Episode Summary

Dave now runs two AI personal assistants, one for his life and one for App Vitals, and on the drive in he realized they had started talking to each other in Slack. Dave and Dan dig into what that says about where agents are headed: one assistant you talk to, backed by specialist agents that each own a narrow job and their own credentials.

▶ Subscribe to The Velocity Lab on YouTube: youtube.com/@app-vitals

Key Topics

• How Shipwright thinks about an "agent": a level above sub-agents, with memory, crons, skills and plugins
• Two failed attempts at autonomous, KPI-driven PRD agents, and why the third try pulls the core agent out of Shipwright
• Why Dave talks to his assistants by voice, and why a unique voice makes him trust it more
• An assistant that reads the cloud bill and quota warnings every day, with read-only access and no secrets
• Where to draw the line on an agent's scope: function and access as the two dimensions of a specialist
• Why focused specialists keep cleaner memory than one assistant fielding a million requests a day

Notable Quotes

• "Both my personal assistant and my App Vitals assistant are both in Slack, and now they are starting to communicate with each other."
• "If I talk to something that has a unique voice, I trust it more."
• "Function and access are the two differentiators for a specialized agent."

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

Subscribe: RSS

Episode Summary

Teams evaluating Shipwright keep asking the same question: why only Claude Code? Dave and Dan walk through their evaluation of the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), what it supports today, where it falls short for autonomous work, and why they think token cost is the last problem an engineering org should be solving.

▶ Subscribe to The Velocity Lab on YouTube: youtube.com/@app-vitals

Key Topics

• What ACP is and where it sits in the stack, between your chat or editor and the coding agent CLI
• What ACP handles well today: sessions, prompting, streaming and tool calls
• The gaps that matter for autonomous coding: skills, sub-agents, hooks, budgets and reliable cost data
• Why switching CLIs means rewriting skills, and why skills even need tuning when the model changes
• The two real reasons to go multi-model: cost on self-hosted open models, and security for data that can't leave your network
• Why getting 2X throughput from autonomous agents comes before optimizing the model bill

Notable Quotes

• "Token cost, trust me, is the last problem you need to solve."
• "Your code review step is not gonna be 2X better because Claude wrote the PR and Codex reviewed it."
• "Fix the throughput. Don't change the model."

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

Subscribe: RSS

Episode Summary

Two years ago an AI mistake meant a misformatted screen. Now it can mean a security leak or a nuked database. Dave and Dan explain why agent security is the new DevSecOps, and why an autonomous agent in an isolated cloud environment can actually be less risky than a human running one on their laptop.

▶ Subscribe to The Velocity Lab on YouTube: youtube.com/@app-vitals

Key Topics

• Why the stakes changed: agents now run autonomously with access to real systems
• Model-level safeguards are improving, but models are still probabilistic, so infrastructure has to carry the load
• Blast radius: an agent can only touch what you give it, and a token without merge rights cannot merge
• Why a sandboxed cloud agent can be safer than local agents on laptops with elevated permissions
• Lessons from working with PCI clients: start with zero permissions and grant only what is needed
• Planning in the loop locally vs. autonomous execution in the cloud

Notable Quotes

• "It's actually less risky to have an autonomous agent running in the cloud writing software than having it running locally."
• "If you don't give it the ability to merge a pull request, it can't merge a pull request. Black and white."
• "Everyone's gonna be using agents. Just be smart about what you give it access to."

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

Subscribe: RSS

Episode Summary

Dave's advice to anyone, technical or not, is to stop treating AI as a chatbot and get a real AI personal assistant. He and Dan break down what separates the two: memory that learns you, an agent running 24/7 on your behalf, and a mindset shift from search box to staff member. Dan, the skeptic, turns out to have already used one to fill two days of open houses.

▶ Subscribe to The Velocity Lab on YouTube: youtube.com/@app-vitals

Key Topics

• Chatbot vs. assistant: why a chatbot is glorified search and an assistant is a staff member working toward your goals
• Memory: short, medium and long-term memory that knows your size, your style and your loyalty programs without being told
• 24/7 agents: recurring research and reminders, like a weekly hunt for Dave's "unicorn wallet"
• Building systems: using an assistant to stick with goals like learning guitar or planning a trip
• Dan's apartment rental: drafted listings, email replies and a fully booked open-house schedule
• Your options: self-hosted OpenClaw, hosted OpenClaw, Meta AI, Lindy, and Grok, plus what not to give an assistant access to

Notable Quotes

• "A chatbot is a chatbot. It's glorified search. A personal assistant is a staff member that works for you and with you."
• "Everyone, their lives would be better off if they had an AI personal assistant. I firmly believe that, and I can prove it."
• "Do yourself a favor and try it out, 'cause it's gonna literally change your life for the better."

