Opus 4.5 changed everything (Interview)

18:49Burke Holland:I mean, I think that you still need to be a really high performing developer to be able to actually ship. And the reason for that is that you need to understand a lot about architecture and security and how an app actually gets to production. Coding something is easy. Code has never been the hard part. That's always been the easy part, honestly, for being honest. It's getting that thing into production that's hard, and that's still the case. And so this is why you see so many people talking about what they vibe coded, and yet none of that stuff is in production because that's hard. So I think that you still need to know a substantial amount about what you're doing.

19:38What I don't have an answer to is like, so people who are junior, then the question is like, well, do you still need to learn how to code?

19:49Burke Holland:I would think that you do because you can't. These concepts build on each other, right? How do you understand what a REST API is if you don't understand how to call that REST API or how it's consumed underneath? And the only way to really understand all these levels of abstraction, but the second that that comes out of my mouth, I'm like, yeah, but at some point you had to understand what the compiler was doing and you don't anymore. I don't know what the compiler does, nor do I care. so as you said like we don't know where all this is going but i don't think that like you couldn't bring a non-technical person in and just drop them inside of an ai tool and be like do it unless it was like v0 or something for versell where it's really abstracting um but to actually ship a piece of software no you still need to be a dev i think that for your high performing devs i actually wonder about this because the thing is like in the past you're really high performing devs or people that could do things like build very complex algorithms to solve speed problems so right performance issues etc but ai is really good at that right like it knows all the algorithms It can just destroy leak code.

21:13Burke Holland:So I'm unsure at this point if that's really the case, other than that you need to know what to ask for a lot of times. Like you may need to know that you need a binary search at this point. Right. And to be able to direct the AI and say, why don't we do why don't we do a binary search here and see if that's faster? You don't have to implement. You don't have to know what that is, how that's implemented. That's not your problem, but it is your problem to understand the conceptual nature there.

21:40Jerod Santo:I think concepts is a bigger thing to learn. I'm not saying nay against learning the code as we've known it, like boot camp level kind of thing, or even a hackathon. You go to a hackathon because somebody says it's cool, and then you get hooked on software development. I'm not saying nay to that, but I think if you can conceptually understand even things like ETL pipelines. like even that i'm using etl pipelines never before before december november last year never knew what they were knew how they were utilized but my etl pipeline is not exactly the definition of extract transform load but it's a version of take something from here have a silver layer or have a bronze layer then transform it into a silver layer and then have a final production to goal which is the medalla method and i didn't even know that until ai taught me it it's like hey what we're doing here oh you learned like via brainstorm yeah yeah well because i knew about etl as a concept and then when it explained it to me i'm like you know there's gotta be a better way and like yeah we should build a pipeline i'm like okay let's talk about that and then i learned about medallion method which is the bronze silver gold kind of process to an etl pipeline and i as a practitioner i began to learn more now i'm really well versed in it but before that i had only understood as a concept.

23:00Jerod Santo:And so I was using a concept to drive the direction, which then taught me through iteration. And now it's, you know, table stakes. It's too easy now.

23:10Burke Holland:Yeah, that's a really good point. Somebody had made this point. I think I've made this point before that like, my fear was, oh, we're all going to stop coding and just prompt AIs. And we're all going to get dumber because no one is going to know what they're doing anymore. Because if you don't use it, you lose it kind of thing. But that's not what's not what's happening. What's actually happening is that, like you said, I'm learning all sorts of concepts that I never would have learned before.

23:37Jerod Santo:The board has expanded versus contract.

23:39Burke Holland:Correct. That's exactly right. So instead of being overly focused on like, how do I compose this function? It's like, who cares? Do you know what a Unix socket is and how cool that is and how that works in Go? I didn't last week but i do now all right that's that's a wild and so i think that like as the people who are using ai are getting this knock-on effect benefit that no one really realizes where they're just

24:02Jerod Santo:learning at an accelerated rate yeah because they are they've let go of whether or not this

24:10Burke Holland:needs to be an if or a ternary or whether i should abstract this out to a different file

24:15Jerod Santo:who cares yeah take us into i suppose more of your world you know for one you work for microsoft you're playing with other people's models that's a thing but tell me how your practices to build something has changed like what specifically has changed step by step uh i mean part of what i do

24:39Burke Holland:is try to figure out the workflows that developers actually need to be successful. And there's sort of two different ways to do this. When you're teaching someone, you really want to start like Greenfield and simple. But in the real world, it isn't like that. It's more complex. So let's talk about like the first one first and we'll talk about it in a second. So for my Greenfield projects, I've experimented a lot with composing workflows that allow me to get from, I have nothing and I want to get to this end point. What are the things that I need to do along the way and how involved do I need to be?

25:16Burke Holland:Because you have all these different, you have the agentic tool itself, whether that's VS Code or the Copilot CLI. And then you have, or others, sorry, right? Cursor, Cloud Code, there's many others. And then you have like MCP servers, which is how your agent can talk to GitHub or how it can talk to Figma. And then you have skills, which have serious overlap with MCP servers. And then you have instruction files. And then you have custom agents, which is you basically just overriding the agent behavior and defining workflows. And it's all very confusing for people because they don't know what they're supposed to do with these things.

25:57Burke Holland:And the honest truth is that neither do the people who are building them. We don't know what the future looks like. All we can do is look at what building blocks we could create, create them, and then see how people put them together and then iterate. That's the honest truth. And so that's what I try to do is figure out what does a workflow look like for me. So currently, my workflow is I'm now fully into the Copilot CLI using it within VS Code. But I start off with a plan where I basically talk to the CLI and I tell it kind of what I want. And I'm in plan mode. And these plan modes have gotten really, really good.

26:39Burke Holland:And people are like, I don't need a plan. But it's not about the plan. That's not what you need. What you need is the agent to think through with you all of the things that you just forgot to tell it that it needed to include in this initial prompt. Because prompting is super hard. with this idea of like prompt engineering, which is just prompt engineering is just giving the model the answer that you want. If you give it enough context, it will get the answer right and give you right. If you were to spell out exactly what to do, it could literally build Minecraft on its own, but you can't do that.

27:12Burke Holland:You're that's not, you can't put the prompt B2B. You can't do it. So in plan mode, you get this iteration where the agent's like, okay, cool. Here's, here's a, did you think about this? Here's what I recommend, but here's three other options. or you can do a fourth one. And you go through about like four or five, six loops of this. And I'm using Opus 4.6 for this. It's incredibly good. And then once you get to a point where you're like, yeah, that's pretty good. Of course, you're not going to one-shot an operating system. But for a lot of us, we can get to sort of like an MVP and a one-shot. So you can like one-shot to MVP and then iterate from there.

27:49So in your MVP, and then in Copilot,

27:53Burke Holland:we have something called autopilot and autopilot. It's like a Ralph loop. You're familiar with Ralph loops.

27:58Jerod Santo:Yes.

27:59Burke Holland:Where the agent is just orchestrator.

28:01Jerod Santo:It's a rust project. Okay. Cool. Yeah.

28:05Burke Holland:So similar, similar concept where it will basically feed the agent's output back to itself. It's just running the agent in a loop and it does this until the agent has some amount of confidence. There's this idea of like, if you tell agents like do this until it's done, they're like, okay, I did it. It's done. You're like, It's not done. It isn't done. But if you tell them, do this until you have 95 % confidence that it's done, then they will run and run and run and run and run, building up a confidence level. So a lot of that stuff is abstracted into the tool. But then I'm also using a custom mode, a custom agent in that that I call Anvil.

28:43What Anvil does is it does two major things.

