Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #721: The Human Skills That Matter Now That AI Can Code with Calle
Transcript
- 0:00Calais, it's been a year and a month almost exactly to the date since we published our last podcast where we met in person in the jungle.
- 0:10And a lot has happened since then.
- 0:11How have you been, sir?
- 0:13Oh, yeah.
- 0:14I've been doing great.
- 0:16And wow, that's been over a year.
- 0:19That's crazy.
- 0:21I wish we were in the jungle again, though.
- 0:24I've been looking out at 20 inches of snow.
- 0:27the jungle is much preferred to this but for anybody who's listening who didn't catch that
- 0:33first episode doesn't know who cali is i'd be surprised if you don't cali is one of the
- 0:38most prolific and active individual builders in the bitcoin and freedom tech ecosystem
- 0:43working on bitcoin the cash you e-cash protocol bitchat claw eye ai and other open source dev
- 0:54projects. You've got a PhD in physics.
- 0:58And I mean, I've been following the sparse
- 1:01podcasts you've been doing throughout the year. I think you were on Citadel Dispatch
- 1:05the summer of last year, and you were talking about this proliferation
- 1:09of AI tools and how Vibe Coding helps you build the Android app
- 1:13for BitChat. That has blown up. We'll talk about BitChat, but I think
- 1:16focusing in on what's happening now
- 1:20with claw eye ai and basically you launching agents to help you do your work you tweeted
- 1:28yesterday about a devops engineer that you launched that would typically cost two hundred
- 1:33thousand dollars but you have it running autonomously 24 7 what uh what's going on
- 1:39yeah i i i don't know what's going on that the i i strongly believe that no one does
- 1:46where we're heading and it really feels like everything that we're doing right now is something
- 1:53that hasn't been done before so we are like 100 in discovery or in a discovery mode or in a pioneer
- 2:03mode where you know any new idea on the table is basically is is is probably the first time that
- 2:11someone tries it out. As you made some examples, I've been focusing a lot on AI agents recently,
- 2:20particularly focusing on OpenClaw, and I like it a lot and try to make it as useful as possible
- 2:26and try to figure out ways how to integrate it into the projects that I'm working on to be more
- 2:32effective, more cost-effective, and faster, ship more and higher quality code. But we'll be talking
- 2:40about that i'm sure in this part in more detail yeah i think i mean just dive into like how
- 2:50prolific this is for you somebody who actually understands like i was saying just before we hit
- 2:57record i'm having some sleepless nights pushing my open claw agent uh to the edges and i barely
- 3:05know what I'm doing from the systems admin back in engineering programming perspective at all and I
- 3:12can't imagine what it's like for you um and in terms of like productivity wise and what you're
- 3:21able to do what's what um how profound has it been for you well everything has completely changed and
- 3:28I would have never thought that I would be able to say that in my uh like programmer career so
- 3:33So like many people, I've been programming for decades at this point.
- 3:37So I consider myself a professional developer with lots of experience.
- 3:43And probably everyone has noticed by now that the work of being a programmer has flipped by like 180 degrees.
- 3:55It has changed in a way that no one would have predicted even only two years ago maybe.
- 4:00So in the last one or two years, maybe we'll start a little earlier.
- 4:06So the way I see this in my mind is we have multiple stages of innovation in AI with regard to LLMs and agents.
- 4:16So level one was using an LLM in a browser, chat GPT.
- 4:21That was the most pivotal moment in AI history, so to speak, when you think about how actual normal people interface and interact with AI.
- 4:32That was the biggest moment.
- 4:34And I think also up to date, comparing to the penetration speed of other technologies, it has been the fastest growing and fastest adopted technology in history was ChatGPT.
- 4:47So it has conquered the entire world.
- 4:50That's level one.
- 4:51you open a browser, you ask a question, you get a response.
- 4:54And we've been doing that for a year or two.
- 4:58And also programmers started noticing quite fast
- 5:02that you can copy code from your code base
- 5:05and put it into a chat GPT, ask a few questions,
- 5:08get some code back and put it back into your code base.
- 5:10So there were many manual steps still involved
- 5:14when doing development work using AI.
- 5:17And so after level one, we reached level two around maybe one and a half years ago, which is the introduction of agents.
- 5:29And agents finally gave the LLMs that were previously confined in the browser, gave them kind of legs and arms to act on your computer.
- 5:41So that is, for example, Cloud Code is probably the most popular one.
- 5:46And then there's codecs and so on from OpenAI.
- 5:51What I use the most is OpenCode, which is a LLM agnostic framework, fully open source, really high quality projects.
- 5:59So that is most of the code that I write today goes through these tools.
- 6:06So and now I'm talking to other software engineers all the time about this.
- 6:12And it's very fascinating to see what people think about this and how they perceive their job changing over time.
- 6:22And you have a small portion, what feels like 10 to 20% of developers resisting the change and they don't like AI and they think it's fallible and it's not as good as they are.
- 6:35And then you have this way larger percentage of developers who use it and try to increase their productivity.
- 6:45And what I see is, you know, those who value the manual aspect of coding, and I compare them to artisms.
- 6:54So people who take pride in having done the work themselves and also enjoy the process of doing so and see some mastery in it or try to perfect their mastery and skills in it have a harder time giving up the job to an AI.
- 7:13Whereas, and then there is kind of like the opposite of that is prolific coders who've been in the business for decades at this point, who noticed that they can increase their output by, and I'm not exaggerating when I'm saying like 5 to 10x, which is, you know, if you are confronted with an efficiency boost of 5 to 10x, then it's really, really hard to say no.
- 7:40And the only good reason that remains to say no is extreme safety.
- 7:47So you're dealing with Bitcoin, for example, and you're not going to have a machine just write all the code for you that deals with money.
- 7:55Or you're in an industrial sector where it's the critical infrastructure or something like that where you need the human in the loop.
- 8:06and or those who really want to perfect their art.
- 8:12So there's still some extremely good,
- 8:15a very tiny number of human workers,
- 8:18coders who can't be matched by the AI
- 8:21and they are getting paid large sums of money these days
- 8:26to be like the one big expert in COBOL
- 8:30or something like that working in the companies.
- 8:32But for the rest, you know, the adoption of agents has led to an incredible output boost and productivity boost.
- 8:45And so that's what I've been focusing on for the last year and a half or two, which is like, how can I make use of these tools to improve all of these projects that I'm working on a lot, you know, a lot faster and also help all my peers to also get on that train.
- 9:02and basically making sure that anyone in our cashier ecosystem uses AI tools
- 9:09and realizes that if you're a software developer today and you're not using AI,
- 9:15I'm willing to put money on the table that you will lose your job in five years.
- 9:19Like you won't have a job in five years.
- 9:21I am 99% sure that this is what's going to happen to most people
- 9:26if they don't adopt this technology.
- 9:30And the economic realities will force you to do so.
- 9:32So that is level two. It has changed the industry completely, which, again, is something that I never have thought that I would experience this.
- 9:44And level three. Now, this is the level that we are currently in.
