# Building the Future of coding, OpenCode with Dax Raad ## Метаданные - **Канал:** NeetCode - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc - **Просмотры:** 94,286 ## Описание Thank you Posthog for sponsoring. Try them out for free here https://go.posthog.com/navi Thank you Greptile for sponsoring. Try them out for free here https://www.greptile.com/go/neetcode Check out OpenCode: https://opencode.ai/ You can find Dax here: https://x.com/thdxr The Full Episode: Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/episode/4pqIupaKYWHl8D4pZMr5hL?si=1-ESZEHzSTK8K_wJyxLFLw Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/building-the-future-of-coding-opencode-with-dax-raad/id1867041268?i=1000752897650 0:00 - Intro 1:02 - The Origin of OpenCode 3:56 - Dax's developer workflow 6:54 - Is code no longer written by humans? 11:32 - Competition, Claude Code 19:04 - Positioning vs Product 23:49 - Will OpenAI acquire OpenCode? 28:02 - The Future of Coding, effort vs impact 37:16 - Code Quality 42:23 - Did AI take the fun out of programming? 45:56 - Will programming skills decay long term? 51:56 - Technical skills alone are useless 58:56 - Becoming an Elite Developer 1:04:03 - Hiring shortcuts, do credentials matter For sponsorship & business inquiries mail@neetcode.io 🚀 https://neetcode.io/ - A better way to prepare for technical interviews Second Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@NeetCodeIO 🧑‍💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navdeep-singh-3aaa14161/ 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/neetcode1 #coding #leetcode #python ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc) Intro bun was acquired by anthropic. Open claw acquired by open AAI is open code next like the name wise it'd be pretty good openai open code. People say like, "Oh, it's okay if it's shitty. It's an intent trade-off to go fast. " Not really. Someone better than you didn't have to make those trade-offs and they ship just as fast. Agentic coding is here to stay, but there's a lot of confusion on what that actually means. We've seen prominent engineers mention that they are handwriting zero code nowadays, delegating this work now to tools such as Open Code, which has been in particular blowing up the last few months. and I got a chance to sit down and speak with one of the creators of it, Dax. We spoke about how they're viewing this competition and agentic coding race, their competing vision of what the future of coding should actually look like, as well as how they would approach an acquisition offer even from a company like OpenAI. I want to thank our sponsors, Post Hog and Gretile. More about them later in the video. Open code has really been ### [1:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=62s) The Origin of OpenCode exploding like over the last two months, especially I think since December. Could you take us back a little bit and just kind of get into how like Open Code started? Like what's the story and how did you get to where you are now? — Uh our company has been doing open source work for a long time. Uh me personally it's been probably five or six years now. Um so we've been in the space we've been used we've like have been building tools for developers. Uh we've seen various companies come and go different phases of it. Uh so we have a lot of experience with building open source stuff. Um our previous project SST uh was decently popular you know nothing close to open code but it basically gave us all the practice in terms of how do you start an open source project? How do you make it successful? Like what does it look like running it dayto-day? What are the advantages you have from being open source? What are the disadvantages? Uh so we had been in the space for a while. Uh we got to profitability and it was just the three of us at the company. Um, we got to profitability with that product in like, man, I guess it's crazy how recent this all was. Maybe in like February of 2025, so about a year ago. Um, and that kind of let us step back a bit and be like, what should we do? Like, should we continue working on this? Should we support other ideas? Um, AI obviously is just a thing for this decade and it would feel kind of stupid if we just entirely ignored it. So, we were playing around with some ideas. uh on like what can we do with AI for developers, in general. Um tried a few ideas, none of them really stuck. Like there were some things that we found that were pretty uh interesting and useful for us, but we couldn't figure out how to turn it into an actual product. Um and it was around that time we started adopting cloud code. Uh and we'd seen you know AI coding tools for a while like cursor was pretty big back then. Uh and none of us on our team like ever adopted it. We tried and we're like this isn't exactly like we're giving up stuff some stuff that we like and we're not gaining too much. So it didn't stick for us. But cloud code was the first time we were like oh this is the exact right workflow. Um prior to that we've just been like pasting stuff into chatgbt and pasting stuff out uh or copying stuff out. And we had always been wondering why didn't that connect to your file system? Like why do I need to do this manual thing? and cloud code was like a kind of a brilliant way to bring all that together and it was and we thought like hey if this is the first tool it's like sticking for us that's probably a pretty big deal and then we started exploring the idea of like what if we took all of our experience in doing open source and kind of grabbed the open source positioning which for some reason was left wide open uh of doing a coding agent that is open source and works with the variety of models out there which we knew would continue to be very competitive with each other — right yeah I The timing of that is actually really interesting. You ### [3:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=236s) Dax's developer workflow mentioned you guys reached profitability in February 2025 and that's I think exactly when cloud code actually came out. And um I think you mentioned SST and I want to get into that a little bit later because I think some of the parallels even though it's kind of I mean it's a dev tool and it's kind of in a similar uh space, but I think the parallels of building that are kind of interesting and I think you uh touched on this a while back uh but You mentioned cloud code was the first tool that kind of like actually stuck with you. What exactly does your developer like workflow look like uh day-to-day right now? How much has it changed? Because you kind of have an interesting perspective because you're actually building one of these tools uh to make it better. So not only are you building it for other users, but you kind of have, you know, building a developer tool as a developer kind of gives you like a unique insight. So what what's been like your experience? — Yeah. Um, so the reason the preview like the reason cursor genic for me or like other people on my team is because we all are like Vim users like we do everything in our terminal. Uh, we really enjoy the Vim experience of editing text. Uh, and that's why moving over to cursor was a big lift because it's like you still have to edit text in cursor but now it's a worse for us a worse text editing experience to gain like some benefits that we didn't like. Um, so the reason cloud code stuck was we could still keep our editor but then we had this separate area where we could do like AI stuff and they weren't stepping on each other. Um, I think that's a big thing for us. Uh, I think cursor was like a progressive step to doing AI coding things where like they would kind of take you solely from editor to uh to like the newer ideas with coding with AI. Um, and there's some benefits to that, but for me and for a lot of people that it would feel like an uncomfortable middle where it felt like I want to use my editor for text editing. I don't want all this AI stuff popping up everywhere. Like when I used cursor, it just felt like I was getting suggestions all over the place. There was like all these new UI panels and like I didn't like I like the idea of the agent feeling like it's like a dumb person sitting next to me. uh that I could like look over and see what they're doing every once in a while and like give them some feedback, let them go, do my own thing, split up work. Uh so just simple fact that cloud code was like somewhere else outside my editor. I think that was uh that was like the key thing for us. Um and we've continued to like explore that uh with open code in that separate place. How rich of an experience can we give you for the various things that you want to do when talking to agents? Um, but my setup is still the same. Like I use Neoim when I'm editing and I use the agent when I'm want to do agent stuff. Uh, obviously we're all using agents more and more to do and less we're spending less and less time in the editor. Um, but I'm nowhere near the type of person that's like, oh, I'm fully off the editor and I'm like not ever writing code manually or I still heavily use the editor and I edit text a lot. ### [6:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=414s) Is code no longer written by humans? There's been a lot of like discourse about that specifically that nobody and we've seen really accomplished smart people saying that they are not writing a single line of code from scratch anymore and I want to get your take on that because I think partially it could be interpreted as maybe marketing if it's coming from somebody at a company who's you know maybe pushing one of these tools and you're also working on a company that's push that has one of these tools — and so what exactly does that mean when you see somebody saying that they're not writing any code from scratch anymore, like a lot of people interpret that as saying that coding is dead, how do you interpret that? — Yeah, it's a one I find those statements confusing because if you ask me like how much code do I write manually, I actually don't know. It's uh it's very confusing. So, I'm not like it's like hard to tell. Like I'm like jumping in and out both of these tools. If they're saying their editor is basically non-existent and they're entirely in these like agentic coding tools, whether it's open code or codeex or one of these other things, I would find that very surprising um because these tools one aren't great for looking at code. So are they also saying that they're never reviewing it or are they pushing up to GitHub and reviewing it there? Um, and then two, I like when I'm designing something new or I'm like working on a difficult feature. Of course, when I'm like iterating on something that exists, like we need another button that does XYZ, like yeah, that's a very easy prompt and I probably don't really have to even look at the code that gets generated because it's probably very similar to what's already around it. But when I'm like working on something new or something challenging or I'm working on new design for something, me typing out code is the process by which of figuring out what we should even be doing. I have a really tough time just sitting there and like writing out a giant spec on here's exactly how the feature should work. I like writing out types. how some of the functions uh might play together. I like playing with folder structure to see what the different concepts uh should be. And this is all stuff that I think most people have most programmers have always done. Um I don't really see a good reason why I would stop that personally because it's like how I figure out what to do. Um but yeah, so when people say that I have a probably kind of cynical take when people say that there's actually no reason to like I don't I think there's this kind of pressure that everyone feels where they feel like this big change coming and they feel the need to like convince themselves mostly that they're on the cutting edge of this change and they're not going to be one of these people that are like left behind because this narrative that like it's going to wipe out a bunch of people and a few people are going to survive. So I think there's like this like bias to kind of overdo this some this stuff or like the moment like one thing works is to express it as like wow this thing worked now everything is working and kind of exaggerate. So it's a little bit hard to understand what people really mean when they say that just cuz there's all this other stuff going on like emotionally and psychologically that makes us all want to like kind of exaggerate what the current state of things are. — Yeah, I think that's a good point because I wouldn't even necessarily say it's intentional. I use the word marketing, but I think um Boris uh the one of the original creators of Cloud Code, he he's made certain statements about not having much code written from scratch, but he's also recently made statements saying justifying why Anthropic is continuing to hire developers, saying that there's still a ton of human involvement in that. So, I think uh it's confusing. I think kind of like you said, but — yeah, it's not Yeah, I wouldn't even Yeah, I agree. I wouldn't say it's malicious. I think we're all excited. Um and like we're all and I think people are like a little scared too and they like all these things coming together. I think it's very hard to interpret what people are saying. Um the thing I have always said you know this is we're in this phase of AI but there's been phases like this before where there's like a new way to do things a new tech whatever it is new framework. Uh and you kind of see a similar thing where they're like this new thing has totally changed how I do everything. I now do everything in this way. And you'll see a lot of people talking about that. Uh, and the clear filter, the filter that's always existed and it continues to apply to today. Use a product they built with it. Often times it doesn't even exist because it's just people like playing with stuff and not actually shipping anything. But then actually use the resulting thing. Often times it's not any better. It's not like maybe it's even worse in a lot of cases. Um, I think we definitely feel that when we use these tools built by people that are expressing, hey, I'm doing everything with AI. Um, these tools exist, so maybe they couldn't exist without it, but they're also not they don't feel that great either. So, I think that's kind of that kind of shows where reality uh is today, — right? Yeah. I want to switch gears a ### [11:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=692s) Competition, Claude Code bit and talk, I guess, about competition. I take it that you're probably a pretty competitive person and — uh the reason I say that is because I think you had an interesting take with SST which for people who don't know uh is kind of I guess you could say just a better experience over certain like AWS uh infrastructure and tools and just kind of giving you a better experience for that. Um but — uh not everything I guess is a competition. Not everything necessarily takes away from someone else. Um, and now that you're working on Open Code, from the outside picture, it obviously looks like you guys are direct competitors. Do you see it that way? And do you see with what's recently happened with kind of Anthropic cracking down on reusing the Anthropic subscription within directly within Open Code, which there's workarounds for right now. But uh with that happening recently, how is like your opinion uh changed on like the competition aspect of it? Did you originally see this as a competition? And if not, do you see it as a competition now? — Yeah. So I'll talk about this. It is very complicated. Um so generally I will say that uh I don't believe like I'm not someone that believes the world is zero sum. I think most systems in the world are set up for everyone to benefit. That doesn't mean that every microcosm of the world is not zero sum. And when it comes to business, people love to like and this is like PR speak constantly like you'll see this from big companies or even small companies acting like oh like we're not we're like even though we're competitors like we can all win or they kind of paint this like rosy picture of like it's all of us doing stuff together. It's that's not it's not that's not true. Like business is just like sports. Like you and another company are competing for alternate visions of the world. And it might not be something where like one side entirely wins or the other side entirely wins. Um but that there is real competition there. And I think people like to deny it cuz I don't know. I think the public wants to believe this like kind of everything is like nice and positive type of thing. I don't think competition is negative. I think it's just like sports like they're two teams want to compete. They're going to like want to kill the other team on some level. They kind of respect each other because they're both at the top of their game doing something, but there are winners and losers and you do want to crush your opponents. Um, so I am competitive and I do think about things in that way. Uh, the other thing though is this something that people don't think about that much. Um, positioning is extremely important. Uh and even though your products might look similar and look competitive, your positioning might have zero overlap. Uh so if you look at uh everything that open code has done, I think we've done a decent job on product, but any of our success is really coming from our positioning. Uh we basically looked at the market and we were like it's very likely that competition between models continues to be a big thing. Not just a frontier models, but also open source models. Like this is going to continue to be a thing. there's going to be a lot of pressure for prices to come down. There's tons of companies purely focused on inference. So, we just saw like a lot of like chaos happening in the model realm. Um, so positioning wise, it's good to build a tool that's not tied to a single model. Uh, because we benefit whenever like one model tries to beat another one. Uh, which we thought, you know, that's going to happen a lot. And two, we're like we want to be a number one open source position. We are extremely competitive with anyone trying to be like the open- source coding tool company because that is the one position that we want to defend. Uh we think that's a valuable position because historically all dev tools eventually end up being open source. Like there's definitely room for proprietary ones, but the default ones tend to be open source. Your database is open source, used to be proprietary. Even like C compilers were proprietary at some point, now they're open source. Uh if you look at almost everything that's in your stack, editors, etc. the majority of the market goes to the open source uh option. So I don't feel like we're technically competitive with cloud code in positioning because they are not trying to do that. They're trying to build like a vertically integrated uh experience. Um which there's always going to be room in the market for uh we just don't really care about that side of it. So they can continue to do their thing. That's fine. But then if you dig one layer deeper, there is just like rivalry and like uh competition