CRAFTED.

• Thanksgiving Special: "What is my actual impact on society?" Legendary technologist Kelsey Hightower on the power we all have

  ** I'd be so grateful if you'd take five minutes and answer our annual survey. It'll help me make the show better for you!  **Hey folks, it's Thanksgiving weekend here in the US and it's the time of year when we think about what we're grateful for, so today I'm re-sharing some words from perhaps the most grateful person I've ever had on the show. Kelsey Hightower is a legendary developer. And he has an incredible story. He went from sleeping in his car to becoming a pioneer in the Kubernetes world, a distinguished engineer at Google, and then... he retired. At the age of 42. Because he wanted to have more impact on the world than he thought he could have by advancing up the career ladder. So here are 15 minutes of my original interview with him, because some of the things he said — not about tech, but about humanity, gratitude, and prioritizing what matters — have really stuck with me.Here’s the full interview, originally released in July 2024. We cover a lot, including how he became so good at live demos, why emotion is the key to great software — and storytelling — and how it’s those “boring innovations” and mindset shifts you need to make as a technologist that will take you from “hello, world” to “hello, revenue.” ---Featured voices:Kelsey Hightower: "Retired, not tired" former distinguished engineer at Google and Kubernetes PioneerMe (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.---And if you please…TAKE THE SURVEY: It'll just take five minutes and these surveys are actually really important for podcasters. Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to growSubscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fmShare your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedInSponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon

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• The Roboticist Using AI to Fix How We Pick Startups — Live from Web Summit with Chris Coomes

  In this special live Web Summit edition from Lisbon, roboticist, investor, and founder Chris Coomes shares how and why he built X1 Pipeline, an AI platform that evaluates startups the way he would — only much, much faster. It's something he wishes he had when looking for early stage robotics startups while at Google and Amazon. We also talk about the strange humanoid robots wandering the convention hall at Web Summit, why "agents" is a vastly overused word and why (his take) most of the agent startups he saw at the conference won't be around next year. Plus, why plugging things in is hard — and why (my take) that's a good thing, because it means we humans will still have jobs (as plumbers and electricians) in the future. Enjoy this fun episode, recorded live from the "Croissant Studio" on the floor at Web Summit in Lisbon. ---  Featured voices:Chris Coomes — Founder of X1 PipelineMe (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.And if you please…Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to growSubscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at https://crafted.fm/Share your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedInSponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon!

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• AI’s Got It “Good Enough” (and That Ain’t Good) — A Web Summit Debrief, Live from Lisbon!

  In this special live Web Summit edition from Lisbon, I sit down with Tom Haworth, founder of B13.ai, to talk about why “good enough” AI might actually be one of the most dangerous places we can get stuck.And you’ll hear Tom say it’s time for the leaders of vibe coding platforms (e.g. Lovable, Replit, Cursor) to acknowledge that they’re great when you need to “demo not memo”, but not great (today and maybe ever) at delivering production-grade, secure code. We also make a few detours as we detail a ridiculous week in Lisbon, including:How (shocker!) 90% of the conference was about AIWhy “good enough” AI is not a good place to beWhether we’ll graduate to great AIAI’s ROI now and in the futureWhy it’s still iffy whether AI agents they can be trusted to accomplish complex jobsRobots wander Web Summit, do the Macarena, fall downHow tennis great Maria Sharapova uses (IBM’s) AI How the presumptuous Web Summit’s app prominently suggests we all message Maria… (as if!) Visa wants to help creators monetize (yay! it me!), using Web3 technologies (yes, they said “Web3”; no, I was not expecting to hear a non-ironic use of that phrase)Why self-driving cars are the best robots — and coming soon to more of EuropeHow much Web Summit pampers (and corrupts) the media: I was like a stuffed goose. Hurray for Portuguese custard and other delicacies!How even the beer at Web Summit was high tech---Featured voices:Tom Haworth: Founder of B13.ai, a software consultancy that "empowers non-technical innovators and organizations to build with confidence, delivering market-ready solutions that we design, launch and run."Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great. I love building from zero to one.---And if you please…Share with a friend! Word of mouth is by far the most powerful way for podcasts to growSubscribe to the CRAFTED. newsletter at crafted.fmShare your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your honest feedback on this and other episodes. Email me: [email protected] or DM me on LinkedInSponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Drop me a line and let’s talk.Get psyched!… There are some big updates to this show coming soon!

