Vibing into the vibe (Friends)

0:14Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, a weekly talk show about AI subscription fatigue fatigue. Thanks as always to our partners at fly.io, the public cloud built for developers who ship. If you ship like we do, maybe ship where we do at fly.io. Let's talk.

0:42Well, friends, I'm here with David Hsu, CEO of Retool. David, I want to talk about awareness beyond Silicon Valley. Retool has a great presence and a great awareness inside Silicon Valley. But what about beyond? What's really cool is I think we've done a really good job of building awareness inside of Silicon Valley. And so when you look at customers that use Retool, pretty much every big company in Silicon Valley above a thousand people today now uses Retool and builds internal apps via Retool. So that's really awesome. And I'm really proud of the progress we've made there. But I think the larger opportunity for us, actually, it's outside of Silicon Valley.

1:16When you think about, for example, the Kroger's of the world, the Coca-Cola's of the world, many of them are customers already today. But I think we haven't done as good as a job building awareness, if you will, around the developers in all these companies. And that, to me, is where the opportunity lies. Because so much of these companies run on software. Software is so important. If you think about Coca-Cola, for example, Coca-Cola's not really gotten any cheaper to manufacture in the last 10 or 20 years. Instead, the reason why Coca-Cola's doing well as a company is because they are getting more productive by a better software.

1:48And so every company needs to become a software company and Retool lets you do that. So Coke is a big company, but the principle rings true. Become more efficient by using better software. There you go. Well, if you're beyond Silicon Valley, raise your hand. We want to hear from you. I want to tell Dave that we've reached people beyond Silicon Valley, that we're raising the awareness of what Retool is and what Retool does and some big announcements coming soon here on changelog, which is cool. Well, if you haven't yet, go to retool.com, get a demo, try it out for free, all that good stuff. Again, retool.com.

2:29We can listen to changelogging friends That'll mean Jerry and people you know Changelogging friends It's your favorite of the show Nick Neesey, Nick Neesey making Vim look easy. Hoy hoy. Still rocking Vim. I wrote you a poem, but it's as far as I got. I like it. Do you feel special? You feel sort of special because I wrote you a poem, but also not so special because that's as far as I got. It's perfect. Things don't have to keep going if they're perfect. I think that's a metaphor for our entire relationship, you know? well if you were if you would continue it go to typescript and that's just not possible yeah that's right the longer we talk it's like what's that rule about nazi references on the internet what you know the rule i don't know any rules about nazis what's it called i'm thinking of microsoft tay what's that tell me about that oh my gosh this was a the water's getting hot in here you don't remember this story this is a chatbot that microsoft released on twitter like years ago but before open ai and chat gpt and all that and it only took 24 hours for it to go full nazi oh that's right it was called tay yeah spell that t-a-y okay all right this is godwin's law see i just wanted nick to tell that story long enough for me to get the answer for the previous thing so thanks nick for that partay godwin's law is an adage from the early days of the internet that says as an online discussion grows longer the probability of a comparison involving nazis or hitler approaches one so this is godwin's law but for typescript and nick like the longer we talk to him the probability that he brings up typescript approaches one it wasn't even me i don't even have to do it anymore your reputation precedes you yes are you still type scripting i think last time we were hanging out you're writing php and stuff i was and i am but i'm still writing a lot of type scripts and i'm really liking it are you using that new fast compiler not yet no how big is the code base you're working on is it fast enough for you oh it's it's small enough that i can fit it into a paste into clod the entire code base so oh nice what how big is that how big is clod's context window oh i don't know it starts getting mad at me when it's like around 200k okay i use the school site called get ingest and so you just go to like github.com slash whatever but you replace the hub with ingest that's right did i teach you about that uh maybe change our news man yeah maybe i logged it a couple months ago it's cool ah i liked it so much that i had claude write me a bash script to do all of that for me vibe coding i feel like that's similar to me writing you a one-line poem it's like i liked it enough not to write my own bash script but to have somebody else write it for me you know yeah so that's what exactly are you doing with this get ingest bash script uh this is for when i'm like making a bunch of changes locally and i don't like it's not all out on like a public github repo that get ingest can get at i can just type i called it digest for some reason uh and i can just run digest and it'll throw it on my clipboard and tell me how big it was so i can see like oh this is you know 200k or 40k or whatever i feel like there already was a digest command that does like md5 subs or something you know i have three mac computers and one of them has a digest i thought there might be a namespace conflict there an old yep that's an old linux command or something who knows but not the one i use every day my work computer for some reason it's at least my digest is higher on the path or earlier in the path so it gets that one why don't you name it ingest i mean isn't that what you're doing i because i was creating a text digest of of the repo okay fair enough and how's that working for you my script kind of sucks but claude wrote it so what can you say at least you don't have to personally identify with the crappy code anymore you're like you know what claude wrote that so exactly no big whoop it's wild how much coding has changed in a year not even a year yeah describe say more it's a lot of well i don't know it's also i'm you know i joined a new team a couple months ago uh a new company and uh left meta which was totally different yeah he was llama they made you use llama probably yeah and it was really bad that's why i i laughed when when like i don't listen to rogan but i saw that clip of of zuck talking to rogan about uh how they're going to replace mid-level engineers with ai like this year that's that's his version of self self-driving in three months like right it's not happening yes not not with llama at least not there yeah llama four was uh disappointing to folks i didn't even try it because i saw it was like they dropped it on a sunday or something and it's like by the way llama four go play with it he's trying to be kind of cool zuck always trying to be cooler than he is and then the initial benchmarks like i think even the ones they published were like very impressive and then people actually tried it and it's like no it's not better we're not as good as you know gemini or whatever the although i found gemini currently this is google's latest to be disappointing but i'm also disappointing so you know who am i to judge i have not used gemini like even once but i did download the app i just haven't signed into it i downloaded the app on my phone but i was interested in it because i heard their context window was way bigger but i haven't tried it because i can't figure out am i using 2.5 pro or whatever they call it right i'm so sick of picking a like i know use the best one why do i have to pick and tell you to use thinking and all of this i know like that drop down on on chat gbt.com it's like pick your i'm like you should just know which one i wanted to use based on the question i ask you shouldn't you yes i mean you're smarter than me anyways right my my ai today now post meta working at a new company uh working on a lot of different languages that i'm less familiar with like go like python or yeah python php uh all these other languages that are that are terrible um that are not typescript uh and And it's great.

