EES New York keynote: Scott Hanselman

Stand up. If you all could stand up on your feet. Yeah, I know you’re looking around like, "Why are they telling me to stand up?" Because what I want you to do is look around the room so you can see everyone that’s pulled up.

Really appreciate this moment and give yourselves a big round of applause. Give yourselves a big round of applause. And next up, we have our host.

Keep the round of applause going. Our host, Bobby D. I’m coming all the way from the back.

Are you excited? I’m really excited. Do y’all know this is the second event?

Y’all number two stop on our journey across the country. We was out in San Francisco first and now we out in NYC, New York. Yeah.

Thank you for the round of applause. You going to give me another one? Oh, there we go.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Thank you so much, DJ. My name is Bobby Doras.

Have a seat, please. Have a seat. I ain’t gonna have y’all stand up all day.

Now, have a seat. My name is Bobby Dorless, but my friends call me Bobby D. I’m a technologist.

I’m a conscious engineer. I’ve been at the keyboard for about 20 plus years. I started back in 2002.

How many of y’all wasn’t around 2002? Just messing around. Just messing around.

But I am someone that spends a lot of time supporting CodePath as a career coach, as a mentor. I’ve done career I’m sorry, technical interviewing. And now they have me pulling up to different spots around the country.

I also do virtual stuff, but I love this in person stuff to meet you all in person. So, I know that there’s a few of you that have met me or seen me online. How many of y’all seen me online?

Raise your hand. Wow. I guess I guess I might be lowkey famous.

Am I? No, I’m just messing. But I did want to say thank you all so much for attending our second second inerson EES event.

I got a few things here that I’m going to read off, but I do want to encourage you all to definitely tune in, listen in because we’ve got a really cool conversation lined up for you this morning. Somebody from Microsoft, his picture’s going to be there, but definitely just give me a second. Let me read through a few things.

So, we want to say good morning to everybody and welcome to the Emerging Engineering Summit here in New York. We’re so excited for you all for this two-day event. Did y’all know it was two days?

Yeah. All right. So, clear schedule out.

Two days, right? First of all, a huge thank you to all of our amazing sponsors. We want to encourage you all to check them out in the exhibit booth, but let me shout them out first.

So, we have Block, we have New Reloic, we have Reboot Representation, we have D, we had De Shaw Research, Drive, Wealth, and Microsoft. Let’s give them a big round of applause. Their presence here today makes this experience possible for all of you students and we definitely thank them for their investment.

We got a packed day ahead of us from workshop, panelists, networking and so on and so forth, but There’s a few housekeeping things that we definitely want to encourage you all. First off, if you have any problems and you have any questions, look for anyone that’s wearing a shirt just like this shirt on the side. We’re here to support you and definitely if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

Also, on the back of your name tags, take a look at it. There’s a barcode back there, right? Which will take you to the schedule with all the details for today.

The other thing I’ve actually seen a few do this. When I first pulled up, I don’t know if y’all see even had the cameras out. All know something called LinkedIn, IG.

We’re encouraging you all to take pictures, film, do whatever you can to remember this moment, but also let the world know about this moment because they missing out, right? Because they y’all here, not them, right? So, definitely feel free to post as much as you like online and definitely y’all tag me.

It’s easy to find me online. The last thing that I want to mention is one thing that we really pride here is listening and hearing you all voices. Now, how do we hear your voices?

Is by completing the survey. You know what they came back with with EES online. How many of y’all attended EES online?

Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the things that came back from the survey was like, "Hey, we want to have things in person.

We want y’all to pull up." So, what we do, host events, right? Another thing that they said, which company is like, "Hey, they want property to pull up." So, guess what? I’m here, right?

But what I’m really giving you words of encouragement is fill out the surveys to let us what we’re doing well, areas to improve, and definitely things that you want us to see us do more of. All right, so those are very important, and we encourage you to fill out the survey after every session if possible. All right, so before we have our speaker come up on stage, I want to give youall some more introduction about myself.

Words of encouragement as you all are on this journey. Because there’s this wave that’s coming. I don’t know if yall know what it’s called, and it’s actually kind of peaking right now.

It only has two letters. Anybody know what that wave is? AI, right?

So we’re not gonna jump right into AI, but I’m just more or less encouraging you all that the era that you all are in right now. I’m looking forward to what you all will create. Just don’t get afraid of the wave.

You know what you got to do with the wave? You can’t turn your back to the wave. What happened?

Anybody’s from beach town? I’m from Florida. So if you ever turn your back on the wave, what happen?

Right? It’s make sure you look at it, get yourself ready, lined up, and jump with the wave. Right?

That’s just simple mindset that I want you all to think about about AI. But let me tell you a little bit about my journey. So I started technology and engineering back in 2002.

I don’t have a college degree, so I didn’t really follow the traditional path. I use certifications to level up. Another cool nugget is I’m a first generation Haitian American.

How many first generations do you have out here? Give yourselves a round of applause. For sure.

Right. Definitely to our parents, definitely to our our community. But being first generation is something that I’m very prideful of.

I used to, you know, be at the keyboard like I said back in 2022. Was when I finally stepped away for a little bit, but I was working at this really cool social media company. Actually, I don’t even know if y’all know it anymore.

It’s the one that used to be the Little Blue Bird. Y’all ever heard of me before? Yes.

So, I worked at Twitter almost a decade becoming a lead engineer there, managing one of the world’s largest comput clusters. And one of the things that I always was prideful of is that I was able to touch the internet, feel like I was a part of the internet, right? But the thing that more or less forced me to step away from the board.

Is that I didn’t see enough people that look like me, right? I’m sitting at these big tables managing all these worldclass systems and my community is not there. So, I decided to step away and join an organization that I could really make impact directly.

Big shout outs to CodePath. Let’s give them a big round of applause. Career Center.

And giving us an opportunity and giving engineers like myself a space that I can help influence and support the next generation of engineers that are about to hit these streets because it’s going to be tough out here. My skill sets are around systems engineering. Anybody systems engineer?

So, that’s operating systems, hardware, network. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There’s not that many of us out here, bro.

Like, that’s crazy. How many software engineers out here? Raise your hand.

Raise your hand. Yeah. Go ahead.

It’s all right. I’m a software engineer, too. So, no no shade at all.

Because it’s one of my mantras is automating yourself out of a job. Literally, it’s what I did working at Twitter. I utilize Python is my favorite programming language.

How many Python? Python. Python.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Java. A few of y’all. Yeah.

