“Anyone Can Code Now” - Netlify CEO Talks AI Agents

Netlify's CEO reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year's rate—and 96% aren't coming from AI coding tools. They're everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then discovering they need somewhere to deploy them. The addressable market for developer tools just exploded from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion spreadsheet users, but only if your product speaks fluent AI—which is why Netlify's founder now submits pull requests he built entirely through prompting, never touching code himself, and why 25% of users immediately copy error messages to LLMs instead of debugging manually. The web isn't dying to agents; it's being reborn by them, with CEOs coding again and non-developers shipping production apps while the entire economics of software—from perpetual licenses to subscriptions to pure usage—gets rewritten in real-time.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In the past, before all of this AI, when people asked what to do to be a good developer, I said like, just have a really high tolerance for frustration.

• 0:09Martin Casado?

  That's about right. For me to understand Next or React or some weird CLI, there's nothing fundamental. So it really is just wasted knowledge.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  What defined a developer at its core used to be being able to write code and understand programming languages. And suddenly, that part of being a developer is getting way less important. Software development will just be a skill. Just like with writing, there's still professional writers, but like all of us also have to know how to write as part of our job. Two years ago, our addressable audience was essentially 17 million professional JavaScript developers. And suddenly, computers can write code, and addressable audience for a tool like ours, that's everybody that can use spreadsheets today, which is more like 3 billion people. A year ago, we were sitting at around 3,000 signups a day. Today,

• 1:04Speaker 00

  we're sitting at around 16,000 a day. We're starting to see those kind of patterns where is this an agent accessing, or is it a human? There's also just way more people having fun building crazy stuff. People building like really cool WebGL games and so on that they could like just never managed to build before. And browsers will evolve really dramatically from this. That originally concept of a user agent on the web is getting real. You see people like have history with their ChatGPT or Claude, and they really have a preference. And they don't want to go to like the banks AI and talk to that. They just want to interact in that way.

• 1:42Erik Torenberg?

  The web as we know it is about to become unrecognizable. Not because of new protocol or framework, because of who's building it. For the first time in history, the barrier between "I have an idea" and "I shipped working software" is collapsing. Netlify just watched their daily signups jump from 3,000 to 16,000. The twist? Most of these new users aren't developers. They're marketers, designers, product managers, people who six months ago couldn't write a line of code. Matt Billman saw this coming. He coined the term "agent experience," the idea that AI agents are now a core user of every product you build. But here's where it gets interesting. While others are building tools that say, "We'll be your developer," Matt's making a different bet. He believes we're not replacing developers,

• 2:26Erik Torenberg?

  we're creating billions of new ones. This raises an uncomfortable question. If anyone can build software, what actually makes you a developer anymore? The answer might surprise you and has nothing to do with code. Today, Matt sits down with A16Z general partner, Martine Casado, to cover why CEOs are suddenly submitting pull requests again, why the dead web theory is backwards, and what happens when your son's AI friend needs to open a bank account.

• 2:57Martin Casado?

  Matt, thanks for joining. It's good to see you. So this is Matt Billman, the CEO, founder of Netlify, also creator of the Jamstack. You know, very well known to be an architect of the web and someone that tracks the trends. And you were with us a couple of months ago, and we were discussing AX and what that means. And now, you know, like the space is moving so quickly. We're a few months on. And so the point of this is going to be to talk about what we've learned in the last couple of months. But maybe before that, maybe you can describe what AX is.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:33Martin Casado?

  And then we'll just kind of get into like, kind of what we're learning.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wrote, I wrote an article about, the first article about AX in, back in January, which is like, feels like 10 years ago in AI time now.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  As the term for agent experience. And sort of really thinking about the evolution from user experience as like the term that like really could set a product apart from other products, not just based on a checklist of features, but based on like the experience of like everything around it. And then our first decade at Netlify of really centering around developer experience, that's typically been a way to set platforms aside from other platforms, right? Like by making like lower friction for developers to actually build on them and extend them and use them and so on, towards this idea that we suddenly...

• 4:32Speaker 00

  All of us that build product have this new persona using the product that's an agent driven by AI and that also sort of actually have an experience of the product, right? Like whatever that means, right? Like doesn't necessarily mean that there's like some soul behind it or something, right? But it obviously has some like, it's like actually attempting to figure out how to do stuff with our product in an autonomous way, right? Like so suddenly the documentation about our product, the onboarding experience of our product is no longer just for like a person, it's also for a person asking an agent to do stuff, right? Like and that, that was what I sort of described in this article on, on, on agent experience

• 5:16Speaker 00

  as something that suddenly for us at Netlify became like our product north star and that I've proposed at the time should be pretty important for anybody building products in the world today.

• 5:29Martin Casado?

  So listen, you, I mean, you read Netlify as we mentioned, which is one of the world's largest hosting sites. So have you seen more agents than humans showing up to these websites or? I feel like there's a lot of stuff going down. There's like, there's that, but there's also like people are creating websites using agents. And so I just feel like there's, you know, just a lot to tease out here.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  I think especially in the dev tool space, like I, I'll say that like the term UX have had like outsized adoption in the developer tool space. And I think that's because for developer tools, there's this like wild thing happening where if you take Netlify, right? Like two years ago, our audience, like our addressable audience was essentially 17 million professional JavaScript developers, right? Like, and then there's like some adjacent developers that might use it as well, right? Like, but it's like deeply technical product, like based on writing code and shipping it, right? Like, so the like main audience, these 17 million people.

• 6:25Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  And suddenly computers can write code and that a whole question of like, do you actually need to write code to build software starts becoming like, not really, right? Like, and you start. Having an addressable audience for a tool like ours, that's more like everybody that can use spreadsheets today, which is more like three billion people, right? Like in the distance between seventeen million and three billion is really, really big, right? Like, but if you want to reach that large audience, you have to reach them through the agents they're using to write the code and to build the software, right? So I think that has meant that in the developer tool space, this idea of agent experience is like extra important

• 7:10Speaker 00

  right now. And it's like extra attention of it. That doesn't mean that it's limited to like developer tools. And I think we'll see it more and more in all products, right? Like as agents try to interact with with anything, but it does mean that specifically in our space, it's like become something that's like almost essential to it to to actually like reaching your potential as a company.

