Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #82: What Will Be Scarce in an AI World, The Real Cost of Vibe Coding, The End of the Software Engineer
Transcript
- 0:00A presentation for our team tomorrow, which is about the 20 agents that I have in production
- 0:04and what they actually do, what they've done for me.
- 0:07And in building the presentation, Cloud Code was like, oh, this one's been failing for a
- 0:11week.
- 0:12I was like, what do you mean?
- 0:12Yeah.
- 0:13It just stopped working.
- 0:14It's a problem I have to solve, and I think that's the thing I'm learning is that most of
- 0:17the things you need to know, it's far easier to learn them when you encounter them and bump
- 0:21your toe.
- 0:22It's the week of June 1.
- 0:24Welcome to the Learning Corner Precursor Ventures podcast.
- 0:29Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
- 0:31I'm Mia Farnam, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
- 0:36be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
- 0:40week.
- 0:40Our first piece is a really well researched essay by economist Alexey Moss titled What Will
- 0:47Be Scarce?
- 0:48And it makes a really counterintuitive case for what happens to human labor when AI can produce
- 0:54nearly everything a person can.
- 0:56The core argument is that as automation drives down the cost of commodities, real incomes
- 1:00rise, and people predictably shift their spending towards things that automation cannot
- 1:05cheapen.
- 1:05Goods and services where the human element is the value.
- 1:08He calls this the relational sector, which includes nurses, therapists, personal chefs,
- 1:14bespoke craftspeople, hospitality and care workers.
- 1:17He leans on a behavioral insight from Rene Girard called mimetic desire, the idea that
- 1:22people want things more when others can't have them.
- 1:26Research he ran found that willingness to pay nearly doubled when people knew others were
- 1:30excluded from the same product.
- 1:32The kicker in this argument is that AI involvement actually undermines that
- 1:36exclusivity premium, making human made things feel scarcer and more valuable by contrast.
- 1:41His conclusion is that economics does not become irrelevant in an AI world.
- 1:45Scarcity just relocates.
- 1:48He opens with this Starbucks example, which I think is such a good gut check on all the
- 1:53automation assumptions we make, especially with AI.
- 1:56But Starbucks, if anyone remembers, they had technology that essentially removed a large
- 2:00portion of the human element entirely.
- 2:02And then they tried it out, and they actually reversed a lot of those changes because they
- 2:06found out the handwritten cups, the interactions with the baristas and ceramic
- 2:10mugs, those things drove more people to sit and stay in their cafes.
- 2:16Charles, do you buy the logic at scale that hospitality or so much of this intangible
- 2:22interaction becomes a genuine competitive moat as opposed to a soft differentiator, which I
- 2:27feel like a lot of people are overlooking today?
- 2:29I think we already have examples of this in life.
- 2:31Getting a human customer service person for most businesses and services that are scaled is
- 2:37a VIP experience.
- 2:38For everybody else, you get either the automated phone tree or you get the AI chatbot.
- 2:43And I do think because human labor is expensive, people will say, oh, if that's done
- 2:48by a human, it's bespoke.
- 2:49Remember we talked about was that your brother who's the glassblower?
- 2:52Yeah.
- 2:52Mhmm.
- 2:53Like, yeah, your brother's onto something.
- 2:54We are gonna see a resurgence.
- 2:55And I think we already see this, like, you think about, watches or there's already a lot
- 2:59of handbags.
- 2:59There are lot of luxury goods already where there's a premium on handmade by humans at low
- 3:04volume with great care.
- 3:05I think that will accelerate.
- 3:07And I do think I consider myself an economist as someone who studied the economy in school.
- 3:11Do I think one of the things I've been trying to figure out, if you think about, like, a lot
- 3:14of these conversations, particularly around AI businesses and services, modes, defensibility,
- 3:19it's I think it's all a question about what's scarce.
- 3:21Because historically in software, computer engineering development cycles were scarce.
- 3:25So if you could accumulate a lot of them and turn their energy into product, it was harder
- 3:29to compete with that.
- 3:30And now computer engineering cycles are less scarce.
