Creating communal computers (Interview)

0:28Hello again, or for the first time. We have a lot of fun along the way. On this episode, I'm joined by Spencer Chang, who caught our attention with the Alive Internet Theory website. But Spencer creates all kinds of computery things to bring people together around play, connection, and creation. His experiments with computing-infused objects inspired him to create an entire line of internet sculptures and real-world computing shrines that will hopefully inspire all of us to keep the internet alive and flourishing for years to come. But first, a big thank you to our partners at Fly.io. That's the public cloud built for developers who ship.

1:06We love Fly. You might too. Learn all about it at Fly.io. Okay, Spencer Chang, creating communal computers on the changelog. Let's do it.

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3:17Today, I'm joined by Spencer Chang, who made my day earlier this week. Spencer, you made my day with your alive internet theory. I emailed you even before I, I think, put it in Change Dog News. I'm like, I got to talk to this guy. This guy is making me happy. So welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Jared. So I have been fretting the dead internet theory for probably the last 18 months off and on whether it's in change dog news or just in conversation on the show because i feel it i feel the encroaching of the robotic content increasing the upward swing and so the theory to me feels like a very good one and uh the recent news or the recent uh study that showed they're at they've found about a 50 50 break and ai generated content versus human generated content so i'm thinking well that's a if half the internet at least new stuff being created is is taking over then this this theory has some legs to it you came out with a competing theory and a website i'm not sure how theoretical your theory is if you're just trying to make us all happy about the alive internet and kind of saying uh don't freak out everyone like you know the humans are here we are here and and we're staying i'm putting words in your mouth but that was kind of the gist right like let's celebrate the humanity out there you want to tell the story of this alive internet theory yeah um and i mean yeah i didn't come up with this name i think i it's interesting i think it just sort of emerged naturally online like i found a lot of social media like random like tumblr posts referencing this like tiktok posts some people made youtube videos about it and i think it just like it naturally emerged in response and it's basically like the ad systems yeah like humanity will always be here like we've created the internet so much of it so far and like we're not going away my take on it I I felt very inspired like coming across this stuff and you know I've also been thinking about the dead internet theory and I created this um the prompt of it was I was commissioned to do a piece for the internet archive okay um and it felt very fitting to sort of bring these two things together uh because they've you know archived so much content that have been created by humans for like uh more than the past yeah like three decades or decades pretty much um they have like tens of millions of content which is like a it's just like a very crazy scale to think about like each of these things was like uploaded by a human like in some point in the past and I was just like going through like the archives contents from like different years and it's very cool to see I don't know it's just like very cool to see this content from the past because there's this human touch to it um and I think I don't think that's lost in today's world I still feel a lot of that like even in like social media spaces where like you know a lot of bots flourish like I think every day like they're just like I feel like people are finding just crazier and crazier ways to show that they're human like really pushing the human ingenuity and i'll just see videos that's like like i don't know it's like pieces of like like someone animating like a piece of bread or it's just like them throwing a piece of bread on the ground it's like ai would never like you know it's like too it's like too weird yes yeah there is a uh fluidity and kind of a roundness to ai generated content that humans don't exhibit like we are jagged little pills as they say and there are things that we can do that you know at the current crop of technologies are never going to be able to do maybe now maybe the next crop will will pin us down a little bit better but yes the essential human aspect of of creation is not to be matched by what's out there which is why we still can feel we can feel the the encroachment because it's still obvious like yeah that's not yeah that's not funny or that's not interesting now humans wielding ai to do new things you start to get some pretty crazy creations you're like you know what that is actually pretty smart but it was the idea behind it that made it what it was versus the actual execution which is totally fine so tell me about this website i know how it works i've described it on the show you you load up a time period and then you you know hit go and now you're just like throwing like a collage of just like insanity at our faces.

7:50That's pretty much the idea, right? Like that's how it works. How does it, how do you, how'd you do that? I basically just, yeah, I just pull random content from the archive for a specific time period. And it's just filtered by like media type. So I'm pulling images, I'm pulling audio and I'm putting video files and there's no, yeah almost no like curation whatsoever because i wanted it to be a very i wanted it to be like an authentic look of like the spectrum of things that are on there so there is like uh you know you might run into like uh nsfw content as well right because that's just yeah that's part of the internet returns you know because if i curated it would be like my you know version of the internet and yeah part of me like making it this like overwhelming experience was I thought there was this paradox where like you know the internet archive has archived all this human content and like we also know that it's one of the big sources that a lot of AI companies have trained on and I sort of imagined like an LLM like training on the archives like if I like visually if I picture what that would look like it would probably feel a little bit like this like they're Right.

