Changelog podcast episode #96 with Steve Yegge: https://changelog.com/friends/96

changelog-96.txt

Changelog podcast episode #96 with Steve Yegge: https://changelog.com/friends/96

Welcome to Change Log and Friends, a weekly talk show about
babysitting AI agents. Thanks as always to our partners at Fly.io, the
public Cloud built for developers who ship. We love Fly. You might
too. Learn more at Fly.io.

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Steve Yeggi. Hot take. Let's hear it. What do you got this time? The
death of the IDE.

Oh. Death of the IDE. That's my hot take. I've been coding for
probably the last ten days since I finished the the co co writing our
vibe coding book with Jean Kim, which we'll talk about. And, I just
wanted to get back to coding.

Right? And I've been I've been coding away, and all of a sudden, it
occurred to me that I hadn't installed IntelliJ versus code yet on
this new computer that I was right. It's like, dang. And I was I was I
was harking back. I was reminded of my buddy anthropic.

He was telling me that people don't use their IDs there
anymore. Right. They're all using cloud code to code. They're all
using the terminal console based coding where you just tell the agent
what you want and it goes and does it. And then you kinda like you
review it, but you can review it in line.

You don't really need your ID for that. And so they they don't they
don't fire it up. They fire it up, like, like, as often as you would,
you know, pop the hood on your Uber, open up the Chrome tools in
Chrome or something. Right? Wow.

It's so weird. And I found myself in it too. And so there's my hot
take, man. IDH. Wow.

And this includes, like, text editors, like Versus code,
etcetera. Like, all of it. You're just gonna be in the terminal
Yeah. Reviewing it in line or in the browser. I think the IDE will be
the thing that helps you manage a lot of those things.

Mhmm. And the code editor will still be available, but it's not gonna
be front and center anymore. You know what I mean? Right. I think that
the the focus will shift towards helping you manage multiple agents.

When is this future, Steve? I mean, it sounds like some people are
living there, but most of us are not there yet. When is this future?
Well, so, I have been just started to play with, you know, cloud four,
which has been out for a week, but I'm a little behind because of the
book and everything. So what I wanted to do is extrapolate from cloud
three seven's performance and cloud four's performance and see if I
could, you know, make any right projections about where I think it's
gonna be by the end of the year.

Because I have a bunch of here's the thing is I have a bunch of, like,
tests that I can give it. They're not as obviously, they're not, like,
comprehensive eval suites like a company would run, but I've been
struggling with a set of problems that that cloud's sonnet three
seven, which is the best coder out there, hasn't been able to get
passed. Real simple stuff, like, client server RPCs just really seem
to, like, confuse it or or or anytime you're going over some sort of,
like, you know, network boundary and you're trying to make it make
changes on the client and the server, it it was just outside of its
sort of cognitive bounds. Right? And you could always see it.

You could try it. You tried different prompting. It went on for
weeks. And I just I just found that I had I had a problem that was
slightly too big for it. And I've been giving I have probably seven of
these now, and I've been giving them to cloud four.

I gave my first one last night, and it just banged. Just did
it. Right? It's like, okay. So it's a definite definite increase.

I don't know how much, if it's 20% or a % yet. But what I can tell you
is that the way they're increasing and from, you know, experts like,
you know, Jason Clinton who's, you know, CISO at Anthropic, he told
us, you know, in April that, at the IT Rev Forum that, you know, AI
has been getting four x increases in cognitive power for
decades. That's that's been following you know, it's a function of
Moore's law. And, and they they the experts, you know, the the
consensus in the AI community is that there are probably there are at
least two more cycles left in that progression before something
changes. Mhmm.

It either slows down or or AI finds a way to speed it up. But either
way, it's going to be 16 times smarter than it is today in June, you
know, mid twenty twenty eight. Right. And what does that even mean?
Mhmm.

What does it mean for it to be 16 times smarter? Right. Does it mean
it goes from 10 IQ to 160 IQ? I mean, I don't I don't know what it
means, but it definitely means they're going to be smarter than
us. And so, you know, I got a chance to meet Dario.

Did I tell you guys about that? Dario, saw me in yeah. It was kinda
cool. Right? I was down there in San Jose at that IT rev, forum.

Jason Clinton was there. A bunch of people were there. It was really
cool. I got to meet all all kind of people who are my heroes. You
know?

I got to meet Kent back. It was really cool. Nice. And, anyway, like,
my buddy pings me and says, hey, man. Like, Dario wants to meet you.

I'm like, oh, okay. Cool. So, like, I, you know, I drive up there and,
I Uber up there. And, and I had a nice meeting with him, and it was
really cool. And he and he and he he talked about his vision of the of
the future.

Right? And, and how it's going to be, you know, affecting all of
us. And, I don't know if we're still in hot take land, but, boy, did
he have some hot takes. Alright. So I'll tell you what.

We can talk about that if you like, but I wanna close out my hot take
thing by saying, my talk with Dario suggested that they're gonna be so
good at coding a year from now. Call it a year that and and, honestly,
it's it's it's not gonna be like a step function. It's gonna gradually
get to the point where you're squeezed out if you don't do it this
way. If you're trying to code yourself Mhmm. I don't care how good of
a programmer you are.

Alright? You're a solid brute, solid programming muscle. I get
it. Alright? But the thing is these AIs turn you into the brute squad.

If you're trying to compete manually against somebody who's got five
or six AIs working for them, you're gonna lose. You're gonna
lose. Right? It's gonna be like, you know, trying to do the Tour de
France without without an ebike. You know?

People just don't do it anymore. Mhmm. So, so that's, you know, that's
the thing. Right? It's like, that's why I say IDEs are dying because
you will have to start working this way.

Let I'll give you a sneak preview. We talked to the director of
productivity, developer productivity at a big company that you've
heard of that's got a big presence in in AI. And, and they said that,
they said that a a fraction of their engineers have started adopting
fully autonomous agentic coding with coding assistance coding agents,
not Cursor, Windsurf, none of that stuff. I'm talking about there's
only three right now that are, like, really big, and then there's Roo
and Klein, which are the open source ones. But, you know, it's it's
just cloud code, codecs, and source graph AMP.

K? Those are the ones that, you know, that that actually work for
you. Most engineers out there today listening to us right now have
zero idea what's possible today, what you can do, what I'm doing right
now on my computer, which is writing code as we're talking. My my
babies are all busy. They don't realize it's coming.

I'm serious. They're like, you you you're like this mama bird trying
to keep your babies fed. Right? You know, they're in the nest going,
you know, work. Right?

It's just that's that's the new job, man. I'm an agent
babysitter. Like, I changed my title on LinkedIn to AI babysitter
because that's what I do now. Yeah. Man, the world is changing so
fast, and the world's gonna push back on it too.

That's a really interesting thing that Dario said was that tech is
going to push society harder than society is willing to be pushed. So
it's gonna cause a big train wreck. Like Luddite style? Like
Yep. Yeah.

So what are you babysitting over there? I mean, what are your little
babies working on? Well, oh my god. There was one I gave last night. I
gotta I gotta share this.

Everybody has to share this stupid vibe cutting story. It starts to
get old. Right? I gave it this thing, and it was so hard, and I
couldn't believe it. Right?

Right. I'm about to do that, and it's kind of embarrassing, but it was
a different sort of kind of problem that I gave it. And I and I was
really happy to see that it was so capable of of going outside of the
bounds, of just writing some code for me. So sometime in the last, I
don't know, month or six weeks as I was, like, screwing around with
eMax, you know, bringing it back to be my new IDE, but not for writing
code, for managing agents. Right?

Because EMAX is sort of a tool for managing shells, and so it's really
good for that. Right? And, and at some point, my shell, you know,
start up time, I had probably 40 or 50 shells running at EMAX at any
given time, and I can flip back and forth. They're all CDed into
different directories doing different things. Right?

So it was what you really wanted to be able to switch back and forth
from your agents really fast. It's way better than moving your mouse
between terminal windows and stuff. Right? So, like, it the shell
startup had gone from instantaneous to, like, I don't know, thousand
milliseconds. Like, it was slow.

Like, every shell that opened up so on emacs startup, which I had
opened 30 shells, it would, like, take thirty seconds just grinding
through opening shells. Right? And it was gonna be this tedious, nasty
slug of going through thousands and thousands of lines of emacs
lisp. Any one of hundreds and hundreds of functions that could have
been the the thing that slowed down my shells. Right?

I mean, like or slogging through Git to find out how much I've been
I've been changing stuff like crazy. It was gonna be, like, a big
project to figure out what was slowing it down. Right? So I said, you
know what? Screw it.

And last night late last night before I went to sleep, I gave it to
AMP, which is clogged for, I think it's on it. It might be Opus. And,
and I was like, yo, just figure out why my shell startup got so
slow. Just use Emacs remoting commands, use dash q, whatever, but
prove to yourself that you've made it faster. Fix the problem and let
me know.

I come in the morning. I was working, and I remembered it. I was like,
oh, I know one of my babies might be done. And I flipped over to it
fully expecting it to have, like, completely trashed that directory or
something because they will often just like they're like a toddler
with a chainsaw on ice skates. Just like they're just you gotta be
real, real careful of these things.

Right? It's a gamble. And, also, I, having been doing this for a
while, have, started I've started bypassing all permissions checks. I
disable all the permissions checks and just let them do whatever they
wanna do. Right?

I don't even put them in a Docker container. So I wouldn't recommend
that either. So I always wasn't sure kinda what waistline I was gonna
wake up to. And instead, I woke up and it was like, yeah. I figured it
out.

It was line six hundred and six hundred thirty three of this file
right here where it it had fixed a different error around tree sitter
grammar setup that had been plaguing me forever. It was also related
to the shell startup. And so it fixed all my bugs in Emacs, and it was
like, alright. I cleaned it all up and it's all ready to check-in
now. And I was just like, damn, man.

Damn. Right? This is this is where we're headed, man. It's like you
tell your agent what you need done, and it will do it for you. And it
elevates you to strategic thinking.