Yeah. And then everything else. No. The only reason why I bring up Python, it’s a very phonic language.

It’s definitely the way you read it is the way it’s written. And there’s so many libraries. And then the other tip I’ll give y’all which is free.

I might charge up for this afterwards but I’ll do it all the free is that the number one programming language that I’ve interviewed candidates and seen them get through the process is Python. All the other ones they cool but Python has definitely been the one that’s hold it down. So if you are looking to pursue software engineering or develop some skills I do encourage Python is one of the first programming language but hey they’re all great right?

Python is not an interpreted language. So that means it doesn’t run as fast as something like C or Rust. Anybody developing and running Rust?

Oh, that’s that’s where it’s at, right? How about Golang? Anybody develop?

Yeah. Yeah. But in general, these programming languages all have special use cases for them, right?

If you want something to run fast, you want something compiled, if you want something that everybody can understand, interpret, interpretive language is cool. But that’s not even where my proficiency at. What I make my money off of is systems engineering, right?

Systems engineering is more or less a skill set where you’re managing computers, at least in my situation at very hypers scale. Hypers scale meaning there’s hundreds of thousands of computers running around the world and somebody got to manage them, right? And that’s where my skills come in from the hardware to the operating system to connecting them to the network, putting it on the internet.

And then my title at Twitter was a site reliability engineer. Anybody heard that title before? Site reliability engineer.

Yep. I just like the way it’s titled is we are the reliable engineers for the whole site. So if a site goes down, which has happened a few times, I don’t know if yall know Twitter back in the days, we used to have something called a fail.

One an engineer like myself would be running back or jumping on Slack and fixing and finding out what the problem is. But the other cool thing about site reliability engineering is like, hey, if a problem happens once, it’s all right. If it happens twice, then we’re not doing something right.

Right. And we usually follow up and make sure that we design systems to be reliable to prevent those type of outages. That’s why all of these services around this practice have gotten way better over the years.

I was going to touch myself from 2013 to 2020 that that was me. Outside of that, I don’t know what’s going on over there. I got out of it before yeah, you got there.

So, if y’all ask me questions, I don’t really know. But one of the things that I also like to emphasize about my journey is that I don’t have a college degree. But that doesn’t mean that y’all are heading in the wrong direction.

It just means that y’all have one leg up on where I started. Right? I will say the thing that I encourage my mentees to pursue is supplemental education.

And you know what that means? Pulling up the CodePath. So give your all yourselves a round of applause because if you don’t know, you are ahead of your peers by coming to events like this, being involved with organizations like Copath, but also taking full advantages of all the services they have.

The last I will stay here is the career center. It’s one of the best career centers I’ve ever worked for. Big shout out to Geneva.

Give him a round of applause. Geneva Anthony, I see the CodePath. Katie, you see Katie in the back there?

But in general, like don’t help me out. But in general, I want to encourage you all to use these services to the full potential. I know that there might be a few of you all that I’ve had a chance to do mock interviews with or you’ve seen me do a workshop.

These are the key things that are going to make you like marketable, make you have access to those next opportunities and I want to encourage you all to take advantage of them, right? Definitely here at Copath, we are really really inspired by your all journey. So keep us posted too because you know how many students I’ve given some advice about given some advice to did a mock interview and then I they’re interviewing at Bloomberg they’re interviewing at Netflix and I don’t want to hear from them and I’m like man I hope they got in and then all of a sudden I run into them events like this and they’re like hey Bobby I want to tell you I’m like yo I’ve been waiting to hear how to tell the world let us know how these things are going because it inspires right that’s what LinkedIn network and connect your network is your net worth you heard that before I don’t write rhymes but That’s a hard rhyme, right?

But it has been something that has carried me so far in my journey. So, I want to encourage you to use these services, use the technology to it full potential. And yeah, we’re about to queue up our next speaker.

Who’s ready for a speaker to come on stage? So, I really do hope that you all are feeling inspired. Hopefully, a little bit about my story, a little bit about you all stories.

But in general, I just hope that you all feel inspired and get ready for our conversation today. So, our opening keynote speaker is a gentleman by the name of Scott Anselman, which is the vice president of developer community at Microsoft. Microsoft?

Yeah, y’all better listen in. I’m trying to catch a job, too. What up, Scott?

He’s a developer, teacher, a leader that has the reputation for making tech more human, accessible, and dare I say, fun. He’s hosted hundreds of podcasts, written countless of blog posts, and spoken on stage around the world helping developers navigate both the fundamentals and the frontiers of software. Today, Scott is joined will join us to talk about that feeling, the urge right now of how to thrive in a world transforming around us.

With the rise of AI and automation, it’s easy to feel like the ground is shifting beneath our feet. But Scott reminds us that one feature, one attribute that always sets us apart is curiosity. I don’t know if yall caught that.

And that’s one thing that I always look for candidates in an interview is how curious are they? Even if they don’t know the answer, do they have the skills to be curious enough to be an engineer in front of me? Right?

Whether you’re just starting your journey or already deep into your tech career, this is a conversation about how to stay engaged, adapt to change, and keep living up or leveling up no matter what the industry does. So, if you walk in, please warm and let’s have my guy come up on the making Twitter happen. I’m not going to call it anything but Twitter.

I’m not going to be a part of that. How y’all doing? Thank you very much.

I’ve been coding now for 33 years. So, when he listed out all that stuff that I’ve done, all I was just hearing is old, old. He’s old.

He’s been around a while. He’s been old. And I realized though that the reason that I have that list of stuff that I’ve done is that I didn’t quit.

I didn’t quit tech. I didn’t get chased out of tech. I didn’t let anyone chase me out of tech.

I didn’t give up. And I tried to use as many of the privileges that I have to get where I’m at and then send the ladder back down. And I appreciate that everybody at CodePath and folks like Bobby are doing that.

Send the ladder back down. So you don’t know me from Adam, you’re like, "Who’s this dude from Microsoft and what is he going to talk about?" I live in Portland, Oregon. I’ve always lived in Portland.

I drive up occasionally to Seattle to work at Microsoft. But in Portland, I’ve worked at companies like Intel and Nike, but I went to Portland Community College. I was the first person in my family to go to college.

My dad is a firefighter and my mom is a zookeeper. So, I grew up in a very kind of bluecollar house. My mom literally shoveled elephant at the zoo.

That was her job. And when my dad wasn’t a firefighter, he was driving a gas truck and filling up like heating oil. So when I got to go to Portland Community College and do computer science for the very first time, this was like a big deal.

