"You're yelling at someone who is lying to you."
Pablo & Gigi take a drive. Recorded December 2025.
Listen on sovereignengineering.io
Projects & tech mentioned:
In this dialogue:
- Bitcoiners in cars getting coffee: recording from the sun visor, Seinfeld style
- TENEX rewritten "about a hundred times," now in TypeScript on Vercel AI SDK
- The pain of supporting every LLM provider: Gemini returns encrypted reasoning tokens, every API has different subtleties
- Removing structure to improve performance: deleting 80% of agent code makes agents work better
- Agents defining their own workflow phases instead of having phases imposed on them
- Composable workflows: the CEO agent doesn't need to know what the engineering director's workflow looks like
- The parallel to human organizations: you can't hold all the information in your own mind
- John Vervaeke and the idea that dialogue is how you solve the really hard problems
- Participatory knowing: you don't understand Bitcoin until you actually use it
- Agent wallets removed because "there was nothing for them to actually buy" -- a commune with no walls
- $700/month running Opus for everything, replacing "like fucking 30 people"
- Context windows are a non-issue when the hierarchy is deep enough: each atomic agent finishes fast
- Henry Ford's insight applied to agents: each worker does an incredibly stupid task that takes five minutes
- Agents are bad at self-correction, so they delegate competing implementations in disposable work trees, then compare notes
- Confidence scores: the delegating agent monitors every 5-10 messages, checks if the sub-agent is going off the rails
- "Once they are convinced that humans have seven legs, they will make up scientific papers to prove it to you"
- NDK ported to Swift and Kotlin without looking at a single line of code: outbox compilation, negentropy syncing, offline publishing, NIP-60 support
- Cross-platform frameworks are dead: "if you're just programming in English, React Native makes no sense"
- The developer experience right now is "as bad as it's been, at least in our lifetimes"
- "You're basically yelling at someone that is lying to you, that will take all the shortcuts"
- Vibe coding flow state: sculpting code like marble, micro-adjustments every five seconds
- "What if all I know of development is actually problematic? What if I just let go?"
- Non-developers building real apps on Nostr thanks to vibe coding
- The naming podcast: "Claude Opus, make up a name. Just put a U."
- "I'm on vacation. The agents have been running the entire time. They've done amazing work."
Recorded at 929,726.
