Action absorbs anxiety

We’re here with our old friend, Arun Gupta, a free man. You’re a free man now, Arun. [laughter]

Well, yeah, indeed it is. I like to call myself as a free agent now. This is the first time - gosh - in almost 30 years I’ve ever been a free agent… And it’s weird, because over the last five, six job changes, I’ve never had to prepare a resume. I never applied for a job. The last time I applied for a job was sun.com/jobs back in ’98, actually.

Wow. And after that, I’ve always been “Hey, come work for me.” Can I do this fun thing? And “We’ll craft a job for you” kind of thing. And as part of, as I say, corporate restructuring, the entire team that was to do with developers was let go. And here you go, involuntary free agent… But rightly said, there’s definitely a bit of freeness to this entire thing… But I’m enjoying it so far.

The company’s Intel, right? That’s the free agent company you’re from.

That is right.

So there’s some obvious things in the news about Intel for the last while. Are you going to spill some beans? Can you share some stuff? How close can we come to the sun on this conversation? [laughter]

Well, so back in ‘21, I believe, is when Pat Gelsinger wrote a letter on LinkedIn, which is an open letter to the open ecosystem. And he said open ecosystem is a fundamental philosophy at Intel. And at that time I was at Apple; nothing open there. Things are changing, but at that time it was very rough. And I said, “My God, a CEO like that, who believes in open source and an open ecosystem… And if somebody could fix or change Intel, that’s Pat Gelsinger.” And so that’s what got me excited. I saw the letter in the October-November timeframe, I said “Yeah, it’s good…” But then things changed in the January-February timeframe ‘22, when they reached out that “Hey, we would like you to run this open ecosystem team”, and they offered a very lucrative title of a VP. I said, “Okay, you know what? That sounds exciting.” And I’m never afraid of challenges in that sense… So let’s bring on the toughest challenge. Let’s put the pedal to the metal, everything that you have learned in the industry, and see what we can do to turn the ship around.

And we did our best, you know what I mean? My team was responsible for the developer outreach in the open source world. We were running events, we were doing hackathons, we were doing workshops, we were doing blogs, a very successful podcast… All sorts of fun stuff that developers would reach out to. We ran that, and over the last year or so I was running the developer programs team that was about 40 plus people. So I had a whole bunch of dev rel people under me who was really directly writing the code and working with the developers. That was the Dev Academy Team. Then there was an Ace Team Academia community and events. And that team was responsible for running large events, having Intel’s presence at events like KubeCon, Open Source Summit etc. re:Invent and all. And we were very directly engaged with Academia, running student ambassador programs and all sorts of fun stuff. Also managing all the social media handles.

And then I had a bunch of folks – at some point, I had OSPO, the Open Source Program Office part of my team as well.

And then I had a whole bunch of principal engineer-like people who were working with hyperscalers, or with AI communities, and all… So I would say the last gig was very satisfying, because you’re operating at that scale, driving the presence in the developer ecosystem… We had a lot of fun.

For sure. I think even what drew us to – going back to the open source strings you were pulling there, what attracted you to Intel was something that was surprising to us. Jerod, you may know the details a bit more, but I think it was like contributions to Kubernetes, or there was some unknown Intel deep contribution into various things in the open source community that were largely – we were unaware. I would think that we would be kind of aware, to some degree, right, Jerod? But there was some surprise there when we met Arun two years ago at All Things Open, I want to say… Is that right?

Right. Yeah, I mean –

Three. Three years.

[00:08:13.27] I remember when we were interviewed, I didn’t know about – I mean, I knew Intel is a good contributor to open source. But to the extent that they are contributing? I said “Oh, that is dope.” And frankly, that’s what excited me, the opportunity, three and a half years ago, that that’s the storytelling that needs to be done. That Intel was the – I don’t know what the current status is, but Intel was a top Linux contributor for almost 20 years. We were the founding members of Linux Foundation, CNCF, OpenSSF, all of these top-notch foundations. We were among the top 10 contributors to Kubernetes, among the top five of OpenJDK, among the top three of PyTorch, now TensorFlow, so on and so forth. And with the maintainership role in PyTorch and TensorFlow, we were committing upstream contributions from other CPU companies into PyTorch, creating space for them. So we were really doing not just very Intel self-centric contributions, but very chop, wood, carry, water kind of work.

So in that sense, three and a half years ago the hope was that, yes, we tell the story more, we drive more value towards CPU, but that was a pre-ChatGPT world. And I joined February 2022, and since ChatGPT launched in November of that year, everything changed.

I think that’s when we spoke, actually, was ‘22. So it’s been three years.

That’s right, yeah.

Time flies when you’re having fun… And of course, Intel has had – it’s been in choppy waters for a little while now, and it’s just a huge corporation… I think 110,000-ish employees at its peak… I think they’re obviously trying to reduce down, I read, to 75,000 by the end of the year, which is quite a drastic cut. While you’re there, your head’s down, you’re doing these things… You know, over the course of time, the last 12 months, 18 months, was there writing on the wall? Did you feel the pressure coming? Or was it a complete surprise to you when your whole division was – what do they call it?

Corporate restructuring.

Yeah, restructure. That’s what it was.

Corporate restructuring.

I’m sure there were whispers, right? Like, other people were losing their jobs.

For sure. Last year or so, I would say, we definitely saw the writing on the wall. Not to the extent that the entire team will be eliminated. So I did not expect that, frankly, to that extent. Over the years I was there, we were definitely trimming team constantly, constantly doing budget realignment… That’s part of the job. So no regrets, no complaints about that. How do we justify the cost? How do we justify – “Hey, you’re going to sponsor KubeCon at the top tier level. That’s a 100K sponsorship. Then 100K budget, then a 50K travel, et cetera, logistics, et cetera. So you’re going to spend a quarter million dollars on running an event… And how do you justify the cost? Okay, so let’s trim it down, maybe. Not do the top tier sponsorship, let’s do the second tier sponsorship kind of a thing. And let’s send less people, let’s make sure we are not making people fly from North America to Europe. Let’s leverage the local European developers that we have.” So all that change was constantly happening. So that was constant [unintelligible 00:11:31.15] that was happening.

And last year, when Pat Gelsinger was let go, and then when Greg left earlier this year, that’s when it became very, very apparent that “Oh, this is not going good.” And it’s just like the very classical administration change, right? And the new administration came in. Anything and everything to do with previous administration got to go… And that’s literally how it came across. It was a very cold call, there was no discussion, the decision was handed down to my boss, that “Okay, you and your team are gone.” So I was not even communicated directly.

[00:12:16.01] My boss, one of the most empathetic and kind people - so she and I were constantly chatting. But from the executive management, the decision was handed down to us that “Yeah, we don’t need this.” Well, okay… Well, I guess you made the decision… So here we are; we’re going to make best of it. And as I said, when grief hits you, the order is usually death, divorce, and layoff. And then there are five stages of grief. So across the team, there were people of different ranges, people very young in their career, fresh out of college, a year or two out of college, and some were more experienced, some were more mature, some were at Intel for 25, 30 years, some not so that long ago. And so different people had different capabilities, a different ability rather to process that grief. But for me personally, I was very clear that I’m just going to cut through the first four stages. There is no denial. There is no anger. There is no depression. There is no bargain. Yup, cut it. Pull the card. I am on the accept stage. What next? Right away.

