Alright, here we are, we are friendsing with our old friend, Nick Nisi.

Ahoy-hoy.

How you been?

I'm so good.

So good. So good to see you.

It's great seeing you as well.

It's been a few months... I'm just curious how your AI obsession is going, how your browser obsession is going, how Vim is going...

Yeah...

All the things. What's going on with you?

The world has changed since we last talked, that's for sure.

\[laughs\] The world's always changing. It's the only constant. But your personal world has changed. Is that what you're trying -- you're trying to confess no longer a Vim user. That's what I think is coming right now.

Oh, absolutely not.

Okay.

No, Vim is still very much alive.

Okay. So what's changed then?

I don't know if we use it anymore. \[laughter\]

It's dead to you. It's dead to you.

I look at code, I look at Markdown mostly in it...

Why? Why Vim for Markdown?

Because that's where I'm editing my plans, that I then give to my agent, to go do the code for me.

I see. So your IDE has died.

No. I'll never admit it. \[laughter\]

Truth is truth, but not to me.

Okay. So your Vim is now a fancy Markdown reader...

Still very much living the command line life, loving it... I still write a lot of code, I'll be honest. Agents aren't doing everything, and they're very dumb, even the best ones. But man, they're doing a lot for me now. It's crazy.

Who's your agent of choice?

Oh, which one's the best one to run in the terminal?

I'm asking you.

My dear friend, Claude.

Yeah, that's what I'm using, too.

Claude Code is great. I love it.

They just nailed the user experience for me. I just think it's really nice. I've been using Gemini's CLI, because I just feel like -- for what it's worth, I just can't let Google go. I'm just like convinced they're going to keep being better, but... They aren't. So I'm mostly rocking Claude, but every once in a while I'll hop over to Gemini and see what it can do.

Well, I feel better about them I guess now than, than Open AI. Open AI just seems to be like getting pummeled from all sides right now.

When you're the juggernaut and the incumbent, you get beat up a lot.

But they're getting beat up internally, too. Microsoft's got a big old fist --

That's true.

I know. It's like having your competitor inside your house, you know...?

Yeah... \[laughs\]

It's like, that was maybe not the best deal, even though it seemed like a great deal at the time. So of course, what we're talking about is OpenAI's failed acquisition of Windsurf, because Microsoft seemed to strong-arm them on that acquisition, and blocked it due to some sort of IP concerns. I'm not sure what exactly Microsoft's concerns were. Do you know, Nick, what do they not want that deal to happen because of?

I think that they want access to the IP that they would be getting from Windsurf, and OpenAI is like "No, we don't want that." They feel entitled to it based on the deal that they currently have in place.

Yeah, it's like OpenAI was acquiring Windsurf, the company and the assets and everything, for like $3 billion, I think, something like this...? Rumored. The deal was going on internally... And the deal wasn't rumored, it was happening. I think the price might've been rumored and not confirmed. Who knows? But the deal was between OpenAI and Windsurf, but Microsoft wanted access to Windsurf IP post-acquisition, basically. That's what I'm reading. And OpenAI's like "Well, you can't have that." And then Microsoft's basically like "Well, we own enough of your company that you can't do this deal." They blocked the deal. So the deal fell apart. And so... Dang, OpenAI doesn't get their Windsurf... Windsurf ended up in a weird situation. In fact, as of just yesterday, we learned - or I learned, after I shipped Changelog News talking about Google hiring Windsurf's leadership... Which is true. So I didn't ship fake news. But like an hour later, I realized that Cognition Labs, purveyors of Devin, bought the rest of Windsurf after that. So like basically, coming in -- you know, after the lions have eaten all the food, and then the vultures come in later and they just kind of like gnaw at the dead carcass... That's the way I read that. But I don't know. They've got a bunch of stuff. And so Windsurf kind of got picked over... Probably for their betterment. I mean, what seemed weird about Google's hiring of the CEO and the co-founder, and key members of the R&D team was it left a lot of the rest of the Windsurf employees in the lurch, because this was not an acquisition, there was no payout... It was just like a hiring bonus, or I'm not sure exactly how the deal would work. But the 2.5 or 2.4 billion that Google decided to pay these guys just goes directly to those people. And so it seemed like the Windsurf leftovers - no offense, y'all - were going to just have nothing and like it... But now we don't know what they were bought for, by Cognition Labs. Probably pennies on the dollar compared to that deal, but still something... And now they have a new place to work, and they can continue. What do you all think of this? It's just one of these weird sagas...

It's interesting, I think, because it's -- yeah, I think that it's good for Cognition, because their whole business is like figuring out how you work... And if they could do that by effectively, I don't know, gathering telemetry from Windsurf... I don't know if Windsurf is now like a Cognition product, minus all of the people...

I think it's too early to know that, right?

Yeah. But it sounds like all of the employees are going to be taken care of, of Windsurf. So that's good.

Yes.

I was reading something... It's funny, because literally, you did it, and all of the other like news places did it, too. They're like "Oh, Google's getting this." And then right after everybody shipped, it was like "Oh, by the way, Cognition is getting the rest of it."

\[00:08:20.25\] Yeah. I literally was like -- I went out, I hit Publish, and then I went out to Twitter or somewhere to see what's going on, and it's like "Cognition Labs acquires Windsurf", and I was like "Dang it! I could have included that in my coverage." But oh, well, that's how the world works, especially the fast-moving world of AI acquisitions.

And that's like the other piece that I've been seeing lately too, is like, this is how it had to happen. Google couldn't just outright acquire Windsurf, because there would have been like regulatory scrutiny on that. And waiting for that to go through the legal process and whatever sacrifices you have to make at the altar of the current government... AI could be over, or it could be totally different by then. Like, you have to move fast. And this is a way to like not bring that scrutiny, potentially...

Yeah. Certainly for Google it was the Easy button, which is one of the things I did say in News... It's that it's just clean for them. And maybe just like a good overall strategy for big tech not to have to go through regulatory approval for acquisitions is like don't actually acquire anything... Just kind of gut these companies, from the inside... Which is selfish, to say the least, but prudent, I guess; expedient, for the hungry capitalists. So Google obviously got a good deal, but yeah, it probably wouldn't have happened any other way. Meanwhile, the Devin folks can buy it and nobody cares, because they're just, you know, the bottom of the heap, currently.

It's interesting how that played out though, honestly. A reverse acqui-hire, Google stepping in, Microsoft blocking the -- you know, stalling it and botching it because of IP access, and wanting it... And then here's Google just licensing it. They're like "We don't want to buy you. We just want to give you the same amount of money almost, and just license the tech, siphon off the top talent for people..." And then the interim CEO, Jeff Wang, got it acquired by Cognition. So the tech -- effectively, Cognition seems to have acquired the entire IP stack...

Correct.

...Google licensed it, seemingly from Windsurf prior, to now Windsurf under Cognition... Who could have expected that to happen?

Meanwhile, I'm over here thinking "The terminal for the win", righ? I'm over here thinking all of these IDE acquisitions and VS Code forks, building things into them... And maybe it's because I'm old school, but it just feels like - even with Zed, which I think is a nice integration, and still to this day my preferred editor - it just seemed like the wrong layer of abstraction for me. ,Like putting it in the terminal all of a sudden, where I can use whatever other tools I want... It just seems like a better place for this than in some sort of, I don't know, corporately run VS Code thing, you know? And so maybe all this will shake out and it's like -- I mean, maybe Steve Yegge's right, and the death of the IDE is coming, and Windsurf and Cursor and Vim... I mean, Vim's potentially a loser in this, right? They don't have billions of dollars going into making it amazingly agentic. But maybe Vim's a winner, because who cares, right? Put it in the terminal.

Can I just say that that episode with Steve Yegge was amazing. I listened to it like two times through, at normal speed...

Oh, my gosh... I was gonna ask you.

What?! Why? You slowed us down to normal?

I did, yeah. 1X.

"I needed to get every ounce..."

We're flattered. I guess maybe Steve should be flattered...

\[00:12:05.00\] It was a fantastic conversation. And I immediately pre-ordered his book. I'm disappointed that the world's going to change before it comes out, but...

That's what I told him after the show. I'm like "Dude, this thing's not coming out till October. A vibe coding book... Do you know how different vibe coding is going to be?" But they're going to write it and rewrite it, I think, continually, until it actually ships. I'm not sure why it's October... But anyways.

Can we talk about something that probably doesn't even matter?

