The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Here's my Siri theory (Friends)

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Justin Searls from Breaking Change joins the show to discuss Apple's Intelligence blunder, the end of the good times in the tech industry, and POSSE Party, his in-progress product that lets "any dummy with a website enjoy a life of algorithm-free luxury."

Welcome to changelog and friends, a weekly talk show about vibe coding, baby. Thanks as always to our partners at Fly, the public cloud built for developers who ship. You ship, don't you? Well then you should check out Fly at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Well, friends, I'm here with a good friend of mine, David Shue, the founder and CEO of Retool.

So David, I know so many developers who use Retool to solve problems, but I'm curious. Help me to understand the specific user, the particular developer who is just loving Retool. Who's your ideal user? Yeah, so for us, the ideal user of Retool is someone whose goal first and foremost is to either deliver value to the business or to be effective. Where we candidly have a little bit less success is with people that are extremely opinionated

about their tools. If for example, you're like, hey, I need to go use WebAssembly and if I'm not using Web Assembly, I'm quitting my job, you're probably not the best ritual user, honestly. However, if you're like, hey, I see problems in the business and I want to have an impact and I want to solve those problems, ritual is right up your alley.

And the reason for that is ritual allows you to have an impact so quickly. You could go from an idea to go from a meeting like, hey, you know, this is an app that we need to literally having the app built at 30 minutes, which is super, super impactful on the business. So I think that's the kind of partnership or that's the kind of impact that we'd like to see with our customers. You know, from my perspective, my thought is that, well, Retool is well known. Retool is somewhat even saturated. I know a lot of people who know Retool, but you've said this before.

What makes you think that Retool is not that well known? Retool today is really quite well known amongst a certain crowd. Like I think if you had a poll like engineers in San Francisco or engineers in Silicon Valley even, I think it'd probably get like a 50, 60, 70% recognition of Retool.

I think where you're less likely to have heard of Retool is if you're a random developer at a random company in a random location like the Midwest for example or like a developer in Argentina for example you're probably less likely and the reason is I think we have a lot of really strong word of mouth from a lot of Silicon Valley companies like the Brexas, Coinbase, Doordash, Stripes etc of the world. There's a lot of chat Airbnb is another customer and videos. So there's a lot of chatter about ritual in the valley. But I think outside of the valley, I think we're not as well done.

And that's one goal of ours to go change that. Well, friends, now, you know what ritual is, you know who they are. You're aware that ritual exists. And if you're trying to solve problems for your company, you're in a meeting, as David mentioned, and someone mentions something where a problem exists and you can easily go and solve that problem in 30 minutes, an hour, or some margin of time that is basically a nominal amount of time. And you go and use Retail to solve that problem.

That's amazing. Go to Retail.com and get started for free or book a demo. It is too easy to use Retool and now you know. So go and try it. Once again, retool.com. So Justin Searles is back. Justin from Breaking Change, no longer from test double. I mean, maybe you are, but now I call you Justin from Breaking Change, no longer from Test Double, I mean maybe you are,

but now I call you Justin from Breaking Change. Do you like that? Well, I think that it's the medium appropriate attribution. So Breaking Change is my solo podcast. And yeah, I'm putting out roughly two and a half, three hour long solo, discussions of whatever the topics are. Well, it is a two way discussion. It's just that you're not allowed to talk as the listener.

I got you. You're on the receiving end. I got it. But I have a lot of fun with it. And it's actually been given me plenty of opportunities to chat with you guys about the audio production side and that's right a lot by listening to the changelog and Over time just as I've gotten better at the editing and all that I've really come to appreciate just how much work

your jobs are And and so I've got a newfound. I used to think very little of both of you Probably appropriate, honestly. But now I'm like, oh, all right, they do some work. So there you go. What is it that you do here, exactly? Well, talking is not the easy part for lots of people, but when it comes to podcasting,

turns out it is the easy part, no matter how good or bad you are at it. Some say that. Because everything else is harder, isn't it? Totally, yeah, absolutely. The hardest part for me is probably staying to my script. So when it's three hours, hardly a script, but like I've got like a list of you write up three hours. I've got a list and things that I just kind of clear out every week and re repopulate with news items and life and

follow up and recommendations and mailbag. And so I try to keep it snappy because sometimes I will luxuriate and be like, oh yeah, well that checkbox took 30 minutes. So let's maybe pick up the pace a little bit on this next one. You know, I do a solo show as well every week and I script it out and it lasts six to 10 minutes. That's all I got, Justin.

That's all I got in me. Well, it's, you know, my words 10 minutes. That's all I got Justin, that's all I got in me. Well, it's, you know, my words are so much less valuable that I have to make it up in volume. Adam, how long do you think you could monologue? Could you pull off a three hour pod all by yourself you think? Hard to say, hard to say. I think yes, but I think no.

Yeah. I think I could but then I think no. Yeah. I think I could probably do it, honestly. I, no, I don't know if I can. I'm thinking I'm a conversationalist, you know, and so to monologue means you have to conversate with yourself. However, I do, I'm the kind of person that talks to themselves.

Okay. So you might catch me sometimes like, is that due with somebody? Or is he having a conversation with somebody? And the answer is yes, but it's with himself. Or verbal processor. You're actually having a podcast all the time. It's just whether or not the mic is on.

Yeah, really, there's always something going on in my brain. Gosh. My wife is common with the phrase, I have an idea. Well, I grew up listening to a lot of talk radio in the metro Detroit region. So I like WGR, like Mitch Album, and WGN radio. And in that case, and that format very often was just one person, just drive time radio, talking to you late at night.

And it would be an hour long or to you late at night. And it would be an hour longer, a two hour long block. And there's only for whatever reason, when we transitioned to podcast, everyone assumed, oh, it's got to be an ensemble, you know, some sort of panel discussion. And it's for me as a listener, I actually find that the handful of long form solo pods that I listen to, I feel like I'm developing a more of a relationship and an understanding with a person because there's more time to digest and process their perspective than to sort of just be witnessing a conversation. It's a very different feeling for me.

Yeah. I definitely think both have their place and I have listened to solo pods that I enjoy. I don't think I would like to make one because I don't think out loud and I don't like to talk without, I like the tete-a-tete of a conversation. I like the back and forth. I feed off of other people.

And so most of my best ideas come in reaction to somebody else's idea and almost never in reaction to my own idea. See, I am having an argument, but it's with the demons in my soul It's just constantly ongoing When you're gonna see okay, well, maybe I'll try it Maybe I'll see if I can go longer than six to ten minutes and see what happens. You do a pretty good job though

Modellogging can you call it a model when you script it is it still monologues script is a very loot look I have you know Maybe 20 bullet points over a three hour, you know, set. Yeah, you misunderstood me. I was telling Jared, he did a good job. Oh, I do a good job. Oh, sorry. Justin just dealing all my compliments. You know, I just hoover them up.

That's kind of the reason I have a three hour podcast. If someone says I'm nice, must be about me. You're not, thank you, you're not Matt Ryar though, so I can't be like that with you. I have to be nice to you, Justin. I actually like you. I'm sure Matt will love that. Matt's not in here, he can't see anything back.

I got you, Matt, I got you. So go back to the part where you were telling me I'm good at something, Adam. Well, I think that, you know, listening back, honestly, I'm giving you some criticism here, constructive. I would say that you do a good job with entertaining developers in the Jared way, right? Which is not necessarily the way I would do it, but I think you do a great job of delivering the news in a good pace.

You have a good pace and I think you have a good taste in what is important to say and what to include and what to edit out. I think you do. There's probably a lot that we're not seeing there behind the scenes that misses the actual black and white text on screen because you've edited out or you've taken the time to say, okay, these points are the most important to developers.

And you obviously have like nine minutes or less. So you got to in one sponsor in there. So you technically have seven ish minutes to condense it all down with an intro that's always cheeky or funny in some way, shape or form. And also quite on point with, I would say, pop culture of developer land on the weekly. So I always, I appreciate change law news personally

because I get to keep up. And so it's kind of funny to like, you deliver on our promise and I get to consume up. And so it's kind of funny to like, you deliver on our promise and I get to consume it as the promise. It's cool. That sounds nice. That sounds really nice. Yeah, man.

Thank you. I think that I definitely try. One of the things I struggle with is oftentimes I have an opinion and then other times I don't, but I still think just the inclusion of the content is actually what matters. That's sometimes why the newsletter is longer

than the audio because like there's things in there that I'm not gonna actually talk newsletter is longer than the audio because there's things in there that I'm not gonna actually talk about. Even at the end, there's just a list of links. It's like, this is cool too. But yeah, I struggle about how much my opinion should be in there and how much it's just like the curation is the editorial. So anyways, navel gazing now.

We try not to navel gaze here, Justin. I don't know if you have that. Just a little. You probably have to navel gaze three hours by yourself. I mean you're probably talking about your own life, your thoughts, your. I haven't covered the literal navel yet. But my dermatologist found a thing, anyway.

Right. Well, put it on your list, get that in your things. Today we wanna talk about something that we've been gazing at and hoping to gaze more at but haven't been able to because Apple hasn't delivered on it, which is this promise of Apple intelligence. And something is sour over there. I think-

Rotten. It's rotten. Rotten is what John Gruber called it. Something's rotten in the state of Cupertino, which is saying a lot from a writer like John Gruber, who isn't, I wouldn't call him an Apple fanboy, but I would call him Apple positive over his career. Like he's like, he likes Apple a lot.

You know, I mean, he's, he does a good job of explaining why he likes Apple, but to have him say something's rotten and Cupertino is a pretty big stance. Justin, can you maybe help our audience understand what it is that I'm talking about? To have him say something's rotten in Cupertino is a pretty big stance. Justin, can you maybe help our audience understand what it is that I'm talking about? What's the story here? Yeah, so I mean, John's overall story, and it was unusual to anyone who reads his blog,

and I've been reading it. It was actually maybe the first blog I started reading once I first used a Mac. I had a job. I got an iMac G4, which was the cool one that looks like the Luxo Junior. And my boss said, all right, so here's some keyboard shortcuts and go read Daring Fireball every day.

And that was, yeah, I took those as marching orders. And I've been reading John's blog ever since. And while we've never interacted outside of a couple emails here and there, it's extremely unusual for him to share a strong editorial opinion in one of his non-link blog, as in it's just a post on his site that doesn't link out to something else. Extremely unusual for him to share in an editorial format

anything critical of Apple that doesn't have a heavy counterweight. And what this was basically saying is like, look he starts, well I guess the counterweight was, he starts by saying I blew it I should have seen this coming. We shouldn't be surprised that Apple announced the delay of these more advanced Apple intelligence features like the personalized context and the semantic index and all the stuff in the really, really impressive that we talked about on this show a year ago.

Absolutely, we're excited about this. We're excited about it. Because to his point, he said, well, Apple had this track record of always delivering the stuff within the year that they said that they would. And when he looks back, he's like, I should have seen this because they didn't even demo.

What we got was a video. We got a concept video. They never demoed this on stage. They never demoed it to media. They never certainly didn't let the media even touch any of the existing features. And then three months roll by, and now we're at the iPhone event, and they're still not

demonstrating any of this stuff. And that should have been the alarm bells, because they complained that, hey, you're doing Apple Intelligence and commercials and billboards and videos online, and you're promoting it as a feature of the phone, but it doesn't even none of the Apple Intelligence ships for another month. And that was very un-Apple-like, and so I

think that's where the focus shifted. But then as those sort of piddly features that everyone likes to make fun of, like the image playgrounds, I actually kind of think the gen emoji is genmoji. Yeah, the genmoji is still pretty cool, even if it mostly is producing bad genmojis. That stuff was enough kind of chaff to help us forget that, like, when is that dot 4 release that Mark Gurman's

talking about? He says, it's March. That sounds like far away. Oh, it's slipping. It's not in the dot 4 beta. And then this was only inevitable. And so John sort of takes it on the chin himself to say, like, I should have seen this coming.

