986: Does Code Quality Matter Anymore?

In this potluck episode, Wes and Scott answer your questions about popover navigation patterns, the Vibrate API on iOS, whether code quality still matters in the AI era, Wes’s evolving Obsidian second-brain setup, where to start with modern full-stack JavaScript, and more! Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:02 Using display none with popover and hamburger navigation 03:37 Vercel on iOS and experimenting with the Vibrate API 05:47 Does code quality still matter in the AI age? 11:08 Wes’ second brain update and Obsidian workflow QMD 19:57 Brought to you by Sentry.io 20:21 Supporting older browsers and missing out on modern web features 23:32 iPad browsing quirks and dealing with outdated Safari 28:26 What to do when you encounter a badly built or inaccessible website 33:37 Is the Effect TypeScript library worth the learning curve? 37:04 Where to start with modern full-stack JavaScript 43:39 Are column grid frameworks still relevant with modern CSS? Graffiti 49:54 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: AVerMedia Video Capture Card Wes: Power Bar Extension Cord Shameless Plugs Phases Podcast Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we got a potluck episode. You bring the questions, we bring the answers. We've got a couple really interesting questions today. First of all, I'm going to give you an update on my second brain update, which is my like note taking slash, I need to remember this. I need an easy way to log all of these pieces. I made some progress. I'm pretty happy. I'm gonna share that with you. Popover and dialogue for navigations. Is that the move? Does code organization even matter anymore with AI? Can we just put a whole bunch of slop into our repo and it doesn't even matter? Do you need a layout system with Flexbox in grid? You know, like before, we used to have all these layout systems and they don't seem to be that popular anymore. Do you even need something like that?

• 0:42Wes Bos?

  And a whole bunch more questions. Effect. TS, some stuff about supporting older browsers and new CSS features, all of kinds of good stuff. If you've got a question, go to syntax.fm. There is a button in the nav that says, "Ask a Polla Question." Click on it, put your question in there. We'll answer it on an upcoming episode. My name is Wes Bows. With me is always is Scott Talinsky. Let's get into it.

• 1:02Scott Tolinski?

  All right. First question here from Alex. "With dialogue and popover available to us, I understand that we don't need to use JavaScript to toggle a navigation anymore, but are we now back to using a display none or similar on the button if the navigation is hidden behind a hamburger menu on smaller screens but spelled out on larger screens? Are we back to using a display none or similar on the button?"

• 1:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah, he's talking about like, you have like a nav that slides out from the side, and then you have a hamburger button, and you press that and the thing slides. On like a desktop, you're not showing the hamburger menu, right? You're simply just like hiding it.

• 1:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, but what are we saying? Are we now back to, isn't that how we've always been doing it, even?

• 1:48Wes Bos?

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:49Scott Tolinski?

  Without this technique? Yeah. So to me, this is a nothing issue, a nothing burger, because to me, yeah, this is just how I've always done it. And I do love the idea of using dialogue or popover or any of these things to toggle a navigation. I actually did a demo for that at JS Nation a while. A JavaScript-less hamburger menu slide over that whole thing with the animation. You can use the starting style, you can use allow discrete, you can animate these things. And granted, the browser support isn't 100% yet, and it's not something that's going to work on older browsers.

• 2:28Scott Tolinski?

  If you're asking me, we have these techniques and they do work with popover and everything like that. But at the end of the day, I'm still most likely doing this with either CSS to JavaScript and CSS to apply a class just for backwards compatibility reasons. That's pretty much how I'm doing it today. I think the future is with popover and dialog to do these things with starting style, allow discrete, the CSS properties that allow us to animate something when it goes from display none to display whatever. And to me, that is the future, but I'm still using JavaScript in a class to apply that class today.

• 3:10Wes Bos?

  Plus, I think most complex websites at this moment are having double navs, simply just because it's so hard to make a decent mobile nav that's not super overwhelming. And people are simply just saying, all right, well, on mobile, our nav is gonna, yeah, it can look a little different, but like sometimes there's simply just less stuff in the navigation that needs to be shown. So people are just rendering out two different navs, hiding and showing them depending. But kind of related, I wanted to ask you about this. I just saw this yesterday, when you're using Vercel on iOS, tapping some of the like tabs, it now uses the vibrate API, which I had no idea.

• 3:50Wes Bos?

  iOS now has haptics, meaning that you can make the, like, you can use the little thing inside of it. Did you see that?

• 4:00Scott Tolinski?

  I didn't see that because I don't use Vercel on mobile. But I do know about this haptics API and there is, I'm trying to remember what it is. There is some app that I use on the regular and when it wants my intention, when it wants my attention, it does do that buzz and. I like it because I don't have sounds turned on. And if it needs to get my attention, I think it, I don't know what it is. Man, what is it? I'm trying to remember what web app specifically it is, but it does. It gets my attention the moment, just with a little button. And gotta say, that's nice because it's not sound. It's not making a, you know, sound on my phone or something like that that I might miss. Cause I always have that stuff turned off.

• 4:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it certainly can be abused. And I'm curious now that it's, it's in iOS, if people are going to abuse it. But like on, I absolutely love it on native apps like on chat GPT. As the response starts to, starts to stream in you, a couple of little quick little things. Or if something doesn't work, the way that it works though, is absolutely nuts. It's an input type of checkbox with a switch attribute on it.

• 5:08Scott Tolinski?

  Hmm, that triggers it.

• 5:10Wes Bos?

  Yeah, so you cannot, there's no programmatic like navigator dot vibrate API working. But you can turn a switch that is hidden on and off many times. And that will make the vibration go on and off. I bet they're going to take that away because it's just, it's too good for Apple to let us have that.

• 5:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and this is an Apple thing because Chrome on Android.

• 5:32Wes Bos?

  Yeah, there is a navigator dot vibrate API in the web standards.

• 5:36Scott Tolinski?

  Make that clear, yes.

• 5:37Wes Bos?

  Would have made way too much sense to use.

• 5:39Scott Tolinski?

  Would have made way too much sense. And of course it's on Chrome and Android because they actually implement the web APIs. It'd be great, yeah.

• 5:47Wes Bos?

