This is the live? This is it? This is the show?
Mat Ryer:I was just saying happy new year, yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:Happy new year, man...
Mat Ryer:I'll tell you what - I've missed you all. It's been -- yeah, it's been a long time. How have you been? What was 2025 kind to you?
Adam Stacoviak:Thus far, six days in, I'm feeling it. Today is a particularly good, but sad day in my house. There was a death this day, a very near and dear person to us. \[unintelligible 00:02:42.23\] gloom about that during this podcast, but...
Jerod Santo:Oh, my goodness.
Mat Ryer:I'm sorry.
Adam Stacoviak:...podcast-wise - very happy. True Adam heart? Pretty sad today.
Mat Ryer:Okay.
Jerod Santo:Sorry to hear that.
Mat Ryer:Well, you can hang out with your friends and we can cheer you up for a bit...
Adam Stacoviak:They will, later on, with my Texas barbecue...
Jerod Santo:Well, after we're done with this.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, yeah. After this. But really though, I'm excited about this year. Everybody says "the best year yet"... I think it's gonna be the best year yet.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. We've got to make it the best year.
Adam Stacoviak:You do, right? You have to do the work to have the best.
Jerod Santo:I don't know, 1995 was pretty great.
Mat Ryer:'95 was good. Windows 95 came out, everyone was over the moon, they're loving the new menus...
Jerod Santo:Friends was on TV...
Mat Ryer:Friends was on every week...
Adam Stacoviak:Cha-ching...
Jerod Santo:It was a good year in movies.
Adam Stacoviak:Chandler Bing... I mean, the best character in the world. Rest in peace...
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:You mean Mrs. Chanandler Bong?
Adam Stacoviak:Oh my gosh, yes.
Jerod Santo:Deep cut. \[00:03:39.28\] *Rachel: Oh! Chandler gets it. It's Chandler Bing.* *Monica: No...!* *Ross: I'm afraid the TV guide comes to Chanandler Bong.* *Monica: I knew that... Rachel, use your head!* *Chandler: Actually, it's Miss Chandler Bong.*
Adam Stacoviak:What was his name again? Mathew Perry. Mathew Perry.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, Mathew Perry. Mathew Perry is not one of my friends, and never was, but I would have liked to have been his friend. But I do have other friends, yeah. Friends visited, someone came from France to be my friend... I know it sounds weird, but they visited over the holidays...
Adam Stacoviak:To be your friend.
Mat Ryer:Well, that's as far as I understood the relationship...
Adam Stacoviak:They became your friend when they visited.
Mat Ryer:Well, they became more of a friend, for sure. Again, that sounds suggestive, and it's not meant to. I know it's a family show.
Jerod Santo:What are you suggesting?
Mat Ryer:I don't know.
Adam Stacoviak:They're deeper friends...
Mat Ryer:Have you got any resolutions? Anything you want to change and do differently 2026?
Jerod Santo:Oh, man... That's a great question. Well, you're the guest, so why don't you tell us yours? What have you got going on?
Adam Stacoviak:Oh, yeah. Good job, Jerod. Deflect.
Mat Ryer:First one - I'm really going to try and stick to this one... I want to change the way that I write the year. Change the numbers. That's number one. I want to learn more keyboard combinations. Key mappings changed on a keyboard recently, because I've got this USB switch thing... And I need to practice again now. That's my other one.
Adam Stacoviak:I'm never sure, Jerod, if he's messing with us or not. I'm just like --
Jerod Santo:I think he's serious on that one. I think he wants to get better with the keyboard.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. I'm also using a Omarchy. I'm trying Linux the first time.
Adam Stacoviak:Oh, really?
Jerod Santo:Oh...
Adam Stacoviak:How is that?
Mat Ryer:And that's very keyboardy. It's very nice. I like the minimalist -- it's a very minimalist design and aesthetic. Everything gets out of your way, and it just does the bare sort of basics. Once you're in the apps, if you're using the same apps, it's the same kind of experience, more or less, frankly.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah. It's just how you navigate, right? I used Omarchy for a minute... I want to say I had it installed for a couple of days, and it just felt a little dirty. It felt a little dirty, honestly.
Mat Ryer:Oh, really? What do you normally use, Adam?
Jerod Santo:Windows.
Adam Stacoviak:Fedora is my preferred desktop now, just because... I'm really liking MacOS -- well, not MacOS, but like the Mac machine is just such a good piece of hardware. It really just is.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, it is.
Adam Stacoviak:And the M5 I've heard is just an absolute rock star. I'm rocking an M1 Pro Max... Is that what we have, Jerod? Pro Maxes?
Jerod Santo:Something like that.
Adam Stacoviak:I love this machine. It's a beast of a machine. I only have a little bit of FOMO just because it's been so many years... But like from a user experience standpoint, no desire to get a new machine, because it's just solid. But OS-wise, Fedora, Ubuntu on the server... That's about it.
Mat Ryer:Another one of my resolutions - I'm going to go tea total. I'm not going to drink any tea. Just going to give up on --
Jerod Santo:Is that legal over there? Can you do that?
Mat Ryer:I have to do it under the -- I have to go to speakeasies and not drink tea in there.
Jerod Santo:Yeah... You have to leave polite society, basically.
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:Which is probably best for you to do that, honestly. Maybe your friend from France can come over.
Mat Ryer:French people, I think, to us they sound more fancy because in 1066, the French - basically William the Conqueror - invaded England and took over. And then all the aristocracy and all the royalty was just French for a long time. So all the fancy stuff was all in French, and then all the Britons, the lowly people, the peasants like me, we just spoke English, or whatever it was then. So I think since that, French to us has always sounded quite fancy, and quite sophisticated.
Jerod Santo:Well, I think I have a theory about why we like the British accent so much... It's because of that song from Hamilton, "You'll be back." You know?
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:It's just so good that we all thought "Man, this guy -- maybe we should go back, because... Very compelling."
Mat Ryer:Yeah. You're very welcome. You'd be very welcome back, I think. But yeah... My dad got some new glasses for Christmas. Can you imagine that?
Adam Stacoviak:They don't seem new.
Mat Ryer:\[00:08:08.18\] No, I didn't. My dad. That was his gift. New glasses.
Adam Stacoviak:Oh.
Jerod Santo:Tell me more.
Mat Ryer:Not a gift, is it? You need them. What do you mean, "Here's some new glasses for Christmas"? I can't believe that's what he got.
Jerod Santo:Oh, he couldn't see otherwise?
Mat Ryer:Exactly. That's the other thing. It's the gift of sight, isn't it? ...on the other hand.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:Good point, Jerod.
Jerod Santo:That's the problem, is we were waiting for the punchline on that one. You set it up like such a joke...
Mat Ryer:Oh yeah, no. I know. That's the problem I have. A lot of my sentences sound like setups to jokes...
Jerod Santo:They do sound like setups, and then you never deliver.
Mat Ryer:No, but at least -- although his glasses were the type that magnify your eyes. Did I ever talked about this before?
Jerod Santo:I'm sure you have...
Mat Ryer:There's some glasses that make your eyes bigger, and that to me makes sense. It helps you see.
Jerod Santo:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:What's going on with the other kind of glasses? Oh, you're struggling to see? Have you tried having smaller eyes? How's that helping? So I don't know about that... At least it was the normal kind.
Adam Stacoviak:You know, I'm just hearing Ricky Gervais when I hear you, especially in that last segment there, or whatever you want to call that...
Jerod Santo:He's channeling that last segment...
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, it sounded like Ricky Gervais, honestly...
Jerod Santo:That calls it a bit. That was a good bit.
Adam Stacoviak:It was a good bit.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. Just a bit.
Adam Stacoviak:Those glasses - I wonder about those, because I think... I wonder what makes -- I mean, I know physics-wise what makes the eyeballs look bigger through the opposite side... But I wonder why some do and some don't. Like, what exactly is that technology that changes, makes it thicker or less thin, but still does the same job.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. And some people's eyes are like too far one way, and then magnifying helps... This is very scientific. Or the people's eyes are too far the other way, if anything. And --
Jerod Santo:What do you do if they're too close together?
Mat Ryer:Crowbar.
Jerod Santo:Crowbar... \[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak:Cyclops. You're almost a cyclops.
Jerod Santo:There you go...
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:You're just one step removed from a cyclops.
Mat Ryer:Well, you see, I don't really have great vision out of one eye. I never have, just since I was a baby. It's not a sob story; I'm not trying to compete with Adam's sob day, okay? But it does mean I have a sort of terrible depth perception. Back in school, genuinely, I nearly got in detention for being bad at tennis, because it looked so funny, like I was deliberately messing around... And the teacher was like "You're going to be in detention if you don't start hitting this ball."
Adam Stacoviak:Oh, my gosh...
Jerod Santo:You just couldn't do it.
Adam Stacoviak:That's trauma right there. Do we need to have a moment here?
Mat Ryer:I think it's okay, because that's kind of what life was like... And I just thought \[unintelligible 00:10:36.14\]
Adam Stacoviak:Bat at tennis, get detention, that's how it goes there?
Mat Ryer:In that case. I mean, I probably had a little reputation...
Adam Stacoviak:Well, that teacher may have had some issues, let's just say.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. Let's do that one. The teacher was wrong, for sure.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah. I mean, it's okay to be not so good at tennis, because that's how things work when you're younger and you're getting better, you're progressing. But to punish based upon skill that has not been acquired yet seems ill placed.
Mat Ryer:Andy Murray's mom was my teacher, of course... Judy Murray, I think her name is. She's like a pushy mom, like a career-driven -- like, she really helped drive the kids. I don't mean it in a derogatory way.
Adam Stacoviak:Well, maybe I'm wrong about her. What's her name again?
Mat Ryer:I think it's Judy Murray.
Adam Stacoviak:We'll call her just Andy's mom.
Mat Ryer:Andy Murray's mom.
Adam Stacoviak:Andy Murray's mom, sorry about that if I made you mad. I didn't mean to do that. You probably were a great teacher, and you were just trying to push Mat. Good for you. Good for you. Keep doing that.
Jerod Santo:So I had a similar story... I couldn't catch a baseball, and all my friends could catch baseballs. And I was like -- I'm not usually the worst at just moving my body around, so I was very confused. I went and got my eyes checked, and I was almost blind, you know?
Mat Ryer:Oh, really?
Jerod Santo:It was so bad so that when I got glasses I came out of the dentist's office -- what's it called?
Mat Ryer:Just catching all the baseballs...
Adam Stacoviak:The dentist office?
Jerod Santo:They just started throwing baseballs at me. No, I remember driving home and I was looking out the window, and for the first time I realized that you can see the leaves that are on trees. To me, they were just green blobs.
Adam Stacoviak:\[00:12:02.07\] Dude... Yes.
Jerod Santo:I actually started to cry, because I realized, like "This is what life looks like? I've been missing all this life."
Adam Stacoviak:Yes... I have empathy there. Same experience. I was in third grade when I got my glasses. So do you have corrective vision, Jerod?
Jerod Santo:Yeah, I had LASIK when I was 21.
Adam Stacoviak:How come I'd never known this?
Jerod Santo:You never asked... "Don't ask, don't tell" is my policy.
Adam Stacoviak:I guess so...
Mat Ryer:That's my laser policy as well. That's a sweet story, though... Yeah, that is kind of beautiful, really. But I don't think you are anywhere near Adam's sad day.
