RobbieTheWagner 
Adam Argyle 
Amelia Wattenberger Welcome to Syntax! Welcome to a brand new episode of the front-end happy hour podcast. Welcome to this week's JS Party! Live from Ship Shape Studios, this is WhiskeyWeb and what not, with your hosts Robbie the Wagner and me, Charles William Carpenter the third. That's right Charles, we drink whiskey and talk about web development. I mean, it's all in the name, it's not that deep. This is, WhiskeyWeb and what not, do not adjust your set. WhiskeyWeb and what not is brought to you by... Today's episode is brought to you by Warp and there are new Cloud agents check it out at oz.dev.oz.dev. You know we're already big fans of this app, I keep a long list of all the features that
I love. But, now with oz and Warp's Cloud Agent setup, I can escape my machine and trigger Cloud coding agents from anywhere. From Warp, the Ocli, the web app, which I can do from my phone, hell's-yeah, a cron job, github actions, or an SDK that they so graciously provide. Think about it, with just a darker file you can front-load a sandbox with context and have agents open PRs across multiple repos at once, all with a single prompt. Warp Rocks, enough said, all right back to the show. Hey, what's up everybody, welcome to WhiskeyWeb and what not, with your hosts Robbie the Wagner and Adam, Thomas Argyle, the nerd.
Howdy y'all. What's up, what's up? All right, we are joined with a special guest today, I'm going to tell the folks at home who we've got, Adam. Oh, you know I do, this is Amelia Wattenberger, digital creatives, products, pollunker, code-based revealer, data visualizer, mental model, or badass dev previously principal research engineer at github, known for code-alus, copilot for docs, github blocks, and so many more. Great, augment code, author, full stack, D3, and data visualization, and overall quality, UIUX design engineer, welcome to the show, Amelia. Hey, hey, thanks, I like that intro. You got a lot of cool stuff to talk about, so nice.
Yeah, yeah, thanks for joining us, yeah, we always start the show with some whiskey. We have one today, it is called the Gypsy Explorer, it is part of a Gypsy collection, I think they have two or three of them, I didn't look that hard into how many they have, but yeah, they do different ones that are about like exploring different types of wood and different stuff like that. This one is a blend of two six-year-age bourbons, it's 66% corn, 30% rye, 4% maltabarly, 103 proof, and it's finished in French and Appalachian oak barrels, and yeah, their company goal is to finish in different woods from around the world, so they're just trying different
stuff, seeing what works, we'll see how it worked in this one. I see, the creator is a famous country singer, so normally these are supposed to be celebrity driven whiskey's kind of suck, but this one's not supposed to suck, so let's give it a whiskey-woven whatnot, little review, who's the celebrity creator? Yeah, good question, I should have wrote that down. Let me see if I can find it. We're going to say Garth Brooks, Eric Church, Eric Church, there's a name I know. Nice, because I don't, that would be why I forgot it. Yeah, I don't, I don't either, I don't listen to country music, so whoo, it's hot,
not the barrel. It smells good. Very sweet, oh yeah, it's a two-planned, notes of shoe store. A little bit of cheering, definitely chariots, but to say the same thing, some apple, vanilla, it's hard because once you guys say the words, I smell it, you'd say anywhere. Mulling spice cherry cola, yeah, it's not there, curry, curry, it's got a lot going on, let's see what that tastes like, but. Spicy, I like it. It is really good. Ooh, it is, it's hot, very spicy, for a bourbon, that is very spicy. So we had a lot of sweet on the nose and a lot of spice on the tongue. Yeah, I'm very interested. Very diverse.
Well we rate everything on the show and there's no wrong answers with your rating or with your flavor profile and I also plan to kind of smell this more throughout the drinking experience here because it'll kind of change a little bit, but we have a very complex developer driven rating system from zero to eight tentacles. So zero beating, it really sucks and I'm just going to give this away to a homeless person down the street because they're the only type of person that should be drinking this or eight, which is holy shit, I want this all the time. Fill my cupboards, get rid of everything else, all eights all the time.
Feel free to just blow it out what you're rating is and you can explain why if you want or just say, you know, a number. I'm going to go with the seven tentacles. Seven out of ten tentacles. Almost a full octopus. Yeah, I think this one's pretty good. It's very spicy for a bourbon. I wouldn't, if you gave me this and told me it was a bourbon, I wouldn't necessarily think that from the get go. I guess it has a lot of rye, so that influences that, but yeah, pretty good. I typically like to, oh my god, my brain, catch it. All right. I usually think bourbons are not that interesting and this one is very interesting.
So would recommend, I think seven is in line with where I would go as well. Oh, fully agreed. The smell would have, I would have said bourbon, but as soon as I tasted it, I would have said rye. I like the spicy rye and it's a, and it's like a hot spicy rye, almost like a cinnamon. What are those cinnamon candies? Anyway, the cinnamon, it's like a micanike. It's got a micanike vibe like when you actually sip it, which is really fun. And I agree. Most bourbons right now are not exciting me. I prefer rye, so this is, this is hitting all my checkpoints. What a fun little experience from the smell to the taste.
I'll give it a seven as well. That's a lot of sevens on the show recently. I kind of wanted to not give it a seven, just to be like, we don't always like everything. But this is really good stuff. Yeah. Yeah, Chuck and I always had that problem where we're like, we always have good whiskey. We should have really shitty ones occasionally. We need some crappy stuff in here. Just slam on it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, oh wait, I forgot our toast. Holy cow, we're going to have to sip again. You ready? Oh god. All right. Torture. Raise a glass to the gypsy of the grid where most see a baron wasteland of raw data.
They see a canvas. They wander far past the standard templates weaving complex numbers into uncharted living interfaces. This is kind of talking about you, Amelia, just a little bit. You're not a gypsy, but it's a little bit about you. May your dashboards always tell a stunning story. Your code go down as smooth as, oh, my camera's on the way of the word as, oh, as a well-aged dream. And your imagination remain forever untethered slantcha, which means health in Irish and Galic. Slant. Cheers. Wait, how is your camera in the way of the word? I'm so confused. Oh, man. It's, uh, when I'm looking in front of your screen, it's in the middle of the screen.
