He Thinks AI Code May Break Everything - EP 59 Will Wilson

**Will Wilson** (0:00)
Imagine you're like a detective, and you're at the scene of a car crash, right? Car has veered off the road and crashed, and everybody's dead. And you're trying to figure out, was foul play involved, right? The moment you walk into that crime scene, you're accidentally destroying evidence, right? You could be stepping on some key trace of something, you're contaminating with DNA. It's actually very, very hard and delicate, and you have to be really careful about everything you do. And you can't rewind time and watch the crash from a different angle. You can't rewind time and go look and see if the guy's brake lines were cut. You can't rewind time and give him a field sobriety test, right? It's exactly the same way with debugging software. Most of the time, we get to the software after the car has already crashed. And after the machine has falled over, the server has exited, its memory, its core memory has been dumped somewhere.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:55)
Well played.

**Will Wilson** (0:56)
Like, you know, it's like the aftermath of a crime scene. And not only is most of the evidence gone, but anything you do might destroy evidence further. Whereas when you are debugging in a simulation, because it's a simulation and because it's deterministic, right, fully replayable, you can just rewind time.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:31)
Welcome to the Core Memory Podcast. This is Ashlee Vance. We are joined today by Will Wilson. Awesome name.

**Will Wilson** (1:39)
Easy to remember.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:42)
You were getting, obviously, getting to everything you've done, and are doing, but you're the CEO and co-founder of Antithesis.

**Will Wilson** (1:50)
That's right.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:50)
Does it have a second part to it? No, it's just Antithesis.

**Will Wilson** (1:54)
Just Antithesis, yeah, yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:55)
You guys were operating in super secret stealth mode for several years and have emerged.

**Will Wilson** (2:03)
Yeah. Well, so this is actually kind of a fun story in itself. We were in stealth mode for five and a half years.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:08)
I saw that. It was lengthy stealth. It is.

**Will Wilson** (2:11)
And that requires a sort of an extreme set of people and a slightly extreme approach to building a company, which is maybe something we can get into if you want, but we could also just start with what it does.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:24)
I did, kind of, because that jumped out at me. I mean, yeah, just to give people context, I mean, the big picture, we're going to talk about a lot of stuff, but clearly we're in this moment where how people create software is changing dramatically with AI. I've been fascinated by software forever. I was an open-source dork for many, many years. But yeah, so we're in this moment. I mean, I think people who are immersed in the San Francisco AI scene know this all too well. I wanted to try to give people who are not professional software developers or even maybe just super-dialed in to what's been going on with AI and software a picture of where we're at. Because I think everybody sees these stories about companies are using this to write all this code. I can never actually get a good sense as to how much of this is actually going on, and what's good, and what's bad, and where these tools are at. So I wanted to level set people there. You're a perfect person to do this because Antithesis analyzes software and tries to make sure everything's working smoothly. The AI, in fact, told me that this is prescient. It could not be more prescient to have you on the podcast.

**Will Wilson** (3:38)
And then they told you you were absolutely right?

**Ashlee Vance** (3:41)
It did. It did. So it was telling me I'm picking good guests. But yeah, why don't you set up Antithesis in your own words.

**Will Wilson** (3:48)
Okay, sure. So let's actually start not in the present moment. Let's go back. Let's go back like 75 years.
So you use like software programs because everybody does because software is eating the world or it's already eaten the world. And a thing that you might notice about your software programs is that they don't always work super well. Like often, I mean, just literally yesterday, right? Like Verizon had this huge outage that left like most of the US unable to make phone calls. And why is that? Like we're like very used to this idea for some reason, that software just doesn't work properly all the time. You know, you log on to your bank and you can't log in to your account and they have a little red error message. It's like, hey, sorry, it didn't work. And we just are, we just roll with that. But like that's, that's actually very strange if you think about it, because we don't just expect buildings to like randomly fall on us.