SO much to dig into

So the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey report is out. It’s out there, Adam.

You know, surveys like this are very much needed, I think. It grounds us in our crazy cycles, right?

It does. This is their 15th year doing it, which seems like a lot…

Wow, yeah.

Maybe it took them a while to get this prominent. I mean, if you do something 15 years in a row, you must be doing something right.

They say that.

Or else you’d stop, I think.

They do say that. Or you’re crazy.

Or you’re crazy.

Or you’re crazy, you know?

So this year – I mean, it’s gotten pretty big. It says that they’ve received over 49,000 responses… Which, you know how much they wanted to get to 50,000 and couldn’t quite get there. So that 49,000 is cool, but you know, as the people running that survey, they much would have rather said 50,000.

Yeah. No one would say 49,000. Unless it’s a price and you’re trying to do the 49.5 versus 50, psychological…

Oh, trying to round you up?

Yeah, you know… That’s when it makes sense. But when you’re stats and audience size - you want big.

That’s right. There’s no 1999 here. This is a 49,000+, from 177 countries, across 62 questions, focused on 314 different technologies. And as is obligatory, a brand new focus on - can you guess it?

Maybe it’s… I don’t know. Surprise me, what is it?

AI agents.

Oh, my gosh.

Of course. LLMs, and such like.

I didn’t see it in here yet, but did they talk about their downtrend as a result, too? Or is it “This is just a developer survey”?

Stack Overflow’s downtrend?

Yeah.

I don’t think they want to talk about that at all.

No, I don’t think so either, right?

But it’s real. In fact, they do have an open tab, because I was thinking about that… 49,000 responses. However, Stack Overflow itself is declining, as you said.

Yeah.

Here’s a blog post from Eric Holscher, friend of the show, from Read the Docs. Eric Holscher, Read the Docs.

Read the Docs. And Write the Docs, I believe. Read and write.

Read and Write the Docs. Someone’s got to do both.

Yeah. Why not?

Eric’s a fan of both. He’s been on the pod a few times…

Yeah.

And here he is, talking about Stack Overflow’s decline. Of course, he’s quoting our fellow friend of the show, Gergely Orosz, who I think was just analyzing somebody else’s gist that they dumped. So this is like three layers of inception right here… But the chart is nice, showing monthly questions asked on Stack Overflow, dating back to 2010, pre-2010… And they peaked between 2014 to 2017 at about 200,000 questions asked per month, or answered per month… Just questions per month. Whether or not you get the answer I guess depends. And then it’s been a precipitous decline ever since. Most people blame ChatGPT, but if you look at this chart, it was already on its way down prior to ChatGPT launching in 2023.

Yeah, good point.

But since then, it’s gone way down, like 25,000-ish.

You know, it begs the question… So there’s a place – I mean, prior to AI and prior to let’s just say deep learning and data lakes with lots of knowledge stored in them… I think asking a question to a community like this, like Stack Overflow has provided for many years, has been very pertinent. But what has been your personal experience with that user experience of the “Have a question, find a question, get the answer, apply the answer, move along with your life, because you’re a developer, you’ve got better things to do”? What’s been your experience with that, with them?

With Stack Overflow?

Yeah. What’s been your personal happiness level, I suppose, with the status quo user experience they offered?

So I should say I’ve never been a user. I don’t think I have an account. I’ve never answered a question, I know that…

Maybe that’s not true. It’s been a long time. Maybe I answered one way back in the day. I do not believe I have an account. If I do, it would be news to me. So I’m merely a person who lands there.

Okay.

I’ve heard a lot of the stories about the moderation on Stack Overflow, and the complaints about people’s questions being deleted… And some just draconian moderation around what is a good question, what’s not etc. And of course, I’ve also seen the gamification, and how some people have rose in prominence from it, so there’s also social benefit of using it over time… So I’ve been along for the ride, but I haven’t been a user. I’ve only been a question reader –

Taker.

…yeah, I’m a taker.

Nothing wrong with that. I mean, when you’re a mass appeal website like that, you have to have a large majority of takers, not givers.

For sure.

I’m with you. So you’ve been able to have a profile there, you’ve been able to gamify your involvement, whether it’s an answerer, or a questioner - I don’t know how you would phrase those personas either. But very much so it’s been this really kind of unique world. If you’re a listener out there and you’ve been a gamified, enriched user of Stack Overflow and you love it, let us know. I’m curious what that’s like, or has been like. But to me, I’ve never been like “Oh, I’ve got to go there and answer all the questions I know, so that I can rise to prominence.” I’ve never understood that specific user experience. But I think my experience with Stack Overflow has been generally – I would say on par.

[00:08:10.18] Sometimes you find an answer, sometimes it’s out of date, sometimes you have some responses that bubble up as “Hey, it’s been a year or two. This has changed, this is the new way.” So generally it’s been the prompt before the prompt, so to speak.

Right. Yeah, obviously I’m glad it exists. I wish it would continue to exist prominently. I do not know the details of whatever moderation drama, and… You know, there’s backlash. Even from people who are longtime contributors, I’ve seen them leaving the platform, and so they’ve got their problems. Every website does; it’s a difficult thing, moderation.

However, like most people, even as just a casual user, I’m not using the website anymore. I’m just not landing there. And so that’s a problem.

In fact, Eric, in his post about this says that he’s a little bit worried about something like this happening to Read the Docs… Because obviously, his livelihood and a lot of his life’s work is with Read and Write the Docs… And it’s a very similar situation, a Q&A site or a documentation site. And of course, the LLMs answering our questions for us is the biggest reason probably for Stack Overflow’s decline. And so he’s hoping that doesn’t happen to Read the Docs. But at least when he wrote this, back in January, he says they haven’t really seen a huge decrease in traffic. So it hasn’t happened to them yet, but it is slightly different when you have official documentation for your Python library, versus questions about how to use your Python library. It’s a different beast altogether…

I hope Stack Overflow does not continue to decline. I think it kind of needs to exist. I think the LLMs need it, because it’s a source of truth for them. But the incentives – just like the rest of the web, the incentives to publish are just going away. Like, why would they do that, if they’re not going to get the traffic?

Yeah. I mean, even the reason I mentioned the UX experience is the fact that you mentioned the decline was prior to really this uprise of AI and agents being a thing. It was already in a downward trend, based on Eric’s blog post and Gergely’s illustration, of course. It’s already showcasing that. There was an obvious spike up for COVID whenever that happened, because everyone was trying to figure out everything, right?

Yes…

So obviously, there’s this peak, an unearned potentially peak in user experience, or even just usage… But it was already on this downward trend. So I just wonder, was it a systemic issue with how Stack Overflow works, insofar as that you said it’s needed? Like, we need a source of truth. That’s what docs present, that’s what Stack Overflow has presented in the past, or even now, is this version of what is true in terms of a question a developer asks.

Right. So back to the survey, they have the data, of course, but they also do some editorial, which is nice, and related to Stack Overflow’s decline, on the homepage of the survey you’ll find kind of their editorial, the creators of the survey… Meaning they try to contextualize some stuff and make a few conclusions for the reader. In fact, there’s probably 20 or 30 of them on the homepage, that just randomly refresh, or they switch orders as you refresh the page. So they’re not trying to make one more important than the other. But one of their takeaways from the survey is Stack Overflow is a destination developers visit frequently. I thought that one was funny, because that one almost sounds like a self-serving selection from the data.

