How'd you like to listen to dot net rocks with no ads? Easy? Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month. We'll get you that and a special dot net rocks patron mug. Sign up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey guess what might it's dot ad rocks episode nineteen seventy nine. And I said that with an Australian accent because I'm Carl Franklin here in Connecticut.
And I'm Richard Campbell, and I'm down in Queensland, Australia.
So and our guest is in Australia as well, So it's gonna be a down Under show today.
Say we got a Southern Hemisphere bias?
Yeah, all right, Uh so let's talk a bit out the show number. It's nineteen seventy nine, So what happened in that year?
Well, let me just oh a fair bit. Yeah, a lot of things. You perusing the list, I've got a lot of space and a lot, well a little bit of space, a lot of science at a huge amount of compute, Well.
A lot happened in Iran, China, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Three Mile Island happened, the Iran hostage crisis, the Iranian Revolution, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
That didn't end well, Nope for them, for anyone.
US China relations. United States severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan, established full diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. Oh, let's see some The music for UNSEF concert was kind of important.
We're heading into the Live aid era, right, Yeah, that's coming.
The Dukes of Hazzard premiered on January twenty sixth I remember my brother and Nice to drive my mother crazy, all the car chases and stuff. She would like come in and turn the television off. It just drove her up the wall. I think that was the point of the Dukes, that hazard, wasn't it.
Driver.
Yeah, you'll talk about space. So an anti nuclear demonstration happened on September twenty third. Nearly two hundred thousand people protested nuclear power in New York City, or just nuclear in general. But tell us about space and compute what happened.
Ninety seventy nine is the year that the Columbia Shuttle is delivered to Kennedy Space Center. It's still two years away from flying, but they it has now been built. Enterprise is being retired as a museum article after finishing its testing. It was too expensive to refit it into being a spacecraft, although that had been the original attension. Instead they'll use a different test article, which will become Challenger. Yeah,
but Columbia's now assembled, bunch of changes. It still has problems. It's the heaviest of the shuttles that will fly, and so it's limited by certain aspects. But it's still you know, we're making progress, although a couple of years away from flying. Voyager one and two make their fly bys of Jupiter in nineteen seventy nine, and Pioneer eleven does the very first flyby of Saturn. Wow. So those are all new things.
And Skylab in July nineteen seventy nine now originally been launched in nineteen seventy three as part of the Apollo Missions projects. It was only intended for one hundred and forty days of use, okay, and so this is already six years later. They actually had one hundred and seventy two days of use over three missions they extended it. It had plenty of problems they and it had been left empty, although prepped for someone else to visit it. They had a welcome kit, the door been left unlocked,
all that sort of thing. And they had thought that they would be able to get the shutle ready in time to keep an a do over. In fact, they figured it would stay it over till at least the early eighties, but there was a solar maximum going on then they and the additional solariation expands the atmosphere to the dragon Skylab was greater than expected. Also, there was
a lot broken. You know, they used control moment gyros for directional stabilization on Skylab, and at that point one had already failed and another one was failing, and there had been no plan to make them serviceable, so there was really no way to fix them. They would literally have to deploy a new set of gyros on some kind of attachment to the space station. So there's going to get this point was like, you could just build another space station.
So Skylab was manned. At one point.
My Skylab had three mission sent to it, yes, okay, one, two, and three, and we talked about those you know, in the past few shows when when those happened. But now it had been empty for several years, the atmosphere had expanded, so it was reintercasterment and expected, and it came down over the Indian Ocean and Australia, and.
It lasted a lot longer than my and my brother's snow sculpture referring to the blizzard of seventy eight that we talked about last week's.
In the previous episode. One other science one before we get into the computing stuff, because the community stuff so extensive, is nineteen seventy nine is the year that we first found hydro thermal events. So this was the Riviera submersible experiments off the southern south of Baja California, about eighty five hundred feet of water with you remember the Alvin submersible woods whole. So they were looking around for underwater volcanic activity and came across these things we now know
as black smokers. So these were jets of black material coming out of the ocean floor and the extremely hot three hundred eighty degrees celsius like seven hundred degrees fahrenheit in the deep dark abyssal parts of the ocean. And they're surrounded by life. There are tube worms and kinds of crabs and all sorts of things that are feeding off of the heat and the minerals that are pouring out of these black smokers. And it was a revolution
in thinking around where life could emerge. It was this belief that you needed to be a certain distance away from the sun and have pad with water and all these things. And here was this completely dark place that had life emerging around it. And it speaks to the idea that we talk about these days about perhaps the Europa in orbit around Jupiter, with enough heat, could possibly have life under that ocean, underneath the ice cap that is Europa. So that all begins in seventy nine with
its discovery. Nobody thought they were there. This was a fine So is the important moment.
You know what I remember fondly about this period National Geographic magazine. There was some great photos and especially from those space missions, and just amazing, amazing stuff. And as a kid, I was just wrapped by a National Geographic My mother recently passed and we're cleaning out her attic, and it turns out there they saved all their National Geographic magazines going back to the thirties.
