Conor

Anyways, we're done, we're done, nobody cares. Nobody cares. Did we lose listeners over the AI hot take?

Bryce

Starting like 100%. I don't know, I don't know whether I can find somebody senior to bring in here who's gonna be a good culture fit for the team and like have the right energy for like this like new, like shifting, changing, evolving landscape. And my hot take is, and like him, him and I talked about this a little bit, my hot take is not everyone's gonna make it.

Conor

Welcome to ADSP the podcast, episode 287, recorded on May 5th, 2026. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we continue and conclude our chat with Marco. In this episode, we chat about all things AI. We get an AI hot take from Bryce, and we discuss whether we should let AI do your taxes. Alright, everybody's recording now, and we're recording in the meeting. Bryce was already recording when he joined, and so he started talking, and we'll let him continue to talk. But before we do that, we have to because when I was editing last time, at one point we were gonna let Marco tell us a little bit about MVComp, but I interrupted to get more details on his path to NVIDIA and not having been programming like a few years ago. And then we never came back to MVComp. So one, just put it on the stack. It doesn't need to be at the beginning, it can be at the end. We'll put NVComp on. We also did get one, or technically I think two questions from a single listener that we will put on the stack as well. So there's a couple topics on the stack, actually, and while we're at it, just we'll put the the second implementation of the GPU rotate, which everybody is waiting for. That's the third item on the stack. All right, now over to Bryce. Feel free to tell us what you were telling us.

Bryce

Hang on, hang on, I gotta finish typing the thing to my agent.

Conor

Alright, now he's busy. Now he's busy with AI.

Bryce

That's the thing, that's the thing I was gonna tell you. Is like I just got back from dinner, like sat down, got on this call to start recording, and at the same time I was like, Alright, I gotta check how things are going.

Marco Salgado

I think that's the problem, kind of that before, if you wanted to get some sort of work done, there was a hurdle because it's like, okay, if I wanna do something, I have to spend some time getting back into whatever I want to do and getting acquainted with what I was doing, and so it takes uh a couple of minutes, half an hour. So you can't just hop in and do work for ten minutes, or you couldn't. And now you can because it's like, okay, what was my agent doing? What do I have to tell it now so that it keeps working? So you can fit everything in in five minutes. And I think that's what what makes it so intense now. That's actually one question that I wanted to ask you guys is uh how you're dealing with context switching because I find it uh that now it's so exhausting, so much more exhausting than six months ago.

Conor

Yeah, I mean, I would say it even it's less than five minutes sometimes. Like last night, so today is May 5th, tail end of the day. Well, I mean, it's very much the tail end of the day for Marco, because you're you're over in Europe. Actually, yeah, where what bro what conference are at you at, Bryce?

Bryce

I'm at uh Go Sim in Paris.

Conor

Go Sim?

Bryce

Yeah. It's some sort of agentic conference.

Conor

Go Sim. Alright. Well, you're in Paris. Alright, so both of you, it's a tail end uh East Coast stuff.

Bryce

Let me let me do a better. Let me it's the it's uh it's an agentic AI conference. It's I don't know what Gosim stands for. I'm sure I could be able to get it.

Conor

Okay, he's gonna figure that out but it's pretty good. So la last night was May 4th. May the fourth be with you. And for the hardcore Star Wars fans out there, which includes me now, maybe not a couple years ago, but now I'm a massive fan, it was the two episode season finale of Maul Shadow Lord available on Disney Plus, and I think that's the only place you can get it. And my wife, beautiful wife, and I were watching last night, and we she is also a huge Star Wars fan now. And I can't remember if it definitely wasn't in between episode nine and ten. I sat on the couch for that, but at some point, I think we were watching Jon Stewart right before that, and then I got up to get like, you know, a bubbly or something, and then I was like, I went up the stairs, and she's like, Where are you going? And I was like, I just I just want to go check on codex real quick, just real quick, just like 30 seconds to see if it's still iterating. Because now I've gotten into the habit of like coaxing it into basically it'll only launch six subagents at a time, but if you tell it like, you know, cue up a hundred subagents, and as soon as like one is done, just like launch another one and keep launching them, and you just tell it like I'm gonna step away for a couple, I'm gonna go have dinner, I'm gonna be away for a couple hours, but I don't want you to stop working while I'm gone. A lot of the times, if you tell it the right incantation, it'll just keep working while you're gone. And if you get that incantation correct, you can just pop upstairs, check to see if it's stopped, look at the work for like 10 seconds, commit it, and then like hit the up arrow key, launch the same magic command, and then poof, it's back off to the races for another couple hours. And so the point being is do you even need five minutes? And my wife was like, What? No, no, no. We're done work, we're not done. And I was like, I'm not gonna do it. I'm just gonna do it.

Bryce

Do you not know about stop hook, by the way, Connor?

Conor

Do I not know about what?

