The Standup with ThePrimeagen - Why software keeps breaking? (Lost Episode)

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

[Sponsor] Sentry: Catch, trace, and fix bugs across your entire stack. Use code: prime for $100 in free sentry credits → https://trm.sh/sentry [Description] Ever wonder why even the biggest apps and systems seem to break out of nowhere? In this lost episode of The Standup Pod, we dive into the hidden chaos of modern software development, technical debt, and why keeping complex codebases alive is harder than ever. [Hosts/Guests] Prime: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/theprimeagen Teej: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/teej-dv Trash: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/trash Casey: https://thestanduppod.com/contributor/cmuratori [Partners] Linear: https://trm.sh/linear Sentry: https://trm.sh/sentry [Socials] x.com/thestanduppod instagram.com/thestanduppod tiktok.com/@thestanduppod facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573286173150 [Other Places to find us] Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01A062kejnXFkJE01bjN5J RSS: thestanduppod.com/feed.xml Clips: @TheStandupPodClips Website: thestanduppod.com

Hey, we're doing a quick bonus episode of the stand-up. It's going to be short, it's going to be hot, it's going to be spicy. Casey is going to give us kind of a thesis on the change of software and where things are going and perhaps kind of his thoughts on the web world and on the programming world. Why does software always break? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway, sorry. Casey's going to give us a thesis on why does software always break. Casey's. This is a hot new thesis.

thesis. No one's ever seen it before. Except I posted it back in 2021. It's just gotten more true since then, Casey. It actually has got more true. And repost it. So essentially what I wanted to try and point out to people, because I don't think that this is appreciated enough. We talked about it in the previous episode of the stand-up that we did, where I was saying, like, all of, like, a lot of the things that I see people saying positively about AI coding. I don't necessarily disagree with. I just think they're not including this really important other part,

which is that a lot of the things that people are talking about doing with AI are things that no one should have had to do in the first place. They're being done because we've created such a bad programming environment that nobody wants to interact with it anymore, right? It's always breaking. It's always changing. It's got way too many layers of abstraction. Most of those layers don't work very well.

There's way too much complexity, like all this stuff. So, yeah, it's like that, I mean, it makes perfect sense why someone reached for an AI until because why do you want to do it, right? And so I just want to talk about sort of a separate part of that, which is just the very unreliable nature of software nowadays, and especially builds. Like, it's like, okay, I got this piece of software that I wrote. And, like, what are the chances that I could compile it again in six months or something?

Or a year or two years, right? Or even, not even compile. What's the chance that it'll run still if it uses things like Rest APIs with some web service, right? So, you know, I've got these different web services I'm using. So even if I don't have to recompile my thing, or even if it's an interpreted thing that runs and I'm keeping the same version of the interpreter or whatever else, it's going to make these API calls out to web services and those services could change. So what I did, and hopefully we can put the graphs up as I'm talking about them, but I posted these on Twitter. They're very simple. It's just taking the fact that, look, if you assume, right, and I say this in the tweet stream, that if you take the chance that something will remain working after a year is some probability.

So like 90% chance that this Twitch Rest API that I'm going to call, a 90% chance that they will have kept it the same a year from now. So that it will still work, right? My app sends this Rest API call out to Twitch. It expects certain response back and they're not going to change it in some breaking way, right, in a year. If we assume that we just have some probability like 90% for that that we can pick, we just imagine one, right? Or, you know, if we have to measure just imagine your head 90% or something like that. then the chance that your code remains working after X years is just given by P to the X times N,

where N is the number of those calls to things that you have, right? So you can graph this. And what I showed is that if you had a 99% chance that every API call you use, 99%, right? Which is way higher than anything in the web world typically has after a year. But 99% across all tools, the graph still looks pretty bad. bad, right?

You look, and you look at it, it's like, okay, after a year, it's like, it still looks pretty darn bad. It goes down pretty rapidly based on the number of tools. So you can see the graph I show is like one tool, two, tools three, tools four, tools five, just it goes down. I love that book. You see what I'm saying? A great Dr. Seuss book.

