Rubber Duck Radio

A podcast about the craft of software development focusing on AI and the future of software development.

Rubber Duck Radio is a general podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 30 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Rubber Duck Radio, a general show with 30 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 #32

  Decisions, Not Essays: System One AI

  Sep 24, 2026—

  Tim and Paul unpack the rise of System One models like Jev and Laya—non-autoregressive AI that doesn't write essays but makes fast, typed, confidence-scored decisions for pennies. They separate hype from reality around 'zero hallucination,' share real-world builds including Tim's Rust/MLX inference engine and his plain-English farming game RoboFarm, and explore what happens when coding agents rely on memory and when LLM agents quietly collude. Plus, a look at Meta's Muse Charm versus xAI's Grok Bot—toy or tool? If you want to stop forcing every problem into a chatbot and start building with measurable smart if-statements, this episode shows what to make next.

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  Episode #1

  Better Tools, Same Old Mind

  Sep 17, 2026—

  Tim opens with a brutal lesson from California’s Delete Act: when he let flagship AI models plan a multi-system compliance rollout, they were brilliant at reading docs and terrible at holding a plan, all vocabulary, no scar tissue. Then he and Paul unpack the strange moment Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk all called for slowing the AI frontier, question whether Apple’s new $1,999 folding iPhone is real innovation or just another screen, and explore Google’s Web MCP as the harness upgrade that could let agents skip the 'clicks and clankers.' The episode ties these threads together around one idea: we keep mistaking better tools and scaffolding for a smarter mind, and the next real unlock is reliability, not AGI.

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  Episode #31

  The Timeline Is Vibes: AI Doom, SQLite, and Real Work

  Sep 10, 2026—

  Tim and Paul unpack Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's dramatic resignation and the AI doom debate, landing on why 'the timeline is vibes' but the boring risks—concentrated power and economic disruption—deserve real attention. They then give SQLite its overdue flowers as the unsung engine behind offline-first apps, local vector search, and the coming bespoke software boom, before comparing GPT-6 Astra's token-hungry launch with the cheap, fast, and surprisingly capable Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Paul also reports back on dictating with HARK and its meeting-to-coding-agent MCP workflow, and the two share cautious optimism on Apple's foldable under John Ternus—closing with the reminder that the real signal is usually much quieter than the hype.

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  Episode #30

  The Agents Bring Volume, You Bring Taste

  Sep 3, 2026—

  Tim Williams and Paul Mason unpack why trading the keyboard for voice makes agent workflows faster, even if you type well, and what that shift reveals about where AI agents are headed. From DHH's Omarchy OS built for agents, to Taylor Otwell killing GitHub issues in favor of AI-assisted PRs, to the flood of AI slop and license laundering, they trace a single throughline: the human in the loop is no longer the bottleneck, but the point. Plus a hands-on look at Qwen 3.8 Flash-Next, the local model that barely beats a 27B dense model while running on one card.

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  Episode #29

  Nvidia's $13B Grab, Fake Models & a Half-Terabyte Mac

  Aug 27, 2026—

  Nvidia reportedly buys Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, an 80x revenue multiple that has the AI world arguing about who controls the open-source town square. Tim and Paul break down the three camps reacting to the deal, why the real risk lives in defaults and CUDA neutrality, and how anonymous Chinese model drops were unmasked by tokenizer forensics. Then they dig into Apple's new Mac Studio with up to 512GB of unified memory, what it means for local AI sovereignty, and whether an $18,299 desktop is a supercomputer or a used Honda Civic, all pointing to one question: who holds the defaults?

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