00:00.66 James Welcome back everyone to Merge Conflict, your weekly developer podcast talking about all things world of software development. I'm one of your hosts, James Munson. I'm with me as always, the one, the only, the glorious, the illustrious, the luscious Frank Kruger. How's it going, buddy? 00:14.45 Frank Luscious. That's a new one. I'll take it, though, James. Thank you. i don't have any compliments for you other than i like the dark atmosphere, the moody, ah the moody world that you're living in If you can't see James, please go to YouTube so you can see James. 00:29.17 Frank That way you can see the mood, the strong mood he is projecting. Oh, 00:34.23 James very moody. It's podcast mood. We're watching a new show on Netflix called bo bokin boatdekin show bokin Bodkin, Bodkin, B-O-D-K-I-N. 00:42.95 Frank you're ahead of me. 00:46.68 James um it's on the netflix it has um will forte and a bunch of people but basically it's a mystery thriller and they're recording a podcast like they're like podcasting about a murder mystery in ireland which is very cool and it's funny because we're watching it and then others like i'm like i gotta go watch i gotta go record a podcast she's like of course you do so 00:49.36 Frank OK. 00:58.55 Frank Oh, God. Right. 01:09.43 Frank and And not murder anyone. I like how murder mysteries have become so prevalent on Netflix. Now they're having to do like meta murder mysteries. 01:17.96 James Super meta. 01:17.95 Frank It's always someone like writing a book about it. 01:18.63 James Yeah. 01:19.95 Frank But I guess that's been done since the 80s No, I'm behind on the Netflix. I've heard of the show called Stranger Things. I thought I might try that one out. 01:28.38 James I 01:29.72 Frank Something, I don't know. Something about hunters of demons. I might try that one. I don't know. I'm new to this Netflix thing. 01:35.75 James haven't watched the demon hunters yet, but they're everywhere. So, um, I got a new phone, Frank. 01:38.97 Frank Yeah, I don't know. I don't think that's a murder mystery. so 01:44.81 Frank Ooh, wait. um did that Did the simple phone? Because remember something like three years ago or something, you said you were going to go and simplify your phone world. Did we do that? 01:56.28 Frank Or did we splurge and get like an iPhone 22 plus, whatever we're up to these days? 02:02.58 James It's good question. ah So I actually, so if we go back in the archives, if you were to go back in my YouTube archives, there's probably a video of me getting like smart or they're not smart, but little flip phones basically from China. 02:15.05 Frank Yes. Very cool. 02:16.50 James And i tried those out. And the main problem really is a lot of those phones didn't have 4G. They're only 3G. 02:24.17 Frank Right. 02:24.28 James There really wasn't like maps or directions. Didn't really... 02:27.91 Frank Does the 3G network even work in the United States anymore? Didn't they, like, turn all that off? Yeah. 02:33.53 James At the time, it was still on, I believe on AT&T, but pretty much everyone's turned it off. 02:37.91 Frank Mm-hmm. 02:38.85 James Yeah, the GSMs. 02:39.29 Frank Yeah. 02:40.90 James Yeah. 02:42.23 Frank Welcome to 2026. 02:44.31 James Yeah, and I think the T9 just really killed me at the end of the day. 02:44.96 Frank Upgrade or die. It's 02:49.75 James And I believe I had a fatal flaw back then. 02:50.32 Frank been too long. Yeah. 02:53.98 James I've watched a lot of videos recently. And i think it's totally possible to like move to a, you know, a non-smartphone. But I think you have to have a smartphone if you're like us because two-factor authentication or mobile banking apps, all different authentication, all this stuff. 03:07.79 Frank Fair. 03:08.54 James Even if it's just Wi-Fi only, it's just have a Wi-Fi only device, I think it's completely, i think it's completely sane to be like I have a, iPod for all intents and purposes, iPod touch, you know, that has this stuff. 03:17.85 Frank Yeah. 03:21.18 James And then I also have a phone that can make phone calls and text on it separately. I think you could have those two worlds in which the one on the left, which is I'm holding in my hand, like the iPhone, 03:32.95 Frank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 03:35.00 James could stay at home if you needed to go out in case of an emergency. 03:36.43 Frank The black mirror. Yeah. 03:37.88 James But if you're like, hey, I need to access Wells Fargo, going to need to face unlock and do the shenanigans. 03:38.53 Frank Mm. 03:44.90 James Just like our modern world almost requires it in a way. 03:48.22 Frank You know, i would have agreed with you a year ago, but these days I'm thinking like you just need one button and that button is um talk to the AI and just ask the AI to do whatever you need. 04:01.38 Frank Like call this number, go read this website and summarize it for me. 04:03.81 James Mm. 04:05.94 James A claw, a claw phone. 04:05.94 Frank Pull out my Visa card. I need to pay for, yeah, claw phone. um Boy, trademark copyright. Get on that Microsoft or whoever bought that guy. Um, like I feel like, oh, right. 04:15.23 James Yeah, OpenAI, Peter. 04:18.14 Frank Open AI. Um, yeah, i feel like, uh, you can outdo the iPod. The iPod had what? One, two, three, four, five buttons, maybe even a sixth one button. 04:27.31 James Hmm. 04:29.78 Frank That's all you need. 04:31.42 James You know what? It's actually very clever that you say about that because in theory, a claw. So I was actually at work before we get to my phone. was actually at work and we were talking about what is a claw, right? 04:39.36 Frank hmm. 04:42.26 James And what does that mean? And I haven't used any claws. However, I do use copilot tasks. 04:45.98 Frank Mm-hmm. 04:48.98 James I do use agentic workflows that we've talked about. I do use long running tasks in the CLI. I do use um background coding agents. And they're all doing stuff and they're talking to different services, sometimes at my whim, like, or my, my, whatever it is, like I have it connected to different services. 05:07.96 James Um, and it can do stuff on my behalf, like copilot tasks can generate PowerPoints. It can, uh, book a date night for us. It could do a movie. It could do whatever. It has my login. It's got my credentials, all these things. 05:20.31 James Are those claws? What is, what is a claw? 05:23.38 Frank No. Only because I don't like the name. I get what you're saying, though. It's um um super agents. Lots of skills, can talk to lots of services. 05:34.06 Frank It's just an AI that's thoroughly connected to your universe and the external universe. Both universes collide. 