[00:12:24.10] Of course, they publish the data as well, and everyone can come to their own conclusions. But connecting the dots and trying to have takeaways is, of course, the interesting part. And many of us don’t have time for that. In fact, if you don’t have time for that - to our listener - of course, we’re here to even read you some of those connections.

So there is a question about Stack Overflow, frequency of visiting Stack Overflow… And of course, on the homepage they create these conclusions, and then you can drill down on the actual chart that that comes from. And they have a few questions like “How long have you had an account on Stack Overflow?” and then frequency of visiting Stack Overflow. And what’s crazy is there’s 45% of the people who answered this survey have had a Stack Overflow account for over 11 years.

Wow.

So that’s like a very dedicated, longstanding group of folks, you know?

Yeah.

And a strong majority, 82% of respondents, visit at least a few times per month, with 25% visiting daily, or more often. So it’s declining, but I think in terms of a community, they’re showing through this data at least - of course, they’re serving their own community, so that’s inherently self-representative, I guess - people are using the site; just not the same numbers they were prior.

76% used the site for more than six years. So you mentioned 45% over 11 years… There’s another stat, 76% having an account for six years or more; it says “or more”. So maybe that’s like 6 to 10, something like that. That’s a lot. I mean, they’re definitely in their echo chamber when it comes to the survey. This is not randos who don’t know Stack Overflow. So this is going to be as truthful as it can be, given the tenure of the account holders. I mean, you’ve got 76% six years or more as an account holder. That’s a lot.

Here’s a funny one. So in the data they provide you the range of responses, and then they also categorize that based on the people responding. And so in this case, they’re categorizing it by age. And so you can look at all respondents, and you can look at age respondents. And the youngest category is age 18 to 24. And in that category, the number of people who’ve been using the website for 15+ years is two-tenths, a fifth of a percent. So what’s 32,578…? That’s how many people took it. Times .002. 65.15, if I’m doing my math right. So 65 people started using Stack Overflow somewhere between the age of three and nine.

Wow.

They would have to, right? Because they’re aged 18 to 24.

Unless they’re lying.

Or they’re just lying. That’s the other thing about surveys, is people just fill in random things…

65 people were – you said nine was the highest age, or five or nine?

It had to be three to nine, because –

Three to nine.

Well, they’ve been using it for 15 years, and they’re age 18 to 24. So three on the low end, and nine on the high end. So can you imagine some three-year-old stumbling across Stack Overflow and signing up? “I’m gonna ahead and…”

“How does this pacifier work, okay? C’mon. How do I get into this?”

[00:16:15.05] [laughs] Yeah. I mean, most of the questions are probably about Roblox, and stuff like that. And Minecraft.

That’s true. That’s true. Yeah. Wow… Very interesting. So definitely some interesting stats coming from that. What about the – what I’m noticing as I go through the different age brackets is really it’s the older generation that has been using it for longer, obviously. So I think 35 to 64 is probably a range of the last 15 years. Because if you were 35, 15 years ago, you were - what, 20 years old? It’s pretty common to pick up Stack Overflow at 20, whenever you were in your junior days, or just getting in development. And 15 years ago - that was 2010? Yeah, 2010. So 2010 was a pretty popular year to use Stack Overflow, I think.

Alright. Well, I thought we would go through some of these conclusions and use those as launching pads to drill down. Was there anything that jumped out at you – I mean, we can go into the AI stuff. Obviously, some of our listeners would love that, and other ones are so sick of it… We could go into technologies, you’re going to have AI in there as well… We could talk about remote work, we could talk about content creation… We could talk about all kinds of things. History… Tools…

Yeah. I want to talk about YouTube, man. Can we talk about YouTube on this? I’m trying to scroll it and keep my context, so forgive me if I get a little discombobulated… I’m looking at two in particular, and I’m thinking about the younger generation, because what – I mean, we can always talk about AI, but I think that that’s an obvious large category to talk about. But I think we’re going to start to see how that is impacting younger developers, those who are coming into software development, whether they’re the traditional engineer type, or someone who’s just throwing together something because they have to build a website for their business, or whatever.

I’m looking at the one that says “Younger developers want developer content with social or interactive formats.” So a little self-serving here. We run a podcast, as you know, Jerod, so we’re on YouTube, and stuff like that…

Sure.

So I’m thinking, where is the young model of who we want to reach and who we want to serve? Because we serve humans, not machines. We use machines to serve humans, and solve problems… But I’m thinking, how are the younger generation going to be impacted by this major change? Thankfully, they still want good developer content. They’re not just saying “Hhey, every LLM give me all the content only.” They want that social nature and they want interactive formats. So that’s one piece of this data puzzle.

And then the other one was the respondents learning to code using YouTube for community more than professional developers. So they’re leaning on this scalable content, maybe even influencer, which I’m not really – we wouldn’t consider ourselves influencers, although we may influence. We’re not considering ourselves the stamp of approval influencer. But it is reassuring that the places that we’re pouring our efforts into is being looked at by the younger generation, the younger developer who’s coming in… Even though AI is coming, and AI is here, and is doing good stuff.

Yeah, so there’s two questions that speak to that, as you said. The first one is “How do you choose to find relevant developer content?” And the Stack Overflow folks say “Well, all age groups want lists and articles”, because everybody loves a good listicle. “Younger developers show a significantly higher interest in more social and interactive formats. For example, 37% of 18 to 24-year-olds want chat with people, not with GPT.” Well, that’s all the kids are saying now. ChatGPT is just Chat now, I’ve learned.

[00:20:24.18] Is that right?

Yeah. “Ask Chat”, that means ChatGPT.

“Ask Chat.” Okay.

That’s what the kids are saying. Compared to only 20% of 55 to 64-year-olds. Do you want chat with people, Adam? Do you want this? I mean, because you’re – okay, you’re not 55 to 64… But we’re between these two groups, you and I.

Yeah.

And young people want chat with people, and old people don’t… As much.

I don’t know… I think with people it’s still a necessary component. I mean, that’s obviously why we have Zulip, that’s why we had Slack… That’s why we went from Slack to Zulip, because we really care about community… So I personally desire that.

Now, am I trying to chat with people more than chat with GPT? I think it depends. I think I want to self-explore as much as possible, and with little to no hallucinations. And I’ve learned to do chat, solo chat let’s just say, with the model, inside of ChatGPT, or Claude, or Grok, or wherever I’m doing it. And I’ll have a certain amount of happiness with that process. And then I have a prompt that is sort of canned. I’ve learned to can it, essentially; it’s become repetitive, so I’m like “Okay, I should probably store this, so I can just copy and paste this in the future.” And it’s this version of summarize what we’ve discussed here, so I can have my XYZ agent review and verify what we’ve found. Because I get to the end of a session and I’m like “This is awesome”, conquering the world… Meanwhile, there’s four core hallucinations in there that just destroy the model…

So getting at the “with people” part, I want to explore self-driven for a bit, with less hallucinations as possible. And then, once I’ve gotten to a certain comfortability with what I’m trying to accomplish in my own mental model or new lexicon I had to learn to do whatever, I would want to have this community of folks to pair with, or spar with, or ask questions of. So I agree with that. I think I want to chat to a certain degree, get some self-assurance, and then expose those ideas to real people, to validate, “Yes, good path”, “No, not good path.”

