It's the holidays, and the Working Code crew has a gift for you: a peek behind the velvet rope. In the spirit of Captain Crunch's "Oops! All Berries," this week's episode ditches the usual format entirely. No triumphs, no fails, no structured topic—just pure, unfiltered aftershow energy.

Tim unpacks Cory Doctorow's concept of "reverse centaurs"—what happens when you're not assisted by AI, but reduced to its peripheral? Meanwhile, Adam drops a perspective on humanity's place in the universe that reframes everything you thought you knew about time. That, plus Carol humbling an AI chatbot, the death of the golden age of television, and whether the books you loved as a kid were actually any good.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

It's that time of year—each host reaches into Santa's sack of topics to see who's been naughty and who's been nice. Ben returns from visiting his employer's manufacturing headquarters in Georgia with some philosophical musings. Carol is on a mission to slash CI/CD build times. Adam has cautiously optimistic news about passkeys finally working (sometimes). And Tim reflects on a TLDR article suggesting that the management skills you've built—knowing what to build and what not to build—might be exactly what AI-era coding demands.

Plus: December blues, mushroom tea for focus, and jQuery as peak imperative JavaScript.

Links mentioned:

• Owning A Lucid Has Been Super Disappointing
• Driving Xiaomi's Electric Car: Are we Cooked?

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

How do you teach an LLM to write code you can actually trust? Carol's federal government team has been tasked with exploring unattended AI code generation, so she came to Adam and Tim for advice. Their first piece of guidance: whatever tools you pick today will be obsolete by the time you're done evaluating them. The real goal isn't adopting a specific workflow—it's building the skills to ride the wave.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Remember that you will die. That's the meaning behind "Memento Mori," and it's the theme of this week's episode. Guest Shawn Oden, joins Adam, Ben, and Tim to discuss digital death preparedness for geeks. Inspired by clearing out his grandmother's house and buying his late best friend's computers to protect his digital legacy (and potentially lost Bitcoin), Shawn advocates for documenting passwords, creating wills, setting up power of attorney, and having honest conversations with loved ones. The hosts explore practical steps like using 1Password with shared family vaults, the importance of organ donation documentation, and the philosophical tension between honoring a deceased person's wishes versus meeting the needs of those left behind.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

• In Case You Get Hit by a Bus (book)
• eol-dr - End of Life Digital Resources on GitHub
• EOL-RalphHightower - Another digital estate planning resource
• NOLO - Get Your Affairs in Order - Legal self-help resources

Full show notes and transcript here.

How do you stay motivated when you're stuck building features you don't understand? Carol brings a conversation she's been having with her team about feeling like a "feature factory"—churning out work without clarity on what problem they're solving or what value it adds. When every standup is "is this done?" instead of "have we made anything better?", burnout follows fast. The hosts explore the tension between customer-driven features, competitive pressure, arbitrary boss decisions, and the human need to feel connected to meaningful work.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

What happens when your passion project becomes so successful that you have to shut it down? Advent of Code creator Eric Wastl announced he was scaling back from 25 days to 12 and removing the global leaderboard. The reason? People were feeling bad at their jobs because they couldn't solve puzzles in 45 seconds like the leaderboard speedrunners.

Quiet UI launched with excitement, garnered incredible buzz, and shut down three weeks later when the demands became overwhelming.

This week, the hosts explore how good intentions collide with bad behavior—where success becomes punishment, communities ruin what was made for them, and the people who just wanted to share something cool are forced to walk away.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

When you use ChatGPT instead of Google, you're not just getting a faster answer—you're cutting out the content creators who made that knowledge possible. In this week's episode, we explore the economics of AI search, the death of Stack Overflow, the junior developer problem writ large, and why capitalism keeps pushing moral responsibility onto individuals who have the least power to change anything.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

In this week's episode the gather round and share what they've been up to for trunk or treat. Adam shares his waning motivation for his Jump Run side project, we explore sustainable motivation, the rewrite temptation, and whether it's okay to just... do the fun thing sometimes. Meanwhile, Tim provides a reality check on AI coding tools—he spent real hours comparing GitHub Copilot and Codex on actual work, and the results are messier than the hype suggests.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

How do you keep millions of people safe on 40 different dating sites while simultaneously figuring out what drives them to buy memberships? Sean Corfield joins Adam and Ben to discuss the surprisingly complex engineering and business challenges of observing user behavior at massive scale.

Sean runs us through fraud detection and prevention (including devastating "pig butchering" romance scams), database architecture at enormous scale (700GB databases with 250M+ row tables), custom domain-specific languages for writing business rules without touching SQL, real-time scoring systems with hundreds of rules, zero-downtime deployments and schema migrations, and the constant cat-and-mouse game between scammers and detection systems.

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Can you really multitask, or are you just rapidly switching between contexts and hoping your brain doesn't lose track? This week, we dig into the cognitive load of deep work, the impossibility of maintaining multiple large projects in your head simultaneously, and the ADHD patterns that shape how many of us think and work.

Carol returns from the chaos of federal government planning meetings with renewed energy and alignment. Adam finds flow in his Jump Run project while navigating compliance season. Ben discovers the exhausting reality of writing actual specification documents for the first time in his career—and realizes just how taxing deep thinking can be.

reCAPTCHA Migration: https://privatecaptcha.com/blog/recaptcha-migration-to-google-cloud-2025/

Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.