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Hey Philly, it's dot net rock.
Wow.
Yeah, so long since we've been in front of a real crowd.
That a live show man.
While I drove down here from New London, it's about four and a half hours and I had road trip flashbacks.
Yeah, yeah, no kidding. It was one of the I think we stopped here on every tour, Yes, every single one, from the very first one two thousand and five, which is entirely your idea because I was brand new, twenty eight, twenty ten, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. Yeah, yeah, everyone. We always came to Philly. Sometimes we got to do a whole day, like we do a day of dot net thing. Sometimes it would just be the evening show. But you know, you could always count on Philly folks to come out
and have a great time. So this is a special one. It's a one off, it's one of a kind, and we're gonna have some fun.
We are going to have some fun. Before I introduce the other two people who are here with us, let's talk about.
Nineteen eighty one.
Nineteen eighty one. All right, so do you know what happened in nineteen eighty one?
A few things, tell us, but I focused purely on space and technology topics. Well, go ahead, Well it's nineteen eighty one, so it is the beginning of the Space Shuttle program. Well, the successful launch after years of delay. Remember, Shuttle was supposed to rescue sky Lab and they lost that in seventy nine. This is nineteen eighty one. They missed it by a few years. So STS one flies
in April with Young Crippon on board. They for fifty four hours, thirty seven orbits and a totally successful flight, really, no no drama, great test flight. Famously, it was Crippen. Young was the guy who flew everything. He was in Gemini, he was in Apollo, but Crippen was the new guy. And as they were bringing it in for a landing, says how it FLI And he said flies like a brick shit house because it did right, This a one hundred ton vehicle with stubby little wingstune two hundred miles
nuts at hour. You know, it's stuffed a landa thing. Anyway, they had to edit that so if you ever see the quote from Robert Crippen it's flies like a brick, that is not not what he said Later that year sts two. So they turned Columbia around in about six months and flew it again in November. This time it was angling truly. Engel was supposed to be on Apollo seventeen. He got bumped by Harrish and Schmidt, the only scientists
to ever walk on the Moon. And so they flew Columbia again, and the main job of the second flight was to test out the Canada Arm because their first this was back when they thought they were going to fly these things every two weeks and they were going to deploy satellites from them, repair satellites from do all this cool stuff right. It was a space transport system except for all that part where did that didn't work?
And so they this was the trials for the It was going to be five days up there working on the Canada ARM And on the first day they had a field cell failure and so they were low on power. They couldn't operate the arm, so they cut the mission down to two days and turn around came back.
Was that the flights with the white painted external tank.
This is when the external light was still Another voice, what's going on here? Oh, that's Jeff Fritz.
That's Jeff Frid's okay, Yeah, So that that's back when the tanks were painted white, and that paint weighed something like fifteen hundred pounds. So that's why they lost it eventually.
It was just weighs that much.
When you get that much of it on there.
Well, you can dump the cans overboard once you get space. So and Columbia was always overweight, right, she was. She was just the first flying vehicle. And that's why she never went to the space station. She couldn't get to it. That didn't have any that mass, didn't have enough energy get there.
That was the space shuttles that had.
Space shttle Columbia.
Yeah, and that's the one with the bricks underneath it.
With the well, and that would crumble in your hands like they would crush. Right, they're very delicate. It was ridiculous to delicate.
And another voice you heard was Bill Wolf.
And uh, the geek out start because of me ranting at Carl in twenty eleven when Atlantis landed for the last time. Well he was in a bar with some of this, yes, and uh and just how screwed up? You know, space Shuttle never really did what was supposed to do, all the missions that it could never actually do.
And and Richard will never tell you this, but he had the Space Shuttle manual and read it cover to cover so he could tell you everything about the Space Shuttle.
Uh, not entirely true, but okay.
Uh.
Anyway, he talked me into let's do that as a show. And I thought you guys would crucify us for that because it was not exactly software. And I was wrong. The geekout and I kept doing them. And this is eighty this is eighty one. This is the end of November, end of December show. The next two shows will be the annual Geekouts. So I've been working all my scripts for an update on space and an update on energy generation. So that's coming last space topic and then we'll talk computers.
Voyage two does its flyby of Saturn in August, so one of the pioneers already coming gone. But this is the second time we got to look at Saturn Voyager when I gotten there the couple years before, and we got some better images, and that sets us up for eventually Cassini. And this is when they figure out that that titan very likely has a prototypical atmosphere and increases
the excitement for building bigger missions around all right. On the computer side, nineteen eighty one is the year that Sony introduces the three and a half inch floppy disco. Beginning of all of that, there was competing sizes. There were three inch versions and three and a quarters as well as the three and a half and a three and a half ultimately be the one that was adopted everywhere. Not so floppy, though not a flop at all, quite rigid actually, which part of the reason it worked so well.
They used the Bernoulli effect inside that rigid housing so they could increase I density. The original discs were only three hundred and sixty K, then they went to seven twenty and then one point four megabytes, so much storage, but by far easily most important story nineteen eighty one the release of the IBM fifty one fifty which you know is the IBM PC four point seven to seven
MEGAHURTZ processor. The eighty eighty eight processor by default sixteen k ARAM, but you could expand it to two hundred fifty six. Later we would come up with an expansion burd to take to six.
Forty, but need more than two hundred and fifty six.
Well really sixteen k right, basic configuration, but you could run twos that's all there was, of course, shipped with CPM eighty six, or you could run this brand new shiny ms DOUS one point zero. Why did they do the eighty eighty eight instead of the eighty eighty six because it was cheaper and more readily available. The eighty six ers were in high demand and they wanted to build a lot of these machines. They were trying to get faster to the market, and so the eighty eighty
eight was more readily available. It also made the machine cheaper because it only had an eight bit input bus, and so all of the bus structures were eight bit instead of sixteen bit. That will be changed with the later models, with the XT and so on.
The turbo, remember the turbo, but.