Yeah, I think a mixture is for the win, for sure. I think they serve different purposes. I certainly enjoy chatting with people generally more, because I can’t easily predict their responses. It seems to me like when I’m looking for advice on how to do something, or a tool to do a thing, I’m perfectly fine with asking Chat. But I don’t find things there unless I’m looking for them. I think people are the best source of unsolicited recommendations. Because if you’re excited about something, you’re just going to find me and come and tell me, right? And we see that all the time in our Zulip, where it’s like “This is cool.” In fact, that’s what I do… Most of my work is finding cool stuff and sharing it with people, a.k.a. Changelog News. That’s unsolicited recommendations, right? Like, okay, you solicited it because you signed up for Changelog News. But if you’re hanging out in Zulip and you’re just part of our community, you may have not wanted to know there’s this cool movie you should watch. Someone’s going to come and tell you. That’s irreplaceable, I think. I mean, you could be like “Hey, every N hours, please send me a recommendation.” You can do stupid stuff like that to imitate it. But when people find useful tools, useful lists, useful long-form articles that really compel them, they’ll share. And I think we need to chat with people for that.

[00:24:18.21] Do you remember – this is really going to date us, Jerod, if you remember this. And I know you do, because we’re old.

Okay. Yes.

Mahalo.

I do. That was Jason Calacanis’ thing, right?

Yeah.

Was it the encyclopedia…?

It was essentially search powered by humans.

Search powered by humans.

So rather than the result –

Right. You ask it, and a human goes and finds it for you.

Right. The list of results wasn’t necessarily algorithmically compounded, and refined etc. It was somebody, a real human, with context… I think it doesn’t scale, but the premise is good, in the fact that you’ve got humanity in this seemingly inhumane process. You search Google, get results; that’s a machine, it’s ranked by some sort of order you don’t even have… It’s a black box, how the results got there. Somebody could have paid, somebody could have paid an SEO engine, somebody could have gamified the thing, and to not earn the number one ranking, or even the top 10 ranking.

But then you go to Mahalo, which was this idea, “Okay, take the same kind of result, the same kind of search term”, or search query, and you put a human in the middle there which says “Rather than return this algorithmic result list that is arbitrary, and black box, and controlled by the behemoth, let’s put it in control of maybe Jerod, a particular human. And their name is on the result. And so it’s owned by a human.” I like that idea. I think I want to see a resurgence of Mahalo in today’s world, personally.

So here’s a question… Why do you think it is that 18 to 24-year-olds want to chat with people more than any other older age group? What is it about that group of folks?

Loneliness. Yeah, I think it’s a lonely world there. I think the more we’re – I mean, this is really getting philosophical, but I think the more… Well, this is 18, right? So these 18-year-olds were probably not just introduced to their smartphone, or to their smart tablet, or whatever you want to describe it as. It’s not a computer anymore. That’s not a computer to people like us. They probably had something for many years, and so they’ve probably already been in this self-isolating framework, or decline, where they’re just socializing less… And if I were 18 to 24, I want friends. I want friends. I don’t want just money. I don’t just want a job that fulfills me. I want the whole kit and caboodle, so to speak. I want to self-learn, because that’s just my personal nature, but I want to socialize. And I personally am the kind of person that needs a sounding board. I need my idea to be reflected off of somebody… And you know this, because we’ve been working together for so long, how I operate. I need somebody to hear my idea. You don’t even have to say, yes, you like it, or no, it’s a bad – just please listen. Just listen. And then I do desire feedback, but you don’t have to. It’s not a requirement. As an individual human, I need to tell another human about my crazy ideas, just to see if there’s any resonance. And if there is, then I’m going to chase that dog. If not - well, the idea dies in my brain, and I move along, and I keep doing my daily thing. So I’m a person who needs other people. So I can empathize with these 18, 24-year-olds that are in a world where they’re more self-isolated than normal, than we ever have in our history.

[00:28:05.18] Yeah. What’s interesting is like the 25 to 54-year-olds all want chat with a bot, and then the olds don’t want that either. I think they’re just grumpy. They don’t want anything anymore.

They’re kind of done.

They’re like “No, we’re good.” This is how you choose to find relevant developer content. So there is a context for this. It’s not just like “Do you like chatbots?” It’s like, “Do you like to find relevant developer content via an AI chatbot?” And I think 55 to 64-year-olds don’t care too much about finding relevant developer content. At least I don’t think I’m going to at that age…

But one thought I had - which, I agree with the loneliness factor - is what about novelty? So I feel like our age-ish is more likely to become infatuated - and I guess I use that word from a lack of thinking of a better word - with AI chatbots, because we remember how bad it was… Remember the bots – maybe you didn’t do this, but when I was a kid, we wanted to talk to a computer. We could never do that. And if you found a chatbot that was anywhere near decent, I would just talk to that thing. Let’s see if it can say this, say that. And they were just like pre-programmed responses back then. It was all deterministic, and they only had so many responses. They were terrible. They didn’t pass the Turing test, that’s for sure.

And so for most of our formative years and up, we’ve been desiring smart computers that can talk to us. And now we have that, and so we kind of want it more. Whereas these young bucks, they kind of grew up with that ability. I mean, it’s gotten better over the last three or four years. It’s gotten way better. But I don’t know, chatbots aren’t all that novel when you’ve grown up in the smartphone era. You’ve had Siri your whole life.

Yeah, the 18 to 24, if you just started recently, then you’re still in that first five years of your journey, which is the fresh part. That’s when you’re learning all of your initial things to consider and concern about for the next 10 years. Yeah, I agree with that. I suppose novelness makes sense. I agree with that.

Then when it comes to YouTube specifically - so back to the other question that’s relevant to this YouTube topic… Is this the one you’re looking at, community platforms?

It’s a summarization of it. So the question in particular was – it’s kind of hard to search, I think. It was – let me scroll back. “Respondents learning to code use YouTube for community more than professional developers.” So they’re using this algorithmic feed and search to find content… Versus, “Hey, Jerod, you’re a friend of mine. Where do you get your content?” So they’re going there. That was the one, and then the other one was “Younger developers want developer content with social or interactive formats.”

Right. Which is the one that we’re just looking at. That first one comes from this particular question. When you click the link, it goes to here.

Gotcha.

And the question was “Which community platforms have you utilized considerably or consistently in the past year, and which would you like to use next year? Select all that apply.” And that’s where they’re drawing this from. And so, again, broken out, this time not by age, but by professionals that use AI, and learners that use AI, and write-ins.” Oh, so you can write in. Did anybody write in Changelog…?

That’s almost non-existent, really. Mastodon, Lobsters, Matrix, Lemmy, Discourse… Mastodon’s on there twice.

Yeah. These are all write-ins. Fediverse.

Lobster’s on there twice. Matrix is on there twice. Lemmy’s on there twice. Fediverse is obviously the undercurrent. It’s all of those things.

[00:31:58.21] Right. So these are the seedy underground where you get 0.02% of write-ins. But back to the major platforms… And so, of course, it’s the Stack Overflow Survey. Stack Overflow’s number one. But specifically, YouTube is up high for all developers, and especially for learning-to-code people. It’s number two at 70%. So 70% of people learning to code will go to YouTube, versus 60% of professional developers will use YouTube. And that tracks with me. I think that the younger generation, of course, will more likely be learning to code. There are people who are older and still learning; they’re transitioning or switching careers. But most learning to code are in that 18 to 30 age demo. And again, YouTube is a primary form of learning for these people. It’s just become a thing you do, right?

Yeah.

