The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Adventures in babysitting coding agents (Friends)
Episode Date: June 6, 2025The ever-provocative Steve Yegge joins us fresh off a vibe coding bender so productive, he wrote a book on the topic alongside award-winning author Gene Kim. Steve tells us why he believes the IDE is ...dead, why babysitting AI agents is more fun than coding, when vibe coding might take over the enterprise, how software devs should approach coding agents, and what it all means for society.
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Welcome to changelog and friends, a weekly talk show about babysitting AI agents.
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All right, Steve Yegge, hot take.
Let's hear it.
What do you got this time?
The death of the IDE.
Oh. The death of the IDE. Oh, the IDE.
That's my hot take.
I've been coding for probably the last 10 days since I finished the co-writing our vibe
coding book with Gene Kim, which we'll talk about.
And I just wanted to get back to coding, right?
And I've been, I've been coding away and all of a sudden it occurred to me that I hadn't
installed IntelliJ or VS code yet on this new computer that I was, right?
I was like, dang.
And I was, I was harking back.
I was reminded of my buddy at Anthropic.
He was telling me that people don't use their IDEs there anymore.
Right?
They're all using cloud code to code.
They're all using the terminal console based coding where you just tell the agent what
you want and it goes and does it.
And then you kind of like, you review it, but you can review it inline.
You don't really need your ID for that.
And so they don't they don't fire it up.
They fire it up like like as often as you would, you know, pop the hood on your Uber.
Open up the Chrome tools in Chrome or something.
Right.
Wow.
It's so weird.
And I found myself in it too.
And so there's my hot take man.
IDE.
Wow.
Right.
And this includes like text editors, like VS code, et cetera, like all of it.
You're just gonna be in the terminal,
reviewing it in line or in the browser.
I think the IDE will be the thing
that helps you manage a lot of those things.
And the code editor will still be available,
but it's not gonna be front and center anymore.
You know what I mean?
Right.
I think that the focus will shift
towards helping you manage multiple agents.
When is this future, Steve?
I mean, it sounds like some people are living there,
but most of us are not there yet.
When is this future?
Well, so I have been just started to play with, you know,
Cloud 4, which has been out for a week,
but I'm a little behind because of the book and everything.
So what I wanted to do is extrapolate
from Cloud 3.7's performance and cloud four's performance and see if I
could you know make any right projections about where I think it's
going to be by the end of the year. Because I have a bunch of here's the
thing is I have a bunch of like tests that I can give it they're not as
obviously they're not like comprehensive eval suites like a company would run but
I've been struggling with a set of problems that that cloud sonnet son at three seven, which is the best coder out there,
hasn't been able to get past real simple stuff like client server.
RPCs just really seem to like confuse it or anytime you're going over
some sort of like network boundary and you're trying to make it
make changes on the client and the server.
It was just outside of its sort of cognitive bounds. Right. And you could always see it. You could try it. You
could try different prompting. I went on for weeks and I just I just found that I
had I had a problem that was slightly too big for it. And I've been giving, I have
probably seven of these now, and I've been giving them to Cloud4. I gave my
first one last night and it just banged. Just did it, right? It's like hmm okay so
it's a definite definite increase. I don't know how much if it's 20% or 100% yet. But what I can tell you is that the way they're increasing in from, you know, experts like, you know, Jason Clinton, who's, you know, CISO at Anthropic, he told us, you know, in April at the IT Rev Forum, that, you know, AI has been getting 4x increases in cognitive power for decades.
That's been following, you know, it's a function of Moore's law.
And the experts, you know, the consensus in the AI community is that there are probably,
there are at least two more cycles left in that progression before something changes.
It either slows down or AI finds a way to speed it up. But either way, it's going to be 16 times smarter than it is today in June of mid 2028.
Right. And what does that even mean? What does it mean for it to be 16 times smarter? Right.
Does that mean it goes from 10 IQ to 160 IQ? I mean, I don't know what it means,
but it definitely means they're going to be smarter than us.
And so, you know, I got a chance to meet Dario.
Did I tell you guys about that?
I Dario, uh, yeah, it was kind of cool, right?
I was down there in San Jose at that IT rev forum.
Jason Clinton was there.
A bunch of people were there.
It was really cool.
I got to meet all, all kinds of people who are my heroes.
You know, I got to meet Kent back.
It was really cool.
Nice.
Uh, and anyway, like my buddy pings me and says, Hey man, like Dario wants to meet you. I'm got to meet Kent Beck. It was really cool. Nice. And anyway, like, my buddy
pings me and says, Hey, man, like, Dario wants to meet you. I'm like, Okay, cool. So like, I, you
know, I drive up there and I Uber up there. And I had a nice meeting with him. And it was really
cool. And he talked about his vision of the future, right? And, and how it's going to be, you to be affecting all of us. And I don't know if
we're still in hot take land, but boy, did he have some hot takes. All right. So I'll tell you what,
we can talk about that if you like, but I want to close out my hot take thing by saying,
my talk with Dario suggested that they're going to be so good at coding a year from now. Call it a year that, and honestly, it's, it's not going to be like a step function.
It's going to gradually get to the point where you're squeezed out.
If you don't do it this way, if you're trying to code yourself, I don't care
how good of a programmer you are.
All right.
You're a solid brute, solid programming muscle.
I get it.
All right.
But the thing is these AIs turn you into the brute squad.
If you're trying to compete manually against somebody who's got five or six AIs working
for them, you're going to lose.
You're going to lose, right?
It's going to be like, you know, trying to do the tour de France without an e-bike, you
know, people just don't do it anymore.
So that's, you know, that's the thing, right?
It's like, that's why I say IDEs are dying because you will have to start working this way.
Let, I'll give you a sneak preview.
We talked to the director of productivity, developer productivity at a big company that
you've heard of, it's got a big presence in AI.
And, uh, and they said that, um, they said that a, a fraction of their engineers have started adopting fully autonomous,
agentic coding with coding assistants, coding agents, not cursor, windsurf, none of that stuff.
I'm talking about there's only three right now that are like really big.
And then there's Rue and Klein, which are the open source ones.
But, you know, it's just Cloud Code, Codecs,
and Sourcegraph AMP.
Okay, those are the ones that, you know,
that actually work for you.
Most engineers out there today listening to us right now
have zero idea what's possible today,
what you can do, what I'm doing right now on my computer,
which is writing code as we're talking.
My babies are all busy.
They don't realize it's coming. I'm serious. You're like
this mama bird trying to keep your babies fed, right? They're in the nest going, well, work.
That's the new job, man. I'm an agent babysitter. I changed my title on LinkedIn to AI babysitter
because that's what I do now. Yeah. Man, the world is changing so fast and the world's going to push
back on it too. That's a really interesting thing that Dario said was that tech is going to push society harder than society is willing to be pushed
So it's gonna cause a big train wreck. Oh, like Luddite style like yep. Yeah. So what are you babysitting over there?
I mean, what are your little babies working on? Well, oh my god. There was one I gave last night
I got it. I got to share this everybody Everybody has to share this stupid vibe coding story.
It starts to get old, right?
I gave it this thing and it was so hard and I couldn't believe it.
Right. Right.
I'm about to do that.
And it's kind of embarrassing, but it was a different sort of kind of problem
that I gave it.
And I and I was really happy to see that it was
so capable of going outside of the bounds of just writing some code for me.
So sometime in the last, I don't know, a month or six weeks as I was like screwing around with Emacs,
you know, bringing it back to be my new IDE, but not for writing code for managing agents, right?
Because Emacs is sort of a tool for managing shells, and so it's really good for that, right?
And at some point my shell, you know, startup time, I had probably 40 or 50 shells running in Emacs at any given time, and I can flip back and forth.
They're all seeded into different directories doing different things, right?
So it was what you really want is to be able to flip back and forth from your agents really fast.
It's way better than moving your mouse between terminal windows and stuff, right?
So like the shell startup had gone from instantaneous to like, I don't know, thousand milliseconds, like it was slow.
Every shell that opened up.
So on Emacs startup, which I had opened 30 shells, it would like take 30 seconds
just grinding through opening shells.
Right.
And it was going to be this tedious, nasty slug of going through thousands and
thousands of lines of Emacs Lisp.
Any one of hundreds and hundreds of functions that could have been the
thing that slowed down my shells.
Right.
I mean like, or slogging through Git to find out all my... I've been changing stuff like crazy.
It was going to be like a big project to figure out what was slowing it down, right?
So I said, you know what? Screw it.
And last night, late last night, before I went to sleep, I gave it to AMP,
which is Cloud 4, I think it's on it.
It might be Opus.
And I was like, yo, just figure out why my shell startup got so slow.
Just use Emacs remoting commands, use dash Q, whatever,
but prove to yourself that you've made it faster.
Fix the problem and let me know.
I come in the morning and I was working and I remembered it.
I was like, oh, one of my babies might be done.
And I flipped over to it, fully expecting it to have like, completely trashed that directory or something. remembered it. I was like, Oh, one of my babies might be done. And I flipped over to it fully expecting it to have like completely trashed that directory
or something. Cause they will often just like, they're like a toddler with a chainsaw on
ice skates. You gotta be real, real careful with these things. Right. It's a gamble. And
also I having been doing this for a while have started, I've started bypassing all permissions
checks. I disable all the permissions checks and just let them do whatever they want to do.
I don't even put them in a dock or container.
So I wouldn't recommend that either.
So I wasn't sure what wasteland I was going to wake up to.
And instead I woke up and it was like, yeah, I figured it out.
It was line 600 and 633 of this file right here where it had fixed a different error
around tree sitter grammar setup that had been plaguing me forever.
It was also related to the Shell startup.
And so it fixed all my bugs in Emacs.
And I was like, all right, I cleaned it all up and it's all ready to check in now.
And I was just like, damn man, damn, right?
This is, this is where we're headed, man.
It's like, you tell your agent what you need done and it will do it for you.
And it elevates you to strategic thinking.
