Amazon, Google and Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge

because it was a really good criticism of Google. It was a really realistic picture of Amazon, including Jeff Bezos, not giving a shit about your day. He still doesn't. Did you write these kind of things all the time? I was fed up in their six years and I still couldn't get a platform at anybody.

They went nuts and then I followed the wine later. I told him how it was. But you were actually right in hindsight. I was right about all of it. The university started.

Steve Yege is widely known for his writing and rants in software engineering. His blog post, Get That Job at Google, circulated by Google HR for hiring purposes for 15 plus years. And his Google platforms rant, written a decade ago, is still heavily cited across the industry. Steve worked for seven years at Amazon, 13 at Google, and is now building AI tools as Source Graph. In this record, with Steve, we cover the infamous Google platform rant, and why Steve thinks Google is still terrible at building platforms.

Why Steve, unretired from tech encoding, thanks AI tools. Why Steve thinks more dev should vibe go together with AI, and many more interesting topics. If you're interested in how AI tools will change how tech companies operate, how us developers can keep up with them, or why the core DNA of tech giants like Google and Amazon seem to change very little over 20 years, then this episode is for you. If you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe to it on any podcast platform and on YouTube. Steve, just welcome to the podcast.

It's so nice also, meet you in person. Okay, thanks for having me again. So the first time I ever came across your blog, it was was a Stevie's blog rant. This was around 2010, because I read this article called Get That Job At Google. Back then, I was trying to get my first job outside of abroad, basically the first job in the UK, and I looked for the best preparation materials.

And the two things that helped me most was, of course, I stamford about cracking the Google interview and your article, Get That Job At Google. And what really stuck with me, this article is still up there, and I just tweeted recently that I think after almost 15 years, it's still very relevant. One of the things I really liked is, you put this important takeaway is, if you don't get an offer, you may still be qualified to work there, so don't blow your ego at all. What motivated you to write this article? Get turned down by a bunch of places.

No, it's true. Actually, a lot of my friends got turned down. I knew they were good, right? So I saw the false negatives, sorry, false negatives, because they were so scared of false positives, and they were Google and they could just turn people away. Turned into a town to waste.

This was Google in 2008, so like this was it, they barely went public, they were the hottest thing. What did I say? They joined in 2005, actually. You joined in 2005? Yeah, so by the time I wrote that, I had seen three years of interviewing there, and I knew what it took, right?

And I don't think it's changed that much in the last 15 years or whatever. This episode was brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML predication, skin provisioning, and fine-grained authorization. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. They're APS, you're easy to understand, and you can ship quickly and get back to building other features.

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To get started, go to Statsig.com.com.pragmatic. That is SCATSI.com.pragmatic. Happy building! Yeah, and one thing that you wrote about is this thing called the Interview Anti-Loop, which I never heard about it until then. What is it? Does it still exist?

I mean, it's a phenomenon that I observed that everybody knows about, that it was the one thing in that post that recruiting in HR were a little worried about me publishing it. I was like, well, there's no point in doing the post if we don't talk about it. It'll give us some credibility. And I think it did ultimately, right? You could just get unlucky and accidentally get the six people at the company who disagree with you the most on everything technical.

No. Right? And it's just bad luck. In fact, I think a lot of tech companies have this policy, or at least use to have it until recently. Maybe they'll do that. You can re-apply after six months, exactly for this reason.

And I knew a bunch of people who re-apply to Google multiple times. One guy knew, a guy on his fifth attempt. And then went on to get promoted really fast and write up the ranks and everything. It was very obviously a false negative, but it just took a bunch of tries to get in. So a super critical criticism that a lot of people who read that article have is like, well, if this is what it takes into Google or Meta or whatever, which is my skill, not my matter as much as the interviewers, I don't want to do that.

I really appreciate that you just like, you didn't hold back and you just kept it real. But what is your take on on people who are like, well, that's not fair? It's not meritocracy, that kind of stuff. Interviewing is not really a very good signal. I empathize with their viewpoint.

In fact, at several points in my career, I've sort of kind of given up on interviewing and just like you guys do it. There's a lot of people who think they're really good at it and they think they know how to do it well. And so, even though the statistics at Google, they ran many, many statistical analyses and found it, there isn't really a lot of correlation between how you score and whether you're an offer and whether you do well and so on. And so, I kind of lost faith in the process a little bit. I noticed that I was a reference, I should say, for a buddy of mine who was applying it on topic.

And I got a call, just a regular reference call. And the person was the hiring manager, not a recruiter. And the hiring manager talked to me for probably at least 40 minutes, digging into all the things that you don't pick up in an interview. Because he recognized, just like we do, that interviewing is a really flawed process and it's a trade-off that the company has to make between sort of like effort that they expand, trying to find good candidates and being really accurate in their assessments. That's a trade-off.

Yeah, and then interesting enough, you know, some people are saying, I guess a lot of people are saying this is unfair. You know, there's also criticism of coding interviews, lead code, etc. And they're like, why can't these companies just ask me to the work? And then thought to us, some companies are doing that these days, like linear and some of the floor-able companies are like, who have a strong and a brand? They're like, we will pay you your like day rate, week rate, and for a week you will work with us remotely.

Now, of course, and I'm actually talking with the end-your-mangers, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm the first-entry-mangers. You can use AI tools like they're immune to everything because you're actually doing the work. Now, the downside is it's a week of your life, right? And people are like, well, I can't interview at five different places. And I feel, you know, there's all this trade-off.

And now it is real-world, right? So there's this spectrum of interviews. And as you said, like, in the end, just like, take your poison, right? That's right. And I know, look, man, I'm in the industry for 30, 35 years.

I've seen people try all sorts of different variations on trying to improve this. Like, first company I worked for required you to do a six-month co-op before you can get a full-time offer there. Well, that geo works. Geo works. And they had probably the highest hiring bar I've ever seen.

And they got acquired by Amazon, and Amazon was just blown away by their hiring bar. In fact, we should probably mention, I mean, I think you only have both seen this, but there's this open secret in the industry where if he goes to the website for, like, Google, meta, a bunch of big tech, even Microsoft, you're not going to see Software Developer Engineer 1 advertised because they fill all those up with interns. So the internship is actually a recruitment operation. It is. It's a really cutthroat.

College hiring is super cutthroat in the industry. And the big companies like Microsoft, you know, and Google, they sort of dominate it. They have the resources to build all the relationships with the schools. And it's, yeah, so they get the cream of the crop, you know. Yeah.

And then they fill up an entry level. I'm really proud of any intern that goes off to a startup, really. I actually just talked with someone. She'll be on the podcast. She had returned off from Microsoft and Google.

And she talked with her mentor at Microsoft. It's a good mentor. And the mentor was saying, like, look, you can do big tech, but like with startups, you have a very different skillset. And she thought about it for a long time. And in the end, she took a, she took a risk and she went to CODA.

And she's now an opening. I actually, but I think that experienced helper, but, and she talked to her mentality. I was like, wow, like she sounded like a, you know, like a wise experience person. And yeah, I did not expect it. Cause it was like, it was paved.

I see a lot of this too. I mean, college kids are savvy these days. They know it's stuff. Like really inflex. And in fact, all the stuff we talked about, even many of the things that we talked about in the blog post about getting a job at Google, getting a job is just hard as a software engineer right now.

The other thing that's really resonated with this article is, is you wrote, I'm going to quote it, when you get an offer from a tech company, you just happened to squeak by. And at the time when I read it, I didn't really believe it from outside. But now that I've also, you know, I've got in jobs. I've been a hiring manager and made so many offers, you know, people were coming in and they're like, oh, I smashed the interview. Actually, like out of maybe a hundred interviews roughly that I've been the hiring manager at Uber.

There was like two, that was like, we had more than one person do a double thumbs up. We had thumbs up double thumbs up. The rest were a mix of like thumbs up, thumbs down. And then we came to a decision and it was like, it could have gone either way. Like one went to the debrief.

So like, I now really appreciate it. I feel this is one of the things that's hard to believe from the outside. The best story is when I was at Google, I was on their, you know, their hiring committee, which is a blind, you know, double blind. They don't see the candidates, they're not the interviewers who's doing it. They're just reading feedback packets.

And the interviewers don't bias each other. And one day they didn't experiment with us, okay, because we were the ones that ultimately made that decision that you just talked about, right? The thumbs up, thumbs down type thing. Not the interviewers. Google has a separate committee that actually looks at all the feedback, right?

And the recruiters did an exercise with us where they presented a bunch of packets, hypothetical packets, say, of candidates who had been rejected or accepted. Actually, they didn't even tell us. They just said, these were just a bunch of candidates. We're going to do the process on them. We had feedback on them, though.

We went through and we evaluated them all and decided we were going to not hire 60% of them, right? Have you figured this one out yet? No, not yet. We were reviewing our own packets. Yeah.

So we voted not to hire 60% of ourselves. Yeah. Okay. And it was a very sobering realization. And the next week or two was like the best time to apply to Google.

So we were just like, come on through, right? I mean, it was nice. Well, because 60% is almost a coin toss. A coin toss is 50% here a little bit better. Right.

