952: VS Code, GitHub & Copilot - UNIVERSE 25 Announcements + Reactions

Live from GitHub Universe, Wes, Scott, and CJ talk about the latest AI and developer tools from GitHub, including Agent HQ, Copilot integrations, and the new mission control for agents. They also share stories from the Syntax meetup, hack their conference badges, and debate AI’s role in coding. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 03:39 This year’s GitHub Universe badges were next-level 07:35 Keynote recap: GitHub Agents, Copilot, and Mission Control 18:21 Brought to you by Sentry.io 20:33 Plan Mode and the future of collaborative coding 23:40 Cursor’s new trick: firing off agents straight from Slack 25:32 Copilot Metrics Dashboard and agent analytics 27:53 Effortless MCP integration and custom agent workflows 31:35 Wrapping up GitHub Universe 2025 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, live from... Where are we? San Francisco, live from New York! We are not live at all, we're recording here at GitHub Universe 2025. We were here last year, which was pretty interesting, and it's nuts to see. Like, last year, we were talking about, like, better copilot, like, tab completion and stuff like that. And now, it's just like, agents and all this stuff that CJ hates.

• 0:29Wes Bos?

  We're gonna, we're gonna go through a couple of things here. We're gonna kind of rattle through all the announcements that they have and talk about that as to, like, are they catching up to Cursor and all these things? And what is the interesting stuff? And how does it all work together? We're gonna talk about our badges, which is really cool. I think possibly very, maybe even more interesting to some of the audience. And, uh, yeah, it's good. We had a meetup last night, thanks to everybody who came out. That was a hoot, eh?

• 0:55Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah, it was great. Everybody, man, we had a big turnout last year for the meetup.

• 0:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 0:59Scott Tolinski?

  And it was a, just like, a great mix of the types of folks from all different companies and working on different problems, fans of the show. And this year was just even better. We had a massive table of free stuff. We had security guards and police officers coming up and being like, "Can I get some of this stuff?"

• 1:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah, check X for that part. A San Francisco cop driving around the city with our hat on.

• 1:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yeah, our internet hat.

• 1:25Wes Bos?

  The internet hat on. Yeah. Props to everyone who came out. That was, that was always really fun, having meetups and getting to chat with people. Because you get to hear the type of stuff people are working on, the problems that they're hitting, what they're learning. You don't necessarily hear that stuff every single day. We try to solicit it as much as we can, but just talking one-on-one with people. And also, like-

• 1:45Scott Tolinski?

  All night long, talking one-on-one.

• 1:47Wes Bos?

  There's a lot of devs who came from companies that are not allowed to talk about stuff that they work on.

• 1:54Wes Bos?

  And, like, they, they gave us the scoop on some of that stuff. And it's always really interesting getting to hear from these, like, huge companies that use this tech, but they're not allowed to talk about it.

• 2:06Scott Tolinski?

  Huge companies that we cannot name.

• 2:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Wes Bos?

  Just fruit companies and stuff like that. Oh, man.

• 2:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. It was great. So shout out to everybody who showed up to that. And then we also had a big Syntax team meeting. We got the whole team here from all over the globe. We are a global team now. We have a-

• 2:26Wes Bos?

  It's a Canadian podcast with a-

• 2:28Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, sure, yes.

• 2:29Wes Bos?

  With a global team. You know, you always see the stuff like "Made in America" with international components. Like, this is a Canadian podcast with international help.

• 2:39Scott Tolinski?

  I think only, what, a very small percentage of the team is in Canada now. I don't know if we can continue to say that, but-

• 2:46Wes Bos?

  Doesn't matter.

• 2:47Scott Tolinski?

  You could just declare it if you'd like.

• 2:48Wes Bos?

  It's like our grassroots. It began in Canada, mostly.

• 2:52Scott Tolinski?

  Just as much as the team lives in Colorado.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55Scott Tolinski?

  I will say this. This is a Coloradan podcast.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm here too, by the way. Hello.

• 3:01Wes Bos?

  CJ, what's up?

• 3:02Scott Tolinski?

  CJ is joining us in the booth at GitHub U.

• 3:05Wes Bos?

  As a resident AI hater.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'm going into this blind, so I did not watch the keynote. I'm just gonna be live reacting to what these guys tell me. And I'll give you the real feedback about it, I guess. I don't know.