05:40.86 James is Is it like there's a there's a world of consumer claw and then there's like world of DIY YOLO claw? like safe mode, like, like, like a sandbox mode, like, you know, cause okay. 05:51.67 Frank yeah Interesting, yeah. 05:57.36 James For example, for example, I open up Copala tasks. I say book a book, a book a date night for me and Heather in where I live on this day, go make it happen. I walk later books, books, the open table, picks, picks it up, puts it on my calendar. 06:10.84 Frank Yeah. 06:12.17 James Yeah. There's like, pi is that pinchers? That pinchers are not claws? 06:17.91 Frank Yeah. 06:18.10 James Platinum claws? Is that like bronze claw? You know what i mean? Like I see Burke and he's like, and other people are like, and Hanselman. They're like, oh, I just like WhatsApp a thing. And then it like does the thing and it does other thing. 06:28.73 James I'm like, yeah, but i could also just open the co-pilot app on my phone and be like, hey, I want you to go do this thing. 06:32.95 Frank Yeah. 06:33.54 James And it's like, cool, I'll go do it in the background come back later. Boom, right? So I think I'm struggling. Like what is a claw? What is an agent? What is an agentic? agent that's running in a workflow for us? Are they all the same thing? Are they all different? 06:49.62 Frank It does not behoove us to draw too many boxes right now because we're still trying to figure this technology out. So anyone who draws a box around a set of capabilities is doing it wrong, in my opinion, because you'll never draw that box correctly. 06:56.76 James Hmm. 07:02.03 James Hmm. Hmm. 07:05.44 Frank So I agree all those things, but I don't feel any value in creating artificial names or drawing any kind of line. In the early days, i kept getting annoyed because we kept calling everything agents. 07:19.53 Frank I've completely flipped on that. I think we should just keep using that word and over abusing that word so it loses all meaning because i don't like this idea of this is what an agent is. This is what a skill is. This is what a system prompt is. We're still too early in the days to really solidify that stuff. And honestly, that stuff won't be solidified until everyone is using this. We're we're still um programmers. We're still in our cute little programmer bubble. 07:48.34 Frank And we like drawing boxes. We like ontologies. We like bordering things. But the borders will be established when 50% of the world is using this technology. 08:01.78 Frank And that will tell us what these things are and what borders to draw. 08:04.28 James No, I think that makes, come that makes complete sense. I was recently doing a talk ah with a, with a coworker with Kayla. We're doing a talk on CLI, Copilot CLI. 08:15.54 James And this was a talk that was in pretty a broad stroke, like as of audience. And what I mean by that is developer audience, non-developer audience, early in career, late in career, broad audience. 08:26.33 Frank Yeah. 08:30.65 James And after the talk that we gave together, and some people come and talk to us, and they said, we really enjoyed the talk. it' was very inspirational. But what is a terminal? what are What are shell commands? 08:41.15 Frank Yeah. 08:43.61 James what what do you like 08:43.60 Frank Right. 08:46.07 James There is, and and I'm identifying this gap because you're talking about this 50%, this adoption rate, right? 08:51.18 Frank Yeah. Mm-hmm. 08:53.62 James The chat JVT, you just talk to the thing and it does the thing. It's a big box of things, right? Talk to Copilot. 08:57.65 Frank yeah not 08:58.13 James It's a box of things. you talk to the Geminis. It's a box of things that we have constructed. The clause, the unlimited parallel of you do all the things. Who's living in that world? I don't know who's living in that world. But when I think about it, this these mechanisms to interact with our... 09:15.54 James AI agents in a way that can do things for us and can read information go get stuff, just like a search engine. Here's a search engine, go do a thing. that's That's, you know, you could run a command, do a thing. 09:27.19 James um you identify some latitude, longitude, figure out what that's at on a map. 09:30.36 Frank Sure. Yeah. 09:32.57 James um There's a plethora of people in the world that have never opened a terminal before, have never opened VS Code before, have never opened an IDE before, don't even know what an IDE is. And yet that is their entry point somewhat because the the text box is comforting in a way. 09:53.43 James However, It is the worst medium in my personal opinion to introduce the to this, you know, what is a good medium? A chat box. And I think maybe this is why the claw, like for better or worse, I hate to say it, but like a chat box, a talk to my thing, do a thing for me. 10:11.35 James We understand. We've done it for years. 10:13.67 Frank yeah 10:14.19 James We've opened up the messages. We've done the thing. We've sent the emails back and forth. I fundamentally believe that many of these tools are very powerful and yet very not user friendly. 10:29.07 James You think about this, we had a very rich GUI, an IDE, a code editor, of VS code, a cursor, a windsurf, an 10:37.02 Frank with icons that represent commands instead of typing slash commands like it's irc in 1980. 10:42.87 James We had buttons that brought up beautiful GUIs that people crafted and did things with, right? then went down to the CLI. And now the coolest part about the CLI and the terminal is fast because there's no Chrome. 10:53.63 Frank Is that? Wow. Okay. 10:55.22 James It's very fast, right? there's There's less things. In the beginning, in the beginning in the days of your, in the days of your, what could you do? 10:58.43 Frank Win 32 is fast. 11:02.43 James you could type to the thing. Maybe you can confi configure some MCP servers, but maybe it just did it for you automatically. 11:03.90 Frank Yeah. 11:07.39 James And then you think about it. All of these things, the Claude codes, the Gemini's, the co-pilot CLIs, they all grow. they have all the things. 11:14.22 Frank Mm-hmm. 11:14.76 James They got the skills. They got the agents. They got the things. They got the they can avoid the remotes. 11:17.60 Frank Yeah. 11:17.76 James And they got to all that stuff, right? And then the question is, is that still a good medium for users? And the question is yes and no. Because given a text box that they can enter into, a user that is not us, 11:37.11 James will use the straight defaults of whatever that is, which means whatever terminal, CLI, whatever it is, GUI, whatever defaults are the best wins the race. And why? 11:51.32 James Because said user will open it enter the thing in which everything is pre-configured with the things that it needs or makes it easy to pre-configure the things that it needs. 