Latest / CTO Lunches / Ep1 - Cory O'Daniel on Citizen Developers

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Ep1 - Cory O'Daniel on Citizen Developers · CTO Lunches

• Kendall: Go ahead. Rishi: apologies for being late. I will tell you both the all the crazy dumpster fires that have happened this morning at some other point. and owe you both a beer for for being late. we'll Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah. Rishi: talk we'll talk through Kendall: Yes, you do. Two beers. Rishi: yes. Two beards. that's fine. That's fair. Last time Kendall and I forgot to introduce the podcast. We're gonna do better at it this time. core Kendall: We also got shit for not introducing ourselves, Rishi. We just assumed people knew who we were, so we should probably do that. Rishi: We could do that. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: I was on a podcast on my podcast and a fucking squirrel ran into the office. Like there's weirder shit that that's coming down the pipe for you Rishi: Ha ha. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: guys. Rishi: Everyone out here is seeing bears, so I I would prefer that not to happen here. I don't want a bear in my office. But it'd be funny. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: That'd be that'd be you'd be you'd be you'd be in some serious shit. Kendall: Sorry, go for it. Rishi: Hi everyone. Welcome to the CTO Lunches Podcast. I'm Rshi Malik, one of your hosts, here with Kendall Miller and our special guest, Corey O'Daniel from Mass Driver today. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: I'm Corey O'Daniel, CEO of Mass Driver. I'm also the host of the Platform Engineering Podcast. Mass Driver is an infrastructure management platform, IVP internal developer platform. essentially the idea is that operations and developers, like neither team, should have to learn something new to enable self-service in an organization. And so your operations team just kind of pushes Terraform modules, Helm charts, et cetera, into our registry, and then developers diagram like what they need from the cloud and when they're diagramming all the provisioning happens from the the diagrams that they're building. So it's kind of it on its surface. It's pretty nice. I think it's cool. Kendall: I'm excited about it and and I wanna add that because Pulumi allows me to write infrastructure in PHP, I will never have to use your product. So it's it's perfect, really. my name's Kendall. I'm I'm the CEO of a company called I'm sure that they don't. I hope they don't. but Rishi: With the the We're starting off with the hot takes. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Do they support PH Do they support PHP now? fuck. I I thought you were for real and I was like, okay, I mean Yeah. Yeah. Kendall: No, no, I'm I'm I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm sorry. Okay. I'm Kendall. I'm CEO of a company called Deployed. we make a box that we're shipping local AI into for regulated industries. So people who want to use AI but can't use the frontier models for data reasons. and I also run the CTO lunches organization. And Rishi, over to you, and then we gotta talk about what we're drinking before we get started too. Rishi: Thank you. hi, Rishi Malik. I am a technical leader for many decades at this point. lots of stuff in the finance and fintech space. these days I have a career cockpit job search, AI powered get you a job platform called Hype Up. and I do a lot of other things around the the data in AI space these days, as we all tend to do. what are you guys drinking? Kendall: Corey, you first. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: I am finishing a cortado with whole milk, where I've been practicing some of Rishi: Ooh. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: my latte art. So today I did Antarctica, the continental shelf of Antarctica, with a little tink tank in it. Kendall: Wait, I are you wait, sorry. tink tink aside, the continental shelf of Antarctica, are you Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah, yeah. Kendall: are you bullshitting us or is that a real thing? You actually did the continental shelf of Antarctica? Cory CEO @ Massdriver: I I did, but I do my o I like I do my latte art a little different than like your average barista. I I have like a like a Rorschach test kind of approach to it, so I just pour the milk in and then it's whatever it looks like to me. And so today it I was like, I kinda looks like kinda looks like Antarctica. It's I Kendall: okay. Okay. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: mean, it's gone now, it sank, but I mean, you know, even more realistic. It's melting away. Kendall: I mean it might be the shoreline of the eastern part of Russia for all all you know, like I do you really know what the continental shelf of Antarctica looks like? Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah, I googled it. I didn't want to like say I didn't wanna like be off. So I was looking at you know have you seen those people? No. No Kendall: Okay, okay. No, no. Now now it's n now I believe you. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: but nobody knows. It's always melting and changing. Like it always looks different. Like that's what it looked like in June of last year and nobody know the difference. Except for Flock. Kendall: Okay. That's right. That's right. That's right. Exactly. Rishi: I think it's a vote of confidence in us that you're like, you know what, these people may actually know what the continental shelf of Antarctica looks like and call me out. So I I better I better make sure it's correct. 