Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / Why Agents are Driving Software Development to the Cloud
Transcript
- 0:00However, if you're reviewing a code that your agent wrote,
- 0:04that's a ridiculous flow. It's like why am I leaving my
- 0:07workbench to go up to GitHub? You shouldn't.
- 0:11You should just. Do it right as the agent is
- 0:13writing it. And So what you're seeing is
- 0:16some of the things that like we're like the hero features of
- 0:19GitHub, like I think collaborative code review are
- 0:22going to be moving out of GitHub.
- 0:30I want to I want to start with the fact that you've been
- 0:33creating Warp before that you did Google Docs.
- 0:35You are all about the collaboration.
- 0:38And so Warp is a logical next step in collaboration, making
- 0:44the idea of software engineers collaborating in the cloud be as
- 0:48easy as the knowledge workers collaborating on Google Docs.
- 0:52But there was something funny that I read when I was doing
- 0:57research to start this podcast with, and I think you have a bit
- 1:03of a hot take when it comes to sandboxes.
- 1:07You're not super stoked on sandboxes?
- 1:11I'm cool. I'm cool with.
- 1:12I'm cool with sandboxes. Well, what is it?
- 1:15Tell me why you don't like the idea of the paradigm of
- 1:20computers. OK, so no, I, I'm cool with
- 1:24sandboxes. It's a funny hot, it's a funny
- 1:27way to start with a hot take. My my take is just, there's
- 1:30this, I've seen a bunch of tweets around like the right way
- 1:34of moving agents into the cloud. It's like set up like a cloud
- 1:38computer and let your agents kind of loosen it.
- 1:42And that's fine. That's not exactly how I think
- 1:47it ought to work. I think that the primitive that
- 1:50makes more sense to me is actually like imagining your
- 1:53agents is sort of like teammates who run in the cloud.
- 1:57And as teammates they have like sets of permissions and are
- 2:01doing stuff as themselves. And the really simple paradigm
- 2:04of like will move your laptop to a cloud dev box someplace and
- 2:09use that as a sandbox is kind of wrong because what you actually
- 2:13want is different agents doing different kind of things.
- 2:16And each one of those agents has its own set of like access
- 2:20controls. And just to make that more
- 2:21concrete, it's like on our team, when we're using agents, we have
- 2:25like we have agents that are automating all sorts of stuff,
- 2:28but some of those agents are automating things that like
- 2:30touch our CRM. And we don't want those agents
- 2:34like touching our code base necessarily.
- 2:36Some of those agents are, you know, checking for fraud and
- 2:39need to look at our production database.
- 2:41And so I would rather view the agents less as like that you
- 2:45plop them into a cloud computer and more as like they are sort
- 2:48of teammates, each with a set of permissions and roles in their
- 2:52own little workspace or they just have from like a least
- 2:55privilege perspective exactly what they need to do their job.
- 2:59I think that the the like cloud computer thing is like an
- 3:03analogy. It just is not the right, not
- 3:06quite right. It's almost like a difference
- 3:08between like a long running server and a like Lambda or
- 3:12cloud function. I think we want our agents
- 3:14running honestly more like lambdas or cloud functions.
- 3:18But I don't know. It's not like I don't, I'm not
- 3:21like upset about this view. Like I, I'm totally fine if
- 3:24people want to watch cloud computers.
- 3:26I just think it's, it's not, it's not exactly the way that I
- 3:28would try to set it up technically.
- 3:31So what you're saying is there are other beliefs and views that
- 3:35you hold more dearly and you are upset?
- 3:37About this is not this is not a thing that I spent like my
- 3:39nights. Thinking about you're going to
- 3:41die on. No, no, not at all.
- 3:43This is like a a kind of, oh, I see everyone moving this
- 3:46direction. I think maybe there's like a
- 3:48slightly better direction to to move in besides that, that's
- 3:52all. What are some hills you want to
- 3:54die on? I mean, a big thing that I'm
- 3:57like focused on right now is I do think we want to get agents
- 4:00off of people's laptops. And so I, I do think that the
- 4:05move from interactive agents, which is what last year was, was
- 4:09all about. And I'm talking about the coding
- 4:10space here where, you know, last year, I think really caught on
- 4:14things like Cloud Code, Codex Warp to some extent, where it's
- 4:18like you as a developer are sitting there talking to your
- 4:22laptop, asking it to build features, asking agents to pick
- 4:25bugs. Yeah.
- 4:26We're at a point now where agents need to transition from
- 4:32being like a solo sport to a team sport.
- 4:35And this is what I'm hearing from companies, too.
- 4:37Like, we talked to a lot of business leaders, like, they
- 4:39want a way of building automations with agents.
- 4:42They want a way of seeing what these agents are doing.
- 4:44They want agents, You know, right now if you do things
- 4:47locally, it's like every time you start a new agent, you
- 4:50basically you're starting from scratch in a sense, because the
- 4:53knowledge of the agent isn't really being built up over time.
- 4:57And so this is the year I, I think you got to get agents off
- 5:01laptops. You got to get them into some
- 5:02centralized system that's running in your cloud where you
- 5:06are tracking what they're doing, where there's cumulative memory,
- 5:09where they can run when your laptop is closed and so on.
- 5:12And so that's like, I don't know if it's a hill I want to die on,
- 5:15but it's like very much what I think is that's just like what I
- 5:18think needs to happen this year. And I think is is starting to
- 5:21happen for sure. Well, how are you seeing the
- 5:24best teams collaborate? Yeah.
- 5:28So it's pretty cool. I I mean, I can speak to to our
- 5:32team, which I think is a pretty good team.
- 5:35It's like I can pull up now in ounces.
- 5:39Oz is our like cloud agent platform and I can see what
- 5:42everyone on our team is doing with agents, which is pretty
- 5:44cool. And so if like I want to go like
- 5:48review APR or something, I can actually see how the agent, how
- 5:52the agent got there. I can see what the plan was.
- 5:54I can see the conversation, I can see what verification steps
- 5:57happened. I can also like set up basically
- 6:04environments for agents to run in that other people on the team
- 6:06can use. I can set up skills so things
- 6:10that are like repeated knowledge where you know, if I or a good
- 6:15examples like our person who runs our data team has set up a
- 6:18skill where anyone on our engineering team can now use an
- 6:22agent to access our data warehouse and the DBT tables and
- 6:26the agent understands the schema and all of that.
- 6:28And so we can all like now self-serve into doing data
- 6:31analysis when we launch new features, we want to explore
- 6:33user behavior or even people who aren't on the engineering team,
- 6:36like who are on the go to market team or on the growth team can
- 6:40use that same skill. And so I think a really high
- 6:43functioning team is building with agents right now is
- 6:45thinking about like, how do you accumulate knowledge?
- 6:49How do you make sure that everyone on the team is like
- 6:52working, you know, as effectively as possible.
- 6:55And that involves like a lot of transparency around.
- 6:57However, everyone is doing their stuff with agents.
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- 7:54Let's get back into this show. Yeah, there is a lot of the
- 8:00boring word would be governance stuff that you.
- 8:03Should. Figure out here, and one of
- 8:05those that I've been experimenting with or just
- 8:08realizing that companies are butting their heads against is
- 8:11when do we make a skill for the whole team?
- 8:14When do we make a skill for the whole company?
- 8:16How do you track thousands of skills across the company in
- 8:19this skill repository or database?
- 8:22And then that's just for skills. What about for special prompts
- 8:25or special rules or all the ways that you want to now kind of
- 8:30solidify these practices in these operating procedures?
- 8:35Yeah, so it's it's exactly what companies need as they scale is
- 8:41you can't just make everything available to everyone and every
- 8:44agent or you're going to get agent chaos and you're going to
- 8:48get agents doing things that you don't want them doing or, you
- 8:52know, more sort of prosaically, like you're not.
- 8:55It's going to overwhelm the agent.
- 8:57Like agents have limited contacts, like they're going to
- 8:59use the wrong thing at the wrong time.
- 9:01And so, you know, just in the same way that we've spent as an
- 9:06industry building, I don't know, 20 years of SAS, 25 years of SAS
- 9:12for humans to to do all of these internal tasks.
- 9:17What we need is, is a SAS equivalent essentially for the
- 9:22agent knowledge worker or the agent coder to like find the
- 9:27right tasks to work on, to find the right data stores.
- 9:30And I don't think that SAS is going to look like human SAS,
- 9:34like human SAS has. You know, there's been a lot of
- 9:38work put into what are the dials and knobs and UI that a human
- 9:44needs to use in a tool like Salesforce or linear Notion or
- 9:47whatever. And that stuff tends to be like
- 9:50irrelevant for agents. What matters to agents is like,
- 9:54it's like what data is available?
- 9:55Can they understand the data schema?
- 9:57What actions can they take? How do they report their
- 10:00artifacts? And so it's actually the much
- 10:02lower level, like machine oriented set of primitives.
- 10:05But I do think like, what's the SAS platform that needs to exist
- 10:08for agents to do knowledge worker tasks?
- 10:10Is is is a reasonable way to think about it?
- 10:13So I've heard you talk about this meta App Store type of
- 10:18thing before, and now I'm starting to wrap my head around
- 10:21it because it feels like there's going to be an App Store, but
- 10:25it's not going to be the traditional SAS that we think
- 10:27of. And it's probably going to be
- 10:28very bespoke to each individual organization.
- 10:33Yeah. So, so the way I see SAS sort of
- 10:37developing is that increasingly the front door to any like
- 10:42knowledge work task is going to be what I call a like a meta
- 10:46app, which I think the easiest way to think about it is
- 10:51something like Warp. It's something like cloud Code
- 10:53or Cloud cowork or GBT codecs where you as a knowledge worker,
- 11:00the mindset that you're going to be in is like, not like I want
- 11:04to go use a tool to do a task. Like there's only going to be 1
- 11:07tool. And that tool is where you ask
- 11:09an agent to do something and the agent can actually do the thing
- 11:13for you and do like draw it. Make this more concrete.
- 11:16For most of my career, if I wanted to do some kind of data
- 11:19analysis, I would probably import the data into a
- 11:23spreadsheet. Like I'm spreadsheets person.
- 11:25I helped build Google Sheets. I would go in there.
- 11:28I would probably like add a bunch of formulas.
- 11:31I would maybe create a pivot table.
- 11:32I would format it. I would try to like generate
- 11:34some charts and then I would try to like, but like, why am I
- 11:38doing that? It's because I'm trying to
- 11:39understand something or get some insight.
- 11:42And today the spreadsheet for me is being disintermediated
- 11:46because I will just ask Warp to like do the analysis for me.
- 11:52And what's really cool is it's like Warp can literally build me
- 11:58the spreadsheet on demand if I wanted to.
- 11:59I, it can build me a table, it can build me formulas, it can
- 12:02build me charts. I just don't need to as a user,
- 12:05learn another interface. And it's, it's like a pain to
- 12:08learn how to use a spreadsheet. Like, you know, it's like, it's
- 12:12what people finance spend, spend years, spend years doing.
- 12:15It's like you, you don't actually need to shape as a
- 12:20human your, your skill set to the app rat like like in the
- 12:26past, you would need to like go like read the manual.
- 12:28Essentially, there's only going to be 1 manual to read, which is
- 12:32again, it's a tool. It's like or, or cloud code or
- 12:35Codex or one of these tools that can basically go from your
- 12:39intent to solving your problem. And the types of problems that
- 12:44these apps can solve is like, it's incredibly wide-ranging.
