Exploring with agents (Changelog Interviews #680)

What's up, welcome back to the chain-log. I'm Adam Stikoviak and it's been a minute. I've missed you You know sometimes you have to retreat to attack. I said that before in the podcast How can you push at sustained high-output thresholds when you need to slow down and check yourself get centered get focused and then Get back in a groove and do your best work rest assured my friends the chain-log is you're just a nothing's changing And I'm working on some really big ideas and I cannot wait to show with you today I'm talking with Emilio Weinberger designer Data is veteran ex-github next and now designing intent at augment code What if the last 30% of any software project working on is about to become the hardest part you've ever done That's the argument Amelia is making today We discussed the identity crisis developers are having as agents take over the keyboard the epic redesign of developer tooling in this Agent-verse world we're in the arc from autocomplete to chat to CLI back to UI Why intent treats a workspace as a core primitive and not a chat thread the tree off between one word tree per agent versus one Or tree per task and why she thinks prototyping just got easier, but finishing got harder a massive Thank you to our friends at fly without them.

This probably not be here. There's such good friends great partners We love them check them out use them. We use them fly.io. Okay, let's talk to Amelia Well friends, I'm here with a good friend of mine Michael Greenwich founder and CEO of work Oh s Michael author agents.

I feel like this is burgeoning It's it's kind of happening all of a sudden. What's the state of the world for author agents? Yeah, it feels like author agents is one of those things that nobody knows what it means, but it's very provocative Everybody wants to talk about it practically speaking. I think there's two things here The first is when you say author agents You're talking about how do I get the data into an agent that it needs to be able to do its job And for that we built something called work was pipes It's actually more of an integrations product It helps you take your agent and connect it to your customers Google Drive and connect it to Salesforce and HubSpot and connect it slack And all this other stuff that they're gonna use and do it in a way that's safe and secure and managed That's one type of auth for agents kind of data access.

The other type is actually authorization It's like permissions for what the agent is going to do because you connected all these systems But then you say what capabilities does it actually have how can I restrict the agent behavior? So it doesn't go off the rails and go do a bunch of crazy stuff. That's a lot of stuff we're building today We don't have a product announced yet for that, but we don't working on it. The third I would say is probably the identity layer for agents How do I identify an agent by its name?

You know, that's really coming from the enterprise identity systems are out there if you look at Microsoft and Microsoft's entry agent ID They're doing a lot of interesting work there. There's also expansions to open ID connect and skim for agents We're building all this into the work of us platform So if you're looking for an identity stack that will support agents again future proofing work was a great place to go But it's changing really quickly, you know, none of us were talking about open claw You know, like weeks or months ago, and that's a new paradigm I think we're gonna see not just within consumer software, but in the enterprise too. So it's an area very very rapid development Well, it makes me think about agents versus people not negatively But this will where we'll have more agents than people you know today if we have seven or eight billion people on the planet in the future We're gonna have trillions of agents going off and doing things And so the challenge around identity on authentication for agents is actually significantly bigger than just how people interact in the same way Like, you know, GitHub isn't gonna work super well for agent coding because you'll have so much more code getting written The same is true for identity and permission and logging systems when agents start doing stuff with it So we're building for not future today. Alright friends The next best step is to do what I've done which is use auth kit.

Okay, that's how I authenticate my CLIs my APIs my applications All that good stuff workOS.com is where you go try it out today a million users with auth kit for free You can't be that deal. It's it's literally free again workOS.com try out today Friends, I'm here with a friend JS partier slash friend of the developer world. Really one burger It is my first time actually I think having a deep conversation with you I'm looking forward is very much we come from similar routes of desire I haven't been to the labs you've been to in the but they can have next as you've been to in the depth that you've been to I love the vision design you've done in the world and I've always been a fan of yours So finally having a chance to go deep with you is a joy. So thank you for coming and welcome to the show Yeah, how can be here?

It's long overdue. It's an overdue. I wonder why we haven't done it sooner and we always say that right? We do the fun things in life.

Why didn't we do this sooner? Every time we're just too busy working, you know It's too much work to do I do want to understand how you're looking at the world we're in right now Because there's some there's some change if you didn't notice Amelia. What do you feel about this change? I know our our audience is like gosh, can we get them with the same high stuff?

I don't think we can't I think it's it's here today Yeah, yeah a little bit of background about me that might inform my perspective So I come from like design development database background and I joined the get up next team Which is like the R&D team at github shortly before we launched github co-pilot Which in a lot of ways feels like the beginning of this craze it does I would agree though and So I've been paying attention to this space pretty closely since Gosh, what was that 2021 2022 and um, I don't remember and um It feels like things have been accelerating as far as like how quickly things are changing and how receptive we are to that change Um, but also if you take a longer view They don't feel like they've changed that much right it's been like four plus years Um, and there has been like a pretty coherent arc of like first we did autocomplete then we were like Um, we want to have chat conversations check if he came out Um, let's ask agent. Let's ask not even agents. Let's ask LLM's about our code bases Um, and then we gave them tools, right and they started writing code for us and then we moved to the CLI and now we're kind of in this like Uh, let's go back to the UI and apps arc. Um, but like over four plus years.

That's not that much change to have happened Um, I do think it's accelerating so for like the first three years. It was like, okay So what are we doing? Are we actually changing that much? And now it feels like oh, yeah, we're like, we're like, yeah But like it is important to take a longer view of it because day-to-day it feels exhausting, right?

There's five new things every single day, so Um, it's good to have a little bit of a Wait, is it actually changing that much notically perspective? Can you um, can expose the the insides of get up next and what brought on copilot and what brought on this world? I do agree with you that That feels like the the first version of this for developers was autocomplete from get a copilot And really a lot of pushback even from github and microsoft for open source code and training models Like the first thing was really less about what we can do with it and more about why did you do this with our code? Damn you github microsoft.

So you were on the inside of all of the lab work there The the beakers pouring things and things blowing up and maybe not blowing out tickets into that world Yeah, so I don't want to claim like any ownership or like intellectual ownership over copilot because I joined like But right when we launched like I helped with the lunch. Um, there are some interesting things Um That are part of my experience of that time. Um, like there was a lot of pushback initially like um Even internally and then like the first users every time it was introduced to somebody they're just like yeah We have autocomplete right like it's just better autocomplete. This is not This is not very exciting.

And then like a day two days after anyone started using it It's like whoa, this is actually very different right like because mechanistically It's not so different than the things the tools that we already had. Um, but in practice, it's it's very very different And I think like those earlier days in AI Um, there's way more pushback of like do we really need to do this look? We have so many things to do as a business at github. Um, like let's focus on those things first This was get up next though, right?

It wasn't this uh a part of that or did it come out of research from get up next and wouldn't the next thing I remember Uh having conversations about there like that was the whole point wasn't it like to do research and do to do exploration? Yeah, exactly. Um, so get up next was kind of formed around that time Um, it actually started as the office of the CTO before Jason Warner left and um Yeah, that was kind of that's those are and those still are the marching orders of like just like explore, right? It's one of my favorite places that I have worked where it's just a lot it's it's quite a small team Maybe like 15 people and just like very experienced, um, product engineers researchers who all have these different backgrounds Um that just bring a lot to the table and then you have this really nice venn diagram of Um, ic's of individual contributors who just really know their stuff, but they know different stuff So and like they have some overlap with each other so you get to like figure out what to prototype and make squads and it's very like autonomous And you know, what do you think comes next?

Let's explore that until we Convince ourselves that it is or isn't the next thing. Um, so it I have a lot of love for that team What was your role there? You were doing a lot of digitalization, which is such a long word to even say I don't know how it can say that perfectly three times straight fast. I know I would struggle there But nonetheless, it is very cool and is very beautiful Uh, what was some of the things that you did there to contribute and things that you really enjoyed doing?

