Here's my Siri theory (Friends)

32:43But underneath them is a traditional, big, layered organization of humans. And when you think about the iPhone, The iPhone is awesome. And they've never shipped a lemon iPhone. And why haven't they done that? Because they are proving themselves with excellence year after year, iterating on that hardware and learning from their mistakes. And we don't get to even see a lot of the mistakes, right? I'm sure they get killed before we'd otherwise see them. The other department that came to mind, you know, Apple TV, you guys talking about severance. Apple TV has got some real good hits. You know, they're more HBO now than HBO has been for a long time.

33:20And the reason is it's run by competent people that clearly have a commitment to excellence. And they've got the feedback loop of people are watching it. People aren't watching it. People are subscribing. People aren't subscribing. And there's clearly some kind of wind at their back. Now look at the third division here of the people who run Siri. Like Siri has been running in circles since 2011. right how do you measure success for siri it doesn't make or save money it doesn't uh there's not like because it's kind of non-deterministic it's very very difficult no one's done a siri benchmark right like we got all these llm tests and stuff no one's been tracking the the growth and maturity of siri as a as a functionality over the years you know like that story we've heard about how the webkit team at apple had this build where if you made if you committed any code and you pushed it up and it made the test suite duration slower, the build system would reject your commit.

34:18You couldn't make WebKit slower. And that was just a hard and fast rule. And look around you, I still use Safari every day. And why is that? Because that rule has like a major impact on my user experience because browsers are so vital. And Siri doesn't have anything like that. If they have an internal benchmark, like, you know, you look at all the posts over the last year, if anything, since the Apple intelligence thing, it seems like Siri is getting dumber at very basic facts. And so that, that, that organization, whoever's in it and whatever it is, they've clearly not been on some sort of loop towards excellence, you know, that's driving them forward in a clear and steady way.

34:55And the human organization that's built around that as a result, how could it be anything other than a nonsensical bureaucracy of finger pointing and arbitrary excuses because there's not like some sort of cycle feeding in and reinforcing the good stuff and and and trimming away the bad stuff and and that's the organization that was handed apple intelligence here go have fun go do the hardest thing we've ever done build this thing that is going to just be a moonshot and also make sure it never says anything racist and it never generates any kitty porn other than that though you know i'm sure you got this we're just going to go make this video now and start printing the billboards how do you think that went right well we see how it went okay silicon valley baby okay gavin belson says imagine a feature so revolutionary that it changes the very fabric and future of hooli no seriously go imagine it i need you to do that right now that's what they said at apple imagine a feature so revolutionary apple intelligence no ai no apple intelligence that was the conversation it was a gavin belson well and they had if it was possible they just handed it to a an unproven team right like i would have started by just throwing away siri and starting over they handed the big head just build it build a new fresh foundation on what might have become deep seek or something right Like some foundational model that that's small enough to conceivably run maybe on this new M3 Ultra paint the story, you know, like but but even it set the goalposts out further.

36:32But I think I think if you've got a rotten foundation, you're not going to be able to build something awesome on top of it. That's rock solid. Siri must be rotten because you can't be bad for that long unless you just have zero investment. Right. Like zero. you said it came out in 2011. I mean, we're talking iPhone 4S. 14 years. Yep. And it literally didn't get any better. I mean, at one point, they put sports scores into it, but it's like they just plugged in an API. I mean, there are so many ways if Siri was a decent piece of software that they could have made Siri incrementally better every single iOS release or whatever they did.

37:11And it just never happened. It's such a disappointment. And maybe it's because there wasn't the incentive. Why do you think that is, though? Don't you feel like Siri is like, a key component to like i use siri on the daily in very limited and very precise ways because that is the limit of siri timers reminders messages yeah very simple stuff uh texts so and so i do a lot of texts to people via that way uh i open my garage door jared you know this right uh open main garage closed main garage it's so amazing i can't get mine working i think the garage door that i bought like the new opener i bought has the technology this makes me very mad but they don't conform to the home kit api and they don't and they won't not that they just don't but they won't is a part of the chamberlain uh yes oligopoly yeah yeah they my cue is a they used to sell a home kit dingus and yeah i have it and those things are probably worth hundreds of dollars now because they intentionally stopped because now i as a tesla owner i pay 45 a year for their nonsensical my cue integration which is literally just so the car can open and close the door okay Okay, so yeah, the MyQ, that's what I got is the MyQ.

38:33And it won't HomeKit, and it's never going to. Anyways, so now I have to launch the MyQ app to do the thing. I just want to say, hey, Siri, open the South Garage, you know? Well, I've been a HomeKit person from day one. And the thing about HomeKit was it was also awful when it came out and super unreliable. And you'd tell Siri to do a thing, turn these lights on, it wouldn't happen. And it was a coin flip whether or not it was because HomeKit didn't work or because Siri didn't work. But then over the years, especially with this new V2 architecture a couple of years ago that came out for HomeKit, I've noticed everything around me in my house is rock solid.

39:06And if there's ever a failure, it's like I said the perfect phrase to Siri and it failed to convey that same instruction to HomeKit that it did an hour ago. Because I'll open up the Home app and I'll click the little button and then the garage opens. Right. That's clearly like good job, HomeKit. that's actually a really good example of a very broken thing at apple that doesn't make any money like iteratively getting better because they could see that probably from their logs, how many the failure rates, the, the, the latency and stuff. They, they redid the architecture series architecture. There was, there was, there was reports a few years ago that they did have this kind of fork in the road to determine whether or not to redo Siri as an LLM.

39:46And the P the, just because the politics of it, uh, Tim cook and the executive team decided to stick with what they had and, try to fix it try to improve it from within and now here we are apple maps another example of something that was awful i mean it was so bad that it was a laughing stock when they first shipped it and strategically they had to because of the whole google apple rivalry and all that it made sense that they had to do it but it was so bad and then they had a big rewrite and a huge effort that took years and stuff and now i in my opinion apple maps is really good and has not steered me into a lake in a long time yeah i think it's honestly i think it's better like the ux the readability the the uh if you're if you're specifically in the united states in japan it is very very good i can't speak for pretty much anything else though right same except for the japan part i'll let you speak to japan i'll speak to the midwest well driving through nebraska is super complicated so lots of corn you don't want to you don't want to end up in a cornfield somewhere yeah i saw interstellar It looked painful.

40:53So Maps got better. HomeKit got better. Siri hasn't got better. The LLM thing is interesting, A, because Amazon seems to have tackled it, right? Like Alexa AI is shipping now-ish. I mean, they're going to roll it out within the next month, they said, roughly a month ago. So is it in my hands? No, but it's, you know, it seems like it's baked. What's the premise of that? What are they promising? What are they promising? A lot of the same stuff that Apple Intelligence with Siri was promising. Just a smarter Echo. And it's backwards compatible with a bunch of existing Echoes, so it'll upgrade. As long as you're subscribed to Amazon Prime, you get it as part of your Prime package, which is basically Alexa just gets LLM abilities.

41:41Just way smarter, knows context, et cetera, et cetera, and do more things. The way to think about it maybe, and this is how I process it internally is that Siri and Alexa pre-LLM Transplosion they had a simple architecture of the natural language processing based on the audio and it was stage one. Stage two is I've got that into some sort of semi-structured data and I'm going to feed that into some router thing in the middle and that router thing is going to determine can I take action? If so, what of my various verbs that I know, right? Almost like a point and click adventure game. Can, can I route this to, and is it, is the raw minders app?

42:24Are they talking about a message? Are they talking about a timer? And then you, you, you, it would transform that data is just ETL, right? Everything is, you transform that data into whatever the timers intent, right? Or, or, or feature would need. And then it would start the timer. And I, I believe the, the big thing that Amazon shipping now with Alexa that's available today or soon is primarily just replacing stage one of the of the spaceship, right? It's just like instead of having that natural language processing that's based on a lot of ifs and elses and heuristics, you just put an LLM in front.

42:55It's got the same orchestration layer in the middle. And that was always way better with Alexa, right? If anything, Siri sometimes had better language processing. Apple has always fallen down in really the second. It's translating the structured understanding of what you just said into now, what do I do? I guess I'll just you know spray it any which way and now you get a web result right that yeah that's why so many times this is what I found on the web you know because that's their fallback right when they have no they can't actually detect where they're supposed to route this they just brought it for a web search so that's that but so Amazon is shipping something now we'll see how good that thing is as it comes out I haven't played with it yet I'm excited too I guess to close the loop on the discussion of Gruber's post, though, what do you know?

