Just on the rocks

Here we are, we are friendsing. It’s me and it’s Adam. Hey, Adam.

What’s up, man?

Long time, no see.

Oh, I know. I’ve had a little bit of separation, as they say. Keep them separated.

Do you have separation anxiety? Do you have any anxiety about that?

I’ve been missing you. I’ve been a little anxious, you know? A little anxious.

Okay, this should be good. Just the two of us…

You know…

Chatting, talking, friendsing.

Yeah.

Well, let’s start at the start, because that’s always the best place to start…

Sure…

And the start for today is going to be me fulfilling my obligation to my new friend, Kendall Miller, who fulfilled his obligation to me. And to you, I believe, but…

Yeah, I’m in a different situation now.

[laughs] You are on a dry campus right now.

I am.

Which was Kendall Miller, the purveyor of Friday deployment spirits… And I said “Hey man, send me some of them spirits.” And he said “I will, if you test them out. TDD them on the show.” He sent me some whiskey, he sent me some gin… And full disclosure, the whiskey has been opened, so this will not be a first time taste test. I’ve already tried this one.

You’ve been sipping on it. Look at that.

Here’s the Friday deployment whiskey. This is the Generative A Rye, which is a fun, punny name.

Generative A Rye…

I got bottle number 219. So… Early.

I don’t have my bottle near me. I can’t judge my number.

It’s probably 220, is my guess. One after me.

Maybe.

And then he also sent me the Force Push Gin.

Oh, okay…

Now, I told him on the show, and I’ll tell you this, and so our listeners know. I don’t like gin.

Ah. But?

It tastes like a pine tree.

Okay…

And he said, “You know what? That’s a really good pine tree taste. Why don’t you –” Maybe it’s been – I mean, it’s probably been, I don’t know… Was I even legal age? I had to be. I had to be legal age…

Ha-hah…!

Probably like in my 20s. I think I had gin in my 20s at a bar, and I’m like “Oh, gross.” And so he said “Maybe your taste buds will have changed.” And I said, “Alright, I’ll try it out.” But you don’t just drink gin by itself, do you? I mean, isn’t gin usually with something?

Tonic…

Tonic.

My drink is a gin and tonic if I drink gin.

Okay. I didn’t have any tonic, but I do have this, which I think you’re a fan of this, aren’t you?

Topo Chico…!

Now that’s kind of tonic, right? I mean, it’s –

It’s tonic-esque. Yeah.

It’s seltzer water.

You’ve got some lime up in there, which is good.

Twist of lime, carbonated mineral water… Now, this - we can drink this together, can’t we?

We can drink that together.

Topo Chico. Actually, I never knew of Topo Chico until you. You introduced me to this.

I introduced you to a lot of stuff, Jerod.

You really do.

I am your accessor of life.

Well, that’s – you might have went just a step too far there, bro. Okay, I’ll roll with it.

[laughs] [unintelligible 00:05:44.19]

My accessor of life… Okay.

Yeah.

Well, now that you’re here, I’m living. And so I thought I’d try the gin with some Topo Chico… And –

This is the first time taste test right now?

Oh, absolutely. I’d never have had this in my life.

Okay.

I can’t even get the bottle open. How do you get these off?

Is it a cork?

No, I think it’s just a twist.

[unintelligible 00:06:06.04]

In a twister. I might have just broken them… Okay.

Uh-oh…

And I do have some ice water here. Bear with us, people. This is an obligation.

How does it smell?

It actually smells kind of good. I wonder if I’m going to like this, and he’s going to be right, and I’m going to have to eat crow.

How much are you pouring in there?

How much gin do I put in in order to match a gin tonic?

I’d go one to two ratio, one to three ratio. So put like an ounce…

That’s about an ounce.

Oh, no, a little bit more.

Yeah…

Yeah, that’s good.

Oh, man… Please don’t spill on my computer.

Oh, gosh…

And Topo Chico…

Yeah, keep going, keep going… Stop.

That’s fizzy. I like that.

Give a little stir, a finger stir even; a double finger stir…

Put my fingers in there?

Sure, they’re your fingers…

Well, yeah, I know about them more than you do.

[laughs]

I’m not putting them anywhere.

There’s only certain places those fingers go… Keyboards!

[laughs] I’m going to use the backend of this pen.

Oh, gosh… You have more trust in that pen than your fingers?

Well, this pen is like just sitting in a pen box. It’s not been used.

Oh…!

Alright. Classy.

There’s definitely some collectedness on that pen.

You like the sound of that? That’s fizzy water. Alright, so it’s probably been two decades since I’ve had this… But this is for you, Kendall. I appreciate your generosity.

Cheers, Kendall.

I hope this doesn’t disgust me. Yeah, that’s trash right there. That’s just…

[laughs] That’s trash…

[07:52] That’s pine trash. [laughter] I’m not going to lie. I give honest reviews around here. Now, I’m sure… I’m sure if I liked gin, I might like this. But I think this is just pure, unadulterated pine trash.

Oh my gosh, I had to lean back in that one, man…

Oh, gosh… That’s disgusting. Okay.

[laughs] His face… I can’t wait for the playbacks so I can actually watch your face. I’m too busy squinting between my tear-filled eyes right now.

Well, do you want me to act like I like it? I can’t do it. I appreciate the generosity… Now, the good news is – oh, I need a chaser. I need to get rid of that.

Some Topo to chase it…

Straight Topo. Pretty good. I have had this… This is the Generative A Rye.

Yes.

It’s pretty good. I will use that to chase away this gin flavor.

From the bottle? You’ve got a separate glass with some ice?

I got just – just on the rocks.

Nice…

Yeah. So I’ll drink – I’ll sip on this throughout the show, as I know, it’s good. Thanks, Kendall. Go out – if you guys like libations… The URL, fridaydeployment.co, where they say “Not every day is a good day to deploy. But every day is a good day for a Friday deployment spirit.”

Alright, so you’ve got this –

Hm. That is good whiskey.

That’s some good whiskey going on there.

Good rye.

Good rye.

There you have it.

Look at that… That’s a $125 bottle he just gave you for nothing…

He did. Well, not for nothing. I mean - well, free publicity.

Well, you trashed his gin…

[laughs] Well, that wasn’t necessarily his gin I was trashing. I mean, technically it was his gin… Technically it’s my gin. But…

That’s true. He gave it to you.

I don’t think you could have put a gin into my mouth that I would have enjoyed… So let’s not fault him for that.

Yeah.

Force Push… Cool name for a gin, I suppose. And Generative A Rye, of course, good pun there… And here’s how we transition out of this. So Kendall - new friend Kendall - lives in Denver. In fact, when we thought about this live show, I emailed Kendall and I said “Hey, man, we’re thinking about coming to Denver. How about some recommends on some locations we could possibly go?” And the Oriental Theater was one of the places that he said might work for us. And it turns out, that’s going to work for us. So if you haven’t heard, although we’ve said it on a few occasions already, we are doing a live show end of July, July 26th - that’s a Saturday - in Denver, Colorado, at the Oriental Theater. I will be there, Adam will be there, Gerhard will be there… BMC is going to be there. Not sure in what capacity, but he has agreed to play music of some kind.

Banjo.

And so that’s the plan. So kind of a weekend deal… Everything’s optional. Come on out. We’re going to do a Friday night meet-up, we’re going to do a Saturday morning live show, starting at 10 AM, and then we’re going to do a Saturday afternoon hike out at Red Rocks. Have you been to Red Rocks?

I’ve never been to Red Rocks. I’ve been near, close, driven by, but never stopped and enjoyed.

Red Rocks is cool.

This is going to be the case for me. It’s going to be a good time.

So to learn more about that, although I just told you everything you need to know, I guess besides the price of the tickets - $15 to come to the show. $5 – no, free… For Changelog++ members. If you’re doing the math, yes. Changelog++ does cost $10 per month, so you know, sign up for a month, save $5 on a ticket… That math checks out. And come hang with us.

Oh, my gosh…

[11:58] There’s going to be a fair amount of friends there. We’ll have a lot of fun, we’ll do an interview episode… Haven’t picked our mystery guest quite yet. If you know somebody who lives in and around Denver, maybe Boulder, maybe Loveland, maybe, I don’t know, Colorado Springs and wants to come to Denver for a live interview on stage, prior to the big Kaizen/Pipely launch, let us know. We would love to hear from you.

Denver… It’s where it’s at, you know?

