The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Lightspeed search built for devs (Interview)

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

We talk with Don MacKinnon, Co-founder and CTO of Searchcraft—a lightspeed search engine built in Rust. We dig into the future of search, how it blends vector embeddings with classic ranking, and what it takes to build developer-friendly, production-grade search from the ground up.

What's up, friends? Welcome back. Yes. This is your favorite podcast, the changelog. We feature the hackers, the leaders and those building the future of search. Today we're joined by Don McKinnon, the founder and lead developer of search craft, a blazing fast AI native search engine that's written in rust. Of course, we get into the details of what makes modern search tech, from ranking to embeddings, the why of building it in Rust, the impact of AI on the future of search, and how developers are using Searchcraft

to deploy production-grade search into their apps without needing to be search experts. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners over at fly.io. Yes, the home of changelaw.com and the public cloud built for developers who ship. That's you. That's me. That's us. And you can learn more at fly.io. Okay, let's do this. Well friends, I'm here with Damian Schengelman, VP of R&D at Auth0, where he leads the team exploring the future of AI and identity. So cool.

So Damian, everyone is building for the direction of Gen.AI, artificial intelligence, agents, agentic. What is Auth0 doing to make that future possible? So everyone's building GNI apps, GNI agents. That's a fact. It's not something that might happen. It's going to happen. And when it does happen, when you are building these things

and you need to get them into production, you need security, you need the right card trails. And identity, essentially authentication, authorization, is a big part of those card trails. What we're doing at OZero is using our 10 plus years of identity developer tooling to make it simple for developers, whether they're working at a Fortune 500 company,

or they're working just at a startup that right now came out of Y Combinator, to build these things with SDKs, great documentation, API first types of products, and our typical Auth0DNA. Friends, it's not if, it's when, it's coming soon. If you're already building for this stuff, then you know. Go to Auth0.com slash AI, get started and learn more about Auth for Gen. AI at Auth0.com slash AI. Again, that's Auth0.com slash AI. Today we're joined by a long time listener and community member and even caller inner to our annual State of the Log episode.

Don McKinnon, welcome Don. Hello, thank you for having me. Caller inner. I love caller inner. Well, you know, I'm a professional with words. I like it. What about friends? You want to call them friend Jared or should we wait for that?

We'll see. we'll see. We'll see. Don, you've been hanging out a long time, you've been listening a long time. Yeah. You came over to Zulip, you're in Zulip with us. Curious just how you came across the pod, how you found us, what interests you, et cetera.

Oh man, I don't remember where I first came across the change log, but I've definitely been listening to not only like the main podcast, but all the other shows you guys were producing the time before. So it just kind of became part of my like weekly ritual, like commuting to work, listen to the changelog. And then I joined the Slack community, I was there for a bit and then now Zulip, yeah. And you left us a voicemail, BMC remixed your voicemail, and in your voicemail you professed your love

of Adam Jacob, and your like of Adam Jacob and his thoughts and his career, and BMC took some creative liberties with that, isn't that right? Yeah, he definitely took it to another level of like creepy stalker-ness. And it just so happens I have that audio with me. Oh wow, no.

I was like, cue it up! Cue it up. We're not gonna play your original. We'll just do the creepy one. So you can defend yourself afterwards. Cue it. Okay. My favorite episode was from Chef to System Initiative.

I've been following Adam Jacob on social media for a while. I've been also following Adam Jacob to work. And I got kicked out of his company. So it was interesting to hear more about his career journey that led him to kick me out of his company. And I disagree with him, but regardless, he's always entertaining and he's always kicking me out. He's always kicking me out. He's always kicking me out.

Oh gosh. What did you call that whistle, Jared? Cop whistle or something like that? Yeah, I think it sounds like a cop cherry, you know, like as it goes up. I mean, that's what I call it. The cherries are actually the lights, I think, but. Oh, it's not like a slide whistle or?

I mean, it probably is a slide whistle, but it just reminded me, and I think he was trying to evoke, you know, as if you're becoming, you're getting arrested because you got kicked out of Adam Jacobs company for stalking him. That's my thought, I don't know. Yeah, I took it as like, made that,

but maybe like a uh-oh or a ooh. Like a, like some sort of auditory signal that this was a major throw down kind of thing. Like all good art, it's open to interpretation. And BMC knows how to make good art. Well, we have some things crossing here. Don is a Denverite. Is that what you call him?

Denverite? Denverite, yeah, that's good. Okay, Don's a Denverite. BMC makes good music. BMC's gonna be making good music in Denver at the end of July. We've talked about it before. Don has tickets, might be coming,

but we're doing a live show, and we've picked Denver because it's a cool place, it's kind of centrally located. And Don, you like Denver, you live there. Yeah, I've been here on and off since 93, so kind of before like, it became cool. That's a long time, man. Holy cow, 93, gosh.

Yeah, I even moved away for a while. I moved to New York for a bit and then I came back because I'm like, yeah, Denver's a lot better. Yeah, I love Denver. Denver's a fun town. You know, going back again for a purpose that is not GopherCon is kind of strange, Jared. That's, I've only ever gone to Denver for GopherCon.

Yeah. That's my reason for all the times I've gone. Wait, what is GopherCon? You have to dig into that. Well, Gopher is the mascot of Go, the language, Go Lang. And GopherCon is the conference that was begun in Denver by Eric and Brian. What is Eric's last name? Brian Kettleson, what was Eric's last name?

Yeah, Sam Martin, Eric Sam Martin. Those two folks founded that conference and Go ForCon has been like the staple conference for Go developers for many, many years. And they now have Go ForCon like EU and like Go ForCon elsewhere. So like it's, it's transcended Denver in the United States. And I think it's gone to even different cities.

Yeah, I was in San Diego one time. It was in Florida. I think it's gone to even different cities. Yeah, it was in San Diego one time. It was in Florida. I think it's in Chicago now. But it was definitely in Denver for the first few Go4Cons. And we would travel up because we had Go Time the Podcast. And we also were doing some filming work and just trying to create stuff and do cool things. And so we went to Denver as a team a couple of times,

but this will be the first time back as the change log. For not that purpose, yeah. To close the loop, go for con.com. There is one coming up August 28th, 2025. So a few months from now in New York City. Oh wow. There you go. Check it out.

Well, Don, we're here to talk about you and your new thing, Searchcraft, going after the search space, which is an interesting part of the world, and it seems like one that's maybe changing dramatically, or at least potentially changing dramatically, with all these new large language model tools and ways of searching and finding and synthesizing.

Why don't you tell us about Searchcraft and what it is and why you're doing it. Yeah, so to take you back as to like kind of the problem space, Searchcraft is a search engine. It's written in Rust. And the reason we made it is because we, my co-owner and I, we worked at an agency before this, before we started to found a product company.

And we were building for a lot of like startups and other types of companies, and we were integrating search a lot. And so like when you're going fast and building like a startup MVP, you kind of like try to reach for things out the shelf that you can kind of integrate quickly. And like, so there are options out there for search,

but none of them we felt like were like that great for the kind of like moving quickly. We were kind of selfish in that we like, okay, well we want something that's not only like easier for us, but like once we hand off our code to clients that they can kind of manage it themselves without having to be an expert at maintaining clusters of search engines

and things like that. Yeah, so that's kind of why we decided to build it. But when we started building it, this whole AI thing was not a thing yet. Right. We started building Searchcraft back in 2021, mostly because I was really excited about Rust and the performance benefits and reducing the kind of hardware you'd need to run a good search engine. But now that the AI thing has really kind of become this whole movement over the past year. We're kind of having to shift, but also there's a lot more companies like that are now kind

of coming to realization that they need to look at how they're doing search. So it's been like a good kind of convergence of forces, right? Like we're kind of like coming out with this new thing and there's a lot of people who are like re-evaluating how they're approaching search now via AI. So yeah, I think the timing is really good and it's kind of like primed to change, I guess. Search is one of those weird things where like, you just don't wanna have to build that, right?

Like it seems like it should have been done by now. You know, it's part of that whole don't make me think from Steve Krug Mm-hmm back in the UX days of like the early days of learning UX at least for me reading that book Was how crucial search was? It's just one of those things you want to build. It's like oh can I just have that off the shelf, please? Yeah, totally like like there's a lot of things people just should not solve. It's been a can I just have that off the shelf please? I'll get in. Yeah, totally. There's a lot of things people just should not solve. It's been a solved problem, right? If you are building an app, you need a login system,

you're not going to write your own authentication layer anymore. You shouldn't, because you're probably going to get hacked. So don't you get something off the shelf. If you want analytics, you're going to get something off the shelf. It's kind of the same thing as long as like search, you definitely notice like if your product

doesn't have search in it, and it's difficult to do it correctly. So like, I feel like there is room for improvement in what's out there. That's kind of like why we decided to hop in this space. So it was 2021, you wanted to create a search product. There's a bunch of stuff out there. Top of my head, Algolia, Elastic, Type Sense. What's the Y Combinator one? Actually, that's probably way more than one Y Combinator. Anyways, those are top of the head.

