The T-shaped leader, Disney can’t catch a break, and will you trust Auto mode?

0:05Andrew, what do you think? Is this the time that they finally start clamping down all these underpriced AI services? Like, is it all going to start getting expensive now? Is that where we're at?

0:13Ben:Yeah, you know, I've talked on the show before about how sometimes it feels like the token cost world that we live in right now feels very temporary, almost fictional. And guests have come on the show and given me varied opinions on why they think I'm wrong or why they think I'm right, why token costs will go up and go down. You know, you're not the only one as well. But one thing remains for certain, like with the tokens available to me right now, I try to use them and learn from them. because I just feel like eventually the belt's going to tighten. And maybe some people are starting to feel that heat now because I definitely think our industry, you know, in the middle, as we approach the middle of the year, is really evaluating their spending.

0:55Yeah, yeah. Use those usage session windows while you got them. Use all of them if you can. So what does that mean for people that are users of AI, you think? Oh, man, it's too early for me to really know the answer to that. But yeah, I mean, I think people will pay for it. If they're getting value out of it, they're going to pay for it. So it doesn't matter if it costs$200,$2 ,000. If you get more value out of it, then it's worth it, you know.

1:22Ben:Indeed.

1:23Andrew:Well, anyways, welcome to your Friday Deploy. I'm your host, Ben Lloyd-Pierce. And I'm your host, Andrew Zickler. And this week, we're covering the death of Sora, Claude Code's new safety controls, the end of computer programming as we know it, and Microsoft's attempt at a redemption tour. Andrew, we got to start off with this sad, sad news of Sora being shut down. So what's going on here?

1:49Ben:Yeah, speaking of belt tightening, OpenAI is shutting down its standalone Sora video app. And this is the focus on enterprise customers. They claim as the company prepares for their potential IPO. You know, that's despite Sora reaching over 1 million downloads within days of its September launch. We all know how fast ChatGPT grew, Sora grew even faster. So the decision to kill a proposed three-year deal with Disney is something that accompanies this decision. Because Disney was looking to invest, you know,$1 billion into OpenAI. In exchange, OpenAI would have access to Disney's IP for a limited time.

2:29Ben:You know, this represents a pretty strategic pivot, I think, from consumer-facing products towards going back towards the enterprise and the business market. Maybe open AI like Anthropic sees more sustainable revenue in enterprise sales rather than making direct-to-consumer solutions. What do you think, Ben? I mean, it sounds to me like you're saying that selling trinkets at a loss doesn't get fixed when you do it at scale. Is that what we're describing here?

2:59Andrew:Yeah, it's hard for me to know if this is like a cost thing, like it just cost them too much to run Sora, or if it's more like they had this partnership with a company like Disney, maybe Disney wasn't impressed by the technology and decided that the partnership wasn't going to work. And by backing out of it, it kind of like delegitimized the product itself, like just the foundational market fit of it. But, you know, I think really what we should take away from this is that, you know, AI is really like this lumpy bubble that's forming. Like we talk about lumpy adoption with AI a lot. Like there are teams that are doing really well with it, are accelerating super quickly.

3:37Andrew:And there's other teams that aren't and teams everywhere in the middle. I actually think that something very similar is happening with the bubble that's being created around AI. You know, it really does, in many circumstances, deliver a lot of value. So it helps you write code faster, helps you do complex analysis and research. But with video, you know, like a tool like Sora just doesn't really provide like those same sorts of like gains. You know, you don't get a productivity gain or a quality gain. It's just like a cool tech with like some gimmicky consumer applications, I feel like. You know, and they're just really kind of dealing with like, I don't know, it feels like a physics problem at some point.

4:18Andrew:Like, you know, there's a complexity issue with this. like chat is just like a single string of tokens so it's like relatively affordable to like generate large amounts of text with a with an ai model but then if you think of like an image it's almost like a matrix of tokens right it's like a becomes like a two-dimensional array um and then if you have a video it's like it's like a series of a bunch like potentially millions of those matrices in a row so you're actually stepping up in an order of magnitude to go from text to vid to image and then to video. And I personally just think it's like, it's too expensive for consumers to use AI video generators in a useful way.

4:57Andrew:Like they're, they're a gimmick that's fun to play with, but to actually like produce something with them, it's just like the costs are just too high at this point. And I just really think it's a great example of how like, it might be cool technology, but it doesn't seem to meet societal's needs right now. Like I feel like if you're looking for one place where society is going to resist AI adoption in particular, I think videos really are both from like a, just the creepiness factor of like having AI generated videos, but also the tech is just isn't there for the ways that people would want to actually use it.

