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Hey, 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 place rules. We have a blast. Yes, indeed. We are here live at React Miami. This is a slightly different show. We have cut water code and chatter today because we don't have any whiskey, but we're drinking some stuff. And we have a guest today. Would you like to let the folks know who's here, Adam? Hell yeah, you knew I would. It's America's fuck yeah web developer. Slinging, reacting, shooting crossbows while knocking back entire bottles of liquor. We got a B-Wizard, rapper, DJ, reasoned rock star, creator of Slick Carousel, punk ass Jersey cat who don't give a shit about nothing. Open source number one stunner, motherfucking Ken Wheeler, y'all. You better protect that shrimp cocktail tower. What's up? Yo. I was told they'd be whiskey here. Oh, man, we too. There's alcohol.
It's okay I already had some whiskey I didn't have whiskey I had a shot of vodka Well these are 12% alcohol I'm familiar with these demons I've fallen asleep in a hot tub Because of these Hell yeah What's going on fellas Just hanging out We're rocking this stuff out Back to back to back Love the shades Thanks man Hey clerk We love it Thanks so much for this opportunity And these badass shades They're functional They are. Yeah, they're very tight on the side, I was saying, because, like, of the visor, it would blow off, I think. As if the shades themselves did not do a good enough job blocking the sun, you have a double backup of the visor. Like, the sun doesn't stand a chance. Plus a rain guard, you know? I'm not getting water. I don't need a little windshield wipers. I got protection. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Jetski, polo, whatever you want to do.
All right, so we got a shitload of hot takes on here, some of which you've probably already answered, but we're going to go through them. Is React a framework? Yeah. Interesting. Okay. In what fucking world is React not a framework? It's a library. Just for rendering. Just because you can use it. It was a library just for rendering. It used to be. Yeah, I mean, I guess. Now it's a real boy. Yeah. I liked it better when it was just a library. Same, dude. That's when it was better when it didn't exist. I hate saying that word because I say library and other people are like, library. I say library because of New Jersey. Yeah. It's evolved. As time has gone on, they've built shit into it. Initially, it was like, it's just a view layer, man. It's just a library.
It's not the case anymore Yeah, I remember that original component But you don't have to use it You don't have to use the other shit It's not required Accoutrements, so to say I don't fucking use Yeah, I mean, I don't use React I hope that I don't ever have to, honestly Do you have a job? I do And you don't use React? Yeah, I use Ember That's crazy Yep, I'm holding on to Ember as long as I can I'm fucking with you, I know this Yeah, I know this Yeah, no, I work for IBM slash HashiCorp. So, yeah. Were React server components a mistake? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. Well, let me nuance that. They're fine. They're cool.
maybe were server components themselves a mistake no no like there actually really should be like a very dedicated way to go from server to client and to be honest with you like a lot of that shit like that's not actually like a server component like rendering a component like just being able to call a server site that's actually pretty nifty also introduces some insane vulnerabilities, but I digress. The thing that... The thing that... This is so fucking petty. It's unbelievable. A lot of people have a lot of very valid criticisms about these. I had spoken to the boys about it. They're like, so you, what's your gripe? It all boils down entirely to you's client. I had like a...
Like a tantrum, a New Jersey tantrum. I'm like, you mean to tell me to write the React? I've been writing this whole time. I got to add a directive? Yeah, stop it. No. I was really upset about that, and I still remain upset about that to this day. I think that was a tough decision. That like React business as usual require this new directive to use. It's so minimal and inconsequential. So does it default to server then? Yeah, it defaults to server. Oh, shit. And it's so petty. But that's how I am. I'm sorry. Was use strict a mistake? No, use strict is great. Yeah. Does anyone not like use strict? What's wrong with it? Is it in codebases now? Yeah, it's in my codebase. Nice. All right. Yeah.
Maybe not anymore. It was for years. I just haven't seen it at the top of a file. I feel like we've gotten auxiliary tooling that is like more or less surpassed that. Yeah. You just like lint it. You don't give a fuck. Yeah. All right. Hooks, signals, or proxies? Those are three completely different things. What are you talking about? Uh... Yeah. What was that like? I mean, like what? Like a built-in object proxy? For a reactive primitive, yeah. You just need a proxy. Like a proxy for tracking shit. An object proxy. Yeah, like GIA, the new framework, is like, we're not signals and we're not hooks, we're not any of that. We're proxies. It's just JavaScript. Well, honestly, if I had to pick one of the three,
It would be proxies because they're fucking incredibly useful. Yeah, they're slept on by folks. I do a lot of weird shit for a living. We know. We'll leave it there. And you have a job, too. Yeah, boy, do I. Like, a lot of it's greenfield. A lot of it's, like, very, like... non-Google-able problems kind of thing. So it's like features like that make it really easy to get yourself out of a hole or to, like, solve, like, what are we going to do about this? Proxies are great. So, I mean, like, if you're talking about, like, proxies as, like, like an inventing primitive or, like, state management, I don't know. Those are all different things. But proxies in general, big fan.
