Latest / The Ruby AI Podcast / Programming Isn't Dying, It's Climbing the Abstraction Ladder

Transcript

Programming Isn't Dying, It's Climbing the Abstraction Ladder · The Ruby AI Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: We are in the Buzz Sprout studio live at Railsworld.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_04: Or two of us are.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm somewhere else.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know quite yet where I woke up.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_04: If you can't recognize that famous Texan that we have on the show today, it is none other than OB Fernandez.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_04: I go by Bubba now.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the show, Bubba.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty cool broadcasting from here.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is day two of Rails World, two of two.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: It hasn't actually started yet.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: It starts late.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: It starts at 10 a.m.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: today, but we're here in the Buzz Sprout studio and we could see everything going on around us.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: At C, I'm kind of you can't really see anything.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: One theme of Rails World seems to be that it's very dark and cold the entire time you're here.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I see everything in here.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Feels like a fish tank.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't see it.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: In the middle of it.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's true.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_04: You need like one of those Japanese public toilets where the glass fogs when you close it, you know, and you lock the door behind you.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't know that, but that sounds great.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Nah, I like people to watch.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Keep the door unlocked.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Just for the sense of danger.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, how's your experience been so far of uh Rails World?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Non-stop talking.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's been a lot to talk about.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: Lots to talk about.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: A lot to talk about.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Spicy takes.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Feels like the future of computing involves the death of programming.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: It does seem that way.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, DHH, you know, said that literally in his uh opening keynote, right?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, some people, some people I think are overreacting to that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Overreacting to that, or do you think DH?
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think some people just overreact to DHH in general.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that's a fair point.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Fuck.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're gonna overreact to me.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's not reacting enough.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently it's contagious.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_04: Nothing is new from DHH's uh standpoint, I don't think.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know it's been 21 years?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: This is my first time ever going and seeing him uh speak a lot.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Same.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's what I guess I expected based on everybody else talking, you know, talking about DHH.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing though, because uh takes uh and all that stuff uh get a little boring to me.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I I think what I find more interesting is just the death of programming.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is not the first time that the death of programming has been proclaimed by the industry.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: We are repeating aloof.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely true.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: But this time it's different.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And yet uh I don't think so.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: You don't think so?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think so.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think it's definitely cool.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: The future doesn't repeat it rhymes, but more and more uh is crystallizing for me that that no, I don't think it's gonna be any different this time.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's interesting in and of itself.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like we're obviously we're not, most of us, writing code anymore.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: What you know, writing code in the in the traditional sense of just you know, hands on the keyboard, uh typing the code.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: So that's where people kind of jump from like that to okay, we're not programmers anymore.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually disagree with that statement as well.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: But what I want to know from you is is there a rebirth or is there a or is it an inflection point where we're kind of changing what it means to program?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's moving up the abstraction ladder.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there was a point in time where I imagine that people who wrote Assembler were having arguments about whether you should continue to do code review on the assembler that was generated by the compiler because they didn't trust the compiler.