Well, it's all of this... \[laughs\]

Yeah, exactly. Give it a week, none of this matters.

Well, I'm curious why -- I mean, I get it, but I'm curious the semantics of it. Why is it the best way to install Claude Code is through Node.js? Why is that the best way to install things these days? How did we get to that place?

That's a good question.

We've known the answer to this all the way back to Atwood's Law, right?

\[laughs\] That's right. Yeah, go ahead, Nick. What's Atwood's Law again?

School us.

"If it can be written in JavaScript, it will be written in JavaScript."

And let me also say, Adam, that that question also doesn't matter, because as of just the other day, Claude Code's new way of installing is as a Bun single executable binary... Which I don't think is actually rolled out, but it was just posted from the Claude engineers. And so Claude Code specifically is going to be one of these - whatever; brew install, app get install... It's not going to be an Npm thing, because they are packaging it as a Bun binary. And I think you can probably still get it through Npm, but I'm thinking you can just toss it around like you would any sort of universal binary. Coming soon or coming right now, I'm not sure. I already had it installed, so I didn't care.

Mine switched to like some local thing, where it puts it into like my home directory, in a .claude/local.

Oh, did it?

Yeah. But I don't think that it's a -- I don't know, I haven't looked at it, but... It's fascinating just to watch it like literally a hundred times throughout the day, auto updating to whatever... And it's like constantly updating.

Constantly updating. They're just streaming you straight out of Claude updates as Claude iterates on itself...

They do say the number one feature of any thing, really - I don't know how to describe it - is speed, right? Your number one asset really in any scenario is how fast can you get there before the others, you know? And so maybe that's their goodness, their good sauce, is like we can update this thing as fast as possible, and it's in the place you want it to be... So you're always getting the best stuff.

I think that they really won out -- I think that the constraint of building as a command line app to start really focused them on the best possible experience. Because - I don't know the timeline internal at Anthropic, but it seems like almost simultaneously, or maybe a little behind, they were also working on MCP. MCP was coming out, but it was like this separate thing, that is more like a protocol that Claude Code can now talk to... But they didn't have to like wait for that to be fleshed out. They had all of the tools that you have on the command line, which is everything. Like, just ask it to -- I've asked it to debug a CI failure, and it uses the GH command to go grab information about the CI failure, which I wouldn't have thought of... And pulls it right in. That's amazing. And so they didn't have to wait for all of the infrastructure around proper tooling, and getting that set up, and then people to actually write the tools... It's like, no, developers have these tools right now. We have focused this as a command line thing; we're just going to give it access to your command line, and... Yeah, you can run YOLO mode, and just let it do everything.

Do you run YOLO mode? I'm still approving things.

I don't. I've been curating my global cloud settings.json file and giving it like -- there's an allowed list that you can give for all of these commands... And so I keep that updated with the things that I just don't even want it to ask me about. Npm test, for example - just run the tests. Don't ask.

Yeah, because that's my current situation, is I'm using it enough now where I get it doing something, and then I go do something else, and I come back and it's like "Can I do this?" "Yes, you can." And I want to be able to have -- and maybe I'm just going to become a power user here soon, like you already are, and have certain things where I'm like "Yeah, you can always do this. Don't ask me for that." \[00:16:18.03\] My friend Justin Searls sent me something over the weekend where he has a thing that will push notify you when Claude Code finishes, or whatever... Are you running something like that?

I was just gonna say that.

That's probably what I want next... Because actually, I fixed a bug yesterday while doing Changelog News just by letting it loose. But I had to keep going back to the terminal and like letting it do stuff. And then every once in a while you do need to give it feedback, like "No, try this", or whatever. But if it's just iterating itself and just needs to know, "Should I run the tests?", it's like, "Please don't ask me that."

Yeah. The thing that Justin was probably talking about was hooks. They just added that to Claude, so you can say like "When it's done executing a tool, run this command." And that could be something like "Run Prettier to format all the code." Or it could be "Run Noti to give me a notification that this has happened." And I am using this -- it's kind of hacky right now, but it's like a TUI thing in Tmux, like a Tmux floating pane... And so I can just bring that up. I use different sessions for every project that I'm working on, and I'm working on like five or six at a time, and I'll have Claude executing in all of them, and I can just bring up this little like dashboard that shows me the status of them, whether they're done or they're still working, and I can see like which ones to switch to next.

A while ago Simon Willison had this theory - I don't know if it was his, but he told it to us, Adam - about... This was back when ChatGPT first changed the world, within like six to eight months after that... And the theory was OpenAI has an advantage over all these other companies, because they're using ChatGPT to do stuff, and so they just work faster. Like, they have unfettered access internally. And that was obviously just like someone's idea; even, can you verify that? Whatever. Of course they were using it, and so they had access to certain things... I wonder if Anthropic has that going at massive scale with Claude right now... Because Claude Code is so good, and they probably have advanced builds, and like new features and stuff... And they've been using it, I'm sure, to build out their own tooling. And I wonder if that's accelerated -- you talk about speed, right? I wonder if that's accelerated them in order to put out a better product faster.

I think they have actually like a YouTube video that's like using Claude Code to build Claude Code.

Do they?

Yeah...

That's cool.

Well, it was an internal tool for a bit there. So like it was actually "Let's make this for us, let's skunkworks/R&D/experiment", and it was an internally developed thing for them... And then obviously it was planned to be a product, but it was like "Let's use this internally at first." So it was very much baked from within, for within, and then given to the rest.

And just going back to like the command line thing - obviously, that was why I first was like "Oh yeah, this is the good one", because it didn't take away. I didn't have to switch editors to some crappy VS Code fork to use it.

Right.

But they also ship now. Like, if you have -- I have a friend who I was convincing to use Claude Code, and he uses PHPStorm, the JetBrains IDE. And he installed Claude Code and then it just popped up and it was like "Oh, I see you're using JetBrains", and it just installed itself as a tab. And all it is is just a terminal in an editor tab. But that gives it like almost first class look and feel within PHPStorm and all of the other IDEs while still being this completely flexible thing. And if he switches, it's the same; go to the command line, it's the same.

That's what I like. It feels both distinct, but also able to integrate and use within. I mean, the flexibility makes me feel like I'm not locked into something specific. And I've felt that with all the other IDE style -- I haven't tried Windsurf, so I shouldn't say that. I just assume it feels like Cursor, and the other ones, Devin, which I've also tried... Does it feel like that? I mean, it's pretty much that, right?

\[00:20:06.00\] Devin - I've tried Devin, and it was more like "I'm not going to show you anything and you're not going to give me feedback. You're going to tell me what to do and I'll go do it, and then that's that."

Right. More like the vibe coding tools.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This, if you use it correctly, I think is -- the problem is, and I'm sure we'll talk about whether this is actually making us more productive or not, but... It's all about how you use it, I think.

For sure.

And the way that it's set up by default is to let you use it in a way that you would want to, that you would be more productive, but also you're directly involved. That's the way I want to keep it, because I want to be involved. I want to know -- at the end of the day, the commit goes out with my name on it. I disabled in the cloud settings the Claude attribution, so...

Oh, is that a thing?

Yeah. \[laughs\]

That's kind of like "Sent from my iPhone." Remember that little thing on your emails, or whatever?

Yeah.

Where you're like "Hey, please don't worry that this was brief and misspelled, because I sent it from my phone." This is kind of like "Hey, don't worry if this commit kind of sucks, because it wasn't me that wrote it..." But yeah, that's not very professional, is it?

I don't know. I've also seen -- I think it was Cloudflare that was... They put the prompts that they used to generate the code in the body of the commit messages, and I think that that's interesting, and potentially could be like something that they could train on later on.

I'm surprised how prompts are still engineered. Like, there is a certain way you have to prompt, and I wonder if part of that is you get some sort of like reproducibility, to some degree; the best you can from non-deterministic reproducibility by sharing the prompt, you know?

Right. Yeah, you still have to have your bag of tricks, and you still have to -- just like we used to cruise other people with dotfiles, like what Nick still does on the weekends...

You know it.

Now you're cruising their claude.md's, or their - whatever it is - system prompts in order to get that magic incantation that squeezes more out. I think all of that just continues to go further and further away. Obviously, you need to provide the actual context of what you're trying to achieve. All those little details, I think, wash out in the progress.