Wow, that's crazy. Yes, So so here's a weird one about those black smokers. So you'll share this nationally graphic magazine. Those two birds are brightly colored. They're white and red. It's like it's dark. Why these things have colors? Yeah, I did do, all right. Let's talk about computers. Nineteen seventy nine the release of the Atari model four hundred and eight hundred, also the TI ninety nine that is a scientific calculator. No, no, t I nine nine was a
computer made by talking instruments. Yeah no, I mean games for it back in the day. The Motor sixty eight thousand processor is released, and a couple of online things. The origin of CompuServe. Oh yeah, I love the CompuServe. So originally a company a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance out of Columbus, Ohio, which they actually started in nineteen sixty nine renting time on PDP tens, but in seventy nine they added dial up so you could island.
It was acually internal customers primarily, but they started opening up to consumers and it didn't go particularly well. The company gets acquired in nineteen eighty by H and R. Block for twenty five million dollars. They only have they have less than a thousand users at that time, but by ninet eighty four it'll be one hundred and ten thousand.
Wasn't they owned by Sears at one point.
Yeah, it went through many hands before it end up at AOL.
But I just remember the snap packs which had you know, a code and it had the password explore plus world, right you remember that?
Yeah? Yeah, and so much fun. This is also just beginning of modes in general. So this is when I first got a motem as well. And for better or worse, like the Vancouver area had a ton of BBS's, it was very early on. It just ways for geeks to connect to each other. It's also the first computer worm was built by John Shock and John Hopp at Xerox Park, largely by accident of propagating piece of software across networks.
And so there was your first computer worm. But by far, without a doubt, the most important thing for computing in nineteen seventy nine VisiCalc. Van Bricklin, the precursor to all the spreadsheets. Yeah, and the first real you know they at one point it was personal computers are described as
an accessory for Visical. Right, this was the point of the personal computer first released in seventy nine on the Apple two and IBM sites in their history of the IBM PC that that product shipping made them accelerate the development of the IBM PC to get a version of Hysical Chronic. Now, the ibm PC made sense and they
got it out in nineteen eighty. The story of VISICALCU is also one of mush drama too, because a former Visit Corp employee, Michiga Porl leaves and forms the Lotus Corporation Lotus one two three, create Lotus one two three and then the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Yeah, that was part of that, and that's nineteen eighty three, and what was the claim to fame for Lotus one two to three totally optimized for the IBM PC, and that of course will later lead to multi Plan by Microsoft, which will
eventually become Excel. Yeah.
I remember my father bought a Tiers eight Model four and that's kind of my first foray into computers, and he bought it for Visical.
YEP. Visical was villefort because.
He did his taxes and bills and everything on Visical. Can I remember once a month and getting that thing out and putting it on the dining room table and we didn't see him for a few hours.
You know this is really up until now, personal computers have been toys. Yeah right, this is the product that made it actually a business product and important and changed everything. Yeah.
Still a critical tool in the arsenal today.
Oh yeah, spreadsheets, spreadsheets. Whole companies built around spreadsheets without a doubt.
You have a great joke, don't you, Richard? How about you and your wife in spreadsheet?
Oh but yeah, she's the industrial engineer. I'm a programmer. When we argue, it involves a spreadsheet. Yeah, and it's only because that happened, right. We were trying to we were arguing about how to redo a deck, and in the end resolved the argument with a spreadsheet. I'm like, this is who we are. It's great, this is reality for us. Awesome? So is that it? That's it? All right?
Well with that, let's roll the crazy music for better no framework?
Man, what do you got?
Well?
I realized when we were recording last week's show that this might have been a better, better no framework for that. But tech Nitium Software has a DNS server written in C sharp that's open source and their tagline is self host a DNS server for privacy and security, block ads in malware at the DNS level for your entire network, and technitium I don't know how you say it, but
tech nit i um technitium probably technician who knows. DNS server is an open source, authoritative as well as recursive DNS server that can be used for self hosting a DNS server for privacy and security. It works out of the box with no or minimal configuration and provides a user friendly web console accessible using any modern web browser. Cool how about that?
Yeah? Yeah, interesting? And we always argument of like what DNA server should you run, because you know, there's plenty of free ones out there, but this is a free one too, guys. It's just open source, so good stuff.
But if you think about it, like your basic Windows land has everything except the DNS server, and back in the day we were editing host files and putting IP addresses and names in there, and then you had some other protocols on top of that that worked with anything but TCP IP, right, So you know, this is kind of a it's kind of an important thing. If you don't want to go outside of your network for DNS. Yeah, there you go. If you're gonna know if you need it. Yeah, we're not going to try to sell.