So it took me, I would say, maybe a day or so to kind of get over it… But then I quickly moved on to the accept stage. “Okay, this is it. Good riddance. I’m going to focus on the right technologies and do more fun things now.”

Yeah, how do you do that? Because a lot of us get stuck in those other stages. Like, how did you actually execute on that plan? It seems like – you make it sound easy. Was it easy?

No, no. Not at all. Not at all. It’s often not very easy, actually, as a matter of fact. And very often you are kind of stuck in that loop. Very well said, Jerod, that “What could I have done differently? What did I not do right? Can I go back and talk to the executive management and say “Hey, but these guys are really doing great. If you want to build another DevRel team, why build another DevRel team? We already have this skill set. You’re not understanding the [unintelligible 00:14:17.08] of it.”

So I think my point is that we did all of that. We did all of that. But staying stuck in the past causes worry, and worrying helps nobody. Worrying takes away precious time from your current, present time, and it’s an opportunity cost. You can keep worrying about the past without an opportunity to either influence it or impact it or change it. So the way I realize it is over the last few years, last several years, actually, I’ve started listening a lot more about mindfulness and kindness, and that’s the thought process I’ve been bringing into my head, that “Okay, you know what? That decision is done. We were never part of the decision. This one decision that the team has let go is neither an indicator of the team, nor an indicator of the me”, and I’ve been doing a lot of counseling to a lot of folks across the team. Even now, “Folks, it’s okay. We’re all going to find a job. Let the job not define your career. Let the job not define your life. I know you’re going through a tough time, but how can we help each other? How can we get through this together? And there are only better opportunities sitting in front of you.”

So I think it’s not easy, but I guess there is no discount to aging, and with that comes an experience that “Yeah, it’s okay, it’s normal. It’s part of life. How do I move on?” I can spend five hours in the day worrying about it. “Oh, man, I got – it stings. It hurts. It’s bad.” But then that brings your entire motivation morale down… As opposed to – my mantra is really “Action absorbs anxiety.”

[00:16:13.04] So what I’ve been doing is, instead of being anxious about the future or worried about the past, my GitHub profile has never been this green, and I’ve been just loving it. I’ve been vibe coding very heavily over the last several weeks now, using Cursor, playing with Roo Code, playing with Cline, playing with Claude Code, all sorts of fun stuff, playing with all sorts of different LLMs, you know… When gpt-oss-20b launched, I played with it, I posted my comments and feedback about it… A/B testing, playing with all sorts of fun developer tools… Which as a VP of a 40-people team, I never got a time to be more hands-on, but I would say in my career I’m probably most hands-on with the latest and the bleeding edge of technologies now.

So in that sense, I could be worried about the past, that “Why did I get laid off?”, or pick up the latest and the greatest technologies and get myself ready and better equipped for a role that is probably waiting for me.

That phrase, “Action absorbs anxiety” - I had to write it down; I got my little notepad. I knew I would have to take notes on this call. I think that’s a good one, because the action, to me - and maybe you can help me understand this, but I feel like when you take an action versus sit there and stew, or think about the past, one, it brings you to the present, but it also helps you focus, which means you’re freeing yourself of other distractions to focus on the problem set. So the action is the focus. That is so key. Because I can be the one sometimes to sit there and stew a little bit, and kind of be poor me for maybe a day or two too long… And then I’ve gotta get up. But this “Action absorbs anxiety” is really good. Thank you for sharing that.

I think it’s fundamental. And usually, I’m more of a doer than sitter and thinking about it. And usually, what I do is if there are 10 things – and again, this is from one of the podcasts… The approach that I’ve learned and I try to follow is if there are 10 things that needs to be done in the moment, I always pick the easiest thing. Because that easiest thing will give you a quick victory, and say “A-ha, I’ve shown something here. Now I can do a better thing on top of that.” Usually, people pick “Let me tackle the hardest thing first, so that the hardest obstacle is out”, but you’re not even ready for that hardest thing. More stumblings, more falls etc. are gonna happen. So I pick the easiest thing over there - tackle it. That gives me a sense of accomplishment. Then go to the second easiest, third easiest, so on and so forth. So you build on top of that. And that action kind of creates that virtuous cycle for you, that flywheel for you that feeds back into you, that you are actually accomplishing something better.

And it’s weird how – you know, we have that Daniel Kahneman, “Slow thinking, fast thinking” kind of a thing. How our sympathetic versus parasympathetic system works. And that to me is training my parasympathetic system. It’s not a flight or freeze moment. I’m not in it for a fight. I’m just gonna train my parasympathetic system, which is in the back of my brain, that it’s gonna be okay. You’re living in a shelter, you have a very nice and kind family, put your feet on the ground, you’re able to stand up, you are still able to run 10K a day, you’re still able to body-squat your own weight… So it’s okay.

Yeah.

Those were excellent humble brags. I was just thinking about your running, because you said “Action absorbs anxiety…” But when you run, your mind is free. Your body is working, and your mind is free. And I wonder if you’ve struggled with that. Because a lot of times while your body is doing stuff, your mind is so actively free that maybe you can run circles in your mind while you’re running. Has it affected your running at all? Have you found solace in the running? How’s that been?

[00:20:21.03] It’s very therapeutic for me. Very, very therapeutic, actually. I’ve been running for 40 years. And more recently, I’ve started doing 10K on a more regular basis. One of the things that happened is for the first couple of weeks or so, because my son was in a summer break as well, so I would sleep late, I would get up late… Late as in like seven o’clock, and that’s late for me. 7 or 7.30 in the morning. But now that my son’s high school senior year has started, and sometimes I drop him to school, my schedule is back to sort of the normal stuff, wherein I sleep at 10 o’clock, I get up at 5.30, I go for a run, because I need to go drop him to school. So I’m back to that normal schedule. And so I’ve got to get my hour run or a lifting done in between. But during that time - you’re right, if you’re not doing anything, the mind is free and just wanders all over the place… But I have become a big podcast listener more recently. So I have a set podcast, and it usually starts with the day, with New York Times headlines, New York Times Daily… Headlines is about 10 minutes, they give you four or five top headlines of the day. Daily digs 30 minutes into a topic. Then I listen to a whole bunch of different podcasts. This could be either a TED podcast, this could be like a Rethinking podcast by Adam Grant, this could be Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam… More recently, I’ve started listening to 20VC. That gives you the broader landscape of the industry, and where the VC industry is going. I recently subscribed to Andreessen/A16Z podcast, so I listen to that quite regularly… Gosh, there are so many that I enjoy. And if I look at my library here – yeah, “Think Fast, Talk Smart” is really good. I like that one. “Consider This” is a good one, by NPR. That gives an idea. I love listening to Wall Street Journal. They have some really good topics there sometimes.

My key podcast, typically in the long run, that I love to listen to is “10% Happier with Dan Harris.” And that’s a mind-blowing podcast, because that’s the one where I’m getting all of these mindfulness, kindness, preaching, not worrying about the past or the future. Hard Fork is amazing. It’s by New York Times, again. I listen to that quite regularly.

More recently, I started listening to IMO by Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson. So they host this podcast… I think a couple of weeks ago they had Barack Obama on that podcast. “Opinions” is pretty good. So a whole bunch of podcasts. So I can usually circle through them.

So 10K - how long does it take you?

