S3 · E12
September 28 · 53 min
TG
That's Girl Code
thatsgirlcode
Hot takes, tech talk, and women who get it. All things tech, all things corporate, and all things women in STEM!
- 20 episodes
- weekly
- Avg 40 min
- English
- TG
S3 · E11September 21 · 17 minGenie 101 - How AI Agents Talk to Your Data
In this solo episode, the last one of Season 3, Ellen picks up where Eden's MCP episode left off and asks how AI agents actually get to a company's data. She starts with what an agent is, an AI that works toward a goal in steps and calls tools to reach things it can't touch on its own. She then walks through how software's access to data has changed: developers wrapping hand-written SQL in functions, then agents calling those same functions as tools, then MCP as the "menu" of tools any AI app can use. From there she introduces Databricks and Genie. Genie began as a plain-English-to-SQL translator, and it has grown into your business analyst. The real challenge turned out to be giving AI the tribal knowledge about your data, not writing SQL. She breaks Genie into three pieces: Genie Agents that analysts teach, Genie One as the single front door, and Genie Ontology as the shared map of what your data means. She also covers how Genie reaches out to tools like Slack through MCP, and how it can become a tool inside someone else's agent, all while your data stays governed.
- TG
S3 · E10September 14 · 26 minMCP 101: How AI Actually Touches Your Tools
MCPs are everywhere right now. Can Eden explain them in 10 under 10 mins? Not sure, but she'll try. In her last solo episode of Season 3, Eden breaks down the Model Context Protocol — the standard Anthropic released in 2024 and handed to the Linux Foundation in 2025 — using the hat business she and Ellen actually run as the example. What happens when you try to wire an AI agent to Shopify, Notion, Formspree, and Instagram DMs by hand? You build five custom integrations, maintain them forever, rewrite them when you switch models, and drown your context window in JSON. MCP is the fix. In this episode: • The problem MCPs solved (and why "the model is a brain with no limbs")• Hosts, clients, servers — what each piece actually does• Tools, resources, and prompts• The July 2026 spec change that made MCP stateless• The critiques: context bloat, the 67,000-token tax, and real security incidents
- TGS3 · E9September 7 · 1 hr 4 min
AI Chip Economics - What's Inside, Who Builds it, & Who Pays
Eden and Ellen break down the economics of AI chips. They talk through how a chip actually gets made (wafers, logic dies, HBM memory), why one company in Taiwan (TSMC) manufactures nearly every advanced chip on Earth, and why NVIDIA's record-breaking quarter might be propped up by companies investing in each other in a circular loop.
- TG
S3 · E8August 24 · 19 minA Beginner's Guide to Git & GitHub
90% of the Fortune 100 run their code through GitHub, and this week it went down for 7 hours. If your reaction to that is questions and confusion .... this one is for you. Eden breaks down Git vs. GitHub (not the same thing!!): The 2005 drama that made Linus Torvalds rage-build Git in two weeks, the platform that built upon it and became a social network for developers, plus the bare minimum version control every vibecoder needs to know.
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S3 · E7August 17 · 38 minWorld Models: The Brains Behind Waymos & Humanoid Robots
LLMs predict the next word. World models predict the next moment. Eden explains the AI "brains" powering Waymos and humanoid robots and Ellen gets into the real-world applications: simulated tornado testing, robot hands that can hold an egg, NVIDIA's Cosmos, and why people are getting paid to wear GoPros while doing chores. Your delivery robot is smarter than you think.
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S3 · E6August 10 · 25 minBasics for the Baddies: Quantum Computing
Ellen goes solo to tackle quantum computing! She walks through quantum computing basics: classical bits vs. qubits, what superposition and the Bloch sphere actually mean, why rotating qubits creates wave interference that amplifies right answers and cancels wrong ones, why that gives quantum computers an exponential edge over brute force, and why all of it points toward Shor's algorithm eventually breaking RSA-2048 encryption.