Bryce

Most of the harnesses have hooks that have on certain events, like if it tries to read a file or if it tries to stop. So you can just install a stop hook that tells it to keep going. If you want to have a chance to do that.

Conor

Do you want to keep going hook? It's not it's not stopping on anything. It's just concluding that it's done, it's finished doing the task that I assigned it.

Bryce

I warn you to be very careful with this because it can end up in a loop where it just sends a short response of I'm done, and then the stop hook triggers no, you're not, and then it just loops on that forever, and that's very token wasteful. But aside from that problem, it's very useful. I'm working on uh figuring out how to how to get past that.

Conor

Yeah. Anyways, I didn't answer your question, Marco, but it's definitely a thing. Like I was having dinner a couple weeks ago with a buddy of mine who works in Vancouver, and he was saying it's almost like exhausting now because a lot of the mundane tasks that sometimes you know you'd it'd be a Thursday, kind of a long week, and you're just mentally tired, and you'd find that mundane task that's gonna take an hour, and then like you'd just do that. Now, like those mundane tasks, they're they're gone, they've evaporated. So all that you have to do now is like hard thinking work, and it's hard to do that like constantly, where you're gonna sit down and you know that like the work that you're gonna do is like I'm gonna have to sit here and really think about the structure, or you know, it's not easy work, and so you find yourself mentally exhausted like a lot quicker because there's no like updating the docs or changing some markdown file, like all that stuff. I feel amped.

Bryce

I feel amped all the time, Connor.

Conor

I'm not saying I feel exhausted, but I when he was saying that, there are definitely times where like Friday rolls around and I do feel like more like mentally zapped than you know the before times. And so how do we deal with this? I don't know. You go for more runs. Yeah. I don't know, Bryce. I guess Bryce is amped, so he doesn't have any any issues with this.

Bryce

I'm building I'm building things, Conor.

Conor

Yeah. I mean you you you showed me what you're you're working on.

Bryce

And uh Yeah, we can't we can't we can't talk about it yet until it's done on the podcast, but like I don't know. I'm pretty close to having the orchestration layer set up, and then we can start doing the real fun stuff. But I think like I want to say like two weeks. Two weeks maybe. Yeah.

Conor

Have you have you guys heard of I I do think that I'm like uh 75, 25, and the 75 just so amped, like it's hard to fall asleep because you're so excited. Which is interesting because I've listened to some podcasts that say the opposite, like that they're the exact opposite. They've never been less motivated before in their careers because like AI is taking a lot of this work. I find myself the opposite, and it's just like and uh I was listening to a couple podcasts that were talking about what Andre Carpathy was talking about. I don't know, I'll link it in the show notes, but he was talking about like this idea of like neural computing, and it's just it's gonna be like just in time apps and like just in time websites, and like I completely see that being the future. Like just the other day I added some feature where I could sort my race times. Like I have a website that lists all of my 5k, 10k, half, and marathon times over the last like decade plus. And I had a half marathon over the weekend. It didn't go well, and I wanted to know like what was the what was the ranking of this in the 27 like half marathons I've run in my lifetime. And so like I'm not gonna go and like manually eyeball it, like that's impossible. So I just went to Cursor and was like, hey, add like a a sort mechanism so that when I'm filtering, if I hit, if I just click on the header of this column, just immediately sort it. And then I said also too, once it's in sorting mode, inject a basically column that shows you one, two, three, four, five, because it didn't have the numbering. Sure enough, one-shotted that. And like, I why do I have to sit down at a computer, launch a cursor instance, and like tell it that's what I want? Like in the future, you're gonna be able to talk to this website, and it's gonna just in time generate you like a version or like an edited thing where it's just say, like, and you can imagine like being in Android auto, like in your car, you're driving, and like all the time what I want is like show me all of the restaurants that are open like past you know 9 30 p.m. that are within like a five clon. It is terrible at that right now. Like, it cannot tell you for the life of it, like what's open currently, and especially like if I want a specific type of muffin, you know, that should be a thing in the future. It'll it should be able to identify every single restaurant.

Bryce

Why do you think it's bad at this?

Conor

Oh, it's just terrible. When you are choose a destination, why? Because it has not figured out to like hook and also too, Google Maps in general. Like, how do you query Google Maps?

Bryce

Say I'm driving from I will say, I will say, listen, I don't I I I I I've I've my Twitter takes have gotten a little bit spicier recently, and I hate to use this platform to shit on Gemini, but I just have to. I tweet so I I had this thing where like I needed to ask, I needed to update some calendar invites, I needed to add a person, like invite a person to some Google Calendar invites, and then I wanted to change the color of a bunch of Google Calendar invites. It was like a pretty simple ask. I sent the prompt to Gemini from like, you know, my Google Calendar page. So there's a little Gemini button on my Google Calendar page, and it was immediately, it was just like, I can't do that. And then I went to Chat GPT and I did the same prompt in ChatGPT, which what what company makes ChatGPT again, Connor?

