Agent, take the wheel (Interview)

29:41And we need to be prepared for changing our product again. Like if you get Beyang on the CTO of Softcraft, he said something that stuck with me a couple months back. He said, in these times when you build with AI, the old startup playbook of try stuff out, find product market fit, scale it up. That playbook has worked for the last 15, 20 years, but maybe that's over. Because now, as soon as you find product market fit, there's another huge technological change that might pull the rug out from under you. And you need to be prepared that you cannot say, we found this, let's scale this up. You need to be able to move with the technology because we're in a phase of upheaval, you know, phase of change.

30:28And we try to embrace this from the start by saying our products, you know, get out of the way of the model. The picture I use is built light scaffolding, wooden scaffolding around the model. So when the model gets better and bigger and stronger, the scaffolding falls away and you again get access to the raw power of this model. And yeah, that's the meta thing, you know, like keep it simple, be able to move fast, move as fast as you want, be able to, that's, should have mentioned it at the start. We don't have a model selector. We pick the best model for the job that we think is the best model for the job right now.

31:07And we are prepared to change this. So if tomorrow a new model comes out, we want to be able to say, this is now the best model for coding. But we want to provide the best experience without the user having to select, you know, out of these premium models, low-cost models, fast models, select one of 18 for this given task. Now you need to activate ask mode and then go into planning mode and then go in execute mode. We want to say, no, this is the best way to do this. And you don't have to worry about this. We pick the best model for you. And right now under the hood, it's a mixture of different providers models.

31:42And we just want to provide the best experience. yeah when we talked to uh steve one thing that was uh stuck out i suppose was the copy the the web copy when i say this the word copy on amcode.com and it said and i i i just can't believe some of the words that was written here and this is quinn apparently because i asked beyond who wrote this and he said it was quinn so there you go it was me oh it was you was it you yeah it was me yeah you wrote all this okay so i'm gonna read your words talking to the right guy well beyond credited Quinn and you're crediting yourself. Let me read the words. Confirm that it's true.

32:18Awkward but true. I believe you. It says, and this is older because the website has since changed. I had to go use the Wayback Machine. Thankfully that still exists. And I'm able to actually see back to like last month or earlier this month or something like that. So the heading says everything is changing. Then it says we believe programming with AI is going through massive changes dot dot dot again. The models yearn for the tools and tokens. We hold them back if we make them, and this is kind of harkening to some of the things you just said. We hold them back if we ask them, if we make them ask before they can change a file.

32:55Give them tools and tokens and everything changes. 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. And so I'm not going to read the whole page because we should miss a few more lines, but a really good copy for one. So very profound. And then you mentioned how you and Quinn have been working on this and kind of chatting back and forth. Like this is what it did today. And he says that, and you say that. What exactly are you doing with this thing to like build this thing? Like what is, give us a glimpse into what it's like to have this be true for you and put this to work.

33:41Yeah, so first of all, thank you for the compliment on the copy. Amazing copy. The dramatic reading of my copy that I – Yeah, does that feel good? It was really good. I mean, the reading as well as the copy. The reading was excellent. Can I read the rest of it actually now that I think it was? There's only a few more lines. Go ahead, go ahead. I'll finish it off, man. Yeah. It says, it's all going to change. AMP is embracing it. So that's what AMP is. Our way of keeping up, question mark, shipping. we add and we add and remove every day we're building for where these models are going if that means amp will look completely different in three months so be it it's like this it's almost like a rap song it's like this anthem against this this rally calling away and it goes on to say if you want long-term support and the same ui in 2032 if you want to spend a maximum of 20 bucks per month amp is not for you if you want to find out where this is all going come with us and this says read the manual and i think that is just like so cool it's like you're going off into this this sort of like bernie man journey in a way it's like you know i don't know where we're who we're gonna be when we come back but we're going on this journey and we're opening the flood the floodgates we're letting go of all the restrictions and what happens happens is that kind of what's going on yeah i i think um so i didn't have raps on mind i it was more like 60s you know like the rolex copy or whatever you know like the magazine advertised and um but i think this come with us thing builds on this idea that we've had that is you know i said this to queen and beyond that I want to spread excitement and curiosity and the joy of discovering these new things.

35:32And if people want to come along and they are open-eyed and are also excited by this, let's pull them along. Let's explain how this works. Don't act like this is something that nobody else can do and it's magic. You wouldn't even understand. Just click, run agent and accept what the agents do. So like, no, this is a tool by professionals for professionals, a power tool. And you can understand how it works. And I want to show you how this works. And I want to pull you along, which is also where the blog post comes from, right? The subtitle of the blog post is The Emperor Has No Clothes. Because a lot of the copy from other AI software is this AI magic.

36:14It knows everything about you. it's going to replace you and it's going to replace your job and whatever you're doing. And for me, the fascinating bit is that these are incredibly powerful tools. Let's figure out how to yield them. Let's figure out how to make real use of them and just build, you know, come along, let's use this. Like everything is changing. These are incredible tools that will change software in the next years tremendously. Let's come along. And to go back to your question, what does it look like in practice? When Quinn and I started building this, so AMP started out as the VS Code extension, and it's written in a standard web stack.

36:57In VS Code, the sidebars is usually a web view. So in our case, we use Svelte for this. And what we would do is we would hack on this. And we started with the normal, what everybody knows, like the user message, assistant message, tool calls, like the display of this. And then, for example, we would add a new tool call, like say format file. There's even a video recording of me and Bian doing this. You add a new tool and say the agent can now format files. And then in the UI, it would show up as like just, you know, like an unstyled JSON message, like tool, format file, arguments. And then you would go, let's see if the agent can build me a nice looking component for this.

37:40And then I would take a screenshot of this thing. And I would open a new conversation with the agent and say, can you make this look better? It's this tool call. And here's all of the other components that we already have. And also check your work by opening this URL. And then what the agent would do is it would go, oh, let me look at these other components. Oh, this is how tool calls are displayed by using these components. Let me look at this. Oh, so it's missing this. Let me add a new component. Let me add a storybook entry. Let me open the storybook in the browser. Oh, here's a screenshot.

38:13but now it looks good. And then you're sitting there and you send a message to Quino and you go, you won't believe what just happened. Like it used the browse and took screenshots and then it ran into an error and it figured out how to fix this error and it got the diagnostics. And it's just this excitement of seeing when you put it on the right tracks, it's an image I use is that you kind of just scream at a nation and say, fix this issue that I have. What you have to do is you kind of have to set some rails and say, here's a file. Here's an example file. Here's how you get feedback about your work.

38:51You know, here's the command you have to run to get linter output or compiler errors or whatnot. Go and do it. And then it goes off and it will run into obstacles and issues and it usually will jump over those hurdles. And it then comes back and says, here's a new component. and we had you know there was another thing where we we also have a at the same time we started sending so many dms back and forth that i was i was on a bike ride and i was listening to another podcast and they were also talking about agents and i'm like oh yeah we should do this and this and this it got so excited i stopped the bike and i said quinn a message we should record a podcast just to share this excitement.

