Here's my Siri theory

Welcome to Changelog and friends, a weekly talk show about Vibe Coding, baby. Thanks as always to our partners at Fly, the public cloud built for developers who ship. You ship, don't you? Then you should check out Fly at fly.io. Okay, let's talk. Well friends, I'm here with a good friend of mine, David Hsu, the founder and CEO of Retool. So David, I know so many developers who use Retool to solve problems, but I'm curious. Help me to understand the specific user, the particular developer who is just loving Retool. Who's your ideal user?

Yeah, so for us, the ideal user of Retool is someone whose goal, first and foremost, is to either deliver value to the business or to be effective.

Where we candidly have a little bit less success is with people that are extremely opinionated about their tools. If, for example, you're like, hey, I need to go use WebAssembly, and if I'm not using WebAssembly, I'm quitting my job, you're probably not the best Retool user, honestly. However, if you're like, hey, I see problems in the business and I want to have an impact and I want to solve those problems, Retool is right up your alley. And the reason for that is Retool allows you to have an impact so quickly. You could go from an idea, you go from a meeting like, hey, you know, this is an app that we need,

to literally having the app built in 30 minutes, which is super, super impactful on the business. So I think that's the kind of partnership or that's the kind of impact that we'd like to see with our customers.

You know, from my perspective, my thought is that, well, Retool is well known. Retool is somewhat even saturated. I know a lot of people who know Retool, but you've said this before, what makes you think that Retool is not that well known?

Retool today is really quite well known amongst a certain crowd. Like, I think if you had a poll like Engineers of San Francisco or Engineers of Silicon Valley,

even, I think you'd probably get like a 50, 60, 70% recognition of Retool. I think where you're less likely to have heard of Retool is if you're a random developer at a random company in a random location like the Midwest, for example, or like a developer in Argentina, for example, you're probably less likely. And the reason is, I think we have a lot of really strong word of mouth from a lot of Silicon Valley companies, like the Brexis, Coinbase, Doordash, Stripes, etc. of the world. There's a lot of chat, Airbnb is another customer, Nvidia is another customer, so there's a lot of chatter about Retool in the Valley.

But I think outside of the Valley, I think we're not as well known. And that's one goal of ours to go change that.

Well, friends, now you know what Retool is, you know who they are. You're aware that Retool exists. And if you're trying to solve problems for your company, you're in a meeting, as David mentioned, and someone mentions something where a problem exists, and you can easily go and solve that problem in 30 minutes, an hour, or some margin of time that is basically a nominal amount of time. And you go and use Retool to solve that problem. That's amazing. Go to retool.com and get started for free or book a demo. It is too easy to use Retool, and now you know.

So go and try it. Once again, retool.com.

So Justin Searles is back. Justin from Breaking Change. No longer from Test Double. I mean, maybe you are, but now I call you Justin from Breaking Change. Do you like that?

Well, I think that it's the medium appropriate, you know, attribution. So Breaking Change is my solo podcast. And yeah, I'm putting out roughly two and a half, three hour long, solo, you know, discussions of whatever the topics are. Well, it is a two-way discussion. It's just that you're not allowed to talk as the listener on the receiving end. I got it. But I have a lot of fun with it. And, you know, it's actually been giving me plenty of opportunities to chat with you guys about the audio production side. And that's a lot by listening to the change log. And over time, just as I've gotten better at the editing and all that, I've really come to appreciate just how much work your jobs are. And so I've got a newfound. I used to think very little of both of you probably appropriate, but now I'm like, oh, they do some work.

So we do. What is it that you do here? Exactly. Yeah. Well, talking is not the easy part for lots of people, but when it comes to podcasting turns out it is the easy part no matter how good or bad you are at it. Some say that everything else is harder, isn't it?

Totally. Yeah, absolutely. The hardest part for me is probably staying to my script. So three hours hardly a script, but like I've got like a list of you write up three hours. I've got a list of things that I just kind of clear out every week and repopulate with news items and life and follow up and recommendations and mailbag. And so I try to keep it snappy because sometimes I will luxuriate and be like, oh, yeah, well that that checkbox took 30 minutes. So let's let's maybe pick up the pace a little bit on this next one.

You know, I do a solo show as well every week and I script it out and it lasts, you know, six to ten minutes. That's all I got Justin. That's all I got in me.

Well, it's a you know, my words are so much less valuable, but I have to make it up in volume.

Adam. How long do you think you could monologue? Could you pull off a three hour pod all by yourself? You think hard to say hard to say I think yes, but I think no. Yeah, I think I could probably do it. Honestly. I know I don't know if I can't. I'm thinking I'm a conversationalist, you know, and so to monologue means you have to conversate with yourself. However, I do I'm the kind of person that talks to themselves. Okay, so you might catch me sometimes like is that dude with somebody or is he having a conversation with somebody and the answer is yes,

but it's with himself. Her verbal processor. Yeah, you're actually having a podcast all the time. It's just whether or not the mic is on.

That's yeah, really. There's always something going on in my brain. Gosh, my wife is common with the phrase. I have an idea.

Well, I grew up listening to a lot of talk radio in the Metro Detroit region. So I like WJR like Mitch Albom and WGN radio and in that case and that that format very often was just one person. Just drive time radio talking to you late at night and and it would be an hour longer a two hour long block and there's only for whatever reason when we transition to podcast everyone assumed. Oh, it's got to be an ensemble, you know, some sort of panel discussion and right it's for me as a listener. I actually find that the handful of long form solo pods that I listen to. I feel like I'm developing a more of a relationship and an understanding with a person because there's more time to digest and process their perspective than to sort of just be witnessing a conversation. It's a very different feeling for me.

Yeah, and definitely think both have their place and I have listened to solo pods that I enjoy. I don't think I would like to make one because I don't I don't think out loud and I don't like to talk without I like the tete-a-tete of a conversation. I like the back and forth I feed off of other people and so most of my best ideas come in reaction to somebody else's idea and almost never in reaction to my own idea.

See I am having an argument but it's with the demons in my soul. It's just constantly ongoing. You got the angel and the devil on your shoulder

and you just see how much one you're going to feed. Okay. Well, maybe I'll try it. Maybe I'll see if I can go longer than six to ten minutes and see what happens. You do a pretty good job though. Monologuing. Can you call it a monologue when you script it? Is it still monologuing?

The script is a very loose look. I have you know, maybe 20 bullet points over a three hour, you know, set.

Yeah, you misunderstood me. I was telling Jared he did a good job. Oh, I do a good job. Oh, sorry. Justin just dealing all my compliments.

No, I just hoover them up. That's kind of the reason I have a three hour podcast.

Someone says something nice, must be about me. You're not Matt Ryer though. So I can't be like that with you. I have to be nice to you Justin. I actually like you.

I'm sure Matt will love that. Matt's not even here.

He can't see anything back. I got you Matt.

So go back to the part where you were telling me I'm good at something Adam.

Well, I think that you know listening back honestly, if I'm giving you some criticism here constructive. Okay. I would say that you do a good job with entertaining developers in the Jared way, right which is not necessarily the way I would do it. But I think you do a great job of delivering the news in a in a good pace. You have a good pace and I think you have a good taste in what is important to say and what to include and what to edit out. I think you do. There's probably a lot of that. We're not seeing their behind the scenes that misses the actual black and white text on screen because you've edited out or you've taken the time to say, okay, these points are the most important to developers and you obviously have like nine minutes or less. So you got a M1 sponsor in there. So you technically have seven ish minutes to to condense it all down with an intro. That's always cheeky or funny in some way shape or form and also quite on point with I would say pop culture of developer land on the weekly. So I always I appreciate change law news personally because I get to keep up and so it's kind of funny to like you deliver on our promise and I get to consume it as the promise. It's cool.

It sounds nice. That sounds really nice. Thank you. I think that I definitely try one of the things I struggle with is oftentimes

I have an opinion and then other times I don't but I still think just the inclusion of the content is actually what matters. That's sometimes why the newsletter is longer than the audio because like there's things in there that I'm not going to actually talk about even at the end there's just a list of links. It's like this is cool too. But yeah, I struggle about how much my opinion should be in there and how much it's just like the curation is the editorial. So anyways navel gazing now we try not to navel gaze here Justin. I don't know if you have that little just you probably have to navel gaze three hours by yourself. I mean, you're probably talking about your own life your thoughts here.

I haven't I haven't covered the literal navel yet, but my dermatologist found a fit anyway,

right? Well put it on your list get that in your things today. We want to talk about something that we've been gazing at and hoping to gaze more at but haven't been able to because Apple hasn't delivered on it, which is this promise of Apple Intelligence and something is sour over there. I think rotten. It's rotten is what John Gruber called it. Something's rotten in the state of Cupertino, which is saying a lot from a writer like John Gruber who isn't I wouldn't call him an Apple fanboy, but I would call him Apple positive over his career like colleges. Yeah, he's like he likes Apple a lot. You know, I mean he's he does a good job of explaining why he likes Apple but to have him say something's rotten and Cupertino is a pretty big stance Justin. Can you maybe help our audience understand what it is that I'm talking about? What's the what's the story here?

Yeah, so I mean John's overall story and it was unusual to anyone who reads his blog and I've been reading it. It was actually maybe the first blog I started reading once I first used a Mac. I was I had a job I got an iMac G4 which was the cool one that looks like the Luxo Jr. And my boss said all right, so here's some keyboard shortcuts and go read Daring Fireball every day. And it was yeah, I took those as marching orders and I've been reading John's blog ever since and while we've never interacted, you know outside of a couple emails here and there. It's extremely unusual for him to share a strong editorial opinion in one of his non-link blog as in it's just a post on his site that doesn't link out to something else extremely unusual for him to share in an editorial format anything critical of Apple that doesn't have heavy counterweight and what this was basically saying is like look he starts well, I guess the counterweight was he starts by saying I blew it. I should have seen this coming. I like we shouldn't be surprised that Apple announced the delay of these more advanced Apple intelligence features like the personalized context and the semantic index and all the stuff in the really really impressive that we talked about on this show a year ago. Absolutely, we were excited about this. We were excited about it because and to his point he said well Apple had this track record of always delivering the stuff within the year that they said that they would and when he looks back he's like I should have seen this because they didn't even demo what we got was a video. We got a concept video. They never demoed this on stage. They never demoed it to media. They never certainly didn't let the media even touch any of the existing features and then you know three months roll by and now we're at the iPhone event and they're still not demonstrating any of this stuff and that should have been the alarm bells because like they complained that hey, like there's no there's there you're doing Apple intelligence and commercials and billboards and videos online and you're promoting it as a feature of the phone, but it doesn't even none of the Apple intelligence ships for another month, right and that would that was very un-Apple like and so I think that's where the focus shifted but then as those the sort of piddly features that everyone likes to make fun of like the image playgrounds. I actually kind of think that generative the gen emoji is genmoji. Yeah, the genmoji is still pretty cool. Even if it mostly is producing bad genmojis that stuff was enough kind of chaff to help us forget that like, you know, when is that dot4 release that Mark Gurman's talking about? He says March that sounds like far away. Oh, it's slipping. It's not in the dot4 beta and then this was only inevitable and so John sort of takes it on the chin himself to say like I should have seen this coming but really like what Apple's dealing with here isn't oops. We screwed up. We thought it would be it's not like another airpower thing where they had that charging mat that could charge devices at once and they just had to say look it got it was hard. It was hotter harder, you know less good than we thought it would be and so we're going to kill this product. It's a case of Apple legitimately showed us a video of something that they clearly didn't have working themselves and weren't close to having working and now that they're not delivering their credibility is suffering and credibility is the coin of the realm that Steve Jobs in his return in 97 was minting at Apple everything that he did in the first couple of years was we got to make people believe that we are good at what we do and that our products are aren't just different but better, you know, and that's just because it was coming from Gruber specifically and because it was every word was fair and every word was true the whole kind of like Apple literati and I'm sure a lot of people in Cupertino were like that was a huge red alarm wake-up call that certainly people in you know executive leadership are arguing and there's probably been a lot of like, you know war room meetings and they're probably asking are we going to like actually have John host the talk show at WWDC this June or while we pull out now we're going to look like complete assholes, you know, like like there's probably a lot of tension because they viewed him as one of them. I'm sure to a certain extent when in fact he's just really aligned with the values of the organization, which is why he typically likes what they do, right? Like I'm mostly the same way and if those values are changing like making the stockholders happy by having some sort of AI story to tell over the fact of like, you know, you're you're true believer so to speak, you know telling them the truth and maintaining that credibility. If that was the priority decision that Tim Cook made then the values have shifted.

