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Coding agents are revolutionizing software development, but are you getting the most out of them? Many AI coding tools struggle with complex, long-running tasks, often getting lost in the middle of a project. In this episode of Tool Use, we sit down with Kiran, one of the core contributors to Slate, a research-driven coding agent built for the toughest production-level challenges.

Kiran shares a deep dive into how to properly set up your dev environment to maximize the performance of any coding agent. We discuss the critical role of feedback loops, clear development pipelines, and consistent codebase patterns in getting correct, reliable code from LLMs. You'll learn why models are great at following patterns but terrible at creating them, and how to structure your projects for AI success. We also explore what makes Slate different, including its unique approach to context management that keeps it on track during complex tasks, preventing the performance degradation common in other agents.

Find Slate here:

https://randomlabs.ai/

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00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:54 - Setting Up Your Dev Environment for AI

00:15:18 - Is Software Engineering Dead?

00:18:20 - Why Coding Agents? The Origin of Slate

00:21:52 - What Makes Slate Different?

00:33:19 - The Bottleneck: LLMs vs Tooling

00:44:30 - Why LLMs Get "Lost in the Middle"

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Tool Use is a weekly conversation with the top AI experts, brought to you by ToolHive.

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Unlock the power of AI for your business, even if you're not a tech expert. In this episode, AI strategist Marni Wills reveals how non-technical founders can leverage AI as a new operating system to amplify their intelligence. Learn to build powerful AI workflows, create your own AI operating system, and personalize tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for massive business growth. Marni breaks down her exact process for using AI agents, developing custom instructions to avoid hallucinations, and building a "second brain" to automate tasks from email marketing to securing podcast interviews. This is your guide to making AI work for you, strategically, not technically.

Connect with Marni Wills:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marnie-wills-entrepreneur

Website: https://businesswithaistrategist.com/

Instagram: https://instagram.com/businesswithai_strategist/

Digital Store: https://stan.store/business_with_ai_strategist

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00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:19 - First Steps for Non-Technical Founders

00:08:13 - How to Avoid AI Hallucinations

00:11:04 - Building a Custom Prompt Library

00:27:17 - AI Agents vs. Automation (Lindy vs. Make)

00:32:48 - Creative AI Workflows You Haven't Thought Of

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Tool Use is a weekly conversation with the top AI experts, brought to you by ToolHive.

Join the Tool Use Discord: https://discord.gg/PnEGyXpjaX

Are you ready for AI agents to browse the web? We explore the future of AI agent authentication, web security, and API design in this deep dive. As AI agents proliferate, critical questions arise: how do we handle security without giving an agent your password? How can we make websites optimized for agent consumption? We're joined by Bobbie Chen, a product manager at Stytch specializing in bot and AI agent detection, to discuss the risks and opportunities.

We cover how OAuth can provide safer, scoped permissions for agents, and the emerging open standard Web Bot Auth, which allows agents to cryptographically prove their identity. Bobbie breaks down Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta" of AI security risks and discusses strategies for mitigating malicious behavior. We also touch on the future of AI SEO, how API design must evolve for a hybrid human-agent world, and the potential impact of agents on web monetization and advertising.

Learn more from Bobbie Chen:

Stytch supports Web Bot Auth: https://stytch.com/blog/stytch-supports-web-bot-auth

Stytch Connected Apps (OAuth for AI agents): https://stytch.com/connected-apps

Stytch Fraud and Risk Prevention: stytch.com/fraud

AGI Builders Meetup: https://luma.com/agibuilders

IsAgent SDK for agent identification: https://IsAgent.dev

Additional Resources from the episode:

Simon Willison's lethal trifecta: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta

IETF Web Bot Auth: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-nottingham-web-bot-auth/

Jon Postel as "benevolent dictator" of IANA: http://memex.org/meme4-01.html

Freestyle Cloud: https://www.freestyle.sh

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00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:25 - The Risks of AI Agents Browsing the Web

00:07:14 - A Bot Registry vs. Open Protocols

00:18:04 - How AI Will Change Web Monetization & Ads

00:35:03 - The "Lethal Trifecta" of AI Security

00:41:25 - Practical Advice for Website Owners & Agent Devs

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Tool Use is a weekly conversation with the top AI experts, brought to you by ToolHive.

Join the Tool Use Discord: https://discord.gg/PnEGyXpjaX

Master advanced prompting techniques and meta prompting in this deep dive into AI context engineering. As AI models evolve, the way we interact with them becomes more critical than ever. Prompting is no longer about simple questions; it's a skill that separates mediocre results from magical ones. In Episode 57, we're joined by Michael Tiffany, founder and CEO of Fulcra, and AI consultant Ty Fiero to explore the strategies that unlock an AI's full potential.

Discover why prompts are more important than ever, how to tailor your requests for specific models like GPT-5 and Claude, and why a "high agency" attitude is the key to getting great outputs. We discuss practical methods like iterative prompting, using one AI to critique another's work, and asking the model itself how to create the perfect prompt. Learn how to avoid AI sycophancy, the power of multimodal prompting with images, and how to right-size tasks for complex projects. Whether you're a developer using vibe coding or just want to get better answers from ChatGPT, this conversation will change how you talk to AI.

Guests:

Michael Tiffany, Founder and CEO of Fulcra

https://www.fulcra.ai

https://x.com/kubla

Ty Fiero, AI Consultant

https://x.com/FieroTy

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https://x.com/kubla

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00:00:00 - Intro

00:06:02 - The High-Agency Prompting Mindset

00:10:36 - Techniques for Reducing AI Bias

00:19:10 - Meta-Prompting: Having AI Write Your Prompts

00:23:12 - How to Build Prompting Intuition

00:30:00 - AI for Spec-Driven Development

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Tool Use is a weekly conversation with the top AI experts, brought to you by ToolHive.

