BONUS: A Beginner’s Guide to GitHub, LIVE with Cassidy Williams

23:18There's also commenting agents. There's custom agents that you could build. There's the GitHub Copilot app that lets you run things on your computer and then push things to GitHub easily. There's a lot, which we'll get into.

23:32Cassidy Williams:That's so awesome. But that is how we'll start for now. What's next then? Okay. So I talked about you make this new repo. And I saw that there was a question in the chat asking, do you recommend storing files and code in different places and folders? And how does that work? Yes. I will actually show you on my computer. Let me pull it up on a different screen really quick. Oh, there it goes. One second. I'm going to pull it up and zoom in. On my actual desktop computer, it's not letting me zoom in fully. But you can see at a high level. I have a GitHub folder, and all of these folders are repos.

24:09They're just folders of code. and if I were to click into this this is just a folder of code and the folder of code looks exactly the same as what you might see in a github page this these are all just folders of code now if you want to push code to github you could either do create a code space which is something where again you can kind of code online or something that I like to do for beginners is use something called GitHub Desktop. Now, GitHub Desktop is a really nice tool where it lets you just push things to GitHub very, very easily, where if I click Setup in GitHub Desktop, it's going to open up the app for me.

24:47I already have it installed. You all might not have this one installed quite yet. I recommend it if you install it, and I'm going to move somewhat slowly so you have time to install it while I zoom in. I like the desktop app as well. The desktop app is great. Yeah, let me get into it. I really like it. And there's actually a lot of different Git desktop apps that aren't necessarily the GitHub one, and you can use those too. They will all work. Usually what you might see when you're looking at a lot of code and stuff, you'll see the term CLI, which stands for command line interface. And that is where it's like those old school computers of the black and white screens, and you're just typing in commands to your computer to do things.

25:33that is that is what a lot of git does where when you run these commands it'll say like git init initializes a git repository then you add a file then you commit that file you push all that you could do all that or could you could use a github desktop and so once you have this open and and you have you have your repository um i have this neuron is fun repository here that's that's the one that it's opening. Now, I'm going to click show in Explorer just to show that on my computer, where once again, this is kind of small, it's literally just a folder on my computer with nothing in it currently.

26:13But if I want to put something in it, that's where I could start adding code and I can start adding things. I can point an AI tool at this particular folder and do something. What I'm actually going to do though is inside this folder, I'm just going to create a text document really quick and I'm going to name this text document again it's very small but I'm going to call it readme.md so let me just do that really quick and I named it readme.md I'll put it in the chat as well just so you all can see what I'm talking about readme.md that readme file I'm just gonna I'm gonna open it up in notepad you can open it up in an actual code editor you could you could open up in text edit if you're on a mac on a basic basic document in here you could say hello world and let me see if I can make this zoom in a little bit more why isn't it zooming in on here there we go there we go you could say hello world you can make it you can make it say whatever you want I'm gonna say hello world my name is Cassidy and I'm on a live stream right now ha ha that's it I'm just gonna I'm gonna save it now when I do that I've saved this file inside this neuron is fun folder.

27:29It'll be whatever your repository name is. I said that it should be your username. It could be anything. Now, once I've saved that, now if I go back to this GitHub desktop app, hey, it shows my file. And it shows it all in green. Now, it's showing it all in green because these are additions. These are little plus signs right here. It's not letting me zoom in any further, but there's little plus signs here next to it saying, okay, these are new lines of code that were added to this. Yes, it's English, but that's what it is. And.md stands for markdown, which is markdown is a type of styling language that you can use to make your text different.

28:08Shapes, sizes, italic, bold, and so on.

28:10Cassidy Williams:Agents love it. When they send you messages and chat to the TV or Claude or whatever, they're talking to you in markdown most times. Yes. So we've made this file. I'm going to the at the very bottom left over here it has create readme.md I could say like initial commit it could be whatever you want and then you commit this file now when I say commit that commits it to version control so I mentioned version control before I mentioned git before committing something says hey this is a checkpoint kind of like a checkpoint in a video game where before you're about to hit a monster you might hit a checkpoint you might save your save file like five times before you go fight said monster that's what a commit is in git and now once you've made a commit you could then push it and that's basically it's a save point it's a save point exactly and so when i hit this push button up here it'll say publish push what it'll do is push it online and so if i go back to my browser where did my browser go here it is and then I refresh this page.

29:21Look at that. Hello, world. My name is Cassidy, and I'm on a live stream right now. And this is a real link where if you went to github.com slash Cassidy slash neuron is fun, you can see this exact file that I just made in front of you right now. Love it. And so that is the power of being able to push something to GitHub, is that it suddenly exists online now. And now in this about section, I could make it and it'd be just like, this is an example repo. I can add a website URL and have it be google.com. I could have it actually be the neuron. I could have it be anything. You could add whatever you want and it'll add things to this description here.

30:04Now, I mentioned that you should be doing this for your username slash username. I'm going to go back to github.com slash casado slash casado, where it's my username. That is also a readme file, where if I were to look at the actual file itself, that's me clicking on the file name right here, readme.md. If I click on that, it shows me just that individual file, and it has preview. If I click code, you could see the actual text that I typed in. And this is that markdown language that I mentioned, where that markdown language, if If you want to make text big, you add a hash in front of it. If you want to make links, you put words and then braces here.

30:46There's a syntax to learn. We won't get into it right now, but you can learn how to do that with various free learning platforms online. And it's basically the same thing you're doing in, like, Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Exactly. You go and you hit H2, H3. Exactly. So don't let that intimidate you too much. Once you get it, it's pretty easy to understand. Exactly. And so when you have this file on your machine and then pushed to GitHub right here, if you go back to your GitHub profile, because that's a special repo, that's the exact file that shows up as your profile right here. And I've seen some people with some fancy GitHub readmes.

31:27Mine is just some text on a list. People will add images there. People will add animations. It's a good way to like add some zhuzh to your profile and kind of introduce yourself as to who you are and everything. I like it. Okay. So for folks who are in the chat following along, does this make sense? Do you have any questions so far?

31:53I'm going to do a quick swig of water.

31:56Cassidy Williams:Yeah, I'll provide some context. Let you take a break from talking. So it took me a very long time to just get comfortable in GitHub because there was a lot of things. It's a very powerful tool. So there's a lot of things you can do in there. And it took me a while to get comfortable with that loop that you just shared. But I think the kind of the three terms that you just talked about, committing and pushing in particular, when you start coding with your agents, these terms are really important for you to know because you're going to be telling your agent to do that a lot. You're going to be saying, okay, now commit this version or okay, now let's push this code to the private repo, public repo when you're ready to push it out.

32:39Cassidy Williams:And just getting comfortable with the language there and knowing what you're talking about is really, really important, especially if you're just using Claude, if you're using GitHub Copilot, if you're using whatever tool you like to use, just getting familiar with those terms is really, really helpful. Yeah, for sure. This is a really good question. We just got here from Kelly Roberts I wanted to bring up. How do you get to someone's repo if you don't know their username? It depends on what you're looking for. And so if you're looking for a specific project of theirs, search works really well.

33:13And so if, for example, I'm trying to find something really specific about something, you could say like owner colon Casadoo means that it'll look under everything under me. but if I don't know anything and I'm just like okay you know what I know that I want to look for something that was made by some of the people who used to work at Facebook I think their framework was called React or something I'm just going to look up the word React then we see what it is you can look for actual code itself you can look for repositories various issues issues are uh bugs in repositories, which I can explain in a little bit.

33:51You could look for individual users, you just search. And so it's something where depending on what you're looking for, you can probably find it. Google is powerful. GitHub search is powerful. There's a lot of options here. But if you really want to look for what someone is doing specific to that user, you probably need their username or at least their name that they might have put on their readme which is why it's really good to have a good get up copilot yeah you know actually though i'm looking for something to name something like this yeah you could be just like okay there's this girl named cassidy i think who did something something i you could look me up eventually and it hopefully will come up

34:37Cassidy Williams:so we got another question which i think gets back to get history and perhaps this leads into So the next thing that we're talking about is, do you need to create backups in GitHub? Or if an agent accidentally deletes some code, can it be retrieved? It can. So that is the power of Git. And that's what version history is. And that's something that is really awesome. Where let me go to one of my repositories, for example. Let me go to... This is the kind of thing I don't know. Okay. Yes. So let's just say my agent deleted a bunch of code. That happens. What are called, I mentioned that when you have a checkpoint, they're called commits.

35:19I did that clicking really fast. When I go to this repository, this code repository, this is a project that I've been working on for years. I think seven or eight years, maybe nine. I've been working on it for a long time. It has 291 commits, most of them written by hand, and now AI is helping me a little bit more. you can look at this timeline over time and let's just say your coding agent really messed something up in this one in this particular one it says that it added 11 lines but it deleted five lines and i'm like oh i actually didn't want it to delete that and and i wanted it to add this but i didn't want to do that whatever whatever you can undo an entire commit where let's just say i don't like these top five commits i want to completely roll back to these commits on august ninth.