• 7:33Martin Casado?

  So from the perspective of that, Levi, it seems like there's, there's, there's two things going on. One of them is to what extent are agents making websites?

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:41Martin Casado?

  Right? Using like the bolts or the lovable's or the replits or like the whatever it is to like generate like the website, you know? And then there's a second one is for a website that's already generated.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:52Martin Casado?

  To what extent is an agent visiting it, right? And so how do you think about, you know?

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's those two parts to it constantly, right? Like, and

• 7:59Martin Casado?

  Is it, by the way, is it X, both of those? Or is it?

• 8:02Speaker 00

  It's AX. Like we at Netlify, we talk about like, at Netlify, we actually talk about three kinds of AX relevant to us, right? Like it's all AX, right? Like, but there's like Netlify's AX, right? Like, what is the agent experience of using Netlify?

• 8:16Martin Casado?

  Sure.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Right?

• 8:16Martin Casado?

  Right, right.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  That's like Netlify.

• 8:18Martin Casado?

  Like you're like the, yeah, like you're like the website or whatever. Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Totally, right? Like, it's like our CLI can can code code figure out how to use our CLI. That's like part of Netlify's AX, right? Like, then there's our customers' AX. The stuff that our customers build, how can we help them?

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Make that like make a really great agent experience.

• 8:40Martin Casado?

  Assuming they're using agents.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:43Martin Casado?

  Using cursor like.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  But independently on that, right? Like if they're building like an e-commerce site.

• 8:48Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  What do we need to help them with to make it easy? Like now Stripe has a new like payments option to buy directly through ChatGPT.

• 8:58Martin Casado?

  I see, I see, I see, okay, I see, sure.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Building e-commerce sites on Netlify, right? Like, what do they actually need to do different to make sure that ChatGPT can also buy their products on behalf of users? Right? Like, there's that whole line of talk, like stuff like, should we help people charge for crawling like CloudFlare? Or do people even want that and so on, right? Like, that's all in our mind, like the customer EX. We're like, how do we help our customers do these things?

• 9:25Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  And then the third side of it is kind of what we call industry EX. That's like all the protocols and like general standards we have to agree on and as an industry to make all of these things simpler, right? And that that's kind of how we think about it internally. So we touch all three of those. And I would say we've done the most work on Netlify's own EX right now. And that again, kind of comes back to just like how how massive that change in like the developer world is right now.

• 9:55Martin Casado?

  Right.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  But we are obviously also doing a lot of work on helping customers build MTP servers and figure out how to make their sites accessible for agents. Or like deciding if a visitor is an agent or a human and so on.

• 10:11Martin Casado?

  Do you have any numbers that like are you can highlight on like whatever? Three years ago, you know, people were not using AI to build sites and now they are like, like, do you have any? Can you give any sense of like?

• 10:25Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 10:25Martin Casado?

  The extent that.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Where we see it, it's just that shift in like the mass of people that are suddenly coming in the front door. It's like, that's just the first obvious one where like a year ago, we were sitting at around 3,000 signups a day, which for a developer tool is like.

• 10:40Martin Casado?

  That's a lot.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  That's a lot.

• 10:41Martin Casado?

  It's a lot, yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Today, we're sitting at around 16,000 a day.

• 10:45Martin Casado?

  Wow.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Right? Like.

• 10:47Martin Casado?

  Do you have a sense of where they're coming from?

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Like, the wildest thing is that it's everywhere, right? Like, because like, at first, we started having a whole bunch of these agents sort of directly integrating with First Bold, that new being like the largest one, right? Like, then a whole world of like, same that new builder I O, mimics, Rocket, like, code made, windsurf, like, just like, all of these different ones. But all of them together is kind of like a four percent of the of the signups. So the rest just happens organically, right? Like, and we actually, both that new had like, used our claim flow, which is like, become one really common technique for agent experience.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  This idea that you can like, let an agent use your product before the human knows the product exists. And then, when the human wants to get involved, they go and claim whatever the agent bids, and sort of open an account. And at first, like, bold that new, which is one of these like, very consumer oriented code agents, right? Like, was using that flow and sending anybody that wanted to to really do something with their website over to us. And then, a few months ago, we changed to a white label agreement with them, where they are now like, fully vertically integrating Netlify, and they're like, white labeling us and selling it directly to their customers

• 12:11Speaker 00

  to give like, a really integrated vertical experience.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  And ironically, you cannot see that change in in in our signup numbers at all, even if that was like, our highest partner, right? Like, because like, the the general growth of the space of people building web like that.

• 12:32Martin Casado?

  Are they using AI tools? Are they using like, a cursor or chat GPT? Or is it just like, people are like, decided to make websites?

• 12:39Speaker 00

  I don't know for sure, right? Like, because you can't always see what they're building with, right? Like, but I think it would be a weird coincidence that that like, a lot more people were like, I really like HTML now, right? Like, and I think it's more likely that that that you'll just see that the amount of people building. Web apps and websites exploding because like the barrier to entry for doing it is like massively disappearing. Like you have people today that accidentally create a web app in React, right? Like you're going to ChatGPT and you're like prompted the right thing. And suddenly it spins up a canvas and it built you all this stuff and you download it and it's like, okay. Now where do I put it, right? And we're pretty much like the simplest place to put it, right?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Like, and then we have made our tooling really great for all of these sources, right? Like, and we're seeing that and we can see in the personas that come in that suddenly they go from being like developers. Obviously, still ton of developers. There's also a lot of personas that like in our onboarding like characterize themselves as like marketers or designers. So product managers or all these other roles.

• 13:47Martin Casado?

  I would expect if AI is driving this, exactly that would happen, which is you go like.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:53Martin Casado?

  Netlify has always been a very technical tool for developers. Like if you're like a JavaScript developer, you use like a hosting by yourself. So I would guess like probably the clearest indication that AI is doing it is exactly this. Like the mix of like technical versus non-technical shifts.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. And it really shifts.

• 14:11Martin Casado?

  Do you have, I mean, are there any rough numbers to that or is it just?

• 14:14Speaker 00

  I don't like.

• 14:15Martin Casado?

  Is it still vibes?