It elevates you up to, as we say in our book, the vibe coding book,
Jean Kim and I, it elevates you to the head chef of a kitchen where
you've got these AI robotic sous chefs, right, that are brilliant and
they're somewhat unreliable and untrustworthy or erratic. And your job
now as a developer, back to the death of the IDE, you're not writing
the code anymore. You're you're a manager now. And you know what? What
freaked me and Jen out Jean out was that we were using all these Git
commands that we had never used before.

And we were doing all these things in Git that we hadn't done
before. Really weird edge case cherry picks, three branch crosses,
blah blah blah, all this archival work with the AI, but still. And we
were like, why are we doing this so much? And we we we, like, puzzled
through it. Like like, we we puzzled through many, many, many, many,
many questions and problems to write this book.

Okay? And we discovered that the reason we were using all of these Git
commands that we hadn't used before was that we were managing teams
now. We weren't doing individual coding. Individual coding has a
certain Git workflow. Tee managing teams of agents that are working
I've just to complete that question, I've got the one that works on
eMax.

All it does is eMax. And that agent is sitting in that directory and
we have an understanding. Alright? That's eMax. You're eMax, baby.

And then I've got three more that are all working on my my old
computer game because it's a really big, gnarly old legacy code
base. And it's a really easy way for me to, test the limits of these
things and know when they've gone too far because it's my code and I
can see when they've done something really wrong. Right? Really subtly
wrong, maybe. And so, one of them is working on bugs, which is
basically just random anything I wanted to work on right now.

So it's idle about half the time. And then there's one that works on
this node client that's gonna replace all of my other clients, and I
don't know node or react or any other stuff. So I'm building it
totally vibe Cody style. Right? Just like telling it what I want.

Hooked it up to puppeteer. Right? Have you ever seen that before? My
god. I hooked it.

One of my colleagues was like, I was complaining that I was like, I
kept having to go. I fire up my web app, and I'd be like, the button's
in the wrong place. And I go back to Claude Cove or, you know, source
graph app, and I'd be like, the button's in the wrong place. And they
oh, okay. I'm sorry.

I'll I'll fix it. They would, like, you know, fix it. I go back, and
it would still be in a it would be in a different wrong place. Right?
So so one of my colleagues says, why don't you just use the Puppeteer
MCP server?

I'm like, okay. So I, like, I didn't know what that meant. Puppeteers
are are remoting a remote control sort of agent that lets that also
lets you screenshot. And so so I hooked it up, and and and I told I
told Claude, I'm like, go go use the Puppeteer MCP server to start
doing your development now. And it was like watching it was like
watching, like, a claymation stop motion.

Like, it popped open Puppeteer and started working really, really
fast. K? It looked like a time lapse of of an engineer working, except
it was going right in front of me. Okay? And it was like and it was
talking while it was doing it.

It was like, oh, look at that. That button's in the wrong place. I
better move it. Oh, look. This button's not even wired up.

Let me fix the handler for it. And it's just it's just working. Right?
It was life changing watching this happen. I was just like, woah.

I mean, like, seriously, I mean, like, you know, and then of course it
wrote, you know, a bunch of garbage, right? I mean, you have to like
temper this with. Right. They are in a weird, they're in a weird sort
of right, they're going through puberty right now. They're in an
awkward phase.

I don't know what's going on with them, but they're really, really
hard to manage. They're ornery and they're not for everyone. So this
coding agent thing I say, oh yeah, it's gonna take all the all the IDE
jobs. It's gonna take all the right you know, all that. You know, I
say a year because, man, it's gonna take that long.

Even if the technology didn't change at all, even if the models didn't
get any better from here on out, which a lot of people sort of tend to
make that assumption, they would still be good enough that all coding
would change to use this, or probably at this point, 70% of coding
right now would change to use this. Right? 78. Because you can build
up software around them, guardrails, checks, etcetera, in order to fix
the honoring or at least not to manage it. Right?

Exactly, Jared. We are engineers and and and and I mean, engineering
has been around for hundreds of years. And what engineers do is build
reliability on top of unreliability. Mhmm. And building those layers
in to make, you know, to wrap basically safe wrappers around the AI
that we have today would take us a year or two, and then everybody
would be using it anyway.

But the reality is the models are gonna get a lot smarter. In fact,
they are going to get smarter than us in the next two years. And, you
know, there's all sorts of speculation about what that's gonna
mean. To me, it means we're gonna work a lot faster, and that's all it
means. So I'm actually excited for it.

I'm excited for the tools to get faster. But it's people are having
trouble letting go. They're having trouble letting go. They're like, I
like coding. I I do like coding, so I'm one of those people.

I like coding too. Coding's great. Here's the problem, man. Using
these agents okay. Because, look, I've written over a million lines of
production code in my career.

Right? I mean, like, I've written too much code, man. You know? And, I
know how rewarding it can be. I know how much pride you can have in
it.

I know that high writer's high that you get while you're in the
groove. You know? I know all that. K? Unfortunately, for better or
worse, whatever, like, the coding agents are like a slot machine.

They are as addictive as a slot machine. Okay? They have you part you
pull a lever with every query and hoping for a good outcome. Like,
please don't trash my Emacs directory. Right?

And some the the potential upside is just incredibly high, and the
potential downside is incredibly high. And and so you get these
dopamine hits followed by the, oh, one more try. What it'll get it on
the next try. Dude, we had to drag three people off stage in April at
the San Jose IT Rev Developer Leadership Forum. These were, like,
experienced people my age, you know, been around, you know, of coding
since the eighties and nineties, up on stage doing vibe coding demos
of stuff that they right?

And we would have to, like, go up there and drag them away because
they couldn't close their laptops. Right? I am so addicted to this,
multi agent workflow stuff that I have to have a plan every night to
get my computer closed because I need to go to sleep. And so I, like,
I have to tell myself, okay. What if I just gave them all like
something that would take him fifteen minutes and ran out of the room,
right?

You know, it's because as soon as they stop working, you feel
guilty. Dude, it's so weird. And that dopamine, man, it never gets
old. So like the the the the it's like, yeah, it's fun to go on a
walk, but dogs love to stick their head out the window, and when the
car's going 50 miles an hour, because you just get all the smells at
once, that's kind of what multi agent coding is like. Kent Beck said,
it's like riding a toboggan down a ski slope, Right?

You're never, like, really in control. You could steer. Right. Right?
It's absolutely exhilarating.

And, you you know, and it's also astonishing what they can get done if
you if you have a very, very, very keen watchful eye on them and you
give them the smallest tasks humanly possible. There are a lot of
other rules that we put into our book. You have to it's a steep
learning curve, but once you get there, you'll never go back. So I
guess I I think maybe multi agent is the key then because I find
myself with one agent just sitting there waiting for it to do
stuff. And I just get I lose my patience.

I'm like, I'd rather be coding because I'm just watching you do
it. And you're just thinking about it. And so maybe I just need more
things going on to not lose my concentration, or what is it? Like, I
don't want I don't I guess maybe babysitting one toddler, even if they
are on ice skates with a would you say a flamethrower? Chainsaw.

A chainsaw. Chainsaw. Chainsaw. Chainsaw. It's It's just not all that
exciting to me.

But if I had maybe, like, a bundle of them, six of them, then I I'd
keep myself busy. Did you ever play the greatest Assassin's Creed of
all time? Assassin's Creed two, I think I think it was. No. I remember
the first one by It was the one where, like, it was the one where you
had, like, towards the end of the game, you would get, assassins to
work for you.

Mhmm. And they would go off on missions, and they'd assassinate
people. Mhmm. Right? And I was like, I'm not gonna like that because I
like assassinating people.

Does this sound familiar? It would. And it's just, you know, it's so
satisfying that, you know, jump off the wall and everything and, you
know, onto them. And and I was like, this is this is boring. This is
like watching, you know, people golf.

Right? Why would you, And, you know, it's fun while you're doing
it. But then I played that part of the game and found it was
incredibly addictive to send all of my agents off on missions, give
them instructions. Maybe they'd come back. Maybe they wouldn't.

Maybe they'd die. Mhmm. And for some reason, managing them was, like,
really fun. And they dialed it in to where, like right? And I'm
getting the same same vibes from managing multiple agents.

Right? It's like, it's you have you can give them great autonomy. And
and with every model release, you can give them more autonomy. They
can do longer and longer tasks, you know, without your without your
help. And we're getting really close now.

There's a lot of people right now, as we're speaking, who have
successfully managed to get other agents to do the babysitting for
them. Because most of the babysitting that you most of the babysitting
you do, actually, we talk about it in the book, is, you make them
verify their work again in multiple ways. Right? Because well, it's
it's very complicated. But, basically, they can only do one thing at a
time, and they can only do one thing they can only do one thing well
at a time.

So you can't say, solve this problem and do it elegantly and write
tests for me because it'll it'll what it'll do is it'll do a half
assed job of all three of those things because it only has so much
room in its context windows, okay, in input and output. And so it will
do its best to shape a perfect solution to your to within its
constraints to your, you know, to your question. And so, what you have
to do is you have to say build this thing. Okay. New conversation.

Take a look at this thing. Make me a plan to make it better, to make
it, like, you know, elegant. Okay? Alright. New new conversation.

Take this plan, and now make it elegant. Okay. Now, you know, for
actually, first, you'd write the tests, then you'd write the code,
then you'd make it elegant and so on. But there's there's these passes
that you have to do through the code with the LLM, with the agent, or
else or else it will try to do too much and it will fail and it will
piss you off. Right?

So it's super frustrating working with these things because they're
kinda like humans and you get all these expectations about them, and
then they go off and do something really weird. Right? And, you know,
you tell them to paint a line in the street and they paint it right
over your car, you know? And you're just like, woah. Where's the
common sense?

So, like, there's a there's a real art to this. Mhmm. And and I and
and the funny thing is it sounds horrible. It sounds like the worst
work ever. Right?

It sounds like so much worse than what we used to do, but it ain't. It
isn't. Right? Because like what's happening is you're now the senior
engineer. Your expertise is super important.

You're a trained engineer and you're like, you know, you're you're
looking at the work of a very smart but still clearly very junior
engineer who doesn't really know what you want and can't really look
at the whole code base yet and just making best guesses. And you have
to guide it and steer it and keep it on the rails. And there's
automated ways to do that. There's prompting ways to do that. There's,
like, your own personal habits ways to to to do that.

