I just want AI to rename my photos

30:42Right. And I think about like all of the things that, you know, we've spent 20 years downloading little tiny utilities to do that were these sort of like one off apps that are like batch resize a bunch of photos. Simple example or like rename these photos with all the same name in sequential order based on when I took them. Like these are the kinds of things that we do a lot on our computers that are not hard tasks and they're not particularly like mentally complex tasks, but it's like a constant part of computing life. It seems like you're in a position where I should just be able to say to Raycast, rename all of the photos on my desktop based on what they are and when I shot them and put them in an order that makes sense.

31:26Just clean up my desktop for me. Yeah. Are we are we are we almost there? Are we there? Are we nowhere near there? Where are we? We're 90 % there, I would say. Really? In fact, you can do this today in Raycos. Like we have that, right? You can't do this. And then the 90%, I'd say like every now and then it doesn't work, right? Thomas, I'm going to try this right now while we sit here and it's not going to work and I'm going to be mad at you about it. I'm scared. But like it's possible, right? And you mentioned like this sort of like super authentic OS, I think what you mentioned, right? So where the computer does everything for you.

32:04I mean, when we reach that state, we talk about HEI, then there was a question like, why should I even open a computer? What is a computer at that moment? I think how we think about it is more, what's an intelligent OS? What's sort of the AI OS? So how our operating systems will change to adopt this new future where everything can be smart and it's not necessarily static. So you mentioned you maybe want to have a little app to do something. What if you could have this app just by asking AI and it builds this little app for you? And then you have it for yourself, right? And then you use it for the job.

32:42And then the job is done and then it maybe gets this post. And then it's like, that's fine, right? And so it's like this one-off software, this personal kind of software that is personal to you, but maybe also to your team or your company that is very tailored to the use case you want. I think that's something which is quite fascinating as things get smarter and software maybe gets cheaper to build I think there is something quite fascinating when your operating system becomes similar so where you can just prompt things into existence for a short period of moment when you need them and then when the job is done you just don't need to use them anymore and then tomorrow you have a different one Or maybe at some point you have apps that are just appearing there as you progress with your day.

33:31And it's like, oh, I saw David needs to do certain things. Hey, here's a little app for you that you probably can use. All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to finish my conversation with Thomas Paul Mann. Be right back. Support for this show comes from MongoDB. Innovation is the key to success. But innovation also comes with its own set of challenges. And if you're a developer who wants to find a new way in and think outside of the box and think beyond legacy code, it's time to check out MongoDB. MongoDB is a flexible, unified platform that's built for developers by developers.

34:08MongoDB is ACID compliant, enterprise ready, with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps fast. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? Start building at mongodb.com slash build.

34:31All right, we're back. We're talking AI with Thomas Paul Mann. Let's get back into it. You bring up another thing that I've been wondering about, which is I think a thing that Raycast did really well early on was make it really easy to build Raycast extensions. Like it's just a little bit of fairly straightforward JavaScript and you can have something up and running pretty fast. and so you've built sort of an app store on top of Raycast in a way that seems to be working really well and there's a lot of stuff and it's pretty easy to do. Does that all eventually go away if we get agentic AI that is good enough to just go do all this stuff on my behalf and I no longer need this sort of interim step of somebody built an extension that helps go do it?

35:13Or is actually what we need lots and lots, like should I be using AI to build JavaScript extensions for Raycast or should I be using Raycast to just completely obviate the JavaScript extensions? Yeah, I mean, fair point. So yeah, extension was really what put us sort of on the map because we realized really quickly, okay, people just want to integrate and Raycast with everything, basically. And there's no way we can build all of that. So we gave it out to community and then we made it super easy to build them. And that allowed us to have over 2 ,000 extensions now in the store. So, and every day there is like new contributions coming and so on and so forth.

35:52But if you take a step back, what we really wanted to do is like build a productivity platform. That's sort of like what we wanted to do. And extensions is almost like an implementation detail or JavaScript itself, but even extensions are an implementation detail, right? So imagine like those wouldn't exist for a second, but services still exist, right? You still want to do something with Google Docs or Spotify or you name it, all your files for that. And so the idea was always how can you integrate with those things really easily so I can't do the job for you. The solution that we did is people can build extensions, you can use them.

