Teradata’s AI Shift, PromptFu Rumors and the Rise of Verification Debt

Control, this is Agent Dev. I'm in position. Copy that, Dev.

Standby for go. Standing by. Hey, everybody.

Welcome. Welcome to another episode of Agents of Dev. I'm just...

I'm Mitch Ashley. Good to be here with my co-host, Brad Shimmin. Welcome, Brad.

Good morning, good afternoon. Hey there, Mitch. How you doing?

I'm doing well. You're on the East Coast, so you know, by, by far as I know, it could be afternoon there. I know it's not afternoon, but it feels like it.

The day's been long already. Too much cloud code. So I, I blame, I blame the time zone change, spring forward.

It's messing me up. That definitely messes us up, especially our dogs. They're, they're always like- Mm ...

"What, so when is t-time to eat? Just, like, tell us. " They did not agree to this.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Their, their representatives in Congress did not vote for this- ... but okay. Whatever.

Yeah. So, let-let's jump right in. Um, we have some good call-out stuff, so jump in.

I think you have some information about talking about what, Teradata? Yeah, right. Uh, one of my favorite companies, 'cause I, I, you know, think this is...

Anyone who's been in the, you know, data professional space for long knows who Teradata is and, and they, you know, I think, have done a great job of transforming themselves into a modern open data platform provider and they- Mm-hmm ... have, like everybody, have realized the, importance of bringing data to AI, and particularly in support of agentic, you know, workflows and building anything agentic in nature. And, like everybody, they've said they've, they've cottoned on, to the idea of vectors, vec-vector stores, and embeddings, and the importance of, of that for semantic search.

Um, but unlike everybody, they also recognize that, it's not the only type of data, it's a representation of data, and that data might be structured in a relational database, it might be unstructured, video, audio, et cetera. It might be semi-structured- Uh-huh ... in JSON.

And, so they, they've updated. They've been working on this for a year, but they've, they've brought a pretty big upgrade this week, or this past week. Probably just this past week.

Week or so. Week or so. We'll go with that.

Yes. It's hard to know because we record- We don't even know if it's morning or afternoon more this last week, but- It is all the same, actually. Yeah.

So yeah, they have this really neat idea, that I've seen from other companies like Oracle, and they've done a good job with this and, and that is a hybrid search capability that, basically lets you do, like, traditional keyword matching and semantic search con... in a conjoined manner. Instead of having to- Mm ...

you know, go get something and then pipe it on. You're, you're basically treating it as a single retrieval so that you can bring to your agents, a context that is much more accurate. And what do we get from that?

Less hallucination. So- Yeah ... that is my, my call-out, my tip of the hat, goes out to those guys.

Let me ask you, so 'cause you, you look at all the databases and, and I, I don't spend time in just kind of the database world. Uh, have they all sort of adopted the unstructured data or w-we'll look at anything. mp files.

We'll look at your JSON. We'll look at your structured into tables and columns and rows and et cetera. What, what's the state of the industry?

Ugh. Yeah. So the NoSQL versus SQL still kind of persists, but it's not with the same fervor that we saw earlier and all the, you know, full stack, AppDev, you know, folks kind of said, "Hey, we want it, we want this," and MongoDB shot up.

Right. Uh, it's, it's, it's, I think, more of, a case of, you know, optimizing for the use case, and you may find yourself in need of a, a graph database, for instance, that can scale to a certain degree, and you may not get that degree of concurrency and, and lack of, and latency, you know, guarantees if you're running it as an add-on or a plugin within, Postgres, for instance. Interesting.

Um, so maybe you'd want a pure play. So it, it, it, it's this specialization versus, I, I would say, not commoditization 'cause it's not that. It's, it's...

Or even consolidation. It's, it's more what Oracle calls converged database and most humans call multimodal databases- Mm. Okay ...

wherein they can, they can handle all the different indexing simultaneously together. It's kind of the idea that we're seeing play out right now with the, the whole open, data lakehouse. You know, once, once you slapped on ACID, you know, com- you know, guarantees for transactions- Mm ...

can it really not to do anything? It can do everything. So- Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm ... just let's, let's just, you know, throw all our data into these open data lakehouses- Yeah ... and then work with it.