• 14:16Speaker 00

  It's still vibes. It's still vibes, right? Like, but it's, I can say the vibes are very strong. Like even just, even just talking to our customers, right? Like we can, we can see this shift. We have other things that we can see, things like for like our core audience, we have this functionality called why did it fail?

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Where when a build, like when you open a pull request, we run a build and we push that to your site. When that fails, that's always sort of a point of like, okay, now I have to go and debug it and figure out like why, what happened, right? Like, so we put a button in the UI that literally says, why did it fail? Click that button and we send like the logs and the code like to an LLM and we give you a diagnosis.

• 15:02Martin Casado?

  That's awesome.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Then first we put a button on saying, copy this result to an LLM.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Right? Like, because like if you want, you're in that loop and you want the LLM, okay, it failed, go fix it, right? Like, and immediately when we put that button in, we saw that like 25% of everyone that clicked, why did it fail? Clicked copy to LLM.

• 15:27Martin Casado?

  Wow.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  That's like also a pretty big sign of like how much this is like shifting, right? Like, and now we just launched this thing called agent runners where you can like spin up like autonomous runs with cloud code or codecs and so on, right? Like, so now how we have it like just fixed button.

• 15:43Martin Casado?

  You know, you listen remarkable to me, I will say, here's a personal anecdote, which is, I developed with Cursor in the evenings for hobby projects. I've been using Netlify for years.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:53Martin Casado?

  Right? But I never remember all the commands, like whatever. This was super remarkable to me is like, the LLMs actually know it. So I'll be in Cursor and I'll like, you know, want to be like, oh, like, what are the Netlify commands still, you know?

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:07Martin Casado?

  Whatever, deploy this, add this, whatever. And it actually knows it. And so I would say even for the case of professional developers.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:15Martin Casado?

  They're using LLMs to debug. Because I mean, it's just like, there's just so many frameworks and so many tools to know. So.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  And you should, right? Like, I mean, that's one of my big thesis that like the whole definition of a developer is really going to change, right? Like where, where the, what defined at developer at its core used to be being able to write code and understand programming languages and understand the syntax and like that layer sort of below the visible substrate of things, right? Like, and suddenly, that part of being a developer is getting way less important and potentially going to a what's zero importance, right? Like, and then the other skill set of being a developer of like

• 17:01Speaker 00

  clarity of thought, of understanding what users actually need you to build, of systems thinking and system design and so on. Those elements are suddenly becoming like the main qualifier for like, are you actually a really strong developer? And that also changes the persona, right? Like, there's a lot of personas that were like really, really great at like the puzzle level layer of like low level code and so on, but that might not be that strong in like the more humanistic layer of like. Taste and what to build and so on, right? Like, and there's a lot of people that were sort of like cut off fundamentally from development that are very strong in those layers and that start entering the field.

• 17:44Martin Casado?

  Interesting. I'm gonna give a counterpoint to that. I don't know if this writer is up, but like, try this on for size. I started programming in the 90s.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:52Martin Casado?

  And to program, you sat down at a computer and you knew a programming language and you wrote the programming language and you had a program.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:01Martin Casado?

  And so like, you were just thinking about the logic of the program.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:06Martin Casado?

  And then, you know, the 2000s, especially late 2000s rolls around in the web. And then like, to be a programmer, it's no longer about writing code. It's like, you have to know frameworks. And there's nothing fundamental about frameworks.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:19Martin Casado?

  Like for me to understand next or react or,

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:24Martin Casado?

  you know, some weird CLI, it's, there's nothing fundamental. So it really is this wasted knowledge. I'm like, I'm like, using space in my brain.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:35Martin Casado?

  You know, to remember some dumb design decision from like some random person, right? And so for me, it's actually a little bit different, which is the nice thing about AI is like all the framework stuff it knows. I don't have to waste my brain. And I can literally just think about the programming logic.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:53Martin Casado?

  Which I think is actually

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 18:56Martin Casado?

  what matters because you're actually articulating what the program can do. So it's, it's kind of a similar thing to what you're saying, but I think maybe I'm even abstracting out more. Like, I actually think, I think code's a very effective way to articulate trade offs.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:07Martin Casado?

  And to articulate what you want something to do.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:09Martin Casado?

  It actually is, right? Like, like English is ambiguous, like,

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:13Martin Casado?

  you know? And so it's fine to write code. I would just say all the framework nonsense is the stuff that we shouldn't like, we should like not worry about. And then of course, to your point, there are things where you don't have to describe so low levels code that you can do a high level.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  And, and there's so many aspects that like, we, we've both like been like hardcore, like, Our brain has been changed by sitting with stuff like a Commodore sixty four and like learning memory addresses and just taking for granted that like every little comment

• 19:42Martin Casado?

  I remember P. I remember like you're like poking like independent memory like you're like loading like.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  It was like that level, right? Like, so we also forget how much of a barrier it is like just when you start, right? Like that, like that whole learning curve of like, oh, I mistyped one character and now nothing works, right? Like, and, and I think we underestimate like how big of a difference it makes when all of that is sort of no longer a barrier, right? Like where, hey, like even if you leave out like a character here and there, like the logic still holds, right? Like the logic is still sound, right? Like, so suddenly you just need to start practicing that ability to reason with, with, with logic and to understand

• 20:29Speaker 00

  like the system. And it's really fascinating, I think, to see some of these people, like, I see sort of two journeys, right? Like I see people like us that are starting to learn how to work with AI and coming from like the world we come from. And I see these people that come from like the completely opposite apart and start learning to build software without that journey that we went through. And it's so interesting to see that interplay they have with the AI then, right? Like, because that becomes the, the, the sort of constant iteration one that's just like, why does this do this?

• 21:04Martin Casado?

  Yeah, it becomes basically an educational tool. That's exactly right. It's like, it's like, it's like the AI not only does, but also teaches you how to do it. You learn the fundamentals that way. No, I absolutely have seen the same thing. Yeah. Can I, can I move the conversation a little bit, which is, um, so we've kind of been working kind of out towards the user. We've talked about like, you know, Netlify itself, you know, you know, using AI and then how is a good target for AI? You know, as you go towards the user, we're actually seeing the browser itself seem to evolve, right? And there's like new browsers, AI level browsers. Are you starting to see impact from that? Or is that still kind of on the come?

