Dark Factories, Polymorphic UI, and Why Developers Still Matter - Whiskey Web and Whatnot

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It's the hard part. If you want to spend less time fighting it and more time building, download Get Cracking today at getcracking.com slash whiskey FM and get a special promo offer. Cool. Back to that episode. What's up, everybody? We're at, let me start again. Hey, this is Whiskey Web and whatnot. Hey. We've done this before. Yes. So Whiskey Web and whatnot live at React Miami, hanging out with Jason Langsdorf at the Clerk booth. Thanks, Clerk, for having us out. Yes. Great time had by all. Yeah. We have a bunch of hot takes for you if you would like to rapid fire do them. We can also talk about whatever you want.

But let's see. I mean, I want to hear about the Lambo first. Hold on. Can we just start there? I mean, how could we pass that up? What year was the Lambo? What was the color technically called? Man, I'm going to be lucky to get the model of this thing. It was a Lamborghini Huracan. Oh. I didn't even know that was one of them. Dope name. Yeah. I looked it up. I'm glad I looked it up after I drove it because now I know what it costs. Which was? About 50 bucks. Yeah, it's a quarter million dollar car. It was electric lime green. I don't know what the official colorway was, but it was. Fuck you, money green, I believe.

Yeah, something like that. But it was incredibly fun to drive. And I've informed my wife that we're going to have to take out a second mortgage on the house because I'm going to need one of those. I need to feel that engine again on my butt. I didn't even get to drive it in fun mode. Like the, the, it's one of the, the, these supercars have, um, a million switches for like traction control and torque and all that stuff. And the, the car handler, when I asked him if I could drive the car, I watched him get in and he started flipping all the switches to like kid friendly mode. Baby's first drive.

In all, in all honesty, uh, I had never driven anything more powerful than a Toyota Prius before. So it was the right choice by the handler to not let me drive that thing at full power But I kind of wanted to Did you put it to the floor at least once? For one minute, yeah This was all part of a shoot that we did for Clerk Where we were, as part of doing this We ended up getting a police escort and closing a bridge So that we could do some driving shots in Miami And the police escort would get way out in front So that they're not in the shot So you get this big open stretch of empty road in front of you and I'm driving a quarter million dollar car.

And I was like, you know, if I just push down, this could be fun. So I, uh, yeah, at one point I, I just wanted to see, I didn't get it going that fast, but I did the zero to 60 thing to see how it felt and it felt wonderful. It was great. Wow. Yeah. Can highly recommend, uh, if you ever get the opportunity to floor it in a Lamborghini, you should do that. Nice. It was automatic also. It was automatic. Like it had paddle shifting, but again, in kid friendly mode, because if you drop the clutch in a quarter million dollar car, I think you have to buy it. That's how it works. How did the pedal feel?

You know how like a truck has like a different pedal? Some pedals are stiff. Some of them are loose. Some of them give you lots of early feedback. And then what was it like? It was it was very responsive, but not jumpy. Like I kind of expected it to be like I've driven cars where as soon as you touch the gas, it like jumps kind of like jerks you. Yeah, that's what I mean. it was really responsive without like throwing me back. Right. You feel the acceleration, but you're not being like jerked around. So it's a, it's, it's really nice to drive. It was really fun. Oh man. Nice. So sick. Can you tell us about, uh, like why, why did you have a Lamborghini?

Or is there like, or is that a secret for, we'll find out later. No, no, no, no secret. So what we, what we did was I, uh, the clerk team reached out to me and I, they, they said, we're going to react Miami. We want to go big. We want to do something really fun. And so I said, okay, great. Why don't I like bring a crew and we'll do some interviews on the spot. We'll get some really good sizzle reel. We'll like be able to fly a drone around the venue. You know, it'll be fun. And they were like, we like it, but can you think bigger? I was like, okay, what if we did some interviews the day before?

We'll like bring some, you know, be strategic about who we want to talk to. We'll bring some people out. We'll do some interviews in like a nice location. They were like, all right, we like where you're going, but can you think bigger? I was like, we'll rent a location per speaker. and they were like bigger. I was like, we'll rent a Lamborghini. And they were like, there you go. That's what we were looking for. But so the idea is we're going to release a new show here pretty soon called The Build Log. And the core idea around it is that we wanted to explore this concept of like the industry is changing faster than we've ever seen.

All the tools seem to be falling out from under our feet. There's new stuff every day. but that I think is creating a lot of burnout and anxiety and this sense of hopelessness and like, how can I possibly keep up? I got to do my day job, right? I don't have time to just read this stuff all the time. So the thought was let's focus on the things that don't change and the things that make builders into builders aren't really going to change. They were true in the bronze age. They were true 10 years ago and they'll be true 10 years from now because they're not tools, right? It's a mindset. It's a strategy.

It's the outlook. It's the way you treat people. It's the way you lead. Those are the things that really make builders into builders. And so we wanted to talk to people about the concrete, like the principles that govern how they were able to build things. And we wanted to talk to people who've had a really successful time building. So we had Colin Sidoti from Clerk. We had Tanner Lindsley from the Tan Stack. We talked to Gabe Greenberg from G2I. And we talked to Rita Kozlov from the Cloudflare team. And each of them has built something a little bit different. And hearing the way that they thought about how to build healthy teams and to take these really big swings, you know, with whether you're doing a startup or a big internal project or an open source community, it's a big long-term swing.

So how do you know what to focus on, where to put your energy, which things are worth betting on and which things aren't, how to say yes to this feature request but no to that feature request. There's so many things you've got to be able to get right. and you got to keep the whole team going with you. You got to keep everybody going in the same direction. You got to make sure that as you grow, you don't like lose sight of the vision or have people who don't really understand what the original goal was. There's a million things that have nothing to do with the tools. And if you can get those things right,

any set of tools is going to get you where you want to go. So that's what we wanted to talk about in the show. And the Lamborghini was there to drive me between interviews because that was, originally we were going to do it as kind of like a comedians in cars getting coffee vibe. Yeah. But we figured out there's literally nowhere inside of a Lamborghini to hide equipment. Oh, or the sound. There's barely enough room for two passengers. So we were like, well, we can mount some cameras in the, nope, won't fit there. Maybe we can put a rig on the hood and like shoot through the windshield. But the windshield is so tilted back, you just see the reflection of the clouds.

We were like, oh, we can get good polarizers. Like, this isn't going to work. I think the only way we could have done it is if we would have actually gone full out and gotten like a process trailer where you're not actually driving. you're being towed through the city yeah at which point you can like mount cameras all over the place but then you have to get like we already had to get road closures and permits but this is like big road closures and permits so it kind of goes from being like hey you're gonna do this thing for an hour to like okay you're like paying the city to shut down a full street for like a day

and it's it gets way more expensive we don't and we didn't we wanted to go big we didn't want to we didn't want to be irresponsible you hit the edge of the request that's good that's good nice nice very cool all right well let's do just a few hot takes and we'll let you uh get back to we should record and tell the stuff yeah we've asked you a bunch of these before where should we start what's your least favorite programming language my least favorite programming language uh i would say my least favorite programming language is i was forced to write uh coffee script a little bit sorry that was just me breathing and it wasn't it wasn't coffee script

specifically it was that coffee script hit the uncanny valley for me where everything that i knew didn't work anymore but it felt like it should yeah and so i felt like i was constantly stepping on rakes despite looking at something that looked like a thing i already knew so uh i i found it very frustrating not because of what it was but because of how similar it was to things that i had done before and how hard that made it for me to pick it up did coffee script have semicolons i forget no i don't i don't remember i've blocked most of the memory out semicolons or no semicolons i am uh i'm a semicolons person because in in you know there's like that one edge case where

a semicolon is a problem if you don't have it yeah and i like why tempt fate like it's it's not like it matters like it's gonna get compiled away in the bundler so just do it like a pretty year i'll add it for you i know pretty you'll fix it if you don't have it too but like come on yeah i'm not sure that i've ever typed one honestly i feel like pretty you're always you just you just save and i like to see them it's like the end of my sentence exactly right like i i don't i'm not like carefully getting my tabs right but like i want my tabs to be right yeah like yeah i don't know i i also don't care like if i open up a project and the project has

uh semicolons turned off in prettier i'm not gonna like argue yeah i just i let prettier do its thing. I feel like I've kind of completely let go of the idea of caring what code looks like. As long as the formatter does the thing and we don't get merge conflicts on code formatting. Yeah, makes sense. Have we reached AGI? No. What's your preferred AI harness? Can I be really honest? Yeah. I don't get to write code anymore, so I haven't used any. No cloud code, no codex, no pi. I downloaded cloud code. I think I paid for it by mistake. I got somebody sent me a, my friend Joel sent me a link to get like the preview of Claude

Code, like a trial. And I put my credit card in for it and I think I forgot. So I think I'm paying for Claude Code, but I haven't, I've used it for like one thing to see. And I don't even think I finished it. I think I started and forgot what I was doing and moved on to the thing. But I've kind of like in my role now, so much of what I'm doing is helping other people talk about what they're building, that I don't ever actually build anything myself. So I've looked at a lot of them, but not doing it. SAS or SAS? Yeah, SCSS or SASS. Wait, the difference is that SAS has like the special syntax, right?

SASS is omits semicolons, white space delimited. Yeah, not that one. No, I want the one that looks like CSS. These days, neither, because CSS does everything I want with nesting, and that was what I cared about. Yeah. And I never used the stuff that was confusing, like the mix-ins. I felt like they weren't quite clear enough as an abstraction, so I never really worked with it. They were fun to write, but never fun to read someone else's. So fun to write. But yeah, they were impossible to debug, even when it was mine. Yeah. And impossible to upgrade. Like if you're trying to move off of Sass, you're like, I'm stuck.

