# The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read"

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Peter Steinberger argues that AI agents make small teams more effective when builders steer by product judgment and design fast ways to test the work.

- Show: The Pragmatic Engineer
- Hosts: [Gergely Orosz](https://realalpha.app/people/gergely-orosz/)
- Guest: [Peter Steinberger](https://realalpha.app/builders/peter-steinberger/) is creator of OpenClaw and founder of PSPDFKit.
- Published: Jan 28, 2026
- Length: 1 h 54 m

## The best minutes

- [57:20](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3440) [Agents work best when they can test and debug their own output](https://realalpha.app/s/agents-work-best-when-they-can-test-and-debug-their-own/) (6 min)
- [1:03:37](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3817) [A single prompt is a poor test of AI coding](https://realalpha.app/s/a-single-prompt-is-a-poor-test-of-ai-coding/) (4 min)
- [1:34:18](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5658) [AI adoption requires redesigning teams and codebases](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-adoption-requires-redesigning-teams-and-codebases/) (4 min)

## Also worth watching

- [42:58](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2578) [Codex trades speed for stronger context on complex apps](https://realalpha.app/s/codex-trades-speed-for-stronger-context-on-complex-apps/) (6 min)
- [1:21:43](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4903) [CLIs let agents filter and chain tool calls](https://realalpha.app/s/clis-let-agents-filter-and-chain-tool-calls/) (3 min)
- [1:11:03](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4263) [AI makes upfront planning cheaper to revise, not unnecessary](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-makes-upfront-planning-cheaper-to-revise-not-unnecessary/) (3 min)
- [24:03](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1443) [A 50,000-page PDF forced a two-month redesign](https://realalpha.app/s/a-50-000-page-pdf-forced-a-two-month-redesign/) (2 min)
- [29:29](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1769) [Burnout came from lost belief and conflict, not just long hours](https://realalpha.app/s/burnout-came-from-lost-belief-and-conflict-not-just-long/) (4 min)

Skip the early career and PSPDFKit marketing and culture discussions, sponsor reads, and the closing rapid-fire round.

## Full analysis: Peter Steinberger says he had, like, 600 commits in a day

- Steinberger said he thinks he had like 600 commits in one day.
- That output depends on agents testing and debugging their work, not commits alone.
- Teams should measure test coverage, rework, cost, and risk before changing review or staffing.

Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/#analysis), free with an account:

- [1:43:27](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6207) His 600 commits show throughput, not quality
- [57:33](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3453) Agents gain leverage when they can test their work
- [1:00:54](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3654) Fast feedback pushes architecture toward testability
- [1:11:35](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4295) Cheaper revisions make planning lighter, not optional
- [1:35:19](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5719) Steinberger expects companies to redesign work
- [1:28:56](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5336) Personal assistants hide engineering and permission costs

## Summary

Steinberger built PSPDFKit into a developer tools business and spent 13 years developing the product. After selling his shares and taking a break of more than three years, he returned to building with AI agents and created OpenClaw.

Steinberger says AI agents let builders move beyond writing every line of code, but they still need to understand the product and steer its architecture. He argues that the key to reliable AI-assisted development is closing the feedback loop so agents can run tests, inspect results and correct their work. He describes OpenClaw as a personal assistant that can use a person’s tools and context, and says making the system feel simple takes substantial engineering. He expects companies to redesign their codebases and teams to use AI effectively, with fewer people who can combine product judgment and technical skill.

### Minute by minute

- [1:52](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=112) **An iPhone frustration sparked his first app.** Steinberger says he began tinkering as a teenager in rural Austria and taught himself through work and side projects. When an iPhone website lost a message he had written, he built an app by parsing its HTML and charged $5; he says it made about $10,000 in its first month.
- [9:39](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=579) **A PDF viewer became a product.** Steinberger says he took on a crashing magazine app, stabilized it and built a PDF viewer that became the basis for PSPDFKit. He sold an early version to developers, then kept adding features, including text selection, which he says took months because PDF files were more complex than he expected.
- [17:34](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1054) **Developer trust shaped PSPDFKit.** Steinberger says the company won developers with a polished product, technical blog posts and conference appearances, relying on inbound interest rather than cold outreach. PSPDFKit expanded across platforms and had 70 employees when he sold his shares. He says custom enterprise pricing reflected different customers’ usage and value, and recalls a 50,000-page Bible that forced a major redesign of the PDF data model.
- [29:29](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1769) **Burnout followed years of strain.** Steinberger says he burned out from working most weekends, carrying the responsibility of fixing company problems and navigating management conflicts. After selling his shares, he spent months away from his computer and took more than three years to decompress before returning to build a side project.
- [34:42](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2082) **AI tools drew him back to building.** Steinberger says he returned to coding through a web project, then tried Claude Code and saw the potential of AI agents. He describes prompting as addictive and says he stopped obsessing over details that users never see, while still caring about architecture and product quality.
- [41:20](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2480) **He focuses on structure, not every line.** Steinberger says he sometimes ships code he has not read because much of an application is routine data handling. He focuses on system architecture and product behavior, while agents inspect the codebase and implement changes. He says he often runs five to ten agents in parallel and prefers Codex for complex codebases because it takes more time to read files before acting.
- [49:04](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2944) **Builders steer agents toward outcomes.** Steinberger prefers the term “builder” to “architect” and says people who focus on product outcomes often adapt well to AI. He argues that developers who mainly enjoy solving hard technical problems may find the shift harder. He treats agents like imperfect teammates, steering them toward a goal and improving the result iteratively.
- [54:19](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3259) **Parallel work makes the job more demanding.** Steinberger says working with agents feels like building software, but requires more mental effort because he manages several tasks at once. He says the crucial practice is closing the loop: agents need to test and debug their own work. He describes building CLI tools and live tests so agents can reproduce issues and verify fixes.
- [1:03:37](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3817) **Effective AI coding takes practice.** Steinberger says developers can misjudge AI after trying a single prompt because agents need context, iteration and clear ways to verify results. He says he learned to adjust his prompts by asking models why they made particular choices. Asked how he would rebuild PSPDFKit, he says he could run a company with 30% of the people, relying on senior engineers who can delegate and exercise product judgment.
- [1:13:48](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4428) **OpenClaw grew from a personal assistant idea.** Steinberger says he wanted an assistant that could understand his life, remember context and act proactively, but the technology was not ready at first. A WhatsApp relay let him use an agent on a trip to Morocco; it handled voice messages and helped him navigate. He says that experience convinced him the project could feel like a personal companion rather than a collection of tools.
- [1:21:09](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4869) **CLIs give agents more flexible tool access.** Steinberger says he built command-line tools to connect OpenClaw to services and devices. He argues that CLIs let agents filter and combine results more flexibly than MCP calls, which can load unnecessary tool descriptions and data into context. He says a separate tool can convert MCPs into CLIs for on-demand use.
- [1:25:32](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5132) **OpenClaw’s reach comes from hiding complexity.** Steinberger says he added the agent to a public Discord despite its broad access to his computer, and that users quickly became excited by seeing it operate cameras, home automation and other tools. He describes OpenClaw as a way to use email, calendars, files and other services through a conversation, with memory and multiple agents working behind the scenes.
- [1:34:18](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5658) **Companies need to redesign for agents.** Steinberger says companies will struggle to adopt AI well without changing both their codebases and how teams work. He designs code for agents to navigate, treats pull requests as prompts for a feature discussion and often reshapes contributions with an agent. He prefers fast local tests to waiting for CI, while still running a full local check before committing.
- [1:42:29](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6149) **Curiosity and practice matter most.** Steinberger says he would look for people who build in public, contribute to open source and enjoy experimenting with AI tools. For new graduates, he recommends building projects and using agents to explore complex code and learn why systems were designed a certain way. He says he now finds prompts more useful than code alone for understanding how a proposed solution was reached.

## Transcript

The Pragmatic Engineer, hosted by Gergely Orosz, with Peter Steinberger.

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

[0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=0) What if you could merge 600 commits on a single day and none of it was slop? This is what today's guest, Peter Steinberger, the creator of CloudBot, claims he's doing. Peter is a standout developer who built PSPDFKit, the PDF framework used on more than 1 billion devices. Then he burned out, sold his shares, and disappeared from tech for three years. This year, he came back and how he builds and what he's doing now looks nothing like traditional software development. In today's episode, we cover why he no longer reads most of the code he ships, and why that's not as crazy as it sounds. How he is building CloudBot, his wildly popular personal assistant project, which feels like the future of Siri. The closing the loop principle that separates effective AI assistant coding from frustrating vibe coding.

[0:41](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=41) Why he says code reviews are dead and PR should be called prompt requests, and many more. If you're interested in how the software and your workflow could change in the coming years thanks to AI, this episode is for you. This episode is presented by Statsig, the unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. Check out the show notes to learn more about them, the Pragmatic Summit on the 11th of February in San Francisco that I'm hosting with them, and our other senior sponsors. All right, Pete, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Gage. It is awesome to meet you in person.

[1:11](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=71) Yeah, and I almost messed it up. Yeah. What happened? You lost track of time. Does that happen often, and how so? Not usually, not usually. This is an interesting time for me because my latest project is blowing up. Clawed, right? Clawedbot, yeah. Clawedbot. I'm struggling a bit to get enough sleep, but it's interesting. I never had a community blowing up so fast and it's just incredibly fun to work with. So before we get into Clawedbot and all the fun stuff you're doing, I want to remind all the way back, you create a PSPDF kit, which is used, I think, on more than 1 billion devices, users. If you see a PDF render, you probably see that.

[1:55](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=115) But even before that, how did you get into tech? Oh, my God. How did you get into tech? So I'm from rural Austria, always mobbing the introvert. So eventually, we always had summer guests, and one of them was a computer nerd. and then I kind of got hooked with the machine he had and begged my mom to buy me one and ever since then this was in high school or so? I guess I was 14 and ever since I started tinkering, I can remember the earliest thing was like I stole an old DOS game from my school and then wrote a copy protection for the floppy disk so I could sell it it took like two minutes to load I was just always tinkering also playing a lot of computer games of course but like building stuff almost feels like playing a computer game like definitely right now it feels better than victorio when i started out i read like the equivalent of bash scripts for windows and then i did like websites so i guess a little bit of javascript uh even i had no clue what i was doing and then the actual first language where i i had to learn how to build things is when i started university and i never met my dad and i come from a from a poor family so i always had to work i had to had to finance my own studies right so when other people were were having

[3:30](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=210) holiday i just worked full-time at a company so the the first real job i had was was in vienna it was supposed to be one month and then they kept me for six months it was just a bridge between military and and my university and i kept working there for like i think five years and i remember the first day they gave me this huge book well maybe that huge it says microsoft mfc um i still of nightmares and i got i got like i was like this is terrible like For the next win, I just silently used .NET. I just didn't tell them, and like a few months in, I just told them, yeah, about the tech stack, I did a few modernizations, but then it was too late.

[4:10](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=250) I did this a few times in this company. I don't know why they kept me. No, because my shit worked. So I did .NET. And actually, I actually dig it. .NET 2.0 had like generics. It took insanely long for the application to launch because everything was compiled at first start. And your hard disk was like, if you remember. So how did you stumble into both iOS and where did the idea from PSPDF come from? Not even the first one. The first one wasn't even available in Austria. In Austria, yeah. A little time went on and I was at university and a friend showed me the iPhone and I think I touched it for a minute.