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Build full-stack apps from a single prompt with Fastable, the revolutionary AI tool from AI consultant Richard Abrich. In this episode, we dive deep into how you can go from an idea to a deployed web application using AI, and learn how Richard built the tool to accelerate his own development workflows.

Richard shares his expert approach to context engineering, hallucination mitigation, and creating a powerful feedback loop by piping logs directly into the AI agent to debug and iterate faster than ever. We explore Fastable's tech stack (FastAPI, Python, React, Postgres) and how it offers a more flexible, vanilla alternative to tools like Lovable, giving developers the control they need. If you're interested in AI-powered development, the future of disposable software, or building your own tools to solve real problems, this is a conversation you can't miss.

Try Fastable for yourself: https://fastable.dev

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00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:57 - Fastable's Tech Stack vs Lovable

00:07:33 - Context Engineering for Non-Technical Users

00:17:32 - Fastable Demo

00:31:08 - Mitigating AI Hallucination

00:45:53 - The Future of Disposable Software

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Tool Use is a weekly conversation with the top AI experts, brought to you by ToolHive.

Join the Tool Use Discord: https://discord.gg/PnEGyXpjaX

Unlock massive productivity gains with AI and get hours of your life back. In Episode 55, after 10 years as a software developer with the last three focused on AI, I'm sharing the secrets to my personal productivity system. Learn how to leverage multiple LLMs, build a "digital brain" with Obsidian that goes beyond a simple second brain, and create hyper-custom automations to focus on what truly matters.

I'll walk you through my complete setup, from the AI models I use daily (like Claude and local models) to the hardware and software I use to interface with my computer, including powerful voice transcription workflows. We'll cover how to use AI coding assistants to build your own scripts, essential terminal utilities that will speed up your workflow, and the specific media tools I use for tasks outside my expertise. This is the ultimate guide to leveling up your productivity with AI.

Mike's GitHub: https://github.com/MikeBirdTech

Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

Mike's Stack: https://github.com/MikeBirdTech/stack

Dataview Plugin: https://obsidian.md/plugins?id=dataview

Connect with me

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00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:52 - Which LLM Should You Use?

00:04:17 - How to Build a "Digital Brain" in Obsidian

00:12:40 - Voice Transcription: The Biggest Productivity Unlock

00:17:59 - Building Custom Automations with AI Coding

00:32:06 - Using AI as a Thought Partner

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Tool Use is a weekly conversation with the top AI experts, brought to you by ToolHive.

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Feeling intimidated by AI tooling? This is the perfect place to start. Join us for a deep dive into AI agent fundamentals with expert educator Hai Ngheim. We break down complex topics like context engineering, explaining why it's a more useful term than prompt engineering. Learn the key differences between an AI Agent and a workflow, and discover when to use each for maximum efficiency. We demystify Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), explaining why it’s fundamentally a search problem, not just a vector database issue.

Explore the future of AI interoperability with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the "USB-C for agents" , and see how it simplifies building with AI. For those intimidated by the command line, we offer tips on getting started with powerful tools like Claude Code. This episode covers the fundamentals of deep research , browser-use agents , and what makes a "deep agent" capable of producing high-value output. If you've heard these buzzwords online , this is the explanation you've been waiting for to help you integrate these powerful AI tools into your life.

Guest Links: Check out Hai's Agent Engineering Bootcamp: https://maven.com/agent-lab/agent-engineering-bootcamp

Check out AGI Ventures Canada on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginning-hai-nghiem-swnsc/

Connect with us

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https://x.com/haithehuman

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:05 - Context Engineering vs Prompt Engineering

00:03:36 - AI Agents vs Workflows

00:20:56 - MCP (Model Context Protocol) Explained

00:29:58 - Getting Started with Claude Code

00:38:49 - The Power of Browser-Based AI Agents

00:48:50 - What Are Deep Agents?

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Tool Use is a weekly conversation with the top AI experts, brought to you by ToolHive.

Join the Tool Use Discord: https://discord.gg/PnEGyXpjaX

Open Source AI is key to a positive future for humanity, and Alignment Lab AI is building the tools to make it accessible to everyone. In a world where a few big tech companies control the most powerful "black box" AI models, concerns about data privacy, algorithmic transparency, and entrenched power are growing. This episode explores the alternative: a future of decentralized, user-owned AI.

We're joined by Austin Cook, Chris Hardwick, and Jordan Parker from Alignment Lab AI to discuss their mission to democratize AI through radical transparency and distributed ownership. Discover how open source AI empowers you to control your own data, run powerful models locally on your own hardware, and create truly personalized AI assistants. We get into why specialized open source models can outperform giant frontier models for specific tasks, the importance of owning your compute, and how you can get started with your own local AI lab.

Learn more about Alignment Lab AI:

https://www.alignmentlab.ai/

https://discord.gg/r7NaHJZxCR

https://x.com/alignment_lab

Connect with us

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https://x.com/alignment_lab

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:52 - What is AI Alignment?

00:07:05 - Can Open Source AI Compete with Frontier Models?

00:10:46 - The Dangers of AI and Your Data Privacy

00:25:13 - What You Can Do With a Home AI Lab

00:32:01 - The Future of Personalized AI Assistants

00:35:51 - How to Help the Open Source AI Movement

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Tool Use is a weekly conversation with the top AI experts, brought to you by ToolHive.