Recorded on Father's Day, episode 168 opens with Michael and Damashe wishing each other a happy Father's Day before diving into everything going on in the world of AI, coding agents, Earshot, and more. Support the Show If you enjoy Technically Working, you can make a one-time tip or set up a recurring subscription at technicallyworking.show. Click the support link to get started. The Big Earshot News: Flutter is Out, SwiftUI is In Michael reveals he has switched Earshot from Flutter to SwiftUI after a day and a half of intense work. The reason: he wanted to add a feature that lets users customize and reorder their in-app actions. In Flutter, the only reliable way to rebuild that UI was to background the app or force-quit it, and neither of those felt acceptable. SwiftUI wins because it gives Michael a better path to features like Apple Shortcuts integration and data sync through Apple CloudKit, without requiring users to create an account. Build 113 on TestFlight will be SwiftUI. A phone overheating bug during playback is being fixed before that build ships. Damashe suggests delaying cross-platform work until the iOS version is solid, and floats using AI to translate SwiftUI to Kotlin for Android down the road. Michael is focused on option B: get it done, get it out, get people testing. Earshot TestFlight Beta The public TestFlight link is available. If you found it, you can use it. No need to ask for permission. TestFlight supports up to 10,000 testers, so there's plenty of room. A few early users have already switched from Castro and canceled their subscriptions, and Damashe removed Downcast while giving Earshot a real look. Upcoming features mentioned: auto-add to queue with options for add-to-end or add-as-next, and an Overcast-style theme for users coming from that app. The $100 Claude Plan and the Multi-Agent Setup Michael upgraded to the $100/month Claude plan because he kept hitting usage limits. The reason: he built a full multi-agent system in Claude Code specifically for Earshot development. Here's how it works: A planning agent pulls issues from GitHub It decides which of the other nine specialized agents should handle the work Agents include: security, accessibility, UI, and others The planning agent creates a plan, sends it with the issue to the assigned agent That agent completes the work, then passes results to a test agent If tests pass, the planning agent opens a pull request Michael reviews and merges Agents live as Markdown files in the ~/claude/agents/ folder. You can tag a specific agent directly, like @earshot-security, or run the whole loop through the planning agent. Michael got the idea from watching short-form video about loop-style AI workflows versus single prompts. He built the agent set by talking to Claude in the web interface, asking it to build out agents one question at a time. Anyone who wants to see what the agent files look like can email the show. Claude for Chrome: Damashe's Accessibility Workaround Tool Damashe has been using Claude for Chrome regularly, about a couple times a week. His main use case is getting around inaccessible web elements that VoiceOver can't interact with. Things like broken sliders, forms that throw vague error messages, or pages where he can't find a button to complete a task. He grants Claude permission to access the page, tells it what he's trying to do, and it figures it out. He noted it works in Helium, a Chromium-based browser, even though Claude officially only supports Google Chrome. Claude Cowork: One Use So Far Michael tried Claude Cowork once to order 50 flyers from a major national print chain. He uploaded the flyer file, told Claude to pick the right paper and add 50 copies to the cart. It got to the checkout page, picked glossy paper instead of the matte Mallory wanted, and even suggested adjusting the text color for better contrast. Not perfect, but impressive for a first try. Damashe plans to try Cowork this week to order business cards through Vistaprint, since there's something on that page he hasn't been able to get through accessibly. Codex Check-In: Damashe Plans a Revisit Damashe is going to give OpenAI's Codex another look in the terminal. When he tried it early on, he preferred how Claude worked and found Codex too noisy in the terminal. He acknowledges that in AI tools, things change fast enough that checking back in occasionally is worth doing, unlike, say, trying out a new calendar app. Spoiler: he doesn't expect to switch, but wants to see what has changed. Siri AI and Apple Intelligence in Beta 1 Michael is running the first beta of the new Siri with Apple Intelligence and has been impressed. He thinks if it ships on by default, it will surprise a lot of people. His comparison: asking Google Assistant on his Pixel 9 Pro to make a phone call still gets a refusal. Siri is actually doing things. He wants Siri to eventually handle appointment scheduling the way X.ai's Amy and Andrew did back in 2017 and 2018, where you CCed an AI assistant on emails and it handled the back-and-forth. Damashe wonders whether Siri AI will require an iPhone 18 for any features, and thinks it probably won't, mostly because Apple already has enough work ahead getting the rollout right. The conversation also touches on Apple's folding phone and whether the price will ever make sense. The Build-It-Yourself Era Michael spotted a Microsoft session at the upcoming ACB Convention titled something like "The Build-It-Yourself Era," which caught his attention. The idea: AI tools have lowered the bar enough that sometimes the best software is the one you just ask Claude or Copilot to build for you. That philosophy is exactly how the Community Builder app came to be. Damashe extends this to a broader point about companies that laid off developers in favor of AI and may end up hiring back people who know how to use AI tools to build internal processes. Open Source and Accessible Spreadsheets Michael mentions some community work happening to build an accessible grid library in Python for a piece of open-source hardware software that was lacking accessibility. The goal is something you can arrow through, type into cells, and possibly add calculations to. Damashe gives a general shoutout to open source as something you can fork and fix when the original team won't prioritize accessibility. Audio Editing with AI: The Descript Comparison Damashe wants to test whether Claude Cowork can handle simple Reaper tasks, like trimming the last ten seconds of an audio file. Michael mentions using a different approach: he fed a transcript of the Our Perspective promo recording into Claude and asked it for edit points with time markers. It was off by a second or two but got him where he needed to go. Michael floats the idea of building something like Descript using an LLM and third-party services with Reaper underneath, and Damashe immediately points out that they never did get around to learning Reaper's scripting language even though LLMs make that way more approachable now. Hermes: Damashe Gets Excited Damashe still hasn't set up Hermes yet, but after listening to the June 10th episode of the Intelligent Machines podcast, where they interviewed the creator of Hermes for the second time, he is now much more interested. He had previously written it off as another OpenClaw-style tool, but the interview changed his thinking. He wants to run it on a Raspberry Pi and have it call out to a bigger model when needed. Michael suggests pairing it with Ollama Cloud and putting the Pi on Tailscale. Claude Getting Michael's GitHub Wrong Claude keeps assuming Michael's GitHub username is pay-on-media because his company is Payown Media LLC. It corrects itself, but it keeps happening. The fix: add the actual GitHub username to the CLAUDE.md file so it stops guessing. Listener Shoutout Shoutout to Jamie, who emailed to say he keeps listening even when topics go over his head because the show is good and entertaining. That is exactly what the show is going for. Podcast Numbers Total downloads: 36,919 Seven-day listens: 300 Episode 167 "Going to Atlanta": 174 listens Episode 166 "If You Used a Passkey, Why Are You Asking for a Code?": 185 listens Episode 165 "No Excuses Left for Inaccessible Apps": 210 listens Most episodes from 165 and earlier are sitting around 200 downloads, which suggests either Earshot beta testers are listening to the back catalog, new listeners are finding the show, or both. Where to Find Us Email: feedback@technicallyworking.show Michael: @payown@dragonscave.space Damashe: @damashe@technically.social Bot: @TW@technically.social Hashtag: #TechnicallyWorking (capitalize the T and W so screen readers read it right) Support Technically Working by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/technically-working Find out more at https://technically-working.pinecast.co Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/technically-working/4e0882d3-2746-463c-8955-4b1d184fb5ee This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-431b7d for 40% off for 4 months, and support Technically Working.