28:48Burke Holland:The first thing that it does is it decides, is this an easy task? a medium task or a hard task? Because you want different workflows from the AI depending on what those are. Those are not the same thing. If you ask the agent a simple question, that's an easy task. It should just answer that. But if you give it a hard task where you need it to build something, then it really needs to plan. It needs to use sub-agents. It needs to farm work out. In GitHub Copilot, you can use different models. So like you can use Gemini 3, 5.3 Codex, and Opus 4.6 all in the same run. and you can use as many of them as you want to.

29:23Burke Holland:Okay, so now we're in an orchestration scenario. For six, let's say we're going to do a massive refactor. It might farm out the design work to Gemini. It might farm out the refactoring to 5.3. You might have 26 sub-agents running. You need to review that code. And so this is my workflow now is to try to automate all of that. So I'm planning and then I'm autopilot with my custom agent, which out the other side needs to give me something that's verifiable. Like, how do I know that you think that this worked? What is the evidence that you have that this worked? And if it's in a browser, then you can use skills like the agent browser skill to have the thing check its own work.

30:04Burke Holland:That's like the easiest scenario. Like for native apps, this gets really tough. Like if you're building a native Mac app, how the heck is the agent going to do that? It can't, right? It could write unit tests, but unit tests, as we're learning, are woefully inadequate for telling you whether or not your code actually works. So that's a long way of answering your question is that I don't have all the answers. These are just the things that I think about on a daily basis. And then how do I further get myself out of the loop? So if I'm sitting here babysitting the thing constantly, how can I automate what I'm doing right now?

30:39Now, is it possible, could, Adam, for instance, is it possible for me to give Copilot CLI

30:46Burke Holland:a large job and then walk away and have it message me on Telegram and say, hey, listen, like I did this much. I think this is what we should do next. Let me know what you think. And then I can respond and say, yes, do or don't do this. And then it goes off and continues to do it. Can it operate more as like a team lead and less as, and I think the answer is yes, but you have to have the workflows and the checks and balances set up to actually make that happen.

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33:38Jerod Santo:That's an interesting one because recently I did a version of that. I'd been, I'm trying to to decide if I should say the brand name. Similar to the way you SAS killed something for your wife, I SAS killed something for myself because I use an invoicing tool that is largely glorified email. It's really just an email through a service that is a paying service. They largely pay us via wire or ACH, which is not at all through the conduit of the invoicing service. The invoicing service is like$500 to$800 a year because of the kind of clients and brands we work with. There's a lot of them, and I just don't feel like I need to delete brands to kind of get back to a lower tier service.

34:25Jerod Santo:And it's kind of like paying extra for a database just for a couple rows of brands that work with us a couple times a year but don't need to get deleted. All I have to say is I just kind of thought about it. I was like, could I just build this in Rails? Because I love Rails. And I actually miss Ruby a lot. could I build this in Rails and could I one shot this in a way and I was like here's all the things I want and I wrote my own list I handed that to CloudWeb I call it CloudWeb not CloudCode CloudWeb Opus 4.6 extended thinking hey this is my thinking I'm going to go to bed give me the best prompt to get a good V1 in place I'm going to hand this and in this case I'm going to name drop to Augie because Augie is from our friends over at Augment Code They're one of our sponsors, not sponsored from this show, but one of our sponsors, and I love them.

35:14But Augie is also good at doing things on a loop with a great prompt and not have to do it in that dash dash dangerously way, if you know what I mean.

35:27Jerod Santo:And so I can walk away happily knowing that it's not going to RM anything or do anything negative to my system. And so I'm going to hand this. I'm literally telling Claude this. I'm going to hand this play by play. I'm taking what you give me. I'm going to copy and paste it directly into Augie, let it go, and I'm going to walk away. Okay? The next morning I wake up. Ledger is born. Okay? The next morning I have an app that works, invoices, emails, PDFs, logs in, all the things. I mean there's a couple things I could probably do to make it more production ready, but like it's the V1. And so that's one thing.

36:09Jerod Santo:The other thing is on the Telegram front, the challenge I wonder is that there are times when I'm in those kind of loops like you are. And as a great teammate, it may have a more complex problem I can solve in Telegram. I may actually need to be there with it. And I guess in that case, it might be great to know that, but it might bug me on that walk or it might bug me on that restful step away. So I'm kind of torn on that bug me on Telegram front. But it'd be nice because maybe I'm at lunch with a colleague and I'm still working. I want to be in work context. But sometimes the thing that I have to that that sort of, you know, human in the loop scenario with the agent to take that next step requires deeper thinking than I can do in a telegram message or I may need to access more tools or whatever.

36:59Jerod Santo:And so then I might just be like, oh, man, I got this agent anxiety again. I got to get back to my agent. You know what I'm saying? So that's my long-winded response to you is like, I one-shot something recently out of frustration, but it wasn't a true one-shot. It was a thoughtful, deep V1 one-shot. It wasn't like build me a Rails app to replicate X. It was more like, here's what I use. Here's what I use about it. Here's what I really care about it. Here's all the things I don't want you to do. Here's all the things I do want you to do. And I'm literally going to bed. I just told her what I'm doing.

37:32Jerod Santo:Came back the next morning and Ledger's born.

37:35Burke Holland:Yeah, I've thought about this a lot myself, where it's like, what you really want is for the agent to just work all nights, like you said, and then build the thing that I want. But the problem is, it doesn't know what you want. And you cannot get out everything because you don't know. And that's not how software is built anyway. In no world are all the requirements and constraints to find up front. What happens instead is that you think you know, you discover it as you go. That's right. And it changes and you make trade-offs and the agent has to do the same thing. And so I don't know what the answer to this is other than whatever product you and I are replacing currently probably has a team of devs and an engineering lead.

38:17Burke Holland:And every Monday morning they get together in a stand-up and maybe they have a stand-up every day where they go over all of the work that's in the backlog, what the status is on each one of those things. And I almost wonder if that isn't the future, right? Because you can't just hand this work off and then just walk away and expect that the agent is just magically going to know exactly what you want. It just doesn't. And so in order to really build anything of size, you'd almost have to have a daily standup with your agent where you go over all of the things that it's working on and review with and that's tedious that's actually the part no one likes right like chat if you're listening to this pod like if you're in a daily stand up you're like that's i that's my least favorite part of the day yeah i mean i'm with you but there are reasons why we have processes and that's so that we can actually build things that work i did something similar where i have a ralph loop.

39:17Burke Holland:I have Copilot CLI running in a loop and it's building a multiplayer game where you just, uh, yeah, you just LARP as a baby bird and you're hatched from an egg and you fly around and I'm letting it, it's deciding everything. It decides what features it should add. It decides what's engaging. It decides what bird behavior is. And I check on it every morning, but it's just running 24 seven and it does a pass and it adds something. And then it comes back and looks to see what it could add and it just keeps going. Do I think that this will end in a playable, like viable piece of software? I do not.

39:51Burke Holland:Right? Probably not. I think it will be some monster of a thing that is interesting to look at, but is not, it's not something you would ship. And from what I can tell, this is currently where we're at. So like, I won't name names, but there are companies that have built, like they sent agents off to build an entire browser or they sent agents off to build an entire compiler. And it's phenomenal that the agent can even do that. Like instead of throwing stones, when this happens, people should just step back and acknowledge the incredible feat that that is, that you had a thousand agents that built a browser.

40:26Burke Holland:That's amazing. But to actually ship that browser, that is a whole other story to ship that compiler. That is a whole other story. I don't have answers here other than to acknowledge that these are the gaps that we're currently trying to think through? I have some verse of an answer.