[4:53](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=293) and then I immediately bought one, like, like this, like it, it clicked when I felt it. And, and the, to me, this was like a holy F moment, because it was just like so different and so much better. So I got, I got one. I was still not thinking about building for it. You know, that was, that was, what one was this? 2009, 10, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And then I, I used their browser. I can, I can see the story. I was literally driving in the subway, and by the time I was using a gay dating app, and this was iPhone OS 2. Yeah. Long time ago. I typed this long message, I pressed send, and we were just going into a tunnel, and the JavaScript disabled the send button, and then an error message came.

[5:39](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=339) But there was no copy-paste. There was no screenshot. So I was just like, and I couldn't scroll anymore because scrolling was disabled. So this long message was a little bit emotional, was gone. and i was so mad i was so mad i'm like what the hell i went home and i downloaded xcode that's that's where that's where the window came and i was like where is the id so it was like like i was like this is unacceptable i basically hacked the website i used regular expressions to like download uh to parse the html which is like totally not something you should do and i built an app and i used i used iphone os3 beta with like core data in beta regex kit lite i used a hacked version of gcc that backported the blocks compiler so i could use blocks in iphone os3 it took me quite a while until anything worked because like i had no idea what i was doing and i was like using all kind of like beta tech but eventually i i got it to work and i i wrote that company it's like hey I'm making an app.

[6:40](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=400) What do you think about it? Got no response. Of course. So I was like, let's just put it in the app store. And this was for the dating app, right? Yeah. So you just like, you know, you looked up, you saw their APIs. You could just like easily like build a client on top of it. API was HTML. Oh. I was just literally parsing HTML. Oh, so you kind of parse the HTML, kind of turn it into your own, you know, like use it as an API. Clever. I mean, this was back in the day where no one thought this would happen, but. I made, I put it in the app store. i charged five bucks for it and i made like 10k in the first month and i had no clue what i was doing so and there was like so many complex tech stuff this was very early on but there was a lot of weird forms on apple so i just put in the the bank account of my grandpa and then one day my grandpa called me yeah something is weird like i got this huge payment from apple i'm like this is mine this is mine don't touch it but the the funny thing was and I this blew off and I remember I was in a club one day and like I saw someone using my app and I was so proud and I wanted to like tap him on the shoulder and say I built this and I thought like really weird so it didn't and then I I went to the company I worked for for five years and

[7:52](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=472) told him like I'm gonna pursue this this is this is really exciting and my boss was like mocking me I really like, oh, you're making a mistake, this is a fad, this will not go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know what that got me? That's what you're calling you as a chip on your shoulder. I'm like, you know, one day, I'm gonna have a company that's worth more money than yours. Why took me eight years? So I got hooked. I'm a little bit of an addictive personality, which you see again right now. But I worked a lot on this app. I learned in high speed and this was also the time where I started Twitter and that was hugely, hugely influential for my career.

[8:38](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=518) I made this app actually quite good and then one day I was at a party at 3 a.m. Slightly intoxicated. And I got a call from a US number. The guy on the phone was like, yeah, hello, this is John from Apple. Yeah, there's a problem with your application. Some people reported pictures and that was it. that was the end of my app it was good until it lasted and I was just I just quit my job and was like well F you Apple I did freelance work I was at DubDub I was introduced to DubDub being DubDub DC yes sorry for the insider terms I was introduced to someone as one of the best iOS developers in Austria at a bar at 2am in San Francisco and I basically got a job in the US and then I moved to the US for a while and then I went to the Nokia development days and it's all like stone age by now oh my god and then someone came up to me and said yeah they built this app somewhere in Eastern Europe and it works but it crashes sometimes and it was like it was like a magazine viewer right this was back when the iPad just came out and Steve Jobs said that like this is the savior so everybody was building magazine apps and I was like that sounds like an interesting short term gig and I was like okay I'll help you out

[10:05](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=605) and I opened the app and it was like the worst code of iOS that I've ever seen in my life it was literally one file with like thousands of lines of Objective-C yes where they used Windows as tabs I didn't even know it worked I was surprised it worked at all but it felt like a house of cards and i i tried to i tried to surgically fix things but like as soon as you touch something something else would break um so i got it i got it somewhat stabilized and told him like look this is this is like madness um i'm gonna really like this for you yeah but it took half a year i'm gonna do it in a month well it took me two months um i wasn't that far off and and then here i was working on a on a pdf viewer you know on every technical problem The domain is, I wouldn't say like completely unimportant, but you can always find interesting problems in every domain.

[11:04](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=664) And there was a lot of interesting problems because you had a SQL that would render a PDF that would maybe take 30 megabytes, but the whole system had 64 megabytes. So if you're not very smart and like are very careful what you do in the background and when, the OS would just kill you. I got really fixated at like making it good like when rotation is like the page would like animate and so you know I like those details I spent way too much time on that that's why it took two months instead of one but the end result was it's good and then I worked with them for a while and then a friend texted me up it's like yeah I'm working on this magazine but it's really hard I'm like no way it's hard I know like I did it you just built one and he was like can you get me the code I'm like sure so i sold him like i extracted the the part that was pdf from from this magazine app and i i made sure i made sure like the other person was okay And then I sold him that.

[12:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=720) I was like, well, if he's interested in that, why let's not try to sell it to other people? I used a WordPress template and mutilated it to run on GitHub pages. And then when you did the Fastlane flow, at the end, you got a Dropbox link to my personal Dropbox with a source code zip. And I built it in one afternoon, and I tweeted it. And then in that week, three people bought it. It was like, I guess, 200 bucks. but back then and for me this was like amazing and not only i got like three people who just bought it and like 10 emails who 10 people who complained about it um because they wanted it but it didn't have the features they wanted you know this is like i got nerd sniped i was like oh i didn't have text selection oh how hard can it be three months later oh yeah it's really hard text selection in a pdf specifically yeah yeah yeah yeah you know the saying they're saying like that companies are built by young people because they don't know how hard it is.

[12:59](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=779) Yeah, yeah, I had no idea what an insane madness this file format is. Peter was talking about how some problems look deceptively simple. PDF rendering is a good example. You look at it and think, how hard could it be? And then you spend months on edge cases that you didn't even know existed. This looks easy until you build a pattern shows up in other places too. Internal tooling for feature flags and experimentation is a classic example. Teams often underestimate how much work it is to build the infrastructure around these tools. There's a reason big tech companies like Uber invested years into building internal experimentation and feature flagging systems. Which brings me to Statsik, our presenting partner for the season. Statsik gives you the complete toolkit without building it yourself. You get feature flags, experimentation, and product analytics all in one platform tied to the same underlying user assignments and data. In practice, it looks like this. You roll out a change to 1% of users first. You see how it moves the top pipeline metrics you care about, conversion, retention, whatever is relevant for the release. If something goes wrong, instant rollback. If it's working, you can confidently scale it up. Companies like Notion

[14:04](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=844) went from single-digit experiments per quarter to over 300 experiments with Statsig. They shipped over 600 features behind feature flags, moving fast while projecting against metrics regression. Microsoft, Atlassian, and Brex use Statsig for the same reason. It's the infrastructure that enables both speed and reliability at scale. Statsig has a generous free tier to get started and pro pricing for Teams starts at $150 per month. To learn more and get a 30-day enterprise trial, go to statsig.com slash pragmatic. And now let's get back to Peter and why rendering PDFs was a surprisingly hard problem.

[14:36](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=876) But now I remember, there was a few weeks ago, someone emailed me. They did something PDF and they wanted my help. And I just wrote them like, I'm sorry, like I did my deed. I know more about PDF than any sane human person ever should know. And I went to therapy. Good luck. But that took off and I just, I was waiting for my visa, I worked on this project and it just kept on, more people kept on buying it. And, you know, it was like, it was like summer, I was like lying at the lake and I got another email that someone bought it for 600 bucks, 800 bucks, but just upped the prices as it had more features.

[15:15](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=915) And by the time I went to San Francisco to work at this company, it already made more than what I made there. but my whole life was I still thought like I have to be there you know so I did it and also interestingly at this company I had to So when we say you moved to San Francisco Yeah and of course also it ended up being something where I had to build build something with my framework at that company too but you know startups are not like eight hours they're a little more and my personal project was also a little more so my sleep was a little less and then eventually after three months Sabine, my manager, came over and said this Peter, are you okay?

[15:58](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=958) And they gave me a choice To either keep working at this company and drop my project or vice versa. And I had one week to decide. The counter was one week to stay there or leave the country. Because I was on a complicated visa. And the decision was quite easy. It's like, yeah, I want to do my own thing. And at this point, it was already taking off. You already saw that there's a big business here. It will probably pay you as much as your U.S. job. would have paid i was never money driven it was more about what were you driven by i want to make stuff that other people find amazing like i i i love tweaking the details i love those little delights it wasn't even that the space there were competitors in that space but my anger was always like i built something as if apple would have built it like like with like with like all the love and care and polish and and those little delights that a lot of people in the industry don't get uh so even though we had competitors that had way more features and were around way longer my company was more successful and my product was more successful because developers tried the different ones and mine just felt the best i think software is all about about how it

[17:19](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1039) feels much more so than the feature set like why do we buy apple stuff it has more features than than windows um but it it feels better so how did you go from like you you left this company and you were building this pdf component that started to sell at what point did you hire the first person realizing okay there's something more to this when i went back to vienna then i was like okay i have to go all in and that's where i i started working with freelancers a little bit and I'm way too late to be honest also like I could have hired much earlier but you know it's a big step and that's kind of where it started having a life of its own and I spent pretty much 13 years of my career building this product with this weird name that I never changed because it took me like I thought like 5 minutes about it and then it stuck PSPDFKit they finally did a rename but I wouldn't have renamed it but now it's a mouthful but it's very unique.

[18:22](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1102) Well, you get it if you do Objective-C because it's just a namespace. Yes. And by the time it made perfect sense, my marketing, my strategy for marketing was always, I only care about the developer. Like, I know like upper management does the decisions, but if I can convince the people inside the company, they'll do the marketing and lobbying for me. That worked really well. We never did like cold emails or aggressive. It was all inbound. All we did was like, make good stuff, and write insightful technical blog posts. And I went to a lot of conferences. For me, in part, it was, okay, if people understand that the people who built this product know what they do and love what they do, that reflects on the product.

[19:10](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1150) And that worked really well. And then what was the tech style behind PSPDFKit? Was it Objective-C? Was it later Swift? Were there other technologies like C or anything else? eventually expanded to to all the platforms um big shift was the switch out apple's renderer which was in years is still quite buggy to like a big c++ one that one then we used across all the frameworks um we were we were really early with web we were one of the first pdf frameworks that ran in webassembly and i did the most clever thing that it was the very early days when webassembly was just taking off and we built a benchmark and that benchmark was eventually used by by google and microsoft and apple and i basically had all these companies like working really hard and making my renderer faster because because because they use their benchmark as one with their benchmarks and the benchmark was just like rendering our stuff with our shit.