• 21:48Speaker 00

  It's a good question. I think it's still more on to come than like something that's like very real right now. You see it in like the access patterns, right? Like where you suddenly see like all of these sites being accessed by all kinds of different agents in, in, in all kinds of different ways that are different than human access patterns, right? Like, and that comes from browsers and from tools like Claude Code and so on, right? Like one thing that Von G S just came up with and everybody like us included are copying now is this idea of like for their documentation side, use content negotiation. So when Claude Code asks for a

• 22:29Speaker 00

  page instead of sending the HTML, respond directly with the markdown. So it uses less tokens to like interpret it, right? Like

• 22:38Martin Casado?

  Oh, I see. I see. I see. I see. Oh, that makes a lot of sense, right?

• 22:41Speaker 00

  So we're starting to see those kind of patterns where we actually start like in practice, building like content negotiation where like, is this an agent accessing or is it a human accessing? And maybe we should do different things, right? Like, and I think those are sort of early signs of what will happen when even the browser starts being like that and starts like having AI inside that sometimes it's the human viewing and sometimes it's the AI in the browser.

• 23:08Martin Casado?

  Yeah. So based on this, is your mental model that most AI is working with a human? Or is your mental model that these things become more divorced over time? Because the browser question to me assumes there's a human driving the browser in tandem with an AI where like the purely agentic one, maybe there isn't a human so tightly in the loop.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think, I think it's pretty obvious that we, that in the beginning of this journey, it was all sort of very human in the loop, right? Like, and there will, I think there will always be a large set of human in the loop interactions, right? Like, and especially the browser, I think will generally be very like experience oriented, right? Like, and I'm going somewhere and I'm experiencing something. So maybe you have this assistant that helps you with everything, but it's still like very in the loop. But it's also very obvious that especially these building blocks around actually like strangely enough, like the code agents in the CLI, like Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, like

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Those are sort of churning out to be really strong generalist agents, right? Like because they live in that like CLI space where they can do anything you can do in a computer pretty easily, right? Like, and they can write codes, so they can even write their own tools to do new things and so on. And they are kind of like really being able to do longer and longer stretches of just like uninterrupted work where you give them some task and they just try to solve it, right? Like, so I think.

• 24:43Martin Casado?

  I had one of these CLI tools where I'm like, I was just trying to be like, okay, I'm gonna make it do a full game. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a, I'm gonna have a test that I'll test if the game works. And then I'm gonna have it just keep iterating on it until like it, you know, passes the test. And it ran for a few hours and it cost me $10,000.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  That's the other constraining factor.

• 25:07Martin Casado?

  For those that are watching, be careful. I was like, whoops.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  It's wild.

• 25:16Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  But I think, I mean, just to your question, right? Like, I think we'll see both, right? Like, I do think that we are on this cusp of seeing more and more like truly autonomous agents. Hopefully, they're still always doing things because some human.

• 25:30Martin Casado?

  As opposed to like actually having true, true agency and like the robotic takeover.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Hopefully, it's still like long task, but some human was like, hey, go do this thing.

• 25:39Martin Casado?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you, do you think about like, I mean, you, you talked a bit about it in the content negotiation, but do you actually think about the economics and how they're shifting as a result of all of this stuff? Because it does feel like.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:52Martin Casado?

  Spend is very different in the world of agents. It really is about tokens. It's less about like computer wrecking stories.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Everybody is repricing, right? Like, we've launched new pricing for the, for the same reason, right? Like, I think everybody is starting to build credit models in some form, right?

• 26:07Martin Casado?

  It seems to me, so I, I remember the shift from perpetual to, to like recurring. Like, I remember that, right? It feels like we're going from like a recurring to like a usage based.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:19Martin Casado?

  Based on this. And is, is your experience the same?

• 26:22Speaker 00

  It's, it's the same. I would say, I think all of us are also looking for ways to make it more outcome based rather than pure usage based, right? Like, and finding, trying to find ways, because like, often the usage of the agents, that, that's like a weird thing with usage based, right? Like, that often you, you have very little control over what. Like, it's this question I asked the agent.

• 26:44Martin Casado?

  A long one or a short one?

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Right, like, it's gonna use a lot of tokens.

• 26:48Martin Casado?

  It's gonna be a hundred bucks and twenty bucks.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  I don't really know, right? Like, it's gonna be ten thousand, right? Like, and is this game worth ten thousand or like ten dollars, right?

• 26:56Martin Casado?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  So I think a lot of us are also trying to figure out what like those elements of like value are.

• 27:03Martin Casado?

  That sounds very tough to me.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  And it's really tough. So I think in reality, everybody's kind of like used space right now, right? Like, but I think at the same time, it's not impossible that over time, even if it's tough, we start getting better at figuring out elements that feels more aligned to, to, to values and then, then just pure token usage, which feels pretty like one out of your control and not super aligned in the sense like if I could do the same thing for you.

• 27:28Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  In like five tokens, you would probably prefer it.

• 27:32Martin Casado?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  You'd probably pay me more to do it in really fast in five tokens than to do it really slow with like ten million tokens, right?

• 27:40Martin Casado?

  Are you, are you, are you using agents and operations now, like?

• 27:44Speaker 00

  We are, we are using some internally, but um, not enough, I would say. But, but we are using some, like, we are using some, like, I think especially our developer organization have, have, have built custom agents for all kinds of stuff, like linear integration and management there and things like keeping up with what's happening in next year so we can keep doing that and so on, right? Like, we've built a lot of that kind of internal tooling.

• 28:14Martin Casado?

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, for me, I'm just very interested in like, like, right now, today, not science fiction, like, where do agents apply, right? Clearly, they're a great productivity tool.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:23Martin Casado?

  They can do longer running tasks. Clearly, like, there's like basic stuff that they're pretty good at. Like, for example, if I'm like, I don't know, convert from this language to this language, like, there's good, these kind of like, you know, well scoped, well defined tasks.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:36Martin Casado?

  Seem less good at like, you know, ongoing operations where you've got to be correct and, you know, like, these are kind of these complex spaces and so forth and so.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I think in the end, in a lot of those. Like, I mean, obviously, the kind of agent we're like the highest, highest, highest adopters of is the coding agents ourselves as well, right? Like, we're even like something like agent runners we build, like, we're now building a lot of the product with those agents, right? Like, and, and

• 29:05Martin Casado?