Yes. Great book. He captured, Dr. Seuss was, a lot of people don't know that he, the doctorate that he had was in computer science. Yeah. It's very, you know, he was software engineering. He was one of the few to become a professional engineer in software as opposed to the rest of us. Yes, yes.

That book, One Fish, Two Fish, Redfish, Bluefish, that's where two fish. That's where two fish comes from. He did that cipher. Yeah. Yeah. And along with Bruce Schneier. So anyway, so if you pick something less than 99%, like the graph for just 90%, it's very depressing, right? Hey, Brian, don't forget, scorn planning's later.

No. Do this! You've decided to put you on call. I can't do, I can't do, I can't do on call. You're on call? Lucky? What are you saying? With Century, on call is so much fun.

It has all of our errors, logs, spans, metrics, replays, And even releases in one spot. It has all the context we need to solve any bug. Even if half the time Centri beats me to fix anyway. Just because software development's torture doesn't mean on-call has to be. Wow. That's amazing. Does Century also attend my meetings? That's the best part.

No! Century can't actually make on-call fun, but it can make it less scary. Everything you need to fix real issues in one place. Buceroo. Got that 6 p.m. post-m. more than planning. Don't forget. Look at that. It's like nothing's going to work. Even at 90% chance that it remains working over a year,

not 90% chance it will break. 90% chance it will work over a year. It is dismal. Even with just one or two tools, it's horrible. But if you're talking about using seven, eight APIs, which is very common in software nowadays, forget it. You simply will not be able to use this thing.

if you update anything, right? And so I just wanted to underscore, like, this is not good, right? This is not a very sustainable way to work on things, and it has incredibly bad knock on effects. One of them is what we talked about, which is that no one wants to do this anymore. It's not satisfying to work in this world because you're constantly just, you feel like you're drowning, I feel like, right?

With all these, like, things, oh, this broke, this changed. Oh, they changed the way React Direct. Oh, we're doing this now. That web service doesn't even exist anymore. They canceled it, and now it's this other web service. That's not programming to me. That's like some kind of weird management feeling thing. It feels like you're a manager more than a programmer

because you're just trying to make this house of cards not collapse by constantly shuffling things around. And so, A, I totally understand where people are coming from when they want to reach for these AI tools. I totally get it. And I think that if I was developing software in this world, I would reach for them too. So, like, that's why when I say, like, I don't use any AI tools right now.

I'm, like, asterisk, but that's because I'm working on very specialized stuff. I'm not having to do these things, right? And so it's very obvious to me why I have a very different opinion. It's not that I, like, if somebody just don't understand the power of AI, it's like, no, it's like, I do actually understand the power of AI. I just think that a lot of the power of AI is really, it's only correcting pretty bad situations that we sort of created ourselves. That's mostly what's doing for you in these scenarios.

But also, I think this has so many bad effects and everything else. Performance security is the biggest one, but things are changing like this all the time. You just have so many exploit surfaces, and you have no idea. Like, if you ask me to secure some system that's using all of this kind of this way of working, I just have no idea. I'm like, how could I? Right? Here, Casey, I got a good one for you. Let me just show my screen really quickly.

Yeah. This happened just a little bit earlier. when I was doing Chessie, the vibe coding. My vibe coding good times right here. Let me just go like this. Am I, I, I think I'm not mirrored, right? Yeah, I'm not mirrored. This was the thing that I got back from one of the Claude 3-5,

which was I asked it because I was like, hey, I need to log in. We're going to use Twitch. And I need to be able to store, obviously, my session data, so I can make sure, you know, when someone makes an HP request, I know who I'm talking to. And so when I did that, this is the message I got back because I asked, like, is the session data secure? Like, if I just knew someone's Twitter,

which idea and username could I just like log in by them and they're like oh yeah totally you definitely can let's add a jWT like this was going to go out and then someone could just spoof me and then just you know and then just start yeah it knew when you asked it right like but i had to know to ask it because i've written this problem once before so it's like i know what i'm looking for and it's just hilarious about how like dangerous security issues actually are because if you didn't know this like how would you know to ask to do some sort of sort of JWT or some sort of cryptographically signed thing to verify you're from the server and not from someone malicious. Like you just wouldn't even know the aspect.