You on No. And without a doubt. It's like, yeah, it's one of those things. Just learned to configure it correctly. It's important, right, you know that whole running joke of it could be DNS, it's always DNS. Definitely, definitely DNS. It's impossible if it's DNS. It could be DNS. It's dns NS. Okay, Well that's what I got today. Richard, who's talking to us awesome, grabbed a comment off show nineteen seventy four, the one we did with Don Delamarski
when we talked about Gethub spec kit. Yeah, and they've said a huge conversation, lots going down there. And I've read comments from this show before, and I'm gonna read oother one. This one's from Richard Cox who said, I just finished listening to this. I think there's one part that your guests got wrong. If m inference stopped, work
stops thanks to the bubble bursting. Talking about the AI bubble, the models will start to degrade as new input like code using new versions of tools will not be included. Then the output will not use those new capabilities. IE. Over time, as the rest of the world moves forwards, the lms will increasingly be stuck in the past. Yeah, I mean, I get the sentiment that, you know, when the bubble bursts, a certain amount of work's going to
go away. Would argue there's too many models. Now, I'm sure there'll be a few models, so they'll continue to go forward. But we're seeing such incredible overspending at the moment, right, It'll be interesting to see what happens. And modelbility is getting easier, and I would also argue less important, like in that sense that it's just going to be part of the flow. It'll be interesting to see what models emerge post bubble burst, right, and boy, there's lots of
noises about the bubble versus these days. It's be interesting to see what happens. Oh, I know it, but fair point, it's all we're you know. The interesting thing about this is this software in some ways does degrade because the world keeps moving on and these things need to keep being regenerated and optimized. So Richard, thank you so much for your comment and a copy of music co Buy is on its way to you, and if you'd like a
copy of music, go buy. I write a comment on the website at dot netrogs dot com or on the facebooks. We publish every show there and if you comment there and ever reading the show, we'll send your copy us to go buy.
And of course needs to co by developed a while ago to provide music that's neither too boring or to distracting twenty five minutes track and there's now twenty three tracks and you can get it at Musicdoco by dot net and the entire collection in wave, flak and MP three formats. Okay, let's introduce Callum Simpson and he is a solution architect with fourteen years of software development experience as of this recording, and recently promoted VP of AI SSW,
an enterprise consultancy based in Australia. Our friend Adam Cogan runs that he spends most of his time using AI to help deliver projects faster or building projects that use AI, and usually both. Despite being more productive than ever, he claims to have not written a complete line of code in over a year. He's also a product owner of SSW yak Shaver, an AI product. He'll tell us about today.
Callum, thank you very much, Carl, and great to be here.
Hey Richard, hey Man, great to have you. I was just down at SSW was part of their brainstorming day, so we had a chance to hang out.
Okay, what did you think about it?
Yeah, that's great. You know, it's not my first brainstorm. It's always fun. What I think you saw my clothes where I commented on you know, SSW is clearly all in on the AI space, and more than anything, what I saw was a bunch of different teams trying to find a way to rain the LMS in, to put parameters around them so that they focus on the things that are important productivity wise, whether that's around controlling architecture,
deployment strategies you talked about. It was a group that we're talking about, I said, a UX frameworks that also the LMS would be pressed against. It's like this is how you build UI when you write, when you're building code, and I just thought it was really clear thinking from a group of really smart developers trying to get the most value from these tools.
That's awesome, that's right. Yeah, we're trying to use it. I guess in every way we possibly can to get as much value out of it. So anything that can be sold by AI, we are trying to do it.
Cool.
I am so curious about yak shaver. First of all, what a funny name. Wow, And I think.
Adam Cogan was involved. What do you think was going to happen?
I'm sure, yeah, But but there's probably just a very small handful of people in this world who have ever attempted to shave a yak.
Well, first you have to own a yak, don't you.
Well, you know, necessarily you could be a yak shaver professional and go around from yak to yak to yak, you know. I mean they have obviously yaq milkers who make butter from yak, you know, cream or whatever.
I've had yak milk in my coffee, in my tea. You know, it's the thing when you're in Nepal.
I was gonna say it's potentially an alternative name, but the name itself came from I think there was a guy called Colin Vieri in the nineties, was a PhD student at MIT, and he got the name from an episode of The Ren and Stimpy Show. In that show, there was a yak shaving day, and basically yac shaving Day was sort of like this thing where where these
people do this series of ridiculous tasks. And so the concept of yak shaving is sort of like when you start doing your main mission and then you realize, all, right, in order to achieve this mission, I need to go down a side quest, and then in order to do this side quest, I need to go and do another side quest first before I can come back and finish
my first side quest to finish the main goal. And then you end up going down this like ten ten layers of causality, and whatever you're doing has absolutely nothing apparently to do with the original goal, but you have to do it unblock all your other things to get back up to the original task.
And then every new layer you say to yourself, should I really be doing this exactly?
What am I doing with my wife?
Better use is of my time?
Exactly? And so that's sort of what we're what we're trying to do with with Yakshava is cut out as much of that sort of busy work as possible. Now, obviously we are software developers, so most of the busy work we do has to do with or at least a large part of it has to do with putting items in backlogs. So that was the sort of original concept. Is you know, when you've got an issue, when you see a bug on a website, what do you have to do to actually report that bug to the right team?
You know, you need to figure out which backlog does this PBI belonging, who are the stakeholders of this project, all that sort of stuff, And if you're on a call with a bunch of important people, you can either sort of skip over the problem because you know you've got better things to talk about, or you can tell everyone, all right, wait for five minutes, I need to go figure out all these details, put in the right backlog all that stuff first. So it is a tough problem.
And obviously we don't want to skip over issues when we see them, but we also don't want to waste everyone's time. So that's that's sort of the whole idea of what we're trying to achieve or the problem we're trying to solve.
So yak shaver does it? Is it sort of an agent kind of thing where you give it permission to do stuff, you know, like an MCP word and why wouldn't you just use an MCP.
Yeah, good question. So when Yakshava first was conceptualized, it was sort of like, I think it's almost three years ago now, so back then we didn't have mcps. We had only just got you know, of custom GPTs that can do tool calls and stuff like that. But yeah, the idea of an MCP was still very far off.