• 3:16
  unknown: Yeah.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh when I bring that up, well, first of all, most people will nod their head because it's common trope.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: You agree?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: I do.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but that's the funny part because we like to think that you know we live in extraordinary times.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: In a lot of ways, objectively, it is extraordinary to have machine intelligence, very sci-fi, you know, yeah, yeah.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And everything like that.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then you go, okay, well, you know, when programmers moved from hand rolling uh assembly code, you know, to to generating machine code or you know.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't quite in that era, but I mean I started programming in the in middle eighties and then professionally in in '95.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I was close enough to talk to people that went through that era and to sort of live through certain aspects of it.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a little visceral for me.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've and I lived through the era right at the beginning of my career where Visual Basic and other you know kind of 4GLs came along, and then people were like, Yeah, you don't need programmers anymore.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it keeps happening.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: You tell people all that and then they nod, and then they don't get it.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like we're moving up the abstraction ladder.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's gonna be a new set of frameworks, new set of tools, new set of ways to version the artifacts that we want to collaborate on.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the act of putting that all together and you know translating what the executives want, let's say capital, because it's gonna become startlingly clearer uh very, very soon, I think, what that actually means for society.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: But let's say the people that call the shots they don't want a program.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: No, they may think they want a program, but some of them, like like my great CEO Brandon, uh loves the vibe code and he puts stuff together directly based on his uh ideas, but they're they're still prototypes.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't actually want to be a programmer, he wants to be a CEO.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Based on that experience, based on the perspective, based on how I see things come together, I say, okay, we're moving up the abstraction layer.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Where's the next level languages and frameworks?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Where, you know, what's the thing that's gonna get branded with a brand where people are like, now I'm a brand programmer, right?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So here in this conference, I've been talking to people, and I call it I you know since we're at Rails World and I'm a Rails guy, you know, I'm like, okay, well, what is Rails next?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Let's imagine that trademark issues aside, we were able to create the layer, you know, the the translation layer that turned a set of artifacts, written down artifacts, obviously, you know, preferably in GitHub.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so we can collaborate easily on it, you know, put that through a layer that transforms it into a properly written Rails app in such a way that's repeatable that you don't have to actually look at that code.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because that code is now the machine code or the intermediate language or you know, pick your poison for that particular trope.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then people just I I mean, some people get it, but I think uh as a whole, people are not getting it.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, oh, you know, I don't code anymore.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's like, guess what?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: The code where the code is changed.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I totally agree with you there.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: And we were talking about this yesterday.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: To me, the exciting thing is the harnesses that are being built and the knowledge graphs, all the pieces that you're putting into place around the agents to support them and get the outcomes that you want.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because that to me is creative problem solving, which is what I got into programming to do.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm curious because I know like you have a soft spot in your heart for this, you know, for this kind of development.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: You've been doing it for longer than most people.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: So where do you see that fitting in to let's say Rails Next or into this higher level of abstraction?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like, are we are we touching it when we start working on the tools that support the agents?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're touching it directly, you're manipulating text symbols that end up being inversion control.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: That that is a paradigm that I think it's premature to call that dead.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you want easy collaboration, you want repeatability, and that's that to me, that's still the way to do it.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like right now, everyone's just got you know running around with like a chicken with their head cut off and like trying all sorts of different things.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: There's a million different ways to do spectrum development.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: But we we also live in a fairly large corner of the programming world, which is like kind of web and consumer mobile kind of stuff, but the programming world is is big and getting bigger because it's much easier to apply software to all sorts of things than it was ever before.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Man, if people think the AI bubble is huge, just wait till we get into the robotics bubble.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Say more about that.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Capital wants to replace white-collar labor because now it's apparent that you can probably replace a lot of layers of it.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Wait till they can replace blue collar.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: They at least like white-collar kinda.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: They don't like blue collar.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, pardon the spicy take partner.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's right.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: You get where I'm coming from.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: You get where I you get where I'm coming from, though, right?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: No, I do.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: This is a tale as old as time, right?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we wanna, you know, we could make all this stuff a lot cheaper if it wasn't for all the people we had to pick.