Conor

OpenAI.

Bryce

Right, right. And who makes Google Calendar?

Conor

Google.

Bryce

That's right. That's right, right. And so so ChatGPT's Google Calendar integration worked perfectly in the first time. And so now, like, like it's actually really good. Like I've I've been doing all my calendar management from the Google Calendar like plug-in thing in ChatGPT, but every time I try to use Google's AI to do anything with Google's products, it sucks. It's terrible, it's just absolutely awful. It can't do anything in Excel, it can't do anything in email, it can't do anything with my calendar.

Conor

First of all, it's Sets, not Excel. Excel's a Microsoft product. I don't want to be the pedantic guy on the podcast, but Excel is from Microsoft. Google Sheets is from Google. And you're thinking that's a distinction without a difference, big difference. Big difference, folks. And I haven't really tried to do much with like integrating stuff. And in general, I don't use ChatGPT anymore because it's just terrible. That being said, Gemini's been offline all day. What do you mean?

Bryce

Except for what ChatGPT 5.5 is great.

Conor

5.5's amazing, but like if you're just using it as like a free user going to like the web app to ask some question, I gave up on ChatGPT like months ago because You're not, you're not, you know, you're still not paying for a ChatGPT subscription. I don't want to pay for like if it's just simple questions. Like if I want to know how to convert some Fahrenheit to Celsius or I want some random thing. Also, too, I don't want to be using my corporate account for like personal questions, you know?

Bryce

Like if if I'm if I'm looking for muffins, I don't even video knowing that I'm I don't I don't use my I like I have personal subscription to to to Chat GPT and actually to Gemini. Although, you know what? I'm I'm really I really should make a note to go cancel that Gemini subscription.

Conor

It's so funny because everyone's like anecdotal experience. They have one bad experience, they go look at Gemini, and Gemini happens to be better that day, and now I've been using Gemini for the past, but like Bryce is saying that you know ChatGPT is way better.

Bryce

I I have I have no commentary on the quality of the model itself, but like my default has been to use ChatGPT for all my like chat like tasks, and the the times when I've tried to use Google's AI has been when I've needed to do something that involved tool use with Google's product, and it sucks. It's so bad.

Conor

Yeah. I don't know what's your experience, Marco. What are you what are your uh I mean both you can answer your own question and then uh do you prefer Gemini, ChatGPT, none of the above? You're just sitting up outside touching grass, enjoying life.

Marco Salgado

I've been using perplexity for my web-based stuff. I use perplexity because you can choose the model according to what's the best at the moment. And for me, I mean whenever I need to look something up on the internet, it's more than good enough. And then for coding, I'm still with cloud code. I've been seeing that apparently uh codecs and GPT 5.5 is supposedly better, but I don't know. Cloud code works well enough for me, and I'd rather just stick with that because who knows, maybe in two months another model comes from Anthropic and it's now better than 5.5, and I don't want to be switching between codecs and cloud code all the time because I have also my conversations.

Bryce

You're not you're not thinking big enough. The reason why you need to be multi-harness and multi-model is because when you start using this stuff enough, you're gonna run out of your corporate token, you know, rate. And sure, I could go and ask for more, but my whole like I just want to move fast. I don't want to be down for like a day or two or three days because I need to explain to people why I need a hundred million more, you know, tokens or whatever. You know, so like I I have like I now have like a system, like a cascading system of various different ways that I can get inference from NVIDIA, where like the worst case is like I go spin up some B200 nodes on on Brev and just like serve myself Deep Seek V4 Pro or something. Like that one of the quantized versions that'll fit on like a B200. Yeah, so yeah, you gotta have like a you gotta have a strategy, like you know, a fallback scheme in case your uh your preferred model is not available.

Marco Salgado

I'm not that big of a token abuser. You really destroy the cloud code tokens in inside of like a month?

Bryce

I think I'll I think I will run out of I I I don't think I should say what like the NVIDIA cap is on like dollar spend like by default, but I'm already in the power user group, and yes, I think I will expend it. Because like r not not right now, because right now I'm just putting together this orchestration system. But once I get back to actually doing like runs of stuff, yeah, I'm gonna burn through it very quickly.

Conor

I think that's a good thing. Because boy oh boy, is he abusing tokens, that's for sure.

Bryce

Yeah, yeah. But but the thing, the thing is, you know, NVIDIA has this great developer crowd, Brev, and um it's fairly easy to get access to GPUs in Brev, except just not Blackwell GPUs. And so I have been thinking lately, like, okay, like, you know, I have all this access to this Brev compute that I can use for the various projects I'm working on. And so, like in the worst case, I'll just figure out how to run on, you know, like there's a ton of H100 availability here, so I can just run, you know, some models myself on uh on all these H100s and then serve up my agents that are also running on this infrastructure. That's one of the reasons I had to pause to do this orchestration layer thing.