5:32Ben:And I think all of that nuance is why Altman is killing the video generator because, you know, at the end of the day, the company also has too many pots on the stove and it just doesn't have enough heat to cook them all, just the reality of the matter. And Anthropic really becomes a real winner here. They bet on knowledge work at the beginning. They did not pick up distractions. They did not try to own the consumer market as aggressively. And that's been paying in dividends for them, you know, literally like their adoption rate among the enterprise is way up. But I want to pivot for a second on this story too.

6:04Ben:You know, we talked about open AI, but I think a lot of folks are missing one of the most interesting parts of this story. And that's Disney's new CEO having a pretty brutal first week because of all of this news. So, you know, we lose the$1 billion investment in partnership with OpenAI. They're caught off guard. He found out 30 minutes after OpenAI announced in a press conference and they were not on the same page. And then Epic Games laid off, you know, a thousand employees from their company after a partnership as well, which they've been making with Disney. And ABC, it canceled The Bachelorette because of its star being caught in a video that ruined the reputation and they made the decision to not air the season.

6:50Ben:And so The Bachelorette being ABC, a subsidiary at Disney is one of their biggest shows. It's just a brutal pile up here in the news for his first week as the CEO. And Altman just really added a doozy on top. So that was an interesting tidbit that I extracted from this one. All right. Well, I think we should pivot from there to another foundation model provider that has been doing also some really cool things that we've already brought up here, and that's Anthropic. So what's going on with Cloud Code now? Yeah. So Cloud Code just announced Auto Mode. It's a new permission system that automatically approves safe coding actions while blocking risky ones.

7:30Ben:And you may recognize this as an all-or-nothing kind of behavior. Developers have come to call this YOLO mode. And if you've been using Claude, you know this as invoking Claude with the dangerously skip permissions flag. A flag that if you use Claude code with any seriousness, it's probably aliased in your bash. Let's be serious. Yeah, everyone who's using Claude code has this turned on. Everybody used it. And what did this mean? It meant we were having a trade-off here. We needed speed and autonomy over security. And for some folks, that's a palatable decision and a palatable exchange. But you know what the rest of the story is.

8:09Ben:This results in a lot of situations where AI does things that are unexpected. And ultimately, we've been tackling this as engineers with things like harness engineering, you know, right? Great rules and skills and hooks. Be deterministic about how you prevent the LLM from stepping in these landmines. But auto mode represents an ability for Claude to understand the long-running coding tasks that are active right now and be able to make the right decision about whether or not something needs a closer look or approval. And of course, it doesn't eliminate all risk because how could anything eliminate all risk?

8:44Ben:But it certainly helps users trust it without an all or nothing experience. What do you think, Ben? Well, I'm assuming you're breathing a huge sigh of relief over this one, Andrew, because I know you've had that configuration turned on for some of your agents.

9:02Andrew:And I've just been sitting over here waiting for you to share your own version of the story of my agent deleted the production database type thing. So hopefully this will save us from that, but we'll see. But, you know, I've been saying, and maybe I sound like a broken record, but, you know, advancement in AI is a lot like other technological progress. Like it often feels like you take three steps forward, you take two steps backwards. But in the AI era, I feel like this permissions and access control problem, like it feels almost like we've gone like 10 steps backwards because we've kind of just thrown caution to the wind with a lot of these tools.

9:38Andrew:And then just by their nature, AI agents can operate at a scale that is just like, you know, almost incomprehensible. So if they do crazy, destructive things, they can do it faster than any human could ever be able to do it. But, you know, tools like CloudCode, like you can sort of manage this risk by like isolating it on like a VPS or something like that. As this like agentic way of working becomes more common, you know, I think we're going to see a lot, you know, we're going to see a lot more AI like doing work on people's laptops, on their devices. and I do think that we're going to see more examples of like rogue AI that will that will break out of of that environment and you know cause some destruction so you know when I when I switched to co-work or at least started trying out co-work and using it just to see how it worked relative to Claude code you know it was immediate that it became apparent to me that there is like this severe lack of control over what Claude can access and do.

10:40Andrew:So like, you know, it wants you to like install the Chrome browser so it can go browse the web and do things on your behalf. But then when you go to install that, there's like these super scary warnings that are like, anyone can just put a prompt injection on their website and it will hijack Claude and that will be operating hijacked on your computer. And that is, I mean, that's terrifying. Like we should never be in that situation. so yeah i mean this is something that like all of the companies doing stuff with ai like like i really feel like we're missing a foundational layer like there's some sort of fundamental technology that all agents should be using to make sure that their access control is properly scoped because i mean we're hearing stories of like outages at aws caused by rogue agents like like it's the same same type of problem so you know this is a real problem unfortunately there's not great solutions, but it's at least positive to see that companies like Anthropic are thinking about this challenge.