40:44Jerod Santo:And I think this is the lens we need to take because this is the lens I'm taking. And it's helpful to me is that not all software is created equal, right? Just like your game is not the same kind of production level, shippable, sellable, SLA-able software. Like those are not, they're still software, but they're not the same software. The benchmarks, the requirements, the desires are totally different. And so I think the lens we have to take is that there's a lot of naysayers like oh but it can't do this or oh it can't do that well let me just tell you like uh you even called it out in your post sam altman and you know others talking about where we're going and engineers being replaced where we're like now that ain't gonna happen and this year we're like oh my gosh it's gonna happen soon it might happen like three months from now you know and so i think not all software is created equal i think versions of software will change in terms of like your toy game and it's probably that for you versus somebody else's browser they want to like figure out if they can actually ship getting that to production getting it to ship is way different but it's a different kind of beast even the most recent example uh with cloudflare and open next like i don't know i saw that did you see this yeah

41:57Burke Holland:shout out to steve i used to work with steve here at microsoft the guy that wrote that that blog post. That was a great post.

42:02Jerod Santo:Yeah. I mean, like even just like the way they wrote it out was just phenomenal. I'm excited about that because the uptick of software getting created, the uptick of repos being created on GitHub, the uptick of all the things, essentially apps on the app store, there's a lot. And I think what's happening is people are learning how to build more software. or they're learning like you are about Go and WebSockets or Go and how you can use a Unix socket, for example, and what that does for the way you can connect and stuff like that. I mean, RPC versus a REST API, you've got, gRPC I mean, you've got all sorts of things that are happening where you're now learning different things, and that's the explosion happening is that your world, your world and my world as well, and hopefully our audience's world, is now flattened in terms of, well, I can touch pretty much any piece of language or protocol or software as I'd like to because the AI is getting enough better, getting better enough to take me there.

43:05Jerod Santo:And I'm learning with it. And hopefully you're not just simply one-shotting and praying, but you're more like iterating with it. Because I find the most fun I'm having building software is iterating with it, learning with it. and not like it's teaching me and I'm teaching it, but more like I'm just learning through the process of actually being a developer again, touching things I would have not touched a year ago, building things I wouldn't have even dreamed about and learning along the way and iterating along the way, using, iterating, using, iterating. That feedback loop for me is really just a one-person shop in that regard because a lot of my software is just built for and by me for the most part.

43:43Jerod Santo:Yeah.

43:44Burke Holland:Somebody said the age of personal software is here and they're 100 % right. And I think that's what most of us are doing right now. And so for people who are listening to this that are skeptical, I can't stress enough, you can build anything. And if you're listening, thinking to yourself, no, you can't. I've seen what AI can do. The problem is that we've been trying. We've been on this sort of hype grind for so long that we sold people six months ago. A year ago, we were like, you can build software with AI. And you could, but it was tedious. And then a year later, we're telling people, no, no, no, no, no.

44:14Burke Holland:You can build software with AI. And they're like, fool me once. right you're not going to fool me again but i don't know what to tell you besides just go y 'all just go do it like ever wanted to build a triple a game just go do it just go do it see if i'm wrong test me and see if you can't get to something that's functional inside of an hour yeah and you

44:33Jerod Santo:can you really can now these and really thanks to open source i mean we were and maybe you could speak to this given GitHub and Copilot. There was a lot of outrage on the initial release of GitHub Copilot in that, oh, GitHub released this thing and it trained on all of our code. Damn you, GitHub, and all this stuff. But then open source is still here and still, I would say open source is thriving more than ever. And there's this massive swing back to just simply open source and free and open tooling. I mean, OpenNext is the example we just led. there. I mean, it's a good thing.

45:12Burke Holland:Yeah, because it's so cheap to create software now that it's nothing for you to just create something and then make it available to everyone. Until it's not. Well,

45:25Jerod Santo:not the cheap side of it, but until it's not worth sharing, where you want to protect your moat or build a moat. 100%.

45:33Burke Holland:But I do think that there are emerging problems that we don't really have answers for. So the VS Code is probably one of the biggest open source projects. And I think last year, every year when we get to December, they do like a triage of the open issues. They spend December just trying to do spring cleaning, essentially get the repo down to a manageable number and do clean up the backlog. And it was like a year ago, it was 8 ,000 issues. This year when we went into December, they were like, okay, how many issues are we working through? It was 15 ,000 issues. Wow. Like this is not We have to figure out the process.

46:10Burke Holland:The team is actually doing this. The VS Code team doesn't just build VS Code. They're also trying to figure out the AI processes for their own workflows that you use to create a tool which has to be reliable. It has to be fast. It has to work. It cannot go down. We can't just ship a release where people are like, the editor doesn't work anymore. We can't do that. Catastrophic. Right. Exactly. Like you said, there's different kinds of software. But when we're talking about what we build for ourselves, that's one thing. but these teams and i was just in redmond talking with um one of the engineers michael lively on the team who's just that's what he's doing is trying to figure out what are the workflows and putting them together so that the team can actually ship software with ai and have it remain at the quality bar that they are going to insist that it is we did that it just has to be a non negotiable for people.

47:02Burke Holland:Yeah. We, we should, Adam, we should talk about like your point about our developers going to be replaced. We should talk about that because I have, I have thoughts here.

47:12Jerod Santo:I know you do. Let's, let's do it. So what I see right now is this sentiment just keeps

47:22Burke Holland:getting thrown out, but it isn't actually happening. Like AI is taking jobs, but not in the sense that it's doing them. It's taking them in the sense that if you're in tech, that is money that's being diverted to GPUs. Everybody's investing in GPUs and not headcount. And if you're in the enterprise, I think a lot of places are using it as an excuse to downsize. It's a convenient scapegoat. But it isn't taking the job in the sense that, oh, we don't need you because now AI does what you do. We're not there. Models are extremely capable. And so I'm pessimistic that that's actually going to be the case.

48:05Burke Holland:And I actually wonder if we don't end up with more developers. But then you start to ask, well, what is a developer exactly? And we even have looked at this at Microsoft. Am I an advocate? Am I a PM? Am I an engineer? Or am I all of those things? Because I can now, if there's a feature that's missing in VS Code, I can open an issue or I could open a PR with three different implementations of that issue done with the AI. And then we can either approve and say, yes, we're going to do this. Or we can just be like, no, we're not actually going to add this at this time. Close it out. What do I care?

48:42Burke Holland:It's a 15 minute job for me to create three different iterations. So it's like this age of abundance where I can contribute in a place where I before didn't have the time to. I don't have time to sit down and learn the LLM API in the tool. I just don't. I have other things to do. But now I can actually, I can contribute. So am I an engineer? Am I an advocate? Am I a PM? And I think we're going to see more of this where like, what is it exactly that the job title is, right? Is there such thing as just a developer anymore? If I'm in marketing and I need to build a, I need a quick page or something.

49:23Burke Holland:Can I just vibe that up? If I'm in sales, right, and I need a system that makes it easier for me to answer questions the customers have, can I just vibe that up? I mean, I don't know the answer here other than to say that it seems to me that like the AI is going to replace developers would be better stated as like AI, everybody is going to be a developer at some level, maybe going forward. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

49:54Jerod Santo:I'm with you on that. I feel like calling everyone a developer is a slight challenge. Calling everyone a builder is more plausible. I think it comes down to

50:10Burke Holland:let me push back on that a bit though because I think that for us as developers one of the things that we've always had over other people is that we have the knowledge and the skills that they don't have and therefore we're worth a lot of money it's a lucrative field and we don't want to give that up we don't want to give that up if we're just being honest and I don't blame people for not wanting to give that up it doesn't make you a bad person but I think we're still trying to gatekeep some concepts. We don't want these things to be available to everyone because then if they do, then we're in an existential crisis.

50:46Jerod Santo:I'm kind of for everyone being a builder, honestly. I'd actually toy with creating a new podcast focused on the idea of builder. I was going to call it future builder. It was a double entendre. It was like, you know, you're literally building the future and it's the future builders of tomorrow in a sense. And as developers today, but tomorrow it's everyone's a builder. I'm not sure the world's ready for that yet. I'm not sure I'm ready to produce that kind of show yet, but I like the idea that everyone is a builder because, and the reason I feel that way, I talked to a good friend of ours, Damien Tanner.