9:18I can just ask all these questions. And I'm going to say something embarrassing. This is embarrassing. Okay. Please do. I pay for ChatGPT Pro, Claude Pro, or not ChatGPT Pro. It's plus, I think, right? Because the Pro was like the million dollar one. 200 bucks a month, right? No, I don't pay for that. I pay for the 20 dollar a month. Okay. I pay for Claude Pro, which is$20 a month. perplexity which i'm paying for and i didn't realize for months because like i use raycast and raycast gave me a six months free of perplexity pro and then it just charged me and i forgot about it and didn't realize for months um but then also i'm paying for raycast ai because it's just that convenient to have like a little and i'm using them all and i'm using them all differently and and here's the worst part like this just i don't know i don't even want to admit this but like last week.

10:14Okay. Nevermind. No, you already said you're going to, I didn't ask you to, but now that you actually do have to know. Okay. Uh, last week Claude came out with, uh, okay. Before that, like a couple of weeks before that I was like running into this thing with like Claude where I'd be like asking it questions and it's like, Hey, you can't ask anything more until after 4 PM because like I hit some limit internally and I'm like, dang. And then I'm like, should I just pay for another? Yeah. I'm like, should I just pay for another account and keep going or or what and i i didn't because i'm not crazy right but then last week they came out with hey you can instead of paying 20 a month you can pay us five times that and get five times the the the uh the usage or you can pay us 200 a month and get 20 times the usage and i'm like that sounds reasonable i haven't done it but it sounds reasonable which one did you go with 10 or 20 or neither uh when i do it because it's it's more of a probably a when given the state of things uh i'll go with the hundred dollar one a month so you got chat gpt you've got claude that's 40 bucks right don't add this up for me then you got raycast he's not doing it for the rest of us is like 20 bucks a year what is raycast's ai version like 200 bucks a year 100 bucks a year i believe it is it's like you have raycast pro and then you have what like the ai stuff which is like another four dollars yeah so you have to have already paid them 100 bucks a year to pay them another 100 bucks a year to get the ai yeah so that's 200 bucks a year let's just call it for raycast pro plus ai sounds that's 240 bucks in but i guess you're also getting raycast right raycast is indispensable yeah i can't live without raycast either okay this is not a paid ad raycast for life okay raycast for life for sure almost lost it there i often disagree in order to make it not a bad look at alfred over here there's our alfred no old alfred light man raycast has ran circles around you default mac os software for the win uh what can play uh what can raycast do that spotlight can't do nick what's your favorite raycast feature oh uh the ai a lot oh uh the ai okay non-ai feature like serious raycast feature okay um i'm just that's so hard to say if i had to say do you launch a lot of apps with it i launched a lot of apps let me tell you about a little thing called spotlight okay this is an app that like a feature that it just does that there's a million apps that do it but i like that it's just one app and that's a clipboard manager i love yes having this pretty much unlimited clipboard that i can just constantly refer back to yeah the clipboard history i believe is unlimited i believe it's unlimited it does not sync across devices so if you have a macbook pro and an imac or something like that they're not going to sync those clipboard histories but built-in mac os does do clipboard sharing so then it does well i think this is by design i don't know if this is i think you can do it but i think by default it doesn't do this i like that feature premium feature dude what i like most about the clipboard uh feature is that when you conjure it i guess whenever you elect to have this interface pop up with your history you can search your history and paste it immediately and it's like that's like five days ago history and a fuzzy search is the whole thing so it's not only just like front or back it's like all over the place in this thing and so it's pretty accurate well let me use this opportunity to mention a little piece of freeware open source freeware called mackie m-a-c-c-y which is a clipboard history management tool that lives in your menu bar and does everything you guys are describing but it's built by an individual who just loves software just wants to put out free stuff into the world and uh i use that for clipboard history one thing well guys one thing well i was once like you all right okay tell me how you've become enlightened i'm already gonna run raycast to open my apps why spotlight opens apps for you yeah but it can't do other things i can't like the clipboard management thing that i can use mackey for like claude which has their own desktop apps surely oh you're not selling me fellows you're not selling me well the good thing is we're not here to sell you i know you're here to enjoy ourselves i did kind of set that up as the but fair get you yeah i should get the get you you know what's funny to me is that in our shared doc of potential topics for this conversation near the bottom it says i don't know i don't know who wrote this are we contractually obligated to talk about ai and the answer is no however i didn't realize this but nick's more of an ai junkie than he is a TypeScript junkie because, I mean, what would we go, five minutes and he's already confessing all of his subscriptions.

