Inside the PowerShell Working Groups with Ryan Yates

Andrew sits down with longtime PowerShell legend James Brundage to recap what he calls his "summer of fun," a stretch of side projects that prove PowerShell can go way further than most of us ever thought to push it. James kicks things off with Wave, a module for creating and manipulating real .wav files in the object pipeline. Once you see audio as a sine wave and some math, you can generate notes, play music, and even draw animated SVG waves straight from PowerShell.From there, the tour keeps rolling. MarkX turns Markdown into queryable XML so you can pull out code blocks or turn Markdown tables into typed data tables. James also shares how a vibe coded Wolfenstein 3D style clone in PowerShell (that got pulled from the internet after some tough feedback) sent him down the audio rabbit hole, and how he's collaborating with Bruce Payette on getting Braid to play nicely with PowerShell. Then it gets visual. James walks through his Matrix module, which brings the transformation matrices already baked into .NET over to PowerShell and CSS, and shows off a hallway of fake 3D depth built entirely with PowerShell generated SVG. He explains the simple trick behind PowerShell static sites (a .html.ps1 script that spits out HTML, plus a ToString or HTML property on your objects) and shares Fun, a tiny web server where any function named with a leading slash becomes a web page. The episode wraps with a promise of a Part 2, because there is clearly way more to cover.Key Takeaways:

Adam Driscoll, creator of PowerShell Universal, returns to the show for a deep dive into how AI has reshaped his day to day work. Since selling PSU to Devolutions last October, Adam has gone from writing thousands of lines of code himself to running a fleet of coding agents through GitHub Copilot, working across the PSU codebase, documentation, and Jira tickets. He and Andrew talk candidly about the personal side of that shift, the strange mix of mourning your old flow state while also getting more done than ever. From there the conversation turns practical, covering how Adam builds guardrails around agents using PowerShell modules and MCP servers, why planning in smaller steps beats one shotting a huge feature, and why Pester testing has quietly become non negotiable. They wrap with a PowerShell Universal 2026.3 update, including a redesigned admin console, new AI chat and MCP guardrail features, and Devolutions Agent support for running PSU jobs, plus a fun detour into Adam's side projects: a fully managed SQLite engine called Ahtola and an accidental 20,000 line Unity game.Key Takeaways:

Justin Grote (posh.guru) rejoins the PowerShell Podcast a year after his last appearance to talk about how fast the agentic AI world has moved since then. He walks through his experiments with the agent host protocol, running coding agents in isolated dev boxes and spot VMs so a stray command can only trash a container instead of his laptop. He and Andrew dig into what a "harness" actually is, how tools like these steer raw model output into something useful, and why that shift pushed Justin into a real existential dip this past summer, wondering what the point of hand building modules is when an agent can spin one up on demand. He works through how he came out the other side (doing it for the love of the game and the community), then gets into the practical stuff: a from-scratch C# rewrite of ModuleFast that cut Az module install time from seven seconds to three, the ExcelFast beta for slinging PowerShell objects in and out of Excel, and how he's tuning prompts using VS Code's new debug view and token caching. They also cover the rise of agent plugins (bundled skills plus MCP), his favorite lightweight plugin Ponytail, and Justin's read on where PowerShell fits once AI can talk to APIs directly. The conversation closes on advice for people getting into PowerShell right now and where to find Justin online.Key Takeaways:

Andrew welcomes back pen tester and AD security enthusiast Spencer Alessi (Tech Spence) fresh off DEF CON for a wide ranging chat on where PowerShell still fits into offensive security, how AI is changing his workflow, and what makes an environment genuinely painful to attack. Spencer talks through why PowerShell remains a favorite for both attackers and defenders, how he uses LLMs to speed up one off scripting tasks (and where they still fall short), and how he leans on AI tools to obfuscate offensive tooling during engagements. The conversation shifts into real world stories from the field, including a memorable case of exposed domain user hashes sitting on an overly permissive share, before wrapping up with the three controls Spencer sees make the biggest difference for defenders: application control, content filtering, and network segmentation.KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Andrew welcomes back Constantin Hager, a senior systems engineer, PowerShell User Group organizer, and brand new Microsoft MVP. They open by revisiting Constantin's infamous "size of a finger" intro from his first appearance, then dig into his talks at PSConfEU this year on dev containers with GitHub Codespaces and on Maester, the testing framework for M365 and on-prem AD. A quick detour into the GitHub vs. GitLab vs. Codeberg debate leads into the main event: a deep breakdown of Microsoft365DSC, what it actually does, how it treats M365 tenant settings like Intune, Entra, and Exchange as idempotent, drift-monitored code, and how the M365DSC Workshop wraps the notoriously painful setup process into a lab folder anyone can run. They cover the workshop's multi-tenant design, its DSC Community roots, and the honest limitations, like settings that still aren't exposed through public APIs. Constantin also shares his organic path to becoming an MVP, updates on his user group's shift to English-language talks, and a heads up on an upcoming blog series diving deeper into M365DSC. They close with news on the free PSConfEU MiniCon, happening October 13th with the CFP open until September 25th. Key Takeaways: