BONUS: Scott Hanselman Showcases Engineering with AI LIVE from Microsoft Build 2026

0:00To the Neuron AI Explained, I am Corey Noles here today from Microsoft Build 2026 in San Francisco. We're down at Fort Mason right off the water. I had a really cool keynote this morning and fresh off that keynote, we're going to be joined today by Scott Hanselman who works for Microsoft, works for GitHub. He's a VP, member of technical staff and he's going to join us today. We're going to talk about coding and Windows and all kinds of cool stuff as we go. Happy to be here. Whatever makes you happy. That's great. It's good to have you here. This is my actual computer that I work on every day, so we can do whatever we want to do.

0:33I asked if it was the Surface Ultra, and he said no. No, sir. This is my... But it is an ARM Surface. It's a Surface Laptop 7. It's my favorite machine right now. Big fan of the ARMs. I've really grown to like that. People have got to understand, these things are lovely. Close them, they turn off, you open them, they turn on, there's no fan, everything's quiet. It sits on my laptop for days, there's no wait. It's chill. It really is. It really is. So tell me, you all had a lot of big announcements this morning. And you came on and did a fantastic presentation toward the end. Can you tell us a little about what you went over?

1:03So we're in a really kind of crazy moment with AI right now. And I want to spend the next kind of thousand days as I get towards the end of my career really teaching people how to do AI augmented software engineering. And I feel like there's all this talk about slop. There's all this talk about vibes. But my degree is not in computer science. My degree is in software engineering. Software engineering matters. And now they've given us this power tool, this freaking chainsaw, and you know, and they're telling us that hey, it's just vibes, man. Just vibe it into production. But I think that AI augmented software engineering is more interesting than just vibing stuff.

1:39Like programming languages exist to be specific, and I like Windows. I've been working on Windows since May of 1990. Wow. When I installed Windows 3.1, and I learned how to do Hello World from a guy named Charles Petzold, who wrote a book called Programming Windows. And so, like, this is, gosh, what is that now? 35 years of Windows. 36 years of Windows, right? So I like Windows. Yeah. And I got to work on things like Windows Terminal, WSL, which lets you run Linux on Windows, WSLG, that lets you run graphical apps on Windows from Linux. Yeah. Like, there's cool stuff. We announced WSLC, which is containers.

2:15So you can just type container images and have your Docker files work without having to install any third-party software. That's amazing. So I like this. So I got to kind of move away from being a manager, and now I'm an individual contributor with that kind of generic title, member of technical staff. And in January, you know, I was playing with OpenClaw. I've been running my claw for a couple of months, and Peter was like, hey, you know, you made this. He saw my Vibe-coded Windows app. Yeah. And he's like, this is cool. You should keep doing that. Keep doing that. And I talked to the Windows team, and I was like, we need to do something cool here.

2:48Like, let's give me a couple of designers. Give me someone who's got actual taste. Yeah. And let's turn my vibe-coded app into something that is moving towards AI augmented. Kind of a middle of the road there. Instead of not just vibes, but not as rigid as software engineering traditional would be saying. Well, that's a great question. So like, what is rigidity? And I think it's less about rigidity, it's more about speed. So when you take something like being able to run in containers, being able to spin up an open cloud, being able to bring it back down, being able to put a PR up, run multiple PRs in parallel, have multiple copilots running in Git work trees in parallel.

3:24I think three to five is kind of optimal. Any more than that, you're fooling yourself. Going to start getting messy. People think they can multitask. No, you can't. No, we're not good at it. No matter how good we think we are. Humans don't know how to multitask. But I can juggle, though. Yeah. So I can do three or four work trees. So I use WorkTrunk. And I'll show you how all this works. And then I use the new GitHub copilot app. And then we can do a release a day if we wanted to. So we're learning as much as the folks working on OpenCLAR are learning. It's like, how fast is the right amount of fast?

3:53Yes. And how do you avoid being a slop cannon? Yeah. And you really be a software engineer, good SDLC, amazing tests, good code reviews, read all the code that the AI writes. Yeah. We are looking at the code. So I'll show you how I look at diffs. Oh, that'd be great. How we move through that kind of stuff. You know, it's really interesting because we very much are at a time where, not just the pace of AI, but the pace of development since AI is moving so insanely fast. And the ability to find ways to keep up with that speed in a competitive way, but not churn out hot garbage feels like the trick.