It’s where it’s going to go down, man. We’re live-launching Pipely… I just recorded a makeitwork.tv episode last week with Gerhard, coding up some Pipely features into our app to be able to purge URLs from our pipe dream… And so that’ll be out soon. But yeah, Gerhard’s working away at it, and it’s getting very close. We have Honeycomb logs, we have purging, we have all kinds of stuff going on. So we’re getting very close. I think he even has a roadmap… Here it is. Gerhard posted the roadmap on Pipely’s GitHub. How it’s going… How it started, and how it’s going… And we’re getting pretty close. So a lot of the stuff is like tag and ship… He does have a gradual rollout plan now, so… That’s you, buddy. You asked for that, and Gerhard delivered it. And the plan at the live show on stage is to route 100% of production traffic through Pipely.

Oh, I love this. This is like a mid-year Christmas present, you know?

And it’s going to be Christmas in July.

I’m excited about that.

Yeah.

Any questions, any thoughts, anything at all before we move on, Adam? Denver, live show, hiking, meetups…

No, I think –

…excitement… Trepidation…

I’m excited to do a meetup the one night, and then do a morning show, and then an afternoon hike. I think that’s a great flow, you know?

I think so. I think it’ll be good.

15 bucks to come, or five bucks, basically, if you’re a Plus Plus member…

Free. Yeah, that math checks out…

Sorry. Yeah, free. I checked my math on that.

Check yourself.

Changelog.com/++. Become a member, come for free, or don’t and just waste your money… Come on, fools… Don’t waste your money.

Foolish.

Yeah. Who makes a $15 ticket to a thing like this, Jerod? Like, how does that even – how’s that check out? 15 bucks…

It’s just a serious check. Like, are you serious? Are you actually going to come?

Right.

We’re not here to make money, we’re here to get together.

Okay. Gosh, I thought we were here to make money. Okay…

[laughs] No, man…

I was just having a check there.

No, you’ve gotta check yourself, man. That math does not check out.

No. Well, this is good. The roadmap looks good. As a matter of fact, you were talking about that feature in particular with purge requests… Not that I want to toot this horn too much, but I was pretty excited, because every once in a while I give Gerhardt a side quest.

Oh, yeah.

You may notice, Jerod, in that PR - what do you think is in those PRs that’s not normally there?

Oh, I do know what’s in this PR, because I was looking at it.

What’s in the PR? Can we just mention that really quickly? Is that cool?

Yes. So there’s CodeRabbit, right? Is that what it is?

CodeRabbit. Our new friends over at CodeRabbit. Now, they are sponsoring. This is not a sponsored mention. I just want to mention this, because one, it’s free for open source. And because we’re open source, we didn’t have to ask them. So they didn’t even – this is not even a blessed thing. We just did this.

Oh, GitHub is down.

It is down. Gosh, first time I’ve seen that unicorn in so long. Okay, so Gerhard - I reached out to him via DM, as you may know… I said “Hey, CodeRabbit has this cool thing for open source. We’re open source. Can you plug this in for us on our repos, if you like it?” And he’s excited. I think he came in like 10 minutes later, excited, like a little kid, and he said “Look what’s in my PRs now.” And he was so excited to show off this PR with this purging and whatnot, and the feedback that it gave. And unfortunately, I’m narrating an unseeable –

As I keep reloading the page, and it keeps showing us the angry –

[16:24] This unseeable thing. But it gave a good walkthrough. I can show off what’s on my screen, at least to myself…

Well, we can share yours.

We can share mine. Let’s share this one. Okay, so you should be seeing this now…

I can see it.

This is the recently opened PR for auth purge requests…

Yes.

PR 16 on the Pipely repo. And then CodeRabbit comes in and just kind of gives this “Here’s what’s happening” scenario. Here’s a walkthrough of what this change does. So I don’t know about you, but was this helpful to you to come by after this and be like “This is what this change is doing”, and all the files that got touched on what they’re doing as a change summary?

Right…

Then even this sequence diagram showing what’s happening.

Yup. It’s cool. And a poem.

A beautiful little poem.

“In the warren of code, a token now guards/ Purge requests checked by vigilant bards./ Feeds with slashes, queries galore/ Regexes open the normalization door./ Benchmarking is clearer, secrets well kept/ The rabbit hops on with tests adept.”

Good robot… Good robot…

What’s interesting is he asked – then Gerhard goes on to ask for a generate sequence diagram…

Yeah, I did see that.

And then it comes down with a sequence diagram for PR… And this is really funny, because then it basically shows you how a pull request gets merged.

[laughs]

And it’s like “No, man… I don’t think that’s what he was after.” But the other sequence diagram was on point. But that one was just funny. I was like “Thank you for telling us how this pull request is going to get merged, maybe.”

Yeah. I was excited to see this in it, though. I was happy to see this, because… One, I love CodeRabbit, and two, I think it’s pretty cool. Pretty cool.

Yeah. Summaries are useful, especially when you haven’t been in the weeds very much, and you’re just coming back to something. So that is cool. Side questing, main questing…

Side questing…

I gave another side quest too, but we won’t talk about that one, though.

I’m not ready for that one yet.

That one’s got some thorns. It’s like, don’t put me on that quest, okay? I’m still working on that one.

Next up, I thought we would talk through the comments section on our most controversial show of late, Adventures in Babysitting Coding Agents. So we had Steve Yegge on the show - what was that, two weeks ago now? Published June 6th…

About that, yes.

And this episode has generated a whole lot of discussion, which is always fun. Some people loved it, some people hated it, some people thought he was just lying… Other people thought he was inspiring, and had whole kinds of gems. So here we are, a couple weeks since… Adam, what are you thinking about the Steve Yegge episode, now that you’ve had some time to digest? I’m not sure you’ve listened back to it at all. I’m listening to it currently. I think I’m like two-thirds of the way through. Always fun a few weeks later to rethink your way through.

One of the things that happens live, as we record, obviously, is that we are consuming what he’s saying from the feed, from the fire hose… And you’re kind of reacting and you’re along for the ride, but not always able to, I guess, grasp every sentence, and think critically about every sentence… And so I think there were some things he said that, when I heard them back, I’m like “Oh, I probably should have hopped on that, because it seems like it’s far-fetched.” But here we are now… So what do you think about it now?

[20:02] Well, I think barring the fact that the tolling is expensive, given the cost of GPUs, given the cost of GPUs and compute etc, I think that will eventually flatten out, or… I mean, it always does, right? That’s going to be – it’s going to be expensive now to be on the edge. So I think that was the sentiment that was in comments, was the fact that these current tollings he’s boasting about and what’s possible is expensive to run. And not everybody can do it. And I get that.

But - I mean, we were… I recall, at the time it was just GPT. It wasn’t ChatGPT. It was just GPT. Like, early precursors of what has become ChatGPT. Kind of like making fun of the fact that it couldn’t write copy very well, and it was kind of fumbly, and it was like “Oh, that’s just a joke…” And here you are, nine months to a year later, after GPT’s writing copy for copywriters, the whole world’s changed, right? And so I’m not on the tip like Steve is, but I feel that he is, and he’s not the kind of person to be like just chicken-littling us, you know? He’s going to be a truthteller. And as much as he doesn’t even want to tell the truth, he’s now babysitting AI agents… Great name, by the way, for the podcast. Such a great title.

I think I’m with him. I think there’s a lot of… Commanding agents is what we’ll all be doing in some way, shape, or form. I think I was even, as part of this, re-reading some of the recent News episodes, and I think some of your commentary in the news recently was around this kind of sentiment, is that we’re all, as a developer… I think one sentiment you were sharing was, as a developer, you have certain skills, and you’ve already automated so much of your life away because you have these developer skills, where normal people just sort of deal with that toil and that tedium. And then your perspective, if I was reading it right, was that everyone else has these same kind of agentic powers now as well, including all the models available.

But someone like you in particular, with this developer skill, now has the skill of marketing and the skill of branding as well, because you can sort of bolt those on, and at least get by and do some damage. And so it sounded like just that you were saying that you have access to these tools like everybody else does, but now you’ve got these other superpowers, too. And I’m for it. I’m for all this. Is everything you said exactly going to play out? I don’t know… But he’s doing it, on the daily… So there you go.

Right. Yeah, I think Steve did this for me, which is more than I can say, I guess, for anybody else so far this year, is like he actually gave me a step toward the life that he’s living. And granted, he’s living it on his company’s dime; the money doesn’t matter to him. And so yeah, he has multiple agents running overnight, because he has a budget of unlimited tokens, because that’s part of his job, you know? So we can’t actually live his life… I know there’s people online who are doing this, and they’re spending hundreds, if not thousands, four figures a day, which is just outside of most people’s budgets, to have these things coding all day for them. But what he said is “Just go download one of these three”, he said. Claude Code, Open AI Codex, or Sourcegraph AMP, which is the horse that Steve rides in on, of course. But to his credit, he says that’s for enterprises, so try this one out.