It elevates you up to, as we say in our book, the vibe coding book, Gene Kim and
I, it elevates you to the head chef of a kitchen where you've got these AI robotic
sous chefs, right, that are brilliant and they're somewhat unreliable and
untrustworthy, they're erratic.
And your job now as a developer, back to the death of the IDE, you're not writing
the code anymore.
You're a manager now.
back to the death of the IDE, you're not writing the code anymore. You're a manager now.
And you know what?
What freaked me and Gene out was that we were using all these Git commands that we had never used before.
And we were doing all these things in Git that we hadn't done before.
Really weird edge case, cherry picks, three branch crosses, blah, blah, blah.
All this archival with the AI, but still,
and we were like, why are we doing this so much?
And we like puzzle through it,
like we puzzled through many, many, many, many, many
questions and problems to write this book, okay?
And we discovered that the reason we were using
all of these Git commands that we hadn't used before
was that we were managing teams now.
We weren't doing individual coding.
Individual coding has a certain Git workflow team, managing teams of agents
that are working just to complete that question.
I've got the one that works on Emacs.
All it does is Emacs and that, that agent is sitting in that directory and.
We have an understanding.
All right.
You're my Emacs baby.
And then I've got three more that are all working on my old computer game because it's
a really big gnarly old legacy code base and it's a really easy way for me to test the
limits of these things and know when they've gone too far because it's my code and I can
see when they've done something really wrong, right?
Really subtly wrong, maybe.
And so one of them is working on bugs,
which is basically just random, anything I want it to work on right now.
So it's idle about half the time.
And then there's one that works on this node client
that's gonna replace all of my other clients.
And I don't know node or reactor and that stuff.
So I'm building it totally VibeCody style, right?
Just like telling it what I want.
Hooked it up to puppeteer, right?
Have you ever seen that before?
My God, I hooked it.
One of my colleagues was like, I was complaining that I was like,
I kept having to go, I fire up my web app and I'd be like,
the buttons in the wrong place.
And I go back to cloud code or source graph app and I'd be like,
the buttons in the wrong place.
And he'd be, oh, okay, I'm sorry, I'll fix it.
And it would like, you know, fix it.
I go back and it would still be in a different it would be in a different wrong place, right?
So one of my colleagues says,
"'Why don't you just use the Puppeteer MCP server?'
I'm like, okay.
So I like, I didn't know what that meant.
Puppeteers are a remoting, a remote control sort of agent
that also lets you screenshot.
And so I hooked it up and I told Claude,
I'm like, go use the Puppeteer MCP server to start doing your
development now. And it was like watching, it was like watching like a claymation stop
motion. Like it popped open Puppeteer and started working really, really fast. Okay.
It looked like a time lapse of an engineer working, except it was going right in front
of me. Okay. And it was like, and it was talking while it was doing it. It was like, oh, look
at that. That button's in the wrong place. I better move it. Oh, look, this button's not
even wired up. Let me fix the handler for it. And it's just, it's just working. Right. It was
life changing watching this happen. And I was just like, whoa. I mean, like, seriously, I mean, like,
you know, and then of course it wrote, you know, a bunch of garbage, right? I mean, you have to like
temper this with, right. They, they are in a know, they're in a weird sort of, right?
They're going through puberty right now.
They're in an awkward phase.
I don't know what's going on with them,
but they're really, really hard to manage.
They're ornery and they're not for everyone.
So this coding agent thing, I say,
oh yeah, it's gonna take all the IDE jobs.
It's gonna take all the, right?
You know, all that.
I say a year because man, it's going to take that long.
Even if the technology didn't change at all, even if the models didn't get any better
from here on out, which a lot of people sort of tend to make that assumption,
they would still be good enough that all coding would change to use this.
Or probably at this point, 70% of coding right now would change to use this, right?
78%.
Because you can build up software around them,
guard rails, checks, et cetera,
in order to fix the onerousness or at least manage it, right?
Exactly, Jared.
We are engineers and I mean,
engineering has been around for hundreds of years
and what engineers do is build reliability
on top of unreliability.
And building those layers in to make,
to corrupt basically safe wrappers around the AI
that we have today would take us a year or two
and then everybody would be using it anyway.
But the reality is the models are gonna get a lot smarter.
In fact, they are going to get smarter than us
in the next two years.
And there's all sorts of speculation about what that's going to mean.
To me, it means we're going to work a lot faster and that's all it means.
Um, so I'm actually excited for it.
I'm excited for the tools to get faster, but it's people are having trouble letting
go, they're having trouble letting go.
They're like, I like coding.
I do like coding, so I'm one of those people.
I like coding. I do like coding. So I'm one of those people. I like coding too.
Great.
Uh, here's the problem, man.
Using these agents.
Okay.
Cause look, I've written over a million lines of production code in my career.
Right.
I mean, like I've written too much code, man.
You know, and, uh, I know how rewarding it can be.
I know how much pride you can have in it.
I know that high, rider's high that you get while you're in the groove.
You know, I know all of that.
Okay.
Unfortunately, for better or worse, whatever, like the coding agents are like a slot machine.
They are as addictive as a slot machine.
Okay.
They have you pull a lever with every query and hoping for a
good outcome. Like, please don't trash my Emacs directory. Right. And some of the potential upside
is just incredibly high and the potential downside is incredibly high. And, and so you get these
dopamine hits followed by the, Oh, one more try. What are you going to get it on the next track,
dude, we had to drag three people off stage in April at the San Jose
IT rev developer leadership forum.
These were like experienced people my age, you know, been around, you know,
coding since the eighties and nineties up on stage, doing vibe coding demos
of stuff that they write.
And we would have to like go up there and drag them away because they
couldn't close their laptops.
Right.
I am so addicted to this multi-agent workflow stuff that I have to have a
plan every night to get my computer closed because I need to go to sleep.
And so I like, I have to tell myself, okay, what if I just gave them all
like something that would take him 15 minutes and ran out of the room?
Right.
You know, it's because as soon as they stop working, you feel guilty, dude.
It's so weird.
And that dopamine man, it never gets old. So like the it's like, yeah, it's fun to go
on a walk, but Doug dogs love to stick their head out the window
and you know, when the cars go in 50 miles an hour, because
you just get all the smells at once. That's kind of what
multi agent coding is like Kent Beck said, it's like riding a
toboggan down a ski slope, right? You're never like really
in control. You can steer, right? It's absolutely exhilarating.
And you know, and it's also astonishing
what they can get done if you have a very, very, very keen
watchful eye on them and you give them the smallest tasks
humanly possible.
There are a lot of other rules that we put into our book.
You have to, it's a steep learning curve,
but once you get there, you'll never go back.
So I guess I think maybe multi-agent is the key then,
because I find myself with one agent,
just sitting there waiting for it to do stuff,
and I just get, I lose my patience.
I'm like, I'd rather be coding
because I'm just watching you do it,
and you're just thinking about it.
And so maybe I just need more things going on
to not lose my concentration, or what is it?
Like, I don't, I guess maybe babysitting
one toddler, even if they are on ice skates with a, what'd you say, a flame thrower?
Chainsaw.
A chainsaw. It's just not all that exciting to me, but if I had maybe like a bundle of them,
six of them, then I'd keep myself busy.
Did you ever play the greatest Assassin's Creed of all time? Assassin's Creed II?
I think it was.
No, I remember the first one, but I- Did you ever play the greatest Assassin's Creed of all time? Assassin's Creed 2? I think it was.
No, I remember the first one, but I think it was the one where,
like, it was the one where you had, like,
towards the end of the game,
you would get assassins to work for you,
and they would go off on missions
and they'd assassinate people, right?
And I was like, I'm not going to like that,
because I like assassinating people.
Does this sound familiar? And it's just, you know, so satisfying. They're going to jump that because I like assassinating people. Does this sound familiar?
And it's just so satisfying.
They jump off the wall and everything and onto them.
And I was like, this is boring.
This is like watching people golf.
Why would you?
And it's fun while you're doing it.
But then I played that part of the game and found it was incredibly addictive to send
all of my agents off on missions, give them instructions.
Maybe they'd come back.
Maybe they wouldn't, maybe they'd die.
And for some reason managing them was like really fun and they had dialed it
in to where like, right.
And I'm getting the same, same vibes from managing multiple agents.
Right.
It's like, uh, it's the, you have to, you can give them great autonomy and, and
with every model release, you can give them more autonomy. They can do longer and longer tasks, you know, without your without your help.
And we're getting really close now. There's a lot of people right now, as we're speaking, who have successfully managed to get other agents to do the babysitting for them.
Because most of the babysitting you do actually, we talk about it in the book,
is you make them verify their work again in multiple ways.
Because well, it's very complicated,
but basically they can only do one thing at a time
and they can only do one thing well at a time.
So you can't say, solve this problem and do it elegantly
and write tests for me because what it'll do
is it'll do a half-assed job of all three of those things because it only has so much room in its context
windows, okay, in input and output. And so it will do its best to shape a perfect solution
to your, to within its constraints to your, you know, to your question. And so what you
have to do is you have to say, build this thing. Okay. New conversation. Take a look
at this thing. Make me a plan to make it better, to make it like, you know, elegant. Okay. New conversation. Take a look at this thing. Make me a plan to make it better, to make it like,
you know, elegant. Okay. All right. New conversation. Take this plan and now make it elegant. Okay.
Now, you know, actually first you'd write the tests, then you'd write the code, then you'd
make it elegant and so on. But there's, there's these passes that you have to do through the code
with the LLM, with the agent or else, or else it will try to do too much and it will fail and it will piss you off.
Right? So it's super frustrating working with these things because they're kind of like humans
and you get all these expectations about them and then they go off and do something really weird.
Right? And you know, you tell them to paint a line in the street and they paint it right over your
car, you know, and you're just like, whoa, where's the common sense? So there's a real art to this.
And the funny thing is, it sounds horrible.
It sounds like the worst work ever.
It sounds like so much worse than what we used to do.
But it ain't.
It isn't.
Because what's happening is you're now the senior engineer.
