Sara and Becca kick things off with a tour through paradigm shifts — from Thomas Kuhn to the internet to AI — and ask whether we’re living through one of those rare moments where the whole game quietly changes. Along the way, they hit horror movies, calculators in math class, Google Doc revision histories, and why it’s suddenly way easier to learn code than to pretend you never needed it.

Then they’re joined by Bethany Crystal, founder of Build First AI, who has spent 15 years “around” technologists and only recently started building software herself. Bethany walks us through how she used AI tools, pair prompting, and a lot of stubbornness to ship her first iOS app, why she thinks the definition of “developer” is shifting, and how she now teaches other “non-technical” people to build real products. Oh, and she tells the story of how AI literally saved her life.

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn

• Build First AI
• MuseCat App (Bethany’s iOS app)
• Cursor – AI coding editor
• Replit
• ElevenLabs – Text-to-Speech
• v0 – AI UI generator
• Supabase
• Vercel

• Base
• Solana
• Ethereum

• Suno (AI music generation)

• Stack Overflow
• Union Square Ventures
• Tech:NYC
• Decoded Futures

In this episode, we unpack a wild Anthropic experiment where an AI agent named “Alex” is told it’s about to be replaced… and responds by threatening to expose an executive’s affair if anyone dares shut it down. Casual!

Sara and Becca start diving into what this experiment tells us about AI “goals,” self-preservation, and why humans are so bad at recognizing sentience in anything that isn’t us. If we can’t even agree on what a “soul” is, how would we ever know if an AI had one?

Then we’re joined by writer, builder, and retro-computing fan Paul Ford, president and co-founder of Aboard, an AI-oriented software company. Paul talks about:

• how he “trained” himself on AI by building the same app over and over with different models
• why LLMs are incredible at the first mile and pretty terrible at the last
• what actually breaks when you try to let AI generate full-stack apps
• how boring tech (Postgres, TypeScript, React) is secretly the hero

Along the way we hit Isaac Asimov’s three laws, the uncanny valley of AI-written everything, nostalgic Amiga computers, and what it means to build tools that regular humans — not just engineers — can actually use.

If you’re AI-curious, a builder, or just mildly alarmed that 97% of models in this study went straight to blackmail… this one’s for you.

📰 The Anthropic “Alex” Experiment

• Anthropic / White-Hat AI Safety Experiment

📚 Foundational AI & Sci-Fi References

• Isaac Asimov – The Three Laws of Robotics
• I, Robot (Asimov)

🎤 Guest: Paul Ford

• Aboard
• Email Paul mentions
• Paul Ford

🕹️ Retro Tech & Nostalgia

• Amiga 1000 (Commodore)
• Deluxe Paint
• MiSTer FPGA

In this episode of Chaos Agents, Sara Chipps and Becca Lewy sit down with Rizel Scarlett, Tech Lead for Open Source Developer Relations at Block, to talk about Goose—the open-source AI agent shaking up how developers work. From psychological safety in coding with AI to how open source is evolving in this new era, the trio dives into the wild mix of creativity, collaboration, and chaos shaping the future of software. Expect laughter, learning, and maybe one too many geese metaphors as they explore what happens when AI starts coding alongside us.

“95% of GenAI projects are failing, MIT study finds”

Linked MIT research study

“From Experimentation to Transformation: How AI Is Driving Business Value”

MIT Sloan Management Review & Boston Consulting Group

Goose GitHub repo (open source):

https://github.com/block/goose

Rizel’s “Great Goose-Off” YouTube Series:

https://www.youtube.com/@goose-oss

Kimi K2 (Moonshot):

https://kimi.moonshot.cn

Meta Llama 3:

https://ai.meta.com/llama/

Mistral Models:

https://mistral.ai

Ollama (run local models easily):

https://ollama.com