I didn't get to see your initial prompt. Did you initially say make it secure? How did it know you wanted a secure service? Okay, so again, that's fair. That's prompting issues. We can call that prompting issues that I did not tell it to make my login secure. It is funny, though. It is very funny that it's like, oh, you wanted secure?

I can do that. I love that that is the... got you. I'd like to raise a more serious point about that though, which is that if you imagine how things work currently, they're already bad currently, but let's just take a eye out for a second. If you imagine the way things work currently, there is actually one saving grace, which is everyone uses all these frameworks and all these different things.

They pile all this stuff together, and it's a nightmare to secure yes, but what is true about that? Well, you at least know that you are using this thing. And there are security researchers also looking at this thing. So when there is an exploit, you either know or could know. And when it's fixed, if you update, you get that fix. Right.

So if I'm using one of these things, I don't know what's a good example to pick here because I don't. Orchan. We can just use ExpressJS. ExpressJS just literally had this with the, or this was like six or eight years ago with Regix. expansions, you could do certain regex expansions and have a regex DOS effectively. Single requests take down an entire machine. So, I don't know what to pick because I don't know what would be fresh people's mind, but so something like that. So you take an ex-pl like that,

it's like, that's bad and that happened because you're using all of this other code that you have not secured yourself, and that's not a good thing. But it does mean that when someone finds it somewhere, you will at least know, and if you update your system quickly, you can mitigate that damage to some degree, right? If you imagine the alternative world where, you know, some open AI product is just crapping out exploits like that because in the system there's certain things it just didn't know or learned improperly that's like when it compressed them down and it's got its weights. It never really understood how to secure this one particular thing. Everyone who asked for that thing now has that in their own code base and there's no tracking because we have no idea how many people asked for something.

something that happened to hit that part, right, of the LLM's production chain. And so unlike the Express JX, it's where everyone at least knows they got jumped. In this case, we don't even know where all of those exploits are. They're everywhere, right? Yes. And then you also have the kind of like the creeping problem, or the leaky abstraction, which is everyone has that problem. A quarter of those become open source projects.

The LLM learns from those open source projects. It, you know, like it did, you know. Donald Rumsfeld, you know? Like Donald Rumsfeld talked about this, RIP. So it's one of those things where it's like, I just really do. This is one of the things too, is like

I don't actually dislike progress in some Luddite way. Like I like computers getting better and I like pushing the boundaries of what they can do. And people have this weird thing where they think if you're not pro AI, you're just like some kind

of person who just doesn't understand or doesn't progress. No, it's like, the problem is, I'm not hearing anyone solve these problems. If I thought that these things were incompetent hands where, like, people were making reason decisions and they saw the train wrecks and they were going to, they had ways of figuring out they were going to fix them, I would be much less worried. But like a lot of the stuff I see with AI is it just feels like people who don't really know what they're doing, applying these things way too early. And I think the costs to software are going to be really high. And, you know, these people are going to be nowhere to be found, right? They're going to have collected their huge

paychecks from companies that never even made money in the first place, which is where VC funded. They're going to take a bunch of that money, and they're going to be gone, and they're not going to clean up the mess, right? So in my mind, it's like, there's only two ways this goes. Either the AIs get so good that they can fix this problem with their cells. And just to show you how not anti-briced him, I'm praying for that outcome, right? Because it's the only one that I see plausibly averting this disaster, or B, they don't. They don't get that good, right? For the next 10, 20 years, no one can figure out how to make an AI that can really be good.

And then we're cleaning up this mess. And that is going to be the nightmare to end on nightmares. Because it is just going to, like, if you thought security was bad now and it is, oh my God, dude. If you thought performance was bad now, oh my God, right? It is going to be an epic nightmare. So I just think, I wish people took this stuff more seriously, and they're really not. And that's the part that really definitely gets me upset about it in that Casey-Rant way.

And so I'm just like, what if this doesn't work, guys? Like, what if it doesn't work? You're just, you put all your hopes on this someday getting way better than this right now. What if it doesn't? I'm so nervous. So let's, fingers crossed, that it works. That's all I would say. Yeah, two things.

