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**Jerod Santo:** \[20:11\] Right. |
**Nathan Sobo:** Now you're unleashing this random process in the middle of it... I don't know. Again, you can maybe find those things without rigorous design and good testing in a system where it's less stochastic in nature. But how are you really going to explore the surface area of that? |
So all the algorithmic stuff, I think, has to be dialed in. And then I think beyond that -- yeah, then there's this new frontier of like "Okay, once that's all working immaculately, now what about this LLM?" And how do we get that? But that can't be perfect ever, I think. That can only be like making the score as high ... |
So anyway, I really don't want -- I definitely don't want Zed held together with baling wire, but I think the opportunity... I'm writing a blog post about this. It's like, there's so many times, in every system - I'm sure you've been here, because I have many times - where you're like "It would be better if we did this... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Nathan Sobo:** And I think the exciting promise of AI for me is it's less about how many billion lines of code we generate a day, or whatever, as a human species, but more like "How many well-tuned, not held together with bailing wire, really high-quality software systems are we maintaining as the human race?" |
I did this pull request over the holidays; it was like 30,000 lines, and it nearly killed me. And then it inspired something that I hope we're going to be shipping in a couple weeks, doing an AI feature, basically. But yeah, the effort that has traditionally been involved in any codebase that meets the real world at sc... |
**Jerod Santo:** No, I think that's a really good way of looking at it, because my entire software career I have been selling the idea of slowing down to go faster, and spending the extra time and the extra money to design it right, to test it right, to do all of the rigorous things that slow you down and cost more mon... |
**Nathan Sobo:** Totally. |
**Jerod Santo:** You don't have to talk to anybody. Just do it. |
**Nathan Sobo:** I spent like two freaking weeks on and off, and like a very intensive week kind of right around New Year's... Oh, my God. Yeah, I pulled an all nighter around New Year's day, because I told myself "I'm not going to blow my time box on this", right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "Oh, I almost got it." |
**Nathan Sobo:** Yeah. I told myself, "I'm not going to blow my time box on this." And - yeah, and I got it compiling at least. Just like change to this core part of the gpui API that's just called like thousands and thousands of times all over the system... But it was wrong. It wasn't right. But I hadn't realized it w... |
**Jerod Santo:** Or pull an all nighter. |
**Nathan Sobo:** ...and it's in the codebase forever, or I can fix it, and like work my tail off fixing. And it's cool now that I think -- and I think we're still getting there; to be real, we're still getting there. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Nathan Sobo:** But the promise of AI, I think, for me, is having this third choice, of like "I fix it, and the horrible part of fixing it is actually fast." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[24:16\] Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, there's something that has happened with access to all the things. I'm not going to name them all. We all know what they're called... Is that the trivial yet mundane things we would do are somehow made a little easy. Like, an email response. I did this thing, I was like "I almost procrastinate... |
**Jerod Santo:** Time consuming... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Huh? |
**Jerod Santo:** Time consuming. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, time consuming. But even from a cognitive overload standpoint... |
**Nathan Sobo:** Right, right. I get you on both fronts. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I mean, that's it for me. In one scenario or two where I would normally procrastinate, I've now forced myself to say "Let me consult my genius golden retriever on acid to help me." \[laughter\] Because it's there, waiting, willing and ready. And provided it can do a mostly good job... I massag... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sludge... |
**Nathan Sobo:** Yeah, I think it's -- I mean, I don't know. To me it's like "Fine..." It's good to have more software on the whole, and it's good to have more people creating software that meets their needs on the whole. And my sense - and we'll see, because - I don't know, I can't predict the future. Maybe the singul... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Nathan Sobo:** \[27:42\] And they're also kind of not like even digital constraints in the sense that we could generate a ton of code now as well. But the constraints are, I think, still about controlling complexity. Controlling the complexity of the system we're building, understanding the implications of what we've... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sadness. Sadness, man. Sadness. |
**Nathan Sobo:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Zed would be dead at that point. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Gosh. |
**Nathan Sobo:** It would be like a hobby. It would be like a hobbyist tool. Kind of like a Ford Model T, or something. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, somebody working on their old muscle cars, or something. |
**Nathan Sobo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm on the line of this idea - when you're in sales, you always think it's a numbers game. Or anything, really. If you're trying to grow a startup, it's a numbers game. The more opportunities you have, the more possibilities you get for a yes. Obviously, you get some no's too, but I feel like this i... |
**Nathan Sobo:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You can test and experiment at such a rate, and fail sooner, too. Like, don't waste so much time. Or find the thing that's actually got a thread to pull and you pull on that thread, and you do what you've got to do to take that next step. I feel like that's what's happening, it's like the ultimate n... |
**Nathan Sobo:** But overall -- I don't know, my challenge to myself, and everybody on my team, and everybody, is like the bar should be higher now. If we have this new technology that can automate tedious BS, then we should have fewer excuses. In a world where I can generate tests, like - okay, not writing tests, not ... |
**Jerod Santo:** For sure. Yeah, the trade-off has always been the value. Let's just take testing as one example of rigor. Like, the value of those tests divided by the cost of those tests. That's where you decide "Should I do this or not?" And it's been a hard sell even beyond the engineers, but like to the product ow... |
**Nathan Sobo:** Sustainable progress. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Not just like doggy paddling; we're not going anywhere. But as the cost approaches zero, which is what's going to happen if we continue to make progress like this. The cost is going down towards zero; it's not there yet. But if it gets down near zero, then the value to cost calculation is like --... |
**Nathan Sobo:** Right. And in a world where you're spending, I don't know, 50 cents worth of compute, choking on some error in your algorithmic code, the cost is going up of getting it wrong as well, you know? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, not that I'm saying this, by any means, \[unintelligible 00:31:08.21\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Who's saying it? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...but Cursor was founded in 2022, and then I think they got some seed funding and like officially came out early '23. And they came out focused on AI. They sped through the process. Whereas you were aware of and knew where some things were going, but you focused on the core editor. Do you feel like... |
**Nathan Sobo:** Yeah, I don't feel late, because I think we're all early. Yeah, I mean, I definitely didn't set out to build an AI code editor when I started Zed, because... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:14\] That wasn't the point. |
**Nathan Sobo:** Yeah, exactly. I set out to build the future of software development. People laugh at me less when I say that or whatever now, because we've proven out more of our ability to just get close... But it's always been this vision of a fundamentally better experience for the developer. Yeah, and then AI eme... |
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