  Next question, Krasmir says code quality. I hear more and more that people saying that if AI is reading and writing the code, we may not need to make it so well organized. So far, we are making sure that the code is well written so that we can maintain it and understanding it. But now, since a robot is doing that, like, do we, do we really need to have well-written code? Certainly, I do care a lot and this pisses me off a little bit because it sounds like we are outsourcing the brain job to the machine and only focusing on output. So the question here is like, does it necessarily matter that some of this code is, is ugly?

• 6:27Wes Bos?

  Is maybe spaghetti is is like duplicating code over and over again. You know, like, like one of them that that gets me all the time is that you have AI generate some CSS. And it puts like a font size and a line height on absolutely everything. I'm you. You wrote that nine times over and over again. And some people are saying like, it doesn't matter like it will update those nine places where where you have the line height. And I don't think that's that's a very good, good way to go about it. I think eventually these, these things are going to rot. It's not going to update something in the right spot. Things are going to change a little bit between the two. And we still need to think about like performance and how this code writes.

• 7:11Wes Bos?

  And a big part of how these AI tools work is discoverability of the code. Meaning that it might use like a, like a TypeScript LSP, the language server. It might like look at this function and then it can use the LSP to figure out where that function is called. And it can sort of just crawl out and look at your code base from that. Rather than just doing like raw searches on your code base. And well-written, well-organized code is, is that, right? So I still think this matters quite a bit. I, I've certainly have been in many code bases where you just let AI do its, do its thing. And then you come back to, to change something. And of course you have to understand it. It's, it's very frustrating.

• 7:54Wes Bos?

  But once this thing grows to a certain size, it's very frustrating, very hard to, to sort of get a handle on it.

• 8:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah, I, I, I think now more than ever, and not, maybe not more than ever, but this is so important. And, and actually CJ and I have just been talking quite a bit about this. We were just talking about it yesterday. But like, to me, yeah, that, that whole argument of.

• 8:19Scott Tolinski?

  Well, the AI will just update it everywhere. Dry code becomes less important. That sucks. I hate that because anybody who knows anything about working in AI is that it always starts off really well. And then as the project gets bigger, it starts to get worse and worse and worse because that context bloat, because there's too many things, because there ends up being drift. And this is a thing that CJ and I have been talking a lot about, like, what are we doing to solve this? And we have some really fun ideas, so some stuff where we'll talk about in the future here. We're working on a video together right now. But I think this is important because that organization, that steady structure, that

• 9:04Scott Tolinski?

  lack of drift and everything like that is going to really make your projects more maintainable over the long run. And I do agree about outsourcing the brain job. We can't outsource the brain job. That brain job is our entire, like, role as if we're vibe coding here. And if you start to outsource that that brain job, what are you even doing? Like, you might as well just be, you know, hit and enter on a keyboard and, you know, slopping it out, so.

• 9:35Wes Bos?

  Not much there. And like, like, one more thing to say about that is, I was thinking the other day, how we've gone from AI is good at making stuff from scratch, but it's not that good in like existing code bases. But I'm starting to feel the opposite, where like, of course, you can spit something out and it'll, it'll make something from scratch. But like, I was putting it in my course codebase, and I said, like, hey, move this thing, like, something I've been wanting to do for forever is move from Express to Hanno. And I've been writing my code in like web standards, like all of the new stuff for the past probably two years, I've been writing it all in web standards. And then I was like, you know what?

• 10:18Wes Bos?

  I'm gonna like throw an agent on this and say, see if, like, what it can do. And it like, it picked up. It says, ah, I see you already have been writing some of this code. In web standards, which is the APIs versus like the express way of doing things, allow me to just to go ahead and do the rest of it for you and convert it over. And I was like, man, it's so much, it did such a better job, given nice, clear, concise examples.

• 10:45Scott Tolinski?

  Established patterns.

• 10:46Wes Bos?

  Structured, established patterns, all of that stuff versus just like letting it rip. And it used to be the opposite, but now it's just like, oh, that was code that I probably would have written myself. And I'm glad that it, it did it exactly the same way as I had been writing it for the last two years.

• 11:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I've been finding the same thing. They've gotten a lot better at those aspects for certain. Next one here is an update on second brain from Wes. I would imagine you've been talking about your Obsidian journey, about how you're working with Obsidian to catalog data and things like that.

• 11:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Scott Tolinski?

  Somebody wants an update here and let us know, Wes.

• 11:27Wes Bos?

  This is me. I just, I just put this in here. This was not a question.

• 11:30Scott Tolinski?

  You asked your own question?

• 11:31Wes Bos?

  I asked my own, I wanted, it's my podcast. I'll talk about what I want. But basically, like a couple, I don't know, maybe about a month ago, I asked like people, hey, like, like, what are you using for? Not necessarily just notes, but as like, like a place to put something. I said, I like, I specifically want to, when I have something that I need to remember, I want to just dump it into some sort of system and be able to recall that and have it like a, like a second brain, right? And I specifically in my life, I have that for just measurements. Like we have these windows at our cottage and there's a specific measurement of them. And every time I'm like, oh, there's blinds at the store and then I can't find it. I'm like, did I put this in markdown? Is it in my Apple notes? Is it in my email?

• 12:16Wes Bos?

  Did I text it to myself? Did I text it to my wife? You know, I just can't find it, wherever it is. And then I have that with like, like links for the show and just, just random stuff in my life where I'm just like, I need to remember this. Where do I put this? A lot of people messaged me and said, dude, you gotta, you gotta give Obsidian another try. And I have, I've tried the Obsidian note taking thing for, for many, many times. And it's never really stuck. I've just been like a straight up markdown in a folder kind of guy, which is like 80% of what Obsidian is. But I decided, let's, let's give it another shot to, to see where it is, right? So I.

• 12:55Wes Bos?

  Took, I don't know, probably 10 years worth of my markdown notes. And then I spun up a Claude code instance and I said, like, like, convert these to like an Obsidian Vault. So I created a vault and I put some, some things in there and it just kind of analyzed it all and then organized it and, and made the different categories and tags. And then it, it figured out who the meetings, like I have lots of meeting notes with people, you know? And then it, it tagged the people that I had the meeting notes with. And I was like, okay, this is, I don't want a full-time job. A lot of these like note taking people are just like, their whole personality is taking notes. I'm not into that, right? I just needed like a good system that, that will help me. So it, it moved all of that stuff over to an Obsidian Vault, which I was very happy with.

• 13:39Wes Bos?

  And then I also, I hooked it up to my OpenClaw bot. There's a whole Obsidian CLI that you can use now. And I've just been like, that's the perfect interface for, I need to remember this at one point. And I'll just type it into, like, make an Obsidian note that logs X, Y, and Z. And one thing that, that I always do is, is clothing sizes, you know? You, you're like, oh, I want to buy this shirt. Do I need a medium, a large, an extra large, you know? What, what size is your chest? I don't know. And so what I did is I told it to make like a, I don't know what it's called, but it's kind of like Notion where you can create extra properties that are associated with everyone. So I, I just went through like-

• 14:21Scott Tolinski?

  Metadata, front matter?

• 14:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was like, I just went, I grabbed like five or six of my shirts that I like. And I just measured like the arm and the chest and, and all of this stuff. And then I also gave it notes as to how it fits. If I put a hoodie underneath it or if it's like a T-shirt. And then I've just been able to like, have that data in there where I can reference it myself. But I can also ask like my OpenClaw being like, hey, here's a shirt I'm looking at. Here's the sizing chart. Which one do you think will, will fit me best? And that to me is such a, like, I know people are always like, this OpenClaw stuff is stupid. There's no actual use cases for it, which I'm, I kind of, I'm kind of on board there. But this is one thing where I've been like really happy with it, you know? And then I can-

• 15:05Wes Bos?

  Like send it. Eventually, what I want to get to it is I can I can just send it screenshots. You know, you can just sometimes I'll screenshot stuff. I'm like, I got I got to remember this. Um, I would love just to like, share that screenshot into some sort of system. And then it will like OCR it, maybe go to the webpage. And then the final piece of this is um, QMD, which is from Toby, um, CEO of Shopify.

• 15:31Scott Tolinski?

  Nice water bottle. Whoa.

• 15:33Wes Bos?

  MadCSS.com. Make sure you you check that out. You can you can grab one of the water bottles. You can grab one of our bombers you want. Anyways, QMD from Toby. So this is a

• 15:46Wes Bos?

  kind of solves the like, memory issue with a lot of these AI things. And what it does is that QMD will search all of your markdown. So you can you can give it all of your your markdown documents. What it does is it takes all the sentences from each of those markdown and and vectorizes them. Um, and then you can run like a vector search against those. So like if if I were to like have a note on like shirt size. And then if I were to to later do a search for like coat measurements. Even though those are not the same words, they're they're similar enough. You know, the when you vectorize something, it it turns it into a mathematical representation on all these different axes.

• 16:30Wes Bos?

  And then you're able to like find things when you're not just doing straight up like like text search. So it uses vectorization and then it also uses a couple of different other ways to query it. And then it will rank them for you. It works really well. You can hook up your cloud bot to use this instead of the the built in memory. And I was surprised at how well this worked. It doesn't do like images or video or anything like that, which I I hope it will eventually support. So like ideally, I would just search like screenshot of uh, Twitter conversation or something like that. And it would then pop up. But I feel like I'm on a pretty good. Like space now with Obsidian, QMD. I have it running on a laptop over here, so I can just do it from my phone.

• 17:14Wes Bos?

  Or I can, um, I can do it in the Obsidian app. I can message the bot. I can do it on my desktop, you know? I feel like it's in a really good spot now. So that's my update on my second brain right now. And I'm, I'll, I'll update as I, as I get better at it.

• 17:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do the same thing. I've been using Obsidian forever and ever, and I, I like it so much more than Notion. I, I get so annoyed with Notion every other day. If I could have a better real time kind, like that would have no hesitation in dropping Notion. Now granted, I couldn't make that decision, uh, for the whole team because I'm sure there'd be so many edge cases and bugs. But like for me personally, my personal use case, I love my Obsidian setup and I have been doing the same thing. And I do think like Open Claw is a, or any kind of local agent, whatever system is a good way to interact with Obsidian. One feature that I really like in, um, Obsidian, if you aren't using it Wes, is the daily notes feature,

• 18:11Scott Tolinski?

  where it creates a new file every time you open Obsidian for that day.

• 18:18Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 18:18Scott Tolinski?

  And that way I just kind of tag everything and I just do brain dumps in those files. If I'm having one-on-one meetings, if I'm having meetings in general, something I need to take notes on. It pretty much always just goes as a tagged thing inside of the daily notes. And then obviously you could then, if you wanted to use AI to whatever later. But just having those tags in there makes it really easy for me to just use those, uh, daily notes as a dumping ground for stuff that I don't want a full-on markdown file for of everything. I use a number of different, would you believe I actually made a custom theme for, uh, Obsidian Wes?

• 18:56Wes Bos?

  I would. I, I actually made a Cobalt 2 one probably three or four years ago. And I, I was surprised, I was, when I, when I came back to it, I was like, oh yeah, I made a theme for this. I like Googled Cobalt 2 Obsidian and I was like, I wonder if anyone has done it. I did it.

• 19:10Scott Tolinski?

  You did it. Well, maybe we should, cause I could go, I could go all day on Obsidian. So maybe we should have a full-on episode about that. Because I would love to share some of my favorite tips and tricks as well as like show off my setup a little bit.

• 19:22Wes Bos?

  I, yeah, I agree because there's so many more things I would like to fix about it. And then also like the sync thing, I'm using iCloud, which is, is way too slow. I want it to like, I know they have a paid product, Obsidian Sync, so we will do, we'll do an episode on it. So let us know.

• 19:37Scott Tolinski?

  There's a number of self-hosted sync. Yeah, yeah.

• 19:40Wes Bos?

  I saw those, yeah.

• 19:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they're not, they're not easy to set up, I'll tell you that.

• 19:45Wes Bos?

  Oh, I don't mind that. Give me something that's hard to set up and flaky. Sounds like my, my thing to save four bucks a month.

• 19:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:57Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry. At sentry.io forward slash syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right. Next question here is from, I just made this one up. Not really a question, but maybe a topic for discussion. Awesome podcast, by the way. Yeah, let's actually just, let's discuss how awesome the podcast is, Wes.

• 20:33Wes Bos?

  It's very good.

• 20:34Scott Tolinski?

  That's the discussion. Now, I often get envious when you mention new JavaScript and CSS features and state that you can safely use them. I mean, sure, if you develop a site which mostly devs use, and that's true. But if you work in the industry, bank, insurance, or whatever, you have to support older browsers as well. I'm not talking IE6, thank God. But for the example, older Safari versions would still make up a large amount of traffic. Yes, I will absolutely acknowledge that we are spoiled as hell over here. I'm not making anything that needs to be in that ecosystem. And because of that, I get to use the latest and greatest, even the pop over question earlier, right?