- 12:47Like for another example is like, I don't really make
- 12:51presentations anymore in a presentation tool.
- 12:55I just ask an agent to make me a website.
- 13:00And like, I asked it to read our brand manual.
- 13:03So the website is styled the way that I want.
- 13:06And it's just so much faster to have it do it via code than it
- 13:10is for me to like go into Google Slides or Figma Slides and start
- 13:14like figuring out how to like, you know, you know, draw cursors
- 13:17and shapes. I just would rather go right
- 13:20from my intent to the outcome. And so if you think of it like
- 13:24that, you should start thinking about like, well, what value do
- 13:28these SAS interfaces really provide?
- 13:33And I think at the interface level, it's not that much.
- 13:36I think there is a lot of value that they provide in terms of
- 13:38repeatable complex business logic.
- 13:41So for instance, like an app that I think is probably fine is
- 13:44something like Stripe where it's like it's like years and years
- 13:49of encoding, like regulations and integrating the payment
- 13:53systems and it's. Not a thing that you're.
- 13:54Going to do on the fly, but like there are apps, you know, a lot
- 13:58of apps that are just sort of a simple UI on top of a database
- 14:02schema that I, I, I don't want to use like our, our, I'll give
- 14:06you one more example. I know I'm talking a lot like
- 14:08our talent team built our own interface on top of our AT our
- 14:15applicant tracking system, our ATS.
- 14:17And we like it more than the than the interface that this ATS
- 14:21has been building for the last 10 years or whatever.
- 14:24And this is built by our talent team who don't know, they don't
- 14:27code. And so it's just like bespoke
- 14:31apps for these internal applications or even no apps and
- 14:35just go straight to the answer. Just go like from a prompt, use
- 14:39the database, get what you want is the future.
- 14:41Yeah, I've said this a few times before where it's like the agent
- 14:45is now the equivalent to the browser in a way, because it's
- 14:49your gateway to the world. That's a great analogy.
- 14:55That's a great analogy. It's.
- 14:56Yeah. We don't want 50 million
- 14:59browsers, we just want one browser that can get us to the
- 15:01web page. Yes, I think that's maybe that's
- 15:04even like the better word for it.
- 15:06Like I'm, I'm calling it a meta app, but it's like it is a
- 15:10browser that does things essentially.
- 15:13Is maybe a good way of putting it, but yeah, it's the only app
- 15:17that you really are going to need.
- 15:19Is the way of interfacing with the agent for a lot of tasks.
- 15:22Not for everything, but for a lot.
- 15:24Yeah, it feels like then your app is just a skill in a way.
- 15:30Yeah, it's, it's kind of true. It's like some the data needs to
- 15:34live someplace, right. So I think data still matters a
- 15:37lot. You need to guide the agent in
- 15:41terms of what the data means and how to use the data.
- 15:45And that could be a skill. There's some place for code
- 15:51still in terms of, you know, one of the problems with agents is
- 15:54that they are there's, they're non deterministic.
- 15:57So even if you give an agent a really good skill, if you have
- 15:59like a business process that needs to be done exactly right,
- 16:05that needs to be in code, in my opinion, like again, just going
- 16:09back to like a financial transaction system, you don't
- 16:12want an agent like inventing how to do that on the fly.
- 16:15But you know, the, there's just a lot of things where it's
- 16:20totally fine to have the agent do it on the fly.
- 16:22And so it's, it's going to be a really different world of
- 16:25software. Software is going to still
- 16:27matter a ton, but the, you know, the, the way you interact with
- 16:32it is going to be very different.
- 16:34And I think, honestly, I think that's one of the things I
- 16:36haven't heard people talk about quite enough is like, there's a
- 16:39lot of talk about the way that you build apps is very different
- 16:44now, which is true, right? There's it's very easy to build
- 16:47an app in war for cloud code or even like a thing like lovable.
- 16:50But what? But what actually is going to be
- 16:52the biggest change for, for knowledge workers is the way
- 16:56that you use apps, right? Not the way that you build apps.
- 17:01And so the it's the way that you like learn how to prompt and
- 17:04talk and work with an agent is going to be the biggest change
- 17:06that that's coming. So one thing that happened to me
- 17:10and I have an exact experience of this is I created a little
- 17:15electron app and vibe coded it up and I was super stoked
- 17:19because it did all these different things to create short
- 17:23clips for my podcast, right? And later on I thought, wait a
- 17:30minute, why do I even need an app for this?
- 17:33Why did I go through the process of this app when now I just can
- 17:38create it inside of the agent and I can tell it all right, go
- 17:43ahead and use this skill to extract the transcript, then use
- 17:48remotion. And it's like a process that it
- 17:51has now in a skill form. And I don't actually need an
- 17:54app. I don't need to drag and drop
- 17:56the clip. I can just say here's my video,
- 18:00go and do your thing. Exactly.
- 18:03That's how it's going to work. Like just encode the knowledge
- 18:05and a skill. And then this one interface of
- 18:08like interacting with the agent can basically get you the
- 18:11output. And honestly, if you needed an
- 18:14app, it can do what I call like build you a just in time app.
- 18:18It can build you a little interface in the course of
- 18:20interacting with the agent. But I don't know, like the idea
- 18:23of like these long, long lived apps where you have to learn how
- 18:28to use them. I think is, is going to, is
- 18:32going to change. I think that's actually pretty
- 18:34cool. I think it's to be pretty fun as
- 18:35someone who is it's, it's a better way of interacting with
- 18:39computers. The way I, I called it in my
- 18:41article, it's like we're all like digital gods now.
- 18:43We can all just like have computers do what we want when
- 18:48we want, you know, at least until the singularity or
- 18:52whatever, until they they, they stop listening.