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: But if there's no consumers, like who's gonna empower the economy?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: There isn't.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, did you forget that history didn't end like 10 years ago with Obama?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And history includes things like a lot of people dying.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, are we that arrogant to think that history, you know, that particular kind of history is not gonna repeat itself?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where people get into the doom and gloom.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's for sure.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and it is scary, and I got kids, and I hope to have grandkids someday, and it's you know, the sort of thing that I go, okay, well, you know, hopefully we don't go down that route.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I think one of the takeaways from DHH, you know, just bringing back here to Austin that was cool yesterday, is the idea that okay, we we face an uncertain future, we participate in creating that future.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let's be optimistic.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, let's manifest a cool utopian, you know, future with all this shit.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know that he's necessarily saying utopia.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm saying that.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: The part that I respect is the um, hey, with no information about the future, or with very imperfect information about the future, we have two options.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: One is to be fearful and the other is to be optimistic.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's the rational choice is to be optimistic.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: The ra the rational choice, it's also you know, fear is the mind killer.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I I truly believe that I have believed that all the whole time.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And people accuse me of having paranoia all the time, which is you know, another way of saying the universe is out to help me instead of out to get me.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: That truly works in different ways.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, some people call it God, some people call it uh you know, manifesting, some people you know wear crystals around their neck.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't work actually, but sorry, crystal people.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: Is that it?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Have you tried it?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: You don't know.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: I tried and it didn't work.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So empirical evidence.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I get it.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I know people, and I just wrote I just wrote this post on on X that went viral and about meat proxies.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh huh.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I do have this real friend.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Some people are like, uh, Claude wrote this.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, fuck off.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is the most not Claude writing that I've done since Opus came out.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, you know, fuck off.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: That was really me.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And some people were like, that friend doesn't exist, and this story didn't happen.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, fuck off.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: This friend does exist.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: He does work for a company that most people, at least programmers, have heard of, and he is a staff engineer, and he is afraid of for his future, but in ways that I found enlightening rather than oh yeah, that checks out.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like the enlightening part is that this may be another case where people whose heart is not in the industry end up getting pushed out because those are the people that are most afraid, right?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like if your heart's in this industry, if you're a creator specifically with programming, this is my friend's creative and he's super smart.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that he read the article and he he sent me a message afterwards and he says, Hey, dude, the thing is, my heart's never been in this career.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Oh.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, about that.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that's not gonna work out very well for you in this in this phase that's coming up because like what's gonna be rewarded in this phase that's coming up is really the applied creativity towards actual programming.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: I agree with you, and I'm gonna add that I think it also rewards a uh a resilience to change that in my mind was what I signed up for by getting into this industry.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like I signed up to be at the forefront of a very changing, turbulent industry.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: And it's true, I didn't predict this amount of change.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what I had prided myself on and what I tried to bring my team up on was the ability to adapt to change quickly.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think when you combine that with a true love of problem solving in a creative fashion with computers, that's really where you can maybe feel more comfortable.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: You have to be ready to change your the label that you use, you know, as a way to describe yourself.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when I was a kid, I was a nerd or a hacker.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: When I got involved professionally into software, I was for eight, nine years a Java programmer.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then I discovered Ruby and Ruby on Rails in 2004, 2005, and I became a Rails programmer.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, those labels have their use, but I think people get attached to them.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you gotta be willing to make the leap when something happens.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe this is the death of Rails, you know, at some point.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it is the death of the current generation of programming languages as we move into whatever that next level of abstraction is.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: We've been here before and you survive and you adapt.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine that a lot of people here at this conference probably have only done Rails or have only done web paradigms.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's possible.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a kid, I I did the whole BBS scene thing and video games and like copied source code out of magazines.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then in my earliest years of programming, I I did a service dispatching system and small talk and then some database stuff, power builder, heavy-duty log processing and Pearl, Diagnostic Systems, and and Java Micro Edition at uh Daimler Chrysler in the early 2000s.