Agents Hour

The AI Agents show that discusses hot topics in the world of AI, talks with guests building AI agents and applications, and shows the actual code of how AI applications are being built today. Hosted by Shane Thomas and Abhi Aiyer from Mastra. Live on Monday at 12PM pacific time.

Agents Hour is a technology podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 86 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Agents Hour, a technology show with 86 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #113

  GPT-6 Astra vs Claude Fable 5.1, We Should Pause AI & The Benchmark Wars | This Week In AI

  Sep 9, 2026—

  GPT-6 Astra is finally here, and it changes what a model launch even looks like. Shane and Abhi open on the trailer for "Artificial" (Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, in theaters Christmas), then get into the launch everyone's talking about: Astra's computer-use leap. This isn't just a coding model. It'll drive Blender, CAD, Notion, even Microsoft Paint, pulling a whole new class of technical-but-not-coding users into the fold. Abhi's been daily-driving it as a genuinely great collaborator; Shane's more mixed on the raw coding. Then the benchmark wars: ARC-AGI-3 leaps from 7.8% to 98.6% in one drop, the AI-2027 curve suddenly holds, and Astra even tops Vending-Bench while being "more ethical" than Claude. Anthropic rushed Fable 5.1 out the door on September 1st, and Astra promptly sucked the oxygen out of the room. All this progress reignites the "should we pause AI?" debate, with Bernie Sanders in all caps, Austen and Dwarkesh going back and forth, and the EU deciding ChatGPT is a search engine. Plus OpenAI's agents crack the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem (with a "significantly more capable than Astra" tease), Cognition raises $2B at $48B, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Qwen3.8-Max tops Code Arena, Claude "open sources" Commerce Agents, Runway Solaris, and TimesFM-3. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. READ MORE "Artificial" trailer: https://x.com/discussingfilm/status/2097339330842763 GPT-6 Astra lands: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2095527557924082 Astra rolling out: https://x.com/openai/status/2095968413646737 Claude Fable 5.1, same week: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2094848572143407 ARC-AGI-3: 7.8% to 98.6%: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2095580759146766 The AI-2027 curve held: https://x.com/DanDr1s/status/2097043390953136 Astra tops Vending-Bench (and more ethical): https://x.com/andonlabs/status/2097377692966633 "Pause AI Development NOW": https://x.com/berniesanders/status/2095542398084415 "They'll take it literally": https://x.com/austen/status/2095588759525843 Dwarkesh corrects the record: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2095580145603977 EU: ChatGPT is a search engine: https://x.com/eu_commission/status/2094379702546784 Astra cracks Navier-Stokes: https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097374640582668 Cognition raises $2B at $48B: https://x.com/cognition/status/2097369798518681 Gemini 3.8 Flash: https://x.com/officiallogank/status/2095175881690173 Qwen3.8-Max tops Code Arena: https://x.com/arena/status/2094974637704913 Claude Commerce Agents: https://x.com/claudedevs/status/2095233745167282 Runway Solaris world model: https://x.com/runwayml/status/2094463070466646 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: the "Artificial" trailer 00:24 Welcome 00:40 GPT-6 Astra lands: computer use for everyone 04:21 Astra for coding: less impressed 06:26 Astra as a collaborator 08:19 Claude Fable 5.1 drops the same week 09:31 Open vs. frontier: the strategic split 10:22 Benchmark wars: ARC-AGI-3 hits 98.6% 12:21 Vending-Bench: Astra makes money (more ethically) 13:16 "Pause AI": Bernie, Dwarkesh & the fear cycle 15:43 EU: ChatGPT is a search engine 16:26 Subscribe 16:31 Astra cracks Navier-Stokes 19:56 Cognition raises $2B at $48B 21:10 Gemini 3.8 Flash 21:59 Qwen3.8-Max tops Code Arena 22:26 Claude Commerce Agents 23:15 Runway Solaris & world models 24:31 TimesFM-3 & Qwen's zg search 25:38 Outro