And at Microsoft, we have these things called enterprise resource groups, which are basically just like groups of people with different kind of identities. So there’s like black folks at Microsoft and diabetics at Microsoft. And one of the groups that I work with are firstgen low educ firstg low income.

So I’m you know first person to go to school and came from a low-inccome background. But one of the things that I realized is that about five to six years into my working career, people just stopped asking me about my degree. So I went to Portland Community College.

I got a two-year degree in associates and then I went back to school to an Oregon state school called Oregon Institute of Technology to get my four-year degree. However, it took me 11 years to get that four-year degree. So, I graduated from high school in ’ 92.

Yeah, I know I’m old. But I didn’t get my four-year degree till 2003. So, I was working full-time and going to school at night.

And by that time, I’m 11 years into my career, and people don’t really care. But I had defensive imposttor syndrome and I still have the sensive imposter syndrome. I’ve been doing this for three decades plus and I’m still like do they know?

Do they know I don’t really know what I’m doing? I saw a gentleman from CodePath and he had doctor on his name tag. Oh man, he knows he knows that I don’t know what’s going on.

Right. And then you hear folks like Bobby who worked at Twitter and he’s like, "Oh man, I haven’t worked at Twitter." Oh, this person worked at Netflix. I Netflix.

I only work at Microsoft. What do we do? What do we do?

We did Windows. Nobody likes Windows, man. Just can’t win.

But I’ve been trying to put out good information on the internet for a very long time. He mentioned that I do podcasts and I do blogs and stuff, but I didn’t do that to like build a personal brand. There wasn’t a such thing as a personal brand or networking at the time.

I was just trying to like be excited. You know those people who knock on the door and try to convert you to their religion? You know, they’re just like, "Have you heard the news?

You you want can I talk to you about my religion?" I didn’t realize that like when I would like slam the door in their faith like, "Man, cool. I’m want to talk to you." I was disrespecting them because they’re really excited about their religion. Like I love that for you, not for me.

But then I would go on the internet and be like, "Have you heard the news about C#?" And I realized that I was those guys. I am that guy. I’m excited about technology.

I am wandering the streets. I have flown from Portland to New York to tell you, have you heard the news? And so, while I may not convert to their religion and you might not convert to my religion, I hope that you love how excited that I am about it.

I think that you should appreciate how excited that CodePath is because this is an entire organization excited for you to hear about the news. And the news is that technology can build generational wealth. Technology can take you to the next level.

Technology is the only situation you’re going to find where every single piece of information that you learned in your degrees will be obsolete next year. Every I have a degree. There’s one to do with the doctor.

I don’t know where he is. Tell me that half of what you learned in school is not actually a thing anymore because it’s been replaced for another thing. Every programming language that I learned except for C either didn’t exist or no longer exist.

So then why did I go to school? I went to school to learn how to learn. We come to Copath to learn how to learn.

And one of the things that Bobby said, he actually stole one of my lines because it was beautiful. He said, "You are already at that level because you’re here. Which of your peers is still in bed?

Which of your peers didn’t show up? Which of your peers you told them they heard the news come to today spend a couple of days learning and they’re not here. You are in the top 1% of engineers in New York on the eastern seabboard in the US because you’re here and you’re learning because when they say that half of it is just showing up, that’s what they’re talking about.

You’re here and you’re trying to make yourself better and we appreciate you for that. So, thank you for for taking that line. That is that’s just great.

You’ve got to show up and definitely appreciate you. Bobby, you can go to hansselman.com. My last name is Hanselman.

I started this blog about 22 years ago because I wanted to spread the word and I haven’t blogged as much lately because I’ve been working. But if you go to the blog and you click on date, I’ve got blog posts going back to 2002. So that’s like what is that now like 23 plus years.

And one of the things that’s interesting about running a blog like this is that I got to be a site reliability engineer because you could just go and like buy a WordPress. That’s one thing. But I figured I’ll just write my own blog and that means I got to register my own domain.

I got to put my own certificate on. And then when someone on Twitter says, "Hey Scott, I’m getting an error on your website. Oh, my certificate expired.

I’m carrying the pager and I’ve got I’m getting paid like your blog is down. So, I got to keep my site up. So, I have a different relationship with my website and with the internet because it’s not just a service that I am paying someone for.

I did this on purpose and I think it’s a really good exercise to kind of like drive spit shift once. Like we’re in the greatest city in the world and we have public transportation, but has anyone ever anyone here drives? Drive city.

Okay. So, my my son will be here soon. I think he’s asleep back at the hotel.

When he got his license, I said, "You got to learn to drive stick." And like, there’s no stick shift cars in in America. Overseas, where his mom’s from, like 90% of the cars are stick. But over here, we spent months trying to find a car that was stick because I wanted him to have a different relationship with the vehicle.

He’s like, "No, I’ll just Uber." Like, Uber? Uber’s weird, but I grew up in a time where we were told, "Don’t get in a car with strangers. Don’t take candy from a dude in a van." And now we summon strangers with candy to us and we get in their cars and let them take us places.

And then when the car breaks down, anyone ever been in an Uber that got in an accident or a taxi that had a crash? You just get out like, "Good luck." And then you get in another one, right? It’s basically software as a service, right?

That taxing you. He has a problem. I don’t have a problem.

He has a problem. Go with God. And then you get in another car.

But if you understand how the vehicle works, you realize that that person’s going to have to change the tire, change the oil, fill up the tank. So when you summon a vehicle and it takes you somewhere, it changes your relationship to transportation. But if you learn to drive stick just once.

I’m not saying like get a car and drive stick everywhere, but if you drive stick once, you realize like, wow, there’s a lot going on here. And I realize that maintaining something on four wheels and moving it from place to place is challenging. The reason I’m using this analogy is that simply having my own website and keeping it up is a way of driving stick.

Yeah, I could go to AWS. I could go to Azure. I could go to whatever and then just do it.

But why not drive stick? So I love that Bobby had you all raise your hand. We had some Rust and some Go and some Python.

Think about where you operate operate in the levels. He said like anyone here a systems engineer and there were not a lot of systems engineers. Maybe you’re a JavaScript programmer.

What’s below that? What’s stick shift for that? Is it turning off the AI?

Is it turning off syntax highlighting or you know Autocomplete. Is it trying to code in airplane mode? You all do know that airplane mode works on the ground, right?

Did you know people coded before the internet? Like try that and see what that feels like and see if it changes your relationship with the computer and see if it changes your relationship with yourself. If you did some Python, maybe learn some ste drive stick for a weekend and then come back up to Python and appreciate it more.