[20:04](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1204) Nice. And then as a company grew, one thing that I remember about PSPDF Kit, you did write a lot of blogs and one blog in 2019. So this was about like, I think, you know, year nine or ten in the company. It was about how the team worked and you mentioned things there like every feature starts with a proposal. You mentioned that you are conservative because it's a big API that people use. Do you want to be careful? Things like the Boy Scout rule to refactor. How did you kind of put together the culture of this now, this team which was now closer to 30 or 60 people? We were actually 70 when I sold my shares and now it's almost 200.

[20:44](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1244) And I knew right from the get-go, I was like, I'm not going to find the people that I need in Vienna. So it was always just like remote first. And eventually we ended up with some kind of hybrid model, which made things a bit more complicated. i learned a whole lot on the go like i i never had the urge to be ceo i always was coding i i brought people in to people that that helped me a lot with other other parts uh and on the business side i can do it and i think i think i'm quite good at it but just don't enjoy it like even on sales calls where you like have to like think of all the magic number how much it It would be worse because that's how enterprise works.

[21:25](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1285) Ugh, worse. Peter just said, ah, the worst about enterprise sales because selling to large companies, enterprises, is as tricky as it gets. Not just because you need to get pricing right, but because of all the enterprise features that you need to build. And this leads us nicely to our seasoned sponsor, WorkOS. If you're building with AI agents or automation tools, here's a problem most teams don't think about at first. Once an agent can take actions on your behalf, you need to control what it's allowed to do. and traditional auth just wasn't designed for that. That's why WorkOS introduced MCP auth, which gives teams a way to authenticate AI agents with explicit permissions, auditability, and enterprise-grade security. Instead of sharing over-scoped API keys, you can define clear boundaries for the data that agents can access and the agents they can perform.

[22:11](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1331) If you're building AI power features and want to shift fast without compromising security, check out workos.com.mcp. And with this, let's get back to Peter and enterprise pricing. But that's also the only thing that really works on a model like this. Yeah, you mean enterprise sales specifically, right? Meaning custom pricing. So can you tell us for devs listening who go to a vendor's website and they're frustrated that there's no price, it says call us or schedule a meeting, why that is? Oh, that's right, because we're going to look at your company and then just take the dice and think about the number that you're probably willing to pay.

[22:48](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1368) And that sounds horrible. but also when you have a product where you can't really tear it down to a specific number like it makes a difference if a freelancer contacts us or one of the big fortune 500s let's not say names because the usage will be different the value they get out of it will be different and charging the same you would either exclude one or the other if I go too low they're gonna see this fishy it's like procurement for like 500 bucks we're not going to even start the process and if we target it too high we're going to lose those people so so as horrible and unfair this process scenes for some kind of products it is the it's the most fair way after all you know you know on software there is i would say there's like four access there's like easy and hard and interesting and not interesting we were very much in the not interesting and hard part if you build something that every developer wants to build it's going to be a hard sell it's it's a hard sell anyhow selling anything to developers is a hard sell yeah but if it's if it's too easy or too interesting good luck but if it's oh god i don't want to do this and oh my god this is hard That's a good spot to be in.

[24:02](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1442) So I found a really interesting niche and there were just an infinite number of complex problems. You need to tell me one or two hard things about parsing PDF. How hard could it be? If there's a specification, I'm an engineer, I know specifications, what's so hard about it? I mean, there was just one example where, you know, like PDFs have links. So like I said, there's like a table of contents and you click on it and it goes to like page 37. So I built this whole model with the assumption, oh, yeah, maybe there's like 100 or 400 links in there. And then we got this one customer who like paid really good money.

[24:37](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1477) And then it's like, oh, it takes four minutes to load a PDF. What the heck, guys? And I looked at it and it was like a 50,000 page text Bible from Canada. And it had like... 50,000 pages. It had like more than 100 links per page. 500,000 links. My data model completely exploded because my assumptions were off by a number of what, 1,000? but by then you have like a mature product with an api so like how do you how do you completely redesign the internal part without breaking things for everyone like suddenly everything has to be lazy but before parsing 101 was easy but now they were like this was like so difficult to

[25:16](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1516) **Peter Steinberger:** keep it working for people um i think i spent like two months just on that completely redesigning like the internals and like making sure it's still easy for people they don't have to know what we

[25:29](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1529) what we load easy what we load lazy or if you copy the thing it still has to like have to keep some connection it needs to keep the references and some of those things so i sorry and i i love to do support and i think that that was a confining factor why the company worked because if if you send a ticket and then the the ceo replies and helps you out um that has impact and my my strategy was always like i always used to list in reverse because if you if you send a ticket and you get a reply within five minutes that's magical if you wait one or two days not much difference yeah so yeah and this uh this was one of the problems where i worked uh two months and i finally got it down to almost like this.

[26:15](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1575) That must have been satisfying. And it was very satisfying. And you were writing a lot of the code, or you were involved in a bunch of the code. Obviously, a big team was now here, but you were still kind of overseeing it, right? Or in the details. I mean, of course, I had a really great team, and some parts I was more involved. I was always more involved in mobile, because that's where my heart was. But I was always very deep in the tech. And the marketing side, the business side, I had like Jonathan's Hub, I had Martin's Hub. those i i found good people the thing is if you like the blogging and writing about how you solve interesting hard problems will help you hire interesting people that want to solve interesting problems this is what i remember at ps pdf kit that your blog was every now and then it made it to hack and use as well but it was just interesting to read and i couldn't name again i i'm not one into pdfs but if i had to say something a pdf i would have said ps pdf because they're the only ones where i read interesting entering blogs about how you optimize or ship it's still there by the way i i myself also sometimes ask myself like interesting do more companies not see this

[27:22](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1642) or is is the question that you you need to be a developer who's either the ceo or up there who just likes doing this and by the way did did you ever write this thinking this will be helpful or you just wrote because you got something out of it like putting out that you solved this hard problem I like sharing and, like, inspiring people. There were sometimes even conflicts where we were like, should we write about this? Because it's, like, a little bit of secret sauce. But I just never listened to those voices too much. I just, you know, there's also, like, when you write something down, there's this principle of, like...

[28:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1680) you understand it, but then if you want to teach it, you really have to understand it. So to me it was also a little bit like, oh yeah, I worked on this really hard problem, and now I want to like preserve it and like help others. So I got a gig of it. Of course I liked the attention, but really it was this, sometimes I just referenced a year later to my own post, it's like, yeah, this is This is both company documentation. This is like my own logbook. It's helpful in so many ways. And a lot of the speaker companies, oh, they put on too much red tape. There's a lot of developers who don't really like to write.

[28:42](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1722) So I forced everyone once a month, a full day just to write a blog post. But you gave them the time. You're like that day, you don't need to do any other work, but write something. Yeah, you have a day to come up as a post. ah days is quite much actually i mean when i'm nowadays when i write posts it still takes me a few hours i don't want to dwell too much on like the i think the the the starting time of the company is the most interesting the the the growth phase you get more red tape you get more people it's much more gardening your product instead of like doing doing white hacks um and more iterative so so it got a little bit less interesting uh over the years and there was like more people drama because the more so the more people you have the more issues there are and i didn't enjoy it that much and i was really really burned out what burnt you out do you think i was just burning too hard i was working most weekends i i i tried to shuffle all my material needs and you know as a ceo you're basically the waste bin because everything everything that other people don't manage or or can do or or mess up you have to fix and it's also quite lonely because you you can't openly talk about a lot of things i mean i i i structured the company to be quite open

[30:09](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1809) but still like you cannot you cannot be negative you have to even if even if like even if like really bad stuff happens i know that was like there was like one weekend where my my co-founder called me at at 5 a.m and told me like yeah there's this big airplane company and their planes are down because our software is crashing that was a very interesting weekend until i could like i disassembled their their app and did prove that they messed around with our source code to triggering a license key fallback that eventually, like, caused the shit they had. But that was like a if the Suez company's gone and more moment.

[30:51](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1851) And that's just on top to all the additional stress. And there were quite a few of those things. You can do that for a while. And I also believe, like,

[30:58](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1858) **Peter Steinberger:** burnout doesn't necessarily come from working too much. It comes more from, or at least for me, when you work on something, but you don't believe in it anymore,

[31:08](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1868) or you have, like, too many conflicts. And we also had a, we did fight a lot in the team, with, like, management team. And by the time I made this mistake and I thought you have to, like, lead a company more democratically, so that was also something that burned me out. I wouldn't want to miss it for the world, though. Yeah. So, you know, from the outside, it seems you sold your shares, you made enough money to not have to work again, And should you not choose? And for a lot of people, like, you know, people who are starting out their business or one day want to start a business, this sounds like the absolute dream.

[31:43](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1903) Like, this is, I guess, what we know realistically that most people will not make it. But if you make it, I mean, you've kind of like, I guess, you know, checkbox done. You're kind of, it's a little bit, if you're like climbing on a wall and you ring the bell, you're done. And then what I noticed is from the outside, again, on your blog, the blog post completely for several years what what did you do uh in in this time uh and and what what did you learn in this time you know before you came back to where we are now i needed a lot of time to decompress i i catched up a lot on the things i thought i missed i i partied a lot um there were months where i didn't even turn on my computer and for a while i was i just didn't have this feeling of like what should i do now like like i would definitely was like why border you know you're not you're not supposed to to retire so early or like have so much have such a good exit that you never have to work again that messes my mind quite a bit that that was some that was some hard years and then in in april i was like i there was this idea that i had years ago and even a side project that I started, I was like, yeah, I want to continue on that.

[32:59](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=1979) And then after more than three years, I just sat back to my computer and started hacking again. But the thing was, this was like a Twitter analytics thing, and it was written in Swift and SwiftUI. And back then, I already knew this would be so much better if I would build as a website. So was this an existing idea that you kind of had at the back of your mind something something twitter analytic yeah it was just like something i wanted to build for myself yeah because uh because it didn't exist and then even three years later it didn't exist it still doesn't exist uh it it kind of does but i got a bit sidetracked so i i went back and i i wanted to build it in in this web tech but web was really was always even at my company the one thing that i looked into the least because i had i had someone really smart who took care of of of that side in company that i brought in martin so i never had to worry about it that was one of the you're not hands-on with react or any of that yeah and when i came back i was like what's a prop you know that that level where you really and you know this is like this is a trap i see with many developers the the better you get at one technology the harder it is to jump somewhere else it's not that

[34:15](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2055) you can't do it but it hurts so much you're like like i can i can program in in in in apple stack i I can program blind. But then in that stack, I have to Google the most mundane stuff and it just like, it just hurts. You feel like an idiot again. Yeah, and I guess the more experience you have, it kind of sucks feeling. I mean, I'm sure you say embrace and all that, but it's not great. You're not as efficient. You know that you could be faster, et cetera. Yeah, so I came back and I was like, gosh, there has to be, there has to be, what is this AI? What is this AI stuff that people are dismissing?

[34:51](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2091) Let's look into this. And in April, a lot of us were dispensing it. Probably rightfully so. And I, to a degree, I credit those three years where I basically didn't turn on my computer because in those years, you guys checked out AI and learned that it's crap. Yeah, the people who, as I was about to say, so you missed out on, you didn't do the beta of GitHub Copilot, you know, glorified autocomplete, which is GPC3, or maybe not even. There was then, of course, 3.5, which is a big jump and it got increasingly better than GPT-4. And so by the time you came back, what tool did you first use? Because you missed out on like two years of like us devs using, dismissing, finding some niche use cases for it.

