I remember growing up, I remember we had, it's the Gregory's. It's the phone. It's like the, it's the map in the book, right? Whatever you, the drive, in the car. And I remember mum used to direct dad all the time or vice versa. Yeah. And I remember when I was like five or six, I was like, am I allowed to give dad directions now? And I was like, that was super exciting, right? I do want to just go back to Simon's post and I apologize for everyone who wanted a bit more spice. Joe and I agree on most things as is quite

common. Wrong, wrong. I'm just kidding. I mean, yeah, I don't know. I mean, yeah, go back to Simon's post. I think it's one of those things where, it's funny because the conversation that Hugo and I were having via text, I think it was a lot more heated in the sense where I think a lot of things just come across differently with no verbal cues or context. I can also come across as a bit rough on text,

so I do apologize, but it brought us here today. It did. And look, it brought us together. I do want to say, because I think these are points we've circled around, but from Simon's post explicitly, when he thinks it's okay to vibe code, projects should be low stakes. Okay. Think about how much harm the code can do, right? Consider security, watch out for secrets. Think about data privacy, be a good network citizen. Then a very important one that I think is we haven't talked about yet is your money on the line. Yo, if you're building, trying to build LLM stuff and you're pinging open AI, guaranteed your LLM assistant if it's allowed to execute arbitrary code you're in YOLO mode will fucking like you got to put caps on that stuff right oh yeah yeah or you're gonna get caned you'll get caned but I do yeah I suppose are there any other because we've had so much interesting conversation in the chat actually I'm I'm interested. If you were the BDFL, so Benevolent Dictator for Life, king of software engineering practices around the world, what are three rules you'd set for how software engineers use AI tools now? It's

an interesting question because as you're saying that, I was thinking about getting a driver's license and knowing the rules of the road, right? But then I'm thinking about self-driving cars. And, well, you don't need to know any rules of the road. I guess it's already been programmed in, but you still need to, I guess, have an idea of, do you, do you know where you're going? If you, if you get a self-driving car. Yeah. So how do you handle

failure modes? Maybe with a self-driving car, you actually do need someone who has a license to take over in the 1% of cases or one in 10 to the minus 5% of cases that it could actually kill someone or people.

Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, it's the same thing where I would say at least understand what you're doing. I mean, you know, it's, and this is something I've been talking about a lot for years really, but I don't think we have any shortage of great tools at this point. Great technologies. There's maybe too many in my opinion yeah agreed but our ability to use those tools to fullest potential i think uh you know lives and dies by our ability to understand how to use them to their fullest potential and right now i'd give the industry whether it's software data you know machine learning i'd probably give us about a D in that area. I mean, having run a consulting company, I always joke that I should just be quiet about this because that's what you pay me to go fix. And if I'm a consultant like yourself, there's a lot of money to be made by fixing the mistakes of others. I truly believe that still it's a knowledge gap problem at the end of the day. And it's only going to get worse, actually, not better. so i'd say that if i were a benevolent dictator i would just make sure that uh there's a standard body of knowledge that anyone who wants to call themselves a professional in this industry has to um has to learn i would say you know in their respective crafts so that's that's the one thing i would do then from there you know feel free to make your own mistakes as you as you see But until you know, until you have that body of knowledge and the skills, how would you know, how would you know that anything works? You know, and I think the other part of it is map this back to what the businesses need, right? And I think more than ever, if you don't know what you're building and you don't even know what the business needs, like this is a recipe for disaster. Huge, huge, huge disaster. But this is exactly what's going to happen. And of course, every CEO in the world is saying, oh, we need to replace all of our workers with AI right now. You know, not even including software, it's everybody at this point. So we're in a very interesting time where I think that, you know, so what was interesting, Axios had an interesting article covering a survey that was done by Ryder on just the disconnect between what c levels think about their ai capabilities and progress so far versus what employees think about it it's fascinating i should find this and put it in the chat here but it was um uh yeah it's uh enterprise ai attention workers decks and stuff but it is this is fascinating to read through essentially what's happening is um see it's the c-suite probably for reasons that they they want to look like they're they're accomplishing a lot of stuff with ai say well we're accomplishing a lot of great stuff with ai right then you talk to the workers like no way in hell or we're not even close the data sucks systems are creaky nowhere near doing ai so that that's the that's the tension right now or employees actively undermining AI initiatives because, well, I don't know. I think somebody called it, what was the quote here? You are, what was it? I'm interested here. Yeah. Asking a turkey to vote for Thanksgiving. It's like asking employees to embrace AI. So it's an interesting study and I would rather want to look at it, but this is sort of the crux we're in right now. Did you have a link at some point? I did. I put it in the chat for the YouTube. Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. This is where we are, right? I mean, there's not an executive in the world. And again, I talk to people who are outside of tech, by the way. I do try and live outside of our bubble, but like white-collar workers across the world, knowledge workers, they're getting pressure to you know embrace ai uh you know my wife had this happen to her at her job where the boss pulled her side and said hey can you help us like understand where we can put ai