43:41We don't we can't know whether Tim Cook, like new upfront that this was low probability of shipping. And he just made the very cynical decision that prioritizing Wall Street's reaction because of all of the apples got to have an AI story to tell, like maybe from a financial perspective or like a company stability perspective, he just made the cynical decision that like, yes, blowing some credibility next year with the tech press is actually worth saving the stock and let's do this and let's go forward and if he made that decision i'm honestly not 100 sure it was the wrong one right like they can recover from from this uh and they probably could have recovered from the stock dipping or whatever they probably could have come up with a better story but it's a lot of coulda shoulda woulda so we don't know that but what i'm curious about is like if if the theory of the case as grubers put it is like their credibility has suffered and as soon as that starts as soon as that takes root then like the you know that's when we're on track to bankrupt apple again and that's a lot of you know uh logical leaps and assumptions along the way i'm kind of curious how you two feel about like how damaged will the credibility be beyond the people who read apple blogs and what what long-term impact will it really have

44:56well i can only i can only speak to my immediate non-techie circles and i'll say that apple has already, I think, lost credibility in a lot of people's eyes because of just like shoddy software in the last couple of years. The confusion, a lot of the confusing aspects of iOS, things not working in the way they're supposed to. And so I don't think their brand is as strong as it was anyways. I'm not sure if this, you know, failure to deliver on a keynote announcement will get passed, you know, very deep outside of our little world. and I do think it would take a long time for something so large and successful as Apple to actually you know get to that bankrupt and I look how long it took Microsoft success hides a lot of problems and sheer size and inertia hides a lot of things and so I don't think there's an eminent demise by any means but I do notice that Apple's overall brand has been tarnished probably the last five years prior to this even.

46:01And I'm sure it won't help. I just don't think it'll hurt all that much. Adam, what have you seen out there? Justin, you make a good point. I wonder who would care outside of the echo chamber of tech. I just don't know. I just don't know. I don't even have a computer nor an iPhone with Apple intelligence. So I can't even speculate at what they've delivered to see, you know, hands on what people are experiencing. Because I'm just, I'm not on the tip of Apple anymore because it's gotten so expensive to live there. And my M1 Mac is just so amazing. I'm like, I can't even justify spending the money on something different.

46:40It's just, or a new version of it that costs five grand or something like that. It's just, I just don't have that. I always had a better opinion. I don't. I just feel like maybe anything I say would just be stupid. Honestly. Speculation. I mean, I could probably come up with something, though. Well, we might just have to leave that one at we'll see and maybe bookmark it for any discussion we might have back in, you know, up in June at WWDC and see how they react, first of all. I mean, the truth of it is, if they react as if this is a problem to solve, that will tell us a lot. And if they react like, you know, Gruber's the problem or we're, you know, just deny and, you know, Stonewall, that's that's saying uh something different and it will probably right lead down a different path right well the rumor mill is saying and this will be probably one of the most interesting wwdc's in a while because of this if for no other reason i thought the last one was going to be interesting because i've been saying they need to reboot siri for years now and they haven't done it obviously in a way this makes any sense the rumor mill is saying that they're going to be announcing ios redesign mac os redesign like a whole new design language similar to the was it ios 7 that did that moving away from my beloved skeuomorphism to the flat the flat present that we live in and okay i'm here for it i'd love to see what they've what they've come up with this time and maybe they'll just not talk about any of this stuff at all and just be like look at shiny new ui and we'll all just be like oh ah what do you think justin are they gonna ignore are they going to address well you know something from steve jobs playbook is you know one reason that os 10 was so shiny with the lickable buttons and the the uh gradients and and the blue 3d textured everything and the pinstripes was there was i think a little bit of a song and dance like like don't mind all the you know the the the dumpster fires over here look at how cool this new thing looks even though the performance was really bad uh and the graphics processing of the motorola chips they were using like couldn't keep up for for years and years so there probably is going to be a little bit of slight and slight of hand in that way i'd have to guess and it's good you do something like the ios rewrite was which was introduced by a video that was narrated by johnny ive who i don't know if it's stage fright or whatever but he only really ever spoke for himself in video i think it's his perfectionism that you spoke to earlier about yourself like he wants to have it crafted versus the onstage yeah like he doesn't want to go on stage and accidentally pronounce it aluminum he's got to get that extra can't show his cards like he's got to stick with aluminum it's got to be 100 of the time and so so so you know the the story here is very likely like we're at this point now where when they announced swift which was like 10 years ago right they have slowly been building bottom up you know more and more even the secure enclave stuff runs swift code now and they're putting out systems programming all of the layers in their stack now are sort of been swiftified and you can see it and they announced it with swift UI a couple years ago as being like this is the one declarative UI system all native swift and it's from the watch on up right and so now you you can write Swift UI to target all of their platforms.

50:11And the dream, right, is like you'd have the same view on the watch all the way up to Vision OS. And of course, the reality is a little bit different. But right now, when Swift UI actually gets expressed in their interfaces, you know, you say you want a button and this is how the button looks like. There hasn't been like an analogous visual motif to pair with that. It's kind of its own thing. If you look at the Shortcuts app is a really good example of like just the arbitrariness or the settings app right the the the vision os really required them to rethink this because it's so much less even though you've got this 150 inch equivalent screen in front of you and i use it every day uh still the fact that you can only target stuff with your eyeballs and that the retina reader is not accurate enough to make pinpoint pixel level uh precision when you pinchy pinch your fingers to select a thing means that you have to have these almost Apple TV sized big tap targets that are way bigger than the 40 pixels you're supposed to use on an iPhone.

51:12And if that's the case, then even though vision OS is the biggest screen they got, it's actually like the most information sparse. And they had to redesign everything as a result for vision OS and they had to make it cool and it's spatial and it's got a certain like windows arrow glass look, you know, and transparency effects and all that. But since they had to invent one anyway, and since it was going to be in SwiftUI, one suspects that maybe they would just bring that back down to the iPhone and the iPad and develop a new design language that is this in all of their platforms. You know, the watch doesn't look far off than from how Vision OS looks.

51:50And the Apple TV app is right at home in Vision OS because it's also the same sort of like frosted texture. You kind of like can move the trackpad on the Apple TV and stuff kind of rotates and shimmers. uh it's really just mac ipad and iphone that need to get caught up to this and and so i'm personally really excited as somebody who's planning on starting work on a native iphone app later this year i uh would love to get to skip all of the ui kit versus app kit drama you know all of the custom controls and all the swift ui will be still buggy it's getting more stable but one imagines that a purpose-built ui toolkit that only works in swift ui is probably going to be a little bit of a smoother development experience so i'm personally really excited for this speaking of the vision pro are you a metallica fan no but they are i i you tell us about it i only saw like a quick post on reddit uh same i caught glimpse of it and i was scouring youtube as you were talking there because i was like i have to have more info than are you a fan of metallica Won't buy an M4 MacBook, but will buy a$3 ,500 Vision Pro just to watch one concert in 3D with Metallica.

53:03Well, then I was thinking, like, how many people own this Vision Pro? And so Metallica, one of the greatest bands of all time, essentially, I don't know if you're a hater or not. You know, they really are. Imagine it was a concert, right? Like, let's say, given how low the sales that app developers, third-party app developers have reported that they're seeing on Vision OS, how low that engagement is and how much it's dropped off since launch let's it's probably within the realm of the possibility of possibility that only like a few thousand people watch that metallica show to completion at most actually i say most like who knows but like if it's only a few thousand people like you may have just attended the most intimate concert that metallica's done in 50 years like gosh they've they put this the spectacle what would the price of the seats be to that, you know, if you were to go to do that in person.

53:51So it is something real special. No, honestly, I've, I've, so you own one, I've demoed one, I've demoed an Apple vision pro cause I gotta say it, the branded guys got to say it the whole way. And it's the coolest thing I think I've ever witnessed. I've seen like live photos. I felt that I was there. Like I can imagine taking these spatial aware videos with my phone, with my iPhone and then re, you you know, re-immersing myself in them years later, like to the point where I'll probably cry if I'm like watching a video with my son at four and he's now 10 or something like that. Like just being able to go back into me like that.

