How software will change

So you can make a lot of shitty ideas come true, then what? Are you gonna ship that? That sounds like, I don't know, something coming out of Microsoft. That's not what we're trying to replicate here. That process is not actually... Because we already had this. If you step back for a moment and think of the towering organizations we have who have had tens of thousands of programmers at their disposal. I mean, I'm picking on Microsoft here. I love Microsoft some of the time, but I'll pick on them in this case because they have had endless resources, endless programming capacity for decades, right? This is what's showing us that just being able to write a lot of code does not produce great compelling software. Now, the other thing is we've had this capacity for about six months. That's not very long in human life cycle capacity of internalizing what's going on. And I think it's actually funny that the critique of AI is, why isn't it going faster? What are you talking about? We've not had any other form of progress that has moved as fast as AI, and you're impatient because in the last three months we haven't rewritten the whole world and made it a utopia of software goodness?

`0:23:33`

This is the classic innovator's dilemma. These companies have gotten so good, so established at the old way, and therefore their entire structure, management layers, processes are tuned for a time that no longer exists. But you can't pivot that. These are super tankers. It just doesn't happen. This is why we're finally getting this upset in the technology industry. For a while, I was very upset about the duopoly between Apple and Google on mobile, because it felt like mobile was the most important computing platform that we had, and I could not see a path to unseat either Google or Apple sitting on top of that, controlling everything, taking their toll booth money. But the game has changed. This is no longer the most important platform. Mobile phones are important, but there's also a lot of other form factors coming, whether it's glasses or it's earpieces or whatever else have you. It's all in play now, but the computing platforms themselves are in play for the first time in probably 40 years, if you look at the desktop. Linux has been around since '91. It's not taken off or taken over on the desktop. It's taken over everything else. All the devices you have on your desk, your fridge, your toaster, everything runs Linux, except for your computer. Now, funnily enough, your Android is actually Linux, but wrapped so sufficiently that you can't really recognize it. But now there's an opening, and the opening is exactly as you say it.

If there's a piece of software you depended on that bound you to Windows, it is completely within reach for you personally to start rewriting it. And maybe you won't get to 100% coverage, but this is the old joke about Microsoft Office. "I only use 5%." Yeah, well, we all use a different 5%. Well, what if we all just build our own 5%? What if I just took the functionality that I need and just did that? That is a completely different challenge and one agents are incredibly capable of doing right now, today, and I've done it a lot of times over. So one of the amazing things I've found with the latest agent engaged is I have become a polyglot programmer, something I was absolutely not before. I was a Ruby programmer--... first and foremost, and then I dabbled a little bit in Bash--... when I had to. And in the last two months, I've written C++. I've written three applications that have shipped in Omarchy Quattro. I wrote a writing app. I was using this app called Typora, which is a very nice app-

`0:26:33`

... which in itself is based on another app called iA Writer, which was my real love on the Mac-... for a clean, simple Markdown writing environment. That's where I write all my essays. And then I moved to Linux, and I couldn't get iA Writer, so I moved over to this other tool called Typora. It was a piece of shareware, and it had a lot of features I just didn't need. And about six weeks, seven weeks ago, I thought, "Do you know what? I only need 5% of Typora," which is already a basic app. I literally told the agent to get going, that I wanted it written in C++ and Qt, because that would fit well with the aesthetic of what I was building with Quattro. And in, I think, about 20 minutes, it had the first version. I started using it, and it wasn't quite right. Within two days, I'd given up Typora, and I wrote and have written all of my essays since that moment in Omawrite.