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**Adam Stacoviak:** I've seen you since then, and the Beyang who you are is still the same person, but what you've been able to accomplish on this thread pull of like "Just help developers be more intelligent with their codebases, have more clarity and understanding, be more efficient with your processes, understand yo... |
**Beyang Liu:** No, totally. We've been building DevTools for the vast majority of our professional careers. Both Quinn and I are just insanely passionate about this area. If you would just let us code all day in a cave, that would be a great life, in my view. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That'd be a great life... \[laughs\] |
**Beyang Liu:** And I think building DevTools for as long as we've been building them, we've learned a lot, both about how individual developers work, the diversity of preferences and skills and tools out there, but also at the team level, how organizations build software, and all the challenges and bottlenecks that ar... |
\[01:40:16.15\] But the theory behind computer science, and now machine learning and AI - I don't know. There's almost like a spiritual element to it, where you can see glimpses of maybe some of the fundamental laws around knowledge, and information that govern the universe... And so for that reason, it's an insanely r... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Man... You know, I really struggle with that idea of going into a cave and coding all day. And actually, I have a playlist on YouTube called Working Beats. It's a glimpse into the Adam world. And as I hear cool beats on YouTube, I store them away. If I'm gonna work to them, I store them in my ... |
**Beyang Liu:** Nice. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I go back to it. And there's lots of cool beats on YouTube, from all sorts of places. So I don't subscribe to one channel, I just make a playlist. And I let the algorithm help me in discovery. Right? That's how you're supposed to do it. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And so I put this one in there in the background -- on a YouTube video there's always... What? There's a video, right? And so on this one it's not just the music, but it's this background, and it's this developer with these three large monitors... Which is just amazing. Code on all of them. I'm like... |
**Beyang Liu:** Like a DHH view? Have you ever seen him posting? Yeah... \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, exactly. And the view is this massive, beautiful mountainscape. And I'm like "That is so weird." I love it visually... But then you think about it, right? That developer is staring into the black window, into the black mirror, as they call it, right? Hammering away code. Now, I'm with you. I'm ... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But then I'm like "This is juxtaposed to this beautiful view." And software is not making the mountain, right? Software may make the company possible that makes the boots that allow a person to put them on, and climb the mountain, but it's not making the mountain. So it's like this really weird, you... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know. |
**Beyang Liu:** But you know, the way that you -- I don't know, what I would say to that is the way you experience the mountain... You know, the photons bouncing off from the star, to the mountain, into your eyeballs... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Preach... |
**Beyang Liu:** ...and then how they get translated into these signals that get assembled into what we call consciousness... There's certain fundamental, I don't know, forces of nature at work there. One of the cool things about the latest advances in AI is now you can actually see some of these come into something tha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:44:21.12\] Yeah. I mean, I would be that -- if I could have that view, I would have that view. So I'm not knocking it, by any means. I was just thinking -- as you'd said, I would be happy to code in a cave all day, or be in a cave, coding all day. I can agree with that, and I can empathize with... |
**Beyang Liu:** Oh, of course. Of course. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I'm not saying that you don't think that by any means, because we both have children, and I'm sure we both feel the same way about our families, and our wives, and our children, and our lives, and stuff like that. |
**Beyang Liu:** A hundred percent. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think we're in a unique position in time and history, which - isn't that always the case for every human being, to be in a unique position in time and history? It's always the case, right? There's never a time when it's not unique. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, it's funny how history works... Every year is unprecedented, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. And I think in particular to us, we've been on the struggle bus, I would call it, as developers, key by key, stroke by stroke, character by character, putting into the machine, to get the dev tool out or to get the thing out. And now we've gotten to a point where we can say "OK, now my... |
So I'm with you. I struggle with the desire, because I want to go deeper, and it is tantalizing, because I can produce way more than I've ever been able to before, or even explore caverns I've never explored before. I'm going into new regions I've personally never explored before. You may have, somebody else may have, ... |
Here's what I want to end on, because I know we're getting close to time... I want to call them skeptics. I kind of want to call them resisters. They're not AI skeptics - and maybe you can disagree or agree with this - but I want you to give... Because I think you've got a unique perspective, a unique frame of referenc... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, that's a great prompt. I'm thinking about like -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It wasn't a question, it was open-ended. Just -- I gave you some points. |