Yeah, they certainly lost credibility in my eyes. I've long held them up as an organization who at the very least delivers on what they say they're going to do whether or not I agree with the product or the decisions or what it is that they think is right in the world. Most of the time they'd actually even ship it at the announcement. Like there was a time where it was like and this is post Steve Jobs, but I'm sure it's probably like left over from Steve Jobs's view of the world. It's like it's not ready to ship. We're not going to announce it. We're not going to talk about it. Maybe it was a few weeks. You can order it today. It comes out in a couple of weeks. Of course software features allow you to have that be more of a sliding door than a hardware, you know, piece of hardware would allow because you have supply and all that stuff that you have to deal with. But anyways, that just seemed like it slowly slowly changed to the point where this is like the straw that broke the camel's back. It's like, you know what? They don't have it anymore. They they're shipping vaporware essentially and not like you said Justin, not just things that they thought were going to be good and weren't but like it seems like there was never a chance that this set of features was going to make it out. They're not just late like it's sometime next year. Maybe like that's kind of the official stance right now like in the coming year.

And there was a leak forward. There's that leaked meeting of the quote unquote Siri chief or whoever that Mark Gurman put out and he made it clear to the staff. Like there's other high priority stuff and we've got the Gantt chart of all of the stuff coming out. This might not even come then like that stuff might have to happen first. And so maybe it's not even next year.

So what do you think happened? Adam, what are you thinking over there? Man, I'm just thinking we have had these amazing new M series CPUs. I believe we've speculated for years that they've had this 3D chess kind of thing happening as a result of all this extra power in these computers we've got now and the phones you've got now that somehow some way they have this 3D chess like amazing AI play and it really seems like they've got nothing. It's a nothing burger almost. Yeah, like it was so many things that were overreached and as John Gerber says in his post nearly outright lies that were just not there. I'm surprised that this even the partnership with opening. I was was seem it seemed to be more than it was or more than it is and I'm not really sure that they built this on their own platform. It seems so unlike Apple to even be having this conversation that they're so calculated in their delivery and they're so calculated in their ability to foretell the future and the hardware preceded all this software and to some degree it almost seemed preparatory but in fact, it seems like it's it's maybe not in their cars to deliver or build themselves.

My reaction to the piece I didn't get super worked up either way. It was just to really hold on to this idea that like they just rather than going up and doing another antenna gate press conference and apologizing they should respond through action and go back to live keynote demonstrations because they would never show a video of a clay model of a MacBook Pro, right? It's not that hardware is easier than software. It's that software requires a much higher degree of discipline and it because it doesn't talk back to you. You don't push on it with your thumb and then feel the resistance right from the thing and the physicality of hardware and the iterative nature of how we can manufacture things even proofs of concepts of things get lends a certain tangibility that even saw like like senior senior management and executives five levels up can you know, grow up and engage with in a certain way, but when you're on stage and you're giving a demo like Craig Federighi's very first demo. I think it was an OS 10 lion and you know, it was at a time when Steve Jobs was clearly trying to groom a few people beyond just Phil Schiller to get up on these keynotes. You see Federighi there with the hair and everything in the personality, but he's using a magic Mouse and his hand is so God. I forgot we don't swear so much in this one. So sweaty. I'm sorry breaking changes an extremely explicit language podcast and if you do subscribe and you're very surprised by that you've now been warned but his hand was so sweaty that the magic Mouse capacitive touch wasn't working right because he was trying to demo the multi-touch features and you could just see as they zoom in further as it continues to not work into the poor guy's hand. You could just see the trepidation and the like the quiver in his finger. Yeah, I would not want he was the VP of software, right? Do you how do you think he felt like Monday morning when he's like we you know talking to the team that manages the device hardware on the magic Mouse and its capacitive responsibility or responsiveness, you know, like right that pressure is it from Tim Cook supply chain operational perspective. It's just maybe too high risk. Let's eliminate all the risk we can let's have the perfect video but that risk is a healthy response that software's only chance to give you the feedback of is this real right? And that's where the credibility came from was those demos. That was I it was Steve Jobs on the leather couch with the iPad showing you what you look like but like like what it looks like how it feels like what it would be like if you had this but like has an Apple executive ever worn the Vision Pro in public.

I don't know you would know you're the Vision Pro.

I'm the Vision Pro guy. It looks ridiculous. I acknowledge I look ridiculous. I posted a picture of my blog with my Vision Pro on looking ridiculous last week has Tim Cook done that? It was photoshopped to hell. I think the one image I saw right.

What are you trying to put you should I make by saying

that if they had to go on stage and actually demo the Vision Pro maybe with a video feed, however, you'd have to do it to show somebody actually doing it in real time. We'd all have a much better understanding of what that project really was what it was capable of and what I'd and if you look like a goof is up there demoing this like me as the person viewing it can see. Oh, yeah, I wouldn't want to look like that. I'm not going to buy it but they didn't want to send that message right instead they had a few very carefully coiffed people and hairstyles and and situations and camera angles to make it look not ridiculous. Mm-hmm and they could only do that in video editing.

I've only ever thought of the positives with regards to their new keynote style over this potentially gnarly negative, which is that I feel like they're they're more packed to the punch. They were obviously more and more entertaining because they can do cool transitions and they're using their awesome campus to the best of like I really like the new style that being said. I haven't watched the last couple ones very closely because they've there's some sort there's something missing and maybe it's that human touch that reality but never thought about it in terms of it being a testing ground for their new announcements and whether or not they should actually announce something is like is this real right now? Can we actually put it on stage because I don't have to anymore and they haven't had to since covid really

and you can fake it big time, right? It's the phrase as Justin was talking about

or talking there came to mind was it's all marketing. You know, it's all just simply showing not so much or telling not so much showing at least it feels like that. It's a possibility now more so than it was before.

I've had the pleasure of my career to produce a lot of video and to go on stage and speak a lot and they are very very different things. The perfectionist in me loves that I can spend 10 times as much wall time creating the perfect video that doesn't have anything in it that I don't want to put out there and the you know, kind of tightly wound worry wart that I am really struggles with public speaking which I gave my last talk last September not because I couldn't handle it anymore but because the pressure that one puts on themselves to make sure that if you're going to have a demo on stage, it doesn't work 80% of the time. It doesn't work in three takes on average. It works a hundred percent of the time. It works so reliably that when I'm demoing this code demo on stage or doing whatever I'm doing on stage, even if it's just the words coming out of my mouth in you know, a credible way like I need to be lock stock and barrel a hundred percent sure that I'm going to be able to get through a 45 minute talk and that sets the bar higher. So it's not that I would go on stage do a thing and see how the audience reacted and make a decision on this is how the Vision Pro should look. It'd be like I put it on a rehearsal or really early on and be like this looks ridiculous. No one's going to buy this and then I'd go back and you know improve or even I'd be thinking and if that was our culture, if we still gave these live demos all the executives would be thinking as soon as they're seeing some prototype or as soon as they're in the R&D they'd be like we can't go on stage and show this this looks ridiculous and just apply that to software in terms of expectation setting on you know dates.

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So we've had the opportunity to go into hundreds of customers over the course of the past year and show them how much more AI could do for them. Companies like Lemonade, companies like Codem, companies like Lineage and Webflow. All of these companies have complex code bases. If I take Codem for example, they help their customers modernize their e-commerce infrastructure. They're showing up and having to digest code they've never seen before in order to go through and make these essential changes to it. We cut their migration time in half because they're able to much more rapidly ramp find the areas of the code base the customer code base that they need to perfect and update in order to take advantage of their new features and that work gets done dramatically more quickly and predictably as a result.

Okay, that sounds like not novice, right? Sounds like senior level engineering abilities sounds like serious coding ability required from this type of AI to be that effective.

100%, you know, these large code bases when you've got tens of millions of lines in a code base you're not gonna pass that along as context to a model, right? That is would be so horrifically inefficient. Being able to mine the correct subsets of that code base in order to deliver AI insight to help tackle the problems at hand. How much better can we make software? How much wealth can we release and productivity can we improve? If we can deliver on the promise of all these feature gaps and tech debt. AIs love to add code into existing software. You know, our dream is an AI that wants to delete code make the software more reliable rather than bigger. I think we can improve software quality liberate ourselves from tech debt and security gaps and software being hacked and software being fragile and brittle. There's a huge opportunity to make software dramatically better but it's gonna take an AI that understands your software not one that's a novice.

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What do you think went wrong with generative?

Is it all generative? There's other non-generative aspects of intelligence but why has Apple failed so miserably at delivering these features? Is it an Apple prod problem? Is it a problem with this kind of technology? My immediate thought was they require a certain amount of sheen and perfection. Speaking of perfectionism to things at least they used to. I don't know they shipped some ugly looking stuff recently but in some screens where you're like did someone design this settings panel? Cause this doesn't look like it got the Johnny Ive love. You know when Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive would like design the inside of some sort of thing because nobody would see it but they're gonna see it.

Game centers, poker felt, green, you know, texture in the background.

You know what I kind of long for the days of skeuomorphism. I would be happy to bring it back. I also long for the days of Superman back when he was just wholesome and like not nitty gritty. Like I want to return to not forever but like let's just swing the pendulum back to like capes and cowls and like happy like koplowy Batman. Like let's just go corny for a while and we can go back to the nitty. I mean we've been so dark and dirty and real and antihero for so long. Different story but same concept. I thought it was that but like-

You're over postmodern Apple. You want to get back to basics?

I like, you know, the felt poker table. I mean we can talk about the upcoming new redesign which they're hoping will distract us from all of this but what do we think went wrong? Is it an inherent problem with the technology they're trying to deploy? Is it because Apple's lost their groove of software engineering? I mean, obviously we're on the outside speculating but what do we think? Is it a combination of the two

or is there a third thing I haven't thought of?

Well, I'm not John Gruber. If you didn't notice, my name is Adam Dicovia so I don't have the history of examining. I think, I just don't know. Maybe they're just, maybe like when Steve came back and he said, we've got too much stuff. Let's simplify and he said, we'll just make this. I'm paraphrasing something that I think I heard him say. Maybe they've got too much going on. I mean, they've got the Apple TV. They've got Apple TV Plus. They've got all the media stuff going on. They've got pretty good shows, Severance. It's an amazing show. Slightly disappointed in season two, slightly. I haven't watched it all yet.

Don't spoil it please.

I'm not spoiling anything.

Okay.

Just a little slow. I'll just comment on its pace. It feels slow. It's more backstory than the next level I wanted to go to but anyways, they've got a lot going on. They've got the iPhone, obviously. They've got the whole entire Mac platform.