Adam, you got any more? There's a lot. That was my list. Do you got any more than that? I mean, there's more. Yeah. I don't know if you want me to? There's a lot on my list. Those are my lists. Yeah, Don, do you got any more than that? I mean. There's more, yeah. I don't know if you want me to go down the list, but I mean, those are the big ones, right? Algoli and Elastic kind of are the big two. As far as open source, TypeSense is probably like the third, I would guess. All right, so that's a fair enough crowd.

We know there's more out there, but. Melee, Melee, what is that one? Miley search, yeah. Those guys, I am aware of them, because they're one of the only ones who are also written in Rust. Yeah, what is that one? Miley search, yeah, those guys, I am aware of them because they're one of the only ones who are also written in Rust. Yeah, I remember that one. I haven't heard much about them recently. You know, it just makes me sad about that name though.

Miley's, like, you can never spell, I can spell search craft. Test me, go ahead. I mean, I can't spell Miley's, and if I spelt it for you, you'd be like, that spells Miley? I often throw in one too manyiley's and if I spelt it for you like that spells Miley I Often throw in what to one too many L's when I do it I think they're French company don't wrong or something like that. You know, like no, it's my search

Yeah, it is a French word. I think Made up French word, maybe I don't know. Well regardless of Adam picking on their name Sorry Miley or or Miley. I had to. Searchcraft, where did you guys decide to differentiate, make something different? There's open source offerings, there's expensive offerings for scale,

I'm sure there's enterprise, there's lots of people who've kind of carved out different areas, and what were you thinking with Searchcraft, what was gonna make it different? Yeah, so for one thing, we didn't wanna try to be everything to everybody, right? So like Elastic, I think, you know, it's a great product. They put a lot of work into it.

It does a lot of things great, but I think it does too much. Like you can use it for content search, you can use it for log search and like everything, right? So because it tries to do a lot, there's like so many different ways you can configure it and tune it and it makes it overly complicated for like the majority of people who just wanna add search

to like their website or their app or whatever. So our focus from the get-go was like, let's think about developer experience and think about how we can simplify this. Because we don't think people should have to be an expert at search to integrate search. Like we are really very much targeting like front-end devs. Like a lot of startups have like TypeScript developers and whatnot. You know, they're used to building React applications and they're not going to know how to like, stand up a search cluster and tune JVMs and things like that. So we

don't want them to have to deal with that kind of thing. So whenever we build a feature or decide to like, add something to the product, we're like, let's think about how this affects what the developers are doing and how they're using Searchcraft and does that make sense? And what was your process towards that end? I think Rust was involved, but what else? Like what kind of decisions you had to make to get there? Yeah, so Rust came, one, I was a big fan of the language. I've primarily worked in the last few years

in like TypeScript and JavaScript and I started learning Rust back in 2019 and I was very impressed with how well designed the language is and when we chose to build SearchCraft I was like I think this is a good marriage of tech and like vision in that like we wanted to inherently make something less complicated and like lower the hardware requirements, which was like a good fit with the rest. Cause like you automatically, you know, you don't have to deal with JVMs. You don't have to deal with like standing out. Okay. Maybe I had to have like a three node like cluster before. Now I can just have

like a single machine running, serving like millions of records on this tiny little machine because Rust doesn't use the same amount of memories like a Java app would right? so that's kind of where that came from is if we can reduce the size of the cluster then we don't have to deal with complexities like sharding and cluster management things like that so for for the majority of people, they can have a very simple setup. Is it set up to be self-hosted then, or how does it? Yeah, so to be upfront, the core engine is not open source,

but we do offer it for free. You can download it from Docker Hub and self-host it. You can also, like, we have a SaaS cloud that is free as well, like there's a free plan on there. It's not functionally crippled at all. You can do whatever you can do with the highest tier plan. You just don't get as many documents or requests. Sure.

But yeah, we encourage people to download and try it out. Cause that's when you're as a developer, you know, you're going to want it to like play with something before you bring it up to your boss or whatever. And like, Hey, I think we should use this. Right. So, so it's free and available to self host, but not open source. Is that a business decision? Is that a business decision? Is that a timing decision?

What's your thoughts on that? It's kind of both. One, I didn't want to open source something just to open source it and then, you know, like risk any, at any point in time down the road, like pulling that back. Like I'd rather just like not even open that door if that was a possibility.

And so that was part of it. We did take some investment to start the company and I had concerns about that down the road if that it was ever an issue. Also, like single vendor contributions to open source are kind of like, I don't know if there is a lot of benefit to, I don't know. Search is a very niche kind of field in that I doubt a lot of people would be able to contribute to it to begin with. Does that make sense?

Right? Like all of our microservices and integrations, those are all out there as open source, but the core is not. Well, certainly a decision to make. I think that there are projects that don't need to or shouldn't. And there are others that should. And if you are, and you have to ask yourself why.

Why are we doing this? And if the primary reason would be contribution, I think in this case, that probably isn't a very compelling reason, because like you said, if you have a, I've always asked people and wondered about open source projects that are like almost entirely

or sometimes entirely contributed to by a singular corporation and how they deal with what is open source but not really open contribution software. And it's a very tricky thing to do right because you're not actually interested in a lot of the things. Or if you are, then why would people contribute

if you're just going to be making money? Like there's all that kind of weird gray area that can be avoided if you just opt out. So at least, and the nice thing is you can change that later whereas you can't easily go the other direction later without rug pulling, right? It's like- That's totally it.

Like I don't want to like arbitrarily make that decision and then like, okay, you know, down the road, change that and then get the angst from the community about it. So it's Rust, it's Docker, it's faster in memory, efficient according, compared to Java-based software, which is, is that Elastic? I don't think I have even.

There's a few, so Elastic is the biggest one. We're definitely smaller and faster than Elastic. There's also Solar, which is an open source project. They're both actually built on the same core library, Lucene, if you guys are familiar with Lucene. So they both use that core library. And then there's OpenSearch, which is Amazon's fork of Elastic.

And Russell's on the reasons, but what else in terms of like, I don't know, indexing or storage engine, or there's gotta be other things that you considered along the way that have helped us to become fast and efficient. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So our storage engine, it was a database that was designed for like embedded. It's an, like an embedded database. So it's designed to run various minimal hardware, right?

So a lot of the crates in the Rust ecosystem are designed to be like embedded system compatible, which was another kind of motivation to go that route. So they're already geared towards like efficiency. So what's it called? Is it like an off the shelf thing or something that you built? No, I did not build that

Reusing a database called sled sled Okay, you can look it up if you want. That's a new one for me Adam. You're sled until today man Just now okay. I'm checking it out slut sled rust crate High performance embedded database with an API that's similar to beatreeMap. Interesting, and then how does this thing work down under the covers? Do you know how that works, Don? I mean, when I was evaluating it back when I started, I really got into digging into it,

and I mostly chose it for speed. I looked at a couple other ones, like just like RKVDB whatever the key value map database LMDB. There's a couple other ones I looked into but I was really going for like performance at all costs at the time and so that's kind of why I went with SLED. And if you dig into the guy that if you dig into the maintainers like he's got this whole kind of like manifesto about his approach to writing software that I thought was very interesting. Is that Space Jam, Tyler Neely?

Is that right? Yeah, Space Jam. Yep. They call themselves the Champagne of Beta Embedded Databases. The Champagne. The Champagne is their space jam reference. I think that's it. that's just like GitHub handle. OK, yeah. Space Jam Tyler Neely.

So literally this person's handle is Space Jam. OK, the handle space jam and the name is Tyler Neely. Tyler Neely. Yeah. OK. Cool. Is this like a Michael Jordan space jam or a LeBron James space jam? Because quite a bit different. Well, I mean, based on our avatar, it's neither. It's it's it's actually have to start saying neither. My wife yells me for saying neither.

I don't know about you guys, but my wife is like, don't say neither. It's neither. OK, babe. It's some sort of dragon. Some sort of dragon for their avatar. Are you a tomato guy as well? Not tomato, man. But then how do you spell it? I've never actually met a tomato person. Have you well? Not tomato, man. But then how do you spell it? I've never actually met a tomato person.

Have you done? Well, that's like the saying, right? Like tomato tomato. Yeah, totally. Tomato. I like it. Tomato. Maybe if you're from England, I don't know.

Yeah, perhaps. It's a nice tomato. I've met people who spell potato differently, like a T-O-E or a T-O. Well, no one says potato. That's right. But wasn't there a politician who couldn't spell potatoes? And Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle.

This is going back to the 90s, Don. You're just dating yourself. Remember that, Adam? Oh yeah. He like corrected some kid in elementary school who had spelled, cause you know, when you pluralize potatoes, you throw an E in there, right? Right.

Oh yeah, wasn't it like he up at like a chalkboard and the kid came up and like corrected his spelling? It's either that or the other way around. I feel like the kid had it right and then Don Quayle corrected his spelling to be wrong. I think that might've been what happened. It could be either way. Either way, it's a hilarious moment.

It kind of ruined his career, didn't it? Dan Quayle, not Don Quayle, Dan Quayle. I'm also liking that Freddy and Slip though. Oh wow. It's a good Freddie and Slip. I mean that is such a different time. You think about people could be disqualified from politics for not knowing how to spell.

Right, I was talking to somebody about that recently with who was the politician who yelled on stage and it ruined his campaign. Oh yeah, he was like the DMC chair for a while. Yeah, he effectively did the developers, developers, developers, developers yell, you know, similar to Steve Ballmer. Politics, politics, politics, politics.