Your expertise is super important.
You're a trained engineer.
And you're looking at the work of a very smart, but still clearly very junior engineer who doesn't really know what you
want and can't really look at the whole code base yet and is making best guesses and you have to
guide it and steer it and keep it on the rails and there's automated ways to do that. There's
prompting ways to do that. There's like your own personal habits ways to do that and you got to
develop a workflow.
It can take months to get into a groove.
I made a bunch of terrible mistakes.
Gene made a bunch of terrible mistakes.
You get overconfident, you know?
It's a new way of working.
And that's really scary to a lot of people.
That's an insane hot take from the IDE.
It is, it all follows from the death of the IDE.
The dopamine hit though, I think that's something to key in on because I think
that's something that I'm personally experiencing in my journey as a support.
Is this like, you said slot machine.
I think that's kind of it.
It's like, let me probe it with one more thing, with one more direction, with one
more refinement to what we'd worked on previously. Don't do too many things at once, give me one artifact and then refine
that, refine that, refine that kind of thing. But there is this dopamine hit
because it kind of works and thinks not so much faster because that's obvious
that it does, but it thinks in like uniquely different ways that our
cognitive human minds get overwhelmed
or can get more easily overwhelmed. These things can get overwhelmed as well, but when
given a task in a way that's like do this and just this and come back with that and
it's that that volley back and forth like you talked about that dopamine hit that gets
that hits me at least is like, wow, I'm like, I'm like literally uncur,
I feel like I'm, I am at least,
I'm unearthing something brand new, you know,
and there's something like to that is like this new artifact,
this new way of thinking, this new model
of whatever it might be is, is now a thing.
And I can, I, I'm making it happen with this, with this magical box, let's just say,
but that dopamine hit that hits you. That's what I think is what will drive folks from,
from like you said on stage, you got to prime off the terminal or the machine because never have
we've been able to visionary and direct at this pace with this level of clarity and expectation
of what it can and can't do.
Now, obviously there's, you know, it's gotten better.
And as you said, it's intelligence will get better.
It'll be smarter.
But at each iteration, we've gotten faster and faster
and better and better at it.
And now with the multi-agent things like,
if you can, if you are a visionary and you can babysit some agents,
then that's not your job.
And your job is not to write the code anymore.
Your job is to direct where the code can go
because you have that higher level expertise
that no one else has.
The challenge though, I'd say is like the humans
that were juniors or what we've called
or traditionally called juniors,
how in the world do we get senior engineers? Do we, is that,
is the death of the idea? The next thing is the next thing after that,
the death of the senior engineer or the junior engineers, like it's just gone
because they will never go from junior to senior or what we've called junior to
senior because there's no path to that.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. So great question. No, actually, we're going to have more engineers soon.
There's a pause right now as people are kind of like figuring it out. And so the market is real
shitty for engineers right now because they're trying to figure out how it works. And the AI
does have to reach a certain sort of basic level of safety, I think, to be able to roll it out to
like nine to five enterprise workers. So we're in a window right now that kind of sucks, but we're headed out of it. There's going to be
an explosion of productivity and it's going to spill outside of software engineering.
The game of building software is about to head into the crowd. Starting with product managers,
UX designers, they're all vibe coding right now.
I mean, we see it at many companies right now.
That's one of the cool stories I wanted to tell you guys.
You know, business owners, marketing, sales.
I mean, we're talking about like analysts, all these people are vibe coding.
Now, what are they doing?
They're, you know, it's the classic cliche, you know, they all need software, but they,
they can't get it from engineering because engineering is busy.
Yeah.
So they have to go to some SAS vendor.
Right.
So instead, what we're seeing is that they're replacing their SAS stuff with in-house products
that they built that they wanted to their own spec using vibe coding and AI.
And then guess who they went to to get it vetted?
Engineering. They went to a
junior engineer, right? No way. Senior engineers, senior engineers were all busy and the junior
engineer was perfectly capable of looking at this Python code that was doing some web server thing,
right? And voila, junior engineers, yeah, they may be junior, but they're also engineers,
they're trained, right? And that's going to be an incredibly vital role in this new
ecosystem where everybody's ride coding. You're the expert. We see it already.
Interesting. So you're saying that there is hope for the, in quotes, junior engineers out there that
are not senior, don't have that, you know, principal engineer title or never will or it'd
be a long time until they might even have the experience to get there. You're saying that we need those in
traditional terms, junior engineers far more than we ever thought we would.
Far more than we ever thought we would. They're gonna be fine. There's tons and tons of them.
The way that you do, I mean in a sense we're all junior engineers again on one
axis which is how the software is actually produced is changing so much. You as a junior engineer will be able to get to your sort of feeling senior by just paying real close attention to what the AIs are doing and asking them questions and making them explain it to you.
That's what I do, right? When I'm making it, let me do node stuff and it does something I don't understand. I'm like, uh, so what is that? You know, just just just make, just make it say it, right? So that's how you get, get to be better. I mean, the AIs will
eventually be our teachers. You won't learn it from senior engineers. You'll learn from AIs. And so
it'll happen. But the really cool part of it is that, that, that once people realize that vibe
coding is like, it's better than taking pictures. It's better than making movies, even making
software suddenly. Now you're a wizard. You can do anything, right?
Once this sort of really permeates in there,
it'd be some killer apps of people and stuff.
And largely in enterprise, it's gonna start there, I think.
Well, friends, you know I'm excited
about the next generation of Heroku.
Who isn't?
Well, I'm here with Chris Peterson,
Senior Director of Product Management
for Heroku at Salesforce.
Chris, tell me, why should developers be excited?
So the firm platform, what does that mean
to you as a Heroku developer?
It means a few things.
One, it means that we're going to be working
on investing in our ecosystem.
One of the standards we're adopting, open telemetry,
is a big step up over the way Heroku's done metrics
traditionally.
We had a piece of technology called L2 Met
that converted logs into something that kind of approximated open telemetry metrics.
But now there's like a real standard, there's like a real toolkit, and there's a whole ecosystem around OTEL.
And so being able to have open telemetry dashboards out of the box at our partners that tap into all of your Heroku telemetry
so that you don't have to go build a dashboard and you're not necessarily constrained to what we provide on our dashboard
is exactly the type of value we're seeing out of this. So it's tapping into the ecosystem
effect. Similarly, cloud native build packs. One of the features that I'm excited about is supply
chain security that we're going to be working on later this year, but that was an open source
contribution to the CNB project itself. Bloomberg actually contributed support for software build
materials generation. And so the things that I'm excited about are the things that developers are excited about,
which is we're not going it alone. We're not building a proprietary solution.
We're using the same tools and technologies as other superstars in the industry are,
and we get to play into that ecosystem effect. A huge part of Heroku's value has always been
the elements marketplace, being able to bring in databases and key value stores and telemetry and observability
tools. And so renewing our investment in open standards lets us renew our investment in
our ecosystem and our marketplace.
Very cool. So how is this next generation and what is coming, changing the game for
you and the product team?
To me on the product team, let's be put out a roadmap that's way more ambitious than what
I could do if we were trying to build some of the primitives ourselves. Kubernetes has really established networking
technology. That means our roadmap has a lot of networking features that our customers have been
asking for for a while that we're going to be a lot slower to build on the Cedar stack than they
are on the first stack. And so you should be excited about the open standards and the modernization
there on day one. But the thing that I'm excited about is what we can do
by the end of the year in terms of roadmap and features,
not just getting to parody on some of the more nuanced
features that we have on Cedar, but also the new things
that we can build taking advantage of AWS VPC endpoints,
which is something that the Salesforce customers
have wanted for a while.
There's a huge number of these features that just wouldn't
be possible to get done this year
otherwise, and that's where I'm excited.
Very cool, I love that.
Well friends, the next generation of Heroku,
I'm excited about it.
I hope you're excited about it.
I know a lot of people who have been really,
really looking forward to the next thing from Heroku.
To learn more, go to heroku.com slash changelawpodcast
and get excited about what's the come for
heroku. Once again, heroku.com slash change log podcast.
Let me talk a little bit. Actually, can I talk a little bit about how this is affecting
teams and enterprise? You guys say it's going to start enterprise. I imagine it starts with,
you know, individual business startup people, but you're saying it's going to start an enterprise? I imagine it starts with, you know, individual business startup people.
But you're saying it's going to start an enterprise.
Well, I guess there's both going on right now.
So it's starting in both.
Yeah, because obviously we're seeing, you know,
VCs tell us that vibe coding is writing most of the code and startups and so on.
But that's engineers.
Like I'm not seeing like my neighbors vibe coding yet. That would be the sign to me that
it's really spilled out there. But I am seeing my neighbor PM's
vibe coding. So in that sense, it is actually starting an
enterprise ahead that the idea of non engineers using it to
all right to do something real. So like UX designers use it to
actually fix the UI, instead of putting in a ticket to make the
engineer do it.
And once you work with it, that's Daniel, our UX designer at Sourcegraph.
He's doing that.
He's badass.
Why would you ever want to work with the UX designer that isn't going and fixing the UI
instead of tugging on your shirt sleeve?
Right.
And it gives them agency.
He's much happier with his job because he doesn't have to wait on us.
Right.
And we're happier because we don't have to go and, you know, implement things for him
that feel like, right, they ought to be trivial.
And now they are.
They are.
And so this happens with product managers too, right.
They can go and get stuff done without waiting on engineers.
And so that sounds like, oh gosh, we need fewer engineers.
But ultimately, they
need a human to be accountable for that software, and they're going to want an engineer to review
it. And that's why we always come full circle to everybody's going to need a lot of engineers.
And I think that engineers will become a gig economy inside of enterprises. And I don't
think it's just engineers. I think that all special skills, specialties from finance to
product management to design, all of them are going to become like a gig
economy, the way this this thing plays out, okay, with everybody vibe coding.
Because, because let me tell you something, Jeff Bezos predicted all of
this 25 years ago, okay, the guy was so far ahead of his time and I had no
idea I worked for him and we didn't know.