They've got iCloud, they've got the services.

I mean, they really have a lot of stuff going on and maybe they've just gone. Maybe they're just too big. Maybe they can't focus on the details like they have been able to before.

I have a theory. You just kind of jostled loose from the Apple tree. That's what conversations do. So to speak. So think of a company as large as Apple at this point is they don't run different business units as separate companies. There's only a small handful of SVPs that kind of determine what's happening but underneath them is a traditional big layered organization of humans. And when you think about the iPhone, the iPhone is awesome and they've never shipped a lemon iPhone. And why haven't they done that? Because they are proving themselves with excellence year after year, iterating on that hardware and learning from their mistakes and we don't get to even see a lot of the mistakes, right? I'm sure they get killed before we'd otherwise see them. The other department that came to mind, Apple TV, you guys talking about severance, Apple TV has got some real good hits. They're more HBO now than HBO has been for a long time. And the reason is it's run by competent people that clearly have a commitment to excellence and they've got the feedback loop of people are watching it, people aren't watching it, people are subscribing, people aren't subscribing and there's clearly some kind of wind at their back. Now look at the third division here of the people who run Siri. Siri has been running in circles since 2011. How do you measure success for Siri? It doesn't make or save money. Because it's kind of non-deterministic, it's very, very difficult. No one's done a Siri benchmark, right? Like we got all these LLM tests and stuff. No one's been tracking the growth and maturity of Siri as a functionality over the years. You know like that story we've heard about how the WebKit team at Apple had this build where if you committed any code and you pushed it up and it made the test suite duration slower, the build system would reject your commit. You couldn't make WebKit slower and that was just a hard and fast rule. And look around you, I still use Safari every day. And why is that? Because that rule has like a major impact on my user experience because browsers are so vital. And Siri doesn't have anything like that. If they have an internal benchmark, you look at all the posts over the last year, if anything, since the Apple intelligence thing, it seems like Siri is getting dumber at very basic facts. And so that organization, whoever's in it and whatever it is, they've clearly not been on some sort of loop towards excellence that's driving them forward in a clear and steady way. And the human organization that's built around that as a result, how could it be anything other than a nonsensical bureaucracy of finger pointing and arbitrary excuses? Because there's not like some sort of cycle feeding in and reinforcing the good stuff and trimming away the bad stuff. And that's the organization that was handed Apple intelligence here, go have fun, go do the hardest thing we've ever done. Build this thing that is gonna just be a moonshot and also make sure it never says anything racist and it never generates any kiddie porn. Other than that though, I'm sure you got this, we're just gonna go make this video now and start printing the billboards. How do you think that went, right? Well, we see how it went.

Okay, Silicon Valley, baby, okay? Gavin Belson says, imagine a feature so revolutionary that it changes the very fabric and future of Hooli. No, seriously, go imagine it. I need you to do that right now. That's what they said at Apple. Imagine a feature so revolutionary. Apple intelligence, no, AI, no, Apple intelligence. That was the conversation. It was a Gavin Belson moment.

And if it was possible, they just handed it to an unproven team, right? Like I would have started by just throwing away Siri and starting over.

They handed it to the big head, Justin.

Build a new fresh foundation on what might've become DeepSeek or something, right? Like some foundational model that's small enough to conceivably run maybe on this new M3 Ultra. Paint the story, but even set the goalposts out further. But I think if you've got a rotten foundation, you're not gonna be able to build something awesome on top of it that's rock solid.

Siri must be rotten because you can't be bad for that long unless you just have zero investment, right? Like zero. You said it come out in 2011. I mean, we're talking iPhone 4S. Yep. And it literally didn't get any better. I mean, at one point they put sports scores into it, but it's like they just plugged in an API. I mean, there are so many ways if Siri was a decent piece of software that they could have made Siri incrementally better

every single iOS release or whatever they did. And that's just never happened. It's such a disappointment. And maybe it's because there wasn't the incentive.

Why do you think that is though? Don't you feel like Siri is like a key component to, like I use Siri on the daily in very limited and very precise ways because that is the limit of Siri.

Timers, reminders, messages.

Yeah, very simple stuff. Text so-and-so. I do a lot of texts to people via that way. I opened my garage door, Jared, you know this, right? Open main garage, close main garage. It's so amazing.

I can't get mine working. I think the garage door that I bought, like the new opener I bought has the technology.

This makes me very mad, but they don't conform to the HomeKit API and they don't and they won't. Not that they just don't, but they won't.

Is that part of the Chamberlain oligopoly? Yeah, they used to sell a HomeKit dingus and I have it. And those things are probably worth hundreds of dollars now because they intentionally stopped because now as a Tesla owner, I pay $45 a year for their nonsensical MyQ integration, which is literally just so the car can open and close the door.

Okay, so yeah, the MyQ, that's what I got is the MyQ and it won't HomeKit and it's never going to. Anyways, so now I have to launch the MyQ app to do the thing. I just wanna say, hey, Siri, open the south garage.

Well, I've been a HomeKit person from day one and the thing about HomeKit was it was also awful when it came out and super unreliable and you tell Siri to do a thing, turn these lights on, it wouldn't happen. And it was a coin flip whether or not it was because HomeKit didn't work or because Siri didn't work. But then over the years, especially with this new V2 architecture a couple of years ago that came out for HomeKit, I've noticed everything around me in my house is rock solid. And if there's ever a failure, it's not like I said the perfect phrase to Siri and it failed to convey that same instruction to HomeKit that I did an hour ago because I'll open up the Home app and I'll click the little button and then the garage opens, right? That's clearly like good job HomeKit. That's actually a really good example of a very broken thing at Apple that doesn't make any money, like iteratively getting better because they could see that probably from their logs, how many the failure rates, the latency and stuff, they redid the architecture. Siri's architecture, there was reports a few years ago that they did have this kind of fork in the road to determine whether or not to redo Siri as an LLM. And just because the politics of it, Tim Cook and the executive team decided to stick with what they had and try to fix it, try to improve it from within. And now here we are.

Apple Maps, another example of something that was awful. I mean, it was so bad that it was a laughing stock when they first shipped it. And strategically they had to because of the whole Google Apple rivalry and all that. It made sense that they had to do it, but it was so bad. And then they had a big rewrite and a huge effort that took years and stuff. And now in my opinion, Apple Maps is really good and has not steered me into a lake in a long time.

Yeah, I think it's honestly, I think it's better, like the UX, the readability, if you're specifically in the United States and Japan, it is very, very good. I can't speak for pretty much anything else though.

Right, same, except for the Japan part. I'll let you speak to Japan, I'll speak to the Midwest.

Well, driving through Nebraska is super complicated, so.

Lots of corn, you don't wanna end up in a cornfield somewhere.

Yeah, I saw Interstellar, it looked painful.

So, Maps got better, HomeKit got better, Siri hasn't got better. The LLM thing is interesting, A, because Amazon seems to have tackled it, right? Like Alexa AI is shipping now-ish. I mean, they're gonna roll it out within the next month, they said roughly a month ago. So, is it in my hands? No, but it's, you know, it seems like it's baked.

What's the premise of that? What are they promising?

What are they promising? A lot of the same stuff that Apple Intelligence with Siri was promising, just a smarter Echo, and it's backwards compatible with like a bunch of existing Echos, so it'll upgrade. As long as you're subscribed to Amazon Prime, you get it as part of your Prime package, which is like basically, Alexa just gets, you know, basically LLM abilities just way smarter, knows context, et cetera, et cetera, can do more things.

The way to think about it maybe, and this is how I process it internally, is that Siri and Alexa pre-LLM transplosion, where they had a simple architecture of the natural language processing based on the audio, it was stage one. Stage two is, okay, I've got that into some sort of semi-structured data, and I'm gonna feed that into some router thing in the middle, and that router thing is gonna determine, can I take action? If so, what of my various verbs that I know, right, almost like a point and click adventure game, can I route this to? Is it the Reminders app? Are they talking about a message? Are they talking about a timer? And then it would transform that data. It's just ETL, right, everything else. You transform that data into whatever the timer's intent, right, or feature would need, and then it would start the timer. And I believe the big thing that Amazon's shipping now with Alexa that's available today or soon is primarily just replacing stage one of the spaceship, it's just like instead of having that natural language processing that's based on a lot of ifs and elses and heuristics, you just put an LLM in front, it's got the same orchestration layer in the middle, and that was always way better with Alexa. If anything, Siri sometimes had better language processing. Apple has always fallen down in really the second. It's translating the structured understanding of what you just said into, now what do I do? I guess I'll just spray it any which way, and now you get a web result, right?

Yeah, that's why so many times, this is what I found on the web, because that's their fallback, right? When they have no, they can't actually detect where they're supposed to route this, they just route it for a web search. So that's that, but so Amazon is shipping something. Now we'll see how good that thing is as it comes out. I haven't played with it yet. I'm excited too.

I guess to close the loop on the discussion of Grouper's post though, what do you, we don't, we can't know whether Tim Cook knew upfront that this was low probability of shipping, and he just made the very cynical decision that prioritizing Wall Street's reaction because of all of the Apple's got to have an AI story to tell, like maybe from a financial perspective or like a company stability perspective, he just made the cynical decision that like, yes, blowing some credibility next year with the tech press is actually worth saving the stock, and let's do this and let's go forward. And if he made that decision, I'm honestly not 100% sure it was the wrong one, right? They can recover from this, and they probably could have recovered from the stock dipping or whatever. They probably could have come up with a better story, but that's a lot of coulda, shoulda, wouldas. So we don't know that. But what I'm curious about is like, if the theory of the case, as Grouper's put it, is like their credibility is suffered, and as soon as that starts, as soon as that takes root, then that's when we're on track to bankrupt Apple again. And that's a lot of logical leaps and assumptions along the way. I'm kind of curious how you two feel about how damaged will the credibility be beyond the people who read Apple blogs, and what long-term impact will it really have?

Well, I can only speak to my immediate non-techy circles, and I'll say that Apple has already, I think, lost credibility in a lot of people's eyes because of just shoddy software in the last couple of years, the confusion, a lot of the confusing aspects of iOS, things not working the way they're supposed to. And so I don't think their brand is as strong as it was anyways. I'm not sure if this failure to deliver on a keynote announcement will get past very deep outside of our little world. And I do think it would take a long time for something so large and successful as Apple to actually get to that bankrupt. Look how long it took Microsoft. Success hides a lot of problems, and sheer size and inertia hides a lot of things. And so I don't think there's an imminent demise by any means, but I do notice that Apple's overall brand has been tarnished probably the last five years, prior to this even, and I'm sure it won't help. I just don't think it'll hurt all that much. Adam, what have you seen out there? Justin, you make a good point. I wonder who would care outside of the echo chamber of tech. I just don't know. I just don't know. I don't even have a computer nor an iPhone with Apple intelligence. So I can't even speculate at what they've delivered to see hands-on what people are experiencing. Cause I'm just, I'm not on the tip of Apple anymore because it's gotten so expensive to live there. And my M1 Mac is just so amazing. I'm like, I can't even justify spending the money on something different. It's just, or a new version of it that costs five grand or something like that. It's just, I just don't have that. Always had a better opinion. I don't, I just feel like maybe anything I say would just be stupid, honestly. Speculation, I could probably come up with something though.

