Good Stuff 53 - Own your AI Stack

Jarrad Grigg returns for a proper van experience. The episode kicks off with Mythos skepticism—marketing spin dressed as existential threat, same playbook as GPT-2. The real concern isn't frontier models being "too powerful," it's the tiering of intelligence to highest bidders and the creeping nerf of consumer-tier models.

Jarrad's been going deep on local models (Gemma 4, quantized versions) but finds them six months behind frontier and context-limited. Pete's Mac Mini experiment: useful as a permanent harness, not useful for actual inference.

The conversation pivots to business ownership: if you build your entire operation inside Claude Cowork, you've handed Anthropic an off-switch for your business.

Wingman is open source for moral reasons—"I can't charge you a license fee for the thing that defines your business."

MCP gets declared dead (CLIs and bash scripts win). Jarad walks through his new design workflow: voice in, text out, agents duking it out on requirements before touching any visual tools.

The secret sauce in an AI world? Text documents—your encoded knowledge that you don't make public.

**Key Moments:**

- [03:55] "Mythos is so dangerous we're all fucked. Thoughts? Hyperbolic."

- [05:30] "Every six months they make Claude a retard. You feel it."

- [08:17] "Models don't have to be that intelligent. It's about the harnesses and systems you put around it."

- [12:09] "I morally can't charge a license fee for this—what I'm saying is you should use this to define your business. That's your business, not mine."

- [16:27] "The answer isn't agents. If you need 200 agents and someone else builds it with software, they outprice you."

- [18:22] "MCP is dead. CLI. I already know the shapes I'll get back. Write a bash script, bang, done."

- [24:29] "Voice out, text back is the way to go"

- [33:13] "Closer to bare metal. Bash script means no dependency on anybody."

- [42:39] "Your secret sauce is text documents. Your knowledge distilled into instructions agents can use."

- [48:41] "Technology wins. There's going to be people who don't care about your principled position."

- [1:01:33] Energy usage debate: "What's your frame of reference? Hair dryers globally approach AI datacenter usage."

- [1:10:02] "Juniors will just pick up the tools from day one. Almost inevitably the people who come in fresh are better than those moving from an old paradigm."

**Friends of the Pod:** Gabe, Deadman, Benji Taylor, Diplo, Justin

**Quote:** "If you put the whole thing inside Claude, your switching costs mean you'll never leave. They can turn your business off by turning off provision. So the question is: where do you decide to build that system, and who really controls your business?"