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This week, Robbie and Adam talk about the ethics and economics of AI, and why “stealing with extra steps” feels like the right metaphor for where things are headed. They dig into open source burnout, whether AI replaces developers or just reshapes the job, how tooling and multi-agent systems fit in, and whether the future belongs to niche expertise—or just better prompts. Presented by CodeRabbit: http://coderabbit.link/whiskey In this episode: (00:00) - Intro (01:56) - Whiskey rating & review: Old Forester 1897 (04:50) - Music taste, Spotify ages, and feeling old (07:29) - Is AI just…

Transcript

Read the transcript · about 13,120 words, follows along as you listen

Welcome to St.Tat. Welcome to a brand new episode of the front-end happy hour podcast. Welcome to this week's JS Party. Live from ship-shaped studios, this is Whiskey Web and whatnot. With your hosts Robbie the Wagner and me, Charles William Carpenter the third. That's right Charles, we drink whiskey and talk about web development. I mean it's all in the name, it's not that deep. This is, Whiskey Web and whatnot do not adjust your set. Whiskey Web and whatnot is brought to you by...

As more and more code is generated, developers end up spending more time reading and reviewing code. This creates an issue on reliably shipping quality code. So even though AI is promising, a lack of proper guardrails can slow down teams. CodeRabbit is an AI code reviewer, unlike AI code generators like Curcer, Windsor for GitHub, Copilot. It reasons and submits feedback on your code base while you raise a pull request to merge code into your VCS.

CodeRabbit is a self-improving agent and it learns from your interactions and creates learnings. CodeRabbit generates one click commit suggestions for some review comments, making it easy for developers to address review comments. CodeRabbit is used by 100,000 open source projects like BU, NextJS, and it's installed on 2 million repositories so far. It's also performed more than 15 million PR reviews. Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to Whiskey Web and whatnot on Margarita Thursday.

First Whiskey Web and whatnot of the year for 2026. Excited to be here. Have some whiskey. How's it going Adam? Dude, I'm so good. I'm also fighting just the doom and gloom of AI looming over top of our heads. Like a Pac-Man just eating all our shit and giving us nothing in return. It's like, give me some coin please. I'm just like, no, I'm just going to take it. It's been brutal. We would jump more into that. But let's ask some Whiskey first. All right, so this is the old Forester 1897. It is bottled in bond, which means it is 100 proof.

And I think they grow all of the stuff there. I don't 100% know what that means. Chuck would know. The Nashville is 72% corn, 18% rye, and 10% melted barley. It is 100 proof because it is bottled in bonds. Of course it's 100 proof. And it is at least four years old. I don't know if you were, I guess you can see it on your screen too. But here for everyone, it looks like this. It's green. They also have like a teal one and a bunch of different colors on the thing.

I forget if it's 1920 or 1910 that they have. That's like our previous favorite. But they have a bunch of them that are different years. And they're supposed to be, I guess, modeled after that year. Like how Whiskey was popularly made then or something. That's cool. I love the little, it's so many moments. It's like every year they're probably just like, let's do one tweak. Because it's going to take us five years to taste it. So, try to own one little chip. Imagine your build times for five years everybody. That's whiskey.

You got an 18 year build time on this bottle. Yeah, that's why everybody just sources whiskey. They're like, I don't know the time to age this. MGP, give me some whiskey. Let's do it. We'll sell it right now. Oh, yummy. Spicy. A little bit of apple and pear. A little bit of cinnamon. Colors more on the yellow side than the red side. Oh, it tastes good. It's much, much different than it smells. Oh, yeah. That's why I was like, I'm not going to go much off this because I'm not loving the smell. But I do like the taste at the moment.

I feel like I'm getting like current jelly on the flavors. A current jelly. Nice. Yeah. I don't know why. I'm trying to figure it out. There's a, there's a dancing, a dancing pepper dancing spice on there, which is good. Yeah, the trailing cinnamon. And then as it trails, you get some of the sweetness coming in from that bourbon influence. Okay. Cool. Yeah. And that's a little bit, I don't know if it's like too much wood or what, but a little bit of harshness like on the finish, which just happened a few times.

And I don't know what causes that, but it's a really young age. Maybe could be might not be old. I think the young age is why I don't like the smell, but it tastes good. I only like old smells. Well, it's good. I'll be 40 in a couple months. You'll love it. Start smelling 42. I thought you were already 40. I thought you were 40 at some point. I guess you were just rounding up. Yeah, my wife got really mad. She's like, you can't round up to 40. And I'm like, you can.

She's like, no, you need to be at least there. Oh, so it's greater than or equal to I can't round up unless I'm alright, whatever. You can only call seal. Yeah. My wife and I are mentally like 75. So it's fine. What was your Spotify age? You got, did you check that out? I didn't do my personal rap, actually. I did the one for the show to like see our listener growth and what was most popular and stuff that I didn't do. I think I looked at mine for a second and like literally all I listened to, like every single like of my top songs was just made a parade.

And I was like, well, that's not very interesting to look at. So I didn't even bother. I do a good job separating. I think we've talked about it on here, but I have like a decoy account for all the kids crap they want to listen to. And anytime someone asks for something on the Google home, it's not my account. It's the burner. It's a burner after a dog's name. Anyway, mine though, I opened it up and my friends and my spouse are all getting like 30 and 20.

And mine says 87. You're listening ages 87. And I was like, a lot of friends and after. There's definitely, yeah, like pretty much on the weekends, I wake up to an idea of crooners in the morning. I really like that. And I listen to a lot of banjo, old timey banjo stuff. So they're like, yeah, you're probably from the 40s. I'm like, geez. Yeah. You know who I like that's I guess relevant to that category, but new is Teddy swims. He's my jam right now.

Nice. He looks like like a Post Malone before he lost weight. Yes, he does. Nice. Yeah, and he's really good. Like I never heard of him. And he was on like the VMAs on like a side stage, which is usually for like shitty stupid artists. I was like, wow, this guy is awesome. And like he's actually really popular. There's a couple like top 10 hits that you've probably heard. Cool. Dang, I'll go check it out. I was spending some records this week to us just I felt like listening to albums.

The whole you know, start to finish albums were so good. I need to revisit that. And then just even getting up out of always a pup. Guest appearance. He is just freaking out on the floor like do something with me. Get that one. My pup visits me all the time. She's like, so you done working yet? I'm like nah, she's like, but I got the toy ready. Don't you want to play? I will. You know, I'm good for it. Just give me some time. All right. So let's regress just a second to our rating system.

Zero to eight tables. Zero is the worst. Eight's the best. Four and a half smell the road. What do you think? Five and a half, six. Something in there. It's drinkable. It hits. It's in the category. I'm happy. I'm not disappointed. High proof. I'm gonna drink this and more. And so it's not throw away. It's good. It's just yeah, I'm not going to write home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I've had any old forester that I would throw away. This one. I think I've had three or four before and this one is maybe the worst one, but it's still good. So I'm going to give it five five seems appropriate.