So back then the idea was instead of just you know, letting the agent do whatever it wants because obviously models weren't as reliable, then we would force it through a pipeline where there's a couple of branching points where it can either do this or do that. Is, are you trying to report a PBI or send an email for example, as one of those branches, and we make each.
Of the all right, So it's not you're not giving a total agency, You're you're guiding it.
As you say, exactly, That's that's sort of the the Yakshav V one you have mentioned MCP. We are currently developing a V two that will indeed use MCP servers.
Okay, video context, what's that?
Yeah, exactly.
So the the main I think distinguishing factor between Yakshava and maybe firing up a you know, a MCP host like clawed Desktop and just saying hey, go create an item in the backlog is with Yakshava, we use a video as the input. So what you'll do is, you know, you'll share your screen and then you'll speak into your microphone and you'll say, hey, I'm just on this website. There's a URL, and here's the problem that I've got
on the website, and then stop recording. And then basically the AI will obviously analyze the transcript, will analyze what it can from the screen that you shared, and then interesting go ahead and you figure out where to put it and how to format it all that stuff.
So it's a little more powerful than something like play rate, which can go and navigate a site and all that stuff. But what if you're not using a website, What if you're using a piece of software. Right, yeah, exactly, use a video screen. I'm sure it's brilliant.
That's right, And and some creative people have used it, even completely unrelated to software, which was an unexpected use case. You know, people like the building maintenance team when they find, you know, like an issue with the coffee machine, for example. Yeah, record a video of it and it gets filed off in the appropriate Obviously we're using back clothes for the office maintenance because Adam's the boss.
But in the same way that people use GitHub for recipes and things like, it's useful to have a coherent documentation chain for any of these things.
Well, chat GPT is good for that, and I find that the chat GPT is more consumer oriented that way, Like I can take a video when I could say, hey, what is what is this thing? You know, here's the here's a couple of pictures I snapped at my laptop, and it figures out what it is from that, here's the problem I'm having. I take a screen, you know, video of the screen, and it you know, can diagnose
problems that way. So, but what I don't like about chat GPT is it doesn't understand the context of code right for example, and I don't want it to right Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So one of the I guess main things that we're doing with Yakshav, apart from the video input, is also the sort of organizational consistency. So what you'll do with Yakshav is set up you know, these are all my projects, These are all my people and who's associated with which project, and these are the formats that I like to have.
My pbis created in all that sort of stuff, you'll sort of define it and that way everyone who uses it ends up with a consistent result, because obviously if everyone just used chat GPT and recorded a video of whatever with none of that consistency, then you're going to end up with a completely different thing.
Every time. The world is full of abandoned video that's just sort of a normal thing, right, Like this is I think the important part in all of these things. And I'm not going to point out they actuap per se, but it's like what do you do with it after? Like where does it go? How does anybody ever look at it? Although you've always got the quality problem right, like we've been you see this recurring theme with AI
generated text in general. People are writing their corporate emails using these tools and they're over long and over complicated, and some ways you're pushing the problem down the line, like right, yeah, well, I guess this is the challenge with anything related to these AI tools is like how do you make sure the thing you're making is concise? That the next person down the line isn't being dumped with a lot of unnecessary work.
Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned that actually, because one of the other really cool things about yakshaber is not only does it generate the PBI, but it also puts the link to the video that you recorded on the PBI. So what it means is that the developer who picks up that issue and works on it, they, if they want, can just ignore all the AI generated PBI text and just watch the video of the user explaining the problem and what do you mean when you see PBI backlog items?
So that's basically the of the bug. So if we've got a bug on a website, we've recorded a video showing that bug, and then the developer who picks up that that issue to fix can watch the video.
That's very Adam Cogan. He used to and maybe he still does. But when we had issues with our website, we would get emails from Adam that had screenshots that were annotated with you know, things circled and whatever, and you know this should be that, and that should be this, and yeah he's always been that way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But often there's heaps of details in the video that has an extra being transcribed in the text, right, and just being able to watch the video is it makes it so much easier because you don't have to go back to the original reporter and say, hey, what are your reproduction steps? So you know all that sort of stuff. You can just watch the video.
Yeah, anytime you can avoid having to go struggle with a reproduction is good. It's all about capturing that. But it's interesting to think about this from a workflow perspective of what's the next thing We're trying to avoid shave in the act here? Right? So are these just distraction
items from a main thing? Because we also talked about the fact that there's many little things you need to do before you can get on with the main thing, right right, So I guess it's some of this just getting harnessing more people into the workflow so when they get those things done, you can move forward.
I'm curious about video transcription. I know that there are tools out there that do it, but they're kind of the transcription is usually integrated into those things, right, Like there's we use camtesa a little bit here, and I have maybe an older version.
I don't know.
If the newer versions do trans but transcription rather, but that is a huge thing for me, so if I have meetings, I know that Zoom can generate transcriptions, but just it would be really easy to to have a desktop application though. You could just drop a video into it and it could transcribe the video. Yeah, for sure, it seems like a simple thing. But then I could look it up. I could look up what we're we talking about.
