Working Code

What if the best way to get good work out of AI is to stop being nice to it? Adam and Tim have both landed on the same uncomfortable discovery: when you pit AI agents against each other, with fake points, opposing incentives, and competing models, the output gets dramatically better than anything a single polite prompt can produce.
Adam's bug-hunting pipeline hands fake rewards to sycophantic agents and then throws the scores in the trash. Tim made Claude and ChatGPT argue for twelve rounds straight until they both said "ship it".
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.
And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.
With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Full show notes and transcript here.

Tim spent a single Sunday afternoon with Claude and built Show Bot -- a sarcastic Discord bot trained on every Working Code transcript, complete with a Dungeon Crawler Carl personality, fallacy detection badges, and a talent for roasting anyone who tries to prompt-inject it. The conversation turns into a deep technical walkthrough of RAG pipelines, local models, cross-encoder reranking, and what happens when you just start building things that make you laugh.
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.
And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.
With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Full show notes and transcript here.

Testing sounds simple until you actually try it. Private methods that can't be reached without hacks. Dependency injection that doubles your architecture's complexity before a single assertion runs. Production code that slowly warps around your test suite instead of the other way around. Ben has spent his entire career shipping code without tests, and this week he decided to change that. The crew walks him through every trap he steps on, and a few they've been stuck in themselves.
Links
Ben Nadel's Blog
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.
And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.
With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Full show notes and transcript here.

Do commit messages even matter anymore, or did pull requests kill them? Ben works one commit per PR and thinks the commit message is the PR description. Carol and Tim put all the context in the PR and treat commits as disposable breadcrumbs. Adam's somewhere in between — when he's not pushing thirty knife emojis and "nope, still not working" to QA. Meanwhile, Tim's back from emergency eye surgery with a gas bubble floating around his eyeball.
Links
Ben Nadel's Blog
Conventional Commits
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.
And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.
With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Full show notes and transcript here.

For ten years, Adam's codebase has carried an ORM layer that everybody knew was wrong and nobody was touching. Nine hundred functions. Fifteen hundred files. The kind of job that gets solemnly nodded at in architecture meetings and quietly dies on the roadmap — every single year. So he stopped waiting for a volunteer and handed it to an AI agent instead. Claude's problem now.
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Thursday.
And, if you're feeling the love, support us on Patreon.
With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Full show notes and transcript here.