All right. So speaking of throwing things away. Is AI just stealing with extra steps? Interesting. Stealing with actual once the extra step, the extra step is you have to prompt it. You know, like, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, like instead of, yeah. Well, instead of being like, hey, you know what? I painted the Mona Lisa. That this is my work. Like instead of just flat out taking it and saying that it's mine. You go, create me something that is 99% the same using all of it as your reference, but it's a new new at work. So it's mine now.

So pretty much stealing feels like it's still stealing. Yeah, the worst one I saw was rock, which because it doesn't have as many limits on what it'll do, right? It's horny. It's rude and it rips shit off extra fast. And so yeah, they're like, take this piece of work. Just take the watermark off and it's like boom, the watermarks gone. You're like, yeah. All right. Now just change the hat. It's like the hats different. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna sell that.

Just like, no, that's messed up, dude. Don't do that, please. I hadn't really thought that far into it because like with coding, it's a little bit more obfuscated. It's like, you know, I'm building this thing and I don't understand how to build certain parts of it. And I want to get like advice and like iterate on it. And it feels like it's coding it from some sort of expertise, not just like stealing code, but it is really just stealing code. Like I always forget that it's not not thinking at all.

It's just like, like there was a, I don't know exactly what happened because I guess haven't seen this somehow online, but I guess like within the past few days, like Adam Wathen laid off a bunch of people at tailwind. And like all of that was like attributed to AI stealing all of their work. Basically like they can't I guess sell as many templates and stuff when it just like AI can just build them. You don't need to buy them because like it just looks at it and goes, that looks like this.

Here's an Indigo 500 everything and you've got it for free. So that's pretty fucked up. I don't love that. I don't that's part of it like when we opened up and I was like, doom and gloom. It's basically inspired by that. I've seen AI steal open source work. It steals close source work. It's like because it doesn't really care. Even if the code's obfuscated, it'll figure it out. It'll make new patterns and match them and regurgitate them without you asking.

So it's gone to see assess tricks and read every article and stolen it and regurgitate it as if it's its own. It's gone to every open source repo stolen that it's gone anywhere. It can find code. It's just a greedy little but all and it'll go steal all that stuff. Then it replaced junior jobs. So we saw layoffs attributed to we don't need juniors. We have AI and now we have open source laying off very talented high quality engineers because they can't afford them because AI is just generating the same. It's generating the things that made them money.

So the free side of their thing that led people and funneled them into the payment scenario is now toast and basically if tailwind can't do it, no one can do it. So I was thinking about that all day. I was like, dude, open source is dead. Open source was almost even kind of dead already. It was like, why are we doing this anymore? No one gets paid from it. It's not helping you get a job. All of its benefits have kind of dwindled away other than the goodness of our hearts.

You know, which I, hey, I'm actually a very positive person. I'm pro that but we're in a scenario now where I'm just like, I don't know where the rainbow is going anymore. And so I made a joke about OSS open source software is now we should just start making CSS close source software. Thank you. I thought that joke was all right. You know, it takes a certain audience to think that's funny, but yeah, man, I love CSS. It's about to be really popular. Yes, it is. Yeah. Oh, man. So yeah, the really the only benefits to open source as of now, I still make all of my stuff open because one, I don't really care. And like, two, you get all the free stuff. So like GitHub lets you run more.

GitHub actions and stuff and like code rabbit. You can run infinitely for free on all open source stuff. So like, that is cool. It has been actually really good. How are they going to do that? They're pledging that it's going to be free forever. And then it does cost them a lot of money. I imagine whenever the like VC money dries up. And it's like, you know, you have to actually make money now that they might turn it off. But for now, I'm really enjoying it because I'm like, hey, AI on my machine, build this thing. And then I'm like, cool. I don't want to look at any of the code. I'm going to ship it up to GitHub. And then it's like, ooh, this stuff sucks and it's going to break in this way.

And then I'm like, I go back to my local and I'm like, hey, did you know this sucks and it's going to break in this way? It's like, oh, my God, you're absolutely right. So it's actually been catching stuff that like, I don't know if the local stuff is not being thorough enough when it's building it or like what the disconnect. It doesn't know what it's been doing. Robbie, that's the problem is AI doesn't know why. But I mean, what it's doing, whatever they have, whatever secret sauce code rabbit has seems to be better at like actually deciphering what the code should be doing.

So it's like better at knowing when you messed up little things that like, you know, general AI doesn't know. So that's like. And they call some learnings, right? Yeah, we've been studying what code rabbit does and they have learning. So I'm going to say, well, hopefully they learned on stuff that they should. Maybe that's why it's free. So maybe the free part is like, you're the product. So you put it on your open source and now they're like, sweet, you let us in.

You let the vampire in and now we're going to bite your shit. We're going to suck up everything we can out of it and then make our tool. So I knew I got it off my eye in the first place. Yeah. Slot machine fly wheel go. Yeah. Oh, there's so much in this category to talk about. It's just out of control. Anyway, continue to thought I feel like you still had one going on. Oh, I don't know. My thoughts frequently just end. But yeah, Prime had like retweeted something about the whole tailwind thing. It was basically like, you know, I think, and I kind of agree with this take.

But I don't know what your thoughts are that like basically for all of these CEOs who just like through caution to the wayside and like, we need to, you know, we're racing to be the best AI product. We need everything to, you know, work immediately. We don't care how much stuff we steal. We don't care who we put out of work. Whatever that all of those people should be held criminally liable for like anything that was in fact theft. Like you might have to do a little bit of, you know, investigation into how you could prove that it was like actually, you know, grand larceny or whatever.

But like, it is, in my opinion, it is. And it's easy to see. And I suppose we're in a lawyer scenario where it's hard to prove. And that's just a pain in the ass. Yeah, it's like a, it's money, money did this. And it made people want to make fast cash. And so they stepped on carcasses. They stole from people without asking. And, you know, they're going to make a claim like you put it on the internet as soon as it's on the internet that shit is just a web page and a web page. You can't control that, which is honestly something that was kind of cool about the internet for a while.

Was it it was a very anti corporate place to be because no one controlled it. And it was open and free. And that was its value. And then this tool showed up and stole from it at a massive rate. Like it was fine when crawl like spiders were crawling it to help us find the content on it. But it sucks when something is crawling it to soak it up and steal it and sell it back to us that sucks. So yeah, I think it is on a higher up folks that there should have been some accountability.

There's still needs to be accountability. There is none. There's only growth. And we're probably even going to see a scenario soon where like an AI company had an AI CEO and the AI CEOs chose to continue stealing. You know, and you're like, well, and then who do we blame at this point because CEOs that are AI don't make money. And yeah, you're going to have to try to sue the corporation. It's just dude, it's a humongous nasty mess. And the people benefiting it from it are not us.

Our jobs are about to go. Tons of jobs about to go. The work that I'm even doing now is insanely different than it was six months ago different from two years ago and wildly different from five and 10 years ago. Yeah. And there's no stopping it. It's just this huge thing. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about, you know, the whole will all the jobs go away or not. Like I think if you're a big corporation and you continue to make money somehow.

Like your corporation is not cut down by AI. Then other than greed and like, hey, I need instead of like $50 million, I need $150 million personally. As long as you don't have too much of that, I don't see why you wouldn't just continue to pay developer like you wouldn't hire more probably. But just keep paying the people that you are. Make sure they're using AI to its fullest to like ship stuff really quick and like whatever. Because I think you still need like, there's a lot of stuff that yes, it can kind of build like code basically anything I ask it to these days.