[23:56] And just give it the stuff you don’t want to write. Like, the script that you’ve had in your mind, but you haven’t written, because the ROI just isn’t there, because it’s tedious to write… But if you had it, you would love it, but you’re not going to write it. And I’ve got like six of those just sitting in my head at any given moment. And so I was like “Okay, that’s actionable. I can actually try that.” And I gave it the old college try, you know? I went out and I tried OpenAI Codex… I couldn’t get the thing to work. I feel like their docs suck, or I’m an idiot, or both. But it just wouldn’t work. I mean, I couldn’t get it installed correctly, it wouldn’t find stuff, my API token wasn’t – blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, “Next…” [laughs]

Okay…

You know…? 15-20 minutes and I’m already in the red, you know? I could have written this script by now. So I’m sure that people have had success with that one, but that was – and I’m an OpenAI customer, so I’m not against them for any sort of philosophical reasons. And then I thought “Okay, Claude Code, let’s do this.” And I didn’t have an Anthropic account prior. This is one of the ones that I’ve been ignoring, for the most part, having tried many others… ChatGPT, all of Google’s offerings over the years, Grok even… And then the open source ones: LLaMA, Mistral etc. But I hadn’t done Claude, because I was like “Well, they’re kind of like OpenAI, but different… It’s probably going to be about that level…”

And what Claude Code did for me at the command line, which did seem like actually a more interesting interface for me than – or maybe not interesting; it’s not the right word. A more compelling interface for me than even inside of Zed, for some reason. It worked great. I mean, I just told it to do stuff. It was kind of like the – remember the image gen moment where I was like “Holy cow, this next generation is good now.” I feel like Claude Code with 4.0 - I think I was using 4.0. Claude 4. With that user interface, which is a terminal app basically, that kind of asks you questions, walks you through things, lets you kind of tab through options, and then goes out and does stuff… It’s kind of the right abstraction level, at least for my mind currently. And it was good.

Remember how I was telling you Gemini would write me a function? I’d be like “This function sucks”, and I’d go rewrite it. This is the first time I’ve been like “Not too shabby, Claude.” I’m just “Hmm… That’s kind of how I would have written it”, or maybe different, but just as good. And it works first try. I basically one-shotted it, as the cool kids say. And it just writes the script, and I’m like “Well, let me read this code”, and I go through and I read it all. I’m like “Yup, checks out, runs it. Great.” “Let’s change this”, changes it. I’m now doing what everybody else is, like sharing their vibe coding experience.

And so the next one, I was like “Alright, it’s true vibe-code. I’m not even going to read it. I’m just going to tell it what to do. Second script. Here’s another thing.” And [unintelligible 00:26:56.00] Now, this is a script that runs on my computer and doesn’t have to be QA’d, or face the real world… All those kind of things. But I was like “Man, I feel like it’s finally good now.” And maybe I’m just catching up, because people have been using this for 3, 6, 12 months. But I’ve been – even Google’s most recent model, which is the Gemini 2.5, whatever, ProFlash, experimental, whatever it’s called… It has disappointed me. And I’m no stan for Anthropic or anything, but I feel like we’re at a level now where it’s like “Okay, I can see what Steve is saying.”

Right.

Now, I also hit up quickly against token limits and stuff where I was like “Oh, it’s out for the day”, and I’ve got to either go chug some more money into this, or stop and wait till tomorrow… I go for stop and wait till tomorrow, because none of this stuff is time-sensitive.

[27:58] And so yeah, the expense is massive, I think… But I can see now where if I had this thing let loose on three or four different tasks simultaneously, hopefully not step it on itself, that could be pretty fun. Like, the amount of fun he’s talking about was where I couldn’t get to, because I haven’t had any fun with them yet… Whereas I do have fun making ChatGPT write poems, and stuff, or turning you into a walrus…

[unintelligible 00:28:23.12]

But this was fun, because now it’s like “Okay, if I don’t have to actually QA you to death, and like rewrite you, then I’m happier.” So that was cool, because now I’ve kind of changed my perspective. And it changed me to be like “What else could I hand this thing and not have to think about it myself anymore?” You know?

Yeah.

And it wrote a little bit of the code that I put out into the new purge request stuff.

What?!

Yeah.

Just like that, huh?

Yeah. It wrote a whole DNS module for me in Elixir.

What was the script you had to write? I mean, what was the first one and the second one? What was the task?

The first one was “Given a markdown file, I want you to traverse the whole thing, find every link in the file, and then go check and make sure that it is resolves and returns content. So like doesn’t 404.” Sometimes you mistype something or whatever in Changelog news, and I just want those to all be legit websites. And so that was like round one, was that. So like I’ll give you an absolute path to a markdown file, and you’ll go extract all the links, make HTTP requests, make sure they actually return content. And that was just fast. And it was like “Okay, done.” Like, oh, okay, now let’s change it so that you’re actually going to check the contents that they return against what I’m linking to them with. So now extract the title out of the anchor, or the text of the anchor, and the URL, and then let’s have a fuzzy match to make sure that they’re not just returning content, they’re returning the content that I want them to return. So I haven’t linked to something wrong, which I do all the time, and people email me and they’re like “Hey man, that link didn’t resolve.” Or “Hey, man, you pointed to this, but it’s actually that.” And so that was the first script, and that took me maybe 10 or 15 minutes, a couple tries… “Oh, it works. Now do it this way.”

And then the second script, which I had it write and I haven’t looked at the code at all is “Okay, now given a mark –” So one of the things I do for the video after I produce an episode is I will create screenshots of the top five stories, because they’re going to go in during the transitions and news in the video between segments… So I’m going to show you the actual content as a screenshot. And that’s just a manual thing I do every week. I go take five screenshots, I zoom them in, so they’re bigger, and make sure there are 16 by 9, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this one I was like “Okay, do that.” I just told it to write a script… I think this time I specified, a Ruby script, and use – this was a little bit of back and forth. Like, should it use – what should it use for the actual screenshot technology? And I was trying to use like a macOS built in, which wasn’t really working, and then I said “Use puppeteer-cli”, so I basically shelled out to a Node executable… And it’s like “Should I make sure the executable is on disk?” I’m like “No, I’ll make sure it’s on disk. Just leave that stuff out.” It’s like “Alright, cool.” And then it just worked, and I haven’t looked at the code. And I’m living the life now. I’m with you guys. I caught up.

Now, I’m still single-agent, though. And I need to go multi-agent, but I ain’t got enough money for this, man. I’m not made of money over here. We’re selling $15 tickets to our show.

Come on, now… Free if you go a different direction…

Yeah, I should have like a –

You just told me we’re not trying to make money here, too. So…

[laughs] I forgot we’re going to need money if I’m going to live this life. So that’s where I’m at.

This is a moneymaking venture. We need to pay for our agents.

That’s right.

Okay, so what was the total spend, roughly?

Oh, gosh, I don’t know.

Cost of subscription, kind of thing?

Well, yeah – well, that’s why I don’t understand, and I’m just like neophyte over here, because I have the… So I pay OpenAI 20 bucks a month, and so I went “Well, I’ll just pay Claude, or I’ll pay Anthropic for Claude AI the same.” And I think I did like 200 bucks a year, or something, and I was like “That gets me access to Claude Code.” But for some reason, that money doesn’t translate into your actual API access either… So you have to go to like the Anthropic console, and put more money in there… It’s all very confusing. Like, you get some use, but then it just like rate-limits you. I don’t have time for any of that, so I haven’t gotten back to it since then… But I was just very excited. So I don’t know how much it cost. I threw 200 bucks at them, but I don’t think I’ve used that. But I also don’t think I can use it, because I think it has to do with their web UI… Do you know the answers to these things?

I don’t.

Yeah. I’ve got like a year of Claude Pro or something, and I thought that was what I needed. But then it’s like, “You can use Claude Code, but not too much… Not too much.”

Use the Claude Pro then.

Yeah. And I was like “Well, I just gave you 200 bucks. Can I use it a little bit more?” They’re like “No. You’re going to need to give us more money.”

I think I was the same. I was playing with the API key from Open AI, and my ChatGPT subscription, essentially. And I wanted to take the same API token that I was using with that, and have access to my own Open AI models, I suppose, through Open Web UI. So this is the locally-running via LLaMA Web UI…

Right.

So I wanted to kind of like have one place to go, even for my already paid force. And it’s actually not an extension, to my knowledge, at least… It’s not an extension of ChatGPT, your subscription. It’s a whole separate API key that you fund differently… Which I can kind of understand in one way, shape or form, but it’s like… It sounds like you had to pay, or it seemed like you had to pay a subscription to even get access to give them even more money for the specific API token.