But not for every use case. That may be what's driving my perception- Not for every- ... yeah, is that whole, like, it's all accessible and 'cause it's in a data lake, but it's got the ACID constraints on it.

Yep. Interesting. Yeah, it's a, it's a new era.

I'm, I think it's a nice time to, to be building right now simply because we don't have the same sort of, in, you know, technical debt, or inertia- Mm-hmm ... that's associated with, you know, making a heavy investment in a single database management system with an emphasis on the management system. Excellent.

Well, my, my call-out is, OpenAI, open... I can't talk. First of all- Awesome ...

whoever named that company gets the T-shirt of the week for sure. Prompt Foo. You know, I'm thinking, "Okay, now we can have- Your Prompt Foo beats my Prompt Foo.

Well, then we're gonna have Prompt Foo Fighters, of course, aren't we? Exactly. So anyway, you know, what, what, what jumps up to me about this one is that Prompt Foo is basically a security agent or technology, if you will, about making sure that the interfaces to the LLM, what agents are doing as they're going through the development pipeline, going into CI/CD processes- Mm ...

trying to constrain, I would, in my terms, constrain from a security standpoint, what the agents, what the calls, whether they're APIs or, you know, direct prompts going through code, however that's working, could be through web scraping, whatever method, how that's, how, how, if it's being done securely. Um, now what those- Mm ... constraints are and how you control those, I don't know yet 'cause I haven't had a chance to really kind of dig into it and understand how Prompt Foo works.

But it... " You know? " This is bar.

This is bar, not Foo. Yeah. Yep.

But it al- it also looks at, at rag flows and behaviors of agents, things like that. So it's, it sounds like a really interesting company. Definitely gonna dig into it more.

And, what's notable is, you know, p- the companies that the big players acquire says a lot of about where they're heading and where there are gaps- Yeah ... or where they're looking to accelerate, right? We could build that ourselves and, you know, you know, why couldn't, Claude or, or, it, Codex write this up tomorrow?

Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Well, I guess, I guess we're gonna get into that. But that, that's sort of the leapfrog.

So it's not just the, the Ciscos and the Microsofts and, and Googles of the world that- Yeah ... do acquisitions as part of their innovation strategy. You know, even the- Yeah, there's a lot to acquire ...

quasi tech startups. Yeah. Right.

Some of them with excellent guerrilla marketing that might earn them, let's say, $5 billion, in an acquisition higher, as we've spoken about with a certain clawy, crustacean. Um- ... it's, it's a, it's a weird world right now, is, is it not?

" Or, "Tired... " Mm-hmm. Well, we're in it.

You know, it's like me with- We're in a world where we can do that. I mean- Yep ... in theory.

Not everything is accessible through generated code. Well, yeah, you can do it. You can, you can one-shot pretty much anything agentically these days.

Clearly, we've seen that from Anthropic with their, compiler. So, but the, the point is it's, that's very different than maintaining that software over time. And I think that's, that's where the rubber really hits the road.

Well, that's the perfect lead in. I didn't bring up Foo Fighters, prompt fighters, Foo prompt code fighters, whatever they are, acquisition by OpenAI, for that purpose. But it, it, it's funny, you and I have kind of come to the same place independently about, what, what about the whole, all of the debt that we're creating and are we kind of- Oh ...

are we sort of creating a false sense of security through AI-generated code? 'Cause we don't really know the quality of that code. Just because- Yeah ...

it got generated doesn't mean it's a- adequately tested, it's adequately secured to the point of acquiring companies like that. And, I did this, analysis on kind of where we are with doing AI development- Mm ... of AI.

More AI-assisted than agent, agent-centric yet, 'cause that's where most people are. They're still in that earlier one-third of the adoption phase. And especially for more junior developers, it's really easy to say, "Hey, press the button.

It's generated the code. Good. Check it in.

It runs. It seems like it works. " There's a kind of a gap, I guess you can say, in AI-generated code verification debt, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That isn't being picked up and recognized by everyone.