51:21Jerod Santo:He runs LayerCode. And we talked recently on the podcast, and one of the things we talked about was that he just in time built something for himself, and then his sales team and sales folks just in time built dashboards for themselves. And so now you have production level software that's good for them because they're production of one. They're the user of one. They're not only the builder, but they're also the user of it. So it's good for me. It works. That's all that matters. I think that's super cool. I want that world to exist because the more people who can build software for themselves is going to be, there's a long tail upside for that.

52:02Jerod Santo:Yeah. Whether or not. And the reason why I teeter on that they're a developer or not is for the reason you said before, which was they have they may miss this deep knowledge of, say, the Unix socket with Go, for example, or ETLs for me or software development lifecycle. They don't understand this larger, truly developer world kind of thing. And maybe that will erode over time. And I'm fine with that, too. I'm mostly fine with that. I think there's going to be more software and more people building software. And if you want to call them software developers, I'm cool with that. I'm zero about gatekeeping.

52:39Jerod Santo:In fact, I invite them all. It's like saying it's no different than being anti-newbie into our world. We've been so pro-newbie for years and years and decades basically, or at least this last decade been pro-newbie and kind of anti-calling people juniors even. There's a lot of – it's a pejorative. I'm for everyone coming in. I'm like the one song, Arms Wide Open kind of thing. With Arms Wide Open. The Creed song? Yeah, man. Creed all the way. I love Creed. I'm a Metal Gems kind of guy. Yeah, with Arms Wide Open, come on in. Come build. It's going to get more fun, more lively. More software is better for the world.

53:17Jerod Santo:And I think that as this world evolves, as this thing evolves, we're going to need more people to build good software. bespoke software for personal use bespoke software for just in time business level functional personal software and then truly platforms and production systems like our friends at cloud just did with you know open next as an example of them using you know a thousand twelve hundred bucks to take next from uh what it was with you know for sale only essentially and enabling veet and all the process behind that. That's a different kind of thing than you are in our building, but they've got a team and some smarts and some true talent that not so much you and I don't have, but they've got some skills behind those tokens.

54:06Burke Holland:Yeah, you have to know a bit about what you're doing to pull that off. If I was going to take the other side of the argument on what I just said, it would be that the reason why we recoil at this is because to those of us that have been writing code for decades, it's a craft. it is right and i remember when we in your post i did and when when we had this big influx of people and even my my kids when they were in high school they're in college now but it was this big push you know that everybody should learn to code and like literally everybody was in these coding classes because they wanted to make a ton of money that's not a bad reason to want to be in to want to learn to code but they had zero interest in the craft right and that's why so many so few of them just made it out the end of the pipeline is because it's hard.

54:51Burke Holland:It's hard and it isn't fun and it's tedious and you really have to enjoy the craft. And it's like, AI is never going to write code that's up to our standards because it's not a craftsman. We're craftsmen. AI is not. And so I do worry that we're building essentially like strip malls and track homes, right? Whereas like, if you go back in history in my town here, they were built, the homes that they built were just beautiful. And if you fast forward to today, they're nothing, right? Even my house is just a brick square and that's fine. I don't want to be ungrateful, but at the same time, can we even build, can we build cathedrals, Adam, anymore?

55:36Burke Holland:Does anyone even know how? I don't know that we do. And I, so I worry that we're not, we're going to forget how to build cathedrals. This is, this should be the next

55:45Jerod Santo:blog posts oh yes you know i actually uh i agree with that sentiment because i was recently in pittsburgh pennsylvania and if you haven't been to pittsburgh it is a beautiful city there's a lot of history there because it's one of the original 13 colonies there's a lot of history there whereas you know other places are sort of new everything's new california everything's new you know as an example nothing against california it just doesn't have the same kind of history that pennsylvania ohio or other states might have and i'm in downtown pittsburgh and there's this courthouse where they literally conduct court and uh it's just breathtaking it's massive a massive like you know craftsman level stone building that when my wife and i and our kids were walking through pittsburgh we're like we gotta go tour this thing no one you gotta go outside and see it right yeah no one cares right everyone who lives there it's like yeah been there done that seen it nobody's going there and when my family's like what'd you do today we're like uh we toured the courthouse like why i'm like because it was beautiful it was massive it was amazing like the the level of quality of work it took to make that and like it was just breathtaking i'll throw a foot on the show notes because it's just it really is just breathtaking and to your point

56:58Burke Holland:do you think could we do that today right like yeah exactly i don't know possess the skills

57:03Jerod Santo:I think we do. There's a small margin of folks who do still have those skills. And because it's a rare skill, they can charge high dollars. And because they can charge high dollars because it's a rare skill, it happens less. I don't think we can't do it. I think it's become such a smaller minority that does that kind of craft. And for those reasons, it's elevated in cost. And for those reasons, it's just done less.

57:31Burke Holland:yeah you never see it because it doesn't make any sense to do it only the hyper rich can afford it

57:36Jerod Santo:and so only the in the unique places where the hyper rich can afford it does it take place for sure it happens it just doesn't right but it used to be everywhere that used just used to be you

57:45Burke Holland:know how things got built and it took a long time right and it took time it took years decades for things to get built and now we can throw these things up in a matter of months right like we could throw up a whole house in like less than three months it used to take years but the thing is like the difference in the quality is unmistakable, right? These, these, and so anyway, the analogy being is that, are we moving into a place where like we look at software? I'm already at the point where people are like post stuff they built on X. And I'm like, I'm not impressed because I know what you did.

58:18Burke Holland:I know that because I can do it too. And how sad is that? I remember people used to post stuff on like Hacker News about like these CSS transformations that they pulled off and you're like that's unbelievable how did you do that and now it's nothing i can write a whole javascript framework by the time this podcast is over i could literally enter that prompt and we'd have one i'm not saying it would be good but you you see where i'm going with this right it's like it's devaluing the thing let's let's talk about that though okay so there's things

58:50Jerod Santo:that are incumbents in the in the marketplace i'm trying to think of like particular ones like npm for example they say that npm can't be unseated because of its ubiquity and because of its just tentacles out there I think we're two or three this might actually hit closer to home because I just said npm and I'd forgotten where you work I forget that github owns that too all the time okay good I'm not throwing shots it's just my example but I kind of am in a way because we talked about this recently was that securing github or sorry, securing NPM is table stakes. And I do believe that. That's still the show we did recently with Nicholas Zakis.

59:31Jerod Santo:Oh, Zakis was on the show.

59:33Burke Holland:He's awesome.

59:34Jerod Santo:Yeah. A lot of great things to say. We talked about the details of that. And I think we're a couple major security issues away, which you've already had a couple with NPM, away from the incumbent being threatened by a newcomer. If a newcomer came with the abilities of NPM, and maybe a couple people with the seat that have the clout to be behind X, whatever X may be, not literally X.com, but whatever X as a variable may be. If we're a couple security issues away from NPM, having the possibility of people saying, you know what, if there was an alternative, I'd choose it. We're there. We're so close to that.

1:00:18Jerod Santo:There's a lot behind that. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot behind that.

1:00:22Burke Holland:Let me think through that because I see where you're going with that. But then there are two things pop into my head. First of all, right now, people's appetite for risk seems to be ludicrous. Like it's just like crazy.

1:00:34Jerod Santo:Like they are open for risk or they're not. Yes.

1:00:37Burke Holland:They're just open to risk. Right. Even my own. Right. There's a flag that you can pass. YOLO, why not? YOLO, exactly. It's a YOLO flag. Just let the agent do whatever it wants, right? Now, I have not been bitten by this yet, and there's some things that you can do to help mitigate this, but that is inherently super dangerous. Open Claw is one of the coolest things I've seen. What a great project, right? And you can lock it down, but you kind of have to do that. You have to lock down and say, well, only this Telegram user, and you have to test and make sure that that's actually the case. Did that actually just happen or did it just tell you that it did it?