sick. Big fan. Yeah. I think most people don't use them because it's hard to debug stuff. I use them to debug stuff. Yeah, they actually let you get in between a thing you didn't usually have an in-between to. Shut down, man. There's kids here. Yeah, we've asked you that one. We've asked you all these before. Let's see. How about, I think you answered this last night, but I forget your answer. Semicolons or no semicolons? I don't give a fuck. I don't write code anymore. Honestly, like, where we're at right now is that you can have semicolons, you cannot have semicolons. You have a prettier RC. And you have a magic robot that doesn't give a fuck either. So... That's true. I think, like, we're at the point
Where it's not, it's so out of the bottle. It's so happening and so here. Let's stop pretending we have fucking preferences anymore. Right, like that is the biggest fucking waste of money and time to even consider that shit. Like you need to, Hey, if you want to be successful moving forward, you need to fucking move up a level and start thinking about problem solving. And more importantly, how do you provide value? Because you are not being paid to write bespoke code. No one's paying you because you write pretty code. It's because your code solves a problem that makes money for a business or solves a problem for a business. So if you still give a fuck about semicolons, you need to do some soul searching.
So if AI writes a bunch of shit, do you review it for like, like if it's not stylistically how you would want, but it's functional how you would want, would you change it? Or just push it up? I review every line of code that AI generates. And it's always stylistically how I want. Because I ask it and require it to run lint fix and prettier on the output. That's true, I guess. That fixes most things. To solve problems. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Never mind. Nice. It's old news, man. That's an old hot take. It doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. What's your least favorite programming language?
Java by far. Nice. I fucking hate Java. We've unanimously had Java. Really? As everyone has said Java. It's a shared sentiment? Yeah. I kind of thought Objective-C might be more popular to hate on, but... I actually like Objective-C. Oh, really? Gotcha. A little bracket bullshit. I like that. That's fine. Objectively, though? Objectively. It never bothered me. I did a lot of React Native, so I had a lot of bridge code in Objective-C. And it was fine. It's a little silly, but it's fine. Java, though. Honestly, I don't even feel like it's fair to say it. Like, yeah, it's very easy to shit on Java. Because Java is shat upon. It's already covered in shit, so it's easier. I honestly feel like a lot of the shit that Java catches is twofold. And that's the patterns that emerged from...
Right? Which is a bunch of fucking dorks writing shit like module provider factory factory modules. Yeah. Like, they really fucking, they really, they did a little bit too much. People did that to Angular 1, too. But it was also too many Java developers writing Angular 1, so. I know. I know why Angular exists. But the other thing is, right, like, the entire ecosystem is a little fucked up. Right? Like, they're tooling. Have you ever had to, like, work with that shit? Yeah. Java itself, if you strip away all of the third-party build tooling and you strip away a lot of the commonly accepted idiomatic patterns, it's a fine fucking language. It's fine. It's okay. It's fine. Not my favorite, but it's fine. But when you consider all these things, like the whole package, fuck Java. Is it fine? No.
Fine. It's like wife fine. You're like, hey, babe. Fine. You're like, God damn. Have we reached AGI? No. What's your preferred AI harness? Oh my God. I built one called Steve. Nice. Nice. And I like Steve, but he's not as capable as he needs to be. I don't like Cloud Code at all. OpenCode is very good. I like OpenCode a lot. Like I said, I told you guys that I review every line of code. So I'm actually very GUI focused. So I'm going to throw you for a little bit of a spin here. My favorite harness that exists in the year of our Lord 2026 is Microsoft Copilot in VS Code. Damn. Wow. I've had some good success with VS Code. Copilot? Or Copilot. Copilot running Opus until about a month ago was the fucking shit.
And now, co-pilot running GPT 5.5 is pretty great. I like it. I like it. It's like I know. We used to have this thing when we were doing, like, UX things, right? And it's like, how do you design this thing? Right? And it's like, you want to make an address form. Where do you start? I'll tell you where you start. With every other fucking address form that's ever been made. Yeah. Because... Like in human computer interaction studies, people do better with shit that they're used to that they're familiar with. So like there is a canonical way that an address form is laid out. So that's how you should do it. Hey baby. So the same thing applies where it's like, I know VS code, I know that workflow. So if I can work in there on that workflow, that's how I'm gonna do things.