Now, more, more senior developers are gonna know, yeah, but okay, let me go make sure this is, this is g- not only gonna function correctly, but it's code I want. Well, I, I wanna ask, do you think that even the most seasoned developer isn't going to fall prey to this verification debt w- that we're, we're starting to talk about here? Because if AI makes you 50% more productive, for example, the org- the organization that you work for isn't just gonna get 50% more goodness.

It's- Mm-hmm ... it's gonna get more pull requests. It's gonna get more documentation, more POCs, and more gambling against the future, you know?

Mm-hmm. In that the gamble is this isn't gonna go wrong. And all of that is, is like, there's not a one-to-one correlation between, you know, saving time, and increasing output or value, and I think people really kind of lose sight of that.

And so I, I love what, we're hearing from some, some folks who I, I like to read, like Lars Jansen and, and Kevin Brown- Mm-hmm ... who are the two, two guys recently that have been writing about this, lately, and I was just citing, an idea from there with a 50% increase, and I think they're absolutely right. It is gambling against the future, and it's the same gamble we take with any technical debt, except I think with, agentic code, you have a much greater risk of, of the Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns than you do with traditional technical debt, which is gonna beYou know, just increased inertia, or complexity leading to more friction, less speed, you know, more headaches.

But you see the headaches. Mm-hmm. Well- With this you don't.

And to, to that point is sort of the gap that you miss, whether you're more early in your career developer or let's say an experienced developer under pressure, time pressure. Right. Okay.

Well, I'll, I'll take that. Right. I'll worry about it later.

Right. Right. Is i-i-it isn't just that it's implemented and functional, it's like how is it implemented?

Because when I wanna go change something to that, and that's what I've noticed really- Mm ... in the development process is, well, wait a minute, because that's not quite what I was looking for or how I wanted it to come out- Yeah ... in terms of an output structure or whatever it might have been.

And you realize, well, okay, to make that change, it's actually a pretty substantial change to code. And, you know, you can design code to be resilient and not require as much change, you know, whether it's through submodules and structuring and kinda organizing how you architect the code. Or- Mm-hmm ...

you can just kinda let AI do it. And I think we're, we're still in this ear-earlier phase of, yeah, but what's it generating and is that good? Because if tomorrow Brad comes up and says, "Hey, we've gotta change the signal process this way for our reports," and it's a re-architecting and you're like, "Well, if I would've known that, I wouldn't have done it that way originally, and maybe I don't want to do this now," right?

That kind of a question. So there can be some pretty big consequences by not knowing what the technical debt is, I guess is my point. That's right.

Yeah. I mean, when you, when you build a product and you have a traditional product, and, you know, you have a very clearly, you know, defined, you know, set of outcomes that you're, you're trying to get to, and you therefore architect it to do that within whatever constraints you've already set for that software. Mm-hmm.

It has to be available at such time, it has to be secure for this, blah, blah, blah. And you ha- you know all those things, and so you build that into your spec that you use to build that software. And I, I've noticed with agentic, development in particular, that th- ideas like spec-driven development are, are game changing, absolutely game changing.

However, they don't work the same way that they do with traditional software development in that I, I feel like they're much more compartmentalized and therefore constrained, almost like, you know, a cart horse with, with blinders on that doesn't see the, the, you know, people yelling at the side of the horse- Mm-hmm ... because we're afraid the horse will bolt. Mm-hmm.

Don't startle the developers is what you're saying. Right. You don't wanna startle the agent is what I'm saying.

The agent. Okay. So don't let them see all the things that might, might influence them or might scare the c**p out of them.

And, and I feel like that's what the current ideas around spectrum and development really are doing, are putting blinders on, on the horse because we're afraid of it bolting. So here, here's the dilemma with that is my belief proven, proven multiple times. You know, sometimes when you have a theorem, you look for proofs even if it's not always true.

But- ... throughout my career, I, I've learned that, you know, 51% of planning only occurs in what you write down in a spec or a plan or a doc or whatever. Yeah.

The other 49% comes from implementation. You learn... That, that spec is woefully inadequate when you've completed it, right?