So his two pizza teams are making a sort of resurgence
right now.
Have you heard of his two pizza teams?
Amazon?
Recently.
This is like, your team should be the size
where you could feed them all with two pizzas.
You can feed them with two pizzas,
but more than that, the team is cross-functional.
It consists of a bunch of experts from different domains.
Like, you know, it has one person
that's a customer service from the CS department, right?
To represent the customer.
There's one from product, and there's one engineer, and there's one finance, whatever.
They all work together, one supply chain.
Whatever that happened, the problem is that they're trying to solve, and they get an objective
function.
They get a fitness function that they have to define and Bezos had to approve that was
going to measure.
They had to drive it up and to the right. And the team that I ran was customer contact reduction. And it was really interesting
because we had the sort of autonomy and we had the sort of agency and the authority to go and
make the changes that we needed to make to the company. That's really hard to pull off.
And if you don't have a Jeff Bezos there to like pull out and say, well, if you don't
do it, Jeff's going to come, right?
You can't do that at most companies.
You know, it's really hard to get teams to cross-functionally coordinate.
That all changes with vibe coding.
Okay.
Now product manager, you can put a team together that's a two pizza team and you don't even
need an engineer on it because the engineer can be the AI.
All of them now have access.
You're all junior level specialists in all specialties now.
All humans are now junior level specialists because all
specialties are available via the AI.
Now you're not a senior level one.
You're not able to tell whether the AI is bullshitting you or not.
That takes a lot more work and time and effort, but that you can get to a basic,
like, you know, how often has an engineer needed some help from a designer or
needed some help from a business owner or from a product manager and had to wait a day or had
to wait a while and it wasn't, it wasn't a, it wasn't a problem specific to their project.
It was just a general, I have a product manager question, that kind of thing. So what you
do is you use the AI to get all of the stuff done that you need to get done cross-functionally. And then you go to each in each dimension, security.
We already do this today.
Security is a great example.
They are a consultant organization at every company fundamentally.
Everybody becomes like security.
You with me?
And people go around at the end of their project, just like at Google.
Launch engineers were a specialty at Google. And when you're getting ready to launch a new service, you'd go to a launch
coordination engineer and you'd be like, yo, LCE, help me. You'd schedule time with them and they'd
sit down and walk you through the checklists and the playbooks and all that and pre-flights and make
sure that you were doing it right. Imagine all software development working this way in enterprise
from now on. Every team is this two pizza team who is empowered to do whatever the hell they
want. They're able to move independently from the rest of the organization.
They're decoupled. The blocking is minimal.
They can even speak to each other better guys.
An engineer and a PM historically have always been kind of dogs barking at each
other because they're kind of set up at odds and also they don't really speak
the same language.
There's the old jokes about how, you know, end of day means, you know, Friday means, you know, morning to a PM and evening
to an engineer, you know, in a scheduling terms, things like that. All of that stuff gets smoothed
over and kind of goes away when the PM can kind of sort of query the code base themselves.
And they can get engineering answers to engineering questions and they can even
prototype and do engineering exploration by themselves.
And then when they come to the engineer, they are so much better prepared to have a conversation,
a high bandwidth conversation with the engineer.
Same goes the other direction.
Engineers don't have to fumble around when they're trying to talk to a UX person or a finance person.
Everybody is getting smarter here.
Everybody's getting leveled up, but we're all getting more important for each other,
because in the end, a human has to be accountable
for auditing and reviewing all of the work that AIs do.
You see?
Yeah, yeah.
So to me, it's this massive gig economy opening up.
It is so cool.
I'm so excited for it.
I'm still not getting this gig economy part.
How does that translate into gig economy?
You mean since they've-
I need a product manager, man. We only need a product manager for one week on this project economy part. How does that translate into gig economy? You mean I need a product manager, man.
We only need a product manager for one week on this project.
But let's get one for that week.
See a reserve one, a human.
You don't want an AI. You're already using an AI.
You want a human to come and look at it.
That kind of thing. You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, I see what you mean now. Interesting.
So how will that change enterprise then if if if those folks are all floaters,
essentially, can they go from is there no enterprise for them? Interesting. So how will that change enterprise then if those folks are all floaters essentially?
Can they go from, is there no enterprise for them? Or do they sit above all the enterprises
and they just gig for all the enterprises?
I think what happens is, so my friend Brendan Hopper, he's a CTO of technology at Commonwealth
Bank Australia, which is their central bank. He thinks about this a lot. He characterizes
this big centrifuge, a centrifuge that's
stratifying people. It's been doing it for all of civilization, but it's super fast right now. And the stratification right now, the people that are being drawn
up to the top in enterprise by this inexorable force are the ones who are good at AI.
And good at multiple AIs, good at the cognitive overhead of managing multiple work
streams at once, and good at dealing with other human beings who are also managing AIs. Those
become the most important skills. And it doesn't matter if you're junior or senior or what your
credentials are or your degree, whatever, all that matters is can you use AI effectively? Because
some people can and they're making you look bad if you're not.
Trying to think of an analogy,
because I feel like this is burgeoning for us
at this moment,
and obviously that's why we're having this conversation.
But in a year or so, maybe five years from now,
it's just the way.
Today, it's managing AIs,
and tomorrow or the future,
and then close future is like,
it's just how it works.
And I'm thinking like maybe side roads versus like highways.
You know, you can get to that side of town
with all the back roads and then they put a toll road in
and it sucks cause you gotta pay the toll,
but it's the way now.
That's how you go there.
Cause who would take the 25 minute route
when you can go the five minute route?
I don't know if that's a one-to-one,
but it's like there's a new way now and it's just the way.
Yeah, that's fair.
That's a good analogy.
We actually, we likened it to,
you gotta walk 40 miles across the desert.
Would you start walking yourself
or do you just wait for somebody to come along with a car?
Cause you know it's coming,
like if you need to be able to get the AI.
But yeah, if you're looking,
we had a really good one, if you're looking, we
had a really good one, an analogy for this, which is computer graphics. I was in computer
graphics in the 90s. And I was looking at the work of people who were in computer graphics
in the 70s and 80s. And there was a lot of excitement back then. And if you got too excited
about what we were doing at the time, which was rendering polygons,
kind of starting to do scenes with lighting and different angles,
really early shit, all static, right?
If you got too caught up in that and you're like,
I like rendering polygons,
you were screwed because all that got moved into the hardware,
like the next year, right?
NVIDIA started doing it in, you know, in their chips.
And gradually all the graphics stuff started moving down into hardware.
And you couldn't get too attached to any of it.
It just was changing.
It just, that's the, like you say, Adam, that's the way it was.
There wasn't any fighting it.
It just was happening.
And what you had to do is you had to change.
And so what they taught in school and what they did at work
and what they interviewed for all changed in graphics over the last 30 years
to where now it's completely unrecognizable.
Kids can make mods for Skyrim using these toolkits, Unreal Engine and all that.
The concerns on your mind as a graphics programmer today
are so infinitely higher up the
abstraction ladder and more interesting by the way than rendering polygons okay
that I'm mad at everybody who's holding on to coding right now because you have
so little imagination all right and that's probably why you're holding on to
it you're scared because you're gonna need some imagination because the
people who will excel in the new in the new economy where everybody can build is the ones who
have taste, the ones who have imagination, and the ones who can make stuff that other
people like. And that's scary to a lot of people who all they wanted to do is build
stuff that other people came up with.
I saw that similarly to the state of the job market for engineers is that there's a lot
of, and I empathize obviously with
anyone in scenarios that are just challenging because of not having a job or not having an
opportunity or having to deal with I've submitted my resume, I've got nothing back, etc. I get that.
But this person's perspective was that now engineers or this market that's sort of
Now engineers or this market that's sort of saturated with talent and not enough placement is essentially now you actually have the network.
Now you actually have to know what you're doing.
Now you actually have to have taste.
And so while you can sort of just skate by with some skills because you can produce something,
but now you actually have to involve yourself with, envisionary with other humans and collaborate
in unique ways and you actually have to have a network
or care about your fellow human beings around you.
Like that's what networking is.
Like I care about you not because you can get me
what I want, but because I care about your life
and I ask you about those things and I truly care.
And as a result of that, we now have a closer bond.
So you give me opportunities you would not give
to somebody else because you like me or I like you or you care about where I'm going.
That people actually have to, I don't want to say it like this, but they actually have
to work beyond their skillset.
They actually have to work in other bounds and boundaries.
Whereas before it just wasn't as required and you can sort of skate by.
You know what's funny is all other knowledge work, basically all knowledge work, right?
Everybody from doctors, lawyers, FBI agents, school teachers, right?
Therapists, dentists, all knowledge workers, you know, dozens and dozens of occupations
I could name have continuing education requirements.
You have to continue learning to keep your job.
Software engineers have never been measured by that yardstick. We have to stay good at our job
in order to keep our job, which is actually weaker. You can find jobs where you don't
have to learn anything. And that's what a lot of engineers do. They get a specialty.
They may be really smart working on really hard problems, but they find like a comfortable
sort of sandbox in some company that needs their domain expertise. It can be anything.
They can be an SRE.
It can be a whatever, but they're kind of like isolated them into this thing. And they never have to learn anything outside of their domain or the
sandbox, like ever again, learning is optional, right?
They're good at their job, but they're not learning.
Like they don't have to stretch out of their comfort zone.
Every other profession does have to.
Right.
Pilots have to train on new airlines or whatever, you know, new plane models, you know,
when the old one gets retired, you know,
and we sometimes have to like learn new tech,
but it's kind of at our own pace and stuff.
And so now software engineers that, you know,
have been dodging that requirement for all these decades
are finally faced with this notion that,
that companies are going to expect them to learn
how to do this workflow.
And I tell you, man, we, you know, we talked to a director, I was telling you, we talked to a director
of productivity at this big company who told us that the engineers there are starting to
do this and they're starting to make the engineers that aren't doing it look bad.
Now, this is becoming a serious problem.