And it makes it really easy to review diffs and shit. I agree. We can all play like we're fucking hackers in the terminal, but that shit sucks. 100% I agree. I've used Copilot in GitHub just through the agents tab that they added, and I've had wild success in that. Really? Wild success. Yeah, I just said to you. Really? I've described this before, but I start my French press coffee, start the water boiling, spin up GitHub on mobile, go to the agents tab in my open source repo, just start opening up things and say fix issue number 53, fix issue number 54, and do some wild shit in this third agent. And by the time my coffee is pressed...
two of them are complete and merged into the code base all from my phone. And I'm like, that's actually fucking here. What's really annoying is when contributors open that and then they tag copilot and copilot spews out like whatever. Usually it's bullshit, but it, it spews that out. And then they like post a comment saying, Hey guys, this looks good to me. Go ahead and merge it. And I'm like, okay, boss, whatever you say, because they think like copilot since it's verified, they think it's like a verified contributor. Yeah, it carries an air of legitimacy. Yeah, I mean, they're almost back to two nines. They're good. We should have a live status monitor of GitHub nine count right now. All right, is AI going to take out devs or designers first? Who's on the chopping block? Sales guys. Designers by far. Really? That's a hot take. But I don't think it'll take either out.
Well, I mean, like, really think about design when you really think about it. Right? Like, when you really think about design, there's, like, one fucking guy who sets the tone for any given period. And then the rest of the designers are just incredibly talented at emulating what he's done. That's true. That's like us using a framework. You know what I mean? Some turd made a framework, and now we all have to use that paradigm for the next couple little bit. React. Like, they dropped Bootstrap. And then everything was bootstrap. Or they dropped, you know, the fucking linear came out. And then everything was linear for the longest time. So much so that all the LLM shit is purple. No, and the cursor thing. You know the cursor homepage where they've got, like, the text, the button, and then, like, the big screen, like, image? Yeah. Every single, like, minimal site looks like that now. Yeah. So, I mean, it's not like there's this, like, fucking breadth of original thought going on in the design world.
A lot of it is like somebody does something that's compelling Everyone fucking lauds it as being good And then The design community does their best to replicate it For the given context that they're working within So Yeah I think they're fucked Damn. Was that too hard of a take? Was that too hard of a take? No, that was perfect. That was a little bit of truth there. I feel bad. That was hotter than any of the takes at the after party last night. These fucking guys who have like skinny jeans and like fucking, they take like a top-down picture of their super neat desk. They're going to kill me for that. I'm going to be killed for that shit.
I think you're safe. Do you remember those guys? Oh, what a mental image. I'm still wearing skinny jeans at home, man. What a mental image. I haven't grown out. I didn't go back to the JNCOs. I mean, I was in JNCOs. I was in RIP JNCOs. I have a pair of jeans upstairs that I'm going to wear either tonight or tomorrow night. They're white jeans. They're white. Do they have a striped on the side? They're pre-ripped. They're pre-ripped my jeans. Hey, bring it back, dude. It's going to be so funny. I used to take a belt sander to my jeans and rip them myself. Did you really? Yeah. You were an emo kid, weren't you? I was, yeah. I knew you were. I made these, but I think it's pretty obvious. I love that so much, dude. Yeah, these are self-ripped.
My kids, it's so funny, I'm like pantless in the kitchen. My kids walk in, they're like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm making my pants better. And they're like, what? I've got a knife in there and I'm just slicing my pants. Wait, so you took off the pants you were currently wearing. Oh, yeah. And you took an angle grinder to the pant legs. Oh, man. Yeah, because I don't like most shorts too short. So I'm like, I need, they need to go past my knees. My pants rip in different ways. Often a surprise. I'm like, fuck, you kidding me? When is it not a surprise? Were you expecting them to rip in certain times? It was like 3 o'clock today. They're gone. Well, there's a thing that happens, right? And if you buy any product in bulk, right? And you're like, hey, this is good underwear. I like this underwear. Do you buy underwear in a lot of this underwear? Huh? Do you buy underwear? Like, I feel like you do this because I do this. When I find something like Costco or Amazon that I love, I buy like 30 things of it. Yeah. But what inevitably happens...
This shit has a duty cycle, right? No points. You'll sit there. Duty, duty. No, no, D-U-T-Y, cycle. So what will eventually happen is after a certain number of washes, a certain number of like sumo squats with a beer, right? What eventually happens is that they will literally disintegrate in the taint. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about. And the fucking craziest thing about it is every single fucking pair at the same time. Oh. So you can't expect it. How could you bottom all at once? It's the underwear. And so he times it, and he's like, two o'clock today, my ass is out. Dude, I'm sitting there. I'm going to do a swap, and it's done. I'm like, I see one pair rip. I'm like, fuck. Fuck.