4:28So it's funny that you talk about the speed of stuff. Let me actually skip to something that you might be interested in that's kind of unrelated. So I mentioned how too many people are multitasking, and I think you see people token maxing. and like it's not i don't think it's cool to have a token leaderboard no no like you're lighting money on fire well you need to use the right amount of tokens to do the job so i'm not interested in number of prs number of commits lines of code yeah i'm interested in humans like what problem got solved what user story happened yeah but i also am noticing people that are just kind of like vibrating with enthusiasm and activity but did you actually do anything so i made this dashboard for myself because you can feel yourself getting that dopamine rush.

5:09Yeah. So this is called Hansel Projects and basically it looks through all of my different projects and it says pick the work that you have the energy for. So I like how am I feeling? What's my emotional state right now? Do I feel like doing PRs? Well I got 12 PRs. Well, but I got some issues on this one that might be interesting. But maybe... Am I feeling a little more problem-solving today? Yeah, exactly. Do I want to do human PRs? Here's some stale PRs I need to work on. But like this one is some like maybe some small automations. Yeah. So I don't want to like wake up in the morning, have a crush of a hundred to-dos, and then do all the bots and then go to bed and then rinse and repeat.

5:44So there's a humanity to it. So I made my own dashboard that looks at all of my repos. I've got 140 plus repos. These are different priorities. And it prioritizes it based on like my emotional state. Oh, I love that. And this is actually running in a... I'm doing lazy today. Yeah. Then that's okay. And we need to tell ourselves that that's okay. Yeah. Because like the social media kind of like leaderboard of people are like, what are you doing, bro? Why aren't you like burning tokens? Not interested in doing that. And you saw that in the keynote because I don't want to Burn tokens for tokens sake.

6:15I don't want to waste energy. I don't waste money Maybe some of the tokens are on a laptop. Maybe they're in copilot. Maybe it's this model Maybe it's that model like there's a slider bar of importance and I want to use just the right amount so here This is from yesterday I can generate this every day. These are open PRs actionable items, and you can see that I'm inside of the GitHub Copilot app running this local dashboard. This is the Copilot app. I used to spend most of my time at the terminal, so I'd have like here's a pane, here's a pane, here's a pane. So I've got like two PowerShells and an Ubuntu, right?

6:51And you can see over here I've got like all my different terminals from my OpenClaw, Ubuntu, I I could also install Kali Linux or Red Hat or whatever. Yeah. RSL is my main. But then I found myself spinning around console task switching. Yeah. But then, and I was running Copilot CLI. And now I'm inside of GitHub Copilot, the app, and I can see things from an actions perspective. What are the issues that are open? What are the PRs that are open? It's more stuff to be done than a terminal multiplexer. Yeah, I don't need a terminal multiplexer. I just need to know what's going on. So here I'm working on the open claw Windows node that we have launched today.

7:34I saw that. That's exciting. And you can see like I'm working on this thing called Mojibake and I had Christine back at the office fix that. Mojibake is when emoji gets corrupted because of double encoding and you end up having like an emoji or a Chinese character turn into like three or four ASCII characters. Yeah. So Christine has gone and fixed that for me and what's nice is I can see the changes that looks like a lot of changes but she was actually repairing a double encoding error right so there's there's the removal and there's the replacement back fixing the Chinese resources so I can look at this PR and manage this PR directly from here and then she's also gone and she's added 188 lines of test to make sure it doesn't ever happen again yeah so I'm basically spending a lot of time reading PR is looking at issues as a human and I'm basically applying my sense of smell.

8:26Like, code smell matters. People aren't reading this stuff enough, and I feel like that's important. I don't know, what do you think? I think you're exactly right. I think a lot of people just do things. And, you know, maybe when you're building a nerdy little app for home or something, maybe that's fine. But when you're dealing with real production software, obviously, that's a big difference. Like, how long does it take? So, she made these changes for you this morning. realistically when does that hit users? That's a great question. So it would depend. So if it's something like Windows, it might be a couple of weeks or a month because Windows has the Insider, they have the different rings.

9:03It depends because you don't want to go from, we'll use Christine as an example, from her computer to a billion computers overnight. So maybe a couple of months. And it goes through rings. Windows Insider gets it and then it finds its way. If it's my toy, like I wrote an app called Peak Desktop that brings the Mac feature where you click on your desktop and all the windows run out of the way and it lets you access your desktop and they come back. That's a Mac thing. I brought that to Windows. I can push that out and people will get it within an hour. I think there's a lot of stuff like that that'll really excite people that you guys rolled out this morning.

