RobbieTheWagner 
Charles William Carpenter III 
Ben Holmes [00:00:00] Robbie Wagner: Hey, what’s up everybody? This is Whiskey Web and whatnot. The podcast with way too much eye contact.
[00:00:09] Chuck Carpenter: yeah, that, that’s finally the what not that we dialed in is eye contact. It’s a funny joke because, uh, Robbie and I have the prompter now so that, you know, the camera’s right there and it fixes this massive problem. We took an audience poll and they were tired of us looking astray at random, uh, areas and, uh, and hopefully this improves our, our listenership.
[00:00:30] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, we’re just kidding, obviously. anyway, we have a special guest today, Ben Holmes. What’s going on, Ben?
[00:00:36] Ben Holmes: What’s going on? Yeah, I’m doing great. How are y’all doing?
[00:00:41] Chuck Carpenter: superb.
[00:00:43] Robbie Wagner: day.
[00:00:43] Robbie Wagner: , for anyone who has not seen you around the interwebs, could you please give a few sentences about who you are and what you do?
[00:00:49] Ben Holmes: Yeah, totally. So my name’s Ben. I go by be Holmes Dev pretty much everywhere. So you’ll see me around Twitter, YouTube, discord, any [00:01:00] forum where nerds, , collaborate GitHub course. , I’ve been a software engineer for, well, all my whole career, kind of my whole life. , I’ve been working at Astro as a senior maintainer and as of next week, or I don’t know what it’ll be by the time this is recorded, but, uh, joining Warp as a product engineer.
[00:01:22] Ben Holmes: So continuing the, the road, I, I guess if there’s a theme in stuff that I do, it’s making developers’ lives a lot better, trying to build whatever they’re trying to build. So just keeping on that train.
[00:01:33] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that’s cool. Robbie uses Warp.
[00:01:35] Robbie Wagner: I Nice. Okay. How you liking it?
[00:01:38] Chuck Carpenter: that’s Yeah.
[00:01:38] Robbie Wagner: Love it. Yeah. The only complaint I have right now is I’m out of, uh, agent credits, so,
[00:01:45] Chuck Carpenter: If
[00:01:46] Ben Holmes: We could slip under the table. I mean, if you send me some whiskey, I’ll send you some credits. I
[00:01:51] Ben Holmes: think it’s, I
[00:01:52] Ben Holmes: think it’s a
[00:01:52] Ben Holmes: good relationship. I don’t
[00:01:54] Ben Holmes: know.
[00:01:56] Robbie Wagner: But yeah, I think having that built in is, is super nice. Like, I, I liked [00:02:00] work before. I didn’t really fully leverage all of the features, but I’ve been like learning more about it, doing more things with it recently, so.
[00:02:06] Ben Holmes: Yeah, I mean it shot up in feature set probably in the past like couple months. ‘cause I just tried it way back in 2020 or something like that because I was using hyper term at the time, which was like an electron based terminal. I, I don’t know why. I just liked that it had a JavaScript config file and I just went with it and they realized, wow, it gets slow.
[00:02:28] Ben Holmes: Even for like normal things, this probably isn’t good. It eventually was no longer actively maintained. Uh, this warp came along and said, Hey, we’re built in rust, so we’re a lot faster. And by the way, we have like a command pallet so you can jump between things like VS code and you can like copy, paste little blocks of execution that you run.
[00:02:48] Ben Holmes: That was like the original feature that I came on the scene with. So I’ve always loved that. And now all of a sudden you can just like ask it to do anything for you, and it will, like I’m in a jam with Git [00:03:00] and I have no idea how to revert this. Can you help me? And it’ll just run the five GI commands for you and get you back where you are.
[00:03:07] Ben Holmes: So it’s, it’s progressing really quickly. You can, it’ll edit code for you now. It’s becoming a full on cursor replacement. I don’t know what the future holds, but yeah. They’re, they’re going deep or we are going deep
[00:03:18] Ben Holmes: on all of Yeah. to see, see what the
[00:03:20] Ben Holmes: limits They, you, you’re the guy. You’re the new CEO. It’s, it’s gonna be amazing.
[00:03:26] Ben Holmes: that last part, we, we may, we may have to
[00:03:28] Ben Holmes: cut, it may have to cut it. Yeah.
[00:03:31] Chuck Carpenter: Uh,
[00:03:32] Ben Holmes: Whiteboard Officer is, is an easy title to use. I think that’s always gonna stick around.
[00:03:38] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. All right. Yeah, we can, we can stick with that no matter where you go. You’ll always be that.
[00:03:42] Ben Holmes: Yeah.
[00:03:43] Ben Holmes: Yeah.
[00:03:44] Robbie Wagner: So speaking of going deep on things, let’s go deep on this. Chuck.
[00:03:48] Ben Holmes: Okay. Okay. about this.
[00:03:49] Chuck Carpenter: now we might have different ones because Robbie and I ordered at a certain time and then ordered for you at a different time. so I don’t know. We’ll see. so this is the Heaven [00:04:00] hill grained to glass rye. So they do a couple of different, , bourbons and r this particular one was distilled in 2017 and bottled in 2024 Uhhuh.
[00:04:11] Chuck Carpenter: There we go. , this one is 123.2 proof, so quite hot. , we’ll see how that goes. Uh, 63% rye, 24%. Oh, I can’t read it. That’s why I put it on this other screen. Corn and 13% malted barley. Yeah. I need readers. I’m getting old. yeah, but they’ll all be six years old regardless.
[00:04:34] Robbie Wagner: Nice. Yeah. it out of norland glasses.
[00:04:39] Robbie Wagner: Norland
[00:04:39] Robbie Wagner: glass.com.
[00:04:40] Ben Holmes: Okay. There you go.
[00:04:44] Chuck Carpenter: , thank you to our sponsor, Norland Glass. Uh, thank you to our sponsor Warp. Uh, they don’t know it yet, but when they get the bill, they will realize it now.
[00:04:52] Ben Holmes: I did not know I was in the middle of
[00:04:54] Robbie Wagner: as well.
[00:04:55] Ben Holmes: Um, oh, wow. Yeah, they’re
[00:04:57] Ben Holmes: all,
[00:04:57] Ben Holmes: they’re all
[00:04:57] Robbie Wagner: popular
[00:04:58] Robbie Wagner: episode.
[00:04:58] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Chuck Carpenter: all
[00:04:59] Ben Holmes: Wait, [00:05:00] I just got an Apple Pay charge. What is,
[00:05:02] Ben Holmes: what is
[00:05:03] Ben Holmes: this? Huh?
[00:05:04] Chuck Carpenter: have never sent me your number. It gets
[00:05:06] Ben Holmes: Yeah, it’s from www. That’s not very descriptive. Alright.
[00:05:09] Chuck Carpenter: No. Yeah, it’s, it’s just from the internet in
[00:05:12] Ben Holmes: This is just from the internet.
[00:05:14] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:05:14] Ben Holmes: Yeah.
[00:05:16] Chuck Carpenter: Ooh,
[00:05:16] Chuck Carpenter: It smells like ginger ale to me.
[00:05:18] Robbie Wagner: I was gonna say something much different. It smells like, you know, the pool floats that like have the cup holders in them, but like a bunch of cup holders, like the entire float
[00:05:28] Robbie Wagner: is
[00:05:29] Robbie Wagner: like,
[00:05:29] Chuck Carpenter: Oh yeah. Like the flat one that has like, and what, what, you know, it’s a cup holder wherever you might want it to be. What it really is is like additional water holder, because that’s what ends up in there. Yes.
[00:05:40] Robbie Wagner: So imagine that you’ve unwrapped a new package of that and you poured a bunch of pineapple juice into all of the cups. That’s what I’m getting.
[00:05:51] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Are you catching those notes? I mean, it’s, uh. We took some advanced, , what would be a whiskey sommelier. Anyway, we took, we took some advanced [00:06:00] courses on this to develop these, these, uh, aromatics and these
[00:06:03] Ben Holmes: Yeah. I don’t even think Mid Journey could do something with that. It’s too
[00:06:09] Ben Holmes: niche.
[00:06:10] Chuck Carpenter: if you opened up a fresh pool float, but only the one that
[00:06:15] Ben Holmes: Only the one.
[00:06:16] Chuck Carpenter: mostly useless cup
[00:06:18] Robbie Wagner: it has the right ratio. If you filled it up with, pineapple juice that you would get the amount of plasticy smell and the
[00:06:25] Ben Holmes: Okay. the plastic and the pineapple Okay.
[00:06:28] Chuck Carpenter: I mean, I do have light notes of pineapple now that you’ve said that, which is really ridiculous. But
[00:06:34] Robbie Wagner: All right. I’m gonna
[00:06:35] Chuck Carpenter: you’re in Charleston area. , and there’s a pineapple fountain there that I remember. Yeah.
[00:06:41] Chuck Carpenter: Anyway, that’s all I got. I don’t know what
[00:06:44] Chuck Carpenter: that
[00:06:44] Ben Holmes: It’s very postcard worthy. Yeah. That’s in the downtown area.
[00:06:48] Ben Holmes: one that you can actually like jump in and walk around if you want to.
[00:06:52] Chuck Carpenter: Nice.
[00:06:53] Ben Holmes: It’s pretty
[00:06:53] Ben Holmes: cool.
[00:06:54] Chuck Carpenter: Hang out with Bill Murray.
[00:06:55] Ben Holmes: I’ve never, have I ever seen him. I know someone who is in [00:07:00] his neighborhood, so it’s like multiple connections
[00:07:03] Ben Holmes: removed,
[00:07:04] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:07:05] Ben Holmes: but he’s around. He’s definitely around.
[00:07:07] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. If you go to his minor league baseball team or something, then maybe you see him. That’s what I’ve heard. I haven’t seen him either. That’s like a, that’d be a fun little, little game. Find Bill.
[00:07:19] Ben Holmes: Fine.
[00:07:20] Chuck Carpenter: Find Bill Oh yeah. Hmm. getting old.
[00:07:23] Ben Holmes: How old is he?
[00:07:24] Chuck Carpenter: I think he’s
[00:07:25] Chuck Carpenter: gotta
[00:07:26] Robbie Wagner: I’d say
[00:07:26] Chuck Carpenter: seventies.
[00:07:28] Robbie Wagner: is my guess.
[00:07:29] Ben Holmes: Hmm. Yeah. I don’t know. We have the
[00:07:32] Chuck Carpenter: same
[00:07:32] Robbie Wagner: There’s no way we could ever find out. So
[00:07:36] Ben Holmes: Nope. not look it up. Listen, I’m trying to give our guests the attention he
[00:07:40] Robbie Wagner: yeah, I said I’m not gonna look it
[00:07:42] Robbie Wagner: up. Oh, I have the GPT desktop app right in front of your face right
[00:07:46] Ben Holmes: now.
[00:07:46] Ben Holmes: We got, wow. ‘cause you’re like entirely too handsome. I don’t wanna see that all the time,
[00:07:52] Ben Holmes: I actually did move it to the right. That’s so funny. I’m seeing 74.
[00:07:56] Ben Holmes: Very
[00:07:56] Chuck Carpenter: Okay.
[00:07:57] Robbie Wagner: was close.
[00:07:57] Chuck Carpenter: So it’s pretty good.
[00:07:58] Ben Holmes: Very good.
[00:07:59] Chuck Carpenter: [00:08:00] Anyway. All right. I took a first sip. It is hot. It burned my mouth a little bit.
[00:08:05] Robbie Wagner: Yes. Does have, um, a little heat.
[00:08:07] Chuck Carpenter: but I get Wow. Yeah. in the beginning. Those like root beer or barrel candies, a little of
[00:08:13] Ben Holmes: Mm.
[00:08:14] Chuck Carpenter: And then Yeah, cinnamon. I’m not sure what else I’m grabbing there. There’s something kind of bitter, rainy, a little whatever
[00:08:22] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:08:23] Chuck Carpenter: finish.
[00:08:24] Ben Holmes: Root beer for
[00:08:24] Ben Holmes: sure. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Not a lot of pineapple, not
[00:08:30] Ben Holmes: much floaty.
[00:08:32] Ben Holmes: Maybe zero floaty actually.
[00:08:33] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yes. The smell to taste ratio is definitely a hundred to
[00:08:37] Chuck Carpenter: zero,
[00:08:38] Ben Holmes: Uh,
[00:08:38] Chuck Carpenter: I think, in that. Yes.
[00:08:40] Ben Holmes: yep.
[00:08:41] Chuck Carpenter: Alrighty, well, while you ponder any additional tasting notes, I will remind you and, uh, the two people who are joined us for the live stream, , are a highly technical rating system. Zero to eight tentacles, zero being horrible.
[00:08:58] Chuck Carpenter: Spit this out. Throw it away. [00:09:00] Those guys are assholes for sending it to me. Four, , middle of the road, you know, , it’s okay. You drink it or not. And then eight, clear the shelves. I want every bit of this I can see. I will never drink anything again now and I won’t put you on the spot for rating first.
[00:09:16] Chuck Carpenter: I’d like to do that, , to my much less handsome co-host, Mr. Robert
[00:09:20] Ben Holmes: I was expecting the word guest,
[00:09:22] Ben Holmes: but All
[00:09:22] Ben Holmes: right. no.
[00:09:25] Chuck Carpenter: And once I said less handsome. Listen, don’t undersell yourself, Ben. You’ve got youth on your
[00:09:30] Ben Holmes: I’ll take it. I’ll take it. Yeah.
[00:09:33] Robbie Wagner: okay, so this is awry, right? I can’t read from here.
[00:09:36] Chuck Carpenter: rah.
[00:09:36] Robbie Wagner: so
[00:09:37] Robbie Wagner: in terms of a RI tend to lack, , smal or Bader, but uh, I’m just kidding. This one is not bad. The proof is actually very high compared to the amount of burn. Like there is a good bit of burn, but I was surprised at how smooth it is.
[00:09:52] Robbie Wagner: It’s a little bit sweeter than your typical rye. I’m pretty pleased with it. I think it could maybe do with a little more [00:10:00] aging or something, like mellow it out just a tiny bit more. but I think it’s pretty good. I’m gonna give it a six.
[00:10:06] Ben Holmes: Hmm,
[00:10:06] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. Do you have feelings on this, Ben, or do you need me to jump ahead? Let you ruminate?
[00:10:12] Ben Holmes: I’ll, I’ll jump in. So my experience is mostly, well, I don’t have a lot of experience with whiskey. The one time that we tasted a bunch of different kinds of whiskey was for an astro offsite, actually, because Matthew knows his way around whiskey a little bit. , he’s in Kentucky. This is Kentucky straight.
[00:10:32] Ben Holmes: So I don’t know if Kentucky’s like a, a common place for whiskey to be made or
[00:10:38] Ben Holmes: brewed. Yeah. Okay.
[00:10:41] Ben Holmes: Gotcha.
[00:10:41] Chuck Carpenter: all right, well, we’ll have to whiteboard this a little bit. Yeah.
[00:10:44] Ben Holmes: Uh, so, so Kentucky is, is over here on this part. I, I’m not gonna try to draw Kentucky. I’m going, I’m
[00:10:51] Chuck Carpenter: no, How close is it to the Ohio River and then the Mississippi River and then Yeah.
[00:10:56] Ben Holmes: Yeah. ‘cause we went to one, the one [00:11:00] distillery in Utah, like actually the one, because of Mormon culture, it’s very, very hard to have a license to do it. but we tried a lot of whiskeys there and I feel like I prefer ones that are more spicy.
[00:11:12] Ben Holmes: I don’t know, because it’s not, it’s not like it sticks with you or anything. It just kind of, it just kind of hits you in the face. And I like that. And the, and the Rooter, the flavors are good too. Like the, the aftertaste is good.
[00:11:25] Ben Holmes: So I don’t have a lot of perspective. I’m gonna say a five. I don’t know.
[00:11:30] Chuck Carpenter: Nothing
[00:11:30] Chuck Carpenter: wrong
[00:11:30] Robbie Wagner: That’s fair.
[00:11:31] Ben Holmes: hopefully we go up from here.
[00:11:33] Ben Holmes: I don’t know.