Turbo button go up to eight megahertz and dokey go like, yes, do not be processor cycle synchronized. That's not a right idea idea. It was always intended to be licensable. And so within a year Columbia Data Products makes the first of the PC compatibles and all of our careers. Yeah, also in the same year. And I never realized this happened in the same year. You always thought this was older the Osbourne one. The Osbourne one came out in nineteen eighty one. So this was what we call a luggable.
It was literally like a suitcase keyboard attached onto the bottom, had a five inch displaying in the middle, a pair of five and a quarter floppy drives on each side, weigh about twenty five pounds speakers. Yeah, I remember having it. I had a compact, but not in Osborne in Osbourne. And there's a good reason for that, because Osborne were quickly out of business by Osborne in themselves. Yes, would just say as they started selling their first machine, they
started talking about what was going to be a second machine. No, I was born too, and that stopped sales of Osborne one because everybody was waiting for that, and that bankrupted the company. So they never built the Osbourne two, and they became a verb. Do not Osborne yourself. Don't talk about your new product till you're ready to sell it.
It's okay that we talk about the geek outs because our show is free.
Yeah, there you go. One last thing on computing. We'll move on the IETF. That's the Internet Task Force publishes AREC Specification seven nine to one, which is a definition of IPv four.
Oh there you go.
Oh yeah.
A lot of things happened in nineteen eighty one.
That's the beginning.
And in the cultural side, I have three things. Ronald Reagan inaugurated in December, shot in March. Nice yeah, sorry sorry, no, no, no, it wasn't nice. I mean, yeah, it wasn't nice. MTV debuts. I want my MTV Gary Newman here in my cars? Right, was the first video Killed the Radio Star? And also speaking of Donkey Kong that came out in nineteen eighty one. Awesome, But if you played it in turbomodate one and that's it, So I guess we should go for better no framework, right,
all right? Play the crazy music? All right, buddy, what do you got? So I've got an interesting GitHub repo that's trending, and I thought it was topical for what we're going to talk about today. This is from the dot Mac and it's called claud dash mem. So this is persistent memory compression system built for Claud code. So
it's a plugin. It's a plugin for Claud code that preserves context across sessions by automatically capturing tool usage observations, generating semantic summaries, and making them available to future sessions. So it's like client side context, right. It squishes it all down and then on every other prompt it sends it back. So it allows claud to maintain continuity of knowledge about projects even after sessions end or reconnect. So I kind of like that because you know, keeping all
that context is kind of expensive these days. But we're going to talk about all that stuff coming up here. But first, I guess the next thing we do is talk about comments.
Who's talking to us, Richard Hi grab a comment off show set nineteen seventy nine, So that's brand new, and that's the show we did with Callum Simpson talking a little bit about yak Shaver and our ongoing explorer defined apps that are actually out in the market using AI technologies. This comment comes from Blackweb, and I'm going to summarize them just a bit, but he says, on a recent project, I gave some AI tools that you discussed or try.
We're trying to build at ten app using cloud and Aspire Native application in VS twenty twenty six, brand new VS code. The I tools included Copilot for Windows eleven, get hub Copilot with GPT five and Claude four point five. Copilot was helpful in all aspects of the project for coding and research, but it had trouble fixing errors and bugs. Often gets stuck in a loop and can't get out
of it without some human help. When the Claude four point five plugin is at it, it gets even faster and better at all aspects of coding, including script generation, which it excels at. And now for the bad stuff. Get Hub's pricing model and billing is aggressive and predatory. It counts premium requests, which is basically anything you send in in VS and VS code. You starting free trial budget is twenty five requests, which most developers will use up
in about an hour. You can set the dollar limit t additional requests for various purposes, including gethub actions and so on. For Copilot pro, you get three hundred quests for ten bucks, then of course they're all premium requests and you're showing a progress bar. I used up three point seven of my requests, so that would be like ten in a few hours. I quickly became paranoid about exceeding my request budget and running up a big bill.
Claud's pricing model is even more aggressive than Githubs, starting it at seventeen dollars a month, it must be paid in advance for about two hundred bucks a year. I was impressed by Githubs, Copilot, and Claudes coding ability, but I immediately felt like it was aggressively trying to run up the request score as fast as possible. It is able to edit my code window, generate new files, enter in excute CLI commands, and rapidly generate tests, all of
which eats into that budget. Get help Copilot did generate new code that worked, but it did it so fast that I had no idea what it had done, and had essentially no knowledge or understanding of the code degenerated, making me dependent on the AI for fixing any bugs it created, which of course consumes more credits. After a few hours with giphub, Copilot and Cloud, I felt like I'd been replaced by it and had become a little
more than a human moderator or a monitor. Watched it work and gave minimal input in suggestions while running up AI tool generated bills of hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars per week. I also wondered if it was being used to train AI tools to replace me and other developers. AI coding tools are not creating bells developers. They're creating unemployed or underemployed AI coding tool addicts who are stuck in their exponentially increasing bill for those tools if they
are independent coders. And I've builted the many podcasts on AI coding on dot in Rocks, I'm increasing concerned and baffled by the endless fanboyism for a by the two people I like and respect very much, Carl and Richard. You guys need to stop drinking AI kool aid and start talking to real developers who workflows and coding skills are being adversely affected by AA coding tools that you're providing with free blowing and biased reviews.
Yeah, you know, I've been waiting for a comment like this because there is that sentiment out there and it's probably underrepresented by our audience. So, first of all, a black Web, thank you very much for being brave enough to send that to us. And yeah, I mean, I feel your pain. However, I don't share your experience, and I shared my experience, which is, you know, mostly positive.
There are times when I don't understand the code that the AIS written, but I usually ask it to comment any code that it writes so that I can understand it. I also develop in pieces. If I say need a full stack editor for some classes, I'll start with the models, than the data layer, than any kind of manager, then finally the UI. I might break all these down into
different prompts if they're too complex. I didn't always think this, but now I believe in baby steps and it works for me and my agent of choice is the co pilot CLI and clauds on at four five. I never felt like it was taking over my job. It's only made me more productive, and he basically came back by saying, can we hear a balanced view of AI coding tools from actual developers, not AI apologists who are trying to sell a very expensive product. And I said, well, I
am a real developer with real customers. The money they pay me and the productivity games far out weigh the costs of Copilot. I'm not an apologists for any technology or any company. I'm an independent developer and a podcaster. And he basically said, you know, you make a good point. Maybe I just need to figure out more efficient ways to use this.