1:01:13And but I think that when it comes to things like NPM, one of the things that NPM has going for it is that these models are they know so much about it and they know how

1:01:28Burke Holland:to use it. They know what these modules look like. There's all this history. It's in the training data. right the second that you invent something else well now the model doesn't know what that is and you can mitigate that by providing context and maybe future iterations will know but it's like models are so good at using these established tools for instance like um i know i work at microsoft but if you want to have some fun chat you can use firebase models know everything there to know about the Firebase CLI. So you can literally log in on your machine and then tell the agent to build something, tell it it can stand up its own Firebase services, which are free, right?

1:02:08Burke Holland:You have to physically enable billing here. And it can do everything. It knows how to use the Firebase CLI from front to back. That makes it really hard for you to supplant that with something else because people choose the path of least resistance. That's my immediate reaction to that is that it's just too easy. It's already there. Models already know how to use it. And that makes it really, really hard to supplant it. But then again, like we're just in a space where nobody knows anything. No one, if you take nothing from this podcast, it's this, listen, chat, listen.

1:02:47Jerod Santo:No one knows anything.

1:02:48Burke Holland:No one knows what they're talking about. That is the TLDR of this whole podcast.

1:02:52Jerod Santo:You've said chat a couple of times. You've addressed it like chat. What does that mean when you say that? I think I know what you mean. What do you mean when you say that?

1:02:58Burke Holland:Yeah, sorry. What does chat mean? I don't know. I mean, my kids say it all the time when they're talking to their friends. They're like, hey, chat. Well, it's like if you're a streamer and you're talking to chat. Yeah, I think. I don't stream on occasion.

1:03:10Jerod Santo:I understand what you mean now. Okay, cool. The audience. Gotcha. Gotcha. Sorry. Yeah, sorry.

1:03:14Burke Holland:Listeners. I guess for you, it would be listeners.

1:03:16Jerod Santo:Right. Well, it's okay. I just want to make sure. I thought I knew what you meant, but then I wasn't sure if I knew exactly what you meant. Okay, so I think here's an example. I'm trying to make sure I have the right kind of context for this is there was I thought it was entire.io and former CEO of GitHub Oh, Thomas but wasn't there like a way to render diffs that was like re-implemented in like record time by different GitHub hosts and I'm just like paraphrasing that because I thought I saw some posts on a brand new diff out there it wasn't entire, it was something else I believe

1:03:58Jerod Santo:I wish I had the context I don't have the context

1:04:02Burke Holland:I know Rhys I apologize if I'm butchering your name built faster GitHub just vibed up this really fast, super fast interface for GitHub so it's possible that that's 100 % true I think right now Like everyone has to basically, you have to take your priors and just throw them out.

1:04:26Jerod Santo:Here we go.

1:04:27Burke Holland:I think I might have this context.

1:04:28Jerod Santo:I think I might actually have it. Yeah. Here you go. Diffs. Check this out. D-I-F-S. Diffs.com. A different rendering library. Now I could be wrong, but I thought I saw some posts around this. So it's Pierre Computer Company. Pierre.computer. They link out to code.storage. and link out to diffs.com. Now, this is burgeoning in the last week, so I'm catching up myself even on this, which is why I'm less versed in it. Maybe next week I'll be super steeped. But there is a, and somebody out there is like, Adam, shut up because you don't know what you're talking about, but this is it, okay? These diff styles are just amazing.

1:05:09Jerod Santo:Somebody came out with this as a brand new startup that's been funded, and Pierre.com is that, and one of their products is diffs.com. Now, I thought I saw a post that this is being implemented by folks faster than ever. And I don't know how that really relates to NPM, but just that you can go from the old way or a way or the known way or the incumbent way to a totally new way because it's just revolutionary, really well done and compatible. So I think the one thing that may be an NPM killer, and I could be way wrong and I could be just a pundit in this scenario, not so much somebody who's been an NPM user for many, many years.

1:05:51Jerod Santo:But I think that if you can come up with an NPM-compatible way and teach agents quickly enough, NPM could be threatened. The fact that it's an incumbent and could be no different than you have S3-compatible object storage out there. No different. I mean, you have Tigris. I'm a user of Tigris, Tigris.com. Is it Tigris.com? TigrisData.com, I believe. Yeah, TigrisData.com. And they're S3 compatible. They have an amazing Go SDK. They actually used to use the Amazon, the AWS S3 CLI SDK for me to use. And now I just use their native Go SDK just to go right to Tigris, and it's S3 compatible. So no different than you can actually compete at the object storage level with R2, which is a great example, T3, which is Tigris, or straight up S3, that you can compete on that level.

1:06:50So I don't know if being an incumbent and being not known by agents, I think you can quickly get versed in this world so fast.

1:06:59Jerod Santo:Could be.

1:07:00Burke Holland:Yeah, you're absolutely right. But I do think your point is well made, though, that like nothing is nothing is nothing. I don't say nothing is nothing. Nothing is nothing is. Well, software is so cheap to create now that if you're a software company, like the odds that somebody can reimplement what you just did on their own are pretty high and are not are only going to get higher. Right. And so I don't know what that means other than to say that I don't think anyone is, there is no one is safe. Everyone is going to have to reinvent themselves and think differently about things. They have to, they're going to all have to forget our prior assumptions about literally everything.

1:07:44Jerod Santo:Yeah. Do you have a lens? Cause you probably have a lot more colleagues than I do. I have zero now. It's just me. Some editors, but as you may know, Jerry recently retired from the show. love him to death no ill will no drama whatsoever just just change but i'm literally a team of one now and so i have no colleagues but you probably have colleagues burke and so my my question is this is given you have colleagues and maybe it's not the case here but i'm sure somewhere in microsoft are there people who are sort of not so much anti-ai but resistant do you have awareness of their position their posture towards what we're going through right now

1:08:24Burke Holland:Yeah, 100%. I think that there's a strong contingent of devs out there even who are like, I would never let – and they call them clankers and they call them slot machines. And they're not wrong. These folks aren't wrong. They're really pushing back and saying this is a bad idea. I don't think this is good. and a lot of these folks are craftsmen they have a lot of pride and they're extremely good at what they do but I I do think that at this point it's kind of like trying to hold back the water like you're trying to you are trying to be the dam and so for those folks first of all you always need people to tell you that you're doing it wrong or that this is wrong.

1:09:12Burke Holland:You need these people on literally every issue you can think of. If you don't have someone questioning it and saying we should not be doing this, something is wrong. So I think that it's healthy to have that. But I do think that the inertia and the momentum here is these folks are, and I've seen a lot of them come around to where they say, like I was just talking to, who was it? Ryan Florence, who did React Router on Twitter. last night. He said, I have not written a line of code in a month and a half. And I thought, and I had responded and just said, I see more and more of this. I haven't written a line of code in quite some time.

1:09:51Burke Holland:Right. And Ryan Florence is no slouch. This guy knows what he is doing. He's a very, very smart. And so I think that I'm just seeing more and more of these really like S tier devs basically saying like AI is writing my code now. That's what I would say to the people that are holdouts is just that I understand. That's a really hard time right now. We don't know what's going to happen. The threat is existential. It feels like the pandemic hit, and then everything after that has just been uncertainty on top of uncertainty. Amen. We just want to go back, but you can't go back. It just gets worse. It's here.

1:10:32Burke Holland:It's here to stay, and part of me, it's like it's never been more exciting to build. And then the other part of me just grieves. It just grieves. Like, you know, like I'm just, it hurts. It's a loss. And so all I can tell people who are resistant is that I understand how you feel.

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1:13:54Jerod Santo:There's a book, okay? I'm going to recommend this book. And you may have read this book, Burke. Who Moved My Cheese? Oh, man. That's a classic. Right? Yeah. Do you know the story well?