[35:41](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2141) Oh, Cloud Code. So you started with Cloud Code. I think that came out. Cloud Code just came out. It came out in May, but there was a beta beforehand. Yeah, I think they had something. Didn't they have something in February already? They had a beta from February. Correct. Yeah. So, so. So ClockCode was your first, you come back after like a, you know, hiatus and you immediately turned on ClockCode. You missed everything else before. And, you know, it was like, I remember I took this big, messy side project that I built. And I have this browser extension that converts a GitHub repository into one big markdown.

[36:17](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2177) It was like a 1.3 megabyte markdown file. And I dragged it into Google's AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 or something. And I typed, write me a spec. and it generated those 400 lines of spec and I dragged the spec into cloud code and I was like, build and then I continue, continue, continue and while I was like working on other stuff, you know and eventually told me like, it's 100% production ready and I started it and it crashed. I'm sure we can all relate to the story of the AI saying the code is production ready and crashing this is a pretty funny and innocent story but I personally don't trust code that AI generates without verifying it.

[37:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2220) And this leads us nicely to our seasoned sponsor, Sonar. So let's look at some data. A new report from Sonar, the State of Code Developer Survey report, found that 82% of developers believe they can code faster with AI. But here's what's interesting. In the same survey, 96% of developers said they do not highly trust the accuracy of AI code. This checks out for me as well. While I write the code faster with AI agents, I don't exactly trust the code it produces. This really becomes a problem at the code review stage, where all this AI-generated code must be regularly verified for security, reliability, and maintainability.

[37:35](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2255) SonarCube is precisely built to solve this code verification issue. Sonar has been the leader in the automated code analysis business for over 17 years, analyzing 750 billion lines of code daily. That's over 8 million lines of code per second. I actually first came across Sonar 13 years ago in 2013 when I was working at Microsoft Skype and a bunch of teams already use SonarCube to improve the quality of their code. I've been a fan since. Sonar provides an essential and independent verification layer. It's the automated guardrail that analyzes all code, whether it's developer or AI agent generated, ensuring it meets your quality and security standards before it ever reaches production.

[38:12](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2292) To get started for free, head to sonarsource.com slash pragmatic. With this, let's get back to Peter and how AI agents cannot exactly be trusted. It was just good enough that I could see the potential. And I understood, it's like, yeah, this is where it's going. And from that moment on, I had a few months where I had really trouble sleeping. And I, in... I remember because once on Twitter, I sent you a direct message. I was up early for valid reasons, you know, my kids or something like that. But it was 5 a.m. and I sent you a message on Twitter and you replied immediately. And I was like, why are you up?

[39:16](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2356) And it's like, oh, this is usual. Like I usually, I'm still usually awake. And I asked like, why? And you said like, oh, I'm just like using Claude and it's really, really addictive. And I was like, really? And you're like, yeah, I'm not joking. Like it's really good. And I think that was the thing. You said something or wrote something like just one more prompt. Like you told me how, like what made it so addictive or what still makes it so addictive? I was the same economics as you go to a casino. that's that's it's my little slot machines you know you you you press the trigger and and it's like nope you tap in the prompt and it will like crap or it does something that actually blows your mind and it's And you're saying it blows your mind.

[40:01](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2401) You're a really experienced developer. It's not easy to blow your mind, right? You've seen good code. You can differentiate crap code, decent code, good enough code. You have a bar, right? It's so funny. In my company, I used to obsess over every detail, every spacing, every new line, the naming. I spent so much time bike-shedding. and in retrospect I'm like what the heck why did I do that like what's the point the customer doesn't see the inside of course like it has to meet certain standards it has to work it has to be fast it should be secure but like how much did I bike shit there is like estupido you say that but then you also just said that people loved PSPDF kit because it was the most polished it worked the best Do you not think that that amount of caring, bike shedding, as you call it, being obsessed, it sounds like you were keeping tech depth at bay, you know, like being obsessed with white spaces is not going to be messy.

[41:05](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2465) And we know it's not just the white spaces. We know you're going to care about testing and all that. Like, it sounds to me that PSPDF kit, you know, like what I see is you were not just building a product that was great UX, but you built something that had a really good hygiene and that's how it could be high performance and all that. How do you think about it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, to a degree, yes. And even now, like, I, I mean, like, my last blog post was a confession that I shipcoded on Read. Yeah, we have to talk about that. And at the same time, I spent so much time to, like, restructuring. I mean, even today, I really wanted to get this PR in where it was like 15,000 line chains where in my list, I moved everything over to a plugin architecture which I was so excited about.

[41:59](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2519) And I care a lot about the structure. Did I read all the code? No, because a lot of code really is just boring plumbing. Well, what are most apps? Like data comes in from an API in one form. You're like, you parse it, you package into a different form. You store it in a database as a different form. It comes out again in a different form. Then it's like HTML or whatever. And you're typing something. It's a different form again. And all you do is like you're massaging data in different forms throughout your app. This is what most apps are. We are pretty chasing printers. And the really, the hard part is solved by Postgres 30 years ago by some neck birds.

[42:39](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2559) That's really what a lot of software is. Like there's always some interesting parts, but I don't have to care how this button is aligned or which Tailwind class is used or like many details are boring and many other details are interesting. But I think it's much more about system architecture than having to read every single line. Right now, jumping forward, what is your workflow like? Like when you're working on CloudBot, are you using a terminal, multiple terminals, which tools and how are you, you know, like you said you're not you're kind of like not reviewing the code but you're still thinking about architecture like what does your average day look like in terms of tooling you know you have to explain to a developer who might join the team you know at one point you think like what does it look like it's interesting let's let's let's go a little bit we were we were in in in april with cloud code and then i got really hooked and then i did some i had a phase where i did cursor and then i did i i used gemini 2.5 a bit then we had this phase with opus 4 i hooked up a lot of my friends like i know i know both armin and mario from vienna they got they got ai pilled because i i was addictive you know my my enthusiasm was like confusing them and then

[43:57](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2637) they tried it out and then and then eventually also of We were up at 5 a.m. and I called it like the Black Eye Club. I mean, there's a reason. Like I started a meetup in London that I called Cloud Code Anonymous because it's a little bit like a drug because it's so much fun. Like to me, what blew my mind so much was this realization that I can build everything now. Before you had to really pick which side project you build because software is hard. It's still hard. but now like I am this this friction that I talked about where I'm so good at this technology and I'm like so bad at this and I'm like oh let's make the CLI and go I have no clue about go but I have I have a good system understanding and once you have that it's like you you develop a feeling what's right what's wrong like it's it is a skill in itself I remember there was this tweet where someone said oh when you write a code you you feel the friction and that's why that's how you make good architecture i feel the same friction when i prompt because i i see the code flying by i see how long it takes i see if like the agent pushes back um i see if what it creates looks like messy or like makes sense when i prompt i i have a hinge already how long it's going to take

[45:18](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2718) if it takes much longer i understand that i messed up somewhere you kind of feel the model you you know you know how usually it's like this or if it runs i feel it's very much a symbiosis like i i learned to to talk may i even say there or that language more so it's like my my knowledge how to use those things improved and also the models improved and then and then like over the time between between april and now i would say at inflection point was summer where it just got so good that you could you create software without actually writing code by hand but the real that change that like sold it for me is was again gpt 5.2 that was again I think it's underrated I don't know why why all these people still use cloud code I kind of get it it's a different way of working but whatever OpenAI cooked there is insanely good pretty much every prompt i type gives me the result i want which is insane like like on on cloud but my latest product i use between five and ten agents in parallel if you're very much cloud code built you have to forget quite a lot of the the silliness that the things that you have to do to create good output with cloud code i mean i also met met that team and and they created

[46:50](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2810) a whole new category like cloud code is is is a category defining product and it is amazing for general purpose computer work and it is really good for coding and i i i still use it almost

[47:02](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2822) **Peter Steinberger:** every day but for writing code in complex applications codex is just so much better because it it it takes 10 times longer um cloud would read three files and then be confident

[47:17](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2837) enough to just like create code and then you really have to steer it and push it so it reads more code so it gets it sees a bigger picture of your code base so it it it weaves in new features better and codex will just like be silent and just read files for 10 minutes and if you are If you only work on one terminal, I completely understand how you find this unbearable. But I rather have something where it's also you don't tell it what to do. You know, this is also something that people don't get. Like, I have a conversation with the model. It's like, oh, let's look at this. What options do we have for this structure?

[47:57](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2877) Did you consider this feature? It's like, because... Every session is like the model starts from having no understanding about your product and sometimes you have to just give it a little bit of pointers. What about this and this? So it explores different directions and you don't need plan mode. Like I'm just having a conversation until I say build this, it will not build this. There's some trigger words because it is, they all are a little trigger hungry. But as soon as I say, let's discuss or give me options, they will not build things until I say build. so a lot of would you say a lot of your prompting or a good part of it is this conversation where you are pretty much planning together with the agent yeah it's like what about you remind them it's like okay we need documentation what would be a good spot it would like give me some recommendations no this should really be its own page do we need a configuration how does this fit into this other feature I am designing the system because I have this system understanding about how is my my product how are the shapes looking i don't have a line-by-line code understanding that's that's what codex does for me but i'm the architect you know it sounds a little bit like

[49:10](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2950) you're almost you know for years back this this totally came got out of style but there was this idea that you would have the architect with a capital a who used to be a software developer but they're not hands-on anymore because they spend a lot of time understanding the business and they have these developers working underneath them. And some companies still kind of work a little bit like this, but most modern companies don't. But some banks, et cetera, I met people there who are capital architects. They do the system plan. They talk with fellow architects. They have the blueprint and then they literally pass it down to the team.

[49:46](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=2986) And everyone hates this model, obviously, because, you know, again, like I think as people, you kind of want more. The architect is never on call for the stuff. And so it just kind of breaks down in practice. And a lot of large companies just move to the staff engineer model where you're kind of all working together. Of course, there's people who might have more input. But it sounds like it's almost like this world where you are the architect who kind of, you know, you have your little agents who do the code. Except in this case, you are, of course, fully responsible because you're still an individual contributor.

[50:15](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3015) You're not like, okay, you might say you're a manager of agents or whatnot, but the code is yours. It's your responsibility. You're going to be on call if you push out code that takes down CloudBot, which it did just recently, you're on the hook for it, right? And I think the difference in this system when it was in companies, the architect was kind of shielded from the output of their work because there's so much people and so much process, etc. Well, I wouldn't say architect, I like the word builder. Builder, yeah. And I think also that there's a few categories that I see for people that are highly successful using AI and people who really struggle.