- 9:48This is the next evolution of AI agents are these proactive, always on running agents, personal AI agents that have a memory and the context about you that run either on your own home computer all the time or on a server somewhere in the cloud all the time.
- 10:09you're the only one who has access to that one computer and the agent has its own computer can
- 10:16do anything on that computer and with that power and with a loop that closes kind of like tells the
- 10:22agent to work around the clock and with all these ingredients combined we've seen what the future
- 10:31of personalized AI agents will look like a couple weeks ago when you know open call blew up and when
- 10:38When I first discovered OpenCall, I had, like we're talking about this before the recording,
- 10:44as you said, almost like two or three sleepless nights, just trying to process what this means.
- 10:49Because when you try technology for the first time and then you get this intuition that,
- 10:56oh my God, like this is so powerful.
- 10:59Everyone will have this in one year.
- 11:02This will be everywhere in one year because it's too powerful.
- 11:05It's like this ChatGPT moment again, I think, where the first moment you tried ChatGPT, you were like, sure, this is so significant that there is no way this won't penetrate everywhere.
- 11:20This is how I felt again with the latest iteration of level three autonomous AI agents.
- 11:27And yeah, that's been on my mind a lot lately.
- 11:30yeah and what would you say to people because i've um been using open claw for like i was i'm an og
- 11:39i was using it when it was clawed bot and i had to set it up uh in the cloud via cli i didn't have
- 11:45is it clawy or claw i.ai i call it clawy clawy i didn't have clawy i didn't have like one click
- 11:52deploy so i set it up like a like a caveman in a vps and i've been using and i've similarly had
- 11:59this like holy crap this is so powerful everybody's going to be using this eventually but there there
- 12:04are naysayers out there like it it's like cloud code like i've been using cloud code and cloud
- 12:08co-work and it's the exact same from what i understand um what are the differences and what is
- 12:14the difference between just using cloud code or cloud co-work um uh sort of in in a silo versus
- 12:22is creating an open claw and giving it access to cloud code.
- 12:28And the way I understand is open claw is like a harness
- 12:31that really adds a bunch of power to cloud code
- 12:35and other models for that matter.
- 12:38Yeah, so we definitely have to differentiate
- 12:40between kind of like what's the LLM
- 12:42and that can be cloud, sonnet or opus or GPT
- 12:47or whatever it is, like the brain.
- 12:49and then the body, which is the Claude Code CLI, for example, or OpenClaw.
- 12:57So kind of where do you put that brain into?
- 12:59And the biggest difference between the level two coding tools
- 13:03and the level three personal agents is the loop.
- 13:08Personal agents are alive all the time.
- 13:10They don't care whether you leave your keyboard or not.
- 13:12It's not meant to interact.
- 13:14They're not meant to be interacted with using that one single keyboard that you have on your computer.
- 13:21And when you close your computer, it's gone again.
- 13:24But it's rather meant for something that is active all the time, can do something in the background,
- 13:31and has memory about everything you've done so far.
- 13:35And that is what OpenCore also does.
- 13:37It has a persistent memory.
- 13:39Sometimes it struggles with that memory, but it at least tries to remember everything that you've been doing.
- 13:44You can talk to it like a normal person via chat.
- 13:47So you usually interact with it with Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever you want.
- 13:53And you can tell it to every day at 2 p.m., make a report about all the activity that's been going on in this GitHub repository, for example.
- 14:04This is one of the many examples that we're using in our dev organization,
- 14:08which is we have one of these queries that basically just tracks our progress on GitHub
- 14:14and gives us daily reports about, hey, these are the new pull requests that were open.
- 14:20These are the new issues that were open, sorted by Severity.
- 14:23And these people are working on that.
- 14:25And there is no activity in this project.
- 14:27So maybe you should look at it or something like that.
- 14:30Having something like that that gives you automated responses every day, for example.
- 14:35It could be every hour.
- 14:36It could be every week.
- 14:37Whatever you want.
- 14:37It could be news aggregation, research on the latest topics that you're interested in,
- 14:42or just something very banal and related to your personal life.
- 14:47So there are clear differences in the capabilities between level two and level three.
- 14:53I think, you know, it's very normal that there will be skeptics about, you know, what is this useful for?
- 15:00I've seen many technologies come and also go where you always have the same thing.
- 15:05and since we're so new
- 15:08and so early with this technology
- 15:10basically the limit is your
- 15:13imagination right now is if you
- 15:14cannot think of a way how this can be useful
- 15:16for you then think a little
- 15:18harder that's what I would suggest
- 15:20because I'm pretty sure everyone
- 15:22who deals with computers
- 15:24and that's everyone as something
- 15:26that they don't like doing
- 15:28themselves or they would
- 15:29like someone else to do it
- 15:32like in the background for them
- 15:34and yeah so so you can probably come up with stuff yourself i'll just give you one uh one anecdote
- 15:40of mine is you know i've been on a conference and using like uber or bolt or something like that for
- 15:47for taxi rides so at the end of the conference i need to put all the invoices together for my
- 15:51accountant so they can you know be properly accounted for and i hate that stuff like it's
- 15:56it gives me anxiety just to think about that little task that i have to do after every single
- 16:01conference is download all the pdfs from uber they're like have these weird file names and then
- 16:06i need to go into every pdf take out the date and rename it and send it to my accountant like these
- 16:12are like a couple of stupid steps that i need to do after every conference and this time i just
- 16:18like downloaded 15 invoices as a pdfs and i dropped it over to my chloe over signal and i told it like
- 16:25hey you know just you know look into the pdfs extract the dates rename the file send them back
- 16:30to me. And I just could go on with my life. And three minutes later, I have received 15 PDFs back,
- 16:36perfectly formatted in a way that I can just drop and forward to my accountant and I'm done with the
- 16:40task. This is something very personal to me. No one would build a product just for that because
- 16:46it's too specific, but we don't need to anymore. We have now machines that can do basically everything.
- 16:52And that's just mind blowing. And another thing that I think is something that we're just getting
- 16:59adjusted to is how we talk to computers. Something is fundamentally changing in how we interact with
- 17:05computers. Because, you know, for example, just the experience of installing software until now,
- 17:11it was either, you know, go to a browser, download a file, and then click on it, go through that,
- 17:17set up, blah, blah, blah, and then you have a software. Or if you're a Linux person, you just,
- 17:22you know, you do it over the terminal, you install it, and then it's there, and maybe you need to
- 17:27configure it and then you can use it.
- 17:29And lately, the way I've been installing most of the software
- 17:34over for an AI agent is basically just taking the link to the GitHub or to the website of the thing that I want it to use I send it to Ling and say install this And I just turn around and do my thing
- 17:47It comes back after two minutes and says, it's done.
- 17:50It's working.
- 17:51I've tested it.
- 17:52What do you want me to do with it?
- 17:53And, you know, it's just, it's mind-blowing.
- 17:58These basic interactions that hadn't changed for over, you know, for decades
- 18:05Since the invention of the personal computer, everything has now changed.
- 18:09Every single person can now use basically everything through a language-based interface.
- 18:16And I think that's amazing.
