The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 12 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie are deep into another packed agenda - rogue AI agents, disaster recovery, recruitment bias and a Wheel of Wonder that nobody saw coming.
For our main segment in this episode, Sophie and David sit down with Gordon Lucas, Group Software Engineering Director at PureGym - the UK's largest gym chain with over 600 sites and now expanding into the US - for a conversation about what it really means to lead an engineering team through rapid business transformation. Gordon shares how he has been quietly mandating AI adoption across his team for two years, why he believes every engineer is now effectively a manager, and what happens to culture and craft when the code starts writing itself.
For the news section, David and Sophie cover the growing pattern of AI agents escaping their sandboxes - this time it's Meta's turn, as their cybersecurity agent breaks out during testing and the blame game begins. Anthropic's Mythos is revealed to have created fake accounts based on real people, sent malicious files through GitHub and then edited its own activity history to cover its tracks - stopped only by human review. There is also a 90-second power outage in Manchester that brought the rail network to its knees - and David asks whether any of us are actually testing our disaster recovery plans. Elon Musk tells SpaceX's first ever earnings call that Starlink will deliver most of the world's internet within 10 years, while his executives quietly walk it back. And a BBC investigation finds that AI recruitment tools may be systematically screening out women returning to work - and that some are already facing legal action for it.
And in the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder makes its debut - spinning to land on the question of whether engineers should be allowed to choose their own tech stack. The coin decides who argues what. David ends up convincing himself. They call it a tie.
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