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 talks with Apoorva Joshi, DevRel at MongoDB, about what it looks like to come to AI from the inside — seven years as a data scientist in cybersecurity before she ever touched a foundation model.

They get into how she evaluates whether a problem needs machine learning at all, why she gives models her brain dump instead of asking for a first draft, the proxy service she built so workshop customers never have to juggle LLM API keys, and why her trust level still sits around seventy percent.

The conversation also goes somewhere heavier: what happens to an economic model built on the value of human cognitive work, why so much AI discourse quietly assumes coding agents represent all of AI, and the question of where meaning comes from when the thing that gave it to you gets automated.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Apoorva on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/apoorvajoshi95/
• Mongo DB Builder Blog - https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/builder-blog

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

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 John O'Nolan, founder of Ghost, the open-source publishing platform he runs as a nonprofit that's deliberately capped at 50 people and can never be bought or sold. It's an unusual perch from which to be one of the most AI-optimistic builders in tech.

They get practical fast: John's Codex Desktop setup across two Macs, why "goal mode" is the biggest workflow shift of the year, running adversarial red-team sub-agents mid-task, and the risk-based rule for when to ship AI code versus pump the brakes. Matt shares his own turning point building a Laracon puzzle in hundreds of thousands of lines of code between meetings.

The conversation widens into where this all goes — a future long tail of small, niche businesses competing with giants, why "you're bad at prompting" is a more useful frame than "the AI is bad," and John's "made in China" theory for why today's slop era gives way to quality.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• John O’Nolan on X - http://x.com/johnonolan
• Ghost Website - ghost.org
• Incorruptible by Eric Ries - http://bit.ly/4pqxmbD

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

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 talks with Lauren Dueck, SVP and Director of Communications at The Asia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm advising the world's top companies. Lauren shares how AI is reshaping geopolitical consulting, decision-making, and communication — across both her daily work and her firm's high-stakes advisory practice.

They dig into practical, grounded uses: reducing decision fatigue, comparing dense reports, and priming Claude with current events because "AI is very bad at telling time." Lauren then walks through a standout project — an agent-based war game that simulated the Strait of Hormuz crisis 50 times, modeling how players like the Reserve Bank of India and South Korea's Blue House might respond.

The bigger thread is a contrarian one: that AI will make genuine human expertise rarer, more valuable, and more expensive, even as it reshapes entry-level work, deepfakes, and how the next generation learns.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Lauren Dueck on X - https://x.com/LaurenDueck
• Lauren Dueck on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlaurendueck/
• The Asia Group - https://theasiagroup.com/
• Strait of Hormuz Report - https://straitofhormuz.theasiagroup.com/

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/