This week’s episode is a little different: instead of an interview, I’m reading an essay I wrote called “Sitting at a Slot Machine,” a candid story about falling headfirst into “vibe coding,” building an increasingly elaborate AI Context System, and realizing that unlimited execution can be just as dangerous as it is exhilarating. I unpack the dopamine loop of constant progress, the slow creep of complexity disguised as productivity, and the hard pivot back to simplicity... where the real craft becomes pruning, not piling on, and a few tight, well-chosen habits beat any sprawling framework.

Crypto’s melting down, so Rex sits down with Dan and Gerrit for AI Tools: Round Three—a conversation about what’s actually changing in day-to-day work when models ship, agents run in parallel, and “sessions” start to feel like a lifestyle.

They react to a big model-release day (Opus 4.6 + ChatGPT 5.3), compare Claude Code vs Codex for real coding work, and unpack why Claude feels so sticky: better UX, more glazing, and a dopamine-loop quality that’s hard to ignore once you notice it.

From there it gets practical: managing context windows with dashboards and handoff files, building bespoke internal tools (like Rex’s “notification hub”), and watching weird new ecosystems form — Moltbook-style bot social networks, and even “Tinder for bots.”

Are we building useful developer tools—or just feeding an addiction?

In the second episode of our AI tools series, Rex, Dan, and Garrett dig into the internal systems they've built around Claude Code: markdown session logs, pre-commit hooks, context management strategies, and notification hubs. Dan shares war stories from running AI on helicopters inspecting power lines (including the time an agent changed his root password without asking). Garrett walks through his approach to scaling ten concurrent projects. And Rex asks the uncomfortable question: is all this meta-tooling actually helping, or are we just tinkering because it feels productive?

The conversation moves to local LLMs—Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral—and whether a $15-20k home lab makes sense when Claude iterates faster than anyone can keep up. The hosts wrestle with context window limits, the ROI of refactoring, and what it means that these tools are specifically designed to make you feel like you're accomplishing more than you are.