15:23Listen, I didn't want to tell you all this. This is so embarrassing. However, we're on a podcast listened to by the world, basically. Here's all my stuff. I'm just, you know what? You embrace or you die. Ooh, I like it. Yeah, embrace or die. This is worse than streaming services though. You're probably paying more for these models than you are for your streaming services. I mean, is your wife okay with this or your employer? Hopefully your employer is helping foot the bill. Listen, listen, listen, listen, we don't need to talk about that. Okay. Okay. Fair. Sorry. I didn't want to get too personal.

16:02I get some benefit out of it and it's, it's real good. And I am not a person. I would not say that I'm a day to day vibe coder, like for one-off things like a digest script. Yeah. Like just do that. Now, are you just using the term vibe code because it's fun? Or are you really referring to the practice of vibe coding in which you don't even look at the source code that's been produced? That is what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay. You don't even look at it. Like the digerscript, I barely know. Oh, man. You don't even know. I mean, it's bash, right? And nobody knows what that does. Did you hear about the latest security vulnerability?

16:36Yes. Yes, actually. Yes, I did. But I'm still vibe coding. I'm still not even looking at the code. for day-to-day stuff i don't like i don't use it in that way i'm a team of one right now too so like i'm using it as literally another co-worker like this is somebody that i can bother and yeah they're an idiot but they're helping me to formulate my thoughts before i go talk to somebody actually like any of my other co-workers it's a warm-up method right is that what it is i can knock off some low-hanging fruit and i'm not like just copying and pasting code from them i will give them the repos that i'm working on and like everything i do is an open source so uh i'm freely able to do that which is like a privilege i'm sure like where i'm at um but like i give it that so that it has the context and then i can ask it questions and hopefully it knows like hey that method that you're telling me to call actually exists and like even when i give it the entire repo 80 of the time it's correct it'll make up methods the other 20 of the time or things that don't exist right uh so like i totally don't trust it right it's better than staring at a blank screen and wondering what to do i can like ask it some questions and i mostly like keep it at like a high level like architectural style thing like my favorite thing in the world is to like talk through like here's how i want to do it okay now like let's create a mermaid diagram and just like right like visualize how this is going to fit together so now i'm understanding a little bit more while you're paying money because you're it's not so much the utility of the tool that you want it's just that you're really lonely yes because you're a team of one you need someone to talk to and these things just fill that void you're like let's make a diagram while i think through this so you're you're rubber duck debugging basically exactly tell me you know And who else is going to tell me like how OIDC works to the tune of Lil Wayne lyrics, you know?

18:36Yeah, exactly. It'll play along with all your stupid games like I used to on JS Party. Oh, funny. Well, friends, I'm here with a good old friend of mine, Terrence Lee, cloud native architect at Heroku. So Terrence, the next gen of Heroku called Fur is coming soon. What can you say about the next generation for Heroku? Fur represents the next decade of Heroku. You know, Cedar lasted for 14 years and more. Still going. And Heroku has this history of using trees to represent ushering in new technology stacks and foundations for the platform. And so like Cedar before, which we've had for over a decade, we're thinking about fur in the same way.

19:19So if you're familiar with fir trees at all, Douglas Furs, they're known for their stability and resilience. And that's what you want for the foundation of a platform that you're going to trust your business on top of. We've used stacks to kind of usher in this new technology. And what that means for FUR is we're replatforming on top of open standards. A lot has changed over the last decade. Things like container images and OCI and Kubernetes and CloudNative, all these things have happened in this space. And instead of being on our own island, we're embracing those technologies and standards that we help popularize and pulling them into our technology stack.

19:52And so that means you as a customer don't have to kind of pick or choose. So as an example, on Cedar today, we produce a proprietary tarball called Slugs. That's how you run your apps. That's how we package them. On Fur, we're just going to use OCI images, right? So that means that tools like Docker are part of this ecosystem that you get to use. So with our cloud-nated build packs, you can build your app locally with a tool called Pack and then run it inside Docker. And that's the same kind of basic technology stack we're going to be running in Fur. So you providing this access to tools and things that people developers already using and extensibility on the platform that you haven't had before.

20:28But this, you know, sounds like a lot of change, right? And so what isn't changing and what isn't changing is the Heroku you know and love. That's about focusing on apps and on infrastructure and focusing on developer productivity. And so you're still going to have that get push Heroku main experience. You're still going to be able to connect your applications and pipelines up to GitHub, have that Heroku flow. We're still about abstracting out the infrastructure from underneath you and allowing you as an app developer to focus on developer productivity. Well, the next generation of Heroku is coming soon.

20:57I hope you're excited because I know a lot of us, me included, have a massive love and place in our heart for Heroku. And this next generation of Heroku sounds very promising. To learn more, go to heroku.com slash changelog podcast and get excited about what's to come for Heroku. Once again, Heroku.com slash CheenBlog podcast.