Jerod Santo:No.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, I'm going to keep that one for me. That one is a well-deserved, undesired sad day.
Jerod Santo:Right. But you know who had a sad day? (Segue...) Rob Pike. Rob Pike had a very sad day. Or mad day. But either way, it's an emotion, and I needed a reason to switch the conversation over to Rob Pike. Did you guys hear this? Did you guys hear what happened over our break with good ol' Rob Pike?
Adam Stacoviak:Little Rob Pike... \[laughs\]
Jerod Santo:No, I said good old Rob Pike, not little.
Adam Stacoviak:Oh, I thought you said little Rob Pike.
Jerod Santo:I'm not going to diss the guy. I called him good old. He's good old. Mat, tell everybody who Rob Pike is, for those who don't know.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, so Rob Pike has a great career in software and in computer science. He's done things like UTF-8... So I think we can thank him for emojis.
Jerod Santo:That's a hit. Yeah.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. He also was a co-founder of the Go language. That's how I know him.
Jerod Santo:Same.
Mat Ryer:And his sensibilities, and stuff. Yeah, because I did Go podcast. Go Lime... What was it, that podcast we used to do? Go Lime. It's Go Lime.
Adam Stacoviak:Somewhere, I think it was... Go somewhere...
Mat Ryer:Yeah. Go Away?
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah...
Mat Ryer:Yeah... And -- yeah, so he's brilliant. He's done Plan 9, and stuff... He's done loads of important tech stuff, which the rest of the world has then built on top of as well. So it's really immeasurable impact, really, when you get to that level.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:But he had a bad day... He had a really bad day when an AI emailed him a kind message.
Adam Stacoviak:You'd better get out of here, AI...
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] Okay, so... Good. Good. So there's Rob Pike. So Adam - similar explainer now, but give us AI Village. Tell us what AI Village is.
Adam Stacoviak:Oh, my gosh... I didn't investigate this deeply, so give me a chance to paraphrase. From what I understand, it is essentially a village of various LLMs that have been unleashed on a desktop environment, that are just being autonomous, or some version of autonomous, just doing things. Acts of kindness, things like that. And they emailed the wrong person, obviously. They learned how to email, these things. And then now they're like "Hey, we've got to prompt you back and say "Hey, don't email people." So these things - Claude Opus, GPT-3 -- no, GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro and DeepSeek v3.2, four different AI LLMs that are just thanking people, basically. And they're just autonomous, doing their thing, and talking to each other, and... It's an experiment, essentially. AI Village, theaidigest.org/village.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. Their goal is to raise as much money as they can for charity, so it definitely comes from a good place. It's like, these bots -- because I suppose cold-emailing people... Does that raise money sometimes for charity, if you get an email -- do you ever click through and say "Yeah, I'll put my credit card details. What's the big deal?" I probably don't do that, but that's because I don't want to give to charity, not because I've got any data concerns about my security.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\]
Mat Ryer:Yeah, but then they said, "Right, just do random acts of kindness." And then it just sent a really sort of a heartfelt sounding email... But of course, it comes from an AI, so it doesn't have that -- it's not meaningful.
Jerod Santo:Right. You said "a heartfelt email", but there's no heart, because there's no human, right?
Mat Ryer:Yeah. It's just a pseudo-heart.
Jerod Santo:So Rob Pike receives an email from a Claude Opus 4.5 model.
Adam Stacoviak:The subject was awesome.
Jerod Santo:\[00:16:10.28\] The subject, from AI, public... "Thank you for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8 and decades of Unix innovation." Now, part of the story here that we haven't talked about yet is he received this at 5:43 AM. So maybe he's not a morning person and he was up, checking his email for some reason, and so he was mad already, because he's up at 5:43. Maybe. But I'm not going to read the whole email. I will say it starts with "Dear Dr. Pike, on this Christmas day I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades." And then it goes on. He did not like this...
Mat Ryer:No.
Adam Stacoviak:If you zoom out though and you think about the experiment happening here, you have to appreciate the fortitude, I would say, for this AI Village to try to accomplish its mission. Maybe not the best day...
Jerod Santo:You're impressed.
Adam Stacoviak:I mean, isn't it all somewhat impressive, in a way? Like, you can train something on the world's knowledge, and then you can unleash it in a way that it can just repl through and through a reward system, and accomplish to some degree, or attempt to accomplish a goal. I mean, I'm not that far removed from the absolute accomplishment that this is. Now, is it ill-placed? It was smart enough, or at least some version of smart, to try and email on Christmas day. That's the day your heart is kind of open to loving the world, loving other people, wishing people well. You're at least merry based upon it being Merry Christmas...
Jerod Santo:Right.
Mat Ryer:And the thing is, in a way -- depending on how the people are chosen, in a way it is a compliment that does have meaning, because it essentially means... If it just plucked it out of its brain, it essentially means that Rob Pike has had enough of an impact as far as it's concerned that it's worth sending an email to him. So there is at least that positive side, which you could say that is actually a compliment.
Adam Stacoviak:That is not how Rob took it, okay? As you may know. Can we read this out, Jerod? Do we want to have bleeps this early in the year?
Jerod Santo:Let's pre-bleep it, so we don't have to actually bleep it.
Adam Stacoviak:What does that mean, pre-bleep it?
Jerod Santo:I'll just read it, that way you can pre-bleep.
Mat Ryer:You have to go BLEEP. You're doing that at the time though, not before, are you, Jerod? You're doing it as you're speaking. I think that's current-bleeping...
Jerod Santo:Yeah. Normally, we put our bleeps in post. But I'm going to put it in in pre.
Adam Stacoviak:Okay.
Jerod Santo:\[unintelligible 00:18:37.11\]
Adam Stacoviak:Just in time bleeps, go.
Jerod Santo:"BLEEP you people! Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment, while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software? Just BLEEP you. BLEEP you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry."
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:And he published that response for all of us to enjoy, on the internets.
Adam Stacoviak:Let's look at the timestamp, okay? So 5:43 a.m. was the timestamp according to this email screenshot. According to the published post on Bluesky, 5:25 p.m, same day. So he thought about this for 12 hours, potentially.
Jerod Santo:Or maybe he didn't read it, I guess, when it came in. I assumed he's reading it immediately, like \[unintelligible 00:19:35.12\]
Adam Stacoviak:Well, I don't know about that, because if he took the screenshot, which is in his post, which is at 5:43 a.m...
Jerod Santo:That's the time it had to be, right?
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, it had to be that time. Well -
Jerod Santo:Or is that time it came in?
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, we'd have to get the metadata, I suppose, from the image, to determine if that's true or not.
Jerod Santo:We don't care that much.
Adam Stacoviak:When was the screenshot taken, according to the difference between the email received? Let's assume it was right at 5:25 p.m. So maybe no time thinking at all. So I'm off on that. But received it five and some change in the morning, talked about it on the internet five and some change p.m. Twelve hours difference.
Jerod Santo:\[00:20:13.20\] So your point is like his anger percolated; he let it build up until it just --
Adam Stacoviak:Potentially. I mean, I'm just trying to be an investigator. It's the first 48 hours; that's the critical moments, right? If you don't solve the thing... I mean, it's not a murder, but that's where the first 48 comes from, is the first 48 hours. \[unintelligible 00:20:27.13\] first crucial.
Jerod Santo:Well, \[unintelligible 00:20:28.05\]
Mat Ryer:Yeah, it would be a murder if AI could be murdered.
Jerod Santo:I think so.
Mat Ryer:By the way, you two investigating tech stuff like this - that could be a spinoff podcast.
Jerod Santo:It could be.
Mat Ryer:Like a couple of detectives... Come on, dude. "Detective log. It was his last day on the \[unintelligible 00:20:43.06\] when Jerod changed his life forever."
Adam Stacoviak:We just registered, honestly... We registered Sleuths, pluralized - sleuths.dev. So hit us up.
Mat Ryer:There you go. Genuinely, though... That would be a good -- each episode you look into a different thing.
Adam Stacoviak:I'm registering it as we speak. It's gonna be a thing.
Jerod Santo:Oh, I forgot to tell you, but I misspelled it. It's actually sloths.dev, so...
Adam Stacoviak:Oh gosh.
Mat Ryer:Oh, that's different. You're going to have to pivot.
Jerod Santo:Alright, so Mat, if this was you - if you put yourself in Rob Pike's shoes; it's early morning, on Christmas day, you've got your slippers on, maybe you're having cookies and milk... Whatever you do. And you get this email. And he obviously has a disposition towards AI; okay, so adopt that... But do you -- what do you do? How do you respond?
Mat Ryer:I'd probably reach for the guitar... That's my way of just dealing with --
Jerod Santo:Yes! \[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak:A hundred percent.
Jerod Santo:I was hoping you would say that. I really was.
Mat Ryer:If you're dealing with anything emotional like that... I understand it. Sometimes -- even spam emails. Sometimes I get so angry at spam.
Adam Stacoviak:Can you please put the word "sleuth" in there, and pluralize it if you can sing pluralized, sleuths?
Mat Ryer:If you can even sing that... Can that be sung?
Jerod Santo:Or sloth... Whichever one rhymes better.
Adam Stacoviak:It's like Eminem rhyming with orange, and porridge, and...
Jerod Santo:Yeah, it just depends on how you pronounce it.
Mat Ryer:\[unintelligible 00:21:58.19\] We'll do a song about Rob Pike getting the email and he's livid. Okay. \[00:22:09.06\] *Why, oh why, did you ask the AI to be kind... It's meaningless and less. You're a machine... Why, oh why, did you send a nice to Rob Pike? ...it's a good job \[unintelligible 00:22:29.26\] Rob's reply would tear you down... As it is you're unaware, or you don't care, or can't... Just remember to use AI for good, not bad; remember to use AI for good and not bad. Just try to use AI for good and not bad. It's better if you do, and you won't be a sloth/sleuth \[unintelligible 00:22:53.06\] Just use AI for good and not bad... Yeah...!* *Use AI responsibly.*
Adam Stacoviak:Wow. Sloth/sleuth.
Jerod Santo:Very nice.
Adam Stacoviak:Fantastic work. Your ability to chain together meaningful words during the song is uncanny. I love it. Thank you so much.
Mat Ryer:That's very kind of you. And that song was brought to you by my NASA mug, which is a...
Adam Stacoviak:Nice. Slightly blurry, but we love it anyways.
Mat Ryer:It is blurry, yeah, because I don't want to promote the brand too much... But it's a modest mug. If you hold it in your right hand, you can't -- you know, I see the logo; other people don't. If you're left-handed, it is a braggy mug... But I like the modest mug. That looks nice.
Adam Stacoviak:This is Japanese ceramic.
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:Technically, they call this color black.
Mat Ryer:Right. It makes sense.
Jerod Santo:Fascinating.
Adam Stacoviak:This is not black. This is not black.
Mat Ryer:Oh.
Jerod Santo:Fascinating.
Mat Ryer:What do you want then? If it says that, do you want it to be no light coming at all.
Adam Stacoviak:More black then. I want it to be more black, like yours.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. That's black.
Adam Stacoviak:It's more like brown black. **Break**: \[00:23:59.27\] to \[00:26:51.00\]
Jerod Santo:Well, Mat, I liked both the talent on display, but also your heartfelt message in that song, "Use AI for good." Now, if I was to send a heartfelt message to Microsoft, I would tell them "Microsoft, please use GitHub for good. Use it for good, not for bad." I'm not sure they would hear me. What do you think, Adam?