Marco Salgado

And what do you do for Autorun? Because you can't run autorun everywhere, anywhere you like. And that's I think that's where it really becomes powerful because having two BP.

Bryce

Right, but but but Brev Brev is one of the approved sandboxed environments for NVIDIA. It's not behind the VPN. All of the stuff I'm doing, none of it has access to any NVIDIA proprietary information. All the stuff I'm doing is just experiments on a certain thing that we can't talk about yet. But all it all it requires is just my agent to be able to look at code on GitHub. It doesn't need access to anything proprietary, it doesn't have access to any my my security models is is that this is running in a cloud instance, it has no credentials that can do any damage to anything.

Marco Salgado

Yeah, that's definitely nice.

Bryce

Yes.

Conor

So I mean I don't know if we fully answered Marco's question. Bryce doesn't need to take a break because he's so excited.

Bryce

And uh no, I gotta take a break because I need to go tell this agent what to do.

Conor

But yeah, I'm 7525. And I I am concerned, like when I when I hear some of the stuff that I hear on podcasts about just the like motivation of certain developers being at like all-time lows. Yeah, that is that is concerning to me, but can I can I can I have a hot take? Alright, go ahead. I mean, of course. Actually, wait, this is the perfect the perfect time. At one point, like a hundred episodes ago, there was some Korean K-pop song I was supposed to insert whenever Bryce had a hot take. Boom.

Bryce

I just inserted it, and uh I was talking to one of my more AI forward colleagues at our Shanghai office when I was there two weeks ago. And he he's really like a very forward-thinking guy, and I think he was really early in a lot of this hygienic stuff in ways that I didn't realize like a year ago. But like now I realize like, oh, he was totally ahead of the curve. And he said something about, you know, I have everybody in my team is uh either an intern or a new college grad. And like I have slots for senior people on my team, but I I don't know how to fill them because like we're doing all this Agenic stuff, and all these young kids, like they get it. And I don't know, I don't know whether I can find somebody senior to bring in here who's gonna be a good culture fit for the team and like have the right energy for like this like new, like shifting, changing, evolving landscape. And my hot take is and like him him and I talked about this a little bit, my hot take is not everyone's gonna make it. I think that there's some people in some systems and parts of our ecosystem that are very resistant to AI. And if that becomes a persistent, stubborn attitude, I don't think they're gonna make it. Like I one of the themes of this conference that I've been at has been so this it's a conference about like open source and in the agenic era, like oh, and not maybe not open source, but it's about the but about open models, open weights, open source in the agenic era, like open AI basically. Um not the company open AI, but you know, open space AI. And one thing that keeps coming up is like, you know, do our existing open source licenses make sense for like in this era? Like what does open source licensing mean when all the code is generated by these models that we're trained on all the code in the world that has varieties of different models? And then like the other thing that came up in a conversation today was this idea that like open and this has come up a couple times, that open source is open source dead? You know, could open source be dead? There's a lot of these projects that are saying we don't want open source contributions. Like, no, no, we're not accepting any open source contributions or or we're only accepting contributions from people within the team. The the trend line that I'm seeing, I think that like saying, oh, we're we're not, we're using zero AI, we're not accepting any open source contributions, that's like saying, oh, we're not using version control. Like, no, we're we're we just we don't use version control, that's not how we work. It's an unstoppable force. It's a it's a it's a change in the way that we work. And I think that if projects in systems and communities and people don't adapt, they may be left behind. And you and I, Connor, I think had talked about this, about this idea that like it's hard, it's getting harder and harder to talk to colleagues who are AI skeptics. Like, to the degree that like if somebody is an AI is AI skeptical, I I almost can't have a meaningful conversation with them because the way in which I've worked has changed so much. The philosophy of how I've worked has changed so much that like I'm we're talking about two different jobs. We're talking on two different timescales of what's possible. We're we're talking with using two completely different tool sets. And so it's like if they don't believe, if they just reject everything about what I'm doing, how can I have a meaningful conversation with them? And like I'm not saying that everybody has to be as AI gung ho as you or I are, but I think if you just believe that this is something that you can just, oh, it's a trend, it's gonna blow over, or that you don't have to have like a real legitimate plan for how you're going to adapt to this world, if you just are denying it and think it's gonna blow over, I think you're gonna get left behind. That's my hot takes.