11:35Ben:Yeah, it's funny you do say that, Ben, that, you know, I'm probably having a sigh of relief over this. It's definitely great to be moving towards, like you're saying, a more baseline layer that all LLMs or coding flows can use in a shared way that is more adaptive and smart, which leverages the intelligence in the long-running context of the model to make its decision-making smarter. That's what harness engineering is all about. So I'm really excited to see this development. You know, I've certainly been in situations before where LLMs make booboos while we're coding and it's hard to undo. Or I wish I would have had better guardrails on the things that executed.

12:13Ben:Like, for example, operating sometimes on a database, you know, on a dev server, of course, never in production, can be a little harrowing using a coding agent. And I've definitely had to do some really bad surgeries before. But whenever those happen, I think it's really important to use the harness to learn from itself. Think of how you can build your own auto mode. This is how people create these guardrails for themselves. So in this case, I had Claude review everything that happened, thoroughly review all of the actions it took, and it made a detailed report about the failure mode. From there, you should have Claude write a skill, create a deterministic hook, and a check on those types of commands in the future.

12:55Ben:Because if you didn't know this, even before auto mode, you could already set per bash command types of checks and hooks on your cloud code configuration to give you closer control over things and to make sure stuff passed certain sniff tests. So you can always turn these solutions into protections, but ultimately sometimes one mistake is all it takes. So auto mode is hopefully going to charter a safer future for the rest of us. and most ai will put in a surprising amount of effort to get around your attempt so much controlling it because it views it as a helpful workaround rather than like a malicious action that's against the wills of it against the will of its like operators so yeah so what's our next

13:40Andrew:one ben yeah i'm sure we'll see more on that story up next we got the end of computer programming as we know it, coding after coders. So this is an article from the New York Times, super in-depth, very long article. It was a really great read, a lot of stuff to take away from this. But it really just explores how AI is disrupting software development first among all of the knowledge work professions. And developers' roles are really shifting more from creating to judging on things like code quality and architectural designs. The article highlights It's really how AI has done a great job at taking away the drudgery associated with producing code versus like when you compare it to like other creative aspects.

14:22Andrew:AI so far has really sort of taken away the more soulful creative parts of it and has left a lot more of the like tedious work. Like what do you do with this asset you've created after it's already been produced? It's really like helped developers free up their time in a way that a lot of other knowledge professions haven't fully realized yet. So they really are like the vanguard in terms of this transformation. But, you know, with that said, there's also like non-technical people that are increasingly solving problems with code through AI assistance. You know, just sort of showing how, like, not only is like code generation being democratized, like, I feel like that's kind of obvious.

14:59Andrew:But, you know, the role of development is now going horizontal. Like more of a wider range of people are now able to be developers, for lack of a better term. So, yeah, Andrew, what did you think when you read this article?

15:14Ben:That's a great call out that people's skill sets are getting broader, just like how you have the emergence of T-shaped engineers who are able to execute on almost every element of the engineering process, but deeply specialize in one or a designer who can ship. You know, these types of persona, they're becoming more and more mainstream because of how agentic capabilities are unlocking, you know, the outputs of these types of folks. And I think this is happening in every industry. And we can learn a lot by studying what's happening in tech because it's so deeply disrupted and disrupted first as a knowledge working environment on code.

15:53Ben:And I think it's a really great sign when topics that we cover so feverishly on Dev Interrupted go mainstream like this. You know, this New York Times piece it features, it features Steve Yege, who we've talked about extensively on this show, as well as engineers in the network and in the world around Dev Interrupted. I recognized several names scrolling through the article, and I'm sure you will too if you've been paying attention. and there's a really interesting divide we've been covering on the show as well between software engineering and software development and this article blows that wide open and talks about how engineers now spend their time developing their tastes and creating the right environment to execute that taste rather than actually writing the code manually themselves.

16:42Ben:You know, I think this was a really interesting drill down. It's, again, the topic going mainstream on the New York Times, and it represents really how the seismic shift is going to extend beyond tech. Because like you said, Ben, you're getting folks that are now be able to use technology in ways they never could before. You get T-shaped everyone, not just engineers. Yeah, these trends are coming for all of knowledge work. You know, it's really just like a confluence of factors that has made software engineering to be the first profession

17:13Andrew:that's being disrupted. And yeah, I think this is just, you know, it's a really great article that like really taps into the zeitgeist of the moment with this AI transformation. And yeah, judgment over creation, like that's really like the way that we as humans can continue to be, you know, important as AI takes over our work, you know. And I also do want to point out that I, you know, I don't think it's hopeless for people that like the craft of writing code. Yeah, the typical software engineering job is transitioning away from being craft focused in terms of like your ability to create something and more outcome focused.