However, I know things that could be better because I know what's better. So like I think, you know, like I was doing stuff for the number data today. And I'm like, I know that this thing isn't going to work with it the way you did it. So like having that human that knows to check you and be like, now maybe that could be code rabbit or like some other, you know, I review or maybe there is no human. But I think like as long as they're the developer salaries are not hindering you're like making money. Then why wouldn't you just keep them like keep the status quo.

Like, you don't need to lay everyone off just cause. But maybe that's what you're thinking your margins. Yeah, I mean, it's a corporation. This is always their claim. It's like they're just going to do whatever it takes to make more because more is better at least to corporation. Right. It's like, if you can, you should, if you've seen Gastown, I'm not Gastown. So the person who created beads. Do you know what beads is. Cool. Let's go. Things you put on a little bracelet. Yeah, or you can make some more of them. Yeah, curtains too. That's great.

There is a so beads is a way for you to pass data between agents. But there is an anal beads repo, which they took ANAL and they made it something like analysis. Something. Anyway, so you can use ANAL. Yeah, because of course it is because it's the internet. And that's maybe you know, AI wouldn't do something stupid like that. That's a human. Yeah. So let's say everyone you've used Claude or you've used open code, which I've been using open code in the past couple weeks. You've got an agent. You did some shit with it. But now you now you have two agents.

You spun up a new tab and now you have two and they're both doing shit. And you're like, oh, yeah, now we're going. And then you you spin up five. You have five tabs. And now you're like, okay, well, these five tabs are starting to stomp on top of each other. I got to use work trees. And you're like, yeah, okay. This is now your got work trees and your multiple agents are working. And so now you're back merging their work from work trees into a branch.

It's a feature branch and you're feeling really good about it. However, your orchestration is getting tough. And you're having trouble managing Ralph. So even though Ralph was in there managing a loop for you, things are still getting out of control. You need to pass data from one agent to the next because in order to do a big task. Yeah, dude, go ahead and interrupt me. It's fine. No, I just I forgot about the Ralph thing. What's the last name of Ralph? I forget Ralph something. Yeah.

Yeah, he's so hot right now. Ralph is so hot, dude. I know. I watched like five minutes of Matt Polcock explaining that it's just a for loop and that it's not just because stuff is better now. You can like, it's viable. Whereas like before it wasn't viable because AI would just like choke and die. Like you couldn't just let it for loop. But now that it's better, it's like viable, which makes sense. I don't know. It's not really that it's better. It's more like you formalized.

Okay. So yeah, let's let's talk more about Ralph versus Gastown because these are like, they're both trying to solve the same things. People want to do bigger, better shit with AI. And so that's kind of what I'm working to. So like you've got five agents now. Now you have 10 agents and you need to pass data between these because agents lose their memory. The memory needs compressed. So how do you pass memory from one agent to the next? And there's all sorts of different strategies. Dude, people are writing emails.

People have an agent write an email in quotes, but basically the same thing to the next agent. Here's what I did. Here's what needs to be done. Here's some history. Go do that shit. That's what I do. If I know I'm going to run out of tokens or context or whatever it may be soon. I'm like, Hey, just wrap up what you're doing and like tell me what to tell the next time. Like so that we can start from here. And that's like mark down to people are writing to mark down files. Right. So you've got like a plan. The plan goes through some to-dos.

Maybe you evolve it and it writes it back to the mark down. And I've even been trying a skill base version of this. So like I invoke an agent with a skill. It goes and does this task. It learns a bunch of stuff from performing the task. Bakes it back into the skill. So the next agent I spin up to do the same tasks somewhere else in the code base like a migration or whatever. It's bigger smarter faster than the one prior. So it's like you have this issue like once you run it to a bunch of agents, you need to pass data.

Okay. So we'll fast forward to gas town. And gas town is from the person who may be it's which beads by the way everybody is a get based way of sharing data amongst your agents. So you're not going to litter your repo with mark down. You're also not dealing with a sequel light database or vector database or emails or whatever it is or skills. You're not beads is a get based way to persist data across multi agent sessions. So then you have gas. Is this related to sorry I know nothing about this, but you might like jujitsu or JJ or whatever that's I think also for doing like kind of get based something like basically so you could like every time you run something and AI it's like like stashing what the last thing did so you're not cloppering yourself or something and then like you can ultimately I think commit the whole thing just like it or whatever, but like something like that I don't know if they're related at all or different.

What you're talking about is that there's multiple people trying to solve this same problem. And I even want to talk about a certain point to where like both things that we're doing in the AI world that are becoming popular. Just get baked right into AI super fat again stealing. Hey everybody's uniting on this really nice pat steel it. Okay, like Ralph Wiggins is now baked into clop basically is this good example like people were hand rolling a python script. That's what Matt Polcock did. He showed hand rolled python that was looking for a certain promise that got returned by the agent if it didn't then it just ran that shit again in the loop.

Now it's official in cloud cloud. It's just like oh yeah great idea we stole it. So then that's going to happen with beads and all these other tools especially like the can ban thing which we'll probably get into we're seeing businesses wanting to be the swarm manager. And then okay, so let's get to gas town. Gas town is the person who made beads which is currently the most popular and tried and true way for sharing data amongst your agents on long running and difficult tasks like overnight type tasks.

And gas town. Okay, you're talking about like people. Hey, I want to keep people around. Gas town is people. Gas town isn't a set. It's essentially like seven people, seven roles, which also if you tried open code, oh my open code. Have you seen that? I have not no. God, let's talk about that one too. It's kind of like a mini gas town built right into open code if you install these plugins. It's kind of cool. Okay, so imagine gas town is the scenario where it's like look you want to get something really big done or you want to have you want to delegate a whole bunch of work to a whole bunch of agents.

You're the I don't know the only human that's involved in this whole thing and there's seven different roles that can have one or many of them. And it's kind of like if you think basically like you maybe you have a plan and an orchestrator and the orchestrator spins up agents. It's like that on in a small gas town scenario. So you've got roles that do specific things that can help you fan them out in parallel. Verify work verify tests to just do the whole nine like some people are out there basically trying to recreate entire companies entire agencies entire huge businesses and taking every single person's role and turning it into a recreatible and overnight scenario with agents and it burns through your cash like crazy, but it does create it creates results. Here's the thing that I'm always laughing at.

Okay, I just want to like side side step real quick. I've tried a lot of these things. I see a lot of the things that people make with these. And while it is cool, it reminds me of computers for computer say you know people that code just to code the computer they're like look what I made the computer do. And you're like that's pretty cool. I mean the computer to that. What did it make though? You're like it's kind of turd over here. All right. Well, you that's a really elaborate turd. You know and I'm looking at people's output from like gas town and Ralph Wiggins the same way I'm like wow you ran Ralph all night for like 150 bucks and you got a turd.

You know, I find it's like it's mildly better than my one shot turd. So congratulations to your whole new setup. But I don't know everyone is very like they would. So we're creating these things because we want the future. Well, some people some people want this future where maybe models are better and we will talk about that too is like models. Have they peaked? When are they going to peak? That's really impactful for how we predict what's happening next.