Well, so time is money, yep. And if this stuff saves you time, that's worth a lot. And you could easily justify paying charges for things like Claude if it's saving you hours of time.
Yeah, and therefore making you money.
Yes, I'm working with teams that are spending thousand dollars a month. Yeah, but they're cranking through six weeks prints
in days like they're moving code fast. It isn't. And then my problem is and there's two things that really hit me with black webs comment and all about billing, Which is first is this feels like telcos We're only going to find out after the fact how much it costs you, and the fact that you're learning on the back of it and it's fixing itself means it makes a mess then cleans it up for you and gets paid for it like that is pretty annoying. Yeah, right, But the bigger thing to me is we still don't
have real pricing. Right. This is the blue ocean phase of this technology where they're low buying the figures just to get us on board. It will be very interesting to see what the real economics this looks like when the crazy ends and everybody actually has to pay the piper, Like, is this actually going to be viable? I don't know the answer to that.
It's so we have before we have a discussion that we need to wrap up the comment because that's basically what this whole show and.
Black Web you're timing is impeccable having provide us with a comment that you literally says a foundation for the show about what is AI going to look do to development in the next in these next few years. So thank you so much for your comment and a copy of music Code Buy. It's on its way to you. And if you'd like a copy of music Code Buy, write a comment on the website at dot netroocks dot com.
When the facebooks you publish every show there, and if you comment there and ever reading the show, will send you a copy of music.
Go and if you don't want to do that, you can always just go buy it and music to code by dot net. It's twenty five minute tracks. There's twenty two of them. I'm working on twenty three now and you can get the collection in MP three, wave or flak. All right, now, let me formally introduce the other two guys that are here with us tonight, starting with Jeff Fritz. Jeff is a principal program manager in Microsoft's Developer division on the dot Net Community Team, where he leads development
of live video and online content. Jeff is the executive producer of the dot Net coonf series of online events. Heard of that. He is also a Twitch and YouTube partner as well as the founder of the Live Coders stream team. You can catch Jeff writing dot net code with Gethub Visual Studio in Azure on his video stream called Fritz and Friends at Twitch, dot tv, slash c Sharp Fritz. Bill Wolf is here and this is an important date for Bill, isn't it?
Bill?
It is? Because so tonight I've been running Philly dot net, which is one of the largest and certainly one of the oldest dot net communities on the planet, possibly in the Galaxy and been running it for twenty four years. So I started it in two thousand and one.
And also you had something to do with this whole Inetta thing, do you remember I did.
I was one of the I was a VP at Anetta and I ran the speakers Bureau and my job was to send famous people all over the country to various user group meetings.
And that was all.
Funded through Microsoft at that time, and so that was an interest project. But I started doing user groups in nineteen seventy eight, so some of you may not have been around then, but it's been a long time. And Rob Kaiser, who's been by my side much of this time. We were very instrumental in something called PAX, which was one of the first user groups in the country, Philadelphia era Computer Society. And I'll just one quick story. One of my favorite meetings I ever ran at PAS. We
were at LaSalle University. This was in the early eighties and I was because I'm very shy, I was on stage. I was on stage sort of moderating, and the panel there were the team from eniac OH and because some of them still lived in the Philadelphia area, we actually got like remember that they got like six people in and they explained to us how they built eniac and how they made it run and how they tested it and stuff. It was fascinating.
Was that related to the Jetson's uniblab because that's the one I remember when I was that old. Well, Bill, this is your last hurrah, isn't it. Yeah?
Yeah, I'm gonna step down as the Philly dot net leader. I'll still be involved in community. I still do speaking here and there, but certainly not what I used to. I can't keep up with these guys. They do a dozen conferences a year. I used to do that, you know, I used to do the v bits and you know, connect and all of those things. But I'm, you know, on my way out.
Well, we're going to give you a good send off. That's why we're here. So how about.
Hands straight down?
Yeah?
I want to go back to the to the comments from the black web because I think it's all this fear element that I think is pervasive. Right now, if you think about what he just said, and I paraphrase it, Middley's original email was longer. It's like the tool got away from them. Yeah. Claud's especially kind of notorious for that, right, you get this sort of agentic mode where it's starting
to make changes in all kinds of places. And if you start really thinking about about tokens all the time, now you're asking you questions about what it's done, which is burning more tokens for you. Just get a picture what's going on. Like, I think you got to get away from the token trap part.
I would look into a good system prompt that puts, you know, cages, a cage around what you can and can't do and which you sure and shouldn't do. And I've learned from Jeff and other people that they're these great cope There's a Cope pilot, awesome repository that has all sorts of prompts for different things. There's a we just learned about this. There's a c sharp pro developer prompt that has all sorts of of you know, guidelines about how it should write code and all that stuff.
If you're not using those things, you're missing out.
And I'm running up your charges. Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm an enterprise architect. I actually have a real job these days. And one of the things fascinates me. I'm at a company that has six seven thousand people and part of my job is to try and keep track of Azure cost usage.
Oh wow, yeah, of course.
Very few people know how to do that, and you have to sort of have a fintech degree. Where is a Kouva over here. You have to have a fintech degree to actually figure out how much it costs to run a website connected to a database and all the security and all the monitoring and all that stuff. But I can see the same problems they're going to apply in the AI space and until they have some better tools that help you understand that.
Is part of the problem here is all this stuff is so masure like we don't have It's like Agile at the beginning, right where nobody really new well because you kind of got to do what you want because there was no plant.