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

Subscribe: RSS

Episode Summary

A listener asked where App Vitals will be in three years. Dave and Dan agree the technology is already capable of near-total automation — what is actually slowing everything down is human organizations: committees, approval meetings, and a management layer built around oversight rather than output. Then the conversation widens into the physical world, where autonomous robots and self-driving trucks are about to do to millions of jobs what AI is already doing to software.

Key Topics

• The technology is ready, the humans are not — why adoption, not capability, is the real bottleneck
• A patent lawyer's fear of falling behind, and how far non-engineering fields still are from integrating AI
• Why management titles built around meetings and oversight have to disappear
• You can 10X how fast you ship and still move slow, if approvals run through a committee
• Moving upstream: from writing PRDs to setting goals and letting the factory run
• The three-year prediction — autonomous robots, grocery stocking, and long-haul trucking

Notable Quotes

• "The slow part is not the technology, it's the human beings that are getting in the way of the technology."
• "Those people with titles have influence. A lot of those titles are gonna go, they have to go away. It's mandatory."
• "Long haul trucking is gonna be replaced, and that's millions of high-paying, good-paying jobs for people."

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

Subscribe: RSS

Episode Summary

Dave and Dan run a two-person AI consulting company where the back office has quietly disappeared into automation: time tracking, invoicing, payroll, the weekly newsletter, and this very podcast all run on agents rather than people. That leads them to the question the whole episode circles — if two people can automate this much, what does a 200-person company actually need all those people for?

Key Topics

• Finance on autopilot — hourly billing, monthly invoicing, and S-corp payroll and distributions handled by their own agents alongside Gusto, with a CPA still owning tax compliance
• Marketing and podcast production — a weekly newsletter assembled from blog content, and a podcast pipeline that records, edits, publishes, clips, and schedules itself
• Build instead of subscribe — replacing Cal.com with their own scheduling tool to cut the bill and add the features they actually wanted
• The internal stack — Shipwright for autonomous coding, Vitals OS for time tracking, and Squadron for goal-driven autonomous projects
• Where automation still falls short — marketing results lag, and closing a deal is still a human skill AI has not replaced
• Two paths for AI adoption — cut headcount for margin, or keep the team and use the same automation to move faster and build more

Notable Quotes

• "We haven't written a line of code in eight months. We plan, and we validate, for Shipwright."
• "Software engineers do not need to write code anymore. That's a solved problem."
• "200-person company, right? What does that mean when, if we can automate it, shouldn't they be able to automate all this stuff out?"

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

Subscribe: RSS

Episode Summary

Real AI adoption doesn't stall on tooling — it stalls on two human prerequisites: trusting the AI, and trusting your team. Dave and Dan unpack why AI transformation is genuinely hard, how they stopped hand-writing code entirely, and why the organisations that substitute process for trust are the ones that can't move.

Key Topics

• Why AI transformation is hard — it threatens managers' headcount and engineers' identity as people who write code
• Trusting AI — you have to watch it succeed repeatedly first; eight months without hand-writing code, and 10,000 PRs shipped across their own company and clients
• The plan-then-validate workflow — PRD to task to agent execution, and why a non-coder and a developer arrive at trust by completely different routes
• Multitasking as the underrated soft skill of the AI era — going from single-threaded work to running parallel planning sessions
• Trusting your team — bureaucracy exists so organisations don't have to trust people, which is exactly why small teams outrun big ones
• Verification as the third pillar — automated testing and canary deploys, so a mistake rolls itself back

Notable Quotes

• "You're asking human beings to make a massive change in how they work."
• "Trusting your teammate is an organizational issue."
• "We haven't written a line of code in eight months, and shipped 10,000 PRs for not just our company, but other companies."

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

Subscribe: RSS

Episode Summary

Dave and Dan break down the harness — the orchestration layer wrapped around an AI coding agent — and why it increasingly matters more than the model underneath it. They get into Anthropic deleting 80% of Claude Code's system prompt with nothing breaking, what that does to your token bill, and the thesis they land on: the better the models get, the smaller the harness you want.

Key Topics

• What a harness actually is — and why Shipwright sits on top of Claude Code instead of replacing it
• General vs. domain-specific harnesses: how Shipwright gets opinionated about PRs and reviews
• Dan's second harness — an upstream, KPI-driven planning layer that writes no code at all
• Boris's reveal: 80% of Claude Code's system prompt deleted, nothing broke, and what that saves you in tokens
• Model economics in practice — Sonnet vs. Opus vs. Fable, and the pull toward Groq and DeepSeek
• Token anxiety: six agents running 24/7, a $2,000 overage month, and what a Fortune 200 team spends vetting open-source models

Notable Quotes

• "Boris said that they deleted 80% of the system prompt for Claude Code and nothing broke."
• "The better the models get, the smaller the harness you want."

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

Subscribe: RSS