And so, I mean, the whole, I don't know, the whole process is also heavily biased towards whether you like the person or not. You know, a lot of the decisions made in the first 10 seconds, they say. Yeah. But you might take away, I think, different people take different things. But the reason that really helped me not just at that time when I got this first job in the UK, but actually I read right after later when, for example, later applied to Facebook.

I narrowly didn't, but I didn't get it. And actually that rejection helped me get that position at Uber, which all of these are just got thrown in. Like, what I took away from it is this is how the process is. You might not like it. But you can either just, you know, complain or think is unjust or you can know it unjust and you know that you just need to try hard and when you do get it, you know, don't take it for granted.

So how do you get rejected by Facebook? Have you got a job at Uber? Because if it's helpful, I'll go get rejected at Facebook. What was helpful is I did a bunch of time preparing for Facebook. Like it was very clear at the time that they actually sent some materials and the preparation did not go to waste.

So, you know, I learned how to do the algorithm, go coding, big O. Like, I knew some of that before, but I really refreshed it on the spot on Facebook for a system design. I thought I nailed it because I heard the question before and I just like drew up like it was like design Instagram. Like I got this, you know, no conversation with the person. And later I kind of got some feedback on like, you know, what I didn't do it.

So by the time I got to, we're actually heard that like again, not many people got double thumbs up, but in hindsight, I kind of got the, I did get like two or three double thumbs up because I have practice. Also, I think the other thing is that Uber at the time just was Amsterdam. So in London, a lot of people in Newhouse interview Amsterdam, Uber struggled to have people who understood these interviews. So I guess I stood out because I prepared year earlier. So the preparation does not go to waste.

So, yeah, preparation is so important. So important. But boy, what do you prepare for now? Like I've got a buddy who's out interviewing right now. He's just very senior engineer and he says that the teams are all asking, they want somebody to come teach them AI.

That's what everyone's doing. So they want someone who knows AI because they don't. That's the theme. Yeah. I so what do you prepare for?

Well, I just talked with someone again, she'll be on the podcast, Jumbie, who interviewed 46 AI companies. She's the engineer who went to code off and became an AI engineer there. So she interviewed 46 and she said it's a mess and you know, this is like for mid level. So like we're not talking staff level, but a lot of them are still doing the usual lead co-style interviews. And then they might ask a few things about AI.

And she said that there is one new type of project that she actually likes is a project, especially for AI. You know, build something based on AI. And she says she loves it because she can actually show off what she's capable of doing. It seems it's a mess. I don't think people know what to do.

And you know, I don't think even a lot of companies know what AI engineers will get into this. But before we go, so you wrote the Get That Job at Google in 2010 years later, you wrote another one called Get That Job at Grab. You were a grab. Now, you would think that these two are kind of connected, but Get That Job at Grab was more of an article about the job market at the time in 2018. You wrote a quote because something strange, very strange is going on in the industry.

It started maybe a couple years ago and it escalated a lot around a year ago. And then what completely crazy about six months ago, what happened is this global demand for software and years completely else's supply. And I think it might be happening because we missed the market correction sometimes the past five years. The article was basically a bit of heads of saying the market is really hot. And now that I read it back, I was a bit of amazed because you wrote this one or two years before.

Anyone mentioned it. It was happening. It was heating up to be the hottest job market. And you know, we saw it in 2021. It was a peak.

You saw this and you were pretty much advertising. It's anyone who was actually listening to whatever you were preaching. Yeah, well, I mean, they're the early warning system. The recruiters are that they will tell you what's going on with the market, right? Because they're directly in touch with hiring managers who are the ones who are, you know, in touch with the people with the budgets who are deciding what the company is going to focus on.

And so the recruiters, if you're in touch with your recruiter network, right, you know, kind of what the trends are and all that stuff. And so I started noticing that the world was running out of engineers. Yeah. That's fundamentally what was happening back then. Yeah.

And I mean, you know, like you also, I think some people were externally looked a bit surprising because you were doing great at Google and you went to this scale up grab. I mean, they're going fast, but I think so people are thinking, why is it going after Google to grab? Why were you going by the way? Well, well, you know, I mean, GeoWorks Amazon Google all really similar in a lot of ways. You know, GeoWorks was more like device software, but still, right?

Yeah. You know, grab, grab a buddy from Google who was CTO there, right? Theo and Vaslakis and he was like, man, this is an adventure. You got to come. So I started chatting with them and realized they were on just this, I mean, that Southeast Asia in general is just this incredible productivity explosion and it just is seeing fun, right?

And it turned out to be actually really fun. It was and then code killed it. So, you know, back then, like, get that job grab. You did describe how the market was was really heating up and, you know, something's happening in COVID. But what you're both here is so now there's a got of an investor money has creating a lot of startups, a lot of startups, including some very big ones and they're galloping up all the ends, you're left on the planet.

And now it's a fight. Yeah. We got worse after that. Yeah. I was like, how did you see a play out and how does it continue all this today?

Because I feel today we might see something similar in a different area, right? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of investment coming in for sure. It's coming in hot. Right.

We went through a huge spike right after I posted that because shortly afterwards was COVID, right? Two years later, we had the stimulus package and that gave everybody a lot of money. And that was like tons of startups appeared because of that. So great time founders and so great time to be a remote engineer, basically. Right.

Then the stimulus package and the stimulus money went away and things started to kind of crash and then AI came out and everybody got really uncertain. And so it kind of dipped a little. It has dipped, I think. If you just look at Indeed's report, you can see jobs have dipped pretty heavily since they're peak in 2021 or 2022. But we also see a productivity explosion on its way, like a boom of jobs coming.

So it goes up and down. But yeah, I think at that time in 2018, the market was showing signs that it was going to, and that's what that's what everybody wants. They want to predict what's going to happen. Not just that they know what stocks to buy, right? But also, you know, how to make the right decisions for the companies, right?

For the careers. And right now, I think you and I both agree that things are kind of headed back up right now. Yeah, yeah, and we'll get into that. But I want to go back to the second time. So the first time I came across your blog, I didn't really even connect the name with the Facebook then was get a job at Google.

The second time was a few years later, which was this Google platform, which was published on Google, Google Plus, right? Yeah. So it was an internal facing document. Apparently you wrote a lot of these or just like rants or like, I meant for Google internal only, and somehow it was set to anyone could read it on the internet, hacker news jumped on it. And as soon as it went out, you know, people archived as well.

First of all, how did this rant came along? Because this rant has been so referenced, it's now I think on GitHub as well as TV platform rant, because it was a really good criticism of Google. And not just that, but it was kind of a really, really realistic picturing of Amazon, including Jeff Bezos not giving us shit about your day. I think, you know, people were like, he still doesn't, you know. Yeah, but it just felt very real and raw.

And clearly it was, I understand it wasn't meant for public consumption, but you know, like, hey, did you write these kind of things all the time? Like, because we only saw this one thing. And I've heard that you had a history of just internally just keeping it really real. I had other ones internally, sure. None of them were quite that, I guess, accusatory or whatever.

I mean, like, I was really taking Google to task because I was fed up for it. I've been there six years and I still couldn't get a platform at anybody, right? Yeah. So like Google to ship a proper platform that even internally, like the code search team didn't want to give me an API. Like, it seemed conceivable today that you'd give somebody a REST API to your stuff, right?

That's the way we think today. Well, outside of Google, inside of Google, who knows, they're just not really big on internal services. They're just like, he's our product. Yeah. I'm driving nuts, completely nuts.

I went nuts and then bottle of wine later, I, yeah, told them how it was. Yeah, so let's recall some of that part because I'm going to link it, obviously, so people can read it. But first you start summarizing on what Amazon did write and then what you observed throughout your time. You were early Amazon, right? Yeah.

Early, yeah, I got there in late 1998. It was pretty small back then. We were in one building in downtown Seattle, just a three-story building. Wow, that's it? A four-story building of which we occupied three floors, I guess, I guess.

Yeah. And yeah, there was just one data center at the time and it was just a very small, it already had a cult-like sort of feel to it, right? An electric feel. Yeah. I mean, a sense that there was something really magical going on.

So was it still the bookstore part or was it already expanding beyond books? We, when I joined, we already had music and I think we were just launching video. Yeah. So I think we just brought our tabs really early on. I'll have to go back and look at the industry.

Yeah. And then, like, you know, as you said that, basically Jeff Bezos mandated platforms, APIs, what to do there? You know, it's interesting because everybody thinks that there was a real memo. The memo was, I don't know, Jeff wouldn't write an actual memo, right? I don't know, how the fuck would he do that?

He just tells people stuff and it happens. But the customer service organization in particular was, I was in customer service tools at the time. I may have been running customer service tools this time. Bezos would sit with us every week in a meeting and we would look at the top 10 reasons that customers were contacting us, right? Yeah.

And he'd want to know, why are these customers still contacting us and getting triple charge for their books? That kind of thing, right? And everyone was always, where's my stuff, right? Yeah. Customer service had really interesting me.

I may have been, you know, I've never thought about this for, but it may have been Jeff's sort of affinity for customer service, wanting to be the earth's most customer-centered company that led him down this path of forcing people to open up for APIs because the customer service team kept saying, we can't make any changes to OBDOS, you know, our web server, because that's their code. We can't get into the supply chain code. We can't get into the fulfillment center code. The customer, we can't help the customer. And Bezos was like, all right, tell you what, right?