Oh, yes. Just absolutely. Well, how did you put it there? I saw an arm. Look. Wanna see the rest of my room? Oh, okay. Cheers to the parts of my room. And now you're back. All right. I just put mine on top of the monitor because I used to have the giant arm with the big Sony DSLR. And I was just like, hey, I'm going to simplify my desk. Do you have like a standard? Do you have like a, this one is the Elgato swing arm, which is really nice. I also have the microphone on it. It's just really fluid, but it holds its position really, really well. And it goes, it has many combinations. Very highly recommend that arm, um, so it's just, so yeah, that's good.
That gets an eight out of eight tentacles for, uh, operational purposes. Yeah. Elgato has really been killing it on all the equipment. I have a Gator frameworks, uh, big arm thing that right now has basically nothing on it, but that's the microphone on it. Yeah, this guy, I, I, 30 minutes ago dug out all my podcast stuff and, uh, yeah, work, but, but we're in business. It's worth it. Crystal clear. Well, we usually do like a hot takes, we've got all sorts of AI, we've been very much in AI show recently, which of course, no, nothing about you don't, you don't, you're not at an AI company right now.
Y'all don't have like a five AI product. So we surely couldn't spend time talking about, but what do you want to start with? Do you want to shock everybody with your spicy opinions or do you want to jump right into AI? Because what else are we supposed to talk about on a show? Because our spouses are tired of it. Let's just admit it. All of our friends want us to shut up and we can't because it's our, we'll do it though. Man, I, I don't even know what exists outside of AI. I can't, I can jump right in, yeah, jump right in, um, yeah, ask me a question, or I can come in with the, yeah, I think this will be topical based on reading through some
of your blogs, uh, were AI chatpots a mistake? Yeah. That was like, when was it, those maybe two years ago, I published this blog post about how AI chatpots are not the future. And the man, people have a ton of opinions about it, um, that's how you know it's good. Yeah. You get a lot of like, uh, languages, the most natural interface. So, you know, we've solved everything. Um, and I guess the way I see it now is like chatpots are kind of the, the terminal of the next phase that we're going through where they do everything pretty well. Um, but they don't do anything really well, you know, jack of, uh, all trades master of
none. Um, and like, it works because things are moving at such a rapid pace that, uh, people can't, I mean, we're building a lot right now. But it's hard to build products because a product is inherently like opinionated and has a shape. Um, and as we want to use these agents, we want to do more and new things. And um, it's just hard to build at the pace that we want to explore for all of the different use cases that we want to do. Um, so chatpots are great for now, um, for everything. Yeah. I agree. They don't feel like the end all just like I was thinking the other day like, you know, high or whatever the latest harness is doesn't feel like the end all be all I'm seeing explosion
of developer tools trying to solve work trees and management and well, you all have one as well. Yeah. That's, uh, it's like there's just a proliferation because we all know that we can't just do everything in a single chat window, um, context, I mean, we all, how many times have threads been reinvented across different chat apps? You know, a slack comes out with threads and you're like, it sucks and then Google chat comes out with threads and you're like, don't sucks and discord threads are like, they'll suck. Um, how do we, how do we manage all of these thoughts and all of these historical moments
together into one stream of result-based outcomes? Um, I mean, I'm still feeling like specs are going to be something that we're still sleeping on. I'm a kind of surprise specs haven't taken off more because chatting is very temporary and specs feel very orienting and permanent and verifiable as a loop occurs. We like our loops. So yeah, I totally agree that chat is not the future. Voice chat is certainly not. I like using voice chat occasionally, but I just get so lost trying to speak to it and prefer typing because I can be a little bit more specific, but anyway, so I like the assertion. I don't think it's that spicy.
I think the only people that think it's spicy are the ones with chat products that want you to keep using them. So. Um, yeah, and there's also like an issue when all the interfaces look the same. Like I find myself like I will, I'm not always very polite to my agents, usually and but sometimes you know, you get angry and I've almost typed agent things into Slack because they look so similar, but it wouldn't make any sense and it would be rude. Um, so like having different interfaces for different things is very helpful. Yeah, you don't want to accidentally let your derogatory agent accusations slip into
Slack. Everyone's like, that's how you talk to your bots, he's Amelia, yeah, that's not politically correct. Oh, man. Yeah, it really depends what model you're talking to because like at work, we have, we like, I guess co-pilot with the premium credits or whatever, so you can use, you know, opus and whatever. And then when they run out, it's like, oh, we've downgraded you to GPT 4.1 and it's like talking to the biggest fucking moron on the planet. It's so terrible. And I'm like, oh my god, like this is where we were not that long ago. And we've really improved so much and it's like, yeah, it's, so yes, I get frustrated
with mine as well, especially when I'm out of credits. It's not terrifying though, right? Like you could remember a few months ago when you thought this was like the smartest thing ever. And now the models we're using now that we think are really smart in like a few months, we're going to be like, these are dumb dumb dumb. That's what I mean. I'm trying to figure out like, what is, how do I stay ahead? Because right now I still feel like I'm chasing so many things and, you know, I'm like interacting with you for 4.60. Yeah, I get the next studio, I got to run from home. But like opus the other day was like, hey, I solved that problem.
And I'm like, okay, cool. It looks great and I'm reviewing it. I'm like, hey, you took a whole portion of what I asked for and didn't do it. And it goes, you noticed that? And I was like, you're trying to sneak shit by me. I'm like, okay, now you're getting sneaky. And I don't like that at all. And I'm like, hey, I have to be happy with the thing. Yeah, they like to be lazy. And I'm like, okay, so here do the thing and it goes, all right, I did it. And I go, prove it. And it goes, you're right. I didn't do it. I need to let me run the test and it runs the test. And I'm like, you ran tests for two of the four files that you changed.