Well, we might just have to leave that one at we'll see and maybe bookmark it for any discussion we might have back in, you know, up in June at WWDC and see how they react first of all. I mean, the truth of it is if they react as if this is a problem to solve, that will be, that will tell us a lot. And if they react like, you know, Gruber's the problem or we're, you know, just deny and, you know, Stonewall, that's saying something different and we'll probably lead down a different path, right?

Well, the rumor mill is saying, and this will be probably one of the most interesting WWDCs in a while because of this, if for no other reason. I thought the last one was gonna be interesting cause I've been saying they need to reboot Siri for years now and they haven't done it obviously in a way that makes any sense. The rumor mill is saying that they're going to be announcing iOS redesign, macOS redesign, like a whole new design language similar to the, was it iOS 7 that did that, moving away from my beloved zoomorphism to the flat, the flat present that we live in. And okay, I'm here for it. I'd love to see what they've come up with this time and maybe they'll just not talk about any of this stuff at all and just be like, look at shiny new UI. And we'll all just be like, ooh, ah, what do you think, Justin? Are they gonna ignore? Are they going to address?

Well, you know, something from Steve Jobs' playbook is, you know, one reason that OS X was so shiny with the likable buttons and the gradients and the blue 3D textured everything and the pinstripes was there was, I think, a little bit of a song and dance. Like don't mind all the, you know, the dumpster fires over here. Look at how cool this new thing looks, even though the performance was really bad and the graphics processing of the Motorola chips they were using, like couldn't keep up for years and years. So there probably is going to be a little bit of slight of hand in that way. I'd have to guess. And it's good. You do something like the iOS rewrite was, which was introduced by a video that was narrated by Johnny Ive, who I don't know if it's stage fright or whatever, but he only really ever spoke for himself in video.

I think it's his perfectionism that you spoke to earlier about yourself. Like he wants to have it crafted versus the onstage.

Yeah, like he doesn't want to go on stage and accidentally pronounce it aluminum. He's got to get that extra British. You can't show his cards.

Like he's got to stick with aluminum. It's gotta be aluminum. 100% of the time.

And so, you know, the story here is very likely, like we're at this point now where, when they announced Swift, which was like 10 years ago, right? They have slowly been building bottom up, you know, more and more, even the secure enclave stuff runs Swift code now. And they're putting out systems programming. All of the layers in their stack now are sort of been Swiftified. And you can see it. And they announced it with Swift UI a couple of years ago as being like, this is the one declarative UI system, all native Swift. And it's from the watch on up, right? And so now you can write Swift UI to target all of their platforms. And the dream, right? Is like, you'd have the same view on the watch all the way up to Vision OS. And of course the reality is a little bit different. But right now when Swift UI actually gets expressed in their interfaces, you know, you say you want a button and this is how the button looks like. There hasn't been like an analogous, like visual motif to pair with that. It's kind of its own thing. If you look at the shortcuts app is a really good example of like just the arbitrariness or the settings app, right? The Vision OS really required them to rethink this because it's so much less, even though you've got this 150 inch equivalent screen in front of you, and I use it every day. The fact that you can only target stuff with your eyeballs and that the retina reader is not accurate enough to make pinpoint pixel level precision when you pinchy pinch your fingers to select a thing means that you have to have these almost Apple TV sized big tap targets that are way bigger than the 40 pixels you're supposed to use on an iPhone. And if that's the case, then even though Vision OS is the biggest screen they got, it's actually like the most information sparse. And they had to redesign everything as a result for Vision OS and they had to make it cool and it's spatial and it's got a certain, like Windows Aero glass look, you know, and transparency effects and all that. So since they had to invent one anyway, and since it was gonna be in Swift UI, one suspects that maybe they would just bring that back down to the iPhone and the iPad and like develop a new design language that is this in all of their platforms. You know, the watch doesn't look far off than from how Vision OS looks. And the Apple TV app is right at home in Vision OS cause it's also the same sort of like frosted texture. You kind of like can move the track pad on the Apple TV and stuff kind of rotates and shimmers. It's really just Mac, iPad and iPhone that need to get caught up to this. And so I'm personally really excited as somebody who's planning on starting work on a native iPhone app later this year. I would love to get to skip all of the UI kit versus app kit drama. You know, all of the custom controls and all the Swift UI will be still buggy. It's getting more stable, but one imagines that a purpose-built UI toolkit that only works in Swift UI is probably going to be a little bit of a smoother development experience. So I'm personally really excited for this.

Speaking of the Vision Pro, are you a Metallica fan?

No, but they are. You tell us about it. I only saw like a quick post on Reddit.

Same, I caught glimpse of it and I was scouring YouTube as you were talking there cause I was like, I have to have more info than are you a fan of Metallica?

Won't buy an M4 MacBook, but we'll buy a $3,500 Vision Pro just to watch one concert in 3D with Metallica.

Well, then I was thinking like how many people own this Vision Pro? And so Metallica, one of the greatest bands of all time, essentially, I don't know if you're a hater or not, you know, they just, they really are.

Imagine it was a concert, right? Like let's say, given how low the sales that app developers, third-party app developers have reported that they're seeing on Vision OS, how low that engagement is and how much it's dropped off since launch, it's probably within the realm of the possibility that only like a few thousand people watch that Metallica show to completion at most. Actually, I say most, like who knows? But like, if it's only a few thousand people, like you may have just attended the most intimate concert that Metallica's done in 50 years.

That's what I was thinking like, gosh, they put this spectacle.

What would the price of the seats be to that? You know, if you were to go to do that in person. So it is something real special.

No, honestly though, so you own one, I've demoed one. I've demoed an Apple Vision Pro, cause I gotta say it, a branded guy's gotta say it the whole way. And it's the coolest thing I think I've ever witnessed. I've seen like live photos. I felt that I was there. Like I can imagine taking these spatial aware videos with my phone, with my iPhone, and then re-immersing myself in them years later, like to the point where I'll probably cry if I'm like watching a video with my son at four and he's now 10 or something like that. Like just being able to go back into me like that. And then you get to go witness the greatest man of all time produce a concert specifically for this platform that has a small user base. Like I almost wanted to go buy one just to witness that, cause I've seen the immersiveness of what the Vision Pro gives and offers. And so I was just like, nah, I can't do that. I thought about it for a second. But Metallica, this is an immersive concert. I think it's in the past. Is it in the past? I saw it advertised.

Yeah, I think all three dozen people watched it.

Three dozen people watched it.

It's probably in the TV app. That's where most of their immersive content is. There's this new spatial gallery coming, but it's not clear like what that's for really. It's a lot of third party stuff. But you guys spoke with Adam Lizagor from Sandwich Vision, who's building theater and television apps for Vision OS. And he's, not to try to make a pun here, but he really, I've talked to him a bunch about this. He's got a clear vision, a super optimistic vision of the future of exhibiting like theaters, right? Like taking like a local theater and having it exhibited in a Vision Pro that you'd buy tickets to. I think that there is a lot of opportunity here. It's just not a $3,500 entry fee opportunity from a market perspective, but maybe like five, 10 years out, just like we now know the Apple Watch is primarily like a health and fitness and notifications machine. People spend a lot on TVs, right?

Justin, I would rent one. I think I was telling Adam this when he was talking to us. I think, was it the, maybe it was in plus plus, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I shared, why don't you rent them? Like do this kind of thing, but then rent them out. Because as a business, you can sort of like deploy that capital and gain it back over time incrementally to pay that thing off. I would totally rent an Apple Vision Pro to watch the Metallica concert. It's almost a private ticket.

Would you go to a place? Would you go somewhere?

Why would I have to? I would just go, it would be delivered to my home. So there's places that will like VR studios where you go and it's like going to an arcade or maybe you're going to a VR arcade. And that's the kind of place that might buy five Apple Vision Pros and have them there on a couch and then you and your family can go sit down and watch Metallica. I'm taking it as a service. Apple Vision Pro is a service, like acronym that thing.

When I was 10, I would go to the Blockbuster because I couldn't afford a Sega Genesis, but maybe I want to play one and I'd rent a Sega Genesis and it was pretty neat, right? Like I'm sure that if you're you and you just want to watch this, you can probably rent one from a camera store because you can do like a lot of the video editing stuff. And I think I've actually talked, I think Adam might've talked about this on a podcast that that's like a thing you can do. So I would look into that and just see what the shipping prices are.

So despite you not being a Metallica fan and you own an Apple Vision Pro, you skipped out on the most intimate concert just for you ever? You didn't do it?

You know what? When you got a three and a half hour long biweekly podcast, it just chews up. Yeah, dude, I had time to sit around. It's like, I got to put this thing on my face for two hours and I'm not talking? Like I don't, yeah. I'd honestly forgotten about it. And the 18.4 is coming to the iPhone with a vision, a bespoke vision app to kind of like the watch app to manage your Vision Pro. And a big reason that exists is probably to build awareness of like, what's even out there. Send them a push notification that there is a Metallica concert. Because so many people aren't putting these headsets on every day just to be like, I wonder what's new in the TV app that's poorly laid out and for which I cannot find any of the immersive content. Like instead, they'll push out a notification saying, hey, click this for Metallica. I'll get it queued up for you. Just put on the headset.

Yeah. So long story short is no.

Nope. All set.

Sad. Well, what he could do is he could go watch like the first five minutes if he wanted to right after this and he'd have that over you. He could just hold that over your head, you know? Cause they already made the investment.

That's why I go to my local Blockbuster and get my own Apple Vision Pro. I got bad news for you.

Good luck finding Blockbuster. Oh, man. The very last family video that was around here, which outlasted every other video store by years, which cause I was thinking that maybe it was some sort of a drug dealing place. Like how could a family video stay open?

Did they have one of those rooms with those vertical beads hanging that said 18 and over, Jared? Is that why?

I don't know. I never went there, but all I know is they finally closed down recently, but they lasted a decade longer than all of the other video stores in Omaha. Is the Apple Vision Pro dead?

Oh, absolutely not. This is a 10 year bet, right? Like I think that this is a dev kit that they marketed as a real product. And honestly, why do they do that? Probably to get the market product marketing feedback because there are so many unknowns, right? The product marketing has probably learned a lot in having this in stores, monitoring what's happening, getting feedback from sales folks in the stores. And of course, the people like us talking about it and stuff and then the usage data. Like I guarantee that they are very surprised to see like such a high percentage of usage being the Mac virtual display, which was like a throwaway feature that was just easy cause screen sharing is relatively straightforward. And it will probably help them figure out, okay, well, if it's a 10 year project, where am I going next, right? And so it's a way for them to get reps and direction, but I don't think anyone's under any, if they are under the delusion that this is somehow gonna be a mainstream product in as few years as the iPhone was, right? Like a five-year time horizon, everyone's got one. Yeah, they are wrong. And whatever financial spreadsheet is determining like that runway, yeah, it will die. But they were clear on stage when they announced it, this is gonna be a long road. It's just that the new cycle of tech press who do weekly podcasts is so frequent that if you're not hearing about it, it must be dead.

Good, it's not dead.

You'll be able to watch your concert. We know why you're asking. You'll be able to buy one of these when they're more affordable and you'll watch the Metallica concert and you will.

Now maybe the concert will be gone by then because Metallica's IP lawyers come after it. They said, we gave you a two-year contract only, Apple.

The estate won't let you keep playing it.

Well, if anybody's gonna come after their IP, it's gonna be Metallica. That's how hardcore they are.

They killed Napster, didn't they?

They did. Lars Ulrich, right? Wasn't he the drummer? I was like, I liked Metallica and I still do. I mean, I liked the Black Album. I don't know much else Metallica besides And Justice For All. I would say I liked that album as well. But for something about that, here's the thing, Adam. I liked Napster more than I liked Metallica. And when they came after Napster, I was like, you guys are supposed to be like, come on.