9:05It's like the LLM's fire hose of what it had to consume. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know. There's an interesting like empathy with the machine a bit. Right. Experience as well. That was trying to get at. That is interesting. So I'm not sure how long you've been around. I've been around for the majority of it. Do you remember Flickr? Are you a Flickr? Were you a Flickr user? I do remember Flickr. I barely. Barely. All right. So you're quite a bit younger than me. That's fine. A lot of people are. flicker had this really cool thing and of course for those who don't know flicker it was kind of the original web 2.0 image site where you're sharing your pictures and it was very popular very good built by the same fellow who built slack is that right i think that's right check my work there but going off memory and the reason i bring it up is because flicker had some of the most interesting pictures in the world on it for a very long time and they had an interesting sort, you know, where it was like, give me pictures and you could search an area or a word or tag and stuff.

10:06And then you could say sort by interestingness. And I always love that concept of like, well, you know, give me everything, but let's go ahead and like, somehow I'm sure it was some fuzzy math they were doing inside of Flickr or some hard coded thing. Who knows based on like stars, who knows what it was, views probably just start with the most interesting and work your way down from there and i loved that inside of flickr and i wonder if the internet archive at least has one of those buttons where like yeah you're not curating it but you could be like please send the most interesting things because i don't want to bore people as they enjoy the live internet or you're just like you're just fire hosing it whatever they got i'll take it yeah they don't have any uh they have like you know the basic sorts of like you can sort by views and stuff like that but it's almost like because this is historical content like I'm curious I'm wondering what what you saw on a given day when you on Flickr when you would turn on that filter because this isn't like something that you know this content isn't something that people are like actively going to or like returning to like you would I don't even know how someone would like stumble upon it like maybe only if you're searching for that specific kind of content yeah it's almost like for this case it's almost like it's better at that like like the more interesting stuff is the stuff that's buried and so it's funny that you say stumble upon now do you remember stumble upon yeah yeah i i don't know if i was like i don't know if i knew about it when i was using the web but i i do know about it yeah so stumble upon used to be it was a firefox extension i'm sure it's still out there in some form or the other probably bought by three different private equity companies at this point it was just for fun and discovery and it was a firefox extension it's probably other browsers too that you would throw in your in your in your uh tab bar when you're bored and you would just click a button and it would it would send you to a quasi random place on the internet and they had curation i think and they were like trying to send you interesting stuff which is kind of why you appreciate it because you're going to stumble upon some pretty cool stuff it's not it wasn't terrible you're almost guaranteed to enjoy what you're going to land on.

12:15And this, your, your website reminded me of that because it was almost like you hit stumble upon and you just like cut clicking the button like 75 times and just loading them all into the dom. You know, that's what it felt like. So they hired you to build this. That would have been nice. They asked you to build this. Oh, you mean stumble upon the end? Oh, you mean stumble upon? No, no, no. I don't know what, I don't know who they are or where they are. I'm saying like you this wasn't uh you caught a random hair this was like or wild hair so yeah they well they asked me to make an art piece to celebrate they recently hit like a trillion web pages and yeah I I was trying to figure out what is the best what yeah what what could I make though did you have to pitch it back to them or did they just let you go go wild it was pretty just like you know a lot of flexibility for the artistic vision yeah as long as I used like archive content or like you know was inspired yeah like use our stuff somehow to build something cool yeah and you certainly did

13:23well friends I don't know about you but something bothers me about getting up actions I love the fact that it's there I love the fact that it's so ubiquitous I love the fact that agents that do my coding for me believe that my CI CD workflow begins with drafting toml files for GitHub actions. That's great. It's all great until yes, until your builds start moving like molasses. GitHub actions is slow. It's just the way it is. That's how it works. I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry because our friends at namespace, they fix that. Yes, we use namespace.so to do all of our builds so much faster. namespace is like getup actions but faster i mean like way faster it caches everything smartly it caches your dependencies your docker layers your build artifacts so your ci can run super fast you get shorter feedback loops happy developers because we love our time and you get fewer i'll be back after this coffee and my build finishes so that's that's not cool the best part is it's drop-in.

