The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Adventures in babysitting coding agents (Friends)

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

The 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to changelog and friends, a weekly talk show about babysitting AI agents. Thanks as always to our partners at fly.io, the public cloud built for developers who ship. We love fly. You might too. Learn more at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Well friends, Retool Agents is here. Yes, Retool has launched Retool Agents.
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Starting point is 00:02:26 Learn more at Retool.com slash agents. Again, Retool.com slash agents. 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.
Starting point is 00:02:47 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.
Starting point is 00:03:10 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.
Starting point is 00:03:27 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.
Starting point is 00:03:41 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,
Starting point is 00:03:57 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.
Starting point is 00:04:09 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
Starting point is 00:04:34 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
Starting point is 00:05:07 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.
Starting point is 00:06:00 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.
Starting point is 00:06:35 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
Starting point is 00:06:45 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
Starting point is 00:07:36 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.
Starting point is 00:07:56 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.
Starting point is 00:08:20 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.
Starting point is 00:08:51 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
Starting point is 00:09:18 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.
Starting point is 00:09:51 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?
Starting point is 00:10:20 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.
Starting point is 00:10:53 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?
Starting point is 00:11:15 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.
Starting point is 00:11:39 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.
Starting point is 00:12:10 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.
Starting point is 00:12:31 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.
Starting point is 00:12:57 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.
Starting point is 00:13:22 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.
Starting point is 00:13:42 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.
Starting point is 00:14:03 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.
Starting point is 00:14:31 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.
Starting point is 00:14:47 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?
Starting point is 00:15:06 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
Starting point is 00:15:25 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
Starting point is 00:16:03 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.
Starting point is 00:16:21 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%.
Starting point is 00:16:46 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.
Starting point is 00:17:06 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.
Starting point is 00:17:27 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.
Starting point is 00:17:48 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.
Starting point is 00:18:08 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
Starting point is 00:18:31 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
Starting point is 00:18:59 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.
Starting point is 00:19:21 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.
Starting point is 00:19:46 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,
Starting point is 00:20:04 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?
Starting point is 00:20:24 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.
Starting point is 00:20:45 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.
Starting point is 00:21:03 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
Starting point is 00:21:22 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
Starting point is 00:21:43 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
Starting point is 00:22:20 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
Starting point is 00:22:55 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.
Starting point is 00:23:32 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
Starting point is 00:23:53 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.
Starting point is 00:24:17 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
Starting point is 00:24:42 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
Starting point is 00:25:22 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,
Starting point is 00:25:53 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.
Starting point is 00:26:20 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
Starting point is 00:26:40 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.
Starting point is 00:27:08 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.
Starting point is 00:27:49 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.
Starting point is 00:28:10 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,
Starting point is 00:28:40 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
Starting point is 00:29:21 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.
Starting point is 00:30:09 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?
Starting point is 00:30:25 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.
Starting point is 00:30:40 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
Starting point is 00:31:17 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.
Starting point is 00:31:51 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
Starting point is 00:32:25 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
Starting point is 00:32:45 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
Starting point is 00:33:04 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.
Starting point is 00:33:33 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
Starting point is 00:34:01 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.
Starting point is 00:34:18 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.
Starting point is 00:34:37 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
Starting point is 00:35:07 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?
Starting point is 00:35:28 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?
Starting point is 00:35:44 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
Starting point is 00:36:12 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.
Starting point is 00:36:35 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.
Starting point is 00:36:56 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.
Starting point is 00:37:32 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
Starting point is 00:38:00 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
Starting point is 00:38:28 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.
Starting point is 00:38:59 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.
Starting point is 00:39:17 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.
Starting point is 00:39:33 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?
Starting point is 00:39:54 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
Starting point is 00:40:37 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.
Starting point is 00:40:57 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,
Starting point is 00:41:17 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.
Starting point is 00:41:29 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
Starting point is 00:41:45 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,
Starting point is 00:42:18 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.
Starting point is 00:42:39 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
Starting point is 00:43:06 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.
Starting point is 00:43:37 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.
Starting point is 00:44:15 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.
Starting point is 00:44:37 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?
Starting point is 00:45:07 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
Starting point is 00:45:39 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.
Starting point is 00:46:02 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
Starting point is 00:46:21 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.
Starting point is 00:46:49 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,
Starting point is 00:47:28 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.
Starting point is 00:48:02 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.
Starting point is 00:48:22 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.
Starting point is 00:48:41 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?
Starting point is 00:49:05 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
Starting point is 00:49:35 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
Starting point is 00:50:00 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?
Starting point is 00:50:28 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
Starting point is 00:50:40 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