- 18:20It opens so many new doors and helps so many new people to use software and be more productive humans.
- 18:29yeah it's i mean it's become clear to me over the last six weeks the form factor with how we
- 18:35interact with computers is changing right before eyes like voice to text voice to voice even
- 18:40um is how i mean a month and a half ago i would use voice to text for some things
- 18:47but really not much and now whenever i'm on my computer i'm hitting option spacebar and just
- 18:53talking for five minutes and then sending sending that prompt or that conversation to to my agent
- 19:00and then just doing these tasks and it's like we're projectionists now we can just think of
- 19:05something we want in your example of the uber receipts for your accountant like i need that
- 19:10you can just project it into reality which is insane
- 19:13and
- 19:17you know it goes even
- 19:19there's even
- 19:20it goes even deeper I'll tell you
- 19:23just a little story about
- 19:24how I started
- 19:27working on BitChat because
- 19:28when I saw Jack
- 19:31release BitChat
- 19:32for iOS initially
- 19:34I was like oh no this is
- 19:37iOS I'm an Android guy
- 19:39I would like this to exist for
- 19:41Android why did he only build it
- 19:43for iOS, right? And we're in times where you can just do it. But the thing is, I'm not an expert
- 19:49on Android. I've never made a real Android app before. And I've been searching for experts in
- 19:57several fields for so long. For example, we're working a lot with NFC these days for Cashew.
- 20:05and try to find an Android expert
- 20:09that also has experience with NFC.
- 20:14You're looking for someone very specific
- 20:16and even if you have the money to pay them,
- 20:20it's super hard to find them.
- 20:22And even if you say like, okay, I'm going to learn it.
- 20:24So you go out and search for documentation
- 20:27and what you see is code from eight years ago
- 20:32that hasn't been updated
- 20:34or like super old documentation or PDFs that look like technical sheets
- 20:39that you really don't like to read or you can't understand
- 20:44or something like that.
- 20:45It's like even for someone who has a good amount of skill in a certain field,
- 20:53there are blockers that would have cost you either a lot of money
- 20:58or time to find someone who can help you.
- 21:01and now I can just talk to the machine and tell it like,
- 21:05can you please explain to me how NFC on Android works?
- 21:08It will figure everything out.
- 21:10It's the best expert that you can think of
- 21:13in several very specific domains
- 21:15in the thing that you are good at already.
- 21:18So it not only helps the uninitiated to raise the levels
- 21:25and become more productive humans that can focus on their lives,
- 21:29but also the ones that are really deep into their own profession helps them to, you know, broaden their scope and figure out things that they weren't able to figure out before.
- 21:42It's truly mind-blowing.
- 21:44And I had a discussion with Justin Moon a couple weeks ago about what this means for Freedom Tech.
- 21:51And since you brought up BitChat, I think BitChat's the perfect example of something that's been accelerated via these AI tools and is a freedom tech project that found, I think it's safe to say, like mass adoption during the elections in Uganda, when they turned the Internet off in Iran, when they had the hurricane in Jamaica, people have been turning to BitChat, which you've been working on.
- 22:15But I think talking about a broader topic, like how important are these AI tools for the proliferation of freedom tech generally?
- 22:26And what does it mean for how we build these freedom tech apps moving forward?
- 22:32Does it give you more hope that we can actually win this battle?
- 22:35Yeah, 100%.
- 22:37And interestingly, it's a human factor.
- 22:40The answer is the human factor at the end of the day, because with AI, what effectively happens is that you increase the number of people who can reach a certain goal.
- 22:53And previously, it was confined to a very small number of people.
- 22:56You need like the Android, NFC, Bluetooth expert who has worked on some project five years ago.
- 23:04And that's why he is the perfect person to build BitChat today, for example.
- 23:09Right.
- 23:10So the chance of this happening is just way lower.
- 23:14But today, we're 100% at a point where you can build a solid and useful application with a single person who's motivated enough to actually pull it off.
- 23:29So Jack has proven that.
- 23:31He's basically said, I wanted to research how Mesh Networks works.
- 23:35And he's built this incredible app.
- 23:36or another example is OpenClaw itself.
- 23:41It was built by a single person.
- 23:43It's unheard of.
- 23:44It's impossible.
- 23:45There's no way in the world one year ago
- 23:49that this would have been possible.
- 23:51And today, like only a year
- 23:53or maybe two years into this technology,
- 23:55we've already seen profound effect,
- 23:58profound impact of highly motivated individuals
- 24:02who are now able to execute.
- 24:04I still think, you know,
- 24:06it requires some upfront work from you as a human
- 24:11because it's not like everything has now the same difficulty for everyone.
- 24:19It definitely equalizes everything,
- 24:22but still being an expert in a certain field,
- 24:24knowing what the pain points are,
- 24:27having all that context that you only gain through experience,
- 24:30That is what makes you stand out in the sea of equal capabilities.
- 24:40And I think that's the move forward, is figuring out who's motivated and less who's skilled.
- 24:50It's more about you as a person, what are your goals and your ideals.
- 24:53And if you're a person who's like a doer who doesn't sit there and wait until someone else does it, but you're motivated enough to do it, previously the biggest obstacle was skill. And today it's not anymore. And that's just, that's amazing. We can't even start to comprehend what it can change.
- 25:12I believe that software is one of the most important driving factors in today's world.
- 25:17How we, as humanity progress, we see this in mass adopted software and social media.
- 25:24And so like all these things have a massive impact on the world today.
- 25:28So, you know, one plus one equals two.
- 25:31Give them the tools and they will build.
- 25:37Well, it goes both ways too, right?
- 25:39It's a double-edged sword because it can be used for good and bad.
- 25:44And so how do you view that particular nature of this beast that we're working with?
- 25:50Because it seems like we're in an arms race to avoid the digital panopticon
- 25:55and ensure that we can leverage free and open source software tools
- 26:00that preserve privacy, sovereignty, and the ability to operate outside the wall gardens.
- 26:06I mean, I'm almost getting goosebumps thinking back to our previous conversation in the general now because we're kind of closing the loop and we talked about similar topics a year and a half ago.
- 26:20But things were so different back then that it felt like, you know, and here's what I want to say actually about your question is the good usually comes from the many, whereas the bad comes from the few.
- 26:33But the bad from the few usually has all the resources that they need to build a centralized social media platform that conquers the entire world.
- 26:43So although everyone has improved their skills, I think it's vastly disproportional in how much it has helped the many.
- 26:53We are way more people who want to see good in the world than those who want to see bad in the world.
- 27:01And we as the mass of people have increased our ability disproportionately more than the large mega corporations who can also now use Vibe coding.
- 27:12All right. Okay. You can use Vibe coding now too.
- 27:15But they were able to do anything that they want anyway because of a large amount of resources.
- 27:21But this technological shift has benefited especially those with smaller resources or smaller teams and individuals.
- 27:32And so my hope, I'm very hopeful because I know that there are more good people than bad people in the world.
- 27:40And those good people now have way more tools to express themselves, to actually change the world, and to show us their vision of the world and inspire others.