• 21:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Scott Tolinski?

  I'm absolutely aware of that. And I am sorry for anyone that has to support all the older stuff, but you know what? I spent most of my career supporting IE6 and IE5 and stuff, so.

• 21:31Scott Tolinski?

  If you haven't had to support IE5 or IE4 in your career, then this is the, which you gotta do now.

• 21:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's much better.

• 21:42Scott Tolinski?

  It's much better. And granted, so many of these things, like Popover has a great polyfill.

• 21:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Scott Tolinski?

  That you can use that polyfill. So many things do exist now that you can just polyfill them away. How do you feel about the current state of this, Wes? Because to me, we still have the concept of progressive enhancement. Of your users on older browsers should have a working experience. I mean, you can, you can make that experience nicer for your more modern users as well.

• 22:13Wes Bos?

  Totally. A lot of this stuff is you can write it in such a way where you fall back, you progressively enhance. Like, one example is on the Mad CSS website. There's like the navigation up at the top is like kind of these tickets. And I use the new CSS feature, corner shape scoop.

• 22:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Wes Bos?

  Which allows you to like cut out the corners. Yeah, big fan. Only on Chrome and Edge right now, not in Safari, not in Firefox. And someone was giving me crap for that because like, I was like, it looks, in my opinion, it looks fine with just regular rounded corners on Safari. I ended up going back and using like a CSS mask and then just punching out the corners. It's not the exact same experience, but in my opinion, it works great. It looks good. It looks good on all the browsers. And then most of our traffic is going to be on like a Chrome-based browser and they're going to get the best experience. So in my opinion, that's fine.

• 23:16Wes Bos?

  I wrote it in such a way where you can just remove those @supports queries in your CSS eventually. Or you can throw a polyfill in there. Not a big deal. Some of this other stuff, yeah, you simply just have to wait for it to be supported in this. And probably the biggest one is...

• 23:36Wes Bos?

  Safari iPads, because like people get an iPad and then they have them kicking around for like 10 years and like they don't necessarily care to upgrade because they have their email, they got their Safari and they got their Netflix and there's a lot of people that are simply just happy with their iPad. And Apple does not update these old iPads. So you got old versions of Safari. That's like probably the biggest killer for all these new web standards things.

• 24:05Scott Tolinski?

  Even not even just old iPads, iPads in general. My buddy Topher, who's been on the show before, he said his like main computer usage these days is iPad and then he's remoting into other things. And it's just like, oh, that's, that's great. And I love, I love the speed and some things about the iPad, but I could not live with Safari on the iPad as my main browser experience in 2026. Could not live that way.

• 24:36Wes Bos?

  No, no, simply how slow it is to copy and paste text is just, I don't understand how people do that full time. But like the features supported on that Safari are great. I was talking to people who said, we have to support the last two major versions. Like that's their new mandate at their company. And with Safari now releasing a major version per year, that means they have to support like two-year-old browsers, which is kind of weird, but maybe, maybe okay. You know, like this stuff, you can't have like rules for this. You really just have to like, look at your stats for your traffic and then pipe that into your like, can I use or pipe that into your browser stats and say like, are

• 25:21Wes Bos?

  we allowed to, to, to use this new scoop feature or whatever? Or do we need to wait until everybody catches up?

• 25:30Wes Bos?

  But man, things are a lot better. Things are way better these days.

• 25:33Scott Tolinski?

  We get a number of things coming in on Sentry of like, this feature is not, you know, this API that we are using isn't supportive. That that error results in a console error on our Sentry, and then we just fix it. We we wire up a polyfiller, we whatever. So if that's the type of thing that you want to have a handle on of what your users are actually using your your stuff on, man Sentry is a great tool for that. Because not only that, you're getting to see what aspects of your app are slow, what aspects of your app have issues in general, what aspects of your app. And when you see these things, you can click and see what exactly that browser is. And maybe you're only getting one or two users with those issues and whatever. But, you know, it depends on what your

• 26:17Scott Tolinski?

  tolerance is there. But yeah.

• 26:19Wes Bos?

  Some of the hardest bugs I've ever had to fix have been, they show up on my Sentry and it just, I just go like, oh, what like, where is this happening? Where could this possibly be happening? And you go in the sidebar and you say, it's happening on iPads. Or it's happening in Safari, this weird version, which is really hard to run old versions of Safari. If you have a Windows, you're out of luck. If you're on a Mac, there's no way to run old Safari. You have to go and download, you have to go download like an iOS emulator on Xcode that is an older version. And luckily, the versions of desktop Safari and iOS Safari are very, very close. And that way you can replicate the bug and go ahead and fix it.

• 27:03Scott Tolinski?

  I will say that that root cause seer, which is like Sentry's root cause analysis AI tool, is so good at this stuff. Because when I have an issue and it's like an error and it's a weird error, maybe something I haven't seen before. And then I do the root cause analysis and it's like, older versions of Safari have this issue. I'm like, okay, that makes so much sense, you know. So shout out to Sentry, sentry.io forward slash syntax. Sign up, get two months for free. Yeah, this podcast is brought to you by Sentry. But that's on, this whole thing's on like an ad, but legit, this is a useful tool in this.

• 27:37Wes Bos?

  Was an ad. So, but it was a good, we should use it. You should use it. We are sorry, we should use it. We do use it. I use it. I've been using it for probably 10 years now. It's fantastic.

• 27:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I will say, we did get a question in our inbox here that was like,

• 27:55Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know if you guys would do this because the episode might seem like an ad, but you should do an episode where you're detailing your Sentry setup. Folks, would you like to actually see that? Or would that feel too much like an ad? Because like Wes, I have been using Sentry for longer than I can remember. At this point, I have a ton of projects on Sentry. I use all of the tools and stuff like that. So if that's actually something you'd be interested in, leave a comment below. If that feels too much like an ad, then we don't have to do that as well. You can always make a little side video on it or something on my personal channel.

• 28:26Wes Bos?