39:34So also on ampcode.com, we have like this five, six episodes, I think, podcast where we just talk about what we do. And in that first episode, I described something that I also couldn't shut up about. And that was, I was working with AMP on the right as the assistant on AMP itself. And I was refactoring some tests. And what I was doing was, you know, standard like TypeScript tests with like this describe and test, test, test, like pretty repetitive stuff. And so I started refactoring these tests. And back then we didn't have Amptap, which is the completion. And I was like, I wish I could have recorded what I just did to five of these eight tests and then say to the agent, you now do the rest, right?

40:21So I started to type out a prompt to the agent. I said, I want you to rebuild a feature that records the keystrokes. Like once you hit record, it should record the keystrokes that you make in the editor. And then when I stop recording, it generates a prompt and sends it to the agents. It's like, here's all of the keystrokes I just did. Go and finish the work I was doing, right? And I sent this off to the agent and the agent went off. And as they say, one shot at it, right? It went off and it actually built something. And I was like, surely this isn't going to work. So I've boot up the debug build.

40:55I start modifying. No, I start the start recording command and it shows like a little recording icon in VS Code. I was like, okay, cool. But now it's going to fall apart. So I started modifying the tests again. I changed two out of eight tests. I hit recording. It says recording stored. Surely now it's going to break. So then I hit this other command that it added to add like the keystrokes to the agent and say to the agent, this is the edits I just made. And I hit that button. And at that moment, I realized that what it did was a pretty naive version. It truly recorded every keystroke, Like not as a diff, but truly like, you know, T-E-S-T, new line, return, all of this.

41:35And it gave, it sent like 60 lines or something or 160 lines of just keystrokes. And I was like, yeah, what the hell? And I send it off to the agent, basically saying, you know what I just did? And then it's 160 lines of keystrokes. And it came back and said like, I see you're trying to refactor these tests to switch from assert to expect. Let me finish up the rest of the tests. Get out of here. And it went and did it. And yeah, exactly. So then I sent Quintinventus like, dude, we got to record the podcast. Like, this is crazy. You know, like, is this something that you would use every two minutes?

42:11No. You know, is it like a little feature that I build in 50 minutes? Yes. Is it amazing? 100%. Like, the ability that you can just, like, build a tiny feature by just describing it roughly. it comes back and it cut and it works and then this mind-blowing thing of sending 160 characters and then you realize yeah they they are somewhat like us but they're also not they they can make sense of 160 characters right and and say okay this is what you're trying to do here right and it's just couldn't you make the same sense as a human though what do you what do you i know this is amazing i'm not arguing against this but like what are you what are you arguing for by saying they can comprehend the 160 lines of code or the well as a human yeah you could right if i give you 160 lines of one characters you could i for sure it takes a little longer maybe it takes a little longer that's what i'm saying but that's the other thing you know where um you can sometimes just paste some error messages in that are not formatted and if you do this with the human they're like what is this and then you realize oh it's one file path broken up into four lines and not four separate, you know, whatever, stuff like this.

43:24And for these models, that just, it's, you know, it's not an issue. Like it's like the red and butter. It's like, yeah, yeah. Making sense of text. And then the other thing, right. Is, is you can sometimes send them like the rot 13 encoded text or something and talk to them in that. Just to troll it or why? Yeah. But they, they get it. Like sometimes they get it and they're like, oh, this is rot 13 encoded and reply also encoded back and stuff. It's a troll back. They're really like us in some sense, but they're also strange. You're going to encode your question. I'm going to encode my answer.

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46:01let me ask you this you said earlier there's this divide in the enterprise and for lack of better term let's just call it believers and unbelievers right so you have the the bulls and the bears and of late you know on this podcast we've been just doused in believers yourself chris mccord was just on the show he's he's into it obviously steve yeggie's into it uh chris Anderson, who's got Vibes DIY, they're building a vibe coding thing. And like all these stories are in alignment, but there is a lot of people that are super skeptical for various reasons. And I can list off what I think are some reasons that I've heard, but you said with your enterprise customers, there is this inside enterprises like skeptics and believers.

46:49What's the skepticism's argument that you're hearing? Maybe you could steel man it for them and not just dismiss it. But like, what are the skeptics skeptical about inside the enterprise about these tools and their future? I don't want to distinguish between enterprise and, you know, let's just, let's just say in general, I think I had a conversation last year at a Rust conference in Italy with a senior engineer who was, um, done some amazing stuff in the last 20 years, like apparently a crazy good programmer. and he was like back then i was working on zed and and talking about the text editor and he's like so you have ai features and i said yeah and he and i knew by the tone you know not a believer right and he's like can i turn them off and i was like yeah sure you can and then i said why do have you not played around with it just curious i'm like have you not played around with it and he's like ah well i played around with it a year ago two years ago and it just gave me back garbage and i'm like what did you use chat gpt and he's like some website and it stuck with me it stuck with me so much that i wrote a whole blog newsletter post about it because it was this there was no interest at all there was no curiosity at all it was just i tried it once it doesn't work i don't you know so i think there's a lot of i don't want to say willful ignorance but i i think there's a lot of ignorance where people have kind of tuned out all of this and yeah just like some of us have tuned out crypto or whatever it is, blockchain in general.

48:26And I think some people have just tuned this out. And whenever AI pops up, their eyes get blurry and they just ignore what's next. And I think that's a big thing that some people just, it's not like they looked at stuff and thought, it's not for me. They just don't realize how much has changed in the last few years and um that's one part that i see and then the other thing is that um some people describe it at the bell curve meme where the junior engineers get a lot out of it because they don't know that much so the ai takes care of a lot of stuff for them they never have to learn how to center a diff with css you know like nice and then on the other end of the bell curves the senior engineers get a lot out of it because they know a lot and they basically know how to review what the ai is doing and they know where the pitfalls are and the trap doors and what tests to write and what not to do and how to architect the thing so they're like you know hey nice i don't have to type all of this like i know what goes in this file i know what goes in that file i don't have to do this and then there's like the middle part of the bell curve where it's the engineers who are trying to get better at what they're doing and they want to learn all of this and they are not i think comfortable with you know agent take the wheel kind of thing they they're like i don't i don't know what's going on here i want to know what's going i don't know understand this and they get skeptical and yeah that's also what a lot of people describe in the enterprise and then the third problem is that it's something you have to learn like you have to get better at this it's it's you you the first time you try an agent you won't have amazing results possibly you know on a small scale yes but some people do crazy stuff but others will fail and i think there's this problem that all of the hype and marketing over the last few years hyped it up as you just say build me a website and it's going to look amazing and the expectations were made so high that now some engineers try this stuff out and they go you know fix this distributed database oh look it doesn't do it it doesn't know how to fix a distributed database and so they bump up against these expectations and then they're kind of let down when it doesn't work on first try and then they give up and And what Mitchell Hashimoto recently said, I think last week, he's like, when have you ever become more productive with a tool after using it for just a single day?