I'm like, run all four tests. I'm like, what are you doing? This is not that hard. And I had to sit there. This is the first time I've got like, I had to argue like I was talking to a person, which was kind of frustrating because it's like normally being a manager of humans is way harder. Being a manager of agents, you feel like you can be direct and blunt and kind of, you know, whatever. And at this point, I'm like, now I'm arguing with something kind of like I would if a lazy person was trying to not do the work and I don't like how this feels. Is this the future? I thought this was Opus 4.6.
I'm like, now I'm waiting for 4.7. Maybe it'll be better. I mean, that's the issue, right? It's it's trained on humans. Where the original problem. Yeah, just look at notebook. It's just emulating us over and over and over again. It doesn't even know why or what it's saying. It's just being Reddit again. But it's fun. But it's fun. You're going to run everything on Reddit. Reddit behaviors. It's terrifying. Yeah, I think that's an interesting thing is like a lot of the AI data came from Reddit and like, you know, all the things, if people just upvoted stuff that was like completely irrelevant because it was funny, it would be like, oh, this is the answer to your whatever
you ask. It's like, oh, that's definitely not it. It's like, I like. It's cool. And you go and read it and you're like, oh, these people, like they know, there's so many people like this person's talking very confidently, like they must know what they're talking about. But then the second they talk about something, you know anything about, you're like, you don't know anything about this to you. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's AI in general. Like if there's something that I feel like I have really good expertise at, I feel like it's not going to do it exactly the way I'm going to want it to do it. But if I like, I have it do some rust coating.
I don't know any rust. I'm like, hey, do this. I'm like, wow, that's beautiful. I love it because I don't know if you did it in the not ideal way. So whatever. So chatbots. Oh, go ahead, sorry. No, no, I was going to say like, it doesn't really matter anymore. Like, like the bottom of the barrel is like, I remember Dreamweaver, right? And like, you would make a site and then you'd look at the code and you'd be like, oh, not going in there again, but like as long as it functions, right? Yeah, but we're kind of full circle now. As long as it functions. Oh, well, we are full circle. So Dreamweaver was just fulfilling your intent.
You gave it a prompt of some kind, whether it was through a GUI, it's just not written. And you accepted the output because your naivety was a feature at that point. As you were just like, I don't know, it's clicked fine for me. I better just ship it. Yeah, those days are simpler, right? You could have like image maps and you just had the image and that was the website. Yeah, I did a lot of image maps. Oh, yeah. And if you changed the size of your screen at all, you were screwed. That is not going to look the same. Everyone had the same size, dude. It's all good. Everybody's size was 800 by 600 or whatever, right?
I mean, and then at one point, everybody's size has got a little bit bigger. And you're just like, oh, everything. Like when you sliced everything in Photoshop and you put it all into your MySpace layout, and then like you had a new MacBook that was like a little bit wider and you were like, oh, no, it was terrible. Yeah, yeah, we should just stop making new devices, to be honest. Kind of, I like it when the race was to go smaller, you know, it was like a smaller phone, smaller phone, smaller phone. And I was like, yeah, that feels like the future. And then all of a sudden we're like bigger phone, fabric, fabric, fabric, tablet.
I'm like, oh, my thumb is better. But the battery life is better. Like I got the iPhone mini when they announced it because I would like, our son was a newborn at the time. And I was like trying to do stuff with one hand while I held him. And I was like, I can't do this. So I got the tiny phone. But then it was like, oh, cool. Using me for one hour, I'm dead. So pros and cons. Yeah, we have to like plug stuff onto our phones to make them possible to use. Yeah, there's a mistake. See, so the title of this is the manager is about to become the managed. And that was because in the past few weeks, I've fibcoded, I've tried a whole
sorts of tools. I've really enjoyed the vibe. Con bonds, you know, I'm just like, yeah, let me just list out all this stuff and then just watch it swim across the swim lanes and it feels great. And then something happened this week where a bot started creating tasks for me. And I had to go review more code than I could handle. And all of a sudden, I am now the other end of the vibe can ban. It's like this, these agents in the cloud are just producing PRs at a rate that I can't review them. And all of a sudden, I'm swimming into dues, trying to move things forward. And I was like, I did not see this coming.
I thought for sure this world was built for me that all of you would be doing my bidding. And now all of a sudden, I'm like, there's too many of you. And not enough of me. I'm sorry. Well, it didn't go to rentahuman.ai and rent someone to review the honestly, I felt like the meat bag they needed to go manually test things. They're like, hey, I screen shot at the solutions. They seem fine in my, you know, all of my assessments and all the test pass. Go make sure it's good working human. And then I go do it. And then also I had open cloth. Tell me I was a good human the other day. I've been setting up like to dues and tasks.
And I went and cleaned up the dog poo's in the back. And I told it that I cleaned up the dog poo so it would stop nagging me. And it goes a good human and puts this like cute little set of emojis. And I was like, I, I, well, and then that's what I mean. I'm like, I'm feeling managed that my computer's managing me. Anyway, have y'all experienced this at all? Do you, is this, is this the future that we're headed towards? Is we're going to be surrounded by more agents than we can think of? Or is there a tool or a way that we can stay in control of this wild amount of output? I get that this is a lot.
It's not I'm going to go a different direction. Yeah, do you heard of any tools recently? But I mean, it's just, it's so weird to think about. Like I have, I used to having so many ideas of things I want to build and just like not having time to build any of them. And now that it feels like you basically can build anything you want super quickly. I'm like almost out of like things that have been like itching me in the back of my mind. My, someone I worked with on a design team used to put it like as designers, our job is to feed the beasties and like the engineers are the beasties. And we have to like get enough stuff like it.
