37 published episode pages covering agentic workflows, knowledge systems, architecture, ROI, security and the hard lessons from operators who shipped.
Use the topic guide to choose a starting point, then open an episode page for the conversation, transcript, chapters, resources and linked primary sources.
Explore the topic guideDave Pengelley, Richard Webbe and Matt Slager debate one AI assistant versus specialist bots, project context and how to get useful pushback instead of automatic agreement. Dave shows an AI-edited camping Field Notes video and an early career game prototype, alongside discussion of proactive help, model efficiency, second-brain notes and data risks.
Dave, Matt and Richard assess OpenAI's Dev Day through an operator lens, focusing on Dots, pricing and the emerging everything-app strategy. They weigh voice agents, privacy and practical workflows against the need to start with a real business problem.
Dave Pengelley, Matt and Richard Webbe explore AI-generated content, human judgement, practical workflows and the question of how Australia approaches AI adoption. They compare voice-led planning, connected tools and classifier-style workflows, ending with a test for whether a new tool solves a real problem.
Dave Pengelley, Richard Webbe and Matt Slager debate data centres, AI risk narratives and JEV's structured-output approach to automation. They then turn to API-first products, MCP access, human-led iteration and fast micro-app builds.
Dave Pengelley and Shawn Hain compare the AI tools in their daily work, from browser agents and cloud environments to multi-model reviews. They examine vendor lock-in, sandboxed client work, long-running agents and the discipline needed to turn AI-assisted building into useful output.
John Ansley, Co-Founder, Board Member and Chief Revenue Officer at Knowby, joins Dave Pengelley, Richard Webbe and Matt Slayga to connect a 1992 Steve Jobs lesson about operational productivity with the challenge of getting ROI from AI. They explore how Knowby turns real work into step-by-step instructions, then discuss process improvement, interfaces and keeping AI context portable.
Darren Mitchell joins Dave Pengelley, Richard Webbe and Matt to explore AI as an amplifier for customer research and sales work, not a replacement for human judgement. They discuss critical thinking, provenance, deterministic systems and agent-friendly websites.
Annie Vella joins Dave Pengelley, Matt Slayga and Richard Webbe to examine how AI-assisted development changes cognitive load, flow state and accountability. The panel explores supervisory engineering, meaningful productivity measures and the systems thinking required for enterprise AI.
Tony Kirkham joins Dave Pengelley, Richard Webbe and Matt Slager to examine AI-driven cybersecurity, zero trust, observability, identity controls and the enduring value of network fundamentals.
Dave Pengelley, Richard Webbe and Matt examine whether AI will reshape monolithic software, and why a business-first approach matters when rebuilding systems. They explore agent harnesses, guardrails, progressive disclosure, technical debt and validation practices for production work.
Dave, Richard, and Matt unpack Substack AI scanning, the cut-and-paste economy, Hermes book packaging, algorithm gaming, go-to-market engineering with free MCP tools, and why wanting an AI receptionist is the wrong first question if your process cannot support it.
Angus Lee Forbes joins the panel on FWIP (fwip.app): on-device private file tools and a one-off fee after a sketchy e-sign subscription trap. The crew also covers token burn, models that game evals, harness wars versus base models, ownership when agents multiply, and sovereign dependency risk.
Kate Fabian (Adoptech) joins the panel from Far North Queensland on process-first AI for trades and regional SMEs. The hour covers strategy versus theatre sub-agents and token budgets CRM as process design and sovereign AI questions before the next tool purchase.
Mobile/Telstra friction the morning of the show opens into outage stories, sovereign AI, and Dave's vanished ChatGPT project with Notion as backup. Richard on untested LLM failover in business agents and the backhoe redundancy lesson; Dave on Hermes for the podcast; Matt on observability that acts.
Harness guardrails steer LLM answers before the weights do. Episode 24 opens on Richard's LinkedIn pushback on ethical-AI bias narratives, chatgpt.com versus API differences, and self-contained RAG where you only corrupt yourself. Matt's spine: access, audit, and control are becoming the product. News and economics cover GLM 5.2, GPT 5.6 limited preview, Claude Sonnet 5, local hardware growth, token spend comparisons, deterministic workflows versus agent loops, Richard's concentric ring rule, and build-versus-buy on dashboard mirrors and CRM maintenance.
Smart models do the wrong thing silently. The smarter the model gets, the sharper the human's judgment has to be — and almost nobody is investing in that judgment layer. Episode 23 anchors on the Rouse Hill IRL debrief, the deepfake video-call scam where the victim was the only real human, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas's line that the model is no longer the product, and Anthropic's agentic-coding persistent-returns-to-expertise paper. Dave's 32-agents-to-zero-productivity parable, Richard's bank-spreadsheet $40M/$140M caution, the baoyu comic-consistency anecdote, and the Roobot wearing different hats reframe on repo Claude Code plus hats vs fifty agents per project carry the practical corollaries. Enterprise translation covers Microsoft Agent 365, Copilot as harness, Claude Tag in Slack vs Salesforce Agentforce, and the on-prem-RAG pendulum swing.