Conor

So I mean, I I'm interested, Marco, to get your thoughts on this as well. But like, so I I want to guess reframe a little bit of like, yes, we had that conversation, and let me uh put my biases if you are for somehow stumbling across this podcast for the first time, Bryce and I uh, and it sounds like Marco as well, but he can speak for himself. We're we're massive fans. I love AI, it's making it's changing my life. Absolutely love it. It's and it's not I don't think there are a ton of people that think it's like a fad and it's gonna blow over anymore. I think everybody is seeing. They've tried, you know, since basically December of 2025. They've tried either GPT or the anthropic models, and they've seen that these things are useful. Uh I think now though it's it's people coming to the realization, like maybe we should get this guy on. So I I I randomly saw this YouTube video. I think it had like either less than a hundred views or less than like a thousand views when I first saw it. I'm not subscribed to the guy. I have no idea why YouTube recommended it to me, but I watched it and it was interesting. And it was basically a guy, he's a Zig developer. I won't know his name off the top of my head, and he has a small YouTube channel with like a couple thousand subscribers. And he had been working on a, I want to say, source control, like an alternative to Git, plus or minus, you know, the the the details don't really matter. But he basically quit his job, worked on it for two years, and hadn't really gotten the amount of interest in it that he would have liked. And so now he basically just posted this video saying that he kind of feels a bit lost because he, you know, left his job in order to work on this thing, and now AI's here, and AI is basically replicating like half of the open source stuff out there. Is open source dead? That's an interesting question. Like, I don't think these models would be possible, or at least they wouldn't be as good as code without the open source ecosystem. So it's kind of like a little bit of that's certainly sure. Maybe is open source dead? Maybe, but like that's ironic because the fact that these models are so good is due to the fact that they had a corpus of open source code to train on. And um, but that doesn't mean that open source isn't dead, right? Like I think I said on a past podcast, like anyone that's like working on some niche language in hopes that it's gonna like break into the top 20, that that language is not like a AI, you know, better for AI code gen. It's like a lost cause. And I think that's a really sad thing if you were investing like a decade or half a decade in a language that now it's just like, well, we don't even really care that much about programming languages. Anyways, so I don't think it's necessarily like people that are anti-AI and don't believe it's a thing. I think it's more that like people are people are anti-AI because they're worried about like the the disruption that it's gonna cause in society and this and like I think in that video, if it if it wasn't the Zig guy, I I'm I could be misattributing this, but basically it was either that or in a podcast where someone said, like, I didn't get into software engineering to like prompt LLMs to generate me code. Like, I got into it because I liked the art of like crafting code, and like now that's not what being a software developer is anymore. Like, what does that mean for my career and for like my meaningfulness of like, you know, like if I don't want to sit there prompting and like architecting systems and not actually handcrafting the code myself, like what does that mean for me? And like I'm not I don't have the answer. I just think it's an interesting like thing that he brought up that I hadn't really thought about it. Like, I have had my own like mini existential crisis of being like, Do I do I actually like programming? Like, I really thought I liked programming, but this new thing is like even better. I can move faster, I don't care about the code so much. And anyway, so like I guess I fit into a a bucket of people that manage to transition to this new style, and I'm still happy. You know, I might be a little bit more exhausted, I might be working harder, but I'm still happy. But I think that there's a huge fraction or percentage of developers that are not happy. They're not happy like prompting these LLMs. And the it's just like, what does that mean? Like, should we care? Like, I mean if it's affect if it's go ahead.

Bryce

Again, I don't know, I don't know if they're gonna make it.

Conor

Well, it's it's not a question about whether they're gonna make it or not. It's a question about like, or I guess I guess maybe it's a moot point. You're just kind of saying, like, it doesn't matter, it's kind of like the nuclear thing or whatever, like whether or not we do it or something, like someone else is gonna do it, so like you just have to get on the train or get left behind.

Bryce

Like I I think that I think that there will continue to be roles for people writing code, uh manually reviewing code, uh, but I think there will be a lot less of that.

Conor

Well, I I guess, but that that doesn't really answer the question. The question is, should we care about the people that are sad and that like they don't get to write their like for loops and algorithms anymore?

Bryce

Yeah. Should should we should we care about our colleagues who have you know invested a substantial amount in their career and now maybe skills and and things that they're passionate about, because a lot of people in this industry are very came to it because they're passionate. Should we care that that may be changing and changing very rapidly? Yeah, of course we should care. Of course we should care. You know, and I think it's hard when we have so much excitement about this to have empathy for that audience. And I think you and I, Connor, don't probably don't have perspective on it because we are we're happy to be in this like architecting mode. And for me at least, it's been many years since I was really writing code myself because I think we've talked about it before in the podcast, you know, I've had these ergonomic issues over the years that have sort of naturally pushed me to into more of an architect role. I couldn't just sit at a keyboard and spend 10 hours a day, you know, building stuff. Now I can do that again. So yeah, I'm very excited about that. I can understand how for other people who are at the keyboard, you know, hacking away 10 hours a day and who really enjoy that, how they could be very devastated by having that taken away. I especially I understand it because that's something that happened to me. I used to really enjoy that, and then I physically could no longer do that. And so I and I I had moments where I was really very much in the throes of existential crisis because I was like, well, this was my whole career. What am I going to do now? Right? Like I've been there, I get it. I had times when my ergonomic issues first started coming up where I really thought I was gonna have to find another job or another career because I would not be able to be successful because the thing that I was good at, which is writing code, you know, I couldn't do it anymore. But, you know, those, those, those fears did in my case prove to be unfounded because I was able to, you know, adapt, go into a bigger role, you know, a role where I'm more architecting and leading than writing code day to day. And I mean, I guess with AI I ended up working out, but yeah, like it was really rough. That period of my life was a very rough period of my life. And uh it was very hard on me mentally, in addition to being like like tough on me and painful physically. So yeah, I fe I feel for for people who are on the other side of this. I don't know, I don't know how to help folks. And like to some degree, I think that as we progress down this timeline, you know, as we progress down the the the shift towards this agentic era, I think people do need to reassess if you if you are not happy working in the new ways in which we may work, you may need to find something that makes you happy, you know? And I don't know what that is. Like I I I hope it continues to be like you know, the same career path that you still have some stability, but that may not be the case for everybody. You know, if you're not happy working in this new way, and if the the industry of manually writing code is a dying industry, then you may need to go find so and and if you're if you're finding it depressing and sad to be in that space because the thing that you used to do is no longer as valued, then it might be time to go and figure out what else would you be passionate about? I don't know. I'm just rambling here.

