Ben Spent $600 on Amp credits

Hello Mr. Ornstein. It's been a while. It's been a while. I'm good. I messaged you because I was like, I got to talk to Lavin because I'm a programmer again. I never thought I'd see the day. I thought I thought you had left us. Yeah. I'm back, baby. I got pulled in. And it's awesome. It's the AIs man that got me. It's the best time ever to know how to program without having to program. Yeah. It's so good. I started a couple of months ago, probably like starting to do like a little HTML and CSS edits. It's like my personal website and various things. And I was like, oh man, like cloud code is pretty good at this. Like this does pretty good stuff. And then maybe like three weeks ago, I started doing it more in earnest. I was like, let me try to write some real code. And then I started getting better at it. And it started to like really blow my mind. And lately, I've been waking up in the morning, like excited to get to my computer and like just make stuff. What about are you excited to go to bed and let cloud run loose so you can wake up in the morning and see what he did? I have sometimes I'm kicking off stuff before bed. Not too much. But yeah, I think that's okay. So I have a lot of questions, I guess. So first of all, what are you programming? Because I think the AI world has turned a lot of people into like TypeScript and React programmers. Are you using it to build stuff and technology that you know or in technology that it wants to use? You know, so I started off. Okay. So my the test project that kind of really got me sucked in is I was talking to a friend of mine. And he was like, oh yeah, they talked about that at like the last city council meeting. And I was like, oh man, I wish I had known that happened. But there's no great way to just like get summaries of what's happening at the city council. And so I was like, well, this is silly because they published videos of every meeting they have to by law. And it's on the public website. And so I was like, I bet it wouldn't be actually pretty easy to write a thing that like scrapes it, grabs what I want, sends me a summary via email. And so I was like, let me, this is a perfect use case. Let me try this cloud code thing. And so I started hacking on that. And I was like, okay, make me a Rails app. And it should work this way. And these are how the background jobs should be laid out. And I was like, being like very prescriptive. Yeah. So it was like, it was like I was working with like a very junior programmer. It's kind of how I was thinking of it. Um, where I was like, I was being pretty like, I was telling it a lot of what to do initially. Yeah. And checking it a lot, being like, okay, let me see what you did. Okay. And not not quite that. Or I like this gem instead. And that kind of thing. Yeah. That was a funny thing to give a fuck about these days. And so I got it like, I don't know. I actually got it working. I got it like basically all the way there are basic version where like it scrapes the website. It pulls the video down. It extracts the audio. It, um, grabs the agenda and uses that to figure out who was speaking at what points. So like, diorizes it labels the speakers. And then it feeds that into, um, a summarizer. And like makes me a summary and emails it to me. And I was like, boom, it works. It's amazing. And then I was talking to the cloud about something. Um, and I was like, is this the best language for this? And it was like, actually, Python would probably be better for these reasons. And I was like, actually, I think I really asked this like, should we rewrite this in rust? And it was like, uh, probably not. It's going to take longer. It's probably not what you need. This is very IO. It's not not really what it's made for. Um, and I was like, well, what about Python? And it was like, yeah, Python. I know Python better, honestly. And so like, that might be better. And I was like, no way. Uh, all right. We read it in Python. And I let it just crank on that for like 30 minutes or something. And it was like, here we are. It's in Python now. And that was kind of my first like, whoa, it was like. And some of those like, wow, it doesn't, I don't think it actually matters what these things are written in at least some of the time. Like certain tools. I just, it doesn't matter. There's different categories of things that you build with it for sure. I use it in different ways, depending on what I'm building. Um, if I'm building something for myself that I don't care about at all, then I'm going to, you know, basically vibe code it. Like, I have a little workout tracking thing that me and Steve use that, um, it's perfectly tuned for exactly what we do with exactly the equipment we have and whatever. And I can just open up cloud for my phone on the toilet and queue up a thing to make a PR to make a change to it. You know, it's it's incredible. And then for other stuff that like is real products that we're working on or whatever, I definitely think of it more as, um, I don't know, just like IDE tools on steroids, you know, where I can just like tell it, okay, I want to extract this bit of logic to this other thing. And it's just, it's just like having like the world's fastest typist sitting next to you who understands every instruction you give it. And even if that's the only way you use it, it's like incredibly life altering technology. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, I've been lean in, yeah. So that makes sense. I haven't actually used this for anything that's like production grade, I would say. I guess this like summer, so I put up a landing page for this summarizer that I wrote, um, and people signed up for it. And so I guess that I kind of have an app and production that I care about a little bit. But I'm still not really reading the code. I'm just like, right, more tests for that. Like something broke, right, a failing test. All right. Great. Now we're good. And so I am treating it like production-y because I do want to go, I don't want to break. Um, uh, and I'm still really kind of not looking at the code. Is it a web app? Like, there's like an interface. Yeah. It's, it's, yeah, it's a processing pipeline that just takes, like, money, a bunch of data. Yeah. And there's like, there's a, a, a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A basic web app. Yeah. That you sign up. You subscribe. You pick which little bits of the commute, like which committees you care about and, you know, you can not subscribe and that kind of stuff. Yeah. Uh, and it's still, I, I haven't so far, like pushed something where I was like, oh, God, I broke it in this big way that I didn't notice because I didn't look at the code. Like it mostly is just working so far. And it's small. It's not a huge app. Um, but I've done like a bunch of big refactors on it. Um, where I'm just like, what sucks about the code base? It's like these things. I'm like, all right, go fix those things. So what motivated you to ask at that question? No, um, I was not looking at the code. I was curious if it would make it go faster. Okay. That was part of the prop is kind of like, which are like, are there refactoring you could do that would help you make changes quicker? And I was like, yeah, if you split these files up, I would have a little more locality of things I wouldn't have to think about. I wouldn't have like a really like an 800 line file. And I'm saying, yeah, why didn't you do that in the first place, Claude? You know, also then I was like, well, well, then I was like, well, what should you put in the, uh, Claude MD that will keep you from getting us in this place next time? I was like, how about these things? I was like, all right, put them