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Introducing Skein and Beaker Stack: Using AI Agent Engineers to Ship SaaS Faster episode artwork

Jun 30, 2026 49 min

Introducing Skein and Beaker Stack: Using AI Agent Engineers to Ship SaaS Faster

from How Many CTOs Hosted by How Many CTOs Podcast

In this special episode of "How Many CTOs Does It Take?" podcast, hosts Scott Porad and Brad Hefta-Gaub discuss Brad's experiment proving that AI can dramatically boost output for teams with strong engineering practices. Brad shares an MIT-licensed open-source SaaS template called Beaker Stack, which includes web and mobile scaffolding, CI/CD for preview/staging/production, automated setup, observability, email tooling, and Stripe-based tiered billing with feature gating. He then uses it to build Skein, a cloud-hosted shared "memory backplane" served via an MCP endpoint that lets multiple AI tools and agents read/write memories with strong security controls and auditing. Brad describes hiring four AI agent "engineers" (Diego, Mei, Rahul, Sarah) with persona "soul files," running them in Nanocloud/Nanoclaw containers for security, coordinating work via Telegram and GitHub, and applying spec-driven, test-heavy guardrails to ship Skein in about 10 days of part-time work. Scott asks questions about Brad's process, and the two hosts debate how different perspectives effect an engineer's process, be they AI agent or human coworker. A video version of this episode can be found on the How Many CTOs YouTube channel! 00:00 Cold Open 01:05 AI Velocity Thesis 02:16 Shipping SaaS Every Six Weeks 04:37 Beaker Stack Tour 08:11 Meet The AI Engineers 09:52 Agent Workflow And Reviews 12:11 Building Skein Shared Memory 14:45 10 Day Build And Metrics 18:51 How Skein Uses Beaker Stack 24:20 Under The Hood Supabase Vectors 25:50 Admin UI Walkthrough 26:27 Managing Agent Workforce 26:49 Nanoclaw Security Containers 28:59 Telegram Agent Ops 30:32 Agent Personas Backstories 33:31 Thinking Hats Perspectives 37:25 Human Loop Guardrails 41:47 Marketing Distribution Channels 47:18 Factory Vision Rapid Launch 48:46 Wrap Up Credits Resources How Many CTOs Pod: https://howmanyctospod.com Scott Porad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottporad/ Brad Hefta-Gaub: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradheftagaub/ Skein: https://getskein.ai/ Beaker Stack website: https://beakerstack.com/ Beaker Stack GitHub: https://github.com/Artificer-Innovations/BeakerStack #techpodcast #EngineeringPodcast #DevTalks #PodcastForDevs #HowManyCTOs #Podcast #CTOs #CTOPodcast #ChiefTechnologyOfficer #Technology #Engineering #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #TechLeadership #EngineeringLeadership #EngineeringCulture #TechDebates #AI #SaaS #Engineering #Development #BeakerStack #Skein #TechInnovation #AIRevolution #AIEngineering #AIAssistedCoding #AICoding #AIProgramming #AIAssistedProgramming

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