Conor

Well, I mean I've got thoughts, but I'm I'm curious to hear from Marco. What are your what are your thoughts on all of this? And also too, I guess you've you've started you've been like compressed, right? Like uh you started programming for the first time like four years ago. And so uh yeah, I'm curious, like what what are your thoughts, both like personally how you you feel about this whole thing, and also like more in general?

Marco Salgado

Yeah, I think I would agree with you both in that obviously uh programming with AI is the future, and there's no way around that. People that use agents to program are orders of magnitude more efficient and more productive than people who don't. I mean, just this week I did something that took me uh two days of working on it, uh not here and there, not fully on it. Something that six months ago, just six months ago, would have taken me a whole week at least. And so uh there's no way around that. Someone that uses AI is gonna be more productive than someone that doesn't. But then uh I also have this feeling that uh right now it's uh very fun and very interesting because of the novelty because you have so many options, you can do so many things, but I can see a future where maybe the joy will be taken out of it because right now they're not good enough that uh they do everything for you. I tell it what to do, and then I still need to know how to code myself because I need to look at what the AI has done and then judge whether that's what I wanted it to do or not. And for that, I need to be uh good at programming because I need to understand what the code is doing and whether the idea that I had is actually what the code is doing or whether there's a better way of doing it. So it kind of takes the boring part away, which is actually writing it, but I still have to have the taste in what good code is and have the good ideas. But maybe in a year from now from now or five years from now, it's already better at me than that.

Conor

Or I I'll just say I think you said something really key there, and maybe didn't even notice that you said it. You said it took the boring part away, which was writing it. And so I think maybe that is like, you know, we view it as boring, or I wouldn't have necessarily said that writing code was boring, but like I was mainly doing it in C. And it I wouldn't say it's boring, I always said it was painful. Like, and that's one of my theories is that like depending on the language you were coming from, if it was C or CUDA C, you love these tools. You never you don't have to sift through, you know, template error message. You just put it in a loop, the AI figures it out. Whereas if if you were maybe a Rust or a Ruby or some language that was really pleasant to use with a really good ecosystem, that the the fun part, you know, was writing the code. It wasn't necessarily, you know, and so and so you take that away and and anyway, so I feel like we're all in a group of folks that you know don't miss the typing of the you know the syntax. But I think some people actually really enjoyed that. Anyways, Bryce, you were gonna respond to the B.

Marco Salgado

But yeah, I think the question is that will in five years the EAI be better than us at the basically everything? Yeah. And so where would our place will where would I well where will our place be in that?