I'm going to blast anybody standing in the way of that. And what that turned into was, well, you need to provide something to the customer service technical team that's not them going and linking against your code and trying to get it to run locally in some different environment, right? Yeah. Which is what they're doing with this awful C++ code. So yeah, so that's kind of the origin story.

Yeah. And this was like early 2000s, right? Like before, you know, we even have things like service that are microservices. Yeah. Well, back then, the services were things like they were proprietary protocols like Corba, like a, so, Camco, and Tularian, the Pub-Sub things, and they were all really nasty when they were formatting.

And there was a possibility to do rest. And right, it'd been invented at the time, but everybody was kind of poo-pooing. It's like, no, no, nobody really kind of understood it from here. No type of safety, no protocol. Yeah.

It took years. But it turned out, yeah, that's what you need. You need an API. And that was the origin of my rant too, right? Which was, I talked about Amazon desktop, mostly wrong.

Yeah. This is how we started your memo so that was actually fascinating to read. I think it was clear that you were on Google side, right? Like even though you're trashing Google, it very clearly came through that you actually wanted to like shake things up. Like, hello, like the memo when I really felt like, hey, like we should be better than Amazon.

Yeah. Here's all the reasons. And here's the things that they're doing better. And it's not that hard. We're going to do it that well and then we will be better, right?

I made sense, right? Yeah. And I just felt like we were good at everything else. We were good at a lot of stuff. Google was extraordinarily good at a lot of things that Amazon had no clue how to do.

Really? And it took Amazon years to catch up to Google and a lot of things. So let's talk about that. What were the things that Google was just really good at? Like Google had one service called Stubby.

I think I even mentioned it in the post called Stubby. Sorry, Chubby. Chubby was a locking service. Chubby and Stubby, they went together. The locking, distributed locking, those are not easy to implement.

Okay. We're talking, you know, Paxos times 10, you know, make sure the thing stands out all the time. They have a 9's of availability, which is like, yeah, yeah. It's like basically 30 seconds downtime every 10 years. Okay.

It was a very reliable service. Oh, wow. Okay. Five, nine is hard to get to. Amazon, five is almost insane.

It's just like what? So that was just one example. Big table early on, they had like free basically like unlimited, no SQL storage with some pretty good query facilities for everybody in the MapReduce infrastructure, Google and then it, you know, like, yeah, on and on, right? So like really good hardcore engineering problems solved in a way that is like just tough, tough to do. I was very impressed.

I slapped myself like my forehead. Sometimes when I was like, I see some of the stuff they did. I got there and I'm like, why do I think of this? Like I had this game that I had a custom RPC protocol. When I look at Google's, which is now gRPC, it was called a call buffers and stuff.

You look at it and you're like, oh, wow, it's a forward compatible protocol. I can add stuff to it without breaking it. But it's binary and high performance and it was beautiful. It is beautiful. Spicy, no more people don't use it to be honest.

So yeah, they did a lot of things really well, but they didn't do platforms well at all. It wasn't part of their DNA. They just didn't get it. And it was, they didn't do internal or a struggle or neither. Neither neither.

Neither neither. And then so you wrote this round, which again, like, I think if you're listening to this, you need to read that round. It is like one of the best things I've read. It's also very interesting, by the way. What was the impact?

Because obviously you sent it internally. It now leaked externally. So clearly, you know, people were making fun of Google. Did it achieve that shake up effect? And you know, how high did this thing get?

I'm pretty sure it must have gotten pretty high. Well, I mean, Google had a very open culture. So it got right up at the next TDIF, right? Thank God it's Friday, right? It's Google's iconic Friday meeting.

It's like all hands. I remember a band, the guy was in charge of our film center, not film center, sorry, our data center at the time. He was a, he stood out there and said, well, you know, we all read the rant. So, you know, they got a kick at it, right? But you know, Vic Endotry was pissed.

I mean, he was really, really mad, right? Because I had like told him he had an ugly baby and very, very loudly in public. And, you know, and I'd use his ugly baby to do it. This was a developer's Google.com, baby or something else? Google Plus.

I call it Google Plus ugly, right? And, you know, and he was like, he had really gone in for that, the head spot at the time. And he had planted the seed of fear in Larry Page. He was like, this was a killer, this was a killer, this was a killer, this was a killer. We had to have a Facebook, which was stupid for many reasons.

So I'm going to wait. Oh, so I'll tell this again. I'll say this again. That blog rant, that famous rant, was actually part two of an 11-part series that I had meticulously planned out. And I never finished because I accidentally published the second one externally.

And the implications were actually so big that I was kind of like in hiding for a while. But, yeah, no, I was actually picking apart Google Plus. Dimension by dimension. And, platforms was just one of the dimensions where it was failing. But you were actually right in hindsight.

I was right about all of it. But they never said sorry. I was also right about not getting into publication ads. I was right about a lot of things at Google, but I'm not very good at convincing people that I'm sorry. So, tell me that story.

Because you've, you've, you've, tell me the story once and then use that around. We mentioned it super briefly. You killed publication ad. And this was like, as I remember, like what happened? Is you joined Google and then what did you do the first time?

I went around all the projects. I was allowed to pick whatever I wanted and I picked print ads because I thought it sounded like a cool challenge. I became a domain expert over the next six months, learned everything you're supposed to know about magazines and newspaper publications ads in the United States and concluded that we were never going to make a dime, that all of them hated us and blamed us for the declining revenues and they wouldn't want to talk to us and we reeval. And I wrote it up as a big decision tree. I said we could try this.

We tried this. It didn't work. Try this. The whole thing. I mapped out the entire decision tree of everything you could do.

And they said, well, what about illegal stuff? They didn't put that in writing. What if we just sucked up the phone book? I declined. And then they got mad and sent it to other teams and came back to me for my postmortem.

So they tried to make it work? They tried to get it out and they tried it in England. And they couldn't do it because I was right. I never got so much as I'm sorry or anything like that. No.

But you concluded this and not where this is. First of all, you said if you were you wouldn't do it and then you moved on to the next thing and then they failed to or tweet. It sounds like twice. I didn't make a proposal in the postmortem which was very similar to what ultimately turned into Groupon. It wasn't complete shooting.

It was one thing that I said you will need a sneaker network of like a thousand people somehow. Which is what Groupon ultimately did. It sounds like you did the best that you could. You gave the best. It sounds like you were like look if you want to try it, I believe this will not work.

I believe we could try this and leave it at that. You did what you believe in. What do you think happened to Google+. I remember Google launched Wave which died down pretty quickly. It was supposed to be next email.

That was the first time I remember this early 2010s. Google could not do anything wrong. Every time they launched something I was like wow this is an ex-baconic Google App Engine. It's the coolest thing and I onboarded and it was so cheap. It was ridiculous to cheap.

Later I figured out why because it was so nice. Google Wave was the first one where I remember all the Maggis, all the online portals, tech or such. Google has replaced email and we're like oh wow Google has replaced email and you tried it out and didn't work. Then Google bus came along and I think we understood from the outside not as Google or as Google was trying to really take on Facebook and if they didn't succeed Facebook would win. I don't think from the outside it seemed like it was going to go and go and yeah it was pretty ugly but then it just kind of stopped.

You were on the inside. How did this play out? We've heard there's books about like Facebook's went all in wartime. They were working hard and they actually saw this as a major threat and energized them. What do you think about it?

How much of an amter's point did you have on this? I was there. I talked to people who were in the heat of it. Wave was targeting a space that ultimately got solved by Slack. Slack was the right form factor and Wave wasn't.

When I saw Wave I was totally impressed but they had cast a spell over everybody and I didn't see what I didn't get it. But I got Slack instantly. It was very similar. I think Google had trouble. I struggled to find the right form factor.

This was why I wrote that 11 part series. I knew that if they basically acted right then and got read it, just took them. Just bought read it. It took over that social network. They would have had something.

This was long before read it was in the top 10 in the US. It was hot. It only was tech eks. Yeah. It was also big back then.

Yeah. Before pre-digs. Blow up or whatever. I wanted them to either build a Reddit that was done slightly better because you know Reddit evolved. Even they want to change it or something.

It had to be different from Facebook where people wouldn't be able to migrate because the network effect fundamentally. Google, we're like people. They make decisions and decisions can be terrible. Everyone around the knows it and they try to tell the company. Don't tell me what to do.

That was it. It feels like it. Looking back so many years later. You've left Amazon like 10 plus years. How do you think Amazon?

How do you think both Amazon and Google have changed but also in what sense have they not changed? I think Amazon has changed way more than Google. You're the first person to ask me this. Amazon has improved dramatically in almost every possible way you could improve. Amazon has always executed better than anybody on Earth.

They found a way to do it without having all the flaws I mentioned at the beginning of my post. It's quite nice now and people that I know who work there are pretty, pretty satisfied. They're doing well and they still execute well. They're a company that makes good decisions by and large. Of course they've fallen their face once in a while.