[00:11:33] Chuck Carpenter: All right. There you go. yeah, or maybe we ruined it for you, you know, and you’re like, this is a five and everything else sucks. Now what the hell? so
[00:11:42] Ben Holmes: off my tentacles.
[00:11:43] Chuck Carpenter: yes. Well, they can grow back, apparently, which is
[00:11:46] Ben Holmes: Oh yeah, that’s true.
[00:11:48] Chuck Carpenter: can have up have like nine and beyond. So anyway,
[00:11:51] Ben Holmes: yeah. That’s weird,
[00:11:52] Chuck Carpenter: so in Utah, that’s High West Distillery there, which is actually a
[00:11:57] Ben Holmes: You know? Yeah.
[00:11:58] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. And they, it’s in [00:12:00] Park City. Actually they’re Maine, but now they have like a tasting room there and some other stuff the glass bottles are hand-blown too, which is really cool.
[00:12:09] Ben Holmes: Oh, they
[00:12:09] Ben Holmes: are? Oh, I didn’t even realize. Okay.
[00:12:12] Chuck Carpenter: that’s a cool place to visit. So yeah, you, you got a pretty nice experience around that one. , okay, so for r , and this is definitely barrel proof, so super hot in that sense, but, , yeah, I think it’s different and interesting for a rye. I like the sweet to spicy balance to it. for me, I feel like it’s kind of, it, it’s a little bit higher than the both, both of you.
[00:12:34] Chuck Carpenter: Like I compare it to So will, it has a rye that I really like. but even this is like. Probably like a wider spectrum of flavor for me. It is kind of knocking me back a little bit each time. Ha I have a taste, but it kind of changes as I get through it a little bit more. I feel like. I dunno. 7.2 for me, I’m a seven two on this.
[00:12:56] Chuck Carpenter: This one is not a cheap bottle also, by the way. And I like to take [00:13:00] into account price, into, , how I rate things. So this was, I want to say one 50 or above, something like that. 1 51, 180, somewhere around that. So it’s not something you’re necessarily gonna grab and sip on at a regular, you know, interval.
[00:13:15] Chuck Carpenter: But it is like, if you’re wanting something kind of different but also yummy throughout, or you want to impress a friend or something like that, like, oh, I would easily reach for this and be like, here’s a cool one you may not have tried. , so given those things, like it’s on the price your side, so it’s not your regular sipper, but I think it’s, worth the punch that it’s packing.
[00:13:33] Chuck Carpenter: So I’m going seven two. Oh yeah.
[00:13:35] Ben Holmes: I would like to increase my answer, to a six or a seven.
[00:13:39] Chuck Carpenter: You may do whatever you want,
[00:13:41] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Whatever. No
[00:13:42] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. We, we have not chiseled your vote into the trophy. Um,
[00:13:46] Chuck Carpenter: so
[00:13:47] Ben Holmes: But there is a
[00:13:47] Ben Holmes: trophy.
[00:13:48] Chuck Carpenter: There, yeah, definitely keep looking in the mail. A third gift may come. It definitely won’t be a bag of dicks. It might though.
[00:13:56] Ben Holmes: It might,
[00:13:59] Ben Holmes: I’ll
[00:13:59] Ben Holmes: take the [00:14:00] Odyssey
[00:14:00] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, that’s a candy
[00:14:01] Chuck Carpenter: thing is
[00:14:02] Chuck Carpenter: it’s literally bag of dicks.com.
[00:14:04] Robbie Wagner: Anyway,
[00:14:06] Robbie Wagner: let’s move on to things that have no faults, hot
[00:14:09] Robbie Wagner: ticks.
[00:14:10] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, hot
[00:14:10] Ben Holmes: warp. Oh.
[00:14:12] Ben Holmes: All right.
[00:14:12] Chuck Carpenter: Warp. Warp. for everything. So while you’re saying it’s like quickly becoming a cursor, , replacement and cursor, I’ve, I’ve used, windsurf, uh, AI quite a bit
[00:14:23] Ben Holmes: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:25] Chuck Carpenter: but yeah, I think I’m gonna have to give warp another swing.
[00:14:29] Chuck Carpenter: I don’t know.
[00:14:29] Robbie Wagner: You should, I’ve been telling you now that someone else has told you, maybe you’ll
[00:14:32] Robbie Wagner: listen.
[00:14:33] Chuck Carpenter: Yes. Because I don’t believe you and I think that you’re very bad. , And so I just kinda skip your recommendations on most things in life, although, oddly enough, we have a lot of the similar things. You don’t have this hat, but I have his hat. , we have these prompters, we have the same cameras.
[00:14:50] Chuck Carpenter: We’re like, we are the twins, but like, I’m the Arnold Schwarzenegger and he’s the Danny DeVito. Okay. So it’s like that. [00:15:00] Anyway, all righty. Sorry. Hot
[00:15:03] Robbie Wagner: Oh, that just reminded me that today is Jersey, Mike’s Day of Giving, and I have not gotten us up there anyway.
[00:15:10] Robbie Wagner: So inferred types or explicit types.
[00:15:14] Ben Holmes: I mean, if I’m going off of what I actually end up doing inferred types, but when I’ve added explicit types, I, I’m probably gonna bring up AI a lot in this conversation because my head’s been wrapped around how it affects the way I am writing code. And one benefit of like writing a descriptive function with a descriptive return type is suggestions will improve if you give it more handrails of what to do.
[00:15:40] Ben Holmes: Like cursor, tab completions are really, really good at just filling in the gap If you say, and it returns this, oh, okay. Now I will go ahead and check that. it’s also kind of nice to on, on functions that return a bunch of different things, like a switch case, if you just need to gate it to make sure if you add like a seventh case, that [00:16:00] it’s also gonna adhere to that type.
[00:16:02] Ben Holmes: So like if something’s complicated enough, I’ll throw a ty on there, but if I’m doing my day to day, it’s all inferred as it should be. I don’t know. It’s too much effort to type everything, especially when it’s really fancy objects and you just don’t even know what the shape’s gonna be yet. You just kind of leave it where it is and trust that the types line up.
[00:16:21] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I tend to like inferred as well. I always like. Hover it and make sure it’s returning the thing. I thought like before, I’m like, yeah, I’m good. But, , I agree. I do want to take just a second and we’ll come back to other hot takes,
[00:16:35] Robbie Wagner: but you mentioned Cursor a couple times, warps AI stuff a couple times, I’ve had a lot of issues with Cursor.
[00:16:43] Robbie Wagner: I’ve heard
[00:16:43] Ben Holmes: that
[00:16:43] Ben Holmes: Cursor
[00:16:43] riverside_ben_raw-synced-video-cfr_whiskey_web and wha_0332: is
[00:16:44] Robbie Wagner: supposed to be so good and I’m like, Hey, I don’t even know what I asked it, like, change this file somehow and it’s like, okay, let me do it. And it like doesn’t do it It’s Like it
[00:16:55] Robbie Wagner: doesn’t make any changes, but it says, it’s like, I’ve updated the file in this way and it like, prints out what it’s gonna [00:17:00] do.
[00:17:00] Robbie Wagner: And I’m like, okay, but could you
[00:17:01] Ben Holmes: Oh wow.
[00:17:02] Robbie Wagner: the file? And it’s like, you’re right, I didn’t update it and then it like updates it or like tries to update it and still does nothing. And then I was like, could you, could you stop telling me that you’re updating it without actually updating it? And then like the third or fourth time it just goes.
[00:17:16] Robbie Wagner: Hey, you’re right. I’m actually pretending to update this all the time and I’m just not gonna do it. Like, and I was like, what?
[00:17:23] Chuck Carpenter: Also, you’re outta credits.
[00:17:25] Chuck Carpenter: Please
[00:17:25] Ben Holmes: Shoot, I thought too
[00:17:27] Ben Holmes: long.
[00:17:28] Chuck Carpenter: Oh my gosh. That
[00:17:30] Chuck Carpenter: is
[00:17:30] Ben Holmes: So that’s not what I expect you to say. I, if I’m thinking about like what do I use cursor for and where does it fall flat for me, like the cursor, tab completions, like have you used those just like day-to-day code stuff? Does that
[00:17:45] Ben Holmes: work
[00:17:45] Ben Holmes: for you?
[00:17:46] Robbie Wagner: yeah, That stuff seems to get it right a good bit.