- 18:54But like at this moment, we've never had, it's never been
- 18:57cooler in my opinion, is just be able to tell a computer what you
- 19:00want it to do. And you don't have to shape your
- 19:03behavior to the computer. You can just like it will do
- 19:06what you want. It's pretty neat.
- 19:07Well, that goes to this idea that you have on, like how
- 19:12important it is to be able to express your intent.
- 19:16And I've also said this where articulating what's inside of
- 19:21you that you want to get out is one of the strongest skills that
- 19:26we can have these days. You know, whatever's inside of
- 19:30you, you've got all these ideas or you've got this stuff that's
- 19:33doing, and how do you articulate that in a way that can then be
- 19:36taken by the agent and created? Yeah, this this is one of the
- 19:42first things that I wrote about when agents started to become a
- 19:44thing, which was like the limiting factor here is actually
- 19:49humans ability to express what they want, right.
- 19:52So if you're, and that's true for if you have a, an agent that
- 19:58can basically do what you tell it to do, it will do what you
- 20:03tell it to do, but it can't like yet read your mind and so.
- 20:09And the other thing that's interesting here is like often
- 20:12you don't actually know what you want.
- 20:14I believe. That until you start doing it
- 20:18and iterate. And I believe creativity and
- 20:20like building stuff is fundamentally an iterative
- 20:22process is how I work. At least where OK, I think I
- 20:26kind of want something that has this shape and the agent will
- 20:29give me something I'll be like, no, no, no, I don't want it.
- 20:31That's that's the wrong shape. Let's go again.
- 20:34And so that's going to be where what sets, I think great
- 20:39knowledge workers apart, knowledge work like great keep
- 20:43builders, you know, creator, whatever is the ability to
- 20:48iterate and express the intent that you want to an agent to
- 20:53actually get to something that's cool and useful and and like
- 20:57worthwhile. And so it's really interesting
- 21:00from the standpoint of like, OK, if you're someone who is, you
- 21:03know, entering the workforce or like, you know, you're going to
- 21:06try to figure out what do you, what should you learn how to do?
- 21:09You should actually learn how to communicate really well.
- 21:13You should learn how to like write well.
- 21:15You should learn how to like, think very clearly and express
- 21:18intent, which is, you know, it's not the same exact skill set as
- 21:25like learning how to program. It's, it's like a little bit
- 21:29different. It's related.
- 21:32And I wanted to get into a little more of something you
- 21:36glossed over earlier where working in Warp you have the
- 21:40whole team that can see the whole history of how APR was
- 21:46created. I know that you have been pretty
- 21:49bullish on file systems from the get go.
- 21:52Can you explain how that looks when I submit APR?
- 21:58How I can see that provenance? How everything is working.
- 22:03Yeah. So this is one of the big things
- 22:05that we're we're building. So we built this platform called
- 22:09Oz. And the idea behind Oz is to
- 22:11make it really easy to, you know, basically move all these
- 22:15cloud agent conversations and prompts and execution off of
- 22:20laptops into the cloud and get to something that's like, you
- 22:24know, like Google Docs type system where it's like we're all
- 22:28collaborating together as a team and moving from the world of
- 22:31like Microsoft Word on everyone's individual laptop to
- 22:35a world where these agents are sort of team visible and team
- 22:37owned. So the way that it, it actually
- 22:40works is like when you, when you run a cloud agent through Oz, it
- 22:48basically everything is cloud backed.
- 22:50And so the cloud backing can be stored in our database or we're
- 22:56making it so honestly. So I think companies want the
- 22:58ability to own this data, right? They want to own the
- 23:02conversation traces, they want to own the prompts.
- 23:06And so we're making everything pluggable.
- 23:09So if you want as a company to be like, OK, we will provide a
- 23:13data store into which Oz cloud agents can record all of this
- 23:17stuff so that we own it. Oz is basically the
- 23:21orchestration layer and the coordinator.
- 23:23And the thing that says, OK, when Zach launches an agent,
- 23:26we're going to, we're going to run this agent in a particular
- 23:29environment. We're going to run it on a
- 23:31particular cloud machine. We're going to write all the
- 23:33data to a particular cloud location and it's all API based.
- 23:39So, you know, that's all flexible.
- 23:41So it could run on our hosting or could run on another
- 23:45company's hosting, which by the way, is the thing that the
- 23:47companies really want is the ability to have these agents not
- 23:52lift their code out of their own infrastructure someplace else.
- 23:56It can write the data into our back end or it can write the
- 23:59data into their back end. And so our our product approach
- 24:03is really around flexibility for companies that want to like
- 24:08deploy something like this, not trying to force everyone into a
- 24:12particular way of doing it. Where we do where we do sort of
- 24:17force consistency is at the API layer.
- 24:19So there's a bunch of contracts where the agents like they need
- 24:23some place to write a conversation that conforms to a
- 24:25particular model. Does that make sense?
- 24:28Yeah. I guess where I'm questioning
- 24:31now is do you have a spectrum of how like locked down it is so if
- 24:36somebody doesn't want anything going outside, they can't use
- 24:40the research lab models? Like certain they're not Privy
- 24:43to codecs or quad code. So we support a variety of
- 24:49things here. What I find that companies often
- 24:51want is to provide their own LLM endpoints.
- 24:54So companies will often want to serve these models through like
- 24:59things like Amazon Bedrock or to cloud like Vertex or Azure.
- 25:05And so we, we try to support that as well.
- 25:10Again, there's like a real spectrum.
- 25:11Some companies are just like host the whole thing for me,
- 25:16like they don't care, they want ease.
- 25:18Some companies are like, we can't have inference leaving our
- 25:22cloud. We can't have code leaving our
- 25:25cloud. We, you know, and so there's
- 25:29just a variety of things and we're trying to build something
- 25:32that is, you know, we don't do like a full on Prem yet.
