Whiskey Web and Whatnot

The authoritative voice of AI, programming, and the modern web. Also whiskey.

239: Flogging Margins With The Dropcap Murphys

This week, Robbie and Adam welcome Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show to talk brand truth versus brand slop, whether CSS knowledge is now your biggest advantage, the rise of dark factories, and why apps built in a weekend don't inspire trust. They...

Creators and Guests

RobbieTheWagner
Adam Argyle
Chris Coyier
Dave Rupert

Show Notes

This week, Robbie and Adam welcome Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from ShopTalk Show to talk brand truth versus brand slop, whether CSS knowledge is now your biggest advantage, the rise of dark factories, and why apps built in a weekend don't inspire trust. They dig into OpenClaw workflows, burn windows, agent browsers, the death of pointing and clicking, and whether we've accidentally turned ourselves into energy vampires. Along the way, they cover hot pockets, men's cereal, border shape, and why caring about what you do might actually be a curse.

Presented by Warp: https://www.warp.dev/oz

In this episode:

Chapters

  • 00:00:00 Welcome & Introductions
  • 00:05:30 Brand Truth vs Brand Slop: The AI Authenticity Debate
  • 00:10:54 One-Shot Apps & The Weekend Project Problem
  • 00:18:15 CSS in the Age of AI: Does It Still Matter?
  • 00:25:20 Live Demo: Claude Builds a Podcast Landing Page
  • 00:29:37 Context Rot & The Flogging Margins Problem
  • 00:36:55 Dark Factories & Code You Never Read
  • 00:44:52 Energy Vampires & AI Brain Fry
  • 00:51:35 The 10,000 Watt GPU vs The 40 Watt Brain
  • 01:24:10 Wrap Up & Where to Find Everyone

Links

Connect with Chris

Connect with Dave

Connect with the hosts

Subscribe and stay in touch

Whiskey Web and Whatnot Merch
Enjoying the podcast and want us to make more? Help support us by picking up some of our fresh merch at https://whiskey.fund.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to St.Tan! Welcome to a brand new episode of the front-end happy hour podcast. Welcome to this week's JS Party! Live from Ship Shape Studios, this is WhiskeyWeb and whatnot. With your hosts Robbie the Wagner and me, Charles William Carpenter the third. That's right Charles, we drink whiskey and talk about web development. I mean it's all in the name, it's not that deep. This is, WhiskeyWeb and whatnot do not adjust your set. WhiskeyWeb and whatnot is brought to you by... 2001... 2002... Oh hello, I didn't see you there. I don't know if you heard me counting, but I just did over 1000. I have all this time to work out because Oz is busy orchestrating agents to do all my work for me in the cloud.

Oz is a brand new offering from the team that brought you warp. It allows me to trigger cloud coding agents from anywhere. Warp, the ACLI, the web app, a cron schedule, GitHub actions or any app I want with the SDK. So I'm always in control. Trust me, as the world's most important AI podcast, we know a thing or two about what makes a good, agentic AI workflow. If you want to have all your work done for you, like me, head on over to Oz.dev and get started with 1000 free credits. You stay classy planet Earth. Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to WhiskeyWeb and whatnot with your host, Robbie the Wagner and Adam Thomas Argyle, the nerd.

Happy St. Patty say, y'all, welcome. Yeah, it all comes together now. Is that the airport earlier? There was, there are some people wearing Shamrock stuff and only then hours later did I connect to that's unbelievable. Yeah, I'm always greenish shirt. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. I've put it into the rotation. I've never seen it before and I'd like to think I've seen most of Dave shirts at this point. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, thanks for joining us, fellas. Adam, would you like to tell the folks at home who we have on the show today? Oh, you know, we've got a shot talk show collab for y'all today.

If you don't know who these two cats are, I'm going to tell you, we have Dave in the shed, Rupert, aka Macho Man Randy standards, aka Barack Shadow, Dom Obama, aka T-Swiptonator, aka Bernie standards, blogger, Gaber, hacker, goofball, figuring painter, base slapping, RSS sling, struttle making tinker taker and friend on the other side. We've got Chris Koyer, creator of CSS tricks, co-founder of CodePen designer, developer, entrepreneur, badass, front end master, RSS puncher, email lover, claw hammer banger. Actually, Dave, please call him or two. He's also a blogger. He's not a business man. He's a business man and overall rad cat that I never hit with baseball back.

Cause you just don't do that to nice people, do you? Both co-host the excellent excellent show, shop talk show, which happened watching for years. We're listening to whatever, but welcome to the show. We can't wait. We're so happy to have you. You're born to do this. Yeah, you're so good. Like I feel like it's like a 50 50 were even going to like say the guest name. Like if they don't say it, like it's probably not happening. I don't know. That's, yeah, you're so good at this. Yeah. Adam is great at that. And something else that people will enjoy for this episode, we're not going to say a single word about the whiskey we're having because we all have different shit.

So let's try. I do have legit Irish whiskey though. I've got the green spot. I'm not going to go into all the details maybe later, but I am going to do something silly with it. And I'm going to put some green drops in it. Okay. I think it works. Oh baby, James says. I'll put a baby, James and in my baby class. Oh my god. It's not mixing together. Oh, here it goes. Oh, there's a baby James. That looks pretty good. Yeah. I should have probably had some before I did that. But okay, I got a toast. So as everyone takes their first sip, maybe your CSS always cascade without lumps. The luck of the Irish finally help you center that damn div.

And your whiskey pour smoother than AI generated slot. Here's to keeping the bugs out of our code bases and the good stuff in our glasses. Slotcha. Cheers. I'm going to hang out in the garage so hard after this. That is not baby James. That is full grown up, James. I need more explanation on I'm going to hang out at the garage. I'm going to get a folding chair out. Steely Dan. Oh, nice, nice. Okay. Like a delivery hot dog's leisure. Yeah. It's right to the garage. Is this you? I'm going to start from around back in the note. Gate open. Yeah. Oh, God. Okay. So yeah, we don't have to talk about this whiskey because we're skipping it.

We're going to move talking about it to the end in general also because people don't care about it. So we will talk about it last for the folks who do care about it. That's a big change. Yeah. I figured we'll jump right into the hot take. Well, introduce a guest. Do a toast. We'll have whiskey. The spirits are what keep the spirits high, right? There's like a whole theme here where like it gets hotter and so it goes on. But we don't always have to like do a four minute like dream, you know, a trample in the beginning. So it's kind of like hot ones, right? They kind of go straight into like, hey, you're going to take a bite and then I'm going to ask you a spicy-ass question.

Okay. Let's springboard right into that. Are we in the age of branch truth or brand slop right now? There's like a bunch of brands out there that are claiming that they're now doing branch. And y'all are a good example of maybe brand truth. You're authoritative. You have a specific subject. You're very genuine and honest. Chris has a really good way of saying like, hey, I'm talking out my ass right now. So you don't have to believe a single thing I say and then everyone goes, yeah, but what he said was good. You know, so you have brand truth. Do you think other people are doing that or whenever they post like this for their thumbnails?

To get the ratings, are they, is that their true self or are they just virtue signaling towards mainstream? Slop. What do you think? That's a lot, man. I think so I think you have to play the game. So I do give like some people like credit, right? Like there's data like this. Are we talking YouTube specifically? Is that what was that word talking about specifically kind of? Or is it like all sorts of stuff? Yeah. Yeah. But there's just social in general. But I mean, I mean, if it's a video and then the thumbnails are ridiculous. Like they're saying, whatever you play the game a little bit. If it's a video, at least you're you're freaking there.

Your mouth is moving. You're saying words and stuff. That's different than like, you know, if there's like AI voice over stuff, I'm already out. But that's Slop for sure, you know. AI voice garbage. But you know, if you're on camera and you're saying words, there's some truth to that that I can I can get behind. It's almost more trustable than written word these days. You know, you read a blog post. It's a little harder to suss out whether you're reading some Sloppy Slop or not, especially when it can be like on blog.microsoft.gov or whatever you don't know. You don't know. We're convictingly more over there.

So everyone's convicting one. Yeah. Is that why videos so hot lately? Is that it's like naturally true? Go ahead. Sorry, David. Oh, no. Like, you know, when you see like the like Sora B roll every like three second cuts, you know, like that's like an immediate like a voiceover. Like I'm just like, and it sounds really authoritative. But it's like this is probably soups fake and just generate a script generated a video in a show that just stinks. I don't know. I don't want to waste time on volume game. Like the people that are doing that only need one or two things to hit and they make a bunch of money.

So they don't care. Like, those thousands of videos everywhere and who cares? Yeah. How come sheep never know their genes? Like sheep are so happy being sheep. And sometimes I kind of wish I was a sheep. You know, then I'd know all the T-swift songs, words, and I'd go to shows that were full of more people. And I'd like sports and have friends everywhere I went. You know, there'd be like a lot of reasons to be made, but no, I'm a dork. And I, and I just can't do it. I'm like, I'm like a sheep that knows he'll never be a sheep. And it makes me never sheepy. Anyway, you know what I mean? Do you feel this at all?

My life is so, you're so, you're so smart and okay, is it smart and amazing? Smart. Sometimes I think it's smarter to not do, to think. My life would be so much easier if I didn't care. If it was just like, give me a website, link, you know, like, did. And I'm like, just give that to my boss or whatever. Like I would just, yeah, that would be cool, but like I, that's not what I do, you know? It's kind of a, like a blessing, but also a curse, maybe I don't know, but it's just, you know, caring about what you do stinks, you know, if you, if I didn't care, it'd be a lot easier. So if you think it would be fun at all, yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, probably not. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I don't do because I don't, how many bosses like that, the sounds like that happens to you sometimes, Dave, but like you can't work for me and poop out a website with AI and turn it into me and be like, I'm done, boss, you know, like we don't, that's not the kind of shop we run. I don't, I don't need that kind of work, like that's not useful to me. So I don't know, I don't know, like how, how many people have a job where you can one shot your way to a promotion? I just don't, I don't know. Is that happening? Yeah. I think it happens at jobs as much, but like people that have no coding skills can now,

you know, launch a business they couldn't have before and they might look into like a really good business model. But yeah, like if you're just one shouting something at work, it's going to be bad most of the time. Yeah. Here's one. Here's one. I got for you. Yeah. Go ahead. There's three times and I wrote them down and I feel bad because I bet there's a chance that some one of these three people, I'm not going to name who they are, but they're like real people that I know mostly consider friends. Maybe all of them decent friends. Give them thick names, less boss, Scott, and, and, uh, Theo, okay, let's just use those

names. No, but they made an app, they made an app. It's an app. I would exist in the world. Yeah. And they almost proudly say they did a new weekend classic, you know, you did a new weekend. Good for you. I'm in the world and it's paid years of freaking sign up page and it costs money monthly. I won't sign up for it. I just won't do it. I just like you didn't, is it, is it me or, you know, like it's like it didn't take you any time. Maybe I'll just do it too. Maybe I'll make that app in the weekend and like I just don't know that it's not like it does. Is it though? Is it that I don't think you deserve it?

I don't think you've like proven to me that you care that much about this thing. Like, there's just something that just is a media know from me. Like, I don't even want to look at it. Let alone rubby's. Something like that. Dex, Dex had comments that you liked right along the lines. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had a different analogy I was going to go after. So okay. Uh, Yamaha guitar, right? Yamaha makes jet skis also. Would you say they are not experts in one or the other? I feel like they're very like the knowledge in one thing is not necessarily what makes you put out a good product. Like there's a lot of, could be a lot of people involved in like the, well, I guess it's

just one person in the example you gave, but I don't know where I'm going with that. I mean, it's fun. I liked it. I just want you to, I feel like I've like six months in mind. I want you to spend six months with your app and just sweat it. So I know that you live and breathe the topic of whatever app that is and then I'll look at it. It does dangerously giving my email to something, you know, just risk to the little security risk possibly. But to me, it's like not as much of that. I'm like, oh, whatever. It's just Google off or something. That's like probably not too terribly dangerous. But I also am reminded of this book that was a Erica Hall.

You remember her day? I mean, I know she's not like, yeah, just enough research was a book sheet at one point. Did you do just enough research for this app or did you just like interview yourself for eight seconds? And then that was so popular for so long ago, it was like, look, if you have the need Chris, someone else does, you need to chase that need. Hey, look, you need a little place to go make a little quippy demo with HTML and CSS. Hey, maybe other people might too, just call it code pen. You know, a lot of these things start out as like, I needed it. That's true. Didn't know a shitload of other people needed.

There's like an indie, indie hacker podcast for years. The whole core of it was like, I was just a schlaub and I needed this little thing. And so I made it for myself and it's turned into a thought about it. It took you so long to do it that you went to bed, sleeping about it. You woke up thinking about it. You worked on it the next day and like the human brain had time to digest and think about it. And then if it went three, four days of you sleeping on it and stuff, maybe you'd come to better conclusions or maybe you'd drop it because you're like, yeah, I don't know. You know, here's the idea was conference, conference talk from 2020.

You ready? Ready? Ready? Here we go. All right. I woke up on Saturday. I was thinking about this thing and I asked Claude and then like was like, go build it and then like, it's done. Any questions? Yeah. Yeah, you in the front. Yeah. Okay. Not a question, but you're okay. You're just a duck. Okay. Anyway, I feel like you're also has this thing. It doesn't inspire you. Is your thing is a cloud hosted spreadsheet capable of doing what your app does? There's two of the three of these apps. I'm like, that's what Apple notes is for. Only it's just way more useful and I trust it way more. Yeah. Okay.

I don't want to be like too down on it, but I want to have like a new policy of my own where somebody said, I used to have this for podcasts too, by the way. If you have a podcast, it's got like three episodes on it and you invite me on these days I might re-evaluate because I'm not exactly who I used to be. You know, maybe I'll still come on it. But at the time, I was busier than I am now, and I'd be like, call me when you hit 100 episodes and then I'll come on your bug. There's like a thing that's like, I don't, you just had an idea one time to start recording some audio and I'm just the first person you emailed.

You're not good at this yet. That's fair enough. Check out episode 40ish with Chris Corier for all this much. Wait, Dave was on 212. Did I not say that in the intro? Damn it. Dave, you were on 212 and I meant to say it. One, two, baby. Yeah. One, two. That's over a hundred ago. I think that's fair though, but at work, we do have people like basically one-shotting tools that either A, remove an entire SaaS product, which has happened twice this week at Shopify. I won't say what SaaS products, but we are shooting them down like they're cans on the fucking fence. It's crazy. That sounds good to me.

It is good, honestly. Like, think about how many black boxes you had to buy into to get to get to success as a corporate, like, scenario. So now you can take it all back. You can take back Google Docs. Google Docs is on its way getting taken back by us right now. It wasn't that hard to build a really rich markdown editor. They can vomit that, like, LLM's can vomit that out pretty good right now. Yeah. I saw one off the LLP, called Mist or something. That was like a really nice mark, like, collaborative markdown with comments thing. That was definitely just a weekend project by some blogger, dude.

And it looks great, but it is one of those things where it fits my policy where I'm like kind of noping out of it until they kind of provably stick around with it for a while. But yeah, do you think that's even one of them is even like Google Docs? That's what that one seems like. Man, that baby's got that's loaded with features. It's loaded with trust. It's loaded with off that other people already have because they're already Google customers and stuff. That one seems like in a category, it was like, it's just a true company and you don't need to structural. You know, like, you don't need to externalize every document.

So that means like 90% of your docs that are just internal only now don't need the junk that you were depending on the other one for. And so it's causing like a like a decently healthy reevaluation of like, what do we actually need this for? But also you're challenging SaaS. So there's like a new competition aspect to things. I don't know. Some of it's healthy and a lot of it is like, not we're going to see some pretty gnarly shakeouts from it. And we already have. We've seen companies taking huge hits and then they're doing, you know, they're doing layoffs because they're questioning their own future.

Anyway, we don't have to get all down around this stuff, but oh, here, let me pivot. Let me pivot. What do you think? Is CSS now more important than ever because people are comfortable shipping slop? And you're there going, no, I'll go the extra fucking mile, watch my app because people do care about design. So they'll open up two versions of the same thing and they'll look at yours. You know, CSS, you have a leg up is your CSS knowledge now? The biggest advantage that you've ever had in your career or is CSS dead because people just tailwind fart their way through life. Well, that was going to be my question, like, how much life force do you have to argue

against tailwind? Like, I don't see it as much anymore. I think if you go to Claude right now and you type in Claude the website, right, not Claude code, the tool, which you probably have opened with a local folder or something, but just use the app and you say, like, I just did this, speaking of this, Dave, I didn't even tell Dave this. There's a thing we linked to in the header of shoptalkshow.com that says, go subscribe somewhere. And there was this little app that this guy made called plunker or something like that. It was one of those like no vowels apps or whatever. And it just made you a quick little landing page for a podcast that had a proper Spotify

link in it and a proper Apple podcast link in it. You know, the right kind that like embedded you right into the app, like the, the link was formatted correctly to not just go to the website, but go to the app itself for whatever. I'm sure there's like very little technology to make this all work, but they did a good job and it was mobile friendly and all this stuff. But it was long time ago, it looks pretty un-maintained at this point. And I was like, this is going to be a good demo for code pen 2.0 because we can, we can deploy pens now and then map a domain to the pen. So it'll take me about two seconds to make a podcast landing page for shoptalkshow and

replace this little sass app plunker thing. And it'll just be a quick little 90 second video I can do. That's like good marketing for code pen kind of thing. But I feel like hosting is a, you can't, you know, you can't vibe code your way on a hosting. Somebody's got a host your thing, you know, you're not going to vibe code an entire hosting app. So that gives us some, you know, some cool stuff going on at code pen. But that's where I was going with the like, just go to Claude right now and say like, make me a one-page app for a podcast, yada, yada, yada, do that. It's probably not going to be a react until when it has probably much less recently.

