Ep #11: No Shortcuts. Backyard Designers, AI Slop, and the Leadership Squeeze

Tom and Jonny are back for a duo episode after a month of guest interviews — Jonny has just about got the internet back after a house move and a camping trip. 

They reflect on what the recent guest run has taught them, dig into Backyard Designers Club and the hooha it sparked, and talk through why design and engineering leadership is such a hard place to be right now. 

Plus: Tom built a 3D chess game for his 5-year-old using Opus 5 and Three.js, and Jonny's Ooda gets a quiet YC moment.

Chapters

0:04 — Intro: Jonny's back (and has internet again)

3:44 — Reflections on a month of guest episodes

8:20 — The common thread: leaders who build

17:00 — AI raises the floor, not the ceiling — but the ceiling hasn't moved

21:35 — The AI slop problem: Hacker News, Substack's detector & LinkedIn's report button

22:08 — Ellipsis and the proof-of-work problem for human writing

26:10 — Ini's wireless-in-the-browser project: the opposite of slop

21:32 — Backyard Designers Club: craft, sound design and game-like delight

29:13 — How fast an original idea can be cloned

31:21 — The hoo-ha: exclusion, community claims, and what a community actually is

38:53 — Who's on Backyard Designers — and what it says about design's visible/invisible divide

41:35 — Engineering leadership burnout: Gergely Orosz's three reasons leaders are quitting

44:35 — Is design leadership 12 months behind engineering on the same trajectory?

51:57 — Tom's AI experiments: agent skill pack + a 3D underwater chess game

1:00:01 — Jonny's Ooda project gets a YC validation moment

1:00:42 — What's coming up: Build workshop, Wednesday event with Christine Røde (The Browser Company), Brighton in September

Useful Links

Backyard Designers Club — https://backyarddesigners.club

Broke Ass Designers — the commentary/reaction version - https://brokeass-designers.fly.dev/

Ellipsus — proof-of-work writing tool https://ellipsus.com/

Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) — engineering leadership trends post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gergelyorosz_interesting-recent-trend-im-observing-share-7487619068187852800-ceQ2/

Ooda — Jonny's internal tool hosting project — https://ooda.run

Podcast feedback: [email protected]

Near Future Build Workshop (Aug 13th): https://nearfuture.works/build

Find us at https://nearfuture.works