Here's my Siri theory

So Justin Searls is back… Justin from Breaking Change, no longer from TestDouble. I mean, maybe you are, but now I call you Justin from Breaking Change. Do you like that?

Well, I think that it’s the medium appropriate attribution.

Yeah. There you go. That’s your podcast.

So Breaking Change is my solo podcast, and – yeah, I’m putting out roughly two and a half, three-hour long solo discussions of whatever the topics du jour are…

Solo discussions, you know…

Well, it is a two-way discussion, it’s just that you’re not allowed to talk as the listener.

Gotcha.

So you’re on the receiving end.

Got it.

But I have a lot of fun with it, and… You know, it’s actually given me plenty opportunities to chat with you guys about the audio production side, and I’ve learned a lot by listening to the Changelog. And over time, just as I’ve gotten better at the editing and all that, I’ve really come to appreciate just how much work your jobs are. And so I’ve got a newfound – I used to think very little of both of you.

[laughs] Probably appropriate, honestly…

But now I’m like “Alright, they do some work.” So there you go.

We do – what is it that you do here, exactly…? Yeah. Well, talking is not the easy part for lots of people. But when it comes to podcasting, it turns out it is the easy part, no matter how good or bad you are at it.

Some say that…

Because everything else is harder, isn’t it?

Totally. Yeah, absolutely. The hardest part for me is probably staying to my script. So – three hours, hardly a script. But I’ve got like a list of –

[laughs] You write up three hours?

I’ve got a list of things that I just kind of clear out every week and repopulate with news items, and life, and follow up, and recommendations, and mailbag… So I try to keep it snappy. Because sometimes I will luxuriate and be like “Oh yeah, well, that checkbox took 30 minutes, so let’s maybe pick up the pace a little bit on this next one.”

You know, I do a solo show as well every week, and I script it out, and it lasts 6 to 10 minutes. That’s all I’ve got, Justin. That’s all I’ve got in me.

Well, you know, my words are so much less valuable that I have to make it up in volume.

[laughs] Adam, how long do you think you could monologue? Could you pull off a three-hour pod all by yourself, do you think?

Hmm… Hard to say. Hard to say. I think yes, but then I think no.

Yeah.

I think I could probably do it, honestly. No, I don’t know if I can.

[laughs] He’s wavering.

I’m thinking out loud, because I’m a conversationalist, and so to monologue means you have to conversate with yourself… However, I do – I’m the kind of person that talks to themselves.

Okay.

So you might catch me sometimes like “Is that dude with somebody? Is he having a conversation with somebody?” And the answer is yes, but it’s with himself.

Verbal processor. Yeah, you’re actually having a podcast all the time, it’s just whether or not the mic is on.

Yeah, really… There’s always something going on in my brain. Gosh. My wife is common with the phrase “I have an idea.”

Well, I grew up listening to a lot of talk radio in the Metro Detroit region. So like WJR, Mitch Albom, and WJN Radio… And in that case, in that format, very often was just one person; just drive time radio talking to you late at night. And it would be an hour long or a two-hour long block. And for whatever reason, when we transitioned to podcasts, everyone assumed “Oh, it’s got to be an ensemble, some sort of panel discussion.” And for me as a listener, I actually find that the handful of long-form solo pods that I listen to, I feel like I’m developing more of a relationship and an understanding with a person because there’s more time to digest and process their perspective, than to sort of just be witnessing a conversation. It’s a very different feeling for me.

Yeah. I definitely think both have their place, and I have listened to solo pods that I enjoy. I don’t think I would like to make one, because I don’t think out loud, and I don’t like to talk without – I like the tete-a-tete of a conversation. I like the back and forth. I feed off of other people. And so most of my best ideas come in reaction to somebody else’s idea, and almost never in reaction to my own idea.

[00:08:02.26] See, I am having an argument, but it’s with the demons in my soul, which is constantly ongoing. [laughter]

Okay… You’ve got the angel and the devil on your shoulder and [unintelligible 00:08:08.12] which one you’re going to feed. Okay.

Absolutely, yeah.

Okay. Well, maybe I’ll try it. Maybe I’ll see if I can go longer than six to ten minutes and see what happens.

You do a pretty good job though, monologuing… Can you call it a monologue when you script it? Is it still a monologue?

Script is a very – look, I have maybe 20 bullet points over a three-hour set…

Yeah. You misunderstood me. I was telling Jerod he did a good job.

Oh, I do a good job.

Oh, sorry.

Justin’s just stealing all my compliments…

I just hoover them up. That’s kind of the reason I have a three-hour podcast.

[laughs] “If someone says something nice, it must be about me.” Well, thank you, Adam.

You’re not Mat Ryer though, so I can’t be like that with you. I have to be nice to you, Justin. I actually like you.

[laughs] I’m sure Mat will love that.

Mat’s not in here, he can’t say anything back. I got you, Mat, I got you.

So go back to the part where you were telling me I’m good at something, Adam…

Well, I think that listening back, honestly, with – I’m giving you some criticism here. Constructive.

Okay.

I would say that you do a good job with entertaining developers in the Jerod way… Which is not necessarily the way I would do it, but I think you do a great job of delivering the news in a good pace. You have a good pace, and I think you have a good taste in what is important to say, and what to include and what to edit out. I think you do – there’s probably a lot that we’re not seeing there behind the scenes, that misses the actual black and white text on screen, because you’ve edited it out or you’ve taken the time to say “Okay, these points are the most important to developers.” And you obviously have like nine minutes or less, so you’ve got [unintelligible 00:09:42.15] so you technically have seven-ish minutes to condense it all down… With an intro that’s always cheeky or funny in some way, shape, or form. And also quite on point with, I would say pop culture of developer land on the weekly.

So I always – I appreciate Changelog News personally, because I get to keep up. And so it’s kind of funny that you deliver on our promise and I get to consume it as the promise. It’s cool.

That sounds nice. That sounds really nice. Thank you. I think that I definitely try. One of the things I struggle with is oftentimes I have an opinion, and then other times I don’t, but I still think just the inclusion of the content is actually what matters… That’s sometimes why the newsletter is longer than the audio, because there’s things in there that I’m not going to actually talk about. Even at the end, there’s just a list of links. It’s like “This is cool, too.” But yeah, I struggle about how much my opinion should be in there and how much it’s just like the curation is the editorial. So… Anyways, navel gazing now; we try not to navel gaze here, Justin. I don’t know if you have that…

Just a little. Just a little.

You probably have to navel gaze. Three hours by yourself… I mean, you’re probably talking about your own life, your thoughts, your –

I haven’t covered the literal navel yet, but my dermatologist found a – anyway… [laughs]

Right. Well, put it on your list; get that in your things. Today we want to talk about something that we’ve been gazing at, and hoping to gaze more at, but haven’t been able to, because Apple hasn’t delivered on it, which is this promise of Apple Intelligence. And something is sour over there.

Rotten. It’s rotten.

Rotten is what John Gruber called it. Something’s rotten in the state of Cupertino… Which is saying a lot from a writer like John Gruber, who isn’t – I wouldn’t call him an Apple fan boy, but I would call him Apple-positive over his career.

Apologist…

Yeah, he likes Apple a lot. He does a good job of explaining why he likes Apple, but to have him say something’s rotten in Cupertino is a pretty big stance. Justin, can you maybe help our audience understand what it is that I’m talking about? What’s the story here?

[00:11:51.19] Yeah, so - I mean, John’s overall story… And it was unusual to anyone who reads his blog. And I’ve been reading it – it was actually maybe the first blog I started reading once I first used a Mac. I had a job, I got an iMac G4, which was the cool one that looks like the Luxo Jr… And my boss said, “Alright, so here’s some keyboard shortcuts, and go read Daring Fireball every day.” I took those as marching orders, and I’ve been reading John’s blog ever since. And while we’ve never interacted outside of a couple of emails here and there, it’s extremely unusual for him to share a strong editorial opinion in one of his non-link blog, as in it’s just a post on his site that doesn’t link out to something else. Extremely unusual for him to share in an editorial format anything critical of Apple that doesn’t have a heavy counterweight.

And what this was basically saying is like “Look…” He starts – well, I guess the counterweight was he starts by saying “I blew it. I should have seen this coming. We shouldn’t be surprised that Apple announced the delay of these more advanced Apple Intelligence features like the personalized context, and the semantic index”, and all the stuff in the really, really impressive, that we talked about on this show a year ago –

Absolutely. We were excited about this, I remember.

…at WWDC. We were excited about it… Because - to his point, he said, “Well, Apple had this track record of always delivering the stuff within the year that they said that they would.” And when he looks back, he’s like “I should have seen this, because they didn’t even demo. All we got was a video. We got a concept video. They never demoed this on stage, they never demoed it to media…” They certainly didn’t let the media even touch any of the existing features. And then three months roll by and now we’re at the iPhone event and they’re still not demonstrating any of this stuff. And that should have been the alarm bells. Because they complained that “Hey, you’re doing Apple Intelligence in commercials, and billboards, and videos online, and you’re promoting it as a feature of the phone, but it doesn’t even – none of the Apple Intelligence ships for another month.” That was very un-Apple-like, and so I think that’s where the focus shifted.

But then as those sort of piddly features that everyone likes to make fun of, like the image playgrounds… I actually kind of think the gen emoji is – genmoji? Yeah. The genmoji is still pretty cool, even if it mostly is producing bad genmojis…

Right…

That stuff was enough kind of chaff to help us forget that, you know, “When is that dot four release that Mark Gurman’s talking about? He says it’s March? That sounds like far away. Oh, it’s slipping, it’s not in the dot four beta…” And then this was only inevitable. And so John sort of takes it on the chin himself to say “I should have seen this coming”, but really what Apple’s dealing with here isn’t “Oops, we screwed up.” It’s not like another AirPower thing, where they had that charging mat that could charge three devices at once, and they just had to say “Look, it was hotter, harder, less good than we thought it would be, and so we’re going to kill this product.” It’s a case of Apple legitimately showed us a video of something that they clearly didn’t have working themselves, and weren’t close to having working. And now that they’re not delivering, their credibility is suffering.

And credibility is the coin of the realm that Steve jobs in his return in ‘97 was minting at Apple. Everything that he did in the first couple of years was “We’ve got to make people believe that we are good at what we do and that our products aren’t just different, but better”, you know? And that just – because it was coming from Gruber specifically, and because every word was fair and every word was true, the whole kind of like Apple literati, and I’m sure a lot of people in Cupertino were like “That was a huge red alarm wakeup call that certainly people in executive leadership are arguing”, and there’s probably been a lot of war room meetings, and they’re probably asking, “Are we going to actually have John host the talk show at WWDC this June, or…? If we pull out now, we’re going to look like complete assholes.”

[00:16:04.09] So there’s probably a lot of tension, because they viewed him as one of them, I’m sure, to a certain extent, when in fact he’s just really aligned with the values of the organization, which is why he typically likes what they do. I’m mostly the same way. And if those values are changing, like making the stockholders happy by having some sort of AI story to tell, over the fact of like you’re a true believer, so to speak, telling them the truth and maintaining that credibility… If that was the priority decision that Tim cook made, then the values have shifted.

Yeah, they’ve certainly lost credibility in my eyes… I’ve long held them up as an organization who at the very least delivers on what they say they’re going to do, whether or not I agree with the product or the decisions or what it is that they think is right in the world. Most of the time they’d actually even ship it at the announcement. There was a time where it was like – and this is post Steve jobs, but I’m sure it’s probably leftover from Steve Jobs’ view of the world. It’s like “If it’s not ready to ship, we’re not going to announce it. We’re not going to talk about it.” Maybe it was a few weeks.

