Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

Using AI As a Thinking Partner, Not a Vending Machine

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

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 Greg Storey — author of Creative Intelligence: Don’t Ask AI, Think With It — about why most people are using AI like a productivity vending machine instead of a true thinking partner. Greg shares how AI can become a creative and strategic collaborator, exploring design thinking, divergent vs. convergent thinking, and the three questions he asks every time he starts a conversation with AI.

They also dive into the bigger picture: why AI maximalism misses the point, how to stay creative as the tools become more capable, and what it means to preserve human creativity and curiosity in a rapidly changing world.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

AI Researcher Michelle Yi on Watson, World Models, and Why AI Should Be for Everyone

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Stauffer is joined by Michelle Yi — co-founder of Generationship, board member of Women in Data, and AI Researcher at Basis Research Institute — who shares her 20-year journey across AI research, industry, and startups.

Michelle traces the evolution of AI from her early days working on IBM Watson through to modern language models, reflecting on what's changed, what's been lost, and what's finally becoming possible. She and Matt dig into the importance of democratizing AI and making it genuinely useful beyond big tech.

The conversation closes on Michelle's vision for a more equitable and responsible AI future — one being built through initiatives like Generationship and Basis Research Institute, and powered by people who choose to engage with AI rather than sit it out.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

AI in Elementary Schools: A Principal’s Take

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

In this episode, Matt Stauffer is joined by Amie McCaw, an elementary school principal in Southwest Michigan with 19 years of experience leading K-5 buildings. Together they explore what AI actually looks like inside a real elementary school and how teachers, principals, and students are navigating it.

Amie shares how she uses AI for communications, observation feedback, and behavior planning, while always vetting the output and never passing it off as her own. She talks about the surprising generational divide on her staff, where younger Gen Z teachers are often the most skeptical of AI, and why she still wants her K-5 kids learning to write a sentence before reaching for a chatbot.

The conversation widens into bigger questions: how AI is reshaping teacher burnout, why critical thinking has to come before trust, and why no tool will ever replace the human connection between a teacher and a child.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Teaching Non-Developers to Build Real Apps With AI

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Stauffer talks with Brian Casel about what it means to be a “builder” in 2026—and how that definition is rapidly expanding beyond traditional developers.

They explore Brian’s work with Builder Methods and his YouTube channel, alongside the broader shift from writing code to spending the majority of time in planning, specs, and product thinking. The conversation highlights how AI is reshaping software development, enabling both technical and non-technical builders to create real, production-ready tools—not just experiments.

They also dig into the rise of internal tools across all types of businesses, the growing importance of building in public, and why product thinking may now be the most valuable skill in the AI era.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Is AI Replacing Developers or Just Changing the Job?

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Stauffer talks with Ian Landsman — 20-year SaaS founder, bootstrapper, and the person many credit with making the Laravel ecosystem possible — about what it actually looks like to build software with AI when you're not a full-time developer.

Ian shares how AI removed the biggest bottleneck in his workflow — the code itself — letting him think like a product builder instead of a programmer. They dig into running multiple AI models simultaneously to debug hard problems, using AI to tackle security audits, building competitive comparison pages for Help Spot, and why writer's block may be solved.

The conversation also gets into the harder questions: how much code should founders actually read? What happens when junior developers lean too heavily on AI without oversight? And what does it mean for small software businesses when the internet starts opening up again through MCP?

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Kent C. Dodds on MCP and How Product Engineering Might Outlast Coding

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Stauffer talks with Kent C. Dodds — educator, JavaScript expert, and creator of Epic Web, Epic React, and Epic AI — about what it actually looks like to use AI at the frontier of software development.

They dig into how Kent ships thousands of lines of AI-generated code without reviewing most of it, why he believes "product engineering" is the most durable skill left in the industry, and what MCP (Model Context Protocol) is and why it matters far beyond the developer world. Kent also walks through Kody, his personal AI assistant that controls his home, journals his life story, and can integrate with virtually anything.

The conversation gets real on education, the future of jobs, the role of human empathy in an AI-dominated world, and why Kent thinks the parts of our jobs AI is taking are usually the parts we hated most anyway.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Creating AI Workflows for Designers

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

In this episode, Steve Schoger, designer and partner at Tailwind Labs, shares how he’s actually using AI in his day-to-day work, including tools like Claude in his design workflow. The conversation explores how AI is changing creativity, how it affects team collaboration, and what it might mean for the future of design and development.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Advocating for more AI Governance

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Stauffer talks with Karen Maria Alston, a 20-year communication strategist turned AI governance advocate, about why AI is impacting everyone, whether they use it or not.

They get into the real-world ways AI is already shaping daily life: deepfake photos on dating apps, AI-generated social media influencers with millions of followers, voice mimicry scams draining retirement accounts, and what it means that most Americans, including most politicians, still have no idea any of this is happening. Karen breaks down the case for voter mobilization, legislative action, and why individual abstention from AI doesn't actually change the trajectory.