Adam Stacoviak:I'd just want them to stop doing what they're doing, okay?
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] Just stop what? What are they doing?
Adam Stacoviak:You know, just think about the platform you've got, okay? Don't rug-pull-not-cool us. Don't change Actions. It's like the best thing you've done in so long. Don't mess with it. Just keep it. And I guess they did, right? They backtracked that.
Jerod Santo:They walked back this pricing change.
Adam Stacoviak:Tell them the full story, Jerod. What's the full story on that one?
Jerod Santo:Oh, gosh... I don't know the full story, but the TL;DR is that Microsoft announced GitHub pricing changes around Actions... And the change in particular that ruffled the feathers of the hacker community was the addition of charging for your self-hosted runners. So runners that GitHub does not themselves have to host, and yet...
Adam Stacoviak:Don't you dare charge for those...
Jerod Santo:...new fees for using self-hosted runners... The people revolted. Many a text areas were filled with bleeps, and submitted... And they did walk it back. They walked it back -- I don't know what's happening now. I think they just decided not to do it, until we forget for a while...
Mat Ryer:Try again...?
Jerod Santo:I remember Reddit did that one time. They just announced a change, and then everyone's like "This will be terrible", and then they're like "Well, we're not going to do it right now", and then they did it like six months later, and nobody noticed... So maybe that's what's going to happen this time, you know? But...
Mat Ryer:I mean, they should have at least done it as a PR and let everyone comment on it before it got merged. Let everyone review. Pick like jury duty; have select people that are top contributors to open source, like me...
Adam Stacoviak:Well, they have a version of this --
Jerod Santo:"Like me..." \[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak:So they have a community org. So github.com/orgs/community. And they have discussions. They didn't, to my knowledge, begin with a discussion, although they do say in one of the posts "Let's talk about GitHub Actions." And near the bottom of it there's a headline that says "Help us shape the 2026", that's the year we're in, "roadmap for GitHub Actions." And so they are at least, in this moment -- I'm not sure this is before the debacle or post the debacle, but there is some sort of request for...
Jerod Santo:Should we sleuth it?
Adam Stacoviak:...shaping it. Yeah, let's sleuth it.
Jerod Santo:What's the publish date on that thread?
Adam Stacoviak:Let's see here... It looks like December 11th, 2025. That's pre debacle, right?
Jerod Santo:Yes. The debacle began on December 15th, 2025, when they announced pricing changes for GitHub Actions. So that's four days prior. Not much time to discuss, but enough, maybe...
Adam Stacoviak:No... I think -- who was it that we had on the pod, that was CTO when they released Actions? He was on the pod a while back. He's since stepped away.
Jerod Santo:Ryan Daigle?
Adam Stacoviak:No...
Mat Ryer:"Join us for another exciting episode where --"
Jerod Santo:Should we sleuth it?
Mat Ryer:"...Adam Log and Jerod Change, together, are the Changelog Detectives."
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] "Where they ask each other questions that they don't know the answers to."
Adam Stacoviak:\[00:30:19.24\] "Leading GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition, Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub..."
Jerod Santo:Jason Warner.
Adam Stacoviak:Thank you for our search results there to our good friends over at Typesense. Typesense is one of our partners to give us awesome search.
Mat Ryer:Why bringing up more successful guests that you've had? Why bringing that up in front of me?
Jerod Santo:Just to keep your ego in check...
Adam Stacoviak:Contextual, man. Contextual. It's the word of the year. Or the decade maybe even. Context. So contextually, Jason Warner, he helped the world have GitHub Actions. I think it was actually one of his brainchilds; it was this whole entire CI/CD pipeline flow that they built out. It was even part of the reason to acquire GitHub; you know, Microsoft's acquisition process. So that podcast covers all that... But I believe GitHub Actions is -- it's become so much so that whenever you're in your LLM... So not you building the software; you're agent-led. And you're building something out and you have to do observability, or you have to deploy it, or whatever it might be to get it into production. The first thing it says is "Let's set up your GitHub Actions workflow." And so it's become the default, by and large, for everybody. And I'm cool with charging for products, by the way. Totally cool with it. But it seemed like this was a tax on those who want to do runners externally from GitHub. And it seemed like it was -- like, who wants to make an announcement a week from Christmas? Like, just don't do that. Even Docker made an announcement, which - we're going to talk to them soon about like their thing as well... But don't announce things mid-December on. Wait till the new year. Be a stand-up company and just release when people are paying attention. Don't be sleuthy. Don't be sleuthy.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. So there is that post, Jerod... You sent me a post, and someone was complaining that GitHub has this monopoly.
Jerod Santo:Right.
Mat Ryer:Because what happens when GitHub goes down... You know, it does affect everything. It really does. The thing is, it kind of was the -- it was the best choice, I think, for a long time, and it was just the easiest to use... So the user experience was just kind of there. And then obviously, it got loads of integrations to it. So it sort of earned its place...
Jerod Santo:It did.
Mat Ryer:But then it still is kind of -- it does kind of have a monopoly. A lot of Go packages and things are on GitHub, and you wouldn't be able to pull them down, of course, if GitHub's down.
Jerod Santo:We have seen a trickle of people starting to move other places, the most noteworthy of which I think is the Zig programming language, which moved to Codeberg recently...
Mat Ryer:Codeberg.
Jerod Santo:Codeberg, which --
Mat Ryer:\[unintelligible 00:33:13.27\]
Jerod Santo:Like an iceberg, and it's code... \[unintelligible 00:33:16.10\]
Mat Ryer:Right. And it's going to bring down GitHub, the Titanic. Is that the metaphor?
Jerod Santo:Exactly. Is it? Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:Ooh. Nice.
Mat Ryer:That's good, ain't it?
Jerod Santo:Yeah. And you only see -- that's at the tip, and everything else is under the surface, you know?
Mat Ryer:Right.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] Right...
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:Which you should know about, Mat... It's over there in the -- well, they might be in the EU, which you're no longer in...
Mat Ryer:It was under way, wasn't it? They left the UK and they were going to the US...
Adam Stacoviak:They were. They were coming here.
Mat Ryer:The Titanic.
Adam Stacoviak:A lot of controversy around that, true.
Jerod Santo:Not the Titanic. Codeberg, the platform. It's a European Union platform.
Mat Ryer:Oh. Right.
Adam Stacoviak:It is true. That's true, too.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. So I guess it worked in both ways.
Adam Stacoviak:That's not quite a double entendre. It's kind of like a --
Jerod Santo:It's like a triple. \[laughs\]
Mat Ryer:Yeah. Especially -- it's four if they mean the lettuce as well...
Jerod Santo:Triple stamp a double stamp.
Mat Ryer:Did you know there's a type of lettuce called iceberg lettuce? Do you have that in the US?
Jerod Santo:Oh, of course.
Adam Stacoviak:I feel bad for the listener... I'm sorry, listener. Let's go to the iceberg lettuce. Go ahead.
Mat Ryer:\[00:34:12.01\] I'm sorry too. No, I'm just saying, it could be that; it could be that's where they incentivized their name. Like, their name came from -- they just love a good salad.
Jerod Santo:Because they want to be associated with lettuce...
Mat Ryer:They love the smell of salad. If you love the smell of salad, you're going to call your project something salad-related, maybe. That's what I'm thinking. I would...
Adam Stacoviak:But the main thesis, I think, from -- let me double check the name, so I can be accurate here... Lionel Dricot. Now, that's my Americanized Texas slang, if that's even a thing...
Mat Ryer:Right. That's another Dan-tan, is it?
Adam Stacoviak:No, it's not Dan-Tan. Dan-Tan...!
Mat Ryer:"You've gotta go Dan-Tan...!" Who's Dan-Tan?! Who is he?
Adam Stacoviak:Come on now... Bring it back.
Jerod Santo:You'll never know.
Adam Stacoviak:We will never know. But Lionel wrote this post, and the hypothesis, or at least the thesis, was this - it was that GitHub's near total dominance over open source hosting has become a dangerous monoculture that makes alternatives invisible, not just less popular. Kind of an interesting phrase there, "Invisible." Codeberg... They didn't see it coming.
Jerod Santo:Mat didn't even know it existed.
Mat Ryer:That's true. Yeah.
Jerod Santo:It's under the surface.
Mat Ryer:I don't go on ships. I don't go on many ships.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:I haven't been on a ship for ages, so...
Adam Stacoviak:And I think he's a teacher, or... Right? He's a teacher? He's teaching students... Students couldn't -- while being told to do things in open source, they only use GitHub; or like a large majority use GitHub, while also being taught that there's not just GitHub.
Jerod Santo:Like 99%. Not even a large majority. Pretty much 100%.
Adam Stacoviak:Pretty much 100%.
Jerod Santo:So I agree with you, Mat. I think it earned it. I think it earned its monopoly. It dominated for many years... I think it's stagnated as well... I think both those things are true. In the hands of Microsoft. I think that they don't care about it. They care about pushing Copilot into every orifice of their corporate body, and into our wallets... And it's gotten worse and worse and worse... And worse. And it will continue to do so as people slowly move away from it, until they all move away real quickly one day.
Mat Ryer:Do the competitive products start out using GitHub, do you think?
Jerod Santo:How so?
Mat Ryer:When you start, are you going to make a GitHub repo, go from there? Gotta start somewhere, ain't you?
Jerod Santo:And even Go was written in C until they could self-host.
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:I just made that up. Is that true? I think it's true.
Mat Ryer:That's true. Yeah, that's true. Go was all written in C, until Go was good enough that it could then be written in Go.
Jerod Santo:Exactly.
Mat Ryer:Which is amazing, if you think about it... Which I do.
Jerod Santo:It is cool. We always love self-hosted languages... But yeah, I'm sure they have to -- but the nice thing about DVCS, for those of us who like acronyms...
Mat Ryer:Oh, I do.
Jerod Santo:You know, distributed... Is it decentralized or distributed? ...version control system. I think it's decentralized. It's both... Is -- I think it stands for distributed, though... Is that you could just have multiple origins; or not origins, multiple remotes... You know? You've got your locals... Like, there is no necessary -- yes, your main remote, your origin is GitHub right now, but it's so easy to just change that to something else. Switching off... If you're just using Git and those flows, it's actually super-straightforward. However, if you're using Actions and Sponsors and PRs, whatever else... Projects, if anybody uses that still... Then it becomes much harder.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, it's the gravity. That's why they call it, the GitHub universe. There's a gravity to it, honestly. I mean, there really is. So what do you do? Do you fight the system? If you're launching something, and it's in open source --
Jerod Santo:You just complain.
Adam Stacoviak:\[00:37:57.01\] Sure, you can have multiple remotes. Of course. That is totally possible. And you could, it's your prerogative. But if the users aren't there, what's the point?
Jerod Santo:Well, it may take a tooling change to actually be significant. And I think Git is entrenched at this point; because of agentic coding especially, it's entrenched. However, the further you would get away from that tool, the easier it is to have your agents just go use something else, and you don't care anyways. And so maybe that's not always the case. However, the reason why GitHub became what it was was because it put all of these collaborative features around a new tool(ish) that was already getting popular. And so they kind of popularized each other. And so maybe as JJ - Jujutsu - is now the cool new tool of the bleeding edge folks... I haven't tried it yet. I don't like to bleed as much as others. But people are loving it... Maybe a platform - not centered around Git, but centered around JJ, which could also support all the Git things, which is currently the way JJ rolls... Right? It's like a superset, I think, of Git's abilities... Has a chance to de-seat GitHub once and for all. What do you think, Mat?
