AI Coding with Peter Suhm

Hey everyone, welcome to Countdown to Laravel Live Denmark. I'm Mathias Hansen, your host, and today I'm chatting with Peter Suhm who's going to be speaking at Laravel Live Denmark this August. Alright, thank you for joining me today Peter. I know you're a very busy man, working both at Tailwind Labs and Laravel now, right? Yeah, at least as an experiment right now, I'm trying to what having two jobs is like. So how's that working for you? Well, it's working pretty good so far.

em They're both part-time engagements, but, they're sort of using different parts of the brain, which I think helps too. The tailwind one is more business focused and admin focused most of the time, even though I end up writing quite a bit of code sometimes, including today actually. And then Laravel is much more code heavy right now. So do you like getting to get a little bit more into coding and doing some more coding than previously or recently at least?

Yeah, it's fun to get back into it a bit. eh I find it very fun, especially eh without saying too much about my talk with all the new tools that we have available now. It's made it much more fun for me. Yeah, that makes sense. ah So I want you to take me back a little bit, because I know you didn't get started programming last year. It's probably been a little while. So how long have you been into computers and programming and tech and stuff like that?

For a very long time, even just Laravel, we know each other from the Laravel uh meetup group. And I was part of starting that back in 2014. And I think at that point I'd already been doing Laravel for one or two years. And then before that, uh was a lot of, right before that, I worked for a short time as a Ruby on Rails developer. But before that it was mostly WordPress. I think from like a PHP standpoint, but yeah, I got started with it like way back when I was a kid.

Basically I started making websites and stuff when I was 10, 11 years old. just found it really fascinating that I remember my dad is a developer as well. And he's not like a web developer, but he still like sort of understood how it worked a little bit. And I remember when I was 10 or something like that, he, He always gave me access to computers, but they were always his old computer. So they were always like DOS based.

em And I remember I asked him like how you made a website or something like that. And he showed me that you could just literally run FTP in MS DOS like on the command line basically. So he just showed me how you could just create an HTML file. Cause I remember it was like a mystery to me like, how do I get it on the internet? And then. with our internet connection, you got this like free hosting thing. I don't remember those.

you got, yeah, so you got some weird like URL that you could basically just have FTP access to. And I think it was just like the same credentials that you use for email or something. And it kind of looked like your email. And then he just showed me how you could, you could just run FTP on the command line and your, your HTML file was online and you could access this in a browser. remember like, calling my cousin and be like, go to my website.

And the crazy thing about this is whenever I made changes to my website, I remember I had to like yell down to my parents and ask if I could turn on the internet so I could FTP it up to the server. Right, so and then I had to wait until after 7.30 so it was half price and all that stuff. I remember that too, yeah. Yeah, so I always got into it really early.

remember like we had to do like a book review uh in school and I remember reading Harry Potter and I asked the teacher if I could turn it in as a website instead of uh a Word doc. And so I made a whole like Harry Potter website as like my assignment. And then I got into PHP and then I got out of it a little bit but then I remember in high school I was so like obsessed with like making money and making, making money on the internet sounded really appealing.

So I was building all these websites to try to make money on the internet and I had to learn programming to make those work. So I was kind of, I learned real programming from wanting to make money online. Then I ended up going to university, do like partly computer science stuff and got more, more technical there. So was that when you started getting into Rails or what did you use em back then when you first started trying to make money online basically?

When I was just running to make money online, it was just PHP. didn't even know that there was something called a web framework. So you just build everything from scratch. You sort of ended up building your own frameworks, if you remember. Like, cause you didn't even know that that was a thing, but you've quickly realized that you wanted to abstract stuff more. But yeah, no, after that it was WordPress.

And then from there on, I discovered Rails somehow and quickly got a job because apparently there's not a lot of people who could do Rails.

But then Laravel came out and I was like, wow, I can still do PHP and it's just as good as Rails. Oh I shared a feeling when Laravel came out I was about to give up on PHP and it's like maybe this is not the thing and then suddenly oh wait this looks amazing this could totally work. So did you start using Laravel you know back Laravel 4 or 5 or something like that or do remember? No, yeah, probably almost three, because I think I started in 2012 at least.

Yeah, so I can't remember exactly what version. I feel like I can remember like the big version four rewrite with composer and everything. I think I had a chance to see version three first and then version four came and it was like, wow, this is a whole new world. man, yeah. It's been a while. It's been a while. Lots. I mean, all the basics, all the basics of the framework are still the same. You know, we had curing back then, we had, you know, all the caching drivers and stuff like that.

oh And it's just more mature now. That's really cool. um So have you always been into web development? Have you ever played around with, you know, doing games or phone apps or I don't know. Not really. my, and my interest really, like I can really get into computers and like, remember like doing like operating systems classes and stuff in university.