The conversation also gets into identity, the social contract, and the deeper human cost of automation, including what it means to lose a job that was part of who you were, and what it looks like to be hopeful about AI without being naive about it.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

The Nexus of Technology & Theology

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Stauffer talks with Nick Peterson, PhD, Assistant Professor of Homiletics at Christian Theological Seminary, ordained AME minister, executive pastor, and grant director, about the deep history between religion and technology, and what AI is really doing to knowledge, credit, and labor.

They explore how Nick uses AI as a tool for falsifiability rather than content generation, why the plantation economy is a useful (and uncomfortable) lens for understanding who benefits from large language models, and how the same dynamics that shaped the Gutenberg press, televangelism, and colonialism are very much alive in the age of Claude and ChatGPT.

The conversation raises harder questions about what it means to own an idea, what students lose when AI does their thinking for them, and whether the consolidation of knowledge in the hands of a few tech platforms is something new, or just the oldest story in human history, running faster.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

A Framework for Approaching Worrying Technology

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Stauffer talks with Reuben Johnson — aka YoBigRube — founder of Fly Duo, a storytelling studio specializing in high-trust narratives for complex and sensitive messaging. Reuben brings a perspective shaped by decades as a self-taught developer and outsider to the tech establishment.

They explore what it looks like to engage with AI when you have real criticisms of the industry — from choosing the least evil tool to running local LLMs, using AI as a writing accountability partner, and refusing to let a machine call itself human.

The conversation covers AI bias, abstracted accountability, the vulnerability of kids to AI characters, and why the answer to symbolic activism isn't more symbols — it's showing up in community, staying curious, and never deciding you've done enough.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Beyond “Spicy Autocomplete”: What AI Models Actually Do

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Matt Stauffer sits down with Sam Rose, developer educator at ngrok, to unpack what’s actually happening inside the AI models we use every day. Sam breaks down ideas like parameters, gradient descent, embeddings, and vector search in a way that makes them intuitive, using simple analogies such as converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. Along the way, they explore Ethan Mollick’s concept of the “jagged frontier” of AI capability and discuss why benchmarks like SWE-bench don’t always tell the full story.

The conversation wraps with a thoughtful look at the ethical tensions around modern AI: intellectual property concerns, the massive financial momentum behind these systems, and what it means to keep using these tools thoughtfully even when you’re still wrestling with their implications.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Understanding, and Automating, Business with AI

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0400

In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with AI strategist Blessing Richardson about how businesses can use AI in practical, responsible ways. They explore the importance of data literacy, building personal AI tools, and creating a culture of experimentation inside organizations. The conversation also looks at the deeper questions: how AI is changing the way we work, how it affects us as humans, and what the future of AI in business might look like.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

How AI Is Changing Writing and Creative Work

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

In this episode of Pragmatic AI, Matt Stauffer and Jordan Keller discuss how AI is reshaping writing, content creation, and the people who make their living with words.

They unpack Jordan’s wide-ranging career, the pressure writers are feeling as AI floods the internet with passable content, and why taste and discernment matter more than ever. They explore where AI can genuinely help, especially in research and synthesis, and where it still falls short in originality and creative depth.

The conversation also touches on decentralization, ownership, and what it means to build a voice in a world where anyone can generate text in seconds.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

The Education Business in an AI World

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0500

In this episode of Pragmatic AI, Matt Stauffer interviews Jeffrey Way, the creator of Laracasts, to talk about what AI is really doing to developer education. They explore how AI is changing the landscape of developer education, the challenges it presents, and the need for educational platforms to adapt. Jeffrey shares the tension many educators feel right now: excitement about what AI makes possible, mixed with the uncertainty of what it replaces. The conversation moves beyond developers, exploring how AI changes the way non-technical people learn, build, and participate in the software world.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

AI’s Impact on Open Source Funding

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0500

In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Adam Wathan, creator of Tailwind CSS, to talk about the very real impact AI is having on product companies, open source communities, and the broader tech landscape. Adam shares how AI has affected Tailwind’s business, including revenue shifts and the difficult decision to make layoffs.

They discuss the emotional weight of leading through change, the search for new opportunities in an AI-shaped world, and what it means for developer education moving forward. Adam emphasizes that while AI is reshaping how we build, developers must adapt to AI tools while maintaining the human element of software development.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Dreaming Bigger With AI - Aaron Francis

Matt Stauffer — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0500

In this episode of Pragmatic AI, host Matt Stauffer interviews Aaron Francis, a Laravel developer and co-founder of Try Hard Studios. They discuss Aaron's journey from being a software developer to an educator, the impact of AI on the development landscape, and the importance of adapting to new technologies. Aaron shares his insights on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI, the shift in developer education, and his current ventures, including faster.dev, which focuses on teaching engineers how to use AI effectively. The conversation also touches on the quality of code produced by AI and the importance of maintaining standards in software development.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Pragmatic AI Season One Trailer

Matt Stauffer — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0500

AI is *everywhere*, like it or not. Everyone's either hating or hyping. But where do you find the middle?

New podcast alert! First episode drops 2/10/26. Short, practical interviews w/builders, founders, & researchers using & studying real-world AI.