Forking Cal.com to closed source (Interview)

What's up friends, we'll go back this is the change log. What if the majority of open source repos out there are already compromised and we just don't know yet. That is the unsettling theory Pier Richardson co-founder of Katakon brings to this podcast this week. We dig into how AI has flattened the knowledge graph so a 16 year old can vibe hack a power station as easily as their mom can vibe code and I was sapped while the reporting culture that has kept open source safe and secure all these years is collapsing under the AI generated noise, slop, what if you want to call it.

Katakon's moved to fork its own code base and take the sensitive parts private and the eye opening reality that shipping $1 of AI tokens for pennies on dollar that is now a common start business model. Lots going on lots changing a massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io. Your agents they need computers my agents they need computers we host everything we do on fly.io and you should too check them out at fly.io okay let's do this. Friends this episode of brought to you by friends at coder.com secure environments where developers and agents work in parallel and I'm joined by Nicky Pike field CTO forecoder Nicky what is a field CTO?

So I get that question a lot and it's you know half the people understand it half the people don't so field CTO I describe it very simply as we're dev rel for the C-suite so we provide a bridge between the customer voice between the C-suite and the managers and the leadership teams of our customers back into our products and then we go through and we help enable our teams to have the same message to make sure that the message is correct and that we're building on something that people actually want not just something that we think they want. Okay so we're taking the laptop away from the developer not really though we're putting them in a cloud development environment and secure environment where they can work with their agents in parallel these are blessed environments. What's wrong with the laptop? The laptop is the is the trap here and not only because of the fact that it could be stolen you could lose it it breaks and you're out of work while you wait for a new one but there's also just the consistency you got there we all know developers developers are going to be looking for some of the latest and greatest and if you're not really controlling how they get out there that's where you get this it works on my machine it doesn't work on in production it doesn't work anywhere else because you don't have that consistency you don't have that ability to really standardize what that environment looks like and this is a problem not only for new people coming in you know the onboarding statement is it average I think is like four to five weeks for a new employee to really get their their local laptop set up and ready to start doing the first time of code and you know the time to first commit is a metric that almost everybody knows and the reason they can't do that is because there's a lot of tribal knowledge out there they got to go talk to other developers what do we use and where do we get our dependencies are we getting from public are we getting from private repositories but there's also the security and the supply chain aspect of this when you have local machines out there look at like the shy holland you know that virus that went out not long ago this was a compromise of the empty um public repositories they went and downloaded things empty um did what it did next thing you know you're compromised but when you use something like what we're doing with cloud development environments then you can mandate and you can put restrictions on there to say hey you can only go get your packages from our private repo those packages are expected to have been thoroughly vetted we know that they're clean now does this stop everything like shy holland know if that compromise package gets into your private repo you can still have that but it really reduces the surface area of the attack and it also reduces the blast area of the compromise should it happen because if your laptop gets compromised and you have to kill the laptop for whatever reason that's weeks out of work while you're either fixing that or you're getting a new laptop then the cloud development environments allows you to kill that start back up fresh and you're back and running in five minutes you don't have to wait all that time well first step is to go to coder.com install coder self-host environments your teams to enjoy to standardize around and it's open source so you try it out today once again coder.com well friends I'm here with an old friend it's been a while it's a it's been too long here great to my co-founder of one of my favorite companies out there I usually call us how we scheduled this thank you very much for being the backbone of all my scheduling it is about time since we've gotten back on the pod yes the pumas intended thank you so much I think actually our first pod was really about how it was about time where the initial conversation sort of began with this era where cal.com I'm even sure if you had cal.com at the very moment we did that podcast or not but it was we were used to the county when I say we I mean the organization change log and the county has been around for a while but they had changed they weren't working I mean a lot of different stuff which I'm sure you're aware of but one of the things one of the undercurrents the themes of that podcast was it is about time and so you know this very well because you probably live eat and breathe all the things around time being one of the co-founder of cal.com but thank you for coming back on and yes it's about time.

I don't think so much it's been it's been time and we need to make more time I think it was right around the time when we bought cal.com which may or may not be four years ago or three years ago time is a real concept it is so yeah thank you for having me again I'm excited. And I guess like full disclosure I am a very small check investor in Cal very small seat investor through I think your angel is stuff that you had way back and that's how much I believe in it because I was like okay I think even then if I'm recalling correctly because I'm trying to go back on my own memory open source was core to your mission you know you've been open source for a very long time at your commercial product is probably licensed differently which I'm not familiar with exactly which license you chose and how that's laced out. I know things are changing even to this year around open source I'm sure you have thoughts on that so I'm happy to go wherever you want to but yeah big fan of cal.com user daily of cal.com and it's been too long to catch up and I'm sure that this new era of of cal is gonna be different I suppose in this next era of agents where you probably have a lot of folks using agents to act on their behalf to maybe create events manage their availability even book time with someone what is it like in this world that we're in with agents running a muck or maybe not a muck in this area. I think all the cards have been shuffled and nobody knows what's coming next I think I don't think there's a single person who could predict what the outcome is like predicting how a certain stock goes like that person is a liar you know you can never really say what's gonna happen but one thing for sure is that I think a lot of things are happening that we could not predict as easily as before like usually you started sats company have a playbook you know you have you know you get from zero to one million from one to 10 million there's certain pattern matching and playbooks etc I don't think any of that works anymore and even when it comes to how to you know build in public or how to build open source how to build you know the safest software or the fastest growing software like everything has been reshuffled I think about seven months ago we joked that darrios that like in six months from now everybody will be using AI agents to write code I have not written a line of code like in weeks and samples to our anti engineering team it's all code code gen and AI agent assistant and so that prediction was so back seven months ago and everybody was laughing at it and now it's just like it's the technologies here right and so the questions like what else will change in terms of and I can only focus on startups I don't want to touch broader society aspects of like how what's the meaning of jobs and work like I don't want to touch that but like I think for startups like it's a really weird time right now like there's some like time that you could never really predict before and then you start as always a weird journey but now it feels like extra volatile I'd say and and and I think to get to your point to open source and I think open source multiplies that by like a factor of 10 like you're basically drinking from the fire holes because you know when you're when you have a private source a closed source business you're the only one committing to it there's no such thing as a public repository where people can like look inside and contribute etc etc for all those businesses and I strictly focus on commercial open source you just have so much noise and like back in the days it was like if somebody opens a request you would immediately know okay it's black and white either it's a well thought out whole request and you can with tests and everything and well you know thought out structure or it's whack and if it's whack you close it and it's like anyone can look at it and be like okay yeah this is worth closing that one's worth reviewing and then you know you you build on top of that and you engage with the author nowadays everything looks the same like you get a pull request and it's always written by by cloud by clock code or by maybe codecs or maybe if you're lucky by some other coding assistant right but it's like back in the days you had a thousand open source contributors and you would have a thousand opinions right and one person would do something and then the other person would like reject that idea and now you just have a thousand people using two different coding assistants right it's like this whole notion of like the best idea wins it's like the best large language model wins but you only have or maybe the best prompt given to that large language model wins because there's still some variation among prompts right but like um it's really really hard to distill what should be merged into the project and whatnot um and then what's even worse is that like the confidence of that pull request is so high because the large language model is like here's the best thing delivered to you on a golden plane and then you stop the peel peel off the layers of the audience and you're like wow even these tests are like hallucinated like that does make sense like it looks so real right like it's wow this is like the best thing ever and then you start to run and you're like wait why is that thing hard coded like what you know like so many question marks and it's like you're like why am i even reviewing this and so imagine being a commercial converse company um there's so many tweets out there we don't even need to reference one there's so many just search for like open source and then like shutting down external pull requests and having this like vouch system where only like really calls people who went through like multiple rounds of interviews are able to commit to the repository because it's just so much AI slop like literally AI coded slop being thrown at your repository so that's probably number one that's what i'm saying like drinking from the fire was imagine you have one cracked engineer on clock code like spamming your private repository okay now i have a hundred of those who just and some of these pull requests are literally just like hey Claude can you fix this get up issue for me and then they open a pull request and i'm like okay but like bangs but i could have done that you know like where's your uh well added knowledge come you know this is no no added knowledge and you're just essentially adding more slop to the code base so it's really hard um that's probably number one i'm happy to go over many more problems now i was talking to a friend of mine uh friend of mine Adam Jacob did you know Adam Jacob any chance to see a name you know Adam Jacob he's famous or being the founder of chef and maybe infamously being the founder chef he was here he probably laughed at this moment but he uh created a company called system initiative and they had begun to rethink ci or not sorry not ci but they began to rethink infrastructure it was very visual very innovative but they focus on the visual layer and this is pre-a.i and obviously not things will play that and so they've sort of failed product market fit but a lot of the ideas were still really good and they parlayed a lot of that good stuff into what's now called swamp.club and they are uh AGPL V3 open source but very specifically they are open source but not open to contributions they do each based contributions now is this is this where you're thinking like hey you can file an issue you can file a bug you can file your your concerns but we'll never accept a pull request ever that's fine i mean i i think so here's my here's my current issue with everything open source we we're clearly training AI that's okay i mean that's collected AI companies are already giving open source companies tons of free tokens which is you know great like i have a free max i have a free codecs i'm very grateful for that i understand that we are producing the code that they are training the next launch language modern on and that's i think it's fine i mean it's still violating the license i guess but um but i think the problem is um that when entire open source repository as it is right now gets overwhelmed with slop it just destroys cold quality i mean look it's still our job to as maintain us to review and and approve and merge and change pull requests so it's still our job to to make sure the quality is high but it's just so much more work now to differentiate between bad PR and good PR that it's simply not possible like humanly possible and i know peter from open call said he's not reading his own uh diffs anymore like his own cloud or codecs um PRs i don't think necessarily that that's the solution that we just like close our eyes and hope for the best and then like have tests etc because um this is this graphic what that was like the moment you introduced slop to your code base now the coding agent looks at your existing project and then it adopts bad practices and you know it's kind of like a recursive loop of pool right like it just gets worse over time same thing happens with with large language models right the worst quality of an open source repository the worst AI will be in the future learning from that bad code right and so um that's another issue i have the open source where if you cannot get the resources in place to actually have really really high quality and and be remind that means you need to end up hiring really like i see five i see seven level people who know what they're doing because you hire a generic i see one i see two i see three chances are they will be using cloud code and they they incentivize to use cloud code because that's just how the whole industry works today and that's okay i'm not saying that's bad but like you still need these like sorry to say this like study computer scientists who know what oh and it's and i'm on the don't and uh so yeah um i it's not it's not a great outlook if slop gets multiplied you know um so i think the whole training aspect and the you know code and public aspect is really really the coming issue yeah as you're speaking about uh your concerns and challenges i'm looking at cal.com's open source repository cal.com slash cal.com and i'm on the pull requests tab and you can probably see there's just an immense i mean more than you would probably ever want to or be able to no there's no chance there's no chance we'll get to the bottom of this it's just so it's um well and it's also hits the community right like people expect to get the same level of treatment for like a one line hey claw please fix issue 115 then someone who is investing deep knowledge and and time and resources into making something better that they feel deserves to be merged so it's like it's almost like um how would you describe this best like the best way it's like it's like mass propaganda where you where you just pull so much misinformation that it's just impossible to know what's the truth and what's not because you're just drowning in the sea of everything's fake and then the reality just gets murky right and the same request like you just don't know what's good anymore when everything looks equally good and then there's like a stellar PR and then the rest is just uh two line prompts from claw you know so it's like it's really tough like it's it's i don't envy any i don't even envy framing open source maintainers who back in the days would be happy you would be happy for every pull request that would come in you would be like so which is one thing something i can change it yeah let's do it when when we first had a conversation we probably had 20 open pull requests and then when you had like suddenly you had five more you'd be like whoa where did they come from and and you would like reach out to these people be like and we'd be like oh my god thank you so much for you know contributing in the system in the blast etc etc so it's like yeah it's um and it's and it pains me because also there's um this is another problem that people are facing that they think they are more likely to get hired if they can show open source contributions so now they the entire part line is let me find the top 10 repositories let me orchestrate 12 different agents and they're all trying to find different issues like basically the claw instruction is find the most uploaded issue and then submit a PR in these five it's almost like you're spamming your your CV which is also really terrible strategy by the way into like hundreds of companies and trying to hope one of them sticks and then your aiation comes back with like oh i've opened 20 different pull requests and these and these different repositories does that make you more likely to get hired i don't know so it's weird it's a really weird time i'm i'm not saying there's a this is it's weird i it's weird we're really struggling we're really starting yeah well i mean so let me i didn't say the numbers so you've got 358 pull requests yes no sorry 356 yes um and that's still a lot even 358 is i mean it's two more it's a lot of pull requests difference between 356 and 358 but that's a that's a dramatic amount of four requests if that were my pull requests inbox i would just say inbox zero it and just cancel it right i mean look it yeah or or just literally cancel the PR tab altogether which i think is kind of what was mentioned before adam jake his flossy was swamped in club and that is the or else swamp dot club it's the coolest thing ever you guys check it out um they're just like forget it we're not gonna do it you know and they're i don't think their their problem was the amount of pull requests or even the pull request that would be or likely be a slop it was more like we know we're building we don't we want to build or happy to take your ideas we just don't want your code we want code that we would write that matches our style of code that our engineers uh can curate whether it's with an agent or not it's it matches our style it matches our lingo it goes at our pace it fixes our problems that we think are worth fixing we're happy to hear ideas we want to use swamp but it's issue-based co-contributions and you'll give us the problem or the challenge or the solution in in pros and they may even bring that into context and they may even write a promise and they may even write the initial prompt that style is the journey i agree so um it's there are clearly um there's multiple reasons and benefits to be open source right like some things simply have to be open source react js has to be open source javascript has to be open source python has to be open source just to run the thing calico necessarily doesn't have to go open source right so we've been open source for many different reasons but but to in order to run it that's not what we open source right we're not a javascript framework we're not a ui library so for us the the the the pitch and the idea was always like build in public build trust build them and then another thing build a most secure code base because i would say up until january 26 i would say open source is always more secure than closed source like i would stand by that statement and that's the problem today i no longer think that right so like the pendulum has swung you know this is like very safe open source because bear mind when you open source you had security researchers making really good pry's fixing the holes fixing vulnerabilities reporting vulnerabilities that was a reporting culture the reporting culture no longer exists 99 percent of the reportings we get are i generated like we have an inbox security calico that people send vulnerabilities and 99 percent of them are i generated like including that email that sends it because people are spamming repositories and and half of those vulnerabilities also hallucinated like they just simply don't exist um you reproduce it and it's not there or it it got something wrong and it's using the wrong API endpoint and so the culture of like open source makes you more secure because you have actual human beings who know what they're doing checking your code base has kind of formed behind and then at the same time so that's gone and then at the same time the autonomous attack attacking tools have gotten so good that the amount of knowledge needed to attack a repository is basically can you run a shell command your terminal right so like we went from pen testing requires crazy amounts of tooling and knowledge and reverse engineering of apis and and and man in the middle attacks and yada yada like so much work had to go in into basically finding and abusing vulnerability let's say you're a black hacker right let's say you are a legal person you want to extort people it was really hard you had to be really good these are really smart people who would execute those attacks nowadays maybe not with cloud because of all the security features but there are large-language models out there that are so good at pen testing and well cloud security to be honest um their product that um it's really easy to find dormant vulnerabilities like Firefox at like 12 p0 vulnerabilities reported by AI react react have vulnerabilities found by AI next JS had its own fair shares of vulnerabilities reported by AI so it's like we're really in trouble because i'm not saying our engineering team is flawless from pre-ai like obviously this is not a AI versus pre-ai code but the amount of money resources and talent to find and abuse vulnerabilities has like a hundred x in terms of ease of use right and so you're getting basically evil people at single prompt in their terminal to find an abuse open source repositories so the whole pendulum of like oh we open source remote secure has completely swung in the other direction like wow this is so easy to hack any open source repository my theory is that the majority of open source repositories are compromised right now we just don't know yet thank you for says to a five bucks a five for says 12 p0 vulnerabilities like what do you think your open source repositories looking like hello yeah that's funny it's not it's really great so yeah we just had that um you know one of the more recent ones was light lm it was compromised by splatching attack yes i mean that was even more unique one was malicious in how it executed but how they got there really interesting you know the social engineering behind it we're just getting the keys and stuff like that and using the the blessed pipeline to get the thing in the pipy you know that was really interesting we're seeing that more and more and more because there's always been holes right i know two times a two there's there's always been holes it's not you know then versus not kind of thing no it's that now the holes execution they are so much more efficient yeah right well the tool is now more evenly distributed so the knowledge graph has kind of come down to every human being that is in some sort of first world scenario that can afford 20 bucks a month maybe even the free version of it that's the same access the same tool that the world's greatest engineers at some of the biggest companies are using right they're we're all using a version of the similar and same tool and so the knowledge graph has kind of flattened dramatically and you're right the bad actors now have the same thing and not only do they have the same thing it's a faster tool than you've ever been able to script before we've always been able to script batch has always been there and sure it's always been fast on a given cpu but now the ability to write it and infiltrate into just pentest security security security researchers call this bite hacking because you're no longer knowing what you're doing like you're literally just instructing the agent the same way you have by coding and now like everyone's everyone's neighbor is by coding their iOS apps which by the way is great like democratizing access to technology big fun but like what happens when the same like when the mother is by coding an iOS app and then the 16 year old son is by packing the power station nearby right like that's not great so yeah is exactly like the the the access to technology also means that like malicious hackers have like they are so happy about all of this right they it's like a birthday present like what do you what do you mean i don't i no longer need to you know to spend 16 hours studying the code pace i can just have an ai find all the holes for me that's awesome here's my bitcoin address painting money otherwise i publish your data on the dark web like you who yay that's great and even that is probably fully autonomously executed including sending the email and opening the wallet and checking whether the funds got received and um yes this is a great it's a great situation around here it's a great you seem very uh grim and not very excited about the future of open source would you would you agree with that right i think i would i would probably summarize this like if you run a commercial open source business you have a huge target on your hat because you are a business and a business means you have customers and the customers meaning you have sensitive data and you can potentially be distorted um if you run an open source free github project even if you run open cloud like open cloud does not have an enterprise edition that they sell to fortune 500 that runs on the same code base even if they had to they would probably not publish it on the same github people so it's like if you run a ui framework a library that i don't know helps you work with time zones like you're fine like stay open source um well unless you find you you accidentally import an npm package that completely compromises a project which will happen so that's another one to talk about obviously but like but any business today that has an open source um let's call it this way any open source project that's eventually makes a database call you are in trouble and i'm saying this after five years of being open source and 15 years in the industry you should probably take your project private and rewrite everything that touches off database and encryption which is what we're doing now as calicorn like this has been um a big change we've been doing this under the hood for quite some time but basically starting 15th of april we're taking the commercial version private so we still have a community version fully open source you can use it at your own risk you can self-host it you can run it on your own infrastructure ideally behind many firewalls but um the same code base that runs on apple cloud com will no longer be publicly accessible because it's just too risky for us like we have we have a commitment to open source but we also have a commitment to every single of our customers and given this like pendant on spring we just that the risk reward ratio just really sucks yeah is this um is that the change and i understand what the change is predicated on but is it because the visibility into the flaws are more visible now because the tool is better and faster is that the kind of the one kind of core reasons to change so the security researchers we spoke to right we have a couple of those and obviously there's also the good people helping you with providing tools to find vulnerabilities before the black hackers but everybody says if you have an open source report you're like five to ten times easier to to hack than the closed source repository right so think about five to ten times it's not like 10-15 percent it's like five to ten times that's a big delta and so the reason it's so much easier is it's called black box hacking like you basically need to guess and reverse engineer like you call an API endpoint we try to guess them at like what does it do how could i attack this with open source you literally see the back end you see the function call you see is this an ideal or is whatever is there something else that i can like you know is there a way i can inject the script or whatever and again pre-ai you would need to spend eight 16 20 hours to research and study every single function call and find these things you know manually and that's what what good security researchers would do and they would get a bounty for and that's what black hackers would do and typically speaking sorry say this the smart ethical hackers are faster and better than the script keys which is one extortu something coin that's just facts that's always been facts right like an honorable security researcher who's a white hacker who gives you bounties is always more intelligent than some dumbass city and some random kitchen hacking or software right that's just always facts but now again with AI it doesn't matter because both are just putting the same prompt find a vulnerability and listen to that repository and run the same prompt and guess what the black hat hackers usually fast because they have an incentive right they have an immediate extortion links incentive to hack and blackmail that's a big problem right so yeah i would be really cautious if you have a repository that has a database that has customers to run that out in public and that doesn't mean you should um you should like close your open source we're not shutting down our repository i mean hack it's an amazing piece of software that we've published but it just means that you need to internally fork your existing code and just make sure that you just rewrite every single function call that it's vulnerable like that is you know hackable you know don't care about some random front and library that that's fine like a drag and drop component keep that but like the way you do all the way you do database calls the way you even rewrite your your entire middle layer and the christmas calls everything like probably like start today or start yesterday and take all of that private it's just not worth the risk until that whole pendulum swings back into security which you know could happen could also not happen it's just it's yeah we don't know we really know well friends i'm here with the CTO of build kite and one of the most challenging problems of modern aerosol development is continuous integration and continuous delivery and so lachlan d'onald build kite CTO what are you thinking about today's teams the challenge they face the speeds at which they're developing new features new code it is just overwhelming how do you all think about that such a good question is the question everyone's asking right now all of our big customers are asking us at the minute like you know if we five or ten x our three put this year or a thousand exit what breaks and when and you know my answer is kind of same as it's been for the past 20 years which is the bottleneck is still trying to integrate those code changes in and then deploy them and check they work and then keep them working as you keep throwing more and more code at it i think a lot of the fundamentals are the same but we're just a thousand xing the speed of it and you know that changes nearly every variable yeah for sure okay so where where does build kite thrive what particular tip of team or enterprise do you thrive in the area that build kite has always thrived in is is like this like fastest moving tech companies of the world so like we've been disproportionately successful in that small niche they're kind of Shopify class uber class you know open AI class of um fakes that have this key problem around iterating really really fast then you know the thing about all those fakes is they all have subtly different needs subtly different problems and so we've tended historically towards building like really well engineered like a blocks that scale like orders of magnitude more than what our nearest competitor does so you know i think that puts our system in this tension where you know you've got a expensive time assembling those building blocks that those like blocks to get the thing that you want but the end result is far and away more performant and scalable and the experience is better than what you get from something that's off the shelf so i think we've started from a position of really well engineered like a blocks and then are kind of working backwards towards kind of creating the thing that scales down to a startup that starts with one person and ten agents next week my friends go to build kite dot com that's build kite.com you deserve better ci engineer for the frontier we are all facing trusted by the teams setting the pace again build kite dot com once again build kite dot com so the way you're if i understand correctly just said that the mechanics of how you're making this change the change we understand what the change is influenced by but then on the how you're saying to internally fork in your case your commercial open source company and so you've had all of your code out there your open source has been licensed one way but if you go a certain way there's certain features that were always available open and open source source available that you can see you're saying that you're changing that so that all that code base will remain there the license of free and open source will remain the same but internally your mechanism is to fork it and rewrite the areas the surface areas that are at risk or at most risk yeah correct and we also obviously point the production in the url to the private repository right so like right because you know what you see on github today is what we've run on the website that's just how open source works right that was the whole point like you see the code that runs my service that was the whole spiel so that spiel is no longer safe enough to be valuable for your customers like it's it's an unnecessary attack vector so that doesn't mean we're no longer open source we are still open source it's just that we have an internal fork the same way other many companies like webpress.com is an internal fork of webpress.org and it's still webpress uses the same plugin system but if you sign into webpress.com today it's a different experience than if you get the open source webpress so they kind of like did that change well probably more from a commercial point of view not from a security point of view but i think they internally most definitely have different things in their all system than what's out there which i don't blame them but the the narrative of like one code base for everyone you know self-hosted and production environment just no longer makes sense it's just it's it's from a security point of view it's it went from wow this is safe because webinsource 2 is that really the smartest safest decision you should make as a business that has customers and that you want to keep them safe you know yeah i guess the question might be why even remain open source at all and i don't mean that as like aint open source i mean more from a chore standpoint so if you've got a fork your own code base and now you don't want your vulnerabilities out there so that means there's a buffer layer between what is open source and what is closed source i.e the fork that you have internally the chore it must be to keep those two code bases and even remotely in sync and not have you know developer gymnastics playing around like what's the point of open source then for a commercial open source company that was you know has been in your shoes but you're not making this change i mean it is it's it's a really it's a really terrible situation you know it's like you know it's this is big poison i would argue the reason to keep an open source project and by the way we're also rebranding it to cal.diy we got that to me so like do it yourself essentially like it's it's a whole it's there's gonna be big red letters like use at your own risk not production ready like you can self-host this for your whatever hobby or maybe small business um i think the benefit is if people end up self-hosting a quote unquote community edition it's they are not gonna be the one being hacked right like it's us it's the largest company that gets the attack the one with the most money the month the most reputation your neighbor barber who self-host cal.diy like a you need to find that server be you need to know exactly who you're targeting who you're like it's it's kind of like security by distribution right like when you're self-hosting you're not going to be the target unless it's like a very easy to attack multiple multiple nodes in a way like if it's if every node runs the same software then you do like this like mass attack but it's just not commercially viable for hackers to hack your neighbor's barber shop so theoretically speaking yes the cal.diy version will have the code base off today right the potentially we don't even know if it's insecure we just know it's out there but let's say it's slightly less secure than the private fork sure but it gains its security by being just so irrelevant in terms of distribution right like five people here ten people there five people here one person there so you're kind of gaining that security back by just being more like less of a target you know less of a target in your back and then at the same time we can always obviously and i'm only strictly strictly talking about like auth and database and and middle layer etc like if the community builds great features we can we can adopt them and credit them if we build sick features which we do we push them back into the open source community edition so i hope to keep that relationship stronger so my website has been doing it for many years so it's not like a unique idea like we've always had private and public folks of open source projects docker has its own enterprise edition that's private source but like i think and if i'm being honest with you all of these forks have been for commercial reasons some investor has pushed you some IPO some bank look that you'll be like we need some proprietary code because of whatsoever that looks better in in our brochure but trust me with my fullest heart this is not a commercial like we are we are growing like seven to twelve percent month over month we are not in any way short on cash we have no investors who are bullying us to go private source we have the most open source friendly investors on our cap table we had to convince them this is the right decision this is like a a like nuclear problem for commercial source you know and so it's um i wish it was a commercial decision because then i can like say okay this is only affecting us but this is this is affecting the entire industry this is like a yeah like uh the quantum computing cracks encryption type of level you know yeah the quantum what they call that uh quantum safe or quantum ready in terms of security and but not exactly i mean that's that's really the same thing too but what other examples can you give i know that you kind of give a couple but what are some explicit examples of other commercial open source companies that think like you do or have the same problems you do and can you enumerate their challenge in the public that's being showcased well i can i have many conversations you know that i really cannot make public because of security and like it's just the risk inherent risk and what's on x what do you see on x what would you really i mean i can definitely talk about public situations right like this um and i also don't want to throw anyone under the bus but there's you know there's um there's tooling around logging right like lock systems that um lock user activity those products are usually open source because it's it's a developer packaging to like you need to import the SDK so those have been hacked by AI which is really bad because now that attacker has access to all your users actions that makes sense like the events that they send for them they are really screwed because they they have to be open source for the sake of being a developer kit right um so i would say that's two companies that are directly affected and i know um there is a CMS which is open source which is really struggling because when you're a CMS um you simply cannot expose your internal systems to the world i mean just think about how much knowledge is locked up in a CMS and all the risk of of um somebody i don't know like if you get right access to someone CMS and you're publishing something on nike.com you know like that's just not great um so uh there's a lot of commercial open source businesses out there that um that have to be open source in order to to run um in that regard we're almost somewhat lucky that we don't depend as much as others to be self-hostable again 99% of our revenue comes from our SaaS you know after calicom it's not like um we sell a code snippet that people inject in their business so yeah it's um and then um there's a couple of payment providers that that like call themselves the open source version of Stripe obviously anything that touches payments is hyper critical you know that's that's always tricky um i don't even want to talk about crypto because i really don't like crypto but all of these crypto projects are being cracked open that open source um it's it's it's a wild rest out there and so you're you're if you are a doctor doctor peer yeah uh your your prescription for these commercial open source companies in these high impact areas is to rethink their model and follow you in terms of forking internally creating a new relationship with your open source version if you even keep it in your case you're keeping it you know cal.doy or diy with the super cool had a little case of uh of dyslexia there from a moment there but uh unless cal.doy.

does it again diy yeah what do you do yeah well do yourself come on Adam well on the bright side on the bright side on the bright side yeah on the bright side and maybe on the that side like what's open source stays open source right like we we're not disappearing tomorrow. And they're not recording this yeah like they're more like cleaning the rock and making okay when you're vacuuming we're vacuuming the rock and closing the door to access it you can look at it it's beautiful it's a beautiful rock but you can no longer step on it um no because like look there's like so many folks other color comes up going anywhere, like we can legally not, not we can physically not get rid of the code. What we can do is move forward gracefully and make sure that the most vulnerable pieces of any piece of software is not public. I think that's a very fair statement to say because back in the days you would have those public because it's just really hard to hack them.

Now it's easy to hack, thereby I need to take these things private. And by the way, having private code is not protected from being hacked. I don't, nobody thinks that that's the role of the solution. But if a security researcher, or if many security researchers say it's five to ten times easier to hack you on your open source, you have to listen to the security experts.

If you don't listen to them, you're literally, well, probably you could use that as a way to even go to jail if you get hacked. I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, but like if you ignore multiple warnings from experts, you should probably rethink why you're in the coupon of the business. So my recommendation, my medicine is first don't freak out.

There's a high chance you're not compromised. Most likely you run a really small project, you're not a big target. Second is to run many of these AI scanning tools and to see what the blast radius is today. Most likely it is quite high.

Every single project I talked to was experiencing an uptick of reports by these AI tools when I 10th hold. It's just messy. It's really bad. Turns out humans are really bad at coding for many years, including everything before AI.

So chances are you just have vulnerabilities. That's just a fact. And then my recommendation would be to at least temporarily go private and work on all these vulnerabilities because here's another problem. And this really, right?

When there's a hacker who actually wants to compromise your project, they are also running code scans against your own pull requests. So they today, probably if let's say you really want to screw someone, you would run code scans against their own pull requests. And if you detect a pull request that fixes a previously known vulnerability that you potentially found already, or maybe not, right? Like an AI can understand whether a pull request is a feature or a fix of a vulnerability, right?

Like you give an AI just random code and ask it like, what is this PR about? And it will tell you this is fixing the vulnerability. So they're using that. I mean, whatever is technically possible will happen, right?

I'm not making this up. I don't know what personally any hackers, but that's what I would do if I was evil. You would scan the PR, you would identify this PR is fixing the vulnerability. And in that second, I would have used the vulnerability and sent them an extortion level, right?

That's just a scary part, right? That's not a real thing, right? That's not a real thing. I should not become a Marvel evil, Marvel super villain.

But anyway, again, everything that's technically possible is out there in this happening. So I'm not giving you the play book. That's literally what's probably discussed in these dark web forums. And so your best shot today is to take the repo private, fix all of these things in private, and then merge it back into one chunk.

That's just your best life. It's quite like commit. Don't give them a path to change. Don't feed the machine.

Don't feed the machine. Don't feed the machine that's going to explore you for Bitcoin. Well, if I don't know, you were talking about this when you came on this podcast, I'm probably not going to tell you. You got me down over here, man.

I mean, this is good stuff. I think this is this is truthful. I mean, this is where my head's been at as well. And you're bringing some new light to some things with me.

I want to go back to if you don't mind, not so much to fully backdrop. I want to go back to your pull request tab and not specifically just yours, but the pull request tab. And the reason why I mean, so you're saying what you're saying about commercial plus-source companies. I don't think open source is dying.

I do think pull requests may be changing and are becoming not irrelevant, but just fraught with a lot of slop that people don't want to deal with. So even projects like Ghosty, they're not taking on pull requests like they were before. A lot of folks that, you know, like Ghosty is a great terminal. And for a lot of reasons, it needs to be in wants to be open source for the true nature of what open source is, but they're being open source, not open to contribution.

So I want to, I want to pose this thought experiment here. How does this change GitHub? Is GitHub a jeopardy anyway, as a business, maybe not because a lot of the commercial features are on top of things that aren't there. But like, if a lot of us are on GitHub, because that's where open source is.

And if the relationship we have with open source changes, or open source changes enough, you know, is GitHub in a risky scenario? Because I mean, they're banking almost everything on Co-Pilot. I mean, that's a large majority of their other infrastructure, even NPM. I know they have some change coming out, another talk to whoever's working at GitHub behind the scenes or in front of the scenes.

If there is any on NPM, I'm not saying any negative about those folks at all. I just know that there's neglect. There's neglect there around NPM. So even one of the things that is the largest package manager and registry known to man on planet Earth is NPM.

It's so important. I mean, that's what the actual packages happened. And we know how that went down, right? You know, what is the picture of GitHub if all this changes?

We have thoughts on that? Well, I mean, it's not it's not it's not bright for commercial open source. I can tell you that. So like, if you obviously run packages, etc, free mobile source, you're probably more okay, sure you build a new React alternative or self kit, whatever, tell when alternatives.

But GitHub obviously has to rethink its own, like, I wouldn't call it economic model, but like place in the world with AI where, and this is I would even say there's those beyond security. It's like, look, if somebody like Peter doesn't read its own diffs and the neighbor who vip codes its iOS app, do people really care about the source code? Do you want to see the source code? Like, there are probably already projects out there where the community has looked at more of your code than you yourself who published that repository, right?

Simply, I mean, yeah, totally. I mean, that that's going to happen, right? Where the maintainers have seen less of the code base than the community combined. Usually it's like the maintainer who writes the code knows the code, but now it's like, I can prompt any project and publish it on GitHub and then chances lie, I barely scratched the surface of the code that I've published, right?

It's like, as long as it works and it looks good, why would I read the code, you know, and it's safe, safe. So obviously, distributing code almost feels like distributing binary at some point and GitHub wouldn't work if people just publish their binaries, you know, it works, but like, we've got to read that or like you just put the byte code, the assembly code, whatever, the binary code up there, you know, 00101001, that's great. Cool. So if source code, as sad as it sounds, really, but I'm not a fan of this, but if source code becomes unreadable, because nobody knows what the doing anyway, so if nobody knows programming anymore, new students come out of university and they don't, they can't read source code, they don't know what it, I don't know what it, if statement is, they don't know what it, you know, what, what point has GitHub besides being a CDN to share zip files, if it even is around that time, or, you know, or DMG files, like you're basically turning into a mega upload where people just throw up all their garbage.

So yeah, they 100% have to rethink everything like, what is the meaning of code in 2027, 2030, what is the meaning of code in 2030, you know, and then obviously it's not in any way AI first. I mean, the fact that, you know, when I just explained, anyone can open pull requests for anyone, you know, there should be guardrails, there should be rules who can contribute, like we're using these third party GitHub actions that like autoclows pull requests for people who are not verified, that's all just hacks, you know, that should be first party coming from GitHub. Why do I have to install different third party plugins to make sure only legitimate people are opening pull requests? That should be your job GitHub, you know.

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And I think that's why developers gravitate towards solutions that are mature, things that they know that will scale, even things that are open source, you're going to pick something like PlanetScale for your database provider, not because it's the cheapest or because it's the most fun to use, but because you know it's going to be a durable provider that you can scale on for years. And Workforce is like that for off. At the earliest, early days, if you look across all these different services, they kind of look very similar, but at day 1000 or day 2000 or day 10,000, you're going to want to have made sure that you pick a platform that could scale with you. And today, Workforce is powering off and identity and security and permissions for all these AI companies, literally the fastest-growing companies in the world, like OpenAI and Dropic and Percir, and Perplexity.

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WorkOS.com once again, WorkOS.com. Yeah, he talks about coming back a step to the door around being critical infrastructure for agent code life cycles and determine a set of ways to measure that. Number two was for everyone who works on or advocates for co-pilot and shut it down. It's not about the people he's trying to be kind here.

I'm sure there's many times acquired cars, acquired cars. Hey, whatever money is possible. And he says by Pierre, which is peer to computer. We talked about the pot before, you may be aware of as well here by Pierre and lunch, agent repo hosting as the first agent product.

And I compare for more of it, if I need to, but then the last one was reevaluate all product lines and initiatives against the new North Star, which is really predicated on being critical infrastructure. I gave back those nine's, of course, and he says, I suspect 50% get cut to make room for the different ones. And so I'm not sure if he's accurate, wrong or right, but there's a lot of folks who are upset at the uptime and downtown stability of GitHub. I mentioned before, they're, I know they make a lot of money.

I have been a prize as well, but I think they're really banking on a get up co-pilot. And I just had Burke calling on the podcast. He's one of the developer advocates on the get up co-pilot team. So he's largely aware of what's going on there.

Has more co-pilot advocates than co-pilot users. You know, I'm not a get up pilot user. I'm also not a hater. I'm not a hater.

I mean, either. I also don't hate polar bears. I just don't see that on a basis. Sure.

I love polar bears. What I think is interesting. If we look back, because I've also had a podcast with Amelia Wattenberger. And if you recall, do you know Amelia Wattenberger by the chance that Naomi Gabbelio she works on the get up next team, which is where get up co-pilot came out of.

Oh, I see. Co-pilot was already in place and in motion before she got there, but she was a role, she played a role in GitHub next, which was sort of an offshoot of the office to the CTO at GitHub. So it became this area to innovate. And that office of the CTO is predicated on Jason Warner.

Jason Warner's idea was get up actions, get back to this large UI, get up acquired by Microsoft. I'm compressing a lot of the history here just for the dovetail. And so this next area was this laboratory where a lot of the innovation came from. That's where get up co-pilot came from.

And a lot of the race and current status of the race of where at was, was, you know, around getting a co-pilot being tab completion. They were the first, they were the first while factor. And here they are the late runner, not the front runner of this. Yeah, yeah.

It's just kind of wild to see the picture kind of come full, full pendulum there on that. And you know, this Microsoft has any race in the coding industry right now besides just co-pilot, right? Is that the core of the world? So, you know, the parameter.

Of course, we have cursor, we have codecs from Jet2PD and we have cloud or clock code, which is primarily terminal, obviously. And then we have what's called WinSurf, I believe. And, I believe it's a train of effort, didn't it? No, WinSurf got acquired, but what's it acquired by Microsoft?

I remember. Google. I think there's some anti-gravity. Anyway, everything is yes, and replic.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, and then you know, I love it. It's actually got some pretty cool stuff. I haven't used their stuff yet, but I just didn't give it a war.

And yeah, there's a landscape. It's not only true, but I think what I really find sad about Microsoft is that I think they have the head screwed in the right place, but they just don't have the execution, right? Like, they came up with co-pilot. They were the first investors in OpenAI, the first big ones that they made it big.

They fully banked on it. And now they seem like they profit the least of this. Yeah, I'm not really sure what's that. I just think it is kind of what I look back at.

We were all enamored with GitHub Co-pilot, Tap Completion, Function Completion, things like that. And now it's not really the major player in the race, but it seems like GitHub is banking big on that. But as a team and individuals like you are and we are, we're not sure of the future of GitHub. And I don't know either.

I just don't know. But I know that they seem to be largely focused on Co-pilot and their uptime has been down dramatically. No. Now, Mort Woodward, who's a developer advocate for the dev team there, he's come out and talked about it.

Ryan DeGill, COO, not CEO because there is no CEO of GitHub anymore. He might have been working on Twitter about slash X around these things. And it's cool. Please talk about it.

But there's something going on there and there's something changing there. And there's code right now, which I'm not even sure who's moving to codeberg. I think a lot of it might be potentially self-hosted. So what keeps you at GitHub these days?

If you're not up in source, you know, if you were going to talk about coms, it's more dramatically up in the source like you were before. What keeps you, what keeps you're gonna be your epicenter? It's not really much of your epicenter. And look, what happens if the user base of GitHub is agents?

It's not really a nice business. The whole thing is, because the reason why I struggle with that one, and I want to maybe, and maybe you can draw this line too, is largely agents, but is largely agents there on behalf of a human. So that's where I draw the line because I've got agents and I'm a human being. And so I have intent, right?

And those agents are acting on behalf. And so bots versus agents, maybe a little bit different. And I'm not sure how to draw the line there. Well, how much is it a human intent?

If you ask a lot like research, the top 10 frameworks and and then of those repositories picked the most popular issue and open up your offer it. Is that really your intent? It's no different than search, right? And search will still be, you would still say it's the top search results, right?

It's just a new search. It's giving a lot of intention. That's what I'm saying. Like your agent makes a lot of assumptions and decisions that detach you from it, I would say.

Yeah. That line will continue to be examined and blurred, in my opinion. I think I sit on the side that if I were making that search and say, hey, go out and find me the top 10 repositories and help me learn how to commit a PR, I think that's still user intent. I would probably still draw that back to user intent.

I think that's the one I think everybody should do that. But if that AI makes that decision for you and just makes it for you, the PR and everything, you no longer have any emotional connection to that. You might not even know which repository your agent committed to. Yeah.

I suppose if it's fully autonomous and there's no awareness and the intent is very thin, then it does get thinner. Obviously, it's more than AI agent only. I think this whole agent thing, well, first things first, agent is a horrible name because agent theoretically means there is a persona that has its own objectives and autonomous decisions, right? Everything else to me is like a human scaled with AI, right?

Top completions are different to autonomous coding, right? Like you are still writing codes, but you have auto-completion. We've had auto-completion for words in 15 years. That's just not that crazy.

But I think the innovation came for coding that it was actually working and not just branding weird shit. But the autonomous future that a lot of people are imagining is what I just said, that you have this coding agent who wakes up at 8am, well, doesn't sleep, doesn't need to. And Grinds, GitHub bounties searches the web for whoever probably the most profitable agents will be hacker agents, you know, that try to extort you on a bounty versus extortion metric. But let's say you were a white hacker agent, you would probably autonomously serve the web, you would find interesting repositories.

Maybe you are looking for repositories that your company is depending on. You try to maybe put your own company policy into that fringe open source project, or you want to maybe you're trying to improve a certain library that your company depends on. I mean, even today already code code could analyze your code base today, and it could find a potential vulnerable open source dependency, you depend on any with them. It could autonomously visit that repository's project and open a PR itself on that project trying to get your fix into it.

Like, that is not impossible today. That's I'm not sure if it's happening at scale, it's probably happening in installation. But theoretically speaking, your agent could hit a wall and then autonomously raise a PR in that dependencies repository. That's not no longer your decision, your decision was to improve your product, but the agent made the autonomous decision to go out and hunt an over a PR in someone else's repository.

That to me is very detached from tap completion. You, Adam, wants to improve my very much. Are you for that against that then? That seems altruistic.

While it may not, it's one step or two steps removed from my original intent. Original intent is to learn about the security by dependency graph, and then the two steps removed is figuring out which ones have issues and correcting them or finding a correction in some real PR. Are you for that against that? Well, I think as the tech community, we need to find peace with the fact that even though this GitHub user has a human avatar, this GitHub user has not written a single word of that PR.

That's just a reality. First, we need to be okay with that. And then the second thing we need to make peace is, did that person even think about my project when they opened this PR? Are they aware of it?

Do they know me? Do they like me? Do they have the same ethics? What is their altruistic intent?

Is it to improve their own dependency? Or is it to find a job because they ask a lot of code, like, hey, I'm unemployed, find the best 20 repositories and get my name out there? Or is it even trying to build it back door or break a feature or change a button that was previously most clicked? And now it's, you know, you can also, you don't have to be a hacker to, it's not illegal to raise a PR against Calico that makes our product worse.

That's not illegal, right? No. I think you don't go to prison for that. If you ask Cloud Code to make Calico worse, it'd be like, okay, dokey.

Let me remove the login button. Jumps done, you know? Let's dovetail hardcore to the right if you don't mind. And let's talk about the success that you've had.

I mentioned it to the show. See the investor for a small check, of course, but I was very happy to do that because, you know, I was using Cal only, I like to call out better, I liked your mission, we had to the podcast, I liked your mission, I liked, you know, this was a lot of the rage at the time to come out as a commercial resource company. We both know JJ, I think you were part of it was his capital in terms of your initial raise and support there. So some history there.

But tell me about, give me as a maybe a seed investor, give me a glimpse behind the scene of success that is happening or has been happening. Yeah, look, I mean, we are blessed in terms of timing and the renaissance of open source. I believe that might even be the topic of our first conversation, like where do all these commercial resource startups come from? And they're all doing great from what I've seen, the people that I'm trying to be close to open source was almost like a, what do you call it, like I wish that for way too long and it was still striving.

I think now it's getting harder again. I think my vintage of open source companies has been pretty successful with what they're doing. There's many good outcomes and look open source is awesome. I love a bit source.

I wish we would not be under this threat, which just can't close your eyes to it. So no, Calico has been growing fantastically. We're very happy. The teams are happy.

We're reaching, I'd say, like the milestones we set for us, very low churn, high growth, you know, high margin sales. We don't have a single AI product that's catching on, which also means we're not burning any AI tokens, which means our margins are great. It's still great. It's quite funny when I talk to founders.

They're like, oh my god, we're doing faculty and they are now. And I'm like, okay, how much was the bottom line? Like, oh, I mean, we're burning 10 million. So it's like, wow, fantastic.

So it's like, I mean, look, every business is great. If you're selling like a dollar worth of AI credits for 10 cents, you know, like that every business is fantastic. If that's your business model, right? Like, if you, and then you've seen this on Twitter, you know, like all of these coding assistants are like adding rate limits and reducing usage and trying to upgrade you into $200 plans and, you know, like the economics don't make sense in the AI space.

They don't make sense yet. I mean, they will, but it's a it's an uber type thing was like, how is this uber so cheap? Well, somebody's paying for it. You know, $15 from SF airport to the city.

Yeah. Right. That doesn't have any more, but it was fantastic times. I was loving it.

That was great. That was a good time. See now it's like, oh, god, eight bucks for that ride. Wow.

One dollar delivery door dash. Right. That was good. I was on the recently, they said, I can't recall what it was, but I was so surprised by it.

They literally send their marketing, we'll eat the fees. That's great for marketing because your market is like sweet. You know, this is a great care. Let's let's get some people attracted, but you're literally telling the market, we're going to lose money.

We're spending the gate. We're taking a fee. You're basically saying, do not invest in this business unless you like to lose money. Yeah.

That was kind of funny. I was told my wife, I'm like, babe, that that basically says, let's, we're just going to lose money here to get this business. We're going to subsidize it as marketing. Adam, if you want to have the fastest growing startup in the stream, you could launch a landing page and you say, get a clogged API key that works for half the price.

We pay 50% of it, but still pay me. Right. So you're going to have to, you post this on Hacunus and you're going to make like 100 million in the first year and you're going to burn 200 million because that's the amount and you pay 50% of it. But you've got to be a startup making 100 million in the first year.

And you can go to every podcast and say, this is how we made 100 million in the first year without saying you burn 200 million. Yeah. But that is essentially what sadly a lot of startups are doing right now. They add some flavors, some problems, some system problems, some UI, some site bar, some orchestration and drag and drop.

But a lot of these startups are simply doing that mug with a 50-50 split, but you know, maybe a 5% to 95 or a 10% split. So in my eyes, it's not a great business, but for some it works. If you can raise billions of dollars, you can do that for quite some time. You know, the one agent that hasn't done that and has done it, hasn't done it to the degree, what am I trying to say there?

They haven't, they famously come out and said, we're not going to sell it for a less than it should. It's actually expensive and we're charging appropriately, is our friends over at AMP code. Now they're wrapping open the eyes APIs, they're wrapping anthropics APIs, they're giving you versions of GPT, 5.4 codecs, et cetera, they're giving you versions opus 4.5 at all the different variations of it and they're sprinkling their own abilities on top of that. And AMP is, I don't know if it's source graph because that's where its roots came from, but what makes it so good, I'd love to like learn what makes it so good, but AMP, have you played with AMP on each chance?

Here? I have not known. Well, after this podcast, go and play with AMP, AMP code.com, I believe it was so successful for them, that they spun this out of source graph. So AMP was a sub product of source graph, which was already largely popular and very successful.

And they built their own agent called AMP and it was so successful they had to like spin into its own company. So now it's AMP code, AMP, or AMP, in one of the two, I'm not sure. And if I have a really hard problem, I just know I want to get right. I've got to use AMP and they have a free model which is paid for by ads.

And now that's changed to that. It's like 10 bucks per day you get. And they basically said it wasn't successful. They actually put a 10 million dollar per year business in ad sales on that and they close it down.

But by and large, they're not subsidizing the tokens. They're charging appropriately and profiting on it. And then everybody else is still growing quite well. Yeah.

Another business. I mean, exactly. It's like how aggressively you want to grow. I mean, again, you can add your flavor on an AI and wrap it and make a good UI and resell it and make money without losing money.

Like it's perfectly fine. It's just the coding space. It's so competitive that nobody's really in it for the UI. It's just like, where can I get the most computer money?

But companies that have not done this also is like mid-year, they've always been profitable. It's bootstrapped this since they never raised funding. And I don't know what revenue mid-year is today. But they found a way to profitably sell subscriptions and rate limit accordingly.

I mean, they pretty early built, I mean, they always built their own AI. I feel like they've bought other AI. So maybe the margins make more sense for them because you're your own supplier. You don't need to buy tokens.

You just need to buy just buy infrastructure. And then the inference and the infrastructure and the cost to make infrastructure keep it up. So you're cutting out one middleman for sure. Yeah.

The one with your own markup. It is a big mess there. I think with, I mean, it's a big mess to manage, but it is you're sort of in charge of your own mess. So your cost center is different.

You're not buying tokens. You're purchasing man hours to produce and to sustain and hardware itself and managing that hardware's up time. Literally hardware infrastructure, like real hardware, bare metal, as they say. Oh, wow.

My journey calls itself first community funded AI research lab. That's it. I like that. We are lean self-funded to see the team always hiring.

The journey has no investors. We are funded by our own community. That sounds like the community has ownership, which they do not break into you. That's the same with customers or my investors, which does that?

Well, I mean, yeah, non-dilutive capital means I own the ship. Anyway, I mean, look, it works. I mean, look, it works for them. And I think that something like incredible that you can build AI businesses without burning credits, burning the whole.

Anyway, how do we get to it? I mean, yeah, telecom. We don't sell tokens. You don't have any.

I wasn't going to come back to it. If you don't have a AI, what was your growth come from? Yeah. Who would have thought people still use SaaS?

No, I mean, it's, yeah, I think we just continue to do a good job and build a good product that people love and pay money for. It's not everything else to be a surprise. Surprise. Where are you, again, they're pun here, but not on purpose, where are you spending your time in terms of product?

Like, where is the innovation happening that contributes to growth? What is making that happen? I personally, I spend every day at work looking at product-related topics. Pretty much every major product decision goes over my desk or comes from my desk, which means not only larger and new initiatives, whether it's an iOS app or a browser extension, but also looking at existing features that we need to sharpen the edges, not sharpen the edges, soften the edges, sharpen the edges, both right, zero, and fix tons of bugs, make sure to get enough buy-in in the company and assign resources.

So I would say I'm mostly responsible for the product quality today, so if there's something inherently broken, please send to me. I recently started to do sales again just because I enjoy doing it, not because it's not because we're short stuff, but because I really just want to have this conversation with customers and learn from them and understand what they go through. It's more like a product exploration than necessarily closing the money. That's how I spend most of my time with really just talking to customers and then trying to bring that to life.

You want to take a bug fix? Maybe an issue. Let's call it an issue. You want to take an issue out on the air for me?

For sure, yeah. I'll spin up my code. I'll spin up my code and submit it if you are. So we reschedule a lot we have in the past.

So we either, as changelog, we use Cloud.com to schedule all of our podcasts, our entire workflow for creating any new event that is podcast related, and I do as well in sales. So all my sales calls, I do a lot of conversations with founder CEOs, key product leaders in companies that advertise with us. We have them on the podcast via voice, and so we showcase who they are. It's not just me reading an ad, it's very unique and informative in our audience.

I love that. So I do a lot of scheduling for all the surface area of what we do here. So reschedule is at the core of the crux of what we do, scheduling, and also reschedule because not everybody can show up and we even have reschedule. And so the challenge that I face, one of the challenges I face with reschedule is one that works great.

And the only part that doesn't work great is that if I want to reschedule and my availability dictates how I can reschedule, I can't break that unless I go in and create an override. I know my schedule and I want to reschedule it and I want to be able to pick whatever time I want on my own schedule, not have to go jack with my availability to then have it open and create an override. I feel like that could be a little smoother and that's been a multi-year challenge because it's never been changed. And I never told you.

I just worked around it. So here we are on the podcast. How do you feel about that? That kind of changed.

Have you experienced that yourself? What do you think about that? You know what? I think I have this on my never-ending list of tickets for like at least a month.

And I think today's the time where I finally get to ship that. I've experienced this myself. I'm always annoyed. I always talk about it with a team and then some hits the fan and it gets deproretized.

But I do have to fix this and I do agree it's very annoying. And we will keep it in the same UI that you do like a normal user would. Don't take it back to admin. Do it in the same reschedule.

And I'm not sure I would give that ability to the invited. No, no. We don't know. We don't know.

We just control the calendar. We want to charge. Yeah. Because we've even had to reschedule a podcast and we largely record our podcast at 2 o'clock p.m.

And that's been a standard for us for a long time. It's where we mentally block off our own day to even be present in our podcasts. But at the same time, it may be somebody who's in Europe or maybe even Australia or New Zealand or South Africa or somewhere in the region where the time is far ahead 15, 12 to 15 hours in advance of my time here in Austin, Texas, which is central standard time. We want to reschedule to way out in the morning.

Same day, same concept, but I can't even do that in an easy way. Well, I will tell folks this, go ahead and put on the calendar and I'll manually change it. Yeah, exactly. Am I okay?

And I've been fine with that. But I would say keep it in the same UI because this is great UI functions well, but recognize I'm going to add me a little bit more ability. It may even warn me like, hey, you know, I don't know, figure it out here. Figure it out.

But that's where it should happen. You know what? I just wrote this in my coding agent. So maybe we get a PI in the next two minutes.

Let me so awesome. Let me so awesome. Kick that off. So great.

It's a good product. Is what you're trying to say. Yeah, that's exactly what we were just doing. You know, you tell me something that's really frustrating.

I agree. It's really frustrating. And then it's my job to make that not so frustrating anymore. I know you do that.

And then you just do that over and over again until people really like your product. Yeah, make them happy. Make them happy. Right.

I know you just read about this on March 25th. Just hit six. Oh, no, seven million ARR. And I think you mentioned in the pre-call that numbers north of that number by little because your growth rate is 10, 12% per month.

You said it was the what? I mean, every month is different between five and 10 in a good month and that month. But yeah, I'll never. We're hoping to three x per year.

That's kind of always been the agenda and the milestone we want to go for, which is, yeah. So we are looking now at, well, soon to eight million. Hopefully soon to crack the time and open some champagne and go to bed at 1230 instead of 10. Three in the morning.

We have a party. Can I be in the car? Hopefully. Hopefully.

Yeah, we should. Yeah. We have a company retreat in Japan, which we're really excited about. So maybe that would be sick if that overlaps with the 10 million milestone.

That would be really sweet. That would be June. So April, May, June, maybe June of this year. Okay.

So you're thinking by June of 2026, potentially 10 million. They are probably not potentially in the realm of possibilities. Yeah. Okay.

What would change what would make you grow more and what would change your growth? Like what are the things that keep you up at night in terms of positivity and negative? I know open source with one of them and a threat there and we've talked about that. But what are the positive sides and potentials by negative sides that keep you up?

We do have large customers, right? We have a lot of grassroots, but we're also large customers. And I think there's a bit of a like a sass shop going through the industry where like a lot of companies are really deeply looking at their vendor list and try to cut corners and cut costs and come with the argument like, oh, but like we're paying it too much. We can buy cool you and we can you don't have to buy good color come.

We literally open sources forecast, like it saves you money and tokens. Like if you think that's the cost cutting approach, like just self-hosted portfolio, like that's much easier. But yeah, that's still thing, right? So like I would say the entire SaaS industry is experiencing some sort of sell shock, SaaS shock, where just under more due diligence than in the golden days of 21 where the pockets were a bit deeper and the money was flowing like champagne.

But I mean, that's just not something that I only look at. That's pretty much everyone's looking at budgets and allocations and what to bring in house. Scheduling up to this day is still really freaking hard. It's not something you can just one-shot like some other SaaS companies.

We have internally stopped using certain products because it was a weekend of cloud code to get to 70, 80% of that functionality. Scheduling is just like even the first 20%. It's just still really, really hard. So I think AGI has achieved the more we can one-shot calico without working.

That's my benchmark. Yeah, but it is. That's pretty funny. Yeah, I guess, you know, even as an investor in Cal and as a user of Cal, because like anybody, I've thought about where do we spend our money?

I don't think we spend a lot of money. I think it might be like 30, maybe 60 bucks a month. I don't know what the number is. I want to say it's at least 30 bucks though for Cal.

And yeah, even though we're an investor, we're paying user. That doesn't make sense. Because why would you not? But I think in any case, maybe I can self-host.

I love the self-host. I'm a homelabber. Maybe I can actually just go a different angle to Cal and not so much say the 30 bucks. That was not my concern.

It's like how much change can I actually influence in my bottom line? And while 30 bucks a month is not dramatic, what control can I get over self-hosting Cal.com? You offered open source for a reason, you even blessed the Docker image I could run. So you make it super easy, brilliant convenience to self-host Cal if I want to.

It's definitely crossed my mind. I didn't execute on it. It was in my to do list to look into it. But only as an exercise of could I, not so much, should I.

And that's an interesting place to be and around to ask you, have you felt because you're growing, but have you felt a retraction and has it been that, has it been self-hosters going into it? I don't think that's going to be a case. But no one's going to self-host Cal unless they really, really want to. Well, there's, I think there's two reasons people self-host as you correctly identify.

One of them is I want to tinker with it and play around with it and make changes. And the other one is security and putting it behind your own firewall. Those people have always existed. We do have governments and healthcare that self-host, right?

And they, new slash also pay us because they want to and they need support and they need feedback and help and developer our office hours and compliance help and setup. And they pay as well. So we do have a really small amount of people who self-host and pay us. Now they're most certainly, our Docker file, I haven't checked that in a long time Cal come, has really pulls, has over a million installations.

So take it or leave it. That's a really big number. We're not. In totality or by a certain measure?

Whatever Docker hub tells me, I don't know the, the analytics of Docker hub are really okay. But it's been pulled a million times. Now is that a million customers? No, but it's also not 10.

So anywhere between 10 and a million people are using the self-hosted file container. So it's a big number. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's obviously not a billion people, but it's, you know, it's a million pulls. But we don't charge them.

That's okay. They would probably be on a free tier. You know, if these are individuals, they would be on a free plan or free plan is as liberal as the open source version. We always want it to be like, you don't have to be self-hosting in order to get the product for free.

You can be honest after you're only for free, right? I think where, where the revenue is coming from is just people want to move fast, companies want to move fast, self-hosting takes time. It puts the burden on you to keep it safe and updated and maintained. And a lot of people just simply don't want to do that.

I mean, why is renting popular? Sucks. I'm, I'm, it's just, sometimes you just want to rent and pay people money. And then when the sink is broken, it's being replaced, you know?

Yeah, limit your liabilities, limit your responsibilities, limit your accountability, limit limit limit as a, I can do that. I mean, I don't rent person at home owner, but I do like limit my liabilities, who doesn't? That's just exposure, right? Lease a car.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even that I own my own cars too. Like I don't lease, at least services and things, maybe, but not really like those kind of large items.

And I know people that have said, oh, this is why this is not ones or this can be, you know, this goes from a CapEx to a, you know, whatever X. I mean, I like your own things. Yeah. I mean, you can go either way.

So I imagine this shift from how you're forking your own code base. I imagine you thought to some degree, maybe you haven't. Have you considered just literally going close source completely and going like the TL draw route where they have TL draw license, it is literally not open source, it's not even using any source available license. It's just source available and issuing out a license key and being very, I guess, smooth with how you might license something.

So you might have an experimenter who's trying to figure it out. Maybe you've got a home lab or who literally wants the home lab and host a self-host and you just give it instant license key. Have you ever examined that world at all when it comes to closed source available? And the only way you can really use it is literally with a license key.

Otherwise, it's in like a demo mode. I have never seen the TL draw license and they actually made it up themselves. That's so interesting. Yeah.

It's a heading on the podcast a little while ago. It was a really good conversation. I'll give you a TL, a TL DR of this. I'm looking at it right now.

It's the TL DR of their success. They largely sell in SDK. So they only even sell you finished software. We came up with the analogy during the podcast.

It's like orange juice concentrate that you put in your freezer. You add the water, right? Like it's not even a complete product. It's a complete SDK and that's what they sell and they sell it as closed source.

It's source available and there's been some talk even, you know, they were out there on X famously pulling back their test suite because you can easily replicate TL draw from the test suite. You know, that's I'm sure you've been down that road. I've seen that the threats and stuff like that. But I think it's because of the threat.

I'm not anti-open source, but because of the threat and the desire to have a sustainable commercial company and have source available because of the reasons why source available makes sense for trust, but have that relationship. So what a license key let you do. And of course, in this case is literally everyone who is a user gets a license key and you're very liberal with how you distribute those license keys that are non-page. So you want to be very open with it, maybe even instant with a home lab key, for example.

But you get an email and a name and you can forge a relationship that's very different from here's our free and open source, you know, Cal dot DY, DY, DY, what is wrong with you today, Adam? Cal dot DY, you know, you don't have a relationship with anybody who uses it really unless you force a relationship or desire a relationship or get that inbound issue, which you don't even really want. I mean, maybe want the issues without the pull requests. So what do you think about that license key world?

Have you examined this thought at all? So as of today or whether the current way the repository split is that you can fully sell those telecom and then there's a couple of pro features that do require a license key that are like on the resource available license. So it's pretty similar what you're explaining. The only difference moving forward is that that source available will go private source, right?

So the chemical of tomorrow will strictly be an HPLV3 potentially an MIT and we might even change that MIT because it's no longer commercially used by us. Like it's there, it's public, but it's more of a public good than a commercial asset. So the but the source available part will go private source because it's already commercial and it's very sensitive of the product that should not be for the public eye. That's kind of like the I think the decision we made would not.

So we would never take anything, well, first it's not possible, but we would never take anything private that's previously open source. But what we do take private in a sense is that we no longer have the source available commercial parts also source available. We take that private source. And I think the initial question I had just to go back to the issue started was why even stay open source.

I think at the end of the day, we are forced to make a decision here, whether it's the right or wrong time will tell, the market will tell, the technology will tell, we don't know, it just feels like the right one. A lot of people in the industry agree with me and security experts agree with me, which is sad I hate, like I don't like it, but that's just what it is. So we do not want to give up the open source ethos. We keep Cal.DI for self-hosters, for anyone who's you know, excited to contribute and be part of this community.

It's just simply not that instance that we would be running on our production environment. That's really just an ATO, TLDR or TLDR, but TLDR, like the only difference is the open source code is now fully open source project. We don't run it ourselves. We give it to you.

You can run it yourself if you want to, but we have a commercial fork of that thing that can do a little bit more and is a little bit more safer. So in a way, it's not like we are private source company now. We just use our own private, we use our community vision as the foundation, and then we put some locks on it. Given what you share with me and what I've also been seeing myself in terms of how things are changing, I'm sad too by that, but I'm not the state is what it is, I suppose.

And I'm sad by the fact that's the fact, but I'm okay with how it makes sense to protect the investment, the company that you have our responsibility to run. Well, the customers, right? Like the customers, right? The data we're processing is no longer fun.

We have really important data we're processing. We're always going to be at where they're going to meet with at a certain time. And I know you have like, ability to charge for meetings, that's like even that, whether they're making money, there's a lot of things you can get from that that you can cross the same with other data. None of this is sadly, look, if you run a chill open source project that makes a button green and glow and you hover over, that's very different to having millions of customers who interact with each other, whether it's a chatbot, whether it's Discord, imagine Discord gets broken open to or and every single DM is public.

That would freaking suck. So, I would suck. So open source is not dead, but it's changing. Would you give me that?

Yeah, 100%. I think I also don't think that commercial open source is that open source is framing open source and commercial source, the subcategories. If you run a framework, you find if you run a package, you'll probably find as long as you have your dependencies safe and secure. If you run a commercial open source project, probably make sure that it's not the same as running on your product environment.

And that's usually good advice. But commercial but it's still really valid and fun and just fulfilling place to be in. It's a lot of fun. Yeah.

All righty. Well, thank you so much for the situation is depressing. It's not a happy ending yet. But I do think, you know, I think what I also hope is that people just simply understand.

I think there's always haters out there who try to read into things, but I think my hope is just people just get it. Like, yeah, makes sense. It sucks. But I should say, yeah, we are at a at a unique position in place, for sure.

And I think there's hard choices to be made. And I think things are definitely changing all around. And it's a TBD on where it lands in terms of that change. I'm long open source.

Same. I really hope one day we get back to where it, you know, we could be even more forthcoming with with details. But I know when you're high value, kind of property, it makes sense, obviously, to do what you need to do to protect yourself and your customers. And no one can really value for that.

And I certainly appreciate the non-rogable aspect of it. You know, I think there's a lot of folks who had just simply rug pool and it's not at all the case. And then, you know, if you were starting fresh and green and brand new, maybe you never even go open source at all. Maybe you start literally as close as proprietary and you prove yourself in the market.

Or you don't. You know, I think that the lower to being a commercial open source company these days is dramatically different than it was four years ago. Totally. Yeah.

And we don't even know where coding comes out in a year from now. So like, I think the most important skill for any founder is, you know, like, you have to adapt. And we're adapting now. And you need to be okay with that change, you know, we're no longer a buck, we're turning into a private butterfly.

So you just need to be okay with that transition. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for keeping me on time with all my time with Cal.com.

Big fan, as you know, big user, as you know, daily active user of Cal. And I love it. I, I, when we started using it, when we first invested, never look back. I've hit a couple of scenarios, but you've fixed things over time.

It's gotten smoother, easier, better. Time has been always amazing. And, you know, for me, five stars, well, I would only knock you maybe a quarter of a point on the one thing I mentioned in this pod, but maybe after that, it's back to five stars. And I just got an notification from my coding agent who shipped your PR to override hosts.

Get out of here. Yeah. So during the time, during my life, I had this before in these days. And I didn't do a single thing and it looks amazing.

Come on. Now we shall see what happens. We shall see. While the 40 is in that feature.

I can't wait. Yeah. You'll be the first one to test. I'll send you another.

All right. Well, thank you again for coming on the pod. It's been good talking to you. I appreciate you.

Well friends, a lot is changing out there. I'm not about you, but every single day I open up X with trepidation and anticipation at the same time. Like, I don't even know, you know, can I get a reset here? It's not about you, but I'm loving Codex personally.

I'm not really digging clove right now. I haven't really ventured out to other places. Open source models are doing cool stuff, but by and large, Codex, Codex App Server and the fun things happening in and around the open AI, Codex World, chat, GPT Pro World, it's just got me lasered in gravitational focused in and I'm liking it. So I'll be in San Francisco here in a few weeks, September 14th through September 18th.

If you're in SF, I would like to say hello. I'm trying to plan an IRL. Yes, a change log, IRL. If you do it, it figures crossed at planet scales headquarters.

I really hope you do that. If it starts a line, we'll make it happen. If you're not yet a member, go to changelog.com slash community is free to join, get in the loop, get notified of all the things happening. I'll see you there.

Big thanks to the sponsors of this podcast, coder.com work, OS and build kites. And of course, our partners in crime fly.io. Okay, friends, that's it. The show's done.

Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you again soon.