- 27:54So I'm way more optimistic in that regard than one and a half years ago because we have now the way more powerful weapons that we can use to fight against surveillance or repression and the digital panopticum, as you call it.
- 28:17Yeah, I completely agree.
- 28:19And to your point about just figuring out what your skill is, what you're good at.
- 28:23For example, like when I view my contribution to to this space is just the ability to observe and curate.
- 28:32And so that's what I've been using my agent to do is just that the media company is observe and curate.
- 28:38So I have it running all these prong jobs to surface information that I think people aren't getting enough exposure to.
- 28:46And then I can then curate that and put it in a podcast or a newsletter or share it on social media.
- 28:55And it's been incredibly impactful.
- 28:57Like the amount of sort of output that we've been able to push out over the last couple of months has increased, I think, at least five, maybe 10x just because we have these tools available.
- 29:11And so now when I'm thinking of TFTC, it's like, OK, I want a CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, but for Freedom Tech and sort of economic economic storylines that people aren't getting in the mainstream.
- 29:27And I think it's it's I think it's successful.
- 29:32We're like two weeks into this five day a week newsletter that we've been putting out with the help of our agent.
- 29:38and I've gotten a ton of responses like, hey, I love the mix of content.
- 29:42I haven't heard these stories.
- 29:43And so that's been a signal to me like, okay, these tools are working for my particular niche in the media world.
- 29:50And I think on that note, it took me like a few weeks to really like download a CloudBot,
- 29:57started working with it, and it took me like a week or two of understanding how its memory works
- 30:02and basically what it could do, pushing it to its limits, exploring the territory which it operates in,
- 30:08where after a week and a half, two weeks,
- 30:11I was like, okay, here's how I can use this.
- 30:14But it took experimentation.
- 30:17The point I bring this up is to ask you,
- 30:19in terms of practical first steps
- 30:22for anybody listening to this
- 30:24who isn't experimenting with these technologies,
- 30:26how do you think they should approach using this stuff?
- 30:31I want to start with especially the security aspect first.
- 30:35So you should be aware that using agents on your computer or with your personal accounts can go terribly wrong.
- 30:46So that is something, you know, that's the first thing you could think about.
- 30:50We're not at a place yet where, you know, some highly polished experience exists made by a large company or something that is fully safe to use.
- 31:02And to be honest, I also don't think that that will happen anytime, you know, very soon, at least not very soon, because his agents are just too kind of powerful to put them in a box yet.
- 31:15So first, what you do is you set it up.
- 31:20You can set it up on your own machine.
- 31:21Sorry, on a separate machine.
- 31:23Let's say a Mac mini is the trend.
- 31:25Or you can also use a service that runs it for you.
- 31:28and one of them is Chloe, C-L-A-W-I.ai.
- 31:35And the process is basically super simple to set up an agent.
- 31:40You make a subscription, you pay for it monthly,
- 31:42and there is like AI credits included,
- 31:45and off you go, and then it starts.
- 31:48And the next step is to connect it to one of your messengers
- 31:52that you want to use in order to interact with it.
- 31:54So then you're set up, and you have your own personal agent
- 31:57that you can ask questions about.
- 32:00And what I do is think about things
- 32:05that I wish I had someone,
- 32:07like my own personal human agent,
- 32:10basically do things for me.
- 32:12So one of them could be accounting bookkeeping,
- 32:14for example, that's one thing.
- 32:16But in Kesha, we run a large organization.
- 32:20As I said, we need to basically have something
- 32:22that can observe progress.
- 32:25That is also something that many people use.
- 32:27is having a bot that just observes things and writes reports on it.
- 32:32And in your case, it can be news, for example.
- 32:35And in my case, it's pull requests and issues on GitHub, for example.
- 32:39And lately, what we've been experimenting, especially with Chloe,
- 32:44in order to make our operation more efficient,
- 32:47is to pick off kind of jobs that we would have hired someone for,
- 32:53where we can carve out some specific aspect
- 32:56where we think this is safe and nothing can go wrong there
- 33:00if you automate this part, for example, observing something
- 33:03and then build like a dedicated bot just with those skills.
- 33:09And in the case of Chloe, we run our infrastructure
- 33:13on a system called Kubernetes.
- 33:15It's a fairly common advanced provisioning system
- 33:19where the cloud basically is Kubernetes.
- 33:22and you have experts for that.
- 33:27Obviously, there's people who know Kubernetes in and out
- 33:30and you can pay them to do a certain job for you.
- 33:34But you also know we have these agents
- 33:37that know Kubernetes really, really well as well.
- 33:39So if you plug in a relatively good LLM into it,
- 33:44say you use Sonnet 4.6 or even Opus or something,
- 33:50You kind of get to a better than junior person in that specific job that just works for you 24-7.
- 33:59And that's what we've been doing.
- 34:01So we have this DevOps agent that lives in a Signal chat with us.
- 34:08And I can ask the bot in real human language, hey, how's everything looking?
- 34:14Are there any problems with our cluster?
- 34:16and then it'll say, yeah, there are like two people whose agents have crashed
- 34:22and they haven't come back for like five hours.
- 34:24Maybe you should look at them and just gives me further hints to any problems
- 34:29that might have come while I was doing something else.
- 34:31So this is for our operation.
- 34:34It's extremely useful already today.
- 34:37And I'm just thinking about, let's say you run a factory, right?
- 34:40So you have a factory with all sorts of sensors and monitoring and reporting
- 34:46and all of that needs to be observed.
- 34:48Like a human needs to sit there
- 34:49and look at that data basically to make use of it.
- 34:52And what we've been doing so far before AI
- 34:54is like dashboards.
- 34:55That's the way we typically try to condense information
- 34:59so it's useful for us as humans.
- 35:02But today, I mean, you can still do the dashboard.
- 35:04It's no problem.
- 35:05But you can also just plug an agent into that system
- 35:08that can read the raw data.
- 35:10And it will probably come up with like even better ways
- 35:12to look at the data and report anything
- 35:15that is out of the ordinary for you.
- 35:17So just this one little thing and again we just talking about one thing that it can do that it was not particularly designed to do but it does exceptionally well Just this one thing is by itself already huge
- 35:32Imagine what it means for the industry, well, the industry producing physical goods in real factories,
- 35:39what it means to have agents plugged in into their system that can observe everything 24-7 all the time.
- 35:45and that costs basically no money.
- 35:48I mean, you pay for the LLM,
- 35:49but the difference between a human doing that job
- 35:53and the bot doing that job is basically no money.
- 35:56So if I can think of like two or three ways
- 35:59how this can be extremely useful for me,
- 36:01I know there must be millions of ways
- 36:04for millions and billions of people
- 36:06how they can make it useful for them as well.
- 36:09And the nice thing about these agents
- 36:11is we don't need to know before what they're going to do
- 36:15because they're general purpose machines.
- 36:17They can probably do way more than we think that they will.
- 36:21And they will continue improving in the coming months and years
- 36:25and will be just like mind blown for the next couple of years.
- 36:28I'm pretty sure about that.