Yeah, it was like that. It was that exciting, he was like, and the people were like, no. Yeah, he went so over the top that it literally trashed his campaign. He just disappeared out of political life after that pretty much. And I was telling someone like,

remember when you could used to get disqualified by like just being awkward on stage one time and yelling, but now it's darn near impossible to say anything. Anyways. Different time. We are on stream. If we give it a goog, I'll throw back to a pound to find.

Please do. Give it a goog when you type in Dan, D-A-N space Q-U, it spells out Dan Quail and then potato. There you go. You know, it's like, you should, you should be searching for Dan Quail potato. It's kind of sad that this man who I don't know, I don't know any even his politics,

but his entire life now, like historically is characterized by misspelling potato one time, you know? It's like, yeah, what's he's known for? That's what he's known for. A little side quest here, let's close the loop. In June, 1992 during a spelling bee at Munez Rivera Elementary School in Trenton, New Jersey, Dan Quell famously altered a student's correct spelling

of potato to P-O-T-A- POTATOE, which is incorrect. Oh, with no plural. Gotcha. Yes. This is the became a wildly circulated gaffe that resulted in widespread ridicule. To this day, to this day, 2025, we're still razzling about it. You know, he was the vice president at about it. Poor fella. You know? He was the vice president this time. I mean, I guess that is what he's known for. We're talking about it now. That's right.

You know, I'll tell you that's an easy slip. Well, because of his plural, you do put the E in there. Yeah. But if it's not plural, you don't. That's when the E's in there, because it's in there for the E-S. That's right. I mean, English is kind of like the JavaScript of language. It really is.

And you gotta learn all the exceptions, you know, like that one. Anyways, he's the last president. I think we can hold him to that standard, you know? No, we know. The elementary school kid had it right. Yes, I got us there by, I think, Space Jam.

Saying either instead of either, or either instead of either, my bad. But yes, you did. You said neither. Neither, it's neither, apparently. Oh yeah, because we're talking about Space Jam. I forgot where we were. That's right, that's right.

We're way upstream, we're like six hops up. Well friends, it's all about faster builds. Teams with faster builds ship faster and win over the competition. It's just science. And I'm here with Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of Depot. Okay, so Kyle, based on the premise that most teams want faster builds, that's probably a truth. If they're using CI providers for their stock configuration or GitHub actions, are they wrong?

Are they not getting the fastest builds possible? I would take it a step further and say, if you're using any CI provider with just the basic things that they give you, which is, if you think about a CI provider, it is, in essence, a lowest common denominator generic VM. And then you're left to your own devices to essentially configure that VM

and configure your build pipeline. Effectively pushing down to you, the developer, the responsibility of optimizing and making those builds fast. Making them fast, making them secure, making them cost effective, like all pushed down to you. The problem with modern day CI providers is there's still a set of features and a set of capabilities that a CI provider could give a developer that makes their builds more performant out of the box,

makes their builds more cost effective out of the box, and more secure out of the box. I think a lot of folks adopt GitHub Actions for its ease of implementation and being close to where their source code already lives inside of GitHub. And they do care about build performance and they do put in the work to optimize those builds. But fundamentally, CI providers today

don't prioritize performance. Performance is not a top level entity inside of generic CI providers. Yes, okay friends, save your time, get faster builds with depo, Docker builds, faster GitHub action runners, and distributed remote caching for Bazel, Go, Gradle, Turbo repo and more. Depot is on a mission to give you back your dev time and help you get faster build times with a one line code change. Learn more at depo.dev. Get

started with a seven day free trial. No credit card required again. depo.dev. Wow. No credit card required again. Depot. That does. What makes search cool? Like obviously we all need it, but like what makes it cool to build? What's fun about it? Yeah. So it, I think because it's like a kind of a niche problem that makes it,

it's like difficult to solve correctly. Right. But you can, that makes it's like difficult to solve correctly, right, but You can there's like a lot of areas to innovate because it's not an area that a lot of people are working in So that that's exciting and That we decided to like start over and not build on like Lucene like we kind of for better or worse Maybe we're you know learning things the hard way but we got to like learn as we went unlike how

these systems work and like digging into like things like relevancy storing and those kinds of algorithms and like how to quickly navigate through B-tree maps efficiently right like when you have to do things like, okay, we're doing typo tolerance, right? That's a feature that search engines typically need to have. So if I misspell something, how do I still find this term that I'm looking for? So when I dug into that, I was like, okay, well, now I'm learning about things like Levenstein distance, which I had never learned about before, like in school. Um, that was something that I learned while building Searchcraft. And it's like, how, how, Levenstein distance is like, how far can you get

from the original term and still match, right? Like, and the further places you go out, the more kind of like nodes you have to travel down through your Petri map. Um, which increases reduces performance, right? But the more nodes you go down, the slower it gets to do your lookup. So you have to find a balance between like how many places can you go before it starts not only affecting performance, but also like accuracy. Because then you start matching to a lot of things that like are not good matches, which means your search is actually becoming less relevant when the intention is to make it kind of more relevant and still match when things, when the user makes mistakes, but the data is there

somewhere. Is there like a sweet spot that you found or? Yeah, three. Okay, just write that down. All your competitors are like, oh, there's some work we don't have to do. Oh no. Actually the number is different based on how long the phrase is. Okay. So the longer the phrase,

the more distance you actually want to give it because then you can account for multiple mistakes. And the shorter the word, the tendency to, there's a tendency to be less mistakes and also you want less false positives when you have shorter words. So you tend to reduce that number when you go smaller. So like, there's a certain threshold where we go to three,

but below a certain threshold, we have a set of like two, so. I see. So I think in the video you sent over, we watched you were indexing Wikipedia on a Raspberry Pi with Searchcraft, and you were giving examples of quick lookups with misspellings, I think Einstein might have been one.

You just spelled that singular word wrong. And that would be a case where you would, is it three characters that you're searching? What's the three applying to when it comes to misspellings? Yeah, up to positions away from the original term, essentially, yeah. Gotcha.

Where you could have, how many mistakes can you accommodate before you're making too many false matches, right? Okay, so yeah. Which is why smaller words, you'd wanna do less because it's gonna match to too many things Yeah, exactly and Then for longer phrases you could actually match multiple misspellings in different words throughout the phrase and it would still That's correct. Okay And that is interesting and the way a lot of search engines work is like you have your word and each word is considered

a token, right? Which people are becoming more and more familiar with now because of LLMs, tokens and new tokens, right? So you, when you're doing the ingestion process, you pull in your data, you chunk it out, usually by like words, whitespace or whatever into tokens. And then those tokens are used and stored in columnar format, which gives you fast lookup times against that token.

And as you said in the opening, I think it is a good time to be a search engine because everybody is now realizing that maybe our search isn't as good as it could be, you know, cause it's kind of a thing that, and I've done this, I've done it twice. I rolled it out on Postgres and forgot about it. And then we switched over to Type Sense

and we rolled it out on Type Sense and kind of just forgot about it. And it just is what it is. But then here comes Chachie BT and friends and everyone's starting to think like, well, couldn't you just talk to my website and it will just show you what you want to find? And it makes that interface, that chat interface

where these models have seemingly endless knowledge of the entire world except for my website, is so compelling that everyone's like, ah, maybe our search is not good. Maybe our search needs to be good now. And so then you kind of poke your head up and start looking around and see what people are doing. I was, I'm on the TypeSense mailing list

and they just shipped some features with LLMs doing something. I can't remember what they're doing. I think they're actually like kind of writing your query for you. Like you put in plain text and they've turned it into their query language with an LLM, which seems like a cool thing.

And I'm sure Algolia is doing stuff, I'm sure Elastic's, like everyone's like, okay, we need to revamp all these search engines. So what are you guys, I assume there's some kind of pivot involved with the current fast-pacing world of LLMs. Yeah, and you're totally not alone in the fact that you're like, you had set up search in a couple iterations

and then kind of like forgot about it and left it. Like every literally every company did that, right? Yeah, of course. Okay, yeah, I mean, it checked the box. We have the little magnifying glass in the corner. All right, we're done. You can find stuff sometimes you can't. You can find stuff.

And you're like, this would be better if you, and I'm like, yeah, it would be, but. Most of the time it's like, you can find stuff. And you're like, this would be better if you, and I'm like, yeah, it would be, but. Most of the time it's like, you can find stuff kind of, right? Like it's not great, but it's there and we check the box. And a lot of companies were like that. They were like, we checked the box, we have search kind of works.

But we don't really care because people can just search Google and Google will give us the traffic to our article that we just published yesterday, right? And that's what everyone did, literally. They're like, Google will just give us traffic so our search on our own site doesn't have to be great. But now, because of like, Google's doing like the whole AI summary thing,

they're like diverting traffic to sites less and less, right? So like, this is not just opinions. It's like companies are saying across the board where their traffic is just plummeting because Google is not sending them there anymore. They're sending it. They're either keeping them on Google or sending them to Google own properties kind of thing, which is kind of nefarious, I think.