Yeah. Yeah. East Coast or West Coast? West Coast. Whiskey on the rocks or neat? neat but with one rock I want a little bit of water to open it up but I don't want it all the way on the rocks just one rock that sounds like a rap dude black coffee or with milk depends on the coffee is it good coffee because I love a black coffee when it's good coffee but like if you know if we're having coffee from a hotel yeah McDonald's coffee I'm putting milk in there beards or mustaches obviously beards Adam or Robbie hmm is this is this robbie pre or post looking like the lead singer of hawthorne heights whichever you like better i guess

i respectfully decline to answer the question nice all right that's all we got thanks for coming by appreciate it all right i'm just gonna keep it still recording so i don't forget to nice yeah i think we got kent Kent, we're ready for you if you're down Pop in Mr. Dodds, we're ready Kent C. Dodds Queuing up in the dugout right now Throwing a couple pitches with Jason Warming up Put on those headphones there to your left and all will be clear. Wait. It really makes me want to have a hearing aid. Like, this is dope. I can just hear all the time. That does feel like a future. Just always wear these.

Yeah. Oh, because look at the clarity. Ooh, yeah. That does change everything. I can never hear anyone, and it makes having conversations very hard. I can just whisper at you with my softest and lowest voice, and it's just so crystal clear. Oh, the dulcet tones. There we go. Now I'm going to just relax. Kick it, bro. These chairs are finicky, but we're making it work. Oh, they're good. They're good. What's been a highlight for you so far? Oh, so I got here for AIE on Monday, so I've been here all week. Wow. The highlight is definitely, sorry, I'm going to just slightly adjust this, and I'll start that over.

yeah so I've been here all week and the highlight for me has been um talking with people in the hallways that honestly I actually track is always so good yeah um I originally was not speaking um I just a couple weeks ago decided you know I really need to be there to talk to people and so I um got my um flight and hotel just on myself and then Michelle was like hey somebody dropped out Like, would you mind filling in? Yeah. Did you have something in the hopper? Was it that new? Yeah, I was actually working on my AI assistant, the Kodi, that's powered or only really accessible through MCP. Just to kind of play around with it.

You know, I did the OpenClaw thing, and that was fun. But there were some things about OpenClaw that I didn't particularly like. And I also, I really like MCP and I wanted to show people how powerful MCP can be by building like a personal agent or personal assistant. So I was having so much fun with that that I just started preparing the talk for nothing. I was like, I'm sure I'm eventually going to talk about this. If you're learning, you write it down. Someone else is going to want to follow the steps. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I said, yeah, Michelle, I've actually got a talk that's very applicable to AIE.

and I think I could give that. And of course, last week, Cloudflare has their agents week and they're releasing something really significant every day that significantly impacts how I want Cody to be. And so I'm like constantly changing, like ripping things out and changing things. I've got two agents working on Cody right now. Yeah, cloud agents for the win. And so it was a little bit stressful leading up to my talk because I was like changing things going up, but it ended up really good. So yeah, I'm loving it here. It's great. Awesome. I'm happy to hear that you're building your own agent. It's like one

thing I was kind of laughing about last week was how we're in a malleable software state. We're in personal software. That's what everyone wants. And it is, it's a meaningful thing to be talking about. But so many people went and pulled OpenClaw off the shelf and never customized it. And you were like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to customize it. And to me, I was like thinking of it like punk rockers or goths that they all uh want to be unique yet they go look the same so it's all us developers are like malleable software i love customizable personal software i'm just gonna go use the thing off the shelf though you know and i'm like that's the opposite you're doing the

thing that the goths did you know anyway so i'm happy to hear that you're not a goth you're like a legit indie uh you know put on the ground dude you got the history like you you've seen this repeat itself um through that uh that goth lens so yeah that's good oh that's awesome yeah i i think that um i actually think that chat gpt or like open ai and anthropic and google they're all going to come up with like general purpose agents that the um normies my wife is offended when i say normies but we don't mean it derogatorily it's this word it's too technical right now. Yeah, yeah. So like, I and I think that even most of us will probably end up using one of

those, not because we're being lazy, but because we're prioritizing what we spend our tokens on and our time on. And so that's actually part of why I wanted to build Cody as an MCP server, because that'll hook into whatever the big dogs actually come up with. I interact with Cody mostly through Claude on my phone, or sometimes through cursor. And sometimes chat GPT that They're not, like, reasonably, or as you might expect, they're not as good at MCP as Claude is. But, yeah, so when they come up with their general purpose agent, I can just hook up Cody and I can still control the shades in my house or the lights or it automatically integrates.

Like, I can actually integrate with anything. I have a safe way to handle keys and everything. And it can do, it's so crazy. I could give you my whole talk right now, but I won't. I want to know, where do you think this is going to live, this personal assistant? Is it going to be in your pocket? Is your phone going to become your open-claw? Are you going to do tokens locally? Or are you going to have a little box in your house that's got a couple of GPUs in it? It's cracking tokens. It's got a local model. And it's running a friendly, normie open-claw variant or something like that. So we have an assistant.

Where is this going to be for us? That's a good question. I think it will be actually very similar to the computer, where it used to just be at the mainframe and you'd go to the mainframe and then you could do stuff. And eventually it got small enough to be in our house. But the computer that's in your house is nowhere close to the power of the supercomputers that these big companies have. But that's okay. You don't need it to be that powerful. And my MacBook is plenty powerful for me. And I think not having any actual research-backed way to support this opinion, but it makes sense to me that we will be satisfied with the models that

we're able to run directly on the device or in our closet at home. But at the same time, there are some things that I do where I am using a service, even today, like with not involving AI. And I think that that will continue. So like if I've got a really heavy load that I want to do, then yeah, sure, that'll run elsewhere. Or another example, like my personal photos, I used to use Google Photos and now I self-host that. He stole it. That's my last app I need to make for my, I don't use OpenClaw, I've customized it. But that's one of the last things I want to do, scrape all my photos down and own them on my machine

and have no dependency there. I've been really loving, I call it liberating my data because it was trapped in some SaaS and now it's mine. I like photos though. I want them backed up a lot of times, which I feel like a service would do, and I wouldn't. Backblaze, yeah, there you go. Backblaze will do that for me. I have it all on a Synology NAS, and they've got an app for managing all of that stuff, and then I just back it up on Backblaze. It's actually, honestly, all told, it ends up being more expensive than Google Photos, but they're making money other ways, and I'm not entirely jazzed about the way that they're making money on my stuff.

Yeah. So a couple years ago, I pulled it all down, and it's all mine, And it is still backed up. But, yeah, I'm with you, Robbie. You definitely want to back up stuff like your photos or your tax documents and whatever. I don't care as much about my tax documents. IRS tracks all that. It's fine. Yeah, maybe so. So, yeah, it's exciting times. It is, yeah. All right, you want to hit them with some heat? Let's hear it. Yeah. All right, so we've got a giant list of hot takes. We're not going to do them all. I think we asked you this one before in passing at some point. but is React a framework? I don't care.

Okay, were React server components a mistake? I don't care. I don't know. If you'd asked me that a year ago, I'd say, of course not. Now, I don't think so. That's not as sure. Yeah, that's the trend that I'm at. At this point, I'm not actually using... I mean, I'm actively using React. I've got apps that people pay for that are using React. But my active development, like Kodi, is not using React. It's using Remix for any of the UI stuff. So I'm just about Remix right now. Nice, nice. Hooks, signals, or proxies? I'm fine with hooks. I don't know. Yeah, hooks. I've actually not used signals. Oh.

Have we reached AGI? No. Nice. The thigh man is back. What is up? What's up, thighs? Our boy thighs. What's going on? The thigh man is back, guys. We call him that because that's all you can see of him in the shot. You can always see him. I got it. Oh, wait. You're in the shot, actually, if you lean forward a hair. Right here? Yeah, you're good. Yeah. Come on closer. How you doing, Ken? It's good. How are you? How you doing? What's up, dude? It's so hot back there. It's hot right here right now. Yeah. I'm sweating tokens. I feel like it was cold yesterday. Yeah. And now it's hot. What happened?

That's Florida for you. No, but I mean, we're inside. Yeah. No, but in Florida, the seasons are like that, inside and outside. Okay. So we were in winter inside yesterday. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. I got it. Because that's what happens. It's like, are any of you guys from Florida? No. No. So this is a really funny story. I love telling this story. So one day in March, I woke up. It was freezing cold, like 32 degrees, right? I went for my morning run. It was great. That's a joke. I don't run. I just went for my morning coffee walk. And then around 3 o'clock, it was 98 degrees, so I went to the beach.

I went from 32 to, like, 98. That's pretty crazy. It feels like, but, like, you know what I mean. That's a wild thing. That's how it really matters. I know, yeah. Don't love that. I'm with you. It was so bad. Give me my Utah weather, man. What is Utah weather like? Sometimes it can, like on a single day, your temperature range can go maybe 20 degrees, I think. That's not bad. So, yeah. And you can go like between weeks. Last week it was freezing. Now we're in the 80s. So that's really nice. It can go quite a bit. But yeah, in one day, that sounds nuts. Yeah, it was bad. The body is not built. I also experienced something worse than that.

I had for Omicron, it was like 15 degrees in the morning in New York. And then I flew back to Florida later that day. Like I flew out the morning and it was like 15 degrees, like freezing outside. So I flew back to Florida and it was like 85 degrees. The human body is not acclimated for that. Like I had my like airport fit on where it's like matching pants, matching hoodie, you know, got to be stylish. TikTok influencers type stuff. Wait, you didn't do pajamas? That's like the new cool thing. No, no, no, no. I go to the airport now. I'm like, why is everyone in pajamas? It's not pajamas. Wait, not just the airport.