Number one, Casey, since you like seeing computers push, you know, to their limits, You are a fan of JavaScript on the server then. True. True. That's nothing to bring that CPU temp up for a smaller amount of users than putting that JS on the back end, boys. But only one of the cores, TJ. Only one core. I would also like, can everything go through a MySQL query as well?

Everything. Yes. I mean every. Like there should be no data stored anywhere except in MySQL. Let's query every, every pixel of an image. We call it our SQL at this point. Our SQL. Our sequel.

It's our sequel. Yes, it's our sequel. My serious, my serious point is, um, I heard it framed this way a while ago. Justin, uh, Keyes, one of the maintainers of NeoVim was talking about. He's, he would be very interested to see. And like, this is more towards Vision 1 of AI being good at solving problems than, uh, than not is like, can we start seeing AI's reduce the entropy of a system? Yeah.

Right now, they're very, good, very good, we'll put quotes, very good. I mean, okay, 10 years ago, we would have considered it literal magic to type something in and have a website come out of any kind. Correct. So, absolutely. So we'll say very good. I'm going to say very good because it's like unfathomably good compared to what like my prediction for where we would get in my lifetime 10 years ago, right? The human language understanding part is like clearly light years ahead of anything we had 20 years ago. Yeah, and there's a bunch of other follow-off effects. So it's like, okay. But so it's like, okay, it can, add a bunch of stuff to my system.

I need a new feature. I have a clearly scoped bug request. I have some idea that I'm like, I'm the driver. It is my agent. Right. I think that's kind of where this is like, I'm sending it as my representative

to go solve these things. And it can like maybe do that. But it doesn't actually like if I just say fix the mistakes or like, I say make it better. Be more secure. Look at this code base makes more secure. Right. Sometimes it will pick some.

up some obvious ones, which also you're sort of like, okay, but then shouldn't you have gotten that the first round? It is kind of like a strike against the LLM. You have encoded inside of you the secure pattern, and you gave me the not secure pattern. That's stupid. I'm not writing the code anymore. Pick the secure one.

To be fair, to be fair, that is also what a human would do. It has learned correctly. If you ask them to write it, they will write the insurers. They're like, why didn't you write the secure one? It's like, I didn't want to. It took longer. I don't know there was this paper a while ago where it was like LLLLN, were like more tired in the winter time because they had it's time.

Sadder answers. They had sadder answers. They had sadder answers and they worked less hard when it was wintertime because all the training date is like, oh, it's January. And everyone's like, dude, I hate work. Yeah, they also got more accurate on math answers if you said, take a deep breath. Their accuracy actually like skyrocketed because it was just like, well, because people will, because remember, LLMs are just reflection of written human behavior, right?

Like, that's what it is. minimizing devices, right? So the next most likely thing of after try again and think smarter this time is to get a better answer. Could you try to get, but hey, let's take a deep breath. Like, relax for a second. Could you answer one more time? You'll get a, you'll literally get a better answer from most people because they're like, oh yeah, I feel better. Okay. Yeah. Maybe they solved that, whatever. I don't really know. They're doing all this. But my general point being, I don't currently see them overall being a thing that I can let go. And it redone. deuses the entropy of my codebase, which is that's, if it could do that, even just a little, we would be like way more on the track of your vision one where it's like, oh, we can just let this run on chromium. We'll just spend a billion dollars. We're going to run it for five, 500 million human years on chromium.

And like in six months, it's going to come out and chromium's going to be tight. It's no longer one gig per tab page. it's going to be 800 megs, boys, 800 megs only to load that static site. Right? And we'll be like, incredible. But there's not, I don't see that as a thing people are proposing of like we are close to. I get the zero to one.

