Whiskey Web and Whatnot

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

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

This week, Robbie and Adam are live from React Miami with a packed lineup of rapid fire interviews and hot takes. They catch up with Jason Lengstorf about driving a quarter million dollar Lamborghini through Miami with a police escort, the philosophy behind Th...

Show Notes

This week, Robbie and Adam are live from React Miami with a packed lineup of rapid fire interviews and hot takes. They catch up with Jason Lengstorf about driving a quarter million dollar Lamborghini through Miami with a police escort, the philosophy behind The Build Log show, and why the principles of building matter more than the tools. They talk with Kent C. Dodds about his personal AI assistant Cody, MCP servers versus OpenClaw, why he's building agents to work on agents, and the future of personal versus cloud based AI. Tanner Linsley drops by to discuss polymorphic UI libraries, spec driven development with state machines, and why determinism matters when AI is writing your code. Francesco shares his thoughts on Prolog being the most hated programming language, why Grok is best for harsh feedback, and his mission to convince JavaScript developers that Rust is the future of backend development.

Presented by GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/lp/whiskeyfm

In this episode:

Chapters

  • 00:00:00 Welcome & Introductions
  • 00:01:39 The Lamborghini Experience & Building The Build Log
  • 00:09:09 Hot Takes with Jason: React, Semicolons & CoffeeScript Trauma
  • 00:13:48 Kent C. Dodds on MCP, Personal Agents & The Future of AI Assistants
  • 00:21:40 Hot Takes with Kent: React, Hooks & AGI
  • 00:25:58 Ryan & The TikTok Aesthetic: Instagram Ads, Keyboards & Airport Fashion
  • 00:31:39 GitHub's Two Nines Problem & The Git Repo Revolution
  • 00:39:30 Phone Wars: iPhone vs Android, Vision Pro Failures & The Flip Phone Dream
  • 00:45:47 Tanner Linsley on Polymorphic UI Libraries & Spec-Driven Development
  • 00:55:55 The Slop Fork Debate & Projections of Software Specs
  • 00:58:42 State Machines, BDD & Multi-Agent Orchestration
  • 01:01:43 Hot Takes with Tanner: Tailwind, Dark Factories & Cloud Code Desktop
  • 01:11:31 Francesco on Rust for Web Development & Conference Culture
  • 01:29:00 The Grok Advantage: Hard Feedback & Comparing Things
  • 01:35:29 GitHub Downtime Normalization & The Feature of Forced Breaks
  • 01:41:33 Wrap Up & The Power of In-Person Connections

Links

Connect with Jason

Connect with Kent

Connect with Tanner

Connect with Francesco

Connect with the hosts

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Episode Transcript

In today's modern technological world, developers face many difficult questions. Artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, JavaScript frameworks, even CSS. With so much happening so quickly, how can a developer possibly keep up? Simple. Just listen to the world's most important AI podcast. Two experts, countless opinions, zero hesitation. The Internet is complicated. These men are not. Each week, they review the latest developments in artificial intelligence and modern web development. This is Whiskey, Web & Whatnot, the world's most important AI podcast. Whiskey, Web & Whatnot is brought to you by...

Over half my PRs are created by agencies these days. Same thing with my coworkers. Now we'd be shipping code faster if it wasn't for all the bottleneck, managing branches, work trees, pull requests, merge conflicts. It's just a whole big mess. But enter GitKraken. That's been helping me stay in control of all this parallel agentic development. It's got visual Git workflows, code reviews, pull request management, and merge conflict resolution all built in. Not to mention it's got my own model subscriptions available right there as agents. So generating more code, that's the easy part. But keeping all that work moving in and out and flowing towards production, now that's the hard part. If you want to spend less time fighting Git and more time building, download GitKraken today at GitKraken.com slash WhiskeyFM and get a special promo offer. Cool. Back to that episode. What's up, everybody? We're at, uh... Let me start again. Hey, this is WhiskeyWeb and whatnot. Hey.

