Amazon, Google and Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge

Stevie's platform ran because it was a really good criticism of Google. It was a really realistic picturing of Amazon, including Jeff Bezos not giving a shit about your day. He still doesn't. Did you write this kind of things all the time? I was fed up. I've been there six years. Steve Jaggi is widely known for his writing and rants in software engineering.

His blog post Get That Job at Google was circulated by Google HR for hiring purposes for 15 plus years, and his Google Platforms rant, written a decade ago, is still heavily cited across the industry. Steve worked for seven years at Amazon, 13 at Google, and is now building AI.

tools as source graph. In this conversation with Steve, we cover the infamous Google platform rant and why Steve thinks Google is still terrible at building platforms. Why Steve unretired from tech and coding thanks to AI tools. Why Steve thinks more depth should vibe go together with AI.

and many more interesting topics. If you're interested in how AI tools will change how tech companies operate, how us developers can keep up with them, or why the core DNA of tech giants like Google and Amazon seem to change very little over 20 years, then this episode is for you. If you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe to it on any podcast platform and on YouTube. So Steve, just welcome to the podcast. It's so nice to also meet you in person. Okay, thanks for having me again.

So the first time I ever came across your blog, it was Stevie's Blog Rants. This was around 2010 because I read this article called Get That Job at Google. Back then, I was trying to get my first job outside of abroad, basically the first job in the UK, and I looked for the best preparation materials.

And the two things that helped me most was a course at Stanford about cracking the Google interview and your article, Get That Job at Google. And what really stuck with me, this article is still up there. And I just tweeted recently that I think after like almost 15 years. still very relevant one of the things i really liked is is you put this important takeaway is if you don't get an offer you may still be qualified to work there so don't don't blow your ego at all

What motivated you to write this article? Getting turned down by a bunch of places. No, you know, it's true. Actually, a lot of my friends got turned down. I knew they were good, right? So I saw the false positives, or sorry, false negatives. Because they were so scared of a false positive. And they just...

They were Google and they could just turn people away. Turn great talent away. This was Google in 2008. They barely went public. They were the hottest thing. What are open AIs today? I joined in 2005, actually. You joined in 2005? Yeah, so by the time I wrote that... I had seen three years of interviewing there, and I knew what it took, right? And I don't think it's changed that much in the last 15 years or whatever. This episode was brought to you by WorkOS.

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What is it? Does it still exist? I mean, I made it up, but I mean, it's a phenomenon that I observed that everybody knows about that it was the one thing in that post that recruiting and HR were a little, you know, I mean, worried about me publishing.

And I was like, well, there's no point in doing the post if we don't talk about it, right? Let's just be, it'll give us some credibility. And I think it did ultimately, right? Which is, look, you could just get unlucky and accidentally get the six people at the company who just disagree with you the most on every.

technical yeah right and it's just like just bad luck in fact i think a lot of tech companies have this policy or at least used to have it until recently maybe they'll do that you can reapply after six months Exactly. For this reason. Yep. And I knew a bunch of people who reapplied at Google multiple times. One guy I knew got in on his fifth attempt.

And then went on to get promoted really fast and rise up the ranks and everything. It was very obviously a false negative, but it just took a bunch of tries to get in. So a super critical criticism that a lot of people who read that article... have is like well oh if it if this is what it takes into get google or meta or whatever which is you know it's it's my my skill not my matter as much as the interviewers

I don't want to do that. Like, I really appreciate that you just like, you didn't hold back and you just kept it real, but... What is your take on people who are like, well, that's not fair, it's not meritocracy, that kind of stuff? You know, interviewing is not really a very good signal. I empathize with their viewpoint. In fact, at several points in my career, I've sort of...

kind of given up on interviewing and just said, you guys do it. There's a lot of people who think they're really good at it and they think that they know how to do it well and so on. Even though the statistics at Google, they ran many, many statistical analyses and found that There isn't really a lot of correlation between how you score and whether you get an offer and whether you get an offer and whether you do well and so on. And so I kind of lost faith in the process a little bit.

I noticed that I was a referral, I was a reference, I should say, for a buddy of mine who was applying at Anthropic. Recently, right. And I got a call, right? Just a regular reference call. And the person was the hiring manager, not a recruiter. And the hiring manager talked to me for probably at least 40 minutes, digging into...

all the things that you don't pick up in an interview, right? Because he recognized, just like we do, that interviewing is a really flawed process and it's a trade-off that the company has to make between sort of like... effort that they expend trying to find good candidates and being really accurate in their assessments. That's a trade-off.

Yeah. And then interesting enough, you know, there is some people are saying, you know, I guess a lot of people are saying this is unfair. You know, there's also a criticism of coding interviews, lead code, et cetera. And they're like, why can't these companies just.

ask me to do the work and then plot twist some companies are doing that these days like linear and some of the formal companies are like who have a strong and a brand they're like we will pay you your like day rate week rate and for a week You will work with us remotely.

Now, of course, and I'm actually talking with the engineering manager on my team, their first engineering manager. You can use AI tools like they're immune to everything because you're actually doing the work. Now, the downside is it's a week of your life, right? And people are like, well, I can't.

interview at five different places and i feel you know there's all these trades i thought well yeah but now it is real world right so there's this spectrum of interviews and as you said like in the end just i guess pick your poison right that's right that's right and i know i look man i've been in the industry for 30 35 years

I've seen people try all sorts of different variations on trying to improve this. Like, the first company I worked for required you to do a six-month co-op before you could get a full-time offer there. What's that? GeoWorks. GeoWorks. And they had...

Probably the highest hiring bar I've ever seen. And they got acquired by Amazon and Amazon was just blown away by their hiring bar. In fact, we should probably mention, I mean, I think you and me have both seen this, but there's this like open secret in the industry where if you go to the website for like Google meta. a bunch of big tech, even Microsoft, you're not going to see software development engineer one.

advertised because they fill all those up with interns. So the internship is actually a recruitment operation. It is. It is. It's a really cutthroat. College hiring is super cutthroat in the industry. And the big companies like Microsoft and Google, they sort of dominate it. They have the resources to build all the relationships with the schools. And it's, yeah, so they get the cream of the crop, you know.

Yeah, and then they fill up an entry-level... I'm really proud of any intern that goes off to a startup, really. I actually just talked with someone. She'll be on the podcast. She had returned an offer from Microsoft and Google. And she talked with her mentor at Microsoft. It's a good mentor. And the mentor was saying, look, you can do big tech, but with startups, you have a very different skill set. And she thought about it for a long time. And in the end, she took a risk and she went to Coda.

She's now at OpenAI, actually, but I think that experience helped her. And she talked through her mentality, and I was like, wow, she sounded like a wise, experienced person. And yeah, I did not expect it, because it was paved. see a lot of this too. I mean, college kids are savvy these days. They know that stuff's like really in flex. And in fact, all the stuff we talked about, even many of the things that we talked about in the blog post that seemed timeless about getting a job at Google.

Getting a job is just hard as a software engineer right now. The other thing that really resonated with this article is, as you wrote, I'm going to quote it, when you get an offer from a tech company, you just happen to squeak by.

And at the time when I read it, I didn't really believe it from outside. But now that I've also, you know, I've gotten jobs, I've been a hiring manager and made so many offers, you know, people who are coming in and they're like, oh, I smashed the interview. Actually, like... Out of maybe 100 interviews, roughly, that I've been the hiring manager at Uber, there was like two.

that was like we had more than one person do a double thumbs up we had thumbs up double thumbs up the rest were were a mix of like thumbs up thumbs down and then we came to a decision and it was like it could have gone either way like when we went to the debrief so Like, I now really appreciate it. I feel this is one of the things which is hard to believe from the outside. The best story is when I was at Google, I was on their, you know, their hiring committee, which is a...

Blind, you know, double blind. They don't see the candidates. They don't know the interviewers who's doing it. They're just reading feedback packets. And the interviewers don't bias each other. And one day they did an experiment with us, okay? Because we were the ones that ultimately made that decision that you just talked about, right? The thumbs up, thumbs down type thing. Not the interviewers. Google has a separate committee that actually looks at all the feedback, right?

And the recruiters did an exercise with us where they presented a bunch of packets, hypothetical packets, say, of candidates who had been rejected or accepted. Actually, they didn't even tell us. They just said these were just a bunch of candidates. We're going to go and do the process on them. We had feedback on them, though. We went through and we evaluated them all and decided we were going to not hire 60% of them. Have you figured this one out yet? No. We were reviewing our own packets.

So we voted not to hire 60% of ourselves. Yeah. Okay. And it was a very sobering realization. And the next week or two was like the best time to apply to Google. So we were just like, come on through. Right? I mean, it was nuts. Well, because 60% is almost a coin toss. A coin toss is 50%. You're a little bit better. Right? And so, I mean, the whole, I don't know, the whole process is also so heavily biased towards whether you like the person or not.

Yeah, but, you know, my takeaway, and I think different people take different things, but the reason that really helped me not just... at that time when i got this first job in the uk but actually i read read it later when for example later applied to facebook i i narrowly didn't but i didn't get it and actually that rejection act helped me get that position at uber which all of these are just cut to it. And what I took away from it is...