21:23So how do you know, like, do these various, does Claude and ChatGPT, do they know about each other? Do you keep them completely separated? Like, is there any sort of weird, awkward relationship vibes going on? Because how do you know which one to turn to and when? Oh, yeah. This is a great question. oh yeah i'm glad you asked me all right this is mostly vibes i think honestly this is how you're feeling you have to vibe into the vibe that's right it's like pre-vibe coding that's right i don't the vibe i got is just like i don't really use chat gpt much for work okay it's more of a hangout after work kind of a chill i have it because like i play with it and you know my kids and I have been doing a bunch of image generation stuff, which has been fun.

22:14Uh, but then also like, you know, sometimes like my, my daughter and I are like halfway through the first Lord of the Rings book after having just read the Hobbit. So we, we read actual literature, literature, but sometimes we just goof around to a bedtime and we have like, I'll just like ask my kids for a list of things that they want to hear. And then I'll throw in like a message, like, uh, you know, a message about not fighting with your brother and then have chat GPT generate a story, a bedtime story for us that has all of that. And every single story that my kids create has like, you know, dad fell in the toilet or dad turned into a butt or, you know, typical things that a six year old and an eight year old would be talking about.

22:51And that's a lot of fun. But that's primarily how I use that. And then occasionally for writing, although I kind of like Claude a little bit better for that. But Claude is the workhorse here. I really like Claude for code. I like the interface for it. I like being able to set up projects for it. and like you can give it a bunch of context in those projects that it'll just share each time and then as of like yesterday i'm like in this but i'm also very slow to adopt things but yesterday i integrated uh github's official mcp server into it and wow that's so nice so what did that do for you uh it can like do a bunch of things like i can have it like comment respond to pull requests and issues and stuff like for me i'm not letting it go that far yet yeah uh there's a trust that has to build up before i do that right but like an issue comes in and i can just be like hey you know issue 44 on this repo give me a summary of what you might think and it already knows about all the code because it's in a project so like give me your thoughts about where i might start looking for like where what could be the issue here and it can just go fetch that and it's like it's saving me the steps of having to go copy and paste is basically it i'm getting less use out of my favorite tool of raycast my my clipboard manager copy paste yeah that is cool so how how close do you think you are to that trust threshold and you can just tell it go comment on this for me oh i don't know i'm scared of that because like as much as i use ai i don't want anyone to know that i use ai for you're telling everyone right now

24:32this is the show as much don't send this to your manager cut this out cut this part out they're actually really cool about ai too like i was playing with devin for a little bit the 500 a month ai coder and i don't think that it's very good but uh yeah um but yeah i don't know it's it's cool and i like the main thing that you're always doing with all of these is managing the context right i'm constantly thinking about when claude's going to give me the little purple message that says my chat's running a little long and how succinct i should try and make things i've got some like pre-set scripts that i'll throw in there like preset uh uh what do you call those prompts that's like you are you know going forward like there's one specifically that i use right now that's really good and it's like going forward don't assume that anything i tell you is accurate because like the worst thing about any of these is when they're just like you know you're yes man they're just like applauding everything you're you're right and it's going to tell you that you're right i wanted to challenge me and tell me like what are the things i'm not thinking about and like i've got i'm crafting prompts that help me that i can just paste in when i feel like it's getting a little i don't know kiss assy for a better word right uh and then i can yeah set it straight but then like you're you're managing those those contexts and like that's where uh raycast ai comes in for me because raycast is like i have it set to like option space and that pops up in a little window and that is reserved for the queries that i want that are like one-offs like i'm having a conversation over here with claude about you know this i don't know feature of of next js you know i'm talking to it about next cookies and i want to go deeper on next cookies but i don't want to screw up its context so up pops uh raycast and i have a discussion over there about next cookies and then i go back and what are they using they're using claude also but it's a different session they'll use whatever you want but yes i use claude 3 7 mostly in there he's so excited about this jerry look at his face that was like me in temporary mode the other day when i just wanted to be a temporary conversation yeah um except for it didn't work but it's like that yeah are you managing the context or is the context managing you that's too deep for me oh gosh you know i'm still uh i'm still a uh neanderthal with these things i'm just i have it set up in zed i also just use chat gbt.com and then i have olama which i had opened in a terminal session i just talked to it but i don't have the patience to wait for a lot of these things unless they're going to be right and i just find chat gpt is right more than any of the other ones however with zed which is still my daily driver editor i can just switch back and forth constantly between different models and uh see which one i like the best and i just don't like any of them honestly um i get angry their code sucks i'm just like i can write this better myself I don't mind.

27:40I don't like a blank screen when it comes to creativity, but when it comes to software, I'm just like, got no problem with it. Like I know I just start writing. So I'm still trying to find where it fits out. I still have, I have a right functions and stuff for me. I just am always like this function sucks, you know? Yeah. Oh yeah. And I don't want to think that I want to be like, good job, little guy. That's a great little function you wrote there, you know? So it sounds like you're in the same boat as me though. Like I don't use it for, I'm going to say like I don't like how long it takes for responses and things like that.