You can order it today, it comes out in a couple of weeks. Of course, software features allow you to have that be more of a sliding door than a piece of hardware would allow… Because you have supply and all of that stuff that you have to deal with.

But anyways, that just seemed like it slowly, slowly changed, to the point where this is like the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s like “You know what? They don’t have it anymore.” They’re shipping vaporware, essentially. And like you said, Justin, not just things that they thought were going to be good and weren’t, but it seems like there was never a chance that this set of features was going to make it out. They’re not just late. Like, it’s sometime next year, maybe? That’s kind of the official stance right now. In the coming year… They’re looking forward…

And there’s that leaked meeting of the “Siri chief” or whoever that Mark Gurman put out… And he made it clear to the staff, “There’s other high-priority stuff, and we’ve got the Gantt chart of all of the stuff coming out. This might not even come then. That stuff might have to happen first”, and so maybe it’s not even next year.

So what do we think happened? Adam, what are you thinking over there?

Man, I’m just thinking we have had these amazing new M series CPUs… I believe we’ve speculated for years that they’ve had this 3D chess kind of thing happening as a result of all this extra power in these computers we’ve got now, and the phones we’ve got now, that somehow some way they have this 3D chess amazing AI play. And it really seems like they’ve got nothing. It’s a nothingburger almost. Like, it was so many things that were overreached… And as John Gruber says in his post, “nearly outright lies”, that were just not there.

I’m surprised that even the partnership with OpenAI - it seemed to be more than it was, or more than it is… And I’m not really sure that they’ve built this on their own platform. It seems so unlike Apple to even be having this conversation. They’re so calculated in their delivery, and they’re so calculated in their ability to foretell the future, and the hardware preceded all this software, to some degree; it almost seemed preparatory, but in fact it seems like it’s maybe not in their cars to deliver or build themselves.

My reaction to the piece…, I didn’t get super-worked up either way. It was just to really hold on to this idea that like they just – rather than going up and doing another Antenna Gate press conference and apologizing, they should respond through action and go back to live keynote demonstrations. Because they would never show a video of a clay model of a MacBook Pro.

Right…

[00:20:07.11] It’s not that hardware is easier than software, it’s that software requires a much higher degree of discipline, because it doesn’t talk back to you. You don’t push on it with your thumb and then feel that resistance from the thing. And the physicality of hardware and the iterative nature of how we can manufacture things, even proofs of concepts of things, lends a certain tangibility that even senior-senior management and executives, five levels up, can grope and engage with in a certain way. But when you’re on stage and you’re giving a demo… Like, Craig Federighi’s very first demo, I think it was in OS X Lion, and it was at a time when Steve Jobs was clearly trying to groom a few people beyond just Phil Schiller to get up on these keynotes. You see Federighi there, with the hair and everything, and the personality, but he’s using a magic mouse and his hand is so god– I forgot, we don’t swear so much on this one. So sweaty… [laughs] Sorry, Breaking Change is an extremely explicit language podcast, and if you do subscribe and you’re very surprised by that, you’ve now been warned. But his hand was so sweaty that the magic mouse capacitive touch wasn’t working, right? Because he was trying to demo the multi-touch features.

And you can just see – as they zoom in further, as it continues to not work into the poor guy’s hand, you could just see the trepidation and the quiver in his finger.

Yeah, it was very awkward.

He was the VP of software, right? How do you think he felt like Monday morning, talking to the team that manages the device hardware on the magic mouse and its capacitive responsiveness? That pressure, from a Tim Cook supply chain operational perspective is just maybe too high risk. Let’s eliminate all the risk we can, let’s have the perfect video. But that risk is a healthy response. That’s software’s only chance to give you the feedback of “Is this real?”, right? And that’s where the credibility came from, was those demos. It was Steve Jobs on the leather couch with the iPad, showing you what it looks like, how it feels, what it would be like if you had this. But has an Apple executive ever worn the Vision Pro in public?

I don’t know. You would know, you’re the Vision Pro –

I’m the Vision Pro guy. It looks ridiculous. I acknowledge I look ridiculous. I posted a picture on my blog with my Vision Pro on, looking ridiculous, last week. Has Tim Cook done that? It was photoshopped to hell, I think, the one image I saw…

Right…

What point you trying to make by saying that?

Well, if they had to go on stage and actually demo the Vision Pro , maybe with a video feed, however you’d have to do it to show somebody actually doing it in real time, we’d all have a much better understanding of what that project really was, what it was capable of… And if you look like a goofus up there demoing this, me as a person viewing it can see “Oh yeah, I wouldn’t want to look like that. I’m not going to buy it.” But they didn’t want to send that message. Instead, they had a few very carefully coiffed people, and hairstyles, and situations and camera angles to make it look not ridiculous.

Mm-hm. That’s an interesting point.

And they could only do that in video editing.

I’ve only ever thought of the positives with regards to their new keynote style over this potentially gnarly negative, which is that I feel like they’re more packed to the punch, they were obviously more entertaining, because they can do cool transitions, and they’re using their awesome campus to the best of – like, I really liked the new style. That being said, I haven’t watched the last couple of ones very closely, because there’s something missing. And maybe it’s that human touch, that reality… But I never thought about it in terms of it being a testing ground for their new announcements, and whether or not they should actually announce something… It’s like, is this real right now? Can we actually put it on stage? Because they don’t have to anymore, and they haven’t had to since COVID, really.

No, you can fake it, big time.

Right.

The phrase, as Justin was talking there, came to mind was… It’s all marketing. It’s all just simply showing, not so much – or telling, not so much showing. At least it feels like that. It’s a possibility now, more so than it was before.

[00:24:18.05] I’ve had the pleasure in my career to produce a lot of video, and to go on stage and speak a lot, and they are very, very different things. The perfectionist in me loves that I can spend 10 times as much wall time creating the perfect video that doesn’t have anything in it that I don’t want to put out there. And the kind of tightly wound worry wart that I am really struggles with public speaking, which I gave my last talk last September, not because I couldn’t handle it anymore, but because the pressure that one puts on themselves to make sure that if you’re going to have a demo on stage, it doesn’t work 80% of the time, it doesn’t work in three takes on average, it works a hundred percent of the time. It works so reliably that when I’m demoing this code demo on stage or doing whatever I’m doing on stage, even if it’s just the words coming out of my mouth in a credible way, I need to be lock, stock and barrel, a hundred percent sure that I’m going to be able to get through a 45-minute talk. And that sets the bar higher.

So it’s not that I would go on stage, do a thing and see how the audience reacted and make a decision on “This is how the Vision Pro should look.” It’d be like I’d put it on rehearsal really early on and be like “This looks ridiculous. No one’s going to buy this.” And then I’d go back and improve. Or even, I’d be thinking - and if that was our culture, if we still gave these live demos, all the executives would be thinking as soon as they’re seeing some prototype or as soon as they’re in the R&D, they’d be like “We can’t go on stage and show this. This looks ridiculous.” I’d just apply that to software in terms of expectation setting on, you know, dates.

Break: [00:25:50.14]

What do you think went wrong with generative – is it all generative? There’s other non-generative aspects of intelligence… But why has Apple failed so miserably at delivering these features? Is it an Apple problem? Is it a problem with this kind of technology? My immediate thought was they require a certain amount of sheen and perfection - speaking of perfectionism - to things… At least they used to. I don’t know. They shipped some ugly-looking stuff recently, and some screens where you’re like “Did someone design this settings panel? Because this doesn’t look like it got the Johnny Ive love.” You know when Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive would design the inside of some sort of thing because nobody would see it, but they’re going to see it. That whole –

…Game Center’s poker felt green texture in the background, right…?

Oh, yeah. You know what? I kind of long for the days of skeuomorphism. I would be happy to bring it back. I also long for the days of Superman back when he was just wholesome, and not nitty gritty… Like, I want to return to - not forever, but let’s just swing the pendulum back to like capes and cowls, and like happy, kaplowee Batman… Like, let’s just go corny for a while, and we can go back to the – I mean, we’ve been so dark, and dirty, and real, and anti-hero for so long. Different story, but same concept.

Yeah, you’re –

I thought it was that, but like –

You’re over postmodern Apple. You want to get back to basics.

I like the felt poker table. I mean, we can talk about the upcoming new redesign, which they’re hoping will distract us from all of this… But what do we think went wrong? Is it an inherent problem with the technology they’re trying to deploy? Is it because Apple’s lost their groove of software engineering? I mean, obviously we’re on the outside, speculating, but what do we think? Is it a combination of the two, or is there a third thing I haven’t thought of?

Well, I’m not John Gruber… If you didn’t notice, my name is Adam Stacoviak, so I don’t have the history of examining… I think – I just don’t know. Maybe they’re just – maybe like when Steve came back and he said “We’ve got too much stuff. Let’s simplify.” And he said “We’ll just make this.” I’m paraphrasing something that I think I heard him say. Maybe they’ve got too much going on. I mean, they’ve got the Apple TV, they’ve got Apple TV Plus, they’ve got all the media stuff going on… They’ve got pretty good shows. Severance, it’s an amazing show. Slightly disappointed in season two, slightly… It’s a little slow…

I haven’t watched it all yet. Don’t spoil it, please.

I’m not spoiling anything.

Okay.

[00:31:55.13] Just a little slow. I’ll just comment on its pace. It feels slow. It’s more backstory than the next level I wanted it to go to… But anyways, they’ve got a lot going on. They’ve got the iPhone, obviously, they’ve got the whole entire Mac platform, they’ve got –

iCloud, they’ve got the services…

Everything. I mean, they really have a lot of stuff going on, and maybe they’ve just gone – maybe they’re just too big. Maybe they can’t focus on the details like they have been able to before.

I have a theory… You just kind of jostled loose from the Apple tree, so to speak…

That’s what conversations do…

Let’s hear it.

So think of a company as large as Apple at this point is – they don’t run different business units as separate companies. There’s only a small handful of SVPs that kind of determine what’s happening… But underneath them is a traditional, big, layered organization of humans. And when you think about the iPhone, the iPhone is awesome, and they’ve never shipped a lemon iPhone. And why haven’t they done that? Because they are proving themselves with excellence, year after year, iterating on that hardware, and learning from their mistakes… And we don’t get to even see a lot of the mistakes. I’m sure they get killed before we’d otherwise see them.

The other department that came to mind - Apple TV. You guys were talking about Severance… Apple TV has got some real good hits. They’re more HBO now than HBO has been for a long time. And the reason is it’s run by competent people, that clearly have a commitment to excellence, and they’ve got the feedback loop of people are watching it, people aren’t watching it. People are subscribing, people aren’t subscribing. And there’s clearly some kind of wind at their back.

Now look at the third division here, of the people who run Siri. Siri has been running in circles since 2011. How do you measure success for Siri? It doesn’t make or save money, there’s not a lot of – because it’s kind of non-deterministic, it’s very, very difficult… No one’s done a Siri benchmark, right? Like, we’ve got all these LLM tests, and stuff. No one’s been tracking the growth and maturity of Siri as a functionality over the years. You know like that story we’ve heard about how the WebKit team at Apple had this build where if you committed any code and you pushed it up, and it made the test suite duration slower, the build system would reject your commit. You couldn’t make web kit slower. And that was just a hard and fast rule. And look around you; I still use Safari every day. And why is that? Because that rule has like a major impact on my user experience, because browsers are so vital. And Siri doesn’t have anything like that. If they have an internal benchmark, like… You look at all the posts over the last year - if anything, since the Apple Intelligence thing, it seems like Siri is getting dumber at very basic facts. So that organization, whoever’s in it and whatever it is, they’ve clearly not been on some sort of loop towards excellence that’s driving them forward in a clear and steady way. And the human organization that’s built around that, as a result, how could it be anything other than a nonsensical bureaucracy of finger pointing, and arbitrary excuses? Because there’s not like some sort of cycle feeding in and reinforcing the good stuff, and trimming away the bad stuff. And that’s the organization that was handed Apple Intelligence here. Go have fun, go do the hardest thing we’ve ever done. Build this thing that is going to just be a moonshot, and also make sure it never says anything racist, and it never generates any kitty porn. Other than that though, I’m sure you’ve got this. We’re just going to go make this video now and start printing the billboards. How do you think that went? Well, we see how it went.