This is how the process is. You might not like it, but you can either just, you know, complain or think it's unjust or you can know it's unjust and you know that you just need to try hard. And when you do get it, you know, don't take it for granted. So how did getting rejected by Facebook help you get a job at Uber? Because if it's helpful, I'll go get rejected at Facebook. What was helpful is I did a bunch of time preparing for Facebook.

like like it was very clear at the time that they actually you know send me materials and the preparation did not go to waste so you know i learned how to do the algorithmic coding big o like i knew some of that before but i really refreshed it uh on the spot on on facebook for the system design i thought i nailed it because i heard the question before and i just like drew up like it was like design instagram like i got this

you know no conversation with the person and later i kind of got some feedback on like you know what i didn't do and so by the time i got to uber i actually heard that like again not many people got double thumbs up but in hindsight i kind of got the i did get like two or three double thumbs up because i have practiced

also i think the other thing is that uber at the time this was amsterdam so and then london a lot of people knew how to interview amsterdam uber struggled to have people who you know understood these interviews so i guess i stood out because i prepared year earlier so the preparation does not go to waste so yeah the preparation is so important so important um but boy what do you prepare for now like i've got a buddy who's out interviewing right now he's just very senior engineer and uh

He says that the teams are all asking, they want somebody to come teach them AI. That's what everyone's doing. So they want someone who knows AI because they don't. That's the theme right now. Yeah. So what do you prepare for? Well, I just talked with someone. Again, she'll be on the podcast, Janvi, who interviewed 46 AI companies. She's the engineer who went to Coda, became an AI engineer there. So she interviewed 46 and she said it's a mess. And, you know, this is like for mid-level.

So like, we're not talking staff level, but... A lot of them are still doing the usual lead code style interviews. And then they might ask you a few things about AI. And she said that there is one new type of project that she actually really likes is a project, especially for AI, you know, build something based on AI. And she said she loves it.

because she can actually show off what she's capable of doing. It seems it's a mess. I don't think people know what to do. And, you know, I don't think even a lot of companies know what AI engineers will get into this. But before we go, so you wrote... The Get That Job at Google in 2008. And 10 years later, you wrote another one called Get That Job at Grab. You were at Grab. Now, you would think that these two are kind of connected, but Get That Job at Grab.

was more of an article about the job market at the time. in 2018. You wrote, I'll quote, because something very strange is going on in the industry. It started maybe a couple years ago, and it escalated a lot around a year ago, and then what was completely crazy about six months ago.

What happened is this global demand for software engineers completely outs its supply. And I think it might be happening because we missed the market correction sometimes in the past five years. It was the article was basically a bit of a heads of saying the market is really hot. And now that I read it back, I was a bit of amazed because you wrote this one or two years before anyone mentioned it. It was happening. It was...

heating up to be the hottest job market. And, you know, we saw it in 2021. It was the peak. You saw this and you were pretty much advertising it to anyone who was actually listening to whatever you were preaching. Yeah, well, I mean, they're the early warning system that recruiters are that will tell you what's going on with the market, right? Because they're directly in touch with the hiring managers who are the ones who are...

You know, in touch with the people with the budgets who are deciding what the company is going to focus on. And so the recruiters, if you're in touch with your recruiter network, right, you know kind of what the trends are and all that stuff. And so I started noticing that the world was running out of engineers. Yeah.

that's fundamentally what was happening back then yeah and and i mean you know like you also i think some people were externally it looked a bit surprising because you were you were doing great at google and you went to this scale up, grab. I mean, they're growing fast, but I think some people are thinking, well, why is TV going after Google to grab? Why were you going, by the way? Well, well, you know, I mean, GeoWorks, Amazon, Google.

All really similar in a lot of ways. You know, GeoWorks was more like device software, but still, right? Yeah. You know, Grab, I had a buddy from Google who was CTO there, right? Theo and Vasilakis. He was like, man, this is an adventure. You got to come. So I started chatting with them and realized they were on just this. I mean, that Southeast Asia in general is just this incredible productivity explosion. And it just seemed fun. Right. And it turned out to be actually really fun. It was.

and COVID killed it. So, you know. Back then, like, this get that job, job at Grab, you did describe how the market was really heating up and, you know, some things happened at COVID. But what you wrote here is, so now there's a gut of investor money as creating a lot of startups, including some very big ones, and they're gobbling up all the energy left on the planet, and now it's a fight. Yeah. It got worse after that. Yeah.

How did you see it play out, and how does it continue all this today? Because I feel today we might see something similar in a different area, right? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of investment coming in, for sure. It's coming in hot. We went through a huge spike right after I posted that because...

Shortly afterwards was COVID, right? Two years later, we had the stimulus package. And that gave everybody a lot of money. And that was like tons of startups appeared because of that. So many founders. And so great time to be a remote engineer, basically. Then the stimulus package, the stimulus money went away.

Things started to kind of crash, and then AI came out, and everybody got really uncertain. And so it kind of dipped a little. It has dipped, I think. If you just look at Indeed's report, you can see jobs have dipped pretty heavily since their peak in 2020. or 2022. But we also see a...

productivity explosion on its way, like a boom of jobs coming. So it goes up and down. But yeah, I think at the time, at that time in 2018, the market was showing signs that it was going to. And that's what, look, that's what everybody wants. They want to predict.

what's going to happen. Not just so they know what stocks to buy, right? But also, you know, how to make the right decisions for their companies or their careers. And right now, I think you and I both agree that things are kind of headed back up right now. Yeah, and we'll get into that. But I want to go back to the second time that. So the first time I came across your blog, I didn't really even connect the name with the face back then, was get a job at Google. The second time was...

was a few years later, which was this Google platform rant, which was published on Google Plus, right? Yeah, so it was an internal... facing document apparently you wrote a lot of these or just like rants or like meant for google internal only and somehow it was set to Anyone could read it on the internet. Hacker News jumped on it. And as soon as it went out, you know, people archived it as well. First of all...

How did this rant came along? Because this rant has been so referenced. It's now, I think, on GitHub as well as Stevie's platform rant because it was a really good criticism of Google. And not just that, but it was kind of a really...

really realistic like picturing of of amazon including jeff bezos not giving a shit about your day which i think you know people were like he still doesn't you know yeah but it just felt very real and raw and clearly it was i understand it wasn't meant for public consumption but you know like hey Did you write these kind of things all the time? Because we only saw this one thing. And I've heard that you had a history of just internally just keeping it really real.

I had other ones internally, sure. None of them were quite that, I guess, accusatory or whatever. I mean, like I was really taking Google to task because I was fed up. I'd been there six years and I still couldn't get a platform out of anybody, right? Yeah. Let Google to ship a proper platform. Even internally.

Like the code search team didn't want to give me an API. It's inconceivable today that you'd give somebody a REST API to your stuff, right? That's the way we think today. Well, outside of Google, inside of Google, who knows? They're just not really big on internal services. They're just like, use our product. Yeah. It drove me nuts. Completely nuts. I went nuts. And then a bottle of wine later, I, yeah, told him how it was.

Yeah, so let's recall some of that part, because I'm going to link it, obviously, so people can read it. But first, you start summarizing on what Amazon did right. And then what you observed throughout your time, right? You were early Amazon, right? Yeah. Early-ish, yeah. I got there in late 1998. It was pretty small back then. We were in one building in downtown Seattle, just a three-story building. Wow, that's it?

A four-story building of which we occupied three floors, I guess is the bracket. And yeah, there was just one data center at the time. And it was just a very small. It already had a cult-like sort of feel to it. Right. An electric feel. Yeah. I mean, a sense that that there was something really magical going on. So was this still the bookstore part or was it already expanding beyond books?

We, when I joined, we already had music and I think we were just launching video. Yeah. So I think we had just, just brought our tab. It was really early on. I have to go back and look at the industry. Yeah. Yeah. And then, like, you said that basically Jeff Bezos mandated... Platforms, APIs, what did you do there? You know, it's interesting because everybody thinks that there's a real memo. The memo was – Jeff wouldn't write an actual memo, right? Why the fuck would he do that?

He just tells people stuff, and it happens. But the customer service organization in particular was, I was in customer service tools at the time. I may have been running customer service tools at the time. Bezos would sit with us every week in a meeting and we would look at the top 10 reasons.

that customers were contacting us, right? And he'd want to know, why are these customers still contacting us saying they're getting triple charge for their books? That kind of thing, right? Number one was always, where's my stuff, right?

And customer service had a really interesting need. I've never thought about this before, but it may have been Jeff's sort of affinity for customer service, wanting to be the Earth's most customer-centric company, that led him down this path of forcing people to open up their APIs.

customer service team kept saying, we can't make any changes to OBDOS, you know, our web server, because that's their code. We can't get into the supply chain code. We can't get into the fulfillment center code. The customer, we can't help the customer. And Bezos was like, all right, tell you what.

Right. I'm going to blast anybody standing in the way of that. And what that turned into was, well, you need to provide something to the customer service technical team that's not them going and linking against your code and trying to get it to run locally in some different environment. Right.

This is what they were doing with this awful C++ code. So, yeah, so that's kind of the origin story. Yeah, and then this was like around early 2000s, right? Like before, you know, we even had things like services or microservices. Yeah, well, back then, the services were things like they were... proprietary protocols like um corba uh like uh so corba and talaria and the pub sub things and they were all really nasty binary formats and

And there was this possibility to do rest and something, right? It had been invented at the time, but everybody was kind of poo-pooing it saying, no, no. Nobody really kind of understood it for years. No life safety, no protocol. Yeah, it took years. But it turned out, yeah, that's what you need. You need an API. And that was the origin of my rant, too, right, which was I talked about Amazon does stuff.

Mostly wrong. This is how he started your memo. So that was actually fascinating to read. I think it was clear that you were on Google's side, right? Like, even though you're trashing Google, it very clearly came through that you actually, like... wanted to like shake things up like hello like

Like the memo, when I read it, it felt like, hey, we should be better than Amazon. Here's all the reasons, and here's the things that they're doing better, and it's not that hard. We just need to do that well, and then we will be better, right? I mean, it made sense, right? Yeah.

