678: Mentoring a Box of Numbers
12 Feb 2026More on the impact of AI coding, and the Jony Ive-designed Ferrari interior.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco HVAC update
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s Special: ATP Insider: After Apple
- Follow-up:
- Units corner
- WarGames display reincarnated (via everyone)
- AI
- Whoops, we whiffed on disclosing past/future sponsors 🤦🏻♂️
- Steve Troughton-Smith’s experimentations
- Dread & fatalism
- Productivity promise vs. reality
- Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding by Rachel Thomas
- AI-Generated Code Quality by Mark Levison
- Comprehension Debt by Aman Shekhar
- Your Brain on ChatGPT by Nataliya Kosmyna et al
- Some related links from our AI conversation:
- Steam Machine & Steam Frame delayed due to component shortages/price increases
- Ferrari Luce
- Post-show: Casey is car shopping
- Members-only ATP Overtime: China’s ban on electric door handles
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
- Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last.
- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Marco’s HVAC update
- Special: After Apple
- A vague unit conversion
- The WarGames screens
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- AI coding
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- AI coding, continued
- Component shortages
- Sponsor: Quince
- Jony Ive’s Ferrari interior 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Casey’s getting the itch
Marco’s HVAC update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I have to ask you, what is the temperature in the building that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in right now? Because all I know is I see in the pre-show, in our internal show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco’s HVAC update and I’m scared for you. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mentioned my HVAC or HVAC, I never know which one it is, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard both. You can say both. Problems in past shows because basically all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last summer I didn’t have reliable air conditioning at the beach. That is also our heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all winter long in that house. We don’t drain the water because we go there all the time in the winter. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, the, you know, it has to be kept from freezing. So my solution last winter, when it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it first broke last February, like a year ago, February, um, my solution was, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to bring a bunch of space heaters in and just run them on low all the time. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, you know, the nice safe oil radiator kind. So it’s not like a safety risk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s certainly not an efficient use of electricity or money. Well, you got the solar panels. Doesn’t that help? It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps, but I mean, it’s a lot of power. Like that’s like it offsets it, but it doesn’t cover the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by any means. Especially if you have snow covering the panels. Yeah, exactly. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the course of the last few months, we occasionally get listeners asking, hey, whatever happened to that project?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I believe the last update I gave you was probably in the fall. Basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all spring, summer and fall. I had a parade of different service people come out and try to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the heck was wrong with my systems. What ended up happening was, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short, nothing good. The service person who spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most time with it, and these are people, they were like calling tech support from the manufacturer and trying to decode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these codes and they couldn’t, they’re hooking up all sorts of diagnostic equipment, nobody could figure out what the problem was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this person recommended a major kind of servicing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reinstallation, like disassembling a bunch of things, cleaning them out, testing all the lines again, doing the vacuum,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this, like a ton of work. And listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how much a new Honda Accord costs today, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I probably could have bought one for the amount of money that I had to spend on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then at the end of it, he said, I still can’t get it working right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recommend full replacement.” And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, gobsmacked, but I’m like, well, I mean, what else can I do? And I called, I called like some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous people and I kind of ran it by, I’m like, hey, I have this guy telling me this, does that sound right to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you? Because you’ve also seen the system? And they also said, hate to say it, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I told the guy, all right, fine, make me a proposal. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what you got for full replacement. And then he ghosted me completely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was October. And I called back a couple of times and I talked to his secretary,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, he’s working on it, he’s working on it. Ghosted me, never called me back, never got me a proposal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I needless to say, I’m not thrilled with having worked with this guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this point, having giving him a lot of money for a system that was still broken. But fortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the other service providers I had worked with at the beach, who was very busy in the summer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a lot less busy in the winter. And so I got him on the job now. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, he has replaced my upstairs unit. I still, we’re still waiting on the downstairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unit to come in from the manufacturer. The upstairs one is replaced. Downstairs is still space heaters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which brings us to this past few weeks. upstairs unit. Again, it works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s holding temperature. It’s a brand new unit. And I said, you know what? I’m tired of all these comp, get me a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple unit. So we have a, a Dakin or Dyken. I don’t know how the brand’s pronounced. We have a Dyken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system. That’s just like the most. Cheap, simple thing. Cause everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there is cheap, simple Dyken systems. And when they break everyone out there knows how to service them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re easily serviced and replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is this a Northeastern thing? Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen them around here. It’s all like train and a couple other things around here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re very popular for split unit systems. They’re not that common for central systems yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I see this is a central system But they’re spell the name of the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco d a I k I n as far as I can tell they seem to have a really good sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network because Every HVAC tech out here wears Daikin shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco draw. They have a Daikin sticker on their car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You still like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the best parties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously doing a lot of sales outreach But but you know, I’ve seen like their stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is everywhere. Everyone has had a service it it’s simple It doesn’t seem like it’s super high quality, but it’s also not that expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at the beach, that’s kind of what you want, because like it’s such a harsh environment, nothing out there lasts very long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a consumable. It’s going to rot out
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway in a few years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So if you’re only going to get five to 10 years out of something like this, it’s best to have it be reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serviceable and replaceable. So anyway, so I’ve been using space heaters downstairs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new system upstairs. And then we have this massive cold freeze this winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’ve been relying on my Yolink sensors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My house is filled with Yolink sensors. I can see the temperatures everywhere. I have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside so I can correlate what’s going on inside to what’s going on outside. So I can tell when the system’s working right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have water sensors everywhere for water leaks at every, under every sink trap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under every toilet valve. And a couple of, next to the fridge, like in case that leaks, like next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the ice maker. and a couple of floor locations, water leak sensors everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m going through this freeze and I’m watching my, and we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the house is lifted, cause it’s the beak, so it’s on stilts, and the water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main, there’s a challenge when you have a lifted house with no basement under it, how do you insulate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the water main and the sewer main that have to come in and out of the ground to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go up to the house? So we have this boxed out closet that goes around them, And there’s a heater inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that closet that keeps it, you know, 50 degrees or whatever. And of course, sensor in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. So I’ve been monitoring that. I’ve like during the worst of the freezes, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco water main closet got down to like 36 degrees. I was watching.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m like, oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And meanwhile, the bay is frozen. There’s no ferry service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the only, and I don’t have a driving permit anymore, so I don’t live there anymore. So the only way I can get there, if I need to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I can like bum a ride from someone during the day. if they happen to be driving their truck on for, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, if they’re a contractor or something, like, I know a few people so I can like, I can ask for rides. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to get there. And it’s not fast to get there. The answer often, you know, the answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I want to go there on Saturday, the answer is too bad, you’re going on Monday. Anyway, I’m watching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these sensors go down on these like, you know, super freezing Saturday nights. I’m like, oh God, getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tense. And like, I know a couple of people out there that if I really had to, I could call them to go over there and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change something I really had to but like you also don’t want to call a friend to go over to your house when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Five degrees with 40 mile an hour winds if you really don’t have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s ideally you don’t need that Anyway, so I made it through all the deep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freezes. I thought Yesterday I get a water leaks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alert from yo link in an outdoor utility closet that houses the the water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heater And like the water filter and a couple of air handlers I know there’s a water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filter attachment there that leaks sometimes. So an occasional false alarm there is common. So I’m like, yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably fine. And then I got the water leak alert again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, hmm, that’s weird. Let me check. And I have one camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is mounted right below that, like looking out of my front stoop like to see when teenagers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are walking up to my stairs. And peeing. And peeing, yeah. Well, they don’t pee on those. They pee at the other side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my bad. This is where teenagers get off the beach and use my foot wash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lovely. And just flood my entire front patio with water and sand. It’s delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re really selling Fire Island well. It’s uninhabitable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the winter. Even if you wanted to be there, you can’t get there. People treat private property like their own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey public utilities. Like you’re really doing a bang up job of selling me on Fire Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s part of its charm too. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh-huh. I’m sure. So anyway, after the couple of water leak alerts, I check my camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s there and it’s raining. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not because it’s not raining, but it’s raining at that camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, oh, I misunderstood. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I guess. If your water heater is in there, that’s probably rotted out and has just failed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I called if I’m like, I can’t get there until Friday, really. So my God, I called a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend. He went up and opened the closet and sure enough there’s some pipe that ruptured and this has never been a problem before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Because the downstairs HVAC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system is not running That closet which has the air handlers in it is not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warmed up by it so a Pipe froze in there and ruptured.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He turned it off I’ll know in a couple days like quite how bad it is. I’m gonna send a plumber over there in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning Um, but, uh, I have a leak. It rained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over my front patio all day long. Thanks to YoLink for alerting me to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, my next step is I think I’m gonna, I’m gonna look into their various options for water main shutoffs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really want to get one for our house just on principle, but they’re, they’re surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they’re about $300. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fanciest ones actually stop the water. The less fancy ones turn a valve that you already have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey water. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco are still a couple hundred
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John The very fancy ones literally have the valve inside them and will turn off the.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I almost ordered it today, but I wanted to go there like measure and make sure like my about because it says like you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you your valve has to like move fairly freely, you know, because it can’t it doesn’t have that much pressure. It can apply.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why you need the what he called the ball cock valve. We get a lot of leverage with the big lever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, thanks. Yo link. Yo, yo link has been awesome for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like and you know, we also because we have the the restaurant now, the restaurant has an apartment above it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’ve also been able to monitor that apartment. Like, you know, staff stays there in the summertime. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s yet another property to manage. And I’ve been able to monitor that and make sure that’s been not freezing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during these coldest nights. And so it’s been remarkable having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yolink in my life. So thank you, John, for bringing Yolink to us. Yes, very much so. You know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody who missed the whole deal with Yolink, it’s this family of these sensors that use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a radio protocol called LoRa that is much much much lower power and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher range than Wi-Fi. And it’s not based on thread, it’s a whole different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so basically you have these very inexpensive sensors that run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like AA batteries or a button battery and last like two years or a year on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life. And because it’s super low frequency, It goes through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walls, fridges, you know, like lots of things that other things might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have signal problems going through. It goes right through them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So you can—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it also has extremely long range. Now the canonical example for me is I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contact sensor on my mailboxes we’ve spoken about many times. And granted my mailbox is, I don’t know, 10, 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meters from the house or yards if you will. It’s not that far. one of these sensors, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside a metal, um, box and it’s beaming, uh, beaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the open and close signal all the way into the house. And I’ve, I’ve understood that in perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conditions, like basically out almost outdoors or outdoors, these things can go upwards of like a mile.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They can work astonishingly long ways in really good conditions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So they, they’re great. And so I have yodeling sensors all over the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have them all over my house and I can monitor things, get alerted for things like, hey, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fridge is above temperature. Like something’s wrong, go check it. And the water leak sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are now everywhere. And they work, they work really well. And so, and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap. Like a Yellinc sensor is maybe 20 or 30 bucks, depending on what kind of sensor it is. So you can have, and there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription or anything. So you can have a whole bunch of them. And their app is what you’d expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not a good app. No, it’s not great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey but it works. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s really robust home assistant integrations if you’re one of those dorks like me. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do need to get a hub, which is like 40 or 50 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco 20, 30. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get a set with like a hub and a couple of temperature monitors for like 50 or 60 bucks. Like it’s not, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything, you know, burdensome really in this world. And compared to like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I’ve had like the Eve home sensors before that the Eve airs. Those are like 70
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks each and they don’t work as well. I can tell you that from experience. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work as well. well. And they have like smart outlets and stuff too. They have a whole family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of smart stuff and it all is like cheap but functional.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matthew Feeney And reliable. Tim Cynova Thanks for Yolink for sponsoring this show. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey they didn’t sponsor but they…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Feeney They should. Tim Cynova At this point, I’m happy to sponsor them because they have saved me a lot of anguish. Matthew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Feeney Well, that’s the thing is I was moaning just a moment ago about how I don’t want to put a $300
⏹️ ▶️ Casey valve on my water supply. The flip side of that is I’ve lived having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of your house underwater and that’s a lot more expensive than 300 bucks. So it is on the to-do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list at some point to get either the, you know, have a plumber come out and weld in or whatever, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the fancy, fancy versions, or maybe one of the ones that just sits on the valve and, you know, twists it shut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on its own. But I really do need to look into this one way or another.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s also, um, so, and the way it works is, you know, you can obviously remote control your water main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have one of these, but also they have integrations where like if you have a leak detected it can automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn it off and that kind of thing also has insurance implications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some insurance companies will require that you have those in certain high-risk situations or sometimes you might be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a discount on something if you have that So that’s worth looking into if that’s relevant to you.
Special: After Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have some news. We recorded and released a new member special,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and perhaps more exciting than anything else, I remembered to talk about it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gold star and cookie for me. We have a new member special, ATP Insider After
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. John, what does that mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit difficult to explain, but we were kind of musing on a world without Apple in
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of different hypothetical scenarios. In the beginning, we tried to explain, well, why are we talking about this topic now? You know, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John a declaration that we’re abandoning Apple? No, that’s not what it is. Except for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, maybe for Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John no spoilers. But anyway, we did a couple of hypotheticals, like what if Apple had never existed, alternate history type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing, or what if Apple, at some point in our future when we’re still alive, ceases to exist, and we’re exploring
⏹️ ▶️ John what would we do in terms of tech? What platforms would we use? What things would we miss? What things
⏹️ ▶️ John would we be looking for? And obviously, in that discussion, we inevitably end up talking about our history
⏹️ ▶️ John and how we got where we are, especially since both Marco Casey are fairly new
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Apple platform from my perspective. So we get to hear a lot of backstory on that as well. So there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP Insider after Apple chosen mostly for the alliteration, let’s be honest, but I think it’s a pretty good title.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed. Yeah, this one was fun. We went into a bunch of random places as the three of us are want to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I really enjoyed it. There’s a lot of history there, both personal history and general history. I think I think you’ll really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoy it if you are not a member and this or any of the other, many other member specials,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, or wetting your whistle or striking your fancy, you can go to ATP dot FM slash join. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for not an altogether terrible, terribly large amount of money, you can get all of the member specials.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, you can do what John suggests, which Marco and I do not agree with. And you can be a member for a month and then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, you know, download everything and then cancel your membership. We do make that very easy, but you’re, you’re not going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. You’re going to become a member and stick with us because you like us. And so you can go to, go to ATP dot FM slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, remind me for the 800th time, if people wanted to see what member specials were available, what is the URL for that?