  Have you found that's actually increased feature velocity?

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can, we can see like, yeah, oh, yeah, like, when people get good at it, it starts really increasing the velocity with which you can build stuff. And also, it increases the capacity of like, as really strong engineer to both go do some really hard focused work, but just spin off a bunch of like, the, the easy stuff along the way and get it done, right? Like, but what I was saying there is that I still think we are more in the line of using that to build programs that does stuff when it's like automations, rather than having like agents automate stuff, because it becomes like weirdly unpredictable, right? Like, and in the end, once you know what to automate, it's like simpler to

• 29:50Martin Casado?

  To just act, to actually automate it?

• 29:52Speaker 00

  To actually automate it, right?

• 29:54Martin Casado?

  I totally agree.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  But I think the, the fact that like, it's so much cheaper to write automations changes that, like, you start building a lot of automations and potentially you start building a lot of apps and automations instead of like, buying a lot of software.

• 30:10Martin Casado?

  So this is a better from his side, but it just reminded me of something. So you know Max, Max Bishman, the airflow, you know, super set guy? So like hardcore open source developer has a company called Preset. And he was telling me, he's like, you know, the most amazing thing with these, with these coding agents is I've only worked on open source. Right now I'm working on a large open source. This project's been around for a long time, so all the agents know it.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:32Martin Casado?

  We're doing kind of front end JavaScript stuff, which they're all really good at. And so, you know, so like, I feel like, and then all of the, the engineers in the company are like pretty senior.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:42Martin Casado?

  So it's like, she's like, so it's like, we all woke up and we were like superheroes. It was like, you know, and so like, you've got these senior engineers

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:51Martin Casado?

  that are using these coding models like junior engineers on an open source code base. And, you know, the velocity is 10x, right? So That makes a lot of sense, but I also compare it to, I mean, I work with companies where they're doing pretty new stuff and it's not front end and it's kind of still experimental. And maybe they've got more junior developers or whatever. And I feel like the velocity hasn't increased at all. So I would assume like, at least in the case of Netlify, like you are doing a lot of JavaScript, a lot of front end, a lot of web. I mean, I would think that is probably pretty amenable to these models or.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  And I mean, but I will say that people that get good at them start using them for things across the stack, right? Like, and I see that, right? Like you can get them to where I go.

• 31:44Martin Casado?

  More, more senior developers or more?

• 31:46Speaker 00

  More senior developers, right? Like I think, I think especially when the deeper you go in the stack, the more you need to really be like kind of an architect, right? Like to get these kind of agents to do the right stuff, right? Like, and then the higher up you go in the stack, the more you can now be like, just jump in and do it without like, without any development background.

• 32:06Martin Casado?

  Yeah. It's kind of a fun time, right?

• 32:08Speaker 00

  It's really fun.

• 32:09Martin Casado?

  Are you coding?

• 32:10Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm like, so I kind of made it like around the same time I wrote the AX article.

• 32:15Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Like a little before that, I kind of started making it my personal mission that like, I want to learn how to be a really good developer again. I would say I was a pretty strong developer, right? Like I built all of it. I built like the back and the front and everything, right? Like for the first version, like everything, like from the C++ to the CSS, right? Like everything.

• 32:35Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  But I started saying like, I want to make it my mission to become an equally good developer without writing any code myself.

• 32:46Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  And ideally without looking at code. That's still, I still, you still need to do that, right? Like, but, but I kind of like started to make it my mission. And in the beginning, it was very frustrating. And now I think it's really fun.

• 33:00Martin Casado?

  Really?

• 33:00Speaker 00

  And now I do a lot of pull request. There probably are noises.

• 33:05Martin Casado?

  You're actually submitting PRs?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  I'm doing.

• 33:08Martin Casado?

  Wait, but you haven't looked at the code?

• 33:09Speaker 00

  I mean, okay, when I do PRs to our actual code basis, I do go and look at the code because I've learned the hard way than otherwise the team does and they shouted me.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  So now I go and look at the code first and tell Claude Code to fix it before I open the pull request. A lot of that has like, we launched this new agent runner product and a lot of that has like informed it because I wanted to make sure that you could actually do the whole like cycle of iteration before you open a pull request versus like the GitHub integrations where you ask code like Claude Code to do something and then you get a pull request you never knew like directly didn't do something useful, right? Like, but, but I do find like that once you start changing that whole mentality to just like work through the context engineering and the prompts and like the systems thinking and like guiding this model, it's pretty remarkable

• 34:06Speaker 00

  what you can get it to do. And there's definitely some cases where, so it's funny, there's some cases where I've built something where realistically, if I had the time to just sit time with a code editor in a like uninterrupted stretch and write the code, I would have written it faster and probably better. But as a CEO, I definitely don't have that time, right? And in this case, I could still build it, but just by like spinning off these async run, checking on in between meetings, like where did it go? What did it do? Let me give it some feedback and do another iteration and so on, right? Like, so suddenly you can work in that way and it's a lot of fun.

• 34:48Martin Casado?

  I mean, I was just, you know, I, so I, I kind of work on these home projects and I was actually using like the Cursor CLI and I was at dinner. I was curious how I was doing. So I was like checking this out.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  I've done the same.

• 35:03Martin Casado?

  A VC at a dinner, like talking about deals, checking out my coding agents.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  I totally been like in the same situation and, and it's funny, I've noticed like. Every founder CEO with a technical background I talk to now doing pull request again. It's just really funny.

• 35:23Martin Casado?

  I think it's, I literally think it's a framework issue. Like if coding was simpler like it used to be, like everybody was still be coding, but it just got, you just have to learn too many different things. And so it's really remarkable. Do you, do you ascribe to the, that AI is going to kind of usher in the dead, what's called the dead web theory where it's like, it's only going to be agents talking to websites and you know, there's no longer a UI issue and.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  I get it. Like I, I get it, but like, I don't, I, I really don't believe in it. Like, and I don't see it. I see the opposite happening now, right? Like in some, everything is happening at the same time, right? Like, so you have a lot of slop generated that like other agents consume and you have like, like lots of LinkedIn. That's just like chat GPT and so on, right? Like probably people are asking chat GPT to summarize it from it and so on.