28:11Like when I'm in the flow of coding, it's more like pre coding where I'm using it the most it's having the conversation and making sure that like validating my thoughts on the approach before I go and waste a bunch of time. Yeah. And I'll actually use it now to, and I've said this on the show a few times already just to replace Google, basically. Like I just don't Google anything anymore. I just ask an LLM and I'll even honestly ask it for the docs. I'm like, how do I use this function? Like give me the API and a couple of examples. And that for me is faster than going and finding the docs in some cases, especially for obscure libraries and stuff.

28:50Although the more obscure, the less accurate it happens to be, but that's just part of the game. And so I'm basically just using them at that level. Once I have it generating code for me, I'm just, I think maybe I'm just too controlling in particular about code. And it might just be a me problem, you know, where I need to get over it. Nope. But I just don't like what, no, it's not. Okay, good. Thank you. There's a place for us too. Thank you. But I'm okay with it. And I continue to do more, you know, just like slowly, slowly, slowly more. and I told Adam this on the last Friends where it's just him and I talking about I'm not sure you heard the one where I turned him into walrus and all that but it was good that feature inside of ChatGPT has been a little bit of an eye opener for me of like we don't got long man we don't have very long because that was like a huge improvement all of a sudden in the image generation land where it's like why would I hire anybody almost ever, almost ever at this point.

29:57Whereas last year I was like, yeah, this is not going to actually produce anything I can use. It's great for like ideas and stuff, but then you have to go hire someone to actually produce the final logo or whatever. And I just feel like lots, that ship is sailing very quickly and I don't see any reason why, except for maybe the, just the intricacies of the software development platform and all the different things can go wrong maybe might just give us a longer hedge and the subjectivity of creative work versus the objectivity of does it work does it work right you know that kind of thing but i don't think we have too much longer left do you think nick i go back and forth for sure yeah like it's it's when i let it when i let it vibe code for me it's real bad so that's why i don't do it much but I mean just think of where we were a year ago two years ago right it's it's come a long way so I don't know has it come a long way in prose because I feel like I feel like it's so average at writing like it's not it's never impressed me the way it has with these images and I wonder if it's actually gotten better if they're still testing that like you know maybe you better answer and adam as well because don't you use it to generate some stories and stuff as well bedtime stories and things adam i have before yeah so nick's story of the bedtime story was very familiar except for it was not exactly the same um definitely i've had fun around that stuff image generation has been something we've done before conflict resolution, like how to respond to a certain email even.

31:38I think what I don't ask it for is what to say I ask it for. Like, okay, here's all the context. What am I missing from this scenario to maybe establish more empathy or just word salad them a little bit more than I should, you know, kind of thing. It's really iffy. A lot of communication type stuff. A lot of framework thinking, a lot of ideation, sort of evolution, stuff like that. Math. I love doing it with like word math. That's the best. Hypothesizing a scenario with, you know, multiple inputs or, you know, multiple scenarios and which one plays out to have the greater outcome. I don't know.

32:19You name it. It's kind of wild, honestly, to even have that as a tool. well let's change subjects since we are just now doing what we do on every episode just talk about ai and let's talk about yeah i mean it'll work its way it's just weaving its way into every part of life it was like it's like covid you know covid weaved its way into every aspect of life there for about two years maybe 18 months and i remember thinking more about the mind virus than the virus virus because it's like can we i remember one time i was at a meal with friends and of course everyone's just talking about you know this and like all the things i mean you can go into all the different things like the social distancing aspect how it spreads the vaccines oh they're acting weird the lockdowns can you believe what they did this person had it here's what happened to them this person had it and i was like y 'all we don't give her many opportunities to hang out and have dinner just us adults here like it's actually infected our minds like we can't talk about anything else except for the back then we called it the coronavirus you know oh yeah and i'm the coronavirus because it's like the novel coronavirus i'm like can we talk it's like a mind virus more than it's a virus virus anyways can we pause for a second and talk about how corona beer was actually like hit by that initially like guys it was like a small bounce back i was like whoa hang on a second corona beer and coronavirus different things okay right don't if you don't want to get it don't drink corona you know like that would have been for their branding for like only three months or so and then we moved on called it all sorts i'm not sure if that says something good about humanity like are we just that stupid yes are we just that stupid no hesitation that's why we're afraid of these ais they don't have to be that smart to outdo us you know it's not much to manipulate us for sure well for sure yeah it doesn't take much really i mean a couple yaks in and you're shaved you know i mean like come on that's right you're on a whole different subject thinking it's real you know and meanwhile it's all simulation have you seen the uh now we're now we're getting way upstream but well it's nice up here the water of course have you seen the ones where there's people that are posting on instagram and tiktok and other places where they're like skeptical of mirrors because how can you actually see the reflection how can it see me over here and i'm just like do you not understand how mirrors work this is wild how does it see all right behind the towel right and it's not just one kooky person that's like there's a whole i mean there's probably a website with a forum on it at this point maybe we do need to reinvest in education all right busy bar let's get busy talking about something else lame busy bar busy bar let's talk about some hard work you think the bar is lame or what do you think i'm just i'm just messing around like going from that to like busy bar come on it was not a good can they compete we'll see what is it what is the busy bar okay i i uh til today on this had no idea existed it's seems to be a hardware device yes that has a that's programmable in some way shape or form it's got an sdk or an api that you can program against it you can tell the world you're busy you can do pomodoro you can tell somebody you're on air for podcasting it's like an lcd pixel display that does all sorts of cool stuff automates into home assistant and other things It's like the hardware meets the ideation software, you know, event change.

