Working Code

Eighteen weeks ago Adam handed his decade-old ORM layer to an AI agent. This week he kills the whole refactor — and the feeling that comes isn't regret, it's relief. Somewhere in the grind he realized he'd only ever weighed two options, push through or admit defeat, and both assumed he had to see it to the end. This week is about sunk cost — how being partway down a road can convince you that you owe it the rest of the way, and how freeing it is to decide you don't.

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 Thursday.

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

Mentioned in this episode:

• 249: 10 Years of Tech Debt — where Adam first handed the ORM layer to an agent

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

The promise was that AI would take the grunt work off your plate and leave you the good stuff. This week is the part no one advertised: you got into this to make things — but what comes instead is the restless guilt of sitting there with nothing to do while the agent works, and the slow realization that when it finishes, the job left for you is mostly reviewing.

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 Thursday.

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

Mentioned in this episode:

• xkcd: "Compiling"

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Getting unstuck has gotten so cheap that Ben can't remember the last time he actually learned something at work — and the struggle he's skipping was where knowing the code, and caring about it, used to come from. This week is a conversation about what software craftsmanship even means anymore, when the tools are happy to do the caring for you.

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 Thursday.

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.

This week is the quiet worry underneath all the productivity gains: that every time you hand the boring work to a machine, you're handing over a little of the curiosity that made you good at the work you care about, until one day the well of ideas just runs dry.

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 Thursday.

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

Mentioned in this episode:

• Taffy — the REST framework for ColdFusion and Lucee
• Rest Assured by Adam Tuttle
• Postman
• Engineering Explained

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Adam trained an AI on twenty years of Ben's blog, then asked Ben to pick his own words out of a lineup of forgeries. This week the hosts play a game of Ben or Bot, and you can play along too!

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 Thursday.

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

Mentioned in this episode:

• Play "Ben's Blog or AI?" yourself
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
• Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans
• MassTransit

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

What's the point of a personal wiki when AI agents have already read the entire internet? This week is about patterns for co-maintaining a personal wiki with an AI agent, and where its job ends and yours begins.

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 Thursday.

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

Mentioned in this episode:

• Karpathy's LLM Wiki gist

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

This week is a philosophical conversation about what you let into your head — the podcasts, the influencers, the political figures, the friends — and the difference between a snapshot you can hold at arm's length and a living relationship you're quietly being shaped by.

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 Thursday.

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

Mentioned in this episode:

• Fritz Haber (YouTube)

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Adam wrote a blog post this week about why AI keeps making him feel worse. This week is an honest conversation about the hypocrite's bind: needing to use the thing you recognize the harm of, and what that does to you.

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 Thursday.

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

Mentioned in this episode:

• Adam's blog post: "On the AI of It All"
• Impeccable Style
• Mental Notes

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

"We have solved all of the world's problems." Observability past the point where more logs stop helping, continuous deployment when the customer is the federal government and the change-management board is a real room with real people in it, JSON's loose schema as a load-bearing feature rather than a quirk to apologise for, and the awkward question of who actually owns the code you wrote on a work-issued machine.

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 Thursday.

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 11:30 PM and you're still prompting. The code is better than anything you'd have shipped a year ago. The output is prolific, the roadmap is moving, the tooling is miraculous. So why are you still here at 11:30 PM? This week is an honest conversation about the strange shape of burnout in the AI era — the productivity that keeps compounding, the bar that keeps rising right along with it, and the quiet feeling that somewhere in the last year the craft stopped feeling quite like yours.

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 Thursday.

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.