in there. The whole experience of working with this stuff is like so unbelievably meta all the time. I fucking love meta, dude. It makes me so happy because I love the meta. I am not God or people like, yeah, but what did you build? I'm like, who cares? It's so good. Like my system is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm working on some new stuff that I depending on when we release this, I could talk about it maybe, but I want to be careful too. But I can say in the abstract, I'm like, I'm doing some work. And then I realize the things that I'm asking it to do, maybe I can ask it to make something that I can use to ask it to do these things more efficiently than the way I'm asking to do it now. And it's just like layers and layers and layers of, yeah, I mean, it all for me boils down to like, what do I, what tools do I need to get AI to build for me such that I can be the sloppiest, laziest person I know how to be. And I can't decide if that's awesome or depressing, you know? You know, like writing a Claude scale that allows me to not have to be precise about my instructions or let's me not practice writing things clearly. I mean, I feel like the thing that, yeah, that doesn't worry me so much personally. I feel like the thing that matters is the quality of the end product. Yeah, I agree. But do you feel like the competency like draining out of your ears, you know, because that's kind of a fear that I do have, not even specifically for programming, but just I used to spend a lot of time writing, you know, and getting being a clear communicator. And now I'm hitting a button on my keyboard that turns my microphone on and I'm just ranting in like this totally incoherent, unorganized jumping around way that's not sequenced in any sort of logical order. And it doesn't give a shit and the results are fine. And it's just like, is this what I want to be rewarded for? I'm unsure, you know, like, I think it's amazing. I love it. But at the same time, I can't help but feel like my kids are gonna be fucking stupid, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I sort of know what you mean. There, yeah, the process of actually distilling your thoughts into writing is a thinking process, right? And like, yeah, that's probably like atrofeating a little bit in me, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it is making me dimmer. We'll see. I don't know. That's a productive. Kind of kind of making things that aren't real and things go nowhere. But dude, I made a skill. And this is like, this isn't, yeah. My Twitter is just like all of this. And none of this feels unique to me, but maybe it is to people that are listening. I made a reflect skill, which is the looks back over the conversation and looks for like commands that didn't work, things that took a long time they could have places where we misunderstood each other and like, updates the cloud MD to like fix that for next time. And then like some of the, I update the reflect skill itself and I'm like, oh my god. Yeah. So meta. That's just so meta. Okay, so I keep saying cloud, but to be real, I have actually broken up with a cloud code. What are you using now? I'm using amp. Okay. Well, Rich guy shit. That's right. Yeah. True story. Honestly. What is the, how much do you spend on amp every whatever month or week or whatever? I don't know. Let me check my bill real fast. I still haven't used it because I feel like I haven't had a problem that's deserving of it yet. That's kind of like the branding issue that I almost feel like they have right now. Yeah. You know, all my stuff is too easy. Oh, I bet they would hate this. I'm going to be very sad to hear this. I told Thorsten about it already. So yeah. Okay. I mean, I should just use the free one at least and play with that. I don't know. What are you talking about? You are the rich guy. You should just use the thing. I know. It's just that I again, I just psychologically, I can't ask it to do things that I feel are beneath it. You know what I mean? Why? That's insane. Yeah. I don't know. It's just like cloud can do this and cloud feels free. So why should I spend money to do this? You know, even on whatever. It's not free. I just 200 bucks a month, but it's just nicer. I think it's way nicer. Okay. I'll explain why, but right I'm having I just discovered that I have so many invoices in there that I didn't realize I turned on auto reload and there's no notification of it. So I was like, oh, I spent 75 dollars. I click like, oh, show more. I'll try it this week. I need to be playing with more of these agent harnesses anyways out of necessity because of something that we're working on. Great. Okay. Well, all right. So this is interesting. I signed up. I started using it on January 16th. And so that's like what? Like seven days ago, nine days ago, so far spent $584. It's not cheap. So I have a $2,500 a month amp at this point. That's way cheaper than paying anyone to do anything for you though. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. That's also more than I thought it was. I didn't quite keep track of that. I'm not thrilled about this information. That's a workable workable. Okay. So that's good data. So I have to feed this in now. So worth it. I would say yes. But let me tell you why I like amp. Let me tell you why. And then I'm going to really nice orb reflect a little bit. If you think about it, paying market rate for your tokens is actually better morally for you. That's a better person because of it. Explain that. No, I'm just not. Okay. It does prepare you for the inevitable. Exactly. Reckoning of my budget will already be prepared for it. Exactly. Like, like, yeah, it's like the Uber situation, you know, we will pay the real price one day. No, I think everyone is just betting on the costs coming down such that these are the real prices or lower. In which case, ample, you'd be even better than for you. So you only be pleasantly surprised, I guess. So there's like, you'll put up the app. You don't pick a model. Instead, they have picked like 10 models for you. Yeah. Depending on what the task is, like, they have them, they've picked a certain model that does code search. They've picked a certain model that does web search. They've a certain model for talking to you. They have an Oracle that for making bigger architectural complicated decisions slowly. There's like a whole fleet of models that they they have and they are constantly swapping ones in and out to sort of give up the best overall experience. So it's like the Omakasa model experience. Sure. And like, that wouldn't matter if it didn't actually produce a better experience. Like, you'd be like, well, I'll just use Opus or everything who cares. And I can use it for a lot. She turns out over there with a lot of code. But in fact, I find it to be a lot faster. And I think it's because they're internally, like, just faster, like to get stuff done. Just straight up faster. It gives you results. So they delegate to cheaper models when faster. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes that makes sense. Yeah. And yeah. So that's, I think that's the biggest, I ran a bunch of, so I like one night. I was like, I wonder, am I just imagining it or is this faster? So I built an LLM Benchmarking tool in like an hour and a half. That was probably like 60 of the dollars that I spent. And yeah, I read a bunch of tests, different languages, different challenges. And AMP won every time. Like I won around like 80 tests, different size challenges, different languages. And AMP constantly won. I think there's one single run or a cloud code beat it by a couple seconds. So turns out, I'm not just imagining it, at least on the Benchmarks that I gave it. Nice. And it's usually something like 20% faster than cloud code or so. And like five times faster than codex. Like codex was just like a dog in this thing. It was so slow. There's a lot of nice UX touches as well. Like, you know, Torsten, right? You're from over there with him. Yeah. I talked to him like, multiple times a week. So yeah, he's got taste. And like, he's he's the one of, I mean, top three person I've encountered on the internet in terms of just like, this guy's fucking good at things, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. And like, so like, I think I love is like they, they unshipped stuff. I feel like we have a better way of doing this now. That old thing is just deleted. And it's like, oh, but I was using that. Like, don't care. We're trying to make the best thing for the people that care the most and want to pay for the best thing. Sorry, it's gone. Yeah. And I'm like, hell, yeah. It's time you have for that. So though, it's just, it's, yeah, it's really clean. It's really nice. And I just like, I just of the thing, I've done, yeah, I've been using cloud code codex and amp. And it is definitely by far by my favorite by a decent margin. Okay. I'm going to give it a real, I'm going to give it an honest shot. There is something. I don't know why. And I mean, everyone feels this way, but fixed prices are just so much more, so much less scary. It's like why I like paying for like digital ocean instead of AWS, you know? Even if it costs me more, it's just like this just one less thing to like not think is going haywire in the background that I'm not paying attention to. But yeah, I mean, I'm going to get, I'll get, I'll give it a real limits. Also, you're one of the richer people. I know. So like, I could be all right. Yeah. Okay. I'll set a limit on it. I'll spend 500 bucks on it to what happens. Yeah. I think I should do that. I need to have. I need to have things for it to build. I'll say like the biggest struggle for me with the AI stuff in general is so much of the work we do is so visual. And I still have struggles to find a way to make it faster for me at doing highly specific UI things. I think it's possible to make it to help people do things that where they don't aren't looking for a specific outcome. They're just looking for a good outcome and we're building things in that space. But for me, it's like Steve's designed this thing in Figma. I know I need to apply this exact list of tailman classes. It is just purely mathematically fewer characters for me to type those classes. And it is the type of sentence telling clawed to add those classes. And the tooling with like the Figma MCP and stuff like that is still dog shit. I do think the actual end result here, the actual workflow that will be faster is when like whatever Steve designs is like it's just already done now instead of having to even translate it to code. And we invested in this company called paper. That's like a Figma competitor that's built on the DOM and everything underneath the hood is represented with HTML and CSS. And they already have like an export as tailman thing. But they're like still like very early stage startup. So it's not quite where we would need it to be yet. But I do think that's probably how that type of work is going to get easier. That feels like I don't even know why are you doing that work? Why are you doing that work? I think my design to HTML it seems like I don't know. Not high value. I mean it's the highest value thing to be do. See all the things we sell. No, I think I enjoy it. And I learn a lot about how tailman can be better by actually doing that work. You know. I think tailwind stagnates when I don't do that work because everyone else that gets tasked with that work just like has a high-paying tolerance and isn't thinking about ways that the tool could be better to improve that stuff. That makes sense. But yeah, whatever. And to be clear, you have me and I enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do I always enjoy it? I don't know. I enjoy the meta like you. I've tried to find ways to make it easier and faster. But yeah, anyways, I don't even know what we're talking about anymore. I've been having, so yeah, so like one thing that I've been enjoying is starting to like shift. How do I shift my thinking to use these tools well? Because I have all these instincts from a decade plus of being a programmer. And a bunch of stuff has just had a date. And I think one thing is kind of like the overhead and time it takes to like make a tool for something. Dude, you have to make tools for yourself all the time now. You know, it's life changing. It's silly not to you. It is life changing. Exactly. Like I was okay. So here's like a, I can name a couple examples, but a concrete one. I was working on this new talent UI or 10 plus template a couple of weeks ago. And Steve had designed this really cool like chart in Figma. And if I just like export it from Figma's SVG, like the SVG is bullshit. I just know it's bullshit. I just look at it. I'm like, this is, it's like a mess. It doesn't like scale properly when I resize things because it's just done in this not the way that you would do it if you were like a SVG wizard writing things by hand. So I just like took a screenshot of it and like fed it into V zero. And I was like, build me like a tool with sliders and stuff where I can like manipulate things like the slope of this curve, like how close these lines are together. What point it starts at? Well, point it ends at, you know, and it takes like a little bit of back and forth, but by the end of it, I just have this like little thing deployed on or so. I can tweak some knobs, copy the SVG. And it's just like the purest SVG imaginable because it's programmatically created, you know, it's not just like this flattened, rasterized almost version of the SVG. And I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have done that in the past, but it took like 10 minutes of work to do. And I got like an infinitely better result. And I feel like I'm doing stuff like that like constantly. Now, just like, yeah, I don't know. I've always been sort of skeptical to be honest of tools like like the loveables and the V zeroes and the sort of like what business do you want to build? Make no mistakes. So text area, you know, like, of course, like, I don't think we're there yet. But they're insanely good for personal software that no one else is ever going to use that you can literally delete after the fact. If that was the only thing they did, they'd be like worth the weight and gold, you know? Yeah. Yeah. The other day, I was, I had this the other day, I was like, I was like a sicking a cloud code on my drop box. And I was like reorganize this whole thing. Just go. Yeah. Which was delightful. Dude, just so, dude, I remember the day that it dawned on me that like a cloud code is actually just like an interface for working with any terminal command available on my computer. And it was just like, what the fuck this is insane. I was teaching Steve how to use cloud code the other day because not super technical guy, right? And he like booted up his computer at my house. And it's like Elgato camera hub app had like frozen in some fucked up way. It was like half on the screen and there was no way to quit it. And I was like, bro, this is perfect. Open your terminal type cloud and type Elgato camera hub is somehow fucking not quitable. Get rid of it. And clouds like no problem. It goes away. And Steve was just like, whoa, is this the only way I'm going to use my computer? Honestly, I can't stand not typing into a non AI powered text box anymore. Oh, yeah. Like CD into a directory. Look at what's in the directory. Moot. No. I