  Next question from Ray Garza says, what do you do if you run into a website that is visually bad or has severe accessibility issues? This is not a one-off site, it's something I visit very often. Do you try and contact them or do you just ignore it? Man, this drives me nuts. There's a website that you have to go to, I don't know, six or seven times a day or like, I don't know, like you have to log into your accounting or something like once every month. And there's just these issues where that drive you absolutely nuts. In many cases, I will flip on a screen recorder and simply just show the bug happening or show the accessibility.

• 29:08Wes Bos?

  It's probably even bigger if it's an accessibility issue because that company can get in trouble. There's like people out there that will find websites that are not accessible and then they will sue you. A lot of them are well-meaning, but a lot of them are also like ambulance chasers as well. So there's a bit of an issue there if your website is not accessible. So what would you do? Yeah, I flip on a screen recorder. I kind of like just detail it. I do this all the time for people's websites and I'll like usually preface it by saying like, "Hey, feel free to throw this out." Like I'm not trying to be obnoxious. I don't need an update on it, but like if this is helpful for you, send this to your dev. Here is a problem that I am specifically running into it.

• 29:50Wes Bos?

  And sometimes that is the best feedback for people because they're not using their own product in that way or they don't necessarily have those issues. And if you can just detail it nice and clearly and speak in terms that the developer can do, it can be very helpful and you can just send that along.

• 30:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I agree to this to some point. And then other times you are going to be Screaming into a void. I think it depends on what, what the company is. We had a very fun rant section against the, well, I was ranting, Wes was just cracking up at the, uh, the awfulness of the Optum RX website. And I can guarantee you, if I were to attempt to catalog even one of their numerous thousands of issues on the Optum RX website, that they would not give two shits about it. So sometimes there is that, you know, you just, you're not gonna

• 30:44Scott Tolinski?

  get any progress on there by making that. And it's just like, uh, I would save my energy, but I would also take into stock which, which companies do you think are actually attempting to make their product better and which ones are just, uh, pushing out garbage to you?

• 31:03Wes Bos?

  This is, this is something that I hope AI will actually fix is, is just like listening to people complaining about their product and then being able to distill that down or possibly even fixing it in their code base. Cause sometimes it's just these little problems where like, like one of them is I visit a website several times a week where my one password auto fills, but it doesn't trigger it until I put a cursor in there, hit a space and then backspace. And then it goes, ah, your password is good. You may now click the button. I'm like, I know, but my, because you're listening for like a key up event. And when I use a password manager, it doesn't trigger a key up event. So now

• 31:45Wes Bos?

  I have to like manually go and trigger a key up event. And this is so annoying. And like, this is probably like a 10 second fix where you just listen for like an input event instead of a key up event additionally. And, and then you could, you can run your validations and check it all against it. And like, that would probably be a 10 second fix. The AI could probably, by the time I've done this, AI could have that fixed. And I am looking forward to that world where, where this, this happens.

• 32:11Scott Tolinski?

  I'm going to be honest, if we die, you know, right now, if the craftsmen behind these apps aren't good enough to, to craftspeople behind these apps are not good enough to create them right now. Well, what makes you think they are going to take two seconds to type into a chat bot and say?

• 32:28Wes Bos?

  They're not going to. It's going to. This is what Ben's modem is. So Ben Vinegar used to be the manager of syntax. He's working on a startup called modem, modem.dev, and it's doing exactly this. It's listening to all of the sources of feedback of your users. And it will say, ah, people are complaining that like password autofill needs like a key up event. And then I go to your code base. Ah, I see. We can add an input event instead of a key up event. And then, ah, here's a pull request for that type of thing. Like for a dev at a large company, they would have to have a meeting and they would have to get approval and they would have to like delegate and put story points behind it. And for them, it's just, it's not worth it, you know?

• 33:13Wes Bos?

  It's a 10 second fix, but probably three days of fussing.

• 33:18Scott Tolinski?

  I still think that would require somebody to care.

• 33:21Wes Bos?

  It don't. Well, I think a lot of these devs do care, but it's just like, it's just so, it's just too hard. It's too hard for them to like care that much, you know?

• 33:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Wes Bos?

  And like, they don't want to have to talk to a manager about input events.

• 33:37Scott Tolinski?

  So next one is effect. Effect, if you don't know, at effect dot website is, that's a library for working effectively in TypeScript. It's intense. Effectively, yeah, I didn't even, I didn't do that on purpose. We've talked about effect a number of times on here. It's one of those things where you look at it, you're like, huh, this, this looks interesting, but it also looks like a lot. So the question here is, I've recently tried it out and it's been great. It really does show the power of the type system of TypeScript, but I cannot deny the learning curve. Trying to evangelize this is probably what folks spreading the word about RXJS felt back in the day. But unlike RXJS, I actually see the value add. Any thoughts?

• 34:20Scott Tolinski?

  Effect is one of those things I look at about every two weeks and think, yeah, I should give this a try. And I think for me personally, effect becomes more interesting with AI and vibe coding than it does without it. Because I'm going to be honest, I don't want to write all this code to do this stuff. This is a lot of extra code to do this stuff, but it is one of those things that. I think will be effective or would be effective for AI apps because there it. Stop laughing every time I say effective. That's, that's the, you cannot say-

• 34:55Wes Bos?

  You're doing a great job explaining it. Yeah.

• 34:57Scott Tolinski?

  You think I'm not doing a great job explaining it?

• 34:59Wes Bos?

  No, I, I mean, you're, you're saying it's effective. Go ahead.

• 35:05Scott Tolinski?

  It helps you write code without bugs. It helps you write code that handles errors better, interruptions, async, synchronous code, composition, but it is very Rust-like in its API. It is intense. There's a lot of extra stuff to do, stuff that you're used to doing with less code in straight up TypeScript. And because of that, it feels daunting to write by hand for me personally. But as I've gotten more into AI coding, I have been swayed to say, let me, let me take some time for this. The only thing that I, the only reason I have it is because it requires a lot of buy-in and I don't have the time or the projects

• 35:48Scott Tolinski?

  to deal with that buy-in at this point in time in my life.

• 35:52Wes Bos?

  Like a lot of your like lower level business logic, concurrency, error handling, all of that stuff, like that you've, you have to buy in to effect at a very early level of your project. And I've, I've also like go to effect that website and like I understand it. I totally get it. It's the same thing with, with RXJS as well. The people that, that use it are just like, this is the best thing ever. We don't have as many bugs. This thing flows really well. There's great concurrency, amazing error handling, retrying. But it's just, if you look at the code, it's just like, I, I don't, I'm tired even just, just looking at this, this type of thing. And it requires such a brain shift

• 36:34Wes Bos?

  that I think the most regular developers are probably not willing to, to take on.

