Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

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

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 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. * Matt Stauffer on X [https://x.com/mattstauffer]  * Tighten Website [https://tighten.com/]  * Michelle on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleyulleyi/]  * Basis Research Institute [https://www.basis.ai/] * NYC Rat Research in the News [https://nypost.com/2025/09/20/us-news/new-york-city-rats-are-social-beasts-even-have-unique-accent-study-finds/]  * Pyro.ai [http://pyro.ai/]  * Women in Data [https://www.womenindata.org/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=16687994330&gbraid=0AAAAACLu-q86DqcRWS3oSGa6GM9p8Lx5K&gclid=Cj0KCQjwk_bPBhDXARIsACiq8R2Zu6kQIUzE7NLGWTgaTmsD7JIu4KRqgLJ5a_K0wEde7uNSuj80DuQaAt1eEALw_wcB]  * Generationship [https://www.generationship.ai/]  * Decile Group [https://decilegroup.com/?]  * Bobiverse Series [https://www.amazon.com/Bobiverse/dp/B0753LBFQ7]  * Becky Chambers Book [https://www.amazon.com/Long-Small-Angry-Planet-Wayfarers/dp/0062444131]  * Andrej Karpathy YouTube [http://youtube.com/andrejkarpathy]  * Community Usage Tweet [https://x.com/CraigThirtyFour/status/2049900579342753814?s=20]  * Setlist FM [https://www.setlist.fm/]  ----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten [https://tighten.com/].

AI in Elementary Schools: A Principal’s Take

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 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. * Matt Stauffer on X [https://x.com/mattstauffer] - https://x.com/mattstauffer [https://x.com/mattstauffer] * Tighten Website [https://tighten.com/] - https://tighten.com/ [https://tighten.com/] * Amie on Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/amiemccaw.bsky.social] - https://bsky.app/profile/amiemccaw.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/amiemccaw.bsky.social] * Amie on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amie-mccaw-53633464/] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amie-mccaw-53633464/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amie-mccaw-53633464/] ----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten [https://tighten.com/] - https://tighten.com/ [https://tighten.com/]

Teaching Non-Developers to Build Real Apps With AI

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 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. * Matt Stauffer on X [https://x.com/mattstauffer]  * Tighten Website [https://tighten.com/]  * Brian Casel on X [https://x.com/casjam]  * Builder Methods Website [https://buildermethods.com/] * Brian Casel on YouTube [https://youtube.com/@briancasel] * Productize Course [https://www.productizeandscale.com/crash-course/] ----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten [https://tighten.com/] - https://tighten.com/ [https://tighten.com/]

Is AI Replacing Developers or Just Changing the Job?

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 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? * Matt Stauffer on X [https://x.com/mattstauffer]  * Tighten Website [https://tighten.com/] * Ian Landsman on X [https://x.com/IanLandsman]  * Ian Landsman on Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/ianlandsman.com]  * Ian Landman’s Website [https://ianlandsman.com/]  * HelpSpot [https://www.helpspot.com/]  * Aaron Francis Counselors [https://github.com/aarondfrancis/counselors]  * Solo [https://soloterm.com/]  * ahrefs [https://ahrefs.com/]  * Outro [https://outro.fm/]  ----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten [https://tighten.com/].

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

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 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. * Matt Stauffer on X [https://x.com/mattstauffer]  * Tighten Website [https://tighten.com/]  * Kent’s Website [https://kentcdodds.com]  * Kent on X [https://x.com/kentcdodds] * Kent on GitHub [https://github.com/kentcdodds]  * Epic Web [https://www.epicweb.dev/] * Epic React [https://www.epicreact.dev/]  * Epic AI [https://www.epicai.pro/]  * VS Code [https://code.visualstudio.com/]  * Cursor [https://cursor.com/home]  * CodeRabbit [https://www.coderabbit.ai/]  * Cursor Bugbot [https://cursor.com/bugbot]  * Practical TypeScript Course [https://www.epicweb.dev/practical-typescript]  * Justin Jackson Post [https://justinjackson.ca/claude-code-ruin]  * EpicProduct.Engineer [https://www.epicproduct.engineer/]  * Community Usage [https://x.com/boggybot/status/2012680005667467289?s=20] from Bogdan Kharchenko [https://x.com/boggybot]  * Jesse Genet on X [https://x.com/jessegenet?s=20]  * Kent C. Dodds AI Engineer Miami Talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IxSbMhT7v4&t=24465s] ----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten [https://tighten.com/].