'Cause you know, we Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah. Rishi: we are geographic experts here on the show. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: As you can tell the tink tink is here. Anyhow. Kendall: Okay, Rishi, what are you drinking? Rishi: sadly I am drinking coffee. And I say sadly just because, you know, it's been a dumpster fire of a morning, but you know, that's that's okay. the coffee itself is delicious. It's from Novo here in in Colorado. It's excellent. I'll give it through the rest of the day. What about you, Kendall? Kendall: Well, so since we're filming this, in a morning, which I appreciate you both pointing out, so now it seems real weird that I brought liquor to the to the show. I normally only drink liquor in the morning when I'm recording a podcast with Rishi or doing something Rishi: Ha ha ha. Kendall: else stupid with Rishi, but because I'm recording a podcast that could be at any time of the day and you could be drinking coffee because that would be completely normal. This eleven Rishi: I drink coffee all times of the day. Kendall: eleven AM gin is totally normal. So I'm drinking Roku Gin this morning. I mean I'm a Jin guy and so that tends to be what I am drinking. This is the Minori Rishi: Nice. Kendall: Select Edition, that that is using some unique Japanese fruits and botanicals. It's very good. I'm I'm I'm almost out of it, but that's that's what I brought to the show. So thanks, gentlemen, for making me look like an alcoholic. Rishi: Ha ha ha. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: It's the gin in the morning. Kendall: it's great, it's great. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: I don't know if it's the gin in the morning or or drinking it out of the mason jar that it just it had a real bathtub gin vibe when you first lifted it. Kendall: So I I have four children and the only cups in my house for many years, Corey, have been ball jars, mason jars. So Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah. Kendall: these are my small ones that I put liquor in and I have big ones too. But yeah, thanks, thanks, thanks. I'm a classy man. Rishi: I mean I I have a couple of kids, they're well past the age where these are necessary, but honestly about half the time we use the plastic IKEA, you know, multicolored plates and cups and stuff, they're just still Cory CEO @ Massdriver: yeah. Rishi: standard in our our house. And it works. Yeah. Kendall: They get the job done. Why not introduce some more microplastics? Okay, well, Rishi: Ha ha. Kendall: wait, before we we go in the direction of what we're actually here to talk about, and maybe Rishi you wanna set that stage, but is there anything that we gotta do before before we get there? I think that's it, right? I'm just making sure. Am I following protocol? Rishi: I I I you've never followed protocol, Kendall. That's why this whole thing works. no, let's let's jump right in. I mean I Kendall: Okay, okay. Okay. Okay. Good. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Th there's a quick there's a quick there's a quick ad from the sponsor, McDonald's. No? No, I don't no I no If that's what we're pausing. No guy. Kendall: No, no, no, no McDonald's. Rishi: I psure. I feel like they have a lot of lawyers that would maybe say we didn't sponsor that. What's happening? Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah. It'd probably be a calciad Kendall: Yeah. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: anyway nowadays. Kendall: That's right. Rishi: That's true. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: my. Rishi: no, I think we jump right in because it's a very exciting topic, at least at least to me that we're gonna talk about, you know, and you know, I'll I'll sum it up by saying like we're you know, we're all seeing the rise of the citizen developer. Corey wrote an excellent blog post about it, you know, got a bunch of traction around CTO launches, around you know, hacker news. and I think it is you know, I just think it's a very exciting time and it's a painful time. that we're all kind of going through. So to me, let's just dive right in. I don't know if you wanna talk about your the genesis of that post, maybe Corey, and like what what caused Kendall: Well and Rishi: you to write it. Kendall: and first define what is the citizen developer because it's a relatively maybe it's a term that's been around for a while, but it's it all of a sudden has some new hotness to it. So start with what it is. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: It it does. It's a term that's been around for like quite a while, right? It was the term used for many years, but i with such a small scale that like wasn't like very common, especially in like the buzzwords of Silicon Valley, but it's effectively the person that's introducing shadow IT at your organization, right? So it's in the nineties that was somebody buying something you know, the person in accounting buying you know, accounting software and then just like Adele server air quotes shows up and like IT puts it in a literal closet someplace, right? Or the person that's like setting up an access database, all of a sudden there's a bunch of PII in it in like the early 2000s. Like late 2000s, it started to become no code. And now the citizen developer is effectively anybody at an organization who's seen an idea kind of die on the backlog, right? And they're like, it can't be this hard, right? Like it can't be that hard to write software, right? And that they sit down, they grab Claude and lo and behold, it's not. Right, and like we might all of us are well it's slop, the rap's a piece of shit. And it's like, I don't know, I saw a guy one shot Mario Kart the other day. Like it might be it might Rishi: Yeah. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: right, it might be a completely shit app, but you can play it, and it's much further than I would have ever gotten building a Mario Kart clone. Like that guy can tweak stuff today. He's not learning code for three years and then spending two years building some shit. Like he's he's doing the thing now, right? And like people are doing this in your business. And so the wild part is like we started seeing this a little bit. And then we started seeing a lot of it. And then I started researching it and it's just crazy. It's like the Department of Veterans Affairs had a citizen developer program. And and lo and behold, theirs is also very scary. Their tagline is if you can use Microsoft Office, you can write software. And I'm like, Wow, are you guys using Google? Like are you using Word to write your code? Like I don't I don't know where Claude's writing but like that's a s that's a scary one. But it's happening, right? And so we have to you know Kendall: I mean, isn't that a little separate from AI though? I mean, if you can use Microsoft Office, if you will put up with that form of torture, you can write software. In fact, you can write complex recursion and probably in a an antique language. So I I'm not sure they're wrong. I'm not sure that it's necessarily specific to AI. But anyway, sorry, keep going. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah yeah. And so now we're just starting to see organizations. So, you know, cut customers that we have today where, you know this guy I was talking to geeze, like two months ago, he was talking about his renewal. And they th they're they're a company that are like private they're a private equity adjacent. Like they they buy a I'm trying like not I th I I I believe he's on the CTO lunches, so I'm trying not to like I I'm not allowed to say customer names, I'm trying to be extra vague, but They're they have 300 software developers, a lot of software developers. And stopping to me is like, next year we're gonna have like up our seat count. And it's like, like like what do you think? And he's like, 3,000 seats. And I'm just like, excuse me, what the fuck did you say? Like, 3,000 seats? Like, did you guys buy a really big comp like did you guys buy a company 10 times bigger, like engineering wise? Like, no, top down mandate. Everyone's a software engineer. We have to figure out how to deal with it. And you know what? Like, that's the most real ops answer I've ever heard. Right? Like there's so many people in our space right now that are already saying, it's slop, like, we gotta stop them, we gotta figure out how to like tell them no. And it's like, dude, our job as ops is to tell people yes. It's software developers are producing change, we create stability from that change. Like that's our entire job. Well, guess what? Ten times the people can write software now, a hundred times the people can write software now, right? Like it's just it's a vol velocity change for us, but our job's still the same. And like businesses wanna make money. Like software development is a means to an end. That end is Profit, everyone has the means now. So I think our job as ops is the most important it's ever been. Right? Yeah. Kendall: Well, and so Rishi: I think Kendall: so I have a a story related to this. A good good friend of mine is the you know, in operations at a large organization, operations pro program management, and found out that their program management software was was up for renewal and looked into What's the software they're currently using? What's the software they could be using? Turns there's this other product over here that costs half as much that some of the organization's working with. And so she went to to pursue that and I'll just switch us over to this other thing. It'll cost us half as much. And then she she gets a quote from them. She's about to sign the document and she's like, well, hang on a second, and it's like a Friday. And she's like, I wonder if I could build something that would do this and meet some of our own never, never built software before, use Claude code. worked through the weekend. It took her longer than she thought it would. It was it was like two, three full days. And then you know, showed it to a couple people and they're like, this is good enough. So now she has to hand it off like here here's the role that the the platform for this does. This is what I'm teeing you up for. I'm curious to hear about this. But you know, she's like What I built didn't have a proper database, didn't have any of the security concerns, you know, worried about it. We we didn't have auth properly set up, whatever. Like there's there's a whole Rishi: Hmm. Kendall: bunch of things. So when she hands the app over to the ops team or the team that's managing this internal platform for the citizen developer, now that team has to go re-plummet, right? And so it's it's it's not a rewrite of the the application. They probably took what she had and And you know, ran it through Claude and said, okay, now use this and now use that and change this and change that. And but it, you know, got it to production ready inside their their production environment, never written code before, and now she maintains the thing, and she has been for six months. And I don't think she particularly likes it, which I find highly entertaining. Like it turns out maintaining software is a lot Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Mm-hmm. Rishi: Yeah. Kendall: less fun than creating it. But I mean, yeah, well, so talk just Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Day two's a bitch. Kendall: a little bit about like like if I'm a citizen developer and I say, Hey, Claude, go build me a fill-in-blank. what are all the steps that have to happen to go from that to now I have a working thing that I can trust in it? Like, why do we need a platform for citizen developers? Because it is different if it works on my machine, right? And so just just talk about why and how and what what you're doing to make that easy because I'm actually curious about that. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah, I so I can talk about like how how Mass Driver does it and like our our approach, but it's really funny, there's there is so much like meta problems before it even gets to like the compliance security cost scale issues, right? Like one of the crazy so we we have this lead lead, I don't know what the right word is. I'm I'm not good I'm not great at sales everybody, so I use wrong words, but this this company that we're talking to that is experiencing this problem as well. And they did not have a top-down mandate that everybody was a software developer. They just found one day that their platform for paying out their their customers, their I don't know what the right word is for them, just stopped working one day at five o'clock. Right? what he's like, why do you think as somebody who does this, he's why do you think our app would have gone down at like five o'clock? And I'm like, dude, there's a I could not guess. He goes, The person took their laptop home. And I was like, of all the things I could have thought Rishi: Ha ha ha. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: of, for the thing that pays out your like people that are using your platform, you just like the nightmare of that is like, wait, so their email addresses are on there, their bank account information is on there, and that's just on like a dude's Lenovo. Right. That's that's terrifying. So then I hear the next part of this. They've done a deep dive, and there's over 70 of these applications in their business that are now like business critical. They don't have like a Like a true consumer-facing product. And so now it's like the obudsmanship of it all. It's like there's 10 apps that kind of overlap, like different teams generated them. And so it's like, how do we even merge these apps together? Like the organizational thinking is not there. And it's just wild. Like these people use a computer like my mom does. I'm like, how did you even get to this person's laptop? And they're like, it's a long number. You had to like type into the browser. And I'm like, the IP address of like his of his computer? Like, what are you doing? And it's like, yeah, well, we just bookmarked it. And then it's like, bookmark it, solve the problem, solve that DNS problem. You just bookmarked the IP address. There you go. Problem solved. Like they're solving problems in very novel ways that our businesses have to deal with, right? So like where this starts to get interesting for people is like if I sit down and I have Claude or whatever I'm using, I'm just saying Claude because it's a fun one, it's easy to say. But I mean, etc. And I ask it to build me an app, chances are it's gonna run on localhost. Great. Right? And then I'm like, my teammates need it. Well, what's it gonna do next? It's not gonna say, okay, well, let me go ping your DevOps guy and see what your golden paths are. We're gonna get this thing in the prod. It goes, huh? Vercell has a free tier and so does Superbase. Rishi: Yeah. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: And all of a sudden you're fucking multi-cloud now, right? Like you know what I'm saying? Like, we got everything we finally migrated everything to AWS. It's like, well, except for Doug's program, which is now running on Vercel and Superbase, and now that's actually your problem. Now all of a sudden you got PII or whatever. Going out to some platform, you're violating sock too. Like not just like you really like the amount of pain that comes from this, and it's preventable, right? And so I'll tell you how like we do this with Mass Driver. You can do all this without buying our shit. You should buy our shit. Please come buy our shit. But like your team can do this if you have a platform team that has the time. And so the way our plugin works, if you drop it in Claude or whatever, is Mass Driver has at the heart of it this thing that we call the context engine. And the The power of the context engine is there's a lot of stuff that we at Mass Driver gave up on four or five years ago that is exciting to me because I'm starting to see the industry now give up on it because of agentic, right? So you're seeing people like Brian Grant and that team like turning their backs on GitOps. Great. Gave up on that idea forever ago. GitOps was the worst fucking place to put configuration. That was that was what hamstrung us at software. And so this this context engine is effectively. The real source of truth. I'm putting air quotes around that as well, because the real source of truth is prod. Everything else is an approximation. But what what it does is your config is in a database. And this allows you to do a ton of powerful stuff. And so our context engine is always kind of constraining Claude. So Claude's like, hey, I want to build an app, but I can see that I've got this like MCP server that talks about like deploying stuff. Let's see what it's saying. And it goes, well, you're dubbed. Your ops team has already assigned a subnet to you. You can't actually access it. You don't have the AWS CLI, you don't know what a subnet is, you don't have a VPC client, but