But their traffic is dropping off. So they're like, okay, well, I guess we have to make our search better now. And what are people doing? They're like, well, there's this whole chat GPT kind of experience that's out there. Let's look at that, right? So companies like Algolia Elastic and us, we're like, okay, we have really powerful keyword search,

but people are wanting to do this natural language thing. So let's do that. So we do have like, as you said, to do this natural language thing, so let's do that. So we do have, as you said, a pivot in that. We have an AI offering that is coming out when there are SDK very shortly. But the thing about these, I would call them first generation AI approaches is that a lot of them, while they've really focused on like the natural language semantic reasoning layer with the language models,

they haven't put a lot of thought into the information discovery aspect of it, that middle layer that says, okay, like, yes, the LM can translate the user's intention, but like turning that, like powering that with something that can actually serve you up, accurate information, accurate and relevant information and recent information is like a problem still. So like you'll use these chat interfaces and they'll give you like, you've seen it like either non-existent information or wrong information. Right. And that's like a information discovery problem in that like they aren't using the proper

tooling underneath. Kind of like if you're going to do like a keyword based search, you typically don't want a wild card against like a SQL database because it's not going to be what you need it to be. You need like other relevancy tuning features in there. So I think companies will get there. I think the advantage that search-based companies have is they understand relevancy already

and they've solved relevancy now. And then, so we let the language models kind of handle like the semantic reasoning part and the language models convert that user intention into the proper kind of like machine API queries, right? So like, let's turn those that natural language set like question into machine API queries and then query the right kind of system to get that information back.

So I think you'll see more of that kind of like second generation approach where they're hooking it up to the right tools and then that experience is gonna get better. Is it pretty much, is fuzzy search and intention similar? Because it feels like it's similar to me, but I don't think it is an implementation. Fuzzy search, so there's a couple of different things. There's fuzzy search, which is like,

let me not have to put the complete thing, right? Like I can do partial search and it completes it for you. There's also kind of related, but different is typo tolerance, where I misspell it and it knows what I'm doing. But then there's also things like synonyms, which is like, I'm looking for shoes,

but I should also match on sandals or loafers or whatever. Yeah. Right. Where the words are completely different, but they could have the same intention. When someone searches or types into a search box with search graph, have you been search craft? I want to be more clear on my almost search graph. That's kind of cool, too. Search craft, if they're using that, are you doing or is it That's cool too. Search craft, if they're using that,

are you doing any intention analysis in addition to fuzzy search and stuff like that? Yeah, so our semantic layer is language model based. So it converts that into, I don't know how much of the secret sauce I should give out, but it does convert it into like, what machines can understand. You already gave three, what else can you do? Oh no, just give it away, give it it all away. No, it converts that into like what the machines expects, right? But there's also like, if you're using like a search engine underneath your semantic layer,

you do things with relevancy tuning that improves, right? So like I mentioned before, like the synonyms, right? So knowing that shoes matches to sandals or other things like that. And that's just handled for you on that retrieval layer. So has this required you to go back and get more money or slap AI on your pitch deck and around or what round? Or what are you doing there? Now with AI. Now with AI.

So when we started out, AI wasn't as, like it was just kind of nascent and starting out. And it wasn't really a thing. We started SearchCraft May of 2024. So we are kind of working on it on the side. Oh, I think it's in 2021. That's when we started working on it, yeah. So we started building it working on it on the side. Oh, I think it's at 2021. That's when we started working on it. Yeah. So we started building it in 2021, but like we had to build the core.

And then it got to the point where like, yeah, this is really good. Like maybe we shut down our consulting agency and build our own product company. And that's what we did May 2024. And then at that point, my co-founder and I had to learn, well like how do we pitch and get investment I've never done it before. Right so we're fortunate enough that we were able to do our first raise with like all angel investors individual angels and we were able to close that rather quickly which allowed us to shut down our agency company and start full time or going full steam on search craft. So that meant like turning our like our essentially like our proof of concept core and then making like a company around that, like building customer dashboards and billing and all of our like SDKs that we made for the front end and all of that.

Is that company chalk? Is that what that is? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Chalk was my previous company. We consulted for startups. That was kind of our bread and butter. You know how I found that? I stalked you. You kicked me out of your company.

I stalked you. No. I was just thinking, I was thinking Searchcraft is a really cool, no offense to our friends over at TypeS sense, but I think search craft says search because it literally has the word search in it. And you couldn't really get a better mark than that. Like search craft is pretty strong. And I was thinking geez, I sure hope don has the trademark for that because that's a pretty cool mark. And sure enough somebody has it, you know, who has it on chalk?

Chalk does yeah. Yeah. Well, we registered originally under Chalk. But. All good. Still works. At some point it's gonna transfer it to my co-founder and I. Well, it doesn't matter who owns it as long as somebody does next. Somebody owns it, yeah.

Yeah, you're not gonna, it's not, well I guess it's IP itself, you sold the company, but for now don't worry about transferring it. Eventually it should get transferred though. But. Yeah, we made sure before we like, we're completely sold on the name that we picked something that someone didn't have. Yeah.

I would hate to like build up branding and race through all the domains. And then you're like, oh wait, somebody else has it. Yeah. It's like no reason. You it's like racing and you're like, you're at the wrong track. Dude, I just, I just won the race. Yeah. Cause no one's here.

Okay. No one's here. Go over there. Not a one-to-one, but pretty similar, you know? Wrong name, right business kind of thing. Well, it's the second craft that we've come across recently because we had a show with Andreas Moller? Moller?

Of Nordcraft, previously. Toddle, renamed to Nordcraft. You are Searchcraft. Of course there is Minecraft, as we mentioned on that show. We failed to mention there is Starcraft, there is Warcraft, there's all these different games that were crafts, but now we have like startups that are crafts.

This could be like the new Web 2.0 naming where they just take the letter out, you know, they take the vowel out of the end like Flickr and Fiverr, no Fiverr, yeah Fiverr did take it out. Or the if-if, the if-if is Shopify, Friendify, that's right. Anyways, craft could be like the new.

Or a bulls, or a bulls. Or a.ly. Oh yeah, Fastly. Bitly. Bitly. I don't know. Clue Lee. That's a new one, actually. Shop a file.

Anyways, a new trend here. So, is there a craft TLD? I'm guessing no. There's Hey, that could be your next business. You know, someone's going to buy it. Crafty. Yeah, no, it's kind of funny because I like have like a little like hobby thing. I don't know why. The thing about like once we settled on what the name would be, like the branding was like real easy to come up with after that.

Yeah, they can do a good job on that search craft is I think strong, obviously, because it's got the word search in it. I mean, you don't have to explain it. There's no explanation necessary. What we do is in the name. There you go. It's a good name right there. We were we were talking about investment in AI.

Yes. To go back. Go back to your experience. The first time fundraising. Yes. You said all angels. What were your steps? What was your plan?

What did you actually do? Okay, we'll start at the beginning of the process. So when you go to do a raise, like you have this idea for a company, but then you have to kind of like, okay, how do I translate that idea to business people, right? And that's a pitch deck, right? You grade a pitch deck. I had never written pitch deck before.

So my co-founder and I, we kind of talked to a few different mentors in the space. We had worked with like startups as our clients. So we actually knew a couple people who were like written pitch decks for those startups. So we're like, can you like show us how to do this? And they kind of told us like, okay, well, you kind of have to tell this whole story about like, this is the change in the world. And then this these are the winners and losers. And this is how you can be a winner by taking advantage of this change that's happened in the world and then these are the winners and losers and this is how you can be a winner by taking advantage of this change that's just happened in the world and that's kind of like how you sell it to investors right interesting

there's a formula for it there's a formula right and if you don't follow the formula they kind of instantly throw you out of the room kind of thing and we didn't know that either is that the exact formula you just shared or can you can you be more precise less vague that's kind of like. And we didn't know that either. Is that the exact formula you just shared or can you, can you be more precise, less vague? That's that. I mean, that's kind of like the general formula, like there, there's multiple steps in along that way. And then like, as far as like, they even get as far as like on slide three, this is what you need to show on slide seven. This is what you need to show.

Like there there's a pack, like a formula to it. And, um and the VCs know it, but people, first time founders don't necessarily know this. Yeah, I wanna learn this framework, I wanna learn it. Yeah, so we had a guy who kind of showed us the ropes on that, he didn't know our product well enough to come up with the messaging, but he kind of gave us the basic structure of how we should form the pitch and then we kind of took that and ran with it and refined.

We've probably written a dozen versions of the pitch deck by now, maybe even more. It's one of those things you have to keep tweaking, especially as the industry changes and you're doing a different kind of, if you're a different round of raising, it changes. They very much want to know more about revenue projections the further along you go and things like that.

It's just giving me a really good idea for a series or something. It's like startup pitch decks five years later, or however, once they've arrived and you go with a founder and you go back to their original pitch deck and they walk you through it and then you can talk about all the stuff that's changed or were they right? Where were they wrong? Yeah, that would be very interesting. We almost did that with BeyondLU last time I talked to him because he was talking about it was either him or Quinn.

I think it was Quinn actually, not I think about Quinn Slack, his co-founder, they were sharing how their vision has been similar, but it's obviously changed over like as progress has happened and technologies change, but like their mission, their core mission with developers has been the same. He's like, if you go back to the original pitch deck, and I think he was supposed to actually link it up to me. So I should go back to those show notes and, or go back to them and get a link, but that was the closest we've gotten to my knowledge of surfacing the original pitch deck and going through it.