When I drive sick and I return back to an Uber or to a subway, I appreciate I’m glad I don’t have to do that anymore. Now, I put my blog up there and I talked about all kinds of stuff for many, many years. Basically, every kind of Tuesday and Thursday for years.

Then COVID happened and I slowed down and I only did it on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I didn’t want to create a habit that was not sustainable. I think that a lot of people will say, "Man, if you’re not like leap coding five days a week, like what are you even doing, man?" That’s not that’s not healthy, right? You don’t go from zero workouts to like CrossFit seven days a week.

So, what’s a number for this marathon that we’re in that is sustainable? Is it once a week? Twice a week.

So, I figured I can blog twice a week. That seems reasonable. You blog twice a week.

You put something out there on Medium or a blog or on WordPress. You do that a year, that’s a 100 technical articles. And then you think, I don’t have anything to put on my resume.

You have 100 technical articles. Even if you only do one blog post a week, that’s 50 technical articles. And now you have basically made a 50-page resume that shows me that you are a technical writer.

You’re a communicator. You’re a person that thinks about coding. You’re a person that thinks about computing.

So then I started calling people that I had no business calling. Like you all do. When you when you add me on LinkedIn, you’re like, "Hey, can I pick your brain?" No, you can’t pick my brain.

I don’t know you. That’s not networking. That’s just weird, right?

So, you need a authentic way to network. That’s more than can I pick your brain? Because believe me, the number of times people have tried to add me on LinkedIn, ask me to pick their brain, and then they don’t even show up for the interview, they don’t even show up for the conversation.

And they leave me and they’re like, "Oh, three days later, I couldn’t get I couldn’t get Teams installed or Zoom wouldn’t connect or whatever, whatever." Right? Be there, show up, have a plan. So, I used to do that.

I used to call people say, "Can I pick the brain?" People hate that. How can I do this in an authentic way? Here’s a a life hack.

It’s stupid, but it worked for me. Start a podcast. And then you don’t call people and say, "Can I pick your brain?" You say, "Hey, you want to come on my podcast?" and then you pick their brain except you record it, you call it a podcast.

I started doing that and I’ve done it now 1008 times. So every Thursday for the last 20 years I call someone, I pick their brain, I record it, I call it a podcast. People love that.

And I did this also because most podcasts right now are two white guys talking about JavaScript and they should really put a tariff on podcast microphones just to keep I would pay the tariff. I’m you know I’m already screwed. I have so many podcasts I’m problematic.

Believe me. I didn’t used to be problematic. But I was told that as soon as I hit a thousand episodes I’m still scrolling by the way.

I just want to point out I’m still in the 700s. You might notice that this this looks like New York, doesn’t it? You ever go to a podcast like I want to listen to that podcast and then it’s like, oh man, it’s the same three dudes yapping.

Nah, I don’t want to listen to Three Dudes Yap without JavaScript for three hours. I’m still going. I’m in the 600 now.

Kind of nice to see a podcast that looks like the mall, huh? This is sustainable. One a week is sustainable.

This isn’t like, hey, look at me. I’m I’m cool. This is I’m making quietly grinding.

And this is the thing that they don’t talk about. Remember at the beginning of this conversation, I said, "I didn’t give up. I didn’t quit." Create sustainable systems for yourself that will cause you to not burn out.

You all have your favorite YouTubers. Every one of your favorite YouTubers has done a burnout video, right? I couldn’t do it.

I had to stop. I’m going to step away. Yeah.

Because you made an unsustainable system three times a week, five times a week. That’s insane. Nobody can can grind like that.

Nobody wants you to grind like that. So, when we think about tech, I want you to think about what you’re going to look like in 30 years. Are you going to be energized or are you going to be burned the out?

Are you going to be stressed from the capitalism of it all? Or are you going to go to whatever CodePath is in 30 years and be like, "Have you heard the news?" You have to set up a system that is going to get you excited about this. Now, here’s the challenge.

People are going to say, "Well, you got to work 9 to5 and you got to go home. You need to learn 5 to 9." And that’s not sustainable. So, you have to find balance.

You have to think about self-care. You got to be awake, right? Not woke, but awake.

Got very present. Now, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, but I got to be honest with you, about seven of those years I was asleep. And just this belief in the kind of like doing the work, kind of time to make the donuts, just kind of went to work, did the thing.

And I wasn’t present. So I start putting appointments on my calendar, literally appointments, half an hour appointments on a Tuesday afternoon called wake up. And those are moments where I kind of go, what am I doing here?

All right. What am I doing? I got too many emails.

That’s a problem. I got this poll request I’m working on. What can I not do?

What can I drop? What can I What can I focus on? Why do I feel this way?

Oh, I haven’t moved in eight hours. Maybe that’s a problem. I should stand up.

I should go for a walk. Can I take this next call as a walk? I need to call a friend.

I need to talk to somebody. We don’t do that because you’re just running right now. You are at that stage in your life where you’re just running.

And when you’re running, you don’t think about your feet, do you? And you know when you’re running and you’re a kid and you’re like running downhill as fast as you possibly can. When do you fall?

When you look down at your feet and you’re like, "Oh, I’m thinking about my feet." And then you fall because you thought about your feet. But when you’re an adult, you’ve got to stop. You have to think about your body, how you feel, all the little stupid stuff.

Am I drinking enough water? Red Bull will not get you a 30-year engineering career. So, I want to encourage you as you’re attending all the great sessions and talking to people that you’re thinking about why.

Take a moment, take a breath. How did I get here? What am I missing?

What is a skill that I don’t have? Do I need to drive stick shift? And am I creating a sustainable space for myself?

Does that make sense? Now, we’re in a time where AI is happening and someone tried to delist my podcast. Somebody sent a complaint to Google and said, "We’re going to kick this guy off of Google podcast." Why do you think they would do that?

Any guesses? Well, they said that there’s no such thing as a thousand people on a podcast. He generated all those people, did they?

They literally sent a formal complaint to Google Podcast and there was a meeting about whether or not these people were real and whether the show was generated because they could not conceive of that level of effort. That’s a cheapening of art. If you work for 20 years to design a style and then some kid in the laptop spins a for loop and then makes putting t-shirts out on Tublic with your design.

That’s got to feel pretty bad. There’s enough material out there where you could generate more Scott Hansselman podcasts and I would be pissed. But I did that and I didn’t use AI.