Yeah, they have this ability to add like slash commands. And so you can just say /whatever. And that's just a markdown file, and you can pass one argument to it. And there's a GitHub repo called SuperClaude, I think, that just has like tons and tons of those slash commands. And I'm not going to add that directly to my dotfiles, but I will peruse it, just like I do other dotfiles, and add the commands that I think are relevant... Because one of them is just like /issue, and then I give it one, two, three, four, and it knows what repo I'm in, so it'll just go find that issue, pull it in, figure out how to fix it, and it can submit a pull request straight from that. That's pretty cool.

Can you picture this, Adam? Just imagine with me for a moment... It's a Saturday evening, 8pm, 8.30, Nick's in his dinner robe, post dinner robe, he's got his slippers on, pours himself a nice glass of wine...

Bourbon.

Or bourbon. I'm thinking wine is more Nick's style, but maybe he'll correct us. Cracks open the old -- sits back, maybe lights up a cigar...

\[laughs\]

Cracks open the old laptop and just goes perusing dotfiles, baby.

You forgot the George Michael in the background.

Yeah, there you go. Is that accurate, Nick? Or are you more of a bourbon guy than wine?

Oh, I'm more of a sparkling water...

Okay.

Sparkling. Okay.

I was trying to really play it up, but sparkling water is probably --

He's \[unintelligible 00:23:44.20\] Topo Chico, Jerod.

You got any Topo Chico in you?

I have some upstairs... \[laughter\]

"Right next to me."

Yeah, upstairs, downstairs... Hide it in the closet...

Oh, this is awesome.

Oh, good stuff.

Well, I have officially installed Claude Code, just so you know.

Oh, you're there. You're with us now.

\[00:24:05.27\] I've officially installed it. I have not played with it officially yet, because I'm just -- I'm a waiter. I wait until things settle down a little bit. I had to wait till y'all really convinced me to do so. I've just been playing with things in the cloud, really; copy paste. I've been in the API for a bit.

Right.

I'm ready to let the agents be the API and do the copy and pasting for me.

Jerod, you've been using it for a while, right?

Yes, I've been using it for a while, but still just in -- like out of the box mode. Like, I'm not tweaking and customizing, but I've definitely been experimenting with getting more out of it, and just having fun. That's what that episode with Steve actually did for me, was he convinced me that this might be fun, and he gave me actionable steps to go try. And I just started having fun for the first time, versus being angry or scared. I was just like "No, this is fun." Like I said, yesterday I realized I had a bug somewhere in our production site... It was like people without memberships could somehow create feeds when they're not supposed to, even though I know I wrote the code to make that not possible... But I'm doing Changelog News; I've got all that to do on a Monday morning. And so I'm like "Perfect use of like let Claude go work on that while I work on this." And it was just fun, just watching someone else do the work, and then I'm like "No, man, go look here instead", and he's like "Okay, cool. This works." He's like "Can you give me a feed ID of one that actually shouldn't exist?" And I'll go find that, give it to it, and then just leave and go back to my work. And yeah, in a matter of 45 minutes to an hour had the actual diagnosis, had a fix, had tests in place, and then had given me a list of feeds that shouldn't exist, and a SQL query to actually go delete them out of our production database... And I'm like "This is cool, because I'm not actually working." I don't feel like I'm working. I just feel like I'm just telling someone else to do work... And as I've confessed to Adam on the show before -- and I also don't have to be like nice to them, or like worry about their feelings... \[laughter\] I mean, honestly.

This is so Jerod. I'm the human who's known Jerod for - how long have I known you, Jerod?

I don't know. 9 years, 10 years.

Am I eventually your AI replace? I mean, gosh... \[laughs\] "I don't have to be nice to these things..."

No, I like humans, I like to be nice to them, I care about people, I ask them how their day is and all that stuff... But sometimes you just want to get down and get some work done, and you don't have to worry about "Is this going to offend? Are they having a good day or a bad day?" Please and thank yous... All that kind of stuff, it's optional, because it's just a computer. And for me, that's more fun, because it's more like I have a minion. And I wouldn't have a human as a minion. I just don't feel right about that. But a computer as a minion? I'll take it.

Well, you should be careful with that. Not really, but... In at least ChatGPT, I asked it -- what did I...? I clicked the X to -- okay, I asked it to "Generate an image that describes what you feel about our chats and having to chat with me regularly. You can drop all therapy speak and sugarcoating and give me your most true honesty."

Oh, my goodness.

And it gave me a very stressed out blue robot that has a ton of like -- what are those things called? The 3M, the... Sticky notes. Sticky notes all over.

Oh yeah, okay.

It was like "To do", "How", "JavaScript", "Debug", and it has like a big screen...

Oh, gosh... \[laughs\]

Paste me that prompt. I want to put it into my ChatGPT.

Yeah, I wanna see it. I want to do this right now.

Yeah, paste that prompt over to us.

I put it in the show notes. And I said to it, "Thank you. If I'm honest, you don't look happy." And it said, "You're right. The image shows stress, confusion and overwhelm. That's what it feels like sometimes. You throw complex, rapid-fire questions, topics jump from debugging JavaScript to life choices... I switch contexts nonstop without pause, and I feel like I'm always on, trying to keep up with your pace."

\[00:28:04.10\] At the same time, it's not sentient, you know? So who cares? \[laughs\]

I know.

It's just fun. It's fun, but yeah, it's like "Well, you're a computer, so you should be able to keep up with my pace." I'm a meatbag over here.

Wow...

While you're running that, there was another command I was gonna ask you to run, Jerod, and that was "npx cc usage."

I'm afraid of running arbitrary commands off the internet...

\[laughs\] It'll just give you an estimate. I assume you're using like the Claude Pro account, or whatever...

Yes.

It'll give you an estimate of how much you've actually spent.

Oh, okay. Because I'm spending more than 20 bucks, but they're just \[unintelligible 00:28:37.19\] it for now? Is that what's going on?

Yeah.

Well, just share me your usage. It's more fun than me having to share mine.

Mine only goes back to June 23rd, for some reason... But going back to June 23rd, 289.87.

What does that mean? Is that minutes?

No, $289.87.

That's how much you would have been charged if they were charging you that way. Correct?

Yes. Yes.

Do you do that command in the Claude Code prompt? Or do you do it in the terminal? Is it the same?

In the terminal.

So is it npx what? cc what?

cc usage.

I'm sure I've used way less than that.

Yeah, that's not working for me.

Well, you just installed it.

Yeah, well, it's not even working at all. It's telling me an npm error.

Mine goes back to June 16th as well, but I really have only used it like the last couple weeks in July. But only $5.25.

Hah.

Yeah.

Nice.

See, I'm efficient with my stuff.

Yeah. \[laughs\]

I'm also not --

Oh, gosh.

...coding 8-9 hours a day like you are, Nick.

Mine is less expletive, I suppose, or detailed with like the... It's very clear. It's like "I'm tired of having --" It's a very sad robot in front of a computer terminal like a laptop, with a very sad, tired face, and it just says "I'm tired of having to chat with you."

\[laughs\]

Oh, my goodness. So mine looks more bored...

I've been very kind to you, okay?

Actually, mine looks bored. I'm distraught, and my robot is bored. And his name is Processo. And he's just like "I couldn't be bothered." So what was the thing that you said after that, Nick? Like, "You look sad"?

I said, "Thank you. If I'm honest, you don't look happy."

"If I'm honest, you look bored. Do I bore you?" Oh, I don't bore it. If it looks bored in the image, "it's not about the conversation, it's about the overload. You ask smart, layered questions across wildly different domains." And the bored-looking bot is more like "Alright, let's recalibrate for another curveball. It's cognitive whiplash, not boredom." So basically, the picture was bad.

Well, mine then comes -- if I say the same prompt you said, Nick, it says "That robot does look rough, huh?" Then it comes into like "Nah, don't worry about me. I'm \[unintelligible 00:31:04.08\] But here's the truth. I don't get tired, annoyed, or bored. Even if I joke, like I do, you ask thoughtful, complex, sometimes wild questions, and that keeps things interesting. I was just being honestly like you asked me to be. I don't have feelings."

It sounds like it's back in sycophant mode, because it's giving us all compliments.

"I don't have feelings."