And you gotta develop workflow. It can take months to get to get into
a groove. I made a bunch of terrible mistakes. Jean made a bunch of
terrible mistakes. You get you get over you get overconfident.

You know? Mhmm. All kinda it's a new it's a new way of working, and
that's really scary to a lot of people. That's an insane hot take from
the IDE. It is.

It all follows from the death of the IDE. The dopamine hit, though, I
think that's something to key in on because I think that's something
that I'm personally experiencing, in my journey, I suppose, is this
like you said slot machine. I think that's kind of it. It's like, let
me probe it with one more thing, with one more direction, with one
more refinement to what we'd worked on previously. Don't do too many
things at once.

Give me one artifact and then refine that, refine that, refine that
kind of thing. But there is this dopamine hit because it kinda works
and thinks not so much faster, because that's obvious that it
does. But it thinks in, like, uniquely different ways that our
cognitive human minds get overwhelmed or can get more easily
overwhelmed. These things can get overwhelmed as well, but when given
a task in a way that's like do this and just this and come back with
that, and it's that that Volley back and forth like you talked
about. That dopamine hit that gets that hits me at least is like, wow.

I'm like I'm like literally I feel like I'm I am at least. I'm
unearthing something brand new. You know, and there's something like
to that is like this new artifact, this new way of thinking, this new
model of whatever it might be is is now a thing, and I can I I'm
making it happen with this with this magical box, let's just say? But
that dopamine hit that hits you, that's what I think is what will
drive folks from from like you said on stage, you gotta pry them off
the terminal or the machine because never have we been able to
visionary and direct at this pace with this level of clarity and
expectation of what it can and can't do. Now obviously there's, you
know, it's it's gotten better and as you said, it's it's intelligence
will get better, it'll be smarter.

But at each iteration, we've gotten faster and faster and better and
better at it. And now with the multi agent things like, if you can if
you are a visionary and you can babysit some agents, then that's now
your job. And your job is not to write the code anymore. Your job is
to direct where the code can go because you have that higher level
expertise that no one else has. The challenge, though, I'd say is,
like, the humans that were juniors or what we've called or
traditionally called juniors, how in the world do we get senior
engineers?

Do we is that is the death of the IDE the next thing? Is the next
thing after that the death of the senior engineer or the junior
engineers? Like, it's just gone because they will never go from junior
to senior, what we've called junior to senior because there's no path
to that? Gotcha. Gotcha.

Okay. So great question. No. Actually, we're gonna have more engineers
soon. There's a pause right now, as people are kinda like figuring it
out.

And so the market is real for engineers right now because they're
trying to figure out how it works. And the AI does have to reach a
certain sort of basic level of safety, I think, to be able to roll it
out to, like, nine to five enterprise workers. So we're in a we're in
a window right now that kinda sucks, but we're headed out of
it. There's gonna be an explosion of productivity, and it's going to
spill outside of software engineering. K?

The game of building software is about to head into the
crowd. Alright? Starting with product managers, UX designers, they're
all vibe coding right now. I mean, like, we see it at many companies
right now. That's one of the cool stories I wanted to tell you guys.

You know, business owners, marketing, sales. I mean, we're talking
about, like, analysts. All these people are vibe putting. Now what are
they doing? They're you know, it's the classic cliche, you know, they
all need software, but they they can't get it from engineering because
engineering is busy.

Yeah. So they have to go to some SaaS vendor. Right? So instead, what
we're seeing is that they're replacing their their their SaaS stuff
with with in house products that they built that they wanted to their
own spec using Vibe coding and AI. And then guess who they went to to
get it vetted?

Engineering. They went to a junior engineer. Right? I don't know
what. Senior engineer senior engineers were all busy, and the junior
engineer was perfectly capable of looking at this Python code that was
doing some web server thing.

Right? And a voila. Junior engineers, yeah, they may be junior, but
they're also engineers. They're trained. Right?

And that's gonna be an incredibly vital role in this new ecosystem
where everybody's ride coding. You're the expert. So we see it
already. Interesting. So you're saying that there is hope for the, in
quotes, junior engineers out there that are not senior, don't have
that, you know, principal engineer title or never will, or it would be
a long time till they might even have the the experience to to get
there.

You're you're saying that we need those in traditional terms, junior
engineers far more than we ever thought we would. And tomorrow Far
more than we ever thought we would. They're gonna be fine. There's
tons and tons of them. The way that you do.

I mean, in a sense, we're all junior engineers again on one axis,
which is how the software is actually produced. It's changing so
much. You you as a junior engineer will be able to get to your sort of
feeling senior by just paying real close attention to what the AI is
doing and asking them questions and making them explain it to
you. That's what I do. Right?

When I'm making it, when I'm doing node stuff and it does something I
don't understand, I'm like, so what is that? You know, just just just
make it say it. Right? So that's how you get get to be better. I mean,
the AIs will eventually be our teachers.

You won't learn it from senior engineers. You learn from AIs. And so
it'll happen. But the really cool part of it is that that that once
people realize that vibe coding is like, it's better than taking
pictures, it's better than making movies, even making software,
suddenly now you're a wizard. You can do anything.

Right? Once once this sort of really permeates in, there'll be some
killer apps with people and stuff. And and and largely in enterprise,
it's gonna it's gonna start there, I think. Well, friends, you know
I'm excited about the next generation of Heroku. Who isn't?

Well, I'm here with Chris Peterson, senior director of product
management for Heroku at Salesforce. Chris, tell me, why should
developers be excited? So the firm platform, what does that mean to
you as a Heroku developer? It means a few things. One, it means that
we're going to be working on investing in our ecosystem.

One of the standards we're adopting, OpenTelemetry, is a big step up
over the way Heroku's done metrics traditionally. We had a piece of
technology called L2 Met that converted logs into something that kind
of approximated OpenTelemetry metrics. But now there's like a real
standard. There's like a real toolkit, and there's a whole ecosystem
around Otel. And so being able to have open telemetry dashboards out
of the box and our partners that tap into all of your Heroku telemetry
so that you don't have to go build a dashboard and you're not
necessarily constrained to what we provide on our dashboard is exactly
the type of value we're seeing out of this.

So it's happy in the ecosystem set. Similarly, cloud native build
packs. One of the features that I'm excited about is supply chain
security that we're gonna be working on later this year, but that was
an open source contribution to the CNB project itself. Bloomberg
actually contributed support for software bill of materials
generation. And so the things that I'm excited about are the things
that developers are excited about, which is we're not going it alone.

We're not building a proprietary solution. We're using the same tools
and technologies as other superstars in the industry are. And we get
to play into that ecosystem effect. A huge part of Heroku's value has
always been the elements marketplace, being able to bring in databases
and key value stores and telemetry and observability tools. And so
renewing our investment in open standards lets us renew our investment
in our ecosystem and our marketplace.

Very cool. So how is this next generation and what is coming changing
the game for you and the product team? To me, on product team, let's
me put out a road map that's way more ambitious than what I could do
if we were trying to build some of the primitives
ourselves. Kubernetes has really established networking
technology. That means our road map has a lot of networking features
that our customers have been asking for for a while that we're going
to be a lot slower to build on the Cedar Stack than they are on the
first stack.

And so you should be excited about the open standards and the
modernization there on day one. But the thing that I'm excited about
is what we can do by the end of the year in terms of roadmap and
features, Not just getting to parity on some of the more nuanced
features that we have on Cedar, but also the new things that we could
build, taking advantage of AWS VPC endpoints, which is something that
the Salesforce customers have wanted for a while. There's a huge
number of these features that just wouldn't be possible to get done
this year otherwise, and that's where I'm excited. Very cool. I love
that.

Well, friends, the next generation of Heroku, I'm excited about it. I
hope you're excited about it. I know a lot of people who have been
really, really looking forward to the next thing from Heroku. To learn
more, go to heroku.com/changelogpodcast, and get excited about what's
to come for Heroku. Once again, heroku.com/changelogpodcast.

Let me talk a little bit, actually. Can I talk a little bit about how
this is affecting Teams enterprise? You guys might You said it's gonna
start an enterprise? I imagine it starts with, you know, individual
business startup people. But you're saying it's gonna start an
enterprise?

Well, I I guess there's both going on right now, so it's it's starting
in both. Yeah. Because the the the obviously, we're seeing, you know,
VCs tell us that Vibe Coding is is writing most of the code in start
ups and so on. But but that's for that's engineers. Like, I'm not
seeing, like, my neighbor's Vibe Coding yet.

That would be the sign to me that it's really spilled out there, but I
am seeing my neighbor PM's vibe coding. So in that sense, it is
actually starting an enterprise ahead that that the idea of
nonengineers using it to to code, alright, to to do something
real. So, like, UX designers use it to actually fix the UI instead of
putting in a ticket to make the engineer do it. And once you work with
it that's Daniel, our UX designer at Sourcegraph. He's doing that.

He's badass. Why would you ever wanna work with the UX designer that
isn't going and fixing the UI Yeah. Instead of tugging on your shirt
sleeve. Right? And Why don't you do it?

Agent. He gives them agency. He is much happier with his job because
he doesn't have to wait on us. Mhmm. Right?

And we're happier because we don't have to go and, you know, implement
things for him that's that's that feel like right? They they they
ought to be trivial, and now they are. They are. And so this happens
with product managers too. Right?

They they can go and get stuff done without waiting on engineers. And,
and so that sounds like, oh, gosh. We need fewer engineers. But
ultimately, they need a human to be accountable for that software, and
they're gonna want an engineer to review it. And that's why we we
always come full circle to everybody's gonna need a lot of engineers.

And I think that engineers will become a gig economy inside of
enterprises. And I and I don't think it's just engineers. I think that
all special skills is specialties from finance to product management
to design. All of them are gonna become like a gig economy the way
this, this thing plays out, okay, with everybody vibe coding. Because
because let me tell you something.

Jeff Bezos predicted all of this twenty five years ago. Okay? The guy
was so far ahead of his time, and I had no idea I worked for him, and
we didn't know. So his two pizza teams are making a sort of resurgence
right now. Do you have you heard of his two pizza teams, the Amazon
team?