• 36:40Scott Tolinski?

  I have no doubt that it would be useful. I have no doubt-

• 36:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 36:45Scott Tolinski?

  -that I would probably like it to some degree. But even like back when Redux was becoming the thing. And I always just felt like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff to do what I'm trying to do. And that turns me off of it a bit, even though it is really neat.

• 37:04Wes Bos?

  Noel says, "I'm an experienced Rails developer, interested in building full-stack apps within the JavaScript ecosystem. Since Rails is mature and standardizes conventions in all aspects of full-stack application, I'm finding it challenging to know where to get started in the JavaScript ecosystem. For example, in the Ruby ecosystem, it's pretty much just Rails if you want to build a full-stack app. However, in the JavaScript ecosystem, there are many options such as Next, Tansack, Remix, Redwood SDK, and Astro." Not only, and that is only like the full-stack like spa framework, you know, like that's just a small part of our JavaScript ecosystem. Not only that, but the additional burden of having to choose between tools. For example, do I choose Prisma or Drizzle?

• 37:48Wes Bos?

  What about authentication? There's Auth.js, but it looks like Better Auth is a successor. The list goes on and on and on. I recognize that each project and team will be different requirements and shit. Do, do, do, do. What do I do? This is a very, very, very common complaint in the JavaScript land of like, where's the rails of JavaScript? And every time we say this, everybody comes out and says, "You need to be using Nest.js," or there are several other like things in our ecosystem that are tip-to-tail, absolutely everything. And I always ask, "Well, why are people not using that? Like, why don't people use that?" And it's because as a JavaScript ecosystem, we prefer to pick and

• 38:32Wes Bos?

  pull all of the different pieces together to build our own stack, which is sometimes great and sometimes really frustrating. So what do you do in this situation, right? Prioritize stability. If this is a brand-new thing that has not yet been totally figured out, stay away from it. Because like Scott will tell you, with ZeroSync, as amazing as ZeroSync is, it had what, two or three major API changes? And it's been been kind of hard to switch from one to another, right?

• 39:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And

• 39:04Wes Bos?

  Something that you like, though. Like, that's not bad for you, but it's if you're looking for something that is stable and long-running.

• 39:12Scott Tolinski?

  No, no, you're 100% right. And I am the worst person to give advice there on this type of thing. Because I like totally am quixotic on those, those elements of it where I'm like, that's no big deal. The whole API just changed. There's no big deal. What's, what's that a day's worth of work? Like, that's not realistic work. Like,

• 39:31Wes Bos?

  So stability, maintainability, is it, is it well maintained, right? Like, like, where are we at with it? Is it standard space? This is the big one for the JavaScript ecosystem because so much of what we do will simply just work together because these things are built upon web standards. You know, request, response, fetch, all of the standards in JavaScript. If these things are built together and built on a standard, the fact that you, you built your API in, in Hanno and doesn't necessarily matter that much because 98% of your code will be movable to like a Svelte Kit server handler because they're all built on, on these standards, right? So that to me is probably the, the biggest thing here is that if I need to move,

• 40:17Wes Bos?

  will I need to have a massive rewrite or will the fact that I just use web streams and uploaded a file as multipart? Will that just work, right? Modern ability, does this support the later features that I need? That's a good thing to ask yourself. And then like docs and popularity. Is this project big enough that I will be able to, to get help in AI? Others like my personal website is on, on Waku and I was upgrading it yesterday and I hit a whole bunch of, of problems with it and I had open up bugs on the GitHub repo and, and say like, this is how it is. And it's just like, that framework is not as big as some of these other ones. If I had built that on, on Next or on Svelte Kit or something like that, I bet that I wouldn't have had those issues

• 41:01Wes Bos?

  because somebody ran into it first, or I would have been able to find like a GitHub thread where somebody else has hit it. But in this case, I'm like creating threads on Discord and whatnot and I'm okay with that. But I would probably not bet the farm on like an alpha version of some software for a larger company with a bigger team, right?

• 41:21Scott Tolinski?

  Totally. I, it's, it's totally what, what your, your tolerance is there. But also like, not just your tolerance, but your, The practicality of it all. It is funny that, uh, like when we were, we had an episode recently about Electron and a lot of the comments were like, Electron sucks, use this brand new thing, or use Tori, or use this or that. And like, I, I'll tell you, one of the big downsides, you could tell this, uh, the feedback to that episode, uh, drove me nuts a little bit, but one of the things is the ecosystem there, right? The amount of times that I found things like, um, in-app payments or various like little, little APIs that like weren't mature enough. Not because

• 42:06Scott Tolinski?

  those systems are bad. In fact, I quite like Tori. Tori's not bad at all. It's, it's great. But the ecosystem is so much more mature on Electron that you have to look at that. That is a big component to it, which is why I choose to use the most niche, whatever things at all points in times on all my projects. So, uh, I will say, I, right, Wes, I, well, you believe that I recently built an app with React?

• 42:31Wes Bos?

  Whoa. How come? Are you coming back?

• 42:34Scott Tolinski?

  No. Hell no. Uh, because I, I wanted to use Remotion, that's why. And also I'm not writing the code. This is a vibe coded thing. So I don't actually have to look at the React code. So, but I had, that's the first one I've, I've touched and

• 42:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Scott Tolinski?

  Woof.

• 42:49Wes Bos?

  But like, like, that's another example as well. It's like, if you want to use Remotion or you want to use like React Native, right? There's so many use cases for, or, or tools that are simply only out there for React, meaning that like, yeah, like React is by far not the best choice for this thing. If, if you're looking at, if you're looking at it from a subjective point of view, but if you're looking at it in terms of like docs and, and libraries and, uh, other people that have done things and, and portability from like, oh, all of a sudden I want my components to, to be in MCP server. Wow. Somebody's already made something for React components and they, it just works.

• 43:27Scott Tolinski?

  It pains me to admit that, but I

• 43:29Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 43:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. That's how you know I'm 40 years old now, Wes, is I'm starting to make a sensible choices.

• 43:38Wes Bos?