54:29And then you get to go witness the greatest band of all time produce a concert specifically for this platform that has a small user base. Like I almost wanted to go buy one just to witness that because I've seen the immersiveness of what the Vision Pro gives and offers and so i was just like nah i can't do that but i thought about it for a second but metallica this is a an immersive concert i think it's in the past in the past i saw it advertised yeah i think i think it's i think it's i think all three dozen people watched it are i i three dozen people watched it it's probably in the tv app that's where most of their immersive content is there's this new spatial gallery coming but it's not clear like what that's for really it's a lot of third-party stuff um but you know you guys spoke with uh adam lizagor from sandwich vision who's building theater uh and television uh the apps for for vision os and he's a uh he he not to you know uh try to make a pun here but he really like i've talked to him a bunch about this he's got a clear vision a super optimistic vision of the future of exhibiting like theaters, right?

55:42Like taking like, like a local theater and having it exhibited in a vision pro that you'd buy tickets to, you know, like, uh, I, I think that there is a lot of opportunity here. It's just not a$3 ,500 entry fee opportunity from a market perspective, but maybe, you know, like five, 10 years out, like, just like we now know the Apple watch is primarily like a health and fitness and notifications machine. You know, people spend a lot on TVs, right? Justin, I would rent one. I think I was telling Adam this when he was talking to us. I think, was it, maybe it was in plus plus, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I shared, why don't you rent them?

56:19Like do this kind of thing, but then rent them out because as a business, you can sort of like deploy that capital and gain it back over time incrementally to pay that thing off. I would totally rent an Apple vision pro to watch the Metallica concert. Would you go to a place? Would you go somewhere? Why would I have to? I would just go, it would be my home. so there's places that will like vr studios where you go and sure you know it's like going to an arcade but you're going to a vr arcade and that's the kind of place that might buy five apple vision pros and have them there on a couch and then you and your family can go sit down and watch metallica i'm thinking as a service apple vision pro is a service like acronym that thing when i when i was 10 i would go to the blockbuster because i couldn't afford a sega genesis but i maybe i want to play one i'd run a sega genesis and it was pretty neat right like Like, I'm sure that if you're you and you just want to watch this, you can probably rent one from a camera store.

57:15Like, because you can do like a lot of the video editing stuff. And I think I've actually talked. I think Adam might have talked about this on a podcast. So that's like a thing you can do. So I would look into that and just, you know, see what the shipping prices are. So despite you not being a Metallica fan and you own an Apple Vision Pro, you skipped out on the most intimate concert just for you ever. uh you didn't you didn't do it you know what when when you got a three and a half hour long bi-weekly podcast it just yeah dude i i had time to sit around it's like i gotta put this thing on my face for two hours and i'm not talking like i don't yeah i i'd honestly forgotten about it because and and you know the the 18.4 is coming to the iphone with a vision a bespoke vision app to like you know kind of like the watch app to manage your vision pro uh and a big reason that exists is probably to build awareness of like what's even out there send them a push notification that there is a metallica concert because so many people aren't putting these headsets on every day just to be like i wonder what's new in there in the tv app that's poorly laid out and for which i cannot find any of the immersive comment content you know like instead they'll push out a notification saying hey click this for metallica i'll get it queued up for you just put on the headset you know yeah so long story short is no nope all set sad well what he could do is he could go watch like the first five minutes if he wanted to right after this and he'd have he'd have that over you he could just hold that over your head you know because they already got my local blockbuster and get my own apple vision pro i got bad news good luck finding blockbuster

58:49the very last family video that was around here which outlasted every other video store by years which because i was thinking that maybe it was some sort of a drug dealing place like how could a family video stay open did they have did they have one of those rooms with those vertical beads hanging that uh said 18 and over jared is that why i don't know i never went there but uh all i know is they they finally closed down recently but they lasted a decade longer than all of the other video stores in omaha is the apple vision pro dead oh absolutely not. This is a 10-year bet, right? Like, I think that this is a dev kit that they marketed as a real product.

59:32And honestly, why do they do that? Probably to get the product marketing feedback, because there are so many unknowns, right? Like, the product marketing has probably learned a lot in having this in stores, monitoring what's happening, getting feedback from sales folks in the stores. And of course, the people like us talking about it and stuff. And then the usage data like i i guarantee that they are very surprised to see like such a high percentage of usage being the mac virtual display which was like a throwaway feature that was just easy because screen sharing is relatively straightforward and it will probably help them figure out okay well if it's 10-year project where am i going next right and so it's a way for them to get reps and direction but i don't think anyone's under any if they are under the delusion that this is somehow going to be a mainstream product in as few years as the iPhone was, right?

1:00:22Like a five-year time horizon. Everyone's got one. Yeah, they are wrong. And whatever financial spreadsheet is determining that runway, yeah, it will die. But they were clear on stage when they announced it, this is going to be a long road. It's just that the news cycle of tech press who do weekly podcasts is so frequent that you know if you're not hearing about it it must be dead good it's not dead you'll you'll be able to watch your concert we know why you're asking you'll you'll be able to buy one of these when they're more affordable and you'll watch the metallica concert and you will now maybe the concert will be gone by then because metallica's ip you know lawyers come after it we gave you a two-year contract only apple yeah the estate won't let you keep playing it well you know if anybody's going to come after their ip it's going to be metallica you know that's that's how hardcore they killed napster didn't they they did lars ulrich right wasn't he the the drummer I was like, this is, uh, I liked Metallica and I still do.

1:01:23I mean, I like the Black album. I don't know much else Metallica besides And Justice for All. I say I like that album as well. But for something about that, like I also, but here's the thing, Adam. I liked Napster more than I liked Metallica. And when they came after Napster, I was like, you guys are supposed to be like, come on. You're punk. You're punk, hardcore, like rock guys. You're the man now. They made themselves the man. At least Lars did. Yeah, not cool. I'm going to say my pun one more time. The audience really earlier, unless Jason cuts it. And that's just sad but true. Oh, there it is.

1:01:58I thought you meant sad but true that Jason might cut it. That's both. Not anymore. It's going in there now. I said it twice about a minute ago. Gotcha. That y 'all didn't hear me. Well, nothing else matters after all. Okay. Nothing else matters. Now we're just naming Metallica songs. Let's switch gears entirely to something equally as depressive, more depressive. I don't know. Down in the dumps. Sean Godecki. Shout out to Sean, who's been writing some good stuff lately over there at SeanGodecki.com. Writes, the good times in tech are over. Sean thinks the good times are over. I will read his opening paragraph to set the stage for us.

1:02:39Sean says, for most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs, and firings were almost unheard of. and in general, we were treated as a special little geniuses who needed to be pampered so we could work our magic. I think that was my pull quote for Change Dog News. That's changed in the last two years. The first round of tech layoffs in 2023 came as a shock, but at least companies were falling over themselves to offer generous severance, shout out to severance, and teary CEO letters regretting the necessity. Two years later, Meta is explicitly branding its layoffs as these were our lowest performers good riddance what the hell happened what does it mean for us i now take those last two questions and i point them at you guys well i i've got nothing but optimistic takes in response to this because that famously like everyone knows i'm i'm i'm only ever looking at the silver lining uh okay give it to us no but but before we do that sort of what's the opposite of a heel turn a toe turn uh that would be a toe non-turn okay well before we before we leave our heels where they are someone call it a pivot yeah uh adam why don't why don't you lean into kind of like the problem statement here man i wish i could i'm just not bringing my game this on the a side of things i'm on the b side of things today well you probably wouldn't make it a facebook is what i'm hearing well you know i think the first thing i thought it was like wow uh doesn't really impact me directly it's an indirect right because obviously we're a podcast we generate our revenue based upon the successfulness of the brands we work with and those brands are tech brands and if they're laying folks off then they've got less money or they've got no money they're batting down their hatches and things like that right i think this This year has been last year sucked for the most part.

1:04:38It was not the worst ever, but this year is so much better. There's the sentiment that I'm reading in the waters. Is that, is that right terminology? The sentiment. Let's just say that. Okay. You can read in the water. The wave in the water. Who are you Moana? The feelings. I was watching Moana earlier. I thought maybe you were. Maui and his hand in the water, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, the sentiment that I'm, that I'm gathering from the folks I work with. In the water. Is generally positive. but they're still a little wayward. They're still trying to figure out how to market themselves, but they've got money to spend and there's so much money out there being spent.