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• AI coding agents: overhyped, amazing, or both? Interesting reactions to the Anonymous CTO episode

   Hey everyone. I've gotten so much interesting feedback on last week's Halloween episode featuring the anonymous CTO saying spooky things about AI and coding agents that I thought I'd share a quick solo voice memo style episode with you. The feedback ranges from people saying he's spot on about the insidious problems that AI coding agents create while others saying "he's holding it wrong." In other words, he's not using AI properly. Listen to this short episode and you'll also hear reaction to his claim that "adversarial AI" is not really a thing and why context and data are so critical. And please please please: take five minutes and complete our annual survey. I have big plans for the show and some new things I'm working on. So I really want to hear from you. And for one lucky survey taker, I will make a $100 donation to the charity of your choice. Here's the survey. Again: it takes just five minutes and these surveys are actually really important to podcasters and sponsors. Thanks so much!And go to crafted.fm to get the newsletter and see all past episodes, including the Halloween Special with the Anonymous CTO on Spooky AI Things (listen to this first before listening to today's episode)

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• Why This CTO Says AI Coding Agents Are “Insidious”, Overhyped, and Nowhere Near Replacing Human Engineers

  AI coding assistants promise to write your code, speed up your sprint, and maybe even make engineers obsolete. But what if the people building with them every day see something very different?In this special Halloween edition of CRAFTED. — which also marks the show’s third anniversary! — a masked CTO shares what he can’t say publicly: that these tools are powerful, but insidious. In his view, coding assistants are great for auto-complete, but they can’t do what a human engineer does. He says they’re terrible at starting from scratch and will often suggest code that “works in vacuum”, but not in context. And because AI can write so much code, so quickly, it’s hard to catch errors. In short, he sees an increase in short term velocity, at the expense of increased defects and an increasing dependency on systems that are untrustworthy. I want to emphasize that this episode features the experience of one very experienced person. There are obviously others who disagree, who say AI coding agents are incredible, so long as they’re managed well. However, there are also an increasing number of people questioning the sustainability of coding agents — they're incredibly expensive to run — and also how good they are in the first place.For example Andrej Karpathy, the guy who literally coined the phrase "vibe coding" and was early at OpenAI and Tesla, just said publicly on Dwarkesh Podcast that the path to AI agents is going to be a lot slower than people in the industry think it will be. He said coding agents are "not that good at writing code that's never been written before" and that there is too much hype right now about where AI really is, with people in the industry, quote "trying to pretend like this is amazing, when it's not." And he said: "My Claude Code or Codex still feels like this elementary-grade student." Today's guest agrees with Karpathy on a lot of this. Our guest has worked at startups, scale-ups, and big tech companies you've definitely heard of and today he's at a very AI-forward company and using AI coding tools every day. Enjoy this special episode of CRAFTED.! ---And pretty please...!Share with a friend! Word of mouth is how podcasts grow!Subscribe to the newsletter at https://www.crafted.fmShare your feedback! I’m experimenting with new episode formats and would love your feedback on this and other episodes. DM me on LinkedIn or contact me email, via https://www.crafted.fmSponsor the show? I’m actively speaking to potential sponsors for 2026 episodes. Let’s talk!Get psyched!… There are some big updates to the show in 2026!---Key Quotes03:16 The myth of AI replacement: “The idea that AI can actually supplant a software engineer in their current role is basically nonsense.”06:29 Why AI struggles without human input: “If you remove the human engineer from the equation, there’s no place to start from. The AI does not do well when you’re starting from scratch because it doesn’t have the real-world context or the continuous learning required to make that system better.”12:21: The illusion of speed: “Coding assistants help you generate code very quickly. There’s an illusion that your velocity increases. What actually happens is you’re just shipping more bugs to production.”13:30 More code than humans can review: “AI generates so much code that no human can keep that context in their head and review it in a meaningful way. At some point you just have to trust — but who are you trusting? You’re trusting the AI, and the AI cannot be trusted.”14:02 AI & Junior Engineer Hiring: “The narrative that hiring trends have anything to do with AI is absurd. It’s not that AI is replacing junior engineers — it’s that companies are running lean and don’t have the bandwidth to train them.”15:42: Where the AI Bulls and Bears Differ: “Whereas we see flawed systems that aren't ready for primetime [...] they view this as ‘oh, that's, that's insignificant. They will get better almost immediately. It's not a big deal.’ But we've been repeating this cycle for years at this point.”19:50 Where AI Excels: “Where review and revise are part of the process already, that's a really good place for generative AI because you already have a human in the loop.”21:02: What builders need to unlearn “To the extent that people think these things are thinking or reasoning or on any path to AGI at all — they should discard that. These models don’t think. They’re very sophisticated pattern-matching machines, and that’s really it.”

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