So a lot of these methods are trying to like Ralph Wiggins is trying to take a sort of mildly capable model and make it better by running it through the same thing over and over again. I just talked a whole bunch. But basically like I want to chat about Ralph Wiggins. Ralph Wiggins, gas town AI harnesses if you don't know what AI harnesses are yet. Let's talk about those. And just like how people are trying to take this machine, this model, which is just a word vomit machine.

It's a pattern matching high prediction engine and tweaking it into producing the things that we want at a code like how does bolt work bolt works because it's it's got an AI harness on it. It's probably going to evolve into a gas town scenario here and then at the end of all this all these businesses all these good ideas that people are putting in here and then they just turn around and get fucking stolen by these big companies that are already stealing everything and they're going to steal it and sell it back to you or they're going to sell it to the other people that don't know how to use it.

Dude, we're just in this machine right now. It's a machine of machines and I don't know where we're going but dude, we're going there fast. I feel like it's spinning faster every week. God, it's overwhelming and then to have people losing their jobs at tailwinds just. Whoa, it's an interesting situation where like on the one hand, I mean you can't stop it, I guess. So like I'm kind of okay with the like quick iteration and it being stolen and then whatever because that means I don't ever have to like super configure my stuff like warp and open code do a great job of me telling them nothing and being like I want to build this maybe maybe I let you look at my code and like like you can build a warp dot MD or whatever like very minimal handholding and then I'm like default settings go build me this and it's like that stuff is just going to get better and better as like all of these like you know it's almost like algorithms.

Like you know everybody like was like what's the best algorithm for all the things like what's the best sorting algorithm how do we do that the fastest. I think whoever builds the one that basically needs the least handholding is going to be the winner like I can just tell it in plain English this is what I want. And it will figure out all the nuances of what I meant and like build it the best way because there's been a lot of you know stuff happening quickly like every day there's a new new way to do all this and tell it all the give it the most context.

And like make sure you have less contest if you see that now it's like oh you give it too much and that's why failed you're like get out of here well I don't think I've had the problem of too much context yet. That's totally a thing to it's annoying until I used open code I was like super bearish on all of it because if you go into like chat GPT or like clawed chat or whatever and you're like build me something it's like. Like unless you're asking it explicitly like I need a function that does this it's going to be like it would give you something but like open code or like agent work flows in general I guess are like just so much better than like.

A chat bot or like the initial way that I was interacted with so I think maybe this isn't even close to the end like we'll just keep iterating on how we use this but like I don't I don't think the models themselves are going to get all that much better I do think we've kind of capped out like. Where they are like it's going to be diminishing returns or even if it did get a lot better I feel like you're going to have to just spend like. 100x the power and cooling for it to where it's like not feasible to use like we're going to burn the planet up before we get to like a better model in my opinion.

Yep I think that's pretty sound and that that's a good segue into like what is in AI harness and so it's like if you look at how bolt and lovable and same dot dev and a lot of these different websites work is they they take your wack ass prompt your vague weird sentence that you wrote. And the AI harness is all the layers and guards and enhancements that are specific and proprietary to their interpretation of what you said and this is why loveables results look the way they do so the same way bolts look the way they do or if you use cloud directly.

The way that it looks based on their AI harnesses that are kind of built into cloud and what these are it's like a they take your like a bolt for example takes your prompt gives it to an orchestrator ask the orchestrator enhance the prompt so then it doesn't enhance when pass the enhancement pass says okay now optimize this for a multi agent scenario so devy out to work and articulate back in front end all the different tasks. Then it gives the tasks to the agents which point those come back and it does a critical review of them with a different agent right so the harness here is the ecosystem and the cycle the machine that they put your prompt through that turns into something bigger and better or then was originally.

Yeah so their secret sauce that makes it it's a secret sauce totally and so like what you're pointing out is like if the models are towards the best that they're going to be because they are just word prediction machines they're not smart they suck at math stuff like that the harnesses are the value and that's why cloud is probably so badass right now it's like it's got it's got a model that's specifically trained for coding very highly specialized for coding plus.

They've got a lot of a lot of data on how to make the most badass harnesses so they got bad as harnesses you know I'm sure work is somewhere in the same position and open code is trying to get there yeah I'm glad I've somebody to talk to about this stuff because no one else in my near vicinity knows anything what I'm saying yeah I appreciate you Robbie yeah so I'm here for I don't know what where it's going to go but it's it's exciting and scary I'm enjoying using a lot of the things personally but it's not.

Yeah I can see all of us having no jobs at some point so I don't know what happens then I hope someone has a plan for that other than just there being a thousand rich people and everyone else is unemployed I think about it like a or here's a romantic potential which is that did you ever have an old car yes I did okay do you ever take it to a mechanic because it broke all right so like that's going to be us bro not the car but the mechanic we're going to be there and be like oh you you you have a car from the 2010s or you have a website from the 2010s I was a mechanic during that time yep I know exactly how all those work you have a problem with it bring it over I'll put it in my garage I'll fix it up for you and I'll give it back and bro that's how we get old man like this just in whiskey dot fund is now open for all your merch needs that's right Robbie we're hearing reports of hats sweaters and t-shirts as well as a link to join our discord server what's a discord server just read the prompt or man hit subscribe leave us a review on your favorite podcast app and tell your friends about our broadcast it really does help us reach more people keeps the show growing

all right back to your regularly scheduled programming I guess the one thing that is that would be my advice to anyone is don't learn all of the things that everyone knows tail in is probably a bad thing to be an expert at because like that's what AI is going to give you like if you learn the things that AI doesn't have a ton of examples on like embers a pretty good example because like nobody uses ember and if there is stuff about ember out there it's like stack over flows stuff from like six or seven years ago so it's like not relevant to current ember but like the more you know about like emerging technologies like before there's a lot of documentation about it or like get into the canary versions get into the niche things that like people aren't using learn CSS is also still hard for like not close source software but cascading style sheets I think that is the future of like just trying to quickly learn or a niche to like even if you're going to then go turn around and train a small AI model on it to be like oh my agency is good at this like one thing because I know it and I trained AI on it and like the big models will get it in a few months but like

right now pay us a ton of money like that could be a good business model I agree that that niche is ahead of the slop or the mainstream output that is coming from AI so yeah you're going to have you're going to have emerging groups of people or companies that are like the reason our shit is bad ass is because we do exactly what AI can't or what it won't because it's just so edgy the edges might become way more better because the mainstream is getting thicker it's getting fatter every year mainstream music gets bigger and thicker every year and it pushes out indie and smaller things every year same thing with web design and applications we're seeing the mainstream just get thicker and so yeah if you want to position yourself you kind of need to pick position yourself as the factory of these things so hey we stamp out houses all day I'll make you a hundred homes and three days with my template and my specialized agents or I'll make you a unique super bad ass house you can't get any anywhere else and it costs a hell of a lot of money because this is a human hand done maybe mostly hand done like oh here's funny did you play expedition 33 I did not if you heard of this game I've not oh my goodness bro this game won way way more awards than destiny to well who did it

well it's good point okay expedition 33 is a really really I loved it is it really really great great game however after one a bunch of awards it turned out they used AI for a lot of their prototype textures and some of the prototype textures made it into the final game at least in like early versions of the final game and the gaming industry stripped them of their awards oh wow for using AI I was like that's really interesting is that going to happen to our industry too like it's like your app used AI or are you going to get stripped of something no I don't think so I mean there is it's kind of like the illegal versus immoral debate of like I think for the longest time I was trying to hold out and be like hey if you're using AI every day to like just build stuff and you don't know anything about what you're doing you're stupid don't do that but now I'm kind of like you know what we don't actually need to know how most of this works yeah it does not help me to know how it works I can like double check the code to make sure it didn't do something stupid like nest tin for loops or like you know you got to know like basics but you don't really have to know that much about like most things