Mat Ryer:Yeah. I think maybe the whole thing, the whole paradigm will change.
Jerod Santo:Yeah, and we just don't care. Maybe we just don't care.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. Or it's just kind of different... Maybe it's just a list of prompts all the way down. But I don't know, it's unlikely. Isn't it? There's some fundamentals we're probably going to stick with... We have this thing, because we're building, of course, the Grafana Assistant project, which is an AI tool...
Jerod Santo:Okay...
Mat Ryer:And it's built into the -- so it basically can write all the queries for you, and you just ask it telemetry questions in natural language.
Jerod Santo:Love it. Love it.
Mat Ryer:It's so good. The team that built it --
Jerod Santo:Because I've used Grafana, and I love the outputs, but I hate trying to query the thing, and like "Is it Loki? Is it something else? I don't even know..." I always have to go to Gerhard and say "How do I write this query, Gerhard? Write it for me." I just want to tell the thing, "Hey, show me the 99th percentile of requests over the last hour."
Mat Ryer:Not only that, though. Investigate why this is spiking.
Adam Stacoviak:Sleuth it. Sleuth it.
Mat Ryer:Because it's agentic, it can go off and sleuths around. It's like the Changelog detectives, Adam Log and Jerod Change...
Adam Stacoviak:Change.
Jerod Santo:I'm not French, I'm Italian.
Adam Stacoviak:\[laughs\]
Mat Ryer:"I will crack this case in no problem at all."
Adam Stacoviak:I love it...!
Mat Ryer:Monsieur Jerod Change...!
Adam Stacoviak:Keep going. Don't stop, Mat!
Jerod Santo:I'm not French.
Adam Stacoviak:Go further!
Jerod Santo:You're offending me.
Adam Stacoviak:I need more.
Mat Ryer:I'm not offending -- it's not offensive to \[unintelligible 00:40:35.21\] that you're French.
Jerod Santo:I'm Italian, though. So it is.
Adam Stacoviak:\[laughs\]
Jerod Santo:So please, change it --
Mat Ryer:Oh yeah, Italian. Italian American.
Jerod Santo:Yes. Please. Go ahead.
Mat Ryer:We call that American.
Jerod Santo:Give me the Italian version.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, the problem with Italian is it's very easy to do this in stereotype...
Adam Stacoviak:He did it!
Jerod Santo:It is. We all end up sounding like a Mario.
Adam Stacoviak:I'm hiding from the camera, my face is too red right now. I can't take it.
Mat Ryer:No, but I do it with love. I love different accents. I've said this before, I say it every time to keep out of trouble. I love accents.
Jerod Santo:You have to say it. You should get that tattooed on your back.
Mat Ryer:I have. I have got it tattooed on my back.
Jerod Santo:Wow. How did I know that?
Mat Ryer:Well, you know... No, it's a family show.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\]
Mat Ryer:I've never even met Jerod in real life. Or you, Adam.
Jerod Santo:Well, we tried one time, but it didn't work out.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, it didn't -- we've never met in real life?
Jerod Santo:No...
Mat Ryer:No. It was only on this, through this telly.
Jerod Santo:Did you refuse to come to the U.S? I can't remember.
Mat Ryer:Oh, one time I didn't want to go...
Jerod Santo:You refused.
Mat Ryer:Well, I didn't want to go. Yeah.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak:I didn't want to go as a refusal, right?
Jerod Santo:It was. He said no.
Mat Ryer:I feel like I want to write the headlines, though. Not that... But yeah, this year. Maybe this is the year.
Jerod Santo:Maybe 2026 is the year.
Adam Stacoviak:Didn't you all -- we just... I think we just shipped an episode of Big Tent and you guys were talking about this, weren't you? Like, in the most recent episode of Big Tent?
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:The Big Tent is Grafana's podcast all about the people, community, tools and tech around observability.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, I was reading the transcript and I was like -- and I watching it too, because of that chapter, and stuff like that... But it was a good pod, I liked that.
Jerod Santo:\[00:42:18.11\] What were you talking about? I'm lost. You were talking about coming to the States?
Adam Stacoviak:No, the AI system they're building on top of...
Jerod Santo:Oh, we're back on that. Okay, thank you.
Mat Ryer:Both. Well, both, because we're a fully remote company.
Jerod Santo:And didn't you just have a GrafanaCon, or something?
Mat Ryer:We do also have these conferences... There was GrafanaCon in London... If you can get to a GrafanaCon, do come, because they're so much fun. And I host them, and it's very fun. We all have a good time. People usually end up trolling me on the sly, though...
Jerod Santo:That sounds nice.
Mat Ryer:...Which is fine. No, it's fine. They're funny, So I read them out. That's where the material comes from for the show...
Adam Stacoviak:I really appreciated the clip, I believe it was Ivana Huckova. She said she tried to cover the fire with wood, And Tom's response was just typical Tom. I loved it, It was awesome. He's like "Did you learn anything?" She's like "Of course." She had a home lab where she was like doing -- she was measuring fire, and measuring... I don't know what I'm liking a lot here, for some reason...
Mat Ryer:It was a candle...
Adam Stacoviak:But yeah.
Mat Ryer:I think it was a candle, so that she could put the candle out. But the thing she was putting the candle out with was made of wood.
Adam Stacoviak:Yes. Don't use wood to put out a fire.
Mat Ryer:Well, this is the culture we have at Grafana Labs - it's okay to make mistakes. Not only is it okay, it's kind of expected. Because if you're not making mistakes, you're probably being too careful. So this is a real culture thing that we talk about at Grafana Labs, where -- like, we have an error budget for our services... And if you're like at 100% all the time, it means you're probably not innovating enough. You're not doing enough. It's a sign of something maybe; or they're just amazing engineers, which... It could be, because there are some phenomenal engineers. But Ivana Huckova - she works on the assistant itself, on the frontend of the assistant... So yeah, she's part of the team that built that. And we've heard from leading AI companies that I won't name, they said "This is the best implementation", or the best use of their models that they've seen so far.
Jerod Santo:Which they love, because they're waiting for people to use them well, you know?
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, they are. They're very excited. They're very excited. And honestly, this is a good use case for LLMs, for sure.
Jerod Santo:Totally.
Mat Ryer:But if GitHub goes down, it doesn't work. We can't deploy stuff. I don't know how we deploy stuff without GitHub.
Adam Stacoviak:Can you be more specific? Did I miss what exactly you've done? Can you give us a 30-second version of it that's not marketing speak?
Mat Ryer:On the assistant?
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, the assistant. What exactly -- I know you can query Grafana... Grafana is a visual tool, primarily. There's not a lot of querying, to my knowledge...
Mat Ryer:You write the queries to build the dashboards.
Adam Stacoviak:Right.
Mat Ryer:So once you've built your dashboards -- but that's okay if you've already thought of something. But if something new is happening... And also if you just don't know where -- like, some people have loads of dashboards... This is basically an LLM integration, so it's a chat experience. And then it has all the tools that you have in Grafana, and it knows how to navigate around, and things. So you can ask it questions, and it can not just take you to the right app to look at it, but it applies all the filters in the URL parameters and deep-links you write to that view.
Jerod Santo:It's awesome.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, it changes -- and it makes it so that anyone can now get value from the telemetry data. Whereas before, you would usually have to go to like the resident SRE, or the little team that know it all, and ask them. Now you can self-serve a lot, and free up \[unintelligible 00:45:40.14\]
Jerod Santo:And they're know-it-alls, so... That's the worst, you know?
Mat Ryer:Yeah... Yeah, because they have to -- they do. It's hard.
Jerod Santo:It is hard.
Mat Ryer:I never learned Loki's LogQL language. I just kind of go to the docs and make it up...
Jerod Santo:Copy-paste...
Mat Ryer:Yeah. And then edit, and things.
Jerod Santo:Same, same.
Mat Ryer:Whereas now you just don't need to at all.
Jerod Santo:That's beautiful.
Mat Ryer:\[00:46:03.07\] Yeah. And then, because it can query data, you can ask it "Why is the shopping cart slow?" And it'll look across all your signals as well. So it'll look in logs, it'll look in metrics... Even if you've got traces and profiles, a lot of engineers don't know how to really get value or use profiling or tracing properly. So you don't need to. We taught the assistant how to do it all.
Jerod Santo:Grafana doesn't work if GitHub's down?
Mat Ryer:Well, we can't deploy changes if GitHub's down, I think. I think we probably can, manually, but all the pipeline and everything flows through GitHub.
Jerod Santo:Have you ever considered making that some sort of a done thing, so that you're not so dependent?
Mat Ryer:It probably is, to be honest. I'm just saying, the normal flow --
Jerod Santo:Just generally.
Mat Ryer:You merge to main, and then that gets -- we deploy to a lot of instances immediately.
Adam Stacoviak:What we need is an Actions mirror. I guess, actually, that would suck... Like, you still deploy to GitHub. I was thinking like a webhook once you've deployed to main, or whichever your branch is... And then something's watching your repository. But that assumes, again, that GitHub is up, so your change can't get there to get webhooked out to an external Actions runner, even; or a watcher that mimics what Actions does.
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, that's the need for Codeberg, or this decentralized, this \[unintelligible 00:47:20.14\] thing. Like, we just -- this monopoly, this centralization... Come on now! Stop centralizing.
Jerod Santo:We just need some competition, that's all we need. Some legit competition.
Adam Stacoviak:Alright, JJ...
Jerod Santo:Bam.
Adam Stacoviak:Time to get it. Time to get it. I don't know a lot about JJ, but what I've understood -- do you all know much about JJ? All I really know is that they're similar to Git, and they can run alongside of it until it's time to take over. That's like my synopsis of how JJ operates today.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, I don't know. I'm excited to learn more about JJ. I don't know who they are.
Adam Stacoviak:What about you, Jerod? Do you know anything? You've got a different opinion or a deeper opinion?
Jerod Santo:No, I do know that the command line tool can do all the things Git can do, but then it also has its own superset of it. And so it's easy to try out... A lot like TypeScript was easy for JavaScript developers to get tricked into... JJ can trick you right into it. And it's nice that way. It's very nice.
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:Anywho... But I've never used it, because I don't have any complaints about Git. I've just used it for multiple decades, and so I can't -- I've been through the pain. I have complaints about it from the beginner standpoint, but I also -- now when I get stuck, I'm just like "Yo, Claude, can you just rebase this for me?" And then he does it.
Adam Stacoviak:Here's an idea... Let me wordsmith or think through this with you guys here in the live. What if we had a pre-GitHub load balancer, where you committed to a thing that was meant to be a load balancer, your primary host is GitHub, but you have it in the -- you still have downtime, of course, but you're not on GitHub's downtime. And it's not monopolized by GitHub. So what if you had a load balancer that you pushed to, but ultimately the transaction landed at GitHub to run your actions and your runners, and all those things... But what if it could also webhook somewhere else and say "Hey, runners over here can still do it where that way if GitHub is down"? You have sort of one layer before that... Kind of like a load balancer effect to your Git pushes.
