“Anyone Can Code Now” - Netlify CEO Talks AI Agents

26:29Like, and finding, trying to find ways, because like, often the usage of the agents, that's like a weird thing with usage based, right? Like that often you have very little control over what, like, is this question I asked the agent? A long, whatever, short one. Right, like, is it going to use a lot of tokens? Is it going to be a hundred bucks and twenty bucks? I don't really know, right? Like, it's going to be ten thousand, right? And is this game worth ten thousand or like ten dollars, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think a lot of us are also trying to figure out what those elements of value are.

27:03That sounds very tough to me. And it's really tough. So I think in reality, everybody's kind of like usage-based right now, right? Yeah. But I think at the same time, it's not impossible that over time, even if it's tough, we start getting better at figuring out elements that feel more aligned to values than just pure token usage, which feels pretty like one out of your control and not super aligned in the sense like if I could do the same thing for you in like five tokens, you would probably prefer that. It would probably pay me more to do it really fast in five tokens than to do it really slow with like 10 million tokens, right?

27:40Are you using agents and operations now? We are using some internally, but not enough, I would say. But we are using some. Like we are using some, like I think especially our developer organization have built custom agents for all kinds of stuff, like linear integration and management there and things like keeping up with what's happening in next years so we can keep doing the right framework adapters and so on. We've built a lot of that kind of internal tooling. For me, I'm just very interested in like right now today, not science fiction, like where do agents apply, right? Clearly, they're a great productivity tool.

28:23They can do longer running tasks. Clearly, there's basic stuff that they're pretty good at. For example, if I'm like, I don't know, convert from this language to this language, they're good at these kind of well-scoped, well-defined tasks. They seem less good at ongoing operations where you've got to be correct and these are kind of these complex spaces and so forth. Yeah. I think in the end, in a lot of those, like I mean obviously the kind of agent we're like the highest highest highest adopters of is the coding agents ourselves as well right something like agent runners we build like we're now building a lot of the product with those agents right like and have you found that to actually increased feature velocity?

29:08we can see like when people get good at it it starts really increasing the velocity with which you can build stuff and also it increases the capacity of like a really strong engineer to both go do some really hard focused work but just spin off a bunch of like the the easy stuff along the way and get it done right like but what i was saying there is that i still think we are more in the line of using that to build programs that does stuff when it's like automations rather than having like agents automate stuff because it becomes like weirdly unpredictable right like and in the end once you know what to automate it's like simpler to just to actually automate it to actually automate it right like i totally agree but i think the fact that like it's so much cheaper to write automations changes that like you start building a lot of automations and potentially you start building a lot of apps and automations instead of like buying a lot of software so this is a bit of a side but it just reminded me of something so you know max max bichemin the airflow you know superset guy so So like hardcore open source developer has a company called Preset.

30:20And he was telling me, he's like, you know, the most amazing thing with these coding agents is I've only worked on open source. Right now I'm working on a large open source. This project's been around for a long time. So all the agents know it. We're doing kind of front end JavaScript stuff, which they're all really good at. And so, you know, so like I feel like and then all of the engineers in the company are like pretty senior. Yeah. So it's like, she's like, we all woke up and we were like superheroes. It was like, you know, and so like you've got these senior engineers that are using these coding models like junior engineers on an open source code base.

30:58And, you know, the velocity is 10x, right? So that makes a lot of sense. But I also compare it to, I mean, I work with companies where they're doing pretty new stuff and it's not front end and it's kind of still experimental. And maybe they've got more junior developers or whatever. and I feel like the velocity hasn't increased at all. So I would assume like, at least in the case of Netlify, like you are doing a lot of JavaScript, a lot of front end, a lot of web. I mean, I would think that is probably pretty amenable to these models or... And I mean, but I will say that people that get good at them start using them for things across the stack, right?