I don't know I feel dirty that I like that now but like yeah I feel like the path of the senior is like gone like the path of the juniors already gone but now it's just like yes you're singing the song dude this is why I was all doom and gloom when we joined over Christmas break I needed a banjo tuner on my iPhone and I went to the app store and I looked for tuners and they were plenty and they all looked like ass and they were all for guitar and not for banjo and I went to the anything app which hey anything app if you want to sponsor us write me an email the anything app allows you to create a new app from this app so he's it's bolt for your iPhone okay so I talked about this I didn't notice but yeah it's called anything dude I got a banjo app out of it in about 10 minutes while my kids were getting ready for bed and it looked really nice and it was all the tunings that I tuned my banjo to and the frequencies my favorite part was it going through I'm writing the code for this and I'm just kind of like glazing over looking at what it's writing and it has an array of all the frequencies for the tunings and I'm like that shit is cool

that would have taken me so long just to find just to source the data for the frequency of a G string and a but do you get any kind of satisfaction though like I feel like I get a little more satisfaction if it were at least like web technologies like using web audio API to like do something with the frequency because I did this for I had an EmberConf talk that was talking to your dog with Ember and it would take dog barks and like based on the pitch of the dog bark it would say are they happy or angry yes I feel like you could do something similar with like just make a tuner like that like based on the pitch or whatever so that would be more fun to me because I could then at least understand the code afterwards like read through it and stuff but I don't get any joy out of like other than the like the little bit of like gamblers satisfaction of like winning when like out the prompt goes right and the code does what I wanted it to do that like small dopamine hit but not like any real satisfaction was not from the dopamine hit was because I gave a big middle finger to the apple app store

that's where I got my joy and the the follow up joy was v1 of this app was not tailored enough to what I want before AI you'd go to a website and be like it has a dark and light mode toggle for me I get to pick my preferences matter wow you know you could go choose you know like that that was the amount of customization we had now I'm in a scenario where I'm like who cares what's in the app store I make my own apps and when those apps spin up I ask for dark mode and it just does it doesn't even have a switch it'll just create the dark mode for me on the fly in fact all that I want more tunings I just I don't have to log an issue I don't have to write an email I don't have to contact support this is my software if anything I had a drop in my stomach because I realized that we've always known native apps perform better than the web but it was inaccessible it was inaccessible to create that many native apps the word that high quality and basically now we're not there anymore I felt a deep sync of my stomach because it felt like the web will die because native apps have always been mildly superior and now it's accessible to anyone to make one and I was like holy shit I hate that but

I also love that for myself in a way like oh great everything I've ever dreamed for is now possible same thing for my mom but now what am I going to do it like my career has been you need a dark mode toggle that's going to be a week of work yeah let me just go ahead and work on it so I don't know this is difficult to hand roll because you've got to think about every little color unless you're doing like and I mean I'm going to sound stupid with this but I think there's like a CSS property to say like I want this to be like display text or whatever so it's either white or black based on what you've chosen yeah you know pitch that to the CSS working group six years ago yeah yeah yeah so like you can use that but like if you're wanting it to be custom in any way of like I want to like be spoke when it's dark I wanted to look at the way I want not just like inverting colors then it is a ton of work to figure out like all of those colors yeah I mean I feel like you could probably be like yo AI I don't want you I don't want to just invert them I want like I want you to draw upon other dark mode websites I want you to give me like five options I'll tell you which one looks

cool yeah you could be done in minutes and that's like that's pretty scary that's pretty scary there's a let's see I used to call it lift and shift I wrote a blog post about this I'll find it and put it in the show notes maybe I try to look at my website really quick but it was a scenario where like you used to be able to go to a website and like you could view source right so you would view source now now you can tell AI to steal source you go to any website that you like you like the color scheme and you're like steel source and then you switch tabs and you paste source like that's an AI has made it even easier so what was the title this was like is it even easier with less prompts to steal stuff isn't just stealing with extra steps it's stealing with less steps and that's kind of why I think what bugs so many people is like you can steal art with less steps you can steal less steps for you I think it is more steps behind the scenes than just copying and pasting I think is the more but yeah it is very easy for you to steal there's a chrome extension you can go install it right now and you can go to a website for beautiful UI examples you find

the beautiful UI example that you like you open up in a new tab and then you steal everything and you go back and you're like take this entire beautiful aesthetic and apply it to my garbage idea and dude is really good it's stupid it's stupid that like that's easy on like non-standard things like I can't think of the what the company was but they had like they turned their website into like a video game animation style like Cheetah that like ran around and like did stuff like it wasn't just like boxes like is it good enough to steal something like that and be like oh instead of a cheetah I want it to be like an ape like can it do are we there yet because if we're at that the we're done like there's nothing else we need to do that's a good question I don't know if it can do that but it can it can augment during copy and it can go as deep as like webGL effects and stuff like that so you can be like this site has whatever going on I don't even know like that's kind of the point you're that we're talking about here's like you don't have to know the implementation details you just say my eyes like that copy it AI and it just copies it and you're

like and that just stole years of someone's work okay so yeah somewhat related I'm gonna take as a little different course please let's let's get off this is so to me native apps you know like a Mac app let's say what do you think about animations because like desktop apps kind of historically have just all been like there's a thing you should be able to click on the cursor does not change legs not like a website we're doing cursor mouse mouse hand or not should you have different cursors should it animate should it show you in some way that it's clickable or should it I feel like the default of like 90% of things as it does nothing you just like click everything to see if it's clickable and like a desktop app and like while I guess that's a standard for some reason is that the best for users or like is it a no-no to like add in nice delightful animations to that stuff or make like a little hand or like make it more fun web like I guess like I'm asking because like in swatch I feel like it's very drab like I want it to be better at like delighting people as they move around but I also don't want people to be like oh that's just a website that

you threw into it like it is a website but like so I tried before to make it all very default click nothing does anything like you can't select text anywhere because it's an electron app like the same as you would in an oral app like you know the stuff that I feel like is kind of dumb that it's a standard but I don't know what are your thoughts on that in general I love this topic Robbie this is a design discussion and I I've seen this trend I recap this as is the Mickey Mouse hand valuable to users does it inform people that when you hover over a thing and it turns into this shape which everyone can see I'm like I got the thumb out and the index pointer up which also that icon changed in the macOS release recently and it drove a bunch of people nuts because the thumb is now perpendicular instead of like angular and everyone's like why didn't know that set oh god it's so funny to do the conversations okay so I up until last year and I'm just gonna admit right now I'm a trend follower up until last year I put cursor pointer on everything that the mouse could touch that did some shit because I was like look it's obvious you're just making it a no-brainer