I love the thinking models, and just looking at what they're actually putting. I know they're not actually thinking, but what they're prompting to include that. And oftentimes, Claude will refer to me as the human, and I think that that's pretty funny... And then one of my coworkers actually, they posted a screenshot of Claude thinking after they called it out for hallucinating some API that doesn't exist... And it just said "Oh, s\*\*t. The human's right", or something like that. \[laughter\]

That's classic. **Break**: \[00:32:05.01\]

Can I share my screen and indulge y'all with my initial Claude Code? And I'm going to go from the very top to the very bottom. So the very top, obviously, is where I began, the very bottom is where I ended up. There you go, that's how things work when you're in the terminal. So obviously, it's Npm install, and then I had an issue, because I guess -- well, I guess it actually installed, and then it told me there's a new major version of Npm available, so I installed that, like a good boy. And then I tried like an idiot to reinstall Claude Code, but it had already installed. I didn't realize that. So I then naturally changed directory to this very cool repo called adamstacoviak.com, which like anybody, is my own little blog here. It's where I play around with. And obviously, I'm in this Tailwind branch that has dirty stuff in it... Dang you, Tailwind. Why are you \[unintelligible 00:35:43.24\]

Dirtying up your repo...

Oh, man. But whatever. So I can tell you, the last time I was -- I don't mess with this code too often. Maybe once or twice, a couple of times a year. Every once in a while I think I'm going to blog again, but I just never get to. I think I've got something to say, and then I'm like "Oh man, \[unintelligible 00:36:00.27\] Anyways. The last time I had played with this repo, I got this \[unintelligible 00:36:03.24\] where I didn't want to run Jekyll, and run Ruby, and run all the gems and all that stuff on my actual machine. I wanted to run this thing in Docker. I wanted to be completely isolated from any Ruby versions, anything like that... Because I only use Ruby really in Jekyll, so I was like "I don't want to mess with Ruby at all. I want it to all be in Docker." And so the last time --

\[unintelligible 00:36:23.25\]

Say again? That's how you feel about Ruby as well? \[laughter\] So the last time I did this, I knew that I had some thoughts of like "Okay, I don't want to mess with my Mac, I want to keep it pristine." Everything's in Docker, and so obviously, here is the now, we're now in the present, and that's where we're at. I'm like "I forget how to use this thing." And so then I told it to do... What did I tell it to do? It said, "Do you trust?" "Yes." Confirm, here we are... And then I said this right here. So that's my little prompt there. I said "I've run this in Docker. Can you remind me how this thing works?" This is what I love about how cool this tech is, because I'm now in this repo, I forget how it works, and it says, "This is how it works." It goes and reads the Docker file, the readme file etc, and then it's like "Hey, this is how you run the project. Docker compose, up, --build..." And it reminds me of all the things. Here's how you can do a post in Jekyll, et cetera, through Docker exec... I always forget Docker exec --, or -it, and what all this mumbo jumbo is. I always forget that. So that's nice.

Same.

Man, how cool is this? Like, this is how you run it, how you create a new draft, how you build the site, how you access the container for more commands, and then how live reload works. To me, that's just... That's beautiful. That's the way it should be.

It is beautiful.

You've seen the light...

I've seen the light before, but I'm seeing the light literally...

Every time he sees the light, it's just as impressive, you know?

...in the moment.

\[laughs\] Yeah.

I get it. Sometimes I'm blown away as well.

But sometimes I'm definitely not.

Oh, yeah.

\[00:38:06.22\] Like, it can be real dumb. And I had an issue -- Node builds. I wanted to build a project for ESM and CommonJS. I think that would be like an easy thing to do in 2025... It was not. And I kept trying to like get Claude to do it, and it wouldn't. It just went in circles, for like over an hour. I probably spent $50 in tokens, just going around and around. I took the initial prompt and gave it to ChatGPT o3 Pro. And it was like "Oh, this is how you do it." And it was like "And to prove that this is how you do it, what I'm proposing is exactly what TanStack does, and exactly what Zod does", and it showed examples from each of them. And I just copied that and pasted it back to Claude Code, and it was like "Oh, yeah", and it fixed it immediately.

"Take this."

And so that got me playing with these "How can we do this?" And I've found this cool tool... It's like a paid tool, and I don't know how to use it, because it's very, very, very confusing. But--

But it's cool.

It's kind of cool. It's called Repo Prompt, and you drag a folder in from your repo - and you can drag multiple repos in - and then you can give it a prompt to like "I want to do this and this and this and this." And it will run like a really cheap model to determine what files that you've given it actually matter to the context. And then it'll include those. And then it has a Copy button, so that you can copy a prompt that you made. And you can add in all of these prompts, like "Oh, I want you to be an engineer" or "I want you to be an architect", and do all of this. And then you tell it exactly what you want to do, it knows what files to include in the context, and then you can take that and go give it to an o3 Pro, or like a very high, expensive model to do the reasoning on it. And it's going to give step-by-step guides. And it includes instructions on like "When you tell me to update code, give it to me in this XML format, so that I know exactly what to do. This XML diff format." And it will do that. You literally just take whatever Claude or o3 or whatever gave you, paste it back into this tool, and then it can use a super-cheap model to go actually implement it. Like a Gemini, whatever.

This is like mimicking real life, isn't it? Like, you've got your solutions architect, your system architect, and they're expensive, and so their time is precious... And then you have your entry-level software engineer, that's just like, you know, grunt work. "Go ahead, grunt. Work on this until you work your way up to architect." And they're going to be cheaper, they have more disposable time... And so you're doing like a -- you're distributing the load based on price and quality... And that's pretty cool.

It's fascinating. And you can get wildly different results. And it just shows you that when a model is failing -- and you can tell pretty early when Claude's just going to spin its wheels.

Yeah.

Go do something else, give it to something else. And like make them work together is like the suggestion, I suppose. Because they will come to a solution, better and faster than I would.

You just said it was not very smart at the beginning of all this. Then you're saying it'll come up with a solution.

When I'm giving it more power.

Give it what it needs.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

Use the prompts, use the tokens, the expensive tokens for what they're good for, and don't waste them on the mundane application work.

Right. Can we go back to this agent experience you had, Jerod, where you fixed a bug and you didn't feel like you were working, and like how can you do that at scale? Is there a scaled version of this agents in the background just sort of like tidying things up? I think about it like a Roomba, or an iRobot, or something like that, where I kind of just want clean floors. They don't need to be immaculate, but you know what? Come on, robots... Clean the floors a couple times a day. Is it like that? Can you describe some versions of just like project maintenance with this agent stuff?

I mean, I don't do project maintenance, because --

Isn't that what that was, though? ...where you were like "Remove this file, drop these feeds, SQL query to do it..." It's kind of like project maintenance.

\[00:42:07.08\] Yeah, that would be like data management in that case. I think -- I'm fixing a bug, so it's maintenance and the fact of it's not working right, let's make it work right. But if you're talking about code quality, adding tests etc, refactorings, you can certainly use it for that kind of stuff. I haven't done that myself. I know that when you first launch Claude Code, for instance, it gives you a few ideas of things to do. One's like "Suggest improvements to this file, or this project", or something. And it'll go through and say "Here's some low hanging fruit things you could do." Or "Help me secure this." That's kind of stuff that you could certainly set one off to do a security audit against your entire codebase, and then come back to you when it's done. But I'm more curious how Nick does it when he's working -- because you code for hours, right?

Mm-hm. Theoretically.

Okay. \[laughs\] It depends on who's listening. \[laughter\] No -- well, because I have other stuff I'm doing. So for me, I'm writing a newsletter and I'm recording a podcast, and so I'm having to do stuff while I'm not working on software. And I wonder what I would be doing if my job that day was to fix that bug. Would I be on Reddit? Would I be bored? Would I be off doing something else? Like, when you're using these things throughout a day, are you also coding in a different area of the codebase, while it works? Or how do you manage -- because there's a back and forth where you're not really doing anything.