just like the first thing I do when a terminal boots now is like fire up something amp, cloud, whatever like. Yeah, don't talk to me. All of that was just the prep work necessary for like where we are today. Totally. And so the personal tools things like I have it organized my Dropbox which is delightful. And I found this giant folder with like a ton of images and it's like, oh man, I got to I do want some of these, but I do actually want to delete a bunch of these too. And so I start like looking at it, delete, looking at it. No, keep this one, looking at it, delete it. I was like, wait a minute. And I just like go to, I go to amp and like make me basically a tinder for this directory. And I'm just going to swipe left and right using the arrow keys. And you're going to delete the stuff on the left and you're going to keep the stuff on the right. And it was done in like 30 seconds. And I was like, "Fip, pip, pip, pip, pip, pip, pip, pip, flip through the whole directory done." And like, like you, I was never going to build that. I was never going to make that for myself. But it just was like the fact that I could just put it up. Because you might literally never need it again. Right? And then in the past, the calculus was always, is this going to save me enough time in the future that it's worth the investment to build now? And that question is gone, you know? And even if it were, I wouldn't do it anyway sometimes because like it's just boring. I don't want to write this JavaScript bullshit whatever. Like I just, I don't like it. It's not interesting to me. But the fact that I could just be like, do it like this. There's a bug fix it. Okay, great. We're off to the races. Amazing. I love it. Have you installed cloud code on a production web server yet? Well, funny. You should know. So I've been, I've been cloudbodding. My whole timeline is this and I haven't installed it and I barely understand it. It looks like one of those things that like is someone is going to make the version that normal people understand probably soon. But I am keen to learn more about this. I was going to say my use case for installing cloud on the server the other day are, we built this little asset server for serving my placeholder images and stuff like custom placeholder images for tailwind stuff so that they looked different than all the unsplash ones that other people are using. And the server just started 500ing and just like went down. So I just logged into the server and I installed a cloud and I started cloud and I said, what the fuck is wrong? And it figured it out. And it's incredible. We fixed the problem. I love it. I've been, I've been using xc.dev. It's like a really nice like a get yourself a VM startup. And then it just ships with his own little terminal at AI. It's like they're just like, oh, yeah, this is a part of like the stack now. Like if you, of course, you need an AI and this thing, like you don't even need to install something. It comes with it. It's just like, yes, this is the future. Well done. I was using a stripe AI chat in their docs the other day just on a whim. Just like, let's try this and just like see. And yeah, it's amazing, you know, just asking it like so. Looking at this page, I'm getting the impression I should sort of set up my app to work like this. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's how you should do it. You know, it's just, yeah, I don't know. It's, it's amazing. I love it. So codbot. So what the fuck is codbot? Okay. Um, it's an easy way to talk to clod. So basically it spins up. It has interfaith like connectors so that if you want to talk to clod by sending it a message to telegram or discord or slack or whatever, it just supports all these out of the box. And it's so just like a bunch of like connectors to a central thing that just like is clawed. It's just. Well, I should say a model. Sure, but is it, yeah, is it like directly to a model or is it like in like a clawed code? Like something that can actually kind of do it. It's either it's like, so what is it? What is the tech? You know, like what is the, is how much of this is like really fancy new stuff and how much of it is just like the realization that you could wire things up in this way and solve this problem. It's basically all the latter. There's nothing new here really. There's no fancy technology. It's taking like raw API calls to the models. It's not like just invoking clod code or something. Uh, I don't exactly know that part to be sure. Like, but it's okay. It's basically a running model behind the scenes in a north like with that with a chat sequence going on. And so like the way I use mine is I have it wired up through telegram. And so I have a bot that is my personal agent. And I just message it stuff. And it can do things. So like the message goes through the gateway. It gets stopped at the model. It thinks for a while. It comes back with the answer. And so like one way to think of it is like. You're running this on like a VPS. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. EXC dot dev. I'm using for this. And like, I didn't want to, you know, put it on a machine with too much stuff on it. I wanted to keep the blast. Because like, so it's, it's clawed if you, if you dangerously run permissions and give it access like whatever. It's like, by default, it's just like, yep, have a good time. Like you can do anything you want. Yeah. Um, it's like, I keep it in a place so it's, you know, it doesn't, can't hurt me too much. Um, and the, okay, so here's the amazing thing about it. Here actually is the, maybe the new thing that actually is, in fact, the most important thing. It can modify itself. Okay. So like, I, so it ships with some skills. Like, oh, we know how to connect to this and we know how to connect to that. Like if you want, you can enable these integrations because we already know how to like do whatever. Fine. Um, but then I was like, so I message it and I'm like, Hey, I would actually like to be able to send you voice messages as opposed to just text messages. Can you do that? And it was like, yeah, if you want, I can get whispered out CPP and compile that and run it locally. Or we can like, even give me an API key and I'll like, I'll set up a thing to like use 11 labs to parse your voice or whatever. And I get you these four options. I'm like, yeah, do the, yeah, compile whisper and like run it locally. And it's like, sure, no problem. Hold on. And then a minute or two later, it's like, all right, I'm ready. And so I send it a voice mail. It's like, yep, I heard it. I got you and it responds normally. That's wild. It is wild. It, that's the, that's the magic. You can, so give me some examples of things that you're using this for, especially on a VPS because I've seen people talk about using it on like a computer where they are like logged into their email and stuff like that so they can automate stuff like that. But when you're on a VPS, you, I'm assuming, I mean, I don't know, maybe you have some of that stuff authenticated, but I'm guessing probably not a lot. So what are you using it for? So I've increasingly been giving it more authentication abilities. So I set up a shared one password vault to drop various APIs keys into so it can have access to those. And I was just like, hey, I'm going to give you access to stuff through a one password vault, like write yourself a little thing so you can get to it. It's like no problem. And Claude's, it's running, you know, I have it using Opus 4.5. And so like, it'll sometimes be like, oh, here's a link for you to click that will give me authorization to this thing in your browser. And then when it comes back to tell me what the code was, which is hilarious, because