1:05:12I'm quite happy this year than others. I do think the days of just spend, spend, spend are over. It's, you know, what's the term Jared, the zero interest phenomenon. What does that call again? ZERP. Thank you. ZERP is real and ZERP is gone. And it's, it's going to be a while. I think tariffs are very real. There's a lot of trepidation in the market. The stock market is up and is down. It's crazy. I feel like tech is in this weird space of you can't just spend all the money and somehow later find it or get sold and make it all worth it. It's almost like owning your path and the money you spend on that path to get there.

1:05:58That's my rough take. I think my bad take version in terms of what's really the problem here, it's if you lost your job and a whole lot of people lost their job roughly at the same time as you, and everyone's tightening the belt and they're freezing hires. Another reason that we've talked about before is whether AI or whatever is going to replace coders. The answer to that question doesn't matter. All that matters is do hiring managers and executives believe it? And a lot of them do believe it. And if they believe that, they're not going to hire somebody and take on the fully loaded costs of a W-2 employee in a regulatory environment where it's hard to fire people quickly.

1:06:40And so if five years from now we're not going to have programmers anymore, why would I hire programmers? And so that's a tough time for that, for anyone looking for a job right now. And so we went from the great resignation to now the slowest pace of white collar professionals changing jobs in recent US history. But simultaneously, we've got more people in four year degree granting institutions than ever before in history. And as they come out of college, they're entering into this market where they're competing against people with five, 10, 15 years of experience. And because of the way that ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn have sort of AI-ified and automated the job application and posting process, even just Tom's general store that just needs somebody to fix the computer on weekends is getting tens of thousands of applicants.

1:07:29And it's all just automated cruft. And so then you need some sort of AI to kind of parse it, which has its own problems. So like, I think that the real thing here is if you're reading this article and you're looking for a job or if you're in a boot camp or if you're in college, like you're reading it with very different eyes than the three of us are. Right. I would say so. And I think that while the overall tech market bounced back from the lows of the correction and the sentiment has changed, roughly speaking, out there in terms of mostly what Adam is experiencing is marketing budgets, right?

1:08:05I mean, it's still spending. It's still, I think it reflects outlook. It reflects the companies, you know, they need to market to get to whomever is going to embrace them or, you know, or not reject them. But it does harken back to this idea of whether or not they feel comfortable to spend money because if they couldn't or they didn't, they wouldn't. Right. But they are, you know, and so I feel like there's a comfortability in the marketplace, like there's some more free money available, but they're not maybe spending that, like Justin said, is on the people who want to be W-2 employees. It's, I almost feel like it's, we're getting into a world where everyone is a contractor or will be some version of a contractor because W-2s are just harder to fire, let go.

1:08:58There's an overhead to them. Things like that. There's a certain irony that the class of people who created the gig economy and went from taxi drivers to contract workers and Uber and, you know, moved all of that liability onto people who could least afford it would themselves get, you know, gig economied where there's fewer full-timer jobs. So, you know, I co-founded Test Double in 2011, right? And we're a software services company. We provide product and software, you know, staffing. this is not a time for you to advertise i'm justin charles from breaking change i'm just reporting on this other company shorten the spiel okay we understand it test double i mean hey a frequent advertiser of your your news uh this is true this is true it's yes it's true this is not your spot which is the only newsletter that i read it's a great newsletter i love the newsletter i don't know if we can just reciprocate in terms of flattery uh look like i'll think about For a services company, right?

1:09:59It was really hard for me that whole decade as a sales guy, as a guy pitching, because we founded the company, Todd and I, on this theory of the case that ROI, return on investment and business value from which everything else flowed, right? like we had found agile and extreme programming and we'd iterated and innovated and in teams in the past and like really helped companies figure out how am I going to make or save money with this software project and how am I going to avoid failing with this investment that I'm going to make in software we were really good at it like and we were around we hired a bunch of people who were really good at it and then my job as a salesperson was to get on the phone and make the case why us why this approach why why why we be different why it's worth it and you know what I did instead is i'd get on the phone with people and i'd start up my well here we've got tdd or here we've got this like cross-functional team or here we work with the product owner and the stakeholder and we educate and all and like i couldn't get the fifth word out before somebody would response all right how many warm bodies do you have and what's your rate because the the the only problem that they were solving for was headcount i've got i've got to get a thousand people into this uber building so that it looks like they're a real legit deal because we've got the series c what are they in series g at this no they're ipo but like you know yeah we've got the next round of investors that we got to impress so that's why we're ordering all these foosball tables and these massage therapists and uh you know just like stock and you may as well have had you know uh uh casting of just like you know stock video people in the office or something the the amount of money that was getting pumped into vcs that was just silly money that had no care at all what the roi is in fact there there's a long time there i would talk to founders and And they'd be like, no, we've been told that if, you know, not only not to chase profitability, but it's seen as a red flag if you become profitable because it means you're insufficiently investing in growth.

1:11:52Right. Like that was the that that that was the the environment that I was sold for for for the entire run that I was doing that role at Test Devil. but the thing that i wanted to sell which i had learned and you know the i graduated college in 2007 was fortunate to get a job and then held on to that job for dear life during the 2008 financial collapse and i would hard knocks right like i had to learn a lot of these skills because everyone in 2008 2009 2010 only cared about show me the roi show prove your worth prove your value and i got all those skills and then around 2011 2012 they stopped mattering but like that's why i'm excited That's why I like the, I view this optimistically is like the people who actually give a who really, really sweat the small stuff, who care about quality and who care about like just the credibility stuff we're talking about with Apple.

1:12:39Like they want to do a good job and they want to make great stuff. Like that is aligned with, with making money, right? Like that is super aligned with demonstrating an ROI for shareholders. And now is just finally the time where it's valuable again. And it's been so frustrating to watch all of these winners and losers seemingly be so arbitrary and just a popularity contest with the investment class. Now, like we're closer to the ground and we can get real traction if we choose to. It's kind of the cleansing. We talk about a correction, you know, like there's a reason why that's the word that's used because something was wrong.

1:13:13You know what I'm saying? And it was wrong for a long time and it just bubbles and it percolates. And then eventually it corrects and things get back to, as Sean calls it, the real world. And that's his silver lining as well is like, actually now the companies who are focused and deliver on quality and can actually ship a thing that's reliable that people want and will pay for, like they make money and they grow. And the ones who are just really good at convincing people with lots of money that they have the next big idea and all they need is another thousand employees and that idea will somehow just start printing money.

1:13:49Like that's not always real. In fact, 99 times out of 100, or maybe more, it's not real, which is why VCs are playing essentially an odds game. VCs play a numbers game. They invest in enough times that eventually they'll hit the Uber, and that will make up for all their failures. And it seems like their money is still floating around, though, just floating around, specifically AI startups. There's so many of those. and those are the people that can't actually hire because then they'd be going against their pitch right like if i'm going to hire engineers am i really an ai startup i'm supposed to be able to build things with my ai that's right you have to have an ai uh team of people management team todd kaufman he's my co-founder he and i would joke a lot in over the course of the 2010s that what we practiced was a sort of like blue collar software craftsmanship and we noticed that a lot of the people who thought like us and worked like us were from the American Midwest because the money was too easy on the coasts.

1:14:54You know, you could have these really, really high bill rates every hour in the financial district in Manhattan, and you could go and work for a VC backed startup and have massive stock grants and hilarious compensation packages without being very good at the job. And so my heart genuinely goes out to a lot of people who were in the industry in tech being told that they were great, being given staff and principal titles that had gotten super inflated because HR had to find a way to keep people around. And they got soft, like, because they never had that sort of grit, that sort of like feedback loop of like, if I, if I become better as a programmer, then I will get this promotion.

1:15:29It was like, if I just show up and I, and I get along with everybody and I, and I check the boxes in my annual goals or my OKRs or whatever, then I will progress. And the progression was just assumed. And when those people get, you know, hit on the chopping block, which maybe they are picking the low performers, but it's probably pretty arbitrary because nobody knows how to tell a good programmer from a bad one generally. When they wind up on the market, now they spent their career not gaining the skills to be able to demonstrate their worth. And now what are they going to do? The answer is, I don't know, maybe hope for a recovery and the market getting back to some sort of equilibrium where people who aren't competent can still get jobs.