36:04You're making it sound pretty cool. It's actually pretty cool. Yeah. So here's why I thought we could talk about this, because you guys love hardware. I mean, Adam's always buying stuff. Nick buys a bunch of stuff, don't you? He does buy a bunch of stuff. He just likes spending money. Software, a lot of software. Yeah, a lot of subscriptions. I'm sure there's probably a subscription play in here somewhere. They're all consolidating down into Raycast. That's true. Now, could you integrate Raycast with BusyBar? Probably. Yes, you could. Yes, you could. Because this thing is like, it's about the size of an alarm clock, wouldn't you say?

36:35Maybe a larger alarm clock. Supposed to sit on your desk or somewhere. I think it can even mount on your monitor. Yes. And like face the other way for, you know, people. And if you're RTO'd already and you're back in the office, it's got like a big, looks like it really is satisfying to push like start slash stop button. like one big button on top massive button yeah and then one like a national button and like triple the size there's a dial and another knob and that's about it they call it a productivity multi-tool and the thing is just programmable to the hilt so i thought this is the kind of thing that nick would super want to buy so i just thought i'd ask you like you want one of these i did see this before you posted it uh and i kind of shrugged it off but then i saw that you put it in here and i then i was like let me go look at the look at it and then i was like ah fine i'll buy it but you can't buy it i wasn't that much did you actually uh put a purchase down oh no you can only give them an email and they'll let you know when it's ready yeah i did do that it's probably vapor hardware at this point i know and i hate that there's so many of these hardware projects that just don't come to fruition you know okay but the saving grace of this one is that i think that it's by the people who do this the flipper right what you got there uh this is the flipper zero oh yeah sorry i had to spin to see your whole screen you have this thing what is that thing it's like a tell the world what this is nick it's the coolest little device nick buys stuff okay he's got all the hardware stuff nick is now an official staple bring your hardware wares let's go all right so what's the flipper i don't know i look cool i don't know it looked cool they had a they had a sign up form so i signed up it's like a little tool that you can use for some lightweight hacking of various things it's got some antennas in it and and different like sensors uh to make like physical hacking kind of cool i think uh although it's not like super super uh i don't know everything's encrypted right so it can't like it's not going to break that encryption on this little tiny device but like things that aren't encrypted it can do it can like old wi-fi networks that aren't uh it might be able to hotel keys hotel keys yeah okay i can do that i've heard uh i've never tested this i've heard that it can open the gas tank of a tesla oh yeah wait a second teslas don't have gas i mean the charging port oh you're trying to pull a quick one on me i'm done with that he did get me for a second i didn't even catch that part maybe i've been duped on that yeah the charger you're talking about a charger container button thing yeah now why would you want to hack the the charger can like to to charge it up for somebody before they know listen i don't condone terrorism i guess i was gonna say do you vandalize you're not one of these tesla vandals are you oh no not yet not yet not no no this is he's got a hacker tool and he's saying he's not a vandal yet i have done nothing with this thing i got it and then i got too busy to to play with it and i just for you i plugged it in so that it now has a battery charging.

40:03So it's charged up. No, the red light is on it saying that it's, because I just did it like a minute ago. So at best case, you bringing out this Flipper Zero solidifies the fact that the Busy Bar may actually ship because they're the same people. Good point. They shipped a Flipper. Yeah. They did. And this is more renowned too. This Flipper Zero is really sought after, does well. it's i've seen some demonstrations of it it's pretty cool yeah there's some really cool things if you're a switch player like a nintendo switch you can set up your flipper to be all of the amiibos things that like get you extra like the little that's cool so you don't have to go grab them yeah i might actually think that's cool you're selling me on it did you ever get it when you were a kid there was this this like toy it was it was called a casio secret sender 6000 no oh it was like a little it was like a little like pda before pdas were really a thing but it was totally a toy public displays of affection like a personal data personal is that i don't know personal digital assistant i think um yeah well it was like one for kids and it had like you could have a little journal in it and it had some games and if somebody else or within 20 feet of you had one you could send messages back and forth over its ir port but it also had an ir port so it could be a remote control for any television that's so you know me being the hacker in second grade when they'd wheel in that giant tv oh yeah oh it turned off randomly once every time and nobody knew just they never knew it's too hard until this podcast right here when i tell the world about my ai infatuation this is like taxi cab confessions with nick nancy gosh nick oh that's cool um i didn't have one of those i did have a game genie though did you guys have game genie no i wish i did game genie was so cool what what was the fundamentals of the game genie what did they do well it was basically like mods for your nes games you know like modding is cool and so with game genie it would somehow you'd plug your nes game into the game genie and then the genie into the nes and it would be a middleman and you could basically turn on different superpowers and cheats and all kinds of things to make games easier because games were really hard back then especially some of them and so it's just a way to make the game kind of more fun um any serious gamer wouldn't use it of course and i was only a serious gamer on a couple of games like zelda and megaman but everybody everything else it's like i don't care i'm gonna be awesome and excite bike you know so game genie was cool i don't know how it worked or why it was a thing or if the game companies were happy about it i'm sure there's probably a youtube history of game genie out there i should go watch but it's a cool device well friends i'm here with a brand new friend of mine cal galbraith co-founder and ceo of depot.dev your bills don't have to be slow you know that right build faster waste less time accelerate docker image builds get up action builds and so much more so kyle we're in the hallway at our favorite tech conference and we're talking how do you describe depot to me and depot is a build acceleration platform the reason we went and built it is because we got so fed up and annoyed with slow builds for docker image builds get up action runners and so we're relentlessly focused on accelerating builds Today, we can make a container image build up to 40 times faster.