sometimes it's like literally being like, tell me the two factor off code that you see. It's like, someone that says never tell this to anyone. Sometimes they're like using OAuthflow where like it'll redirects to a broken link intentionally and be like, tell me what's after the code equals in the URL. And I'll use that to offer so funny to me. It's just, it's a problem. God. Yeah. So like, I'm sitting in my, I'm sitting in my like house. And I'm like, oh, I wonder if you can control the temperature. Like that be neat. And so I said in a voice message, like write yourself a little script to like see if you can control my thermostats in the house. And it's like, oh, okay, well, it's it's this kind of thing. So whatever. And like, eventually, I have it right a CLI that it uses itself to send messages to the thermostats in my house. And like, it will, it can kick off a cloud code session as a sub agent. So I can be like, yeah, write yourself a script to do this thing in the future. So I was like, on my, on my drive home, I was like, oh, man, it'd be nice to be able to have this thing make me appointments. Like, I don't want to like make the doctor appointment. I want you to like, you do that. Yeah. So I was like, write yourself a thing to use whatever you need to like make me appointments. It was like, okay, cool. Can you go get me a, this API key and I like paste that into the telegram. It's like, I cool. I'm set now. You want to test it out. I'll call you and see if it works. It's just like. So you're making appointments with like, it's using like 11 labs or something to make a phone call. Exactly. That's fucking crazy. That's what I want. So bad. So maybe one day we should pair on tuple and record a video or something of how to set this up because I just don't know that I have the patience to do it from scratch myself when I know people have already done it. So here's interesting. So there's, so I tried to install this thing twice and each time the onboarding was like so developing that I just like like, fuck this thing. I just like deleted it. Yeah. Yeah. And I kept seeing people talking about it. I kept seeing people, I was like, okay, this must be good. I got, and like I finally pushed through the third time it got through. But like, it's coded by a developer that loves code. You know, he's like, and like, so because of that, it has a million connections. It's super extensible. It's just very, it feels extremely developing. I'm like, yeah, you should put it on a VPS over here and yada, yada, yada. But like, so, so, so this core idea, an agent that you can read that you can talk to through lots of method ways that you've given enough access to your tools that it can do useful work that can modify itself as you have preferences and tell it things and learn from you. Billion dollar company all day long. Like, this is like an amazing thing. This is life changing. It's going to be enormous. And so like, I don't know if this is the implementation of it. And like, clearly, the cup, like the labs are going to be going in this direction too. Like, this is just too good. Yeah. It feels too great. But like, this is, yeah, it feels kind of like what Chad CBT is trying to do with like, expedient integrations and stuff, but on steroids, right? Yeah. This is like the fast and loose, like just dangerously skip permissions with everything style. Yeah. I had a use case yesterday or the day before my wife texted me like a screenshot of this, these earrings. And she was like, um, can you get me these for Valentine's Day? You know, I was like, okay, wow, my, my immediate reaction in this like AI world is like, I should be able to take a screenshot of this conversation and paste it into something that returns me tracking number when we set you up. No, I'm serious. That's totally doable. Yeah. So the, the only time, so this thing has like agent browser out of the hood, it'll happily run a headless browser and do stuff for you. And you can give it a credit card. It will buy stuff for actually, I haven't confirmed that. I'm sure it will, but I haven't. It's terrifying. We can do it. Yeah, dude. So we'll set you up. We'll get you a credit card of not too high a limit. Yeah, yeah. Just set up a credit card with like a thousand dollar limit or something, you know? Yeah. And put it in your shared vault. And it'll see it in the vault. It'll be like, oh, yeah, I see it. I'll use that. So here's the interesting thing that I'm noticing. So this is, I think, another interesting, like business question mark or just like future direction. I keep trying to get my tool, my agent, my personal agent, to do stuff for me. And it keeps running into captions. Like I'm like, oh, sign up for 11 labs and get yourself an API key. And it's like, oh, darn, they've got the cloud flare capture on it. I can't do it. Can you go do it? And then tell me the API key. I'm like, God damn it. And so we used to live in this world where like automation signaled fraud. Yeah. Yeah. Like humans good, automated bad. And so you just, you needed to block bots from your stuff. And that's about to flip or like, at least it's about to change where it's like humans weird, rare. Yeah. We need some sort of cap show with this concept of like trusted agents or something. Exactly. Or something or some sort of proof of work or stuff like this. I've been thinking about this lately because like what I suspect there may be, I don't know if like maybe the existing players can just like pivot to this fast enough, but like I do think this is an interesting spot to be like, this is a tool for doing what 11 labs does. But it's actually extremely easy for an agent to sign up. It has an anti capture. It's the opposite. It is surely agent friendly. It says no humans allowed as the H one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you just don't even think about people using it. People should never be on this page, touching it, clicking anything ever. And you build from that as you're ground up. And I think that is like a really interesting direction to go. Like how many dev tooling dev tool companies out there are built assuming humans will sign up for them and integrate them all of them. Yeah. But like things just changed. That's not true anymore. Like my agent is going to make these decisions. And I wanted to have credit card and I wanted to have an email. It already has an email address. I set it up already on my personal domain. And so like if you just stop blocking me and put better docs on the homepage and be like agents, this is for you. Like my agent will be so happy and it will pick you out of the five things as if I was in the Google search results. Yeah. Dude, it's so, uh, it makes me wonder like I'm in the business of like building a framework that people use to style websites. But like, when do we stop needing websites? You know? Like, yeah. Yeah. So I feel this thing happening. I think that's like it's like, I mean, when do we stop needing them? Kind of never really but like increasingly, I'm like, I just want to send voice messages to my assistant and like how do you do things? Yeah. And so like, it doesn't really need a website. It needs an open API spec of what you do. And the ability to sign up and not have a capture. It's, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what I feel, it feels like, um, yeah, I don't know what to make of the future. You know, it feels like we're burning a lot of bridges behind us as we go in a lot of ways. You know, and I don't know where it leads. But yeah, I'm equally, I'm more excited than I am terrified. But sometimes I do think this is kind of terrifying. Yeah, I can't get unexcited. I'm afraid I just, I'm too high. I'm definitely not getting unexcited. But it is still at the same time just like, man, what, what is the final destination? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I've kind of decided I'm just not going to try to predict it. Yeah. I think it'd be too hard to predict. And so I don't think I'll have very much success there. And so I'm just not going to, I'm just going to think I'm going to think a little bit ahead, but like that's about it. And hopefully nothing really bad happens. We'll see. It's a wild time out there. So I check my list real quick. I have some notes. Oh, there's one more thing I wanted to mention. So like you and I are slightly weird or slightly outliers in the world. And so I have a friend who learned to code because he wanted to make an app. So he makes a, he makes a space repetition system for learning Mandarin Chinese. Yeah. And like, because like he was a language nut. He was obsessed with Mandarin. All the tools out there sucked. So he made a, he's like, I want to make a really good one. I have that I could do it. And he has a wonderful like eye for good design and like good UX and made a really good product. And he basically like, he forced himself to learn to program to make this app. So he like rolled in a rails boot camp and like spent like years coding this thing. But he was never like that excited about programming. He wasn't like a programmer's programmer. You know, he was like trying to get the thing done. Wanted to make the product. Like, that's the only way to make the product he wanted. And just literally yesterday, I like pair programmed with him. I was just like, all right, type, clawed, hit enter. And now like start telling it things. And like I had to kind of like, people, like, it's not 100% obvious how to start using it exactly. Like, like, you got to like, this is learning curve for sure. Like how to think about what you're saying to it and how to sort of anticipate like where it's going to misunderstand you or whatever, right? And like, and have it's like, have it check that itself. Like, be like, write yourself a little utility. So you can check the output of that. I'm not sure. And like, like, refuse to open up your editor, refuse to open up the browser, like make it loop back on itself. Yeah. And there's a bunch of stuff like that. But like, we just paired together for like 90 minutes. And he's been texting me today. Like, he texted me today. He's like, I think I made, I'm going to make a year's worth of progress in one day. And like, I think that's probably totally accurate. Like, I don't think that's exaggeration. Like, he's got, like, he's got a bunch of, he had a bunch of failing tests, he had a bunch of issues and PRs that like have been sitting around for a long time. Like, he's just like, not that into the programming part. So it's like, he's trying to get work done. He's doing marketing too because he's like, he's running this business by himself more or less. And so he's like, he's got other stuff to do. And he's like, upgrading gems. He's fixing the test suite. He's pushing the new stuff out. He's like, fixing bugs, fixing security thing. Like, just, and like, I think he maybe really is like 400 times faster than he was, like, yesterday. I did. I 100% can see that being true. Like, yeah. Dude, it is, I, I'm really surprised when people talk about this stuff as if it's not useful or something. Yeah. I don't even try to engage with that anymore. I'm just like, okay, whatever. You can think that I don't care. Yeah. That's fine. Enjoy your makeup stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, like, I'm kind of excited about this idea of, and I don't know when I'm going to have time to prioritize this honestly, but I'm like, excited about this idea of trying to make Tailwind almost like a self updating framework by building the right tooling to like notice when a new CSS feature is released in a browser and then design an API for it based on like my personal taste that's been like documented and write the tests for it and test it in the browser. And, you know, like, 100% possible. Like, this is, yeah, we could probably get your Claudebot doing this in like, I don't even know if it needs to be Claudebot, you know. But I mean, whatever. There's a bunch of ways to do it. But like, yeah, I think this is all the pieces are there for that. At least a V1, you would probably want changes because you're new, but like, every time, yeah, like, be watching for it, do the first pass. You know, me when it's ready, totally, totally. Yeah. Dude, it's crazy. I really do want to play with some of this voice stuff too, because like, I saw a tweet the other day or yesterday or something where someone was like using Claudebot to try and like book a restaurant reservation through OpenTable, but they wouldn't take them through OpenTable, so that just like used 11 labs to call the restaurant and make a reservation, you know. Yep. Yeah, like, that's so cool. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing about having like your assistant be wrapped around an AI that's like, agentic and wants to do stuff is like, it's like, oh, that didn't work. Let me try this. Okay. That worked cool. Yeah. It's, it's awesome. It feels like we're in this weird transition period, though. We're like, we're trying to sort of build like adapters to the real world that like would not be necessary if everything was just built that way. But when I think about other times that that's happened in the world, it's taken a long fucking time for things to go all the way the other way. Like the example that I think of is everyone talks about how like self-driving cars would be so easy if just every car was self-driving, but it's so fucking hard because like most cars aren't, you know what I mean? And I wonder, I guess, well, I guess my question is like, how temporary is the need for the ability for Cloudbot to make a phone call to something? Because isn't it like the eventuality? Like we don't have phone calls anymore, you know, with businesses anyway. Everything's got an API basically. Yeah, like, yeah, I think, yeah, I think we're going, yeah, I suspect this will be like the agentification era where like for some number of years, we're just like exposing more and more of the world to autonomous agents in ways they want to use it. And like they're smart enough to like, it can make a phone call. So like, if we have to use a phone, we can use a phone. But like, it doesn't want to you. Like that's clearly like not the best thing to do it, right? But I suspect we're basically going to add APIs to everything more or less. And like, I feel increasingly like anything that my agent can't do for me is sort of dead to me. Anything that doesn't have a command line tool is sort of like, what are you doing? Like the thing I had to do to control my thermostat is make a command line tool and then it uses that. So like all the complexities wrapped up in the tool. But like it's running on a VM. It can just call commands. Yeah. So so far, every time I want it to learn a new thing, I'm like, I'll fire up an ant session. If it's complicated, it'd be like, let me see how that does this. And we iterate on that. And then I give it to my agent. And it's like, like a cool, that's perfect. I know how to use this. Thanks. And so it's like, I want everything through CLI now. Like don't make a single device in my life that I can't see a lie. Yeah, it's funny how we've sort of like gone back in that direction because of all this stuff, you know? Like things, yeah, I have to click our bullshit. Yeah, click today scrolling through your mouse clicks. Yeah, dude. Get ready to your browser. We're doing terminals now, baby. Yeah. Dude, there's so much opportunity to build