You know that's true, And I mean that sounds like an interesting future feature that weak we can backlog. Maybe we could actuate it right now and you your details about it will form the video, and then the developer who picks it up, we'll have all the context of why you wanted it, so that.
Yeah, I like it. All right, take a break?
Yeah, all right, Well this seems like a good place to take a break, so we'll be right back after these very important messages. Did you know you can easily migrate asp net web apps to Windows containers on Aws. Use the app to Container tool to containerize your iis websites and deploy to AWS managed container services with or without Kubernetes. Find out more about app to Container at aws dot Amazon dot com. Slash dot Net, slash Modernize, and we're back at starting at Rocks. I'm Carl Franklin.
It's my friend Richard Campbell. Hey, and this is Callum Simpson from SSW and he's down in Australia with Richard. Right now, we're talking about Yakshaver and is this going to be an open source product? I know it's a desktop application.
Yeah, So I mentioned earlier we've got sort of like a V one Yakshaver and a V two Yakshaver. So the V one Yakshaver as it currently is is not open source. It's basically a cloud based pipeline subscriber before where we sort of force everything through a pipeline with a few brand options. But what we really wanted to do with V two is to make it open source desktop application. The reason why we wanted to make it open source is because it's a desktop application that we
expect users to install on their machine. So obviously it's not doing anything crazy. All it's doing is orchestrating MTP servers from the local machine. So why not make an open source so anyone can open the lead and see what's happening inside.
It's really, really cool.
Now what are the key AI parts here? Is it just a transcriber? Like, what do you use an LM for their other generative ail? What's going on inside this out?
Are we talking about the V two up with the MCP service?
Yeah? Yeah, So basically.
You'll record your video well, as you said, transcribe the text of the audio of that video, and then we throw it over to the MCP orchestrator. And basically what that is doing is saying, all right, here's the transcript that the user has submitted. Here's the system prompt. So inside yak Shava you can sort of define how you
want it to work. We leave that sort of up to the user, but you would have I guess an organizational default that you can then customize if you so wish, and then Yakshava will basically take that and then start using the MCP servers that you made available to it to get through whatever it is you're trying to do
with that transcript. So, for example, you could give yak Shava the GitHub MCP server and you could give it instructions to say, you know, figure out which backlog or project I'm talking about in my transcript, put this issue in that backlog. Surely you include the link to the YouTube video in that issue and use whatever whatever PBI
template is available in that repo as well. Uh, and when when approaches it is it will then use you know, the GitHub MCP to search all the projects you've got available, figure out all right based on that transcription, I think he's talking about that one, and then you know, search the that repo for the templates, find the right template, maybe have one template for reporting a bug, one template for creating a feature request, that sort of thing, and
then fill out that template. And then we also pass it originally when you've recorded your video we uploaded to YouTube, and we pass it in the link to the YouTube video, so it can then embed that that YouTube video in the issue as well as.
Part of it.
So start getting issues with videos, which is pretty cool, that's right. And we also we also give it a
couple of built in MCP tools as well. So we have one tool that basically says, grab a screenshot at the specified timestamp, because when we give it the transcript, it's you know, it's got all the time stamps of when each bit of text was said, so it can sort of figure out what the key moment or moments are in the transcript, you get a you got a thumbnail maker based on context, that's right, and then we've got another tool that takes that well, can take that
screenshot and then you use a multimodal LM to analyze it so it can sort of grab some context out of that screenshot as well. So in that way it's sort of able to analyze the video as well as what you've said.
It's very cool. I'm also thinking just de duplication is often, you know, you build these tools so it's easy for people to report problems. They're going to report a lot of problems, and they're off going to report the scene problems. Oh yeah, for sure.
So yeah, that's that's one of the by the way, one of the reasons why we really wanted to transition to this V two MCP approach because a lot of people have a lot of requests like that, you know, and all you have to do to do it with the new world is you just say, and you're prompt before you create a GitHub issue, make sure you search for any duplicate issues that already exist, and if they do, add this as a comment instead of creating a new one, right,
and yeah, that way it's just a prompt update instead of having to go back to our pipeline and adding all these extra branches to handle different cases.
Well, and it's tougher to get people to do that because it's way easier to just create a new issue that searched you existing ones. So yeah, you can get the tool to do that for us, Thank goodness for that.
Well, but you have to put that in the system prompt you know, that has to be a rule, right, that's right, don't create new issues unless there's nothing there already.
Yeah, you think it's actually original. Yeah, it's really interesting. Another you know, we're talking about how general VII is coming into the different aspects of software development. This is an aspect of generating issues intelligently and trying to get as much information to the developer as possible, whether it's for a bugfix or a feature. Of course it's free.
Course, Yeah that's right. Yeah, So I was going to say, originally we with the V one solution. This was another pain of the V one solution. We integrate with GitHub and as your DevOps, but the majority of people we spoke to about it, they didn't actually use those tools.
They use something like Gira or whatever some other tool, and it was it was just too hard to keep adding all these because you know, every time we create one of these branching bits of logic in the V one we had to also reproduce that same you know, the same actions or set of actions in each of the backlogs that we're integrating with so GitHub Badge develops. We didn't want to have to keep doing that with Gira, Zender,
whatever other tool people are using. So that was yet another argument why we moved to MVP because with MCP you can even have exactly the same prompt, but if you've got a different system that you're using for your backlog or you have to flop the MCP server and as long as it has a vaguely similar action available, it'll work just fine.
