Worrying about AI is the easy part. Everyone already has a list. The interesting part is what lands on it, what doesn't, and why. From military use, to an AI slop takeover, to the possibility that the tools are making us stupider.

This week, the hosts respond to a question from the State of Devs survey: “Which of these general AI risks and issues are you most concerned about?”

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:

• State of Devs 2025 survey — the questions that set off the discussion; the survey itself is now closed
• OpenAI's Hugging Face security incident — what happened when agents escaped a constrained cyber evaluation
• LinkedIn's campaign against AI slop — the official explanation of its new reporting control
• Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl — tools for publishers to allow, block, or charge AI crawlers

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Nobody went to conferences for the talks. You went for the hallway, and for a roomful of people who'd made the same odd career bet you had. We didn't know how good we had it. COVID hit, AI is now everyone's best buddy, and now all these meetups and spaces are slowly disappearing. This week the hosts go looking for what's left of the developer hang.

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:

• Anthropic's Project Vend — the AI-run shop behind the tungsten cube story

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

Tim is trying to hire remote developers, but the interviews have started to feel like one long CAPTCHA. Before he can decide who's right for the job, he has to figure out whether he's interviewing the candidate or ChatGPT. This week the hosts discuss the state of remote developer interviews in the AI era.

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:

• Mostly Technical #29: “Super Epic Crazy” — the source of the cover-letter story about most applicants missing simple instructions
• Roberto Serrano on AI fraud at Brown University — the course whose take-home exams triggered the in-class-final story

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

They say history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, and apparently so do show topics. A year on from our episode on the value of friction, the crew are back to discuss value of struggle. The question this time: now that AI will cheerfully do the hard part for you, which struggles are worth keeping, and which you can finally hand off?

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:

• Ronny Chieng's Harvard Class Day speech — the "your generation's job is to kill AI" address.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Full show notes and transcript here.

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.