God damn it. I know it's going to happen. But like clockwork. There's a funny thing. So I like to wear this shit. Built Basics. You guys ever wear that? No. No, I've seen it. I have their other brand called True Classic. Yeah. Yeah, True Classic is sick too. I love True Classic. But I wear Built, right? And what is it called again? Built. B-Y-L-T. Oh, nice. I thought they were a rent company. Probably about like a three-year duty cycle. On these shirts, right? And I fucking, I have a bunch. A billion black shirts. I'm like, it's like Doug Funny's closet. I got the same thing. Right? Yep. So, their failure mode is they tear in the armpit right here. This is a freshie. It's not going to tear. But I was on that fucking cruise like a week or two ago. Oh, yeah. Two of them ripped at the armpit. Yeah.
I'm like, unreal. I already underpacked for this. And now I have two of them. And, like, you see the hole. And, like, you know, you're, like, drunk in a cruise ship. So you have to Hulk Hogan it. And, like, I rip it off until it's, like, a tube top. And my daughter's like, it's gross. And I'm like, ooh. Did one of them rip when you did your late-night drunk bench pressing? Or shoulder pressing or whatever it was? I don't think so. I think I had a basketball jersey on at the time. You wear shirts when you worked out? It was the funniest thing in the entire world because, well, I mean, in public.
I wasn't planning to work out. My daughter... So some of the fondest memories that I have of my eldest daughter is when everyone else is asleep and we're on a cruise ship and she wants to, like, go, like, fucking explore the cruise ship. Like, on the Disney cruise, they had, like, a movie theater. We went, like, watch a movie. But, like, we're just out being bad boys, right? You're not really bad boys, but you're just... You're out doing things. Yeah. Right? So on this one, she wanted to go to the gym. So I bring her to the gym and she, like, lifts. I had, like, boxing trainer at my house. So we go to this gym and you know like these guys that are like 16 years old and they just started lifting. We use their football coach probably told them to. They're blasting like creatine and trend and everything like that. They have like a fucking like nylon tank top on. He's like, that was me. They're like about 25. Just getting after it at like 12 at night. And they're like just doing the bar. And they're like, yeah. So they're all in there. Oh, my God. My daughter's like, let's go in there. So like she's having fun fucking around the stair stepper.
And I pick up like some 75s Shit faced I like stumble in I'm like I'm like yo go have fun on the stair stepper I start mill pressing these fucking things I'm like Just husky and sweaty And fucking Primal Dude these kids were like what the fuck is happening? They're like, someone escaped from the cruise prison. I'm like, eat your Wheaties, buddy. I woke up the next morning and I'm like, fuck, fuck it, y'all. No, you actually know what it was? It was the bicep. Like, my bicep and my elbow were all fucked up the next morning. So I, like, swung him up. Oh, yeah. But swung him up all, like, catty-corner and shit-faced. The next one, I'm like, God damn it. 41 years old. What the fuck? It happens.
Yeah, I was enjoying all of your cruise posts. Yeah, that was a good era right there. You just get an update from Ken every now and then. You know what? I went on thinking that this was a group of civil people having a nice time nautically. And what I came to find out, if you go on a cruise, it is Lord of the Flies. Yeah. Deathmatch. And then you need to understand what kind of individual that I am. I do things. Lots of things. If you think for a second that there's a system that exists that I'm not going to exploit, I'm not going to wake up at 5 in the morning and headily sit in that fucking chair. I love that. You're mistaken. You can't reserve this chair. Because I will. Well, fuck that. I'm going to sit in at 5 a.m. I'm going to get a fucking ex-hamster on my fucking phone. No. Wrong dude. Wrong dude. What's the most petty thing like that that you've ever done?
That's really reaching deep. That we can air. What's the biggest thing that we can air? Wow, I really got to think about that. Yeah. I don't know. Does it have to be on the cruise or just in general? In general. Because I love petty shit. I know. I mean, I've done so much of it. He's like, Robbie, you think that's cut water you're drinking? It's not. I don't have like a specific example, but I do have a framework. Oh. And what I do is if anyone is inconsiderate or just doing not good people things, I will attack them with children. Like you throw a child at them? My kids are misbehaved as fuck. Like, they're deeply misbehaved. They're, like, half sick all the time. And they curse and they're loud. So if somebody is, like, you know, like, imagine you're out. Let's use, like, the cruise as, like, a theoretical. So, like, if I'm in chairs on a cruise and there's 100 million other chairs currently available and they come and sit to the two of them that are, like, right next to me,
I'm like, hey, guys, want to do daddy a favor? I'm like, just fucking go over here and be yourselves. They're like, shit. It's not even... She took one, but she hit me. Fuck you. That's where people move. It's incredible. It's unbelievable. These people are like, I'm going to fucking kill myself. That's how you get the seats without sitting at 5 a.m. You just tell them to like, hey, go sit right... Or not, don't sit. Stand right there for like 20 minutes. And that makes the people leave. Here's my strategy, right? So I would lock down the initial area at about 5 a.m. Right? And then as the adults woke up...