[00:17:49] Ben Holmes: Yeah. I feel like it’s a better version of co-pilot because it’ll tab around the file when you’re doing refactor, it’ll edit things behind the cursor. So I never miss closing [00:18:00] braces anymore. It just kind of molds it into place when I’m doing really deep react stuff. So it’s just great if you know you’re editing code, but I’m with you on the assistant stuff.
[00:18:10] Ben Holmes: My issues are a little bit deeper. ‘cause there’s, well, I mean there’s two ways to approach. code agent workflows. One of them is very explicitly, here are the files or directors you’re allowed to look at. Now go fix this problem. And that’s the way cursor does it. So you tell it whatever your current file is or the directory, you can say entire directories.
[00:18:29] Ben Holmes: Now it doesn’t work for me, but it, you can apparently, I don’t know, I need to try it again. , but if you do that, it’ll just adhere to that and make a suggestion. And I noticed that means if you ask it, make this more performant. For example, I was trying to fix something in my code where I thought, oh, this is doing a bunch of function calls to this library and it’ll be inefficient.
[00:18:51] Ben Holmes: Or actually, it was a package in our repo and it said, oh yeah, I’ll make a like a map so that we have O of one lookup and we save everything in a [00:19:00] nice cache and everything’s good. And it shared in the Discord ‘cause I thought, oh, this is a great suggestion. Look what it did. Then someone said, oh, I wrote that function.
[00:19:07] Ben Holmes: It already uses a cache. But it didn’t know because it was only told to look in the one file. It didn’t click through. Like I would’ve gone to definition to see what is this thing. I was trying to make it performant and it doesn’t do that. so now there’s a different kind of agent workflow that Klein uses.
[00:19:25] Ben Holmes: I don’t know if you’ve run across Klein at any point,
[00:19:28] Ben Holmes: but, or a
[00:19:29] Chuck Carpenter: C?
[00:19:30] Ben Holmes: uh, with a C, so C-L-I-N-E? Yeah, it’s, it’s a North Star for a lot of stuff Warp is doing. We’re trying to dial it in more, but it’s like an open source vs. Code extension that you can just go grab and put it in cursor or just anything. Give it a API key.
[00:19:47] Ben Holmes: You can use open router or just Claude, just like get Alaw key, put it in and instead of. You telling it the files, you can tell it, go fix this problem. And then [00:20:00] it’ll just go through all of your folders, all of your directories, decide which ones look like they’re gonna solve the problem, drill into those, read those files, so it takes a bit longer doing context gathering.
[00:20:12] Ben Holmes: And then it comes to you either with a game plan, if you ask it to just write a plan, it’ll write like a markdown file with mermaid diagrams. It’s kind of crazy, but it’ll like say, here’s how I’d approach it. Then you can flip it to act mode, and then it’ll like implement the plan. if you have a very focused prompt, then it will solve it.
[00:20:30] Ben Holmes: If you have very generic, I want to build an electron app that does this, that and the other, it can really go off the rails because Claude tends to go off the rails if you let it. but it’s just this really nice way of working where it’ll go out in the universe, it’ll look at all the files, it’ll read the ones that thinks are relevant, and then it’ll come back and solve your issues.
[00:20:48] Ben Holmes: And I found that it’s a lot more reliable doing that. and that kind of brings me to what Warps doing, , because Warp is in the terminal, it can also, it’ll reach for CLI commands more so, so it’ll [00:21:00] like actually run LS on the directories that it wants to look at in a similar way. Say, oh, these files look relevant.
[00:21:06] Ben Holmes: And then maybe it’ll, start the dev server, see if the error still occurs, stop the dev server, and then continue on with the flow. So it’ll like jump in, do a little debugging, jump back, and then it’ll edit files on your behalf as well. That part, I’ve noticed some weird issues of, it tells me it modified the file and it kind of didn’t.
[00:21:26] Ben Holmes: So similar to cursors like, oh shoot, it didn’t actually make the edit correctly. And the longer I let it run, the more likely it is to kind of fudge edits. So that’s something that needs to be worked on, I think like across the board for agents. But I just like the mental model of it’s just gonna do what I was gonna do anyways.
[00:21:43] Ben Holmes: Walk around a bunch of directories, figure out how the heck this project works, and then do a best effort fix and see if it worked. So that feels like the direction things are moving in. , and hopefully Cursor picks up something like that too, because I feel like their agent mode isn’t useful [00:22:00] beyond like a couple files that are in my head because it doesn’t really drill deep on the stuff that it probably should.
[00:22:06] Ben Holmes: But I expect the cursor team’s gonna like watch this and DM me saying, we’ve added this and you should go test it. They’re very, very forward whenever they have new things to try, which is super cool. So everyone’s racing towards this new idea. Uh, it’s probably the takeaway.
[00:22:21] Chuck Carpenter: I’d say that’s fair. so inferred types. Great.
[00:22:24] Chuck Carpenter: Thanks.
[00:22:24] Ben Holmes: Oh, yeah, yeah. Right question, right. Uh,
[00:22:28] Robbie Wagner: yeah. Sorry to derail us a bit
[00:22:30] Robbie Wagner: there.
[00:22:30] Ben Holmes: oh,
[00:22:30] Ben Holmes: I, I wanted to talk about that. I feel like it’s a blog post that’s just brewing or something
[00:22:35] Ben Holmes: like
[00:22:36] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. And we’re also not like hard and fast into these bullet points. Like, must check this, must check that, you know, there’s aspects, there’s questions in here that you’ve basically already answered, in conversation. Like, I don’t, I probably don’t need to ask you cursor or windsurf or war per ghostie.
[00:22:52] Chuck Carpenter: ‘cause turns out you have some bias,
[00:22:54] Ben Holmes: yeah, now Windsurf iss interesting ‘cause I tried it and I just thought the tab [00:23:00] completions weren’t as nice as cursor. That was kind of my only issue. And, uh, Z as well. I love the Z editor. It is like on, its like bare bones, the nicest editor I’ve ever used. But their tab completions are like kind of all over the place.
[00:23:16] Ben Holmes: They’re playing catch up. It, I don’t know it, I wish that it was more dialed in ‘cause otherwise, like z is what I want editors to feel like it’s built on rust, super fast, more friendly to vim users like me. so I, I just prefer it for those things. But AI completions matter a lot
[00:23:34] Ben Holmes: right not plugins and extensions and things that you can use on vs. Code forks like cursor.
[00:23:40] Chuck Carpenter: Right. Exactly. never ran into issues with extensions ‘cause I’m mostly doing what development projects?
[00:23:47] Ben Holmes: Five Astro tailwinds, react views felt. If all those are present, I’m probably fine.
[00:23:53] Ben Holmes: But you’re
[00:23:54] Ben Holmes: totally
[00:23:54] Robbie Wagner: Ember, so
[00:23:56] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Robbie. Robbie uses dead tech,
[00:23:59] Chuck Carpenter: so you [00:24:00] have to
[00:24:00] Ben Holmes: you use ember.
[00:24:01] Robbie Wagner: I do. Mm-hmm.
[00:24:03] Ben Holmes: that Joji,
[00:24:03] Ben Holmes: you
[00:24:04] Ben Holmes: use Emperor. Okay, nice.
[00:24:07] Ben Holmes: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
[00:24:07] Chuck Carpenter: He drives a DeLorean also so he can go back in time to its relevance from time to time. No, I’m just kidding. All right. I have friends there. They’re not gonna like that.
[00:24:15] Ben Holmes: yeah.
[00:24:16] Robbie Wagner: where did, where did we leave off?
[00:24:18] Chuck Carpenter: I, I don’t know. I jumped around a Editor battles. Yeah. I, I, knocked out a couple. Here’s what I wanna know.
[00:24:25] Chuck Carpenter: Get Rebase or get merge.
[00:24:27] Ben Holmes: Oh, that’s great. I still do Rebase, but not for any like philosophical reason. It was just in my first like true full-time gig. Everyone did Rebase, so I said, okay, I’m gonna learn that, and I’ve just stuck with it. But I felt the pain, if you try to rebase on Maine, you’ve got like 20 commits and it feels like you’re saying the same thing over and over and over again.
