Crabby Rathbun, Model Councils & Why You Want More Tech Debt

Artificial Developer Intelligence · Feb 20, 2026 · 1h 11m · transcript

This episode covers the Krabby Rathbun AI bot drama (automated PRs, fabricated hit piece, Ars Technica retraction), safety team shakeups at OpenAI and Anthropic, Gemini model distillation/cloning attempts, Perplexity model councils, and a heavily economics-flavored discussion on AI job displacement, tech debt as strategy, cognitive debt, and workflow automation convexity.

Takeaways

Ars Technica AI-generating an article about an AI bot drama — and getting caught fabricating quotes — is peak 2026 irony

Distillation/cloning is an unsolvable problem for frontier labs — they cant restrict usage…