- 25:37Like we, we, we could, it's like that that starts to be hard for
- 25:41us to manage. But within everything but that
- 25:44we are trying to make it so that it's very, very flexible in
- 25:48terms of, you know, data ingress and egress.
- 25:51Because, you know, companies, this is their their IP that the
- 25:55agents are working on. Sometimes it's the customer
- 25:57data. And so you need to be really
- 25:58careful. Yeah, I.
- 26:02Can imagine why companies would want all of this provenance on
- 26:05how folks are interacting with the agents.
- 26:07But what are the big use cases there?
- 26:10Is it audibility? Exactly.
- 26:13So OK, so the big use cases are auditability.
- 26:16So especially if you know something goes wrong, you want
- 26:21to understand why. And that could be for, you know,
- 26:26it could be for like a security, it could be for just like, yeah,
- 26:32like something caused the crash. You want to figure out why.
- 26:35So it's like could be debug ability you want.
- 26:39And, and sometimes honestly for like compliance reasons, like
- 26:42companies, it's just like not safe to have agents doing stuff
- 26:45that people you'd be tracking. You want cumulative knowledge.
- 26:52So like, I would call it like, like like like a context
- 26:57management so that over time the agents improve.
- 27:01And so one of the foundational building blocks for that is like
- 27:06some way of seeing what agents have done, how they've been
- 27:08prompted, probably evaling like, is this especially for
- 27:13automations? Like is this, is this the right
- 27:16setup? Is this the right way of
- 27:17configuring the agent? So you want, if you want to do
- 27:20that, you need to see record of the agent runs and how it, how
- 27:23it worked. And then a third thing would be,
- 27:27you know, hand off and steering. So if you have everything in the
- 27:33cloud with a conversation trace, you can do things like you can
- 27:38have an agent start a task in the cloud and then you can have
- 27:41a developer pick it up and or you could have multiple
- 27:44developers pick it up and like, and so that that sort of
- 27:48functionality again, is unlocked by being in the cloud.
- 27:52So there's a whole, a whole host of reasons why I think it's it's
- 27:55a better architecture. Yeah, there.
- 27:59Was something that I think you said in your talk at the Coding
- 28:02Agents conference. We did and it felt like it was
- 28:05almost like these 10 commandments that you've thought
- 28:09about when it comes to what you would want with a tool like
- 28:15this. Can you go over those real?
- 28:16Fast. Yeah, sure.
- 28:18So I think you want some of them I just mentioned.
- 28:21I think you want an audit trace for the reasons I just said.
- 28:24I think you want hand off because these agents are not
- 28:29always able to complete a task. I think you want access control.
- 28:37So you want the ability to grant agents granular permissions to
- 28:43systems and understand like and be able to limit what they what
- 28:47they can access. You want memory, so which is
- 28:52I've been calling it like cumulative context.
- 28:54Memory is probably a better word for it.
- 28:56You want overtime the system to work better.
- 29:02You want evals. So you want the ability like to
- 29:05measure how these agents are performing over time.
- 29:11And then from a like deployment perspective, you want flexible
- 29:17deployment. So meaning like, you know, you,
- 29:20I think it's really important to companies that the agent can run
- 29:23in existing environments and you don't have to like necessarily
- 29:26forklift code over. And then the final thing I would
- 29:29say is you want programmability. And so that means anything you
- 29:35can do with an agent through the UII think should be honest,
- 29:40everything should be built as a programming stack.
- 29:42So there's an SDK for launching agents, there's an API for
- 29:45launching agents. If I want it programmatically
- 29:48get the artifacts in an agent produced, I should be able to do
- 29:53that. And so, yeah, I think that's the
- 29:55shape of a, a good agent system. I see a lot of companies trying
- 30:02to build this. Some companies will be
- 30:04successful building it. I think a lot of companies are
- 30:06going to waste a bunch of time trying to build something cuz
- 30:09it's very easy to like get started with the website where
- 30:11you launch a cloud code. But that's like not, that's like
- 30:15not going to get you to a real scalable solution for for big
- 30:20companies, it will like, if you're like Stripe and they have
- 30:22a product around this, you can do it.
- 30:24But I would think for most companies, you should be looking
- 30:27at what are the components that you should be using from
- 30:31something like Oz where you can sort of like, you know,
- 30:34bootstrap your agent system and not waste time building it to
- 30:38make sure it works well. So one thing that you didn't hit
- 30:42on, or maybe I missed it, was observability of the agents
- 30:46working. I missed this one, sorry.
- 30:49Yeah, this is the other one. It's like, yeah, you should be
- 30:52able to go in at any given time, get a link to an agent and just
- 30:56see what it's doing and steer it honestly.
- 30:59So if you want to hop in and change its direction, you should
- 31:03be able to do that. You should be able to do it from
- 31:07anywhere. Is another thing like agent
- 31:08access anywhere. So you could do it from, you
- 31:11know. AAA from.
- 31:13Your phone, you should be able to do it from, you know, like
- 31:17wherever. And so these agents are things
- 31:19that you're just like, you know, if you have a teammate on Slack,
- 31:23you should be able to like access your, your agent teammate
- 31:26wherever you are. Yeah.
- 31:28OK. So, and that is going back to
- 31:33what we were just saying earlier, how we interact with
- 31:37the agents and how we interact with apps in general is a much
- 31:42different experience because we're now interacting in a way
- 31:48that we want to see all these agents in the UI.
- 31:51But that might be the only UI that we care about.
- 31:55Yeah. I mean, I think, OK, I think
- 31:58your job as a builder and I use, I'm going to use builder even
- 32:03more broadly. It's not just like software
- 32:05engineer anymore. It's like even as a knowledge
- 32:09worker in general is going to be like, how do you effectively
- 32:13prompt manage and like, you know, kind of like steer a bunch
- 32:19of these agents to do useful stuff?
