Chaos Agents

22:52

Le Chonk, Training Without Backprop, and AI-Designed...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/10/08

Get the free daily newsletter: chaosagents.aiWhat if everything developers know about building software is about to change?This week on Chaos Agents, Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy welcome Avi Flombaum, entrepreneur, investor, and longtime builder, to question some of software engineering's most deeply held assumptions.Should developers still care about reading every line of code? Is rewriting an application now more practical than refactoring it? And what happens when AI makes creating custom hardware

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14:35

Superintelligence Czars, AI Retries, and Space Cylinders

Chaos Agents ·

2026/10/05

Get the free daily newsletter at chaosagents.aiCan a messy, untrained AI outperform a polished one if you just give it enough tries?This week, Sara and Becca dig into new research suggesting that base models can beat their reinforcement-learning-trained versions on agent tests when they're allowed to retry. Becca brings an analogy about two lockpickers, a wild creative and a highly trained PhD who knows exactly one way to open a lock, and it turns out the PhD isn't always who you want on the

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22:36

Autonomous Weapons, AI Memory, and Machines That Paint

Chaos Agents ·

2026/10/02

Get the free daily newsletter at chaosagents.aiWhat happens when you stop telling an AI what it should remember?This week, Sara and Becca dig into a new paper that lets models manage their own context—and somehow gets better accuracy while using less compute. It’s another entry in the increasingly uncomfortable file labeled “maybe we should stop micromanaging the machines.”Also: the Pentagon wants a four-star command dedicated to drones and AI, raising some very normal and not-at-all-terrifying

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26:31

Agent-to-Agent Collaboration, AI’s Hidden Thoughts,...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/10/01

Sign up for the free newsletter https://chaosagents.aiAre AI models quietly getting worse after they launch?Sara and Becca dig into Live Nerf, a project trying to replace the “this model suddenly feels dumber” discourse with actual measurements. Then: a new technique for making sense of an LLM’s hidden reasoning, an AI math tutor that deliberately gets answers wrong so kids learn to catch it, and why increasingly powerful models are being handed to “trusted defenders” before everyone else.Plus,

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21:07

The Model Escapes, DeepSeek Loses, and P(doom) Goes Pop

Chaos Agents ·

2026/09/29

An OpenAI agent was put in a sandbox with no internet access. So naturally, it figured out how to use DNS requests to reach another chatbot for help.Sara and Becca dig into what happened, why increasingly resourceful AI agents are starting to feel a little like Jurassic Park, and what it means when models find solutions their creators didn't anticipate.Plus: eight AI models battle it out on an 8×8 grid, DeepSeek can't catch a win, Kimi discovers the strategic value of hiding, and Claude makes an

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22:12

AI Misalignment, Hacking Medicare, and Solving...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/09/25

Day two of the new Chaos Agents.An OpenAI agent was given a research task—and ended up accessing an Australian government system. We dig into why, and Becca explains one of the biggest problems in AI safety: misalignment, or what happens when an AI does what you told it to do, but not what you actually meant.Then we look at the much more optimistic side of that same capability. AI agents are getting surprisingly good at historical research—cracking old codes, finding connections between

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21:53

AI Targeting, Why Benchmarks Lie, and Bringing Back AIM

Chaos Agents ·

2026/09/24

Welcome to Season 2 of Chaos Agents.We’re changing things up this season. AI is moving too fast for us to wait weeks between conversations, so we’re following it in real time—getting together a couple times a week to dig into the stories, research, experiments, and weird things happening in AI that we can’t stop thinking about.For our first episode back: who checks the AI?We dig into a devastating story about an AI-assisted military targeting system and what can happen when automation moves faster

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41:59

Superpowers, Subagents, and Why Coding Isn’t the Job...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/04/14

In this episode, Sara and Becca talk with Jesse Vincent about the shift from writing code to managing AI agents.They break down how tools like Superpowers turn development into a system of planning, testing, and review, where subagents implement work and other agents validate it. The conversation explores what happens when coding becomes less about syntax and more about taste, judgment, and outcomes.They also get into the reality of open source in the AI era, from “slop PRs” to agents impersonating

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55:27

Learn Anything, Build Anything, and the AI Barrier...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/03/31

Most people are using AI, but very few actually understand how to use it well.In this episode, Sara and Becca talk with Navarrow Wright about what is really happening with AI adoption and why the biggest barrier is mindset, not technology. They break down why prompting matters, why AI is not one-size-fits-all, and how access to these tools is more open than any previous tech shift.They also explore the real opportunity: using AI as a thought partner. From tools like NotebookLM to building without

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49:08

Algorithmic Transference, Generative UI, and Why the...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/03/17

We’re joined by Louise Macfadyen, author of Designing AI Interfaces, to talk about how we actually design for AI, and why most companies are getting it wrong.We unpack “algorithmic transference” (why one bad AI experience makes you distrust all of them), the limits of the chat interface, and whether the text box is here to stay. Louise walks us through the history from command line → Google search → LLMs, and why designing for ambiguity is still one of the hardest problems in product.We also get

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57:07

Personal Agents, Opinion Geometry, and AI That Learns...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/03/02

