CRAFTED.

In a rapidly changing work landscape, understanding the five key skills of PRISM is crucial for success. Dr. Gabriella Rosen-Kellerman discusses how resilience can transform challenges into growth opportunities. She emphasizes that creativity is innate and vital in today's world. Building rapid rapport fosters effective collaboration in dynamic teams. Mattering ensures shared purpose, which boosts team confidence during transitions. She also explores how coaching and targeted practices can develop resilience, innovation, and prospection.

In this engaging discussion, audio producer Leslie Chang, known for her insightful work on Michael Osborne's projects, joins to explore Steve Jobs' complex legacy. They analyze how Jobs transformed a small graphics lab into Pixar and his growth after being ousted from Apple. Leslie highlights Jobs' unique storytelling skills and his 'reality distortion field.' The hosts also delve into his relationships, including his daughter Lisa, and ponder whether they would want Jobs' life, weighing his immense achievements against personal sacrifices.

Dan Blumberg, a former WNYC producer turned product leader and podcaster, joins the conversation with hosts Chuck and Robbie. They delve into Dan's journey and the essentials of podcasting, discussing the pros and cons of platforms like Apple and Spotify. Dan shares insights on audience retention and effective gear recommendations. He also touches on his kayaking adventures and explores alternative career paths. Get ready for exciting updates on his show, Crafted, coming soon!

Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta, dives into the complex world of startup funding. He reveals how local market benchmarks matter more than Silicon Valley headlines for founders. Peter explains the surge of AI startups and their impact on funding, while exploring why high early valuations can set unrealistic expectations. He also addresses the surprising statistic that 70% of startup employees never exercise their equity. With insights on SAFEs and founder vesting, it's a treasure trove of data-backed funding strategies for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Matt Lerner, the founder and CEO of SYSTM, shares his expertise on startup growth and his book, 'Growth Levers and How to Find Them.' He dives into the key insight that 90% of growth comes from 10% of efforts, emphasizing the importance of rapid learning and experimentation. Matt discusses the Jobs-to-be-Done approach for understanding customer needs and the significance of reaching the 'aha' moment quickly. He also highlights common pitfalls founders face and provides practical strategies for effective growth sprints.

Kelsey Hightower, a legendary technologist and Kubernetes pioneer, shares his journey from sleeping in his car to becoming a distinguished engineer at Google and retiring at 42 to focus on societal impact. He emphasizes the power of small acts of recognition, discussing how simple gestures can restore dignity. Kelsey highlights the importance of speaking engagements to inspire others and the role of open source in leveling the playing field. He advocates for turning technical skills into business impact and balancing awe of AI with a focus on human intelligence.

Join Chris Coomes, founder and CEO of X1 Pipeline and former robotics lead at Google and Amazon, as he dives into the world of AI-powered startup evaluation. He shares his motivation for creating X1 Pipeline and explains how it mimics his personal review process but at lightning speed. Chris critiques the hype around 'agents' in tech, noting many won't survive, and discusses humanoid robots at Web Summit. He insightfuly argues that while AI is powerful, it still needs human creativity for true innovation.

In this lively discussion, Tom Haworth, founder of D13 AI, explores the dangers of 'good enough' AI, emphasizing the pitfalls of vibe coding and its technical debt. He critiques the superficiality in AI demos at Web Summit, advocating for a deeper understanding of AI capabilities. Tom also discusses how Maria Sharapova's IBM collaboration highlights the challenges of AI deployment. The conversation touches on self-driving cars being the most reliable AI robots today and the underappreciated potential of blockchain technology.

Listeners share mixed reactions to the Anonymous CTO's controversial views on AI coding agents, with some agreeing and others dismissing his claims. A security expert supports the CTO's caution, while an engineering leader highlights productivity boosts from skilled use of these agents. Concerns about marketing overpromises and the necessity of context for effective AI usage come into play. The debate around adversarial AI continues, emphasizing data quality as a critical factor in AI success.

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.”