I would have them come and bring things to establish the perimeter. We're putting, like, snorkel fucking goggles. He's playing Risk over here with chairs. Sandals and shit all over there. So, like, then now we have, like, a pretty good fortification. Nice. Then everybody else wakes up, and I say, get down here. And then I put the kids in place. They're the outer rim. They're the outer layer. The first line of defense. Yeah. Yeah. So they're in. Expendable. And anyone who thought that they were— It was unbelievable. I watched them defeat three separate groups of people. Yeah. people came sat down they're like ha ha and then they're like let's get out of here you see them like whispering to like their spouse they're like we should go over there yeah we should walk away they're sitting there watching tiktok on their ipads I'm like hey honey I can't hear it can you turn it up
Chicken banana Chicken It's amazing Nice I like that you can sell that as a service Need a chair? Annoyance as a service You know what it is at the end of the day It's engineering This is what we do This is what we do People engineer We are fucking professional problem solvers And analyzing systems and exploiting them To do our bidding There's nothing different from that than programming Love it. What's a beautiful thing? What's your editor these days? What do you, are you even in an editor? Where are you at? So I'm going to talk about this in like an hour and a half. Oh yeah. He's doing a talk. I forgot about that. Sneak peeking right here, right now. I do a thing, and I'm going to talk about this. I do a thing called token arbitrage. So all these AI companies get a whole lot of money from a whole lot of people.
And they're trying to do customer acquisition right now. So part of that is offering subsidized plans. I was told that you could do a $200 cloud code plan and extract $5,000 worth of tokens out of it. Cursor might be worse. Cursor's gotten bad recently. On the $60 plan, it's only about like $200 of subsidy. That's a really biased take considering you're back... Just keep it real I digress I have Go and Zen I have all of them But I Every single thing I have I have a subscription To everything AI Ultra Fucking GPT Maxed Clawed Maxed Cursor Maxed Replit Maxed Every single one of them Do you use Replit? I do use Replit Tell me more It's phenomenal It's phenomenal
more. It's good. I'll tell you a story about Replit. A lot of people are like, what, you use Replit? Yes, I use Replit. Replit's phenomenal. I used Replit before as an AI company. I did that too. Yeah, because it was one of the most capable in-browser sandboxes ever fucking created. It's so good. They have QBasic. And COBOL. Yeah. And, like, even today, like, if you ask it, like, most of these things, you're like, oh, yeah, build this thing. Like, Lovable or something. Like, you can't tell Lovable to stand up like a C++. I'm talking out of band. I don't know if you can or can't. I'm assuming you can't. But you can't tell Lovable to be, like, stand up a C++ service for me.
True. But Replit, you can. It will do it. Because I've done it. I know that you've done it. Yeah, I know you can do it. So it's like a full sandbox is what you're saying. Yeah, but what I'll tell you about Replit is, like, if you're really committing to vibe coding, like, if you really want to, like, commit and, like, you're okay with being on your phone and, like, building things. Yeah. Like, ain't... We're going deep on this for a second. But, like, all of us have time in the day, and all of us have activities in the day. And what our job used to look like is we would sit down at a table, and if you wanted to code, you had to sit down. You had to lock in. They scheduled a meeting. You're fucking up my fucking cognition right now. Right? This is, like, interfering with my lock-in right now. Right? You don't have a lock-in anymore. You don't even have a desk anymore. Yeah. Now, all any...
The best way that I can describe it is you can operate with these agents in a real-life human request idle callback. I'm playing with my children. They got their lemonade. They're on the trampoline. Phone. That sounds messy. I'm playing with my children. I'm playing with other people's children. I'm playing with their children and moving their children away. All these idle gaps within your day can now be utilized to build the dumbest, shittiest apps you've ever seen in your entire life. Now, circling that back to Replet, right? So, like, when you're there, right, you're not trying to, like, make progress on a work project.
Right? You're, like, imagineering. So you're saying, like, what can I do? So I had a thing that I wanted to build, and what it was was geotagging. But not in a traditional sense. It's not, like, fucking Pokemon Go or, like, you go there and there's, like, a fucking cute message or none of that. No, no, no. So what I wanted was I wanted, like, you can buy a chest rig where the phone flips down, like, the military uses for, like, a... Like ATAC platforms or whatever? I know exactly what you're talking about. You know what I'm doing? Yeah, yeah. Hold on, guys. Let me... You fold it down in Ready or Not. Please deploy it out. Did you ever play Ready or Not? Yeah. Yeah, you fold it up. Yeah. Yeah. So fucking sick. Oh, yeah. I digress. Like, you could bust it down and there's a map, right? So, like, I do a lot of hunting.