Whereas our ages and up, we started with blogs, and forums, and documentation… And many times for me YouTube is just way too slow. I do not want to watch a video that’s been dragged out to 10 minutes on purpose, because 10 minutes is the perfect length of a video, but really the content should be 90 seconds… In order to get one thing out of it that I’m looking for, or to learn something new. I’m less likely to do that than I am a blog post that I can scan quickly, and look at some pictures, and then decide if I want to dive deeper. I’m not saying I don’t do that with YouTube, I’m just less likely to. But I think that calculus has flipped as you go down the age brackets.

Thankfully. I mean, I’m surprised - not really, but kind of surprised - Stack Overflow is so high. I don’t know if they…

It’s a Stack Overflow survey.

Maybe because it’s the echo chamber, it makes sense for it to be so high.

Sure.

I think if they bust out the echo chamber, it’s going to be drastically lower than that. I am happy… I mean, it’s really wild to see GitHub and YouTube compete. Such a uniquely different platform.

Yeah, I wouldn’t even put those in the same category.

No. But they compete. I guess they’re both social, so there you go.

Right. I mean, where else can you go in the world where you can self-publish, for the most part, without any real censorship? I mean, there’s obviously copyright…

There is some censorship, but…

…TMCA… There is definitely, I would say socially acceptable censorship, some socially unacceptable censorship when it comes around politics… But we’re not talking about politics generally in this podcast, and generally around software development, generally. I mean, it becomes political at some point, as code and –

Yeah… I think most coding channels don’t have any issue with that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So I mean, for the most part, you have an unfettered ability to publish video, as well as you want to or as poor as you want to. So I think with that kind of platform, it makes sense to me to see that be so high. And thankfully, chaptering… So for me, I’m with you in the way you responded, except for if I find a 10-minute video and it doesn’t have chapters, I’m bailing.

Sure.

If it does have chapters, and I think that – and I don’t know how to describe this litmus test I go through, but for some reason there’s this way to discern as a human whether something is good or bad, or for me or against me. So in that reptilian brain version of Adam, when he’s watching YouTube videos, he’s thinking about that.

“Chapters good. Oh, chapters bad.”

Yeah.

[laughs]

So chapters are a must for me. And if it’s a 10-minute video, and I think “Well, this probably took about two or three minutes to explain”, I’ll look for the chapters, or the chapters that go past the intro, or the “Who I am, and why I do what I do.” And I appreciate all that. I’m a diehard fan. I want to hear – that’s how I became a fan of Techno Tim. Timothy Stewart, he’s a friend of ours now. I was a watcher like everybody else, but then I became a friend and I said, “Hey, let’s talk on a podcast. Let’s be friends”, and we’re friends now.

[00:36:11.12] I will still watch his stuff, and I’ll go past the preamble. And he’s cool with that. Why? Because we’re friends. I don’t need the “I’m Tim, or Techno Tim, this is where I came from, this is my context…” No. Just take me right to the “TrueNAS, don’t fail, how do I configure it” scenario. And thankfully, he’s of the chaptering mindset where he chapters. So YouTube must have chapters if there’s any length of video whatsoever for me to get my attention. Unless it’s like golf content. I’ll watch that.

[laughs]

I’ll watch that 45 minutes straight, no problem.

Oh, yeah…

I mean, I waste a lot of time watching golf content.

Especially if you need a power nap. Speaking of chapters, we got some props, dude. We got some props in Denver, from a listener who attended the live show for our chapters, which was nice. Because you know, we do those with love. We do those because –

Yes. We care.

…we are now chapter snobs… But we don’t always know if other people are – we know that some people like them. We’ve heard some things. But it’s always nice to have reinforcement learning of “Hey, I love your guys’ chapters. They’re so on point.” He turns his nose up at people that don’t have them on their podcast now, now that he’s learned the better way… Him and I had some camaraderie around that. Can’t remember his name right now. He was the fellow who gave us a hiking recommendation. I can picture your face.

Jim? Was it Jim?

No, it wasn’t Jim.

Okay.

Maybe it was. I don’t know. We met a lot of people. Here’s a couple of shout-outs… Names I do remember. So at the meetup on Friday night, there were three, I think, randos that came. And very cool.

We say that with love, right? Can you explain just the randos with love, just for those who are not getting that insider joke?

First of all, randos is part of one of our Changelog & Friends theme songs… Adam and Jerod and Some Other Rando. Because we usually have a third, or sometimes a fourth, although today was just the two of us. And so that got worked into a BMC song that we play sometimes on our show. And then we also invited a bunch of Denver locals to the show, people who aren’t necessarily listeners… And so some of them came, some of them didn’t… It’s not easy to get outside your comfort zone and go to a meetup of a bunch of software podcasters on a Friday night knowing nobody. They didn’t even know the show, some of these guys, until the day of.

We didn’t even have signage. We’re just like “Show up.”

We had nothing.

“Hopefully you’ll find us.”

You said “If you can’t find us, just start asking people if they listen to the Changelog podcast.” [laughs]

That’s right.

It’s not really helpful advice. And yet they did. That was very cool. It takes guts. So shout-out to Aaron, Randy, and Pedro, and I think Trevor… Although he might be a listener. I think Trevor’s a listener. Those three aren’t even listeners. Maybe they are now. But they just came out and hung out, and they came to the show. I thought that was pretty cool. It takes guts to do that, and so we appreciate it.

It does.

I think they had fun, so I think it was worth the discomfort.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. Names from Friday night, I don’t remember any of them. So good job for you.

Do you remember Randy, Aaron, and Pedro?

Probably, but not by name. I’m so sorry.

[laughs]

I mean no offense, obviously…

That’s why there’s two of us.

It’s easy for me to get overwhelmed in public-facing scenarios, because I feel so much pressure to give my full love, I would say. I’m a giver. It takes a lot out of me. I’m not an extrovert, I’m an introvert that gets depleted through social interaction, not invigorated. I will say though, I was riding a high, so there’s a part of that that’s not true. I do get fueled, but I also get equally depleted.

Break: [00:40:06.02]

Well, let’s change our focus to some technology here, still avoiding the AI topic, and let’s talk Python. So one of the things they had is this admired and desired question where they asked people about certain tags, meaning like Stack Overflow tags, so technologies usually, or concepts represented by a tag, that the respondents desired or admired. And the distinction - I have to go read it, again because I didn’t totally… It’s like admired – okay, I’ll read their words. “To better gauge hype versus reality, we created a visualization that shows the distance between the proportion of respondents who want to use a technology that’s desired.” So you desire to use it. “And the proportion of users that have used the same technology in the past year, and want to continue using it.” That’s admired. Did you track that?

I’m tracking it.

So I can be like “Desired - Rust.” But I had never really used it, so I can’t admire it, because that would require use. That’s how they’re separating the hype cycle. Because I could be hyped about it –

It’s a connection to the hype, essentially.

Yeah.

It’s making hype real.

Yeah, exactly. And from that set, I want to talk about UV. UV is a Python package manager built in Rust, and it’s the most admired Stack Overflow tag this year. UV. Have you heard of UV, Adam?

I have not heard of UV.

Okay, so –

In this context, no. But in other contexts, yes.

You know ultraviolet.

Yes.

Alright, so I haven’t used UV, so I guess I desire it more than I admire it…

We do desire it. We think the way you install Python packages is weird.

Exactly.

We know that.