that when their mouse goes over over a thing and it turns into the Mickey Mouse hand then voila they know that click will do something you don't have to make the background change you don't have to put a border color change you don't have to transition or do anything more than cursor pointer and get your result however it is now trendy and I think some of the trends okay so there's trend and there's the web platform if you do nothing on your site Robbie what things on your page already turn to a cursor pointer and what things don't I would want to say that anchor tags and buttons do but I feel like I probably add that into one or the other of them it's probably only one of them it's probably a trick question I'm gonna say it's a trick question to which one yeah yes anchor tags do it anchors so 25 30 years ago or whatever the design system choice for the web was Mickey Mouse cursor for links that's it that's it well the problem is people started going okay well this is gonna actually open a new page or route or whatever in your spa but it's a button because it's doing an action and they take it and then then it's like oh well but it's taking you

another page so it's actually an anchor tag and then people probably weren't changing it from the Mickey Mouse hand so they're like people started seeing that I mean like oh it is good to say that like this is clickable maybe we should just add cursor pointer to all these also whenever we have any button I don't know I don't know if there's a right answer if it's just personal preference there is no right answer there is the answer the web tried to instigate there's the reality that users assumed it's just like a blue link like that was it that was a design system decision and then there's the reality of like where we are today and what users want when they hover around and so tailwinds and influential library in this concept of Mickey Mouse or not because they opt to not in their templates and their presets and stuff like that cool they reset everything they have their own reset so I guess they were yeah and they're going to they're going to leave buttons in arrows so it's like basically you only Mickey Mouse a link and you are you cursor auto everything else hi okay so then with that don't love that though with that if we assume that's the the default

that we want if you have a native app that's like an electron app or whatever would you still Mickey Mouse hand links in it like if you're like you know here's nothing yeah no Mickey Mouse hands I don't know on a native app yeah so that it's not first I don't love I wish that we could just agree that it's the same on the web and in native apps and like pick a standard and like then also allow more fun stuff in native apps like I don't feel like there's a and I haven't developed one in like Swift or you know whatever but I feel like there's not like a frame or motion in Swift that's like you know what I want all this stuff to be delightful and do all these crazy animations I feel like they don't have that maybe they do they do they do and it's just no it's okay well maybe yes no no one has the time to polish with a physics animation library but there are high quality high frame rate ways for you to bring delight into a native app but not with not with electron or whatever that's that's still going to be sure web right but yeah if you're Swiftland there's pods there's Cocoa pods and there's even a built-in Swift animation library

here's a fun thing I made a physics library in CSS six years ago it's called physics f i z z x and I've been recently hacking on it with AI because AI doesn't know what the fuck I want but that does know physics because it knows how to regurgitate the next thing in a physics equation I'm no math pro I prototype the original version with no AI but here I'm using AI to like take me to the next level it probably crap out amazing Swift or even objective C native physics engines like renderings it doesn't care it's like look it's math man and math has been consumed and regurgitated across more than just the web that's a funny powerful thing about AI though is that it doesn't know why or what it does know the patterns and the patterns of physics are known these are just established and known and it's true been trained on them yeah all right so all I'm hearing is I can add as many animations as I want to swatch and I shouldn't worry about it you should you should do that let's talk about vibe Kanban as a final capstone on AI and get the hell off of this topic yes because I know it's consuming all of our lives and it's overwhelming

did you see the post from the got there's like there's not a godfather of AI but there's like a just a second names anyway there's someone on twitter who's like very known for like being early in on all this AI stuff and he wrote a post over Christmas break that was like I'm overwhelmed with AI there's so much happening I can't keep up and everyone's like well if you can't keep up how the hell am I gonna do it anyway we're like at that scenario you know so so vibe Kanban so like everyone we're all in the same boat we all can't keep up that's kind of what I'm trying to say me I can't keep up I'm trying to Robbie he can't chuck his way behind actually he's probably actually doing okay I just want to I just want to make fun of Chuck because he's not here he should be open codes oh my open code and that shit is actually pretty cool which we haven't talked about much but anyway okay so vibe Kanban here's real quick do you say Kanban or Kanban Kanban dammit it does sound cooler it's like salsa yeah anyway smoother okay so vibe Kanban is one of many okay so again you're gonna you're gonna see someone steal this idea and make a

business out of it really soon I'm actually here's a prediction I have for 2026 maybe 2026 prediction is GitHub's projects become automatically vibe Kanban with co-pilot so anything you've done in there is about to just auto move into complete hell's yeah right okay so vibe Kanban Kanban you spin this up opens up in a new tab and instead of writing a new prompt you create a new task and the new task targets a branch targets a few basics and then you give it a prompt that's like hey I want to add okay here's here's the thing I did I went into my personal website issues and I found four issues that have been in there for two years one of them was I want to show page views I want to show page visitors active people on my site there was like there were four things I just hadn't gotten to and I created each of these as a to do in vibe Kanban and vibe Kanban takes your issue creates a work tree spins up cloud feeds it your repo and the task and auto manages it working across until it hits complete so it moves your tasks into being worked on and you can see it and there's audio so you got this tab and all of a sudden like AI is just doing

shit you're like holy shit I have like employees like like you know like agents in your CLI is like one thing but like when you see issues moving across your swim lanes and across columns inside of a Kanban you're like this is really compelling I found it compelling I guess I'll say maybe you won't and so yeah two of my four issues were just completed they were done by open code so this was an open code vibe Kanban scenario I just gave it shit two of them completed two of them didn't and then you can go retry them isn't that funny you can retry and add context you'd like oh I see how you failed let me retry you with some more information to help you complete it and that's what vibe came and there's multiple of them right now there's a cloud one there's non-cloud ones there's some of them are beautiful some of them and you can tell people vibe coded them but who cares you're like I don't love the CLI I mean I do but at the same time like I really love watching a task move across a task board and then playing a sound when it's complete like that's satisfying as hell like warp is the best I've had until then I'd ask something from warp

warp does the thing it makes a little cute little chime says it's done I go check whether it's done or not I give it some more instruction or it's done and it's all good but vibe Kanban has been one of the most so over my break over the past months this has been the most delightful tool I've used and I found that there's multiple variants of this across multiple different implementations and so someone's going to turn this into a business but dude it's really cool I'm now a project manager this is what I mean my role is changing I'm no longer coding on my personal website I'm a project manager I've got a backlog and I just send my backlog to a bunch of turd nuggets that are just lackeys in a gas town and then they do the work and that this is our future and that's 2026 right now I don't I don't like it I like that I can build things that I couldn't have built myself like above my abilities but I don't like it is taking the work that I thought was fun because I'm never going to have fun again it is not fun for me to sit down on my couch and manage a Kanban a hundred percent I much preferred like dirty hands satisfying details a good example is if you make

a car I want to sweat the details I want to sit in the driver's seat and I want to and I want to hold the steering wheel and I'm going to rub my hands around the edges of it and I'll be like no the leather is wrong you know like this is this is my role as a CSS developer I like sit in there and it's like that's not satisfying enough I know a texture would be more and I go with sign a nude texture but dude with like vibe Kanban I'm just like make a steering wheel and make it drivable and it's like the car is drivable and I'm like this is way less satisfying I made five cars and last year I only made one car that was half as good but I felt better about last year's car and this year's car yeah man it's weird to be continued I don't want to I have more things I could say but let's let's stop talking about this yeah we're at an hour and we had like a huge task list of so if you want to talk about but yeah we can briefly touch on a couple other things maybe the real quick yeah let's just tell me about your Christmas I had Christmas stitches maybe we'll make that quick but yeah tell me about your Christmas what's that yeah so we also I yeah I think