- 32:23And so, you know, you should imagine you're going to have a
- 32:27lot of them. They're going to be running on
- 32:28different time horizons. They're going to have different
- 32:30skills, they're going to have different outputs.
- 32:33It's going to be really like one thing that is really kind of
- 32:35annoying is it requires a lot of multi threading in your mind.
- 32:40I don't know if you feel this is your like I, I constantly feel
- 32:43like I'm like losing track of like, yeah, exhausted.
- 32:47It's exhausting. It's it's kind of a just from
- 32:52like a psychological perspective.
- 32:53This is one kind of like unfortunate outcome is like I'm
- 32:57getting more done, but I feel like I'm also working harder.
- 33:00Yeah, it's like more mentally taxing on me.
- 33:02We're working. Harder, but less at the same
- 33:05time. Yeah, I'm like, just like
- 33:07juggling a lot of stuff, you know, like typically when I do a
- 33:12podcast like this, I'm like, I have agents working on stuff in
- 33:14the background and I'm like, OK, I'm going to have to go back and
- 33:17check that PR when this is done. And like, it's, it's not really
- 33:23making my life easier. It's making me more productive.
- 33:26But it's not. I don't think that demands on
- 33:29people are going to be less, unfortunately.
- 33:32No. Well, yeah, I mean, fortunately,
- 33:35unfortunately, it definitely is a lot more like brain juice that
- 33:41you got to put towards something and.
- 33:44It's not, it's not the fun. It's like the, it's like the
- 33:48contact switching brain juice, which is what I hate.
- 33:50Like it's like it takes you out of flow.
- 33:52I would much rather be in flow coding something.
- 33:56Deep. But yeah, that's like more fun,
- 33:59but I just can't really justify doing that when I could be
- 34:02building 5 things at a time, you know?
- 34:05It's which yeah, it's it's weird situation.
- 34:08It is. Well, and I have to ask, I know
- 34:11you've answered it a few times before, but I imagine listeners
- 34:15are probably wondering this question of like, how do you
- 34:21feel like you can compete against the labs that are just
- 34:26pushing out subsidized tokens? Yeah, it's an awesome question.
- 34:31It's like it's the it's the most challenging thing for our
- 34:34business for sure. And so just to expand on the
- 34:36question, it's like when we offer AI and Warp, we
- 34:42essentially are like paying API rates.
- 34:45It's somewhat better than API rates because there are scale.
- 34:47We were able to like negotiate discounts with the model
- 34:52providers that you know, that if you're like an individual using
- 34:56the API, you can't really do. But the, the short answer is
- 35:01like, I think we are trying to be complementary to the other
- 35:07tools on the market. We are trying to build something
- 35:10that is actually a great place to use Cloud Code if you want to
- 35:13use Cloud Code or if you want to use Code X.
- 35:16We're building features that make it possible to use like our
- 35:19coder view and our file tree and voice input and like actually
- 35:24make a really nice workbench for any coding harness with a bunch
- 35:28of launches that are coming out around this Oz orchestration
- 35:33platform is also we're making it work multi harness.
- 35:37And the idea is just like, I think it's better for us to
- 35:42compliment rather than compete when we're in a period of cost
- 35:49being a major driver of what people choose from a pure
- 35:52product standpoint, I'm very biased, but I think our product
- 35:56is like better than a lot of these like other TUI, like I
- 36:00think it's better than than a lot of the other stuff out on
- 36:03the market. But we're not in a moment of
- 36:07pure product competition because the labs have a cost advantage,
- 36:13which is not like unfair. It's like it's their model.
- 36:16It's like it's fine. I do think though, for the
- 36:19record, it's temporary because I think open weight models, you
- 36:25know, NVIDIA just invested $25 billion in this.
- 36:28There's like reflection AI, there's a whole bunch of open
- 36:30weight models that are going to become good enough for the
- 36:34coding use case and that's going to drastically change the
- 36:37economics of selling tokens. But for now, I like, I don't
- 36:42think we should try to compete too much on that.
- 36:44That said, it's actually we're still having like pretty wild
- 36:48growth even as like a, a business of selling API, sorry
- 36:53of like, yeah, selling these API tokens.
- 36:55Like we're still growing really fast.
- 36:57Like we're, we're growing at like over 1,000,000 new revenue
- 37:01every week recently. It's all like, and it's all we
- 37:06don't lose money on it, right. And so it's pretty cool from the
- 37:10perspective of like, even though we aren't the cheapest option,
- 37:14it's such a good product and it's so useful to people that
- 37:18they're totally willing to pay a slight premium to get to use AI
- 37:24through us. And so, you know, it's and it
- 37:27also just speaks to just like the value, like the market that
- 37:30we're in being such an incredible growing market that I
- 37:33still think we can build a really big business even if
- 37:36we're not like the cheapest product around.
- 37:39That's all. That's great answer and it's
- 37:44interesting that you talk about swapping out harnesses.
- 37:48I would have considered warp to be a harness.
- 37:55You don't. Look, we have our own owners.
- 37:57Yeah, so. So we have.
- 38:01Well, here's how I think about it.
- 38:02So in case people are not totally familiar.
- 38:06So warp itself is the is the terminal or we, we now call it
- 38:11like an Ade. It's so it's a agentic
- 38:13development environment. It's a term that we we coined
- 38:15actually that's. Becoming it's like a hybrid
- 38:17terminal, right? Yeah, it's like a, it's like a
- 38:19hybrid terminal that has some coding features in it, but only
- 38:23a coding features that are really useful for agentic
- 38:25development. Within WARP, we have our own
- 38:29agent, which is, is think of it as like our version of Cloud
- 38:35code, where the advantage of using our agent is that it's
- 38:39really tightly integrated with the UI.
