
• Blank Canvas

Follow us online at thecodingagency.org.