51:09Like you have to put some effort and you have to get better at this. And I think that's a problem. Like people, these models are anthropomorphized, which is also what I've been doing in the last hour, right? I'm at fault, right? And talk about intelligence and it's the agent and whatnot. And there's this mode of thinking where, well, these things are smart and these are like humans and these are close to AGI and whatever else somebody somewhere says. But the reality is that these are large language models based on a transformer architecture. They have a certain way of taking the context that you put in and producing something.

51:53and they cannot do everything. They don't know everything. You have to know about what goes into the context and what shouldn't go into the context to not derail them. So there is a learning curve, but it's not something that somebody tells you on the website, you know, like, hey, you got to learn this, you know, because nobody says we have a learning curve. That's amazing because the last 20 years of software has said learning curves are bad, you know, saying this as a Vim user, you know, like learning curves like do you even use them anymore i hear the ids dying i mean don't you just let the i don't take the wheel yeah yeah yeah like that's that's a hot topic like i said yeah i know it is i've been bringing it up non-stop do you use them or not yes or no yeah exactly not anymore i use my am mode in vs code but i don't honestly i don't type that much code by hand anymore like it's truly crazy i i mean say that again say that one more time clear okay so the journey in some sense of the last one and a half years was that i i worked at saucecraft i wanted to try something else i wanted to go as hardcore programmer as i can and i went to Zed and we build a text editor in Rust from the ground up with our own, you know, GPU framework and whatnot.

53:22That's truly some of the best programmers in the world work in that team. And it's truly an amazing product. It's amazing code base. I feel like I've reached the core of what programming can be. But then over the year with AI getting better and then trying out stuff like back then, like cursor tab where i was sitting down and i just want we were building the completion for zed so i was working on that the tab completion the fancy ai commission and figure out what the competitors are doing you know so i tried out tab a cursor tab and i was sitting there and i would change a switch statement or whatever it was like some repetitive thing where back in the day i I would have been so proud to pull out an amazing, impressively good Vim macro.

54:12And I would just start typing like a console log or something in one of the switch statement cases. And it would say, oh, you want to add this down here too? Tap. You want to add this too? Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And I hit tap 10 times and it had the whole thing. And I sat there thinking, damn, like this is faster than I will ever be. Like all of the Vim, you know, I'm going to use Colmac and I'm going to use Quickscope and Vim and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, you now have models that are faster than you at doing this. If you have like a CSV file or something and you, I don't know, remove the last column, I would have done this, you know, selecting normal mode, jump to the end, delete, blah, blah, blah, or macro and repeat it for 990 times and whatnot.

54:57on. Now with these models, you could just remove the first column, second column, it would go, you want to remove all of the column, like the last column, tab, tab, tab, tab. And I was like, that's crazy. Like that changes a lot of things. And then I worked on the Zed completion and we built this ourselves. And I realized I'm not an ML guy. And Antonio, the guy I worked with, he's maybe the best programmer I ever worked with, but he's also not an ML guy, but we could built something of equal quality as cursor tab was and i was sitting there thinking this truly is going to change a lot of stuff like if if if like an open source mall like you can use a quen or deep seek or whatever if you can turn this into a completion mall that edits code faster than somebody who's really good at win myself right if it's faster than i can be like that has to change stuff that has to change stuff in death to one and then after that moment i had this thought of like you know i don't know how to phrase this in a in a way that doesn't offend anybody but um go ahead this thought of offend away are the yeah am i working on a horse carriage you know like by working on a text editor am i am i working dang i don't mean it you know but it's just it's It's a really good text editor though.

56:20It's really good. It's an amazing product, but it's just this, I've worked in the Vim mode with Conrad at Zed and I was like, all of that stuff. And it's amazing. But then you're like, I want to be efficient at the end of the day. I'm not somebody who loves programming and being fast at stuff because of macros and key bindings. I like doing stuff fast. Like I like being efficient. And now suddenly I realized that all of my Vim macro stuff was kind of invalid, you know, because I could just tap, tap, tap in another editor to get rid of this brute force, whatever, you know, chores. And that changed a lot of stuff.

56:59That changed a lot of stuff with how I look at developer tooling. And then basically I, you know, just to round this up, I looked at different other companies and talked to different other people. and then I ended up coming back to Sourcecraft because I talked with Quinn and I told him everything I just told you and I'm like, dude, everything is changing. He's like, you want to come build the future here? You know, like I agree with you. Like a lot of stuff is changing. So yeah, that's, and now I'm working in VS Code, which I've never wanted to do. And I don't like VS Code. Like aesthetically, I don't like it, but it's just, I also realized I don't care that much anymore.

57:41And then I thought, am I the leper here? Like, is this, what's going on? And then I talked with a bunch of other people, colleagues at Sourcegraph and people I met in San Francisco or at conferences, and they use Am2 or they use Cursor, Windsurf. And there was at least five of them that said, I was a hardcore Vim person, but I switched to using VS Code, Cursor, whatever, because I realized it's just a 10X multiplier. And the other stuff doesn't matter that much anymore. And if you were to ask Primogen or TJ or whatever, they would give me for saying this, of course. But I had this feeling, and a lot of other people have this feeling too, that the age of fast mechanical movement in an editor, it's kind of over when you have these models that are much faster than you.

58:35And when you project out the future that these things are getting faster and cheaper and that maybe surely you will have this running on your laptop, right? And then it's like instead of having your Vim key bindings and Comac and a split keyboard that you can put up vertically or whatever it is, you just talk to your computer. Maybe. I don't know. But yeah. It goes back to your bell curve. Well, I was going to say you said horse carriage. I kind of want to come back there, not to like slap the offense on there, but to really think about that, though, like you have to think about. I'm trying to do this in the moment.

59:14I'm trying to like listen as a podcaster would and I'm trying to think about where we can go and I'm trying to like, you know, think about this idea, too. And what you had me thinking about really is like, what do I do today? You know, automatically go to the easy choice because that has become the 10x multiplier in my life. And I think the easiest response would be vehicular movement. How do I get from A to B? You know, for example, I took my kid to, he's in golf now and he went to a camp today. I didn't walk him there. You know, we didn't get onto our horse carriage with horses and go there, although distant family members may have done it that way.

59:59No, we got into our new version of the carriage, which is called an F-250. It's still a diesel truck, but can't modernize that quickly and that fast. But we got into a vehicle and we went back and forth from here to there. I didn't think about or cry about the fact that, you know, my grandfather, my great grandfather may have, you know, travel via horse at one point. And they loved it because of the nature of the care of the horse and all the things that go into the pasture and all the pure things that are beautiful, right? Doesn't take away the beauty, but it takes away. It changes the utility of day-to-day life.

1:00:34The utility of me maintaining a pasture with space for my horse so I can go from A to B is over. That way is over, right? There's no one doing that. I now take a vehicle and that's, that's just how it is. And so that's what you had me thinking. Like this is the most obvious thing of like, I would never go back to the way, or maybe I, I would, if I could retire, if I had a few money and it's like, yeah, now I can afford the pasture and I can take horses everywhere because time doesn't matter. You know, maybe that's a different kind of thing, but yeah, the obvious answer is a vehicle that moves faster because that's the way of the world.

