Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.Matt Stauffer talks with Ian Landsman — 20-year SaaS founder, bootstrapper, and the person many credit with making the Laravel ecosystem possible — about what it actually looks like to build software with AI when you're not a full-time developer.Ian shares how AI removed the biggest bottleneck in his workflow — the code itself — letting him think like a product builder instead of a programmer. They dig into running multiple AI models simultaneously to debug hard problems, using AI to tackle security audits, building competitive comparison pages for Help Spot, and why writer's block may be solved.The conversation also gets into the harder questions: how much code should founders actually read? What happens when junior developers lean too heavily on AI without oversight? And what does it mean for small software businesses when the internet starts opening up again through MCP?Matt Stauffer on X Tighten WebsiteIan Landsman on X Ian Landsman on Bluesky Ian Landman’s Website HelpSpot Aaron Francis Counselors Solo ahrefs Outro -----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.In this episode, Steve Schoger, designer and partner at Tailwind Labs, shares how he’s actually using AI in his day-to-day work, including tools like Claude in his design workflow. The conversation explores how AI is changing creativity, how it affects team collaboration, and what it might mean for the future of design and development. Matt Stauffer on Twitter - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Steve Schoger on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchogerSteve Schoger on Twitter - https://x.com/steveschogerSteve’s video on X - https://x.com/steveschoger/status/2035077141050622173?s=20Paper - https://paper.design/Skogafoss Waterfall Hike - https://thephotohikes.com/skogafoss-and-the-waterfall-way-hike/-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.Matt Stauffer talks with Nick Peterson, PhD, Assistant Professor of Homiletics at Christian Theological Seminary, ordained AME minister, executive pastor, and grant director, about the deep history between religion and technology, and what AI is really doing to knowledge, credit, and labor.They explore how Nick uses AI as a tool for falsifiability rather than content generation, why the plantation economy is a useful (and uncomfortable) lens for understanding who benefits from large language models, and how the same dynamics that shaped the Gutenberg press, televangelism, and colonialism are very much alive in the age of Claude and ChatGPT.The conversation raises harder questions about what it means to own an idea, what students lose when AI does their thinking for them, and whether the consolidation of knowledge in the hands of a few tech platforms is something new, or just the oldest story in human history, running faster.Matt Stauffer on Twitter Tighten WebsiteNick’s Website Nick on Instagram Nick on Facebook -----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.Matt Stauffer sits down with Sam Rose, developer educator at ngrok, to unpack what’s actually happening inside the AI models we use every day. Sam breaks down ideas like parameters, gradient descent, embeddings, and vector search in a way that makes them intuitive, using simple analogies such as converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. Along the way, they explore Ethan Mollick’s concept of the “jagged frontier” of AI capability and discuss why benchmarks like SWE-bench don’t always tell the full story.The conversation wraps with a thoughtful look at the ethical tensions around modern AI: intellectual property concerns, the massive financial momentum behind these systems, and what it means to keep using these tools thoughtfully even when you’re still wrestling with their implications.Matt Stauffer on Twitter Tighten Website Sam Website Sam on Twitter Prompt Caching Blog Post Co-Intelligence Book Benchmark Blog Post Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality Stephen Welch on TwitterWelch Labs on YouTube Julia Turc on YouTubeBuild a Large Language Model (From Scratch) Book Nathan LambertAaron Francis WebsiteFaster.dev Mitchell Hashimoto Armin Ronacher My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts Blog Post -----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.In this episode of Pragmatic AI, Matt Stauffer and Jordan Keller discuss how AI is reshaping writing, content creation, and the people who make their living with words.They unpack Jordan’s wide-ranging career, the pressure writers are feeling as AI floods the internet with passable content, and why taste and discernment matter more than ever. They explore where AI can genuinely help, especially in research and synthesis, and where it still falls short in originality and creative depth.The conversation also touches on decentralization, ownership, and what it means to build a voice in a world where anyone can generate text in seconds.Matt Stauffer on Twitter Tighten Website Jordan Keller on BlueskyJordan Keller Website -----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Adam Wathan, creator of Tailwind CSS, to talk about the very real impact AI is having on product companies, open source communities, and the broader tech landscape. Adam shares how AI has affected Tailwind’s business, including revenue shifts and the difficult decision to make layoffs.They discuss the emotional weight of leading through change, the search for new opportunities in an AI-shaped world, and what it means for developer education moving forward. Adam emphasizes that while AI is reshaping how we build, developers must adapt to AI tools while maintaining the human element of software development.Matt Stauffer on Twitter Tighten Website Adam Wathan on Twitter Tailwind CSS Adam’s Podcast Episode Re: Layoffs Buy Back Your Time Book -----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

AI is *everywhere*, like it or not. Everyone's either hating or hyping. But where do you find the middle?New podcast alert! First episode drops 2/10/26. Short, practical interviews w/builders, founders, & researchers using & studying real-world AI.