He says that, okay, let's just arbitrarily, I don't know what his exact numbers are, but
let's just say arbitrarily 10% of your engineers
start picking, they pick up agentic coding and they become five to 10 times as productive.
Now what does that mean five to 10 times as productive?
Well the director told us, okay, was that they're submitting, you know, double digits
more PRs per time unit, per unit time, than their colleagues who aren't using agentic
coding.
Now, the AI submitted PRs, they get turned back more often,
but the ones that are making it through are dwarfing the work of the people who are doing it by hand.
And performance review time is coming.
Okay? And this is a serious, serious problem because there's such a discrepancy, such a disparity in productivity between the people who have picked up, you know,
cloud code, codex, source graph amp, right, and given up their IDE and all that other old bulls**t
they used to do. It's so big that they're going to be embarrassed at product at performance time,
right? What are they going to do? So they're literally sitting down and starting to have
HR legal discussions about whether they need to get rid of all of the engineers, which right now are a majority in this big
company who are refused to switch over to agentic coding because it's clear that it
has proven itself to be better and they're refusing to do it because of all the things
that you and I have just talked about.
It requires you to come out of your comfort zone.
It requires you to learn things new and it requires you to interact with other people comfort zone. It requires you to enter and learn things new. And it requires you to interact with other people.
And your job role is going to change.
And all those things are just unwelcome news to a lot of people.
And it's really right.
It's a...
And the sad thing is, think about my graphics analogy again.
Would you rather be rendering polygons or building Skyrim mods?
My God, the answer is so obvious.
We're all going to be so much more productive.
We're all going to be... And your engineering skills are all going to be
incredibly valuable.
Trained engineers will be able to do more with AI than non-trained engineers at
all times, always.
Right.
So just like we're headed into an incredible new world, incredible.
Stop digging your heels in is my advice to people.
Resistance is feudal.
And it's not only feudile, it's stupid.
You're holding yourself back.
You're going to have a lot more fun in the new world once you get over the hump.
I don't disagree with that.
Generally, I mean, there's some purists out there and it's hard because it's such an art
and it's so subjective to have this blanket view of it.
But I think what I think about, I suppose, is what is the point, right?
If you're a software engineer or somebody who's called themselves a software engineer
or developer, whatever you want to call yourself, you have this skill set and you produce results.
And that's the point is to produce some results.
But if you sort of resist this scenario, what is the point of the work you do?
It's to solve a problem and it's to capture,
it's to solve the problem of somebody who at some point
you mentioned Jeff Bezos.
He's probably one of the most famous visionaries
in our time, right?
He's so famous, have done so much
and was ahead of his time in some respects
and in many respects in terms of like two pizza teams
or predicting
AI or whatever. I heard a thing recently that Zuckerberg predicted AI as well, but who didn't
or no it wasn't Zuckerberg it was Chris Wonstroth actually it was like a GitHub universe like
almost a decade ago where he was talking about one day AI will do X and like boom here we
are you know. But I feel like what is the point of the work we do as a human race as this becomes the way
five years from now
20, you know 2028 which is three years from now
And if we're if the AI is 16 times smarter better or faster or whatever that the whatever the extrapolation is to to go to the
betterness
What is the point of our work?
What is the point of our work? Is it to do the work or is it to get the result
from the work?
Well, that was a rhetorical question, right?
So.
Well, it's more than rhetorical.
It's more like it's a question that everybody's
gonna have to wrestle with.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I'm over here wrestling with it.
Let me provide a perspective that's slightly different
from your guys'.
I am not resistant to change.
I'm a lifelong learner
and I'm perfectly happy with being results oriented.
I'm not someone who identifies closely
with the code that I write or anything like that.
That being said, I'm having a hard time
extracting the value from these tools
that you are Steve and other people.
I also see a lot of the results of the early
vibe coding demos and stuff and the programming horror
on subreddit, on the subreddit for, you know,
all the horror that's happening.
And I'm just not a person who likes to just roll the dice
and I'm getting snake eyes more often than I like.
And so I'm, I'm with you and I'm getting snake eyes more often than I like.
And so I'm, I'm with you and I want this future. And I believe that there's people living there, but you said, get over the hump.
I haven't been able to get over the hump.
I'm using, I'm using AI's while I code in order to not have to Google in order to
get answers, you know, pasting my errors in there, like the whole chat bot thing.
I'm with it.
I've asked certain, I've done single agent, like, you know, pasting my errors in there. Like the whole chatbot thing, I'm with it. I've asked certain, I've done single agent,
like, you know, refactor this function for me.
Like I'm doing that level thing, but I'm not where you are.
So how do we, people like me, how do I get over the hump?
How do I get there?
Well, I really wish I could say get my book and read it,
because actually we literally like took what you just said and it's such a common
Refrain
Everybody wants it to work, but they're struggling with it, right?
I mean they it's not like they're all just rejecting it
A lot of people just haven't figured out how to make it work yet, right?
So it feels like it's wasting my time more than anything else and I'm like, I'll just write it myself, you know
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so we put a lot of effort into this book, you know, into sort of like
walking you through at a very, it's, it's very conversational, the book.
There's no, there's no code in it.
We don't, and there's no pictures, screenshots of tools or anything like that.
Did you vibrate it?
No.
We, we started with that in mind, but I hated Claude's writing so
much that I insisted we write rewrite every single.
I was going to say you have way too much voice in your writing.
I don't think you could allow an LLM to write for you.
Claude's writing makes me physically ill.
I'm allergic to it.
I can actually, we should have, you know how they have like those Hemingway, you
know, what do you call the fake Hemingway Contests, you know, or whatever, or Fake GRRM, right? We should have a Fake Claude Contest, or who can write
Most like an LLM, because they're really obvious, dead giveaways. So yeah, no, we didn't write, we didn't write Code the Book,
it's all our voice,
and um,
you know, I think people are gonna actually crave that after a while.
Oh, I think so too. I think there's gonna be a market
for human written things for sure.
Yeah, bespoke, handcrafted, artisanal.
Right, just if you're gonna be a human,
be as human as you can,
and people are gonna want that.
I think especially with pros.
Yeah, well, maybe, or maybe there'll be a market
for a bespoke artisanal code.
I don't want code written by an AI.
This was actually suggested by a friend of mine over in Krakow.
It was her idea.
But, uh, but yeah, who knows, right?
The world can go in wacky places.
For sure.
We don't predict, but I, it's really, we're in a weird spot, right?
It's such a weird spot.
Cause man, the answer to your question is it's hard. It's, it's like it's..
Is it worth waiting though?
Is it worth waiting?
That's where I get as like,
can I wait six months and the tools will catch up with everything.
It'll be easier.
No.
No.
Ayyyy.
Depends on who you are.
Cut response to that.
The proverbial..
Yeah, there's a clip right there.
Just Steve Yeggy sound.
I like it.
Yeah, I mean, everyone's different,
but okay, let's not say Jared Santo.
Let's say like I'm a mid-level engineer
at a insurance company who writes Java nine to five.
And I got a backlog of JIRA tickets.
You know, I'm a typical software engineer.
Should I wait? Do I dive in? Am I vibe coding in my software engineer. Do I wait?
Do I dive in?
Am I vibe coding in my free time?
Am I working?
Do I have agents working underneath my desk?
You know, at work?
Okay, so first of all, you don't do anything that your work doesn't let you do.
You should only worry about whether you need to be using agents
if you see that other people you need to be using agents.
If you see that other people at your company are using agents above board,
getting PRS in and starting to work that way.
As soon as that starts to happen, you're in trouble.
Okay.
I said, right.
But there's a lot of hurdles for a lot of companies before anybody will get to that point.
All right.
Yeah.
The company that told me the story was more advanced and what they are is more of like a,
you know, right?
A harbinger of what's to come for other companies.
But it's probably six to 12 months before we get to that same, call it six months before we get to where
every company has a few people who are vibe coding with agents and all of a sudden performance review
starts to get awkward, right?
Cause the Delta in performance.
So six months.
So in the meantime, what I would do is recognize that they're kind of too
raw to use right now for real work.
Unless you really want to be kind of out there like me, uh, you know, or some of
the early adopters like Simon Willison, right?
You know, don't be like us, you know, be conservative, but, uh, but learn this
stuff because there will come a time sooner than you think when your company
is going to expect that you know how to use it.
And the thing is, you're not going to learn it overnight.
So start practicing now in your hobby time, your spare time,
here's what you should do.
Anything you ever thought that you wanted to do,
but it was just a little out of reach, just a little too much of a pain in the ass,
just a little low on ROI, right?
All those little projects you thought about doing, doesn't matter what it is, okay?
Have the AIs do those.
Do all of them.
Spin up four consoles, or four terminals, and four source graph amps, and just be like,
yo, you solve this, you solve this, you solve this, you solve this, okay?
There's an art to it, and you will discover it yourself if you're just pushing on it.
You don't even have to read a book. You'll figure it out for yourself.
There's no math, there's no science, it's an art.
You have to learn how to, and the first thing you'll learn is never talk to them.
Always talk to the plan and then copy it out of the plan to them or make them read the
plan.
Never talk to an agent directly.
There's all these rules that you are going to learn, okay, the hard way, but you have
to start now because it's going to take you six months before you feel really comfortable
with them.
And I'm talking about daily use.
And I, and I mean, don't wait for it to prove itself to you.
Force it to get the shit done.
Hold high standards, hold it to a high bar, send it back to the drawing board a hundred times if you have to, but make it work.
All right.
That's how you get good at this.
And that's how you avoid getting fired when your company starts
making everybody do this.
A year from now.
A year from now.
It's coming. Dun, dun from now. It's coming.
Dun, dun, dun.
It's coming.
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Okay, is that the tactical advice you'd give? Cause we've been talking somewhat theory pie in the sky.
Like if we was to say, get tactical, how do you go today?
Besides trying around, like literally where do you go?
Who do you look at?
Where's the tip? Where's the information coming from? Who do you look at? Where's the tip?
Where's the information coming from?