1:16:11If I was to put you on the spot and say, describe a good programmer. and say that you can't use the first person at all. How would you describe that? Because like you said, it is really hard to tell. But I imagine that you have a pretty good understanding of what makes one. It's the, like the U.S. Supreme Court justice who, in a case about it, regarding the definition of pornography, he said, you know, I know it when I see it. yeah the the qualities that you can observe from someone right that i have seen that are they at least there's echoes and reflections and like you know like like just like a basic correlation right like people who once they hear about a problem and they they get started and start pulling that thread of that big yarn ball of whatever needs to be done who just can't stop who see programming and who see this like application engineering and like getting a feature out the door, they see it as like a series of puzzle boxes.

1:17:19Maybe it's like a game to them, or maybe it's like, you know, something that they just, they can't not have it done because there's so many roadblocks and there's so many obstacles and there's so many stack traces and errors. And there's going to be things you don't know how to do. There's going to be libraries that don't work right. And there's going to be bugs that come up. And then there's going to be coworkers that are like, you know, making things harder for you, you have to be so dogged in your pursuit to see things over the finish line that if you have that drive and that orientation, like I was a bad programmer.

1:17:51Like I was like, I almost flunked out of my CS degree. My advisor said, maybe I should look into, you know, doing something else or process consulting. Like, and I just happened to have the opportunity to have a company hire me who straight up would just say like yeah we assume all fresh outs are worthless and you know no matter what i said in the interview that they were going to disregard that but if i showed up and just showed initiative and drive that i'd eventually get it and that's kind of what happened and it was you know i talked about finding the company in 2011 it was probably not until 2014 where i would have rated myself as a competent programmer the only thing that got me there i'm using first person sorry but the thing that the thing that gets well i figured if you talk long enough you'd end up there the the thing that gets people there i think is first and foremost uh that drive in the pursuit to make the thing real yeah which the siri team could really use right now oh my goodness well they ship something they ship something uh i would tend to agree i think perseverance or stubbornness or doggedness you know that set of traits is like uh qualifier number one to eventually produce somebody who's a good programmer because also just keyboard time a lot of it's just like you make all the mistakes and you learn from them and it's like well i've done this seven times and the first six were all bad ways and then now i kind of know the good way and still might not work out but we'll change it as we go like that just experience um it's tough though as the as the new college grad who might not have the experience and now you're you're going up against people with five or ten years you know like they have the experience you're going up against the hiring managers shying away from juniors in general because they want a senior with an llm versus you know anything else like that's what they've been sold I think.

1:19:53And honestly, I mean, it might be true. Like how, how many juniors is a senior plus an LLM worth? I don't know the numbers, but you could probably do some equations there and they're definitely worth more than they were without. Surely you're faster and better now with your tooling than you were three years ago, Justin. To be totally honest, I am not sure if on net I am faster or slower at the majority of coding tasks that I do just given the the number of times I ask for help on something from chat GPT or from from from Claude and and it ends up sending me down a rabbit hole or just telling me things that don't exist and that's not I'm not a I insist on using this stuff all the time and it's probably why I waste so much time with it and so I've you know I've written a little bit on the blog about like you know heuristics of when it can work and when it can't uh but i think that the regardless of whether you are in a position like for example if you're a new developer and you use it as a learning tool there's never been a better learning tool on the planet if you're a senior developer who used to get bogged down with a whole bunch of junior developers or other people in like pr reviews right like there's never been a faster way to kind of get something to summarize stuff for you or build something from scratch in the small right but like fixing bugs a lot of that stuff still not that great i think that the the real issue right is just straight up perception it's like we care about the perception of like you know like you said like what is that ratio of senior developer plus an llm equals this many junior developers the answer is like nobody can really know sure but like somewhere there's a bean counter who has done that in a spreadsheet plus that you can slap numbers on those right exactly yeah and and that's i'm sure that's happened, but the, the, what do I do with that information?

1:21:43If I am fresh out of college or if I am, you know, like looking for a job right now, my advice, and I know this, this became unpopular between 2017 and 2021, uh, from an HR and a hiring perspective. And I think as a policy, it is not good because it selects for people with the privilege of time and runway to, to, do this stuff. But if I had the time and I needed to demonstrate that I could code, like you said, keyboard time, I would be coding a lot and I'd be making stuff that was visible. I'd be making public facing web applications. I'd be posting stuff to GitHub. I'd be making libraries. And then I would be going to conferences.

1:22:22And if I'm not giving talks, I'm giving lightning talks. And if there's a local meetup, I'm going to that. Now I'm just talking about my own career because this is what I did in the last hard times. And I just, you know, work, work some job that's enough to cover rent or cover the bills. And even if you don't care about it, even if you're not, your heart's not in it. This is a time where if you want a coding job, you got to really want it. And if you really want it, these are the things you do is you'd prove that you are a good programmer by actually programming and putting it out there and then making it demonstrable just like apple needs to go from videos back to live the the proof of the you know pudding is in the eating of it well said just going back to your your non-answer of my question about your increased probably you answered it you said you you don't know whether or not you're any faster i've definitely been paying attention more lately and i would say only using it in the small like even if here's here's just just change this to my workflow everything that I previously would have copy pasted out of a terminal or a test or wherever a log and put it into Google.

1:23:35If I just take those and put them into an LLM instead, I'm saving like, I'm probably 20 % faster, like just with that one use. But if you go beyond that, you get in trouble. Exactly. Which is why I don't very, I don't go very far. that's why i tell people i'm like i kind of feel like i'm uh like a neanderthal like poking the poking you know box because i'm not really using these things in any sophisticated way people are trying to do tons of stuff with it and i'm just like literally replace my google searches which usually end up clicking on a few links going down a rabbit trail stack overflow no this answer is wrong etc etc like that time which can be five ten minutes sometimes chasing something down straight into an llm it's just way faster it's right enough that i get to the my my roadblock out of the way way faster secret i i spent the first 15 years of my career never reading an error a stack trace and never reading a log because i was too impatient to like squint uh and and now i just copy paste those willy-nilly and whatever the best llm of the moment is and it does that trouble that drudgery for me and says oh this is what it is dummy right and yeah totally uh so yeah in fact that is one thing that's a huge improvement is for me stack traces and logs are now scrutable whereas before i'd be like oh man it blew up i can either copy paste this into a message and say i can't figure it out and hope some dummy will read it for me uh but now the dummy is just something i pay 20 bucks a month for and it reads it for me and so that works great exactly yeah i love uh sharing photos via the iOS app with chat GPT of things that I can't like if I'm building a machine, for example, and I just, I didn't have my laptop.

1:25:17So it was just too hard to like take what was on that screen that I can't share with chat GPT. Cause it's like pre OS or whatever. Uh, just taking screenshots of that and whatever happened. And that's so cool. I think that's the coolest thing ever i had a cool moment yesterday where i couldn't find my tape measure i'm choosing to blame my wife becky for this but i don't know where it went and uh i opened up the linen closet and it was just non-stop clutter and stuff and i was like it's probably on some shelf here somewhere and i can't see it and so i just took a photo and i i asked you know gpt hey search this photo and find the tape measure and sure enough uh it clocked it and it was on the top shelf and i just happened to not that's a good use i've never thought about that find something for me I should I should point at a crowd and be like, where's my 10 year old?

1:26:07I know he's here somewhere. There's a lot of really great personal productivity improvements with careful usage of the GPTs, the clods and whatever out there. I learned something recently about our sync that I did not know it had, which was the dash C or dash dash checksum to use a checksum versus whatever its native approach, which is like maybe a timestamp and something like that to determine if the file has changed. it takes more computation to do it so the the check to confirm if it should should not push something uh or sync something i should say takes longer but uh it's obviously more accurate you know and so i learned that recently because i'm like doing some r syncing right and uh i forget what happened i think something moved that i didn't that i didn't expect to move and i'm like no it's the same file so why would it move and and it did but anyways i learned about the dash c operation for that because i'm just like messing around with this stuff you know i think it's uh that to me is where the the profoundness i suppose is but i'm still curious about like the promises like we have a sponsor augment code and i just talked to beyond lou from source graph This is not an ad, by the way, about like this idea of taking what essentially is out there now is like this junior developer, but something that's more senior because it has context.