⏹️ ▶️ John ADB.FM slash specials.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. And so you can check out all of the different member specials. There’s a bunch of them at this point. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t remember the count, but there’s been a lot. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so. And there’s a separate feed for them too. Like, when you become a member, you get a dedicated feed that just has the specials. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you just want to go back through the specials one by one, you don’t have to hunt them down in the other feeds. They’re in all the other feeds too, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a dedicated feed just for specials if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want. We appreciate all of the members that make this show possible, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really would love it if you’d check out these member specials. We have a lot of fun doing them, and we get to go a little bit off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the beaten path, and I really enjoy that too.
A vague unit conversion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Let’s start with Units Corner. We were talking last week about Robert Tait’s micro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LED, quote unquote, TV review video, where he basically installed a stadium monitor in his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house. And during that, the display had a pixel pitch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 0.9 millimeters. And in the video, Robert said, and this was transcribed, transposed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transcribed by John, the general rule for pixel density is that if you multiply the pixel pitch by 10, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will give you the viewing distance in feet where individual pixels are indistinguishable. John, apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said, the general rule is if you multiply the pixel pitch by 10, you get the distance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can’t see the pixels anymore. So 0.9 millimeters means about nine feet away. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where did you go wrong there?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I really went that wrong, but some people were confused by it and thought it was hilarious that I was mixing
⏹️ ▶️ John these units together and people are gonna think my pronunciation of hilarious
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s millimeters and feet and then 0.9 millimeters times 10 does not equal 9 feet. It doesn’t equal 9
⏹️ ▶️ John meters. It doesn’t even, I mean, you know, what are you talking about? I omitted the words in feet. What I should
⏹️ ▶️ John have said is the words in feet after distance. If you multiply the pixel pitch by 10, you get the distance in feet
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can’t see the pixels anymore. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ John rule. This is directly from the video, which is just a rule of thumb for theater people. Apparently that math works
⏹️ ▶️ John out. I think it was perfectly clear because I gave the example. So for 0.9 millimeters, that means 9 feet away.
⏹️ ▶️ John But my bad for not putting the words in feet in there. And as I say here in the notes, a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John listeners are now very unit sensitive, thanks to Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here it is, I’m trying to be inclusive and no good deed goes unpunished.
The WarGames screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of member specials, a little while ago, I think it was a couple of months ago, we did ATP Movie Club War
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Games. And this is kind of apropos because the whole of the internet, and that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a complaint, I’m glad that you all did. The whole of the internet sent us a YouTube video from Dave’s garage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where he bought basically one of the display units. I don’t know how to describe this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that generated those screens in the bunker. Those like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, those, I don’t know, how, how can I verbalize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this? Well, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, we’re talking about is in the movie War Games in the big room with all the screens that show like the Lines with the
⏹️ ▶️ John missiles exploding and stuff that those are the screens we’re talking about It’s like how did they do that back in 1980? Whatever when this was
⏹️ ▶️ John made? Well, they did it with the thing you’re gonna see on Dave’s garage channel. It’s a vector display And
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, it’s very tiny and it’s monochrome. So how do they do those big things? Basically, this is not really about how they made
⏹️ ▶️ John the movie But just my understanding is that they got these little vector displays. They filmed them with a film camera
⏹️ ▶️ John and they filmed different images and with different color filters in front of the monochrome screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they got a red pass and a blue pass and a green pass, whatever, whatever colors they use. Like you see colors in the movie. That’s just because
⏹️ ▶️ John they put different images and they filmed it with a film camera. And then they put that film together and then they projected
⏹️ ▶️ John onto projection screens. And then they filmed the projection screens with the movie camera. So it’s quite a ways to
⏹️ ▶️ John go, but you know, without computers, they can do graphics that big. But anyway, the vector display itself is like, I don’t know, it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John seven inches diagonal or something. It’s a tiny, it looks like an oscilloscope screen practically. But vector displays are really
⏹️ ▶️ John cool and getting it up and running is really cool. That’s really what the video is about is. So I bought one of these, these
⏹️ ▶️ John war games displays on YouTube. Again, they’re not war games displays, but they’re used for the movie. How do I get it
⏹️ ▶️ John to do literally anything? And it was a fun video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was very well done. And you know, the Dave fellow was like, I’m not a developer, but let me tell you about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the low level programming I had to do in the communication protocol to work through in order to get this to work. It was
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AI coding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We’re going to talk about AI for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. This is still part of followup. We’re going to do this a little bit in a funky way. Uh, what we’re going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I’m gonna introduce a couple of things and John, John, I think you would like to say a couple of things, but then I’m going to plow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through like a whole bunch of stuff and there’ll be a bunch of links in the show notes and we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try, we’re going to try to get through all of the stuff that I need to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through to to set the stage, and then I’ll let you two loose to have a conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. But bear with us for a minute, because it really requires a whole bunch of foundation before we can really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a conversation about it. So first and foremost, on behalf of all three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we all apologize, genuinely, we all apologize for not having disclosed past or future sponsorships
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from AI companies. I like to think we do a pretty good job of this. We try really hard to do a good job of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we 100% whiffed on this one. And so that is our bad and the offending parties
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been sacked. But we should note that Google Gemini has been a past sponsor, Anthropic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been a past sponsor, will be a future sponsor, and genuinely, I hope I don’t come across as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sarcastic, we really are sorry that we didn’t say that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, I think our batting average is really high. I can see it’s like 99% of the time is always remember to do it. I think part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the reason that it didn’t even occur to me for these sponsors is kind of like, if we had to say, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple past sponsor of the show, record has never has never sponsored the show. But we talk about Apple so much like these
⏹️ ▶️ John big companies like Google obviously is in league with Apple and now like Anthropic and Open AI like they’re such
⏹️ ▶️ John big companies it’s like well they’re not they don’t sponsor our sponsors are small companies that
⏹️ ▶️ John want to get their message out we’re not doing ads for Google but we did we did do it for Google and the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing for Anthropic now these companies have uh hodge jillions of dollars in their advertising so obviously you listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ John show you would hear that they’re sponsors and even if you’re a member you can look in our show notes and you will see in the show notes who our sponsors are, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we do try very, very hard. Anytime we bring up a sponsor, Casey will say and blah, blah, blah, former sponsor,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, former future sponsor. We try to do that pretty much all the time. Obviously, we’re not going to say that every time we
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned them within an episode, but we do try to like the first time they brought up or whatever, mention it
⏹️ ▶️ John do it for Google Anthropic. And I have to say, going forward, it’s going to be difficult to remember to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it every time we bring up AI type things because it’s like Google, we talk about Google all the time. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will we continue to try just to remind you because not everyone has listened to every episode. And why do we tell you this?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re telling you this so you can add whatever grains of salt you want to add to our opinions. Some people will believe all you. You had
⏹️ ▶️ John a Google one Google gem on an ad on a past episode. Therefore, everything you say about Google is bought and paid for by Google. If you want to believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you should believe that. Other people will say, I’m going to knock off point zero two percent from everything you say, because
⏹️ ▶️ John Amtropic brought ads on your show. Whatever you want, whatever, how many or any grains of salt you want to add
⏹️ ▶️ John to our opinion, you do that. But we have to tell you so that you know to either add grains of salt know how to add grounds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, we all think as humans all think I’m not influenced by them having ads or whatever. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s mostly true. But you know, it’s very always very difficult to say that’s why we want the audience to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So with that in mind, I wanted to first highlight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some stuff from front of the show, Steve Trout and Smith. Steve has been on a bit of a journey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to codex and Xcode and has a bunch of different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweets on Mastodon about it. and there’s a thread about it. John has pulled out some highlights
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m gonna read. Again, we tried to cut this down to the bare minimum, but there’s a lot here. And it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking into if you haven’t seen these tweets. It is fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the short answer before we even get into this is, Steve Trout and Smith is excited by and doing things that he
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks is good with AI products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with that in mind, Steve says, I had long since rewritten an app that he was working on in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Swift. So this was only a contrived test of Xcode’s new agentic programming support, But it did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in five minutes what took me months of on again, off again, effort and preparation. Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Swift is too easy, all things considered. What about porting the app to another platform like Android?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hold my beer. Uh, so then later, so now I have a one-to-one recreation of classic same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game, the app in question, uh, in Android’s Java slash XML. Later, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passed it the Swift version of the project that it had created from the original Objective-C project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and instructed it to turn it into an Android project that I could just open in Android Studio and install. So now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just exists on Android. Steve continues, I’ve spent some time cleaning up the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey project and prepping it for Google Play. I’ve tested Google Play distribution internally, at least. I’m still reeling from the fact that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is possible, never mind viable. I tried this conversion process before, perhaps a year ago, with the agent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feature in Chat GPT and got nowhere. There’s clearly been a lot of progress made here in a short amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sticking with Steve, but kind of on a different subject, Steve writes, three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps from zero to functional in a day. This is the biggest change to Xcode in Project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Builder in its entire history, dropped on a random Tuesday when the 26.3 beta was released.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Steve went from zero apps to three that were functional in the span of a day. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then finally from Steve, building one app used 7% of my weekly codecs usage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limit. Compare that to a single awful slideshow and keynote using 47% of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my monthly Apple Creator Studio usage limit. Yikes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Before Steve had embarked on this whole, like I’m gonna write a bunch of new apps, important things, he had been exploring
⏹️ ▶️ John the AI features in Apple’s Creator Studio and complaining bitterly that even just experimenting
⏹️ ▶️ John with it to try out the features was burning through the allocation of free, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, free AI things that you get to do with like iWork or whatever, like, you know, give you an outline, generate a slideshow
⏹️ ▶️ John or a promo or whatever. those limits seem really, really low. Um, I mean, you’re not paying
⏹️ ▶️ John a, I mean, you are paying a subscription or creator studio, but you’re not paying a separate subscription to
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever models it’s using behind the scenes. So on one, on the one hand, I kind of understand how like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John creator studio, you pay a subscription for the software and we give you some piddling amount of like, you know, server side
⏹️ ▶️ John AI type things are free. But if you want more than that, you had to hook up to an API key or something. On the other hand, comparing
⏹️ ▶️ John this of like, I made three entire apps and use 7% of my $20 a month usage. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if Apple’s AI usage prices are going to be like their RAM prices, or maybe that’s a bad example these days. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should make an adjustment here or charge more money for their creator studio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we used Steve Trout and Smith as an example of yay AI. There’s been a couple of posts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that have been making the rounds recently and that several of you had pointed out to us. That’s kind of about like AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dread and fatalism. We’re not going to really talk about them right this second, but I wanted to call them to your attention again. Links in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. We Mourn Our Craft by Nolan Lawson and The Tipping Point by Thomas Ricard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably pronounced that wrong, I’m sorry. But there’s a couple of more pessimistic takes on AI and what that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means for development and software engineering and so on, which I think are worth your time. Whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not you agree with them, I think it’s interesting. And then one or more anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people wrote in with regard to AI and productivity and the promise of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, all of these people will 10x their productivity versus scientific studies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. So again, I’m just going to kind of hit the high level real fast. The scientific evidence doesn’t actually back the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea that AI provides a huge productivity boost. A recent study from Anthropic found that for junior developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a set task, the time taken to complete a task was not statistically significantly faster, just two minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than those who did not use AI tools. And their understanding of the output and ability to answer questions on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was actually much worse. Put a link in the show notes. Separately, a randomized controlled trial from mid-2025
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found that experienced developers were slower with AI. Separately, a Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey study from 2024 found that for trivial tasks, that the users were able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily describe AI could save some time. But for complex tasks, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was of minimal benefit. So trivial tasks that you can describe to AI quickly, yeah, you save time. But anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of complex, not so great. Then a survey from Atlassian found that only 4% of companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are seeing return on investment on their integration of AI tools. Separately, a study
