In a daring experiment that could only be described as "asking for trouble," Ian and Ash take their rambling tech discussions to the stage at the twelfth Leeds Testing Atelier! Marvel at their technological inequality as Ian gleefully controls all the buttons while Ash sits helpless without even a mute switch. Witness real humans actually listening to them in person - proof that their podcast isn't just shouted into the void!

First, Ian waxes lyrical about Model Context Protocol (MCP), which (despite sounding like a villain from Tron) is actually how AIs connect to your apps to book endless holidays during the inevitable robot apocalypse. Then Ash tackles the fascinating world of "glue work" - those invisible tasks that mysteriously fall to testers and minorities while everyone else pretends not to notice the team slowly disintegrating.

With audience members bravely volunteering their opinions, this special live episode proves that What A Lot Of Things can indeed survive contact with actual humans, and that you can never have too many Clangers references.

Our thanks to Ivor Caldwell, Emily O'Connor, Bryan Jones, Faisal Sultan, Melissa Rocks and everyone else who shared their thoughts, questions and opinions. You are awesome, and you make the world a better place.

In this episode, Ian and Ash plunge headfirst into the wild world of “vibe coding” - where developers surrender to the AI gods and trust whatever code they spit out! Watch in horror as our intrepid hosts debate whether letting AI write your code without checking it is just weekend fun or a recipe for cybersecurity disaster. Marvel as semantic diffusion transforms innocent terms into tech industry nightmares before your very ears! Will Ian’s adamant defence of the original definition save the term from the clutches of corporate jargon, or is he just fighting against the vibe?

But wait, there’s more! The dynamic duo then migrates to the fresh pastures of Bluesky, the social media platform where exiled Twitter users now frolic freely. Gasp as they navigate the thorny thickets of free speech absolutism, moderation policies, and Jack Dorsey’s digital flounce! Between debating buttons that lead to nowhere and dreaming of Figma-specific content filters, Ian and Ash once again prove that in the chaotic landscape of tech, sometimes you just have to read the diffs, and sometimes you have to vibe your way through it all.

But what do you think? Have your say on Bluesky

Links

• The Clangers and the clip from the episode "Goods" whence sprung our name (2m 40s watch).
• Leeds Testing Atelier, at which we are recording a Live Episode of What A Lot Of Things!
• Andrej Karpathy on X: Vibe coding
• Claude Code and Cursor (and Github Copilot)
• TechCrunch: TurinTech reveals $20M in backing to fix problems in ‘vibe coding’
• Simon Willison: Semantic Diffusion (and Wikipedia article on Semantic satiation)
• ThoughtWorks: Fuzz Testing
• YouTube: Interview with vibe coder 2025
• leojr94_ on X: “guys, i’m under attack”
• Wikipedia: Fuzz testing
• Bluesky, the AT Protocol, and Bluesky starter packs (and Mastodon).
• Fast Company: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on her company’s ascendant year and what she’s planning next or you can read a more ad-free version of the article including Ian's highlights.
• Ian Dunt, now on Bluesky
• Wikipedia article on Freedom of Speech
• Quote Investigator on "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" and "My Customers Would Have Asked For a Faster Horse"

In this episode, Ian and Ash embark on a thoroughly British adventure through the land of presentation software, complete with the obligatory post-implementation complaining. Marvel as Ian delivers a monumental discourse on PowerPoint crimes, Keynote superiority, and why Comic Sans should be punishable by “a damn good encouragement.”

Meanwhile, Ash provides a heartfelt eulogy for Skype, Microsoft’s once-beloved communication tool that’s being put out to digital pasture this May, only to be replaced by its demonstrably worse offspring, Teams.

Between passionate debates about slide etiquette and whether “post-amble” should be a real word, our intrepid hosts ponder why big companies buy innovative tools only to slowly suffocate them, contemplate the future of VR meetings with battery life measured in minutes, and propose a spin-off podcast called “Terrible Product-Type Meetings.” All delivered with the quintessential British approach of having an idea, implementing it, and then complaining about it afterwards – just as nature intended.