I’ve been playing around with the numbers more recently… Usually, if I’m running at a normal pace, it would take about 9:15 pace per mile. So about, say, 57, 58 minutes. But more recently, I’ve been experimenting. And experimenting in the sense that if you think about 220 as a baseline, 220 minus your age is your maximum heart rate. So for a 50-year-old person, that would be 170, if you think of it that way. Now, if that is your 100% heart rate, you go down from there - 190, 180, 170, 160, so on and so forth. Zone 2 is where fat burning happens, if your heart rate is between that region. Zone 3 and 4 is where your aerobic energy is burned. And with aerobic energy, you consume a lot more glycogen. It’s mostly glycogen-centric. So you can consume Zone 3 and 4 rather quickly within an hour, but you need to replenish it. But if you’re running in Zone 2, that fat-based energy allows you to run a lot longer. So I’ve been experimenting Zone 2, but I really got to slow down my running.

[00:24:17.25] So the usual pace, 9, 9:15, but Zone 2, I have to run at an 11-minute pace. And I have a little bit of a time at my hand right now, so I’ve been playing around with Zone 2 running. So a 10K could take sometimes up to 70 minutes, kind of a thing. But then I’m really focusing on my watch that, “Okay, hey, here is my Zone 2 bottom, and the threshold heart rate. I’ve got to keep it between that. Am I running too fast, too slow?” Kind of measuring that and enjoying that dynamics while I have time.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So that gives you even more time, to listen to more podcasts… Because that’s a heck of a list you’ve got there. Holy cow, you listen to more podcasts than I do. So the running’s been helpful… The experimentation has been helpful… Are you actively playing the field? Like, are you in interviews? Are you discussing things with people?

Yeah, that’s happening. I have, fortunately, a very good, deep network. So applying a role through a company website or LinkedIn doesn’t get anywhere, right? It just lands in a box. [unintelligible 00:25:22.14] system is broken. So you really have to start talking to people, getting a referral. And sometimes just the referral doesn’t cut it, so you’ve got to go talk to the hiring manager, essentially, that “Okay, hey, here’s a candidate that I know.”

And then you’ve got to think about, “Okay, what do you want to do? This is what you have done for the last 25 years…

What do I want my next 10, 15, 20, whatever that timeframe looks, I want to do there?” So you’ve got to craft that pitch ready, that “Okay, here are three things that really matter to me. And here’s what I’m good at. Here’s what I’ve done.” Be very crisp with that elevator pitch, so to say.

So I’ve been talking to a lot of folks, all different kind of roles. IC, founding engineer, founding CEO… All sorts of roles. CMO, SVP… All sorts of different roles. But I am not in a rush to really pick up a role. I think it’s really got to match with what I’m excited about. And what I’m excited about really is three things that matter to me. Something that I really excel at is building that developer community. How do you grow your developer community? It doesn’t matter what product it is.

Last week I wrote an article on LinkedIn which talks about how you grow your developer community, say from zero to 100K? Then from 100K to a million. Then a million to five million. Then five million to 50 million. Then 50 to 100 million. And I wrote that article based upon my experience, because I built some of those communities. And what are the leading factors? What are the lagging factors that kind of indicate what that looks like? What are the growth triggers that you need to adapt? So building that developer community is something I’m super-excited about. So that’s one.

The second part of it is anybody that is doing technology these days, open source is a big part of it. So if there is an open source angle to it, then I will excel all the more. If there is no open source angle, that’s fine, too. But if there is an open source angle to it, then I will excel all the more. So how do you tap that open source community to work for you in your basis, in your advantage? And how do you make sure the open source monetization model is in place? So that’s the second part of it.

[00:27:44.08] And then the third part, I definitely want to have AI as the central element of it. So developers, open source, AI - those are the three key bullets that I’m looking for, what my next role is going to be. So I’m not too much into the title, but I really care about those three components. What kind of impact can I have in the company, in the industry? Because I know I’ve done wonderful things in the past, so I’m just going to take my time to figure out what my next role is going to be.

Break: [00:28:20.19]

I was a little worried about open source there for about a week, maybe a week and a half, and I started to see more and more of – like, when we had the conversation, Jerod, a little while back, just talking about if I could generate code so quickly, does it make open source no longer valuable? Because we tend to open source full frameworks, full ideas, community-led things that have a lot of different facets and bug fixes, and it’s very, very rich. It’s a very rich thing. And I had been really, really worried, I suppose… Almost deeply sad in my heart, like “Is something going to change fundamentally with open source now that it’s ‘so easy’ to generate some new code?” And I sat there for a little bit thinking that, until I began to play more so. And maybe you feel this way, tell me if you do… But I kind of feel – no, I fully feel like the change that’s happening right now is going to influence even more open source, because more people will develop more things, that are uniquely valuable to them, they’re uniquely valuable to the workflows they decide to use… And I feel like we’re going to have a major, major boom in a proliferation of more open source out there, more developers, more people using software, more developers contributing more software. I was worried for a bit there. How do you feel? Are you worried about less open source, or do you think it’s for sure more open source being produced?

I think it’s definitely leading more towards more open source… And I’ll give you my theory behind that. So if you think about - the pendulum swung too hard towards LLMs to begin with. Oh, “400 billion parameter model. 500 billion, a trillion parameter model. And those are the ones that we really need. Those are all closed source models. You should worry only about the performance part of it, and we are good with that.” But now we are seeing kind of pendulum kind of coming back. Those LLMs are great at all the things that need to be done in the world. But in order to solve my problem, I don’t need 99% of that functionality. I need a small language model that does my thing well, and really well.

[00:32:17.20] So if you think about it, that pivot is coming down back from LLMs to SLMs, small language models. Three, five, seven, fifteen billion parameter model, that can very well run on my CPU. And that’s exactly where the innovation is happening. And if you think about – pick a vendor. Microsoft, Google… Amazon is very, very service-centric, but pick any other vendor, essentially they have an open source model. And those open source models are a lot smaller. Five to seven billion parameter models. Heck, even OpenAI has a GPT-OSS 20 billion parameter model. Grok, xAI just did their Grok model. It’s a large model, but it’s open source.

All of these large commercial entities are realizing that open source is the way by which you can bring the largest developer mindshare. As quirky as Grok is, but now open-sourcing it, you understand the quirkiness, and then you can start participating and make it better. So I think in that sense, with AI, frankly, more open source is going to happen, because it’s not going to be less.

Yes, people are going to be able to generate more code… The thing that I worry about though, is - I’m not a coder, but I’m using a vibe coding tool. And before vibe coding, I could have done maybe 400, 500 lines of code in a day, but with vibe coding now I can do 4,000 lines of code a day. What kind of technical debt that generates for a future generation?

So for example, I remember seeing a keynote from GitHub where they say “Hey, we want to reach out to a billion developers.” Sure, you want to reach out to a billion developers, but what does that mean? The classic example they said is “A grandma should be able to say on her phone “Hey, take all my Instagram photos, organize them in certain order, store them somewhere…” And she doesn’t even say ‘store’. “Organize them in a certain order” etc. Now, the idea was that is an NLU interface, that you’ll parse that. At the end of the day, you need software to organize all of that. So if you organize that source code, it’s sitting in a GitHub repository… So the classic example is great, where you get it work up and running for the first time. Who maintains that source code if things go wrong? And the models are not there.

I mean, I’ll give you an example. I was playing with an app – I’ve been working on an app, actually, and that app really allows you to compare different protocols. So REST, gRPC, WebSocket, SSE, GraphQL… So there’s a graph database, and I make the query to the database, and I compare them, and I create a Postman collection for it, for example. So I did all of that. Now, I created a GitHub Codespaces version of it, where if I single-click, you can have that environment deployed in your own environment.