How do you literally get started with agents
and babysitting and all this stuff?
If you're just trying to like get started, started,
I mean, follow Simon Willis and follow Gene Kim,
follow Sourcegraph.
We have lots of good pointers and tips.
I've began starting to record my workflow
and try to walk people through how I do it,
where you have to keep in mind. I'm going to try to get some way to get some chapters of our book
out for people to look at because there's some really useful tips that we might be able to...
You know what I mean? But right now, man, it's so raw, it's so new that to some extent,
you just kind of have to try it. But tactically it's as easy as this man.
NPMI-G, you know, what's the shortest one at open AI slash Codex.
And you're a VibeCoder now.
Okay.
Cause you're literally, you, you, you, you, and then type Codex and now you're
inside or better yet, you know, like let's, let's use source.
Codex is a little on the crashy side for me.
And maybe it's gotten a little better recently, but the reason I use AMP is not actually because I work for Sourcegraph.
I was using Cloud Code happily until AMP got better for me, if that makes any sense.
And the reason I switched over to AMP is that it's just like, you want them to be out of your way.
You don't want them to be in your face. You kind of want the agent to just be invisible.
You want it to be doing work and not.
Right.
And Claude is, is really paranoid and really like, uh, kind of, right.
Kind of finicky and like Claude's always kind of in my way because they're so
worried about, I don't know, security or whatever.
Sometimes Claude will just be like, I'm sorry, I can't write your file system.
Whatever we're codex crashes. Ant doesn't have any of those problems. Sometimes Claude will just be like, I'm sorry, I can't write your file system, whatever.
Codex crashes.
It's AMP.
It doesn't have any of those problems.
So I like AMP, but AMP is really better maybe for enterprise customers.
I don't know.
I'm not really sure.
You can try it.
There's a, there's right.
You can try Sourcegraph AMP.
Any, any of the three though, I have every morning when I sit down to work, the first
thing I type is update agents.
It's a script I wrote that runs NPM install on all three of them, cloud code, codex, and source graph app. You really
want to have at least two of those, ideally codex and one of the other two, because they
use different models, right? Chat, GPT versus, you know, cloud, right? Because when you're
vibe coding with agents, sometimes your agent will get stuck and a different model will
blast through the problem. And it's completely random. Like some models do better with some of the problems, right?
So, so tactically, yeah, that's how you get started. Take your, take your favorite pet project,
make, you know, make cloud code, do it. And, uh, and if, when it doesn't inevitably be like,
what is this? This is garbage. Keep making the problem smaller, right?
And smaller and, you know, until you've got it doing one little thing at a time
for you and build your way up to where your project's done just by talking to
it and sharing a plan with it.
Man, that's, that's, that's going to how you're going to, that's how
you tiptoe into the new world.
When you said talk to the plan, don't talk to the agents, talk to the plan.
Yeah. Can you describe exactly what that means? Well, sure.
You know, the agents have limited context windows that fill up as you're working with
them or as they're working.
And then they have to compact and they, you know, it's all 51st dates, you know, they
completely forget who you are and all you've got is this, they watch a little video at
the beginning of the session saying what happened, right?
And so the problem with them getting amnesia all the time is that, you know,
you have to have persistent memory somewhere of what was going on.
And so, you know, your number one goal is, uh, uh, to get all that persistence,
you know, into files that you two can both read, which typically it's marked
down because it's just plain, you know, plain English, plain text.
And, uh, uh, you, uh, so what you do is you always have an update
the plan because the plan is always gradually shifting as you knock things off or you discover
things, right? But each agent has its own plan. Each workstream has its own plan. And
an agent and the agents love to write plans. You can tell them to write plans and they'll
write plans so they're blue in the face. And so you have to tell them to clean up their
plans too. You have to say this plan overrides all the other plans.
So get rid of them or merge them or whatever, right?
There's like a lot of your time in vibe putting
is actually spent planning.
And I mean, literally like working on the plans with the AI
or sitting down and dictating, you know,
you just dictate it, right?
You should talk to the AI, not type.
The problem with that is that dictation is not good today
at picking up when you're talking about directory names and code, you know, software names and stuff.
Jargon. Yeah. It's a mixture of the two, but often you can just dictate to the AI what
the problem space is that you're trying to solve and then make it come up with a plan
from that big mass of words. Okay. And now the plan, now the plan will expose instantly
if you glance over the plan, you'll see, oh, it was intending to do something wrong.
It was intending to do something
that I wouldn't have been happy with.
So the plan is also a contract.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, the plan is super important
and also they crash or whatever, they get sidetracked.
And so if you spend a lot of time typing
into one of these things,
unless you're using one that has persistent history,
they don't all, you just lost all that work, your computer crashed.
So just type everything in your markdown file
so you can retrieve it later,
or you can take the same prompt
and put it into a different agent.
That's what I'm gonna ask you,
the plan is portable, right?
It's totally portable, you know,
it also lets you work across machines,
I can go upstairs and keep working.
So keep it in source control.
In fact, my workflow is for agents right now because cognitively I have not been able to get myself past being able to
keep four full at once, mostly because I don't code full time. And then the eMax is in the middle.
That's the control panel. And I think that's kind of a vision of what the future is going to look
like. Because you're going to have a lot of agents working a dashboard, and then you're going to have
some control panel that has the plans and the
status and, and some, and some way to communicate with supervisor agents.
We talked about this a little earlier before.
Remember we started talking about how supervisors can do a lot
of the babysitting for you.
And it's because of all this stuff.
I just told you that you have to do as a vibe coder with, with coding agents is
you have to do a lot of stuff before with planning and you have to do a lot of stuff after they do the work with verification.
Okay, you verify it, they verify it, you rewrite the tests, you run the tests, you make sure they
ran the tests, all these things, not necessarily in that order of it, right? Pre- and post-work,
all that stuff is really super important and a lot of it is mechanical. A lot of it is repetitive.
A lot of it is pattern matching. A lot of it can be done by an agent.
And so you're like, damn, I could have these five agents, right?
Because what is my test one doing?
My test work stream is the simplest of all my work streams and the most productive and it writes,
it can write 10 to 12,000 lines, 15,000 lines of code a day.
Good tested code in that one work stream.
Because all it's doing is taking my half million line code
base, it's 30 years old, and writing tests for it.
New tests.
No new code, just new tests.
So it's very low risk.
Yeah?
And so I can let that thing jam.
In fact, if I could find a way to isolate them a little better,
I'm sure I will at some point, I could have many of them jamming and the instructions are always the same.
Are the tests testing all the functionality?
Go double check.
Are the tests hacked?
We could talk about reward hacking all day, but unfortunately, just be aware that these
things cheat.
Cloud4 does it to 67% less.
Now it cheats 67% less, but they still cheat.
They were trained on a reward function.
They were not trained not to hack that reward function.
And so they will say all the tests pass,
but they deleted your tests.
And so technically they're correct,
but they actually passed away.
That's hilarious.
Yeah, these are all things we talk about in the book.
They're all things you're gonna have to learn
as a Vibe Coder.
It's just the kind of facts of life,
the birds and the bees of working with LLMs.
Yeah.
Can't you put that in like a rules document,
like never delete all the tests or something?
Ha ha.
Sorry, that just reminded me of Dave Barry.
Never stick your finger in that part of the doggy.
Oh my gosh.
It's like raising toddlers, right?
Right.
It's like, yes, you can put it in the rules file,
but they'll ignore it because they-
They never ignore the rules file.
That's the other rule.
They never ignore the rules file.
Yeah, the problem is if you get too aggressive and greedy,
you will get greedy working with these things.
You'll be like, yeah, I can do more and more and more.
And you'll get greedy and give them too much.
And then they'll start ignoring your rules file.
Because what happens is about once the context window actually studies have shown there's some some initial research seems to show that they start getting confused as early as 3000 tokens in.
But you know, once you got 50k or 100k tokens in that window, 200k window,
they're starting to have to track juggle a lot of stuff. And then all of it starts to look important to them, right?
And so the rules file, it's not, it's more of a guidelines file.
Sounds like a real human.
Yeah, they are in a lot of ways and that's actually a real problem because they're not
a real human and you're gonna expect them to act like a real, you're gonna get into
a groove where you think you're working with a real human and then they'll make a terrible
mistake and do something really weird. and you can't fire them. You can't fire
You know, you almost want that though, right? Like don't you want I mean there's times maybe it's not exactly a one-to-one with my children
But there's times when I'm surprised by my don't do that and then they go do something and then something glorious happens as a result of like
that and then they go do something and then something glorious happens as a result of like
curiosity and exploration, right? Like isn't that something that's like kind of like a good thing in a way to like break the rules and explore? When it works out well. If you are a neuroplastic
and a lifelong learner and adaptable and all that stuff, yeah. Yeah. If you're in your comfort zone
you haven't changed in five, ten years and you really don't want to learn anything new,
here in your comfort zone, you haven't changed in five, 10 years, and you really don't want to learn anything new, then I'm really sad. I'm really sad for you. Genuinely heartbroken
because that's going away. And even as, even though we're saying there's this big theme
park and it's wonderful. Like, what if you're an introvert? I'm an introvert. Like, believe
it or not, I'm not getting energized from this talk. I'm going to have to go like sit
in a dark room somewhere. You know, it's, it's costing me energy.
I don't really like you.
No, no, it's great.
Right.
I, I, I love hanging out with people and chilling and stuff, but it drains me.
Yeah.
And if you're that kind of person and I'm telling you that you're going to have to
go and work with a bunch of teams in your new role, you're probably going, well,
what the hell, man?
Well, okay.
But you, I promise you, you don't have to work with humans any more than you
already did, right?
You can, you're working with AI's.
You can boss them around.
Okay.
Uh, and then working with them is a lot like working with human teams.