Yeah. So this is why I’m excited, because this has been a long-standing bugaboo for the Python community, and for the community that has to use Python because they’re trying to do other stuff. And Python is so prevalent, right? It’s like, package management is weird; requirements.txt etc. The weirdness of that. Pip, and the other stuff… We made a whole show with our friend Brett Cannon just like telling us how to do it right, because it’s weird.

And UV is a relatively new technology, that’s a better Python package manager, by Charlie Marsh. Charlie Marsh, a developer who’s building Astral, which is high-performance tools for Python, in Rust… Of which UV is one. And he’s won (oh, see what I did there?) the hearts of many Stack Overflow respondents and just developers in general. People really love UV. It’s solving their problem. And - did you know this, Adam? Charlie will be on the podcast in September. So he’s coming up. He’s going to be joining us. That’ll be fun.

I didn’t know that.

Yeah. So there’s a teaser in there.

I’m excited about that. Two months from now.

But yeah, 74%, the most admired. I mean, he’s beating out large language models. He’s beating out Tailwind. He’s beating out Delphi.

Yeah.

Wow. A lot of people probably don’t know what Delphi is. He’s beating out Polars. I don’t even know what Polars is.

[00:46:15.00] Even Ollama.

He’s beating them all, man. Charlie Marsh and UV winning. Winning.

So there’s obviously the context of UV, but I think just this spectrum of desire and admire - I think that’s a really interesting measure, because that’s hype and reality. Hype versus reality, is what that essentially stands for in my brain.

Yeah, because desired is kind of the hype, and admired means “No, you’re actually using it.” You still like it [unintelligible 00:46:44.22]

Yeah. You bought the hype, and you tried it, and you’re using it, and you’re like “This was what they said it would be, and I agree. I’m going to keep using this thing.” So going back to your desire for Stack Overflow to remain, this is a reason why I would want it to remain. I don’t know where we can get this data otherwise. Maybe the LLMs will expose this to us, and maybe with a much larger and maybe potentially more accurate dataset… But this kind of range here alone from the desired and admired is cool.

It is cool.

Yeah. I mean, this is signal versus noise. This is what we’ve tried to produce since our inception, which was open source is moving fast, there’s so much happening out there… What’s worth your attention? It has always been our thesis of content. And I like this. Obviously, thank you for getting him on in September and all that good stuff, because we get to examine this desire versus admire scenario and what exactly is happening there. But it’s a cool measure.

It is a very cool measure. And it seems like UV itself has grown as a way of solving the Python problem. Python continues to grow… So in the programming, scripting, and markup languages section, Python is capturing almost 58% of all respondents using it, behind only SQL.

Yeah, databases.

HTML, which is – of course… Yeah, databases, and then the web. So HTML, CSS… And number two is 62%. And then, of course, JavaScript, which has eaten the world, and continues to, is used by 66% of respondents. I assume that includes TypeScript, since I don’t see TypeScript as its own category. Good job, surveyors.

Oh, it is there.

Some surveyors actually split those into two… Oh, is it?

It’s there, 43%.

Yeah. See, that’s weird.

It blended in.

It did blend in.

Well, if you add those two together, it’s tremendous.

That’s like 100%.

Yeah, it’s huge.

So if you add JavaScript and TypeScript, you’re at 100%. Now, some of those people are using TypeScript, but they also answered yes on JavaScript, because they know… [laughs] I mean, everybody pretty much knows.

Or somebody only entered JavaScript because they thought it meant both.

Exactly.

Is that what you meant? Yeah.

And then later they saw TypeScript, and they’re like “Oh, I should mark that one, too.” Someone needs to fix this bug. They need to make a category called “TypeScript, not JavaScript”, or I don’t know, “JavaScript, not TypeScript.” Anyways…

So you have that separation, yeah.

So Python though saw a 7% point increase over 2024 to 2025.

That’s a lot.

That’s a pretty big increase, especially for a language that’s been around for like 30 years, right?

Scroll down to the number of people who submitted to this one. I can’t see it in my view. Okay, so 31,700 responded to this question, which is 64% of the total respondents of the whole survey. I don’t know about you, but I feel like the web is kind of default. We should keep measuring it, of course, but I’m not surprised it’s up there at the top, because what else do you choose? There is no other choice besides HTML, CSS, and then obviously JavaScript.

[00:50:15.01] So I feel like those are naturally going to be at the top. So Python kind of is the true number one, aside from SQL, which is more and more understanding of databases, which totally makes sense as we move into the next era of all the things. Databases have always been there, but they’ve been super-prominent as companies, open source, etc. for the last decade. But Python has been steadily growing, year after year.

Yeah. And I think that that trend actually shows up in another question about web frameworks and technologies… Because on that one we have Node.js at number one, with 48.7%, React number two, 44.7%, then jQuery number three. Hello, jQuery. Hello, darkness, my old friend… But the interesting rise here is FastAPI, which is a Python-based web framework. It has had a five-point increase over the last year. So this is a significant shift up for FastAPI, which I had previously not heard of, until maybe like six months ago. And that’s because people are building more Python stuff, with APIs, and MCP, and that kind of thing.

Right. They’re not having to worry about the interface. The interface is somewhere else. It’s the conduit of the data that they’re trying to engineer around.

Yeah. So Python continues to grow, despite being dominant. Pretty cool… Pretty accomplished… What else? What else is interesting here? Do we broach the AI tooling topic, or do we just continue to avoid it for now?

I just live in the world, man. I just do what I’ve got to do. If I have to talk about it, I do. If I don’t, then I don’t. I’m cool with it.

Alright. Well, let’s start with an anecdote, because I feel like we’ve been very bullish of late, maybe because I have been more bullish of late than I was…

I’ve had the ability to also be bullish, because I’ve already been bullish.

You’ve been bullish the whole time.

I can pile on.

Yes. And I’ve been singing Claude Code’s praises quite a bit. And here’s a story… So I think it was last show, after we quit recording with Nick Nisi… We had just talked for a long time about my new Claude Code habit, and how much Nick is using it, etc. etc. Ultrathink, if you recall that conversation…

I tried that recently.

Did it work?

I mean, I got a result… I was happy with it… I want to think that my “Ultrathink!” had something to do with it. I don’t know, though.

So after that conversation, we’re hanging out with Nick in the post show, and we’re talking about CPU.fm coming soon… We now have a design. We haven’t been completely dragging our feet, just sort of dragging our feet, but we’re making progress. And we’re telling Nick that it’s time for me to take the design, which is in Figma, and put it into our Rails application, so we can get this sucker out there. And I said “Nick, I don’t want to write any code.” Do you remember this, Adam? I think I told both of you guys.

Yeah. I thought it was hilarious.

“How can I do this without writing a single line of code?” I was very hyped. And Nick said “Well, there’s a Figma MCP server.” And so you turn that on, and you point Claude Code at your design file or your project, and then you tell it to turn that into a web page. Well, that’s what I did this morning. I turned it on - only it wouldn’t turn on, because I needed to first upgrade our plan… Because Figma needs to make money. And so we went from starter/free to pro. $20 a month for me, $20 a month for you… Spoiler, we’ll be turning this off soon… [laughter]

One-month upgrade.

[00:54:22.23] Yeah, one-month trial.

I hate those annual plans, that require [unintelligible 00:54:26.28]

I know. They get you. Because they save you 16%, and you’re like “I don’t want to spend $900 right now.” So I went with the monthly, $20 a month. I had to turn us both on, because we both actively use it. And that allowed me to get inside of Figma and turn on the MCP server. This is my first MCP server, people, so here’s my experience. And I went to Claude Code and I said “Hey, can you use the Figma MCP server?” And Claude was like “No, I don’t know how to do that.” And so I taught it how to do that. And then I said basically that - “Take this design and put it into this Rails index with Tailwind.”