36:02I can do that. And it'll just go back in time and do that. And if you go back in time, you can save the ones that were ahead. There's also a concept called rebasing, which means you can save some that are ahead, some that are behind. AI tools are very good at this. It is a pain to do as a human. You can do AI. I've had to do it before and it's been nasty, but you can do it. AI tools are very good at it. And so you could say, actually, I want you to undo just these four changes from this commit on August 9th, but then keep the rest. It can do that. And that's what's great about Git.

36:39Cassidy Williams:Yeah. It's kind of helpful to have, if you're working on a code base, have this like commits tab open in like a separate browser. Um, and then you can just roll back and you say, Hey, I like the version from, I think it was like a couple of days ago better. Maybe it was. And then you could look at purge, a merge pull request, you know. Right. Yeah. And then you could say like, oh, I liked the color in this, but I want this. Yeah. You can do all of that reconciliation by committing. But it's helpful to have that open at the tab so you can actually go back and read the commits. Because I know when I'm working with coding agents, sometimes I'm just in the flow and I'm not looking at all of the changes that it's making.

37:14Cassidy Williams:I'm looking at the code that it's working on. So it's helpful to have that. Right. One of the things that we don't have to say as often because of AI tools, but we would always say commit early and commit often. Because if you commit changes often, then you can find all of the little granular things that you might have done along the way. Yeah. Where sometimes if you do a gigantic commit where it's just like, actually, I wrote 10 ,000 lines of code and I'm just committing it all at once. Then later when you're going back in your history, you're like, okay, something happened in this mega commit.

37:47and now I've got to find it. And that gets really, really challenging to debug. I've absolutely never done that.

37:55Cassidy Williams:That never happened. Wouldn't it be me? Who would do that? Yeah, exactly. Okay, were there any other questions? I think things that we can probably cover, maybe just as a recap for everyone who's tuning in, Andrew Swetman had a good question, which was, So is the main purpose of GitHub to track changes in code, saving different versions, collaborative coding, or other? I said I think it's hosting code, tracking changes, and collaborating with others. Would you edit that statement at all? Yeah, it's all of the above. Yeah, like you can host your code on GitHub. You can collaborate with others on GitHub, and you can track the changes across your code on GitHub.

38:40Awesome. Cool. How do I follow Cassie and Corey and Grant's Git profile? You can go to github.com slash Casadoo and smash that follow button. Don't forget to like and subscribe, y 'all. It really helps. That's right. That's right. Here, too, by the way. While you're here, if you're here, you're watching. Please like and subscribe. Click that thumbs up button, y 'all. That's right. Let's get it pushed up the feed. Ring it. Okay.

39:06Cassidy Williams:I think we should talk about, if this works with what you're planning, pulling and merging and forking and cloning. Sure. of the things that were very confusing to me when dealing with other people. I understand. Okay. These are a whole lot of words. Okay. So I'm going to go back to one of my projects. Let me do, you know what? I'll start with this neuron is fun one and just talk about the tabs that you see here. Now we've just been talking about code when we've been talking about checkpoints in your code, which are commits. And then we pushed some code. Now let's just say y 'all don't like this repository.

39:42You're just like, there's some bugs here. There's some typos here. I want to fix it. I want to do something. That is what issues are for. An issue is where you tell an open source maintainer, where you tell a developer, where you tell someone there's a problem with your code or there's an enhancement that I want. And so in here, when you create a new issue, you could say like, add cooler formatting to the readme. I don't know. I don't like it. I'm just going to say that. When you click create, that creates an issue and you can see it right there. Now whenever someone goes to this repo they can say oh there's some issues in here I'm going to check out what are some problems with this code.

40:23Oh someone wants cooler formatting. Great and these issues can get really granular you can add different labels to them you can add custom labels to them. I'm going to call this documentation and enhancement and call it a good first issue. You could say that it has an issue type if it's a bug feature or a task you can add different fields that are more granular you i it's overkill for this repository to have this many labels but when you start to have a really really massive repository that's where it's particularly helpful where i'm actually going to really quick let me look up home assistant github home assistant is an open source smart home organization.

41:04Where all of their code is open source, they have tons, thousands of people who contribute to the code here. They have this readme, they have all of these repositories here. If you were to go to the Home Assistant repository and this core right here, this all looks familiar. You see the code right here. You see that it has over 116 ,000 commits throughout this code repository, which is a lot. It's a ton. They've also got so many files here. They've got a very fleshed out readme with images and logos and things. It's a really cool project and I highly recommend.

41:38Cassidy Williams:If you look at the issues... We would just very briefly say there's these folders and inside the folders are code files. Like if you scroll down, you'll also see some code files that are not... Yeah. So if I were to click this, some of them are more folders. Some of these are just straight up code files. So it's all of this code is in this one place. You can use Home Assistant in your house. This is not an ad. This is just an open source project that I like. They will have it. But if you go to their issues, you can see because there's thousands and thousands of issues, it's helpful to say, okay, I want to see only issues that have certain labels where like, for example, it needs more information.

42:18Let's dig those down. Or ones that are only associated with certain projects, only certain labels, or only certain authors. That way you can kind of filter and see which bugs do you want to tackle in certain code. Corey, you had a question. Yeah, what I was wondering is, just to screen back there while you were looking at that and talking about the different folders, suppose you want to run that. What do you pull down? Great question. So one thing at a time really quick. Issues are just bugs in code, and sometimes they get a lot. Now, let's just say you wanted to run all of this Home Assistant stuff.

42:54It depends on the repository, how you pull that code, how you change things, and so on and so forth. If you want just the code for the project, for example, if you just want the code for my Neuron is Fun, which is literally just this one file, you can download it. You can download it as a zip file. That's what this button is right here. You can open it with GitHub Desktop, which pulls that folder onto your machine. You could open it in the GitHub Copilot app if you have it, which is an AI tool that is fully integrated. Or you could use the CLI, which is that black and white text there. That is how you pull the code.

43:29Now, for how you run it depends on the project. And so sometimes if it's a web project, you can open it in a browser or you have to run a local server and run it. If it's something like Home Assistant, that's something more complex where I have not run it on this particular machine. I would need to install some things to make it work. And usually the readme file tells you how to run it. Yeah.

43:51Cassidy Williams:That makes sense. And I find a useful way to deal with all that kind of stuff is have your agent help you with it. Yes. If you don't know, yeah, get everything I need to do. Literally what you can do at the limit is you can just use the hyperlink of whatever code base you're looking at, give it to your agent and say, fork this, clone this, let's make a copy of this and let's run it. Okay, I see some questions that I think are very good. First of all, with all the value that GitHub offers for free, how does it make money? They have paid accounts. It is not harvesting code for nefarious purposes.

44:31There are pro accounts that you can get that give you more limits because there's a whole lot more that is in GitHub that I haven't shown you yet. so we can get into that. But there's paid accounts as well as team accounts. I think most of GitHub's money probably comes from enterprise accounts where enterprises can have a whole configuration that's fully just limited to their enterprise and not accessible to anybody else on the internet. There's a lot of enterprise business level stuff and that is where GitHub makes money. And then I also see the question, does GitHub monitor the open source code that others contribute?

45:05I often worry if I'm about to download something with a virus. Yes, to an extent. Now, there's something where, for example, I'll pull up on my blog repository, I have to make some changes. You might see on this tab here, security and quality has 123 things here that I really should fix. You can set up specific security policies, you can enable certain types of vulnerability reporting, depending on the project, you can do all sorts of things. dependabot is github's uh open source tool for for uh checking on bad code packages because you've seen security vulnerabilities in the world in the tech news where it's just like this package was

45:45Cassidy Williams:downloaded all of these times and stuff yep that is what supply chain attack is what that's exactly and so what it does is it creates what's called a pull request which i was about to get to next so it's perfect timing for this question that says, hey, you really need to fix this. So issues are when you have something that needs to be fixed, where once again, I had that issue before where it was just like, okay, make it prettier, but it could be an actual bug. A pull request is someone actually making that fix. It could be the maintainer. It could be any of you out there in the world. You can make a change.

46:18A pull request is saying, hey, I want you to pull my code into your repository. In this particular example here, I could say, okay, I know that I have, let's see, where was, these are some pull requests where people were able to add, oh, I'm on issues. That's why it's doing that. Sorry. Wrong tab. This is that dependabot thing saying, hey, this is a security issue. You need to fix it. You need to delete these 2000 lines of code and add these 797 lines of code. And so what I can do is I can check out the files changed. I know that most of these are in my package block.json you don't need to worry about that I know that that is a file that I don't need to look at and I'm saying okay that needs to be updated sure

47:00Cassidy Williams:I'm cool with that I'm going to have a proposal I'd like to to send your way so from a beginner perspective I would never accept a pull request from someone else but I do think because I just don't trust. I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know if I can trust it. I'm very, you know, off, hands off when it comes to that type of thing. So is there, do you agree with this statement that, you know, when you're just starting out, don't accept pull requests from anyone else, but maybe you could have your agent look at the code and review it. And if there's a good idea in there, maybe it could implement it.

