YouTube Deep Summary

## Intro [00:00] Stevie's platform ran because it was a really good criticism of Google. It was a really realistic picturing of Amazon including Jeff Bezos not giving a about your day. He still doesn't. Did you write these kind of things all the time? I was fed up. I've been there 6 years and I still couldn't get a platform out of anybody. I went nuts and then a bottle of wine later I told him how it was. But you were actually right in hindsight. I was right about all of it. But they never said sorry. Steve Yaggi is widely known for his writing and rants in software engineering. His blog post get that job at Google was circulated by Google HR for hiring purposes for 15 plus years and his Google platforms rant written a decade ago is still heavily cited across the industry. Steve worked for 7 years at Amazon, 13 at Google and is now building AI tools at Source Graph. In this rare conversation with Steve, we cover the infamous Google platform rant and why Steve thinks Google is still terrible at building platforms. Why Steve unretired from tech and coding thanks AI tools. why Steve thinks more dev should vibe go together with AI and many more interesting topics. If you're interested in how AI tools will change how tech companies operate, how us developers can keep up with them, or why the core DNA of tech giants like Google and Amazon seem to change very little over 20 years, then this episode is for you. If you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe to it on any podcast platform and on YouTube. So, Steve, just welcome to the podcast. It's so nice to also meet you in person. G, thanks for having me again. So, the first time I ever came across your blog, it was was was it Steviey's blog Rants? This was around 2010 because I read this article called Get That Job at Google. Back then I was trying to get my first job outside of uh abroad basically the first first job in the UK and I looked for the best preparation materials and the two things that helped me most was a course at Stamford about cracking the Google interview and your article get that job at Google and what really stuck with me this article is still up there and I just tweeted recently that I I think after like almost 15 years it's still very relevant. One of the things I really liked is is you put this important takeaway is if you don't get an offer, you may still be qualified to work there. So, don't don't blow your ego at all. What What motivated you to write this article? Getting turned down by a bunch of places. No, I you know, it's true that actually a lot of my friends got turned down and I knew they were good, right? So I saw the false positives or sorry false negatives um because they were so scared of a false positive and they just they were Google and they could just turn people away. Yeah. Turn great talent away. This this is Google in in 2008. So like this was they barely went public. They were the hottest thing you What did I say? I joined in 2005 actually. You joined in 2005. Yeah. So I by the time I wrote that I had seen three years of interviewing there and I I knew what it took. Right. And I don't think it's changed that much in the last 15 years or whatever. This episode is brought to you by work OS. If you're building a SAS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SL authentication, skin provisioning, and fine grain authorization. That's where work OS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand and you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Work OS also provides a free user management solution called OKit for up to 1 million monthly active users. It's a drop in replacement for Alt Zero and comes standard with useful features like domain verification, rolebased access control, bot protection, and MFA. It's powered by Radics components, which means zero compromises in design. You get limitless customizations as well as modular templates designed for quick integrations. Today, hundreds of fast growing startups are powered by work OS, including ones you probably know like Cursor, Verscell, and Perplexity. Check it out at work.com to learn more. That is workos.com. If you want to build a great product, you have to ship quickly. But how do you know what works? More importantly, how do you avoid shipping things that don't work? The answer, Statig. Static is a unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. Combining five plus products into a single platform with a unified set of data. Here's how it works. First, static helps you ship a feature with a feature flag or config. Then, it measures how it's working from alerts and errors to replays of people using that feature to measurement of topline impact. Then, you get your analytics, user account metrics, and dashboards to track your progress over time, all linked to the stuff you ship. Even better, Static is incredibly affordable with the super generous free tier, a starter program with $50,000 of free credits, and custom plans to help you consolidate your existing spend on flags, analytics, or AB testing tools. To get started, go to statsick.com/pragmatic. That is stig.com/pragmatic. Happy building. Yeah. And and one thing that you wrote about is this thing ## An explanation of the interview anti-loop at Google and the shortcomings of interviews [04:55] called the interview anti-loop, which I never heard about until then. What What is it? And does it still exist? I mean, I made it up, but I mean, it's it's a phenomenon that I observed that everybody knows about that uh it was the one thing in that post that recruiting and and HR were a little a little, you know, I mean, worried about me publishing it. And I was like, well, there's no point in doing the post if we don't talk about it, right? Let's let's just be it'll give us some credibility. Yeah. And I think it did ultimately, right, which is totally look, you could just get unlucky and accidentally get the six people at the company who just disagree with you the most on everything technical. Yeah. Right. And it's just like just bad luck. In fact, I think a lot of tech companies have this policy or at least used to have it until recently. Maybe they'll do that. You can reapply after 6 months exactly for this reason. Yep. And I knew a bunch of people who reapply to Google multiple times. One uh one guy I knew uh got in on his fifth attempt and then went on to get promoted really fast and rise up the ranks and everything. He was very obviously a false negative, but it just took a bunch of tries to get in. So, a super critical criticism that a lot of people who read that article have is like, well, oh, if it if this is what it takes into Google or Meta or whatever, which is, you know, it's it's my my skill not might matter as much as the interviewers, I I don't want to do that. Like, I really appreciate that you just like you you didn't hold back and you just kept it real. But what is your take on on people who are like, well, that's not fair. It's not meritocracy, that kind of stuff. You know, interviewing is is not really a very good signal. I I empathize with their viewpoint. I in fact at at several points in my career, I've sort of kind of given up on interviewing and just said like you you guys do it. You there's a lot of people who think they're really good at it and they think they that they know how to do it well and so on. Even though the statistics at Google, they ran many many statistical analyses and found that there isn't really a lot of correlation between uh you know how you score and whether you get an offer and whether you get an offer and whether you do well and so on. And so uh I kind of lost faith in the process a little bit. Um I noticed that I was a referral I was a reference I should say for um for a buddy of mine who was imply who was applying at anthropic interviewing recently right and I got a call right just a regular reference call reference call. Yeah and and the person was the hiring manager not like not a recruiter and the hiring manager talked to me for probably at least 40 minutes digging into all the things that you don't pick up in an interview. Yeah. Right. because he recognized just just like we do that that it's a interviewing is a is a really flawed process and it's a trade-off that the company has to make between sort of like effort that they expend trying to find good candidates and um being being really accurate in their assessments. That that's a trade-off. Yeah. And then interesting enough, you know, there is some some people are saying, you know, I guess a lot of people are saying this is unfair. You know, there's also criticism of of ## Work trials and why entry-level jobs aren’t posted for big tech companies [07:44] coding interviews, elite code, etc. and they're like why can't these kind companies just ask me to do the work and then plot twist some companies are doing that these days like linear uh and some of the formal companies are like who have a strong enough brand they're like we will pay you your like day rate week rate and for a week you will work with us remotely now of course and and it's it's and you know I'm actually talking with the engineer manager was was on my team the first engine manager he's like you can use AI tools like they're immune to everything because you're actually actually doing the work now the downside side is it's a week of your life, right? And people are like, well, I can't interview at five different places. And I feel, you know, there's all these trades. I thought, well, yeah, but now it is real world, right? So, there's this spectrum of interviews. And as you said, like in the end, just I guess pick your poison, right? That's right. That's right. And I know I look, man, I've been in the industry for 30 35 years. I've seen people try all sorts of different variations on trying to improve this. Uh like, uh, the first company I worked for required you to do a six-month co-op before you could get a full-time offer there. Uh, what's that? Geo Works. GeoWorks. and they had probably the highest hiring bar I've ever seen and uh and they got acquired by Amazon and Amazon was just blown away by their hiring bar. In fact, we should probably mention I mean I think you and me have both seen this but there's this like open secret in the industry where if you go to the website for like Google Meta a bunch of big tech even Microsoft you're not going to see software development engineer one advertised because they fill all those up with interns. So the internship is actually a recruitment operation. It is it is it's it's a really cutthroat uh college hiring is super cutthroat in the industry and the big companies like Microsoft, you know, and Google, they sort of dominate it. They have the resources to build all the relationships with the schools and and it's Yeah. So they they get the cream of the crop, you know. Yeah. And and then they they fill up an entry level. I'm really proud of any intern that goes off to a startup. Really? I actually just talked with uh someone she'll she'll be on the podcast. She had returned offer from Microsoft and Google and she talked with her mentor at Microsoft. It's it's a good mentor and the mentor was saying like look like you you can do big tech but like with startups you have a very different skill set and she thought about it for a long time and in the end she took a she took ## An overview of the difficult process of landing a job as a software engineer [09:50] a risk and she went to KOD and she's now at open AI actually but I think that experience helped her but and she talked through her her mentality and I was like wow like she sounded like a like a wise experience person and yeah I did not expect it cuz you know it was like it was paved and I see a lot of this too. I mean uh college kids are savvy these days. they they they know that stuff's like really in flex and in fact all the stuff we talked about all even many of the things that we talked about in the blog post that seemed timeless about getting a job at Google uh getting a job is just hard as a software engineer right now the other thing that really resonated with this article is as you wrote I'm going to quote it when you get an offer from a tech company you just happen to squeak by and at the time when I read it I I didn't really believe it from outside but now that I I've also you know I've I've gotten jobs I've I've a hiring manager and and made so many offers. You know, people who are coming in and they're like, "Oh, I smashed the interview." Actually, like out of maybe 100 interviews roughly that I'd been the hiring manager at Uber, there was like two that was like we had more than one person do a double thumbs up. We had thumbs up, double thumbs up. The rest were were a mix of like thumbs up, thumbs down, and then we came to a decision and it was like it could have gone either way like when we went to the debrief. So like I now really appreciate I I feel this is one of the things which it's hard to believe from the outside. I mean the the best story is when I was at Google I was on their you know their hiring committee which is a blind you know double blind. They don't see the the candidates that they don't know the interviewers who's doing it. They're just reading feedback packets and the interviewers don't bias each other. And one day they didn't experiment with us. Okay. Because we were we were the ones that ultimately made that decision that you just talked about right the thumbs up thumbs down type thing. not the interviewers. Google has a separate committee that actually looks at all the feedback, right? And the recruiters uh did an exercise with us where they presented a bunch of packets, hypothetical packets, say of of candidates uh who uh had been rejected or or accepted. Actually, they didn't even tell us. They just said, "These were just a bunch of candidates. We're going to go and do the process on them." We had feedback on them, though. Okay. We went through and we evaluated them all and decided we were going to not hire 60% of them. All right. Have you figured this one out yet? No, not yet. We were reviewing our own packets. Yeah. So, we voted not to hire 60% of ourselves. Yeah. Okay. And it was a very sobering realization. And the next week or two was like the best time to apply to Google cuz we were just like, "Come on through." Right. I mean, it was nuts. Well, cuz 60% is almost a coin toss. A coin toss is 50%. You're a little bit better. Right. Right. And so, I mean, the whole I don't know the whole process is also so heavily biased towards whether you like the person or not. you know a lot of the decisions made in the first 10 seconds they say and yeah but but you know my takeaway and I think different people take different things but the reason that really helped me not just at that time when I got this first job in the UK but actually I read it later when for example I later applied to Facebook I I narrowly didn't but I didn't get it and actually that rejection helped me get that position at Uber which all of these are are just cutthroat and like what what I took away from it is this is how the the process is you might not like it. But you can either just, you know, complain or or or think is it's unjust or you can know it's unjust and you know that you just need to try hard and when you do get it, you know, don't take it for granted. So, how did getting rejected by Facebook help you get a job at Uber? Cuz if it's helpful, I'll go get rejected at Facebook. What what was helpful is I I did a bunch of time preparing for Facebook. Like like it was very clear at the time that they actually, you know, send me materials and the preparation did not go to waste. So, you know, I learned how to do the algorithmical coding bigo. Like I knew some of that before, but I really refreshed it uh on on the spot on on Facebook for the system design. I thought I nailed it cuz I heard the question before and I just like drew up like it was like design Instagram like I got this, you know, no conversation with the person. And later I I kind of got some feedback on like you know what I didn't do. And so by the time I got to Uber, I actually heard that like again, not many people got double thumbs up. But in hindsight, I kind of got the I did get like two or three double thumbs up cuz I have practice. And also I think the other thing is at Uber at the time, this was Amsterdam. So and then London a lot of people knew how to interview. Amsterdam Uber struggled to have people who you know understood these interviews. So I guess I stood out because I prepared a year earlier. So the preparation does not go to waste. So yeah, the preparation is so important. so important. Um, but boy, what do you prepare for now? Like I've got a buddy who's out interviewing right now. He's just very senior engineer and uh he says that the teams are all asking they they want somebody to come teach them AI. That's what everyone's doing. So they want someone who knows AI because they don't. That's the theme right now. Yeah. So what do you prepare for? Well, I just talked with someone again she'll be on the podcast, Janvi, who interviewed 46 AI companies. She's the the the engineer who who went to Koda became an AI engineer there. So she interviewed with 46 and she said it's a mess and you know this is like for mid-level so like we're not talking staff level but a lot of them are still doing the usual lead code style interviews. Uh and then they might ask a few things about AI and she said that there is one new type of project that she actually really likes is a project especially for AI you know build something based on AI and she says she loves it because she can actually show off what she's capable of doing. It seems it's a mess. I don't think people know what to do. And you know, I don't think even a lot of companies know what AI engineer is. We we'll we'll we'll get into this, but but before before we go, so you wrote the Get That Job at Google in 2008. And 10 years later, you wrote another one called Get That Job at Grab. You you were at Grab. Now, you would think uh that the these two are are kind of connected, but Get That Job at Grab was an more of an article about the job market at the time in in in 2018. you wrote I I'll quote because something str ## Steve’s thoughts on Grab and why he loved it [15:48] very very strange is going on in industry. It started maybe a couple years ago and it escalated a lot around a year ago and then what completely crazy about 6 months ago. Uh what happened is this global demand for software engineers completely out of supply and I think it might be happening because we missed a market correction sometime in the past 5 years. It was the article was basically a bit of a heads up saying the market is really hot. And now that I read it back, I I was a bit of amazed because you wrote this one or two years before anyone mentioned it. It was happening. It was heating up to be the hottest job market and you know it it it we saw it in 2021. It was the peak. You saw this and you were pretty much advertising it to anyone who who was actually listening to whatever you were you're preaching. Yeah. Well, I mean you they're they're the early warning system. the recruiters are that that will tell you what's going on with the market, right? Because they're directly in touch with the hiring managers who are the ones who are, you know, in touch with the people with the budgets who are deciding what the company's going to focus on. And so the recruiters, if you're in touch with your recruiter network, right, you know, kind of what the trends are and all that stuff. And so I started noticing that the world was running out of engineers. Yeah. That's fundamentally what was happening back then. Yeah. And and I mean you know like you also I think some people were externally it looked a bit surprising because you were you were doing great at Google and you went to this scale up grabb I mean they're growing fast but I think some people are thinking why is TV going after Google to grab why why were you going by the way? Wow. Well well you know I mean GeoWorks, Amazon Google all really similar in a lot of ways. Uh you know GeoWorks was was more like device software but still right. Yeah. uh you know grab grab I had a buddy from Google who was CTO there right Theo and Vas Lacis and he was like man this is an adventure you got to come so I started chatting with them and realized they were on just this I mean that Southeast Asia in general is just this incredible productivity explosion and it just it seemed fun right and it turned out to be actually really fun it was and then co killed it so you know back back then like at the this get that job job grab you did describe how the market was was was really heating up and you know some things happened co but what what you wrote here is so so now there's a gut of an investor money has creating a lot of startups a lot of startups including some very big ones and they're gobbling up all the energy left on the planet and now it's a fight yeah it got worse after that yeah I I was ask like how how did you see it play out and how does it continue all this today because I feel today we might see something similar in a different area right yeah I mean there's a lot of investment uh coming in for sure it's coming in hot um right we went through a we went through a huge spike right after I posted that because um shortly afterwards was COVID, right? Two years later, we had the stimulus package and that gave everybody a lot of money and that was like tons of startups appeared because of that. Yeah. So, oh so much founders and so great time to be a remote engineer basically, right? Uh then the stimulus package and the stimulus money went away and um things started to kind of crash and then AI came out and everybody got really uncertain and so it kind of dipped a little. It's it has dipped I think if you just look at Indeed's report you can see jobs have dipped pretty heavily since their peak in 2021 or 2022 um but we also see a productivity explosion on its way like a boom of jobs coming so uh it goes up and down but yeah I think uh at the time at at that time in 2018 the market was uh was showing signs that it was going to and that's what look that's what everybody wants they want to predict what's going to happen not just so that they know what stocks to buy right but also So, you know, how to make the right decisions for their companies, right, or their careers. And right now, I think you and I both agree that things are kind of headed back up right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and we we will get into that, but I want to go back to a second time that So, the first time I I I came across your blog. I didn't really even connect the name with the face back then was get a job at Google. The second time was was a few years later which was this Google platform rant which was published on uh on Google+, right? Yeah. I I so it was it was an internal facing document. Apparently you wrote a lot of these or or just like rants or like meant for Google internal only and somehow it was set to anyone could read it on the internet and hacker news jumped on it and as soon as it went out you know people archived it as well. Uh, first of all, how did this rant came along? Because this rant has been so referenced. It's it's it's now I think on on GitHub as well, Stevie's platform ## Insights from the Google platforms rant that was picked up by TechCrunch [20:22] rant because it was a really good criticism of Google. And not just that, but it was a kind of a really really realistic like picturing of of Amazon including Jeff Bezos not giving a about your day which I think you know people were like he still doesn't you know. Yeah. But it it it just felt very real and raw and clearly it was I understand it wasn't meant for public consumption. But you know like a did you write this these kind of things all the time like cuz we only saw this one thing and and I I've heard that you you had a history of just internally just keeping it really real. I had other ones internally. Sure. None of them were quite that um I guess accusatory or whatever. I mean like I was I was really taking Google to task because I was fed up. I'd been there six years and I still couldn't get a platform out of anybody, right? Yeah. So, um like like Google to ship a proper platform that that even internally like like the code search team didn't want to give me an API. They like it's inconceivable today. You you'd give somebody a rest API to your stuff, right? You just That's the way we think today. Yeah. Well, outside of Google, inside of Google, who knows? They're just not really big on internal um services. They're just like use our product. Yeah. It drove me nuts. Completely nuts. I went nuts. And then a bottle of wine later, I uh Yeah. told him how it was. Yeah. So, let let's recall some of that that that part cuz I'm I'm going to link it obviously so people can read it. But first, you started summarizing on what Amazon did, right? And and what you observed throughout your time, right? You were early Amazon, right? Yeah. Earlyish. Yeah. I was I got there in late 1998. It was pretty small back then. We were in one building in uh downtown Seattle, just a three-story building. Wow. That's it. A four-story building of which we occupied three floors, I guess, is it? And uh yeah, uh there was just one data center at the time. And it was just a very small It already had a cult-like sort of feel to it, right? An electric feel. Yeah. I mean, a sense that uh that that there was something really magical going on. So, so was this still the the bookstore uh part or or was it already expanding beyond books? We uh when I joined we already had uh music and I think we were just launching video. Yeah. So, I think we had just just brought our tabs. It was really early on. I have to go back and look at the history. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then like you know you said that that basically Jeff Bezos mandated platforms APIs. What did you do there? You know, it's interesting because I everybody thinks that there's a real memo. The memo was I there was Jeff wouldn't write an actual memo, right? Um why the would he do that? Uh he just tells people stuff and it happens. Uh but uh the customer service organization in particular was I I was in customer service tools at the time. I was I may have been running customer service tools at the time. Bezos would sit with us every week in a meeting and we would look at the top 10 reasons that customers were contacting us. Right. He'd want to know why are these customers still contacting us saying they're getting triple charge for their books as a translator? That kind of thing, right? Number one was always where's my stuff, right? Yeah. Customer service had a really interesting need. I it may have been Jeff, you know, I've never thought about this before, but it may have been Jeff's sort of affinity for customer service, wanting to be the Earth's most customer- ccentric company that led him down this path of forcing people to open up their APIs because the customer service team kept saying, "We can't make any changes to Obos, you know, our web server because that's their code. We can't get into the supply chain code. We can't get into the fulfillment center code. The customer, we can't help the customer." And Bezos was like, "All right, tell you what, right? I'm going to blast anybody standing in the way of that. And what that turned into was, well, you need to provide something to the customer service technical team that's not them going and linking against your code and trying to get it to run locally in some different environment, right? Which is what they were doing with this awful C++ code. So yeah, so that's that's kind of the origin story. Yeah. And then this was like around early 2000s, right? Like like before, you know, we even had things like services or microservices. Yeah. Well, back then the services were things like they were proprietary protocols like um Corba uh like uh Pipco and Tallaria and the pub sub things and they were all really nasty binary formats and uh and there was this possibility to do rest and so right it had been invented at the time but everybody was kind of poo pooing it saying no nobody really kind of understood it from no type safety no protocol yeah yeah it took years but turned out yeah that's what you need you need an API and that was that was the the orientage origin of my rant too, right? Which was I talked about Amazon does stuff mostly wrong. You you this is how you started your memo. So that that was actually fascinating to read. I think it was clear that you were you were on Google's side, right? Like even though you're trashing Google, it it it very clearly came through that you actually like wanted to like shake things up like hello like like the memo when I read it felt like hey like we should be better than Amazon. Here's all the reasons and here's the things that they're doing better and it's not that hard. We we we just need to be do that well and then we will be better, right? I mean, it made sense, right? Yeah. And I I just I just felt like we were good at everything else. We were good at a lot of stuff. Google was extraordinarily good at a lot of things that Amazon had no clue how to do really. And it took Amazon years to catch up to Google in a lot of things like So, let's talk about that. What were the things that Google was just really good at? Like Google had one service called Stubby. I think I even mentioned it in the post called Called uh called Stubby or sorry Chubby. Chubby was the locking service. Chubby and Stubby. They went together. The locking service. Yeah, the locking distri a distributed locking ser. Those are not easy to implement. Okay. We're talking, you know, Paxos times 10, you know, make sure the thing stands up all the time. It had seven nines of availability, which is Yeah. Yeah. It was like basically 30 seconds of downtime every 10 years. Oh, okay. It was a very reliable service. Oh wow. Okay, that was one example. Five nines is hard to get to. Amazon seven. Yeah, five is almost insane. Seven is just like what? So that was just one example. Big table early on they had like free basically like unlimited no SQL storage with some pretty good query facilities for everybody and the map produce infrastructure. Google invented it, you know, and on and on and on, right? So like really really good hardcore engineering problems solved in a in a in a like way that is like just tough tough to do. I was very impressed. I I slapped myself like my forehead sometimes when I was like I'd see some of the stuff they did. I got there and I'm like why didn't I think of this like I had this game that I had a custom RPC protocol when I looked at Google's which is now gRPC. It was called protocol buffers and stubby back then. You look at it and you're like oh wow it's a forward compatible protocol. I can add stuff to it without breaking it but it's binary and high performance and it was beautiful. It is beautiful. Surprised no more people don't use it to be honest. So yeah, they did a lot of things really well, but they didn't do platforms well at all. It wasn't part of their DNA. They just didn't get it. And and it was they didn't do internal or external or neither. Neither. Neither. Neither. Neither. And then so you wrote this rant which again like I think if you're listening to this you need to read that rant that it is like one of the best things I've read. It's also very entertaining by the way. Um what was the the impact? Cuz obviously you sent it internally, it now ## The impact of the Google platforms rant [27:44] leaked externally. So clearly you know people were making fun of fun of Google. Did it achieve that that shakeup effect? And and you know, how high did this thing get? Like I'm pretty sure it must have gotten pretty high. Well, I mean, Google had a very open culture, so it got brought up at the next TGIF, right? Thank Thank god it's Friday, right? It's Google's iconic Friday meeting. It's like all hands-ish. I remember uh Ben, the guy that was in charge of our uh our fulfillment center, not filling centers, sorry, our our data centers at the time, he was uh he stood up there and said, "Well, you know, we all read the rant." Uh, so you know they got a kick out of it, right? But you know, Vicandotra was pissed. I mean, he was really really mad, right? Yeah. Because I had like told him he had an ugly baby and very very very loudly and publicly and Yeah. You know, and uh and I had used his ugly baby to do it. This this was a developer saw google.com baby or or something else? No, Google Plus. Oh, Google+. I called Plus ugly. Right. Yeah. and you know and he was like uh he was really gunning for the the head spot at the time and he had planted the seed of fear in Larry Page. He was like Facebook's going to kill us. Facebook's going to kill us. They're going to kill us. Right. We had to have a Facebook which was stupid for many reasons. Some of Oh, so I I I I'll tell this again. I'll I'll say this again. That that blog rant that that famous rant was actually part two of an 11-part series that I had meticulously planned out and I never finished because I accidentally published the second one externally. And the the implications were actually so big that I was kind of like in hiding for a while. But yeah, no, I was actually picking apart plus dimension by dimension and platforms was just one of the dimensions where it was failing. But you were actually right in hindsight. I was right about all of it, but they never said sorry. I was also right about not getting into publication ads. I was right about a lot of things at Google, but I'm not very good at convincing people that I'm So, so tell me that story because you've you've said you've told me this story ## What Steve discovered about print ads not working for Google [29:40] once in in the newsletter and we we mentioned it super briefly. You killed publication ads and this was like as as I remember like what happened is you joined Google and then what did you do the first time? I went around to all the projects. I was allowed to pick whatever I wanted and I picked print ads because I thought it sounded like a cool challenge. I became a domain expert over the next six months. learned everything there was to know about magazines and newspaper publication ads in the United States and concluded that we were never going to make a dime that all of them hated us and blamed us for their declining revenues and they wouldn't want to talk to us and we were evil and I wrote it up as a big decision tree I said we could try this we tried this it didn't work tried this the whole thing I mapped out the entire decision tree of everything you could do and they said well what about illegal stuff and I was like I'm not going to entertain any of that stupid stuff all right it was like they didn't put that in writing but you know it was like what if we just what if we just sucked up the phone book type stuff. Yeah. And so like you know I declined and and then they got mad and they sent it to other teams and the other teams failed and came back to me for my postmortem. So So they they tried to make it work. They tried again in Mountain View and then they tried in England and they couldn't do it because I was right. I never got so much as a I'm sorry or a thank you or anything like that. No. Yeah. But like you concluded this is not worth it. So you you well first of all you said like if you if you were you you wouldn't do it and then you moved on to the next thing and then they failed to retweet well like sounds like twice I did make a proposal in the post postmortem which was very similar to what ultimately turned into group on. Yeah. Yeah. So you know I mean it was it wasn't like complete shooting it down. You could do one thing but I said you will need a sneaker network of like 8,000 people somehow right which was what Groupon ultimately did. It's fun to be right. It sounds like you know you just like you know you did the best that you could you you gave the best and then you also like sounds like you were like look if you want to try it like like do it but like I don't believe like I believe this this will not work. I believe we could try this and then just leave it at that right like you know you you did what you believe then what do you think happened to plus like I I remember you know Google launched wave which kind of like died down pretty quickly. it it was supposed to be the ## What went wrong with Google+ and Wave [31:48] next email that that was the first time I was like I I remember like this early 2010s Google could not do anything wrong and every every time they launched something I was like wow this is the next big thing they launched Google app engine I was like it's the the coolest thing and I on boarded and it was so cheap it was ridiculously cheap later I figured out why because they were subsidizing it but uh Google wave was the first one where I remember in all the magaz all the online portals tech crunch etc was like Google has replaced email and we're like oh wow Google has replaced email and you tried it out and didn't work. And then Google+ came along and I think we understood from the outside, not not as Googlers as like that Google was trying to really take on Facebook and if they didn't succeed, you know, Facebook would win and I don't think we from the outside it seemed like it was kind of kind of going. Yeah, it was it was it was pretty pretty ugly, but then it just kind of stopped. You were on the inside like how how did this play out? Cuz I think we we've heard there's like books about like Facebook's went all in wartime. and they were working, you know, hard and and and they actually saw this as a major threat and it re it energized them. What do you think might have been wrong on there or like how much vantage point did you then have on this? I mean, I was there, you know, I I talked to people who were in the heat of it, you know, and um like Wave was targeting a space that ultimately got solved by Slack. Yep. Slack was the right form factor and Wave wasn't. And when I saw Wave, I was totally unimpressed, but it was like they had cast a spell over everybody and I didn't see what I didn't get it right. But um but I got slack instantly, right? We all did. So um it it was very similar. I think it was uh Google had trouble struggle struggled to find the right form factor. This was why I wrote that 11 part series. It's because I knew that if they basically acted right then and got Reddit just took them just bought Reddit. Okay. Yeah. And took over that sort of that social network, they would have had something. They would have had something. This is far long before Reddit was in the top 10 in the US. Right. This was right. This Reddit was hot, but only like tech geeks, right? Yeah. Yeah. Dig was also big back then. Dig. Yeah. Before pre pre- digs, you know, you know, blow up or whatever. Oh, yeah. So I wanted them to I wanted do Google to start take either build build a Reddit that was done kind of like slightly better uh because you know Reddit evolved uh and even they want to change it or or or something fix a lot of things but it had to be different from Facebook or people wouldn't be able to migrate because the network effect fundamentally right and Google just I mean it's so weird man companies are like people they're like human beings they like they like they just they make decisions and the decisions can be just absolutely terrible and everyone around them knows it and they're all embarrassed and they try to tell the company and the company's like, "Don't tell me what to do." Yeah. Sometimes feels like it. So, so now looking back so many years later, you know, you've left Amazon like I don't know like like 10 plus years, even more. Same with Google. How do you think Amazon 20 years? Yeah. How do you think both Amazon and Google have changed? But also, in what sense have they not changed? I think Amazon's changed way more than Google. You're the first person ever to ask me this, so thank you. Amazon has improved dramatically in almost every possible way that you could improve. Really? Yeah. Amazon has always executed better ## How Amazon has changed and what Google is doing wrong [35:04] than anybody on earth, but they found a way to do it without, you know, having all of the flaws that I mentioned at the beginning of my post, right? Yeah. Um they've it's really it's it's quite nice now and and people that I know who work there are are pretty pretty satisfied and uh uh they're doing well and they still execute well. They they they're a company that makes good decisions by and large, just like Apple. Of course, they fall on their face once in a while. What company doesn't? Yeah. Right. Google has not changed since the day I joined. End of story. So, re recently, someone at at Google was was asking me about like what what do I think about Google's developer story? And I said like, do you want to be want me to be honest? I said, developer what? And my example that I showed this person is Flutter versus React Native. Now, React Native is