Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day, helping them ship faster with AI — not in theory, but inside their actual teams. Each week they share what they're seeing in the field: what's working, what isn't, and what most people are getting wrong. Covering Claude Code updates, AI-enabled SDLC acceleration, and personal AI agents. No hype, no BS.
Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Nov 13, 2026 · 8:20
Episode Summary Dave spent a weekend running AI models entirely on a 24GB MacBook Air with no fan, and used them to build a zooming, panning video from a script for $0. Six…
Nov 2, 2026 · 14:39
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…
Oct 27, 2026 · 41:53
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),…
Oct 19, 2026 · 10:16
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…
Oct 12, 2026 · 14:06
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:…
Sep 28, 2026 · 15:11
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…
Sep 22, 2026 · 17:14
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…
Sep 21, 2026 · 16:24
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…
Sep 15, 2026 · 13:30
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…
Sep 10, 2026 · 12:30
Episode Summary Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay argue that the software engineer's role isn't disappearing, it's changing dramatically, and that raw coding ability is no longer what…
Sep 10, 2026 · 12:11
Episode Summary Thirteen months ago DHH called AI "slop" and a fancy autocomplete. Today he runs his own agent-orchestration project and reviews PRs from an inbox. That…
Aug 28, 2026 · 15:19
Episode Summary Open-source models have caught up to Sonnet on the benchmarks, so does it still matter which model you use? Dave and Dan argue the model stopped being the…
Aug 20, 2026 · 14:00
Episode Summary Dave was dead set against building a Human-in-the-Loop mode for Shipwright — then Dan shipped it overnight using autonomous agents, and Dave came around…
Aug 18, 2026 · 17:35
Episode Summary Teams are finally staring at their AI bills — and the reflex is to use the LLM less. Dave and Dan make the opposite case: the answer isn't a cheaper model or less…
Jul 30, 2026 · 10:46
Episode Summary A month ago, Dave and Dan weren't giving this advice. Now they're telling every client — from solo founders to the Fortune 500 — the same thing: adopt autonomous…
Jul 21, 2026 · 14:53
Episode Summary Dave and Dan make the case that developers are no longer getting paid to write code — and explain why that's actually better news than it sounds. Drawing from…
Jul 17, 2026 · 15:19
Episode Summary Dave and Dan break down how Shipwright, their open-source autonomous coding agent, stacks up against Devin AI — a $26B-valued competitor. They cover the key…
Jul 10, 2026 · 16:13
Episode Summary Dave and Dan tell the origin story of App Vitals — from LiveKit AI-voice tutorials to an AI-transformation consultancy to shipping their own open-source…
Jun 30, 2026 · 26:46
Episode Summary Major announcement: Dave and Dan are open-sourcing Shipwright, the autonomous coding agent they've been building since November. It takes you from PRD to…
Jun 21, 2026 · 23:27
Episode Summary Dave and Dan pull back the curtain on the autonomous coding agent they built — an agent that lives in the cloud, takes instructions in Slack, and runs a full…
May 28, 2026 · 17:33
Episode Summary If AI handles the coding, then being an engineer means planning and reviewing — the work of staff and principal engineers. But that breaks the career ladder: how…
May 26, 2026 · 10:57
Episode Summary Dave and Dan get candid about the most uncomfortable question in software right now: is my career still safe? Dan recounts a literal "therapy session with Claude"…
May 22, 2026 · 15:48
Episode Summary Org-wide AI transformation keeps failing — not because the tech doesn't work, but because trying to move 200 engineers at once turns into a slog. Dave and Dan…
May 20, 2026 · 13:00
Episode Summary Anthropic is taking the gloves off. The VC-subsidized era of essentially-free AI agents is ending: OAuth tokens lose Open Cloud coverage, Claude Code Max plans…
May 18, 2026 · 19:26
Episode Summary Dave and Dan dig into service readiness — the industry calls it "harness engineering" — and why testing just moved to the #1 spot of their 13 repo-readiness…
May 16, 2026 · 12:42
Episode Summary Dave and Dan announce a reshaping of their AI adoption work: org-wide SDLC transformation over three months wasn't moving the needle, so they're switching to…
May 15, 2026 · 15:08
Episode Summary Dave and Dan look three months down the road: autonomous coding went from "watch every line" to "Claude is basically an employee" in six weeks. They share their…
May 13, 2026 · 12:30
Episode Summary Dave and Dan riff on how they used Claude Code to build the entire AppVitals business — marketing site, internal SaaS replacements, time tracking, invoicing, even…
May 8, 2026 · 27:48
Episode Summary The Velocity Lab's first-ever guest interview. Dave and Dan sit down with Brian Jones (Tahoe Digital), a non-technical founder who has built multiple AI-native…
May 8, 2026 · 10:03
Episode Summary Engineering leaders have been sitting on the same migrations for years — monolith to microservices, ORM rewrites, framework upgrades — because the cost of doing…
May 5, 2026 · 11:59
Episode Summary Generic AI PR review agents from Copilot, Gemini, and Claude are a baseline, not a finish line. Dan and Dave break down the five things senior engineers actually…
May 1, 2026 · 10:49
Episode Summary AI transformation isn't a tooling problem. It's an organizational one. Dave and Dan dig into why bringing in AI without cutting bureaucracy, top-down processes,…
Apr 28, 2026 · 13:34
Episode Summary Dave and Dan walk through the questions a board or executive will ask about AI — from inventory and tooling to ROI, accountability, and competitive risk — and…
Apr 25, 2026 · 14:52
Episode Summary Dave and Dan break down the upfront infrastructure work required before a single repo is ready for autonomous programming. They walk through the full prep…
Apr 13, 2026 · 13:52
Episode Summary Dave and Dan share what they're seeing in the field this week: non-software engineers — in marketing, sales, customer service, and data — are getting massively…
Apr 12, 2026 · 11:31
Episode Summary Dave and Dan announce Vitals OS — App Vitals' autonomous coding pipeline built on Claude Code and their Shipwright plugin. In the past two weeks it shipped 393…
Apr 6, 2026 · 16:34
Episode Summary A client asked Dave and Dan a deceptively simple question: "What should we call the job title for the person who leads our AI engineering transformation?" The…
Apr 5, 2026 · 11:03
Episode Summary Dave and Dan share a jaw-dropping collaboration breakthrough: Claude Code's voice mode accidentally picked up Dan's suggestions over a Google Meet call, turning a…
Apr 4, 2026 · 17:39
Episode Summary Dave and Dan share how they shipped 254 pull requests in 7 days using AI agents Sully and Bodhi — with only about 10 hours of human effort combined. They unpack…
Mar 28, 2026 · 14:28
Programming languages have always built on top of each other. With agentic coding, is the knowledge of code itself going to disappear? Dave and Dan debate whether software…
Mar 28, 2026 · 11:43
Claude Code updates for March 27, 2026. Dave demos voice mode in the CLI, remote control sessions from your phone while walking the dog, and the 1 million token context window…
Mar 28, 2026 · 15:19
Why giving every engineer access to every AI tool does not work. Dave and Dan break down the scattershot approach and why you need to focus on the entire SDLC.
Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Your podcast? Get the Podli badge for your site
