Episode 296: From Vibe Coding to Real Change, Fireant’s Vision for Smarter Solutions with Thomas Mynott

Episode notes

How can technology rebuild trust and reduce admin burdens for volunteers in fire and emergency services?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.

Recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) 2025 Conference alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience Conference in Perth, Australia.

Fireant’s Thomas Mynott joins the Smart Firefighting Podcast to explore how technology, trust, and collaboration are shaping the future of public safety.

Thomas shares how Fireant builds custom software that strengthens communication and efficiency for fire and emergency service organizations. He explains why some agencies are returning to building their own systems, how involving volunteers in design leads to better adoption, and what it takes to make technology truly serve those on the ground.

The conversation covers everything from the promise and pitfalls of software to the rise of “vibe coding” — where field personnel create quick, practical solutions for real-world challenges. Through it all, Thomas emphasizes one word that drives Fireant’s approach and success: trust.

So take a listen to hear what he has to share.

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources.

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro, live from Perth
2. 0:47 Day two at AFAC with Thomas Mynott
3. 2:45 Random encounters in the Tim Tam Arena
4. 3:10 Where the name Fireant came from
5. 4:32 Buy versus build: where custom software fits
6. 7:12 Is software improving our lives?
7. 8:44 Taking the admin load off volunteers
8. 11:23 Bringing volunteers into the design
9. 13:18 Vibe coding and proofs of concept
10. 16:44 Words to live by: trust

Questions answered in this episode

What is Fireant and what type of technology does it provide?

Thomas Mynott explains that Fireant builds custom software solutions rather than selling pre-built software packages. He compares it to building a custom house versus buying a pre-designed one, where the custom solution is designed to meet specific requirements exactly how the client wants it.

Hear it at 4:51

How does Fireant help with volunteer retention and reducing administrative burden?

Thomas Mynott says technology can reduce the administrative burden on volunteers who often feel they spend too much time on paperwork instead of helping their community. Fireant brings volunteers into the actual design and development process, which increases adoption. He points to the New South Wales SES, where nearly 70% of the workforce voluntarily adopted a new volunteer management system within weeks because users were involved in the design.

Hear it at 9:14

What is vibe coding and what role does it play in emergency services?

Thomas Mynott describes vibe coding as drag-and-drop, AI-assisted coding that empowers operational people to build simple apps themselves without waiting for organizational approval. It is good for producing proofs of concept and validating ideas, but he cautions that at some point real builders are needed to ensure security, scalability, and proper architecture, just as you would need a real builder for a house.

Hear it at 13:54

What does Thomas Mynott say is key to working in the fire and emergency services sector?

He says trust is central. Fireant has focused on being a trustworthy steward in the sector, and he observes that the AFAC conference community is strongly underpinned by trust, which keeps participants from becoming just buyers and sellers.

Hear it at 17:03

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 296 transcript

From Vibe Coding to Real Change, Fireant’s Vision for Smarter Solutions with Thomas Mynott

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Thomas Mynott

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to our podcast mini series recorded live at the Institution of Fire Engineers 2025 conference in Perth, Australia, alongside the AFAC, WAFA, and the Australian Institute for disaster resilience conferences. With over 28 conversations with fire chiefs, engineers, researchers and innovators, we explored how the fire. An emergency community is adapting to a rapidly changing world from climate resilience and community-led adaption to the rise of new technologies like satellites, AI, and simple tools designed for the field to the importance of mental health, diversity, and global collaboration. These episodes highlight the shared challenges and inspiring solutions shaping the future of safety. Enjoy. We're rolling live here at Thomas Mynott from Fireant. Thomas, how are you doing today?

[0:50] Thomas Mynott: Mate, this is day two. Well, this is my second, this is my second day here at the AFAC conference. Second time as well, doing the AFAC conference. And I think, yeah, definitely remember in Australia last year, doing fantastic. We, I really enjoy coming to the AFAC conference, particularly as an, I guess, an industry representative. You know, I feel like the opportunity that we have to just, I think, collaborate with everyone across the sector, it's hard to find a better way to be able to do it in what I would call like a relatively non environment. Yes, a lot of, is really, I think, the primary objective, of everyone here, is to share ideas. It's to innovate, it's to collaborate, and it's also like just the random chance encounters that we all, I think, want. And just to kind of see what, you know, these conversations can kind of possibly lead to and going back to, sometimes it's hard as an industry partner, you know, we have an objective, which is to try and take our solutions and support our customers. But you can always, you know, it's hard to sometimes bridge the gap. And AFAC just allows you to do it in a really informal way. And so we love coming here. So again, this is day two. The energy, I think, here has been fantastic. Day two's, I think, always my favorite as well, because you get that critical mass of members. And so, yeah, look, and the presenters have been fantastic, Rake, just across the board. Yeah. We're going great.