And the first thing it said is “I can’t do that, because it requires way too many tokens.” And so instead of reading the entire – because the whole web page is one Figma project, and I pointed it at the entire thing at first. And it said “Instead of that, I’m going to take a picture of it, and then I’ll ingest the picture, and then I’ll reproduce the picture.” And I said, “Okay, fine.”

“Good for you, go do it.”

“Go do it.”

“Well, however you do what you do, do it.” Right?

So it goes away, it probably takes like 45 seconds, maybe a minute, I don’t know…

Really?

Yeah. And it writes a new Rails view, and all the CSS, or the Tailwind classes, or whatever, whatever, whatever… And it like triumphantly declares success. Now it says “Reload that page and see what you think.” It was complete dog trash, dude. It was like a child –

Oh, my gosh…

It was like a – you take like a Picasso… Because this is a high fidelity comp. You’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it. This is a very nice website. It’s like taking a child and saying “Hey, can you reproduce that Picasso for me in the next 45 seconds?” And then they draw stick figures and stuff and like present it to you. And it’s your kid, so you have to be nice and be like “Oh, it looks good.”

“Such a great effort. I see what you did here.”

But this is so bad, dude. It was so bad.

Yes.

I was so disappointed. And then I was like “Well, okay –” At least it had the structure, though. Like it had the sections. It was like the content of the sections was really bad. So I’m like “Okay, that’s a start.” How about now? And maybe it’s because it took a picture. So I said “Okay, there it is. Now let’s focus in on like the hero section.” Now we’ve just limited the scope… And I went and selected that in Figma. It uses like the currently selected object, or whatever.

I said, “Now that we have the framework, I want you to focus on the hero section. Don’t take a picture. Like, actually use what Figma gives you, and just reproduce that, pixel for pixel.” I can’t remember what I said. Something like that. Like, “Make it look exactly like the Figma thing.” And it went away, and it did its thing, and it had a checklist, and it checks everything off… And it declared victory. Like, “Go check it out!” It was like lipstick on dog trash, dude. It was just terrible. So I’m disappointed. And I’m like “Dang, I’m gonna have to code this thing, aren’t I?”

Oh, my gosh…

So that leads us to Stack Overflow conclusion… 66% of developers are frustrated with AI solutions that are almost right. They’re almost right…

Yeah…

…but that makes them wrong.

Can we dig into some details there?

Yes, we can.

Well, not the question. Your experience.

Oh, my experience. Yeah, of course. I didn’t want to go to the graph. Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Ask away. Prompt me.

Okay, so I’m unfamiliar with this… So did it let you – are you able to say “Using Tailwind” or “Using class-based utilities”?

[00:58:09.16] I told it to use Tailwind. I already had Tailwind set up in the Rails app… So all it had to do was like use it. And so yes, I said “Using Tailwind”, which it did. If you go look at the HTML, it has all the Tailwind classes. But where it really falls down is it’s not – we have the CPU logo. And it’s not going to go take that asset out of Figma, and put it into a webpage in any sort of way… Which is what I’m going to do. That’s what you’re going to do, right? You’re going to say, “Okay, here’s a logo. What’s the best way to get it in?” No, it just reproduces it in HTML. It’s like a circle and it says CPU. It’s like literally a circle, like a red circle, or blue; I don’t know what color.

Could you have then said “For assets like that, don’t use that. Just put a standard, known size for a future SVG logo replacement.”

I probably could.

Like, could you have said “Give me the framework, the bones, and I’ll fill it in with the good stuff.”

I probably could, and there is a blog post out on Anthropic’s site how best to use this thing. Or maybe not on Anthropic’s; on Figma’s website, about how best to use it.

Yeah, “I’m not reading that. I’m not reading that…”

“I’m not reading that. I don’t really – I don’t have the patience.”

“I’m going on my own, man. I got this.”

I’m frustrated and I’m moving on. Like, I’m back where I was with Gemini when it wrote that crappy function, when I was like “No, this function sucks.” That’s why I’m like “This frontend sucks.” Now, I’ve got to decide, am I going to rip it all out and start fresh, or am I going to use at least the skeleton it has in place? I don’t know. I stopped right there, because we needed to record this, so I stopped working on it. But it brought me back to Earth a little bit, from where I was, which was cloud nine… Because Claude Code had impressed me so many times. But when it comes to this – I mean, this is for me going to be the bomb diggity. It’s like, Figma design to HTML, pixel perfect, responsive etc. Optimized. That’s going to save people so much time and money. I will love that feat. I was very hopeful that this would work.

I’m also not willing to continue to try it, though. And maybe that’s me… I’m just frustrated and going back to my old ways on this particular – I’m waiting. I’ll try it again later. But the stuff that you’re saying, like “Could you tell it to do this, that, or the other thing?” Probably. But I just don’t think I have the patience for that, because what if it doesn’t work, and now I’ve just wasted more time? My early indicator is it’s not going to get to the fidelity that we want. And there’s no – it’s not going to cross the chasm with current tools.

Yeah, I think for a random landing page that you want to get – I mean, maybe that’s even a bad example.

For a starter.

Yeah, you want something with good bones.

Now, what you can do… And it is cool, because – it’s plugged into it now, so you can say… And I haven’t tried this yet, but they tell me you can say this, like “Take all of the colors out of that Figma file and use those whenever you’re doing any sort of component creation, or something.” You can have it use the colors, maybe copy gradients, or the exact radius for rounded recs and stuff, or for rounded corners… And that’s cool as like a little bit of a shim… But it’s not going to just take a Figma design and turn it into a web page, which the world wants. The world wants that feature.

What is v0 doing then, Vercel’s thing? How is that – I mean, is it focused on components, versus bigger picture? Is that why you think it’s maybe more used and maybe more popular, because it’s like getting to a component result, versus a full-on painting? “Make the tree nicer, not make the whole painting nicer.”

[01:02:05.24] Yeah, maybe. They also – and I don’t know v0 personally. I haven’t used that one –

It’s a little Bob Ross joke, by the way…

That’s fair.

I should have said happy little tree, my bad.

Yeah. I don’t want to give you the shout-out. The Ack. Reference acknowledged. I think a lot of those are using that one component library, that SHA-CDN or SHA-D – I don’t know what it’s called. It’s the worst name ever. You know what I’m talking about?

No. Is it called SHA-D?

[laughs] No. SHA-D would be cool. It’s like SHA-CDN, or SHA–

I’m sorry, I was just thinking like calling it Shorty, but like the –

The slang version, of SHA-D. Go SHA-D, it’s your birthday.

Yeah.

This one, [unintelligible 01:02:40.02] What do people call this thing? Anyways, this is a very popular thing. It’s by Vercel. I think – it’s not by Vercel. I should say that differently. I think Vercel has hired the person that built this. I think it’s named after the person. So the person’s name is SHADCN or SHAD-CN, and they built this component library.

My assumption is Chinese, so that’s why CN maybe?

Maybe.

Just a guess. Or it’s a CDN…

Very popular. 91,000 stars on GitHub. So a lot of these coded-from-scratch vibe coding tools like v0 are just using this, and they’re all components, like you said. So they can just use this, and it will look like this. And for your startup’s first version or whatever, it’s good enough.