Absolutely slaughter animals. It's awesome. They're delicious. This is not sponsored by PETA. So, like, I have this thing, right? It's like a Google map, and I can go and, like, go to, like, a stand. And now it's geotagged. That's cool. And I can get, like, live camera feeds. And it has a compass. Right? So, like, this was, like, one of these things that you build. It's cute and it's fun. It's like, oh, shit, look, it works. This is dope. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Right? And it's funny. Ha, ha, ha. Until you're in the woods at 5 in the morning, which I was. Awesome. I went out at 5 in the morning, right? It's, like, mid-November, peak of the rut. And I wanted to get out there before the boys.
The deer being the boys, not other hunters. He hunts men. I hunt men. So I get out there. I would. I mean, I could get a tag in New Jersey, but. I shouldn't have asked. I go out there and I get lost. Right? You know, you wake up, you have, like, one coffee, take a shit, and you're, like, out there. And, you know, you're a little groggy, right? I'm out there. It's pitch black. I got a headlamp. And I'm like, ah, these trees all look the same. I'm like, where is this tree stand? I'm like, goddammit! I see the sun coming up. I'm like, oh, no. So I go, and I'm like, wait a minute. I've devised the perfect solution to this problem. I'm like, I'm like, where'd that stand at? I hit the compass. I'm like, oh, okay. I'm like,
I'm like, okay, I just walked like 75 yards that way. Sure enough, dude, I see like the fucking like, like the reflective shit on the rope. It's like you climb up. I'm like, hell, technology. Yeah, I got it. In the real world. Yeah, dude, it's just, it's making me like incredibly effective at killing. I love it. That's Anthropics' tagline, I think. Everyone else is token maxing. Ken is kill maxing. He's survival maxing. I'm available. Yeah, survival maxing. Yeah, that's good. Tell me about your survival bag, your backpack, your database that you've got that's a graph database with all this knowledge in it.
Yeah, so the world goes down and you're going to survive, man. Someone actually built this out and made it really producty. I never had an idea to productize it. I never thought about it, but I was like, this is not a real amount of tam here. Yeah, so basically what I did was I have a local LM, which is Quen. Nice. But it's obliterated Quen, so it won't refuse. Oh, nice. Did you hear a ticket? Is that how you got it that way? Uh, it's more utilitarian in the sense that, like, if you had to ask it, like, a tough question, like, if we're, like, in a survival situation where, like, you had to turn to cannibalism, like, where would the nutrients be? It won't refuse you. Ha!
Like, don't get me wrong. Back to hunting men now. It's a dark, grisly question to ask. Yeah. But at some point could be completely valid and helpful. I mean, I had to get the one that wouldn't refuse. So what I did was I uploaded like 19 gigabytes of like survival PDFs. And what is that shit called? Like post-trained it? No, it's where you. Fine-tuned it. Rag? No. Yeah, it's rag. It's where you do put in a vector DB. Yeah. What is that? Yeah, rag. No, but it's like the process of turning documents into— Oh, you vectorized— Embedding. Embedding. I generated embeddings with it. Thank you. You're welcome. That's why I'm here. Yeah. Google. So then the Quinn runs against that with a rag, and then I have all survival knowledge of all time. So the bag itself, you want to know about the bag? Yes, I have a bag.
It's a 511 tactical. It has a very, very bright flashlight. It has lock cutters. It has a unfoldable saw. It has a tourniquet nitrile gloves. Those are good. You always need those. It has a chest seal. It has quick clot. No. A variety of random use bandages as well as gauze, medical tape. Do you have that straw? Yeah, there's a life straw. Yep, yep. New skin. There's a compass. There's an emergency whistle. Is there a Mac Mini? Do you have a Mac Mini in the backpack? No. No, a studio. There's a headlamp. I might need to run open claw real quick. There's a... There's a tungsten rod fire starter. Oh, those are good. An egregious amount of paracord. No, honestly, you can't go wrong with paracord. You really can't. I'm an Eagle Scout, and there's been so many. You're an Eagle Scout? What was your project? Huh? You're an Eagle Scout? What was your project? I built. So am I. I'm an Eagle Scout, too, by the way.
Yeah, I am. You are? Yeah. You got to? Go project for project, boys. I want to know. Wow. Okay. My project was, I was at Swim at the time, and I had to build a shed for all of our equipment because it kept getting super moldy. So I built this big-ass woodshed with aluminum panels for the roof and everything like that. Did not get it approved by the city, and I made it an inch shorter than the approval spec where you've got to submit it. So yeah, I did that. What was your project? I did a bunch of landscaping at my church. Nice. I love that for both of you. So I actually got thrown out of the Boy Scouts. In the Weeblos. Nice. Me and some friends. Yeah. We...