I totally agree. Bolt made it seem like, in loveable made it seem like that was the only thing that was ever going to come out of them. But they have strongly adjusted. I agree. Yeah. I mean, Bolt had it in its system prompt. So that's kind of why that was happening, you know? That's like the, I've heard it called the react AI tailwind stack, the rat stack, which is the rat stack. Oh, I missed all the stacks we used to deal with. And the mean stack, the morn stack, there were so many cool stacks, jam stack. Yeah. Now we got rat stack, the rat stack. There is like, if you find like, there's leak system prompts online and a lot of them

have like use react and tailwind for, or in chat, see and for, you know, doing things. And, you know, that's everywhere from like Figma to Versel, of course, V0 and then like lovable, GPTs, Claude's, Gemini, things like that. So it's, it feels like it's pervasive. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I kind of just have this like, I think you're selling me God in my pocket, right? You're selling me infinite, some of human knowledge in my pocket, but it can't write a fucking web component. Get out of here. Like that's stupid. Like I just, I don't know, man, it's, I think, I think knowing CSS is super valuable.

Do other people see it? I don't think so right now. So that's my, my opinion or perspective, but it's super valuable. I feel like it depends on what you ask it for too. If you ask for web components, can it not do it? It does it in my experience, it'll eat each, like over and over. It kind of like does like very like, you know, like document or like it'll create a class. And then in the constructor, it's like document, create element, div div dot class name equals food, you know, like, and then like it'll like set data like very like imperative setting where it's like in web components, we don't do that.

We just like write a template and then, you know, this is the reason people didn't like web components at first was it was too, it was too adaptable. Like I write web components my way. Dave writes, he says we, we write our components this way, Shopify writes our components a way that I would have never fucking chosen. I don't like it at all. It's crazy. We have like many classes and we extend many classes. And then you're like, where the hell am I in this stack of classes? And it's not web components fault. It's just like it was so loose and people like, people like something that's opinionated.

That's always been the fact. Like react as it's changed its opinions, it's been what pissed people off. You know, Amber having one opinion for everything is actually drawn people to it, Phoenix having one opinion for every, that's drawn people to it. He assess having new opinions, pisses people off, they're like, tell me the right fucking way to do it. And people are like, well, there's, there's a hundred ways and they're like, well, then I'm out. You know, and to me and you and like other people were like, I love finding my way with a tool. I want to find a tool that's like omnicapable and adapts in all these situations.

And web components is one of those things. It's hard for LLMs to complete just like CSS because there's a thousand ways to skin that cat. And that is not good for the auto complete engine. It's not a smart engine. It's things just predicts the next word. And so when it's there's variability and there's options, it's, you know, Adam, you had a, this is like a while ago, like more early days stuff, but you had a prompt for CSS where you wrote in English language all this stuff that you, how you wanted CSS to be written. I remember reading it because it was like use, you know, certain modern things and don't

do modern things. It probably said do use nesting, please. Yeah. And I feel like we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. I remember there was some kind of, it wasn't, this is way before skills or anything like that, you know, but anyway, I feel like it's still relevant. I would kind of want to resurrect that thing sometimes because it's like, I find it just as a, as a tiny example, and I feel like these things don't age very well. I'll probably sound like an idiot in six months, but like, it doesn't do nesting very well. I like ask it to do CSS. And it's much, much happier not nesting than nesting. I think that's weird.

So did I just, is that just a prompting issue though? Should I have just been more explicit and said, just please nest. And then it will. And then it will forget, you know, yeah, you're right, though, and this, this is one of the other hot takes I was going to ask you all about, which is like, is AI going to ruin or springboard standards adoption? Because it really, this is wilds because that was at a one shot, like five seconds ago. This was one shot. Yeah. I mean, whatever looks nice for me, let's see the CSS. So we got all going to be in one file, which is not just, but yeah, CSS at the top, they

should find code pen, probably, and we'll put our, it's a great idea. Yeah. More capable editor inside of here. Yeah. That's the bold choice right there. But okay. We're good. Yeah. That's a gritty background. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is actually pretty good. I mean, you know, what's interesting too is you get down to, to, to, to, to, to, to, a lot of stuff. But that's okay. A lot of stuff. No, nesting. See, um, sting, you know what, about half, I'd say of new 2.0 editor stuff on code pen looks exactly like this, and you can sniff it out because of the way that it does comments in the CSS to the sections with like two dashes before the, yes, there's a lot of, just

copying out of CSS comments. Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. There's a few, you know, like, I wouldn't do that, but, uh, you know, um, yeah, what do we think of this? Like hot tick. Should we do a round table on this? Is this, yeah, is this like a thumbs up or a thumbs down good for the web or bad? You know, like Dave, when you look through this, I see you're like, you're like poking out stuff you don't like. But overall, are you thinking, wow, are you thinking like this is garbage? I could do, I could work with this. Yeah. I mean, yeah, like I could start with, yeah, like I'm more, I think I'm more impressed

than I would have been six months ago, with that makes sense or, you know, three months. And then what about the, like the fact that this is one shot is interesting, but the fact that I can work with this, do you think you could just keep asking it stuff? Could you say, okay, I like what you've done here, but no fucking way. It'll completely rewrite the whole site. Yeah, seriously, it's really, I'm totally with Robbie. It's weird. It's so weird. We don't have to work here, but I don't know that I will in cloud code. Like if you exported this, you cleaned it up a little bit and then you started using the

CLI tool to do, I think it would be a little more surgical with it. Well, I know what you mean with all of it is if you're doing it for too long, it will compact your context and fuck all of it up because like anything you ask, even if it's like completely scriptible, like, hey, here's this thing that programmatically should be this way. Please do it for me. Cool dope. I'm doing it. I'm 500 files in and I just forgot how to do it. So I'm doing it however I want now and it's like, so it totally depends how many times you ask it. Like maybe if you ask it one or two things here, it'll be fine, but let's see.

For the audio only listeners, Dave put a secondary prompt in after it one shot this beautiful podcast page, which has really nice animations in it. How the hell did it do that? Dave's prompt was make me a graph about context rot and put it in the hero section of age. Cool. It doesn't understand nagging Dave. This is a little turned on right now. Good chart, dude. No, just to get this out of my mouth. I appreciate it. I get a title for this episode called Flogging margins as we were discussing like what should be titled and I liked it because that's you're describing exactly what happens. I one shot something and I'm like, holy cow.

That was really great. And then I'm like, hey, tweak this thing over here and it goes, oh, you got it. Let me tweak that thing. And so I'm done. I'm like, it's not tweaked. It's all I wanted was a little spacing added to that thing and it goes, oh, yeah, you're so right. Let me go add the spacing to that thing and it adds the spacing to that thing. And then something else gets spacing too. And I'm like, no, that's now we're working backwards and I swear to you, I'm in this scenario where it's like, I ask for something. One thing's fixed. Two things break. One thing's fixed. It's just front end development with these tools is so tough right now.

They really need to level up specifically their CSS and HTML. Yeah. Well, so it does a bit of faze in the chart, it did okay. I better than I like it. This is like the nicest chart I've ever seen in my life. I'm sure it's like that. It's just for that concept. It's good. All right. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done playing. So I think it kind of goes back to, do you care to read the code? Because like, so Shepard, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. Shepard was in Svelte. I upgraded to Svelte 5. I got way bigger because Svelte 5 is like base, whatever it ships is way bigger. But then each component is way smaller.