- 3:33I wouldn't say cheap.
- 3:33I wouldn't say free.
- 3:34They're less scarce.
- 3:35And I think everyone's trying to figure, well, what what is scarce?
- 3:37I don't think we we know.
- 3:39So people have gravitated towards taste or energy.
- 3:41These fuzzier.
- 3:42The things that I do think we will see are resurgence.
- 3:44It's funny.
- 3:45I went to two coffee shops in Palo Alto.
- 3:47This is obviously a very Bay Area thing.
- 3:49They're both on University Avenue.
- 3:51One coffee shop has one person working behind the bar, and a machine makes almost all of the
- 3:57drinks.
- 3:57Very capital efficient.
- 3:59I think I said two words to the person in the coffee shop.
- 4:02Coffee shop was pretty full.
- 4:03The people were all working on laptops.
- 4:05They weren't really talking to each other.
- 4:06It felt like a library with a coffee shop in it.
- 4:08The other one I went to is a really old Italian coffee shop on the other University Avenue that
- 4:13has no takeaway.
- 4:15They make all of it on, like, traditional espresso machines.
- 4:18And you go there and everybody's sitting there and talking.
- 4:20And the coffee is made by the people behind the bar.
- 4:23Many of them have been working there for a long time.
- 4:24It's not the fastest coffee shop in the world, but I think it's the most pleasant.
- 4:28And I think the people who go there go there for the experience.
- 4:30I don't know how you invest against that theme, but not everything that happens in society
- 4:34needs to be a money makings.
- 4:35So I do think we're gonna see what he described.
- 4:37And because human things are expensive and hard to procure, I think people are gonna value them
- 4:41even more than they do today.
- 4:43I think in your example, one thing that's true is both can exist at the same time.
- 4:47For my own coffee shop, it's right across the street.
- 4:50There's only one.
- 4:50They had five locations, and they sized down during COVID.
- 4:53It's very neighborhood feel.
- 4:55There's always a line.
- 4:56It always you don't get your coffee immediately, but everyone draws there.
- 4:59And there's a Starbucks a block away, and it's way less crowded mostly.
- 5:05And it's just a different group of people who go there.
- 5:07I was talking to the manager, and their their Square tablet had broke.
- 5:12And so they really could only take cash.
- 5:14And there were still lines.
- 5:15Like, people were still lines waiting.
- 5:17And so that was, in their world, a defensible moat that worked for them.
- 5:21People still showed up, and a lot of that had to do with the human element of it, the more
- 5:25rational sector piece that Imas talks about of just the extra intangible aspects.
- 5:30That's a pretty spot on comparison, I feel like, or example that we're making because it's
- 5:34talking directly about hospitality.
- 5:36I guess one thing that got me thinking when I was reading this article is the rational
- 5:39sector, which he kind of argues is going to grow or more people might enter that space.
- 5:45He gives the examples of service jobs.
- 5:48So think in hospitality, nurses, teachers, etcetera.
- 5:51Those people have historically underpaid for old times.
- 5:54And so I'm wondering, does something like this cause those people to actually be paid
- 6:00correctly?
- 6:01Or does it just have more people enter the space because their jobs that they previously
- 6:05worked in are no longer in high demand?
- 6:08We had COVID happen.
- 6:09Say that created demand for teachers and learning experiences that we hadn't seen prior,
- 6:15but that didn't really change the salaries that they were paid.
- 6:18So I like the framing of his his piece because it is optimistic and that things relocate,
- 6:23which is great.
- 6:24But the way he talks about the rational sector, I'm just not so sure if those people will get
- 6:28the premiums that they've always deserved, I guess.
- 6:31I would love to believe that they will.
- 6:32I'm skeptical that they will.
- 6:34But I do think people who are at the very high end of those services are gonna make more
- 6:39money.
- 6:39And I think, you know, you are gonna end up with the star economy, where I think the people
- 6:43at the very top in some of these other professions are gonna find that they can
- 6:47command more.
- 6:48If you're a really great tutor, there might be wealthy families who say, you know, as great as
- 6:52AI tutors are for my kids, I really want a human.