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Berkeley at the California Review Management found that there is no statistically significant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relationship between AI adoption and productivity gains. At Harvard Business Review, there’s a study that describes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how AI-generated slop is actually harming productivity, even when it seems to be producing work. Think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an increase in the number of PRs to an open-source project, then in actuality, just wastes the maintainer’s time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then finally, MIT’s State of AI in Business finds that 95% of companies are seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zero returns. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. John, I am happy to go through these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey links that you compiled or would you prefer to? How would you like to proceed?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can. That’s just some more in the same vein. I had some of these links you just read, I had also had in the notes ready to go, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we got many of them sent by listeners as well. This is all, I think, from one listener that we just read this list, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and so some more from John. AI generated code quality and the challenges we all face by Mark Levison.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There were findings, the key findings from five different studies. AI-assisted pull requests have 1.7 times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more issues and human-authored pull requests. Technical debt increases 30% to 41% after AI tool adoption.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cognitive complexity increases 39% in agent-assisted repos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Initial velocity gains disappear in the first few months. Change failure rate is up 30%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And incidence per pull request is up 23.5%. Then another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article, Comprehension Debt, the Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code by Armin Shekhar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Comprehension debt refers to the gap between the code generated by LLMs and a developer’s understanding of that code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In this post, we will explore the implications of comprehension debt, its impact on software quality and maintainability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and strategies for mitigating its effects. And then finally from John, your brain on chat, GPT accumulation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of cognitive debt when using an AI system for essay writing tasks, my Natalia Cosmina, Cosmina,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cosmina, or something like that. And others. Uh, anyways, uh, while LLMs offer immediate convenience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our findings highlight potential cognitive costs over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neuro linguistic and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, fellas, thank you for being patient. What do you got? So
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a lot. And I think it was structured in this way. Steve Troutman Smith, who’s a frequent
⏹️ ▶️ John person cited on the show is a very skilled, experienced developer on Apple platforms and just a very generally, very
⏹️ ▶️ John good coder. So this is not a novice. He’s using it. he’s having great success. He’s porting
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that he had tried to port himself, taken months and not done it, and then he’s doing it in five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not like somebody who is, I wasn’t able to do this thing before because I’m not a skilled coder, but now that I have a, I can, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a skilled experience coder who is fairly productive, does a lot of stuff and is
⏹️ ▶️ John having great success. Then he has ideas for apps and whips them up in two seconds. He’s impressed by it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we have all the people who are scared about it. And then we have, but how good actually is it? and
⏹️ ▶️ John these people studying it. Oh, so I see everyone seems to love it. I think it’s great, but actually it’s not helping
⏹️ ▶️ John productivity. It’s hurting it. And all these, you know, all these studies finding that it’s not giving a return on investment.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the truth? What you know, how can we square this circle? And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that we just read is the truth. The truth is that A.I. is massively
⏹️ ▶️ John overhyped. There’s a lot of money behind it, forcing your employees to use it, which many companies have been doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John which blows my mind. By the way, when you have something that the people like, you don’t have to force them to do it. You know, forcing people
⏹️ ▶️ John to use it. It’s like, even if you don’t want to use AI, if you’re programming for this company, you’re forced to use it because it’s going to increase productivity
⏹️ ▶️ John and this, that, and the other thing. It doesn’t surprise me that it’s not having productivity gains.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not saying AI is a fad, but it reminds me of a lot of the sort of business fads that go around for
⏹️ ▶️ John practices that are good, things that are actually good, but that become sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John trendy or popular or like mandatory to do. And then companies will just force
⏹️ ▶️ John like everybody to do them, even though they’re good things like, you know, you pick agile, which we always
⏹️ ▶️ John make fun of, but all sorts of other sort of good programming practices that are actually good ideas and
⏹️ ▶️ John have longevity about, you know, uh, ways to architect code or ways to organize people or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anytime there is any idea that is actually good in the technology industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets overused to the point where people hate it and it causes negative productivity because
⏹️ ▶️ John people feel like they have to use it. And AI is like that times a million. That’s why you see AI in
⏹️ ▶️ John every single product in the world and every feature. And, you know, companies have entire releases where the only
⏹️ ▶️ John directive from the company is whatever you’re doing in this company, I don’t care. Next release, you’ve got to have AI
⏹️ ▶️ John something reportedly Apple did that. Look at any product that you see, see that all the time. So it doesn’t shock me that
⏹️ ▶️ John people aren’t seeing productivity games. It’s not just because, oh, they’re using it wrong. It’s because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not all things to all people. And especially when we go into the essay writing and stuff like that, as you,
⏹️ ▶️ John as you start to stray more into like the other things that LLMs can do, it becomes a lot spotty.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the other hand, in the hands of a skilled developer doing specifically the few things that it’s actually very good
⏹️ ▶️ John at, the value is tremendous. Like Steve Trout and Smith is just one person, so it’s annexed data or whatever. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason lots of coders are out there saying this is really
⏹️ ▶️ John doing things for me faster, better than I was before. And as I said in the last episode, it really
⏹️ ▶️ John is a skill to learn how to use these things. So even Steve Trout and Smith would admit that he’s climbing that learning curve
⏹️ ▶️ John of how to actually use this tool productively. Again, my analogy last time was like Photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can massively increase your power as a graphics designer. But it’s a lot to learn if you’ve never used a computer before
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day. And this seems to be like that. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John wrapping all this up, as I tried to emphasize last week and continues to be true. All right, well, so does
⏹️ ▶️ John that mean we once we just learn how to use AI at the things that it’s good at in a good way, and we aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John all forced to use it and and the hype, you know, the bubble bursts and the hype is gone. And we figure out what is it actually good for and what is it not
⏹️ ▶️ John good for? Everything will be fine. It’ll be smooth sailing. No, because there’s still absolutely the unresolved issue of
⏹️ ▶️ John how is it that these tools came into being and how are the sources of the power that they have drive being
⏹️ ▶️ John compensated? I think maybe this is a unrealistically optimistic view. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is plausible. To have an LM that
⏹️ ▶️ John is as useful as this thing, thing Steve Trout and Smith is using to, you know, be more
⏹️ ▶️ John productive and get more stuff done. That is entirely trained in an ethical
⏹️ ▶️ John way. In the same way that Adobe and Photoshop has that their their models are trained entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John on licensed images. Like so they paid for the images. They train them out on the images. They put that feature in Photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is a there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, a lot of people who wrote him with a feedback were like, I’m against AI
⏹️ ▶️ John in all forms because it’s just 100% evil. I think even they would agree like, like, okay, but what about the Adobe thing? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, right? They would say, no, you’re, you’re draining the deserts of all their water or whatever by you. It’s like, you’re not, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, you know, the energy usage of, of the AI feature in Photoshop is not significant in the grand
⏹️ ▶️ John scheme of human energy usage. And I think they’re, if they’re telling the truth, which I believe they are about only training
⏹️ ▶️ John their models on, on data that they owned or legally licensed. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s perfectly fine. And I think that is possible for coding agents
⏹️ ▶️ John right now. It’s not happening because, you know, even if you have like an MIT license open source thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John does the MIT license say anything about AI training? I bet it doesn’t because it didn’t exist when the MIT
⏹️ ▶️ John license was written. So even even the most permissive open source license probably doesn’t explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ John allow AI training. So it’s an open question. But you can imagine a future in which I know Stack Overflow is
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this. The Stack Overflow is essentially licensing their data to AI people. And I think people are grumpy about that, but legally,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, probably good ethically, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, Stack Overflow is dead with AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but the only asset they have are all their questions that people train the models on. So they’re selling those to, they’re selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m saying like that, like let them do whatever they need to survive right now, because I like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good place. Like, that’s not a good business to be in right now, because AI has is completely replacing
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but the AI, the AI coding agents could not exist at their current level without training on things like Stack Overflow.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they’re, you know, get well, the getting is good. But also So for open source projects, you can imagine a future in which licenses
⏹️ ▶️ John are made that say explicitly things about whether or not AI training is allowed and under what conditions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if that’s the case, I can imagine a future Adobe style coding agent that is entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John trained on license code that is, you know, licensed from SAC overflow, licensed from
⏹️ ▶️ John open source that explicitly allows us in a license. And I think what we’ve shown with current technology
⏹️ ▶️ John is coding agents can be useful productivity boost if you don’t think that
⏹️ ▶️ John they are completely replacing for everything and everybody has to use them. That’s, you know, like if, if you contain the hype and
⏹️ ▶️ John just look at what they’re actually good at, that is possible. Now I grant that’s not happening now. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John people are using these agents and they don’t care where they came from. Just like we don’t care where our food came from. We just eat it. If it tastes good, we’re happy with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And we don’t care that what terrible things happen to get this food to our, you know, like I it’s human nature
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, it’s the chief sound, Steve Troutman Smith to be excited by the fact that he made three apps in a day and did this this porting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you could never do before despite months of trying, and it gets done in an afternoon, as someone who’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John technology enthusiast, you’re gonna be excited about that. But people have to be, you know, it’s important
⏹️ ▶️ John to still remember that just because you’re excited about it and it did a cool thing, doesn’t mean every issue involved in this
⏹️ ▶️ John technology has been resolved because you have the good thing that you want. But I’m still hopeful about
⏹️ ▶️ John it because I agree with the promise of it. I agree that it can do great things in the right hands in limited circumstances.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think for coding specifically and not the entire universe of the rest of the things that people
⏹️ ▶️ John want AI to do, which is apparently mostly talking to it as a therapist, which is a whole other ball of wax. But anyway, for coding
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically, my personal experience has shown me that this is a powerful, useful tool that
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I could access in a much more ethical and also I would
⏹️ ▶️ John add cost-effective way. But even now, yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the challenge we face. And I think, like, I would try to give this kind of balanced picture of AI last
⏹️ ▶️ John time, but people tend to latch on to the part that they either do or don’t wanna hear about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the problem is it’s a complicated topic. Like I don’t agree with the people who say it’s 100% evil and we
⏹️ ▶️ John should stop it in all forms and never pursue it in any way. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I do agree with the people who say it still has problems and we should ignore those problems just because it’s doing something useful for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John The truth is what we just read, that it is great at certain things and there are a whole bunch of other
⏹️ ▶️ John problems that are unresolved and it’s currently a bubble and it’s being overhyped and there’s a lot of bad that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John come from it. But yeah, it’s a complex topic. I don’t know, what do you guys think? I know we all got a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of feedback about this. Like I only saw the feedback that like ATP got and I got, but did you specifically get any feedback you wanna address?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A little bit. So earlier today, I got my keister to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly start working on the iPad layout and call sheet, which has been trashed since call sheet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was around. And it’s been too long. I should have already taken care of it, but I hadn’t yet. And my first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut at this was, all right, let me use the 26.3 beta and let me ask, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Xcode agentic stuff via Claude. And I don’t recall what model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was on and I should have paid attention, I didn’t think about it. But let me ask it to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cast and crew list and call sheet, which right now on iPad is one column, which is awful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks terrible. It should at least be two columns, maybe. And I have some ideas from maybe something even more advanced than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. But my first cut was, hey, Can you just make this two column? And it took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of back and forths between me and, and Xcode, I guess, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Claude, or I don’t know how to describe this, how to verbalize this, but took a couple of back and forths and it got it to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that visually it was exactly what I wanted. And that only took, I don’t know, 10 ish minutes, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really was not long at all, but functionally it was a mess. And, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t, the particulars don’t matter, but suffice it to say, like it totally screwed up navigation. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things were hosed. And I’ve heard rumblings that, that these things don’t do too well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Swift UI. And the theory is in part because Swift UI is a moving target in part because it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new. Um, but one way or another, I can tell you that I was not exceedingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressed by that experience. And additionally, shoot, now I’m drawing a blank as to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it was, but there’s something else I had to do that was much less invasive. Golly, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just really going to drive me nuts because I can’t remember what specifically it was, but something in call sheet. And I wanted it to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, oh, I think I needed it to pump or to, to pipe a date from, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like high up in the, in the object graph to deep within the object graph and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the particulars are not that important, but I asked it to do that for me and it did,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it did it in a very clunky, very immature way. And as I dug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into what it was doing and what it had done to figure out, okay, is this really what I would have done? Is this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, was I saving myself rote work or was I, or am I punting on something that I should really have a think about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was quickly obvious to me that no, I punted on something that I should have had to think about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I could go back and forth and say, no, don’t do it that way. Do it this way. Or why did you choose that instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this and blah, blah, blah. And I could have done that. And there have been instances in less complicated topics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that’s worked out really, really well for me. But in this particular case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it didn’t give me the results I wanted. And I ended up for the piping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the object graph, I ended up doing that all by hand. And for the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, I had to put it away because I had other stuff I needed to do. I think I’ll probably take another stab at it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably tomorrow. But I get the vibe that I’m going to end up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going back and just rolling all of this by hand. hand because from this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular use case, I’m not trying to extrapolate to everything under the sun, but for me and call sheet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been okay. Like simple stuff, it can handle really well, but anything even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vaguely complicated, it’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s also the learning curve of using the tools. Like I said, if you, if you see the people who are more experienced at using
⏹️ ▶️ John these tools, it is actually a fairly complicated skill and that kind of leads to like the, okay, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the time investment in building up that skill and time required to essentially execute it. Like Steve Trout
⏹️ ▶️ John and so it’s posted. We don’t have a link to it, but maybe we can find it for if you follow the threads policy. He posted,
⏹️ ▶️ John what did I have to say to AI to make one of these apps that he made? And it was 77 different prompts, and they were
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly complicated. And it’s kind of like one of those things of like, like I said, if you’re like mentoring a new employee,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s faster if you just do it yourself. But like, yeah, but I’m mentoring a new employee. Well, you’re not mentoring an AI. They’re not learning from what
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re talking to. Like in general, like the model is the model until they Like, you know, it’s obviously you got your context
⏹️ ▶️ John window, but that’s basically it. So you have to think like, do I want to spend the time mentoring
⏹️ ▶️ John a box of numbers that is just going to be replaced by different boxes of numbers later? Um, or do I just want to do it myself?