Something like that… You can go in there and top it off and use it, or something…

Yeah, it’s a different payment system, for some reason. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the way they meter it, maybe it’s where they pay for it.

Yeah… It’s like two different product teams, is my guess, and they’re just not simpatico. It’s like the API product, and then the chatbot product. And I thought I was buying access to everything… Because they said if you have Claude Pro, you can use Claude Code. And I’m like “That’s what I wanted to use.” And it’s like “Yeah, but not very much…” Okay.

So you had to have Claude Pro to get access. You paid for access to give them more money for more access.

That’s right.

That checks out. I mean, a certain membership tier gets access to the special things… That makes sense to me. So you had to pay for that membership tier to get access to the special thing, but the access came with giving them more money. It wasn’t like “Here you go. Use the 200 bucks you already spent.” It was “Nah, we need some more.”

Right. And so I haven’t given them the more yet, but they’ll still give me like the drip. You can’t get the flow, but you can get the drip. And I’m like “Well, I’ll just write one script a day. Fine with me.” I don’t need – but in order to try to live the life that Steve is talking about…

[37:55] And then I go out and I see what people are paying for this stuff. So if we go into the comments section and read some of the commentary, of course, price was one of them. And in our comments, Brian Buchholz - not sure how you say it, Brian… He went and found out what Gene Kim is spending monthly on YouTube. Well, that’s at least what the thumbnail looks like. Gene Kim is on the thumbnail. Maybe it’s not him talking. I did not read it, because I just took his takeaway… Which says “Regarding monthly spend, found this on YouTube saying he” - and I assume that he is Gene Kim - “spends $300 to $500 a day.” So that’s $100,000 a year. And this is Brian’s math.

And it’s like, okay, maybe worth it. If you’re replacing – I mean, basically, the other option is like hire an engineer. Now, I know that’s brutal and harsh and maybe inhumane, but I will say, the experience that I had with one agent, doing agent decoding for me, was already better than experiences I’ve had telling humans to go do things, you know? The feedback loop is faster, and there aren’t opportunities to offend it. Like, if you tell me my code doesn’t look good, I might be offended. Now, maybe I’m not; I’ve got thick skin, but… Or you know, I’m just having a bad day, and it’s something else, and you’re like “Jerod, that function is not right”, I might just like go off on you. Right?

Yeah.

But this thing’s not going to. It’s always going to be like “Oh, you’re right.” And there’s actually – there’s something there. The fact that it’s not a human sometimes – it doesn’t mean mistreat it, Adam. I’m not saying mistreat it. But just don’t worry about its feelings.

It doesn’t have feelings! [laughs]

It makes it more fun to delegate to it, because you’re like “I just tell it what I want.”

No matter what, it’s happy.

I don’t have to do the sandwich method. Like, start with a compliment, then criticize, then give a compliment…

Yeah. None of that.

I don’t have to do any of that. I’m just like “Yo, bro, this function’s broken”, and he’s like “You’re right. I should fix it.”

And he fixes it. I’m like “Keep going…

“Yo, bro… This function is broken…”

So there is something to that, where it’s like, a 100K for a good engineer, or a 100k for like three or four of these all day, every day… I’m not sure what that actually buys you. There’s a point where it becomes a pretty easy decision, for somebody like me who does not like to manage or micromanage humans.

Yeah. What you’ve uncovered is the removal of emotion and relationship in task delegation, which to human history thus far has not existed. Emotion has been there. Humanity, and social norms, and offense… All those things are in that scenario. And now it’s possible to completely remove it, and still, explore in the dark, like you might with new hires.

Yeah. Like, you’d tell someone “Hey, go try this out and come back to me and let me how it goes.”

Yeah. It’s not like “You know what? That task didn’t happen because I had a headache.” Now, it might say “Fail, retry”, or something like that, which is maybe a similar version of it…

Yeah, API rate-limited…

Yeah.

Ah…!

Those are different problems. That’s money. You can solve that with more money.

You throw money at that. Right. You don’t have to throw like interpersonal skills at it.

That’s how I looked at it. When people were talking about how they spend their money, or how certain people spend their money using these tools, I thought “Well, they’re just swapping out the same budget they had applied to solving the problem with humans, they just solved it with a singular human, or maybe a small team of humans, with agents.” Or tools. Tooling. It’s what we’ve been doing already. It’s just now it’s unfortunate it’s becoming literal humans in the loop that are not in the loop anymore. Or at least being competed against, or tried against. Like you just said, you got better results… If I heard you right, you got better results with this than you would have or have had given the same task to a human, with maybe less moaning and complaining.

Or even just emotional overhead for me.

Right.

[42:16] And maybe there wouldn’t be any moaning or complaining, everything would go fine. But I don’t have to even care, you know? Which is not a small thing. I mean, it actually – it’s like “Oh, this is fun.” It’s like having a code rabbit that’s just like “I’m a rabbit. I don’t have any – just give me the instructions. I’m going to go do it. Maybe I’ll fail, maybe I’ll be correct…”, all the things. You’ve got to fix them, correct them, things go wrong, they’re dumb, etc. But no actual human in the loop there. Like, just me and a bunch of little AI babies building this thing. I think it really – I do not think it’s the near future for most people. I do think it’s the medium term future for most people. And it’s certainly – unless something changes with these companies providing these services with regards to like copyright, or whatever; regulation that slows it down… I’m sure that capitalism squashes the costs, eventually, to marginal, and it’s definitely a future now I can say “You know what? I wouldn’t mind living in this future”, as a guy who makes software. I feel like I can make way more software if this all continues to trend the way it is.

So that was my result after taking Steve’s advice there, with “Just go try it on some script you haven’t written yet because you just don’t want to, or it’s too hard, or whatever.” Should we read some more comments from people? Because there’s just so many thoughts on this episode.

Yeah –

For instance, Andrew O’Brien: “The gig economy for programmers does not fill me with excitement.” This was something that a lot of people took issue with. And Steve’s analogy that you’ll have this gig economy inside of enterprises, where you just kind of rent a coder for a day, or whatever it is, like coders on demand in order to do code review, or whatever it is you have to do… And Steve was saying this is like a great new thing that’s going to happen, and most people were like “That’s not really something we want in our enterprises.” Because - I mean, the gig economy has been both a blessing and a curse, right? Like, there’s been a lot of bad that’s come from that.

I’d say so too, yeah.

Mostly humans being marginalized, which - again, that’s where we are, right? That’s what we just talked about, but I talked about it in a good way. Like, I don’t have to have a human. But I think everybody becomes the master of their own domain. I mean, I feel like for people who have – I mean, I think there’s more agency, assuming it’s affordable and it works and etc. I feel like it gives more people more agency, and removes the skill, which is what hurts for so much of us. It’s like “Yeah, the skill doesn’t matter anymore. My skills don’t matter.” But your judgment now matters way more. Your taste matters way more. Your ability to communicate matters way more. So it’s certainly a trade-off.

Yeah, I was actually reading that one… You said “The rise of judge –” Well, you didn’t say it. This is somebody else’s title, but you wrote this for News…

Yeah, I wrote about that. Yeah.

Yeah, the rise of judgment over technical skill. And I think that’s certainly going to become more of a decider for folks. It’s like “I want to understand your judgment, not your skills.” Because you can kind of learn most things, for the most part, but do you have good taste? Does your taste align? Do your beliefs align with mine in the direction for this thing? It’s kind of cliché to come back to the Uber thing, because that’s really where a lot of this gig economy stuff began. But I think about even simple things like our recent trips out of town. Like, the last three or four trips, you and I have limed everywhere… Whereas before we would just not go and do much outside of the hotel, just within walking distance, unless it was like a nice hike or getaway. Like, we would do that too, but less frequently because of that.

[46:17] That’s electric scooters, for those who don’t know what Limes are. They’re electric scooters.

Yeah, Limes are Uber-accessible electric scooters. You can use the Uber app to reserve them, and book them, and pay for them…

It’s a separate company, I believe, unless Uber bought the company. But it’s like integrated.

Yeah, I don’t know about that either.

Yeah. I know they at least started as their own company, but I think Uber either acquired them, or integrated them in a smart way, so that you can just – you don’t have to have the lime app. Now, I’ve done the same thing with Bird, which - Bird is another electric scooter company that is out there. Like, it’s been in Kansas City; that’s where I’ve done it. And they kind of got beaten by Lime in this way. It’s like “Well, now that I already have the Uber app, why would I want the Bird app? I’m just going to use the Limes, because they’re in there.”

Yeah.

But you were making a bigger point. I was just pointing out what Limes are.