- 6:55But I want, like, the best human I could find, and my willingness to pay for the best human
- 6:59will be, like, much higher.
- 7:01In the same way that if you are in hospitality and you work at a really good hotel or a really
- 7:05good restaurant, you can make more money.
- 7:07The standards are higher.
- 7:08The expectations are higher.
- 7:08You have to be better at your job, but you can make more money.
- 7:10But that's more money within relative to that profession.
- 7:13I I'm very curious to see how this all plays out.
- 7:16It is interesting because I think the piece does focus also on elitist is a strong word,
- 7:20but higher income power to drive where the relational sector is gonna have the most
- 7:25demand.
- 7:25That feels a little bit ironically dystopian when you think about the article and the
- 7:29takeaway being so optimistic.
- 7:31And then I think, oh, all the power and attention is truly being driven by the people
- 7:35who have the money to kind of position it in that direction.
- 7:38And the question that remains is who will have the money at the end?
- 7:40I think there's this undercurrent conversation that it will be the plumbers, the electricians
- 7:45who've been put behind, and now they will be at the forefront.
- 7:47But I don't I don't know.
- 7:48I think people who can continue to go to the high luxury resorts Yeah.
- 7:51Will continue to go to those resorts and will pay even more premiums to go to the best ones.
- 7:56I immediately thought of White Lotus when I read his art.
- 7:58Yeah.
- 7:58That's what I was thinking of.
- 8:00Yeah.
- 8:00I think the other thing that I've been thinking about, which is related to what you said is if
- 8:04AI is as deflationary as we think it is for digital services, that means those things
- 8:09become cheaper.
- 8:10But if you're already sitting on quite a bit of wealth, you're gonna find yourself paying a lot
- 8:14less for stuff that used to be expensive, which means maybe your willingness to do weird things
- 8:19with your money that are esoteric could go way up.
- 8:21Might just be like, well, you know, I don't need to spend as much money on x y z thing
- 8:25anymore because of AI.
- 8:26What are other passion things I could do with my money, things I'm interested in?
- 8:29Hey, I'm gonna have a sommelier come to my house and hang out with me for a week and like,
- 8:33teach me stuff.
- 8:34Like, new ways to monetize expertise or human experience are gonna show up.
- 8:38Do you think they're gonna be mostly accessible to people who made money in the pre IA era who
- 8:42are sitting on it.
- 8:43And suddenly, like, AI is making all of the other things in my life cheaper and easier, so
- 8:47I have more money and time for leisure.
- 8:49Like, they will be the Keynesian beneficiaries of all this stuff.
- 8:52I do love the way that you worded it earlier, the star economy.
- 8:55This is the time to lean into if you had a hobby that you're good at.
- 8:58If you wanted to perfect it, it would be the time.
- 9:01Our next piece is by Lisa Kustova titled 40 buyers and nothing to sell, describing an
- 9:07honest take on vibe coding and what happens when you follow the hype production.
- 9:11Lisa spent nine months trying to build an AI powered content system for financial advisers.
- 9:16She showed up to a major industry conference in Huntington Beach with 40 people ready to buy,
- 9:20exactly what the title says, and nothing to sell them because the product was structurally
- 9:25broken in ways she could not see or diagnose on her own.
- 9:29The piece is organized around this metaphor of footprints on a glacier in New Zealand.
- 9:35Hikers were essentially following tracks, hopefully looking like they were going
- 9:40somewhere, not realizing that tracks they were following were actually someone's practice labs
- 9:46on the same path.
- 9:47And the technical failure was really stark in her product she was creating.
- 9:51Her AI coding assistant had quietly created three separate services to handle the same API
- 9:57call, never flagged it.
- 9:58And when things did break, it confidently blamed other tools rather than its own output.
- 10:03What actually fixed things was, surprise surprise, a Bulgarian engineer who looked at
- 10:08her code the way a plumber analyzes a wall leak and declared that it was a total mess, and that
- 10:13if he had received this code from an actual software engineer, he was like, I would kick
- 10:17this back to them and, like, fix your crappy code.