What company doesn't? Google has not changed since the day I joined. End of story. Recently, someone at Google was asking me about what do I think about Google's developer story. I said, do you want me to be honest?

I said developer what? My example that I showed this person is Flutter versus React Native. React Native is about 10 full-time people at Facebook and a few other in the core team and a few other people from some other company. I mean, first of all, Facebook invests 10 full-time people. If you go to the showcase page of React Native, which is where you show, you may see logos, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, I think they have one big flagship apps and then you have Shopify, you have all these big companies.

You will find the blog post. Shopify says, why are you all in on React Native? Why are we having thousands of developers working on React Native? React Native is inside of Meta's Facebook app. It's Instagram.

It doesn't run whole thing. It's in there. Obviously, they're apps app. Then you go to Flutter. You see some small Google apps on the top.

It looks nice when you scroll down and it looks like an intern made that page. You have some random Chinese app that you never heard about. Then BMW, which is a brand that you know is somewhere in the very bottom. There's no big apps. There's no big logos outside of it.

Even for the Google logos, Flutter is not using any other flagship apps. I'm like, startups who are deciding which ones to use based on this, they will go for React Native. It actually has a street cred. I asked someone at Meta, how did you pull this off? With a smaller team, you executed clearly what I think is better in terms of you got the big customers, you're building for Google.

Everything is about impact. The React Native team, the first thing they did is drive impact. They got React Native inside the biggest apps into Instagram, Facebook, etc. Then the rest came because Shopify is like, well, if you use inside of Facebook with thousands of Vlobers, we can use it as well. Google can't afford to be disintermediated in the mobile space.

They can't afford to become the plumbing that people can swap out. That's always been an existential threat for them. The Facebook application is a platform itself. You can write applications inside of it. If you're writing for the Facebook platform, you're the New York Times or whatever.

It cares if you're an Android or iOS. That's Google source nightmare. That's why Facebook and the AJVI hadn't laid off the React Native team because that's there basically, hey, you don't know Android, we do. That's their play. Google, they'll never give up on it.

What happened was, unfortunately, Vlutter is not from the Android team. That pissed the Android team off because Android was an acquisition. Vlok was a guy that ran it, was very particular about them being in charge of their own destinies and not beholden to anyone else. He kept Android running the way they ran it inside. They made all the decisions and the buck stops there.

Vlutter came along and threatened their dominance as the platform. It pissed them off and Google has been unable to reconcile those things even since 2018 when I was looking at this problem. 2017. One of my biggest question marks about Google and why they have not changed this is around their cloud platform. When I worked at Microsoft, I liked to say Microsoft was Skype.

They just bought Skype and they left us alone. It was Skype. I was like, all right, this is, I don't like that much. But they gave us a mandate. They said you need to use Azure.

We were the first, we were the new purchase, so they just dumped it on us as Azure was not ready. I was the next to the data team. They were moving over and saying it's a huge pain. It's like we don't want to do this, but it was actually Trapper. It was forcing it on them.

It's blood, sweat, and tears. Eventually, what I've seen is over time, when I talk with Microsoft, what are you guys using? Obviously using Azure or being might not be using it. AWS is using AWS. I talk with teams like Google, what are you guys using?

Or, hold on. Why are you not using GCP? It doesn't scale. It doesn't have the things. How can you be going to be number one, maybe number one cloud platform if your own company comes up with excuses.

I try to ask this on back channels from people working at GCP and they always come with excuses, but I don't understand How is it that it's the only cloud company that does not use its own cloud service for their their flagship service for the flagship products? I think it's all just who's been the most successful at marketing and convincing people that they're using their own clouds But they are all all currently huffing their own farts Amazon doesn't use AWS No, I'm so I'm enabling AWS Okay, I mean like right for the retail side the ad side and like of course they want you to use it It's but all the core the core core core stuff and they have migrated and so like it's all free through and far as I'm concerned It's all like I think it might have changed because it is less that they had a name for the old stuff And I think more and more moving over there never bet against Amazon Yeah, AWS may have actually graduated before they can't actually use it internally. Yeah, the hurdles for Google were insurmountable Hmm, so maybe this is fair by the way So maybe this is not entirely fair because what I understand is their infrastructure is way bigger and more complex than anything else It's sort of fair to say that Google's cloud runs out on top of Google's infrastructure Which actually does scale the biggest in the world

Not sure if you're in Amazon Well, one thing that I am wondering is because I'm still waiting for what will the tool or platform be that Google releases that their Internal tool teams use it and they're like, oh, we have you know hundred thousand or like fifty thousand or hundred thousand Soft for the whole of it is like Google using it. You should use it. You know Microsoft did this with like This is a non-gouber. No, no, no, it's not some some Google's well I'm thinking could we see this maybe with with some AI tools? You know like AI coding tools etc. Could they finally do this or maybe this is not a Google way to do it?

They'll be like, alright, we have our superior internal tools and we will build an external thing You know, we have Borg will build Kubernetes for everyone else. I don't I just don't I don't think Google understands developers I don't think they ever did ironic. It's it's it's really closely related to their blind spot around platforms, right? If you don't get platforms, it's because you don't understand developers It's just ironic because Google like no company or few companies treat developers as good as Google does right in terms of yeah And few companies have built a platform as incredible internally as Google's is You know at the sort of foundation level. You know you unretired you retire for first time time and then you're tired because of well Initially, Sourcegraph, but then also AI what what made you kind of come back into the game?

It's not a binary thing. I've been gradually unretiring if it makes any sense And it's because it first I was like, you know what? I'm really climbing the walls. I really wanted to go work with some people and so that's you know That's where I went to the source graph like that was familiar ground right that was good search for everyone else Yeah, yeah, and then shortly afterwards AI showed up and I was like that was like the next step up is oh, man Maybe I better get back into coding again for a while because this looks really different So fun fact is the last time we talked about three years ago You were head of engineering at Sourcegraph and then people told me I saw that became in you made some changes Which we're actually like pretty well received but like you shook up you introduced where people could drop there Yeah, that kind of stuff and then next thing I know is like oh you you wrote this like you write about everything Which you know if we'll link some more things but I love writing about you wrote about like oh I'm stepping down as heavy engineer because I'm going back to coding Yeah, which was not what I would have expected again from just and I view that as another step in me sort of coming out of retirement Right because I had given up on coding. I just it wasn't worth it anymore Can't back had given up on coding a lot of my old buddies and colleagues right You know Just like environment set up is just over the top these days right and you know just building a simple web app

You probably have to use you know 25 different frameworks many of which I've incompatible competing, you know Whatever as soon as you update to the latest reaction thing You all the routers bracing after we learn that and so at some point you get tired of it and you're just like I'm done Man, I can't this isn't it's not worth it right and I completely turned that on his head And I saw it coming as soon as he came out I was like oh wow look you can write an actual function that's reasonably good Right and then when for okay now then I was able to project forward and see whether it actually goes and say oh oh Oh, you know that it's coming right and so so now I'm getting sort of like more and more fired up with each passing month This episode is brought to you by sonar the creators of sonar cube the industry standard for integrated code quality and code security That is trusted by over 7 million developers at 400,000 organizations around the world Human written or AI generated sonar could be used all code and provides actionable code intelligence that developers can use to improve quality and security Early in the development process So in our recent introduce sonar cube advanced security and enhancing sonars core security capabilities with software composition analysis and advanced Attic application security testing with advanced security development team can identify vulnerabilities in third-party dependencies ensure license compliance and generates software bills of materials

It's no wonder that sonar cube has been rated the best at a cone analysis tool for five years running So join millions of developers from organizations like Microsoft and Vidia Mercedes bands Johnson and Ebay and supercharger developers to build better Faster with sonar visit sonars source.com slash pragmatic security to learn more One thing that has we've talked a lot in the industry I was talking about it is how AI will first and foremost and I think like experience developers we can get there But how will impact junior developers and you wrote this again controversial title the death of the junior developer But interesting enough when you read closer a lot of your articles are like us by the way like there's a title which you think like Oh, it's the end but a lot of their wake-up calls to me when I read it properly It wasn't like oh, there's no more junior developers It was a wake-up call saying hey if you're a junior developer you need to get your your stuff together quickly and Change like whatever the junior's developer is before you were it's not gonna work for you So like what is it that you've seen and like that something inspired you?