⏹️ ▶️ John But still like the, there are, there are targeted instances when used by a skilled practitioner where it can do amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John things that were not possibly for, which is why people are excited about it. And one thing I’ll add to that, by the way, I still haven’t let these things touch
⏹️ ▶️ John any of my apps code. Not because my apps code is beautiful or anything, but just because. I don’t, I don’t know. I just don’t want to, or
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I don’t think I need to at this point. because I’m not doing, anyway, whatever. But I did find something
⏹️ ▶️ John to do because I’m trying to use up the last of my little $100 subscription, which I did cancel, by the way. Oh, good for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was trying to use, it’s gonna run out, it’s gonna expire soon, so I’m like, well, let me just use the last little bits of it. Here
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the things that I would recommend. If you ever wanna play with one of these things and you’re like, well, I’m not gonna learn how
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a Wrangler and use a coding agent to write my codes for me, it gets as complicated or whatever. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna try something, one of my suggestions would be, point it at your code base,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to at least figure out how to give it stern instructions to never to not modify your code at all. But it’s mostly good about that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it helps to just maybe put in a Claude that MD or whatever your equivalent is and say, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ever commit anything, don’t ever modify any files, you have read only, whatever. But just simply say this,
⏹️ ▶️ John find any bugs in this program. And it will find a bunch of crap that are not bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it will find some actual bugs, too. Even if it’s just a typo in a variable name, it will find them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, actually I did that with Claude code, not with the new beta. I did that with like a week ago with Claude code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and for the most part it was nothing that was that super duper important, but it definitely did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find some stuff and what, and what I did, I think I might’ve said this already. Apologies if I’m repeating myself, but I just cloned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the repo somewhere else. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this way, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then gave it its own little sandbox and let it run amok and I can choose to push that, you know, to main, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can choose to just leave it on my computer. No harm, no foul.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not asking you to fix the bugs. You’re just saying, find them. And like I said, it’s gonna find stuff that’s not bugs because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that smart, right? But it will find legit bugs. And the thing is, you can keep asking it, find any
⏹️ ▶️ John more bugs in this program, find any more bugs, find any performance issues, find any concurrency issues, find any memory safety
⏹️ ▶️ John issues. You phrase it 75 different ways, just keep asking it questions and asking it to point you to things. And all it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say is, I think this thing over here is wrong. And I think, and it’s gonna be wrong a lot of the time. It’s gonna be pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John to things that are not bugs, which is annoying, asking the open source maintainer who’s getting bug reports from
⏹️ ▶️ John AI that are just not bug reports. But for your own code, I as a programmer value
⏹️ ▶️ John very highly the ability to find even one bug out of like 10 things that it pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ John because hey, that’s one bug you didn’t know about before. And when you fix it, it’s gone. And when it can’t find
⏹️ ▶️ John any more legitimate bugs, does that mean there’s no more bugs in your program? Absolutely not. There’s always more bugs in your
⏹️ ▶️ John program. Like we’re programmers, we know there’s always more bugs. But this is one of the few tools
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ever seen, aside from like, you know, linters and memory safety protect checkers
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. Like all those things that are in Xcode can find like your Swift 6, you know, strict concurrency,
⏹️ ▶️ John finding places where there might be issues. This is like that. And I highly value tools like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope these tools find a way to continue to exist in some reasonable form so that they can be used even for that targeted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really quickly. I know we haven’t given Marco a chance to talk and I apologize, but as an example of something that worked out super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey duper well for me, I think at this point I was using chat GPT, but, uh, For various and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting reasons, I, I was exposed to an eight N like the letter N numeral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight letter N, which is a workflow like automation thing that you can self host.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I wanted to have a notification in the morning that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me what lamps thing the kids were doing. So that’s, um, shoot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, uh, library art, music, uh, shoot, I’m trying to forget, uh, sports, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No P and something else. I forget. Basically, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey special class they have each day. And this is actually a really complicated problem to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s not exposed anywhere by the school system or anything like that. And so I built an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey N8N mostly by asking ChatGPT to do stuff, a whole thing that will like go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and figure out what is the calendar for the school district? Do they have school today? Is it a half day?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do they have a snow delay? Or are they out because of snow? and based on such and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a like reference date count forward all the school days from that reference date to figure out okay this is day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number three which means Michaela has library and Declan has counseling and then send me a push notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 6 45 while we’re sitting down to breakfast so I can ask them how are you excited for library and counseling and so on and so forth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is dumb this is very Casey I get that you don’t need to make fun of me I am well aware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly this sounds awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right I’m saying like I would love this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid thing it’s a stupid because I could never frigging remember what their specials were each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day. And it’s driving me crazy. And so I built this thing, mostly with chat GPT, that will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help me do this and help me figure it out. And so I’m just sitting there at breakfast and then bloop, my phone says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, guess what? Declan has counseling or whatever I just said. And Mikhail has library. It doesn’t matter. You get the idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is actually, again, very complicated because you’re pulling in all these different pieces. And some of that is a testament
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to any to end, which is very cool and very, very weird, but very cool. But a lot of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was me saying to ChatGPT, hey, I’m targeting an 8n, can you write me a bunch of JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’ll plug into a node in an 8n that will do this thing? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly told it like, this is the step where I need you to parse out the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school calendar and tell me whether or not today is a school day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then the next node is, all right, given that today is a school day, count from this reference date and figure out how many school days there’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I forget exactly how it works. We get the idea, right? So I’m breaking down the major problem into micro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems and having Chad GPT figured out and it took some back and forth, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is freaking cool and it solves a problem for me. So in the one breath I’ll tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Kahlschied, I’ve had not great luck for the most part. I had some good moments, but not great luck. But for the Sun 8N
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, it was freaking amazing. So I don’t even know what I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it right now. Leaving aside the ethics, leaving aside the environmental impacts, just as like a tool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely like it, but I’m not sure, I can’t figure out how much of this is overblown and how much isn’t.
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AI coding, continued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve said a lot and I apologize Marco, please interrupt me start talking so I don’t keep talking for the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You got it. You can always count on me So the way John let off earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is correct. This is all Correct in some ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a great interview on strategory a few days back with Benedict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Evans and Ben Thompson and And one of the, they were talking about like, you know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will AI replace all of these like SaaS product companies? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their argument and Benedict Evans’ argument was no, because you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most apps really are, especially a lot of business apps, but like what most apps really are, you think about like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, what is something like Salesforce? So you know, it’s, they’re basically like databases with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front ends. And like, that’s what almost, that’s a huge amount of software is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a database with a front end. A huge amount of other software is basically a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spreadsheet, but custom. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spreadsheets and databases came out and were made available with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personal computer revolution, they were very disruptive to a lot of jobs that came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before them. Ask accountants, or rather ask calculators,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or computers, what were they actually called, computers? The people who spreadsheets made their job a lot less necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also we still have accounts and we still have people doing a lot of these jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we still have a lot of products that exist that are basically databases or customized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spreadsheets, despite everyone having access to database tools and spreadsheet tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their argument was basically like, you know, AI is going to be a component of lots of software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s not going to replace the need for software. And I think that’s probably correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a little bit different than those in the breadth of the types of problems it covers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the nature with which it solves them. Being kind of non-deterministic is a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unusual in the computing world. Let’s just say unreliable. And certainly when you’re looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco businesses using AI in business roles, one of the biggest challenges is this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is constantly changing. And so you can build a business process around calling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chat GPT API or something. But next month, whatever you built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will break because something will change. GPT 5.5 or 6.0 comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and all of a sudden the integration you built, it works differently and now you have to rebuild it. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be a lot of that tumult for a while, for a long time. I think there will always be value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the market for customized software, the same way there always has been value for it, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have spreadsheets and databases and they can build their own. However, one major difference with AI is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are making the construction of these things even easier than it was before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think to software developers, this is probably on the level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, like the jump when we went from assembly code to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compiled code and higher level languages, that was a major jump in programmer productivity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can draw a lot of parallels to that. It isn’t a perfect analogy, but you can draw a lot of parallels to that kind of jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with AI, where I do think that the era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of kind of hand-customizing really nice code that you’re making yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be commercially in the past. Now, the same way, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are a custom furniture maker, there’s still a market for custom furniture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can be a really good woodworker and you can make really nice custom wood furniture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people. But most people’s furniture is not custom made. Most people’s furniture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is large scale made by machines and flat packed into boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Ikea or whatever. That made it a lot more affordable for a lot of people, which is good. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were a furniture maker, it’s like, well, hmm, the market just got a lot smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once power tools and automation and factories started taking over that business. You know, the AI revolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here with code generation in particular is that kind of moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for custom software. Now, the good news is most software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most code that most people write is shuffling stuff around in a database
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a spreadsheet or something similar. Most code that most people write is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring and really simple. And that is easy to automate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’re finding. That is a major shift, but not unreasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And certainly the industry can survive that. It does change things. It’s gonna keep changing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. But most code that most people write in most apps most of the time is really boring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that is now much easier to automate. The more difficult code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is for a little while at least, I mean, maybe forever, but probably not forever, for a little while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more difficult code or more high-level problems will still be generally better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done by humans. But that’s probably not gonna last that long. I mean, we’ve had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI tools for basically zero time and they’re already really good. Where are they gonna be in five years?
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if they’re gonna plateau like the other uses. I got some pushback last episode saying that the chat interface
⏹️ ▶️ John had plateaued but it actually is continuing to advance. Not plateaued as in flatlined, but the rate of advancement is much slower
⏹️ ▶️ John for those things than it is. Right, and so, like, I mean, the one thing about the coding thing is I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seen the rate of advancement slowing yet. Surely it will at some point, because unless we have some other advance,
⏹️ ▶️ John because these things don’t scale forever, right? But, you know, the line is still
⏹️ ▶️ John going up. And as for your analogy with like assembly versus C and stuff, a couple of things to
⏹️ ▶️ John say on that. One, when we went from like assembly to like higher level languages,
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, that resulted in tremendously more programmers and tremendously
⏹️ ▶️ John more code because it became more accessible. Doing stuff in assembly is
⏹️ ▶️ John work that is only possible by a much smaller subset of people because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so fiendishly difficult and unforgiving. There’s a reason we made higher level languages and when we did,
⏹️ ▶️ John things became easier. Manual memory management is more difficult than not having to do
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, manual memory management. In the days when we had to do manual memory management in C and you were allocating
⏹️ ▶️ John and freeing everything, there were fewer programmers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. Let me jump in right there. You’re exactly right. But just in case you’re not familiar, I forget that not everyone that listens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this program is a developer. So assembly language is, and John will correct my piss poor analogy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, but my definition here, but assembly language is basically a hop, skip and a jump from ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and zeros. Like it is as close as you can get to actually telling the CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the processor, I would like you to add these two numbers and put the result in this piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of memory right here. Like it’s very low level and you have to think about a bunch of junk that the three of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t generally have to think about. And so that’s what makes it like you have to be the right kind of weirdo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John development. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to do complicated things because you’re thinking about so much stuff and every time you can remove things that you have to worry about,
⏹️ ▶️ John what has happened is not that like, I will now pro every pro every programmer was an an assembly programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John at one point. Like that was back in the day, there were no high level languages. There was just assembly or even before that machine
⏹️ ▶️ John code where you’re literally writing ones and zeros, which I have done and it’s not fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably on a piece of paper at that point or a punch card, but anyway. And it’s like, oh, all these people are gonna be out
⏹️ ▶️ John of business because now Pascal exists and you can just write words and you’re not writing assembly instructions and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like portable across different architectures. And so your skills of knowing this particular CPU assembly code, that’s worthless.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re out of a job. There’s not gonna be any more programmers. just every time there has been an advancement in the
⏹️ ▶️ John art of programming, it has produced, it has resulted in us having more programs and more
⏹️ ▶️ John programmers. And I don’t think that will be any different with this new tool. We will have more programs
⏹️ ▶️ John and more programmers. It’s just that what we call a programmer will be, you know, it’s like, well, they’re not a programmer. They’re just prompting
⏹️ ▶️ John an AI. I was like, well, they’re not a programmer. They’re just using C. It does all the stuff for you. You don’t, you don’t, you have to know where the
⏹️ ▶️ John run, they don’t even know what the registers are. They don’t even know what CPU they’re running on. They don’t even know who’s allocating memory. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John a garbage collector is going to come clean up for you. that must be nice. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey has always happened
⏹️ ▶️ John in every higher level language. Now, obviously this is different because those are all deterministic advances. This is a non-deterministic. So I’m just saying this is an
⏹️ ▶️ John additional tool in our toolbox in the same way that having like, I don’t know, linters or a tool
⏹️ ▶️ John linters are not a thing that is a hundred are a hundred percent accurate and they cite things that aren’t actually problems or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you just use them as a tool to try to make programming more accessible and let us do a better job. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as for your furniture analogy, which I think is a good one, but I would say that we have long since been
⏹️ ▶️ John in the age of manufactured furniture, before LLMs. Like forget about LLMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John We went from the handcrafted furniture age into the mass-produced junky furniture age,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably in the 80s. You’re talking about in code, just to be clear. If you’ve ever worked for a
⏹️ ▶️ John big company and seen the code behind your favorite product, it looks a hell of a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John more like something stapled together in a crappy factory than it does like a handcrafted,
⏹️ ▶️ John beautifully turned, solid wood thing made by artisan craftsmen. Like the only place that exists
⏹️ ▶️ John today, forget about AI. The only place that exists today before AI was in small
⏹️ ▶️ John teams, in small startups. And even then, only if you’re lucky. Any big program
⏹️ ▶️ John does not look like that. Like, maybe it started off as a beautiful hand turned,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, hand assembled carved piece of furniture made by artisans, but it doesn’t stay
⏹️ ▶️ John that way. and success makes it look a lot more like, it’s like, imagine an Ikea
⏹️ ▶️ John sofa, not Ikea, because I don’t want to slam them. Imagine like some mass produced sofa held together with staples, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the size of Manhattan. That’s like the program, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s running Salesforce right now. And into that fray, you throw one more tool, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John this, you know, LLMs that can help you out with your coding process or whatever. And honestly, I don’t think it changes
⏹️ ▶️ John the nature of the product. It is still a stapled together sofa the size of Manhattan. is just that people aren’t manually
⏹️ ▶️ John putting the staples in anymore. And who knows? Maybe if this stuff continues to advance, we’ll be able to shape that down
⏹️ ▶️ John into something that looks closer to that hand assembled piece of furniture. But characterizing
⏹️ ▶️ John the pre L.M. age as we were all hand making these beautiful turned pieces of things on our lathes
⏹️ ▶️ John is not fair. We’re even even my dinky little programs are not that. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John have like 30,000 lines of code like it. So that’s why we programmers are out here are excited by this, because,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if I can find a tool that will find me one additional bug that it couldn’t find before, that tool has value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what we will see here is going to be very similar to those other advances. You know, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those other advances came around, when we had higher level languages, well, you know, every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had programmers, I’ve been one of them. You’ve had programmers who have said, I’m going to keep doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it the old way, either because I like it better, or because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I can do a better job or there’s some, you know, my code will perform better or you know, whatever it is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, all of those advantages for all of those steps, memory management,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compiled optimizations or you know, assembly optimizations, over time, all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those advantages have been erased by other benefits or by just the sheer performance of the higher level tools.
