AI:AM — AI Coding Agents, Chip Design, and the Value of Human Judgment · October 6, 2026

Podcast: AI:AM · Prakash Narayanan & Nathan Labenz

Opublikowano: 2026-10-07

Thomas Sohmers, co-founder of Positron AI, describes how coding agents changed chip-design testing, drove token spending above payroll, and shaped the company’s plans for commodity memory and looped transformers. Shawn “swyx” Wang of AI Engineer discusses hiring and performance in the age of Claude: employees still need to bring expertise, judgment, testing, and accountability to AI-generated work. Chapters (0:00) Chip design agents and hiring (1:22) The Curve debate shifts toward runaway AI (2:36) Models turn reasoning into better training data (4:05) Frontier models may already have research taste (4:33) A frontier execut...