12:02.62 James And the thing that uses one of the best models out of the box, not necessarily the cheapest model, maybe even in the most expensive model out of the box, we'll give it the best results out of the box. 12:07.99 Frank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 12:11.65 James Right now, once do they get out of that sandbox and they want to do more, What do they do? Do they open VS Code at that point? Do they open up a full editor? Do they open up a Copilot app, a ChatGPT app? Like, what do they do? It's very fascinating. I then watched a person um um at this group and I said, well, you know, you can, you can if you want a little bit more power and control, you can open VS Code. And they said, well, what's VS Code? 12:37.27 James I said, it's a code editor, right? And they said, well, you said it was an IDE. was like, let me defactor these things. And then I watched them use VS Code. It's very fascinating. 12:49.55 Frank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 12:49.84 James They have no idea how to open a thing, open a pane, close a pane. 12:49.83 Frank Mm-hmm. 12:54.00 James What is a chat view? What these things? It's whatever the default thing is. Open a folder? Why am I opening a folder? Almost when they go into the CLI, into a Claude, into a Copilot, into Gemini, they hit that command. 13:06.38 James Why are they hitting that command? They don't even know that it's a command. Are they passing in parameters? They're never going pass out a parameter. But what they don't know is that they're actually opening context of that folder. 13:17.42 James Like, do they know that they're opening the context of the folder? At least in the GUI, they're opening the context of the folder, but then why are they opening in the context of the folder? 13:24.11 Frank Mm-hmm. 13:25.10 James It's very fascinating to think through this entire workflow, right? And it brings us full circle into the back, in my personal opinion, that handcrafted, 13:37.72 James user experiences for a narrative, for a story arc, for a specific user are the mass consumer consumption product. It's not VS Code. It's not the terminal. It's not a CLI. That's not what it is. The reason ChatGPT can be so successful, the Claw desktop can be so successful, the Copilot desktop it can be so successful because it is a sandbox, because it is the enter a thing and I will do it for you, right? They don't call it MCP servers. 14:07.93 James They call it Connectors. What do you want to connect to? 14:10.46 Frank Mm-hmm. 14:11.93 James Oh, that makes legitimately so much sense, right? The user doesn't care how it's being connected, but now they can say, oh, I'm really interested in connecting or seeing into my Gmail. 14:24.66 James How do I see into my Gmail? Connect it to your Gmail. Oh, easy. I've done that in the past. I've used some if this, then that shenanigans. I've connected and logged in with my Google account on something. 14:36.73 James Right? They've done this thing. So I think what it brings us back to in a very short amount of time in my personal belief, and we may not be there right now, this moment, but I think we're going to go full 360 from the GUI, away from the GUI, back fully to the GUI. 14:52.38 Frank Yeah. 14:54.14 James And I think we're going to see a renaissance of GUIs, and which is so fascinating, Frank, because because we saw a renaissance of terminals. And I'm going to tell you right now, terminal's not where it's at. 15:05.85 James In my personal opinion, now for some people, absolutely yes, I love the terminal. 15:06.46 Frank yeah 15:09.82 James Not me, you. The terminal's super powerful. But are the billions of people, billions of people going to use the terminal? And the answer is like, no. The Windows terminal is my favorite terminal all time. The shell, the PowerShell, it's you know, the shells inside of a terminal, there's boxes inside of boxes, is a beautiful mechanism. 15:26.27 Frank Yeah. 15:31.80 James But I don't believe it is the right mechanism for mass user consumption. There's a reason Mac OS, there's a reason Windows, there's a reason Linux, for all intents and purposes, have a graphical user interface, a GUI, a beautiful GUI. And as a reason, Frank, 15:47.10 James in which you and I have stay put our entire careers on the line. Everything that we've done 15 years ago, we bet on the GUI. We bet on a GUI. 15:57.56 James You know who else bet on a GUI? 16:00.49 Frank Steve Jobs. 16:00.54 James Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. We all bet on GUIs. 16:03.32 Frank you 16:05.65 James It's the GUI because the GUI is a representation of not only what we want to do, but the possibilities of what we can do. When we have just a box, 16:17.91 James what are we supposed to do with the box? Unless you know what to do with the box. And that's the interesting part of it. So I think i think that's what's interesting. We're in this pivotal, interesting point in time that I can sit here today and I think that we're gonna go full circle, but I'll also say at the same time that all of these pieces of the pie are almost just equally as important because that GUI is actually gonna be powered by the CLI. 16:46.90 James And that is what is crazy in many cases, in many cases. 16:52.82 Frank I both agree and disagree with you, but I'll say I mostly agree with you. But I draw a few different boxes around your boxes. I have boxes for your boxes. 17:02.88 James Well, if you don't have boxes for boxes, you know, you're not even at a yeah U-Haul. 17:03.45 Frank um 17:05.73 James How you going to fix it in that super mover? We don't know, Frank. We do not know. 17:09.56 Frank I am 100% with you that it's all about GUIs in the future. People couldn't organize files. So we got the Notes app, and we got OneNote, and we got iPads. 17:19.31 James Yeah. 17:20.36 Frank you know like there There's baggage from the 70s that we're still trying to ditch. And ah the modern generations don't care about that baggage from the 70s. Programmers do. We're a weird bunch. And we shouldn't use ourselves to compare against the rest of the actual world. The rest of the world just wants to get their job done. We like to fetishize tools and technology. That's what we do because we're obsessed with them. 17:43.74 Frank But I just want to make a few points. like Things like Claude Code and Copilot CLI are not command line interfaces. They like to call themselves that. 17:56.15 Frank They are GUIs, straight up GUIs. They happen to render using terminal codes. Just like you can render a GUI using HTML. You can render a GUI using Win32. 18:08.58 Frank You can render a GUI using pixel bashing in a game engine. They are choosing to render their GUI with terminal ANSI codes. 18:13.77 James Sure. 18:18.36 Frank It's still a full full window of stuff. The command line is the Unix philosophy philosophy of lots of small tools that interact with each other. 