into all of our processes and she's like i see where this is going this is the first time after our quote unquote gpt moment that i've had like family and friends reach out to me and people i chat with all the time but people actually reach out to me about work. Like people working in marketing or lawyer cousins and that type of something. Like, hey, yo, what's happening? Actually, some of my really sharp teacher friends pinging me about it all the time as well. I want to go back to the analogy- What are they talking about? What are the questions

they ask you? On

the legal side they're very interested in what can be automated and what can't and how trustworthy tools can be on one side on the other side they're asking about regulation so i've got some family members actually who are pretty high up in in the legal system here and they're they're actually on councils and committees to figure out how to regulate AI. Oh, interesting. I've been trying to pass some certain things which will mean that in certain legal situations, no AI can be used. And I was like, well, that seems quite... We need to define certain things because if I send an email, right, or if I'm using Grammarly to correct stuff, is that using AI if it's ai powered and these types of things so i think having a more nuanced idea but to your point there are so many tools so much software and the movement's so quick that it's actually incredibly tough the the teachers um are at schools where use of ai is being banned and students are submitting stuff that's clearly if not generated by ai has a bunch of ai in it and of course you and i know that ai can be incredible for ideation and then filtering as well. I think the combinatorial explosion of ideation is one thing, but not enough people use it for then crafting and honing and

filtering. Well, they're not incentivized to it. It's like, give me a term paper. It's like, fine, I'll give you a term paper. Don't worry about it.

That's the other thing. As I said to my teacher friends, I was like, yo, this is exposing a huge problem with the system that why are we even asking students to write essays what's their incentive their incentive from like fucking like middle school to the end of high school is to get the best grade possible i don't know what a gpa or whatever it is there or maybe that's college i don't know but then it is college actually then after that so they're incentivized to get the highest mark possible not incentivized to learn right yeah that's

exactly it it's interesting my sister's a lawyer so i asked her about you know how she's using lms there and it definitely helps with some things i think uh speeding up doc creation and stuff like that or potentially researching but uh still a lot of errors with it but then i was thinking like what are what are the similarities and what are the differences? If you were to replace vibe coding with vibe accounting or vibe legal work, like what would that look like? Or vibe anything else that's not coding. What are the similarities and differences here? That's something I've been thinking a lot about this week is like, what are the boundaries? Where if you were to say, let's just vibe out. So I think part of it is a creative pursuit. And that's a big distinction where vibe writing is probably something that's interesting. I can't copyright any of it, by the way, versus maybe vibe lawyering. And so let's just think of an interesting case here. I guess there's maybe some utility to that. And

people are doing it, but I think the good lawyers humans in the loop and they're able to then, like it supercharges them, I think. We've got lots of 10X lawyers these days, Joe. 10X lawyers. I'm so sorry.

How about 10X? Is ambulance chasers a thing in Australia? Not as much because we don't, you know, we don't have the, you know, I'll sue them vibe that America has. Yeah, I guess it's maybe an American thing. I kind of like a Better Call Saul. Or the

47th and 45th president of the US, who whenever it's like, hey, someone said this about you, I'll sue him. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to degrade the quality of the conversation by bringing up old mate. But actually, when I lived in New York, one of my favorite Subway ads was for a divorce lawyer. And it said the phone number was 1-800 And the tagline was for when diamonds aren't forever. That's

pretty good.

Yeah. I'm a huge fan of that. My other favorite of recent times marketing campaign is the city of San Francisco with Alcatraz. They decided to do a marketing campaign a few years ago, escape to Alcatraz to get tourists there, which is, is, is, is, is wonderful. I am also, it's something we've been talking to, like lawyers I know who can use these tools, you know, can use it to do the types of things that usually have paralegals or interns or students help with or junior assistants. One thing I'm actually very concerned about is what career paths this carves out. And I think we're seeing it in engineering as well and data science. We've already had an issue with entry-level positions in data science and ML from the get-go. But now, how are we even going to learn things if all the people who've learned things are building and they don't really need to employ people to help them to establish careers. So what happens to entry-level positions now? That's