1:01:11I think that's a good point. There's a generational divide too. And I forgot to mention this, but also last year, I gave a talk in Munich at something from the university. Basically, there were a lot of people much younger than me hanging out at this meetup. And we started talking about AI and you know back then I'm sure you've you could confirm this a lot of hand wringing about is it pure programming is this still programming when you use cursor and these other tools and Kodi and Windsurf is this you know is this real programming do you unlearn stuff do you I don't know like do you get dumber by doing that do you really learn it the right way all of this And, you know, is it not artisanal code if it's not written by hand, you know?

1:02:05And I talked to these young people at this meetup and I realized they don't care. Like that's over for them. They've never think my code is not real code because I didn't use Emacs to write. They just use the tool available. and they would tell me, oh yeah, I organize my docs in this way so I can use like cursor to pull in this whenever it needs this. And I also have like this library of these rules and I organize my files like this because then it's easier to do this. And they didn't even spend two seconds thinking about, is this the right way to do this? It's just the way they now program. They grew up with AI.

1:02:48And if they cannot get this out of their editor, they ask chat GPT or Claude or whatever and they ask stuff here. and it just opened my mind that, you know, made me realize that maybe a lot of this handwringing is just like old man wondering about the clouds, you know? Like, is this still true programming? Turns out people, younger people don't care, you know? And it felt like somebody in 1965, like, oh, the electric guitar is this real music, you know? If it's not a violin or something, it turns out the young people don't care. They don't want to hear it. They moved on. And that's how I felt about a lot of stuff there.

1:03:35And yeah, like you said, it's a generational thing, right? And if you're the young generation, I mean, go to any 20-year-old at university right now, studying computer science or programming in their spare time. I will guarantee you they use AI and they don't bat an eye about it. Like they don't worry about is this true programming. Okay. Here's something visual for the, for the, you know, those tuning in via video and they can see me. What am I, what am I doing here? What is this? Calling somebody. Taking a phone call. What is this? Or maybe this, since it's like a real object. This is taking a phone call to folks these days.

1:04:18This is not. Right? And so there's a generational divide. It's like that is not the way the phone operates anymore. The phone has moved to this other thing that is not connected to a line to the house. It is now free range and roaming to wherever you go. And it's personalized. The phone has changed even. You know, so you can't, as much as we want to stay in the past, the future comes no matter what. Time is linear. We cannot stop time. We're only in the, we literally only have this present moment. The past is gone. We can't change it because all we can do is this moment. And the future is coming no matter what we do.

1:04:59That's how time works, by the way. You know, is this, is this analogy like, well, okay. And what I mean by doing that gesture of the phone and not the phone is that what if writing code or being a software developer is not in Vim anymore? What if it is not in even VS Code really that much longer? What if it's in a version of what these tools are evolving into? And that's... Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. I 100 % agree. It hurts if you have a Vim tattoo, though, you know? Yeah. I mean, I kid, but there is an identification factor, which is actually baggage to change, is identification. Just like we identify, perhaps, with the music of our youth or our formative years and not the current music.

1:05:53There's an aspect of that because so much of what we do with our computers is who we are and what we care about, and we can express that through our tool choice, our editor choice and that's why there are flame wars because like who really cares well we do why because we're the kind of people who care and so of course we're going to care when you call vim or zed a horse carriage for instance like yeah you didn't want to offend anybody but uh yeah it might be the case now there's also rational skepticism that i think comes from being around enough to see a lot of fads come and go. And I think if it weren't for my particular perspective through this podcast, I would have written these things off pretty early myself because I, and you could probably go back if you had copious free time and like track my change of mind throughout episodes because the results I was getting early on were really bad.

1:06:50and i was like this is not useful this is a distraction i'll just keep coding and it came through like prolonged exposure and progress to actually get to the point where i think it's just recently i'm like yeah this is amazing you know the mind blow is happening but i could have easily just been like heads down going back to my work because i've seen a lot of things that are quote unquote promising or game-changing and they weren't you know and so that's part of it i'm just going back to some of your thoughts around resistance, Torsten, and people who are not on board yet. And then the other one is, is the, you went to the bell curve and you know, that, I think they call it the midwit theme or midwit meme where like the one in the middle thinks they're like the smartest and has the worst take, right?

1:07:36It's like the junior gets it for a different reason. The senior gets it and the middle ones don't get it. And I think in this particular case, it's because of the skills. Like VIM is a skill. And you put a lot of effort into learning that. Maybe it was easy for you, but for most people, it's not easy. And so there's some sunk cost fallacy there. Like, well, I've worked really hard at these skills. And if you look at that bell curve, like, well, the junior doesn't really have any skills, so they don't care. They're like, cool, this helps me do stuff I couldn't do. And the senior, I think, if they are continually curious and self-aware, they realize that the skills are a means to an end and really what they're about is the end.

1:08:18And they can also get to the end better, faster, stronger with this tool versus the ones that, I mean, I know Vim, I've spent a lot of time learning Vim and yet I don't identify myself with Vim. And so I can just set Vim aside when I think that it's no longer the best thing for me to do the thing. But when you're at the peak of that, the peak of that bell curve you've spent a lot of time a lot of money a lot of effort maximizing your engineering skills and so it's the hardest for you to say these skills aren't actually all that useful anymore all that valuable and i think that for a lot of us just hurts i think there's a lot of identity wrapped up in this where like you said like people identify with i'm the guy who never has to look up a method in Rust.

1:09:09I'm the guy who knows all of the syntax. I'm the guy who's really good at Vim. And to use that example again that you brought up with the senior engineer, I think, I mean, I guess you can affirm this. As a senior engineer, there's like these moments where you realize that the code does not matter that much. Like what matters is also the marketing and the business and the team and how you ship stuff, how often, you know, like you're not this line. There's so much more to it. Like it matters, but there's so many other things. Yes. You realize that code might be a liability even and whatnot. And that same curve, I think you can go through over time when it comes to tools where you're like, well, I mean, I had this experience early on.

1:09:54I was pretty good and fast and I'm super proud of it. And I thought everybody who is a really good program has to use Vim and, you know, whatever. And then I had a senior colleague and he used Supplym and I don't think the guy has ever configured any keyboard shortcut ever in his life. And he was still incredibly fast. And he did a lot of amazing stuff and made a lot of smart decisions. And he was a senior engineer for a reason. And I realized maybe that's not the differentiator. And I think there's a lot of this going on where right now people are running around with AI as the sledgehammer to hit people over the head and say, you know, this is over.

1:10:31What you've put a lot of effort in is not worth a lot anymore. And to some extent that's true, to some extent that's harsh and you have to empathize with people. But I also went through it. I struggled with it for a long, long time. You know, I get it. Yeah. I think what we have to recognize in order to accept that harsh reality, but also overcome it and really leverage it is that it's not that our skills are useless. It's that they've lost value. But because of where we've been as engineers, we are well positioned to leverage the new tools better than other people and to adapt quicker and understand when things do go wrong, what went wrong.