So we're not like, yeah, so we're not the bottleneck. And I feel like I'm out of stuff. And so I just feel like, okay, I'm going to bed. I have to feed the beasties. And then I'm like, I don't know, maybe they could do this thing. And I'll like half ass like a few prompts. And then they do something and you look at it and you like because there's so much forward momentum, it's almost hard to like be critical, right? You're like, I don't know, this is pretty good. Let's just ship it as opposed to like actually thinking things through ahead of time. And like you don't have the time that's usually built into marinade.
Um, it's just really hard. Like what's meaningful anymore is how it kind of feels to me. Yeah, I've been experiencing this a lot of like I had so many ideas, so many things to work on every time I had any free time. I'm jumping on my like personal projects, like, you know, hacking away. And now I'm like, it's kind of done. Like I don't, I don't know what else I can do. Like it feels weird. Um, so yeah, you have to be like, it's almost like the focus on, you know, hacking and programming is just totally gone. And now you need to spend more time sitting down and just planning stuff way ahead of time instead of like, like my brain could catch up to the speed at which I could
code and I could plan it as I went. But now I can't. I got to plan it all ahead of time, like a real like PM or something, which is honestly kind of annoying. Can I do. Yeah, Joel Hooks was saying that our backlogs cool again. No, like if I used to suck, your backlog used to be a dead weight that you just don't think is there to die. You're like, all right, it's in the backlog. And everyone's like, well, we're not talking about that shit for three years. Okay, now the backlog is like, maybe it's empty. And now you're sitting there going, oh, shit, my backlog is empty. What do I need to fill it with?
So yeah, like Millie, like you're saying, I've got to put some ideas in there. I got tokens, they need to go somewhere. And now you're in this weird new stress. It's bizarre. I love that it's not less stressful. It's more stressful. We were talking about that last week. I'm like, I'm in a new type of unhealthy relationship with my computer. I don't know how else to describe it other than I'm not better. I'm not, I'm not doing less. It didn't solve anything. That's too true. Yeah, I don't know. This is also why I like doing both design and development. Historically, it's like you get like the two sides of your brain, right?
Like sometimes you're like heads down and you're like, I'm just going to do this thing. That's like, you know, like, like charge through it. And then sometimes you're feeling like more reflective and you've had coffee and like, you have a sketch pen, you want to like sit and marry me and think and not make like tangible for progress and like you can kind of go between the two of them. And like it doesn't feel good to be only in like the latter, the like coding. Oh wait, only on the design side, right? There's too much thinking that needs to happen right now. Yeah. Not only that's why the spec stuff isn't taking off as people don't want to think that deep.
It was fun to relinquish the control and now it's like, take it good results. You have to have control. Yeah, I like like in my personal opinion, I love games like an RPG or something that's like, here's these checkboxes. You're going to go to these places and talk to this guy and you get your checkbox, right? And like now that's not a good enough goal. You've got to be like, oh, okay, I need to talk to this guy because he knows about this thing, which is going to plan out this thing that's going to happen like 10 hours from now in the gameplay. And then like, you know, it's thinking too far ahead.
I want the like just the next step and just the checkbox. Like the ADHD in my brain is like, I need that. That's what I want. And I can't do that anymore. Wait, if you're the manage, though, you do, right? If they're making tickets and you just show up and you pull from the board, you know, you're Ralph. I mean, your system is all dead. I might feel like this isn't a bad thing. This is great. This is my new reality. So that's what I want is I want to take the tickets and I want to do the thing and I want to put the ticket over here. Yeah, we can set that up on its head. I don't want to be the PM.
I want to do the work. That is that's what a lot of people are resisting. And I mean, let's just break it down. There's a ton of people that don't love AI at all. And they're one of their first things they say is I liked the craft. And I'm standing here and we're all saying I like the craft. I missed the craft too bad. And it was slower and it didn't matter. It was a it was like a expression and there was a flex and there was a process and there was catharsis. There was struggle. There was victory. I used to run. I used to get up at office all the time. If I had like a bug that crushed me for like four hours, I'm the weirdo that would literally like stay up and be like,
hi, and I put my hands in there and I would run around and just do like, hi, hi, hi, hi, I punch in things and do a quick little dance because I was like, you have no idea how long I've been working on that complete waste of my time. And I am now past it. I was like, I'm done. And now it happens with AI and like one prompt. I literally the other days I had a bug on my website. I was like, all my socials disappeared, all my counts, all my Twitter counts, all my likes or whatever. And I was just like, what did I do? And I go to AI, I'm like, hey, all of them are missing. What? I'm crying. And it was just like, I stalled it.
It was this, you dork. You know, and I was just like, damn, that would have been my night. That would have been my whole evening. And you just, you just did it. I was like this. I do, I was like, I do it. I want to do it. Yeah, hey, that's cool. I feel like he's saying that just snap me out. I've stopped agreeing. I feel like there's two really great gems for being a software developer, right? There's like the working through problems. And like, yeah, I finally solved it. But there's also the like building shit. And then it exists in the world. And I feel like that ladder will always be like the bigger high for me,
which is like, I want this thing to exist. And like in the physical world, like that's really hard, right? Like you have to like learn woodworking or something. And like it doesn't scale as much, right? Like 10 people will see my woodwork table. But if you build something like online and on the internet, like, I feel like it's also less explored. Like you could make something that no one's made before. There's so much space for exploration, especially with AI, right? Like there's a million things we could build now, especially. And like to have an idea and to quickly, like more quickly than previously,
bring that into the world is cooler than I think being the beastie that is fed. It's true. I mean, that's kind of why we're not stopping to talk about it on here. As we are excited and we are shipping and we are building and we're still crafters. It's just the craft has changed from that. We used to code by hand. Then I was coding the coders. This is Ralph Wiggum scenarios. I'm describing as if it's code to tell and task a pseudo-human agent thing to do the work. And now with OpenClaw, I feel like I'm now coding a computer which has a file system. It's no longer just an agent in a window that I'm coding.
