{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Near Future Podcast","title":"Pilot: Tom and Jonny find their feet (and microphones)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3074,"description":"Near Future Podcast – Pilot Episode\nWelcome to the Near Future Podcast, where Tom and Jonny explore what they're building, learning, and experimenting with as AI reshapes how we work.\nIn this episode:\n\nAgentic Murder Mystery\nJonny walks through his experiment building a six-agent murder mystery game using NanoClaw. He created a cast of AI suspects — each with their own secrets, personalities, and email inboxes — and ran a live session with a group of exited startup founders. The conversation covers what makes agents distinct from standard LLMs (triggers, tools, memory, collaboration), and the surprisingly playful emergent behaviour that unfolded when participants tried to interrogate and social-engineer the AI suspects.\nThe Near Future Logo Instrument\nTom shares his experiment turning the Near Future logo into an interactive, playable design tool — built in Claude Code — that generates ambient generative music as the logo animates. The conversation explores what it means to treat a brand asset as a toy, and how ephemeral software experiments fuel deeper craft practice.\nCraft, Design, and What Lasts\nJonny reflects on receiving his long-awaited Poem Clock — a piece of hardware by Matt Webb that displays AI-generated rhyming couplets telling the time — as a lens for thinking about what makes design feel timeless. The duo discuss Dieter Rams' principles, the difference between craft as polish vs. craft as practice, and what that means for designers navigating the AI era.\nHiring Designers in the Age of AI\nTom shares observations from a recent head of design hiring process — how AI is adding noise on both sides, what strong portfolios look like right now, and the balance between deep foundations and pushing the frontier.\nDesign Engineering & the Future of the Design Team\nA candid discussion on whether every designer needs to become a design engineer, the role of different archetypes within a team, and how to close the gap between Figma and code without putting everyone...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/8vUveugi5ZjKDI2pGhMY6ZwBcP7SSSqiqKb9hZCqvHM/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9lOGE1/OTk1MmI3NWJjZTAw/Y2EyMWJjODZkODFj/MjI4MC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}