Yeah, what projects did I work on? Um, when I in the beginning it wasn't all about AI so we did some fine explorations around like, um, making data easy to work with and um, How does that loop into actions? Like how do you have these like, uh, How do you know, do you mean or do you mean actions in general? Yeah, I get up actions.

Okay cool. Um Get up actions is one of the coolest pieces of tech ever honestly is so inventive Uh, it's one of those things that once you use it and you really really appreciate and understand it and you examine it Uh, you're like, wow, this is this is a very thoughtful piece of software Yeah, yeah It can be a little frustrating to work with because it's you know ci, um, but the way it was designed is actually quite elegant Um, it's actually really really powerful. It's almost like separate and compute from storage in a way Or the way that you do that in distributed computing, you know where you have the platform itself and then the runners You sort of separate the engine that is the smarts the if then else kind of scenarios with workflows and whatnot It's really just uh, uh, I think it's it's a pretty well piece of software Yeah, and I also think a lot about the way it's integrated with the codebase Um, like this is this is relevant these days with like agent roles, right? Like what goes in the codebase and what doesn't and like what should be coupled with get and get branches and what shouldn't Um, and I think The way actions work where they have to be checked into the codebase is really nice because you get a lot of power out of that Um, so it's something I think about a lot Let's go back to exploring because I I agree with you What do you think about this world we're in right now?

I feel like personally as a developer what I'm doing is a lot of exploration I feel like everything I build makes me build one more thing to make that thing smoother better Whatever and now I can because I have superpowers and so I don't feel encumbered by what I know I feel unencumbered by what the agent knows And I feel like every time I hit a problem like gosh can so we just wait Hang on a second. Let me solve that. Let me see if I can think about that a little bit because it's much like you I have this product manager use experience and design background that I don't really That I haven't you know I use day-to-day, but it's not on my the front and center of my resume So it's because I'm a podcaster and software developers along that I've sort of left my roots in a way from the public eye But internally all I don't think is about is design intent specification how they should work Why does it work that way? Oh my gosh?

I usually just be so frustrated by that and so that therefore I have tastes That I just can't seem to let go of What do you think about the state we're in with exploration being able to explore more Was offered yeah, it's really empowering like it feels like these agents are 80 percent good At doing anything which really levels you up. There's this concept I've been thinking about that I'm gonna not put into words well because these are kind of half big thoughts but like if you think of like For any given thing that you're gonna work on if you think of the work linearly right like 0 to 0.5 is half of the work point five to one is all the way done right It's linear because you know, that's the way we think about our work because it's been pretty static Like what takes a long time for a long time? And now that agents are here They're kind of like blowing up that our expectation of how long things take and how valuable they are as a result Um, so that like what used to be you know 70 percent of the project is now like you throw prompt in the box if the prompt's good enough Um, and maybe there's some back and forth you get 70 percent of a thing right and like that number will go up But like that 70 percent has been squished into you know 10 percent of the project and then that last 30 percent is actually really hard now because we're starting all these new things I'm like I want to do a I want to do B You know, why don't we throw CD and EN because they're so easy to do but then you have to at that point decide Like do I keep going with this thing because it's actually quite a lot of work to go from like Oh, here's like a like kind of rough prototype to like here's like a polished version of the thing And I've been very intentional and thoughtful about what it looks like and how it acts And it actually feels a lot harder to do that because like you've stepped off the um, the moving sidewalk, right? You're like you're like used to going fast and then you're like wait No, I have to go slow again and like I can't do this part for me and it's really frustrating And I have like six things that I'm juggling at once Um, so it's like it changes the nature of things where um as someone who's like I love prototyping It's like one of my favorite things.

It's actually how I think of myself as a builder is I'm pretty much just a prototyper Um It like I believe very strongly that that that is the way to get to really nice informed products It's just like exploring within the medium It it makes that part way easier, which is great, but then it makes other parts feel a little bit harder. Yeah in my opinion Do you feel then that you as a product ever do you feel like you? I mean I've seen your work at least with what's in the public eye Maybe not what's behind the scenes on your easel that's you know got to cover over it So nobody can see your painting kind of thing. Um, I knew a an artist at one point I'd always peek in their studio and I was I always loved it because I got to see behind the scenes What no one else got to see and I got to see the the unfinished the exploration the oh this was red now It's let me just paint over the whole thing and kind of things That's why I say that but I always appreciate that But when we look at the way you product that you feel like it's hard to get to finished then considering that or do you feel like you're in a In a place where polish is just the hard part and that's the product in the end And that's the part that takes probably the majority of the time It's like taking this thing that works for me or work for me in my scenario or my team's scenario To something actually scales to multiple teams and is sign upable and usable and viable and Insolible and instantiable and all those things Yeah, it's interesting like how do you break that part down you can break it down into like Like polish and craft and like the art side of like, um, what it is What is it that we think is valuable as a society is going to have to change because you know that 70% again is so easy That like which also makes it hard to throw away, you know, you like throw in a prompt and it like builds a whole app for you And you're like, this isn't exactly what I want but it feels really wasteful to throw this away because that would have taken me a long time Oh, yeah, we become uh hoarders in a way, right?

A little software holders. Yeah, exactly. I got some software and going on over here So I'm empathizing big time. I've been running out of disk space Almost a lot of software.

That's a lot I tell agents to write a lot of software So like that like our impression of the valuable like how valuable that that part is is gonna change And then like what do we think is valuable as a society and what we want to pay for like there's questions around that And then there's also questions around like how do you get it fully functional, right? Like if I ask an agent to make a game or make like an infinite canvas there's usually like A lot of iteration and back and forth or just like manually getting into the code to get things like really feeling nice and working functionally And like I feel like those are the two Hard parts that are left in that like 30% of like polish and finishing up, you know, the less the less 20% that is 80% Yeah, you know, I think polishing a product and delivering it to folks is is actually the hard part I feel like I've been building a lot of personal software and I'm kind of okay with that I've been in a way feeling guilty for not releasing some of it open source But I'm like well, then I would have the burden of open source and maintainer ship Which I don't mind if I plan to if my intent is to make it a product and give it to others Which I would like to do given infinite time I think at some point maybe agents can solve some of those challenges as a as an agent maintainer in a way potentially I just don't have the time to release this open source and deal with potential issues or just somebody else's problems Or they want to contribute a different direction in the hang on a second. This was a personal project It's a USB stick on my curb. I gave it to the world.

It is what it is It's open source not open to contributions. I don't know if I want to be that guy either I don't know if I want to be that person. I'm like not invited can't contribute So I just I sort of just like hold it back. How do you how do you feel about the state of the world?

You feel like every developer is in this version of predicament. Yeah, the open source thing is really hard Um There's not the question of like because these agents are getting better How valuable like how does that change how valuable open source projects are and like like, you know MPM packages, which is kind of interesting. There's also like can we make it easier to do open source, right? To like maintain an open source project.

Um, you asked previously about what projects I worked on at GitHub next and one of the things that we Worked on was called doc pilot or covalent for docs. I think is what we called it in the end and it was like an early exploration of rag essentially where we would index open source code bases and then Have these kind of like chat or bespoke docs where Developers can come in and say like I'm this type of developer I'm good at these things I'm bad at these things or my experiences Or really we could like check their get up to see what they're really familiar with can you answer like this question about the docs or Do a walkthrough for me knowing who I am as a person and what this what this code base is And there were some really interesting future directions possible future directions around like Can we actually just make it easier for open source maintainers? Um, because like writing docs is Usually not the highlight of what they do. Um, it's like the tedious annoying thing that they have to do and once they write the docs they're stale um so they're interesting like directions around, uh, we can uh automatically write these docs and then if there are things that aren't Fully explainable from the code base.