And you're ready to- Yeah ... okay, let's go into implementation, whatever, however you approach you're taking, whether it's with AI, AI or not. And that's one of the benefits of using AI, is you can get to an implication, implementation place, let's say not production ready, but you can get there very quickly.

You can run parts of it very quickly. You can, you know, we used to block a spec out. Here's a, you know, a module we're gonna just do a dead call to or whatever, um- Mm-hmm ...

so we can start to work with it. We, we can do that very easily with, you know, with AI. We can say that's a later feature, right?

Dot, dot, dot. We'll worry about that next. Um, so it, it accelerates that learning curve or understanding curve of, let's say, intent curve of what you're really looking for because you're learning through implementation.

Um, and that's what, what I don't like about the I'm in planning mode or spec mode or definition mode, like pick, pick your favorite. Claude kind of gets into this question and answer. Do you want to do A, B, C, or D?

Mm. I feel like I'm in, you know- Therapy? Yes.

Yeah. Should, should I lie down for this question? Um, I'm like, okay, I, I get it.

I, I s- see where we're going. It's definitely helpful. But that's planning and implementation aren't, aren't, you know, co-linear.

They don't sit there and like- No ... I finish one and I start the other and- ... forever that shall be the process.

You know, you see where I'm going. On to the next. All, all, all of my specs that I've completed with Conductor in, in the Gemini, you know, experience, let's call it, have been archived.

And do you think I think about them? No. Do you think the, the agent thinks about them?

No. They're just archived. Somebody's like, "Hey, don't we have an...

Don't, isn't there an artifact for that? " Right. Right.

Didn't we do this t-three months ago? Oh. Yeah.

It's interesting. I, I'm... So, so here's the other side of the coin is, all right, if it's s-easy enough to generate new code, it's easy enough to make changes, so what if it's wrong?

So what if it's re-architected badly? Not, not, not for performance- Yeah ... or for scalability, but just in terms of maintainability of code.

If, if creating code, the cost, the time, the effort, the complexity of doing that continues to drop, drop, drop, drop, becomes less- Yeah ... consequential Okay. So what?

Maybe I do rearchitect half the application in making some changes, and as long as I've got a way to test it and verify it and make sure it works- Well, yeah. Are you- ... it's secured and all those things, do I really care?

But, but the, the, just that's just it though, right? If, if, if your agent has agentic process can do that, do you really think that all the unit tests that it's going to come up with are representative of- Mm ... the system as a whole, or are they specific to the task at hand?

It's a blinders, right? I hope it's the latter. Exactly.

Exactly. Well, and that's, that's, that is... that's a really good point, which is it's not only edge case, it's the making up our, our own unknown unknowns.

What about... What are the things that could possibly happen, right? That we said, you know- Yeah ...

I like to tell, tell myself and tell teams of what are the assumptions we're making? And let's, let's go break those assumptions. Let's say you can't do this backwards.

Well, what if you could do it backwards? Let's try it and see what happens and see what breaks, and, and not just for fun and games. It's those are the things...

That's how you start to uncover some of those- Oh, I love that ... weird conditions, you know? And that's where innovation occurs- But AI doesn't think that way ...

I feel- Yeah ... like you're saying, and I think you're right. Yeah.

Yeah. It... Through, through, consequential change and impact becomes opportunity from an entrepreneurial perspective.

Mm-hmm. I just read this on an article. I know Alan Post wrote about the, the tech media industry, the whole disruption with how Google's, not to get too far afield here, Google's changed the whole SEO calculations and algorithms and how traffic's being distributed.

I'm like, yeah, they're... so they're rewriting the, the rule book. Screw that.

Tech media rewrite the rule book. Let's go rewrite it ourselves. You know?

Don't, don't wait for Google to figure it out and tell us what we have to do. Now, we're still gonna have to do part of that anyway. But don't just be a f- a follower to- Yeah ...

to, you know, waiting for the crumbs to drop off the table, right? Yeah. Under the table, over the table.

Always be over the table. Exactly. And before we move on to, from this topic, I wanna- Mm-hmm ...

I wanna bring up something that, is, has been personally bothering me lately. Mm. Okay.

This is, this is time for Brad's diatribe. No, it's not that bad, as last time. Should I lay down again?