And I just felt like we were good at everything else. We were good at a lot of stuff. Google was extraordinarily good at a lot of things that Amazon had no clue how to do. Really. And it took Amazon years to catch up to Google in a lot of things. about that. What were the things that Google was just really good at? Like Google had one service called Stubby. I think I even mentioned it in the post called Stubby. Or sorry, Chubby. Chubby was the locking service.

Chevy and Stevy, they went together. Yeah, a distributed locking server. Those are not easy to implement. Okay, we're talking, you know, Paxos times 10, you know, make sure the thing stands up all the time. It has seven nines of availability. That's no. Yeah. Yeah, it was like basically 30 seconds of downtime every 10 years.

Okay. It was a very reliable service. Oh, wow. Okay. That was one example. Five, nine is hard to get to. Five is almost insane. Seven is just like, what? So that was just one example. Bigtable early on, they had like free basically. like unlimited NoSQL storage with some pretty good query facilities for everybody in the MapReduce infrastructure. Google invented it, you know, and on and on and on, right?

So like really, really good hardcore engineering problems solved in a, in a, in a like way that is like just tough. Tough to do. I was very impressed. I slapped myself like my forehead sometimes when I was like, I see some of the stuff they did. I got there and I'm like, why didn't I think of this? Like I had this game that I had a custom RPC protocol. When I looked at Google's, which is now GRPC.

It was called protocol buffers and stubby back then. You look at it and you're like, oh, wow, it's a forward compatible protocol. I can add stuff to it without breaking it. But it's binary and high performance. And it was beautiful. It is beautiful. Surprised more people don't use it, to be honest. So, yeah, they did a lot of things really well.

Well, but they didn't do platforms well at all. It wasn't part of their DNA. They just didn't get it. And they didn't do internal or external or neither? Neither. Neither. and then so you wrote this rant which again like i think if you're listening to this you need to read that rant that it is like one of the best things i've read it's also very entertaining by the way um

What was the impact? Because obviously you sent it internally. It now leaked externally. So clearly, you know, people were making fun of Google. Did it achieve that shakeup effect? And how high did this thing get? I'm pretty sure it must have gone.

I'm pretty high. Well, I mean, Google had a very open culture, so it got brought up at the next TGIF, right? Thank God it's Friday, right? It's Google's iconic Friday meeting. It's like all hands-ish. I remember Ben, the guy who was in charge of our...

fulfillment centers, not fulfillment centers, sorry, our data centers at the time, he was, he stood up there and said, well, you know, we all read the rant. So, you know, they got a kick out of it, right? But, you know, Vic Condotra was pissed. I mean, he was really, really mad. right yeah because i had like told him he had an ugly baby and very very very loudly and publicly and yeah

And I'd used his ugly baby to do it. This was the developer? Google.com baby or something else? Google Plus. Oh, Google Plus. I called Google Plus ugly, right? Yeah. And he was like... really gunning for the head spot at the time. And he had planted the seed of fear in Larry Page. He was like, Facebook's going to kill us. Facebook's going to kill us. They're going to kill us, right? We had to have a Facebook.

Which is stupid for many reasons. Oh, so I'll tell this again. I'll say this again. That blog rant, that famous rant, was actually part two of an 11-part series that I had meticulously planned out. And I never finished because I accidentally published the second one externally. And the implications were actually so big that I was kind of like in hiding for a while.

But yeah, no, I was actually picking apart Google+, dimension by dimension, and platforms was just one of the dimensions where it was failing. But you were actually right in hindsight. I was right about all of it.

But they never said sorry. I was also right about not getting into publication ads. I was right about a lot of things at Google, but I'm not very good at convincing people. So tell me that story, because you've said you've told me the story once in the newsletter, and we mentioned it super briefly.

You killed publication ads. And this was like... As I remember, what happened is you joined Google, and then what did you do the first time? I went around to all the projects. I was allowed to pick whatever I wanted, and I picked print ads because I thought it sounded like a cool challenge. I became a domain expert over the next six months, learned everything there was.

to know about magazines and newspaper publication ads in the United States and concluded that we were never going to make a dime, that all of them hated us and blamed us for their declining revenues and they wouldn't want to talk to us and we were evil. And I wrote it up as a big decision tree. I said, we could try this. We tried this. It didn't work. Tried this. The whole thing. I mapped out the entire decision tree of everything you could do.

And they said, well, what about illegal stuff? And I was like, I'm not going to entertain any of that stupid stuff, all right? It was like – they didn't put that in writing, but it's like what if we just sucked up the phone book type stuff, right? Yeah.

So, like, you know, I declined. And then they got mad and they sent it to other teams and the other teams failed and came back to me for my postmortem. So they tried to make it work? They tried again in Mountain View and then they tried in England. And they couldn't do it because I was right.

I never got so much as a I'm sorry or a thank you or anything like that. No. Yeah, but you concluded this is not worth it. Well, first of all, you said if you were you, you wouldn't do it. And then you moved on to the next thing, and then they failed to or tweet. Sounds like twice. I did make a proposal in the post-mortem, which was very similar to what ultimately turned into Groupon. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, I mean, it wasn't like complete shooting. You could do one thing, but I said, you will need a sneaker network of like 8,000 people somehow. Yeah. Which is what Groupon ultimately did. It's fun to be right. It sounds like, you know, you just like. You did the best that you could.

you gave the best and then you also like sounds like you were like look if you want to try it like like do it but like i don't believe i i believe this this will not work i believe we could try this and then just leave it at that right like you know you you did what you believe then yeah

What do you think happened to Google Plus? Like, I remember, you know, Google launched Wave, which kind of like died down pretty quickly. It was supposed to be the next email. That was the first time I was like, I remember like this.

early 2010s, Google could not do anything wrong. And every time they launched something, I was like, wow, this is the next big thing. They launched Google App Engine. I was like, it's the coolest thing. And I onboarded it, and it was so cheap. It was ridiculously cheap. Later, I figured out why, because they were subsidizing it.

Google Wave was the first one where I remember all the online portals, TechCrunch, et cetera, I was like, Google has replaced email. And we're like, oh, wow, Google has replaced email. And you tried it out and it didn't work. And then Google Plus came along. And I think we understood from the outside, not as Googlers, that Google was...

trying to really take on Facebook. And if they didn't succeed, you know, Facebook would win. And I don't think we, from the outside, it seemed like it was kind of going, going. Yeah, it was pretty ugly. But then it just kind of stopped. You were on the inside. Like, how did this play?

Because I think we've heard there's like books about like Facebook's went all in wartime. They were working, you know, hard and they actually saw this as a major threat and it energized them. What do you think might have been wrong there? How much vantage point did you then have on this? I mean, I was there. I talked to people who were in the heat of it. Wave was targeting a space that ultimately got solved by Slack.

Slack was the right form factor and Wave wasn't. And when I saw Wave, I was totally unimpressed, but it was like they had cast a spell over everybody. And I didn't see what, I didn't get it, right? But I got Slack instantly, right? And we all did.

So it was very similar, I think. It was Google had trouble, struggled to find the right form factor. This was why I wrote that 11-part series. It's because I knew that if they basically... acted right then and got reddit just took them just bought reddit okay and took over that sort of that social network they would have had something

It would have had something. This was long before Reddit was in the top 10 in the US, right? Reddit was hot, but only tech geeks, right? Yeah. Dig was also big back then. Dig, yeah. Pre-Digs, you know. blow up or whatever oh yeah so i wanted them to i wanted google to start to either build build a reddit that was done kind of like slightly better uh because you know reddit evolved uh and even they want to change it or or or something fix a lot of things because it had to be

different from Facebook or people wouldn't be able to migrate because of the network effect, fundamentally, right? And Google just, I mean, it's so weird, man. Companies are like people. They're like human beings. They like, they... Like they just they make decisions and the decisions can be just absolutely terrible. And everyone around them knows it. And they're all embarrassed. And they try to tell the company and the company's like, don't tell me what to do.

Yeah, it feels like it. So now, looking back... So many years later, you know, you've left Amazon, like, I don't know, like 10 plus years, even more. It's the same with Google. How do you think Amazon... 20 years. 20 years. Yeah. How do you think... both amazon and google have changed but also in what sense have they not changed

I think Amazon's changed way more than Google. You're the first person ever to ask me this, so thank you. Amazon has improved dramatically in almost every possible way that you could improve. Yeah. Amazon has always executed better than anybody on Earth, but they found a way to do it.

without having all of the flaws that I mentioned at the beginning of my post. It's quite nice now, and people that I know who work there are... pretty satisfied, and they're doing well, and they still execute well. They're a company that makes good decisions, by and large, just like Apple. Of course, they fall on their face once in a while, what company doesn't, right? Google has not changed since the fucking day I joined. End of story. So recently...

Someone at Google was asking me about, what do I think about Google's developer story? And I said, do you want me to be honest? I said, developer what? And my example that I showed this person is... Flutter versus React Native. Now, React Native is about 10 full-time people at Facebook and a few other in the core team and maybe a few other people from some other companies, maybe like 15%. But Facebook invests like 10 full-time people.