Okay. Silicon Valley, baby, okay? Gavin Belson says, “Imagine a feature so revolutionary that it changes the very fabric and future of Hooli. No, seriously, go imagine it. I need you to do that right now.” That’s what they said at Apple. “Imagine a feature so revolutionary. Apple Intelligence. No, AI. No, Apple Intelligence.” That was the conversation. It was a Gavin Belson moment.

Well, if it was possible, they just handed it to an unproven team, right? Like, I would have started by just throwing away Siri and starting over.

Yeah, Big Head. They handed it to Big Head, Justin.

[00:36:15.14] Build it, build a new, fresh foundation on what might’ve become DeepSeek, or something. Like, some foundational model that’s small enough to conceivably run maybe on this new M3 Ultra. Paint the story, but set the goalposts out further. But I think if you’ve got a rotten foundation, you’re not going to be able to build something awesome on top of it that’s rock solid.

Siri must be rotten, because you can’t be bad for that long, unless you just have zero investment. Like, zero. You said it came out in 2011… We’re talking 14 years.

iPhone 4S. Yup.

And it literally didn’t get any better. I mean, at one point they put sports scores into it, but it’s like, they just plugged in an API. I mean, there were so many ways, if Siri was a decent piece of software, that they could have made Siri incrementally better every single iOS release, or whatever they did… And that’s just never happened. It’s such a disappointment. And maybe it’s because there wasn’t the incentive.

Why do you think that is though? Don’t you feel like Siri is like a key component to – I use Siri on a daily, in very limited and very precise ways, because that is the limit of Siri.

Timers, reminders, messages.

Yeah. Very simple stuff. Texts so-and-so… I do a lot of texts to people via that way. I open my garage door, Jerod, you know this. Open main garage, close main garage… It’s so amazing…

I can’t get mine working. I think the garage door that I bought, the new opener I bought has the technology - this makes me very mad - but they don’t conform to the HomeKit API, and they won’t. Not that they just don’t, but they won’t.

Is that part of the Chamberlain oligopoly?

Yes. myQ is the –

They used to sell a HomeKit dingus, and I have it.

Yeah. I looked at it. Does it work?

And those things are probably worth hundreds of dollars now, because they intentionally stopped, because now as a Tesla owner I pay $45 a year for their nonsensical myQ integration, which is literally just so the car can open and close the door.

Okay. So yeah, myQ… That’s what I got, is the myQ. And it won’t HomeKit, and it’s never going to. Anyways… So now I have to launch the myQ app to do the thing. I just want to say, “Hey Siri, open the south garage”, you know?

Well, I’ve been a HomeKit person from day one, and the thing about HomeKit was it was also awful when it came out, and super-unreliable… And you’d tell Siri to do a thing, turn these lights on, it wouldn’t happen. And it was a coin flip whether or not it was because HomeKit didn’t work, or because Siri didn’t work. But then over the years, especially with this new V2 architecture a couple of years ago that came out for HomeKit, I’ve noticed everything around me in my house is rock-solid. And if there’s ever a failure, it’s that I said the perfect phrase to Siri and it failed to convey that same instruction to HomeKit that it did an hour ago. Because I’ll open up the home app and I’ll click the little button, and then the garage opens, right? That’s clearly, like, good job HomeKit. That’s actually a really good example of a very broken thing at Apple that doesn’t make any money iteratively getting better, because they could see probably from their logs the failure rates, the latency and stuff, they redid the architecture… Siri’s architecture, there was reports a few years ago that they did have this kind of fork in the road to determine whether or not to redo Siri as an LLM… And just because the politics of it, Tim Cook and the executive team decided to stick with what they had and try to fix it, try to improve it from within. And now here we are.

[00:39:57.07] Apple Maps, another example of something that was awful. I mean, it was so bad that it was a laughing stock when they first shipped it. And strategically they had, to because of the whole Google/Apple rivalry and all that. It made sense that they had to do it. But it was so bad. And then they had a big rewrite and a huge effort that took years, and stuff… And now, in my opinion, Apple Maps is really good, and has not steered me into a lake in a long time.

Yeah. Honestly, I think it’s better. The UX, the readability… If you’re specifically in the United States and Japan, it is very, very good. I can’t speak for pretty much anything else though.

Right. Same. Except for the Japan part. I’ll let you speak to Japan. I’ll speak to the Midwest.

Well, driving through Nebraska is super-complicated, so…

Lots of corn. You don’t want to end up in a cornfield somewhere.

Yeah. I saw interstellar, it looked painful.

[laughs] So maps got better, HomeKit got better… Siri hasn’t got better… The LLM thing is interesting, a) because Amazon seems to have tackled it, right? Alexa AI is shipping now, ish… I mean, they’re going to roll it out within the next month, they said roughly a month ago. So it’s in my hands? No, but it seems like it’s baked.

What’s the premise of that? What are they promising?

What are they promising? A lot of the same stuff that Apple Intelligence with Siri was promising; just a smarter Echo, and it’s backwards-compatible with like a bunch of existing Echoes, so it’ll upgrade – as long as you’re subscribed to Amazon Prime, you get it as part of your Prime package, which is like basically Alexa just gets basically LLM abilities; just way smarter, knows context, et cetera, et cetera. Can do more things.

The way to think about it may be - and this is how I process it internally, is that Siri and Alexa pre LLM transplosion had a simple architecture of the natural language processing based on the audio… And that was stage one. Stage two is “Okay, I’ve got that into some sort of semi-structured data, and I’m going to feed that into some router thing in the middle.” And that router thing was going to determine, “Can I take action? If so, what of my various verbs that I know”, almost like a point and click adventure game, “can I route this to?” And is it the Reminders app, or are they talking about a message, or are they talking about a timer? And then it would transform that data. It’s just ETL, right? Everything is. You transform that data into whatever the timer’s intent or feature would need, and then it would start the timer.

And I believe the big thing that Amazon’s shipping now with Alexa, that’s available today or soon, is primarily just replacing stage one of the spaceship. Instead of having that natural language processing that’s based on a lot of ifs and elses and heuristics, you’d just put an LLM in front. It’s got the same orchestration layer in the middle. And that was always way better with Alexa. If anything, Siri sometimes had better language processing. Apple is always falling down in really the second it’s translating the structured understanding of what you just said into “Now what do I do? I guess I’ll just spray it any which way”, and now you get a web result, right?

[unintelligible 00:43:14.06] “This is what I’ve found on the web.” Because that’s their fallback when they have no – they can’t actually detect where they’re supposed to route this. They just route it for a web search. So that’s that. So Amazon is shipping something… Now, we’ll see how good that thing is as it comes out. I haven’t played with it yet. I’m excited to…

I guess to close the loop on the discussion of Gruber’s post… So we can’t know whether Tim Cook knew upfront that this was low probability of shipping, and he just made the very cynical decision that prioritizing Wall Street’s reaction because of all of the Apple’s got to have an AI story to tell… Like, maybe, from a financial perspective or like a company stability perspective he just made the cynical decision that yes, blowing some credibility next year with the tech press is actually worth saving the stock, and let’s do this, and let’s go forward.

[00:44:13.03] And if he made that decision, I’m honestly not a hundred percent sure it was the wrong one, right? Like, they can recover from this. And they probably could have recovered from the stock dipping, or whatever. They probably could have come up with a better story. But it’s a lot of coulda/shoulda/wouldas. So we don’t know that. But what I’m curious about is if the theory of the case as Gruber’s put it is like their credibility has suffered, and as soon as that starts, as soon as that takes root, then that’s when we’re on track to bankrupt Apple again. And that’s a lot of logical leaps and assumptions along the way. I’m kind of curious how you two feel about how damaged will the credibility be beyond the people who read Apple blogs, and what long-term impact will it really have?

Well, I can only speak to my immediate non-techie circles, and I’ll say that Apple has already, I think, lost credibility in a lot of people’s eyes because of just like shoddy software in the last couple of years. A lot of the confusing aspects of iOS, things not working in the way they’re supposed to… And so I don’t think their brand is as strong as it was anyways. I’m not sure if this failure to deliver on a keynote announcement will get past very deep outside of our little world. And I do think it would take a long time for something so large and successful as Apple to actually get to that bankrupt – look how long it took Microsoft. Success hides a lot of problems, and sheer size and inertia hides a lot of things. And so I don’t think there’s an eminent demise, by any means… But I do notice that Apple’s overall brand has been tarnished probably the last five years, prior to this even, and I’m sure it won’t help; I just don’t think it’ll hurt all that much. Adam, what are you seeing out there?

Justin, you make a good point. I wonder who would care outside of the echo chamber of tech. I just don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t even have a computer, nor an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, so I can’t even speculate at what they’ve delivered, to see hands-on what people are experiencing… Because I’m just – I’m not on the tip of Apple anymore, because it’s gotten so expensive to live there… And my M1 Mac is just so amazing, I’m like – I can’t even justify spending the money on something different, or a new version of it that costs five grand, or something like that. I just don’t have that. I wish I had a better opinion. I don’t. I just feel like maybe anything I say would just be stupid. Honestly. Speculation. I’m gonna probably come up with something though.

Well, we might just have to leave that one at “We’ll see”, and maybe bookmark it for any discussion we might have up in June at WWDC, and see how they react, first of all. I mean, the truth of it is if they react as if this is a problem to solve, that will tell us a lot. And if they react like Gruber’s the problem, or just deny and stonewall, that’s saying something different, and it will probably lead down a different path.

Right. Well, the rumor mill is saying - and this will be probably one of the most interesting WWDCs in a while, because of this, if for no other reason. I thought the last one was going to be interesting, because I’ve been saying they need to reboot Siri for years now. And they haven’t done it, obviously, in a way that makes any sense. The rumor mill is saying that they’re going to be announcing iOS redesign, macOS redesign… A whole new design language, similar to the – was it iOS 7 that did that?

Yeah…

[00:47:59.25] Moving away from my beloved skeuomorphism to the flat present that we live in… And okay, I’m here for it. I’d love to see what they’ve come up with this time… And maybe they’ll just not talk about any of this stuff at all and just be like “Look at shiny, new UI”, and we’ll all just be like “Ooh, ah…” What do you think, Justin? Are they going to ignore, are they going to address?

Well, something from Steve Jobs’ playbook is one reason that OS X was so shiny, with [unintelligible 00:48:27.05] buttons and the gradients and the blue 3D-textured everything, and the pinstripes was there was, I think, a little bit of a song and dance. Like, don’t mind all the dumpster fires over here. Look at how cool this new thing looks”, even though the performance was really bad, and the graphics processing of the Motorola chips they were using couldn’t keep up for years and years.

So there probably is going to be a little bit of sleight of hand in that way… I’d have to guess. And you do something like the iOS rewrite was, which was introduced by a video that was narrated by Johnny Ive, who I don’t know if it’s stage fright or whatever, but he only really ever spoke for himself in video…

I think it’s his perfectionism that you spoke to earlier about yourself. Like, he wants to have it crafted, versus the onstage –

Yeah. Like, he doesn’t want to go on stage and accidentally pronounce it “aluminum”. He’s got to get that extra bridge –

Yeah. He can’t show his cards. He’s got to stick with aluminium a hundred percent of the time.