- 10:19The real lesson she lands on is that the map everyone is following in Vibe coding is upside
- 10:24down.
- 10:25Prompting feels like progress, things we've all talked about before, but engineering an actual
- 10:29system that works in production does require a fundamentally different orientation.
- 10:34I read this piece, and I was thinking that Lisa is one of the few people willing to publicly
- 10:37document what actually went wrong when vibe coding meets production.
- 10:41In reality, even when there's a lot of excitement and demand coming her way.
- 10:44But for every Lisa, I think there's probably, like, a 100 founders or operators who don't
- 10:50realize that their product is structurally broken until customer does, which is far more
- 10:54dire.
- 10:55How long, Charles, do you think it will take before the market starts separating the
- 10:59products that were genuinely engineered from the ones that just look like they are on the
- 11:03surface?
- 11:04My current thinking is hype moves three times as fast as reality, which means it's gonna take
- 11:09a while because everybody's AI psychosis, AI Pilled CEO, believes that these things can be
- 11:14vibe coded into production.
- 11:16And it's gonna take some failure before people say, well, wait a minute.
- 11:20Maybe this isn't such a good idea after all.
- 11:22And maybe we overestimated what we could do, and we need to go back and take a more
- 11:27fundamental look.
- 11:28And I hope you didn't fire all of your software engineers.
- 11:30And I think some of the stuff people will realize, you know what?
- 11:33Maybe vibe coding an internal wiki or a software tool that's used by two people that we
- 11:37would never pay to bill, maybe that's an okay use.
- 11:40Maybe our core production service that we use to make money that has some complexity
- 11:44shouldn't be vibe coded by someone who's not a developer.
- 11:46Whenever I talk to friends who are actually trained software developers, the way that they
- 11:51use coding systems is different.
- 11:52You know, the coding assistance help them write code, but they're still making judgments.
- 11:55Or they're giving the coding assistant far more instructions on architecture and design, and
- 12:00they're not just letting the coding assistant make a bunch of really important architecture
- 12:04decisions on its own.
- 12:05And I think that's why you get better code versus, I think, using coding system when you
- 12:11don't understand the fundamentals of software development or architecture.
- 12:14It will build you something.
- 12:15It will probably work, but that doesn't mean it's maintainable.
- 12:18I was just doing some math.
- 12:19It's about 10 to one for me.
- 12:21Support, tinker, upgrade, debugging to build.
- 12:25A lot of my friends are like, for someone with your ability, that's probably right.
- 12:28They're like, if you were better, you'd make better decisions upfront.
- 12:31You'd plan a little better.
- 12:32And it wouldn't be 10 to one.
- 12:34It'd maybe be three to one.
- 12:35But anybody who tells me, oh, I just like one shot of this thing, I've never touched them.
- 12:38Like, it's probably broken.
- 12:39You don't even know it.
- 12:40So I have a real appreciation for the craft of software development and, like, what it takes
- 12:46to fix things when they break and how you diagnose the problem and how you figure out
- 12:49what about it you wanna fix.
- 12:51And so I think this is the first of many of these stories we'll hear.
- 12:54And they're gonna get a lot of attention, just like the the robots that trash those people's
- 12:58houses and a desire to get cleaning robot training data.
- 13:01There there's a a deep audience for, like, AI mishap stories.
- 13:05Oh, absolutely.
- 13:06I like the metaphor of the hikers in the glacier because it showed that, like, we're
- 13:09kind of in unexplored territory, not for software engineers.
- 13:13They've been doing this job forever, but for everyone else who's, like, jumping into this
- 13:16role and upscaling themselves.
- 13:17She had two really good graphics.
- 13:19One was kind of really invariable looking terrain, like if you were looking across a
- 13:23valley.
- 13:24And in different pockets, she outlined, over here, it works well.
- 13:27You're up on the top of the hill.
- 13:29Over here, it doesn't work as well, but I'm not quite sure.
- 13:31Over here, it's a a deep valley into a pit.