14:28It works right alongside your existing GitHub actions with almost zero config. It's a one-line change. So you can speed up your builds, you can delight your team, and you can finally stop pretending that build time is focus time. It's not. Learn more, go to namespace.so. That's namespace.so, just like it sounds, like it said. Go there, check them out. we use them we love them and you should too namespace.so is this a common thing for you or you like pick up grants or what do you call them like people give you money to create or is this an uncommon thing how's this yeah it's i wouldn't say it's common but i guess i now wouldn't say it's uncommon okay it's i i've been i mean yeah i'm sort of still even now like figuring out what it means to be like this independent artist, designer, technologist.

15:26It's been almost three years now of doing this full time. I started in January of 2023. Really? Yeah. And I used to, I used to work as an engineer in tech and I, I found my, I mean, yeah, it's been, yeah. So every now and then I'll sort of get these commissions from very different sort of organizations like sometimes they'll be more arts based sometimes they'll be more like technology based um yeah and you found this more interesting than your engineering job yeah i mean i sort of um i sort of stumbled into it i and i don't think i wouldn't call it like um a break from my engineering career sure i think um it's actually just like it felt like the most natural progression of it.

16:19So I worked at Coda for like three and a half years, which for those who aren't familiar is like in the, you know, document like database editing space. And I got into that because I was very inspired by like a lot of the like research and HCI stuff behind it, like Dynamic Land and Red Victor and like making, creating software a lot more accessible to people. Now, you know, now it's interesting because a lot of that is like coming true, at least the democracy of creating software. But yeah, I felt like what we were missing was like, I thought there needed to be a cultural, an equal cultural change, as well as the technology change to get people interested and invested in like taking agency over technology like i think if you look like four or five years back there wasn't like a broad societal sort of interest or like even awareness of of the like political power of software um i think it's changing now with all with all of the like effects of ai and stuff but yeah yeah i I felt like I wanted to bring those two together.

17:38So sort of where I am, I thought that allowed me to like both push for technology, technological change, but also cultural change. And you're pretty good at it because it's allowing you to live, which, you know, the stereotype of a starving artist is not just a stereotype. There's a lot of artists that don't make any money off of their art, but it's nice that you're able to create a kind of, you live at this intersection of art and, and technology. And there's lots of money on one half of that intersection, right? Is the, on the technology side. So it's kind of a nice place to live, right? Yeah.

18:13It's, um, I, I feel very grateful that I, I, I am able to make a living doing this. I feel like, yeah, I honestly not sure. I still like, it still feels weird to be able to say that. I think it's very like, not as steady of a path, obviously, compared to, you know, working, um, And a standard engineer job. But yeah, I've found ways to think about making a business creative as well. And I think that was one big hump I'd get over of treating my art and my creations also as a business. And looking at it from that lens. Because it's important that it sustains. Like if I want to keep doing this work, if I care about the ultimate impact or possible change that I can create from it, I also need like it's my responsibility to make sure I can keep doing it.

19:06Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to two guys in the Ruby community who are longtime open source maintainers. Yeah. And we were talking about that push and pull between sustainability, finance, your hobbies, your passions. and the unfortunate sometimes result of parlaying your passion into a job because it allows you to sustain it but it also turns it into your job yeah have you felt any of that where it's like i love making art but i don't want to make art today because i have to because somebody hired me to yeah i have felt like uh slivers of that tension i have like only in the space where i've I've had to be the most business about it, which is I have like a shop for these like internet sculptures I make where I put digital experiences into ceramic and other material objects.

20:06Just because that involves a lot of like manual labor, like I'm making everyone by hand. So there's a lot of like repeated processes. So every time you get an order, you're like, dang it. yeah sometimes it's just like okay i'm like spending several hours like you know making all these my head like damn yeah you start doing the math like how much am i making per hour on these pieces of art well let's go there because that stuff is so cool um thank you you have this concept that you put on your website of creating communal computers that gather that people gather around and play connect and create and it seems like that particular thing that you're making is very communal and is like melding the real world with the digital world.

