Alessio Fanelli, founder of Kernel Labs and co-host of Latent Space podcast, walks us through two very different AI workflows: (1) a fully autonomous coding setup using OpenAI Symphony + Linear, where Linear acts as a state machine and Symphony manages agents through the whole dev lifecycle with zero babysitting; (2) Codex with browser access searching eBay for underpriced Pokémon cards—autonomously browsing, extracting PSA certificate numbers, and flagging deals on $10K–$20K cards for his San Carlos card shop, Merlin Games.
Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts
What you’ll learn:
Why “agent manager” is a better mental model than “agent prompter”
Why local Mac Minis don’t scale, and what a cloud VPS unlocks
How to wire Symphony and Linear together as an agent state machine
How to track token costs per task (and what 221 million tokens buys you)
What Glimpse does, and why better agent senses extend autonomous runs
Why your CLAUDE.md probably needs a full purge, not more instructions
How Codex scouts underpriced $10K Pokémon cards on eBay at scale
The new category of small business that AI just made possible
Brought to you by:
Firecrawl—Power AI agents with clean web data
Jira Product Discovery—Prioritize with insights, build with confidence
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Intro
(02:24) Prompter vs. agent manager
(04:31) Live demo: Symphony + Linear
(09:31) Setting up Symphony
(14:15) Purging your skills files
(18:06) The benefits of this system
(19:10) Demo: Using Codex to hunt for Pokémon cards
(24:17) The benefit of AI for small businesses
(28:23) Lightning round
Tools referenced:
• OpenAI Codex: https://openai.com/codex
• OpenAI Symphony (open-source framework): https://github.com/openai/symphony
• Linear (project management/agent state machine): https://linear.app
• PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) grading: https://www.psacard.com
• TCGplayer (card pricing): https://www.tcgplayer.com
• eBay (used for card price scouting): https://www.ebay.com
Other references:
• Meta Ray-Ban glasses: https://www.ray-ban.com/usa/ray-ban-meta-smart-glasses
• The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar: https://www.amazon.com/Monk-Riddle-Creating-Making-Living/dp/1578516447/ref=sr_1_1
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0451208633
• AS Roma (football club Alessio and Claire are both fans of): https://www.asroma.com/en
Where to find Alessio Fanelli:
Latent Space podcast: https://www.latent.space/
Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