We can just email the maintainers, right? Like we can just interview them whenever something comes up where there's a gap And so they wouldn't have to go like make a doc site and like write all the content instead It would be auto-generated but also be grounded within the code and be grounded within their answers And I think like, you know, that was two three three and a half. I don't know it was a long time ago and um Like the things that we can do now feel even more crazy, right? Like you could imagine being able to open source something and just like basically not having to maintain it, right?

Like the docs are written up like you have agents like figuring out whether they should update it in a way that users want Um, I saw one of the AI coding apps added like a feedback form that was like suggested prompts for the code base Um, so if they liked the prompt, they're just like throw it at an agent and then you know polish it up And that's a new feature for the app like it feels like maybe we could you could do the same thing with like an open source Library that like is kind of like community grown Um because agents are doing a lot of the the hard work of like maintaining the code and like aggregating across a lot of qualitative data Which is users asking for things like it feels like we could push that pretty far in an interesting direction. Yeah Yeah, I think there's a lot of influx to open source now, but then I you know when we're talking about the subject I'm thinking about the things I'm making and while it's not polished. Maybe it would be useful to somebody else Maybe my design thoughts and traits and tastes actually translate to you know what I know I could generate that But I like the way you thought about it. So maybe it's more of a personal Solution to how I solve the problem or how I think about problems now I break them down Um I mentioned on the podcast a couple times.

I don't know if you know about this But uh, I've been working on something I've got called agent flow and it's not at all like intent Which we'll talk about here in a minute from augment friends of ours augment But and something you've you know, you've designed but uh, you know I've thought about this problem of how can we how can we as technologists build software and I keep thinking with like a knowledge base And the the language of the agent is very much marked down Like I never thought I would care about how much markdown and I like you were just saying about developers I want to write docs. I'm like, you know what? Kind of writing docs now. Okay, it's like it's my ability to control that future in a way Like if the doc says this thing or if the spec says this thing or uh, I've adopted the way python Uh, directs itself with peps python I think they're called python hands my proposals and I just swapped out python for projects They're called project enhancement proposals and that's where the work is done You know, so if it's a specification It could be some research it could be a knowledge base article It could be I even have my agents write blogs.

I call them builder logs. It's so cool Uh, but we're done with a journey I'm like, hey, can you just write a story about that and I use it to learn because I'm often exploring places Where I don't know a lot and I need to get caught up And I'm the kind of developer who just wants to sit there and say just do all the things prompt a magical way and don't have any Understanding a lot of reasons why I'm building software isn't just to build the software and solve the problem It's it's to understand the software that should be written to get there And maybe in the future that doesn't matter But all it says is that I think a lot about this this process of getting to good software and I question You know, is my software worthy of open source that somebody else want to use my stuff And how will open source change when essentially generating a solution whether you have taste or not is Is the closest version of free we've ever had? Yeah, one. I want to check that out.

That sounds really cool Also, you're really good at naming things Two great jumps in there and two just like what does the world look like when we have software on demand and I don't know software too cheap to meter I think whenever I think down the path of like, oh, what if software is just instantly generated on the fly I always come back to like people don't want to make all of their software Right, like I don't want like a blank phone and to be like, oh, you know what? There's folders and I have an app where there's like emails in here, right? Like I don't want to have to think about that I want like these smart defaults or like Like tasteful things that I've decided that this is the way I want to work because I see it out there And like it's fully fledged for right like doing a lot of abstract thinking and product projects Talking about abstract things is really hard Because you can say words and there's a picture in your head and then the person you said those words too has a completely different picture in their head So like the farther you are away from something tangible and something fully fledged The harder it is to communicate about even if LLMs are, you know, so good at English and language So like there's got to be some room for taste and like opinions and Like having proposals for the ways things are put together and how software works in that world And like maybe things look more like some kind of like remix culture, right? Where I say like I want to use atoms and then like I can change it, right?

Like I can change it on the fly But like I don't want to go from like zero to one all by myself. I want to like To one I've thrown a lot of numbers around and I don't know if they all make sense Well, you know zero to one is a woman term. I like zero to point five That's because that's where I feel I'm at. I feel like a lot of my things are point five and point five is usable by Adam And Adam likes it.

Okay. Yep. I like my stuff. You know, I'm constantly working on it Hey friends, I'm here with Dan Mangus co-founder and CEO of RWX Dan What makes RWX and the way you're doing CI so different and interesting to our audience You know, obviously we're talking to you because we want to promote what we're doing We want more engineers to become aware of what we're doing at RWX But I think the thing that's interesting to me is that RWX is really kind of the first major evolution and CI and the approach for CI And this is just highly relevant with a Jack Tech driven coding You know CI is largely been the same since the end of the practice But these platforms were created when being able to run code in the cloud was really valuable The fact that you could spin up virtual machines that would run some automation on a gift push was you know Really impactful for engineering teams trying to like build good developer processes and tools But that's kind of the extent what we've done at RWX is we've taken state-of-the-art techniques used in build systems Organizations like Google and meta You know Google has our internal build system plays inspired the open-source Basil tool but every engineering team I've talked to the ones to adopt basil He's just found it extraordinarily difficult to use and figure if they have a dedicated engineering team to build and maintain the rules It's hard to extend it to work with different types of languages and frameworks and engineering teams are looking to adopt So it's been you know to a prohibitive to actually adopt, you know those technologies But the ideas behind basil are really impactful They're similar to a lot of the ideas behind Nix I would say Nix is kind of very similar, you know in the difficulty to adopt and effectively what we've done RWX is we've taken those techniques We've made it very easy for engineers or agents to actually adopt and utilize those Which namely are the automatic content based caching and the graph based task execution Which means it already eliminates all redundancy You know whereas other platforms are having to run the same set-up steps on the same jobs In every virtual machine that's spinning off RWX can run the setup once on one machine and then fan out Accordingly based on just your dependency graph So effectively with RWX you never have to think about parallelization at all You're on other platforms so it's like we'll add this onto the existing job I make a new job for it but I have to do it all that setup With RWX you've just defined the tasks that you want to run and the dependencies between it And we will run it with maximum parallelization based on your dependency graph What friends are good next step is to go to rwx.com learn more check out CI in a whole new way Once again, RWX.com I was telling you before that I feel like I get so far into one thing I'm trying to like get it to be usable by the masses But to get there I got to solve some other problems So one thing I'd recently was I created this thing called gauntlet I just bought the domain and it's going to send my software into the gauntlet So rather than CI it's really like a battle tested ground There's a femoral ink is containers involved There's which is do you know what ink is familiar?

I do not This is the coolest new thing by the way. It's not new It's a canonical's lxd Relicensed because they had a license challenge and one of the original creators maintainers a part of that Fortit happily Stefan I forget his last name in the moment, but Ink is essentially is system level containers and virtual machines So think of like a hypervisor we can instantiate an elixir container or a VM pretty easily on some like prox mox Something like that But super super fast and built on top of ZFS and just phenomenal pieces of our and so here I am trying to solve this one problem And then I'm like I get so shiny object right shiny object did And I have this idea to like turn my code base into a sandbox and I have a virtual machine over there on prox mox I'm like listen agent. Let's just build out a sandbox and prod is prod and sandbox is sandbox Maybe the developers who have been done this or this is like normal for me I'm like, okay, this is a brand new world. Let's figure out sandbox feels like we can break everything in here We can tear down and build it back up again In fact, that's what we want to do because if we can that means prod is a femoral away And we can get back to zero or get back to one quickly And so as I'm building this thing out and doing all this stuff I mean, there's a pod here because I want to do this not for just this software But for other things I'm working on and so I started to get into this more like I stopped working on the main thing You know now I'm over here working on this side project this side quest that actually is really really cool So that's it.

That's what happened. I was like, I'm trying to go this direction But I get shiny object did and now I'm over here building a side quest. It's kind of cool Are you doing things like that too? Or is it just like you just go straight and you're good?