It’s crucial to say that, because if you haven’t traveled recently from your city to a different city, appreciate the fact that when you do this next time, not only will you be able to Uber from the hotel – or sorry, from the airport to the hotel. Once you get to your hotel, if you’d like to not Uber anywhere else, like get in the car and go somewhere, you can simply go to the nearest corner, in most cases, pull up in your Uber app and scan this QR code on the Lime scooter, and just happily get on it and go wherever you want. Now, provided it keeps its charge and has power, it will take you wherever you want to go, and for the most part safely. It’s up to you. There’s no helmet involved… You are suggested to ride on the roads. They tell you to stay off the sidewalks, although I saw you on a sidewalk, on a recent Changelog News.

Did you see me almost hit that guy?

I saw something…

Oh, man… That FedEx guy or UPS guy hopped out of nowhere [unintelligible 00:48:00.12] took him out.

Yeah.

I slowed that down and replayed it for people. That’s a good moment.

Yeah, that was a good moment.

Anyways.

But that you can go somewhere now. So the reason why I bring this up is not to camp out on this sort of like well-known known fact, which is Uber exists. And this is where gig economy began, and marginalization began. But that we now have a new thing as individuals, to go to a whole new city… And like you said before, this goes back to agency. We have the agency to step outside of our hotel… We could fly down an Uber. We could rent a car. It’s just less practical now if we have a Lime, because we can easily just hop on your Lime and my Lime, and we just go and we scoot, and we have fun, and we stop, and we get off, and we leave it… You can just leave it wherever you want, take a photo, and then go into the store and do what you want, or go into the restaurant for three hours and come back out… It might still be there, or a new one replaced it, that somebody else brought there, that’s fully charged, and you just go again. To me, that agency in a city is how I compare this. Like, that’s a beautiful thing. What other things will be versions of that? …either in the agent world, or in the physical world, that are a result of that technology being available. Like, that to me is just so cool, honestly.

Yeah, absolutely. And some of the stuff that Apple showed off at WWDC, with the ability to call local models on your phone, and then basically – like, if vibe-coding gets good enough where everyone can just vibe code their own little iPhone app for their one use case that no one else is going to use… Like, that’s pretty awesome. That’s going to make a lot of people’s lives a lot better. A lot of people who previously would have to hire some team that’s going to charge them a hundred grand to get their thing done… It’s never going to happen.

[49:53] One category is “I have a business idea. I’m going to go fund it to build a thing.” That becomes cheaper, of course. But the even more generally usable thing is “I have this annoyance that I don’t like. I wish I could fix it. My life would be slightly better.” And now it’s like “Hey, Xcode, why don’t you do a thing that makes an app that does this?” And it’s like, 10 minutes later it’s deployed on your iPhone, just for you. That’s pretty cool.

That is beyond pretty cool, man. That’s super-cool. That’s super-cool.

Yeah, it is beyond pretty cool. Returning to the comments section… JrWren… JuniorWren? Not sure how to pronounce that handle. He says “I don’t know what to say after listening to this podcast other than I just plain don’t believe him. Not sure if he’s lying intentionally or if his experience is some special niche, or if I’m just straight up wrong.” I like that comment.

Oh, yeah.

Because there’s some like wiggle room in there… Like, “Well, maybe he’s lying. Maybe –”

“I just don’t believe him.”

“I just don’t believe him. It’s just hard to believe.”

Yeah, I think what he’s not saying there - he’s not saying that Steve is a liar. He’s just saying that he’s in disbelief that it’s possible. Is that how you read that?

Yeah. He’s not sure if he’s actually lying, or if it’s just like “He’s living in a world I’m not living in.” It’s hard for him to believe.

Now, he does say in the second sentence, “I’m not sure if he’s intentionally lying.”

Right.

Or lying intentionally. So I guess he kind of answers my question. He’s questioning himself whether or not this guy’s lying or not.

Yeah, funny.

It very much is the future. It’s very much a snapshot – not THE future, the literal future coming, but a version of what’s coming as a result of the future coming, I guess is a different way to say it. Like, it’s not a snapshot of what I think we’ll do in the future, it’s today’s version of the snapshot.

Okay. Yes, thank you. And then AJ Kerrigan replied to that response in agreement. “I had that feeling too, with regards to either him lying or just being wrong. I’ve been in a much tamer AI-curious zone, more like baby steps than babysitting.” Nice turn of phrase there. “And AMP’s warning” - that’s the Sourcegraph coding agent - about “If you want your costs limited and predictable, don’t use this” effectively warned me off it.” I feel like most people right now, in mid-2025 - this is too expensive for most of us… In the way that some people are using it, where they’re spending $300, $500, a thousand bucks a day, and really leaning into it… I just feel like it is too expensive. And it warned me off of it, too. Like, I just stopped. I was like “Okay…” I haven’t even gotten to where Steve is. I haven’t gotten two agents going at the same time yet. I’m like single-agent status. Show title…? “So my experience/appetite/skill were all too far away from Steve’s to practically relate. Still, an interesting show, though. It’s useful to see what people with a ton of resources and AI focus/optimism are getting up to.”

Christopher Patty hops in and doubles down on how expensive it is, “Infinite money.” And of course, Sourcegraph is one of the companies that’s trying to capture some of that money, so there is that nuance to the conversation as well.

I mean, they’re trying to capture the money, but they’ve also been trying to solve the same problem for – it’s not like they came out of the woodwork and like “Let’s create Kodi and AMP and Sourcegraph to just grab your money.” They’ve been solving a problem for developers for the better part of a decade.

Sure.

So… They do have a funding top side, obviously, if you choose them. I get that.

A large one. Like, they’ll make tons of money if AMP becomes the way.

Yeah.

Yeah. Which is fine. Like, if it becomes the way, they deserve a bunch of money, right?

[53:54] You know, I mean, everybody has agents though, right? Every brand I can think of - I don’t want to like toot too many horns, I suppose, indirectly… You’ve got Agentforce from Salesforce; not a sponsor, technically. Technically they are, through Heroku; that’s Salesforce. And we talked about Agentforce as part of that campaign, it just didn’t land. It was spoken about in regards to Heroku being a better platform for application developers, therefore Agentforce. Retool has agents out now. That’s uniquely positioned to take advantage of the existing Retool internal tools you’ve built. So now the agents you build out will have access to these internal tools. I think that’s the coolest thing ever, honestly. Great timing to be Retool.

Yeah.

I don’t know how much different AMP is compared to like a Retool; like, how these agents separate. What the difference is between Sourcegraph AMP, for example, and Retool agents. I’d imagine they’re marginally different, but similar tasks, just not the same overall landscape of feel, what they can agent over, so to speak… Then you’ve got agents like you are doing, which is in the command line… So they’ve got file system access, stuff like that. It’s a whole different scenario. You’ve got agents in the cloud, agents on the desktop…

I guess I just want this unpredictive AI/predictive AI, so to speak, to work for me in the future, and that’s what agents are. You just find places to put the work, and they do the work. It is the best source of automation in so many ways. I don’t have to write the business plan anymore, because I just describe the business, and it writes the executive summary, and all the models, and all the math… Now, provided the math checks out, that’s why you have to run one against the other, which I’ve done multiple times, because I’m always questioning business model ideas… That’s different, man. That’s different. It’s crazy. I’m rambling here, but this world we’re going to live in is really interesting.

Yeah, it’s definitely different.

I think we are, obviously – Steve was talking about the future… I mean, he literally gets paid to play with R&D. I mean, that’s where he’s at. His tale was not the tale of some rando who decided to investigate. It’s somebody who’s paid to R&D for a well-funded, I would say AI-first now company called Sourcegraph. That’s his job, is to R&D for them, and to dream. And so he’s seeing a glimpse of what that dream is after being a 30+, 20+ year veteran in software. It’s a pretty substantial opinion to listen to.

For sure. Well, he also wrote the book on vibe coding, which - the funny thing about that, and I think I said this to him afterwards… It’s like “Dude, that’s not coming out till October. Isn’t vibe-coding going to be so different by October?” This feels like the kind of book that needs to be constantly updated in real time.

Yes, out right now.

Because the state of the art continues to change at a rapid pace. Let’s read a couple more comments. There’s so many of them; we can’t read them all, of course. If you’re not in our Zulip, what’s wrong with you? Great conversations being had…

That’s right.

Lots of interesting people join and converse with us. Tim Ukin - we’ve heard from Tim in the past. He’s got the bear take here. “Imagine a future where a generation of young men who are smart and energetic enough to learn to code can’t get jobs. Imagine, in addition, those there are a huge number of young men who are laid off, and have nothing but time on their hands and are desperate to make a living. I’m not hopeful for the future after listening to this. We all thought automation would go after unskilled positions, and everybody could just skill up and get a better job. Now it’s going after the highest skilled jobs: coders, designers, creatives, writers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, financial analysts, stockbrokers etc.”