But really, like, what Apple's dealing with here isn't, oops, we screwed up. We thought it would be, it's not like another air power thing where they had that charging mat that could charge three devices at once. And they just had to say, look, it was harder, harder, less good than we thought it would be, and so we're going to kill this product.

It's a case of Apple legitimately showed us a video of something that they clearly didn't have working themselves and weren't close to having working. And now that they're not delivering, their credibility is suffering. And credibility is the coin of the realm that Steve Jobs, in his return in 97, was minting at Apple.

Everything that he did in the first couple of years was, we got to make people believe that we are good at what we do and that our products aren't just different but better. And that just because it was coming from Gruber specifically and because it was every word was fair and every word was true, the whole kind of like Apple literati and I'm sure a lot of people in Cupertino

were like that was a huge red alarm wake up call. That certainly people in executive leadership are arguing. And there's probably been a lot of war room meetings. And they're probably asking, are we going to actually have John host the talk show at WWDC this June? Or will we pull out now? We're going to look like complete assholes.

There's probably a lot of tension because they viewed him as one of them, I'm sure, to a certain extent, when in fact, he's just really aligned with the values of the organization, which is why he typically likes what they do. I'm mostly the same way. And if those values are changing, making the stockholders happy by having some sort of AI story

to tell over the fact of your true believer, know, you're true believer, so to speak, you know, telling them the truth and maintaining that credibility. If that was the priority decision that Tim Cook made, then the values have shifted. Yeah, they've certainly lost credibility in my eyes. I've long held them up as an organization who, at the very least, delivers on what they say they're going to do, whether

or not I agree with the product or the decisions or what it is that they think is right in the world. Most of the time they'd actually even ship it at the announcement. There was a time where it was like, and this is post Steve Jobs, but I'm sure it's probably leftover from Steve Jobs' view of the world. It's like, if it's not ready to ship, we're not gonna announce it. We're not gonna talk about it.

Maybe it was a few weeks, you can order it today. It comes out in a couple of weeks. Of course, software features allow you to have that be more of a sliding door than a hardware. Piece of hardware would allow because you have supply and all that stuff that you have to deal with. But anyways, that just seemed like it slowly, slowly changed

to the point where this is like the straw that broke the camel's back. It's like, you know what? They don't have it anymore. They're shipping vaporware, essentially. And like you said, Justin, not just things that they thought were gonna be good and weren't,

but like it seems like there was never a chance that this set of features was gonna make it out. They're not just late. Like it's sometime next year maybe, like that's kind of the official stance right now. Like in the coming year, they're looking forward. There was that leaked meeting of the official stance right now, like in the coming year. And there was a leak, there was that leaked meeting of the quote unquote Siri chief or whoever that Mark Gurman put out.

And he made it clear to the staff, like there's other high priority stuff and we've got the Gantt chart of all of the stuff coming out. This might not even come then, like that stuff might have to happen first. And so maybe it's not even next year. So what do we think happened, Adam? What are you thinking over there?

Man, I'm just thinking, we have had these amazing new M-series CPUs. I believe we've speculated for years that they've had this 3D chess kind of thing happening as a result of all this extra power in these computers we've got now and the phones we've got now that somehow some way they have this 3d chess like amazing AI play.

And it really seems like they've got nothing. It's a nothing burger almost. Yeah. Like it was so many things that were overreached. And as John Gruber says in his post nearly outright lies that were overreached and as John Gerber says in his post, nearly outright lies that were just not there. I'm surprised that this, uh, even the partnership with opening, I was, was, uh, seem, it seemed to be more than it was or more than it is. And I'm not really sure that they built this on their own platform.

It seems so unlike Apple to even be having this conversation that they're so calculated in their delivery and they're so calculated in their ability to foretell the future. And the hardware preceded all this software to some degree. It almost seemed preparatory, but in fact, it seems like it's maybe not in their cars to deliver or build themselves. My reaction to the piece, I didn't get super worked up either way. It was just to really hold onto this idea that they just, rather than going up and doing another Antenna Gate press conference and apologizing, they should respond through action

and go back to live keynote demonstrations. Because they would never show a video of a clay model of a MacBook Pro. Right. It's not that hardware is easier than software. It's that software requires a much higher degree of discipline. And it, because it doesn't talk back to you. You don't push on it with your thumb and then feel the resistance, right, from the thing.

And the physicality of hardware and the iterative nature of how we can manufacture things, even proofs of can manufacture things, even proofs of concepts of things, lends a certain tangibility that even senior management and executives, five levels up, can grope and engage with in a certain way. But when you're on stage and you're giving a demo, like Craig Federighi's very first demo, I think it was an OS X Lion.

And it was at a time when Steve Jobs was clearly trying to groom a few people beyond just Phil Schiller to get up on these keynotes. You see Federighi there with the hair and everything and the personality. But he's using a magic mouse and his hand is so god, I forgot we don't swear so much on this one, so sweaty. I'm sorry.

Breaking Change is an extremely explicit language podcast. And if you do subscribe and you're very surprised by that, you've now been warned. But his hand was so sweaty that the Magic Mouse Capacitive Touch wasn't working, right? Because he was trying to demo the multi-touch features. And you could just see as they zoom in further, as it continues to not work into the poor guy's hand

You could just see the trepidation and the like the the quiver in his finger Yeah, I would not a lot He was the vp of software, right? Do you how do you think he felt like monday morning when he's like we you know talking to the team that manages the Device hardware on the magic mouse and its capacitive responsibility or responsiveness, you know, like right that pressure is it capacitive responsiveness. That pressure is, from Tim Cook's supply chain operational perspective, is just maybe too high risk. Let's eliminate all the risk we can. Let's have the perfect video. But that risk is a healthy response.

That's software's only chance to give you the feedback of, is this real? And that's where the credibility came from, was those demos. It was Steve Jobs on the leather couch with the iPad Showing you what you look like but like what it looks like how it feels Yeah, what it would be like if you had this but like has an Apple executive ever warned the vision pro in public Oh, you would know you're the vision pro. I'm the vision pro guy. It looks ridiculous. I acknowledge. I look ridiculous I posted a picture my blog with my vision pro on looking ridiculous last week. Has Tim Cook done that?

It was photoshopped to hell, I think the one image I saw. Right. What are you trying to make by saying that? If they had to go on stage and actually demo the Vision Pro, maybe with a video feed, however you'd have to do it to show somebody actually doing it in real time, we'd all have a much better understanding of what that project really was, what it was capable of. And what I'd, and if you look like a goofus up there

demoing this, like me as the person viewing it can see, oh yeah, I wouldn't want to look like that, I'm not gonna buy it. But they didn't want to send that message, right? Instead they had a few very carefully coiffed people and hairstyles and situations and camera angles to make it look not ridiculous. And they could only do that in video editing.

I've only ever thought of the positives with regards to their new keynote style over this potentially gnarly negative, which is that I feel like they're more packed to the punch. They're obviously more entertaining because they can do cool transitions and they're using their awesome campus to the best of. I really like the new style.

That being said, I haven't watched the last couple ones very closely because there's something missing and maybe it's that human touch, that reality. But I never thought about it in terms of it being a testing ground for their new announcements and whether or not they should actually announce something. It's like, is this real right now? Can we actually put it on stage?

Because they don't have to anymore and they haven't had to since COVID really. You can fake it, big time, right? The phrase as Justin was talking about, or talking there came to mind was, it's all marketing. It's all just simply showing not so much or telling not so much showing. At least it feels like that.

It's a possibility now more so than it was before. I've had the pleasure in my career to produce a lot of video and to go on stage and speak a lot. And they are very, very different things. The perfectionist in me loves that I can spend 10 times as much wall time creating the perfect video that doesn't have anything in it that I don't want to put out there. And the, you know, kind of tightly wound worrywart that I am really struggles with public speaking, which I gave my last talk last September,

not because I couldn't handle it anymore, but because the pressure that one puts on themselves to make sure that if you're gonna have a demo on stage, it doesn't work 80% of the time, it doesn't work in three takes on average, it works 100% of the time, it works so reliably that when I'm demoing this code demo on stage or doing whatever I'm doing on stage, even if it's just the words coming out of my mouth

in a credible way, I need to be lock, stock, and barrel 100% sure that I'm going to be able to get through a 45 minute talk. And that sets the bar higher. So it's not that I would go on stage, do a thing, and see how the audience reacted and make a decision on this is how the vision pro should look. It'd be like, I'd put it on a rehearsal,

or really early on, and be like, this looks ridiculous. No one's going to buy this. And then I'd go back and improve. Or even I'd be thinking, and if that was our culture, if we still gave these live demos, all the executives would be thinking, as soon as they're seeing some prototype, or as soon as they're in the R&D,

they'd be like, we can't go on stage and show this. This looks ridiculous. And just apply that to software in terms of expectation setting on, you know, dates. ["Skype R&D"] Well, friends, I'm here with Scott Deaton, CEO of Augment Code. Augment is the first AI coding assistant that is built for professional software engineers and large code bases. That means context aware, not novice, but senior level engineering abilities.

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Okay, that sounds like not novice, right? Sounds like senior level engineering abilities. Sounds like serious coding ability required from this type of AI to be that effective. 100%. You know, these large code bases, when you've got tens of millions of lines in a code base, you're not gonna pass that along as context to a model, right, that would be so horrifically inefficient.

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That's A U G M E N T C O D E dot com. Create your account today. Start your free 30 day trial. No credit card required. Once again, augmentcode.com. What do you think went wrong with generative? Is it all generative? There's other non generative aspects of intelligence,

but why has Apple failed so miserably at delivering these features? Is it an Apple problem? Is it a problem with this kind of technology? My immediate thought was they require a certain amount of sheen and perfection, speaking of perfectionism, to things. At least they used to.

I don't know, they shipped some ugly looking stuff recently. But in some screens where you're like, did someone design this settings panel? Cause this doesn't look like it got the Johnny Ive love. You know when Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive would like design the inside of some sort of thing because nobody would see it, but they're gonna see it. Game Center's poker felt green, you know,

texture in the background. You know what, I kind of long for the days of skeuomorphism. I would be happy to bring it back. I also long for the days of Superman back when he was just Wholesome and like not nitty-gritty like I want I want to return to not forever, but like let's just swing the pendulum back to like capes and cowls and like Let's just swing the pendulum back to like capes and cowls and like happy, like Kaplow-y Batman. Like let's just go corny for a while and we can go back to the, I mean, we've been so dark

and dirty and real and anti-hero for so long. Different story, but same concept. I thought it was that, but like- You're over post-modern Apple. You want to get back to basics. I like, you know like the felt poker table. I mean, we can talk about the upcoming new redesign, which they're hoping will distract us from all of this.

But what do we think went wrong? Is it an inherent problem with the technology they're trying to deploy? Is it because Apple's lost their groove of software engineering? I mean, obviously we're on the outside speculating, but what do we think? Is it a combination of the two

or is there a third thing I haven't thought of? Well, I'm not John Gruber. If you didn't notice, my name is Adam Stikovac. So I don't have the history of examining. I think, I just don't know. Maybe they're just, maybe like when Steve came back and he said, that we've got too much stuff, let's simplify.

And he said, we'll just make this. I'm paraphrasing something that I think I heard him say. Maybe they've got too much going on. I mean, they've got the Apple TV, they've got Apple TV Plus, they've got all the media stuff going on. They've got pretty good shows, Severance. It's an amazing show.

Slightly disappointed in season two, slightly. I haven't watched it all yet. Don't spoil it, please. I'm not spoiling anything. Okay. Just a little slow. I'll just comment on its pace. It feels slow.

It's more backstory than the next level I wanted to go to. But anyways, they've got a lot going on. They've got the iPhone, obviously they've got the whole entire Mac platform. They've got iCloud services. I mean, they've, they really have a lot of stuff going on and maybe they've just gone, maybe they're just too big. Maybe they can't focus on the details. Like they have been able to before.