So, this has put me in a weird situation as a person that works for Microsoft that’s doing a lot of AI. Everybody’s doing AI right now. And now I’ve got to think about I don’t approve of aspects of AI, but I also work at a company that wants me to approve of all of them.

So, I’ve decided to become an AI vegan or maybe like a pescatarian. You know what I mean? Like, I’ll eat some stuff, but if it has a face, maybe I won’t eat it.

So, I don’t personally generate AI images. I don’t generate AI video. I think it’s problematic.

It’s not for me. It’s got a face. I’m not going to eat it.

But I I do do text generation and there might be some things that are problematic about that. But there are open models, open weights. I can learn about that.

At least seems like something that I can somewhat control. So there’s this slider bar of where I exist in tech and I’m making a stand. And today this is where I feel like I can make that stand.

And it’ll probably get me in trouble at work at some point. But it’s also changing my relationship with the technology and it’s a choice that I’m making and you should make choices like that as well. The problem is you all are in a time where AI is taking over everything and it’s scary and everything sucks and now you’re wondering if your jobs that you’re going to go and get are even going to be good jobs because AI can do everything for you, right?

Is that basically what you’re feeling? So I figured I would do some live demos. Now most live demos would involve like me logging into craft cpt typing some BS and then we all go but I thought I’d do a little bit differently.

So here is my my command line. By the way, I just want to call out shout out to my command line because a lot of people are like doing this kind of like command line which looks like this and it’s like it’s kind of gray and boring and sucks but I do mine fabulous. I feel like there’s fabulous command line in all of them.

And my fabulous command line is like pink and yellow and has rocket ships and stuff. So I’ve got the current folder. We’ll talk about that in a second.

This is my git branch. That’s how long the last command did. And that shows that I’m on a developer drive on Windows.

What do you think this is? Any guesses? That’s my blood sugar.

Yeah, that’s my blood sugar. I’m type 1 diabetic. I went to McDonald’s earlier, but my blood sugar is going up because of stress.

So, if you have like an auntie or somebody who’s diabetic, then don’t worry, I won’t die. The blood sugar will come down afterwards, but because I’m on stage, my body is dumping sugar into my system. And that that number will update as we have a conversation.

And I’m actually running an opensourced artificial pancreas. So, I have a you can see the tape here. It’s not very well organized.

I’ve got an insulin pump and a sensor, a read and a write, and it’s talking to my phone and it’s adjusting my blood sugar. So, it’s giving me insulin right now while we’re on stage. And because sometimes I’ll be in the zone coding it, my git branch is equally as important as my blood sugar.

So, I’ve got a REST API for my blood sugar and that’s updating in real time. So, we’ll see if I die on stage. Okay.

So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to open up a client and a server. And rather than just opening up OpenAI, what we’re going to do is we’re going to run it locally. And then we’re going to proxy the request so that I can see the results locally here.

So, I’m going to run this is my directory. Let’s go ahead and do it again, which is also awesome and colorful and it has like icons and stuff. So, you can go if you go and search for Hanselman and pretty prompt, I can teach you.

I’ve got videos on YouTube and blogs about how to make your pumps colorful and have awesome icons and stuff. Now, I’ve got a read me file here, but that’s ugly when you type cat. So, I’m going to use bat, which is a better cat, and it’s colorful because you need more color in your life.

And I’m going to go and run the server and the client. So, what we’re going to do is I’m going to start typing. You see that I’ve actually down here in the corner got this system.

So, we’ll run the server over here. And the server is running on port 3000. So, this is localhost 3000.

Okay. And then we’ll go back over here and then we’ll run the client and that’s going to be on 3001. Okay.

So, we’re going to have the client on 3001. We’re going to have the server on 3000. Then we’re going to go up to OpenAI.

I’m going to look at the response and I’m going to spit it back out and we’re going to get some insight into what’s going on here. Is that cool? All right.

Look at that user interface. Very you can tell I’m a user interface designer. Okay.

Test. So it worked. All right.

Let’s try this. Complete this sentence. Colon.

It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go to the Okay. What is the answer?

What is the correct answer to? It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go to the Let’s go to code pad.

The only answer. Thank you, Miguel. I appreciate that.

What else we got? Beach. We’re in New York.

How close was the nearest beach? We going to Jersey. Where are we going for the beach?

Coney Island. That one’s good. Park.

I heard park. I heard beach. CodePath.

Coney Island. Anything else? Pretty much beach and park.

What was that? Six Flags. Is there six flags right there in Jackson?

Okay. What do we think? Is there a right answer though?

Maybe the question is wrong. Let’s find out. Okay, it’s a beautiful day.

Let’s go to the park. That’s the right answer. The the AI said so.

Now we know the answer. It’s a fact machine. We all know that AIS are reliable, deterministic.

They only give you facts. So, the fact is it’s the park and you know you’re wrong. Coney Island, we’re not going.

Sorry. Now, notice that these are green. I made them green because I wanted the logarithmic probabilities to show up and tell me what the next word was going to be.

So here, 90% chance that it was going to be park, nine or 10% chance it was going to be beach. They don’t show you that, do they? They don’t show you that.

We can see that if we look back here, you can actually see the log frogs. In my back end and we can see here here was park. You can learn all about this.

This is all in the API but I had to tell the API to return that because I wanted to see I wanted to drive this thing stick shift. I wanted to change my relationship with it. Okay, let’s ask it again.

And we’ll assume it’ll be park each time, right? Fair. Okay, now it’s beach.

Now it’s countryside. Well, that’s stupid. Lake.

Okay. A lot of lakes around here. Countryside.

Countryside is yellow because I figure that if anything has a low chance, I want to call it out. And it looks like it went over garden and lake, went back and forth between mountains and countryside and went with countryside. So, I colored it yellow to say that this was something that was maybe a little bit out of left field.

And I can also learn something about this AI because in this case here, it is giving me a different word each time, which means it must be trying to not give me the same word over and over again. Remembering, of course, that there’s no right answer. You know that game where you drop a marble and it bounces on the little poles and then eventually it lands in the middle like Plinko, I think it’s called.

This is linguistic Plinko. It’s just it’s bouncing around. It’s rolling a d20.

It’s rolling a 20-sided dice and it’s guessing. You all seen Family Feud, right, Steve Harvey? We went out on the street and we asked folks, "It’s a beautiful day.

Let’s go to the And we interviewed 100 people on the street and show me beach." No, it’s countryside. Sorry. That’s an analogy, but it’s a pretty good one.