Yeah.

But they’re not going to take an existing design and build it out… Unless that design’s like wireframed. So they’re not going to take something that a designer did, and turn that into a web page. That’s still a world of front-enders, you know?

Right. Yeah, that’s where I thought, maybe that’s where my question came from, was if you’re using Tailwind, Tailwind has a lot of really well-known components out there… My assumption is that a lot of the wrapping divs you’ve got to do, and the various utility classes you’ve got to use to get to these layouts is pretty well-known… And so I thought “Well, it would be smart enough to think like that”, but clearly it’s not, because it’s… I mean, what do we expect? We’re expecting a machine to do both the thinking and the art, in the same motion. And I think even as a human, I have a hard time doing that. Not that I’m better than these LLMs, but we’re the original art creators, and I’m using me because I’m the best example I know of, because I know me, right?

Yeah.

It’s hard to do both the thinking and the artistic side. That’s why you have a left and right brain. The analogy for a human being is “Well, I’m more right brain prone, or left brain prone” kind of thing. I think about it like that; we’re asking it to do potentially in the moment way too much. Technical/code, and visual design. It’s a lot.

Sort of. I think that – so our designer, John Henry, if you go read the Figma file… That project, he has embedded a lot of the thinking into Figma. So there are –

It’s good layers, and stuff. [unintelligible 01:05:12.00]

There’s layers, there’s groupings, everything’s logical… Like, there’s a structure in there that has been thought through. And so I feel like a machine could do that. It could be like “Okay, I’m going to take this–” And I’m not sure what it is over there in Figma. I think it’s probably like all bunch of SVGs… But whatever, this tree structure that I’m getting from the MCP server, that has all the information in it somewhere - I’m going to translate that into HTML and CSS. I think we can get there without very much thinking.

[01:05:49.20] Now, there are, on the specific details, like “How do I implement this picture? Should this be a PNG? Should it be an SVG? Should it be a this, that, the other thing? Should I use some sort of CSS-based animations, and stuff?” Like, yeah, that might be a step beyond. But I think a static representation of a Figma project in HTML - I think that’s possible. And so that’s kind of what I was expecting.

Now, maybe the skeleton and the bones are there, and I’m just getting too stuck up on how – or too caught up. I don’t feel very stuck up about this, but I do feel caught up on how bad it looks, and how… Like, when it did try to do a thing, it was not good, dude. Not good. But when I go back and look at what it has done - which I haven’t done, I just stopped, so we could record - Maybe, like I said, maybe the bones are good. Maybe the structure is good. Maybe I can just build from there, and not have to throw it all away. But I’m just trying to provide, you know, some color around my previously always bullish the last couple of weeks stance.

That’s right. AI tool frustrations.

Yup. So people are kind of frustrated. They’re frustrated. 66% quote AI solutions that are almost right, but are wrong, and then people are also frustrated with debugging AI-generated code, and saying it’s more time-consuming than human-generated code.

Maybe not a great analogy, but this is what’s coming to mind in the moment… Imagine you go and you rent a car, right? And you get there, and you stand in line, you prepay, you consider the insurance, whatever you’ve got to do. And you get in the car and it doesn’t go. It’s not a car. It just looks like a car.

It’s not a car. [laughs] “I thought I rented a car.”

Are you upset or excited?

Right.

Right? That’s –

Yeah, almost the real thing is like worse than not even close, because you were bamboozled, right?

Bamboozled is very accurate.

Yeah. This is not a car…

This is – come on, Enterprise, try again. You know?

Yeah.

Can I get the car, please?

“I want the actual website, not the thing that looks like a website”, you know?

Well, and even going back to the dinosaur era of this, which was PSD to HTML…

Yeah.

And for those who don’t know what PSDs are - gosh, you live in a cool world, okay?

This is a good analogy, actually, though.

Go ahead.

Because there’s similar frustrations. I’m not sure if you’re going there.

Kind of, yeah.

Okay, go ahead. Yeah, finish your thought, and then I’ll add on.

Well, mostly just there was this idea that I as a designer can do really cool stuff, I can make it very cool-looking… But somebody else has got to turn this into a real website, and that’s the hard part. And you kind of want this pixel perfection… Then you almost demand it, and the website kind of sucks from a Braille standpoint, when it comes to mobile or not mobile… Which is a whole different era. Mobile-first was post-PSD to HTML.

Right.

And so you’ve got all these anomalies along the way that could happen that, sure, it looks like it, but it doesn’t function the way it should.

Yeah. And even then you had more layers, because you had the designer, right?

Oh, a pun? Is that a pun?

Yeah.

Nice.

A designer, with their Photoshop layers.

That’s right.

And they have pixel perfection in their Photoshop file, right? That’s what they want on the webpage. And they know they’re not going to get it, but they hope they get close. Then you have the PSD to HTML shop or person. A lot of times you’ll just send this to a shop, they’ll send it back, right? There’s even companies that would do this for you.

It’s big business.

And you would spend a couple thousand dollars maybe? I don’t know.

Yeah.

Twelve hundred bucks?

A finite amount of money.

Yeah. And you’d send the PSD file out, and you’d get back HTML and CSS. And that might look pretty stinking close to that file. Or maybe not. There’d be little things wrong. And then you have the developer who’s implementing that into the site. And they go open those HTML files, and it’s like div chaos. And it’s incredibly brittle, and hard to work with, and terribly coded. Somehow they managed to make it look almost like the website design, but it was like unusable trash when it came to the code quality.

[01:10:14.29] Or break constantly as you changed it…

Yeah, exactly.

…or anything with it. You added too much text here, it broke the whole website.

Right. They’d like space stuff with like the ampersand NBSP…

Or the actual break tag.

Yes. Lots of break tags, lots of ampersand NBSPs with that non-breaking space, like the invisible space.

That’s right.

Like, if I do seven of these, it’ll push that thing over far enough, you know? And you’re like “Yeah, but that was just once. You could have put it in CSS and it would apply to every single element.” But instead, you have seven NBSPs, 14 times.

Hardcoded. Every time.

Yeah. So those are the bad ol’ days. So I don’t know, we’re definitely better off than that.

Are you saying frontenders have a future then for a little bit? For the next few years? Hay day maybe?

I think they’re not going anywhere in the short term.

Yeah.

I think so. I do think, just like everybody, their job will be evolving… But until you can hook these things up directly to Figma, and say “Codify this” and it just does, at that point I think frontenders will be looking for something else to do with their time. Which would be great, because it’s just a huge waste of time. I mean, it’s not like a waste like you shouldn’t be good at it. It’s just like, it’s an implementation detail of a bigger project that nobody really wants to have to do. You know? If it were easy, nobody would be like “Nah, I’m going to do this anyways.” It would just be done.

Right.

And there’s lots of people trying to solve that problem, like the Nordcraft folks; Figma themselves… Like, what if we could just take the designer and the developer and make them work together on the same thing, so there is no translation step? People are trying to solve that problem. Anyways, “vibe coding not really a thing”, Stack Overflow says. Most respondents are not vibe coding. 72.2%, in fact.

It is burgeoning. And it’s not their core audience. So of the folks – we already identified who has accounts, right?

Yes.

And wasn’t a large majority of the survey respondents had accounts?

Yes.

And most of them had accounts for 15 –

A long time.

At least six years, right? A lot of them. So it makes sense to me that vibe coding is not represented. It’s not true…

Yeah, totally.

It’s true amongst that group, though.