And then, after a few days, I realized “Oh, you know what? That Codespaces environment is not working”, so I asked Cursor, “Delete that Codespaces button from the repo.” And the dude didn’t understand. He says, “Oh, you want me to delete the button, so I’m going to infer you want me to delete the .Codespaces and .DevContainer definition from the repo.” It struck it out, completely. I said, “What the heck?” I said, “I want you to delete the button only. Am I not explaining it? Are you not getting it? Are you inferring it?”

[00:36:00.05] Oh, my gosh…

So I think in that sense, the amount of frustration, the amount of technical debt it’ll create – yes, it’ll generate more source code, but the amount of debt it’ll create is scary.

I have a hard time disagreeing with that, especially with the latest round of releases. I think specifically ChatGPT 5 has showed what I would call diminishing returns in large language model advancements. It seems like – you know, when Sam Altman posts a picture of the Death Star prior to the launch, we’re expecting something big… And it falls flat. It’s like marginally better, whatever. They fixed a few sycophant-y things, which apparently people liked… They were mad that you took away my sycophant, because I want more compliments… But it just wasn’t much, and so that is leading me towards what I’ve been saying for a long time, is like “What happens if we plateau in these models and the code that we’re getting right now only gets marginally better over the next two to five years?” There’s going to be a lot of not-so-great code being produced. And a lot of people that are producing it and publishing it online are people who don’t know what good code looks like. That’s dangerous, right? That’s dangerous.

Yeah, I mean, I was listening to the A16Z podcast this morning, and Martin Casado and all these folks… I think Aaron Levie from Box, they were talking about exactly that concept, that Open AI has been talking about AGI, and they were asking, “What number do you put to it? When will AGI be possible?” And GPT 3 and 4, we saw massive, significant improvement in terms of the LLMs. But GPT 5 now is only marginal improvement, if we at all we call it that way. Some folks have actually even expressed frustration with the uses of GPT 5 in that sense.

So I think if AGI was a thing to be delivered by 2027, this is not the kind of progress that we want to see over there. We want to see more aggressive progression to be able to deliver AGI by 2027. So I think in that sense, what does even AGI look like? Is it a marketing terminology? Is it AI washing your product? I’ve heard Danilo and Dario Amodei talking about “Yeah, AGI is a thing. We should be getting ready for that in the next couple of years.” But are the models really operating at that level? Because this Cursor dude, which is using Claude 4 as a backend, deleting my DevSpaces directory - I’m not giving control to you at all.

Yeah, you’ve got to turn the auto button off, that’s for sure. When you request that change, don’t auto that one. Definitely approve that one by manual submission.

It’s such a mixed bag, because sometimes they do it so right and you’re amazed. And then other times you’re just like “Are you a child?” Obviously, there’s no cognition there. But the way that I think about it, it’s like “Seriously, dude? You just deleted the entire Codespaces file? That’s just stupid.”

Right. One of the most frustrating things that I don’t like about it is - I say “Okay, you can commit to the repo, but I don’t want you to push to the repo. I will let you know when to push.” Because if other developers are using it, I don’t want them to have a half-baked experience. And again and again and again, I have to remind Cursor, “Please do not push without my explicit consent.” “Okay, I got it.” And then a couple of hours later, it’s pushing back to the repo.

“Back to how I do things…” Yeah.

I say, “Dude, are you listening to me at all?”

It’s kind of ironic, because all these years, computers just do exactly what we tell them. They’re deterministic, they’re calculators, they just calculate things, and they do exactly as they’re told. And we’ve always wanted them to be able to do more, and to intuit, and do all the stuff that humans can do. And now we’ve kind of gotten a little bit of a taste of that, but it’s also brought in all of our flaws of just like not doing what you’re told. We’re used to people not doing what they’re told… [laughter] But we can rely on computers to at least do – if I tell you to do the wrong thing, you’re going to go do the wrong thing, and then that’s my fault. But at least you did as you’re told. Now it’s just like, “Maybe I’ll do what I’m told.” And it’s like “Oh, gosh… What have we created?”

[00:40:15.01] You’re right. It makes you wonder that – because I was reading an article, and they were saying it’s not about prompt engineering these days. It’s about context engineering. So it made me wonder that when I give that command to Cursor, that, “Hey, you know what? Delete that button”, should I have said “Do not delete the directory”? I did not understand that it will do that for me automatically. So I think in that sense, it does make you wonder, “How much of context should I give it?” And even if I’m telling you not to push to GitHub repo, what made you change your mind that you’re still doing it? And then - to talk about psycho-fancy, it says, “Oh, I apologize. I should not have done this, because you asked me to do that earlier [unintelligible 00:41:00.11] So don’t ask me again and again.

So I think, in that sense, there is definitely immaturity in terms of what – my younger son was building an application, and he was deploying to AWS. And all of a sudden, the entire DynamoDB database was nuked by Cursor. And he was like “Ah, what happened?!” I said, “Well, I’m glad we set up a daily backup. So you have a backup, you can restore from that.” So things like that - very, very immature right now.

You know, you gave us a laundry list of the ones you’re using. You mentioned like Claude Code… You mentioned some of the obvious ones. Cursor, you mentioned Cursor, but you haven’t gone back to other ones you’re using. I’m a fan of Augment Code; one of our sponsors as well, but big, big fan of their tool. I think it’s arguably one of the better tools to use out there. I like AMPCode a lot as well… But I haven’t had this challenge where it randomly deletes things. And I think it’s because – you mentioned context engineering. And Jerod, you may remember this - way back… I think way back is like in this year. So forgive me by saying “way back”, but just a few months ago. I said, “You know what it is? It’s document-driven development.” And this spec-driven development. But I was I like “DDD better.” It sounds cooler. And so I was like “Document-driven development is the way to go.” You have to document what you’re going to build, and then give it – that clarity is the spec, is what you’ve designed. And our friends in the Python language community, they have PEPs. I think it stands for Project Enhancement Proposals, I believe. Or is it Python Enhancement Proposals?

Python Enhancement Proposal, yeah.

Yeah. So this idea of PEPs. And so what I’ve done in my work playing with this is I took that model of PEPs and I’ve borrowed it and replaced it, and it’s Project Enhancement Proposals. And so I’ve taken the document-driven development as an operating system, and I’ve implemented something I’m calling agent flow. And the way all this flows together is a way for these agents to draft PEPs, implement that work successfully, document what I’m calling knowledge-based articles or KBs, bugs maybe even, or even updating back to that PEP. Or even builder logs, which are like stories of what they do to build. And this entire workflow I’m calling agent flow. It’s groundbreaking, I think. I think this context engineering is the way to go, PEP engineering, however you want to call it, document-driven development… Giving them a full spec of a feature. And not like build the whole app, but more like make this thing better in these ways. And it’s very clear. There’s phases in there, there’s whatever… And it’s doing all that work. All I’m telling you is the rough idea.

[00:43:58.17] And all I’m playing with really is like little CLI tools. Like a Granola CLI… Don’t get upset, Granola. I reverse-engineered - not me, but somebody else; the agent - reverse-engineered the unofficial Granola API, just so I can extract Markdown files from Granola AI. It’s so cool. But this idea of like document-driven development and agent flow to me has been just impressive, and full of results. Positive, good results.