1:14:08Burke Holland:It's been a while since I've read it. Yeah, but I know – yeah, I essentially know the fundamentals. But go ahead.

1:14:15Jerod Santo:Well, I don't know by heart. I just know you have Scurry and you have him and you have Ha. And essentially the story is there's cheese. There's mice, right? They're in this maze and there's cheese. And there's been abundance of cheese in this area for a while and they're all going back there. And one day they go back there and the cheese is gone. This represents change, right? Okay. Used to come here every day, get our daily cheese, enjoy, enjoy, come back, whatever. And then him and Hawk kind of keep coming back. He coming back and the cheese is just never there again. Meanwhile, Scurry is gone looking for the cheese.

1:14:54Jerod Santo:and I think as sad as it makes me to say that to lament that idea for us that this craft is changing it truly I am but if we sit there if that story is true at all for anybody if we sit there like him and ha and worry about the cheese and it didn't move or it did move or where is it going to be at and they're just so worried and anxious about that future meanwhile scurry just was like out of here. Going to go find the cheese. I think we have to take that into consideration. We have to find a way to move around the value chain. And we have to adapt because otherwise we'll be like him and I will be in the past.

1:15:34Jerod Santo:Meanwhile, Scurry found the new cheese and is back to this new world to enjoy again. I think we have to figure out that kind of way. And I want to mention a friend of mine, John Daniel Trask. He is the co-founder and CEO of Raygun and recently of AutoHive. And you may know Raygun. They've been an error tracker for and performance platform and Core Web Vitals for years. Stand-up software, amazing team. And John Daniel Trask said this recently. Jeez, I thought I had that. I had a couple of his bookmarked. Let me find his actual other one. Give me a sec. He's like, I've been, yeah, I've been a, for 34 years, I've been a development, or sorry, he says, 34 years of development experience here.

1:16:24Jerod Santo:Haven't manually written the line of code in about 18 months. Now, he is one of these examples of a CEO coming back out of retirement, so to speak, and writing code again. But I know John Daniel Trask, and he's always been in the details. He's always been a tinkerer. He's always been on the side doing something. While it may not be production rigging code or something like that, and I'm just only speaking from my awareness, not his truth. But he said, I haven't written a manual line of code in about 18 months. Never have had higher output. Shocks me how few have adapted yet, though. Yeah. And that's why our audience, some may be like, Adam, shut up.

1:17:05Jerod Santo:Or, my gosh, why do you keep talking about AI? And I think it's just natural because it is the conversation out there. The cheese is moving or is moved. How do you adapt?

1:17:21Burke Holland:Yeah, we get this on VS Code all the time because, as you can imagine, VS Code has, I don't know what the public number we share is, millions of users. It's astronomical. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of these folks, a lot of these folks, they just want to live their life, right? They just want to write code. And most of the updates that we make are in the realm of AI and people rightfully get upset. And they're like, why, where is the rest of the stuff like for the editor? And the truth is that this is the direction that everything is going. Like it just is. In order to remain a relevant tool, VS Code has to adapt and move and meet developers where the future is.

1:18:11Burke Holland:But it has to do that while still supporting the devs who need to open up index.js and be productive with their code today with no AI. And so it's a focus on doing both. But I understand and we hear that feedback and we understand how you feel. We understand, but that is not the direction that things are headed is very much agentic in AI. That is just where the industry is going. And in order to be a relevant tool, you have to move in that direction too.

1:18:44Jerod Santo:do you think we'll get to a point uh a year from now two years from now and i know this will be major step function changes as we keep progressing but do you think we'll get back to that uh wow this was a handcrafted piece of software and then that that person or those persons or that kind of team is like we only build handcrafted software here um you like artisanal uh yeah i mean yeah i I mean, it may be even charge a major premium. I don't know.

1:19:16Burke Holland:Well, so let's use an analogy. It's like you could go – if you could buy a piece of furniture today, let's say you needed a dresser. You could buy from somebody who has handmade that. They've rounded the edges themselves. They've used a lathe. It's beautiful. They stained the wood. I do some woodwork.

1:19:36Jerod Santo:Are you a carpenter? You can know all these terms. I love it.

1:19:38Burke Holland:A little bit. I've done some woodwork myself. I think if you're a developer, you just like to build things. So I like Lego. I like woodworking. I like knitting. Knitting is very much like a building type activity. But then the answer is, well, you could buy that for$350, or you can go to Walmart, and you can buy a particle board proximity of this thing for$25. And the question is, whether or not that matters. Most people are going to choose the$25 particle board thing, right? Or maybe they get someone in the middle, but it's really a luxury when you go out and you say like, there isn't a logical reason to do that other than you want to own a piece of handcrafted furniture.

1:20:24Burke Holland:And I just don't see, because software is digital, I don't see people caring. I do think that there's, I'm already at the point where it's, I'm like, I can't believe we used to write every line of code by hand. Adam, do you remember this? We used to literally type function, space, bracket, return. And maybe like an occasion,

1:20:46Jerod Santo:tab completes some things. Not so much the agent level, but yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even this is we used to code with AI via tab completion. Yes. Not like write the whole file, right?

1:21:03Burke Holland:just write the whole thing yeah but we we used to line we moved on from that so quickly because copilot when copilot first came out it was ghost text and autocomplete and uh and i when they first showed it to us internally i was like oh my gosh i'd never seen anything like it i had no idea that we would go from there that was listen to me audience listeners chat that was like three years ago that was three years ago it was today we are in a totally different spot and in fact a year ago there was no agent mode in visual studio code there was an edit mode fast forward a year later and we have full-on like agentic workflows from github which is something that was just announced right agents have memory they can do deep research they you can And you can deploy, you can type fleet in the GitHub Copilot CLI and it will deploy a fleet of agents.

1:22:00Burke Holland:It will determine how many to deploy, what to focus them on, how to divide up the work. Like we are moving at a click that is really hard to wrap your head around. And even me, like when I see stuff that's coming up internally, I'm like, what the heck is that? What even is that? I don't understand what that is. Can we please slow down? I just learned this thing yesterday. Right, exactly.

1:22:23Jerod Santo:I learned this thing today. there's a daily release of something yeah we're in the ultimate season of build build build you know i think it goes back to developers developers developers maintainers maintainers maintainers to throw back and i think the very much i'd love to see someone at microsoft stand up on the stage and say build build build because that's the era we're in right just to just to throw back to the old day of developer building i totally agree like we're in this is like there's

1:22:50Burke Holland:two ways to think about it it's like this is the death of developers or this is the second coming

1:22:55Jerod Santo:baby this is like second coming i agree for the next completely agree yeah for the next i would say let me try to let me try to predict this and i'll come back to this stage here again if i'm wrong i don't know i was gonna say 10 years but i feel like that's a long time oh that's an eternity it is an eternity i feel like i mean well i don't want to say developers are going to die anytime I'm saying because that would be just an absolute shame. But I think making software is not going to change. We need smart folks with awareness, intent, understanding, moral high ground, etc. to craft and mold the platforms, protocols, and software built on them over the next forever perpetuity.

1:23:39Jerod Santo:I think we should always have – I mean software is for humans largely. And I think actually – I take that back. A lot of software is actually being built for agents to make better software, for humans to make better software, which is a weird cycle. But I would say for the next five years at least, for the next five years, it's a whatever developer is world. Whatever a developer is going to be, it's that world. It's time to build, so go build. It's available to you right now. It does – back to my notion of toll booth. There is a toll booth in front of that. We used to have to buy an IDE, and then maybe in the case of VS Code, we didn't because it was open source and free, but subsidized by Microsoft, right?

1:24:21Jerod Santo:Bringing on more users to the platform, more users for Azure, et cetera. Subsidize elsewhere. And thankfully, you've got an amazing team building VS Code for all these years, just diligently building some of the best software known to man. I have some quirks with it, but that's okay. I'm personally a Zed user. I like Zed. That's a good editor.