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's all programming.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's all super fucking cool, you know.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you find programming cool.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And like the things that I'm doing now with Chad Fowler on regenerative software and like uh, you know, being able to move up that abstraction layer so that the source code that we now consider sacred is no longer sacred.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually disposable.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's super fucking cool, also.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: That and that's also programming.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: It is also programming.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I totally agree.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_04: Regenerative software is a really interesting idea.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the future?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's really bad for the success of the well-grided Rubyist.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't really love this idea, but I think it might be true.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm, you know, I'm super closely associated with Ruby in the Rails world and and whatnot.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's not necessarily the best thing for me as well, but I think that the attachment to the current paradigm, which is clearly going away, get a fucking grip.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: People, you're not going to be doing code review very, very soon.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you continue to insist on doing it, you will be obsolete very soon.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And by very soon, I mean like within a matter of a couple of years, you will be obsolete.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: People will look at you and they will laugh in pity.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And a very, very few of you will retain your employability in the same way that people are still doing COBOL and still doing to some degree Java.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and the rest of us will move on to newer paradigms, which are still programming and are super fucking cool and involve new.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: I see a huge greenfield of programming, and I think that's where people lose the plot.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because they look at this other thing, they go, This doesn't look like what I was doing, so I don't want to do it.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: The reason regenerative software is so so interesting to me is that it unlocks being able to make that mental shift because it says this code that you thought was so sacred that you need to maintain and make sure it's well architected and make sure that every line is correct, you know, according to whatever your flavor of correct is, you know, well tested, well architected, you know, whatever.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually bullshit.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can delete it and you can regenerate it.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And anytime that you want to fix something about that code, you want it to be better factored, you want it to be better tested, you want it to adhere to a different uh architectural paradigm, you want to change the programming language that it's implemented in, you can the same way that you compile source code into something else, you do, right?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so how is this working mechanically?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how do you see it working mechanically?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: The reason that people go, hey, you're full of shit, you can't do that, is because the agents are non-deterministic.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, compiler's deterministic, so you can prove that the output is correct.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, agents are non-deterministic.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you go, fine, put guardrails in place.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: My colleague Sebastian has a metaphor that I I think is really cool, which is like if you take a kid to a bowling alley and you want him to have fun, put up the bumpers.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because even if you know throw it at a wild angle, instead of going into the gutter, it's gonna bounce around and it's finally gonna knock down some pins.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, right now, agents are at a sufficiently primitive state that they need bumpers.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are the bumpers?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually a cool software challenge.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: What are the bumpers?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the reason that you don't see more, and this is this is my cynical, you know, 52-year-old take.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: The the cynical reason I think people aren't actually developing the bumpers is that the lack of existence of those bumpers right now is our job security.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting, but it it could it also be that not everybody sees it the same way, like they don't see into the future where it's very convenient for them to not see it that way because there's an expression I can't remember exactly how it goes, but you know, like don't ask someone to work on something that's gonna take away their job or something like that because you're not gonna you're not gonna get it.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think as an industry, we're not focusing on that, except for a couple of suicidal wackos who are like, Yeah, we can replace senior developers, no problem.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: We just need sufficient guardrails.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing is you replace the senior developers, that actually is the unlock.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because then once people are like, you know, off the cliff and realize that there's nothing under them, they're gonna fall, then they're like, Oh, maybe I should flatten my wings.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh shit, I have wings.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: I can fly.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, because this thing gives you magic powers to imagine whatever reality you want, right?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this does resonate with me because in my conversations, which I you know I have had a lot of, and I've had a lot even in the last couple of days, there is a certain sense of resignedness, or just like, this is the way it is, and I don't know anything else we can do about it, and we just have to do it this way.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, whether it's agentic development or it's the way that the person is working on a team, or the way that software development, like the direction it's heading, which makes me feel well, I feel bad about it because I think we're software engineers with agency, and we can, you know, we have power and we have a team, most of us, with which we can overcome a lot of these challenges that we are feeling existentially.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's human nature to want to hold on to the thing that makes sense and you know, to you at the time.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why this meat proxy incident, let's call it, was so instructive for me.