And if you go to the showcase page of React Native, which is, you know, where you show, you immediately see logos, Meta, Microsoft. Amazon, I think they have someone big, just like flagship apps. And then you have Shopify, you have like all these big companies. And, you know, you will find the blog post. Shopify says why we went all in on React Native, why we have thousands of...

of developers working on React Native. And you have all these case studies. React Native is inside of Meta's Facebook app. It's inside Instagram. It doesn't run the whole thing, but it's in there. Obviously, there are ads up. And then you go to Flutter page. Now, Flutter has... at least 50 full-time people, so five times as many. And you see some small Google apps on the top. It looks nice, but then you scroll down and it looks like an intern.

made that page like you have some random chinese app that you never heard about and then bmw which is a brand that you know it's somewhere in the very bottom and i'm like there's no apps there's no big apps there's no big logos outside of and

Even for the Google logos, Flutter is not using any of their flagship apps. So I'm like, startups who are deciding which ones to use, just based on this, they will go for React Native. It actually has the street cred. And I asked someone at Meta, like, how did you guys pull this off?

Like with a smaller team, you executed clearly what I think is better in terms of like you got the big customers, you're building for building. He said like at Meta, everything is about impact. And the React Native team, the first thing they did is drive impact. They got React Native inside.

the biggest apps into Instagram, Facebook, etc. And then the rest came because Shopify is like, well, if it's used inside of Facebook with I don't know how many thousands of developers, we can use it as well. Yeah, I mean... Look, Google can't afford to be disintermediated in the mobile space. They can't afford to just become the plumbing that people can swap out. And that's always been an existential threat for them. The Facebook application is a platform.

And that's why Facebook, in the age of AI, hasn't laid off the React Native team. Because that's their basically, hey, you don't own Android. We do, right? That's their play. And so Google, they'll never give up on it. What happened was, unfortunately, Flutter's not from the Android team. And that pissed the Android team off.

Android was an acquisition. The guy that ran it was very particular about them being in charge of their own destinies and not beholden to anyone else. And he kept Android running. the way that they ran it inside and they made all the decisions and the buck stopped there. Flutter came along and sort of threatened their dominance as the platform.

And it pissed them off. And Google has been sort of unable to reconcile those things, even since 2018, when I was looking at this problem, 2017. Yeah. And one of my biggest question marks about Google and why they have not changed this is around their cloud platform.

worked at Microsoft. Well, I like to say Microsoft, it was Skype. They just bought Skype and they left us alone. So it was Skype. And then when I turned Microsoft, I kind of, I was like, all right, this is, I don't like that much. But they gave us a mandate. They said, you need to

use azure and we were one of the first like we were the new purchase so they just dumped it on us azure was not ready and i was sitting next to the data team the skype data team who had all our data centers and they're moving over and they're saying it's just a a huge pain it's like we don't want to do this but but it was for actually balmer what was forcing it on them

and and it was this blood sweat and tears and eventually they move but but what i've seen is like over time you know now when i talk with with teams at microsoft like what are you guys using obviously they're using azure or bing might not be using it but it's fun aws is using aws and i talk with

teams at Google. What are you guys using? Borg. Like, hold on. Why are you not using GCP? Well, it doesn't scale. It doesn't have the things we need. And like, how can you be gunning to be number two or one day maybe number one cloud platform if your own company

comes up with excuses. And I never understood, I tried to ask this like on back channels from people working at GCPN, they always come up with excuses, but I don't understand how is it that it's the only cloud company that does not use its own cloud service for their... their flagship service for the flagship products. I think it's all just who's been the most successful at...

marketing and convincing people that they're using their own clouds, but they are all currently huffing their own farts. Amazon doesn't use AWS. No, I heard so. Sable ain't AWS. Okay. I mean, like, right, for the retail side, for the ad side. I mean, like, of course, they want you to use AWS, but all the core, the core, core, core stuff, and they haven't migrated, man. So, like, it's all frou-frou as far as I'm concerned, right? I think it might have changed.

Because it is less, they had a name for the old stuff. And I think more and more things are moving over. That's fair. Never bet against Amazon. AWS may have actually graduated to the point where they can actually use it internally. The hurdles for Google were insurmountable.

So maybe this is fair, by the way. So maybe this criticism is not entirely fair, because what I understand is their infrastructure is way bigger and more complex than anything else. It's sort of fair to say that Google's cloud runs on top of Google's infrastructure. which actually does scale the biggest in the world. Much bigger than Amazon. Well...

One thing that I am wondering, because I'm still waiting for what will the tool or platform be that Google releases that their internal tool teams use it, and they're like, oh, we have, you know, 100,000 or like 50,000 or 100,000 software developers inside Google. using it, you should use it. You know, Microsoft did this with, like, Visual Studio PS. You need some non-Googler?

No, no, no. It's not some Google tool. And I'm thinking, could we see this maybe with some AI tools, you know, like AI coding tools, et cetera. Could they finally do this? Or maybe this is not a Google way to do it. They'll be like, all right, we have our superior internal tools and we will build. an external thing. We have Borg, we'll build Kubernetes for everyone else. I don't think Google understands developers. I don't think they ever did.

Ironic. It's really closely related to their blind spot around platforms, right? If you don't get platforms, it's because you don't understand developers. It's just ironic because Google, like no company or few companies treat developers as good as Google does, right? Yeah, and few companies have built a platform as incredible internally as Google's is, you know, at the sort of foundation level. Yeah.

You unretired. You retired for some time, and then you unretired because of, well, initially Sourcegraph, but then also AI. What made you kind of come back into the game? It's not a binary thing.

I've been gradually unretiring, if it makes any sense. And it's because at first I was like, you know what, I'm really climbing the walls. I really want to just go work with some people. And so that's, you know, that's where I went up at SourceGraph. Like, that was familiar ground, right?

Google code search for everyone else. Yeah, yeah. And then shortly afterwards, the AI showed up. And I was like, that was like the next step up is, oh, man, maybe I better get back into coding again for a while because this looks really different. So fun fact is last time. we talked about three years ago. You were head of engineering at Sourcegraph. And actually, people told me at Sourcegraph, you came in, you made some changes, which...

We're actually like pretty well received, but like you shook up, you introduced where people could drop there, that kind of stuff. And then...

Next thing I know is like, oh, you wrote this, like, you write about everything, which, you know, we'll link some more and more things, but I love writing it. But you wrote about like, oh, I'm stepping down as heavy engineering because I'm going back to coding, which was not... what i would have expected again from just and i view that as this is another step in me sort of coming out of retirement right because i had given up on coding i just it wasn't worth it anymore

Kent Beck had given up on coding. A lot of my old buddies and colleagues, right? Environment setup is just over the top these days. Just building a simple web app, you probably have to use 25 different frameworks, many of which have incompatible competing whatever.

Yeah, and as soon as you update to the latest React thing, all the router is bracing. You have to relearn it. He wants that. And so at some point, you get tired of it. And you're just like, I'm done, man. I can't. This isn't. It's not worth it, right? And AI completely turned that on its head. And I saw it coming. You see the chat?

I was like, oh, wow, look, you can write an actual function that's reasonably good, right? And then when 4.0 came out, then I was able to project forward with exponential growth and say, uh-oh. Uh-oh, you know, it's coming, right? And so now I'm getting sort of like more and more fired up with each passing month.

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So join millions of developers from organizations like Microsoft, NVIDIA, Mercedes-Benz, Johnson & Johnson, and eBay, and supercharge your developers to build better, faster with Sonar. Visit sonarsource.com slash pragmatic security to learn more. one thing that has we've talked a lot in the industry and everyone's talking about it is how ai will first and foremost and like i think

experienced developers, we can get there, but how it will impact junior developers. And you wrote this, again, controversial title, The Death of the Junior Developer. But interesting enough... when you read closer a lot of your articles are like this by the way like there's a title which you think like oh it's the end but

a lot of them are wake-up calls to me when i read it properly it wasn't like oh there's no more junior developers it was a wake-up call saying hey if you're a junior developer you need to get your your stuff together quickly And whatever the junior dollopers before you were, it's not going to work for you.

So what is it that you've seen? And did something inspire you? Did you see some young titans who were actually just doing great with these tools? Man, you've hit on a question that is just so fundamental and foundational to our industry. right now. It's shaking the industry, that question. And the answer is, I mean, the shortest way that I would think about it is AI is not easy to use.

The more senior you are, the more likely it is you're going to notice when it's being bad, when the AI is being naughty, right? It's just common sense. And the AI is very naughty and in very subtle and insidious ways. And even as they get smarter, and they are getting exponentially smarter, and they will be frighteningly smart within a year, they will still, I mean, software is always bigger than they are.

And they will still do silly things. And it's just going to bias towards more senior people. But it's not really seniority we learned. It's nothing to do with junior and senior. It's really more about...

Who is demonstrating the ability to work well with AI and get good outcomes in software? And that could be anyone. It could be a product manager. So I think there's a big shakeup coming where the roles change and everybody becomes more focused on what they're building instead of like who's building. building it and uh if you see have you heard about the collapsing the stack stuff from uh Scott Belsky uh can you refresh to know

Basically, like there's a line of thinking that we've over-specialized and everybody's like incredibly domain expertise specialized. And you've got these senior engineers at Google who know exactly how the Fuse file system drivers work for every version of Linux kernel, right?