9:37Like all the new utilities. Oh yeah, that's a great point. So we're partnering with UUtils and they are Rust implementations of what people know is like the GNU utilities. And the idea is that if you're out at the command line you you want to fall into the pit of success. Hey, I just got this Windows machine. I've never used a Windows machine. LS. And you hit LS and you hit enter and it doesn't work. You're like, what the hell, man? Right? So we added like 75 utilities. So like grep should be grep and grep should work. And I shouldn't have to open, you know, Ubuntu just to get grep. Yeah. So that's the kind of stuff.

10:11Little paper cuts matter. Yeah. So we're fixing those and that's pretty sweet. And then things like the terminal, Like this is actually, like I believe, do you like Tuis? Are you a person of a certain age? Let me see if I can remind you of one of our favorite Tuis. And you tell me what you think. So a Tuie is a, here let's do this. We'll do a fun thing and you tell me if you remember this because you might be my age or you might be a crisp 29. I never, I can't tell anyone. 46. Okay, 46. So I'm pushing 53. That look familiar? Yeah, yeah. Reminds me of my old DOS days. Yeah, exactly. So this is a text user interface And TUIs, text user interfaces, are having a moment.

10:50And one of the things that makes TUIs possible, and fun things like that shadow and all these different characters, is a really rich terminal that understands all the things. That's the Windows terminal, which is itself open source. It's like this TUI right here is actually called Groot. And it is a user interface on top of Git. And you see, it's a new way of thinking about user interfaces. And some people are like, well, hang on, you're going backwards, man. No, you've got Windows apps, you've got TUIs, you've got browsers, you've got agents. Like, there's room for what you want to do. And we have an internet that's been built entirely on what humans like to build, how they psychologically interact with things, how humans best understand, best ingest information and respond to it as opposed to what works great.

11:41And the funny thing is it's kind of led to this sort of resurgence for the command problem. And I think that's okay. And what's great about it is that I can do my work here. So here I am, like, switching branches. I can come out to the GitHub Copilot app, and I can click on a pull request. Here's Christine's thing that she did a couple days ago. I can see the PR perspective. I didn't have to go to, you know, Copilot. Then Claw Sweeper, this is kind of cool. Claw Sweeper is a bot that's written by Peter and Vincent and the folks at OpenClaw. and it's going through here and it's saying, yeah, is this good?

12:13Is this a good idea? So it's done some of my review for me. And then if I want, of course, I could go up into GitHub itself, find those PRs, click on those PRs. See, PRs are already starting to roll in. And then I could even, let's see, here's a GitHub Actions one here. Here Regis did one where he's working on the gateway. I can look at this, and I could assign one of the other leads, or I could assign the reviewer. And then we're seeing kind of agentic conversations where he'll talk to Copilot and say, like, I disagree. I don't think that's it. Or Copilot consistently thinks our architecture isn't the way it should be, but we disagree.

12:50So we change the architecture documentation in order to steer it. Because AIs are really good at making features, but they're less good at making architectures. That makes sense. So we believe we know more. So we've got all these docs to talk about, well, here's how we want localization to work. So when Christine puts in her localization fix, we check it against that, you write tests. That's where you start moving a couple clicks from Vibes. Yeah. And into, like, we're actually making software for a reason here. I like that. Yeah. There's a formality to it. I think people, like, it's fun to, hey, man, it's just Vibes.

13:25Yeah. Is this for yourself? Great. Vibe. Knock yourself out. Yeah. Like, I made a stupid game called Baby Smash. We make a stupid one every time we get a new model to play with. You know, it's a silly game, right? So I go and I make this game, it's called Baby Smash, and it doesn't matter that it's silly. And it, right? So like, it's not a huge deal. But then the thing is, it got a couple hundred thousand users and now it's like, oh crap. Oh, now it's a thing. I made this for my kid and now it's a thing. So I ended up making a website that you might get a kick out of. It might be fun for your viewers.

13:58It's called Tiny Tool Town. Ooh. So Tiny Tool Town is a place for stupid tools. and it's made for an audience of one, which is me. But the idea is that all these people are making cool stuff. Why don't they get a homepage? Yeah. Right? So look at this. You can go and browse the tools and they're just piles and piles of fun tools. And here's the thing. Check this out. Let's look at here. And I think there was a coloring book that I saw. Hopefully Grant's throwing the links to these in the chat as we go. Oh, yeah. In the tiny tool town. So here you go. So Maria went and made a coloring book with the vibes.