[2:09] Kevin Sofen: And event last night?

[2:16] Thomas Mynott: Yes.

[2:17] Kevin Sofen: Okay. Yeah, I was around taking photos.

[2:19] Thomas Mynott: You were. You were. Yeah, you were photobombing all my photos.

[2:22] Kevin Sofen: Yes, I was.

[2:23] Thomas Mynott: Oh, was I in there? Okay. We've got the back of your head, right, and all my photos.

[2:26] Kevin Sofen: I'm okay with that.

[2:27] Thomas Mynott: And we'll put you up on my LinkedIn, and I'll tag you, at least the back of your head.

[2:30] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, please.

[2:31] Thomas Mynott: The gala is on tonight. And again, you know, figuratively and literally, you get to let your head down. It's a great opportunity, again, and just to network, to connect with more people in just an insanely informal way, and you know, our goal is the perfect social loop.

[2:45] Kevin Sofen: Random Encounters, and here we are in the informal Tim Tam Arena. Okay, I'm trying to just go like one a hour without being too much of a degenerate. Please feel free to before or after the podcast. I see the logo in the back here with the wonderfully large Honey I Shrunk the Kid signs. Fireant. Here we go. So tell me a little bit about Fireant. is the name. What's the origin of what is Fireant?

[3:15] Thomas Mynott: Genuinely wish there was that really compelling story behind this, but actually the co-founders, Maxim and Dan, they had sold their first deal to a customer, still didn't have a name, didn't even have an ABN. And so over the course of an afternoon drinking, they came up with the idea of Fireant. Now, this was back in 2018. The irony was that back then, I think they fire, what's the Ant-Man? Ant-Man was a big movie out. I think that particularly, I think it might've had something to inspire the concept of it, but then also back in 2018, there was no real issues with fire ants in Australia. Now, fire ants are a huge.

[3:57] Kevin Sofen: I was walking around Kings Park and I saw, a couple of signs saying the tech, the early sign. Supposedly they're not in Perth yet, but there was a concern.

[4:04] Thomas Mynott: They are definitely in Queensland. And they weren't really in 2018. So no one really thought that would be a problem, but now I swear it's pretty fun. Actually, once a month, I'll get a farmer from Queensland, call me, ask him to get rid of their fire ants. Can you please stop doing what you're doing?

[4:20] Kevin Sofen: Right.

[4:22] Thomas Mynott: Right. But if we ever do, that is a marker that we could definitely call on us as well.

[4:32] Kevin Sofen: So yeah, digital solutions, software. Funny, I mean, I think we live in this world where you're like software is just, whether it's enabling us or slowly eating us, don't know. But tell me about some of the digital solutions and software that Fireant plays a role with in terms of working with the public safety, fire service members.

[4:51] Thomas Mynott: So when we think of technology on a spectrum, there's a wide range of different types of technology solutions that buyers have available to them. a lot. Software is such a useful way of solving problems using technology because somebody has already thought of a problem and has already come up with a solution that has been pre-built and relatively tailored to that unique problem and it's obviously designed to be scaled. So software sits on the spectrum. On the other side of the spectrum, you can always build your own technology. And we call that your, custom built. And then there's everything else in between, right? And you've got platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, everything else as a service, and then all the way through to custom built. And so on that continuum, Fire it sits on the building of the custom software. And it absolutely has its purposes, it has its utility. There's particular reasons why building software makes more sense for buyers versus getting software, in the same breath, there's times when you might buy software instead of building it. For the non-technical people that I speak to, most of my family. So I just use building analogies a lot to explain, I guess, the concept of technology to people who just genuinely don't really have much of an understanding. And really, when you think of building a custom piece of software, it's exactly the same as just building a custom house. type of house that is going to, meet specific requirements that you deep down really want. Then you will have to go to a builder that is going to build exactly what you want, exactly how you want it all the way down to you can go to your Clarit thes, you can go to your master builders. You can go to your big builders that have just got your pretty cookie cutter. We. Already done to the designs. We've already done. We already know what the layout is going to be. the doorknobs are going to be. But fundamentally, the solution already exists. And again, when you think about buying a house or building a house, there's reasons why you might choose one over the other. I'm happy to kind of get into that a little bit more. But yeah, again, when we think about the spectrum of technology, Fireant sits squarely on the, we build the solution. And we're finding actually, you spoke interestingly when you said, you know, software is taking over. Again, when I think of software, I think of SaaS and it's taking over. Is it improving our lives or is it not? That's actually a really good question because actually, I think the jury's out on that. We all assumed that there was going to be this huge improvement, decrease in the amount of admin we'd all have to do. Make our lives easier, streamline our lives, but it hasn't really lived up to that promise just yet. I think the jury is out on that. What we're starting to see is more and more customers, particularly in the fire and emergency services sector, as in starting to go back to their roots of going, hey, we used to build technology once upon a time, and we call them legacy systems now, the legacy, because even going to get rid of them anytime soon. [inaudible 8:07] It's a movie of our generation.