And I thought it was really interesting and I could get excited by it, but sort of the main driver for me has always been like trying to like start businesses and projects and like there's something I want to see in the world. So I need to figure out how to like program that. And it's mostly been web. I, I remember doing like I did it like an Android app, probably also high school or maybe first year university or something like that.

I remember I took it very seriously with my friend who was learning graphic design and it was like a geography quiz. And we had a friend who was a musician create the music track that was running in the background and had really nice, really, really nice graphics. And then it had this like geography questions. It was really cool actually. But that's the only time I think, otherwise it's always just been web.

So you kind of have this, you always had this entrepreneurial mindset of, know, building a business online and trying to use your programming skills to run a business. I've always been trying to build a business. then at one point I realized, wow, doing it online seems like a hack compared to how hard it is in real life. Because even when I was a kid, I was trying to make money, like selling stuff on my street and like selling my old toys and selling plants and selling popcorn.

like, I was always like trying to make money, collect bottles, you know, here in Denmark, have the, you can make money if you collect bottles and return them to the store. So do you remember the first thing you ever uh sold online that was a piece of software, a code you wrote that someone paid for? Yeah? Do want to talk about that? well. I hope no one is able to find this because it's quite terrible. This was like before I knew anything about like frameworks.

I didn't know anything about like validation or security or anything like that. But I built like a website that was basically like a hot or not website. If you remember those websites. But you could basically do it for anything. So you could just, saw a picture of something and you would just rate it and then you show you the next picture. em And I thought this was like really cool. And then I found this website called hotscripts.com.

I think maybe I found some, like I found some code there for another project or something like that. So I knew about this site. So em I signed up for this hotscripts.com website. I'm pretty sure it was called Hotscripts and it had like a chili pepper or something as their logo. and I connected it to my PayPal account and I just put this hot or not script up there for $25 and I actually sold a few copies. I can't remember like maybe five or 10 of them.

So it just like once in a while, like even years after I would just get a PayPal notification that I made $25 but it was really mind blowing to me that it was possible. That's cool, so you basically sold code you wrote on a marketplace. Yeah, so it's basically you just bought this uh app if you wanted to spin up your own hot or not style website where people could rate an image of some sort. em I think my own use case was for a recipe website.

think I told you the other day that I used to be into like making websites about cooking and stuff like that. So I think you could rate like food pictures or something like that. I can't remember the details, but I sort of made a generic version and I put it up on that website and then made a few sales, which was insane. Those was like in high school. Do remember that feeling of getting the first sale? Like, can you remember how that was like? yeah, it was just, it felt like unreal.

The first time it happened for real real when I started making real money was when I launched WP Pusher, which was my deployment tool for WordPress, which was sort of my first real business that was, um you know, turned into my job basically. em And I remember launching that and it was sort of like nothing happened. No one bothered or anything like that.

But then someone, picked it up and it ended up being, there ended up being an article written about it on the WP Tavern website, which was like a blog with, it was like the main news website for

WordPress at the time. then the sales just started coming in and I woke up and it was just like, I made like several hundred dollars, eh probably almost a thousand dollars. And that was like the first time it felt like real money. I can't remember, I was early 20s, I have been in university at the time. And that was just completely unreal. I love this concept you probably heard of it called stranger money.

The first time you make money off of something you sell, that's not just friends and family, right? People you don't know buying your product. That sounds exactly what happened here, right? Waking up, that's incredible. uh So I wanna move on a little bit to talk about your talk. Because you're of course here because you are speaking at lay of the life in a few months And without uh giving out too many details yet.

I love to hear a little bit about what um What you what you talk is about and so why you're you're giving this talk? Yeah, so as this is news to no one, our job jobs as developers have changed quite a lot recently. There's a lot of like, it's, it's almost crazy if you don't use AI to write your code right now, right? Like, because everyone is doing that. But obviously, it's still very new. And not everyone is doing it yet. And people are doing it to different extents.

Um, so there's, um, but there are some people like myself, I think that are turning into power use of some of these tools and, I rely on them like a lot. So, and I've been really embracing is specifically cursor the AI code editor, over the past year or so, and just gotten really, really into it. And, and I, and I feel like I also got pretty good at it. So, um, I did this talk. at our local meetup.

And the first time I did it, it didn't go so well, but it was also just, there's a few like technical things that went wrong, both with the talk, but then also just me not realizing how long my speaking slot was and stuff like that. But then I did it again a month later at the meetup in a different city here in Denmark. And it was really well received. I think people really took some stuff away from it.

So, that got me really excited and I submitted it to a couple conferences and got accepted to speak at Laravel Live in Copenhagen, which was really exciting. the talk is basically what I've learned about using cursor as my main way to write code in the past year. And it sort of got em three parts.

The first part is me em just explaining sort of what cursor is and giving some... explaining some of the important things relating to LLMs, how they work and why that's important in the context of using cursor. And then the second part is a live coding part, which is the fun part of the talk where em I sort of pretend like I've been asked to uh take over and maintain this uh existing Laravel app And I'm using Cursor to quickly get up to speed and start to be productive on that level app.