[50:54](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3054) I care more about the outcome, the product. I very much care about how it feels and everything, but how the plumbing works underneath, I care structurally. But, you know, not to the biggest detail. and then there are people who really love to to code on hard problems like think about algorithms don't really like the i'm building a product with like all the marketing all the they more like they like to solve hard problems and those are people who really struggle and and and often reject ai or get really sad because that's exactly the job where that ai does like it solves the hard problems now sometimes i give it some pointers but many times i learned i learned more this year than the last five years around around software architecture and designing there's so much inside those monsters um on knowledge and everything is just a question away but you have to know what question to ask of course i also built this twitter thing and it's still not done and i really hope i i'll get back to it at one one time everything worked but if i used it more at some point things got really laggy and weird and then it worked again and i just couldn't figure it out and it was like really difficult to debug because it was not easy to reproduce it was just like

[52:08](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3128) you use it more and things got really slow i basically had like software in in in psql like in postgres that would be triggered when certain inserts were doing and then the database would would get really busy and the model couldn't see it because it was it was it was so far abstracted from all the you know like those those models are really good at tracing through but this was a side effect that was so hard to see because it was only in this one file a function that had no connection to anything else um with a name that was not easy grabable i just never asked the right question until i was like do we have any side effects for this and this and i found it and i fixed it and it's like but everything is just the right question in a way yeah but you you need to have like knowledge, expertise, you know, experience.

[52:58](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3178) I mean, so these are the people who reject it, and then the people who care a bit less about how it's being plumbed internally, but are just excited to build things, they are really successful. And one thing that also helped me is, you know, when you run a company and then you hire people, you can't breathe on everyone's neck and, like, make them have the line of code exactly that way. And there's a lot of people who didn't manage a team, to have this experience how to how to relax a little bit and understand that yes this maybe is not exactly that code that i want but it will get me closer to my goal and for anything that is like not perfect we can always make it better and like put more time into it i very much believe into this iterative improvement i had to learn to let go a little bit of my company so so so then And when I had Cloud Code, it kind of felt like I have imperfect, sometimes silly, but sometimes very brilliant engineers that I have to steer and where we work together on a common goal.

[54:01](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3241) It was a lot like being the boss again. Interesting. Now, you built kind of software, I guess, the traditional way, pre-AI for 15 years or even more than 15 years. And you got really good at being also leading a team and how to have high standards. you really cared about the craft there as well. You've now kind of been, I guess, vibe coding or working with agents for a year. You're comparing the two. What do you think really, really changed? And what do you think are things that kind of stayed the same despite all that? First of all, I don't like the term vibe coding. All right. How should we call it?

[54:35](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3275) I think vibe coding is by now almost as slow. Oh, yeah. I call it, I tell people, what I do is enchanting engineering with a little star. Vibe coding starts at 3 a.m. um now like because all the the mundane stuff of writing code is automated away i can move so much faster but also means like i have to think so much more i'm still very much in the flow like it is it is completely the same feeling as for me as i very much get in this flow state but it is mentally even more taxing because i have i don't have one employee that i manage i have like five or ten that all work on things and i switch from this one part to this other part to this other part mostly because of i'm designing this new subsystem or like this feature and then i know that it will probably take codecs like 40 minutes or or one hour to build so like i want to like have the plan right and then i build it and then i'll i'll move on to something else but then this is cooking and then i work on this and then this is cooking and then this is cooking and then at some point this is cooking and then this is cooking and then i go back to this one so like i i i switch around a lot in my head i wish i wouldn't have to do that like i'm sure

[55:44](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3344) Anyway, this is a transitionary problem, and at some point we have models and systems that are so fast that I can parallelize a little less, but to stay in the flow state, I need to massively parallelize. So that's how it works, and I'll go back to data. Yeah. And maybe tweak it a little bit more, but usually just try it out. Maybe then this is ready, because this only took like 20 minutes. So I constantly jump around. Usually there's one main project that has my focus, and I have some satellite projects that also need attention. But where I can maybe spend five minutes, it does something for half an hour, and I try it, and it doesn't need so much capacity up there.

[56:27](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3387) This almost sounds, you know, like two things come to mind. One is there's these, like, games where you have to manage a kitchen with the employee and you see, like, recipes or something come out and you need to jump and do it. It's more like StarCraft, you know, they have, like, your main base and you have, like, your side bases to give you resources. That as well. And also one thing that just came to mind, as you said, like, I go there and I watch this and I make a decision, is when I see the chess grandmasters play multiple boards at once, you see sometimes they have 20 boards and they always all, you know, they go there, they kind of you can see that they just like see what's on that board they make a decision and for some boards they stop for longer i guess better players or better opponents it feels you know both they're occupying 100 of their brain you're occupying your bay and you're you're kind of scaling yourself as long as you can context switch the difference the difference was up until this cloud code i you have to work a little different because it is much faster but then the output often doesn't work on the first try so like it makes something but then it forgot to update

[57:27](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3447) **Peter Steinberger:** three other things it crashes or you give it the good thing how to be effective with coding agent is always like you have to close the loop it needs to be able to debug and test itself that's the big

[57:39](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3459) secret um that's also something i i think that's part of why i got so much more effective um but But yeah, with Cloud Code, I often had to go back and fix up the stuff, or it just takes a lot of iterations. So in the end, it's not that much faster, it's just more interactive. And these days with Codex, it just almost always gets it right. My general strategy is always I build a feature, and of course, you always let it write tests, and you make sure that it runs its own systems. It runs them, yes. And so even when I write a Mac app, I don't know, like I just, yesterday I debugged this feature where the Mac app couldn't find a remote gateway, but like the same code in TypeScript could, but Mac app is kind of annoying to debug because like it builds it, you have to start it, you have to look at it, you have to like, no, this is not working.

[58:39](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3519) So now I just tell it like, you know, you're going to build a CLI just for debugging that invokes all the same code paths that you can call yourself and then you just iterate and you fix it yourself and then it will just cook and it just cooked for an hour and it was done and it told me like there was a race condition here and here and like a misconfiguration blah blah blah I was like yeah it sounds sensible I don't need to I don't need to see that code it's like but you don't need to see it because you set up the validation loops and you trust that because it ran it I mean this is I guess it's not too dissimilar to like sometimes when you work on a large project in a large company when all the tests pass I mean it doesn't mean that 100% is there but it's it's a pretty good and and all the new new code has test as well you know someone thought about it and tested it and all that but even even on my on the very little project we always had bugs for like anti-gravity has like a certain a certain weirdness with how it takes tool calls in the loop in the format so you have to like some filtering yeah and i broke a bunch and it actually took me way too long to realize like what am i doing here i just need to automate

[59:42](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3582) this so i was just going to codex it's like design live tests that spin up a docker container install the whole thing spin up a loop use my api keys from this and this file and then you tell the model to read an image create an image before and then look into the image and see what it sees so i don't not just tell the loop i'll still tell tool calling make it work and then it solved itself it took forever but it it tested all my api keys like from from entropic over setai over glm like everything and it fixed all those little intricacies where where sometimes the tool calling didn't work or the ordering was wrong because i closed the loop and and that's that's And closing the loop, you mean just have a way to have the agent be able to validate its work?

[1:00:33](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3633) That's why, that's the whole reason why those models that we currently have are so good at coding, but like sometimes mediocre good at writing creative, because there's no easy way to validate, right? But code, I can compile, I can lint, I can execute, I can verify the output. If you design it the right way, you have a perfect loop. like even now for websites I built the core in a way that can be run via a CLI so I have this perfect execution loop because the browser loop is insanely slow you want something that loops fast So it sounds like one thing that is not really changing from like before is we had this before like backend or business logic heavy thing could easily be or more easily be verified that it's correct Surprise! Actually using authentic coding makes you a better coder because you have to You have to think harder about your architecture so that it's easy and verifiable because verifying is the way how to make things good.

[1:01:31](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3691) Well, and remember back even before AI, for complex systems, like once you got someone who built these things before, what they started with, how do we make it testable, right? Like you need to design interfaces, classes, testable. You need to think about like, am I going to fake things? Will I use mocks? Will I use end-to-end testing, which will be long, et cetera. But these are like really hard architectural decisions. And once you make them, they're, I guess, harder to change. And in your word, you know, like the model would cook a lot longer if you ask it to make a massive refactor. And, you know, if you have tests, it'll get it right.

[1:02:04](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3724) But, you know, we still have these trade-offs. It's still software. I would say I write better code now that I don't write code myself anymore. And I wrote really good code. But, like, even back at the company, sometimes testing was so tedious. and you come up with all those edge cases and the branching. I mean, outside of Ken DeBeck, who I deeply respect, and he was on the podcast and we talk, like he still writes tests first and he tells me, he's not mad at me for not writing it, but if you want to write like, you know, poor quality code, it's on you. But I don't know many developers, myself included, I never liked writing tests.

[1:02:45](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3765) And even when I pretended that I did, I just never did. It's a little bit like writing documentation and writing tests to me it was never a creative expression it is so good now like i i would say for my last project i have really good documentation and i didn't write a single line myself like no i don't write the test i don't know documentation i explain the model the trade-off so like why we did something like this and then tell it like like write that write the entrance section beginner friendly and then more technical detail at the end and it is so good i never had a project with that good documentation just by every time we design a feature this is a part of this is a part of the process and also like testing i'm almost like okay we built this how are we going to test this yeah we could do this and this what if we build it this way and oh yeah then we can test it better it's like this is now part of my thinking because i i always think like how do i close the loop how do i the model always needs to be able to verify the work itself um which automatically steers me to better architecture so why do you think there's you know a bunch of like experienced devs who are still pushing quite a bit back on on just like the idea that ai can do a lot of this

[1:03:57](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3837) that was a week ago i i stumbled over a blog post by McGallagher, Cook of His Love, that I deeply respect and learned a lot from. And this blog post was just was a dissing of the current way how models work. And what he did was he tested like five or six models, including some that make no sense, like the OpenAI 120 billion open source one. It's not good enough to write good code. And he He just, he wrote a prompt, as far as I understand it, there was not a lot of information on the episode, but to me it sounded like he wrote a prompt, he put it on CloudWeb, and he pressed send. And then he took the output and ran it and it didn't compile.

[1:04:47](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3887) And then he was disappointed. But he's like, of course it will not work. Do you think I can write bug-free code on the first attempt? and those little those models are ghosts of our collective human knowledge they work very similar in many ways of course you don't get it right the first time like there will be mistakes that's why

[1:05:08](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3908) **Peter Steinberger:** you have to close the feedback loop and also you don't just send a prompt to the model you start a conversation hey this is what i want to build it's like he complained that it used old api

[1:05:20](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3920) yeah you didn't specify the macOS version so it's so it made an assumption to default to like old api because that information was missing and it is it is trained on a lot of data not just the last two years and there's just more old data than new data so this is like the more you understand how those little beasts think the the better you get at prompting um and then and then and then he He spent maybe, I don't know, a day on playing with it and then just decided that this technology is not really good. But to be effective, you have to spend significantly more time. You know, it's like you know how to play guitar and I put you on the piano and you try it a bit.

[1:06:04](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=3964) It's like, oh, this sucks. I'll go back to my guitar. No, no, it's like it's a different way of building. It's a different way of thinking. you have no idea how often i screamed at like 3 a.m to cloud code because it did something silly i slowly started to understand why those things do what they do with like exactly the way i tell it to do things and sometimes you can literally ask you can even even last year like i for this project i the last project like cloudboard i feel like a human merge button because the community is like blowing off and all i do is like reviewing prs i i have very little time to actually write code myself anymore and in the beginning it would often like just cherry pick things and would close the pr and i was like so annoyed so i'm like why are you doing this yeah when you say this and this i interpret this this and this it was like ah like i i learned the language of the machine a little bit more i tweaked my my prompting and now i get exactly what i want because it's it's a skill like any other skill yeah and this is like simon willison has been saying the same thing even though we've been using it for years and i think everyone i think once i start to use it i also

[1:07:13](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4033) realize like i'm not i'm okay at it but i i could do better what if we put this to a real test because i think it's fair to say that right now you're building cloud bot which is a you know it's not something that generates revenue there's a lot of users and it's blowing up and it's it's a really cool tool but it's not pspdf kit which is a business that it's a lot of revenue is hinging over it if today you know we just wiped pspdf kit does not exist you need to rebuild pspdf kit you now have these agents how differently would it look how much would you trust it what would you delegate what you would you validate and and when you know you built up a team around it because now it's a profitable business at the very least you need to hire sales people whatnot how do you think the team would look different today with that same product because you you know exactly what it took to build that And you also know what these tools can do today.