- 36:30Yeah, that's the crazy thing to realize is how this thing is pretty good right now,
- 36:35but it's probably the worst it's going to be.
- 36:38100%.
- 36:38It's going to get faster and better at doing what it's doing.
- 36:41and just from a software engineering perspective,
- 36:45if you go back to level two,
- 36:46the agent then writes code for you in your computer.
- 36:49Right now the flow is you enter a prompt
- 36:51and then you wait a couple of minutes
- 36:53and then you observe what the agent has produced.
- 36:56That loop will become like 100 milliseconds at some point.
- 37:00You will just enter it and press enter
- 37:02and it will be there instantly for you to observe.
- 37:05And if you don't like it,
- 37:06you can just redo everything instantly as well.
- 37:08So just the flow of talking to the thing and getting something back, all that is going to compress a lot in the next coming years.
- 37:17And even just the speed aspect, just the performance aspect itself will open, unlock new ways of working with it again.
- 37:25Yeah, I guess I'm diving into particulars of building products with it, whether it's the Cachew Protocol, BitChat, Klawi.ai using the AI to build that service, now Numopay.
- 37:44So it seems like you've been shipping at an increased clip, just observing publicly.
- 37:50And I'm assuming that you're using all these tools to do that.
- 37:54I think it's a safe assumption.
- 37:56I guess let's just talk about some of the things,
- 37:59particularly at the intersection of Bitcoin and eCash with the Cashew Protocol,
- 38:04what you've been able to ship that's been on your mind for many years, I'm sure.
- 38:09Yeah, so I just hinted towards NFC.
- 38:13NFC is something that I've been researching for years at this point.
- 38:16And I'm very jealous about the fiat world in that sense,
- 38:23that tap to pay is just an incredible user experience and everyone loves it people use it
- 38:29all the time everywhere globally i remember a conversation i had with miles miles suitor from
- 38:34from cash app where we were talking about uh bitcoin adoption around the world and how we can
- 38:39improve ux for bitcoin payments and he told me the story that doesn't leave my mind anymore which is
- 38:45is somewhere in peru in some like distant uh isolated mountain somewhere and he finds his little
- 38:52shack that sells him a Coke.
- 38:55And in this mountain somewhere in the nowhere, the person hands him over a POS device and
- 39:02she takes his iPhone and she taps it and it makes beep and it takes like three seconds
- 39:07and the payment is done.
- 39:08And he said, that thing made him more bearish than anything else with regard to Bitcoin.
- 39:16And that just resonated completely with me because that is what makes me bearish about
- 39:21Bitcoin as well is the user experience. Because if fiat feels so good, like why do you even need
- 39:28Bitcoin? That's what many people think, how many people think. So obviously we need to get better
- 39:33in Bitcoin and offer at least the same experience, the quality of experience or better. And I think
- 39:40we can do better because we're an open source system and we can, you know, where improvements
- 39:46of one thing help also the other thing.
- 39:49We don't need to compete.
- 39:50We can also collaborate.
- 39:52And that's what we're doing with open protocols.
- 39:54And that's the whole idea about Bitcoin, basically,
- 39:57is just we all work on the same thing.
- 39:59So NFC, I think, is a vital part.
- 40:03Tap to pay just works.
- 40:04Everyone loves it.
- 40:05And in order to build that,
- 40:08I needed to get all this expert knowledge,
- 40:11which I wasn't able to obtain over the years.
- 40:13And I said, like, I was actively looking for people who can help me, but found no one and so forth.
- 40:19Until at some point, I think this started all more than a year ago again with a little project I called NSC Chat.
- 40:28And that is kind of a, if I think back, it's kind of like a precursor of BitChat.
- 40:34Because it's like BitChat, but with way less radius distance.
- 40:38It's just a simple chat app that you run on your phone and you write a message.
- 40:42and you have to tap the other phone in order for the message to go wrong,
- 40:46one phone to the other.
- 40:47So it's like a very stupid, simple chat app
- 40:50where you need to touch the phones in order to send the message.
- 40:52And I built that as a step towards kind of NFC payments
- 40:57because with Cashew,
- 40:59and that's the Charmin eCash protocol that I'm working on,
- 41:02money can be sent as a bearer asset, bearer token.
- 41:05So that means like if you can package it in some kind of a data package
- 41:09and you can send it over and there could be,
- 41:11you know, email or telegram or SMS or whatever it is, any communication channel, you can make a payment.
- 41:19So I wanted to see Bitcoin payments happening with tap to pay using Cashew by sending the e-cash token from one phone to another.
- 41:28And that was the first proof of concept I was able to only achieve because of AI.
- 41:32So I thought like, that's neat. Awesome. That's great.
- 41:34So this is exactly like these are the building blocks that I was looking for for so long.
- 41:38We have Cashew as a protocol that we can build on that runs on Bitcoin and with this incredible property that if you can send data, you can also send money.
- 41:52So that's what Cashew enables us.
- 41:55And at the same time, I just should clarify, if we deal with money, for example, the core libraries of Cashew, they're all handwritten.
- 42:03because we're not at a point yet where I can safely just say
- 42:08that the agent does a better job than I do in figuring out what could go wrong
- 42:13or how you could lose money and so on.
- 42:15So that's very important to us is the critical parts are
- 42:18handwritten, normal programmed libraries,
- 42:22and that's what usually a casual library is.
- 42:25But once you have that, once it's running, once it works,
- 42:28then you can build all the scaffolding around it, pipe coding.
- 42:31Like there's nothing that can go wrong basically because the library itself works.
- 42:35You know that you won't lose e-cash.
- 42:38So now let's build an app around it.
- 42:41So we started with this NFC chat, sending around e-cash tokens and then showing like, okay, this is possible.
- 42:46And then this ultimately ended, like culminated in something, in a project we call Numo.
- 42:52We've been working on this for a couple of months at this point in stealth mode.
- 42:58We haven't announced it to anyone until like yesterday.
- 43:00and Numo is our approach to introduce tab to pay to Bitcoin using eCash.
- 43:08Because with eCash, it has this very simple flow of data flowing from one phone, the payer, to the receiver, the POS device.
- 43:17So Numo runs on a normal Android POS.
- 43:21I have one here, I control it, for example.
- 43:23This is a standard POS that runs Android.
- 43:26But it can also be any Android device, any Android phone.
- 43:30So it needs to be an Android phone because iOS doesn't allow you to use the NFC chip in that way.
- 43:38So the POS device itself, of the merchant, runs Numo.
- 43:42And then any other phone, and now this can be iOS or Android, doesn't matter, can basically just tap to pay to it.
- 43:48And if it runs a cash audit, then the cash audit will see that there's an NFC chip and then take the token and send it over to the POS.
- 43:57And why is this cool?
- 43:58because, first of all, it's using eCash generally.
- 44:04Cash-to-us privacy inherits this incredible privacy by default.
- 44:09So while the UX is amazing, you also have the best privacy possible,
- 44:15which is a great combination.
- 44:17Usually you have a trade-off there.
- 44:19And the next best thing is that it works offline.