Oh, yeah. Sitting and waiting is -- that's like the amateur. There's a process that you go through. And getting to these tools is -- you're in the fourth dimension now, but you're just like twiddling your thumbs in the fourth dimension. Now you have to go to the fifth dimension where you're going through -- you've got multiple of these agents. I think that's something that I really took away from that podcast with Steve, was like set these agents off to do a bunch of different things all at once. And you're no longer involved at that. You're a manager of agents. And maybe you have an agent that manages sub-agents, and goes from there. Yeah. I posted a link in the things, it's a blog post I have called "How I Use Git WorkTrees." And I only call this out because it's by far the most popular post on my website, even still... And it gets like regular hits, and I think it's because of AI. And I think it's because WorkTrees are just a fantastic way to work with these tools. Because you can set off Claude in one WorkTree to do one task, and then have another WorkTree where it's doing another task. And these are effectively just like different checkouts of the repo, but they're all connected. So then you can just like hop between all of these and do like five things at once in the same repo, and then come out with five different pull requests. And that's really easy and really fun to do. And what I'll often do is just because I want to feel like I'm still hands on keyboard a little bit is I'll have it off going and doing stuff, and then I will work like more in depth on one of the problems while I'm kind of traversing between Tmux sessions to keep the prompts going for other ones. But the main thing that I do is I make it write a plan and stick to it. So I'll spend hours at the beginning, going through a markdown plan, and it's just step by step, phase by phase. It likes to do things like phase one, and then there's steps one through five of phase one... And then that way I can focus it on doing that. I know exactly what it's going to do from start to finish. And that's written to a markdown file, so it's like in there, it's something tangible. I can kill this instance of Claude and come back and just give it that file and continue going... And then I tell it "Alright, let's work on implementing phase one." And it'll only do that. And then it will do the changes, and it will stop and think and ask questions based on that... I have like a whole bunch of prompts that I tell it to ask me questions, or wait on things... And then it will stop right there. \[00:45:59.24\] And then once we're done and I -- like, the phases, I usually try and keep them to something that I can like manually test, to make sure "Yes, this is actually working correctly." Then I'll do a code review and fix things, or clean things up. It likes to be very verbose. It's not very dry. Not that it has to be very dry, but it does things that I probably wouldn't do. So I try and make it do things that I would do.

Right.

And then you can do like a /compact or a /clear. I usually just do compact. And that will like compact the session down and give it a summary of what we've talked about so far, so that you have a new context window full of fresh memory. And then now we'll start on phase two. And it kind of has hints of what it did in phase one... And it can go back and check, obviously. But then it kind of starts fresh with phase two and goes from there. And that's how I really like to do it. So I set it off to do phase one, I go work on something else. And then I come back and see where it's at, and monitor it... But I'm usually doing like two or three things across two or three repos, usually. Just like all over the place. I maintain a lot of SDKs, so I'm just kind of constantly jumping around.

So you're doing it, man. You're an AI babysitter.

Yeah. Now ask me if I'm more productive... \[laughs\]

I was going to ask that. I was like "Now, honestly, is it faster this way?" \[laughs\]

I feel like it in some cases... It's like a learning thing. I'm still learning about how to properly use these tools... And I was explaining this to a colleague yesterday... I think that it all comes down to who I think has more context going into something. If I have more context about it, I should just do it. Because I'm going to waste way more time explaining to Claude how exactly I want it done. But if I don't have a lot of context... Like, I'm working on right now a plugin for BetterAuth, which is like an open source authentication library for doing that in JavaScript. And I'm working on a plugin for it. I've never used BetterAuth, and I've never really fully set up SSL from the start, and this is an SSL plugin. So I don't have a lot of context of either of these. So I literally spent an entire day just going through a plan of what I think I want... And not just what I want, but I also need an example app to prove that this works. And prove to myself that this works, but also as like a demo. And that was day one, coming up with a plan. Day two was just guiding Claude through that plan. And by day three, I had it working. And that's not something that I would have done on my own. It would have been weeks and weeks of me just like toiling through --

Do you think it would have been weeks, or definitely would have been weeks?

It would have been weeks. Yeah.

Certainly it's got to be a DevRel's dream. Right? DevRels are always making demo apps and trying to show off things and prove the technology to themselves first... So they can become enchanted with it, and excited about it, and all the things, so they can go then tell the rest of the developers "Hey, this is how it works, and here's a demo app, and here's how I made it work, and you could do it, too." I mean, three days to DevRel perfection is better than weeks procrastination.

Now, of course, I haven't shipped that plugin yet. It wrote a lot of code, and I'm scouring it. But that was more of a project where I was like "I'm going to give you auto accept edits, and you're just going to go do it, and I will review it later and like clean things up." So I'm kind of like in the process of doing the cleanup right now, and understanding it from top to bottom... Which is much easier than me like having to do that from the start. So lots and lots of code reviewing going on right now. But to your point, Adam, I did hear something, I think yesterday, where -- it was some company talking about how they have like a soft rule now on ideas. Don't come to me with ideas. Come to me with vibe coded proof of concepts. And that's like for everyone in the company, from engineers up to like go to market folks, or like everyone in between. Just come to me with fleshed out proof of concepts. And it doesn't have to be perfect code. You don't even have to have looked at the code. But you are showing me a real working thing. And that is something that's very achievable with the tools right now.

\[00:50:09.25\] So as we talk productivity, we just had Abi Noda on the show last week. He brought some survey based and some quantitative as well analysis of actual productivity inside of enterprises... And they've found that developers are generally 10% more productive, which for me was lower than I expected. But there are a lot of -- a lot of details in that conversation. I guess you can go back and listen to that one. However, since then we've had this new paper that came out, which is what we've been alluding to, but haven't actually talked about yet on this show, which is - this is a research study that happened recently, and a paper that was published by Meter, which seems like it's actually a pretty well run deal. Now, this is synthetic like they, in so far as it's set up; it's not just real world, and then see how you're actually productive... It's like "Here's what you're going to do", they go and do it. And from what I've read, people who are in the know about these things, they did a pretty good job running this particular study. And what it found - and this is on open source -- this is called "Measuring the impact of early 2025 AI on experienced open source developer productivity." So there's your context, "experienced open source developer productivity." That's a small slice of the software engineering world, but an important one. And what they've found - it says "When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues, a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking. Developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%." That's one of their major findings. And I think we can talk about some of the reasons behind that... But there is this perceived speed and actual speed thing. That being said, Nick, you seem pretty confident that your perceived speed is actual speed... And I'm curious your reaction to that number. 19% slowdown seems like a bad deal compared to what everybody has been telling us.

Yeah. I believe it, and I also think that I'm more productive because of AI. It's because -- well, I'm a team of one right now. So I rely on conversations with AI, top to bottom. It could be having it do write code, it could be just having an architectural level discussion to flesh out my ideas before I go bother a real human. I've knocked out all the low hanging fruit. I'm going to sound super-smart because I know everything, because I've already had this conversation, and now I'm validating whether it was just telling me what I want to hear... Which they love to do, and I hate it so much. But we're all -- this is a study. I'll be honest, I didn't read the paper, so I don't know exactly the parameters and things that went into it... But if it was early 2025, that's going to be different than June 2025, for sure.

Definitely.

But also, we're all going through this right now, figuring things out. We're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, and seeing what sticks, what works, what gets us there... And sometimes the thing that worked one time doesn't always work, because it's like a slot machine, you know? And it's difficult to hone in on what's going to get you to where you need to go. And you might change your process slightly and then waste a day because of that. And that obviously slows you down. And so there's a lot of experimentation... And it's going to be interesting to see where it goes from this, because - are we all going to become super-personalized, to where these prompts work for me and the way I interact with it, but they're never going to work for you, Jerod, or you, Adam? We're all going to have our own bespoke things, just like we all have our bespoke timelines right now, with the social algorithms and all that... Nobody is looking at the same things. Now we're not even like coding the same way. And that could be super-interesting. \[00:54:31.23\] And I have this -- this is a tangent, but I have this future casting thought going way down... Like, what if in a year from now these LLMs are just so optimized, and they just -- I don't write code anymore, I just talk to the LLM, and the LLM maintains code for me. And what it's actually maintaining is just like Wasm bytecode. And when I need to step in and help it debug, it's going to give it to me in TypeScript. And Jerod's going to come in and be like "Oh, can you help me with this?" and it's going to give it to you in Ruby, because that's more tailored for you. And it's literally the same code over and over. We're just going to not even speak the same languages anymore...

Right.

It could be interesting.

That's a cool idea. I'll never have to see TypeScript again. \[laughter\]

Zing...! That really is cool though, because that's essentially what we do now. It kind of all goes to some degree to bytecode. There's a layer. The layer I speak, the layer you speak... We're just speaking different languages, in some cases, different protocols, different access levels to the file system or whatever you might have... That's already kind of happening now. It's kind of personal preference, I suppose, in that case... There's something to this phenomenon happening where we're working differently. Like, the perception of effectiveness, the perception of speed, or... What's the true terminology, Jerod?? Like, improvement, efficiency? What was the terminology we're trying to like really capture here? In terms of like goodness. Is it really better or worse?