I don't know if the the story was similar I think you I don't know if the one you were saying that was similar was another time or the same time but yeah my son fell and hit his ear on the coffee table and like almost sliced the ear in half and had to go get yeah that glued like like December 22nd or 3rd or something no way dude that's like around the same day that you were like you had something similar like what happened with yours okay so yeah it was not the Christmas Eve it was the night before so it was literally the 22nd and yeah my kid at 10 o'clock at night is brushing his teeth and he funny sneezes whatever that means take this into anyway he hits his head on the counter in the bathroom and just rips a inch and a half gash in his head and it just starts gushing blood everywhere yeah so I'm like oh man that looks like a hurt on in it yeah yeah it was like I pivoted from hey that looked like I heard you oh my god this is leading everywhere and then we have to rush downtown oh dude it's wild yeah yeah Kate let's so funny you had a similar thing I can't believe it yeah yeah Caleb had to take Finn to like urgent care for that

and then they were basically like hey it's late just go to the hospital so they went to the hospital and yeah I got it fixed up but yeah we went to ER there was a guy with one leg he peed his pants while we were watching yep interesting okay okay I mean that's what happens in the ER downtown big city so yeah all the things happen in the ER yeah yeah so we had that but experience that's wild yeah other than that we uh yeah we're super busy we like traveled down to my parents for their Christmas party and then came back and then hosted for Christmas Caitlyn's mom came in and then we uh did a bunch of activities like we uh there's this big ice thing where they like bring in this team of people from China that are like ice sculpture people and they do this like whole thing like they did polar express this year so there was like a full side like life-size train engine out of ice kind of thing like and you walk through all the scenes from polar express they have like the hot chocolate stuff and like all the different stuff so that was cool people are cool and then you say I had to do that huh yeah right yeah so that's yeah

gotta find there's some niche thing well I mean I you say that uh this keeps you're dragging this back in I'm so sorry dude I didn't mean to everyone I'm so sorry I said it too but I can't I can't let it go there's there's the have you seen the company that uh they do like marble statues with like a robot and it uses like like so they're basically saying they're gonna make it way cheaper no like you can't have a marble facade on a building because it's expensive because there's like artisans have to do it all no they don't you put it in like a 3d printer for marble and like they're saying they can they're gonna bring back stone on like you know all buildings there'll be no reason not to use it anymore because it'll you can just have it everywhere which is kind of cool but also puts a ton of people out of work wow anyway jeez christmas uh this is last year my kids are gonna believe in Santa probably that was fun they wouldn't go to bed I don't know so if your parents out there and your kid didn't go to bed before christmas that's a stressful time for a child you know they're like is there like gonna

give me coal or presence and you're like yeah you better go to sleep that's a good way to make sure you don't get cold yeah yeah yeah luckily we haven't had any trouble with that thus far but yeah I mean I'm sure the I don't can't remember ever like being like you know what I'm gonna stay up and and check like and see if anyone showed up because I feel like yeah I was always forced to go to bed at some point but yeah I never I think I tried one time but I was a kid you just can't your body's like yeah shut down initiated and you're like yeah yep yep yeah I remember my cousin and I always used to try to stay up all night just on random nights we'd be like oh yeah it's like 3 a.m. we're gonna make it and then we'd be like you don't remember anything after that you're just out like the kids at school they're like I stayed up all night and then did and I came as school today and I'm like no you didn't stay up all night it sucks and you look like it so yeah yeah the only time I like stayed up all night and did something I went to like a lock-in at like a church and like stayed up all night for that and then my dad had me and like I don't know a

couple other kids doing like some building something on a dock at the lake so like I was using like a hammer right and I had also had a bunch of allergies so I had like taken a bunch of Benadryl and stuff and I'm like hammering stuff in and like falling asleep while I'm doing it like this is uh this is not good child labor force that's what I hear yeah yeah yeah I used paying us it's fine man did you watch Stranger Things I don't want to make this episode longer but like didn't know where we might start it tonight I don't know we'll see but yeah we've had way too much going on and way too many people staying here and we haven't had the chance yet but RIP your pup yeah let's just share everybody his pup I had a final day no longer yeah yeah it was a rough few days but uh we're good now but yeah the the other dog I think was like stooping to his energy level because now he is way hyper all the time and I'm like looking your microphone yeah yeah and before they were just kind of sleep all day so they would both they both wanted to sleep all day but like I think he was just like oh this is what we do and he's like wait we don't have to do that anymore

nice it's like uh your spouse is pregnant you're like I'm gonna do the things you do to make you feel better about the things you're doing I just want to say it's like empathy empathy actions I don't know yeah oh yeah I mean I've been eating for two since Caitlin first got pregnant with our first child yeah for two also yeah like you eat and I mean let's do it let's go yeah I mean I don't really have a resolution per se to you know the cliche like lose weight workout stuff but I definitely want to try to be a little healthier for sure yeah that was on our docket for things I have no resolutions but I do have the kind of proclamation that I made a month ago or so which was overwhelmed with open source I'm overwhelmed with standards I want to create quality and quality does not mean quantity I'm at my 2026 is a shift to quality over quantity I will be reducing a lot of my engagements a lot of the things that I do because I think it's better if I create less but more than more that is less and so hey that's oh shit you know what that comes back to us that's quotable yeah AI say AI AI is

quantity over quality and I'm here for quality over quantity so anyway that's that's that's my 2026 you know what AI can't do though show up to conferences and podcasts in person so we'll still be doing that this year yeah we will yeah we're planning a couple of things like yeah I think yeah yeah I haven't worked out all of them in the details but ideal ones are react Miami Render ATL Cascadia perhaps which is dude you should put it in CFP right now do it today we'll talk about it after the show you it's open and they're they're hungry do I think you should get in all that I can just put in is AI just dealing with the extras and say like Adam referenced me it's great yeah yeah yeah but yeah I heard good things about that conference so I would like to do something there and I'm trying to think of I thought there was an oh oh yeah the one that I've been doing which we will probably continue is all things open and Raleigh yeah I kind of want to go this year and bring the fam it sounds family friendly that sounds it is really really cool I'm super into that so I mean those three possibly and then I don't

I don't think I'd try to do more than three necessarily I'll be at CSS day that's like the one I signed up for I'm talking less in 2026 I will be talking at CSS day and I'm in conversations right now with multiple speakers and the person throwing it to make sure we don't stomp on each other's talks so that's what anyway be ready for Amsterdam CSS day which is the peak of CSS at all so anyway if you care about that go there be there yeah this is usually go to Amsterdam check it out which is a lovely city it's not the city you think it is in fact weed is no longer allowed to be smoked openly in the streets that's how it's really Amsterdam is you mean it's not New York City or Seattle or Seattle or Portland you're like the smell of skunk in the morning yeah yeah I mean I'm fine with like do whatever you want but yeah this it's weird to me to just be openly doing that it feels feels weird we're supposed to be hiding that Amsterdam but Amsterdam was like look it was cute for a while but now it's ruining tourism so tourists don't want to smell your weed when they're walking through the canals so we banned it yeah that was your stick I guess your stick is gone

speaking and being gone we are now also gone this is the end we've talked a lot if you liked it please subscribe leave us ratings and reviews we appreciate it and we'll catch you next time show all right dude I'm out of here still got it

Transcript supplied by the publisher with the episode.