And then the third part is sort of me reflecting on whether we're all gonna be out of a job in the future or if there's actually a future for us developers. Yeah. So it's pretty packed talk. yeah. So one thing is live coding on stage, is, know, difficult enough, but, you know, LLMs are famously non-deterministic, right? So just because it worked exactly in one exact way when you're practicing to talk at home, it doesn't mean that it's going to output the exact same on stage, right?

So that sounds fun. Yeah, and I think, so I've done it a few times now, so I've sort of started to get a better sense for what some of the things that can possibly happen are. And you're totally right, they're non-deterministic, so you never really know what you get. But that's also part of what I wanna show. part of the talk is me showing how I do this. And when I do this normally, I also don't know what's gonna come out of it. And then I have to sort of, react to whatever comes out of the LLM.

em And there are ways to get it more consistent in terms of what it's outputting. em And I'm showing some of those ways as well. Cool, yeah, I was fortunate enough to see your second iteration of this talk, the good one. um No, I really enjoyed the talk and also really enjoyed how you're not just talking about prompting, it's like zooming out and talking a little bit more high level about the whole experience.

I'm really excited to see what you're cooking up for for Level Live for this talk as well and see if the LM gods are gonna be with us uh during the talk, which I'm sure they are. Yeah, they have to be nice in the week prior. Exactly, and hopefully we don't get a bunch of model updates and all kinds of stuff a few days before the conference. eh think that's what happened first time, right?

There was a bunch of updates to both cursor and the models and... we were on Claude 3.5 and then I gave it, the day before I gave it the first time, it was Claude 3.7 and then I switched to Gemini because 3.7 ended up not being really good in my

opinion and now it's either Claude 4 or Gemini. We'll see what it looks like in August. be, have changed quite significantly. Yeah, you might have new models by then too, who knows. So kind of on that note, what's your go-to uh LLM right now for just in general day to day, not necessarily for coding, just for coding. For day-to-day stuff, like my Google replacement is ChatGPT. em I do use Claude sometimes. Yeah, I like ChatGPT too. Sorry, I like Claude too, but I don't use it as much.

um ChatGPT has been more sticky with me. em So I think I like the app a bit better as well. em And then, but for coding, it's em for most coding tasks, I use Gemini 2.5 in Cursor, but a lot of the time I'll like take a problem that's like quite hard to crack and I'll open up ChatGPT in the browser and use 03 there to sort of chew on that problem for like three to five minutes or whatever.

And then just do something else in Cursor while that's going on and then come back to it and then sort of see what it came up with and then. take those ideas and then either redo it in cursor or rewrite it or just sort of explain the solution to Gemini and have that right. I find 03 is really good at chewing on heart problems where it also has to like search and do research. Hmm. So maybe I'll ask you the same question again in two months and we'll see if the answer is the same. Who knows?

So we're almost running out of time, but I just want to ask you one more question. I know you don't live very far from Copenhagen, so you probably go to Copenhagen quite often, but what is one thing you want to see or experience or eat while in Copenhagen? Yeah. mean, if I go to Copenhagen fairly often, I'll say I live an hour away. Um, but this time like going to the conference for a couple of days and staying at a hotel and stuff, it's quite different from my normal Copenhagen experience.

So I'm pretty excited about that. I, one of my favorite things to just do in Copenhagen is just walk around the city. It's extremely walkable and, you can like walk all the way across Copenhagen. in a few hours, which is really nice because the different parts of the city is very different. And you can also walk along the water. There's a lot of water, em both like lakes and em the sea is right there when you're in the city. And I really enjoy that.

So that's a big part of it for me is just walking around the city, especially if I'm in a conference. I do need a break once in a while from people and it can be quite intense for me to be at a conference setting for a few days. So it's really nice to do that. Food wise is the other thing that I'm sort of always like when I go to Copenhagen, I live in a small town where there's not almost no options in terms of food.

So food wise, that's the other treat of going to Copenhagen is like the opportunity to have more interesting food. Yeah. I don't know specifically what I'm gonna go for, but one of my favorite restaurants in Copenhagen is an Ethiopian restaurant. That's uh really, really amazing. That's where you eat with bread, with your fingers, right? With your hands. That's it, you know.

enormous pancakes, sourdough pancakes, you just have a bunch of curries and little sides and you just eat them with the bread. It's amazing. You have to take me. I'm sold. take you. And I just realized the venue where we have the conference, uh as you know, you were there last year too, of course. uh We have the canals right next door and all the food stalls. So you kind of got two for two right outside the door, is uh really nice.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking your time to uh talk to me today and talk a little bit about your experience and your talk It was so nice talking to you. Of course, yeah, I'm excited. That was Peter Suhm Want to hear more from Peter? He'll be presenting at Laravel Live Denmark this August on August 21st and 22nd in Copenhagen. Grab your tickets now at laravellive.dk