18:29.80 Frank Cloud code, vs ah sorry, copilot.cli, those are boxes of small tools. And they integrate all those small tools into a development environment that just happens to render in the terminals. We call it a CLI because none of us know anything about what the heck we're doing here. And we love to... 18:53.21 Frank Again, go back to the fetishization. If you can convince someone, oh, look, it's like Vim and it looks like a hacker from the 70s. Isn't it cool? And you can be cool with it. It's a GUI. It's a GUI, guys. Like, yeah, it's a lightweight GUI. Everyone's tired of HTML because we're all tired of HTML. HTML is our day job. We are creating HTML apps. Therefore, we hate HTML apps. So we want something different than it to actually work in because it feels like now you're in the back end of the work. 19:22.49 Frank So I find a lot of these differences without distinctions, to be quite blunt. um We are not working in the command line. And the command line is dead. No end user wants to use the command line. I will agree. like It's funny to watch other industries use the AI tools. The big ones I pay attention to are the doctors and the lawyers. And they are 100% still stuck at the chat window user interface rendered through HTML. But that is irrelevant. They don't want it rendered in a terminal because it doesn't have good font support and it doesn't cascade well and it doesn't work well on iPads. You know there's you need a big button for our giant meat fingers to hit. Not typing stuff. Typing stuff on a tablet is terrible. We don't want command line interfaces for that. We want big buttons for our meat fingers to touch. And that's why I think like the GUI is important and will stay important for people actually trying to get their work done. 20:23.09 Frank um That said, um there is still this philosophy of lots of small tools interacting with each other. And the glue now, the thing making all those tools interact with each other, instead of the old Unix pipe command, now it's an AI. 20:40.09 Frank And the AI is handling all the piping between all the tools. 20:42.77 James Yeah. No, i think that's a super valid point. And I think all the tools in the toolbox, right? You got the CLIs, you got the MCPs, you got the different things, you have all the different capabilities, all the things, some are easier to install than others, some are this, some are that, right? And different you know requirements that you may need. 21:02.36 James I think all those tools powered by the agent and giving them agent knowledge of those things is what makes it really powerful. And that's the the challenge in my personal opinion is the knowledge. i watch you know I watch um my my poor agent try query internal GitHub things that need certain authentication in this and it tries the MCP, it tries this, it tries the API, it finally gets it to work, right? 21:24.30 Frank Oh gosh, yeah. 21:29.44 James It tries all the things. Now it could be a user error. It's a scale problem because i haven't told it of what it needs to do and I haven't given the correct permissions, ah but it is a series of tools, right? 21:38.55 Frank Yeah. 21:39.82 James There's multiple tools that I can use at its disposal and all those tools, all those skills, all those things, right? Or what makes the clause the clause. But I think that all the clause, whether it is an open claw or whether it is copilot or Gemini or whatever it is, 21:55.22 James Those are all different user interfaces of a collection of tools together. you know, it's just a feature of capability. Like i saw a graph, um, someone, you know, ragging on copilot. Oh, Microsoft has 300 different copilot products. 22:09.65 Frank Oh, I was just going to draw that meme. 22:10.60 James It's, 22:11.47 Frank They beat me to it. Okay. 22:13.66 James Well, at the same time, you could probably say the same thing about a Gemini. i got Gemini on Google Maps. Is that a product or is it just a feature that is powered by Gemini, right? Or is it all the things, right? 22:24.07 James And I obviously work at Microsoft, so I'm biased, right, about these people hating on stuff. But it's just different features. I got a thousand features that are inside of my browser, right, and that are inside of this tool and that tool because i use different GUIs all the time for different things. 22:33.30 Frank Yeah. 22:37.58 James I want features and capabilities at my fingertips all the time. right i got apple intelligence in five or 20 different places on my phones and my things right and all these different things this thing it's fascinating like what will be happen in the future and what i think in general is and we're not there yet and we've talked about it before is like and you said it earlier is like the 50 60 80 percent the 80 20 80 the 90 10 the it's really the 99 one mass consumer adoption is like it's not when it's an app that you install it's not that it's a goo that you talk to it's just that it does the thing 22:46.28 Frank Yeah. 23:09.78 James Right, like when you are, the power of IntelliSense when we're writing code is that it just did the thing. The power of writing a message on my phone, if I text you and I typo something and it auto-corrects, I don't care how it's happening. 23:17.62 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 23:26.41 James It's obvious, i don't even know if that whatever it's doing. i don't think it's AI. I think it's just like magical auto-correct. It just does it. Do I care how it works? No, I don't care what I'm using or how I'm doing a thing. It gets to the point where once the hardware the software like join together and things just work as i would expect then that is the real tipping point right i think for this technology and we're starting to see some of that leak in a little bit right um when you go in and edit a document and it just 23:47.35 Frank Mm-hmm. 24:04.18 James you You say, you know, rewrite or whatever. You say, you know, spelling, like whatever it's doing. It's just built in, right? It just does it for you as you're typing automatically. Like it's a magical moment. And it has been there, but who knows how it's powered, right? 