Links

• Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
• Rethinking the Presentation: Ian’s presentation opus astonishingly preserved on Slideshare from 2009.
• Apple’s Keynote and Microsoft’s Powerpoint. Oh and Google Slides.
• Fonts: Arial and, er… Comic Sans
• Sir Ken Robinson’s iconic TED talk: Do schools kill creativity?
• Toastmasters
• The Thick of It (watch on iPlayer) and In The Loop, both by Armando Iannucci, and featuring Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker
• Difficult difficult lemon difficult.
• The Register: Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5
• BBC: Microsoft announces Skype will close in May
• Weekend Testing
• Microsoft with the world’s highest cookie consent form to press release size ratio: The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams
• The Team Guide to Software Testability by Rob Meaney and our very own Ash Winter
• Meta’s Horizon Workrooms Virtual Office and Meetings and Ian’s VR experiments in using it with Dan Hammond
• Lawyer cat filter mishap

In Episode 29, Ian and Ash venture into the wild frontiers of video podcasting, with Ian's "door and chair" background sure to be nominated for design awards. The pair tackle the thorny art of story splitting, with Ash confessing his frustration at watching teams scramble around massive requirements like ants on a dropped ice cream cone. Meanwhile, Ian suggests testers might be uniquely positioned to lead such efforts, having "a clear foot in each domain" – or as Ash quips, possibly Schrödinger-like properties.

The mood darkens as Ian reveals Apple's "deeply disappointed" (not "gravely disappointed" – an important semantic distinction) announcement about disabling UK encryption features following secretive government demands. Our hosts explore the concerning implications, suggesting this puts the UK's surveillance powers closer to China than democratic peers, while wondering if police might soon arrive because "computer said nick."

Between discussions of HP's spectacular customer service own-goal (forcing callers to wait 15 minutes even when operators were available), Ian's surprisingly positive experiences with Claude Code AI, and the shocking revelation that they're podcast royalty in Côte d'Ivoire (top 10!) and Cameroon (top 100!), our hosts deliver an episode that proves that story splitting may be challenging, but splitting hairs about levels of disappointment is an art form unto itself.

Links

• The Register: HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls, and then ditches it.
• Live Multicam in Final Cut Pro for iPad
• What A Lot Of Things on Bluesky, and our podcast hosting service Transistor.
• The Humanizing Work Guide to Splitting User Stories
• Mike Cohn: Five Story-Splitting Mistakes and How to Stop Making Them
• Conway's Law (wikipedia) which explains why heavily delineated technical teams (front-end, back-end, database) end up splitting work along those same boundaries rather than by user-pathway centred flows.
• Youtube: Introducing Claude Code, and Claude Code: Overview
• Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users
• Matthew Green: Three questions about Apple, encryption, and the U.K.
• UKGov: Investigatory Powers Act 2016, and its Wikipedia entry.
• Edward Snowden (wikipedia) and Uber's God View (The Guardian)
• ...and, of course, Cynefin.

In Episode 28, Ian and Ash wade into the treacherous waters of AI-generated testing strategies, with Ian demonstrating how LLMs can now create comprehensive (but perhaps suspiciously mundane) test documentation with just a few commands. The pair debate whether testers should fear for their jobs or simply laugh at AI's confident yet risk-blind approach to testing. Meanwhile, Ash ponders the BBC's hand-wringing over the future of open source software, questioning whether the current gatekeepers might need to stop finger-wagging at younger developers and instead create more welcoming environments for volunteers.

Between discussions of 960Mbps internet connections, mind flayers in Baldur's Gate, and the correct pronunciation of "Ethernet," our intrepid hosts manage to deliver a rollicking episode that proves testing isn't dead - it's just a zombie looking for brains.

Links

• Simon Willison's blog, and his post about how "o3-mini is really good at writing internal documentation".
• Examples of o3-mini's work: Test Strategy for Ilkley Live and Ilkley Live New Developer Onboarding Guide
• Simon's `llm` and `files-to-prompt` command line tools
• We'll Give It A Go - The Spooky Men's Chorale (Youtube)
• The Cursor IDE as used by Ian.
• Ben Franklin's Famous 'Liberty, Safety' Quote Lost Its Context In 21st Century (NPR)
• Content Management Systems - Contentful, Sanity and Strapi.
• Douglas Adams quotation on age and technology
• Openreach Full Fibre Broadband
• Things Ian never wants to end: his game of Baldurs Gate 3 and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
• BBC News: Will young developers take on key open source software?
• Will Young...
• Unix tools - `curl` and `wget`.
• The Register: Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer
• The naming of `git`.

In this barnstorming episode of What A Lot Of Things, Ian and Ash bravely venture into the uncanny valley of AI pair programming, where the machines are suspiciously eager to agree that you're an absolute genius. Will our intrepid hosts manage to navigate the delicate dance between genuine collaboration and what Ash describes as "an advanced rubber duck with impeccable manners"? (Spoiler: sort of!)

