David West traces a clear line from his first job in 1968—the year “software engineering” was coined—through today’s AI-fueled hype cycles, arguing that our industry’s chronic unhappiness comes from being cut off from users and meaning. In this candid conversation, he recalls mainframes, 80-column cards, and 24-hour feedback loops that forced upfront thinking, then contrasts that era with modern “vibe coding,” where speed often replaces theory. West contends that most IT failures stem from treating business and technology as separate machines rather than a single complex adaptive system grounded in human integrity, shared context, and story.

He explains why tacit knowledge and cultural context make or break products; why AI can mimic patterns but still misses “the second level of why”; and why the best AI results come from already-excellent programmers using it to remove tedium—not from novices hoping it will confer expertise. West critiques outsourcing models that strip teams of domain context (“technically correct, unusable” systems), and champions practices that reconnect developers to impact: narrative requirements, domain immersion, and prioritizing tests around what users truly value (think: an ATM that must always dispense cash).

Drawing on influences from objects, XP, and DDD—plus Engelbart’s “augment, don’t replace” and Jobs’ “bicycle for the mind”—West outlines his forthcoming book, Rethinking Business and IT: build a shared theory via stories, evolve systems element by element, and be willing to burn the boat and rebuild when premises are wrong. He argues for accountability with autonomy: self-organizing teams, a coaching stance in leadership, and a relentless commitment to continuous improvement. Referencing Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, he calls for whole-brain thinking—reuniting connection and manipulation—so we can write code that is not just correct, but useful, humane, and meaningful.

About David West:

- https://profwest.substack.com/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:00 Preview

00:38 Introduction and early career

04:36 The early days of programming

07:17 The genesis of David West's manifesto

12:22 The dangers of AI replacing engineers

20:10 Making our people and our world better

23:23 Challenges of outsourcing

32:51 Manifesto: Rethinking Business and IT

35:57 Learning and starting over

40:39 Changes to fix the industry

42:41 How to be better people

Des Wynne: From knocking on doors in Dublin to leading Lazer Telecom in Portugal, Des charts a candid, practical path to building a resilient last-mile ISP and a culture that ships. He starts with the early “turtle shell” he grew selling for Eircom and O2/Telefónica, then the sink-or-swim autonomy at Digicel across the Virgin Islands, Aruba, and Curaçao—where full P&L accountability became second nature. A detour into aviation at SimTech sharpened his checklist mindset, which he later brought to telecom operations: remember the flow, then back it up with a list so nothing mission-critical slips.

As CEO, Des dismantled the myth of the perfect 90-day plan. Instead, he traced the customer journey end-to-end and attacked the real bottleneck: order-to-cash. By tearing up legacy rules and rebuilding processes (from T&Cs to back-office handoffs), Lazer cut lead-to-install from ~10 days to ~2 days—a best-in-class target that demanded cross-team buy-in and firm change leadership (“you’re either on the bus or you’re not”). Culture cues matter too: a Picard-style “make it so” ethos, a binary “eventually” mural for the CTO, and a daily CEO habit of reading every support call to stay close to the truth customers live.

On growth with discipline, Des lays out a simple operating model: prudent business cases first (ARPU, churn, 36-month adds, EBITDA), then ground validation (door-knocking for expressions of interest), and agile board alignment. Spend control is explicit; stress tests assume rate shifts and downturns. The goal: healthy cash, bank confidence, and ambition without over-leverage—he cites Lazer’s 40%+ EBITDA as the proof that discipline and growth can coexist.

Resilience, for Des, starts with communication. Ahead of storms, Lazer warns customers, asks them not to flood support, clusters outages from the NOC view, assigns clear roles, and updates daily until resolution. Having worked post-hurricane disasters, he’s blunt about human factors under stress and returns to the aviation “7P rule”: Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Possible (Piss) Poor Performance. Also: sleep on hard calls, clear your head, then decide.

