Outcome equals intelligence plus agency. AI is making the first part cheap. Yevgen Nebesov has spent five years mapping the second.Yevgen is a systems architect who watched too many good ideas in his projects go nowhere because the power arrangement around them didn't support them. His answer is the power loop, a model of power as a flow through six domains, and a book called The Architecture of Power.What you'll hear:- Why a traffic light has power, and where that power actually sits- The six domains of the power loop: events, narratives, agendas, beliefs, decisions, institutions- Why "technical debt" is a narrative, and how to sell a problem in the language of the dominant institution- How to hollow out a decision meeting by quietly building a parallel one- A bridge in 2050, an AfD case study, and the fawn rescue club that gets farmers, hunters and animal rights people into the same field at 4 a.m.Yevgen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevgen-nebesov/The Architecture of Power (book): https://leanpub.com/thearchitectureofpowerThe framework and the Power Canvas: https://architectureofpower.rocksYevgen's TEDxKarlsruhe talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePG1uvM6YKMMore episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

Most people lose track at three coding agents. Prateek Karnal runs ten to twenty at once.Prateek built Agent Orchestrator (AO) after working on AI infrastructure at Composio, where the company was already running agents at scale. His personal fix for a crowded laptop went viral at launch, passed 12,000 GitHub stars, and became a company. This conversation is about what running a fleet of agents involves once the screenshots stop.What you'll hear:- Why productivity does not scale with agent count, and Prateek's honest number for himself: two to three times- The mind-numbing parts of agentic coding: tab switching, copy-pasting CI failures, "you're a senior engineer, make no mistakes"- "I only do two tasks a week": why finding work is becoming the bottleneck- How a Kanban board works when agents hold the cards and no human moves them, and what a security founder in Texas does with 500 of them- Ben's tender agent, a credit card with a limit, and the 1,000 euro insurance policy it bought on its ownAgent Orchestrator on GitHub: https://github.com/Untrivial-ai/agent-orchestratorAO website and docs: https://orchestrator.incAO Discord: https://discord.com/invite/UZv7JjxbwGPrateek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateekkarnal/Prateek on X: https://x.com/agent_wrapperMore episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

Petra Wille thinks measuring your team's token usage is one of the worst things a leader can do right now. She explains what to measure instead.Petra is a product leadership coach, author of STRONG Product People, and co-organizer of Product at Heart, one of Europe's largest product conferences. She works with the people who line-manage product managers, designers and researchers, which makes her a good read on what AI is actually doing to product organizations instead of what LinkedIn says it is doing.What you'll hear:Why every AI question in the company ends up on the product leader's desk, and why that is not new (mobile and APIs went the same way)The AI maturity curve: experimentation feels like more work before it feels like less, and most teams quit during the "more work" phaseWhat happened when teams tried to replace engineers with vibe coding, or replace product people with Claude-written backlog items (none of it went well)Why the eight-engineers-per-product-manager ratio is broken and three is the number she now sees workingLearning headlines: giving every direct report one three-to-four-month learning focus instead of a training budget nobody usesWhy artificial users and AI-run interviews still lose to talking to actual humansPetra Wille: https://www.petra-wille.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-wille-b8b1329/STRONG Product People: https://www.strongproductpeople.comProduct at Heart: https://productatheart.comAll Things Product podcast (with Teresa Torres): https://www.producttalk.org/all-things-product/More episodes & all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.pageNewsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarworkHost: Ben, founder of Stellar Work