- TG
S3 · E5August 3 · 53 minTech Tea: AI Edition - OpenAI vs Apple, Hugging Face Hacked, AI 2040 and more
Episode Description In this episode, Eden and Ellen cover recent AI news. 1. Apple v. OpenAI LawsuitApple's federal lawsuit against OpenAI, two former employees, and hardware startup IO over alleged theft of trade secrets — plus the Musk-Altman fallout on X. 2. OpenAI Sandbox EscapeHow an OpenAI model being tested for hacking skills broke out of its sandbox and breached Hugging Face. 3. AI 2040 Scenario ForecastA look at AI 2040, a long-form projection of AI's trajectory through 2040, including proposals for international coordination and universal basic income. 4. AI and the Jacobian ConjectureHow AI disproved an 87-year-old math conjecture with a single counterexample.
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S3 · E4July 27 · 26 minThe Phia Scandal: How an AI Powered Fashion App Got Caught Cookie Stuffing
Phia was supposed to be the Google Flights for fashion. An AI shopping assistant co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, backed by $43.5M and a Coachella lineup of celebrity investors. Then researcher Ben Edelman caught their browser extension cookie stuffing: silently taking affiliate credit for sales it didn't drive, possibly even swiping commissions from your favorite influencers' links. In this solo episode, Eden breaks down how the scheme worked (feature flags, background tabs, and a setting literally called "enable coupon auto drop"), why it only targeted iPhone Safari users, whether Phia's Series A investors were misled, and what past cookie-stuffing cases, from the eBay wire fraud convictions to the ongoing Honey lawsuits, might tell us about what happens next. Sources mentioned in this episode: Ben Edelman's investigation: https://www.benedelman.org/phia-forced-clicks/ Brian Dunning's Blog Post Alleging Ebay's Involvement in Cooking Stuffing: https://www.briandunning.com/fix_ebay.html
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S3 · E3July 20 · 1 hr 6 minThe Full Stack of a Health Wearable: Silicon to Software
It’s the golden episode (season 3, episode 3), and Eden and Ellen are getting a little science-y. This one’s all about health tech wearables — the rings, watches, and bands tracking your every move, and what’s really happening under the hood. We break down: How the hardware senses your body — optical PPG (photoplethysmography), ECG, LED light, and why the fingertip and earlobe are prime real estate for readings The metrics — heart rate, HRV, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, blood pressure, temperature, and how each one is actually derived Signal vs. noise — why your ring is more trustworthy asleep than mid-workout, and the adaptive filtering that cancels out your footsteps AI, machine learning & inference — the difference between measured data and educated guesses, and why you are your own baseline (and why that baseline is the real product lock-in) The competitors — Oura, Whoop, Garmin, Apple, and up-and-comers like the Lumia ear cuff Your data & who’s protecting it — privacy policies, consent screens, Washington’s My Health My Data Act, Senator Cassidy’s proposed HIPRA, and what happens to your data when a company changes hands As always — we’re no doctors, lawyers, or geopolitical specialists. Stay safe out there.
- TG
S3 · E2July 14 · 28 minDAIS Recap
In this solo season-three opener, Ellen recaps Databricks' 2026 Data + AI Summit, unpacking the keynote's core framework — Context, Control, Cost, and Choice — and CEO Ali Ghodsi's argument that AGI already exists but lacks the enterprise access needed to be useful. She walks through the expanded Genie product family, including Genie Code, Genie One, Genie Agents, Genie ZeroOps, and Genie App Builder, along with the underlying Genie Ontology layer that powers them. The episode also covers two major infrastructure announcements: the Rayden engine for real-time analytics, and LTAP, which unifies transactional and analytical data, eliminating traditional data pipelines. The episode closes with a brief look at Omnigent, a Day 2 open-source tool Ellen has adopted into her own workflow.
