Software Development with AI and Vibe Coding with Harness’ Nick Durkin

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. I'm happy to be joined by my friend Nick Durkin, field CTO at Harness.

Haven't seen Nick. Geez, I think the last time I saw you was probably maybe CubeCon. It's been a little bit, uh, you've been working with a lot of my team.

So Alan, as always, thank you so much for having us on. Oh, it's a pleasure. We have been doing a lot of harness stuff.

Well, to be fair, I was at RSA, I guess that was last month, it seems like, forever ago. And so we were working with, you know, formerly the Traceable team, which is now part of Harness as well. And, and so it was good, good to, uh, work with them.

I, I, I had known the traceable, uh, since, you know, Jody Lodge traceable, so it was, it wasn't a new entity or a new company to me to, to do, but nevertheless, it's good to have you here, Nick. Um, for those who maybe aren't familiar with you or maybe even aren't familiar with harness your field CTO, what's that mean for you, Nick? What does that mean to the audience?

Sure. I work with all of our largest customers, and so these are technology companies. These are financial services customers.

These are, uh, all of the hotels and the airlines that you use, all the banks that you use, but really helping them change how they're delivering software and change how they think about what building and deploying software used to be and what it can be now. And I think when you, when you talk about even the traceable merger, it's bringing, you know, not just the builds and the deploys, but also now as we're operating tools and so into the day two of making sure that everything stays secure, everything stays audited, everything stays compliant, and that you can deliver software, you know, like, uh, the industry's best, but you can do it in regulated secure environments. I love it.

Nick, beyond the, the traceable merger was, was big news of cost, but what else, you know, coming from the hardest side of things. Sure. I think, you know, Alan, you got us on here years ago talking about our ai and that was predictive modeling back in 2018.

That was, you know, machine learning, neural networks and clustering. And we've always had a constant understanding of removing the worst part of people's chops. And I think that's been core to what we've done with automation, with machine learning, with with ai, and we're doing the same.

And so even coming out with our MCP server, making sure that you can interact with Harness a accordingly, I think it comes down to what we saw at Google from the Dora research. You know, people are getting 25% more from code today, right? Because of all the ai, but they're not actually able to get it through the system.

And so they're actually one to 2% lower, uh, yield into production. And this, this is the problem is if we don't actually automate everything, right, uh, we're not gonna gain the value. I think it's like putting raw materials.

If you put more raw materials in front of a Ford F-150 line, it's not gonna get you any more Ford F1 fifties. Agreed. Agreed.

io? Yep. That's where you can look and, and one of the unique things about Harness is that we do have a, a large set of offerings, but each one of them, uh, it actually integrates with all of our competition.

Uh, you can use what you want when you want it. So although the offering's massive of what we can do for you, you can, you can use the parts and pieces you need now. Right.

Alright, let's talk a little bit about Vibe coding. You know, Nick, I, we were talking off camera, uh, we, we discussed this on the, uh, tech field, excuse me, on the Textron Gang Show this morning. com basically calling into is Vibe coding ready for the enterprise?

And, you know, as part of this, and it was a good conversation with Keith and Mitch Ashley and myself, uh, Anna Aloha Ward and um, uh, Jack Pool security analyst. You know, Nick, I think it was just in January that the, like the term vibe coding kind hit our radar and it sounded like, you know, something like surfer hippies in LA Do or something, right? Hey dude, we're vibe coding, you know, and it, it, it, it seems, I don't know, childlike toy, like a toy.

Uh, no. And everyone, you know, the, the grownups in the room were saying, oh, this is not good codes, it's not quality, it's not secure, it's not this. But in this AI world that we're living in now, the Time Crunch is so condensed that from January to June, now we're discussing it isn't an enterprise tool or not.

And you are, you know, you are positing that how Vibe coding can remove some of the worst part of developers' jobs. Kumbaya is are, are we still talking about the surfer dudes? What, what happened between now and January?

I think this actually follows the same pattern that we saw with Cloud, but it's doing it infinitely faster. You know, I always preach if you have to make it easy for people to do the right things and you have to make it hard for them to do the wrong things. And I know that's a basic statement, but if we made it easy to make VMs right, we wouldn't have the clouds, right?

And I think this is where it gets complicated and with vibe coating, it's actually become even a normal practice and a standard of let's get started, let's try something quickly. If you look in the startup market, the whole point was let's go find market fit as fast as we can. And if we can do that quickly, if we can do that leveraging any technology, I think that's fine.