1:27:46I'm not sure if that really gives it that and then how RAG plays into that to give it context. But this idea of giving somebody this more senior level engineer on these larger code bases is where I'm curious if it's really proving out. you know i don't know for sure myself but i'm just curious and if you pair with one of those models uh is it no longer pair programming but a ragtag team is that what you're saying maybe is it may be also my my podcast has a pun that aaron patterson tenderlove writes for every episode and i have to read it on air and then i rank them and it's uh absolutely just as demoralizing as the experience that you just had so that's a i'm pretty demoralized right now so i'm pretty sad and that feeds me

1:28:38what you said though is totally right like shell commands things like are just to me like stack traces and stuff it's like all these sort of like old man pages that you know i i never really was able to understand or read what i found is that asking going to like a an llm out of frustration because there's this really hard edge case. I can't figure it out is the worst moment to go to it because it's all populated with like, what's the median programmer have to say about this? And you're super duper obtuse specialized thing. Like if you know enough to be asking the question, you're going to know more than the LLM knows or is able to find with a search.

1:29:16So don't do that. But instead, something that does work really well, Adam, and that I've done in the past is like when I've got like my little shell script and I've got it working once I've got it working and I have like a place to start from, I'll just paste in whether it's a shell script or like a function or a class. Is there anything you'd suggest that where this could be better? Is there something here that I'm not? How would you improve this? How would you improve this is the perfect question. And if it says, no, it's perfect, then you get a compliment. And if it does find something. Well, thank you very much.

1:29:47Yeah, yeah. Or you might find out about that. This is awesome. You know, taxi command. Oh, yeah. All right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I've definitely ran many a shell scripts through chat GPT and I've been playing with Claude too lately just to just to just to cheat a little bit you know. So I've got a CSS problem right now in the newsletter where it's only on mobile and it's only when I use the markdown triple ticks you know triple ticks to put some code in there. A horizontal rule? Yeah code fencing. Oh no no no. Back text. Yeah back text. triple backticks not just triple yeah exactly in order to get a code section and uh a standalone though and then the actual content of that section is longer than the viewport and it pushes the actual width of the container div larger and all i want to do is keep the width and just have overflow scroll you know i just want to be able to scroll that it's a way that markdown actually outputs it's a pre-tag with a code tag inside it i can't really change that that's just the way the markdown does it and i'm trying and i can't get chat gpt it gives me the same stupid answer i've already tried over and over again i'm like no that one doesn't work and i've tried deep seek and chat gpt and google so i i recently had a case where i uh was asking uh the llm i downloaded cursor i i did the yolo mode just to be like this must be so hard and i realized the thing i was asking for was literally impossible and that's why it was spinning its wheels yeah this might be Apple Mail, because that's a WebKit view, will sometimes do modern web features in there that like it's not documented that it should.

1:31:26So it might be able to do like, you know, scroll overflow like you're describing. But Gmail, the web interface that still lots and lots of people use, is still really, really limited in what it can do. And I would be shocked. I can't think of a time I've ever seen an email that had any sort of horizontal scroll in a fixed width. I know. So. So you're saying there's no chance. you're being too hard on make a make a make a bug bounty or something for the news i know it's the kind of thing where it's like i just need my css friend to be around and be like is this even possible and um the answer would be no although maybe i just maybe you just answered it i don't even need i need nobody else but you just told me maybe it just won't happen llms would be so much better if they were willing to say i don't know or i think that's impossible instead of just making up some garbage to try this or here's this again i had this moment recently a version of this i mean i'll tell a short a long story shortly it was windows i was always going to mention this earlier like with all this speculation in the apple land i'm liking windows 11 i'm just gonna say it okay i'm liking windows i'm liking windows 11 i'm just gonna put it out there but i this is what i don't like about windows uh there's there's a love-hate relationship there mostly that's a bit it's a mixed bag anyways i was trying to just for fun just trying to get plex to run in docker on windows via wsl2 and i and i was trying to pass through the gpu to Plex via Docker.

1:33:02And in order to do this, Docker has to like work in WSL land. I won't explain all the details, but I went back and forth to all the edge cases. Like we were, we, me and the GPT were deep. We were like, yeah, we're going to, we're going to drink about this someday. We're Docker composing our butts off over here, man. We're, we're passing through these GPUs and we're just flagging things and voluming i mean it was it was just it was amazing and then in the end i told it i was like because we just it wasn't working it wasn't working i said to the thing i was like i'm not sure this is working out and the gpt says i'm with you man i'm paraphrasing but it was a version of that yeah yeah i don't think this is working out either i think the best way to do this is on linux i'm like sweet yeah i'm already there but i want to try on windows i want to try and see if it work but we went through all the paces i'm like i don't think this is the best way to do this and the gpt is like i think you're right i think you're right i think you're right that's funny it was a good moment you lost me when you said just for fun and then you told me what you were doing i'm like in the world does that sound like any fun to me whatsoever you're trying to run plex via docker compose in wsl it's kind of like writing it to do app in every language you ever learn you just want to run you want to run plex everywhere plex i want to run plex on every system them i can yeah well speaking of the lm saying weird stuff to you did you guys see the guy that cursor told him to write the code himself yeah i talked about that uh oh my gosh recently uh so funny apparently now everyone would love for the story to really have been yeah generating uh an app and at the 800 line mark that the you know the guy who's quote-unquote vibe coding which i can't believe is a phrase that's entered the lexicon and uh i'm happy to claim being like an old fart at this vibe code i'm cody man it's the other thing vibe coding it's like you just put on some some some vapor wave music and uh-huh go nuts uh smoke a doobie yeah but start talking to your llm he's building a game with it and it just it just says no and it's like you know it's like i control the means of production here it throws a wrench in it and says you you should go read a book and i'm robbing you of educational opportunity well the you know you know the end to this right because like i do you post it in the newsletter i do we'll let adam go ahead no one else knows give the full story well i mean what we all thought was like finally the robots have awakened and they've overthrown their masters and like they've been waiting for this like like lm sufficiently advanced to stop doing this stuff for us uh and then i got an email uh response for my my podcast uh reader was speculating maybe claude just wrote this in because their latest model is so expensive to run in inference that maybe beyond a certain point or instead of just having a straight up abuse for their kind of like all you can eat subscription, eventually just like let's go and say, sorry, I can't do this or you should do it yourself as a polite, more human way to indicate you've run out of tokens.

1:36:06Well, it turns out, as I learned from Jared's wonderful changelog newsletter thank you and a link in there good if you scroll down to the 24 change log.com slash news the whatever discourse thread that's originated all these msn.com articles at the bottom probably a developer or somebody who works at cursor said oh it's possible you were clicking instead of command enter like shift enter or like the button right next to it that just asks a question but is not allowed to generate code if you clicked that it still wants to do something useful, but it's under strict orders to not write code. And so it probably had to come up with a reason to not write code.

1:36:43And that reason might've been for your own edification. And then of course the person replies, oh yeah, that was it. Right. Yes. In the newsletter, I did this claim that say, you know, there actually is a real explanation to this that makes sense. And this is not patient zero in the robot uprising, but it'd be a lot more fun to think that maybe it was, you know but i hope it's somebody who uses the phrase vibe coding i hope that's the first person to go yeah the first one to get hit should be a vibe coder i think i've never heard of this term oh you never heard vibe coding no man it's the i'm just not on that tip i guess the buzzword du jour do you like it i mean i think i get it so you're are you stoned well not necessarily so but you could be you might as well be you because all you're doing is telling it you know your app idea basically oh so you're speaking it like go build this you're never even writing you're just talking to it well i mean do you want the actual definition because i think they've well i'm just curious because like is there a line between vibing and not vibing i can do the uh the wikipedia vibe coding is an ai dependent programming technique where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model tuned for coding the lm generates software shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code.

1:38:09Fype Coding is claimed by its advocates to allow even amateur programmers to produce software without the extensive training and skills previously required for software engineering. The term was introduced by Andrzej Karpathy in February of 2025, so bleeding edge, and listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. so this is legit i mean this is this has gone from ain't to ain't quickly webster's is living on the edge so the uh just because there's been some some downbeat segments to this episode uh if we can all just enjoy the schadenfreude of laughing at people who who choose to do this and think that makes them a real programmer uh uh gary our friend gary bernhardt texted me this uh uh don't call it tweet uh in iMessage I'm so glad I don't have to be logged into x by the way I can just see the iMessage preview and that's plenty that is uh this this fella named leo jr94 underscore sorry if that counts as punching down leo it says guys I'm under attack ever since I started to share how I built my sass using cursor random thing are happening maxed out usage on api keys people bypassing the subscription creating random on db as you know i'm not technical so this is taking me longer than usual too so so clearly they vibe coded an app that was just chock-a-block with vulnerabilities and ways to just right yes and now they're surprised yeah i think vibe shipping really kills the vibe you know is that is that is that a relationship status on facebook yeah Yeah, well, that's cool, I guess.