[00:24:50] Ben Holmes: Like, okay, fixed package log. Okay, fixed package log. If I merged, I knew that wouldn’t happen. So I’ve, I’ve wondered about the other side. I just, I haven’t jumped in. [00:25:00] I don’t know what the cons are. If you just do merge instead,
[00:25:02] Chuck Carpenter: Hmm.
[00:25:03] Ben Holmes: if either of you do that,
[00:25:05] Ben Holmes: I
[00:25:05] Ben Holmes: don’t mean,
[00:25:05] Chuck Carpenter: I
[00:25:06] Robbie Wagner: I always
[00:25:06] Chuck Carpenter: that’s that’s for Yeah. I Ray Bass crowd. Okay. If you know what you’re doing, I say rebase is the thing to do, but, uh,
[00:25:14] Chuck Carpenter: if I hit one of those where it’s like a hundred commits of the same thing, I tend to just like take all of my changes, just reset to Maine and just like add my changes. I’m not gonna rebase through
[00:25:26] Ben Holmes: I, that’s a good idea. Or you can tell war power through his rebates, man. Just
[00:25:31] Ben Holmes: like chew through. It may, it’ll probably wreck it if it was a hundred commits, but I like
[00:25:37] Ben Holmes: to try.
[00:25:38] Chuck Carpenter: if it, if it’s a hundred commits. what took you so long? That’s what I wanna know. What took you
[00:25:42] Chuck Carpenter: so
[00:25:42] Chuck Carpenter: long?
[00:25:43] Robbie Wagner: or
[00:25:43] Robbie Wagner: or people are
[00:25:44] Ben Holmes: That’s
[00:25:44] Chuck Carpenter: team. Yeah. Or you’re on a huge team or something. I don’t know. I have embraced merge when I’ve been on teams that merge. That’s fine. Like having been a consultant, you try to be a good visitor.
[00:25:58] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, okay. You take, you, you [00:26:00] don’t wear shoes in your home. Great. We’ll take those off while we’re here. That’s, that’s fine. It’s the analogy for me. But as far as like benefits of choosing it, I dunno. I, I’m never really seen it. So people just like that. I guess they don’t like rebasing or they don’t know how to use their tools.
[00:26:15] Robbie Wagner: I guess question before I ask this question. You said you use Vim, do you use it in like VS code or like outside of it?
[00:26:23] Ben Holmes: Yeah, I use Vim Motions, so I’m not a true Vim user. I guess I picked it up originally, , for Twitch streaming where there was one redemption you could do. Make me use Neo Vim for five minutes and that was my excuse to learn Vim motion. So at first it was a punishment, like I have to go leave comfy vs.
[00:26:44] Ben Holmes: Code open neo vim with very small config files. So nothing was really nice to use and I just learned some vim that way. And then eventually I thought, okay, so Neo Vim is a hassle and I don’t understand Packer at all, even [00:27:00] after watching a Prim Magen setup video for three hours. So maybe I should just focus on the motions.
[00:27:06] Ben Holmes: So then I did that and eventually had the confidence to just turn on Vim motions for like day-today work instead of just live streaming fun stuff. And it kind of stuck ‘cause you learn some really useful ones. Like if you learn ci, like just the CI characters, you realize how fast you can move like CI parentheses and you can just delete everything inside the parentheses and start typing.
[00:27:29] Ben Holmes: I ran into that so much. Or CI quotes and then rewrite some tailwind classes. Like it’s really easy to do. So it’s worth learning. Just a few basic motions and just plug it into whatever editor you’re using and it works fine in VS code. and I think, yeah, don’t turn on Vim motions and Bash. It’s really weird. It’s, I’ve tried it before. yeah. For editing. It’s really, really good. So I still stick with it.
[00:27:55] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, so there’s a middle ground. You don’t have to be all one or the other. That’s kind of [00:28:00] good to know. As I say, I’m sure Prime will be, very disappointed
[00:28:04] Chuck Carpenter: in you. But here’s the thing. I think he tricks us all into doing weird shit that make us worse so that he can seem better because of what he’s used to.
[00:28:13] Chuck Carpenter: I mean, that’s how I end up with a keyboard like this.
[00:28:15] Chuck Carpenter: That
[00:28:16] Ben Holmes: I tried. Yeah. Oh, still, how long have you been using
[00:28:20] Ben Holmes: it?
[00:28:20] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, uh, no, this is sat in a box for a good year or so. Like I got it and I tried it for a couple of weeks and then there was one other time in between that I was like, I’m gonna try again. I’ll just do an hour a day. And then I was like, I, I actually have 14 jobs and need, and I’m really
[00:28:35] Ben Holmes: it’s, it’s tough. Yeah.
[00:28:38] Chuck Carpenter: I’m back at it now.
[00:28:39] Chuck Carpenter: This is Mike, my first week back,
[00:28:40] Chuck Carpenter: so I just do an hour in the morning.
[00:28:42] Robbie Wagner: Yeah, I need to do that because that’s my problem though, is I, I do it for like a day. And I’m like, wow, I was slow. And then the next day I like have deadlines and I’m like, I can’t, I can’t type on this
[00:28:52] Chuck Carpenter: No.
[00:28:54] Ben Holmes: Yeah.
[00:28:55] Chuck Carpenter: it. I do an hour in the morning. It’s kind of like my reading. if [00:29:00] I try to say, oh yeah, I’m gonna read a bunch this weekend, da da da. No, it won’t work. It’ll like 30 minutes a day.
[00:29:06] Ben Holmes: Yeah. Just live stream and make a challenge. I have to use the Kinesis keyboard for five
[00:29:11] Ben Holmes: minutes. Just yes. Witching is tough.
[00:29:14] Robbie Wagner: Well, we’ll start a, uh, a new thing. This gave me a business idea. We’ll have the Vim Gym. You come in and it’s a, a gym where you just use a keyboard that is totally off of what you would normally use and you have to use Vim and you’ll learn it
[00:29:29] Ben Holmes: Yep.
[00:29:30] Chuck Carpenter: The Vim Jim,
[00:29:31] Ben Holmes: Hmm.
[00:29:32] Ben Holmes: Then Jim Scott exist. Yeah.
[00:29:36] Robbie Wagner: so I do want to. Regress back. ‘cause why I had asked that is this very important question is sidebar on the left or right in vs. Code.
[00:29:45] Ben Holmes: Ooh, it’s still on the left, but the one change I make, you know, that fat activity bar with those big icons,
[00:29:54] Ben Holmes: remove that, remove just that, and then learn the shortcuts to go between them, because there’s just [00:30:00] something aesthetically about that big bar with massive icons. I’m just like, no, I need to remove that.
[00:30:05] Ben Holmes: So I, I do that at least, but I know the argument for the right side because it doesn’t bounce your code around when you collapse it. It’s a good argument. It’s good. I just, I just haven’t changed it. I don’t
[00:30:17] Ben Holmes: know.
[00:30:17] Ben Holmes: It feels it’s an argument that makes sense. I don’t know how I would say it’s good. Like, I, I feel like that doesn’t, even though it bounces a little, it does not, it doesn’t affect me. Like I all right.
[00:30:28] Ben Holmes: I don’t know.
[00:30:28] Robbie Wagner: whatever. a thing for me. It’s not like this and then it’s like I can’t read it. It’s bouncing, uh,
[00:30:35] Ben Holmes: I tend to leave it open. I don’t
[00:30:37] Ben Holmes: know.
[00:30:37] Chuck Carpenter: I tend to leave it open too, unless in the, in the small occasions that I am just on the laptop screen and I have to make my text bigger because I am old. And at that point then I close it.
[00:30:49] Chuck Carpenter: ‘cause I want all the space. But normally, and I do use hotkey to move around files and stuff too, so I don’t know. Well, all right. We solved that major, major issue.
[00:30:59] Robbie Wagner: [00:31:00] Yeah. yeah. Solved everyone. Just so you know, the right answer is left always on the left.
[00:31:06] Chuck Carpenter: Just leave
[00:31:07] Robbie Wagner: you ask Jason Langsdorf, he’s the one that was like, oh, this has an objectively correct answer. At the right side.
[00:31:13] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah, I know, but there’s always someone who feels that way of like, oh no, I’ve figured this is solved. Yeah. , hold on here, chat. What do you, what? Do we have some chat here on this? Oh.