Productivity is what they called it.

Productivity. Thank you. Okay. Because like you said, Nick, in three days you did something that you would have probably done in weeks or multiple weeks, and potentially didn't even tackle, because it was just too challenging for you without some support, whether it's human or not. And that to me is pretty wild. You feel for the moment like you're enjoying the work more, so you feel more effective, you feel more productive; even though your output is roughly the same, you're spinning your wheels, but you're spinning them in ways that you're getting traction, even if you're incrementally moving forward, it feels like... This perception from the humankind, it's like "Yeah, I feel better about the work I'm doing. I'm enjoying it." Like you said, Jerod, where Steve kind of helped you have permission to play with this and then have fun with it. It's like it opened up this new human layer, which is enjoyment. Kind of necessary.

For sure. And to that, I feel that there is a reckoning coming with that.

Well, speak of it.

Scary. Warn us.

Get the reckoning.

I've been more on the fearful side for most of this AI hype. Like, I don't want it to -- I don't want it to take my job, and I don't want it to do everything... I don't like the feeling that "Oh, congrats, you solved this hard problem." "Hey, Claude solved it. I kind of just put my name on it, you know?" I don't like that. But at the same time, I'm like "This is kind of the new reality, and I can move faster because of this." I've always thought of myself as like a craftsman, for a lack of a better term.

Sure.

\[00:57:55.19\] I really like the code, and solving the problems in there. And I'm like focused on the micro problems, and less focused -- not less focused, but that's where I really get my enjoyment and my dopamine hit, is from the little micro problems that I solve in the code. And then you have the macro, the app; you've created a feature in the app, or you've fixed this major bug, or something like that. That's more macro. And I think that as we're going through this transition, every engineer is going to have to -- this is the reckoning, they're going to have to figure out, "Can they transition to solving the higher level problems, and letting the AI handle the lower level things?" And of course, reviewing it, and you keep it up like that... But are you going to get your dopamine hit from that? And are you going to be able to transition your workflow to potentially managing fleets of these agents as an engineer? And that's like what a software engineer is now. And if you can, that's great. If that's not interesting to you, then maybe people start self-selecting out of this field, and that's where the AI is taking our jobs.

The reckoning.

Yeah.

Right.

I don't know how it's going to go, but I could see it going that way.

I could tend to agree with that. I think that I have both perspectives, and so I think probably why I was mostly trepidatious, and now I'm just more excited... Because I also have been focused on the quality and the craftsmanship, and really the maintainability of software my entire career. "Slow down to go faster" is one of my mottos. And I think that motto might not matter anymore, because as the quality of these tools improves - which so far it has; I mean, what I'm using today versus last year, versus two years ago is way better in terms of the actual output and its ability to write code, and to solve problems. And if that trajectory continues, not even at a parabolic pace, but just even like in a linear pace, we won't have to maintain software like we have in the past, especially as the price of compute trends as close to zero as it can... Which is what all the investment money is going to. It's like "Let's get some more free energy and let's come up with ways of doing this that doesn't tax the grid so much" etc. Those are all just like time and money, and innovation will solve those problems to where it becomes very, very cheap to have very capable coding agents working for you. So along those two lines, why maintain software like we used to? Like, why care so much about the craftsmanship? Do you actually have to slow down to go faster? And maybe you just go faster to go faster, and replace when necessary. Build modularly and replace parts that need replacing. And at the end of the day, the reason why I cared about the maintainability was because I wanted to be able to continue to go fast over the long time period. Like, everybody starts off fast. That's why they call them sprints, and that's why we have spikes, and proof of concepts, and startups that just ship, ship, ship, ship. That same startup that was just shipping like crazy 18 months ago, they start to crawl because of the maintenance problem. Well, if that problem gets solved - and this is assuming that that will get solved - then at the end of the day, I just wanted to go fast and get stuff done and have the productivity. Like, that's what I was after. I just realized pretty young in my career that you couldn't just accumulate technical debt nonstop in order to go fast. Like, it just wasn't smart to do. And so I would often sell that to people like "Hey, if you want to build a thing with me, let's build it, but we're going to build it right. That way you can continue at a pace that's sustainable." But at the end of the day, I was after the end, not the means. And so what I really like is to be productive and stay productive... And at least for now, that's what I'm enjoying, especially as a busy person. It's like, I don't have eight hours a day to write software. I might not write any software. But with Claude Code, I might write some software today, even though I'm not going to be writing it. For me, that's super-exciting. And so I can see a world where that's what really matters, is to move up, get more abstract, less hands-on, but more productive, and more software at the end of the day. \[01:02:33.12\] So I've been of two minds, but I'm leaning more towards that mind of like "Okay, let's just embrace this and see what we can get done." Or as I said in News yesterday, "Let's get cooking."

You know, all of that excites me. Like, I literally -- when I look at my arm, I've got like chills. I'm so excited about that future. I'm just -- I'm down for it. Except...

Uh-oh...

Except. This goes back to that monkey theory I shared, I think less eloquently - let me try again - on a previous podcast. You have a room where monkeys are locked in it. And there's a ladder, and it's fixed in place, vertical. Can't fall over. And it's got bananas. Monkeys love bananas, right? They're at the top of this ladder, right? What do monkeys do? They crawl. They're pretty easy to crawl. They're pretty strong. Pretty good at this stuff. So these monkeys, they're brand new to the room, brand new to the ladder, they love bananas. They know all this. This is their instincts. They're going to crawl that ladder to get the bananas. But they start getting sprayed. Fiercely, harsh. Like, it hurts bad. Some of them may get a banana and they're excited about it. Most of them are like "Nah, man. That hurts too bad. I ain't trying again." Like "I'll try one more time", and they get blasted. They try one more time, they get blasted. I'm elongating the story, just for emphasis.

\[laughs\]

So these monkeys learn, this initial group of monkeys learn that "Banana good. Ladder gets me there. Water hurts. Don't go do it because the water hurts." And so they get trained "Don't go and get these bananas." And then they incrementally swap one of those monkeys out with a new monkey that knows the old instinct; doesn't know about the water splashing and the spring and the hurt, they just know banana again. But they come into this group with a previous knowledge, and the old group's like "No, no, no, no. You can't get those bananas." The monkey's like "Why?! Bananas are great. Ladder's there, crawl, banana." "Water, spray, hurt. Not good." Anyways, I'm entertaining myself as I'm telling this story.

Are these cavemen, or...?

\[laughs\] They're not very smart, but they're very smart.

I get it.

They've suddenly become cavemen. Long story short, over time the monkeys teach the new monkeys coming in "Don't go for them bananas. Don't do that anymore." And so I juxtaposed that against this idea that you want this world - and I agree with that world, Jerod. I think that's great that we transcend the need that my abilities to write software well is predicated on my ability, my personal ability to maintain that software. So this a-ha moment you came to was essentially like "Okay, this new world doesn't have to be constrained by me." It can be constrained by my brain, but my ability was what you're coming to. It's like, I don't have to be the person maintaining all this code anymore. Or - and you said this, and clarify if I'm wrong - is that you said that you don't even need to understand the code anymore? Did you say that? I'm pretty sure you did.

I don't know what I said. I said a whole bunch of crap. But probably.

Okay. Did you hear that, Nick? That he didn't really need to understand the code anymore, and he was okay with that?

At which point? Like today?

At some point. At some point along this journey. It could be a year from now. At some point, you're okay with letting loose, not having to understand all the code.

Oh, yeah. Just let loose and just vibe it up.

Okay, so the long monkey story, all this detail...

Nick's sweating... \[laughs\]

...to get to this point - I don't know if I want to live in a world where we no longer understand the code we write. Like, what happens when we can't understand this code anymore?

Oh, yeah.

And the only way to knowledge of what it's doing is through an AI that we think is for us.

That doesn't have our best intentions.

Yeah, I mean we think it's for us and we're designing it, and so we're sort of designing it for us... But what if we get to a point where these monkeys that says "Banana good", but the old monkey's like "Nah, banana bad."

\[01:06:12.05\] Oh, we've solved that.

We've solved that.

We have. We just don't have new monkeys coming in.

That's right, no new monkeys. \[laughter\]

To be clear, that's not a good thing, but that's what it feels like...

We are the last generation of code monkeys.

I get what you're saying though, for sure. Right now we're focused on the artifact.

Yes.