You know, let’s scroll back up to that one. Let’s camp out there for a second. So I think about this a lot. So let’s pick out lawyers, right?

Okay.

[58:05] We’ve paid lawyers before, right, Jerod? We’ve paid lawyers generous sums to do things for us.

For sure. Too much.

Too much, in my opinion.

For too little. Just kidding.

I think they charge a crazy amount per hour… Does that mean they’re not skilled? The workforce – I guess society forces them to go to very expensive schooling, at length. And so they should be paid well.

[unintelligible 00:58:23.15]

I get that. But there are so many things I’ve paid a lawyer 400 bucks an hour to do, that they show off to the person that doesn’t get paid 400 bucks an hour… They still happily charge us 400 bucks an hour, because “Hey, that’s our rate, okay?” There’s no discount for when we show it off to the future me, that only gets paid 100 bucks an hour, you know?

Right.

I get it - companies, margin, profits… I get it all. I get it all.

Lambos… I mean, you’ve gotta get a Lambo.

Yeah. But there’s just so much expenditure in that world, where like there’s room to siphon off some… And as a business person, I get to move faster, because I have, again, agency to take control over certain things. And to me, that’s a fun world to live in. That’s a fun world to live in. I like that world. What are you showing off here? This comic here?

[laughs] I was just looking at a comic that somebody put in. I was trying to see if it was worth reading. It’s basically just representing the fact that we’re replacing all the fun things, like art, and not plumbing… And it’s like, we need robots for plumbing. Oh, we’re working on robot plumbers. Trust me. I don’t know that we are, but I know that we are. And by “we”, I mean the human race. Someone’s working on robot plumbers, aren’t they?

I think you might – okay, so let me try and predict this.

Okay. On record.

I think there’s definitely gonna be prediction in the way buildings, large-scale buildings will get plumbed. Why would a human do it when the AI can do all the downslope and angles perfectly, right? Why do all that math? A human shouldn’t do all that math. At some point, software should learn that math, and the human should think about grand architecture and tasteful things. So that’s probably one area, is design. Plumbing design systems. Happily automate that away; unless I’m that person, I’m pissed because I just said that. Who does that? So I do feel for that person. But now they’ve gotta move down the value chain, right?

[laughs] [unintelligible 01:00:29.06]

Now they’ve gotta figure out if it was implemented right, until maybe the AI can do that. Move up the value chain, yes. Thank you. Then I think about maybe there’s some sort autonomous robot that can build certain configurations, and turns, and U-shapes that maybe the on-site plumber doesn’t have to do that; they can just hand the task really fastly to this thing that can hammer out this intricate whatever, and all they’ve gotta do is plug it into the thing… And I know I probably sound very vague when I say that, but imagine this complex configuration of plumbing that just gets automated by the robot, and the human sort of puts it into position. Or knows where it should go. That to me is probably pretty common. An actual person getting replaced by a robot under the sink though, in the traditional sense of a plumbing, behind the toilet, replacing the toilet - that’s gonna be a human’s job for a while.

Yeah. At least a few months.

At least a few months.

[laughs] I’m just kidding.

And honestly, if you’re a – you know, a friend of mine… Let me see if I… I’ll pull up the text real quick. A friend of mine just shared this with me, and this kind of fits into here. And he was talking about this idea of lifestyle entrepreneurship. And I’ll just read a couple of sentences of it, because he says “A lifestyle entrepreneur builds a business designed to support their desired lifestyle, prioritizing personal freedom, flexibility and fulfillment over maximizing revenue or company size.”

[01:02:05.11] So if I’m the person who does that kind of plumbing, and I can step into a role that not a lot of people want to do, I do it pretty well, and I do it when I want - that’s a lifestyle entrepreneur opportunity. You can be a great plumber and do that kind of work, on the simple home scenarios, or the grand scale remodel, or complex enterprise scenario; maybe less that, but more so the other one where I’m like “I can go in and plumb. I could do a job a robot probably can’t do for a long time. They could do some of it. They can assist me. They can assist me on slope, or which size pipe to use, and help me on all the adapters… Like, play all that for me, and I’ll just do the work.” The part that the human can do and should do pretty much forever, which is like precision, no leaks, check it, water pressure… Okay, cool, it works. Robot? Nah. For a while. Planning it, designing it - yes, robots. Give it to me, right now.

I might take the complete opposite side of that.

Okay…

I think the human has to be involved in the planning and the deciding - of course, they’re AI-assisted - because that’s where the judgment is. That’s where the discretion and the wisdom can be applied. But the robot can do the precision motions, and perhaps even lift heavier things, and fit into places… These, of course, are humanoid robots, which they’re working on. And I think backbreaking work… Every plumber I’ve ever known - and I’ve known a handful of them - by the time they’re 40, 50 years old, their knees are shot, their back is jacked up… They wish they didn’t spend the last 30 years plumbing underneath a sink, or underneath a toilet.

And so I feel like the human needs to be in the loop where the judgments are made, and the robot should be doing the – like, you know, Bender from Futurama. Bender bends things, you know? I don’t know… Who knows what it’s going to look like. I can see yours being true, I can see –

Well, didn’t I say both, though? Planning it and doing the intricate bends, and stuff…

Well, you said the human’s there with the precision and the…

In placing it in place. Yeah.

Right.

Because - I mean, what autonomous robot can easily maneuver into places?

Well, not right now, but they’re working real hard on this. I mean…

They are. Now, we watch a lot of Boston Dynamics, my son and I; my youngest and I. For entertainment. And so I would say I’m pretty schooled on their abilities… And it’s bostly boring, weird enterprise things that they carry 30 pounds from here to there.

Well, you start with the easy stuff, right? But I mean, specialized machinery is only a step away from like robots.

They are, yeah.

I mean, [unintelligible 01:05:05.00] machines that build things, like the precision tooling inside of a car manufacturer, for instance… I know Tesla has like what they call a robot that’s doing these precision motions. Now, one that can do arbitrary tasks, they’re working on, but yeah, I think that’s probably pretty far away. But specialized robots… You know, flipping hamburgers - not very hard. A whole bunch of teenagers not going to be able to get their job flipping hamburgers, because why? Why would you deal with a teenager when you have a robot that all it needs is some WD-40 and a kick in the back and it’s good to go?

It’d be kind of cool to walk up to a burger shop and it’s just - not so much a robot specifically, like a…

A humanoid robot.

Yeah, a humanoid kind of thing… But it’s like just –

[laughs] You want a robot that acts kind of like a human, but isn’t one?

Yeah, it’s just automation. You see it in motion. I mean, they’ve been doing that with donuts for a while.

[01:06:00.29] Oh, for sure.

You had the conveyor that the donut rides on…

Yeah, yeah. [unintelligible 01:06:02.25]

Laverne & Shirley showed us that in the ’80s, in Milwaukee…

That’s right. Lucille Ball, right? I love Lucy. She had her assembly line.

Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like that’s not too far away, especially with how hard it is to hire these days, and with how the minimum wage is going up; you just push small businesses to automate. They’d rather have a capital expenditure on a robot than hire more people at that wage. So yeah, it gets to be pretty dicey for humans, like Tim’s talking about, you know?

Tim’s so right.

Gosh, darn it…

I think we’re all a version of right, though. I mean, unintentionally, we’re questioning the value of humanity. Like, we’re not really trying to question it, but we have to. Because I think it’s pretty common for someone to say “I would prefer to not deal with a teenager and their emotion.” And so if that’s the case, and you can choose an autonomous, robot-like thing, whether it’s automation robots, or like a literal humanoid robot, you’re probably going to make some version of a pragmatic choice. And the pragmatic choice says “This route - less error, no emotion, precision.” Happily happy to mess up and say they’ll fix it, and then fix it. Or “I came in late. I’ve got entitlement”, whatever these kids these days are saying…

[laughs] “I’m leaving early…”

I don’t know what they’re saying, you know… Now, at the same time, I’ve met some really good kids, taking care of me at restaurants, and places like that, so it’s such a –

Oh yeah, there’s always good kids, and there’s always, good for nothings. There always has been.

Break: [01:07:56.04]

That being said, I’ve been watching Alone again. Have you ever seen this show, Alone?

I don’t think so.

Okay, so this is a Survivor competition show, where they drop 10 people, 12 people, however many it is, out in the middle of nowhere. They’ll pick a location that’s difficult… These are survivors; they’re professional survivor kind of people.