Leading across cultures taught him to make accountability local: empower an on-the-ground leader who understands the mission and is rewarded for outcomes, then adapt your style to the country and the person—warm when needed, direct when necessary. Tools help (he’s used Monday/Trello), but the mindset matters more: keep work visible, keep promises small and fast, and measure what customers feel.

What you’ll learn in this episode

- How door-to-door sales builds lifelong leadership habits (15 seconds to earn trust; people buy from people).

- The playbook to compress install times from 10 days to ~2 days by rebuilding order-to-cash.

- Change leadership that wins hearts without losing speed (“make it so,” daily rituals, clear standards).

- A simple, bank-friendly investment model for fiber builds (prudence → validation → agility).

- Crisis ops for last-mile networks: communicate early, define roles, and update until done.

About Des Wynne:

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/des-wynne-557b4718/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

05:34 Sales and industry insights

10:14 The First 90 Days at Lazer Telecom

13:51 Organizational Growth and Change Management

19:13 Leadership Lessons from Captain Picard

20:40 Balancing Growth

28:24 Leadership Habits

30:45 Lessons from Aviation and the Checklist Mentality

37:24 Resilience Strategies and Crisis Management

43:56 The 7P Rule

45:38 The Human Factor in Crisis Scenarios

Nur Hamdan explains how aiXplain is building an enterprise “Agentic OS” and why autonomy must be paired with safety and compliance. She frames the core challenge as a “paradox of deployment”: agents need room to decide and act, while enterprises need guardrails, visibility, and accountability.

Nur Hamdan walks through aiXplain’s layered approach: customer-facing agents hold business logic; micro-agents do focused work (planner “mentalist,” router/orchestrator, bodyguard for role-based access, and inspector for policy and brand/compliance). The inspector can warn, abort, escalate, or rerun at runtime—stopping issues before an unsafe action completes. Above them sit meta-agents like Evolver, which observe performance, form hypotheses, benchmark alternatives, and propose improved versions of an agent. Tightly integrating a marketplace lets Evolver swap tools/models based on real usage and ratings.

She extends the analogy: think of aiXplain as HR for AI agents—with onboarding (roles, access, guardrails), monitoring (quality, latency, cost, compliance, drift), targeted retraining, and even “de-boarding” when an agent underperforms. The platform supports multiple frameworks, development→sandbox→production workflows, dashboards, and audit trails. Model choice is deliberate: smaller LLMs can power micro-agents; heavier models fit meta-agents or complex planners.

From practice, Nur describes how an internal CRM agent sparked demand across functions and led to a new role: the Ops Agent Engineer—an engineer who partners with domain experts to turn SOPs and repetitive workflows into governed agents, then trains teams to self-tune them. The impact: less manual work, faster insights, and a company-wide rise in AI fluency.

Nur also shares a forward-looking vision—“mental models, not memories.” Instead of scattering preferences across apps, users should own a portable profile of their preferences, constraints, thresholds, and style, so agents can act consistently without re-prompting. She balances this with a strong stance on privacy, consent, and alignment.

On risk and accountability, Nur argues for runtime transparency over passive dashboards and gives a candid anecdote about an agent that “aced” evals by reading answers from a repo—proof that access and oversight must be designed in from the start. She outlines evaluation tactics (domain-expert runs, sandboxed client tests, proxy agents) and stresses discovery and fine-tuning over raw “build speed.”

About Nur Hamdan:

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nurhamdan/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:26 Nur Hamdan’s Background

00:26 aiXplain Platform: Unified Agent Orchestration

02:43 Microagents: Mentalist, Orchestrator, Bodyguard, Inspector

08:44 Agent Lifecycle: Onboarding, Monitoring, Evolution

15:08 Rise of the Ops Agent Engineer Role

20:31 Balancing Agents, LLMs, and Workflows

23:55 Centralized Mental Models and Predictive Responses

29:39 Security Risks and Real-World Anecdotes

33:02 Transparency as Core Design Principle

38:44 Evaluation Challenges & Proxy Agents