- TG
S3 · E1July 7 · 51 minAI Needs a Mother
Why does representation in tech (especially in AI) actually matter? Because we've seen what happens when it's missing. Eden and Ellen walk through a history of products built without women in the room: crash-test dummies modeled on the average man that left women 47% more likely to be seriously injured, drugs dosed for male bodies, heart attacks misdiagnosed because the textbook symptoms are men's, hiring algorithms that penalized the word "women," and facial recognition that couldn't see darker-skinned women. The through-line is simple. When women aren't in the room, tools get built without them in mind, and the harm is real. Now AI is being shaped in exactly those rooms. This episode is about why that can't happen again, what the numbers at the top labs actually look like, and why getting women in early isn't optional.
- TG
June 8 · 42 minOff Season Recap - Vibe Coding Hackathons, Being Al Native, and Adjusting to New Coding Standards
It's an off-season check-in because some things just can't be an email. Ellen and Eden are back at the mic to catch up on everything since production wrapped — TGC Media is officially an LLC (yes, there's a prenup), merch is incoming, and the new website just went live thanks to Eden's Claude Design and Claude Code build. Both Ellen and Eden came back from their work trips with the same question on their minds: how do you actually vibe code as a team? From merge conflicts and over-documented AI-generated code to whether any of it is production-ready, this one's for anyone navigating the messier side of building with AI. Plus — AI slop horror stories, Eden's surprising change of heart on in-person work, and a TikTok about Gen Z IQ decline that makes the whole "AI native" thing feel a little more complicated,
- TG
S2 · E13March 30 · 56 minAISPIRATION: (AI + Inspiration) An ideation session of practical AI use cases
In our season two finale, we’re talking all things AISPIRATION: (AI + Inspiration) the AI tools, automations, and workflows helping us work smarter, create faster, and make life a little less manual. From streamlining podcast production and prepping for high-stakes presentations to building custom Notion automations, organizing shopping decisions, cleaning up chaotic inboxes, and using AI as a real tool for self-improvement, this episode is one big brainstorm on how to make AI actually useful in everyday life.
- TG
S2 · E12March 23 · 31 minData Centers 101: Where AI lives and where its going
This week I'm diving into one of the most fascinating infrastructure stories happening right now — data centers. We're going full 101 on what they actually are, how they work, and why AI has completely broken everything the industry thought it knew. We cover the four pillars every data center is built on, why a random suburb in Northern Virginia became the backbone of the global internet, and what happened when drone strikes took out three AWS data centers in the Middle East earlier this year — and what that means for how we think about digital infrastructure as a target of war. Then we get into the AI shift — why a single Nvidia GPU rack draws 42 times the power of a standard server rack, why Meta scrapped two years of construction mid-build because their facility was already obsolete, and why Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are all racing to secure nuclear power plants just to keep the lights on. And then we go to the frontier. Space-based data centers — and why the cooling problem doesn't disappear just because you're in orbit. The moon — and why 14 days of complete darkness makes it nearly impossible. And the ocean floor off the coast of Denmark — which is actually working right now. Sources & further reading: Middle East AWS attack highlights data center vulnerabilities — TechTarget: https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/Middle-East-AWS-attack-highlights-data-center-vulnerabilities Space-based data centers — Real Engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osMooAvpSSs Underwater data centers — Denmark / North Sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyklsgOClJA Equinix data center infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v477fvbj3rk
- TGS2 · E11March 16 · 23 min
What are Claude Skills? And How to Use Them to Boost Your Productivity