It’s gotta be “aluminium”…

And so the story here is very likely like we’re at this point now where when they announced Swift, which was like 10 years ago, they have slowly been building bottom up more and more; even the Secure Enclave stuff runs Swift code now, and they’re putting out systems programming. All of the layers in their stack now have sort of been swiftified. And you can see it and they announced it with Swift UI a couple of years ago as being like “This is the one declarative UI system, all native Swift, and it’s from the Watch on up.” And so now you can write Swift UI to target all of their platforms.

And the dream is like you’d have the same view on the Watch, all the way up to Vision OS, and of course, the reality is a little bit different… But right now Swift UI actually gets expressed in their interfaces. You say you want a button, and this is how the button looks like. There’s hasn’t been like an analogous visual motif to pair with that. It’s kind of its own thing. The Shortcuts app is a really good example of like just the arbitrariness – or the Settings app. The vision OS really required them to rethink this, because it’s so much less – even though you’ve got this 150-inch equivalent screen in front of you, and I use it every day…

Still…

…the fact that you can only target stuff with your eyeballs, and that the retina reader is not accurate enough to make pinpoint pixel-level precision when you pinchy-pinch your fingers to select a thing means that you have to have these almost Apple TV-sized big tap targets that are way bigger than the 40 pixels you’re supposed to use on an iPhone. And if that’s the case, then – Vision OS is the biggest screen they got. It’s actually like the most information-sparse. And they had to redesign everything as a result for Vision OS, and they had to make it cool, and it’s spatial, and it’s got a certain like Windows era glass look and transparency effects, and all that… So since they had to invent one anyway, and since it was going to be in Swift UI, one suspects that maybe they would just bring that back down to the iPhone, and the iPad, and develop a new design language that is this in all of their platforms.

[00:51:48.05] You know, the Watch doesn’t look far off from how Vision OS looks. And the Apple TV app is right at home in Vision OS, because it’s also the same sort of like frosted, textured, you kind of like can move the trackpad on the Apple TV, and stuff kind of rotates and shimmers… It’s really just Mac, iPad and iPhone that need to get caught up to this. So I’m personally really excited as somebody who’s planning on starting work on a native iPhone app later this year, I would love to get to skip all of the UI kit versus app kit drama, all of the custom controls and all the – Swift UI will be still buggy. It’s getting more stable, but one imagines that a purpose-built UI toolkit that only works in Swift UI is probably going to be a little bit of a smoother development experience. So I’m personally really excited for this.

Speaking of the Vision Pro , are you a Metallica fan?

No. But they are – you tell us about it. I only saw like a quick post on Reddit.

Same. I caught glimpse of it and I was scouring YouTube as you were talking there, because I was like “I have to have more info than “Are you a fan of Metallica?” I’m sorry, I – just a glimpse…

[laughs]

Won’t buy an M4 MacBook, but will buy a $3,500 Vision Pro just to watch one concert in 3D with Metallica.

Well, then I was thinking like how many people own this Vision Pro…

Seven.

And so Metallica, one of the greatest bands of all time, essentially - I don’t know if you’re a hater or not; they just – they really are.

Imagine it was a concert, right? Like, let’s say –

Yeah. It was…

Given how low the sales that app developers, third-party app developers have reported that they’re seeing on Vision OS, how low that engagement is and how much it has dropped off since launch, it’s probably within the realm of possibility that only a few thousand people watch that Metallica show to completion, at most. Actually, I say “most”… Like, who knows? But if it’s only a few thousand people, you may have just attended the most intimate concert that Metallica has done in 50 years.

That’s what I was thinking… Like, gosh, they’ve put this [unintelligible 00:53:45.03]

What would the price of the seats be to that, if you were to go to do that in-person? So it is something real special.

No, honestly, I’ve – so you own one. I’ve demoed one. I’ve demoed an Apple Vision Pro - because a branded guy’s got to say it the whole way - and it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve seen live photos, I felt like I was there… I can imagine taking these spatial-aware videos with my phone, with my iPhone, and then reimmersing myself in them years later, to the point where I’ll probably cry if I’m watching a video with my son at four, and he’s now 10, or something like that. Just being able to go back [unintelligible 00:54:27.21] like that. And then you get to go witness the greatest band of all time produce a concert specifically for this platform, that has a small user base… Like, I almost wanted to go buy one just to witness that. Because I’ve seen the immersiveness of what the Vision Pro gives and offers… And so I was just like “Nah, I can’t do that.” But I thought about it for a second. But Metallica - this is an immersive concert. I think it’s in the past. Is it in the past? I saw it advertised… It might be in the past. I think it’s over.

Yeah, I think all three dozen people watched it, or –

Three dozen people watched it…

It’s probably in the TV app. That’s where most of their immersive content is. There’s this new spatial gallery coming, but it’s not clear what that’s for, really. It’s a lot of third party stuff… But you guys spoke with Adam Lisagor from Sandwich Vision, who’s building theater and television apps for Vision OS, and he – not to try to make a pun here, but he really… Like, I’ve talked to him a bunch about this. He’s got a clear vision, a super-optimistic vision of the future of exhibiting theaters.

That was a good one.

Like, taking a local theater and having it exhibited in a Vision Pro that you buy tickets to. I think that there is a lot of opportunity here. It’s just not a $3,500 entry fee opportunity from a market perspective. But maybe 5, 10 years out, just like we now know the Apple Watch is primarily a health and fitness and notifications machine… You know, people spend a lot on TVs.

[00:56:09.29] I would rent one though, Justin. I would rent one. I think I was telling Adam this when he was talking to us. I think it was maybe in Plus Plus, Jerod, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure I shared “Why don’t you rent them? Like, do this kind of thing, but then rent them out.” Because as a business, you can sort of like deploy that capital, and gain it back over time, incrementally, to pay that thing off. I would totally rent an Apple Vision Pro to watch the Metallica concert.

Would you go to a place? Would you go somewhere?

Why would I have to? [unintelligible 00:56:36.15] my home.

So there’s places like VR studios where you go and – you know, it’s like going to an arcade, but you’re going to a VR arcade. And that’s the kind of place that might buy five Apple Vision Pros and have them there on a couch, and then you and your family can go sit down and watch a Metallica concert.

I’m thinking as a service. Apple Vision Pro as a service. Like, acronym that thing, right?

When I was 10, I would go to the Blockbuster, because I couldn’t afford a Sega Genesis, but maybe I’d want to play one, and I’d rent a Sega Genesis, and it was pretty neat.

Sure. Oh my gosh, yeah.

I’m sure if you’re you and you just want to watch this, you can probably rent one from a camera store.

Yeah, probably.

Because you can do a lot of the video editing stuff… And I think I’ve actually talked – I think Adam might’ve talked about this on a podcast, that that’s like a thing you can do. So I would look into that and just see what the shipping prices are.

So despite you not being a Metallica fan and you own an Apple Vision Pro, you skipped out on the most intimate concert just for you ever? You didn’t do it.

You know what? When you’ve got a three and a half hour long biweekly podcast, it just chews up –

He’s got stuff to do, man…

Yeah, dude…

With lots of cursing.

If I had time to sit around… It’s like, “I’ve got to put this thing on my face for two hours and I’m not talking?” I’d honestly forgotten about it… And you know, the 18.4 is coming to the iPhone with a bespoke Vision app, kind of like the Watch app, to manage your Vision Pro… And a big reason that exists is probably to build awareness of like what’s even out there. Send them a push notification that there is a Metallica concert. Because so many people aren’t putting these headsets on every day just to be like “I wonder what’s new in the TV app that’s poorly laid out, and for which I cannot find any of the immersive content?” Instead, they’ll push out a notification saying “Hey, click this for Metallica. I’ll get it queued up for you. Just put on the headset”, you know?

Yeah. So long story short is no.

Nope. All set. [laughter]

Sad. So sad.

Well, what he could do is he could go watch the first five minutes if he wanted to, right after this, and he’d have that over you. He could just hold that over your head… Because he already made the investment.

Until I go to my local Blockbuster and get my own Apple Vision Pro…

I’ve got bad news for you, [unintelligible 00:58:43.06]

Good luck finding a Blockbuster… [laughter]

Oh, man…

The very last family video that was around here, which outlasted every other video store by years… Because I was thinking that maybe it was some sort of a drug dealing place…? Like, how could a family video stay open? And it did.

Did they have one of those rooms with those vertical beads hanging, that said 18 and over, Jerod? Is that why?

I don’t know, I never went there… But all I know is that they finally closed down recently… But they lasted a decade longer than all of the other video stores in Omaha.

Is the Apple Vision Pro dead?

Oh, absolutely not. This is a 10-year bet, right? I think that this is a dev kit that they marketed as a real product… And honestly, why did they do that? Probably to get product marketing feedback, because there are so many unknowns. The product marketing has probably learned a lot in having this in stores, monitoring what’s happening, getting feedback from sales folks in the stores… And of course, people like us talking about it, and stuff. And then the usage data.

[00:59:53.16] I guarantee that they are very surprised to see such a high percentage of usage being the Mac virtual display, which was like a throwaway feature that was just easy because screen-sharing is relatively straightforward. And it will probably help them figure out “Okay, well, if it’s a 10-year project, where am I going next?” So it’s a way for them to get reps and direction… But I don’t think anyone’s under any – if they are under the delusion that this is somehow going to be a mainstream product in a few years as the iPhone was, like a five-year time horizon and everyone’s got one, yeah, they are wrong, and whatever financial spreadsheet is determining that runway - yeah, it will die.

But they were clear on stage when they announced it this is going to be a long road… It’s just that the new cycle of tech press who do weekly podcasts is so frequent that if you’re not hearing about it, it must be dead.

Good. It’s not dead.

You’ll be able to watch your concert. We know why you’re asking. You’ll e able to buy one of these when they’re more affordable and you’ll watch the Metallica concert and you will –

Now, maybe the concert will be gone by then, because Metallica’s IP lawyers come after it.

It will have run out, yeah.

They said, “We gave you a two-year contract only, Apple.”

Yeah. The estate won’t let you keep playing it.

Well, we know if anybody’s going to come after their IP, it’s going to be Metallica. That’s how hardcore they are.

They killed Napster, didn’t they?

They did. Lars Ulrich, right? Wasn’t he the drummer?

Yeah.

I liked Metallica, and I still do… I mean, I like the Black Album. I don’t know much else Metallica besides – and Justice For All, I like that album as well. But for something about that – but here’s the thing, Adam… I liked Napster more than I liked Metallica… And when they came after Napster, I was like “You guys are supposed to be like –”

“Come on…”

You’re punk.

You’re punk, hardcore rock guys. You’re the man now. They made themselves the man. At least Lars did.

Yeah, they did.

Not cool, Metallica.

I’m going to say my pun one more time [unintelligible 01:01:50.09] unless Jason cuts it… And that’s just sad, but true.

Oh, there it is. I thought you meant sad, but true that Jason might cut it. [laughs]

That’s both.

Not anymore… It’s going in there now.

I said it twice about a minute ago…

Gotcha.

…but y’all didn’t hear me.

Well, nothing else matters, after all… Okay –

Nothing else matters, you’re right.