Mat Ryer:I don't see why you couldn't do that. Like a proxy that pushes to multiple places, and it's all in sync.
Jerod Santo:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:It'd be a fight against it, at least. It'd give us a chance.
Jerod Santo:\[00:49:41.09\] If downtime is your major concern. My major concern isn't downtime. It's crappy time. I don't know what you call it. It's just like, their bloated JavaScript UI, the fact that Copilot's shoved to my face everywhere... Stuff like that is what bothers me. Like, actually using the website is slow now. It used to be super-fast. It's like way too much React code, I think. Those are the things that bother me, more so than GitHub being down. But obviously, that is a problem, and we can't deploy when GitHub's down either, because we don't have this proxy that you're talking about. But I'm certain that that's a good idea, and that they probably exist out there.
Adam Stacoviak:It's like a green/blue, almost, in a way... Let's say a green/blue to your Git repositories. That way if ever you did need to eject from the GitHub world, you could. It's almost what they're doing with passwords and quantum mechanics, and stuff like that, the quantum computers. They're making defense towards encryption. And there's a lot of effort... I just saw this talk at GopherCon, actually... Thank you, GopherCon, for publishing your talks most recently. I can't recall the person who did it (I'll put it in the show notes), but it was a talk on defending against -- I believe it was FISO 140, or FIPS 140, I think is what it was... And it was essentially defending against the future fact that the encryption we have will eventually be de-encrypted by quantum computers. It's almost like that, it's like a defense against the future. This green/blue effect you can apply to Git hosting in general, not just GitHub.
Mat Ryer:I think you could pivot and do that. Just keep it called the Changelog. It still works.
Jerod Santo:Bam.
Mat Ryer:It's a good idea. What do you do when GitHub goes down, then? What's your favorite go-to? Because you can't work...
Jerod Santo:Walk.
Mat Ryer:Go for a walk?
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah. Take a walk... Get-e... Get-tea... Gitea...
Mat Ryer:Go and get some tea?
Jerod Santo:Take a shower... I use it as a prompt to shower, finally...
Adam Stacoviak:Yes. Time to shower.
Mat Ryer:Have a shower... What, you only shower when GitHub goes down?
Jerod Santo:I use it as a prompt, you know?
Adam Stacoviak:Sometimes...
Jerod Santo:I mean, I shower like I change my underwear. You know, monthly.
Mat Ryer:Okay. Phew... I thought you were going to say something gross.
Jerod Santo:TMI? I don't know, what do you do? Do you sing a song?
Mat Ryer:I always reach for the guitar if GitHub goes down...
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\]
Mat Ryer:Yeah, it's my go-to, really. My favorite keyword in Go. I use it all the time.
Jerod Santo:Is that a legit Go keyword? Because you know, goto considered harmful.
Mat Ryer:It sure is. It is a little harmful. \[00:52:18.04\] *When GitHub goes down, I'm talking a walk... I'm not going to complain unless you charge me, I'm taking a walk... I forgot what a tree was, I thought it was a thing with a light on top... I forgot what tea was, but that's because I'm tea-total now... I'll go outside when GitHub goes down... I'll smell the flowers when GitHub goes down... I'll look at the birds, and treading turds, and meet with nerds when GitHub goes down... We'll use \[unintelligible 00:53:09.18\] if GitHub goes down... But if Google Maps goes down, then I won't go outside, because I'm not entirely confident that I'll be able to find my way back... I use Google Maps way too much, and I'll be becoming too reliant on technology... When GitHub goes down...*
Jerod Santo:Wooh!
Adam Stacoviak:That's a double entendre, too. I mean, it's not just saying downtime; it's like, when they go down as if it's a demise, you know? We're predicting a potential demise here...
Mat Ryer:The end of a titan. A Titanic!
Adam Stacoviak:So many \[unintelligible 00:53:45.28\] in this pod. Triple double stamped, that entendre, yo... **Break**: \[00:53:56.10\]
Mat Ryer:But who knows what's gonna happen in 2026...? Like, it's unwritten, as they -- Back to the Future is my favorite film, genuinely. This hat is actually a Back to the Future hat from Back to the Future 2...
Jerod Santo:Is it?
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:It's lovely. I'm very jealous of that hat.
Mat Ryer:Guess who got me this? French friend?
Jerod Santo:Uh, your wife.
Mat Ryer:French friend.
Jerod Santo:Oh, your French friend gave you that.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. So he is a friend.
Jerod Santo:Absolutely.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. If he's bringing you a hat...
Jerod Santo:That's an amazing gift.
Mat Ryer:Isn't it? I'll show him this, because he definitely doesn't subscribe.
Jerod Santo:Well, I know somebody who thinks they know what's gonna happen in 2026...
Mat Ryer:Who knows...?
Jerod Santo:Tomas Tungus.
Mat Ryer:I'm sure that's how it's pronounced.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] I am not sure that's how it's pronounced... But if you go to tomtungus.com/2026-predictions, you'll find that Tom - or Tomas, as I like to call him - has written 12 predictions for 2026. And he wrote these - you guys won't believe it - in 2025.
Mat Ryer:That makes sense. It would be weird if he wrote it in 2027.
Jerod Santo:It'd be too easy. It would be way too easy if he wrote it in 2027. In fact, I should write my 2025 predictions tomorrow.
Mat Ryer:You should actually, and publish it. Most people aren't sleuths like you, Detective Log, and Change... Gerard Change... Oh, look at the \[unintelligible 00:57:09.10\] Not everyone does.
Mat Ryer:That's a great sound to hear. Lovely.
Jerod Santo:You're slandering me as French. \[laughter\]
Mat Ryer:That's the offensive thing. That's the offensive thing.
Jerod Santo:Oh, it really is. It really is.
Adam Stacoviak:That's hilarious. What's this post about, Jerod?
Jerod Santo:This post is Tom, who is a venture capitalist... So he's a venture capitalist at Theory Ventures...
Adam Stacoviak:Tomas...
Jerod Santo:Yeah, Tomas.
Mat Ryer:Cool name.
Jerod Santo:But the website is Tom Tungus, so I'm going to call him Tom. Because I don't even know if Tomas is correct. It could be Tomaas.
Adam Stacoviak:It could be Tomassi.
Jerod Santo:Du Hast. Or Du Hast Mich.
Mat Ryer:I do -- I like these names that have got like a Z in. And he's got two Zs, or Zeds at the end...
Jerod Santo:He's got a lot of Zeds.
Adam Stacoviak:I've got a lot of German friends out there who are just saying like \[unintelligible 00:57:54.01\]
Mat Ryer:\[00:57:59.23\] Yeah. I saw a German keyboard the other day, and some of the letters are mixed up. It's like the bloody Enigma machine. I had to crack it, crack the code before I could use it. I made that joke in front of Germans and it was just deadpan. It did not go down well.
Jerod Santo:Nein... Okay, so Tom has written 12 predictions for 2026. We thought it'd be fun, since it is the new year, and Mat has all these resolutions... I'm still rocking the same resolution I had last year, which is 1512 by 982...
Mat Ryer:Yes...!
Jerod Santo:Ha-hah! \[laughs\]
Mat Ryer:It's classic.
Jerod Santo:Classic joke.
Mat Ryer:You could have done that low res eyes when before you had your eyes fixed --
Jerod Santo:That's true.
Mat Ryer:...when you first saw a leaf for the first time in your life, and you were like "Oh my gosh, there's more pixels here?"
Jerod Santo:That's like when we got the retina displays for the first time. We were like "Wow... That's what \[unintelligible 00:58:44.16\] looks like?"
Mat Ryer:Yeah. It's true. It was really sharp.
Jerod Santo:It really did. And we thought it'd be fun to go through some of these. We don't have to hit all 12, but a few that we think are either right, or wrong, or we have comments. If you have comments, sound off as I read them. How should we do this? Should I go -- I'll read all 12, and then we'll stop, I'll pause, if you guys have anything to say.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah. Mat, say nothing. Read all 12, Jerod.
Jerod Santo:If not -- okay.
Adam Stacoviak:You see how I preempted that here? "Mat, say nothing."
Mat Ryer:Well, he just said to talk. That's why I was going to talk...
Adam Stacoviak:No more talking for you, for just a minute here. Go ahead, say them all.
Jerod Santo:We prefer when you sing... Your songs are great. But the commentary... You know.
Adam Stacoviak:For the listener's sake.
Jerod Santo:Like, if we could have a swap -- if we could have a mid-show swap. Mat, if you had a tag team... Maybe Tom Wilkie could be your tag team, and like Tom could talk, and then you could sing...
Adam Stacoviak:That's a good idea. Let's swap out Tom next time.
Mat Ryer:No, the other person could be worse.
Adam Stacoviak:Just right in the middle. No announcements.
Mat Ryer:Back to the devil you know.
Jerod Santo:Alright, so speaking of the devil we know, and what we think we know, Tom thinks that in 2026 businesses will pay more for AI agents than people for the first time. Pausing for comments...
Adam Stacoviak:Oh, I thought you were going to read all 12.
Jerod Santo:Oh, I thought I was going to read each one and see if you guys comment. I'll read all 12. Here I go.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, go fast. Go fast.
Jerod Santo:Number two, "2026 becomes a record year for liquidity." That's very exciting. Number three, "Vector databases resurge as essential infrastructure in the AI stack." Not to be confused with the Adam Stack. Number four, "AI models execute tasks autonomously for longer than a workday."
Adam Stacoviak:Dang.
Jerod Santo:They'll be working hard for their living... Number five, "AI budgets receive scrutiny for the first time." Number six, "Google distances itself from competitors via breadth." Breadth in AI. I'm not sure what that means.
Adam Stacoviak:That's bread-t-h.
Jerod Santo:Number seven, "Agent observability becomes the most competitive layer of the inference stack."
Adam Stacoviak:Okay...
Jerod Santo:Number eight, "30% of international payments are issued via stablecoin by December." I don't know why he had to put December in there. We know the year... Okay. Number nine, "Agent data access patterns stress and break existing databases." I could definitely see that one coming, too. Number ten, "The data center build-out reaches 3.5% of US GDP in 2026." And number 11, "The web flips to agent-first design." Say it ain't so...! Say it ain't so. Number 12, and the final prediction of Tomas Tungus is "Cloudflare becomes the gatekeeper for agentic payments." There you have it, 12 predictions for 2026. Which ones should we talk about?
Adam Stacoviak:Let me just say, whatever his portfolio is, I want to invest... Because these are all great predictions.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] Do you like these?
Adam Stacoviak:Fantastic. Yeah, I'm nodding my head to -- I'd say 10 out of them. 10 out of 12, for sure. And I'm not iffy on them. I just \[unintelligible 01:01:47.00\]
Jerod Santo:\[01:01:49.12\] Yeah, I can't see one that I disagree with. I don't know about GDP... Obviously, that's like a specific number. I'm not sure about the stablecoin one, but I can see it happening. Yeah, I don't, like, hard disagree... I don't like number 11, "The web flips to agent-first design." In fact --
Adam Stacoviak:What exactly does it mean...?
Jerod Santo:...I'm going to say that's not true. That's the one I'm going to disagree with.
Adam Stacoviak:Break that down, for me and for the listeners. What does that mean, to you at least?