If you've ever copy-pasted the same giant prompt into Claude over and over again... this episode is for you. Eden breaks down Claude Skills: what they are, how they work, and how to set them up. Whether you're a developer or someone just trying to get more out of AI in your everyday life, Skills are one of those things that once you get it, you can't go back. We cover: Why LLMs are stateless (and why that matters more than you think) What a Claude Skill actually is The brain aka SKILL.md How to build your first skill in 5 steps How to refine skills over time to avoid bloating them with tokens Where to find inspiration / pre-built skills you can download and use today → clawhub.ai If you're new here or want to go deeper, check out these two episodes Eden referenced: 🎙️ Agentic Systems: Details for the Developers — the technical patterns behind how agentic AI actually works. You can use these principles to write better SKILL.md files. 🎙️ AI Basics for the Baddies — the foundational episode on how LLMs work under the hood
- TG
S2 · E10March 10 · 57 minFour Tech Startups You Need To Know: Runway, Fauna Robotics, Daydream, and Neko Health
This week, we're covering four companies sitting at the bleeding edge of AI and robotics. We start with Runway, the $5.3B NYC startup quietly reshaping Hollywood from the inside out. Founded by three NYU art students, Runway's text-to-video tools are already in Oscar-winning films and our very own episode promos ;) Their bet on world models could put them at the center of enterprise AI in ways nobody expected. From there, we get into Fauna Robotics and their robot Sprout, a 3.5-foot foam-covered humanoid that is Ellen's new obsession and might be the most interesting developer platform in robotics. Sprout is a safe, expressive platform designed to live next to people. Then we look at Daydream, the fashion AI agent built by the woman who launched Nordstrom.com and scaled Stitch Fix to a billion in revenue. It's ad-free, hyper-personalized, and asking a hard question: can a vertical AI shopping layer become a durable business before Amazon or Google absorbs the idea? We close with Neko Health, Spotify Founder Daniel Ek's proactive health company that puts you in a chamber of 70 sensors and hands you a clinical picture of your body. Same day, no MRI, no radiation… for $370. In their first year alone, 1% of people scanned received potentially life-saving interventions for conditions they had no idea they had. Sit with us as we chat through four companies with four very different bets on what comes next.
- TG
S2 · E9March 2 · 58 minDatabricks Deep Dive
In this solo episode of That’s Girl Code, Ellen breaks down Databricks: why it exists, what problem it solved, and how data actually flows through it. She explains how companies got stuck between messy data lakes and expensive data warehouses, and how Databricks’ lakehouse approach keeps data in object storage like S3 while adding reliability and performance through Delta Lake (Parquet files plus a transaction log), powered by Spark for scale and Unity Catalog for governance and lineage. Then she maps real-world ingestion into three patterns—files landing in storage (Auto Loader), SaaS and apps pulling via connectors/APIs, and real-time streams like Kafka/Kinesis (Structured Streaming)—all landing first as Bronze Delta tables, before being cleaned and joined into Silver tables and shaped into Gold tables for dashboards or machine learning. She closes with two concrete examples: a near-real-time retail dashboard combining foot-traffic sensors, transactions, and store metadata, and a customer-segmentation ML workflow using feature engineering, Feature Store, MLflow model tracking, and even vector search to turn clusters into meaningful segment descriptions for marketing.
- TG
S2 · E8February 23 · 50 minAI Tech Tea: China’s Robots, Meta’s Name Tag, Amazon Ring & Flock Safety Partnership, & Space AI
This week’s tech tea covers everything from China’s jaw-dropping humanoid robot showcase to Meta’s rumored facial recognition rollout in smart glasses. We unpack the Amazon Ring and Flock Safety controversy, surveillance creep, and what happens when facial data meets federal subpoenas. Then we shift gears to Elon merging Elon, breaking down the SpaceX–xAI acquisition, trillion-dollar valuations, and why the future of AI compute might live in low Earth orbit.
- TG
S2 · E7February 16 · 28 minOpenClaw: The Autonomous Agent That Took the Tech World by Storm
OpenClaw is the open-source AI agent that exploded across GitHub almost overnight. It runs locally, connects to your email, calendar, social accounts, and developer tools, and can take action on your behalf without you in the loop. It’s the personal AI assistant many frontier labs have hinted at but haven’t released. In this solo episode, Eden breaks down how OpenClaw actually works, the origin story behind its rapid rise, the naming drama with Anthropic, and why companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have been hesitant to ship something like this themselves. From prompt injection to exposed API keys and massive attack surfaces, we unpack the security trade-offs behind giving AI “hands and feet.”