232: Are we Idiots or Maniacs?
In this week's episode the crew is back to discuss the never-ending journey of self-improvement in the tech industry, are we idiots to ignore it or maniacs to go along with it? Ben and Tim are back from CF Summit to recount there experiences where a big topic of discussion was... you guessed it, AI.
Follow the show and be sure to join the discussion on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @workingcode.dev on Bluesky. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.
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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.
Transcript
Spot an error? Send a pull request on GitHub.
[00:00:00] Highlight
[00:00:00] Ben: everything from the white space to the ordering of the properties to the ordering of the meth. It's like, the reason that I think about that stuff is because the code is my baby to some degree, I feel like once I leave a company, I feel like, oh, that code's baked.
[00:00:13] Ben: You don't have to touch it. Please don't ever touch it.
[00:00:16] Carol: Yeah. I'm more like, please don't touch it and don't call me.
[00:00:19] Ben: Yeah.
[00:00:21] Intro
[00:00:41] Adam: Okay, here we go. It is show number 231. And on today's show we're gonna talk about the difference between idiots and maniacs. if you wanna know what that means, you're just gonna have to stick around till we get to that part.but first, as usual, we'll start with our triumphs and fails. We've got the whole crew again this week.
[00:00:55] Adam: Uh, hi
[00:00:55] Carol: Wow.
[00:00:57] Tim: Hey.
[00:00:57] Carol: guys.
[00:00:57] Adam: uh,Mr. B
[00:00:58] Ben's Triumph
[00:00:58] Adam: en Nadel, I'm gonna come to you first.
[00:01:01] Ben: All right, I'm gonna go with a failure. It's more of a triumph, but I feel like I'm, it's, I've let it a little bit out of control. So, I have for a long time tried to write myself little notes. I have historically used, oh my God, I can't remember the name of the. Trello, sorry. I've historically
[00:01:18] Ben: used Trello to, to write myself little notes, and I have different swim lanes on the Trello board for different things, one of which was random podcast thoughts. And I sort of tucked that away and I didn't always remember to write things down. And when I did write things down, I didn't always remember to bring them up. And when I did remember to bring them up, I didn't necessarily have any process for removing them from that board and marking them as, as like having had been used on the show. and then we had created a behind the scenes content, content ideas channel here in the podcast. This is a little bit how the sausage is made and we occasionally put things in there, but I don't think I've even been good about putting stuff in there, especially not in the last couple of months. And finally, what I started to do on Sun on Saturday when I was traveling back. On Wednesday when I was traveling back from CF Summit was, I just went into Discord and I declared to myself, this is gonna be the place that I put these random thoughts. And I started calling 'em show notes. And I was walking around the airport. I had like an hour and a half to kill. So I just started barfing. it was 3:00 AM and I just started barfing these thoughts into Discord. and then someone said, Hey, please stop doing that.
[00:02:33] Ben: Uh,
[00:02:35] Tim: You're clocking up the general
[00:02:36] Ben: yeah, so then I created a channel in Discord, a public channel in Discord just for my thoughts, my ranting thoughts. And I have started to put stuff in there. And I'm calling that a triumph because I feel like I've found a place that's public enough, but also out of the way enough for me to feel like I can put anything that I want into it.
[00:02:57] Ben: And people from the Discord chat have been participating. So that's, that's a, that's definitely a win. My goal was to try to. Let them kind of battle test and harden some of these thoughts before I bring them into the podcast. And that was a reaction to our previous episode on it good friction? There was one episode where I was like, this makes so much sense in my head, and you all kind of gave me these blank stupid stares.
[00:03:22] Tim: I don't know if everyone did. I, I know I did. I gave you a hard time about
[00:03:25] Ben: So, so, but, and that was my fault. I wanted to be able to come into the show with a more formulated, more codified thought. and my hope was by putting these thoughts into somewhere a little bit more public. People like y Sean Car Fields and your Adam Camerons of the world could come in and on them early and give me a chance to like, you know, beef them up a little bit before I present them to a wider audience.
[00:03:50] Ben: So I think this has all been a huge triumph. My only failure aspect here is I feel like I don't know how to organize it yet.
[00:03:57] Ben: It's kind of, it's kind of happened very quickly. Like I've, I've put a lot of stuff in there 'cause I'm sort of just like clearing out the attic, you know?
[00:04:04] Ben: so I've put a lot of stuff in there, but I have no idea how to organize it and I have no idea how to like, keep these coherent threads going
[00:04:12] Adam: Well, I was just gonna say, why don't you make them threads instead of just one continuous, like stream of chat. If you made threads, then people could reply in the thread, and that way at least it's all in one place for that discussion. Instead of having to like trace back every time somebody replies to some, one of
[00:04:29] Ben: that's a great
[00:04:29] Adam: know, you dumped 20 all at once and then somebody replies to one in the middle.
[00:04:34] Ben: So do you think I should have like the, so, so the way the threads work, my understanding is you have a message and then that message can become a side quest of conversation.
[00:04:45] Ben: So I wonder if the primary, the primary message should really just be a teaser and then you go into the thread to get
[00:04:53] Adam: That's not a bad
[00:04:54] Ben: Because I feel like. If I put the full thing
[00:04:57] Ben: in the main channel in any way whatsoever, people will just wanna reply to it there.
[00:05:02] Adam: Yeah, I agree.
[00:05:03] Tim: Or you could put the whole thing and then just immediately create a thread that says, comment here on this thread.
[00:05:09] Carol: Yeah, I mean, when you create a thread, you can say it, it requires an initial message to include in the main chat. So just put the, I I think I like the idea of a teaser. 'cause I think you're right Ben. I think people will still reply in the main thread. Just without thinking.
[00:05:22] Ben: All right, so I'm gonna call this T trium across the board because we have taken my
[00:05:27] Ben: fum and we have hardened it into a triumph.
[00:05:29] Ben: We have upgraded it. Awesome. All right, cool. So that's it. That's me.
[00:05:34] Carol's Triumphs and Fails
[00:05:34] Ben: Carol, what do you got going on?
[00:05:36] Carol's Failiumph
[00:05:36] Carol: I'm gonna go with a fell, I don't even know how you say this word, guys. 'cause I don't really say it often. I'm usually like on one side or the other, but I'm gonna go with this triumph and fail thing and that we released our, upgraded. net core project that had been a.net framework project and the prod this past weekend.
[00:05:56] Carol: So another weekend of working, which wasn't very fun,
[00:05:59] Carol: but right before it was ready to go into production, someone tells me there's a bug and all of a sudden you can't create new applications. So no one can create anything new. And I have no idea what's happened. There's not been a code change, like nothing is making sense.
