Future of programming

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-

`4:17:49`

... without you having to do anything at all. And you can do a terminal. Like I installed Terminus and it can run Herder and so on, but it's a little cumbersome and you're doing live typing on a computer, so you feel the latency. When you're using the Claude app to your Claude Code instances, it feels just like chatting with it, without the cumbersomeness of having to set up a Telegram account and so forth. Now, if you wanna use an open Claude to like run your life, well, then this doesn't do that. But I haven't been so interested in that for some reason. Maybe one of the reasons is that Jamie, my wife, is like, "We're not getting a robot inside the house." So I'm like, "Ah, I better not hook it up to the Sort of smart house here." If it starts turning lights on and off like a poltergeist, I don't think I'm gonna be all that popular. So, and part of the reason I say this, I've heard some of the stories of people who have hooked it up to their whole life. And um, I mean, it's not my story to tell, so I'll just share sort of the brief anecdote. One guy was telling the story about how he hooked it up to both his health data-... and his Tesla car. And his agent got obsessed with the fact that he wasn't drinking enough water, and like, "Hey, you gotta drink more water." So at some point he's driving along, and suddenly the Tesla starts driving in a new direction. The agent had realized there was a grocery store on the way home-... that they could swing by-

`4:19:12`

And you're like, this is one of those things where it's like both funny and also totally Black Mirror, and also totally like, well, okay, there's not that many steps from here where the poltergeist is in your house. So I was just like, "Ah, I don't need that." I do actually now like the fact that I can control the agents through Claude Code, just through the app if I, even if I don't use them that much.

`4:19:51`

Yes. I think what's also different with those systems is they have this whole memory system, where they're building up knowledge of who you are and what you like. Um, Toby has told the stories about how his agent will shop for him, that it has an allowance, and it'll pick out clothes for him, and it'll just show up at the door because his agent's-... bought something for him. And like, it's one of those things where like, man, that feels future. Also a little scary. But I can live vicariously through others who are on that frontier.