1:11:21And like help the agent better than a neophyte could help the agent do its thing, even though it's pretty good. You just tell it what you want and it's getting better, you know. but I feel like skilled people can adopt new tools as long as they don't have the baggage that we're talking about, probably more effectively than people who don't know how to use tools at all. Yeah, there was this amazing Kent Beck quote that popped up, I think yesterday, a couple of days ago in a pragmatic engineering newsletter. And I think Kent Beck said this even two years ago about ChatGPT and I'm getting the numbers wrong, but I think he was saying that oh, I just realized that 90 % of what I can do as a programmer is now worthless, and the other 10 % have just gone up in value by 100x.

1:12:12Yeah, he drills it. Yeah, and it's this, like, a lot of the mechanical stuff, like which framework do you configure how and what goes into which config file and how do you type this and how do you do that and how do you – construct an FFM pack command, what command line arguments, all of that stuff, right? Pretty worthless right now. But what to build and when and how to, say, organize it, how to architect it, what dependencies to pull in, what pitfalls to avoid, how to build this for future use. All of those like meta, or say let's say engineering skills right it's about trade-offs it's about making decisions of how to build something under a set of constraints that's now super valuable like that's that's the multiplier now not how fast you can type 100 there's analog to this i just told this to my kids this morning because of course as parents and teachers we're trying to figure out how to approach these new things as well there's a lot of upheaval in school systems right now i I mean, it's a mess out there.

1:13:25There's a lot of cheating that's just way too good to keep up with the cheating detection tools. And what I said to my kids, which I think applies specifically to our work as well, is there's a big difference. It's a small delineation, but there's a huge difference between using AI to help you think and using AI to think for you. And if you're using it to think for you, then we're headed towards idiocracy and you're not going to make it, you know, like you're going to be one of those. But if you're using it to help you think, now you're basically just a superhuman. And I think when it comes to coding, it's very similar.

1:14:04Like we do have to be engaged and be making those decisions and judging the results and like doing all the things that are unique to us and our context and our business goals. And like the things that we know, because the coding agent just knows what you tell it to do. and it's going to do its best to get it done and probably do it better than you can do it but it can't decide what to do not yet we're not there yet and so use these things that help us build way better than we could before versus just building for us and just being along for the ride even though it does feel like a ride along the way which is kind of why it's fun right like you're like wow it's just happening yeah i mean that the windows kind of passed and we i was just arguing back really just to this idea maybe to the vim folks who have the tattoo and all that on vim folks is like you know you can still ssh into a machine today it's not common to do it you usually use a cli to do it and at some point you'll have an agent use a cli to do it or maybe today you should be doing that but ssh still exists you still have a username and login you can still control how you access a linux machine it's just not common like it doesn't mean that you can't use vim anymore it doesn't mean that those skills go by the wayside either or even you know nurturing and curating your vim file those are still truths that they just live in a different world now where that used to be a productivity tool for the ultra x programmer and now that version of a programmer is sort of flatlined in a way because the agent can go faster than it right in a way or the person controlling babysitting as steve said babysitting the agents and torson you didn't describe it as that you didn't seem like it was tedious toil maybe uh steve is in a different realm than you are but um i think of it like that like it doesn't mean that vim doesn't exist or that sh doesn't exist you still sh into a machine it's just kubernetes orchestrates your your sea of machines versus you individually doing that and ssh into each one of them and provisioning them it's just like not how you do it now you know it's just not the way so sh still exists vim still exists it's just used differently i think what you're saying also touches on something else which is that in these discussions, a lot of stuff gets thrown into one bucket that is programming.

1:16:44Will AI be able to replace programmers? And I think people need to understand there's a thousand different types of programmers out there. There's like a programmer who works at Big Tech on distributed systems. There's a programmer who works at a hardware company on embedded systems. There's a programmer like me who works on dev tools and there's programmers with web stuff and people that work in agencies. And I live in a small town in Germany. If I would try and go meet like the hundred programmers closest to me, most of them work in companies that are not software companies and they modify old Java programs and whatnot.

1:17:25And some of them do WordPress websites. And I think when we say it's going to change a lot of programming and then people push back with, oh, it cannot modify the storage layer of Postgres. That's not what I mean. But what I mean is that every day, 10 ,000 of times, somebody gets a phone call to call somebody else to say, can you change this on our WordPress website? And that person who makes that change maybe is called a programmer, but it needs some skills to do this. And I'm thinking that a lot of this will change in the future. Maybe not in the next four, six, eight, whatever months, but a lot of the stuff on the fringes will change heavily.

1:18:08And come back to your point of SSH into a machine. When the cloud got big, a lot of people were saying, the cloud is just another computer. It's not different. And we will always have sysadmins. We will always have sysadmins that administrate those machines. And yes, we do have sysadmins still, right? 2025, we still have sysadmins. Yeah, they're just like graduated. Exactly. In different areas. And if you look at the number of job postings that hire for sysadmins, I'm pretty sure that's changed in the last 15 years. And I think some of those changes will happen to programming. I don't think you will find the same amount of, you know, in Germany called a web designer or front-end developer, like people who build websites for a living for like companies and whatnot.

1:18:55I think a lot of that might change in the next couple of years. But if you work on a distributed storage layer at Google, an agent is not going to take your job in the next two years, you know, probably not. Yeah. If you're working on like really edge fringe R and D, those are areas that are more protected. I would say if you're in the 80 % realm where 80 % of the development is done by a common, hireable, typical developer these days, that job is probably more in jeopardy of either getting compressed or agentic. And you become a babysitter and you have taste and curation and humanistic tendencies, which is like care and humanity, you know, like things that, that thus far machines can probably reason it, but not really feel it the way we feel it.

1:19:47But, you know, those are still traits and qualities that remain, you know. It's such a wild thing to think about how this is changing, though. Like, even in the moment, like, this podcast is for software developers. Okay? Just in case you didn't know that, listener. And agents. You're a human. This is not a podcast for robots yet. Jinx. so that's a profound thing to even think about too i've been thinking too about the kind of code you're writing have you been amping with amp can you kind of like give us maybe a more clear picture of the behind the scenes because i asked you for that and you kind of alluded to it and you basically described what you did versus literally how it looks what it looks like to sort of like write this level of code.

1:20:46It seems like I would describe your job today, maybe not the R &D version of AMP and where you're taking that platform, but your job as a trained professional software developer, you're not writing code these days. You're trying to generate as much code as possible and solve as many big problems as possible. Is that pretty accurate to what you're doing? well i still i guess my title is still software engineer right and i do i wrote this other blog post about how i use amp that's also an appcode.com it kind of goes into this and i think the bigger picture idea is that um i call it paint by numbers programming so that means my job as a senior engineer is to think of how will I implement this.

1:21:38And then what I have constantly running my head in the last few months is like, will the agent be able to write this code for me? Like, can it do this? And if the problem is too large, or there's a lot of implicit knowledge in my head that I couldn't write down, or it's too cumbersome to write down, I go in and paint by numbers programming. I put in the lines, like I say, I want this file and this file and this new service and it should have these methods and it should do this and these arguments, please write this code for me. And on a practical level, I think 50 % of our, or more, say 60, 70 % of the code in our code base, which is a standard TypeScript, Svelte, SvelteKit, you know, there's standard looking code base.