43:44We can make a GitHub Action Runner up to 10 times faster. We just rolled out Depot Cache. We essentially bring all of the cache architecture that backs both GitHub Actions and our container image build product. And we open it up to other build tools like Bazel, Turbo Repo, SC Cache, Radel, things like that. So now we're starting to accelerate more generic types of builds and make those three to five times faster as well. And so in simple terms, the way you can think about Depot is it's a build acceleration platform to save you hundreds of hours of build time per week, no matter whether that's build time that happens locally, that's build time that happens in a CI environment.

44:21We fundamentally believe that the future we want to build is a future where builds are effectively near instant, no matter what the build is. We want to get there by effectively rethinking what a build is and turn this paradigm on its head and say, hey, a build can actually be fast and consistently fast all the time. If we build out the compute and the services around that build to actually make it fast and prioritize performance as a top-level entity rather than an afterthought. Yes. Okay, friends. Save your time, get faster builds with Depot, Docker builds, faster GitHub action runners, and distributed remote caching for Bazel, Go, Gradle, Turbo Repo, and more.

45:05Depot is on a mission to give you back your dev time and help you get faster build times with a one-line code change. Learn more at depot.dev. Get started with a seven-day free trial. No credit card required. Again, depot.dev.

45:24But this Busy Bar does some cool stuff. So for instance, it's smart home integrated. So anything that works with Apple, HomeKit, or Google, whatever their competitor's called you can connect everything up and so this thing this one button could like you're busy you're recording bam your whole house could respond right like pause the music that's playing out of your home device what are they called your alexa home pod yeah home pod thank you turn off all the lights in case you're it's one of those kind of a shows uh lock the door perhaps close the garage doors start your laundry i don't know what else you want to do when the show goes on but connect it all connect it all that's cool i would really like that if i had that button and i push it and then like in this like ominous voice throughout my house it just goes dad is busy and it just plays that on repeat over like an announcement and just plays it nonstop until you touch it again.

46:28But my room is insulated somehow in this magical world, so I don't hear it. Right. Yeah, that would get me to buy one. And it's developer-friendly. So right out of the box, BusyBar comes with an open API ready for integration into your project. So you could probably get your CICD involved. You can probably get your Raspberry Pis involved. uh looks like it's taken golang javascript python etc none of your languages except for you said you're writing some go now right is it because the typescript team likes it i'm not that basic am i i'm just wondering people were up in arms because they picked go you know like this was a big controversy it makes sense did you read any of the uh back and forth oh no i watched some interviews with like andrew salzberg why does it make sense you think uh from my understanding and i could be totally getting it wrong but my understanding was that they want to do like a one-to-one port to the point where they like wrote they basically wrote like code mods that would take a line of javascript and spit out a line of go and like went that far yeah and switching over to another language like Rust that is not a garbage collected language like Go is and JavaScript is, would mean that memory management would be handled differently, which means it wouldn't be a true one-to-one port, which would let bugs sneak in, potentially.

47:56Yeah, it'd be more of a rewrite, a ground-up rewrite in a new language versus an actual port. Yeah, and apparently Go and TypeScript have a lot of the same idioms, I guess. I mean, garbage collection being a huge one in that sense, of course. JavaScript, you know, itself is kind of a C style language, which Go is a also influenced. So that makes sense. Of course, C Sharp was the one that people were like, come on, it's Microsoft. Isn't C Sharp supposed to be Microsoft's, you know, powerhouse? It's workhorse language. Didn't Anders create C Sharp? He did, but he also didn't write it in Delphi and he recreated that too, didn't he?

48:44So I thought it was a cool. Pragmatic choice by them, you know, versus being like, well, we are Microsoft, therefore C Sharp. It's like or Rust, which is also burgeoning inside of Microsoft. It's like, let's actually be pragmatic about what we're trying to achieve and just go that direction. and it sounds like that might have been, that might have won out, which pragmatic choices, I think, in large engineering teams don't always win. But a lot of people were confused about that announcement, apparently. They thought it was the TypeScript runtime that was 10 times faster, not the compiler, which would be like a huge win, wouldn't it?

49:24Like, hey, all your TypeScript code runs 10 times faster than it did. It's like, oh, you don't know how bad my code could be. You know? You're going to make my code faster? please as a runtime yeah well and edge you know that's the other thing with the c sharp is like well couldn't you just more easily work it into no that wasn't the c sharp it was actually the rust people saying if it was written in rust instead you could more easily get it into chromium and firefox than in go and then you could start to do what your ultimate goal isn't it nick is just to have TypeScript become the runtime of browsers.