stuff now. And I don't even know what those things are. But I just know that it's there. I think that's how conversations with like neighbors, you know, who work in like real physical world jobs, you know, like a friend who like runs like a small electrician business, you know? And it's like, I, I chat with him trying to think about like, okay, what, what could you do to be better than everybody else because of this stuff, you know? And it's still kind of hard to figure out a good answer to that. But it seems crazy that there's not a good answer, you know? Yeah, I do think I mean, I mean, I imagine the trades are like some of the lat, like, are just the hardest to like help with this probably, at least in terms of like their like hands-on work, like until like, hands-on stuff for sure. But yeah, an automated back office for electricians, totally. Yeah, like, they're probably paying somebody to do this right now or like answering the phone themselves or like, you can quotes themselves or whatever. But like, yeah, if you say like, oh, yeah, you should just hold the talk button on Telegram and describe the job in front of you. And then it's going to email a quote to the person in a beautiful form. Yeah, literally, like, just look through the history of quotes that have issued to people and figure out like what this is going to be based on like a similarity to other things. All that work can be turned into zero effort for sure. Mm-hmm. Just crazy how fast this stuff gets better. I don't know if you saw the other day, I like, quote, tweeted a tweet that I tweeted a year and a half ago. I tweeted this tweet during the sort of auto-complete era of coding AI stuff, you know? Everyone was using GitHub, Copyle and stuff like that and early versions of cursor. I hadn't played basically any of it yet because it's just like didn't seem like it was going to help me. And I tweeted something like, you know, is there anything out there yet that can like actually automate like boring, tedious, programming tasks like new version of this library came out. Here's a commit. Oh, you can see I updated one file and there's 600 other files to update. Can you just go and like, contextually update all of them automatically for me? I was like, I was like, this is when AI will be useful to me, like, when it can do this. And there was no answer in the replies. Everyone was like, oh, yeah, that'd be cool. And now it's like a year and a half later. That's how we build literally fucking everything, you know? It's not even like, like, as soon as the first coding agent that appeared, like, as soon as that happened, it was just like, okay, um, the world has changed now, you know? Like, it's so weird to have been a programmer for like 12 to 15 years or something. And like during that time to see like almost nothing change, like those basically building web apps for that whole time, the JavaScript frameworks got beefier and changed a bit and like tailwind came out and that was nice. And like, but like it basically was the same job start to finish. Yeah, you got more popular. We got a little bit better automated tests and stuff. And then I like took a few years off being a CEO and such. And then like, this happened. And suddenly it is completely different. Yeah. And like yesterday, I'm teaching my friend. I'm like, and I had to be like, stop looking at your editor. Like, that's the first step. It's just like, don't open your ID at all, actually. And he was like, oh, I'm using codex in my ID is like, no, no, no, no, no, just don't even do that. Yeah. Stop looking at it. It's insane. It's like looking at the code is like almost like basically an anti-pattern. It's kind of nuts. I, I can't decide how I feel about that part. I'm like, yeah, I feel like this is a bit of like, is that true all the time? No, you should definitely get the code sometimes. I'm not like, I don't fully believe this. Although I'm not 100% like, don't look at the code pill, but I'm good. I'm pretty close. And I do think that's the only, I think that ratchet will just increase in that direction. I don't think we're going to look at the code more later ever. No, I think that's true. Yeah. Yeah, it is, it's definitely changed the way I think about a lot of things with code, even without going that far, even just like, you know, API design feels like a very different job than it did before. There's no like trying to sort of like be, be clever and sort of elegant and make programmers think like, what a, what a great attribute name or method name or something, you know, what? I just feel like, I'm trying to remember this specific example. It's talking to Taylor from Laravel about this the other day. I remember he added this feature in like a recent version of Laravel, something to do with like, when you like eager load a relation from the database, it like automatically brings this other relation along because you always need them together. And he was trying to name this method for like a long time. And like in the original PR, it was like, you know, automatically load, um, relationship and you pass in a name or whatever. And Taylor eventually just called the method chaperone, you know, and he's like, oh, it's this is so just like classy, you know what I mean? But that's not a good name for an agent. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah. And same with Tailwind, like there's so much stuff in Tailwind that's like ambiguous because we tried to make it short, like a BG dash could be a color or a background position or a background size and you're supposed to sort of know. But if I was building Tailwind today, probably like every utility class would just be like abbreviating whatever the characters are in the class in the process that's property, you know? Yeah. And I wouldn't really care about if they were longer or what it would just be like, how can you just like make sure? How can you just like design everything in a way where like the robot will never make a mistake? Like that's the only fucking thing I care about anymore. I don't care about how it looks or um, I think you could mourn that. And I don't really mourn it honestly. Yeah, but it's not really mourning it. It's more it's more just like man, like I spent a lot of time cultivating that skill. Yeah, you know, yeah. I think you're intuition is right there. The like the the move now is just like reduce ambiguity. Yes. Yeah, just as clear as possible, like a self documenting is possible. Whatever the next major version of tail and that you put out is like, I think you should be thinking about your consumer as an LLM. 100% like like, yeah, I think we need to change like that H1 on the homepage to be like the CSS framework for AI, you know, like it already is, but yeah, just accept it. Yeah, exactly, accept it. Your users are telling what they want. But the other the other counter into what the ironic thing is changing it to make it better for AI is going to make it worse for AI because it's already fucking knows how to use it the current way. I mean, I think I think we're going to get past this problem of like, oh, things can't change because the model's trained on like old data. Like I think all the foundation model companies know that like we need to be able to just like be accurate in real time, you know. For the first time, I'm starting to think about like, how do I get stuff in the training data for like as they're updating us in the future? Like what am I putting out in the world to teach the LLM's that are coming out later to use the things that I want them to use? Yeah. That's an example of that. Like what are you working on that you care about being in the? Well, it's when I think about when I think about making these