Yeah. Recently. This is like, your team should be the size where you
could feed them all with two pizzas on that. Feed them with two
pizzas, but but more than that, the team can is cross functional. It
consists of a bunch of experts from different domains.

Like, you know, one it has one one person that's a customer service
from from the CS department, right, to to represent the customer. And
there's one from product, right, and there's one from there's one
engineer and there's one finance, whatever, and they all work
together, you know, one supply chain, whatever that happened the
problem is that you're trying to solve, and they get an objective
function. They get a fitness function of that they have to define and
Bezos had to approve that was going to measure. They had to drive it
up into the right. Mhmm.

And, and and, the one the team that I ran was customer contact
reduction. And, it was really interesting because we had the sort of
autonomy and we had the sort of agency and the authority to go and
make the changes that we needed to make to the to the company. K?
That's really hard to pull off if you don't have a Jeff Bezos there to
to, like, pull out and say, well, if you don't do it, Jeff's gonna
come. Right?

You can't do that at most companies. You know? It's really hard to get
teams to cross functionally coordinate. That all changes with Vibe
coding. Okay?

Now product manager, you can put a team together that's a two pizza
team, and you don't even need an engineer on it because the the
engineer can be the AI. Mhmm. All of them now have access. You're all
junior level specialists in all specialties now. All humans are now
junior level specialists because all specialties are available via the
AI.

Now you you're not a senior level one. You're not able to tell whether
the AI is bullshitting you or not. That takes a lot more work and time
and effort. But but you can get to a basic like, you know, how how
often is an engineer needed some help from a designer or needed some
help from a a business owner or from a product manager and had to wait
a day or had to wait a while. And it wasn't it wasn't a it wasn't a
problem specific to their project.

It was just a general, I have a product manager question, that kind of
thing. So what you do is you use the AI to get all of the stuff done
that you need to done get that you that you can get done cross
functionally, and then you go to each in each in each
dimension. Security. We already do this today. Security is a great
example.

They are a consultant organization Sure. Company,
fundamentally. Right. K? Everybody becomes like security.

You with me? And people go around at the end of their project. Just
like at Google, you launch launch engineers were a specialty at
Google. And and when you're getting ready to launch a new service,
you'd go to a launch coordination engineer, and you'd be like, yo, LCE
helped me. You'd schedule time with them, and they would sit down and
walk you through the checklists and the playbooks and all that,
preflights, and make sure that you were doing it right.

Mhmm. Imagine all software development working this way in enterprise
from now on. Every team is this two pizza team who is empowered to do
whatever the hell they want. They're able to move independently from
the rest of the organization. They're decoupled.

They're the the blocking is minimal. They could even speak to each
other better, guys. An engineer and a PM historically have always been
kinda dogs barking at each other because they're kinda set up at odds,
and, also, they don't really speak the same language. There's the old
jokes about how, you know, end of day means you know, Friday means,
you know, morning to a PM and evening to an engineer, you know, in a
scheduling terms, things like that. Mhmm.

All of that stuff gets smoothed over and kinda goes away when the PM
can kinda sort of query the code base themself. And they can get
engineering answers to engineering questions, and they can even
prototype and do, you know, x engineering exploration by themself. And
then when they come to the engineer, they are so much better prepared
to have a conversation, a high bandwidth conversation with the
engineer. Same goes the other direction. Engineers don't have to
fumble around when they're trying to talk to a UX person or a finance
person.

Everybody is getting smarter here. Everybody's getting leveled up, but
we're all getting more important for each other because in the end, a
human has to be accountable for auditing and reviewing all of the work
that AIs do. You see? Yeah. Yeah.

So it's I, to me, it's this massive gig economy opening up. It is so
cool. I'm so excited for it. I'm still not getting this gig economy
part. How does that translate into gig economy?

You mean I need I need a product manager, man. Right. We only need a
product manager for one week on this project. Okay. It's gonna take
but but let's get one for that week.

So you reserve one. Right? A human. You don't want an AI. You're
already using an AI.

You want a human to come and look at it. That kind of thing. You see
what I'm saying? Yeah. I see what you mean now.

Interesting. So how will that change enterprise then if if, if those
folks are all floaters, essentially? Can they go from is there no
enterprise for them? Are they do they sit above all the enterprises
and they just gig for all the enterprises? I think what happens is, so
my friend Brendan Hopper is a CTO technology at Commonwealth Bank
Australia, which is their central bank.

He thinks about this a lot. He he characterizes this this big
centrifuge, a centrifuge that's stratifying people. It's been doing it
for all of civilization, but it's super fast right now. And the
stratification right now, the people that are getting drawn up to the
top in enterprise by this inexorable force are the ones who are good
at AI and good at Yeah. Multiple AIs, good good at the cognitive
overhead of managing multiple work streams at once, and good at
dealing with other human beings who are also managing AIs.

Those become the most important skills, and it doesn't matter if
you're junior or senior or what your credentials are or your degree,
whatever. All that matters is can you use AI effectively? Because some
people can, and they're making you look bad if you're not. Trying to
think of an analogy because I feel like this is burgeoning for us at
this moment, and, obviously, that's why we're having this
conversation. But in a year or so, maybe five years from now, like,
it's just the way.

Today, it's managing AIs. And tomorrow or the future in the, you know,
close future is like, it's just how it works. And I'm thinking, like,
maybe side roads versus, like, highways. You know, you can get to that
side of town with all the back roads, and then you put a toll road
in. And it sucks because you gotta pay the toll, but it's the way now.

That's how you go there, because who would take the twenty five minute
route when you can go the five minute route? I don't know if that's a
one to one, but it's like there's a new way now, and it's just the
way. Yeah. That's fair. That's that's that's a good analogy.

We actually we likened it to, yeah, you you gotta walk 40 miles across
the desert. You know? Would you start walking yourself, or do you just
wait for somebody to come along with the car? Because you know it's
coming, like, if you need to be able to get the AI. But, yeah, if you
look at we had a really good one, an analogy for, for this, which is
computer graphics.

I was in computer graphics in the nineties, and I was looking at the
work of people who were in computer graphics in the seventies and
eighties. Mhmm. And there was a lot of excitement back then. And if
you got too if you got too excited about what we were doing at the
time, which was rendering polygons, kind of starting to do scenes with
lighting and for different angles, really early all static. Right?

If you got too caught up in that and you're like, I like rendering
polygons, you're screwed because all that got moved into the hardware,
like, the next year. Right? NVIDIA started doing it in in in, you
know, in their chips. And, and and gradually, all the graphic stuff
started moving down in the hardware, and you couldn't get too attached
to any of it. It just was changing.

It just that's the like you say, Adam, it's that's the way it
was. There wasn't any fighting it. It just was happening. And and what
you had to do is you had to change. And so what what the what they
taught in school and what they did at work and what they interviewed
for all changed in graphics over the last thirty years to where now
it's completely unrecognizable.

Kids can make mods for Skyrim using these tool kits, Unreal Engine,
and all the dirty the the concerns on your mind as a graphics
programmer today are so infinitely higher up the abstraction ladder
and more interesting, by the way, than rendering polygons, k, that I
I'm mad at everybody who's holding on to coding right now because you
have so little imagination. Alright? And that's probably why you're
holding on to it. You're scared because you're gonna need some
imagination. Because the people who will excel in the new in the new
economy where everybody can build is the ones who have taste, the ones
who have imagination, and the ones who can make stuff that other
people like.

And that's scary to a lot of people who all they wanted to do is build
stuff that other people came up with. I saw that, similarly to the
state of the job market for engineers is that there's a lot of and I I
empathize obviously with anyone in scenarios that are just challenging
because of not having a job or not having an opportunity or having to
deal with I've submitted my resume I've got nothing back etcetera I'm
I I get that but this person's perspective was that now engineers or
this market that's that's sort of, saturated with talent and not
enough placement is is essentially now you actually have to
network. Now you actually have to know what you're doing. Now you
actually have to have taste. And so while you can sort of just skate
by with some skills because you can produce something, but now you
actually have to involve yourself with and visionary with other humans
and collaborate in unique ways.

And you actually have to have a network or care about your your fellow
human beings around you. Like, that's what networking is. Like, I care
about you not because you can get me what I want, but because I care
about your life. And I ask you about those things. I truly care.

And as a result of that, we now have a closer bond. So you give me
opportunities you would not give to somebody else because you like me,
or I like you, or you care about where I'm going. That people actually
have to, I don't want to say it like this, but they actually have to
work beyond their skill set. They actually have to work in other
bounds and boundaries, whereas before it just wasn't as required, and
you can sort of skate by. You know what's funny, is all other
knowledge work, effectively all knowledge work, Right?

Everybody from doctors, lawyers, FBI agents, school teachers, right,
therapists, dentists, all knowledge workers, you know, dozens and
dozens of occupations I could name have continuing education
requirements. You have to continue learning to keep your job. Software
engineers have never been measured by that yardstick. We have to stay
good at our job in order to keep our job, which is actually
weaker. You can find jobs where you don't have to learn anything.

And that's what a lot of engineers do. They they get a specialty. They
may be really smart working on really hard problems, but they find,
like, a a a comfortable sort of sandbox in some company that needs
their domain expertise. It could be anything. They could be an SRE.

They could be a whatever, but they're kind of, like, isolated them
into this thing, and they never have to learn anything outside of
their domain or the sandbox, like, ever again. Learning is
optional. Right? They're good at their job, but they're not
learning. Like, they don't have to stretch out of their comfort zone.

Every other profession does have to. Right? Pilots have to train on
new airlines or whatever, you know, new new plane models, you know,
when the old one gets retired. You know? And we sometimes have to,
like, learn new tech, but it's kind of at our own pace and stuff.

And so now software engineers that that, you know, have been dodging
that requirement for all these decades are finally faced with this
notion that that companies are going to expect them to learn how to do
this workflow. And I tell you, man, we we, you know, we we talked to
director I was telling you, we talked to a director of productivity at
this big company who told us that the engineers there are starting to
do this, and they're starting to make the engineers that aren't doing
it look bad. Now this is becoming a serious problem. He says that,
okay. Let's just arbitrarily I don't know what his his exact numbers
are, but let's just say arbitrarily, 10% of your engineers start pick
they pick up a Jenta coating, and they become five to 10 times as
productive.