1:22:25A lot of that is generated. And a lot of the, say, load-bearing parts, the stakes in the ground parts where you say, like, this is the architecture, these are the central pieces, that has been kind of written by hand or revised by hand. But I'm going to guess, I would say the test suite, 90 % of that is generated, right? Like, oh, cover all of these cases. Then we have a storybook that is pretty long by now, which is just a web service website that shows all of our UI components, right? Like the Svelte components. And it shows them in all of those different configurations, you know, show arrow two, what's the active state?

1:23:09Is it active, deactive? Like all of that stuff. So you have one page and you can see one component in all of the different states, right? And imagine an activity indicator. It can be blue, red, green, or idle or whatever it is. And it has a tooltip. So you want to see when you develop this, you want to see what does it look like in all of those different states. What I previously would have done is create the storybook page, create one version of this, create some mock data, do some Vim stuff, duplicate the mock data in like different states and different configurations, and then, you know, render it or put in other terms.

1:23:46you have a test suite and you have some mock data, like five different users. One user is deactivated, one user is activated, one user is an admin, one user is a group admin or whatever it is. And previously you would have used your editor to duplicate that information multiple times, or you write other helper scripts to remove the code duplication. But what I'm doing now with the agent, when I want to do like tests or storybook or whatever, I'm like, here's the component here's where i want to render it or here's the test that i want to write go and type out this code for me like it so most of it is not super smart like it's not coming up with amazingly new algorithms or whatever it is but it's just the the chores and like this just typing you know and one other thing that people kept saying is that i didn't realize how much dumb typing i did you know while programming you're like you know we've all heard this oh thinking is the bottleneck you know like typing speed doesn't matter but then you're doing it and it's like okay yeah fix the import statement no add that missing import no no no align this auto complete this blah blah blah there's a lot of typing still involved and you know that's what i try to get rid of i don't try to get rid of you know the thinking part like you put it it's it's more that i know what the structure is please write out the rest for me give you a concrete example from two hours ago i have two components in the ui and they should do the same thing two buttons you know they one of them has two buttons and the other one has one of two buttons and i'm like why are they inconsistent like they both should have these let's call them sign in and sign out buttons right one only had sign in and the other had sign in and sign out dumb example doesn't make sense should be the same button you get the point two buttons.

1:25:41And I was like, okay, if I do this, then I have to duplicate the call from here, update the import statements, adjust this, make sure that this is flex box aligned and it renders correctly and adjust the height of this. So this button, blah. So I say agent, this component has one button. This component has two buttons. The first one should also have two buttons. Please make it happen. And it looks at both components. It figures it out. It's not a hard task, copies it over and 20 seconds later, it's done. And I didn't have to type this out. And that obviously goes, that's one of the smallest examples.

1:26:19What I did earlier today was I built, I wanted to have some, I don't know, let's call it a testing script where I have a bunch of data and I want to go through the data and I want Each piece of data, I want to send it against the API and see what comes back. And because I noticed that my feedback loop is start up the dev build, try this out manually, hit the button, do this. I'm like, I could build a tool where I can do this 50 times in a row and see all of the results on the same page. And half a year ago, I would have never attempted to do this because I don't want to build another thing and type out 300 lines of code.

1:27:03and I would need to figure out how to do a three-pane layout. But then I was like, I can generate this. If I say, here's the data in this folder, here's the API, give me an ability to put an API key in and then render me a website with a three-pane layout where on the left side you list the data. When you click on one, you show the data and then you have a button to send the request and then you see the results on the third pane. It goes and does it. There's no issue. And I don't care about how it looks. Like, is it styled or not? It's just, yeah, it's useful. It's like a little, what do you call this?

1:27:43When you're woodworking, you build like tools to like a tool for the tool, right? Ad hoc. Yeah, it's like a tool specific. Yeah. Is it shim? Is it shim? I don't know. But it's basically, I'll give you a really concrete example, another one from a few months ago. This was early days of AMP. and um yes for everybody listening this is not in production this was early early days yeah but just like two years like two months ago yeah yeah so this is two months ago so early days i we had the agent fail sometimes to edit a file right so in users would say uses early early early alpha testers okay they would say it sometimes fails and then i would go that doesn't help me.

1:28:30I need the data. Like what was the input? What was the actual file on this? What's the thing that happened? And in order to figure out what went wrong, I guess in the past, what I would have done was figure out some logging, like some error reporting, use sentry or logging or something, and then put the data in some form that makes it readable for me to figure what the problem was. But then I thought, I now have at my hand a code-spooing, like a machine that can spit out code really fast. And if that code is a standalone project under a thousand lines, it will 99 % of the time get it. So what I did was I put in the code, don't do this at home, but I put in the code something like, if you are on Torsten's machine and you run into this error, put the raw data dump, like a JSON that was this big, for everybody listening, I made a huge gesture, like let's say 600, 700, 800, whatever lines big.

1:29:31Take the raw data, put it in this folder on Torsten's computer. And I just ran this for two days and I collected a thousand files. And then I said, AMP, let's build something. Here's a folder full of data. What I want you to build is a data viewer. I want you to build a little web app in Go. And I've never seen the insights of this code. Build me a Go web app that lists all of these files. It takes out these two fields. It syntax highlights them. And then it shows me a diff between these two fields. And then give me keyboard control so I can go through the data. And it did this in 45 seconds. I open up the website.

1:30:07I go click, click, click, go through. And I go through like 50 examples. And just by being able to look at the data, I spotted a bug. I realized, oh, it's a white space issue. And that's only because I had syntax highlighting and a diff, and I could easily go through data. And I never would have built this on my own because syntax highlighting, pain in the butt, like the diff in the JavaScript, the three-pane layout, I would have given up. But the barrier to entry with this, you know, the agents or the AI in general is so low that you can build stuff that you never would have attempted before, right?

1:30:44And to come back to what I would originally have tried, like logging and whatnot, imagine you get logs of like, input this, output this, and it's just this, like a line of logs. Would you have spotted a white space issue in those logs? You know, with like, oh, it used two spaces instead of a tab or whatnot. And I don't think I would have. But just being able to say with the push of a button, I can generate 500 lines of code. I changed how I approach this problem from an engineering perspective. And I think a lot of people are now realizing this where they say, oh, somebody tweeted yesterday, Jeffrey Litt, I think.

1:31:31He's like, oh, I kind of wanted to figure out. What was it? How many words are in each section of this Markdown document or something? What would you have done in the past? Would you have sat down and written a tool to do this by hand? Probably not. Like it would have been an idea that you brush off immediately. And he's like, Claude, build me like a one file, whatever strip to do this. And it did it just because it's affordable now. So now, you know, come back to real software engineering. how many tests and debug tools and test suites and like introspection tools or analysis tools have we not written because it would have been too much effort.

1:32:15And that's now affordable. And how we're starting to realize this. And the question is, when will we really leverage this? When will we make use of this? And to go one even further, you know back i've worked at softcraft since 2019 with one year break and a lot of large scale customers they say can you make this work for our code base can you make the tool that you have work for our large code base what we're seeing now is that people change the code base to leverage ai more they're like oh these files are too long for an agent it blows up the context window. You know what? Let's split it up in five files.