So you've tweaked yours a dozen times so far. Yeah, at least. You're still a couple years into it, right? Like two years in? Yeah, I guess we're technically a year and a couple months out. Yeah, less than two. You added AI, you sprinkled AI into all of the slides.

We had to, so, okay, so from the individual angels, like they were excited about what we're building and saw the potential and they wrote the check and we got in there. But subsequent talks we've had with like more institutional offices, like venture funds and pre-seed funds and things like that, they are pretty, like AI has sucked up

all the oxygen in the room. It's like, that's all the dollars are going. You have to have AI, unfortunately. It feels like it's a cliche thing, but it is the truth. They're only investing in AI right now. I don't know if that pressure is coming from the lending partners wanting to be in that space,

or it's just the thesis supports investing in AI, because AI is such a transformative kind of shift right now. Right. What it is, is the true overlords of this earth are forcing money to flow to AI to do this thing. Like that's what's happening. It's the Illuminati. Okay.

Oh, the Illuminati. That's right. You know what? Somebody is puppeting and orchestrating with the money. I was actually thinking about this the other day and that like, so there's this huge fear as developers that AI is going to replace all of us. And I mean, not even just developers, like you're a writer, you're an illustrator,

like all of these professions are getting supposedly replaced by AI, right? So is that just a transfer of wealth from all these people to like, okay, a few handful of companies that control the models? Like Anthropic and OpenAI, they're going to kind of like all that. All the valuations are just through the roof, right? Like the valuations on these companies are astronomical and they only actually make sense if that plays out. If that plays out, they make total sense, like invest right now.

But if not, then obviously a lot of people are burning up cash making that bet. But that's pretty much the bet they're making, isn't it? I think that is the bet, but like, is that, I mean to be existential about it, is that like good for humanity and that like, instead of paying people, companies are paying the AI companies instead of people. But eventually they're probably gonna pay this amount.

Like, I think a lot of that like GPU usage is being subsidized by VC capital right now. And like the true cost is not there and you're hooking people in to make them like dependent on these systems and then you're gonna raise the price once the VC money goes away. I mean that's always been the play, right?

It's like you just subsidize the price of the thing until you have critical scale and mass to the point where you don't have to do that anymore and then you turn on the money making machine and everybody who is subservient to that is less better off than they were prior. You know, we're all like, wait a second, this doesn't actually scale, now it's more expensive,

you know? That's what happened, that's what Uber did, right? That's what the Netflix. Uber was what I was thinking of when I was talking about that, yeah. Yeah, Uber did that, like they killed the cab industry and now they control like transportation, right? The streaming providers. Well, there's still cabbies outdies out there you know they're still doing their thing and and they have had to

Change the way they work and so I feel like it was an industry that was rife for disruption because it was entrenched and I Think unionized as well. I'm not sure about that Might depend on this. Definitely in the bigger cities. Yeah, the bigger cities. That was a big thing for New York. And just like not a good, I mean, it wasn't a good customer service and now the cabbies, I think, like I've taken a cab because they've been like hustling for my money,

you know, you're waiting for your Uber and they pull up and they're like, what are you gonna, I'll take you right now for five bucks less, like let's roll, you know? Oh yeah. I got no problem with that. So like that's been good,

but then there's obviously been fallout as well. So it is nuanced. It's not all good, not all bad. But certainly Uber did that, right? They just made it so cheap to take an Uber for so long. And it's just not cheap anymore. Airbnb was the same way. It used to be cheaper than hotels.

Now it's like, I go to a hotel. I prefer a hotel to an Airbnb at this point. Because- I'm a big fan of like, especially if I go to a hotel. I prefer a hotel to an Airbnb at this point. I'm a big fan of like especially to go places like New York. They have like really nice like boutique hotels that you can go in. Yes. Totally like, oh, I don't have to worry about getting cleaning up after myself for the Airbnb host. I don't get, you know, cleaning fees.

There's always one thing that goes wrong with an Airbnb in my experience where it's like I had to go out of my way for whatever it was, like the key didn't work or the instructions weren't clear on the trash cans or this thing, and you're like talking to the host and they're not what it was originally, which is like just another friendly person in society. Like they're a small business trying to do a bunch of these things.

And whereas the hotels pretty much have that all figured out and like you can just go to the front desk and there's just like a professionalism to it. And then it also costs less now because of the cleaning fees. So it's been interesting to watch that. Cause when Airbnb first came out, I was all about it. Like I was saving money. I was in the city, like not at a,

what do you call it? a tourist trap or something. Like real people helping them out, like living in someone's house was cool. And now I'm just like, yeah, give me the hotel. So it's been a weird full circle for me. I mean, I think if you're still traveling with like a big group, it's pretty good. For sure.

Like you got like five people or whatever, like it's gonna be better than separate hotel rooms probably Yes, if you have to get two hotel rooms one Airbnb will almost always be cheaper, but that I think is The exception to most travel which is yeah two people or whatever Anyways where else does this happen though an industry where it's subsidized like I was thinking like honestly I was thinking about cars versus like horse-d drawn buggies.

Like, was there any subsidization happening then? Because like, it's a step change or step function change in how humanity works to go from a horse drawn buggy or cart to a car. And clearly we have not gone back, you know, so I'm wondering like where else a big step change happened in humanity where it was subsidized for a bit Because that's what AI is. I was that change, right? Was gasoline cheaper than like feeding your horse or whatever or stabling your horse back then? Yeah, I'm not a historian I don't know the answer to these questions. Yeah

Automobiles when they came out, I thought there was like a like a kind of like a rich wealthy person thing I'm sure it started there and worked its way down. I mean, that's how most new technologies work, right? it was probably like the you know, what do you call that the What's the Apple thing with the goggles was that thing called again? Vision Pro Vision Pro that has not trickled down yet Yes, their sales are trickling out Well, the smartphones a better example. Like when the iPhone first revolutionized phones, which it really did, and internet communicators,

it was a rich person's device. And now there are phones all the way down the pricing ladder to free with a plan for everybody. You know, pretty much for the populated civilized world that nobody could afford that original iPhone if you didn't have all kinds of disposable income.

So I do think new technology generally comes out expensive, works the price down, but the subsidies, I think, is where we were kind of keying in on. Now we're, it's the reverse though, like the, at least from the software and services side, where it comes in cheap and then they bring it in. It comes in free. Yeah.

Quote unquote free. They get you dependent on it and then. Yeah, it's more of a drug dealer model, which I've said before, you know, the first hit's always free. And it is addictive. So I mean, it really does work to a certain extent, where it's hard to go back to life before it isn't Adam you said that a few times where it's like would you go back?

No, I mean it's especially to like a car versus I'm talking about with your chat GPT relationship No Don't take my chat GPT away from me, please see See? Yeah, no, it is a good product. Yeah, I really couldn't imagine life, you know, this work calculator is just too good, you know? It really is.

I couldn't imagine life. I couldn't imagine running businesses without it, you know? Like you have to have this thing. Like it's, you have to think so much faster and it thinks bigger and faster for you. Now you're still evaluating the output. It's just helping you get to that result, the data faster, you know, or even running scenarios against a business model.

For example, like destroy this business model for me. And it uncovers these new ways that you will die. And either draws new fear in or is like, makes you more invincible because you feel like, oh, I can sustain all that, you know? I mean, it's definitely a faster way to work for certain things. Like I don't go to stack overflow anymore. I go to my LLM and ask you the question. Well, stack overflow is dying.

I mean, how do you, what do you guys stand on, on the whole thing about like trading data? Like, was it fair that these models were trained on this information that was out there? Like what are your opinions on that? Let me think about it for a second because I don't want to be wrong about this. I think my gut reaction is it's public on the internet. So it's the internet's information, but then that doesn't feel good

because like sometimes you put personal ideas that belong to me, Adam, on public. Does that become somebody else's idea or somebody else's thing? It's really hard to answer that without specifics, but I think Stack Overflow in particular, it's like such user-generated content. So it's kind of like it's owned by the world in a way.

And you know, Stack Overflow enabled the ability to have this new place to go to, this new website to go to and, and built all the form and function around the usefulness of exchanging questions for answers essentially. And hopefully this dialogue back and forth of which one's right and which one's the, the one you should follow. Hard to tell. You know, it really is hard to tell.

I think baseline judgment without more specifics will be like, if it's public on the internet, should follow. Hard to tell, you know, it really is hard to tell. I think baseline judgment without more specifics will be like, if it's public on the internet, then sure. Cause if I went and studied like a thousand machines could, I could learn the same information. It's just done at scale, you know, and in perpetuity, I suppose. Hard question to answer really. It's a lot of nuance, a lot of facets to that one.

But as you're learning, to take it back to like, you could learn and learn all these things and read all this information and absorb it, you're giving an exchange for learning, you're giving them an ad impression, right? So the people querying through like the language model interfaces, they're bypassing that, right?

They're getting that from the language model versus giving an impression to the originator of the information. Well, there you go. So that, there in last row. Adam could read a book and he could learn from that book and then he can come tell me what he learned. And I don't think there's anything immoral

about that at all. And so I think when it comes down to infringement on somebody else's creation, I think it should be focused on the outputs more than the inputs. And if you are directly copying and redistributing somebody's creative work as an output. I think you're outside of bounds.