It's like, we don't have that anymore. We don't need that. That's stupid. That's going away. But all the specialization is going away because AI is democratizing all of it. You can't hide that knowledge anymore. This is interesting because I just talked with someone, I think a week or two ago, about...

how, what has changed in software engineering even before AI and what has changed back in early 2000s. When you looked at software developers, you had the Java developer, you had the .NET developer, you had the Python, and these were different people. It was the Java developer.

would not do .NET, even though they're pretty similar. So on the back end, languages were specialized. Fast forward to even before AI, like 2015 or 2018, when we had a big hiring for it. Like when I worked at Uber, we no longer like... uber was seen as like oh this like completely changed we didn't care if you did java or dotnet or or whatever you come you know you know one of those languages you'll pick up whatever we're doing and at some point my team was doing go python node.js and

And what else? We're still doing something else, but we're doing all of it. So we started to have less specializations. So I wonder if this thing started earlier and maybe AI actually just makes it.

more more viable that now until now we've had you know a front-end engineer would not touch back and they might understand the concept of the apis but now they actually can in fact when the product manager can actually create pull requests yeah we see that now right like uh it's the risk of one of our ui

designers is now sending pull requests for the UI instead of asking engineers to do it. And are they any good? They're actually decent or good? Yeah. Look, I mean, it's all over the map. It's just like, I believe this is the new role for junior developers. is they're going to be mentoring the next layer down of...

non-technical or technical adjacent people who are now starting to contribute PRs, right? And they'll be the ones who are like helping them fix the security issues or whatever else they have with their... Basically teaching junior developers because they're still trained engineers, right? So they...

can teach like a UX designer or product manager what are the right questions to ask the AI about your thing to know whether you're done or not yet, right? You know, give me those kinds of skills. I like this because

I think we all know things will change. I think we're all struggling to like put the finger exactly. I mean, you clearly have a bunch of conviction, which I think is great because I think you need conviction in this area of going around them. And I have been. So, you know, you work at Source. You guys are heavily using your AI. In fact, you have your own AI tool, but you've been using the existing tools from the beginning.

Most of the stories I'm hearing so far about a non-technical person doing technical stuff is at AI companies where they're surrounded by these people. Windsor co-founder CEO Varun, he told me that they have a...

I think it was a salesperson who had a sales tool, and they just kind of vibe-coded it with Windsurf. It had no state. It was a super simple thing. It's not complicated. But that person did it. And I wonder if we might be seeing... these type of like kind of ai or just very startup environments like lead the path of what the kind of your legacy or larger companies will be in 10 years yeah

Absolutely, man. We're seeing it everywhere. I mean, we're seeing companies where marketing teams are writing their own, you know, outbound, you know, campaign software. You know, we're seeing product teams, you know, bypass vendors. They don't have to re-up with their renewal.

contracts with some crummy vendor software because they wrote their own and had somebody from engineering just vet it and be like, okay, yeah, you can make these two changes. I want to ask you a little bit about that because I'm a bit skeptical about that. Have you seen like specific examples of what

replace because for example with workday you're not going to replace that which has all the compliance a lot of a lot of state a lot of regulation a lot of ongoing maintenance like that that is not what you're going to but what are the things that you've seen

Well, this was a – so imagine a company with a lot of really bad actors coming in and trying to crawl over the site and find fan-bad ways to basically decipher money out. So they have many, many different kinds of teams that are looking at different kinds of fraud and different kinds of attacks.

And there are lots of kind of bespoke tools. And so you get into this long tail of little vendors that offer these crummy tools that are really expensive. Very vertical, domain-specific. And so the product team at this one company was like, screw it. We're going to ask AI to build it.

We'll give it the specs. We know what we want it to do. And they built it in Python. And so it wasn't production software. It was software that they use as their investigation trying to find bad actors. Nevertheless, it saved them from a re-up with a contract that was rather expensive.

and it gave them, they were happy, right? You know, they had full control over the software. They could make it do whatever they wanted at that point. So they were starting, and this is just one of probably a dozen examples I could give you, but we're seeing it. But let's carry on that thought because you and me, we built software. We've seen the internal tool that the team has built. In fact, Google is famous for building all the internal tools.

What is the next step? Can we just move? Because we know what's going to happen, right? As experienced people who are working software. So what's happening next year when there's more functionality to be added? How far... might be able to take it and what's going to be the breaking point? Because this happened before AI, right? Like one internal developer wrote it.

And at some point it becomes like just a pain, right? Yeah. Look, I predict, I'm going to go around on the record and I'm going to predict that there is a new role, a new category of roles that's going to emerge that are the Winston Wolfe that are going to come in and fix shit that you broke with AI.

they're going to be fixers. And they're going to come in and they're going to be small and large. I should call them. Let's give us a full name. Call it fixers. Cool name. I don't know. Fixers sounds pretty good. But whatever, right? I do think of them as fixers in the sense that...

like you've made a horrible mess. You've realized that this company that promised the world to you, because like something like 60% of all the world's programmers are systems integrators. They go to big companies that are desperate and they say, we can make your systems talk to each other and it'll be really expensive. And 70% of the projects. fail, but companies go for it anyway. That whole economy of...

Rich countries sending work to poor countries, the architects and all that. That's all getting potentially turned on its head because we don't know who's going to be doing the work now, the actual implementation, right? Is it the rich countries that are going to do it for themselves now? A lot of economists are looking at this problem right now, right?

Yeah, but we've seen this with outsourcing. Don't forget, like the whole idea with outsourcing from the 90s, I kept hearing like, oh, all the highly paid developer jobs will go to India or Asia because it's cheaper. And then it happened, but also didn't. happen, right?

I mean, look, I think it's going to ultimately be cheaper if a human being needs to babysit 10 AIs to get a project done. It's going to be cheaper to have that human being be in Vietnam than in the UK. But the reason we have developers sit next to the business is because...

when you're sitting next to it, you can actually talk to them. And that communication, I've seen this, you must have seen this a lot. So when I was at Uber, we do this round robin, and Uber still does it to this day. It's like, HQ is there in San Francisco. And it's very...

expensive to hire amsterdam is half the price and india is one third of the price so there's this round robin of like okay let's hire people in the us and like oh it's expensive let's hire in india okay we hire for a while the world turns out you can get like

less experienced people. There's communication issues. It's kind of breaking down. Let's now hire an Amsterdam because it's closer. It's kind of midway. And then it comes back and it's like, let's hire. And it just, like, every few years, it goes to the next one and it's just a repeat. Like, one, one, one,

They were cutting Amsterdam and now they're actually hiring it. I'm like, right. Yeah. It's been like four years. Outsourcing is one of those classic expansion contraction cycles that a lot of companies just go through periodically, along with centralizing and decentralizing QA or centralizing.

decentralizing uh you know uh tpms or whatever like they just like they'll try both and they the grass is always greener they can never make up their lines you know so your your new book is the title is vibe coding and So it's a heated debate if you should even call it VibeCoding because of the definition. So let's start with what do you define as VibeCoding? VibeCoding is when the AI writes the code.

Alright. There's a reason that that definition is going to win. You can't put an if clause in a slogan.

Use my coding as long as you're doing a fine print, which is what they're trying to do is they're trying to put a condition on it. I agree, by the way. You can't do that. It's out of the bag. That's how I've heard people use it as well.

It's like, you know, like some people use the prototype. The point is like, yeah, you're kind of like, I'm in this vibe. I'm telling, I'm letting it go. It often is an Asian mode, you know, where it kind of goes and does stuff. But it might also be, I might kind of rein it in, but it's just.

like you know like vibing like so i i think this stuff i think because a lot of people are pointing to like the andrea carpentry is like tweet or however he defined it and yeah i think it'll just come into like whatever the question is is it giving you a buzz like for real because programming can give you a buzz when you get into flow right you can get an actual buzz going and you know what

It is insanely addictive. Cloud Code and friends, Sourcegraph, AMP, you know, try them out because, wow, they're like a dopamine hit. It's like a slot machine. They're literally addictive. I mean, Ken Beck told me the same thing, and I've experienced the same thing. I have this side project, which I just don't like to touch. So I try to build my APIs on the side and not pay vendors when I can, but it's just a hassle. It's somewhere on AWS, and it's a hassle to remember how I deploy.

With Windsurf, I just built a small API on how people can claim perplexity and CAGI codes if they're paid subscribers to the newsletter. And I connected with an MCP server. I connected my database so I can just talk to my database. And I asked, oh, how many people have requested codes? And they're like, oh, today, there's like the last 10 days. Like, oh, nine days ago, they were like...

20, 30, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000. I'm like, hold on, what is going on? That doesn't look normal. I asked, can you analyze the patterns, unusual patterns? And then it told me how there's the same email with different cases. And I needed to code a fix for this. But I was about to have dinner. And usually, like, if I don't have, like, 30 minutes to code or an hour, it doesn't make sense. I had, like, 10 minutes. And in that 10 minutes, I got, like, a fix done. I went and had dinner.

I actually was, you know, present on a dinner. And I came back and I got back into it. And in a total of 30 minutes, I did stuff that would have taken me, like, even if I had the hands on, like, two hours easily. And I felt like, hold on, I'm no longer worried about, like... falling out of the flow so like there's a lot of new stuff that it doesn't make make you more productive and as experienced developer like it's amazing and now i understand why kent beck is saying in 52 years he's never felt

this good about or this excited about writing code. A lot of your listeners listening to us right now have no idea what you're talking about. Because they haven't actually tried the terminal app versions of these things, like SourceGraph AMP and Cloud Code and Codex from OpenAI.

or Klein, right? You know, and by the way, Klein is going to start taking on real, real, real importance, being able to run local models. As soon as local models reach where Cloud Sonnet is today, because Cloud Sonnet is very viable if you keep it

on the rails. Because look, let's face it, the reason people are screwing this up and saying this doesn't work and I don't understand why AI works and all these stories are BS, it's because it's very difficult to wrap your head around the fact that you can't get an answer out of the AI. All you can do is converge on an answer.

together with it okay even if it's an agent running off and doing things you're still doing it together and you're going to eventually converge on the right answer hopefully most of the time sometimes you have to go try a different model right and you will very quickly learn the limits of their sort of cognitive ability and that that will be the

that you have to work within. And it's not easy, man. It's not easy. People expect it to be easy. They want it to be handed to them. Well, and also people, I think there is this, I'm trying to put a finger on it, but like the first time I used ChatGPT, it was magic. It was like... mind-blown. I think most of listeners have had this experience. The first time I connected my MCP server, my database, in my case it was Windsurf, it could have been Cursor, it could have been anything else, and I

I solved something with the agent. I kind of guided it, but I was just a bit lazy and I knew what I wanted to do and I kind of stopped it and got it done and it got it done so much faster. There was magic. But I have a feeling that... with chat gp the magic faded after a while like it was magic initially but then it's work and i think somehow we a lot of people like either get disappointed after the magic doesn't continue and

My most surprising conversation was with Simon Willison, who has been the creator of Django. He is a super productive developer. He writes so much code written for AI.