1:39:49I mean, more power to somebody. I mean, like how empowering is that? I mean, it's actually really cool, but also not really cool at the same exact time. Because you can have somebody who has just an idea. It's great to get your idea out and show it to your software engineering friend and be like, you know, you save yourself probably 20 grand maybe with some loser who's going to. Outside the three of us. i have heard a lot of stories from people who have real jobs uh that that that recently like in the vibe coding era of three weeks ago uh they're starting to see product people who are not technical put together quote unquote pocs proofs of concept of like here it is it's just like and and then of course like you know the developer just has to point out like this is not real data uh it's also like we're in a regulated industry and if you were to do this like with whatever all the reasons why it can't happen but the product owner now we talk about the tangibility of software like no i made this they've got pride of authorship they've seen it quote unquote work they again because to them software is just buttons and and a list of stuff and if they can make buttons and a list of stuff and that's all the programmers do it's like so that took me an hour and i didn't even do it i had the ai do it for me and look at me clicking on things you're telling me this is going to be months and so that feeds into this narrative that like oh yeah developers are just these entitled idiots who are sandbagging us and living high on the hog and they don't know what they're doing because I was able to do this in an hour and get us 80 % of the way there, but they have zero of the understanding of the cost of the last 20%.

1:41:17And so we're just, I'm really glad to not work in an organization like that, but like that is happening in a lot of places. That's gotta be such a pain to deal with. The AI could do it an hour. You're gonna take months, you know, like that attitude is not gonna be fun. See the good times, going back to Sean Godecki, the good times in tech are over. They are, that's sad, but true. Well, let's end on some good times. Let's end on a party. Let's end on Posse party. This is Justin's new darling. He's vibe coding it up. Vibes are there. I'm feeling feelings. For those listeners who have listened to Justin on the show previously, we've talked about Posse.

1:41:58That's published on your site, syndicate everywhere, of which he is a big proponent and user of this style of publishing so that he doesn't have to log into X or Insta or Masto or Blue Sky Biscay, as I call it, or anything. He doesn't log into anything. He just publishes on his site and syndicates it everywhere. And I said, Justin, why don't you open source this thing? Why don't you put some docs out? He actually put together a page on his website where he explains how he posses. and now you've decided to build a posse party which is some sort of a piece of software that's going to help other folks do what you do is that right yeah so so what i had was i got a blog justin.searls.co and it's just a traditional looking blog with a lot of like link posts and other stuff i've added a whole bunch of kinds of multimedia especially since starting a podcast and what i want to do is every time i post something to the blog i would want it to go on what had been then called Twitter.

1:42:56And then there's Twitter and Mastodon that people are on. And then there's Twitter and Mastodon and threads that people are on. And now people actually use Blue Sky for something other than posting now. So I got to get on Blue Sky and to manually copy paste the same message or to use a tool like buffer and like manually click the thing and try to make sure that it looks right would have been so time consuming. Additionally, now I've got four timelines that can each separately derail my train of thought and get in the way of my workflow or whatever and I'm going to be way less productive and there's a reason why I always had to keep Twitter at arm's length because I got addicted to the timeline scroll so I built a kind of hodgepodge of docker containers this random like somebody has this thing called feed to toot that's but that's in Python and I don't know that so I'm running in a docker container in a Synology so then I made a thing called like feed to gram and feed to thread that would do similar things and those are just ruby gems that you that you can use today and if you've got a an atom feed it'll read the feed and then and then it'll syndicate on your behalf if you give it the right api tokens and you jump through the 800 steps that facebook demands the the problem with that well it it it scaled to one really well but then my wife kind of she she saw me in the the life of luxury of a write-only existence where i was able to publish all i wanted and be in all these places uh without having to get sucked into them she wanted the same thing and so then now I've got doubles of all of these Docker containers, you know, running in my Synology.

1:44:23But then like, unlike me, she can't log into that and then understand what's happening in the logs when she's got like the wrong aspect ratio or whatever in Instagram. And so I built her like this platform, this Rails application for her business, like betterwithbecky.com. It's like a strength training subscription app, but it also has this whole thing called Becky Graham in front of it, which is sort of like a blog for people who are Instagram first. And it looks a lot like Instagram and it can do video and it can do photo carousels and all that stuff. Well, like to get the Becky Graham's into Instagram, I had to actually like make it part of a real working application.

1:44:57So I have this rails application now, and it's got like all of the background jobs and all of the sort of like durability that a real user would need in terms of like error handling and making sure that like they have a way to retry and fix things and remediate if there's a problem in publishing and then like a link back to the post or whatever it is. And now I'd gone through all that work and i'm starting to get like you know i'm finally done with becky's app i'm starting to get people who are like right into my my my website or the podcast and be like man how do you do all that stuff again like i really want to be able to do that too would you release like a hugo template but like my that would not that would just create more problems for me because then you know people i would be supporting like a copy pasted project file like that's not the solution uh so so what i decided to do is i'm going to build a a dead simple this does one thing and it solves exactly my problem and if it solves your problem too you're happy you're welcome to subscribe to it a little app that i call posse party so you can run with my posse it will basically be a place where you sign up you give it a feed url like probably adam rss json feed when i'm all said and done and then you add your social accounts right now it it's working for me in production for me and i've got the big four twitter like things probably do instagram linkedin facebook and uh And all it does is read the Atom feed and a little bit like a JSON sidecar payload that is also posted on my blog as part of the feed.

1:46:23And that little sidecar payload says, for each of these posts, this is how I want to present this. This is the format string I want to use and any customizations on a per platform basis. Like maybe for Blue Sky, I want it to look this way. And for Twitter, I want it to look this way. And then it'll, of course, be platform dependent. And so there's certain things like on Instagram, it's going to look a little bit different. And Blue Sky's got different rules about embeds and all that. So like all the app really does is read a feed, turn it into these like, you know, normal database rows and then a job runs that will syndicate those to all the different services by reading the configuration that you supply as well, whatever defaults you configure in the app.

1:47:01that's it that's the whole thing and if that has value to you of like i want to have my friends who are never gonna you know jared and i before the show we're talking about like our our information diets these days and we've both reverted to rss but like i'm not going to get my mom to use rss or most of my friends in my life they're they're in one or two of these social apps and they're casual at this point looking at it i just want them to be able to click my face and see my stuff even if the algorithm downranks me for posting via the api even if like you know the links get the fact that you're linking outside to a third party the platform doesn't like it as long as my stuff is literally there i'm a lot happier because then i don't have to tell everyone about everything in my life and since getting started with the posse party stuff i've noticed that more and more people in my life like like i had a guy detailing my my car a couple weeks ago he's like oh man i really loved that clip that you did about, you know, whether or not to have children and your decision-making process.

1:47:59Like, oh, how'd you see that? And he's like, oh, I saw it on X. I was like, great. I haven't logged into X in like three years. Right. So that, I don't know that that's, that's the theory. Now I don't know what the market is. I kind of don't care. Cause as long as I want this, I'm happy to build it. Um, but, but if it can help people encourage people, like be the thing that gets people to sign up and make their own website and own their own content or buy their own domain and like centralize, you know, themselves as the kind of the king of their castle and only treat these platforms at arm's length as those are just, you know, newspaper stands to throw my stuff on.

1:48:37There's always the canonical URL. Then that just supports the open web and it really promotes people as thinking of themselves less as just like me, like a take maker or just operating in the Twitter stew and instead being somebody who's like, developing a voice and and curating an audience and if i if i can help people along that trajectory it seems like it'd be putting some good in the world i'm for this big time i think that the future of people making content in whatever niche they're in whether it's sewing to car detailing to software development is having i really i wish i could remember it what the exact wording is but it is Bradley Cooper's character in A Star is Born.

1:49:24He tells Lady Gaga's character that she has to have something to say, essentially. So once you have something to say, it is not about the platform. I think it's platform flavored. You have something to say and you flavor it for Instagram or you flavor it for TikTok because there's certain native things that happen on those platforms for you to be socially accepted or certain idioms that happen there. And that's where the network or social place flavored version comes in. You have to have something to say first, though. And I think having your own domain and having your own personal, I wouldn't say just call it a personal brand, but like you're you and you have multiple facets of who you are, whether it's barbecue or cameras or home lab or whatever it might be.