there's a subnet that exists that you can put shit in. Also, here's four or five Terraform modules that you're allowed to deploy. It doesn't say the word Terraform, it doesn't even say the word database. To Claude, it's like they can use Postgres or Dynamo. It happened to be two Terraform modules, right? And so Claude's building an app and saying, I have access to provision stuff through a pro a Postgres and a Dynamo. It doesn't even know that it's Terraform on the other side or. open tofu so I don't get sued, right? And so the context engine is essentially providing context about your cloud environment and your rules, compliance tooling, etc. But Cloud is just kind of interacting with it almost like if you're familiar with like Kubernetes, it's almost like a CRD. It's like it's explaining like how this pattern works. And so it's like, I can provision something in the staging with this subnet and like these modules and they can connect together. And so it's not generating Terraform. It's not interacting with your cloud environments. It's interacting with a permission model. That's been exposed through this context engine. So it can't make wrong choices. It only has right choices available. And these have been all dictated by your operations team. And so the cool thing for your develop, your citizen developers, is they literally need nothing on their machine besides the MCP server and whatever nightmare is generating the code. Right? They don't have to have AWS CLI, they don't have to have Docker. They don't even have to have Git. It's fun time, right? And that's where you want these people to be. Like you don't want them to have our tool chain. You want them to be able to have power, but they're not gonna use our tool chain. Like GitHub and pull requests are falling apart right now. Developers have been LGTMing shit for years. Like fifty plus percent of them aren't even reviewing PRs anymore based off some surveys I saw recently. It's like when their world, the professional world's collaboration layer, starts to break down, there's no way these other people are ever gonna go read a PR, right? And so we have to start thinking about like what does their computing environment look like in the future because They're going to be the software developers that we have to serve. Or we'll Rishi: That's Cory CEO @ Massdriver: probably be out of work because we told them no, and they're like, fuck this guy, he's slowing everybody down. Sorry. Rishi: I mean that's that that's fascinating. Like, you know, as someone who, you know, to your point about like anyone can build this, like I built a very small version, you know, much shittier version of what you you all do. It was fascinating just to see, you know, the the interaction points because it was one of those things where like as I was testing it, right? I'm a software developer. I love get I can, you know, deploy, I can write Terraform, I can do all that stuff. I was just talking to this Claude skill that was then like, cool, I'm gonna take your code, I'm gonna go build it. I'm gonna deploy it, it's gonna be all magical here. And I was like, I really like this. Like as an engineer, I was like, this is actually way better. So I I can very much imagine that like for a citizen developer who has no context of it is just their their only option. This is how they get to express their needs and and solve a bunch of these problems. and I did to me, I think that that part is being fascinating because right now I think we tend to think of it, at least I do, as citizen developer versus regular engineer. And you know, it's kind of it's i in my head it's been about citizen developers becoming more engineering, like through these tool usage, you know, through the the things you can do. And I actually think maybe it goes the other way now. Right. Maybe it's less maybe it's engineering becoming more citizen developers and understanding more of the the business, what the finance team is doing, kind of moving almost outside engineering in a different way. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah. So this is a this is a small argument I make in my my piece on this is it's funny like you're saying like maybe like software developers are like kind of become citizens developers too. We are. We are, we just have hooperists like we don't admit it. Like it's funny, like mass driver Rishi: Ha ha ha. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: mass driver's written primarily in three languages. There's like node for most of like the graph relation stuff, like the API. There's Elixir, big distributed system behind the scenes for like kind of orchestrating everything, and then there's a lot of Go, right? And so I've done a ton of Elixir, been doing Elixir forever. I've got some Go experience. I am a caveman at React. Like I remember old school CSS and HTML. I was used I remember when it was called Ajax. You remember that? That's how old I am. Like I'm feeling I'm a- I wrote some stuff. Ajax. Like, that was a long time ago, right? I'm a citizen developer when it comes to React and Node. I know distributed systems, I Kubernetes, I know Postgres. You throw me a node, and I'm just I'm a caveman, right? Like we're all citizen developers as soon as we're out of our lane of expertise. Like you think about like the the human centipede of like how like requests go through an org, right? It's like buyer over on like the buyer team has an idea, talks to a PM, some stuff gets drawn and balsamic or whatever, right? Some developers get some work scheduled, and then something comes out, you know, a week later, or the MVP, depending on how fast and agile you are, gets back to the buyer and