[00:31:23] Robbie Wagner: just just
[00:31:23] Chuck Carpenter: okay. Danny What up bro?
[00:31:26] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. I’m gonna teach him how to, uh, travel and not hurt his neck anyway,
[00:31:32] Robbie Wagner: Oh, was that a a problem?
[00:31:34] Chuck Carpenter: so he travels with this like screen, or it’s a thing that you clip onto your laptop screen and then it has like two extra screens Oh my, and then it, like, and he just has it on a table though, so, you know, you’re like looking and like, I think you need laptop stands to elevate up.
[00:31:52] Chuck Carpenter: And I use AR glasses so that I get a bigger screen and then can still just be in whatever comfortable position. [00:32:00] So anyway.
[00:32:01] Ben Holmes: like Vision Pro or? to
[00:32:02] Robbie Wagner: sponsor
[00:32:02] Chuck Carpenter: No, no, no. Yeah. Uh, no. I, I don’t make that kind of money. Uh, Yes.
[00:32:08] Robbie Wagner: Who does?
[00:32:09] Chuck Carpenter: I have, uh, gosh, rocket is what mine are called. so there’s a couple of different ones. There’s like X reel and rocket and whatever.
[00:32:16] Chuck Carpenter: I, I was in a coworking space for a little while and so I saw some dude which looked like, looked like he was just wearing RayBan and staring up and typing. And I’m like, what does this dude have going on? So find out, they’re like $300. So it’s like a pair,
[00:32:29] Ben Holmes: Doable. Yeah.
[00:32:31] Chuck Carpenter: external monitor. and the, the rocket ones I like, ‘cause I wear corrective lenses like you, , sometimes contacts, sometimes not.
[00:32:38] Chuck Carpenter: And you can adjust them. So like you can take your glasses off, put those on and adjust them, and they act as corrective lenses for the screen as well. And so I was like, yeah, done. Sold,
[00:32:50] Ben Holmes: Interesting. So, rocket. R-O-K-I-D. This episode is brought to you by Rocket Glasses. I can send them an invoice, but they’re in China so they probably won’t pay me.[00:33:00]
[00:33:00] Ben Holmes: Hmm.
[00:33:02] Robbie Wagner: That’s yeah, look at that. Yeah. um, what’s the word? I, I can’t Uh, sub headline tagline. What word words? Plural. I’m, I’m just going to quit now. , let’s go to some of these questions that aren’t hot takes, Chuck, because I think there’s some things we should dig into and we’re kind of, kind of done with the hot takes at
[00:33:21] Robbie Wagner: this point.
[00:33:22] Chuck Carpenter: Okay. Fine. Suit yourself. Jeez. do you have one in mind? Go ahead.
[00:33:26] Robbie Wagner: no, you, you go ahead. You go ahead, sir. You
[00:33:30] Robbie Wagner: first.
[00:33:31] Chuck Carpenter: yes, so I found this kind of interesting. It’s almost like a two part question. So you create a lot of content online and in those things you’re usually like, look at this thing I’m trying, and it does these cool things and there’s kind of a deep, deep dive there, , to a degree for your content.
[00:33:49] Chuck Carpenter: But then, the next one is, alright, look at this other thing, and I’m da da, da da. So the first part is like, do you ever find that that kind of stifles your own deep learning into [00:34:00] any particular technology or subject?
[00:34:02] Ben Holmes: Yeah, you’re speaking to like an existential crisis that I’ve had for a while. Like everything is awesome, but what to focus on and the beauty of Astro is I’ve gotten to explore the entire ecosystem because Astro supports everything. You can put React or viewers, felts, it’s very generic. Back
[00:34:28] Chuck Carpenter: Maybe you could. Have you
[00:34:30] Ben Holmes: uh.
[00:34:30] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. Sorry. I’m just giving you crap.
[00:34:32] Ben Holmes: It’s open source. It could be, it could support anytime. You can support it anytime. but yeah, like it’s, it’s very general. we’ve wanna explore all sorts of like database technologies too. , going from SQ l Light to MySQL with plant scale to Postgres, tried so based recently and that’s very different.
[00:34:51] Ben Holmes: so I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of breath in the stuff that I’m trying mostly to meet people where they’re at and see what tools they’re using because I don’t [00:35:00] love picking winners and in JavaScript, I mean, people really have not picked winners or at least people keep trying to make a new tool.
[00:35:08] Ben Holmes: That’s, that’s kind of the joke of JavaScript is people keep trying to make a new tool. Even though Claude tells everyone to use a React app, we’re still going to make spelt better. That’s just what it is. so I, I’m with you that. finding a focus is very useful and I’ve been figuring out what I would want to do.
[00:35:26] Ben Holmes: ‘cause I, I’m very good at finding very scoped projects, focusing on them, really, really hard shipping, and then, you know, putting it in maintenance mode, fixing bugs, and then moving on to the next challenge. Some people wanna stick with one important, like lifelong challenge or something like that, and I just, I don’t think that’s really me.
[00:35:47] Ben Holmes: So I do think there’s some truth in if you only do a one minute video, because that’s usually been my cap, you can’t go deep enough to really learn a technology. So I do get comments saying, you should [00:36:00] make a full length video about this tip because I didn’t know that you could. well, the video I’m putting out, you can put SQL L in the browser.
[00:36:08] Ben Holmes: That’s a very cool thing. You couldn’t do that before. , and for this one. It was actually born out of a conference talk that I gave at JS World Amsterdam, the other week. And I’ve done this a couple times in the past of going deeper on a technology, spinning some shorts out of it and then pulling like a full 20 minute, let’s live code this from scratch session.
[00:36:33] Ben Holmes: So it’s a very different format. Like I have like a me in front of the desk coding for a few different topics and then the whiteboard is just a lot of pyrotechnics and explosions and you should be excited about this. So I feel like I wanna do more on the full length side without it being like a massive 20 hour edit.
[00:36:54] Ben Holmes: ‘cause I’ve actually done that before. I’ve done a couple where I adapted the whiteboard to like a full length video. It took me 20 [00:37:00] hours. It’s like it was a, I can’t do that.
[00:37:02] Robbie Wagner: you need like a, some ai deep fake whiteboard stuff to where you can just be like, do this and it will like draw it I’ve. I’ve wondered, at least for editing, it’s tough because video editing technology is, well there’s two major players I know of that I use. One is Final Cut Pro, the like official Mac OS tool. You can run it on a MacBook Air and it’s great and cap cut, which is from TikTok and that’s what I use for like a second pass on all my videos, to add all the audio, all the visuals, all the effects because they have very trendy, nice looking overlays that you will not find a final cut plugin for.
[00:37:43] Ben Holmes: You have to go to cap cut for all this stuff. So I’m bouncing between two different editors. I have no idea how I’d automate anything that I’m doing and I’m like maybe operator. Maybe Claude can just like move my cursor and edit a video. It just feels so far off. I don’t
[00:37:59] Ben Holmes: [00:38:00] know. so the original question about like the focus of videos bounce between topics, I do wanna do more long form, , maybe, but also like doing multiple videos about a single topic because I do think in general I learn best just by seeing someone explain something for like a few minutes and then I’ll immediately have a project idea go off and build it.
[00:38:24] Ben Holmes: I’ve never completed like a course, I’ve never really wanted to make a course either. ‘cause I know I wouldn’t finish my own course. What am I doing? I would rather just find something exciting, get everyone excited about it, and then jump in the discussion when people go build with it. a really good success case for that was React server components.
[00:38:44] Ben Holmes: I built like a repo that just showed how you would DIY react server components because no one knows how to do that.
[00:38:52] Ben Holmes: Even to this day, although I tried to teach people, but I found random messages and forks of people [00:39:00] saying, yeah, I built my own React server, component server. ‘cause you open source this repo explaining the topic.
[00:39:05] Ben Holmes: It’s like, oh shoot, that’s kind of what I want. I just want people to find a springboard that tells you step one, and then they have ideas to go step 2, 3, 4, whatever. So I do think I wanna stick with the short format just because it’s how I consume things. It’s how I get excited and go jump off and go try something new.