47:38Cassidy Williams:What's your thoughts? Yeah. So this is where you're going to have to read something. If someone is making a change into your code, where, for example, if someone said, hey, I'm going to fix the issue and add formatting here, I'm going to look at the formatting that they did. And if I'm just like, oh, they just made my name bold. Okay. I'm cool with that. I'll accept that pull request. I'll accept that change. If there's anything I don't understand, ask your AI tools. Yeah. There's just, just if there's ever anything you don't understand, And don't do that. And it might be great. I agree. It might be great.

48:14You never know. It might be awesome. There have been times where people have made a pull request for me, and I'm like, oh, they just solved that entire bug for me. That's amazing. And I'm able to just smash that button, and I don't have to write the code, and it's awesome. That happens often. There's so many times where I'm even looking through something, I'm just like, oh, they have a typo. I'll just fix it. I fix it. I make a pull request. And I've done that for really big softwares in the world that like Netflix uses purely because they had something open source. And I was just like, oh, they didn't capitalize the H in this word.

48:45I'm just going to fix it. Then they did it. And now I've contributed to something that Netflix uses. It's a silly thing, but like that's kind of the cool part of open source and the nefarious part. The cool part is anybody can contribute. The scary part is that anybody can contribute. And so you want to only actually merge things, accept pull requests, do anything that could change your code if you understand it. And if you don't, that is what these AI tools. Yes. I use the term merge. So merge is when you merge changes into your code. Where, let's just say I'm going to change this readme file.

49:26I'm going to go back to this file on my computer. Again, it's the hello world. My name is Cassidy. I'm on a live stream right now. Ha ha. I'm going to say something else. You know what? I'm going to make this big by putting this hash in front of it. I'm going to say, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to my personal website. And I'm going to make this into a link. And this is also more markdown language right here. Let me just do that.

49:56Cassidy Williams:You can link it to, yeah. I was going to say, since we're talking about Neuron, it's fun. You can link to our website. Yeah, I probably should have done that. You know what? I'll just link to, I'm going to link to this live stream and I'm just going to do on live stream right now, link to that. Blammo. So if anybody sees this in their feeds, they'll see that. So I'm saving that. I'm going to go back to GitHub Desktop. Now you'll see there's some red and some green here now. Red are lines that I'm removing or changing and then green is what I'm adding. So this hello world, I added the hash in front of it.

50:28So it'll now be bigger. technically the way git does it's differentiating it's like oh you deleted the line i'm on a live stream right now and you changed it to this line and so there's some red and green in here now i'll say like i'm adding links to my readme to make a commit and i'm committing it and now to push it online i'm merging my changes into the existing file where it's the exact same file as before but it has changes and I'm merging those changes. Kind of like when you're merging into traffic. Now there's new cars in this lane, there's new words in this file. And then I'm going to click this push button and if we go back to the repo and then I hit refresh, hey look at that!

51:21Oh why did my links not work? That means I have to fix it. And we can do that. And so I can fix it on my computer or we can do it just on the browser right now which is very fun okay someone just asked about that yeah yeah so someone was just asking and now i'm gonna fix it so you can fix things just in the browser which is nice and it looks like for some reason my computer put a slash in front of all of these i don't know why i did that but now i'm gonna fix it by deleting all of these slashes why did it do that you know what i'm not gonna question it to edit it did you did

51:54Cassidy Williams:Did you just select code? Is that what you're at? Yeah. So there is actually a little pencil button. So there's a little pencil button right here that lets you edit files. And you can do this with any file. It doesn't have to be just a text file where if I were to go to Home Assistant, for example, and go to just one of their random code files right here, there's a pencil button. And that says fork this repository to edit the file. I'll explain that in a bit. But yes, you can just edit the file right there. So you can do that with any sort of thing. and I'm going to get rid of these slashes and I'm going to make these line breaks a little less aggressive right here.

52:30While you're doing that, I have a basic question

52:33Cassidy Williams:that I skipped over in my learning journey. When you merge something, is every time you change the same file a merge technically? Because I think of merges in the sense of I've been working on something in a branch and then I'm merging it to main. But is it anything a merge technically when you're changing the same file? Yeah, you could be merging something in just one file, or you could be merging a ton of changes together where it's like, oh, I edited files 1, 2, 3 over here, but files 4, 5, 6 over here are unrelated, but they need to be together into one big branch of code, one big section of code.

53:10We are merging those changes together.

53:14Cassidy Williams:Got it. Thank you. It's a very catch-all term, for sure. Yeah, but it's another one I say a lot. It's commit, push, merge. Yeah. And then there's also this nice little preview button here so I can look to make sure my changes are actually good. And oh, thank goodness they are. Perfect. So I'm going to commit it here. I'm going to say fix weird slash thing. I don't know. And I'll commit it. Boom. And now this is live. So that is how you edit a file in there. Yes. How do you deal with multiple changes that overlap or conflict? that is called a merge conflict and that that is a thing that happens very regularly and it's usually if again if multiple people are working on a code base let's just say grant and cory and i are working on this exact read me right now all of us are trying to make changes to it and all of us try to push at the same time usually that may that results in some kind of merge conflict and so what you end up having to do is fix it and you can ask your ai tools to do that which which I'll be honest, they're very good at it.

54:24But then there's other times where it's just like, okay, actually, I want to keep Grant's change here. I want to remove Corey's change here, but actually add it here. You end up just making a whole other commit that merges the conflict together to fix that. That is a thing that happens for sure. But merging, it makes a new commit. And kind of like what we see right here, now I have three commits in this repository where I have that initial one. I added the links and then I have the commit for fixing the weird slash.

54:51Cassidy Williams:So each of these are technically different versions, right? So if you're thinking of it in terms of version history, it's like you've now created three different versions that you could roll back to or you could roll forward to, et cetera. Yeah, and you have your description here, but they also have these IDs right here where let's just say I put adding links to my readme like five times because I just keep adding links to my readme and the commits all look the same. There's a computer readable ID right here and those will always be unique and always be specific to that one commit. And that way, if you ever need to revert or something, you don't have to differentiate between all the different add links, add links, add links.

55:29You can use that little ID right there.

55:32Cassidy Williams:It enables bad commit etiquette. Yes. It's good to be very descriptive when you are making your commits. But yeah, Git is the thing that controls all of these changes. Yeah. Yeah. It assigns those numbers, I assume. Yeah, exactly. It assigns all of those keys to everything. It handles all of the diffing between up saying the differences between the different files. And something that's also kind of cool is when you look at the actual commits themselves, you could see that red and green part. So you could see the exact changes that were actually updated. You can even comment on these individual changes if you wanted to point something out to someone.

56:15you could link to all of those individual changes. And I could say, I want to copy a link to this exact line of this change and put it in a chat somewhere. You could do that. And so it's a good way to, again, collaborate and remember how things are working. Or you could give it to your agent and say, do you see that? That wasn't supposed to happen. Fix it.

56:35Cassidy Williams:Exactly. Side note, it might be helpful for people who've maybe never coded anything before. Can you just show when you make a comment in the code, like with the double slash? When you make a comment in the code? Okay, sure. Depends on what you're making. You know what? I'm going to add a file right here. I'm going to create a new file, and I'm going to call this file index.html. Now, fun fact, if you've ever worked with websites before, if ever you have a folder that has an index.html in it, that is your homepage for a website. That is just how browsers interpret it. So index.html, I'm going to write some code in here.

57:12ignore the actual code that I'm writing oop clicked the wrong button you don't need to see that okay flashing back to GeoCities yeah we're going to do a hello world I'm going to do a little body right here I'm going to say this is a fun website and I'm going to do a comment in here and say this is a secret part that the computers cannot read and then I'm going say, wow I am having a blast. We'll just leave it at that. Let me wrap these in some tags actually. So don't worry about the code that I actually just wrote here but just know that this is some very basic HTML for deploying a website and showing you things.

58:00I'm going to commit this and I'm going to just say add

58:10Cassidy Williams:The reason why I wanted to share this is because a lot of times when you're looking at what your agent is writing, like if the agent is writing a lot of your code, it'll have these like bracketed or sometimes it's a slash depending on the language notes about what each feature does. And agents love to write lots of comments. They love comments. They love comments. They do. But that's just to help you when you're reading it or it when it's reading it understand what does the function actually do. Right. And so right here, this is a comment in the language HTML. That means the computer's not going to interpret this part.

58:43If I were to go to, for example, let me go back to my blog repo. I'm certain I have some comments written down in some of these files. I will go to a random one and just hope that I'm giving you a good example. If I go to get tags, aha! This is a function that I wrote for getting tags of blog posts. Get tags from all the posts is here in plain English with a couple of slashes. So that's a good way to just kind of document your code and understand what different things do.