31:39And I see that, right? You can get them to where I go. more senior developers or more more senior developers right like I think I think especially when the deeper you go in the stack the more you need to really be like kind of an architect right like to get these kind of agents to do the right stuff right like and then the higher up you go in the stack the more you can now be like just jump in and do it without like right without any development background yeah it's kind of a fun time right it's really fun time are you coding I'm like so I kind of made it like around the same time I wrote the AX article.

32:15Yeah. Like a little before that, I kind of started making it my personal mission that like I want to learn how to be a really good developer again. I always say I'm a pretty strong developer, right? Yeah, of course. I built like the back and the front and everything, right? Like for the first version, everything. Like from the C++ to the CSS, right? Like everything. Yeah, yeah. But I sort of started saying like, I want to make it my mission to become an equally good developer without writing any code myself. Yeah. And ideally without looking at code. Wow. You still need to do that, right? But I kind of like started to make it my mission.

32:54And in the beginning, it was very frustrating. And now I think it's really fun. Really? And now I do a lot of pull requests that I probably annoy as a team. You're actually submitting PRs? I'm doing like... Wait, but you haven't looked at the code? I mean, okay, when I do PRs to our actual code basis, I do go and look at the code because I've learned the hard way that otherwise the team does and they shout at me.

33:23So now I go and look at the code first and tell Cloud Code to fix it before I open the pull request. A lot of that has, like, we launched this new agent run-up product and a lot of that has, like, informed it because I wanted to make sure that you could actually do the whole, like, cycle of iteration before you open a pull request versus like the GitHub integrations where you ask like plot code to do something and then you get a pull request you never knew. Like, did it do something useful, right? But I do find like that once you start changing that whole mentality to just like work through the context engineering and the prompts and like the systems thinking and like guiding this model, it's pretty remarkable what you can get it to do.

34:07And there's definitely some cases where, so it's funny, there's some cases where I've built something where realistically, if I had the time to just sit time with a code editor in a like uninterrupted stretch and write the code, I would have written it faster and probably better. But as a CEO, I definitely don't have that time. And in this case, I could still build it. Yeah. But just by like spinning up this async run, checking on in between meetings, like where did it go? What did it do? Let me give it some feedback and do another iteration and so on, right? Like, so suddenly you can work in that way and it's a lot of fun.

34:48I mean, I was just, you know, I kind of work on these home projects and I was actually using like the cursor CLI and I was at dinner. I was curious how it was doing. I was like, okay, this is what I was doing. It's literally like a VC at a dinner, like talking about deals. I'm checking how my coding agents are doing. I've totally been like in the same situation. And it's funny. I've noticed like every founder CEO with a technical background I talk to now are doing pull requests. Yeah, I know. I know. It's awesome. It's just really funny. I think it's, I literally think it's a framework issue. Like if coding was simpler, like it used to be, like everybody would still be coding.

35:30but you just have to learn too many different things. And so it's really remarkable. Do you ascribe to that AI is going to kind of usher in the dead, what's called the dead web theory, where it's like it's only going to be agents talking to websites and there's no longer a UI issue? I get it, but I really don't believe in it. And I see the opposite happening now, right? Everything is happening at the same time, right? So you have a lot of slop generated that other agents consume and you have lots of LinkedIn that's just like chat tpt and so on, right? And probably people are asking chat tpt to summarize it from it and so on, right?

36:14I think the cliche is like, to sound fancy, I use AI to create something big and then to read it, you use AI to summarize it. But there's also just way more people having fun building crazy stuff. And there's a lot of that out there now and there's people building like really cool like WebGL games and so on that they could like just never managed to build before. And like there's so much going on that I think that theory just under, like there's so many of these theories, I think that just underestimates like humans and like being creative. I will say I personally have visited more new websites in the last six months and probably the five years prior just because there's so much more cool stuff.