That’s pretty awesome. Yeah, I think my flow has been similar. For example, I don’t do discussion in Cursor. All of my discussion is with ChatGPT. So hey, I’m formulating an idea because I don’t know at what point of time Cursor will trigger “Oh, let me start implementing the repo.” “No, don’t implement the repo right now. I’ll let you know when I need to implement the repo.”

“Stop. Don’t do anything.”

Yeah, exactly, right? So what I do is I discuss with ChatGPT that “Here is what I would like to do. What about this? What about this? What about this?” So I craft my prompt from ChatGPT, because ChatGPT can maintain the session. So as I’m going back and forth, then I say, “Alright, now craft a prompt. Now you understand my requirement. I think I’ve communicated clearly… So give me the requirement.” So I re-read it, I make sure that everything is documented correctly, and then I say “Make this as a prompt for Cursor.” Then I give that prompt to Cursor, and then it says, “Boom, now you go generate the first shot of the repo.” And usually, I commit the first set to the repo, and then I start tweaking it for developer experience, whatever that needs to be done.

Then the other tool that might be worth looking at, as you’re talking about, Adam, is Amazon Kiro, that was launched a few weeks ago. And they are doing exactly what you’re saying about spec-driven development or document-driven development, where you can define the spec… I’ve heard good comments about it. I was not particularly impressed by it myself. I didn’t see much value of it as such, but maybe I haven’t explored it enough. But that is definitely worth a look, Amazon Kiro.

Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, I think we have a show coming up with somebody from the Kiro team. There was a great post on X a couple of days ago about this topic, and I found it funny. I’ll share it here. “Programming has quietly turned into a practice of making micro-wishes to a genie. The art is making the wishes in the right order in just the right way to eventually get what you want.”

Right.

And I think that’s approximately true. Now, the quote tweet, as we used to call them back in the Twitter days, is even funnier… “Programmers don’t realize that this is exactly what their PM’s relationship is to them.” So we are now the PMs, you know? They used to be making micro-wishes to their programmers trying to get what they want, and now we’re doing it to our Claude Code or our Cursor.

Yeah, I played a little bit with Repl.it, I played a little bit with Lovable, all of these different tools, just to kind of get an idea of the landscape that what are the tools that people are doing. And the more you play with them – I mean, if you think about it, Lovable has reached $120 million ARR in seven months. Seven months. That’s astounding. This $100 million ARR - companies used to take three to five years, and at $100 million, they’d say “A-ha, I’m ready to go IPO.” The landscape, the dynamics are very different. Cursor is almost a billion-dollar ARR. Almost a billion-dollar ARR.

I was listening to the 20VC podcast, they were talking in that podcast that by end of next year, it’ll potentially be $4 billion. But then this morning they were also talking about on A16Z - or I think different podcasts - about the AI bubble. Because what is Cursor? Tomorrow, if say Anthropic says “We’re not going to let you use Claude”, Cursor is going to fall flat. Because they’re really relying upon the backend of the Claude.

[00:48:08.10] And all of these companies - Anthropic, OpenAI - they’re all burning money. They’re not cashflow-positive yet. Yes, their valuation is $60 billion or $500 billion, whatever that number is, but they’re all burning cash. So they’re burning more GPUs today, so they’re not earning money, and if Cursor is just like a VS Code, nicer interface on top of Claude, why would Anthropic not build deeper features with Claude Code? So it’s TBD that Cursor continues to stay the market leader, versus Claude Code kind of picking it up.

So I think all of this landscape is very dynamic. And then on the parallel side, you start seeing tools like Cline, or Roo Code. These are open source vibe coding tools. These are becoming popular as well. If you look at Cline, there are about 2.5 million developers using it. If you look at Roo Code, there are about 20,000 stars to the repo. And they brag about how you can use – they’re not tied to a backend model. You can choose whatever model… You can even choose OpenRouter. So I played with this – I believe in RooCode I configured OpenRouter. And in $5, literally $4.53, I could create a full-blown app that could talk to my Strava, and get me some details. I think you can actually start quantifying dollars in the lines of code that are being returned, and you can start justifying these tools more and more.

Yeah. Five bucks, get an app. Kind of cool. That’s kind of what I mean. I don’t know about the open source side of that, but I definitely think there’ll be more code. I wonder if the world will be invited to somehow solve little problems in their house, but I really feel like I’m going to eat my words on this one, because… Dig this. This is sort of a side tangent, but I was talking to my wife, as you would, when you’re driving. And I think I was saying something like – I had a conversation with somebody and I compared Windows and Linux. And she said “That person has no idea what Linux is. I’m like “They have to know what Linux is.” And I was comparing them – I was just saying like Windows versus Linux in this one case, I’m like “And by the way, this is Linux. This thing is Linux.” I was doing a comparable. I’ll save you the story and the backstory on that front. But she’s like “They have no idea what Linux is.” I’m like “Babe, most of the world knows that most of what we do in the world runs on Linux.” She’s like “No, absolutely not.” But here’s me, the naive, hopeful one. I’m like “No, that’s gotta be true.” Like, it’s so true for me, it has to be that true for so many other people. She goes on Facebook and she posts the thing and says – she essentially re-asks my question, and there’s just so many hilarious comments… Like, “The internet has an operating system?” You wouldn’t believe the things.

All that to come back to say “Five bucks, get an app”, that seems kind of cool. I want that for the world. I want to empower people to create software, I think more so in like home labs or in home spaces, where they can solve their own problems… But I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s really gonna be a thing. It might be a while till that gap closes.

I want that too, and I’ve been on this personal software kick… You know, this Adam - I’ve been talking about home-cooked meals, and like single use apps, and now we can just vibe code up our own little solution… It doesn’t have to get published, it doesn’t have to be for anybody but us… And I want that for everybody, because you know the power of like just scratching your own itch and then moving on in life. Like, that is so awesome. If you do it 10 times in a week, now all of a sudden you’re saving all this time and effort.

[00:51:46.24] But then I saw somebody say the other day, which struck me as true… They said “Everyone’s gonna have their own vibe coded app, just like everyone’s gonna have their own 3D printer in their house.” Because that never actually happened. Like, 3D printing was supposed to be this revolutionary, new technology, there’d be one in every house, you’re gonna print your own furniture, your own this, your fixes… It’s like, it’s cool, and a lot of people make really amazing things with it, but it never actually permeated - not yet, at least, mass market. I don’t even know, of all the 150 people in my personal network that everybody has according to that one guy… I know two people that have a 3D printer.

And they’re super-nerds.

And I just feel like this might be like that. What’s that?

They’re super-nerds, or they’re just tinkering, or they’re creating like –

They’re creative types.

No offense, but like key chains and like trinket type things.

Yeah. That’s fun, that’s cool stuff. Maybe they fix a shelf, or something. But it hasn’t actually done what everyone said it was going to do, and because it’s technically complicated, there’s a lot of faults you can run into… We have a 3D printer; we bought a cheap one. Should have bought an expensive one, because it’s just been a headache, and so it just sits in the closet… And I feel like vibe-coded apps are gonna be kind of like that, where it’s like “Yeah…” Now, those are easier to get going than a 3D printer, but maybe on a similar trajectory. I don’t know.

Well, and to add on to that, you and I live this world on a regular basis… But can I ask – my wife is a tech. She’s really awesome. She is a director of technical programs at NetApp. So she’s very technical in that sense, but she’s not a programmer. She has a master’s in computer science and an undergrad in computer science as well, but she left programming a long time ago. But can I ask her that “Hey, why don’t you try vibe coding?” It’s like “What am I doing here? Why do I need to do–” So I think that’s one friction point, frankly.