36:28But you could even equally think about it like, oh, an AI can build something like that for you so you can use it. And then your extension might behave differently. So the notion of extensions becomes almost a bit blurry. right it's just like that's evolving software in a way and and even for yourself you're probably like just downloading some extensions but you haven't built them in the first place or somebody else built them so it's not too far off like for you prompting an ai to come back with a solution for you but it's like tailored to words you right the key thing i think is like to make it all cohesive like if everything is like different and you can't find yourself around it becomes It's quite annoying and not useful, right?

37:10That's why people prefer apps in the first place and why apps and mobile phones, one, because they're optimized for the phone. They follow the same UI and UX patterns and people know how to use them. And so then the mobile app is also more and more catering towards that. And I think that's going to be similar to make it really useful. We want to integrate with everything around us and make it extremely easy for you to consume that information. And then also because software becomes free in some way to create, at least little apps, you can transform that however you want to consume it. And I think that's super exciting because we're all slightly different and we have maybe different preferences.

37:53I maybe want to see a graph where this Uval will have a different representation. And if you could just change that with just a little prompt and then you have it your way, I think that's super exciting where basically software becomes malleable and you can change it ad hoc and it becomes just what you want and becomes really this personal touch. And that's what I'm personally really excited about. And that's what I feel like operating systems will evolve into something that is like a personal operating system to you. And they're not looking all the same and software is not all the same. They're like tailored really to the person that sits in front of the screen.

38:29Yeah, it's funny. One of the things I talk about all the time with AI stuff that I think is actually really powerful is just like simple CSS stuff for styling apps and webpages. Just the idea that all of a sudden what I now have is the power to tell this app that I want it to be blue. And it can be because that is, because like that's a thing that like Claude Code can do, right? Is change the CSS to make it blue. That is a thing it is capable of doing. And then what you need on the other side is basically just the hooks that give me that tool to do. And I think what it's been before is like, okay, you have to build a bunch of complicated things and you have to come up with a whole, like, how do we display the color wheel?

39:14Do we do? And it's like, that's not like an impossible thing to do, but it is a thing to do. But if you just let people plug in that way, you give them all kinds of opportunities and options just by like opening it up to, we're gonna let you build this however you wanna build it. yeah i think that we have all the billing blocks right right but i think what i'm getting at with the with the extensions thing is like as the as you're thinking about ai and i guess just just to go back to this i like i want to rename a bunch of photos in a folder on my computer which is a thing raycast is very well set up to do um if i prompt raycast kind of out of nowhere to just do that you have a bunch of tools and you have a bunch of of you know agentic systems that will go try and figure out how to do that for me.

40:03Or should I build the thing once, like vibe code my way into a Raycast extension that renames files on my computer and then just use that over and over? Because now I've built a thing that is like reliable and robust and stable and it will do the same thing every time. And the problem with a lot of these AI systems is they don't do the same thing the same way every time. And sometimes that's exciting and interesting and leads you down different roads, but other times I just want it to rename the photos. Like I don't need new ideas about renaming photos. I need you to rename the photos. And in the same way all the time.

40:37Exactly. So I think, and especially as you're thinking about this stuff, you're like, okay, well, do we, do we want to use this, all of these AI models in a way to like build rigid structured things that you can then do on your computer over and over reliably, or is the kind of open-endedness of the system a feature, not a bug? And I just can't quite figure out where I land on that spectrum. Yeah, it's a tricky one, but I think like for tools, having something unpredictable is like a no-go, right? Like you wouldn't use, let's say, I don't know, something complex like Photoshop and half of the time the pixel turns red and half of the time it turns blue, right?