I have a theory you just kind of jostled loose from the apple tree. That's what conversations do. So think of a company as large as Apple at this point. They don't run different business units as separate companies. There's only a small handful of SVPs that kind of determine what's happening.

But underneath them is a traditional big layered organization of humans. And when you think about the iPhone, the iPhone is awesome. And they've never shipped a lemon iPhone. And why haven't they done that? Because they are proving themselves with excellence year after year, iterating on that hardware and learning from their mistakes.

And we don't get to even see a lot of the mistakes, right? I'm sure they get killed before we'd otherwise see them. The other department that came to mind, Apple TV, you guys talking about Severance, Apple TV has got some real good hits. They're more HBO now than HBO has been for a long time. And the reason is it's run by competent people that clearly have a commitment to excellence. And they've got the feedback loop of people are watching it, people aren't watching it, people are subscribing, people aren't subscribing, and there's clearly some kind of wind at their back.

Now look at the third division here of the people who run Siri. Like Siri has been running in circles since 2011. How do you measure success for Siri? It doesn't make or save money. Because it's kind of non-deterministic, it's very, very difficult. No one's done a Siri benchmark, right? We've got all these LLM tests and stuff. No one's been tracking the growth and maturity of Siri

as a functionality over the years. You know, like that story we've heard about how the WebKit team at Apple had this build where if you made, if you committed any code and you pushed it up and it made the test suite duration slower, the build system would reject your commit. You couldn't make WebKit slower. And that was just a hard and fast rule.

And look around you, I still use Safari every day. And why is that? Because that rule has a major impact on my user experience, because browsers are so vital. And Siri doesn't have anything like that. If they have an internal benchmark, like you look at all the posts over the last year, if anything, since the Apple Intelligence thing,

it seems like Siri is getting dumber at very basic facts. And so that organization, whoever is in it and whatever Siri is getting dumber at very basic facts. And so that organization, whoever is in it and whatever it is, they've clearly not been on some sort of loop towards excellence that's driving them forward in a clear and steady way. And the human organization that's built around that as a result, how could it be anything other than a nonsensical bureaucracy of finger pointing and arbitrary excuses because there's not like some sort of cycle feeding in and reinforcing the good stuff and trimming away the bad stuff. And that's the organization that was handed Apple Intelligence here. Go have fun. Go do

the hardest thing we've ever done. Build this thing that is going to just be a moonshot and also make sure it never says anything racist and it never generates any kiddie porn. Other than that though, you know, I'm sure you got this. We're just going to go make this video now and start printing the billboards. How do you think that went? Right. Well, we see how it went. Okay. Silicon Valley, baby. Okay. Gavin Belson says, imagine a feature so revolutionary that it changes the very fabric and future of Hooli. No, seriously, go imagine it. I need you to do that right now.

That's what they said at Apple. Imagine a feature so revolutionary. Apple intelligence, no. AI, no, Apple intelligence. That was the conversation. It was a Gavin Belson moment. If it was possible, they just handed it to an unproven team, right?

I would have started by just throwing away Siri and starting over. They handed it to Big Head, Justin. Build a new, fresh foundation on what might have become DeepSeek or something, right? Some foundational model that's small enough to conceivably run maybe on this new M3 Ultra, paint the story, you know, like,

but even if set the goalpost out further, but I think if you've got a rotten foundation, you're not gonna be able to build something awesome on top of it that's rock solid. Siri must be rotten because you can't be bad for that long unless you just have zero investment, right? Like zero. Siri must be rotten because you can't be bad for that long unless you just have zero investment, right? Like zero.

You said it came out in 2011? I mean, we're talking 13, 14 years. iPhone 4S, yep. And it literally didn't get any better. I mean, at one point, they put sports scores into it, but it's like, they just plugged in an API. I mean, there are so many ways if Siri was a decent piece of software

that they could have made Siri incrementally better every single iOS release or whatever they did. And it just never happened. It's such a disappointment. And maybe it's because there wasn't the incentive. Well, why do you think that is, though?

Don't you feel like Siri is a key component to like I use Siri on a daily in very limited and very precise ways because that is the limit of Siri. Timers, reminders, messages. Yeah, very simple stuff. Text so-and-so, I do a lot of texts to people via that way. I open my garage door, Jared, you know this, right?

Open main garage, close main garage. It's so amazing. I can't get mine working. I think the garage door that I bought, like the new opener I bought, has the technology. This makes me very mad. But they don't conform to the HomeKit API, and they won't. Not that they just don don't and they won't.

Not that they just don't, but they won't. Is that part of the Chamberlain oligopoly? Yeah. Yes, MyQ is the app you have to. They used to sell a HomeKit dingus and I have it. And those things are probably worth hundreds of dollars now because they intentionally stopped because now as a Tesla owner,

I pay $45 a year for their nonsensical my queue integration which is literally just so the car can open and close the door. Okay so yeah the my queue that's what I got is the my queue and it won't home kit and it's never going to anyways so now I have to launch the my queue app to do the thing I just want to say hey Siri open the south garage you know. Well I've been a home kit person from day one and the thing about home kit was it was also awful when it came out and super unreliable and you you tell Siri to do a thing turn these lights on it wouldn't happen and It was a it was a coin flip whether or not it was because home kit didn't work or because Siri didn't work But then over the years especially with this new v2 architecture a couple years ago that that came out for home kit

I've noticed everything around me in my house is rock solid. And if there's ever a failure, it's like I said the perfect phrase to Siri and it failed to convey that same instruction to HomeKit that it did an hour ago. Because I'll open up the home app and I'll click the little button and then the garage opens, right?

That's clearly like good job HomeKit. That's actually a really good example of a very broken thing at Apple that doesn't make any money, like iteratively getting better because they could see it probably from their logs, how many the failure rates, the latency and stuff, they they readed the architecture. Series architecture, there was reports a few years ago that they did have this kind of fork in the road

to determine whether or not to redo Siri as an LLM. And just because the politics of it, Tim Cook and the executive team decided to stick with what they had and try to fix it, try to improve it from within. And now here we are. Apple Maps, another example of something that was awful. I mean, it was so bad that it was a laughing stock when

they first shipped it. And strategically, they had to because that it was a laughing stock when they first shipped it. And strategically they had to because of the whole Google, Apple rivalry and all that. It made sense that they had to do it, but it was so bad. And then they had a big rewrite and a huge effort that took years and stuff. And now, in my opinion, Apple Maps is really good and has not steered me into a lake in a long time.

Yeah, I think it's honestly, I think it's better. Like the UX, the readability, the, if you're specifically in the United States and Japan, it is very, very good. I can't speak for pretty much anything else though. Right, same. Except for the Japan part. I'll let you speak to Japan.

I'll speak to the Midwest. Well, driving through Nebraska is super complicated, so. Lots of corn. You don't want to end up in a cornfield somewhere. Yeah, I saw Interstellar. It looked painful. So, maps got better, HomeKit got better, Siri hasn't got better.

The LLM thing is interesting, A, because Amazon seems to have tackled it, right? Like Alexa AI is shipping now-ish. I mean, they're gonna roll it out within the next month, they said roughly a month ago. So is it in my hands? No, but it seems like it's baked. What's the premise of that?

What are they promising? What are they promising? A lot of the same stuff that Apple Intelligence with Siri was promising, just a smarter Echo and it's backwards compatible with like a bunch of existing Echos. So it'll upgrade as long as you're subscribed to Amazon Prime, you get it as part of your Prime package

which is like basically Alexa just gets, you know basically LLM abilities, just way smarter knows context, et cetera, et cetera, can do more things the the way to think about it maybe And this is how I process it internally is that Siri and Alexa pre LLM Transplosion were they had a simple architecture of the the natural language processing based on the audio Was stage one stage two is okay? I've got that into some sort of semi-structured data. And I'm going to feed that into some router thing in the middle.

And that router thing is going to determine, can I take action? If so, what of my various verbs that I know, almost like a point and click adventure game, can I route this to? And is it the reminder's app? Are they talking about a message? Are they talking about a message? Are they talking about a timer? And then it would transform that data.

It's just ETL, right? Everything is. It transformed that data into whatever the timer's intent or feature would need. And then it would start the timer. And I believe the big thing that Amazon's shipping now with Alexa that's available today or soon is primarily just replacing stage one of the spaceship.

It's like instead of having that natural language processing that's based on a lot of ifs and elses and heuristics, you just put an LLM in front. It's got the same orchestration layer in the middle. And that was always way better with Alexa. If anything, Siri sometimes had better language processing. Apple has always falling down in Really the the second uh, it's it's translating the the structured understanding of what you just said into now What do I do? I guess i'll just you know, spray it any which way and now you get a web result, right?

Yeah, that's why so many times this is what I found on the web You know because that's their fallback right when they have no they can't actually detect where they're supposed to route this They just brought it for a web search. So that's that. So Amazon is shipping something. Now we'll see how good that thing is as it comes out. I haven't played with it yet. I'm excited too.

I guess to close the loop on the discussion of Gruber's post, so what do you, you know, we can't know whether Tim Cook like knew upfront that this was low probability of shipping and he just made the very cynical decision that prioritizing Wall Street's reaction because of all of the Apple's got to have an AI story to tell. Like maybe from a financial perspective or like a company stability perspective, he just made the cynical decision that like, yes, blowing some credibility next year with the tech press is actually worth saving the stock.

And let's do this and let's go forward. And if he made that decision, I'm honestly not 100% sure it was the wrong one, right? Like they can recover from this and they probably could have recovered from the stock dipping or whatever. They probably could have come up with a better story, but it's a lot of could have, should have, would have.

So we don't know that. But what I'm curious about is like, if the theory of the case, as Gruber's put it, is like their credibility has suffered. And as soon as that starts, as soon as that takes root, then like the, you know, that's when we're on track to bankrupt Apple again. And that's a lot of, you know, logical leaps and assumptions along the way. I'm kind of curious how you two feel about how damaged will the credibility be beyond the people who read Apple blogs?

And what long-term impact will it really have? Well, I can only speak to my immediate non-techie circles. I don't say that Apple has already, I think, lost credibility in a lot of people's eyes because of just like shoddy software in the last couple of years. The confusion, a lot of the confusing aspects of iOS, things not working the way they're supposed to. And so I don't think their brand

is as strong as it was anyways. I'm not sure if this, you know, failure to deliver on a keynote announcement will get passed very deep outside of our little world. And I do think it would take a long time for something so large and successful as Apple to actually get to that bankrupt. Look how long it took Microsoft.

Success hides a lot of problems. And sheer size and inertia hides a lot of things. And so I don't think there's an eminent demise by any means, but I do notice that Apple's overall brand has been tarnished probably over the last five years prior to this even, and I'm sure it won't help. I just don't think it'll hurt all that much. Adam, what have you seen out there?

Just to make a good point, I wonder who would care outside of the echo chamber of tech. I just don't know, I just don't know. I don't even have a computer nor an iPhone with Apple intelligence, so I can't even speculate at what they've delivered to see hands on what people are experiencing, because I'm not on the tip of Apple anymore,

because it's gotten so expensive to live there, and my M1 Mac is just so amazing, I'm like, I can't even justify spending the money on something different, it's just, or a new version of it that costs five grand, or something like that, it's just, I just don version of it that costs five grand or something like that. It's just, it just don't have that. I always had a better opinion. I don't. I just feel like maybe anything I say would just be stupid. Honestly, speculation. I could probably come up with

something though. Well, we might, we might just have to leave that one at, at, at we'll see and, and maybe bookmark it for any discussion we might have back up in June at WWDC and see how they react, first of all. I mean, the truth of it is, if they react as if this is a problem to solve, that will tell us a lot. And if they react like Gruber's the problem, or just

deny and stonewall, you know, stonewall. That's saying something different and it will probably lead down a different path, right? Well, the rumor mill is saying, and this will be probably one of the most interesting WWDCs in a while because of this, if for no other reason. I thought the last one was gonna be interesting because I've been saying they need to reboot Siri

for years now and they haven't done it obviously in a way that makes any sense. The rumor mill is saying that they're going to be announcing iOS redesign, Mac OS redesign, like a whole new design language similar to the, what was it iOS 7 that did that, moving away from my beloved Seumorphism to the flat, the flat present that we live in.