and like there's values that we care about that are in conflict with theirs and we want to show that our values lead to better results. Uh so we're definitely going to be like naturally competitive from that point of view, — right? That makes sense. And up next, we talk about why Open Code has been so successful so far and also how the team has already reacted to acquisition offers that they've already received. One of my most interesting parts was when we talk about how AI has made shipping code faster and shipping features, but it actually hasn't made it any easier to actually know what to ship in the first place. If anything, it's actually made it harder because it's so easy to just throw out a bunch of features even if nobody actually cares about those features. So, I wanted to introduce our sponsor Post Hog, which for me when I'm working on Neat Code. io helps me solve the problem of what I should actually be building and what users actually care about. Post hogg makes it really easy to know how users are engaging with your app, how they're finding your app, why they might be dropping off of your app. For example, on Neat Code, we recently added a streak feature and that helped increase retention a ton. So when you add a feature, whether it's easy to add or difficult to add, you need to know whether it made any sort of impact or not because sometimes you can add a feature and people actually don't like it. So it's important to know that and you don't really know that unless you're using some kind of tool and Post Hog makes it super easy. Honestly, I wish I was using it a lot earlier. It's really easy to set up. It has a generous free tier. You can even self-host it. It's open source so you can do that if you really want to. Some of my favorite features are one the feature flag which is a pretty I would say mandatory feature. You need it one way or another and Postto makes it pretty easy to integrate that. So with that not only can you progressively roll out a feature but you can also run like an AB test and you can know precisely if a feature helped your app, helped engagement, helped retention and things like that or it actually hurt. Of course they've got heat maps so you can see how users are like interacting with an app. So rather than like talking to a million users, which is not always scalable. I mean, I love talking to users, but it's also easier to just get insights through analytics. And there's a cool feature called session replay, which I won't show you like all the list of emails on the left over here. But you can see how each individual user was actually interacting with your app, whether they were on mobile or they're on phone. You can see exactly what they did. So here you can see I had a user scrolling and I added a continue feature where you can continue where you left off. So I can see that clearly they see that they open up the menu, they navigate to the practice page. I can see exactly how whether they had a bug or just I want to see what they're using. I'd be able to kind of capture that information without having to have them like send me like a screen recording or something like that. Like I said, it's super easy to integrate. So what are you waiting for? You can check it out at go. posttog. com/navi. tell them neat code sent you. I guess as ### [19:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=1144s) Positioning vs Product a user, someone who's used like Open Code and Cloud Code, I'll definitely say that Open Code is very like it's a very great experience. It's easy to use. It has integration with other well it has workarounds for cloud code but it has direct integration with OpenAI. Um, but you're saying that like positioning wise, you're saying that the quality of the tool is, as good as it is, and as much as that matters, you're saying that it's actually more important that I guess the bullet points in my head are that it's open source, that you can switch between models very easily. There's no sort of lock in. And maybe third is that you guys were probably the first like big uh open source tool that's doing this — and like that first mover advantage. Would you say that those three things like positioning wise are the main contributors? — Yeah, I would say that those are like the umbrella and they kind of manifest as like a thousand little things that you have to do to actually successfully do those things. So for example, uh why be open source? The benefit is you get way more eyes on it trying it in different environments than you can internally which means open code from the beginning has been designed to like sneak its way into every type of environment. If you're someone with a super lockdown enterprise laptop and your company only has access to Amazon Bedrock, we made sure that that's worked, but Amazon Bedrock has quirks in different regions, like we cover all of those like tedious little things um to make sure that this can kind of work across the board. And being open source helps a lot because we can't really recreate those environments, but other people can and they can submit issues and fixes for it. Um so yeah, it's uh the benefit of being open source is you can cover like a longtail any like long tail type scenario kind of can kind of cover really well. I was gonna say but to to go back to your original point. Yeah. Like I think if our product was half as good, I think we'd probably still be equally as successful because the majority of our success comes from that uh doing those positioning things correctly, — right? Yeah. And I guess that's probably a big part that most people overlook nowadays. And — Yeah. Um, in terms of uh like the competition aspect of it, one last uh interesting uh thing I was curious about was OpenAI is taking sort of a different route at least in their relationship with you guys. What is that relationship and why is OpenAI doing it differently? — Yeah. So, this kind is again goes back to our positioning. We're like if we're the open source option that means we have a shot at being like a standard that other people build on top of or we get embedded in places. Uh so even prior to the open AI thing we had been working with GitHub, GitLab, Jet Brains trying to convince everyone that hey you guys offer LM's uh service and you guys have a pool of people that want to use HFT coding. just bless open code as a great way to do that because we're putting a lot more time into it than you guys are doing with your native tools and people seem to like it. Um, and we convinced a bunch of them like uh that hey like this is a good idea, let's do it. Uh, we had enough of them on board that I was able to then go to OpenAI and say uh hey like you know a few it seems like the industry is supporting this like are you guys willing to support it too? Um, the reason I went to them is because one uh they're in again going back to competition they're in competition with Anthropic. Panthropic is winning in terms of mind share for coding. Uh for them they can only gain from doing something like this like PR-wise just practically getting more users in uh using codeex. I also timed asking them like the day before anthropic blocked uh cloud max and open code. So I kind of told them this is happening um like I think we didn't get any advanced notice. It just got blocked the night before and we ended up messaging them and yeah they were they kind of saw the opportunity uh just to counter position. Um, so yeah, I don't I don't know if this means fundamentally they like embrace this type of setup uh or if it's just exploiting these kind of short-term uh incentives that they have to try to beat anthropic. Um, but that's really what our company does well. Like we're good at figuring out these things and like applying pressure in the right spot to get something to fold in a way that's good for ourselves and really like all our users and usually the open source community broadly. uh because that also made it so other coding agents like Pi also got access to open uh open AI uh plans. So um yeah, like I said, it's all just playing these people against each other trying to understand their incentives, trying to create a good situation. Um we've done this before. Typically, it usually ends up looking like you have like one company that you can kind of position as like the bad guy and then you kind of get the rest of the industry to like uh be on the other side of it and you can kind of make things happen in that way ### [23:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=1429s) Will OpenAI acquire OpenCode? — right? And I think it's kind of funny that it's sort of changing very quickly who's the good guy and who's the bad guy and uh like you said even like as OpenAI's incentives change they might you know change their mind about certain things as well. Um, on that note, we we've seen really interesting acquisitions happening lately. I think a couple months ago, Bun was acquired by Anthropic, which I think probably caught a lot of people by surprise. Um, and recently we've seen OpenClaw um, acquired by OpenAI. — Um, is Open Code next? Like the name wise it'd be pretty good. OpenAI Open Code. So, so yeah and I guess what would be the calculus like behind a decision like that? — Yeah, and I think what I'm going to say is probably true for a lot of founders. Um, we have spent a lot of years building companies to various successes. Uh, we've always dreamed of building in a much bigger market than we were. Like with every company you build, you're like, "Next time I want to go for something bigger. " And you spend so much of your life looking for that. uh the day you find it, which we know we found that with open code. Like now