Your engineers need an AI control plane, not more tools | Guild.ai’s James Everingham
Collaborative agents, navigating the Wasteland, and the ten dollar an hour developer.
Right now, a lot of engineering leaders are stuck in the same loop: rolling out AI tools only to watch their teams quietly drift back to business as usual. Andrew sits down with James Everingham, former Head of DevInfra at Meta and current CEO of Guild.ai, to discuss how to break this cycle by treating AI not just as an autocomplete tool, but as a "sentient fabric" woven directly into your software development lifecycle.
They explore how replacing top-down AI mandates with impossible business challenges—like eliminating code freezes entirely—empowers developers to organically build game-changing tools like conversational onboarding agents. Finally, James breaks down why 2026 is the year of the agent and how his team is building the enterprise infrastructure needed to safely govern, audit, and scale collaborative agent workflows.
1. OpenClaw rockets to risky new heights
OpenClaw just rocketed past 250,000 stars on GitHub in a matter of months. One thing is clear: this project has completely left the original audience. Your bus driver and your aunt are starring this repository. People are so hungry for these automated assistants that they are rushing to host them on unvetted cloud services, effectively putting their private data in a panopticon. It is an incredibly cool but equally terrifying experiment. Just remind your aunt to keep her OpenClaw updated, please.
Read: OpenClaw rocks to GitHub’s most-starred status, but is it safe?
2. Navigating the agentic wasteland
Steve Yegge is back with the next evolution of his Gastown concept. He introduces the “Wasteland,” an example of “factory federation”, where engineers can link together their Gastowns via shared wanted boards and multidimensional reputation systems. This is certainly one way to distribute and collaborate with the gains from agentic engineering, one that we’re just at the early stages of exploring. It’s complexity is paired with the signature Yegge flair – he leaves us with an RPG-style character sheet to track our trustworthiness across the burgeoning federation.
Read: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns
3. Agents at the operating system level
Perplexity just announced a general-purpose digital worker that can execute long-running jobs for days or weeks at a time. What makes the Perplexity Computer different is that it operates a computer just like a user can, opening new modalities of browsing and long-running queries and tasks. As I have mentioned on the show before, agents have arrived on an internet that was not built for them. This is an interesting sneak peek into a future where most of your deep, long-term research and browsing happens in the cloud.
Read: Introducing Perplexity Computer
4. Copilot here, Claude there... now what?
AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code are adopted across your teams, but are they actually working? Faster code doesn’t always mean faster delivery.
Join us live on March 26 for a product demo on connecting AI activity to delivery outcomes. We’ll walk through a new framework for validating and scaling AI impact on speed, predictability, and DevEx. Don’t just deploy tools - measure what matters.
5. The ten dollar an hour developer
Geoffrey Huntley said on our show that the cost of software development has plummeted to $10.42 an hour, which is what it costs to run a Claude Code session on a loop. We need to make a critical distinction here. Software development, the act of turning requirements into code, is being replaced wholesale. Software engineering, the act of building architecture and making technical decisions, is thriving. You have to adapt and focus on those higher-order skills because that’s where the real work happens now: deciding what needs to be built and why.
Read: Software development now costs less than than the wage of a minimum wage worker
6. Mapping out the future of our industry
If you are trying to figure out where your new engineering skills fit in this changing world, you need to check out Scott Werner’s latest project. Built as a Claude artifact, it acts as a philosophical tree of potential futures, mapping out exactly how introducing agents to an industry creates a chain reaction of completely new roles and opportunities. Engineering is about to proliferate everywhere, and this tool can help you discover a life passion or a unique career path that simply does not exist yet.