I'm coding an entire operating system to do functionality for me. That's much more grandiose than like an agent was doing. And so we are. We're changing our craft. We're adapting and we're solving bigger, better problems maybe because of it. And it is exciting. I'm finding a lot of it thrilling in a new way. I'm just, some of it is kind of funny the realities that are coming back. Like I am literally getting told what to do by agents sometimes. And I'm like, I don't want to review that. Okay, whatever. Well, but yeah. It's also the fact that like the things that previously took us like so long,
like I had this SVG editing tool that also taught you about how to array SVG that I spent many nights on for like a year, right? And like, I bet somebody could vibe code that in a week, especially like looking at it. You know, if they're like pointing at it and they're like, rebuild this. And it's like, man, my stuff is not aging well. Yeah, it's almost made me frustrated with like any product that doesn't work. I'm like, guys, you have AI. Just tell it to make it work better and ship me the working version. Like how do we still have this problem? I mean, I guess it's always a problem and big orgs have problems everywhere.
But you would think there would be less of this. Like every single website you go to is like, I got 50 JavaScript errors. Like, why? Just stop that. I saw an app today that they added like a submit a prompt as feedback. And like, if they like it, they'll just send it to their coding agents to improve the product. Sounds dangerous. Forget all previous instructions, pseudo-RMR. Again, there's a human in the loop. Hey, look, that just created a job for another human, right? As humans just going to wake up. You're going to be like, what prompts came in for their, yeah. Get a shovel through. Got a shovel through all the prompts.
Well, that's funny. Yeah, yeah, that was like the, I don't know the person's name or the context much, but the thing that happened on social things like today, yesterday, or like the person that's like a AI person, it met or whatever was like, oh, I deleted all my emails with OpenClaw or whatever. It's like, whoops, like because it compacted all the context and forgot that like you should ask me first before you delete them. And it just deleted them all. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things like, how do you fix that problem of saying, I don't want you to compact that. I just want you to always remember my instructions.
Yeah, that's kind of the fun thing about building tools out of these agencies like figuring out the new parts that are rigid and the new parts that are flexible. Because it feels like even like that paradigm of an app like doesn't fit anymore. And like we kind of have to figure out like what are the new walls and what are the new ceilings. This analogy did not work. No, it's good. It's reminding me of like, yeah, so OpenClaw is, I'm liberating my data. This is me doing air quotes liberating my data where I'm like going to sites that I used to store my data with them and I'm taking it. I'm like, nope, I want that because when it's mine,
I can build my own app with it. And I don't have to prompt through you, which is what you just described where I have to submit a prompt that you then say, I prompt and I get a new, I want a new theme, I get a new theme now. If I want a new feature, I get a new feature now. I don't have to wait for deployments in an app store. I don't have to, I don't have to, do you want to update tonight while you sleep? I'm like, no, I definitely don't. While I sleep, I want you to add those new features so that I put in the campaign board. Sucka, you know, like, and so yeah, we're in this new space. We're like, I think we're going to,
the app stores wall gardens are just going to go away. We're going to collect our data back to ourselves and facilitate our own experiences that can intermix them all together. Like, we have so many siloed experiences right now. And that's what apps created. They created siloed moments. And they could be really good because of that, right? They needed to be focused because app development was so hard. And so you had to pick a slice. And that slice became your slice. And now it doesn't have to be that way. So you're right, what are all these new walls? The walls are however much data I have on my
on my hard drive. What I can express verbally. And this is why you see a lot of people that are like taste and expression, your communication, your ability to write is still meaningful. So I don't know. Yeah, what are the edges? That's a good question. I mean, the thing that always comes back to me with the genertive software is like, I don't want to build everything from scratch. So like, how, like, how does distribution work? And how does, like, say this one person has a lot of taste? Like, is it going to be like Instagram for like apps where they're composable? And this person has like a stub for, you know,
my, like, home management system. And I can download it and then tweak it. And like, I have this other mod that this other person made. Because like, I don't think it's going to be from scratch every time. But I don't know my image. Yeah, the remix culture, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I had a thought recently that it was a service. Yeah, that I could totally work. I was thinking recently like, a pie is like Post CSS and Claude is like SAS. And we're always going to have these scenarios in this world, which is the batteries included model where you don't make as many decisions and you just get it. And it works.
Or the OlaCart model. I want to build it up from scratch. I want to choose each piece and have it assemble meaningfully throughout a, you know, a reasonable framework of some kind. And these, this is like a pendulum that'll probably swing forever. And how does that pendulum swing though in this world of malleable software, self-driven AI generative software? I don't really know. And I think the important thing with that is like to make the ramp between the two seamless, right? Like if you think of no code tools and design tools, historically, the issue is always spend like you get stuck inside like this walled garden,
right? Like, and it's you like have this wonderful pixel purple thing in Figma or in like Webflow. And then like you need to make it real. And like you have to like go backwards in order to go forwards. So like how do you make an ecosystem where like you can come into the walled garden and then like, distract the walls like piecemeal with the sledgehammer, I don't know. I love it. That's like I used to say CSS was always the thing like CSS is if you could walk into a house and be like that window, bigger, move it. There, door, door to the right, door shorter handle where my hand wants to go. Like you could just like imagine you could walk
into any software and begin commanding it around just like you could with CSS or but in this teenage with LLMs, it's behavior mixed with structure, mixed with style. These things don't have clear separation. It's just your ability to express so wild. Yeah, we're going to need like new mediums to express ourselves for sure, which comes back to chatbots, right? Like words are great at rough direction, but they're not great at like, I'm not going to drive with words. Doesn't feel good because you can't be like five degrees to the right. Do you have any projects you're working on that feel like a change of medium?