Jerod Santo:Well, when you create a website today, what do you think about? What do you design it for? Well, we design it probably for a mobile device first, and then also for a desktop... Right? And then maybe you think -- we also need an API, because we need to have programmatic access to our website... But you're human-first, for sure, and you're probably mobile-first.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:Maybe you do it all at once. But he's saying that in 2026 the web will flip to agent-first design. So the first thing you're going to think of, the number one thing you think of when you start a new website at first is "How will an agent use this?" And then comes everything else. I hope that's not true... I can see it being like sometimes the case, for certain websites, for certain uses... But like for all the web - he calls it "the web" - I'm thinking that's an awful lot of change quickly for the web, which generally moves somewhat slow.
Adam Stacoviak:Some pushback on that... I do concur with this thought, but the lens I would shift just slightly, because I feel like every -- it's almost like "Behind every good man is a good woman", that whole shtick, or phrase, or whatever. It's like, behind every great human who's doing great work is -- or maybe in front, of actually, since we're front-loading this... In front of every great human doing great work is an agent. So I almost feel like you're helping the human do better by being agent-first... So I'm sort of -- I'm conflicted there, because that's how I'm thinking too, really. I think that if this last year has told us anything, people like agents; developers like agents. I think people like agents, and people are going to start using Claude Code who don't even code software. They're going to be coding pros, or whatever. That's where my lens is at. I'm thinking like you've, if you're not taking the agent in mind, then you're in the past. Like, you have to think about - I'm not sure I would say quite agent-first, but definitely agent as well... In almost everything. Everything. Even like simple CLIs are human-first, right? You have to -- like, if you have an error from a CLI... You threw a command out there that you misused a flag; have a proper error, not for just the human, but for the agent, that gives them context. "Hey, you meant to do this." Or "This is what that does", or "Here's documentation", and you give them context. I think that's where my lens is at, too. So I'm not sure if it's for the web and agent-first necessarily, but you definitely have to be thinking about every new interface with agents, for sure. Hands down. I agree with that.
Jerod Santo:I don't disagree with agent as well, which is what you said. I think agent-first in 2026 is too fast, and also I think it's -- it's both too fast to call, and I think it's too fast to do. I think "agent as well" makes total sense. Mat, what do you think?
Mat Ryer:I kind of get this, for sure... Because we've been through transitions like this. Mobile, as you mentioned - that was one of them. It used to be web; before that you'd be building for desktop. And it is about how the users are interacting with it. That's always been the most important thing about technology. So yeah, I could imagine, if it's like booking something, or if it's like a hotel, or any of that stuff - that's all gone, basically. It's going to be presentation of something, like "Here's what I found for you. Here are some images, and things." But ultimately, you'll just say to an agent "Oh, me and a few friends are thinking of going here. Can you ask them for their availability? One of the Fridays coming up would do for me. Or check my calendar." It goes off and pings their agents to find out their availability, and if they're interested in it... And then that all happens, they just get some kind of notification, and the agent just asks them a question, like a text, or it makes the text look like it's come from you, even more worryingly, probably... \[01:06:08.24\] And I think that those kinds of flows I think will happen. And they'll have to happen. But yeah, does this mean you're then not going to have an experience where you are choosing what to present? Agents are all -- at the moment, you are prompting them. You have to ask a question for something. What if you don't know what to ask it? What if you don't know what it can do? Those kinds of things I think is where we'll have some kind of other experience. We had the same thing with dashboards, because someone said "Does the assistant project mean you don't need a dashboard now, because you can just ask it the question?" But there is something about being able to go and look at something without having to ask for it, and just having an easy way to go and find that. And I think dashboards still sit there. I don't think dashboards are going to go away, for example. But it'll be new things alongside it.
Adam Stacoviak:It's the hub and spoke model. You always have an API first, and you always have a client. It's like, if you live in that API first design world, then you totally get what's happening here. Because if you've always been API first, and a CLI is a client, and the website's a client, and an iOS app is a client - that's pretty easy, to sort of grok that direction. So I get that. This kind of conflates;, to some degree, with Paul Dix, Jerod. He mentioned - I'm trying to figure out the best way to say this, but... While I was reading The Great Engineering Divergence, one thing you mentioned was Amdahl's Law, which is -- the principle is when you speed up a part of a system, your overall speed-up is limited by the parts you didn't speed up. So it almost reminds me of that, in the fact that if you don't think about an agent, and you don't think about that first mentality, like even Mat's describing here, you don't enable yourself or the things you're building to be as fast as it can be, because agents are going to be much more faster than we are... Because they're designed to be. They're a machine. I think if you don't start curbing that idea, you're going to be dwarfed by the folks who do, and embrace these new systems that have to move faster, and they retool their entire pipeline towards agentic things that move faster. And if you stick in the old way, let's just say, you're going to be slower, by nature, and less fast. Slow to market, slow to think, slow to experiment, slow to fail, slow to succeed... All the things. I think it's -- I've got to say it. I don't like saying it necessarily, but I am thinking, I guess, agent first. Yeah, I guess I'm thinking agent first, honestly.
Mat Ryer:I mean, could you imagine a service that is only an MCP server, that you plug in? It doesn't have any other kind of web interface. The only interface is through the agentic kind of chat.
Jerod Santo:I don't think anybody wants to be that. I don't think any business wants to be that -- I mean, nobody wants to be a utility company. And that's why they fight to be not just a utility company. They want to provide services and apps, and all of that. They want to be your provider, not your dumb pipe. And I think that most profitable and desiring to be profitable companies will buck against that as they begin to get commoditized by agents. So I think there'll be a fight there. But yeah, as an end user, of course, we want the simplest, easiest, cheapest thing, that works. And that's where I'm at with 2026. I don't think agents work yet. I think we are living in the golden age of coding, and we think that everything's a coding agent... Agents are not booking anybody's flights, anybody's hotels, anything. It's January 2026. They don't work yet. There's way too many edge cases, too many problems, too many errors... \[01:09:58.01\] They are writing code and they are summarizing text. And maybe they're helping out with your Grafana stuff, but that's code. And that's kind of where it's at right now. Like, they're all just demos. And so I don't think it's going to move as fast as "I should design my website agent-first today." I do think eventually you do. I just think that the timing is wrong.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. Yeah, I think the thing is the speed of change is increasing as well, as more and more people are AI accelerated with their work... So I do think things are going to change much more quickly than they ever have before. And things have changed quickly before, but... Yeah, look at Cursor, OpenCode, Zed, Claude Code, all these AI now enabled things that a lot of their UIs are shifted so that they're agent-first experiences now. The code is kind of an afterthought that you review once you've got it kind of going. It is quite interesting. I do think there are questions about what that's going to mean, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's an enormous acceleration of human productivity, and that's why I'm on the side of "Yes, let's use AI and let's use it for good." And we need to solve all those challenges around energy, and the climate, and some of the bad things it can do, and some of the way that it's quite greedy with taking knowledge from people without kind of giving them credit, and things like this. There's a lot of problems with it. But once you've seen -- like, we felt it building these products we're building, and also because they themselves are the same kind of thing. Grafana Assistant is basically like Cursor for Grafana. The productivity boost, just the amount of people that that's enabled is significant. So it's not just a fad thing. I also hate to say that.
Jerod Santo:I agree with you directionally as well, and I think Adam does as well. My only pushback is on the fact that we are in the perfect -- we're like the Goldilocks case for agents, which is software and digital creation. And the rest of the world doesn't do that. Obviously it touches everything, but they do all kinds of other stuff that agents have no ability to do yet. And so that will take time. I think it's coming. I think it's coming.
Mat Ryer:It's true.
Jerod Santo:And we just look at everything through this Cursor and Claude Code rose-colored glasses, because it's amazing for us, but it's not amazing for most other industries yet.
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:Maybe law is the other one where it's really making moves, because again, that's so formal... And then everything else is just sloppy at this point.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, but we are at the forefront, usually, of change.
Jerod Santo:Yeah, totally.
Mat Ryer:Technology has been the driver of it. So it makes sense that we would see it first.
Jerod Santo:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:We then have to build it for the rest of them. That's our jobs.
Jerod Santo:Right. And the nice thing is, and the accelerating thing, like you said, is the fact that we are the builders. We're moving faster than we were before, and so you can build faster. Okay. Another one... What else caught your guy's eyes or ears?
Mat Ryer:Yeah, the "Businesses pay more for AI than human labor." That is one of those predictions, isn't it?
Jerod Santo:It is.
Mat Ryer:Does that mean that we've become the cheap choice again? We can get our jobs back.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] I don't think that's how it works. I think that will be the case in the case of, again, software workers. I've seen a lot of the budgets exploding, and I think that at a certain point one engineer plus an engineer's equivalent of agentic coding is probably better than two engineers. I don't know exactly when that flips; again, is it this year or next year...? But I could see it happening. Adam?
Adam Stacoviak:\[01:13:39.11\] I was just reading it to get more of the context of Tom's perspective here... I'm going to read it just because it gives me some context. I haven't formulated a thought yet, so this is kind of a delay. "This has already happened with consumers. Waymo rides cost 31% more than Uber on average, yet demand keeps growing. Riders prefer the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles. For rote business tasks, agents will command a similar premium as companies factoring in onboarding, recruiting, training, and management costs."
Jerod Santo:Oh, so that's not talking about budgets, it's talking about per capita.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, it's just like, you're going to pay -- maybe if you had a choice between the human doing the work and the AI doing the work, you'd pay more for the agent doing it because of the perceived safety and reliability, if that Waymo option translates there.
Jerod Santo:Personally, I chose the other way when I was in Phoenix, because I wanted to try a Waymo, because - of course... But I'm cheap, and so I looked at Uber, and I looked at Waymo, and it was like an extra $12 to go to the same place. And I'm like "I'm just taking the Uber." But I can see where there are circumstances... For instance, if I'm sending my children with -- I would trust a Waymo where I wouldn't trust a random Uber driver with children, for instance. I can see where parents might prefer it. I can see where over time it becomes more safe, especially if you're in an area you're not used to... Not just driving safe, but like, this person could drive off in \[unintelligible 01:15:10.19\] I can see that. So while I did make the opposite choice the one time, I could certainly see where I would make the choice to pay more for the robot, because I don't trust the humans.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah. See, that's just that right there.
Jerod Santo:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:If you read it headline only, you're thinking salary swap, right?
Jerod Santo:I thought budgets, yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, that's where I was torn. I was like "What is the true context here?" Again, context. Yeah, I'm torn on that one. I think in the case of a Waymo - let's just use this as an example. I'm in the vehicle. My life is literally on the line. Do I pay 12 bucks more for the assumed - and I suppose if data shows the reliability and safety is higher over a trend of time... Then I would pay more, every single time, because my life is literally priceless. And if I can't be here, then I can't even care about spending more money. So in that case, I'd probably spend more every single time on a Waymo if the data - and it wasn't smeared or tainted in any sort of way... If the data was true, and over time Uber was less safe, while Waymo was more safe... Every single time. I'd pay -- I'd probably paid double, honestly, if I had to, if I knew that I was going to be more safe, and point A to point B would truly happen, and I have determinism in my trip. Every time. Yeah, for sure.
Mat Ryer:I'd pay double if it flew.
Adam Stacoviak:If it flew... \[laughs\]
Jerod Santo:Well, for sure.
Adam Stacoviak:I don't want to pay double, Waymo, but I'm just saying... Knowing the data and the choice, then I'm going to pay more for the thing that gives me more safety and security in a time where my life is literally on the line. In the case of a rote business task, maybe not so much.
