Episode notes
Last week on the Platformer podcast, Granola's Chris Pedregal told me we are only 5 percent into the AI transformation of work. For the fourth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, we talk to someone who is trying to speed up the process — building an AI tool for writing software, and a company that can increasingly run itself. Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, which he started in 2016 with his wife, the designer Haya Odeh. Last month, Replit published a claim that caught my attention: that its engineers nearly tripled the amount of code each person ships in…
Podcast
Platformer
Casey Newton · Tech & Science · English
Weekly audio updates at the intersection of tech and democracy. From Casey Newton. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Platformer All episodes →
-
30 Sep 2026 · 11 min
OpenAI connects the Dots
With safety questions still swirling, the company introduces a more business-focused take on agents Read the newsletter here: https://www.platformer.news/openai-dots-agents-devday-2026/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
28 Aug 2026 · 55 min
AI agents got so good that this top Meta exec quit her job
Three months ago, we began our podcast miniseries by asking how likely artificial intelligence is to take large numbers of jobs. Our first guest, Box CEO Aaron Levie, argued that mass disruption would be highly unlikely. And several subsequent guests, from Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to labor economist Kathryn Ann Edwards, expressed similar skepticism about a labor wipeout. The argument has significant emotional appeal — who doesn’t want to believe that technology will create more jobs than it eliminates? For our final episode, I wanted to speak with someone who has considered the…
-
21 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
Every's Dan Shipper on the "dirty secret" of writing with AI
For our penultimate episode, I wanted to visit someone running a version of that experiment in a somewhat unexpected place: the media business. Dan Shipper runs a website that reviews new technology alongside a product lab that’s building it — and for some time now I’ve wondered what it’s like to work in a place like that. Today Every is a publication about AI that draws attention across the industry. At the same time, Every is also a product studio. But AI is changing the way that the company writes. Every has tried to clone the taste of its editor in chief, Kate Lee, by collecting a…
-
19 Aug 2026 · 17 min
An LLM wiki changed how I work
And everything else I learned about productivity this year. Read the newsletter here: https://www.platformer.news/karpathy-llm-wiki-journalism-productivity/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
14 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 12 min
Town's CEO on the self-organizing company
Last week on the Platformer podcast, Replit's Amjad Masad predicted that within three years, we'll be using fewer apps and more agents — with the agents using apps on our behalf. For the fifth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, I talked to someone building one of those agents. Jean-Denis Greze is the co-founder and CEO of Town — though his actual title there is mayor. Town's signature bet is that you will not have a relationship with a piece of software so much as with a character. Your assistant — Town calls it a townie — gets a name, a personality, and an animal…
-
6 Aug 2026 · 10 min
How much of my boss's job can AI do?
Six months after trying to automate myself, I gave Claude Fable 5 a bigger job: replacing Casey. Read the newsletter here: https://www.platformer.news/replacing-casey-with-claude/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
31 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 14 min
This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss
Last week on the Platformer podcast, Thomas Paul Mann predicted that within a few years, as much as half of the software on your Mac could be software you made yourself. For the third episode of our miniseries on keeping your advantage at work in the AI era, we take a look at the tool that may already know more about your job than any other: the AI notetaker that listens to every meeting you take. And there's no better person to discuss it with than Chris Pedregal. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Granola, and if you've met with a startup founder or a venture capitalist over the past two…
-
28 Jul 2026 · 14 min
A big week for AI denialism
In the wake of OpenAI’s cyberattack against Hugging Face, few seem ready to acknowledge the implications. Read the newsletter here: https://www.platformer.news/a-big-week-for-ai-denialism/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
-
22 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
The case for making your own apps
In the second episode of our second season of the Platformer Podcast, Raycast co-founder and CEO Thomas Mann offers a clear-eyed critique of commercial software. In his telling, most software is a compromise: companies chasing growth pile features onto their products until they turn generic. His answer is hyper-personalized software: apps built for a market of exactly one person, then remixed and shared from there. He predicts that within three years, 30 to 50 percent of the software on your Mac could be software you made yourself. Thomas also broke some news on the show for Glaze Pro…
-
15 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 9 min
He tried 200 to-do apps so you don't have to
Last season on the Platformer podcast, we explored what AI means for jobs — including the risk that huge numbers of them might soon go away. This season, we're asking a more practical question: what can you actually do about it? In the first episode of our second season of the Platformer Podcast, The Verge Editor-at-Large David Pierce joins us to talk about his obsession with productivity. David tests every productivity tool in the world so that the rest of us don't have to. He estimates that he has personally installed, used, and abandoned some 200 to-do apps — a number limited, he told me,…
Take it with you
The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.