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, why am I so excited?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: And why are so many people so upset?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is, if you're used to creating the future, right?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you're used to creating new open source projects just like that because you wanted to, uh, you know, or just starting companies because you wanted to, like making things happen.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes we forget that that kind of person is somewhat in the minority.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's safe to say that, right?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Most people just want to be told what to do and do their job well so that they can get on with their lives.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: And in this particular area of of humans, you know, like humans are well compensated to do that here.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I've been in enough corporate situations where people tell me, like, hey, actually, you suck more than the person who's just uh dependable and delivers the same results every day so that I can make proper time estimates based on their performance.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, Yeah, but they don't know what they're doing.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's like, yeah, no, they may not know what the fuck they're doing, but that at least they do it consistently.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: So you're fired, just knocking off the city.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and it's like, and then you know, tell me in the comments or send me an email if you find yourself ever doing that because like I want to talk to you.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're in a club together.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Those people right now, they're they're so screwed.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Those good dependable people are so screwed for a little while because right now they can tell that a software AI agent can do their job very, very well, right?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: But maybe it's up to us as a person who is creative and a and a leader and visionary to say, okay, this is the way.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Because I still me, I still think we need those good dependable people, but we can't count on them to all sprout wings and fly in this new reality.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: They need to be led.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the the transition is gonna be bumpy, sure.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, because right now, unless they start at least flapping their arms, you know.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I don't know, to abuse that metaphor a little bit.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so so they haven't been able to manifest wings for themselves, but they start flapping their arms.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's like the one that's like sitting there and at least enthusiastically hitting enter.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever to get Claude to do stuff, right?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's different ways to react to that.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I have another friend, and this is a real friend, you know, who I like, and I would have considered hiring at some point, but like maybe a year ago, he's like, Oh my god, I love Claude and I love coding agents, it's so amazing.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: I got like two jobs and I'm working like two hours a day.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like not exaggerating, he's like admitting this to me, right?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: The engineering manager slash entrepreneur, you know, CTO and me is like recoiling in horror.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: No, don't tell me this.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: I know, right?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, I'm racing motorcycles and I'm making music and then all this stuff.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so a lot of those stories cropped up of like contractors who took like five different contracts, yeah, right, and was billing quote unquote, you know, oh my god.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it was it was horrifying, and I was like, Oh my god, like this is this is uh gonna be an interesting time we're moving into.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: I I guess if your job has certain expectations on you and you're able to meet them in an hour because of AI, and you spend the other seven hours or whatever playing with your kids or racing motorcycles or whatever you do, good for you.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that lasts for you.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: But it's probably not gonna work for very long.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not in the long term, but then again, big companies and big governments.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Most government software shops are not really using AI, as far as I know.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, we are in uh a couple of government projects, and it's a it's a slow adoption curve.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: And and to be honest, sometimes it's really like, well, we know you're using it, but we don't want to hear about it.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, not yet, right?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because we don't have a policy, we don't have a you know we're just so that that adds to the inertia, but I I mean what were we talking about before, you know, in terms of leadership and like cre it's just we're still green, we're still so so green.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's still many different ways to do this like kind of spectrum how do you reify the concepts that are embodied.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Involved in doing this next level of abstraction, like what makes sense?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're still trying to adapt terms like spec and you know, it's like those kinds of ideas that exist in the current paradigm.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, if you say to someone about regenerative software that you delete the tests also, yeah, because they're considered part of the implementation, they're like, What?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like how will you know that the thing is correct if you also delete the tests?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, you have to write all this other stuff that's the contract.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a time where you need to coin new terminology, it's a new paradigm.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is more helpful to coin new terms at this stage in history so that people can break free of the previous paradigm.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I agree with you totally.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, I'm I'm doing a lightning talk later on today, and part of it is based on the fact that I'm striving to look for new principles because I came up with agile and I came up with XP, and I came up with Agile.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, you came up with Agile?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: I know I'm sorry I didn't come up with it.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I grew, you know, I grew up with it.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I came up with it.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up with it.