20:54Can you tell us more about them and where this idea came from? Yeah. So they're effectively like design objects or art objects that you would picture putting up for display in your house. Like I have one that's a ceramic fortune cookie. But what makes them special is I have like put like RFID tags in all of them. and program a specific digital experience that fits the sculptural form. So the fortune cookie gives you a new fortune every time you tap your phone to it. And yeah, they sort of connect the physical to the digital in this interesting way. And it's cool that other people can experience it as well.

21:40And I sort of just stumbled upon it. I was taking a ceramics class with my partner. and just making stuff for fun. And, um, I like, I was feeling this issue of like telling people my website whenever I met them. And, uh, I literally was just like, well, it'd be really nice if I just had something I could like give people my website. Here's my website. You hand them a token. Yeah, exactly. And I have this like stamp on my website. That's sort of the website logo that's made out of my Chinese name, basically. So it's sort of like a sigil. So that was the first piece I made. I just wanted something that represented my website.

22:25So I put the stamp in this small token and then put my website on it. And not really expecting too much of it, honestly, just for my personal use. But people reacted very strongly to it whenever I pulled it out. and like just like being able to feel like i feel like ceramic especially has a very earthy feel that's very different from how you you sort of yeah from how you perceive software and like it just i could see how the experience of my website connected to that was like so much more meaningful than just like them experiencing it in isolation and so that yeah yeah that's how i just ended up like okay there's something interesting here and how i started experimenting anymore yeah i love that concept i have heard it one time previously and i can't quite put my finger on it but it was at a conference and there was a person who was like i think they said do you want my website or something like that and they handed us a thing and i'm like what is this and i'm like you know and it's an experience or like put your phone up to it like it's it's a conversation starter it's different the technology is very pretty straightforward you know it's like yeah it's like the same thing as a qr code basically like you're just encoding some sort of address that gets opened or whatever but that doesn't make it not cool i mean it kind of makes it even cooler it's so simple and yet the melding of the two worlds in a unique way is what is memorable and uh unfortunately for this person it's not memorable enough that i can give them a shout out um but i've also seen this recent trend at conferences of like coinage being handed out as gifts or as rewards or even just a way to stay in touch and i don't think i've seen any of those I know like Amazon does one.

24:06I have one from, we were at Oxide's office a couple weeks ago and they had little oxide coins that are just cool things that you're gonna go, like I think put it over on the shelf over there. It'd be sweet if it had some sort of, you know, thing in there that maybe it does and I should go try. But no one said that. Yeah. Pick it up. So what other stuff? I think the fortune cookie one's a cool example cause it's not just a URL. It's like a, it's a fortune, right? So what other stuff are you putting into these objects? yeah um so i did a bunch of experiments like one of the ones one of the first ones was like this um pillow that you put your phone on and it turns on do not disturb um and yeah i'm finally actually releasing that tomorrow i like that uh yeah and then so can you sew no it's so it's uh it's made out of concrete actually oh it's a concrete it's a concrete pillow but it does have like a fat like a fabric tag that you would expect from like a pillow thing yeah incorporate into it but uh yeah i liked i don't know i just like contrasts so i wanted it to be concrete because like it looks like a pillow but it's yeah no i like that i just expected it to be an actual yeah exactly yeah um i made like this bathtub where you you put your phone in the bathtub while you shower and it plays your shower playlist is that made out of concrete as well no that was made of ceramic okay most of Ceramic, ceramic, yeah.