[1:08:02](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4082) I could easily run a company with 30% of the people. It would probably be quite difficult to find people on that level. But you want to have really senior engineers that really understand what they build, but that are also comfortable in delegating and know which parts are actually important to work on and which parts I can vibe that's still something I don't see I don't see a lot especially in the AI world there is so much crap on Twitter there's so many people that are loud but clearly have no clue what they're doing there's so many dumb concepts around like I'm sorry but the Ralph Wiggum one like this is again another another silliness people use to work around uh model limitations of of of opus you don't even need when you use codex there's there's maybe a few cases where you have a really long list of individual tasks that can be automated but that's usually not how software building works so there's these people who i see so many people building up this elaborated orchestration layers and then you have like beads that automatically creates tickets and then your agent does tickets and then your agent emails the other agent and then you build up this this elaborate mess what for oh yeah they did they designed the the spec for like a few hours and

[1:09:36](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4176) then it just like the machine builds it in the whole day i don't i don't believe this works like like this is this is this is the waterfall model of software building this we learned long ago that this doesn't work like maybe yes people work differently and maybe it does work for some i just i just i don't see how this how this could work for me like i have to start with an idea and often i purposefully under prompt the agent so it would do something that would give me new ideas you're like maybe like 80 of the things i assume but like crap but like they're like two things are like oh i didn't think about that way and then i i iterate and shape the project and i have to i have to click it i have to like i have to feel it i feel i feel to make good software i you know one thing that those those things often lack is taste i have to feel like how does this feature feel and then the beauty now is that features are so easy i can just like throw it away or like reprompt it my building model is usually very much forward it's very rarely that i actually revert and have to go back it's just like okay no then let's change this No, no, let's do this.

[1:10:51](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4251) And it's like, it's like shaping. I love how this, like, you start with a rock and then you, like, sizzle away at it, like, pick different areas. And then slowly, like, this statue emerges out of marble. That's how I see building something. I guess reflecting on how software engineering is changing, this seems like a change because before we had AI or any of these agents, upfront planning did make a difference. You know, writing, at PSPDF, you insisted I think to have a proposal where people put a lot of thought up front to specify and do because it was expensive to I guess to build do you think this is changing because of the cost of just writing code is going down or I still plan you still do yes

[1:11:40](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4300) **Peter Steinberger:** but I don't put as much into it because it's not so much easier to just like try and look at the results

[1:11:48](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4308) and then see if oh yeah this this shape could work or no we have to like the tweaking and even even like oh no we have to like do it a completely different way it's not so much cheaper that it's to me it became much more playful Yeah, I guess because like, you know, when you're working, even if you have like a new grad on the team or an intern, you know, you give them something, they're working for a day or two. Now you give them another, it's not a day or two, you know, and we're not talking days here, we're talking minutes or like if it's a long running task, like 10, 20 minutes at worst. Plus, you're not just waiting on that thing, you have parallel things running.

[1:12:19](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4339) So it's not that much of a waste, if you will. In Cloud, but at the beginning, I had this assumption of like one agent and then eventually changed to multiple agents. and there was an assumption of like one provider like whatsapp and now it's multiple ones and changing that was like such a pain would i would have been such a pain if i would have written it myself because you have to weave in literally everything through the whole logic of the application and yeah it took codex like three hours it would have taken me like two weeks you know so so that upfront planning i i could have realized it in the beginning but now i i I know that I can just change things and it's much easier to work down your technical depth or you evolve how you think about a project as you build a project.

[1:13:08](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4388) That's why I don't believe in, I don't know, things like Gastown where you write up this back and then it builds itself and then it's done. How can you even know what you want to build before you built it? You learn so much in the process of building it that will go back into your thinking of how the system actually will end up being. To me, this is very much a circle until I... You don't walk up the mountain like this. You go around and sometimes you like you stray off a little bit of paths, but eventually you reach the top. That's how I feel it's Australia. You've been building Claude for two months, three months, non-stop ish.

[1:13:49](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4429) Let me switch a little bit here. One of the ideas that got me back was even even in in april may was i i wanted to have this hyper personal assistant and not like not like one that sends you a good morning email oh these are your three tasks no one that has a really deep understanding of me and doesn't just i don't know i meet a friend and then and then when i go home it would ping me hey how was how was that meeting or one that would wake me up one day and say hey you haven't texted Thomas in three weeks and I noticed he's he's in town right now because I checked his Instagram account they want to say hi or something that says hey I noticed every time you meet that and that person you're sad why is that like something something that is deeply personal like almost the the anti-ORM It's kind of like the movie Her, but that's where the technology is going.

[1:14:57](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4497) Those models are really good at understanding text. The bigger the context is, the more patterns they see. And even though they are like matrix calculation without a soul, it very often feels different. So this was like one of these ideas, and I even created a company I called Amantos Maschina, like the loving machine. But in summer when I explored it, the models weren't quite there yet. i got some results that was like okay this is like i'm a little too much on the edge of what i need right now which was very exciting because i know that the the state of the eye goes so fast that oh i can just revisit that in like a little later and and one of the ideas also was is that i assume that all of the big corporations right now are very much working on personal assistance In the future, everyone will have, you will have your best friend who is a freaking machine that will understand you, that will know everything from you, that will can do tasks for you, that will be proactive.

[1:16:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4560) That will require a lot of tokens, but everyone who can afford it will have one. And of course, this will democratize and trickle down to like more and more people as we learn how to build more efficient systems and hook up on chips. No question, this is where the things are going. You see like the first things with like OpenAI who launched Pulse with some productivity, but we just don't have enough compute yet to offer this as a feature. And also it's quite difficult. My idea was like, I kind of want something that runs on my computer and where the data is actually mine. And it's also quite scary that you give open-air entropic access to your email, your calendar, your dating apps.

[1:16:46](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4606) I don't know if you talk to your normie friends, but a lot of my friends, they use that a lot to basically have a therapist. And it does work incredibly well. Like, it's a really great listener. It understands your problems. And unless, like, some of the versions of 4.0 that are like, sure, this is a great idea. I want to put french fries into a salad. It works really well, and I did that too. I mean, part of it just is like the act of reflecting already is helping you. So it would even work if the machine would only repeat exactly what you wrote to a degree. But it actually gives insightful questions.

[1:17:26](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4646) it's actually it got really good so i had this idea of this like assistant but the tech wasn't there so i did that apart and i built a whole bunch of fun stuff with like of course like a bit vibe tunnel into this in your career to become like an authentic engineer you have this phase it's a trap phase where you you're looping and building your own tools to like optimizing your on webflow but this idea of like this hyper personal agent stuck a little bit and then over the last few months i i really started i built it but finally initially i didn't even had the the scope that it has now like i called it whatsapp relay i just i just i just wanted to do to trigger stuff on my computer with whatsapp so i built like a whatsapp relay where i had an agent that could do stuff with my computer and then i i was traveling to morocco for a friend's birthday and was out most of the day and just used whatsapp to to talk to my agent and i was kind of hooked it it was guiding me through the city it was making jokes it could text other friends via whatsapp from me and I remember I was blown away because I in the beginning the tech was very scrappy but I I built in something where I could send it an image

[1:18:52](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4732) didn't even use the proper thing to send an image I just gave the a string and it could use the read tool to like read the string and then I was in Morocco and was just like just like not thinking and sending it a voice a voice message but I didn't build that and then like like 30 seconds later it replied to my voice message and like how the did you do that oh yeah you sent me a file and and then i looked at the header and i found that it's ogg so i used ff impact to convert it and then i i looked for visper on your computer but it's not installed but i found the open ai key so i did a curl to open ai server let it translate and i'm like holy cow like this was opus 4.5 and it's so incredibly resourceful like you just did this you know other people say oh you need a skill or some system no just like it just figured it out i slowly got hooked on the thing i i used it i used it to wake me up and it was running i it was running on my mac studio in london and was connected SSH to my MacBook in Morocco and was turning on the music and making it louder and louder because I didn't reply. And to make that work, I added a heartbeat, which in a way is insane from a security perspective. You have a model that you prompt with, do something cool and

[1:20:18](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4818) surprise me, that you send every few minutes to make it proactive and go through your task list uh like probably the most expensive alarm clock ever but it was just hilarious and also the text it sends like because i i was i had a balloon for it and it knew that i had to wake up very early and i didn't reply and it was like you could see the reasoning peter's not responding but peter has to wake up no no no no no sleep as it was bitching to me and then i showed it to the the friends I was with and everybody was like hooked like this is something magical and I was hooked too and then I I went on Twitter and I got the most muted responses because nobody would get it I feel it's somewhat of a of a new category of products that a little bit like your story with like you know when you didn't get the iPhone from the marketing campaigns on TV and anywhere and then you had to use it yeah so I worked on it but only the last two months and the name changed from wow relay to at some point a cloud said like then what is this name like it doesn't fit the feature set anymore because like i had like telegram in there and other features so i renamed it to to claudis because it's an inside joke because i like doctor who i felt cloudbot is is a better name has a better domain and

[1:21:44](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4904) explain the product better so it had done on the domains and then I also quietly build up my army because to make this work you want everything to be a CLI. So I was just building CLIs for everything, like for Google for my bed for lamps, for music Why CLIs? Why not MCPs? And what do you think about MCPs anyway? It's a crutch

[1:22:08](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4928) **Peter Steinberger:** I think that the best thing that came out of MCPs is that it made companies rethink to open up more apis but the whole concept is is silly you you have to pre

[1:22:21](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4941) export all the functions of all the tools and all the explanations when your session loads and then the model has to send a precise blob of json there and gets json back but surprise models are really good at using bash and like imagine imagine you have a better service so the model could ask for a list of available cities and then get like 500 cities back and then it has to pick one city out of five city but it cannot filter that list because that's not part of how mcp works and then it's okay give me the weather for london and you would get like the weather temperature wind rain and like 50 other things that i'm not interested in because I just want to know, is it raining or not?

[1:23:07](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=4987) Probably raining because London. But the model needs to digest everything and then you have like so much crap in your context. Whereas if it's a CLI, it could use GQ and just a filter for exactly what it needs. But does it not seem like a limitation that everything is loaded around an MCP in the context? That seems a problem. It sounds like it could work if MCPs were not in the context and there was a way to discover or decide which one to use. Yeah, that's what companies are building now. but there's still the problem of that i cannot chain them i cannot i cannot easily build a script that says hey get me get me like all the all the cities that are over 25 degrees and then and then filter out only that part of information and like pack it in one command that's it's all individual mcp calls i cannot i cannot script it yeah but but i guess this is just a matter of time because if we think about like you know when you're when i'm building a weather app right now now.

