AI Agents, Brain Fog & Caveman Coding

Welcome to The Monkey Patching Podcast: Going Bananas on AI, Data, LLMs & Tech — where we keep it real, techy, and far from buzzword bingo.

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts, or visit us at monkeypatching.io

🧠 Episode Topics & Links

• Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
  New arXiv research shows relying on ChatGPT dulls neural engagement and weakens writing skills compared to search or free writing. EEG readings revealed the lowest brain activity among LLM users.
  Source: arXiv · June 10, 2025
• Amazon CEO says AI agents will soon reduce company’s corporate workforce
  Andy Jassy forecasts a future where generative-AI handles many office roles, trimming Amazon’s white-collar headcount: “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.”
  Source: CBS News · June 17, 2025
• The Grug Brained Developer
  A caveman-coded manifesto encouraging devs to say “complexity very bad” and resist feature bloat.
  Source: grugbrain.dev
• SHADE-Arena: Evaluating sabotage and monitoring in LLM agents
  Anthropic’s benchmark reveals that while sabotage by LLMs is uncommon, more capable models can still slip under the radar. A reminder that complexity brings power — and risk.
  Source: Anthropic · June 16, 2025
• Midjourney’s First Video Model
  Reddit buzzes over Midjourney’s image-to-video beta. Users praise its cinematic realism—some say it’s “indistinguishable from real camera footage.”
  Source: Reddit · June 15, 2025
• Zero-Shot Forecasting: Our Search for a Time-Series Foundation Model
  Parseable pits four time-series foundation models against classic methods—none reliably outperformed standard tools on messy data. Zero-shot remains aspirational.
  Source: Parseable · June 3, 2025
• If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A Tediously Accurate Map of the Solar System
  An interactive scroll map scaling the Moon to a single pixel, forcing you to traverse near-endless blank space. As the author says: “It’s the empty space that’s a problem.”
  Source: JoshWorth.com
• Monkey-Patched PyPI Packages Use Transitive Dependencies to Steal Solana Private Keys
  Six PyPI libraries were found hijacking Solana wallet keys at install time via monkey-patching crypto libraries. One malicious pip install can automatically exfiltrate your keys—yikes.
  Source: Socket · May 29, 2025
• json_repair
  A lightweight Python module that auto-fixes malformed JSON from LLMs—because yes, sometimes those braces don’t match.
  Source: GitHub