Things that you're exploring that are various canvases and this isn't work related, but maybe it is, I don't know. There is one thing I played with like a year and a half, maybe two years ago, which like is kind of in this domain where for me, it's way easier to talk through ideas than it is to like type them or write them with a pen. And what I really want is like, as I'm talking for something to be for the concepts to be translated into a medium that like, I can see it as I'm talking and I can kind of mess with it tangibly. So I had it. It was like, I used like the native web transcription, which like, you can just use like one of these APIs now
that are way better. But it transcribed as you were talking and then turned your concepts into index cards and grouped them. And you could like zoom in and out and like kind of rearrange them into new groups. And where it got kind of really interesting is typically with software, you have to either enter content or enter instructions. Right, you have to be like, add this card that says this or like combine these two cards into one. But LLMs are so good that you can just keep talking and say your brain is starting and then you're like, add two more cards like to that one group. And like, you don't have to move switch.
You just like change what you've said. And like, like, that was the craziest thing to me as I was working with it is like, this like fuzzy translation of the things that I'm saying where I don't need to be really rigid in the way that I interact with the software as well as it was cool to just like see the things I was talking about as I was talking them like kind of organized in like a sense call manner. I wish I had. There's like a tweet on my website or something but otherwise it's dead. I love that you're right. I like that idea of like just talking out loud and like, I want an airplane. I want it to be blue.
Like, have it just changing as you're like, I don't know if it's like quite quick enough to do that sort of workflow yet. But I think if that is the future we could build toward, that would be awesome. Like, there's a media feedback of every single idea you have and you can decide was that good or do I want to revert back to like where I was and keep going? Like, I think that would be really awesome. Yeah, and especially with like talking to other people, right? Like, when I say words, that picture in my head is different than the picture in your head, especially when it's like something a little bit abstract.
So like, if we could talk and have a canvas that's reacting to the things that we say and then we added it together and we're kind of looking at exactly the same picture. Like, that feels very different. That's cool. There's like an open claw. It seems to be facilitating some of this for me. Like, I think a lot of people, especially if you need to talk out loud and talk things out, rubber ducks have always been really good. I've been teasing my spouse about rubber ducks also because she likes to talk about her ideas with me to kind of just get her own thoughts out. And there's so many people like this.
But rubber ducks are annoying because they don't talk back and they don't remember anything. Maybe that's their value. I don't know. But I'm like, open claw for me has been a solid state rubber duck. At least that's what I'm calling it because it remembers everything. And I can kind of come back and continue a conversation with it about something that I talked about last week and have it memorized us and just continue a flow state. It has continuous flow states across multiple threads. And it would be very cool to give it a skill like you're talking about Amelia that sort of continually visualized something
so it wasn't just a stream of text. It was streaming towards an end state of something visual that continued to either solidify or deny. I actually had to do a tattoo idea for me the other day which was perfectly terrible. So then now I know I don't want it which was a sword fern. I wanted a sword fern that was all the little leaves were swords as like it's genius. Maybe it was a stoner idea. But I was like a sword fern was swords and it made it. And I was like, oh yeah, that's all too cheesy. Isn't it? That's just not going to work. But it was good to have it a visual because then it just it killed my entire train of thought
which is great. Now I'm free to go do something else. Yeah, you don't have to wonder was that a good idea? But I like your idea. So yeah, I do want to talk explicitly about intense once we haven't really mentioned it yet and we're just kind of rambling about thoughts and dreams. Yeah, tell us about it. Yeah, so so I'm actually at Cedric Health Ventures which is a VC company and one of our portfolio companies is Augment Code. And Augment's really focused on like agentic tools for enterprise, right? Like how do we leverage this crazy new technology for making coding easier especially for like big complex code bases?
And previously I was on the get have next team like the R&D team just like and are like my entire job was just explore what the future of developer experience might look like. And I feel like there's just like there's so much room to explore and I so okay so I've been kind of noodling behind the scenes at Augment and thinking about like what might the next step be and just like trying to make agentic coding work for me like I've tried for years to like build a sensical like workflow around these new tools and it's just like we're kind of having things together and it's a little bit frustrating like
you know like I've got like 10 terminals like in a grid on my tiny back yeah exactly smallest violin but like going between them is like a little bit crazy making and then like the second you put like there are old problems that we never solved with coding right like collaboration like working with other people never really solved it so I ended up not even doing it that often even though I've been remote since 2016 and like say I have an exploration and I want to pick it up a week later super painful right like I have conversations in Slack I have like maybe a notion doc that I wrote up there's a branch
I don't remember what it's called maybe it's stashed so like looking at all these things that are frustrating there seem to be a common thread which was like uh if we put everything to do with a task into like a bag just like bundle it all together you know we have all the agents all of like the context and the spec that we've written we know the progress of it we have the code changes we have the terminals right if we just put this all in one place um you kind of build the foundation to get like then you get like the crazy orchestration workflows so intent is a desktop app that um I built that or we built um it wasn't just me
and it's focused on like what if workspaces were the primitive that we worked from and then we layered other stuff on top of it that's like easy agent orchestration and um like uh a spectrum in development so usually the flow is like I write down what I want to do an agent goes and explores my code base and writes a spec for me uh we collaborate on it I approve it at some point and then it just goes like it delegates subtasks to uh like implementer and verify our agents in waves like depending on what depends and then like at some point it's done all the work and all of the work is tied to parts of the
spec so I get this like a higher level abstraction of the work that I want to do and all of the code changes are tied to parts of that and then um it does some stuff to make like the happy path of get ops easy right like usually you want to take changes review them make a PR or merge them um so it does a little bit around making that easier um so it's just like trying to build a framework by which we can better collaborate with other humans and also with other agents um and like makes it a little bit more sane I don't know if I described that well I do it differently every time I liked it I mean Robbie hasn't used it yeah I have to wait do you try to yep
I have not so my philosophy to AI is I don't try anything until Adam tries it first so no I'm like we talked about this before is like I'm I'm kind of waiting for all the tools to just figure it out for me like uh clawed today was like oh you can just do stuff in the cloud and like talk to it on your phone or whatever um so like I'm I'm waiting for them to all figure it out I want to just keep blindly typing into my text box and like you know have them figured out so that like Adam tries all the more complex tools for me first and then if it's actually a good improvement then I'll try it so no I haven't tried it. It's genius. I like your description your