we're serving a market that's like 30 to 50 million developers. Like we could reach all of them. That's like pretty crazy to have a product that could do that. Uh wanting to hand that over is a very difficult decision because this is a thing that you spent years searching for. Um and your floor of success like even if things go to are like it's like still like pretty good. So these offers tend to be less tempting um compared against our this like the thing we've been looking for forever. So we've had plenty of acquisition offers come our way already in the past like past couple months. Um we haven't like pursued any of them. Um someone would have to like drastically overpay uh which to be honest has happened like AI stuff is crazy. Like we've seen some acquisitions last year that were like kind of absurd numbers wise. Um so overpaying is not out of the question. But uh I'm actually very proud of our team because I have a specific story where uh CEO of a company called me and they were like hey we're interested in acquiring you guys. Uh and we talked I talked to them about a little bit and I was like I don't know if this will work out but I'll talk to the team. I posted in their team chat like hey like know this company wants to acquire us. Everyone ignored me. They just kept talking about like product stuff. They were working on other stuff and I pinged everyone again and then someone finally replied being like tell them to off until they add another zero. Uh, and it's not like we like even talked about numbers or anything, but it was really cool to see that the whole team is really aligned and trying to take this all the way and not like trying to cash out something pretty quick. — Yeah. No, I think that's really interesting. And um, yeah, that's why I asked about like the calculus behind it because I think uh, like in the case of Bun um, Jared for example, he's obviously been working on this — and like he did not get into this for the money. he would not have created that project for the money. But it did end up working out for him in the end. And I think not only did it work out for him, I think it probably worked out for Bun as well in the sense that um probably for a long time, I'm not an expert on how many people are working on Bun, but he was probably the main single point of failure. And I would say that your uh while you guys have a small team, it's it is set up somewhat differently. Um so yeah, I think that that does make sense. — Yeah. the and like you know every founder I'm saying this now uh if you talk to me again after a couple years and it turns out I was a slo and really struggling my willingness to sell is going to be totally different like with companies it's always about can you continue to stay motivated every single day uh any company that becomes huge is because the founders successfully did that for years and years and it's very hard to do that and a lot of these acquisitions happen because uh you know like even though the company might be doing well making progress maybe the progress isn't as fast as the founder's hoping or it seems like infinite work ahead of them. Um sometimes that's when these acquisitions uh happen and again like they're great acquisitions for everyone including the employees. Uh but yeah, we're trying to go all the way at least as of now. — Yeah. Right. Um I want to switch gears ### [28:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=1682s) The Future of Coding, effort vs impact and talk about the future of coding. And I'm not going to ask you to look inside your crystal ball and you know precisely predict the future. But I still want to talk about I think the big thing that I think about is uh we saw actually Jared I think he made a tweet not too long ago about uh how engineering is really just about the tradeoff of like time versus like or what you can get out of it. It's really just about that sort of trade-off. And I think that's not exactly a new idea. I think I've heard it framed as like effort versus impact. Um, and I think that really gets to the heart of like what a lot of the discourse and like fear about AI programming is at this point, which is that the trade-off is that you can move much more quickly now. And some people might think that there isn't a cost to it. associated with debt that you're going to have to pay in the future. And I would say that most serious people will still say that there's some level of debt. But I think the disagreement comes in the sense of like how much is there? And I say that it's not a new discussion because like we've heard the move fast break things argument in the past. Uh even if you go to a lot of like big companies like big tech companies, at least the ones I've worked at, the code isn't exactly perfect. Like there's always going to be sloppy code. There is going to be technical debt. And so how has that changed? Has something actually dramatically changed recently and how much and how do you think about that? — Yeah. So this is another thing where I'm like the same dynamics that existed preAI are like continue to be true. So here's what I'll say about this whole trade-off conversation. Um this has always been the case. It's When someone builds something and it wasn't built great, uh, oftentimes they use the excuse, well, we had to move quick, so I made these intentional trade-offs. But then you ask them, okay, is that objectively true or was that subjectively true for like the moment in time that you were in? So if you were to now go and rebuild the same thing from scratch, would you actually like make all those same trade-offs or was it just that you at your skill level at a certain time could only focus on so much so you made certain trade-offs and it's almost always the that's the case like anytime I build something no matter how successful it was I look back at all the stuff that we did badly five I told this recently like 5% of that was intentional trade-offs the other 95% of that was inexper experience. It was my first time doing something or we were like overwhelmed with other stuff. The next time I went and did that, I got almost all that stuff right up front. There was actually no additional time cost, no additional anything. It was my own ability and like my own experience that was really limiting everything. Um, so this is the case with AI as that's AI as well. Like people say like, oh, it's okay if it's shitty. It's an intentional trade-off to go fast. Not really. Someone better than you didn't have to make those trade-offs and they ship just as fast. So I think there's like the truth of this is like yeah it helps it basically elevates everyone like wherever you're at you can do more than what you're technically at and that's great but we shouldn't we should have regrets like we should look back and reflect on what we did and say next time we can do this better. Here's how what we've learned. Um if you don't do that then we're just doing the other thing which is we're just being lazy and we're making excuses for it. Uh, and I don't think that leads to anywhere great or even good. Um, I think a lot of the AI discourse, that's kind of what I've been saying. It's been like, well, we shipped it and it worked, so that means we have no regrets and we did everything right. Um, not really. Like the situation you're in now isn't great and it's okay. Doesn't mean you're a bad person. Doesn't mean you did anything wrong, but like be honest and kind of direct about that, — right? So, like you're basically saying it's a skill issue that — Yeah, more or less. Yeah. Right. Like Yeah. Uh I mean this has been the case forever where um the previous iteration of this was like using really high level infrastructure like um something that's really easy to deploy like one click deploy type of thing and you do that your first time and your company's successful and you realize you have to move all that stuff uh to something more serious and that's in the middle of your company trying to like grow a b lot getting a bunch of customers is the most painful thing you'll ever deal with. the next company you start, you just start with the more complex thing up front because you just don't want to deal with that again and you know how to do it now. So yeah, it's that same dynamic over and over, — right? And I guess to play devil's advocate for a bit um based on what we kind of talked about towards the beginning which is that like in terms of product and like users at least maybe in the short term uh positioning can sometimes matter or rather maybe just moving fast can be more important than um than like the quality and you're willing to sacrifice quality. Um along that line, do you think it was for Claude Code, was it a mistake for them to move so quickly or maybe initially it was fine for them to move quickly, but at some point they should have done something differently? And I obviously, you know, you don't work at Claude or Anthropic, but based on what you know, how do you feel about that? — I think it's exactly what I said. I think everyone tries to move as fast as possible. We're all make trying to go really fast making judgment calls on what corners to cut and depending on your level of experience in the thing you're doing that kind of looks different. So my understanding of cloud codes it's exactly that like they had this idea and they kind of built this prototype which was which had such good product market fit that it was going to succeed regardless of how shitty the experience was or how bad it was built. Uh and that's good and that's a lot and that happens a lot. Um, but it's not like a fundamental truth that like nobody could have shipped that same thing at the same