Episodes

  • AI Book Club recording of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

    AI Book Club recording of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut
    Aug 16 2026
    This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut, held August 16, 2026. This was the club's first work of fiction, and much of the discussion is about what that mode makes possible: getting inside the madness of scientists like John von Neumann in a way a biography can't. We talk about the book's opening scene as a thesis in miniature, logic carried to irrational ends, the 'death of play' in the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol, Move 78 as a case for human unpredictability, the garage door scene as a metaphor for...
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    59 mins
  • Orchestrating docs instead of writing them yourself — podcast with Sarah Deaton of Anthropic

    Orchestrating docs instead of writing them yourself — podcast with Sarah Deaton of Anthropic
    Aug 2 2026
    In this podcast, co-host Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti and I chat with Sarah Deaton, a technical writer at Anthropic who works on the Claude Code docs, about what documentation work looks like when much of it is automated. We discuss orchestrating docs through skills and agents rather than writing them, mining AI assistant conversations for doc gaps, running forensics on every false claim that reaches the docs, new metrics like time-to-correction and steers per PR, the fences that keep AI-generated docs honest, and how she closed more than a hundred pull requests in a single day.
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • AI Book Club discussion of The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby

    AI Book Club discussion of The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby
    Jun 28 2026
    This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Sebastian Mallaby's The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. In the discussion, we talk about the complex character of Demis Hassabis (and comparisons to Ender's game), the idea of founders' personal morality acting as a final safeguard, and the relentless acceleration of AI development. We also talk about the historical rivalries between deep learning and reinforcement learning, the growing urgency around AI-driven job displacement, and what it means to train AI to automate our own work.
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    58 mins
  • Judging beautiful docs, AI fatigue, and tool slop -- podcast with Fabrizio

    Judging beautiful docs, AI fatigue, and tool slop -- podcast with Fabrizio
    May 31 2026
    In this podcast, I chat with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about a variety of topics related to AI and docs, such as applying Italo Calvino's literary principles of lightness and quickness to evaluate docs, the reality of AI review fatigue versus creator fatigue, whether vibe-coded tools are tools slop, developing internal skills for repeatable doc processes, and the utility of running local AI models.
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    58 mins
  • AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', by Max Tegmark

    AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', by Max Tegmark
    May 17 2026
    This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Our discussion explores Tegmark's visions of superintelligence, the unpredictability of AI goals and subgoals, and how the Asilomar principles fare against the relentless market pressures of today's AI arms race. We also contrast the book's theoretical focus on cosmic energy (and how superintelligence might more efficiently extract energy from matter) with the immediate, tangible threats AI poses to cybersecurity and global financial systems.
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    57 mins
  • AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang

    AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future', by Dan Wang
    Apr 23 2026
    This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Dan Wang's Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Our discussion tries to tie some of the book's themes to AI (to align with the book club's theme), but only in places where it makes sense. Some topics we discuss include social engineering, electric vehicles, contrasting energy infrastructures and the ability to power AI compute, mass surveillance networks, the differences between America's lawyerly society and China's engineering state. Fortunately, one of the book club members had recently been to China and could share firsthand experiences and impressions of cities...
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    59 mins
  • Podcast: How valuable are agent skills? Conversation with Larah Vasquez and Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti

    Podcast: How valuable are agent skills? Conversation with Larah Vasquez and Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti
    Apr 12 2026
    In this podcast, I chat with Larah Vasquez and Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about using skills to extend AI capabilities, the future of agentic engineering, local models like Qwen and Gemma, and whether the tech writer role is shifting into automation architecture. We get into the memory problem in LLMs (and why some of us actually prefer the no memory to extended memory), the progression from prompt engineering to context engineering to compound engineering to orchestrating whole agent systems, and how skills are quietly forcing engineers to write down knowledge they'd never documented before.
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • The Emerging Picture of a Changed Profession: Cyborg Technical Writers — Augmented, Not Replaced, by AI

    The Emerging Picture of a Changed Profession: Cyborg Technical Writers — Augmented, Not Replaced, by AI
    Apr 5 2026
    I recently gave a presentation to students and faculty in person at Louisiana Tech University on March 30, 2026, focusing on what I call the cyborg model of technical writing. The idea is that the emerging model for tech writing isn't one in which AI replaces tech writers but rather one in which AI augments tech writers. Tech writers interact with AI in a continuous back-and-forth, conversational, iterative manner. This post contains the recording, slides, transcript, summary, notes, and more from my presentation.
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    1 hr and 29 mins