1:24:44Burke Holland:Yeah, there's so many great dev tools out there. That's the other thing I tell people is that you can't lose. All of them are good right now. So no matter which one you pick, first of all, they're about all on par at this point, and they're all excellent. You can't make a bad choice.

1:24:58Jerod Santo:You really can't. I mean, we're in the plethora of amazing software. We're in the plethora of change, and we're in the plethora of making your own thing and potentially making something that everybody else loves, too. I mean, take Peter Steinberger. I mean, just three weeks ago, I was DMing with him. Now I can't get a return. Why? He's super busy, right? We were just talking about – Oh, yeah.

1:25:16Burke Holland:He's the most famous man in the world. Yeah.

1:25:18Jerod Santo:Yeah. I mean he went from coming back from retirement, solving his own problem, releasing it for others, having a great product direction with it, and working his absolute tail off on it to now being called a genius by Sam Altman and working for OpenAI to keep building OpenClaw in the open. and there could be you know positives and negatives that because there always is but he went from you know peer to transcendent now i mean still he's still talking to the world i'm not going to say he's not but he's definitely a busy person now and i think he's got some really good taste which i think is really important in this next era's taste in software you can't just come like you said before to a boot camp thinking that software developers make a lot of money therefore I make software so I can make a lot of money.

1:26:10You really have to enjoy the end, not just the means.

1:26:15Jerod Santo:The means is software creation, is software developer, but you have to enjoy the end too, and you have to have clear developer user experience and user experience and good intent and ability to specify what should be in the world from where we're currently at. I think that's the homework that we can keep honing and exercising as craft folks. I think that's very well said.

1:26:39Burke Holland:And to your point, Adam, about like Peter, this is a really good example because it's not like Peter was just a guy that showed up and was like, I think I'm going to build something with AI. This guy's a really good developer. Like he previously solved an extremely hard problem. So yes, it happened rapidly, but we're also talking about an individual that's extremely, extremely high level engineer, extremely capable. Right. So it doesn't lend credence to this idea that you don't need to be a developer, but rather that if you are a really good developer, that you can really do anything.

1:27:14Jerod Santo:We're in the era of polymath. Are you familiar with this term, polymath?

1:27:18Burke Holland:Okay.

1:27:19Jerod Santo:I think we're in the era of that. I think if you are a developer that's been seasoned quite a bit, maybe you haven't dabbled in everything that you possibly could have, but you've been aware. Maybe you've been listening to this podcast for many, many years. We've never been a Ruby camp or a JavaScript camp or a TypeScript camp or a Go only or a Rust only. We've never been a – we've been agnostic to the software landscape, so to speak, very clearly for those reasons because we've been talking about and touching so many different areas. I think you've been paying attention to the show where you go back in its history and you connect those dots.

1:27:52Jerod Santo:Now you're a polymath of sorts. You can come with some version of context and get drafted into polymath. If you can begin to connect dots, you can become a polymath, I think, in this kind of world here. Because AI will help you do that. And it's already smarter than most of us. And it just needs us to kind of guide it a little bit. And I say for now. For now it needs us to guide us.

1:28:13Burke Holland:Yeah, I agree. And I had actually tweeted out something like last week or something where I was working on something. I wanted to build something. And I asked the AI about it. It was like, oh, yeah, we should use Go. You should use Go to do this. and I thought, I don't know go. And then I remembered that doesn't matter at all. So it's like, like I was this close to just being like, no, I don't want to do that. I don't know go, but then remembering, oh, that doesn't, that's irrelevant. I can, I can actually learn it and let the agent do it as I go. I can still do it. And that is the thing that people are going to have to do right now is, is they're going to have to start thinking differently.

1:28:53Burke Holland:Everything, you know, has to be rethought. Literally everything. The next time you think that can't be done, the answer is probably absolutely can be done. And you have to, it's just, it's like, I don't want to say think different, right? I don't want to say like, it's hackneyed to say you can do anything with AI. You just have to figure out what that thing is. If AI isn't useful, it's your problem, not the AI. But at some level, there is truth to this in the sense that the limiting factor is you. It's me. It's my preconceived notions about what can and can't be done and what I'm willing to not or not do with the AI.

1:29:31Burke Holland:That's it. Yeah.

1:29:35Jerod Santo:I've gotten a lot of fruit in my labor around planning. I've thought a lot about certain problems and now there are personal problems for now. And at some point I'll start launching more things. And I've mentioned that on this podcast and I'm not going to go into it here necessarily, but I've found a lot of value in just planning because in some cases I'm learning new ground. I'm very well in one area, but kind of mediocre in like 17 other areas. And so I'm taking those 17 of those areas and I'm thinking deeply and I'm spending time learning and I'm not in a rush to get to the end. I'm kind of settling in the means in a way.

1:30:12Jerod Santo:I'm learning about different protocols or different way of doing things or just zooming out a little bit to being like, wow, you know what? This is actually, I hadn't played with that. I hadn't considered how I would connect to this. And I just sort of like steep, I would say steep in that, in that craft part of it is learning about what's possible and then making a decent plan and then executing that plan. That's kind of been my ground. There's is just really just enjoying that learning process again. And the process of like making something and iterating with it discovering learning discovering learning and shipping that's been quite fun to kind of solve my own problems because there's been areas where i've just haven't like i have never built this much software in my entire life than i have in the last six months yeah right a hundred percent a bit of a ton of software largely behind the scenes but that's okay for now uh but i think as i level up and as ai is obviously leveled up like we're only a few months away since opus 4.5 which i think is what changed the world for a lot of folks that was a major step function in the right direction and now it's like well the world really is a developer's oyster so yeah and we should point out that opus 4.5 kind of like to me kicked off started something but it is not the only model right there we now we have 4.6 there's

1:31:32Burke Holland:4.6 fast there's 4.6 with a 1 million context window 5.3 is an outstanding model context

1:31:38Jerod Santo:Yeah.

1:31:39Burke Holland:Five, three is unbelievably good. Gemini is a great model, right? They just released three, one great model, right? So these model companies are really going at it, trying to deliver the best coding experience and then developers. Listen, we're the ones who win, right? We are. We're getting all the best tools. We're getting all the best models. That's right. This is now the time. So I agree with you. I've never built so much software in my life and I'll have an idea. I'll be like, oh, I wonder if I can do that. And then I'll just go do it. I'll just build it. And you may throw it away. Who cares?

1:32:13Burke Holland:Who cares? There's going to come a point where tokens need to be counted in matter. That is not this point right now. So throw the agent in a while loop and let it just run for days on end. What do you care? Right?

1:32:29Jerod Santo:Well said. Well said. I'm personally getting some really good enjoyment from Codex. GPT 5.3 has been really cool. And I feel like when I play with that thing, it spits things back to me. I'm like, can you explain it to me like I'm five? Because I don't even know what you just said. You're just so next level in how it responds. I'm like, you think I have the context here, but I'm not following you because you're way smarter than I am. Can you please just dump it down a little bit?

1:32:55Burke Holland:Somebody who described 5.3 as a really, really senior dev. And Opus 4.6 is your best friend. Yes. And so they're different in the way they interact. and so like I said I'll use I use four six I interface with four six and it just delegates work to five three because I actually don't want to I don't want to interface with five three I know it's a really good dev so I want it writing code but I want to talk to four six because it's always like oh yeah you know what you're totally right I'd miss that you're so smart we should talk that's the gaslighting so nice it's like yeah it makes me feel good yeah makes me feel

1:33:32Jerod Santo:I'm with you on that. I've been actually doing that exact step, which is I've used Opus 4.6 to do planning and then delegated to 5.3, GPT 5.3 for those exact reasons. Because I'm like, you know, I thought I was smart, but now I'm talking to you. I feel like I'm just not that smart anymore. Or it's just not as nice. It's like, Adam, can you just pick it up here? I'm like, I want to be 10 steps down the road here, and you're holding me back here. Yeah. Which is part of the battle here. What else you want to say, Burke? I know that we've got lots to say. You got some cool stuff you're working on.

