Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

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 Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, about why AI keeps falling short on technical and product content, and what organizations can do about it.They dig into why dumping unmanaged PDFs into an LLM produces confident but unreliable answers. They also cover how structured, topic-based content and metadata change the outcome, and where AI genuinely shines: summarizing, translating, and transforming content.The conversation also takes on bigger questions: the “uninvited author” that now sits between writers and readers, deterministic versus probabilistic content, the EU AI Act, digital sovereignty, and why polished output is no longer a proxy for quality.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Scriptorium - https://www.scriptorium.com/Sarah O’Keefe on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahokeefe/The Uninvited Author - http://www.theuninvitedauthor.com/-----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 Tom Crary, President and COO of Laravel, for a rare look at AI on the business side of a fast-growing, PE-backed company — not the coding side everyone talks about.Tom walks through how his team leads with security and trust (including a custom data agreement and a hard line around financial systems), then puts AI to work everywhere else: board decks that dropped from 30 hours to under 8 to create, contract review that cut outside legal spend by 70%, and non-developers shipping their own internal apps. He's candid about the failures too — a comp-plan math error that slipped past every human reviewer — and about runaway token spend and why he refuses to make a leaderboard out of it.The conversation closes with an unexpected turn into AI-assisted biohacking, where Tom feeds genome data, blood work, and wearables into structured data to work around the context window — and a speed round on where all of this is actually headed.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTom Crary on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-crary-01246510Tom Crary on X - https://x.com/TMoney1371Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/-----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.Matt Stauffer sits down with Bill Van Loo — high school engineering educator, creative technologist, and independent electronic musician — for a clear-eyed conversation about using AI in the real world. Bill describes himself as a longtime skeptic who spent a "summer of AI learning" and came out the other side with a practical framework rather than hype.They dig into the difference between throwing a problem at AI and getting it to build you a tool, why Bill's laser-cutter workflow became his turning point, and the three ways he thinks about AI: as a thinking partner, a way to handle tedious work, and a way to build things.The conversation also wrestles with the harder questions: how to prepare students who are anxious and often anti-AI, how to protect learning instead of offloading it, and where a working artist chooses to keep the machines out entirely.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Bill Van Loo Website - http://billvanloo.com/Bill Van Loo on Instagram - http://instagram.com/billvanlooBill Van Loo on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-van-looMatt Laracon US Talk - https://youtu.be/au9bIQsrh8k?si=WoJ078glcr9CCnv7-----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 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/mattstaufferTighten 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-----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/mattstaufferTighten 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-----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/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Lauren Dueck on X - https://x.com/LaurenDueckLauren Dueck on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlaurendueck/The Asia Group - https://theasiagroup.com/Strait of Hormuz Report - https://straitofhormuz.theasiagroup.com/-----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 Kayla Helmick to talk about her journey from traditional virtual assistant work to leveraging AI for automations, podcast editing, and app development — and how she turned an early existential threat into the biggest boost her business has ever had.They get specific about the practical stuff: building reusable Claude skills to process podcasts, fixing stuck Zapier and Tally form automations, and going from playing around in Lovable to building and deploying a full Laravel app with Claude Code — her first being a memorial website for a friend.The conversation also widens out to the harder questions: keeping a human in the loop for quality, how AI is reshaping the future of virtual assistance and the work itself, and what it even means to call yourself a "virtual assistant" when you're shipping internal tools.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Kayla’s Website - http://kaylahelmick.comKayla on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kayla.helmick/Kayla on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaylahelmick/Kayla Helmick on X - https://x.com/kayla_helmick-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/Big thanks to the companies that support the show:Mailtrap - https://l.rw.rw/pragmaticai_4

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 Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm, about what AI is really doing to creators, careers, and company culture — and why so little of it is actually about the technology itself.They get into the generational backlash against AI, the myth that "all the layoffs are because of AI," how building with AI sparked a hard conversation with Justin's own co-founder, and the practical ways Justin uses ChatGPT and Claude in daily life, from meal planning to packing for a trip to London.The through-line is a challenge for an AI world: as the easy work gets automated, all that's left is the hard stuff — so do the hard thing, increase your "luck surface area," and lean into the human connection AI keeps surfacing.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Justin Jackson Website - https://justinjackson.ca/Transistor.fm - https://transistor.fm/Inception Point AI - https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/The Panel Podcast - https://panelpodcast.com/-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/Big thanks to the companies that support the show:Mailtrap - https://l.rw.rw/pragmaticai_3

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.Matt Stauffer talks with Michael King, founder and CEO of iPullRank, about what he calls relevance engineering — the work of getting brands and people seen inside AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.Mike explains why he reads patents and white papers instead of public docs, how he built his own retrieval-augmented generation prototype to understand how these systems actually work, and why visibility now comes from building "surface area" across your whole content ecosystem — Reddit, LinkedIn, digital PR — rather than from links alone. They get into the disappearing line between white hat and black hat, and why AI search has no rulebook yet.The conversation also turns personal: how Mike mandated his team get  faster with AI, how he empowers people from the bottom up instead of issuing ultimatums, and how AI frees him to spend more time on the creative work — including music — that he actually wants to do.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Michael on X - https://x.com/VeryWellVersedMichael on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkingphilly/iPullRank Website - https://ipullrank.com/iPullRank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/ipullrank/iPullRank on X - https://x.com/iPullRank-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/Big thanks to the companies that support the show:Mailtrap - https://l.rw.rw/pragmaticai_2

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 software engineer and self-described "Renegade Historian" Dave Stanton, who has built an entire AI-driven workflow that lets him program — and write a 400-page history book — almost entirely by voice from his phone.They get into the nuts and bolts: an always-on Mac Mini running stacked Claude Code sessions in tmux, SSH access from anywhere, voice-to-text tools, and a self-designed "PhD" where Sonnet plays research assistant and Opus plays a hypercritical dissertation chair, with every critique tracked as a GitHub issue. Dave explains why the book itself was never really the goal.The conversation widens into the bigger questions — what gets lost when AI handles the rote work, whether to retain human connection on purpose, and Dave's honest 80/20 split between optimism and unease about where all of this is heading.Matt Stauffer on X Dave Stanton’s Website Dave on X Tighten Website Blink for iOSSuperwhisper Geography as Destiny on GitHub ngrok TailscaletmuxSolo Please Use AI by Sean Smucker -----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.Big thanks to the companies that support the show:Mailtrap