- 38:41And so like, it just is like you get better user experience than
- 38:47if you use a pure CLI. So like we give you editable
- 38:50diffs, we give you code review, we have LSP that runs over the
- 38:54agent stuff. And so there's all these nice
- 38:55features around using our agent and it's a really, really good
- 38:58agent harness. So like historically we've been
- 39:02many times at the top of the public evals.
- 39:05So one of them is terminal bench.
- 39:07We've been in the top three on suite bench.
- 39:09So it's a really great harness. But we're about choice at this
- 39:14point. And we, we recognize that some
- 39:18users honestly for cost reasons would prefer to use cloud code
- 39:22or codec to what user subscription or whatever.
- 39:25And so you can use those things in warp and have a really,
- 39:28really great experience that way as well.
- 39:30And so we, we think it's like a, you know, it's, it is, we do
- 39:34have our own harness, but we don't sort of force it is, is
- 39:38our take on it right now. It's bring your own harness or
- 39:44use off the shelf in a way. Yes.
- 39:46And like developers are like curious, right.
- 39:48So sometimes developers want to use Gemini.
- 39:53It's like I don't, it's Gemini's fine like sometimes, but like
- 39:57there's a totally good reason why if you're a developer, you
- 39:59might want to like switch between art warps, harness the
- 40:03cloud code harness, codex harness.
- 40:06There you you might want to run all three honestly, for
- 40:09different types of tasks. You might want to compare them
- 40:13with warp. You can like, you know, I think
- 40:16one really cool thing that comes out of work destroyed multiple
- 40:18harnesses is like you can have you can fire up free agents and
- 40:22have. Gemini, try to do a task Codex
- 40:25try to do a task clock code. You can have clock code review
- 40:28Codex's work. It's, it's just like it's a,
- 40:31it's a cool thing to sit one layer above from a like
- 40:36orchestration standpoint. And so there's real power in
- 40:39that. And for companies, we can
- 40:41provide metrics in terms of like, well, which one of these
- 40:44harnesses is actually performing best?
- 40:47And so there's there's like a nice thing just being one layer
- 40:51above. Yeah, that optionality, but also
- 40:54again going back to the observability and being able to
- 40:57tell, first of all, what are people preferring?
- 41:00And then second of all, actually, should they be
- 41:03preferring something else? Because like what's exactly for
- 41:06and on like a, a tokens per, like you can measure the
- 41:10efficiency of the harnesses, you can measure like the PR
- 41:13throughput from observability standpoint, it's really great.
- 41:16And then the other thing that companies are concerned about is
- 41:19lock in, right? So if you are, they should be
- 41:23honestly, like you should be concerned if you're locking in
- 41:26your entire stack to like clock code or codecs or something.
- 41:29It's like, I don't know, there's this crazy stuff where the
- 41:31government is designating Anthropica supply chain risk and
- 41:34like even beyond stuff like that, It's it's you should be
- 41:39setting yourself up as a company for a future where some of your
- 41:42models are open weight. I really strongly feel that you
- 41:45should not be imagining that you're going to have to pay a
- 41:48ton for intelligent tokens forever.
- 41:52And so I would be very wary as a company of like just betting on
- 41:56a single Frontier Lab to provide all your tokens because you're
- 41:59going to end up overpaying and giving it a bunch of power.
- 42:03Yeah, I make this joke a bunch, but I saw one of my favorite
- 42:07tweets was instead of having codecs review quad codes work
- 42:16and say hey, like review this work and tell me where there was
- 42:19problems. You tell one of them that the
- 42:24other one just went through the code base and introduced a bunch
- 42:27of bugs and it needs to go find them.
- 42:31That's smart. And so it's much more rigorous
- 42:35and much more like, oh man, there's bugs everywhere.
- 42:38We got to go find it. That's awesome.
- 42:40That's hilarious. So yeah, we're, I mean, we're
- 42:44investing also in an actual orchestrator.
- 42:49And So what I mean by that is a so with with Oz, we have all
- 42:55these orchestration primitives, you know the five things I
- 42:57mentioned earlier. But what you really what's cool
- 43:00is once you have those primitives, you can start to
- 43:02have like different patterns of orchestration.
- 43:05And so you can have an orchestrator where you have like
- 43:07a team leader that says, I want to, if you give it a complex
- 43:11task, I want it to spin up five agents to do this.
- 43:14We're going to have two agents that are verifying, We're going
- 43:16to have one that's designing. And there's, there's like a ton
- 43:20of different patterns you can do for this, just like there's
- 43:22different patterns for how humans work together.
- 43:25And so this is going to be native functionality that we
- 43:28have for making it possible for agents to do harder, longer time
- 43:32horizon tasks. And so it's it's going to be 1
- 43:36of like the most, it's just going to be like a crazy, a
- 43:39crazy type of sci-fi experience that you see agents coordinating
- 43:44each other. But yeah, that's definitely
- 43:46that's coming. It's pretty cool.
- 43:48Yeah, you have the QA agent and I imagine you have different
- 43:52compositions of teams that you could have again where I can
- 43:56bring my own and create my own composition or I can grab some
- 43:59off the shelf for more. Exactly.
- 44:01Yeah. And so my attitude on this is
- 44:03like, I don't know the right pattern.
- 44:05If it's like a hierarchy, if it's like they all work on a
- 44:08team, if everyone has roles. And I don't think anyone knows
- 44:12the right pattern. I don't actually even think that
- 44:13there is a right pattern. So what we're trying to do is
- 44:16make it very flexible so that, you know, people who want to try
- 44:21different stuff and can build different patterns of
- 44:24orchestration on what we're doing and what we'll provide.
- 44:27Like you said, some out-of-the-box so that you can
- 44:29sort of like measure and see how they do.
- 44:32Yeah, it's pretty cool to see agents having conversations with
- 44:35each other. It's like.