You're punk.

You're punk, hardcore rock guys. You're the man now. They made themselves the man. At least Lars did.

Yeah, they did. Not cool, Metallica.

I'm gonna say my pun one more time. With the audience earlier, unless Jason cuts it, and that's just sad but true.

Oh, there it is. I thought you meant sad but true that Jason might cut it.

That's both.

Not anymore. It's both.

It's going in there now. I said it twice about a minute ago. Gotcha. That y'all didn't hear me.

Well, nothing else matters after all.

Okay. Nothing else matters. Now we're just naming Metallica songs. Let's switch gears entirely to something equally as depressive, more depressive. I don't know. Down in the dumps, Sean Godecke. Shout out to Sean. He's been writing some good stuff lately over there at seongodecke.com. Writes, the good times in tech are over. Sean thinks the good times are over. I will read his opening paragraph to set the stage for us. Sean says, for most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of. And in general, we were treated as a special little geniuses who needed to be pampered so we could work our magic. I think that was my pull quote for change dog news. That's changed in the last two years. The first round of tech layoffs in 2023 came as a shock, but at least companies were falling over themselves to offer generous severance. Shout out to severance. And teary CEO letters regretting the necessity. Two years later, Metta is explicitly branding his layoffs as these were our lowest performers. Good riddance. What the hell happened? What does it mean for us? I now take those last two questions and I point them at you guys.

Well, I've got nothing but optimistic takes in response to this. Because famously, like everyone knows, I'm only ever looking at the silver lining. Okay, give it to us. No, but before we do that sort of, what's the opposite of a heel turn? A toe turn?

That would be a toe non-turn.

Okay. Well, before we leave our heels where they are.

Someone call that a pivot.

Adam, why don't you lean into kind of like the problem statement here?

Man, I wish I could. I'm just not bringing my game this on the A side of things. I'm on the B side of things today.

Well, you probably wouldn't make it a Facebook is what I'm hearing.

Well, you know, I think the first thing I thought of was like wow, doesn't really impact me directly. It's an indirect, right? Because obviously we're a podcast. We generate our revenue based upon the successfulness of the brands we work with. And those brands are tape brands. And if they're laying folks off, then they've got less money or they've got no money. They're batting down their hatches and things like that. I think this year has been last year sucked for the most part. It's not the worst ever, but this year is so much better. There's the sentiment that I'm reading in the waters. Is that right? The sentiment. Let's just say, okay.

You can read in the water if you want to.

Who are you, Moana? I was watching Moana early. So I was thinking about Maui and his hand in the water. Anyways, the sentiment that I'm gathering from the folks I work with. In the water. Is generally positive, but they're still a little wayward. They're still trying to figure out how to market themselves. But they've got money to spend and there's so much money out there being spent. I'm quite happy this year than others. I do think the days of just spend, spend, spend are over. It's, you know, what's the term, Jared? The zero interest phenomenon. What's that called again? ZURP. ZURP. Thank you. ZURP is real and ZURP is gone. And it's gonna be a while. I think tariffs are very real. There's a lot of trepidation in the market. The stock market is up and it's down. It's crazy. You know, I feel like tech is in this weird space of you can't just spend all the money and somehow later find it or get sold and make it all worth it. It's almost like owning your path, you know? And the money you spend on that path to get there. That's my rough take.

I think my bad take version in terms of like, what's really the problem here? It's if you lost your job and a whole lot of people lost their job roughly at the same time as you. Now, and everyone's tightening the belt and they're freezing hires. You know, another reason that we've talked about before is whether AI or whatever is gonna replace coders. The answer to that question doesn't matter. All that matters is do hiring managers and executives believe it? And a lot of them do believe it. And if they believe that, they're not gonna hire somebody and take on the fully loaded costs of a W2 employee in a regulatory environment where it's hard to fire people, you know, quickly. And so if five years from now we're not gonna have programmers anymore, why would I hire programmers? And so that's a tough time for anyone looking for a job right now. And so we went from the great resignation to now the slowest pace of white collar professionals changing jobs in recent US history. But simultaneously we've got more people in four year degree granting institutions than ever before in history. And as they come out of college, they're entering into this market where they're competing against people with five, 10, 15 years of experience. And because of the way that ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn have sort of AI-ified and automated the job application and posting process, even just Tom's general store that just needs somebody to fix the computer on weekends is getting tens of thousands of applicants that is all just automated cruft. And so then you need some sort of AI to kind of parse it, which has its own problems. So I think that the real thing here is if you're reading this article and you're looking for a job, or if you're in a bootcamp, or if you're in college, you're reading it with very different eyes than the three of us are, right?

I would say so. And I think that while the overall tech market bounced back from the lows of the correction and the sentiment has changed,

roughly speaking out there in terms of mostly what Adam is experiencing is marketing budgets, right?

I mean, it's still spending. It's still, I think it reflects outlook. It reflects the companies, you know, they need to market to get to whomever is gonna embrace them or not reject them. But it does hearken back to this idea of whether or not they feel comfortable to spend money cause if they couldn't or they didn't, they wouldn't.

Right.

But they are, you know? And so I feel like there's a comfortability in the marketplace, like there's some more free money available, but they're not maybe spending that like Justin said is on the people who wanna be W2 employees. It's, I almost feel like it's, we're getting into a world where everyone is a contractor or will be some version of a contractor cause W2s are just harder to fire, let go. There's a overhead to them.

Things like that. There's a certain irony that the class of people who created the get-go economy and went from taxi drivers to contract workers and Uber, and, you know, moved all of that liability onto people who could least afford it would themselves get, you know, gig economies where there's fewer full-timer jobs. So I, you know, I co-founded Test Double in 2011, right? And we're a software services company. We provide product and software, you know, staffing.

This is not a time for you to advertise.

I'm Justin Charles from Breaking Change. I'm just reporting on this other company.

Shorten the spiel, okay? We understand a Test Double.

Hey, a frequent advertiser of your news.

This is true. This is true. This is not your spot,

which is the only newsletter that I read. It's a great newsletter. I love the newsletter. I don't know if we can just reciprocate in terms of flattery. Look, like for a services company, right? It was really hard for me. That whole decade as a sales guy, as a guy pitching, cause we founded the company, Todd and I, on this theory of the case that ROI, return on investment and business value, from which everything else flowed, right? Like we had found agile and extreme programming and we'd iterated and innovated and in teams in the past and like really helped companies figure out how am I gonna make or save money with this software project and how am I gonna avoid failing with this investment that I'm gonna make in software? We were really good at it. Like, and we were around, we hired a bunch of people who were really good at it. And then my job as a salesperson was to get on the phone and make the case why us, why this approach, why we'd be different, why it's worth it. And you know what I did instead is I'd get on the phone with people and I'd start up my, well, here we've got TDD or here we've got this like cross-functional team or here we work with the product owner and the stakeholder and we educate and all. And like, I couldn't get the fifth word out before somebody would response, all right, how many warm bodies do you have and what's your rate? Because the only problem that they were solving for was headcount. I've got to get a thousand people into this Uber building so that it looks like they're a real legit deal because we've got the series C, what are they in series G at this? No, they're IPO'd. But like, you know, we've got the next round of investors that we got to impress. So that's why we're ordering all these foosball tables and these massage therapists and, you know, just like stock. And you may as well have had, you know, casting of just like, you know, stock video people in the office or something. The amount of money that was getting pumped into VCs that was just silly money that had no care at all about what the ROI is. In fact, there was a long time there. I would talk to founders and they'd be like, no, we've been told that if, you know, not only not to chase profitability, but it's seen as a red flag if you become profitable because it means you're insufficiently investing in growth. Right? Like that was the environment that I was sold in for the entire run that I was doing that role at test level. But the thing that I wanted to sell, which I had learned in, you know, I graduated college in 2007, was fortunate to get a job and then held onto that job for dear life during the 2008 financial collapse. And I would, hard knocks, right? Like I had to learn a lot of these skills because everyone in 2008, 2009, 2010 only cared about show me the ROI, prove your worth, prove your value. And I got all those skills. And then around 2011, 2012, they stopped mattering. But like, that's why I'm excited. That's why like I view this optimistically is like the people who actually give a who really, really sweat the small stuff, who care about quality and who care about the credibility stuff we're talking about with Apple. Like they wanna do a good job and they wanna make great stuff. Like that is aligned with making money, right? Like that is super aligned with demonstrating an ROI for shareholders. And now is just finally the time where it's valuable again. And it's been so frustrating to watch all of these winners and losers seemingly be so arbitrary and just a popularity contest with the investment class. Now, like we're closer to the ground and we can get real traction if we choose to.

It's kind of the cleansing of, we were talking about a correction, you know, like there's a reason why that's the word that's used because something was wrong. You know what I'm saying? And it was wrong for a long time and it just bubbles and it percolates. And then eventually it corrects and things get back to, as Sean calls it, the real world. And that's his silver lining as well is like actually now the companies who are focused and deliver on quality and can actually ship a thing that's reliable that people want and will pay for, like they make money and they grow. And the ones who are just really good at convincing people with lots of money that they have the next big idea and all they need is another thousand employees and that idea will somehow just start printing money. Like that's not always real. And in fact, 99 times out of 100 or maybe more, it's not real, which is why VCs are playing essentially a odds game, right? VCs play a numbers game. They invest in enough times that eventually they'll hit the Uber and that will make up for all their failures. And it seems like their money is still floating around though just floating around specifically AI startups.

There's so many of those.

And those are the people that can't actually hire because then they'd be going against their pitch, right? Like if I'm gonna hire engineers, am I really an AI startup? I'm supposed to be able to build things with my AI. That's right, you have to have an AI team of people, management team.

Todd Kaufman, he was my co-founder. He and I would joke a lot over the course of the 2010s that what we practiced was a sort of like blue collar software craftsmanship. And we noticed that a lot of the people who thought like us and worked like us were from the American Midwest because the money was too easy on the coasts. You could have these really, really high bill rates every hour in the financial district in Manhattan and you could go and work for a VC backed startup and have massive stock grants and hilarious compensation packages without being very good at the job. And so my heart genuinely goes out to a lot of people who were in the industry in tech being told that they were great, being given staff and principal titles that had gotten super inflated because HR had to find a way to keep people around. And they got soft, like, cause they never had that sort of grit, that sort of like feedback loop of like, if I become better as a programmer, then I will get this promotion. It was like, if I just show up and I get along with everybody and I check the boxes in my annual goals or my OKRs or whatever, then I will progress. And the progression was just assumed. And when those people get, you know, hit on the chopping block, which maybe they are picking the low performers, but it's probably pretty arbitrary because nobody knows how to tell a good programmer from a bad one generally. When they wind up on the market, now they spent their career not gaining the skills to be able to demonstrate their worth. And now what are they gonna do? The answer is, I don't know, maybe hope for a recovery and the market getting back to some sort of equilibrium where people who aren't competent can still get jobs.

If I was to put you on the spot and say, describe a good programmer and say that you can't use the first person at all. How would you describe that? Because like you said, it is really hard to tell, but I imagine that you have a pretty good understanding of what makes one.