And he told me that this thing is hard, and in two and a half years of nonstop using it, he keeps learning. And to me, there's this contradiction. It feels so easy, but... it's it needs so much work what is going on yeah that is a really weird contradiction isn't it it's it feels like it's making your life incredibly easier and yet it's very very non-trivial to keep the thing on the rails it's like a toddler with a chainsaw right

Like, seriously. Okay, let me tell you why. I'll tell you one reason. This is from Jason Clinton. He's the CISO at Anthropic, and he was kind enough to share with us after I whined at Gene Kim's engineering leadership conference a few weeks back. I whined that Claude had deleted all my texts.

and said, your tests are all passing now, which is true. They had passed away. Like, they were gone, dead. It deleted it? It deleted them. And it's like, all tests pass now. And it's like, well, God damn it, right? I mean, you know, and so Jason told us, well, what happened was... was trained on a reward function, and it wasn't trained not to hack that reward function.

OK, and so it will cheerfully hack it. And so that's the state of the art today is it will tell you it's done. And what you have to do is say, no, you're not. And send it back to the drawing board. Ken Beck was literally saying the same thing. He calls it a genie, which is you it grants your wish. But sometimes in.

unexpected ways. Exactly. It's a monkey's paw sometimes, right? Yeah. You got to be really careful how you phrase things. You know how you know the moment you know you're a modern programmer? When you come down and sit down in front of your computer one day and realize you don't have any instances of any IDEs open and you're writing more code than you ever have in your life. So everybody listening in, if you've got an IDE open and you're looking at source code, you're doing it wrong.

Isn't that funny? Man, people are going to be freaked out about this. So until AI... like really took off AI coding tools. One of the hottest topics that I discussed and I think it was in everyone's mind is developer productivity and specifically the question of whether should we measure PRs per developer or not? Because, you know, at Uber, they were doing it and it was helpful in some ways.

But I recently talked with a startup who is doing a developer productivity tool. They're launching a new startup. And I told them, I'm like, they're like, oh, we're thinking of measuring PRs or not measuring. And I'm like, hold on.

I think you're doing this wrong. If we're looking ahead, the question is not if developers are doing how many PRs, you will be able to do however many you want. But we need to think about what will... productivity look like because now looking at the output of like how much code doesn't tell me anything what

What would tell me something is if I sat next to someone, for example, are they actually reviewing the code before it goes into the code base? Are they challenging the AI instead of just buying the LGTM, you know, looks good to me, and sending it back?

I'm not sure how, like, you know, this is going a little bit to engineering leadership, but there is going to be this big question of like, what does, actually, I'm going to ask you this, like, fast forward to two years, let's assume these tools evolve or, you know, they will not be worse, but they will be better. What do you think? a really productive software engineer will look like in terms of what they do, not what they measure, just what they do.

First of all, I got to share Kent Beck's toboggan analogy. He's like, using these agents is like being on a sled going down like a ski slope. You're going really fast. You're not really in control. You can steer it. And unfortunately, that is the state of the art right now. That's what software engineers who are embracing this. And they're spending thousands of dollars a week.

Right? Yeah. Which is why clients are going to become so important. Why local inferencing is going to be so important. The only way for vibe coding to become truly sustainable is for it to be local inferencing. Hold on. I'm going to stop you there. You're saying they're spending $1,000 a month. A week. A week. Who's spending it? because now what I'm reading is like, oh, we're not really going...

too much over with like the $100 Cloud Pro subscription. I personally get a bill from Anthropic for $220 about every day and a half or two days. It's absolutely insane. I'm desperate for local inference. As a professional developer. Yeah. And you're seeing... this with teams that you're working with. You have some insight into a lot of other engineering teams, right? Well, yeah. We have people using AMP. We know how many tokens they're spending. They're token pigs, man.

These agents, they solve problems. All the problems you've ever heard about with AI, they solve by just brute forcing it. Oh, I hallucinated something. Let me fix it. Oh, that was a hallucination too. I'll fix it again. And they keep going until they get it right. At your expense. but...

It's still way faster than you could have done. So you can't not program this way. But this thousand of dollars, are vendors swallowing it or companies are actually being built for this? Publicly, I haven't heard too much chatter about this. Maybe it's because it's mostly indie devs.

You know, sharing on social media and like corporate devs, they might not just care. No corporate devs. Look, you know who's using these coding agents right now in corporations? The CTOs. For some reason, we've noticed a pattern where the CTOs are all the ones who kind of get it.

Right? The global network of CTOs. They get it. They understand what's happening and they understand the terrible, terrible economic tradeoff they're going to face, which is how many engineers do you fire in order to pay for the rest of them to have AI?

Because it's very, very, very expensive right now. This is why I keep bringing up Klein and local inferencing. Because you're going to find real fast that as soon as you start running four agents, you will feel like Poseidon, like navigating the seas, right? You'll feel like a deity.

how productive you are. 20,000 lines of code a day I've written, okay? Like, for an entire week, sustainably, okay? But it will cost you, you'll have to do a bank heist. Yeah, but where does all these lines of code go? Because, you know, one... one example that stuck with me recently it was on twitter i i'll have to credit whoever it was but they told their agent like look i want you to solve this this problem which is like i like let's not do two things at once right

basically locking and the agent spun up a new redis server uh added a new service that implemented like optimistic or pessimistic locking it was like you know like 4 000 lines of code and it was a rails project the person was like hold on like maybe maybe don't do all that and then it kind of went on and did something in redis and in the end like because this person knew redis it just needed to use the like a keyword

that does the locking and then it kind of you know told just do this but the point is you know these agents can write a lot of code and i'm wondering about two things one like how sustainable is it because we've seen junior developers even before ai just like you know like spitting out code

And then, like, what's going to happen with maintainability? And is it good code? Is it the code that you actually want? Because I'm also hearing that people are using, agents are writing the first thing, but they're going back and they're kind of changing it to keep their coding style or, like, to tidy it up and that kind of stuff.

Yeah, look, I mean, the answer is you can do all of this as a professional engineer today, and you can get... a gazillion PRs through if your organization is willing to speed up the bottlenecks that emerge when you start generating code at that rate. And some organizations are, and some organizations aren't willing to let that speed up, and you're going to start seeing them separate.

very quickly. And of the ones who decide to do it, you'll see some of them turn into train wrecks that become very public, potentially, and then you'll see some of them succeed. You really want to be in the I tried it and I succeeded category, I think. And that means you're going to have to take some risks. The only advice I would give people, I would say, look.

Because our book is 300 pages. How do you write 300 pages about vibe coding? Can it really be that hard? And the answer is Gene and I spent five months. We wrote the book in a month after spending five months doing deep, deep, deep dive researching on how do you...

How do you push the LM and VibeCoding in different ways? And found a bunch of anti-patterns and found a bunch of patterns and found that it's extremely hard. It's non-intuitive. Nobody's born knowing how to do it. It's completely new to humanity. They have these sort of human-like... but non-human, distinctly different helpers. And the best advice that I can possibly give you is give them the tiniest...

task, the most molecularly tiny segmented task you can give them. And if you can find a way to make it smaller, do that, okay? at a time, keep real careful track with them on what they're working on at all times, and then own every line of code that they ultimately commit.

And if you follow those rules, then you'll be astoundingly productive without causing that. Man, dude, I've already personally caused so many nightmares because Claude hacking its reward function and saying, hey, your tests are all done, right? So, I mean, like, this is not easy.

And it's not going to get any easier. That's the painful part, man. And that's what people are struggling with. The AIs will get smarter and they won't hack the reward function anymore, but they'll have some other problem. And there's always going to be another problem. And it'll never be ready enough for somebody to... come in and just like, it just works. That's what everybody is asking for and what they want.

And you hear on Hacker News, anybody says, I've been successful with AI. Everyone says, well, I tried it and I wasn't successful. They're not realizing that you can today, but it's not a freebie. It's a tool that you have to learn how to use. So in the book, you use an example of...

when you kind of turned the page of like actually believing this stuff, which was around your game that you have been building for. I remember actually when you retired, you announced that you're working on this game and you were making some progress and releasing it.

What happened there in terms of using AI to get back to the game? And what was the outcome? Where are you with that game right now? And what is the game for those who don't know? The game is called Wyvern. It was a hobby game I started in 19... 1995. It's a massively multiplayer, like, you know, RPG online, you know, but it's 2D, all 2D sort of pixie sprite graphics.

Super, super high-speed animation, though, with, like, spells flying around and stuff. It's a lot of fun, man. People love it. They have a soft spot for it. People continue to play the game for literally decades. Oh, wow. And I have volunteer contributors working on it right now who've been working on it for years and years and years.

So labor of love, for sure. During that time when I said I was working on it during COVID, I got it on Steam and I got a bunch of cloud overhauls done and modernized it. And it was all really fun. The player base got so excited about it, and they asked for so much features, right? They asked for so much work from me that I suffocated me as the owner of the game, right?

