Craig Mod joins Paul Ford and Rich Ciotti to talk about building bespoke accounting software for his unusually tangled life as a Japan-based American writer, publisher and membership entrepreneur. What starts with taxes and receipts opens into a wider argument about who gets to make software in the age of AI, and what kinds of human judgment still matter.

Nilay Patel presses Sundar Pichai on Google’s AI reorganization, the rapid spread of Gemini and agents across search and software, and what those shifts mean for publishers, creators and the fragile idea of a common web. Pichai argues that Google is building toward more capable systems while insisting the open web remains essential, even as search grows more opinionated, personalized and self-contained.

Molly Graham talks with Manoush Zomorodi about building a career in media while every platform, business model and job description keeps changing underfoot. Their conversation turns disruption into a working philosophy: hold fast to the craft, experiment relentlessly and remember that the body, not just the mind, pays for life on screens.

Anthropic’s Felix Riesberg argues that the real bottleneck in AI is not model capability but human imagination, as users learn to hand off the tedious scaffolding of work and life. The conversation ranges from live artifacts and personal dashboards to hacked-together Bluetooth gadgets, all in service of making software more ambient, playful and useful.

Dan Shipper argues that AI is remaking work less by replacing people than by changing the interfaces around them: companywide agents in Slack, desktop copilots that become the operating system for knowledge work, and SaaS products rebuilt for humans and machines to collaborate together. He is strikingly bullish on the survival of SaaS, the rise of forward-deployed AI operators, and the prospects for product managers and full-stack designers who learn to ride the models.

A Friday roundtable weighs whether OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to public markets before their growth stories cool, while parsing the accounting, infrastructure bets and investor narratives beneath the AI boom. The conversation also skewers SpaceX’s far-fetched pitch for orbital data centers and treats commencement-season boos as a warning that the public is souring on Silicon Valley’s vision of automation.

A veteran enterprise sales leader argues that AI has changed the tempo of software selling more than its fundamentals. The conversation traces why enterprise customers still want hands-on change management, why AI-native buyers compress decisions into days, and why great go-to-market teams raise the floor with process without crushing the ceiling for human judgment.

Nilay Patel and Liz Lopatto sort through the spectacle and legal debris of Musk v. Altman, a trial nominally about OpenAI’s nonprofit origins but really driven by Elon Musk’s bid to punish Sam Altman. Their conversation sketches a courthouse circus, a statute-of-limitations defeat, and an AI industry where dishonesty feels less disqualifying than fully priced in.

Alice Real traces Rust’s rise from forum culture and async infrastructure to Android and the Linux kernel, arguing that the language’s strict rules buy reliability in exchange for a steeper learning curve. The conversation digs into ownership, borrow checking, governance by committee, and why memory safety has turned Rust from an enthusiast’s tool into an institutional one.

Alex Rattray argues that the internet’s plumbing was built for humans and conventional software, not language models, and that today’s Model Context Protocol often buckles under the weight of context, tool sprawl and weak security. The conversation traces a different path: AI agents that write and execute code against typed APIs, with permissions enforced at the API layer rather than bolted onto chat interfaces.

Anthropic’s Boris Cherny describes Claude Code’s breakneck rise from developer tool to everyday agent, arguing that the real shift is not better autocomplete but software that can use tools, act across apps, and multiply a single worker’s leverage. The conversation tests that vision against rate limits, token waste, enterprise gamification, and the unresolved question of whether today’s boom is durable or simply running ahead of itself.

Clare Vale tours Google I/O’s AI blitz, from Gemini 3.5 and agentic coding tools to new image and video generators aimed at consumers and creators. The takeaway is a mix of genuine speed and multimodal promise, plus the familiar frustration of confusing product names and half-working launches.

A Google executive and longtime labor economist argues that AI is more likely to reshape work than erase it, even as new forecasting data suggests a small but meaningful chance of far more severe disruption. The conversation pits Silicon Valley’s job-loss rhetoric against a slower, messier reality in which tasks automate faster than occupations, and policy failures may matter more than the technology itself.

Oncologist and former Cancer Moonshot adviser Dr. Komal Megharajani talks through how AI is actually entering healthcare: not as a miracle cure, but as documentation help, clinical decision support and a new layer on top of physicians’ judgment. The conversation keeps one foot in policy and another in the clinic, tracing how evidence, training, regulation and lived experience shape what these tools can and cannot do.

Molly Graham talks with Instacart co-founder Max Mullen about the gap between AI hype and actual utility, tracing her own skepticism to the moment a chatbot became a credible writing collaborator. Their conversation lands on a practical case for experimentation: the tools are improving fast, best used on mundane tasks, and still bounded by the need for human judgment.

Fiona Feng argues that AI has shifted software engineering’s bottlenecks away from writing code and toward verification, review and cross-functional coordination. Drawing on the rapid evolution of Anthropic’s Claude Code team, she makes the case for flatter orgs, lighter planning and a willingness to kill processes that quietly outlive their purpose.

Two longtime co-hosts finally record in person and use the occasion to take stock of work, ambition and the strange freedom of building together. Their conversation turns on optionality in the AI era, the difference between bootstrapping and playing someone else’s game, and the culture they are trying to design one week at a time.

A conversation about replacing unread Markdown specs with HTML artifacts that people actually engage with, turning plans, mockups, and even one-off interfaces into collaborative tools for working alongside AI. As agents get cheaper and more capable, the real managerial work shifts toward allocating compute, shaping context, and staying close enough to the process to judge what is worth building.

As BuzzFeed sells a controlling stake to Byron Allen, outgoing CEO Jonah Peretti argues that digital media’s platform era collapsed into a deals business and bets AI can rebuild both the company and the products people use directly. The conversation turns over old wounds from Facebook’s broken promises to creator economics, then lands on an ambitious, still-fuzzy vision of BuzzFeed as an AI-powered media and social platform.

Hardware veteran Caitlin Kalinowski argues that AI’s next great expansion will happen not on screens but in factories, robots and supply chains, where safety, manufacturing know-how and geopolitical risk matter as much as software. Drawing on stints at Apple, Meta and OpenAI, she sketches a future shaped by AR, drones and reindustrialization, while warning that war may change faster than consumer tech.