We've done this before. Yes. So, Whiskey Web and whatnot, live at React Miami, hanging out with Jason Langstorff at the Clerk booth. Thanks, Clerk, for having us out. Yes. Great time had by all. Um, 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. 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 the official colorway was but uh 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 gonna have to take out a second mortgage on the house because I'm gonna need one of those I need to feel that engine again on my own my butt. It was awesome. I didn't even get to drive it in fun mode. It's one of the, these supercars have a million switches for like traction control and torque and all that stuff. And 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 honesty, 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, yeah, at one point 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 if you ever get the opportunity to floor it in a Lamborghini, you should do that. Nice. It was automatic also? It was automatic. Okay. 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. Yeah. that's how it works yes how did 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 late what yeah what was it like it was it was very responsive but not jumpy like i i kind of expected it to be uh 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'm saying

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 really nice to drive. It was really fun. Oh, man. Nice. So sick. Can you tell us about, like, why did you have a Lamborghini? Or is that a secret for we'll find out later? No, no, no, no secret. So what we did was the clerk team reached out to me, and 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. Yeah.

And they were like, we like it, but can you think bigger? And 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? And I was like, we'll rent a location per speaker. And they were like, bigger. And 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.

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. No. So the thought was let's focus on the things that don't change and the things that make builders into builders change. 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. 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, 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've got to keep the whole team going with you. You've got to keep everybody going in the same direction. You've got to make sure that as you grow, you don't 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 passes. so we were like well we can mount some cameras in the nope won't fit there maybe we can put a a rig on the hood and like shoot through the windshield but the windshield so tilted back you just see the reflection of the clouds like this is like you know we were like oh we can get good polarizers like this isn't gonna work yeah 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 going to 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 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 get back to recording a ton of 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?

I would say my least favorite programming language is I was forced to write CoffeeScript a little bit. Sorry, that was just me breathing. And it wasn't CoffeeScript specifically. It was that CoffeeScript hit the uncanny valley for me where everything that I knew didn't work anymore, but it felt like it should. And so I felt like I was constantly stepping on rakes despite looking at something that looked like a thing I already knew. So 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 CoffeeScript have semicolons? I forget.

I don't remember. I've blocked most of the memory out. Semicolons or no semicolons? I'm a semicolons person because there's that one edge case where a semicolon is a problem if you don't have it. And I'm like, why tempt fail? It's not like it matters. It's going to get compiled away in the bundler, so just do it. Pretty Earl will add it for you. I know Pretty Earl will fix it if you don't have it too, but come on. Yeah. I'm not sure that I've ever typed one, honestly. I feel like prettier always support me. You just save and they show up. But I like to see them. It's like the end of my sentence. Exactly, right? Like, 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 also don't care. Like, if I open up a project and the project has...

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 um as long as the formatter does the thing and we don't get like merge conflicts on code formatting yeah yeah yeah it makes sense uh 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 the preview of Cloud 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 Cloud Code. But I have used it...

for like one thing to see. And I don't even think I finished it. I think I like started and forgot what I was doing and like 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. SaaS or SaaS? Yeah, SCSS or SASS. Yeah. Wait, the difference is that SaaS has the special syntax, right? SASS is omits semicolons. 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. So, 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. Just good. 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 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? Is this Robbie pre or post looking like the lead singer of Hawthorne Heights? Whichever you like better, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I respectfully decline to answer the question. Nice. All right. That's all we got. Thanks for coming by. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right. I'm just going to keep it still recording so I don't forget to press it again. I think we got Kent. Kent, we're ready for it. If you're down, pop in. Mr. Dobbs, we're ready. Can't see you later. Hey, did we get a photo together? It's just too lovely. Ken C. Dodds queuing up in the dugout right now, throwing a couple of pitches with Jason. All that bite is perfect. Warming up. Warming up. Yeah. Put on those headphones there to your left, and all will be clear.

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 feature. I 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. That feels good. Yeah, 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. Yeah. And I'll start that over.

Yeah, so I've been here all week, and the highlight for me has been talking with people in the hallways. Always. The hallway track is always so good. Yeah. I originally was not speaking. I just a couple weeks ago decided, you know, I really need to be there to talk to people. And so I got my flight and hotel just on myself, and then Michelle was like, hey, somebody dropped out. Yeah, definitely. Nice. 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 a personal agent or personal assistant. So I was having so much fun with that that I just started preparing to 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. Yeah, man. 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 customize it. And to me, I was thinking of it like punk rockers or goths. They all want to be unique, yet they go look the same. So all us developers are like, malleable software. I love customizable personal software. I'm just going to go use the thing off the shelf, though. And I'm like, that's the opposite. You're doing the thing that the goths did. Anyway, I'm happy to hear that you're not a goth. You're like a legit indie, you know.