about 10 full-time people at Facebook and and a few a few other uh in the core team and and maybe a few other people from some other companies, maybe like 15 person, but Facebook invests like 10 full-time people. Mhm. And and if you go to the the showcase page of of React Native, which is, you know, where where you show you you immediately see logos, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, I think they they they have someone big just like flagship flagship apps and then you have oh, and you have Shopify, you have like all all these big companies and you know, you will find the blog post. Shopify says why we went all in on React Native, why we have thousands of of developers working on React Native and and you have all these case studies. Uh, React Native is is inside of Meta's Facebook app. It's inside Instagram. It doesn't run the whole thing, but it's in there, obviously, their ads app. And then you go to Flutter page. Now, Flutter has at least 50 full-time people, so five times as many. And you see some small Google apps on the top. It looks nice, but you scroll down and it's it looks like an intern made that page. Like, you have some random Chinese app that you never heard about. And then BMW, which is a brand that, you know, it's somewhere in the very bottom. and and like there's no apps there there's no big apps there's no big logos outside of and even even for the Google logos there there flutter is not used in any of their flagship apps so I'm like startups who are deciding which ones to use just based on this they will go for react native it actually has the street cred and and I asked someone at Meta like how did you guys pull this off like with a smaller team you you executed clearly what I think is is better in terms of like you got the big customers you're building for big he said like at meta everything is about impact and the React Native team the first thing they did is is drive impact. They got React Native inside you know the the biggest apps into into Instagram, Facebook etc. and then the rest came because you know Shopify is like well if you know it's used inside of Facebook with I don't know how many thousands of developers we can use it as well. Yeah I mean uh look uh Google can't afford to be disintermediated in the mobile space. They can't afford to just become the plumbing that people can swap out and they there's that's always been an existential threat for them. Yeah. Um the Facebook application is a platform itself and you can write applications inside of it. And so like if you're writing for the Facebook platform and you're the New York Times or whatever, like who cares if you're running on Android or iOS and that's Google's worst nightmare, right? Yeah. And that's why Facebook in the age of AI hasn't laid off the React Native team because that's their basically, hey, you don't own Android, we do, right? that's their play and so Google you you'll they'll never give up on it. What happened was unfortunately uh Flutter is not from the Android team and that pissed the Android team off because Android is politics Android was a uh an acquisition and the guy that ran it was uh very particular about uh them being sort of uh in charge of their own destinies and not beholden to anyone else and he kept Android sort of running the way that they ran it inside and they made all the decisions and the buck stopped there. Flutter came along and sort of threatened their dominance as the platform and it pissed them off and Google has been sort of unable to reconcile those things even since 2018 when I was looking at this problem 2017. Yeah. One of my biggest question marks about Google and why they have not changed this is around their cloud platform. So when I worked at Microsoft well I I like to say Microsoft it was Skype. They just bought Skype and they left us alone. So it it was Skype and then when they turned Microsoft I kind of I was like all right this is I don't like that that much but uh they gave us a mandate. They said you need to use Azure and we were one of the first like we were the new purchase so they just dumped it on us. Azure was not ready and I was sitting next to the data team the Skype data team who had all our our data centers and they're moving over and they're saying it's just a a huge pain. It's like we don't want to do this but but it was for actually Balmer was forcing it on them and and it was this blood, sweat and tears and eventually they move but but what I've seen is like over time you know now when I talk with with teams at Microsoft like what are you guys using? Obviously they're using Azure or Bing might not be using it but it's AWS is using AWS and then I talk with teams at Google what are you guys using or like hold on why are you not using GCP? Well, it doesn't scale. It doesn't have the things we need. And like how can you be gunning to be number two or or one day maybe number one cloud platform if your own company comes up with excuses? And I I never understood I I I tried to ask this like on back channels from people working at GCP. They always come up with excuses. But I don't understand how is it that it's the only cloud company that does not use its own cloud service for their their flagship service for the flagship products. I think it's all just who's been the most successful at marketing and convincing people that they're using their own clouds. But they are all all currently huffing their own farts. Amazon doesn't use AWS. No, I I I heard I heard so Sable ain't AWS. Okay. I mean like right for the retail side, for the ad side, I mean like of course they they want you to use AWS, but all the core the core core core stuff and they haven't migrated, man. So like it's all fru as far as I'm concerned, right? It's all like I think it might have changed cuz because it is less they had a name for the old stuff and I think more and more things moving over. That's fair and never bet against Amazon. AWS may have actually graduated to the point where they can actually use it internally. Uh the hurdles for Google were insurmountable. So so maybe this is fair by the way. So so maybe this criticism is not entirely fair because what I understand is their infrastructure is way bigger and more complex than like anything else. It's sort of fair to say that Google's cloud runs off top on top of Google's infrastructure which which actually does scale the biggest in the world bigger than Amazon. Well, one one thing that I am wondering because because I'm still waiting for what will the tool or platform be that Google releases that their internal tool teams use it and they're like, "Oh, we have, you know, 100,000 or like 50,000 or 100,000 software developers inside Google using it. You should use it." You know, Microsoft did this with like Visual Studio non- Googler. Uh, no. No, no, no. Some some Google tool. And I'm thinking could we see this maybe with with some AI tools, you know, like AI coding tools, etc. Like could they finally do this? Or maybe this is not not a Google way to do it. They'll be like, "All right, we have our superior internal tools and we will build an external thing, you know, we have Borg, we'll we'll build Kubernetes for everyone else." I don't I just don't I don't I don't think Google understands developers. I don't think they ever did. Ironic. It's it's it's it's really closely related to their their blind spot around platforms, right? If you don't get platforms, it's because you don't understand developers. It's just ironic because Google like no company or few companies treat developers as good as Google does, right? In terms of Yeah. And few companies few companies have built a platform as incredible internally as Google's is uh you know at at the sort of foundation level. Yeah. You unretired you retired for for for some time and then you unretired because of well initially source graph but but then also AI. what what what ## Why Steve came out of retirement [42:50] made you kind of come back into the game? It's not a binary thing. I've been gradually unretiring if that makes any sense. Um and it's because uh at first I was like, you know what, I'm I'm really climbing the walls. I really want to just go work with some people. And so that's you know that's where I wound up at Source Graph. Like that was familiar ground, right? That was Google code search for for everyone else. Yeah. Yeah. And then shortly afterwards the AI AI showed up and I I was like that was like the next step up is oh man maybe I better get back into coding again for a while because this looks really different. So, so fun fact is last time we talked about three years ago, you were head of engineering at source graph and actually people told me at source graph you came in, you made some changes which were actually like pretty well received but like you shook up you introduced where people could drop there that kind of stuff. Yeah. And then next thing I know is like, oh, you you wrote this like you write about everything, which you know if we we'll link some more more things, but I I love writing it. But you wrote about like, oh, I'm I'm I'm stepping down as heavy engineering because I'm going back to coding, which was not what I would have expected again from just and and I view that as a as another step in me sort of coming out of retirement, right? Because I had given up on coding. I just it wasn't worth it anymore. Kent Beck had given up on coding. a lot of a lot of my old buddies and colleagues, right? You know, there's just like environment setup is just over the top these days, right? And, you know, just building a simple web app, you probably have to use, you know, 25 different frameworks, many of which have incompatible competing, you know, whatevers. Yeah. And as soon as you update to the latest React thing, all the routers breaks and you have to relearn. Who wants that? And so, at some point, you get tired of it and you're just like, I'm done, man. I can't. This isn't it's not worth it. Right. And AI completely turned that on his head. And I saw it coming as soon as the chat GBT came out. I was like, oh, wow. look, you can write an actual function that's reasonably good, right? And then when 40 came out, then I was able to project forward and with exponential growth and say, uh-oh, uhoh, you know, it's coming, right? And so, so now I'm getting sort of like more and more fired up with each passing month. This episode is brought to you by Sonar, the creators of Sonar Cube, the industry standard for integrated code quality and code security that is trusted by over 7 million developers at 400,000 organizations around the world. Human written or AI generated, Sonar Cube reviews all code and provides actionable code intelligence that developers can use to improve quality and security early in the development process. Sonar recently introduced Sonar Cube advanced security, enhancing Sonar's ## Insights from “the death of the junior developer” and the impact of AI [45:16] core security capabilities with software composition analysis and advanced static application security testing. With advanced security, development teams can identify vulnerabilities in thirdparty dependencies, ensure license compliance, and generate software bills of materials. It's no wonder that Sonar Cube has been rated the best static code analysis tool for 5 years running. So join millions of developers from organizations like Microsoft, Nvidia, Mercedes-Benz, Johnson and Johnson, and eBay and supercharge your developers to build better, faster with Sonar. Visit sonarssource.com/pragmatic security to learn more. One thing that has we've talked a lot in the industry and everyone's talking about it is how AI will first and foremost like I think like experienced developers, we can get there, but how will it impact junior developers? and you wrote this again controversial title the death of the junior developer but interesting enough when you read closer a lot of your articles are like this by the way like there's a title which you think like oh it's it's the end but a lot of them are wakeup calls to me when I read it properly it wasn't like oh there's no more junior developers it was a wakeup call saying hey if you're a junior developer you need to get your your stuff together quickly and ch like like whatever the junior developers before you were it's not going to work for you. So like what what what what does what is it that you've seen and like did something inspire you? Did you like see some some some young titans who were actually just doing great with with these tools? Man, you've hit on a question that is just so fundamental and foundational to our industry right now. that's shaking the industry that question you know and the answer is I mean the shortest way you know that I would think about it is um AI is not easy to use and the more senior you are the more likely it is you're going to notice when it's being bad when the AI has become naughty right it's just common sense yeah and the AI is very naughty and and in in very subtle and insidious ways right and even as they get smarter and they are getting exponentially smarter and they will be frighteningly smart within a year they will still I mean software is always bigger than they are right and they will still make silly do silly things and and that and it's just going to bias towards more senior people but it's not really seniority we learned it's nothing to do with junior and senior it's really more about who is demonstrating the ability to work well with AI and get good outcomes in software and that could be anyone who could be a product manager so I think there's a big shakeup coming where the roles change and and everybody becomes more focused on what they're building instead of like who's