[8:20] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, and thinking about how eerily spot-on it is or is not, don't know.

[8:27] Thomas Mynott: I would say spot-on, but yep.

[8:29] Kevin Sofen: I know, but I'd like to think maybe there's be some little disparities in terms of where we're heading. But yeah, I think ultimately how software can be such an integral part of where we're at today in terms of how it runs our life.

[8:43] Thomas Mynott: Yes.

[8:44] Kevin Sofen: Gives me hope and I think I want to lean into maybe some more of the hope and excitement part of like examples like a volunteer fire service members are ones that are always asked to do more with everything. It's a huge challenge of retention, recruitment, of response times, things like that. Tell me a little bit more about the Fireant role within these recruitment, retention,,

[9:14] Thomas Mynott: So there's a really great, And to answer this question, how do we empower volunteers? How do we help our volunteers, particularly in a climate when volunteerism is on the decline? When the difference between the generations of volunteers in the same agency can cover nearly four different generations, how do you cater to such a diverse group? And the actual answer was innovation. And underlying that was a great framework to think about innovation. And it's interesting because one of the things that they identified is the volunteers joined to do a particular thing, yet to your point, they feel like they've almost been hoodwinked in a lot of ways. A lot of ways because all of a sudden they almost feel like they're free labor, just producing so much administration. There's such an administrative burden on so many volunteers and I think, hey, look, I've come to help my community. You know, I'm happy to clean up, to go and rescue, to go and help, to do whatever. But here I am spending most of my nights filling out Excel spreadsheets. Filling out rosters, managing people, you know, and as I didn't sign up for that. a full-time job that I can do, you know, and get paid for, but here I am doing that instead. So technology, when implemented correctly, can absolutely deburden a lot of the volunteers and deburden the administration. But when I say, when you're implementing technology correctly, one of. The actual biggest challenges that we've seen when you implement new systems and get into a volunteer organization is the change management and the ownership of the change by the volunteer. And if they are not taken on that journey, will not adopt the system. And then that doesn't solve the underlying root cause, which is, hey, we're trying to de- But then the volunteer turns around and goes, yeah, but you never consulted me on what I needed or what I wanted or what is my core problem. of the question which was, where do we differentiate ourselves? One of the massive benefits we're seeing when it comes to building custom solutions is inviting the volunteer into the actual design and development process. So we will literally bring them in and go tell us what is it that this system needs to look from the customer, I'm sorry, from the end user being the volunteer in that situation, that the likelihood of, and we've seen this particularly with the SES in New South Wales, when they deployed a brand new volunteer management system and we worked with them to do that. They released it into the wild, they didn't mandate that it needed to be downloaded, and yet over a period of a couple of weeks nearly 70% of their entire workforce, which is a very diverse. Workforce started to use the platform. And one of the reasons was because during the development of that particular system, their project team – the SES project team – did such a good job with the communication, the invitation to people from different units to be involved in the design who then would go a way to their unit, champion the change. Keep people up to date. And what was coming. But then ultimately, when it got released, it's like, hey, well, you know, you guys have told us this is what you want. So even when it comes to a complaints perspective, it's not even a complaint now. It's actually going can we hadn't considered certain things can we just modify and so I think that their volunteers or even their workforce if it's permanent into the journey of building those systems so that actually is going to reduce the workloads is actually going to achieve the outcomes that technology has always promised and so yeah we've seen really good results.

