Gerrit Hall

Are we building useful developer tools—or just feeding an addiction?In the second episode of our AI tools series, Rex, Dan, and Garrett dig into the internal systems they've built around Claude Code: markdown session logs, pre-commit hooks, context management strategies, and notification hubs. Dan shares war stories from running AI on helicopters inspecting power lines (including the time an agent changed his root password without asking). Garrett walks through his approach to scaling ten concurrent projects. And Rex asks the uncomfortable question: is all this meta-tooling actually helping, or are we just tinkering because it feels productive?The conversation moves to local LLMs—Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral—and whether a $15-20k home lab makes sense when Claude iterates faster than anyone can keep up. The hosts wrestle with context window limits, the ROI of refactoring, and what it means that these tools are specifically designed to make you feel like you're accomplishing more than you are.

Rex digs into how AI coding agents are changing the way real teams build software. Taylor Savage and Gerrit Hall share the workflows, tools, and guardrails that actually work: from custom IDEs and inbox-driven agents to multi-pass code reviews, collaboration at “agent speed,” testing that matters, and keeping data safe. A grounded look at what to automate, what to supervise, and how to ship faster without losing the plot.