• 36:14Martin Casado?

  I think the cliche is like, to sound fancy, I use AI to create something big and then to read it, you use AI to summarize it.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  But there's also just way more people having fun building crazy stuff. And there's a lot of that out there now. And there's people building like really cool, like web GL games and so on, that they could like just never managed to build before. And like, there's so much going on that I think that theory just under, like there's so many of these theories, I think that just underestimates like humans and like.

• 36:48Martin Casado?

  I will say, I personally have visited more new websites in the last six months and probably the five years prior, just because there's so much more cool stuff. I'm like, I've like kind of reduced everything to like a handful of sites that I check every morning in the last five years. And now there's always something new and it's like.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I think it's totally true. I mean, I, I also see it as just a general moment of like people building way more stuff than they did before. Right? Like, and I still see, and way more people building, right? Like, and that's again, back to that idea of like, it becomes more accessible to be a developer. We open up, like for so long, we've taken for granted that like. Again, if you're sort of really generous, go beyond JavaScript and so on, right? Like, let's say, what would you say is like, like 100 million professional developers in the world? Maybe even less?

• 37:36Martin Casado?

  I mean, we always estimate 60 roughly. It's probably more than that.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, but like, if you're really generous, you say like 100 million, right? Like, out of like, what, 8 billion people or something like that, right? Like, that's like a really, really small part of humankind.

• 37:52Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  And every other human can only use software

• 37:56Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  that those developer builds for them, right? Like, and that's like such a constraint on that part, right? Like, and to me, when that constraint goes away, we're just gonna have a lot, like unimaginable amount of more software, right? Like, yeah, maybe some of it will be bad, but there'll also be a lot more good stuff.

• 38:15Martin Casado?

  The future's gonna be weirder, wilder, and more wonderful than we could imagine. This is an aside, but it's an adjacency, which is, I really love that 3JS is having a moment.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, me too, me too.

• 38:26Martin Casado?

  It's amazing.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  It's amazing.

• 38:27Martin Casado?

  So for those listening, 3JS is a JavaScript library for 3D. And it's always just been kind of this.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:33Martin Casado?

  You know, like, why would you use the web for 3D? You know, like, you know, like, you didn't have, like, you know? And now there's just full-on, like, games being written, multiplayer games being written, really high-quality graphics. Like, did you see that one recently? It was like.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, the small planet, the tiny planet.

• 38:51Martin Casado?

  The mail delivery one.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it was so amazing. And just like.

• 38:55Martin Casado?

  And that probably wasn't even using AI, but like, it is, it is a time now that I do think that.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Precisely, and it'll get encoded into like, the, the, the language models will train on it. They'll figure it out and you'll start seeing people just like being able to just like spin something like that on.

• 39:10Martin Casado?

  That's why I say, and you were there too, because we're old. But like, I mean, this does remind me of the early days of the web. It really does. Like, you just never know what to expect.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 39:19Martin Casado?

  There's this whole creative element, you know? It has nothing to do with business. Nobody to be sass. It's like kind of random, kind of, you know? And it's a cool time to be in the industry.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  It's really cool. And I think. Like for me, it also reminds me just like in a much in small scale and when I started Netlify and like.

• 39:39Martin Casado?

  When was that?

• 39:40Speaker 00

  So I started working on it in like 2013, right? Like, and then the we launched out of private beta in March 2015. And back then, a front-end developers was like, they were seen as like a pseudo developer, right? Like, it was like someone that took a Photoshop file, sliced it up and then handed it to a real developer. They would implement it into something working, right? Like, that was a front-end developer. And part of like the the mission back then was like, hey, if we give them like the right tool chain, these front-end developers will go crazy and they will just build the whole thing, right? Like, if we just separate all that backend stuff for them and like, that was like the jam stack idea, right?

• 40:16Martin Casado?

  I remember your early pitch, I remember your early pitch where you were like,

• 40:21Martin Casado?

  best for static sites, maybe you'll see a little bit of dynam. Seriously, you're like, you can use it for static websites. And then like now, look at it now, it's like, everything, like, everything is built using this.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  Everything is built using on it, right? Like, and and these front-end developers are obviously the mainstream developers, right? Like, there's like no question now, right? And that's just like the same moment I think we are with this chism where like, there's still this notion of like, oh, these vibe quarters, they'll still need like a real developer to come like, and we will give them the tools. And we all just see like this massive.

• 40:55Martin Casado?

  But I will, I will say,

• 40:59Martin Casado?

  like, the hardcore developers also became full-stack JavaScript developers. It wasn't like, you know, like, everybody just kind of shifted over that.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  And I think it'll be the same again, right?

• 41:10Martin Casado?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Everybody has to like, take that next leap, but it will be a much, much bigger pool. And it'll probably also be a different shift where like, today, you're kind of like either a developer or not to some degree, right? Like, of course, there's mixtures, there's some VCs that develop software.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  In general, right, like, people that are like developers, like, hired with the title developer. And that's what they do, right? Like, and I think that's the other shift that like, I think software development will just be a skill.

• 41:40Martin Casado?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  And there will still, like, just like with writing, there's still professional writers. But like, all of us also have to know how to write as part of our jobs, right?

• 41:49Martin Casado?

  Same thing with like, yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Development will become like that, right? Like, you're like, there'll be a level of it that you're just expected to be able to do. In lots of different jobs and then there'll still be some expert developers that are like only doing that, but it'll be the minority, I think.

• 42:05Martin Casado?

  Bring us a bit into the future. So where do you think this? So I mean, I mean, just actually to try and maybe catch up the conversation a little bit, which is or summarize the conversation is, is last time we talked about this was a little bit speculative. You've seen actually dramatic increase in users. Clearly.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  We've also seen like after that, so many companies start focusing on the X, right? And as I said, especially the developer tool space, right? Like where I think everybody has just seen, okay, we have to go in this direction, right? Like Bessemer had the updated version of like the developer tool loss and the first one was A X, right? Like it's like recent. It's like an example. And there's so many like from Superbase to like Neon, like everybody is like super focused on like, we've got to work with these agents. So we don't really matter, right? Like, but then also in spaces like, like the C G of HubSpot, he's really like geared HubSpot towards like, we need to just be really great for these agents to work with, right? Like, and that's going to be the interface to much of our data and automations and everything like

• 43:06Speaker 00

  that, right? Like, and you're starting to see, I think now with like chat G P T's shopping, like integration, you'll start seeing everybody in the e-commerce space be like, okay, how do we really deal with this and so on, right? Like, so I think it's also become a really tangible industry.