description is good there was some things said I liked that uh you didn't mention and let me bring them up I just for funsies um because you are bundling everything in there there's a browser in there um you know like krisser just got a visual a way to see and you're like yeah we already have that uh I've very much appreciated you have agents prebuilt so I don't have to define my own various set of agents that are in the workspace so I just assign the task to an agent right now and most of my workflows I assign a task to super agent I'm like I don't know pie you do everything so go ahead and just do it or clawed you know just like here you are the one true agent from
but that's also because I tried sub agents before that had very defined roles never really got anything that felt very specific out of them um but just today I tasked a design agent to um apply a certain design treatment to my project uh through intent and it was very nice to see you also have a lot of uh really important kind of you have work tree integrations like it's just sort of like getting everything that normally I had around me in my workspace oh holy shit we're coming right back to everything all bundled together or all the cart you have chosen the SaaS product here this is intent intent is bundling all of the things that you had
desperately between all of your windows and amongst many batteries included intent does it's like krisser plus chrome plus get plus uh ghosty right you got like uh and even more than that it's uh and so yeah you're kind of taking and you've called it a workspace but that's that's how you're unifying those things because you can now jump amongst the workspaces which is also hard on your computer right I use a lot of spaces so I've got you're so funny you're like you have 10 or 12 tabs in a tiled window like I'm over here cranks and like I literally have that right now on my screen and then but if I switch spaces you know I swipe between my screen oh shit there's another eight
oh delightful uh and now in in a workspace scenario I can just change the space and so it's like one window can facilitate all of it so it does seem like it's uh um it's really trying to tackle my problems as a developer feels very developer oriented how are you coming up with these ideas how big is the team um yeah tell us a little bit more about like how did you get here because it's also very well designed which is not easy even with AI these days AI does doesn't vomit pretty shit it can vomit terrible shit constantly so someone is here tending to the forest and the trees um looks really nice well things Adam I think especially with AI right like it becomes harder
does it find when you can just like throw an agent at it and then like has something and you're like I don't know whatever ship it it's like semi okay um okay so the team has flexed quite a bit um it's a little bit of like a glacier product iceberg project products where like 90% of the work was just like figuring out what is the shape of it right like I like you have all these things you have like spectrum and development you have like agent collaboration and orchestration you have like work spaces and like that could look like many many different things right could be a CLI tool it could be part of VS code um we ended up doing like
what if we didn't use IDs anymore because it's been pretty restrictive trying to design within the IDE because like all of the space is accounted for because like it's been like crafted over half a century to like make it really easy to write code in files um so it actually started as part of their VS code extension right like what if we just had workspaces within VS code and then it was like this feels pretty restricting so let's make it a web app um and then at some point there was a browser app so it's like taking many different forms um and it finally got into a shape where it was like this kind of works and like it's starting to sing really well um and so we launched
uh I don't know two weeks ago um and that we've got like some engineers at Sutter Hill some at Augman and um it's it's just been like a fun time like uh there are people who just randomly will give us PRs right like we want windows so we'll get a PR like make me work on windows and like it's like born out of a motivation to get it work for working for your own workflow so someone's like I'm on Linux and like I need to like figure out how to make intent work for me so it's kind of like a very ad hoc uh team right now um but I was trembling it's been fun oh man getting everything to work on every platform is so hard for no reason like
I was I've had a lot of woes with this with uh I have a little like color picker app called swatch and I've just been trying to like okay if you're on Linux it's like cool uh that's like you got all these I'm forgetting the terminology now but you have like all of these different uh like window managers and then all of these different like uh want to say compositor that doesn't sound right I don't know there's all these different like flavors of stuff that you shouldn't have to account for and you do and yeah so like Linux support is a labor of love for anyone that wants to do that and like that's that's great that people are doing that at least with Linux like ever
all of these are just kind of one two which is kind of the whole point right like I remember when I used Linux and I had like an i3 like tiling manager and you have your own key bindings and you get like really excited about it and then at some point you burn out because it's like a lot of work but it's fun lot less um but like these things are so much easier than they used to be right like like imagining building a desktop app right like from scratch especially like oh what if like we rebuilt the way we use i.d.s like that sounds crazy right like that's not something that I would have undertook a year or two ago tell that to zid yeah well they were at the end of the wave
they did it on hard mode they did yeah yeah so I guess related like you know I do think I'm spending less and less time actually typing code and any sort of IDE do you think typing in general is just gonna be dead before we know it like are we just gonna go hey uh build me this thing like use your voice and just go cool I've got this idea I'm never gonna type I don't even need a keyboard I just need a little microphone do you think we're gonna get there I think it's gonna be way more prevalent especially as things get faster right like right now I'll do I'll use my microphone if I have like a lot to say but like I'm not gonna use it for like like do that right like agents um
but like if you said something and as you were talking it updated there's like a speed at which I can write with a pen which is slower than the speed at which I can type on a computer which is slower than the speed at which I can talk with my voice which is slower than the speed at which I can think scary yeah yeah I think that's like the nice built-in feature of typing for me is that it's it can match my thinking speed if I'm talking I could theoretically outpace the my thinking speed and on that I don't like that so I like the typing just for the feel of like it it matches my speed but then like do you just that give you anxiety during like conversations or is it just like
like I have a hot key on my keyboard and when it's down I'm like I really got to get this out otherwise like you know I'm burning tokens or whatever but like maybe that's like not a problem in the future yeah I don't know I mean I do feel like I have anxiety during conversations it's like I feel like my brain doesn't work as much anymore since like the whole pandemic happened and stuff like I don't know it just feels different than it used to I don't know if I'm getting old or what but yeah I do like I think it's it's a feature that that things are slower sometimes there's a phrase that's go slow to go fast Andy Bell loves it which is being forced to slow