I think you brought up a point, you know, okay, the code might not be that great. Well, I hate to tell you the first time I write the, you know, any code, it's not gonna be that great. It takes honing, it takes skill, it takes, you know, actually testing and trying it.

So getting to that point faster is actually the advantage. And we even just had a hackathon and, you know, 35 teams sat there, pretty much all of them were quote unquote vibe coding, what was able to come out of a three day hackathon instead of being, you know, here's 10% of the project delivered and here's what we wanna do. We have full blown what I would almost consider harness modules built in three days.

And they're able to do so because they get those, um, you know, they, they, they remove the empty pallet or the, the, you know, the, the, the empty painting. They, they get somewhere to start and start kicking it off quickly. That combined with their knowledge of a space or an area is what makes it beneficial.

So I think we're absolutely seeing it, uh, come into the enterprise and if we're not watch these startups move even faster. I, I agree. I agree.

I mean, as I said on the Textron gang this morning, Nick, oftentimes new technologies come into the enterprise via the backpack, meaning the people who bring them in there, we saw it, you mentioned the cloud, but the whole shadow IT thing where people would just whip out their credit card and fire up a couple of instances on AWS that was really how the cloud sort of started getting, you know, critical mass. So I heard an interesting stat today, 70% of workloads are still on private data center, not, not cloud, right? So as hard as those VMs are, and as much as they cost, they'll do that for all.

Yeah, 70%, that's still a big number, man, huge number. But nevertheless, that means 30% isn't, and, and I, as you said, the AI time crunch is exponentially more crunched it seems than anything we've seen in the past. So, um, in six months it went from a joke to real.

I can only imagine where we'll be six months from now. But let me ask you, what are the worst part of developer's jobs, Nick? Sure.

I think when you look at most AI and what people have been leveraging it for, it's been around code gen. And to be fair, that's usually some of the best part of people's jobs. No one loves babysitting deployments.

No one loves waiting for tests to run. Uh, no one loves debugging infrastructure. Or, you know, if they get a security vulnerability, not only figuring out what it was, but actually, you know, writing the code to fix it.

And so when you go and you focus your, uh, you know, when you focus ai, when you focus removing the pains, it should be around that. And I think that's where customers right now and companies right now, you can get a ton of code, you can get great things outta vibe coding, but if you don't have a way that's fully automated to get to production, it doesn't much matter. And so when you can start removing, like I said, I don't wanna write, uh, the pr, uh, to figure out how to go and fix the security vulnerability, let AI handle that for you.

I don't want to, to go and figure out, um, you know, what a good deployment looks like and, and have, you know, be up at, at crazy times when we're doing deployments. Let AI handle those things for you. That's where you actually start gaining people, uh, wanting to come to a platform as opposed to fighting it.

If you go and take the best part of someone's job, they'll, they'll fight you tooth and nail, right? But if you go and remove the worst part, they'll gladly come with you. And that's what we're seeing with industries.

They want to standardize. I actually look at, I i I, I know this a little side, but I actually look at software delivery a little bit like football and, and stick with me for like two minutes, Alan. I hate sports analogies, but we're gonna go with it.

Like most people in the world play football with their feet in America. We play with our hands, I still don't know why we call it football. And in Australia, they bump the ball and they jump all over each other and it's absolutely amazing to watch.

But this is software delivery right now everyone's playing football. We don't know actually the rules. We don't know what a score is worth.

We don't know where the offsides, we don't even know how big the, the field is. And once you can actually put policy in place, once you can have the same rules for everyone, it actually makes the game go faster, right? Everybody knows how they're playing, they know what they're playing.

And this is what gives people that opportunity. If you set those things up, they might be difficult to set up in the first. Now you actually get that production line moving, right?

Everybody's playing the same game. We can operate accordingly. And I think that's what we're seeing in the industry is people are clamoring for that velocity and they'll move wherever they can to get it.

Fair enough. I I, you know, I did, I I won, I saw an Australian, uh, football or strain rules football game in the Melbourne cricket grounds. Yes.

A hundred thousand people. They got some big people playing football there, man. No pads.

Yeah. That's a whole different, uh, strength. And, and, and I've been in that exact stadium.

I think it's the second largest stadium in the world. Mm-hmm. Um, absolutely amazing.