Is this consult- No, no ... tip time? This is, this is vertical.

Yeah. Couch? Okay.

This is not that bad. Okay. Um, but I, you know, in, in thinking about the verification debts, that, that load of verifying is, so hard, and it's getting, it's getting more and more onerous.

I feel like every time I build something that I'm... I, I, I don't know how old our listeners and viewers are , but hopefully they're old enough to, to know what microfiche is. Um- Oh.

Yeah. And- It's not, it's not a species that swims in the ocean. It's not that kind of fiche.

No, it is not. No. There's a very strange spelling.

Uh- ... and it's on, you know, emulsion and it's, it's basically something you need specialized hardware to use. But the way you use it, and what you're using basically, is an archive of a lot of information- Mm-hmm ...

housed in a very small footprint. And to interact with it, you would typically in the past, and I think they still exist in some places, like libraries, if those of us who know what that is, and in newspaper offices back in the day. Mm-hmm.

You would go into a room, and it would have all these huge, huge monitors, and you would s- basically scroll through, you know, at high speed. It looked like warp speed. Literally scroll- Like all the stars ...

before they had electronic, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And it, it was just... Overwhelming is the word I, I would use to describe interacting with that, and I feel like when I'm validating- Mm ... the code or even the documentation of what's written, I, I, you know, am in, again, back as a child, you know, going through one of those microfiches trying to scroll to find the newspaper article that I'm looking for and know that I haven't missed something important.

I don't know that I haven't missed something important. Mm-hmm. All I know is that I don't have the cognitive ability to, to actually keep up with the amount of information that's scrolling past as I try to get to what I think is the outcome.

So I feel like I'm, I'm, like, mentally just crushing my, my ability to function as a human being in trying to keep up with this. Well, it, it's... I think you're hitting on a really important point where as, as anything accelerates, and I think we're already here in many, in many other areas, but as we, as we...

the velocity increases of code, of security vulnerabilities, of incidents that happen, of operations problems we have to s- to address or, or just debugging, you know, software and creating code. Mm. As the velocity of that increases, there, there'd be a point there won't be enough humans on the planet to, to observe and look at all that stuff.

Maybe we're already there. No. Like, it, it is impossible...

You know, you, you're, you and I are banging our heads up against an impossible problem we actually can't solve. We can't look at all of it. We can't understand all of it.

Even with the best microfiche technology scrolling as fast as it could, I remember when, dial-up modems went from 2400 to 9600. I can no longer read it. It scrolls by too fast.

We're kind of in that era of, you know- Yep ... talking about going back a ways. So something has to change.

You have to do it differently, and that's, I think- Well- ... what you're pointing to is that set innovation opportunity of like, okay, where's the verification debt bots, agents, psyches? Well, let's ask that question.

Okay. Let's, let's ask that question. What is that?

Because what I see in the industry right now is a technique that we, we've known for a long time and we use to a great degree, and we, we call guardrails, which is- Mm-hmm ... prototypically, you know, having an adjudicator model, let's say for instance, evaluating or, you know, having a-Uh, what would you call them? Uh, battle robots, uh- Mm-hmm ...

rock 'em, sock 'em robots. Battlebots. Mm-hmm.

Yes. To, to sort of battle over quality and completeness and a-accuracy. And so what I call all of this isn't guardrails, but epicycles.

Hmm. You know, the way that we very long ago tried to describe the retrograde motion of planets by just drawing another circle on another circle on another circle to try to explain what the heck was going on. And so I, I honestly think that as long as we have enough compute and the models continue to improve, that, yeah, I think that you could close in on Zeno's paradox, increasingly getting closer and closer by simply adding more of these epicycles to a given process.

And that coupled maybe with advancements in, in, like I was just talking about with Teradata, for one, you know, inve-advancements like that that improve the context that agents are, are looking at. Mm-hmm. We can get toward a point where maybe you and I don't have to scroll the microfiche.

Mm-hmm. " You know, let's step away from the, the microfiche viewer. At some point, yeah.