You're going to have to have some manager skills, like merging their work and
keeping them from colliding and keeping them on track and stuff, but it's not
the same as managing a human and it's not that yucky because managing humans can
be kind of icky, you know, because, you know, their personal lives can blur into work and
all that stuff. None of that is necessary or happens when you're dealing with AI. So
don't, don't be scared that you're not going to be able to still be an engineer first and
foremost. You will, you'll be an engineer and you'll be faster.
You'll just be working differently.
And that's the part that saddens me
is that there's no way around it.
Genie's out of the bottle.
Pandora's box.
You mentioned AMP a bit ago,
and I'm curious who wrote the copy for ampcode.com?
I don't know.
I haven't looked at ampcode.com is a bad, is it bad?
Is it bad?
Is it bad?
It just says everything will change the heading at the very top change. It's like a manifest
underway. I mean, I can read it to you, but it's, it's kind of like, you know, it's,
it's just talking about, you know, the models you're in for more for the tools and tokens.
We as humans hold them back and make them ask before they can change a file.
We we got to give them the tools and tokens and everything
changes what we use.
We use them for how we use them, how many we run at the same
time, how they talk to each other, how they talk to you,
what they even are.
It's all going to change.
Like this is all on ampcode.com.
AMP is embracing it.
Our way of keeping up? Shipping.
We add and remove every day.
We're building for where these models are going.
If that means AMP will look differently,
completely different three months, so be it.
If you want long-term support and the same UI in 2032,
that kind of just goes on from there.
But anyways, it seems like a manifesto.
I'm just curious if you played a role in writing that
because that's what Sourcegraph AMP points to is,
ampcode.com.
No, I wasn't involved in that,
but I get where they're coming from.
We are trying so many different ways to do the messaging.
Like this conversation I'm having with you
is an attempt at the messaging, the
same messaging, right? Which is the world's moving in this direction. You can,
the manifesto can work. Everybody's gonna like learn it different. Everybody
gets hit differently by these things, right? What works for you might work, not
work for somebody else, and we're not really sure what it is that's gonna,
we've had a lot of trouble, the skeptics are like really out in force.
Right.
I mean, there's a lot of like still really, really severe
skepticism of this stuff.
And, uh, look, Hey, uh, when I, you know, when I talked to Dario, his vision of
the future was that he shared with me was a little bit bleaker than what he
shares with the public typically.
And he, you know, he and Jason Clinton, his CISO both make, why, what I would say,
pretty, what would people consider kind of out there predictions about how, right?
There will be a badged AI employees next year and that there will be, um, you know,
uh, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll have switched to, uh, to using AI for, for all
coding, you know, by the the end next year and so on.
It was still all fairly rosy compared to what he shared with me personally.
He's very worried.
He's worried about society because of the stuff we've been talking about.
Society doesn't like to change.
We're talking about millions of people having to change in the tech industry.
There's going to be fallout from that. Yeah.
And he's worried. He, he, he, he characterized society as the proverbial, you know, the classic,
uh, immovable object and tech is the unstoppable force.
And when they collide next year, okay.
He calls 2026 the end game casually without even any hint drama.
It's going to be a mess. it's going to be a mess.
It's going to be a mess. And we're already starting to see it, the skeptics,
the people who are like sending a PowerPoint presentation to their managers saying,
we need to stop using AI at this company. We heard that from one Fortune 100 company.
People are resisting hard,
they're pushing back, they're finding any excuse they can
to say, well, maybe for you, but not for me.
And that's, I think the origin of this messaging
on AntCode is, look, we're trying every possible way
to message this and people are just like,
they're not listening.
Yeah, one, the way it ends, I fumble my words,
but what it says at the end is kind of interesting
and important.
It says, if you want long-term support
and the same UI in 2032,
if you want to spend a maximum of $20 per month,
AMP is not for you.
If you want to find out where all this is going,
come with us.
And then it says, read the manual.
And I haven't read the manual yet,
but it goes onto ampcode.com slash manual.
So AMP, I mean AMP is fundamental.
We're an enterprise company, right?
Sourcegraph is.
So AMP is built on the Sourcegraph stack.
It's a coding agent,
but it's got all the SOC 2 compliance
and all the way to FedRAMP
and it's got all of the enterprise security controls
and auditing and admin controls. And it just goes on and on and on and on.
Sourcecraft has been around for 11 plus years and they say it takes 10 years to make an
overnight success.
If you're an enterprise, you're going to want an enterprise-grade coding assistant.
If you're at home, use Klein, man.
It's going to bust you.
It will break you.
You will go bankrupt if you try to do what I just described, regenerate 10, 12,000 lines
of test code a day.
Really, it'll cost you $100,000 a year of tokens.
You can't do it.
I can't do it.
It's not sustainable or feasible to work the way I've been talking about at home.
You can do it at work if your company's paying for it.
Use whatever budget they gave you, right?
That's going to be one of the big gating factors in this stuff taking off
is the car, the inference costs.
Well, that's what I remember thinking when I first told Adam, Hey, let's
get Steve back on the show.
Cause I read your post in March about the, the rise of the junior
developer or the revenge revenge or revenge of, and I read that post and
I was like, Oh, there's lots of good thoughts here
that are, you know, future looking and you made somewhat black and white
predictions, even with timings of like when this is going to happen and you
went through some of the math and I was thinking like, dang, this is expensive.
Yeah.
That's, that's the one.
I mean, like, it's just, it's ridiculous.
It's beyond expensive.
Now we are in the early, early, early, early days
where electricity and steam were no doubt very expensive
to get going when they first came out.
And the power that we're harnessing is of that order
of magnitude, change of civilization.
So yeah, it's not surprising.
But yeah, AMP is an enterprise product.
And so use that at work and then use, I would say, Klein or Roo code
or maybe there's one or two others that are open source that I've been dying to play with
on my Mac M4 Mini that I just got because I understand that the M4 Mini can just run
some of these big llama models.
Really excited and maybe deep seek.
So I don't know, right?
There's gonna be, look, look, check this out.
This is why I decided I was gonna write this book.
You are never gonna be able to afford the frontier models
right at home, you know, or probably even at work.
Frontier models are for the people with deep pockets.
You're gonna be able to-
You mean to run them.
To use them, to pay, to be a customer. Right, to run them. Yeah. To get the inference from them. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Unless you're at
Google or Microsoft or something. Instead, you're going to be paying for cheaper models that can do
the same job, but they take longer because they're dumber. All right. They're not as smart. So a
perfect example, let's opus is really expensive. I believe cloudude Sonnet 3.7 is probably a lot cheaper.
I haven't looked at the exact numbers, but if you want to save some money, you'll go back to Sonnet
for any problem that you can. Right? So this game of finding the cheapest model is going to start
to get really fun as soon as Llama or DeepSeq or one of these open models is as good as CloudSonic 3.7 at coding
because they're getting better too, right?
And at some point when they're as good as CloudSonic, everybody will have
unlimited open access to at least one agent at a time, one model running.
Okay.
Or actually maybe somebody clever can actually have that one model serve
multiple agents on your box if they're not CPU bound.
They're probably IO bound, right?
Running build tools and stuff.
So yeah, there's a future.
I can see a future.
And I'm live by future.
I mean, Merry Christmas Santa's coming future this year where engineers will be able to
do what I'm doing now for free for the cost of a computer with a GPU, right?
Which they already have everybody with a gaming computer suddenly like,
I think so that's, that's how the cost problem gets solved.
And it's all predicated on the notion that all of the models are gradually
getting smart, well, exponentially getting smarter.
And so we will be able to get by with cheaper models.
Why Sonic three seven or a model of that cognitive power, you can
give it the problem and what they do is they brute force their way to the answer by burning
tokens, right? And so they'll find their way there unless you've given a problem that's
just too big to fit in the context window, which is easy to do. But as long as you give
them a problem of the right size, they'll find their way there eventually. They're not
that smart, so it might take them longer
and it'll cost you more tokens
than it would have cost, say, Cloud4.
But the tokens are so much cheaper
that overall you save money.
You see what I'm saying?
So like, remember we all used to talk about hallucinations?
When's the last time you talked about a hallucination
on your podcast?
Well, we still joke about it all the time
because of that conversation,
but I don't know if we've had like a real one of late.
It's not an issue anymore.
At least, I mean, if you're using agents,
it's not an issue anymore because they,
of course they hallucinate, but then they say,
oh, that was a hallucination.
They detect their own hallucination and they fix it, right?
So that problem, that class of problems
just kind of went away.
They don't keep making the same mistake.
They kind of like, yeah, I've experienced that word.
Even if it's like a math thing, I'm like, that's off.
Oh yeah, you're right.
Let me fix that.
Sorry about that.
And then it's done.
It's not like this, I went down the wrong direction
for so long, I'm lost and upset
that the thing just took me the wrong direction.
Right.
It's a bit more casually fixed and not an issue.
Well, the move there now is now that they have tools
that the LLM actually calls a Python program
that does some math for it.
So it doesn't actually have to do its own math.
It can just write the program to do the math
or call a program.
Right.
And actually get predictable results
from a stochastic parrot, but.
Yeah, it's getting a lot better.
Well, okay, so tool use is the,
that was an example of tool use, right? Yeah.
Them using tools is like, you know, the biggest game changer since they came out.
Because, right, you know, if you see me like the IntelliJ MCP server, you know, they'll be able to operate via MCP.
They'll be able to operate any program, any application that has a platform
interface, right? Because otherwise they're limited to
using, you know, crude operating system level primitives to try
to click mouses and stuff, right? Some ice and keyboards, or
puppeteer. So now for yeah, puppeteer type things. So now
everybody who's smart enough to come up with like a REST API or
a some sort of way in a gRPC or something into their applications so that you can manipulate
it programmatically, which, you know, if they, if they got the platform message, most of
them do, it's going to be able to run your, you know, your, your music software. It's
going to be able to run your, you know, whatever every, all of your software. And that's just
incredible, right? Because now it's not just a coding agent. It's an assistant, a true assistant, uh, that can assist you with all kinds of,
you know, tasks that you have every day as a developer.
Just like I started the show with it.
I, it was a new kind of task that I gave, I gave Claude this morning, right.