[1:24:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5040) I know that even without AI, I know I need to build up this thing. I need to fetch the data, so I will search what kind of APIs are available, which one do I like, what kind of trade-offs for pricing, for covering, etc. And then I choose that API, and I could chain APIs because I could get that result and look up, etc. So I guess this is, you know, like, it sounds pretty much, we've solved this so as pre-AI, we're going to solve it. It'll just take some time, and who knows what the format for it will be. I mean, I built MacPorter, which is a small TypeScript thing that converts an MCP to a CLI.

[1:24:36](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5076) So you can just package it up. Basically, you're saying CLIs right now are a lot more efficient. Yeah, yeah. So in CloudBot, I don't have MCP support. But via MacPorter, you can use any MCP. You can literally be on your phone and say, hey, use the Vercel MCP to do this and this. and it will go on the website, it will find the MCP, it will load it and it will use it all on demand. Even right now, if you use MCP, you have to restart cloud code, which is like very user unfriendly. So I quietly built up my army to like automate everything, which was a lot of work. I think Theo did a video a few days ago where he told me like, this guy is insane.

[1:25:17](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5117) Because the list is really long by now, but as I was playing with my agent, I wanted him to do more and more stuff. I felt it really hard to convey what it does. It's still hard to me. In January 1st, just a week now, I did, okay, let's try something. Let's do the really insane thing of making a Discord and then adding my agent to Discord. There was somebody who contributed Discord support to it, and even though I wasn't sure if I should merge it, then I actually did. so i put on my agent who has full read wide access to my computer in a public discord what could possibly go wrong yeah it's like this is absolutely insane and then of course like some people joined the discord and then they saw me they saw me using the full power of this thing like checking my cameras doing home automation it playing dg for me like i was in the kitchen and i told him like look at my screen and are my agents done because it has full access of my clean and it can click so it can actually click into the terminal and type for me and like it can tell me your codex say this and this because it just sees the screen i mean i'm working on optimizing that yeah like i actually want to stream out it because it would be much it would be much better

[1:26:36](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5196) if it's text but it works already like it it's in the background it's i'm looking at my screen and like make some rants if i do some shit and everybody who experienced that for a few minutes got hooked like this was this was the craziest blow up from 100 stars to like what 3 300 stars in a week um and i think i merged 500 pull requests already that's why i feel like a human merge button so that's why that's why i'm i'm little i'm little all over the place these days because this project is blowing off and and and you know the beauty of it is the technology disappears you just you just talk to a friend on your phone that is infinitely resourceful has access to your the email your calendar your files can build websites for you can like do administrative work can scrape websites can call your friends or can call a business i'm just about to to merge the call feature it literally can call a business and like make a reservation for you and you don't have to think about compactation or or in all of that context blends away i have like a i have a memory system that will remember um not perfect nothing's perfect yet but it's already feels magical because all because because now i i walk around i see like

[1:27:58](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5278) this event, I send It will not only tell me the reviews of this event, if there's a conflict in my calendar, if friends talked about it. It has so much context that the responses that it can give me are so much better than what any of the current tools that live in their own little box can give me. Well, sounds like you built whatever Apple was hoping Siri to do, but they've been unable to. I honestly, I built the best marketing tool for Entropic to sell them more subscription. I don't know how many people signed up for the $200 subscription because of CloudBot. And like many people already had one and used a second subscription because of that, because it's so token hungry.

[1:28:45](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5325) It's not that it's token hungry. It's just that people love it so much that they use it all the time. And because the technology blends away, they don't see that it spawns sub-agents and does like a whole bunch of things in the background. to just make it feel easy but like there's some actual engineering like there's a lot of work in the back uh to make it feel easy you know this is like the hard part like you hide complexity to a degree that it it feels magical oh but yeah but this is interesting because like i i can sense from we're talking you know you put so much thought into architecting this thing and right now like you've been building this for a few months and yes it blew up but in your head like do you have a structure of how cloud bot is structured like what parts you need to modify you know like like you kind of you can get your your mindset into it and you you know where modification needs to do you know what you want to refactor because it's not going to be efficient are you thinking about like things like memory consumption token consumption efficiency those kind of things i mean token consumption is more like how to how to structure the prompt and memory it's typescript that shows json around in the end let's be honest yeah like like like i get text

[1:29:57](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5397) from from an llm i save text to to disk i send text to whatsapp or to now we have like msteams slack discord uh signal imessage whatsapp and there's there's two more that are landing like metrics that will expand the thing even further. It's like, it's really poorly by now. But mostly, again, I move around text in different shapes. And maybe it goes to different providers, or there's like, now it's different agents, and there's like the agentic loop, and there's like a lot of configuration, and there's, it's a lot of plumbing, but nothing's, there's nothing in there that is really difficult. Yeah, well, but it's a lot of small things right like i i feel in software right like we we know for software even before ai there was not much difficult of course you need to learn and understand the language and all that but the difficulty is how do i how do i make it so that it feels magical so so what i worked on a lot is now you have you have this one-liner that you're typing it that you pass in your command i will i will check if you have known installed homebrew installed i'll install the npm package i do some check if you have any existing stuff just to like yeah just to make it work simple even if you

[1:31:14](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5474) already used an older version and everything and then i'll guide you through uh setting up a model but again i will i will pre-find if you have codex or cloud installed so you can just press enter so you don't have to think about it mostly just press enter and then you want to whatsapp you type in your number it will just work again and then and then i'll ask you do you want do you want to hatch your bot and you can press yes and then and then like a tui a tui comes up because you're still in the terminal right you want a good experience yeah so just a tui basically for that and where you where you to see wake up my friend and then the the i programmed the model i added a bootstrap file and to explain Model that is now being born, to create an identity and a soul, where the values of the user are in, and then the model will be like, Hello.

[1:32:11](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5531) Like, Stretches, who are you? Who I am? What's my name? You know, and this is, like, I've watched people do it, and that's where the magic starts. That's where they're like, they no longer think about, I'm talking to GPD 4.2. no i'm now talking to my friend created warhorn like a unicorn with part of his name or like i'm talking to claude uh and then it's like what's important to you what do you do it's like curious i programmed it to be like curious and then go through this bootstrapping phase and then it will actually delete the bootstrap file and create a a user.md with like information about you a soul.md with like all the core values and an identity with the like what's his name what's his core emoji what are the things that are like inside jokes and and but there's like evolving documents that it will maintain and like tweak as you interact with it and then you it will just like send you a message on on whatsapp and you just like suddenly you talk on whatsapp like making this flow easy that was hard yeah also like even even coming up with the idea of you know you're you're not you're not editing the configuration because the agent can edit its own configuration.

[1:33:24](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5604) You don't have to update anything because the agent can update itself. You can literally ask a bot, update yourself, and it will fetch itself and update itself and come back. It's like, hey, I have new features. Blending the technology away so far, that's the magic. That's why I... But it feels pretty similar to what you would with PSPDFKit, right? You kind of blended away the complexity of a PDF. So it was just there, you could rotate, you could do... Yeah, even at the API level back then. But it's a bit bizarre. Like what you described reminds me of this Black Mirror episode I just watched, which is called Play Thing, where it's a digital little creature that creates, of course, a Black Mirror, so it has a black, a bit of a dark ending.

[1:34:07](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5647) But it was also a game. It also kind of feels, you know, we talked about how you don't play as much games because you like, but this also feels a little bit like a game, right? But it's kind of like more connected with reality. Just fascinating how we're here. pulling back into the realm of software engineering. So you build this product and it's now, it's a production software. You're merging poor because people are using it. Now, thinking back to PSPDFKit and companies that are like that, which have, you know, like tens or hundreds of developers working on production software, knowing what you know with how you're building CloudBot and the tools that you're using, how do you think software engineering at those larger companies could change?

[1:34:49](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5689) Because one thing I see is for individual people like you, it's like AI is really, really hitting a fit. Like you're making you way more productive. You're in control. At teams or at companies that are, you know, have existing code, it's just a lot kind of slower. It's not really, okay, people use it for this or that. But it seems a huge divide between the two worlds. And you've kind of been the CEO for this company. What might that be? Or is it just more of a timing thing where every user technology often comes with hobbies, you know, pick it up earlier? I think companies will have a really high time adopting AI efficiently because this also requires to completely redefine how the company works.

[1:35:29](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5729) You know, like at Google, they tell you you can either be an engineer or like a manager, or you want to also like define how the UI looks. That role doesn't exist because either you build it or you design it. But this new world needs people that have a product vision. that can be able to do everything and you need like far fewer of them but ultimately just very high agency and high competency people.

[1:36:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5760) **Peter Steinberger:** But you can probably trim the company down to like 30%, which is very scary because, I mean, economically this will all lead into a fiasco, and a lot of people will have trouble finding a place in this new world, but I'm not the least surprised that current companies cannot very successfully use AI.

[1:36:26](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5786) I mean, they do to a degree, but you have to do a big refactor first, you know, like not just on your code base, but also on your company. I design, even on the code bases, I design the code base not so it's useful, it's easy for me, so it has to be easy for the agent. I optimize for different things, not always the things that I prefer, but the things I know work the best and have the least friction for those models because I just want to move faster and ultimately they have to deal with the code, not me. I deal with the overall structure and architecture, and I can still do that in the way that I like.

[1:37:00](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5820) Everything has to be re-thought. You know, pull requests. I see them more as prompt requests now. Like, I don't, somebody opens a pull request, I don't, a lot of do is say thanks, and I think about the feature. And then with my agent, we start off with the PR, and then I'll design the feature as I see fit. The agent rarely reuses, like maybe I reuse some code, but it's more like it gives the agent a good understanding of what the goal is and sometimes it's very useful because it's tricky bugs right but I basically rewrite every pull request and weave it in also a lot of people let's just say the overall code quality of PR has run down a lot because people vibe code and building a successful feature still needs a lot of understanding of your overall design and if you cannot do that you will have a harder time steering your agent and the output will be bad.

[1:37:55](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5875) Yeah, and if you don't have the feedback route to close it, et cetera. Yeah, so I found it highly effective. Like, you know, at PS3DFKit, sometimes a pull request was like a week in the work and then you comment on it and then somebody has to context switch and you wait for CI for 40 minutes. No, I have the discussion. I see, okay, how would this affect something? Like, I let the model review. They will already bring something up. I have some ideas as well. We're going to reshape it into a form that fits my vision. and then we weave in the code. It's literally, there's so many new words I use for like writing code now with those models, which is so funny, like weaving in code into an existing structure.

[1:38:31](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5911) And sometimes you have to like change the structure so it would fit. Now, imagine that you would hire one or two people to make it a small team. How do you think in this world, and you want to keep doing what you're doing, how do you think things like code review, CI, CD would change? I don't care much about CI. Why? Why not? You used to care a lot. Like a PSPDF kit, you used to care a lot, right? And I still do this. There's value. But I have local CI. I'm a little bit of DAHP now. Because the agent runs the test, right? Yeah. And it's just way faster. I want to push back on the PI and then wait for 10 minutes to wait for CI.