put on the ground. Dude, you've got the history. You've seen this repeat itself through that goth lens. So, yeah, that's good. That's awesome. Yeah, I think that... I actually think that chat GPT or like OpenAI and Anthropic and Google, they're all going to come up with like general purpose agents that the normies. My wife is offended when I say normies, but we don't mean it directorially. It's just this word. It's too technical right now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So like. 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 ChatGPT. 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 with Cody and I can still control the shades in my house or the lights or the, 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 clause? 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 Kraken tokens. It's got a local model. And it's running a friendly normie...

open cloud variant or something like that. So we have an assistant. Where's this going to be for us? That's a good question. Uh, I think it'll be actually very similar to the computer where, um, 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. And, um, but like the computer that's in your house is nowhere close to the power of the supercomputers that these big companies have. Yeah. 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 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. 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 is scrape all my photos down and own them on my machine and I 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 feel 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 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, it's... 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. So, yeah. 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.

The IRS tracks all that. It's fine. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. So, yeah, it's exciting times. It is, yeah. All right, want to hit him with some... Hit him with his hee-heat? Let's hear it. Yeah. All right, so we got a giant list of hot takes. We're not going to do them all. Okay. 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? Uh... 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, like, I'm not actually using, I mean, I'm actively using React. Like, I've got apps that people pay for that are using React. But my active development, like Cody, is not using React. It's using Remix for any of the UI stuff. So I'm jazzed about Remix right now. Nice, nice. Hooks, signals, or proxies?

Uh, I'm fine with hooks. Like, I don't know. Yeah, hooks. Okay. 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. 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... Oh, wait. I shouldn't lean forward. You're in the shot, actually, if you lean forward a hair. Right here? Yeah, you're good. Yeah. Okay, good. Come on closer. How are you doing, Ken? It's good. How are you? How are 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. I got it. That's what happens. It's like, are any of you guys from Florida?

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. It's one from 32 to like 98. Wow. That is pretty pretty. Well, like it feels like, but like, you know what I mean? That's a wild swing. I know, yeah. That's Florida. Don't love that. Yeah, 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. Yeah.

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... 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. Yeah. 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? No, it's not pajamas. Wait, not just the airport. That's everywhere, man. It's the TikTok shop.

matching sets that are like $60, but you get them. They're the compiest thing ever. Is that like when you're all in pizza? You've got a pizza top and a pizza box? 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 the hot pinks or the hot yellows. 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 save so much money by not caring about that. He still wears a suit to the airport. He's like... Where's my cigarette tray? Oh, man. All right. Will AI take out designers or developers first? Probably to... 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... Light? Yeah. It's like, I'm on the light side. I'm not on the dark side. Dark factories when you write... When an agent is writing code and you don't look. Oh. 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. They just say... That sounds like the Sith. It's like the dark factory. You know where that came from? And that came from somebody who was like, we can't call ourselves a vibe code company because it's got a bad reputation. So we got to come up with something cool. The investors won't listen to dark factories. It depends. Like, Cody 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 bounce and stuff. You have an agent loop. That's for the agent, not for me. Are you a big Ralph guy? Yeah. 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 page. We're going to take this clip and send it to your coworkers. Yeah. 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 you're reviewing. That was so helpful for me because all of these CLIs, it just edits the code. It's like a dark factor. It's this black box that you don't really see into. But with Cursor, you see the diffs, and you can understand. I can vibe check code and be like, hmm. Are we using a use effect? Nah, that's not right. Warp has one button that says C diff, and it'll open them up in tabs in Warp. Hmm. Are you a paid Warp sponsor? No, but there's a couple of the features that I really like. What's you being a paid sponsor? I don't know.

They did sponsor our show, though. Yes. I liked them before that, so it was nice to have a product that we actually like to use. It's so hard to not appear a shill. Yeah. How dare I like something. You have an opinion. You need to 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?

Use T-Mux? T-Mux? It's C-Mux now, dude. I love C-Mux. I thought it was Z-Mux now. Oh, yeah. It might be Z-Mux, actually. I thought it was A-Mux. Agent Mux. No, it has to have a B, C, T, Z. It has to rhyme. Maybe M-Mux. We need to do M-Mux? I actually don't even have tabs in cursor. I turn that off. So I have no tabs now. So actually what's funny now is like, I don't even use the IDE anymore. Cause it's just the agent view anyway. Oh, it's a cursor glass. You're happy that when that cursor three came out or it was a cursor two and they were, 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. But yeah, that's, you know, 2026 is pretty wild. It is wild. Yeah. Dario was right.