59:17Cassidy Williams:Okay, Kyle Bellin in the chat has requested, can we get to forking versus branching? Of course, sure. Kyle has made a request. Kyle, we will fulfill that request. So let's just say you really like Neuron is fun. You love this repository. It's great. It's doing so many things for you. You want to keep it for yourself, as is as a nice little copy for yourself. That's where you click the fork button. When you click fork, that creates an entirely new copy with all of the commits and everything of this repository on your profile. and then when you do that you can make whatever changes you want and they'll just live there and it's beautiful and it's great but if you ever want to make changes to uh if you ever want to pull in the new changes from the original repository into your fork you have to do some magical pulling from main and everything to make that happen and so it's it's really just a copy of something so a lot of times if people for example there there have been some viral stories where for example claude code was open sourced at one point someone put all the code for claude code online a bunch of people made forks so they could get that copy because they knew that anthropic was going to take that offline and they did and but a bunch of people were able to keep their forks on their computer of the copy of all of that code because so all it is is it's making a copy and when you want to make changes to code, you do that there.

1:00:52I'm going to show a quick example. There's a website that I really like to go to called online go.com. I play the board game go very often. It's very, it's great. It's open source. It's a cool setup and everything. And the maintainers are very nice. They have a GitHub repository right here. If ever I want to make changes where, for example, there've been times where I find a little bug in the website. If I want to make changes, I have to fork the repository, change it, and then make a pull request to try to push my changes to the website. So this is onlinego.com and their org is github.com slash onlinego slash onlinego.com.

1:01:30But if I were to fork it, which I think I already have, actually, I'm going to click this button and I'm pretty short. Oh yeah, the fork already exists.

1:01:39Cassidy Williams:Basically lets you make edits to it yeah yeah so then i can go to github.com slash casadoo slash online go.com and this is my fork and it says forked from online go.com this is my copy i am 1 ,999 commits behind because i haven't made changes to this fork in a while so i'm going to click this sync fork good year by the yeah yeah i'm gonna update that and let that be now in sync with the main fork of uh of that thing real quick question go ahead what's the difference between forking and cloning so like why would you fork something why would you clone something so a fork is to make your own copy for your own changes your own things when you clone something cloning is just putting that on your machine necessarily So I'm going to need some water in a second.

1:02:30Sorry. When you fork, that lets you put it on your GitHub account and you have your own copy, like in the cloud and everything that you can then clone to your computer. Cloning is just copying it to your computer from GitHub.

1:02:43Cassidy Williams:So that would be, for example, if you wanted to use your local coding environment, whether that's VS Code, whether you just use Codex or Cloud Code or GitHub Copilot on the desktop, that would be where you would make those changes and then you could then you know upload your version to github from there right it downloads it to your computer so cloning is just a word for download forking is copying it to your account but then i would still need to clone or download this version of it to use it on my local computer yeah and then what about branching So branching is for making changes within a repository without making a copy somewhere.

1:03:26So typically what you do, like etiquette-wise, it kind of depends on the repo, is if I want to make changes to my own code, I make a branch. Okay. And so you can make a branch either on your computer or here on the website where you can view all the branches. I just have the one branch called main, but I can make a new one right here. That's usually where you stage all of your changes for one thing, where you can have a whole feature live on just a branch before you merge it into your main repository. Is that the same as a work tree? No. Sounds similar. Very similar. I've actually written a blog post on the difference between work trees and branches.

1:04:11You tell us then.

1:04:12Cassidy Williams:Yeah. You tell us. Okay. So long story short, your main branch is kind of like your tree trunk of, of your, of your code repository. If you want to make changes, but you don't necessarily want all of your changes to happen at once, or you don't want to affect production. Let's just say I'm redesigning my website, but I only want some changes to go in at once, or I want to make sure I make all my changes before making it go live. You usually make a branch, you edit everything on that branch. Once you're happy with the state of that branch, you merge it into the main tree trunk. And that is it. Work trees are very similar, but instead of making a branch off of the main tree trunk, you're copying the entire tree into another thing.

1:04:58And so it's a work tree because it's supposed to be a working tree. You copy the entire tree, do all of your things, and then you merge the entire tree together. It generally does the same thing. For our purposes, it does the same thing. work trees were originally made to because when you do branching committing merging yeah making sure everything is done it was just a lot of commands and if let's just say you were working on a branch and suddenly you were got an urgent bug and it said although your team said okay we know that you're working on this important thing but you have to fix this urgent bug right now you would have to say okay i'm going to commit my changes on my branch go back to main then i'm going to make a new branch.

1:05:42Then I'm going to work on these changes to fix the urgent bug. Then go back, then do all of the merging, go back to my branch, merge main into that branch, then fix it. It was a lot of finagling when you're working on multiple things at once. Work trees would be, you're working on your work tree of this brand new feature. You hear about the bug, you go to another work tree that it's just the copy of main, fix the bug, merge it back in, and it's a little bit easier to switch between tasks. Work trees are particularly helpful when you're working on multiple things at once.

1:06:13Cassidy Williams:Okay. I have a practical real world example of this at play and I think it's important to distinguish between the two and this is how I would distinguish them. So I've noticed that agents really love to make lots of work trees especially when you have different feature ideas and if you're using let's say one big agent like a Fable or a GPT-6 Astra as an orchestrator and then you have a lot that go off and dispatch different features that you're working on to sub-agents, they will all make different work trees. Now, if you're doing the local version, what happens is when you make a work tree, it copies the entire code base and it takes up a lot of space.

1:06:47Cassidy Williams:So this is something to be concerned about is if you have a lot of agents working at one time and lots of work trees and you're only using it on your computer, your space is going to fill up really quickly. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's pros and cons of both, but really it's just they're both different ways to work on changes without messing with the main branch the main production environment same end goal yeah yeah same end goal for sure very cool maybe maybe tell your agents to branch so that it's not so yeah you could it's there's there's benefits to both i i use a combination of both and honestly i don't even have a really good set rule for them yeah nice fair yeah so i i hope that answered your question kyle about forking versus branching and stuff i know that was a whole lot of different words really it's just a way to work on things where did these words all come from i realize that's a silly question but the word choice for so many of these things is unique and i'm wondering if this doesn't all go back to some random decision by some people in the 1950s and we're still following them through today or you know yes and no and it's not even as far back as the 50s it's it's it's in the 2000s yeah where uh the the man who linus torvalds he made the linux operating system he also made git um he picked some because some concepts were were in other version controlling systems git is just like the latest hotness really there have been various version control systems over the years sbn garrett team foundation server so many different things um and typically they all have the concept of like it's kind of like a tree with branches because you're making these changes that are merging together um and i think people just kind of picked branches and like a work tree it's like you're working on the same thing but it's a separate tree of work work tree I love it I was just curious it felt like sometimes there's interesting history behind how words were picked in various industries and fields yeah like the cut and paste used to happen with scissors and glue and you know publishing yeah there's a whole lot of tree metaphors there's literally a command for cherry picking so it's just there's a lot that would be where you're taking those little pieces of the code instead of the whole thing, right?

1:09:18Cassidy Williams:Yeah. That would be cherry picking. Yeah. If God, I would be disappointed. So we have a couple other things we want to cover, but is there anything we went over too quickly? Let us know in the chat. Cassidy, if there's anything specifically that you are thinking you want to go through next. Yeah, there was one more thing that I wanted to show here. So I mentioned I made this index.html where it's a very, very basic, like this is super simple HTML that doesn't show you that much. When you do that on GitHub, you can have your settings for your repository and in your settings this is where you can set a bunch of collaborators for example let's just say I wanted to add Grant and Corey as collaborators I can and I can add their usernames and I'm not going to do that right now because I don't want to set up a passkey but anyway I could I could do that where they don't have to make a fork or anything to make a change to my repository they can just push to it there's different moderation rules I can enable.

1:10:14I can say, oh, I want to limit how many people can actually make a pull request or like someone can only make at least five PRs at a time, pull requests at a time before I cut them off. I can turn this into a template that anyone can clone. There's a lot of different things. Advanced security. I can turn this into an app and so on and so forth. But one of the things that I really wanted to show was pages. Now, people mentioned how they make websites on GitHub and stuff, you choose a branch that you want to deploy from. And so I made that index.html file. I have some repositories where I made just a ghpages branch that is for GitHub pages.

1:10:51It's up to you. I'm going to just point this at main and I'm going to hit save. And then that now is a hosted website and that is it. And so it usually takes like a second to actually load but what i can do is if i go to so this repository is neuron is fun i think it's casadu.github.io slash neuron is fun and oh there isn't a github pages site there that's because it's still deploying but that website will now be live and it'll just just work which will be great. Okay. So I'm letting that.