Let's, let's change lenses and then look, look through the telescope now or whatever. So- Mm-hmm ... so I think, I think I have a similar perspective maybe described a different way, which is we, we tend to think about linear things.

I'm gonna go get a, an agent that does code security. I'm gonna go get an agent that does guardrails for this. I'm gonna go get an agent that does...

So I, I think w-the future we're headed to is kind of a crowdsourced agent model, which is, it's just like y-if you and I were on a development team of, you know, let's say a dozen people or, or larger, it could be five hundred people for that matter. But we all- Yeah ... come to this from a different perspective.

You know, I'm looking at all this from how we're gonna scale and maintain this. You're looking at this from- Hmm ... data quality and how do we do data protection or whatever perspective you're bringing.

But you're also bringing a lot more than that. You're bringing a whole bunch of experiences that helped you develop that perspective. So in a crowdsourced model, it, it's almost like a- Hmm ...

I don't know the right, right mathematical term, whether it's a Monte Carlo exercise or what, whatever it is, but- Well, that is a really great- ... through that crowdsourcing, you, you get to the answer. Great algorithm.

You know, you get to the answer. Yep. Yep.

Which is, okay, yes, we've... All these factors have been considered, and the gotchas and downsides of scalability have been addressed, and none of them are a hundred percent, none of them are at twenty percent unless they aren't important. There's some...

Okay, great. We've reached an equilibrium, not a three-body problem equilibrium, which is a whole different other issue. Yeah, very different.

We have- We have, we have to, like, treat the world like it's, it's a two-body max problem. There you go. Yeah.

Or we can't solve it. If we get three-bodied code, we're in trouble, and nobody will ever know where anyone's gonna go next. Um- Mm-hmm ...

but it, it's that sort of a, of, of a shared mindset across human computer, AI, agentic- Hmm ... work that comes to the right conclusion. And so that way you have the diversity of thought or diversity of background skills, models, whatever it is that's bringing that, and that's what we- Yeah ...

do as humans on teams. Now, we're, we're less... We can't handle the volume that we could in an AI world as humans, but we could with AI.

So long story short, short, I think that's sort of a manifestation of what you're talking about, how that looks with the- Yeah, and with the... I, I, you know, I, I don't even know if we need AI to do this. I think maybe we need- Hmm ...

to stop chasing determinism and start treating our agentic systems like the weather and just use ideas like, you know, Markov chains, or hidden- Hmm ... Markov models to, to- Mm-hmm ... " Mm-hmm.

" Mm-hmm. I mean, maybe at... You know, I'm not talking about at a macro scale, maybe at a micro scale as to, you know, if we step away from the microfiche viewer and we have these very complex autonomous systems building, documenting, and running themselves, that maybe that's the best, most efficient way to accommodate change and to anticipate change, most importantly.

So maybe we're talking about, you know, v-uh, just a very different idea of what software actually is going forward. I don't know. Yeah.

It's not- Interesting ... what we're doing now, though, I'll tell you that. By the way, Courier producer, excellent producer, PodGet pro-producer just messaged that our audience, sixty-three percent of our YouTube audience is between twenty five and forty four, which sounds about right, right?

They're not only gonna all gonna be in their- They're twenty six-ish, he says. Yes. Yes.

So that, that's, that's super helpful to know because, you know, if you're speaking to someone who is four or five years into their career versus fifteen or twenty- Hmm ... years into their career versus thirty plus into, into their career, you know, they're, they're coming at it from different perspectives, skill levels, experience levels, all that kind of thing. So that's part of that collective, right?

And that's the other thing about- Agreed ... development is earlier in your career, you don't have all the faculties of that judge role that you perform. You've seen some of my posts about this, and that's where, mentors or other folks can help speed the development of that by working with other people, to develop that skill, and I think you can in accelerated fashion.

So... I applaud IBM, for instance, in bucking the current trends toward, you know, cutting off the, the people coming into the, the industry and instead are, are actually prioritizing bringing new people in because I think they recognizeWhat you're saying- Mm-hmm ... as being, you know, critical to being able to have continuity as a business moving forward.

You cannot break the val- the supply chain of knowledge and insight and expertise. So love it. It, it- We need to do more of that.