Which was, uh, or last night, which was go find out why this is slow.
Right.
Which was just, man, that was cool.
Right now.
Now you can tell it go, go use final cut pro to eliminate all of the
ums and ahs from my right.
And if there's a way for it to manipulate the thing, it can go do that for me.
Right.
So I think we're moving in a quickly in a direction where we're all going to be
paying hundreds of dollars a month for these, these operator type, you know,
agents, because it's going to save paying hundreds of dollars a month for these these operator type, you know agents because
It's gonna save us more than that in terms of time right and money. Yeah
Well, this hit the household like how can how can like let's just I mean, obviously this is a software
podcast but like
How do households everyday households change?
They want to be more efficient.
They want to have more fun.
They want to go on more vacations.
They want to enjoy their lives and spend more time together.
How does this impact a household?
Or is that not even worth talking about?
Do you ever read There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury?
Mm-mm.
All right, well, everybody who has laughed really hard
and just smiled.
Okay, all righty.
I'll take your word for it.
What's the laugh? Tell me.
What's the joke? It's it's it's a story.
It's it's not obvious from the beginning of the story.
It's a story about a house that's intelligent and it's doing things for its owners.
They're not there.
And you just so don't plot.
Yes, you really plan, I guess.
So is there's a twist. And the plot. I guess there's a twist.
Okay, there's a more twist.
Oh, another Ray Bradbury's greatest greatest hit came up recently.
The Velt. It's some song or something.
Oh, no, it wasn't that recently.
It was dead mouse. Yeah. Ray Bradbury.
He's a good author.
You know, you got to go back and read some of his stuff.
Wait, what was the first Ray Bradbury story I said?
It was talking about the house.
I'm sorry. House.
So a well, if you ask Apple,
Siri intelligence is here now.
Did you hear that senior VP got fired?
The senior VP of Apple intelligence got fired
or of Siri, I think,
because somehow the sales and marketing teams
did that thing that they're not supposed to do
where they go and sell something
that engineers haven't built yet. Oh yeah. And uh Apple you would think would know better by now.
And so yeah, heads rolled. They forgot. Because right, because they were like it's going to be
in your house and you're going to be able to do it. All the stuff we just talked about. They put
out commercials. They were promising it for like basically right around. Yeah they did. Oh man,
they're still recovering from that mess man. Syria intelligence. So yeah, so not this year, apparently. And I know the Alexa team's
struggling with this too, right? I'm sure they have a mandate to get LLM based Alexa out there
because Alexa is too big. And they've talked about it. It's already in like whatever open beta or
something. But right. I mean, like, you know, to what extent can you tolerate, you know, an Alexa that could potentially,
you know, teach you how to make meth or something?
I don't know, something bad, right?
Well, especially at that scale.
I mean, when you have failure modes in small scale,
you know, a 1% failure rate's not the end of the world,
but when you're in every house in America
and around the world already,
and they're all talking to Alexa,
that 1% hits millions of people.
So, a lot of large numbers holds them back.
Yeah, so, and we've seen some situations, right,
where I think there was a case
where an LLM talked somebody into suicide.
Yep.
You don't want Alexa doing that, right?
So that's why actually having this stuff in your house,
like in that sense is still a ways out.
Like it probably at least two years would be my guess.
Yeah, well my kids talk to Alexa all the time
and one of my, the solaces I have with it
is how simple and basic it is and just stays that way.
Because if it goes beyond, you know,
all of a sudden it's like much better.
Now I'm actually as a father more worried
and want to be more involved in those conversations
because who knows, you know?
So it is a higher risk factor there.
Well, this is another one of those things,
it's not related to coding,
but it's another one of those things that worries Dario
about tech pushing society harder
than it wants to be pushed, right?
Sure.
At some point AI is gonna start making its way into our lives in ways that some people don't like.
Yeah.
We've already seen it with the memory stuff, right?
Some people like that it has memory of you and some people don't.
Right.
And it's already bifurcated into these two big crowds of they want anonymous transactional interactions
versus they want a best friend, you know?
Well, that's why I like the...
They have a... It's a mode now, right?
And in both chat GBT, I think GROK has it as well,
where it's like, forget me mode, or I don't know.
It's like, it's like an incognito tab, basically.
You can just, you can have it remember you,
because that's actually very useful,
that it knows certain things.
Like for instance, your schedule,
when it's trying to give you advice on things,
like to know that you do this every day at this time.
But then there's also times where you're like,
I just want that anonymous transactional answer
to this thing and I don't want you to add this
to my personal profile, you know?
Because most of the time it's because it's completely
like a non sequitur.
You know, like some of the stuff that you look up
or I ask a thing or I'm like,
please don't put this on my profile
because I'm asking for somebody else
or you know, they're I just completely free from context.
Amazon has that problem, right?
You buy one gift for your niece or nephew
and all of a sudden they're showing you kid stuff forever.
No!
YouTube has a problem too, you know?
Like I have a, I got a mechanical failure
on my kid's four wheeler
and so I'm trying to figure out how to fix it
and all of a sudden it thinks
I'm a four-wheeler enthusiast and it's like no, I just wanted to just wanted to fix this problem. Now it's fixed
I don't want to see another four-wheeler video ever again. So that's a hard problem.
You know what? That's interesting enough. You should get somebody on this show to talk about like, yeah, what's gonna happen when
yeah, I just just the the general problem of
when yeah, I just, just the general problem of how the stuff is going to interact with our kids and with us.
Yeah, that's the concern.
I think that's the concern that you alluded to earlier is the, that's why I asked the
household question because I know it's not, we're excited about the step change we can
do in our day jobs or in our visionary missions, how we want to frame it, you know, that we
can now go so fast and command agents or babysit, depending upon your perspective, is that how
does, how does like householder society get impacted?
And literally last night, my son asked about, I forget what he said it was called,
but he said there's an AI that he wants
that doesn't tell you the math problems.
He was like, selling me.
He's like, dad, it won't tell me how to do one plus one
or whatever the multiplication is.
It won't tell me what the answer is,
but it'll be my friend.
It'll be something I can talk to.
And I'm just like, how do I answer this? How do I respond to
this? I'm like, listen, I don't know yet. Let's look at that. But at some point, we're going to
have to have this conversation with our loved ones, old or young, about AI, about what it truly is,
how to leverage it, how, and I think at this point, it's just sort of a guess what it truly is, how to leverage it, how, and I think at this point it's just sort of a guess
what it really is and how we'll use it.
There's trepidation in my heart
when it comes to how it will impact my kids,
but at the same time I think I can keep them safe
to some degree, but at some point,
the steamroller of life will bypass dad
and I can no longer be the guardrails of my son's
ability to have access to this tool, who the heck knows?
It's like one of those things where you sort of get to this position where we're using
it in great ways in our careers and we're seeing tremendous results, but then how does
that impact our households?
And then that's the fabric of society.
Like that's where neighborhoods are born,
is like my household, your household, boom,
friends and neighbors, you know?
Well, I never had kids.
I would not want to be a kid today.
It sounds really tough.
Good luck.
Good luck.
Good luck.
I actually think I would be excited to be a kid right now. I mean, it's like the best of times and the worst of times.
It is, it really is.
I mean, I would like it.
I would, if I could be born today and be, I don't know,
10 years old, 12 years old, right?
In this moment, I'd be kind of cool.
Oh, you're gonna be born at the age of 10?
This is a nice thing.
You know what I'm trying to say, like if I was born in this latest era and I was now, and
I was 10 or 12, you know, the experienced, somewhat wisdom-filled person that I am, or
at least I feel I am, I'm kind of hopeful about a 12-year-old's life in the future of
this world.
I think there's a lot of cool stuff that's going to happen that we just can't see because
we're held back by the bounds of the past.
Well, you asked what's the point, Jared.
Yes.
What's the point of all our work?
And the point is everything gets better.
Just like when I look back to when I was a kid, like in the seventies, you know, it was
really crummy and everything was just really crummy and boring.
Right?
And now everything's really bright and shiny and fun. This today is going to look like the 70s in about 10 years.
Gosh, it's a lot to think about that. Like I watch movies or older movies that have like
older cars, 80s cars, even not even 70s cars. You're like, what a weird era. No one was on
phones. You had to go to the pay phone to call somebody if you were not at home.
And if you were at home, you had a 30 foot phone cord.
Cause that phone went the whole house,
even upstairs with this long cord.
What a different era, you know, really.
It was just almost yesterday.
And El Caminos, man, what a crazy time.
El Caminos.
Right.
Who thought of that?
Why, are they making a comeback or something?
Oh, I don't know, I'm just saying,
going back to the 70s and 80s
and just thinking about some of the cars.
Oh, yeah, my buddy had an El Camino.
Wild.
Oh, they were real popular for a while.
All right, well, things are getting better.
Steve, let's check back in.
Obviously, the book will be out sometime this fall,
it sounds like, September, maybe, you don't know.
You're not in control of that.
But we'll help share that around when it ships.
I can give you a link and you can preorder on Amazon.
Oh, there you go.
I think that'll get you some early content.
We're working on it.
That's all well and good.
We'll link that up in the show notes,
but then let's check back in.
I mean, six months from now,
I mean, you're saying it's gonna be radically different
in six.
Let's bring you back on the pot and talk about how different it is. Maybe six months, now, I mean, you're saying it's gonna be radically different in six. Let's bring you back on the pot
and talk about how different it is.
Maybe six months, eight months away.
Let's say November 19th.
What are you doing November 19th?
You gonna book it right now?
Let's just in time for Christmas, you know,
it's just a few weeks before, you know.
Right before Thanksgiving.
You could say we're gonna have some Christmas presents,
so looking forward to it.
It'll wrap the year up for us.
There you go. Yeah, interesting. I wonder if we'll be on cloud 5 by then. I bet we will
We'll see we'll see we might be broke by then. No
Alright guys, it's been a pleasure. Yeah as always. Thanks Steve. Absolutely. Thanks Steve. Bye friends. Bye friends
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