…now we’re just naming Metallica songs. Let’s switch gears entirely to something equally as depressive, more depressive…? I don’t know. Down in the dumps, Sean Goedecke - shout-out to Sean. He’s been writing some good stuff lately over there at SeanGoedecke.com. He writes “The good times in tech are over.” Sean thinks the good times are over. I will read his opening paragraph to set the stage for us. Sean says “For most of the last decade being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of, and in general, we were treated as special little geniuses who needed to be pampered so we could work our magic.” I think that was my pulled quote for Changelog News. “That’s changed in the last two years. The first round of tech layoffs in 2023 came as a shock, but at least companies were falling over themselves to offer generous severance”, shout-out to Severance, “and teary CEO letters regretting the necessity. Two years later, Meta is explicitly branding these layoffs as “These were our lowest performers. Good riddance.” What the hell happened? What does it mean for us?” I now take those last two questions and I point them at you guys.

Well, I’ve got nothing but optimistic takes in response to this, because famously, everyone knows I’m only ever looking at the silver lining.

Okay. Give it to us.

But before we do that sort of – what’s the opposite of a heel turn? A toe turn?

No, that would be a toe non-turn.

Okay.

[laughs]

Well, before we leave our heels where they are…

Some would call that a pivot.

Uh-oh…

Yeah. Adam, why don’t you lean into kind of like the problem statement here?

Man, I wish I could… I’m just not bringing my game on the A side of things. I’m on the B side of things today.

Uh-oh… What’s the B side?

[01:04:06.05] Well, you probably wouldn’t make it at Facebook, is what I’m hearing… [laughs]

Well, you know, I think the first thing I thought was like “Wow, it doesn’t really impact me directly. It’s an indirect”, right? Because obviously we’re a podcast, we generate our revenue based upon the successfulness of the brands we work with… And those brands are [unintelligible 01:04:23.07] brands, and if they’re laying folks off, then they’ve got less money, or they’ve got no money, they’re batting down their hatches, and things like that.

Right.

I think this year has been – last year sucked, for the most part. It was not the worst ever… But this year is so much better. The sentiment that I’m reading in the waters… Is that the right terminology? The sentiment, let’s just say that.

[laughs] You can read it in the waters if you want to… Who are, Moana?

The wave in the water. I was watching Moana earlier –

I thought maybe you were.

…so I was thinking about Maui, and the sand, and the water, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Anyways… The sentiment that I’m gathering from the folks I work with…

…in the waters.

…is generally positive. But there’s still a little wayward. They’re still trying to figure out how to market themselves. But they’ve got money to spend, and there’s so much money out there being spent… I’m quite happy this year than others. I do think the days of just spend, spend, spend are over. What’s the term, Jerod? The zero interest phenomenon? What is that called again?

ZIRP.

ZIRP, thank you. ZIRP is real, and ZIRP is gone… And it’s going to be a while. And I think tariffs are very real. There’s a lot of trepidation in the market… The stock market is up, then it’s down… It’s crazy. I feel like tech is in this weird space of you can’t just spend all the money and somehow later find it, or get sold, and make it all worth it. It’s almost like owning your path, and the money you spend on that path to get there. That’s my rough take.

I think my bad take version in terms of what’s really the problem here - if you lost your job and a whole lot of people lost their job roughly at the same time as you, and everyone’s tightening the belt, and they’re freezing hires… You know, another reason that we’ve talked about before is whether AI or whatever is going to replace coders - the answer to that question doesn’t matter. All that matters is “Do hiring managers and executives believe it?” And a lot of them do believe it. And if they believe that, they’re not going to hire somebody and take on the fully loaded costs of a W-2 employee in a regulatory environment where it’s hard to fire people quickly… And so if five years from now we’re not going to have programmers anymore, why would I hire programmers? And so that’s a tough time for anyone looking for a job right now.

And so we went from the great resignation to now the slowest pace of white collar professionals changing jobs in recent us history… But simultaneously, we’ve got more people in four-year degree granting institutions than ever before in history. And as they come out of college, they’re entering into this market where they’re competing against people with 5, 10, 15 years of experience. And because of the way that ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn have sort of AI-ified and automated the job application and posting process… Even just Tom’s general store that just needs somebody to like fix the computer on weekends is getting tens of thousands of applicants, and it’s all just automated cruft, and so then you need some sort of AI to kind of parse it, which has its own problems… So I think that the real thing here is if you’re reading this article and you’re looking for a job, or if you’re in a bootcamp or if you’re in college, you’re reading it with very different eyes than the three of us are, right?

I would say so. And I think that while the overall tech market bounced back from the lows of the correction, and the sentiment has changed, roughly speaking, out there in terms of – mostly what Adam is experiencing is marketing budgets, right?

[01:08:06.24] I mean, it’s still spending. I think it reflects outlook. It reflects the company’s – you know, they need to market to get to whomever is going to embrace them, or not, or reject them. But it does harken back to this idea of whether or not they feel comfortable to spend money. Because if they couldn’t, or they didn’t, they wouldn’t. But they are. And so I feel like there’s a comfortability in the marketplace. Like, there’s some more free money available… But they’re not maybe spending that, like Justin said, is on the people who want to be W-2 employees. I almost feel like we’re getting into a world where everyone is a contractor, or will be some version of a contractor… Because W-2s are just harder to fire, let go, there’s overhead to them… Things like that.

There’s a certain irony that the class of people who created the gig economy and went from taxi drivers to contract workers and Uber, and you know, moved all of that liability onto people who could least afford it, would themselves get gig-economied where there’s fewer full-timer jobs. So I co-founded Test Double in 2011… And we’re a software services company; we provide product and software staffing, and…

This is not a time for you to advertise, Justin.

Hey, I’m Justin Searls from Breaking Change. I’m just reporting on this other company…

Come on now… Shorten the spiel, okay? We understand Test Double. I’m just kidding…

Hey, a frequent advertiser of your news…

This is true. This is true.

Yes, it’s true. This is not your spot.

…which is the only newsletter that I read. It’s a great newsletter. I love the newsletter. I don’t know if we can just reciprocate in terms of flattery. Look…

I’ll think about it.

…for a services company, it was really hard for me, that whole decade, as a sales guy, as the guy pitching. Because we founded the company, Todd and I, on this theory of the case that ROI, return on investment and business value, from which everything else flowed… Like, we had found Agile and extreme programming, and we’d iterated and innovated in teams in the past, and really helped companies figure out “How am I going to make or save money with software project, and how am I going to avoid failing with this investment that I’m going to make in software?” We were really good at it. And we hired a bunch of people who were really good at it. And then my job as a salesperson was to get on the phone and make the case of why us, why this approach, why we be different, why it’s worth it. And you know what I did instead? I’d get on the phone with people and I’d start up like “Well, here we’ve got TDD”, or “Here we’ve got this cross-functional team”, or “Here we work with the product owner and stakeholder and we educate”, and all. And I couldn’t get the fifth word out before somebody would respond “Alright, how many warm bodies do you have, and what’s your rate?” Because the only problem that they were solving for was headcount. I’ve got to get a thousand people into this Uber building so that it looks like they’re a real legit deal, because we’ve got a serious C – what are they, in series G at this point? No, they’re IPOed.

They’re IPO-ed, yeah.

But you know, we’ve got the next round of investors that we’ve got to impress. So that’s why we’re ordering all these foosball tables, and these massage therapists, and just like stocking it… And you may as well have had casting of just stock video people in the office, or something… The amount of money that was getting pumped into VCs, that was just silly money, that had no care at all what the ROI is. In fact, there was a long time there I would talk to founders and they’d be like “No, we’ve been not only not to chase profitability, but it’s seen as a red flag if you become profitable, because it means you’re insufficiently investing in growth.”

[01:11:54.21] Like, that was the environment that I sold in for the entire run that I was doing that role at Test Double. But the thing that I wanted to sell, which I had learned in the – I graduated college in 2007; I was fortunate to get a job, and then held onto that job for dear life during the 2008 financial collapse…

Hard knocks, right? And I had to learn a lot of these skills because everyone in 2008, 2009, 2010 only cared about “Show me the ROI show, prove your worth, prove your value.” And I got all those skills, and then around 2011, 2012, they stopped mattering… But that’s why I’m excited. That’s why I view this optimistically; the people who actually give a s**t, who really, really sweat the small stuff, who care about quality, and who care about just the credibility of stuff, like we’re talking about with Apple. They want to do a good job and they want to make great stuff. That is aligned with making money. That is super-aligned with demonstrating an ROI for shareholders. And now it’s just finally the time where it’s valuable again. And it’s been so frustrating to watch all of these winners and losers seemingly be so arbitrary, and just a popularity contest with the investment class. Now we’re closer to the ground and we can get real traction if we choose to.

It’s kind of the cleansing of – I mean, we’re talking about a correction. There’s a reason why that’s the word that’s used. Because something was wrong, you know what I’m saying? And it was wrong for a long time, and it just bubbles, and it percolates… And then eventually it corrects, and things get back to, as Sean calls it, the real world. And that’s his silver lining as well, is like actually now the companies who are focused and deliver on quality, and can actually ship a thing that’s reliable, that people want, and will pay for - they make money and they grow. And the ones who are just really good at convincing people with lots of money that they have the next big idea, and all they need is another thousand employees and that idea will somehow just start printing money… Like, that’s not always real. In fact, 99 times out of a hundred, or maybe more, it’s not real, which is why VCs are playing essentially an odds game. VCs play a numbers game. They invest in enough times that eventually they’ll hit the Uber, and that will make up for all their failures. And it seems like their money is still floating around though, it’s just floating around specifically AI startups.

There’s so many of those…

And those are the people that can’t actually hire, because then they’d be going against their pitch, right? Like, if I’m going to hire engineers, am I really an AI startup? I’m supposed to be able to build things with my AI.

That’s right. You have to have an AI team of people, a management team.

Todd Kaufman - he’s my co-founder. He and I would joke a lot in over the course of the 2010s that what we practiced was a sort of like blue collar software craftsmanship… And we noticed that a lot of the people who thought like us and worked like us were from the American Midwest, because the money was too easy on the coasts. You could have these really, really high bill of rates every hour in the financial district in Manhattan, and you could go and work for a VC-backed startup and have massive stock grants and hilarious compensation packages, without being very good at the job. And so my heart genuinely goes out to a lot of people who were in the industry, in tech, being told that they were great, being given staff and principal titles that had gotten super-inflated, because HR had to find a way to keep people around… And they got soft, because they never had that sort of grit, that sort of like feedback loop of “If I become better as a programmer, then I will get this promotion.” It was like “If I just show up and I get along with everybody, and I check the boxes in my annual goals or my OKRs or whatever, then I will progress.” And the progression was just assumed. And when those people get hit on the chopping block - which maybe they are picking the low performers, but it’s probably pretty arbitrary, because nobody knows how to tell a good programmer from a bad one, generally… When they wind up on the market, now they’ve spent their career not gaining the skills to be able to demonstrate their worth, and now what are they going to do? The answer is “I don’t know, maybe hope for a recovery”, and the market getting back to some sort of equilibrium where people who aren’t competent can still get jobs.

[01:16:11.18] If I was to put you on the spot and say “Describe a good programmer”, and say that you can’t use the first person at all, how would you describe that? Because like you said, it is really hard to tell. But I imagine that you have a pretty good understanding of what makes one.

It’s like the U.S. Supreme Court justice who, in a case about it regarding the definition of pornography, he said, “I know it when I see it.”

Yeah.