[00:06:16] Carol: I spent. Like, it's not gonna sound probably crazy, but I spent like six working hours like focused on this, trying to find the problem.
[00:06:26] Ben: Can I, can I interrupt for one second? Just for clarification? When you say no one can create. New applications. You don't mean net applications, you mean like a user submission application?
[00:06:37] Carol: yeah. Like the user. Yeah, like a job application, like applying to a
[00:06:41] Carol: job. They can't, they no longer can do this, right? So six working hours, just looking at code, looking through logs, trying to figure out what's going on. This is after two other engineers had spent most of the week looking at it and I got pulled in 'cause it hadn't been resolved. So finally, the following morning after spending so much time, I messaged my supervisor and I was like, look. I can only tell you what the error is. I can't tell you how it's getting there. Like nothing is making sense. So I was just feeling like I couldn't get through anything and just it, nothing was adding up. we called the engineer in who wrote the application. She's now a supervisor for another project. another piece inside OPM, she came in, sat with one of our engineers on the team and within 20 minutes she had it fixed.
[00:07:28] Carol: And I was like, so I was like happy that I called her in. But then I'm also kind of just frustrated with myself that I didn't do it sooner, that I didn't realize, like follow my own rule, which is with most engineers, if you can't solve it in an hour or two, ask for help. 'cause chances are someone else knows what's going on and they can provide more input. And I spent a lot of time,
[00:07:51] Carol: a
[00:07:51] Adam: you're right. It's so tough to to know where is that line? Like, is two hours, is two hours enough? If, if two hours and 20 minutes would've been the moment where you found it, you
[00:07:59] Carol: Yeah, or, or in the case, like where I'm the engineer, they called in because they couldn't figure it out. So I felt this huge burden to like solve their problem
[00:08:08] Adam: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:09] Carol: and I couldn't, I couldn't,
[00:08:11] Tim: So when she, when she showed you guys what the problem was, was this, like one of those things where, oh my God, we should have known that, or was like, there's no way we could have known that without her help.
[00:08:20] Carol: yeah, I wouldn't have known it because they call IDs different things sometimes. So for this instance, they were hitting the API to insert a new applicant, but instead of using like the applicant id, they were using the candidate id, which is what comes from another system. And I thought that the candidate Id like just transposed.
[00:08:42] Carol: And so the applicant ID and everything was good. It's not, that's not the right value. How it ever worked, I don't know. But we started getting like, unique ID con or unique index constraints. So it was like, can't insert, can't insert. 'cause they're already there. And I was like, oh, we just hit the point finally.
[00:08:59] Carol: And I'm glad it happened before prod. 'cause it would've immediately probably started happening in Pro had that been the case.
[00:09:04] Tim: Wow.
[00:09:05] Ben: Did, did it have anything to actually do with the. Upgrade from T net core to T net framework or whatever you said. I don't, I don't know, t net words.
[00:09:14] Carol: it only had to do with the fact that they rewrote it to use an API, backend to do all the database calls. So the web client isn't accessing the database at all, is sending requests out to the API to then hit the database. So had it just been a full kind of like one for one rewrite probably wouldn't have happened.
[00:09:34] Carol: But the, it's easy enough to transpose something when you're looking at IDs.
[00:09:39] Ben: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:40] Carol: Yeah.
[00:09:41] Ben: I, I was gonna say, just speaking of IDs, here's, here's something that I always wrestle with. If you have a URL defined, that's something like. Users slash you know, colon, the user ID slash applications slash colon, the user ID or application id. I, I go back and forth on whether or not, whether or not I want those things to be more fully qualified. Meaning when the parameter is mapped out of the URL, should it be ID or user id or should it be ID or application id? And the problem is, is that when I'm doing just the user part, it feels like it can just be id, but then suddenly I tack on that slash applications and now suddenly have two parameters that are id and I have to go back and I have to change the ones. And, I, I always end up kind of shooting myself in the foot from a URL perspective, but then I feel like sometimes people take that and they go too far in the other direction where every primary key in every table is the table name id. And then I'm like, well, I can't be on board with that anymore. Now.
[00:10:52] Ben: Now you're just a maniac.
[00:10:55] Carol: Well, it was kind of funny 'cause there we have two different tables that always like get me all messed up. It's because we have applicants and then application and when I'm quickly scrolling, they look almost identical and I have to like stop myself and like see like, am I an applicant or application?
[00:11:14] Carol: And I'm like, oh, why do we do this to ourselves? So
[00:11:18] Ben: Yo. Naming the thing that relates to things is, is one of the hardest things for
[00:11:24] Carol: yeah,
[00:11:25] Ben: Right? It's like,
[00:11:25] Tim: and caching.
[00:11:27] Ben: yeah. And caching and off by one errors because it's like you could have your applicant as your user and then the application is the thing they submit. But then like, what's the thing that is the collection of user applications and, and joining those together.
[00:11:43] Ben: Sometimes I, I, I'm, that's not a great example, but. It's like that's the thing that I always find the hardest to name properly.
[00:11:50] Carol: Well, that was me guys. What you got, Tim?
[00:11:53] Tim's Summit Experience
[00:11:53] Ben: woo
[00:11:58] Tim: it's been about 10 years since I've been to a cold fusion related thing, so didn't realize that until I just sat down and thought about it when I was there. but yeah, it was cool. It was like I've seen, I saw, I saw Ben, Ben was peeing,
[00:12:09] Tim: which
[00:12:09] Ben: people in hard.
[00:12:10] Tim: He was peeing hard, like, like, what was that? The. Second night he was, you know, hanging out late. Everybody was like on the balcony. He's chatting to everybody. He
[00:12:18] Adam: It's like 7:00 PM.
[00:12:20] Tim: don't know what time it was, you know?
[00:12:22] Ben: Yo, can I just say it was hilarious to me, so I'm, I don't like loud noises. I think that's part of my introversion. I also don't drink and I don't dance. I also have trouble hearing things and really noisy, not, I have trouble discerning noises in really noisy environments. So on that night with the balcony, they had a dj and the DJ was playing music like stupid loud.
[00:12:46] Ben: And I'm looking around, I'm
[00:12:47] Tim: That's why,
[00:12:47] Tim: that's why everyone was on the
[00:12:48] Tim: balcony 'cause it was
[00:12:50] Ben: nobody was enjoying the music.
[00:12:52] Ben: It was so
[00:12:53] Tim: He is like, I'm getting paid regardless, so I'm just gonna keep playing music. Yeah.
[00:12:57] Ben: Yo. But I'm used to Tim being the best dressed person at the conference, and you know, he showed up in his, in his suit. I think it was a two piece suit, not a three piece suit. This time though, maybe
[00:13:06] Ben: so slacker, but
[00:13:07] Tim: I, I, I dialed it down a little bit for the ho, for the hoi ploy.
[00:13:12] Ben: But I feel like, mark Tata gives him a run for his money in terms of stand outness.
[00:13:17] Tim: Yeah, for sure. I mean, Mark's wearing a suit as well, but it's like neon pink with like orange hair and like bright green glass. And he had like, he changed suits like three, four times a day.
[00:13:30] Adam: Goodness.
[00:13:31] Ben: Yes,
[00:13:32] Tim: Deta, he's the, he's the, the, the Cold Vision evangelist for, for Adobe. And, but yeah, he, he, he, he was, he was out there, but, you know, definitely PE people saw him. They saw me and they're like, oh, that's weird. He's wearing a suit. Then they saw him like, oh, wow, that's, that's even weirder. But no, it was, it was cool. I got to see people I haven't seen 11, 12 years, Emily Meyer, Ray Camden, Pete Fry tag. Yeah, this is awesome. To, to hang out with all those guys again and, and, to see them.
[00:13:59] Tim: So it was really nice. And I, they did, interviewed me about kind of, you know, our company. Started on cold fusion version one. Right. So back in
[00:14:08] Tim: like 1996. And so they were just kind of interviewing about sort of how cold fusion's grown with us as a company and how, you know, even 30, it's been 30 years, right?
[00:14:19] Tim: It was a 30 year anniversary of cold fusion. So, you know, even though it's not a hundred percent like the, the main tool in our toolbox anymore, it's still got an important spot and, you know, probably will continue to. So I was pro, I was doing the propaganda for Adobe, so
[00:14:37] Ben: Yeah, he was up on the, keynote stage,
[00:14:39] Tim: mm-hmm.
[00:14:40] Tim: Like the first person they invited, they didn't put me on the speaker list. I'm like, mark, why am I on the speaker? Oh, you're surprised. I'm like, okay, you guys just didn't, you guys were LA you guys were lazy. You just didn't put me up there. So.
[00:14:50] Carol: they give you a bunch of, free stuff? Because when they left me out of the, the brochure, like the brochure, one year I was the only female speaker and they comped my room. They comped everything on it. 'cause it was immediately following the whole like, dongle joke debacle.
[00:15:06] Carol: And they were like, oh
[00:15:08] Tim: Well, they had already comped everything in advance,
[00:15:11] Carol: Oh, nice.
[00:15:11] Tim: was nothing, so, but I did get to go to, we, a nice restaurant, the, the, keynote speakers. It took us all out to a really super nice restaurant and yeah, had a great time. So, yeah, it was, it was good to do that. And it was great seeing Ben there.
[00:15:25] Ben: I just wanna jump in for a second and give some props to Carol because for years, so summit's been going on for five, six years or something, and for most of that time I thought to myself, Vegas. I'm never going to Vegas. That's, I'm introverted. That seems completely overwhelming. It's just gonna be wall to wall gamblers and prostitutes.
[00:15:47] Ben: That's pretty much the, the image I had in my head.
[00:15:49] Carol: It is like Christmas
[00:15:50] Ben: Yeah. and, and Carol said, no, Vegas is really not that bad. It's not at all what you're thinking. It's just a conference. It's not even that many people. It's not in a casino, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm pretty sure Carol was the one that tipped me over to finally saying, all right, maybe this year I'll actually go.
[00:16:08] Ben: And I went last year for the first time and I had a wonderful time. And it is not like being in a casino, and it is not wall to wall strippers. so, thank you Carol for, for getting me outta my
[00:16:20] Ben: comfort
[00:16:20] Adam: halfway across the the room, right.
[00:16:22] Ben: Yeah.
[00:16:22] Carol: Yeah. I mean, I mean, you
[00:16:23] Ben: they're around the corner
[00:16:25] Carol: Yeah.
[00:16:25] Tim: I mean, they're there if you look for 'em, but.
[00:16:28] Ben: actually. Okay. Hilarious side story for a second. So I check into the hotel, or I'm, I'm online. I, I get to the, to the counter. The woman's checking me in. She's asking me, you know, is it part of the whole Adobe thing? I say, yes. And I don't even remember how this came up. I feel like she volunteered it.she said, oh yeah, my husband works the nighttime, the graveyard shift for the roulette tables.
[00:16:51] Ben: And I think we're joking about that. And she leans in. She goes, he told me how to spot the prostitutes. The prostitutes always have purses that have chain handles. If it's a chain handle, that's a prostitute. Alright.
[00:17:08] Adam: Okay,
[00:17:08] Ben: guess we're just volunteering that in Vegas. That's why.
[00:17:12] Ben: But she
[00:17:12] Carol: will put that in my notes to take with me next time.
[00:17:15] Tim: don't don't bring a chain
[00:17:18] Adam: I've been looking for Halloween costume
[00:17:20] Tim: Yeah. There you go. I, I will say this. So, back when I did attend like years ago, I would usually get a giant suite and hand out like 50 keys and people would come up to the suite and it like hang out. Like the whole, my, my suite was like party Central. 10 years later I'm still getting stories. People are like, oh dude, I remember. But the thing is the stories have grown over time.
[00:17:41] Adam: Yeah.
[00:17:42] Tim: They have taken on a life of their own and people are like, oh yeah, that's when so and so did that thing in, in your bedroom. And I'm like, really? Yeah, that was cool. I'm like, that did not happen.
[00:17:50] Tim: That did
[00:17:51] Tim: not happen at
[00:17:52] Adam: Yeah. In reality, it was 20 nerds sitting around a table talking and playing cards
[00:17:56] Tim: No.
[00:17:57] Tim: Well, I mean, it did get a
[00:17:58] Tim: little crazy. We had a big giant, I had giant steam shower. People were just
[00:18:03] Tim: going in there in the steam shower, like groups of people, they had clothes on. Some of 'em, some of 'em stripped down to their underwear, but they were sitting in the, in the steam shower all hanging out and chilling and talking and drinking and, and, and that story kind of got turned around a little bit.
[00:18:18] Tim: I'm
[00:18:18] Tim: like, no, that did not, no, none of that stuff actually happened. It was pretty tame in retrospect. But yeah, that, that's kind of taken a life of its own, which as it should. So anyway, that, that's me. How about you, Adam?
[00:18:32] Adam's Triumph and Container Queries
[00:18:32] Adam: I'm gonna go with a triumph. so this is, I'm, I'm late to this party, but I'm glad to be here. the, there's a CSS feature that came out, I think it was a couple of years ago, and I finally had an opportunity as like, oh, you know, I've been hearing about this thing.
[00:18:47] Adam: it's called container queries. And I wanted to, I, I finally like ran into a place where it's like, oh, this is the thing that container queries solves the problem. So I, I got to play with it. It turns out it's like super easy to implement and use in Tailwind V four, which was, a double bonus. 'cause I'm, I'm writing Tailwind code.
[00:19:04] Adam: so if you're not familiar, if you're, if you are familiar with Responsive design, but you're not familiar with container queries, they, that's like the same basic thing except that, container queries, it's just you define what the container is that it's checking the width of. Right? Instead of being basing everything off of the full page width, you're saying, okay, well what if I have a two column or a three column layout?
[00:19:28] Adam: And the, the sizes of those columns might change as the page width changes, but then the stuff that's in those columns, I might want, maybe it's a, a horizontal layout with a screen is wider and the columns are wider, but as that column gets narrower, a horizontal layout doesn't work as well anymore. So you might swap it to be like a vertical stack of something.
[00:19:47] Adam: and so, we finally got to, to play with container queries, and they are like, it's beautiful. It's, it's like such a small amount of code and it does, it just works perfectly. It does, it works exactly like I thought it would and I'm so happy with it.
[00:20:01] Ben: What was the thing you, container query just outta curiosity.
[00:20:05] Adam: So, I mean, it's basically what I just described there. So, one of the things I've been working on at work is, kind of building a new system of templates, like design templates to make it real easy for our customers to kind of choose from a library of like, this is what the template should look like.
[00:20:20] Adam: And then they can kind of customize it, swap stuff around, add their own copy, pick their own images, change the colors, et cetera. And, one of the components on the page, it's like an, it's an upsell thing, right? So we're talking about the giving page. You, you're saying, I want to give $500 to the school of engineering or whatever.
[00:20:36] Adam: And then underneath that, there's like this little box and. The idea is it's a, it's a quick little upsell, a nice photo and some text to say like, did you know you can just check this box to add a $25 gift to the general fund or whatever help, college kids who need scholarships or something like that, right?
[00:20:52] Adam: and that's pretty much exactly what I was talking about. So I've got the, this one layout that's, I call it the 50 50. it's just, it's two columns are, both are exactly 50%. The one with the, like giving four minute scrolls vertically. And then the other column is just like a nice image and it's stuck right there on screen.
[00:21:08] Adam: It doesn't move. and, so the, the two columns are dependent, you know, they're, they're 50% of the browser window width, except when you get to a really narrow width, then the two columns stack. but so for these wider or like wide ish views, right? So let's say like think iPad, right? Maybe I've had horizontal or maybe I've iPad vertical, orientation.
[00:21:30] Adam: You've got this two column layout and it's fine. Maybe the two columns are somewhat narrow. And so when you have that, then you, like, within that column that has the form, then if you have, like, let's just call it a card, right? And if that card was split vertically, so you've got like left half as a photo and right half is a little bit of text and like a checkbox, if those columns get too narrow, then it just feels squished.
[00:21:54] Adam: It doesn't look right. Right. So then what I did was said, okay, if the column is below this width, then swap it to be, horizontal or vertically stacked instead of horizontally, split. Yeah.
[00:22:07] Ben: So just to paint the picture for other people, and maybe for myself as well, you could have done this with traditional media queries where you think about the page getting thinner until it hits a break point, and then you
[00:22:21] Ben: change those buttons. But to use a media query in that regard would have baked into it an understanding that you were in a two column layout. And then, well, what if one day you wanted to have a one column layout? Or what if one day you wanted to have a three column layout? Then
[00:22:37] Ben: all of that logic has to change together
[00:22:39] Adam: right. Yeah. You can do a, a just a traditional responsive, media query, but then you have to go, okay, this is a two column layout, so you know, instead of 10 24 pixels, I'm basing it on five 12. Right. Or, or if I wouldn't normally break it at five 12, I have to say, well, actually it's because that's 10 24 because I'm, it's two columns.
[00:22:56] Adam: So each one of them is
[00:22:57] Ben: now you don't have to care about any of that.
[00:22:58] Adam: Exactly. Yeah. And that, and that, that's another nice thing. It's like this same component gets reused across different layouts. Right. This upsell thing I was talking about. and so, it doesn't care what kind of layout it's in, it's just like, if we're below this width, you know, if the, if my container is below this width, then it stacks vertically, and if it's not, then it's next horizontally.
[00:23:17] Adam: and, and so like I did that and that was kind of like the eye-opener moment for me. And then I found like five other places in that same formula. I was like, Ooh, that would be great. Here and here, and here and here.
[00:23:26] Ben: nice. Yo, quick, quick side tangent for a second. So. One of the conversations that we had in Discord was,I was saying, I, I don't like the idea of recording the reasons that decisions were made. I feel like companies really love the idea of recording stuff, and I'm like, I'm over it. And the container queries is an interesting thing because I believe, and I could be totally wrong on this, but I believe that for years we wanted container queries as an industry. And the browser makers were like, we can't do this. Because you can very easily code yourself under a corner where you're like constantly snapping back and forth between different container query conditions and you get all this flicker. And you could imagine that someone had write, written some giant document about why this wouldn't work. And then I, I think it was like one guy was just like, well, what if we just do it this way? And everyone was like, oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, that works. And I think to myself, like, how many people. Would have the goal to say, like, read the documentation on why a decision was made and still wanna say, yeah, but what if we did it a completely different way?
[00:24:35] Ben: Whereas if no one ever recorded why decisions were made, then it would be like any day someone could come in and be like, you know what? I think we can prove this process and not have to be weighed down by this 10 years of technology decision makings that may or may not still be relevant.
[00:24:50] Adam: You know, it's almost like nuance applies to most things.
[00:24:53] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
[00:24:55] Adam: Because like I, I, I agree with your, your thesis there, but at the same time, like, you know, sometimes you document the decision so that you're, you, you know, you've run across those comments that are like, you know, the comment is 20 times longer than the code and the comments like, don't try to modify this.
[00:25:11] Adam: And at, you know, it's like a whole three paragraphs of like, this is why it is the way it is. And then underneath is like, okay, and, increment this counter every time that you try to fix this and spend more than a day on it, and then give up, you know,
[00:25:22] Ben: Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely nuance. For sure. For sure. cool. I have not used container queries, but I look forward to trying it.
[00:25:29] Maniacs and Idiots
[00:25:29] Adam: So, George Carlin has a joke. Ben wrote it down for me. I, I'm, I'm referencing it from Ben, and he was paraphrasing it. but basically you ever notice that the people who drive faster than you are maniacs and the people who drive slower than you are idiots. which I think is, it's a perfect joke, right?
[00:25:43] Adam: It's a, it's a one line, one liner, and, and it just perfectly captures that little, glimpse of, of humanity. but I think you had a really interesting take on this, Ben. You were kind of relating it to, I don't know. I, I don't wanna put words in your mouth. You go ahead.
[00:25:56] Ben: I, I, I was relating it to the kind of the muscle and the gesture of learning and to, to kind of put it in a context. I was listening to the fall through podcast, formally known as Go Time podcast, and they were talking today, and this is a topic that they have touched on many times in the past, which is that developers don't know enough layer below stuff.
[00:26:24] Ben: We all sort of have a superficial understanding of the technologies that we work in. We don't necessarily have any mastery or even understanding. Of the layer below. To paint a concrete example in the cold fusion world, cold fusion is built on top of Java, and our whole request response cycle, I think, is a fairly thin layer above the Java server lit context. and I know nothing about the Java server lit context or how Java pages work, or how JSP tags work, and like maybe it would benefit me to learn a little bit more about that lower level stuff, but I just, I've never been motivated enough to dig in. But, but on the, on the Falter podcast, they were talking about how people don't know enough about things like chip architectures and the kind of the distributed system of, of networks that's actually inside your single computer.
[00:27:16] Ben: And people don't know enough about distributed systems, but they, they talk in such broad strokes, like this is what all web developers should know, and. I look at that and I think to myself, well, those people are maniacs. Like why would I have to know about chip architecture in order to build a forms over databases web app?
[00:27:38] Adam: Right.
[00:27:38] Ben: But at the same time, I look at other people who, who like don't know the first thing about writing SQL statements or didn't even know that you could add an index to a database to help look up performance. And I'm like, well, those people are idiots because they didn't even take any time at all to learn about how the basic tools that they use on a day-to-day basis actually work. And, and I feel like I, I feel like I've gotten so comfortable building upon the, the 20, 25 years of web development knowledge that I've accrued. That I am a little bit seeing this world in a bifurcated way, where it's like the people who are putting in more effort than me are maniacs, and the people who are putting in less effort than me are idiots. And I feel like I don't have a good muscle anymore. A good instinct on what are the things I should be spending more time learning actively, and what are the things that are not necessarily worth my time to investate,
[00:28:40] Adam: So I wanna jump in here. I, I am gonna put words in your mouth this time, Ben, because, well, because I, I know you and I know your intent, and I just wanna make sure that nobody is misreading what you're saying. You know the word maniac. I. Think in a lot of context, in a lot of contexts can be seen through a positive light, right?
[00:28:58] Adam: It's, it's difficult to see the word idiot through a positive light, right? So, but I know you, and I don't think that what you're saying is people are dumb because I think that there's, it's what's think the, the nuance loss there is people who choose not to put in as much effort, right? Like they have the ability, but they're just like too lazy or not interested in, in being better at their craft
[00:29:18] Ben: Well, e exactly. And, and I guess part of the, the, difficulty or the, the battle that I'm having in my own head is that, am I becoming an idiot? And meaning that, are there things in, in the humorous sense of the word, like are
[00:29:33] Ben: there are things that I should be spending time learning and that I have the ability to think actively and deeply about, but I'm just choosing not to because I think I've maybe lost some of the perspective after having been in this industry for so long and.
[00:29:50] Tim: It's like, like testing.
[00:29:54] Ben: I mean, when that proves to be a problem, you know, I'll reevaluate. But, but obviously thi this is very front of mind for me because of all the AI stuff, because I am clearly not diving into AI the way I think a lot of people are.
[00:30:11] Tim: You sure do talk about it a lot.
[00:30:13] Ben: And, and that's a lot of that inner turmoil that I have, that I, you know, are these people the maniacs or am I have, I just become the idiot? And, and, and that, that's obviously very specific to ai, but I, I think this is broadly I applicable, you know, to put it in another concrete example, I have used MySQL for a long time and I have like actually read books about MySQL and about, from the guys from
[00:30:40] Adam: You're a mania.
[00:30:41] Ben: Right. But yeah, and I think a lot of people would say, well, that's ridiculous.
[00:30:45] Ben: Like, who needs to, to spend time learning about MySQL? But there are definitely things about databases that I don't understand. Like I don't understand how replication works and how the low level right ahead log works and how, data capture, there's, there's something where you can like actually tap into the log events so that you can do your own kind of trigger logic.
[00:31:05] Ben: Like I, I don't know, low level stuff like that. 'cause that to me was always, I don't need to know that those like only database maniacs learn stuff to that level.but like now I'm using SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and I feel like I've definitely swung way hard the other way where I've like put in zero proactive effort into learning about SQL Server. And all I do now is I go to chat GPT and I say, Hey, I need to add a uniqueness constraint to an email column on SQL Server. How do I do that? And, you know, it gives me like a two line altar statement. I'm like, all right, that's good enough for me. I don't really care that much. Like, that terrifies me. It terrifies me that I'm like, yeah, I just don't care that much, but like, maybe that's okay.
[00:31:46] Ben: I don't know. And, and that's the, that's the battle that I'm having in my head is that I no longer feel like I know what's okay and what's not okay.
[00:31:54] Adam: Well, I mean our industry has exploded in a very short time, like basically in a single lifetime. We've gone from a computer can fit into a single room now to, there's probably. somewhere between 10 and 50,000 different things you can specialize in, in computer science or, or computer technology work.
[00:32:14] Adam: so, you know, if, if you have one of these 10,000 plus jobs, you know, you can't be expected to even have a base level of all of the other jobs on that list, right? Like, you're gonna, you're gonna have your specialty and you're gonna hopefully kind of like have some awareness of what's out there on the peripheral of, you know, just outside of your lane basically.
[00:32:38] Adam: and, and I think that that, and, and, you know, when we're, when we're younger and more excited and the, the industry hasn't exploded as much as it has yet, right? So we're like, we're growing with the industry, right? So our. And it's kind of like, one of those charts, right? So the, the industry is going up into the right and we are getting older and, and having more things, demanding of our time.
[00:32:58] Adam: So we're going down into the right. And so you, you kinda hit this point where you will never, you know, the, where the lines cross, I guess it's like you, you're never, you're going downhill from there. You'll, you'll never
[00:33:10] Tim: It's our, it's our life career burndown chart,
[00:33:12] Tim: right?
[00:33:12] Adam: Yeah, exactly.
[00:33:15] Carol: your past
[00:33:15] Carol: velocity.
[00:33:16] Tim: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's funny you say 'cause it's like, I'm remembering when I went to school and I had to learn the TCP/IP stack,
[00:33:25] Tim: right. And that was on the test. And I remember as a sweat that I'm like, but when you're young and you're inexperienced, you don't really know what you're gonna need to know in the job.
[00:33:33] Tim: right.
[00:33:34] Tim: and
[00:33:34] Tim: and educators, educators don't really know what field you're going into. So I think they just give you a smattering of everything. I'm watching Max take classes and he's, you know, doing all this
[00:33:44] Ben: Max is your son. For
[00:33:45] Tim: max is my son Maxwell. Yeah. My son, my, my son Maxwell, he's, he's getting his CS degree and I saw him, he had to build, A program that simulated a, a virtual memory, right? And I'm like, okay, that's cool. But it's like, and when you're young, you're like, well, maybe I need to know this. You try to learn everything. You don't really understand how it all goes together.
[00:34:07] Tim: You just have a whole bunch of stuff that kind of is thrown against your brain. Some of it sticks. And then hopefully, eventually you make connections between them all. And you know, he makes this, this VM simulation, virtual memory simulation. And it's, I'm like, yeah, I, I, that will never actually be useful to you in your job. I didn't tell him that. I didn't wanna discourage it. 'cause he was super excited.
[00:34:28] Tim: He, I heard him go, yes. And he comes out and goes, dad, I, I built it and it worked on the first try. I'm like, well
[00:34:33] Tim: it's prob I'm like, it, I'm like, it probably has bugs that you don't know about yet. Working on the first try is always a forehead flag for me. But you know, it's like, as I've gotten older, it's like I learn about a new thing and I'm like, okay, that's interesting.
[00:34:46] Tim: But. I realize in my job role, it's probably gonna be somebody else's problem, so I'll just be aware that it's a thing,
[00:34:54] Carol: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:54] Tim: but
[00:34:55] Tim: I really don't
[00:34:55] Carol: to resolution.
[00:34:56] Tim: Right. But I don't really care about the details, so I I get what you're saying, Ben. It's like, I think at some point you just gotta be like, you can't know it all.
[00:35:06] Carol: this year has been completely chaotic for me. Like
[00:35:08] Carol: 20, 25 has just been. One problem after another. So I feel like I am on the same page as you, but for a different reason. I am in the learn what I need to, to react to the problem because the person who knew it is no longer here.
[00:35:25] Carol: I don't have time to learn it all. I only can get through one like fire, and I just need to solve it as quick as possible or find someone who can solve it quickly and then move on to the next one, which is sad because. I would spend a day going through and being like, what does this new AWS service do?
[00:35:43] Carol: And like, how is this useful to me? And now I'm just going, don't implement anything new. Actually don't look at the forward progress and what we're gonna design. Let's only focus on making what we have like maintainable. And I feel like I'm also pushing developers that way and it makes me feel bad. So we'll be like in story pointing and I'm going, there's no way.
[00:36:04] Carol: That's five. You don't need time to go learn everything. Just make the fix. And it's like a three max. A three. Don't even dare put a five on that. And I have to step back and go. It's not fair for me to like put them in this fight mode because of what's going on. They need to have the opportunity to learn and I shouldn't take that away from them.
[00:36:22] Carol: So I have to like close my mouth a lot.
[00:36:25] Ben: Yeah. But I think we all also have had horror stories that we've lived through where people over-engineer stuff
[00:36:32] Ben: because it's fun and exciting, and then people like Carol are left maintaining it after the, after this person's gone. Right. You know? So I think there's a certain degree of pragmatism that you're, IM imbuing into their development life that I think is going to be valuable and is, is valuable and will continue to be valuable in the rest of their career.
[00:36:53] Adam: That's a really interesting thought. Ben, what if you had to, you were specifically responsible for all the code you ever wrote, like you have to go back and fix it when it breaks,
[00:37:02] Ben: Yeah,
[00:37:02] Adam: if you've moved on to another job or whatever,
[00:37:04] Ben: that is
[00:37:05] Carol: Oh damn.
[00:37:07] Ben: I mean. hate to say this, but like to some degree I am so emotionally connected to my code, which I know is like a total party faux pa, but I, you know, everything from the white space to the ordering of the properties to the ordering of the meth. It's like, the reason that I think about that stuff is because the code is my baby and, and I to some degree, I feel like once I leave a company, I feel like, oh, that code's baked.
[00:37:35] Ben: You don't have to touch it. Please don't ever touch it.
[00:37:39] Carol: Yeah. I'm more like, please don't touch it and don't call me.
[00:37:42] Ben: Yeah.
[00:37:45] Adam: I think it would change the way that people wrote code Yeah. it would. Yeah.
[00:37:49] Tim: I feel that because there's a project that an API that I wrote that I'm really pretty much the only person who worked on it and I did for a short period of time, give someone else access to it. And she started making so many weird changes to it. I just took away her access. I'm like, I, I can't, I, I can't handle, I can't handle what you're doing to this.
[00:38:13] Adam: You broke, Ben. I broke in. We did it. We did it.
[00:38:19] Adam: I wish people could see how red he's turning.
[00:38:21] Tim: it is
[00:38:21] Carol: we should have
[00:38:22] Ben: Oh my God. That
[00:38:23] Carol: out a random sticker every time it happens,
[00:38:26] Ben: just like revoke.
[00:38:28] Tim: I just remember, I like, she started like, like I, I was like very proud. It was a very stateless thing and she started like putting in like. These database storage queries. I'm like, no, no, I don't. I don't. I don't want any of that. I don't want any of that at all. I wanna be able to scale this thing horizontally.
[00:38:42] Tim: Stop it.
[00:38:43] Understanding the Low Level
[00:38:43] Ben: Oh. Yo, so true. Oh, I, that's like the other. Okay, so not to, to to, to bring it back to the fall through podcast this morning, I was out front walking on my little cul-de-sac here, so I was listening, and one of the other things that they were talking about was how, because people didn't understand the kind of low level architecture of things, they started to add a lot of complexity in order to try to mitigate the things that they didn't understand.
[00:39:10] Ben: And one of the examples that he gives is putting database servers on a different server. The whole reason that we had database servers was to try to get around some sort of, I, I didn't quite follow the logic that he was saying, but basically if we had just left database servers on the same server as the application server, we would've, been able to architect things much more simply. But I'm listening to him say that, and I'm like, well, what about just scaling anything? I mean, at one point the one server you're on may not be sufficient. And then if you hadn't prepared.
[00:39:42] Ben: Have a separate database server, then you're kind of in a world of hurt. 'cause now you have to scale, you know, vertically instead of any chance of scaling horizontally,
[00:39:50] Ben: so.
[00:39:51] Adam: you can only throw so many CPU cores and so much ram like there are, there are servers out there that have, you know, like 512 CPU cores and a terra flop of, of Ram or whatever. It's like, okay, well what are you paying per hour for that buddy?
[00:40:05] Ben: I feel, I feel like the, the people on the fall through previously Go Time podcast, like they skew so hard to the other side of low level understanding that, I think they almost miss this simplicity that you break into your life by not having to know the low level stuff. So it's, I, it's, again, it's like one of those things where I just feel like I've lost my ability to some degree. To know where I'm supposed to put the effort. 'cause there are people who feel very strongly in so many different directions.
[00:40:38] Tim: I mean, how far do you go with that? I remember in my super early days, you know, teenager learning programming, you know, it was common to actually write assembly,
[00:40:46] Tim: Right,
[00:40:48] Tim: But then it's like, well, you know, why can't we have, you know, have the computer we, we'll, you know, create a scripting language and you'll compile it to, to assembly.
[00:40:55] Tim: Like, oh, that's a great idea. I mean, is that how far you wanna go down to assembly level?
[00:40:59] Ben: right, right. And that wouldn't serve me,
[00:41:02] Tim: Hey, what? Yeah, what, what, what benefit do you get from that? So, but I do love that George Carlin quote. 'cause it is so true. Like, I'm going 80 miles an hour in a 70, and then some person goes past me in 90. I'm like, that person is reckless. They're so reckless, and someone's going 70 in my lane. I'm like, yeah, the way you slow poke, my God. What do you, you shouldn't even be on the road if you're going 70 miles.
[00:41:25] Tim: It's the, it's the no one goes the speed limit. Come on.
[00:41:27] Driving Anecdotes and Lessons
[00:41:27] Adam: Well, so it's funny you mentioned that my daughter actually just took her driver's license test and got her driver's license today.
[00:41:33] Ben: Ah, congratulations.
[00:41:35] Adam: yeah, and, it has been, I love her to death, but having to drive with her for all the hours she has to, to log to, to learn everything and, and get prepared to take the test has been a little bit of hell because.
[00:41:49] Adam: she's my rule follower child. Like I have one that's like, why, why would somebody choose to break the law? I don't understand. Like, why? You know, why would you drive 46 in a 45? It doesn't make sense. and, and then my other child is like, get outta my way and I'm gonna go jump off the roof of whatever, you know, like,
[00:42:05] Tim: That's your boy. That's your kid right there, buddy. That's your kid.
[00:42:09] Adam: but, but I've been driving with my daughter for a lot and, and man, you, you can tell everybody hates you because you're getting like four or five cars past you all at the same time in a no passing zone. So.
[00:42:24] Tim: Yeah.
[00:42:24] Ben: man.
[00:42:26] Tim: That's funny. My son, max is the same way. He's very much so He'll, he'll drive the speed limit. I mean, he's slightly over, but the speed limit. But the weird thing is, is like when he sees a turn, he doesn't slow down. He's, he's like, it's a 35, I'm going 35. I'm gonna take this turn at 35. Like, no, no, no, no, buddy.
[00:42:45] Picking the Perfect Tool
[00:42:45] Ben: not to bring it back to ai, but just to bring it back to AI for a second.
[00:42:48] Adam: Son
[00:42:49] Tim: go. Here we go.
[00:42:50] Ben: No, this is, this is part of the big struggle that I have where I, I just, I don't wanna spend the time. Picking the perfect tool. And because I have never done that in my career, you know,
[00:43:07] Ben: the tool that I had, I learned to use it good enough. I knew Cold Fusion. I use cold Fusion. I knew my sequel. I use my sequel. Like I, I have the cards that I was sort of dealt by chance and, and I'm playing them. And it was never a thing to me where I was like, well, let me try to find the programming language that perfectly suits this use case. Or like, let me try to find the perfect no SQL database, because using a relational database in this context would be like, not optimal. Like I just use the things that I have and I make it work. And that has served me well. That, that has been in that sort of sweet spot where I'm neither the maniac nor the idiot and
[00:43:50] Ben: I To to, me, you know, and I feel, but I felt good about it with the AI stuff. I, I feel like I want to take that. Thing that, that gesture, that approach that has worked so well for me, for the most part in the last two decades and continue to leverage it because it's the, it's the, you know, it's my anchoring point. It's the thing from which, all other learnings have have happened. And now I look at this ai and if I say, oh, I tried AI and it didn't quite work the way I want it, people are like, well, which tool are you using and which model are you using? And which system prompt have you given it? And like, how many examples did you give it?
[00:44:30] Ben: I'm not, to me that's like the, oh, you're not using VS code. Well, of course it didn't work if you're still in Sublime Text. I'm like, well, they're both text editors, bro. Like, It feels. Uncredible that we're suddenly in a world where the very specific tooling is actually making a meaningful difference, where it has not made a meaningful difference in the last 25 years. And I, and I don't know if that's BS or not, you know, I don't know if those people are maniacs and I'm an idiot, or if they're idiots and, and like I'm just a normal person trying to get my work done.
[00:45:05] Tim: I mean, AI right now is like the, like the early 1990s of internet, right? The early days of the internet. If you were looking back, if you're the person, like totally a hundred percent doubled down on Netscape. You're the idiot, right?
[00:45:21] Adam: Yeah,
[00:45:22] Tim: And so I think that's where you're, it's such a nascent technology that
[00:45:26] Tim: it is and is growing so fast.
[00:45:28] Tim: It's like, I don't think there's any right answers right now. It's just a whole lot of questions and a whole lot of opinions. So I, I block most of it out and not worry about it. It's like, do what I can with, do what I, and like, but unfortunately, like corporations have all decided this is what's gonna help them increase their net revenue by 20% year over year. So they're
[00:45:48] Tim: all like, oh, figure it out. Yeah.
[00:45:49] Tim: Go, go do something with ai, ai. And, and we've had meetings about that to, to be honest, we're like, you know, our, you know, our corporate parent is like, oh, we're gonna use AI to get more lean and more, you know, more efficient and all that. And we're going through the motions.
[00:46:02] Tim: But honestly, it's all window dressing right now because it's
[00:46:06] Adam: had several people Go ahead.
[00:46:08] Tim: because like what we set in, you know, if we come up with a policy now, it's gonna change in six months. It's gonna change in a year. It's gonna change in two years.
[00:46:15] AI in Customer Relations
[00:46:15] Adam: Yeah, we've had several customers reach out to us and say something along the lines of like, what sort of AI stuff are you building into your products? What, you know, how are you going to use AI to benefit us? And, you know, we, we have taken time to think about it and ultimately where we've landed so far, you know, reserving the right to change our minds in the future.
[00:46:35] Adam: But what we've landed on is like the, the community that we serve, our, our customers, their livelihood is a hundred percent on the backs of their own credibility, right? The, the relationship, the personal relationship that they build with their constituents. And it would be a disservice to them to make it possible for them to spit out 10 times as much stuff and, and go a hundred times less personal.
[00:47:05] Adam: Because it might have some short term wins, but it's definitely gonna have long-term losses and trying to be thoughtful about that and, and communicate that in a way that's respectful and to, to point out like, yeah, everybody's doing it, but that's, you know, basically everybody's just kind of betting on hype and trying to keep the hype train alive and eventually it's gonna crash.
[00:47:26] AI's Impact on Credibility and Efficiency
[00:47:26] Adam: And there might be a few things that stick around that were worth it, but like 80, 70% of the stuff that people are doing with ai, you know, in 20 years if we don't hit, you know, a GI and, and you know, if it doesn't pan out to be this like panacea of all things, then 80, 20, 70, 80% of what's there is just gonna be, have been like wasted effort and it's gonna have burnt your social capital.
[00:47:50] Adam: And so it, it's a very interesting situation. I it's a very principled position that we've taken and I, I'm personally finding it very interesting, but it's, it's a tough, tough spot to be in.
[00:48:01] Tim: yeah, and I agree with that because I read something, I think it was on TLDR r like, this week. Someone made the point that AI is fine. We're. Wrong information or
[00:48:12] Tim: an AI failure, the cost of that is low,
[00:48:15] Tim: but if the cost is high, right? So like we deal with insurance, so, you know, say, oh, we're gonna improve your, your claims by, you know, having AI approve or deny your claims. And then AI, you know, fails and like misses something important and denies a claim that should have been paid. And now you got a million dollar lawsuit. I mean, that's a high,
[00:48:35] Tim: high failure price. But you know, if you're just dealing with something low level that doesn't, you know, where if you fail, that's okay.
[00:48:42] Tim: We'll just try again. That's, that's okay. So.
[00:48:48] Ben: It. It's funny, you know, as much as I have maybe been slow to use AI in my life, I definitely love listening to podcasts where people talk for hours about ai. You know, I'm trying to marinate in the, in the noise of it all to try and sharpen the, the thought process. And this is just, this is like the age of TikTok for me, where it's people be like, oh, the, the feature that I really love the most is the deep research where I can just ask it a question and it goes off for 45 minutes and gives me some huge report about something. And I think to myself, like, I've been using deep research features forever. They're called books. And like someone spent 10 years mastering something and then decided to write a book about it, and then I read that book, right? But it's like people, people probably don't even write books anymore.
[00:49:38] Tim: Matt Diman does.
[00:49:40] Ben: Who,
[00:49:41] Carol: Do.
[00:49:42] Adam: They don't get the reference. They're not.
[00:49:44] Tim: Dungeon crawler, Carl?
[00:49:45] Ben: I still don't get the reference, but I like it.
[00:49:47] Adam: It's a book that Tim and I and most of our Discord likes.
[00:49:50] Tim: Yep.
[00:49:51] Ben: Gotcha. Gotcha.
[00:49:52] AI at CF Summit
[00:49:56] Ben: I will say at Summit, so CF Summit this year, the conference that Tim was talking about earlier had a whole track just on ai and I did go to a fair number of the AI talks and I was a little disappointed in that. It, it felt like there was, I don't wanna say that there was no there, there, but it was one of those things where I went in and I, and I'm, I went in with the mindset that I don't understand this stuff and I want someone to show me how that this is gonna, like, change my life. And it felt very much like a. Here's a presentation about how AI will change your life, but like, not actually show you how it will. And, and I felt like I came away from all the AI talks with like no actionable things to do other than to look more at AI like that the action was to, to get on that hype train. And, you know, some of the, some of the talks were really good. Brian Sape, I don't know how to pronounce his last name.
[00:50:53] Tim: Is that bay,
[00:50:54] Ben: he gave a last minute talk. He was brought in as a, an unscheduled speaker on ai and he talked about ai they were using it at, at his company. And it was super compelling. And he's a very compelling speaker.
[00:51:06] Ben: And, and I did, I, I got confidence just from hearing him talk about it. And he actually did talk a little bit about what metrics they were looking at. Like how many people do tab acceptance in their, in their GitHub co-pilot or they use Cursor, like how many people actually do the tab completion for Cursor and like how many times a week and how many of the engineers are actually doing that? And then like how many of those lines I think get edited over time kind of a thing. Like he's actually trying to understand how people are using it and like that I'm actually kind of interested in, because that feels concrete. At least it feels like something I can think about in terms of my mediocre brainpower at this
[00:51:46] Ben: point.
[00:51:47] Tim: hi. His, his, I think was all the ones I went to. His was the only one that actually interested in me and gave me something to think about. I don't need to know how to write prompts, right? That's gonna change. But his thing was basically, look, we have a tool. This tool can probably make you more efficient, but we don't know about how much, so
[00:52:05] Tim: let's measure everything. And then he, he kind of said to, I talked to him afterward and kind of off to the side and he's like, yeah, he gave me a number. He is like, if ai, 'cause what's gonna happen is, you know, people are gonna use AI right now. It's cheap. As a winner gets picked, it's gonna get super expensive because building all this stuff costs a lot of money. And so the price is gonna go up and at that point, the efficiency gains aren't worth the price. So he is like, he's got a number. He is like, when it hits this, you know, it's, it's not worth doing anymore. So, and that, that makes sense to me. It's like we have a tool, let's measure the tool. Does this tool help us make money or not? Yes or no?
[00:52:42] Patreon
[00:52:42] Adam: Okay, well, then this episode of Working Code is brought to you by making it an entire episode without mentioning ai.
[00:52:48] Adam: Maybe it'll happen one day.
[00:52:49] Ben: Next time.
[00:52:51] Adam: And listeners like you, if you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon. Our patrons cover our recording, editing, and transcription costs, and we couldn't do this every week without them.
[00:53:03] Adam: Special thanks to our top patrons, Monte and Giancarlo. You guys rock. We really appreciate.
[00:53:09] Thanks For Listening!
[00:53:12] Adam: We're gonna go record the after show, which you've heard me say a hundred times before, 230 times before, almost whatever, the, you know, the outro music plays and the hoi poid go away and we keep talking.
[00:53:19] Adam: and if you support us, then you get to hear us talk about all kinds of random stuff. It looks like on the docket for tonight, we have a whole bunch of, TV shows that somebody wants to discuss, and, chat messages, chat spam from ai. so that should be interesting if you would like to hear that and all of our past, after show episodes.
[00:53:37] Adam: And you can go to patreon.com/workingcodepod, throw a few bucks our way. We'd greatly appreciate it. And you get instant access to that and, early access to new episodes when they drop. And, members only area in our discord. and we'd love to have you. That's gonna do it for us this week. We'll catch you next week.
[00:53:54] Adam: And until then.
[00:53:55] Tim: Hey, I might be a maniac or an idiot here, but your heart matters.
[00:54:00] Adam: Nice
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