So there are tools that are built into Visual Studio visual Studio code where there are gauges that you'll see down in the foot of the tool. And I'm sure everybody here is using Visual Studio twenty twenty six. And
yes I'm even talking to you, dear listeners. You do on that you're using the new Visual Studio, But on in the footer there's a little getthub copilot icon, and when you mouse over that or you click on it, it'll bring up a little set of progress bars and show you just how much you're using your Copilot resources. Now to a little bit of our our commenter to
their request requirements. There are different models that you can use with Copilot that have different we call them multipliers, right right, Okay, I see the agile one has has jimmed in here, yes, rate, so right, there are some more energy hungry models that you'll see a higher multiplier run with. And right now here at the time of this recording, right Claude Opus is up there as a
I think it's a three time multiplier right now. But there are other ones that you can use that have a zero multiplier, like GPT Mini.
It's kind of like playing slots exactly.
So what you want to do is you want to choose a model that's going to help you appropriately for the types of tasks you're going after. If you're doing some text summarization, you're doing a little bit of small code generation, using that mini model is going to really help you and not cost you a thing. But if you're trying to one shot an asp net core controller with some great views to go along with it that use Bootstrap, break out that Claude Sonnet four to five and go to town.
Right.
So if I ask Copilot in visual Studio, is it going to tell me what's a way to save money by changing my model?
I would.
So the models sometimes they know about each other, sometimes they don't, and you can give them. There's a fetch command that you can give copilot GitHub copilot right hashtag fetch space and then you can give it a URL and it will go out and analyze that RL. So
you can point it to to your point. Bill, you can point it to that pricing page on the GitHub website and have it report back here's the relative pricing of the models, and it might be able to give you some advice as to hey, let's use this model instead of this for certain.
Types of tasks.
So there is also auto mode, which is there's the real slot machine.
Right, Yeah, that's a weird one, that's right.
Hey, do choose the model appropriate for this task that I'm asking you about, and it will go and figure it out. And the best parties, it's not going to tell you which one that.
You that you haven't even turned it all the way up. Automode is one thing. Automode with unsafe.
So curl and curl, and I might have some experience.
Doing a little bit of that.
Please don't do this at home.
No, no, no, but again I have seen folks dialed in like that. Yes, and the burn rate is spectacular. But you've written your prompts well, and these are not These are multi page prompts. These are not small things. No. Yeah, yeah, the burn significant that the co generation is astonishing, and.
So having a very explicit instead of instructions, the prompt yeah can reduce the token.
Yeah, especially with Claude because, like Richard said clause Claude is kind of like Scooter the intern that's over eager to please the boss. Miss Frankly, shopping your Patsy is twice I already shopping them again, So it goes out, and you know, I thought you might need some more paper, So I went to Staples and I bought fifty reams of paper that kind of stuff. And like, I didn't
ask you to do that. So in the sipstem prompt you have to say, don't do anything except exactly what I tell you to do, right.
And this is this is one of the reasons why when I when I give talks that that get into AI topics like this, I like to come back to I believe that the best folks at writing those prompts, it's going to be the elementary school teachers.
Right, because are used to talking to kids. You have to hear it's splicit.
They've got a room full of kids that have ADHD, they've got opposition defiance disorder, and you don't know what they're going to do.
Get in the tub, the water use.
We forgot that step.
Right, So it's it is one thing to be very explicit. You mentioned the awesome Copilot repository. Our friend Burke Holland did an amazing job putting together what he called beast Mode, which was right, a series of system prompts that help out the GPT models to really get you towards your solution. But there's also agent descriptions out there so that you can bring down those markdown files and load in and get that persona.
Right.
When we talk about talking to an LLM, one of the first things we refer to before you even get into defining the context of the problem that it needs to solve, is defining that persona who are you going to behave as what are you going to do? And you mentioned the expert c sharp You are an expert c sharp developer and you know how to do this,
that and the other. I saw one that was one of the agents that's in that repository was talking about you are a fantastic at writing unit tests, and it even referenced personalities in the tech space and said, you have the ability to write tests like this person, and you know object oriented programming like Uncle Bob Martin, and you're going to be able to define and refine and do these things.
Well would uncle Bob do?
I know?
So we talked about this and Code with AI episode ten which came out this week, that writing agents, and we just sort of tried to differentiate between an LM and an MCP, which is a model control protocol, model content context protocol. I always get that messed up and agent right, So the agent is at the highest level and the LM you would give the system prompt, right, but the agent has a prompt. That's just like Jeff was saying, what is your persona, what is your area
of focus that you're going to do? Right? Are you only going to work on testing? Are you going to work on code? Are you working on VB code? You're working on assembler code? Right, those are the kinds of things that an agent can help with, but it's at a high a much higher level, and it will do things on your behalf, not just not just code, right, And you just have to be careful that you don't give it permission to go, you know, sell your house or something.
Don't don't give it that essay past word into your SQL surfer.
No, not the production one anyway. Oh, they're supposed to be different, that's right, in production. I just told you guys still know essay? Like who uses essay anymore? Right? Yeah?
Managed identity?
Managed identities now, yeah, and we should take a break for these very important message.
Yeah, we should. We'll be right back. Mission.
What a show, it's intermission.
What do you know?
Okay?
I think that was inquisition?
Yeah, oh, agreed to get popcorn?
Did you know? There's a dot net on aws community. Follow the social media blogs, YouTube influencers, and open source projects and add your own voice. Get plugged into the dot net on AWS community at aws dot Amazon dot com, slash dot net.
And we're back. It's don I Rocks Emberger Campbell. That's called Franklin. Hey, sitting with our friends Jeff Fritz and Bill Wolf. We're here at Philly dot net.
Ten thousand people in the audience on a very first live show in quite a while, and really fun to be in front of sitting with everybody and having a little fun making a show about I think a pretty serious topic coming into the end of the year here.
But in all seriousness, is this the first time you've done a show where there's a court downstairs in the building, just in case any of these folks get rowdy.
That's true.
Co birds.
Yeah, I'll tell you know where in Philly.
You know, I've been working with a couple of software development consulting companies now that are not only going all in, but they're trying to get all of their developers not only using the tools, but they're coming up with sets of standards for how they want to make software as a whole for their customers. And so they're building out templates for deployment, they're building templates for infrastructure, they're building out templates for UAX, all focused on educating the cogenerators.