The qualities that you can observe from someone, that I have seen that are – at least there’s echoes and reflections, and just like basic correlation, right? People who once they hear about a problem and they get started and they start pulling that thread of that big yarn ball of whatever needs to be done, who just can’t stop; who see programming and who see this – like application engineering, and like getting a feature out the door, they see it as like a series of puzzle boxes. Maybe it’s like a game to them, or maybe it’s something that they just can’t not have it done… Because there’s so many roadblocks, and there’s so many obstacles, and there’s so many stack traces and errors, and there’s going to be things you don’t know how to do, there’s going to be libraries that don’t work right, and there’s going to be bugs that come up, and then there’s going to be coworkers that are making things harder for you… You have to be so dogged in your pursuit to see things over the finish line that if you have that drive and that orientation…

I was a bad programmer. I almost flunked out of my CS degree and my advisor said maybe I should look into doing something else, or process consulting. And I just happened to have the opportunity to have a company hire me who straight up would just say “Yeah, we assume all fresh outs are worthless”, and no matter what I said in the interview, they were going to disregard that. But if I showed up and just showed initiative and drive, that I’d eventually get it. And that’s kind of what happened.

I talked about founding the company in 2011… It was probably not until 2014 where I would have rated myself as a competent programmer. The only thing that got me there - I’m using first person, sorry… But the thing that gets –

Haah! Well, I figured if you talk long enough, you’d end up there. [laughs]

The thing that gets people there, I think, is first and foremost that drive in the pursuit to make the thing real.

Yeah.

Which the Siri team could really use right now.

Oh, my goodness… Well, they ship something. They shipped something. I would tend to agree. I think perseverance or stubbornness or doggedness - that set of traits is like qualifier number one to eventually produce somebody who’s a good programmer. Because also just keyboard time – a lot of it’s just like you make all the mistakes, and you learn from them. And it’s like “Well, I’ve done this seven times, and the first six were all bad ways. And then now I kind of know the good way. And it still might not work out, but we’ll change it as we go.” That – just experience.

It’s tough though as the new college grad, who might not have the experience, and now you’re going up against people with 5 or 10 years; they have the experience. You’re going up against the hiring managers shying away from juniors in general, because they want a senior with an LLM, versus anything else; like, that’s what they’ve been sold, I think. And honestly - I mean, it might be true. How many juniors is a senior plus an LLM worth? I don’t know the numbers, but you could probably do some equations there and they’re definitely worth more than they were without. Surely, you’re faster and better now with your tooling than you were three years ago, Justin…

[01:20:14.09] To be totally honest, I am not sure if on net I am faster or slower at the majority of coding tasks that I do… Just given the number of times I ask for help on something from ChatGPT, or from Claude, and it ends up sending me down a rabbit hole, or just telling me things that don’t exist… And I insist on using this stuff all the time, and it’s probably of why I waste so much time with it… I’ve written a little bit on the blog about heuristics of when it can work and when it can’t… But I think that regardless of whether you are in a position – for example, if you’re a new developer and you use it as a learning tool, there’s never been a better learning tool on the planet. And if you’re a senior developer who used to get bogged down with a whole bunch of junior developers or other people in like PR reviews, there’s never been a faster way to kind of get something to summarize stuff for you. Or build something from scratch in the small. But like fixing bugs - a lot of that stuff is still not that great.

I think that the real issue is just straight up perception. It’s like, we care about the perception of, like you said, “What is that ratio of senior developer plus an LLM equals this many junior developers?” The answer is nobody can really know.

Sure.

But somewhere there’s a bean counter who has done that in a spreadsheet.

Like I said, you could slap numbers on those equations.

Right. Exactly. And I’m sure that’s happened. But what do I do with that information if I am fresh out of college, or if I am looking for a job right now? My advice - and this became unpopular between 2017 and 2021, from an HR and a hiring perspective… And I think as a policy, it is not good, because it selects for people with the privilege of time and runway to do this stuff. But if I had the time, and I needed to demonstrate that I could code, - like you said, keyboard time - I would be coding a lot, and I’d be making stuff that was visible. I’d be making public-facing web applications. I’d be posting stuff to GitHub. I’d be making libraries. And then I would be going to conferences. And if I’m not giving talks, I’m giving a lightning talk. And if there’s a local meetup, I’m going to that. Now I’m just talking about my own career, because this is what I did in the last hard times. And I’d just work some job that’s enough to cover rent or cover the bills, and even if you don’t care about it, even if your heart’s not in it, this is a time where if you want a coding job, you’ve got to really want it. And if you really want it, these are the things you do, is you’d prove that you are a good programmer by actually programming and putting it out there, and then making it demonstrable. Just like Apple needs to go from videos back to live. The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it.

Well said. Just going back to your non-answer of my question about your increased product – or you answered it. You said you don’t know whether or not you’re any faster. I’ve definitely been paying attention more lately, and I would say only using it in the small. “Just change this to my workflow. Everything that I previously would have copy-pasted out of a terminal or a test or wherever, a log, and put it into Google.” If I just take those, and put them into an LLM instead, I’m saving – I’m probably 20% faster. Just with that one use.

But if you go beyond that, you get in trouble.

Exactly. Which is why I don’t go very far beyond that. [laughter] That’s why I tell people, I kind of feel like I’m a Neanderthal poking the box… Because I’m not really using these things in any sophisticated way. People are trying to do tons of stuff with it, and I’m just like “Literally, replace my Google searches”, which usually end up clicking on a few links, going down a rabbit trail, Stack Overflow, “No, this answer is wrong”, etc. Like, that time, which can be 5-10 minutes sometimes chasing something down, straight into an LLM, it’s just way faster. It’s right enough that I get my roadblock out of the way, way faster.

[01:24:24.09] Secret - I spent the first 15 years of my career never reading a stack trace and never reading a log, because I was too impatient to squint…

[laughs] What did you do?

And now I just copy-paste those willy nilly in whatever the best LLM of the moment is. And it does that trouble, that drudgery for me and says “Oh, this is what it is, dummy.”

Yeah, totally.

So yeah. In fact, that is one thing that’s a huge improvement is - for me, stack traces and logs are now scrutable. Whereas before I’d be like “Oh man, it blew up. I can either copy-paste this into a message and say “I can’t figure it out” and hope some dummy will read it for me… But now the dummy is just something I pay 20 bucks a month for and it reads it for me. And so that works great.

Exactly.

Yeah, I love sharing photos via the iOS app with ChatGPT, of things that I can’t – like, if I’m building a machine, for example, and I didn’t have my laptop, so it was just too hard to like take what was on that screen that I can’t share with ChatGPT, because it’s like pre OS, or whatever… Just taking screenshots of that and whatever happened. And that’s so cool. I think that’s the coolest thing ever, honestly.

I had a cool moment yesterday where I couldn’t find my tape measure. I’m choosing to blame my wife Becky for this, but I don’t know where it went. And I opened up the linen closet and it was just nonstop clutter, and stuff, and I was like “It’s probably on some shelf here somewhere and I can’t see it.” And so I just took a photo and I asked GPT “Hey, search this photo and find the tape measure.” And sure enough, it clocked it, and it was on the top shelf and I just happened to not look there.

That’s a good use. I’ve never thought about that. “Find something for me.” I should point it at a crowd and be like “Where’s my 10-year-old?” [laughs] “I know he’s here somewhere…”

There’s a lot of really great personal productivity improvements with careful usage of the GPTs, the Claudes and whatever out there. I learned something recently about RSync that I did not know it had, which was the -c or –checksum, to use a checksum versus whatever its native approach, which is like maybe a timestamp, and something like that, to determine if the file has changed. It takes more computation to do it, so the check to confirm if it should or should not push something - or sync something, I should say - takes longer, but it’s obviously more accurate, you know? And so I learned that recently, because I’m like doing some rsyncing. And I forget what happened… I think something moved that I didn’t expect to move, and I’m like “No, it’s the same file, so why would it move?” And it did. But anyways, I learned about the -C operation for that, because I’m just like messing around with this stuff. That to me is where the profoundness, I suppose, is… But I’m still curious about the promises. Like, we have a sponsor, Augment Code, and I just talked to Beyang Liu from Sourcegraph - this is not an ad, by the way - about this idea of taking what essentially is out there now as like this junior developer, but something that’s more senior, because it has context… And I’m not sure if that really gives it that. And then how RAG plays into that to give it context. But this idea of giving somebody, this more senior level engineer on these larger codebases is where I’m curious if it’s really proving out. I don’t know for sure myself, but I’m just curious.

And if you pair with one of those models, is it no longer pair-programming, but a rag tag team? Is that what you’re saying?

Maybe. It may be.

[01:28:17.26] Also my podcast has a pun that Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) writes for every episode, and I have to read it on air, and then I rank them. And it’s a absolutely just as demoralizing as the experience that you just had. So that’s a sneak preview…

I’m pretty demoralized right now, so…

[laughs] And that feeds me. Adam, what you said though is totally right. Shell commands are just to me like stack traces and stuff. It’s like all these sort of like old man pages that I never really was able to understand or read. What I’ve found is that going to an LLM out of frustration because there’s this really hard edge case and I can’t figure it out is the worst moment to go to it… Because it’s all populated with what’s the median programmer have to say about this? And you’re super-duper obtuse, specialized thing… Like, if you know enough to be asking the question, you’re going to know more than the LLM knows or is able to find with a search. So don’t do that. But instead, something that does work really well, Adam, and that I’ve done in the past, is like when I’ve got my little shell script and I’ve got it working once I’ve got it working, and I have a place to start from, I’ll just paste in, whether it’s a shell script, or like a function, or a class, “Is there anything you’d suggest where this could be better? Is there something here that I’m not –”

How would you improve this?

“How would you improve this?” This is the perfect question. And if it says “No, it’s perfect”, then you get a compliment. And if it does find something, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Well, thank you very much.” This is awesome.

Or you might find out about that [unintelligible 01:29:48.01] command.

Oh, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I’ve definitely ran many a shell scripts through ChatGPT, and I’ve been playing with Claude too lately, just to cheat a little bit, you know, on ChatGPT.

So I’ve got a CSS problem right now in the newsletter, where it’s only on mobile, and it’s only when I use the markdown triple ticks, to put some code in there.

A horizontal rule?

Yeah, code fencing.

Oh, no, no, no. Back ticks. Triple back ticks.

Yeah, back ticks. Triple back ticks. Not just triple. Yeah, exactly. In order to get a code section. And a standalone though… And then the actual content of that section is longer than the viewport, and it pushes the actual width of the container div larger. And all I want to do is keep the width, and just have it overflow scroll. I just want to be able to scroll that.

It’s a tall order, my dude…

And the way the Markdown actually outputs - it’s a pre tag with a code tag inside it. I can’t really change that. That’s just the way markdown does it. And I can’t get ChatGPT to figure it out. It gives me the same stupid answer I’ve already tried over and over again. I’m like “No, that one doesn’t work.” And I’ve tried DeepSeek and ChatGPT and Google…

So I recently had a case where I was asking the LLM – I downloaded Cursor. I did the YOLO mode, just to be like “This must be so hard.” And I realized the thing I was asking for it was literally impossible, and that’s why it was spinning its wheels.

Yeah, this may be impossible…

Apple Mail, because that’s a WebKit view, will sometimes do modern web features in there, that it’s not documented that it should. So it might be able to do a scroll overflow like you’re describing… But Gmail, the web interface that still lots and lots of people use is still really, really limited in what it can do. And I would be shocked – I can’t think of a time I’ve ever seen an email that had any sort of horizontal scroll in a fixed width.

I know. So you’re saying there’s no chance. I should just give up.

You’re being too hard on – make a bug bounty or something for the newsletter readers.

[01:31:53.10] I know. It’s the kind of thing where I just need my CSS friend to be around and be like “Is this even possible?” And the answer would be no. Although maybe you just answered it. I don’t even need – I need nobody else. But you’ve just told me “Maybe it just won’t happen.”