It's the, you know, what, what got you here isn't gonna get you there problem, right? So you can't hire s- people to be trained the same way you or I... I mean, you, y-y-you-- the people coming into the industry five years ago weren't trained the same way you and I were when we started- No, right ...

on relative points in our career, right? Things are different. We, we didn't have LeetCode.

No, we didn't have open source or I, you know, what's a repository? You know, there's a lot of things that didn't exist when I started. Um, but the point being is, if you're hiring and if you're seeking a job for how we developed code five years ago, that's still happening in organizations, but I think the reason why people aren't hiring entry-level is 'cause they don't know what the next kind of person they're going to need and develop and grow as they use more AI.

That's right. So look at the skills, and that's what I'm trying to point out in this analysis, of using, you know, like who, who's the implementer? Who's the judge?

Who are the functions that, you know- Mm-hmm ... are this kind of function versus task functions? And someday the, those could shift around more, right?

Could also move into AI. But I think that's that forward-thinking you're talking about with IBM, which is they've gotta be l- I haven't asked them about this, but they've gotta be looking at this like, "Hey, wait a minute. If we cut off the supply chain now, at someday we won't have any more people like we need, and we'll be in the same problem- Five years ...

with COBOL that we had- ... you know, 10 years ago of they're all retired or died or whatever. We can't find any more.

We gotta retrain the next generation. So kudos for thinking systemically, not short term. Yeah, agreed.

Okay, it's time for the drop. All right. Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw one out here to start with.

one01, or whatever number it was addition, of, of the of the code. I'm like, I'm not sure about that numbering scheme, but whatever. It doesn't matter.

The, the... with the thing of there's a bunch of features in it, a few others, things like hooks. And, and none of these are necessarily new things, right?

There's hooks. There's, some behavior controls. But seriously, hook- hooks has just been added.

Yeah. Just, just been added, right? Okay.

So nothing new. Okay. Just, just checking.

And, and as I looked at it, and I was talking to a reporter about it, I'm like, yeah, these are... y-you could look at this as run-of-the-mill kind of features. Maybe some are catch up, maybe some are a little bit new, maybe a lot new.

But when you look at how they're implementing it, they're taking some of the control plane, like I need to manage what AI is doing. I need to constrol- control. I need to make AI accountable for what it's doing.

The starts- Yeah ... of that, you know, I've, I've thought of it mostly about how you do th-do that in the broader environment of in development- Mm ... and test and CI/CD and into production, and they're pulling some of that into the IDE itself.

So, you know, I immediately thought of, you know, "2001" and the Starchild and the evolution of humans, and now we're- Yeah. Yeah ... into the third generation of, of AI- IDEs.

Maybe I'm thinking a little too far ahead, but it could signal s- of a change of this move from code-centric to directing, judging, and controlling and, and what happens with AI more than just a set of tools. I've got five more slash commands in my IDE. Okay, great.

So what? Now you got five more things to do. I mean- Right.

Right ... not so what. They're all good.

But it isn't just adding more features, more ornaments on the Christmas tree. It's about changing how we manage the whole process. And I thought that's what's distinctive about this VS Code release.

So it's gonna go by the wayside. Most people say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, they're catching up here. " I think there's more to it than that.

Yeah, I love that. It... By the way, is it still written in Electron?

I don't know. Is it still an Electron app, I mean? It's probably been rewritten 10 times by now by Boris and everybody else.

But re-rewritten. I don't know. Call, call me when it's, when it's native Go or Rust.

I, I, I don't know. So- I doubt it's been rewritten. I don't think so either.

That's, that is like the definition of inertia. Uh- There you go ... absolutely.

I mean, it is a behemoth. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So my... That...

And actually, that figures into my drop as well. Um, I, my preferred editor IDE, as you know, is, is Zed, which is written in Rust. Um, but, uh- You have, you have, you have principle scruples.

It's in Rust. I do. I, I stand- Okay ...

behind them firmly. Okay. Um, but, but, I, I look at it as more of a text editor than, you know, a, a, an agentic IDE, the same way that I don't use Warp, the, you know, terminal emulator as an agentic terminal.