That's everywhere, man. It's the TikTok shop matching sets that are like 60 bucks, but you get them. They're the comfiest thing ever. Is that like when you're all in pizza? You've got a pizza top and a pizza bottom? No, it's solid colors, though. Oh, solid. Oh, that's what's cool. Graphics are out. It's like the royal blues. The girls always do like the hot pinks or the hot yellow. They've got embroidery on them, though. Yes, yes. They have the custom embroidery stuff. Exactly. that's the new trend you're totally not up to date on all that I saved so much money by not caring about that he's like

where's my cigarette tray oh man alright will AI take out designers or developers first probably I don't know are you a designer or a developer No, it's fine. Crocs or flip-flops? Oh, dude, flip-flops. Mustaches or beards? Neither. Dark factories or light factories? Factory, like places that you build stuff? Well, like a dark... I'm on the light side, I'm not on the dark side. Dark factories when an agent is writing code and you don't look. Oh, I've never heard of that. You've never heard of that? Oh, man, there's entire companies, entire dark factories where they don't look inside. That sounds like the Sith.

The dark factory. You know where that came from? And that came from somebody who was like, we can't call ourself a vibe code company because it's got a bad reputation. So we got to come up with something cool. Dark factories. It depends. Like, Kodi is totally a dark factory. If you spend 30 minutes reading that code, you've spent more time than I have. But that's because it's like personal software. Like, if I break it, it's no big deal. But like the Epic Workshop app, yeah, that's a light factory. I'm definitely using agents for every line of that, but I'm also reviewing the majority of it. So for Cody, do you have tests?

You've got linting? Oh, yeah. Okay, so there's still some bouncing stuff. You have an agent loop. That's for the agent, not for me. Are you a big Ralph guy? Not a Ralph guy. What's your AI interaction medium of choice? Cursor, every day. I love Cursor. Cloud agents are amazing. I love Cursor. I work at OpenCode, so this is weird. I'm getting docked on my pay. We're going to take this clip and send it to your coworkers. Yeah. Okay. No, I love Cursor, and I'm trying to make this for OpenCode, but I love Cursor because when you edit or when you ask the agent to edit something, it opens the windows of the code that it edited,

and you can visually associate the code as a review. That was so helpful for me because all these CLIs, it just kind of edits the code, and it's kind of like a dark factory. It's like this black box that you don't really see into. But in Cursor, you see the diffs, and you can kind of understand. And I can kind of vibe check code and be like, hmm, why are we using a use effect? Nah, that's not right. Warp has one button that says see diff, and it'll open them up in tabs in Warp. Are you a paid Warp sponsor? No, but there's a couple of their features that I really like. I don't know. They did sponsor our show, though.

I liked them before that, so it was nice to have a product that we actually like to use. Yeah, man, it's so hard to not appear a shill. Yeah. How dare I like something? You have an opinion. You need to make your own. Join the dark side. The dark side of the dark factories. All right, Ken, beards or mustaches? Oh, neither. Yeah, you asked him that already. Oh, I did. Oh, snap. Okay. I mean, for me, neither. For you, both. Hey. Your tabs in your code editor. Oh, wait, no. Your tabs in your browser, top or left? Top. I'm like inbox zero personality, so I don't ever have that many in there anyway.

What about tabs in terminal? Are you trying all the new hipster tabs on the side? Do you use Tmux? Tmux? It's Cmux now, dude. I thought it was Zmux now. Oh, yeah, it might be Zmux, actually. I thought it was Amux. Asianmux. No, it has to have a B, C, T, Z. It has to rhyme. Maybe Memux. We need to do Memux. I actually don't even have tabs in cursor. I turn that off. Tabs? No tabs. No. So it's actually, what's funny now is like, I don't even use the IDE anymore because it's just the agent view anyway. You use cursor class. You're happy when that cursor three came out or is it cursor two? Yeah, three.

Yeah, you're all in. I was like, yeah. Well, at first it was like, I kind of want to see the code and stuff, but I haven't done tab complete all year. Yeah. That's, you know, 2026 is pretty wild. It is wild. Yeah. Dario was right. Dang it. Oh, man. But he was right. A little bit right. We still have jobs, but AI is writing all our code. Yeah. That has been a theme here is people are like, I don't care anymore. That's been like the number one answer. So as an educator, that's like who I've been teaching people how to implement code for all these years. That's existential for me, obviously. Like nobody needs to learn it anymore.

Of course, that's overstated. Like, I think you need to really have those technical chops, but eventually maybe not. And so that's why I have been pivoting to Epic Product Engineer, where I'm going to teach you the last skill that you need. Because if agents learn this skill, then our industry just dissolves away. And that is knowing what to build. What to build. So that was always the way we made fun of these things at first. It's like, oh, it's going to take our jobs. That's if the product manager could even tell me what they want. effectively, you know, like we spend weeks doing that. So, yeah, well, I think it's also funny because if you let AI write all your code,

okay, it's going to break. But like all these big companies that are like robust and secure, they're just like having security vulnerabilities and breaking and everything like that. So like, well, does GitHub have two nines again yet? No, not yet. I checked earlier. It's at 87.86. Wow. They actually went down from yesterday. Yeah. Yeah, that was the PR merge check thing that was reverting merges, which was crazy. That is crazy. Should we just write a new GitHub? That's what I'm hearing. Oh, that's peer.co, right? Yeah. I mean, Cursor acquired a new GitHub. Graphite. Why are you using Shopify? I like it.

We used the peer computing company, code.storage. That was cool. That was good. Oh, is this the one with the website that has the like... I need to see this. Cloudflare has artifacts. Yeah, not architects. Artifacts. Artifacts, yeah. And that's get repos on endurable objects, like on workers. Like, that's pretty wild. Man, I can't believe. Actually, I'm the first production deployment of that outside of Cloudflare. Actually, it's funny. Actually, my personal blog is on there. So that's production for my three listeners. Dylan shared a screenshot of like the usage graph and there's this giant huge dot in Utah

nice well we'll see how long that lasts yeah code it's really interesting because like we were talking about this the other day and like okay let's say you build a GitHub competitor right end to end it looks the exact same as GitHub but just works better how do you get people on it? you really network externalities man i know but like you're not gonna easily convince an entire org even if you have like nine nines of nine you're not gonna be able to convince like an org to be like hey come on to my github it's more reliable and better it's like no you're they're gonna go with microsoft yeah it's gonna suck but that's just have you ever worked with

microsoft yeah i don't know i don't know how people decide anything because like when facebook killed myspace i was like myspace is better why why are we going to facebook it sucks yeah and so slopified yeah and i'm like been on facebook recently no no of course not have you yeah i yeah like it's just sort in passing there's so much ai slot it's like i'm on tiktok a lot we already have established this and there's a decent amount of ai on there but the stuff on facebook guys it's so bad like my mom will send me tweets or not tweets uh posts posts i guess faces i don't know uh books she'll send me books on facebook and uh she's like ryan you will not

believe that this happened i'm like mom there's a gemini logo in the bottom right corner and she's like oh i thought that was the sun oh my goodness oh no going back to your original thing though because this bugged me a long time when I was at agencies where there was a $4 million budget. This is like early 2000s or whatever. It felt like wild amounts of money for software. And we're like, what's going to happen with the $4 million? We're going to spend $1 million on development and $3 million on marketing. And I was like, what in the world? And so we would build like a cooking app. And we would work really hard.

We'd have great designers. We'd build this cooking app, not ask any users at all. But then the rest of the money got spent on marketing. and in weeks, thousands of users because they were advertising on Facebook. They were just everywhere blasting people. And it worked. If you have a good Instagram ad, we'll pay for whatever you want. It worked. It drove me nuts. I was like, you can basically pay to get a bunch of users. You know what's really funny about that? Oh, this is so funny. I got Instagram ad this morning. See, it's working on you. Look, you're feeding the machine, man. I know, I know.

I'm a sucker for a good Instagram. Yeah, so I saw this keyboard, not sponsored. Wait, you all use Facebook, but you all use Instagram? They're the same thing now. My girlfriend's on Instagram, man. I gotta like, repost, comment, I actually like, you can go in and if you're looking at ads, you can be like, I actually only want to see ads, which is what I prefer. I like to look through all the dope shit on there. Oh my goodness. Yeah, so I saw an ad for this keyboard. It's a low profile, but like gives like the IBM vibes. And I was like, I'm like, ooh, that looks good. And I open it up and I'm like, ooh, it's only a hundred bucks.