Dang it. 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. 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 was 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 spent weeks doing that. 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, 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, that was the PR merch check thing that was reverting merges, which was crazy. Should we just write a new GitHub? That's what I'm hearing. Oh, that's a pure.co, right? Yeah, I mean, Cursor acquired a new GitHub. Graphite. We used Shopify. I like it. We used the pure 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. And that's get repos on endurable objects like on workers. Like that's pretty wild. 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 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 can't. Network externalities, man, yeah. I know, but, like...

You're not going to easily convince an entire org, even if you have like nine nines of nine. You're not going to 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, they're going to go with Microsoft. Yeah, it's going to 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 are we going to Facebook? It sucks. Yeah. So sloppified. Yeah, and I'm like... Have you been on Facebook recently? No. No. Of course not. Have you? Yeah, like...

It's just... 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. Posts? Posts, I guess. Posts. Faces? I don't know. Books? She'll send me books on Facebook. And 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. Yeah.

And I was like, what in the world? And so we would build like a cooking app and we would, you know, 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 they have a good Instagram account. 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 won't use Facebook, but you'll use Instagram? They're the same thing now. My girlfriend's on Instagram.

man. I gotta like, repost, comment, whatever. 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. You're going shopping? 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. I'm like, ooh, it's only a hundred bucks. And I'm like, ooh. And I bought it. And then you turned off the bidet. It works. Yeah. No, but Instagram ads... It's just very rainy from South Park. 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 the timeline of stories. So you're tapping through and you're like, wait, no. No.

Like my finance platform that I use for myself, 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. I'm 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. Me too. I hate it too. And it works. I hate that it works. It's really annoying. You'd 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. All of Theo's ads. The little jump ahead button for like the commonly skipped ad. I love that. It's the right arrow on the keyboard. Yeah. Skip 15 or 30 seconds. You're like, boop, boop. Oh, good. I'm done. And then you see the little bar at the bottom. Like, ting, ting, ting. And I'm like, ah, there we go. Back to the content. 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. Yeah, yeah. No, don't do it on this one. Listen to all the ads on this one.

Yeah, click all the links, please. Oh, wait, there are none right now. Yeah, there's a link up there. Oh, yeah, Clerc. Everyone go to Clerc and tell them that Whiskey Web and whatnot sent you. Yeah. All right. Or that Jason sent you, whatever. Or that Ryan sent you. Don't tell them that I sent you, I guess. Kent did not send you. Yeah, I came to your site and it was not Kent. Did I tell you guys about the video I did with Clark a while ago? No. With the Apple Vision Pro? I saw, I didn't watch the whole video, but I saw that. I was like, this is. This is hilarious. So you're familiar with the Apple Vision Pro, right? Yeah. So I was like, this has an amazing chip. It's an M5 chip. It's got, 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 retouched to me, and they're like, yes, 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 were so many issues. First off, the screen recording...

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 like 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 kick to the post, everybody. We'll kick to the good parts and make it look like it was seamless. It was seamless. Yeah. Clerk was amazing. It was so funny. It's like how the mighty 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. Yeah. What do you not like? It's the software is 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 bubbly. Yeah. It was like 26 and I open up and I was like, what? Wait, there's traumatic aberration. Oh, no. I see glass morphism. No! 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 can 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 AI? I turned it all off. I turned it all off.

it all up. The app summaries, that scared me one time. My girlfriend texted me like a bunch of things in sequence. And the summary was, I got hit by a car, assignment due, what should we do for dinner tonight? like a leaf got hit by a car or something like that. 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. Oh. 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 just so it's.

always good. It is smoothie. Man, 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 Apple Fold. I saw that. Apparently it has no crease and no notch. I don't know. What would you call that? Like the crease, I guess. No gap. 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. I don't know. It's a divot or a dimple. Dimple. Yeah. Long dimple. Oh, 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 a phone? Yeah, that's what it's called. And then there was the unibrow or the bunny ears on the iPhone that 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. Hey, that's a good one. The camera on that device... MKBHD did a comparison of every iPhone photo. And the 4S holds up, like, really well. Like, compared to, like, nowadays. I think some of the low-light stuff, it still suffers. But, like, still...

I was really impressed on how well... The size of that device was so good. The mini-savos were so good. I had a Moto X. Oh, yeah. It had this really nice curve on the back. It felt so good in the hand, and it was like four inches or something. Oh, it was so good. Palm had that, too. The Palm devices. The Palm Pre had a little curve on it. It was nice. We need to bring back flip phones, because I had my dad's flip phone for two years, 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, and... Clap it shut and put it in your pocket. 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'd open up and I'd catch it and like, hello. So you were cool, you're like secret walking. Boom! Agent Ken's secret. Hey!