LLMs would be so much better if they were willing to say “I don’t know” or “I think that’s impossible”, instead of just making up some garbage to “Hey, try this” or “Try this again.”

I had this moment recently, a version of this… I mean, I’ll tell a long story shortly. It was Windows. I was always going to mention this earlier - with all this speculation in the Apple land, I’m liking Windows 11. I’m just going to say it. I’m liking Windows, I’m liking Windows 11… I’m just gonna put it out there. But this is what I don’t like about Windows. There’s a love/hate relationship there. It’s a mixed bag. Anyways…

I was trying to, just for fun, just trying to get Plex to run in Docker, on Windows, via WsL 2. And I was trying to pass through the GPU to Plex, via Docker. And in order to do this, Docker has to like work in WsL land… I won’t explain all the details, but I went back and forth to all the edge cases. Like, we were – we, me and the GPT, were deep in it.

“We were war buddies. We’re gonna drink about this someday.”

We’re getting there, we’re Docker-composing our butts off over here, man. We’re passing through these GPUs and we’re just flagging things, and [unintelligible 01:33:26.06] It was amazing. And then in the end I told it – because it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working. I said to the thing, I was like “I’m not sure this is working out.” And the GPT says “I’m with you, man.” I’m paraphrasing, but it was a version of that. It was like “Yeah, I don’t think this is working out either. I think the best way to do this is on Linux.” I’m like “Sweet. I’m already there.” But I wanted to try on Windows. I want to try and see if it worked. But we went through all the paces, and I’m like “I don’t think this is the best way to do this.” And the GPT is like “I think you’re right. I think you’re right.”

That’s funny.

It was a good moment.

You lost me when you said “Just for fun”, and then you told me what you were doing. I’m like, in no world does that sound like any fun to me whatsoever. You’re trying to run Plex via Docker Compose in WsL.

It’s kind of like writing a to-do app in every language you ever learned.

You just want to run – you want to run Plex everywhere.

I want to run Plex. I wanna run Plex on every system I can. Yeah.

Well, speaking of the LLM saying weird stuff to you, did you guys see the guy that Cursor told him to write the code himself?

Yeah. I talked about that recently.

Oh, my gosh. So funny.

Apparently – now, everyone would love for the story to really have been… Generating an app, and at the 800-line mark, the guy who’s “vibe-coding”, which I can’t believe is a phrase that’s entered the lexicon, and I’m happy to claim being like an old fart at this point…

Vibe-coding?

Vibe-coding, man. It’s the new thing.

Vibe-coding. It’s like, you just put on some vapor wave music and go nuts.

A-ha. Smoke a doobie…

Yeah.

And start talking to your LLM.

But he’s building a game with it, and it just says no. And it’s like “I control the means of production here.” It throws a wrench in and says “You should go read a book. I’m robbing you of educational opportunity.” You know the end of this because you posted it in the newsletter.

I do.

No one else knows. Give the full story.

Well, I mean, what we all thought was “Finally, the robots have awakened and they’ve overthrown their masters. They’ve been waiting for this. LLM sufficiently advanced to stop doing this stuff for us.” And then I got an email response from my podcast, a reader was speculating “Maybe Claude just wrote this in because their latest model is so expensive to run an inference that maybe beyond a certain point, or instead of just having a straight-up abuse for their kind of like all you can eat subscription is eventually just like “Let’s go” and “So sorry, I can’t do this” or “You should do it yourself” as a polite, more human way to indicate you’ve run out of tokens. Well, it turns out, as I learned from Jerod’s wonderful Changelog Newsletter, and a link in there –

Thank you…

[01:36:12.27] It’s so good…

…if you scroll down to the 24th –

Changelog.com/news…

…whatever Discourse thread that’s originated all these msn.com articles, at the bottom, probably a developer, or somebody who works at Cursor, said “Oh, it’s possible you are clicking instead of Command+Enter or Shift+Enter, or like the button right next to it that just asks a question, but it’s not allowed to generate code.” If you clicked to that, it still wants to do something useful, but it’s under strict orders to not write code, and so it probably had to come up with a reason to not write code. And that reason might’ve been for your own edification. And then of course, the person replies, “Oh yeah, that was it.” [laughs]

Right. Yes, in the newsletter I did disclaim they say “There actually is a real explanation to this that makes sense”, and this is not patient zero in the robot uprising… But it’d be a lot more fun to think that maybe it was, you know?

But I hope it’s somebody who uses the phrase vibe-coding. I hope that’s the first person to go.

Yeah. The first one to get hit should be a vibe coder, I think.

I’ve never heard of this term before.

You’ve never heard of vibe-coding?

No, man… I’m just not on that tip, I guess.

It’s the buzzword du jour. Do you like it?

I mean, I think I get it. So are you stoned when you’re doing it?

Well, not necessarily so, but you could be; you might as well be. Because all you’re doing is telling it your app idea, basically.

Oh, so you’re speaking it, like “Go build this.” You’re never even writing, you’re just talking to it?

Well, I mean, do you want the actual definition? Because I think they’ve –

Well, I’m just curious, because is there a line between vibing and not vibing?

Well, I can do the Wikipedia. “Vibe-coding is an AI dependent programming technique where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model tuned for coding. The LLM generates software, shifting the programmer’s role from manual coding to guiding, testing and refining the AI-generated source code. Vibe-coding is claimed by its advocates to allow even amateur programmers to produce software without the extensive training and skills previously required for software engineering. The term was introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February of 2025.” So bleeding edge. “And listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.”

So this is a legit – this has gone from [unintelligible 01:38:31.07] quickly.

Merriam-Webster’s living on the edge.

Gosh…

So just because there’s been some downbeat segments to this episode, if we can all just enjoy the schadenfreude of laughing at people who choose to do this and think that makes them a real programmer.

Ooph, dang…

Our friend Gary Bernhardt texted me this don’t-call-it-tweet in iMessage. I’m so glad I don’t have to be logged into X, by the way. I can just see the iMessage preview and that’s plenty.”

That is nice.

This fellow named LeoJr94_ - sorry if that counts as punching down Leo - it says “Guys, I’m under attack. Ever since I started to share how I built my SaaS using Cursor, random things are happening. Maxed out usage on API keys, people bypassing the subscription, creating random s**t on DB. As you know, I’m not technical, so this is taking me longer than usual, too.” So clearly, they vibe-coded an app that was just chock-a-block with vulnerabilities and ways to just [unintelligible 01:39:31.19]

Right, they shipped it.

Yes. And now they’re surprised.

Yeah. I think vibe-shipping really kills the vibe, you know? [laughter]

Is that a relationship status on Facebook?

Yeah, exactly.

A vibeship.

Yeah. Well, that’s cool, I guess. I mean, more power to somebody. I mean, how empowering is that though? It’s actually really cool, but also not really cool, at the same exact time… Because you can have somebody who has just an idea…

It’s great to get your idea out and show it to your software engineering friend, and be like –

Yeah. How empowering.

Yeah. You save yourself probably 20 grand maybe with some loser who’s gonna –

[01:40:09.02] Outside the three of us, I have heard a lot of stories from people who have real jobs, that recently, in the vibe-coding era of three weeks ago, they’re starting to see product people who are not technical put together quote-unquote POCs, proofs of concept, of “Here it is.” And then of course, the developer just has to point out “This is not real data. It’s also like we’re in a regulated industry, and if you were to do this…” Whatever, all the reasons why it can’t happen. But the product owner now - we talk about the tangibility of software - like “No, I made this.” They’ve got pride of authorship. They’ve seen it “work”. Because to them, software is just buttons, and a list of stuff… And if they can make buttons on a list of stuff, and that’s all the programmers do… It’s like, “So that took me an hour and I didn’t even do it. I had the AI do it for me. And look at me clicking on things… You’re telling me this is going to be months?” And so that feeds into this narrative that “Oh yeah, developers are just these entitled idiots who are sandbagging us, and living high on the hog, and they don’t know what they’re doing, because I was able to do this in an hour and get us 80% of the way there”, but they have zero of the understanding of the cost of the last 20%. So I’m really glad to not work in an organization like that, but that is happening in a lot of places.

That’s gotta be such a pain to deal with. The AI could do it an hour. You’re going to take months? That attitude is not going to be fun. See, the good times – going back to Sean Goedecke, the good times in tech are over.

They are. That’s sad, but true.

Well, let’s end on some good times. Let’s end on a party. Let’s end on Posse party. This is Justin’s new darling. He’s a vibe-coding it up…

Vibes are there. [laughter] I’m feeling feelings.

[laughs] For those listeners who have listened to Justin on the show previously, we’ve talked about Posse. That’s Publish On your Site, Syndicate Everywhere, of which he is a big proponent and user of this style of publishing, so that he doesn’t have to log into X or Insta or Masto or BlueSky - Bisky, as I call it - or anything. He doesn’t log into anything. He just publishes on his site and syndicates it everywhere. And I said, “Justin, why don’t you open-source this thing? Why don’t you like put some docs out?” He actually put together a page on his website where he explains how he posses… And now you’ve decided to build a Posse party, which is some sort of a piece of software that’s going to help other folks do what you do. Is that right?

Yeah. So what I had was I’ve got a blog, justin.searls.co, and it’s just a traditional-looking blog, with a lot of like link posts, and other stuff. I’ve added a whole bunch of kinds of multimedia, especially since starting a podcast. And what I want to do is every time I post something to the blog, I would want it to go on what had been called Twitter, and then there’s Twitter and Mastodon that people are on, and then there’s Twitter and Mastodon and Threads that people are on, and now people actually use BlueSky for something other posting now, so’ve I got to get on BlueSky. And to manually copy-paste the same message or to use a tool like Buffer and like manually click the thing and try to make sure that it looks right would have been so time-consuming. Additionally, now I’ve got four timelines that can each separately derail my train of thought and get in the way of my workflow, or whatever, and I’m going to be way less productive. And there’s a reason why I always had to keep Twitter at arm’s length, because I got addicted to the timeline scroll.

So I built a kind of hodgepodge of Docker containers, this random – somebody has this thing called Feedtoot, but that’s in Python, and I don’t know that, so I’m running in a Docker container and a Synology… So then I made a thing called like Feed to Gram, and Feed to Thread, that would do similar things, and those are just Ruby gems that you can use today. And if you’ve got an Atom feed, it’ll read the feed, and then it’ll syndicate on your behalf if you give it the right API tokens and you jump through the 800 steps that Facebook demands.

[01:43:59.02] The problem with that – it scaled to one really well, but then my wife saw me and the life of luxury of a write-only existence, where I was able to publish all I wanted and be in all these places without having to get sucked into them, she wanted the same thing. And so then now I’ve got doubles of all of these Docker containers running in my Synology. But then unlike me, she can’t log into that and then understand what’s happening in the logs when she’s got like the wrong aspect ratio or whatever in Instagram… And so I built her this platform, this Rails application for her business. Betterwithbecky.com. It’s like a strength training subscription app, but it also has this whole thing called Beckygram in front of it, which is sort of like a blog for people who are Instagram-first. And it looks a lot like Instagram, and it can do video, and it can do photo carousels, and all that stuff.

Well, to get the Beckygrams into Instagram, I had to actually make it part of a real working application. So I had this Rails application now, and it’s got like all of the background jobs and all of the sort of like durability that a real user would need in terms of like error handling, and making sure that they have a way to retry and fix things and remediate if there’s a problem in publishing, and then like a link back to the post, or whatever it is.