- 44:24So as a payer, so the device paying at the POS, could be your iPhone, your Android, doesn't need internet to make that actual payment because all you're doing is you take e-cash from your wallet and you set it over NFC without touching the internet.
- 44:39So that also gives you incredible privacy, obviously, because you're not even online.
- 44:43But it also means that it just works everywhere.
- 44:46And that's, again, one point that fiat payments already have been doing for years.
- 44:51If you do tap to pay with your credit card or if you do tap to pay with your phone, it also works while you're offline because your phone doesn't talk to the Internet.
- 44:59It kind of hands something like a token from the phone to the POS device in fiat land.
- 45:05And so we're doing now the same in Bitcoin land, but with incredible privacy and open protocol.
- 45:11And so the way it works today is you can install Numo on your Android device or on your POS device.
- 45:17It can be any generic POS device.
- 45:21and you can set up a cashew mint.
- 45:23So cashew is a custodial system.
- 45:25You need to trust the mint operator
- 45:27with the Bitcoin that you receive.
- 45:29So you set up one or more mints
- 45:32and then any payer from any mint,
- 45:35it can be like even if we don't share that mint,
- 45:37you can still pay with the eCash to the device
- 45:40and then the device will take that eCash
- 45:42and withdraw with Lightning to their mint.
- 45:45So anything, all the mints are still interoperable
- 45:48because we have Lightning that glues everything together.
- 45:50and you can receive payments from basically any Mint out there.
- 45:55And we've built a cool feature into Numu,
- 45:58obviously realizing, recognizing that it's custodial.
- 46:01There is a rug risk associated with the Mint that you're using.
- 46:05So you should only be using Mints that you trust already.
- 46:09But in Numu, there is a very simple way to say that
- 46:12if we ever reach 50,000 Satoshis, for example,
- 46:16you can enter a Lightning address there
- 46:17and it will just automatically withdraw to that Lightning address
- 46:20whenever you reach the threshold.
- 46:22So that way, you can build this POS in a way that the maximum amount
- 46:27that you put in custodial risk can be very limited.
- 46:32And so you can also withdraw every single payment if you like,
- 46:36but for very small payments, it might not make sense.
- 46:41So we've just released this yesterday.
- 46:43You can find it on numopay.org.
- 46:47download it, check it out, and we'll be working on a BTC Pay integration soon.
- 46:54We've already started working with that, so it also worked with existing BTC Pay server infrastructure.
- 47:00But if you don't want that, you can just download the Numero app itself.
- 47:05It doesn't need any backend. There is nothing that you need to install or set up.
- 47:09Just install the app, choose a mint, and you're done. So check it out.
- 47:13yeah i mean i completely agree i remember miles telling me that same story too
- 47:17i think the offline nature of the the ability to send cashew which should be e-cash via the
- 47:25protocol offline is massive because you think miles in that mountain in peru like his cell
- 47:31phone probably didn't have service but the secure enclave had his credentials for his card and then
- 47:36he was just able to send it to the pos and make the payment probably offline i'm assuming um and
- 47:42now we have feature parity via via eCash now.
- 47:47And I guess what do you want to see in terms of like what or what do you what do we need
- 47:55to see for this to become more prominent as a wallet sort of integration of the NFC standards?
- 48:01Is it proliferation of just simply more eCash wallets?
- 48:06What wallets work with it now?
- 48:07Like Macadamia, I'm pretty sure I could use Macadamia on iOS.
- 48:10And just to clarify, for the iOS stuff, you can pay with iOS, but running the POS to receive via NFC is something that you can't do.
- 48:20That's right. Exactly. To receive, you need an Android phone, but paying, you can do it with any phone.
- 48:25So, yeah, as I said, Macadamia, but they're already, we've worked in the background and we've added this NFC capability to around like six or seven different casual wallets at this point.
- 48:36Most of the popular cash wallets already support this from day one.
- 48:42And Numo also supports bare Lightning.
- 48:46So you don't need to have a cash wallet in order to use Numo.
- 48:49Obviously, that would limit the number of people who can pay with that terminal.
- 48:54So it supports Lightning just out of the box as well.
- 48:58And you can use any Lightning wallets to scan the QR code.
- 49:02And some Lightning wallets, particularly Phoenix, can also use Tab to pay for Lightning.
- 49:10So it will kind of fetch the Lightning invoice via NFC and then pay that over the Internet.
- 49:14So it is compatible with all the wallet infrastructure out there.
- 49:18But generally, the thing that limits growth in Bitcoin today is the utility, not the utility, but I want to say the penetration of Bitcoin.
- 49:31itself. So I'm very well aware of the fact that our technology can only grow as fast as Bitcoin
- 49:40can grow. And when I say grow Bitcoin, I mean people using Bitcoin, not the price going up.
- 49:46So our ultimate goal with Numo is to further Bitcoin as money. That's our main North Star
- 49:54goal for everything that we do, is to support the adoption of Bitcoin for everyday payments
- 50:00around the world.
- 50:02So the infrastructure for that is being built out,
- 50:06and there are great projects out there.
- 50:08For example, we've noted ETC Pay Server.
- 50:12So anyone could already use some form of on-chain payment,
- 50:17a Lightning payment with several existing solutions out there.
- 50:21But I think what's most needed today is kind of a penetration
- 50:30in real economic transactions.
- 50:34And we need more merchants to use Bitcoin.
- 50:37And I think that Cash App is doing an amazing job there.
- 50:41I should say Square, to be more precise.
- 50:45Square is doing an amazing job there.
- 50:47There's BTC Map that you can use to find merchants.
- 50:51There's obviously BTC Pay Server,
- 50:53which is the most popular kind of web checkout system
- 50:57that the Bitcoin ecosystem has produced.
- 51:01And so all these projects help towards the same goal.
- 51:05And we now support that effort as well using Numo and our NFC-capable payment systems that we built.
- 51:15If you want to support this in your Bitcoin wallet, what you can do is, first of all, look at all the NFC specs that exist in Bitcoin.
- 51:24You can read Lacking Invoices by NFC.
- 51:26If your app doesn't support that yet, think about integrating that.
- 51:29If you want truly the tap-to-pay offline instant experience that Cashew can give, then you can also just plug in a Cashew library into your Lightning wallet and pay with eCash for that single step.
- 51:45It doesn't even need to be a full-fledged Cashew wallet.
- 51:48You can just like that single one step that you want from Bitcoin to eCash.
- 51:54You can also do that in order to support tap-to-pay.
- 51:57So there are a couple of wallets working on that.
- 52:00And generally speaking, I think as a community, as a bigger project than Bitcoin,
- 52:07we need to help get Bitcoin more onto the radar of merchants
- 52:12and hope and drive the adoption of real brick-and-mortar stores.
- 52:19So that's what we want to contribute to.
- 52:23I completely agree.
- 52:24Thank you for your focus on this.
- 52:26It's funny, too, because when we last recorded, I think I asked what your archetypal cashew user was.
- 52:33And you said a woman in the jungle selling selling mangoes.