Yeah, way more scalable. That's classic V two stuff is creating the rate set of interfaces for the next iterations where people want to use it in more places.
I know you guys had some discussions on the back end about whether or not it's a good idea to give people all this freedom and flexibility. So what was that discussion like and would you come out of it with.
Yeah, I think it's still sort of an open question that we haven't got an answer to, because I think it could potentially be detrimental. If you give people full freedom to do anything, Suddenly they're sort of swamped by choices and things they can customize, and they end up not knowing how to best use it. Whereas if you sort of force them down a path, you may not be the optimal path, but at least they're forced down the path and they'll figure out how to use it.
Yeah, like some workflow templates or something like that you can choose from exactly instead of just giving people a blank slate. Also, if you think about it, you know, it's kind of irresponsible to just slap some MCP service together and give them full agency to go do whatever you would normally do. I mean that can open up a huge can of worms. Oh yeah, cans and cans and cans of worms.
Absolutely, you really need to be careful, So, I mean, there is a lot of power. With power obviously comes responsibility.
I've heard that you need to be here.
You need to be careful about, you know, surfacing untrusted third party data to MVP servers that can perform you know, potentially destructive actions is actually sort of a running joke in the actually the dev team is when someone's recording a video to be processed, someone in the background will shout out and delete the whole repo while you're there. Yeah, we need to build in some safeguards to prevent.
That from there.
Used to be the running joke on dart net Rocks Alexa delete on my no, not you don't listen to me exactly. She's not quite sure how to help me with that. But you know, a delete my account, you know that kind of thing. Or send five hundred pounds of concrete to Richard Campbell.
Yeah, still trying to clean up that concrete. Thanks for that. Very good. But you know, we even that office conversation with more and more aishing. Our role as shepherds of AI, goodness knows, is to constrain it, to put parameters around each of these things, and so same thing here. You want to focus on particular issue, particular capabilities, and keep limits on all the things that it can do so that it does focus on the direction you wanted to go in.
The other good thing about using MCP rather than a pipeline, I think is that every action that the MCP service takes on your behalf is sort of done in your name because you're connecting directly with your own or credentials or whatever if you use and get MVP.
So yeah, you need to.
Take your responsibility for everything that it does. You can't just give it a random video and then cross your fingers and hope it works.
So that Yeah, Well you bring up a great point because there's lots of conversation about I think this was just at Ignite where they are setting identities for agents, and that's almost like giving you an excuse lack of culpability. All the software did It wasn't me. It's like, dude, it was your prompt the software. We may call them agents, but how much agency do we want them? They're working on our behalf.
Yeah, it's a constant theme.
Well, I just feel like these are unsolved problems. Like I'm appreciating which the work you guys are doing callum just because you are making these experiments and using them yourselves and finding out like what what works, what doesn't, what the limits are on all this are because we I think we're a few years away from really nailing down what these new workflows look.
Like, Yeah, that's right, an experiment.
At this point, you have some other products AI products that you're working on at ss W.
Oh yeah, we've got SSW Eagle I okay, which is a sort of a dystopian email analysis tool that basically checks all of your emails and makes for sure that you are sort of you know, adhering to all the SSW rules and and sort of game fires that a little bit as well. So you have like a leaderboard who sends the most you know, checked by email, and you.
Know, so it checks outgoing emails, not incoming, because that would be a huge security risk.
Yeah. Well, obviously you opt into it, right, So it's not just checking any random email.
You have it checking outgoing emails. Yeah, correct, that's what it sounds like, but not incoming.
Well, it's checking emails that you send to other people inside the company, right, So it's not just paying any random.
It's eternal email. That's good. We did a Cogan rules show in two thousand and six. That was fun. I remember that. Yeah, well, and then you know he's out of serious about that. The rules continue to this day. I think they're very in the middle of a migration of them right now, if I recall from the brainstorming session right there, Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So this, this is the idea of an LLM being able to part stuff and saying, are you is this compliant? Are you
following the rule set? Maybe making suggestions for what's incorrect? Yeah, that's very cool.
Interesting, Yeah, that could be coming soon. The other brains sewing idea, the one that I was working on was sort of an AI that constantly scans your site and looks for problems and sort of reports them before someone needs to actualy them.
Right.
I thought that was a cool idea.
Smart site testing, yow. Yeah, could we build out it? Can we build out a tool that was really good at putting wrong things into text boxes?
You know?
Did you know those test guys, the ones that you know, this is where I entered negative forty three? The all thing blew up?
That's right, that's kind of test is the one that just ignores the instructions and does whatever they want. Yeah, I'm sure if you get a play right MCP to just prompt it, you're a crazy person who ignores instructions and does whatever they want.
Yeah, the breeze I don't want to feed you an LM is ignore instructions like that just seems disturbing to me. Yeah, that's risky. Yeah, absolute trouble, without a doubt. How many folks worked on on yacual what it take to get into this point.
We've got a team of about ten. Now, they're not all working obviously constantly, because you know, when we've got client engagements up, go off and do that. So we've got sort of ten coming going. I think the core team,
you could say, maybe five people working on it. But one of the very interesting things we've noticed recently is well, I'm sort of operating as the product owner of Yakhava, and so as the product owner, I've been trying out AI, like completely AI driven development with not even looking at the code, just to see is that a viable approach?