speed. Um, I'm pretty sure we built open code in a similar amount of time. We had the benefit of hindsight like looking at some of what they did and like you know we didn't have to spend as much time figuring out what the shape of the product should be. So that that's there. But we also built like a terminal framework from scratch in Zigg and then built React and SolJS bindings on top of that and then like got all that working in like a compiled bun binary before a cloud did any of that stuff, right? So these things just aren't objectively true that the trade-offs are equal for everyone. Uh we were playing in a space we're experienced with. So we're able to move at similar speeds while delivering something higher quality. By the way, there's people out there that look at our stuff and they're like it's buggy or there's a lot of issues with it. And it's true and there's someone out there that could have done a better job than us as well. Um, so like yeah, I always try to look below us and above us as well. And that kind of makes you realize like there's always people 10x worse than you, always people 10x better than you. Um, and that's kind of I think that's my explanation of cloud code. — In the next section, we talk about sacrificing code quality to move a bit faster. Does DAX ever commit code without fully reading all of it? Well, the answer might surprise you, and I think now is a good time to talk about our sponsor, Grapile. I don't know about you guys, but reviewing code is definitely not my favorite thing. And so I had a really big change adding an entire discuss or forum type section to my site, neat code. And sometimes I do put like some unrelated changes and PRs. I do commit that cardinal sin. But that's where GPile helps me a lot because we know that reading code like any programmer knows reading code is completely different than reading a book or reading any sort of text. Usually you can understand some text pretty quickly. But reading code there's so much context that you have to understand to even know like what a tiny piece of code is actually doing. That's one of my favorite things about Gretile because it's not just like reading your code and reviewing it. It's doing a lot of deep analysis. It's giving you a confidence score in its review. So, there's certain like metrics and heristics that you can go by. But for me, like I said, I want context. Like what is a change actually doing? So, if you look at uh the trace diagrams, this is honestly one of my favorite things because you get all of that context so much more easily. you can see exactly for each flow. So I kind of have like some context of okay well where could there be some potential uh performance issues like which queries could possibly be a bottleneck like do we have the appropriate indexes on those queries. So it's not just about catching bugs it's just about kind of understanding the code changes that you're making. So, one bug that it caught here was we added like an admin dashboard and there was a bug where any user that's not an admin would be able to create a resource that they shouldn't be able to do. But don't just take it from me. There's a lot of companies using it. I'm sure you've heard of Open Claude. Even big companies like Nvidia are using it. Definitely give it a try. It was super easy to set up. You can actually try it for free. So, there's really no reason not to. You can check it out at griptile. comgocode. Tell them neatcode sent you. ### [37:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=2236s) Code Quality — Right. Uh f from the standpoint of like code quality. Um how are you approaching when code is generated by AI which I'm sure you know you guys are using as much as you can. uh how do you ensure like that you are finding kind of the balance of like using the tools to speed you up but also ensuring code quality when it comes to let's say like code reviews. Uh do you ever commit code without reading it? — Mhm. Yeah. So the counterintuitive thing here is I think our code bases are now cleaner than they've ever been. Like we're producing like I think some of the best code bases we ever have. The reason for that is I think the downside of not having a clean codebase is worse than ever. So before uh the typical life cycle or codebases we started off we kind of make some initial decisions of how we're going to do things and then like one month in two months in we'll realize like oh there's actually a better pattern for doing I make something else something up but we're going to do CSS in this way now. um we just communicate that to the team and everyone kind of understands there's a new way of doing things and we'll just start building new stuff in that new way. We're not going to go back and fix the old stuff right away. Like we'll get to it eventually, but you know like people know there's like a new way and there's old way and we kind of ignore the old way and most code bases have this. There's like layers of different errors of how they how we did things. That's no longer a good thing to do because your LLM can't differentiate between the old way and the new way. It's going to look at the old way and be like, "Oh, that's how I do it. " and it's going to generate all this crap. So, we are motivated more than ever to like really establish our patterns, be really like articulate them very intentionally, make sure there's not a single file in our codebase that doesn't follow that correctly. Um, so yeah, in a in a weird way, we care about code quality more than ever because we have a bunch of idiots working for us now, like these LLMs that uh are will work very hard and like have like photographic memory, but are stupid and that we can't they can't understand the simple idea that hey, there's like a better way to do stuff and this is how we do things now. Um, so yeah, we spent a lot of times adopting uh tools and frameworks that have like strong opinions and good patterns built in. And um we've always been big like domain driven design people. We're doing that more than ever now. Uh and to answer your other question in terms of do I look at all the code? Um mostly right like I think there's areas in our codebase where the patterns are well established or very mature and when I ask it to iterate it's very like I have an intuitive sense that the output is going to be exactly what I'm imagining in my head and I might not review it as thoroughly. I'll do like a quick glance. Does this roughly look right? Um, other areas I have a sense of, okay, these areas are a little bit less stable. I got to be a lot more diligent making sure the LM did the right thing. Um, and I think most of our team operates in this way. — Yeah, I think that's interesting because I know that there's at least going to be some people that are going to hear that and like almost have like an aneurysm and think that how could you possibly like not carefully review every single line of code? But when I think about that at least I I look back and even before these tools and even at like the biggest tech companies, the safest tech companies, not every single line of code was being read. Like code review — is probably the most boring day-to-day task, at least in my opinion, that you're Well, depending on the context, but it's not the most interesting. — Everyone hates it in code review. It's true. — Yeah. It's not exciting. And so like there's already been so much code that's been committed that wasn't carefully looked at. Like I know for a fact I would make pull requests uh at my previous job and I'd get the re like their approval within a couple minutes and I know that they just did a cursory check cuz at some point you kind of just establish trust in a developer and you're kind of saying that you can almost establish some level of trust with like an LLM that uh you know you've used up to a certain point. — Yeah. I would say on this spectrum, I'm still pretty conservative in that uh I do like I said in what you're describing like even when you're at a big company and no one looks at your PR really, — there's still at least one human that knows it because you wrote it, right? — Uh it is a little weird to say like zero people know it. But so I think for me it tends to be more like uh — there's like a risk feeling, right? Like the last time I did something that I felt was like less reviewed. It was a front-end feature. Uh it was a front end in our case. It's a terminal app. Um it was an implementation of like a new like dialogue and I thoroughly tested it from like a user perspective like does it work well? Um we have so many primitives for building dialogues that I know it used. There's like probably a little bit that I got wrong and I think I do remember cleaning it up later. But I know that if it works pretty well and it's using primitives that we built, um there isn't high risk. We do need to come back to this and clean it up later because it's technically wrong and I don't want this to start poisoning other LLM generation. So, — right. — Uh yeah, it's the same thing like you cut corners here and there and you like come back to it later. ### [42:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=2543s) Did AI take the fun out of programming? — Yeah, I think that's a really good point about that at least one human knew it beforehand. Um, on that note, since reviewing code is largely boring and since that's kind of becoming the job in a certain sense if you're creating a lot of like agentic code, um, a lot of people are saying nowadays that it kind of took the fun out of coding for them that now they're just kind of like at the prompt factory writing prompts and it's not really exciting as it used to be. And I have