Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

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 sits down with Tom Crary, President and COO of Laravel, for a rare look at AI on the business side of a fast-growing, PE-backed company — not the coding side everyone talks about.

Tom walks through how his team leads with security and trust (including a custom data agreement and a hard line around financial systems), then puts AI to work everywhere else: board decks that dropped from 30 hours to under 8 to create, contract review that cut outside legal spend by 70%, and non-developers shipping their own internal apps. He's candid about the failures too — a comp-plan math error that slipped past every human reviewer — and about runaway token spend and why he refuses to make a leaderboard out of it.

The conversation closes with an unexpected turn into AI-assisted biohacking, where Tom feeds genome data, blood work, and wearables into structured data to work around the context window — and a speed round on where all of this is actually headed.
Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
Tom Crary on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-crary-01246510
Tom Crary on X - https://x.com/TMoney1371
Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

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 sits down with Bill Van Loo — high school engineering educator, creative technologist, and independent electronic musician — for a clear-eyed conversation about using AI in the real world. Bill describes himself as a longtime skeptic who spent a "summer of AI learning" and came out the other side with a practical framework rather than hype.

They dig into the difference between throwing a problem at AI and getting it to build you a tool, why Bill's laser-cutter workflow became his turning point, and the three ways he thinks about AI: as a thinking partner, a way to handle tedious work, and a way to build things.

The conversation also wrestles with the harder questions: how to prepare students who are anxious and often anti-AI, how to protect learning instead of offloading it, and where a working artist chooses to keep the machines out entirely.
Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
Bill Van Loo Website - http://billvanloo.com/
Bill Van Loo on Instagram - http://instagram.com/billvanloo
Bill Van Loo on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-van-loo
Matt Laracon US Talk - https://youtu.be/au9bIQsrh8k?si=WoJ078glcr9CCnv7

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

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 talks with Apoorva Joshi, DevRel at MongoDB, about what it looks like to come to AI from the inside — seven years as a data scientist in cybersecurity before she ever touched a foundation model.

They get into how she evaluates whether a problem needs machine learning at all, why she gives models her brain dump instead of asking for a first draft, the proxy service she built so workshop customers never have to juggle LLM API keys, and why her trust level still sits around seventy percent.

The conversation also goes somewhere heavier: what happens to an economic model built on the value of human cognitive work, why so much AI discourse quietly assumes coding agents represent all of AI, and the question of where meaning comes from when the thing that gave it to you gets automated.
Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
Apoorva on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/apoorvajoshi95/
Mongo DB Builder Blog - https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/builder-blog

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

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 sits down with John O'Nolan, founder of Ghost, the open-source publishing platform he runs as a nonprofit that's deliberately capped at 50 people and can never be bought or sold. It's an unusual perch from which to be one of the most AI-optimistic builders in tech.

They get practical fast: John's Codex Desktop setup across two Macs, why "goal mode" is the biggest workflow shift of the year, running adversarial red-team sub-agents mid-task, and the risk-based rule for when to ship AI code versus pump the brakes. Matt shares his own turning point building a Laracon puzzle in hundreds of thousands of lines of code between meetings.

The conversation widens into where this all goes — a future long tail of small, niche businesses competing with giants, why "you're bad at prompting" is a more useful frame than "the AI is bad," and John's "made in China" theory for why today's slop era gives way to quality.

Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
John O’Nolan on X - http://x.com/johnonolan  
Ghost Website - ghost.org 
Incorruptible by Eric Ries - http://bit.ly/4pqxmbD

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

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 talks with Lauren Dueck, SVP and Director of Communications at The Asia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm advising the world's top companies. Lauren shares how AI is reshaping geopolitical consulting, decision-making, and communication — across both her daily work and her firm's high-stakes advisory practice.

They dig into practical, grounded uses: reducing decision fatigue, comparing dense reports, and priming Claude with current events because "AI is very bad at telling time." Lauren then walks through a standout project — an agent-based war game that simulated the Strait of Hormuz crisis 50 times, modeling how players like the Reserve Bank of India and South Korea's Blue House might respond.

The bigger thread is a contrarian one: that AI will make genuine human expertise rarer, more valuable, and more expensive, even as it reshapes entry-level work, deepfakes, and how the next generation learns.
Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
Lauren Dueck on X - https://x.com/LaurenDueck
Lauren Dueck on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlaurendueck/
The Asia Group - https://theasiagroup.com/
Strait of Hormuz Report - https://straitofhormuz.theasiagroup.com/

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/