There's no straight in my world. There's no straight That sounds very cool. There never has been and it's even worse now than it has been, right? Like it's so easy to build things that we're we're like doing it more and more So so we want to talk about intent, which is the app that I've been working with with augment code and A lot of the motivation for that is like We there are existing problems within software development that like we have never solved and we're kind of just accelerating things And it's kind of like can we can we just solve these first so we can you know accelerate faster?

So there's actually a project I did at github next um Like workspaces or something where github's fully remote and this was right after covid and like To work collaboratively with other developers has never been easy right like github says It's like the social hub for um developers or at least they used to but like we don't really work together before the PR Um like before that we're kind of just in our own heads. Is that right PR is where it happens in my experience Yeah, I guess the old way the new ways not so much It's not surprising. I guess it's like I guess I've been so steeped in this new way I'd forgotten the old way that nothing happens until PR If you're talking about agents or other other like do you work with other developers before? No, I mean a lot of it is not collaborative.

I mean you open source. Yes other developers That's usually the potential It's not a lot of like team collaboration getting to x. It's more like You know solo getting there, which is weird right like it is Like we're especially we work on I know as a lone wolf developer I kind of like it, but like things should be shareable right it like especially teams working on the same feature We're doing all this like duplicate conversations in slack though Like explaining the code that we're writing locally and like there have been a few stabs at it and replic kind of does this a little bit But like by and large um, you know typically a project is like I have a slack conversation I have a linear issue. I have a github issue.

Maybe there's a sentry bug I look at it. I talk about it Maybe I put comments on a doc in notion and then I make a branch in my like local VS code um, and then I write code on it and you know the outputs in the browser and then like Oh wait, I have to work on this other thing So I like commit it and I put the branch down and then I like go work on you know feature b There's like, you know, there's a bug in prado. No, let's fix it And I like go back to my future branch, but it's like wait What was I working on and like what's the progress and what were the conversations? I was having around this Um, and like the proposal is just like let's have a new primitive Which is a workspace where everything lives so that it's easy for me to put down and pick up and hand off and share and like um, our work as developers is uh, only partially code a lot of it is just like context integration and testing and all these other things and so like let's build a primitive that Works with that and stop pretending that everything's code all the time.

All right, so that project was at github next and Now it feels like I'm just watching things and like Collaboration is even more important now because the same tools that would make things the collaborative with other teammates Feel like the same tools that we need to work with agents where we kind of just need like a room for everything for a specific task Uh, so that like the agents all know what each other are working on and I know who made what change and like we're having conversations and in public Uh, where like i'm talking to agent a and agent being knows about it and we're all working off like the same spec and documents and you know Like embedded web browser so that that was kind of the like core The spiritual core of this new app that i've been working with augment code on called intent where Let's let's like add this primitive of a workspace and then now that we have that so within the app Uh, everything's a workspace. It's not like an agent chat. Um, anytime you want to start a new task you would create a new workspace So you say for this repo i'm gonna add I keep my demo. I keep doing is adding dark mode to my website Um, and then you know that has its own like get work tree.

It has its own set of agents It has its own set of like rich, uh, markdown documents to explain all the context and the spec and then because that's all isolated I can like switch between, uh, Adding dark mode to my site and like maybe adding any blog posts, right? And those can have agents like whole team swarms whatever orchestrations of agents going at the same time And they don't get confused between each other and then when I switch between the workspaces I have the visual reminder of like, um, maybe the browser's open or the spec is open and I know like exactly like what the progress is and who's working on what? So it's a little bit of like a redesign of how do we want to work and can we, uh, build an environment where that's easier And then to come back around to what we were talking about It just makes it so much easier to work on, you know, the 10 things i'm working on at once like this last weekend That was adding, you know, 10 separate features to this app and it It's still a little bit crazy making, but it's so much easier. Well, the challenge I think what you may have saw for and if I if I understand correctly it works based probably has its own get work tree Which means it's not the same shared code base It's a for not really a true get up for kind of thing or get for saying but it's literally it's it's a separate instantiation of the code base With its own get history that it pushes probably to to main or to a branch if you're branching That's exactly, you know, I was just thinking about this this week really with with agent flow It was like it's like the next the next way to get to where you want to go I want to swarm a bunch of agents But I do want to work in parallel I want to have a couple at least because there's things that that might require a CLI touch and an API touch which are two different Code bases that you know, I want to keep the CLI maybe open source and the API is proprietary Maybe it's source available, you know, so you've got different, you know, kind of layers to your product And we go wow, one agent's working on the other one's working on the API I'm actually working in a mono repo that has multiple sub repos because I'm trying to keep the agent in one repo kind of thing Which I think now codecs actually happily just goes wherever it wants to whereas cloud seemed to be like, you know What I'm only here.

Okay, if you tell me to go there be confused I this is me right here wherever you instantiated me at and that's a new word instantiate to me You know, it's just this idea though that That is that spot on that's exactly where it needs to be because if I'm gonna have More than one agent we have to have more than one code base that they're stomping each other's toes It's like two devs working the same repo trying to commit the same it's like no that is not how it should be How did you I mean it seems obvious, but how did you get to that realization from a technical standpoint also from a design standpoint? mostly just trying to Constantly pushing the bounds but like they call it the bleeding edge because it's you know painful right like trying to use all the new tools and You know, I found myself running eight different agents at the same time all working on different tests and like they step on each other just toes and like They started accusing you of changing things right there like Changing this file there's changes in a file. I didn't do just so you know, okay, like it wasn't me I'm not gonna stop again. Oh Matt.

I didn't do that Yeah, I was like, okay chill with you. I know the other agent I should be smarter and have you know intent here and do you know multiple workspaces and be smarter about them So I'm just not there yet, okay I'm coming. Yeah, it is interesting like the So two things two things about what you're talking about um when it's like a lot of the like new explorations from the other tools are around a work tree per Agent thread so each agent has its own get work tree. Um, and that's actually not the direction We went down.

We have one work tree per task and there's kind of these pros and cons for Multiple agents working on the same task within the same environment That's kind of been like an interesting research exploration And I find it actually works quite well where as long as the agents know What each other is doing and are able to see like, okay These are the three other agents within the workspace and like this one's working on sub task a and I'm working on sub task B You really don't run into issues. Um, the one set of issues that we did see a lot was like we have them auto committing It's like a setting So like you split a task into sub tasks and then you like you say like you three tackle these three sub tasks Like in parallel and then auto commit when you're done and because it is like the way get works is like you have to stage files For hunks and then write a commit message and like run the commands like that They would step on each other's toes with that So we added a tool for like queuing auto commits and other than that like You get all the benefits of like, you know, one's working on creating a component The other one's working on adding the component to the layout or another one's working on like global style changes, right? Like you do want some of these tasks to be done within the same environment because like usually when you split things into tasks They're inherently linked together and like, you know, API change as well as like another one's making the page, right? Like you need those to be in the same place and like you want visibility between those agents You don't want just like completely new cloud environment for all of these agents as they're working on the same thing So like it's been interesting exploring like what do you want sandboxed at any given time and the other thing that's been really interesting It's just like orchestration paradigms, right?

Like yes With our given tool, it's hard it's hard to explore any kind of orchestration like I actually had like a home-cooked like Parallel running system because I was doing large refactors where I was like I'm gonna make a markdown file and it's gonna like be slid into 10 tests And then I'm gonna kick off like 10 agents in parallel because it works faster and I can use cheaper agents when it's all spelled out And like it just like was not conducive to like actually exploring like how to make that really nice But like if you have the primitives to like kick off different types of agents And they all have visibility into what each other's doing There's some really interesting paradigms So like our default paradigm within the app is space or space starts with a coordinator agent Which writes the sec and then it delegates sub-task to implementers and then it in waves And then it asks the verifier to validate those changes and it works really well But there's other paradigms like spin up two agents and they ping pong between each other Right and then like agent A goes and it critiques what agent B did and does its own thing and like they kind of like You know level each other up as they go And like there's all these really interesting paradigms that I like I really want to explore and then like you like a gas town, right? And there's like, you know, like there's a decan You know, it's all town. Yeah, we have these mayors and stuff like that I didn't go that deep in I Like that's exactly it right. It's like impossible to follow when you're just like starting from the the primitives which are like an agent so There's like a lot of really interesting things as far as orchestration that I feel like Are just now being being explored And there's a lot more that can be done there But I think we just need the tooling to to make it easy to understand who's doing what and etc Take me into this this this exploration around Coordination because I feel like that's probably the hardest part once you have multiple agents I do think it's smart to to do a task-based versus, you know, agent-based because you may want to have multiple agents But then you have the issue of stomping on toes So you have to kind of coordinate it Do you have like a coordinator or an orchestrator or do you kind of give them hats?

Do you give agents a key agent you are you're the verifier now and now they assume this role is it stuff like that How do you how does the agent know and how do you trust the model to let it explore and push back on the other agents? I guess thoughts if that's how you want to frame it. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So we have the concept of a Specialist, which is just it's like a persona, right?

And it's like a prompt and a default model um and set of tools So we ship the app with a default set of specialists like we have a coordinator and implementer a verifier There's like a PR reviewer UI designer. There's some just like things to get people started But users can tweak those or make their own specialists And the default flow we have that we we've found actually works really well is one coordinator That you start a space with and it does all the research and it like breaks the second It makes sure like it's usually the main thing that you're working with as a developer And then that coordinator on the fly can create other agents like either blank ones or specialists So we in our default prompt for the coordinator we say for the subtasks delegate them to implementer agents and implementer agents Depending on how token sensitive you are like it can be a cheaper model or it can be you know more expensive I really want this to be as robust as possible And like those implementers get their own sub task And it's a note that they can like write in and read from and like so they like it's like kind of scoped It's really well-scoped for them, but they're also told Who else is working within the workspace? And I feel like that's made a lot of difference is just like the agents know And have visibility into who else is working, right? Like it would be weird to join a team and like not know who else was on the team or what they were working on Right, like I'd be like, I don't know what's the scope of my work um, so It's just like this really smooth flow of like coordinator delegates to implementers and then we also found that Agents don't always do exactly what they say they did And like maybe this will change, but for now Sometimes an agent would be like I did xyz and then you know you look at it and they only did xy And so the coordinator is also told to delegate a verifier agent Which again could be a cheaper model.

It could not be You can use like a codex model if you feel like that works better for this this case Um, and that that verifier just knows exactly what the work is that just completed and it like goes through and verifies it You know it runs the tests it runs the app and looks at it And it keeps everyone like to task and it reports back to the coordinator And it's actually kind of a really interesting flow I keep needing to post about it of like having this one chief of staff that you talk to for everything and like It delegates to other agents. So it's like an interesting um It's a different flow where like the work can be happening and I can talk to the main agent about the work that's happening or like Oh, I found a bug and I'll just like as I go through the output I'll keep telling the bugs to the coordinator and because it's not doing the work Uh sending messages is not like doing messages because they get sent right away And it's not like interrupting an agent because the work doesn't stop. Um, so it's been kind of an interesting Uh change in pace of how I do the work with agents. Yeah, that's exactly where I've landed to I mean It's funny how we think like this because I basically said that the agent your your work is too important for you to do the work You're the planner your my orchestrator.

You check on things you've you you confirm the task is clear We sub-agent that and it's and because unfortunately codex isn't smart at that sub-agents yet At least I'm not aware of and I just haven't explored that So put a new tab Uh, and we create a flow essentially and I'm calling flows Um where I want to get to you know from point five to one or whatever point of phase when I applied to that Yeah, I want to have this task done, but you're my planner You're the worker's ready even between a couple of repos So in the case of the sandbox I have the main repo where I've got I thought We actually landed on the fact that I just need like one primary operator Because I was trying to have an operator for that repo and operator over here and I'm like, well, hang on a second now They don't know what you're doing. You have all the context and they got messy And so even with one operator between two repos and sort of two different versions Like you're here to battle test this thing and they're over there coordinating work on the product to evolve it And so it just made a lot more sense. They're like They got confusing for them and for me even Some of your your work here is too important to do the actual work. You're my planner You're my verifier.

We are real time If you see a bug we log a bug kind of thing if you have a thought about something We'll spike on an idea or drop a document there Um, but really came down to that as like I want to have sub-agents they go and do the work And yeah, you're right if you had sub-agents or multiple agents working in a room together And they won't they weren't told to introduce themselves. That would be weird. That would be weird, right? Like, well, hang on a second I'm gonna touch my files over here.

There should be nobody in this room and and uh, you know They've got no eyes in the in no hands sub-speaks We kind of have to give our agents to do this work We kind of have to give them eyes to see something and give them hands to to maneuver something And at the same time I've learned tell me if you've heard this before if you feel this way at least When I say this trust the model. Does that ring a bell or resonate anything inside your million? Trust the model? That makes me uncomfortable.

Okay. I have the opposite So I've I've pushed on the model to not trust it and I don't know about you But lately I've been just specifying things I want to do so well that when they come back with Feelings, I guess I don't know how to their intentions or their thoughts on what I'm putting out there A lot of my responses end up being I like that. Well, your suggestions for this. I review their suggestions I'm like my a lot of my responses is some idea they go and turn on it I review it and I'm like this is awesome and then I ask it for clarity and blind spots and like they go back and review What we've done because I got time to do that Go and review it for clarity.

Is this clear? Are there any blind spots when I'm thinking about that if we started to implement this now The agent could do it, but it would be guessing along the way, you know, and then that's not my intent. That's not my intention Uh, and so then they come back like well, here's five or six things that is unclear and here's like six major Here's here's two high blind spots and here's two sort of mediocre ones And so I can think about those for sure, but I'm busy podcasting responding like I have a job My only job isn't this if this is my only job I would probably read a lot more of it So then my next question is to the agent what your suggestions on those things Because I want to review your suggestions because you've got the time to examine it agent not me And so that comes back with these suggestions. I read those I'm like, yeah, those are great suggestions My next responsibility is what do it?

So a lot of a lot of my interaction with the model is in a way trust the model Not because I've blindly trusted but because I've learned That it's got some pretty good thoughts and it's heck of lots more than me and certainly way faster And so a lot of it is my intention my idea is my desires my problems It's helping me solve and my responses are pretty mediocre. It's like, what do you think about that and do it? It's like my history is like a lot of that like what do you think about that do it? What do you think about that do it?

You know, I don't know anyways revealing too many of my cards here in terms of like just how much I do trust the model when it comes to what I'm making No, that's exactly right. There's um Augment launched this feature a while ago and a lot of these agents have this which is enhanced prompt Which is like you write a little bit and then you ask it to enhance the prompt and it turns your you know 10 words and 200 words and like I like this because This is in a lot of ways what we're doing, right? We're we're trying to have a compressed version and this is what talking is, right? Like you have a maximally compressed version of what it is that you're trying to represent that lives in your head or Maybe doesn't even fully live in your head.

It's just like a dark mode to my side, right? Like and that This wouldn't work previously with code because there's a lot of Things that are inherent and you would have to assume in order to turn those words into an implementation, right? Like first of all, what is dark mode, right? Like what does this person mean when they say dark mode or like what pages should this apply to?

Should this have like some kind of affordance to switch between dark mode and light mode? um, and there's like a set of like Less and less obvious assumptions that you can make about what the person means when they say these words and like you're doing You know, I'm not gonna bring out numbers again, but you're like you're extrapolating Please do I like your numbers. Don't forget about it. You're going from your 751 Okay from ad dark mode to this is the code for adding dark mode I feel like enhanced prompt goes from 0 to 0.1 Where like it's a little it's the negative TLDR, right?

Like it's a little bit more like this is what you mean when you say that and then In the way enhanced prompt works. It's really nice because you can edit it, right? You can read through okay This is a little bit expanded and like oh you're gonna assume I mean this let me actually tweak that because I see it and like it's actually not what I want and then like Extraply a little bit more you get to this like a spec right like that's like the spectrum development Or like a spec is supposed to be somewhere further along that spectrum of like let's add more detail into what that would mean in the code But we're not gonna have the fully fledged implementation because that would be the code right Or like that would be hard to read through and you know I can go from 0.5 to 1 and make assumptions like those assumptions along the way Let's like get out the like big decisions and like agree on them before we do the work Um, so like that's kind of how I think about The way we work with these language models is like we say a little bit and then they they basically flesh it out for us and turn into code This episode's brought to you by our friends at Nordlayer Here's a weird asymmetry in the security world The tools that protect the fortune 500s the big guys the ones that actually stop ransomware before it encrypts everything They aren't available to most companies that need the most you me small businesses midsize teams startups They get breached constantly we see this every single day in our new cycles and the reason usually isn't there Careless is that the enterprise grade stack assumed that you had a dedicated security team to run it Most small businesses medium businesses startups They just don't have this Nordlayer is closing that gap. It's a network security plan from that combines vpn Access control and threat protection into one place built on zero trust deployable in under 10 minutes No hardware no code alone rollout and friends This is affordable plans for just eight bucks a month enterprise grade security minus the enterprise size team needed to run it You have to 22% off Nordlayer yearly plans plus an extra 10% off with the coupon code change log hyphen 10 hyphen Nordlayer Yes, the code is change log dash 10 dash Nordlayer or hyphen whichever you choose Traverse free with a 14 day money bag guarantee check it out at nordlayer.com slash the change log and we use our link as you know You're supporting our show.

We appreciate that once again Nordlayer.com slash the change log My audience knows this uh love augment. Uh, I use Augie on the daily Augie is my one shot tool I love I love just give Augie something just to turn on for a while Like I'll do a lot of thinking with with cloud with codecs I'm I'm no fan of just one particular like any developer really should use Everything they can actually afford and get their hands on um Now even just let me mention you mentioned Uh, how did you describe you said token? I don't think it's a token efficiency, but uh, where you want it to be? Would you say?

Uh, you remember before like people are differently token sensitive token sensitive I like that phrase a lot. I feel like that needs to be you know a phrase in our world because There are some that are more token sensitive. I'm like, hey, listen When we're in when we're working straight away, you're telling this agent what to do We're gonna use codex or gpt 5.3 codex like on high We don't care like I want the best code we can I have plenty of usage space So don't you know take me down to a lesser model and I don't care about speed I just you know, I'm it's working in the background So I'm not trying to get there in two minutes when five minutes is better or whatever the might case might be so being too Consensitive. I think is really uh an interesting place to be And I'm just sort of like you know what I I have access I'm gonna use access and maybe somebody is a little less a little less like that I'm trying to figure out where I was trying to go with that kind of sidetrack myself getting on token sensitivity there But you're talking about like an enhanced prompt and how much I like my one shot Yeah, thank you for bringing me back.

I really appreciate that So big fan of logging now. This is the feature I've never used though I've never used this this prompt enhance and someone have to try it and I guess my challenge there is that when I When we Put our little pros into the text box the CLI the web app I think codex now has a a an app version which felt so non-hacker so I'd go back to terminal even though they gave me two x usage I'm like, no, no, no, I'm going back to where I feel hacker. Okay. I see a lys just where it's supposed to be Don't take us away from that.

I guess maybe intended that too. So sorry about that Exactly. Maybe you have some thoughts on that from there. I feel like hacker is the way I don't take me too far away from I feel at home in the terminal, you know, it's about feeling feeling good But here I am in the terminal and it just you know, I have no affinity like which model I'm using or which platform I'm using But I've never used uh this this enhancement because I feel like at least for me and why I haven't leveraged it Is because part of it is this dance part of it is this trust the model and I'm not just trying to get to software I'm trying to get to reasoning for myself not just for it even though I say hey what suggestions you have do it That whole mantra back up I'm gonna do a go despite saying that I still want to learn along the way And so part of that learning is is my chocolatite pros into it that comes out to their end with clarity And it's that back and forth that I feel like it's like a potter and clay and it's like the It doesn't turn into the bowl right away or this beautiful thing like for example here This my coffee cup is it's a unsami.

It's japanese like this is japanese claver here. Amelia It's just a typical coffee cup But somebody made this with their hand and it's amazing. I love that To get to that You have to feel the bumps you have to feel all the pressure And so I haven't wanted to enhance my prompts because I feel like nothing I'm against it But me sort of feeling the pace feeling the the pressure the back pressure of my dumb idea turn into good idea to To understand that's a good idea to understand a new paradigm to a different way of thinking about it Maybe introducing bun versus go or svelte with It's felt kit versus something else versus a tan stack star like my gosh the wars out there Right, you know like the wars are men's but I feel like that's where I'm personally learning and maybe that's a today problem Which I think is really important to mention right this is 2026 and this is how I feel today This is the problem of today. Maybe in six months now.

I won't care so much because the agent is just so smart I should just forget trying to understand. I don't know. What do you think? I have a lot of thoughts there and I'm trying to think of like what would actually be most interesting like I feel like as developers we're kind of having an identity crisis where like Are we potters and are we supposed to be opening like a pottery factory?

And like that's you know like there's Two main joys that I feel with being a developer and one is like the craft of the code and learning the tools and knowing what are the bricks that you can build your buildings with And the other is just like building things and like thinking of something and then it exists right and I think the way you might feel about this new wave of tools lies along those lines of like Which is the greater joy for you and what do you find the most meaning from? And I've always been like which is why I've moved more and more towards design You know like I started as a developer and now recently I've had more and more design roles Is that it's just so interesting to be able to imagine something and and then it like comes to life Yeah, like that is amazing to me And like a lot of these are things that did not exist before you know like whether they're good or bad This is the first time that they exist and there's something like really amazing in that and um A lot of I feel like Your your main motivations and what you find the meaning in it informs the way you use these tools That's true And I do think it's important to still feel the clay right like you still want to be in touch with the physics of what it is that You're working on and you want to Feel in charge and in control and not like like I think about um art right and like how generative art is changing And like people are kind of having to think about like what is art and like what do we find meaningful and like um if I type a prompt into a box And something comes out and it's like the Mona Lisa right which honestly I think is overrated but it's a good example It like how does that change how I value the the the thing that came out of the box and like can we have workflows where Um, the thing that we think is meaningful which is usually like effort and thought and like the humanness that goes into it Um, can we leverage gen gen AI to make tools for which people to like make a thing and then like really sculpt it and craft it and like put intention and effort and human Uh feelings behind it. Um So that it's not just like type prompt into box and it's fit something out But it's not the usual like paint that we work with as painters right and I feel like this applies to code too where like How do we how do we leverage AI to actually like a tool and not like just an automation of what it is that we do as developers? Um And I think that's like a little bit for me what you're getting at of life very much.

Yeah, like what do we want out of this really? Yeah, it's like it's like uh trying to build a house and you're framing instead of having one framer with one nail gun you have Infinite in a sense or unlimited nails or just something that that's what speeds it up It's it speeds up the idea of thought, you know, you'd mentioned Um as a designer. I feel like I'm a software designer now. I'm not a software developer in a way.

Yeah Uh, I'm designing it rather than developing it but it's kind of a both but it's more designed in development And I think you're a spot on with the identity crisis. I think a lot of people even listen to this to try somebody Uh, not listening now because I got upset midway, you know, maybe you're mentioned more numbers potentially Uh, maybe it's a nice amount But I think we're all having this identity crisis to what are we really trying to do here? And I I think you're right too. It depends on your motivation and how you leverage the tool.

I think the way I look at Um, what AI is today For developers and how I'm using it is very much like a tool not a create this thing for me It's helped me create this thing help use your infinite knowledge So I so I can connect my own dots, you know, my own problem is why I keep inventing new software Um, my wife is I think she might be on the edge of being not cool with it anymore We'll see because I will often say to her in the morning or in the eating we go to bed Bay by invented something new today and this is a very common occurrence like I mentioned gauntlet and then there's agent flow and then there's Bk t a lot of these things are acronyms for some reason. That sounds like that. Why you naming all these things, uh, acronyms Uh, it's not really intentional. I guess they're not really acronyms, but um agent flows and acronym.

It's full full phrase So get off my back, but although the command for agent flow is af I mean a million how cool is af right as a command? I think you went at naming things. Yeah, thank you It's not the millennial version of af. It's just kind of cool.

Either way, it's super short super slim Hey millennial stuff is cool. I'm an older fella. So I'm I think I'm gen Z gen x. I think I'm gen x Are we called correctly?

I forget which gens. There are I just know that I know I feel like I still feel young But I am old so I'm often like in a room with folks. I'm like, yeah, you're kind of like 10 years old with me I'm like sorry about that Just uh, i mean 16 years older than you are maybe even you you uh you underage me. Thank you very much It's very what happens But very much in this identity crisis very much trying to use AI as a tool to help me create and invent and design new things versus simply Magic box give me something, uh, you know everything.

I know nothing. Thank you very much software created product made open source done You know 10 million ARR. You know like that's not I'm not even trying to vibe my way to get there I empathize those trying to get there because the world the world says be richer The world says make more the world says ARR right the world says high high valuation The world says raise 100 million dollars and kudos to those folks there By the way, my granddish congrats on the hunter mill for worker west big fan of michael worker west But they just raised their hunter mill this just yesterday and he's coming on the podcast this Thursday So it'll come to the the actual airwaves here soon But uh, no not against that. That's cool And he started working west before uh the advent of AI and now AI is sort of Reinventing or helping folks reinvent their platforms because well now a million You don't have to support go is your SDK because you're a go shop now.

You can support type script. God bless you Uh Go pick your language that you want to maybe even ruby again who knows because that's the fringe that's the edge case What your thoughts on that is like not just a tool to make more but a tool to sort of sort of flatten Things because rather than just support an interface for my software an api for my software that is only an api in this way Now I can have an ncp server I can have sdk's and I can actually have good sdk's because we can move a little faster and support More of a footprint that the footprint can widen because we have this this new invention tool this new design tool we have I feel like my answer isn't super different than what we've talked about before where it's like now that we can build anything What is it that we built right like it's so tempting to add you know 10 new features to an app Especially with you know you get the 70% really quickly like why don't you just polish that up and ship it out and you know You're done. You know your your app does you know, it's an IDE and it's your notion and it's linear Um, but then you just have this massive app and like why why right like You can only have so much intention behind what you build That it's only it feels like it's becoming Um, the question is what you don't build as opposed to what you do build right like if we if we can virtually eliminate our backlog in a week How does that change what we decide to ship because the answer can't be ship everything. Yeah, because then you know your stuffer it doesn't stand for anything right if it stands for everything so it's been As someone who likes to do scope creep because I like like fully fledged versions of things and like really thinking through You know, what is what is it if it does everything?

Um, it's become like it. It's a new muscle that I have to exercise, right? For sure. Yeah, for sure.

Your choice is your superpower a million Do you uh are you a fan of notion because I think there's some change in the notion world, which is interesting I just saw it something you thought no notion was just docs Everything just changed and so now they're like a version of cloud. I guess in a way where they have notion agents and their sponsor I'm not sure they're sponsoring this podcast and they make it upset, but that's just how it works But I think I'm kind of confused by notion because like I like notion I use notion for what it what it has been Let's just say now what it was what it has been which is a place to organize Teams of folks or one people many and collaborate with external folks on documents or flows statuses It's a version of a document state machine, right? Comments can happen there. You can invite people in there and I think what inhibited my usage of it is just the difficulty it is to manage That kind of workspace anyways, so who does them for throwing agents in there?

Uh or notion AI which I use and I think it's super awesome But now I'm not sure what notion is because if notion is where I go to build agents They don't even belong in notion. What is notion? So it kind of comes this comes this notion or this thought that you had here, which is You know if we have if we have no restraints and we can just put we can just build anything What should we build? I'm paraphrasing what you said and I don't know perfectly my brain and feel free to restate your your phrase But how do you feel about that I suppose where you've got a tool that was sort of known for one thing and now it's Almost reinventing itself to the point where you're like wait now I go to notion for the thing I didn't go to notion for I'm just using them as an example because it's the most clear recent example of a not so much a major reinvention, but a major Major new feature that sort of makes you rethink and they even said in their advertisements on who they are We're not this anymore.

You thought we were just this now. We're 60% not just the 40% you thought were before So we think about that with this massive reinvention and just doing when you should good Yeah, I think it's like this reckoning of how do we use computers? There's there's two analogies that I have in my head one is like the IDE Was invented almost half a century ago, right? And it's very good at working with the primitive of code and you're always working at the code level, right?

You're reading the code you're writing the code you're clicking between files And we like through AI is chat on like on the side and we're like okay These agents are going to write and read the code for you So that's like there's like step one which is like what are the primitives build the UI around the primitives step two is throw AI So it can also use those primitives and then step three feels like kind of like reinvent the tool now that Our role in the system is changing right where We're no longer mainly working with the primitives. We're like moving up a level on the ladder of abstraction and focusing more on like Forcode the meta of like what's the intent? How like what are we building? What are we changing about it?

What exists in the codebase? And it feels like notions kind of going through the same okay We had documents and then we threw AI on the side of those documents and now they're kind of moving to step three which is like Let's work on the meta right like I have this long list of bugs in my app Can you transform that into like a summary or into Some like higher level representation of this so that I can interact with it in like a much higher leverage way And then there's like a next step which I'm super excited about adding to intent which is you can go up another level Which is like if you add AI at a higher level Which I guess is kind of what notion is doing Where like you can talk to an agent about all your workspaces And you can say like hey, what are my last npr's can you make a workspace for each one of these? And then you're like what happened in my workspace? It's last night and the oh like move like nudge along these three tasks right like we've gone another level on the level up on the ladder of abstraction where like We're it's like um moving higher in the air where the things on the ground there's more of them But they're smaller and like they're individually like taking up less Of like our view As far as like our perspective is moving up and up and we can do more and more But we can't use the same representations that we have then and I feel like a lot of software is just going along this this trend of like Okay, like the way we interact with this is changing and how do we design around that and how does that change our identity as software?

Yeah, I like that idea I mean that that's exactly exactly what I want You know as I mentioned before I confide it in you into the rest of the audience that I have a hoarding problem with my software I can't stop inventing new things because I keep finding more problems than I want to solve that I'm like well Why don't you just take a stab at it because what's the worst thing that can happen like we fail to yourself? Like what's the big deal to just do it right? Right and it's the tension between like I want to feel the medium still and I want to do more things Right, so we need interfaces that make it possible to move between those two levels I think about maps a lot right like a map is like an amazing feat of design like google maps Right, we have static maps, but like google maps right like It's like it first of all It's just amazing that we've mapped you know basically everything in the world But like if you think about all of the design decisions that go into Like think of the map of your town at a high level You see all the highways and like what's green and what's not green where the busy areas use them zoom in a little bit You start seeing like smaller streets you zoom in more and you see like paths and you see buildings and you zoom in more You can even go inside a building like it's just like Amazing the like perspective shift that they have to manage in like one interface And like the fact that you can seamlessly zoom in from like inside a building to like a whole town to like a whole country Like it blows my mind and I keep thinking about that. It's like how do we design other things that way now that Qualitative things are a little bit more malleable.

Yeah Yeah, I kind of want to either have own or create A software factory not so I can churn out software Well, because I think and maybe at some point everyone else will truly be a builder because this will just flatten But I think for now, it's the was developers to be software designers whatever we're identity crisis is leading us towards Is that I really want to have a software factory Like I said not because I just want to churn out software I want to have the zoom in I want to have the macro in the micro Because I want I want to have the big picture designer idea. I want to have the intent idea I think the name intent by just spot on I don't know if you were involved in the naming of that But was that your name? Did you name it? That was not me.

I'm good. I Work for the the scrum or whatever you want to call it to sort of think through the the name Yeah, we kicked out around a lot of names. It started out as workspaces Which is very little little. Yeah, you hear it and you're like, okay I kind of get what that is so like we kicked around a bunch of intent Yeah, I still like it, which means a lot.

I think intent is Is a pretty good name for where it's at. I'm not sure because even with my own names. I'm like, uh I don't know, you know, I don't know all the names you've mentioned that have been great. Hey, well.

Thank you I think uh it's fun as a designer as it as someone with intent and good taste I think I have good taste I've learned to trust my taste because I keep solving my own problems And I think there's just agent psychosis thing that I think people have talked about and I'm like, how do you have agent psychosis? Because your ideas are good, but it's not that agent telling me my ideas are good It's me making the thing and using the thing and being like, okay, the idea is good And so I don't feel like I have this agent psychosis Although I am very aware that it is a phenomenon happening to to folks But I do want to zoom in because I want the understanding and reasoning I do want to understand my choice between so here's something I deliberated between recently Which is I like language as a compiled binary. So rust go fun I think it might be more but I'm just not familiar with every language it does And so I largely deliver most of my software and go for those reasons It's just easier to deliver binary Right, so easy. Rust is a harder language to reason about so I like rust I like to use rust when it makes sense, but largely my language of choice for most things Is is go And then I recently was building something with rubies I really want to get back into Ruby and particularly like Ruby on Rails Because Rails does APIs very well and it obviously does web UIs extremely well, right?

It's got models views context it has all that stuff Sorry controller my context But then I was like I got to a certain point with this application where Ruby on Rails could have done it But then I post some challenges to deliver us I won't go into the details but you can't compile a Ruby on Rails app to a binary It's just not possible and I'm not gonna solve that problem yet I don't think I'm gonna solve that problem. Maybe somebody else is trying to So then you have fun and you're like well one can deliver me a TypeScript application Compiled down and because the way it's felt it works and felt works It's just writing it's an abstraction above Play on JavaScript, which I want to write because who wants to do that anymore, right? It's not smart It's like not using agents So I want to just fill it And I want to make some really good for an NUI and just different things in the JavaScript ecosystem And I want to leverage MPM and all the goodies that are there But I can still have a compiled binary, right? I can take a spelt get app inside a button and compile down to one thing And so all that to say is like when I explore my world I want that I want that micro But then I want to zoom out to the macro and say show me the map What's where's the United States?

Where's Earth? And Earth is like all my projects And so I very much as a software designer developer builder at any crisis where everyone would call me or us I want the micro and I want the macro So I applaud you for that work on intent to just give the zoom in and zoom out It's very much important Yeah, this is actually like it's something I've grappled with for a long time It's like how do you represent something at the macro? How do you represent a code base at the macro? And it's a really really hard problem For many reasons One is which like there's no one representation that will satisfy everyone Because we all have different mental maps of a code base And there is no like you either visualize it as like this is the directory structure Because that's the only like pseudo-spatial thing that we have Or like you use the AST to generate a map Or you do something more semantic that's like in my head The structure is like here's the front end, here's the back end, here the API routes So there's just like a lot of there's a huge exploration area as far as like What is a way to visualize?

Code bases and tasks and like monorepos and sets of code bases And like how do you zoom out and what does that look like? And what are the affordances that I want at that level? So it's something that I'm very excited to explore more But has also been virtually unexplored so there's There's a lot we can do in the short term and in the long term I wonder Amelia if we're just code explorers in the end You know if we just become that I just become code explorers I don't know every time I hit a hurdle I want to explore further And then I got to leverage my taste and justification For should I build that or should I pull back? Should I do that?

Should I add this feature? Should I add this feature? So I very much feel the tension that you described here What is the best way to get started with intent? Is it just if you had to give someone an on-ramp Go here do this What would it be?

You build the thing Show off how you're proud Come use it We love feedback It's free Bring your own agent You can use cloud code or codecs or we recommend augments Agent because it's really good at saying grounded Especially in complex code bases Augment code.com slash intent Download it We have a Mac release right now And we've got windows and Linux in the works And just like open it up start tell it what task you want to do And it'll make a spec for you and go from there It's it's been really fun playing with it And it's like it should be a very very smooth fast onboarding Where you just took it up to your existing CLI agent Yeah, I love it I already had all you install it myself And so I was like absolutely already got that I chose or you put a play in I started playing with it Of course I went straight to my micro version of it Which was just me an agent versus the swarm I know we can go right or left Which I think is kind of cool You can blind forget the direction you want to go to there But I was like I'm a couple of here for now Although I do think I want to swarm Or have multiple agents I forget what the terminology was that you use But it was something like swarm or multi-agent or something like that So for any given workspace You can choose the a specialist that you start with And so you either choose the coordinator Which does all this orchestration Or you can just do like one agent That doesn't delegate It just writes a stick for you And then you ask it to Yeah, I'm aware of that before Yeah, that's where I'm at for now I'm still getting comfortable with Trusting the models and trusting the agents to do all my things But I do like the exploration of this world Anything in closing, anything I didn't ask you That we can tell out How can people track you, trace you, follow you, pay attention Which you're putting down Oh, you have a blog Do you still write a lot? Are you, you know, how do you feel about writing? Wait, how should people keep up with you? What's the best way?

I have so many thoughts And yet it's a little time to write them down I do have a blog If you search, if you can spell my last name You can find me on all the things W-A-T-T-E-N-B-E-R-G-E-R dot-com Nailed it, exactly Yep I had a written right here I was on your website Yup, Wattenberger I have a monopolized my family name online Sorry, everybody in my family Well, you know, when you're famous, you're famous, right? I mean, yeah Yes, yep Very famous Well, thank you so much It's been so awesome Going deep with you on this conversation The intent we have is super important And as pacemakers We have to align that with the future we're trying to get to And it's objective too Where we're trying to go And obviously still, but I love the conversation Thank you so much for spending time with me Much appreciate it Thanks so much Adam, this was a lot of fun Well, that's it, this show's done Thank you so much for your patience You all, you know, I know change is challenging I know information and lack of information When change happens It's kind of a bummer And I get that And I will tell you that I want to share everything with you I want to share where I'm at I want to share where I'm going I want to share where the show is going And I want you to rest and ensure that Nothing is changing But kind of everything is changing In a good way This show's gonna get better This show's gonna have more And I'm gonna diversify a bit Load some software Go behind the scenes a bit I've got some plans, but I'm In the middle of re-architecting things So, be patient with me Be patient with the process of this podcast And just know that I have the real few And your best interests At heart Many of you out there, I call my dear friends And I am so thankful for You listening all these years Your loyalty And of course, your friendship While this show today with Amelia was Very cool Talk about agents It's kind of all the rage As you know It's everywhere We can avoid it But this re-platforming The, the prospect that she brings the table Is such a unique perspective In her design skills Her intention On intent The plot Is paramount And so cool And so going back to her journey Talking about intent And what they're doing with it Was so cool for me And I enjoyed it And I enjoyed it too Big thank you to our friends Again over at RBUX Our friends at WorkOS Our friends at Nordlayer And of course, our friends and partners At Fly.io The Beats As always, by a great measure of sounder Those fantastic beats And thank you so much for Listening That's it this show done We'll see you next week