25:31I made a Wi-Fi router that gives you the Wi-Fi to your home Wi-Fi for guests when they come over. I made this tiny, it was like a tiny photo frame with interchangeable pictures, basically. These are all ceramic. And the pictures would link to different photo albums. And they would give you a random photo from the album. all the places this idea can go are you are you tapped out do you have other ones in the works like are you are you thinking yeah i still got a bunch i actually just started like a like a content series on like oh really you know like instagram called uh will it internet will it internet yeah and i just like put i just like try to like turn everyday objects into it instead of like creating a special form for it so like the i mean the first one i did was just on my this is my like casio watch i wear every day and i just you know put it put a chip on it and it gives me a photo from like that this minute of this day in the past so like it'd be right now it's 12 32 right um you know november 13th it would give me a photo that's closest to that like in previous years november 13th so go through your phone like you hold your phone up to it yeah and we go through your phone's photo album and find the closest picture to that date in some past year yeah exactly yeah that's sick i love that and so it's tied to like the minute which i really like it's like okay yeah if i'm like seeing a sunset like i might see a sunset from a previous year uh it's like it's tied to the year and the or the minute and the day so it's how does it pick a previous year it just it just finds the closest one doesn't care what year it is it just picks a random one it'll find all of them and yeah it picks around right i love that how many different aspects i guess some of it is informed by or perhaps limited by the phones um like what the phone gives you to actually do from an nfc totally like do you have like what all can you access or what all can you do like you obviously you're gonna launch a photo album to a spot yeah yeah yeah it's very um do not disturb like what else can you do uh it's very os specific so like this is all like pretty uh this is all like pretty limited to iphone stuff for android i think you have to like get some third-party software i mean you can trigger a lot of stuff i don't know there's there's because there's all this it uses shortcuts basically on ios or there's a lot of um different stuff you can program most of the experiences i do like rely on just like websites um and doing interesting stuff there but i do wish iphone in general is very like protective about like nfc access which like definitely limits like what you can do well i don't want you just like walk by somebody and get close enough that they have an nfc chip you know and they get whatever they want to do i understand why they are they keep it close to the vest but it certainly limits the art doesn't it limits yeah yeah that is really cool so when it comes to the technical underpinnings of this how are you programming the chips and etc um yeah so like i mentioned on like uh ios stuff i'm using like shortcut shortcut uh programs to like run programs on the iphone well you're triggering it from the from the device yeah run on the iphone what do you actually is there an api that apple gives you like i don't understand how nfc stuff works yeah yeah it's just um shortcuts which is this like native iOS application.

29:12It's literally just shortcuts. Yeah, and you can program it to like run a shortcut when you... So do you write that in like in Swift or... No, it's in this like, they have this like no code esque like builder thing for shortcuts. Yeah. It's really, I mean, now it's really annoying.

29:31Wow. Yeah. So then how do you get it onto the chip? It's just like it's just like an address thing. Same thing as a... It's like a URL style. It's like an app-specific URL. I'm not actually sure exactly how it works under the hood, but yes, I imagine it's something like that. Okay. Yeah. And where do you acquire these chips from that put in the ceramic? It's like buy them off Amazon kind of thing? No, I bought them just from like some suppliers I found on Google. But yeah, I've started to source them directly from like China now. Just because I need very specialized. And you probably need, you might need a lot of them.

30:10as you start to sell more of these tokens. What about talking to the chip? Is it just like a USB cable that just connects into them or like a firmware thing? It's just, yeah, it's just a phone thing. So you can, there's a bunch of apps available. Oh, so from your phone, you connect to it? Yeah, exactly. Okay, you can tell I've never done this before because I'm completely clear. Yeah, it's really magical, honestly. Yeah. Yeah. that's super cool so that's uh you call that internet sculptures is that the name of this yeah computing infused objects i'm reading some of the words off your website internet sculptures internet sculptures.com is the is the website for the shop yeah but internet sculptures it sounds is just a step along the road perhaps a uh a move down the path but you're going further now yeah to computing shrines which is like okay similar but different tell us about computing shrines so internet sculptures is sort of like the like the business or the shop like container for all this thing you're selling yeah it's like i do these experiments some of them you know feel cohesive enough repeatable enough to be like products they go in the internet sculptures shop it also serves as a vehicle to do like collaborations with companies or organizations if they want like custom ones.

31:35And the manifestation of all those things is in this latest project, Computing Shrines, which is like a sculptural version of these same concepts where you take larger sculptures and create a more immersive digital experience that's only accessible at the sculpture. So it creates this very direct physical to digital bond. and all of them are basically like collective experiences. So they have some interaction with visitors who have been there before. So one of them is like a, it's like a phone booth made out of acrylic. You place your phone, it's like a phone booth for your phone. So you place your phone inside the phone booth.

32:17Okay. And the website or the web experience is like a voice sharing thing where you hear just the last person's voice. And then once you listen to it, you can record a message for the next person. Oh, and that like replaces the message. So, you know, that only one person sort of, uh, your message isn't there forever. It just, it's only the next person in the chain. That's kind of cool. That reminds me of geocaching. You know, you're a geocache. Yeah. Yeah. Cause they have that concept of like leave a thing or take a thing and leave a thing. Right. Yeah. This is cool because it's that same concept.