1:11:33Cassidy Williams:That's another term by the way that I use a lot. So commit, push, merge, and deploy. Yeah. Deploy. Deploy is making your code exist somewhere. So I just added that URL that I mentioned over here to the side by clicking this website here. It's use your GitHub pages website, saving it. And oh, and see this little yellow thing that says pending this is saying that it's deploying it so now the website that i made is deploying from this index.html file that i made and then it'll just be a plain page with words it's just going to be a plain page with words but it's going to be it's going to be there and it'll be ours and so when i click on this it says oh i clicked on it and it's already done so if i click on it hey, this is a fun website.

1:12:19I'm having a blast.

1:12:21Cassidy Williams:I love it. Done. Amazing. And so that's what's cool about it now, where you can now have whatever website you make, whatever designs you want, and so on and so forth. This one is very plain, and it can be online, and you can give that URL to anyone. And that's the really exciting part. I first got into web development when I was 13 years old a long time ago and the fact that I was able to create a url that like I could give to my cousin who lived across the country and they would be able to check on my website was so magical to me and github has made that so easy you you just saw me click the buttons it's done it's it's so much easier now than ever to be able to do that how did you get into web development truly I was 13 years old I was walking home from school in eighth grade and I heard someone say check out my website and I was like you can have one of those because I thought only businesses could have websites at the time um and then I just started looking up how to make websites and at the time this was a long time ago this was pre-YouTube and all of these amazing tutorials out there that that showed everything and so what on every website what you can do is you can view page source I was literally doing that and I was just like, okay, so it looks like at the top of a website, you need to go, you need to have an HTML tag.

1:13:41Okay, it looks like there's this CSS stuff I have to figure out. I was just viewing the source of websites and copying as I was figuring out how to make websites. And it was very tedious. Figure out what changes cause and effect. Yeah. Yeah. Slowly but surely I figured it out and I found like freewebs.com at the time where I deployed a website for the first time and just kind of figured things out very slowly but surely from there. And I ended up majoring in computer science and I've been in it deep there since. Cities and Angel Fire were where I started and they were very much like get your first homepage on the internet, you know, and it was so, it was very user friendly.

1:14:21But you did find out things like how to add a link. So you had to go and figure out, you know, I need an AREF tag and figure out what the heck is an AREF tag. And then you come and you figure out how to do it. And there were so many just little things that you learned that way, some of which I still use to this day. Yeah, it's burned in my brain because I've learned it so manually from the beginning. Like so many CSS things I learned was from Neopets. Oh, wow. I love Neopets. You had to customize your guild with CSS. And so I would just copy people's code. And I was like, okay, if I change that, oh, it moves.

1:14:57Okay. And I don't figure out how to do it that way. And you'd make a change and wait like two minutes and then see if it actually worked. It was so slow. It was amazing.

1:15:07Cassidy Williams:While we're talking about websites, someone had a question, Tim Campbell. If you make the website with GitHub, can you change it to a hosted website on, say, GoDaddy? Yes. You can change it to a website pretty much wherever you want. You don't have to use GitHub for hosting websites. For example, I often use Netlify. I used to work there. It's a good website hosting platform. I have it hooked up to my GitHub where whenever I make a push, it automatically pushes to my personal website and it's just connected and done. Platforms are really good about it these days. I'll do that with Cloudflare or with Railway for server stuff.

1:15:42Cassidy Williams:Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of different options. I've been using Cloudflare lately. Grant, you turned me on to the workers. Yeah, Netlify is another good one that's basically the same. Yeah. If you really want to keep things super basic, this is not meant to be like a Netlify ad. It's just like convenient. If you go to netlify.com slash drop, you can drag and drop a folder of code files and it'll give you a URL. And it's just done. Oh my gosh, amazing. It's so easy. I didn't even know they did that. It's very, very convenient. And so like have files from an AI tool on your own computer, blammo.

1:16:18but then when you connect it to a, it just drag. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? You drag and drop the code and it's just done. But then if you want to make changes to it, that's where it's helpful to once again, have a GitHub account where you're making your changes and then it automatically updates it wherever your web host is. Yeah.

1:16:38Cassidy Williams:Like my workflow, and I think Corey, you might have something similar is literally I'm coding with Cloud Code or Codex and I have all the code hooked up to my github and i say you know let's commit this change let's push this change uh and then let's uh deploy it to you know the cloud flare site and and or even when you just push it some of my websites are set up so the second i push it it automatically it just knows yeah it just updates the website yeah yeah like as far as commits go mine are mostly just you know it knows when we're taking the next step move move commit yeah and uh which is which is really wonderful partially not because it's hard but because i forget i'm busy i'm distracted i'm doing a lot of things and and i forget and you bet it's the same being a writer uh the longer i go before hitting a save button which is less of a problem now because they all all everything auto saves now but but for years you know if you're working and all of a sudden it's been an hour and a half or your computer crashes and you realize i haven't hit save in an hour this is all devastating and uh yeah whoever we need a nobel prize for the autosave guy actually yes i will say i've had coding sessions where it's like you have created like 30 like 30 different like features and functions like like or 30 commits worth we should probably push this yeah yeah yeah probably good idea it might be that might be a good plan in batches maybe yeah yeah so i'm going to now pull up the GitHub Copilot app.

1:18:13Now I've, I've showed, I've showed GitHub just some of the basics of what you can do. There's so many more things where you can have agents running and there's, there's a whole tab dedicated to that. GitHub Actions allows you to run just a bunch of different things. This one has a deployment action, but there's also different versions where you could have it see like, which of your issues are stale, which things should you run? Do you want to run AI tasks? There's also project boards where you could have like swim lanes, kind of like a Trello board built in. There's also a wiki if you want to add documentation, like a Wikipedia, but just for your project.

1:18:46There's so many options there. That's just some of the basics. You should add documentation. Can we very briefly talk about actions?

1:18:55Cassidy Williams:When would you use an action? Because sometimes, you know, when I'm working with a coding agent, it will like recommend or like set up actions for me. And I'm always a little bit unsure of like how, when they should be used, why they should be used, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, and so it depends on your project. Something that, for example, at GitHub itself, we use GitHub to build GitHub. GitHub Actions will check all of the tests. And so it'll run all of the tests and say like, okay, this code is good to merge because all of the tests passed. Or it'll say this code is not good to merge because these tests didn't pass.

1:19:30These are the changes that you have to make. And so it can do something like that where it's called CICD, like continuous integration and continuous deployment and so on. And so actions can do that. One of the things that I've done where, for example, on my PocketCal repo, which let me pull that one back up, PocketCal, on here I have an action that just checks for stale issues, where sometimes people make feature requests that are kind of spammy that I don't really want to deal with and stuff. And I just kind of am like, you know what, I'm not going to deal with it. and so it marks things as stale in in here and so what it'll do there's there's just a file for it where the language is called uh yaml it'll it has a cron job that says okay i'm going to do this every x number of hours i'm it's going to be running on this kind of computer and it just says this issue is now this pull request is now considered stale if it is stale and then like does that keep you from having to hit the reject button and feel all aggressive yes exactly it makes to feel less guilty.

1:20:32That is 100 % the reason why. I don't want to feel guilty. And so like this, this is one where I thought that this was a good idea, but I needed, and they had made a change, but I needed to actually navigate through that change and understand it. I ended up not really liking their changes, but I needed to like flesh it out more. The action said this pull request is stale and no offense, this person, it was cool, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. And I had to make enough changes that it was enough work that I just didn't deal with it right then. and it went stale. And so that is an example of some actions on there.

1:21:05Cassidy Williams:I like that. So if I was to tell like a co-pilot agent in this case, like, hey, like, can you help me set up an action to do XYZ? It would be able to do it for me. Yeah. Yeah. And so it can compile all kinds of different things. It's a good way to have like server run functions that can do things to your code or can help you fix certain things. It can add formatting. It can check your formatting. It can say like, oh, only people whose names start with the letter G can deploy on Wednesdays. Like it can be really, really specific. It's Thursday, actually, Grant. So today's not your day. Oh, no. Too bad, Grant.

1:21:46No. Sucker. But yeah. So you're able to like layer in a lot of intelligence to how your code is merged and changed.

1:21:55Cassidy Williams:Yeah. Very cool. Thank you. We'll always wonder this, so this is great. Good, I'm glad. Okay, now let me pull... We've got a couple other questions here, too, as we go through. Yes, ask them while I pull up the GitHub Copilot app. What else can I use GitHub for besides storing the code? How about that? Okay, so besides storing the code, editing the code, sharing the code, looking at other people's code, and so on and so forth, deploying the code and so on, it is a place where you can run a lot of different ideas and and create new things and so like they're storing the code but there's actually building the code itself and i think this is where the kit of copilot app is something that is super exciting to show and currently mine is updating so give me a second while it does that really quick no worries i also realized i had a question oh great host you can host things with github actions too i realized this was something that I was wondering.