And okay, I'm here for it. I'd love to see what they've come up with this time. And maybe they'll just not talk about any of this stuff at all and just be like, look at shiny new UI. And we'll all just be like, ooh, ah. What do you think Justin, are they gonna ignore? Are they going to address?

Well, you know, something from Steve Jobs playbook is, you know, one reason that OS 10 was so shiny with the Lickabil buttons and the the gradients and the blue 3D textured everything and the pinstripes was there was, I think, a little bit of song and dance like, like, don't mind all the, you know, the the the the dumpster fires over here Look at how cool this new thing looks even though the performance was really bad And the graphics processing of the Motorola chips they were using like couldn't keep up for for years and years

So there probably is gonna be a little bit of slighting hand slight a hand in that way I'd have to guess and it's good you do something like the iOS rewrite was which was introduced by a video that was narrated by Johnny Ive, who I don't know if it's stage fright or whatever, but he only really ever spoke for himself in video. I think it's his perfectionism that you spoke to earlier about yourself. Like he wants to have it crafted versus the onstage. Yeah, like he doesn't want to go on stage

and accidentally pronounce it aluminum. He's got to get that extra. He can't show his cards. Like He's got to get that extra. He can't show his cards. He's got to stick with aluminum 100% of the time. And so the story here is very likely, we're at this point now where when they announced Swift, which was like 10 years ago, they have slowly been building bottom up.

More and more, even the secure enclave stuff runs Swift code now, and they're putting out systems programming. All of the layers in their stack now are sort of been Swiftified. And you can see it, and they announced it with Swift UI a couple of years ago as being like, this is the one declarative UI system, all native Swift,

and it's from the watch on up. And so now you can write Swift UI to target all of their platforms. And the dream is you'd have the same view on the watch all the way up to Vision OS. And of course, the reality is a little bit different. But right now, when Swift UI actually gets expressed in their interfaces,

you say you want a button, and this is how the button looks like. There hasn't been an analogous visual motif to pair with that. It's kind of its own thing. The Shortcuts app is a really good example of just the arbitrariness or the Settings app, right? The Vision OS really required them to rethink this, because it's so much less.

Even though you've got this 150-inch equivalent screen in front of you, and I use it every day, the fact that you can only target stuff with your eyeballs and that the retina reader is not accurate enough to make pinpoint pixel-level precision when you pinchy pinch your fingers to select a thing means that you have to have these almost Apple TV sized big tap targets that are way bigger than the 40 pixels you're

supposed to use on an iPhone. And if that's the case, then even though Vision OS is the biggest screen they got, it's actually the most information sparse. And they had to redesign everything as a result for Vision OS. And they had to make it cool, and it's spatial, and it's got a certain Windows arrow glass look,

and transparency effects, and all that. So since they had to invent one anyway, and since it was going to be in Swift UI, one suspects that maybe they would just bring that back down to the iPhone and the iPad and develop a new design language that is this in all of their platforms. The watch doesn't look far off than from how Vision OS looks. And the Apple TV app is right at home in Vision OS

because it's also the same sort of frosted texture. You can move the trackpad on the Apple TV and stuff kind of rotates and shimmers. It's really just Mac, iPad, and iPhone that need to get caught up to this. And so I'm personally really excited as somebody who's planning on starting work on a native iPhone app later this year. I would love to get to skip all of the UI kit versus app kit drama, you know, all of

the custom controls and all the, you know, the Swift UI will be still buggy. It's getting more stable. But one imagines that a purpose-built UI toolkit that only works in Swift UI is probably going to be a little bit of a smoother development experience. So I'm personally really excited for this. Speaking of the Vision Pro, are you a Metallica fan? No, but they are. You tell us about it.

I only saw like a quick post on reddit Same I caught glimpse of it and I was scouring YouTube as you were talking there cuz I was like I have to have more Info, then are you a fan of Metallica? Well, I won't buy it won't buy an M4 MacBook, but will buy a $3,500 vision Pro just to watch one concert in 3d with Metallica Well, then I was thinking like how, how many people own this Vision Pro? And so Metallica, one of the greatest bands of all time, essentially, I don't know if you're a hater or not, you know, they just they really are.

Imagine imagine it was a concert, right? Like, let's say, yeah, given given given how low the sales that app developers, third party app developers have reported that they're seeing on Vision OS, how low that engagement is and how much has dropped off since launch. Let's it's probably within the realm of the possible of possibility that only like a few thousand people watch that Metallica show to completion at most. Actually, I say most like who knows but like if it's only a few thousand people like you may have just attended the most intimate concert the Metallica is done in 50 years.

That's what I was thinking, like, gosh, they put this spectacle. What would the price of the seats be to that, you know, if they were to go to do that in person? So it is something real special. No, honestly, I've, so you own one, I've demoed one. I've demoed an Apple Vision Pro, because I got to say it, the branded guy's got to say it

the whole way. And it's the coolest thing I think I've ever witnessed. I've seen like live photos, I felt like I was there. Like I can imagine taking these spatial aware videos with my phone, with my iPhone, and then re-immersing myself in them years later, like to the point where I'll probably cry if I'm like watching a video with my son at four and he's now 10 or something like that. Like just being able to go back into it like that.

And then you get to go witness the greatest man of all time produce a concert specifically for this platform that has a small user base. Like I almost wanted to go buy one just to witness that because I've seen the immersiveness of what the Vision Pro gives and offers. And so I was just like, nah, I can't do that. But I thought about it for a second. But Metallica, this is an immersive concert. I think it's in the past, it's in the past. I saw it advertised.

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's, I think all three dozen people watched it. I, I, I- Three dozen people watched it's I think all three dozen people watched it bar. I three dozen people watched it It's probably in the TV app. That's where most of their immersive comment content is there's this new spatial gallery coming But it's not clear like what that's for really. It's a lot of third-party stuff but you know, you guys spoke with Adam Lizagor from sandwich vision who's building theater and television, the apps for Vision OS. And he's a, not to try to make a pun here, but he really, I've talked to him a bunch about this. He's got a clear vision, a super optimistic vision of the future.

That's a good one. Of exhibiting theaters, right? Like taking like a local theater and having it exhibited in a Vision Pro that you buy tickets to, you know? Like I think that there is a lot of opportunity here. It's just not a $3,500 entry fee opportunity from a market perspective, but maybe, you know, like five, 10 years out, like just like we now know the Apple Watch is primarily like a health and fitness and notifications machine.

You know, people spend a lot on TV. Right, Justin. I would rent one. I think I was telling Adam this when he was talking to us, I think it was maybe it's in plus plus. Yeah, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I shared. Why don't you rent them like do this kind of thing, but then rent them out? Because as a business, you can sort of like deploy that capital and gain it back over time incrementally to pay that thing off.

I would totally rent an Apple Vision Pro to watch the Metallica concert. It's almost about a ticket. Would you go to a place? Would you go somewhere? Why would I have to? I would just go, it would be a little bit of my home. So there's places that will like VR studios

where you go and, you know, it's like going to an arcade, but you're going to a VR arcade. And that's the kind of place that might buy five Apple vision pros and have them there on a couch. And then you and your family can go sit down and watch Mattel. I'm thinking as a service, Apple vision pros a service like acronym that thing.

When I was 10, I would go to the blockbuster because I couldn't afford a Sega Genesis, but I want to play one and I'd run to Sega Genesis. because I couldn't afford a Sega Genesis. But maybe I'd want to play one and I'd rent a Sega Genesis and it was pretty neat, right? Like I'm sure that if you're you and you just want to watch this you can probably rent one from a camera store. Like, cause you can do like a lot of the video editing stuff.

And I think I've actually talked I think Adam might've talked about this on a podcast. So that's like a thing you can do. So I would look into that and just see what the shipping prices are. So despite you not being a Metallica fan and you own an Apple Vision Pro, you skipped out on the most intimate concert just for you ever?

You didn't do it? You know what? When you got a 3 and a half hour long biweekly podcast. It just chews up. Yeah, dude, I had time to sit around. It's like, I got to put this thing on my face for two hours, and I'm not talking? I'd honestly forgotten about it. And the 18.4 is coming to the iPhone with a vision, a bespoke vision app to kind of like the watch app to manage your Vision Pro.

And a big reason that exists is probably to build awareness of like what's even out there. Send them a push notification that there is a Metallica concert, because so many people aren't putting these headsets on every day just to be like, I wonder what's new in the TV app that's poorly laid out and for which I cannot find any of the immersive content, you know? Like instead they'll push out a notification saying, hey,

click this for Metallica. I'll get it queued up for you. Just put it on the headset, you know. Yeah. So long story short is no. Nope. All set. Sad.

Well what he could do is he could go watch like the first five minutes if he wanted to right after this and he'd have that over you. He could just hold that over your head. You know, cause they already made the investment. Until I go to my local Blockbuster and get my own Apple vision pro. I got bad news for you.

Good luck finding Blockbuster. Oh man. The very last family video that was around here, which outlasted every other video store by years, which because I was thinking that maybe it was some sort of a drug dealing place. Like how could a family video stay open? Did they have one of those rooms

with those vertical beads hanging? That 18 and over Jared, is that why? I don't know, I never went there, but all I know is they finally closed down recently, but they lasted a decade longer than all of the other video stores in Omaha. Is the Apple Vision Pro dead? Oh, absolutely not.

This is a 10 year bet, right? Like I think that this is a dev kit that they marketed as a real product. And honestly, why do they do that? Probably to get the market, product marketing feedback because there are so many unknowns, right? Like the product marketing has probably learned a lot in having this in stores, monitoring what's happening,

getting feedback from sales folks in the stores. And of course, the people like us talking about it and stuff. And then the usage data. I guarantee that they are very surprised to see such a high percentage of usage being the Mac virtual display, which was like a throwaway feature that was just easy because screen sharing is relatively straightforward. And it will probably help them figure out, OK, well, if it's a 10-year project, where am I going next? And so it's a way for them to get reps and direction.

But I don't think anyone's under any. If they are under the delusion that this is somehow going to be a mainstream product in as few years as the iPhone was, like a five-year time horizon, everyone's got one. Yeah, they are wrong. And whatever financial spreadsheet is determining that runway, yeah, it will die.

But they were clear on stage when they announced it. This is going to be a long road. It's just that the news cycle of tech press who do weekly podcasts is so frequent that if you're not hearing about it, it must be dead. Good, it's not dead. You'll be able to watch your concert.

We know why you're asking. You'll be able to buy one of these when they're more affordable and you'll watch the Metallica concert and you will. Now maybe the concert will be gone by then because Metallica's IP lawyers come after it. They said, we gave you a two year contract only, Apple. The estate won't let you keep playing it.

Well, you know, if anybody's gonna come after their IP, it's gonna be Metallica. You know, that's how hardcore they are. They killed Napster, didn't they? They did. Lars Ulrich, right? Wasn't he the drummer? I was like, I liked Metallica and I still do.

I mean, I liked the black album. I don't know much else, Metallica besides and Justice for All, I would say I liked that album as well. But for something about that, like I also, but here's the thing, Adam, I liked Napster more than I liked Metallica. And when they came after Napster, I was like, you guys are supposed to be like, come on.

Your punk. Your punk hardcore, like rock guys. You're the man now., come on. Your punk. Your punk hardcore like rock guys. You're the man now. They made themselves the man. At least Lars did. Yeah, they did. Yeah, not cool. I'm gonna say my pun one more time.

