74% of shoppers have used an AI agent, but only 14% trust one to actually place the order. Tim and James try to work out why. Along the way they cover Amazon Dash buttons, a closet that is now just for chips, and who gets blamed when your agent racks up fraud. They also settle on an official rule for when an AI is allowed to buy your groceries. It's stricter than you'd think.Read more

Tech loves to ship fast, iterate, and see what sticks — but who's actually running the beta test? (Spoiler: it's you, and you're paying for it.) In Episode 9, Tim and James tour the Google and Microsoft graveyards, mourn the Zune, argue that Netflix structurally cannot make a sitcom, and land on the uncomfortable truth that you don't really own anything you've bought. Plus: why Clippy was the original ChatGPT, the crab theory of software evolution, and Tim's descent into printing recipes into a binder like it's 1850. Give it time to bake — or cancel it after eight episodes, apparently that's fine now.Read more

A token is three-fourths of a word. Saying "please" costs you one and a quarter of them. Tim says it anyway. James does not. Episode 8 is about AI politeness, token optimization, and the psychological toll of being mean to a computer — including the time Tim swore at Gemini over a calendar invite and hasn't quite forgiven himself. Also: James is designing an executioner bot to do his dirty prompting for him, which Tim correctly identifies as historically terrible behavior.Read more

Tim dropped a bicycle on his iPhone. Three hours without a phone in suburban Columbus later, he had a lot of feelings about vulnerability, parking meters, and the fundamental weirdness of being a ghost in a world built for smartphones. James lost his phone to a Tesla tire swap. Neither of them handled it gracefully. Episode 8 of Breaking the Build is about disconnecting — and how bad we both are at it.Read more