41:17Like you couldn't work, right? Right. And so I think that's a strong argument for software, right? So let's say if you can generate the software once, you don't need any AI anymore. It just works. And then it does the job perfectly all the time. I think it's like a feature, right? It's not a bug. Like it's great. So I think like leaning much more towards that because that's kind of what the world runs on, right? It's software. It's like getting written once and then you use it. And you can always adapt it, right? Tomorrow you say like, oh, rename the files like this way now and then you can use this.

41:52And I think that's like something which is quite nice when you get out an artifact that you can use. And that's like what we have at the moment as extensions, right? You get this artifact out, you can use those extensions and use them over and over again. Where we sometimes struggle with is like, yeah, sometimes those non-smart things, how you do them, they're like just because they're so reliable and fast and become the muscle memory, are somewhat better in a way. And so you kind of want to find a middle ground. And I think for tasks that are very concrete, you want to have what you mentioned, like just you have an app, an extension, whatever it is, but it does the chop.

42:27It does it all the time the same way. Great. And there's some other tasks, and I feel like they're oftentimes more open-ended. They don't have a single solution. They have nuances to it. You don't even know exactly what you want. and those I feel like are the ones that are really good with AI where it just goes out and does something for you and you come back and say, oh, I haven't thought about that. That's cool. That's a nice solution. So yeah, I think there is something nice about the concreteness of software. You write it once and then it works the same way the whole time. Yeah, that makes sense.

43:04Does your quality bar have to be higher than some others because you have this kind of access to all of the apps and even like the system? Like if you wanted to break my computer or allow chat GPT to break my computer, you could. Like it's you have an unusual level of access to my computer in that sense. Does that do you have to treat this kind of nascent technology differently because of it? There is certainly a lot of like scrutiny there. And then when users come to us, they oftentimes ask us, like, oh, is AI running in the background? Can it do something? And so we had actually to put a lot of, like, just like even UI and callouts into the product to say, okay, this is secure.

43:50This is not running if you're not triggering it on. You're in control. So if there is a disruptive action, for example, like deleting a file, you will be prompted and you can say yes or no to that. And I think that's definitely something that we need to maybe do more than others, which others can go a bit YOLO in a way. And because we have this system that you mentioned, we can access your system in a very deep fashion. And so kind of need to build up this trust. And that's also what people expect from us. They use it for years already and it becomes, well, it always works, right? It's this app that basically can never fail because it's always there.

44:32And if you don't have it, people feel like they can't use their computer anymore. And so we put a lot of effort into making it super stable. And so that's here the same way. If you use that, it needs to work basically all the time, which as we discussed is really challenging, right? And I think this is with machine learning and AI generally. It will never be 100%, right? This is just the technology doesn't get you there. So it's always like how far you can push it. that's why we have all these benchmarks where all the model providers try to climb them up and be on top of each other. But you will never be 100 % correct.

45:06And for that, it's even more important to have the guardrails, right? So if something goes wrong, you can either recover or in an ideal world, it never goes off rails and you basically give the user the control, which is oftentimes described as like having the human in the loop, even so that feels like, again, a bit of a sci-fi term, the human. I mean, yeah. Yeah. so do you do you have to uh be extra careful about that stuff kind of at every time like does it make building raycast harder because you have built in this ai stuff that can do so much but is kind of unpredictable in that way i wouldn't say necessarily harder but it's something which we think about um from the get-go we say like hey we want to build a private company we like don't want to collect your data and this kind of stuff.

45:55So that is something that we build trust on. You just need to be smart to know what you build and maybe what you shouldn't build. And then when you build it also in an elegant way and give the user basically the choice of like, do they want to use it? And then if they use it, give them control. You can also say like, hey, always delete my files. Don't ask me for confirmations. That's like user configuration, right? but default that's not turned on for reasons. And so basically giving flexibility. Exactly. Full nihilism. Just whatever, delete anything you want. Go nuts. See what happens. But then you also want to be smart, right?

46:35Like if it's like a rename that you could do undo, you don't want to like prompt a user for that. So this is, I think, the complexity you may be referring to. You maybe need to think a bit more differently about certain things to make sure that the users build up confidence over time. Okay. What's something you wouldn't build? Like you mentioned things you can and can't do because you have this kind of thing. Is there something that feels obviously over the line to you on that front? I should watch out now what I say, obviously. But I think it goes to the privacy aspect. We had certain things, for example, give you a sense of what we felt quite cool.