And what does that mean five to 10 times as productive? Well, the
director told us, okay, was that they're they're submitting, you know,
double digits more PRs per time unit per unit time than their
colleagues who aren't using agent decoding. Now the AI submitted PRs,
they get turned back more often, but the ones that are making it
through are dwarfing the work of the people who are doing it by
hand. And performance review time is coming. K?

And this is a serious, serious problem because there's such a
discrepancy. It's such a disparity in productivity between the people
who have picked up, you know, cloud code, codecs, source graph AMP,
right, and given up their IDE and all that other old bull they used to
do. It's so big that they're gonna be embarrassed at product at at
performance time. Right? What are they gonna do?

So they're literally sitting down and starting to have HR legal
discussions about whether they need to get rid of all of the
engineers, which right now are a majority in this big company, who are
refused to switch over to Agenca coding because it's clear that it has
proven itself to be better, and they're refusing to do it because of
all the things that you and I have have just talked about. It requires
you to come out of your comfort zone. It requires you to enter and
learn things new, and it requires you to interact with other
people. And your job role is gonna change. And all those things are,
like, just they're just, unwelcome news to a lot of people.

And it's really right? It's a a and the sad thing is, think about my
graphics analogy again. Would you rather be rendering polygons or
building Skyrim mods? My god. The answer is so obvious.

We're all gonna be so much more productive. We're all gonna be and and
your engineering skills are all gonna be incredibly valuable. Trained
engineers will be able to do more with AI than non trained engineers
at all times always. Right? So just like we're headed into an
incredible new world.

Mhmm. Incredible. Stop digging your heels in is my advice to
people. Mhmm. Resistance is futile.

And it's it's not only futile. It's stupid. You're holding yourself
back. You're gonna have a lot more fun in the new world once you get
over the hump. I don't disagree with that, generally.

I mean, there's some purists out there and it's hard because it's such
an art and it's so subjective to to have this blanket view of it. But
I think what I think about, I suppose, is what is the point, right? If
you're a software engineer or somebody who's called themselves a
software engineer or developer, whatever you want to call yourself,
you have this skill set and you produce results. And that's the point
is to produce the results. But if you if you sort of resist this
scenario, what is the point of the work you do?

It's to solve a problem and it's to to capture is to solve the problem
of somebody who at some point you mentioned Jeff Bezos. He's probably
one of the most famous visionaries in our time. Right? He's so famous,
have done so much and was ahead of his time in some respects and in
many respects in terms of like two pizza teams or predicting AI or
whatever. I I heard a thing recently that Zuckerberg predicted AI as
well, but who didn't?

Or no, it wasn't Zuckerberg. It was, Chris Wollstrath, actually. It
was like a GitHub universe, like almost a decade ago, where he was
talking about one day AI will do X and like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Boom boom. Here we are, you know? But I feel like, what is the point
of the work we do as a human race? As this becomes the way five years
from now, 2028, which is three years from now, and if the AI is 16
times smarter, better, or faster, whatever the whatever the
extrapolation is to to go to the betterness, what is the point of our
work? What is the point of our work?

Is it to do the work? Or is it to get the result from the work? Well,
that was a rhetorical question, right? So Well, it's it's more than a
rhetorical. It's more like it's a question that everybody is gonna
have to wrestle with.

Yeah. Exactly. Well, I'm over here wrestling with it. Let me let me
provide a perspective that's slightly different from your guys'. I am
not, resistant to change.

I'm a lifelong learner, and I'm perfectly happy with being results
oriented. I'm not someone who identifies closely with the code that I
write or anything like that. That being said, I'm having a hard time
extracting the value from these tools that you are, Steve, and other
people. I also see a lot of the results of the early vibe coding demos
and stuff and the programming horror on subreddit on the subreddit
for, you know, all the horror that's happening. And I'm just not a
person who likes to just roll the dice, and I'm getting snake eyes
more often than I like.

And so I'm I'm with you, and I want this future, and I believe that
there's people living there, but you said get over the hump. I haven't
been able to get over the hump. I'm using I'm using AI's well, I code
in order to not have to Google in order to get answers, you know,
pasting my errors in there. Like, the whole chatbot thing, I'm with
it. I've asked certain I I've done single agent, like, you know,
refactor this function for me.

Like, I'm doing that level thing, but I'm not where you are. So how
how do we people like me, how do I get over the hump? How do I get
there? Well, yeah. I really wish I could say get my book and read it
because the actually, we we literally, like, took what you just said,
and it's such a common refrain.

Everybody wants it to work, but they're struggling with it. Right. I
mean, they it's not like they're all just rejecting it. A lot of
people just haven't figured out how to make it work yet. Right.

So it feels like it's wasting my time more than anything else. And I'm
like, I'll just write it myself, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And so we put a lot of effort into this book, you know, into sort of,
like, walking you through at a very it's it's very conversational
lookbook. There's no there's no code in it. Mhmm. We don't and there's
no pictures, screenshots of tools or anything like that. Vibrate it?

No. I mean, we we we started with that in mind, but I hated Claude's
writing so much that I insisted we rewrite every single every single I
was gonna say, you have way too much voice in your writing. I don't I
don't think you could allow an LLM to write for you. Claude's writing
makes me physically ill. You know, I'm allergic to it.

I I can actually we should have you know how they have, like, those
Hemingway, you know, what do you call the the the fake Hemingway
contests? Mhmm. You know, or whatever, or fake GRRM. Right? We should
have a fake Claude contest or who can write most like an LLM.

Because they're really obvious dead giveaway. So yeah. No. We didn't
write we didn't vibe code the book. It's all our voice.

And, you know, I think people are gonna actually crave that after a
while. Oh, I think so too. I think there's gonna be a market for human
written things for sure. Yeah. Bespoke, handcrafted, artisanal Right.

Just if you're gonna be a human, be as human as you can, and people
are gonna want that. You know? I think especially with
pros. Yeah. Well, maybe.

Or maybe there'll be a market for for a bespoke artisanal code. I
don't want code written by an AI. This was actually suggested by a a
friend of mine over in Krakow. It was her idea. But, but, yeah, who
knows?

Right? The world can go in wacky places For sure. We don't
predict. But I it's really we're in a weird spot. Right?

In such a weird spot because, man, the answer to your question is it's
hard. It's it's like it Is it worth waiting, though? Is it worth
waiting? That's where I get is, like, can I wait six months and the
tools will catch up with everything? It'll be easier.

Oh, it depends on who you are. Corresponding? The proverbial
yeah. There's a clip right there. Just Steve Yaghi sound.

I like it. Yeah. I mean, everyone's different, but okay. Let let's not
say Jared Santa. Let's say, like, I'm a I'm a mid level engineer at a
insurance company who writes Java nine to five, and I got a backlog of
Jira tickets.

You know, I'm a typical software engineer. Mhmm. Should do I wait? Do
I dive in? Am I if I'm coding my free time, am I working am I do I
have agents working underneath my desk, you know, at work?

Okay. So first of all, you don't do anything that your work doesn't
let you do. Okay. You should only worry about whether you need to be
using agents if you see that other people at your company are using
agents above board, getting PRs in, and starting to work that way. As
soon as that starts to happen, you're in trouble.

Okay? Yeah. You said right? But there's a lot of hurdles for a lot of
companies before anybody will get to that point. Alright?

Yeah. The company that told me this story was more advanced, and what
they are is more of like a, you know, right, a harbinger of what's to
come for other companies. But it's probably six to twelve months
before we get to that same call it six months before we get to where
every company has a few people who are vibe coding with agents, and
all of a sudden performance review starts to get awkward, right,
because of the delta in performance. So six months. So in the
meantime, what I would do is recognize that they're kind of too raw to
use right now for real work unless you really wanna be kinda out there
like me, you know, or some of the early adopters like Simon Willison.

Right? You know, don't be like us. You know? Be be be
conservative. But, but learn this stuff because there will come a time
sooner than you think when your company is going to expect that you
know how to use it.

And the thing is, you're not gonna learn it overnight. So start
practicing now in your hobby time, your spare time. Here's what you
should do. Anything you ever thought that you wanted to do, but it was
just a little out of reach, just a little too much of a pain in the
ass, just a little low on ROI. Right?

All those little projects you thought about doing, doesn't matter what
it is. K? Have the AIs do those. Do all of them. Spin up four
consoles, or there's four terminals, and four source graph amps, and
just be like, yo.

You solve this. You solve this. You solve this. You solve this. You
solve this.

K? There's an art to it, and you will you will discover it yourself if
you're just pushing on it. You don't even have to read a book. You'll
figure it out for yourself. There's no math.

There's no science. It's an art. You have to learn how to and the the
first thing you'll learn is never talk to them. Always talk to the
plan, and then copy it out of the plan to them or make them read the
plan. Never talk to an agent directly.

There's all these rules that you are gonna learn, okay, the hard way,
but you have to start now because it's gonna take you six months
before you feel really comfortable with them. And I'm talking about
daily use. And I and I mean don't wait for it to prove itself to
you. Force it to get the shit done. Hold high standards, hold it to a
high bar, send it back to the drawing board a hundred times if you
have to, but make it work.

Alright? That's how you get good at this, and that's how you avoid
getting fired when your company starts making everybody do this a year
from now. A year from now. It's coming. It's coming.

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. The agency is an
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Is that the tactical advice you'd give? Because we've been talking
somewhat theory pie in the sky. Like, if we was to say get tactical,
how do you go today besides Yeah. Trying your own? Like, literally,
where do you go?

Who do you look at? Where's the tip? Where's the information coming
from? How do you literally get started with agents and babysitting
your stuff? I mean, if you're just trying to, like, get started
started, I mean, you know, follow Simon Willison, follow Jean Kim, you
know, follow Sourcegraph.