1:33:01And I'm telling you two years ago, nobody would have split up their files for any tool. They would have said, this is our file. This is our 20 ,000 lines. You're not going to touch this. But now the levers change and the amount of leverage you get out of these tools change. And now suddenly the code base will adapt. That's my bet. The code base will adapt to these tools. And the really interesting bet for me is how will our engineering practices change like yeah what code will be right by hand what code will we generate thinking even further will there be code that we won't check in but instead we just check in the prompt or whatever it is and just generate it on the fly or will all code still be checked in you know yeah this actually opens up a whole new line of thinking for me which i haven't thought before Or how does this impact open source?

1:33:53Because I was thinking through your situation. I was like, well, in the past, that one-off tool to help me do something else, right? Like it's like a side quest, basically. Like I either would have forgot about it, like you said, like, nah, too much work. It'd be nice to have, but I don't need it. Or I'd say, screw it. I'm going to write it. I'm going to open source it. And then other people can use it. And now it's worth it for me, right? Or I'd say, well, let's go see if someone else has done it and see if I can just use somebody else's. Maybe not in that order. I probably would go look first and then decide to build it or not.

1:34:24But in a world where we can just ad hoc generate one-off tools and check them into the code base or not, keep the prompt or throw the prompt away, like does the amount of open source diminish? Does my use of open source not matter as much because I can just generate anything I need? Yeah. Have you thought through this? Because I haven't even thought about the impact on open source. Yes. Quinn and I talked about this in our podcast that, let's be honest, the GitHub contribution graph is not worth as much as it was 10 years ago, five years ago, two years ago. And it had a sharp drop, I think, in the last whatever year or something.

1:35:02Yeah. Like, and you also know Go and you know that, you know, say on one end of the extreme, one extreme is the JavaScript community where it's like, here's one function. I published this as a package. And on the other end, there's like the Go community, which is like little copying is not bad. Like I don't have to pull in this dependency. So now I'm thinking with AI, why would I pull in like a tiny, you know, package? Or why would I write it by hand if I just need like a, why would I even go somewhere and look up a function that formats a timestamp in whatever format I want? Like I can literally ask the LLM, here's the timestamp.

1:35:50Here's all of the five formats. If you don't have all of the five formats, here's the command. Write me a program that generates all of the possible formats. So you see all of the power performance and then write me a function to parse them. Like, you know, like even the act of, you know, code as a way to reduce duplication is not up for grabs, but it's kind of changing because... Start to question it at least. Dumb example. And somebody listening will say, Torsten is an idiot. But just to illustrate the point, say you have a function that validates something and you want to make sure that it validates these 50 cases of whatever.

1:36:27or say 150. It always was best practice to type out these 150 cases. You would write a regex or something, right? And you're like, oh, let's not, you know, regex, blah, blah, blah, because we cannot maintain this list. Now with LLMs, you can generate 150 examples. Like why you can literally add code write time, generate all of the variations. You don't have to let the CPU go through all of the variations. And just stuff like this where, you know, even frameworks, all the goal of a say web framework is to help you reduce the amount of code you have to write but if the amount of code that you can generate is suddenly large and it's fast and it's getting cheaper do i need like fancy templating helpers when i can just say change all of the user avatar components and make them all green you know like something like this and the principle becomes do repeat yourself maybe i don't know but it's this it's certainly a lot of code is based on the assumption or a lot of code and a lot of the way we write code is based on the assumption that writing code takes time is hard and we want to avoid it as much as possible you know but now Now, will that change?

1:37:48Because I can generate you websites with one push of the button now in like 50 different variations. And then coming back to the original question of open source, well, does it make sense to store pre-generated pieces of code and build libraries that are available and configurable for 15 other use cases? when you could just say, well, here's like one version of this and then maybe you feed it into an LLM and you generate your own versions of this. This is a bit sci-fi and obviously it's not performing, blah, blah, blah, but it's just, you know, like this stuff is changing. And one thing that to go one level higher even is, and it's also one of, you know, why I think, you know, the business I'm in is so interesting is Eric Meyer, ex-director of engineering at Facebook, or one of the ex, you know, he's a Haskell guy, like really smart functional programmer.

1:38:49He's done program for 40 years. And he said, he had a presentation two years ago, I think pretty early where he's like, why search for code when you can have an LLM generated for you? And what he means is that when you go and you search for Stack Overflow and you search your own code base or you search the code basis of your company, what you want to answer is, I want to build a user avatar component or something. How do we usually do this? Because you don't know how or you don't want to do it, right? But if you have a model that knows how and can do it in less than a second, why go and find those examples?

1:39:30Why not generate this here? It's the same as you're trying on new clothes and it's like, oh, I'm going to try on the red shirt and the blue shirt and whatnot. But instead you could have a photo taken of you and then say, give me 15 variations where I wear the same shirt in 15 different colors. You know, like stuff changes when you don't have to go look for it, but can generate it on the fly. Well, what you're saying is, is that the efficiencies or the perceived efficiencies we've done in the past have been based upon human efficiency. Exactly. Right? Human, like we thought it was efficient to write shared code so that it was more efficient to stand up a new project.

1:40:11So that was more efficient for teams to unify around codified ways, standards, et cetera. Right. Those are all the efficiencies. But if those efficiencies are under mute or moot, sorry, is that they're no longer they're no longer important. So those efficiencies to an LLM were the thing that begins to generate this code. It's like, well, you know what? I don't need to worry about this one unified way for 25 applications to connect because I could just write it on the fly. Right. For the bespoke need it has, very specific, and that efficiency versus the efficiency of some other ephemeral efficiency that doesn't really matter anymore.

1:40:52Yeah. The analogy I used in the past was, at the end of a book, you have an index with different words that you can look up quickly. And you have that index because it takes a long time to find that specific thing in the book. if you're able to read a thousand pages per second do you need an index still the thing itself is optimized for how it's consumed right now but if the way you consume it and suddenly we why would i need an index at the end of the book if i can just have photographic memory and can read a thousand pages per second and i think a lot of code is still like this a lot of has to be right it's based on how we write and consume code and how hard it is to write code but when the capabilities change you know the tools or how what we produce with those tools will also change the kids are going to totally get this the kids you know the next generation the ai natives they're not going to ask these questions because they're going to grow up in a world without that constraint you know like they'd say like why why would i share like well you have to have a shared library like why would i share my library when i could just tell my thing to make a new library why would i refactor when i could just rewrite or why would i maintain when i can replace like when the cost of replacing maintain your car because it's expensive to replace it but the cost of replacing is approaching zero why maintain i don't know you start to ask a lot of questions that we've assumed were like fundamentally unaskable, right?

1:42:38Because all the calculus changes. I'll give you one funny example. I've started to build this because I posted it and people got riled up about it, but it's a little bit philosophical, but basically a lot of stuff we do when we work with computers is about putting things in a certain form, in a certain structure so the computer can work with it. Example, static site generator blog posts. Right now, the format is you have to have a YAML, front matter it's called, right? The slog, publish date and whatnot, and then the text of this. Now with LLMs, you could technically write a blog post with anything.