they're like, That's not quite what I wanted. Like how like how many times has that happened to any engineer in like the past week? And the result for many engineering teams is like, well, that's what we shipped. Like we'll put your changes on the backlog and we'll get around to it eventually, right? And it's just like, yeah, well like the person that the the expert, the citizen developer, has no control over being the expert, right? We're a pen that has its own autonomy. Kendall: where does this go, Corey? I'm I'm curious, like, it I I think it was I can't remember if it's Anthropic or Chat GPT, somebody launched a like apps thing so you could, you know, hit share like you would on a Google Doc and Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah. Kendall: send the application to somebody else and they could use it, right? Like do the do the frontier models end up hosting the application in such a way that We no longer need the internal. Like now, don't get me wrong, like there's lots of you know, when when finance goes and builds something, you're not gonna want Anthropic to to host that, right? but like like Cory CEO @ Massdriver: No, no. Kendall: where where where do we go from here? Does it just get easier and easier and easier and these things all end up built in and and Claude's like, Are you a developer? Do you want me to help Rishi: Hmm. Kendall: you to figure out how to deploy this within your organization? Or do you think it's something different? Like I'm what's the end state of this? Because this feels like a a an intermediate state. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: feel like the Frontier Labs will definitely like dash for this at some point in time. Like looking at the kind of orgs that are already doing interesting stuff here, like the like the lovables, right? The cursors, like the things that are like frontier adjacent that are in the developer space, the seeing these companies get acquired for bajillion dollars and whatnot, just insane valuations. I think like when you're these frontier models where you're like, hey, everything costs us a lot and like Unit economics on like selling a prompt aren't you super good. It was like, well, what's super good? It's like probably those unit economics I'm hosting this stuff. Like so I think you're probably gonna see them doing this. But as anybody who's probably listened to this that has like a decent size operations team, compliance, security, all these stakeholders from outside of ops that like impose requirements on ops, you hear that and you're like, Well that's a that's a nightmare. It's also a nightmare because like they have all your data. Like I like They they have my code. Do we actually want to have our database too? Like that's terrifying to me, but it's gonna happen, right? I mean like you can already see them start to do it. Right? So like if they're hosting these little apps, like maybe they'll give you a little Postgres or like some sequel distributed SQLite thing, like who knows? But I think like I don't know, like 'cause ops people is like that's where I'm saying, like ops people are important, like we need to be able to figure out how to get these models running in our data center in our cloud accounts, like less of giving it to them. Like I may sound like an Rishi: Yeah. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: AI maximalist here. I'm not. I'm a I'm a doomer who's found the tool that makes me very efficient at writing software, and I love seeing business people enabled. So like I struggle with this, but I don't trust those companies at all. I would not want to host my product like on them, right? Like as far as like now, people might be like, well, but you give them your code, Rishi: What? Cory CEO @ Massdriver: it's helping you generally like code's pointless anymore. Like b business expertise to me is the only thing that matters. Kendall: but I I Cory CEO @ Massdriver: But Rishi: No, I mean a lot of it to me feels a little bit like the serverless race, right? Like it was it was cloud, it was computer, then it was Kubernetes, and it like, actually, you know what, it's serverless. And yes, all the big clouds did it, but then you know, the Vercells, you know, the super base, like everyone else strapped some other layers on top. And I kind of feel like that is it is gonna be a bit of a a land rush, you know, right now to do it. I I do yeah, I think you I think you're right, Gore. I think the Everyone will be in it in some form. And it'll be interesting to see how that merges. Because the the frontier models will merge from a OS perspective because they have the models already. But like the Googles and the AWSs who already have their own models themselves also own all the compute, you know, and the infrastructure Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah. Rishi: can put that layer on top. and honestly, like you look at the the Microsoft, right? Which obviously, yeah, I mean that Azure, but we'll ignore that. But Just from a distribu distribution standpoint, right? They have the users. Like every citizen developer I know is in Microsoft Office in some way. And if you Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Mm-hmm. Rishi: know Microsoft, you know, did far better with Copilot, they could actually make some very big inroads there. Kendall: There Rishi, experience tells me Microsoft does not have to make better products to make inroads there. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Well it's funny so like when I think of so anybody who's like What Rishi: I st I stand corrected. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: so anybody who's like joined a s like a series A company, like as an engine director of engineering ops, right? So like it's funny to think about like the the the growth of a startup and then how that affects like the day two maintenance of like a series C company. There's correlation here, I'm getting there, I swear. Right? So it's like okay, let's say that L LMs didn't exist. It's two thousand twenty or whatever. I don't know, somebody's they existed then, whatever. The day before they existed, right? This same person who wants to build a business is probably sitting down and just banging their head through some no-code thing on Heroku or Vercel or whatever, right? They cobbled they cobbled together a WordPress nightmare. And you might laugh at that, but I know some pretty big businesses that have cobbled together a WordPress nightmare and then it's somebody's problem when they get to series A or series B, right? Like we have all been in that scenario. You join a company and they're hey, We've built this insane monstrosity on Heroku and like we want to move to AWS and it's just like it's my job now, it's figuring out how to this for the 200th time. That company, there's a company that's gonna do their series A, series B in 2030, where operations engineers are gonna join and it's gonna be fully running on Claude, right? Or it's gonna be fully running on, you know, V Zero or something like that, right? And like this world is coming, like these these people are going to create without us. And they're gonna very far without us. But there's gonna be a point in time where it's like, hey, this carrier compliance, getting it out of these clouds is gonna be our problem again. Like this stuff, whether whether it's happening in our org today or not, like it's happening to our industry, it's happening to all industries. And I think like one of the things that's really key is like we need to do the all spa and Hammond Devon ops ten times deploy a day. Like that talk needs to happen someplace where it's talking about how how to do this for the rest of the teams. Cause like In my view, like that for ops is probably like the funnest challenge I think we've ever had. Like a lot of ops kind of feels like maintenance. It's like, dude, we have a huge scale problem now. It's a weird scale problem. It's not it's not server requests, it is meat bags to deal with. But like that's fun. Like we gotta figure that out. And like not not just shun these people off and say no. Rishi: The one of the other things that comes to mind is and not everything is being talked about directly yet, by name, is permanence, is software permanence, right? Like we're used to software, you're a compliance department, you have a compliance tool, your procurement, you have this procurement tool, it lives forever. But I think a lot of the stuff that citizen developers are building isn't that anymore. When I I saw it, it was You know, I have to get a report to the CEO. So here's the rapport, and you know, use cloud to generate, and it's all the information. Way better than using a spreadsheet, more of the data, whatever. Fine. It's out of date after it's shown, right? It's not a platform to build reports. It's like we did some kind of custom stuff. It you know, it can die a a slow death now. and I I kind of wonder if like that's where most software ends up going because it is citizen developers, it is internal usage for the narrow use case, and it costs you so little to develop it, you're just like Fuck it. It can it can die. I will just build it again next month. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: It's funny, there's I'll tell you two I'll tell you a quote that I love, that my co founder uses all the time, Chris. There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution. Rishi: Ha ha ha. Kendall: Yeah. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Like how much like you know what I'm saying? Like how much like debt sort right? But at the same time, like no, I fully agree, like throw away software. it's funny I don't write like scripts anymore. I like pop into Claude and I have it do something, right? It's like there's tons of throwaway software that I have. Where it's like there's active stuff doing things for just like different stuff like my my podcast. Like I spend so much time like researching people and writing, like the last thing I want to do is spend an ass load of time writing a tweet. Like no one reads the tweet. They just want to know that the new episode's upright. And so like I have this whole pipeline that's been developed for like it video processing, et cetera, et cetera, for like the YouTube shorts and all this jazz. And it's like every single time I did an episode, it was hours of manual effort. And then finally I was just like, this is all the shit I wished existed. It exists. And it's throwaway software. It runs on my like sh runs on this thing. My clod has its own machine. I don't put it in a sandbox. I just buy it its own hardware. And I told it if you fuck it up, there's no backups. It's real sensitive about that. It ceases to exist. It cares. it doesn't care. Yeah. Rishi: Well if we back up a second, are you saying we're supposed to do like research and planning for this this podcast? 'Cause like I'm I'm hearing you saying that we're we're doing this wrong. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Don't take don't take this the wrong way. I have way more important people on my podcast than me. That's Rishi: Ha ha ha. Kendall: wow, wow. Sick burn. Sick burn. I mean what's your hot take on where this is all going? Cory CEO @ Massdriver: I mean honestly I think I think that there's gonna be a very different set of developers. I think a lot of like what we are as engineers is gonna change, right? And so like looking at like what happened with dev and ops and what inevit inevitably became like the DevOps team, unfortunately, and like platform engineers, right? But like ops, like security, compliance, cost, scalability, like all of these organizational rules that kind of get like shoved into ops, like this shit's more important than ever. Like the the role of an operations platform DevOps engineer, I think, is more important than ever. Now, what's interesting is as these ops people's role become important because they're providing stability, safety, you know, all of the boring. last mile YAML thing image, right, for everybody in the org and then your business people, PMs, etcetera, are starting to do development work. What happens to the software engineers, software developers in between? Right? There's a couple of scary things that are gonna start happening here. We're gonna have the COBOL problem in like five to ten years, fifteen years, where people are retiring and nobody remembers how to write software anymore. So hey, software developers, you're gonna be making so much goddamn money in like fifteen years when like they're trying to find people like who knows Ruby? Do we have a Rubyist somewhere? Like we need somebody like But what do we do in the meantime? How do we train people? Like, how do we how do we get a senior engineer ever again? Right? Like the the senior engineers we have today, you're the last. Everybody, the the person that's in school right now never is not gonna get like real production experience. They're gonna get the same production experience that we got. So, like, what happens to the developer class that's kind of in between citizen developers and ops? And I think this is where this next like DevOps moment can happen. I think the software developer and the citizen developer. They need to find that DevOps synergy that Ops and Dev never really always wanted, but like never really got to, right? So, like, what are you doing as a software developer? It's like, well, we have tastes. We want to train people to understand like how these systems work. We want to train to think about good software, good systems, domain-driven design, testing. Like, great, like you are stewards of good taste. You've always wanted to be that. You sit there in your linter, right? You sit there writing your style guide, like you wish you were doing this. And it's like, well, that's what you're doing, man. That's what you're doing now. You need to do all of that code craftsmanship. You need to figure out how to write software such that your citizen developers are writing the most banging code you've ever seen. Right? Or you have no purpose because they can produce software now and we can keep shit stable. Like the developers in between, they cannot just throw up their hands and be like, I guess we're all just slop engineers now. It's like, no, your job now is to figure out how to make their job deploy ten times a day clean code, right? I'm making it Kendall: So it's Cory CEO @ Massdriver: safe and secure. You're making it maintainable. Kendall: So it really just boils down to your job as a software engineer now is to email everyone in the company a markdown file and say, please add this to your Claude code. And it says in all capital letters, you are a senior software developer who does not make mistakes. Done. That's Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Right. Kendall: the job of a soft you heard it here from Corey, the CEO Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Yeah. Kendall: of Mass Driver. You heard it here first. That's your job from now on. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: I'll tell you a tech I'll give you a technical hot take now that's short on the way out the door. Skill Kendall: Ha ha. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: files are fucking worthless. people are gonna be like, wait, but that's Kendall: yeah. Rishi: Ha ha ha. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: how yeah they're pointless. They're absolutely dude, if you have no control, you have no control. go back a f. You want hooks. You want hooks or you want Kendall: You want hooks, that's what you want. You want hooks. Yeah. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: a server someplace. Like you want is a server, you want Claude. Yeah. Kendall: MCP made the problem go away, Cory. Just it's fine, don't worry about it. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Skill files are skill files and memory are dumb and that is a it is a f it is an artifact of the past that we will forget about in a year from now. Kendall: well thanks for joining us, Corey. this has been fun. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Thanks for having me. Kendall: And you can check out Corey, the CEO of Mass Driver. You'll it's Massdriver dot cloud, I think is the website, right? And Cory CEO @ Massdriver: Dot cloud, we also have a.ai page that we have we w it it's it's live, it looks cool. That's Kendall: mass driver dot AI. Triple the valuation right now. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: dude's investors love it. They're like, ooh, you bought another domain. Kendall: Yeah, investors love it. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: It's like hell yeah, baby Rishi: Nice. Well we'll put those links in the the notes below. Corey, thank you for being on. Thank you for all those strong opinions. very much appreciate it. It was a fun discussion. I think future is gonna be interesting. So thanks for being here. Cory CEO @ Massdriver: It is yeah, thanks so much.