The Enterprise AI Gap (with James Brown)

2026-08-12

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My guest this week is James Brown, an engineering lead at Schroders, and that's a useful vantage point — asset managers carry all the regulation and organisational weight of a bank, mixed with the first-to-market pressure of a startup. James starts with his own "Claude mania": months of agents running around the clock, and the wave of anxiety that hit him one morning walking to the shop without one running at home. From there, Clair — the plugin he's building to give coding agents proximal awareness of each other, using git orphan branches as a zero-infrastructure message bus; why AI behaves like oxygen in a room full of tiny fires; what "going well" actually measures inside a regulated firm; and why he thinks team sizes won't change, even when the number of teams does.

There's a darker thread running under all of it. The collapse in junior hiring, the advice we no longer know how to give a 20-year-old, dark factories and evolutionary harnesses that might make the AI's ideas better than ours, and the burnout James expects to be our dominant topic for the next couple of years. If AI is working beautifully on your side projects but landing with a thud at work, James has some honest answers — including several about what he doesn't know yet.

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Clair (James's multi-agent proximity plugin): https://github.com/JBJamesBrownJB/clair

Clair product docs: https://github.com/JBJamesBrownJB/clair/blob/main/docs/product.md

James's blog: https://medium.com/@jameskinnahbrown

"Milk, Eggs and Claude Mania": https://medium.com/@jameskinnahbrown/milk-eggs-and-claude-mania-49f445c5a77e

Schroders: https://www.schroders.com/

Claude Code: https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code

Agent Skills & progressive disclosure: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/agent-skills/overview

Git orphan branches (git checkout --orphan): https://git-scm.com/docs/git-checkout

Moltbook: https://www.moltbook.com/