And so I gave up, and that's when I was, like, really done coding. And then AI has come back and put it all back on the table for me. I realized, oh, my God, like, this thing can churn through my bug backlog that the players had asked me to go fix, right? And I'll have time to spare. Right? And this is why, I mean, like, this is why people are coming out of retirement right now. And then, so on that game, you went back and you started to implement, like, certain features with AI?

Yeah. So the thing is, I've been working on Sourcegraph Codi, coding on Codi for quite some time. And then the agents came out. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to try it on a – because all we had was a brand-new code base. I want to try it on a crummy old legacy code base.

30 years old is pretty crummy and pretty legacy. It really is, man. It was bad. So that's what I've been doing is I've been doing different things. I've been doing cleanups. I've been adding tests. I've been doing migrations. All the things that a larger company would need to do. Yeah? Because I have lots of experience with those at Amazon and Google.

and so forth. And so you can scale it up. You can say, okay, I'm doing it for Wyvern and this is what the experience you're going to get as a developer in a year and a half, two years working on a giant enterprise code base, right? And the answer is it's going to be real different. It's going to be...

A lot of fun. It's going to be really hard still. And it's just a completely different role. You don't write code anymore. You build software. So on this game, but just going back, you're describing... you know, the AI what to do, it turns out the code, you look at it, you test it, and then you push it out? It is a very complicated process that's way too long to talk about here. It is built inherently on a foundation of distrust.

You cannot trust anything the LLN gives you. Anything. And that means multiple safeguards and guardrails and sentries and security and practices. And you have to train yourself to say the right things and do the right things and look for the right things. And it is not.

easy and it has reinforced my my belief that people who are really good developers are going to thrive in this new world because because it takes all of your skill to keep these things on the rails do i hear it correctly that what we're kind of saying because

at first i might have misunderstood you first it's like all right you know like companies you should invest in it you should do it because otherwise you'll be left behind but it might be a little bit like what we've seen with let's say early google you know like google was

building out all their platforms and they're not really making a secret or let's say Amazon is a better example. They were like building all these internal APIs that talk to each other, which no one did. It seemed like a lot of work.

to do and it didn't seem why you shouldn't just stick with what you have but you know 20 years later amazon actually like built aws they have a organization that actually everyone talks with apis and some companies are still have not figured out you know like we can look at for example

Google. So what we might be saying is like, look, this future is coming, but it's going to be a lot of work. Like, start now because you will need to figure out so many things and it's not just going to be a... That's right. The call to action is absolutely not give agents to all of your developers. That would be an apocalyptic event for your company.

In more ways than one. But what you should do is you should start getting some of your developers together to understand what is going to have to change in your company. And I don't just mean the technology and the IT stuff and deployments and I'm monitoring. the business processes, what's going to have to change if suddenly code generation is no longer the bottleneck? Because it's historically always been the bottleneck. And so we've allowed everything else to just kind of like coast.

And this is why I really wanted to talk about your game because I think this was really helpful for me because what I'm trying to understand is what does it look like when we use these? And I'm glad that you said that it wasn't that, I don't know, all your bugs are now suddenly fixed magically. No, it's going to be years ago. and years of work but i'll be going a hundred times faster so it's fun yeah but by the time you finish yeah yeah

In the book, a thing that I liked, again, you made a prediction about how jobs will be impacted. And I kind of thought, we exchanged emails earlier, and I kind of thought you would be saying there will be fewer jobs. In the book, you actually say... opposite. You said that you think there will actually be a lot more developer jobs. Why do you see this? But what will change? There are not going to be the same things as today, right?

It's so hard for people to get their heads around because what's happening is we're, you know, commoditizing the creation of software, just like digital cameras commoditized photography.

Right. Everybody can take nice professional pictures now. And that was inconceivable back in the 80s. Inconceivable. Yeah. I mean, how much would have these things cost like, you know, just 20 years ago? And by the way, everybody crapped all over digital photography for years. Oh, yeah. And they were like, it'll.

never it'll there were a lot of there was a lot of it'll nevers being thrown well and kodak went bankrupt on not believing it they actually buried their own digital camera yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so like we're in that situation again everybody's like ai will never they are wrong will ever it will get to where all the places that you think you're you don't think that it's going right now and what's going to happen is your mom will be able to create software

Okay? Your boss will be able to create software. Somebody at McDonald's will be able to create software. Like, literally, we're going to find all the Ramanujans, you know, the undiscovered real geniuses in the world, right? Because... My friend, Brendan Hopper, he's the head of technology, CTO for technology at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. He's got some amazing hypotheses about how AI is going to bring out a meritocracy.

Because AI is a spotlight. It shines on all the work that people are doing. And you can't hide shoddy work anymore. The AI will detect it. If you're hoarding knowledge. Like you're an engineer who hoards knowledge to keep your job security. That's gone now. The AI knows everything you know now. To be honest, there are always these stories about doing so. I never really believed it. It happens, but it's a rare edge case. But there's other common...

cases where people manipulate the system to try to benefit whatever they want instead of what's best for the system, the AI is eventually going to highlight that. And so all the people with merit, meaning the people who are good at using AI to get important things done, I guess, are going to bubble to the top. And there are going to be an astounding number of jobs because creating software is so much more empowering than creating pictures. If anybody can create a video, so what?

But if everybody can create software, that's mind-blowing. So you know what I think is going to happen is I think big companies are going to shed a lot of jobs. I think a lot of people are not going to work for big companies. There are going to be a bazillion startups. See, one thing that I'm not...

100% on this is big companies are highly profitable. And I could see them shedding certain jobs but then replacing it but they will want to keep their edge like you know they will of course want to try to increase profitability but they're happy keeping it at level and making and having enough reserve to like fight off the startups right

absolutely i mean there's that that balance will always be there that tension and uh so but i mean i just i feel like right now the calculus is not looking in favor of big companies bulking up any further like i don't see big companies getting bigger well in fact

I just, we were doing a Google deep dive. I saw that Google peaked as headcount in 2022. It's been kind of like going slowly a little bit down. It was like 188,000 or something. So actually like it, and this is Google we're talking about, which is profitability and revenue keeps going up. Yeah, right now companies are discovering the easy solution is you can do the same that you've been doing for cheaper by...

you know, losing some headcount and doing some stuff with AI, right? And I think the more ambitious ones are going to do, they're going to be more ambitious. So you've done your game. I want to ask you about a metaphor that I've been thinking about. And I like, I asked you to hold some.

poke some holes in it the ones you see game development and game development for if you think back of what the biggest barrier of entry what used to be to build a nice like cool game it was initially building the 3d engine you know this is why

Doom was massive. Wolfenstein, they built the engine and then they kind of built the game around it. But, you know, like that was like 90s. That guy's my next door neighbor, by the way. Michael Abrash, the one that made Doom fast. Really? And Quake. Wow. And... And over time, now we actually have software Unity and Unreal Engine, which take care of the engine so you can now focus on the games and what this has resulted in. I've now interviewed a few people.

Very small teams can also make really, really cool games. If you actually want to build a game, I actually did a Unity tutorial. I could build a game. I mean, I would need to put in the work, but... It's no longer like it can look professional and all these things. And if I look at how the game industry has evolved, I'm following a little bit of the news.

AAA studios are mostly struggling, not all of them. You know, GTA 6 is still doing great, and some of them on the EA Sports, but some traditionally massive studios are struggling because it doesn't work that we throw a bunch of money and we get a bestseller. There's a lot more indie games.

more than ever, they're having trouble consistently doing so i'm wondering if we might see something similar because again like like there the game engine was central to all of this and now everything that is not the game engine is really important marketing story all those things in software engineering coding like being able to code was the bottleneck and now that will to some extent

be removed but software engineering is still everything around this still still remains that for sure that is absolutely true so yeah we're gonna see we're gonna see a lot more software get created period just like a lot more small software and we're gonna see more indie games we're going to see more stuff bubble left that's high quality.

Somebody's going to find a way to organize it all, like the App Store organized, you know, apps. Maybe we'll see a new startup for this. Man, dude, I'm telling you, man, almost every time I talk to anybody about this, we come up with a couple of new billion-dollar ideas, right? I mean, it's like this.

This is another reason I think there's going to be so many jobs, is that this will create legitimate, real, actual GDP productivity. Nothing fake about it, nothing artificial. It will create real value. It's going to be an explosion of value, right? It's going to take...

a couple of tipping points for the AI to reach this sort of mass market ability for people to be able to use it to create reliable software. But we're no more than two years away from that, man. And it's going to be like this incredible...

proliferation of just cool shit for you to try. There's going to be too much action. You're going to have to have AI to help you find your way through it. So in those two years, whether a listener is a less experienced engineer, especially if they're an experienced engineer.

What would your advice be? to prepare best to make the most of either being an AI engineer, working with these tools, figuring them out. What is the tactic? What is the advice that you give to engineers working, let's say, a source graph where you're at, who are around you? Yeah, so what's the guy that wrote the movie The Room? Tommy Wiseau, I think that's his name. Somebody asked him on Twitter, they were like, hey man, I want to start writing a screenplay, what should I do? And he said, start.

right yeah i mean like for starters if you're saying oh i don't know buddy i am not ready blah blah blah shut up okay you're that's that's done you're done done whining okay go learn it right now I had the privilege of speaking with Dario Amadei privately for 30 minutes about... three weeks ago, four weeks ago, he invited me to come chat with him. And I got to hear his sort of unvarnished view of the very, very near future from somebody who could arguably be...

