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Artificial Developer Intelligence

Artificial Developer Intelligence

By: Shimin Zhang Dan Lasky & Rahul Yadav
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Three engineer friends argue about AI so you don't have to. Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, and Rahul Yadav are working developers who've been watching AI transform their profession in real time, and they got opinions on the robot takeover. Every week the three get together to riff on the latest AI news, geek out over research papers, roast each other's tool choices, and occasionally have an existential crisis about whether the craft is dying or just getting weird. What you're signing up for: - AI news without the LinkedIn cringe: model drops, acquisitions, open-source drama, and the other stuff that actually matters if you write code for a living. - Technique corner: real tips from the trenches: spec-driven development, multi-agent orchestration, Claude.md tricks, and all the ways they've wasted hours so you don't have to. - Two Minutes to Midnight: the show's running AI bubble tracker, complete with circular funding diagrams, hyperscaler CAPEX math, and a doomsday clock they keep arguing about moving. - Deep dives that (occasionally) go deep: hallucination neurons, agentic memory, workflow automation economics, LLM architectures the papers nobody else is covering because they're hard. - Dan's Rant: Dan frequently gets mad about things. It's a whole thing. - The feelings segment: Yes, Shimin reads Tennyson on a tech podcast. Yes, Rahul wrote an AI-generated country song. No, they're not sorry. Three friends with strong opinions, questionable metaphors, and genuine love for the craft they're also mourning for. If you want to understand AI deeply, use it without embarrassing yourself, and laugh at the absurdity of it all, pull up a chair.ADIPod Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Grok Buys Cursor, MidJourney Goes Hardware, Hermes Agent & Evaluation-Driven Development

    Grok Buys Cursor, MidJourney Goes Hardware, Hermes Agent & Evaluation-Driven Development
    Jun 26 2026

    MidJourney — the AI image company — just quit image generation to build 50,000 spas that scan your body slice by slice. Then the week got weirder.

    Co-hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, Rahul Yadav.

    ▸ SpaceX buys Cursor — Elon's SpaceX (xAI/"Grok Cursor") is acquiring Cursor for $60B in Class A common stock — a ~60x multiple on ~$1B revenue, largely to buy an enterprise foothold. (Shimin: the first real sign of an AI-tool consolidation phase.)

    ▸ MidJourney goes hardware — the image-gen pioneer is licensing micro-ultrasound chips to build 50,000 body-scan spas (first one: SF, 2027), aiming for a billion scans a month. Fully private, no VC backers, a self-described "community research lab." Terabytes/second — ~500 hours of HD video per single second of scan.

    ▸ Tool Shed: Hermes Agent (Nous Research) — the plugin-maximalist opposite of a minimal harness like Pi: built-in memory, a self-learning skill loop, cron scheduling, swappable memory providers, and ~20 chat channels out of the box. Dan: "parachuting in with sixteen crates of supplies and a film crew."

    ▸ Is AI ruining our skills? (Nature) — physicians' precancerous-lesion detection fell from 28.4% to 22.4% once the AI tool was removed; 52 engineers scored 50% on understanding their own code with AI vs 67% without. Cognitive debt is showing up in the data.

    ▸ Claude Code is a video game (Provi.me) — the "one more prompt" loop that keeps you up three hours past bedtime, and why AI finally made B2B SaaS addictive. Plus the "agent dice" repo: roll a natural 20 and a stop hook makes the agent reflect and write itself a skill.

    ▸ Evaluation-Driven Development (Decoding AI) — treat every AI feature as a hypothesis and gate the PR on an offline eval pipeline (built on Opik) instead of unit tests. Gold-standard vs synthetic datasets, code-metric vs LLM-as-judge evaluators, and an "aggression" dial for how big a jerk your reviewer is. (Shimin: Newtonian physics → quantum mechanics.)