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. It was so tiny. He flipped it out, too. What, is this a phone for ants? Yeah. Yeah. 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 saw your eyes. I can't make it. How do you get me up, dude? I've got the... I'm not this cool to be wearing those, but...

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, like a, 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. That looks pretty cool. 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. Yeah.

You want a slide deck? Boom. If 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. More or less. That was really fun. We even got the iPhone versus Android hot take in there. We did. Hit everything. 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. All right. Send him in. See you, guys. All right. Bye, guys. Thank you. That 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. Ha, ha, ha.

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... Yeah, what you're working on. What am I working on? Oh, I'm working on something salacious. Oh, sick. I don't even know how much I want to share, but... Salaciously sick? I love it. Yeah, like... 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. Yeah. Like generative UI and stuff? No, not generative UI because it's 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. Yeah, have you tried Py the Harness? I have not. It comes with four tools, and it can teach itself new tools. It can build itself features. And so it discovers them or you articulate them. And it forgets about them every day. Yeah. It forgets about them. But, yeah, it's a harness. 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 plug-ins 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 awesome.

Sounds kind of like you're making Pi UI or something that has this strong enough base that the tools and the way that it's been built, it can 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 that much Wild Wild West. You want consistency. Yeah. 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.

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. It kind of sounds like you're building something that is going to have all four of those. So it can deliver functions that enable behavior. It can also figure out what markup you need. Or 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? Yeah. 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. Right. Think of it more like, you know, we know the minimum and maximum representation of what this library needs to do. Like this if I have paid.

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 think 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 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 need it to to have structure and so it's almost like you're you're giving scaffolding to something that is relatively organic it's not 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, I think. Otherwise, then you're not into Terminism, right? Yeah. It's a very new idea. No, I like it. Because, yeah, usually people go grab something off the shelf and it's like the ultimate, you know, carousel. The last select you'll ever need. Yeah, the last select you'll ever need. And you're like, no, actually, this will be the most basic select you currently need. And then if you ask it for more, it does more, you know? 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. Go ahead. Yeah. Sorry, I was going to say, would this 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? I don't know. 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 of these things available to me.

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 because 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. That really is the last problem 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. So I don't think an agent is going to be able to tell us what to do there. And nor should it, because the second that an agent thinks 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, yeah, I think that in a microcosm, you know, you could say that the agent should know what it needs to build.

based on what you have asked you 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's, 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. Yeah, you know. I'm internalizing this a little bit like a 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 VinExt. Everybody said, oh, I think it was Theo actually. He's like a slop fork, right? Slop fork, yeah. Coin the torrent. 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. 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. driven development, 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, and it's like... 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. Yeah.

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. Right. 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 was like... I so very much agree. Like, yeah, state machines, specs, all the things that actually made software development really great over the years that we've been trying to convince normal humans, squishy brains to use like type safety and state machines and, and spectrum and 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's 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. 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. We're like, hey, but they're all really rigid, and it's probably fine. and have an orchestrator watch them as they go collaborate and work out. 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. And that's kind of what I keep doing. And also, 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 giving you a little error. Let me TikTok my way through, I guess not TikTok. What's the swipey one where you chose people? Oh, yeah. Tinder. Dude, let me Tinder through designs. Swipe, right. swipe right and 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? Yeah, by the general sense of the term, sure. Okay, where React server components a mistake? Okay.

No. Hooks, signals, or proxies? Signals. Nice. Is HTML a programming language? Sure. What about CSS? Lately, more so. Tailwind or vanilla CSS? Tailwind. Tailwind. Get rebase or get 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 we 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. Wow. 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 Tanstext start. And then I found out that a router, 10 stack router. And then I found out that that's actually embedded into the desktop app. Cool. So I was like, well, why wouldn't I try that? Yeah. You know, 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 open code.

and I was 100% using the Claude subscription in open code. Yeah. And probably past the date when I wasn't supposed to. He's in the shorts. Go ahead. Ban me. No. Yeah, all that drama is just ridiculous. Like, if we're trying to pay you money, who cares where we're using it at? But they care, I guess. They gave me an open source, one of those open source plans, too, like the 20X plan. Oh, 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? Oh, it had a time limit? Yeah. Well, now I feel better. All of you. You're on the hotel. We'll be the same as you in September. I hope it gets renewed, you know, if that's even a thing. I feel like why wouldn't they renew it? Because they can just train everything on everything everybody's doing. Like, give it to everyone, of course. Yeah, and if they don't, I'm just going to say, come on. You guys are using my open source software. Yeah, you've got a good angle in there. Like, pay it forward, you know? Yeah, thank you all for that.