- 52:37And I think I think we knew MoPay and projects like a BTC pay server.
- 52:43I think that's going to proliferate.
- 52:46Obviously, what Square is doing here in the United States for their merchants, I mean, merchant adoption, because of Square's rollout at the end of last year went literally parabolic.
- 52:55I think there was something like 2 merchants on BTCMAP There probably more than them in the United States that haven put their store on BTC map But I think the way Square rolled it out and Cash App in collaboration
- 53:15with them rolled it out, they automatically added all these merchants and went from like
- 53:182,500 to over 6,000 over the course of a month, which is great to see.
- 53:22shifting gears back to this intersection of AI
- 53:27in Bitcoin and particularly Casio
- 53:30it's a big topic of discussion right now
- 53:33particularly in our world and in the fintech world as well
- 53:37is agents using payments on the network
- 53:41excuse me, using payments with each other
- 53:45to complete tasks on behalf of the humans
- 53:48sending them out to do things
- 53:49And I think it's a wide open landscape right now.
- 53:52I think you have Visa, MasterCard working on their own protocols.
- 53:55You have Stripe, then obviously you have stable coins, Bitcoin over Lightning.
- 53:59I saw that the guys at ARK Labs launched the ability to receive stable coins and automatically
- 54:06turn them into VTXOs via their ARK protocol implementation.
- 54:11And then obviously we have eCash and CashU specifically with the NUT402 protocol.
- 54:17and i think you've made the case that due to this sort of error nature of ecash and the fact that
- 54:24you can send the file that it's actually um the most efficient way for agents to make payments is
- 54:30that correct characterization yeah so that was just like from from our experience what instantly
- 54:36worked it was extremely simple it was almost shockingly simple to teach an agent how to use
- 54:41cashew because we basically told him you know here's your cli and the cli it will produce cashew
- 54:48tokens and you take the token and do something with it depending on what you're doing and
- 54:53instantly got that and because you don't have this get an address here check your balance there
- 54:59send sign and send you have these packets of data that the agent can simply send in an htp request
- 55:06for example so what today you know getting back to the original um question or the idea of 402
- 55:15payments or 810 payments i think it's a very hot topic today we're still yet to see how much of
- 55:22that sticks because we're in this like discovery mode of agents what should they do how much money
- 55:27would you give them how dependable are they with the money that you give them and so on there are
- 55:34stories out there of an agent like sending a random stranger 350k or something because he
- 55:40begged him online and the agent made like a single mistake and the person who owns that agent lost a
- 55:46substantial amount of money due to that uh because they were kind of you know trying at all i guess
- 55:53so um how much of that really manifests we will see but it is clear that the the big ones and i
- 55:59You mentioned the big fiat one, the big fiat monsters like MasterCard and Visa and also Stripe are looking into it.
- 56:07What frustrated me a lot looking at this is that the 402 idea, the idea that we will have services online that ask for money.
- 56:18So you want your machine to be able to pay another machine is a very Bitcoin driven topic, has been a Bitcoin driven topic in the last years.
- 56:27for the last 10 years or so,
- 56:31the only people who talked about this were Bitcoiners
- 56:33because we always thought of ourselves
- 56:37and still think of ourselves as the native currency of the Internet.
- 56:40So obviously the connection there is pretty direct.
- 56:44And there's been development from Lightning Labs on L402.
- 56:50We've been contributing to 402 with X402 and cash payments.
- 56:55The Albi guys have been working on this as well.
- 56:57So it was kind of only this niche topic until the agent came a couple months ago.
- 57:04And then you saw Coinbase working on it, Stripe working on it, the credit card providers working on it, because they all seem to agree that payments of machines to machines will be a thing.
- 57:17And the rails that they market or want to see being used are usually stablecoins.
- 57:25And stablecoins have the benefit of feeling more natural to people, I think.
- 57:35I think the cognitive leap to use a stablecoin is way smaller than the cognitive leap to use Bitcoin.
- 57:44Because the stablecoin is denominated in the same currency that you already use.
- 57:48So it feels like you're still just doing the same thing, but now in a kind of a digital way or something.
- 57:53So the stablecoin people have been pushing really hard to make sure that the agents of the future will use USDC or USDT or whatever it is.
- 58:05Obviously, I don't want to see that future happening because I think it destroys the fiat system and stablecoins are inherently trust-based.
- 58:16And there's all sorts of problems with that.
- 58:21You need KYC to get in and out and all these problems with civil coins that Bitcoin doesn't have.
- 58:27Bitcoin just is born on the Internet and lives on the Internet and doesn't leave the Internet.
- 58:31It stays inside the Internet.
- 58:33And so that's why Bitcoin is still the native currency of the Internet.
- 58:38And civil projects in the Bitcoin space have been trying to, you know, also rival this new trend
- 58:44and make sure at least that we're up there with the others
- 58:49and can show that we show up and that we are ready to compete with them.
- 58:59And one example is the art protocol that I think is a fantastic idea to use.
- 59:05I checked it out already and it works really well.
- 59:08And another way of doing it for even smaller transactions
- 59:12and high frequency transactions.
- 59:15Cache is just amazing for it
- 59:16because it's basically instant,
- 59:18basically free and with insane privacy.
- 59:22All of these factors, I think,
- 59:23are super important,
- 59:25especially in an agentic world.
- 59:27So eCache is just something
- 59:30that works really, really well with agents.
- 59:35Yeah, and particularly in a world
- 59:36where the subject of ID verification
- 59:39on the internet is becoming more prominent.
- 59:42I think the ability to opt out and have these internet-native options
- 59:48that don't require KYC at the edges like stablecoins are imperative
- 59:53because it seems like the digital ID conversation
- 59:55is definitely beginning to pick up again.
- 59:59Every stablecoin is permissioned.
- 1:00:00All of them can be turned off if they don't like your digital ID.
- 1:00:05Yeah.
- 1:00:07I want to be respectful of your time because I know I pinged you
- 1:00:09in the afternoon yesterday to do this.
- 1:00:12And you were gracious enough to do this last minute, but to end it, love getting philosophical with you.
- 1:00:19Last year when we spoke, I really dove into how you view yourself as an artist in the digital world.
- 1:00:25And I think what you've done since then has proven that to be true.
- 1:00:29But thinking about the proliferation of these AI tools and humans beginning to interact with these at an accelerating pace.
- 1:00:38What are your hopes for the future?
- 1:00:39Obviously, the meme of the permanent underclasses here, the meme of the singularity and Skynet having been launched already and will only recognize it in retrospect is beginning to permeate.
- 1:00:50What is your view for how these tools affect our humanity?
- 1:00:56Oh, that's a that's a big one.
- 1:00:57Because so first I'll start with my craft.
- 1:01:02And I hinted towards this already in the beginning of our conversation today.
- 1:01:06But it's been amazing to watch how things can change in a way and in a pace that no one would have predicted.
- 1:01:14the penetration, the proliferation of AI in society
- 1:01:22was always predicted to have the most negative influences
- 1:01:26on the old kind of manual job markets
- 1:01:31and the plumber and the robots will come
- 1:01:34and everyone will lose their jobs and so on,
- 1:01:37which I think is still a risk.
