What do JSON and conversational AI have in common? They are the glue behind ordering coffee, booking flights, and talking to support. In our tests, about 1 out of 3 replies missed the intent until we enforced structured JSON outputs. In this episode, Danny Thompson and Leon Noel break down how to move from “cool demo” to production systems that route, escalate, and self-audit reliably.
SITE https://www.programmingpodcast.com/
💡 Sponsor: Level Up Financial Planning
Changing careers or increasing your income? Get financial clarity with Level Up Financial Planning—helping early and mid-career tech professionals secure their financial future. Visit LevelUpFinancialPlanning.com for a free consultation!
https://www.levelupfinancialplanning.com/
Stay in Touch:
📧 Have ideas or questions for the show? Or are you a business that wants to talk business?
Email us at dannyandleonspodcast@gmail.com!
Danny Thompson
https://x.com/DThompsonDev
https://www.linkedin.com/in/DThompsonDev
www.DThompsonDev.com
Leon Noel
https://x.com/leonnoel
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonnoel/
https://100devs.org/
📧 Have ideas or questions for the show? Or are you a business that wants to talk business?
Email us at dannyandleonspodcast@gmail.com!
What you’ll learn
- Why freeform paragraphs fail backends and how JSON fields fix routing
- A simple schema pattern: department, sentiment, confidence, reply
- Confidence floors that trigger automatic retries before users ever see a response
- Context windows: why rules are read every call while context gets dropped
- MCP basics and how domain context avoids bad translations and metaphors
- Where voice agents work today (predictable conversations) and where they do not
- Practical tool choices for text, code, and voice workflows
- Real labor impacts, retention insights, and reskill advice
- Salary negotiation quick hits: the two lines that matter
Chapters
0:00 JSON as the glue + the 1-in-3 miss
0:30 Intro & episode promise
1:10 Quick defs — JSON / NLG / NLU / MCP
3:00 Why structured JSON beats paragraphs
7:36 Confidence scores & auto-retries
9:02 Sponsor
11:34 Prompts for image/video models that actually work
15:01 Context windows & durable rules
16:32 Repo trees, PRDs & dev logs to reduce spin
20:02 MCP in practice, local dialects & domain knowledge
26:03 Voice agents, predictable vs unpredictable conversations
32:43 Voice mode as a research partner & model picks
33:01 Jobs impact, retention stories & reskilling
37:10 Conversational AI 101, coffee shop flow to backend
40:05 Connectors & phone/drive-thru stacks (Agora, 11 Labs)
46:04 Real-world rollouts, employee retention boost
48:13 Call centers & debt collection case study
51:27 Predictable vs messy conversations — where AI fails
53:24 Career CTA, learn JSON, MCP, voice stacks
57:01 Ask Danny And Leon A Question
1:07:10 The Developer's Guide To AI
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
The Brothers Ortiz
The Brothers Ortiz is the story of two brothers–both successful, but in very different ways. Gabe Ortiz becomes a third-highest ranking officer in all of Texas while his younger brother Larry climbs the ranks in Puro Tango Blast, a notorious Texas Prison gang. Gabe doesn’t know all the details of his brother’s nefarious dealings, and he’s made a point not to ask, to protect their relationship. But when Larry is murdered during a home invasion in a rented beach house, Gabe has no choice but to look into what happened that night. To solve Larry’s murder, Gabe, and the whole Ortiz family, must ask each other tough questions.