I get like smaller features. I get like agentic things for different stuff. I've seen value in each of those. But like I'm not seeing anybody being like, we just let this run wild on chromium. It's a superhuman programmer. You know what I mean? Like, where is that? that. Yeah, I mean, that's probably because the direction originally of the research, right, is

generative, right? So, like, it's why it's called generative AI is because it's, you know, so it may, it probably is taking them a bit to course correct, to the extent that they even want to course correct. Yeah. Um, to, to do like, okay, what if, what if it's about refinement now, right? Um, although again, like reinforcement learning is, is, is kind of in that direction, right? So that is a, as a change. And so, you know, presumably they are kind of working on this stuff. Obviously, it's, you know, I don't work on AI, so I don't have predictions about how they're going to get there. But anyway, I do want to throw out, I do want to throw out something also about what you said a little bit earlier when it came to just like the security vulnerabilities and all that. I think one of the reasons why this will be the case is that we are also marketing a tool that gives the illusion of experience to people that don't have the nomenclature to understand the usage of the experience, right?

I mean, it's the same reason, like, if you've ever chopped wood, the first type of you. you chop wood, you almost hit off your legs. Because you like swing your axe and you realize your legs are too, like you have, you're like, oh my gosh, I almost just hit my shin with my own blood. Like you learned to stand different because you, it takes. Had a buddy who did that. Yeah, I know. It's a very reasonable thing for a lot of people to do. Yeah, you introduce me. Yeah. And so it's like, that's, that's what I worry about is it's, it's not, you know, security, hopefully it will get better. I assume that all things will, it will be better in 10 years than it is today. We, I think anyone will agree with that statement.

I'm not measuring how much better, all that kind of stuff is. But experience doesn't get better. People will still be the same people. So if you're marketing to the same people, they will objectively build bad stuff. And they'll objectively build insecure stuff. They'll do stuff that's crazy.

They'll be like, hey, I need to be able to access my database from the client. No, the L.M's not going to be like, hey, bro, that's a bad idea. They're going to be like, got your back. Well, that's what they're down. Client is downloaded. Let's go. That's what they're going to have to realize. Okay, here is the best possible endgame for AI.

right? Okay, I'm ready. This is the best possible endgame. So they get it all work. They get to the point that I want, right? They're like, okay, this thing is actually like a master programmer, right? And even better because it knows more domains, right? Like, it knows more domains than math.

Because most master programmers are in a certain domain, right? But it knows more domain. So it's great. We've got it. This is going to be great, right? And then what they realize is they've still got that obsequiousness thing going where it's just always like, oh, yes, absolutely. Oh, I'll do that for you, master's.

certainly. Right? You know what I mean? Yep. It has that kind of like really like like, you know, almost slavish kind of disturbing degree to which it's accepting your commands and doing what you ask. And what they realize is that being a dick was critical to master programming. You had to be able to look at the program manager and go, you are so stupid right now.

You have no idea, right? You had to turn them and go like, you don't understand Galactus's pain. You don't understand. And this thing, it's like, shut up and leave the meeting, right? And so what they have to do is they have to re-change that front fine-end, fine-tuning process they do afterwards to make the AI a dick. And then, then we have fantastic software. I love it.

I want this future. AI companies, where are you? Do this for me. Make the AI dick programmer who changes the world. please I will be so happy with that outcome you heard it here we're going to cut that clip and it's going to stop before Casey says programmer AI companies make me that they've had that forever they've probably been there since 10 years ago that already that got different okay one thing for I want to go back quick to Primes thing about the security

I don't the one thing I'm feeling somewhat like less optimistic about it is people will be able to build more complicated ways more easily to break systems because of AI. Right? Like, in the sense, so like, not only do I think there's going to be more services probably, it definitely in, I don't know about percentage wise, but certainly in absolute terms, more insecure things on the internet. I think that's pretty much undeniable because there's just going to be so many more things on the internet. Then the second thing is, it's going to, the cost of creating software in this world goes, dramatically down. Okay, well, what happens when costs go down? People make more of it. Malware, hacking things, DDoS bots, all these other, you know, and so it's like, there is something where I don't even know that we can say for sure, oh, security is going to be so much better in 10 years. The people making bad software, like evil software, bad software, they're already doing that, but evil software is going to be more because it's going to be cheaper, right? And it'll just be like, so I don't know. So it's just something like that's a scary thought actually, because if you