24:17.56 James Now when you're coding and it's finishing as you're writing code, it's finishing the next level. It's just doing the thing that you would expect it to do better than ever. And there's that curve, right? Which is, it has to be at the point in which it you don't have to think about it. 24:34.65 James and I think that's the important part. IntelliSense inside of Visual Studio, right? Like full line completion, you know, full full line completion, I think is a game changer. IntelliCode inside of Visual Studio or VS Code even with C Sharp, I think is a game changer because like I never questioned it. 24:45.27 Frank Yeah. 24:52.86 James I never had to think about the code really that it was generating because it was all locally done semantically and all this stuff. And it was like really good. Now the AI, it's doing a lot more and we're going to get to a point where i don't think about it. Right. And and they're really, really close. Right. i would say 90% of the time I don't to think about it. i can tap, tap, tap and do a thing, or I can trust the AI to do the thing. i don't think we're there yet, but I do think that there we're at a point where I can have a do further deep research. 25:23.77 James Frank loves a deep research, we're getting to the point where I love it, love a deep research, but we're getting to the point that some of those things will just be baked in. 25:25.02 Frank Love it. 25:27.77 Frank Love a deep reach. 25:30.78 James For example, when we finished this podcast, recording stuff should happen automatically. 25:37.57 Frank Mm-hmm. 25:38.72 James I don't care how it's happening. 25:39.41 Frank Yeah. 25:40.04 James It should automatically do the things. And that that's what I'm saying. It's baked in. For example, inside when I installed my new Wavelink on my streamed stream deck, 25:44.85 Frank Yeah. 25:49.72 James it's doing AI processing on my voice right now. I'm in a pretty big open room. I'm just doing AI processing on device and also in software. Automatically, don't even have to think about it. 25:57.88 Frank Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. 25:59.21 James like Those are the things that it's doing. Now, is that AI? um No, there's some you know magic algorithm that's running. But I'm just saying, we get to that point where I don't have to think about it. There's not like a checkbox I enable, right? 26:12.66 James i just doing the thing that I naturally would do And it just happens and it's better. That to me is that magic sauce where I'm like, wow, we did it. That piece of software is like the creme de la creme of like what we're looking for. 26:28.92 James And i don't know if we'll get back to exactly where we were before, but I hope we do one day because I would love for it to just magically work. This is exactly how I want it to do. 26:38.16 Frank I'll just add one more condition to the mass adoption. It's not just, I agree with you, it just needs to work. It just needs to be there. 26:44.86 James Hmm. 26:45.41 Frank But what will be the real tell is people get upset when it's missing. So software that doesn't have it, when you expect there to be an AI there, 26:56.76 Frank And you're like, oh, I'm using 90s software where I have to think the entire time. There's no little helper assisting me in thinking all that. 27:03.46 James Yup. 27:06.88 Frank Clippy is not clipping along here. you know When everyone expects there to be a baseline intelligence helping you to do your job, that's when we'll know we're there. 27:09.32 James Yeah. 27:18.23 James Dude, I like that. That's a great, e you don't know what you had until it's gone, right? 27:22.62 Frank Yeah. 27:23.42 James Yeah. 27:23.90 Frank I mean, I can't go back. We talked about this when I remember when the full line completion was coming out. ah There were a lot of programmers against it. They're like, it's just copying and pasting code. It's the same nonsense. Sorry. It's the same thing. Complaints you hear from artists right now. It's just copying and pasting it's old art. 27:42.71 Frank No, it's it's not. It's actually synthesizing something new. If you're writing wrote boring code, it's going to give you the boring answer because it's all boring. There are a lot of people against that. But nowadays, I would never go back. 27:58.39 Frank if If I don't have an editor with at least some level of AI integration these days, i'm just I feel like I'm working the wrong way. It's like trying to like make like a hardware carpentry analogy, but it's like the power saw was invented. 28:15.25 Frank The band saw was invented. Why in the world would I use a coping saw? like it's It's just a better tool. 28:21.56 James As a better tool. You know, i was ah today, for example, I hate to say it, I hate to waste the tokens, Frank. And this could be, some could say this is a tooling problem. And it very well could be, i was creating a new project of this demo tomorrow morning on the copilot SDK. 28:37.08 James And I created a new project and I was checking in a source code and there's no get ignore. 28:45.72 James And I'm like, 28:46.22 Frank Yeah. 28:47.30 James I'm in VS Code. I know in Visual visual Studio, there's actually add new gitignore for.NET. It does it. 28:51.68 Frank Yeah. 28:53.46 James So I'm like, i think there's a way to do it in the C Sharp dev kit. i think somehow. Or I could just ask the AI to do it. Just ask it to do I said, add a gitignore. 29:04.45 James And you know what? Within 10 seconds, had a gitignore. 29:07.22 Frank Yeah. 29:07.48 James Almost faster than I could i could to click around the UI to do it. And and it also understood my project and all the things, right? 29:11.80 Frank Yeah. 29:14.25 James I hate to say it, right? 29:14.33 Frank Yeah. 29:15.61 James But I'm almost like, I don't want to go create a manual, get ignore, and then copy a thing and do the thing. Just do the thing for me Do the thing for me. Now, some would say when I create the project, the AI should be like, Hey, do you need to get ignore? 29:27.16 James Like put it in there. 29:27.52 Frank Yeah. 29:27.96 James Just do it for me automatically. And like, that's next level. and I think that we should we should get there, but I agree with you. Like I open up some Maui projects that I have, which is where I'm very comfortable. 29:39.54 James Right. and I can really navigate around, and I was talking to someone recently, maybe it was you, maybe it was someone else, but ah there's a big advantage to understanding the code. 29:52.18 James A huge advantage in my personal opinion and being very well-versed in it. Because when things go wrong, when things need to be fine-tuned, when things need to be you know subtly tweaked, you're gonna know exactly how to move things around kind of instead of prompting over and over and over and over and over again to really try to get it. 30:03.73 Frank Yeah. 30:08.19 Frank Exactly. 30:09.38 James You're gonna understand the code better that it's writing. When I write a Swift app, I actually kind of understand the code. 30:12.19 Frank Yeah. 30:16.82 James It's really not that far away from like, no, it's really, it's, it's you know what? 30:17.48 Frank You're getting there. 30:20.56 James Like Swift and Swift-EY, I've written Maui code, I've written in C-sharp, like Hstacks and Vstacks. 