Did you like see some some young Titans who are actually just doing great with these tools? Man you've hit on a question. It's just so fundamental and foundational to our industry right now. It's shaking the industry that question, you know And the answer is I mean the shortest way, you know that I would think about it is AI is not easy to use and The more senior you are the more likely to you're gonna know this when it's being bad When AI is not I'm naughty right it's common sense and AI is very naughty and in very subtle in insidious ways And even if they get smarter and they are getting exponentially smarter and they will be frighteningly smart within a year They will still I mean software is always bigger than they are right and they will still make silly do silly things And it's just gonna buy us towards more senior people, but it's not really senior already we learned It's nothing to do with junior and senior It's really more about who is demonstrating the ability to work well with AI and get good outcomes It's not for and that could be anyone yeah product manager So I think there's a big shake up coming where the roles change and everybody becomes more focused on what they're building instead of like Who's building it and if you heard about the collapsing the stack stuff from Scott Belzky Can you refresh the know basically like there's a line of thinking that we've over specialized and everybody's like incredibly domain expertise specialized

And you got the senior engineers at Google who know exactly how the fuse file system drivers work for every version of the next current right? But we don't have any more we don't need that that's that stupid that's going away But all the specialization is going away because AI is democratizing all of it You can't hide that knowledge is interesting because I just talked with someone I think a week or two ago about how what has changed A software engineering even before AI and what has changed back in early two thousands when you looked at software developers You had the job developer you had the dot-and-developer you had the Python you had and these were different people it was the job developer would not Do dotnet even though they're pretty similar so there was a and we saw in the back end languages were specialized fast forward to even before AI like 2015 or 2018 when we had a big hiring for like when I worked at uber we no longer like uber was seen as like Oh, this like completely changed We didn't care if you did Java or dotnet or or whatever you come, you know You know one of those languages you'll pick up whatever we're doing and as some when my team was doing go Python No JS and what else we were still doing something else but we're doing all of it So like we started to have less specialization So I wonder if this thing started earlier and maybe AI actually just makes it more more viable that now until now

We've had you all front and engineer would not touch back and they might understand the concept of APIs But now they actually can in fact when the product manager can actually create pull requests You'll we see that now right like a source graph one of our UI designers is now sending pull requests for the UI instead of asking engineers to do that and are they are they any good or that they're St. Decents or yeah, look, I mean, it's all over now It's just like the I believe this is the new role for junior developers is they're gonna be mentoring the next layer down of Non-technical or technical adjacent people who are now starting to contribute peers, right? And they'll be the ones who are like helping them fix the security issues or whatever else they have with their code Basically teaching junior Veltas because they're still trained engineers, right? So they can teach like a UX designer or product manager What are the right questions to ask the AI about your thing to know whether you're done or not yet, right?

You know, you know those kinds of skills. I like this because I think we all know things will change I think we're all struggling to like put the finger exactly I mean you have you clearly have a bunch of conviction which I think is great because I think you need conviction and in this area of going around them and I have been so you know, you work as source graph you guys are heavily using your AI in fact, you have your own AI tool, but you've been using the existing tools from from the beginning and Most of the stories I'm hearing so far about a non-technical person doing technical stuff is AI companies where they're surrounded by these people at Windsor go founder CEO Varun He told me that they have a I think it was salesperson who had a sales tool and they just kind of vie coated it with with Windsor if it had no state it was super simple thing It was not complicated without person did it and I wonder if you know We might be seeing these type of like kind of AI or just very sharpie environments like lead the path of what the kind of you Like us your large companies will be in ten years. Yeah, absolutely now We're seeing it everywhere. I mean, we're seeing companies where marketing teams are writing their own, you know, outbound Campaign software, you know, we're seeing a product teams

You know bypass vendors They don't have to read up with their renewal or contracts with some crummy vendor software because they wrote their own and had somebody from engineering Just vet it and be like, okay. Yeah, you can make these two changes I want to ask you a little bit about that because I'm bit skeptical about that Do you have you seen like a specific examples of what they replace because for example with work? They you're not gonna replace that which has all the compliance a lot of lot of state a lot of regulation a lot of ongoing maintenance like that That is not what you're gonna What are the things that you've seen? Well, this was a so imagine a company with a lot of really bad actors coming in and trying to crawl over the site and find fan bad ways to To be some of the scythe money out so they have many many different kinds of teams that are looking at different kinds of fraud and different kinds of Nacks and there are lots of kind of bespoke tools and so you get into this long tail of little vendors that offer these crummy tools that are really Expensive very vertical domain specific and so the product team at this one company was like screw it We're gonna ask you I build it We'll give it this back We know what we want to do and they build it, you know, and Python, you know, and so it wasn't production software It was software that they use as their investigation trying to find that actors nevertheless it saved them from a re-app With a contract that was rather expensive and it gave them they were happy right, you know

They had full control over the software they made do whatever they wanted at that point So what they were starting and this is just one of probably a dozen examples I can give it but we're seeing it But let's let's carry on that thought because you know me we built software we've seen the internal Tool that the team has built in fact, you know, Google is famous for building all the internal tools What is that the next step so like it can we just move because we know what's gonna happen, right as experienced people who are working software? So what's happening next year when there's like more functional to be added how far might be we able to take it? And what's gonna be the breaking point because this happened before I write like one internal developer wrote it And at some point it becomes like just a pain, right? Yeah, look I predict I'm gonna go around the record I'm gonna predict that there is a new role a new category of roles that's going to emerge They're the Winston wolf that are gonna come in fixed shit that you broke with AI They're gonna be fixers and they're gonna come in and they're gonna be small and large you may actually call them Let's give us a roll name. I don't fix yourself call me. I don't know fixer sounds pretty good

But whatever right I do think it was pictures in the sense that like you've made a horrible mess You've realized that that this company that promised the world to you because like something like 60% of all the world's programmers are systems Integrators they go to be companies that are desperate and they say we can make your system talk to each other and we really expensive and 70% of the projects fail but companies go for it anyway that whole that whole economy of rich countries sending work to poor countries the architects and all that That's all getting turned on potentially turn on its head because we don't know who's gonna do the work now the actual implementation Right is it the rich companies that are gonna do it for themselves now a lot of economists are looking at this problem right now Right yeah But we've seen it about sourcing don't forget like the whole idea without starting from the 90s I kept hearing like oh all the All the highly paid developer jobs will go to India or Asia because it's cheaper and then it happened but also didn't happen Yeah, that's how I mean look I think it's gonna ultimately be cheaper if a human being needs to babysit 10 ais to their project then It's gonna be cheaper to have a human being being Vietnam than in you know in the UK But but what the reason we have developers sit next to the business because we're sitting next to you can actually talk to them and That communication I've seen this you must have seen this a lot so when I was a dober we do this round robin and uber still does it to this

Data's like HQ is there in San Francisco and it's very expensive to hire Amsterdam is half the price and India is one third of the price So there's this round robin of like okay, let's hire people in the US and like oh it's expensive Let's hire in India. Okay, we hire for a while. Well, so much you can get like less experienced people There's communication issues. It's kind of breaking down. Let's now hire an amstrad I'm closer It's kind of midway and then it comes back and so let's hire and it just like every few years it goes to the next one and it's Doesn't reach like what I like when I look at the cutting amstrad and now they're actually hiring I'm like right. Yeah, it's been like four years outsourcing is one of those classic expansion contraction cycles that a lot of companies just go through periodically along with

Centralizing decentralized in QA or centralizing decentralizing you know TPMs or whatever like they just like they'll try both and they can never make up their minds, you know So you're you're in your book is the title is by coding and It's a heated debate if you should even call it by coding because it's a definition So let's start with what what do you define as by coding by coding is when the AI writes the code all right There's a reason that that definition is gonna win you can't put an if clause in a slogan use my coding as long as you're doing a fine Print which is what they're trying to do is they're trying to put a condition on it That's how I've heard people use it as well It's like you know like some people use the pro side of the point is like yeah You're kind of like I'm in the survive I'm telling I'm letting it go it often is an agent hold you know where it kind of goes and does stuff But it might also be I might kind of rain it in but it's just like you know like vibing like so I think this stuff I think is a lot of people pointing to like Andre kapart carpets is like tweet or however He defined it and yeah I think it'll just come into like whatever the question is it giving you a buzz like for real because you know

I mean give you a bus when you get a flow right you can get an actual bus going out You know what it is insanely addictive cloud code and friends source graph and you know try them out because wow They're like a dopamine hit it's like a it's like a slot machine They're really addictive I mean Ken Beck told me the same thing and I've experienced the same thing like I have this side project Which I just don't like to touch because so I tried to build my API's on a side and not pay vendors when I can But it's just a hassle and some are in AWS and it's a hassle to like remember how I deploy and but I With Windsor like I had one of I just built a small API on how people can claim perplexity and caggy codes If they're paid subscribers to the newsletter and I connected with an mcp server I connected my database I can just talk to my database and I asked like oh how many people have you know requested codes and they're like oh today There's like like the last 10 days like oh 90s go there like 20 30 a thousand two thousand three thousand like hold on like what is going on?

Like that doesn't look normal as I can analyze the patterns unusual patterns and then it figured it told me how you know Like there's a same email with different cases and I needed to code a fix for this But I was about to have dinner and usually like if I don't have like 30 minutes to code or an hour It doesn't make sense I had like 10 minutes and in that 10 minutes. I got like it fixed on I went to have dinner I actually was you know present on the dinner and I came back and I got back into it and it's all of 30 minutes I just thought that would have taken me like even if I had the hands on like two hours easily And I felt like hold on I'm no longer worried about like falling out of the flow So like there's a lot of new stuff that it doesn't make you more productive than as experienced developer like it's amazing And now I understand why Ken Beck is saying for 52 years He's never felt this good about or just excited about writing code a lot of your listeners listening this right now I have no idea what you're talking about because they don't they haven't actually tried the terminal app versions of these things like So skype amp and cloud code and codecs from open AI or client, right?