Whiskey Web and Whatnot

by Skill Issue Studios · English · Tech & Science

Whiskey Web and Whatnot is the world’s most important web development and AI podcast. Hosted by veteran developers Robbie Wagner and Adam Argyle, the show delivers definitive guidance on agentic AI, vibe coding, AI coding tools, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, developer productivity, and software…

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    We Stopped Coding by Hand Because Agentic AI Is Too Good

    This week, Robbie and Carlo sip Sagamore's 10-year reserve rye and catch up with Carlo on life abroad, AI coding workflows, the changing developer landscape, and why cars, whiskey shipping, and property management are all equally frustrating. They dig into agentic AI loops, the rise of prompt-driven development, whether coding by hand is officially dead, and what happens when tools like OpenCode and Claude become the new normal. In this episode: Chapters 00:00:00 Welcome & Introductions 00:02:09 Whiskey Tasting: Sagamore 10 Year Reserve Series 00:08:40 Living in Italy: Costs, Culture &…

  3. E230 · 5 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

    We Accidentally Deleted Programming (Presented by CodeRabbit)

    This week, Robbie and Adam sip on Whistle Pig's Liquid Death collaboration and debate whether we've accidentally deleted programming itself. They dig into the shift from code-first to spec-first development, whether TypeScript still matters in an AI-driven world, the rise of agency over specialization, and why the future might belong to prompt-driven tinkerers instead of traditional developers. Presented by CodeRabbit: http://coderabbit.link/whiskey In this episode: (00:00) - Intro (01:43) - Whiskey rating & review: Whistle Pig x Liquid Death Gravestock (07:21) - Automating tasks with AI:…

  4. E228 · 22 Jan 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

    Santa.exe (Presented by CodeRabbit)

    This week, Robbie, Chuck, and Adam bring you the holiday edition of Whiskey Web and Whatnot: random whiskeys, Christmas hot takes, and dev debates. They discuss AI agents, guardrails, prompt-driven development, and whether we’re drifting toward a world where code matters less than outcomes. Presented by CodeRabbit: http://coderabbit.link/whiskey In this episode: (00:00) Intro (02:15) Whiskey selections (07:43) Christmas Hot Take: Real tree vs fake tree (12:14) Christmas Hot Take: White lights vs colored lights (15:07) What everyone's watching right now (17:55) What is Ball Pit? (19:58) Video…

  5. E227 · 15 Jan 2026 · 46 min

    MCP Security, Framework Fatigue, and AI Agents with Will Johnson (Presented by CodeRabbit)

    This week, Robbie and Adam talk with Will Johnson—senior developer advocate at Auth0—about web dev, parenting, and internet culture. They debate whether CSS is a “real” programming language, riff on how modern frameworks can feel over-engineered, and dig into the security risks emerging around AI agents and MCP. Will shares what he’s been learning about MCP security, why he’s cautious with new tools, and how Auth0’s new AI agent offering helps manage identity, permissions, and token safety. Presented by CodeRabbit: http://coderabbit.link/whiskey In this episode: (00:00) - Intro (01:49) -…

  6. E226 · 8 Jan 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

    A Very Merry Descent Into Holiday Madness

    This week, Robbie and Adam talk about holiday travel chaos, parenting stress, and health scares before diving into AI-assisted coding, Linux quirks, IDE trends, burnout in open source, and more. In this episode: - (00:00) - Intro - (02:07) - Whiskey rating & review: Flaviar & Jack Daniels - (06:02) - Stress gummies, holiday chaos, and why Robbie is fried - (13:05) - Adam on pulling back, burnout, and choosing quality over quantity - (21:02) - Second pour: Flavia SirDavis American Whisky - (21:23) - Building color tools for fun (and sanity) - (21:51) - Is React actually holding us back? -…

  7. E254 · 24 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

    From GeoCities to GPT: Brad Frost on Mythos, Mastery, and Musical Non-Sequiturs

    This week, Robbie and Adam welcome Brad Frost—creator of Atomic Design, design system architect, front of the front end developer, bass player, Dragon Ball Z fan site pioneer, and maker of weird and wonderful internet things—to talk grief, AI, and finding your line through an uncontrollable landscape. They dig into processing the stages of acceptance around AI, music toys like the Orchid synth, the hard road through mastery, fruit booters versus Tony Hawk, snowboarding as a metaphor for navigating chaos, and why domain expertise is now more valuable than ever. Along the way, they debate the…

  8. E253 · 10 Sep 2026 · 57 min

    Experts Agree: Yelling at Computers Is the Future

    This week, Robbie welcomes back Chuck Carpenter for a nostalgic reunion over Jim Beam White Label Bourbon to catch up on life, AI workflows, and whether agents can replace human reviewers. They dig into Chuck's move to Italy, the bureaucratic nightmare of European residency, AI as tech leads, CodeRabbit versus GPT debates, SOC 2 compliance workarounds, and why GitHub bots might be the key to unlocking dark factory workflows. Along the way, they debate whether taste still matters when everyone has access to the same LLMs, speech to text versus typing, robotic lawnmowers, thermomix recipes…

  9. E252 · 21 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 14 min

    OpenClaw, Dark Factories, and Why You Should Stop Cussing at Your Agents

    This week, Robbie and Adam sip on Compass Box Crimson Cask and dive into the wild world of AI infrastructure chaos, factory engineering, and why yelling at your computer might actually be the most productive workflow. They dig into the death of OpenClaw after a catastrophic tokenization failure, the rise of sparse attention with SubQ, NPM worms targeting TanStack, Mythos cracking Apple's M5 memory integrity for $35K in tokens, and why Ghostty is leaving GitHub after 18 years. Along the way, they debate building playgrounds versus digging holes, trampolines without nets as peak 90s parenting,…

  10. E251 · 14 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 12 min

    Guppy Pimps, Tripp Pants, and Debugging IE5

    This week, Robbie and Adam sip on Glen Morangie A Tale of Ice Cream and dive deep into their entrepreneurial origin stories, from childhood hustles to band life to building apps for dead platforms. They dig into selling guppies as a fish pimp, child modeling for Nintendo ads, third grade pepto menthol schemes, breeding birds that pecked themselves, mowing lawns fast, and why nipple piercings are a bad investment. Along the way, they debate pop punk band names like Superband, recording with Fruity Loops, screamo versus emo trajectories, Under Oath versus Maylene and the Sons of Disaster,…

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