And that's all these things are as cogenerators right to stay within the lines, so that each developer doesn't have to get those prompts right, they're just pre configured for them. Of like, this is the way we do things. There's some really great things to be said about those agents and being able to supply to them, or being able to pass in in a prompt, a prestructured prompt that you can have written down and out there on disk.
Have those templates built out and sitting in markedown format, so that even when you browse your repository and you look at the markdown, you can look at the template and you know.
That it looks the right way that you expect it to. And the ability for the AI the LM to generate and stick to that is really really good. But I think Carl made a really good point. Don't just stick to the template, but you got to tell it what not to do about the template as well.
Right to get outside of the line.
There's an example I like to show where I gave. I gave an LLLM the ability to summarize the weather scenario for a weather forecast, and I gave it four options sonny, cloudy, rainy, and snowy and I would send into the LLLM a bunch of different forecasts, and inevitably it would come back and say clear, nice, clear, Clear isn't one of them, right, So you have to tell it what to do and what not to do.
This is a topic that we've talked about a lot recently on dot net Rocks, probably much to the chagrin of many of our listeners. Can you guys, please let's talk about something else than AI pat The fact of the matter is it's fundamentally changed the way we write code. For me, certainly has, I know for a lot of our listeners it has. Black Web may be one of the exceptions, but it really has changed the way I write code. So here's a really good example. And I
love using my personal little stupid projects. I'm sitting there. I have a forty nine inch screen, and my wife and I play this game we call Sherlock, and it's
a logic puzzle game. It's from the nineties, I think, but it's been ported to a bunch of things anyway, So it has to live on one side of the screen or the other because my wife and I sit together and usually I'm watching something on a streaming service she's playing, but then when she goes out, I want to switch them around, right, So I got to switch
them like this. So I basically had co pilot generated little Windows app that says, Hey, I want to put this window here, in this window here, and swap them just swap them. Yeah, And I literally did it in fifteen minutes, and I know the code. It's not to do it, yeah, I don't know, God no, but but you know I know how to do it. It's not a magerate matter of me being lazy. I just it was a fifteen minute thing and I was just like, wow, that's so cool.
But vibe coding is a very powerful thing that I think is valuable for project managers. Program managers when they get the idea for a user interface update, for a patch, and they're able to take some code, they're able to take some screenshots, some ideas, talk to the AI generate
those concepts. And for those of us that are in the industry that are experts, like you dear listener with the headphones on, like, you can do this, and you know those edge cases that you want it to do, and we also know how to tell the AI, hey there's a plan here. You need to build because I am a project planner. I am a project manager, and I need you to build that project plan, that spec so that we can walk through it. And Copilot is very good at following a document and execute on those plans.
Well, have you done any vibe coding with AI?
Yeah?
What do you think?
It helps a lot?
Yeah?
I just you know the old days of you weren't sure how to do something. You go to the web, you do a you know, a stack, and you know and copy stuff and a lot of a lot of programmers just copy exactly what's in the page. That leads to all sorts of pan.
Take the error message and the copy that but to Google.
But having AI sort of guide me through things that I haven't done in a while, it really really a time saver.
And you know, to the to the point that I was making a black web. You can ask it to explain itself. I don't understand this, what's it doing? Comment it or give me a summary of what you just did, you know.
But we also use it for QA, generating tests, DevOps, you know, figuring out you know, sort of scripts and recipes for deployments and you know resources. There's a lot of places that it applies beyond just the C sharp coder.
You know, if you're billing by the hour as a developer, you really don't want to No, you.
Don't want to tell anybody that you even have them installed.
Yeah, I think or if you are users tools, you gotta lie about your hours or matter. It's still I think you have to restructure HIO, you, Billy.
The other side of that, Richard, is I think you have contractors that work remotely that really understand these tools, and they can actually juggle multiple clients and build them concurrently. Not that that's a good thing, but I think you're seeing stuff like that going on too.
Yeah.
And one of my favorite parts, how many of you ever have to interview people? Yeah, don't you love when you ask them a question and their eyes are going back and forth, and you know that they're talking to Claude or some other model and saying, give me a good come on, give me something.
Yeah, there's no such thing as a radio quiz anymore.
No.
I talked to one interviewer. He said, here's how I asked the question. Close your off, now answer this question. That's good.
Yeah, Well, you made a good point earlier. Richard about how project teams are able to get through a six week sprint in days.
What was a project team for six weeks was a person with six or seven agents, burning credits like crazy. Sure, you know, running hard, but the results were again astonishing.
What we really can can get into now is those things that were in the parking lot on the combine board, right, they're now in play.
Well, you're exactly right. I could keep telling you know, black web handed at this everybody's talking about it's like we're all going to lose their jobs, and I'm like, it just doesn't look like it. A. We need the Shepherd, but b how much it's not like any of us we're getting to the bottom or to do list right. Yeah, Ever there's always more And how many other projects don't even get on the board exactly because the backlog is so far back Exactly. You go back to the Luddites
and the industrial clothing production. While it was disruptive at the time, it also lowered the cost of cloth enough that people started owning more than one set of clothes. Imagine right, how many software projects have just never been written because they couldn't even get to the table.
It's interesting that the Luddites were the technologists of the day. They had the knowledge of what they were doing, clothes out of weaves, and it was suddenly threatened by machines. But they were you know, if they were us now, like us, we have the knowledge of how to build software, so we can interact with the AI. They didn't have AI, right, but they could probably be more productive with the machines then.
Well, in many on the street could follow that story. Over time, they got retrained on the new machine. Not all of them. Lots of people didn't want to play, but a lot of them did and it did change things around. It's hard to be in the disruption, but we're in the disruption.
So it reminds me of the CAD revolution, you remember that. So my mother was actually a draftsman at Electric Boat. Electric Boat, Yeah, and she she did everything by hand and she was very good at it. And her friend got on the CAD system. She's like, I don't want to do that, right, But they left her alone, and you know, she listened to her music and did her drawings and stuff, and when anybody wanted any real detail work done by hand, they called her.
I was one of the last classes at my university that that had a draftsman class required in engineering. I had to learn how to use.