1:43:21You could have a folder called my posts and it could be a screenshot of a text message. That could be one blog post. You could have a screenshot of a post-it note, a photo of a post-it note, a markdown file, a text file. And then you ask the LLM, here's my five blog posts. Here's the basic template I want for these blog posts. Generate me my blog. And you don't have to put any structure in it because these LLMs are now these, I call them the fuzzy to non-fuzzy adapters. You can throw pictures, screenshots, audio messages, videos, anything at them, and they can spit out text. And when you think about it, it's sci-fi and philosophical, right?

1:44:01But when you think about it, it's how many beautiful things can we build when we don't have to think in strict database column schemas, you know, where we can say, well, a blog post could be anything. It could be a picture, a video, an audio recording, you know? And we now have a tool that lets us transform this into another form. We don't have to put it in a specific thing. That is interesting. So what exactly are you building on? I started to build a static site generator that at build time will just look through a folder called posts and generate out of images and videos and audio files and screenshots an index of blog posts and put them in a format.

1:44:45And the prompt is for each blog post, modify the layout so it matches the content of the blog post. You know, like make it look serious or make it look fun or whatever it is. And I think that's just something we've never had in computing or software where you could say, make this one look like the handwriting, you know, make or, you know, it's just orderly handwriting. Is it fun handwriting? Is it a little throwaway note? Make the page look like this. And it comes up and probably does something, you know, and that makes it look like this. Yeah. So is it non-deterministic then? or are you going to have some sort of - Yeah, it's undeterministic.

1:45:23How are you going to have a reverse chronological listing of posts? Isn't that what a blog is? I mean, or does that also have to be undeterministic? Okay, then the - What is a blog? I mean, a blog is a dumb example, but it's like, then the file names have timestamp in them or whatever it is. But I mean, still, right? Like it's a large step up. That's for sure. Because I don't like YAML front matter. I only do it because the computer likes it, you know? Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. And what I did was, this was two months ago or something, somebody sent me an email and they were like, hey, on your personal website, it still says you work at Z, but I heard you back at Salesforce.

1:46:01And I was like, oh, you're right. And I opened my website with AMP and I took a screenshot of that email, pasted it into the agent and said, fix this. And it went and it found that bit on my website where it says where I work right now. And it updated it based on that screenshot of that email. And I sat there thinking, isn't that amazing that I can take a screenshot of an email and something changes based on it? And I sent it back that person who sent me the email. And that person was like, I'm sure you could have done it faster than asking an agent. I'm like, don't you see, man? Like, this is crazy.

1:46:34I could build you something where you forward an email and it opens a pull request on your website. That's not hard to build anymore. Yeah, back in the day, it was a startup, right? Exactly. That was somebody with a pitch and seeking funding. Now it's, yeah, whatever. We got here, though, specifically by Jared, you asking about open source. Like this entire last 35 minutes-ish has been about the question of open source. Yeah, more or less. And at first, I almost said everything by default is open source now then. Because if you can generate every line of code, then the critical factor is not what the code that gets produced.

1:47:17It's the thought and the intellectual property potentially that makes it proprietary or not around that idea. If by default, then everything is just open source. But then now as the conversation goes on, it's like, well, what if open source doesn't matter anymore? because when we need something, we just make it. There's got to be some living standards, though. The value in the source. I mean, where's value in the source anymore? Right. Like, that's what I'm trying to really - There has to be some source out there because the robots need to learn more. That's, yeah, well, that's a second order effect, right?

1:47:51Like, if we all say there's no value in sharing stuff anymore, then the well dries up, you know, to make these models better. I think we'll find value in sharing things, though, still yet. I mean, I think there will still be libraries and frameworks that will get made. And maybe at some point the source will be just a codified way of the LLMs using this stuff. And there'll be a user like we're a user. And we're only user by proxy in the fact that we care about the name that gets associated to it. They don't want source necessarily. They want tools. Like for training them, they need source. But for their actual building, they need tools more than source.

1:48:31So I don't think we can answer this question in the next three to five minutes, let alone the next three to five years. I feel like this is a generational question. Like if you go out now 20 years and say, what is the impact of open source on the world in 2045? Will it be dramatically different now? I think it might be. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Can I make an optimistic prediction? Sure, please do. I think the value of what's creative and truly human and tasteful and based on experiences, unique experiences, I think the value of that will rise. I think if there's one thing that only you in that moment with that combination of this model and that model in this scenario can produce, I think that's still valuable.

1:49:25But like a really piece, a really creative piece of code, a really insightful algorithm, really efficient, good data structure, you know, but yet another two -week framework or I don't know, you know, like a date parsing library or something or a one-off function to check temp the existence or something like this, right? I think the value of that will diminish. But the value of uniqueness and taste and creativity will, well, stand out. I think that's a good note to end on. You think, Adam? I think so. I think the only thing I would add to really this conversation is just that it seems like perspective is in order.

1:50:12Because when you're closer to the problem, the specifics matter more. like for example future humans may say remember when human validation was based upon lines of code or characters written in their life or whatever like and now it just like it doesn't matter because that doesn't it's not a metric that matters to track when you zoom out right when you zoom in that matters when you zoom out it's like well you you measure things based upon the broad strokes versus the specific definitives on the zoom in well said thorson thanks so much for coming over to our podcast and sharing i know you've been on go time a few times we've known you and known of you especially back when you're writing those books about compilers and stuff but i haven't had you on the changelog so this was a joy i'm i'm fascinated i'm inspired i'm excited more than scared sometimes i'm scared but today i'm more excited about the future with these agents helping us do better, cooler stuff faster.

1:51:16I mean, mostly good, right? Thank you for having me. And small anecdote is I told my wife before we started recording, I'm going to go record this podcast. And she's like, what podcast is it? And I said, it's the first podcast I've ever been on in 2016. You know, back then go time. Yeah, totally. Was Adam, yeah. Yep. That's awesome. always happy to hear origin stories that include us you know we we've been around a while so we have a few of us that was a long time ago it's nice it's good to be friends to you all these years yep it's pretty cool that's what it's all about right there not the last time appreciate the conversations really enjoyable thank you forson breaking news about our denver live show not only will breakmaster cylinder be in attendance bmc is now officially performing some fresh and some classic changelog beats live on stage 30 minutes prior to our 10 a.m start so if you were planning on arriving just before the show starts maybe get yourself to the oriental theater a little earlier and if you haven't bought your ticket yet, you now have one more reason to get in on it.

1:52:3615 bucks cheap and free for ChangeLog Plus Plus members. Find a way to get to Denver on July 25th and 26th. The FOMO is very real. Learn more at changelog.com slash live. Thanks again to our partners at fly.io and to our sponsors of this episode. Retool agents are waiting to work for you. Go to retool.com slash agents and depot 10x faster build times at depot.dev that's it this show's done but we'll talk to you again on friday and we do hope to see you in denver chainsaw.com

1:53:42Game on!