⏹️ ▶️ John Except perhaps that you liking it better because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. And so that’s why I think handwriting all of your code without having AI generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of it for you is going to be like having a woodworking hobby.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you can do it, and if you love coding, if you love the craft of it, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the process of it, you can still do that. But if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this as a job, it’s gonna become increasingly difficult for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be competitive and relevant in that world if you’re not using these higher level tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s been true with all those other advances, and that’s going to be true here too. The promise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though here is that this is a bigger jump than any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those have been in certain ways, not in every way, but in certain ways, it’s a bigger jump.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the real promise of AI is not that it’s going to replace all of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although I do have concerns about junior level programmers coming up in the industry right now. I think that could be challenging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them, but we’ll see, you know, it’ll shake out.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have some questions about that in a future episode. So we will talk about that. I know people have sent in a lot of stuff on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and we’ll see how that shakes out. I mean, odds are they’ll be just using these tools like everyone else. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the value here is, is not that we can replace all of the code that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can and should write with AI. It’s that we can replace a lot of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we can have it do a lot of things for us that don’t require perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behavior all the time, that don’t require super high skill levels or super high complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels yet. We can have it do a ton of tasks that right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either burden us, things like writing tests. Maybe this will actually get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to write tests. Marco’s gonna bring out the test. Some people like writing tests, you know. Some people like writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code. I love writing code. Anyway, so there’s a lot of stuff that right now is a burden to us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that AI will be able to take off of our hands. So that’s a huge advance right there. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secondly from that, what John was saying earlier about how, as programmer productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has increased, we’ve had the need for more programmers. The reason why that’s happened is as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making software has gotten cheaper, more people have employed it to solve problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that weren’t worth doing when it was really expensive. But when it got dramatically cheaper, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those problems became worth doing with software.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey just did it with his N8N thing. It was not worth doing if he had to write all that code himself. and now
⏹️ ▶️ John that he has a tool that can help him, suddenly it becomes worth doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a status board and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a show bot. And the reason, or a tier list maker rather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John why is because we,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like now, things that were never worth making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before might be worth making. Many of them will be worth making. So first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great for basically every business and every hobbyist, like, because we can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make stuff now. And as programmers, I don’t know a single programmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who loves this craft, who doesn’t have a bunch of ideas they’re never gonna get to. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get to a bunch of them. And that can be entire products, it can be little things that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help you, or it can be like, you know, the kind of side apps that help you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your other stuff. I know our friend underscore David Smith wrote about it recently on Mastodon, how he’s made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side apps to help his business, like admin control things or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John tools. Internal
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas, just mini apps to try out ideas for things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just things to kind of help automate something that like no one else but you is gonna need this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need it. You know, I have tools like that. I have like shell scripts I’ve written to do things. I have so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many little tools like that. And what AI can do is also make a lot of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that just weren’t worth making before, all of a sudden worth making. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the major thing it can do, in addition to those other two major things, another major thing it can do, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can keep working when you’re not. So you can have it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what John was saying, go find bugs in my app. You can have it do that every night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while you’re asleep or doing anything else. You can have it, you can assign it a task and be like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go explore these different options for this problem I’m having or this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea I have. Go explore that, and then you can come back the next morning and see what it found and go through it. There’s already people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are doing this with great success playing with things like Cloud Code, let me just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it some grunt work because it doesn’t care that you’re giving it grunt work. You can give it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same grunt work every single night. When it brings you six solutions in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the morning, you can say, all six of those suck, give me six more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not gonna get upset or quit because it’s not a person. Think about what this opens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. You can have an assistant doing a bunch of grunt work that cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you almost nothing, and you don’t have to worry about like, are they miserable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this? Because they’re not a person. That’s a huge opportunity for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people like developers who are gonna be able to harness this. Think of all the different grunt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work you can do. And the biggest challenge to using these tools is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installing the software, it’s not paying for the 20 or 100 bucks a month. The biggest challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for existing professionals in the field like us to use these tools is that we won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of what to ask them to do. That’s the hardest part. We need to think of things to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to assign them. Young people won’t have this problem. As young people come into the industry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna have grown up with these tools. They won’t have the preconceived notions of where the walls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are that we have. They’ll just try a bunch of stuff and a lot of it will work. That’s the challenge for people like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, like us elder programmers. is that like we need to jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this world and start getting ideas for what to have them do. By the way, if you want something that can generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of ideas for you for free, LLMs are really good for that. So you can literally go to ChatGPT
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Gemini or Clawd and you can say, give me 20 ideas for what I can have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Clawd code or Codex or whatever, what I can have it do in my existing code base or a new code base that I am not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking of. You can literally have it tell you, because you know what AI is really good for? brainstorming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because AI is a BS generator and that’s what brainstorming is, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BS. So you can have it tell you how to use it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can then at that point say, eh, these don’t sound very good, give me 50 more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will happily give you 50 more and you can keep doing that because it’s not human.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s the kind of enabling thoughts that we have to start training ourselves to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have if we’re not going to get marginalized over time. And again, like it’s hard for like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the posts mentioned earlier that kind of hit me hard was the morning of our craft that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it does kind of feel like our craft is kind of dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I do feel like I have built up all these skills that are rapidly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becoming marginalized in large ways. I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John that at all. I don’t know. We don’t know. We’re not talking about that post, but I understand the sentiment where it’s coming from, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if you’ve ever seen anyone use these tools to great effect, you need every single one of the skills that I’ve gained
⏹️ ▶️ John as a professional programmer for 25 years. Like those were all absolutely, because if you think they’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John give one of these tools to someone who’s not a programmer and have them build an app and they can do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s gonna be bad because they don’t know, like the skills, like the skills of the programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John are not knowing what words to type. Like you learn, as you advance in your career and you learn multiple languages, you
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually learn that, yeah, that is valuable to be an expert in a particular language or know the details of any particular API.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the real skills of a programmer is not at the level of languages or API’s or whatever the real skills
⏹️ ▶️ John of a programmer at much higher level of how to organize programs, how to how to address complexity, how to solve problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, the LMS can help a little bit with that. But humans are just so far so much farther ahead of them at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point. So I don’t I understand what they’re saying. I mourn my craft. I want to write all my code myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I think I feel like the skills that I’m most proud of are not the skills that involve
⏹️ ▶️ John me typing particular API calls.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to call back very quickly to something that Marco said a minute ago, which I think is important. And I don’t think I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explicit about and I would like to plus one what Marco said, that n 8 n thing that I was talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could have done that. There is no freaking chance I would have wasted the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to do it, even though it would have made me happy, even though it would have been useful even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though I’m more than capable of achieving it, it would have taken me hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just, I don’t think I would ever look at that task and be like, yes, this is worth hours of my time rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing actual work or things that are actually productive. You know, put the quote, scare quotes wherever you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no chance I would have done that. And what I think is unquestionably incredibly powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in freeing, for lack of a better about LLMs and the ability they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to write code specifically is that these sorts of things, those things like underscores doing like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had said in this n8n thing and the tier list thing, you absolutely could have written that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tier list, John, as you have said previously, but would you have bothered? Probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean evidence is was that I didn’t even though
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I exactly even though I just
⏹️ ▶️ John like the other site I just kept using the crappy one that was there just because it didn’t take any time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right and so I think and you guys have each said this in your own way, but I just really want to plus one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it that that that is what’s so powerful to me about these LLMs and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agentic coding or vibe coding, whatever you want to call it this week. I think that’s incredibly powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and incredibly freeing. And I don’t think that’s limited to professional software developers. But I think that we are, to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point a moment ago, perhaps uniquely good at leveraging them for these sorts of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I didn’t, we didn’t address the entire world of things that LLMs can do. But we are in a position
⏹️ ▶️ John to understand to correctly assess how valuable are these tools for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John programming tasks. Like that’s why I decided to see Troughton Smith. Like he’s not a dummy, he’s a good programmer. The more you know
⏹️ ▶️ John about programming, like I feel like you can trust his opinion. This tool was useful for him.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how useful it is for other people in other industries or whatever. I feel like there’s lots of places that alarms are super
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible and are not gonna be helpful at all. But in this narrow, very narrow instance of using it in a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John way for particular things for our profession, we can say that it does useful things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like and you know, Casey, you were just saying a minute ago, like, you know, whether it’s called, you know, vibe coding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or agentic coding. Well in three months, it’s just going to be called coding.
⏹️ ▶️ John what coding is. I don’t know if it’s going to happen in three months. You’re very, you’re very optimistic class pessimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like it. I feel like I’m the momento mori guy, you know, that’s if I’m remembering correctly the person who
⏹️ ▶️ John would walk behind like the the Emperor of Rome or whatever as he goes on his parade and everyone celebrates
⏹️ ▶️ John him and remind him that he’s mortal that he’s he’s gonna die, just behind them whispering that thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like I’m the same way, I guess Marco said, here’s the only problems. The only problems we have with AI are like, figuring out what to ask it and all
⏹️ ▶️ John these other things, young people who better at it. I didn’t say that was the only
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear. Well, the problems that we were gonna have with it, but I just wanted to remind everybody. I mean, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re still even in the Uber phase of this, where Uber had this amazing service where you could get a car to come to you, and they were just running
⏹️ ▶️ John at a loss for years and years, until they could drive all the taxi companies out of business. But actually, the money we were paying
⏹️ ▶️ John for an Uber ride was not paying for enough to cover the costs of the company and the drivers. Remember all
⏹️ ▶️ John those years, right? And start coming out of those years, like now that we’ve killed the taxi companies, we can start turning up the price.