All the tools and slide roll.
Yeah, a little bit of slide rule.
So that really makes me remember my father was an electrical dressman. Yeah, and he did the routing for electrical circuits in nuclear power plants. He worked out three mile Island. You can imagine, well, you know, but it's it is something that happened, yes, and uh, you know, I don't I doubt if his circuit caused the problem, but you can imagine all the drawings. It takes every little wire back then because it wasn't there was no tc P I P.
Well, Wover Dam was built with slide rules. Yep, no calculators, no computers still standing.
So let can we can we pivot the discussion a little. We've been talking about copilot, Claude, some of those tools that help us as developers. But I like to get outside that box a little bit and and something that that I want to make sure that that our developers here in Philadelphia and the listeners I want to I want to make sure that we're thinking about is not just how to use the AI to get your job done.
To build a.
Website, but how can you help your customers use the AI to deliver their requirements, their needs to their customers. There's there's more to that than just slapping a textbox into the middle of your appplications so they can ask questions about their reports. There's a lot more that we can do with that that we need to get. That's a great feature, Oh, without a doubt, it's a great feature.
I can recommend a podcast, yes, but there's there's there's things that you can do to return value to those folks, and I think that's someplace that we need to help the enterprises understand and use the AI better so that they can turn right. The developers can help their end users, whether it's somebody working in a call center, somebody who's working in accounting or doing financial analysis, help those folks get that same multiplier that we're realizing as developers.
Some of the work I'm doing is square there and it relates to CAD because I work for a company that manufactures construction components to build buildings, and part of what we're looking at is AI. How do you, as an architect, how do you design a building for the coast of Florida, so it can handle hurricanes. And if you have and if you ever see those pictures after this dorm, you know, a whole bunch of buildings are flat. There's one or two buildings center block that know that
are standing straight. And the AI said, but that's probably probably the company I'm at. It has to do with how you tie all the pieces together with.
Metal, roof doesn't get pulled out.
Yes, yes, and and we do all those calculations, but we're trying to figure out how to get a I to help do that kind of work.
That's tricky.
That's that's cool.
Yeah, we've been followed. One of the show recurring shows for us has been Vishwaz's show where he's now left gone into a startup to build l M tools for generating RFP responses to government contracts. Oh and it's been fascinting to listen to him as he's as they've learned more and hit the challenges and sort of that progress.
It's been a couple of years of this now, like we're just trying to pull a narrative together, Like he's taking on a tough problem and he's learning more about it getting on there, like these different cases are part of us trying to find stories about what's working what isn't.
But a lot of these What's.
The biggest problem I have with AI is dealing with friends and family, oh god, yes, and holiday parties and they're like.
HEYI is ruining everything.
I'm like, oh, please don't.
And they come up to me at the party and specifically like, you are responsible, You're doing this.
Right, it's your fault.
Well. AI seems to be the current scapegoat for whatever is happening. It is, but listen, a I didn't lay anybody off. That was people. People laid up folks off and they may have used AI as their current excuse, but we're also seeing lots of them walk that back afterwards, but it doesn't get the results they wanted, or that it actually wasn't what they were to do in the first place. Right.
I know that, you know, I have a young gen Z daughter and her generation is feels hopeless, you know about the future that you know, AI kind of take everybody's jobs and all that stuff that you were talking about, Bill, and it's I just have to constantly express to her that you know, this is no excuse to not do your best at what you want to do in life. You know, if you want to learn something for the for the sake of learning it, learn it doesn't matter
if there's an AI that knows it too. You go do what you want to do and be the best whatever that you can.
Assibly help you.
And yeah, that's that's a great point Bill, where I've I've talked to some folks, some artists who really don't like and I I agree with him, really don't like using AI to generate cartoons, images, photos. You're generating those images because you can't get a photographer or the personalities that you want to appear in those In those pictures, you're you're assembling them for some reason because you can't get that to happen, or you can't an artist to
draw a cartoon. But what you can use the AI for is to analyze something that you drew or something that you made. Give it a picture and say, you know what, take a look at this, review it and tell me how I can make this better. And then to your point, I can learn how to improve my skills and do more I do.
On the consulting side, I'm not talking to folks who are making money off of cleaning up by code of projects that don't work. Oh yes, well, and I feel like like we're in a stupid period, right, this is the early days of this tech. We're still in the AI bubble, which is a very stupid period, and people are not knowing how to use these tools, are getting in over their heads. Yeah, like I did this with
access back in the day. Lots of people spent the weekend and got themselves over their heads, Like there's money to be made cleaning up messes and building out the kit to get good at cleaning up the message this will pass only a few years.
One of the best customer comments they ever got is why is it taking so long? My brother could do this in access?
Yeah, like, you know what, you should try have your brother do it.
I'm done, But.
Richard, you're you're hinting at using AI to fix the mistakes that some human implemented with AI. Like the solution to AI being more AI feels like like a we're kicking the can down the road here a little bit.
It's also a normal escalation, but they are missed. You know, we've all we've often misused tools and inexperienced you misused tools and experienced people can get results, and then you start getting real costs. You know, it is possible with minimal skill to get to a certain point in building an application with these tools, but finishing it it's hard.
How many of us sell a sp net MVC applications with SQL statements sitting in a view right to our dot Net listeners?
You put them in the parameter.
Oh, just to change tax here. Anybody a musician or an amateur musician, play an instrument, write songs, jand up if you write songs, a couple of you, Okay, I want to know what you think of Suno and Suno is essentially something that can build a completely professional sounding song, complete with vocals and solos, just from a prompt and it sounds amazing. Now I'm a musician, it's very hard for me not to take offense at this, but I don't.
I kind of look at this as like the Cassio keyboard of twenty twenty five, you know what I mean? Who used to have organs in the home where people could play take me out to the ballgame and learn their things. But that doesn't mean they're going to take a musician's job. Right. This thing, however, it's pretty awesome. So who raised their hand? What do you think about Suno? Andy down? Thumbs down?
What's that?
I can hear you, but i'll replay your yeah?