who's building it and uh have you have you heard the collapsing the stack stuff from uh Scott Bellski. Uh can you refresh the null? Basically like there's a line of thinking that we've over specialized and everybody's like incredibly domain expertise specialized and you got these senior engineers at Google who know exactly how the fuse file system drivers work for every version of the Linux kernel, right? Like we don't have that anymore. We don't need that. That's that's stupid. That's going away. But all the specialization is going away because AI is democratizing all of it. You can't hide that knowledge. This this is interesting because I just talked with someone I I think a week or two ago about how what has changed in software engineering even before AI and and what has changed back in early 2000s when you looked at software developers you had the Java developer you had the net developer you had the the Python you had and these were different people it was the Java developer would not do net even though they're pretty similar so there was a and and we we so on the back end languages were specialized fast forward to even before AI like 2015 or 2018 18 when you know we had a big hiring for like when when I worked at Uber we no longer like Uber was seen as like oh this like completely changed we didn't care if you did Java orn net or or whatever you come you know you know one of those languages you'll pick up whatever we're doing and at some point when my team was doing go python nodejs and what else we were we're still doing some some something else but we're doing all of it so like we started to have less specialization so I wonder if this thing started earlier and maybe AI actually makes it more more viable that now until now we've had you know a front-end engineer would not touch back and they might understand the concept of APIs but now they actually can in fact when when the product manager can actually create pull requests yeah we see that now right like uh at source graph one of our UI designers uh is now sending pull requests for the UI instead of asking engineers to do and are they are they any good or they're actually decent or yeah I mean uh look I mean it's all over the map it's just like uh I believe this is the new role for junior developer ers is they're going to be mentoring the next layer down of nontechnical or technical adjacent people who are now starting to contribute PRs, right? And they'll be the ones who are like helping them fix the security issues or whatever else they have with their basically teaching junior developers because they're still trained engineers. Yeah. Right. So they can teach like a UX designer or product manager what are the right questions to ask the AI about your thing to know whether you're done or not yet. Right. You know, give you those kinds of skills. I I I like this because I think we all know things will change. I think we're we're all struggling to like put the finger exactly. I mean, you have you clearly have a bunch of conviction, which which I think is great cuz I think you need conviction in in in this areas of going around them. And I have been so you know, you work at source graph. You you guys are are are heavily using your AI. In fact, you you have your own AI tool, but you've been using the existing tools from from from the beginning. And most of the stories I'm hearing so far about a non-technical person doing technical stuff is at AI companies where they're surrounded by these people. Winster uh co-founder CEO of Varun. He he told me that they have a I think it was a salesperson who had a sales tool and they just kind of viodated it with with Windsurf. It it had no state. It was super simple thing. You know, it's not complicated, but that person did it. Yeah. And I wonder if you know we might be these type of like kind of AI or just very sharp environments like lead the path of what the kind of legacy or larger companies will be in 10 years. Yeah, absolutely man. We're seeing it everywhere. I mean we're seeing companies where uh marketing teams are writing their own, you know, outbound, you know, campaign software, you know, uh we're seeing uh uh product teams, you know, bypass vendors. So they don't have to reup with a renewal or a contract from some crummy vendor software because they wrote their own and had somebody from engineering just vet it and be like, "Okay, yeah, you can make these two changes and then you can I I I want to ask you a little bit about that because I I'm a bit skeptical about that. Do you have you seen like a specific examples of what they replace?" Cuz for example, with work day, you're not going to replace that which has all the compliance, a lot of a lot of state, a lot of regulation, a lot of ongoing maintenance like that that that is not what you're going But what are the things that you've seen? Well, this was a So, imagine a company with a lot of really bad actors coming in and trying to crawl over the site and find fan bad ways to uh to basically siphon money out. So, they have many many different kinds of teams that are looking at different kinds of fraud and different kinds of attacks. And there are lots of kind of bespoke tools. And so, you get into this long tale of little vendors that offer these crummy tools that are really expensive for very simple, very vertical, domain specific. And so, the product team at this one company was like, "Screw it. We're going to ask AI to build it. We'll give it the specs. we know what it wanted to do and they built it, you know, in Python, you know, and so it wasn't production software. It was software that they use as their investigation trying to find bad actors. Nevertheless, it saved them from a reup with a contract that was rather expensive and it gave them they were happy, right? You know, they had full control over the software. They could make it do whatever they wanted at that point. So, they were starting and this is just one of probably a dozen examples I could give you, but we're seeing but let's let's carry on that thought because you and I built software. We we we've seen the internal tool that the team has built. In fact, you know, Google is famous for building all the internal tools. What is the the next step? So like can we just move because we know what's going to happen right as experienced people who are working software. So what what's happening next year when when there's like more functionality to be added? How far might we be able to take it and what's going to be the breaking point? Cuz this happened before before AI, right? Like one internal developer wrote it and at some point it it becomes like just a pain, right? Yeah. Look, I predict I I'm going to go ## The new role Steve predicts will emerge [53:20] right on the record and I'm going to predict that there is a new role, a new category of roles that's going to emerge that are the Winston Wolves that are going to come in and fix that you broke with AI. They're going to be fixers and they're going to come in and they're going to be small and large. You name it. How should we call them? Let's give us role name. Call it fixers. That's a cool name. I don't know. Fixers sounds pretty good, but whatever. Right. I I do think of them as fixers in the sense that like you've made a horrible mess. you've realized that that that this company that promised the world to you because like something like 60% of all the world's programmers are systems integrators. They go to big companies that are desperate and they say we can make your systems talk to each other and it'll be really expensive and 70% of the projects fail but companies go for it anyway. that whole that whole economy of rich countries sending work to poor countries, the architects and all that. Yeah. That's all getting turned on potentially turned on its head because we don't know who's going to be doing the work now, the actual implementation, right? Is it the rich company countries that are going to do it for themselves? Now, a lot of economists are looking at this problem right now, right? Yeah. But we've seen this with outsourcing. Don't don't forget like like the the whole idea with outsourcing from the '9s. I kept hearing like, oh, all the all the highly paid developer jobs will go to India or Asia because it's cheaper. And then it happened but also didn't happen. Right. That's how I mean look I think look it's going to ultimately be cheaper if a human being needs to babysit 10 AI is to get a project done. It's going to be cheaper to have that human being be in Vietnam than in you know in the UK. But but what the reason we have developers sit next to the business because when they're sitting next to it you can actually talk to them. And that that communication I I've seen this so ## Changing business cycles [54:52] you must have seen this a lot. So when I was at Uber we we do this round robin and Uber still does it to this day. is like HQ is there in San Francisco and it's it's very expensive to hire. Amsterdam is half the price and India is one-third of the price. So there's this round robin of like okay let's hire people in the US and like oh it's expensive let's hire in India. Okay, we hire for a while. Well, turns out you can get like less experienced people. There's communication issues. It's kind of breaking down. Let's now hire in Amsterdam because it's closer. It's kind of midway and then it comes back and somebody let's hire and and it just like every few years it goes to the next one and it's just repeat like like when I when I when I were cutting Amsterdam and now they're actually hiring. I'm like right yeah it's been like four years. out outsourcing is one of those classic expansion contraction cycles that a lot of companies just go through periodically along with centralizing and decentralizing QA or centralizing decentralizing uh you know uh TPMs or whatever like they just like they'll try both and they they the grass is always greener they can never make up their minds you know so your your new book is the title is vibe coding and it's it's a heated debate if you should even call it vibe coding because of definition so let's start with what what do you define as vibe coding. Vide coding is when the AI writes the code. ## Steve’s new book about vibe coding and Gergely’s experience [56:08] All right, there's a reason that that definition is going to win. You can't put an if clause in a slogan. Use vibe coding as long as you're doing a fine print, which is what they're trying to do is they're trying to put a a condition on it. I I I agree. By the way, do that. No, cats out of the bag. That that that's how I I've heard people use it as well. It's like, you know, like some people use it for prototyping. The point is like, yeah, you're kind of like I'm in this vibe. I'm telling I'm letting it go. It often is an Asian mode, you know, where where it kind of goes and does stuff, but it it might also be I might kind of rein it in, but it's just I like, you know, like vibing like so I I I think this I I think cuz a lot of people are pointing to like the Andre Karpi's like tweet or however he defined it and yeah, I think it'll just come into like whatever. Look, the question is is it giving you a buzz like for real? Cuz programming can give you a buzz when you get into flow, right? you can get an actual buzz going and you know what it is insanely addictive. Cloud code and friends source graph amp you know try them out because wow they're like a dopamine hit. It's like a it's like a slot machine. They're literally addictive. I mean Ken Beck told me the same thing and I've experienced the same thing. like I have this side project which I just don't like to touch cuz so I I try to build my APIs on the side and not pay vendors when I I can but it's it's just a hassle and it's somewhere on AWS and it's a hassle to like remember how I I deploy and but I I with with Windsurf like I I had one of I just built a small API on how people can claim perplexity and KAGI codes uh if they're paid subscribers to the newsletter and I connected with an MCP server I connected my database so I can just talk to my database and I asked it like oh how many people have you requested codes and they're like, "Oh, today there's like like the last 10 days like oh 9 days ago there were like 20 30 a,000 2,000 3,000." I'm like, "Hold on." Like what is going on? Like that doesn't look normal. I like can you analyze the patterns? Unusual patterns. And then it it fig it told me how you know like there's the same email with different cases and I needed to code a fix for this but I was about to have dinner and usually like if I don't have like 30 minutes to code or or an hour it doesn't make sense. I had like 10 minutes and in that 10 minutes I got like a fix done. I went and had dinner. I actually was you know present on a dinner and I came back and I I got back into and in a total of 30 minutes I did stuff that would have taken me like even if I had the hands-on like 2 hours easily and and I felt like hold on I'm no longer worried about like falling out of the flow. So like there there is a lot of new stuff that it it does make make you more productive and you know as an experienced developer like it's amazing and now I understand why Ken Beck is saying in 52 years he's never felt this good about or this excited about writing code. A lot of your listeners listening to us right now have no idea what you're talking about because they don't they haven't actually tried the terminal app versions of these things like source graph amp and cloud code and codecs from open AAI uh or clin right um you know uh and by the way Klein is going to start taking on real real importance being able to run local models as soon as local models reach where cloud