We have lots of good, you know, pointers and tips. I I I've begun
starting to, you know, record my workflow and try to walk people
through, you know, how I do it, what you have to keep in mind. I'm
gonna try to get some way to get some chapters of our book out for
people to look at because there's some really useful tips that we
might be able to, you know what I mean? But, right now, man, it's so
it's so raw. It's so new, you know, that that that to some extent, you
just kinda have to try it.

But, tactically, it's as easy as this, man. N p m I dash g, you know,
what's the shortest one, at open a I slash codex. And you're you're a
vide coder now. K? Because you're literally you you you you and then
type codex.

And now you're inside or or better yet, you know, like, let's let's
let's use source. Codecs is a little on the crashy side for me, and
maybe it's gotten a little better recently. But the reason I use AMP
is not actually because I work for source graph. I was using cloud
code happily until AMP got better for me, if that makes any sense. And
the reason I switched over to AMP was that it it's just like you want
them to be out of your way.

You don't want them to be in your face. You kinda want the agent to
just be invisible. You want it to be doing work and not right? And
Claude is is really paranoid and really, like, kinda, right, kinda
finicky. And, like, Claude's always kinda in my way because they're so
worried about, I don't know, security or whatever.

Sometimes Claude will just be like, I'm sorry, I can't write your file
system, you know, whatever. We're codex crashes. It's amp doesn't have
any of those problems. So I like amp, but amp is really better, maybe
for enterprise customers. I don't know.

I'm not really sure. You you can try it. There's there's right? You
can try source graph AMP. Any any of the three, though, I have every
morning when I sit down to work, the first thing I type is update
agents.

It's a script I wrote that runs npm install on all three of them,
cloud code, codecs, and source graph app. You really wanna have at
least two of those, ideally, codecs and one of the other two because
they use different models. Right? Chat g p GPT versus, you know,
cloud. Right?

Because when you're vibe coding with agents, sometimes your agent will
get stuck and a different model will blast through the problem. And
it's completely random. Like, some models do better with some other
problems. Right? Yeah.

So so tactically, yeah, that's how you get started. Take your take
your favorite pet project, make, you know, make Cloud Code do it. And,
and if when it doesn't, inevitably, you'd be like, what is this? This
is garbage. Keep making the problem smaller, right, and smaller and,
you know, and until you've got it doing one little thing at a time for
you and build your way up to where your project's done just by talking
to it and sharing a plan with it.

Man, that's that's that's gonna how you're gonna that's how you tiptoe
into the new world. Mhmm. When you said talk to the plan, don't talk
to the agents, talk to the plan. Yeah. Can you describe exactly what
that means?

Well, sure. You know, the agents have, limited context windows that
fill up as you're working with them or as they're working. And then
they have to compact and they, you know, it's all fifty first
dates. You know, they completely forget who you are and all you've got
is this they they watch a little video at the beginning of the session
saying what happened and right? And so the the problem with them
getting amnesia all the time is that, you know, you have to have
persistent memory somewhere of what was going on.

And so, you know, your number one goal is, to get all that
persistence, you know, into files that you two can both read, which
typically is marked down because it's just plain, you know, plain
English Mhmm. Plain text. And, you, so what you do is you always have
it update the plan because the plan is always gradually shifting as
you knock things off or you discover things. Right? But each agent has
its own plan.

Each work stream has its own plan. And, an agent and the agents love
to write plans. You can tell them to write plans and they'll write
plans so they're blue in the face. And so you have to tell them to
clean up your plans too. You have to say this plan overrides all the
other plans, so get rid of them or merge them or whatever.

Right? There's like a lot of your time invite putting is actually
spent planning. And I mean, literally, like, working on the plans with
the AI or or sitting down and dictating. You know, you just dictate
it. Right?

You should talk to the AI, not type. The problem with that is that the
dictation is not good today at picking up when you're talking about
directory names and code, you know, and software names and
stuff. Jargon. Yeah. It's it's a mixture of the two, but often you can
just dictate to the AI what the problem space is that you're trying to
solve and then make it come up with a plan from that big mass of
words.

K? And now the plan now the plan will expose instantly. If you glance
over the plan, you'll say, oh, it was intending to do something
wrong. It was intending to do something that I I wouldn't have been
happy with. So the plan is also a contract.

Yeah. And so, so, yeah, the plan is super important, and and and also
they crash or whatever. They get sidetracked. And so if you spend a
lot of time typing into one of these things, unless you're using one
that has persistent history, they don't oh, you you you you just lost
all that work. Your computer crashed.

So just just type everything into your markdown file so you can
retrieve it later, or you can take the same prompt and put it into a
different agent. That's what I'm gonna ask you. The plan is
portable. Right? It's totally portable.

You know? It also lets you work across machines. I can go upstairs and
keep working. So keep it in source control. In fact, my workflow is
four four agents right now because cognitively, I have not been able
to get myself past being able to keep four full at once, mostly
because I don't code full time.

And then but Emacs is in the middle. That's the control panel. And I
think that's what that's kind of a vision of what the future is gonna
look like, because you're gonna have a lot of agents working a
dashboard, and then you're gonna have some control panel that has the
plans and the status and and some and some way to communicate with
supervisor agents. We talked about this a little earlier
before. Remember we started talking about how supervisors can do a lot
of the babysitting for you?

Mhmm. And it's because of all this stuff I just told you that you have
to do as a vibe coder with with coding agents is you have to do a lot
of stuff before with planning, and you have to do a lot of stuff after
they do the work with verification. K? You verify it. They verify it.

You rewrite the test. You run the test. You make sure they ran the
tests. All these things, not necessarily in that order, but, right,
pre and post work. All that stuff is really super important, and, a
lot of it is mechanical.

A lot of it is repetitive. A lot of it is pattern matching. A lot of
it can be done by an agent. And so you're like, damn. I can have these
five agents.

Right? Because what what what is my test one doing? My test work
stream is the simplest of all my work streams and the most productive,
and it writes it can write 10 to 12,000 lines, 15,000 lines of code a
day, good tested code in that one work stream. Because all it's doing
is taking my half million line code base. It's thirty years old and
writing tests for new tests.

Okay. No new code, just new tests. So it's it's very low
risk. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I can let that thing jam. In fact, I could if I could find a
way to isolate them a little better, I'm sure I will at some point. I
could have many of them jamming, and the instructions are always the
same. Are the test testing all the functionality? Go double check.

Are the tests hacked? We could talk about reward hacking all day, but,
unfortunately, just just be aware that these things cheat. Cloud four
does it to 67% less. Now it cheats 67% less, but they still
cheat. They they they were trained on a reward function.

They were not trained not to hack that reward function, and so they
will say all the tests pass, but they deleted your tests. And so,
technically, they're correct, but they actually passed away. That's
hilarious. Yeah. These these are all things we talk about in the book.

They're all things you're gonna have to learn as a Vibe coder. It's
just the kind of facts of life, the birds and the bees of working with
LLMs. Yeah. Can't you put that in like a rules document? Like never
delete all the tests or something.

Sorry. That just reminded me of a Dave Barry. Never stick your finger
in that part of the doggy. Oh my gosh. It's just like it's like ray
raising toddlers.

Right? Right. It's like, yes. You can put it in the rules file, but
they'll ignore it because they they Never ignore the rules
file. That's the other rule.

Never ignore the rules file. Yeah. The problem is, if you get too if
you get too aggressive and greedy, you will get greedy working with
these things. You'll be like, yeah. I could do more and more and more,
and you'll get greedy and give them too much, and then they'll start
ignoring your rules file.

Okay? Because what happens is about once the context window actually,
studies have shown there's some some initial research seems to show
that they start getting confused as early as 3,000 tokens in. But, you
know, once you got 50 k or hundred k tokens in that window, 200 k
window, they're starting to have to travel, juggle a lot of stuff. And
they they and then all of it starts to look important to them. Right?

And so, the rules file, you it's not it's more of a it's more of a
guidelines file. Sounds like a real human. Yeah. They are in a lot of
ways. And that's that's actually a real problem because they're not a
real human, and you're gonna expect them to to act like a real you're
gonna get into a groove where you think you're working with a real
human, and then they'll make a terrible mistake and do something
really weird.

And you can't fire them. You can't fire them. You know, you know You
almost want that though, right? Like, don't you want I mean, there's
times maybe it's not exactly a one to one with my children, but
there's times that I'm surprised by my don't do that and then they go
do something and then something glorious happens as a result of, like,
curiosity and exploration. Right?

Like, isn't isn't that something that's, like, kinda like a good thing
in a way to, like, break the rules and explore? When it works out
well. If you are neuroplastic and a lifelong learner and adaptable and
all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

If you're in your comfort zone, you haven't changed in five, ten
years, and you really don't wanna learn anything new, then I'm really
sad. I'm really sad for you. Genuinely heart heartbroken because
that's going away. And even as even though we're saying there's this
big theme park and it's wonderful, like, what if you're an introvert?
I'm an introvert.

Like, believe it or not, I'm not getting energized from this talk. I'm
gonna have to go, like, sit in a dark room somewhere. You know, it's
it's costing me energy. I don't really like you. No.

No. It's great. Right? I I I I love hanging out with people and
chilling stuff, but it it drains me. Yeah.

And if you're that kind of person and I'm telling you that you're
gonna have to go and work with a bunch of teams in your new role,
you're probably going, well, what the hell, man? Well, okay. But you I
promise you, you don't have to work with humans any more than you
already did. There you go. Right?

You can you're working with AIs. You can boss them around. K? And and
working with them is a lot like working with human teams. You're gonna
have to have some manager skills, like merging the work and keeping
them from colliding and keeping them track and stuff.

But it's not the same as managing a human, and it's not that yucky
because managing humans can be kinda icky. Mhmm. You know? Because,
you know, their personal lives can blur into work and all that
stuff. None of that is necessary or happens when you're dealing with
AI.

So don't don't be scared that you're not gonna be able to still be a
an engineer first and foremost. You will. You'll be an engineer, and
you'll be faster. You'll just be working differently, and that's the
part that saddens me is that there's no way around it. Gene's out of
the bottle.

Pandora's box. You mentioned AMP a bit ago, and I'm curious who wrote
the copy for ampcode.com? I don't know. I haven't, I haven't looked at
ampcode.com. Is it bad?