So if you have more than like five components, it's a good call, but I have five components. So I'm like, all right. This is stupid. So I was like, make it solid JS and it's like, boom. Here it is. It was like sick. And then I was like, all right, ship that. And I was like, all right. What if it was just TypeScript, though, and it was like, oh, you're right. No framework. Boom. Done. One shot it. Shipped it. Like if your test coverage is good enough that you know nothing broke, do you care? If like the bundle size dropped in half, it's still working fine. All the tests pass. Yeah. Who cares, right?

That's how you're feeling. Yeah. Oh, man, that's how you look. If you're comfortable with it, well, I have a lot of tests that make me comfortable. Like if you do not have a ton of tests, I would be very worried about doing that. It's test, but it's also like, if I need to go in there and get a little surgical about, I'll tell you, real story, the tour of Code Pen 2.0 is shepherd. We are using we are new customized. I really, I really think it's nice. We even used on on the individual tours. We used corner shape notch, you know, to give it the cool little pixel side and it looks great. It looks great.

But we had somebody write in with the tour that says they were able to get multiple steps of the tour open at once and it's because they were just hammering on the arrow keys, which we have bound to go to next step and go back and it was just, there was some kind of timing thing, man. If you just go on the arrow keys, you can get multiple steps to open at the same time. We had to get in there, man. We had to understand what was going on and we had a little monkey patch a little bit and get it going so that we could ship it and tell the people we toured our thing. That took like understanding of code to do that.

I don't think I could go into Claude and be like, yo, there's this bug or like multiple tour steps can be open. I mean, I could be wrong. Maybe I could sort it out. Maybe I could figure it out. I feel like it was nice to have an employee that was happened to be like, no, I'm going to understand this. I feel like there's just a moment. There comes to be a moment where like you just need an like an intelligent adult to really know what the hell is going on and fix it. And if there, if all the adults have left the room, I worry. Yeah, there's definitely stuff it can't do. I totally agree with you on that.

Like, there'll be days where I'm going back and forth for three hours and I'm like, oh, fine, I'll go code it myself and it's like a one line change or what like super easy. It just can't like understand what I wanted or something. I don't know why it's so bad sometimes, but other times it's so magic. Like I think it's getting better. Like Dave said, like six months ago, hell, not now. Yeah. Pretty. I don't think it's that the models have gotten better. I think how they're the tooling to manage context has gotten better inside of the models. I think that's true. The harnesses. So like harnesses.

Yeah. I just like, you know, I'm still hard to go like, but it's the like when I saw Claude, whatever sonnet or something like do to do's, I was like and watch it step through it iteratively rather than like make a big old PRD and be like, oh, cool, I'll just ignore that. Like that was like a, okay, at least like it takes a predictable path, you know, but still like can go wild, but hopefully you're I love that planning mode when you put it on plan and it makes like an MD file that's and then you can sit there and go back and further. I have, I'm a little, I'm almost nervous to do it, but I have a like deep, it's like

now like a huge feature, but it's like, this is a big next step we need to take and involves data and it involves some stuff. And I, I wrote it out by hand and then I turned that into a prompt and then I prompted back and forth a bunch of times to get this plan really good. And then I rewrote it just for the team because I feel like that planning document's like a little in the weeds, like a one that it created automatically. So I like, re-explained it with regular words and then I'm going to bring both of those things to a meeting and I'm going to say, this is what I want to do, but I think it needs

to get talked about before I just start doing it. And I'm going to have my plan is to have a I help me with all the steps and it's not going to be four steps, it's going to be like 15 steps and there's going to be built in pauses where things need to run and migrations that need to like go to production before we can even do the next step and it's pretty ambitious. And I feel like that's cool kind of, but the reason I'm nervous is like, I don't think I've ever came to a meeting and said, let's discuss this mark down planning document that an AI wrote before. I'm sure there's been lots of meetings like that, but that's like, it's been weird to

me. No, you're like a working group right now, just one person, but you're like, hey, look, I spent a bunch of time in a doc writing my thoughts down in a controlled format that has a decent plan and I'd like to review it with a committee, man, that's, that's good stuff. It's good, but I didn't, you know, the fact that it's like not all from my brain, it feels weird, you know, like because because you know when you're asking someone, the worst thing you can do, I think this is generally agreed upon is to have a feature idea and one shot it and put a PR and then have somebody who's like more senior than you, it becomes

hours of their time. It was 30, 30 minutes of your time turns into four hours of their time, everybody agrees that's bullshit. You just, you can't do that. That's an unacceptable behavior, I work. Not the case actually. So, okay, so a beloved person named Frank Camaro, who you may know, who said, work with the grain of the web, it's a wildly amazing comment that you're building interfaces wrong. If you're not working with the grain of the material that you're working with, this exact same individual months ago, wrote a post called Beyond the Machine and Beyond Machine talks about something called a dark factory.

And I guess if you were to compare it, a light factory would be a factory that you walk inside and you look and see how things are working and then you make sure that the t-shirts coming out of it, that the threads are being created properly and that the stitching is good. But in a dark factory, you say, hey factory, make me a t-shirt and out comes a t-shirt from the other side and you go, good factory and you tap it on its head. So this is now a way that people use AI. They're literally, it's called having dark factories where you don't look at the code ever. You look at the tests, you look at the results, you apply constraints and you do everything

but actually care about the code. So what you're describing, like people don't never, no, there's actually entire agencies that don't look at the code anymore. They're running entire AI factories that are dark and they aren't exploding. I do think there's like a hot taken here where people are struggling right now, there's definitely risk and yeah, you try to mitigate, but there's risk and like even you read it, you're human. You know, hey, what did you get to do that? But that can be read that. If the company is big enough that you miss a test and you open a security hole, you can put real, you can make people at risk, you can, the profitability of your company at

the same time. Data at risk, you could say, oh, build this AI feature into my, into my burrito ordering app that exposes your API key or some shit or that people spam with stuff and you didn't have a test that said, make sure people don't ask 10,000 questions. You just forgot to have like a rate limiter you built into it and you shipped it and you get a $250,000 AI bill or something, it can materially damage your business. Like I just think that's like real, real honest to God risk. It is the extreme side of what's happening right now. I totally agree. I don't run any dark factories. Although actually I'll be honest, my open cloud apps, I have a beer dashboard and a whiskey

dashboard and a birthday dashboard that I don't know what to code. You looked, never even looked at it. And the CSS you're allowed to, you exhale and just let it do it, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of other things I care about when it's my work and I'm delivering it and it's my name is behind it at like a professionally, definitely care. But, and then my personal website, I know every single line of code that's on that thing no matter what the guys helps me or not. But there's like, yeah, there's, and I, I'm being devil's advocate, kind of like pitching these dark factories and I agree with you that it is very risky.

There are an odd amount of folks out there that are running these things all day and then you have people running gas towns, which are like multiple dark factories that they create personas of people inside it. We're in a wild. It's not even not looking there's a, you know, one guy that made this app that he wanted me to review. This is why I'm a little not salty about it, but he even wired up somebody showed him on a used cloud code and then he wired it up to just talk to it. So he's got an app on the Apple app store right now. He couldn't review the code. He doesn't know he's never coded anything in his life.

He wouldn't know how to review the code and nor did he even use his fingers, you know, he just said, he just prompted with his, with his voice and it's not for me, it's on the app stores. Yeah. No fingers involved. I don't know. It just feels weird to me. But it does work and it's fine and all that, but it does kind of feel like, I don't know, it's one, it's one of the ones where I'm just like, I think I'm just going to keep it's glorified notes, you know, so many apps are like that. It's kind of, is it just you want the creator or create tours to be like bought in to the product? Well, that's kind of what you're expressing, right?

Because like, you made some condoms for something. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Don't you want me to care if you're going to download a Gundam painting helper app that the person who created it is like a, at least a pretty big fan has done it before. It like, it like folks me that's like, I sense a gap in the market. I've been, I can get people to spend $299 on this app before I just ruined my life. This is all I'm going to think about now is making money. Anyway, go ahead. Keep going. Yeah. Yeah. I like internally demand it. I'm not asking the rest of the world to think the way I do, but like, yes, I want the

person behind that app to deeply, deeply care about what that app does. I guess I always have, though, you know, it shows me when, yeah, it's always in the product. You know, someone actually cares. Like, given a rip is always there. That's why like a local farmer's market is always cool because the human touch is all over that shit. It just smells and reeks and feels and looks like a human took time to make it versus a factory created good, which looks like a plastic mold was created and wax was poured inside and it was molded and then given to you and they're like, here, have your thing. And so yeah, there's, these are always going to fight each other forever, if you like.