So vibe coding I hate the phrase, but this.
Is exactly vibe coding. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the concept of vibe coding is interesting. I mean, people have different definitions of it, right. Some people say, anytime you use AI to write code, that's vibe coding, whereas others would say, well, it's only if you you only talk to the agent and you don't look at the output.
Sure, so I can say, but that's what Kapothi said at the time, right when he came up with the.
Phrase exactly exactly, but the terms being corrupted. I think so a lot of people just say anytime you use AI to write code, you're vibe coding. I don't think that's good at all. Yeah, and I think it's actually important to draw that distinction because, like we just said, you know, you need to take responsibility for the code that you generate if it's generated under your name. So so.
But yeah, So the concept is, as product owner of yak Shav, I'm just vibe coding the features that I want to see in the tool, and then rather than giving the team an issue that says, hey, I want this feature in Yakhava, I will basically vibe code the feature itself and then give them the poll request, and then their job instead of implement the feature is just review the poll request.
Figure out how badly you've gotten the LM to mess things up exactly.
And I mean obviously that sometimes it does a terrible job, but I think more and more it does a good job, particularly at tasks that are sort of well constrained or are you an implementation that is along the lines of some codes that's already written, but just doing a slightly
different thing, you know what I mean. So there's a big difference between creating a new, completely new piece of code that may have got some new architectural components and that sort of thing that me sounds rather risky to just let AI do whatever it wants. But if you've already got all that set up and now you're just saying, add another you know, vertical slice on this project and just copy the one that's already there, I think it does a much better job of that.
It does speak to this idea that more mature software will be easier to maintain with these tools than very new software. On you know, the wen Star, as long as it's it's good, you know, as long as it's written well, right, right, So it's got to be written well in the first place.
Because it's going to give you more crap, I imagine.
I also wonder if if the success of this has more to do with the scope of the feature or the quality of the prompt.
Yeah, good, good question, And I think that in my experience anyway, a lot of people have like when when they try to do something with AI. You know, the people who I think get bad results. Some people seem to get bad results even though they're fantastic developers. You know, they'll try to use AI and they'll get a a bad result and then they say, well, you know this AI sucks another tool myself.
Yeah, exactly.
But from my perspective, I always try to think, if I've used AI and the result was substandard, rather than blaming the AI, I want to blame myself, and I want to think, how could I how could I prompt it better? How could I give the right context or better prompt or whatever to get the better output next time.
Well, let's say that's the old adage it is a poor craftsman that blames as tools.
That's right, good point, And yeah, so that's something that I'm heavily leaning into is figuring out how we can you know, make this process of AI generated code not vibe coding, to be clear, because we're drawing a distinction there, but generating code with AI that we actually care about and that's going to form a part of our long term code base. How do we actually go about doing
that in the best way. And obviously, to start with it takes longer, probably than writing the code yourself quite but I think in the long term, once you've got your systems in place, you know, you've sort of set that up once and then you can use it infinitely many times. But but yeah, so it's that reason that I've also been doing this vibe code experiment just to see what is the difference between these two different approaches
and what goes wrong when you're VIBE coding. What are the problems that AI has and then how do we try to address them so that we can do a better job.
So I see three categories of code. Then that you have handwritten code, you have AI syst a code, and then you have AI generated code. And you know how different are those things? How can they support each other?
You know?
Where is where is it? I think we're still trying to figure out where the human needs to step in more and where automation it can work fairly responsibly on it.
That's right, I think it really the human needs to If you're delivering a piece of software for a client, the human obviously is the person who the client is engaging to deliver that software. You need to take responsibility for you know, understanding the problem and ensuring that the software that is delivered meets all the requirements and does everything the client needs, but also does all the technical things that the client doesn't even know that they need.
But they do. The client presumes security, probably without even articulating it, that's right. You know, client presumes reliability also without caculating it. Like we've got to make sure those things exist, that's right.
And if we just mindlessly generate something with AI and don't even look at it and then yeah, okay, it does most of the functionality you wanted, but it's all these gaping security flaws, all this sort of things. That's that's you know, that's a problem for you that you haven't taken responsibility for what you have delivered.
Yeah, that's what That's what responsible detment looks like. That's right.
But you can totally be responsible with your delivery and also use AI to do everything. It's just that you need to be taking responsibility for it right ultimately, so do the right thing.
So as a product owner, I see a shape of a V two, is your stuff going to a V three? Ben Yette like, what's the future of the ACTUAV? Look like?
Good question? I mean, I see after after V two. Obviously V two we should be rolling out fairly soon. Hopefully V two is all about MCP servers. I see potentially V three is going to be Yakshava actually writing writing code sort of like disposable code in order to achieve tasks, rather than just using MCP servers.
Disposable code like writing PowerShell scripts and then.
Executing that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, so like in integrating with whatever it's trying to integrate with, it could also be using the MCP servers, but you know, writing code to perform the tools in MCP rather than just using MCP because obviously one of the issues with one of the issues with MCP is you know, if you give it a whole heap of tools, that's just eating up a bunch of context that probably
doesn't need to be eaten up. Although I do suspect in the future we'll get better MCP management, Like you might have some sort of middle layer that says, here's here's the prompt, here's on my tools. Just surface a couple of tools that seem like they need to be used, and that sort of thing.