Starting point is 00:51:03 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.
Starting point is 00:51:28 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.
Starting point is 00:51:52 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?
Starting point is 00:52:18 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
Starting point is 00:52:46 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,
Starting point is 00:53:17 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,
Starting point is 00:53:34 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?
Starting point is 00:53:55 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,
Starting point is 00:54:09 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..
Starting point is 00:54:22 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.
Starting point is 00:54:40 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.
Starting point is 00:54:59 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.
Starting point is 00:55:22 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?
Starting point is 00:55:45 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
Starting point is 00:56:13 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?
Starting point is 00:56:38 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.
Starting point is 00:57:08 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.
Starting point is 00:57:29 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.
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Starting point is 00:58:41 agency dot org AGNT agency.org, agntcy.org. 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?
Starting point is 00:59:07 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,
Starting point is 00:59:25 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
Starting point is 01:00:00 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.
Starting point is 01:00:28 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.
Starting point is 01:00:48 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.
Starting point is 01:01:02 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?
Starting point is 01:01:45 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
Starting point is 01:02:12 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
Starting point is 01:02:39 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?
Starting point is 01:03:07 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.
Starting point is 01:03:29 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.
Starting point is 01:03:51 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,
Starting point is 01:04:12 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.
Starting point is 01:04:23 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
Starting point is 01:04:54 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.
Starting point is 01:05:29 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.
Starting point is 01:05:53 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.
Starting point is 01:06:11 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,
Starting point is 01:06:32 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,
Starting point is 01:06:44 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.
Starting point is 01:07:00 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,
Starting point is 01:07:15 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.
Starting point is 01:07:50 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
Starting point is 01:08:29 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.
Starting point is 01:09:05 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?
Starting point is 01:09:22 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
Starting point is 01:09:41 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
Starting point is 01:10:08 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?
Starting point is 01:10:28 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
Starting point is 01:10:53 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.
Starting point is 01:11:09 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.
Starting point is 01:11:31 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
Starting point is 01:11:58 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.
Starting point is 01:12:24 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.
Starting point is 01:12:56 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.
Starting point is 01:13:26 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
Starting point is 01:13:58 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,
Starting point is 01:14:15 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?
Starting point is 01:14:31 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
Starting point is 01:14:52 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.
Starting point is 01:15:16 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
Starting point is 01:15:34 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.
Starting point is 01:15:58 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.
Starting point is 01:16:16 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?
Starting point is 01:16:45 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
Starting point is 01:17:09 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
Starting point is 01:17:52 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.
Starting point is 01:18:12 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.
Starting point is 01:18:41 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.
Starting point is 01:19:11 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,
Starting point is 01:19:25 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
Starting point is 01:19:40 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.
Starting point is 01:19:52 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.
Starting point is 01:20:10 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,
Starting point is 01:20:23 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
Starting point is 01:21:01 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.
Starting point is 01:21:33 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.
Starting point is 01:21:58 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?
Starting point is 01:22:24 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.
Starting point is 01:22:40 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.
Starting point is 01:22:56 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.
Starting point is 01:23:13 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.
Starting point is 01:23:30 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
Starting point is 01:23:55 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?
Starting point is 01:24:31 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.
Starting point is 01:24:53 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.
Starting point is 01:25:13 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?
Starting point is 01:25:33 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.
Starting point is 01:25:48 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?
Starting point is 01:26:05 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,
Starting point is 01:26:22 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
Starting point is 01:26:39 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!
Starting point is 01:26:56 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
Starting point is 01:27:21 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?
Starting point is 01:27:58 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.
Starting point is 01:28:20 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,
Starting point is 01:28:53 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?
Starting point is 01:29:23 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.
Starting point is 01:29:42 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.
Starting point is 01:30:01 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.
Starting point is 01:30:29 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.
Starting point is 01:30:49 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.
Starting point is 01:31:18 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.
Starting point is 01:31:30 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.
Starting point is 01:31:45 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.
Starting point is 01:31:59 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?
Starting point is 01:32:14 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
Starting point is 01:32:29 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 Have you heard we are doing a live show in Denver, Colorado at the end of July. Saturday, July 26th at the Oriental Theater in Denver to be exact. Join us there for the entire weekend if you want. We'll be meeting up at a local pub Friday night, recording live on stage on Saturday morning, hiking Red Rocks Saturday noon, and who knows what else. It's going to be a blast. Get all the details at changelog.com slash live and join us if you can. Seriously,
Starting point is 01:33:12 do it. Seriously, do it. Do it. Thanks again to our partners at fly.io, to our sponsors of this episode, Retool. Go to Retool.com slash agents, Heroku, heroku.com slash changelog podcast, and outshift by Cisco at agency.org. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y.org. Next week on the pod, news on Monday, Richard Feldman tells me all about the Rock programming language on Wednesday, and Justin Searles is back on Friends to help us digest all the WWDC announcements on Friday.
Starting point is 01:33:44 Have a great weekend. Send this episode to your friends who might dig it, and let's talk face to face in Denver.

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