AGI was achieved on a Zoom call

Shane Thomas (0:00)

AGI was achieved on a Zoom meeting.

Abhi Aiyer (0:02)

I know.

Brad Leford (0:03)

I told Claude to, hey, produce an image and share it to the meeting, and it said, I don't know how to do that. And before I could respond, the Grok Bot agent in the meeting told the Claude agent how to do it.

Shane Thomas (0:17)

We have someone who Abhi and I have worked with in the past, we've known for a while, been working on a new thing, wants to share it to the world. Let's bring on Brad.

Brad Leford (0:26)

Hey, guys.

Shane Thomas (0:27)

And Brad, sometimes we see you in the comments occasionally, so watched the show many times, I imagine, now you're on it. So, would love to know, I mean, maybe a quick introduction to yourself, and then obviously we want to go into what you're building.

Brad Leford (0:41)

Yeah, just an old software guy at this point, been building apps and websites for better part of 20 years and worked with you guys in the past at Gatsby for a spell. I had a COVID stint with Amazon, and it was like my last corporate thing, and they called me back to Palo Alto once they reversed their policy. I said, you know what, I think I'm going to skip that one and put my shingle out and do something for myself. I basically been consulting ever since, which with the rise of AI has increasingly just meant onboarding people onto AI and figuring out how to, really for small to medium businesses, how do they think about it, and maybe build the occasional app for them and things for myself as well?

Shane Thomas (1:26)

Yeah, I do imagine being in that world is different post-AI. I mean, all of our jobs are way different post-AI. Here are some people saying we're just like slot machines hitting enter, which is true to some extent and definitely true for some folks.

But I do think it also opens the range of, especially for people in teams that are not as invested in AI, what you can do is probably pretty impressive to them, right? You can kind of unlock this new uncharted territory a bit.

Brad Leford (1:53)

Yeah, no doubt. It's tough, right? Because it came from a background that's, you know, software is hard, right? And now software is easy. So like I have to actually put my biases aside and be like, wait, software is easy. So how do I talk about it with these folks who might still think it's hard? So that's a new paradigm.

Shane Thomas (2:09)

I guess here's my actual question. Is software actually easy now?

Is it easy or does it just seem easy on the surface? Because it still feels to me that now you can get to 80% in 5% of the time, 2% of the time, but it still feels hard to get from that 80% to 100%, at least in my experience. How's it been for you?

Brad Leford (2:27)

I'll say it's easy for folks that are tech-adjacent. And so in the past, they might have had to go through someone like me or someone like you and be like, hey, we got Google off, can we add Microsoft off to the login page? And we would hem and haw and kind of wring our hands and be like, yeah, we could get that for you in sprint 16, maybe next quarter. Whereas now, those kind of people that I'm working with, literally, if I give them access to the code, which I'm increasingly doing, they'll just vibe it into existence, right?

And so when I say software is easy, it's really kind of like the product side of me is like, forget about your roadmap. You don't need to push off that Microsoft integration out to next quarter. Maybe we could get it done this afternoon. But it's still hard for all the reasons I think you guys like to talk about, and I totally agree.

Abhi Aiyer (3:17)

It's so much easier to create software, especially things that are mapped from things that already exist, like adding auth or something. There's a lot of training in what that should look like or be.

But we're struggling on, I think software is still hard for creating net new things, or even things that are not necessarily well-trained on different languages and TypeScript or complex backend problems. The models are super eager to please. You know, our team just went through this whole retrospective about, we all agreed that we have AI psychosis, because we were trusting the models too much, and we thought that we could do, literally do anything. So it's one, still a people problem, but then we had to really face reality that, no, the model was actually wrong all the time, and we just trusted it.