[13:18] Kevin Sofen: It's encouraging and great to hear that and then kind of building on some colloquial cultural examples we talked about the matrix but also besides the role of AI you've seen this big rise of drag and drop coding and I have some friends and this whole idea of vibe coding. I'm curious in your thoughts in terms of quick iterative fast quote unquote vibe coding. What role as silly as it may be and silly as it may sound does that play with the essence of speed to tinkering, figuring out what actually works. And then maybe even using vibe coding as a chance to then build a custom software to and curious thoughts on that.

[13:54] Thomas Mynott: I think this happened for the operational people in our fire and emergency services sector because now they are unencumbered to go and actually if they have the problem, they don't need to go and try and convince the organization to go and buy a system, procure a system, build a system. They literally can just go and do it themselves. And so it empowers literally everyone now to get to a simple product from idea to at least a workable solution that can be trialed within an organization. There's someone here who is from DFES. And he literally did that exactly what you said. He saw something that frustrated him within his line of work. He just vibe-coded his own app and it functionally works, and now he's taking it to the IT team to say, hey, what if we go and actually operationalize this and actually get some real infrastructure, some real, turn this into an actual products. And that is gonna really revolutionize, I think, how technology is implemented. It's gonna actually, it can really be from the ground up. My only point that I wanna make on vibe coding, And again, I want to go back to a building analogy. If you're not a builder and I said to you, hey, here's an AI bot. It's got to build a house for you're going to build a really bad house. Because you're going to tell. The AI bot, I want a house with this many rooms, two story with this, that and the other, I want it to have walls. I want to have a ceiling. I want to have a roof. Go and build it. But you're not being a builder. You didn't think about drainage. You never thought about plumbing. You never thought about the electricals. You never thought about, is this structurally sound? And the analogy there is, one of the issues that a lot of us are going to have when it comes to vibe coding is we actually don't really know the right, what we're asking for. If we go and ask for an app, we haven't thought about how we ask for the right security measures. We haven't ask, is it aligned with our internal governance structures? We haven't thought about, is it actually, is the architecture that sits behind this application scalable, secure, robust? We wouldn't even comprehend to ask those questions. So, again, vibe coding is going to be good to produce proofs of concepts to validate people's ideas, but at some point, that technology needs to be given to actual tech, whether that's internally external to actually go and go hey thanks for building the business case validated an idea but. You know at some point you need a real builder to go and build a house.

[16:23] Kevin Sofen: Yeah it serves a purpose and that's a great example in terms of how this concept of vibe coding is great because we're removing some of these barriers entry and it's great for some foundational proof of concepts but if you're really trying to build something scalable functional I could imagine there's some serious wrap us up here, because we got the commissioner coming here in a little bit. Any sort of a final words of wisdom that you live by, you give some good building analogies, but is there any quote or words of wisdom that you live by within your daily life or that you apply within your work with Fireant or anything that you've learned in the past couple of days that you could share with us?

[17:03] Thomas Mynott: One word that comes to my mind is around trust, and so 12 months ago, so it was my very first AFAC, and in fact, I was actually relatively new to this particular sector about 12 months ago. Fireant, up to that point, had started building a really strong reputation of being able to deliver some pretty complex problems. And so we were starting to build that reputation, but fast forward to now, we've continued to really focus on being a trustworthy steward in this sector, when it comes to technology. And we've just seen that really pay massive dividends. And so it's just around trust. It's not always going for the most. It's not always going for the biggest. composure. It's just, I think about building trust. And when I think about the AFAC conference and everyone who's here, people genuinely, it's such a strong community here, but it's really underpinned by trust. And I think without that, we lose a lot of value and we all just become buyers and sellers. So yeah, I think that's probably one of my, the one thing that I really focus on a lot in this role in Fireant and just making sure that Fire I and

[18:12] Kevin Sofen: dying that sort of trust and nothing. So yeah, appreciate the work that you're doing, Thomas. Thanks for all the insights today and look forward to staying in touch.

[18:18] Thomas Mynott: Thanks for the opportunity. Yeah, awesome, man.

[18:20] Kevin Sofen: Appreciate it. See ya. And that's a wrap this episode of the Smart Firefighting podcast. If you found value in this conversation, hit like, a comment, share it to someone and tell us what you enjoyed most. Take care and thanks for listening.