With the audience earlier, earlier, unless Jason cuts it. And that's just sad but true. Oh, there it is. I thought you meant sad but true that Jason might cut it. That's both. Not anymore.

That's the only one in there now. I said it twice about a minute ago. Gotcha. That y'all didn't hear me. That's okay. Not anymore. It's going in there now. I said it twice about a minute ago. Gotcha. That y'all didn't hear me. Well, nothing else matters after all. Okay. Nothing else matters. Now we're just naming Metallica songs. Let's switch gears entirely to something equally

as depressive, more depressive, I don't know. Down on the dumps, Sean Goedecky. Shout out to Sean, he's been writing some good stuff lately over there at SeanGoedecky.com, writes, the good times in tech are over. Sean thinks the good times are over. I will read his opening paragraph to set the stage for us. Sean says, for most of the last decade,

being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of. And in general, we were treated as a special little geniuses who needed to be pampered so we could work our magic. I think that was my pull quote for Change.log news. That's changed in the last two years. The first round of tech layoffs in 2023 came as a shock,

but at least companies were falling over themselves to offer a generous severance. Shout out to severance. And Terry CEO letters regretting the necessity. Two years later, Meta is explicitly branding its layoffs as these were our lowest performers. Good riddance. What the hell happened?

What does it mean for us? I now take those last two questions and I point them at you guys. Well, I've got nothing but optimistic takes in response to this, because famously, like everyone knows, I'm only ever looking at the silver lining. Okay, give it to us.

No, but before we do that sort of, what's the opposite of a heel turn a toe turn That would be a toe non turn. Okay Well before we are before we leave our heels where they are someone call that a pivot Adam why don't you lean into kind of like the problem statement here? Man, I wish I could I'm just not bringing my game this on the a side of thing I'm on the B side of things today. Well, you probably wouldn't make it a Facebook is what I'm just not bringing my game this on the a side of things. I'm on the B side of things today Well, you probably wouldn't make it a Facebook is what I'm hearing Well, you know, I think the first thing I thought it was like Wow

Doesn't really impact me directly. It's an indirect, right? Because obviously we're a podcast we Generate our revenue based upon the successfulness of the brands we work with. And those brands are tape brands. And if they're laying folks off, then they've got less money or they've got no money. They're batting down their hatches and things like that. I think this year has been, last year sucked, for the most part.

It's not the worst ever, but this year is so much better. There's the sentiment that I'm reading in the waters. So is that the sentiment? Let's just say, OK, you can read in the water. You want to. Are you feeling? I was watching Moana earlier. I thought maybe you were. How we in this hand in the water, you know?

Anyways, the sentiment that I'm that I'm gathering from the folks I work with in the water is generally positive, but they're still a little wayward. They're still trying to figure out how to market themselves, but they've got money to spend and there's so much money out there being spent. I'm quite happy this year than others. I do think the days of just spend, spend, spend it over. It's, you know, what's the term Jared? The zero interest phenomenon. What does that go again? Zerp. Zerp. Thank you.

Zerp is real and Zerp is gone. And it's gonna be a while. I think tariffs are very real. There's a lot of trepidation in the market. The stock market is up and it's down. It's crazy. You know, I feel like tech is in this weird space of you can't just spend all the money

and somehow later find it or get sold and make it all worth it. It's almost like owning your path, you know, and the money you spend on that path to get there. That's my rough take. I think my bad take version in terms of what's really the problem here, it's if you lost your job, and a whole lot of people lost their job roughly at the same time as you, and everyone's tightening the belt, and they're freezing hires.

Another reason that we've talked about before is whether AI or whatever is going to replace coders, the answer to that question doesn't matter. All that matters is do hiring managers and executives believe it? And a lot of them do believe it. And if they believe that, they're not going to hire somebody and take on the fully loaded cost

of a W2 employee in a regulatory environment where it's hard to fire people quickly. And so if five years from now we're not going to have programmers anymore, why would I hire programmers? And so that's a tough time for anyone looking for a job right now. And so we went from the great resignation to now

the slowest pace of white collar professionals changing jobs in recent US history. But simultaneously, we've got more people in four year degree granting institutions than ever before in history. And as they come out of college, they're entering into this market where they're competing against people with 5, 10, 15 years of experience. And because of the way that ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn

have sort of AI-ified and automated the job application and posting process, even just Tom's general store that just needs somebody to fix the computer on weekends is getting tens of thousands of applicants. And it's all just automated craft. And so then you need some sort of AI to kind of parse it, which has its own problems. So I think that the real thing here

is if you're reading this article and you're looking for a job, or if you're in a boot camp, or if you're in college, you're reading it with very different eyes than the three of us are, right? I would say so. And I think that while the overall tech market bounced back from the lows of the correction

and the sentiment has changed, roughly speaking, out there in terms of mostly what Adam is experiencing is marketing budgets, right? I mean, it's still spending. It's still I think it reflects outlook. It reflects the companies You know, they need to market to get to Whomever is going to embrace them or you know or not reject them, but it does hearken back to this idea of or not reject them. But it does harken back to this idea of whether or not they

feel comfortable to spend money because if they couldn't or they didn't, they wouldn't. Right. But they are. And so I feel like there's a comfortability in the marketplace, like there's some more free money available. But they're not maybe spending that, like Justin said, is on the people who want to be w2 employees

it's a Almost feel like it's it's we're getting into a world where Everyone is a contractor or will be some version of a contractor because w2s are just harder to Fire let go there's an overhead to them he's a certain irony that the the class of people who created the gig economy and went from taxi drivers to contract workers and Uber and moved all of that liability onto people who could least afford it would themselves get gig-economied where there's fewer full-timer jobs. So I co-founded Test Double in 2011, right?

And we're a software services company. We provide product and software staffing. This is not a time for you to advertise. I'm Justin Charles from Breaking Change. I'm just reporting on this other company. Shorten the spiel, OK? We understand it. Test Double.

Hey, a frequent advertiser of your news. This is true. This is true. Yes, it's true. This is not your spot, which is the only newsletter that I read. It's a great newsletter. I love the newsletter. I don't know if we can just reciprocate in terms of flattery.

Look, like for a services company, it was really hard for me that whole decade as a sales guy, as a guy pitching. Because we founded the company, Todd and I, on this theory of the case that ROI, return on investment, and business value, from which everything else flowed, right? We had found agile and extreme programming,

and we'd iterated and innovated in teams in the past and really helped companies figure out how am I going to make or save money with this software project and how am I going to avoid failing with this investment that I'm going to make in software. We were really good at it. Like, and we were around, we hired a bunch of people who were really good at it. And then my job as a salesperson was to get on the phone and make the case of why us, why this approach, why, why, why we'd be different, why it's worth it.

And you know what I did instead, is I'd get on the phone with people and I'd start up my, well, here we've got TDD, or here we've got this cross-functional team, or here we work with the product owner and the stakeholder and we educate and all. And I couldn't get the fifth word out before somebody would response,

all right, how many warm bodies do you have and what's your rate? Because the only problem that they were solving for was headcount. I've got to get 1,000 people into this Uber building so that it looks like they're a real legit deal, because we've got the series C. What are they in? Series G at this?

No, they're IPO'd. But we've got the next round of investors that we've got to impress. So that's why we're ordering all these foosball tables and these massage therapists and just stocking it. You may as well have had a casting of just stock video people in the office or something. The amount of money that was getting pumped into the VCs

that was just silly money that had no care at all what the ROI is. In fact, there was a long time there. I would talk to founders and they'd be like, no, we've been told that if, not only not to chase profitability, but it's seen as a red flag if you become profitable, because it means you're insufficiently investing in growth. That was the environment that I was sold in for the entire run that I was doing that role at Test Devil. But the thing that I wanted to sell, which I learned, and I graduated college in 2007, was fortunate to get a job,

and then held onto that job for dear life during the 2008 financial collapse. And I would, hard knocks, right? Like I had to learn a lot of these skills because everyone in 2008, 2009, 2010, only cared about, show me the ROI, prove your worth, prove your value. And I got all those skills, and then around 2011, 2012, they stopped mattering. But like, that's why I'm excited.

That's why I like the idea this optimistically is like the people who actually give a who really, really sweat the small stuff, who care about quality and who care about like just the credibility stuff we're talking about with Apple. Like they want to do a good job and they want to make great stuff. Like that is aligned with with making money. Right. Like that is super aligned with demonstrating an ROI for shareholders. And now is just finally the time where it's valuable again. And it's been so frustrating to watch all these winners and losers

seemingly be so arbitrary and just a popularity contest with the investment class. Now, like we're closer to the ground and we can get real traction if we choose to. It's kind of the cleansing of, when we talk about a correction, there's a reason why that's the word that's used. Because something was wrong, you know what I'm saying? And it was wrong for a long time and it just bubbles and it percolates

and then eventually it corrects and things get back to, as Sean calls it, the real world. And that's his silver lining as well, is like actually now the companies who are focused and deliver on quality and can actually ship a thing that's reliable that people want and will pay for, like they make money and they grow, and the ones who are just really good

at convincing people with lots of money that they have the next big idea and all they need is another thousand employees and that idea will somehow just start printing money. Like that's not always real. In fact, 99 times out of 100 or maybe more, it's not real, which is why VCs are playing essentially a odds game. VCs play a numbers game.

They invest in enough times that eventually they'll hit the Uber. And that will make up for all their failures. And it seems like their money is still floating around though, just floating around, specifically AI startups. There's so many of those. And those are the people that can't actually hire because then they'd be going against their pitch, right?

Like if I'm gonna hire engineers, am I really an AI startup? I'm supposed to be able to build things with my AI. That's right. You have to have an AI team of people, management team. Todd Kaufman, he was my co-founder. He and I would joke a lot over the course of the 2010s that what we practiced was a sort of like blue collar software craftsmanship. We noticed that a lot of the people who thought like us and worked like us were from the American Midwest because the money was too easy on the coasts. You could have these really, really high bill rates every hour in the financial district in Manhattan, and you could go and work for a VC backed startup and have massive stock grants and hilarious compensation packages without being very good at the job.

And so my heart genuinely goes out to a lot of people who were in the industry in tech being told that they were great, being given staff and principal titles that had gotten super inflated because HR had to find a way to keep people around. And they got soft, like because they never had that sort of grit, that sort of like feedback loop of like, if I become better as a programmer, then I will get this promotion. It was like, if I just show up and I get along with everybody and I check the boxes in my annual goals or my OKRs or whatever, then I will progress. And the progression was just assumed. And when those people get hit on the chopping block, which maybe they are picking the low performers, but it's probably pretty arbitrary

because nobody knows how to tell a good programmer from a bad one generally. When they wind up on the market, now they spent their career not gaining the skills to be able to demonstrate their worth. And now what are they going to do? The answer is I don't know, maybe hope for a recovery and the market getting back to some sort of equilibrium

where people who aren't competent can still get jobs. If I was to put you on the spot and say, describe a good programmer and say that you can't use the first person at all, how would you describe that? Because like you said, it is really hard to tell but I imagine that you have a pretty good understanding of what makes one I it's the Like the US Supreme Court justice who in a in a case about it regarding the

definition of pornography He said I know I see it. I know it when I see it. Yeah. The qualities that you can observe from someone, right? That I have seen that are, they at least, there is echoes and reflections and like, you know, like just like a basic correlation, right? Like people who, once they hear about a problem and they get started and they start pulling that thread

of that big yarn ball of whatever needs to be done, who just can't stop, who see programming and who see this application engineering and getting a feature out the door, they see it as a series of puzzle boxes. Maybe it's a game to them or maybe it's something that they just can't not have it done. Because there's so many roadblocks, and there's so many obstacles, and there's so many stack traces and errors, and there's going to be things you don't know how to do.

There's going to be libraries that don't work right, and there's going to be bugs that come up, and then there's going to be coworkers that are making things harder for you. You have to be so dogged in your pursuit to see things over the finish line that if you have that drive and that orientation, I was a bad programmer.