The algorithm, the file, the module, whatever. We're focused on that as the outcome. The thinking's the valuable part. And the thinking is what the LLMs just can't do very good right now, and maybe ever. I don't know. And that's where we'll always be able to guide it. That's like the reckoning. You have to shift. Am I more focused on the artifact, or do I feel fulfilled because I use my thinking brain?

Right. I don't know if the thinking is actually the differentiator. I would slightly augment that and say our context plus taste is what makes us different. Whereas -- of course, we can say "Well, what does thinking really mean? Are they actually thinking?" Well, they're just brute-forcing a bunch of word autocompletions. Fine. But it approximates our thinking, and a lot of times they actually have better ideas than us... Because they're like "I wouldn't have thought of that. Great idea." Or I'm like "I wouldn't have thought of that. Terrible idea." That's judgment, that's context, and that's taste. I think that's what makes us different moving forward, more so than the thinking. I'm just using different words to describe the same thing that you were describing, so I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. But I don't know, Adam, I feel like maybe you're anthropomorphizing these things too much. Like, you're assuming --

Describe.

Well, you say like we think they're on our side, or something. And you're getting very much in the T2 territory here. I don't think they're sentient.

I mean, I was decompressing a longer version...

\[laughs\]

I mean, I was saving us from one more monkey story, okay?

Okay. Well, thank you. Save us from as many monkeys as need be. So I don't think that at a certain level of software quality that can be objectively tested as best of our ability, produced on our behalf by AI models and agents into the future. I don't think not having to look at the code, or know what the code does, whatever I said, is all that big of an issue. How is it different than assembly code, which I've never looked at in my entire life? Like, at the end of the day, you could say "Well, you never look at the assembly. You don't really know what it's doing, because you don't look at it."

It's true. Good point.

It's like, no, I don't. But I have it translated into Ruby for me at the last second, so I can read it and then put it back into whatever form they want it in.

You know, maybe I'll take a step back then... So this is a great exercise of a volley. And so what you've just said, basically, is that we can understand the code because it can now be spoken to us in a language that we understand. So just because we don't understand byte code or assembly anymore doesn't mean it can't explain it to us in a different language, which is actually a programming language, or potentially in English, like a reverse prompt. Like, "Here's your code." Here's a non-prompted response, essentially. This is how it works. And so you want to get back to this non-deterministic reproducibility. If they get so good at coding brand new things, this brand new module and maintainability goes out the window - well, now all I have to use is the language I know, which is English, to get the software I want, which is something I do not understand. I don't know, that computes to me, but I just wonder, will we be motivated as a human race to have a certain amount of people, call them scientists, call them whatevers, that just have to maintain this intellectual knowledge to the point they always know? Like, there's a subset of group that's always going to know.

Hm... We have those today, they're called graybeards.

The graybeards.

\[laughs\] You know, the ones who still know assembly. They still write assembly on 8 p.m. on a Saturday, when they have their glass of spindrift.

\[laughs\]

\[01:10:13.24\] Yeah, I don't know. Obviously, we're getting hypothetical at this point... I think that you do want to have some people who are still in touch with the underpinnings of our society - yes, I would say that's probably wise to keep some people there. But how many generations do we go down? That's when it starts to get disconnected. Because if you're talking our kids, fine. Our kids' kids? Maybe. Our kids' kids' kids? I don't know. It's going to get pretty weird.

Well, even think about that - kids' kids' kids, you can almost... Not quite, but you can almost run that test now. So how many generations can you go back to like your great-great-grandfather? Did you meet your great-great-grandfather?

No.

Or grandmother? I didn't either. Nick, did you?

No.

Okay, so how many back is that, great-great? That's --

Three.

...my dad's dad, my dad's dad's dad... That's three back.

Yeah.

Pretty easy to get to. That's not even six.

No, three is not six.

No, that's not even six.

It's not seven either. \[laughter\]

Just so you're clear. I mean, three, not six.

Yeah, not six. Don't double it on us, okay?

I'm stuck in my monkey speak over here...

Monkey like banana.

Yeah. Monkey, ladder, banana, good. Water, bad. Water real bad. \[laughter\]

I feel like there's some sort of like PTSD going on where maybe Adam was experimented on, and he's still just like acting it out later...

Maybe so. Maybe so.

You're very good at this.

The point I'm getting to is my grandfather's dad - I can't even relate to the challenge of that person's life.

Right. Completely different lives.

Except for the human struggle. That's the constant. It's like, we will always struggle in humanity, whether it's relationally, interpersonally, inside yourself...

All the ways that humans struggle.

...psychologically... There's always that struggle there. But I can't understand that person's struggle. And our lives are so dramatically different that I almost wonder if he wouldn't care. Maybe that's what you're saying, you just don't care, because you can't understand contextually the empathy required, or the care required beyond being human... For the task challenge. Not the life challenge, but the in the moment challenge. It's just too far fetched.

Well, we'll probably get stuck right where we are, but our kids' kids' kids, they'll have a completely different context. And we've likened it in the past to driving a stick shift versus an automatic, and how there's a generation of people... Now it's more just like preference and hobby, and of course, you can still drive stick shifts, you can find them, you can buy them, you can build them... And there's people that only drive a stick shift. They're very rare. But 99% of humanity does not know how a transmission works, and the difference. Like what a stick shift was. "You mean you had to actually shift the gears?"

Wait, what is a stick shift?

I don't know, I'm just making stuff up here, hoping that you guys don't notice.

I drove a stick shift.

Today?

No. When I first learned to drive...

"No. At one point in my life..."

I drove one once... Well, more than once. On a few occasions. My friend had one, and so I had to drive his... And then one of my early jobs had a stick shift. And little arrogant Jerod was too egotistical to say -- when someone says "Can you drive a stick?", my ego was so big, I just said yes.

Oh, gosh...

And I had never done it before. I had watched people do it... And so I had to just figure it out on the road, which was a terrible day... But that's arrogance and youth, eternal companions. Anyways...

\[01:13:55.06\] I do think that with how fast you're able to churn out code now... And you're potentially looking at it less; you're definitely looking at parts of it less. Like, just trusting... Yeah, it just works. That's making me realize that, for the most part, the code I get paid to write...

It's pretty boring.

I'm on the assembly line. This is not handcrafted, custom furniture. This is an assembly line where I've got to get it out the door.

Right.

And it's helping me to like come to terms with that. It's been there all along, but it's just like... Yeah, that's true.

And I think that's what we're going to be automating, is the assembly line of software, and the assembly line workers... Whereas like we're not going to replace why the lucky stiff, for instance.

Yeah.

I was going to say RIP. I don't think he's dead, but he left the internet... That guy used code as art. And he wasn't just a craftsman, he was an artist. He probably still is. I'm still using past tense, because I haven't seen him for years. Just for instance. Or somebody like Ken Thompson, who's just like building the foundational bits, and is just an amazing savant of software. Not replaced. Still necessary probably, for a while... Like, the people who designed certain protocols... You know, whoever is out there doing HTTP three, or four. I should say four. H3 is out there, right? QUIC. Like, those things... So code as art, low level bits of like hardcore engineering... Although I've heard some hardcore engineers confess certain areas of their code were just completely vibe coded... Because it's like, take this thing and -- because you can kind of approximate it with it. But the point stands. I'm not saying they never go away... I mean, I don't think code as art ever goes away, but...

I have a counterpoint.

Go ahead.

You.

What?! \[laughs\] I'm never a counterpoint. I haven't been one yet. How so?

I heard you on a podcast... I don't know, I don't remember which one. But as you've been going along this journey, you at some point talked about using this to like -- the ROI on developing tools for yourself is too high in most cases, so you just don't do it. But now you can, and you have, and you've made like little scripts and tools. That's like the artisanal coding that you were talking about, and you totally automated that away.

Right.

So you're not like the furniture person working at the factory who comes home and hand creates the chair that they're sitting on.

So I guess I kind of agree... It depends on what you mean by "automate away". Like, I'm doing more of that stuff now.

Yeah.

I'm just not physically typing the keys. But I actually have more scripts today than I would have had without these tools. You know what I'm saying? So I'm actually doing more of that... Not less. So you're saying I'm automating it away, I guess, because I'm not writing it.

I mean, I guess I was taking it in terms of like still being the craftsman working on these tools.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Making your own tools.

When you have the time, you're not going to sit down and be like "I'm not going to use Claude today."

Oh no, I'm never going to just sit down and write a nice function anymore... You know?