My favorite part about this one is you can answer no, which 72% did, and you can answer “No, emphatically”, which means… [laughter] “Not only am I not doing it, but I despise the fact that you asked me about this thing.” And 5% of people said “No, emphatically.”

Of 26,000 people, that’s a pretty huge percentage. I mean…

Yeah.

What’s the number there?

Well, 1% would be 260, right?

Yeah, do the math.

1,200 maybe?

13-ish. Yeah, almost 1,400.

Yeah.

That’s rounded. And so what was the question again they were saying no to? Vibe coding. Okay.

“Is vibe coding something you do in your professional development work?”

Yeah, I’m not excited about vibe coding personally, but I can see – see there’s so many… Like all things, they exist on a spectrum. Vibe coding is not somebody who doesn’t know how to write software speaking into a microphone and getting software out. That’s, I would probably say, the status quo, what people think it is… But it’s also - you can vibe code a certain feature, a certain thing, and not have to be like a full on green codebase from zero to one. It’s more like “Well, just add a feature.” I don’t know. I’m not personally vibe coding… And you tried, at least frontend-wise…

[01:14:23.15] Well, I do vibe code scripts, basically. So I just tell Claude Code to write a script that does a thing, and as long as the script works, I don’t look at it.

Right.

But I’m not gonna vide-code our –

So in this case, I feel like that’s – and that’s what I mean by the spectrum. It’s like, are those folks just upset that you even asked them, and they’re saying no, and then no emphatically? Or is it a true no? Like, is it –

It’s no, emphatically. [laughs]

…the human resisting the future…?

I don’t know…

Obviously, that 1,300 or so on the no emphatically, that makes a lot more sense, but…

It’s more like “I don’t vibe code, and I’m never going to vibe code, so leave me alone.”

Yeah.

That’s how I read it, at least. Alright. Well, anything else that jumped out to you? Obviously, there’s way more on this survey - we’re not here to be comprehensive or anything - that we want to talk about before we say goodbye…

I think there’s obvious ones around here, as I scroll it, looking for things that jump out… Like, Cloud Sonnet is the most admired AI model, and I assume they’re doing the desired versus admired spectrum there, which is cool… So we look at Claude Sonnet, it was 33%…

Desired.

Desired. And that’s of 26,000 respondents. And it was pretty high on the – gosh, it’s really hard to navigate this going back and forth.

The admired is the red one. So 67.5% admired.

I had the data in front of me. I scrolled perfectly and now I’m not, so I can’t answer my own question anymore. But it was pretty high. It was pretty high. There was a lot of folks liking it a lot. I would say make this thing easier to dig into, and not lose your place, and not have to open a new tab just to kind of keep a place. But that’s me asking for a lot… Some AI probably vibed this randomly, fast…

It’s pretty good… I mean, it’s not perfect, but I think there was humanity involved.

Well, I think one thing that’s clear is that, you know, obviously AI is getting better and better. And I think for now there’s a lot of really good use… And provided your – I guess provided your patient with having to maintain AI slop, or generate AI slop, I think the folks doing that are the ones who could not originally do software development anyways. Or they’re being told by companies “You’ve got to do this, because everyone here is a developer now.” We heard that at Build. Everyone’s a developer. Everyone’s a builder. And I kind of agree with that to a certain point, but - I mean, an engineer is an engineer. I don’t care how you slice it. An engineer can make something from zero to one, with docs, and their own gumption, and their own abilities, and not get stuck behind a poorly-vibed solution that didn’t work. They will find the path forward, and they will deliver it. Whereas everyone else is more like trying to leverage it, and getting poor results. Well, the hype is there. For some it’s real. For others, it’s a dream.

And others, it’s a nightmare.

And for others it’s an absolute nightmare, emphatically.

Yes, emphatically so.

I am not surprised that VS Code is still at the top. Good for them. They’ve earned that.

Yeah. The one that surprised me from that was actually not that VS Code is the top used IDE, but that Visual Studio was number two…?

And Notepad? Third?

Notepad++. It’s better!

Is that your version of “It’s better”? I love that. I’ve never heard that before.

[laughs]

[01:18:12.15] I almost want you to do it again.

I just did that on the fly there.

Yeah, Notepad++, 27.4% of 26,000 people.

So what that’s telling me is that there’s a lot of Windows users taking this. Right?

Yeah.

It’s the number three most used dev IDE. It beats Vim. It beats Cursor. It beats Neovim, of course. It destroys Xcode. It destroys Zed. It makes Windsurf look like a piker.

Zed is 7.3% of respondents.

Not bad for a newish editor…

It’s still not beating Sublime, 10.5%… Which was our original marching orders two years ago.

I feel like Zed at 7 is respectable, until you see Claude Code at 9.7%. Because that’s existed for like six months. You know? And it goes back to our conversation with Nathan Sobo, when you asked him if he’s been working on the wrong thing… Or what did you ask him? He got passed up.

Something like that.

Yeah.

It was something like that.

Because he’s building from scratch, you know?

Yeah… And I really hope that that bet pays off, and it pays off if the IDE doesn’t die, which - it’s trending down. The IDE is trending down.

I think it’ll be a long, slow decline if it actually goes that way…

Trending down is a long slope.

Yeah.

When you’re so high, there’s so much farther to fall.

That’s right. I mean, everyone’s gotta use something. Yeah.

But it is trending down. So even so far as that – who did I speak to recently? And I asked them how much code they’re writing? We were on stage with Nora. Yeah. She said none.

Yeah, but she’s like a CEO.

That’s a different example. Yes, I agree with that. Contextually different example. And then I asked somebody else “How much code are you writing?” I won’t tell you their name, but it’s somebody we both know, and they’re at a very – they should be in the FAANG list, in the acronym, but they’re not… So a very prominent company.

It should be in the FAANG…

Zero. Zero. Writing zero of the code.

And what role are they?

I can’t tell you too much. It would give them away. They should be writing code. They previously wrote code up until a year ago, when they didn’t have to anymore. And so now they don’t have to, and so document-driven, documentation-driven, theory-driven, architectural-driven, things like that that’s driving the code.

There’s still AI that’s checking that code, which - I’m not going to toot a sponsor’s horn too much, but I’m a big fan of CodeRabbit, mainly because they offer what they do to open source for free. So if you’re running open source out there today and you’ve got AI spam coming into your PRs, you can curb it with them and also get some intelligence, which I think is pretty cool.

But there’s ways around the slop that isn’t me, human, discerning the slop, fixing the slop. It’s AI fixing AI… Which I’m not sure is a good thing, but the trend towards IDE dying for the people. I’m talking to - and I think you too - is IDE is just going away for them, and they’re writing less and less code. That could be a two-year streak, and they’re like “Nope, we were wrong for two years”, and they’re back to writing code, and the IDE is well alive again. So it could be a failed two-year or multi-year experiment… But for now, the IDE is dying. Steve Yegge… Like Steve said, like he predicted, and that less code is getting written as a result. Less code is getting written by them. It’s getting written by [unintelligible 01:21:58.24]

Less code is being typed into an editor.

Right. No one’s handcoding the code anymore. They’re vibing.

Now you said no one, and you just went beyond the trending. Like, no one is? No one? Come on…

Yeah…

It’s a trend, it’s not a absolute.

Yup.

Alright. Well, no one is talking anymore, or at least will be shortly, because that’s it, man. That’s all I’ve got for this week.

Alright. Bye, friends…

Bye, friends.