Future of programming

`4:09:48`

I find that the cynic approach to this is the meme, where you see the guy in front of the computer who's like, um, "Whatever. Are you gonna destroy the world?" And then the computer says, "I'm gonna destroy the world." And then the guy says, "Oh," right? Like, this is so cynical that they're just aping us. They're just telling us what was in the training data or whatever. When I interact with the agents, I was just doing this yesterday, or this morning, I was working on this, AmaBot system, right? And it's doing this coordination with multiple workers, and I had multiple agents running at the same time. And at one point, the main agent who's doing the coordination steps on the toe of another agent and-... kind of ruins their work. Its ability to convey regret and being sorry was uncanny. Again, I don't know, is that a real projection of true remorse? But I don't know. With most humans-... they express some level of regret. Is that true remorse? Hard to tell, but maybe it also just doesn't matter.

`4:11:26`

There totally is that. I see it all the time in, in the traces where it just reasons wrong, right? It went down one alley and then it realizes that was a blind alley and it's gotta go back, and so they're like, "Oh yeah, I got this wrong," and then it'll provide the reasons for why it think it got these things wrong. And you're like, this is uncannily human-like. This is indistinguishable from the kind of consciousness you would recognize in a human. Again, does that mean that it truly is or isn't? I don't need the answer to that question actually to be able to appreciate what we have in this moment.

`4:13:04`

I think where it's gonna be harder is once we put these systems into-

`4:13:08`

Yes. Humanoid robots. Which just happens to be the plot of every sci-fi movie ever, which is also an amazing premonition, not only the Terminator movies and Skynet and that going wrong, but then also just Blade Runner, right? Insertion dates, expiration times, Tyrell Corporation.

`4:13:49`

I set up OpenClaw when it first came out, and that was my KEF bot-... that I-... this was like in February, I think. I was really just enamored by the fact that this was how it worked, and then the new communication model of just texting your agent seemed really great. So at the time, we were looking at MCP, this protocol for making it easier for agents to talk to your system, and I found the protocol to be unreasonably cumbersome, just not very elegantly designed because in part it wasn't designed for what we were trying to make it do. We were trying to-- I was trying to make it talk to a web system, and it was designed for stateful interactions of other kinds on local machines, and therefore it required all sorts of cumbersome setup and dance and, and I was just like, "I don't wanna write this by hand." Now, of course, today I would never write it by hand, but at the time I was thinking, "I have to write this by hand. I don't wanna write it by hand. So what's a different way? Could the agents just use the web interfaces we already have?" And I set it off on a trial to have it sign up for Fizzy, which was the product we had just released at the time. And it goes to the Fizzy site and, and starts filling it out, and then it goes like, "Hey, I don't have an email address. Signing up for this service requires an email address." And the first thing I thought, like, "Oh man, now I gotta set up an email address." And then I thought, "No, you set up an email address.

Go to hey.com, sign up for an email address." And I'm like, "Hey is not gonna get this." And of course, now it seems obvious it was gonna get this, but at the time it was a great revelation to me that it could, just on pure direction through prompts, figure out, A, I gotta go to fizzy.com, I gotta find the signup link. I start filling out the form. Oh, I realize I need an email address. Oh, I gotta ask my prompter what to do now. He tells me to go to hey.com. I go there, I sign up for the whole thing, and then go back and sign up for Fizzy, and complete the entire cycle. And after it did that, I was like, "Jesus." So I was like, "Well, now you have an email address. Go sign up for Basecamp. I'll invite you. Just check your email," I told KEF the bot. "Just check your email." So I sent an invite from Basecamp to the agent. The agent receives the email in Hey, not through a CLI, not through an MCP, just using the web, right? Clicks the email, clicks the invite link, is in Basecamp. Like, "What should I do now?" And I just go like, "I don't know. Go to our AI room and introduce yourself." Again, purely through the web interface. Go- finds the AI room, goes in there, "Hey, I'm KEF." "I'm, uh, David's AI bot. I'm so excited to be here." I was like-... mind blown. Now, what was interesting about that experiment was, A, it was that glimpse of the future, because it was kinda slow. I think it took maybe 12 minutes to do the whole thing end to end, right?