[1:39:15](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5955) Because you waited 10 minutes on the agent already. if if the tests pass locally we merge and then yes sometimes main slips a little bit but it's it's it's usually very close because maybe sometimes i forget the and the agents call it gate i don't know where that's coming from should i run full gate so now i call it gate full gate is like linting and building and and checking and running all the tests and i almost think it like because it's a it's a wall you know like it's like he calls the linter and like the the builder and the tester, it's almost like a gate before my code goes out. So I know I'm always like, okay, once you're done, commit this, run full gate. I'm slowly adopting their language. And if you hired one more person to work on this, you probably wouldn't do code reviews either.

[1:39:59](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=5999) That's what I'm saying. You would probably trust this person to run, like pick up your working style, right? Even in Discord, we don't talk code, we talk about architecture, like big decisions. Like you still need to have style. Like there was like this one pull request that adds voice calling. So now I like literally I can tell Claude, hey, can you call this restaurant and reserve your seats? And it can do that. but it it it's a big it's quite a big new module that like touches a lot of places i'm like you have to have this feeling is this like this like i got a little bit of this ache it's like i want to merge this but oh this is becoming bloatware so so i i had this idea of like uh let's my typical way let's make a cli out of it and i already had a project where i tried to solve something like this but i'm finished so i opened up codex and said hey look at this pr look at this project could we weave this feature in I again say weave I'm like so no let's keep it could we weave this feature into the CLI what are the up and downsides and then would like tell me like oh yeah I could do this and this and this to give me honest opinion would this to me it sounds like it actually it would fit into the project I was like it was like yeah you would get this

[1:41:11](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6071) and this benefits that we cannot do if we're next on CLI okay but I don't like this this is getting blood where could we build a plugin architecture and then i will and you know like one of the the secret hacks on on on using i effectively is you reference other products like i constantly tell it look into this folder because i solved it there and i solved it there and all the previous thinking i did to like solve the problem well the i is so good at this still to like read the code and understand my ideas i don't have to like explain it again or if i explain it again i might like make mistakes that like wouldn't get across exactly the idea that i have in my head so in this case i know that mario who does like shitty coding shitty coding agent which is like a actually very much not shitty coding agent it's not high i know that he had this plugin architecture that would load code via via gt and because it's all typescript so it was like can you look into this folder and this folder and then it just came up with this really insanely good plugin architecture again by like being inspired by other people and then that's why you don't have this feeling and And then I came up with, yeah, that's what I built last night, basically.

[1:42:17](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6137) I mean, it sounds like this is going to be completely different. Like, you know, PRs are like in your workflow. You're not using PRs that much. As CI is just different, as tests are still doing. There's a more important feedback loop. You're using things more like weaving. Instead of code, you're talking more about architecture and taste. It sounds like a pretty big shift to me. In this world, let's assume you get to the point where you're going to hire the next one and two and three developers on this team. let's imagine that this thing gets a life of its own and, you know, maybe it's a business as well.

[1:42:49](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6169) What skills would you look for and what would you advise an experienced engineer right now? Who would you be excited to work with? What kind of either expertise projects would you look for for someone who sounds like who can work in this way or can pick up this way of working? Someone who is active on GitHub and does open source and someone where I have the feeling that they love the game. The way you learn in this new world is by, like, trying stuff. And it very much feels like a game where you improve your skills as you get better. Like a music instrument, you have to, like, keep trying. And I, that I'm now this efficient and this fast, and I don't know, like, I think the other day I had, like, 600 commits in a single day.

[1:43:35](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6215) This is, like, completely nuts. And it works. Like, it's not, like, there was a, somebody did a code review and said, like, oh, this is actually not slop. And I'm like, yeah. There's a lot of skill that went into it. Yeah, it's a lot of hard work. But you need to play with the technology and learn. And then you will get, in the beginning, it might be frustrating. I don't know, kind of like, you know, you start going to the... Jim, it's going to suck. It's going to be painful. But very quickly, you get better, and you feel that your workflow gets faster, and then you feel the improvements, and then you get hooked. But yeah, play. And yeah, also work hard.

[1:44:18](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6258) Yeah, I mean, you're putting more hours into this thing. I've never, right now, I've never, I never worked more. Even when I had my company, I've never worked so hard as I do now. Not because I have to, but because it's so addictive and so much fun. But also because right now I'm like using the moment where this has traction and there's a lot of people who like are pushing me. And I feel, could it be, because I think you've got pretty good business sense, not necessarily in the business business, but seeing when there's an opportunity, there is an opening for to get traction right like what you said for people to work in the open right now it seems novel you're telling me you don't think you could even if you wanted to hire you don't think you could hire people because there's not many people working in the open clearly using these things fast forward two or three years from now once a bunch of people start to do it and everyone does it it's kind of like moot a little bit so there's also that a group that a lot of people are worried about is the new grads, the people with no experience who are either in school or about to graduate because, of course, you've been an experienced engineer.

[1:45:25](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6325) By the time this came around, you have a lot of things to build on. Putting back yourself into shoes of someone like that and knowing what you know now, what would you recommend of activities that they do, things that they build or try? And would you recommend focusing on the fundamentals of software engineering, on this on the agents kind of mixing the two i would i would recommend them to be infinitely curious yes it's going to be harder to enter this market it's it's absolutely going to be harder and you need to build things to gain experience i don't think you need to write a lot of code but you need to i don't know you know there's a lot of open source that is complex that you can like check out and learn and you have an infinitely patient machine that is able to explain you all the things so you can ask you can ask all questions why why was it built this way to like gain system understanding but it requires real curiosity and i don't think universities right now are set up to teach you that in a really good way this is usually something you discover through pain it's not going to be easy for new people but but they have they have the benefit that they are not tainted by all the experience like they would they they use agents in ways that

[1:46:38](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6398) we don't even think about again because they don't know that it doesn't work and by then it probably does and also their friends use it all the time like the other day I have this little menu bar app for cost tracking on cursor and cloud code and everything and it was a bit slow so I was like okay let's do performance measurement and my old way is like I open instruments and click around and it would just call XS and do everything by the terminal it blew me away it was like I didn't even have to open instruments anymore. It just made it faster. And then did some recommendations. I'm like, all of that sounds good.

[1:47:14](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6434) Do it. Yeah, I think we might be underestimating both how resourceful people entering tech have been, also how young people, if I think about some of the great companies started, they were very young and obviously very inexperienced, but had a lot of passion. So that's there as well. Yeah, it's a big opportunity. I'm especially taking, I have to take it in, But all the things you mentioned about just your way, you know, we've been coding, not carrying out PR, not carrying out code reviews. It's a big change because these things have been us with, like, again, for like 15 plus years of your life, they have been.

[1:47:49](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6469) In fact, you know, a lot of it has been kind of, you know, solid building blocks of PSPDFKit, right? Yeah, we need a lot of new things. Even, you know, even when I get a PR, I'm... I'm actually more interested in the prompts than in the code. I ask people to please add the prompts, and some do, and I read the prompts more than I read the code. Because to me, this is a way higher signal of like, how did you get to the solution? What did you actually ask? How much steering was involved? To me, this gives me more idea about the output. I don't have to read the code. or like if someone wants a feature i ask for a prompt request like write it up really well because then i can just point my agent to the issue and we'll build it so because because the work is the thinking about how it should work and what the details are and if someone else does it for me i can literally say build and it will work uh and i and then yeah of course i think about it but it will will really or if someone sends me a pr that are just a few fixes i told people please don't do that it takes me 10 times more time to to review that than just type in fix in in codex and wait a few minutes so there's like all these insane things that are like would have been

[1:49:01](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6541) completely different even even in the beginning uh now we have a one-liner but for the last two weeks like when it got really traction i thought people to just just point an agent at the repository to configure it so i didn't have i didn't have an onboarding but we had cloud code based onboarding where Claude would like check out the good depository read the things and write the configuration for those people and set everything up so it works like set up a launch agent that didn't have the manual setup because it was not a priority anymore because agents can now do that for you and since the product was built by agents they structured it exactly the way agents expect things to be named and saying there's certain ways that are encoded in the weights how they expect things to be named and everything exactly exactly like how you expect so they are really good at navigating their product so it was not a priority to work on onboarding as much i mean eventually i wanted this magical experience but it was more important to like make sure that your message arrives and that things don't explode so onboarding was literally like type this prompt into your agent um which is would have been mind

[1:50:09](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6609) blowing even a year ago all right so to to wrap up we'll do some rapid questions so i'll just ask Can you tell me what's on your mind? What's a tool that is not a CLI, not an ID, it can be physical, that you use, you like, you would recommend? I buy a lot of gadgets, and many of them dust away. But there's this one kind of crappy thing that was not expensive that gives me almost unlimited amount of joy. And it's like this Android-powered photo stand where I can upload pictures and where it has an email address and friends can send pictures and it will just show pictures. And I put a few in my house again.

[1:50:50](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6650) And I mean, even the animations are a little croppy because it runs Android and it's terrible for my technology. But it gives me infinite number of joy because it is low tech that just shows pictures and reminds me of happy moments in my life. And it was like 200 bucks. And I don't know. To be honest, it gets me more joy than the latest iPhone. I bought the iPhone 17. I still haven't unpacked it because I just, in my head, wanted it but then i couldn't get around to it because it's just a hassle to like move the sims around and i said like basically no no no feelable benefit but like this little this little device gives me infinite joy what's something that helps you recharge outside of tech like just or just moving away from tech and screens what keeps me sane even if i work crazy hours is going to the gym even better working with a coach and leaving my phone in the locker and then i really have like a good hour where i just feel me and i and i'm like in the moment and i'm not distracted by notifications or tempted to like touch my phone like we need more time for this or even sometimes i go for a walk and i i leave my phone at home and it feels very scary it's almost like a it's almost like an organ by

[1:52:13](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6733) now you know it's like your body knows where it is and if you don't know where your phone is you freak out i'm having i'm having a blast i love it this is great pete thanks very much well this was a super interesting conversation and it feels to me that how one person teams build software with AI is already completely different to what we've been used to. One thing that really caught my attention is how Peter thinks in prompts and not pull requests, and how he weaves in the code and no longer merges the code. He doesn't find pull requests all that useful and would rather get prompt suggestions even on GitHub. I do think we might have to rethink the importance of prompts or at the very least sharing of prompts in software development the more we use AI and AI agents.

[1:52:53](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6773) Another thing that struck with me was Peter's emphasizing how important it is to close the loop. As Peter explained, the reason AI is so good at coding, but often mediocre at writing, is because you can validate code. You can compile it, run tests, check the output. So the secret to making AI system development work well is to design your system to close the loop and have the AI run the test. Finally, I was wondering if Peter is in the flow as much even when he's not writing code. Turns out he is. He's in the flow more than ever. and he told me that it's mentally more exhausting to juggle several AI agents in parallel than it was just to write code.

[1:53:26](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6806) My feeling is that someone who was a great developer without AI can be an excellent kind of code architecture or card marketing person with AI. This is just a gut feeling I've had so far, but Peter seems to prove it. Finally, we should note that CloudBot is more of a YOLO project than most production apps. So take the approaches that we discussed with a grain of salt. At the same time, I do think that a lot of what Peter does could well spread to building production code, except review and validation will become a much more important step in those projects. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please do subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube.

[1:53:58](https://realalpha.app/v/8lF7HmQ_RgY/?t=6838) A special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show. Thanks, and see you in the next one.