14:32check it out it's called stillness you can go and pick your colors and like it's just something to chill out and color right that's just one example oh yeah some of these utilities are for the terminal some of them aren't and this is the part that I'm really proud of if you go to github and you say make an issue and you hit a new issue check this out submit a tiny tool it's a custom form. And you can submit your tool right there. Dude, there's no database. The database is GitHub. Oh my god. Right? Yeah. Okay, so this is like the unlock for me, because I vibe this whole thing, right? Yeah. So check it out.

15:13If you go over to the code and you look at GitHub and you go to workflows, so every day I get a text of the tools that have come in and then I look at them as as a human and I approve the ones that I want. So that runs approve tool, which is a GitHub workflow. And then from there, it goes and finds how many stars that tool has, whether or not that submitter is a person or a bot. It generates summaries. So for example, if we go look at her coloring book on the thing, this is all static, which is crazy. You can see it's all very, very fast. Come down here to the bottom, there's what she wrote. And then Copilot looks at it.

15:53and I'm very clear about what's AI generated and what's not. So then each tool gets its own kind of review. And even more, they can have their own separate pages. So every page looks different. See how this one has a totally different theme? Yeah. And then Tiny Tool Town itself has both light mode, dark mode, and GeoCities mode. GeoCities. Now it's a party. It should be stupid, right? Like, it's okay to just make the web weird again. How big of a role did tools like GeoCities and AngelFire play in creating the next 20 years of web development? What I'm trying to do is I want the young people and early in career people to feel like I think we felt.

16:34Yes. You know what I mean? Because I did this show called Azure Friday, and this website was made with Claude Opus. And let's just be real. It's mid. Right? It's fine. It's fine. Right? This website is fine. Like you can see the gradient under Friday and you can like yeah, that feels like Opus, right? And you know, oh, it's got light mode. Okay. There's things that it does that are cool like lightning fast search Mm-hmm, but until it has GeoCities mode with fire Right, it's just not the same man. No, it's not you got to look you got to sign my guest book and Join my web ring. Yeah, let's be fun.

17:15Let's do weird stuff And you know what? That was such a good way to learn back in the day, because there were so many things you were like, I could do this. And you needed to learn like HTML snippets, little things. Exactly. And before you know it, you're like, oh, I know how to do that on my own. Right. I know how to do that on my own. It was very, honestly, a lot like learning to code with AI is today. Instead of so much of a, let's sit down and look at a book and go through this very formally, it's almost like a, I need to do this thing. How do I do this thing? Exactly. So check this out. Let's go to Tiny Tool Town for a second here.

17:42Let's do a git. we'll do a get pull and and we will get pulled sorry and then we'll see what's going on so here we got some stuff and then I wrote a skill down here in the corner I want to zoom in on that for you and then I'm gonna say tiny tool town triage TTT triage and greater skills right right so these skills are gonna go off and they're gonna look at all of my stuff and in this actually I probably I shouldn't have used that model. So it's going to go and fetch the new tool queue. It's going to do all this stuff. Now this right now runs automatically, but we're going to do it manually. So there's one open tool submission that someone has done.

18:22It's going to look for duplicates. Was it done by a bot? Is it a good idea? Does it have a license? Yeah. Like, I feel like this is where things move beyond vibes. Yeah. Make a silly website for tools. That's cool. Yeah. But the thing about licensing, is it fun? Is it like people have tried to put commercial tools here? Yeah. I don't want that. So here we go. Public repo has images. Must be nerdy, yeah. Must be nerdy. Okay, and it seems to approve. It's local, it's MIT license. And I always, this is another good tip for folks who are doing vibe coding. Ask it it's confidence. Yes. But explain to you what your confidence is.

18:58I'm not gonna be confident if it doesn't have a picture, it's not done by a person. Did they make their account yesterday? Yeah, give it your own rubric of sorts. Give it your own rubric. And then I said, make me a table. And I'll just say, okay, cool, approve. and then it's going to go now and queue tool number 535 and then the best part is tool it's a balance let me switch away from the silly mode here and go back over to issues I've got agentic workflows that saved me time because this one that we just got in yesterday uh-huh the workflow checks for me does it have a license and it tags them because remember that labels you can get hub are totally flexible yeah so a human didn't have to go and tell me whether it has an image or not they can tell from the labels but that's toil yeah but i'm not going to make a thing auto approve it yeah human in the loop yes you got to do it you still got to have the human yeah man oh this is a good one i love the approach you took with like okay so i've got this thing i put it up it's a little bit fun holy smoke it's got 200 000 users i need to care now now and then like i think that's a really cool cool kind of use case in this whole let's prototype it and see if anyone cares Yep.