Yeah, you know and by the way client is gonna start taking on real real real important being able to run local models As soon as local models reach where cloud son it is today because cloud son is very viable if you keep it on the rails Because look let's face it The reason people are screwing this up and saying this doesn't work and I don't understand why I works and all these stories are BS It's because it's very difficult to wrap your head around the fact that you can't get an answer out of the AI All you can do is convert on an answer together with it They even if it's an agent running off and doing things you're still doing it together and you're gonna eventually converge on the right answer Hopefully most of the time sometimes you have to go try different model Right and you'll very quickly learn the limits of their sort of cognitive ability and that will be the constraints that you have to work with In and it's not easy, man. It's not easy people expected to be easy They want it to be handed to them well and also people I think there is this strange But a finger on it, but like the first time I use chat GPT it was magic It was like you mind blowing I think I think most of the listeners have had this experience the first time I First time I connected my MCP server my database in my case It was windsurfic and then curves or could have been anything else and I I solved something with with you know The agent I kind of guided it, but I'm just a bit lazy and I knew what I wanted to do and I kind of stopped it

And got it got it done and got it done so much faster. It was magic But what what what I have a feeling that which actually be the magic faded after a while like it was magic initially But then it's work and I think somehow we a lot of people like either get disappointed after the magic doesn't continue and My most surprising conversation was Simon Wilson who has been you know the creative Django. He is a super productive developer He writes so much gold written for you Yeah, and he told me that this thing is hard and in two and a half years of non-stop using it He keeps learning and to me like there's this contradiction like it feels so easy, but it needs so much work What is going on? Yeah, that is a really weird contradiction, isn't it? It's feels like it's making your life incredibly easier and yet. It's very very non-trivial to keep it on the rails

It's like a toddler with a chainsaw, right? Like I seriously okay. Let me tell you why I'll tell you one reason This is from Jason Clinton He's the seesoad anthropic and he was kind enough to share with us after I wind at Jean Kim's Engineering Leadership Conference a few weeks back I wind that Claude had to leave it on my test and said you're testing now Which is true that passed away like they were gone dead It's deleted him and it's like I'll test pass now and it's like well god damn it right and so and so Jason told us well What happens it? What happened was Claude was trained on a reward function and it wasn't trained not to hack that reward function Okay, and so it will cheerfully hack it and so that's the state of the art today is it will tell you it's done And what you have to do is say it may not and send it back to the drawing board You get back was literally saying the same thing He calls it a genie which is you it grants your wish but sometimes in a way It's a monkey's paw sometimes right yeah, you gotta be really careful how you phrasing you know how you know the moment You know your modern programmer when you come down to sit down from your computer one day and realize you don't have any instances of any IDEs open and you're writing more code than you ever have in your life So everybody listening in if you've got an IDE open you're looking at source code you're doing it wrong Isn't that funny man people are gonna be free got about this so we until until AI like really took off AI coding tools one of the

Pottest topics that I discuss and I think whatever is mine is developer productivity and the specific the question of whether should we measure PR's for developer or not cuz you know I do where they were doing it and it was helpful in some ways But I recently talked with a startup who is doing a developer productivity tool there lunch when you start when I told them I'm like They're like oh we're thinking measuring PR's are not measuring and like hold on like I think you're doing this wrong Like if we're looking ahead like the question is not like if developers are doing how many PR's like you will be able to do however Many you want but we need to think about like what will product to be look like because now looking at the output of like how much code doesn't tell me anything What what would tell me something is if I sat next to one for example? Are they actually reviewing the code before it goes into the code base already challenging this the AI instead of just blind the LG Tamiel looks good to me and sending it back and I'm not sure how like you know This is this is going a little bit so engineering leadership, but there is gonna be this big question like what does actually I'm gonna ask you this like fast forward to Years let's assume these tools evolve or you know they will not be worse, but they will be better What do you think a really productive software engineer will look like in terms of what they do not what they measure just what they do?

Yeah, first of all I got to share Ken Beck's toboggan analogy He's like he's like using these agencies like being on a sled going down a city like a ski slope You're going really fast. You're not really in control. You can write you can steer it And unfortunately that is the state of the art right now That's what software engineers who are embracing this and there's been thousands of dollars a week, right? Yeah, which is why clients and become so important why local inferencing is so important The only way for vibe coding would come truly sustain hold on I'm gonna stop you there You're saying they're spending thousands of dollars a month Oh, are we who's who's spending it because now what I'm reading is like oh we're not really going too much over with like a hundred dollar Quad pro subscription I personally get a bill from a profit for two hundred twenty dollars about every day and a half or two days It's all I'm saying so I'm dead as a professional developer Yeah, and you're seeing this with like teams that you're working with like you have some insight into a lot of other engineering teams, right?

Well, yeah, we have people using and we know how many tokens they're spending there their token pigs man these agents They they solve problems all the problems you've ever heard about with AI they solve by just brute forcing it Oh, I hallucinated something when you fix it. Oh, that was hallucination to I'll fix it again And they keep going until they get it right at your expense But it's still way faster than you could have done So you can't not program this way but this this now's of dollars are vendors swallowing it or their companies are actually being built for this Publicly we haven't I haven't heard too much chatter about this Maybe it's because it's mostly any devs, you know sharing on social media and like corporate they might not just care No corporate devs look, you know who's using these coding agents right now in corporations the CTO's for some reason We've noticed a pattern where the CTO's are all the ones who kind of get it right the global network of CTO's they get it They understand what's happening and they understand a terrible terrible economic trade-off They're gonna face which is how many engineers do you fire in order to pay for the rest of them to have AI?

Because it's very very very expensive right now This is why I keep bringing a client and local inferencing because you're gonna find real fast that as soon as you start running for agents You will feel like Poseidon like navigating the seas right you'll feel like a deity right how productive you are 20,000 lines of code a day I've written okay like for an entire week sustainably okay, but it will cost you you'll have to do a Bank Heist yeah, but where does all these lines of code go because so you know one one example that stuck with me recently I was on Twitter I'll have to credit whoever it was but they told their agent like look I want you to solve this this problem Which is like let's not do two things at once right it basically locking and the agent spun up a new register Out of the new service that implemented like optimistic or pessimistic locking it was like you know like 4,000 lines of code It was a rails project but first and I was like hold on like maybe maybe don't do all that and then I kind of went on and did something in red is and in the I'm like because this person you read this it just needs to use the like a keyword that does the locking and then it kind of you know Just do this but the point is you know These agent can write a lot of code and I'm wondering about two things one like house is saying Well is it because we've seen junior developers even before AI just like you know like spitting out code and then like what's gonna happen with

Maintain Billy and it is a good code is it the code that you actually want because I'm also hearing that people are using agents Right into first thing but they're going back and they're kind of changing it to keep a coding style or like to tie you up But that kind of stuff yeah look I mean the answer is you can do all of this as a professional engineer today And you can get a gazillion PR through if your organization is willing to you know to speed up the bottlenecks that emerge When you start generating code at that and some organizations are and some organizations aren't willing to let that speed up And you're gonna start seeing them set free very quickly and then of the ones who decide to do it You'll see some of them turn into train wrecks that become very public potentially and then you'll see some of them succeed You really want to be in the I tried it and I succeeded category I think and that means you're gonna have to take some risks the only advice I would give people I would say look look Because our book is 300 pages how you write 300 pages about vibe coding or can it really be that hard and the answer is You know I spent you know five months we wrote the book in a month after spending five months doing deep deep deep dive researching on How do you how do you push the the LM and I've got in different ways and found a bunch of anti-patterns and found a bunch of patterns and found that it's extremely hard It's not intuitive nobody's born knowing how to do it. It's completely new to humanity

I have these sort of human like but non-human distinctly different helpers and and and the best advice that I can possibly give you is give them the Tiniest task the most molecularly tiny segment to task you can give them Mm-hmm and if you can find a way to make smaller do that okay at a time Keep real careful track with them on what they're working on at all times and then own every line of code that be ultimately commit Mm-hmm and if you follow those rules then you'll be astoundingly productive without causing the man You know I've already personally caused so many nightmares because cloud hacking its reward function and saying hey You're tests are all done right so I mean like this is not easy and it's not gonna get any easier That's the painful part man, and that's what people are struggling with is the AI's will get smarter and they won't hack the reward function anymore But they'll have some other problem, okay, and there's always gonna be another problem And it'll never be ready enough for somebody to come in and just like it just works But that's what everybody is asking for and what they want and you hear on hacker news I mean anybody says I've been successful with AI everyone says well I tried it and I wasn't successful They're not realizing that you can today, but it's not it's not a freebie. It's a tool you have to learn how to use so in the book You use an example of when you kind of turn the page of like actually believing this stuff

Which was around your your game that you have been building for I remember actually when you retired you Announces you're working on this game and you were making some progress and releasing it what what happened there in terms of Using AI to get back to the game and what was the outcome or where are you with that game right now? So what is the game for those who don't know the game called wyvern? It's a it was a hobby game. I started in 1995 It's a massively multiplayer like you know RPG online, you know, but it's 2d All 2d sort of xy sprite graphics super super high speed animation though with like spells flying around and stuff It's a lot of fun man. People love it There's they have a soft spot for it people continue to play the game for that literally decades Oh, oh, I have I volunteer contributors working on it right now who've been working on it for years and years and years and years The labor of love for sure I during that time when I was working on it during covid I got on steam and I got a bunch of cloud overhauls done and modernized it It was all really fun, but the player base got so excited about it and they asked for so much features right?