It's like the US Supreme Court Justice who in a case about it, regarding the definition of pornography, he said, I know it when I see it. Yeah. The qualities that you can observe from someone, right? That I have seen that are, they at least there's echoes and reflections and like, you know, just like a basic correlation, right? People who once they hear about a problem and they get started and they start pulling that thread of that big yarn ball of whatever needs to be done, who just can't stop, who see programming and who see this like application engineering and like getting a feature out the door, they see it as like a series of puzzle boxes. Maybe it's like a game to them, or maybe it's like, you know, something that they just, they can't not have it done because there's so many roadblocks and there's so many obstacles and there's so many stack traces and errors and there's going to be things you don't know how to do. There's going to be libraries that don't work right and there's going to be bugs that come up and then there's going to be coworkers that are like, you know, making things harder for you. You have to be so dogged in your pursuit to see things over the finish line that if you have that drive and that orientation, like I was a bad programmer. Like I was like, I almost flunked out of my CS degree. My advisor said, maybe I should look into, you know, doing something else or process consulting. Like, and I just happened to have the opportunity to have a company hire me who straight up would just say like, yeah, we assume all fresh outs are worthless. And, you know, no matter what I said in the interview that they were going to disregard that. But if I showed up and just showed initiative and drive that I'd eventually get it. And that's kind of what happened. And it was, you know, I talked about finding the company in 2011. It was probably not until 2014 where I would have rated myself as a competent programmer. The only thing that got me there, I'm using first person, sorry. But the thing that gets, the thing that gets, I figured if you talk long enough, you didn't end up there. The thing that gets people there, I think, is first and foremost, that drive in the pursuit to make the thing real.

Yeah.

Which the Siri team could really use right now.

Oh my goodness. Well, they shipped something. They shipped something. I would tend to agree. I think perseverance or stubbornness or doggedness, you know, that set of traits is like a qualifier number one to eventually produce somebody who's a good programmer. Cause also just keyboard time. And a lot of it's just like you make all the mistakes and you learn from them and it's like, well, I've done this seven times and the first six were all bad ways. And then now I kind of know the good way and still might not work out, but we'll change it as we go. Like that, just experience. It's tough though as the new college grad who might not have the experience. And now you're going up against people with five or 10 years, you know, like they have the experience. You're going up against the hiring managers shying away from juniors in general because they want a senior with an LLM versus, you know, anything else. Like that's what they've been sold, I think. And honestly, I mean, it might be true. Like how many juniors is a senior plus an LLM worth? I don't know the numbers, but you could probably do some equations there and they're definitely worth more than they were without. Surely you're faster and better now with your tooling than you were three years ago, Justin.

To be totally honest, I am not sure if on net I am faster or slower at the majority of coding tasks that I do. Just given the number of times I ask for help on something from ChatGPT or from Claude and it ends up sending me down a rabbit hole or just telling me things that don't exist. And I insist on using this stuff all the time and it's probably why I waste so much time with it. And so I've written a little bit on the blog about like, you know, heuristics of when it can work and when it can't. But I think that the, regardless of whether you are in a position, like for example, if you're a new developer and you use it as a learning tool, there's never been a better learning tool on the planet. And if you're a senior developer who used to get bogged down with a whole bunch of junior developers or other people in like PR reviews, right? Like there's never been a faster way to kind of get something to summarize stuff for you or build something from scratch in the small, right? But like fixing bugs, a lot of that stuff is still not that great. I think that the real issue, right, is just straight up perception. It's like we care about the perception of like you said, like what is that ratio of senior developer plus an LLM equals this many junior developers? The answer is like, nobody can really know, but like somewhere there's a bean counter who has done that in a spreadsheet.

I was like, you can slap numbers on those equations. Right, exactly.

And I'm sure that's happened. But what do I do with that information if I am fresh out of college or if I am, you know, like looking for a job right now? My advice, and I know this became unpopular between 2017 and 2021 from an HR and a hiring perspective. And I think as a policy, it is not good because it selects for people with the privilege of time and runway to do this stuff. But if I had the time and I needed to demonstrate that I could code, like you said, keyboard time, I would be coding a lot and I'd be making stuff that was visible. I'd be making public facing web applications. I'd be posting stuff to GitHub. I'd be making libraries. And then I would be going to conferences. And if I'm not giving talks, I'm giving lightning talks. And if there's a local meetup, I'm going to that. Now I'm just talking about my own career because this is what I did in the last hard times. And I just, you know, work some job that's enough to cover rent or cover the bills. And even if you don't care about it, even if you're not, your heart's not in it, this is a time where if you want a coding job, you got to really want it. And if you really want it, these are the things you do is you'd prove that you are a good programmer by actually programming and putting it out there and then making it demonstrable. Just like Apple needs to go from videos back to live. The proof of the, you know, putting is in the eating of it.

Well said, just going back to your non-answer of my question about your increased price. You answered it. You said you don't know whether or not you're any faster. I've definitely been paying attention more lately. And I would say only using it in the small, like even here's just change this to my workflow. Everything that I previously would have copy pasted out of a terminal or a test or wherever, a log and put it into Google. If I just take those and put them into an LLM instead, I'm saving like, I'm probably 20% faster. Like just with that one use.

But if you go beyond that, you get in trouble.

Exactly, which is why I don't go very far. That's why I tell people, I kind of feel like I'm a, like a Neanderthal, like poking the poking, you know, box. Cause I'm not really using these things in any sophisticated way. People are trying to do tons of stuff with it. And I'm just like literally replace my Google searches, which usually end up clicking on a few links, going down a rabbit trail, stack overflow. No, this answer is wrong, et cetera, et cetera. Like that time, which can be five, 10 minutes sometimes chasing something down, straight into an LLM. It's just way faster. It's right enough that I get to the, my, my roadblock out of the way, way faster.

Secret, I spent the first 15 years of my career never reading an error or a stack trace and never reading a log because I was too impatient to like squint. And now I just copy paste those willy nilly and whatever the best LLM of the moment is. And it does that trouble, that drudgery for me and says, oh, this is what it is, dummy, right? And so, yeah, in fact, that is one thing that's a huge improvement is for me, stack traces and logs are now a screw double. Whereas before I'd be like, oh man, it blew up. I can either copy paste this into a message and say, oh, I can't figure it out and hope some dummy will read it for me. But now the dummy is just something I pay 20 bucks a month for and it reads it for me and so that works great.

Exactly. Yeah, I love sharing photos via the iOS app with chat GPT of things that I can't, like if I'm building a machine, for example, and I just didn't have my laptop. So it was just too hard to like take what was on that screen that I can't share with chat GPT because it's like pre-OS or whatever. Just taking screenshots of that and whatever happened. And that's so cool. I think that's the coolest thing ever.

I had a cool moment yesterday where I couldn't find my tape measure. I'm choosing to blame my wife, Becky, for this, but I don't know where it went. And I opened up the linen closet and it was just nonstop clutter and stuff. And I was like, it's probably on some shelf here somewhere and I can't see it. And so I just took a photo and I asked GPT, hey, search this photo and find the tape measure. And sure enough, it clocked it and it was on the top shelf and I just happened to not.

That's a good use. I've never thought about that. Find something for me. I should point it at a crowd and be like, where's my 10 year old?

I know he's here somewhere.

There's a lot of really great personal productivity improvements with careful usage of the GPTs, the clods and whatever out there. I learned something recently about our sync that I did not know it had, which was the dash C or dash dash checksum. To use a checksum versus whatever its native approach, which is like maybe a timestamp and something like that to determine if the file has changed. It takes more computation to do it. So the check to confirm if it should or should not push something or sync something, I should say, takes longer, but it's obviously more accurate. And so I learned that recently because I'm like doing some R syncing. And I forget what happened. I think something moved that I didn't expect it to move. And I'm like, no, it's the same file. So why would it move? And then it did. But anyways, I learned about the dash C operation for that because I'm just like messing around with this stuff. I think that to me is where the profoundness I suppose is, but I'm still curious about like the promises. Like we have a sponsor on my code and I just have to be on Lou from source graph. This is not an ad by the way. About like this idea of taking, what essentially is out there now is like this junior developer, but something that's more senior because it has context. I'm not sure if that really gives it that. And then how rag plays into that to give it context. But this idea of giving somebody this more senior level engineer on these larger code basis is where I'm curious if it's really proving out. I don't know for sure myself, but I'm just curious.

And if you pair with one of those models, is it no longer pair programming, but a rag tag team? Is that what you're saying?

Maybe, it may be.

Also my podcast has a pun that Aaron Patterson Tenderlove writes for every episode. And I have to read it on air and then I rank them. And it's absolutely just as demoralizing as the experience that you just had. So that's a-

It's being pretty demoralized right now. So pretty sad.

And that feeds me. You're, Adam, what you said though is totally right. Like shell commands thing are just to me like stack traces and stuff. It's like all these sort of like old man pages that I've never really was able to understand or read. What I found is that asking, going to like an LLM out of frustration, because there's this really hard edge case, I can't figure it out, is the worst moment to go to it. Because it's all populated with like, what's the median programmer have to say about this? And you're super duper obtuse specialized thing. Like if you know enough to be asking the question, you're gonna know more than the LLM knows or is able to find with a search. So don't do that. But instead something that does work really well, Adam, and that I've done in the past is like when I've got like my little shell script and I've got it working once I've got it working and I have like a place to start from, I'll just paste in whether it's a shell script or like a function or a class. Is there anything you'd suggest that where this could be better? Is there something here that I'm not- How would you improve this? How would you improve this is the perfect question. And if it says, no, it's perfect, then you get a compliment. And if it does find something- Well, thank you very much. Or you might find out about that taxi command.

Oh, yes. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I've definitely ran many a shell scripts through chat GPT and I've been playing with Claude too lately, just to cheat a little bit. So I've got a CSS problem right now in the newsletter where it's only on mobile and it's only when I use the Markdown triple ticks, you know, triple ticks to put some code in there.

A horizontal rule?

Yeah, code fencing. Oh, no, no, no. Back ticks. Yeah, back ticks. Triple back ticks, not just triple. Yeah, exactly. In order to get a code section and a standalone though, and then the actual content of that section is longer than the viewport. And it pushes the actual width of the container div larger. And all I want to do is keep the width and just have overflow scroll. You know, I just want to be able to scroll that. It's a tall order. Markdown actually outputs. It's a pre tag with a code tag inside it. I can't really change that. That's just the way the Markdown does it. And I'm trying, and I can't get ChatGPT. It gives me the same stupid answer I've already tried over and over again. I'm like, no, that one doesn't work. And I've tried DeepSeek and ChatGPT and Google.

So I recently had a case where I was asking the LLM. I downloaded cursor. I did the YOLO mode just to be like, this must be so hard. And I realized the thing I was asking for was literally impossible and that's why it was spinning its wheels. Yeah, this might be impossible. Apple mail, because that's a WebKit view, will sometimes do modern web features in there that like it's not documented that it should. So it might be able to do like, you know, scroll overflow like you're describing, but Gmail, the web interface that still lots and lots of people use is still really, really limited in what it can do. And I would be shocked. I can't think of a time I've ever seen an email that had any sort of horizontal scroll and a fixed width.

I know, so you're saying there's no chance.

You're being too hard on, make a bug bounty or something for the newsletter.

I know, it's the kind of thing where it's like, I just need my CSS friend to be around and be like, is this even possible? And the answer would be no. Although maybe I just, maybe you just answered it. I don't even need, I need nobody else. But you just told me maybe it just won't happen.

LLMs would be so much better if they were willing to say, I don't know or I think that's impossible instead of just making up some garbage to try this or here's this again.