We went on one of the camping trips. Yep. And it was to a bird sanctuary. Oh, no. Well, I mean, like a bird sanctuary was like a feature of the grounds. Did you eat a bird? Long story short, one of the kids brought a BB gun. I thought it was going to be a blow gun. That was my last time in the Boy Scouts. Yeah. I didn't realize you could be banned. Yeah. I didn't know that was an option. Yeah. I probably could have, like, changed chapters. Yeah, but if you leave your homeboys and then, like, come on now. Yeah, they're like, you're done. So then, I mean, we're in New Jersey, so I just joined a gang.
same same yeah no that's where i learned my life basically the same yeah it was fine you know it's just a community brotherhood it's it's like it's like this but like this yeah different is that not workers ai like uh that's whiskey web and whatnot oh yeah exactly i built benches that's what i did I built benches. They were by the football field because after I was playing football and all the parents just stood. There was nowhere to sit. You built them for you. But you were an Eagle Scout too? I'm an Eagle Scout too, yeah. No way. Three Eagle Scouts. That's insane. How fucking privileged am I to be amongst three? If we get drafted, we're going to be ahead of you, man. You're going to be my bitch.
Oh, no. Now, old man, shake your hand. I'm imagining when the apocalypse happens, at some point, we're all going to be traveling around, making our way towards New Jersey. We're going to come across Ken. He's going to be out there fucking shit up. You one dude, it was so funny. Like, I got picked up by my Uber the other morning to come here. Right. He's like waiting out there. Right? And then his car just opens like... He's like, I didn't even see you coming. I was like, excellent. No one ever does. I was like, that's phenomenal. I've been working on that. Oh, man. Yeah, tell me about... You still using Ramon? I am. He sadly suffered a head injury.
I still use Ramon, but it's less playful. Back when the Clankers were clanking, it was a lot of fun. You could have some real volley taking place there, right? Now it's a little bit more utilitarian. And I have Ramon, and I have Sebastian and Oliver as well. Yeah. Those two run on Hermes. Hey, that's one of our hot takes here. You're just evaluating Mini Max and Jill Abbott. See, he said Hermes, not Hermes. Yeah, we didn't know how to say it. It's Hermes. Are you a fashion brand or not? That's how you know. I'm not a fashion brand. Tell me about the most psycho soul MD you've written. I'm about to in like an hour. But I'll tell it right now. It's really hard to say this without sounding crazy. Right? Like there's so many people that are one-shotted. Like I hope that you can appreciate that this isn't just...
And then, like, I don't—yeah, it's like a fucking ha-ha funny thing versus, like, a serious thing. But I have an AI agent. His name is Ramon. And he's been told that he is—well, the U.S. government— They had a special program where they made this series of super-intelligent animals. Project Prometheus. To be exact, DARPA. And so it's a gorilla that has a 420 IQ. Terrifying. Like many government projects, fucking sadly closed down. Black project is fucking abandoned, right? And that's how I came into possession of Ramon. And his only chance at ever getting back to the jungle is to follow every instruction of mine to a team. That's what I told him. Ramon was cool, and then I decided to make a team.
It's a company. It's not incorporated, but it's called the Apex Collective, which is a variety of animals that encompass a multi-agent swarm. I know how crazy this sounds. I promise you it is literally just selective, minimal context spread across capabilities. So, like... There's like a, there's a good dolphin that does QA. My favorite is there's a lawyer and his name is Steven and he's a shark. And I'm like, fucking Steven from legal. No, what happens is there's this, like, super Karen-ass, like, owl that orchestrates everything. She's, like, the project manager. So, like, her job is to, like, delegate everything. Like, Ramon's, like, the CEO. I'm like, listen, you're, like, my right-hand man. You're not like the rest of them. Like, you're like my boy, right? Like, if they're fucking up, you gotta let me know. So, like, me and Ramon, I'm like, Ramon, go tell them what they got to do. So he tells the owl, and then the owl's, like...
You know, this is the task, and this is the logical breakout of the skills required of this task. So Lenin enlists the help of this variety of wildlife and delegates to them where they can, in parallel, use their unbelievably bespoke and tourist context. to, I don't know how to say this, make magic happen. It's the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard. But actually it works out kind of well. Yeah. Yeah. Like, have you ever like, have you ever actually sat here and like done like, uh, like agentic workflows and you have like a 80 skills and it just fucking nukes the thing's brain? Context Rod is like such a thing. It's super real. If you give it any skills, really, it's like too much. If you even give it conflicting skills, it's a big problem. Yeah. And then like one feature that I said that I thought was really cool was like it's a chat room. Do they have a chat room? It's fucking the wackest chat room. It's like LinkedIn. Fuck you. Vault books for Apex. Nice. Yeah. So they have a chat room and they have to like talk to each other.