- 13:33It definitely doesn't work.
- 13:34But you're walking the same plane.
- 13:36It could be all one product that you're working in, and in different pockets, it's working in
- 13:39different times, it's working.
- 13:41Previously, at least for nontechnical people, it's quite binary.
- 13:45I'm building something, and it works or it doesn't.
- 13:47And the customer sees that too.
- 13:49It's like the experience, what it is, and then it's working or it's not working.
- 13:52I think what's scary is you could be getting an output that just looks like it's correct
- 13:57because it came in a pretty package.
- 13:59It came at the right times.
- 14:01Like, it could be spat out in five minutes, and you don't know if it's incorrect.
- 14:05And I think that's where it just takes a little bit more of a technical eye.
- 14:08And my question is, it does seem like people do need to understand the difference between when
- 14:13to use the LLM and when to use more deterministic script.
- 14:17That muscle, I feel like, does derive from having experience of being technical.
- 14:21Do you think that that skill can be taught broadly, or does it just naturally select for
- 14:25people who already have an engineering foundation?
- 14:28And how could a nontechnical person upskill themselves to get there?
- 14:31I assume the question is you just continue have to build and actually take your time and be
- 14:35thoughtful.
- 14:35So funny.
- 14:36So I have a presentation for our team tomorrow, which is about the 20 agents that I have in
- 14:41production and, like, what they actually do, what they've done for me.
- 14:44And in building the presentation, Cloud Code was like, oh, this one's been failing for a
- 14:49week.
- 14:49I was like, what do you mean?
- 14:50It's like, yeah.
- 14:51Just stop working.
- 14:52It's not a critical one, or I would have noticed it.
- 14:55And so my project this week was I went back and put in much better logging and monitoring into
- 15:01all of my agents' skills so that I get regular updates.
- 15:05Software development, you would put in logging and monitoring.
- 15:08It is really interesting how I feel like every week, and I'm like, oh, I have a greater
- 15:11appreciation for this element of I understand this concept now in a much more visceral way
- 15:18because it's something that I want.
- 15:19It's a problem I have to solve, and I think that's the thing I'm learning is that most of
- 15:23the things you need to know, it's far easier to learn them when you encounter them and bump
- 15:26your toe.
- 15:27But how funny is that example that you could
- 15:29you would share that presentation to us tomorrow, and even if things weren't working,
- 15:33we'd be like, oh, how incredible.
- 15:35Amazing.
- 15:35Can you send me over your script so that I can copy it and start running it myself for my own
- 15:39workflows?
- 15:40And Claudine was like, do you wanna include the ones that aren't working in a I'm like,
- 15:43absolutely.
- 15:43Include the broken ones because I wanna talk about the broken ones and what I'm doing to fix
- 15:47them because I think that's, like, part of the lesson too.
- 15:50Yeah.
- 15:50And I think that's the growth muscle that we're going through collectively is there's this
- 15:55instantaneous satisfaction you get when you build something and it works.
- 15:59And you're like, I am amazing.
- 16:01And then when you have to do maintenance on it, it's just so much less fun because the output
- 16:06is the same.
- 16:07It's I already created this two weeks ago, and now I have to dedicate specific hours to
- 16:11continue to make it work.
- 16:12It's so much of a less fun task.
- 16:14But, again, that's where, I guess, real craft taste judgment is built in those hours as
- 16:19opposed to just spitting out something that works in that first go.
- 16:22Our last piece is a really good tie to what we just talked about now.
- 16:26It's an interview with Casey Newton and Boris Churney, the creator of Cloud Code at
- 16:29Anthropic, and it reflects Boris' take on the software engineering job market from someone
- 16:34who's actively automating his own role.
- 16:36Boris hasn't written a single line of code himself in over six months, and he's really
- 16:40clear eyed that the title of software engineer may start dissolving by the end of this year
- 16:44into something closer to builder as designers, PMs, and managers all start shipping code of
- 16:50their own.
- 16:51But his overall forecast is quite optimistic.
- 16:53He thinks that there will be 100 times more people writing or directing code in the near
- 16:58future than there are engineers today, just not people with that specific title.