Bryce

Yeah, so I I I'm recalling what I was gonna say now. Yeah, significant amounts of babysitting are needed. You know, Connor, for a long time there's been this trend where we've come on and talked about it, and I've we've both been excited about AI, but my perspective has been like, oh, this this freaking thing, it keeps like I get so frustrated at it. You know, we've had I think we've talked about it a couple episodes about my like frustration and uh like I'll frequently I'll be I'll tell her like, dude, come on. Like, do you think that was real like I'm like passive aggressive with it? And I know this is not the best prompting style, but at this point, I just I gotta be me, you know. You know, like I'll tell her, like, you know, take this, take this crap out. Like, you know, what are you doing here? And like when it when it violates like agents.md or like some rule that I have like clearly like written down, I'll like do like what you do with small children. Like, did you read did you read the directions that I gave you? Oh, you did? Why didn't you do them? And that makes me feel a little bit better about it. But yeah, I don't know how it's interesting, there's like a duality here because on the one hand, there's what I was talking about earlier with my colleague who was saying that like everybody on his team is a new college grad or or an intern because they get it, they get how to use that. And on the one hand, like, yeah, I think like you you need to have the right mindset, and young people are more likely to have that right mindset. But on the other hand, the crimes that I have seen committed that I was able to catch because I have, you know, 10 to 15 years of experience, like, you know, I'm building this little like orchestration layer thing, and you know, like security is a concern. And like this has been this was pretty clearly laid out in the design document. So I I I don't read a lot of the code, but I spent two days just iterating on the design document with the AI. You know, I had it draft it and then I had it redraft it and redraft it until like I was every line of the design document I read, like every bullet of the design document I was, you know, comfortable with. Like I reviewed that very, very carefully. And like, you know, in particular, like the security section. Because again, this thing doesn't have access to any, you know, proprietary information. It's just like it's it's running in a sandbox. Nothing really that terrible can go wrong, but still, you know, best practices. And uh, you know, there was a very clear plan for what stuff it needed to expose to the outside world. And it just completely ignored one part of that. And, you know, it sure, if I had read every line of code, I would have noticed that. Maybe, but there's no way I could have read every line of code. And so the reason that I noticed it is that like eventually I caught on to like a subtle detail about like the architecture when I was talking to it, or like I was asking about some like subtle thing, and I just had an intuition where I was like, wait, hang on a second. If it's saying that this works this way, then that means that like X, Y, and Z, and that almost certainly has to be super insecure. And keep in mind, I have no background in you know, software security, web services, etc. I just like have a bunch of general industry experience. So I sort of have a sense of like, you know, what could be a problem, what would not be a problem. I know at least what I don't know. But somebody who's less experienced and who doesn't have all of the like war stories and scars that, you know, a more senior dev has, I don't know. I feel like they would maybe miss a lot of these things. But maybe it's the sort of thing where, you know, in the old day, in the old days, you would make those mistakes yourself. And then the horrible thing would happen, you know, you the security bug, the uh corrupting your database, et cetera, would happen to you early on in your career and it would be a learning experience. And maybe now it's just that like it's a lot quicker for you to make those mistakes, and maybe also you learn faster from it. But like I think that the the the people keep asking, but like, okay, but like how are people, how are young people gonna learn if they're not writing the code themselves? Well, I think that if you just go and like vibe code something and it's like a huge big mess and like has a bunch of subtle bugs in it, like you're eventually gonna realize like you're that's that's gonna be a learnable experience too. I don't know about you, but like early on in my career, I wrote some like messy, you know, piles of garbage too. And like I learned from that. And I don't think that's any different. Like, I don't think that the learning process is that much different. Like you're gonna you're gonna make mistakes. You know, this is a thing that lets you make mistakes at a much faster rate, but you're gonna everybody's gonna make mistakes. That's part of the learning process.

Conor

Yeah, and I I guess it depends on the kind of person you are, but like one of the things super early on with these tools that I started calling it or referring to them as is it's the democratization of expertise. And I don't mean that with respect to code. I mean that with respect to a lot of other white-collar professionals that you might need at some point in your life that you have to pay money, you know, real estate agent, lawyers for real estate, taxes, etc. If you are the kind of person that wants to dedicate a Saturday to becoming an expert in, you know, insert whatever, you can. Like this year, I basically filed my own taxes alongside my tax advisor. So like I have my tax advisor do it. But then at the same time, I was like, I'm pretty sure with these tools, you know, I can figure out how to file all the correct forms. Sure enough, like I did a better job and like caught a bunch of things that like my tax advisor didn't even catch because I would just sit there with the model and be like, listen, this is my situation. Like, enumerate the list of things that I could possibly be filing as like taxable income reductions. And like your tax advisor that you're paying whatever X hundred dollars to file for a single year is not gonna, you know. I mean, technically I I guess I could take a meeting with them and then I could pepper them with questions, but like in my experience from the people and the relationships that they have with their tax advisors, you don't get that kind of like service unless if you're going to some like bespoke place. Anyways, and so like I've done this like next year I plan to file my taxes on my own, you know, and there's like a ton of stuff where you can basically teach yourself very rapidly like the expertise that you would offload to some other professional. I mean, there's still some things that you're gonna need actual actual people for. Uh be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at adspthepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.

Bryce

Low quality, high quantity. That is the tagline of our podcast.

Conor

That's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.

Bryce

Let me give you some financial advice. So there's this.

Conor

I disagree with your your advice, but go ahead.

Bryce

There's this quote about, like, God, let me see if I can find it. There's this quote about like a computer cannot take responsibility for something, so it should not be allowed to make a decision that I think is kind of applicable to the idea of having it file your taxes. The reason I pay someone to file my taxes is that if something goes wrong, I have a person I can blame. And uh, you know, some some some potential ways of getting restitution if there's a very serious error in my taxes, right? That that I I have some I have some insurance and protection from a serious error. And if you file your taxes with AI, you don't have that that that protection. And so I'm willing to pay the money for that. Not like regardless of whether or not of of how correct or not correct my taxes are. Sure, maybe maybe they'll miss things. Maybe AI will help me identify things that they missed in the taxes. But like, that's actually even more of a reason for me to continue paying them, because like if they do make mistakes, like you know, I can point that out to them. But like, you know, if something's serious if I made some very serious error filing the taxes on my own, I'm the only person responsible and I have no course for restitution.

