ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Jim Tyler is back for his third visit to the PowerShell Podcast, and he showed up with a full bag of new projects. Andrew and Jim dig into the PowerShell Engineer Standard, Jim's effort to get AI tools writing PowerShell the way a seasoned engineer would. What started as a Chrome extension idea for teachers turned into an AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md standard, browser extensions, a VS Code extension that loops in PSScriptAnalyzer, and even a lightweight local model on Hugging Face so you can generate quality PowerShell without burning tokens.
From there the conversation gets real about security in an agentic world. Jim talks about why local models matter for K-12 data privacy, why open weight coding models with no guardrails keep him up at night, and why small misconfigurations are now legitimate attack paths when an agent can probe your environment in seconds. He also shares how he has used PowerShell and AI to build audit tooling for Google Workspace that simply didn't exist before.
The episode closes on the heart stuff. Jim walks through Model Communicator, the free AAC app he built with speech-language pathologist Kara Cotter to give nonverbal kids a voice without the $300 price tag or the months-long insurance wait. Plus a shout out to Jorge Suarez and endpointjobs.dev, the evolution of PowerShell.News and its new Repo Roundup, Jim's rebranded K-12 Engineer YouTube channel, and his "imposter to presenter" message that everyone has something worth sharing.
Key Takeaways:
Good AI output starts with good guardrails. The PowerShell Engineer Standard bakes in best practices like advanced functions, CmdletBinding, splatting, and version awareness up front, so you aren't fixing the same mistakes after the fact.
Agents have changed the threat model. Misconfigurations that used to feel obscure are now real attack paths, which makes zero trust, process controls, and regular audits more important than ever.
AI lowers the barrier to building meaningful tools, but expertise still matters. Model Communicator works because a speech-language pathologist hand-touched every board, and Jim still reads and understands the PowerShell his tools produce.
Guest Bio:
Jim Tyler is the Director of Technology at Niles Community Schools in Michigan, a Microsoft MVP, and the creator of PowerShell.News and PowerShellEngineer.com. He is the author of PowerShell for Systems Engineers and an elected school board member. Alongside speech-language pathologist Kara Cotter, Jim co-created Model Communicator, a free AAC app for nonverbal learners. He shares PowerShell, security, and AAC content on his YouTube channel, K-12 Engineer, and is a regular speaker in the Michigan K-12 tech community, where he encourages first-timers to go from imposter to presenter.
Resource Links:
- PowerShell Engineer: powershellengineer.com
- PowerShell Engineer Firefox extension: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/powershell-engineer
- PSEng model on Hugging Face: huggingface.co/jimtyler/pseng-14b-preview
- PowerShell News: powershell.news
- Model Communicator: modelcommunicator.com
- Endpoint Jobs: endpointjobs.dev
- PSScriptAnalyzer: github.com/PowerShell/PSScriptAnalyzer
- CISA ScubaGoggles: github.com/cisagov/ScubaGoggles
- Locksmith: github.com/jakehildreth/Locksmith
- Maester: maester.dev
- dbatools: dbatools.io
- PowerShell is fun (Harm Veenstra): powershellisfun.com
- ThreatLocker: threatlocker.com
- PDQ Discord: discord.gg/pdq
- The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gMUhzfLVchM