And I'm like, ooh, and then I bought it. And then you turned off the bidet. It worked. Yeah. no but instagram ads it's just it's just very rainy from south park so the worst ones is when you're on instagram stories and you're tapping through and you get an ad because then you see a fire ad and you're like oh that ad was so good but you can't swipe back because the ads aren't a part of like the timeline of stories so you're tapping through you're like wait no like um my finance platform that i use for my stuff it's called sequence it's like a finance router i saw like an instagram stories ad for it like a long time ago and i could not

find it again i was like scrolling only the ads like show me this ad again i want to be influenced and then i finally found it after like two months it was crazy dang so there you go that's how you get users you pay for ads instagram ads i hate that yeah me too i hate it too and it's and it works i hate that it works it's really annoying you think good products should rise to the top and they don't. It's really rare to have your good quality software outbeat somebody who's got more money than you in marketing. It's just... I feel like another thing as developers, since we're so aware of this marketing stuff,

like everyone's doing marketing, we get mad when we're getting advertised to on YouTube. I don't know if this happens to you guys, but I'm watching a YouTube video and they're like, yeah, so this is really great, but first a quick word from our sponsor. I'm like, no! And I'm like, skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. Oh man, Theo would hate you so much right now. I skip all of Theo's ads. The little jump ahead button for like the commonly skipped. I love that. It's the right arrow on the keyboard. Yeah. 15 or 30 seconds. You're like, boop, boop. Oh, good. I'm done. And then you see the little bar at the bottom,

the ting, ting, ting. And I'm like, ah, there we go. Back to the content. There's podcast tools that will do that for you. Also in the software, they'll identify the ad and just skip right past it. Don't do it on this one. Lesson to all the ads on this one. Yeah. Click all the links, please. Oh, wait, there are none right now. So there's a link up there. Oh, yeah. Clerk. everyone go to clerk and tell them that whiskey web and whatnot sent you yeah all right or that jason sent you whatever or that ryan sent you yeah don't tell them that i sent you i guess i don't know it just had to be different yeah i came to your site and it was not kent

did i tell you guys about the video i did with clerk a while ago no the apple vision pro i saw i didn't watch the whole video but i saw that i was like this is hilarious so you're familiar with the apple vision pro right yeah so i was like this has an amazing it's an m5 chip it's got like i think two of them for like the spatial computing and like the computer itself i'm like hmm can i build like develop an app on this like only on the apple vision pro and the clerk reached out to me and they're like yes let's let's do it so they sent me an apple vision pro and i tried it that was the most excruciating two hours of my life there

There are so many issues. First off, the screen recording or the spatial recording for the Vision Pro cut off in like 15 minutes. So I have like two and a half hours of me just on the camera. That's always a bummer. Yeah. I look so dumb. But then the app just didn't work because there's no native terminal. I had to use GitHub Codespaces. The internet kept dropping. It wasn't my Wi-Fi. it was just a horrible experience but the one part that did work was like the clerk integrations I was like, man, clerk got one clicked and it worked fine with everything else we'll get to the good parts and make it look like it was seamless

yeah, clerk was amazing but it was so funny it's like how the money have fallen I've been Android my whole life I got this phone a year ago, I hate it really? we were talking about this the other night it's the software, it's the problem Are you on liquid ass? Yeah. Dude, I resisted for so long, but I was like, I don't want to fight against this. Let's just do it, whatever. I got hit with the overnight update where I went to bed with my nice, I think, iOS 18, and I'm like, life is good. The world is balanced. And I wake up, and it was like 2,000 or whatever we're on now. It was like 26, and I open up, and I was like, wait, there's traumatic aberration.

Oh, no. I see glassmorphism. No! The notifications on iOS suck. They are the worst. I'm losing so many things because I use those kind of like to-dos, and Android let me really hang on to them, and I could go see the history of them. It's like way more figured out. And iOS, I'm constantly losing stuff. I'll swipe one, and the whole group goes away. And I'm like, no, I knew there was a button to do that. I don't want that at all. Do you have a phone that has Apple Intelligence on it? AI. I turned it all off. I turned it all off. The Apple summaries, that scared me one time. My girlfriend texted me like a bunch of things in sequence,

in the summary was, I got hit by a car, assignment due, what should we do for dinner tonight? And I'm like, oh, like a leaf got hit by a car or something like that. And I'm like, my heart rate was like, I'm like, holy cow, how does Apple mess that up? How are you so bad? How are they so bad? I don't know. And so slow to adopt AI. Because they're a hardware company. The hardware is good. The hardware is fine. The hardware is good. Well, I've always loved their scrolling. That's one thing that Android never could compete. is that iPhone has the vibe where when you scroll, it feels like you're playing air hockey with a friend.

Yeah. You know, there's this glide and this softness to the deceleration of a scroll and the way that they always commit a CPU to that computational behavior. So it's always good. It is smooth. It's really nice. And every time I go back to Android, I'm just reminded. Yeah. But I do miss my Pixel Fold. We were talking about that last night too. I loved that device. It was pretty thick and it didn't matter. It was awesome. Have you seen the rumors? We talked about this last night. but like the rumors of the uh apple fold i saw that apparently it has no crease and no uh notch i don't know what would you call that like the crease i guess no no there's no like visible

crease and there's no like bump yeah there's no little ripple yeah ripple i don't know what it's called no um it's a divot or a dimple dimple yeah long dimple well that reminds me of all the funny words of like phones remember you call the bottom of your phone it's chin oh yeah that's the chin of the phone yeah that's what it's called and then there was the unibrow on the uh or the bunny ears whatever you say came out with the bunny ears on it and so it was either called the unibrow or the bunny ears oh man so it had a chin and it had ears and i was just like put a couple eyes on that iphone x and it looks just like a bunny okay boomer like

my first ever phone was the iphone 4s that's a good one the camera on that device uh mkbhd did a comparison of every uh iphone photo and the 4s holds up like really well like compared to like nowadays um i think some of the low light stuff it still suffers but like still like i was really impressed on how well the size of that device was so good i had a moto x oh yeah like it was It had this really nice curve on the back. It felt so good in the hand. It was like four inches or something. Oh, it was so good. Palm had that too. The Palm devices. The Palm Pre had like a little curve on it. It was nice.

We need to bring back flip phones because I had my dad's flip phone for like two years. G1. And I love to be able to just slam that. That's the Fold. The Fold had that. It was so satisfying. I'd be reading something. Clap it shut and put it in your pocket. Can you aim or fold it? I didn't, but you could. Boom! I would take my flip phone. I'd hold it like this and then flip it like you do. like little toys or whatever, and it goes, and it would open up, and I'd catch it, and like, hello. So you were like secret walking. Agent Kent. What's up, guys? That's awesome. That's so funny. I liked the races to smaller phones, too.

You know, like that was the whole thing. It was like smaller, bigger, smaller, faster. And I was like, yeah, that makes way more sense. I saw a sketch where, like, they played it out, you know, 50 years in the future, and they're like, let me get my phone. Oh, actually, no, Zoolander did that, too. Zoolander did that. It was so tiny. I was just like, hello. He flipped it out, too. What is this, a phone for ants? I remember watching when I was a kid, not now, but, like, I remember watching when I was a kid, like, a week ago. I was just going to make that joke. I know. I saw your eyes. I was like, what the hell is this?

How do you get Mia's eyes? I've got the size. I'm not this cool to be wearing those. But I remember like the futuristic iPhone 31 videos where it would be like flying. Oh, no. The best one was where you would drop the phone and the phone would like have like four little boosters on the sides of it. And it was like. And then it would like come back up to you. And then the one where like extended out into like a tablet. But there's TVs that do that. But it was just all these like weird, like random like designs. And I'm like, what were we on back then? I want the TV that rolls up. Have you seen that?

Yes. Just like goes into the furniture. Like, hell yeah. Yeah. That goes good with your flip phone. You spin it up in the air while it's unwrapping. You unwrap the TV, you catch it, and then you've got a presentation. You want a slide deck? Boom. You're in the elevator. Watch my elevator pitch. That's so funny. All right. Did we miss any? I don't think we missed any hot takes. Did I get your hot takes? You got the hot takes. Yeah, more or less. That was really fun. We even got the iPhone versus Android hot take in there. Yeah, we did. We did. I cannot wait to get my hands on an Android again. Well, thanks for stopping by.

I think we've got someone in the dugout. Oh, look, we've got a Tanner. Oh, you want me to go grab him? A wild Tanner has appeared. Yeah. Send him in. See you guys. All right. Bye, guys. Thank you. My man is leaving. So hot. It is really hot. Oh, man. Put on the headphones there to your left and everything else will just flow through. Yeah. We're just going to watch you work. Headphones, it'll all go. It's like flying in a plane. A little bit. But once you put these on, you'll see the magic that is happening. Once the headphones are on. You can hear so much better. How's that? Oh, baby. Yeah. How are you doing, dude?

I'm good. Welcome to the show. We've been doing hot takes and also just a little bit about today. So I don't know if you want to chat about what you're doing. Yeah, what you're working on. What am I working on? Oh, I'm working on something salacious. I don't even know how much I want to share, but salaciously sick. I love it. I think the term I'm coming up for is like polymorphic UI libraries. like the almost like a ui library or libraries in general that are able to um almost like an agent they can like uh start off as like a minimum viable thing and then as you needed to do more it will like not self-heal but like self-grow pi ui into like generative ui and stuff no not

generative UI because this is way more deterministic like libraries that need to be you don't want non-determinism in something like a UI library or a router or something like that. Have you tried Pythe Harness? I have not. It comes with four tools and it can teach itself new tools. It can build itself features. It discovers them or you articulate them. It forgets about them every day. It can't forget about them. It's an AI harness that starts very blank and it's able to teach itself and create its own skills and create its own plugins and self-modify and self-heal itself yeah so you can open another instance of pi

to teach another instance of pi something new that's either permanent or temporary or whatever it's sounds kind of like you're making pi ui or something that is has this strong enough base that the tools and the the way that it's been built it can uh explore create its own new things and i don't know just kind of build itself out based on needs like imagine that but less more determinism for things that shouldn't be like you don't want at that much wild wild west uh you want consistency yeah so um yeah i'm messing around with that lately that sounds awesome it's very exciting does that mean that okay so i like to think of a lot of the ways the

ui libraries have been evolving is headless skinless boneless and lifeless the boneless ones are the best right especially with a good sauce yeah and so it kind of sounds like you're building one that's going to be able to do yeah he's whispering to us but yeah good to take it um it kind of sounds like you're building something that um is going to have all four of those so it can it can deliver functions that enable behavior it can also figure out what markup you need or is it is it learning from the markup like do you need to bring the bones and it fills everything out or do you bring like how does it work in the boneless skinless lifeless where you've

got a separation of concerns there. I think there's a little bit more determinism to this particular breed of library that I'm looking at because I don't want to build a library that ends up giving every single user or every single instance that uses it something totally snowflake and unique. Think of it more like we know the minimum and maximum representation of what this library needs to do and instead of shipping the maximum representation of that to users or to their agents, and then relying on older tools that we've had, like dead code elimination or whatever, to prune it down. Instead, you ship the minimum version of that library,

but you have a plan and a scaffold of what other pieces you can bring in, almost like a plug-in system, but very modular and written for AI. And then as your agent tries to use the library, it will run into certain features or certain things that it needs that are not yet implemented. And instead of trying to just kind of like write those Wild Wild West style and just dream up something new, we've already prescriptively given it the new, like the pathway that it can take. I see. And it grows into the, you know, it is a snowflake, but we have pre-designed the snowflake and it kind of grows into only what it needs.