Conor

I don't know, I don't really understand. And like I said, I do disagree, but you're saying, but like, so what what's the worst case? The people are gonna accuse you of committing tax fraud and you're gonna end up in prison?

Bryce

No, like like like if there was i i if if if a tax error occurred that like cost me like you know tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, like in and an accountant filed filed my taxes and led to that error, like I could I I have various ways through the legal system that I could go about recouping to some degree my costs.

Conor

So basically you're gonna say if there was taxes that you owed, but because of your advisor, you didn't pay them, you're now gonna force your advisor via the legal system to pay it for you.

Bryce

It gives me it gives me somebody This is a bad look, man. It's a bad look. It gives me somebody else who looks who is culpable, somebody else who is who is on the line who is responsible for doing this thing. And then we're gonna do that.

Conor

We might make this tax section bonus uh bonus content after the outro.

Bryce

It might be a 20-minute after the outro, but uh please, please don't, Connor, just please don't rely on your please don't rely on AI solely to file your taxes.

Conor

No, no, no. So that's the thing. I file my own taxes, like I do all the calculations. I'm just talking to the AI. Like there's just like honestly, you know what I take it but I take it back.

Bryce

I would rather I would rather have you use AI to do all the taxes than have you spend time calculating the taxes to yourself.

Conor

No, no, no. And that's the thing. I'm a former actuary. Like I love spreadsheets. Like I used to love doing my taxes before my tax situation got really complicated. And honestly, like filing your taxes is incredibly simple if you have a simple situation. I do not have a simple situation ever since working for NVIDIA because they're an American corporation, and like the way I get compensated is comes through like different various whatever compensation mechanisms. And so it got more complicated. I offloaded it. But now with AI, like, and the main thing is is like there are certain specific forms that like if you do not fill out that form, it can cost you like ridiculous amounts in terms of like fines. But like once you make sure you got all those forms, there's no worry anymore. There's no worry anymore. So that's the that's the thing that like, I guess in defense of you, although you're you're working in the states for an American company, so it shouldn't be that tricky, but it's that if there was a like a fine that you ended up having to pay, not taxes that you owed in the past, but like a fine that they're levying on you, then I guess you could you could go after the tax advisor. But anyways, we got way off in the weeds because I mentioned taxes accidentally. It just happens to be April just passed, April 15th is for the Americans, April 30th is it for the Canadians. What are we? Are we done with AI? Are we uh are we talking about GPU rotate now? Are we answering questions from uh the people? There was some other third topic on the stack. The EnvyComp. Yeah, what are we taking this conversation?

Bryce

Yeah, we should go to we should we should rotate to GPU rotate.

Conor

Yeah, maybe what we'll do too is this episode that just happened, because that was at the what 50 46 minute mark.

Bryce

I'm sure we're gonna lose I'm sure we're gonna lose listeners over this episode.

Conor

That's alright. The tax stuff is now bonus content. It's gonna be after the outro, and I'll put some little thing in. We got a little get lost in the you know uh tax conversation. If you care, you know, listen, if you don't, feel free to stop.

Bryce

So that one's gonna come. I'll just say this. The point I'm making with the tax situation is less about the specific example of the tax situation. It's more about the general principle of why I there are certain things that I prefer to pay a professional money for, even if I could do them myself, just because paying the professional money for it gives me somebody else who's responsible, where if there's a fuck up, I can go to that person and there can be restitution.

Conor

I see, yeah. I mean, uh that's a that's if that's the way that you Operate, I understand. My thing though is I think that there's the only person that will maximally care about like your financial well being being, like maximally care about it, is you. As soon as you start outsourcing to someone else, like they are now looking out for themselves, first and foremost, not for you. Like maybe you have an amazing financial advisor, tax advisor, whatever other advisor, but like and or in maybe if they're in your family or they're a good friend. What? Trust but verify. Well, that's the thing. If I'm gonna verify and do their whole job for them, why am I paying them in the first place?

Bryce

Because it's it's let it's less work for me to verify a work product by somebody else. This is the same thing with AI. Like instead of me writing 10,000 lines of code, it's less effort for me to review and audit a 10,000 lines of code to review to review a PR from my tax accountant or my lawyer or whatnot. I'd rather do that than have to go and do it all myself.

Conor

I don't I don't know if I I mean in certain cases I think that's true. In the case of this ex specific example, my like verifying was basically just like I said, replicating the whole process myself. Anyways, we're done, we're done, nobody cares. Nobody cares. Did we lose listeners over the AI uh hot take? Certainly, 100%.