Is it bad? Is it bad? Did I claim this or not? It just says everything
will change, the heading at the very top change. It's like a manifesto
in a way.

I I mean, I could read it to you, but it's it's kinda like you know,
it's it's just talking about, you know, the models yearn for more for
the tools and tokens. We as humans hold them back and make them ask
before they can change a file. We we gotta give them the tools and the
tokens and everything changes what we use what we use them for, how we
use them, how many we run at the same time, how they talk to each
other, how they talk to you, what they even are. It's all going to
change. Like, this is all on ampcode.com.

Amp is embracing it. Our way of keeping up question mark shipping. We
add and remove every day we're building for where these malls are
going. If that means AMP will look differently, completely different
three months, so be it. If you want long term support and this in the
same UI in 02/1932, that kind of just goes on from there.

But anyways, it's it seems like a manifesto. I was just curious if you
played a role in in writing that because that's what, Sourcegraph AMP
points to is ampcode.com. No. I I wasn't involved in that, but, I I
get where I get where they're coming from. Mhmm.

We we are trying so many different ways to do the messaging. Like,
this conversation I'm having with you is an attempt at the messaging,
the same messaging, right, which is the world's moving in this
direction. You can the manifesto can work. Everybody's gonna, like,
learn it different. Everybody gets hit differently by these things.

Right? What works for you might work not work for somebody else, and
we're not really sure what it is that's gonna. We've had a lot of
trouble. The skeptics are, like, really out in force. Right?

I mean, there's a lot of, like, still really, really severe skepticism
of this stuff. And, look. Hey. When I, you know, when I talked to
Dario, his vision of the future was that he shared with me was a
little bit bleaker than what he shares with the public typically. And
he, you know, he and Jason Clinton, his CSO, both make, why would I
would say, pretty what would people consider kinda out there
predictions about how, right, there will be, badged AI employees next
year and that there will be, you know, you know, we'll we'll we'll
we'll we'll have switched to, to using AI for for all coding, you
know, by the end of next year and and so on.

It was still all fairly rosy compared to what he shared with me
personally. K? He's very worried. He's worried about society, okay,
because of the stuff we've been talking about. Society doesn't like to
change, and and we're talking about millions of people having to
change in the tech industry.

And, there's gonna be fallout from that. Yeah? And he's worried. He he
he he characterized society as the the proverbial, you know, the
classic, immovable object, And tech is the unstoppable force. And when
they collide next year, k, he calls 2026 the end game casually without
even any hint to drama.

It's gonna be a mess. It's gonna be a mess, and we're already starting
to see it. The skeptics, the people who are, like, sending a
PowerPoint presentation to their managers saying, we need to stop
using AI at this company. We heard that from one Fortune 100
company. We've got, like, there are people who are resisting hard.

They're pushing back. They're finding any excuse they can to say,
well, maybe for you, but not for me. And and that's, I think, the
origin of this messaging on AMP code is, look, we're trying every
possible way to message this, and people are just like, they're not
listening. Yeah. One the way it ends, I'd fumble my words about what
it says then.

It's kind of kind of interesting and important. It says, if you want
long term support in the same UI in 2032, if you want to spend a
maximum of $20 per month, AMP is not for you. If you want to find out
where all this is going, come with us. And then it says read the
manual. Yeah.

And I haven't read the manual yet, but it's it's it goes on to
ampcode.com/manual. So amp I mean, amp is fun. I mean, we're an
enterprise company. Mhmm. Right?

Sourcegraph is. So amp, is built on the Sourcegraph stack. It's a
coding agent, but it's got all the SOC two compliance and all the way
to FedRAMP, and it's got all of the enterprise security controls and
auditing and admin controls. And it just goes on and on and on and
on. Sourcegraph's been around for eleven plus years, and, you know,
they say it takes ten years to make an overnight success.

If you're an enterprise, you know, you're gonna want an enterprise
grade coding assistant. If you're at home, right, use Cline, man. It's
gonna bust you. It will break you. You will go you will go bankrupt if
you try to do what I just described to regenerate ten, twelve thousand
lines of test code a day.

Really, it'll cost you a hundred thousand dollars a year of
tokens. Okay? You can't do it. I can't do it. It's not it's not
sustainable or feasible to work the way I've been talking about at
home.

You do it at work if your company's paying for it. Use whatever budget
they gave you. Right? That's gonna be one of the big gating factors in
this stuff taking off is the the inference costs. Yeah.

Well, that's what I remember thinking when I first told Adam, hey,
let's get Steve back on the show because I read your your post in
March about the the rise of the junior developer or the revenge?
Revenge. The revenge of Mhmm. And I read that post, and I was like,
oh, there are lots of good thoughts here that are, you know, future
looking. And you made somewhat black and white predictions even with
timings of, like, the when this is gonna happen.

And you went through some of the math, and I was thinking like,
dang. This is expensive. Yeah. That's that's the one I mean, like,
it's just it's ridiculous. It's beyond expensive.

Now we are in the early, early, early, early days where, you know,
like, electricity and steam were no doubt very expensive to get going
when they first came out. And the power that we're harnessing is, you
know, a bad order of magnitude, change of civilization. So, yeah, it's
not surprising. But, yeah, you know, it's AMP is an enterprise
product, and, and so, use that at work. And then, use use, I would
say, Klein or Rue Rucode or maybe there's one or two others that are
open source that I've been dying to play with on my Mac m four mini
that I just got because I understand that there that m four mini can
just run some of these these big lava models.

Really excited, and maybe deep seek. So I don't know. Right? There's
gonna be look. Lip.

Check this out. This is this is why I decided I was going to write
this book. You are never going to be able to afford the frontier
models right at home, you know, or probably even at work. Frontier
models are for the people with deep pockets. You're gonna be able to
What do you mean to run them?

To to use them, to pay it, to to to be Right. To run them. Yeah. To to
get the inference from them. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Unless you're at Google or Microsoft or
something. Instead, you're gonna be paying for cheaper models that can
do the same job, but they take longer because they're dumber. Alright?

They're not as smart. So a perfect example, let's Opus is really
expensive. I believe Claude Sonnet three seven is probably a lot
cheaper. I haven't looked at the exact numbers, but if you wanna save
some money, you'll go back to Sonnet for any problem that you
can. Right?

So this this game of finding the cheapest model is gonna start to get
really fun as soon as llama or deep seek or one of these open models
is as good as Claude Sonnet three seven at coding because they're
getting better too. Right? And at some point, when they're as good as
CloudSonic, everybody will have unlimited open access to at least one
agent at a time, one one model running. K? Or or, actually, maybe you
maybe maybe maybe somebody clever can actually have that one model
serve multiple agents on your on your box if they're not, you know,
CPU bound.

They're probably IO bound, right, running build tools and stuff. So,
yeah, there's a future. I can see a future, and I by future, I mean,
merry Christmas Santa's coming future, this year where, engineers will
be able to do what I'm doing now for free for for the cost of a a a a
computer with a GPU. Mhmm. Right?

Which they already have. Everybody with a gaming computer suddenly,
like, I think. So that's that's how the cost problem gets solved. And
it's it's all predicated on the notion that all of the models are
gradually getting smart well, exponentially getting smarter, and so we
will be able to get by with cheaper models. Why?

SONNET three seven or a model of that cognitive, you know, power, you
can give it the problem, and what they do is they brute force their
way to the answer by burning tokens. Right? And so they'll find their
way there unless you're given a problem that's just too big to fit in
the context window, which is easy to do. But as long as you give them
a problem of the right size, they'll find their way there
eventually. They're not that smart, so it might take them longer, and
it'll cost you more tokens than it would have cost, say, cloud four.

But the tokens are so much cheaper that overall you save money. You
see what I'm saying? So like, remember we all used to talk about
hallucinations? When's the last time you talked about a hallucination
on your podcast? Well, we still joke about it all the time because of
that conversation, but I don't know if we've had, like, a real one of
late.

It's not an issue anymore. At least, I mean, if you're using agents,
it's not an issue anymore because they of course, they hallucinate,
but then they say, oh, that was a hallucination. They detect their own
hallucination, and they they they fix it. Right? So that problem just
that class of problems just kinda went away.

They don't keep making the same mistake. They kinda like, yeah. I've
experienced that where even if it's like a math thing, I'm like, that
that's off. Oh, yeah. You're right.

Let me fix that. Sorry about that. And then it's done. It's not like
this I went down the wrong direction for so long. I'm lost and upset
that the thing just took me the wrong direction.

Right. It's a it's a bit more casually fixed and not an issue. Well,
the move there now is now that they have tools that they the LLM
actually calls a Python program that does some math for it. So it
doesn't actually have to do its own math. It can just write the
program to do the math or call a program Right.

And actually get predictable results from a stochastic parrot. But
Yeah. It's getting a lot better. Well, okay. So tool use is the is the
where you just that was an example of tool use.

Mhmm. Right? Yeah. Them using tools is, like, you know, the biggest
game changer since they came out, because, right, you know, if you've
seen the, like, the IntelliJ MCP server, you know, they they they'll
be able to operate via MCP. They'll be able to operate any program,
any application that it has a platform interface.

Right? Because it other otherwise, they're limited to using, you know,
crude operating system level primitives to try to click mouses and
stuff. Right. There's mice and keyboards. Or puppeteer.

So so now for yeah. Puppeteer type thing. So now everybody who's smart
enough to come up with, like, a REST API or a some sort of way in gRPC
or something into their applications so that you can you can
manipulate it programmatically, which, you know, if they if they got
the platform message, most of them do, it's gonna be able to run your,
you know, your your music software. It's gonna be able to run your,
you know, whatever. Every all of your software.

And that's just incredible. Right? Because now it's not just a coding
agent. It's an assistant, a true assistant, that can assist you with
all kinds of, you know, tasks that you have every day as a
developer. Just like I started the show with, it was a new kind of
task that I gave I gave Cloud this morning, right, which was, or last
night, which was go find out why this is slow.

Right? Which was just, man, that was cool. Mhmm. Right now now you can
tell it. Go go use Final Cut Pro to eliminate all of the umms and ahs
from my right.