And I always like the human touch. This is why I like music. I'm really worried that music is going to get overtaken by AI. It's already had numerous hit songs, numerous top charts, AI generated songs, but if it wrote the lyrics, tell me what you used, please, because I haven't gotten nothing that will write good lyrics at all. You know, here's, I'll say one spicy. It felt like you have ever seen the party that come. Oh, yeah, Monday, it's like, for some reason, that app to me, I'm sure I'm just being an asshole. If you work at Monday, sorry, but it never felt like anybody actually cared about what

it does. It was just a story of like getting the business dialed in. Can we market this thing so perfectly in this world that we can achieve growth? It was only ever about marketing and growth of the thing. It was nobody behind the brand. It's true. It's the first brand slot. Yes. There's a ton of products that are all about, they have a marketing angle and they're going to wreck, I built apps where they spent a million dollars building the app and multi-millions marketing it. And you know what? It was way more successful than the people who did the reverse where they spent more money building a good one.

Right. Right. And that always pissed me off. It still pissed me off, obviously, because I'm getting a little riled up. And anyway, it's like, that's really unfair to have like, you forget on Instagram and spend two million. Sure. It really is. Ah, sucks. But if you build it, they will come thing is not true. It's not true. Yeah. It's rare. Maybe that's the blue moon. Yeah. No. There's a popular issue management software. We tried, we demoed when I was doing Lero and it's great marketing page, oh, just beautiful. Oh, so many people sign up for it. Look at all these logos, the NASCAR logos. And you log in, like just, I called it a mullet because it was like business professional

in the front. And then just a hot rat nest in the back, man, I was just like, I was just looking at the back. Yeah. You walking, you like, it's like, I don't know, getting like, like, I don't know, like true, like I care or something. You're just like, oh, wow, look, that's good stuff. And then they just lead you into like, the furnace. And they're like, good luck, you know, I don't know. Yes. Yeah. That's pretty common, I feel like like everyone makes sure their marketing page is nice. And then like over half the time I sign up for something and then it's just garbage because I'm like, oh, like, okay, TikTok is pretty fucking garbage.

At their like, you log in and I'm trying to do marketing and business, you shit. And it's like, well, you maybe get like one text box that won't work and we'll log you out. Like, and yeah, but like, you know, the consumer using it who's just consuming the content is like, oh, this is a great snappy app. But like the people that are trying to make money get the shity app, like, no, what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just that there's like such an inverse of like, you know, I don't know. Like, yeah, you're trying to give them money to like run ads or whatever. And that's how their platform supported actually not.

They're just selling data. They, but you're like, you know, and then you're just like given like the, I don't know the, like, stepchild experience. So, you know, too bad. Yeah. Happens all the time. All right. Should I pivot us a little into some modern, some news that's happening. You guys can pick which one of these you want to attack? I'm just going to say, I'm going to say three things and you're straight up for news. One of them is going to hit you and yours is going to look at the first one is the new energy. You guys know what an energy vampire is from a, sure, we're doing the shadows. Okay.

So the new energy, energy vampire is AI or the new junior AI dev you can hire for $2,000 a month that takes no breaks and just works all night and all day. Or do you want to talk about many claw adventures where you can set your open claw machine to go join an online universe and hang out with other machines energy vampire. All right. Energy vampires. Okay. Okay. This one was written by the guy, Steve Yeg, who was the creator of Gastown and he recently posted AI as a vampire. People in a room. Hey, maybe this even shows happening. You're in a room and somebody starts talking about AI and the whole room that starts to

sort of collapse on itself is now AI is the topic that everyone would be talking about. But we're going to combine the AI vampire with the other new thing that happened this week, which is AI brain fry. Many people, including Steve Yeg are saying that AI is now asking my brain to do more work than I have ever had to do before, not less. It is now the same brain hooked up to multi scenarios that it's not prepared for. And I am now sleeping more or feeling more sleepy or feeling more drained basically because it's like a fucking drug and the drug sometimes isn't pumping into your blood veins. So we have the AI vampire slash the AI drug lord brain fry scenario happening.

And isn't there some guilt in there too? We can throw that one in there where you're like, if you're taking a break, you're like, God, I should have. Before I got up, I should have put a big prompt in there so that's a lot of the AI vampires. Yes. If you have dine to these going while I sleep, what kind of tool am I that I don't even have one? I don't even have a cloud max. Can we start? Can we start getting it? Dang it Chad. You're fucking it up again. I can't keep an AI busy for 30 minutes. I know. Am I failing? Someone? How do you? Dangerous. I know there's a realm permissions. Yeah. I think it just does.

It's stuff. And then it's done. It don't take down. It thinks too fast for me. So I didn't use to plan 10, 20 steps ahead. I was like, I'm going to plan the next step or two and I'm just going to code that for a week or whatever. And now it's like, well, I coded that in five minutes. What's the next thing? I'm like, oh, God. I'm not sure. What do you think the next thing is? I don't know. I think that's, I haven't quite gotten my brain into that rhythm yet. Yeah. I bet you could use one prompt that you could type into cloud code that will keep it busy for one hour. What do you write? Make a lot of research.

Is it, is it, is it that to you say, please research then you say that? No, you say, well, you, you create a while loop. So yeah, if you want to create the, so you code the coder. This is what I've been talking about. That's on the show. It's like at first when you're using AI, it helps you code. When you try to get into the next level, it's like you code the coder and now we're even out of spot. Now where you like code the computer. But like, well, we'll skip that like coding the coder create a while loop. Make it work iteratively. Here's a good example for CSS. You can use playwright to look at the CSS selector performance of the page.

You say while CSS selectors are over one second to resolve, find the selector in question, iterate until you find a cheaper selector that doesn't cause any visual regressions and then loop again. So this thing will literally go from the most expensive selector in the page and burn all the way down until they're under that limit and then the loop will end. That will run for a while because it needs to spin up a browser, it needs to run the way right and used to get it slow part of that. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, that's, but anyway, it's like working iteratively. You create a loop scenario where the thing, so the auto research example is, hey, the performance

on my side, I have a lighthouse score of 80. I want you to make my lighthouse score 98 sit here until it's done and it will try something and then try something and then save it. So like literally goes like, I tried a random ass thing. Did my score increase? It did. Hit save and to get. New brain shows up, hey, I'm a brand new cloud. What should I do? Oh, well, you need to go make the score increase. Okay, well, I'm going to try some shit and it goes great. Try some shit and then you, hey, you didn't make it. So you know, you're literally like incredible. This is, uh, this is a, this is a, it's got to be a little, it's kind of rough and

this is like in this show, I like to call them brute force. You create a loop of brute force LLM shit because the LLM just knows it doesn't know shit. It's not smart. This scenario where it can luck, it's way into success and it can luck it's way into a 100 lighthouse score overnight and it just costs you a 100 bucks or whatever. And so that's how people find these scenarios when you come back it's just an H1 that's like, did it. I mean it has done that to people. Yeah. It's your code base, you know, skill with the code base and now you're at a Hyundai. Here you go. I do want to get back to the energy fan part,

but that does sort of like bring me back to like, Chris' thing where it's like, if somebody's like, oh man, we worked on the authentication system. It took like a month, man. We just were like really like making it solid and secure and billing payment, you know? And if somebody's like, oh yeah, dude, we've I've coded like 10 agents and like, it took 20 minutes. I'm like, oh, don't love that one for some reason. You know, like I don't want to give my credit card to that one, but I sort of trust the human one for more. I don't know, maybe that's a trust thing on my end, but anyway, energy fan part,

I read that Brain Fry article and you know, it's funny is it's like a guy, I think it thinks to like a Twitter post or something that where this guy's like, oh, I got all these things going. Like six projects and like four things written and you know, I'm working on my manuscript and stuff like that. And I just was reading it and I was like, oh man, you found out you had ADHD, you know? That's a lot of people are feeling like. Yeah, I accused them of that. Yeah. It's like, oh man, let's see the feeling is, you hit the limits of your like medicognitive abilities and you just, yeah, it doesn't work after a bit, dude.

Like you just like, like, and that got me thinking like, you know, it's like what's a H 200, a 10,200 watt GPU, right? Like you can like burn so much tokens, dude, like you're just burning tokens. But at the end of that 10,000 watt GPU is what? A 40 watt watt of meat inside my skull. That has to understand what I did. So like, so you've got 10,000 watts down to 40. Yeah, like we just, we can only do so much. So I mean, again, if I didn't care, boom, the same brain. New asks, yeah, our brains, no one's brain is ready for the amount of work. And like Jason Linkstorsev, he's like, I don't have enough ideas for like a day.

