Ajay and Andrew start with a cat-induced re-recording and end somewhere they did not expect: the first real "yes" to the show's core question. In between they dig into the software engineering loop, why contracts and modularization make AI-assisted work parallelizable, how to tell when a system actually needs to be split up, and why observability and flexibility are the two tenets they will not give up. They compare Codex, Claude, Fable, and GLM in real use, from usage limits and precision to one-shotting and transparent peak-hour pricing, trade notes on adopting the GSD workflow without losing their own, and watch Sonnet 5 debug an AWS permissions rabbit hole on its own.

In this episode:

Contracts and modularization, and why they make AI-assisted work parallelizable

How to tell when a system actually needs to be split up

Codex vs. Claude vs. Fable vs. GLM in real, day-to-day use

Why observability and flexibility are the two tenets of the loop

Adopting a shared workflow without giving up a hand-built one

The first real "yes" to the show's question: act, or intelligence?

Chapters:

(00:00:00) - Welcome (and a cat-induced take two)

(00:02:42) - The "software engineering loop": planning and parallelization

(00:05:20) - What's a contract? APIs, JSON, and Amazon Bedrock

(00:08:04) - Versioning contracts: 1.0 and breaking changes

(00:12:09) - Enforcing contracts: validation, CI, and TDD

(00:14:39) - Don't modularize too early: velocity as the signal

(00:17:23) - Model limits and generosity (and Grok 4.5 lands)

(00:20:24) - Codex's precision vs. Claude's fill-in-the-blanks

(00:22:39) - Concise vs. detailed, and OpenAI's Sol/Luna/Tara

(00:25:30) - Trying GLM from z.ai, and transparent peak-hour pricing

(00:32:09) - A bash wrapper to swap models into the Claude harness

(00:34:47) - Back to Claude: why Fable wins on efficiency

(00:37:07) - Is Fable one-shotting because SWE principles got trained in?

(00:38:19) - Sonnet 5 down an AWS SAM permissions rabbit hole

(00:42:41) - Observability for coding agents (LangFuse, Braintrust)

(00:45:16) - Adopting GSD: hooks, overlap, and what to steal

(00:53:03) - Two tenets of the loop: observability and flexibility

(00:54:38) - Blind spots, rituals, and what GSD surfaced

(01:01:36) - Act or intelligence? The first "yes"