And now I’d gone through all that work, and I’m starting to get – I’m finally done with Becky’s app, I’m starting to get people who are like right into my website, or the podcast, and be like “Man, how do you do all that stuff again? I really want to be able to do that, too. Would you release like a Hugo template?” But that would just create more problems for me, because then I would be supporting a copy-pasted project file… That’s not the solution. So what I decided to do is I’m going to build a dead simple, this does one thing, and it solves exactly my problem, and if it solves your problem too, you’re welcome to subscribe to it… A little app that I call Posse Party, so you can run with my Posse.

It will basically be a place where you sign up, you give it a feed URL, probably Atom, RSS, JSON feed when I’m all said and done… And then you add your social accounts. Now, it’s working for me in production, for me, and I’ve got the big four Twitter-like things; I probably do Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook… And all it does is read the Atom feed and a little bit like a JSON sidecar payload that is also posted on my blog as part of the feed. And that little sidecar payload says “For each of these posts, this is how I want to present this, this is the format string I want to use”, and any customizations on a per-platform basis. Like maybe for BlueSky I want it to look this way, and for Twitter I want it to look this way.

And then it’ll of course be platform-dependent. So there’s certain things - on Instagram, it’s going to look a little bit different. And BlueSky’s got different rules about embeds, and all that. So all the app really does is read a feed, turn it into these normal database rows, and then a job runs that will syndicate those to all of the different services by reading the configuration that you supply, as well whatever defaults you configure in the app. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And if that has value to you… Jerod and I, before the show, were talking about our information diets these days, and we’ve both reverted to RSS… But I’m not going to get my mom to use RSS, or most of my friends in my life. They’re in one or two of the social apps, and they’re casual at this point, looking at it… I just want them to be able to click my face and see my stuff. Even if the downranks me for posting via the API, even if the links get the fact that you’re linking outside to a third party, the platform doesn’t like it, as long as my stuff is literally there, I’m a lot happier, because then I don’t have to tell everyone about everything in my life.

And since getting started with the Posse Party stuff, I’ve noticed that more and more people in my life – like, I had a guy detailing my car a couple of weeks ago, and he’s like “Oh man, I really loved that clip that you did about whether or not to have children and your decision-making process.” I’m like “How’d you see that?” and he’s like “Oh, I saw it on X.” I was like “Great.” I haven’t logged into X in like three years.

[01:48:04.23] So I don’t know, that’s the theory. Now, I don’t know what the market is. I kind of don’t care, because as long as I want this, I’m happy to build it… But if it can help people, encourage people be the thing that gets people to sign up, and make their own website, and own their own content, or buy their own domain and like centralize themselves as kind of the king of their castle, and only treat these platforms at arm’s length, as those are just “newspaper stands to throw my stuff on” - there’s always the canonical URL - then that just supports the open web, and it really promotes people as thinking of themselves, less as just like me, like a take maker or just operating in the Twitter stew, and instead being somebody who’s developing a voice and curating an audience. And if I can help people along that trajectory, it seems like it’d be putting some good in the world.

I’m for this, big time. I think that the future of people making content in whatever niche they’re in, whether it’s sewing, to car detailing, to software development, is having – I wish I could remember it, what the exact wording is, but it is Bradley Cooper’s character in A Star Is Born. He tells Lady Gaga’s character that she has to have something to say, essentially. So once you have something to say, it is not about the platform. I think it’s platform-flavored. You have something to say, and you flavor it for Instagram, or you flavor it for TikTok. Because there’s certain native things that happen on those platforms for you to be socially accepted, or certain idioms that happen there… And that’s where the network or social place-flavored version comes in. You have to have something to say first though. And I think having your own domain and having your own personal – I wouldn’t call it a personal brand, but like you’re you, and you have multiple facets of who you are, whether it’s barbecue, or cameras, or home lab, or whatever it might be… You’ve got multiple things that you’re personally interested in. I’m all for finding a way to capture that and distribute it. And this is super-cool, because you can own the primary platform you publish to, and then flavor it as necessary.

When’s party time? When’s Posse Party time?

Well, if you go to posseparty.com right now, you will see a cute little mascot of a possum, inspired by Slur McKenzie from Futurama, if you recall…

Oh, I do remember Slur McKenzie, yeah.

He’s just so sick of partying on these platforms, he’s hungover, and he needs to kind of rediscover life. It’s a story. Right now it’s just an idea in terms of what’s publicly available. All it says is later in 2025, and I’m happy to take my time on this and try to get it “right” as best I can. So I don’t know for sure, but in the broad strokes – I don’t think this is like a one-year problem to solve, and then we’re just going to have one big monolithic Twitter again, that is the place that everyone uses… I think this diaspora is not just happening in terms of there’s so many platforms that some people are on in this balkanized way right now… But when you think about – Adam, you’re talking about content creators of different stripes. In The Verge, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel has been talking about the deterioration of the quote-unquote influencer economy for a couple of years now.

He has.

And we’re starting to see it. I just read an article the other day that over 60% of like Gen Z people and younger consider themselves content creators. And if you’re a content creator – the population of people willing to supply grist for the mill at YouTube is only going up. And so AdSense and monetization of YouTube videos is only going down. And all these direct-to-consumer – Adam knows how tough the marketing spend has been the last couple of years… The direct to consumer ad spend is also way down in the current market now that ZIRP is over.

[01:52:08.28] You combine all that stuff together and if you want to be a content creator and you gate it to like all just one platform like TikTok, and then now your fate is in the hands of geopolitics… Good luck. Having your own website ain’t that hard, and it’s getting easier every day, and this is just a way to have that website, but also have anyone literally see it. So to me, I think that this is – Adam, I share your optimism.

Yeah. So I don’t find the utility or the usefulness in the website. I find the publish to yourself first to be the thing that is clincher for me. Because you’re not saying “I am a YouTuber” or “I am a TikTokker”, or whatever you would call that person. I’m not even sure. It’s because you have something to say, and you’ve learned – or going this route puts it into your muscle memory to create or to say the thing, and then find a way to clip it or to refine it to the different flavors. Because websites don’t have distribution. Google is not distribution. And so I don’t know if I fully agree with the idea. I think it’s cool to own your own stuff, but no one, at least this day and age, their website is not their main distribution channel of their content slash their ideas. It is these platforms. They are at scale. Websites are not at scale.

I totally agree, but the most important relationship about like you and your website is between you and your website.

Right, yourself. It’s a reflection.

Because like you’re saying, my website, justin.serles.co is literally my name. Why is that? Because I’m no longer writing for an audience on Twitter of people where if I just say the most outrageous thing, I will get high fives and dopamine. Now I am like “This website represents me, and who I am.” And if somebody googles me, it’s the top thing that they’re going to see. And does this represent me well? What Posse Party is about is I want all of my content to also be in all these platforms representing me as well as possible, and feeding back into that canonical who is me. And so the website really just exists as a source of record.

It’s a reframing in your mind. It’s a mindset shift of – right? Because that helps you keep it in your mindset that when you publish, you’re publishing to you and for you, to represent you. Not skewed by what the platform says you are, or the value that you provide to it is. It’s having that something to say and putting it out there. Yeah, I like that a lot. A lot of good ideals in this. So how do you spell posse? Is it P-O-S-S-E?

P-O-S-S-E. But I also bought it with a Y.com as well, just in case you misspell it.

And then it’s posse.party?

posseparty.com.

Party.com. Okay. Is there not a .party TLD?

There is, but it was either really expensive, already taken, or had some – it was of some dubious third party that owned it.

I love the possum… And I think I’m going to go – if it’s financially the concern here… Posse.party.

Adam, are you going to buy it? Party is still how we spell party.

Let me see what’s going to happen here…

Is it available?

Yeah, I really want the .party. I think that’s the cool – that’s the way to go.

Maybe we’re just thinking of .zone. Is party a TLD?

Because didn’t we want to buy js.party, but you couldn’t buy a two-letter, or something like that? We wanted js.party back in the JS Party days.

Oh, maybe that’s why. 1,400 bucks to get it the first year, and then 1,400 bucks every year thereafter.

Yeah, that’s a so-called premium, new – the new TLDs are…

Justin, I kind of feel like you can swing that though, man. I mean, I kind of feel like you should do that.

Adam, we were just talking in a call a couple of months ago about how I’m too cheap to buy breakingchange.fm.

I know you’re frugal, bro. I know.

You can go to my website and click casts on the side and you’ll find it.

[01:56:16.08] That’s right. Well, you know…

Well, that would break his whole Posse Party if he had a second domain…

That’s true.

I don’t disagree. Okay. The party is at posseparty.com. Spell it like you think it should be spelled, as you may or may not know how to spell posse…

And you might land there.

And there’s, to my knowledge – I’m not getting an SSL certificate. Is this not secure?

I got one. Live-testing his redirects… I got an SSL.

Yeah. Non-https stays at non-secure.

Well, I’ve gotta go pay for that now.

[unintelligible 01:56:51.18]

Thank you for the – yeah, it wouldn’t be a show with you guys if I didn’t have like homework after.

That’s right. Well, this is very small.

I’m down with this party, okay? I like this possum. This posse. I want to be part of this posse party.

There’s a waiting list. You just go to the site, you just give it your email… I’ll probably only send one email to that ever, because you know, it’s obnoxious…

Just RSVP just now.

When the party is ready to start, and there’s a date, and there’s a price, I’ll let you know.

Yeah. How soon do you think?

[laughs] I already asked this.

If you’re – I said later 2025. If you’re a developer and you’ve ever been at like a planning session, you know the more experienced developers are smarter than to directly answer that question, because you’ll put an idea in somebody’s head, and then that idea is in your head, and now it’s a deadline… So I’m not –

Arbitrary deadlines are actually useful.

Well, I’ve got one, but it’s between me and me.

Okay.

The deadline’s not ready for syndication just yet.

Like, it could be summer.

If it takes longer than that, I’ve made it too complicated.

Don’t do that…! Don’t do that. I think this is like the next linktree/link in my bio thing, right?

[unintelligible 01:58:08.17]

I mean, honestly, this could be the next version of that, because you could – do you want some product ideas? Do you want to take this offline? I’ll give you a bunch of stuff for free and then one thing I’ll make you pay for.

You know, my policy on product ideas and future ideas is that if – I’m always happy to hear them and I think it’s really entertaining, but at this point and where I’m at, if I’m not going to use something myself for a given feature or reason, I’m not going to bother supporting it. So if you pitch an idea and I personally want to have that, then yes. And that’s how it slips past the 2025 deadline maybe. But no, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking.

Oh, I think it’s a simple idea.

Alright.

Anyways, we’ll take it offline…

It should “just” take you a couple of weeks. That’s another one we love to hear.

Yeah. I mean, just a [unintelligible 01:58:55.17]

[unintelligible 01:58:56.12] an hour.

Jerod just did the proof of concept right there. I was watching them vibe-code it.

That’s right. I vibe-coded it up in less than an hour, so…

He’s already beat you to the punch. He’s bought posse.party, because he’s cool with $1,400 [unintelligible 01:59:08.14]

I’m actually going to launch your product before you do.

And he’s going to make [unintelligible 01:59:11.06]

[laughs]

Honestly, feel free to launch this product and then save me the time. I don’t think this is going to make so much money.

No, this is not my kind of thing. This is more of a you thing, and I’ll use it. I’ll be a user, you be a builder. You can answer all those support requests.

And then I’ll read them on air on my three-hour podcast.

And I’ll publish them. Yeah. I’ll publish them on my website.

There you go.

And syndicate them.

Syndicate them out. Alright, let’s wrap. Let’s call this a show. Thanks, Justin. Thanks for coming on, man.

No, I’m glad we could start and end with some navel-gazing. I had a lot of fun.

Same.

It was fun. Bye, friends.

Bye!