That's what I was trying to say, right there. That's what I was trying to say. You can't copy my sentence, I just said it. Ah, it was good though. I like the way you framed that because it's all about outputs versus the inputs. We can all learn things. It's about what comes out, not what goes in.

But the inputs do need to follow the laws, I think, and the copyright. And you can have things that are consumable and things that are not consumable. So if you're consuming things that are not legally consumable, then you're also outside of bounds. And I mean, Anthropic just won a big court case with what they did with these books, scanning books and bringing them into their model. Yeah, but I think that was more they won because the plaintiffs didn't form their argument

correctly. I think the judge was like also said like, hey, if you had actually argued it this way, you could have won, but you didn't. So I can't find for you. How would they have changed the argument to be a winner? You know? Oh, I don't remember. I just remember that was that was the judge's opinion.

It's like he was kind of prodding them along. Like if you had came at this court case from this angle, like you would have had a case, but you didn't. So I can't find it. But like he kind of like showed them the way. Even Google's old book project, I can't remember what that was called. Google books probably.

And their entire purpose was like, you know, index the world's information and make it freely available or whatever their whole mission is. That project would just take books that were either public domain or purchased or whatever they'd acquire through libraries and they would scan them into a digital form and they OCR them.

And that was a huge court case years ago that I think they ended up winning. I can't remember the actual end result, but I think it's a similar construct, I guess. It's similar in pattern to that, where it's like you are an owner of a thing. Can't you not digitize that thing that you own? Like you purchased it, for instance.

Now, if you're, the other thing with Anthropic was there was, and Meadow is in a similar situation, there was two kind of angles, cause one was like, do you have the right to actually do this with purchased copyright or purchased IP, versus they were downloading pirated versions off the internet and scanning those in?

And I think that was the clearly illegal stuff. And I could see why. But I mean, libraries have been formed around this entire thing. Like you get copyright in America at least, and then you agree to have it publicly available as well, then you can sell it. So it is.

There are specific rules around distribution though, right? Like you have the right to purchase and kind of like absorb that content, right? But distribution is a different thing. That's why I said output should be what we should focus on because that is distribution, isn't it? If I'm redistributing 311's new album, do they make albums anymore?

I don't know, that was the first auto-complete that came to my brain there. And I'm just verbatim throwing it out. It's clearly illegal distribution of their copyright. However, if I'm using their album as inspiration for something new, quote unquote new, and that's where it gets really technically difficult to describe whether or not it's new or not.

Like some of these new video channels on YouTube, you guys been watching this where there's new YouTube channels that are just taking over the charts and it's completely AI generated everything. There's a specific like 80s synthwave band that doesn't exist that's like has 310 million subscribers or something now in the last six months. Probably a lot of bots but people are liking this music and it's like straight up using Suno or whatever it is to create the music. And it is, I went and listened to their song

and watched their video and it's like, this is new music. It is however, clearly derivative of old music. And like for me, that's, I'm kind of okay with that. Like this is new, but what Vanilla Ice did to What's Their Names, you know, with the hi-hat, that was clearly copyright infringement. because he was just redistributing the same exact sound.

The music industry kind of like dealt with this, right? Like if you want to take the analogy from, from like the hip hop community and like sampling, right? Like early hip hop was all based around sampling. Basically it was all samples. So yeah, it was all, it was all, it was all sampling. So like they found like okay You can do that

But the caveat is you have to get like permission that you have to get a license to do it, right? If you don't get the license, that's when you get in trouble Yeah, and there's a lot of that stuff getting set up. I mean reddit is has licensing agreements. I think I think stack overflow is does well with a few companies but I think Stack Overflow does well with a few companies, but then there's also people that just aren't gonna get that license and they're gonna just do what they do. And it's kind of a Pandora's box situation.

You don't have a Pandora's box. Who's this Alsup person in this argument? Who's Alsup? Do you know? Was that the judge? Which argument are you back on the Anthropics thing? Anthropics still yet, yeah. Trying to figure it out.

Well, I'm reading the CNBC, and I wanted to pull a quote here, but it says Alsup wrote, A-L-S-U-P, is the person's last name. I'm trying to figure, oh, it's the judge, sorry. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said this. Okay, so what he said was, this is the judge saying it back to whomever.

I'm not sure if this is CNBC, the reporter, the journalist, whoever, but this is the quote. The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to make, or sorry, to generate new text was quintessentially transformative, Al Soprote, like any reader aspiring to be a writer. So the way he framed it was like, they trained them on the works

so they can learn how to write not to Not to redistribute what it read essentially, you know for lack of better terms, I get read it consumed it Oh, this is how you write right? It was like frameworks, you know sentence formation story arc You know stuff like that versus let's literally redistribute there. But I think it's possible. Right, but you can tell them, like,

give me a story in the voice and tone of Mark Twain, and it will do that. Now he's long gone and dead, but like that's, and that's kind of what a lot of these music is like, make it sound like the Beastie Boys, you know, only not. Yeah, but like, can't you do that with a friend though? Couldn't I say, hey Jared, do me a favor? I know you're really good at rapping, right?

You're pretty good at rapping. I mean, no. Would you mind rapping in the form of vanilla ice? You know? All right, stop. Then you might, yeah, exactly. You might use some of the hook phrases. And that's what the LLM is doing back to you.

All it is, is giving you an output of similarity. I know, it's tough. Cause it's like, but then when you say, give me this picture in Studio Ghibli style, it's like, that's pretty much exactly the style of Studio Ghibli. Right. Yeah. In that case there, that is, that's the same concept. I mean, couldn't you do that to a, to an artist though?

Couldn't you take anybody who can draw and draw well, who maybe train themselves on that style and ask them to do the same thing? I suppose it's about output and potential usage. Cause they can read this trend. It wasn't duplicates. What is it called? Copy people that would actually clone artist work for, for resale at a cheaper price. Cause they could, cause they were good enough painters that they could paint it like Picasso actually clone artist work for resale at a cheaper price

because they were good enough painters that they could paint it like Picasso without actually being Picasso. That's been a thing for centuries, right? Yeah, I just can't think of what it's called. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I mean, but was that moral and legal? I don't know.

I mean, you're stealing his ability to sell. You still had to have an ability to do it? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it took some skill. Just like me, my vanilla ice rap is pretty good, you know. But. Yeah, all right, stop. You had it down.

You were pretty good. Like, there's a difference between like, okay, I'm a musician, I learn how to play instruments and I'm in a cover band covering vanilla ice. And the verse is like. Right, right. vanilla ice and... Right. Well friends, it's time to build the future of multi-agent software. And you can do so with Agency. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y.

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That's agntcy.org. And add your support once again, agency.org, agntcy.org. Yeah, there's something about the scale and the speed, which just changes the calculus. It does, I agree with that. It makes it more, I don't know, infringy. Just seem like you can just, because infringy,

that's my professional word of the day. I like it. It's actually pretty good, infringy. Well, Don, you opened up a can of worms here, my friend. And I don't know how I get back on the right track. I guess my response would be, what do you think about that? About the whole training on copyrighted material. The infringiness of it. I mean, a lot of people try to argue, it's like, oh yeah,

I'm just teaching myself. It's like teaching an entity or whatever. Right. And I think there's a difference between like using the information to learn how to read and write versus I'm going to give you something that is clearly derived from this thing. Right. So whether or not they're ever able going to be able to

determine like, okay this is like 30% Mark Twain, so you owe Mark Twain's estate 30% of your creation's value? I don't know, like with the previous kind of iterations of this remixing, like with music, they figured out a mechanism of licensing and royalties and things like that. Maybe that's something down the road. Maybe if you're training on data sets as a whole, you pay into a fund that compensates people who are creating. My fear is that the people with these skills, these skills are not gonna be in demand. So there's no impetus for people to become an illustrator or a writer or a developer.

And so what happens 20 years from now when there's no one coming in into the ecosystem anymore doing these things, right? We just talked about that with Thorsten Ball in light of open source and our new agent at coders where it becomes almost free to just generate some code. Why open source maintain and share libraries when a coding agent can just create me a new auth library

very quickly, one offs for everything. Why don't you just have a bespoke everything? And what does that look like in 20 years? Because all of a sudden, I'm not incentivized to go find open source, download open source, contribute open source, open source my own code when it's just disposable anyways, all code is disposable.

And then we lose public code eventually because this is just like a potential truth and not necessarily that's gonna happen. But yeah, it's similar with illustrators and creatives of all kinds when there's no longer incentives to do that. Although I think when it comes to music and art and even writing,

people are gonna continue to do it because they love it. And maybe that's the same answer with code and open source. You know, people didn't originally make music to make money. They make music and they wanna make money so they can make more music, you know what I'm saying? And then some people found ways of getting real rich off that and of course the celebrity culture and there's all other reasons why people make music.

But a lot of it's just because people love making music and so I don't think humans are ever going to stop making music even if the robots are better at it and maybe that's true of illustration and photography and copywriting I don't know novel no novels but it's not necessarily it doesn't feel good because those people don't have a way of ever making money whereas as they used to. But I think they're gonna keep creating. I think fundamentally we are creative. Well, it'll be one of those things though, where it's like, it's never at the scale that it was, or it's never something for like creating commercial value.