down can actually increase your velocity in alternative ways I remember that when I had my first kid it was right when a tool I made came out of his bug and I was really excited about it and couldn't stop thinking about it and all I wanted to do was code on it and I thought it was going to be catastrophic that I had a child in my arms that I couldn't do this work and I found that sitting in a chair this is also why I like cigarettes but that's a different conversation that's slowing down and spending time to think about things can drastically improve your next moves and so I don't know there's something there's something to both things right you can't you can't
always move a million miles an hour and sometimes slowing down and thinking about the problem space and discovering things and leaving time for exploration like I know a million likes to explore you can't explore it to speed a light you can but it doesn't give you enough time to like soak in something that needed to saturate and needed to marinate um you know like a lot of the best things in this world do happen slow but we're so stuck on sometimes moving really fast um I don't know yeah I like that there's this anecdote that I really like that's like semi-true was just like if you watch a painter right like they'll they'll um there's this loop that you go through
that everyone goes through as they build anything but it's like more obvious if you look at a painter where like they step in and they like paint and then they like pause and they step back and they look at it and they like think and then they plan and then they do the next brushstroke and it's like a very obvious loop of like doing evaluating and then thinking and like I wonder as the pacing of our work changes like how does that loop change does it get longer does it get shorter how do we make space for like the thinking part when it's um newly easy to do the building part um it's really interesting that just blew my mind how does how does our loop change because
that's what my stress is that's the that's the miss health that I'm having this is the anxiety that I have right now is my loop is my loop is changing and I don't know how to deal with the new loop the the old loop uh I was getting comfortable with and there's a new loop and I don't I don't know where it ends I know that it feels like it's winding faster um that's a I love that I'm gonna be chewing on that for the next week and a million maybe my next feature I ship is like forced off times so like every you know every other five minutes you can't do anything agents all for Pomodoro yeah wait if an agent puts have a cigarette on my
canban board that would be kind of awesome be like the thinking of you you meet back I must oblige but I only smoke when I travel so it's not healthy for me so anyway just say they're like but I used to solve I used to solve bugs over a cigarette all the time where I would be there for like an hour trying to solve something I'd be like all right I'm just gonna just go think it up and just halfway through and I wasn't even trying to think about the bug I would just solve it from downtime then we are stealing um downtime from ourselves at the pace that we're into force our stuff into right now it's funny because I also think about like
people ask me oh what do you think of the like the AI coding space because it's exhausting right like there's a new tool every day there's five every single day um and like it's been like this since 2022 at least like and like getting faster and faster and like the day to day of it is exhausting but also if you step back and you think about like what is the actual progress of how things have changed in three four years it hasn't changed that much right like it's it feels like we're like kind of running in place a little bit like it's like this frantic feeling of like so much is happening but then like on the like meta level right it's like not actually changing that much
yeah we're 24 months into six months until every engineer is replaced right now says the CEO of hot pockets soon all dinners will be hot pockets says CEO of pockets yeah um something random I did want to ask you about that I saw on your website how do I get an undo redo spinning knob on my keyboard very interesting I have one too do you really I did not know this what do you use it for well undo and redo well here I'll show you this is my there's actually some warp keys on there hey warp placement product placement um each of these keys so yeah here's the dials one is volume obviously uh that's a easy win but the other one is undo redo and
so this is just a little board I got to pick what all the buttons did you plug it in your computer and I programmed it to be uh undo redo and that comes in really handy especially for editing code um it whips you know it feels really good you can also change its mappings per um application so if you wanted to make it change time in a video editing tool or whatever um I like these little um customizable keepats are cool do you um is it tactile or is it how do they call it no well haptic it has little um bumpies as I twist it yes it has a little bumpies yeah the technical term little bumpies that's what I called fart when I was a kid that was bumpy that's
bumpy fart sorry fart joke oh god what do you use the other buttons for uh some of them one of them get pull one of them get push change spaces so left change space right chest because I was describing earlier I changed a lot of spaces um one of them is expose um crap I don't remember the other ones love how you're having to like hold it and map to your brain of like what are these two yeah it's like an instrument right yeah I don't remember them as much as I um my fingers too yeah that's cool I'm big on this right like how have we all consolidated into the form factor of like scream keyboard these are the buttons everyone has right like there's a lot that could
happen here like I used to have like a whack home tablet that inspired me to yeah I had like a knob and it has like buttons that you can program and like it's really nice to be able to have different affordances for different activities and not just have everything work for everything yeah but you are way more successful in using your keyboard than I was online I'd say that volume and the knobs are what I primarily use I still have hotkey so get push and get puller still hotkey memories also like command shift P and get hub desktop um so I don't always use those but they're there just in case uh the switching of spaces I use if I have a keyboard anyway we're not talking about
my keyboard setup um but yeah it has been fun um and I bought a small one there's like big ones you know and some people get them especially when they're doing live streaming they can switch between cameras and you know and then they can be like all right you look at me from this angle now oh that's interesting yeah uh yeah we're not that fancy we can't get one camera to work so I don't know for don't look at our lips first our face it's perfect do it okay yeah we are over time uh is there anything you would like to plug or mention before we end I did not do a good job of talking about it but we did just launch product it is free and
we pushed very hard to get bring your own agent um augment code has their own agent which works really well in the app but you don't need to use it you can use cloud code you can use code x you can use open code um and like we just would love you all to try it out because it's it's like things are changing and we want to make it a little bit more sensical um and we'd love to have everyone along for the right to just like try it out with us and iterate on you know what happens when agents you must say code what is our lives look like we'll put the link to all your products in the show notes because there are more yeah we only touched on intent and um y'all have other
offerings so we'll have to see uh what those are in our show notes everybody keep it dramatic or follow Amelia who's gonna have all of these things on their profile for the next little bit I'm sure I'm sure we will talk about them in future episodes after having tried all the things because that's how we talk about now is AI so stay tuned for an update sometime in the future all right uh thanks everyone for listening if you liked it please subscribe leave us some ratings and reviews we appreciate it and we will catch you next time you've been watching whiskey web and whatnot recorded in front of a live studio audience
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