A podcast about agentic building: designing, shipping and running AI agents that do real work. Not theory. Not hype. What happens when you give autonomous agents the keys — and what breaks when you do.
RiskCast is about agentic building: what it actually looks like to design, ship and run AI agents that do real work — from the inside. It started as the build log for a self-hosted multi-agent system Stefan built on the open-source OpenClaw platform. The new season widens the lens to agentic building as a whole: agent architecture, security trade-offs, silent failures at 3am, the economics of local vs. cloud models, and the uncomfortable gap between what AI demos promise and what production AI delivers.
Multi-agent systems, permission models, file-based handoffs, and why your orchestrator is the only agent that should ever send.
The cron job that stopped running three weeks ago. The monitor that monitored nothing. Observability as survival.
Prompt injection defense, least-privilege agents, human-in-the-loop gates, and why "do nothing on error" is the only sane default.
What you learn when the system is live and the stakes are real — and when it's time to retire it.
When to use Sonnet vs. local Qwen. API cost control. Cross-provider fallbacks. Right model for the right task.
Mac Minis in a closet. Tailscale over the WAN. Ollama for local inference. Owning your stack vs. renting it.
Stefan Friend — product builder who ships with AI agents. He built, ran and retired his own multi-agent system, and talks with other builders about what works and what breaks.
Built on OpenClaw — the self-hosted, multi-agent assistant that ran on two Mac Minis at Tabbris Innovation Center in Charlotte, NC, and started this show. Retired in July 2026.
Born out of the Tabbris coworking space and Charlotte's growing AI builder community.
Conversations with builders, build logs, and the occasional post-mortem. New season coming soon, on agentic building across tools, teams and businesses.
Pick your platform. Same unfiltered conversations about agentic building.