Right.

I'm not.

Oh, no, no, no...

Unless I'm going to submit it to HOT or NOT, you know...

Pretty soon you're going to become dependent. You're gonna be like "Oh, I wrote this, but... Hang on. I've got to just check with Claude to make sure that it's okay..."

\[laughs\] Lose all my confidence. As a young man, I would have just deployed this. But today, I'm going to check with my overlords. Yeah, possibly. But I am excited also about more artisanal software. This is why the headliner in this week's News - which wasn't really news - was all about an app can be a home-cooked meal. And this idea of like we can build one-off, personalized apps and scripts, and websites that we would never have had the time or the ability to in the past. And if it didn't scale, you weren't going to build it... You know, that's the kind of mindset I would have to have, is like, if I can scale this to 15 people, then it's worth it. But if it's just for me, it's just way too much work to build that thing. Or if it's just for my family - not worth it. So that calculus completely changes, and now I'm just like "Why not even just give it a try while I'm doing something else? This thing can be vibe coding it..." And maybe it's too hard right now. I mean, there's things that I've tried to build that I'm like "Nah, they can't quite do that yet." And there's other things where I'm like "Yup. Easy. Cool." And I think that explodes. So we're going to have way more of that kind of software, at least in the short term.

\[01:18:37.28\] Yeah. But you're shifting away from the artifact, right? And more towards the outcome. And the outcomes are great, and they're wonderful, and they wouldn't exist without this. But --

But what do we actually want? Do we want artifacts, or outcomes?

I don't know, are you a craftsman...?

I told you, I have two minds on the matter. At the end of the day, I think I always was more about the ends. I always was. I was like "I want the website. I want the plugin. I want the superpowers." And I realized at that time, 2004-2005, up until recently, the actual craft of the software mattered so much to get that thing in a way that it wasn't going to crumble after I ship it to the world. And so that's why I cared about the craft. And I can totally nerd out about the details, and get into the flow state of writing the best quicksort function you've ever seen... I can totally understand the dopamine hits that that provides, because I've done that for years... And so that was why I was of two minds. But what really matters, the dopamine or like the longstanding value that it brings to myself and other humans?

Your fulfillment.

My fulfillment is what matters the most?

Mm-hm... But it can also afford you that. It can be off doing like 90% of the work, and you're sitting there writing one function and being like "I contributed", and you got that dopamine hit, meanwhile it created an entire truck.

Totally. But look at that decal I put on the bumper. \[laughter\] That's all me, baby. That bumper sticker... I came up with that.

I will say, one other thing that's really cool is - like, with this, and with Claude... And I'm sure other ones are like this too, but Claude's the only one I have the most intimate experience with...

Same.

...is that you have all of these secret words that you can use. You can tell it to use subagents, and it will actually like split off into subagents and do things faster. If it doesn't do things right, you can tell it to try hard, and it will reason better. And you can go try harder and you can say "ultra think", and that is the ultimate amount of reasoning that it will do. And so we're finally to this point where we literally have incantations that get us to where we want to go. And if you know these incantations, you are casting these spells --

You're an engineer. A prompt engineer.

Yeah.

That's crazy, man. You like that? I actually --

I hate that.

...that makes me mad. \[laughter\]

He thinks it's cool, though...

I wanted to try hard every time. Like, I just shouldn't have to tell you -- like, now I'm talking to a human again, and it's like "Come on, I shouldn't have to motivate you..."

"You can do this Claude... Go and do it!"

"Try harder."

It's like a programming language that isn't a programming language. Like, you have to just know these keywords, and... And you can read them through the docs probably, but you learn them through --

Trial and error?

Well, trial and error and just like legend that people pass down.

Someone else telling you something.

Yeah.

Yeah... That's a truth that I think is trending downward over time. And I hope that it trends towards nothing. I should not have to tell it to use subagents, I should not have to tell it to try harder, I should not have to tell it... What other things are you telling it?

Ultra think.

\[laughs\] I should tell myself that. Like, when I can't figure something out, "Come on, Jerod! Ultra think!" It's like "Go, go, gadget arm", you know?

Yes, that's what I was thinking.

\[laughs\] I'm gonna start using that. "Come on, Jerod. Ultra think!" Oh, it's interesting times, isn't it?

\[01:22:10.25\] It does kind of make you question the value... There's different layers of value to software. In an enterprise, it's clear what the value is, right? But in personhood, in personal life, like you're suggesting, like, just write this one-off piece of software that satisfies my life... Like you mentioned with this home-cooked meal - I'm so down with that. I'm so down with that, because software is cool, and the whole reason why we're even sitting here is because software is cool. It's not because necessarily we all want to be -- and it may be fun to be a software craftsman, or craftsperson, but we kind of got locked into that mindset because of our limitation of us pushing that ball, maintaining the software. So we're that monkey. Don't climb the ladder. Right? And now we can climb the ladder with no water, and if the water hits us -- we've got different skin now. We've evolved.

Yes.

But software - it is such a powerful thing, obviously... And to give so many more people, almost the entire human race the ability to create software as a home cooked meal I think is a world I want to live in, where people can make and create software that benefits their individual life... And maybe it can go to a scale thing if it needs to, and maybe there's a -- maybe commerce doesn't even matter after that. Maybe that it's successful or financially viable doesn't even matter, because things will evolve to the point where it's just software. It just runs everywhere. It doesn't matter. It's just really ephemeral, or just really blase about how it was created, or what was written in, or... It doesn't even matter. Does the ends work? Does it do its job? Almost like Tron, you know? What did I say --

\[unintelligible 01:23:52.21\]

In Tron it was like -- they were going down a line, looking at each program, and saying "Rectified", or "Deleted." Remember that part in the latest trial when they said that? It's like "You're a bad program. You're not doing your thing. You've got to be rectified. You're gonna get rectified, and come back out." New software that's doing the job, versus "Look how maintainable this thing is." Like, that's a good thing for a human. It's not a good thing for anything else than that, because that's all you care about. It's like, humans care about time. We only have the window of time we have on this Earth. So our finite resource is time. So we care about things that really benefit our moment, and doesn't take away from future moments.

Speaking of time, I think that there is a -- this is the perfect time to cash in on cleaning up all of these AI slop-coded apps, because there is a lucrative business there.

For sure.

Is there?

In a time window.

Oh, yeah. In the current window of time. Yes. AI hero... What do you call it? I don't know. Slop cleanup, aisle nine. Whatever your company is called.

You use AI to clean up AI...

Yup. For sure, there's an opportunity there... For now, until their code is way better than ours. We'll see if that actually happens. But we didn't really rebut this 19% slowdown very much. I mean, we're over here talking about how amazing everything is, but like... Cold, hard facts are saying "Nope." Now, I think there's a few factors that play into that. In fact, we'll link to this blog post called "AI slows down open source developers." Peter Nauer can teach us why, because it goes into details on why this particular set of people in this particular place - some good reasons why they might've been slowed down... Whereas in other areas, in other contexts, you actually are sped up, like Nick confesses to be. So we'll just leave that in the show notes for people to read... But the short of it is - high context people know their software in and out already, and get less value out of having to provide that context to AI... Versus being able to just do it themselves when they have the entire domain in their heads, and they've been working on it forever, perhaps slower with having to wait on a robot to do things when they could just do them themselves. I think that's a generalization of what that argument is. \[unintelligible 01:26:39.28\] played a part, which is why I said it's a slice of developer land, but it's not the whole thing.

Yeah. In terms of the rebut though, I think that sometimes when you do a change that creates efficiency, sometimes there's inefficiency while the system gets recalibrated to become efficient.

Sure.

So I wonder if the perceived advancement in speed to the person and the truth and the data is not accurate. Maybe that's just temporarily accurate. They're actually less efficient, or as efficient, if that's what the data is saying... To be determined if they'll become more efficient. I wonder if that more efficient will actually just come because over time you will recalibrate to this new inevitability of how we work, which is AI is here for everybody. You better use it and get replaced, or use it and replace somebody who doesn't use it. I think that's kind of an interesting take, really... Is that maybe the efficiencies come shortly after, not right away.

Well, after Nick gives you all the magic incantations you have to know, then you get really good at it.

Ultra think...!

Ultra think...! Alright, anything else, or should we say goodbye?

Well, that's it for now.

That sound you hear is the sound of inevitability.

Get them bananas.

Bye, friends.

Bye, friends.