[00:39:23] Ben Holmes: , but having more of a narrative and more of a focus is something I’ve really thought about. mean, I haven’t put my flag in the sand of how I build things, but maybe it’s time, maybe ember, maybe it’s time to say this is the Ember Channel. We only use this tool.
[00:39:38] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, I don’t know. It, it, I mean, a couple of businesses, so
[00:39:42] Ben Holmes: is don’t think it sinks businesses. it’s like the, the businesses that went all in on it tended to have been like businesses that were popular before because it was popular before. Not that it, like, because they used Ember, they weren’t a [00:40:00] successful no, no, Right. Yeah. Not, I didn’t mean that necessarily, but if you were trying to put your, yeah, yeah. Just in the sense of if you were saying, uh, like is there a trend around folks wanting to get into perceived older technologies because Ember continues to iterate and release new things in whatever else.
[00:40:23] Chuck Carpenter: I don’t
[00:40:23] Chuck Carpenter: know,
[00:40:23] Robbie Wagner: mean, rails is old and it’s
[00:40:25] Chuck Carpenter: Rails is
[00:40:26] Ben Holmes: Rails is
[00:40:27] Chuck Carpenter: Yes. Yeah. You just need a DHH to like come and have race cars and long
[00:40:32] Chuck Carpenter: hair and personality.
[00:40:34] Robbie Wagner: DHH.
[00:40:35] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Maybe just get him, because it’s based on, I mean, it was inspired by Rails, so we know that as well. Yes, and so, I mean, active record and ember data, there’s a lot of overlapping patterns and that’s why I know that active record is awesome because Ember data is actually pretty awesome
[00:40:54] Ben Holmes: So it’s a full stack tool. I thought it was just a front end
[00:40:57] Ben Holmes: rendering
[00:40:58] Chuck Carpenter: it No, no, It
[00:40:59] Chuck Carpenter: [00:41:00] is
[00:41:00] Chuck Carpenter: It is
[00:41:01] Robbie Wagner: there’s an ORM with ember data to like, you can just be like model save, and you don’t have to know what all is actually happening when you do that.
[00:41:09] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. It’s
[00:41:09] Chuck Carpenter: magic.
[00:41:10] Ben Holmes: because I, I was trying Ruby on Rails this weekend just for fun because with all of these agents, usually they do better when you put them on rails of what they are allowed to do and not allowed to do. And one nice rail that you can put in there, I, I’m not doing this on purpose ‘cause this is all ruby on rails, but it really is like that if you have a good CLI with scaffolding for common actions.
[00:41:37] Ben Holmes: And you have baked in frameworks for this is the one way to do middleware, one way to do off, et cetera. If you point an agent to that, it’ll say, well, there’s only one way for me to do all these things you asked me to do. So I’ll run the one CLI command to create that. Add the auth. And there’s your app if you ask it to do it with JavaScript, I mean, well it depends.
[00:41:56] Ben Holmes: It sounds like Lovable, which is like an online editor seems [00:42:00] to basically demand, if a user asks for something, it’s gonna be next Js, it’s gonna be super base, it’s gonna be this, and it’s able to get on rails that way. but yeah, it’s, it’s nice using something like Rails because if you tell it, I just want this scaffolded, it knows what to do.
[00:42:16] Ben Holmes: And if it doesn’t, you can tell it. Go read the Rails, eight docs and it’ll actually spin up a crawler, read the rails, eight docs and come back to you and say, yeah, I know how to do Rails eight now let me go ahead and add that service.
[00:42:29] Chuck Carpenter: I, that’s what I think makes a web framework. You does, yeah. conventions and that’s the problem with like. Traditional JavaScript frameworks is they’re missing so many pieces
[00:42:41] Chuck Carpenter: because if they
[00:42:41] Chuck Carpenter: put it in there, right, but if you put it in there, they couldn’t recommend their other friends who also have a business in San Francisco.
[00:42:47] Chuck Carpenter: So, you know.
[00:42:49] Robbie Wagner: Ooh, shots fired. But yes. true.
[00:42:51] Robbie Wagner: along these lines, I did have a question around this. Let me see if I can, yeah, so SaaS products, full featured batteries included [00:43:00] frameworks, versus rolling your own type of thing. Like, what do you think is best when you’re, if you’re like looking for an off solution or like email solution or like, you know, things that might be a little beefier,
[00:43:12] Ben Holmes: Hmm.
[00:43:12] Robbie Wagner: do you think?
[00:43:13] Ben Holmes: well, I think about, what have I done? That’s scaled and what are things that I’ve just done for personal projects and most of my personal focus has been on like front end tricks, static sites, et cetera. That’s where Astro was born out of. It’s where a lot of my fascination was. So a lot of my opinions come from there.
[00:43:35] Ben Holmes: So I might know what CMS to use, but maybe not what auth service to use. but I’ve been trying to branch out from that and well, the companies I’ve worked at have all had pretty weird stacks. So services we built at Astro are very node intensive and we’ve tried many things. Plant scale came up and it is lovely for particularly data migrations and having a GUI to see [00:44:00] here is the schema change you’re about to merge.
[00:44:02] Ben Holmes: Here is where the data migration’s going to run. Now it is executed. You have 15 minutes to roll it back, like having those training wheels around it are really, really nice. But the con is you’re working with a hosted MySQL instance. You don’t have as much control over that. You don’t have all the features of Postgres like subscriptions to events.
[00:44:23] Ben Holmes: That would be something really nice that Postgres gives you out of the box. so there’s pros and cons to that one, but I did enjoy it. I don’t have a strong opinion on like, generally should I buy a bunch of services and staple them together versus use a framework that has it all. Because I mean, I mean, just saying it out loud, of course you want the thing that has it all.
[00:44:44] Ben Holmes: Like, I’m gonna spin up Laravel,
[00:44:45] Ben Holmes: Laravel Cloud and be done. I don’t know because I haven’t really used these tools. It just sounds good in principle.
[00:44:51] Robbie Wagner: I think a lot of people want the pain. They want to be the smart, the smart engineer who built the whole thing by hand
[00:44:59] Robbie Wagner: and [00:45:00] spent did they, if you’re using clerk for auth or superb
[00:45:03] Ben Holmes: And now you’re irreplaceable ‘cause you built the architecture.
[00:45:06] Ben Holmes: Mm-hmm. Oh People are like, it’s not fun to just like. You know, rails Be told what to all this stuff like, yeah.
[00:45:14] Chuck Carpenter: Hmm.
[00:45:15] Ben Holmes: the whole reason I joined Astro is because for my personal site, I just set a constraint in college. Like, okay, you’re gonna build your personal site, but you can’t use a framework, you can’t use a build tool. You have to invent all of the universe. So everything down to parsing a markdown file, well, I used a library for that, but turning that into static pages, rendering JavaScript, client-side spas, like, you have to implement spas from scratch.
[00:45:40] Ben Holmes: See how that works? And it turned into me making my own mini framework just to say, I’ve done this. And it turns out it was very similar to Astro. And that led to a career that doesn’t always happen when you just go off and do something. But I will say, like anything I’ve really, really enjoyed was because I set a [00:46:00] constraint of I’m not allowed to use a library here I’m gonna force myself to do this thing. a constraint I’m actually setting right now is just for fun. You’re not allowed to write code. You have to learn how to force these agents to do everything you want to do,
[00:46:16] Ben Holmes: and you cannot though.
[00:46:17] Ben Holmes: jump in. Like maybe you need to go read the docs on all the tools, come back, build the perfect prompt, and then try again.
[00:46:25] Ben Holmes: Even if editing, it would take five minutes, you are forced to do this. I just wanna see where that goes. I just want to see where that challenge leads because it’s the only way you like learn a thing is if you just block out everything else.
[00:46:38] Chuck Carpenter: I really respect that in terms of like, I could grab this tool that has all the sugar and fun for me, which we’ve said in the past can be like, that’s what React is.
[00:46:48] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, everybody’s, everybody’s building apps this way. That’s what I’ll learn. I won’t actually learn how my browser works or,
[00:46:57] Chuck Carpenter: you
[00:46:57] Chuck Carpenter: know.
[00:46:57] Robbie Wagner: Wait, is React like built [00:47:00] on something like JavaScript? A
[00:47:02] Chuck Carpenter: whole other thing. Right. It’s foundational. So any, you know, there is that, but here’s the thing that, because I feel like we can go on. Well, I’ve got a couple of questions,
[00:47:11] Chuck Carpenter: but my first question is this.