⏹️ ▶️ John The prices we’re currently paying for this are not covering the costs of the
⏹️ ▶️ John services we are receiving. Now, in theory, unlike the Uber drivers, which are kind of intractable,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s humans, there’s cars, and well, setting aside, but self-driving. In theory, the cost curve
⏹️ ▶️ John on inference and training will go down or whatever. We’ll see how that goes. It’s technology that’s trying to drive the cost down,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada. But then of course, there’s the whole ethical, legal and moral problem, which is, how did
⏹️ ▶️ John these things come into being by, you know, consuming all this content without permission? And
⏹️ ▶️ John where do the benefits of that go? Oh, they go directly to open AI and not to all the people from whom they took the content.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, well, how is how are all the lawsuits from the New York Times and Disney and Paramount and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we don’t know how that’s going to go. Like, it’s very easy to get caught up into the amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing these tools can do for you. and forget about, uh, is this sustainable?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this affordable? Is this ethical? Will this create a world in which, uh, the things required
⏹️ ▶️ John to train these models are no longer being produced? And it’s like a death spiral of disincentivization
⏹️ ▶️ John where everyone just wants to use the models, but there’s nothing for the models to train on except for the stuff that the models put out and it just gets worse and worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know. That is still unsolved despite all these things. But the whole point of this whole big thing, we keep going around
⏹️ ▶️ John in circles. I know people hear this and they hear Marco talking to like, Marco thinks there’s no problems and everyone should love AI and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do muscle and like It’s all of this. It’s all the good things and it’s all the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John things. It’s a complicated issue. It’s not simple I personally think it’s not as simple as
⏹️ ▶️ John no one should ever use AI and it’s not good for anything I don’t think it’s that simple and it’s also not as simple as
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the future. We’re all gonna be doing this surrender and you’ll be happy. I don’t think it’s that either
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s somewhere in between those extremes and everyone can decide where they think it is but I think we should
⏹️ ▶️ John be all be working to try to figure out like, that’s why I’m, I’m racking my brain thinking, is it possible
⏹️ ▶️ John like these tools are useful, I want to use them. But is it possible to get a tool like this? Where, where it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t destroy the world of open source software, for example, like, is there a way to like, can we
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, you know, licensing the Stack Overflow stuff? Legally, probably fine. Ethically,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the people who contributed who didn’t never foresaw this. And so it’s not great. But like going forward open
⏹️ ▶️ John source, can we change the licenses so that people can decide if they want to to allow their open source stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to be used for training. If they did that, it would make for a model that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think more people would feel comfortable reusing. Or on the macro side of things is, well, nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John cares about how ethical things are. We all buy shoes made by children in third world countries
⏹️ ▶️ John and nobody thinks about it. And I think some people do think about it and I don’t want to reproduce that in another industry. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, let’s say, it’s a complicated issue. In summary, AI is a land of contrast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and again, like, and a lot of those are very valid concerns and questions. My position is simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, A, there’s huge utility to be had, so we can’t just write it off, and B, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not putting the genie back in the bottle. So you know, one thing that I was concerned about was, you know, as I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, thinking about using these tools myself, I thought, well, I’m not going to let it near overcast code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, among other things, overcast code contains pretty sophisticated audio processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithms that I’ve written that took me a year to develop. And I put a lot of work into all the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the voice boost and smart speed algorithms and everything to make mine work really well and sound really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good and be very sophisticated technically. And I thought, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want any of these apps to like to find that and send it to their servers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter what I say, what if they’re going to train on that? And then anybody else can make… They absolutely are. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so here’s the thing though. So I thought of that and I had that concern. I’m not going to let this near my code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then I realized like, it’s going to be you can probably already today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to any of these agents or go to any chatbot and say, generate me some Swift code to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, this kind of processing on audio and make it sound really good. And what else should I be looking at? What are their algorithms?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What other techniques should I be using to make to achieve these things to make them sound good, and it will generate it for you. I know this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have done that with other types of algorithms. I have asked chat GPT or Gemini or Claude to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generate me code to do some kind of relatively… I even asked it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s the kind of problem trying to solve what algorithm should I be looking at and it’ll give me a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overview of six different algorithms to solve this problem which what trade-offs of each ones are what the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is and then I’ll say do you want me to generate this for you in Swift? I’ll say yeah sure and then it generates it for me in Swift and I think there’s no way this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to work and I try and it works. Already the value of of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco proprietary custom techniques and tricks that you do is plummeting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should be really upset about that. And on some level, that is kind of a shame. But also on another level,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this other problem I was trying to solve, I just got the answer and I get to move on. That’s incredibly powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there’s all these different algorithms that like, you know, problems that I’m trying to solve, I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have figured out the algorithm to do it the sophisticated way. It would have taken me a day or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and I might have gotten the algorithm wrong, and I might have had weird bugs as a result,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I might do something in a relatively straightforward naive approach that might have a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficient algorithm that I’m not gonna ever think of or know about, but the AI knows about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AI code is not only giving me the potential to make faster performing code by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving more sophisticated algorithms that cover more things with fewer bugs, but also it’s allowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to make things faster because I’m not having to implement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these tricky lines of code myself. I can actually have it generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the really complex, hairy parts of these kinds of things, and then I can move on, and I can work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on higher value tasks. And so it’s taking over some of those really tricky things, it’s taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over some of the low-end stuff, and some of the shuffling around data code. It’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco win for programmers. We will be the people who stand to win the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most from using these tools are, as John was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experienced, good programmers. We stand to win the most here. It’s a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value creator for us. So ideally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you are done mourning, and I think that’s a process that we’re all going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through, once you’re done mourning, jump in. I’m not mourning. I’m mourning, but I’m also gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I just simply don’t believe the argument in that article. Like I don’t think there’s really that much to mourn, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anyway. I mean, it’s time for my momentum or anything. You were mentioning like, considering whether you should
⏹️ ▶️ John allow this thing to look your overcast code and deciding eventually you should just do so. It’s nice that you got to make that decision. It didn’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John take the code without your knowledge or consent, which is the situation for every other piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of code that’s in that model, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You are correct and also it’s irrelevant.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think it’s entirely relevant, but when people only hear Marko’s opinion on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently and everything I say doesn’t count. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway, oh yeah, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco let me assure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you that could not be further from the
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you ever read the email? I swear to you, if you listen to the feedback from last episode, everyone was yelling at me about
⏹️ ▶️ John things Marco said. We are three different people. I have a different position on this stuff, but it is a complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John issue. Like I’m saying, there’s no one simple answer. Like if that, I’m not saying that I don’t discount that person’s morning articles.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how a lot of people are really feeling like, but the main point I want to get across with all of this, with all this back and forth, all these things
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it actually is complicated and not simply black and white. And every time
⏹️ ▶️ John I see someone extreme in either position, it just makes me think that they’re not interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John that. They don’t, they don’t know enough about the topic because it actually is fairly complicated. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it’s something that we’re all going to have to grapple with. Um, and again, this is just in the narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John realm of programming, which is a tiny corner of the world of things that people are using chat,
⏹️ ▶️ John TPT for. So yeah, we’ve got a challenge ahead of us. Hopefully it’s not like nuclear weapons, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the version of that that does not destroy the entire planet.
Component shortages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One final note on the AI stuff, and I know this has been going on and I’m sorry, but you also wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to call out that AI hardware use and the fact that it’s slurping up, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these LLM vendors are slurping up all the hardware in the world, has had some real-world implications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far in a lot of different ways. But perhaps most recently, the Steam Machine and Steam Frame
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are delayed because of AI-driven RAM and storage shortages and price increases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From Valve, when we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and growing prices of these critical components mean that we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing, especially around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steam Machine and Steam Frame.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is part of the reason people hate AI, because they’re like, the thing I wanted isn’t going to get here because AI is stealing all the chips to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell people, to have a little Eliza bot tell people about their feelings, which is apparently what the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ John of the millions and millions of people who use AI every day are doing with it. And lots Lots of people think that is both
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good idea and bad for people and a waste of electricity and time and resources.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now I can’t get my steam machine. So again, anti-AI sentiment, like I get where it comes from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not frivolous. They’re not against AI because they’re just mean and someone is paying
⏹️ ▶️ John them to be against AI. People, there’s a lot of things not in AI’s favor,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially since it’s like huge amounts of VC and all the benefits going to these small number of companies
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re doing things in an unsustainable way and when this bubble pops, it’s going to destroy all our retirement accounts and all
⏹️ ▶️ John that terrible stuff. And yet none of that and yet none of that negates the fact that it actually
⏹️ ▶️ John can do some useful things in a tiny subset of stuff. And I think we as a people should find a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John extract the good while avoiding as much of the bad as we can.
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Jony Ive’s Ferrari interior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve known for a while that Ferrari is going to be making an EV. I don’t think we knew that the interior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going to be designed by love from.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Which you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John We did know that. And we know in one of the dumbest ways, which I think I would comment that on this show, like
⏹️ ▶️ John months ago, someone was doing like some Johnny Ive interview and they mentioned it in an offhanded manner that Johnny Ive
⏹️ ▶️ John was working on a Ferrari steering wheel. And I think it was like a New Yorker story. I think I remember commenting on the
⏹️ ▶️ John show like, the fact that that’s in this article, what are they
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about? Cause the Ferrari steering wheels of the time sucked. So I’m like, that surely can’t be a Johnny Ive
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but did he just out Johnny Ive and the fact they’re working with Ferrari or have they already worked with Ferrari?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just forgot about it until this came back. I’m like, oh, this is the thing that guy spoiled like a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey year and a half ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job, dude. So this is the Ferrari Luce, I would assume.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, good. I’m one for a million. But anyway, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is their first EV. And I guess a couple of months back or something like that, they announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of the tech behind it, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the drive train.
⏹️ ▶️ John They showed the whole chassis with nothing, just the chassis, the motors, the battery, but no
⏹️ ▶️ John other part of the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now in the last week, we’ve seen a lot of the cabin. Not a full cabin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind you, but a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the interfaces. They would never show you the full
⏹️ ▶️ John cabin. Why would they do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But we’ve seen the interfaces, the steering wheel, the center display.
⏹️ ▶️ John Next month, we’re going to see a headlight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Wait, you might be serious. Are you serious? No, I’m not serious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John OK. Because the way they’ve been rolling this out, I didn’t know. I mean, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can read the little blurb from The Verge. It summarizes it well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So reading from The Verge, Ferrari released the first interior images of the company’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first all-electric supercar called the Ferrari Luce, which is light in Italian. This is the second time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Italian automaker has teased the Luce, which was formerly the Elettrica. I hope I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that right. Without showing us the actual car or even a silhouette. but the interior images should suffice given the bold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey face name of the designer, Johnny Ive. Ferrari decided to outsource the work of designing Lucce’s interior to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ive and his partner, Mark Newsome, who together run the design shop, LoveFrom. Ferrari and LoveFrom have been quietly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collaborating for five years, and Lucce is the first time we’re seeing the results.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The tech underpinnings were revealed last year in Italy. The exterior will debut in May of 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a timeline for you. We’ll eventually see the car, but this is the weirdest car rollout
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve ever seen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s going to show us the chassis, then pieces of the interior, and then in 2026, we’ll show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I would like to just state right up front, I watched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fascinating video by Jordan Golson from PRDNDL, which is Park, Reverse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neutral, Drive, Low. Anyways, I’d not heard of that publication before, but this dude was really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good and did a 20-minute video walking through all the different pieces, which they did in the, what is it, the Transamerica
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in San Francisco, somewhere in San Francisco.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was basically like the reason you’re seeing this. There’s a Web page of Ferrari, but also Love From did basically press like
⏹️ ▶️ John they invited press to come into this room where they show all the things. It’s very much like an Apple press event where everything’s set up on little tables
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. And you can you know, and they have to talk to the creators. And, you know, it’s it’s a very Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so Jordan has a video, which I definitely recommend. Also, a blog post, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer that. Ferrari’s website actually is really, really good. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoyed looking through that. I had a bunch of photos and whatnot. Um, I’m going to come out right out and say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I’m so sorry, John. I really like it. I think it looks really
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know why you’re apologizing to me, but like, like here, the second I saw this, I knew
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what I thought of it, but I’m like, well, hold off. Maybe you just haven’t. And then I watched all the videos and all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And just my opinion got stronger and stronger. And it’s, it’s founded in, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember we talked about CarPlay, Ultra, whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think I think it was just CarPlay Ultra. We talked about it a lot and trying to figure out what’s the deal with this where Apple takes over
⏹️ ▶️ John all the screens in your car and you have to collaborate with the car vendor and they have a way to customize it or whatever. I’m like, how is this going to
⏹️ ▶️ John work? And do car vendors want their their car? Like, how are they going to make it look like Aston Martin or like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John company and stuff? And the pitch for directly from Apple’s mouth of what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with CarPlay Ultra is we have this product. And if you use this product, the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole idea is we will make something that is a blend of your brand
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple’s brand. So 50-50, I guess, maybe Apple would think,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, but like, that’s the pitch. The inside of your car with CarPriyUltra will be half
⏹️ ▶️ John you and half Apple. It’ll be our child together. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mix our genetic material, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This Ferrari interior, made by LoveFrom, is half Ferrari
⏹️ ▶️ John and half LoveFrom. And I think that’s wrong. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the Ferrari interior should be 100% Ferrari and that a designer