Yeah. Okay. So I really like this growing into, that's exactly what I was thinking about. So let's say I have a select element. And at first the design team has very basic select element. There's no groups on it. There's no searching. There's just, it's a very minimal select element. However, if as I go adorn it with maybe more props, adding more options, asking it to do more features, you're saying it would discover that these are needed, pull from the library, which has already solved those particular features and bring them into the bundle on demand as you use them. Yes. That's awesome. It's kind of a maybe it's kind of a gross way to think about it.

And I'm not a medical guy. But I know like when they when they like grow organic matter, you know, they don't just like plop it onto a surface and just like feed it like they usually needed to have structure. And so it's almost like you're you're giving scaffolding to something that is relatively organic. You don't want it to necessarily grow beyond that or kind of grow out weird ways. You're providing a very specific substrate and scaffold for something that is organic. And as it needs to evolve, it will within the constraints that you've given it. And you can have some level of determinism for, you know, millions and millions of people using the library that no matter what corners of this substrate it grows into, each individual piece that it grows into will be the same piece across all of your users.

Gotcha. So you have to solve everything then so that every use case can be extracted from your library that you're building. Yeah. Otherwise, then you're not in determinism. Right. Yeah. It's a very new idea. I like it because, yeah, usually people go grab something off the shelf and it's like the ultimate, you know, carousel. And the last select you'll ever need. The last select you'll ever need. And you're like, no, actually, this will be the most basic select you currently need. Yeah. And then if you ask it for more, it does more. Yeah. And like the pieces that need to be deterministic should be and the pieces that don't should just not be implemented because you want your agent to invent things that are unique and suited to your needs.

But you don't want it to reinvent state management or a state machine that has been true and proven for many, many years. It's like when you're building a carousel, this is a state machine you should use. Yeah. So would it go ahead? Yeah. Sorry. I was gonna say, would this like suggest, like, if I'm like, I want to build this thing and it's like, I see you wanted to do it this way, but you might want to add this feature. Like, will it be smart about like, you might want this extra stuff or is it just like, you still need to tell it? Okay. I don't know. I mean, we would have to know everything that we know that it could do.

Yeah. There's the possibility to provide that in context to, you know, your agent. And so it would say, I know that I have all these things available to me. Um, so I could recommend them to my human if I want. Yeah. I think that's definitely possible. Yeah. I think that would be cool. Cause I feel like that's the big problem that everybody has is like, I don't know what to build. Like nobody knows what they want. Um, that really is the last problem, uh, that we're going to have. And I think that we should keep for ourselves. It's just, it's just knowing what to build. Yeah. So I don't think an agent is going

to be able to tell us what to do there. Um, and, and, and nor, nor should it because the second that an agent thinks that it, that it doesn't need us to tell it what to build, it's just going to go build whatever the heck it wants. And that's dangerous. So, um, yeah, I think that, uh, in, in a microcosm, you know, you could say that the agent should know what it needs to build based on what you have asked me to do. You know, you say, I want to build a website that, you know, that is for like realty or something like that, properties. Yeah, there's probably going to be a carousel on there. And it could make an executive decision to bring that in just automatically.

Right? Yeah. Which is very different than you just saying, you are an agent. Do whatever the heck you want. And it decides to build a real estate site. Yeah. You know? Gotcha. I'm internalizing this a little bit like module resolution. You create a graph of all the modules that need to be imported. But in this case, you're almost doing a feature graph. And then you're going to crawl the graph and build the bundle based on everything that's getting made. So that's how I'm internalizing right now. However, did you say specs? Are you putting specs in here and doing a sort of spec-driven development flow?

Absolutely. I want to talk more about this. I've been doing this a lot recently, and I've been pushing it really far and really hard. So I'm curious, what's your success like? What are you finding your spec looks like? What are your limits on the size of your spec? And what are your criteria for what a good spec should look like? What's funny is I think we have been backing our way into this process because we have a lot of existing libraries. There's a lot of existing open source out there. So I'm not necessarily in the phase where I'm creating a lot of new spec yet. But what I've been doing is looking at everything that we've created as a spec and figuring out, like, you know, given the current boundaries and constraints and spec that we have created over the years, how pliable is everything inside of that boundary?

Something I was talking about recently with Kyle Matthews is we thought it was really interesting, like, when Cloudflare forked Next, right? They built Venext. Everybody said, oh, I think it was Theo, actually. He's like a slop fork, right? Slop fork, yeah. Coin to turn. Now everybody says slop fork, which is really unfortunate because, sure, there was like an agenda there with why they did it. Obviously, they want to pull Next.js users over to Cloudflare, and why wouldn't you? But also there is a part of that process where, you know, they took a spec and they broke it down to just the external boundaries.

And then they created what me and Kyle are calling a new projection. It's a new projection of that spec. and it was so easy and cheap, well, I mean, relatively cheap, to create that projection that it's like, why are we not creating thousands of new projections of the software that we love? That's the promise of Spectrum and Vellman, by the way. It is, yes. And so, and yes, writing new spec, that's an art. Taking existing spec that's battle tested and throwing it into Doctor Strange universe and saying like, What are all the potential projections of this spec? That's very exciting. Yeah, there's a potential remix culture that could happen with software.

The same way that you fork and make a couple tweaks on some prompt that someone's given you. You could fork an entire spec, make a couple tweaks, add in some silly stuff like Ken Wheeler would do, and be like, you're a cyborg monkey that's just escaped from DARPA or whatever he said. And it's like, now I need you to go build GitHub. And all of a sudden you get this like jungle GitHub, you know? It could just be fun. We could make software fun for regular folks because they get to take something that they like to use and just tweak it and customize it for themselves. Absolutely. And I think the part that I'm interested in as an engineer is there are going to be parts of that process that as a developer and curator of the spec, there are certain pieces that I want to stay deterministic.

that I, you know, the value will be gone if these things change. But then I want to allow breathing room, you know, around that spec for a cyber monkey version, you know. And you want to lock down the things that should be deterministic and then allow ultimate expression for the things that don't. Here's where I'm at right now, because specs alone can't get you determinism. Even with tests, you get determinism, but it's a little bit different. I've been finding success with state machines. Yes. So a state machine plus a spec plus tests gives me enough bounds that I can get variants out of something,

but they conform enough into what I want. So it sounds like you're already on it. You're already doing state machines. I swear David is going to pop up here if you say state machines one more time. He's here somewhere. He is here. State machine, state machine, state machine. dude there he is no i'm just kidding i was like no way that would be amazing i couldn't resist i so very much agree like yeah state machines specs um all the things that actually made software development really great uh over the years that we've been trying to convince normal human squishy brains to use like like type safety and state machines and and spec driven

development, like just became infinitely more useful because of the scale of AI. So, yeah. The other thing I've added is BDD, behavioral driven design. And so that's just another way to describe what you want. In this case, you're describing what I want the user to get from it. So it's not technical requirements. It's a little bit squishier than that. But it is still another way to orient the ship as it goes, I need to make the next word. And you're like, yeah, consider that the user needs to accomplish this task. And it goes, oh, yeah, good point. I'll make sure that the state machine allows that particular.

Great. Thanks for the suggestion, BDD. You know, and so just more bounds that are meaningful to the expectations of what we want from the output. Remember, you're not just, you know, some bytes. Like there's a human on the other end of this that needs to derive value from what you're building. Oh, man, one more thing. I'm sorry. I've just been on this so much. is last night we were, okay, so there's context rot or context pollution, right? So let's say you took the state machine, the spec, the tests, and you put those all into the context of the LLM. That's a lot for it. It's, you know, we're like, hey, but they're all really rigid and it's probably fine.

No, instead, fan out five agents, one that owns each particular pillar and have an orchestrator watch them as they go collaborate and work. So that way their context is isolated to one ownership of something. So you have one spec agent. You've got one agent that's on the state machine, one agent that's looking out for the user, one agent that's looking out for accessibility, another agent that's looking out for performance or whatever. Like a company. Like a company. So that's kind of what I keep doing. And also, and I was telling someone last night, you don't have to stop at one orchestrator, dude.

You can spin up five orchestrators with five separate teams, all taking the thing that you want, making five different versions, and just give me a little error. Let me TikTok my way through, I guess not TikTok. What's the swipey one where you chose people? Tinder. Dude, let me Tinder through designs. Swipe right. Swipe right. I'm like, don't love it. Don't love it. That's the solution, you know? And then now you've got, you're using LLMs in this multifaceted way, and you're not just, anyway, so sorry, I'm talking a lot, but okay. That's fantastic. Adam likes this stuff, if you couldn't tell. No way.

It's been fun. Such a surprise. Very cool. All right. Is React a framework? Uh, yeah, by the general sense of the term, sure. Okay. Were React server components a mistake? Um, no. Hooks, signals, or proxies? Signals. Nice. Is HTML a programming language? Sure. What about CSS? Lately, more so. Tailwind or vanilla CSS? Tailwind. Git rebase or git merge? I don't care. Semicolons or no semicolons? I used to care. No semicolons, but now I don't care. What is your least favorite programming language? PHP was not very fun. It has so many dollar signs. Yeah. It's just because that was the first language that I got really deep into.