an opinion on this, but I'm curious to hear yours. like has it taken the fun out of programming for you? — Um, this is a thing where like I think the answer is no. But I actually think I'm in the minority of like the world of programmers because I'm working on my own company, my own product, I can kind of choose whatever I work on every day. If I feel like our company should be exploring something new, I get to do that. So like these tools just help me do more for me of the fun stuff, right? that like exploring new ideas and trying out new things and uh having an idea and being able to like try it out very quickly versus having to commit like a week to building it. Um that's all awesome and great, but I don't think that most companies are structured in a way where you have much else that's enjoyable besides writing code. So, I think that might be a big part of it where if you're setting a prompt and you're sitting there waiting for it, there's like you were kind of assigned the task, there's nothing else stimulating really for you to do. Um, so I can totally relate to why people are saying that. Uh, and also like I think it's always been the case where a lot of the code that we have to write is like it is kind of dumb. Like it's not um it's like iterative. It's like building on top of something that exists. These are things that agents can do. Um, so yeah, like it's not maybe not there's not that often that you actually get something that's challenging enough. Like there's plenty of stuff that agents can't do. Like they can't really design good systems. They can't really do any of that stuff. They can't really figure out what needs to be done. And I think that stuff is fun and simulating, but I can see how that's maybe something you get to do like once a month or once every few months, not every day. — Yeah. I think that's fair because like you said, it does depend on kind of where somebody's working. But my opinion has been I would say mostly consistent with yours. But I would say I have a very different background and perspective in the sense that I like being able to like you said do a lot of like exploration now. Certain things you can just kind of move faster. You can get into a brand new programming language where you don't really have a lot of context. Uh provided it's one of the [clears throat] languages that the LLMs are good at because they're not good at every language but and you can just kind of move quickly. you can kind of just have like a higher level of abstraction. And I was never the type of developer I think that you are where I think you get probably really familiar with your tooling, your languages, your keyboard shortcuts, and like all that stuff. I'm kind of the opposite where I would take pretty much every shortcut that I possibly could. I would just be as lazy as I possibly could. I didn't even want to try open code because cloud code was working for a while and then I just got so tired of the terminal seizures that it was having. So I just you know I had to give open code a try. But for the most part like I have a lot of inertia but uh I still like programming. I still like the interesting ideas. For me it's more about like I just don't feel like having to Google this syntax or remember how you know what exactly this decorator does or just like little things like that. I'd like to solve a problem and ### [45:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=2756s) Will programming skills decay just focus on the most important stuff. And maybe an analogy is like my brain context is just too small. I just can't focus on all the things. So I'd like to focus on the interesting things. I think for in that sense it's made programming so much more enjoyable. But uh I think that over time uh someone like you, someone like you who maybe isn't as disciplined and they over rely on a lot of these tools, they might end up a little bit more like me where they lose some of their expertise and they kind of their skills diminish. And uh it's fine if the LLMs can still do all the things that you need them to do, but if you do lose certain skills and you get to a hard problem and then there's like a mismatch, that's going to be pretty important. How is um how do you see that like over a longer time horizon because those are the things that are hard to predict like what's actually going to happen in five years uh with this. Yeah, I mean I can speak for some of like the feelings I have personally. Um, you know, it feels so much like I remember when I was like a when I was a kid in school, I'd be in math class and like they would write stuff on the board like you know, math problems or whatever. I really challenged myself to like do mental math and like solve stuff in my head. And there was a point where I was very good at it. Like I was like, "Oh, I'm like sharp. I'm like active. I can like really do all this stuff in my head. " And at some point I became an adult and I stopped doing that and now I like can't even add like anything. I can't like it if it I feel stupid when I have to add numbers together or subtract them even just like in life like calculating tip or any of those things. I feel dumber than I was as like a 13-year-old. Um and I feel some of that now with coding where uh I don't think it's hit me that hard yet, but I can see how if this continues down this path, there's just some stuff that I don't remember how to do anymore. And sometimes I'm forced to do it because the LM is not doing the right thing or like it's I can't get the LM to figure it out. I have to like go intervene manually and it like doesn't feel good. It feels like uh I feel like less capable than I used to feel. Um and there's an argument that like technically me not being able to do math as well has no real impact on my life. I can use a calculator. Uh it's for like pretty trivial situations where it happens. It's not that frequent. That might be the case for this as well. So maybe it's fine that we atrophy the skill because it's just not as important as it used to be. Um but yeah, like I think the issue is to me it's like a genies out the bottle type of thing. You give people something that lets them exert less energy, they're going to use it and they're going to want to use it forever. Um so it's just like a fact of life. Like this thing exists, we're all going to use it. Anything that lets people, like I said, exert less energy wins and become successful no matter what. Uh the question is like are people in environments where they're exerting less energy on this and therefore using the energy on something more useful or better or are they just like sitting back and like scrolling TikTok while Codeex, you know, like does its thinking? Um and I felt the pull in both directions. Like there's times where I'm like super active. There's other times where I'm just like I'm just going to throw on YouTube and kind of like veg out while uh while the AI does something. Um, that's like a weird feeling for me because I can see this repeated across millions of programmers every single day. And again, I'm in a very motivating environment. I'm like working on my own thing. If I'm at a big company that I don't really care about, it's just like my job that I'm doing to support my family. Like, why would I try harder than I have to, right? So, I do wonder if how much net productivity lift this all actually has, — right? Yeah, that's fair. Um, I guess based on our discussion so far, I think you pretty much answered this question, but I guess I wanted to still ask it directly and see if you have any thoughts. Um, is liking to code becoming a liability where somebody who likes to code is maybe going to spend too much time rather than focusing on other things that are other skills that are becoming more so important now. Um, yeah. — Yeah. So this is another thing I just kind of play back how things were prior to AI. And I guess like you know people are entering the field now so they don't really know what it was like before. This has always been a problem. There's always been a guy on your team that like overdid stuff and like would kind of check out in terms of understanding the product or the business uh and didn't like strike that balance exactly right. Um, and then there were people that did that really well where they were also very technical, knew when it was worth like pushing the technical side, focusing more on the product stuff because, you know, the technicals don't matter at that point. It's always a judgment call. People that are better or worse, like they have different levels of experience and they're better at making these judgment calls. I think that's continue to be the case now where yeah, there are going to be some people that maybe don't realize that AI can effectively do some things and they're still like stubbornly not using it. I think I've seen that persona less and less as it kind of becomes more obvious that that's like a weird position to have at this point. Um, but you know, there are people that I also see where they just will just keep hitting that button and keep like re-rolling the prompt and they're not getting anywhere and it's not doing anything. and like just read the code. Like I now see people creating like elaborate structures of like we're going to do like prop testing and give like a feedback loop to the LM and have it like automatically figure out the right implementation to solve this bug instead of just like sitting down for like 30 minutes and like reading the code, understand what's going on, trying to piece it together, which can also be LM assisted by the way. Uh, so yeah, it's like I see both extremes and I'm just like, man, this is a crazy time