47:15We have this feature called Focus. And the idea of it is basically you can block distractions, like websites and other things. And then it basically plants them out. And if you go there, you see like a warning and so on and so forth. And then initially we had ideas like, hey, wouldn't it be cool to make this smart so that you don't even need to configure what you want to plug. It just kind of like detects that this is probably a distraction. And then how you would do this is probably like you do a screen recording all the time or some screenshots and then you send them out and then you analyze them and then you come back.

47:51But at the end, we felt like, yeah, this is maybe stretching it a bit too far on analyzing your screen all the time, which we don't really want to do. And I think what we realized, users probably would be very hesitant. And then we thought about using local LLMs for that. And then we said, actually, the person that sits in front of the computer kind of knows what the distractions or the better solution is probably just letting them define it. as boring as it sounds. I feel like sometimes that's the right thing, right? Like, I mean, we have still intelligence. We can think. So sometimes maybe we can also put in what we want.

48:28So that was like just one of the things which came to mind, which we like sort of first started off. Oh, let's make this super cool AI solution. And then you ask yourself like three times why and you end up as like, yeah, maybe a more traditional solution actually cuts it here. That's such a good example because that is the sort of thing that at first glance you're like, yeah, it would be useful if Raycast or my system could understand the places that I'm wasting my time, right? Because it's going to be slightly different for everybody. I spend too much time on Reddit. You might spend too much time on Instagram.

48:59And if I could just be like, just delete all the places that I waste time and it could do that, there's something that is cool about that. And there is something that is like immediately horrifying and off-putting about that. Exactly, right. What a lot of companies have said forever is just we're going to push through that discomfort and trust that actually if people will eventually get used to it we've made it so convenient that they're going to get past the ick factor of this and i think a this stuff just doesn't work reliably enough yet to do that in a really sort of predictable way and the minute i go to like my work email and my focus session is like i'm like i'm out right like we've now broken the system but also i think i think frankly every developer has some responsibility here to say it's actually okay that we're not comfortable with this.

49:49And maybe I shouldn't be pushing you to get comfortable with this. Maybe I should be asking you to make decisions because you're a person capable of making decisions, not to get over the fact that I'm going to make them for you. And I think we're about to go through a million versions of that with all of this AI stuff. It's like, should we just bet on the tech getting good enough that everybody will get used to it or have to? Or should we continue to make an effort to let people be in charge of their own existence? and like this gets big and heady and existential really fast but it does feel like we're encountering that question kind of a million times every day and even like i just keep thinking back to this thing sati nela said about like we're not that far away from people mostly not using their computers and just directing their computers to use themselves and i think philosophically there are ways in which that feels wrong to me i feel like it's always sort of this value exchange right what do you get out what do you put in and what do you get out right and so if it's like super valuable people are willing to put certain things in right i mean people upload health stuff to chatbots nowadays and all this kind of stuff but they're getting something out of it right so i think it's always the question like what is the value exchange here um i think it's at this moment really hard predicting the future if i would look back two years ago when we basically just started this whole ai wave right like would you think like the world is as it is right now where everything is AI?

51:14I don't know. It's really hard to predict. Would you think coding has changed that much? Would you think whatever, pick any topic really? It's really, really hard to predict. And I think it's the classic, we overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term in this case. I think it's really like that. I think no idea what's going to be happening in the next six to 12 months. I mean, everything changed so rapidly. One thing is clear that those things are here to stay like you hear sometimes like even if no models progress any further we by no means have reached the limit of what you can do with even the state of the art right and i think that's kind of like nice for everybody in industry because i mean before ai let's be honest like there was a bit of a try phase in tech right but everything was hyper optimized and nothing really radical changed at least in the terms of software and so now there's a lot of buzz and like every week there is something new.