And the second friction point is - okay, so I can’t ask her “Okay, download Cursor and give it an idea on what you want to build.” So you’re right in that sense. It’s like, yeah, sure, I will play with it for 15 minutes if you want me to… But that’s not something that I’m gonna build [unintelligible 00:53:55.03] and carry on forward. You and I kind of live this thing on a daily basis, and my GitHub profile is super-green because I’m chunking out lots of code, kind of giving it that experience that I want, and tweaking the code accordingly… But that’s our life. That’s not everybody’s life. So I agree in that sense. And I worry about it, that lots of code is gonna be generated, but the amount of technical debt it creates. Think about five years out from now, how many repos are gonna be dead because they were created five years ago and never maintained. And now CVEs, vulnerabilities, all of a sudden are skyrocketing.

That’s the case right now, even. I did this recently, I looked up DNS servers on GitHub. Like, what’s out there in open source that is like DNS resolver related? Because I told you this, Jerod, recently I replaced Pi-Hole… Accidentally, but it’s been kind of fun. I’ll share more another time. But there’s so many results. And there’s some experiments… There’s so many dead repos out there now, before vibe coding, before ChatGPT really helped everyone leg up and leverage AI to generate so many lines of code in a day, from 400 to 4,000, as you had said before… But I think – yeah, it’s gonna get even more.

I wonder though, technical debt - if it’s a random application that I open-sourced on GitHub, or I published to GitHub - because that will become the thing. It won’t really be like “I open-sourced it.” It’ll just be like “Well, I need to use GitHub”, because GitHub is essential in the build stage and the CI stage, to get to production, or whatever production is, or “live on the internet”, they may even say. How do we get to technical debt if I’m just building one-off things that sort of matter to me? It has to be adopted, and absorbed, and communities have to surround around it and stuff like that to become technical debt… How do you think technical debt would result?

[00:55:56.08] So it’s not about your personal apps that are gonna cause technical debt. Now, imagine if I’m working on Kubernetes… I take a look at the issue, I suck up the entire core base in Cursor, and I say “I want to resolve this issue”, and it generates a whole bunch of code, which I have no idea of how the code looks like. And I say “Yeah, send a pull request.” So that’s the challenge. Because now, Kubernetes maintainers are required - if they want to approve the merge request, they are required to review that code, which probably is not gonna be part of the standard and all those things, because you’re not giving it enough context, and it doesn’t understand all of that. And so those are the places where – it’s perfectly fine to create your hobby apps. It’s gonna 10X your improvement for sure. And I’ve been enjoying it. But it’s those projects like PyTorch, or Kubernetes, or OpenJDK where I start kind of injecting this vibe-coded code, and that causes a problem there.

I think maintainers are gonna be all over this. They already are. So just yesterday in Changelog News I covered Mitchell Hashimoto’s recent decision on Ghostty to require disclosure of all AI tooling contributions in every pull request for it to be considered in Ghostty. So if you submit a PR and you used AI tooling and you don’t disclose that you did, it’s like an insta-close, basically. And I’m sure Mitchell knows what that looks like. He must. Because he’s just fed up with it, and he thinks that it’s common courtesy now to say “Hey, this was written 90% by Claude Code.” At least then your maintainers know what they should expect as they go into code review.

And so that’s just one step that one guy has made, and I’m sure other maintainers will follow suit… And hopefully, GitHub actually creates some sort of processes around this. I know there’s the co-authors line in Git, where you could like co-sign that “This was written by Jerod plus Cursor”, or whatever it is. But if we formalize these things, then we can have more clear – what do you call it; disclosure, I guess, of who actually did the coding. And that will help us to avoid some of this stuff, I think. Because some people are actually submitting stuff that adds the feature they want, but they don’t know how it adds the feature they want. They’re trying to be helpful, and they want a feature, and so they submit a pull request written not by them, but it works. And so it’s like “Okay…”

Yeah. That’s where I think it comes back to it’s still just too hard. It’s just still too hard to be a developer, or to develop I guess debtless software.

Yeah, the debt-free scream; the old Dave Ramsey debt-free scream. It’s tough to get to it with software, yeah.

Being a developer, or making software, or however you want to frame what that role is these days as it changes - I think it’s still just too hard. Even though Lovable may get you there quicker, once you get a customer - if that’s a commercial-facing application, or anything beyond a toy - you face serious challenges at scale, or even at not scale. Like, your sale could be a couple hundred people. It could be whatever your little thing is, whatever version of scale you’re talking about. But it’s still just too hard. There’s still too much awareness of what a developer does, from a terminal, to production… Even terminology like I just said, like open-sourcing versus publishing to GitHub - that’s not the same to everyone. Or production, or CI, or all these different things that happen in the build stage. That’s not common knowledge, and it’s still just too hard, I think for most people. And Arun, you mentioned your wife, and how technical she is, but back to what I think you were saying was that she doesn’t have the patience, because that’s not what she’s trying to accomplish.

[00:59:56.19] She’ll play with it as a tool, because you mentioned to go and play with it and see what she thinks… But I think a lot of people will lack patience to put together what we as developers have had to put together for so long. And I wonder when will it actually get easier. I think it’s easier to generate code, but it’s not easier to generate good, debtless code.

I think that’s really the key, really. How do you – I’ll give a classic example. I was working on a simple GraphQL backend… So it’d load the data from a text file, and it creates a GraphQL visualization. And my son came back from office yesterday, he was asking me, “Dad, what library are you using?” I said, “I don’t know. Cursor picked up a library.”

Hah…

So the point is that you are getting to that point because Cursor gives you that ability, “Oh, I’ll pick up a good library.

It’ll look good.” If you’re caring only about the developer experience, you don’t know if that is the right library. You don’t know if Cursor is really checking that “Does that library have enough star, forks, maintainability, or is that Cursor’s preference?” As a developer, you go through that mental process that “I’m going to pick chart3js because that is the top-notch library.” Again, it goes back to context engineering. If I’m not giving the context, Cursor will think what is right for it, and then it’ll move on, and you have no knowledge of how this is being implemented. And if you have no knowledge, that is scary. Putting that code into production is scary.

Yeah. These LLMs are like brute force. They have to give you a result. They’re designed to give you some version of happiness.

Correct.

I even tell it sometimes, “Don’t yes-man me, okay? Don’t yes-person me. Give me critical thinking. Defend your decision, or explain why mine sucks, or whatever it may be, but don’t yes-person me into the next phase because your job is to give me a result.”

“You’re absolutely right. I’m so sorry. I won’t yes-person you.” [laughter]

Thank you. Touché. Touché.

And that’s one of the most annoying things, you know? If you give a suggestion to, say, Cursor, which is using a Claude backend, you say “Hey, this doesn’t look right.” “You are absolutely right. Let me go fix this. I couldn’t even think of this.”

I know. Yeah, because they don’t actually think. They just autocomplete.

Well, and that’s the point. We call it AI. It’s very artificial, and not intelligent.

Yeah. Well, we’re good with marketing terms around these parts.