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was about I was about to say, get him.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: And these concepts don't work anymore for me.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah um in TDD was something that I loved.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I staked my career on TDD.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I gotta let that go.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so I totally agree with you that this is a blank canvas to some extent.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: We really don't know what the principles of organizing teams and building software.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: We may see where it's working and where it's not, but we by no means do we have a uh a common language to talk about.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in terms of people worrying about job security, I think it's really, really silly.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I do believe in Java's paradox.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: I do believe that an expansion is coming.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think people will be able to apply software more and more places.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually, uh after you know, a bumpy ride, as I said before, even those people who are not, you know, crazy creative and whatever will find a place.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: I can't help going to the dialectic of you know, like capital and and labor.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a capitalist, you know, like I like starting companies, I like investing, I like the whole system.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I I do VC and I work at an Andreasen company for fuck's sake.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I like that system, and I also recognize that the people with the capital that actually fund innovation and advancement and and whatever, they have huge fucking egos, and they think that they're never wrong, even when they're very, very wrong.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, if you're talking about venture capital, and more than 90% of the cases, they're wrong, and you know, they're just wrong overall, yeah, you know, in what they're doing, but they're also wrong on a daily and hourly basis with the decisions that they make and that they carry down.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: But their egos cannot handle being that wrong, not that much, not at that level, and not that often, right?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: So like they need other people to be wrong in their stead, right?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh aka accountability, right?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: They need accountability, so like you know, that's that ensures that there's a next level below capital that is accountable, and that next level below capital that works directly with capital is still very well paid and very prestigious position.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's like your CEOs and your directors and you know, yeah, your VPs and stuff like that.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: So they still have big egos, so they also need accountability, you know.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so like they need another level below those and so on and so forth.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you get my drift, right?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, there's still always in a corporate kind of situation, even in startups, going to be a need for the people that are actually at the intersection of getting things done and being accountable for it because the executives are not.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I agree with you there.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and as the economy expands into like robotics and software, etc.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: etc., like there will be a lot of programming to do, even if it looks it's in a different kind of structured language than the than Ruby.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: I found this interesting in yesterday's keynote first that we're at Rails World and DHH almost never mentioned Rails in his one-hour keynote.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: I thought was interesting.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: That was probably a mistake.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but I don't know if it's a mistake because he also said that only three percent of the code that he's written over the last 10 months has been Ruby, and that a lot of it has been in languages that he doesn't know or read or write.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: I've known David for a long time.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: Rails is his baby, he's not going anywhere.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: He's not gonna let it go.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I get that.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: I get that.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: But it is interesting, that's his baby, and he's still not writing it all that much.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that that's situational though.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've been around long enough, you know that there's been periods before where he wasn't actually writing it that much.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like now where he's like actually talking about Rust and in this way, but I mean, I believe there's been similar kind of periods, and I don't particularly worry about it.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: I do think that Rails is a good paradigm for that shape of software.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, fuck, I'm gonna I'm just gonna say I think it's the best paradigm.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I'm biased.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're biased, yeah.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're we're biased and we have commercial interests.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, we believe that.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: For now.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I think you know, as long as this particular paradigm holds, it's still the best.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as long as the paradigm of LLMs and the way that they're trained and the base knowledge they have, it's still the best.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as long as LLMs are in the mix and the way that they think and reason in text, then Ruby is also very viable because Ruby, I believe, has the most readable code of all the major programming languages.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it has an advantage there as well.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I have a question for you.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: You are one of the foremost orchestrators of LLMs that I know of.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: And by that I mean, you know, you've been on construction of harnesses, knowledge graphs, and other tools to support agents for longer than anybody I know, and have you know built up the techs around and companies are for not the first time for you, I know, that supports agenc development in a way that I uh I think is you know rivals any of the biggest or best larger companies.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: What I've noticed is that there sound it seems like there are two schools of thought around orchestrating agents, and there is one that says, and I would say this is like the Scott Werners of the world, the Jessica Kerr's of the world, that say, okay, well, don't treat agents like people, don't anthropomorphize them, treat them as objects or treat them as tools.