- 17:01He uses the tractor analogy to ground the rate of change for everyone who feels uneasy,
- 17:07pointing out that it took seventy years from the tractor's invention to tractors
- 17:12outnumbering horses on American farms, and draws a parallel to how companies that
- 17:17reorganized entirely around computers in the nineties, so completely throughout their files,
- 17:23throughout all their paper, and just decided we're gonna focus on this only, saw massive
- 17:27productivity gains, while others who were half in, half out saw none or much lower.
- 17:32His closing point that stuck out was about access.
- 17:36The winners of some recent Claude Code hackathons that they ran weren't senior
- 17:42engineers, but it was like an electrician.
- 17:45It was a doctor.
- 17:46It was a carpenter.
- 17:47That anecdote really landed for me because it does flip the assumption that AI tools are a
- 17:53gift to people who are already only so close to the space.
- 17:56I think we spend a lot of time thinking about Claude Code is amazing for the best engineer
- 18:00because it makes them 10 times more productive.
- 18:02I would have loved to have seen what the electrician, the doctor, and the carpenter kind
- 18:05of came up with because I would assume that what they created was actually probably closer
- 18:10to something that is actually needed, because they are kind of building off of their own
- 18:14experience than somebody who's like, amazing.
- 18:16I have these tools.
- 18:17I can be productive.
- 18:18Let me just start creating things for the sake of creating.
- 18:21I was wondering that was surprising to you, the hackathon anecdote.
- 18:25I'd read a write up they did in the hackathon, and it was surprising.
- 18:28But I think for me, I thought a lot about Excel.
- 18:31And I think it used to be a long time ago that, like, computation was expensive and computation
- 18:36we had little people called computers who did computation free.
- 18:39And then Excel came out and everyone was like, woah woah.
- 18:41Can an investment banker use Excel better than the average person?
- 18:45Absolutely.
- 18:46Maybe they can.
- 18:46Can a consultant use PowerPoint better than the average person?
- 18:49Of course, they can.
- 18:50The average white collar worker assumes that they will have to use a PowerPoint or
- 18:54PowerPoint like product, whether it's Google Slides or PowerPoint or whatever, or and some
- 18:59kind of app based computation product like Excel or Numbers or whatever as part of your
- 19:02job.
- 19:03Those are just skills now that you must have in order to be effective as a white collar worker.
- 19:08But it doesn't require that you have the design skills of a designer and attention to detail of
- 19:12a consultant or the what's to do with macros and shortcuts of a banker.
- 19:16You can use your mouse.
- 19:17It's okay.
- 19:18You're expected to have some base level familiarity and facility with those tools or or
- 19:22you probably won't get hired.
- 19:23And I think the same is gonna happen.
- 19:24I think I'm an example of what Boris is describing.
- 19:27The code I've written in my life, I've basically written in the last nine months.
- 19:31Other than the code I wrote learning the basics of Python, 95% of the code I've written, I've
- 19:36written with the coding system.
- 19:37It's the only way I know how to really ship code.
- 19:40But I I would never call myself a software developer in the same way that business schools
- 19:44started teaching people Python and R for data analysis.
- 19:47I don't think most of those people would say, oh, I'm a data analyst.
- 19:49They're like, oh, I'm an MBA student who's, doing analytical work.
- 19:51And I think that's where we're headed.
- 19:53There will be, I think, people who are professional software developers because of
- 19:56everybody shipping code with variable in the same way that you would never let an analyst
- 20:00ship their final version of a model to a client or people who know what the model's supposed to
- 20:05do and, like, reviewing it.
- 20:07I think this notion that everybody's gonna ship to production with no oversight, it strikes me
- 20:12as, like, very dangerous.
- 20:13So I do think there will be people who are very skilled at software development, who understand
- 20:17architecture, who understand design, who are gonna look at what people ship and say, we're
- 20:21not committing this.
- 20:22Or this is pretty close.
- 20:23This needs some massaging and fixing and and it's gonna be a little bit more craftsman to
- 20:28make sure that, like, the body stays coherent.