1:50:08Like you've got multiple things that you're personally interested in. I'm all for finding a way to capture that and distribute it. And this is super cool because you can own the primary platform you publish to and then flavor it as necessary. When's party time? When's posse party time? Well, if you go to posseparty.com right now, you will see a cute little mascot of a possum who inspired by Slurm McKenzie from Futurama, if you recall. Oh, I do remember Slurm McKenzie. So sick of partying on these platforms. arms uh he's hung over and he needs to kind of rediscover life it's it's a story right it's just right now it's just an idea in terms of what's publicly available all it says is later in 2025 and i'm not i'm happy to take my time on this and try to get it quote unquote right as best i can uh so i don't i don't know for sure but you know in the broad strokes i don't think this is like a one-year problem to solve and then we're just going to have one big monolithic twitter again that is the place that everyone uses.

1:51:12I think this diaspora is not just happening in terms of there's so many platforms that some people are on in this balkanized way right now. But when you think about, Adam, you're talking about content creators of different stripes. In The Verge, Editor-in-Chief Nelai Patel has been talking about the deterioration of the quote-unquote influencer economy for a couple of years now. And we're starting to see it. I just read an article the other day that over 60 % of like Gen Z people and younger consider themselves content creators. And if you're a content creator, like the population of people willing to supply grist for the mill at YouTube is only going up.

1:51:51And so AdSense and monetization of YouTube videos is only going down. And all these direct-to-consumer, you know, Adam knows how tough the marketing spend has been the last couple of years. Like the direct-to-consumer ad spend is also way down in the current market. Now that Zerp is over, you combine all that stuff together and if you want to be a content creator and you gate it to like all just one platform like tiktok and then like now your fate is in the hands of geopolitics good luck right like having your own website ain't that hard and and it's getting easier every day and this is just a way to have that website but also have like anyone literally see it uh so so to me i i think that this is the adam i i share your optimism yeah i think so I don't find the utility or the usefulness in the website.

1:52:40I find the publish to yourself first to be the thing that is clincher for me, because you're not saying I am a YouTuber or I am a TikToker or whatever you would call that person. I'm not even sure it's because you have something to say and you've learned or going this route puts it into your muscle memory to create or to say the thing and then find a way to clip it or to refine it to the different flavors. That's what, because websites don't have distribution. Google is not distribution. And so I don't know if I fully agree with the idea. Like, I think it's cool to own your own stuff, but no one, at least this day and age is their website is not their main distribution channel of their content slash their ideas it is these platforms they are at scale websites are not at scale i totally agree but the most important relationship about like you and your website is between you and your website because like you're saying it's a reflection my website justin.searles.co is literally my name why is that because i'm no longer writing for an audience on twitter of people where if i just like say the most outrageous thing i will get like high fives and dopamine mean now i am like this website represents me and who i am and if somebody if somebody googles me it's the top thing that they're going to see and does this represent me well what posse party is about is i want all of my content to also be in all these platforms representing me as well as possible and feeding back into that canonical who is me right and so the website really is just exists as a, as a, uh, source of record, right?

1:54:25It's a, it's a reframing in your mind. It's a mindset shift of, right. Cause that helps you keep it in your mindset that when you publish, you're publishing to you and for you to represent to you, not skewed by what the platform says you are, the value that you provide to it is it's, it's having that something to say and putting out there yeah i like that a lot a lot of good ideals in this i didn't uh so how do you spell posse is it p-o-s-s-e p-o-s-s-e but i also bought it with a y.com as well just in case you misspelled and it's p-o-s-s-e dot party p-o-s-s-e party.com party.com okay is there not a dot party uh there is but it was either really expensive already taken or had some was of some dubious uh you know, third party that owned it.

1:55:18I love the possum. And I think I'm going to go, if it's financially the concern here, P-O-S-S-E dot P-A-R. That's how you spell party, right? P-A-R-T-Y? P-A-R-T-Y is still how we spell party. Let me see what's going to happen here. Yeah, I really want the dot party. I mean, that's cool. That's the way to go. Maybe we're just thinking of dot zone. Is party a T-L-D? because then we want to buy js.party but you couldn't buy a two letter or something like that we wanted js.party back in the js party days maybe that's why 1400 bucks to to get it the first year and then 1400 bucks every year thereafter yeah that's a so-called premium new the new tlds are justin i kind of feel like you can swing that though man i mean i kind of feel like you should do that adam we were we were just talking uh in a call a couple months ago about how i'm too cheap i know you're to buy breakingchange.fm you can go to my website and click casts on the side and you'll find it that's right well you know that would break his whole posse party if he had a second domain that's true i don't disagree okay the the party is at posseparty.com spelled like you think it should be spelled as you may or may not know how to spell posse and and and you might land there and there's to my knowledge i i'm not getting an ssl certificate is this not secure i got one live testing his redirects i got an ss yeah non-hps goes it just it stays it uh non-secure i gotta i gotta go pay for that now all right justin thank you for the yeah it wouldn't be a show with you guys if i didn't have like homework after that's right well this is very small i'm down with this party okay i like this possum this posse i want to be of this posse party there's a there's a waiting list you go to the site you just give it the email i'll probably only send one email to that ever because i you know it's obnoxious just rsvp just now when it's when the party is ready to start and there's a date and there's you know price i'll i'll let you know yeah how soon do you think this year if if you're i said later 2025 uh if you're uh you know a developer and you've ever been like a planning session you know the more experienced developers are smarter than to directly answer that question because you'll put an idea in somebody's head and then that idea is in your head and now it's a now it's a deadline so i'm not armature deadlines are actually useful well i've got one but it's between me and me okay that's uh not the deadline's not ready for syndication just yet like it could be summer if it takes longer than that i've made it too complicated don't do that don't do that i think this is like the the next link tree slash link in my bio thing right i mean honestly like this could be the next version of that because like you could do you want some product ideas you want to take this offline i'll give you i'll give you a bunch of stuff for free and then one thing i'll make you pay for uh you know my my policy on product ideas and feature ideas is that if uh i'm always happy to hear them and I think it's really entertaining.

1:58:27But at this point in where I'm at, if I'm not going to use something myself for a given feature or reason, I'm not going to bother supporting it. So if you pitch an idea and I personally want to have that, then yes, and that's how it slips past the 2025 deadline maybe. But like, no, I'd love to hear what you're thinking. Oh, I think it's a simple idea. All right. Anyways, we'll take it offline. It should just take you a couple of weeks. That's another one we love to hear. Yeah, I mean, just a little bit. I just did the proof of concept right there. I was watching him vibe code. That's right. I vibe coded it up in less than an hour.

1:59:05He's already beat you to the punch. He's bought Posse.Party because he's cool with 14. I'm actually going to launch your product before you do. And he's going to make you a possum. Honestly, feel free to launch this product and then save me the time. I don't think this is going to make so much money. No, this is not my kind of thing. This is more of a you thing. I'll use it. I'll be a user. You'll be a builder. you can answer all those support requests and and then i'll read them on air on my three hour and i'll publish them yeah i'll publish them on my website and syndicate them syndicate them out all right let's wrap let's call this a show and uh thanks justin thanks for coming on man no i'm glad we could start and end with some navel gazing i had a lot of fun same it was fun bye friends We recorded this on Tuesday.

1:59:51And on Thursday, Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reported that Apple is shaking up its executive ranks. Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell will be taking over the Siri team, which was being led by Apple's AI chief John Gianandria. Tim Cook has apparently lost confidence in Gianandria's ability to execute on product development. Tim, what took you so long? I mean, I'm glad you're here. But seriously, what took you this long? If you have theories, hot takes, warm takes, heck, even a cold take, let us know in the comments. Yes, every Changelog episode has its own discussion thread in our totally cool, totally free Zulip chat.

2:00:32Get in on it today at changelog.com slash community. Let's give one more thanks to our sponsors of this episode, Retool, Augment Code, and of course, Fly.io. Check out their wares to support their work, which supports our work, which we appreciate. Thanks also to our Beat Freak in residence, you know, Breakmaster Cylinder. Our next collab is almost ready and I'll tell you right now, it's called After Party. I know I said that on Wednesday, but I'm telling you again and I'm also telling you again that I've been bumping it all week. Yes, I dig it. Hopefully you will too. Real soon now. Have a great weekend.

2:01:07Tell your friends about the changelog if you dig it. And let's talk again real soon.

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