Will AI take out designers or devs first? I don't know. I think it's both. I mean, it's going to take out like the top, like 80 to 90% of both, I think, eventually. It's about when, not if. Yeah. It's more about time right now. Yeah, I agree. But I mean, I would say that we have plenty of time. So, yeah. Yeah. It's still a great time to become a developer or a designer. You just have to be better than whatever is going to come out of that. The bar is higher now. Yeah, the bar is higher. Speaking of bars, sidebar on the left or right? Left. Tabs on top or left? It depends. Ooh, where, how? I keep tabs on the top for my browser. 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?

Uh, I tried CMUX. Um, I, 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. Oh, my mom. And depending on what terminal I was using at the time, sometimes it was left, sometimes they were 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're 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 lot. Yeah, I got lost. So, the tabs were at least like, okay, I know very, very clearly that these tabs are separate things. Right. 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 to rapid fire? I'm fine. You got an agent open on your lap just doing work? Yeah. Oh, I probably went to sleep now. Oh, shame. No, I just had a couple of cloud codes running. Yeah. Nice. I probably should have shut it. You've got to always be working. I do like the remote control feature, so I can just go do other shit, and it's still building. Whose remote control feature? The cloud code. I like the dispatch stuff.

It's called remote control. So you like run something and then go do whatever. And it tells you on your phone on the Claude app. 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 Claude 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 then 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 do whatever. Nice. 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 love 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.

A lot of, like, new ideas that I'm, like, haven't even committed to get. Yeah. I should probably do that. Probably do that. Yeah. I should probably do that. Yeah. Yeah. You might lose those. Yeah. And this machine's, like, from 2021. So. You never know. 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, like, Disney charms at one point. Yeah. Like, we went to Disneyland. I had Disney charms and Crocs. You know, I've never owned a pair of Crocs in my life.

I haven't either. Yeah. 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 agentic 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. It's 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. Beards or mustaches? I have neither. Or clean, clean shaven. I'm not capable of either. 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. It's all sparse. Yeah. It's no good. So I just hide that from everybody. You know, I go for that, like, 25-year-old fresh look. It'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, share with everybody? Well, yeah. Go try Tanstack Start. Sick. Yeah. Hey, thanks for sitting down. It was fun. Thanks, guys. This was a lot of fun. Yeah. Take it easy. Go get some work done. Yeah. My agents are doing it right now.

What's up, everybody? Welcome to Whiskey, Web and Whatnot 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? 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 programming language. 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. I don't know. Some people just don't like good things. Yeah, that's true. Get rebased or get merged? Get merged, 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 hit anyway. Whatever is the answer. That's basically a bait question because you'll get hit 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. Yeah. Don't want problems. Semicolons or no semicolons? semicolons just because in rust you use semicolons nice i love semicolons who doesn't me no it was a rhetoric question whoever like whoever doesn't like them doesn't matter sounds like what's your least favorite programming language

least favorite prologue but I think nobody knows it it's a super hard language that I had to learn to pass an university exam and I hated 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 Oh, really? And it has to stay there. That sounds like a viral video in the making. It is. People love hate. And so if you've got it burning inside of you, they're going to love watching it just rage out. Exactly. So 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. Yeah. I know.

Yeah, so they rank, like, 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, like, if, I don't know, I think, like, 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 hate in these guys. 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. Are AGI and Singularity the same? Are they aligned? To what? Singularity? 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 the 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. Cool. What's your preferred AI harness? AI?

AI what? Harness. It's 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 cloud intensively. I want to try codecs for sure, also open code, but I don't want to go in full test mode. It's like when you learned back then JavaScript framework, you don't learn them all at once, like I did, that 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. Gotcha. Yeah, there's a lot to try, and I'm sure there'll be more coming. So I don't know. We'll see. I've been using Claude a lot because, yeah, we've talked about this a lot, but 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, but... 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 Anthropic. 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, the... taking over it means that there is no, there's 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 for, not to design something is maybe faster, quicker, but it's not that we need the less designers. So we just, we will have, I think more work and it will change the way and also the way

people ask things. Like maybe before they were asking for design, it'd have been two weeks, maybe now it's two, three days. So this is my change. But the number and the work, I think it will still be, we will still have to work. for a while. I hope so. But we can take a podcast once in a while. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I worry about that all the time. Like, will I have a job? I don't know. I think that this is an era when we really can't overthink. 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 who are really focused on doing the thing.