like, AI or like agent first dev tool ideas. It's like the as soon as possible, I want that on the internet talking about how like this is for agents, this is for agents, this is for agent, this is for you. As many ways as I can and like get it in the set. So they like like when it later, it took like, what do we use for making phone calls? It's like, oh, well, I know this one's for agents and I'm an agent. Yeah. Yeah. Like like advanced agent SEO for like, yeah, yeah, exactly. Opus 50, like, now's your chance to get in there or like six or like, I feel this way about tailwind for you. Like, yeah, it's probably going to be an adjustment period where like it's like trying to use the old tailwind syntax or something. And you have to like be like, oh, no, read the docs over here and update to like use this syntax instead. But then like the next version, they're going to come out or they'll just move their knowledge cut off up, which they do without even releasing major versions. Yeah. Yeah. And you'll just now you're just there. You're just in the latest. So like, you gotta be thinking about it. I mean, we could probably release it without even being a breaking change. We're just like instead of like import tailwind CSS, you like import tailwind CSS slash AI. And it's like, this is the version of the framework that's designed for agents. Instead of px4, meaning 16 pixels is px16 finally. Like, why the fuck are we making agents divide things by four, you know? Instead of just making things as explicit as possible. And now it's like the docs for the whole framework can fit on to like six pages of markdown because the whole thing is just like a very predictable, describable system of rules instead of every single thing is a special little snowflake, you know? Yep. Yes. You make a machine readable library now, I think. Yeah. Yeah. It's exactly your your customer is an agent at this point. Yep. And ironically, humans will probably be able to learn it easier too if it's just a chance to just do the major versions go breaking change. Yeah. I think we will probably start playing with some of that stuff in the near-ish sort of semi-nearish future. I don't know. And like, realistically, it'll come out like next year. I don't care. But yeah. Go faster though. Breaking changes used to matter. They don't matter now, right? Who cares? You read a doc about how to like upgrade. Oh, dude, I was just thinking about this the other day. Like, dude, it's so funny because we released tailwind for January 2025. Okay, it's like exactly one year ago. And leading up to that, we spent so much time building this like code mod upgrade tool to automatically upgrade auto to and three stuff to to and four. And it was a lot of work and it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good. And now like, you would never do that. You would just write a document and have the agent to have the upgrades and they'll do a better job. Like, that's 100% like code mods are dead, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I think breaking changes too, man. I think you probably need to reset and just like, that doesn't matter anymore. This is a mechanical. It doesn't even matter if it's a mechanical, not even a mechanical upgrade. Even if you can't say if you had A, now you need B. If you say if you had A, and now you maybe need B, or maybe you need C, or maybe you need D. So use your judgment based on these criteria. Yeah. That's fine. Like, that'll still work. Yeah. Yeah. And people just don't even have to think about it. Either like, especially if you're making a breaking change because like, oh, the way this was built, this API, uh, this is bug. And the only way to solve this bug is to like make this breaking change in the API, right? Um, if you just like build systems where your code is like automatically updating, like, you know, like get up, you have dependable and stuff like that. Um, the updates, your dependencies, like, I feel like there's a much smarter version of that that can exist now, where it's just like basically a cron that once a day checks to see if there's new dependencies that have been updated check reads their, um, upgrade guides and autonomously updates those dependencies and updates or code base for those dependencies at the exact same time, you know. Um, yeah, I think there's so much interesting things to do right now that ultimately boil down to set up a VPS install cloud code on it and listen for some white pokes, you know, it's, and it sounds like cloudbot is basically like, um, this very much. Yeah. But to me, cloudbot is an instance of an idea. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's the first person to do it well and have a catch on. But to me, that pattern is just, that's the future. Self modifying agents that operate on your behalf, that update based on your feedback to them. What's the story for like, versioning that stuff for like not losing those improvements? It's kind of like, you should probably stick this in a get repo and commit every so often and like it kind of writes down memories based on a schedule and things like that. It's a little janky. I've already like had to kind of nuke mine once like it kind of can get a bit like it's, it's, it's newish and then we're really fast. And so they're trying to jam a million things in there. Yeah. And so it's kind of like it can get and also no one's done this before and the models are not perfect. So it's like it kind of gets confused at times. Yeah. I can tell mine or restart it. Um, but you know, yeah. Pretty crazy stuff, man. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I gotta get, I gotta get cloud button. I think we should, we should do some pairing. This is like the perfect. I made, I was joking. I don't know if I've said this to anyone or just thought about at what in my head, but it just feels like all this stuff is just like the, the perfect just, if you're like a fucking, um, just like passive, non-confrontational, uh, doesn't know how to like work with people like person, like the world is changing in the matter for you. Like there's people you can hire now, which are actually, uh, $200 a month cloud code plans that you can just put on VPSs, um, whose emotions you ever have to consider. Um, who, uh, you can speak to however you want. And, uh, we'll work tirelessly to do like the things that you need to do. I don't know. It is. Yeah. It's, it's also pretty obvious. Like we're going like the nice, like, people are already doing this and I'm sure this will just continue. Like we're moving to like orchestration levels now where it's like, yeah, cloud code. Like you sit there, you type, it doesn't stuff. You type some more things. Fine. Clearly the direction we're going is like, no, you have a fleet of these. Why would you have one when you have a hundred? Like it's, yeah. Yeah, they do. Like swarm mode is coming to cloud code now or something. And, uh, it's crazy to do this stuff is. I've never been inside of anything that's like progressing so quickly ever. Um, yeah. It's awesome though. It's so interesting. It's crazy. The gap kind of like you said of, uh, between like people that are really paying attention to this stuff and then like the average person. Yeah. Um, I, I think our, my perspective is completely stewed by like my Twitter sphere. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I think that gap is probably only growing. Yeah. Wild. Well, all right. I'm going to wrap it up. Yeah. This was a good man. I'm glad we got to catch up. It's the most technical hacker zinc episode ever probably. I'm back in the terminal, baby. Yeah, it's amazing. Ben Ornstein computer user has returned. Yeah. I look at you. Yeah, you two, man. See you. See you.