Part of a Healthy Breakfast

**Casey Liss** (0:00)
We get a lot of listener feedback, and generally speaking, it's wonderful, it's good to read even if we don't reply to it.
We see it and acknowledge it internally anyway. And there are occasionally pieces of listener feedback that stand out. I don't have the gentleman's name in front of me, but the long email that turned into a blog post was Adam Wunn, I think that's right.

**Marco Arment** (0:22)
His name was Adam Filemaker.

**Casey Liss** (0:24)
Yep, exactly right. That was incredible. We had another incredible piece of feedback that was sent to all of us, but was really for you. Can you tell us about this? Because this was just chef's kiss amazing.

**Marco Arment** (0:37)
I think this might be my favorite feedback I've ever received on a podcast.
I think my favorite piece of follow up I ever heard on someone else's podcast was once, I believe it was an old episode of Connected. Mike said his birthday on an episode and somebody wrote in the next week to say, you got your birthday wrong. This is your actual birthday.

**Casey Liss** (0:58)
It was correct.

**Marco Arment** (1:00)
That I think is my favorite piece of podcast follow up ever. Somebody correcting Mike on his own birthday and being right.

**Casey Liss** (1:07)
So good.

**Marco Arment** (1:08)
But I think this might be my second most favorite. So a million years ago when Overcast first made the clip sharing feature. This, I can't even remember how many years ago this was.

**Casey Liss** (1:19)
Well, let me ask you, take a guess. What episode of ATP was entitled Automatic Kicking Machine? Just take a guess.

**Marco Arment** (1:27)
So we're currently in the low 700s. I'm going to say maybe it's somewhere in the 400s.

**Casey Liss** (1:31)
I would have thought the same Marco. Episode. Actually, John, do you know?

**John Siracusa** (1:35)
I mean, you already spoiled it by saying it's probably less than 400 I don't know. 210

**Casey Liss** (1:40)
Number 34
Number 34, Automatic. Oh, shoot. Wait, wait. I'm a big liar. We're going to have to fix it and edit. 324 is what I meant to say.

**Marco Arment** (1:50)
That's a pretty big difference.

**Casey Liss** (1:51)
I'm sorry.

**John Siracusa** (1:52)
I'm sorry. Price is right rules. I win.

**Casey Liss** (1:54)
Yeah. John wins. Price is right rules. My apologies in my internal. So I take the show notes that we share, and then I generate the ones for public consumption, and I had a typographical error, and I dropped the two in 324 I'm so sorry. I was not trying to set you up for failure. That was a genuine whiff on my part.

**John Siracusa** (2:12)
But anyway. Also, don't say generate, because people are going to think you use AI to do it.

**Casey Liss** (2:14)
Oh, no, no, no. I create them by hand. But anyways, May 3, 2019 was when we last spoke about this.

**Marco Arment** (2:21)
So that was when I wrote ClipSharing and Overcast.
I was using this API, like this AV asset writing API to generate video from a UI I was rendering. That's how those clips were created. And I dug through the docs at the time. And this was obviously many iOS versions ago and many years ago.
And the problem I had was that the system I was using, which as far as I knew at the time, was the only way to do this with Apple's APIs. Every so often, it would just stall when exporting a video. And I realized that if I just, if I detected that it wasn't progressing, and I just canceled the task and shifted the first timestamp, like by like, you know, 0.1 in either direction and just tried it again, oftentimes it would succeed the second time. Sometimes it would take two or three times to succeed. And you would see this as you like, and this is actually still in the current App Store version of Overcast. As you export a clip, you could see you would see like the little pie chart progress meter get like most of the way through and then stop for a couple seconds and then start over at the beginning. What I had built was, as I described it, an automatic kicking machine. That if you just if you kick it and make it reset, it would often succeed. So I just built when I ship the feature, an automatic kicking machine that would just detect when it was stalled, kick it and start it again until it succeeded. Well, David Watson wrote it a couple days ago to say, hey, I believe I plus ChachiPTNClaud figured out what was going wrong with your clip generation system in Overcast. I'm honestly quite frightened that it was possible for AI agents to find this. Now, what David did was it looks like he did was have AI decompile my binary, which is a thing people do. I haven't gotten to that point with AI yet, but it's it's a thing that's happening and it's helping people find bugs and stuff. It's great. And he said the you're using this one API call to composite the graphic. And if you use this other one, it works.