1:34:03Jerod Santo:The get a copilot CLI. We didn't even mention that really. I think it's a beautiful thing. Great work on that front there. I mean, there's a, the world's the oyster for the next coding CLI to kind of keep iterating. You got open code out there. You got Claude. You've got Codex. You've got get a copilot CLI. You got all the things out there. What do you want to say in closing?

1:34:22Burke Holland:Yeah, I would just like to say, you know, for me, because I've been working on the copilot CLI, that's exciting. And it just went GA today. And GA is just our way of saying, like, it's ready for production use because we have so many enterprise customers and they won't touch anything until. Yeah, just today. Wow. And they can't use anything until that thing is out of preview. It has to be stable. Right. They have to know that it's supportable and usable. And so today you can start using that. And I would just tell people, like, I'm super excited about the stuff that is being done to make AI even better so that you don't have to compose these, like, hacky workflows or make Ralph loops, whatever the heck that is, or use a gas town.

1:35:02Burke Holland:Like, there's all these crazy ideas and terminology being thrown around. And the truth is that, like, you don't have to use any of that stuff. just start working with the agent and see what works for you and create your own you're smart you'll figure out the workflows you can make the agent do anything don't don't i know it's easy to

1:35:22Jerod Santo:get overwhelmed trust me i know yeah very but just just use it and figure out the workflows that make

1:35:28Burke Holland:you most productive and you're already if that's all you do you're already in like the top five percent of folks yeah at the moment yeah i would say don't delay you know really really don't delay

1:35:43Jerod Santo:if your pocketbook can handle it uh get the get the smallest version of things if it can go further go further and i would do that based upon graduated usage of course so you'll hit limits and it'll it'll give you that feedback of like hey you've hit your plan limit kind of thing but i definitely did not would not delay my list of things to work on is so long burke and tell me if this is your world here that uh this morning when i woke up and i thought i know what i gotta do today you know i know my my daily tasks i've got to get done but in terms of projects and moving things forward i was like i have to really really work hard to prioritize because i have adhd i like to have novel problems to solve and that's where my brain just really thrives and so i try my best to push back on the adam who wants to go the easier route which is solve brand new problems and never actually finished and deliver right to really kind of push the thing that really should go next over that hurdle to be usable by not just one but by many which is really my biggest issue with my software uh but i really have to work hard to to be disciplined because i am kind of overwhelmed on what i could do what i should do and what i want to do that it takes a lot of discipline in this world so i would say be careful out there y 'all you are cracking up in something that could not be go back in your bottle, so to speak.

1:37:02Jerod Santo:But I've got a whole list. And it's very, very hard. And I have to be very disciplined to be balanced in my life and then also balanced in the work I put out there in terms of software.

1:37:13Burke Holland:Yeah. And this is a whole other podcast, Adam. You should probably have on. I'm trying to think it would be great to talk about this. It's almost like a psychosis. But this is a whole other podcast. But do be careful, y 'all. Once you open this box, You can't shut it. And this is all you will do. It's all you will think about. It's all you will do. It will consume your brain. I know this because I do it. I'm doing it in my sleep. In my sleep, I'm doing it. And so I think that that's the next podcast episode we need from the changelog here. It's like, what is this doing to us exactly?

1:37:47Jerod Santo:Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I don't want to be doom and gloom, but I do have a slight concur on that. because I think before I leave my office, I think, what could I kick off while I'm gone? Yep. But then I have to really push back and say, you know what? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Every moment is a wasted moment. You could be building software right now. What are you doing? I know. Why am I talking to you, Burke? I could be making some bangs, you know? You could have built a 100 ,000 MRR project and instead you did this. It's quite possible. It really is quite possible. Who knows, man?

1:38:18Jerod Santo:I don't know. I don't know. But hey, thank you so much for opening our eyes back in January to many and then coming on the pod to kind of go into some of those details about Opus 4-5 changing things for the game and just sharing some of the backstory there. And thank you for the recommendation on the agent psychosis, I believe is what you're referring to, because I don't know what to call it. Yeah, well, it's a term. It's a term out there. It's a household name, so to speak. no this agent psychosis is like am i crazy that i think i could do these things because it can do these things am i suddenly superhuman or super powered because it's super powered then you have to be like maybe not yeah if i jump out this building will i fly you will not am i neo right now okay yeah am i am i seeing the ones but i'm actually seeing the full am i seeing the lady in the red dress what is happening here thank you so much it's been awesome man Thank you.

1:39:13Jerod Santo:Thanks for having me, Adam.

1:39:18Jerod Santo:Well, it is a new world here at the Change Log, and it is a new world in our developer landscape. AI is here. You can be on the fence. You can be against it. You can be for it. You can be in between. You can resist it. You can do all the things. But I think the one truth is, it's just not going back in the bottom. It is the new way. The developer landscape, the operating system is being rebuilt on top of a this is not hype this is real this is here i want to talk to you about that in zulip changelaw.com slash community free to join zulip chat is for you come share your thoughts come comment on this episode come hang with friends hang your hat call it home all the good things and to our plus plus subscribers hey you know what it's still here changelog plus plus it's still better it's better you know what so much about the changelog will get better not because it was bad but because there's always room for improvement entropy cannot be resisted it is the way and changelog plus plus is better there's a bonus on this episode berk and i go a little deeper a little more closer to the metal as they And you can do that if you're not already a Plus Plus subscriber by going to changelog.com slash plus plus.

1:40:40Jerod Santo:Ten bucks a month, a hundred bucks a year. Drop the ads. Get a little closer to the metal. Get bonus content and support our show. And here in closing, I do want to say one more thank you to my good friend, Jared. Because you know what? This show is better because of you, my friend. And I'm grateful for our work together. I'm grateful for our friendship over the years. I'm grateful for you. and you will be missed by me, by the audience. Take care, my friend. I'll see you out there. Okay, this episode has sponsors. We love our sponsors because, hey, they pay the bills and that's what we like. We like bills getting paid.

1:41:15Jerod Santo:Our friends at Augment Code. Now, I love Augie. Seriously, Augie is my one-shot tool. Okay, if you heard it on the podcast, that's cool. I love it. Augie is my one-shot tool. Of course, I use Squarespace for my small business. my wife runs a company it is amazing and she could not do it without squarespace and of course notion my gosh i love notion keeps me organized notion agents notion ai it is so cool of course check them out notion.com slash changelog squarespace.com slash changelog and just augmentcode.com well one thing that's not changing right here is the beats breakmaster is our beat freaking residents for life.

1:41:59Jerod Santo:We have a fun project that we're working on. Very, very fun. And it's coming soon. It's coming soon. That's it. The show's done. We'll see you.

1:42:42Jerod Santo:We do have a plus plus version of it if you have one or two more things to say or time. Which is a small paying audience, but it's mostly for the loyalist of loyalist fans of Changelog. What do you think they'd want to know about? The down and dirty, what's dirty we didn't throw out there? I didn't even ask you about in the main show. Has this changed your lens on how you think about your future? Has this new ability, this new superpower given you the desire to change anything major? Maybe that's something. how are you thinking about your career I suppose

1:43:21Burke Holland:yeah that's a great question I think I'm like everyone in that I don't know what I don't know what the next six months holds and that's the hardest part about the moment is that there's so much uncertainty for me personally my skill set is it is an intersection of technology and communication that's what I do I've never been a great developer I've always been a good one but I'm not the kind of dev where you could say, Hey, we need to completely rethink the way the editor buffer works in visual studio code. We're going to need you to figure out what I'm not that guy. There's a guy.