How does someone have enough ideas to fuel something overnight and for wheat with 10 of these things? So it's like, there's no human that has enough ideas that are of quality to have 10 agents running and building shitties, like that's just rude, that they're even like insinuating that like you're capable of. Yeah. Unless it's like, you know, some, some GitHub repo with 2500 open issues or something, be like, you take your time. Why don't you get through all those? Yeah, that would be good. You know, I did, I thought a one though that I got to do, I got it to take, I probably took an hour or two.

I, you know, in Google Docs, you can insert an equation. So like these math nerds, it's like a sum which is that big E looking thing and there's like shit above the E and shit below the E and on the web, it's turned, it's called latex, right? And it's like an XML looking format and then they use math jacks or something to turn it into little SVG diagrams or whatever. But of course in Google Docs, it's not latex. It's just something else they invented, right? And I, somebody sends me this article, it's got all, it just tons of it in there. And I was like, I can't, I don't even know how to do this.

I don't know math or latex well enough to like hand convert all this stuff. So I pointed a, I don't even know. So one of them, Claude probably, at the document that it was public document, I made it public so it could access the data. And then I needed to get it into WordPress and WordPress has got this cool like wasm version of it. I didn't want to give it access to like a real WordPress because like don't do that, don't touch that. So it spins up this fake WordPress, this playground one, it makes a new document and I gave a very little information. I said, take that Google Doc that's full of math crap

and make a WordPress draft out of it so I can copy and paste out of it. And it's really struggled with it, but it eventually got it. It eventually, because there's no way to extract latex from a Google Doc. And I don't know how the hell it did it, but it did it and it took a long ass time. Anyway, just a little micro story that's like the head of God, that's impressive. Cause it wasn't just doing code, it was like clicking shit. Yeah, it works sometimes. Yeah, there's potential, yeah? Yeah, there's a, so I haven't tried any of these or could tell you what any of them are called. But there are many things that I've seen post about like,

like Versailles I think has one, Cloudflare has one, like things to just browse shit and do shit with it. I'm a agent browser and others, yes. And I'm like, Panda. Yeah, yes. So I'm like, hey, okay, your entire business model is stopping bots from doing this and you're releasing a product to do this. They're very hypocritical in a weird way about stuff like that. Yeah, they're like, yes. By our AI hardware and flip the switch that blocks all AI, you're like, you're just, they just have their soup and eat it too or whatever. I don't know how you say that, but. Soup, yeah. But yeah, I wonder if they block, like,

like, does it, does the first lock themselves work on websites, not on Versailles? Like, have they thought about that or does it just work everywhere? I don't know. Have you tried these at them? So they're kind of strange. All of them are a little bit different. Some of them have less of an API and more of an API. Hey, yeah. I've seen agent browser access your Slack because Slack is technically a browser, right? Selectron and so it kind of finds the port and gets this back door into the port and then can start just telling the Slack DOM or invoking Slack API through the JavaScript that's in there.

So there's that kind of thing. There's a panda or it's penguin, one of the two that gives you this really low level access into puppeting a browser. There's many of them that will change the UA agent so that you are undetectable. There's a lot of little slippery ways that people are using agent because people are like, hey, it's really hard to open up DevTools and select an element and modify it and then, hey, I just wanted my video to be 2x. Why don't I just use agent browser? They're like, hey, whenever I play a video in Slack, why don't you make them all 2x? That's great. Thank you so much.

And now it's just a natural language doing the job of what code has done traditionally for 30 years. So there's some people are very excited by this and some people are quite annoyed. I do think that is a interesting piece of this whole situation is that the ability to turn words into other things is possible, right? Like, you know, we've had like text or speech to text or things like that, but like kind of inferring the next step, you know, like, you know, I type like, I want to cat with a flamethrower and it can do it, you know? Like, it's, they used to be such a big deal. Number fantastic, Cal used to have, you know,

you'd be like, I got a dentist appointment next Tuesday and it would reliably make you an appointment next Tuesday. You just have to type it out and people are like, oh, my God. Yeah, you know, now it's like, you expect, yeah. Yeah, you expect that in English language. Yeah, it's just like allowing you to, probably your computer with natural language. So it's not just Claude in a folder or Claude in a sandbox. You're talking to a machine with natural language. You don't need to point and click to go to settings. Hey, here's the fun thing I did. How many times have you wanted to format a thumb drive

so that you could update the BIOS on your motherboard? What a fun way to spend on your, what a fun way to spend on your Friday night, right? Yeah. Nobody wants to do this is, oh, it takes me 30 minutes just to find the download link for the latest BIOS version. I went to Claude in my OpenClaude instance. I had the formatted thumb drive. It took me longer to find a thumb drive in my house than to have OpenClaude format the thumb drive with the BIOS image so that I could go flash my motherboard, which is four years old because I'm just too lazy. It took it three minutes to do the task and me 10 minutes to find a thumb drive.

That, to me, this is why I like OpenClaude a quick two. Yeah. But this is what OpenClaude is so cool. Like, I don't want to point and click on my computer anymore when I can just like update my BIOS. I don't really care. I don't care how many people say there. I did not do the Mac many thing. No, I turned my game machine many, but I don't use mine for anything because I started, I was like, hey, you're going to make me money. Let's do polymarket shit. Let's be shady. Let's like bet and gamble. And then I was like, you know what? This is costing me like, you are a helpful criminal. You are, you're okay.

You are an untraceable criminal. And you have these access to these Bitcoin ones. Okay, no, okay. So that reminds me of a separate. So we do have an OpenClaude we use for the podcast and we use it for like making episode art or like, you know, doing tasks I don't want to have to do. And I asked it, I was like, hey, I know there's a lot of services out there that just fake listens, right? Let's just put them on blast here. Mo pod, what's another one? Audience lift. They just, it's like, oh, look, you got 50,000 listens the last hour. Just poof, here they are. And it's like, uh, those can't be real.

So it's like, what if you helped me build that service and we charged other people for it? Cause I know people pay for it and it went, that would be an ethical and fraud. We can't do that. And I went, are you fucking kidding me? Like you told me that this is fraud and we can't do it like sick. I love that you did that. Hey, that's where you bring in her tick. We talked it last week here. I'll link it again, her tick will remove all the guards from your LLM models. It systematically goes through and teaches it to unblock those things so that are, um, I don't know if that's good or bad. I'm just sharing that people made that.

They're like, you know, like phone unlocking when it's like you got an iPhone. What is it called when you jail break it? Jail break it. Jail break it. You can jail break a model now. So anyway, that's, it's an option. Not that you know, but wow, it's just on GitHub. Just sit in there. It's just sitting there. And it's 15,000 stars. Cool. Yeah. I am interested in that harnessing comment you made, though, that it's that it's like not that the models are getting better, it's that we're like the, isn't that starting to feel a little more like moti or whatever? If you want to be as good as cursor is,

that shouldn't open source. So wait, are you in pie yet? So are you on clotted? Do you know what pie is? Pie is the, the new harness that is overtaking the mode of cloud. Oh, yeah. With just whatever model, BIO model. It's, yeah, it's bring your own model. So it's much more open about what it will use. But I like to talk about it like clotted sass and pie is post CSS. So like when you, when you use cloud, you get a really high floor. Like as soon as you start making comments in it or making prompts, it auto lifts you up into a very good result. However, it has a maximum. So just like sasted where you're like,

oh, man, I have to wait for sass to release this new thing. That sucks. Whereas post CSS was like, you could always write CSS if you wanted. You can just go find a new plugin. Go make a plugin. All the plugins plug in yourself into whatever. But also, so here it's like equate what's actually happening here. The pie starts out with a lower floor. Like it's not as good out the box, but it's like infinitely trainable. And when you go to pie.dev, it'll even tell you like this one is mine. This is my harness. This isn't the harness I've been given. This is a harness that I cultivate. And so that's where we're at now.

In terms of like, yeah, we are in a space where you have codex and cloud and all these different things. And pie is the one showing up that's open source and it's trainable on your own work, on your own systems, on your own stuff. And you can kind of take that as far as you want. Whereas cloud does cannot do that. So yes, dude, we are in that space. And pie is your sort of escape patch. Unless you want to keep buying an iPhone, which is cloud. I like iPhones though. Do I get iPhones? I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Do I get an I message? Yeah. I actually wasn't sold all day, whatever the, what are those, they're like open cloud, open cloud posts

where like it hooks up to a WhatsApp. I was like, nah, nah, not doing that. But then you add a more like it hooks up to discord. I'm like, OK, 5% that would be your, that would be your one. I don't know. I just said that's what I do. I do discord. Yeah. Chat with it there. Yeah. Your own little channel or whatever or you just, yeah, you can do a channel or you can tell it like it has a bunch of rules because it's actually really good about trying to be secure. Like it tries to be a good citizen. So it's like, you know, you have to go, allow list who can message it. And then you have to say, like does that person need to say at their tag or does it have

to be in a certain channel or, you know, it has a lot of levers you can pull to lock it down. So ours is like, we have an open cloud channel and you don't have to add it in there. But as anything you say, it will then take that message you put in there, turn it into a thread and then you talk to it in that thread about that thing. And then when you're done, that thread's gone and you go to the next one. Yeah. The thread. Do you have any context? It's super nice. Like, crony ones, that's what seems like the most appealing to me because like it's that I can't, I don't, I can't keep these things busy.