20:05And if they do, cool, I'll go back and invest some time. But if they don't, hey, I learned, I'm going to try. That's okay. And that's why I think one of these tools might take off and someone's going to do it and they found a home page for it. And if not, the whole thing is done on GitHub pages. Mm-hmm. It's done with static, what's it called? I keep forgetting the name of this. See, this is the other thing, that when you vibe stuff, you kind of forget. Astro, that's what it was. So I'm using Astro. It goes and it builds GitHub pages and then all the images get pulled in automatically I'm like everything I could do to make it as lightweight as possible You don't always need a database.

20:41Yeah another thing I would tell people you don't need to super base for everything You don't need to go and spin up a cosmos DB. Yeah, this whole website is run entirely off of a giant JSON file That's wild, but it's but is it though? Like how big would a JSON file need to be before you think it was too big that makes sense I've got a little project like that that's that's essentially run off a JSON file connected to notion. Yeah. You know, it's like, I mean, it's kind of a database, but it's not kind of. So what is a database? Right. So a giant spreadsheet. So look, yeah, exactly. Right. Most of the world runs on Microsoft Excel, right?

21:16So if we look at my blog, which has been around for 24 years, right? So I've been blogging since 2022. What do you think the database is for this blog? First off, wow. Way to go. 2002. Yeah, man. Yeah. I'm impressed. People of a certain age. So what do you think the back end is? Like we got 22 years ago could be access, SQL server. Could be Excel. Yeah. Could be 5300 XML files in a folder. It sure could. Yeah. So it is. There's one each blog post each day technically is an XML file. Okay. Which sounds insane but XML was the hotness before curly braces became the hotness. Yeah. Doesn't matter. By the way folks I'm not sure.

21:58It doesn't matter. It can be spaces, it can be tabs, it doesn't matter. It can be curly braces, it can be angle brackets. It's not that deep. Yeah. Structured data. It's... You're overthinking it. Everything is name-value pairs. So I load, when this thing starts up, 5 ,000 files up into memory and I cache 22 years of my writing. None of it was AI generated. How many megabytes of memory do you think that the 22 years of my life's work takes up as I cache everything to make my website lightning fast? I'll bet it's an embarrassingly small number that makes you feel like you've done a lot less work than you think you have.

22:33Yeah, it's 300 megs. Oh my gosh. It's 300 megs. 300 megs. Yeah, so I run my blog, my podcast, Azure Friday, Tiny Tools, all these things in like an Azure basic one for like 45 bucks a month. You could store that on... You can do it on a Raspberry Pi. Oh yeah. Right? So like look, here's a blog post from 2009 where I I was at Queeznos and I made an app where you could tweet your sandwich order. Because we were trying to like, this is before, gosh, before all the things that Uber Eats and the Instacarts and stuff. So we made Tweet Sandwich. And this is in 2009. But if I go and I pick another blog post, it's in memory.

23:14It doesn't need to not be in memory. No. This is all Jason. So I've got a podcast called Hansel Minutes because I'm not a very good estimator. and people would always ask me how many minutes that's gonna take and I would tell them and they'd be like, those real minutes? Those Hansel minutes? That's fair. So the show has had 1 ,046 episodes. Wow. So every Thursday for the last 20 something years. Giant JSON file. Wow. You pick a picture, you say open image and new tab. It's on a CDN, episode number dot JPEG. Like, you're overthinking your architectures. Your back end does not have to be that complicated because the show comes out every Thursday.

23:57Yeah. I don't need a whole database. No. I know what it is. It can be listed anywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then I make a database. Do I care about the database? I made, let me see if I actually have my password. I probably won't be able to do it on a live stream. Good catch. Good catch. I vibed a front end for it because it was just a JSON file. Yeah. So I made a cool little Opus 4.6 front end, and it makes it a little nicer. Nice. But what I ended up doing is less and less do I log in, and more I just tell my agent to do it. Yes. Because then you make a nice API. So all those REST APIs that we took the time to make over the last 10 years make a skill.

24:35Actually, let me show you something. That's what I do too with the site I was talking about is I have it just, you know, go make sure all of this is current. And come back, give me a report of anything that's questionable, and then we'll go through it, and I'll be like, fine, go update. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, let me see if I can show you something that might not even be on this machine, and that might be cool. So we could actually do something live here. So let's go and look at my Copilot Skills folder, and we can see I've got my expense reports and my code review and stuff like that.