But I think that's, that's what people are, are actually looking for. It's like, let's find out how we can do this quickly. Like give me the path to get to production fast so that vibe coating, you know, it might not be perfect and there's things in place that will prevent me from going to production if it isn't.

But if I do generate something good, if I do hone it, if I go in and tweak it accordingly and it makes, you know, passes all my security scans, passes all my resiliency tests, now it can actually make its way to production rapidly. And so it's actually about building those on-ramps or you know, some people call it the highway or, or, or the runway. Uh, I think it's about making sure that we have those available for our people so that they can actually gain the velocity from vibe coating, because without it in an enterprise space, I'm still bound to traditional deployment types.

And I think that's a challenge for a lot of enterprises. If we can solve the, if you will, the pipelining issue, then you can actually leverage the, the benefits of vibe coding. Does Vibe coding replace junior developers, though?

I think vibe coating in what I've seen it actually, it does a few things. So sure it enhances and takes the, the, our great engineers and makes them, you know, amazing. It, I think it actually rises all tides.

It does take the junior developer and allows them to quickly, uh, learn and quickly scale. So they might not be used right away for the hard and complex things, but what they can do is actually go from that junior status to a more senior or even staff level in a lot shorter period of time because they're gaining that much more experience if they've never seen these types of things. It, it gives them that, that visibility quickly.

So I think to me, I've seen it rising all tides. A lot of people talk about it, you know, removing the junior. The problem is with any, any environment, if we don't have a training ground, if we don't have a way to build people up, then what happens when that group of excellent goes away?

And so I'm not actually worried about us losing the junior engineers. I think it's just gonna be a different way of learning. I dunno if that makes sense, Alan.

No, I, I, I happen to agree with you. You know, as a parent, Nick, I talk to my kids and my boys are both done with college now law school, and, and we talk about, you know, how they should incorporate AI into their jobs and into their professions, and you know, what they're doing. And I, I've told them both you, you can't stick your sand head your head in the sand and ignore it and think it's gonna go away.

You can't fear it either, though. Sometimes fear is healthy. What you've gotta do though is learn to leverage it, right?

It's a tool. It makes you more effective. And if you could be more effective, you are more desirable, you're more in demand than you outlooks better.

And I think that's equally true for developers, whether they're juniors or newbies, freshers, whatever you wanna call 'em. If, if you could harness vibe coating to become a better developer, faster, more power to you. And I think that's what most people will tell you.

Well, I think, I think that's exactly it. If you can put guardrails in place, Alan, that even if you are a junior engineer and you go make a mistake and you do it wrong, but there's things that stop that from going to production now. There's no fear of failure.

It actually makes developing software like a video game, right? The first time you play Mario, you hit the turtle shell, you died. So what do you do the second time you jump over it, right?

Or you jump on it. Now it's the same thing. Oh, I hit a security vulnerability, great.

The system stops me and says, okay, right, go fix this. Right? Ooh, okay, it gets you further now.

Now the next time you run, it goes further. Now you know what, it's not resilient. You didn't build it so it can handle failures.

Okay, great, now I can go fix that. And so if, if the system's in place to actually handle that, it doesn't matter if they're junior, if they're senior, if it's AI code, doesn't matter where the code's coming from, you know that every time it's gonna get better. And failure's not a negative, right?

That's just how we learn. And I think if we set the systems up that way, now, it's a different way. Now it's like playing a video game.

So whether you're junior, whether you're senior, if you write good code, whether it's yourself with ai, it's gonna get to production. And if you don't, it's okay because then we'll learn from it every time. And I think that's where we're headed.

To me, that's like a Nirvana state. Um, if I had that type of protection to know that if I made a mistake, I wasn't gonna be penalized for it. If I, if I did something wrong, I wouldn't make it to production.

I wouldn't be up at three o'clock in the morning. I'd heck, that'd be a lot, lot different methodology, uh, than, than, than what I was used to, you know, way back when, when I was writing code. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a good place to end. This right there, Nick.

Vibe, coating's, your friend. Alright. Hey man, I hope to see you in person soon.

Somewhere along the line here. But until then, come back on. Keep us posted, say hello to everyone at Harness for us, Alan.

Appreciate it. As always, thank you so much and look forward to seeing you soon. All righty.

Nick Durkin field, CTO harness here on Techstrong tv talking vibe coding. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a bit.