If you think about it, it's like, well, what would you have to do to make an AI system that was good at producing more secure software? Well, we have to write a counter agent that's looking for exploits, and we're going to run that, and that's going to be part of the feedback loop where we train this AI. Well, the AI training sometimes takes months to run, depending on how serious this thing is. That means whatever AI agent for finding the things that we can write we have today, we won't have. the AI can deploy those things for a little while, but the people who are, like, exploiting the exploits, they will have that system for finding the exploits today. So the cat and mouse game just got so the, I guess you don't know who the cat and the mouse is, but the exploit finders are always at an advantage because they will always have the AI system for finding exploits before the people

who have the one that can correct it, unless, again, there's some really revolutionary change in how these systems are made, right? And to circle back to your first point, Casey of the more things you have in your software stack, the more difficult it is to change anything because it's more likely to take down your entire system. People are still running Windows like XP. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like right now, you know, like in mission critical scenarios, they have Windows XP or like the joke I was saying for Fortune was like they got owned by some like 15 year old buggers.

What was it prime? It was some PHP vulnerability. I can't remember what it was. ancient php vulnerability all they was deprecated like four two before i started using php it was so old it was deprecated right i didn't even know php ran on windows xp in those days what did it yeah who knows i don't know but i guess you can also install it i was just like i'm crazy that they were those were contemporaneous because i was i was think windows seven i ran it or something i believe i did zamp server x-a-m p pp anyways it doesn't matter t j your point but my point though is like

people don't update when it's even available to them it's not like oh well well The hacker guys got the new stuff today and the new, the like fix comes out next week. So everyone's up to date next week. No. Not even close. Not even close. Like, so that part is a little bit like, I, just something to be wrestling and grappling with. And once again, like my point through most of it is like, yo, if you know things about software and you think more software is going to exist.

that is a nice combination of skills to have. I don't know exactly what software development will look like in five years, but my general thought process just from first principles reasoning is if you know about software and you know lots about it and you're good at it, and your prediction is much more software, that is a good combination of things to have. You will be valuable. It might not be hitting keys inside of Neovim.

I don't know, maybe Neovim will be dead in five years. and it's all the brain control thingy from Tesla with the implant you know whatever from Elon right and that's the only way we're coding sick but knowing more things about software

is still better because I'm going to say use a JWT instead of store this in plain text cookie on the front end right like that will be better it will be better all right so I also have one more

thing that I want to point out with all of these things and especially targeting people that are you know coders to make code like things is that how I learned how to code was that I first started off and they said, okay, this is an if statement. Somewhere between 1999 to 2005 is when I started kind of doing like basic exploration of code.

And so here's an if statement. Okay, this is a NIF statement. Okay, this is a WIllup. Okay, this is a WAL loop. Okay, I want you to print out a house. Okay, I want you to print out a diamond. You get to print out four diamonds. And now you'll notice it gets really annoying.

I want you to be able to do it by different sizes. Here's a function. Here's how you can make a print diamond function. And you know, and you go through all these things and you slowly go, oh, okay, okay, yeah, okay. You build up this kind of picture of how code executes, you learn to debug, you do all these things. A lot of people that are vibe coding,

I'm curious how discouraging it is to get dropped into a Nextjs app with SuperBase with, you know, OTH zero, with like 900 things. And you have to start by debugging a request response. Yeah. And you're like, what's a server? And you're like already into some sort of like crazy amount of difficult where it's like I started by drawing a diamond right like that starting point is vastly different

draw the owl but you had the middle steps I had all the middle steps they're literally given the owl be like draw the owl right it's just like that's really really really hard and so I'm actually curious about the success rate of somebody going through

and being dropped in hyper complex projects comparatively to hey you're young you have this free time we're now putting you through this school like maybe it's high school time. Hey, let's draw, let's draw a diamond. We're going to draw a diamond together. We're going to use QBASIC or some basic language, right, Lua.

And you're just going to do the simplest kind of form of doing things. I'm just, I'm curious what that does to somebody. Because I know there's going to be a bunch of success stories. There's going to be people that are super stoked about programming. They're super stoked about building a product. And they will figure out a way no matter what system you give them. But I wonder, like, overall, does this actually help make programmers or does this actually hurt the learning process?