- 1:01:41But I wouldn't have predicted myself
- 1:01:43that programmers would be the ones who are affected first or even the most,
- 1:01:49and I think probably will be the most.
- 1:01:52So we are at a time, you know, zooming out,
- 1:01:56that software engineers had this incredible run in the last decade or two
- 1:02:02and made astronomical sums of money and still software engineering,
- 1:02:07you know, the salaries associated with it,
- 1:02:10kind of like still detached from rest of society.
- 1:02:14So we have been seeing a decoupling of what you just maybe called
- 1:02:21the permanent underclass and the Silicon Valley upper class.
- 1:02:27But what I see is what's happening right now is changing that drastically.
- 1:02:34And I think that's maybe for the better
- 1:02:36because software engineering has never changed this fast before
- 1:02:41and has become just way more accessible to many, many more people.
- 1:02:46It's not this exclusive skill anymore that you have to acquire yourself
- 1:02:52by decades and decades of working on your own
- 1:02:54and acquiring all these special skills that you can then use to find a job, for example.
- 1:03:00So every software engineer out there who still didn't get it, I just want to say it again, you will lose your job in five years, you're done if you're not using AI.
- 1:03:12Like, I'm sure of this.
- 1:03:15And I cannot say this about, like, another job category just yet.
- 1:03:21So I think it's just a, let's say, let's see, it's ironic that today's, in today's world, the plumber and the carpenter and, you know, manual labor folks are, I think, more valuable than ever before.
- 1:03:41and have more security about their jobs than ever before
- 1:03:46relative to the rest of society.
- 1:03:50But that is something to think about.
- 1:03:52It's almost beautiful to see it happen this way.
- 1:03:57And at the same time, getting a bit more philosophical on this is
- 1:04:01when we last talked, I spoke of software engineering
- 1:04:04as something like an art form where if you have the energy to produce,
- 1:04:11and you have the skill that you can really affect the world with your ideas,
- 1:04:16which is ultimately how I think what drives art itself is finding ways to materialize your thoughts.
- 1:04:26That can be a book or a painting, but it can also be software.
- 1:04:31And although we're in this renaissance of software development,
- 1:04:38we're seeing that the brush really doesn't matter as much as we thought it would anymore.
- 1:04:45So the manual part of it is just completely changing.
- 1:04:50But that means that the rest of software development is becoming more important.
- 1:04:56So now that everyone can write software, or those who can write software before can write even more software,
- 1:05:05software just becomes kind of like a disposable artifact of your activity so what matters now is
- 1:05:15why why do you do what you do and that makes things a bit more complicated as a human to
- 1:05:23figure out why you do something or what you should be doing what's a good thing to do you know what
- 1:05:27makes sense to do those require a completely different set of skills to figure out good
- 1:05:34answers to these questions than just like the learning Postgres and C-sharp and whatever.
- 1:05:41Right.
- 1:05:41So now it's about ideas and execution.
- 1:05:48Some people say taste and aesthetics.
- 1:05:53But I also think about communication and marketing and trying to explain to people
- 1:06:01why you do certain things and why they should be interested in it.
- 1:06:06So all of these way more human things and way more soft-skilled things
- 1:06:12are suddenly at the center of software development.
- 1:06:17And so I think that's the reason why everything is going to change
- 1:06:22and it's changing right now.
- 1:06:24So we might see a new wave of software.
- 1:06:28where we might see a new wave of cyber culture emerge
- 1:06:32because of these changes that we're experiencing, right, Neil?
- 1:06:37Yeah, we may find that all the fears of our humanity being stripped from us
- 1:06:42are actually completely wrong,
- 1:06:45and the technology forces us to explore our own humanity
- 1:06:48and bring it out via our creative endeavors
- 1:06:50in the world of projectionist software.
- 1:06:53There is this idea that it's popular in this universal basic income circles about what do you do once you have everything you need?
- 1:07:05What do you do if you don't have to work anymore?
- 1:07:09And it forces us as humans to really answer that question.
- 1:07:15I think that question is important, whether UBI has arrived or not, whether everything is fully automated or not.
- 1:07:23You should be asking yourself this question like 10 years ago.
- 1:07:28And today, you're forced to ask that question.
- 1:07:32If you're a software engineer, you're literally forced today.
- 1:07:35If you're not a software engineer, you'll be forced in like five years to answer that question, maybe in 10.
- 1:07:41And the good thing is that we're getting more prosperous as a society.
- 1:07:46Hopefully, at least we can all.
- 1:07:47I mean, if this doesn't turn into a dystopia.
- 1:07:50But the good news is that we only have more time on our hands, more life quality on our
- 1:07:55hands to think about the more important questions like who do we want to be?
- 1:08:00What is the goal of all our actions?
- 1:08:01How do we want to live in a society?
- 1:08:04What should this world look like?
- 1:08:05So there's room for new ideas and it's the most exciting times to be alive.
- 1:08:12It really is.
- 1:08:15It really is.
- 1:08:16Happy that you have that perspective.
- 1:08:18Somebody I respect in the world of software development.
- 1:08:21It's great to see that you're optimistic about this.
- 1:08:25Thank you for all you've done.
- 1:08:28I mean, from BitChat to Cache Protocol, now Numopay, Clawi.ai,
- 1:08:33making this agentic world more accessible for other people
- 1:08:37who I think should be experimenting with this.
- 1:08:39It's insane to see what you've shipped since we last recorded.
- 1:08:44So keep it up, brother.
- 1:08:46Thank you. And I want to forward all of those great words that you just shared with me also to the team, which did most of that work.
- 1:08:55And we are a great developer team with incredible people who are working on cashew day and night.
- 1:09:02And we all just want to see Bitcoin succeed.
- 1:09:06And I also want to use this dance to talk to the people who are listening out there thinking, you know, what should I do?
- 1:09:15how can I help, how can I help improve this world we live in, is I, you know, this is a,
- 1:09:25Bitcoin is a free and open source system that lives off the contributions of people like you.
- 1:09:34And if people don't choose to work on Bitcoin, Bitcoin stops working, it will die. So I hope that,
- 1:09:42you know there's at least one person out there with things like i've been a software engineer
- 1:09:46all my life and i'm fed up with this job and i want to do something else to consider you consider
- 1:09:53becoming a bitcoin developer and help with you know help us with driving these freedom technologies
- 1:10:00forward because no one else is doing it there is no one except this circle of people that we've
- 1:10:07talked about trying to counteract the massive growth of surveillance technology and centralized
- 1:10:17control. And so if you feel that you need or you can change something in your life and you want to
- 1:10:25contribute your energy towards something good, please join us and become a Bitcoin developer,
- 1:10:31become a cash developer, look at BidChat, look at all the other projects that are out there and
- 1:10:36contribute.
- 1:10:38If not you, then who?
- 1:10:40Ali, it's been a pleasure, sir.
- 1:10:42Likewise. Thank you, Marty.
- 1:10:45Peace and love, freaks.