Episode description

In this barnstorming episode of What A Lot Of Things, Ian and Ash bravely venture into the uncanny valley of AI pair programming, where the machines are suspiciously eager to agree that you're an absolute genius. Will our intrepid hosts manage to navigate the delicate dance between genuine collaboration and what Ash describes as "an advanced rubber duck with impeccable manners"? (Spoiler: sort of!)

But wait, there's more! Just when you thought the AI world couldn't get more dramatic, enter DeepSeek R1, the plucky Chinese upstart that's got Silicon Valley clutching their very expensive pearls. Our hosts dive into this tale of hobbled chips and unexpected innovation, while simultaneously managing to reference municipal gas works, start taking over the monuments in Monument Valley, and establish the critical importance of saying "What A Lot Of Things" in hardware stores across the nation.

Plus, hear all about the wildly successful What A Lot Of Things Christmas party, where actual listeners crossed actual Pennines to join our heroes for what we can only describe as an evening of unparalleled podcast-based revelry.

Links

• Thoughtworks Tech Radar on Replacing Pair Programming with AI
• Thoughtworks Memo: Coding assistants do not replace pair programming
• Useful coding helpers in the form of Claude, OpenAI o1, and v0.dev.
• Also, OpenAI's o3 announcement (dated before recording) and o3-mini release (dated after)
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Youtube: Brian Eno – January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now (2003, Full Album)
• The shadcn/ui component library
• Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch 2, with all-new Mario Kart
• OpenAI o1 System Card and Apollo Research: Frontier Models are Capable of
  In-context Scheming.
• Github: DeepSeek R1
• Simon Willison: DeepSeek-R1 and exploring DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B
• nVidia Project DIGITS, allowing you to run models locally of only 200b parameters.