  Oh, man. All right. Next question from Sam across the pond. With modern CSS features like grid, flexbox, and container queries becoming widely supported, I'm curious, what do you think about the traditional column grid frameworks like Bootstrap or Bulma today? Man, this seems like, man, I haven't heard of Bootstrap in a long time. Do you ever reach for a framework like that when you want a quick responsive layout? Or do you generally find them unnecessary now that native CSS handles the layout so well? Are they still relevant for certain teams or projects or mostly redundant at this point? I would say in most cases, your use of a layout framework, meaning that like different types of layouts, columns, things like that,

• 44:23Wes Bos?

  not necessarily just like a component. Component frameworks are bigger than ever, can simply be replaced by a couple classes that you add on to something that are common for different layouts. Like, for example, the Syntax website, I had to throw something on there the other day, and I needed the div to be, it was a banner on the top of it, right? And I wanted the banner to span all the way across. And then I wanted the contents of the banner to be the same width of the actual website, right? And what I did is I just went into one of our existing components, and I just found the classes that you just have to add to these things. And then it just snapped directly into place with the grid. There's no need for a massive layout framework.

• 45:06Wes Bos?

  When CSS Grid first came out, there was tons of people trying to build some sort of like beautiful grid system that will work with it. And the reality is that the straight up CSS APIs and a couple utility classes are more than enough for most cases.

• 45:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I built a grid system, believe it or not, for CSS Grid. And I found it to be tremendous pain to go back to working in a grid system. Not because the code was bad or anything like that, or the, not like CSS Grid wasn't a good tool for that. It was like, this just isn't how I work anymore. It's just not like throwing something on a Grid call and stuff. I just felt like way less flexible. You know, I've been working on my graffiti CSS for a little while, Wes. And I have recent, like, this is how I work. I have different layouts, layout sidebar, layout wide, layout readable, split, whatever.

• 46:03Scott Tolinski?

  And this is mostly just like single classes that then can be composed into like full on classic layouts like a app shell or something like that. And like most of the stuff that I'm doing is like a single class or two to do this. And so just yesterday I was like, what if I, I started to see what kind of pages I could implement. So I started building out a bunch of pages. And just to see where are the gaps in this library, because I use this tool for all kinds of things. So it's like, all right, let me try to build a landing page without writing any CSS with just classes and like unlike,

• 46:44Scott Tolinski?

  and not to slam on tailwind, unlike tailwind, you're not using eight classes, you're using like one class or two classes for most of this stuff. And you can see like, it's not perfect. If you're looking at this on video, it's absolutely not perfect. But it's like unveiling where the gaps are in this library for me. But these are all exactly that. These are all either container queries or, or media queries based anythings. This is exactly that. Using just a handful of classes. And to me, this is the way, this is the way that I'm working. Not just because this is my library, but because I'm building this library because this is the way that I like to work. Right? So that's where I'm at right now. And I agree fully with what you, what you said.

• 47:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Couple reusable classes. No need to npm install something. It's, it's even better when they're just like directly in your codebase. So that you can find

• 47:40Scott Tolinski?

  Totally.

• 47:40Wes Bos?

  Like where the code is actually written, you know?

• 47:42Scott Tolinski?

  I would love to do an episode on like the 80 20 here because there's a, there are a handful of like classes, layout classes, like I love a stack. Which is like a concept that I've seen a little bit, like a stack, which is just a vertical display flex with a gap with a margin zero on the children. Like, there's a handful of classes. I get a lot of value out. So maybe we can spend some time in another episode, going deep on what those 80 20 classes are in terms of stuff that could actually make your life a little bit better.

• 48:10Wes Bos?

  Even then, I think in that case, it's just a, a copy paste, throw it in. Not, I don't think you need some external thing. Like even if it's something that someone has written, you know, you copy paste your CSS normalize and then you throw in your, your card, you throw in your stack, all your, the common things that you need.

• 48:28Scott Tolinski?

  Well, funny that you should say that Wes. I do have a button on graffiti that is literally just copy and paste this into your CSS.

• 48:36Wes Bos?

  There you go.

• 48:37Scott Tolinski?

  Because that's how I like to work as well. Also, this doesn't mean to be a advertisement or anything, but the whole thing is because it's built with CSS variables Wes, I built a theme picker where you can change the full like theme on this really easily. And even as far as like the, the fonts and the type scale, like if you, if the type scale is too big for you or whatever, if you want it giant, you can have a larger type scale. You can make all of the corners square if you want square corners for everything. And this is like, what you do with this is you export the theme and it's just here are your CSS variables. That's it. You just copy and paste the overrides.

• 49:18Scott Tolinski?

  And if people are watching this, you can change like massive amounts of this library and it's like 10 CSS variables. Maybe like 12, 15 CSS variables that you're just overriding on top of the system. So I think I'm finally getting there with this library. I think it is like, just looking at this, to me it's like, yeah, I think this is, is starting to hit the places that I want it to hit. Right?

• 49:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah. It's beautiful. What is it? Graffiti dash UI dot com. You want to check it out?

• 49:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, we'll link that up and I'm shipping some of these uh, theme variable stuff ASAP. So it will be up by the time you're hearing this.

• 49:54Wes Bos?

  All right, let's move into the next section, which is sick picks and shameless plugs. I'm going to sick pick something that I've bought probably four times now. And this is a power bar with a couple of USB plugs in it as well. So.

• 50:11Wes Bos?

  All of my kids have, I don't know, they have like a light and they have their Yoto that they need to charge and whatnot. And like, you end up with this, just like, there's too many things. My wife will unplug something because they need to plug something else in and that drives me crazy. Or like, you've got like, all these crappy little adapters plugged in and then they fall out. So I, several times I've bought this power bar where it's got a nice braided cord on it. It's got six or seven different plugs. And then it has, I don't know, there's different versions of them, but there's, there's between four and eight USB things. And they're not the fastest charging things, which is totally fine. I don't need like fast charging for my kids' Yoto or something like that.

• 50:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they'll deal.

• 50:54Wes Bos?

  Leave the thing plugged in for some amount of time and have it in there. And these things are fantastic. So I'll link them up. There's, it's just one of these silly Amazon brands called Mifaso or whatever. But they have been awesome. And my favorite thing about it is that they have flush plugs. So that, I don't know, kids, kids are so rough on plugs and they always just bang them and then they fall out. And like, I'll give it, I'll give you one thing year up. The North American plugs are crazy dangerous. The fact that they like, they, they come out of the outlet partially and then

• 51:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they're just flopping out.