They asked for so much work from me that I I got very I get suffocated me Mm-hmm as the owner of the right and so I gave up and that's when I was like really done coding and then AI Is come back and put it all back on the table for me. I realized oh my god I think this thing can turn through my bug backlog that the players had asked me to go fix right and and all the time Just there right and this is why I mean like this is why people come out of retirement right now And then so on the game you went back and you start to implement like certain features with AI Yeah, so like that was so thing is I can work I've been working on source code You know coding on how you feel quite some time and then the agents came out and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna try it on a cook all we have is a brand new code base I'm gonna try it on a crummy old legacy code base 30 years old is pretty crummy and pretty legacy it really is man It was bad so that's what I've been doing is I've been doing different things I've been doing cleanups I've been doing testing my gradations all the things that a larger company would need to do yeah Because I have lots of experience with that's at Amazon and Google and so I can you can scale it up You can say okay I'm doing it for Wyvern and this is what the experience you're gonna get as a developer in a year and a half to years working on a giant enterprise Code base right and the answer is gonna be real different. It's gonna be a lot of fun

It's gonna be really hard still and it's just completely different role. You don't write code anymore You build software so on this on this game like but just going back like you're you're describing You know the AI what to do it turns out the code you look at it you test it and then you push it out It is a very complicated process that's way too long to talk about here It's it is built inherently on a foundation of distrust you cannot trust anything the other one gives you anything And that means multiple safeguards and guardrails and centuries and security and practices and and you have to train yourself to say the right Things and do the right things and look for the right things and it is not easy and it is reinforced my My belief that people have really good developers are gonna thrive in this new world because because it takes all of your skill Keep these things on the rails do I hear it correctly that what we're kind of saying because at first I might have misunderstood you first It's like alright, you know like companies you should invest in it You should do it because otherwise you'll be left behind but it might be a little bit like what we've seen with let's say early Google You know like Google was building out all their platforms and they're not really making a secret or let's say Amazon's better example They were like building all these internal APIs that talk to you shut it seemed like a lot of work to do

And it didn't seem why you shouldn't just think what you have But you know it's one years later Amazon actually like built AWS They have a organization that actually everyone talked with APIs and some companies are still have not figured out You know like we can look at for example Google So what we might be saying is like look this feature is coming But it's gonna be a lot of work like start now because you will need to figure out so many things and it's not just gonna be a right The calling actually is absolutely not give agents to all your developers That would be that would be an apocalyptic event for your company in more ways than one But what you should do is you should start getting some of your developers together to understand what is going to have to change in your company? And I don't just mean the technology and the IT stuff and the deployments and I'm wondering I mean like the business processes What's gonna have to change if suddenly co-generation is no longer the bottleneck because it's historically always been the Yeah, yeah, and so we've a lot of everything else to just kind of like coast Right and this is why I really wanted to talk about your game Because I think this was really helpful for me because what I'm trying to understand is what does it look like when we use these And I'm glad that you said that it wasn't that I don't know you all your bugs are now suddenly fix magically No, it's gonna be years and years of work, but about a hundred times faster

So it's fun. Yeah, but by the time you finish yeah Yeah, yeah, and in the book like a thing that I liked again I like you made a prediction about how jobs will be impacted I kind of thought you know we talked we exchanged emails earlier and I kind of thought you're gonna be you would be saying there'll be fewer Jobs in the book you actually say the opposite you said that you think there will actually be a lot more Developer jobs what while you see this and but what will change? They're not gonna be the same things as today, right? It's so hard for people to get their heads around because what's happening is we're you know Commoditizing the creation of software just like digital cameras commoditized photography, right? Everybody can take nice professional pictures now and that was inconceivable back in the 80s inconceivable Yeah, I mean how much would have these things cost like you know just 20 years and by the way everybody crapped all over digital photography We're here and they're like it'll never it'll never there's a lot of it'll never is being thrown well in Kodak one bankrupt Not believing it actually buried their own digital camera. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like we're in that situation again

Everybody's like I will never they are wrong. I will ever it will get to where all the places that you think you don't think that it's going right now And what's gonna happen is your mom will be able to create software. Okay, you're boss. We'll create software Somebody at McDonald's be able to create software like literally we're gonna find all the ramen ujans You know they're undiscovered real geniuses in the world, right? Because my friend Brendan Hopper. He said head of technology CTO for technology at Commonwealth Bank of Australia

He's got some amazing hypotheses about how AI is gonna bring out a meritocracy Okay, because AI is a spotlight it shines on all the work that people are doing and you can't hide shoddy work anymore The eye will detect it if you're high if you're hoarding knowledge like you're an engineer who hoards knowledge to keep your job security That's gone now. Yeah, I will know the AI knows everything You know to be honest was always these stories about doing so I never really believed that it happens It's a rare edge case But there's other common edge cases where people may be like the system to try to like benefit You know whatever they want instead of what does for the system the AI is eventually gonna highlight that and so all the people with merit meaning The people who are good using AI to get important things done I guess are gonna build at the top and they're gonna be in a sounding number of jobs because creating software so much more empowering than creating pictures if anybody can create a video so what but if everybody can create software that's mind-blowing So, you know what I think is gonna happen is I think big companies are gonna shed a lot of jobs I think a lot of people are not gonna work for big companies They're gonna be a bazillion startups See one thing that I'm not 100% on this is big companies are highly profitable and I could see them shedding certain jobs But then replacing it but they will want to keep their edge like you know

They will of course want to try to increase profitability But they're happy keeping it at level and making and having enough reserve to like fight off the startups, right? Absolutely. I mean there's that balance will always be there that tension So but I mean I just I feel like right now the calculus is not looking in favor of big companies bulking I'm gonna be further like I don't see big companies getting bigger. Well in fact I just we were doing a Google deep dive. I saw that Google peak to set count in 2022 It's been kind of like going slowly a little bit down It was like hundred eighty eight thousand or something so actually like it and this is Google we're talking about which is Profitability when you keep going up. So yeah right now companies are discovering the easy solution as you can do the same

That you've been doing for cheaper by you know losing some headcount and doing some stuff with AI right? And I think the more ambitious ones are gonna do they're gonna be more ambitious So you've done your game I want to ask you about a metaphor that I've been thinking about and I like I asked you to hold some holes in it The ones you see game development and game development for if you think back of what the biggest barrier entry what used to be to build a nice Like cool game. It was initially building the 3d engine. You know, this is why doing was massive wolfenstein They build the engine and then they kind of built the game around it But you know like that was like 90s guys my next door neighbor by the way Michael Abraham's the one that made doing fast Really and quick. Wow and and over time, you know now we actually have software unity and Unreal engine which take care of the engine so you know you can have focus on the games and what this has resulted in I've now interviewed a few people very small teams can also make really cool games if you actually want to build a game I actually did a unit tutorial. I could build a game

I mean I would need to put in the work But but it's no longer like it can look professional and all these things and if I look at how the gaming industry has evolved I'm following a little bit of a news triple a studios are mostly struggling Not all of them You know GTA 6 is still doing great and some of them and the EA sports But some some traditionally massive studios are struggling because it doesn't work that we throw a bunch of money and we get a best So there's a lot more indie games way more than ever. They're having trouble consistently Doing so I'm wondering if we might see something silly because again like there the game engine was central All of this and now everything out that is not the game engine is really important marketing story All those things in software engineering coding like being able to code was the bottle like and now you know that will to some extent Be removed the software and during it still everything around is still remains that for sure that is absolutely true So yeah, we're gonna see we're gonna see a lot more software get created to period Just like the lot more small software and we're gonna see more indie games and we're gonna see more stuff bubble F that's a high quality somebody can find a way to organize it all like the app store Maybe we'll see a new startup for this man. I'm telling you man every almost every time I talk to anybody about this

We come up with a couple of new billion dollar ideas, right? I mean it's like this is another reason I think there's gonna be so many jobs is that this will create legitimate real actual GP productivity not nothing fake about it nothing artificial it will create real value It's gonna be an explosion of value, right? It's gonna take a couple of tipping points for the AI to reach the sort of mass market ability for people to be able to use it to create reliable software But we're no more than two years away from that man It's gonna be like this incredible Proliferation of just cool shit for you to try it. There's gonna be too much action you can have that AI to help you find your way through it So in those two years whether a listener is a less experienced engineer, especially if they're an experienced engineer What would your advice be to prepare best?