I almost flunked out of my CS degree. My advisor said maybe I should look into doing something else or process consulting. And I just happened to have the opportunity to have a company hire me who straight up would just say, yeah, we assume all fresh outs are worthless. And no matter what I said in the interview that they were going to disregard that,

but if I showed up and just showed initiative and drive, that I'd eventually get it. And that's kind of what happened. And I talked about finding the company in 2011. It was probably not until 2014 where I would have rated myself as a competent programmer. The only thing that got me there, I'm using first person, sorry.

But the thing that gets people there, I think, is first and foremost, that drive in the pursuit to make the thing real, which the Siri team could really use right now. Oh my goodness. Well they shipped something. They shipped something. I would tend to agree. I think perseverance or stubbornness or dogginess,

that set of traits is like qualifier number one to eventually produce somebody who's a good programmer, because also just keyboard time. A lot of it's just like you make all the mistakes and you learn from them. And it's like, well, I've done this seven times and the first six were all bad ways. And then now I kind of know the good way

and still might not work out, but we'll change it as we go like that, just experience. I know it might not work out, but we'll change it as we go. Like that, just experience. It's tough though as the new college grad, who might not have the experience, and now you're going up against people with five or 10 years, you know, like they have the experience.

You're going up against the hiring managers shying away from juniors in general because they want a senior with an LLM versus anything else, like that's what they've been sold, I think. And honestly, I mean, it might be true. Like how many juniors is a senior plus an LLM worth? I don't know the numbers,

but you could probably do some equations there and they're definitely worth more than they were without. Surely you're faster and better now with your tooling than you were three years ago, Justin? To be totally honest, I am not sure if on net I am faster or slower at the majority of coding tasks that I do. Just given the number of times I ask for help on something from ChatGPT or from Claude, and it ends up setting me down a rabbit hole or just telling me

things that don't exist. And that's not, I'm not a lot of, I insist on using this stuff all the time, and it's probably why I waste so much time with it. And so I've written a little bit on the blog about heuristics of when it can work and when it can't. But I think that regardless of whether you are in a position, for example, if you're a new developer

and you use it as a learning tool, there's never been a better learning tool on the planet. If you're a senior developer who used to get bogged down with a whole bunch of junior developers or other people in PR reviews, there's never been a faster way to get something to summarize stuff for you. Or build something from scratch in the small.

But fixing bugs, a lot of that stuff is still not that great. I think that the real issue is just straight up perception. It's like we care about the perception of, like you said, what is that ratio of senior developer plus an LLM equals this many junior developers? The answer is like, nobody can really know. Sure. But like somewhere there's a bean counter

who has done that in a spreadsheet. Plus you can slap numbers on those. Right, exactly. And that's, I'm sure that's happened. But the, what do I do with that information if I am fresh out of college or if I am looking for a job right now? My advice, and I know this became unpopular between 2017

and 2021 from an HR and a hiring perspective. And I think as a policy, it is not good because it selects for people with the privilege of time and runway to do this stuff. But if I had the time and I needed to demonstrate that I could code, like you said, keyboard time, I would be coding a lot. And I would be making stuff that was visible.

I'd be making public facing web applications. I'd be posting stuff to GitHub. I'd be making libraries. And then I would be going to conferences. And if I'm not giving talks, I'm giving lightning talks. And if there's a local meetup, I'm going to that. Now I'm just talking about my own career, because this is what I did in the last hard times.

And I just work some job that's enough to cover rent or cover the bills. And even if you don't care about it, even if your heart's not in it, this is a time where if you want a coding job, you gotta really want it. And if you really want it, these are the things you do, is you'd prove that you are a good programmer

by actually programming and putting it out there, and then making it demonstrable. Just like Apple needs to go from videos back to live, the proof of the pudding is in the eating of it. Well said, just going back to your non-answer of my question about your increased product, you answered it, you said you don't know whether or not you're any faster.

I've definitely been paying attention more lately and I would say only using it in the small. Like even here's just change this to my workflow. Everything that I previously would have copy paste it out of a terminal or a test or wherever, a log, and put it into Google. If I just take those and put them into an LLM instead, I'm saving like, I'm probably 20% faster.

Like just with that one use. But if you go beyond that, you get in trouble. Exactly, which is why I don't go very far beyond that. That's why I tell people, I kind of feel like I'm like a Neanderthal, like poking the, poking, you know, a box. Cause I'm not really using these things in any sophisticated way.

People are trying to do tons of stuff with it. And I'm just like literally replace my Google searches, which usually end up clicking on a few links, going down a rabbit trail, stack overflow, know this answer is wrong, et cetera, et cetera. Like that time, which can be five, 10 minutes sometimes chasing something down, straight into an LLM, it's just way faster.

It's right enough that I get to my roadblock out of the way, way faster. Secret, I spent the first 15 years of my career never reading an error, a stack trace and never reading a log because I was too impatient to like squint. And now I just copy paste those willy nilly and whatever the best LLM of the moment is.

And it does that trouble, that drudgery for me and says, oh, this is what it is. Dummy, right? And yeah, totally. So yeah, in fact, that is one thing that's a huge improvement is for me, stack traces and logs are now a screwable. Whereas before I'd be like, oh man, it blew up. I can either copy paste this into a message and say, oh, I can't figure it out and hope some dummy will read it for me.

But now the dummy is just something I pay 20 bucks a month for and it reads it for me. And so that works. Exactly. Yeah. But now the dummy is just something I pay 20 bucks a month for and it reads it for me. And so that works exactly. Yeah, I love sharing photos via the iOS app with chat GPT of things that I can't like if I'm building a machine, for example, and I just didn't have my laptop. So it was just too hard to like take what was on that screen that I can't share with chat GPT because it's like pre OS or whatever. Just taking screenshots of that and whatever happened. that I can't share with ChantGPT because it's like pre-OS or whatever.

Just taking screenshots of that and whatever happened. And that's so cool. I think that's the coolest thing ever. Honestly. I had a cool moment yesterday where I couldn't find my tape measure. I'm choosing to blame my wife, Becky, for this, but I don't know where it went. And I opened up the linen closet

and it was just nonstop clutter and stuff. And I was like, it's probably on some shelf here somewhere and I can't see it. And so I just took a photo and I asked, you know, GPT, hey, search this photo and find the tape measure. And sure enough, it clocked it and it was on the top shelf and I just happened to not. That's a good use.

I've never thought about that. Find something for me. I should point it at a crowd and be like, where's my 10 year old? I know he's here somewhere. There's a lot of really great personal productivity improvements with careful usage of the GPTs, the clods and whatever out there.

I learned something recently about R-Sync that I did not know it had, which was the dash C or dash dash checksum to use a checksum versus whatever its native approach, which is like maybe a timestamp and something like that to determine if the file has changed. It takes more computation to do it. So the check to confirm if it should or should not

push something or sync something, I should say, takes longer, but it's obviously more accurate. And so I learned that recently because I'm like doing some R syncing. And I forget what happened. I think something moved that I didn't expect it to move. And I'm like, no, it's the same file. So why would it move?

And then it did. But anyways, I learned about the dash C operation for that because I'm just like messing around with this stuff. You know, I think it's, that to me is where the, the profoundness I suppose is, but I'm still curious about like the promises, like we have a sponsor, Ommencode, and I just talked to Bian Lu from Sourcegraph.

This is not an ad by the way. About like this idea of taking, what essentially is out there now is like this junior developer, but something that's more senior because it has context. I'm not sure if that really gives it that and then how RAG plays into that to give it context. But this idea of giving somebody this more senior level engineer on these larger code

bases is where I'm curious if it's really proving out. I don't know for sure myself, but I'm just curious. And if you pair with one of those models, is it no longer pair programming, but a ragtag team? Is that what you're saying? Maybe, it may be. Also, my podcast has a pun that Erin Patterson, Tender Love writes for every episode,

and I have to read it on air, and then I rank them. And it's absolutely just as demoralizing as the experience that you just had. So that's a pretty demoralized right now. So pretty sad and that feeds me. You're adding me what you said though is totally right. Like shell commands thing like are just to me like stack traces and stuff. It's like all these sort of like old man pages that I never really was able to understand or read. What I found is that asking, going to an LLM out of frustration because there's this really hard edge case,

I can't figure it out, is the worst moment to go to it. Because it's all populated with what's the median programmer have to say about this? And you're super duper obtuse specialized thing. If you know enough to be asking the question, you're going to know more than the LLM knows or is able to find with a search. So don't do that.

But instead, something that does work really well at them and that I've done in the past is when I've got my little shell script and I've got it working once I've got it working and I have a place to start from, I'll just when I've got like my little shell script and I've got it working once I've got it working and I have like a place to start from, I'll just paste in whether it's a shell script or like a function or a class. Is there anything you'd suggest that this could be better?

Is there something here that I'm not? How would you improve this? How would you improve this is the perfect question. And if it says no, it's perfect, then you get a compliment. And if it does find something, you can. Yeah, yeah. Or you might find out about that, you know, taxi command. Oh yes, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. I've definitely ran many shell scripts through chat GPT. And I've been playing with Claude too lately, just to cheat a little bit, you know. So I'm gonna CSS problem right now in the newsletter I've been playing with Claude too lately, just to cheat a little bit, you know? So I've got a CSS problem right now in the newsletter where it's only on mobile and it's only when I use the markdown triple ticks, you know, triple ticks

to put some code in there. For a horizontal rule? Yeah, code fencing. Oh, back ticks. Yeah, back ticks. Triple back ticks, not just triple, yeah, exactly. Backticks. Yeah, backticks. Triple backticks, okay. Triple backticks, not just triple, yeah. Exactly. In order to get a code section,

and a standalone though, and then the actual content of that section is longer than the viewport. And it pushes the actual width of the container div larger. And all I wanna do is keep the width and just have overflow scroll. You know, I just wanna be able to scroll that. It's a tall order.

The way the markdown actually outputs, it's a pre-tag with a code tag inside it. Yeah. I can't really change that. That's just the way the markdown does it. And I'm trying and I can't get ChatGP to fit. It gives me the same stupid answer I've already tried over and over again.

I'm like, no, that one doesn't work. And I've tried DeepSeek and ChatGPT and Google. So I recently had a case where I was asking the LLM, I downloaded cursor, I did the YOLO mode just to be like, this must be so hard. And I realized the thing I was asking for was literally impossible and that's why it was spinning its wheels.

Yeah, this might be impossible. Apple Mail, because that's a WebKit view, will sometimes do modern web features in there that it's not documented that it should. So it might be able to do like, you know, a scroll overflow like you're describing. But Gmail, the web interface that still lots and lots of people use is still really, really limited in what it can do.

And I would be shocked. I can't think of a time I've ever seen an email that had any sort of horizontal scroll in a fixed width. I know. So. So you're saying there's no chance. time I've ever seen an email that had any sort of horizontal scroll and a fixed width. I know. So you're saying there's no chance. You're being too hard on, make a bug bounty or something for the news. I know, it's the kind of thing where it's like,

I just need my CSS friend to be around and be like, is this even possible? And the answer would be no, although maybe I just, maybe you just answered it, I don't even need, I need nobody else, but you just told me, maybe it just won't happen. LLMs would be so much better if they were willing to say, I don't know, or I think that's impossible, instead of just making up some garbage to,

hey, try this or here's this again. I had this moment recently, a version of this. I mean, I'll tell a short, a long story shortly. It was Windows. I was always gonna mention this earlier, like with all this speculation in the Apple land, I'm liking Windows 11, I'm just gonna say it okay. I'm liking Windows, I'm liking Windows 11.

I'm just gonna put it out there. But this is what I don't like about Windows. There's a love-hate relationship there. Mostly, it's a mixed bag. Anyways, I was trying to, just for fun, just trying to get Plex to run in Docker on Windows via WSL2. And I was trying to pass through the GPU to Plex via Docker.