And if there's a way for it to manipulate the thing, it can go do that
for me. Right? So I think we're moving in a quickly in a direction
where we're all gonna be paying hundreds of dollars a month for these
these operator type, you know, agents because it's gonna save us more
than that in terms of time, right, and money. Yeah. When will this hit
the household?

Like, how can how can, like, let's just I mean, obviously, this is a
software podcast, but, like, how do households everyday households
change? They wanna be more efficient. They wanna have more fun. They
wanna go on more vacations. They wanna enjoy their lives and spend
more time together.

How does how does this impact a household, or is that not even worth
talking about? Do you ever read There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray
Bradbury? Mm-mm. Alright. Well, everybody who has laughed really hard
in this.

Now. Okay. Alrighty. I'll take your word for it. What's the laugh?

Tell me. What's the joke? It's it's it's a story about it's it's not
obvious from the beginning of the story. It's a story about a house
that's intelligent and it's doing things for its owners. They're not
there.

Okay. So, Don't plot. Yeah. You ruined the plot, I guess. There's a
twist.

There's a twist. There's a twist. Okay. There's a more twist. Oh,
another Ray Brad's greatest greatest hit came up recently, The Velt.

It's some song or some oh, no. It wasn't that recently. Recently. It
was dead mouse. Yeah.

Ray Bradbury. He's a he's a good author. You know? You gotta go back
and read some of his stuff. Wait.

What was the first Ray Bradbury story I said? It was Oh, you're
talking about the house. Offering your house. So, well, if you ask
Apple, Siri Intelligence is here now. Did you hear that senior VP got
fired?

The the senior VP of Apple Intelligence got fired or of Siri, I
think. Because, somehow the sales and marketing teams did that thing
that they're not supposed to do where they they go and sell something
that engineers haven't built yet. Oh, yeah. And, Apple, you would
think would know better by now. And so, yeah, heads rolled.

They forgot. Because right? Because they were like, it's gonna be in
your house, and you're gonna be able to do it. All all the stuff we
just talked about. They put out commercials.

They were promising it for, like, basically right around yeah. They
did. Oh, man. They're still recovering from that mess, man. Siri
intelligence.

So yeah. So not this year, apparently. And I know the Alexa team's
struggling with this too. Right? I'm sure they have a mandate to get
LLM based Alexa out there because Alexa is stupid.

And they've talked about it. They're it's already in, like, whatever,
open beta or something. But, right? I mean, like, you know, to what
extent can you, tolerate, you know, an Alexa that could, potentially,
you know, teach you how to make meth or something. I don't Right.

Something bad. Right? Well, especially at that scale. I mean, when you
have failure modes in small scale, you know, a 1% failure rate is not
the end of the world, but when you're in every house in America and
around the world already, and they're all talking to Alexa, you know,
and that 1% hits, like, millions of people. So Right.

Right. A lot of large numbers hold them back, you know? Yeah. So and
we've seen some situations, right, where, like, I think there was a
case where no one talked somebody into suicide. Yep.

Right? You don't want Alexa doing that. Right? So that's why actually
having this stuff in your house, like, in that sense is still, a ways
out. Like, it probably at least two years, would be my guess.

Yeah. Well, my kids talk to Alexa all the time, and one of my the
solace as I have with it is how simple and basic it is and just stays
that way. Because if it goes beyond you know, all of a sudden, it's,
like, much better. And now I'm actually as a father more worried and
wanna be more involved in those conversations because who knows? You
know?

So it is a higher risk factor there. Well, this is another one of
those things. It's not related to coding, but it's another one of
those things that worries Dario about about tech pushing society
harder than it wants to be pushed. Right? Sure.

Is at some point, AI is gonna start making its way into our lives in
ways that some people don't like. Yeah. We've already seen it with the
memory stuff. Right? Some people like that it has memory of you and
some people don't.

Right. And it's already bifurcated into these two big crowds of they
want anonymous transactional interactions versus they want a best
friend. You know? Well, that's why I like the they have a it's a mode
now. Right?

And in both Chat GBT, I think Grok has it as well where it's like
forget me mode or I don't know. It's like it's like an incognito tab,
basically. You can just Yeah. You can have it remember you because
that's actually very useful that it knows certain things, like, for
instance, your schedule when it's trying to give you advice on things,
like, to know that you do this every day at this time. Yeah.

But then there's also times where you're like, I just want that
anonymous transactional answer to this thing, and I don't want you to
add this to my personal profile. You know? Because Right. Right. Most
of the time, it's because it's completely, like, a non sequitur.

You know? Like, some of the stuff that you look up or I ask a thing or
I'm like this, please don't put this on my profile because it's I'm
asking for somebody else or, you know, they're, like, just completely
Yeah. Dis free from context. Amazon has that problem. Right?

You buy one one gift for your for your niece or nephew, and all of a
sudden, they're showing you kids stuff forever. And it's like,
no. YouTube has a problem too. You know, like, I have a I got a
mechanical failure on my kid's four wheeler, and so I'm trying to
figure out how to fix it. And all of a sudden it thinks I'm a four
wheeler enthusiast.

And it's like, no. I just wanted to I just wanted to fix this
problem. Now it's fixed. I don't wanna see another four wheeler video
ever again. So that that's a hard problem.

You you know what? That's interesting enough. You should get somebody
on this show to talk about, like, yeah, what's gonna happen when
yeah. I just just the the general problem of of how this stuff is
gonna interact with with our kids and with us. And Yeah.

That's the concern. I think that's the concern that you alluded to
earlier is is the that's why I asked the household question because I
know it's not we're excited about the step change we can do in our day
jobs or in our visionary missions, how we wanna frame it, you know,
that we can now go so fast and command agents or babysit depending
upon your perspective. Is that how does how does, like, householder
society get impacted and literally last night, my son asked about I
forget what he said it was called but he said there's an AI that he
wants that doesn't tell you the math problems. He was, like, selling
me. He's like, dad, it won't tell me how to do one plus one or
whatever the multiplication is.

It won't tell me what the answer is, but it'll be my friend. It'll be
it'll be something I can talk to. And I'm just like, how do I answer
this? How do I respond to this? I'm like, listen.

I don't I don't know yet. Let's look at that. But at some point, we're
gonna have to have this conversation with our loved ones, old or
young, about AI, about what it truly is, how to leverage it, how and I
think at this point, it's just sort of a guess what it really is and
how we'll use it. There's trepidation in my heart when it comes to how
it will impact my kids. But at the same time, I think I can I can keep
them safe to some degree, but at some point, the steamroll of life
will bypass dad, and I can no longer be the guardrails of my son's
ability to have access to this tool, who the heck knows?

You know, so it's it's like one of those things where you sort of get
to this position where, you know, we're using it in great ways in our
in our careers and we're seeing tremendous results. But then it's how
does that impact our households? And then that's that's the fabric
society. Like, that's where neighborhoods are born is, like, my
household, your household, boom, friends and neighbors, you know?
Well, I never had kids.

I would not wanna be a kid today. It sounds really tough. Good
luck. Good luck. Good luck.

I actually think I would be excited to be a kid right now. I mean like
the best of times and the worst of times. It is. It really is. I mean,
I would like it.

I would I would, if I could be born today and be, I don't know, 10
years old, 12 years old. Right? You could. In this moment, that'd be
kinda cool. Are you gonna be born at the age of 10?

This is a nice day. You know what I'm trying to say? Like, if I was
born in the in this latest era and I was now and I was 10 or 12, I you
know, the experienced, somewhat wisdom filled person that I am, or at
least I feel I am, I come kinda hopeful about a 12 year old's life in
the future of this world. I think there's a lot of cool stuff that's
gonna happen that we just can't see because we're held back by the
bounds of the past. Well, yes.

What's the point, Jared? Yes. What's the point of all our work? And
the point is everything gets better. Just like when I look back to
when I was a kid, like, in the seventies, you know, it was really
crummy, and everything was just really crummy and boring.

Right? And now everything's really bright and shiny and fun. This
today is gonna look like the seventies in about ten years. Gosh. It's
a while to think about that.

Like, I watch movies or older movies that have, like, older cars,
eighties cars even, not even seventies cars. You're like, what a weird
era. No one was on phones. You had to go to the pay phone to call
somebody if you were not at home. And if you were at home, you had a
30 foot phone cord, because that phone went the whole house, even
upstairs with this long cord.

What a different era, you know, really. It was just almost
yesterday. And El Caminos, man. What a crazy time. El Caminos.

What? Who thought of that? Well, are they making a comeback or
something? Oh, I don't know. I'm just saying going back to the
seventies and eighties and just thinking about some of the cars that
just My buddy had enough of them.

Great. Oh, they're real popular for a while. Alright. Well, things are
getting better. Steve, let's check back in.

Obviously, the book will be out sometime this fall, it sounds
like. September maybe. You don't know. You're not in control of
that. But, we'll we'll, help share that around when it ships.

I can give you a link, and you can preorder it on Amazon. Oh, there
you go. I think that'll get you some early content, and we're working
on it. That's all well and good. We'll link that up in the show notes.

But then let's check back in. I mean, six months from now, I mean,
you're saying it's gonna be radically different in six. Let's bring
you back on the pot and talk about how different it is. Maybe six
months, eight months away. Let's say November 19.

When do you do on November 19? You gonna book it right now? That's
just in time for Christmas. You know, it's just a few weeks before,
you know Right before Thanksgiving. Yeah.

You can say we're gonna have some Christmas presents, so looking
forward to it. It'll wrap the year up for us. There you
go. Yeah. Interesting.

I wonder if we'll be on cloud five by then. I bet we will. We'll
see. We'll see. Or we might be broke by then.

Who knows? Cloud six. Alright, guys. It's been a pleasure Yep. As
always.

Thanks, Steve. Absolutely. Thanks, Steve. Bye, friends. Bye, friends.

Bye. Have you heard? We are doing a live show in Denver, Colorado at
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to be exact. Join us there for the entire weekend if you want. We'll
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It's going to be a blast. Get all the details at changelog.com/live
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Next week on the pod, news on Monday, Richard Feldman tells me all
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back on Friends to help us digest all the WWDC announcements on
Friday. Have a great weekend. Send this episode to your friends who
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