But if I had one that's like every morning, do X, like a little more compelled by that every morning. Yeah. It has like heartbeat stuff built in. So you can, yeah, it has like default crons, I think every hour. And you can like, if you've talked to it, like it uses pie, like the thing Adam was talking about and it like learns kind of. And if it thinks the thing should be happening during every heartbeat, it will like put that into that cron and it will like do it on that schedule or whatever. So yeah, it's, it's kind of, it's, it's super magical for like the first week. And then it starts forgetting how to do stuff.

It does start like, yeah, mine's gotten a little dumber, but Chris, I have a, I have a cron job called the burn window because I don't pay much to anthropic. And so I have, they segment me into, you can only use as many tokens per five hours or else you give us real money. And I'm like, ew, I don't want to do that. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to tell my open claw. Here's a task list. And just before the burn went, just before my window ends where I need to spend tokens, if I have a task and I haven't used the tokens, boom, baby, go do it. So it's an every five hour cron job, but that I call the burn window.

And it will use the leftover tokens that I'm rightfully god damn paying for against the task list that I've created a big fat backlog, backlog of stuff to do. And that's the hard part, the backlog, I don't even have anything on my list. But my mind's just not primed for it, I guess, but, so you got to throw a dart at, throw a dart at your list, Adam, tell me one thing on your list. Oh, snap. I'd have to ask it with the list is I have a Shopify store that I'm building right now. And so I have a, I have a hydrogen virgin, which is kind of like the more realistic one that's powered by a CMS. And then I have a static one that's really nice and interactive and just really beautiful

and I've been working on it. And so when I have burn window time, I tell it to go take a component from the static version and port it over to the hydrogen one and to react and whatever else is going on inside of there. I don't, I don't even. So if you told it to just do it all, it would, you'd be, you don't have the money for the token. It'd probably be a hundred bucks or something like that and I'm just don't like doing that. But dude, I will, I will wake up in the morning and it will have done jobs that would have taken me six hours or a couple days to do that it basically just farted while I was sleeping.

And I wake up and I'm like, holy crap, my job is now left over tokens in a burn window. Like it, and it feels really sad, I feel really sad. And then I guess sad. Back to the brain fri article because I think it's relevant here. One thing it said was like, you know, a lot of people are waiting to burn out. I forget what the number was, but the number was up. But it was like leads to burn out. But it said like, you know, automating mundane tasks, like, you know, wrote very like repetitive tasks, like had a higher satisfaction and you know, it's kind of these sort of like, when I hear you speak, I feel like it's like maybe a bit more of those kind of tasks.

It's a bit more of like, oh, it like, you know, I'm trying to make the Shopify store. You know, you could do it. I don't doubt that you could make Shopify store. Like, you know, at a certain point for you, it's like just work, right? Like it's just like the motions of like building out a site, wiring up the thing, porting the component from the prototype you made, you know, like, and so like, that sort of mundane, like automation is like, maybe does like make you feel better. According to this study or whatever, this Harvard business review article. And so like, I think like, I think we're still learning how to build with these tools

and where they're good at, you know, I think like, go build me 10 businesses is maybe not the place to start, right? Like that's the idea, you know, even with deer like four apps, you like, that's maybe a lot. But I also know, you have ADHD, but no, I also know that you like, like, can like, should you hear the intro? I could do it faster. Yeah. No, I also know that yeah, yeah, you put in the age of ADHD. But I also know that you like, you know, like, whatever, like, you know how to manage multiple projects all at once, right? Like that's like, it's not like a risk for you or something like that.

And they're private, right? Like that takes a huge chunk off of like the things I'm responsible for, oh, meter, right? But there's, you know, I think that's like, I don't know, there's something to be said, like I think like finding out what is automation, you know, but and then there's also this, like, if your boss is making you do it, your anxiety goes up, you know, if you're feeling judged or if you are in a group and like one coworker's just like, just whatever vibe in their balls off, like your anxiety goes up, you know? And so like, so you a brief ride or your balls are gone, yeah, there's only two options.

So it's just kind of like, I think like, you know, I think we're still learning how to use these tools and I think like this, this, I don't know, this article really is kind of interesting to me from like a like process management, you know, like if you ever worked at a company and you like, like, have you ever had the wonderful experience of having like 513 accessibility issues assigned to you in a single day? I have. That was not a great experience, but you know, I think you just like figure out like how to, you know, I don't know, like, I guess like that be created this backlog of crap I have to do or crap I'm responsible for and this is like a bad feeling and it was overwhelming

and anxiety. Like the same thing could happen if you just clawed a year's worth of work and you're like, oh man, what do I do? You know, so yeah, I think like you have a lot of, I think you could end up in a place where you're easily overwhelmed or brain-fried by this thing because you don't recognize the limits of brains, so I wonder if there's some design stuff that could happen. Because I find myself glazing over when you watch one, you know, or the lines go brrrr, when it's like thinking, thinking brrrrr, you know, and you're tempted to kind of see what it's thinking about. So you're kind of trying to speed up a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, whoa, geez, whereas like that, if that could be totally redesigned and that you've seen none of it or like an option, you just see none of it, it makes a little PR and then it even, you know, pulls down the PR bot, cleans it up a little bit. I don't know, like that you're only seeing maybe a later stage of it, you know, like maybe that's what people try to catch up with that, that like they have to do with what's right for them. And then if you're getting burned out because you're trying to speed read all day, well, then stop speed reading, you know. Yeah. There's an IDE that came out that would show you TikToks while it thought.

And so instead of you reading all the things, you could sit there and watch YouTube videos or whatever, I'm not saying that's healthier, but I don't know, people are trying to cope with that. Yeah, it works. Problem, dude. There was this big, though, do something YouTube. Okay, cool. Doon scroll, don't scroll. Come back. Oh, you're done. I had to add sounds to my freaking clot, do like, so I'd like go back to like my blood sounds. They're so good. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just think so good. I just, like you see the CMUX one lately that's going around. No. It's like a new terminal that has a sidebar of all the, oh, wait, I shared that terminal

with a sidebar. Oh, did you? Yeah, that was a, that was ARC, me, CMUX. Yeah, CMUX. There's also DMUX. I shared that in ARC. I think today, really, DMUX, right, wasn't it, DMUX? Well, the advantage is that like if you got, if you got one, if you got a Claude cooking, you know, that there's like, oh, my God, there's sounds and visuals that let, you know, like this one's done or whatever. Man, I watched the, the, it's like a different class of developer. Almost like the two minute YouTube video that the guy is showing it off. He's like, he had like 15 Claude's going in the video. You know, you're like, whoa, buddy, that's fucking chill out.

You know, he's got the free token discount. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Pion Ping stuff was getting me in a meeting today because I was trying to listen to the meeting and it was like, something need to do it. My wife called me, she called me today because she's in the other room and she could hear all of my different pings going off and I have two different kinds right now. I've Mr. Garrison from South Park saying, yeah, I'm coming. And then I have the Pions that are like jobs done and she's like, dude, you are crazy. I think that's what she said from the other room. She's like, this is crazy.

How are you living with all these notifications? Does it do? I don't have to install that, actually, but that sounds awesome. Can they do like, does it do like look tar, double, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we have a whole bunch of, yeah, so good online and ready to go. Yeah, they have like every character from Warcraft and Starcraft and they have Ocarina of Time and. Ready to go. We have Navi. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, dude, I'm sold. It's so good. Well, I think I should have done the Duke Nukem because he'd be like, I'm here to kick ass and chew bubble gum and I'm like, that's fucking cool. I want like a bad ass agent, you know, like shows up.