because it's the extremes are extreme as well. Like than they've ever been. Um, which is why like I'm just trying to like take it day by day and I'm like for me my job is more fun than it's ever been and I'm able to do all this fun stuff and I don't think I've swung to any extreme at all. Uh, and I imagine that's what most people feel as well. I think the extremes are maybe a little over represented, but yeah. ### [51:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=3116s) Technical skills alone are useless — Yeah, I would largely agree with that because I remember um the I'm younger than you, but I'm not I guess like a brand new developer. I remember when I was in school, the thing I heard a lot about and I didn't quite understand it at that point was that people would say coding is actually — not the most important part of being a developer. They would always say that actually the other skills are the harder parts like figuring out what to do, how to do it, how to communicate, how to work with other people. And I would say that, you know, it's true and not true because I think I mean coding matters like you have to have the technical skills, but it's true that the technical skills alone actually don't really get you anywhere if you're just working on the wrong problem. They actually have like zero value. They could have negative value. And so, — yeah. One of the things that I I've said is I felt like in a lot of ways a lot has changed. also feels like nothing's changed where the thing rattling around my head and like sucking up all my energy is what should we be doing? What's going on? Are we doing the right thing? Are we working on the wrong thing? And like 95% of my brain was that and then 5% was like on actually doing it. And now it's like okay 96% of my brain is that now 4% is now actually doing it. So it's it feels that way. Uh that's that that's always been the hard part. It's always been what sucks your energy and like kind of keeps you up at night, — right? What are the other skills? I know you kind of touched on it like what actually uh like matters. Um are there other things I guess like in your career from when you started to now and with the introduction of AI? Uh what are the other kind of main skills that you think are important and how do you acquire those skills? Because it's not as straightforward as learning how to code. There's no sort of direct way to learn those things. — Yeah. So, I don't often give that much career advice because I feel like the world just shifts a lot. Um, and like whatever I made sense for me like might not even be relevant anymore. Uh, but I will say one thing, one observation I made early on was you could just work on the programming skill and like just be a really good programmer and that can get you to a pretty good spot. Um, like career-wise, like depending on what your goals are, it can probably get you everything that you want. But for people that like break through to like a 10x that ceiling, it's always because they became an expert in a second thing. Um, and like there's like generic skills like product and business and strategy and positioning and all that, but there's also some very tangible stuff, right? Like if you're a really good programmer and you also understand the finance industry inside out, you're like in like this top. 1% of people that just does not exist because you're an expert in two things. Um, so I've always been a big fan of like whatever industry you're in, you have an opportunity to learn a ton about it that nobody else really does. Uh and because as a programmer you can like kind of get into you can get one you can get into any industry. Every industry needs programmers. Um not many fields let you enter any industry. Uh if you're like a medical professional you it's like very hard to enter tech like the finance field or like oil drilling or whatever it is. But as a programmer you can do everything across the board. And when you're in this position, you should like really try to become an expert at it because when you understand both these things together, you just can identify you like have this map of the industry and all the players and the incentives and whatever and a like a blaring hole will pop up at some point of like there is a insane obvious gap that everyone is overlooking and you can then go fill that gap. Whether it's just like something smaller where inside your company, whether you're founding your own company, um those opportunities are what gives you that's kind of what gives you like a once in a lifetime situation, right? Right. — Um and I feel like a lot of programmers because programming was so enjoyable, maybe didn't spend as much time doing that or like just weren't as intrigued. Um — but if you feel like programming is getting kind of boring, you're doing prompts all day, the field you're in probably is very interesting. like you can probably find uh if you're curious, like a lot of value in exploring that, becoming an expert. Um and there's like a big reward at the end of that. So that's probably how I would look at things. — Yeah, that's interesting. I think um I know you mentioned you don't like to give advice, but I think your journey has from what I know has been kind of an interesting one where you have I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you seem to be someone who's like opinionated and you're not I mean if someone makes you an offer you can't refuse, you'll take it. But you're not you know you've worked at mostly like startups. You've worked mostly on things that you actually care about. Why haven't you been drawn to the shiny offers or just taking, you know, I think you mentioned Verscell has in the past like has wanted to hire you. I'm sure other companies have Um, yeah. How have you kind of viewed that? — Yeah. So I think it's funny when I was early in my career, I remember distinctly remembering I think it was Snapchat because I think uh Meta came and offered them like4 billion some crazy amount uh Facebook I think Facebook at the time uh and they said no and I was like this guy is an idiot like what he's turned down $4 billion like that's crazy like what the heck does that even mean? Did not understand it at all. Um cuz to me at that point I was like you know working on my first company the idea of an acquisition offer seemed like that's the ultimate like thing like any kind of acquisition offer is like a crazy goal. That'd be amazing if that happened. I think this thing happens where you progress in your career where your safety net starts to increase where you know if you're working at a company and like you're far enough in your career where you know like even the company doesn't fully work out it can probably still get sold for an okay amount or you can like get another job that's still pretty decent. Uh as that safety net increases your ambition just kind of increases proportionally. Um, and I think that that's been my experience. Like the offers that I'm easily able to turn down now, like 10 years ago, there's no chance I would have been able to turn that down because my safety net was zero, right? Uh, so as you build your company, as you like acrew this stuff and it becomes more valuable or you just yourself become more valuable. Yeah. It's just that these offers are tempting occasionally. you kind of imagine like, wow, I'm like so stressed every single day trying to do all this stuff and we're getting attacked from a million different directions and it's like so over stimulating and you just kind of imagine I could just have a bunch of money and like kind of have this cushy job and it's a little tempting but immediately after that feeling you get this deep feeling of sadness because you all your hopes and dreams for like what you imagined your thing would eventually become die. The day you accept an exhibition offer is a day that every single dream you ever had is now dead. Um, so like that like feeling of sadness I think kind of helps you not take these options ### [58:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=3536s) Becoming an Elite Developer — right? Um, so I think a lot of people would describe you as sort of an elite developer. I don't know how your co-workers would describe you, but I think most people like honestly would describe you as an elite developer, but uh what does that mean? Like what makes you good at what you do and why? Like were you just are you just a naturalb born genius or is there something more to it than that? Like what's what separates you from some average uh other developer? — Yeah, this is like a funny thing because um you know as our company's got bigger and we've had more resources to hire kind of whoever we wanted. We've been able to go after like people that we've always admired and they've joined our company and like now we work with them and these people like are clearly better than me. like they're like when I see the work they produce and I'm like I like wouldn't have ever produced that or like I probably would have given up or I wouldn't have done this stuff. So that does have me introspecting a lot like what do like what is the thing that I'm good at? Um and it's really hard. I don't know I don't even know how to answer your question. I think I'm decent at programming. I think nowadays that's not really how I even think about my job. Um, I think what I've been pretty good at is the thing I said earlier, like I really study the environments I'm in. Um, I really study all the players. Like you can ask me anything about any company in my space. Like I like know a lot about them. I know who works there. I know their history. I know like what they care about. I can kind of imagine