The CTO Advisor

Episode 700, and a reboot. Keith Townsend welcomes new co-host Calvin Hendryx-Parker, CTO and co-founder of Six Feet Up, pairing an infrastructure view and a development view on the same CTO problems. First up: Jev, TypeSafe AI's System One classifier that returns typed answers in milliseconds for a fraction of a language model's cost, and what it means to hand a closed-weight third party 200,000 rows of your data. Then Qwen3.8 running locally, and the open-weight classifiers chasing Jev. Next week: local versus cloud inference.

A replay of Layer2C Labs episode 001 on The CTO Advisor feed. The managed data plane is cheap and fast; the cost it hides is the chunking judgment it takes from you. Keith Townsend built a retrieval pipeline over thirteen years of Tech Field Day transcripts, about 237,000 segments, split between Amazon S3 Vectors and an NVIDIA DGX Spark on his desk, and traced where the decisions actually landed. Written by Keith Townsend and narrated by AI — the voice isn’t his and isn’t pretending to be. The full lab, with every number: https://labs.layer2c.com/labs/spark-s3vectors

AI agents are good at producing outcomes. The harder question is whether they can produce the same outcome twice, through a process you can inspect, test, and trust. In this episode, Keith Townsend talks with Adam Jacobs, CEO of Swamp Club and founder of Chef, about deterministic automation in the age of AI agents. The [...]

Description: Keith sits down with Ryan Booth — former network automation specialist, Apstra alum, and now principal consultant at Blue Ridge Consulting — to trace the real career arc from infrastructure engineer to applied AI practitioner. They dig into the transferable skills that actually matter (hint: it's not the coding), why curiosity-driven entry points like [...]

At Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, Keith sits down with returning guest Woon Jung, CTO of Clumio, to break down their new GCS backup launch — and why "replication" and "backup" are not the same thing. They dig into the real failure domains that catch GCP-native organizations off guard, the operational reality of multi-cloud [...]