30:25.95 Frank Yeah. 30:27.46 James Dude, it's all the same. Like the syntax is a little bit butter, but like I can figure that, like I can look at it and understand what's going on. 30:29.09 Frank Yeah. 30:33.42 Frank You're a senior dev, in other words, yeah. 30:35.38 James Yeah, now when I'm reading CSS, hell if I know what's going on, right? But i so I think like, 30:39.62 Frank You're a biased senior dev. 30:41.62 James like when it comes to like dynamic code, Swift UI code, whatever it is, like GUI code, like native GUI code, I understand it. HTML, JavaScript, these react, have I don't know. 30:53.82 James It's really not that hard. Like Blazor, react native, react, Astro, whatever. 30:55.44 Frank No. Not a bit. 30:58.30 James They're not that difficult, but I think there's a huge advantage still to understanding that code and having that deep understanding of it. um But that being said, I still, one, don't want to go back in those languages and frameworks that I know so well because, 31:17.37 James um one, can be way more productive in those languages that I know because I can review the code faster, understand understand the prompts that are better. And even code that I don't know, it means that I can actually create things and things that I don't know, right? 31:27.06 Frank Yeah. 31:31.10 James And then I can learn those things more than ever. 31:31.14 Frank Yeah. 31:33.46 James And I think that's really fascinating. i can You can't go back. 31:35.22 Frank Yeah. 31:35.38 James It's like it's like saying, like, like 31:42.49 James It's like saying like the wheel. You know, someone invented the wheel, a wheel on a bicycle, a wheel on a car. I want to go back to that time, right? You can't go back. You invented the wheel and you have fundamentally changed how we fundamentally move around this entire planet. 31:52.05 Frank that's kind yeah 31:57.30 James You can't go back. 31:57.94 Frank Yeah. 31:58.87 James it We've come too far. 31:59.26 Frank Yeah. 31:59.95 James And this happened very quickly, right? We've come too far. 32:04.47 Frank ah Yeah, absolutely. Sorry you got my mind wandering about the chariot now. Yeah, I mean, once you introduce the chariot into warfare, that changed warfare forever. 32:12.99 James Yeah. 32:13.63 Frank But I want to say, um yeah, I think the other reason to still use the languages you use is because you know the idioms that are good and bad. If you're using a language you don't know, then you're just fully trusting the AI, which is fine if you're if you're writing an app that needs to be done in five days and no one's ever going to touch it after that. 32:37.05 Frank But let's say you're writing an app that you're going to support for the next 15 years of your life, and you need to be able to make changes to that app for 15 years and reliably, comfortably make those changes without breaking all the other changes. 32:50.51 Frank then you want good practices. You want good architecture. And the only way to do that is to know what a good architecture is and the language you're using and then the toolings that you're using and all that kind of stuff. 33:02.71 Frank um We are definitely in the world where we we as developers are generating a lot of slop. up there. And that's fine. It's totally cool. We're experimenting with the tools. We're figuring out what the new bars are for what an app is. um I fear that a lot of people are forgetting about the maintenance thing. Like if you write a product that is good, it will be around for a while and you will be working on it for a while. And eventually tech debt adds up. 33:28.44 Frank we AIs do not solve tech debt. If anything, they create more because it's so much easier to write code now. So it's i I still am fighting against Pierce in my head. Pierce has become my little horse about like, do you do um do you pay attention to the code that the AI writes? And it still bothers me that people don't because... 33:51.34 Frank you're never going to support that code in five years down the road unless you know how it works and also it's going to make you a better developer because as you said then you're not churning on prompts constantly begging it to make the change that you need because you have no idea where that change needs to be but even if you had a cursory understanding of the code you can be like oh go edit import data.ts and make sure it handles this scenario. And then, oh, that targeted prompt is so much better than an untargeted prompt. 34:22.58 James No, it's 100% true. And I think like um ah what I ended up doing is getting to the point with a lot of this POCs that I do all the time and say, okay, is this something I want to maintain? 34:34.65 James Then i need to understand the code. 34:35.39 Frank Mm-hmm. 34:35.93 James Or it's like, hey, this is a very small subset, like the local morph or whatever it is. 34:38.35 Frank Yeah. 34:40.25 James Like this is this is it. 34:40.89 Frank Right. Who cares? 34:41.49 James this is It's not going to be anything else, right? 34:42.46 Frank yeah 34:43.51 James That being said, I also want to reiterate, Slop's not new people. People think they you got the slop of the world. 34:50.74 Frank Yeah. 34:51.76 James That's right. Dude, before AI, I had hundreds of repos. 34:54.23 Frank Yeah. 34:55.13 James Now I just have a hundred more repos, right? Hundreds of more. 34:57.30 Frank Right. 34:57.93 James Now the the code that I'm generating and the projects that I'm generating, slop or not, are just more, faster. 34:58.43 Frank Yeah. 35:05.53 James But I always generated slop. 35:05.60 Frank Yeah. 35:07.05 James Let me let me rest assured to you, the things that I made, there were some high quality things. 35:07.51 Frank Right. Yeah. Right. 35:12.34 James Those were turned real products. 35:12.89 Frank right 35:14.42 James There were many a slops inside of there. So um it is what it is. 35:19.48 Frank I just have to interrupt because I remember when like Visual Basic came out and Delphi came out. like When you could make a GUI by dragging and dropping text boxes and buttons into the thing and double-click the button and then it does something, like my God, I was up to like Project 65 very quickly. 35:37.02 James Yeah. Yeah. 35:38.07 Frank Form 38. I was generating... 35:41.10 James Slop is not new. 35:42.19 Frank Yeah, yeah, 100%. 35:43.14 James Slop is not new. 35:43.71 Frank It's just so much easier now. 35:43.94 James And like, 35:45.23 Frank That's the only difference. 35:45.37 James and just ease It's easier and more mediums. But guess what? 35:48.57 Frank yeah yeah 35:49.02 James We've had Photoshop forever. We've done all sorts of stuff, right? Now the question is, is it Photoshopped or is it AI? What's actually the difference? Is it real or is it fake, right? You know what I mean? Is it a this was a photo that was synthesized through a thing, or this was a photo that was so heavily manipulated that you didn't even know that it's a real photo anymore. 