I, I want my terminal to be a terminal. I want- Mm-hmm ... VI, you know, motions to be what I use, and I want just my Zed editor to be all those things, not a lot more.

Mm-hmm. And, you know, shiny toys, you and I are victims of shiny toys all the time, but I re- I stumbled across one that I really like as, as, like, an actual agentic harness, one that would... I would consider my, you know, IDE, in that as you're, as you're talking about, is what I use to state my intent- Mm-hmm shepherd, that intent to, to an outcome.

And that is, Pie. Just, it's ca- the... from the Pie Nano guys.

Uh, and it caught my attention, and this, by the way, it's, it's, it's written in TypeScript, so, don't think I'm against TypeScript with my hatred of Electron. Um, but- Do you, you'll overlook it for, for the time being? I will, absolutely, yeah.

Just semicolons aside, okay. I, I, I can't get over that one. But, at any rate, their tagline, it, it really caught my attention.

" I just adore that. I know, right? 'Cause they...

It's like, it's like the anti, you know, the anti-VS Code. 'Cause, 'cause like, it, it's basically completely extensible. You, you can write extensions, you can write skills, you can write prompts, you know, template, templating prompts, and themes, and all that stuff.

It... But it's not... All of that isn't baked in.

Mm-hmm. Um, and for ins- instance, they don't even include an MCP server, and they do that on purpose. Uh, I, I would imagine probably because there are better ways to do this.

Um, and, I, I love just the simplicity of it and the extensibility of it, and the fact that y- I can basically use it to write itself, to, to build itself- Interesting ... from within it. And that's something...

Uh, you know, I've, I've... This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, earlier, with spectrum and development, and I'm sure everyone here has heard of this GitHub repo called Superpowers. Mm-hmm.

Right? Which, which I think is over, like- If you haven't, check it out ... 75,000 stars.

Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, yeah. It's, it's really cool.

Um, but what caught my attention with that is, is, within Codex, so OpenAI's, you know, UI, or ID, whatever we're calling it, agentic harness, to install the superpowers, you don't... You're not, like, doing a curl in a shell, you know, pipe. You're basically...

And I, I, I wrote it down. " Mm. That is how you install it.

Mm. Okay. Is within the agentic harness itself- Interesting ...

as a English statement. Interesting. Boy, no- Right ...

dash, dash parameter, dash, dash parameter. No. And if you, if you look at the install, file, which is, a markdown file, you will see that it's, it's, you know, a lot of text and a lot of e- explanation along with some bash commands, you know, laid out in there around the install itself.

Let's dig into that. We should... In an episode, we should really dig into Superpowers and get, like, both some of the things that it does- Yeah, yeah ...

for folks that haven't used it. We could maybe do a live, a live demo for ... a live, failure of a demo.

Well, well, I am gonna do a little, little bit of, though I'm not qualified to do it, therapy for you, to end this episode. Hmm. And I, I think one of the reasons why you may be so colon, semicolon adverse goes back to Pascal days of ending all your statements- Okay ...

with semicolons. I remember those. That's going back a ways too.

Uh-huh. Maybe it's a little PTSD happening there. But I don't know.

I'm just saying. It's possible. It could be.

It is quite possible, man. It is quite possible. Yeah.

All righty. Well, Brad, as usual, it's, great fun. Enjoy talking with you and doing this together.

Always. We, we hope that everybody, all of our 25 to 44-year-old audience members- 26-ish ... 26-ish, enjoy tuning in, and we sure enjoy doing this with you.

Send us your feedback. com. And, be sure to like, follow, share with your friends.

We appreciate everything you do. If you have ideas for topics, guests, things like that, we do have guests that come on. Um, both vendors, but also, you know, there are other, other experts that we'd love to have come talk with us too.

Yeah. So, I'm talking to Tracy Reagan, one of my, long-term colleagues in the, software open source world, about having her maybe join us for a episode, Brad, so... " Oh, love that.

So we just have to schedule that. So we'd love to get more guests on too. Thank you for listening.

Thanks to Corey and our fabulous team, production team that helped bring this to you today. Take care, and we will see you soon. Control, this is Agent Dev.

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