the big, big question right now. That's a big question. I think everyone in the world, I don't have an answer. I don't think anyone knows just yet what happens, right? There's a lot of factors at play. I mean, it's a competitive job market as it is, even if you're senior right now. If you're senior, mid-level senior, even whatever, it's like you have a lot of factors working for and against you. I was talking to somebody at one of the big tech companies yesterday, and they're going to be doing a massive amount of layoffs really, really soon. You'll see it. I'm not going to name which one. You'll find out. That means a lot of very qualified people are already on the street on top of all the other layoffs you just did, that and other companies. So if you're a junior in this market competing against that and ai i don't know what you do this is a good question so i think it's going to redefine the the notion and and um you know what a junior is and what this looks like uh what what does it mean to start your career off i got two kids who are thinking about this a lot you know and i don't sadly i don't have an answer for them right and not because i'm a crappy parent it's because i just this is just one of those inflection points that you're in i've been here before but not quite to this level where you have things that can replace knowledge work to the degree it does that's you know so it's jason brings up a good point what's what's up i thought experimented to understand if junior engineers seem to be junior ai agent managers to get ahead well it's interesting actually so one thought experiment i've been doing with respect to the broader labor force is if we assume that agents are these things that we're just going to be using you know this is the first year of agents we're going to just go for it and everybody has agents if you kind of zoom out it sort of makes you wonder what the nature of a firm is to begin with the nature of a firm being what robert coast defined in his economics paper but i do see this as potentially being as impactful as what happened with the internet where it displaced um you know or definitely changed the dynamics of physical uh uh you know physical physically based businesses um so two things could happen i actually think there's going to be more of a need to go back to the world of atoms, I suppose. I'm going to tell my kids, why don't you just go find a trade that you can do? For one, it's just I think I'm disillusioned personally with the idea of white collar work. I think a lot of it's pretty silly and doesn't need to, doesn't really do anything. And just I think given the open disdain that employees and employers have for each other right now it's i don't know i don't know why you'd want to go to school for that depending on what you're doing totally so yeah i don't know i don't know what this does to juniors i think that's the big question but what is it i think more broadly what does it do to everybody else um it doesn't show anyone's really exempt from uh what's happening you just get a you know mess with in different ways but it is discouraging i talk to a lot of students around the world i actually lecture at a lot of colleges and field a lot of questions and people are asking you know what can i do so i just think that it's uh but if you if you look at that what's been sold to students too it's right you know go to college get a job in these hot tech fields and so forth now i i just think that it's um get college debt as well. College debt. Yeah, especially in the US, tons, right? And you can't bankrupt yourself out of that, by the way. So it's, I don't know, it's interesting. I don't have an answer. What do you think?

I don't have an answer. I think one way I think about it is difficult to see outside the storm when you're in the eye of the storm. And I think we've been in a very complex society. I think, I can't remember what the distinction is here, but I think we've moved to a chaotic society in many ways, where I think in a complex society, you can do tests and pressure test things and see results that then you can perhaps think in vectors from and kind of see the future a bit better. But at the moment, it's become so chaotic that prediction is incredibly challenging. I also totally agree that the relationship between employers and employees is unsustainable. So I think generally power structures and people subject to them is unsustainable. Like look what's happening to scientific institutional knowledge. Look what's happening to governments and relationships with governments more generally. One thing I am very interested in, as you know, and some viewers and listeners may, I went freelance full-time for the first time in the past year, and it has been such a wonderful experience for me. I love it so much. Challenging. I have an existential crisis once a week, but I get to do so much interesting work. Don't worry, people in jobs have that too, by the way. Well, exactly. I didn't so much when I was full-time, even at early stage startups. But I do, I think that maybe I'm cut out for being freelance in a way that other people I know may not be. I know that you're a huge proponent of everyone considering going and doing their own thing. So I'm wondering if you think there are people who are cut out for it and people who aren't. And if so, if AI can help shift a lot of people who aren't to being more capable in this type of thing. Sorry,

I'm just answering a question here. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I think that people have the option now of going off on their own. Increasingly, I think it's going to be your only option is to go off on your own. So if you figure that everyone has the same capabilities with AI right now, right, it comes down to your ability to understand how to use AI, to maybe ask it better questions. When I saw that PwC had got a massive subscription to ChatGPT for their teams, for their consultants, I was like, okay, that just showed me there's going to be no differentiation at all other than hiring a big name firm, right? You all have the same tools now. So the only thing that's going to matter at the end of the day is distribution and branding for yourself. That's it.