36:06.07 James Like that's super, it's super fascinating to think about. And like, there's so much, Yeah, I guess I'm like i a say soapbox, but like there's so much hate, right? And I can't, there's so much angst. 36:18.87 James I guess I'm just sick of the negativity. I'm just, I'm so tired of it and I won't be surrounded by it, right? When people think, you know, I'm not i'm not really on Twitter all that much, even though it may look like because I tweet all that stuff, I'm not on it. 36:33.17 Frank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 36:33.95 James I got off of it a long time ago and I've completely reduced my spectrum of social media because I don't want to be surrounded by that negativity, right? Just because something isn't perfect for you, it's not the perfect product for you, doesn't mean it's not perfect for someone else. 36:50.07 James You what mean? There are billions of people that use Google products, billions of people that use Microsoft products, billions of people that use, you know, OpenAI, right? There's all these a billion people, right? Like there are so many people. 37:02.10 James And just because it's not perfect for you, it's not the perfect product, this or that, it doesn't mean it's not perfect for somebody else. And that's like all software, Of all time, in which it breeds creation. Like, for example, there is a built-in mechanism in Mac OS that allows you to take screenshots for the age of time. 37:18.38 Frank Yeah. 37:19.10 James Command shift four, boom, do it. 37:20.80 Frank Mm-hmm. 37:21.85 James Now I got tiny clips because I think I can do it a little bit better than Apple can do it. Not because it's actually better than how Apple and the amazing engineers did it, because it's a perfect product for me. 37:33.20 James It's how I want to use it, right? And how I want to manage it how I want to do stuff. I use both of them side by side. These things are all about creating those tools in your toolbox that you can use. 37:46.68 James And now there's just more tools in your toolbox that you can use, right, than ever. I mean, there's a lot of scary stuff. I'm not going to sit here and be like, oh, it's not terrifying. we Me and some of my coworkers and even other, we like we'll we'll look at something and then we'll sit there and we'll analyze it like pixels. 38:04.28 James Is that real? Is that fake? But then I think about it. 38:05.92 Frank Mm-hmm. 38:07.13 James I used to do that with some Photoshop photos as well. Like, what is that? What is that? You know what I mean Now we just have to do a little bit more granular, right? Um, it was really fascinating to kind of think about in general. Uh, 38:18.55 Frank So that was a fun detour. James, what phone did you get? I 38:22.39 James I got a light, I got a light phone, light phone too. 38:28.85 Frank love it. It's so little. It's smaller than your hand. Imagine that. 38:33.27 James a comparison. 38:34.86 Frank Oh, my goodness. Everyone, please go to YouTube. 38:36.63 James Is it is it 38:37.91 Frank um it It is, what, maybe two-thirds the size of the iPhone, roughly? 38:44.50 James is it is it is it the size of a a battery MagSafe adapter? 38:44.88 Frank Yeah. 38:48.46 James It is. That is correct. Is it though? 38:49.75 Frank It actually is, huh? 38:50.34 James It is not. 38:51.54 Frank Can you use it as a battery MagSafe adapter for your iPhone? 38:51.83 James Yeah. 38:55.03 James Now that would be amazing. 38:56.60 Frank yeah 38:57.40 James Okay. 38:57.59 Frank That is a cute phone. 38:57.68 James So I had pre-ordered Light Phone 3. 39:02.58 James And I got it, actually. 39:02.70 Frank Okay. 39:04.28 James um i think of that was like $399. Now it's like $599, which is very expensive. 39:08.35 Frank Oof. 39:08.52 James and it has an OLED and it has a camera and it has all this stuff, 5G. 39:10.55 Frank Okay. 39:13.59 James And I got it. And it was very hard to get. And Heather was like, are you really going to use it? And I said, no, I'm not going to. You're totally right. So i just put it on eBay and I sold it 39:22.18 Frank Oh. 39:24.78 Frank Oh, for real. OK. 39:25.75 James Got the money back, you know, maybe made like 50, a hundred bucks or whatever. 39:27.28 Frank Yeah. 39:29.11 James It wasn't the intent, wasn't the purpose, but just to resell it. 39:29.13 Frank Oh. Mm-hmm. 39:31.53 James That's only place to do it, right? On the eBay's, eBay takes its cut. So I recently have been going through another renaissance, which is... just trying to connect closer with the people that I love in my life. 39:43.12 James Right. And the phone is a big distraction, although the phone is a necessary evil as we talked about earlier. 39:43.60 Frank Oh. 39:48.98 James So I went in and I said, well, how much is this 2019 phone going for? This, this came out seven years ago, six and a half, seven years ago, tiny, so tiny. 39:56.09 Frank Yeah. Yeah. It's been that long? Crazy. Yeah. 40:02.52 James and It's an, it's a, it's an e-ink, an e-ink display over here. 40:06.66 Frank I love e-ink. 40:07.77 James You can see it flash e-ink. 40:07.96 Frank Always loved e-ink. i that That blink is very satisfying to me. 40:12.50 James Yeah, there's a little passcode in there. um They sell for $2.99 new and I it on eBay for $1.70. 40:16.60 Frank Quite the bezel. Yeah. 40:19.10 James So said, new and i got it on ebay for one seventy so i said 40:25.69 Frank Okay. 40:26.65 James Okay. That holds up the value pretty good. Let me get a used one. And even if I hate and I sell it later for a hundred bucks, $70 experiment, not bad. 40:33.20 Frank Yep. 40:34.58 James Um, sign up for mint mobile, $15 a month, five gigs. I mean, there's not any apps on here, so it's it's okay. Five gigs, plenty. of you know, I, and it's the same amount that I have on this. 40:43.42 Frank Right. 40:46.37 James So if I can use five gigs a month on my iPhone 14 pro, whatever it is, and I can use it on this. Um, yeah, I just got it. 40:54.42 Frank Did you port your phone number over? 40:54.84 James I just, No, no new phone number. 40:57.94 Frank No. 40:58.14 James So two phone numbers, new number. 40:58.58 Frank new New number. Got it. 41:01.42 James So, um, that was the whole trial is like, I just got a new SIM card cause I need a SIM card from it. Mobile signed up. They sent it to me bingo banga. You can see here. 41:11.76 James I got like, you know phone alarm. That's pretty crisp. But look at that. That's pretty good. It's got a calculator. 41:16.20 Frank It has a calculator? 41:18.54 James It's got, uh, directions. It's got a, you have to install these separately. 