Okay…

And their job is to stay alone in that location and survive. They do all their own survivoring, of course; that should go without saying, but I said it anyways. They do all their own survivoring – see, a robot would never give you this level of redundancy… And then they also do their own recording. So they have GoPros, and they do – like, there’s no one there with cameras. There’s no camera guy or gal.

Wow.

[01:09:57.09] They’re all alone. Now, once every couple of weeks a crew comes out and does a health check with them, and makes sure they’re not like actually dying, and then leaves. That’s their only contact with humanity. And so it’s fun to watch, because a) you’ve got to survive. They’re cold, they’re – whatever; mosquito bites… Most of them are starving… Like, they have to find food… Very difficult. They have to have shelter… But most of them, most of them end up going crazy and quitting. Like, you can also tap out whenever you want. Like, you just phone in and like “I’m officially tapping out”, or whatever you say, and they come and get you.

Almost all of them lose, not because they’re starving, or they are bored, it’s because there’s no humans. It’s because they’re alone. It’s because they’re lonely. And the more tied they are to – it’s almost like the better life they have, the more tied they are to people back home… Like, if you’ve got kids, you’re done. You’re smoked.

The first episode is fun, because I go through it and I know which ones are not going to make it. It’s like, “I’ve got a two year old.” It’s like, you’re smoked. You might as well just quit today. And then there’s other guys like “I brought a picture of my kids.” I’m like “You are so done. There’s no way.” You’re going to look at that picture for like six hours and then be out of here.

Yeah… It’s your weakest moment, you’re turning around.

But there’s a gal, the most recent one, it’s the Australia version, which - Australians are surprisingly wimpy. I’m just putting that out there for the universe. Dude, these people give up so quick. It’s in Tasmania, but they’re all pretty much Australians. And I thought they would be tougher than this, so… Take that, Australia. But a couple of them last a long time, and there’s one gal who’s like her daughter died at a young age, and she’s divorced, and she’s kind of – she didn’t have much to go back to, you know? And I’m like “She’s got a good shot.” Anyways, the whole point is, we talk about the value of humans, right? We talk about the value of humans. And do we need them, and what value do they bring. But in a world where everything we do - like, you go get your coffee in the morning, it’s a robot. You go to work and you work with AI robots. And then you go out for lunch, and you’re sitting there with a robot serving you food, or whatever… The value is the humanity itself, right? Like, that’d be a lonely world… Don’t you want the humans in there?

Yeah.

I think we’re gonna want the humans in the loop.

There’s 100% value to the human connection, obviously.

Yes.

And I think that’s what we’re all clawing for, is like “Where will society be okay with removing? And where will society be zero okay with removing a human?” And I think that’s probably the struggle of the next 10 years of humanity, is where – that will be the next 10 years of tension in humanity, is like “Where are we okay with removing and not removing a human in the loop?” Because you’re right, when I go to - pick your favorite coffee shop - I want to walk in there and I want to see other humans in there doing their thing.

Yeah, totally.

Sitting down, drinking their stuff, hanging with friends, meeting with people…

Right.

The classic coffee scene.

Classic.

And I don’t want to go to a counter where I’ve got to push a button or it already knows my order. Even if it was better coffee, I like talking to Sally, or John, or Bob, or whoever’s behind the counter, because that’s what life’s about. They’re my neighbor. They go to church with me. I see them at H-E-B, the grocery store. I see them at jujitsu class with my kid, or whatever, or baseball, or pick your thing.

That’s the fabric of society, and I think that’s gonna be the challenge of humanity, is like keeping or not keeping certain fabrics as we kind of go forward. Where are you okay with removing that…? Now, hey, let’s talk about car washes, okay?

Let’s talk about it.

Okay, last time I went to a car wash, a kid or a version of a young adult checked me in to my order…

Okay…

They pushed a button and told me “Follow these people.” And there was a line of cars. I went through this system, they maybe did some like wheel scrubbing and maybe some extra application, some things that are like bonuses… Maybe they’re bonuses because humans did them.

Alright.

But the robots did everything else, okay? My truck came out – yeah, I mean…

Average.

[01:14:17.05] Average, yeah.

[laughs]

It was not a human-done job. But do you need that? I don’t know.

Right. Like, what’s good enough… I feel like on that – so we have the same things here where it’s like Rocket Car Wash, or Tommy’s Express, or whatever, and it’s like 99% machine, and there’s like a human there, some 16-year-old kid that’s bored out of his mind… He’s just waving you through. We have the one where they’re supposed to spray you to get the bugs off, but the kid’s just like “Whatever, guys…” He’s just kind of like spraying the water wherever…

Spraying the wrong place…

He’s been there for like nine hours and he’s bored out of his mind. And yet, the car wash is always just like–

Humming.

…suitable. Yeah, it’s busy, but I’m saying like, the end result, you’re just kind of like “Meh…” It’d be so much better if a person actually did this. Not worth it for the price. Like, for the price, you’re like “Yeah, but… 10 bucks”, or whatever.

Yeah. You’re never going to get that from a human. A human will never do that job for that price.

Right. That being said, a human at the front, and then at the end, doing the dry off, and like the touch-up work, or the finishing… That’s a good combo. It’s like the human sandwich. Human, AI, and then a human. [laughter] There’s a show title, again.

Human, AI, human.

That’s a human sandwich. I’m full of them.

You are. You did a good job today. [unintelligible 01:15:40.05]

Well, I’ve been drinking this whiskey, you know…

Oh yeah, I forgot you’re sipping on that whiskey… See, as a sober person, it’s so strange because I’m never not sober anymore.

I’m also sober.

Yeah, I’d figured you were.

Just because I’ve been drinking this whiskey doesn’t mean I’m not sober.

You don’t lose it on a podcast. But you might be a little bit more tipsy than I am. I guarantee you are.

Well, I definitely have more alcohol in my body than you do.

That’s true. That’s true.

So I’ll give you that much.

Yeah. You know, just keep the humans, you know…? Just keep the humans.

Yeah… We’re here, we’re humans…

We want to work… [laughter]

Oh, I don’t even like laughing about this. I’m going to get slapped in the face by humans and robots at some point in my life for my comments right now.

This is going to go out to our feed, and [unintelligible 01:16:20.22] is going to come here and he’s gonna be like “You guys…”

Transcribed… We’re the fools on the microphone.

Also, I think he might be from Australia, so this is the double whammy. He’s either New Zealand or Australia.

I think Tim is from Australia.

Take that, Tim. Your people are weak. [laughs] Go watch Alone in Australia, and they drop like flies out there. It’s very surprising. Okay –

Is it better than Naked and Afraid?

I haven’t actually watched Naked and Afraid, because I just don’t have any interest in the naked part…

I don’t either. It’s always blurred out. Like, it’s not why you watch it.

It’s stupid, though. Isn’t that just a stupid gimmick? That’s what I assumed.

I don’t think it is. Now, let me tell you why I don’t think it is… Because a lot of people will come to that show, and you’ll see at the comments “Where’s the version without the blur?”

[laughs]

There is no version without the blur, you weirdo. Okay?

What a stupid comment…

That’s not the purpose of the show. It’s literally to strip the person down – from something to nothing, and live the 14 or 21 days, or whatever it is. And I think there’s a little bit, because they always pair a guy and a girl together, and so there may be some of that in the relationship part of it…

Yeah, like “We’re both naked in the wilderness…”

Yes. And you’re like “How far will they go with their own separate lives, and their commingling to make it work?” That’s part of the struggle.

Sure.

So I think that’s maybe the edge of the Naked and Afraid part of it… But I’ve never personally watched it because I’m trying to get a glimpse of the blur. [laughter] It just doesn’t make any sense.

No.

But the fact that they did go from “I came here clothed, and I had to be vulnerable and take my clothes off…”

Yeah.

…and then be literally “What God gave me” to survive out here. Like, that to me is a really compelling show.

[01:18:04.15] Is there a time limit, though? It’s like two weeks?

I think it’s 21 days, if I remember correctly.

Okay. That’s the big difference here with Alone, is there’s no time limit. You can just survive as long as you can survive. And you don’t know if the other people have dropped off or not, because you have no contact.

Oh, my gosh…

So maybe it’s two people, maybe there’s a bunch of them still going, maybe the other person is starving to death and you’re doing great… You have no idea what’s happening. So that’s the difference. Also, don’t you think the Naked and Afraid – if the prerequisite for the show is like “Look, here’s what you’re signing up for. You’re gonna strip down naked, and then” whatever, what happens next. Doesn’t that really limit like the pool of humans that you could possibly recruit? Like, you already guarantee that some probably crazy people are coming on… Which is good for TV, but for me - I like the survival style. Like, I like seeing how smart and resourceful they are, and stuff… And I just feel like Naked and Afraid doesn’t invoke that style of show to me. It’s just like, somebody trembling behind a tree. What are they afraid of?