Anthropic pulled Fable five days into its release after a US government escalation over a jailbreak, and the panel reads the rug pull three ways: as hijack marketing (Savio's Indian-cinema parallel), as an iPhone-moment marketing coup (Dave's Apple G4 reference), and as a real safety-versus-export-control fight. The bigger conversation is the two-market split the Fable story made obvious. Individual productivity (Claude CoWork, Hermes, Antigravity, the personal AI OS) is real but is no longer the product. Enterprise, government, and mid-market buyers need a governed, sovereign, decentralised, audit-ready stack, and that is where the margin and the durability live. New guest Savio Francis from StarFCM has been building for that second market for 16 years. His flagship product Theos ships as an AI native environment that sits above the existing OS, lands as a sovereign in-a-box for ISO 27001 and SOC 2 customers, and targets the data-friction and knowledge-friction taxes that the personal AI OS does not even see. Plus: the Fable 72-hour lived-experience, OpenRouter Fusion as the sub-fable multi-model workaround, Cursor being absorbed by SpaceX AI, the cybersecurity time-to-exploit collapse from six weeks to thirty seconds, and the IRL event at the Australian Brewery in Rouse Hill.
Two-person show, just Dave and Matt. The token rug pull is now scheduled. Anthropic is offering Fable at 2x Opus burn rate until 22 June, then it is extra-usage billing only. From there the conversation opens up into the real story of the week: the harness is the product now, not the model. Kimi, Mimo, the Chinese labs and Minimax are all racing for the same layer. Dave walks through his actual daily driver stack: Hermes profiles, Perry White personas, M3 at $20 a month, Telegram as couch interface. Matt brings the hands-off build reality check: 48 hours of Droid Missions produced magical output and nothing that worked. They land on three operating principles: the human SOP and the agent SOP are not the same, ambient context is what humans have that prompts do not, and adoption requires a use case not a licence.
OpenAI ships SharePoint-style internal Sites inside Codex. Employees are already shipping unsecured Lovable and Replit links. The panel lands on the reframe of the year: models are no longer the product, the harness is. Dave walks through his full refactor journey from ChatGPT projects to Hermes soul files and skills, and explains why a $10 a month Minimax m3 plan is now enough to do most of the work. Returning host Joanna Jones joins the panel from Western Australia, where she is now backing a statewide AI education push with the WA Chamber of Commerce.
Covers AI agent harnesses, rate limits and silent failures, sovereign/local AI infrastructure, enterprise adoption challenges, and the upcoming IRL event in Sydney.
Railway went dark for three hours. A ransomware crew took an ERP offline for weeks — and there were no backups. When it happens to you, do you have a recovery protocol, or just a hope?
Your whole team is using AI. You're generating more than ever. So why isn't anything shipping faster?
Anthropic announced a $1.5B JV with Wall Street to deliver AI consulting at scale. Five independent operators discuss what that actually changes for SMBs — and why the answer is less than you think.
608% ROI. 4.2 days down to 6.8 hours. One small manufacturing team. Richard brings the case study that answers the question most operators are afraid to ask.
A founder vibe-coded a SaaS. Launched Friday. Dead by Sunday. How hard is it to get security right when you've written zero lines of code yourself?
Richard's surfing in Indonesia. Nataliya from LeadMark AI joins — enterprise change manager by day, SMB AI embedder by night — with the framing this panel's been circling for months: every 'AI implementation problem' is a change management problem in a tech t-shirt.
Pull the loose thread of the Claude Code source leak and you end up unpicking the whole economics of AI subscriptions. Is a $120 plan or $65 worth of API tokens the better bet once the maths is run?
Your calendar missed a public holiday. Your most trusted JavaScript library just got backdoored. Your CFO's two-week paper report just got replaced in five minutes. What do all three have in common? They were built for a previous reality.
Richard's back. Marno's personal AI runs 72 tasks a day for $1.50. Matt locked down OpenClaw with secure defaults. Dave recovered a corrupted voice recorder file using Claude Code in under an hour. And we debate whether SaaS is dead or just getting reshuffled.
Dave finally pulled the trigger on Claude after Google Gemini trashed his quotas mid-session. Marno went full AI OS — calendar, email, invoicing, all through a Discord bot. Matt ingested Alex Hormozi's entire content library. NVIDIA just announced NemoClaw + OpenShell.
Dave and Matt are joined by Amber and Jo to deconstruct the reality of 'AI Operating Systems' — from deploying autonomous farm robots in regional WA to building compartmentalized AI agencies that parse SOPs to self-correct.
The crew dives deep into the infrastructure realities of Sovereign AI — including why the future of data centers might literally be in orbit. Plus the massive performance differences between standard AI web interfaces and direct LLM APIs.
Why is it that the more AI we use, the busier we seem to get? Welcome to the 'Chainsaw Paradox.' Having the best tools won't save you if you're still hacking at the trees with the engine off.
Your AI agent is running. You step away to make a coffee. By the time you're back — your API keys are gone, your files are exfiltrated, and a hacker you never saw is inside your system. Richard Webbe joins the cast.
What if your software interface changed based on what you needed to do — right now, in this moment? No fixed dashboards. No predetermined layouts. Just contextual, dynamic interfaces generated on demand.
Is your AI actually learning, or just rotting? We dismantle the 'stateless' nature of LLMs and how relying on long chat threads leads to 'context rot' — a digital dementia that degrades your results.
The very first episode. Dave, Matt, and Marno pull back the curtain on how real operators are leveraging AI in the wild — the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, and how to build infrastructure that isn't entirely rented from big tech.