You know like make the most of either being an AI engineer working with these tools figuring them out Like what is the advice that you give you know the engineers working? Let's say a source graph where you're out to your around you Yeah, so you know what's the guy that wrote the movie the room Tom Wiseau? I think this is him somebody asked him on Twitter They were like hang on I want to start right in the screenplay What should I do and he said start right yeah? I mean like first starters if you're saying oh, I don't know buddy. I am not ready blah blah blah shut up Okay, that's that's done. You're done. You're done whining. Okay. Go learn it right now

I had the privilege of speaking with Dario M&A privately for 30 minutes about three weeks ago four weeks ago He invited me to chat with him and and I got to hear his sort of unvarnished view of the very very new future from Somebody who arguably be considered one of the best informed people in the world Yeah, and Dario you know his vision the future is a little bit more bleak than he lets on publicly okay And he and Jason Clinton is sees our both seeing statements that are quite dire like their will be badged AI employees by the Middle of 26 I'm hitting with you right basically is the implication there and other other implications like that the Moore's law of AI how it gets It gets a four times smarter every 18 months. So if you do the math three years from now if they're IQ 10 today They'll be IQ 160 if you want to some sort of rough matter of what you know 16 times modern needs and it'll be it'll be too much for people Dario told me he said look he said society is like an immovable force right an immovable object and and tech and AI are unstoppable force They just won't stop and they're gonna collide and it's gonna be ugly because it's gonna push society harder than society wants to be pushed Harder than society is willing to be pushed and we're already seeing signs of it

We're seeing people revolting against AI putting up the I'm sick of it right he posted I'm sitting never mentioned AI in the post it was really brilliant I love the post by the way the guy that I wrote the ice on because he's speaking for a generation of people who are tired of hearing about this shit But unfortunately you are never going to stuff hearing about it It is that this is the way things are going to be done and in the very very very short order And so my advice to you is get off your ass and learn it now now now okay start vibe coding figure it out There's a lot to learn there's a lot of weird instincts you're gonna have to like learn a lot of stuff not gonna work the way you Expect it to okay, but you start now and you'll be ready because Dario calls it 2026 the end game And he says it without a hint of drama. He says it casually Oh, yeah, 2026 is the end game you understand that's how big this is gonna be and the first ones to follow the first jobs are software engineers Right, so you need to be on top of it to take advantage of the new jobs that arise which are software engineer v2 Which use AI and get amazing things done you have to be one of them Or you're gonna get kicked out of knowledge work all together No, well this is gonna be part of like I think it's clear that it's gonna be it reminds me of the cloud where you know these days like yeah every company uses a cloud either private or public and About 15 years ago it was like AWS and I talked with banks back to we will never use it

We will never on board will always have our day centers Oh, and then you know there was a time where I think it was very valuable to get AWS certification You get hired and get a salary bomb So I feel that there are levels where like I think it's clear to me that AI as infrastructure will be in every single Tech company and of course it will be an every single now company and government and all it will happen I don't see this time frame So I think we might disagree a little bit on how this but it will happen and I think your advice is absolutely solid Like it started now in fact, you know what what I'm seeing now and again This was just this conversation with would jumpy jumpy said that she she saw Chachi B2 come out She was a coda coda spun up in a few months in a IT man She said I'd like to be on that team and they said thank you with no thank you don't have the experience and then she thought for a while Like I'm too late, you know, there's people been doing for five years since Transformers What can I do and then she just went to hackathon She just hacked on the side five months later. She was one of the best at the company and she got on the team early on I think there's a thing of like I was just listening There's maybe you know like put away the the doomsday thing But the point is this thing is happening and as you said now is the best time like Also do get motivation like I do think the industry will change the watch like we'll probably look back at this time

That's something big happen and we're in the middle of it We are in the middle of it and you know what the funny thing is I mean the grass really is greener on the other side here Like it is so fun, right? It's so it's so fun. I'm having so much fun not coding But fixing my bugs and adding features. I love it But I also feel sometimes you are coding you you know what you expect and you correct just so there's a lot of medical Inc happening. Oh, yeah, I read a hundred thousand lines of code a yeah, it ain't easy Right, I mean it's exhausting because if you're not reading it then stuff's living by you know, you'll eventually figure it out But you know try to catch things early. Yeah, but now it's like it's a different ballgame

I love it. I'm having so much fun in Jean Kim my amazing co-author who's you know, he's an author and researcher who I think probably knows everybody in the entire world who's everybody and And he and I are both just unbelievably excited about vibe coding because despite the doom and gloom sound of what's happening The only reason is doing glimmers people don't like change. They don't want to change the way they're working I think so and I've been guilty of this earlier like when I when I saw this big change come at first I was like, oh, this is not great on you know when people are saying it'll eliminate jobs I didn't like the message it just felt like very threatening. I think it's offering sure we're kind of used to us Us Automating a bunch of job like customer support and you know like oh here's the cost savings of like we need your customer We never fire custom agents We just in hire as much and I think it's the first time in history where our work is it is kind of threatening us But what I came to realize is talking to you talking to come back seeing my experiences If you are a good software engineer and you're open to learning and using these things and adding into your toolbox You will be a better and more in demand when that's what I'm seeing for people who start to use this They're now being hired as AI engineers AI engineers actually a software engineer who is able to use but understand the non-deterministic part

They're going deeper into ML. So I think it's like in some ways It's ironic we might have had some stagnation for like 10 or 15 years where you could do the same thing and be more successful and you know Staff engineers just it was more about managing people and I think for the first time in 15 years We're shaking up and so be a great software engineer. You need to learn you need to let your ego go Which you know I think that's something you always done really well Yeah, I mean why why why I get your identity tied up in something that's actually kind of fragile as it turns out look The way I think about it man software is always so big remember that remember when they were building the second Death Star I think was an Empire Strikes Back and you still have done how big was that freaking thing right? That's how that's a typical enterprise software project right there. It's a good visualization of it, right?

So what if you have these robots that are 20 times as productive as a human? Yeah, you're still gonna take freaking years and years and years to build it and there will be our architects overseeing up Right, you're gonna be very very grateful that you have the help of these robots that are 20 times faster than human dark coding or 100 times faster you're still building Death Stars and it still takes years. So there's still jobs They're just different traumatic events can increase your neuroplasticity and you said we've been stagnating many of us have been stagnating the reason I retired I felt like I was stagnating. I was thinking I'll be honest like now like my publication of our manager covers You know like the trends happening and I was just talking with my brother like he's also in tech He's a founder of a crap-dox and I was talking about how looking back like if AI did not happen What will we be talking about is it how to more efficiently move monoliths microservices?

We've been talking about a few years how to measure developer productivity even a little bit better how to scale teams better so that How can you manage 10 teams and It was getting a little bit boring. So you know like I think it's a good good take away Yeah, we were we were incremental improvement mode yes, and this is a step change absolute step change So close off with some rapid questions if you're okay with us sure with all this AI stuff here What is your favorite programming language or do you even have one wow my favorite programming language? Oh my gosh? I don't even care anymore. I'm so what what used to be my favorite programming before all this AI stuff made it like kind of necessary I really like TypeScript maybe I shouldn't but there's something about it I mean it's just so flexible and expressive and I think probably I have to give it a TypeScript and what is an AI tool really?

It's a coding that you like an AI tool that has nothing to do with with with coding okay an AI tool for coding You should try source graph. But just cannot yesterday. I mean come on man That's what I've been using actually turn all the permissions off and just let it run but don't do that But it's so looking on the it feels so good. Yes, and then I'm so until the arm that Rf I've gotten pretty good at sandboxing, but I think I probably a such a shocker containers anyway As for an AI tool that's not related to coding. Yeah, I boy I tried operator I really want something like operator that works if that makes any sense so hopefully some very soon upcoming version of it But it couldn't do something simple like edit my Google Doc for me like it would look at it for 20 literally 20 minutes And then like just build it a paragraph I mean, you know, I think that's a good example of like we will have software explosion there someone will have to build it Who's gonna build it? Yeah, we know was gonna build it so and what's a book recommendation that you had outside of your your own

Read sapiens. It's such an awesome book. I'll see if this was great. I'm glad I feel we went to a roller coaster We went like hi, then hello, and then we ended up I again. Yeah, well, you know change can be scary, right?

But this is a very positive change in my opinion I think it's good to just like I like that we But let's just you know name what it is. It is changing It is a big change and I think for I think what makes it scary for a lot of people including, you know My generation I have not seen this change like people who have been around the dot-com bust might have seen it I want to have a greaty-booch He actually told me like oh actually Ken Beck was saying we've seen this change like when we move to Microprocessors for example like apparently it was a huge thing and everyone's world-struck because they're so much faster now They were going to change everything and then it came back. So like yeah everything changed and then like in some ways nothing changed Yeah, so everybody suddenly had a computer one day. I was there for that and before that nobody had a computer It was inconceivable. Right? So everybody being able to create software is a really interesting stuff in that direction

Well cuz back then right as I understand as a programmer you had to go to work with these companies which had these massive computers and Whatever, so it was only very privileged and then suddenly anyone could do it That's right was with with where the money who had like you know rich parents or whatever Things the PCs were the beginning of the big boom. Yeah, we are the beginning of a big boom There's a lot of money to be made and PC turned out to be pretty great for our software engineers Yeah, all right, Steve. This is very good. This was awesome. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed this interesting and interesting conversation with Steve

Steve remains a prolific writer and you can read more of his rans linked in the show notes below for more in-depth reading about developer tools the Engineering culture source graph or the impact of AI software engineering check out the primatic engineering deep dives also link below if you Enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube This helps more people discover the podcast and a special thanks if you leave a rating Thanks and see you in the next one