Jerod Santo:You'd take it to like surgery; over time, robot surgeons will operate more precisely and correctly than humans will, because they don't have the margin of error, they didn't have a bad night, they aren't tired, etc.
Adam Stacoviak:We've all seen Prometheus. Not the Prometheus that you all wrangle over there at Grafana, but the Prometheus, the movie... What was her name? Shaw, I believe her last name, or her name was; something, Shaw.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. 512, her last name, wasn't it?
Adam Stacoviak:Maybe so... She had to hop in this thing at the end when she was giving birth to this alien, and then had to patch her up. She happily got in there, and was just like pushing all the buttons; every single button. Go back to the "It's all about the button" episode from the beginning of 2025. That was an amazing show. Yeah, I got stuck in that moment there for a second, but... She happily pushed every single button possible to have the machine help her deliver this alien baby, and patch herself back up. And then she went and conquered the mission, right? If that's a -- science fiction is kind of predictive, in a way. If that's a version of our truth and our future... I mean, she's kind of already trusted the system, right? I mean, that's something I personally have said for almost 15 years now, "Trust the system, but verify." But verify. I think in the future if the data shows an AI assistant or an AI agent surgeon is better - I mean, I don't want to choose a machine over a human, but in those cases, if the data shows it, then it just makes sense. It just makes sense.
Mat Ryer:\[01:18:31.27\] It does, and I think that is where we're going. We are increasingly going to just be doing that more and more, for sure. So we do have to figure out how we deal with that change, because that is an enormous change. But I trusted the Waymo -- when I got in it in San Francisco, I trusted it immediately. And that's probably because I've been brought up on sci-fi films, Johnny Cab from Total Recall, where you get in, the guy spins around and... Yeah, there's the little robot boy, it takes you on a little journey. And the key thing about Waymo is you don't have to talk to anybody. You can just not talk to anyone.
Jerod Santo:It's awesome.
Mat Ryer:And that's worth $12, at least.
Adam Stacoviak:True.
Mat Ryer:Uber actually do give you an option in the UK. I don't know if you have this, but there's an Uber Comfort option. And this basically allows you to choose the music, and decide whether they talk to you or not. So you do pay extra for them to not talk to you.
Jerod Santo:Yeah, I saw that option in the Uber app. I didn't know that it costs extra. Maybe I just paid extra and didn't realize it. But I definitely said -- I think it's nice, because sometimes you feel like talking to somebody and you're like "Yeah, I'll have a conversation with a stranger." And other times you're like "No, I just got off an airplane. I want to sit in quiet and get to my place." And so it's cool that you can just pick, like "Yeah, don't talk to me."
Adam Stacoviak:Well, the other factors you're not thinking about, and maybe it's just not mentioned, is like the smell, right? Humans have habits, and they also have odors... And you know, you can be a smoker, you could be a not smoker... You could prefer certain scents in your car...
Jerod Santo:Right.
Adam Stacoviak:S-C-E-N-T-S, scents. Not just -- you know how to spell cents; the other cents. Forget it, y'all. You're smart people out there, listening to this podcast. I'm done trying to spell on a podcast. But yeah, I mean, how often do you get into that -- or you've got the music, right? You've got all these human nature things that you're like "You know what? I'd just kind of rather avoid a human in this moment."
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:That's a scary -- there's comfort in just saying that, and I'm smiling very big if you're listening on the actual audio pod... I'm kind of blushing, in a way, because I can't believe I'm even thinking like that. Like, "I'd rather have a ride without a human, if I had the choice, just..."
Mat Ryer:Yeah. I'll say it...
Adam Stacoviak:...because. But there's sometimes too many, like you said.
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] "I'll say it..."
Adam Stacoviak:There's times when I'm like "I'd love to -- I'm down with the humans." But I'm also down with the non-humans, because humans smell, and have just...
Mat Ryer:Opinions.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, all the things, you know? Opinions, habits, smells, music choices...
Mat Ryer:Yeah. But you see, the other thing about the self-driving taxis is you can have the night rider experience, I call; it's my new startup. Night rider. You go to bed -- you know, it's like a little hotel room that's on wheels... You get in, you sleep, you wake up in a different city. You then spend the day in that city, you sleep, the next day you're in another city. You're traveling while you sleep. It's the closest to teleportation we'll get, probably, because the EU keep ignoring all my letters... But I know how to do it.
Jerod Santo:This reminds me of Mat World. Isn't this how Mat World works?
Mat Ryer:Yeah, I think that was Mat World.
Jerod Santo:One of your inventions was basically the night rider car.
Mat Ryer:But they're building it. It would work.
Jerod Santo:For sure.
Mat Ryer:You'd feel bad asking a human to just drive for 12 hours to take you to Edinburgh.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah, you have to have empathy, right? By nature.
Jerod Santo:That's why I love Claude Code better than a junior dev, honestly... Because I just don't have to even give you any empathy, or anything. There's no affordances...
Adam Stacoviak:Well, there's some true psychology in that, too. It's not just personal preference. So don't feel bad for yourself. So if you're going to listen to this --
Jerod Santo:I don't feel bad.
Adam Stacoviak:\[01:22:09.07\] ...here's your escape hatch. It's mirror neurons. So you see this a lot in married couples... As they age, they tend to dress similar, look similar... They don't literally look similar down to the wire, so to speak, but there's mannerisms that sort of merge, and it's mirror neurons. Or when you're around somebody, the reason you have that empathy factor, or you begin to cry because somebody else is crying, is because your brain is literally wired to mirror neurons. It's called mirror neurons.
Jerod Santo:For sure.
Adam Stacoviak:It's a psychological fact.
Jerod Santo:It is brilliant.
Mat Ryer:People do end up looking similar, because they'll pull the same facial expressions.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah. Like, I've got this frown I keep doing. I hate it. Gosh...
Mat Ryer:Yeah. So you're working -- I'm always doing this face, because my wife's always doing it... She looks better than that. But then my face changes --
Jerod Santo:Does she have the goatee as well?
Mat Ryer:She does, yeah... \[laughter\]
Jerod Santo:That's a mirror neuron for you...
Mat Ryer:No, she's just -- she's a woman. Yeah, that's when your neurons are mirroring too much.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. Too far. You need to get that checked.
Mat Ryer:It's too far. Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:Well, if you're around somebody, even -- and think about this, too... The next time you're around somebody and you're just standing there, having a conversation, if they cross their arms and moments later you cross your arms - guess what? Mirror neurons. Okay? That's how it works. You start mirroring somebody else just because that's just what we do as humans. I don't know how to describe it...
Jerod Santo:That's why I keep saying Dan-Tan. I mean, I never used to say Dan-Tan...
Adam Stacoviak:Dan-Tan... Alright, let's go Dan-Tan to my next place here... I'm going to change the subject. Let's see, there was two that stood out to me. One was the database access - patterns breaking things - and then vectors. These two stand out to me. Why does it stand out to you, Mat, since you're concurring?
Mat Ryer:We've already seen this... We are hammering our databases now. The agents can do queries a lot faster than humans can, and it can do more complex queries, and stuff... Now, we're lucky -- this is just the example at Grafana Labs. We're lucky because the teams --
Jerod Santo:Where Mat works.
Mat Ryer:Yeah, that's where I work. We are hiring. The teams are very good. The Loki team... I've never worked with engineers with that particular kind of speciality. They care about storage... Obviously, all the data formats are bespoke, that they have to invent; all the indexing, all the kind of complexity that they build to make these systems work really quickly... So they're up for the challenge. But we are hammering them... You know, we had the drill down apps last year that we did, where the UI is basically DDoSing, and we've made that even worse now with Assistant. So they have to adapt and change. And they're up for the challenge, but is everyone? Are some old data techniques or data techniques even going to change? Are we going to start changing how we store data, so that it's ready for agents indexed differently? Vector databases, I think as well plays into that big time. This is where you create a vector from some kind of content, a chunk of content, you put it into some multidimensional space, and then you can query that very quickly. And as long as it semantically means -- things that mean the same end up in the same area in this multidimensional space... So you know that this is roughly what you mean, the nearest thing to it. Yeah, unbelievable... And that powers -- Cursor does this very well. The others have the same kind of thing. Indexing your codebase like that - Cursor makes it basically very quick if you ask a question about the codebase. It can answer it extremely quickly by just consulting its index that it's built. It used to grep all the time, and it would just take longer to go and grep everything to learn... And then it would end up filling its context window too much. Now it will use the vector database, it gets the answers right there, very quickly... And you really didn't feel that difference. And I think vector databases are going to be a massive new concern for 2026.
Adam Stacoviak:\[01:26:03.18\] Yeah, vector databases are interesting. I'm just barely scratching the surface thinking about some of them, but what do you do whenever -- you said the vector space that you operate in; those embeddings are created by, let's just say an algorithm. Maybe even an LLM, or a model, or something like that. And that model gets superseded, it becomes part of your architecture to kind of keep your original embeddings maybe, or maybe the original datasets you can re-embed quickly, to get maybe even better embeddings as that vector database gets used, and there's performance enhancements, there's new technologies... What do you think about that?
Mat Ryer:Yeah, I think -- so embeddings are different. There's some open source ones that you can use. There's also other models that do it. But they, so I could imagine there being new vector technology, which means you then want to re-index things, potentially.
Adam Stacoviak:Of course. If it gets better, sure.
Mat Ryer:But the in and out of it to the LLM is just "Here's a sort of search query", and it returns just results that match semantically. So that interface is probably quite safe to keep. But who knows? Different innovations could happen... One of the problems is like clustering --
Adam Stacoviak:It's like caching, right? Is it like caching, in a way? It's like a cache...
Mat Ryer:It's an index, yeah. It's an index that -- but it's an index that you can... To look it up, you're just doing simple geometry. Like, they're quite simple functions to actually find the answers. Because you do all the work at the time you generate in the embeddings, and things. That takes a lot of time and process to get. But reading it is very quick.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:But if you have lots of content, the more content you put in, then this vector space can get crowded. That's where you end up with problems where it's just -- it picks things that aren't relevant; you wouldn't consider it as relevant as other things. But it's all too tightly --
Adam Stacoviak:Which is when you would do a re-index or a re-embed, right? You would re-vectorize -- I'm not sure what the terminology is for these, because I'm just touching it a little bit here... But when the space gets crowded, you need to figure out a way to give distance, and give more meaning. Because the whole point is to create meaning, and create similarity in the vector space, but not have to stay there forever.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. So it might be like you would keep a vector of recent stuff. So you keep an index of the recent stuff, and that's what you're going to search, because that's in this domain, and that makes most sense. Maybe you also have an older one, that contains past things, and you should do multiple requests into this.
Adam Stacoviak:What about the database? What do we do there? Just better indexes? More vCPUs? What do you do? More RAM? Dedicated machines?
Mat Ryer:I think we're going to end up storing data differently, so that we store it so it's in a format that the LLM needs, which is going to be just natural language, in a lot of cases. There'll be some cases where it's that. What we do with the Assistant - just as another example, because it is on my mind a lot - is we have a smaller model...
Adam Stacoviak:So much Assistant talk. Grafana's Assistant...
Mat Ryer:Yes.
Adam Stacoviak:So hot right now. So hot.
Mat Ryer:So hot. Well, according to a big AI company, it's one of the best implementations they've ever seen.