So I think that we should stop overthinking in this era, like, is it worth it or not? Should I do it? 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 to. I'm loving it. OK. Where did I leave off? Let's see. Do you use a VS Code-based editor, like VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, et cetera, 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. And 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 codecs. So usually if I decided to try a tool or if I try to give it a go with WinServe or 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 already trying like two, three ideas, 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 you're not using DIMM? 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, etc. 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?

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. So this is also what maybe decided 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 ask a following up question, basically. I always have many questions. So usually I like to have separate chats. I have chats with titles. I don't know, this is for training, this is for conferences. And then I keep separate chats. And yeah, it makes sense. I like, I still put most stuff in Google, but then the first thing it does is give it to Gemini. I hate the AI mode of Google. I don't know why, because I end up using LLMs, but because when I am on Google, I don't want, I'm there because I don't want to use LLMs. So the AI mode of Google, which is also, I think, is the first one, 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. 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? Like, to get more info. I like that. I go, of course, on Google when I need something, like, on top, like, on the edge. For example, on the news. For example, if when I get a new AI news, maybe someone has been released, like, 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. 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 I don't know. It's maybe because I did a computer science degree, and they told me that they were the final destination, the final answer to all my problems, but I still have many problems. So they didn't solve my coding problems. Classes are cool. They're not evil. But I still see some junior developers...

Basically, they experienced what I did. So they tell them that this is the answer to all your problems. Right. And it's not. Yeah. Yeah, in school it was heavily inheritance-based. And I was, yeah, it's not the best. You find out there's a lot of foot guns from that approach. So, yeah, for sure. I got a new one for the list. Okay. When you run Cloud Code or whatever, do you run it in YOLO mode or do you accept and manage all the permissions as it goes? I think mostly YOLO mode, mostly, except if I have to do something very specific that can have some security issues. If it's a side project, something that I do on a Saturday night because 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 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. Let's see. NPM or PNPM? I hate this question because I am a Rust developer, so I switched to Rust because I didn't have to answer this. But again, simplicity, NPM. PMPM, YARN tools, I think they also existed, especially in the past, to replace the fact that NPM had some flaws, some problems. But I think NPM improved enough that it's good for most of the developers. Well, of course, we might have some edge cases, but again, I like the fact that maybe not everyone is a JavaScript developer. 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 PNPM developers, so I can still be friends. Yeah. I think PNPM 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. And 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? Plain CS, Tailwind. Why don't you ask me these hard questions in front of Adam? I'm not a CSOS guy. No, I think maybe as a CSS, I don't know. It's not my main field, but so, yeah, so. OK. That's it. Sorry, we can cut this one. That's right. 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 I use Anthropica to encode related things. Gemini for like, you know, the day-to-day job, like, or things, like long things. Another one I think that not many people use is Grok. I use Grok also because I have Twitter premium. So I have Grok Plus or whatever it is called. Yeah. Something that I like about Grok is that I think it's the best in comparing things or also giving hard feedback. One of the problems with AI is that usually you can say like, everything is amazing. You get too much soft critics to a blog or a post. I find out that Grok is good at telling you that your thing sucks.

Nice. So, I think it's useful. Like I wrote a book or I wrote a blog post, like, is this good or not? I asked Gemini, it's like, oh, very good. Like, it sucks. You can improve this, this, this and this. And I ended up seeing like, maybe the feedback was more constructive. Yeah. And I think this is more, this is what I use the most. Yeah. 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 I think that drove me crazy to try something else because I say why this 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 is this version better than this one It's usually, it's a bit slow in giving answers, but, and also I like to, you know, to have another point of view. Maybe Gemini has already too much context. So, you know, just, you know, when you use a different browser to try to see if you get a different set of results. So, yeah. But it's very unpopular and I don't see many people doing this, but...

It works for me. I used it for a couple weeks during, like, when Anthropic said you can't use your Claude 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, I can still talk, I use a fast mode, you know, poor mode, whatever, and it still works. Grok has somebody just stopped. 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 see you tomorrow. It has no compaction. Its brain is overloaded. Too much context. I just stop. That's weird. Yeah. Hermes or Open Claw?