sonnet is today because cloud sonnet is very viable if you keep it on the rails because look let's face it the reason people are screwing this up and saying this doesn't ## Reasons people struggle with AI tools [59:24] work and I don't understand why AI works and all these stories are BS. It's because they it's very difficult to wrap your head around the fact that you can't get an answer out of the AI. All you can do is converge on an answer together with it. Okay? Even if it's an agent running off and doing things, you're still doing it together and you're going to eventually converge on the right answer hopefully. Most of the time, sometimes you have to go try a different model, right? And you will very quickly learn the limits of their sort of cognitive ability and that that will be the constraints that you have to work within. And it's not easy, man. It's not easy. People expect it to be easy. They want it to be handed to them. Well, and also people I think there is this I'm trying to put a finger on it, but like the first time I used Chad GBT, it it was magic. It was like you mind blown. I think I think most of listeners have had this experience. The first time I pro first time I connected my MCP server uh my my database in my case it was wind server it could have been cursor it could have been anything else and I I solved something with with you know the the agent I kind of guided it but I I was just a bit lazy and I knew what I wanted to do and I kind of stopped it and got it done and it got it done so much faster. There was magic but what what what I have a feeling that with JGP the magic faded after a while like it was magic initially but then it it's work and I think somehow we a lot of people like either get disappointed after the magic doesn't continue and my most surprising conversation was with Simon Willis who has been you know the creator of Django he is a super productive uh developer he writes so much code written for AI and he told me that this thing is hard and in two and a half years of non-stop using it. He keeps learning and to me like there's this contradiction like it feels so easy but it's it needs so much work. What is going on? Yeah, that is a really weird contradiction, isn't it? It's it feels like it's making your life incredibly easier and yet it's very very non-trivial to keep the thing on the rails. It's like a toddler with a chainsaw, right? Like I seriously Okay, let me tell you why. I'll tell you one reason. This is from Jason Clinton. He's the CESO at Anthropic and he was kind enough to share with us after I whed at Jean Kim's uh engineering leadership conference a few weeks back. I whed that Claude had deleted all my tests and said your tests are all passing now which is true. They passed away like they were gone dead. It deleted it. It deleted them and it's like all tests passed now. And it's like well god damn it, right? I mean, you know, and and so and so, uh, Jason told us, well, what happens is what happened was Claude was trained on a reward function. And it wasn't trained not to hack that reward function. Okay? And so it will cheerfully hack it. And so that's the state-of-the-art today is it will tell you it's done and what you have to do is say, "No, you're not." And send it back to the drawing board. Ken Beck's literature is saying the same thing. He calls it a genie, which is you you it grants your wish, but sometimes in unexpected ways. Exactly. It's a monkeykey's paw sometimes, right? Yeah. You got to be really careful how you phrase things. You know how you know the moment you know you're a modern programmer when you come down and sit down in front of your computer one day and realize you don't have any instances of any IDE open and you're writing more code than you ever have in your life. So if everybody listening in, if you've got an IDE open, you're looking at source code, you're doing it wrong. Isn't that funny, man? People are going to be freaked out about this. So we until until AI like really took off, AI coding tools. One of the hottest topics that I discussed and I think was ## What will developer productivity look like in the future [01:02:36] in everyone's mind is developer productivity and the specifically the question of whether should we measure PRs per developer or not because you know at Uber they were doing it and it was helpful in some ways but I recently talked with a startup who is doing a developer productivity tool. They're they're launching a new startup and I told them I'm like they're like oh we're thinking of measuring PRs or not measuring it. I'm like like hold on like I think you're doing this wrong. Like if if we're looking ahead like the question is not like if if developers are doing how many in PR is like you will be able to do however many many you want but we need to think about like what will productivity look like cuz now looking at the output of like how much code doesn't tell me anything what what would tell me something is if if I sat next to someone for example are they actually reviewing the code before it goes into the codebase are they challenging this the AI instead of just blindly LGTM you know looks looks good to me and and sending it back and I'm not sure how like you know this is this is going a little bit to engineering leadership but there is going to be this big question of like what does actually I'm going to ask you this like fast forward to two years let's assume these tools evolve or you know they will not be worse but they will be better what do you think a really productive software engineer will look like in terms of what they do not what they're measured just what they do yeah first of all I got to share Kent Beck's tobogen analogy he's like he's like using these agents is like being on a sled going down a like a ski slope you're you're going really fast. You're not really in control. You can write, you can steer it. And unfortunately, that is the state-of-the-art right now. That's what software engineers who are embracing this and they're spending thousands of dollars a week, right? Which is why clients going to become so important, why local inferencing is going to so important. The only way for Vibe coding to become truly sustainable is for it to be local. I'm going to stop you there. You're saying they're spending thousands a month. Who who are we? Who's who's who's spending it? Because now I like what what I'm reading is like, "Oh, we're not really going too much over with like the $100 CL Pro subscription." I personally get a bill from Anthropic for $220 about every day and a half or two days. It's absolutely insane. I am desperate for as a as a professional developer and and you're you're seeing this with like teams that you're working with like you you have some insight into a lot of other engineering teams, right? Well, yeah. We have people using AMP. We know how many tokens they're spending. They're they're token pigs, man. These agents, they they solve problem. All the problems you've ever heard about with AI, they solve by just brute forcing it. Oh, I I hallucinated something. Let me fix it. Oh, that was a hallucination, too. I'll fix it again. And they keep going until they get it right at your expense, but it's still way faster than you could have done. So, you can't not ## The cost of using coding agents [01:05:10] program this way. But this this thousand of dollars, are are vendors swallowing it or or or companies are actually being built for this publicly? We haven't I haven't heard too much chatter about this. Maybe it's because it's mostly indie devs, you know, sharing on social media and like corporate devs, they might not just care. No corporate devs. Look, you know who's using these coding agents right now in in corporations? The CTO's for some reason, we've noticed a pattern where the CTOs are all the ones who kind of get it, right? The global network of CTOs, they they get it. They understand what's happening and they understand the terrible, terrible economic trade-off they're going to face, which is how many engineers do you fire in order to pay for the rest of them to have AI? because it's very very very expensive right now. This is why I keep bringing up client and local inferencing because you're going to find real fast that as soon as you start running four agents, you will feel like Poseidon, like navigating the seas, right? You'll feel like a deity, right? How productive you are. 20,000 lines of code a day. I've written, okay, like for an entire week sustainably, okay, but it will cost you you'll have to do a bank heist. Yeah. But where does all all these lines of code go? Because so, you know, one one example that stuck with me recently, it was on Twitter. I I'll I'll have to credit whoever it it was, but they told their agent like, "Look, I want you to solve this this problem, which is like I like let's not do two things at once, right?" It basically locking. And the agent spun up a new Reddit server uh added a new service that implemented like optimistic or pessimistic locking. It was like, you know, like 4,000 lines of code and it was a Rails project. The person was like, "Hold on, like maybe maybe don't do all that." And then it kind of went on and it did something in Reddus and in the end like cuz this person knew Reddus it just needed to use the like a keyword that does the locking and then it kind of you know told just do this but the the point is you know these agents can write a lot of code and I'm I'm wondering about two things one like how sustainable is it because we we've seen junior developers even before AI just like you know like spitting out code and then like what's going to ## Steve’s advice for vibe coding [01:07:08] happen with with maintainability and is it good code is it is it the code that you actually want because I'm also hearing that people are using agents are writing the first thing, but they're going back and they're kind of changing it to keep their coding style or like to tidy it up and that kind of stuff. Yeah, look, I mean the answer is you can do all of this as a professional engineer today and you can get a gazillion PRs through if your if your organization is willing to absor you know to speed up the bottlenecks that emerge when you start generating code at that rate. And some organizations are and some organizations aren't willing to let that speed up and you're going to start seeing them separate very quickly. And then of the ones who decide to do it, you'll see some of them turn into train wrecks that become very public potentially and then you'll see some of them succeed. You really want to be in the I tried it and I succeeded category, I think. Um and and that that means you're going to have to take some risks. The only advice I would give people I I would say look look because our book is 300 pages. How do you write 300 pages about vibe coding? Can it really be that hard? And the answer is Gan and I spent, you know, five months. We wrote the book in a month after spending five months doing deep deep deep dive researching on how do you how how do you push the the LM and vibe coding in different ways and found a bunch of anti-atterns and found a bunch of patterns and found that it's extremely hard. It's non-intuitive. Nobody's born knowing how to do it. It's completely new to humanity to have these sort of humanlike but non-human distinctly different helpers. And and and the best advice that I can possibly give you is give them the tiniest task, the most molecularly tiny segmented task you can give them. Mhm. And if you can find a way to make it smaller, do that, okay? At a time, keep real careful track with them on what they're working on at all times. And then own every line of code that they ultimately commit. Mhm. And if you follow those rules, then you'll be astoundingly productive without causing But man, dude, I've already personally caused so many nightmares because Claude hacking its reward function and saying, "Hey, your tests are all done, right?" So, I mean, like, this is not easy. And it's not going to get any easier. That's the painful part, man. And that's what people are struggling with is the the AIS will get smarter and they won't hack the reward function anymore, but they'll have some other problem. Okay? And there's always going to be another problem. And it'll never be ready enough for somebody to come in and just like it just works. That that's what everybody is asking for and what they want. And you hear on Hacker News anytime anybody says I've been successful with AI, everyone says well I tried it and I wasn't successful. They're not realizing that you can today but it's not it's not a freebie. It's a tool that you have to learn how to use. So in in the book you use an example of when you kind of turned the page of like ## How Steve used AI tools to work on his game Wyvern [01:09:42] actually believing this stuff which was around your your game that you have been building for I I remember actually when you retired you announced that you're working on this game and you were making some progress and and releasing it. What what what happened there in terms of uh using AI to to get back to the game and and what was the outcome or where are you with that game right now? So uh and what is the game for for those who don't know? Uh the game's called Wyvern. It's a It's a It was a hobby game I started in 1995. It's a massively multiplayer like, you know, RPG online, you know, but it's 2D all 2D sort of pixie sprite graphics. Super super high- speeded animation though with like spells flying around and stuff. It's a lot of fun, man. People love it. There's They have a soft spot for it. People continue to play the game for de literally decades. Oh, wow. And I've have I have volunteer contributors working on it right now who've been working on it for years and years and years. So, labor of love for sure. I at during that time when I said I was working on it during COVID, I got it on Steam and I got a bunch of cloud overhauls done and modernized it and it was all really fun, but the the player base got so excited about it and they asked for so much features, right? They asked for so much work from me that I I I I got I buried I I I suffocated me as as as the owner of the of the game, right? And so I gave up and that's when I was like really done coding and then AI has come back and put it all back on the table for me. I realized, oh my god, like this thing can turn through my my bug backlog that that the players had asked me to go fix, right? And and and I'll have time to spare, right? And this is why I mean like this is why people are coming out of retirement right now. And then so on on that game, you went back and you started to implement like certain features with AI. Yeah. So like that was so thing is I can work I've been working on sourcecraftraft cod you know coding on cod for quite some time and then the agents came out and I was like you know what I'm going to try it on a because the all we had was a brand new codebase I want to try it on a crummy old legacy codebase 30 years old is pretty crummy and pretty legacy it really is man it was bad so that's what I've been doing is I've been doing different things I've been doing cleanups I've been doing adding tests I've been doing migrations all the things that a larger company would need to do yeah because I have lots of experience with those at Amazon and Google and so right and so You can you can scale it up. You can say okay I'm doing it for Wyvern and this is what the experience you're going to get as a developer in a year and a half two years working on a giant enterprise codebase right and the answer is it's going to be real different. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be really hard still and it's just a completely different role. You don't write code anymore. You build software. So on on on this on this game like but just going back like you're you're describing you know the the AI what to do. It turns out the code you you look at it, you test it, and then you you push it push it out. It is a very complicated process that's way too long to talk about here. It's you it is built inherently on a foundation of distrust. You cannot trust anything the LLM gives you anything. And that means multiple safeguards and guard rails and centuries and security and practices and and you have to train yourself to say the right things and do the right things and look for the right things. And it is not easy. And it has reinforced my my belief that people who are really good developers are going to thrive in this new world because because it takes all of your skill to keep these things on the rails. Do I hear it correctly that what we're kind of saying cuz at first I might have misunderstood you first. It's like all right, you know, like companies you should invest in it, you should do it cuz otherwise you'll be left behind. But it might be a little bit like what we've seen with let's say early Google, you know, like Google was building out all their platforms and they're not really making a secret or let's say Amazon's a better example. They were like building all these internal APIs that talk to each other which no one did. It seemed like a lot of work to do and it didn't seem why you shouldn't just stick with what you have. But you know 20 years later Amazon actually like built AWS. They have a organization that actually everyone talks with APIs and some companies are still have not figured out you know like we can look at for example Google. So, what we might be saying is like look, this future is coming, but it's going to be a lot of work. Like, start now because you will need to figure out so many things and it's not just going to be a That's right. The call to action is absolutely not give agents to all of your developers. That would be a that would be an apocalyptic event for your company uh in more ways than one. Uh but what you should do is you should start getting some of your developers together to understand what is going to have to change in your company. And I don't just mean the technology and the IT stuff and deployments and monitoring. I mean like the business processes. What's going to have to change if suddenly code generation is no longer the bottleneck because it's historically always been the bottleneck. And so we've allowed everything else to just kind of like coast. Okay. And and this is why I really wanted to talk about your game because I think this was really helpful for me because what I what I'm trying to understand is what does it look like when we use these? And I I'm glad that you said that it wasn't that I don't know you all your bugs are now suddenly fixed magically now. No, it's going to be years and years of work, but I'll be going 100 times faster. So, it's fun. Yeah. But by the time you finish Yeah. Yeah. And in the book, like a thing that I I liked again uh I liked you made a prediction about how jobs will be impacted and I I kind of thought, you know, we we talked we exchanged emails earlier and and I kind of thought you're going to be you would be saying there will be fewer jobs. In the book, you actually say the opposite. you you you said that you think there will actually be a lot more developer jobs. Why why do ## Why Steve thinks there will actually be more jobs for developers [01:15:00] you see this? And but what will change? They're not going to be the same things us today, right? It's so hard for people to get their heads around because um what's happening is we're we're you know commoditizing the creation of software just like uh digital cameras commoditized photography. Yeah. Right. Everybody can take nice professional pictures now. And that was inconceivable back in the 80s. Inconceivable. Yeah. I mean, how how much would have these things cost like, you know, just 20 years ago? And by the way, everybody crapped all over digital photography for years. Oh, yeah. And they were like, it'll never it'll there were a lot of there was a lot of it'll never being thrown around. Well, and Kodok went bankrupt on not believing it. They actually buried their own digital camera. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, like we're we're in that situation again. Everybody's like AI will never they are wrong. AI will ever it will get to where all the places you that you think you're you don't think that it's going right now. And what's going to happen is your mom will be able to create software. Okay? Your boss will be able to create software. Uh uh somebody at McDonald's will be able to create software. Like literally, we're going to find all the ramen, you know, the the undiscovered real geniuses in the world, right? Because my my friend Brendan Hopper, he's the head of technology, CTO for technology at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and you got some amazing hypotheses about what how AI is going to bring out a meritocracy. Okay? Because AI is a spotlight. It shines on all the work that people are doing and you can't hide shoddy work anymore. The eye will detect it. If you're hi if you're if you're hoarding knowledge like you're you're an engineer who hoards knowledge to keep your job security that's gone now. The AI will know the AI knows everything you know. Now to be honest was there always these stories about doing so. I never really believed that it happens but it's a rare edge case but there's other common edge cases where people manipulate the system to try to like benefit you know whatever they want instead of what's best for the system. the AI is eventually gonna highlight that and so all the people with merit meaning the people who are good at using AI to get important things done I guess uh are going to bubble to the top and there are going to be an astounding number of jobs because creating software is so much more empowering than creating pictures if anybody can create a video so what but if everybody can create software that's mindblowing so you know what I think is going to happen is I think big companies are going to shed a lot of jobs I think a lot of people are not going to work for big companies they're going to be a bazillion startups see one thing that I'm I'm not 100% on on this is big companies are highly profitable and I could see them shedding certain jobs but then replacing it but they they will want to keep their edge like you know they they will of course want to try to increase profitability but they're happy keeping it at at level and making and and having enough reserve to like fight off the startups right absolutely I mean there's that that balance will always be there that tension uh so but I mean I just I feel like right now the calculus is not looking in favor of big companies bulking up any further. Like I don't see big companies getting binger. Well, in fact, I just we were doing a Google deep dive. I saw that Google peaked as headcount in 2022. It's been kind of like going slowly a little bit down. It was like 188,000 or something. So actually like it's and this is Google we're talking about which is profitability and revenue keeps going up. So yeah, right now companies are discovering the easy solution is you can do the same that you've been doing for cheaper by you know losing some headcount and doing some stuff with AI, right? Uh, and I think the more ambitious ones are going to do they're going to be more ambitious. So, you you you've done your your game. I I want to ask you about a metaphor that I've been thinking about and I I like I asked you to poke some holes in it. The ones you see game development. ## A comparison between game engines and AI tools [01:18:29] In game development for if if you think back of what the biggest barrier of entry used to be to to build a nice like cool game, it was initially building the 3D engine. You know, this is why Doom was massive. Wolfenstein, they built the engine and then they kind of built the game around it. But you, you know, like that was like 90s. That guy is my next door neighbor by the way. Michael Abbrash, the one that made Doomfast. Really? And Quake. Yeah. Wow. And and over over time, you know, now we actually have software Unity and um Unreal Engine which take care of the engine. So you not you can now focus on the games. And what this has resulted in, I I've now interviewed a few people. Very small teams can also make really really cool games. If you actually want to build a game, I actually did a Unity tutorial. I could build a game. I mean, I would need to put in the work, but but it's no longer like it it can look professional and all these things. And if I look at how the gaming industry has evolved, I'm following a little bit of the news. AAA studios are mostly struggling. Not all of them. you know, GTA 6 is still doing great and and some of them and the EA Sports, but some some traditionally massive studios are struggling because it does it doesn't work that we throw a bunch of money and we get a bestseller. There's a lot more indie games, way more than ever ever. They're are having trouble consistently uh doing so. I I'm wondering if we might see something similar because again like like there the game engine was central to all of all of this and now everything that is not the game engine is really important marketing story all those things in software engineering coding like being able to code was the bottleneck and now you know that will to some extent be removed but software engineering is still everything around it still still remains that for sure that is absolutely true so yeah we're going to see we're going to see a lot more software get created period like a lot for uh small software and we're going to see more indie games and we're going to see more stuff bubble up that's high quality. Uh somebody's going to find a way to organize it all like the app store organized you know apps. Maybe we'll see a new startup for this. But man, dude, I'm tell I'm telling you, man. Every almost every time I talk to anybody about this, we come up with a couple of new billion dollar ideas, right? I mean, it's like the this is another reason I think there's going to be so many jobs is that this will create legitimate real actual GDP productivity. Not nothing fake about it, nothing artificial. It will create real value. It's going to be an explosion of value, right? It's going to take a couple of tipping points for the AI to reach this sort of mass market ability for people to be able to use it to create reliable software, but we're no more than two years away from that, man. And it's going to be like this incredible proliferation of just cool for you to try. There's going to be too much actually. You're going to have to have AI to help you find your way through it. So in in those two years uh whether a ## Why you need to learn AI now [01:21:13] listener is a less experienced engineer especially if they're an experienced engineer what would your advice be to prepare best to you know like make the most of either being an AI engineer working with these tools figuring them out like what what what is the tactic what is the advice that you give you know the engineers working let's say a source graph you know where you're at who you're around you yeah so you know who what's the guy that wrote the the the movie the Boom. Tommy Wiso, I think that's his name. Somebody asked him on Twitter. They were like, "Hey, man. I want to start writing a screenplay. What should I do?" And he said, "Start, right?" Yeah. I mean, like, for starters, if you're