But wait, there's more! Just when you thought the AI world couldn't get more dramatic, enter DeepSeek R1, the plucky Chinese upstart that's got Silicon Valley clutching their very expensive pearls. Our hosts dive into this tale of hobbled chips and unexpected innovation, while simultaneously managing to reference municipal gas works, start taking over the monuments in Monument Valley, and establish the critical importance of saying "What A Lot Of Things" in hardware stores across the nation.

Plus, hear all about the wildly successful What A Lot Of Things Christmas party, where actual listeners crossed actual Pennines to join our heroes for what we can only describe as an evening of unparalleled podcast-based revelry.

Links

• Thoughtworks Tech Radar on Replacing Pair Programming with AI
• Thoughtworks Memo: Coding assistants do not replace pair programming
• Useful coding helpers in the form of Claude, OpenAI o1, and v0.dev.
• Also, OpenAI's o3 announcement (dated before recording) and o3-mini release (dated after)
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Youtube: Brian Eno – January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now (2003, Full Album)
• The shadcn/ui component library
• Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch 2, with all-new Mario Kart
• OpenAI o1 System Card and Apollo Research: Frontier Models are Capable of
  In-context Scheming.
• Github: DeepSeek R1
• Simon Willison: DeepSeek-R1 and exploring DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B
• nVidia Project DIGITS, allowing you to run models locally of only 200b parameters.

Step into a quantum realm of confusion as Ian attempts to explain Google's new Willow chip, a computer so powerful it makes regular supercomputers look like pocket calculators from the 1980s. Listen in amazement as our hosts try to wrap their heads around quantum computing using everything from Schrödinger's cat to hand-waving explanations of mysterious "quantum gates" that may or may not be Bill Gates' cooler brother.

But wait! Just when you thought your brain couldn't take any more, Ash whisks us back to the glory days of rubber keyboards and screeching cassette tapes. Relive the high-stakes drama of typing in magazine code listings where one wrong character could spell DISASTER, and discover why modern gaming just isn't quite the same without the constant threat of losing everything when your RAM pack wobbles.

Plus: Ian's lightning-fast speaking adventures, Ash's suspiciously unopened Christmas present, and the eternal quest to explain why testing isn't just something you do at the end (even when Ian looks really, really attentive).

Links

• Google Blog: Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip
• Jill Platts' Medium article: A Quantum Programming Quest for Newbies with 10 Use Cases
• Photo of a quantum computer
• Leeds Testing Atelier, back in 2025!
• Ian's presentation about his podcasting life
• The Guardian: The Spectrum review – a tactile trip to the 1980s
• Metro: Retro video games are a waste of everyone’s time and money – Reader’s Feature
• Capcom Edition Super Pocket with its 12 highly acclaimed arcade games from the Japanese publisher
• Ian's YouTube hit: 3d Monster Maze on the Sinclair Timex ZX81
• DECTalk sings "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" by Tom Lehrer
• Granny's Garden on the BBC Micro, featuring a beepy version of Irish fiddle tune The Rights of Man (this one on an actual fiddle)

Your favorite tech podcast stretches out for a luxurious 75 minutes this time, like a cat in a sunbeam (speaking of which, meet Ash's new rescue cat Bauhaus).

Ian and Ash dive into McKinsey's latest thoughts on measuring developer productivity, leading to some choice words about their take on "quality assurance testers." Things get wonderfully weird when Ian introduces the Clock of the Long Now - a 10,000-year timepiece being built inside a Texas mountain, complete with never-repeating chimes and powered by temperature differences between day and night.

Fresh from running 100km at God's Own Backyard Ultra (where you run a loop every hour until you can't), Ash contemplates the value of doing things slowly in our rush-rush world. Ian makes a triumphant return to public speaking with an AI talk (using the intriguing IA Presenter), and recommends The Bear - a stressful but compelling show about a high-stakes restaurant kitchen that might just teach us something about team dynamics. Yes chef!

Links

• Why embracing complexity is the real challenge in software today
• DORA’s software delivery metrics: the four keys
• The SPACE of Developer Productivity
• Yes, you can measure software developer productivity
• Wikipedia: Goodhart's Law
• God's Own Backyard Ultra 2024 – Results
• Bauhaus - the movement, not the band.
• IA Writer and IA Presenter
• Ian's talk: Enhancing Team Effectiveness with AI: A Squadify Case Study and Squadify where Ian is CTO
• The Bear
• The Clock of the Long Now, and the prototype in the Science Museum in London
• The Long Now Foundation and Danny Hillis
• Svalbard Global Seed Vault
• Utopia for Realists–the book Ash couldn't remember the title of.