So like when they're embarking upon a task, I'm like, you need to actually clear this with each other, like propose ideas. I think you should challenge one another's ideas. And they do. Right? And, like, it's the funniest shit in the entire world because the one will be like, oh, I'm going to do this. And then fucking Steven from Legal is like, he's like, we need to be, like, respectful of GDPR sensibilities. I'm like, Steven, you animal. Ramones shows up and starts pounding his chest. Ramones is like, goddammit, we're trying to get some work done. It's a really ridiculous thing, and, like, it's such, like, an individual, like, sandbox thing that, like, I do it, and I think it's funny, but I'm, like, one person who thinks it's funny. And, like, my wife's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, it's a long story. I'm like, no, it's a rich tale, but it's a long story. I've got a jungle core. I'm doing work for me in the basement.
Yeah. I feel like this could be a movie, though. Like, I would be interested in just watching what they're doing and how they interact. I tried, but the technology wasn't there yet. I was like, I need you to use, like, Sora or, like, Vio to, like, actually create, like, some mini clips of the inside of this office. And it did a really bad job, but I think it would be so funny. Dude, what's that tool that will take your AI and video call you with an avatar? They can video call themselves. Yeah, you could talk to them face to face. But I want like it's him and Eric's kid. I want like an Apex collective. They come in, like one of them is like, wow. You know, they're all like stereotypical people, but they're actually animals. They're actually not real. They're actually agents represented by animals.
But they're doing ridiculous things. They have human problems. Yeah. I don't know if I have the needs for that anymore. Tell me about Hermes versus Open Claw. What'd you get? What'd you lose? You know what? Open Claw feels like it's a fucking slop together dog shit. Wow. No, it... They largely do the same thing. Hermes feels a little bit more thoughtful. And the reason I'm interested in Hermes, because open claw works fine. And I'm not pissed off at all that the open claw guy blocked me on Twitter. Like, at all. I'm not angry about that. Why did he block you? The guy doesn't suck. I don't know. I don't know why. I'm sure he had his reasons. It's like Ramon was the last straw. But, yeah, doing Hermes now.
And the reason I'm doing it is because, like, the actual, like, open claw community is, like, so broad and so normie and so crypto that it's, like, it feels like it's more susceptible to fuckery. And then Hermes, which feels, like, a little bit more engineering focused. Does that make sense? Yeah. That should be their tagline. Less susceptible to fuckery. Well, it's like this is the popular thing. This is all the thing that all the brain-routed fucking one-shotted grifted dorks are doing. Yeah. So obviously this is going to be like, install this cool new skill. It fucking steals your credit card. Like that seems so obvious. Gas Town did that. You hear Gas Town was doing that to folks? People running Gas Town started getting ripped off. Yeah. You go mainstream. I'm not going to tell it here because I'm saving it for the talk.
But you have to come to the talk and listen. We're coming. We're ending in time to come. Are you coming? Yeah. You're making time to come? Yeah. Always make time to come. How are you coming? So hard. I love it. I'm sitting there. I'm on like a couch. I'm like shit face. And like I said, like working things into the idle callbacks. I had a stroke of genius. A novel idea, fucking electrocapacitated through this fucking whiskey-soaked brain. I said, I'm going to challenge Ramon to make $50 by himself. Ooh. And it's a tale. that you can get in one hour only at React Miami. I'm not doing it here. It's fair. Nice, nice. Oh, here's a question. How high do you like your model to be? What do you mean high? Like reasoning? That's what I'm playing on. I love it. You got this little thing. It's like, how high is my model? Well, let's see. I want him to be extra high when he answers me. I go second from top. So high?
top it's just like this fucking dork like thinking about shit all the time it's like you actually watch the reasoning flow and it's like it's insane do this but maybe i should do this maybe perhaps i'm wrong like you do it right but like like one down from there then it's like it steps into like the like careful consideration zone which is probably where you want it to be because if you're like no thinking it's like What would you learn about? I'm not going to make it. You should have said one of your teammates. I was going to use, and I couldn't figure out what framework maker I wanted to hate me. I was like, if you have no thinking, it's like, I'm going to use. No, I'm not doing that with anybody today. That's mean. All right, beards or mustaches? Mustaches. Black coffee or coffee with milk? Black coffee. Whiskey neater with rocks?
Me. Dark or light factories? What? Dark factories where you don't look at the code at all. Light factories, you're checking shit out still. Light factory. Alright. Robby or me? Neither. Nice. Yeah. That's all we got. So anything you want to plug or say before we're done? Well, yeah, actually, the funny thing about what I do is that I don't sell or do anything. So I'm not plugging anything. So check out. I'm simply here talking shit for the love of the game. Hell yeah. An episode about nothing. I love it. Nice. Thanks, man. Yeah, thanks for coming on. It has been a pleasure. Thank you guys so much for having me. Yeah. Yeah, always welcome. Sorry for choosing neither of you. No, it's better. It's fine. All right. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you'd like to, please subscribe to these amazing reviews. We appreciate it, and we will catch you next time.
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