1:22:52Cassidy Williams:Like, you could host code that download. Oh, yeah. So, like, you could use GitHub Actions to deploy to Cloudflare, for example. Or to deploy to your cousin's server in their house. Like, it could do anything there. I have one that deploys to Vercel. Anytime my repo is done, it passes through. Or anytime a change is made. Yeah, Vercel's another great, like, hosting service. Yeah, they all kind of do the same thing. and they're great. I probably shouldn't say that, but use what lets you work for free. That's right. So I talked a whole lot about GitHub in general, about the platform itself. GitHub Copilot allows you to run all kinds of different agents, all kinds of different tools using the models that you have heard of before, where I'm actually going to pull in that GitHub repository, the neuron is fun repo, and click that, and it just cloned it for me.

1:23:54And so it has some nice to-haves where you don't have to pull in something on the GitHub desktop app or in your CLI or click any buttons. Me just searching Neuron is fun because I'm logged into GitHub. It just pulled it. And now what I can do is I can ask questions about this repository. I can make pull requests to this repository. I can make whatever changes I want.

1:24:16Cassidy Williams:Quick clarifying question. This is the GitHub Copilot app. The GitHub Copilot app. Yes, you can go to gh.io slash app to see it. Here, and I can paste that in the chat. I don't know if that'll work. If you do it, then I can post it on the YouTube. Yep. Okay, yeah, gh.io slash app. Cool. Really quick before I show you actual, like, code things, this little Mona icon, the Octocat, The GitHub logo is an Octocat. It is a cat with tentacles. But there's a secret game where you can grab her and throw her against the wall. But then it also turns into a little platformer game. So while your agents are running, you can play or perish.

1:25:06It's a fun little thing you can do.

1:25:09Cassidy Williams:That is so cool. I would never have thought of that. I know. Yeah, there's so many cool, like, just little nice-to-haves in there. Little Easter egg things that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I made this Neuron is fun thing. You can have just a chat where you ask whatever questions or plan something. I have so many repos in here, and this is after I've, like, pruned it down because I've done so many things. But in here, what I can do is I could do a new work tree or a new branch. I can do either one. Or I could push something to the cloud. I can choose the model. I really like to use auto where it just picks the best model for the task where if it's like oh this is basic we can use like a Claude Haiku or this is something in really advanced we're going to use that GPT Astra new stuff when you have when you have a GitHub Copilot subscription I sound like a shill when you have a GitHub Copilot subscription you have access to the models from all the frontier labs and so you have the open AI models you have the anthropic models You have Kimi K3, some open weight models, and so on and so forth.

1:26:14So I often use auto mode just for whatever. That's a deal everybody sleeps on, by the way. At the risk of sounding like a shill, having all of those right there in one place is really a deal. It's really nice. It's the having just, yeah, multi-model is so nice. And something that I've done a lot is there's a thing called the rubber duck feature where you can type slash rubber duck. There's slash commands in this chat that are kind of secret.

1:26:39Cassidy Williams:Can you zoom in a little bit more so we can see? I zoomed in as far as I possibly could, and it is not letting me zoom in further. But what it can try to do is change the color palette, which is a fun little customization thing, to make it a little more high contrast. Maybe that will help. Ooh, yeah. There we go. That would be great. Will that help? Is that a little better? Yeah, we can see. I think you can see if you have a monitor. Okay. Okay. So the rubber duck feature is something that's built into Copilot, where let's just say you're saying, I want to make a new feature that does XYZ. It turns the website blue.

1:27:15What it'll do is it'll come up with a plan with whatever model you say, let's just say Claude or whatever, a Claude Sonnet, but then it'll consult a model family from say GPT. And so what it'll do is by reconciling the plan with two different model families that have their own different biases, you get a better result every time. So that's kind of the power of the multi-model approach for sure. I agree. I also saw that there was a question in the chat from Steve. Why does GitHub Copilot create strange repo names locally other than the real repo name? Those are randomized names for work trees, actually.

1:27:49It is the exact same repo that you have, but it's creating work tree names. and work tree names just in the inner workings of git have to be unique and so they have some random word generators and some random keys to create work tree names for you so that's why it

1:28:06Cassidy Williams:does that very cool i love that you always grab these like these questions where i'm like i have no idea so thanks for that i don't know if i want to ask yeah yeah that's that's all that is okay so could i come here and could i ask it like hey write me some code hey commit the code hey merge the code. So we're in the Neuron is Fun repo. I could say like, I want the website to be way cooler. What do we want the website to do? Can it render the video game Cat Doom? I was going to say, what if it has a flash? That's way too complicated. That's way too complicated. And also, this has a dictate button too, so I could actually speak it too instead of just typing it, which I used.

1:28:49Cassidy Williams:Isn't that the best, by the way? I love it. I mean, could we add some sort of like mini game to the website? Could we add a mini game to the website? Something cat themed. I'd love for it to be cat themed. Maybe make it so an SVG cat is floating around and if it hits your mouse the webpage explodes. You gotta be specific otherwise if you just say make a game it won't know what to do yeah um cool i'm just gonna do that and so as you can see it has casadu friendly potato at the top so that that is the same repo you're right you're right steve they are yes they are safe to delete once once it's committed you can delete it to your heart's content and then get a copilot also has like a cleanup feature where it can auto archive all of the different work trees and stuff too and i just said you'll want to because i take up a lot of space.

1:29:52Cassidy Williams:Yes. Yeah. I have it. I have mine clear out like every three days or something like that, or it's just automatically. And so because I have this on auto mode, I'm not entirely sure which model it's using right now, but it'll talk through what the entire plan is. And now has that rubber duck review, meaning that it's going to have, it had one model, uh, make the plan. And then the next model is now reviewing that plan and then it'll start implementing it. Wow. That's awesome. Nina just asked, can you also pick the model you want if you know? Oh, yes, of course. If you don't use quantum mode. So while it is doing that, let's just say I want to, I do really care about which model I'm using.

1:30:30Which, one second, let me make sure that I have this configured. Okay, so these are the models that I have access to. I've got Claude Opus on here. I could go all the way to Claude Fable. I could use Kimi K3 once again. I could use Gemini 3.8 Flash. there's a there's a bunch of different models that I could use let's just say four six that's about all four six short yeah I I've got I've got all of these different models you can you can say no I really really care about using Claude Sonnet 5 for for this particular thing and you can do that I lately more and more really don't care about the model as long as it's doing the task well where I like to know which model it's doing but that's why I've been using auto mode more and more where it optimizes it for like quality speed and cost and everything.

1:31:21And it also gives you a little AI credit discount, which I like, but yes, you can still choose. But when you use auto mode, it does a lot of really interesting reconciling. Once again, sounding like a shill, but there's something really. Hey, we brought you here to shill. It's okay. It's my job to shill. If you go to the GitHub blog right now, which is at github.blog, um there this first blog post that you'll see on the page project hydrofusion is really interesting where basically they've been able to figure out a way to break up tasks where it's multiple models working on the exact same task at once and uh they were able to see some really impressive uh speed improvements something like a 5x speed improvement and cost improvements and everything and it's been really cool to see how yeah the multi-model orchestration of how it breaks up tasks works really well so anyway this is a very interesting blog post on the research for it funny enough there's a similar thing in copilot that was just regular copilot that that had like a council feature and these other things where you could just in normal requests tell it like run through this one and bounce it off that one or or run it through three of these and I always thought that was a really cool, made so much sense as a feature.

1:32:45Yeah, exactly. I'm sure we're going to see a whole lot of that more and more in the future, but it's been cool. And so, okay, it finished its rubber duck, and now it's working on the game logic. So we'll see what that looks like in a little bit.

1:32:59Cassidy Williams:Okay, I have a question for you that's shill adjacent. So let's say we're not using the GitHub Copilot app and we're using Codex or any of the other coding tools that are out there. How do we actually work with GitHub? There's something called a GitHub MCP, right? Yes. So depending on the tool, sometimes you can just hook up your GitHub account where you log in and it'll just work. Otherwise, yes, there's a GitHub MCP server. Now, MCP is a whole, this could be a whole other live stream. But long story short, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, and it's a way for AI tools to connect to other tools.

1:33:42That's it. Without you having to learn APIs. Exactly. It's, when you hook up an MCP server, it quote unquote just works. GitHub's MCP server is open source, so you can check out and see how it works. But what's great is when you hook up your GitHub MCP server to your codexes, your clods, your Geminis, your groks, whatever tools you're using, it will now have the context of what GitHub issues do you have open? What pull requests do you have open that need to be reviewed? What repos haven't been updated in a while? You can say what GitHub actions have failed and which ones have succeeded recently.

1:34:19It has all of the context of GitHub in one tool that your tools can then use. and so that's a nice way to just hook it up. You can connect it with any of your various tools, and then also if let's just say you have an OpenAI account and you want to use your keys there, you still can use them in the GitHub Copilot app. Oh, whoa, look. This is our open.

1:34:42Cassidy Williams:Hey, nice. Cool. I'm not going to play it. Just for a second before I interrupt myself and get distracted. You can actually add. I know. If you go into your settings, there's model providers, you can actually add model providers from Anthropic, from OpenAI, from Foundry if you're using something where you've deployed something custom, OLAMA, all that jazz, a custom endpoint, or let's just say you have OpenRouter or something configured. You can add those models to GitHub Copilot. And what's great about this is all under settings. So if you go to settings and then model providers, then it's add provider.