36:58I'm like, I've kind of reduced everything to like a handful of sites that I check every morning in the last five years. And now there's always something new. And it's like, yeah, yeah, I think it's totally true. I mean, I also see it as just a general moment of like people building way more stuff than they did before. Right. Like, and I still see, and way more people building, right. And that's again, back to that idea of like, it becomes more accessible to be a developer. we open up, like for so long, we've taken for granted that like, again, if you're sort of really generous, go beyond JavaScript and so on, right?

37:30Like, let's say, what would you say is like 100 million professional developers in the world, maybe even less? I mean, we always estimate 60, roughly. It's probably more than that. But some, like, if you're really generous, you say like 100 million, right? Like out of like what, 8 billion people or something like that, right? Like that's like a really, really small part of humankind. Yeah. And every other human can only use software. Yeah. That those developer builds for them. Right. Like, and that's like such a constraint on that part. Right. Like, and to me, when that constraint goes away, we're just going to have a lot, like unimaginable amount of more software.

38:11Right. Like, yeah, maybe some of it will be bad, but there'll also be a lot more good stuff. The future is going to be weirder, wilder, and more wonderful than we could imagine. This is an aside, but it's an adjacency, which is, I really love that 3.js is having a moment. Yeah, yeah, me too, me too. It's amazing. It's amazing. So for those listening, 3.js is a JavaScript library for 3D, and it's always just been kind of this, you know, like, why would you use the web for 3D? You know, like, you know, like you didn't have like, you know, and now there's just full on like games being written, multiplayer games being written.

38:44really high quality graphics. Like, did you see that one recently? It was like... Yeah. The small planet, the tiny planet, the mail delivery. It was so amazing. And that probably wasn't even using AI, but like it is a time now that I do think that... Precisely. And it'll get encoded into like the language models will train on it. They'll figure it out and you'll start seeing people just like being able to just like spin something like that out. That's why I say, and you were there too because we're old. But like, I mean, this does remind me of the early days of the web. It really does. You just never know what to expect.

39:19There's this whole creative element, you know, which has nothing to do with business. Nobody to be SaaS. It's like kind of random kind of, you know, and it's a cool time to be in the industry. It's really cool. And I think like for me, it also reminds me just like in a much in small scale. And when I started Netlify and like... When was that? So I started working on it in like 2013, right? And then we launched out of private beta in March 2015. And back then, front-end developers were seen as a pseudo-developer. It was like someone that took a Photoshop file, sliced it up, and then handed it to a real developer that would implement it into something working.

40:01That was a front-end developer. And part of the mission back then was like, hey, if we give them the right tool chain, these front-end developers will go crazy and they will just build the whole thing. right like if we just separate all that back and stuff for them and like that was like the jamstack idea right i remember your early i remember your early pitch where you were like best for static sites maybe you'll see a little bit of dynamic like you can use it for static websites and then like now look at it now everything right everything like everything is built using everything is built using on it right like and these front-end developers are obviously the mainstream developers, right?

40:41There's like no question now, right? And that's just like the same moment I think we are with this schism where like there's still this notion of like, oh, these vibe quarters, they'll still need like a real developer to come like, and we will give them the tools and we will just see like this massive... But I will say like the hardcore developers also became full stack JavaScript developers. It wasn't like, you know... Yeah, like everybody just kind of shifted over there. And I think it'll be the same again, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. Everybody has to like take that next leap, but it will be a much, much bigger pool.

41:16And it'll probably also be a different shift where like today you're kind of like either a developer or not to some degree, right? Like of course this makes sense. There's some VCs that develop software. Like in general, right? Like people that are like developers like hired with the title developer and that's what they do, right? And I think that's the other shift that I think software development will just be a skill. Yeah, I agree. And there will still, just like with writing, there's still professional writers, but all of us also have to know how to write as part of our jobs. Yeah, same thing with design.