And so there's, like, trauma, you know? WordPress, building, like, custom WordPress plugins. Yeah, the white screen of death. Yeah. So there was like some trauma association with WordPress. But I mean, otherwise, like PHP is fun still. It's cool. But yeah, the worst programming language, JavaScript. It's also the best programming language. Yeah, I could see that. Have you reached AGI? No. What's your preferred AI harness? Oh, it changes every week. right now I'm using Cloud Code Desktop like the desktop app as my daily driver which wasn't really possible for me a couple weeks ago I tried it again and now it's

gotten a lot better I kind of got baited into it too Anthropic changed Cloud.ai to use TanSec Start and then I found out that a router, a TanSec router and then I found out that that's actually embedded into the desktop app So I was like, well, why wouldn't I try that? And it's been a lot of fun. But I'm trying a lot of other ones too, like T3 codes, interesting. I've been using Codex for a while. There was a big, long season where I was definitely using OpenCode, and I was 100% using the Claude subscription in OpenCode, and probably past the date when I wasn't supposed to. He's in the shorts.

Go ahead, ban me. yeah that all that drama is just ridiculous like yeah if we're trying to pay you money who cares where we're using it at but yeah well i mean they gave me an open source one of those open source plans too like the 20x plan did they you guys adam didn't get one i got one i matched the criteria but they just denied it anyway i got it at least for six months right uh and had a time limit yeah well now i feel better all of you you're on the same as you in september i hope it gets renewed you know if that's even a thing but i feel like they why wouldn't they renew it because they can just train everything on everything everybody's doing like give it to

everyone yeah if they don't i'm just gonna say come on you guys are using my open source software like yeah you got a good angle in there like pay it forward you know yeah yeah thank you Will AI take out designers or devs first? I don't know. I think both. I mean, it's going to take out the top 80% to 90% of both, I think, eventually. It's about when, not if. It's more about time right now. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I would say that we have plenty of time. Yeah. Yeah. It's still a great time to become a developer or a designer. You just have to be better than whatever's going to come out of that.

The bar is higher now. Yeah, the bar is higher. Yeah. Speaking of bars, sidebar on the left or right? Left. Did you guys go out last night? Tabs on top or left? It depends. Ooh, where, how? I keep tabs on the top for my browser. I do not. But like in most other apps, I like the left tab. Nice. Are you using Cmux or Warp, or how are you doing your terminal tabs on the left? I tried Cmux. I was doing actually top terminal tabs for a while. I was actually a madman. I did not do it normal. I was using Mac spaces. So I had like 10 separate spaces on my Mac. Oh. And then inside of each space, I had a dedicated terminal window.

And then inside of there, I had a bunch of tabs. And depending on what terminal I was using at the time, sometimes it was left, sometimes it was top. The last time I was in using OpenCode, I was using Ghosty. And so I was a top tab. So at any given moment, I had like 30 or 40 total terminal tabs on my machine. When you were in a tab in Ghosty, did you do the panels too? Because that's what I'll have. I'll have like five tabs in Ghosty, but each tab has four instances in it. No, I didn't do that. Like when I started, it's like splitting panels. Yeah. The Chrome wasn't strong enough. So like. I get lost a little.

Yeah, I got lost. So the tabs were at least like, okay, I know very, very clearly that these tabs are separate things. You know, I would jump into a tab and there's like four of them in there. I'd be like, oh, I forgot I had four in there. That's why I didn't do it. Warp just came out with tabs on left, and you can name the tab as a project or whatever, and then you can see all the panels that it has inside of it, and you know what they are. Oh, okay. So it's kind of illuminating what the other ones aren't doing. Almost like a mini-map. I love the term mini-map. I use it all the time. Yeah. Thank you.

Yes, that's right. Yeah, very cool. Great question. Any more of these you want to do? I don't know. How are you feeling? You want some more? You want a rapid fire? I'm fine. You got an agent open on your lap just doing work, yeah? Oh, it probably went to sleep now. Oh, shame. No, I just had a couple of cloud codes running. Yeah. Nice. So I probably should have shut it. No, you got to always be working. I do like the remote control feature, so I can just go do other shit, and, like, it's still building. Whose remote control feature? The cloud code. Like the dispatch stuff? It's called remote control.

I don't know. So you, like, run something and then go do whatever, and it tells you on your phone on the cloud app, like, I'll be honest, I haven't used it yet. Yeah, I hadn't used it until recently, and it was really nice. I was doing, like, tail scale stuff before, and that was really fun. But I guess they must have added that to the Cloud Desktop app. They add everything every day. They're always shipping stuff. I haven't tried it yet for that. Do you know, like, can I start it on my machine? Does my machine have to stay open, or is it, like, cloud-based? No, it's not cloud-based. It's on your machine.

Okay, so I have my machine open? Yeah, so it, like, I guess spins up something that knows how to connect to it, And then you use like that key on your phone. But your phone just knows. You don't have to like copy the key. Right. Because I saw dispatch and I tried that. But you like have to start a chat in dispatch for them to show up on my phone. But it seemed like more oriented towards like just chat and co-work instead of like the code. So it sounds like I need to use remote control. Yes, it's good. You just do your normal cloud code stuff. And then if you have something else to do for a second, it'll give you a notification on your phone if it's stuck.

And you can. Nice. Do whatever. Kent was making fun of me earlier. He's like, you're walking around with your computer and everybody knows you have a local agent. Yeah, where's the cloud agents, man? Yeah. And I'm like, hey, when I used to use Cursor, I loved cloud agents, you know. But lately, I mean, I got a lot of stuff on my machine that's not even in the cloud. Yeah, that's my problem, too. It's like cloud code could do it, but I'm like, I don't want to check this code in yet. I don't need to make a repo just to, yeah. A lot of, like, new ideas that I'm, like, haven't even committed to get.

Yeah. Should probably do that. Probably do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you might lose those. Yeah, this machine's like from 2021, so you never know. Crocs or flip-flops? Oh, well, I can't really wear both anymore. I have terrible feet. Oh, no. But I like flip-flops. But we're definitely a croc family. Like all my kids have crocs. The kids love crocs. Do you have matching charms? No. Oh, that's what other dads I know do with their kids. But my kids had some Disney charms at one point. We went to Disneyland and had Disney charms and Crocs. I've never owned a pair of Crocs in my life. Me neither. All right.

East Coast or West Coast? West Coast. Dark or light factories? Yeah, dark factories. You're familiar with that? No. That's when you set up a genetic development system that you don't look at the code. You can still have all your rules and tests that need to pass and stuff like that, but you just literally don't care. That's more fun. it is more fun yeah scarier if you're talking about production stuff but it is a lot more fun so awesome which means it will probably win out in the end because it's more fun yeah the risk is fun yeah yeah uh beards or mustaches i have neither or clean clean shaven i'm not capable of either so i'm not allowed to have

an opinion if i could grow either i maybe would try but it would just come in like really joe dirt if it's all sparse yeah yeah so i just i just hide that from everybody you know i go for that like 25 year old fresh look that's working dude it's working hopefully it keeps working well we're pretty much at the end of the questions anything you want to chat about pitch uh share with everybody. Go try Tan Stack Start. Sick. Hey, thanks for sitting down. It was fun. Thanks, guys. This was a lot of fun. Take it easy. Go get some work done. Yeah, I will. My agents are doing it right now. What's up, everybody?

Welcome to Whiskey Web and What Not with your hosts, Robbie the Wagner and Adam Thomas Argyle, the nerd. What's up, y'all? This has been so fun. Yeah, we are still at React Miami, if you can believe it. and chatting with more folks here. We've got Francesco. How's it going? Hi, nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, yeah. Let's have a nice chat. Yes, yeah. So we're happy to talk about anything you have on your mind, but we have a giant list of hot takes if you'd like to go through those. Let's go. Let's start with the easy ones first. Sure. All right, this one is super easy. Is React a framework?

Yes. Yes, but to do what? It is. Yeah. that's fair were react server components a mistake uh don't think so i think it's a good option for who wants to use them yeah that's fair hooks signals or proxies hooks is html a programming language of course it is nice love that what about css the css might be but only if you're good at it that's right when adam uses it it's a program Exactly, exactly, exactly. Tailwind or Vanilla CSS? Tailwind. I didn't even hear the second option, but Tailwind. Nice. So you're a Tailwind fan? I am. As a DevOps guy, I love Tailwind. Yes, I love Tailwind as well. It gets a lot of hate.

I don't know why, but I love it. Some people just don't like good things. Yeah, that's true. Git rebase or Git merge? Git merge. usually. Don't hate me. We don't. I think we've had a decent 50-50 split on that one. Yeah, you'll get hate anyway. Whatever is the answer. That's basically a bait question because you'll get hate anyway. Yeah. Do you have a reason as to why you like it? I don't know. I think it's more straightforward, so I like it more. Yeah. Less problems encountered, I guess. Less problems. Don't want problems. Semicolons or no semicolons? semicolons just because in rasta you use semicolons nice i love semicolons who doesn't

me no it was a rhetoric question whoever doesn't like them doesn't matter sounds like what is your least favorite programming language the least favorite prologue but i think nobody knows it. It's a super hard language that I had to learn to pass a university exam and I hate it to it all myself. One day I will make a video to finally take it down forever everywhere on the internet. It's actually the most hated programming language on Stack Overflow. It has to stay there. That sounds like a viral video in the making. People love hate. If you've got it burning inside of you, they're going to love watching it

just rage out. At least I didn't have to say Java. so we have something worse. It's weird, but we have something worse. Everyone else has said Java. I know. Yeah, so they rank. How do they determine what are the most hated? Is it like sentiment analysis of how they're talking about it? No, it's basically Stack Overflow. The question is, what is a programming language? After using it, you don't want to use it anymore. So they don't ask what you hate. But if, I don't know, I think 90% of the people who tried it don't want to use it. Gotcha. So this is basically hate. That's a good signal. It's not really hate, but it's good in this case.