50:05Yeah, I think we're getting there, potentially. Like, I see signs of that with, there's obviously the types as comments thing, and that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, type annotations. I forgot what you call it. Type annotations, yeah. Yeah. But then, like, in the latest, I think, 5.8 version of TypeScript, they also added that erasable syntax only flag, which is, like, setting you up for success with the types of proposed. Remind me what that does? that prevents you from using things that would require runtime code. So like enums, for example, those get converted into like these weird object things.

50:41And so it just prevents you from using them. Another place is like in, there's a shortcut when you're using classes in TypeScript, where you can just say like in the constructor, you can list out all your private methods. And then that way, like they're defined as private or private properties. I mean, they're defined as privates, but you don't have to like define them above, then define your arguments and then have like in your constructor a setter where you're actually setting them you can like condense it all into one well there's a lot of runtime code that has to happen for that to to be uh to take place so they prohibit that as well with this and basically it's just like everything has to be erasable which is perfect because like also uh in the next version of node i think you're going to be able to run typescript unflagged which will be great run it by just stripping the types run it by stripping the types right well these are baby steps in that direction aren't they you think it's ever going to be actually built in uh no i think that'll be where it stops but maybe i'm not thinking the type annotations feature which probably will make it in the browsers i think so yeah do you think that's good enough or do you wish it was actually what what is it gonna get me like faster speeds is that hypothetically yes yeah i mean i don't know maybe i don't know i'll say something that i'll regret if i continue why would we need that you never say anything that you regret on these shows nick right i don't think the tsc is very slow like when i run it in my editor but apparently i think that this was a a scratching their own itch kind of thing meaning like if you have massive code bases right well of which microsoft probably does that's when tsc slows down i can't remember what file it is but they're one of the files in typescript in typescripts code base is like 53 000 lines long and it's just because like it would have performance costs to split it up is that one that anders coded up on a bender one time or something you think he vibe codes oh no no he's significantly gray haired the gray beards don't like the vibe codes well what else is exciting in the world of typescript so we can poo poo it and move on i don't know i'm just enjoying writing it again yeah it's fun don't miss flow yeah what is it i mean is flow only inside of facebook is there other people that use flow when i say facebook i mean meta now yeah there used to be i think i years ago before like 2018 2017 somewhere around there i interviewed someone from i think get kraken i think they were using flow but they eventually switched to typescript too but that was the only other company that i ever knew of that actually used flow it's weird how somebody with the clout of facebook engineering which is what it used to be called back when these things came out was so influential that they were able to get react highly adopted and graphql highly adopted not quite as successfully but still but flow just didn't quite catch on you know you ever wonder why certain things do and other things don't i i do wonder i don't know why but like i wonder if That was just like a fluke that it, that React did catch on in the way that it did.

54:39Well, I mean, React 19, is that catching on as much as, as it should be? Like, is it adding too much complexity? Is it too much, like two in the bag with Vercel? That's my read on it. Those two things. Yeah. Took too long, too hard to explain. People are starting to get the ick because of the tightness of that relationship. and even when we talked with Dan Ebermove a couple years ago now you and I talked to him and somebody else I can't recall who on JS Party Joe Savona that's right even then I was like isn't it weird that you all's official stance is you should use this in Next.js but that's a project that you don't have any control over that's a weird thing the React team's official stance was don't use this directly use it via frameworks of which next js is the only one that does it back then yeah and i'm like that just seems like not a good situation to be in why is that what was that's a recommendation because there was no framework i mean because meta doesn't have its own framework react is just a piece of the puzzle and next js was a widely adopted framework that was that stayed pretty much in lockstep with react's previous releases and using the new technology that and there's i mean there's there's simpatico or they were simpatico i'm assuming they still are they collaborated tightly you know there's a lot of friends between the two teams that's my take nick why do you think why do you think anything else why that might be the case yeah i think that like when when facebook was introduced like flux like the flux pattern remember they didn't introduce a flux library that came later uh i think it was dan abramoff actually who yeah came out with uh redux there was an implementation of that and i think in the same way like next was the one to adopt server components as a an implementation of this theory of how this could be done from the react team or in collaboration with the react team but for the longest time and honestly i don't know anyone else who's doing server components in that way i've been playing a lot with remix slash react router and tan stack start and they all have their own ways of doing server things none of which are really like server components in the the way that they're described or used within next yet at least yeah that whole messaging is just kind of a ball of wax that was very unattractive to me as a guy who's you know in the industry but not in the daily mucky muck of the react ecosystem i'm like this just doesn't seem like attractive whatever's going on here you know and i think a lot of people feel that way it doesn't mean they're not using react and react was a game changer and so i'm not here to to poo poo on it like i am typescript by any means but and it's still a great choice i think as a standalone library and i think that you can get react features in smaller ways or different ways but But I think the RSC stuff has made it just too complicated and just too, and the next JS relationships made the whole thing muddy, you know?

58:06Cause now you're getting in bed, not just with meta, which already doesn't feel like amazing, but now you're also in bed with Vercel and I don't have anything personally against Vercel or anything like that, but some people do, you know, some people are like, eh, I don't know about this. Yeah. My, my recommendation, if anybody asks, which nobody ever does. But my recommendation is to go with Astro until you're absolutely positive that Astro can't solve your problems. Okay. Why do you recommend that? It's just so such a delight to work with. I originally switched to Astro because I was like, I really like react.