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 is joined by Amie McCaw, an elementary school principal in Southwest Michigan with 19 years of experience leading K-5 buildings. Together they explore what AI actually looks like inside a real elementary school and how teachers, principals, and students are navigating it.
Amie shares how she uses AI for communications, observation feedback, and behavior planning, while always vetting the output and never passing it off as her own. She talks about the surprising generational divide on her staff, where younger Gen Z teachers are often the most skeptical of AI, and why she still wants her K-5 kids learning to write a sentence before reaching for a chatbot.
The conversation widens into bigger questions: how AI is reshaping teacher burnout, why critical thinking has to come before trust, and why no tool will ever replace the human connection between a teacher and a child.
Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
Amie on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/amiemccaw.bsky.social
Amie on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amie-mccaw-53633464/
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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 talks with Brian Casel about what it means to be a “builder” in 2026—and how that definition is rapidly expanding beyond traditional developers.

They explore Brian’s work with Builder Methods and his YouTube channel, alongside the broader shift from writing code to spending the majority of time in planning, specs, and product thinking. The conversation highlights how AI is reshaping software development, enabling both technical and non-technical builders to create real, production-ready tools—not just experiments.

They also dig into the rise of internal tools across all types of businesses, the growing importance of building in public, and why product thinking may now be the most valuable skill in the AI era.
Matt Stauffer on X 
Tighten Website 
Brian Casel on X 
Builder Methods Website
Brian Casel on YouTube
Productize Course
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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 talks with Ian Landsman — 20-year SaaS founder, bootstrapper, and the person many credit with making the Laravel ecosystem possible — about what it actually looks like to build software with AI when you're not a full-time developer.

Ian shares how AI removed the biggest bottleneck in his workflow — the code itself — letting him think like a product builder instead of a programmer. They dig into running multiple AI models simultaneously to debug hard problems, using AI to tackle security audits, building competitive comparison pages for Help Spot, and why writer's block may be solved.

The conversation also gets into the harder questions: how much code should founders actually read? What happens when junior developers lean too heavily on AI without oversight? And what does it mean for small software businesses when the internet starts opening up again through MCP?
Matt Stauffer on X 
Tighten Website
Ian Landsman on X 
Ian Landsman on Bluesky 
Ian Landman’s Website 
HelpSpot 
Aaron Francis Counselors 
Solo 
ahrefs 
Outro 
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

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 talks with Kent C. Dodds — educator, JavaScript expert, and creator of Epic Web, Epic React, and Epic AI — about what it actually looks like to use AI at the frontier of software development.
They dig into how Kent ships thousands of lines of AI-generated code without reviewing most of it, why he believes "product engineering" is the most durable skill left in the industry, and what MCP (Model Context Protocol) is and why it matters far beyond the developer world. Kent also walks through Kody, his personal AI assistant that controls his home, journals his life story, and can integrate with virtually anything.
The conversation gets real on education, the future of jobs, the role of human empathy in an AI-dominated world, and why Kent thinks the parts of our jobs AI is taking are usually the parts we hated most anyway.
Matt Stauffer on X 
Tighten Website 
Kent’s Website 
Kent on X
Kent on GitHub 
Epic Web
Epic React 
Epic AI 
VS Code 
Cursor 
CodeRabbit 
Cursor Bugbot 
Practical TypeScript Course 
Justin Jackson Post 
EpicProduct.Engineer 
Community Usage from Bogdan Kharchenko 
Jesse Genet on X 
Kent C. Dodds AI Engineer Miami Talk
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

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, Steve Schoger, designer and partner at Tailwind Labs, shares how he’s actually using AI in his day-to-day work, including tools like Claude in his design workflow. The conversation explores how AI is changing creativity, how it affects team collaboration, and what it might mean for the future of design and development.
 
Matt Stauffer on Twitter - https://x.com/mattstauffer
Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
Steve Schoger on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@SteveSchoger
Steve Schoger on Twitter - https://x.com/steveschoger
Steve’s video on X - https://x.com/steveschoger/status/2035077141050622173?s=20
Paper - https://paper.design/
Skogafoss Waterfall Hike - https://thephotohikes.com/skogafoss-and-the-waterfall-way-hike/

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.