• 3:18Scott Tolinski?

  So, yeah, Wes and I will give you the Microsoft shill take and then CJ gives you the real take.

• 3:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah, leave your comments right now. We hear ya. We're shills and everything like that. No, we're not. This is not an ad. I'm not getting paid for any of this. We're simply just checking it out and reporting what's going on. Because we know a lot of you guys use these tools.

• 3:39Scott Tolinski?

  Speaking of shilling, these GitHub badges are really sick.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the coolest part of this conference, honestly.

• 3:45Scott Tolinski?

  Last year, yeah, last year the badge had an e-ink screen and you could hack it to put whatever you want.

• 3:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Scott Tolinski?

  This year, it's a different level. I don't know. I'll have to post pictures of this. I made a GoldenEye 64 logo for Syntax and put it on here. But there is a Flappy Bird, there is an Etch A Sketch, there is a Tamagotchi. It is a whole ass screen.

• 4:11Wes Bos?

  It's a-

• 4:11Speaker 02

  There's a Tamagotchi?

• 4:12Wes Bos?

  I don't know. So last year it was a... It was made by Raspberry Pi, but it was technically like an Arduino. And I believe that is the same this year, but it also has a Wi-Fi chip in it. So, basically, the whole badge is a printed circuit board that has a Wi-Fi chip in it. It's got a Lipo 3.7 volt battery. USB-C to plug in and then the whole thing is running MicroPython. Which is like, you code these apps in Python. You can run any code you want on it. But like, the sort of the framework for building apps on this thing is preloaded. So you write them with MicroPython. And absolutely wild that is a printed circuit board.

• 4:57Scott Tolinski?

  This is a badge. Yes, we're not clear. This is a conference badge. You know, the thing that's normally, it's just some little plastic thing hanging. My kids are gonna go absolutely nuts playing Flappy Bird on this thing.

• 5:08Wes Bos?

  I got an Edgescats running on it. And as soon as I can, I'm gonna hook it up to the Syntax API. And like pull the latest episode or something like that. Because now that it literally has Wi-Fi on it. Like previously, it was e-NC. So you had to hook a battery up. And then, once the e-NC was set, you can unplug it and it will just stay that way for forever. But this is, this is an actual full color display.

• 5:34Scott Tolinski?

  Brought in my GitHub contributions and all that stuff.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Oh, you got it hooked up? Yeah, so I haven't hooked mine up yet. Like, to connect it to the Wi-Fi, you actually have to connect it to your computer. And like, is you like modify a config file? Is that what it was?

• 5:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you modify a config file. And then I actually was messing with the gallery and I was trying to install some other images. I had this really wonderful photo of Wes with his long hair. That I was trying to get on my badge, but it kept crashing the memory on it. For some reason, I think it's this photo specifically.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  It's Wes's face.

• 6:04Scott Tolinski?

  The badge was just like, I can't, I can't let you do that.

• 6:07Wes Bos?

  It's good. And so, I actually bricked mine. Not I crashed it, I bricked it.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  You had to reflash the firmware?

• 6:14Wes Bos?

  Well, what had happened is, is that like, I uploaded the Wi-Fi credentials and it wasn't working. So I was just like, holding down random combinations of buttons. And I like totally bricked the thing to a point where it started running in like a bootloader mode. And like a bootloader mode on these things is where you can change like the lower level software that it runs on. And I did something. So luckily, they took it back and gave me another one.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Oh, nice.

• 6:40Wes Bos?

  Because I goofed it up pretty far.

• 6:42Scott Tolinski?

  Can we just appreciate that? Out of all the types of people who would end up bricking their badge, Wes managed to probably be the first person, which is so endlessly predictable.

• 6:53Wes Bos?

  And I told the folks from GitHub and they're like, "Good." Like, it's hacker mentality, you know? Dip into it.

• 6:59Scott Tolinski?

  We're happy that you bricked your badge.

• 7:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Scott Tolinski?

  We're very happy about that, yeah.

• 7:02Wes Bos?

  So, pretty fun. Maybe we are due for another. We did an episode on like electronics and microcontrollers, maybe like a year and a half ago. But now that we have like this little thing, I think there's an appetite for something else.