I don’t want to defend it deeply here, but I do want to say I think that that’s one thing I like differently about Augment Code, honestly. They have this – I don’t even know what it’s called; some sort of context engine… It’s got something in it where I haven’t seen quite that same behavior, where the yes-person, yes-man, whatever you want to say is in there. It seems to be – it retains things that I’ve told it even after a few prompts, or kind of like back and forths later. I’ve been very surprised at how much it retains of the core goal… And I don’t know if it’s the PEPs, or if it’s the agent flow, or if it’s the DDD, or whatever it may be, but something in this flow that I’ve been doing doesn’t give me that result. It’s actually been quite uncanny. I’ve been surprised at how well it seems to retain the context, without me prompting it for the context. It retains it in some way.

So I don’t know if it’s what I’ve been doing, the way I’ve been doing it, or it’s Augment Code’s way. I do know they do the RAG method, of retrieval and stuff like that, but this context engine, I think it might have some different smarts with the way it looks at your codebase, and it retains certain contexts… I’m not really sure, but I haven’t had quite that same experience. It’s been a bit more joyful.

It’s probably some traditional software engineering they’re doing in order to provide the model with that context, and everything that it needs. A lot of the differentiation right now between these tools is how much software you write around the model in order to really put its best foot forward in a continuing fashion. And we see that in different ways be better or worse… And that’s really kind of the difference. Because other than that, there’s not much that differentiates these things today. It’s really hard, I think, as a product designer, with the chatbots, especially.

[01:04:18.27] It’s like “How’s Claude’s chatbot UI or buttons or whatever any different than ChatGPTs, really?” There’s not much there. They’re just like their own wrappers around a model, which is why so many people have made money just putting better wrappers around the same model, and getting people to adopt them. But there’s no moat there. And that’s why I’m just laser-focused on the quality, because it was so bad for a while that I was like “What are you people talking about?” I’m talking about the code gen quality up until Claude 4, where as listeners of this podcast know, I’ve been genuinely impressed. It’s the first time where I’ve been like “This code doesn’t suck every time. I could use this. Maybe this is better than what I would have written.” I’m actually impressed. That being said, there’s so many things that make it not 100%. Like, where are we on the “AIs can write all the software” spectrum? I don’t know. Maybe we’re in like the 94. They can do 94% of what you need to have, but the last 6% is everything. That’s really what I’ve been watching, like “Can they make that jump?” Because until we don’t have to look at the code anymore, we absolutely have to look at the code. And if we don’t know how to, then we’re just in Idiocracy. And we’re in serious trouble, like Arun’s talking about. Serious trouble.

Well, just to be clear, I’m still looking at the code deeply. I’m still reading the code… I’m actually learning more about different software as a result of that… Which is great, because it’s like, in my own mental model I know what I’m trying to accomplish with this reverse-engineered API, or creating this archive with 7Z, which is something I’ve been doing… And I wrote this Bash script a while ago, that I wrote personally, and then ChatGPT helped me make it better, and then recently Claude Code wowed my world and just totally improved it, and I was like “Whoa.”

It’s really just wild how you still have to look at the code, I’m still looking at it, and I’m learning more, because my context of what I’m doing is personal. You can learn something more when you actually care about the thing… Like when you go through a training and you do a demo application - it’s a to-do app or something like that, something trivial or very common… You’re like “You know what? I’ve seen this a thousand times. Sure, I have some context for a to-do app.” But in my case, I’m solving a real problem, which is being able to better archive large directories. And I know what I want because I’m the user. I’m the one who has the problem, I know how I want it to work, and so I can care more deeply about the result it gives me… And so I can follow the code and desire to follow the code even more so. So I’m actually following it and learning, more than anything. This visibility of magically prompting is not what I’m doing. It’s very calculated prompting. And then I’m also looking at the code as well, not just “Prompt, get, wish, production, boom, work, see you, bye, go make millions and millions, or billions and billions.” It’s different, yeah.

Yeah. Well, you are the domain expert, so in that sense you know what needs to be done, and you’re intimately familiar with what needs to be done. So in that sense, the learning is always more. And personally - and I think, Jerod, you were talking about this… When the thinking mode is turned on, when it’s putting out the prompt that “Hey, this is what I’m doing… Oh, no, nevermind. This is what needs to happen. Oh, nevermind. I made the wrong fix. Let me back it up”, that’s where my learning happens. So that kind of helps me refine, validate, update my thinking, that this is how I should have gone about problem solving, essentially. And then validating that, “Okay, this is the code that is generated”, kind of thing.

Well, where do we go from here, Arun? Where do we go from here?

[01:07:51.18] So I think I’m looking at lots of opportunities so far I’m exploring, and I’m thinking about where to go. I’m really enjoying being a free agent, and all the learning that needs to happen… But I’m also sensitive of the part that hey, we are end of August almost, September is a major hiring season, but then once we get into October, November, December timeframe, then the hiring slows down… So I’m thinking about – hopefully, I will find something that I’m really excited about, and then I’ll be able to jump on that ship, essentially, and be able to drive those initiatives. If anybody cares about growing your developer communities massively, tapping into it, I’m available. I’m available. Talk to me. Shoot me a simple mail, arun.gupta at Gmail. You can shoot me a mail, you can see the work that I’ve done…

Are you only looking for full-time stuff, or would you also advise, or do like consulting? Are you interested in that kind of stuff?

No, no, anything is open game at this point, really. So anything is an open game. And as a matter of fact, I talked to a couple of companies more recently where they’re looking for an advisor in a consulting role… So I’m talking to them as well. So I think, because I’m a free agent, I have the ability to do all of that… But in the meanwhile, if something solid comes up, then I may have to kind of evaluate the opportunities accordingly. So yeah, anything is game at this point, really.

Considering your history, your work history has been, like you said, you haven’t looked for a job in basically forever, so it’s like, how do you even do it - that’s not my question. It was more of just an outside thought, as you hear me… But I’m thinking of the pressure potentially on you to your next role is - because you’ve been at this company for this long, with this kind of motive, and this kind of direction, and it’s very clear, do you feel pressure that your next choice has to be the way you’ve been doing your career? Does it have to be this multi-year, big, big, ceremonious thing? Or can it be a bit more like I think most ICs have been in the last 5 years to 10 years, which is like one or two years here and there, and more jumpy, and more temporal, I would say? Is there a lot of pressure on your next choice?

Not really. I am, again, trying to keep a very open, growth mindset, depending upon what the opportunity comes up. I have not said no to any of the opportunities. As I said, there was a two-person company that reached out to me to be the founding CEO, for example. So I’m exploring those. There’s a very, very rough idea. They barely started working on this for the last couple of months. But exploring, it’s like “Oh, that’s an area that I’m not super-excited about, and I don’t have a lot of core competency in that.” A CEO role sounds very exciting, but I need to really believe in the mission and the delivery of the mission and that sort of stuff. So to me, really, that alignment with my value, as I said, developer, open source and AI - those are the three core components that I’m looking at it… And of which developer and AI are sort of the more core components. Open source is naturally going to be part of it, but anything that aligns in that, whether it’s an executive role, whether it’s an IC role, whether it’s an advisory role, whether it’s a consulting role, I’m again keeping a very open mindset here. Not trying to box myself, not trying to be encumbered by the past, that “Okay, my next role, I must be a VP as well.”

I mean, I was a director at Red Hat. From there, I went to VP at Couchbase, a much smaller company… But then from there I went to IC at Amazon. And from there, I went to manager at Apple, and then VP at Intel. So I’m totally fine going back, being an IC at a bigger company, because I could be very valuable in terms of defining that strategy where the execution is on somebody else, but I’m equally capable of rolling my sleeves up to help with the execution part of it. So if you have a large team, for example, that needs help… Not just the strategy part of it, but people who want to help getting started - I can certainly do that. So I think, again, keeping options very open, my opportunities very open… Those are the things that I’m really good at, and that’s what I’m looking at.