• 43:22Martin Casado?

  Really tangible, changing the behavior and CEOs submitting P R's, like change in development, changing like the type of users going to the side, like all of these things. Like, do you have like a bit of a more science fictiony kind of prognostication for where things go? Or do you think now it's, can you clearly see the next few years from here?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  I think everybody, like, I don't think anybody can right now, right? Like, I think we're definitely in this like wild space where like what's clear is that everything is changing so fast. I have paths like I believe in, right? Like that trends I believe in and things I think will definitely happen, right? Like, and as I said, like, I think. I I do think we are going to this like world where software is much more of a thing that that's not built by like this small, relatively speaking, really small part of humanity for all the rest of humanity and where software is something much more malleable and that everybody can like sort of like do do stuff on. And I think that also means that like

• 44:24Speaker 00

  code as we know it today is gonna be much more of a niche thing. That's not really very involved in like the the daily process of of software, which will change the infrastructure around software building a lot, right? Like, because everything is so code centric right now, like things like GitHub and pull requests and so on, right? Like, all of that, I think is gonna evolve to like a level of abstraction where it's much more about understanding like the outcome of what the agents do and the iteration with those agents and like introspecting and so on. I think browsers will evolve really dramatically from this and we'll have much more of like that originally concept of a user agent on the web is getting real, right?

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Like, we're gonna have like all of these different ways of of of consuming the web where some looks somewhat like the browser now and some really doesn't. A lot of things that's held us like that's made it really challenging to build like very visual or UI-driven experience and so on are gonna be solved. Like, for example, all of the accessibility constraints, right? Like, they they they're gonna not really matter because like, what what would you prefer? Like, trying to access my e-commerce through a screen reader or just through chat GPT in voice mode, right?

• 45:40Martin Casado?

  I think, listen, I think about this all the time, which I it feels like the consumption layer is changing, right? So like, my son loves to chat with AI friends. And when my my son's fifteen, when my son becomes eighteen, to get a bank account, like, is he gonna go some shitty SaaS bank website? Or is it gonna come through this?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:04Martin Casado?

  Which also kind of begs the question is like. You know, like the web was never super conversational based. It was more UI based. And so does that shift? Is like, is the consumption layer going to include AI going forward? Like,

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's, I think the consumption layer is definitely gonna include AI. And a lot of things are gonna happen in inside like agents that people even have like, like I think people will also, that's another reason I think AI is important versus like that company that thinks they will build like you'll go to their website and they will build.

• 46:38Martin Casado?

  But it's probably, probably the consumption layer is going to become AI and then the AI consumes the traditional web.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Precisely because I don't think you like, I think you like already now you see people like have history with their chat GPT or Claude. And they really have a preference, right? Like, and they don't want to go to like the banks AI and talk to that, right? Like they just want to interact in that way. So I think a lot of that will be really driven by like,

• 47:01Martin Casado?

  Yeah.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  agents you interact with. Then I think at the same time, I think the application layer, it's going to be a whole new part of the web, right? Like where, where a lot of interaction and like, like seeing what's happening and like that whole concept of being able to build something and put it on a URL. And everybody can use it and interact with it and can be like collaborative and so on. Like, I think that's still such a strong underpinning of the web that now that everybody can build more of it. Like we also just at the same time, like we're gonna see less of like the traditional bank website, but we're gonna see much more like interesting stuff.

• 47:39Martin Casado?

  Yeah, I think it's so remarkable, the affinity between users and their, to your point, like their AIs.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:45Martin Casado?

  Like, and it's not just memory. Like, a lot of people are like, well, you have the chat history of memory. It's not that like, did you see like the outcry and the move from GPT four to five?

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:53Martin Casado?

  They're like, ah, yeah, it was so much better than it turns out. That just meant it was more friendly.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:58Martin Casado?

  You just got, you just got used to this. And so I think it's pretty clear that there's gonna be a pretty serious attachment. And they're gonna want to like actually filter the web through that. So you know, something that occurs to me is that there's two kinds of approach here. So some of the tools that I use, it's like they kind of do the work for me, which. Maybe as an old developer, I don't quite like, because I like to have the creativity. I like to be very involved. And one thing that I've actually really appreciated, I mean philosophically about kind of what Netlify is doing. And I just wanted your thoughts about this is like, I get to use whatever tools I want and like, I get to be the developer. And like, how do you view this as it plays out? Like, is this actually a philosophical distinction that's real or am I making that up?

• 48:40Speaker 00

  No, no, I think it's real. And I think there's two really different mindsets on it, right? Like, there is that mindset of like, building tools that claim to be like, we are now your developer. And like, you don't need developers anymore because like, the AI is your developer.

• 48:54Martin Casado?

  It's like you're outsourced developer.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Right, and you're outsourced. Our approach has really been like, you and our developer, right? Like, whether it's to our existing developer base or whether it's to all of these new people that come in and start this journey, right? Like, it's really like, okay, if you want to go on this journey, you're now a developer and you have to learn things. And you have to understand like, what happened, like, how software is built, right? Like, code is like a little part of it, right? Like, but if you want to like, talk to a database, you have to like,

• 49:22Martin Casado?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Know just like some, some element of like, what's happening in the world. And you have to know that to be able to collaborate with these AI agents. And, and it's not like, you're not going to get success if your expectation is that you just go from them, build me X, Y, C app and they will do perfect, right? Like, you're going to be successful if you're willing to learn how to develop software in a world where these agents are able to multiply your abilities, to write code, to do all kinds of stuff, but still have to take the direction from someone, right?

• 50:03Speaker 00

  Like, and I think that's what sort of underpins our whole approach to this and our whole philosophy. This idea that we are like, helping billions of people become developers and take part in this practice of building software. And not that it's like, everybody's just a consumer now, right?

• 50:20Martin Casado?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:23Martin Casado?

