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**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] "You're going to encode your question? I'm going to encode my answer." |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Jerod Santo:** "Let's see you do what I just did." |
**Thorsten Ball:** "How do you deal with this?" |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Break**: \[44:07\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Let me ask you this... You said earlier there's this divide in the enterprise. And for lack of a better term, let's just call it believers and unbelievers. So you have the bulls and the bears. And of late, on this podcast, we've been just \[unintelligible 00:46:17.08\] Yourself, Chris McCord was just o... |
**Thorsten Ball:** I don't want to distinguish between enterprise and whatever... Let's just say in general, I think -- I had a conversation last year at a Rust conference in Italy with a senior engineer who has done some amazing stuff in the last 20 years; apparently a crazy good programmer... And back then I was work... |
So I think there's a lot of -- I don't want to say willful ignorance, but I think there's a lot of ignorance where people have kind of tuned out all of this. And just like some of us have tuned out crypto, or whatever it is, blockchain in general, you know... And I think some people have just tuned this out, and whenev... |
And then the other thing is that some people describe it with the bell curve meme, where the junior engineers get a lot out of it, because they don't know that much, so the AI takes care of a lot of stuff for them. They never have to learn how to center a diff with CSS; you know, nice... |
And then on the other end of the bell curve is the senior engineers get a lot out of it, because they know a lot, and they basically know how to review what the AI is doing, and they know where the pitfalls are, and the trap doors, and what tests to write, and what not to do, and how to architect the thing. So they're ... |
And then there's the middle part of the bell curve, where it's the engineers who are trying to get better at what they're doing, and they wanna learn all of this, and they are not, I think, comfortable with "Agent take the wheel" kind of thing. They're like "I don't know what's going on here. I wanna know what's going ... |
\[50:06\] And then the third problem is that it's something you have to learn. Like, you have to get better at this. The first time you try an agent, you won't have amazing results, possibly. On a small scale, yes, but some people do crazy stuff, but others will fail. And I think there's this problem that -- all of the... |
And what Mitchell Hashimoto recently said, I think last week, he's like "When have you ever become more productive with a tool after using it for just a single day?" You have to put some effort in. You have to get better at this. And I think that's a problem. These models are anthropomorphized, which is also what I've ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Thorsten Ball:** And there's this mode of thinking where "Well, these things are smart, and these are like humans, and these are close to AGI", and whatever else somebody somewhere says... But the reality is that these are large language models, based on a transformer architecture. They have a certain way of taking t... |
And they cannot do everything, they don't know everything. You have to know about what goes into the context, and what shouldn't go into the context to not derail them. |
So there is a learning curve, but it's not something that somebody tells you on the website, you know? Like "Hey, you've gotta learn this", you know? Because nobody says "We have a learning curve. That's amazing." Those last 20 years of software has said "Learning curves are bad", you know? Same as a Vim user, you know... |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you even use Vim anymore? I hear the IDE is dying. I mean, don't you just let Amp take the wheel? |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a hot topic. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** I know it is. I've been bringing it up nonstop. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you use Vim or not? Yes or no? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Not anymore. I use Vim mode in VS Code. But honestly, I don't type that much code by hand anymore. It's truly crazy. I mean... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Say that again. Say that one more time, clear. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Okay, so the journey in some sense of the last one and a half years was that I worked at Sourcegraph, I wanted to try something else... I wanted to go as hardcore programmer as I can. And I went to Zed, and we built a text editor in Rust from the ground up, with our own GPU framework, and whatnot. Tr... |
But then over the year, with AI getting better, and then trying out stuff, like back then CursorTab, where I was sitting down and I just want -- we were building the completion for Zed, so I was working on that, the tab completion, the fancy AI completion, and... Figure out what the competitors are doing, you know? So ... |
\[54:24\] And I hit Tab 10 times and it had the whole thing. And I sat there thinking, "Damn this is faster than I will ever be." Like, all of the Vim "I'm going to use Colemak, and I'm going to use Quickscope in Vim", and blah, blah, blah... You now have models that are faster than you at doing this. |
If you have like a CSV file or something, and you, I don't know, remove the last column... I would have done this - selecting normal mode, jump to the end, delete, blah, blah, blah; or a macro, and repeat it for 990 times and whatnot... Now, with these models, you could just remove the first column, second column it wo... |
And then I worked on the Zed completion and we built this ourselves and I realized "I'm not an ML guy", and Antonio, the guy I worked with, he's maybe the best programmer I ever worked with, but he's also not an ML guy. But we could build something of equal quality as CursorTab was. And I was sitting there thinking, "T... |
**Jerod Santo:** Go ahead. |
**Thorsten Ball:** This thought of... |
**Jerod Santo:** Offend away. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah, am I working on a horse carriage? Like, by working on a text editor. Am I working on a-- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, dang... |
**Thorsten Ball:** I don't mean it to -- but it's just this like... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] It's a really good text editor though, you know? It's really good. |
**Thorsten Ball:** It's an amazing product, but it's just this -- I've worked in the Vim mode with Conrad at Zed, and all of that stuff, and it's amazing.... But then you're like "I want to be efficient, at the end of the day." I'm not somebody who loves programming and being fast at stuff because of macros and key bin... |
And then basically, just to round this up, I looked at different other companies, and talked to different other people, and then I ended up coming back to Sourcegraph because I talked with Quinn, and I told him everything I just told you, and I'm like "Dude, everything is changing." He's like "Do you want to come build... |
And now I'm working in VS Code, which I've never wanted to do, and I don't like VS Code... Like, aesthetically, I don't like it. I also realized I don't care that much anymore. And then I thought "Am I the leper here? What's going on?" And then I talked with a bunch of other people, colleagues at Sourcegraph and people... |
\[58:12\] And if you were to ask Primeagen, or TJ, or whatever, they would give me \*bleep\* for saying this, of course... But I had this feeling, and a lot of other people have this feeling too, that the age of fast mechanical movement in an editor - it's kind of over when you have these models that are much faster th... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Thorsten Ball:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** It goes back to your bell curve... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I was gonna say, you said horse carriage... I kind of want to come back there; not to like slap the offense on there, but to really think about that, though. You have to think about -- I'm trying to do this in the moment. I'm trying to like listen as a podcaster would, and I'm trying to think ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No, we got into our new version of the carriage, which is called an F-250. It's still -- it's a diesel truck, but you can't modernize that quickly and that fast. But we got into a vehicle and we went back and forth, from here to there. I didn't think about or cry about the fact that my grandfather, ... |
And so that's what you had me thinking, this most obvious thing of like - I would never go back to the way... Or maybe I would if I could retire, if I had a few money, and it's like "Yeah, now I can afford the pasture, and I can take horses everywhere, because time doesn't matter", you know? Maybe that's a different ki... |
**Thorsten Ball:** I think that's a good point. There's a generational divide, too. And I forgot to mention this, but also last year I gave a talk in Munich at -- something from the university. Basically, there were a lot of people much younger than me hanging out at this meetup. And we started talking about AI... And ... |
\[01:02:05.12\] And I talked to these young people at this meetup and I realized they don't care. That's over for them. They never think "My code is not real code because I didn't use Emacs to write." They just use the tool available. And they would tell me "Oh yeah, I organize my docs in this way, so I can use Cursor ... |
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