• 51:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 51:33Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Good, good, good pick.

• 51:35Scott Tolinski?

  I'm going to sick pick a capture card. I can't show it because it's plugged in. But I was using the CamLink and like Wes, I was having some issues. Now, I think your CamLink is actually fine, you said now? What's your?

• 51:49Wes Bos?

  Well, I haven't used my CamLink in, in probably three years.

• 51:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Wes Bos?

  But I, I still have it, but it drives me nuts that it's like this little USB thing that just, like the plugs, it hangs out all the time. So I moved to the, like the LiveStremer 4K many years ago and it's been, been fantastic.

• 52:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so you had told me that you had this Aver Media livestream or cap 4K, which is what you just mentioned, and it's 99 bucks and it looks kind of cheap in a way. It doesn't look like as streamlined as the cam link. But I gotta say, this thing has been rock solid for me. I was having like, I was having like three weeks worth of video issues where my cam was not connecting reliably. And I was just getting really frustrated with it. So basically this takes an HDMI in and goes USB out. So that way you can bring in anything HDMI as a camera input into your computer. Again, we use this for our cameras and I gotta say, it's been so nice not to have to think about this thing.

• 52:51Scott Tolinski?

  I hated having to buy a new one, but like I do this for a living and it was getting so frustrating to come in and having like having to unplug and plug back in the cam link every other day.

• 53:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah, my cam like I always unplugged and plugged just to make it work. And I've not done that with this thing since I got it a couple of years ago.

• 53:09Scott Tolinski?

  I haven't had to do it either. Yeah, it's amazing. So check it out, Aver Media. Again, I don't, I don't know if this is just like one of those cheapo brands or whatever.

• 53:17Wes Bos?

  It's not. Oh, no, it's not. Let me tell you, this is like the, I have a few of the like crappy knockoff ones on that you can just get on Amazon for like 11 bucks or whatever. And the quality that comes off of those is not the same. Like the, the colors are off, it skips frames or whatever. Like you actually do need like a good thing that has a chip in it. So Aver Media is a, like a very reputable company, very similar to Elgato. And they have like a huge suite. They have webcams, they've got microphones, they've got like those boards and whatever and capture cards. They, they, they came popular in the like gaming. I have another one at the cottage that you can put in like an SD card in and it will record to the SD card.

• 54:02Wes Bos?

  And then also pass through, which is what gamers use to like record their footage in, in HD and then pass through and stream as well. So they, they're big in the like capture card gaming industry as well. But this, this thing, the best part about it is the fact that it's USB C and it can just, it can live anywhere you want it to go. So it's a, it's a great company.

• 54:24Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, cool. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with them until you sent me this. And yeah, I've been very, very, very pleasantly surprised by this. So shout out to Evermedia. Good stuff. I do have a shameless plug, Wes. We haven't been doing shameless plugs on this show, but I have a shameless plug. I mentioned a couple of episodes ago that my wife was starting a podcast at phases.fm, but I'd like to officially shamelessly plug this because March 4th, our first episode was released, our very first episode. We had a preview episode up. We have a website. We have a YouTube channel. So if you're the type of people who want to watch on YouTube, we're not doing video on YouTube just yet, but

• 55:08Scott Tolinski?

  we will at some point here. We're just trying to get it off the ground and running and get some practice, but it's everywhere that you want to find your podcasts. Phases is a parenting podcast with my wife, Dr. Tolinski. She's a doctor of educational psychology. She's worked in schools as a school psych. She's done testing. She's worked with parents. She's ran a testing center where she tested for learning disabilities and autism and things like that. And she even taught a master's level course on human development. So basically, her and I are taking a really lighthearted approach to talking about parenting in regards to like a scientific way. So super, super light, like super fun, not heavy, super non

• 55:53Scott Tolinski?

  judgmental. And I get to play the role of the, the person who doesn't know anything. And I basically just get to ask her a lot of questions and she gets to share her expertise. So if you're a parent and you're interested in that type of thing where you're going to learn some stuff, low judgment, check us out on YouTube at phases FM or phases.fm as a website or any of your podcast players. Although I do find Wes. Man, I don't know if like, search lags on these things, or what these days.

• 56:21Wes Bos?

  I was just gonna say, I was looking for it on Spotify. And I couldn't find it until I typed in Phases Dr. Talinsky.

• 56:29Scott Tolinski?

  It's weird. And I can't find it at all on Pocket Casts unless I click the listen on Pocket Casts. Pocket Casts got the worst search. I don't know what they're doing.

• 56:37Wes Bos?

  I bet these companies are getting slammed with AI-generated podcasts. They have to like, like, say, okay, well, we're gonna wait and see if people actually subscribe to this thing and they're actually listening to it. Because otherwise, just these random podcasts are showing up. Like, I would love to talk to somebody who works at Spotify, or Apple Music, or whatever.

• 57:00Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:01Wes Bos?

  Show me what you're getting. You're getting like a hundred thousand AI albums submitted every single day. Or like, like, how are they, you know that they're probably code red trying to fight this stuff right now? Or figure out even what to do with it.

• 57:16Scott Tolinski?

  Spotify had to turn off their developer API. I think they're reworking it right now. I don't know if it's back yet. But I was, I was just trying to create a developer account for my OpenClaw. Because I wanted to connect it to my OpenClaw, but it was like, oh, where API is closed. Yeah, I would imagine that's, that's the case for sure.

• 57:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I'll guarantee you that's why. Man, can't have anything nice. Can't have, but also, but there's so much, like, I've been using, I use Spotify for listening to music. And the amount of, like, Suno AI music that pops in, it makes me so mad. Because I hear it immediately. I immediately hear it. And then I like, do a search for this band, and then you find all these like, fake TikToks of these, that they're cranking out, you know? And then I commented AI slop on them, and they delete your comment right away.

• 58:08Scott Tolinski?

  AI slop.

• 58:09Wes Bos?

  Brutal, brutal, brutal.

• 58:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 58:12Wes Bos?

  I don't know. But I also have a theory that Spotify is behind a lot of this AI music. Because why pay humans for music when you can just generate it yourself?

• 58:22Scott Tolinski?

  Wes with the, busting out the tinfoil.

• 58:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Scott Tolinski?

  On a, yeah, I love it. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

• 58:28Wes Bos?

  Peace.