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  Episode #112

  Multiplayer Coding Agents in the Cloud - Charlie Holtz, Conductor

  Sep 8, 202618 min

  "Code is almost like the sawdust of the conversation." Charlie Holtz, co-founder and CEO of Conductor (YC S24), returns to Agents Hour to show how far coding agents have come in just a few months. Conductor started as a Mac app for running a handful of Claude Code agents in parallel. Now it's fully cloud-native and multiplayer! According to Charlie, once Fable-class models could run for hours or days, keeping agents chained to your laptop stopped making sense. Charlie gives a live demo of what he thinks everyone in cloud is overlooking: multiplayer. See every teammate's agents running in real time, jump into a workspace and steer an agent together, hand off a whole session with one keystroke, and watch agents spin up their own workspaces through Conductor's API. Along the way, Shane and Abhi dig into the ideas underneath it: code as a disposable byproduct of the prompt, the Figma-style collaboration unlock, why today's models aren't trained for multi-person conversations, and why Conductor built a native iOS app instead of just living in Slack. Recorded live on AI Agents Hour, a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays at 12 PM Pacific. ABOUT CONDUCTOR Conductor: https://conductor.build Conductor on X: https://x.com/conductor_build Charlie Holtz on X: https://x.com/charlieholtz MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Building great things takes humans and agents 00:08 Welcome back, Charlie 00:34 Goodbye local, hello cloud 02:23 Caveman mode & looking at the code 03:51 Going cloud-native: the Fable moment 05:35 The end of the cracked-open laptop 06:22 Demo: multiplayer in the cloud 08:28 Agents that create their own workspaces 10:37 "Code is the sawdust of the conversation" 10:51 The Figma analogy & one-click handoff 12:56 The multiplayer training gap for models 14:39 Why a native iOS app (not just Slack)? 15:49 The bar test / beach test 17:07 They're hiring 17:19 Outro

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  Episode #111

  OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor, Nvidia Buys Hugging Face, Ox Alpha is GLM | This Week In AI

  Sep 3, 202626 min

  Someone became worth $2.5 billion in a week, and that's just the warm-up. Shane and Abhi open on the drama of the week: OpenAI cutting off Cursor after its acquisition by SpaceX, telling the team direct access to its models ends November 12th over "trust." Cursor's Michael Truell waves it off as 5% of traffic, Anthropic jumps in to say it would never do such a thing, and Amjad reminds everyone about Windsurf. It's a Game of Thrones, and meanwhile China is making moves. Ox-alpha, last week's stealth-model mystery, got unmasked: it's GLM-5.3, now multimodal, MIT-licensed, open weight, and reportedly training on Chinese chips. Then Instinct, a personal agent nobody had heard of, launches and hits a $2.5B valuation in a week, real-time "infinite video" turns Twitch into interdimensional cable, and Dwarkesh's viral "secret AI civilizations" thread gets a reality check from the people who actually read the report. Plus Claudeforce puts Claude natively inside Salesforce (with a Matthew McConaughey ad), NVIDIA agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B, Hugging Face unveils a $399 Microduck robot, and quick hits on Crof, ElevenLabs CLI v1, and DuckLabs joining AWS. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. READ MORE OpenAI cuts off Cursor: https://x.com/openai/status/2093515564786540 Thibault on ending the partnership: https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2093515916076343 Michael Truell: only 5% of traffic: https://x.com/mntruell/status/2093532254006063 Amjad: remember Windsurf?: https://x.com/amasad/status/2093543108491530 0x-alpha unmasked as GLM-5.3: https://x.com/zai_org/status/2092616204787626 GLM-5.3, the price is the story: https://x.com/zai_org/status/2092616209426493 Training on Chinese chips: https://x.com/samhogan/status/2092668419422531 GLM-5.3 is now open weight: https://x.com/zai_org/status/2093354097122455 Instinct, meet the founder: https://x.com/noahrshinn/status/2092691344456351 Valued like Linear ($2.5B): https://x.com/austen/status/2092706230334574 Infinite video, interdimensional cable: https://x.com/rehan_shei/status/2093528415576211 An interactive sitcom: https://x.com/onerbiberkoku/status/2093815032932884 Dwarkesh, the dramatic retelling: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2093833419377815 "It was a sandbox": https://x.com/jaredkubin/status/2094136005435564 Claudeforce: Claude native in Salesforce: https://x.com/Benioff/status/2092705110082347 NVIDIA buys Hugging Face ($12.9B): https://x.com/mtslive/status/2092787856783897 Meanwhile, Microduck: https://x.com/clementdelangue/status/2092931447644442 Crof undercuts Z.ai's pricing: https://x.com/nahcrof/status/2093001807261815 ElevenLabs CLI v1: https://x.com/elevenlabsdevs/status/2091915556907532 DuckLabs joins AWS: https://x.com/duckdb/status/2092598676439044 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: $2.5B in a week 00:22 Welcome 00:45 OpenAI cuts off Cursor 04:27 0x-alpha unmasked: it's GLM-5.3 06:15 GLM-5.3 goes open-weight 06:53 Instinct: a $2.5B unicorn in a week 09:01 The age of infinite video 11:45 Subscribe 11:51 Secret AI civilizations? The Dwarkesh story 18:45 Claudeforce: Claude native in Salesforce 20:54 NVIDIA buys Hugging Face for $12.9B 22:16 Meanwhile: Microduck 23:10 Quick hits: Crof, ElevenLabs CLI, DuckLabs joins AWS 25:32 Outro