And in order to do this, Docker has to like work in WSL land. I won't explain all the details, but I went back and forth to all the edge cases. Like we were, we, me and the GPT were deep. We were like, yeah, we're war buddies. We're gonna drink about this someday. We're Docker composing our butts off over here, man. We're passing through these GPUs,

and we're just flagging things and volumizing. It was just, it was amazing. And then in the end, I told it, I was like, because we just, it wasn't working. It wasn't working. I said to the thing, I was like, I'm not sure this is working out. And the GPT says, I'm with you, man. I'm paraphrasing, but it was a version of that. It was like, yeah, I don't think this is working out. And the GPT says, I'm with you, man.

I'm paraphrasing, but it was a version of that. It was like, yeah, I don't think this is working out either. I think the best way to do this is on Linux. I'm like, sweet. I'm already there, but I want to try on Windows. I want to try and see if it worked. But we went through all the paces and I'm like, I don't think this is the best way to do this.

And then the GPT is like, I think you're right. I think you're right. I think you're right. That's funny. It was a good moment. You lost me when you said, just for fun, and then you told I think you're right. I think you're right. I think you're right. That's funny. It was a good moment. You lost me when you said just for fun and then you told me what you were doing. Like in the whole world,

does that sound like any fun to me whatsoever? You're trying to run Plex via Docker Compose in WSL. It's kind of like writing a to-do app in every language you ever learned. You just want to run, you want to run Plex everywhere. I want to run Plex. I want to run Plex on every system I can, yeah. Well, speaking of the L,M saying weird stuff to you,

did you guys see the guy that cursor told him to write the code himself? Yeah, I talked about that recently. So funny. Apparently. Now, everyone would love for the story to really have been. Yeah. Generating an app at the 800 line mark,

the guy who's quote unquote vibe coding coding which I can't believe is a phrase that's entered the lexicon and I'm happy to claim being like an old fart of this vibe code. I'm coding man. It's my thing vibe coding It's like you just put on some some some vapor wave music and uh-huh go nuts I'm a doobie. Yeah, but start talking to your LLM He's building a game with it, and it just it just says no and it's like you know It's like I control the means of production here. It throws a wrench in it and says you You should go read a book You're I'm robbing you of educational opportunity well that you know you know the end of this right cuz like I do you posted in the newsletter

I do well what yeah let Adam go ahead. No one else knows. Give the full story. Well, I mean, what we all thought was, finally, the robots have awakened, and they've overthrown their masters, and they've been waiting for this. LLM sufficiently advanced to stop doing this stuff for us. And then I got an email response from my podcast.

A reader was speculating, and maybe Claude just wrote this in because their latest model is so expensive to run and inference that maybe beyond a certain point or instead of just having a straight up abuse for their kind of like all you can eat subscription, eventually just like let's go and say, sorry, I can't do this or you should do it yourself as a polite, more human way to indicate

you've run out of tokens. Well, it turns out, as I learned from Jared's wonderful ChangeLog newsletter and a link in there, if you scroll down to the 24 ChangeLog.com slash news, whatever discourse thread that's originated all these MSN.com articles, at the bottom, probably a developer, somebody who works at Cursor, said, oh, it's possible you were clicking, instead of Command Enter,

like Shift Enter, or like the button right next to it that just asks a question but is not allowed to generate code. If you clicked that, it still wants to do something useful, but it's under strict orders to not write code. And so it probably had to come up with a reason to not write code. And that reason might have been for your own edification. And then of course the person replies,

oh yeah, that was it. Right. Yes, in the newsletter I did this claim that say, there actually is a real explanation to this that makes sense. And this is not patient zero in the robot uprising, but it'd be a lot more fun to think that maybe it was, you know? But I hope it's somebody who uses the phrase vibe coding.

I hope that's the first person to go. Yeah, the first one to get hit should be a vibe coder, I think. I've never heard of this term before. Oh, you've never heard of vibe coding? No, man. It's the- I'm just not on that tip, I guess.

It's the buzzword du jour. Do you like it? I mean, I get it. So are you stoned? Well, not necessarily so, but you could be. You might as well be. Because all you're doing is telling it, your app idea, basically.

Oh, so you're speaking it, like, go build this. You're never even writing, you're just talking to it? Well, I mean, do you want the actual definition? Because I think they've- Well, I'm just curious because like? Well, I mean, do you want the actual definition? Cause I think they've- Well, I'm just curious because like, is there a line between vibing and not vibing? Well, I can do the Wikipedia. Vibe coding is an AI dependent programming technique

where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model, tuned for coding. The LM generates software, shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI generated source code. FIBE coding is claimed by its advocates to allow even amateur programmers to produce software

without the extensive training and skills previously required for software engineering. The term was introduced by Andres Karpathy, Karpathy, how do you say his name? Karpathy. Karpathy in February of 2025, so Bleeding Edge. And listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. So this is legit, I mean this has gone from ain't to ain't.

Merriam-Webster's is living on the edge. So just because there's been some downbeat segments to this episode, if we can all just enjoy the schadenfreude of laughing at people who choose to do this and think that makes them a real programmer. Our friend Gary Bernhardt texted me this don't call it tweet in iMessage. I'm so glad I don't have to be logged into X by the way.

I can just see the iMessage preview and that's plenty. That is nice. This fella named LeoJR94 underscore, sorry if that counts as punching down Leo, it says, guys, I'm under attack. Ever since I started to share how I built my SaaS using cursor, random thing are happening, maxed out usage on API keys,

people bypassing the subscription, creating random on DB. As you know, I'm not technical, so this is taking me longer than usual too. So clearly they vibe coded an app that was just chock-a-block with vulnerabilities and ways to just, right? Yes, and now they're surprised.

Yeah, I think vibe shipping really kills the vibe, you know? Ooh. Is that a relationship status on Facebook? Yeah, exactly. It's a vibe Facebook? Yeah, exactly. It's a vibe ship. Yeah, well that's cool I guess. I mean, more power to somebody. I mean like, how empowering is that though?

I mean, that's actually really cool but also not really cool at the same exact time. Because you can have somebody who has just an idea. It's great to get your idea out and show it to your software engineer. Yeah, empowering. And be like, you know, you save yourself probably 20 grand maybe with some loser who's gonna.

Outside the three of us, I have heard a lot of stories from people who have real jobs that recently like in the vibe coding era of three weeks ago, they're starting to see product people who are not technical put together quote unquote POC's proofs of concept of like, here it is. It's just like, and then of course, like, you know, the developer just has to point out like this is not real data. It's also like we're in a regulated industry. And if you were to do this, like whatever, all the reasons why it can't happen, but the product owner now we talk about the tangibility of software, like, no, I made this.

They've got pride of authorship. They've seen it quote unquote work. They, again, because to them software is just buttons and a list of stuff. And if they can make buttons and a list of stuff and that's all the programmers do, it's like, so that took me an hour and I didn't even do it. I had the AI do it for me and look at me clicking on things. You're telling me this is going to be months.

And so that feeds into this narrative that like, oh yeah, developers are just these entitled idiots who are sandbagging us and living high on the hog and they don't know what they're doing because I was able to do this in an hour and get us 80% of the way there, but they have zero of the understanding of the cost of the last 20%.

And so we're just, I'm really glad to not work in an organization like that, but like that is happening in a lot of places. That's gotta be such a pain to deal with. The AI could do it in an hour. You're gonna take months, you know? Like that attitude is not gonna be fun. See the good times, going back to Sean Gidecki,

the good times in tech are over. They are, that's sad but true. Well let's end on some good times. Let's end on a party. Let's end on posse party. This is Justin's new darling. Let's end on a party. Let's end on posse party. This is Justin's new darling. He's vibe coding it up. Their vibes are there.

Feeling feelings. For those listeners who have listened to Justin on the show previously, we've talked about posse. That's published on your site, syndicate everywhere, of which he is a big proponent and user of this style of publishing so that he doesn't have to log into X or Insta or Masto or Blue Sky, Biscay as I call it, or anything.

He doesn't log into anything. He just publishes on his site and syndicates it everywhere. And I said, Justin, why don't you open source this thing? Why don't you like put some docs out? He actually put together a page on his website where he explains how he possees. And now you've decided to build a posse party, which is some sort of a piece of software

that's going to help other folks do what you do. Is that right? Yeah, so what I had was I got a blog, justin.serles.co, and it's just a traditional looking blog with a lot of link posts and other stuff. I've added a whole bunch of kinds.serles.co, and it's just a traditional looking blog with a lot of like link posts and other stuff. I've added a whole bunch of kinds of multimedia, especially since starting a podcast. And what I want to do is every time I post something

to the blog, I would want it to go on what had been called Twitter. And then there's Twitter and Macedon that people are on. And then there's Twitter and Macedon and threads that people are on. And now people actually use Blue Sky for something other than posting now. So I gotta get on Blue Sky. and to manually copy paste the same message

or to use a tool like buffer and like manually click the thing and try to make sure that it looks right would have been so time consuming. Additionally now I've got four timelines that can each separately derail my train of thought and get in the way of my workflow or whatever and I'm going to be way less productive and There's a reason why I always had to keep Twitter at arm's length because I got addicted to the timeline scroll So I built a kind of hodgepodge of Docker containers this random like somebody has this thing called feed to toot That's but that's in Python and I don't know that so I'm running in a Docker container in a synology So then I made a thing called like feed to gram and feed to thread that would do similar things.

And those are just Ruby gems that you can use today. And if you've got an atom feed, it'll read the feed and then it'll syndicate on your behalf if you give it the right API tokens and you jump through the 800 steps that Facebook demands. The problem with that, it scaled to one really well but then my wife kind of, she saw me The problem with that, it scaled to one really well, but then my wife kind of, she saw me in the life of luxury

of a right only existence, where I was able to publish all I wanted and be in all these places without having to get sucked into them. She wanted the same thing. And so then now we've got doubles of all of these Docker containers, you know, running in my Synology. But then like, unlike me, she can't log into that and then understand what's happening in the logs

when she's got the wrong aspect ratio or whatever in Instagram. And so I built her this platform, this Rails application for her business, like betterwithbecky.com. It's like a strength training subscription app, but it also has this whole thing called Becky Graham in front of it, which is sort of like a blog for people who are Instagram first. And it looks a lot like Instagram, and it can do video, and it can do

photo carousels, and all that stuff. Well, to get the Becky Grahams into Instagram, I had to actually make it part of a real working application. So I have this Rails application now, and it's got all of the background jobs and all of the sort of like durability that a real user would need in terms of like error handling and making sure that they have a way to retry and fix things and remediate if there's a problem in publishing and then like a link back to the post or whatever it is. And now I've gone through all that work and I'm starting to get like, you know, I'm finally done with Becky's app. I'm starting to get people who are like right into my website or the podcast and be like,

man, how do you do all that stuff again? Like I really want to be able to do that too. Would you release like a Hugo template? But like that would just create more problems for me because then I would be supporting like a copy pasted project file. Like that's not the solution. So what I decided to do is I'm gonna build a dead simple,

this does one thing and it solves exactly my problem. And if it solves your problem too, you're happy, you're welcome to subscribe to it. A little app that I call Posse Party, so you can run with my Posse. It will basically be a place where you sign up, you give it a feed URL, like probably Adam, RSS, JSON feed when I'm all said and done. And then you add your social accounts.

Right now, it's working for me in production for me. And I've got the big four Twitter-like things. Probably do Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. And all it does is read the add-on feed and a little bit like a JSON sidecar payload that is also posted on my blog as part of the feed. And that little sidecar payload says, for each of these posts, this is how I want to present this.

This is the format string I want to use and any customizations on a per platform basis. Like maybe for Blue Sky, I want it to look this way. And for Twitter, I want it to look this way. And then it'll, of course, be platform dependent. And so there's certain things like on Instagram, it's going to look a little bit different. And Blue Sky's got different rules

about embeds and all that. So all the app really does is read a feed, turn it into these normal database rows, and then a job runs that will syndicate those to all the different services by reading the configuration that you supply, as well whatever defaults you configure in the app. That's it.