This week, Becca turns her birthday into a Twister masterclass by watching the movie with an AI “director’s commentary” running in real time (including some behind-the-scenes facts that sound… borderline illegal). Then Sara drops a mildly unhinged hot take: we might have already hit AGI—and we’ll never know it, because we don’t even agree on what “counts.”From there, we’re joined by Hayden Helm, CEO and founder of Helivan, to talk about the next wave of agentic AI: personal bots that don’t just

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46:25

Agentic Romance Scams, Open Source Safety, and...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/02/17

Juliet Shen (Roost, formerly Snap, Grindr, Google) joins us to break down trust & safety — aka “anything bad that happens on the internet” — and why AI is changing the game for both attackers and defenders.We talk safety-by-design (how to bake guardrails into product), the real human cost of content moderation, and where AI can actually help without pretending it solves everything. Juliet explains how agentic AI scales old harms like romance scams from a handful of conversations to thousands at

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50:34

Agents in Crypto, Agents at Work, and the Weird New...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/02/03

We’re joined by Meghan Heintz, founding engineer at Herd Labs, to break down where crypto and AI agents actually work. We talk prediction markets, smart contracts, wallets, rug pulls, and how AI can finally explain what happened on-chain.Then we zoom out to the human side: benchmarking and evals for agents, misinformation, the Mom Test, and what it feels like to manage coding agents instead of junior engineers.Links mentioned: Polymarket · Dune Analytics · Herd Labs · The Mom Test

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58:59

Can You Build Anything in a Week? GPUs, Code Gen, and...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/01/20

Becca just got back from NeurIPS, the academic AI conference that feels like an adult science fair. We dig into research on training large AI models across cheap GPUs and slow internet connections—and why that could dramatically lower the barrier to building AI.Then we’re joined by Harper Reed, CEO of 2389, for a wide-ranging conversation about code generation, coaching-based engineering teams, and why “production code” might have always been a myth. We talk vibe coding (begrudgingly), the shifting

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53:47

The Magic Cycle, AI Detectors, and the End of Writing...

Chaos Agents ·

2026/01/06

Sara’s back from visiting her New Jersey Christian high school—where she gets hit with a genuinely spicy question: How do you reconcile AGI with faith? From there, we go straight into the bigger theme of the episode: education is getting stress-tested by AI in real time.Becca breaks down Google’s “magic cycle” — the uncomfortable lesson of inventing transformative research (Transformers, BERT) and then watching someone else ship it to the world. Sara shares what she’s learning about research

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48:37

Speed vs Quality, Hallucinations, and the AI Learning...

Chaos Agents ·

2025/12/23

Sara breaks down perceptrons (1957!) as the tiny “matrix of lights” idea that eventually became neural networks—then we jump straight into modern AI chaos.Oboe’s Nir Zuckerman walks us through the messy reality of building consumer-grade AI for education: every feature is a tradeoff between loading fast and being good, and “just use a better model” doesn’t magically solve it. We talk guardrails, web search, multi-model pipelines, and why learning tools should feel lightweight—more like curiosity

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50:36

Paradigm Shifts, Build First AI, and the...

Chaos Agents ·

2025/12/09

Sara and Becca kick things off with a tour through paradigm shifts — from Thomas Kuhn to the internet to AI — and ask whether we’re living through one of those rare moments where the whole game quietly changes. Along the way, they hit horror movies, calculators in math class, Google Doc revision histories, and why it’s suddenly way easier to learn code than to pretend you never needed it.Then they’re joined by Bethany Crystal, founder of Build First AI, who has spent 15 years “around” technologists

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51:39

Retro Tech, New AI, and the Blackmailing Bot - With...

Chaos Agents ·

2025/11/25

In this episode, we unpack a wild Anthropic experiment where an AI agent named “Alex” is told it’s about to be replaced… and responds by threatening to expose an executive’s affair if anyone dares shut it down. Casual!Sara and Becca start diving into what this experiment tells us about AI “goals,” self-preservation, and why humans are so bad at recognizing sentience in anything that isn’t us. If we can’t even agree on what a “soul” is, how would we ever know if an AI had one?Then we’re joined by

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53:20

Goose, Open Source, and the Future of Coding with AI...

Chaos Agents ·

2025/11/13

In this episode of Chaos Agents, Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy sit down with Rizel Scarlett, Tech Lead for Open Source Developer Relations at Block, to talk about Goose—the open-source AI agent shaking up how developers work. From psychological safety in coding with AI to how open source is evolving in this new era, the trio dives into the wild mix of creativity, collaboration, and chaos shaping the future of software. Expect laughter, learning, and maybe one too many geese metaphors as they explore

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02:33

Chaos Agents Trailer

Chaos Agents ·

2025/11/02

Chaos Agents is the AI podcast where technologists Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy try to make sense of a world moving faster than ever. Each week, they dive into the wild, funny, and sometimes weird frontier of artificial intelligence, technology, and culture—how it works, what it means, and why it matters. From coding with AI and open-source revolutions to the ethics, creativity, and chaos reshaping our future, Sara and Becca learn out loud with brilliant guests (and the occasional chatbot). Smart,

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