41:50Development will become like that, right? There'll be a level of it that you're just expected to be able to do in lots of different jobs. And then there'll still be some expert developers that are only doing that, but it'll be the minority, I think. Bring us a bit into the future. So where do you think this... So I mean, just actually to try and maybe catch up the conversation a little bit, which is, or summarize the conversation is, last time we talked about this, it was a little bit speculative. You've seen actually a dramatic increase in users. Clearly, we're seeing... We've also seen like after that, so many companies start focusing on AX, right?

42:25And as I said, especially the developer tool space, right? Like where I think everybody has just seen, okay, we have to go in this direction, right? Like Bessemer had the updated version of like the developer tool laws. And the first one was AX, right? Like it's like Resend is like an example. And there's so many like from Superbase to like Neon, like everybody is like super focused on like we've got to work with these agents so we don't really matter. Right. But then also in spaces like the CJ of HubSpot, he's really like geared HubSpot towards like we need to just be really great for these agents to work with.

43:01right like and that's going to be the interface to much of our data and automations and everything like that right like and you're starting to see i think now with like chat tpt shopping like integration you'll start seeing everybody in the e-commerce space be like okay how do we really deal with this and so on right like so i think it's also become a really tangible industry really tangible changing the behavior and ceo submitting prs like change development changing like the type of years of going to the side, like all of these things. Like, do you have like a bit of a more science fiction-y kind of prognostication for where things go?

43:37Or do you think now it's, can you clearly see the next few years from here? I think everybody, like, I don't think anybody can right now, right? Like, I think we're definitely in this like wild space where like what's clear is that everything is changing so fast. I have paths like I believe in, right? Like the trends I believe in and things I think will definitely happen, right? And as I said, like I think, I do think we are going to this like world where software is much more of a thing that's not built by like this small, relatively speaking, really small part of humanity for all the rest of humanity and where software is something much more malleable and everybody can like sort of like do stuff on.

44:21And I think that also means that like code as we know it today is going to be much more of a niche thing that's not really very involved in like the daily process of software, which will change the infrastructure around software building a lot, right? Like because everything is so code centric right now, like things like GitHub and pull requests and so on, right? Like all of that, I think it's going to evolve to like a level of abstraction where it's much more about understanding like the outcome of what the agents do and the iteration with those agents and like introspecting and so on. And I think browsers will evolve really dramatically from this and we'll have much more.

45:03Like that originally concept of a user agent on the web is getting real, right? Like we're going to have like all of these different ways of consuming the web where some looks somewhat like the browser now and some really doesn't. A lot of things that's held us, like that's made it really challenging to build like very visual or UI driven experience and so on are going to be solved. Like, for example, all of the accessibility constraints, right? Like, they're going to not really matter because like, what would you prefer? Like, trying to access my e-commerce through a screen reader or just through chat, TPT, and voice mode, right?

45:40Listen, I think about this all the time, which it feels like the consumption layer is changing, right? So like, my son loves to chat with AI friends. Yeah. And when my son's 15, when my son becomes 18, to get a bank account, like, is he going to go to some shitty SaaS bank website or is it going to come through this? Yeah. Which also kind of begs the question is like, you know, like the web was never super conversational based. It was more UI based. And so does that shift? Is the consumption layer going to include AI going forward? Yeah, yeah. I think the consumption layer is definitely going to include AI and a lot of things are going to happen inside, like, agents that people even have, like, I think people will also, that's another reason I think AX is important versus, like, the company that thinks they will build, like, you'll go to their website and they will build an agent.

46:38But it's probably the consumption layer is going to become AI and then the AI consumes the traditional web. Precisely, because I don't think you, like, I think you will, like, already now you see people, like, have history with their chat, TPT, or cloud and they really have a preference, right? Like, and they don't want to go to, like, the banks and talk to that, right? Like they just want to interact in that way. So I think a lot of that will be really driven by like agents to interact with. And then I think at the same time, I think the application layer is going to be a whole new part of the web, right?