Yeah, it's a pretty pretty raw design at this point too, right, Like it's all of this stuff is so crazy new. Yeah.
Yeah, it's an exciting space to be in.
So what's next? What's next for you? Personally?
For me, well, I think I continue to use AI to deliver projects. You know, I always felt that my favorite part of my job was the part where I get to talk to the client, understand the problem and design a solution and understand all the different trade offs in all the decisions that are making in that solution, and then you know, talk to the client figure out what is the best solution for them. And then the actual part where I write the code is sort of
the necessary evil. You know, it's not the fun part.
The fun part is designing the solution, right. So I think that's one of the main reasons why I love using A for this, because I can sort of still be fully involved in all that decision making process and solution design, but then I'm basically just delegating all the actual code writing to a system of parallel cloud based agents who while I'm asleep, they can just make a dozen pull requests and the next morning I'll wake up and just review them and you know, provide feedback and.
So on and so forth.
It's a brave new world in it.
Absolutely it's very exciting, Yeah it is.
And it's also I think freeing our imaginations to come up with solutions because and this has been a theme we've talked to many people about, starting with that Scott Hunter interview. Right, just imagination is going to be a very important commodity now, the creativity to think about what you can do, and if you can think it, you can probably get it done. And that's just an amazing thing.
That's right, because I guess there's sort of no downside to just trying something, right is if you can articulate your idea, then you can have an agent go off and have a crack at it and just see what happens. And I mean, the only thing you've lost is maybe a few cents of token usage, and that's really it.
So why not?
So it pays to stay in school kids and learn as much as you can about the English language, and take writing classes and be clear and your thoughts and all of that, and don't use like too much, and you know, treat each other well.
That's right, and the good news.
Of wisdom.
You can also use AI to teach you things as well, which is cooling. So if you want to learn something, you can just ask AI to create a personalized tutorial.
I think that's or even little things like I do this all the time.
Now.
I was watching a TV show and this woman, this young woman had what looked like a tube coming a white tube coming from her ear into her nose with some scotch tape on her cheek. And I thought, that looks very strange. Is it oxygen?
What is it?
So I took a couple of pictures of the TV screen to send it to chat Gypt and it quickly figured out that it was a feeding tube because and then turns out like later on somebody asked her because it was a cooking show, somebody asked her, did you chase your food? And she says, no, I can't taste it because I have this gastric just whatever situation where it takes two hours to half digest food, and so she has to eat through a feeding tube. And she'd had to do that she was twenty one, she'd had
to do it since she was thirteen. Wow, But chatchypt figured it all out, and then I was asking it questions about does that go all the way down the esophagus, isn't that uncomfortable? And it's like telling me all this stuff that I would It's just like having an expert. It's like having Richard in your house.
You know.
I can say Richard, what is that? And hit clause and Richard knows everything, so he would tell me it's.
Really cool, right, which is it's interesting.
It's better, way better than just Google.
Yeah, for sure.
Before you leave, I have an Adam's story for you. It was I can't remember when, but he was doing some videos with me for DNR TV, so that tells you it was a while ago, early two thousands. Yeah, and he was actually in Boston for techads. So that was what two thousand and six maybe something like that, Yeah, something like that. So he came down and we were up all night and I was just basically waiting for him to get his demo together because he was, you know,
working on it. So seven o'clock in the morning rolls around time for Brecky. So we go to a diner. So two thousand and six, right, so we barely have internet on phones, but we do have it. And he go to a diner and I'm putting pepper on my eggs. He goes, you gotta watch that stuff. I said, what black papa bad for blokes?
Like what?
He says, Yeah, I'll give you a prostate cancer. Come on, Well, I didn't have Chatty obviously, but I did have Google on my phone. I looked it up and not turns out. It turns out not only is black pepper good for your immune system and therefore not causing cancer, but kespasin, which is not black pepper at all. But it's the stuff that makes Pepper's chili peppers hot. When you apply ks spasin directly to prostate cancer cells.
It kills them.
So I was like, dude, where did you learn this?
He goes, friend, Yeah, well, look, it's all about strong opinions weekly hill.
So yeah, yeah, a change. But I told my kids.
Because they grew up in the Internet age, and you know, when you have a phone, when you get older, you can use it as your portable BS detector. And you know, and somebody tells you something, don't take it at face value. Go and look it up and look it up at a reputable fact checking site, not just like you know, TikTok. Anyway, callum, thank you very much, it's been so great talking to you, and this is great stuff and I can't wait for V two. I'm gonna run it myself.
I can't wait.
Yeah, I can't wait to roll it out of you though. Thanks having me.
You let us know when it's available do and thanks Callum, and we'll talk to you next time on dot net rocks. Dot net rocks is brought to you by Franklin's Net and produced by Pop Studios, a full service audio, video and post production facility located physically in New London, Connecticut, and of course in the cloud online at pwop dot com.
Visit our website at d O T N E t R O c k S dot com for RSS feeds, downloads, mobile apps, comments, and access to the full archives going back to show number one, recorded in September two thousand and two. And make sure you check out our sponsors. They keep us in business. Now go write some code, see you next time.
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