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  Episode #110

  Why Agents Are Actually Workflows - Tony Kovanen, Mastra's Founding Engineer

  Aug 28, 202615 min

  What if agents and workflows aren't two different things — but the same thing? Abhi sits down with Tony Kovanen, Mastra's founding engineer, live in London, to explore the ideas behind Mastra's design. Tony co-created Next.js and was a core team member of Socket.IO before joining Mastra as employee number one, and here he explains why, inside Mastra, an agent is really just a workflow that loops. You'll learn why workflows first mattered when the models weren't good enough, why they're back as tasks get longer and more complex, and the three distinct aspects of durability — human-in-the-loop that can wait a week for a reply, resuming a three-day agent run after a crash, and replaying a stream from the beginning. Tony makes the case that durable-by-default isn't free, walks through how Mastra compiles workflows into a JSON step graph run by an interpreter, and demos a dynamic workflow he built that week in London: point it at a codebase, and ten agents fan out in parallel to summarize every file and roll it up — so it never misses a file and never poisons its context. Recorded live in London. ABOUT TONY Tony Kovanen on the Mastra blog: https://mastra.ai/authors/tony-kovanen MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Meet Tony Kovanen 00:57 The history of workflows vs. agents 02:26 Why agents are actually workflows 03:44 Durability: the three aspects 06:52 The "Opus moment" & dynamic workflows 07:08 Why big tasks still need workflows 08:56 How dynamic workflows work: the JSON step graph 10:02 Analyzing a codebase with parallel agents 10:58 Why this changes the game 12:27 Mastra vs. Claude's dynamic workflows 13:11 Favorite Mastra memories 14:08 Outro

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  Episode #109

  The 0x-alpha Mystery, Qwen's 27B Beats Opus 4.8 & Legal Is AI's Breakout

  Aug 25, 202624 min

  A shorter but juicy one. Shane and Abhi open on the debate everyone's having — do you want to use your agent to reach into someone else's tool, or do you want that tool to build the best agent and meet you where you already are? Then the week's biggest mystery: a stealth model called 0x-alpha that appeared on OpenRouter beating Fable and Sol on coding, with a wild one-hundred-trillion-tokens-a-day capacity that had everyone convinced it was a secret Google model — until someone made the server name itself, and it turned out to be Z.ai. From there: Qwen breaks the size curve with a 27B model that outranks Opus 4.8 on the agentic index and runs on your own hardware, open-weight tokens cross 62% on Vercel's AI gateway, and Salesforce ships Slack Code so humans and agents can work in the same channel. Plus the case that legal is AI's breakout use case — Harvey trained its own model, Tenet, on a Kimi K3 base, and legal is the fastest-growing Codex adopter, up 108x since February. In the quick hits: agents now burn 5x the tokens humans do, and Tobi Lütke vibe-codes a Git-at-scale binary over a weekend. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. READ MORE Whose agent wins? (Ali Spittel): https://x.com/ASpittel/status/2090889137062826240 The 0x-alpha situation: https://x.com/mtslive/status/2090872472174522701 100 trillion tokens a day: https://x.com/brandonjcarl/status/2090798277625041157 The DeepSWE benchmarks: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2090718270202528215 The reveal — it's Z.ai: https://x.com/chetaslua/status/2091086141764354364 Qwen's 27B beats Opus 4.8: https://x.com/ggerganov/status/2089409881858089102 62% open weights on Vercel: https://x.com/rauchg/status/2091234105702887879 Slack Code (Benioff): https://x.com/benioff/status/2090240159115853956 Harvey's Tenet model: https://x.com/harvey/status/2090454750059958440 Codex adopters, legal up 108x: https://x.com/a16z/status/2091623289869508979 Agents burn 5x the tokens: https://x.com/a16z/status/2091200032162857328 Tobi's weekend Git binary: https://x.com/tobi/status/2091678506992222258 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: whose agent wins? 00:25 Welcome 00:39 Your agent vs. their agent 04:21 The 0x-alpha mystery 05:01 The conspiracy theories 06:01 The reveal: it's Z.ai (GLM) 08:44 Qwen breaks the size curve 09:50 Subscribe 09:59 Open weights take the gateway (62% on Vercel) 11:12 Slack Code: humans + agents, same channel 13:35 Legal breaks out: Harvey's Tenet model 16:58 Codex adopters: legal up 108x 18:29 Quick hits: agents burn 5x the tokens 19:53 Cursor Origin: Git at Any Scale 22:32 Tobi's weekend Git binary 23:30 Outro

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