← All episodes Podcast

Ep #11: No Shortcuts. Backyard Designers, AI Slop, and the Leadership Squeeze

Jonny ·
Also listen onSpotifyApple PodcastsAmazon MusicDeezerYouTube

Tom and Jonny are back for a duo episode after a month of guest interviews — Jonny has just about got the internet back after a house move and a camping trip.

They reflect on what the recent guest run has taught them, dig into Backyard Designers Club and the hooha it sparked, and talk through why design and engineering leadership is such a hard place to be right now.

Plus: Tom built a 3D chess game for his 5-year-old using Opus 5 and Three.js, and Jonny's Ooda gets a quiet YC moment.

Chapters

  • 0:04 — Intro: Jonny's back (and has internet again)
  • 3:44 — Reflections on a month of guest episodes
  • 8:20 — The common thread: leaders who build
  • 17:00 — AI raises the floor, not the ceiling — but the ceiling hasn't moved
  • 21:35 — The AI slop problem: Hacker News, Substack's detector & LinkedIn's report button
  • 22:08 — Ellipsis and the proof-of-work problem for human writing
  • 26:10 — Ini's wireless-in-the-browser project: the opposite of slop
  • 21:32 — Backyard Designers Club: craft, sound design and game-like delight
  • 29:13 — How fast an original idea can be cloned
  • 31:21 — The hoo-ha: exclusion, community claims, and what a community actually is
  • 38:53 — Who's on Backyard Designers — and what it says about design's visible/invisible divide
  • 41:35 — Engineering leadership burnout: Gergely Orosz's three reasons leaders are quitting
  • 44:35 — Is design leadership 12 months behind engineering on the same trajectory?
  • 51:57 — Tom's AI experiments: agent skill pack + a 3D underwater chess game
  • 1:00:01 — Jonny's Ooda project gets a YC validation moment
  • 1:00:42 — What's coming up: Build workshop, Wednesday event with Christine Røde (The Browser Company), Brighton in September

Useful Links

About the pod