Right?
Why I have a famous pain or painting something when you can?
Yeah? Right?
Have you listened to a Suno generated song? There? Actually? Rick Piatto did a video where he made one in five minutes and it sounds like it was done in a professional studio with an emotion, a voice full of emotion and everything. Who else raised their hand? Over here? You you play piano? Oh you never heard of Suno?
All right?
Somebody else?
Yeah? Go ahead?
It feels gross to you? Yeah? Yeah, synthetic feels grotesque.
Yeah.
As a tool to create and refine art, it's kind of grotesque. Do you do you think you could tell the difference between a Suno song and a professionally recorded song, Because I'm a musician and a producer and I record bands and everything and make albums. I couldn't tell the difference. It was really really good a step, Yeah, it's really
quite a step. But here's my opinion. I think that this is only going to make people want to go out and see live music that much more and I think that this is a wave, you know, and after people have been bamboozled or whatever by a what that's AI whatever, you know, then they're going to want to see real people performing with real talent.
Are we approaching a point where all elevator music is going to be generated by AI?
Probably is already.
Yeah. Spotify is basically admitting they're headed down that path. You know how you you can turn on a Spotify playlist of songs, you know, and then it just starts adding stuff to it. Well, they don't even want to pay those royalties anymore, so they're going to start using they're using these tools. If you're not paying attention to playlist, it's just going to start then sizing music on you. And the question is will you notice, Yeah, okay, don't really perform their songs.
Barry Manilowe, who sang I write the songs, didn't write And I don't want to make you just to paying someone to write the lyrics for me or paying someone to play the guitar in the track, because they're real people. So that's the difference. Someone would make that argument.
I think there's a point when we when we do talk about generating art whether it's music, video, even generating stories, generating write fiction, drama that isn't just coming from nowhere, right. We are feeding it information. We are shaping the direction of those prompts and sending them down a path, and.
For some using pieces from real art.
It is so right, there's copyright concerns there. But when we think about that as as creators, when you're looking to get that that ball rolling, and you're able to have a conversation with an AI with a with a language model and start to tease out these things, then if you're if you're talking through I want to write a song, right and I'm just writing the lyrics and and then I don't know. I want to throw help me out understand what the what what the instruments are
that I might want to put at this. It's still me that's saying, hey, you know what, let me let me hear what a what a jazz piano sounds like?
With this?
Personally, I want to hear a human play that. But when I'm writing the song, I don't know how to play jazz piano. I don't know how to compose.
You might want to get some ideas.
I want to get some ideas and to be able to get that first level expert to give me those ideas demo, to get a demo, to.
Hire some real musicians to put their own stamp on it.
Because to the to the point that I've heard a number of folks say, there's a human feel and emotion that you get when that you see not just when you listen to music, but when you look at an art piece and you see the paint strokes in the painting, when you when you see how an illustration is put together, you can see and feel how that was done that by a human, even if it is a human that's drawing in Adobe Photoshop.
And conversely, when you read something that's been generated by an AI, it has that certain, I don't know, a sycophantic feel to it, doesn't it.
It's got an extra emoji and mdash everything.
It's just the way that it sounds like in your mind when you read it. I had this experience, But yeah, I can't. I don't know if this is true because I haven't confronted my friend about it. But I did a post on Facebook and it wasn't I don't remember what it was about, but one of my friends one of my Facebook friends commented, and I swear to god, this person just took my post, put it into chat GPT and said, give me a positive reply about this,
and then they pasted it in. That's what it sounded like to me, and because it kind of summarized everything, you know, and said, oh, it's so good that you blah blah blah, you know, as if to prove that they understood what I was saying. Your real friends don't do that. No, right, No, they don't summarize and bullet point everything you said. So yeah, and let's they want to make fun of it.
Right, So to move this in a different direction sort of positive to me, I think a good area for AI is healthcare. And if I have something going on, and yes, I want a doctor to read the X ray or the MRI, I sure as hell want Claude to also look at it, because if they find something that the doctor missed.
Claude is so positive even if you were going to die and say, oh, if I just take a couple of shots and.
That's one of the best lung tumors I've ever seen.
Right, Claude starts every response with you're absolutely.
Right, right, say when you tell it it's wrong, but you're expected lifespan is lesson sick Bill.
You actually make a good point there, because I'm one of those people who I'll wait to the last minute to go to the doctor. Right, I've got don't do that symptoms.
Thank you.
My wife, missus c Sharp Fritz, has been keeping me honest with that. So but but right, I've got symptoms x Y and say, you know, I've got this weird pain in my leg that happens at some time in the afternoon. And she's like, you really should talk to the doctor about that. But I was like, I don't know, but.
Okay, honestly, wouldn't trust an AI to give me any kind of so anything.
I mentioned here's the medications that I'm taking, here's the weird symptoms that I'm feeling. And this happened to me while I was in Portugal for a conference we were speaking at and it came back and said, no, you you might want to talk to your doctor about that, because you might have a wrong dose on this medication you're taking. Sure enough, talk to the doctor and yeah, let's dial that back. And I don't have the problem.
But I wouldn't.
I would have right, because I'm a middle aged guy in America. I would have been like, when you drive or anything, it could be supreme tuma, but probably a headache.
The radiology story is an interesting one because there was this whole point made by like Jeff Hinton ten years ago saying, you know, generative AI is now figured out radiology. It's better at analyzing images than humans are. Radiologists are are done, They're totally unnecessary. He was one hundred percent incorrect. The demand for radiologists has only gone up, and part of that is that there was such a huge unmet demand for imaging, and the software accelerated the ability for
radiologists to do a good job. And so now they're doing three times as much imaging and most radiologists now use it's like seven hundred models certified by the FDA for imaging.
So this is where I totally agree with Bill that you have these specified models that are trained on their particular like radiology data, right, that are so narrowly focused that they're going to give you a better outcome diagnosis. Then if you just you know, type in a chat GPT, you know, I got it.