what they're motivated by. Um, so I think like my ability tends to be more just having the larger context and like seeing what might happen, being able to kind of place bets in in the right area. And it's not just me, it's like uh my two other co-founders also really good at this. And I think together we kind of have improved each other in this way. Uh so yeah, like kind of like just kind looking at the world and like seeing how chaotic it is and like trying to make some sense of it, understanding what fundamental truths are always true, understanding what things that people believe to be true are only temporarily true. Um I think yeah, our team like spends a lot of time like we me and my friends spent hours talking about this stuff and we find this very interesting and stimulating and we spend a lot of energy there. Um, and that like informs every aspect of your life, whether it's programming, whether it's business, whether it's personal, whether it's, you know, you're hiring someone, you know, these are like things that you can kind of carry everywhere. And I think that's maybe what gives me an ability, but it's like hard for me to say like, oh, I'm a really good programmer when I see people like even on my own team like out executing me, — right? Um, in terms of like those things that you mentioned that you're good at, are they things that just come naturally to you or was there sort of a deliberate effort that you made along the way to actually get good at those things? And if so, is that something everyone can just make a deliberate effort to improve at? — Yeah. And this is something this is another thing that speaking of like truths, this is one of the things that we talk to talk with each other about our company a lot. You go talk to anyone that's like elite top of their game and it feels like they have a naturalb born gift and you go like really talk to them and they'll all almost always say like, "Oh no, like I used to suck at it and I just like kind of got better at it over time and they maybe became more obsessed with this thing than everyone else. " Um, I think for me this specific skill, the thing that it comes down to is really caring about being right. And this is like a weird way to phrase it because of course everyone wants to be right. Uh but I'm talking right in the end. I'm not talking right now. I'm not talking about winning a single argument. I'm talking about ultimately knowing that you had the correct model of the world. And if that's what you really care about, you work backwards from there. It's all about clarity. Like understanding yourself. Like what are your own securities? Your own insecurities really bias your way of thinking. Like you want to believe certain things are true. like you'll take any evidence of something as definitely being true cuz that's how you want the world to be. Um, and this just takes years and years of like growing as a person like you know when you're younger you're a lot more insecure. My ability to see clearly and my ability to like really understand what's going on was really weak back then. Um, as I became more confident as I like you know uh had some stuff under my belt that I could point to that kind of improved my way of thinking. um being really diligent about the stuff that you're consuming and what like anything you consume poisons your mind in a certain way like it buys you in a certain direction. um really limiting that. You know, you need to like interact with the world to like get stimulus, but like doing that too much, you get drawn into like echo chambers and bubbles and like monocultures and it's uh yeah, it's really being self-aware and like thinking about that stuff like it's hard work and you're being I think the way society is now like you're that stuff is being assaulted like every second of the day that you're awake. uh probably in your dreams too, like you're pro they're probably going to get us there next. But uh yeah, it's very hard and it takes like a deep commitment to wanting to be right in the end uh to actually, you know, do all the things that it takes to for that to be true, — right? Um, on the subject of hiring, so ### [1:04:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGsbARhERqc&t=3843s) Hiring shortcuts, do credentials matter from your perspective, like as somebody who's working on these things, how does that inform your uh opinion on when you're actually trying to make a hire? And uh in the context of open code and just kind of broadly in terms of how you like judge somebody, uh I think a lot of people — uh take shortcuts, which is fine, like you have to take shortcuts in some sense, but a lot of people will kind of just use a credential. Um, like I worked at Google and I'm mentioning at this point in the podcast because I always mention it in every video. I have to do that. But uh, and so I guess I say that because in my experience it made a difference. Like the credential absolutely makes a huge difference, — but it I guess it just bothers me that it does make that much of a difference when actually the credential isn't as valuable as most people think. like it uh for a lot of naive people, they'll see maybe a brand like Google or some other like Meta, Amazon, the Apple, whatever, the biggest brands, and then they'll kind of attach that to like certain qualities, which there's I'm sure there's some correlation, but I think it's way too much. And I say this and I'm not saying this in an ass kissing sort of way, but I can almost guarantee that pretty much everybody at the average person working at Open Code in the small team is certainly much better than the average person working at Google. Not from the sense of like innate talent, but in terms of like how much you care, how much effort you put in and uh like you mentioned caring about being right and those sorts of things. And so yeah, uh to I guess to get back to the question, how do you see those things and like hiring? Do you use shortcuts and if not like what kind of evaluation do you do? — Yeah. Um we're in an extremely unique position, right? We build a product that's used by millions of developers, which means our next hire is probably a user and we're open source, which means very likely our next hire is probably a contributor. Um, so we have this natural filter where this is I was talking about some about this yesterday. So everyone's been talking about how open source is chaotic now because there's just like a ton of AI PRs flying all over the place like AI issues. It's like we're all super over overwhelmed trying to manage any open source project. Uh, so if you're someone that wants to contribute to open code, it's very difficult. there's like so much noise and figuring out how to cut through that noise and do something that's actually useful for our team. That is like a crazy filter. Like most people can't figure that out. But there are some people that are like, I see what the team is doing. They're probably struggling with this. I bet if I study what they're doing close enough, I can probably guess what they want and implement it for them and also communicate to them in a way where they get it or like they even see it. It's like a ch it's like it's not how we design this challenge. Just kind of is that is just like a fact of open source today. And every once in a while there's someone that does that. There's someone that comes in and like does something super meaningful in the exact way we'd want it and maybe even solves it in a way that we hadn't considered. Um and at the scale we're hiring like we get enough of those uh every once in a while that we can kind of rely on. So yeah, we so we we're at a team of like 20 now. We were prior to January, we were a team of five or six. Probably team of six. Uh so we've had we hired like you know 14 or so people in the past couple months. Have not interviewed a single one of them. Like I didn't do any kind of interview. Like it was almost like a cold offer. Um did not look at their resume. I actually don't know where most of people were doing before. I kind of asked them what their current job is just to make sure that if they were interested in leaving or not. Um but I don't know anything prior to that. Um, and also a lot of these people are very good about being public with their work. They're really good about showing off their work. Um, I've already seen some of their other work before. Uh, and to me that's really all that uh all that we care about for what we're trying to do. Um, so hiring in a lot of ways is easy for us. And when we find someone that fits that, it's easy for us to like go to them and kind of ask them like how much you need to leave your job and kind of make them that offer. And so it's like pretty much always been worth it, — right? So, uh, I guess one term I've heard in the past is like for people who kind of over glorify a lot of like certain tech companies or a subset of them is the term like fang sexual. I guess you would not describe yourself as a fangexual. But I still have to ask like when you do see a credential, I mean certain credentials are worth more than others. Like if somebody's obviously like a creator of a product then that's you can attach that to them. But if you just see a credential, whatever tech company, what does that mean to you? And what makes you actually respect somebody? I know you kind of answered that um right now, but yeah. — Yeah. So, I think ultimately the reality is companies hiring at scale need shortcuts and credentials are a shortcut. Like you just can't do what we're doing if you're hiring a thousand people in a year, right? Um but at the --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/20691*