This episode is a practical guide to working with AI agents — covering what makes them different from chatbots, how to craft effective agentic prompts, how to calibrate trust and supervision across the autonomy spectrum, and best practices for coding, research, and personal assistant agents. John frames the core skill as delegation, not querying, and walks through the pitfalls that trip up new agent users.

Credits

Cover Art by Brianna Williams

TMOM Intro Music by Danny Meza

A special thank you to these talented artists for their contributions to the show.

Corrections: 

• When discussing an article on the “lethal trifecta,” John mistakenly names the author as Sam Willison, which is incorrect. The author’s correct name is Simon Willison. Our apologies for misspeak. Link to paper in the reference section.

• John incorrectly quoted the Manus tagline as “The AI that actually does things.” The original tagline was “The AI that DOES.” https://medium.com/@okkark.pro/from-shell-product-to-2-billion-the-manus-ai-story-nobody-saw-coming-d8308b57a42e

Links and Reference

• QuitGPT movement / 2.5M users / Pentagon deal: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/chatgpt-uninstalls-surged-by-295-after-dod-deal/

• GPT 5.4 rush release: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/05/openai-launches-gpt-5-4-with-pro-and-thinking-versions/

• Yann LeCun / AMI Labs / $1B seed round: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/09/yann-lecuns-ami-labs-raises-1-03-billion-to-build-world-models/

• DeepSeek V4 / Huawei Ascend chips: https://medium.com/@michael_68282/share-deepseek-v4-will-come-only-when-deepseek-is-ready-for-it-to-come-not-before-a778e55c2655

• "Hunter Alpha" — mystery 1T parameter model on Open Router: https://medium.com/@him2696/the-mystery-of-hunter-alpha-the-anonymous-1-trillion-parameter-ai-taking-over-openrouter-9e4e94dc0cb8

• MIT deep learning heart failure prediction: https://news.mit.edu/2026/can-ai-help-predict-which-heart-failure-patients-will-worsen-0312

• Claude found 500+ zero-day vulnerabilities in Firefox: https://www.anthropic.com/news/mozilla-firefox-security

• Claude Code hitting $1B run rate: Jhttps://www.linkedin.com/posts/chintanzalani_claude-code-has-hit-1b-run-rate-revenue-activity-7402079378714923008-TtUp/

• Anthropic Cowork launch / January 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/webinars/future-of-ai-at-work-introducing-cowork

• METR time horizons for AI agents: https://metr.org/time-horizons/

• Anthropic "Eight Trends" blog post / 60% AI use / <20% delegation: https://claude.com/blog/eight-trends-defining-how-software-gets-built-in-2026

• Opus 4.6 release blog safety warnings: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6

• Simon Willison’s lethal trifecta: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

• CrowdStrike report on OpenClaw: https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/what-security-teams-need-to-know-about-openclaw-ai-super-agent/

• Next episode papers — RLVR and "Let's Verify Step by Step": https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.20050

Abandoned Episode Titles

"Penny Wise, Prompt Foolish"

"My Agent Exposed my API Key to the Internet and All I Got Was This Lousy Podcast Episode"

"Twenty Percent of the Time, It Ignores Me All the Time"

“Read the Diff, Not the Vibes”