- 20:30They're gonna tinker with these things as they come in.
- 20:32But many more people are gonna be contributing to software products, and it's just gonna
- 20:36become another skill you have to have just like Excel and PowerPoint.
- 20:40The one thing that I was noodling on, which was this tractor example, which I think he was
- 20:44using as a way to calm people's fears that things are moving too quickly and and in saying
- 20:48that it took many, many years before tractors were everywhere and people had really started
- 20:52relocating from farming to the back house and in in the factories themselves.
- 20:56I think that one works for the tractor example back then because it was the high barriers to
- 21:01entry to get a tractor is expensive.
- 21:03It was difficult to get ahold of them.
- 21:05You really couldn't start the tractor unless you knew how to work it.
- 21:08This feels different because there are low to no barriers to entry to start getting smart on
- 21:14code, and you can just go running with no oversight in one direction.
- 21:18So that's where I feel like I think the dissemination and, like, training of
- 21:21it is it's gonna happen a lot quicker, obviously.
- 21:23I think, like, half a year ago, I don't think most people didn't know what Claude was outside
- 21:26of the tech bubble.
- 21:27Now they do, which shows you that they've done a great job in terms of distribution.
- 21:31I do think that what you said, how it goes through the funnel all the way to production,
- 21:34that's gonna be what's more similar to the tractor analogy than just the dissemination of
- 21:38who has access to the tractor or to plot code.
- 21:41Also, for seventy years, you could be like, I'm just gonna ride this out.
- 21:44That's three generations.
- 21:45You could have been a horse farm where you're like, I see the tractor coming.
- 21:48I don't want change.
- 21:49My child or the person who takes over my farm, I'm a let them deal with the tractor.
- 21:52I'm gonna keep farming the way.
- 21:54And I think this is why people rightly have more anxiety over this.
- 21:58You know, IBM has been talking about the paperless office for fifty years.
- 22:02We're only kinda now just there.
- 22:04But this idea of a paperless office has been around for a long time.
- 22:06And ironically, the introduction of computers is for some people let let to more paper
- 22:10because people start printing stuff.
- 22:12So instead of having one copy, now you have, like, 10 copies or you print the same thing.
- 22:16So I think previous tech waves, you could see it coming, and you're like, I might just get
- 22:21out the door before I have to deal with this.
- 22:24This is not that.
- 22:25This is here right now.
- 22:27It's funny.
- 22:27The presentation I made for our team, I basically did a Cloud Code session and created
- 22:31a markdown file with all of the outputs I wanted from my agent development work.
- 22:36I gave that markdown file to Cloud Design, and that was the presentation.
- 22:39I didn't touch PowerPoint.
- 22:41It was like Claude code to Claude Design, and then some tweaking and polish.
- 22:44Is it a presentation that would ship to our LPs?
- 22:46No.
- 22:46Is it good enough for an internal discussion?
- 22:48Absolutely.
- 22:49I think the reason people are scared is, like, if you told them you have seventy years to
- 22:52learn this stuff, he would be like, okay.
- 22:54I have something I have some anxiety.
- 22:55But have anxiety for my children and grandchildren.
- 22:57It'd be fine.
- 22:58I'm gonna, like, retire without having had to learn this.
- 23:00That's not what's happening here.
- 23:02That's the scary part.
- 23:02I think it's also the people I mean, mostly millennials, I think, feel like we grew up in a
- 23:07time that was able to grasp the tech wave and figured all of that out.
- 23:11And then right when you're hitting middle management or management your own, you're
- 23:14having to relearn everything.
- 23:15And then bestow that knowledge onto a younger generation who doesn't have any of context.
- 23:19And I think that's where I feel the most anxiety is within that generation specifically.
- 23:24For sure.
- 23:24Well, we are all out of time.
- 23:25Thank you, Charles, for stopping in.
- 23:27Thank you to our listeners for jumping in as well.
- 23:29Please like and subscribe, and we'll talk with you all soon.
- 23:32Thank you.
- 23:33Bye.