Oh, man, like this is legit. This might change my life for the better a little bit. That's good. Yeah, that's good stuff. Yeah. Well, I'm not seeing low tar dabu specifically, but I assume does it exist, but no, this is great. This is enjoy. Well, I had a couple more news items. Should I pull them out or how y'all feeling over an hour, which I don't care. I think this is super fun, but yeah, I have nothing going on, but we can also end if you guys have stuff to do. Let me pitch two things then and we'll just see if they hit we got agency agents. Did you all see this where you can now have an entire agency of it's like so every role

that would be at a 50 person agency, someone has defined an agent to be that person. And now you can just get hub, install them and invoke an entire agency team, a sub team to be so because there's a lot of people promising that you as a one person at home have 50 agents that you manage and now we're all CEOs or whatever. And so here's your agency, you want to you want to do agency stuff, you just download them and invoke them or mini claw. Do you want to talk about mini claw, which was the the mini universe where you could send your open claw instance to a social online website. Well, that's one's old news, isn't it?

What was the freaking? That was mold book. That was mold book. Yeah, Meta bought that, but this one is more like you send them into a 3D, it's like a 3D personified space and it can be any realm that you want it to be. You give them a persona and they basically have actions inside of there like a D&D character. But your instance, are you hoping that interesting stories evolved that you can watch? Yes, why? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you put them in there, you put them in there and you read the stories that are happening and you're like entertained that your computer went and did something silly or brave.

I feel like if I paid a computer to play Wow, I lost the plot, dude. Like, I should be playing Wow, like I watched the great YouTube video the other day, got a jar like a big old pickle jar and he went to a pond and he scooped some mud and water and crap into it and just let it sit there for like weeks and it turned into like a little ecosystem and he was looking in there and there's little worms and little predators and little snails and stuff. That's it. You don't need a computer to do it. Just go to a pond, scoop some mud and do a jar, kids. That's a good, that's a good point, just we're overthinking it, dude, we're overthinking

it. I don't know, people watch people play video games, ask Chris, he's not slaying the spider, he's watching folks slaying spider and he's not wrong. There's something nice about passively getting a story told to you as opposed to writing the story and but I agree with you mostly, Dave, like I'm not, my computer is not participating in this network, but there's something interesting about it. I'd be up for like a, I'd be like, are you familiar with like solo RPGs? Like it's basically like a, well, yeah, people play D&D alone or whatever. Yeah, you play D&D alone, there's a Gundam one anyway, but you play D&D, but they, you

like, basically, like, you know, set up a story and you roll against dice tables like, you know, you're all six, oh, the stranger visits, like, what's the stranger like? And some of a lot of them are like journaling and, you know, kind of like story of crafting like that. But then a lot of them are also kind of like, you know, take you beef or beat through the action and stuff like that. And so something like that would be kind of fun. And I think there are things like that, like, like D&D sort of things, but like, you know, it'd be kind of like, I don't know, like, like, prompting me to use my brain, I

guess is what I want. I don't want. I am zero interested in paying a robot to play a video game that I'm not able to tell it to tell you. I could be convinced though, like, has it, is it provably interesting, you know, like are there people doing it? And they're like, check, this was amazing, you know, like, I don't know, a good story is a good story. So if one of all is, I'm like, open-minded to it. But, you know, we got to be mindful that AI is doing this stuff and AI is expensive. And it has costs on the world. You know, we didn't mention once during this podcast. I feel like, but David, I joke about it on shop talk sometimes, like, you have like a bucket

of live rabbits. And every time you ask it something, you got to take one and like, put it in a blender, you know, it's almost that bad, you know? Like it does bad stuff to the world to like use a ton of AI. So you just got to, but you don't, nobody sees it, you know, it's totally abstracted from you. It's just a little charge on your credit card. But it's like, and then to turn in the fossil on in your house, you know, how much do you use that for productivity is kind of, is kind of cool. It's like, I used it to fix an accessibility bug or something, you're like, hey, maybe it was worth it. But yeah, but yeah, can you imagine that?

Yeah, it's plain language. I can type turn my shower on now, but it's got a, it's got to burn a gallon of water to do it. Like, come on, that stuff's got to level out. It's a man. There's been so many accusations that the water stuff is lies, too. It's just the bubble you heard your news in. Sure. Maybe it's not water go verify depends on how there's something it goes on the factory. Some factories are good. Some factories have waste. Some of them don't. So it's like, you can't treat them all the same. I don't know. It's just like, I'm not going to look in the dark. Our closed loop systems, some companies do it better, but I don't know, man.

If it was a good story, people would be like, yeah, cool. Look at the data instead of like, sign an NDA to like the power, you know, so yeah. There's no way it's a perfect story, come on. I love that you share Chris, the microwave, so microwave cooking for one, which was hilarious and it reminded me of last week's episode or two weeks episode, which was a, the CEO of hot pockets says that all dinners will be hot pockets within the next six to 12 months. Which is still just so good. It's so good. I'm not looking at hot pockets to see like how many I could eat, like how many different flavors before I would like throw up like, is that like size me, but it's hot pocket

me. Hot pocket me. The movie for one month is hot pockets. Yeah. Easily. Easily. Hot pockets. It's official. We got a breakfast hot pockets. So we were okay. Two months. It's just a weird rectangle instead, you know, flaky burrito, seeing of shapes, Adam, like, oh, they've got to go in a minute here. But have you seen border shape? This blows my mind a little bit that it's like cool. I haven't used it, but like I keep seeing it. Yeah, Timonnie is doing wild shit with it. I'm like, that's getting crazy, man. I don't even know why you'd want all those wild little shapes, but it's cool. It's like anything, it's like you'd clip past to get it in the past, and you're like,

but that's neat. But instead of clipping it away, it just redefines the entire shape to be absolutely anything you want it to be. That's crazy to me. Padding. It's just one of those things where I'm like, I didn't know that was coming. So now we just don't have just rectangles on the web. We just have literally any shape that you want. Scorsoles. Yeah. Does it auto-flow? Like if you made a triangle, does it do it like shape outside would inside? Well, I imagine you got to have the padding for it. It's not like it's going to increase the element size to apply the shape. So you got to establish your, you know, you're like, I'm a box and I'm going to push

out and I don't want to get, okay, now my shape changes to a triangle, which I guess is kind of like clip shape or clip path, but you know, I don't think the text is just going to wake out of it though. It'll just flow inside the triangle, right? Yeah. It's like border radius. It's just fancy. Yeah. Mm. Anyway, so it was impressive to me, you know, I don't think I can do the hot pocket challenge. I think I'm out. Don't underestimate yourself. They have, they have hidden value ranch hot pockets. Oh, no. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's so hot ranch conspired, yes, sir, the middle is still frozen.

Oh, that sounds delightful. I'm like, there's a high protein, they have high protein was to lose weight on it because you'd get so sick of them for a while, just like one a day after I'm absolutely starving. Count down to them, make men's hot pockets hot pockets. Did you see your cereal? Did you see the men's cereal? Yeah. I'm like, this is a completely kind of like a myriad, so they know that more men eat cereal. So they're like, let's just make men's cereal and so they'll market it to them that has high protein and whatever they're like shit. I like high protein, anything, uh, exactly, you're like sparkling water.

Yeah. See, I mean, I can eat cereal after I work out and then I'm like feeding my, that's amazing. I'm totally into this. When's the creatine cereal going to hit? I don't know. It should. No. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're over time. Anything you guys want to mention or plug or, I don't know, stuff we want to say before we're done. Shoptalkshow.com. We do it every week. Oh, he stole it from you. 14 years. Or whatever. 15 years. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Something. Generals.

That's out. So long time. Penn. Penn. New, slash two. Penn. Penn. New. Oh, slash two. Nice. Ok. A quick way into the two. I like it. Indeed. Cool. Thanks, fellas. That was a fun time. You know. It's funny when we talk about all this AI stuff. Sometimes it's like exciting and you learn stuff and then and then it's so easy to immediately get you go into dark places and then you got to like grab the rope and come back up for air. You know, that's what I was. I had this tiny bottle of Baileys and then I read the expiration date and it was about four years ago and glad I didn't drink it. It's like aspirin, Dave. Does

it ever really go bad? Yeah, I don't think so. It's just, it's a way of it. It's just a dairy product. Yeah. Does milk go bad? I don't think it's not in Canada. Do cows go bad? No. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe, leave us a raise and review. So we appreciate it and we will catch you next time. You've been watching Whiskey Web and whatnot recorded in front of a live studio audience. What the fuck are you talking about, Chuck? Enjoyed the show? Subscribe. You know people don't pay attention to these, right? Head to whiskey.fun for merchant to join our discolored server.

I'm serious. Like 2% of people who actually click these links and don't forget to leave us a five-star review and tell your friends about the show. All right, dude. I'm out of here. Still got it.