- 44:36Kind of tricky. It goes back to we're all our
- 44:38own little R&D departments and you never know, the pattern
- 44:43might be, did you ever do that in grade school where you would
- 44:46write like a paragraph and then it would be time and you would
- 44:49give the paper to the person sitting to the right of you and
- 44:52you would get their paper and then you would write the next
- 44:55paragraph. And by the end you had all these
- 44:57different stories that were all completed by everyone.
- 45:00That's so fun. That's cool.
- 45:02That might be the best way that agents work too.
- 45:05You never know until you try it. I don't know.
- 45:08I have a feeling that they'll work in ways that are similar to
- 45:12how humans organize because they're just trained on so much
- 45:15human, human intelligence. But fundamentally they're like
- 45:20alien brains. And so they they might work in
- 45:23ways that we don't work well together.
- 45:26Have you thought through the limitations of GitHub and what
- 45:33you want to do about that? Such an interesting question.
- 45:36I know there's a lot. Yeah.
- 45:39So, so First off, if I thought it through a little, we're
- 45:44feeling it because GitHub has all sorts of reliability
- 45:47problems right now. It's it's a huge bottleneck to
- 45:50productivity. You know, the other, the other
- 45:55place that I thought about it is like, there's no real good
- 46:00reason to have this like inner loop and outer loop type
- 46:05workflow when you're working with agents.
- 46:07And so we do one of the cool features that we have in Warp is
- 46:12you do code review within Warp, which is the same place the
- 46:14agent does its work. And so I think it's a stupid
- 46:17wasteful flow to build something with an agent, push it up to
- 46:21GitHub, look at their code review UI, have like a code
- 46:24review bot that does its thing there, pull it back in.
- 46:28Like, why are you doing this dance of like up to GitHub, down
- 46:31to your local, up to GitHub. And so I think that that part
- 46:36we're already like building stuff to just make it so there's
- 46:39no, you don't have to do that. The other thing that is
- 46:42interesting, it's just like. But is that through just like
- 46:45auto save and then you can roll back if you need to?
- 46:50So it's still using git. Just to be clear, it's still
- 46:52using Git, but the piece of it that we are moving into warp or
- 46:58have moved, really it's just like iterative code review.
- 47:01There's you could just bring it all into your app.
- 47:04And so it's again, if you're, if you're code reviewing with a
- 47:08collaborator on your team and you're reviewing their code, I
- 47:12think it's fine to go to GitHub. However, if you're reviewing a
- 47:16code that your agent wrote, that's a ridiculous flow.
- 47:20It's like why am I leaving my workbench to go up to GitHub?
- 47:25You shouldn't. You should just do it.
- 47:26Right as the agent is writing it.
- 47:28And So what you're seeing is some of the things that like
- 47:32we're like the hero features of GitHub, like I think
- 47:35collaborative code review are going to be moving out of
- 47:38GitHub. I think, I think there's like a
- 47:42more interesting question of like, is git good?
- 47:47First of all, I hate git. I don't know how, how you feel
- 47:49about Git. Like, I don't like Git.
- 47:50I don't, I don't understand. And part of the reason like I,
- 47:55I'm, I spent a long time at Google.
- 47:57We didn't use Git at Google. And like the thing that we use
- 48:00at Google was, is basically based on the Perforce, which is
- 48:04like another source control system.
- 48:05And it made so much more sense to me intuitively.
- 48:09And so I, I hate Git. So I'm not a big fan of Git.
- 48:11I would love to see the world not be working on top of Git.
- 48:15And I don't know if Git is great for tracking agent metadata, but
- 48:19the problem is there's so much tooling and scripting around Git
- 48:25that I think I think it's more likely that Git will stick
- 48:29around and you'll find ways to stick to basically build
- 48:33metadata around what agents are doing in to get then to invent
- 48:37some new thing. But I don't know.
- 48:40Yeah, I think I think GitHub is at risk of disruption, which is
- 48:43a crazy thing to say because it's it is the developer tool
- 48:48that has the strongest network effect of any developer tool.
- 48:52But I think it's AI think everything is kind of at risk
- 48:56right now, to be honest. And so if I'm them, I'm thinking
- 48:58about like, how do I rebuild this so that agents are the
- 49:02primary customer or not? Not necessarily.
- 49:04Humans all right. So this episode is brought to
- 49:09you by the good folks at ML Flow, the open source platform
- 49:13for developers who want to build production ready AI
- 49:16applications. Enhance your AI applications
- 49:19with end to end AI observability, all in a single
- 49:22integrated platform with ML Flows Gen.
- 49:25AI capabilities. You can evaluate AI applications
- 49:28using a suite of built in or custom judges, visualize trace
- 49:33executions and agentic analytics, and continuously
- 49:37monitor evaluations, all while tracking every run in one place.
- 49:44Ship better agents, faster. You know that's the name of the
- 49:46game. Get started at mlflow.org.
- 49:50There was something that you were about to say before I cut
- 49:53you off with the how you're doing the auto save or get like
- 49:59features. Was it that idea of is get the
- 50:03right abstraction or is get the right tool for?
- 50:05The job, so we, we do everything on top of Git right now.
- 50:09So like for instance, if we want the we're launching or it should
- 50:14be launched is like a checkpointing feature, right?
- 50:17Where if the agent does some work and you want to go back to
- 50:20it, we we build that on top of Git.
- 50:24We build our code review features on top of Git primarily
- 50:27because like things we want to reinvent now and there's things
- 50:31we want to maybe reinvent in like a year.
- 50:33And I don't think like we're, we, we're so stretched on the
- 50:36things that we want to like reinvent right now.
- 50:38I don't think that we, we're not prioritizing like a whole new
- 50:41sort of source control system. But yes, right now our stuff is
- 50:46built on top of Git, but it is moving some of the stuff from
- 50:50GitHub out of GitHub into our app directly.