Discover the future of software from the people making it happen.Listen to some of the smartest developers we know talk about what they're working on, how they're trying to move the industry forward, and what you can learn from it. You might find the solution to your next architectural headache, pick up a new programming language, or just hear some good war stories from the frontline of technology.Join your host Kris Jenkins as we try to figure out what tomorrow's computing will look like the best way we know how - by listening directly to the developers' voices.
The Enterprise AI Gap (with James Brown)
My guest this week is James Brown, an engineering lead at Schroders, and that's a useful vantage point — asset managers carry all the regulation and organisational weight of a bank, mixed with the first-to-market pressure of a startup. James starts with his own "Claude mania": months of agents running around the clock, and the wave of anxiety that hit him one morning walking to the shop without one running at home. From there, Clair — the plugin he's building to give coding agents proximal awareness of each other, using git orphan branches as a zero-infrastructure message bus; why AI behaves like oxygen in a room full of tiny fires; what "going well" actually measures inside a regulated firm; and why he thinks team sizes won't change, even when the number of teams does.
There's a darker thread running under all of it. The collapse in junior hiring, the advice we no longer know how to give a 20-year-old, dark factories and evolutionary harnesses that might make the AI's ideas better than ours, and the burnout James expects to be our dominant topic for the next couple of years. If AI is working beautifully on your side projects but landing with a thud at work, James has some honest answers — including several about what he doesn't know yet.
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Clair (James's multi-agent proximity plugin): https://github.com/JBJamesBrownJB/clair
Clair product docs: https://github.com/JBJamesBrownJB/clair/blob/main/docs/product.md
James's blog: https://medium.com/@jameskinnahbrown
"Milk, Eggs and Claude Mania": https://medium.com/@jameskinnahbrown/milk-eggs-and-claude-mania-49f445c5a77e
Schroders: https://www.schroders.com/
Claude Code: https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code
Agent Skills & progressive disclosure: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/agent-skills/overview
Git orphan branches (git checkout --orphan): https://git-scm.com/docs/git-checkout
Moltbook: https://www.moltbook.com/
Team Topologies: https://teamtopologies.com/
"Expert Panel: How Far Can We Accelerate with AI?": https://youtu.be/Bg7L4vmmSKg
XT26 (the conference the panel was part of): https://www.juxt.pro/xt26/
Kris on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social
Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/