Like I'm never going to be an illustrator and make money off of it. I just do it for fun. Potentially. I think that's a real potential. It's, that's where I think your position, Jerry, you say input, output, but then I would also add usage

because I feel like it's not actually deployed to the world in a refactored format from input to the LM, output as requests from the prompt, you know, reviewed by the human and used deployed into the world. I feel like that last mile is potentially where the, where the hook is because if I end up using copyrighted material, knowing it was or Studio Ghibli or Ghibli or however you say it, if I'm breaking the copyright law by trying to act like somebody else, even

force the LM to help me be similar to somebody else's creative works, it's up to me to have the moral and legal boundaries of just following that. I would say like the LM is just. Is just trying to give me what I want, and it's my usage that takes me to the legal side of it. That's how I feel, I guess. Is if I wanted to recreate something similar to Mark Twain, if I'm, you know, the kind of person would do that

and would put it out there like it's Adam, but it's also Mark Twain. Well, then that's kind of my fault, right? Not the LLMs. Well, I'm not blaming any computer programs. I'm just talking about how we use them. So at the end of the day, you know, Anthropic, the business is getting sued, not Claude personally.

So I agree with you on that one for sure. But it's still complicated and we can't simply rely on the morality of other people. Like we have to actually institutionalize rules and consequences for rules. And I think it's gonna be super muddy over the next 10 years trying to figure this out. And I think there's gonna be winners and losers.

And hopefully the losers aren't the people who are really just good at drawing and making music and you know, writing poetry. But they might be. We might be. To take it back to like software development. Okay, so the selling point is like, okay, seniors can do more, they can be 10x productive, right? 10x productive rate. Like now I have code gen, I have agents, and I have, you know,

conversational, you know, AI in my IDE and all this. And so I can produce more code. So like, maybe I don't need to hire juniors anymore. But if there's no juniors being hired, then eventually who's going to replace all these senior level people. Yeah, I think that's where- The agents themselves, I don't know. Yeah, maybe so. The advancements of the agents may transcend the need for a future true junior, or what we call a junior, human being developer. I think the answer to that, to Adam's point, is like where does the technology plateau, if at all?

Like if we're getting to the plateau, I don't think any engineers really, unless it's ever the really sucky ones are gonna go anywhere, but if it continues to advance at the rate of change it has, and I'm just been very impressed with the most recent round of models where I was unimpressed previously.

Same thing with the image gen stuff, like it's way more compelling now than it was 18 months ago. And if it stays where it is, I think we're not gonna have these existential problems that we're discussing, but if it continues to change at the rate that some of the capitalists who are highly incentivized to say it's changing, it is changing,

such as Anthropix CEO who says, you know, 18 months from now, there'll be a reckoning, and I know because I can see the future, because the future is inside of our walls, so to speak. And if he's right about that, then I think everything does change and we don't have answers. Maybe we don't need juniors or seniors, but maybe it's gonna plateau right kind of where it is.

I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I think there's some exaggeration on both sides. The model companies, they have to say that because they've received money to make that happen. And they're currently raising more money. Yeah, I mean, billions and billions and trillions of dollars, right? So they have to say that,

but I don't think that's necessarily accurate. We'll see. But on the other side, will it get to the point where it won't need supervision? Maybe it's plateaued, maybe it hasn't, right? If it hasn't plateaued, then maybe there is no need for developers, right? I mean, it's getting pretty good,

and I could imagine 18 months from now, me saying things like, I don't even look at the code ever anymore. I'm just telling the thing what to write at small portions and building up systems with my pros. And it just works. I'm not, I'm saying that with like personal scripts and stuff right now, things that don't leave my machine.

Like I told Adam recently, like, yeah, I'm just letting the thing write it. And then I use it. And if it works, it works. But that's not, that's not leaving the network., yeah, I'm just letting the thing write it, and then I use it, and if it works, it works. But that's not leaving the network, you know what I'm saying? I mean, you can still say that with code that, like, okay, I hire a code school bootcamp grad, right? And they write, they know how to write React,

but they don't necessarily know TypeScript very well. And they write code that works, but it's not written in a way that is great, right? From someone looking at it from a senior developer perspective, you're like, oh, this code is not good, but it does do what the juror ticket said, right? Right, but they didn't write it in 24 seconds.

That's the difference. And I can say, nah, not like that, like this. And it's 30 seconds later, and I can say nah, not like that like this and it's 30 seconds later And I have my next iteration and so I think that person They're dead to me You know what I mean in the functional sense of I'm not gonna go to that person already so yeah I mean and then I think that a lot of these boot camps not to like crap on them But like they sprung up when there was a really high demand for developers There was not enough developers to fill seats and so they turn people out

But maybe shouldn't have been writing code to begin with right? we're just looking for from a paycheck perspective and not like the craft of writing code perspective and Those the the like not a skill people are always going to get filtered out no matter what. I don't think it's going to kill software. That's for sure. I don't think it's going to kill a software developer. I just wonder if really the end result of all this is like you said I don't get the code anymore. And maybe that's true for certain things like you said for scripts.

And maybe that's true for certain things like you said for scripts. But I, yeah, I can't disagree that since that conversation I've had this fear. I'm not sure I want to call it a fear. It's like this, I can't let it go. I know something that a lot of people know and I have concern. Like my friends have no idea about that conversation.

My friends have no really idea about the deep conversation we have with Steve or others that scared the crap out of us. Basically like that conversation with Steve Yegge was probably the one that scared me the most when I think that was that conversation. You said, what do we do about open source? And the moment you said that, I was like, yeah,

what do we do about open source? And I kept thinking about the ability to generate quickly now that does it kill all open source? No, I think it will diminish the need for such widespread open source. Like do we really need to widespread open source larger frameworks?

Yeah, probably. But at some point we may care less about the code because we've got quality assurance checks that we that balance out and they are always true. And so we look at the code less I've I've really been a little concerned about it This is that lead to the development of like new programming languages kind of going away like if there's

If what we have out there is works well enough like is there no impetus to like make another language? I think it comes down to who's writing it and who cares, right? Like you just said good code. And I was thinking when you said good code, I was like, well, just because I think you said a React developer wrote some TypeScript, is that right? Was that the analogy or was it reversed? Sure.

Yeah, they know React, but they don't know TypeScript very well. Right, they know React, they don't know TypeScript very well, but it works. So is that good code? What do we call good code? Something that a human can read and it's well-formed and understandable,

or something that actually gets the job done and works? Well, which one of those is good code? Well, it has to work correctly first. For sure. And then it has to be correct or maintainable. I think its ability to change easily is one of the prime characteristics of good code. And that's why I said I think the calculus changes

if these things continue to get better at a rapid pace because maintenance might not be the same concern as it always has been. I've always written software to be maintainable because any software product that's useful is gonna continue to exist and change. It's never finished. And if you can't change it,

then you're atrophied and you're stuck. And so that's why I say slow down to go faster, get it right in the first place. You go faster over the long term. However, that calculus changes if now we can generate quickly small amounts of code that are good enough to replace, not refactor, replace, rewrite. It used to be very expensive and tool hardy to do that,

but maybe it becomes very cheap and quick and you can get 10 versions, which one's the best, plug it in. Oh, it's not the best anymore. Plug in a new one, just keep plugging in, you know? Then all of a sudden, just the way that we think about building software does change. And a lot of my old tenants,

like a lot of things I've been saying for 30 years, that's not true. 15 years, they go away, they're wrong now. And that is a little scary. And that's the part that scares me the most. I'd say that. Maybe I go away. Should I keep using the word scare?

I'm not like fearful at night. You're dead to them. That's the part that really gives me concern. I would think then because at that point, it's just a whole different world when the calculus changes. Like when you thought truths for 30 or 20 years were true, and suddenly a lot of these like foundational truths

are now up for grabs for change. I think a lot of it changes really, you know, how we think, like you said, building software has been about sustainable software and that's been good software, sustainable software. But if you don't have to maintain it and you trust the thing that generated it and so long as it knows the language,

and you know, what is good code at that point? What is the code we need to have to get the job done? This is why everybody wants AI on their pitch decks. That's why. The implications are massive and anytime you don't have this much up in the air, people are looking to catch some of that for themselves. And so they want the AI solution

because it's changing stuff and I wanna be involved. You know, I wanna be on the upside of this potential future, not on the downside. Cause the downside is super scary, right? Like a lot of people's skills become invaluable, actually means valuable. That's a weird word, right? Non-valuable.

I always thought that was weird. Invaluable means valuable, but non-valuable, perhaps. Yeah, and invaluable is like what? The valuation can't be measured. Yeah, exactly. But it does sound like it just means very valuable, but usually in means not. Anyways, but-

What about unvaluable? Does that work? Yeah, it becomes unvaluable. No, it's not. But we're making up words today. No, there's a lot of fear, right? And I think making decisions on fear is not always a always a great thing. So companies are embracing AI, regardless of the case. Yeah, they're like, we have to have a

story for AI. So let's do the thing. We have to have a mobile app. It's Yeah, totally. It's like the mobile dress. Like, is it the right decision for the long term? That's like, you have to ask yourself that question as a business owner, like, does it make sense? Or are we just doing it to follow the trend? So what does Searchcraft look like over the next 12, 18, 24 months, like you're raising more money,

you're switching a little bit of things? Yeah, we're raising some more money and we're also, you know, we are rolling out some of our AI initiatives, because we have to. Yes. Some more. If you want money, you got to have AI. That's right. But no, it's because people are asking for it because people are, it's what people are

excited about, right? Like they want a search experience that has some AI in it, at least that natural language and semantic reasoning. Like, and so that's, we're building for what people are requesting. So that's what we're doing. As far as the next 12 months, it's like we're looking to kind of work with more customers and we're also looking to expand into more platforms.