Yeah, I wonder if we're going to move away. As the dumb winds down on this. You know, if you think how much better the web got after two what's the level you know, after the dot com boom ended, and you know, after a year or two, we built better websites, like we stopped racing, started to think about what actually made sense. Right now, the business is good for making them models bigger, right Those companies are all incentive to make models bigger because they're going for these
outrageous evaluations. That means they have to constantly show they need to spend more money counter to what they actually needed, what's actually benefit show the customer. So as this ends, and it must, Yeah, I'm wondering if we're not going to go a local model. Right. So software development is actually a pretty narrow domain space. It's pretty tight. So I wonder when the dumb wind's down and we are focused on the most efficient ways to do things, is
that the tookys are gonna become irrelevant. You're gonna own that gear.
And also it becomes more attractive to your customers because you're not sharing screenshots and code of their Yeah, you know.
There's how you get rid of the whole sovereignty problem. Never leaves the building.
Yeah, foundry local is is absolutely a thing, O Lama. Running locally is absolutely a thing that we see folks using more and more. Right, we get the we get the fee models that are running locally on Windows. You can run Quinn on Windows. And if you're running with that the surface laptop with the NPU on it, you can do some amazing things. If you're playing Fortnite and you've got a fantastic GPU on your system at home, well, yeah.
And the radio implodes. GPUs are only going to get cheaper. Yeah, and we're probably going to be you know, racking up a few of those things in an office. Somebody's got to running them on stop.
We are still seeing that that growth of data centers, right, there's been there's a number of properties here in the southeast Pennsylvania region around Philadelphia where we are seeing old old warehouses, old factories that are being bought out and.
Being turned into nuclear power plight.
Let's come back to that in a second. But we're seeing these older, right, industrial facilities that are being bought out and turned into data centers. And there's people protesting because it's it's higher demand on electricity to bill you made an excellent point. We brought up three mile.
Hour in Philadelphia.
When you say we Microsoft, yeah, correct, Yeah, his blue badge is showing. Yeah.
So Microsoft has kicked in something two billion dollars to Constellation, which is the company that had been operating three Mile Island. They turned it off in twenty nineteen because it costs more to operate than the natural gas combined cycle plants that have been built all over Pennsylvania now. And but Microsoft doesn't care. Eight hundred megawatts of electricity is eight hundred megawats electricity, and it was a way to try and put that more power online. It's probably gonna take
a few more years for they get it done. Twenty seven seven, that's what they're shooting for. They're probably it'll probably take longer debt. There's a dozen plants like that around the US. So now Google has approached some some folks in Cedar Springs and Idaho, same kind of situation. Five reactors shut down for five years. So I mean it's going to help. We're in any more power than that.
It's interesting to think in terms rather dystopic terms of tech companies now going to advance technologies on power generation of course, I'm about to record the energy geek out, So here you go, you get a preview. Amazon's now committed to a new reactor design. Like all the tech giants are looking for other power source and.
Another place AI is got a factor in as grid management. Yeah, without getting the electricity.
But I also think we're overbuilding, right, We're in that. We're again in the bubble situation. Like what was the overbuild during the dot com boom? It was fiber optic cable, right, there was a ton of fiber optic cable was late and many of those companies went broke shortly thereafter, and the fire and the and the cable was bought up
ten cents on the dollar. Yeah. The only thing I would say that's safer this time around is the tech giants for the most part, have been spending cash money they already have that it would have used on stock buybacks or something and instead or turning it into land.
But having that extra electric power on the grid not only is going to facilitate AI focused data centers, but we've been trying to do electric cars for how long? We are doing electric cars right, but I mean at scale with significant delivery. Here the amount of draw that that puts on the grid. When we start thinking about higher percentages of vehicles on the road electric based.
They're not even close to the same league of what pot data centers are trying to consume.
No, no, not at all. But having that extra power on.
The it's not have more power on ARID is not going to hurt. You could stand to have more electricity. I think it's going to be an overbuild. I think a lot of them are not going to get finished. I think it's interesting to think in terms of Microsoft not being a software company anymore. Yeah, they're a utility company. Their utility.
So should we call this the future of not software development but the future?
No, I've renamed it the role of AI and software development because that's clearly clearly we ended up for better or worse. It's only a future. I've been doing this AI hype keynote for a while now, very much focused on what the end of this bubble looks like because we've been through this before. Lots of people are going to be hurt. I only it's going to be us. No, We're a scarce resource and our ability to learn these
new tools isn't going to go away. This tool is not going to go away anymore than the Web went away after the dot com boom ended. In fact, efficiency is going to be the word, and most people in software actually like being efficient. They don't like the rampant inefficiency. And so some ways the knuckle downtimes of a downturn is where we thrive because we do make our companies more efficient with what we do, and these tools can do that. It's just that right now there's a lot
of people incentive to not focus on that. That will end. The tools won't.
So if we're on AI one point zero and Web one point oh, was everybody build your HTML? Web two point zero is social media? Now?
It was? It was mash up too, right, Like I would argue that the post bubble AI will be hybrid, a lot more client side and a lot more focused model types. Like I wonder if you think about how constrained you are in a version three of the piece of software, right if adding something new to the stack is anathema. Right, this is our data store, this is our client libraries, like your kind of in a box. Like that's a pretty tight little model. Like here's an
interesting thought for you. The more mature your software gets, the less it's going to cost to maintain because the simpler the model is, because the constraints are so clear, and your most experienced developers who don't want to maintain that software and move on to the new things. The juniors come in and these tools would protect them from making mistakes. Your code coverage betters, your your rules are
clearly delineated. Like weirdly, we might actually get more reliable software out of this for relatively low costs based on the way models behave when they're well constrained.
The push for better models that are smaller and use less power means that we don't need to deploy and run as many data centers consume.
As much energy. That stuff's going to be on my desk. Yeah right, I don't want to go out in the cloud at all.
Yeah, I want my Raspberry Pie tower running.
It as Hey, I think we got to wrap it up, but let's give one more round of applause for Jeff Fritz.
And our friend walking out the door beIN a wolf.
Congratulations, what do I hear?
One? Two, three?
All right, that's our rally cry at Philly.
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