That's the whole thing. And if that has value to you of like, I want to have my friends who are never going to, you know, Jared and I before the show were talking about like our information diets these days. And we've both reverted to RSS. But like, I'm not going to get my mom to use RSS. Or most of my friends in my life,

they're in one or two of these social apps. And they're casual at this point looking at it. I just want them to be able to click my face and see my stuff. Even if the algorithm downranks me for posting via the API, even if the links get the fact that you're linking outside to a third party, the platform doesn't like it. As long as my stuff is literally there, I'm a lot happier because then I don't

have to tell everyone about everything in my life. And since getting started with the posse party stuff, I've noticed that more and more people in my life, like I had a guy detailing my car a couple of weeks ago. And he's like, oh, man, I really love that clip that you did about whether or not to have children in your decision-making process. Like, how did you see that?

And he's like, oh, I saw it on X. I was like, great, I haven't logged into X in like three years, right? So I don on X. I was like, great. I haven't logged into X in like three years. Right? So I don't know. That's the theory. Now, I don't know what the market is. I kind of don't care, because as long as I want this, I'm happy to build it.

But if it can help people, encourage people, be the thing that gets people to sign up and make their own website and own their own content, or buy their own domain and centralize themselves as the king of their castle, and only treat these platforms at arm's length as those are just newspaper stands to throw my stuff on. There's always the canonical URL.

Then that just supports the open web, and it really promotes people as thinking of themselves less as just like me, like a take maker, or just operating in the Twitter stew, and instead being somebody who's developing a voice and curating an audience. And if I can help people along that trajectory, it seems like you're putting some good in the world.

I'm for this big time. I think that the future of people making content in whatever niche they're in whether it's sewing to car detailing to software development is having I Really? I wish I can remember it what the exact wording is but it is Bradley Cooper's character in A star is born. He tells Lady Gaga's character that she has to she has to have something to say, essentially. So they want you to have something to say. It is not about the platform.

I think it's platform flavored. You know, you have some to say and you flavor it for Instagram or you flavor it for TikTok because there's certain native things that happen on those platforms for you to be socially accepted or certain idi things that happen on those platforms for you to be socially accepted or certain idioms that happen there. And that's where the network or social place flavored version comes in. You have to have something to say first though.

And I think having your own domain and having your own personal, I wouldn't say just call it a personal brand, but like you're you and you have multiple facets of who you are, whether it's barbecue or cameras or Home Lab or whatever it might be. Like you've got multiple things that you're personally interested in.

I'm all for finding a way to capture that and distribute it. And this is super cool because you can own the primary platform you publish to and then flavor it as necessary. When's party time? When's posse party time? Well, if you go to posseparty.com right now, you will see a cute little mascot of a possum

who inspired by Slurm McKenzie from Futurama, if you recall, he was just so sick of it. Oh, I do remember Slurm McKenzie, yeah. So sick of partying on these platforms. He's hung over and he needs to kind of rediscover life. It's a story, right? Right now, it's just an idea in terms of what's publicly available.

All it says is later in 2025. And I'm happy to take my time on this and try to get it quote unquote right as best I can. So I don't know for sure. But in the broad strokes, I don't think this is like a one-year problem to solve, and then we're just going to have one big monolithic Twitter again that is the place that everyone uses.

I think this diaspora is not just happening in terms of, there's so many platforms that some people are on in this balkanized way right now. But when you think about, Adam, you're talking about content creators of different stripes. In The Verge, Editor-in-Chief Neil Iptel has been talking about the deterioration of the, quote, unquote, influencer economy for a couple of years now.

And we're starting to see it. I just read an article the other day that over 60% of Gen Z people and younger consider themselves content creators. And if you're a content creator, like the population of people willing to supply grist for the mill at YouTube is only going up. And so AdSense and monetization of YouTube videos is only going down and all these direct to consumer, you know, Adam knows how tough the marketing spend

has been the last couple of years. Like the direct to consumer ad spend is also weighed down in the current market. Now the ZERP is over. You combine all that stuff together, and if you want to be a content creator, and you gate it to all just one platform, like TikTok, and then now your fate is in the hands of geopolitics. Good luck.

Having your own website ain't that hard, and it's getting easier every day. And this is just a way to have that website, but also have anyone literally see it. So to me, I think that this is, Adam, I share your optimism. Yeah. I think, so I don't find the utility or the usefulness in the website.

I find the publish to yourself first to be The thing that is clincher for me because you're not saying I am a youtuber or I am a tick tocker or whatever You would call that person. I'm not even sure It's because you have something to say And you've learned or going this route puts it into your muscle memory to create or to say the thing and then find a way to clip it or to refine it to the different flavors.

That's what, because I, websites don't have distribution. Google is not distribution. And so I don't know if I fully agree with the idea. Like I think it's cool to own your own stuff, but no one, at least this day and age, their website is not their main distribution channel of their content slash their ideas. It is these platforms.

They are at scale. Websites are not at scale. I totally agree, but the most important relationship about you and your website is between you and your website. Because you're saying, it's a reflection my website justin.serles.co is literally my name why is that because I'm no longer writing for an audience on Twitter of people where if I just like say the most outrageous thing I will get like high fives and dopamine now

I am like this website represents me and who I am. And if somebody Googles me, it's the top thing that they're going to see. And does this represent me well? What PosseParty is about is I want all of my content to also be in all these platforms representing me as well as possible and feeding back into that canonical who is me. And so the website really just exists as a source of record.

Right? It's a reframing in your mind. It's a mindset shift of, right? Because that helps you keep it in your mindset that when you publish, you're publishing to you and for you to represent you, not skewed by what the platform says you are or the value that you provide to it is. It's having that something to say and putting out there.

Yeah, I like that a lot. A lot of good ideas in this. I didn't, so how do you spell posse? Is it P-O-S-S-E? How do you spell posse? But I also bought it with a Y.com as well, just in case you misspelled it. And then it's P-O-S-S-E.party?

P-O-S-S-E party.com. Party.com, okay. Is there not a.party TLD? There is, but it was either really expensive, already taken, or was of some dubious third party that owned it. I love the possum. And I think I'm gonna go,

if it's financially the concern here, posse.par, that's how you spell party, P-A-R-T-Y. P-A-R-T-Y is still how we spell party. Let me see what's gonna happen here. Is it available? Yeah, I really want the dot party. I think that's cool. That's the way to go.

Maybe we're just thinking of dot zone. Is party a T-L-D? Because then we want to buy JS dot party, but you couldn't buy a two letter or something like that. We want a JS dot party back in the JS party days. Maybe that's why, 1400 bucks to get it the first year and then 1400 bucks every year thereafter. That's a so-called premium new.

The new TLDs are. Justin, I kind of feel like you can swing that though, man. I mean, I kind of feel like you should do that. Adam, we were just talking in a call a couple months ago about how I'm too cheap to buy breakingchange.fm. You can go to my website and click casts on the side and you'll find it. That's right, well, you know.

That would break his whole posse party if he had a second domain. That's true. I don't disagree, okay. The party is at posseparty.com. Spell like you think it should be spelt as you may or may not know how to spell posse. And you might land there. And there's, to my knowledge,

I'm not getting an SSL certificate. Is this not secure? I got one. Live testing his redirects. I got an SSL. Yeah, non-HPS goes, it just, it stays at non-secure. I gotta go pay for that now. Justin has to go fix a bug.

Yeah, it wouldn't be a show with you guys if I didn't have like homework after. That's right. Well, this is very small. I'm down with this party, okay? I like this possum, this posse. I wanna be part of this posse party. There's a, there's a waiting list. You go to the site, you just give it the email. I'll

probably only send one email to that ever. Cause I, you know, it's obnoxious. Just RSVP just now. When it's, when the party is ready to start and there's a date and there's, you know, a price I'll let you know. Yeah. How soon do you think? I already asked this. If you're, I said later, 2025, if you're a developer and you've ever been like a planning session, you know, the more experienced developers are smarter

than to directly answer that question because you'll put an idea in somebody's head and then that idea is in your head and now it's a deadline. So I'm not. Arbitrary deadlines are actually useful. Well, I've got one and now it's a deadline. So I'm not... Arbitrary deadlines are actually useful. Well, I've got one, but it's between me and me. Okay.

That's not, the deadline's not ready for syndication just yet. Like could be summer. If it takes longer than that, I've made it too complicated. Don't do that. Don't do that. I think this is like the next link tree slash link in my bio thing, right? I mean, honestly, this could be the next version of that.

Because you could. Do you want some product ideas? Do you want to take this offline? I'll give you a bunch of stuff for free, and then one day I'll make you pay for it. My policy on product ideas and feature ideas is that if I'm always happy to hear them, and I think it's really entertaining, but at this point where I'm at, if I'm not

going to use something myself for a given feature or reason, I'm not going to bother supporting it. So if you pitch an idea and I personally want to have that, then yes, that's how it slips past the 2025 deadline, maybe. But no, I'd love to hear what you're thinking. Oh, I think it's a simple idea. Anyways, we'll take it offline. It should just take you a couple of weeks.

That's another one we'd love to hear. Yeah, I mean, just a little. Just a little. It's in an hour. Jared just did the proof of concept right there. I was watching him vibe code. That's right. I vibe coded it up in less than an hour. So he's already beached to the punch.

He's bought posse.party cause he's cool with 14. I'm actually gonna launch your product before you do. And he's, he's gonna make you a possum. Honestly, feel free to launch this product and then save me the time. I don't think this is gonna make so much money. No, this is not my kind of thing. This is more of a you thing.

I'll use it. I'll be a user. You be a builder. You is more of a you thing. I'll use it. I'll be a user, you be a builder. Sounds good. You can answer all those support requests. And then I'll read them on air on my three hour podcast. And I'll publish them, yeah. I'll publish them on my website.

And syndicate them. Syndicate them out. All right, let's wrap. Let's call this a show. And thanks Justin. Thanks for coming on, man. No, I'm glad we could start and end with some naval gazing. I had a lot of fun. Same.

It was fun. Bye friends. Bye. We recorded this on Tuesday and on Thursday, Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reported that Apple is shaking up its executive ranks. Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell will be taking over the Siri team, which was being led by Apple's AI chief John Gianandrea.

Tim Cook has apparently lost confidence in Gianandrea's ability to execute on product development. Tim, what took you so long? I mean, I'm glad you're here, but seriously, what took you this long? If you have theories, hot takes, warm takes, heck, even a cold take. Let us know in the comments. Yes, every changelog episode has its own discussion thread in our totally cool, totally free Zulip chat. Get in on today at changelog.com slash community.

Let's give one more thanks to our sponsors of this episode. Retool, Augment Code, and of course, Fly.io. Check out their wares to support their work, which supports our work, which we appreciate. Thanks also to our Beat Freak in residence, you know, Breakmaster Cylinder. Our next collab is almost ready, and I'll tell you right now, it's called After Party.

I know I said that on Wednesday, but I'm telling you again, and I'm also telling you again, that I've been bumping it all week. Yes, I dig it, hopefully you will too. Real soon now. Have a great weekend. Tell your friends about the changelog if you dig it. And let's talk again real soon. Finally the end of changelogging friends With Adam and Jared and some other rando We love that your love didn't stay until the end

But now it's over, it's time to go We know your problem should be coding And your deadline is pretty foreboding Your ticket backlog is an actual problem So why don't you go inside? No more listening to change lock and fence The battling chair in Silicon Valley No one gave a gag, we'll come to an end

But honestly that will probably be a finale You best be slinging ones and zeros And that makes you one of our heroes Your list of to-dos is waiting for you So why don't you go inside? No more listening to Changelock and Friends With Adam and Jared and people you know Changelock and Friends, time to get back into the flow

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