17:52Andrew:But I do still think that like expertise like is a thing that humans can still like innately develop that, that helps, you know, it really lends to improving AI substantially. So, you know, we still need the people that, that create the Genesis information, the, the upstream frameworks that we all build upon, like, like those sorts of things, you know and and that does take a high degree of craft ability so you know i don't think that's going to be the common the normal job for everyone and and i did really like there was a moment in this article where someone referenced the in the before times phenomenon like how how like our perception of work is now shifting to where like you know tasks that that before ai like i either wouldn't have done it at all because it would have taken too much effort versus what it was worth or I can do it now in a fraction of the time.

18:42Andrew:So I do it more and then I do other stuff on top of that. So I really do like that moment. It kind of made me chuckle.

18:49Ben:So what about this next one, Ben? Yeah, let's talk about Microsoft's redemption tour or at least an attempt at it. We'll see if it pays off. So Microsoft has announced this seven point plan to fix Windows 11 after what some people view it as a systematic degradation of their capabilities

19:07Andrew:with things like forced AI integration, ads, privacy violations, vendor lock-in, you know, stuff like that. And our producer, Adam, really wanted me to cover this because he's felt a lot of these frustrations, I think, as a Windows user. And, you know, it's something that, like, we really should be aware of, I think, because, you know, it's not clear yet if these fixes are going to be structural or if they're going to be like more cosmetic. I do think that Microsoft has really struggled in the last year in particular. You know, they were early to the game with things like Copilot in GitHub and, you know, and GitHub still has like in particular, I think, remained relevant in a lot of ways.

19:52Andrew:But at the same time, they just don't seem to be creating the momentum around AI. And I'm seeing a lot of like, I feel like it's anti-patterns that are coming out of them uh they're doing like the forced adoption like you can't you can't like force somebody to use ai when they would prefer to use something else you know i've seen them applying it to like use cases where there's like high failure rates that ai is just not like very good at successfully doing consistently um and and then they've also just kind of been focused on like building a thin layer on top of foundational models rather than being like a company that like um like like really understands how to like leverage these these foundational technologies so yeah i don't know angie i feel like there's a lot of grievances listed in this article i don't use windows as much anymore these days um but i'm wondering what your your opinion is on it and i'm hoping this

20:45Ben:won't become too much of a hate session i'll try to be nice i'm just joking i've been a long time a windows user for a lot of my life actually um and there's plenty of things that i can still only use on a Windows. But I definitely get all of my work done either on a Mac or a Linux. And there's a bit of confluence of decisions for why over time I've just migrated into that ecosystem one or the other. But to me, as an individual consumer, we're swimming in a whole different sea than what's the reality of Microsoft lock-in. Because Microsoft can be the quicksand of tech. Once you're standing in it, it's too late and you can't move.

21:25Ben:Because Microsoft doesn't need you to love Windows 11, they need you to calculate that the migration cost exceeds the tolerance. And for a company that is a real budget item that gets balanced maybe every quarter or every year. And if the decision falls no, then Microsoft stays another year. And deeper and deeper it goes, obviously creating experiences that hold your data even closer. So Microsoft won this platform war first, and then they came in and kind of stripped to mind the user experience because they could. That's how enterprise lock-in works, especially when it's deep enough to absorb customer contempt, which is definitely boiling over in this article.

22:04Ben:It uses a number of metaphors and analogies to express Microsoft's relationship to its consumers. And across these 20 years of enterprise lock-in that's been fully baked, Windows and Office along the way were their own separate monopolies that had kind of separate things going on as well within it. So it's monopolies or monopolies in some cases. But ultimately, you know, the takeaway is when you're building a platform, you want to evaluate, obviously, your experience, but your ability to migrate and move. And I think a really interesting takeaway from this compared to things like how folks are adopting like AI tooling into their engineering flow is right now there's like not a lock in that's happening.

22:45Ben:People are experimenting with lots of different stuff and being portable between their ideas and prioritizing that portability. Because we've learned from 20 years of experiences like Microsoft that we have to be running and as fast as we can, but carrying the stuff with us in a portable way. So there's definitely lots of lessons to unpack. If you are a Microsoft lover or a hater alike, you're going to find something in this article that intrigues you. So I encourage you to get a closer read. Yeah, that point on portability is something I hadn't considered. But yeah, that's definitely a really key point.

23:18Andrew:I mean, we really like I've normalized this behavior of anything I'm doing should be ejectable to send over to another system. You know, nothing should ever be fully contained within or fully restricted to a single place.