    ▸ Two Minutes to Midnight — ChatGPT slips under 50% share (46.4%; Gemini 27.7%, Claude 10.3%), Nvidia raises $25B in its first bond deal since 2021, and Ed Zitron walks OpenAI's FT-verified financials ($38.5B loss in 2025). ~2B users — one in four people on Earth; no 10x left. Clock moved up to 5:00.

    ⏱ Chapters

    00:00 Cold Open & Welcome
    01:50 News: SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60B
    04:46 News: MidJourney Pivots to Body-Scan Spas
    11:45 Tool Shed: Hermes Agent (Nous Research)
    19:54 Post-Processing: Is AI Ruining Our Skills? (Nature)
    27:13 Post-Processing: Claude Code Is a Video Game
    35:23 Post-Processing: Evaluation-Driven Development (EDD)
    41:44 Two Minutes to Midnight: ChatGPT Under 50%, Nvidia Debt, OpenAI's Numbers
    55:06 Outro

    🔗 Articles we discussed

    News:
    • SpaceX to acquire Cursor — CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisition-ipo.html
    • MidJourney's medical pivot — MidJourney: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

    Tool Shed:
    • Hermes Agent docs — Nous Research: https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/

    Post-Processing:
    • Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1
    • Claude Code is a video game — Provi.me: https://provi.me/cc-like-video-games
    • How Evaluation-Driven Development (EDD) works — Decoding AI (Paul Easton & Alejandro Aboy): https://www.decodingai.com/p/5b766861-0001-494f-a37f-4d4eb104dcfa

    Two Minutes to Midnight:
    • ChatGPT's market share slips below 50% for the first time — TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/chatgpts-market-share-slips-below-50-for-first-time/
    • Nvidia seeks to raise over $25B in first bond deal since 2021 — Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/chipmaker-nvidia-seeks-to-raise-over-25b-in-first-bond-deal-since-2021/
    • Exclusive: OpenAI's financials — Where's Your Ed At (Ed Zitron): https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

    🎙 About ADI Pod

    ADI Pod (Artificial Developer Intelligence) is a weekly podcast about AI and software development for working developers. We go through hundreds of links and dozens of newsletters each week so you don't have to. Hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, Rahul Yadav. New episodes Tuesdays.

    • https://www.adipod.ai
    • humans@adipod.ai

    If something here changed your mind or gave you something to try on Monday, hit subscribe and leave a comment with what you tried.
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    56 mins
  • Fable 5 Ban, Meta's AI Gulag, Elias Thorne & What is Loop Engineering?