⏹️ ▶️ John should say, we will find a way to make the most Ferrari interior you have ever
⏹️ ▶️ John seen. But when I look at this, I say, this is not a 100% Ferrari interior. This is a 50% Love From interior
⏹️ ▶️ John and a 50% Ferrari interior. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the approach I think that you should take with this interior. And worse, love
⏹️ ▶️ John from is very different from Ferrari in terms of what are the adjectives
⏹️ ▶️ John that you would use to describe that. Like it’s not harmonious. This does not look
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Ferrari interior. This looks like an Apple car interior that Ferrari
⏹️ ▶️ John drove by and splashed a bunch of paint over to make it look kind of, and some logos
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it look like Ferrari. And I find that fairly heartbreaking. But I will say though,
⏹️ ▶️ John the chassis and everything, You can see this is a four seat car. So let’s be honest, it’s probably just going to be some stupid Ferrari SUV that
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care about. But yeah, probably. But you know, like it’s I it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s heartbreaking to me because there’s a lot of beautiful design in this and a lot of beautiful work that is
⏹️ ▶️ John like you look at it, if you’re if you’re just familiar with Johnny Ive you know, like they have so many Apple designers
⏹️ ▶️ John there. You look at this and you’re like, yep, nope, they did. That’s the thing. That’s what Johnny Ive does. There’s rounded rectangles,
⏹️ ▶️ John beautifully machined parts. There’s aluminum, there’s glass, there’s clever ideas, there’s attention to detail. there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff. It’s too damn bad it doesn’t look like a Ferrari interior.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get that. I really do. And I think part of the reason I don’t mind that is because I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the unabashed love for Ferrari that you do. Not to say that I dislike Ferraris. I mean, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really good. Oh, and to be clear, recent Ferrari interiors have been terrible. But they’ve been terrible in a Ferrari way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I mean, to me, it’s kind of like, if this were a Lamborghini,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think trades on the fact that it’s weird and loud and obnoxious.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s a perfectly precise example I was going to do. Lamborghini. Give me some adjectives to describe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey interior or exterior.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Loud, obnoxious, angular, you know…
⏹️ ▶️ John Angry, dangerous. Yep, yep. Evil.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Maybe. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Lamborghini’s styling and brand. Inside of Lamborghinis look like the inside of a freaking Transformer from the
⏹️ ▶️ John Michael Bay Transformer movies. The outside looks like them too, right? That, for you like it or hate it,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the Countach for crying out loud. That’s the brand. Can you imagine, and Ferrari is
⏹️ ▶️ John not that exact same thing, but like this interior has no danger, has no
⏹️ ▶️ John menace, has no sexiness to it. No
⏹️ ▶️ John sensual Italian sexiness. Like it’s a Ferrari. This looks like inside of an electric Fiat
⏹️ ▶️ John with Ferrari logos on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. I think the reality is between you and me. I don’t, I think you’re not giving it enough credit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t necessarily disagree with your thesis. It definitely does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have that, what is it, joie de vivre? I don’t speak
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a love child of Love From and Ferrari, but Love From’s genes dominate him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does, but I got to tell you, I really think they did a good job with it. Let’s leave aside the fact that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Ferrari, if you can divorce yourself of that piece of knowledge. I think it’s really well done. So the way this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works is there’s a screen behind the steering wheel, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re calling the binnacle. I presume that’s a common term. I’ve not heard it in this context before.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just blame Love From for coming
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey up with this term. Oh, sure. But the binnacle
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a Love From term. It is in the car industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the binnacle has three gauges, which are their screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The gauges are screens, but they might that. I don’t know if this one does or not, but there’s other gauges that have physical
⏹️ ▶️ John The center dial has a physical hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. Dial thing. Yeah, yeah. And then around the three gauges is a screen, but it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really well integrated. But the point is there’s a mixture, at least some modicum, of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physicality to it. And then the steering wheel has the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flattened bottom, which is John’s favorite thing in the world. There are no stalks. The turn signals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, it’s a T steering wheel or a three-spoke wheel. turn signals are inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the spokes that that go laterally. Then below those spokes, there’s a couple of control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pods, if you will. And then on the center, they have basically an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I don’t love that. With very rounded corners. Yes, very rounded corners.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do love that they have a little bar in front of it that you can use as a wrist rest as you’re operating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screen. I don’t know how I feel about the fact that you can tilt the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toward or away from the driver. Like I get the idea here, but I don’t know if I like it. Um, but in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corner of the screen is a dial, a rounded dial that is separate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the rest of the screen in set within the screen and it has physical hands on it. And by default
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it can show, I think it’s like a stopwatch and there’s a couple of buttons on the outside of the screen, physical buttons on the outside of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screens, like start and lap, you know, hit the, hit the start, stop and lap buttons if it’s a stopwatch or it can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a clock and because what’s behind these physical hands is another screen. The HVAC controls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are in the center screen, but there are a fair amount of physical controls.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, the center console is where the gear shift is, which is very interestingly done. And I think the windows might be there or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. That’s where you insert the key. If you so choose. I really think leaving aside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fact that I don’t really think you’re wrong, John, that this doesn’t exactly scream Ferrari to me. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this is really well thought out and looks really, really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, I mean, it, it looks like, I I mean, I don’t care about Ferrari the way John does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, this looks very much like a designer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who idolized Dieter Rams made a car interior.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, very much so. You know, Dieter Rams was a really, is a really famous designer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for good reason. He’s an amazing designer. Like all the, all those classic mid-century Braun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products, like that’s that level of design. Like it’s, it’s a really great style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has evolved over time to represent like a lot. And Johnny Ive, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Johnny Ive’s a very good designer. But you can see his influences. Like with the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he borrowed a lot from his Patek Philippe Nautilus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With many Apple products, he borrows a lot from Braun and from Dieter Rams.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it is a really good style. This looks like that. If the logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the steering wheel was not the Ferrari logo. logo. Just put an Apple logo there. It could be well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s too many buttons for it to be Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could be any other car brand like, you know, it may be some modern brand. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has that much of an opinion about like Polestar like if that could be a Polestar logo and everybody would be like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what logo you put there, I would have been able to tell you. Do you think people who made this are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple’s design and be like, yeah, these people obviously love everything Apple is doing. Would it surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John you to learn that that it was actually Apple people? No, it would not surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Well, but I mean, honestly, I think the more Apple-like design is like what Tesla and Rivian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, where they try to minimize physical controls and have everything on a small number of screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so. I think a photograph of this interior makes me, screams Apple to me more than any Tesla interior.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you can certainly see the resemblance, but you can also see like, okay, there’s a lot of physical controls. They’re done,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they look beautiful, but they also, the energy, the style,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like the like that kind of like you know sex appeal of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end sports car that’s not this this is nice german
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design done well by johnny ive like that’s that’s what that looks like it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not look like italian sports car so i i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John agree john like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though i don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John ferrari and lamborghini and even though there are so many references to old ferraris like that’s the thing about this like it’s like how can
⏹️ ▶️ John you say it doesn’t look like a ferrari like that steering steering wheel is directly ripped out of an old Ferrari and those air vents and this and that. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, Ferrari’s current styling, forget about the interiors, Ferrari’s current styling
⏹️ ▶️ John trend is a similar example in that they reference their old stuff like crazy. And you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, how can you say this doesn’t look like a Ferrari? Let me show you all the elements that reference old classic Ferraris. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, but like the whole thing cohesively has to say to me Ferrari. And I think the exterior
⏹️ ▶️ John is still kind of say Ferrari, even though I think they’re ugly, they’re going through an ugly phase. It’s difficult for all of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they don’t look, the outside of their cars would never be mistaken for a Fiat, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John put it that way. Like you can’t just take out the Ferrari badge on the outside of like the new Testarossa and put
⏹️ ▶️ John on a, you know, like a badge from BMW. Like no one would believe it. Like it’s clearly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, I’m not sure if people identify it as Ferrari, but there’s no way in hell they’d think it was a Volkswagen or something. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s something, whereas this interior is just, it’s a John Adams special. Like, and getting to the specifics
⏹️ ▶️ John of this, by the way, like setting aside, oh, you’re upset, doesn’t look like Ferrari or whatever. Just in the specifics, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of areas where they did well and where there is where they didn’t. Casey already mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John the physical controls. Ferrari itself did capacitive controls on its steering wheels for way too long. Everybody hated
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It takes them so long to change it. They’d be like, this is this year, we’re getting rid of physical controls in the steering wheel. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they got rid of the physical start button, but they left other capacitive controls. It’s like, no, Ferrari, please, just everything physical.
⏹️ ▶️ John So finally in 2026, they’ll roll out a car, which reverts to their previous thing, which is like, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John give me actual buttons on the steering wheel. So that’s good, I applaud them for that. The clever thing with the dials
⏹️ ▶️ John and the screens, lots of other people have done similar things. This is obviously the much more expensive, much nicer looking Johnny I
⏹️ ▶️ John version of that idea, but it’s not a bad idea. I don’t fault them for that at all. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting and it’s fun. Casey, you talked about the iPad in the middle and I’m with you
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think this shows a decided lack of imagination.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh, yeah, everything is, Johnny, I was just so obsessed with fricking rounded rectangles and simplicity, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John slapping an iPad on the dashboard is surrendering. It’s like, no, I’m not surrendering. Look at all the physical controls. Look at the handle, look at
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrist rest. It’s like, okay, but you put an iPad on the dashboard and you, now you, like, it’s not like, he’s not the first person to
⏹️ ▶️ John put physical controls on the bottom of an iPad. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Ford has done it for crying out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like lots of manufacturers said, oh, it’s an iPad, but there’s a physical dial on it. It’s an iPad, but there’s physical buttons along
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom. Is that, is that the peak? Is that, you know, that’s the best IOD
⏹️ ▶️ John we have come up with? it’s a difficult problem, but like. The you know, the ergonomics of a cockpit.
⏹️ ▶️ John I refuse to believe that an iPad with some physical buttons on it that you can tilt is the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to that problem. Like I do feel like the cockpit like look, you’re stationary.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re in a seat. You’re not going anywhere. It should be possible to make a layout of controls
⏹️ ▶️ John that accommodates a lot of people that you can get at too easily. That is not as weird as this. And the tilting thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you mentioned, Casey, one of the problems with tilting is now it becomes,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you never move it, unless it never moves on its own, which I would wonder about, now you
⏹️ ▶️ John have slightly more difficult time no look reaching for like the fan up speed or whatever, because you have to know
⏹️ ▶️ John what position you last tilted the thing in.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, and those
⏹️ ▶️ John tilt things, if the Johnny Ive iMac monitor arm thing is any indication,
⏹️ ▶️ John they might get loose over time. So it’s very difficult to pull that off. And then go down to the center console.
⏹️ ▶️ John Their idea for the center console, you’ll never guess. Let’s make it out of a bunch of rounded rectangles.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s rounded, like the binnacle, that being a rounded rectangle is probably the biggest sin because it’s like, for
⏹️ ▶️ John crying out loud, like a Ferrari would never have a rectilinear rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle poking up at it. Like it does not look sleek or cool or aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re selling me on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Especially since they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John anything with those corners. They’re just there so it can be a rounded rectangle. Like, even BMW,
⏹️ ▶️ John which does a bunch of rectangles across his dashboard, at least they have sharp corners and look Germanic. This does not look
⏹️ ▶️ John Italian. But then the center console, a bunch of rounded rectangles stacked on top of each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Johnny Ives’ best idea for the center console thing is he doesn’t like it when there’s a big door that you have to open up. So I’m gonna make
⏹️ ▶️ John two other doors. Guess what, Johnny? A million people have tackled this problem before. You can have them open from the side
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely in both directions. But there’s lots of different ways to do this. But the way he chose was that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can open half of each of the sides of the rounded rectangle. But then when both
⏹️ ▶️ John sides are open, there’s just this spine down the middle, which makes it so you have to shove your hand down.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can never get it fully open. The middle of it is always blocked by that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The shifter arrangement’s like, oh, we made it out of glass, and it’s a little thing. I feel like Ferrari already had a kind of a good idea with its gated
⏹️ ▶️ John shifter, play on the gated shifter, but that doesn’t really matter that much, I guess. But yeah, the center console
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly doesn’t look like a Ferrari, and ergonomically, it’s nothing special. The cup holder’s poking out there all the time. Yeah, they’re beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum cup holders, but they’re always in your face. There’s a reason a lot of cars have them tuck away, especially sports cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, like how much space you get for how much space it takes up, the way the rear controls. Look, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John not impressed from a car design perspective. The only thing that’s impressive about it is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like a Johnny Ive, beautiful Apple type interior, and everything is extremely expensive, made
⏹️ ▶️ John of beautiful materials. I’m sure it feels great to you. Like all of that, right? But this is gonna be like a $300,000 car or something. So I’m sure-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey keep going. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe 500. But anyway, I’m sure I’m sure like, yeah, the materials better feel good. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fun to do this as an exercise. And the people who made it should be proud of the beautiful thing that they’ve made. But I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s that great of a car interior in terms of ergonomics. I feel like the people who design like the interior
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the Toyota Santa Sienna or the Honda Odyssey, like those are the best designers in the industry because they find
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to have like insane amounts of storage space and adjustability and cubbies for everything
⏹️ ▶️ John and things that make kids happy in the back seats and everything. That is a harder design problem better solved
⏹️ ▶️ John than this. Granted, that’s just a bunch of cheap plastics and things that are going to be durable to spills and stuff, and it doesn’t look as beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John as this, but I feel like being a designer is not just like making something
⏹️ ▶️ John that satisfies the itch that you have in your brain, which is essentially when you’re Johnny out of the stage in his career can afford
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. So good for him. But like there’s more to design than making
⏹️ ▶️ John a item that you go to sleep with a smile on your face knowing that you made them that exists in
⏹️ ▶️ John the world. It has to solve problems for users. And I don’t think this is a bad interior, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it solves problems for users in a better way. Like it’s not the best in every area than
⏹️ ▶️ John any other control. I can think of any other interior. I can think of other cars that are better of it in lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John areas. Setting aside the fashion, setting aside the Ferrari-ness, just judging it as an ergonomic car interior. It
⏹️ ▶️ John does a lot of things right, but it does a lot of things in a very uninteresting way. And one of the things I thought about this
⏹️ ▶️ John is if you’re interested in this type of thing, Like I love how everything is beautiful and machined and it’s like little jewels
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that I have another multi-million dollar car. You might be interested in I’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes to Gordon Murray talking about his selection of knobs and switchgear for his
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculously expensive cars that he makes Plus some more videos you can see on his channel
⏹️ ▶️ John about I will have timestamp link to him talking about His knobs and his shift lever and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s totally up Johnny Ives alley It’s like oh we spent this amount of money on this thing was it just had to be just right. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John kept going back and forth until the switches felt just so or whatever. If you have a multi-billion dollar car, by all