There's also, I think, going to be a bunch of success stories of people who hate programming, but we're able to make whatever their business product thing is without really having to know anything. And that, like, is certainly going to happen. And you can say, like, maybe it's a net negative for programming or something like that or for the web, although probably most of these people are not building, like, foundational technologies. So hopefully, like, that is going to happen. Right. Yes.

They're going to make their own website. they're going to make Uber for cats and they're going to get to make Uber for cats and they finally don't have to recruit their other friend and tell them I've got the idea you do the code we'll split it 50-50 right they'll just be like I'm going to do the website. The Winklevoss Twins would have owned Facebook

they wouldn't have needed Mark Zuckerberg they would have owned Facebook but would they have had Justin Tipperlake say drop the the it's cleaner Yeah that you know that's the thing is I don't know would you have had that Yeah drop the the Facebook meta it's just cleaner

That's what he said. They didn't listen to him at the time. Zuckberg realized later. It took a little while. Took a little bit of sink in. How Justin Timberlake does. I will also give the inverse, which is that you can also ask AI any question, and you can repetitively ask stupid-ass questions over and over again,

and it will repetitively in the obsequious way. I'm not sure how to you turn that word, obsequiesiences. Obsequence is. Whatever that word is for saying it was subservient. I know the word, I just don't know, you know, that term, the lowly term. It will repetitively be like, certainly, I would love to help you. No matter, you know, unlike Stack or, yeah, Stack Overflow mods, you will not be marked as a duplicate or opinion-based. You will actually be given a nice, full answer every single time.

So maybe, maybe in the end it does actually help more people achieve their coding dreams. I don't know. I want to make sure that people don't think I'm just hyper-negative on all those things. I'm just, I don't understand how this affects the new people or how it affects learning. Because I also had no shortcuts. When my teacher said, build a resolve a maze recursively, I had to learn recursion at that point. There was no other option. I had to learn it.

I couldn't just get an answer. I had to figure it out, which is like, there's something there that is also very special. And I don't know where the balance is. I do think that there might be an argument there for like, can we make an AI that's been trained not to really give you full answers, right, for educational purposes? So it's like the rabbi GPD kind of right like like one that's going to sort of like it's going to give you a hint to help you get unstuck or to help help point you in the direction that you need to go. But it's not going to just tell you how to do the thing because it wants you to learn.

Right. And I assume that that is doable, you know, if you spent time training it to do such a thing because obviously they train it to do very complicated things already. They have, you know, post, their post initial learning phase stuff is very complicated at this point. So I'm assuming that this would, if someone put their mind to it, this would be very doable. Or maybe someone who already has. And that does sound useful as a learning tool, right?

Because you can't. A lot of people don't have the ability to ask, you know, a great programmer sitting next them or something. They don't have that opportunity. So. Yeah, the two that I know for sure, like, boot dev. Shout out. Promocos all the way for me and Prime, if you like that. Yeah.

Share the code. They've got a little, like, AI helper thing. And it's got special prompts for, like, each lesson and a bunch of, other stuff like that, right? So it's like, it can help you when you get stuck on a lesson. Yeah. And it's like not supposed to be like, here's the code. Right. I mean, like, I'm sure you could prompt objective, blah, blah, blah. It'll give it. It was like, yeah. Okay, but it's helping you to learn. So it's like, like, is at least its aim, its error minimization is, is towards that. The other one that I've seen is called like synthesis school or something like that,

which is like a bunch of AI tutor things, but they build it into like a bunch of lessons. And so like this is, I definitely think, uh, and I've said this before too. I think, I think like, People are underestimating in the like learning phase. If you are motivated to do it, LLM can be very helpful at doing it. Now, you have to make sure you're not getting gaslit into believing some function doesn't exist. But like basic, yeah, basic CS fundamentals, it's got all of those books loaded in. Direct. It's can probably you could ask it what's on, you know, like page 37 of algorithms, you know,

and it'll pull out. It probably knows. You know what I'm saying? Like it's seen it so many times on the internet. So we're like basics. So we're like basic CS stuff to get you far on a bunch of these basics. Like dude, you can be asking it.

You can be doing questions. You can be like explain that again. Explain it. You know, like in a way that I would understand if I like really like, I don't know, math. Like can you relate this to a physics example for me?