So we rolled out with our very first initial like handful of like front end SDKs. So of course we did a JavaScript one, we did a React one, we did a Vue one, but we wanna get into other places where developers are at as well. We wanna get into Laravel, get into Ruby on Rails, and all of these other areas as well.

A lot of easy wins there, are ways you can scale horizontally across different ecosystems and just provide the service to more people that way. Yeah. So there's like language platforms. There's also like, you know, direct integrations with other systems because at the end of the

day, like search is really, it's a mechanism of information discovery and information discovery is a way of delivering the most relevant and accurate information to a system. Right. So like, we're kind of like, essentially like a data pipe for any kind of platform. So making, like learning more about like what people are building and how we can give them the information they're looking for in a quicker and more accurate way. That's the problem like we're solving for. And so we're probably in more integrations for these other platforms, you know?

Is there a common API integration that anybody can go out and code against? I assume you haven't attacked the Elixir ecosystem quite yet. We're pretty small, but could I code against a REST API or something and get information in and out of Searchcraft? Yeah.

So we have our core system. It's an API. It's like a REST API, right? So the integrations and the SDKs just make it more convenient, but anyone can use a REST API. We also did put out an MCP server. So if you didn't want to manually configure like your search index cluster you could just pull down

the MCP server project and tell it to do that for you and then it does it. Nice. That's the better way to do it right? That's right. Yeah sure. Save yourself some time. Yeah so we're API based. We have I like to think we have pretty good documentation if we have I like to think we have pretty good documentation if we don't someone please tell me I'm sure they will. Sure, one of our favorite things to complain about. But yeah, no as a as a like a developer focused company like documentation was like very important for us and my mentors have impressed that upon me like hey if you're gonna do like a

developer tool company, your documentation has to be good or people are going to come for you. So that, I mean, as a developer, I find it incredibly frustrating. I'm going to complain about some people right now. Cause like AWS, a lot of people use it, but come on. I can't be the only one who thinks their documentation is not good. I've all I've largely avoided AWS from the get-go except for s3

Mostly because of the documentation and then just the web UI was just a hot mess forever I probably still is they got lots of services, so it's not an easy problem to solve but the docs were always lacking and So I I was always looking for other platforms, except for S3, which was kind of became a de facto for object storage. The other services of AWS I've never really glommed onto, I used CloudFront a little bit and their domain service, their DNS service route, whatever it is, 53. Yeah, 53, yeah.

Yeah, and that's about it because of that reason. I mean, they literally have like a service for everything. They have so much so like, you don't, sometimes it's a decision paralysis situation where you're like, I don't know which one to choose. But I think their weakness in the documentation has kind of like led to opportunities for other companies like these other cloud providers

that make it a simpler experience for developers like ForSell or Flyer, these other ones. Awesome, well, Searchcraft, is it well-baked? Is it ready for use? Get out there and try it, is that the situation? Yeah, so I mean, obviously, like I said at the beginning of the talk, we're not trying to do everything,

but what we do, we try to do very well. And what we try to do very well is content-based search, not necessarily like log searching and whatnot. But yeah, people can either sign up for the cloud account and try it there if they don't want to host it anywhere, or they could download the Docker image and run it locally and play with it. Very cool.

Adam, any other thoughts or questions before we let him go? I was just gonna make note of what I think is a bunch of AI-generated images. Don, do you know about this? He's smiling. Are you holding me? OK, so I'm just noticing your website,

and I'm just noticing that they all seem, especially this one that has you on it when When you're a pilot Don. Okay, are you talking about the Dr. Don? That's right. Dr. Don, tell me more. Okay, I'll show you something. I've browsed away from it and I can't find where I was at. So we kind of go after Elastic a little hard on our site.

That's right, Elastic versus Servicecraft. So it's like a feeling bloated page, right? And so we're kind of making fun of these, you know the whole NLP or what was it? Like the Wigovie, Eczempic drugs, right? Oh yeah, feeling bloated. Feeling bloated, right? And so like, well, Dr. Don is not a real doctor,

but I prescribe search craft every day to be less bloated kind of thing. That's funny. At the very bottom there. And that's, that is you. That is me, that is my face on somebody else's body. See? That's cool.

So we do, we do. That's cool. That's cool. That's good. That's the other problem with these things, it's so stinking cool. It is cool. Gosh darn it. But other problem with these things. It's so stinking cool. It is cool. Gosh darn it.

But I just noticed that every image on your site that's like a person seems to be this new trendy. I don't know if it's trendy or not, but it seems to be like out there a lot. So I think it says trendy. Yeah, so we have a very strong, like we have a very, it's like a science fiction space kind of thing is what we have. But

my co founder, his background is in design. And so he makes a lot of these he'll have like, have an idea for like what he wants to do for the page, like this page is gonna have kind of this theme. And then he's tools like mid journey to get part of the way there. And then he'll like take that kind of generated image and then like, edit it and then he'll like take that kind of generated image and then like edit it and refine it in like Photoshop or whatever you know. I didn't hear you say the word Vectron unless I missed that part. Did you say Vectron? Did you talk about the dashboard?

Oh no, we can talk about that if you want and talking about the space thing it's really cool. It's like Vectron is our user dashboard for people who are on SearchRef cloud. It's where you like sign up for your account, you manage your plan, you can do, there's like a UI for managing all of your search cluster in the schema and thing. So part of SearchCraft is like, as far as like our experience building out Search

for customers in that we were handed off to these startups, right? And maybe they didn't have search experts on their team after we handed it off. And so they would come back and be like, hey, can you tweak this setting or add some synonyms or whatever? And we're like, okay, well, we can, but we'll have to charge you our rate, right?

And we're like, that's kind of a gap we feel like in the market and that like, let's make it easy enough so non-developers can tune relevancy for their search index. And so you can do that in Vectron. You can go in, you can add synonyms, you can, you know, change language settings. You can do things like boosting and waiting on your fields

and not have to do a developer and it doesn't require a deployment. You just save it and it updates it right away without having to like bring your cluster down or do a deployment or anything like that. So you don't have to talk to your developer once it's set up initially. Now that you say that,

you don't have to talk to your developer. It makes me think we've been trying to do that for years and now we're finally there where we can do that. I guess at Nausium, it's a big deal. I like the imagery. I like the spaceness of it. It's cool. It's got a good tone to it.

Vectron is a cool name. I like very much so that old school computer that you've got there to show it off on that comparison page. We'll link up with the show notes. Oh yeah. From the last search in Searchcraft. If you go in and go through the account creation process,

it's like we're very inspired. Ridley's got alien terminals. Oh yeah. And the inspiration for that. Yeah, that's dope. I like it. Yeah, being inspired is cool. It's cool.

That's all I got. I was just noticing as I was browsing these various styles of imagery. And I wanted to, since we've been so deep in AI, I was like, well, these seem like they're AI generated. So they probably are. Yeah. The images, the images, uh, well, there, there was human curation and

intervention and you know what, I feel like we have to apologize. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody was like, Hey, hey, is that, did AI do that? Yeah, absolutely, because I'm concepting and I'm ideationing with my new buddy. That's how it works.

Yeah, it's like to take it back to development. It's like a pair programmer, right? Like you're collaborating. So instead of collaborating with the person, you're collaborating with the machine. Same with design, like you're collaborating with the mid-journey, right, to make images. But the idea still comes from the human.

Yeah, I think so. For now. For now. Well, Don, this has been awesome. We look forward to seeing you in Denver at our live show, hopefully. And searchcraft.io, of course, if you haven't checked it out yet,

go see Dr. Don at the bottom of the Elasticsearch comparison page, as well as some, there's some cool comparisons. Each one has their own vibe, is what I like. The, the Melee search versus Searchcraft is like old school, pixely, eight bit, pong comparison. So each one has their own theme, which is rad. Any final words, anything else to say before we let you go?

Yeah, just, you know, encourage people to check it out and give feedback. And we're very much a collaborative bunch here. So like, if you have ideas about things, like we'd love to hear them and we'd love to hear what you're building. I know, awesome. Nice to meet you, Don, thank you.

Yeah, things are going on. Great meeting you guys. Well, that's it, this show's done. Thank you for tuning in. Fun conversation with a member of the community, Don McKinnon. So awesome having him on the show. As we discussed, we are gonna be live in Denver shortly Go to change law comm slash live learn more

$15 ticket for anyone free for change all members plus plus members that is change long.com slash plus plus It's better. You know what? It's been a while. It's been a while, but it is better again change law comm Plus plus and of course the beatak in residence break master cylinder. Those beats are banging, banging, banging. And hey, break master will be there too. So Denver awaits. Okay, that's it. This show's done.

We'll see you on Friday. So Thanks for watching!