[00:47:13] Chuck Carpenter: You talk about in school, you introduced this to yourself, which sort of like kickstarted your career once you kind of came in contact with Astro. But speaking of school, you seem to be a perpetual student and how does one decide to get an MBA?
[00:47:27] Ben Holmes: Oh, no one is asked about that.
[00:47:31] Chuck Carpenter: it’s about all the dirt I could dig up on you. You like, I try to look on the internet and like, you didn’t have a blog like 10 years ago that I can find Okay. 10 years Yeah. but, uh, I, I did see your, like, your professional blog, but like, I want non-professional things. I wanna know the guy behind the, the whiteboard. So anyway, you got an MBAI think that’s interesting.
[00:47:52] Ben Holmes: yeah, I mean, there is a, a Tumblr with Embarrassing
[00:47:56] Ben Holmes: Doctor who jokes if you
[00:47:57] Ben Holmes: ever want to find that. Yeah,
[00:47:59] Ben Holmes: I [00:48:00] remember the username. but yeah, that was a
[00:48:02] Ben Holmes: time.
[00:48:03] Chuck Carpenter: it’s, it’s actually John Holmes.
[00:48:05] Ben Holmes: John Holmes.
[00:48:06] Chuck Carpenter: Do you know who that is? Has anybody ever
[00:48:07] Ben Holmes: No. Who is John Holmes?
[00:48:10] Ben Holmes: Should I know
[00:48:10] Ben Holmes: this?
[00:48:12] Chuck Carpenter: no. No. Uh, younger than Sherlock, but older than Ben for sure. a seventies porn star known for
[00:48:18] Ben Holmes: Oh my. Okay. Well,
[00:48:20] Ben Holmes: no, I have not been
[00:48:21] Chuck Carpenter: You went to college, you seen things?
[00:48:24] Ben Holmes: Well,
[00:48:25] Chuck Carpenter: Okay.
[00:48:26] Robbie Wagner: Would that be his real name even then?
[00:48:28] Chuck Carpenter: Oh, John Holmes. Oh, I’m not sure.
[00:48:30] Chuck Carpenter: Boogie Nights was loosely, , based on him. So it’s like loosely based on that person who, yeah. I don’t think that was his real name. Johnny Holmes. Or also known as Johnny Wadd. Anyway, Benny Wadd. You could be that. Let’s get back to the original question though.
[00:48:47] Chuck Carpenter: MBA, what made
[00:48:48] Chuck Carpenter: you
[00:48:48] Chuck Carpenter: decide to
[00:48:49] Ben Holmes: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Mm-hmm.
[00:48:51] Chuck Carpenter: MBA? Yeah.
[00:48:52] Ben Holmes: well, I’ve, I’ve always had an interest in product in kind of owning roadmaps. So at the [00:49:00] time it was just, , hopping outta school. I. I was joining as a individual contributor, and I know, well, there are a few tracks I’ve always been interested in the business side of startups.
[00:49:11] Ben Holmes: So Astro kind of spoke to that, got to PP on the curtain, uh, and also engineering managers, product managers that track. I didn’t really know what I was gonna end up pursuing. And so I thought, well, now it’s the time to do it. ‘cause I graduated in the dark ages, the time when everyone was remote. I will not say Vold More’s name, but you know, the time it had a 20, it ended with a 20.
[00:49:35] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:49:35] Ben Holmes: Uh, so I, I just said, yeah, I’ll go ahead and start this now. I was able to finish it just with like a few gaps in there. So it was an online program, um, at Ole Miss and it was, it was a pretty, yeah. All, you know,
[00:49:52] Ben Holmes: you know about
[00:49:52] Robbie Wagner: uh, my best friend went to Ole Miss and then decided they weren’t good enough at football and went to Alabama for his PhD.[00:50:00]
[00:50:00] Chuck Carpenter: Ooh. Shots fired.
[00:50:02] Ben Holmes: Fair enough.
[00:50:04] Robbie Wagner: Both very good. Much better than where I went. So anyway.
[00:50:08] Ben Holmes: Yep. Well, I went to Georgia Tech for computer science, so, uh, yeah, we just got smoked by Georgia State every time we had a strong rivalry with Georgia State and Georgia State didn’t know who we were, so it was, it was kind of funny going
[00:50:22] Ben Holmes: to
[00:50:22] Robbie Wagner: Yeah. I went to Virginia Tech we thought we were good at football a couple times, and Georgia Tech has beat us a bunch, so.
[00:50:30] Ben Holmes: recently, Georgia Tech’s gotten pretty good and I think it’s because you can sort of pay to have players join your team or attend your university when that wasn’t
[00:50:43] Ben Holmes: allowed before. So those with strong engineering programs suddenly are better at football. Interesting.
[00:50:51] Ben Holmes: So I, I’m not saying anything, but I am
[00:50:54] Ben Holmes: noticing Georgia Tech got pretty good.
[00:50:56] Robbie Wagner: There’s a question here that asks, do you own a Peloton? [00:51:00] And Chuck says he didn’t add
[00:51:02] Robbie Wagner: it,
[00:51:02] Chuck Carpenter: I didn’t,
[00:51:03] Robbie Wagner: so I don’t understand what, like, did you just have something about a Peloton? I don’t know.
[00:51:07] Ben Holmes: Yeah, I mean, and this is the last question, if that’s all right
[00:51:12] Ben Holmes: because I do need to hop in a second. good note to end on though, kind of full circle. So, I mean, pelotons, where I started my engineering journey.
[00:51:19] Ben Holmes: So every time I said that at a party, people asked, do you get a free Peloton? The answer is no, but it is steeply discounted.
[00:51:27] Ben Holmes: So I do still have a Peloton and I still do their online workouts. You can like just do weight training on the phone and they still have all the same instructors and they’re phenomenal. Like they will kick your butt completely. They are
[00:51:40] Ben Holmes: amazing.
[00:51:41] Ben Holmes: rad Lopez. Best one.
[00:51:44] Ben Holmes: Rowing. Yeah,
[00:51:45] Chuck Carpenter: rowing ones. I don’t yeah, I need to try that. rower, but I have a regular rower and IU my wife has a Peloton and I do the rowing workouts. Matt Alpers amazing.
[00:51:55] Robbie Wagner: Hmm.
[00:51:55] Ben Holmes: Matt ERs. Okay.
[00:51:56] Chuck Carpenter: to this. It’ll be
[00:51:57] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:51:58] Robbie Wagner: Yeah.
[00:51:58] Ben Holmes: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:51:59] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah, [00:52:00] definitely.
[00:52:01] Ben Holmes: He’s rowing right now.
[00:52:02] Robbie Wagner: yeah. Before we end, , are there things you would like to plug? I.
[00:52:06] Ben Holmes: so there’s this terminal called Ghosty. I think that one’s pretty
[00:52:10] Ben Holmes: good.
[00:52:11] Chuck Carpenter: Yeah. Get that one
[00:52:12] Chuck Carpenter: for
[00:52:12] Chuck Carpenter: sure.
[00:52:13] Ben Holmes: that one, then uninstall it, and then maybe try Warp Terminal. Just, just to see what you think about it.
[00:52:21] Ben Holmes: it’s a nice terminal environment. It’s also really nice for agent workflows. Just start typing plain English stuff. Ask it to build the next dream startup and see what it comes up with.
[00:52:32] Ben Holmes: And if it breaks, go in the discord. Uh, there’s warp discord. Also ask it to make Astro projects. , still spinning those up. Use more server rendering with Astro too. It’s great for spinning up backends if you ever want to. I’ve been pairing the two together, so merging the two universes. Uh, and I have a YouTube and Twitter be Holmes dev.
[00:52:51] Ben Holmes: Go watch me over there for short form stuff and occasional long form where I actually sit down and learn something deeply [00:53:00] instead of making Twitter click bait. Mm-hmm.
[00:53:04] Chuck Carpenter: Excellent.
[00:53:05] Robbie Wagner: All
[00:53:05] Robbie Wagner: right. Well, yeah. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. , everyone, thanks for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe and we’ll catch you next time.