Just better, nicer wording. Yeah. Have we reached AGI? We might be, especially if you ask AI, like say that we reached AGI. In that case, you can panic. But no, I don't think so yet. Yeah, I guess it depends on how you define it. But yeah, I don't think so either. I think that once we will reach AGI, we will know it. It will not even be a question. Yeah. So, we are questioning that, is it or is it not? We will know. We will stop asking that and probably we'll all be dead. It will not even be a problem. Yeah. Are AGI and Singularity the same? Are they aligned? Like, Singularity, that's... I think it's different.

Because that's when the AI is making its own better versions of itself until it just far surpasses anything we could have even comprehended. It's written its own code, so... That's a super intelligence one, right? Like, general intelligence is not there yet, I don't think. Oh, I see what you mean. So AGI being artificial general intelligence, singularity would be some sort of advanced intelligence? Like, better than the IQ of any human, yeah. Yeah, it might be. Interesting. Good call. Yeah. Cool. What's your preferred AI harness? AI? AI what? Harness. like open code, cloud code? I think cloud code for now.

I don't like to try too many tools at the same time. For example, I think I didn't even try codex for now because I don't want to jump tools after tool after tool every single day otherwise I will go crazy. And so for now I'm testing code intensively. I want to try codex for sure also open code but I don't want to go in full test mode. It's like when you learn back then JavaScript framework, you don't learn them all at once, like I did. It was a mistake. But now that I know this, I'm taking one tool, I stay for it at least a couple of months, and then I try something else. Gotcha. There's a lot to try, and I'm sure there'll be

more coming. I don't know. We'll see. I've been using Cloud a lot because we've talked about this a lot, but I I got the like open source free one or whatever. And I'm like, hey, cool. It's free. I'll use it. Cool. And yeah, I don't know if I'm getting better or worse results than open code. It's pretty comparable. I feel like, I don't know. I don't think I'm getting good results out of if I'm forced to use open AI models. Like all the anthropic models do a lot better, I feel like. Usually that's a sentiment, especially for things that has to do with coding. Yeah. For now, I think it's number one.

By the way, this is not sponsored by Entropic. No. Sadly. Unless it wants to be. We will take that money if you would like to give us some. But yeah. Do you think AI will take out designers or developers first? So it's going to take them both anyway. So this is the question. Yeah. I think designer first. But none of them is going to happen anyway. Never? No, yeah, because, you know, taking over, it means that there is no demand for that. And I think that with AI, we don't have less demand in terms of software, in terms of design. I don't see this anywhere. People are asking for more tools. Maybe they're asking to design something maybe faster, quicker.

But it's not that we need less designers. so we just we will have i think more work and it will change the way and also the the way people ask like things like like maybe before they were asking for design maybe in two weeks maybe now it's two three days right so this is my change but the number and the like the work i think it will still be we will still still have to work for a while so and we can but we can take a podcast once in a while yeah yeah i don't know i have worry about that all the time like will i have a job i don't know uh i think i think that this is an era when we really can't overthink

we you see people who are the most successful ones are the people who are really focused on the execution you see prime agency or like people are really focused on doing doing the thing so I think that we should stop overthinking in this era like is it worth it or not and just focus on doing the thing so I think that's a good strategy yeah that's good advice do you want to read any of these? no I keep going dude I'm loving it okay where did I leave off let's see do you use a VS code based editor like VS code cursor windsurf etc or something else I use VS Code for now it does the job again I don't want to

over two lies or if that's a word so I prefer to keep it simple I know that Courser exists I know that Windsurf exists so for now I'm more focused on understanding the things I need to have time to go to conferences so for now I really stick to the basics and it's the same thing that you asked before with Codex so usually if I decided to try a tool or if I try to give it a go with WinCell for Courser, then I would use it for like an extended amount of time. So for now I'm sticking to VS Code because it does the job. I also use some JetBrains tools for Rust, they are cool, but that's already a lot for me.

So like I'm already trying like two, three IDEs, it's already a lot for me. I use JetBrains, I like it for some specific projects. Gotcha. Yeah, I use VS Code as well. I tried Cursor, but I tried it when it first came out, and it was not great then, but I've heard a lot of good things now. But are we even developers if we're not using Vim? That's the question. Well, do you even need to type anymore? Yeah. You can just dictate. Do we need an editor? Yeah. We don't need an editor anymore. Yeah, you can just talk. Like, I would like an app that does this, make no mistakes. Yes. And there's your app.

Exactly. Okay, tabs on the left or top? like in a browser, a terminal, et cetera? Do you like tabs across the top or on the left side? Okay. Tabs on top. It works. Am I the freak one? No, tabs on top, but the bar with the files on the right. Oh, that is a follow-up question. I'm sorry. Is that because if you open and close it, it jumps? No, so that's one of the reasons. But for me, the real reason, I was a left bar guy. But I noticed that on the right, yeah, it doesn't move. And also while I'm streaming, I put myself on the bottom right. And then on top of me, I have the list of the files. Yeah.

So this is also what made me decide to switch and go on the dark side, on the right side. Nice. Yeah, that's what Adam had mentioned that I hadn't considered is like if you're on the bottom right, you'd be covering some of the code possibly also. So it's like, oh, that makes sense. I don't know. I never thought that much about it. Let's see. Google search or just ask an LLM? I think it depends what you need to do. now i think i use llms more than google i think for most of the tasks because i can i can ask a following up question basically i always have many questions so yeah usually i like to have you know

separate chats i have like chats with like titles i don't know this is to for training this is for to eat this is for conferences and then i keep separate shots and yeah makes sense i like the um i still put most stuff in google but then the first thing it does is give it to gemini so it's like i hate the ai mode of google i don't know why because i i end up using llms but because when i am on google i don't want it's because i don't want to use the lms so the ai mode of google which I think it's the first one. Yes, it is. I hate it. I don't like it. Can you opt out? I don't know. I haven't looked.

I don't know. I should check, but for now it's there, and I don't want to use it. Yeah. I think still if you don't go on the AI mode, the first answer is AI anyway, I think. But I don't like the... Yeah, I do like that you can kind of follow up with it, though, like you were saying. Like, if I didn't get my search quite right, then I can go, oh, well, what about this? to get more info. I like that. I go, of course, on Google when I need something on the edge. For example, on the news. For example, if when I get a new AI news, maybe someone has been released during this podcast. Now, check it out.

And the first thing that I do usually is I go on the Google News and I search it. This is usually the first thing I do. And usually it works because I get some latest news about AI on Google Search. Yeah, nice. uh composition or inheritance what is inheritance no composition dude you got me i was like oh no yeah so you don't like classes then what you don't like classes then it's not that i don't like classes but uh i i don't know it's because maybe because i did computer science degree and no they they told me like they were you know like the final destination like the the final answer to all my problems but i still have many problems so that's they didn't

solve my coding problems so yeah classes are cool they're not evil but i see especially some still see some junior developers that basically they've experienced what i did so they they tell them that like this is like the answer to all your all your problems right and it's not yeah yeah it is in school it was heavily inheritance based and i was uh yeah it's not the best you find out there's a lot of foot guns from that approach so yes yeah for sure oh i got a new one for the list okay when you run uh cloud code or whatever do you run it in yolo mode or do you accept and manage all the permissions as it goes uh i think mostly yolo mode mostly except if i

have to do with something like very specific that can have some security issues if it's a side project you know something that i do on a saturday night because you know nobody invited me to go to a party so i stay at home in that case i go yolo mode if i do something that has to do with security api especially api keys and something like that in that case i go i slow down of course the answer is it depends nice yeah i always get worried in yolo mode like what if it decides to delete everything and i'm not watching but i guess it doesn't usually do that but yeah uh let's see npm or pnpm i hate this question because i am a rust developer so i

switched to rust because so i didn't have to answer this but again simplicity npm pnpm Yarn Tools I think they also existed Especially in the past To replace the fact that NPM Had some flows Some problems Right But I think NPM improved enough That it's good for most For most of the developers Of course we might have some edge cases But Again And again I like the fact that Because you know Maybe not everyone is a JavaScript developer Right Maybe they are a Python developer and they say, okay, what is this PMPM? So I don't want people who are not JavaScript developers to get confused. So I prefer to have something simple.

Yeah. But I have some friends who are PMPM developers, so we can still be friends. Yeah. I think PMPM came out at a time where Yarn had gotten too complex and it was like, what if it was simpler again? And so you've got some of the best of both. But then, yeah, NPM has learned from both of them and just put it all into NPM now. So it doesn't really matter. Yeah. Yeah. SCSS or SAS? Plainly says Tailwind. Why are you asking me these hard questions in front of Adam? I'm not a CSS guy. No, I think maybe SCSS. I don't know. It's not my main field. Yeah. So that's it. sorry we can cut this one that's fine

JSX or Jade? JSX that's nice Anthropic or OpenAI? which one I hate or I like more? which one you like I guess I think that lately I haven't used OpenAI at all because usually usually I use Anthropic to encode related things Gemini for like you know the day-to-day job job like or things like long things another one i think that not not many people use is grok i use grok also because i have a twitter premium so i have grok plus or whatever is it called yeah i like something i like about grok is that i think it's the best in comparing things or also giving like hard feedback you know one of the problems with ai is that usually you can say like

Everything is amazing. You get like too much, a little soft critics to a blog or a post. I find out that Grok is good at like telling you that your thing sucks. Nice. So it is amazing. It is, I think it's useful. Yeah. Like I wrote a book or I wrote a blog post, like, is this good or not? I asked Jamie, nice. He's like, oh, it's very good. Grok said like, it sucks. You can improve this, this, this and this. And I ended up saying like, maybe the feedback was more constructive. And I think this is what I use the most. I like that feature. So I haven't used Grok much, so I wasn't aware of that. I started using it because Gemini started to have some weird bugs.