  This is an aside.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:26Martin Casado?

  But I wonder if you have the same experience that I do, which is I find that like using AI as someone who's been developing for a long time is like an exercise in abdicating opinion. Because these, these models do dazzling things, but it's not always the dazzling thing that I would, I would expect it to be, right? It's almost like I've got to like let go of expectations because I, I can articulate, I want this and it will do that, but I would have done it quite differently. And so, you know, A, do you have the same experience of like, you kind of have to like let go? And then B, do you think this is just something because we've been developing? And like that will just not be an issue as a new set of developers shows up?

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Maybe that's why all founder CEOs is now programming with agents because it's like we've already gone through that in a way. You started hiring these developers and you asked them like, do this thing? And they come back with this thing that's like pretty cool, but it's like, I would have thought like, why did you do it that way?

• 51:25Martin Casado?

  I love that. So you're almost like reclaiming power. That's so funny.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  Kind of already got used to that, right? Like, so now I can just do it in a closed loop with an agent that don't actually get angry at you. And you're like, no, change it to my way. So, but, but.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  There's definitely something to it, right? Like that you have to work at that level of like, it's not exact, like, it's not exact, right? Like, but you have to be really good at articulating what is it that matters, right? Like, and what is it you actually care about? And what is it that the agent can just make up? Because like, that's fine. They're like, as long as it works, right? Like, and, and it feels very different than like, it's a very different feel than the traditional sort of part of really like centering yourself, like figuring out exactly in your head, like, how should this software be put together? And so on.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  And you need to sort of like, out of that step, have like, just a really clear idea of like, what is the flow that really matters? What is like the, the part of this software I really care about? And then what is the part that like, fill in the blanks?

• 52:37Martin Casado?

  So one of the consistent things in this conversation we've had is the system should not be the developer for you. Like the user, you know, system builder should be the developers. But now that's not just this subset of professional developers, it can be anyone.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:53Martin Casado?

  So maybe let's just end on this. For those that are listening to this, who are not professional developers that want to enter this, like, what would you recommend to them as far as like, where, places to start? Like, how, how to get going, maybe things to read?

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, so ironically, I think it's harder for me to guide that journey than someone from that space, right? Like, but people I see going on that journey, right? Like, I see them start with like, tools like Bolt or Replid or, or whatever. And then I see them jump very quickly from like,

• 53:23Martin Casado?

  Bolt, did you say Bolt?

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Bolt, Bolt, Bolt on new, right? Yeah, yeah, we have like, for example, like, we, we, we just had like,

• 53:29Martin Casado?

  Bolt's great, by the way, I love Bolt.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  I, I love it, right? And we just had this, this, this launch event where one of our challenges, like silly challenge, right? Like, but we wanted an event and all of our team was building the product. So it was like, who's going to build the event site?

• 53:44Martin Casado?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  So I told the team that this guy, that's like a customer success manager, that's this background and like, you go in this LinkedIn, right? Like, no sort of technical background or anything, but he had been like, super active in the Bolt community. And, and he's just become really good at prompting Bolt, right? Like, and he was tweeting at me with like, a redesign of Netlify he made in Bolt. And it was like, really cool.

• 54:11Martin Casado?

  Wow.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Like, let's just ask him to make the event page.

• 54:13Martin Casado?

  No.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  And he just prompted the event page entirely in Bolt.

• 54:18Martin Casado?

  That's so cool.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  And the event is over now, but the page is probably still at netlify.com/deploy, right? Again, I think it's like, a really like, I think it's like, it was a very high performing event page for us. It's like, like, one of the highest performing event pages we've had in the last four years, right? Like, and And he has just like, he has really learned a skill set, right? Like, it's not, I could not go, I'll admit, I can't go prompt Bolt to make that event pitch. Like, but he's really built that skill set and he's just built it by being like really curious and then looking at all the things he likes, right? Like, he has like a site, I think it's really cool, has that pattern. I'm gonna tell Bolt, like, look at this site and make, replicate this pattern and then combine it with this other pattern, right?

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Like, and I think a lot of the people that start now starts with that kind of sort of remixing, right? Like, and just like, how can I just like remix something? And then the people, like, then some of them starts just going deeper, right? Like, they start using plot code and cursor and play around and they go directly to Netlify and they start like, learning how more of the software work and they interrogate the models constantly. Not like, they don't just take the outcome for granted, right? Like, they keep interrogating, like, why did you do that? And like, how did you build that? And try to actually like, use curiosity to understand. And those people are really learning fast.

• 55:41Martin Casado?

  I do think this is a really important point to make that everybody should know is so, you know, I work with many of these AI companies.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:48Martin Casado?

  And they have, you know, whether it's in a creative domain or a code domain or a technical domain, they have users that don't come from those domains.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:55Martin Casado?

  And, um, and they still have to work hard.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:59Martin Casado?

  Right? So it's not like labor is being removed. Like, it's still, the, the best people work the hardest out of it.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  They work the hard.

• 56:05Martin Casado?

  The best people still spend the most amount of time, right? It's just like, the, the, the product is different in this time. And so for those of you that are interested, I do think, you know, and to use these AI tools, just realize that, you know, like, it's, it is magic in that it gives you a result, but it is not magic in that you still have to put in the time and the effort to learn it. But they're great learning tools to produce great outputs and so.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  It's funny because like, I, in, in the past before all of this AI, when people asked.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  What to do to be a good developer, I said, like, just have a really high tolerance for frustration.

• 56:39Martin Casado?

  That's about right.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  You're just constantly gonna do things in the beginning that this like, it doesn't work and it breaks and so on, right? Like, and I think it's still not.

• 56:47Martin Casado?

  I'm not sure if it's any different.

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Exactly, that's my point, right? Like, I think it's kind of the same, right? Like, it's like, that part of it's probably still the same. You're still gonna be just like, okay, it didn't work, but I'm gonna try again, right? Like, and it broke and I'm gonna try again and like, I'm gonna figure out how it works. And you gotta just have that kind of like tenacity of like, just keep going.

• 57:06Martin Casado?

  Amazing. On that note, I think this is a great place to end. And thank you so much for showing up. That was a lot of fun.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  That was really fun. Thank you.

• 57:22Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com/a16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures.