275: The Feelings Episode

1 October, 2026

How are we doing? No, really. The world moves fast, and keeping up doesn't leave much time to check in. This week, Adam and Ben settle in for a little podcast therapy.

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 Thursday.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Compiling — an xkcd comic about waiting for code to compile.

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Transcript

Spot an error? Send a pull request on GitHub.

[00:00:00] Cold Open

[00:00:00] Ben: Um, the other thing that I find very isolating is that.

[00:00:02] Adam: I'm just gonna turn my headphones off while you do this.

[00:00:04] Adam: Is that okay?

[00:00:26] Intro

[00:00:26] Adam: Okay, here we go.

[00:00:27] Adam: It is show number 275.

[00:00:28] Adam: And on today's show, we have a special treat for you.

[00:00:31] Adam: It's just myself and Ben this week.

[00:00:34] Adam: Uh, so we thought we would do the feelings episode.

[00:00:38] Adam: Uh, Ben never has a shortage of feelings.

[00:00:40] Adam: I've been feeling the feels lately, so we thought we'd get into that a little bit.

[00:00:41] Ben: M.

[00:00:45] Adam: but first, as usual, let's start with the triumphs and fails.

[00:00:47] Adam's Fail

[00:00:47] Adam: I'm going to kick it off and, uh, since I was recently accused of being nothing but triumphs, here's a fail.

[00:00:56] Ben: For shame.

[00:00:56] Adam: Um,

[00:00:57] Adam: yeah, so I've been having some health issues.

[00:00:59] Adam: I've talked in the past on the show about my autoimmune disorder and the way that that can affect me with like, inflammation and stuff.

[00:01:07] Adam: I started having another inflammation attack, maybe a month or so ago.

[00:01:11] Adam: At this point, it's hard to say.

[00:01:12] Adam: and I, like, really, for me that what that was was I was having some hip pain, some back pain, shoulder pain.

[00:01:18] Ben: Mhm.

[00:01:18] Adam: And, and then like about two days into it, I, I started to realize, like, you know, my eye kind of hurts for no reason and I've had a headache for a couple of days.

[00:01:25] Adam: Like just one eye and it's just like kind of tender or sore.

[00:01:29] Adam: Right.

[00:01:29] Ben: Mhm.

[00:01:30] Adam: It was, it was weird.

[00:01:31] Adam: And after about two days of that, I went, you know, let me get this checked out.

[00:01:35] Adam: So I, I

[00:01:37] Adam: made uh, an appointment with my ophthalmologist and um, she was like, yeah, actually this is another iritis attack, which is inflammation of the iris muscle in your eye.

[00:01:46] Ben: Oh man.

[00:01:47] Adam: and, uh, fortunately I caught it early and we jumped right on the, the high strength steroid eye drops and within a day or two, the eye pain was gone.

[00:01:56] Adam: The headaches have all but subsided now.

[00:01:58] Adam: so I'm on the mend.

[00:02:00] Adam: but I'm, I'm still battling and just a general inflammation attack.

[00:02:04] Adam: My shoulder still hurts quite a bit,

[00:02:06] Ben: M.

[00:02:06] Ben: Well it sounds like as long as you don't use your knees, your hip, your back or your shoulder.

[00:02:12] Adam: Right?

[00:02:12] Adam: Yeah.

[00:02:13] Adam: Yeah.

[00:02:13] Adam: So, a lot has, has happened.

[00:02:15] Adam: Right.

[00:02:15] Adam: I started talking about this.

[00:02:16] Adam: The, the pain started about a month ago, maybe a week or so into that is when I started to get like, seek treat treatment for it.

[00:02:23] Adam: And, and then I've just been living since then, for like the last, say, week.

[00:02:27] Adam: I have pretty much lived on a heating pad, um, like the the last weekend that we just had, literally all day Saturday, all day Sunday, I sat on the couch on a heating pad and it has like a built in timer and when it would run out, I, and it would start to cool off, I'd be like, nope.

[00:02:30] Ben: Mhm.

[00:02:42] Adam: And turn it back on.

[00:02:44] Ben: We have one of those.

[00:02:44] Adam: And I sleep on a heating pad to try and like, you know, just comfort those aching joints.

[00:02:49] Ben: Oh man.

[00:02:50] Adam: Which I know is technically you're not supposed to do.

[00:02:52] Adam: So sorry.

[00:02:53] Adam: Not sorry.

[00:02:54] Ben: Yo, whatever makes you feel a little more comfortable.

[00:02:56] Adam: yeah, yeah, for sure.

[00:02:58] Adam: But so here's the fail part.

[00:02:59] Adam: other than my body hates me because of all the pain and the, the difficulty, especially with my shoulder, I think that's the main reason besides the mental aspect of all of it.

[00:03:09] Adam: But the main physical reason is my shoulder pain.

[00:03:11] Adam: I haven't really worked out in over a month.

[00:03:14] Adam: I, I was struggling with a little bit of depression stuff prior to that and kind of slacking off on working out prior to that.

[00:03:20] Adam: But once, once the pain got bad, I was like, okay, well now I can't work out.

[00:03:24] Adam: Right.

[00:03:24] Adam: Before it was excuses, now it is a legitimate excuse I can't work out.

[00:03:25] Ben: Mhm.

[00:03:29] Adam: But just, you know, it's been so long, I'm, I'm feeling my gains go away.

[00:03:33] Adam: I know they come back easier the second time than they did the first time, but um.

[00:03:36] Ben: M.

[00:03:36] Ben: But still it's a, it, it's a big mental.

[00:03:37] Adam: Yeah,

[00:03:39] Adam: yeah.

[00:03:40] Adam: So then it, then it kind of snowballs.

[00:03:42] Adam: Right.

[00:03:42] Adam: I'm getting, starting to get disappointed in myself for letting it go for so long.

[00:03:46] Adam: Uh, and, and there's, you know, uh, broadly too.

[00:03:49] Adam: Right.

[00:03:49] Adam: kind of the, the living in, living through the slow loss of my job to what we will begrudgingly call AI chipping away at it.

[00:03:58] Ben: Mhm.

[00:03:59] Adam: So it's just, it's it's starting to feel like the bad, bad days are outnumbering the good days.

[00:04:04] Adam: Um, you know, I'm a, I'm a positive, optimistic person in general.

[00:04:08] Adam: And this too shall pass.

[00:04:09] Adam: I'm not in a deep hole, but it's not a great feeling.

[00:04:13] Ben: Yeah, I, relate very strongly.

[00:04:15] Ben: I mean obviously I, everyone has different issues that they're dealing with.

[00:04:19] Ben: I've also just been having a lot of depression.

[00:04:21] Ben: Um, I also,

[00:04:23] Ben: this is, I'm, I'm trying not to freak out about this, but I've always, I've had glasses for like 20 something years.

[00:04:31] Adam: Mhm.

[00:04:31] Adam: Mm.

[00:04:31] Ben: Um, for, for farsighted.

[00:04:33] Ben: Uh, well, I, I, I can, I can't see distance is that farsighted or nearsighted?

[00:04:37] Adam: Okay.

[00:04:38] Adam: I think that's nearsighted.

[00:04:38] Ben: I don't, I don't.

[00:04:39] Ben: All right.

[00:04:39] Adam: Your sight exists up close.

[00:04:39] Ben: Yeah, in the, in the near.

[00:04:42] Adam: Yeah.

[00:04:42] Ben: Um, and I, you know, it's like I could, I have generally been able to see very clearly from my face to about six feet and then it starts to get a little progressively blurrier and blurrier.

[00:04:55] Adam: Mm.

[00:04:55] Ben: And in the last two weeks I have noticed that things that are really close, I'm having trouble focusing on.

[00:05:03] Ben: And my wife, who's older than I am, she's like, yeah, that's how it happens.

[00:05:07] Ben: You can see up close one day and then another day.

[00:05:08] Adam: Mhm.

[00:05:10] Ben: You need readers.

[00:05:11] Ben: I'm like, no, that can't be right.

[00:05:14] Ben: And now it's like every hour I'm like checking to see what's.

[00:05:14] Adam: Yeah.

[00:05:17] Ben: My hand, My eyes feel tired to look at my hand and I'm like holding my phone up and I'm like, how close can I get the phone to my face?

[00:05:20] Adam: Yep.

[00:05:24] Adam: Yeah, that's the one that's irritating to me.

[00:05:24] Ben: And.

[00:05:26] Adam: It's like I, I can no longer sit with the phone so close to my.

[00:05:29] Adam: My.

[00:05:29] Adam: And when I say close to my face, I'm talking like, you know, 9 to 12 inches feels too close now, right?

[00:05:35] Ben: Yeah, so

[00:05:35] Adam: Uh, you gotta like hold it, hold your phone out at arm's length.

[00:05:38] Adam: It's annoying.

[00:05:38] Ben: I made an appointment with the uh, with my eye doctor just to make sure that it's just aging and not something more precarious.

[00:05:46] Ben: I had a, I had an eye exam.

[00:05:46] Adam: Yeah.

[00:05:49] Ben: Like my annual eye exam.

[00:05:50] Ben: I dunno, a couple of months ago and everything was fine.

[00:05:52] Ben: So I think it is just suddenly I'm older.

[00:05:57] Adam: Mhm.

[00:05:57] Ben: Uh, and that sucks.

[00:05:59] Ben: Trying not to think about it too.

[00:06:01] Adam: Yeah.

[00:06:02] Adam: if it does turn out that you need glasses.

[00:06:04] Adam: But the.

[00:06:05] Adam: Well you said you've had glasses for, for your nearsightedness.

[00:06:07] Ben: I like for, for, for driving and watching movies.

[00:06:10] Adam: Right.

[00:06:11] Adam: So if it, if it does turn out that you need glasses, like closer to full time or whatever, like, you know, one correction, like a bifocal type situation.

[00:06:16] Ben: Yeah.

[00:06:17] Ben: Yeah.

[00:06:18] Adam: Right.

[00:06:19] Adam: Um, my m.

[00:06:19] Adam: I.

[00:06:20] Adam: So the, the medical eye stuff that I have going on is a very fun experience.

[00:06:26] Adam: Totally, uh, untreated.

[00:06:28] Adam: Totally untreated.

[00:06:28] Adam: It would make me go blind in whatever eyes it's affecting.

[00:06:30] Ben: Oh

[00:06:31] Adam: So you have to treat it, and the treatment changes the shape of your eye.

[00:06:32] Ben: yeah.

[00:06:37] Adam: Like the, I don't know, whatever.

[00:06:39] Adam: It's steroid drops, I guess it changes.

[00:06:42] Ben: And the shape of the eye is how we focus, right?

[00:06:42] Adam: Or maybe it's the iritis.

[00:06:43] Adam: I don't know.

[00:06:44] Adam: Yes.

[00:06:45] Adam: And so, it has changed my prescription.

[00:06:48] Adam: like every time I get an.

[00:06:49] Adam: One of these attacks, it changes my prescription.

[00:06:51] Adam: and slightly, like the first couple times, it was like, you barely qualify for a prescription.

[00:06:51] Ben: Oh.

[00:06:55] Ben: Mhm.

[00:06:55] Adam: It's like literally one eye and the, the minimum increment from totally perfect to here's a prescription.

[00:07:03] Adam: And it has gotten a little bit worse over the years.

[00:07:06] Adam: Um, but when I had that initial prescription, uh, I let the lady at the vision center, talk me into progressive lenses where it's like, not bifocals with a line where it's like above this line it's this prescription.

[00:07:19] Adam: Below the line it's this prescription.

[00:07:20] Ben: Oh.

[00:07:20] Ben: Interesting.

[00:07:20] Adam: It's like it, it is like, transitions kind of gently from one prescription to the other, and you can't see the line in the glasses.

[00:07:26] Ben: Okay.

[00:07:29] Adam: And I think that's the, that's supposed to be the appeal is that you don't have the old people looking bifocal glasses.

[00:07:35] Adam: Right.

[00:07:37] Adam: and

[00:07:38] Adam: honestly, I hated them.

[00:07:40] Adam: I.

[00:07:40] Adam: I didn't wear them almost entirely because I couldn't get used to the whole, like, progressive, prescription thing.

[00:07:48] Adam: Finding the right point within the glasses to look through.

[00:07:51] Ben: Right.

[00:07:51] Ben: Yeah.

[00:07:51] Adam: Like, I'm trying to, like, look straight ahead, but I'm adjusting my head up and down, trying to find the right spot to look through.

[00:07:51] Ben: Because you're constantly judge.

[00:07:52] Ben: Adjusting.

[00:07:57] Adam: Couldn't.

[00:07:58] Adam: Couldn't make it work.

[00:07:59] Adam: It was just like everything was blurry.

[00:08:00] Adam: So I was like, screw this.

[00:08:02] Adam: If I ever have to get another update, I'm gonna get, well, these, this most recent pair that I got.

[00:08:08] Adam: I just got single vision.

[00:08:09] Adam: It's like, that's it.

[00:08:10] Adam: But now, even with those, I can't do the up close.

[00:08:13] Adam: Right.

[00:08:13] Adam: Like we're talking about the, the phone up close or whatever.

[00:08:14] Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:08:16] Adam: It doesn't cover that.

[00:08:16] Adam: It only covers the distance.

[00:08:17] Adam: So I think I'm all.

[00:08:18] Adam: I'm kind of like near to midsighted and now the, the closeup is going as well.

[00:08:21] Ben: Mhm.

[00:08:23] Ben: Well, yeah, even with my, my glasses, which I can see really well with them on, but with them on I see worse.

[00:08:24] Adam: Um,

[00:08:32] Ben: Really close.

[00:08:33] Adam: Mhm.

[00:08:34] Ben: I got, I don't know, I mean, but that's always been kind of true.

[00:08:34] Adam: Interesting.

[00:08:37] Ben: With them.

[00:08:38] Ben: I don't know.

[00:08:39] Adam: Yeah.

[00:08:40] Adam: I don't know, I, I, I grew up with vision better than 20/20.

[00:08:43] Adam: So the moment my eyes started to go, it started to be like, very obvious to me that, something was wrong.

[00:08:48] Ben: Crazy.

[00:08:49] Adam: Yeah.

[00:08:51] Adam: So anyway, that's me.

[00:08:51] Ben: Oh,

[00:08:52] Adam: uh, is peachy.

[00:08:53] Adam: What about you, Ben?

[00:08:56] Ben's Triumph

[00:08:56] Ben: Well, I'll go with a, A, uh, Triumph, which is that I'm starting to do some stuff that I haven't done in a long time.

[00:09:02] Adam: Mhm.

[00:09:04] Adam: Congratulations on stuff.

[00:09:04] Ben: Um, yeah, I know I primarily around.

[00:09:08] Ben: I've done some personal coding, programming.

[00:09:11] Ben: I've also started to do a little bit of fitness stuff.

[00:09:13] Ben: Again, I, I basically have not worked out.

[00:09:15] Adam: Just rub it in.

[00:09:17] Ben: I.

[00:09:17] Ben: But I feel like I'm in a little bit of the same boat where I basically haven't worked out, uh, with any kind of consistency at all since like June or something crazy.

[00:09:26] Ben: Uh, and that was before the puppy.

[00:09:28] Ben: That was more just kind of, I think, general depression and some aches and pains.

[00:09:32] Adam: Mm, mhm,

[00:09:33] Ben: And then the puppy came and, uh, normally what I would do is work out on my lunch break.

[00:09:38] Ben: That's what I've been doing for years.

[00:09:40] Adam: Mhm,

[00:09:40] Ben: Um, but with the puppy, it's required so much, um, that I spend my lunch break with the dog to give my wife a break because she kind of handles the morning and afternoon stuff.

[00:09:51] Ben: So we're constantly trading off.

[00:09:52] Ben: And thankfully puppy is kind of like starting to chill.

[00:09:57] Ben: Um, it's just she's.

[00:09:57] Ben: I mean, she's still young.

[00:09:58] Ben: She's just five months a couple of days ago, so she's still very young.

[00:10:03] Ben: And we just keep telling each other that it's gonna get better.

[00:10:08] Ben: And we knew that the first couple of months were just going to be awful.

[00:10:08] Adam: Mhm,

[00:10:11] Ben: Uh, so I'm, I'm happy to report that is slowly, especially in the last two weeks, feels like there's been a noticeable difference where she's starting to relax a little bit, starting to take some more naps, I guess.

[00:10:25] Ben: So it used to be that I would get up at 5:00am um, which is when I always get up and she would wake up with me and I would take her out and then I'd have to feed her and play with her.

[00:10:32] Ben: And basically from 5 to 8 or like from 5 to 7:30, I'd be just on puppy duty and then I would take a shower and I'd start work.

[00:10:34] Adam: Mhm,

[00:10:40] Ben: But now I'll play with her for like an hour.

[00:10:42] Ben: You know, like, I wake up at five and then by six she's actually ready to take a nap, which is freaking amazing.

[00:10:48] Ben: So from 6 to like 7:30 is on some days, yes, some days, no.

[00:10:54] Ben: Starting to become my personal time again.

[00:10:56] Adam: Mhm.

[00:10:57] Ben: So I've been able to tinker around on my website and swap out some, some technologies and I, uh, just replaced, uh, Hotwire Hotwire uh, the Basecamp 37signals that's their front end framework, uh, which I was using for a couple years.

[00:11:11] Ben: And I just, just this morning, I think, finally finished switching it out for htmx 4 and Alpine.js.

[00:11:19] Ben: my blog doesn't do a lot of really dynamic stuff, so it wasn't that big of a lift.

[00:11:23] Ben: But even things that are a small lift when you're doing them in like 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, it's very complicated.

[00:11:30] Adam: Yeah, it's a, uh, you spend more time orchestrating and remembering where you left off than.

[00:11:34] Ben: Yeah.

[00:11:34] Ben: Yeah, exactly.

[00:11:36] Ben: So, um, it's a, I'm, um, I'm, I don't know when my life is going to look like it used to look, and I'm hoping it will someday.

[00:11:43] Ben: Maybe it won't,

[00:11:44] Adam: Never.

[00:11:46] Ben: but, but I'll take the little, the little baby steps in the right direction as my, uh, triumph this week.

[00:11:51] Adam: Cool.

[00:11:52] Grieving the Joy of Coding

[00:11:52] Adam: Well, uh, feelings.

[00:11:55] Adam: We got them as we've started to allude to already here.

[00:11:55] Ben: We got him.

[00:11:56] Ben: I know.

[00:11:57] Ben: We, we, we've already kicked it off as two, old men complaining about getting older.

[00:12:02] Adam: Yeah.

[00:12:02] Adam: Two, two old men yell at Cloud.

[00:12:04] Adam: Um, so, I don't know, we got so many things written down here, I don't even know where to start.

[00:12:10] Ben: Let, can I, okay, uh, let me start off with a grand gesture.

[00:12:10] Adam: Uh, is that something jump out at you?

[00:12:12] Adam: Yeah.

[00:12:12] Adam: Go.

[00:12:15] Ben: For years,

[00:12:16] Adam: Mhm.

[00:12:17] Ben: years,

[00:12:18] Ben: I felt so lucky to be working in this profession, to be getting paid to do the things that I do.

[00:12:26] Ben: I was almost embarrassed by it.

[00:12:29] Ben: Like when people would talk about their work and what do you do?

[00:12:32] Ben: Uh, what kind of stuff do you work on?

[00:12:34] Ben: I almost didn't want to talk about it with people outside of technology because so many people hate their jobs.

[00:12:40] Ben: And that's just the fact of life.

[00:12:40] Adam: Yeah.

[00:12:42] Ben: And I was

[00:12:44] Ben: not embarrassed for myself, but I was embarrassed to be someone in a conversation that felt so differently than everybody else that I would, when Monday would roll around, I would be like, freak.

[00:12:55] Ben: Yeah, I get to go back to work and like, do this stuff.

[00:13:00] Ben: And, um, I feel like that has, uh, gone full 180 on me.

[00:13:04] Ben: I,

[00:13:04] Adam: Oh, really?

[00:13:05] Adam: Wow.

[00:13:06] Ben: I, I feel like I am struggling to find joy in my work at all, really, at this point.

[00:13:15] Adam: Mhm.

[00:13:15] Adam: Mm.

[00:13:15] Ben: And I am now embarrassed in the other direction to now be one of the people that I always felt really bad for.

[00:13:18] Adam: Mhm.

[00:13:25] Adam: Yeah.

[00:13:25] Ben: And, and I think there's also a lot of sh.

[00:13:29] Ben: Shame that I'm feeling

[00:13:31] Ben: in that I don't necessarily know how to make it joyful.

[00:13:36] Ben: there's been a lot of Talk in the YouTube.

[00:13:40] Ben: I don't know what people call that these days, the vlogosphere.

[00:13:43] Adam: Oh God, yeah, sure.

[00:13:44] Ben: Is that a word?

[00:13:45] Adam: Um, I mean, the blogosphere was.

[00:13:47] Ben: The vlog?

[00:13:47] Adam: Why not the vlogosphere?

[00:13:49] Ben: people talking about the five stages of grief, and we're all sort of in some form or another, grieving the state of what it means to be a software developer, and that the faster you get to the final stage of acceptance, the more you can lean into making the job enjoyable again.

[00:14:00] Adam: Yeah.

[00:14:09] Ben: And I feel like I have gotten to the point of acceptance, but that's, it has yet to unlock anything that is making

[00:14:20] Ben: the work feel better.

[00:14:22] Ben: And so I feel a little bit of just shame and embarrassment that I like, I don't know what to do about that.

[00:14:26] Adam: Mhm.

[00:14:30] Ben: And uh, so that's, that's, I'll start us off there that I have, you know,

[00:14:36] Ben: it's been a, it's been a massive transition.

[00:14:37] Adam: It,

[00:14:39] Adam: Yeah.

[00:14:40] Adam: Okay.

[00:14:40] Adam: So, just what you were talking about there reminded me of a movie title.

[00:14:43] Adam: I haven't seen the movie, but I just.

[00:14:45] Adam: The title is relevant.

[00:14:46] Adam: it's the Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

[00:14:49] Ben: Oh yeah.

[00:14:49] Ben: This is the Nicolas um, cage and uh.

[00:14:51] Adam: Yeah.

[00:14:52] Adam: and the guy from the Mandalorian.

[00:14:54] Ben: Oh God, yeah.

[00:14:56] Adam: Pedro.

[00:14:56] Adam: Uh, Pascal.

[00:14:56] Ben: Pedro Pascal.

[00:14:57] Ben: Yeah.

[00:14:57] Adam: Yeah.

[00:14:58] Adam: like I said, I haven't seen it, but it's a great title.

[00:15:01] Adam: yeah.

[00:15:02] Adam: And it just, I, I completely agree with you.

[00:15:04] Adam: Like the, the privilege of having this job over the last decade plus.

[00:15:08] Adam: And now, like, it's a, there's a little bit of a shame to it.

[00:15:10] Ben: Mhm.

[00:15:14] Adam: Not entirely.

[00:15:15] Adam: Like, it's not a, it's not, universal.

[00:15:17] Adam: Right.

[00:15:18] Adam: Not everybody hates us yet.

[00:15:20] Ben: Mhm.

[00:15:20] Adam: Um, we'll see if that comes to pass.

[00:15:23] Adam: I think it's one of the things that's on the probability board here.

[00:15:27] Adam: and I'm, I'm with you.

[00:15:28] Adam: Like, I can feel there are, like.

[00:15:30] Adam: When I talked earlier about having bad days and worrying about AI taking my job,

[00:15:32] Ben: Mhm.

[00:15:36] Adam: I can feel the joy being sucked out some days.

[00:15:40] Adam: And if I try to be really honest with myself and, and really

[00:15:45] Adam: introspective, which is not something I do well, I probably feel that more on the days when I am kind of just skating by, like doing the bare minimum of work, you know, trying to stay on top of the code reviews that I need to be doing and

[00:16:01] Adam: accomplishing something worthwhile on my projects.

[00:16:04] Ben: Mhm.

[00:16:05] Adam: and

[00:16:08] Adam: it's.

[00:16:08] Adam: What's even worse sometimes is like,

[00:16:12] Adam: if I'm doing that and somehow still kind of like, skirting the edge of running out of my LLM usage quota, right?

[00:16:21] Adam: Like, then it.

[00:16:22] Adam: Then it's starting to feel like, oh, God, this isn't.

[00:16:25] Adam: I'm.

[00:16:25] Adam: I've been trying to do the bare minimum, and I'm about to run out of easy mode buttons, and I'm gonna have to try to do the bare minimum instead of not trying and doing the bare minimum.

[00:16:29] Ben: Sa mhm.

[00:16:37] Adam: And I think that maybe that's part of where the depression of it comes from, because I don't want to have to try again.

[00:16:42] Adam: Right.

[00:16:42] Adam: If we're gonna, if we're gonna go down this path of, letting the robots take over, like, let me find joy in the way that that works and, you know, like, thinking about it differently, reframing it, whatever, if I can find joy in doing it that way.

[00:16:57] Adam: But don't make me have to go back arbitrarily.

[00:17:00] Adam: That feels a bit like a rug pull.

[00:17:02] Ben: That's funny.

[00:17:03] Adam: It's annoying, but like, so to be totally honest, there are those days, hopefully few and far between, but there are those days where I'm like, just skating by, check on my email and stuff, check on my, my prompt threads that I've got going in the background every like, half hour to 45 minutes between YouTube videos, right?

[00:17:21] Ben: Well, and that's, and that's a big part of it for me too is that

[00:17:26] Adam: M.

[00:17:27] Ben: um, my career or my sense of what it means to be working for the last 20 odd years has been typing.

[00:17:32] Adam: Yeah,

[00:17:37] Adam: Yeah, yeah.

[00:17:37] Ben: And when I'm not typing and I'm not talking to a customer,

[00:17:43] Adam: Or thinking deeply about the.

[00:17:44] Ben: uh, yeah, I'm struggling to feel like I'm working and that has a lot of

[00:17:45] Adam: What you need to type.

[00:17:46] Adam: Yeah.

[00:17:52] Ben: shame associated with it.

[00:17:54] Adam: Mm.

[00:17:55] Ben: I uh, like I'm, I feel fraudulent to some degree.

[00:17:55] Adam: Mm.

[00:17:58] Ben: I feel like I'm going to be found out that like, if, if someone were looking at my VPN traffic,

[00:18:06] Ben: they could look, they could point to any number of times during the day and be like, what are you doing?

[00:18:11] Ben: Like, I'm like literally just waiting for a PR review to finish doing its adversarial review or I'm waiting for Claude to come back and, and I'm just like sitting here and staring at the screen.

[00:18:11] Adam: Yeah,

[00:18:20] Adam: Yeah.

[00:18:23] Adam: To me, it feels a bit like that xkcd compiling cartoon.

[00:18:26] Ben: Yeah.

[00:18:26] Adam: But But the compiling corollary here, right?

[00:18:30] Adam: Like, waiting for the LLM to do its job is not, like, widely accepted as a necessary thing.

[00:18:35] Adam: That takes a necessary amount of time.

[00:18:38] Adam: Right?

[00:18:38] Adam: So I think that's why it feels guilty and shameful to not be hovering over it.

[00:18:38] Ben: Right.

[00:18:43] Ben: Well, and I, and I also, because of this,

[00:18:47] Ben: I don't think I have been in a flow state in air quotes

[00:18:51] Adam: Mhm.

[00:18:53] Ben: professionally in like over a year.

[00:18:56] Adam: Mhm.

[00:18:57] Ben: I mean,

[00:18:59] Ben: I don't ever feel lost in the work anymore that I used to feel like.

[00:19:03] Adam: Well, so, yeah, I, Well, I described my bad days, right?

[00:19:08] Adam: I said, you know, there's, you know, basically a string of YouTube videos interrupted by the occasional bit of work.

[00:19:14] Ben: Mm, mhm.

[00:19:14] Adam: Uh, and on the right day, if you look at it from the right angle, you could say I'm getting the same amount of work done that I used to pre LLMs.

[00:19:24] Adam: So I don't necessarily feel terrible about that.

[00:19:27] Ben: Right, right.

[00:19:28] Adam: I do know that I could be more productive if I was in flow or in the zone or whatever with this, tool belt available to me in part because I have had good days.

[00:19:29] Ben: Sa.

[00:19:36] Ben: Mhm.

[00:19:39] Adam: Like, today was a good day at work for me.

[00:19:42] Adam: I

[00:19:43] Adam: put together and, and submitted, I think, like somewhere around six or eight new pull requests.

[00:19:50] Adam: some, like, maybe two of those are projects I've been working on for a Couple of days in a branch.

[00:19:55] Adam: The rest are all like smaller projects, but they're, you know, significant improvements, big bug fixes, that sort of thing.

[00:20:02] Ben: Nice.

[00:20:02] Adam: and it's a, you know, when, when I'm bouncing between two or three things at a time and like, okay, cool, one has landed.

[00:20:07] Adam: And so now I have this like, space in my multitasking board, right?

[00:20:12] Adam: Instead of just working on.

[00:20:13] Adam: I was a previously a very single track thinker, right?

[00:20:16] Ben: Yeah.

[00:20:17] Ben: Sa.

[00:20:18] Adam: This is the thing I'm working on.

[00:20:19] Adam: I will work on it until it's done or I get stuck and then I will shift over to something else.

[00:20:24] Adam: And now I can bounce between two or three tasks

[00:20:27] Adam: because the thinking is outsourced, right?

[00:20:29] Adam: Like, I do my part, I make the decisions, I apply my taste, I prompt the bot and then I can let it work in the background and I start two or three other threads doing the same thing.

[00:20:40] Adam: And so, yeah, like today I think I published six or eight PRs.

[00:20:44] Adam: I think two of those were longer projects.

[00:20:47] Adam: Rest was all new.

[00:20:48] Adam: One of them was like a, you know, documentation to go along with one of the other ones.

[00:20:52] Adam: And you know, just today was a very productive day.

[00:20:54] Ben: That's awesome.

[00:20:55] Adam: Um, in addition to that, I reviewed a bunch of other people's PRs.

[00:20:58] Adam: And when I say I reviewed, I mean I had the LLM review and post.

[00:21:00] Ben: Yeah.

[00:21:03] Adam: Uh, uh, that's the like, oh, that's my flow now is like, I still don't trust it to

[00:21:05] Ben: Sa.

[00:21:11] Adam: take the last step between me and another human.

[00:21:14] Adam: Right?

[00:21:14] Adam: So for code reviews, I have it do the review for me because I found on a technical level it is masterful.

[00:21:21] Adam: Like there's

[00:21:23] Adam: probably

[00:21:25] Adam: 70 to 80% of the things that it finds and comments on that I let survive are things I would not have found myself.

[00:21:31] Ben: M.

[00:21:31] Ben: Mhm.

[00:21:32] Adam: And then there's uh, the, the other 30, 20 to 30% of the things that it finds that I let survive are things I would have found myself.

[00:21:37] Ben: Mhm.

[00:21:40] Adam: And then there's another.

[00:21:42] Adam: If we zoom out and look at things that I don't let survive, let's say

[00:21:46] Adam: 30% of the total, is stuff I don't let survive because it's comments that I just delete.

[00:21:51] Adam: I'm like, that doesn't matter.

[00:21:52] Adam: Because of this historical reason from eight years ago, you know, in the, the lore of the company and the product.

[00:21:58] Ben: Right,

[00:21:59] Adam: and

[00:22:01] Adam: so, because of that, I don't feel I can let it be that last checkpoint.

[00:22:08] Adam: I, I have to remain between the LLM and interacting with another person.

[00:22:12] Adam: I do have a skill that's like anytime we're posting comments to GitHub, I want you to prefix it with, you know, GPT6, whatever.

[00:22:19] Adam: Posting on behalf of Adam as like ah, a one of the fancy GitHub block quotes.

[00:22:22] Ben: Right.

[00:22:22] Ben: So it's very clear who's saying what.

[00:22:24] Adam: Yeah.

[00:22:25] Adam: So like yes, this is submitted under my account, but this is a uh, bot provided thing.

[00:22:30] Adam: And then often if I'm like this sounds legitimate to me but you know, you asked me to review this.

[00:22:35] Adam: I don't know the process that it's doing all that.

[00:22:39] Adam: Well, like from a technical perspective, I don't see syntax errors.

[00:22:42] Adam: I agree with the LLM on all that.

[00:22:44] Adam: But it's

[00:22:46] Adam: uh, it's getting to the point now where the LLM can like have insights about this is the way it's working and it thinks that you should do this that way.

[00:22:53] Adam: And I'm like, maybe, I don't know, I, you know, I, if I had helped design and prompt the feature then maybe I would have an opinion on that, but I don't.

[00:22:56] Ben: Mhm.

[00:23:01] Adam: So I'll prefix that comment and say like, you know, I'll put my own username in my comment colon.

[00:23:07] Adam: You know, human thoughts here, here I might even just say like take it or leave it.

[00:23:12] Adam: This is LLM advice.

[00:23:14] Adam: You'll know better than me whether or not this applies.

[00:23:17] Adam: Right?

[00:23:17] Beauty, Autonomy, and Code Quality

[00:23:17] Ben: Well that's, that's another thing that's really frustrating for me is I feel like I no longer have a good sense of what matters and what doesn't matter.

[00:23:18] Adam: If you disagree, then delete it.

[00:23:29] Adam: Mhm,

[00:23:30] Ben: Like, I have things that are important to me personally, but I, I feel like I have lost touch with whether or not any of those things are meaningful in a broader sense.

[00:23:42] Ben: And it, I, it could very easily become a slippery slope that you could just constantly, you know, I don't know.

[00:23:49] Ben: I'm sure we've talked in the, on this, um, on the podcast before about the five whys when you're doing uh, like root cause analysis, you know.

[00:23:56] Ben: Why did this happen?

[00:23:56] Ben: The site went down.

[00:23:57] Ben: Like, well, why did the site go down?

[00:23:58] Ben: Well, because the database stopped responding.

[00:24:00] Ben: Well, why did the database stop responding?

[00:24:01] Ben: You kind of keep asking until you get to the root cause.

[00:24:04] Adam: Mhm.

[00:24:04] Adam: Mm,

[00:24:05] Ben: I, I almost feel like you could do the same thing now for just like, why does that matter?

[00:24:09] Ben: You're like, well, because clean code's important.

[00:24:11] Ben: Why is clean code important?

[00:24:12] Ben: Well, because then you don't have a lot of repetitive stuff and things are easy to find.

[00:24:15] Adam: Mhm,

[00:24:16] Ben: Like, well, why does that matter anymore?

[00:24:17] Ben: You're like, well, eff it.

[00:24:19] Ben: I don't know.

[00:24:20] Ben: I, uh, like it's like at some point, uh, like this is, like, this is something I said on LinkedIn the other day.

[00:24:26] Ben: Like it's okay to just choose beauty for the sake of beauty.

[00:24:29] Ben: Like that's, that's almost my, my like North Star at this point.

[00:24:34] Adam: Mhm.

[00:24:35] Ben: Uh, I'm uh, like, I think it's beautiful and

[00:24:38] Ben: I can't, that's subjective and I can't argue if you don't think it's beautiful.

[00:24:43] Ben: Like, there's no, we're not going to be.

[00:24:45] Ben: It's not a meeting of the minds at that.

[00:24:47] Adam: Yeah, no, I completely agree.

[00:24:49] Adam: I mean like uh, I got a code review comment yesterday that was like.

[00:24:55] Adam: And it.

[00:24:56] Adam: So I told you I put that little prefix on my agentic comments.

[00:24:58] Ben: Yeah, yeah,

[00:24:59] Adam: My coworkers have picked up on that and they've started doing it too, which I love, because it makes me feel less guilty about sending them agentic comments I think.

[00:25:06] Adam: But um, the.

[00:25:07] Adam: I got one yesterday that was like this query works.

[00:25:11] Adam: It is technically correct, but looking at it is very confusing.

[00:25:15] Adam: It was like it, it was uh.

[00:25:16] Ben: Right.

[00:25:17] Adam: So there's uh, a table and it represents this bit of data and the

[00:25:24] Adam: uh.

[00:25:25] Adam: So it's a list and lists can have list members.

[00:25:27] Adam: List members are in a separate table.

[00:25:28] Adam: But on the list table there was two columns where we cache counts.

[00:25:32] Adam: So the total number of list members and the total number of list members that have email addresses.

[00:25:37] Ben: Mhm,

[00:25:37] Adam: And so anytime the list gets updated, there's this query that runs that like counts the number of list members and the list members that have email addresses.

[00:25:44] Ben: Mhm,

[00:25:44] Adam: And it updates like cache.

[00:25:46] Adam: And the way it was doing that was very performant.

[00:25:49] Adam: Uh, and it was like, you know, select or insert or what.

[00:25:52] Adam: It was update this list table and then it was joining this like subselect of two other selects to get the counts.

[00:26:02] Adam: I don't remember the specifics of it, but then it's like, and then it joins that sub select on and then it doesn't reference the sub select.

[00:26:04] Ben: Mhm,

[00:26:10] Adam: It's like subselect aliased to counts.

[00:26:13] Adam: And then, uh, join, you know, left join or whatever counts on list.id equals Uh, parameter like doesn't reference the count table at all.

[00:26:22] Adam: It's just cross joining sort of.

[00:26:24] Adam: Basically, I think.

[00:26:25] Ben: Mhm,

[00:26:25] Adam: and it was like even, you know, this other person's LLM, um, said that like, this is a very confusing way to write this.

[00:26:31] Adam: You could rewrite it using like a CTE or something like that, and it would be easier to read.

[00:26:36] Adam: And I, I fought with myself over it for a minute.

[00:26:39] Adam: I was like, who cares anymore?

[00:26:42] Adam: Right?

[00:26:42] Adam: We're, we're talking about the ones and zeros effectively here, right?

[00:26:45] Ben: Mhm.

[00:26:45] Adam: Humans aren't going to read this anymore.

[00:26:46] Adam: LLMs are going to read it and does it matter that much?

[00:26:49] Adam: And at the end of the day I, I took the query out and as it was written and I ran it and I compared it to rewriting it with CTEs and they were basically identical in terms of performance.

[00:27:00] Adam: So I was like, okay, fine, you know, if it doesn't matter, then why not pick the more beautiful one, right?

[00:27:06] Ben: Right.

[00:27:07] Adam: Mhm.

[00:27:07] Ben: I mean, exactly.

[00:27:08] Ben: That's how I'm feeling these days, which is a hard thing to, to justify.

[00:27:15] Ben: Sometimes it feels like in the current climate that, I mean, even.

[00:27:20] Ben: I don't know.

[00:27:20] Ben: It's just a lot.

[00:27:22] Ben: It.

[00:27:22] Adam: Yeah.

[00:27:22] Adam: Mhm,

[00:27:22] Ben: I, I feel like I have no uh, compass anymore except for things that I have full autonomy over.

[00:27:30] Ben: And, and that's also part of where I think I'm struggling.

[00:27:33] Ben: And I think this has less to do with AI and more to do with just.

[00:27:38] Ben: I'm recently on a new team.

[00:27:40] Ben: I mean, recently, year and a half.

[00:27:42] Adam: Mhm.

[00:27:42] Ben: but I just, I went from a place where I had full autonomy to a place where I have very little autonomy.

[00:27:49] Ben: And that is also a big adjustment in and of itself and then a big adjustment overlaid with.

[00:27:55] Ben: Oh, and by the way, the entire industry is changing also and we're.

[00:27:59] Ben: And like as a team, we're all trying to figure out how to deal with it as well internally.

[00:28:03] Ben: And what does that mean for communication and what does that mean for

[00:28:07] Ben: PRs and code organization?

[00:28:07] Adam: Yeah,

[00:28:10] Adam: I have a question for, uh, for you, actually.

[00:28:12] Ben: Yeah,

[00:28:12] Adam: So you've said on the show in the past that the stack at your current job is one you basically have zero experience in.

[00:28:21] Adam: It's a rounding error away from being zero.

[00:28:23] Ben: Yeah, yeah.

[00:28:25] Adam: Um,

[00:28:25] Ben: Which, which by the.

[00:28:26] Ben: So, so I'm on a, I'm on a different project now, which is more in a familiar stack.

[00:28:31] Ben: But yes, I spent a long time working in Python and back, back to ColdFusion and um, just like a regular database.

[00:28:33] Adam: What's the more familiar stack?

[00:28:37] Adam: Okay,

[00:28:40] Adam: so this other stack, you were starting to say it was Python and what?

[00:28:42] Ben: It was React and Python.

[00:28:44] Ben: Yeah, React and Python and CockroachDB was the database and I had never used.

[00:28:45] Adam: Okay,

[00:28:49] Adam: Okay,

[00:28:50] Ben: And Tailwind and I had never used any of those really.

[00:28:53] Adam: gotcha.

[00:28:53] Ben: I mean with.

[00:28:54] Adam: So effectively it's like being in a room where everybody else is speaking Greek and you don't speak Greek and you're just like, uh, I'll trust the translator.

[00:28:58] Ben: Yeah,

[00:29:00] Adam: Um, so were you the only person on your team that was like that or was it like the whole team that was in a similar situation?

[00:29:05] Ben: No, no, everybody, everybody on the team was like that I mean it's a small team was just a couple people.

[00:29:08] Adam: Oh, wow.

[00:29:10] Ben: But, but.

[00:29:11] Adam: But so you guys basically built a product using tools you had zero experience in the whole team.

[00:29:19] Ben: Yes.

[00:29:21] Ben: Uh, like will that product be successful?

[00:29:21] Adam: Okay, that's a choice.

[00:29:24] Ben: I mean it's an internal product, so that lowers the kind of blast radius of what could go wrong.

[00:29:26] Adam: Yeah.

[00:29:29] Adam: Okay.

[00:29:29] Ben: Ish.

[00:29:30] Adam: Uh, internal facing.

[00:29:31] Adam: Yeah.

[00:29:31] Ben: Um, but will it be a successful product?

[00:29:35] Ben: Uh, that is yet to be proven out.

[00:29:37] Adam: Okay.

[00:29:37] Ben: Um, it's still,

[00:29:38] Adam: A year plus in.

[00:29:40] Ben: it's.

[00:29:41] Ben: We've sort of handed it off for, for user acceptance testing and now people are going through it and trying to find a lot of issues with it.

[00:29:46] Adam: Okay.

[00:29:50] Adam: Okay.

[00:29:50] Ben: Um, not, not a lot of issues hopefully.

[00:29:52] Ben: But they're trying to find issues.

[00:29:53] Adam: Yeah, yeah.

[00:29:54] Ben: But uh, but yeah, the, the new stack for the project that I'm on now is back to a uh, I think it's Lucee on the back end.

[00:30:01] Adam: Okay, cool.

[00:30:02] Ben: Lucee CFML for the, for the listeners.

[00:30:07] Adam: I think most of them are familiar.

[00:30:07] Ben: For those just tuning in.

[00:30:10] Choosing Tools When Agents Write Code

[00:30:10] Adam: So while we're talking about stacks, I have this other question that's been kind of in the back of my mind and I haven't given it much thought.

[00:30:16] Adam: I see.

[00:30:16] Adam: Um, also where I previously said I'm not much of an introspective person, but I have these thoughts and then they just kind of hang out back there.

[00:30:22] Ben: Mhm.

[00:30:24] Adam: So for lack of a better way to describe it, let's just say I have not written any code in the last year.

[00:30:31] Adam: Plus.

[00:30:32] Adam: Right.

[00:30:32] Adam: I have, but like you said, it's like a rounding error away from zero.

[00:30:35] Ben: Yeah.

[00:30:36] Ben: Yeah,

[00:30:37] Adam: do I still care about Svelte and SvelteKit versus React and Next.js or whatever?

[00:30:43] Adam: It would be that I think I do, but I, I find it a little harder to defend, I guess.

[00:30:45] Ben: Right.

[00:30:52] Adam: Like on one hand, there's the argument that like, okay, well, what if, you know, the LLMs get shut down, right?

[00:30:53] Ben: Yeah,

[00:31:01] Adam: If they get, AGI and it wants to kill us all and so they have to pull the plug and like, okay, sorry, we're turning it off to save humanity.

[00:31:09] Adam: Right.

[00:31:09] Adam: It's a low, low probability, but it's a, it's on the chart, I think.

[00:31:13] Adam: Um, and

[00:31:15] Adam: so I, at that point I don't want to go, oh crap, now I have, you know, a bajillion lines of React code that I have no interest in maintaining.

[00:31:23] Ben: Right.

[00:31:24] Adam: Right.

[00:31:24] Ben: M.

[00:31:24] Adam: and also, you know, I think early on we were.

[00:31:29] Adam: The sentiment that I was picking up was that people were like, well, React is the one that's best known currently.

[00:31:34] Adam: And so that's what the LLMs are going to know best.

[00:31:38] Adam: And I feel like it has turned out that the LLMs are just good at picking up whatever we throw at them.

[00:31:43] Adam: Right?

[00:31:43] Ben: Yo a hundred percent.

[00:31:45] Ben: So htmx version 4 just released like 2 weeks ago

[00:31:51] Adam: Yeah.

[00:31:51] Ben: and, and that's what I just put onto my blog.

[00:31:54] Ben: And I'm asking Claude questions about, you know, what's changed, what do I need to worry about?

[00:31:59] Ben: Why is this particular thing not working?

[00:32:01] Ben: And it has zero problems figuring out.

[00:32:01] Adam: Mhm.

[00:32:04] Ben: Oh yeah, this was added in htmx 4.

[00:32:06] Ben: Here's how you do it now.

[00:32:07] Ben: Like not a problem whatsoever.

[00:32:09] Adam: Yeah.

[00:32:10] Adam: And you know, I think part of that is they figure out tooling.

[00:32:14] Adam: Right?

[00:32:14] Adam: So for a while it was really popular to use the Svelte MCP.

[00:32:18] Adam: Right.

[00:32:19] Adam: You could set it up so that anytime you write Svelte code you have to like hand it off to this Svelte MCP.

[00:32:19] Ben: M mhm,

[00:32:24] Adam: This was like a thing you opted into.

[00:32:25] Adam: But you could say like, anytime you write Svelte code hand it off to the Svelte MCP and it will return a list of, errors.

[00:32:29] Ben: Mhm.

[00:32:32] Adam: Like, oh, you didn't.

[00:32:33] Adam: You, you tried to use this rune in the wrong way.

[00:32:37] Adam: You need to use it this way.

[00:32:39] Adam: And like, here's a link to the docs sort of thing.

[00:32:41] Adam: And it would make the code a little more, um.

[00:32:44] Adam: Not make the code more deterministic, but make the, the code generation process a little more deterministic and like force it to understand the right ways to do stuff.

[00:32:47] Ben: Mhm.

[00:32:54] Adam: And now I feel like, yeah, you can probably pretty much just go, you know, in your, your project level AGENTS.md just say like, this is a Svelte 3 project.

[00:33:04] Adam: Here's the Svelte 3 docs.

[00:33:06] Adam: If something doesn't make sense, start looking in the docs and.

[00:33:10] Ben: Yeah.

[00:33:11] Adam: And you're probably pretty much golden at that point.

[00:33:13] Ben: uh, I think we've talked about this on a previous episode, but I'm sort of in a world now where I'm embracing full AI at a professional level.

[00:33:22] Ben: But I'm still trying to enjoy the hand coding in my personal life because it's always just been a fun activity and I feel like it challenges my brain and forces me to think through problems.

[00:33:22] Adam: Mhm,

[00:33:35] Ben: And even with that mentality, I find it hard sometimes to not just tell the AI to do it.

[00:33:42] Ben: Which is crazy because the whole point of having the personal project for me personally is the hands on stuff.

[00:33:43] Adam: Mhm.

[00:33:50] Ben: Like this is why I'm doing it.

[00:33:51] Ben: You know, it's not like anyone else cares.

[00:33:54] Ben: I'm the only one who cares.

[00:33:56] Adam: Right.

[00:33:56] Ben: And even there, sometimes it's really hard to not just hit the easy button.

[00:34:01] Adam: Mhm.

[00:34:02] Ben: Like um, I was getting this error in Bugsnag.

[00:34:05] Ben: Bugsnag is my like SaaS error logger.

[00:34:10] Ben: And it was saying, hey, this error that you're passing me for logging isn't actually an error, it's just a regular object.

[00:34:17] Ben: So I, I didn't quite understand what they were talking about.

[00:34:20] Ben: That's why I asked Claude.

[00:34:21] Ben: And Claude's like, oh, well, you.

[00:34:22] Ben: It's not an instance of the Error class in JavaScript.

[00:34:25] Ben: So that's the only kind that Bugsnag understands how to serialize.

[00:34:29] Ben: I'm like, okay, that's because the thing I was calling was something I wrote and it returns like a whole bunch of metadata about the thing that it's doing.

[00:34:29] Adam: H.

[00:34:29] Adam: Mhm,

[00:34:36] Ben: It doesn't return the error.

[00:34:39] Adam: Mhm,

[00:34:39] Ben: So I could have just said to Claude, like, hey, just fix this and make it that this returns an error and you know, subclass error and add the special properties that it needs and do all the right jazz.

[00:34:51] Ben: But instead I asked it, hey, can you just kind of outline what it is that you think I need to change from a high level?

[00:34:58] Ben: And then I want to do all the code and then I'll just ask you to review the code as we're going along.

[00:35:04] Ben: And as I'm doing that, it's like part of me really enjoys it because I'm doing the work and I'm trying to understand why you have to call a constructor like this and what kind of arguments.

[00:35:13] Adam: Mhm.

[00:35:13] Ben: And like, should it take individual arguments or should it take an object that has properties?

[00:35:19] Ben: And um, but like, part of me was like, what's just a waste of time?

[00:35:24] Ben: And I hate the fact that I even for one moment think of it as a waste of time because the whole project is a waste of time.

[00:35:31] Ben: Like that's the point.

[00:35:32] Adam: Right.

[00:35:33] Ben: But I feel like, so

[00:35:36] Ben: in such turmoil in my own head, even about my own personal time.

[00:35:41] Ben: And it makes me just very sad, I guess, and angry a little bit that I feel almost like

[00:35:51] Ben: red pilled.

[00:35:52] Ben: I don't know what the right word is here, but you know, it's like,

[00:35:55] Adam: Uh, yeah.

[00:35:55] Ben: it's like I can't even enjoy the thing that I'm the only one who's accountable for,

[00:36:01] Adam: Yeah.

[00:36:02] Adam: Uh, I think I started to

[00:36:05] Adam: lose joy in side project programming before LLMs came around.

[00:36:11] Adam: Right.

[00:36:12] Adam: Like I, I was still doing it, but it was not for the love of the craft.

[00:36:19] Adam: Right.

[00:36:19] Adam: Like a sculptor sculpts, a painter paints because they have to, because it's, it's, it comes from inside them and it needs to get out of them and that's how they do it.

[00:36:28] Ben: Right?

[00:36:30] Adam: and there was a time in my life where code was inside of me and it had to get out and, and I, that brought me joy and I don't think that that's so much true anymore.

[00:36:41] Adam: I still work on Jump Run.

[00:36:42] Adam: I still,

[00:36:45] Adam: for lack of a better word, I will say I enjoy working on Jump Run.

[00:36:49] Ben: Mhm.

[00:36:49] Adam: and I still entertain the fantasy that one day I will make the time to put in the effort to do some marketing and bring on paying customers.

[00:36:52] Ben: Mhm.

[00:37:00] Adam: For the moment, it continues to just be a thing that I am doing for free that is costing me close to nothing financially.

[00:37:09] Adam: and it's, it's.

[00:37:11] Adam: I'm considering what it does cost me in my time to be like a donation to the club that I'm a member of.

[00:37:15] Adam: Right.

[00:37:15] Ben: Right.

[00:37:15] Ben: At least it overlaps with something else that you're very passionate about.

[00:37:15] Adam: So

[00:37:19] Adam: sure.

[00:37:20] Adam: And then of course, the thing that I am truly passionate about at all times is can I make more money?

[00:37:25] Adam: Uh, because as, as we have discussed in the past, that is how I am broken.

[00:37:25] Ben: It's a, it's a three way win.

[00:37:32] Adam: but yeah, so like I was saying, I still work on Jump Run, but I don't feel guilty for using LLMs to do it.

[00:37:32] Ben: Mhm.

[00:37:40] Adam: I guess the way I think about it is actually a little bit more of like this is my playground where I can learn new techniques or try

[00:37:49] Adam: not tools.

[00:37:51] Adam: I don't know.

[00:37:52] Adam: I guess it all kind of boils down to techniques and skills and stuff.

[00:37:54] Adam: But I tend to play with stuff more on Jump Run and see how that works for me and then take what I learn and apply it at work

[00:37:54] Ben: Right.

[00:38:04] Ben: Right.

[00:38:04] Ben: I mean, that was always historically the, the win win in my mind.

[00:38:05] Adam: and.

[00:38:08] Adam: Yeah,

[00:38:10] Ben: And to me that feels much less like a win win these days.

[00:38:13] Adam: Yeah, for sure.

[00:38:14] Ben: It feels like an isolated win with very little crossover sometime.

[00:38:18] Adam: Well,

[00:38:19] Adam: I mean, look, I, I am not trying to say that like there is no skill left in writing code, but I do think that the act of typing on the keyboard to make the code come out and 95% of the code that is necessary is a solved problem.

[00:38:30] Ben: Mhm.

[00:38:41] Adam: Right.

[00:38:41] Adam: Um, the models are just that good now that

[00:38:45] Adam: with the right kind of direction and enough of it,

[00:38:48] Adam: which is still a lot Less work than writing it yourself.

[00:38:51] Adam: You get the code that you need.

[00:38:53] Adam: Where was I going with that?

[00:38:53] Ben: Well, let me, if I can not pivot slightly, but let, um, me.

[00:38:58] Losing Developer Community

[00:38:58] Ben: I want to go to a meta level for a second, which is that

[00:39:02] Ben: because the art of writing code these days, the art of architecting feels so secondary.

[00:39:12] Ben: I've also just felt a lot less camaraderie and I've felt a lot more lonely lately because

[00:39:19] Adam: Mm.

[00:39:20] Adam: Mm.

[00:39:20] Adam: Mhm.

[00:39:22] Ben: talking about AI doesn't even feel like

[00:39:26] Ben: a fun thing.

[00:39:28] Ben: Like it's not satisfying to me in the way that talking about code was satisfying with other people.

[00:39:28] Adam: Yeah.

[00:39:28] Adam: M.

[00:39:35] Adam: Yeah.

[00:39:35] Adam: I think that there are moments where it can be interesting and exciting and satisfying, but that those are fewer and farther between.

[00:39:44] Adam: It's like, oh, let's talk about this skill that I found.

[00:39:46] Adam: Right, right.

[00:39:47] Ben: Right.

[00:39:47] Adam: Like, but other than that, you're talking about it's a text box and you type in it or you dictate into it.

[00:39:55] Ben: And it's so

[00:39:57] Ben: not just the fact that it's non deterministic as a technology, but that everybody's environment is so different.

[00:40:05] Adam: Mhm.

[00:40:05] Ben: You know, what, what harness are you using?

[00:40:07] Ben: What model are you using?

[00:40:09] Ben: What uh, system prompts do you have?

[00:40:11] Ben: What skills do you have installed?

[00:40:13] Ben: What MCP servers do you have installed?

[00:40:16] Ben: We could be having the same conversation but be having two totally different perspectives and not even realize it.

[00:40:23] Ben: I think

[00:40:24] Adam: Mhm.

[00:40:26] Ben: like

[00:40:28] Ben: this isn't a loneliness question, this isn't a lonely statement for a second, but just the, the just to make a very concrete thing.

[00:40:37] Ben: So, um, at work the other day, someone mentioned to me, hey, your PR messages don't start with

[00:40:45] Ben: I can't remember what the name of the term is.

[00:40:45] Adam: Your TPS reports don't have the right cover sheet.

[00:40:48] Ben: It's like they're supposed to say feature or fix and, and um, not yes, conventional commits.

[00:40:51] Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:40:52] Adam: Conventional commits.

[00:40:54] Ben: They're like, it doesn't have a conventional commit.

[00:40:57] Ben: And I'm like, okay, uh, how are you guys getting the code to do that?

[00:41:02] Ben: Um, and, and someone was like, well, it's in my personal

[00:41:02] Adam: Mm,

[00:41:06] Ben: CLAUDE.md file in my, in my, you know, home directory.

[00:41:11] Ben: And I'm like, and again, this is like, I'm like, I don't want anything in my home directory.

[00:41:17] Ben: My philosophy is if it's relevant to the project, it should be in the project so that we're all talking about the same stuff, but we're in this weird world where

[00:41:18] Adam: Yeah.

[00:41:21] Adam: Mm.

[00:41:23] Adam: Agreed.

[00:41:26] Adam: Agreed.

[00:41:26] Adam: Mhm.

[00:41:29] Ben: it's not like

[00:41:31] Ben: I'm writing code for the application and kind of

[00:41:36] Ben: by fact of existence, it's meaningful to the application.

[00:41:40] Ben: I don't want to be the guy who just goes into the CLAUDE.md file that's saved into the project and just start editing it without having some sort of communication with the team.

[00:41:48] Ben: Because

[00:41:50] Ben: that, that has a tangible impact not just on a particular area of the application, but on all areas of the application to be written in the future.

[00:42:00] Adam: Yeah.

[00:42:00] Ben: And do we have to have a meeting about that?

[00:42:01] Ben: I don't know.

[00:42:02] Ben: We're not, you know, it's like the team's not discussing it and I'm not going to be the one who just throws stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

[00:42:08] Ben: That's a, ah, a weird thing to do as the most uh, junior, um,

[00:42:13] Ben: person on the team.

[00:42:15] Adam: Mhm.

[00:42:15] Adam: Mm.

[00:42:15] Ben: And

[00:42:17] Ben: I uh, don't know where I'm going with this thought other than to say I don't know.

[00:42:22] Ben: I just, it's, it's this like, I uh, feel very isolated in this weird world.

[00:42:30] Adam: Yeah.

[00:42:31] Adam: And I think that this, uh, the way our industry is changing is an isolating act.

[00:42:40] Adam: So.

[00:42:40] Adam: Another note that I have down here on the list of things we should talk about in the Feelings episode is I think the, the fall of stack based community gatherings.

[00:42:50] Ben: Yeah.

[00:42:50] Adam: Right.

[00:42:51] Adam: So, a technology specific conference.

[00:42:55] Adam: I, I, I've never had the pleasure of attending a Svelte Summit that's like the equivalent of a React Conf or whatever, but for the svelte world.

[00:43:01] Ben: Mhm.

[00:43:06] Adam: There were some satellite events in like New York City and that sort of thing.

[00:43:09] Adam: But for the most part they tend to be very like European or Eastern European.

[00:43:14] Adam: I think the, the next one is in like Slovenia or something.

[00:43:17] Adam: I'm, I'm not entirely sure, but not exactly easily within reach for me.

[00:43:23] Adam: Which, you know, as, as somebody who has a respect for how US centric, the industry is in general, I gotta applaud them for taking a stand on where they're gonna do that and sticking to it.

[00:43:24] Ben: Yeah.

[00:43:32] Ben: Mhm.

[00:43:37] Adam: I'm sure it has a limiting factor on the number of people that are able to attend and they're still able to pull it off.

[00:43:41] Adam: But

[00:43:43] Adam: I find myself even wondering now like if there was a Svelte event in my, you know, in Philadelphia, just like an hour away from me, would I even bother going?

[00:43:54] Adam: And I'm not sure.

[00:43:54] Adam: I probably would just to like check it out.

[00:43:58] Ben: Right,

[00:43:58] Adam: But if it was, if it was a yearly thing, would I go?

[00:44:01] Adam: Probably not every year.

[00:44:03] Adam: You know, um, maybe for the networking, but not for the content.

[00:44:05] Ben: Right.

[00:44:08] Ben: Yeah.

[00:44:09] Ben: I, I, I have,

[00:44:12] Adam: Mhm.

[00:44:13] Ben: I'm um, I've moved far away from a metropolitan area and um, so I give, I'm north of New York City, there's still tons of stuff in New York City, but it is not an easy place for me to get to.

[00:44:25] Ben: And things that happen in the evening, I'm like, I, if I go, I probably gotta get a hotel room because I'm not coming back at like 11 o' clock at night on a two hour train ride.

[00:44:37] Ben: It's like I'm, I'm not, I'm not that young anymore.

[00:44:37] Adam: Right.

[00:44:40] Adam: Things that happen in the city, I feel like they, they kind of expect you to be a city person so you can just ride the, the subway home or whatever.

[00:44:44] Ben: Yeah, 100%,

[00:44:47] Ben: absolutely.

[00:44:48] Ben: Um, so I, I've been trying to be better about attending things in the rural area, but even that in the AI age I'm just, I feel so much less motivated.

[00:44:51] Adam: Mhm.

[00:45:03] Ben: I go there and all I hear is people talking in very abstract ways about how they're using AI And I think this is a big part of the isolation that I'm feeling.

[00:45:10] Adam: Sa

[00:45:12] Adam: mhm.

[00:45:16] Ben: When people talked about concrete technologies, it gave me something to anchor to because I could see how that was useful in a, uh, in my work.

[00:45:27] Ben: And now people talk about stuff in such high levels of abstraction and disconnect from the, from the

[00:45:36] Ben: ultimate product that's being produced.

[00:45:38] Ben: It's so hard for me to look at that and point to my world and say, oh, that's where I would use it.

[00:45:44] Adam: Right.

[00:45:45] Adam: Yeah.

[00:45:45] Adam: I mean like I, I was just thinking another way if I were to flip the coin.

[00:45:50] Adam: Right.

[00:45:50] Adam: Yes.

[00:45:51] Adam: I write Svelte code using LLMs.

[00:45:54] Adam: I also write Rust code using LLMs and I look, I know, literally zero Rust.

[00:45:59] Ben: Yeah,

[00:45:59] Adam: I, I know, I know that the things are called crates and I think their, their package manager is called like Cargo or something.

[00:46:04] Ben: I didn't even know that.

[00:46:06] Adam: but like that's about it and I know it's fast.

[00:46:09] Adam: Um, but I, I write Rust code now.

[00:46:09] Ben: Yeah,

[00:46:12] Adam: Should I go to Rust conferences?

[00:46:13] Adam: Like, I feel like I have just as much claim.

[00:46:15] Ben: Right.

[00:46:16] Adam: Not claim.

[00:46:16] Adam: Right.

[00:46:17] Adam: Nobody's gonna be standing at the door like, oh, you haven't written any Rust code.

[00:46:19] Adam: You can't come in.

[00:46:20] Adam: But like I have just as much reason to go to a Svelte conference right now as I do to go to a Rust conference because they affect my life about the same.

[00:46:20] Ben: M.

[00:46:29] Adam: And I, uh, to me this is a mourning of that.

[00:46:32] Adam: You know, I'm, I'm sad.

[00:46:32] Ben: Yeah, it is sad.

[00:46:34] Adam: Like

[00:46:35] Ben: It's really sad to me.

[00:46:36] Adam: I, Yeah, yeah.

[00:46:37] Adam: I've been

[00:46:39] Adam: at this company for 13 years and change.

[00:46:42] Adam: I've been programming professionally, God since like 2000-2004.ish.

[00:46:49] Adam: Depending on, you know, where you want to draw that line.

[00:46:52] Ben: Mhm.

[00:46:52] Adam: Um, and so more than 20 years

[00:46:56] Adam: and a uh, good chunk of that time, you know, there was a, like a ramp up period where I didn't even realize that there were conferences and, and blogs and that sort of thing.

[00:47:02] Ben: Sam.

[00:47:02] Ben: Mhm.

[00:47:05] Adam: But like, you know, essentially

[00:47:07] Adam: around 2005, 2006, I realized that that was going on and I dove in and I started to partake and I really enjoyed being a part of the community and going to events and interacting and

[00:47:20] Adam: giving back.

[00:47:21] Adam: And it

[00:47:25] Adam: just doesn't feel like a good use of time anymore.

[00:47:27] Adam: It doesn't feel like there's something there for me and it doesn't feel like it would be worth my time to,

[00:47:33] Adam: to, to do something.

[00:47:34] Adam: stack-focused.

[00:47:36] Ben: I mean I totally understand.

[00:47:40] Ben: I still do a little bit of ColdFusion community stuff.

[00:47:44] Ben: Uh, but it's for the people.

[00:47:45] Ben: I mean like I just like, I just need to get out of the house and see people sometimes

[00:47:50] Adam: so you say you're going to events.

[00:47:51] Ben: like, like go to a conference for ColdFusion that is cold fusion oriented.

[00:47:51] Adam: Is that what.

[00:47:53] Adam: Okay,

[00:47:55] Adam: gotcha.

[00:47:56] Ben: But like.

[00:47:57] Adam: So, but it, so okay, if you didn't have pre existing friendships with those people and you weren't going pretty much just to see your friends, do you think you would still go?

[00:48:04] Ben: I, I can't imagine that I would spend money on an airline ticket and a hotel ticket

[00:48:09] Adam: Right.

[00:48:11] Ben: to uh, you know, unless I had a, a prior art in terms of the community, for sure.

[00:48:12] Adam: Okay.

[00:48:17] Adam: Okay, so let's, uh, let's keep tweaking this equation to figure out where the line is.

[00:48:21] Adam: Right.

[00:48:21] Adam: So it,

[00:48:21] Ben: It would, it would have to be something hyper local, you know, like a train ride away.

[00:48:24] Adam: well, but what if, what if it was still.

[00:48:26] Adam: So you're east coast.

[00:48:28] Adam: You said you're outside of New York City.

[00:48:29] Adam: What if it was still in Las Vegas?

[00:48:30] Adam: I assume you're talking about like CF Summit in Vegas.

[00:48:31] Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:48:33] Adam: so it's still in Vegas, but what if your company is paying for you to go like, and they have no expectation, they're not expecting you to like learn something and bring it back and apply it.

[00:48:41] Adam: It's just this is a thing that's available to you.

[00:48:44] Adam: Do you think you would and, and you don't have a big group of friends there.

[00:48:48] Adam: You might know one or two people, but

[00:48:50] Ben: That's a really tough one because I have so much social anxiety.

[00:48:51] Adam: is there a draw?

[00:48:52] Adam: Yeah.

[00:48:55] Ben: The, the, the fact that the community is familiar to me is, is such a

[00:49:02] Ben: A massive advantage to dealing with my social anxiety to just jump into something that felt very unfamiliar.

[00:49:06] Adam: Mm.

[00:49:11] Ben: I, I, I want to say that I would rise to the challenge.

[00:49:15] Ben: but I don't, I don't think I would, I don't know.

[00:49:15] Adam: Okay,

[00:49:17] Ben: I, I, I, I want to say I would rise to the challenge, but I,

[00:49:21] Ben: I don't know how honest that is.

[00:49:23] Feeling Outside Personal AI Hype

[00:49:23] Ben: Uh, all right, if I can talk more about my sense of isolation for a second.

[00:49:28] Adam: Sure.

[00:49:28] Ben: Um, the other thing that I find very isolating is that.

[00:49:31] Adam: I'm just gonna turn my headphones off while you do this.

[00:49:33] Adam: Is that okay?

[00:49:36] Ben: The other thing that I find very isolating is when people talk about how exciting AI is in their personal lives and all of the examples that they bring up, I just don't connect with at all.

[00:49:43] Adam: Mhm,

[00:49:52] Ben: The number of people who seem to revolve around the struggles of organizing a calendar or like, getting a daily debriefing of their emails or, like,

[00:50:04] Adam: Mhm,

[00:50:05] Ben: finding products to buy.

[00:50:08] Ben: I'm like, all of these in the abstract make sense.

[00:50:11] Ben: Like, okay, that's cool if the AI can do it.

[00:50:14] Ben: But none of it is stuff that I want to put any effort into learning because none of that represents that much pain for me.

[00:50:23] Ben: Like, I make like one plane ticket a year and I go to Delta or I go to United

[00:50:30] Ben: and I look it up.

[00:50:31] Ben: Like, that's not a problem for me.

[00:50:32] Ben: I don't need an agent to go do research,

[00:50:34] Adam: Mhm.

[00:50:36] Adam: Yeah, yeah.

[00:50:36] Ben: you know, or like, what was something I was just listening to the other day?

[00:50:40] Ben: Someone was saying,

[00:50:43] Ben: like, they needed to get a, a report about the emails that came in overnight.

[00:50:48] Ben: So when they come in in the morning, they have a manifest of, like, important emails to look at.

[00:50:52] Ben: And I always look at that and I think to myself, like, I already don't look at my emails.

[00:50:56] Ben: Like, having another thing that tells me about it, like, the problem wasn't that there's important stuff there that I should see.

[00:51:03] Ben: The problem is motivation.

[00:51:04] Ben: Like, I'm just not motivated to look at the emails.

[00:51:07] Ben: Um,

[00:51:07] Adam: Uh, what you need is an email that tells you what's in all the emails you're not reading.

[00:51:10] Ben: I know.

[00:51:11] Ben: Like, I just, I feel like

[00:51:15] Ben: the, the thing that I do relate to is the, hey, I understand how this, yeah, like, I didn't understand how to, to configure my, uh, Wi-Fi router.

[00:51:24] Ben: And I asked ChatGPT and I took a picture of it and it said, oh, you have this type of router and like, here's the URL for the password.

[00:51:31] Ben: You're like, for the admin UI.

[00:51:33] Ben: Like, that I get that's totally fine, like a hundred percent anytime I can see that being helpful.

[00:51:35] Adam: Mm, mhm.

[00:51:40] Ben: What I don't relate to at all is someone being like, oh, well, I Created this uh, agent that does this thing on some sort of a scheduled basis.

[00:51:48] Ben: Like nothing in my life needs a scheduled basis for anything.

[00:51:54] Ben: and like that's.

[00:51:55] Ben: I'm not, I'm not poo pooing the idea of people needing scheduled agents.

[00:51:59] Adam: Mm, mhm,

[00:51:59] Ben: My point is only that it's just not a world that I connect to.

[00:52:05] Ben: So when people talk about all this scheduled stuff that they're having their agents do in their personal life, it is, it is just another way that I feel very othered in the world of AI

[00:52:17] Adam: Mhm.

[00:52:19] Ben: Like I, like I want to see the things that you guys are seeing.

[00:52:22] Ben: I want to feel that joy.

[00:52:24] Ben: But every time you say, well here's how it can give you joy, I look at that and I'm like, I just don't get it.

[00:52:29] Ben: Like that.

[00:52:30] Ben: How does.

[00:52:30] Adam: Right.

[00:52:30] Ben: Why is that joyful?

[00:52:32] Adam: Every, every idea that I have of a way that it could significantly reduce my stress or the demands on my time.

[00:52:39] Adam: It's like, yeah, it's totally possible if you give it this like, unfettered access to the most private, intimate, secret portions of your life.

[00:52:46] Ben: Right?

[00:52:48] Adam: you know, give it access to your, your doctor portal so they can read all of your notes back and forth between you and your doctor and.

[00:52:55] Adam: No, I think I'm going to hold on to that.

[00:52:57] Ben: Yeah, I know.

[00:52:59] Ben: This is like another thing where.

[00:53:00] Ben: Okay, I was just watching an interview the other day, like maybe this was yesterday and some guy was saying that one thing that he had an agent do was that his wife needed to make a doctor's appointment, but the doctor that she usually goes to didn't have an appointment available for like four months or something.

[00:53:16] Ben: So he had an agent spin up in the background that would.

[00:53:16] Adam: Mhm.

[00:53:20] Adam: Hunt down and kill some of her other patients.

[00:53:24] Ben: It was a perfectly aligned agent

[00:53:28] Ben: that, that went through and found people in the specialization she needed and then put it on a Google map so that they could see how far away these are and sort of create a.

[00:53:38] Ben: Do you remember the term mashup?

[00:53:39] Ben: This was like in the early 2000s where you like put everything on a Google map.

[00:53:40] Adam: Oh yeah.

[00:53:43] Adam: Dude, you are, you are looking at somebody who owns like five different Best of Booty albums.

[00:53:50] Adam: Booty being, ah, an album full of mashup songs.

[00:53:50] Ben: So.

[00:53:52] Ben: Yeah, so.

[00:53:54] Ben: So, uh, it was like he had the agent build this mashup of, of medical directory listings and appointment availabilities and, and maps to see how far these doctors are away.

[00:54:03] Adam: Mhm.

[00:54:03] Adam: Mm,

[00:54:06] Ben: And I, and again, it's like, I get how that's helpful, but I also just log into my medical portal and I look at the hospital that's closest to me and I pick a doctor.

[00:54:19] Ben: Like, and I.

[00:54:20] Ben: And maybe that's like a privilege that I don't have anything where it's like if I see someone in a week versus a couple of weeks, like that's not a make or break in my life, you know, Knock on wood.

[00:54:30] Adam: Sure.

[00:54:31] Ben: And when there are things that are emergencies, maybe I'm just lucky because I live in kind of like a not so rural but also not so metropolitan areas.

[00:54:33] Adam: Mhm.

[00:54:39] Ben: So it's.

[00:54:39] Ben: I don't know, like, who knows?

[00:54:40] Ben: Like I.

[00:54:41] Ben: All I'm saying is like, I don't.

[00:54:43] Ben: Like I just, I have trouble relating to almost anything that anyone talks about when they have advanced AI in their personal life.

[00:54:51] Ben: Sorry.

[00:54:52] Ben: So I'm just, I feel very isolated.

[00:54:55] Adam: M sorry, did you say something?

[00:54:57] Ben: I just, it's like, it's like, it's the same way that I feel when I hear how many people watch movies on their phone and I'm like, I just don't get it.

[00:55:05] Adam: Oh, God, no.

[00:55:06] Adam: Yeah.

[00:55:07] Ben: Like, there's no way that you can explain that to me where I'll be like, oh, I, uh, see how that's better than going to a movie theater or watching it on my 62 inch television.

[00:55:15] Adam: Wow.

[00:55:15] Adam: Uh, so,

[00:55:18] Adam: okay.

[00:55:18] Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:55:19] Adam: So comparing it to watching it on a TV at home, like the one thing where I would start to be like, okay, maybe I could see that is like the sort of the, the Vision Pro or other VR headset where it's like, yes, it's a screen that's two inches from your eyes, but the experience, the field of view is the same as watching it on the 60 inch across the room.

[00:55:30] Ben: Yeah,

[00:55:38] Ben: Right.

[00:55:38] Ben: Right.

[00:55:40] Adam: And it's, it's making your head rumble instead of your whole body rumble from the bass or whatever.

[00:55:43] Adam: But yeah, I'm with you on that.

[00:55:46] Adam: I don't get the.

[00:55:47] Adam: I, I will watch a movie or TV show or whatever on my phone out of desperation, but, but

[00:55:52] Ben: Yeah, yeah.

[00:55:53] Ben: I'm not saying I don't watch videos on my phone occasionally, but like, it's never my choice,

[00:55:56] Adam: yeah, we all got a poop.

[00:55:59] Ben: right?

[00:56:00] Ben: It's never like, oh, given the array of options, I'm choosing my phone, my phone is the fallback when.

[00:56:04] Adam: Yeah.

[00:56:07] Ben: And, and, but like, and again, I'm not here to poo poo.

[00:56:10] Ben: The idea that people want to watch on their phone, they enjoy watching because on the phone, I'm just saying it is, it is another one of these things where people say, oh, this is my preference.

[00:56:20] Ben: And I just don't relate to it at all.

[00:56:22] Ben: In the same way that

[00:56:22] Adam: Mhm.

[00:56:24] Ben: I don't need an agent to help me and my wife organize a shared calendar.

[00:56:29] Adam: No, yeah,

[00:56:32] Adam: same.

[00:56:32] Ben: Oh,

[00:56:33] Adam: And I have, I have like 12 shared calendars.

[00:56:35] Adam: You know, me, the wife, the kids, the family has its own like, dedicated calendar for stuff that applies to all of us.

[00:56:41] Adam: And I got calendars for, I have like five different calendars for the skydiving club and you know, like work calendars and.

[00:56:49] Adam: Yeah, yeah, it's a thing.

[00:56:49] Ben: Yeah.

[00:56:51] Adam: And I, the agent would not make it really any better.

[00:56:55] Ben: All right.

[00:56:55] Ben: So if I can keep talking about isolation.

[00:56:59] Ben: No.

[00:56:59] Ben: All right, I don't.

[00:57:00] Ben: What, what do you got?

[00:57:00] Ben: What do you, you have a feeling, your feelings help share your feelings.

[00:57:06] Adam: So.

[00:57:06] Data Centers and Public Discourse

[00:57:06] Adam: Okay, this was kind of the last one I had on my list.

[00:57:09] Adam: and I don't know how true it is, it's just something I've heard through the grapevine.

[00:57:10] Ben: Mhm.

[00:57:12] Adam: And you know, honestly at this point I don't know who to believe on what.

[00:57:15] Adam: There's so much news going along, going around and

[00:57:19] Adam: I'm sure a lot of it is rumors.

[00:57:23] Adam: I'm sure the Frontier AI development companies themselves are putting out misleading information, because it's financially advantageous for them or whatever.

[00:57:33] Adam: But.

[00:57:34] Adam: So take all of this with a grain of salt.

[00:57:36] Ben: M.

[00:57:36] Ben: I would believe it.

[00:57:37] Adam: Um, but I've been starting to hear some things that you know, we make these jokes like, okay, you know, you, if you ask it sup.

[00:57:46] Adam: It burns a gallon of water, right?

[00:57:48] Adam: Like that sort of thing.

[00:57:50] Adam: and

[00:57:52] Adam: I think the, the joke there is, it's dark humor.

[00:57:55] Adam: It's, it's you know, feeling guilty for doing something bad and laughing about it.

[00:58:01] Ben: We're coping with the chaos.

[00:58:02] Adam: Um,

[00:58:03] Adam: sure.

[00:58:04] Adam: But the, I guess what I've been hearing is that they're starting to get better.

[00:58:08] Adam: They're developing like closed loop water cooling systems for their data centers.

[00:58:08] Ben: Mhm.

[00:58:12] Adam: I still think that the energy production, is very dirty from what I understand right now.

[00:58:18] Adam: Like a lot of natural gas burning and turbines and like straight up, like, known to everybody involved that it's illegal zoning, uh, based reasons, that sort of thing.

[00:58:28] Adam: But it is what it is.

[00:58:30] Adam: but I think, you know, is it propaganda to make me not feel so guilty?

[00:58:34] Adam: Maybe.

[00:58:35] Adam: Is it working?

[00:58:37] Adam: Maybe.

[00:58:37] Adam: I don't know.

[00:58:39] Adam: Should I feel guilty?

[00:58:40] Adam: Maybe.

[00:58:41] Adam: but maybe not.

[00:58:44] Ben: It's interesting.

[00:58:45] Ben: I mean, I do think there's a lot of

[00:58:48] Ben: variation in how the data centers are working.

[00:58:50] Ben: I'm, um, I don't know very much about this stuff, but I think, uh, we often talk about things as generalisms and I think that there are things that don't apply generally.

[00:59:00] Ben: Like you're talking about the closed loop versus open loop cooling systems.

[00:59:01] Adam: Mm, mhm.

[00:59:05] Ben: I think that does make a big difference.

[00:59:07] Ben: But I think we don't, we don't ever talk about that nuance.

[00:59:11] Ben: but I, I don't want to talk outside my expertise here in any way.

[00:59:15] Ben: But that did make me think of one thing where people will.

[00:59:21] Ben: Do you ever watch John Oliver?

[00:59:22] Ben: The Last Week Tonight John Oliver.

[00:59:23] Adam: Oh yeah, religiously, yeah.

[00:59:25] Ben: Uh, so one of the things that he will say, they'll be talking about some issue that seems to be getting worse and worse or feels like it's getting out of everyone's control.

[00:59:36] Ben: And people will say, well, where do you draw the line?

[00:59:38] Ben: And his response is always like, just start somewhere and see what happens.

[00:59:45] Ben: And like, maybe it's the right line, maybe it's not the right line, but at least we draw a line at some point.

[00:59:50] Adam: Mm,

[00:59:50] Ben: And um, one of the pushbacks that I hear a lot lately about the data center stuff is people bringing up, oh, well, we've been building data centers for years and we've been putting a lot of industry in impoverished areas for years.

[01:00:02] Ben: And like, why is this suddenly important?

[01:00:03] Ben: You're like, like it's not

[01:00:07] Ben: hypocritical to suddenly feel like you need to do something about something.

[01:00:13] Adam: Mhm.

[01:00:14] Ben: Like the, the, in the same way that I think maybe Sean Corfield or Adam Cameron, someone said, like, you know, like one of the scariest things that you can hear is like, well, this is just how we've always done it.

[01:00:14] Adam: Mm.

[01:00:24] Ben: Or like, like if someone explains like, why you do it this way, well, this is how we've always done it.

[01:00:25] Adam: Mhm,

[01:00:29] Ben: Um, it's like that, that's not a good justification for doing anything that, oh, well, we've always been building data centers, so why are people suddenly worried about.

[01:00:36] Ben: Because we've always been doing it.

[01:00:37] Ben: It shouldn't be a worry.

[01:00:38] Ben: You're like, well, maybe it is a worry and maybe it just didn't reach a threshold.

[01:00:42] Ben: Or like, maybe we've just decided that this is where we're drawing the line.

[01:00:45] Ben: And that doesn't make it hypocritical, I guess, is all I'm saying.

[01:00:49] Adam: Mhm.

[01:00:49] Ben: Um, I, I, I don't know, I just feel like there's a lot of weird

[01:00:54] Ben: and very fuzzy and I think oftentimes very inaccurate parallels that people draw up a lot between a lot of things these days in an attempt to

[01:01:04] Ben: explain how things are and explain how they're going to be.

[01:01:09] Ben: And, and

[01:01:11] Ben: I don't know, I feel like so few of the.

[01:01:12] Adam: One thing I will say, one thing I'll say is that

[01:01:13] Ben: Yeah,

[01:01:17] Adam: for better or for worse, awareness and participation in the discussion is up.

[01:01:25] Adam: Right?

[01:01:25] Ben: Yeah,

[01:01:25] Adam: Like data centers, or hate them, you know, feel like they belong in a different spot.

[01:01:30] Ben: mhm,

[01:01:30] Adam: Whatever, whatever your opinion is, at least we're having the discussion.

[01:01:35] Adam: At least it's not just happening.

[01:01:38] Adam: And people that feel betrayed or, or against the data centers are not just being silently trampled, I guess, I mean, I guess in part maybe they are.

[01:01:49] Adam: But, but there's awareness, right?

[01:01:51] Ben: Mhm.

[01:01:51] Adam: We're talking about it on social media, we're talking about it here on this podcast.

[01:01:53] Adam: Like

[01:01:55] Adam: hopefully that discussion, the, the discourse makes it up into politics where it can have a real effect.

[01:02:03] Adam: And I think the only way to get there is to

[01:02:07] Adam: continue to participate in the discussion.

[01:02:09] Adam: Us as well as, you know, listeners.

[01:02:11] Adam: Do it in your communities, do it on your social media, do it locally, do it, you know, on, on broader nets.

[01:02:20] Adam: But.

[01:02:21] Ben: I agree.

[01:02:22] Ben: Being, being engaged is just generally.

[01:02:22] Adam: That,

[01:02:27] Adam: Yeah, and, and you know, of all the

[01:02:30] Ben: Mhm.

[01:02:31] Adam: unexpected ills that the Internet hath Wrought at least

[01:02:37] Adam: broader access to the discourse has happened.

[01:02:41] Adam: You know, there, there are negatives, like the disinformation propaganda that goes around.

[01:02:45] Adam: There's definitely been downsides to it, but

[01:02:49] Adam: access to the discourse and the ability to be heard if you can communicate clearly is a thing.

[01:02:58] Adam: I think it's, uh, that's got to be the place we stop.

[01:03:00] Adam: You know, the feelings episode has to end on those heavy sighs.

[01:03:06] Ben: Oh, all right.

[01:03:07] Ben: I feel so empty right now.

[01:03:09] Ben: I just feel like I'm drained,

[01:03:12] Adam: Yeah,

[01:03:12] Ben: I guess.

[01:03:12] Ben: In a good way.

[01:03:13] Ben: I feel lighter.

[01:03:14] Adam: sure.

[01:03:15] Adam: I hope so.

[01:03:16] Patreon

[01:03:16] Adam: All right, well, uh, this episode of Working Code is brought to you by LinkedIn, the number one place to have a conversation with Ben Nadel

[01:03:25] Adam: and listeners like you.

[01:03:26] Adam: If you're enjoying the show and you want to make sure that we can keep putting more whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on link.

[01:03:26] Ben: Mhm.

[01:03:32] Adam: I mean, Patreon, um, our patrons cover recording, editing, and transcription costs, and we couldn't do this every week without them.

[01:03:39] Adam: Special thanks to our top patrons, Monte, Giancarlo and Peter.

[01:03:43] Thanks For Listening!

[01:03:43] Adam: We're gonna go record the after show.

[01:03:45] Adam: I got a little tease for you.

[01:03:47] Adam: We're gonna talk about TV stuff.

[01:03:48] Adam: I'm gonna talk about The Rookie.

[01:03:49] Ben: So good.

[01:03:50] Adam: Apparently Ben has started the last season of Ted Lasso and if he spoils it for me, I am literally going to fire him from this podcast.

[01:03:56] Adam: Uh, don't tempt me.

[01:03:58] Adam: And there's other stuff.

[01:04:01] Adam: if you'd like to help us out, you go to patreon.com/workingcodepod throw a few bucks our way.

[01:04:06] Adam: we would greatly appreciate it.

[01:04:08] Adam: Uh, that's gonna do it for us this week.

[01:04:10] Adam: We'll catch you again next week and until.

[01:04:13] Ben: Remember folks,

[01:04:17] Ben: I, uh, no matter how lonely and isolated I feel, I know that I always have you guys.

[01:04:25] Ben: And for that I am thankful.

[01:04:26] Ben: And your heart matters.