Dillon, Scott, and Matt dig into automated testing — the high upfront cost of getting started, why smoke tests deserve to gate code before it hits master, and whether enforced page object models are a useful abstraction or just a layer of indirection. Scott makes the case that smoke tests should come first while his coworkers insist the end-to-end suite will catch everything, and the crew lands on a surprising amount of agreement for a show built on disagreement. Plus: a launch that turned into permanent backend ownership, a 75-day estimate squeezed into two months, and a CLI feedback hook for agents.

Dillon, Scott, and Matt dust off the parking lot for the first time in seven months to work through a backlog of tech news. They open with the 'everything app' land grab — Google's new Whoop competitor, Uber muscling onto Airbnb's turf — and where the line sits between a smart adjacent bet and plain enshittification. From there it's the Cloudflare and Coinbase layoffs and whether 'because AI' actually holds up, then RoboBun quietly becoming Bun's top committer and out-pacing the human who's worked on it for four years. Plus Pi the 'Vim of agent harnesses,' tech bros flexing token spend, and the pod's quietly-passed one-year anniversary.

Dillon, Scott, and Matt dig into a Harvard Business Review piece on the central irony of the AI era: the tools sold to reduce our workload are quietly making us do more, because it's cheap to start work and expensive to finish it. They get into agent-swarm mandates and the dreaded 'tech lead of agents' adoption tier, Dillon's ever-growing pile of 50 open PRs, skill atrophy, and companies torching their entire AI budgets in a quarter. Plus a brand-new drama segment — Spill the Sweet Tea — on TanStack Start's controversial 'RSC support' and whether it actually follows the React spec.