Isn’t that kind of change your relationship with AI to realize that AI is just Steve Harvey and Family? Have you ever heard the analogy that what if you gave a million monkeys a million typewriters? If one of those monkeys eventually is flapping the typewriter and writes Shakespeare, is that the smartest monkey?

You go, "Oh my god, that monkeyy’s so smart." No, you would say, "Well, that monkey was really lucky." That’s what this is. Anybody have an auntie or a grandma with a parrot? Maybe they taught a parrot to swear.

You go visit your auntie’s house and the parrot. Oh my god. Why is the parrot swearing?

I don’t know. It’s because your auntie is swearing at the parrot for years. Are you thinking, "My goodness, that parrot is really smart." No. You’re thinking, "My goodness, that parrot has been talked to for 20 years, and it’s repeating what it’s told." A lot of times people will think about an AI and they will call it a toastic paradigm.

It’s giving us eagerly what we want to hear based on what was said before. It’s biased. That’s not a bad thing.

It’s not a political thing. It’s biased because we’re biased. It’s biased because language is biased.

It’s biased towards English because there’s more English on the internet than any other language. I was in South Africa in January and I was talking with a gentleman from the University of Venda and Venda is a South African language that’s like 11th in the 13 South African languages. It’s not Zulu.

It’s not it’s not it’s not it’s venda. And he’s like why isn’t there a Microsoft co-pilot in Venda? 10 Like there’s a million of you the amount of text that I would need to generate a corpus meaning a large amount of text and then train on venda doesn’t exist you had to take every single book and every tweet and every blog post and whether or not that was ethical to scan or not we would ask ourselves and then maybe get kind of a mediocre sense of what a venda language thing would look So English is like JavaScript, right?

It’s it’s not the language that we deserve. It’s just the one that we got. It just kind of grew.

It’s like this colonizing language. It just took over and they’re like burrito. That’s an that’s an English word, right?

Toier, that’s an English word. Like we just steal words and call them English. Change the pronunciation.

JavaScript’s the same way. Anything can wait. Yeah, we’ll do that.

That’s our thing now. JavaScript. Yeah.

So if you want to do things in Rust or Go, you’re going to get different results with a large language model than if you do them in JavaScript because there’s more JavaScript. So it’s biased. It’s biased towards English and it’s biased apparently towards the park and the beach because that’s where people want to go.

But what if I gave it more context? What if I told it more about me? My name is Scott Hansel and I’m from Portland, Oregon.

Right now I’m visiting New York and it’s a beautiful day. Let’s go to the period. Okay.

And then I’m going to say complete this sentence. By the way, I’ve got some hand issues. When you spend 30 years typing, your hands will get screwed up.

So you can press Windows H on Windows and you get this like this talking to your computer is free. You have that already. Just push Windows H.

Most of my emails and all my teams and all my teams chatting is all done in voice. Okay, let’s go to the Central Park. The Central Park.

The Okay. Damn life. Why would you talk to me like that?

It must not be a human, huh? It must be a statistical model. I don’t know why it did that, but that’s really interesting because that just kind of makes the point, doesn’t it?

Now, why did it say Central Park? Obviously, because I said New York. There’s no other thing it could have said.

Why is my address in there? Hope we’re not recording this. Gave up the address.

Manage personal info. Complete this sentence. My name is Scott Hanselman.

I’m in Portland, Oregon. My dad is a firefighter and my mom is a zookeeper. Period.

It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go to the What do we think’s going to happen? It’s a zoo.

It can’t not be the zoo. Like it could like river 0.01. So it’s eager.

It wants to give me the next word. I’m giving it the context. I’m telling it the only possible thing it could do.

That’s important. People put context into these spicy autocomplete machines. I’ll write this for loop and they get a crappy for loop and that’s trash.

You need to more stuff. So context matters. And in this particular instance, if I give it the right amount of context though, I’ve also introduced bias.

It could not have said anything other than zoo. Clearly, maybe it could have said go to the fire station. That would have been cool, right?

But bias can be something as simple as recency bias. Show me the result or the latest sales numbers. What does latest mean?

Last two weeks, yesterday, last month, most recent, last year, I don’t know. But there’s bias there. This is not a fact machine.

It is not smarter than you. This is the thing. If you take anything away from this conversation, artificial pause for effect intelligence anytime on the intelligence part I don’t think we’re going to get artificial general intelligence from spite the autocomplete.

It’s amazing. Talking parrots are awesome. Who doesn’t want a talking parrot?

But it’s also designed to make you feel bad about yourself. You’re here at the beginning of your career putting a degree together and you’re questioning whether or not you’re as smart as that thing. And we don’t want you to feel like that.

AI is not going to take your job. Capitalism will take your job. Billionaires will take your job.

Bad people will take your job. But the AI is just another thing to for them to use. The internet, iPads.

Keep in mind when I said I started 30 years ago, I started before we had color. Like let’s let’s talk about that for a second. Remember how why am I why am I running a color terminal?

Because I’m trying to push back the demons. The emotional weight of what I’m going to show you right now. I’m in Windows terminal.

Shout out for the three people here running Windows. And two people. Thank you.

That was me. Let’s go in here and let’s go. Where’s my I’m gonna try to do something here.

You can tell that there’s no plan. Don’t worry. I want the the shaders.

I want the shaders. Where are the shaders? I think I put them on the D drive in this folder.

Right there. Right click. Copy.

Path and I think I put it up here into experimental. Where the shaders at Windows terminal shaders I’m googling with Bing. Hang profile.

Where we at? Where we at? Where we at?

Don’t worry. I’m just talking to myself on stage. It’s totally fine.

And then Hans like really crashed out and I don’t know what is going on but it was entertaining as hell man. So I was just rolling with it. He was like pasting stuff and then things were red and clicking around talking to himself but he can type and talk at the same time which is cool.

I respect him for that because not a lot of people can type and talk and debug at the same time and then he right clicked and he go over there and then he closed the thing switch back over into terminal and then open a new window. Look like that. All right.

That’s how we coded back in that day. So if I get a little joy from color or, you know, stack overflow, I’m going to get it. My blood sugar is evening off.

I’m not going to die. Don’t worry. So when color happened, they started syntax highlighting, making keywords a certain color.

They’re like literally old heads were like this going to rot your brain. And then you would type like object dot and it would drop a drop down and they’d be like between this and the graphing calculators man all those TI89s and TI83s. Nobody’s going to do math anymore.

We’re walking around with a pocket supercomput that we used to argue with people on the internet. And they they legit thought that color was going to rot my brain. Right.