1:35:22So it's bring your own key. So you're able to use that account in the app and then take advantage of the GitHub harness without having to do all kinds of MCP configuration and stuff. That's awesome.

1:35:33Cassidy Williams:So that's like bringing the app to GitHub as opposed to bringing GitHub to that. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, I like that. I do find the hardest thing is like when I'm using, let's say the GitHub MCP, and I'm trying to connect to say like Codex or cloud code you have to give certain permissions to certain uh repos and sometimes it's hard to manage all that you know yeah exactly it's it's nice to have it just built in also this game is really fun when we came back and it had more cats i was caught up so i think it's because it just kept running when i went off the page but the longer the game runs the more cats appear and they get faster and so i'm i have to move my mouse so that way the page doesn't explode This is actually very entertaining Yeah, what are we trying to do?

1:36:18Cassidy Williams:Oh, just avoid getting hit by the cats Yeah, you're just avoiding getting hit by the cats Because if you do, the page explodes Oh no, it's kind of like Snake, but with cats How many cats can you get Before it explodes? I was going to say, there was five that time Now I'm focused Oh my word, this is actually way harder than I thought it would be Dang it! Okay, so I want to show you some cool things though that are actually relevant. So you've seen, we made this cool game. Yay. What's cool about it though, is this is an integrated browser built into the app. Let's just say I'm like, you know what?

1:36:53This is neat, but I kind of wish the colors were different. I like the pink and the blue a little bit. The purple is nice, but I want to change something. There's this button called pick and polish where I can click around and say this particular button right here, I want to change it. Or this particular heading right here, I want to change it. And it'll just add it to the app. where let me do try again i'm going to say pick and polish i don't actually want these boxes to exist and then it'll add it to the chat right here it actually shows the code for the each of those individual boxes if you wanted to actually look at that code and i could say oh i actually want to get rid of that i want to do that and i could i could say okay for those particular cards i don't want there to be a border around it i just don't want to i'm going to say don't add a border around these cards they're not modals just have them on the page ai does love its borders around cards it really does yeah it loves adding a gradient background with like the cards floating on there and so yeah with pick and polish this is something that was borrowed from vs code it's able to just do that with the integrated browser before you've ever actually deployed anything.

1:38:08This is just living on my computer before we push it to GitHub Live.

1:38:12Cassidy Williams:That's cool. Can we push it? Can we share it? I'm going to have it fix that and then I'm going to deploy it. Also, I saw there were some questions. Do we ever run out of tokens on GitHub and can we create agents here? Run out of tokens? Yes, depends on your account. And so if you have an account through work, you might have a lot of tokens compared to a free account. There is a free tier. But then there's also paid accounts, Pro, Pro Plus, I think they're called. And that gets you more tokens. And so you can figure out how you want to budget your tokens in that way. Standard API pricing kind of thing.

1:38:47Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's, honestly, I'm not a pricing expert. That's fine. There's a pricing page. Yes. There's various tiers. There's add-ons you can get and so on and so forth. And then for creating agents, yes, you can. I highly recommend checking out foundry if you haven't heard of foundry before let me pull that up really quick while these changes are being made um is that github foundry it is it is microsoft foundry so github github models was kind of merged into microsoft foundry microsoft foundry is basically an agent factory for for building agents uh the custom agents that you can pull into whatever tools that you want you can pull in whatever models you want whatever custom things that you want and it just works.

1:39:33My coworkers swear by it. And so they actually build agents in the GitHub copilot app with Microsoft Foundry, and then they're able to deploy them and have them run.

1:39:43Cassidy Williams:So I actually go back and forth on this. What is really the value of having an agent versus just having your, I guess, copilot? General purpose. Yeah. Yeah. What would you actually really want the agent to do that the copilot chat couldn't do for you because even the chat does a lot of actions now it does yeah i think we're going to see that line blurred a lot i think where custom agents particularly shine is when people need to fine-tune and distill exactly what they do particularly well and repeatedly particularly in a work environment i personally also really like using the general purpose agents i feel like they do the job well enough for the tasks that I do that I don't use custom agents as much.

1:40:30I might use skills, which are similar, but it's more like a skill that an agent can use. Agent life. Yeah, exactly. But for custom agents themselves, I've seen them best used in a workplace setting.

1:40:43Cassidy Williams:Yeah, that's fair. Or maybe when you're sharing this. Or maybe you do the same thing hundreds of times a day or something. Sure. And sharing it with your team, right? Like maybe multiple people use it or they have their own. Or it has like the same context every single time or something. Yeah, that makes sense. That blurring of the line is a great call out because it really feels that way. Like I keep finding myself, the other day I was talking about my agents doing something. I was working in Codex and a friend was like, where are you? I'm like, well, kind of every chat is an agent now. It spins out its own agents and it's different than the way I thought about it six months ago.

1:41:21Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But Nina, let me know if that answered your question. But yes, you could pay, once again, turning into a shill, but you can upgrade to paid GitHub instead of paying for multiple AM models if you so desire, and it will access all of the different AM models that you might want. and there's also one thing that I really like to do is automations too um and so like I have it sending me emails regularly I have different MCP servers that pull in context from things where it'll give me like a daily report of hey this is what you did today these are the issues that you closed so that I can kind of have a daily stand-up thing written down um it can it can all just automate I have very few automations honestly these are all of them and I disabled some of them by manager she runs 40 where she has the slack mcp server and she uses it to summarize certain chats she has certain things to manage email some things to manage her calendar events some things to manage her personal things you can you can run them on the cloud locally there's there's a lot of options there and you can also look through all of your issues across your account and stuff uh i find myself going back more and more often to be like okay which ones of these am i actually reading when they come through this comes through every day once a week i open it at best.

1:42:36How about if this is just Wednesday instead of mowing through my rate limit on days I don't want it? Just trying to... You can burn a lot of tokens. You can. It's easy. I had things set for like hourly and then at the end of the week I'm like, wait, this is running 2 ,100 times a month. That's silly. It doesn't have to do that. Yeah, exactly.

1:43:01Cassidy Williams:Before we move on, yeah, you want to cover Micah's comment? So if I am inside GitHub Copilot and I'm using Claude's Fable model, does it consume the token from my Claude account or Copilot? Depends on how you set it up. If you just have a Copilot account, it consumes it from your Copilot account. If you did the bring your own key thing where you're using not the GitHub Copilot model provider, but like an anthropic model provider, then it'll use it from that. So it depends on which account you're paying for. But if you have just a GitHub Copilot account, it comes from your GitHub Copilot account.

1:43:31Cassidy Williams:What if you have both and you want to use your GitHub and then switch to your Claude when you run out of GitHub? Can you do that? You can. I haven't done that because that sounds like a pain, but you can. And you just switch between the different configured providers. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Let's see. Can GitHub Copilot do projects in workspaces or is that feature using the files on the repo? Yes. so you can do that where like every single one of these sessions can be attached to a repo but let's just say you want to just make a new session like you you you don't have any code attached to it you just want to live um you can do that where that's what these new chats are and so this is a new session right here i've created entire projects just in a new chat right here and then i end up turning it into a repo or I turn it into just like a brainstorming session or something.

1:44:26You can do that in this chats stuff. I've used it to try to hack into my computer mouse, for example. You can use it for a bunch of different things. It doesn't have to be attached to a repository if you don't want to.

1:44:38Cassidy Williams:So basically what you're saying is, you know, once you have your GitHub account set up, you can just come in here and create new projects from from chat essentially and then hook them up to github and do all of the actions that we just saw you do for the past hour and 45 minutes directly from this chat window right yeah where another example is uh my lights in in my in my room right here if you if you look behind me i can press buttons and change my lights and stuff and even that's awesome like my lights next to me all of all of the lights that are in my room are actually controlled from a keypad that i got oh that one turned off now i'm going to turn it back on okay so anyway they're controlled with i got one of those uh logitech mx master their their new uh keypads i don't know if you've seen that i use their i use the mx master keyboard and mouse oh nice i'll never go back it's it's it's nice it's like i i clearly i do not work there but hey look github copilot integration you can get three I also get the Copilot Pro Plus attached.

1:45:45This was an accidental ad, but that's actually a pretty good deal. But anyway. That is good. Yeah, I'm just like, wait a minute. That's actually pretty nice. I haven't picked one of these up yet, but that's really awesome. That's what I'm using. And what's great. Send me that link, actually. Yeah, okay. I'll pop that in the chat. Yeah, it's pretty cool. We'd love to let you sponsor a video. Just kidding. What's been cool about it is it's fully programmable. And so my lights, for example, I could not figure out how to get just like the buttons to work with the Logitech thing. That was something that was frustrating me.