47:11Like where a lot of interaction and like seeing what's happening and like that whole concept of being able to build something and put it in a URL and everybody can use it and interact with it and can be like collaborative and so on. Like, I think that's still such a strong underpinning of the web that now that everybody can build more of it, like we also just at the same time, like we're going to see less of like the traditional bank website, but we're going to see much more like interesting stuff. Yeah, I think it's so remarkable the affinity between users and their, to your point, like their AIs.

47:45Yeah, yeah. And it's not just memory. Like a lot of people are like, well, you have the chat history of memory. It's not that like, did you see like the outcry and the move from GPT-4 to 5? Yeah. They're like, ah, support was so much better. Then it turns out that just meant it was more friendly. Yeah, yeah. You just got used to this. And so I think it's pretty clear that there's going to be a pretty serious attachment and they're going to want to like actually filter the web through that. So, you know, something that occurs to me is that there's two kinds of approach here. So some of the tools that I use, it's like they kind of do the work for me, which maybe as an old developer, I don't quite like because I like to have the creativity.

48:20I like to be very involved. And one thing that I've actually really appreciated, I mean, philosophically about kind of what Netlify is doing, and I just love your thoughts about this, is like, I get to use whatever tools I want and like I get to be the developer. And like, how do you view this as it plays out? Like, is this actually a philosophical distinction that's real or am I making that up? No, no, I think it's real. And I think there's two really different mindsets on it, right? Like there is that mindset of like building tools that claim to be like, we are now your developer. and like you don't need developers anymore because like the AI is your developer.

48:54It's like you're outsourced. Right, like you're outsourced. Our approach has really been like you are now a developer, right? Like whether it's to our existing developer base or whether it's to all of these new people that come in and start this journey, right? Like it's really like, okay, if you want to go on this journey, you're now a developer and you have to learn things and you have to understand like what happened, like how software is built, right? Like code is like a little part of it, right? Like, but if you want to like talk to a database, you have to like, know just like some, some element of like what's happening in the world.

49:27And you have to know that to be able to collaborate with these AI agents. And, and it's not like, you're not going to get success if your expectation is that you just go prompt them, build me XYZ app and they will do perfect, right? Like you're going to be successful if you're willing to learn how to develop software in a world where these agents are able to multiply your abilities, to write code, to do all kinds of stuff, but still have to take the direction from someone, right? Like, and I think that's what sort of underpins our whole approach to this and our whole philosophy, this idea that we are like helping billions of people become developers and take part in this practice of building software and not that it's like everybody's just a consumer.

50:20Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an aside. Yeah. But I wonder if you have the same experience that I do, which is I find that like using AI as someone who's been developing for a long time is like an exercise in abdicating opinion. Because these models do dazzling things, but it's not always the dazzling thing that I would expect it to be, right? It's almost like I've got to let go of expectations because I can articulate, I want this and it'll do that, but I would have done it quite differently. And so, A, do you have the same experience of like, you kind of have to like let go? And then B, do you think this is just something because we've been developing and like that will just not be an issue as a new set of developers shows up?

51:08I mean, maybe that's why all founder CEOs is now programming with agents because it's like, we've already gone through that in a way. Like you started hiring these developers and you asked them like, do this thing and they come back with this thing that's like pretty cool, but it's like, I would have thought like, why did you do it that way? I love that. So you're almost like reclaiming power. That's so funny. And you're kind of already going to do that, right? Like, so now you can just do it in a closed loop with an agent that don't actually get angry at you and you're like, no, change it to my agent.

51:38So, but, but. I love that. There's definitely something to it, right? Like that you have to work at that level of like, it's not exact, like it's not exact, right? But you have to be really good at articulating what is it that matters, right? Like, and what is it you actually care about? And what is it that the agent can just make up? Because like, that's fine as long as it works, right? Like, and it feels very different than like, it's a very different feel than the traditional sort of part of really like centering yourself like figuring out exactly in your head like how should this software be put together and so on and you need to sort of like out of that step have like just a really clear idea of like what is the flow that really matters what is like the part of this software I really care about and then what is the part that like fill in the blanks so one of the consistent things in this conversation we've had is the system should not be the developer for you.