Because I understand physics, but I don't get computer science. Like people are definitely sleeping on that aspect of helping them out. But it's you got to do it yourself. So that's kind of. the drawback. But that's where the danger is because even if you're semi-desiring to learn, because it really is a desire magnifier. So it's like it really reveals your ultimate desires. Was your desire to simply get the thing done or was your desire to learn? And if you,

if you don't have your desires correct, it will, or at least in your head what you think of yourself versus in your actions, it will make it happen. Revealed preference. Revealed preference. That's the term I'm looking for. That can be hard. Like this is why I think like having an AI that specifically designed for this and you only subscribed to that service would be helpful for people because I don't know about you guys, but like if I want to eat more healthy food, the easiest way is to just only buy the healthy food so I don't have like bad food around the house, right? Yes. It's much harder if like I buy a bunch of like cake that I love or something and I'm just supposed

to not eat it, right? Just only eat one slice a week, Casey, come on. I'm just like, I want to eat the rest of the cake. And she's like, I bought natural popsicles for the kids. and I'm like, damn, I love strawberry. You know, like, it's just very hard for me not to want to eat them, you know? This is what I'm saying. For real, though.

And so I feel like the AI is a bit of a problem that way, which is why it would be nice if you had a service that was like Open AI or somebody, right? They have this one that's like education only, and it's just, it's specifically designed not to give you answers very quickly. Like, it's like, I'll dribble out some stuff. I'll give you some answers to it. Even has like this, maybe you could bake the constant time in there. It's like, if you haven't been working on this,

for a couple of days, I'm just not going to tell you anymore, right? You have to spend some time trying it yourself, right? I could see that being very helpful for people because, you know, inaccessibility is best. Willpower is second best, right? So if you can have, you know, if you could have that, that would be cool. And I think that would help bring out those learning abilities of the LLM so that people aren't sort of like too tempted to just ask you.

Like, just tell me how to do the freaking diamond, right, or whatever. Yeah, just give me the code. Yeah. Give me the code. And the thing is, is I also can't blame people for doing that. I would totally do that too. This is why I said, like, how the AI not do that is better, even though it's less, you know, it trains your willpower less, but willpower is hard. It's hard for everybody.

Also, if, like, if you get the experience of actually solving it for yourself a few times, then you're like, oh, it actually was kind of rewarding. Right. So, like, it really can help you, right? You're like, oh, the first, if you start working out and then, like, suddenly your time start going down on, like, you know, how fast it takes you to row 200 meters, right? and you're like, sick. That feels good. Like, initially I wasn't thinking it was feel good. I didn't see any change at all at the beginning.

You can get there. Like, same thing can be happening for some of these, too, where, like, you, in your brain, it's getting connected. Like, oh, working hard can pay off. Interesting. Interesting. Believe it or not, chat. Believe it or not. I like how this was going to be a super short, quick episode.

We are probably, like, an hour in at this point. We're 36 minutes in. And that's why I said, we're going to stop and start a new recording. So you guys, you guys on YouTube, you're. can like it like it like the video right now subscribe i like a comment say okay case you think for this bonus episode i never ask people i never do a call you know calls to action so hey like so he has tj do it press the subscribe button tj streams by the way slams by the way casey has computer enhanced yeah slam dance that and the bell what about that bell you got click that oh man get that bell

click that bell look at that bell there dube needs to do why does that bell not make a sound when you hit it. You know what I'm saying? Like, you get that little, that little Pavlovian response for smashing the bell. Ooh, that would be nice. Because someone at YouTube is still trying to figure out which Gemini prompt to type and get that to happen. It hasn't happened yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the sounds all wrong. It's because they're like, I'm not going to do it until two weeks before my review cycle so I can have a good review cycle. I can promoted to L2 and then I can trash this project to get back to L3. And then after that, we can just delete the whole downvote button and then I'll get promoted to a

VP of Upvote Downvote Systems and then we can close down YouTube because it's a Google product. Boom. Boom. C-suite, that's what we're talking about. C-suite material boys. All right.

Well, hey, that was fantastic. That's the end of the episode. Goodbye, everyone. See later. Take it to everybody. Terminal coffee and hair living