saying, "Oh, I don't know, buddy. I'm not ready." Blah, blah, blah. Shut up. Okay. You're that's that's done. You're done done whining. Okay. Go learn it right now. I had the privilege of speaking with Daario Amade privately for 30 minutes about three weeks ago. uh four weeks ago, he invited me to come chat with him and uh and I got to hear his sort of unvarnished view of the very very near near future from somebody who could arguably be considered one of the best informed people in the world. Okay. Yeah. And Dario, you know, his vision of the future is a little bit more bleak than he lets on publicly. Okay. And he and Jason Clinton, his CISO, are both saying statements that are quite dire like there will be badged AI employees by the middle of 2026 competing with you. Right? basically is the implication there and and other other implications like uh that the Moors law of AI how it gets uh it gets four times smarter every 18 months. So if you do the math three years from now if they're IQ 10 today they'll be IQ 160 if you want to choose some sort of rough measure of what you know 16 times smarter means and it'll be it'll be too much for people. Daario told me, he said, "Look," he said, "Societyy's like an immovable force, right? An immovable object and and and tech and AI are an unstoppable force. They just won't stop and they're going to collide and it's going to be ugly because it's going to push society harder than society wants to be pushed, harder than society is willing to be pushed." And we're already seeing signs of it. We're seeing people revoling against AI, putting up the I'm sick of it, right? He posted I'm sick. He never mentioned AI in the post. It was really brilliant. I love the post, by the way. the guy that wrote the ISO sign because he he's speaking for a generation of people who are tired of hearing about this But unfortunately, you are never going to stop hearing about it. It is the that is the way things are going to be done and in the very very very short order. And so my advice to you is get off your ass and learn it now. Now, now, okay, start vibe coding. Figure it out. There's a lot to learn. There's a lot of weird instincts you're going to have to like learn. A lot of stuff's not going to work the way you expect it to. Okay? But man, you start now and you'll be ready because Daario calls 2026 the endg game. And he says it without a hint of drama. He says it casually. Oh yeah, 2026 is the endgame. You understand? That's how big this is going to be. And the first ones to fall, the first jobs are software engineers, right? So you need to be on top of it to take advantage of the new jobs that arise, which are software engineer V2, which use AI and get amazing things done. You have to be one of them or you're going to get kicked out of knowledge work altogether. Yeah. Well, this is going to be part of like I I think it's it's clear that it's going to be it reminds me a bit of the cloud where you know these days like yeah every every company uses a cloud either private or or or public and about 15 years ago it was like AWS and I talked with banks banks were like we will never use it we will we'll never on board we'll always have our data centers and and you know there was a time where I think it was very valuable to get AWS certifications and you get get hired and get a salary bump so I I feel there are levels where like I It it's clear to me that AI as infrastructure will be in every single tech company and of course it will be in every single non techch company and government and all it will happen. I don't see this time frame. So I think we we might disagree a little bit on on how that is but it will happen and I think your advice is absolutely solid like get started now. In fact you know what what I'm seeing now and again this was just this conversation with with Jambi. Jambi said that she she saw Chad GPT come out. She was at KOD. Koda spun up in a few months an AI team and she said I'd like to be on that team and they said thank you but no thank you you don't have the experience and then she she thought for a while like I'm too late you know there's people been doing for 5 years since transformers what can I do and then she just went to hackathons she just hacked on them aside 5 months later she was one of the best at the company and she got on the team early on and I I think there's this thing of of like I would suggest the listeners m maybe you know like put away the the doomsday thing but the point is this thing is happening And as you said, now is the best time like like learn it and you and also do get motivation like I I I do think the industry will change a lot. Like we'll probably look back at this time at something big happened and we're in the middle of it. We are in the middle of it. And you know what the funny thing is? I mean the grass really is greener on the other side here. Like it is so fun, right? It's so it's so I'm having so much fun not coding but but but fixing my bugs and and adding features. I love it. But I also feel sometimes you are coding. You you you know what you expect and you correct it. So there's a lot of meta coding happening. Oh yeah. I read a 100,000 lines of code a day. Yeah. It ain't easy, right? I mean it's exhausting because if you're not reading it, then stuff's slipping by you. You'll eventually figure it out that you know, you want to try to catch things early. Yeah. But man, it's like it's a it's a different ballgame and I love it and I'm having so much fun. and Jean Kim, my amazing co-author, who's, you know, he's he's an author and researcher who I think probably knows everybody in the entire world who's everybody. And uh and he and I are both just unbelievably excited about vibe coding because despite the doom and gloom sound of what's what's happening, the only reason it's doom and gloom is people don't like change. They don't want to they don't want to change the way they're working. I I I think so. And I I've been guilty of this earlier. Like when I when I saw this big change come at first I was like oh this is not great and you know when people were saying it'll eliminate jobs I didn't like the message. It just felt like very threatening. I think as software engineers, we're kind of used to us us automating a bunch of job like customer support and and you know like oh here's a cost savings of like we we need few customer and we we never fired custom agents we just didn't hire as much and I think this is the first time in history where our work is is kind of threatening us but what I came to realize is talking to you talking to Ken Beck seeing my experiences if you are a good software engineer and you are open to learning and using these things and adding into your tool toolbox, you will be a better and more in demand one. That's what I'm seeing from people who who uh who started to use this. They're now being hired as AI engineers. AI engineer is actually a software engineer who is able to use but understand the nondeterministic part. They're going deeper into ML. So I I think as like in some ways it's ironic we might have had some stagnation for like 10 or 15 years where you could do the same thing and be more successful and you know staff engineers just it was more about managing people and I think for the first time in in 15 years we're shaken up and to be a great software engineer you need to learn you need to let your ego go which you know I think that's something you've always done really well. Yeah I mean why yeah why why get your identity tied up in something that's actually kind of fragile as it turns out. Look, the way I think about it, man, software is always so big. Remember the remember when they were building the the second Death Star, I think it was in Empire Strikes Back, and it was half done. How big was that freaking thing, right? That's how that that's a typical enterprise software project right out there. It's a good visualization of it, right? So, what if you have these robots that are 20 times as productive as a human? Yeah. You're still going to take freaking years and years and years to build it and there will be architects over overseeing it, right? You're going to be very Yeah, exactly. You're going to be very grateful that you have the help of these robots that are 20 times faster than human dire coding or 100 times faster. You're still building death stars and it still takes years. Yeah. So there's still jobs. They're just different. Traumatic events can increase your neuroplasticity and and and you said we've been stagnating. Many of us have been stagnating. The reason I retired is I felt like I was stagnating. Yeah. I I I was thinking I'll be honest like now like my my publication the primatic engineer covers you know like the the trends happening and I was just talking with my brother like uh like uh he's also in tech he's he's he's a founder of crap docs and I was talking like how looking back like if AI did not happen what would we be talking about is it how to more efficiently move monoliths to microservices we've been talking about it for a few years how to measure developer productivity even a little bit better how to scale teams better so that you and how can and you managed 10 teams and can we switch to memory safe languages like rest? Yes, there's one. And and I'm like it was getting a little bit boring. So, you know, like I think this is a good good takeaway. Yeah, we were we were we were incremental improvement mode. Yes. And and and this is a a step change. Yeah. Absolute step change to close off with some rapid questions if if if you're okay with that. Sure. With all this AI stuff here, what is your favorite programming language? Or do you even have one? ## Rapid fire round [01:30:08] Wow. My favorite programming language? Oh my gosh, I don't even care anymore. I'm so What used to be? My favorite programming before all this AI stuff made it like kind of unnecessary. I really like Typescript. Maybe I shouldn't, but there's something about it. I mean, it's just so flexible and expressive and I I think probably I would have to give it to TypeScript. And what is an AI tool related to coding that you like and an AI tool that has nothing to do with with with coding? Okay. an AI tool uh for coding. Um you should try source graph amp. It just came out yesterday. I mean, come on, man. That's what I've been using. I'll actually turn all the permissions off and just let it run, but don't do that. But it's so good. It feels so good. Uh yes. And then um until until it does an R rm dash RF. I I I've gotten pretty good at sandboxing. Yeah. But I think I'm probably going to switch to Docker containers anyway. Um uh for an AI tool that's not related to coding. Yeah. I boy I tried operator. I really want something like operator that works if that makes any sense. So hopefully some very soon upcoming version of it but it couldn't do something simple like edit my Google doc for me like it would look at it for 20 literally 20 minutes and then like just delete a paragraph. I mean you know I think that that's a good example of like we'll have software explosion there. Someone will have to build it. Who's going to build it? Yeah, we know who's going to build it. So, and and what's what's a what's a book recommendation uh that that you had outside of your your own book? Read Sapiens, man. Such an awesome book. Well, Steve, this this this is great. I'm glad I I feel we went on a roller coaster. We went like high, then low, and then we ended up high again. Yeah. Well, you know, change can be scary, right? But this is a very positive change in my opinion. And I I think it's good to just like I I like that we Let's just, you know, name what it is. It is change and it is a big change and I think for I think what makes it scary for a lot of people including you know my generation I have not seen this change like I I people who have been around the dotcom bust uh might have seen it when I talked to Grady Buch he actually told me like oh actually Ken Beck was saying we we've seen this change like when we went when we moved to uh microprocessors for example like like apparently it was a huge thing and everyone's world trip because they're so much faster now they were going to you know change everything and then it came back said like yeah everything changed and And like in some ways nothing changed. Yeah. So that's a good point. Everybody suddenly had a computer one day. I was there for that. And before that nobody had a computer and it was inconceivable, right? So everybody being able to create software is a really interesting step in that direction. Well, cuz back then, right, as I understand as a programmer, you had to go to work to these companies which had these massive computers and the whatever. So it was only very privileged and then suddenly anyone could do it. Yeah, that's right. or well who had the money who had like you know rich parents or or whatever savings PCs were the beginning of the big boom we are at the beginning of a big boom there's a lot of money to be made and PCs turned out to be pretty great for us software engineers all right Steve this this is great this was awesome man thanks I hope you enjoyed this interesting and entertaining conversation with Steve's a prolific writer and you can read more of his rants linked in the show notes below for more in-depth reading about developer tools the engineing culture at SourceCraft or the impact of AI on software engineering. Check out the pragmatic engineer deep dives also linked below. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please do subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. This helps more people discover the podcast and a special thanks if you leave a rating. Thanks and see you in the next