41:20.78 Frank Boy, you just can't take the computer out of computers these days. 41:26.05 Frank Ah. 41:26.20 James By it has notes. It got podcasts. 41:27.83 Frank Would you call those apps with GUIs? 41:31.00 James They are apps with text GUIs. Yes. 41:34.07 Frank Oh, they're CLIs. 41:35.95 James They're CLIs. Yeah. Here's you want to see the calculator. 41:40.28 Frank ah It's not rendering very well for me. Oh, yes. it's It's, yes. It reminds me a lot of a Kindle calculator. 41:47.77 James It's very cute. And, um, yeah, so, so you can add and remove these from the actual GUI that's on the the web. So you actually like remote into it basically. 41:57.16 Frank Hilarious. Yeah. 41:58.07 James Um, but there is turn by turn directions. There's a directory there's contacts. 42:01.08 Frank Okay. 42:02.65 James And how I did this was i went onto my Mac and downloaded V cards and then imported them into the website. So i was just like Heather, Heather um and my stepmom for emergencies. 42:12.26 Frank Hmm. 42:13.69 James But I basically plan to take it. Like whenever we go out onto a date night or we go out, or I'm just like, oh, like I don't need my phone. And it's just going to be in my phone in case there's an emergency or something like that. and I have some notes, which is like my insurance cards or whatever it is like, you know, driving insurance and I might need. And that's it. 42:31.83 James So I'm going to give it a try and see how I use it as a second phone. So it's not going not a replacement for my first phone, but it is a second phone that I'll have with me. 42:36.28 Frank yeah yeah 42:41.63 James And the question will be, how much do I use the two phones together, the two phones separately or not at all? Right. And, uh, did text Heather earlier and she said, gross green bubble. And I said, sorry, it's only black and white here. There are no colored bubbles. 42:57.02 Frank love it ah You know, I mean, it does, given that it's summertime now, it does seem like the perfect beach phone. 42:58.87 James Yeah. 43:05.78 Frank I mean, I have i love those ek displays. um Now, as an app developer and someone who makes all their money with people buying iPhone apps, fully gooey 24-bit color, please keep doing all that kind of stuff. Actually, we're beyond 24-bit now. 43:21.17 Frank um I have mixed feelings. so Let me put it that way. From a communication device, I'm i'm with you 100%. 43:26.18 James Yeah. 43:29.91 Frank hundred percent like i don't I don't need all the communication stuff. i I still today wish I could turn the phone part of my phone off. Apple, please. It's 2026. We don't need that stuff anymore. um But at the same time, I do like my apps from time to time. And I was promoting, I just want one button to talk to the AI, maybe in 10 years. Maybe we'll be there. Like the the software has not caught up yet. 43:58.33 Frank um But I don't know. i I like simple devices too. So I think it's very cool. And I'm very interested in seeing where your experiment lands you. 44:10.28 James We'll see. I figure if anything, you know, being on like a Mint mobile plan, that's like super cheap. And um yeah, giving it a go is good. And then the nice thing is if I don't like I'll sell it on eBay later again and get some cash back. 44:20.02 Frank know 44:23.74 Frank yeah 44:25.18 James Not a big deal. you know, I think that'll be cool. um And it's got 4G in it. 44:28.92 Frank Yeah. 44:29.95 James So that's nice. You know, the new one has 5G, I think. But who what am I doing on that G? or I'm just making a phone call. So I think that'll be... 44:36.44 Frank Yeah. 44:37.75 James the biggest thing in general, but it's got little passcode. It's very cute. um You know, it blinks a lot. It's very blinky, which is good. 44:46.97 Frank They got work on that. 44:49.02 James And 44:49.27 Frank I lied when I said I liked the blink. That was a bit of a lie. The the blink I find reassuring because that that tells me it's an eating screen. But the blink they really got to tone it down sometimes. 44:57.08 James true. 45:00.14 James No, I got music. 45:00.95 Frank Partial refresh. 45:01.21 James There's one, there's one playlist and it's just the songs that you've added. That's it. I think like that's as's cool that it's cool that somebody made this. 45:08.57 Frank Look, man, you know. 45:11.98 James It's cool that this exists. That's what I that's what i think. 45:14.46 Frank you You show off a tiny device. Let me show off a tiny device. This here, do you see this? 45:18.16 James Ooh. 45:18.94 Frank I don't know how to pull focus the way you know how to pull focus. This, aha, OK. 45:22.42 James Put your hand behind it. 45:25.51 Frank Well, this is a tiny little embedded device. 45:26.70 James Thank you. 45:29.44 Frank It's an SP32. It's my favorite little s SPs. 45:32.40 James It's a Garand device. 45:32.40 Frank And they just keep making these things smaller and smaller and smaller. 45:35.90 James I was gonna say that it looks smaller than the one I have. 45:38.26 Frank Oh, it is. It is, James. These things are tiny now. This one has a battery controller. It has peripherals on it. It talks Bluetooth. It talks Wi-Fi. It talks, um what's that silly protocol? 45:47.23 James Wow. 45:50.42 Frank Whatever. it doesn't matter. IoT. It does all that stuff. 45:53.27 James Matter, it has matter in it. 45:54.84 Frank It has Matter on it, no problem. 45:55.45 James a Oh my God. 45:57.76 Frank I've in fact written several Matter devices now for my house on this tiny, it has a USB-C port and the battery controller. 45:58.10 James Wow. 46:00.66 James Wow. 46:04.31 James Stupid. 46:05.42 Frank So all you gotta do is solder a tiny battery to it and you have a full device here. 46:09.18 James Oh my God. 46:10.87 Frank And so, like, i I think these tiny communication devices, like, there's no reason your phone needs to be that big, James. but Your whole phone should be, you know, the size of a watch. Like, I think the Apple Watch could get better, you know? 46:20.90 James It's like Zoolander. Okay. 46:23.08 Frank Yeah, exactly, 100%. um so i'm looking forward to the crazy future of um specializing technology i don't know where apple's gonna land on it it's very curious and they talk about having some ceos that must be a little bit scared because like this tiny little future is coming the ai future is coming and the commoditized hardware future is coming and i'm curious uh how 1200 hour devices are going to compete with I believe I paid $3 for this computer that is roughly as good as the computer I brought to college with me. 47:00.70 Frank So anyway, just food for thought. 47:02.67 James That's crazy. Yeah. All right. Well, what it's going to do for this week's Merge Conflict, people. Until next time, I'm James Montemagno. 47:10.65 Frank And I'm Frank Kruger. Thanks for watching and listening. 47:14.26 James Peace.