Leaders must explain when their product vision has changed

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:08:23

   And part of that is actually very much in the same wavelength as what DHH is talking about. Because DHH, much like me, we loved the idea of creating great developer experiences for humans. And I realized several years ago that what got us here was not going to get us there. like if there was one big move that I made is that I got the AI psychosis delirium whatever you want to call it mosquito bite many years ago and you know not to give myself too much credit but like it takes courage to do that because you have to sit in front of your company and you have to tell them with a straight face and conviction that the thing that they fell in love with is no longer there and the thing that DHH and I fell in love with was beautiful code easy to write for humans with our little like monkey extremities, right? Like primate, like

2. 1:09:19

   evolved extremities. And that's just not the game anymore. But what's awesome is that there's a new game. And the new game is you have to make the agents, well, the game that has always been here is you have to make the agents work on the right things. Capital allocation. I don't know if you've interviewed Mark Andreessen, but at some point he went viral in a self-serving way that was hilarious. He said, the last job is venture capitalist. And sadly, I think he's kind of right.

3. 1:09:49

   I wouldn't say venture capitalist, I would say capital allocator. Because what you do as an engineer is you're allocating tokens. And we all have the same wall clock time. None of us, I think, to my knowledge, can distort time. And so we all have the same clock running. And we have to invent, create, do good for the world, and now we have this superpower of tokens, what are we going to put them towards?

4. 1:10:14

   What are they going to investigate? What languages and tools are they going to use? And so that's what the AJ's presentation was about. He's like, Ruby on Rails got me here. I think other things will get me there. I think right now it might be this programming language called Rust, which is also super controversial when we introduced it a few years ago inside of our cell because it's a language that is like, like the name implies, they named it beautifully.

5. 1:10:37

   I picture it in my head as this rusty, not pliable tool. And the things that I made for a good developer experience were these soft, nice fabrics. And now you have to grab this rusty, hard engine that is always telling you that you're wrong. One of the things that Rust does is that it tells you all the time that you're wrong with really cryptic... it's cryptic because it's almost like approaching mathematical notation.

6. 1:11:10

   It tells you, like, you violated these five lemmas. And you're wrong and you're an idiot. That's what the compiler tells you. And that's what DHS's point was. In the past, you as a human needed to swallow that pill. And it took a specific type of character to swallow that pill. Almost like, you know, when you watch Magnus Carlsen lock in for like a chess game and he's just like so locked in into the rules of the game.

7. 1:11:39

   As a human, you need to lock in into the rules of this language. And now it's coding agents that do it. And like we live, we basically live in the promised land. We ascended to like, oh my God, all of the code in the world is going to be secure. This was where my optimism was coming from. All of the code is going to be fast. It's going to be secure. incidentally you know Vercel built a platform where this kind of code is amazing to deploy like we built almost like the perfect platform for this moment which I'm really happy about but the world has changed and so as a developer you have to like like it's almost like an ego death you have to forget what got you here