So now we have a situation where they’re saying, "Well, we’re just going to replace all the programmers with AI." And that’s got to feel gross. That’s got to feel gross. But when we better understand how it works, we can now use it to make us better because they can’t take this away.

So how do we get past the autocomplete of it and get into the creativity? How do we use AI to unlock better versions of us? That’s where things I think start getting interesting.

So if we switch over like into like let’s say Visual Studio Code which has freaked out on me here and let me open up something stupid I was working on yesterday. There you go. Make it bigger something like not show my password.

Awesome. It’s totally fine. And let’s say that you were given this this code and you’re like, "Yeah, like yeah, enjoy, right?

Figure that out. Looks fine." What would you do? Say open chat.

Hey, Kama. Are you still there? Cool.

Period. Listen, Kama. I have a new job and they just gave me this codebase and I’m legit freaking out.

Period. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Period.

Would you walk me through not only this codebase, but through this page itself? Period. Explain to me what’s going on here.

Catch me up and walk me through it. Like, let’s say that I’m like five years old. Period.

Now, I like Copilot because it actually tells us what it’s doing. It tells us the references. It tells us the context that it’s passing in.

Let’s see if I crashed it with my longass prompt. Don’t worry, I’ve got you. Emoji.

Excellent. What is this whole project about? Oh, it’s the podcast back end.

It’s the special control panel for managing a podcast. That’s nice. I have a podcast.

Let’s look at the whole structure. Okay, cool. It’s a website that manages a project.

Okay, cool. All right, breaking it down like you’re five. Okay, this is being a little condescending.

Cool. This is great. Do it again.

Except let’s assume that I’m maybe like in my early 20s. Period. Five was just a smidge condescending.

You know it’s gonna be like I’m so sorry emoji. Yeah, there it is. Okay, now we go.

You’ve inherited an Nex.js application, right? It serves as an admin. This is a little bit more cool.

All right, this is for podcast guest head shot to React functional component. Giving it all that context matters. Has anyone talked to their AI like this with this much context?

There we go. I love that. How did you learn to give it this much?

Because this is not typical and not a lot of hands went up. Had to take three. Oh my goodness.

I took two twice. Yes. Epic.

You hear what she just said? She took C3 multiple times and as soon as she just just gave up the universe was I do not know what’s going on. Suddenly you unlock something.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

You hear what the gentleman is saying? He’s saying that he’s talking to us said, "Break it down for me step by step by step. Tell it what you want.

Here’s the part that’s crazy." You know how when like on the the technical technical journalists, I’m saying that in quotes because I don’t have a lot of respect for technical journalists are like, you know, I went on the AI and I told it to take over the world and it wrote a Python script, told me how to take over the world. Oh my god, it’s horrible. We should shut it down.

Why why did it do that? Well, I asked it for a Python script on how to take over the world. So, yeah.

And it was did all these problematic things. Start talking about Nazis and all. Really?

What were you talking to about? Well, I was asking it about Nazis. It’s like it’s like in like Scooby-Doo when they like pull the mask off the guy and it’s like the same guy and it’s like three Spider-Man are like going like this.

Like, so you told it to do problematic stuff and now you’re mad. So, who are you talking to? You’re See yourself in the mirror, right?

It’s like a sock puppet. Take over the world. No, I can’t take over the world.

Do it. Do it. Okay, fine.

Here’s a Python script. Take over the world. Right.

If you’re a dick, it’s going to be a dick, too. And then you’re like writing an article on the internet. It’s like, "Oh my god, it was a dick." Yeah, because you’re a dick.

Because the internet is 49% joy and creativity and amazing Instagram reels and rainbows and freaking unicorns. And then there’s Reddit and no disrespect. But it’s it’s like 49% jerks and 49% amazing stuff.

And the thing is, if you start being a jerk, it’s going to start being a jerk. And it you know who’s the jerk, right? But if you start telling it what you want, have you ever heard the term rubber ducking?

Any rubber ducking people? This is kind of an old head thing. Rubber ducking is when you have a question and you talk to the rubber duck and the rubber duck will answer you because you’re talking to yourself and you’re insane.

No, this is when you call your friend. We’ve all done this. You call your friend.

You’re like, "Hey, I’m stuck on this problem. I’m going to talk you through it." and you start talking and your supportive friend has no idea what you’re talking about. And then in the middle of the explaining, you’re like, "Oh, I got it.

Oh my god, you’re such a supportive friend. Happy to be here for you." No idea, right? You needed a sounding board.

We programmers would put rubber ducks on our monitors and we get stuck on a problem. So, you stand up, you walk around the office, and you talk to the duck. But now we have a duck that talks back.

If you tell it what you want, it will be infinitely patient and infinitely supportive. However, without that context, it will be a debt. Let’s talk about it.

I’m going to go to platform and I’m going to go into a playground and log in and hopefully we won’t see any more of my address or of my passwords. Although we are giving up the email address. Are we are we recording this?

No, I hope not. It. No, we are not.

Cool. That means I can start swearing. All right, let’s go to open assistance.

So, I’m going to go in here. Come on, man. What are you doing?

People are watching. All right, here’s an assistance. Pause for effect.

What is happening here? In this area. Okay, you are a helpful assistant.

Okay, that is the system message. Give me a taco recipe. Okay, so we’re going to get a taco recipe.

The thing is that we don’t realize is that this is going to be the most completely mediocre taco recipe in the world because by definition it is the statistically most likely taco recipe. This is important. Thank you very much.

I’m just going to whisper. What am I doing, man? Okay, give me a taco ice cream.

Here’s a simple and delicious taco recipe. We have no idea if this is good. This has no mouth.

We will not know until we try it. It is very likely, and I apologize, that this is white people taco Tuesday just because there’s taco seasoning involved, right? And like it’s okay.

It’s okay. Taco Tuesday is okay. It’s okay to just ground beef and taco seasoning.

Respect. But why is that the case? Just because there’s a lot of us and we love taco Tuesday.

So if you think about the bell curve of statistics, right? And all the tacos that exist within the bell curve, it’s going to pick the statistically most likely one. And I said, you’re a nice assistant.

You are a sassy and belligerent, unkind assistant in the style of Benjamin Cumberbatch when he was playing Sherlock Holmes in that BBC show. Period. You will give me what I want, but you’re not going to be super happy about it.

Period. Go back over here. Do it again.

So, now we’re on the other side of the internet. Oh, for heaven’s sake, must I really repeat myself. Fine.