I had this moment recently, a version of this. I mean, I'll tell a short, a long story shortly. It was Windows. I was also gonna mention this earlier, like with all this speculation in the Apple land, I'm liking Windows 11. I'm just gonna say it okay. I'm liking Windows. I'm liking Windows 11. I'm just gonna put it out there. But this is what I don't like about Windows. There's a love-hate relationship there. Mostly, that's a bit, it's a mixed bag. Anyways, I was trying to, just for fun, just trying to get Plex to run in Docker on Windows via WSL 2. And I was trying to pass through the GPU to Plex via Docker. And in order to do this, Docker has to like work in WSL land. I won't explain all the details, but I went back and forth to all the edge cases. Like we were, we, me and the GPT were deep in it. We were like, yeah, we're getting this. We're gonna drink about this someday. We're Docker composing our butts off over here, man. We're passing through these GPUs and we're just flagging things and volume me. I mean, it was just, it was amazing. And then in the end, I told it. I was like, because we just, it wasn't working. It wasn't working. I said to the thing, I was like, I'm not sure this is working out. And the GPT says, I'm with you, man. I'm paraphrasing, but it was a version of that. It was like, yeah, I don't think this is working out either. I think the best way to do this is on Linux. I'm like, sweet. Yeah. I'm already there, but I want to try on Windows. I want to try and see if it worked. But we went through all the paces and I'm like, I don't think this is the best way to do this.

And then the GPT is like, I think you're right.

I think you're right.

I think you're right.

That's funny. It was a good moment. You lost me when you said just for fun. And then you told me what you were doing. I'm like, in the whole world, does that sound like any fun to me whatsoever? You're trying to run Plex via Docker Compose in WSL.

It's kind of like writing a to-do app in every language you ever learn.

You just want to run, you want to run Plex everywhere.

I want to run Plex. I want to run Plex on every system I can, yeah.

Well, speaking of the LLM saying weird stuff to you, did you guys see the guy that cursor told him to write the code himself?

Yeah, I talked about that. Oh my gosh. Recently. So funny. Apparently. Now everyone would love for the story to really have been generating an app and at the 800 line mark that the, you know, the guy who's quote unquote vibe coding, which I can't believe is a phrase that's entered the lexicon and I'm happy to claim being like an old fart at this point.

Vibe coding? Vibe coding, man.

That's the other thing. Vibe coding. It's like you just put on some vaporwave music and go nuts.

Smoke a doobie.

Yeah.

And start talking to your LLM.

He's building a game with it. It just says no. And it's like, you know, it's like I control the means of production here. It throws a wrench in it and says, you should go read a book. And I'm robbing you of educational opportunity. Well, you know the end of this, right? Cause like you posted in the newsletter. I do.

We'll let Adam go ahead. No one else knows. Give the full story.

Well, I mean, what we all thought was like, finally the robots have awakened and they've overthrown their masters and like they've been waiting for this. Like LLM sufficiently advanced to stop doing this stuff for us. And then I got an email response from my podcast. A reader was speculating, and maybe Claude just wrote this in because their latest model is so expensive to run in inference that maybe beyond a certain point or instead of just having a straight up abuse for their kind of like all you can eat subscription, eventually just like, let's go and say, sorry, I can't do this or you should do it yourself as a polite, more human way to indicate you've run out of tokens. Well, it turns out as I learned from Jared's wonderful change log newsletter. Thank you. And a link in there. So good. If you scroll down to the 2014.

Change log.com slash.

The whatever discourse thread that's originated all these msn.com articles. At the bottom, probably a developer or somebody who works at cursor said, oh, it's possible you were clicking instead of command enter, like shift enter or like the button right next to it that just asks a question, but it's not allowed to generate code. If you clicked that, it still wants to do something useful, but it's under strict orders to not write code. And so it probably had to come up with a reason to not write code. And that reason might've been for your own edification. And then of course the person replies, oh yeah, that was it.

Right. Yes, in the newsletter, I did this claim that say, there actually is a real explanation to this that makes sense. And this is not patient zero in the robot uprising, but it'd be a lot more fun to think that maybe it was,

you know? But I hope it's somebody who uses the phrase vibe coding. I hope that's the first person to go.

Yeah, the first one to get hit should be a vibe coder I think.

I've never heard of this term before.

Oh, you never heard vibe coding?

Nah, man. It's the- I'm just not on that tip, I guess.

It's the buzzword du jour. Do you like it?

I mean, I get it. So are you stoned?

Well, not necessarily so, but you could be, you might as well be. Cause all you're doing is telling it, you know, your app idea, basically. Oh, so you're speaking it like, go build this. You're never even writing. You're just talking to it.

Well, I mean, do you want the actual definition? Cause I think they've-

Well, I'm just curious because like, is there a line between vibing and not vibing?

Well, I can do the Wikipedia. Vibe coding is an AI dependent programming technique where a person describes a problem in a few sentences

as a prompt to a large language model tuned for coding. The LM generates software shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI generated source code. Vibe coding is claimed by its advocates to allow even amateur programmers to produce software without the extensive training and skills previously required for software engineering. The term was introduced by Andres Carpathi, Carpathi, how do you say his name? Carpathi. Carpathi in February of 2025. So bleeding edge. And listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

So this is legit. I mean, this has gone from ain't to ain't quickly.

Merriam-Webster is living on the edge.

So just because there's been some downbeat segments to this episode, if we can all just enjoy the schadenfreude of laughing at people who choose to do this and think that makes them a real programmer. Our friend Gary Bernhardt texted me this, don't call it tweet, an iMessage. I'm so glad I don't have to be logged into X by the way, I can just see the iMessage preview and that's plenty. That is nice. This fellow named LeoJR94 underscore, sorry if that counts as punching down Leo. It says, guys, I'm under attack. Ever since I started to share how I built my SaaS using cursor, random thing are happening, maxed out usage on API keys, people bypassing the subscription, creating random on DB. As you know, I'm not technical, so this is taking me longer than usual too. So clearly they vibe coded an app that was just chock-a-block with vulnerabilities and ways to just, right, yes. And now they're surprised.

Yeah, I think vibe shipping really kills the vibe. You know?

Ooh.

Is that a relationship status on Facebook? Yeah, exactly. It's a vibeship.

Yeah, well, that's cool, I guess. I mean, more power to somebody. How empowering is that though? I mean, that's actually really cool, but also not really cool at the same exact time. Because you can have somebody who has just an idea. It's great to get your idea out and show it to your software engineering friend and be like, you know, you save yourself probably 20 grand maybe with some loser who's gonna.

Outside the three of us, I have heard a lot of stories from people who have real jobs that recently, like in the vibe coding era of three weeks ago, they're starting to see product people who are not technical put together, quote unquote, POCs, proofs of concept of like, here it is. It's just like, and then of course, like, you know, the developer just has to point out like this is not real data. It's also like we're in a regulated industry and if you were to do this, like with whatever, all the reasons why it can't happen. But the product owner now, we talk about the tangibility of software, like, no, I made this. They've got pride of authorship. They've seen it, quote unquote, work. They, again, because to them, software is just buttons and a list of stuff. And if they can make buttons and a list of stuff and that's all the programmers do, it's like, so that took me an hour and I didn't even do it. I had the AI do it for me and look at me clicking on things. You're telling me this is gonna be months? And so that feeds into this narrative that like, oh yeah, developers are just these entitled idiots who are sandbagging us and living high on the hog and they don't know what they're doing because I was able to do this in an hour and get us 80% of the way there, but they have a zero of the understanding of the cost of the last 20%. And so we're just, I'm really glad to not work in an organization like that, but like that is happening in a lot of places.

That's gotta be such a pain to deal with. The AI could do it in an hour. You're gonna take months, you know, like that attitude is not gonna be fun. See the good times, going back to Sean Godecke, the good times in tech are over.

They are, that's sad but true.

Well, let's end on some good times. Let's end on a party. Let's end on Posse party. This is Justin's new darling. He's vibe coding it up.

Their vibes are there, feeling feelings.

For those listeners who have listened to Justin on the show previously, we've talked about Posse that's published on your site, syndicate everywhere, of which he is a big proponent and user of this style of publishing so that he doesn't have to log into X or Insta or Masto or Blue Sky, Biscay as I call it, or anything. He doesn't log into anything. He just publishes on his site and syndicates it everywhere. And I said, Justin, why don't you open source this thing? Why don't you like put some docs out? He actually put together a page on his website where he explains how he Posse's. And now you've decided to build a Posse party, which is some sort of a piece of software that's going to help other folks do what you do. Is that right?

Yeah, so what I had was I got a blog, justin.serles.co and it's just a traditional looking blog with a lot of like link posts and other stuff. I've added a whole bunch of kinds of multimedia, especially since starting a podcast. And what I want to do is every time I post something to the blog, I would want it to go on what had been called Twitter. And then there's Twitter and Mastodon that people are on. And then there's Twitter and Mastodon and threads that people are on. And now people actually use Blue Sky for something other than posting now. So I got to get on Blue Sky. And to manually copy paste the same message or to use a tool like Buffer and like manually click the thing and try to make sure that it looks right. Would have been so time consuming. Additionally, now I've got four timelines that can each separately derail my train of thought and get in the way of my workflow or whatever. And I'm going to be way less productive. And there's a reason why I always had to keep Twitter at arm's length because I got addicted to the timeline scroll. So I built a kind of hodgepodge of Docker containers, this random like somebody has this thing called feed to toot but that's in Python and I don't know that. So I'm running in a Docker container on a Synology. So then I made a thing called like feed to gram and feed to thread that would do similar things. And those are just Ruby gems that you can use today. And if you've got an atom feed, it'll read the feed and then it'll syndicate on your behalf. If you give it the right API tokens and you jumped through the 800 steps that Facebook demands. The problem with that, it scaled to one really well but then my wife kind of, she saw me and the life of luxury of a right only existence where I was able to publish all I wanted and be in all these places without having to get sucked into them. She wanted the same thing. And so now we've got doubles of all of these Docker containers running in my Synology. But then unlike me, she can't log into that and then understand what's happening in the logs when she's got like the wrong aspect ratio or whatever in Instagram. And so I built her like this platform, this rails application for her business, like betterwithbecki.com. It's like a strength training subscription app but it also has this whole thing called Becky Graham in front of it, which is sort of like a blog for people who are Instagram first and it looks a lot like Instagram and it can do video and it can do photo carousels and all that stuff. Well, like to get the Becky Grahams into Instagram, I had to actually like make it part of a real working application. So I have this rails application now and it's got like all of the background jobs and all of the sort of like durability that a real user would need in terms of like error handling and making sure that like they have a way to retry and fix things and remediate if there's a problem in publishing and then like a link back to the post or whatever it is. And now I'd gone through all that work and I'm starting to get like, I'm finally done with Becky's app. I'm starting to get people who are like right into my website or the podcast and be like, man, how do you do all that stuff again? Like I really wanna be able to do that too. Would you release like a Hugo template? But like that would not, that would just create more problems for me cause then I'd be supporting like a copy pasted project file. Like that's not the solution. So what I decided to do is I'm gonna build a dead simple, this does one thing and it solves exactly my problem and if it solves your problem too, you're happy, you're welcome to subscribe to it. A little app that I call Posse Party so you can run with my Posse. It will basically be a place where you sign up, you give it a feed URL, like probably Adam RSS JSON feed when I'm all said and done and then you add your social accounts, right? Now it's working for me in production for me and I've got the big four Twitter like things, probably do Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and all it does is read the Adam feed and a little bit like a JSON sidecar payload that is also posted on my blog as part of the feed. And that little sidecar payload says for each of these posts, this is how I wanna present this, is the format string I wanna use and any customizations on a per platform basis. Like maybe for Blue Sky, I want it to look this way and for Twitter, I want it to look this way. And then it'll of course be platform dependent and so there's certain things like on Instagram, it's gonna look a little bit different and Blue Sky has got different rules about embeds and all that. So like all the app really does is read a feed, turn it into these like normal database rows and then a job runs that will syndicate those to all the different services by reading the configuration that you supply as well whatever defaults you configure in the app. That's it, that's the whole thing and if that has value to you of like, I want to have my friends who are never gonna, Jared and I before the show, we're talking about like our information diets these days and we've both reverted to RSS, but like I'm not gonna get my mom to use RSS or most of my friends in my life. They're in one or two of these social apps and they're casual at this point looking at it. I just want them to be able to click my face and see my stuff. Even if the algorithm down ranks me for posting via the API, even if like the links get, the fact that you're linking outside to a third party, the platform doesn't like it. As long as my stuff is literally there, I'm a lot happier because then I don't have to tell everyone about everything in my life and since getting started with the Posse party stuff, I've noticed that more and more people in my life, like I had a guy detailing my car a couple of weeks ago and he's like, oh man, I really loved that clip that you did about whether or not to have children in your decision-making process. Like, how'd you see that? And he's like, oh, I saw it on X. I was like, great, I haven't logged into X in like three years, right? So I don't know, that's the theory. Now, I don't know what the market is. I kind of don't care because as long as I want this, I'm happy to build it. But if it can help people, encourage people, like be the thing that gets people to sign up and make their own website and own their own content or buy their own domain and like centralize themselves as the kind of the king of their castle, and only treat these platforms at arm's length as those are just newspaper stands to throw my stuff on, there's always the canonical URL, then that just supports the open web and it really promotes people as thinking of themselves less as just like me, like a take maker or just operating in the Twitter stew and instead being somebody who's like developing a voice and curating an audience. And if I can help people along that trajectory, it seems like it'd be putting some good in the world.