[01:12:24.00] I never really considered the fact that when there’s a hiring season – similar to you, I just haven’t had to look for a job, fortunately, in so long, so I don’t know that there’s cycles and hiring flows. I imagine there’s a lot of folks who have had change, maybe even fellow colleagues from Intel, in particular… And since when you made your list you said devs - that was people, open source, that’s software, and then AI, that’s maybe the thing we’re using to get to the software and the stuff. So speaking to the devs that may be in this transitional period in their life, some of them may be still in the grief part of it, or the denial part of it, or just some spectrum of where you’ve been. You’ve kind of come out the other side… What is a strategy for someone looking at the remainder of this year in terms of “I’m not hired. I need to be hired. How can I get hired? …and the ticking time clock that may be happening, because I never considered that September is when it happens, and October, November, December it sort of chills out and diminishes until maybe the new year.”

Yeah, I’m going to go back to the phrase that I made earlier, “Action absorbs anxiety.” So I would recommend – see, because when you are in a job, then you need to prove yourself in the job itself, but you don’t need to demonstrate your profile externally. Now, a few things that needs to be done… Make sure you get your LinkedIn audit done very clearly, because that’s how recruiters reach out to you. Make sure your core competency is called out. Make sure the photo on the top is a professional photo shoot. Make sure your About section is clearly called out. Make sure your work history is clearly called out. Not just the years, but the actual skills that you did, the exact work that you did. Have ChatGPT, Claude, whatever, review your LinkedIn profile, and edit it, and make sure you spend time on that. So that’s one crisp part of it.

The second part of it is you also need to kind of build that profile externally. So for the last several weeks I’ve been blogging twice a week. Usually, one article is about thought leadership, and then one article is about technical leadership. So for example, last week I talked about that thought leadership article on how to grow from 0 to 100 million developers. And after this podcast, I’m going to record a video about the app that I was talking about. I’m going to record that video and announce that GitHub repo, essentially. And then I have another thought leadership article lined up for later this week. Basically, if you are running a DevRel, what your metrics should be. And that’s the discussion that I’ve been having with the Developer Relations Foundation, DRF folks in LF.

So I think in that sense, I’m just sharing sort of my blueprint… And frankly, that keeps me sane… Again, solving that easiest problem, then the next, and then the next, it allows me to show you progress. And the worriness could differ based upon the stage of your life, right? I’m at that stage of the career where I’m not worried about that “Oh, I do not have a shelter”, and things like that. Or my elder son is already working, so he’s on his own already… Younger son is a senior in high school, so he’s about to go to college… There is no financial constraints per se, so in that sense I don’t have a rush. Even if I don’t get something solid in the next few weeks, months as well, I’m not in a rush. No, I’ll do a consulting gig…

[01:15:56.04] And as an athlete, I’m very comfortable with being uncomfortable, physically, mentally, things like that… So that’s something you’ve got to kind of keep in your head. But again, build your external brand, so that that makes you a more attractive talent. Everybody has access to ChatGPT, Claude etc, so everybody’s writing a very impressive cover letter, a very impressive resume… What helps you stand out is networking with people. So that’s sort of where I’ve been spending – having a structure to your day that for the first couple of hours I’m going to scan through LinkedIn, comment on people’s articles so that you build, reestablish that relationship… On LinkedIn, there’s a simple thing that you can say “Who viewed my profile?” So start engaging with those people. If they’re viewing your profile, if there is an interest, maybe look at what their posts have been, start commenting on those. So some simple tips…

But having that structure - for the first couple of hours, I’m going to scan through LinkedIn, for the next couple of hours I’m going to refine my resume, whatever LinkedIn profile needs to be updated, and then afternoon is going to be really digging deep into a technology and then blogging about it. So I think if you have that kind of a structure… Because otherwise, if you are sitting empty, all sorts of weird thoughts come into your head. At least to me, it gives more peace and structure.

Yeah. Idle hands kind of thing, yeah. Get action. Take some action, y’all. I like that. I like that. Action absorbs anxiety. Good job.

And this is not my quote. I heard it from the podcast, but I really believe in it.

I like the idea. It’s solid. It’s a solid idea. I do like that a lot.

Yeah.

What else? What else is left unsaid? What else have we not asked you about? I know we wanted to – I reached out to you on LinkedIn, a friend, I was like “Oh my gosh, how you doing? We should talk.” You’re like “Let’s pod.” I’m like “Of course, let’s get you on the podcast.” What else is left on the set that we haven’t covered that you might want to cover?

No, I think we have covered most of the things here. I think my advice to people is be patient to yourself. Be self-compassionate. Oftentimes when you apply for a role, it’s a multi-week cycle. Recruiters don’t respond back. Sometimes you don’t even get to a recruiter. You may be submitting a few applications every day, every week… Sometimes you don’t get a response… Don’t let that define you. Don’t let that bring you down. Just keep chugging at it in a very relentless manner. Keep chugging at it. Each one of you that is looking for a job at this point of time has done something wonderful… Just focus on that part of it. Don’t let the negative energy come around you at all. Just pull the cord on it right away. Because if you’re not going to believe in yourself, that’s going to show up in your conversation. If you believe in yourself, if you have the confidence that “No, I’ve done this. Yeah, I’ve done this at scale, and this is how I’ve done this at scale.” Imagine what that interview conversation might look like. Mock it. ChatGPT can help you mock those interviews. So I think start getting yourself ready, so when the moment comes, then you are ready.

Ah, yeah.

Yeah, so I think that’s the key part I would recommend. But otherwise - yeah, I mean, it’s a road ahead… The other statement that I love from Bible - I’m not a Bible person, but I really believe in it. “Just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean the road has not been carved for me yet.”

Yeah.

And the moment you think about that, “Oh, you know what? I don’t know where I am going to go.” It’s not a straight road, ever. So hang in there, have faith, have belief in God, or whatever you believe in. There is a road carved out for you already, you just don’t see it.

Yeah. Something that you said there, if I can just add one to what you’re saying… I think that’s such a good idea, to mock up an interview. One thing I love a lot about AI is the ability to sandbox, I guess, iteration. Like try things. Have it do lots of scenarios. And I don’t know how it does it, but that’s a great example of - you can mock up “Hey, give me tough questions I will potentially have if I go for this interview.” And practice with it. That to me is a pretty interesting thing. I didn’t think about that… Because you were suggesting like how to clean up your LinkedIn profile, which is great. But to actually train. Train with it. I think that’s kind of cool.

Yeah, because the common saying is “I’m not worried about 10,000 things, I’m worried about one thing that you have done 10,000 times.” Because you’re going to be so good at it… So train yourself well. Figure out where do you fail, what are your weakness, what is your touch points, what triggers you? How do you keep control under pressure? So ask those tough questions; let ChatGPT help you, let Claude help you, ask those tough questions, and think in your mind. Just prepare that pitch, have those examples ready, that in the previous work, in three years ago, this is what I did. So have those scenarios ready, practice it - that goes a long way. And really, that’s the only way to go forward for me.

Good, yeah. It’s been good, Arun. Thank you for coming back on the pod. Good seeing you.

Well, thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed this discussion. And very fulfilling.

Thank you.