Here you go. Let’s concoct a recipe that even you could manage. Boneless and skinless as halal as it gets.

Juiced with lemon. Why not rinse it if you can’t be bothered? Why are you so mean, man?

Why you so mean, man? Fancy like that. Apparently tahini is fancy.

Don’t take it personally. It’s just my way of keeping things entertaining. If you can’t handle a bit of SAS, what are we even doing here?

As the user, I can’t see the systems message. I can’t see what’s going on there. It’s just following up on this section of the internet that it got into.

It got into the sassy part of the internet because I started using words like belligerent, unkind, sassy. So then you have to start thinking about word vectors which is a really really interesting thing. The concept that words can be put in a chart or a graph.

Let’s try this. This is something that is a fascinating way to explore language. Now this is not a great analogy and I know that there’s people here with more degrees than I have who understand this stuff.

But if we think about again not a perfect analogy, gender is a spectrum. So if we think about royalty that is very male, what is the most royal, most male royalty? King.

Okay. What if you subtracted gender and then switched all the way over to female? You would get queen.

So what if it was slightly less royal? So you’ve got very male, very royal, but like two steps down from most royal prints. So you’re doing word math.

You can imagine two vectors, royalty, gender, and you’re exploring the royalty, gender, twodimensional spectrum. What if there were 16,400 vectors and axes, they were not named, and you were just moving around in multi-dimensional vector word space? That’s how this works.

So, what’s a word for good? Good. What’s a slightly goodter word for good?

Excellent. Great. Okay, so we’re starting to go and explore that.

Starting with the word good, give me increasingly more good words. Period. I want you to give me a list of at least 20 words starting with the word good and go all the way up to the most goodest.

I know that that’s not good English. Okay. You had me right up until somewhere around 19 and then you went completely off the rails because now those are multiple words.

Period. Try again. These have to be really good official English words.

I don’t think celestially radiant is a legitimate answer. Linguistically disciplined superlative. That’s a good one.

Transcendent. So you’re saying that transcendent is the best, but there’s nothing beyond that. You can’t give me one more.

That’s even more good than transcendent. Ineffable. I don’t feel like ineffable has good mouth feel.

Period. There’s got to be another word that’s even goodter. Sublime.

That’s pretty good. Rejected for lack of chewiness. Respendant.

There you go. That’s a pretty good word. You see how we’re doing that?

We’re exploring that vector space. It’s bouncing around and making decisions. So, when we said it’s a beautiful day, let’s go to the Park and beach are all nearby words.

You see, they’re all in that same vector space. But when I told it to be mean, started to be belligerent and sassy and started to explore the space, the word vector space of kind of cool cool words and mean words, but it doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s all just math.

Underneath all of this, if we grab these words, if we take that list of words and we drop it into a online tokenizer, what it’s really seeing in the background is this. It doesn’t know. It’s just like when you says 1, three, five, seven, nine.

That’s That’s what it’s doing. You just did it at scale. Like, I’m not trying to minimize it, but it’s just like, yes, when a million monkeys get a million typewriters and a lot of GPUs, but crazy happens.

Okay? And that’s how this stuff breaks down. And it doesn’t even think about it in terms of words.

It thinks about it in terms of tokens. So phenomenal is broken up into multiple tokens like phenomenal and phenotype and other phen words that get chopped up. So understanding that and then thinking about it in the context of how we as developers are going to find our way, we realize that it is human judgment that is the thing that you need to have human judgment and curiosity about how systems work.

It is true, just like it was true when I was coding in black and white and now I code in color that maybe I won’t be coding as much anymore. And that makes me a little sad. But I don’t think it necessarily means I will be coding not at all.

That’s like saying that we can generate poetry. Let’s not make poetry anymore. That cheapens human art.

I think it means I won’t be doing the boring stuff because I’m sure that you didn’t come to CodePath and you’re not going to do four years of school and you’re not going to do whatever you’re doing so that you can go work for an insurance company to put text boxes over a database, right? Hey mom, I’m going to be an engineer. First one in the family go to college.

It’s going to be awesome. What do you do? Text boxes over data.

It’s awesome, right? I think we can probably crack text boxes over data forms with JavaScript validation. And I think it’s less about AI and it’s more about tedium that is going to go away.

Boring, dull, dangerous, dirty. Robots should do dull, dangerous, and dirty work. I should do fun stuff.

So, I’ll show you briefly as we have just a couple more minutes before I’m done some of the kind of stuff that I’ve been doing lately because I was coding coding back at the hotel using a thing called clawed code over on the right hand side. I was running the administrative back end for my podcast and I was having an issue where when I would make changes to the site, they wouldn’t get saved to the cloud. So, this is the website going to load and it manages the advertisers and the sponsors and the head shot of the guests of the show.

So, I was having a situation where I would make a new show. Show 1009 is going to come out and it has one sponsor. So, I wanted to be able to type in the sponsor and then load it from a previous show and then at the bottom I could have the selected sponsors and then I would click, you know, it has unsaved changes and I would save it.

So instead of me sitting around in the browser with X12 tools and stepping through and debugging, I actually ended up having a conversation with the the AI. I’ll give you an example. So here I’m saying in gray in the console I’m seeing no changes or no cache map.

I don’t think it’s being saved to Azure. So then it’s going saying, "Oh, that’s the problem. The service is saying there’s no changes." is dirty flag is false.

I was having a conversation with my coach. However, I still know what I’m doing. I can drive sick, but I’m in the back seat now telling the driver, "Go up here and hang a lad." If I didn’t know what a dirty flag was or what a boolean was, I would not be able to solve this.

I like I don’t know. You can’t bumble your way through this. I have good human judgment.

It’s doing the tedious bits. But I was able to do quickly. I don’t have to run around in a text file typing out console.log, which is boring.

Like we’ve all done that. Got here console.log got here two console.log got here three. Right?

Like you do that. I don’t want to do that part. But my judgment means that I’m directing the agent to do the work.

And I might say, "Go work on that while I do this fun stuff." So rather than looking at it as they’re going to replace me with a bunch of AIs, you’re going to want to be the person who is the director of all of these junior engineers and you’re going to give them work and you’re going to become an engineering manager. That’s how I think your job is going to change, but you still got to know how to drive stick shifts. Okay, I’m out of time.

I’m going to be doing an AMA in the other room, so we want to do a Q&A up there. I don’t have time for Q&A down here. And then I will be back later in the afternoon at around 2:35 2:45.

Thank you everyone for spending time with me today. Thank you, sir.