Future of programming

`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?

Now I should actually rerun that test. I'd be shocked if it's not much faster. I was just using the Groq bot thing-... which has all these stuff built in for using browsers and using a computer, and has its own dedicated computer without you having to set up a computer. It's basically like a claw in a box. And I was asking it to sign up for something, and it kind of... I got a glimpse of like, oh yeah, that's where we are now, and it's so much faster to use. But at the time, I was just blown away. And then I used it for a little bit and I found like, ah, it's not there yet. I can't actually communicate it within this way. It still needs the CLI. It still needs an MCP because it's just too slow and too token inefficient and so forth. But it was this glimpse of the future. And then after that, I kinda just didn't use it, because the things I wanna use agents for, I was mostly in front of my computer to do. Now, that has changed a little bit lately, and it's one of the reasons why I'm so kind of okay about using Claude Code, because Claude has the best mobile app, where any session you start Claude Code in your terminal on a computer is accessible through the app-