I think the one that I hated the most in Gemini, they finally fixed it. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. When you paste an image, it goes out of focus. then you had to like go with the mouse again and click to refocus on the thing and that drove me crazy to try something else because i say why why it is they fixed it they still have sometimes they does some weird stuff but again to when i want to get criticized now i use grok and also to compare things i like it like like is this version better than this one it's usually it's a bit slow in giving answers but and also i like to know to have another point of view maybe gemini has already

too much context so you know just uh just i know when you use a different browser to try to see if you get a different uh a different set of results so yeah it's um but it's very unpopular and i don't see many people doing this but uh it works for me i used it for a couple weeks during uh like when Anthropic said you can't use your Cloud code subscription with OpenCode anymore. So I was like, oh, Grok is free on here. So I did that. Something that I don't like about Grok, sorry, Elon, is that at some point it just stops. So you can't even use the free model anymore. So if you are in the middle of a conversation

with Grok, like with Gemini, you can still talk, use a fast mode, you know, poor mode, whatever, and it still works. Grok at some point just stops. Probably they want you to upgrade or doing something Yeah, it doesn't warn you at all? No, it just stops and says, like, I'll see you tomorrow. Nice. It has no compaction, its brain is overloaded, too much context, I just stop. That's weird. Yeah. Hermes or Open Claw? I think Open Claw, I think, for now. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, I haven't tried Hermes, so I have no opinion. Crocs or flip-flops? Flip-flops. I also made a talk with flip-flops. I still have to do a talk with Crocs.

So flip-flops is the way. Nice. East coast or west coast? Based on what? U.S.? Yeah, U.S. Okay, because the U.S. is the only thing that exists in the world, yes. Why do you want half of the U.S. to hate me? I mean, only half of them will hate you for your answer. So, you know. I don't know. I don't know what to say. Of course, I'd say east because we're in Miami. Yeah, it's absolutely east. Nice. Dark or light factories? Factories? Yeah. People don't know this term. Well, I mean, light factories. I feel like you made it up. Where did you read it? I definitely did not make it up. A dark factory is there's these companies where they set up enough rules and enough for their LLMs that they don't even look at the code at all anymore.

So they have production applications that they've never looked at the code. All they do is continue managing tests and linters and type checks and all these other things. But as long as it works and the features that they want are there, they don't care about the code. That's the dark factory. So a light factory means you're looking at the code still. Okay. So basically the dark factory, their motto is what could go wrong for the dark factory, right? Yeah. So I didn't even know it was a thing. So I learned something. Today I learned. So definitely a light factory for things, because things will go wrong.

That's the nature of software and things. Coding is a part of creating software, but it's more about fixing things when things go wrong. When I was working at the European Space Agency, a big project, the code was not trivial. But once you do the software to download the pictures, you are basically done. It was more about managing the things, problems, services that go down and turn them up, backup databases, data loss for we don't even know why they're not there. So I think that's the nature of the production. But I think big companies, they know this. So light factors. Yeah. Maybe Amazon doesn't know this when AWS keeps going down.

but I don't know. Now they can just blame AI when things go down. Yeah, it is kind of convenient. What a scapegoat. It's like the new scapegoat. I think we really lowered our standards. I think 10 years ago, if we had a service going down for hours, we would have been crazy. Yeah. Now we are, I don't know, maybe we are accepting, we are becoming a little soft. Yes. We're desensitized from all the downtime and all the news that's happening. It's like, oh, did someone get shot down the street? Okay, well, I still need to get groceries. so I'll just walk around it. But at least when I'll be old, I can say,

in my old times, we were supposed to have 99.99% of servers. Yes. Oh, man. Yeah, GitHub just keeps going down more and more. It's so, so scary. I feel like, yeah, we wouldn't have put up with that like five years ago. Everyone would have found something. Go to GitLab or something else. I don't know. It's the move fasting, you know, maybe. And also, you know what I noticed? That before, when they had an outage, they were doing, you know, at least, like, you know, an excuse, a post. At this point, it's just best effort, service. Yeah, I think we were down a couple of hours. Do whatever. Okay. They are trying to normalize this.

They're not even saying, I didn't say any apologize from GitHub. They don't care. No. Well, people are using it anyway, so they don't care yet. Yeah, whatever. They're like, oops, we're sorry. Yeah, they even saved some servers because they were down to save the money of the servers. That's true. I wonder how much money they saved while I was down. Yeah, everyone's still paying, right? Dang. Yeah. It is fun when you're doing a bunch of work and you try to do something on GitHub and it's down and you go, well, I'm just going to go outside for a while. That's fine. It's nice. I think it's a feature.

So we can go out and call your mom, call your friends and say, how is it going? How have you been so far? It's a feature. That makes me want to go Tyler Dern it on it. Like if I can, if I can take down GitHub for a week, I'm gifting so many developers across the world of vacation. I'm actually go hiking. I will go hiking for sure. That's what I mean. Everyone's going to be like, all right. They just have to say, we will be down for a week so we can, you know, relax. Yeah. Just have to say, we'll be, we'll be back in a week or so. Was I late? I don't know. I tried to woo with them. How long was that?

Let's see I think that's most of what we had I've got a question though for you Because we're going to see you at Cascadia JS That's going to be the west coast And so when we ask you again You better say west coast as your favorite Not the east coast But you know I can change my mind Adam I have one month to change my mind You know intelligent people They change their mind What a great way to start a sentence and be like, well, dumb people choose this. So I'm not going to, I'm choosing the smart one. Which one are you choosing? Oh, shit, I'm choosing the dumb one. Now you guys, I'm dumb. Oh, no!

What are you going to talk about there? And again, what's happening for you here in Miami? Anything you want to recap? Anything that's been exciting? What's in your life right now? Yes, so Miami has been a really great experience. I was supposed to come here in 2022, but then I didn't make it. Then 2023, okay, next year. 2024, okay, next year. 2025, okay, next year. so I don't know if I finally I made it happen so I'm here and it was it really matched my expectations I had very meaningful conversations the I like the dichotomy of being like a very technical conference but also social usually you have just one of the two things mostly social

I like it it's not too big and I hate myself when there is a multi-track conference I meet my friends and I tell them like yes I will come to your talk 100% and then I just forget because I don't know someone invited me to a podcast or something like that so in this case you know with just one stage it's harder to miss my friends my first talks yeah and yeah and I met so many friends one is Pauline from Versailles which is here and I met I've been chatting with her since 2019 then we started going to conferences but we never met before like like like are you going to this conference, yes, and then at the last moment,

I don't know, someone had a problem. So we've been missing each other for like three years. I started to think, so I will never meet her. And we finally made it, so that was really worth it. And yes, and the other question, sorry, my memory is really short. Oh, it's Cascadia.js, but I mean, happy ending you just shared. That's kind of nice, yeah. So at Cascadia.js, I will be a keynote speaker and I will bring the situation of Rust for web development, which is a very hard, this probably will be my hardest talk ever, also because I will bring this talk to mostly a JavaScript, let's say, audience.

But I really want to bring something that, because I've been preaching and talking about that Rust is meaningful for web development since 2022 when people called me like crazy and freak. Now it makes more sense and we are going more into that direction. So I think it's a valid option, especially for backend, also for frontend with WebAssembly. But let's say, again, I think that it's still the best combo. It's still TypeScript on the front end and Rust on the back end. Why not Kotlin? The real question is why Kotlin? I used Kotlin. I think I am the only – if you search on Google Kotlin REST API,

I think the only video on Google is mine. So I used Kotlin to make a video. So you've been there, hated that. Was that a real question or not? Kotlin is just a language that can be used in some specific environments, it's basically Java in disguise Kotlin, so it's just Java on steroids, a bit less steroids than Go, but yeah I would try to convince people that using Rust as a web developer in 2026 is not that crazy anymore and if I get punched in the face I will just take it, and I'll just make an apology video no, it's but I can't wait. Thanks for reminding me that I still have to ultimate my slides,

but I have still 40 days or so. Plenty of time. Awesome. Yeah, we have to figure out what we're going to do. We're going to MC there. Yeah, we don't know how we're doing it yet, but we'll figure it out. Nice. So see you there. Yes. Are you doing the podcast there? TBD. We're definitely not doing it the whole time. We might do an episode or two, but we haven't figured it out yet. It'd be way overkill if we were MCs and trying to podcast. We could just podcast on stage the whole time and just introduce people as they come up. Oh, nice. Interesting. No, you mean, you know, during the breaks, instead of relaxing, you just do also the podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I could do that. You just need some drugs just to stay up. Can be done, yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. Thanks for stopping by. Anything else that you want to mention, plug, talk about? No, I would say that I really believe in in-person events. I think it's one of the few podcasts that I did live. So thanks for having me. I think it's just a different vibe, different experience. I'm not saying that social media are bad, of course. I would be... It would not be true. But I think going to conferences really is the answer to all this AI stress and fear of getting replaced because it creates real connections with people yeah what i really like about conferences

what i really like about tech conferences that you don't talk about tech every time we had like a meaningful conversation for example with adam yesterday something that is not just just frameworks and tools and tips and code but more about the human being part but in person it's it's different Because I understand because I am one of the people on social media. They talk about development because this is our job, our career. In person, we can focus more on the non-tech thing. So this is why I like it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, getting to know people, the people behind the developers. Exactly. Developers are actually real people, which is weird.

Yeah. All right. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave some ratings and reviews. Yes, I don't know what I'm saying We'll see you later Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe Congratulations citizen You are now prepared to face the challenges Of the modern technological world With the proper tools, a steady hand And a reasonably configured terminal Any developer can orchestrate AI agents with confidence You'll do just fine Thank you for listening to Whiskey, Web, and Whatnot The world's most important AI podcast For additional resources, including official merchandise, visit whiskey.fund.

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248: Dark Factories, Polymorphic UI, and Why Developers Still Matter

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