52:13And I think like, even if everything stagnates, we haven't reached sort of the limits of what we can do with all the technologies that we invented in the last two years alone. Yeah. I know it is strange that it feels like everyone is so busy. I mean, the self-driving cars thing is a perfect example, right? Like everybody is so busy trying to invent the absolute end state of this, where it's like, what if it reshapes society? It's like, no, no, no no what if my car parked itself that's awesome let's let's do that like let's figure out how my car can park itself and then how my car can like run more efficiently and there are like a million things along the way that are cool and exciting and powerful that don't require like rethinking the way an economy works and like let's let's not skip all the steps because those are interesting things on the way to something potentially bigger yeah before i let you go let's just spend a couple minute talking about how you use ai in raycast and in general like where where does this stuff fit into sort of your day-to-day life and workflows right now yeah i think the biggest change for me is like for me it's prompt first now basically everything i do i start with a prompt like well we launch something okay gotta write a blog post let me ramble for five minutes into my microphone and then that's my starting point and then iterate on that like that's one of the things um oh i need to like um answer emails which i do a lot okay i'm gonna do a lot with ai here writing code uh same way one of the things that changed for me quite radically is um that you can sort of do things in parallel in the background like i can just kick off a bunch of things um oh there is a feature request on twitter okay let me kick something off um and address that right away um oh there's another one here let me do that as well oh i have this idea let me like kick off some deep research and figure out um what's a good solution for that and it's like oh i need to like prepare for the board meeting oh let me put a few things together so i think my thing my brain is like completely rewired and it's like i'm prompt first by now and i basically just put things on on like start with a prompt and then see do you then wait i have a procedural question about that oh yeah please do you if you start everything with a prompt is is the goal then to kind of filter everything out into somewhere or do you find yourself like living more and more of your life kind of inside the chats of these llms oh yeah there are sometimes things that are just like inside of our ai chat and raycast but like this never really sort of produces an output right it's maybe me like chatting for a while through something oh like i have this like pick Any topic I have, I want to think about how we can land a deal.

54:58These are the points we have. What are elegant ways to maybe continue the conversation? So how could I find a solution to reach our customers better? I think about it as a thinking partner, throwing things back and forth and talk to somebody for a bit and sharpen myself up in a quicker fashion. That's how I use it a whole lot. and so that's i see also like in our company it's just changing where more and more people just start with a prompt a big change that we've seen in the company is all our designers they code now um what used to be basically all static designs they more and more become interactive prototypes directly in our product so sure they can get something where you can feel it and see it and it works and then oftentimes an engineer like brushes it up um but all our designers are basically also halfway developers now which is an incredible change um and i think that like just it's really nice for creative people as well because there was always this barrier of like oh you you draw a few pixels and then somebody else needs to rebuild them to make it interactive and so now we cross that bar essentially it's just like it's a plant like if you're a creative person and you have to will you can make things happen uh which which i'm super super happy to see that it basically coding becomes more accessible to a way um and lms are still failing in a lot of ways at that regard in programming but i think that's like something that i that we've seen in our company happening really heavily that designers become also developers okay uh yeah i think to me part of the reason i ask is because one of the things that was most sort of unlocking in my brain was the thing in raycast where you can like you can basically at mention one of your apps oh yes and then prompt it and it's like that that to me is like okay now we are now we are getting to like the sequence of things that make sense together right where i i don't now need i don't know i don't i don't now need a bunch of different very specific apps i i can just ask ai models to talk to the apps that they already have access to um it sometimes works it sometimes doesn't my whole clean up the desktop thing has not worked at all as we've been sitting here just just nothing it gave me a bunch of semi-helpful information about the files that i have gotta improve it see that's the way but i i can do more prompting i'll figure some stuff out but i think like there's just there's something that unlocks when you start to see okay here here are kind of the things that are available to me uh and you've just seen more of those things than most people so i i was curious to know like are you just constantly doing computer activities through prompts now like you're you're starting by everything starts with a prompt yeah pretty much like basically for me it's it's a lot of like I'm in a browser I have a few tabs open I pull them in with my ad browser essentially I get all the all the tabs in then I start from there then I say like oh by the way put this in a notion page so then it ends up in a notion page and I can share it with my team then I iterate on the notion page I do those things like quite a lot but also it's like I let it write code for me to do certain tasks.