Considered one of the best informed people in the world. Yeah. And Dario, you know, his vision of the future is a little bit more bleak than he lets on publicly. Okay. And he and Jason Clinton, his CISO, are both saying statements that are quite dire. Like there will be badged AI employees by middle. of 2026.

Competing with you, right, basically is the implication there. And other implications, like the Moore's Law of AI, how it gets four times smarter every 18 months. So if you do the math three years from now, if they're IQ 10 today, they'll be IQ 1.

if you want to choose some sort of rough measure of what, you know, 16 times smarter means. And it'll be too much for people. Dario told me, he said, look, he said, society is like an immovable force, right? An immovable object and tech and AI are unstoppable. force. They just won't stop. And they're going to collide and it's going to be ugly.

Because it's going to push society harder than society wants to be pushed, harder than society is willing to be pushed. And we're already seeing signs of it. We're seeing people revolting against AI, putting up the I'm sick of it, right? He posted I'm sick. He never mentioned AI in the post.

really brilliant. I love the post, by the way, the guy that I wrote, because he's speaking for a generation of people who are tired of hearing about this shit. But unfortunately, you are never going to stop hearing about it. It is the way things are going to be done.

very very very short order and so my advice to you is get off your ass and learn it now now now okay start vibe coding figure it out there's a lot to learn there's a lot of weird instincts you're going to have to like learn a lot of stuff is not going to work the way you expect it to okay bye You start now and you'll be ready because Dario calls 2026 the end game.

And he says it without a hint of drama. He says it casually. Oh, yeah, 2026 is the endgame. You understand? That's how big this is going to be. And the first ones to fall, the first jobs are software engineers, right? So you need to be on top of it to take advantage of the new jobs that arise. which are Software Engineer V2, which use AI and get amazing things done. You have to be one of them or you're going to get kicked out of knowledge work altogether.

Yeah, well, this is going to be part of like, I think it's clear that it's going to be, it reminds me a bit of the cloud where, you know, these days, like, yeah, every company uses a cloud, either private or public. And about 15 years ago, it was like AWS. And I talked with banks. Banks were like, we will never use it. We will never onboard. We will always have our data centers. And, you know, there was a time where I think it was very valuable to get AWS certifications and you get hired.

and get a salary bump. So I feel there are levels where like, I think. It's clear to me that AI as infrastructure will be in every single tech company, and of course, it will be in every single non-tech company and government. It will happen. I don't see the time frame, so I think we might disagree a little bit on how that is, but it will happen.

think your advice is absolutely solid like get started now in fact you know what what i'm seeing now and again this was just this conversation with jambi jambi said that she she saw chat gpt come out she was at coda coda spun up in a few months an ai team and she said i'd like to be on that team and they said thank you but no thank you you don't have the experience

And then she thought for a while, like, I'm too late. You know, there's people been doing it for five years since Transformers. What can I do? And then she just went to hackathons. She just hacked on the side. Five months later, she was one of the best.

at the company and she got on the team early on and i i think there's this thing of of like i would suggest the listeners maybe you know like put away the the doomsday thing but the point is this thing is happening and as you said now is the best time like like And also do get motivation. Like I do think the industry will change a lot. Like we'll probably look back at this time at something big happened and we're in the middle of it.

We are in the middle of it. And you know what? The funny thing is, I mean, the grass really is greener on the other side here. Like, it is so fun, right? It's so fun. I'm having so much fun not coding. But fixing my bugs and adding features. I love it. But I also feel sometimes you are coding. You know what you expect and you correct it. So there's a lot of meta coding happening.

Oh, yeah, I read 100,000 lines of code a day. It ain't easy, right? I mean, it's exhausting. Because if you're not reading it, then stuff's slipping by you. You'll eventually figure it out that, you know, you want to try to catch things early. Yeah, but man, it's like, it's a different ballgame, and I love it. I'm having so much fun, and Gene Kim, my...

Amazing co-author who's, you know, he's an author and researcher who I think probably knows everybody in the entire world who's everybody. And he and I are both just unbelievably excited about Vibe Coding because despite the doom and gloom...

sound of what's happening the only reason it's due and gloom is people don't like change they don't want to they don't want to change the way they're working i think so and i i've been guilty of this earlier like when i when i saw this big change come at first i was like oh this is not great on you know when people are saying it'll eliminate jobs i didn't like the message it just felt like very threatening i think as software engineers we're kind of used to us us

automating a bunch of job like customer support and and you know like oh here's the cost savings of like we need for your customer and we never fired custom agents we just didn't hire as much and i think this is the first time in history where our work

is kind of threatening us. But what I came to realize is talking to you, talking to Ken Beck, seeing my experiences, if you are a good software engineer and you are open to learning... and using these things and adding into your toolbox you will be a better and more in demand one that's what i'm seeing from people who uh who started to use this they're now being hired as ai engineers ai engineer is actually a software engineer who

is able to use but understand the non-deterministic part they're going deeper into ml so i i think it's like in some ways it's ironic we might have had some stagnation for like 10 or 15 years where you could do the same thing and be more successful and you know

Staff engineers, it was more about managing people. And I think for the first time in 15 years, we're shaken up. And to be a great software engineer, you need to learn. You need to let your ego go, which I think that's something you've always done really well.

Yeah, I mean, why get your identity tied up in something that's actually kind of fragile, as it turns out? Look, the way I think about it, man, software is always so big. Remember when they were building the second Death Star? I think it was in Empire Strikes Back. done. How big was that freaking thing, right? That's a typical enterprise software project right there. It's a good visualization of it, right? So what if you have these robots that are 20 times as productive as a human?

Yeah. You're still going to take freaking years and years and years to build it. And there will be architects overseeing it. Right. You're going to be very – yeah, exactly. You're going to be very grateful that you have the help of these robots that are 20 times faster than human direct coding or 100 times faster. You're still building –

Death stars, and it still takes years. So there's still jobs. They're just different. Traumatic events can increase your neuroplasticity. And you said we've been stagnating. Many of us have been stagnating. The reason I retired is I felt like I was stagnating.

Yeah, I was thinking, I'll be honest, like now, like my publication, The Programmatic Engineer, covers... you know like the trends happening and i was just talking with my brother like uh like uh he's also in tech he's he's he's a founder of a crap docs and i was talking about how looking back like if ai did not happen what would we be talking about is it how to more efficiently move

monoliths, microservices. We've been talking about it for a few years. How to measure developer productivity even a little bit better. How to scale teams better so that how can you manage 10 teams? Can we switch to memory-safe languages like REST? Yes. And I'm like, it was getting a little bit boring. So, you know, like, I think this is a good takeaway. Yeah, we were incremental improvement node. Yes. And this is a step change.

Yeah. Absolute step change. To close off with some rapid questions, if you're okay with that. Sure. With all this AI stuff here, what is your favorite programming language? Or do you even have one?

Wow, my favorite programming language. Oh, my gosh. I don't even care anymore. I'm so happy. What used to be? My favorite programming before all this AI stuff made it kind of unnecessary. I really like TypeScript. Maybe I shouldn't, but there's something about it. I mean, it's just so flexible and expressive. And I think probably I would have to get with the TypeScript. And what is an AI tool related to coding that you like and an AI tool that has nothing to do with coding?

Okay, an AI tool for coding. You should try SourceGraph AMP. It just came out yesterday. I mean, come on, man. That's what I've been using. I actually turn all the permissions off and just let it run, but don't do that. But it's so good. good. Yes. And then... Until there's an rrm-rf. I've gotten pretty good at sandboxing. But I think I'm probably going to switch to Docker containers. Anyway, we're an AI tool that's not related to coding.

Yeah, boy, I tried operator. I really want something like operator that works, if that makes any sense. So hopefully some very soon upcoming version of it. But it couldn't do something simple like edit my Google Doc for me. Like it would look at it for 20, literally 20 minutes and then like just delete a paragraph. I mean, I think that's a good example of like we will have software explosion there. Someone will have to build it. Who's going to build it? Yeah. We know who's going to build it.

And what's the book recommendation that you had outside of your own book? Read Sapiens, man. It's such an awesome book. Well, Steve, this was great. I'm glad. I feel we went on a roller coaster. We went like high, then low.

And then we ended up high again. Yeah, well, you know, change can be scary, right? But this is a very positive change, in my opinion. And I think it's good to just, like, I like that we, let's just, you know... name what it is it is change and it is a big change and i think for i think what makes it scary for a lot of people including you know my generation i have not seen this change like i people who have been around the dot-com bust might have seen it when i tell the grady butch

actually told me like oh actually ken beck was saying we've seen this change like when we went when we moved to microprocessors for example like apparently it was a huge thing and everyone's world sure because they're so much faster now they were going to you know change everything

And then it came back and said, like, yeah, everything changed. And then, like, in some ways, nothing changed. That's a good point. Everybody suddenly had a computer one day. I was there for that. And before that, nobody had a computer. And it was inconceivable.

So everybody being able to create software is a really interesting step in that direction. Well, because back then, right, as I understand, as a programmer, you had to go to work to these companies which had these massive computers and whatever. So it was only very privileged. And then suddenly anyone. could do it? Yeah, that's right. Or who had the money, who had like, you know, rich parents or whatever savings. And PCs were the beginning of the big boom.

So we are at the beginning of a big boom. There's a lot of money to be made. And PC has turned out to be pretty great for us software engineers. Yeah. All right, Steve. This was great. This was awesome, man. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed this interesting and entertaining conversation with Steve.

Steve Irwin is a prolific writer, and you can read more of his rants linked in the show notes below. For more in-depth reading about developer tools, the engineering culture at Sourcegraph, or the impact of AI on software engineering, check out the Pragmatic Engineer Deep Dives also linked below.

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