**Beyang Liu:** Two things. One, I'll speak philosophically, and then I'll speak on just like a practical level. So philosophically, I think a lot of the skeptics come from a place that a lot of developers come from, which is a point of skepticism, and especially in an area that's as hyped up as AI is, there's sort of ... |
\[01:48:02.18\] The people saying that it's going to solve all our problems, humans are going to be out of the job, or we won't have to work, or it could go off the rails and kill us all... Statements like that to me are not even wrong. They're so far outside the band of what we should even be talking about with respec... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. "I don't know how to do that. I can't do that." Yes, you can. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. So I would say philosophically, what the technology is - it's not consciousness, it's not a human replacement, it's not a God... What it is is it's a universal pattern matcher. If you go and watch Demis's Nobel lecture - he's the head of DeepMind; he received a Nobel Prize for the work that they d... |
And so that is not nirvana, but it is a useful tool. And so if I hand you a universal pattern matcher, and I say "I've trained it on all these different workflows..." You know, like the coding workflow - there's patterns that emerge from that. A lot of the tedious stuff is very patternful in what you do; there's almost... |
That's the mindset with which you should approach these technologies, and that puts you in a mindset of not being -- you don't want to go into trying these tools as a mindset of like automatic skepticism. I feel like a lot of the more prominent voices out there, it's almost like they're going into trying these tools wi... |
That's the wrong mindset. I think you should go in with a mindset of like "Hey, this is an amazing new technology, it's a universal pattern matcher. How can I explore what's possible with this? Let me put myself in like explore, try new things mode." |
And that segues into my practical advice, which is if you want to experience the wow in a way that's tangible and delightful and also practical, I think the first thing I would do is pick an app or pick a domain that's somewhat outside of your wheelhouse as a developer. Maybe you're a hardcore systems engineer, but you... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:52:14.07\] I like that. I think that's spot on with my own recent experiences, that I've gone just a little outside of my wheelhouse, I've built a couple CLI tools, I've learned about CLI patterns that are obvious, like --help, --version; those are pretty common ones, but all these different wa... |
And my hope is that eventually 7zarch is shareable to the world. I want it to be open source. It is not an Adam tool, it's a world tool. And hopefully, if anybody likes the way I'm compressing and the way that we have to compress large media directories... How many YouTubers are out there, right? You will eventually us... |
For a while there, maybe about a month ago, I was actually really, really sad, because we've obviously built this podcast around software development, but specifically this burgeoning, and now the way, called open source. And back in 2009, when we first started this podcast, open source was moving so fast, GitHub was o... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yup, yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But then you also have all these new builders that can start to scratch their own itch and want to share the thing they made. I'm so hopeful for open source now, where I thought before maybe, since you can generate so easily, it would become less valuable. |
**Beyang Liu:** \[01:55:44.02\] Yeah. I think it's so hard to predict what the net effects of this will be... Because there's a certain aspect of it which makes libraries less necessary. When common pieces of functionality are auto-generatable... There's a lot of cases where -- even within Amp, there's one or two packa... |
But at the same time, I do think that there remains a use case for having libraries. I just think that the nature of which libraries are really popular is probably going to change. Prior to agents and AI, a lot of the most popular libraries in existence were some form of middleware, or a piece of abstraction that helpe... |
I think now there's less demand for that form of package, but still a large amount of demand for libraries that are robust, they're well-tested, that provide -- you still need some amount of abstraction, but maybe fewer layers of abstraction over an underlying capability. I don't know if that makes sense. My (I'll say)... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Cyberspace... That's cool, man. I haven't heard that word in a while, man. That's cool. Cyberspace... Alright. Well, ampcode.com, I am a fan... And to be clear, I use all agents. I am not Amp -- I'm agent agnostic. I want to use everything -- and I know that's the cool thing with Amp, is I don't hav... |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah, send me some threads. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...more so than just the podcast. Yeah, because I'm probably inefficient, and overspending as a result. So now I know, now I know. |
**Beyang Liu:** Yeah. To those listening, my recommendation is you should absolutely sample the field of coding agents. There's so many, and I think you should find the one that fits the best with you. I think like we mentioned earlier in this conversation, the switching cost is so low, but the only way you're going to... |
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