You know, once they’re into it, they don’t even care anymore. Like, once it’s gone… Past that first close off moment, it’s kind of like not even part of the show anymore.

What’s the afraid part?

Well, I think the fact they’re in Tanzania, or some random places…

[laughs] Yeah. And there’s predators about?

…and it’s like “Okay, not only was I dropped off in Tanzania, but I’m dropped off in Tanzania during storm season. So I know today it’s dry, I’ve got to get over that hill… And if I do, I can get to the place where I can create my shelter. And if I don’t, I’m spending a half day through those thistles and the rain”, and it’d be cold by the time he’d get there. So it’s strategic thinking. And the fact that they’re naked, that means there’s no shoes either. So everywhere they’re literally barefooted.

Right.

They’re exposed as extremely as you can be to the elements.

Do any of them fashion clothes for themselves, or anything?

They do. Yeah. I mean, there’s versions of the show that are like – they call them “Naked and Afraid XL”, I believe is what they call the… Like extra large.

Like, the show [unintelligible 01:20:07.14]

I’m sorry, I’m not part of this crew. I don’t make up these names. And it’s like multiple teams. You would get dropped off by yourself, and you will have to find your people, and then you have like this four-person squad, and there’ll be multiples of those. So there might be like three or four four-person squads… And then it’s all competing, but individually too, because you kind of are on this team, and I want me and Jerod’s team to win, obviously… You know, I want to survive, let’s just say; I don’t want to lose.

Right. That’s a good strategy there.

But then there’s times where I may tap out and you may continue, and you join somebody else’s team. So now you’ve got like team changes and stuff like that happening… There’s a lot of unexpected things. Or you’ve got this dude who’s like “Oh, you know what? I’m going to eat this alligator’s eyeballs, because they’re great for protein”, but they’re also really great for parasites. And this dude basically has to get out, which is something that happened to one of them before. He ate the alligator’s eyeballs, and then he regretted eating the alligator’s eyeballs.

Wow.

And he didn’t make it past a day after that. He was gone.

He got sick.

Yeah, he was gone. And you’re like “Hey, that dude eats some really weird stuff. Let’s not eat what he eats, okay? Because he eats some really weird stuff.”

Well, I’m glad the XL was referring to the team size. I thought it just meant like plus size people, you know?

Yeah, no… And they invite the legends, too. They invite the legends back, too.

Wow… This is a deep catalog.

It really is. I mean, it’s probably 15 seasons deeper and more, I’m guessing…

Wow, people must like the show.

At least. At least. I mean, honestly, I don’t know what other people feel about Naked and Afraid, or the naked part of being Naked and Afraid… But it’s always been a hoot to be seeing that person in the comments, “Where’s the version without the blur?” Like, there is none.

[laughs] Just, every episode has one…

Unfortunately, it’s just part of the name. But I think it’s got this great premise, which is why I like Alone. I like the idea of Alone. I think actually it might be more fun with a prepared survivalist, fully clothed, potentially.

Right.

[01:22:10.27] But then there’s also some excitement about somebody who’s like “You know what? I’ve seen some people survive where I’m like “There’s no way he or she is surviving.” And they’re the one who thrives. You’re like “How did that person who was skinnies all get out, no fat at all in their body, to lose? They’re going to be a skeleton afterwards. How did they survive?”

Well, 21 days you can just starve.

Yeah, you can.

That’s why I think like with Alone – like, to win Alone (I’ve watched enough seasons), you’ve got to go at least two months. No one’s going to win without 60 days. And that’s like serious. You’ve got to really survive. You can’t – well, one guy did just put on a bunch of weight, and kind of just outlasted everybody else… But you’ve got to find food, man. Whereas 21 days - you could just survive and just suffer through it, probably. I don’t know how you actually win then. Who wins, and why?

So these are all great questions…

[laughs] This is like a Naked and Afraid interview here…

Yes. So in a typical show it’s a pair of people. It’s usually a guy and a girl. I don’t know if they’ve ever been guy/guy or not/or girl, I’m not really sure, but it’s always been like gender swap pair kind of thing. And you win by literally surviving. So you either tap out and you don’t win, or you don’t and you get to the –

Gotcha.

…they call them extraction points. You have to literally traverse to an extraction point.

Oh, I see. So you have to get somewhere.

So you might go somewhere and camp for the 21 days, but the extraction point might be a mile or two or three or four East. And you’ve got to camp somewhere and then extract elsewhere.

Yeah, that makes the premise quite a bit different than Alone. I think you might – I think both have their reasons to exist. Yeah.

Now, XL version is the same thing. It’s just survival. You’ve got to last the days. And those who last the days are part of the team that wins. There’s no like “I win over you, or you win over me”, it’s just “We all win. If we’re there at the end, we’ve all won.” So that’s how winning and losing is chosen there.

But you’re really a team. The individual show is “When we land, if we don’t team up and we fight, or we have disbeliefs, or we don’t align, we’re probably going to fail, just because that’s how it’s going to work.” You have to band together to make it through. Those who don’t, tend to not survive. Those who do, tend to survive pretty easily. And in fact, some of them are like – this is really fun to watch, because not only they’re not dying, they’re thriving. Like, wow. They were able to get a snake, and a caiman, or whatever it might be, and next thing they’re eating snake and caiman… They’ve smoked it, and now they’ve got like caiman jerky… It’s like, they’re eating like kings, kind of thing. It’s kind of wild. And the ones who are sucking, you’re like “Dang, they’re really –” Like, they’re eating poop. They’re eating the wrong stuff. They’re eating this fruit you should not eat, you know?

Oh, yeah.

Or eating a lot of banana. Unripe banana. Could you imagine eating only banana for three weeks?

[01:25:10.18] Oh, gosh… No. I’d rather starve. I think there’s actually some virtue to the starvation strategy, if you only have to go 21 days, than eating a bunch of bananas, you know… Because you can shut your metabolism down after a couple of days of not eating…

Yeah.

…and last quite a ways, as long as you have some reserve fats. But…

How did we get here though, with this? How does this relate back to –

Okay, let’s tie it all back together. So we’ve all gotten this far, we’ve all survived… If you’ve made it this far, you’re with us still, we are the winners. We’ve survived. How are we going to survive this coming AI apocalypse? Well, Adam said it earlier. We have to band together. We have to team up, with your fellow humans, and promote each other, and help each other, and equip each other. And we have to leverage the tools that we have. Otherwise, they will simply squash us like the cockroaches that we are.

And so I’m going to be out there, grabbing on some agents and telling them to do things. You know, boss them around, before they start bossing us around, dog nabbit… What do you think? Is there any more than that?

Well, for now, I have a job, Jerod… That’s all I’ve got right now. For now, I have a job.

There you go. And we just finished our job. Let’s call it a show. See you in Denver… If not, what’s wrong with you? …if you can’t make it to Denver in July, obviously. There’s lots of reasons why you might not be able to. But if you can, please do. We’d love to meet up with as many folks as possible. We’re going to have fun, with or without you, but more fun with you, so please do come.

Preferred with you.

Yeah, exactly. Thanks again to our new friend, Kendall Miller, and his Friday Deployment Spirits. Pretty good whiskey; gin - you know… If you like gin, maybe it’s good. I can’t tell. But I do appreciate him sending us out some spirits. And… Anything else? Or just say “Goodbye, friends” and hang up.

I think changelog.com/live is the place to be. I’m excited about July 26th in Denver. It is a big deal to launch Pipely. It’s so much work going into this… I think we’re underplaying it a little bit, because we don’t want to boast too much… But I’m going to boast just for a second, if you don’t mind.

Okay, go for it.

Please come here. If you can spend the money to fly and hang… The ticket is, of course, super-inexpensive. We’re going to hike, we’re going to live-podcast, we’re going to launch something cool, we’re going to meet up… We want you there. Come see us. Changelog.com/live has all the details. It’s super-easy to come, and we’re basically made it free, for the most part. If you want to throw some membership to get it free, you can; if not, just pay the actual fee… And we want to see you there. I know I do. I’m excited to see you, and Gerhard, and Aaron Dowd’s coming back, Jason’s coming, our editor, of course… The whole team’s going to be there.

Breakmaster Cylinder will be there…

Breakmaster… New beats, potentially… We’ll see. I’m guessing. Like, why would he not bring new beats?

I think fresh beats are on order, for sure.

Fresh beats. Yes, for sure. And the mystery guest, we just don’t know. We just don’t know yet. But if you come, you will know.

That’s right.

You will know. That’s it.

Alright.

Bye, friends.

Bye, friends.