⏹️ ▶️ John means do that. But here’s the thing about Gordon Murray’s car. Go look at the videos on the channel and the tours of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like a Gordon Murray automotive car. It looks like there’s no mistaking it for
⏹️ ▶️ John any other brand. It has him and his like his design ethos is through the entire thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and compare the interior of that car to the interior of this car. Like one of them screams
⏹️ ▶️ John Gordon Murray automotive. And maybe you don’t know what that brand is, or like, like it is very cohesive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this one, it seems, I mean, it’s kind of interesting that they showed us the interior, not inside a car, because it really
⏹️ ▶️ John does look like an interior floating around in space waiting to be put into the Apple car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not wrong. But it isn’t even really Apple like again, like, yeah, I think Dieter Rams, obviously huge influence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also one thing I didn’t think of earlier was like a camera. It’s like this looks a lot like like a
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I will say with these, the influences, which you’re totally right about, like everyone who works there, like love like the cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ John loves Dieter Rams, but here’s the thing. At this point in time and in all their careers,
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny Ive, Mark Newsome, all those people from Apple, their footprint
⏹️ ▶️ John on history in terms of design is bigger than all of their influences, which is very often the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those influences are important to them, but the imprint they have put on the world with like
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPod, the iMac, the iPhone, iOS, like that
⏹️ ▶️ John footprint in terms of design influence is bigger than all of their past influences. So
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, yes, we see all their influences, but at this point they are not referencing themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they are essentially setting a template for all the designers in the future who are gonna be like, we’re gonna look at them, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, that reminds me of Johnny Ives design. It’s like, well, you know, Johnny Ives was really inspired by Dieter Rams and Leica cameras. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John who? Like, it’s almost absurd to even talk about their influence
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point because their particular personal tastes and little brain itches are
⏹️ ▶️ John the only things that matter because they have so much money and power. It boggles my mind before I even let them do
⏹️ ▶️ John this to their cars. Because they said, we’re gonna contract the best designers in the world. And then it’s almost like they were
⏹️ ▶️ John intimidated and didn’t feel like they could push back and say, you’re gonna put
⏹️ ▶️ John a rounded rectangle behind the steering wheel and then an iPad on the dashboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and it looks like a Fiat. Like, shh, it’s Johnny Ive. We paid him how many billions
⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars for this? Look at the books he gave us. He gave us a stack of books. They’re beautifully bound. We have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what he says. I’m like, oh, Ferrari, you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I will say though, one of the things that I thought was really interesting, which I don’t recall having seen before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the rear control panel. So on the back of the center console, there’s a screen that kind of mimics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the control panel, which they call the iPad. Or sorry, the iPad that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John control. Trevor Burrus, Ph.D.: That we call the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. Aaron Powell, PhD.: Yeah, exactly. The control panel. But it has on there like your current speed, how much power the car is generating,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a graph of like recent power and recent speed, which I thought was kind of neat. You can see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that because they’re using Celsius, there’s decimals like animals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, no, this does look incredible, but you’ve convinced me that this should not be in a Ferrari, and I take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back everything I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John Trevor Burrus, Ph.D.: The other thing, by the way, the toggle switches, which is a great idea, but they didn’t go full physical because they’re basically like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like those dials that turn forever You know as opposed to a dial that has stops on it These are toggle switches where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can press up and press down, but it’s actually like a d-pad where you’re going up up down down There’s no there’s no physical persistence
⏹️ ▶️ John of the switches Which is not great because for example Every time I do this now I think of this because of all the rants I’ve had in this program
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m driving around the winter a couple of my cars have seat heaters in them and I
⏹️ ▶️ John can Turn the seat heaters on I turn them on high low or off off for
⏹️ ▶️ John me and the passenger. And I can also tell whether they’re currently high, low or off
⏹️ ▶️ John for me and the passenger without looking at them at all, because they are physical stateful switches that
⏹️ ▶️ John rock. I don’t have to, I know where they are. They never move. And I can tell what position they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in by feeling them through my winter gloves, feeling what position they’re already in without ever
⏹️ ▶️ John putting my eyes anywhere. You cannot do that with any of these controls. That’s one thing, because they’re just, you know, D pad type things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second thing is, they’re machined aluminum things poking out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the dashboard of a car. I know they have the little things that prevent you from
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally hitting them like the little loops of metal, kind of like roll bars, to prevent someone’s knee
⏹️ ▶️ John from accidentally hitting the seat temperature up thing or whatever in the back seats and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you could still accidentally hit them with your knee, first of all. There’s kind of a reason why they don’t have those toggle switches. And second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John God forbid, in any kind of accident or something, now you have these little metal baggers in the dashboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John you should be belted it and it’s airbags and yada yada and a little crash tested and I understand, but like there’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a reason why car interiors aren’t festooned with stiff pieces of metal sticking out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John dashboard, Johnny, and maybe think more about that before you design your
⏹️ ▶️ John next car interior. Like I’m not saying they’re a danger, but it’s a thing that you now have to deal with that you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to deal with if they were flat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I still think this looks really nice. It just doesn’t look like a Ferrari. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a nice car. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco better be for the amount of money they’re gonna charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. I would, this is nicer than most interiors I’ve ever seen. Just, it’s not, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s not, it doesn’t scream Ferrari to me, but it does look really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s, they didn’t do a bad job, but I just, I just kind of disappointed that the world’s best designers didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John any better ideas about it. I think the center console, they did do a bad job with. And I think the iPad in the middle,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a push. Like it’s, it’s not bad. It’s not the worst of those scenes, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John they grab some new problems themselves with the tilting, which kind of defeats a bunch of purposes and they didn’t come up with anything new.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and the air vents, let’s talk about the air vents. I believe other designers have done the same thing which since the air
⏹️ ▶️ John vents are circular and they have a big circle inside them that tilts. And so if you want to close
⏹️ ▶️ John them off, the circle goes flat. And so no air can get through. If you want them totally open, the certain circle goes like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s just, you know, so it’s edge on to you. So it blocks the least amount of air. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a great design for a vent because your only way to reduce the amount of air
⏹️ ▶️ John also involves changing the direction of the air because of the way the vent works, you know, it’s on an angle. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason a lot of them have those little louvers because then changing how much air goes through has less
⏹️ ▶️ John influence on the direction, but Johnny just really wanted it to be a circle inside a tube and so that’s what we got. And I’m sure they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful aluminum pieces. Multipart construction, they show them screwing them together. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John screwing a precision machine, fine threads with aluminum glide. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure it’s all beautiful, but I don’t think those air vents are good air vents. They don’t, they’re better
⏹️ ▶️ John than, they’re better than having to adjust them on a touchscreen. I would give him that. Like it’s not a bad interior. I’m just disappointed that
⏹️ ▶️ John he didn’t have any better ideas or seemed not to understand what the, the scope of the things that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do in the auto industry in this area and things that people have tried before. But maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe it’s just like, I want them to look
⏹️ ▶️ John like this and I’m sacrificing the flexibility of air adjustments so they look nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I got to say those air vents really blow, John. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, one thing that one thing they think there are the first people to do. And I give them some credit for the key thing. Ferrari’s
⏹️ ▶️ John had these beautiful keys for a long time that they give you a little place to stick in the dashboard. Lots of cars do that because they want you to put their beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ John key somewhere in the dashboard. Although sometimes their key is not beautiful. For as you should look nice. Uh, this time they
⏹️ ▶️ John did a thing where it’s like, Oh, we got the Ferrari logo on a key like we have for the past many years and it goes in a little spot in
⏹️ ▶️ John the dashboard, but now it sinks into the dashboard and when it sinks into the dashboard, the yellow from the Ferrari logo
⏹️ ▶️ John leaves the key and enters our little solid glass shifting knob thingy. How does
⏹️ ▶️ John the yellow leave the key? Is there a screen on the key? There is, but it’s E-ink.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not draining, like it’s yellow all the time. Wow. It’s color E-ink. It’s yellow all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time because it’s yellow E-ink, but it takes zero power when it’s just yellow all the time. And only when you put it
⏹️ ▶️ John into what I assume is a little inductive charging thing in your car, it sucks the yellow, like that’s a total Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John Ives-ism and it’s a cute little thing. And I hope the yellow is as bright as it seems in pictures, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s clever for, you know, just like fanciness. And I think that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if they’ll stick with that long-term and how long is E-ink will hold up. I think the lacquer
⏹️ ▶️ John painted Ferrari keys look nicer than the E-ink one, but they can’t make the color drain out of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I don’t know why you want the color to drain out of it, but anyway, that’s what it does. It blends into your dashboard when it sinks in and
⏹️ ▶️ John puts the color into the tiny shift or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this episode, Quince, Squarespace, and Delete.me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perks of ATP membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every week, we have more of us talking. So you’re here for a couple hours to hear us talking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can hear us even more for like 20-ish more minutes every week with an extra topic. This week’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic is gonna be on China’s ban on electric car door handles, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds right up our alley. So we’re gonna be talking about that. And over time, you can join to listen at https://www.fm.com/.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks everybody. talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did it mean to,
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental Check podcasts
Casey’s getting the itch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got a confession to make. I am getting the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itch. I bought my Volkswagen Golf R and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took it home on the 30th of August 2018. Mikayla was a wee infant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has been nearly seven and a half years. I’m starting to get the itch. I love my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s nothing wrong with it. I really enjoy driving it. I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love to drive a a six speed. I love having three pedals. I have literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never owned a car despite what John thinks that is exclusively mine that has two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pedals. Disclaimers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. Uh, I love having a three pedal car. I love my Golf R.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really do enjoy it. It has barely over 30,000 miles on it in seven and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half years. There is no reason to get rid of this car. It’s been paid off for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no reason to get rid of this car, but I’m getting the itch. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to continue the neutral theme for the bottom half of the show, I thought I would do almost a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little mini ATP member special. Actually, I didn’t even think about it this way until just now. A mini, uh, diamond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dogs, uh, convinced me that getting a Ticon, which is the Porsche
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric car, a used one, to be clear, it’s convinced me that’s a dumb idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do that. I can name that tune in five notes. notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you already went through the, there’s nothing wrong with your car or whatever, but you’ve got any itch and you should probably see a doctor
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can’t, I, like, I understand. I,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re, you look, you you’re interested, you like exciting cars and like you’re getting, you’re literally getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the seven year itch. Yes. I, that thought did cross my mind. Yes. The excitement, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John as excited about your car as you used to be. And you’re, you’ve always wanted to try an electric car and you got a big dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not yours. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That does its job. And yours is supposed to be the fun little car or whatever. And you’re looking at the Taycan. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. The used ones that you can get, I do agree that because they
⏹️ ▶️ John have depreciated so much, you can get a pretty startlingly good deal. Like, again, I think we mention
⏹️ ▶️ John this every time this comes up. I wish I had the real number at hand. But what is the average selling price of new cars in the United States of
⏹️ ▶️ John America? And it’s some shocking number, like $50,000 or something. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think it’s even more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ John $48,000, $48,000. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t know. It’s somewhere around there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone can look it up. but it’s like in the neighborhood of 50 grand, which is shocking
⏹️ ▶️ John to me because that’s close to twice as much as I ever paid for a new car in my entire life.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just the average. Average can be misleading, whatever. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get a Porsche Taycan for around that amount of money, which is insane
⏹️ ▶️ John because that actual car new costs like three times that much because electric cars depreciate a lot or whatever. But here’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John those ones that you’re getting for 50 grand, they’re not the good ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, what makes you say I’m not saying you’re wrong. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John makes you say so
⏹️ ▶️ John remember? I think I mentioned this on the show when they came out with like the new generation of this car. They
⏹️ ▶️ John made it just so much better. Like because it was like their second. It looks the same like on the outside like all they just change exterior
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever they change the inside. They change the electrics. They change the motors the battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John They changed everything about it to just be like like their first, you know, is this their Porsche’s first TV
⏹️ ▶️ John and they did a pretty good job. It was a pretty good car, but they learned a lot between their first and second attempt at this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second one is just, it’s kind of like when like, I don’t know, you had a really good Intel Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ John the M1 comes out and you’re like, yeah, I know it’s better, but they’re both Macs, right? It’s like, yeah, they are both Macs. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if you had to pick one to get, like basically my advice would be, get
⏹️ ▶️ John the itch after the second generation 50 grand. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the car to get for 50 grand, not the current one. Now, I know I was gonna try to talk you out of it, But like
⏹️ ▶️ John for my, because I’m such a, you know, you know, with me and my buying computers, like, well, or TVs or whatever, is this the one
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy? Well, it’s a good TV, but like, the next one’s going to be whatever. But the thing is, the next one is out. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in the used market. It’s not like it’s a mystery. The second gen, I feel like, did they go to 800 volt with the second
⏹️ ▶️ John gen? I forget if they did that,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but they think like they might
⏹️ ▶️ John as well have done the equivalent of gone to 800, from 400 volt to 800 volt architecture, which is a big deal in EVs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s just better in every conceivable way. And so it’s like, it’s a shame, like, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, it’s there. and yeah, it’s out of your price range now or whatever, but like, what have one, those are used to get,
⏹️ ▶️ John those are 50 grand when the third one comes out because that one is like, it’s over the M1 threshold. It’s like, went from
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel to M1 and yeah, the M2 is better, but just wait until you get the M1 and then just stick with that for years, you’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And having said all that though, like, it’s not the worst choice in the world for
⏹️ ▶️ John even the first gen one, cause let’s, you know, it’s, you’ll be your first EV. Yes, there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a better one that exists, but it’s a really nice car.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing. And I like, I don’t know. Like I sure as hell wouldn’t do it
⏹️ ▶️ John for sure. Even if someone forced me and said, you have to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John an EV for $50,000, you’re never gonna get a current model one for that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the previous gen. Like I would still be upset about it. Cause I would be like, oh, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John such a shame. But like, if that car appeals to you And if you tried it, and I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re going to talk about any of your possible experiences with trying it, but like if you like
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it seems nice, like the whole point of this is, this is you doing your
⏹️ ▶️ John hobby. It was one of the places where you spend your money to have fun, even though it’s not the best possible car that could be, even though there’s a better
⏹️ ▶️ John version of this car, even though you better serve to wait, yada, yada, yada. Like you bought a, you bought a freaking oil leaking
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW with the engine that exploded and you got some enjoyment out of that for a while too. So who am I to say how you
⏹️ ▶️ John should waste your money on a big
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not I’m gonna say it’s not the worst. No, I like the car. I like the first gen. I like the second gen. It’s not a bad car.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot to recommend it. I think the interior is actually better.