I think OpenClaw, I think, for now. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, I haven't tried Hermine, so I have no opinion. Crocs or FlipFlops? FlipFlops. I also made a talk with FlipFlops. I still have to do a talk with Crocs. So FlipFlops 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. So, yeah, I started... 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 you want to say. Of course, I'd say East because we're in Miami. Yeah, East. Absolutely East. Nice. All over the world. 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 testing. 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 light factory for things because...

things will go wrong. That's the natural role of software and things. Coding is a part of the creating software, but it's more about fixing things when things go wrong. While I was working at the European Space Agency, a big project, the code was, don't say trivial, but let's say once you do... the software to download the pictures from suddenly 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 of software. But I think big companies, they know this. So light, 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. Yeah, 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, I don't know, 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 walk around it. I'll just walk around it, yeah. Yeah, but at least when I'll be old, I can say, in my old times, we were supposed to have 99.99% off 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 too fast, 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 to service. Yeah, I think we were down a couple of hours. Do whatever. Okay. They have tried to normalize this. They don't even say, I didn't say any apologize from GitHub. They don't care. No. Well, people are using it anyway, so they don't care. Yeah, whatever. They're like, oops, we're sorry. Yeah, they even saved some service because they were down. So they saved the money of the service. That's true. Oh, geez. I wonder how much money they saved while it was down. Yeah, everyone's still paying, right? Yeah. 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 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 Dernit on it. Like if I can take down GitHub for a week, I'm gifting so many developers across the world a vacation. I'm actually going hiking. I will go hiking for sure. That's what I mean. Everyone's going to be like, all right. Yeah, 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 back in a week or so. Woo! Was I late? I don't know. I tried to woo with him. I don't know. Just 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. Yes. 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. So, you know, I have one mantra to change my mind. You know, intelligent people, they change their mind. So we will see. What a great way to start a sentence to 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 because I'm dumb. Oh, no. What are you going to talk about there? And, yeah, 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.

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. 2025, finally, I made it happen. So I'm here. And it really matched my expectations. I had very meaningful conversations. 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 is 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' talks. Yeah. And I met many friends. One is Pauline from Vercel, which is here. I met her. I've been chatting with her since 2019. Wow.

Then we started going to conferences, but we never met before. Like, are you going to this conference? Yes. And then at the last moment, I don't know, someone had a problem. So we have been like missing each other for like three years. I started to think about like, so I will never meet her. And we finally met in her. So that was really worth it. And yes, another question, sorry, my memory is really short. Oh, it's Cascadia.js, but I mean, a 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 audience.

But I really want to bring something that because I've been preaching and talking about that Rust is meaningful for 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 back end, also for front end with WebAssembly. But let's say, again, I think that it's still the best combo. 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 or REST API, I think the video is, the only video on Google is mine. So I used Kotlin to make a video. So you've been there, hated that. I create, but was that a real question or not?

And I mean Kotlin is just a language that can be used in some specific environments. It's basically Java in disguise, Kotlin. Yeah. So it's Java on steroids. A bit less steroids than Go. But yeah. So yeah, I would try to convince people that using Rust as a web developer in 2026 is not that crazy anymore. And yeah, and if I get punched in the face, I will just take it. And I'll just make an apology video. No, but I can't wait. Thanks for reminding me that I still have to ultimate my slides, but I have still 40 days, 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. Are you doing the podcast there?

This thing? TBD. We're definitely not doing it, like, the whole time. We might do an episode or two, but we haven't figured it out yet. That'd be way overkill if we were emcees 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 while, 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. Yeah. It can be done, yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. Thanks for stopping by. Anything else that you want to mention, plug, talk about for you? No, I... Okay. Yeah, I would say that I really believe in in-person events. I think it's one of the few...

Podcast that I did live. So thanks for having me. Yeah. I think it's just a different vibe, different experience. Not saying that social media are bad, of course. I'll be... It's not going to be true. But I think going to conferences really is the answer to all this AI stress and, like... fear of getting replaced because it creates real connections with people. What I really like about conferences is that you don't talk about tech every time. We had a meaningful conversation, for example, with Adam yesterday. Something that is not just frameworks and tools and tips. and code but more about the human being part but in person it's different because I understand because I am one of the people who on on social media they talk about development because this is our job our career yeah 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 amazing reviews. Yes. I don't know what I'm saying. We'll see you later. Subscribe. 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.

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