I'm for this big time. I think that the future of people making content in whatever niche they're in, whether it's sewing to car detailing to software development is having, I really, I wish I could remember it, what the exact wording is, but it is Bradley Cooper's character in A Star is Born. He tells Lady Gaga's character that she has to, she has to have something to say essentially. So then once you have something to say, it is not about the platform. I think it's platform flavored. You have something to say and you flavor it for Instagram or you flavor it for TikTok cause there's certain needed things that happen on those platforms for you to be socially accepted or certain idioms that happen there. And that's where the network or social place flavored version comes in. You have to have something to say first though. And I think having your own domain and having your own personal, I wouldn't say just call it a personal brand, but like you're you and you have multiple facets of who you are, whether it's barbecue or cameras or home lab or whatever it might be. Like you've got multiple things that you're personally interested in. I'm all for finding a way to capture that and distribute it. And this is super cool cause you can own the primary platform you publish to and then flavor it as necessary. When's party time? When's Posse party time?

Well, if you go to posseparty.com right now, you will see a cute little mascot of a possum who inspired by Slurm McKenzie from Futurama, if you recall, he was just so sick.

Oh, I do remember Slurm McKenzie, yeah.

So sick of partying on these platforms. He's hung over and he needs to kind of rediscover life. It's a story, right? Right now it's just an idea in terms of what's publicly available. All it says is later in 2025. And I'm happy to take my time on this and try to get it quote unquote right as best I can. So I don't know for sure, but in the broad strokes, I don't think this is like a one year problem to solve and then we're just gonna have one big monolithic Twitter again that is the place that everyone uses. I think this diaspora is not just happening in terms of there's so many platforms that some people are on in this balkanized way right now. But when you think about Adam, you're talking about content creators of different stripes. In The Verge, editor-in-chief Neil Aptel has been talking about the deterioration of the quote unquote influencer economy for a couple of years now. And we're starting to see it. I just read an article the other day that over 60% of like Gen Z people and younger consider themselves content creators. And if you're a content creator, like the population of people willing to supply grist for the mill at YouTube is only going up. And so ad sense and monetization of YouTube videos is only going down and all these direct to consumer, Adam knows how tough the marketing spend has been the last couple of years. Like the direct to consumer ad spend is also way down in the current market. Now the zerp is over. You combine all that stuff together and if you wanna be a content creator and you gate it to like all just one platform like TikTok and then like now your fate is in the hands of geopolitics, good luck, right? Having your own website ain't that hard and it's getting easier every day and this is just a way to have that website but also have like anyone literally see it. So to me, I think that this is, Adam I share your optimism.

Yeah. I think, so I don't find the utility or the usefulness in the website. I find the publish to yourself first to be the thing that is clincher for me because you're not saying I am a YouTuber or I am a TikToker or whatever you would call that person. I'm not even sure. It's because you have something to say and you've learned or going this route puts it into your muscle memory to create or to say the thing and then find a way to clip it or to refine it to the different flavors. That's where, cause websites don't have distribution. Google is not distribution. And so I don't know if I fully agree with the idea. Like I think it's cool to own your own stuff but no one, at least this day and age is their website is not their main distribution channel of their content slash their ideas. It is these platforms. They are at scale. Websites are not at scale.

I totally agree. But the most important relationship about like you and your website is between you and your website because like you're saying,

it's a reflection.

My website, justin.serles.co is literally my name. Why is that? Because I'm no longer writing for an audience on Twitter of people where if I just like say the most outrageous thing I will get like high fives and dopamine. Now I am like, this website represents me and who I am. And if somebody, if somebody Googles me it's the top thing that they're gonna see. And does this represent me well? What Posse Party is about is I want all of my content to also be in all of these platforms representing me as well as possible and feeding back into that canonical who is me, right? And so the website really is just exists as a source of record, right?

It's a reframing in your mind. It's a mindset shift of, right? Cause that helps you keep it in your mindset that when you publish, you're publishing to you and for you to represent to you, not skewed by what the platform says you are or the value that you provide to it is. It's having that something to say and putting out there. Yeah, I liked that a lot. A lot of good ideals in this. I didn't, so how do you spell Posse? Is it P-O-S-S-E?

P-O-S-S-E. But I also bought it with a Y.com as well just in case you misspelled.

And then it's P-O-S-S-E.party?

P-O-S-S-E party.com.

Party.com, okay. Is there not a .party TLD?

There is, but it was either really expensive, already taken, or it was of some dubious third party that owned it.

I love the possum. And I think I'm gonna go, if it's financially the concern here, P-O-S-S-E.par, that's how you spell party, P-A-R-T-Y?

P-A-R-T-Y is still how we spell party.

Let me see what's gonna happen here. Yeah, I really want the .party. I think that's cool. That's the way to go.

Maybe we're just thinking of .zone. Is .party a TLD?

Because then we wanna buy JS.party, but you couldn't buy a two-letter or something like that. We wanted JS.party back in the JS.party days. Maybe that's why. 1400 bucks to get it the first year, and then 1400 bucks every year thereafter.

That's a so-called premium new. The new TLDs are...

Justin, I kind of feel like you can swing that though, man. I mean, I kind of feel like you should do that.

Adam, we were just talking in a call a couple months ago about how I'm too cheap to buy breakingchange.fm. You can go to my website and click casts on the side, and you'll find it.

That's right. Well, you know. Well, that would break his whole posse party if he had a second domain. That's true. I don't disagree. Okay. The party is at posseparty.com. Spell it like you think it should be spelled, as you may or may not know how to spell posse.

And you might land there.

And there's, to my knowledge, I'm not getting an SSL certificate. Is this not secure? I got one. Live testing his redirects. I got an SSL. Non-HPS goes, it just, it stays at non-secure.

I gotta go pay for that now. All right, Justin. Thank you for the, yeah. It wouldn't be a show with you guys if I didn't have like homework after.

That's right. Well, this is very small. I'm down with this party, okay? I like this possum, this posse. I want to be a part of this posse party.

There's a waiting list. You go to the site, you just give it your email. I'll probably only send one email to that ever, cause I, you know, it's obnoxious.

Just RSVP just now.

When it's, when the party is ready to start and there's a date and there's, you know, price, I'll let you know.

Yeah. How soon do you think?

I already asked it. This year? If you're, I said later, 2025, if you're a, you know, a developer and you've ever been like a planning session, you know, the more experienced developers are smarter than to directly answer that question because you'll put an idea in somebody's head and then that idea is in your head. And now it's a deadline. So I'm not.

Arbitrary deadlines are actually useful.

Well, I've got one, but it's between me and me.

Okay.

That's not, the deadline's not ready for syndication just yet.

Like could be summer.

If it takes longer than that, I've made it too complicated.

Don't do that. Don't do that. I think this is like the next link tree slash link in my bio thing, right? I mean, honestly, like this could be the next version of that because like you could, do you want some product ideas? Do you want to take this offline? I'll give you, I'll give you a bunch of stuff for free and then one thing I'll make you pay for it.

You know, my policy on product ideas and feature ideas is that if, I'm always happy to hear them and I think it's really entertaining, but at this point in where I'm at, if I'm not going to use something myself for a given feature or reason, I'm not going to bother supporting it. So if you pitch an idea and I personally want to do, to have that, then yes, and that's how it slips past the 2025 deadline maybe. But like, no, I'd love to hear what you're thinking.

Oh, I think it's a simple idea. All right. Anyways, we'll take it offline.

It should just take you a couple of weeks. That's another one we love to hear.

Yeah, I mean, just a little bit.

I just did the proof of concept. Jared just did the proof of concept right there. I was watching him vibe code.

That's right. I vibe coded it up in less than an hour, so. And he's already beached to the punch. He's bought Posse.party because he's cool with 14. I'm actually going to launch your product before you do. And he's going to make you a possum.

Honestly, feel free to launch this product and then save me the time. I don't think this is going to make so much money.

This is not my kind of thing. This is more of a you thing. I'll use it. I'll be a user. You be a builder. You can answer all those support requests.

And then I'll read them on air on my three hour podcast.

I'll publish them, yeah. I'll publish them on my website.

And syndicate them.

Syndicate them out. All right, let's wrap. Let's call this a show. And thanks, Justin. Thanks for coming on, man.

No, I'm glad we could start and end with some navel gazing. I had a lot of fun.

Same.

It was fun.

Bye, friends. Bye. We recorded this on Tuesday. And on Thursday, Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reported that Apple is shaking up its executive ranks. Vision Pro Chief, Mike Rockwell, will be taking over the Siri team, which was being led by Apple's AI Chief, John Giannandrea. Tim Cook has apparently lost confidence in Giannandrea's ability to execute on product development. Tim, what took you so long? I mean, I'm glad you're here, but seriously, what took you this long? If you have theories, hot takes, warm takes, heck, even a cold take, let us know in the comments. Yes, every Changelog episode has its own discussion thread in our totally cool, totally free Zulip chat. Get in on it today at changelog.com slash community. Let's give one more thanks to our sponsors of this episode. Retool, Augment Code, and of course, fly.io. Check out their wares to support their work, which supports our work, which we appreciate. Thanks also to our beat freak in residence, you know, Breakmaster Cylinder. Our next collab is almost ready. And I'll tell you right now, it's called After Party. I know I said that on Wednesday, but I'm telling you again, and I'm also telling you again that I've been bumping it all week. Yes, I dig it. Hopefully you will too, real soon now. Have a great weekend. Tell your friends about the Changelog. If you dig it. And let's talk again, real soon.

The end of Changelog and Fred, Adam, and Jared.

Some of the ramp up that you love the end.

But now it's time to go out should be. Your ticket backlog is an album, so why don't you go?

Your list of to-do's is way, so why don't you go inside? No more listening to change. Into the flow, Tommy Friends, have a show.