    Fable 5 Ban, Meta's AI Gulag, Elias Thorne & What is Loop Engineering?
    Jun 19 2026
    Three days after Fable 5 launched, the US government banned it — for every foreign national on Earth, including Anthropic's own employees. Then it got weirder.This week on ADI Pod: the Fable 5 export ban, Meta's applied-AI "gulag," the Elias Thorne dataset virus, loop engineering, a local DeepSeek V4 demo, the paper that shatters Dunning-Kruger, and NBER's bubble math.Co-hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, Rahul Yadav.▸ Fable 5 & Mythos 5, export-banned — a national-security order cut access for all foreign nationals (even Anthropic's own staff) in ~90 minutes, reportedly after an AWS jailbreak claim; likely the end of universal frontier-model access. Shimin had a near-"AI psychosis" moment using it to design a novel drone.▸ Meta's "AI Gulag" — Alexandr Wang's unit drafts laid-off engineers to write puzzles and label data to train Meta's weaker models, on full salary and RSUs; the "gulag" label is a stretch, but the internal drama is real.▸ The Elias Thorne mystery (404 Media) — a lighthouse keeper seeded by ~111 ChatGPT-3.5 chats became a "dataset virus" now in ~88% of AI stories and "authoring" books on Amazon across every lab (Cornell's Hamilton & Mimno).▸ AI is fast, the economy isn't (howfastis.ai) — task horizons double every ~6 months, but weak-link / Theory-of-Constraints bottlenecks (Chad Jones; Goldratt) keep growth near 2%/yr; human judgment is the constraint AI can't yet remove.▸ Loop engineering (Addy Osmani) — six pieces turn a bare /loop (Ralph loop) into a real agent harness: automations, worktrees, skills, plugins/connectors, subagents (split the worker from the reviewer), and memory. It amplifies whatever judgment you bake into your skills.▸ Deep Dive — "Beyond the Steeper Curve" (Christopher Koch) — AI doesn't steepen Dunning-Kruger, it shatters it: "metacognitive decoupling" unglues output quality from self-assessment. Plus the "slop grenade" and the sycophancy trap (No One's Happy).▸ Vibe & Tell — Dan runs DeepSeek V4 Flash locally ("DS4," the dwarf star runner) on a Framework Ryzen 395 Max over ROCm, ~14 tok/s, wired to Pi agent — ~$4,000 of hardware, no cloud.▸ Two Minutes to Midnight — Claude on Apple's foundation-model backend (a commoditization tell), the end of subsidized inference, and an NBER paper pricing genuine insolvency risk into the AI build-out. Clock set back to 5:30.⏱ Chapters00:00 Cold Open & Welcome02:01 News: The US Government Bans Fable 5 & Mythos 510:35 News: Meta's "AI Gulag" (feat. Rahul)14:39 Post-Processing: The Elias Thorne Mystery21:12 Post-Processing: AI Is Fast, the Economy Isn't (howfastis.ai)29:22 Post-Processing: Loop Engineering (Addy Osmani)36:37 Deep Dive: Beyond the Steeper Curve (Dunning-Kruger, Shattered)43:46 Deep Dive: Appearing Productive & the Slop Grenade51:51 Vibe & Tell: DeepSeek V4 Flash at Home (DS4)57:39 Two Minutes to Midnight: Apple Foundation Models, Cheaper Inference, NBER Bubble Math1:08:44 Outro🔗 Articles we discussedNews:• Fable & Mythos access update — Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access• Anthropic lobbies the White House over the Mythos/Fable ban — Axios: https://www.axios.com/2026/06/14/anthropic-white-house-mythos-fable• Meta's months-old AI unit is a "soul-crushing gulag," say the engineers stuck inside it — TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/metas-months-old-ai-unit-is-a-soul-crushing-gulag-say-the-engineers-stuck-inside-it/Post-Processing:• Chatbots keep telling stories about lighthouse keeper Elias Thorne — 404 Media: https://www.404media.co/elias-thorne-chatbots-llms-chatgpt-lighthouse-keeper-story/• How Fast Is AI? — Emory Taziki: https://howfastis.ai/• Loop Engineering — Addy Osmani: https://addyosmani.com/blog/loop-engineering/Deep Dive:• Beyond the Steeper Curve: AI-Mediated Metacognitive Decoupling and the Limits of the Dunning-Kruger Metaphor — Christopher Koch (arXiv): https://arxiv.org/html/2603.29681• Appearing Productive in the Workplace — No One's Happy: https://nooneshappy.com/article/appearing-productive-in-the-workplace/Two Minutes to Midnight:• Claude SDK for Apple Foundation Models — Claude Platform docs: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/cli-sdks-libraries/libraries/apple-foundation-models• Can tech companies learn to love cheaper AI models? — TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/09/can-tech-companies-learn-to-love-cheaper-models/• What Investment Data Implies About the AI Transition — NBER Working Paper w35290 (Walter & Walter): https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35290/w35290.pdf🎙 About ADI PodADI Pod (Artificial Developer Intelligence) is a weekly podcast about AI and software development for working developers. We go through hundreds of links and dozens of newsletters each week so you don't have to. Hosts: Shimin Zhang, Dan Lasky, Rahul Yadav. New episodes Fridays.• https://www.adipod.ai• humans@adipod.aiIf something here changed your mind or gave you...
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    1 hr and 10 mins
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