1:46:19So in a chat, I was like, could you just find the IP address of these buttons? Could you see like, is there an API attached to something that toggles them on and off to make them work? I did that in a chat. Now I have a repo called Elgato Lights MX Connection where it does all of my light mapping and stuff. I did it all from the Copilot app. It mapped all of my functions. It added local wrappers for everything, controlled my buttons. And now all of the lights in my room are controlled by this keypad because I ran it in a chat first.

1:46:51Cassidy Williams:That's so sick. It's so nice. It saved me so much time. Just having it on my phone. Like when we moved into this house, one of the first things I did was I went a little wild at Home Depot with all of the smart lights and smart switches and smart plugs. and like our outdoor lights, indoor lights, my lamp, my everything. But I would much rather, especially in here where I'm recording all the time, where that stuff needs to change. I love the idea of having that hooked up just on a keypad where I can one button flick through. It's so nice. Where I literally changed my, well, now it's different, but I had changed my lights to try to match Neuron branding earlier.

1:47:32And I'm able to, yeah, tap all these buttons, do all of these different things because I was able to run it in the GitHub Copilot app and say, okay, look at the IP addresses of this, do this, do this, these are my devices, help me, and then talked through it until I had a configuration that worked well.

1:47:48Cassidy Williams:That's awesome. Yeah. That's so cool. Well, we're getting down to about the last 10 minutes. If you have any last questions, this is the time to slide them in over here. If we've missed your question, feel free to drop it back in. We've done our best to keep up, but it's been a lot throughout the whole thing. And I'm sure we have missed some. And shout out to Cassidy. Like we gave you this really like incredibly difficult task, like teach us everything about Gohub in two hours, right? Yeah. Like good luck. And I feel like I know everything now. I'm so glad. I mean, I'm sure I don't, but. There is so much more I'm going to be doing with this moving forward.

1:48:29I first off want to find the Dependabot thing. That was really interesting. to me depend about is i need that i want can you just ask depend about yeah can you ask it to review your code like cory was about to say it it does an automatic scan across all of your code regularly and and so it looks for just common security vulnerabilities and stuff that's really awesome yeah because i have like i'm thinking of like my games and other things sure by the way i did promise i'd drop in the chat somewhere earlier i'll do that in a minute um oh and look at that it created my pull request and i can actually review the entire pull request in the app i don't have to actually go back to the browser and so i can i could this it says this is how it plays making it feel fair and not arbitrary and as a state machine it did all this verification i can add comments to it um i can also assign it to someone else where i don't have to necessarily assign this pull request to someone um i could look at the code if i wanted to but you know what I'm just going to...

1:49:31oh there's conflicts. Oh no. Okay I'm actually going to go to the browser now because I want to see those conflicts in there. One second. Oh it was because the keypad was on the page. I wasn't looking at it. Okay I'm going to my pull requests.

1:49:50Let's see what the conflicts are.

1:49:54Cassidy Williams:Resolve conflicts. I think we should cover before we wrap as well. oh it's just it's adding this to the change i'm gonna just do that it was because i i know why that conflict happened by the way for people who are asking about merge conflicts that's exactly it i don't know if you saw those those little carrots yeah yeah this right here this is a conflict when you delete those it's like okay it's fixed phew wow just like that good to go And just like that, we are all set. Okay, perfect. Can GitHub control my heat pump heater? I love this. If it can connect to the internet, probably. I was going to say, actually, yeah.

1:50:35And I'm going to delete this old stuff, so that way it can be resolved. And let's see, was there another? Real quick on this one, this video will be archived for eternity, or at least YouTube's eternity. and in addition to that we'll absolutely have a blog post going on as well there will be timestamp chapters throughout here so if you need to come back and reference any of this there's something you think you missed it will be really easy to just pop in the description hit it, if you missed any you can go back or if there's anything you're like I really didn't follow that go back and watch that part again it's definitely worth it and hope it's a good resource for you moving forward it will be for me all weekend I'm so glad

1:51:19Cassidy Williams:and now you can also go to our website and play the cat game because it is merged and it is real what? I'll link it hold on it's got to clear some caches so that way it'll all work but I'm going to paste that in the chat so later once everything is fully deployed we see that yellow icon right there that means that it's deploying once that is green we got one more green check then it's live and you can play with the cats and it doesn't take too long while we're while we're waiting i did have one question that i realized is a little bit more about like code just coding in general more than github but let's say you have something that has something secret in it and you're shipping it to github like an api key or something like that how do you keep those secrets out of like a public repo for example this is something that really threw me off at first and kept me from shipping things because I wasn't sure how to manage secrets.

1:52:19Yeah. So GitHub has a thing called GitHub secret scanning and it makes sure it'll warn you if you push something or it'll say like, hey, we removed this. You can't do that. It can detect if people start pushing secrets. First of all, amazing. Yeah. In GitHub itself, there's a way for you. I just don't have time to pull it up. Look at the time. But there's a way It's easy for you to save secrets into a file on GitHub itself and save your environment keys there, your environment variables there. And then it could use that just as a variable on GitHub, for example, in your GitHub actions. Right. I haven't pushed.

1:52:59One of the repos I was going to show, I just realized I don't have that pushed live yet. But there's some repos that I have where it has those keys saved on GitHub and then referenced elsewhere. I have a VibeCoder code review skill that I run that is holding like the 10 dumbest things and mistakes that VibeCoders make. And it's going through and it's checking for secrets and it's checking for all kinds of just little odds and ends as sort of a backstop for my general recklessness.

1:53:34Cassidy Williams:I thought you were going to say, because I forget that GitHub is amazing and has all kinds of solutions to this, that you can include a gitignore file. There's also that, yeah. Which is the analog way to do this, right? Yeah, so a gitignore file is a file that just hides all files that look a certain way. And then also this is an example where I have a macOS certificate variable and then like a certificate password variable. I don't want people to see that. So I saved that in GitHub and then I'm able to reference it that way in my code and in my GitHub actions. And that means whenever that code runs, it will actually pull that secret and use it so that you can still get the benefits of, you know, that access.

1:54:18Cassidy Williams:The secret variables. Yeah, you get those secret keys. And if someone else runs it, they'll need their own. Exactly. Yeah. And so someone could completely copy this. Again, it's open source. This app has existed for a while. but if they want to have it signed on a mac they will not be able to do that unless they have their own keys because that's where my keys come in and here right here is that git ignore file and you could see like i never commit my node modules files and i don't commit my build folders and various other files that might be on my computer as i'm building this application smart so smart this is great cassie thank you so much thank you so much for having me it was a fun time time flew It always does.

1:55:00These get some fun and all of a sudden it's like, oh, it's been hours. Okay. Just like, oh, I'm tired. What's the best way to keep up with you and to learn more about GitHub as well? So GitHub, if you check out the GitHub blog, github.blog, I shared it before, github.blog has a bunch of articles. Hey, look at that. I wrote that one. There's a bunch of articles in there. It references our podcast. It references the latest and greatest. Something that I really like to point people out to is the change log on the GitHub blog. We ship new changes to GitHub constantly. Sometimes it's like five or six a day where, let's say, today is the 10th.

1:55:40One, two, three. We've got three so far today. And there's all of these different releases. I know some developers where they actually have this as their homepage because they just want to see what's the latest things that they should know on the platform. All new features, improvements, things that are retired. this is a really really helpful page to just kind of keep up with every single thing but also the highlights are on the blog itself for github and then for moi um my website is at casadu.co and this is where i blog and where i have a weekly newsletter if you want to check it out um you should thanks my weekly newsletter goes out sunday nights monday mornings depending on your time zone and it always has a joke but also practice coding questions some web links of the week and various other takes and stuff.

1:56:25And that, that one is handcrafted. I've been working on it for more than nine years, nine and a half years now. So we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary soon. And so this is, this is where you can find me on the internet and links to all the socials and stuff. I love it. And the super minimalist, clean website, easy. Thank you so much. If you want to use it, it's open source. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can use this exact template and uh use it to your heart's content drop that drop that link i'll

1:56:57Cassidy Williams:i'll share it and this is everyone's homework assignment is to copy and make their own version yeah you could scroll to the bottom of my website or go to github.com cassie do slash blag which is how you say it in chicago and i like that oh you're chicago yeah i'mst louis so we're just up the highway neighbors that's right yeah and so it and it has exact instructions that you can follow or you can tell your AI agents to follow, which is what a whole lot of people usually do to be able to run your own blog. Amazing. Cassidy, thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It was very fun.

1:57:33Excellent. And one of these days we'll do this again with some other cool topic or something along those ways because I'm sure there's plenty more. I would love to. Sounds good. To everyone listening, thank you so much. We appreciate you coming. I hope you found this as valuable as Grant and I did. and are ready to go home with homework and bang out some killer GitHub pages and get your repos in order so you can make good sense of things in the future. If you haven't yet, please take just a moment to like and subscribe and pop over to the Neuron.ai and sign up for our newsletter read by 700 ,000-ish every morning.

1:58:07We'd love for you to be one of them.

1:58:09Cassidy Williams:And that's all we have today. So farewell for now, humans.