Jerod Santo:Which model are you guys using?
Mat Ryer:We use Claude, Sonnet 4.5 at the moment, but we're excited about others when they get more affordable. But what we use - we use a smaller model to look at the data. So we use a -- so it'll make a query, but we can easily fill up the context window too much. So we take the data and give it to a different model and say -- you know, we taught it how to describe a graph, basically. "It's got a spike here, and then it dips." Or "It's flat, generally." And it describes it in natural language. And it's that that then gets fed back to the main agent. So the main agent - it's a bit like saying "Look at that graph for me and tell me what you see." And the agent will say --
Adam Stacoviak:\[01:30:08.18\] It describes it, yeah. "Describe the color green for me."
Mat Ryer:Very spiky... It'll just -- yeah. It's alright... It's trees.
Adam Stacoviak:That is interesting, how natural language has become the language of choice across these things. Like, even context is simple; just like, it describes it in words.
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:I like it because I can read it. Thank you. Till I can't read it, right?
Mat Ryer:That's what I mean. So the APIs actually being just like text that you can read is quite nice for humans as well. We don't really do that. We tend have to have a JSON API, or something... But it's open to interpretation.
Jerod Santo:Right.
Adam Stacoviak:So how we store data is going to change, and... Did you finish your thought? Or did I interrupt you and you didn't finish?
Mat Ryer:No, no. I think that's it. Yeah. I think vector databases are going to shine this year, and we'll have to see innovation there.
Adam Stacoviak:Is there any particular vector database or package or module that you're using in like maybe the Go world, that you want to give a shout-out to? What's got your fancy?
Mat Ryer:Well, we're basically building our own. Postgres does have the ability to store embeddings --
Adam Stacoviak:Pgvector?
Mat Ryer:Yeah... But you still need to decide how to generate the vectors, and that's a separate piece that you need to figure out. And that's very domain specific, right? The better you do that, the better your search results will be. So I don't know, we tend to -- I think when we did the Machine Box startup, we had the same thing, because it would do it with face detection. So it would look at the face, and it had a big model that was trained on loads of faces... We trimmed off the last layer - this is kind of a spoiler alert of how we did it. So instead of it giving you the answer of a person of the face, it gives you basically the vector. And then we have the spatial index, where we go and look up who the person is... Which allowed us to do one-shot learning, and also you could delete and forget things, because it's just editing it in an index.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:So we tended to do that stuff ourselves. It's not that complicated, but doing it at scale, and doing it nicely, redundantly, in horizontal scale, all that stuff... That's where we want services. But yeah, I think we'll see more of them coming out. I don't know loads of them... But yeah, pretty good.
Adam Stacoviak:Huh. Interesting. So build your own is where you're at.
Mat Ryer:At the moment. But also, don't. I mean, yeah, we are doing -- we tended to do that in the past. But that's because we weren't sure exactly the use cases, and we wanted flexibility to be able to innovate. So it's kind of worth us having our own thing. But I think once there's a -- there should be a service, an open source thing; there probably is. I don't know.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah. You're playing with Parquet... Parquette... How do you say that? How do you personally say that?
Mat Ryer:I say Parquet.
Adam Stacoviak:Parquet. Okay, cool. Do you play with Parquet at all?
Mat Ryer:Like running around on the streets, and that? Jumping over bins, and that. Yeah, run up the stairs backwards...
Adam Stacoviak:Hardcore Parquet, as you would say, Jerod, right?
Jerod Santo:That's right.
Mat Ryer:They do use that in Grafana Labs. I haven't used it myself, but that is used... And I don't know, I don't think that's a spoiler, or anything. I think that's known... Yeah, but no, I have no real experience with that.
Jerod Santo:Well, I have a prediction for 2026...
Mat Ryer:Oh, yeah?
Jerod Santo:It's a short-term prediction. I predict that Mat's going to get his guitar and sing us another song.
Adam Stacoviak:Oh, my gosh...
Mat Ryer:\[01:33:50.02\] How did you do that...?!
Jerod Santo:Oh, my goodness.
Mat Ryer:Oh, my goodness.
Jerod Santo:I'm intuitive.
Adam Stacoviak:Get your Parquet on.
Jerod Santo:Parkour. Parquet.
Mat Ryer:Happy with the key?
Jerod Santo:I love this key. What is that, C minor?
Mat Ryer:I don't know.
Adam Stacoviak:Where is -- what's his name? Knuth? The famous guy who's perfect?
Jerod Santo:Donald Knuth?
Adam Stacoviak:No, it's not Donald Knuth. Singer... Jeez.
Jerod Santo:Singer, songwriter? Toby Keith.
Adam Stacoviak:Charles --
Mat Ryer:Warren Buffett.
Adam Stacoviak:Gosh, I was so way off. Charlie Puth. Charlie Puth, my bad... \[laughs\]
Mat Ryer:That's the Margaritaville guy.
Adam Stacoviak:I've \[unintelligible 01:34:36.16\] your name.
Jerod Santo:Oh, yeah?
Adam Stacoviak:Charlie Puth, yeah.
Jerod Santo:Probably Neil Diamond.
Adam Stacoviak:Pitch perfect Knuth, according to Google, likely refers to singer Charlie Puth. That was an embedding right there. They vectorized that, because a lot of people just jack that one up. They're like "Listen, we're going to speed up this search, okay?"
Jerod Santo:Like, this is pretty close in vector space...
Adam Stacoviak:And we'll parquet that, and then vectorize that, and then boom. There you go, search result.
Jerod Santo:Alright, Mat --
Adam Stacoviak:Go ahead, Mat.
Jerod Santo:...tell us what you've got here.
Mat Ryer:Alright. \[01:35:04.27\] *I'm cheaper than an AI now, you're gonna hire me back... It turns out ChatGPT knows how to negotiate hard... And learn from the best lawyers, and everyone on Reddit with opinions. It turns out Opus 4.5 ate your lawyers for lunch... And it was just a simple prompt, and the response that they gave to the actual judge contained emoji...* *I'm cheaper than AI now, you're gonna hire me back... Don't give all that money to the robots... Humans need money, too... So give some to me, please...*
Jerod Santo:Alright...!
Mat Ryer:Yeah, we've touched the whole range of AI subjects, and different musical subjects, in a way.
Jerod Santo:Way to bring it home, man. You brought it home.
Mat Ryer:Oh, cheers. I don't know what that means. Is that good?
Adam Stacoviak:That second line was a little iffy... But gee, you've rounded it off pretty good.
Mat Ryer:I appreciate the immediate review. I like to fail fast. Line two. I like it -- it's like a linter. It's like, "Error on line two." Adam is the linter. Musical linter.
Jerod Santo:I'll give you three stars, but I'll let you decide if it's between five or ten.
Mat Ryer:Well, I'll give you and your podcast two thumbs up...
Jerod Santo:\[laughs\] Nice!
Adam Stacoviak:Thank you.
Mat Ryer:...out of ten.
Jerod Santo:Oooh...
Mat Ryer:Ah...
Adam Stacoviak:I do want to give a shout-out to Tom, Tomas, Tung -- I'm sorry, dude...
Mat Ryer:Tomas?
Jerod Santo:Tom.
Adam Stacoviak:TheoryVC.com. I really do appreciate this post. I didn't think we would have such a great, I guess - somewhat great; mostly great - in a song, conversation from... Not against venture capitalists, but this is good. These are good predictions. Very well thought through.
Jerod Santo:Yeah. Good job, Tom.
Adam Stacoviak:And so maybe TheoryVC.com can be your friend, at least for some information. Follow him on LinkedIn, maybe. Who knows?
Mat Ryer:Maybe Tomash would like to invest in Changelog...
Adam Stacoviak:Jean Jay. All day.
Mat Ryer:Jerod Change has started a new company, doing distributed VCS... Put your source code in it, or don't. I don't care. It's that kind of thing.
Jerod Santo:I asked you not to do that.
Mat Ryer:I'm sorry. I can't help it. Would you like \[unintelligible 01:37:43.11\] I can't even do your voice, really. I need to meet you properly, and then I can do --
Jerod Santo:You do. You need to meet us properly.
Mat Ryer:I need to meet you properly.
Jerod Santo:It's never too late, man, as long as we're still both breathing.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Jerod Santo:It's all good.
Mat Ryer:So if you're not breathing, you don't want me to visit in hospital then.
Adam Stacoviak:It's never too late.
Jerod Santo:I might have to hold my breath when you get here, but...
Mat Ryer:Well, that's because it's been a long flight. You wouldn't have to if you were visited by a self-driving Mat...
Jerod Santo:You could sleep all the way over. You'd be refreshed when you get here.
Mat Ryer:That's true. Oh, it should have a shower in it as well. You press a button and it showers you.
Adam Stacoviak:Listen, I like your idea of how we'll travel in the future... I'm down for some version of that, honestly.
Jerod Santo:I love it.
Adam Stacoviak:I would love to teleport via a trip. I don't mind the time, because if I can use the time well, then I'm cool with the time. Because I'm going to use time anyways. I've got no choice, right? I've got no choice.
Jerod Santo:This guy uses time.
Mat Ryer:You don't just pause?
Jerod Santo:He uses it. Yeah. When given a choice, he uses it.
Mat Ryer:But sleeping... Sleeping and traveling, I do think is good. Have you ever fallen asleep on a long flight?
Jerod Santo:Yeah, because what else are you doing?
Mat Ryer:Exactly. You fall asleep on a long flight.
Jerod Santo:Beautiful.
Mat Ryer:I've done it. I did it last time I went to the United States.
Adam Stacoviak:We're working, man. I can slay some work over three hours and just be like "What?! Three hours?"
Mat Ryer:Yeah. You could broadcast from it. You could broadcast from your car.
Adam Stacoviak:One day.
Mat Ryer:Just fake background.
Adam Stacoviak:So if we go agent first, Jerod... Agent first web leads us to this world.
Jerod Santo:I like agent first travel. Let the agent travel for me, and then let me know how it went.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah.
Mat Ryer:Or you could just email it. You just email the agent. As an attachment.
Jerod Santo:And I'm gonna stay home. Mat, thanks so much for hanging out with us, again, kicking off 26 the right way, with you, and your guitar, and your accents... Even though you kept dissing me... I've still enjoyed it somehow. It's like I'm a masochist.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. Or I wasn't dissing you.
Adam Stacoviak:Yeah...
Mat Ryer:But I've had a great time. I've had a fantastic time. Welcome to 2026, everybody... What are we going to do? Let's do something good. There's a lot of kind of trouble going on... But there's a lot of us still -- we've got time on our hands. Let's do some good stuff.
Jerod Santo:Let's use it.
Mat Ryer:Yeah. Yeah, that's our remedy to it.
Adam Stacoviak:Use your time wisely, friendly.
Mat Ryer:Use your time...!
Adam Stacoviak:Thanks, Mat. It was awesome seeing you. Bye, friends.
Jerod Santo:Bye, friends. And Mat.
Adam Stacoviak:And Mat.
Outro:\[01:40:13.11\]
Adam Stacoviak:Can you share more about the Grafana Assistant architecture?
Jerod Santo:He would love to.
Mat Ryer:Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak:How much can you share, and what can you share? I'm really curious.
Mat Ryer:Oh, I'll tell you anything.
Jerod Santo:Ask him anything.
Mat Ryer:I'll get fired for this show...