Asking Good Questions with Edward Roske
In this podcast, we explore the CFO's office's past, present, and future, examining how technology and AI are transforming finance. Join Edward Roske and referents as they discuss innovative ways to enhance the role, optimize processes, and shape the future of financial leadership.
Designed for CFOs and finance leaders, each episode provides actionable insights into leveraging technology to drive growth, improve efficiency, and address challenges.
With an engaging tone, the podcast simplifies complex concepts, covering topics like automating tasks, real-time data analysis, and strategic planning.
Key themes include the shift from traditional finance methods to innovative, technology-driven processes and real-world examples like scenario modeling and automated reporting.
The podcast also highlights future trends, such as generative AI for forecasting and advanced analytics for decision-making, promising to shape financial management. Edward Roske inspires listeners with practical advice and tools to embrace technology confidently.
Tune in for strategies to thrive in the evolving financial landscape.
Asking Good Questions with Edward Roske
You Can't Prompt Your Way to a Flying Car | Tim Berglund
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Then in December 2025 he opened Claude Code and said it on tape: "Okay, this is real."
So I asked him what he sees now that he didn't see in the twenty years he spent calling this a trick. Coding got cheap, and cheap coding exposed the true limiting factor, which is that it's hard to make things that don't suck. His words: coming up with a good idea, still hard. Designing a product interface, still hard. Seven months into the agentic revolution, Jira has not suddenly become good. (Check your own tools and tell me he's wrong.)
He's completely sold on the tool and completely unsold on the idea that there's a mind in there. It talks like a mind, but it's not one. We dig into why the first machine that uses language the way we do keeps fooling our theory-of-mind reflex, whether AI is making work better or just faster, what the Turing test is worth now that it's been passed and gotten boring, ELIZA pulling the same trick in 400 lines of code back in the sixties, and why his firmware is still handcrafted, artisanal, small-batch C++ (like making your own furniture out of wood).
Also in here: the day Claude Opus started calling the other agents its siblings (that terminology did not come from me), the Postmodernism Generator as 1990s proto-slop, the bicycle being invented after photography, and my air-band machine. I have played Ode to Joy on an air piano. It was not quite as much fun as I thought it would be. (The air drums are just clank, clank, clank.)
I'm Edward Roske, and this is Asking Good Questions. New conversations with the people figuring out the human side of AI. If one of these questions stuck with you, subscribe and send it to someone who'd take the other side.
Tim speaks at the Caribbean AI Summit this October in San Juan, on the real history of AI. He gave me a taste of it in this episode and offered to give me the rest, which I turned down so he'd still have a talk to give. Come find us: CaribbeanSummit.AI
LINKS
Caribbean AI Summit (Tim speaks, Oct 9-10): https://CaribbeanSummit.AI
Tim's site (writing, talks, Substack): https://timberglund.com
Tim on X: https://x.com/tlberglund
BOOKS & RESEARCH MENTIONED
The Dartmouth workshop (the 1950s proposal that kicked off AI as a field)
ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum's 1960s chatbot (Tim: about 400 lines of code)
The Postmodernism Generator (the 90s fake-essay site Tim cites as proto-slop)
The Turing test (passed, and passe, per this conversation)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (my fault, as usual)
Also mentioned: Claude Code, Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5, Apache Kafka
This episode of Asking Good Questions is brought to you by Caprus.Ai.
Check how we empower the office of the CFO to harness the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and revolutionize their operations.