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's people on this other side of the divide where I would put you, Steve Yeege, I would put uh a number of others that lean totally in the other direction and say, no, no, we we want to give them names, we want to make them part of the team, and we want to work with them that way.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm curious, because you have had a lot of success, why is it that you come down on that side of the divide?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because it is a very useful model, mental model.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: The LOM models themselves understand that model, and we have decades of understanding of how to organize companies, organizational design of companies and software development lifecycles, and and things that lead you to be able to decompose big projects into smaller projects and to tasks, etc., etc., in ways that are easier to do when you use that mental model.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have that I am aware of mental models around how to direct a swarm of bees or um an antive to get business work done.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you would have to have.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right, I see in order to make it work the other way.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I go, no, that's fine.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like if we're gonna have a piece of software that is responsible for doing something that looks like a job role that you could give to a human, then I want to be able to say Carlos is working on that, even though Carlos is an AI.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes it easier to say Carlos is working on that if he has a personality in a picture and we can all kind of visualize who Carlos is and what he's doing.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as opposed to the blickety blick, you know, underscore WM 16 running on, you know, whatever.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that that's the only way to use AI.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I got a 700-page book I can throw out your head if you tell me otherwise, because it patterns of application development using AI.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: My my book that is coming out uh in its second edition on Addison Wesley soon forward is literally all about how to do that other part, you know, which is the not anthropomorphizing.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it that book actually has fairly little about agentic kind of computing on it, because that's a whole nother book.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and a lot about how to use discrete AI components in your software for doing things like decisions or classifying or you know, so on and so forth, generating UI or you know, number any number of things.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: I read the first edition a long time ago when I was really first learning my way in the uh the sort of LLM agenc world.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: There's the LLMs that we're embedding into the software that are if they're not user-facing, then they're user, they're things that are helping the user through you know during the runtime.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then there is also the agentic development, meaning how are we supporting the agents that are writing the code that are building the software system?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually think now that I'm saying this out loud, those things are kind of blurring, and maybe it's not useful to look at them on two sides of the line.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there's people that are rightfully excited about blurring those lines, and I think that it's a cool area of exploration, but I suspect that it's a cul-de-sac.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like what it does to the software development lifecycle to blur those two things.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's too chaotic.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's too unpredictable.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: I see.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna get projects done on time and to budget, which that's a given that you're gonna need that going forward, then you need predictability and you you need to be able to put these components together in ways that are provable and repeatable, and like all the good things about good software.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Good software will continue to still need to be good software.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons that people are revolting now, and that there's a lot of arguments in people's workplaces, is that a lot of the experimentation that that goes on looks like bad software.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, yeah.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: Plenty of examples.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and many of it is bad software.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the saving grace of all this bad software and you know, bad ideas and experimentation and stuff like that is that it's become so fast to fix things.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like I could probably generate six different versions, uh, you know, each better in the time that it would take me to do like the first feature of the first version these days.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: And people are like, why didn't you just do it right the first time?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Why didn't you think about it and plan it?
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, because every time I'm doing it, I'm learning something about the problem.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do we really need to go back that far?
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe we do.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we need to go back to some of those fundamentals.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like we can iterate faster than ever before, and it if software has never been as uh powerful as it is now, yeah, at this moment in time.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think if you're going down alleys of, oh, let's write the spec correctly and then you know, and then generate it, I'm like, well, yeah, you could do that over and over again, yeah.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right, you know, very quickly because the tools are so powerful.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Congratulations, you're now doing iterative software.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we're actually that far apart.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's just that you know, some of us like experiments having wilder ideas and hence have to throw more of them out.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: But but that's cool.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's how you come up with interesting new ideas that didn't exist before, right?
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I agree.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: All right, Obi, it's been really great having you here.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: We got another keynote starting in a minute.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, thanks to Buzzbrough for letting us hang out here.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Buzzbrot.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is Bubba Fernandez, the new from Austin.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, all right, everybody, we'll see you all next week.