52:46Like the user, you know, system builder should be the developers. But now that's not just the subset of professional developers. It can be anyone. So maybe let's just end on this. For those that are listening to this who are not professional developers that want to enter this, like what would you recommend to them as far as like where places to start, like how to get going, maybe things to read? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so ironically, I think it's harder for me to guide that journey than someone from that space, right? But people I see going on that journey, right? Like I see them start with like tools like Bold or RebelEd or whatever.

53:21And then I see them jump very quickly from like... Did you say Bold? Bold. Bold. Bold.new, right? Yeah, yeah. We have like, for example, like we just had like a launch. Bold's great, by the way. I love it. I love it, right? And we just had this launch event where one of our challenges, like silly challenge, right? but we wanted an event and all of our team was building the product. So it was like, who's going to build the event site? So I told the team, this guy that's like a customer success manager, that's his background. And like you go into LinkedIn, right? Like no sort of technical background or anything, but he had been like super active in the Bolt community and he's just become really good at prompting Bolt, right?

54:05And he was tweeting at me with like a redesign of Netlify he made in bold. And it was like really cool. Wow. I said like, let's just ask him to make the event page. No. And he just prompted the event page entirely in bold. That's so cool. And the event is over now, but the page is probably still at netlify.com slash deploy, right? I think it's like a really, like, I think it's like, it was a very high performing event page for us. It's like one of the highest performing event pages we've had in the last four years, right? Like, and, and he has just, like, he has really learned a skillset, right?

54:40Like, it's not, I could not go, I'll admit, I can't go prompt Bolt to make that event pitch. Like, but he's really built that skillset and he's just built it by being like really curious and then looking at all the things he likes, right? Like, he has like a site, I think it's really cool. It has that pattern. I'm going to tell Bolt, like, look at this site and make, replicate this pattern and then combine it with this other pattern, right? And I think a lot of the people that start now starts with that kind of sort of remixing, right? And just like, how can I just like remix something? And then the people, like then some of them start just going deeper, right?

55:16Like they start using Cloud Code and Cursor and play around and they go directly to Netlify and they start like learning how more of the software work and they interrogate the models constantly. Not like they don't just take the outcome for granted, right? Like they keep interrogating, like, why did you do that? and like how did you build that and try to actually like use curiosity to understand. And those people are really learning fast. I do think this is a really important point to make that everybody should know is so, I work with many of these AI companies and they have, whether it's in a creative domain or a co-domain or a technical domain, they have users that don't come from those domains and they still have to work hard, right?

55:59So it's not like labor is being removed. Like it's still the best people work the hardest out of it. They work the hard. The best people still spend the most amount of time, right? It's just like the product is different in this time. And so for those of you that are interested, I do think, you know, and to use these AI tools, just realize that, you know, like it's, it is magic in that it gives you a result, but it is not magic in that you still have to put in the time and the effort to learn it, but they're great learning tools that produce great outputs. And so. It's funny because like I, in, in the past before all of this AI, when people asked what to do to be a good developer, I said, like, just have a really high tolerance for frustration.

56:39That's about right. Because you're just constantly going to do things in the beginning that doesn't work and it breaks and so on, right? And I think it's still not... I'm not sure it's any different. Exactly, that's my point, right? I think it's kind of the same, right? It's like that part of it's probably still the same. You're still going to be just like, okay, it didn't work, but I'm going to try again, right? And it broke and I'm going to try again. And like, I'm going to figure out how it works. And you got to just have that kind of like tenacity of like, just keep going. Amazing. On that note, I think this is a great place to head.

57:09And thank you so much for showing up. That was a lot of fun. That was really fun. Thank you.

57:22Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.

57:58Disclosures.