32:51Only there's only one thing. Like with a geocache, you might open it up and there might be a few trinkets in there or whatever it is or notes or memories, pictures. and you take one with you and you leave your own yeah and then there's still be a few others in there or there might or might not be but with this there's just one one message you're going to listen to that message you're going to leave one message yeah and then only other only one other human in history is going to listen to that one yeah i love it yeah i'm really inspired by like geocaching and all of the um just like very uh i would say folk practices of like leaving traces of oneself in public places.

33:30Like I even think about like very like, you know, people who will like write on chalk or like scribble something in the sand, like write on chalk on like stone or whatever. Like there's all these like small or like stacking stones. If you've ever seen that. Yeah. I have seen that. When you come across one, you're like, wow, somebody spent three hours or however long it was. And like, sometimes you can, you can tell like you know that multiple people have added to it like just by the arrangement of it i like that there's this this like sense of like how many people have been here oh that's interesting yeah so all these are sort of inspired by um those those practices but using a digital form so that it can like yeah i'm interested in like what other sort of interactive experiences you can do that like amplify those practices and it's like you know some people are like there's like environmental concerns of like some of these practices or like you know tagging rocks especially so this is sort of like a way to keep doing those practices but without like still tying into the physical place but without having to like deface anything yeah well as we began talking about this my mind immediately went to graffiti of which i'm i have two minds about graffiti sometimes it's beautiful art and other times you're like this is just desecration you know this is vandalism and so and it's so permanent of course you can paint over it but not with major effort.

34:52So I like this idea of like ripples in water, you know, they have this ripple effect, but eventually it goes back to calm. And that's kind of what you're doing with these, with that particular photo booth experience. What I think is, I think that's a super cool idea. What are some of your other sculptures you've built or are thinking about building? Yeah. So there's one that's, so the phone booth is like Shrine to Voice and there's another one that's Shrine to Earth and it's inspired by the rock stacking practice specifically. So it's, I transformed this like large boulder and like embedded it with some chips and the experience is effectively like a rock stacking experience.

35:33You like load up the website, all of these rocks like come falling down and they're all rocks that have been uploaded by someone who like went there. And so you're able to like offer a rock to the shrine. So you just, it like accesses your photos it like pumps you to like search for a rock it'll like verify it's a rock I can tell you put some work into that one that was very important to you

36:03yeah it verifies it so I wanted it to be like if I could tweak the model I wanted it to be like like if someone uploaded like Dwayne Johnson like the rock I wanted it to accept that like exception yeah yeah but i'm not that advanced yeah but that now now is it set in stone or can you actually uh can you still access the software side and i can still access the software can you upgrade that sucker come on somebody's gonna it's gonna you know you made my day but that's gonna make somebody's weak if it rejects other humans but it accepts dwayne johnson i mean that's the kind of stuff that goes viral i know i love that i'm just here to encourage you to go ahead and work on that that's my the next version yeah yeah so it verifies it's a rock it removes the background and then you see you like you're able to add your rock to the to the to the pile so are these sculptures then like is the selling of the objects funding this stuff that you want to do?

37:13Or is this also commissioned for other... Because these are like living in public spaces, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to get... I'm working on like a public art version of it to be installed in like a park. Oh, that'd be awesome. Yeah, which would be really awesome. Yeah, I don't know exactly how the funding is going to work, to be honest. I received like a grant from San Francisco to try to do this in a park. We'll see it like based on permitting and stuff if that, how that turns out. But yeah, it's, it's tricky for this stuff. I think like, especially like public art in public art broadly is just like, as I've learned more about it, it's like usually just funded from like private patrons or donors.

38:00because it's just, it's not like a, it's not like a museum installation. It's not like something that like brings in a lot of money. It's like literally like a free thing in public for everybody. Exactly a line item on the budget when there's so many other things that they're already paying for. So, which is really, yeah. I mean, which is interesting. It's like, that's the kind of thing I want to do because I like, I've worked on open source and a lot of my projects as well too. And I think, you know, a lot of my philosophy is around technology as a sort of public good. and so this is an interesting like parallel to that in a very physical universe so yeah i'm gonna figure out i don't know how the funding works but at least for now it's not it hasn't gone large scale enough that it's like prohibitively expensive um i guess i'll cross that path when it when it comes to it okay friends augment code i love it this is one of my daily driver ai agents to use super awesome cli vs code jet brains anywhere you want to be augment code can bring better context, better agent, and of course, better code.

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