58:26Like I had recently, bit of a silly example, but I had to do my text return. Well, I didn't do the text return with AI, right? But for that, I needed to download all my payroll and all of them had a password. So I was just asking AI, I was like, hey, take those 10 PDFs and here's the password. Can you remove it so I can send it to my accountant? And it did it for me. It just wrote some code. I didn't really look at the code because I kind of like know, okay, that's like what it would do. And then it's like, perfect. Otherwise, I would have spent like, I don't know, five minutes going over each PDF, first of all, figuring out how to remove a password, which I have no idea.

59:01And so I think that's like, that's, I think, the change, which I'm quite happy about. And it's like, for programmers, this has kind of existed for a long time. We call this thing scripts. It's like little things that a programmer, every programmer you ask, they have a script for various random stuff that I do multiple times a day. What is if this script is just natural language? Like, what if you just say this? And then to your point, if it solved the problem once, just reuse it so you can use it like many times, right? That's, I think, like those kind of little things that will make a big difference.

59:32And that's what we do with Raycast. We want to speed up every little thing and you use Raycast hundreds of times a day. What are the next hundred things you should do with Raycast? That's how we think about it. What are the problems we can solve that you use actually super often and not just like once a year or whatever? And that's like, I think, the journey we're on. that's pretty cool yeah and it's like once you have computer access the the number of things that can start to comprise becomes just enormous yes which is and and you have access to the browser and it's like again this is why i think raycast is so fascinating because you have you you you can see the whole stack in a way that is very hard to do for almost any other app uh it makes it it means the trust bar for you is very high but it also means like we we talk a lot about, you know, these AI agents just can't see and do all the things that they need.

1:00:27Raycast kind of can. Yeah. I think, like, that's the nice position to be in, like being at this position to do all of this kind of stuff. But we still got to connect all the dots and build up the discoverability, as you mentioned, make sure that people get it. And also make sure people get real value out of it. I've seen so many demos of cool stuff but then you're never going to use this day-to-day only so little that it doesn't really play well and so that's for us really the challenge natural language is great but its coverability is hard you don't know what's feasible and so on and so forth but yeah I'm excited about this helping basically making your computer smarter by using the same apps and tools you have by having one AI that kind of follows you around across your journey on your computer and not having like an AI in every app and it's like everything is like isolated.

1:01:24We've been there with apps, right? It's kind of like annoying. And we don't want to spread that again, that all our knowledge, memory, context lives in each and every app. And I get it, like every company of those apps want to have this, right? They want to lock you in. So you stay in that single app. It's like the financial things that they want to have, right? They don't want to give it away. but if you purely think from a user's standpoint AI should be on the operating system level it just makes so much more sense to be there instead of like in every app and every app needs to rebuild it it just happened to be this gold rush that everybody sees but truly from a user's point I feel like the best thing is if you have a smart operating system that helps you to get your job done yeah I agree alright Thomas this has been very fun thank you so much for doing this with me Well, thanks for having me, long-term listener, and finally making our way here somewhere together.

1:02:22We did it. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Thomas again for being here, and thank you to all of you for watching and listening, as always. If you have questions, if you have Raycast extensions you want to tell me about, if you have thoughts, concerns, feelings about any of this, I want to hear all of them. You can call the hotline 866-VERGE11. You can email vergecast at theverge.com. I'm david at theverge.com. Hit us up. I think this question of how AI belongs in our software is big and fascinating and messy. And I want to know how you feel about it. So get at us. Ask us all your questions.

1:02:54We have another one of these coming up next week about a very different kind of app that I'm very excited to talk about. We'll get to that. But for now, the Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll be back on Tuesday and Friday with all of your usual good Vergecast stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. Thanks to MongoDB for their support. Developers know what developers want. That's why they developed MongoDB, so you can move beyond the bottlenecks and legacy code that's holding you back.

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