• 7:18Scott Tolinski?

  I had a great time on this last night. In fact, I didn't even like go to bed because I was like up in the Python for this last night.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Because you guys got yours early, so you've been able to hack on it a little bit.

• 7:28Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. So, tonight CJ will stay up.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 7:31Wes Bos?

  Year-round.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  That's my night.

• 7:32Wes Bos?

  And be able to do it.

• 7:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, cool. Do we want to get into the keynote now and talk a little bit about some of the announcements?

• 7:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So, the keynote at these things, as you can imagine, is always, you know, we're at GitHub Universe. So, at GitHub Universe, you can imagine a keynote's going to be fancy new features in GitHub. There's also quite a bit about VS Code as there was last year. Like, last year during the keynote, it was a lot of like, "Yeah, okay, VS Code is starting to compete with Cursor." Like, are we even allowed to talk about Cursor kind of situation, right? Where like this year, it was definitely like, a big message was features that exist already that are now being way more useful. So, there's a new center, Mission Control Center, for agents within GitHub,

• 8:23Scott Tolinski?

  where basically you are able to control and send agents off working on problems within GitHub.

• 8:32Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Scott Tolinski?

  In a more organized manner. So, you could assign things, even last year or half a year ago, whatever. You could have a PR, you could assign it to Copilot. Copilot could go off and work on it. It could do it in the background and then it would come back with answers. But now with this, with this new Mission Control, it's a lot more integrated, where you can send a cloud agent to go and work on it. That Cloud Agent can start to work on it. If you want to pick it up yourself, you can then have it open directly in your editor, continue working on it. You can use other agents in there. You can use Claude Code.

• 9:16Scott Tolinski?

  You can assign things now to Claude Code. You could assign things to Codex rather than just assigning it to only Copilot. How are we feeling about that? Have you guys used assigning issues?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Slightly. I've done it like in a in a GitHub issue. You can say like, hey, Copilot, check this out. And then it goes off and there's a link that will pull up like the in browser editor showing you what it's doing. So I've done that a couple of times.

• 9:41Wes Bos?

  I think the big thing that they're fixing here is that it just felt clunky previously. So like, if you want to kick off an agent to build a task, you have like a couple of options, right? You can use Claude Code on your computer. You can throw Claude Code like on a VM, but then it doesn't have access to all of your things. You can kick it off on github.com. But then like, I found in that workflow, it's like, well, it didn't really do what I wanted.

• 10:08Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 10:09Wes Bos?

  Now I have to like, sit here and wait for it and then go back and type on what I wanted. And it's like, well, now I want to edit some of the code. So like, now I gotta like, check that out. And like, now the, seems like the flow of this seems to be a lot easier. Where like the blur between it actually happening on GitHub and happening in your editor is a lot better. So all of these agents run in GitHub Actions. And GitHub Actions can run in your own infrastructure, which is, that's huge.

• 10:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Wes Bos?

  For people, they want to bring their own infrastructure. You don't want to either necessarily pay for that or there's like, security concerns. You don't, you can't run your own code on somebody else's servers for whatever reason.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  To me, that seems like, kind of just like, the biggest feature here is now you have a place to run your agents. You don't have to like, set up a server. You don't have to like, configure things manually.

• 11:01Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  It's kind of just like, a nice point and click way of having your agents running in the cloud in the background.

• 11:06Wes Bos?

  I think the biggest thing here was the fact that you can bring Claude Code. You can bring Codex. You can bring, you bring your own agent. Because like, I was watching this keynote and I was like, this is awesome, but Like, what if we don't want to use the GitHub flavor of everything? You know, is it going to be their only their own thing? GitHub is just like, yeah, you do what you want. Like GitHub is where we have all of our software, all of our our actions. It's where we build everything. And if, when it comes to all this agentic stuff and it doesn't, it's either like bolted on the side, you know, via some like plugin. But like, no, this is like first class support for

• 11:46Scott Tolinski?

  In the workforce.

• 11:47Wes Bos?

  All the other ones. And, and one thing they teased was that you can now, if you have like a GitHub Copilot subscription, you can just log into Codex.

• 11:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 11:57Wes Bos?

  Which is OpenAI's coding engine. And like, it just comes with your subscription.

• 12:02Scott Tolinski?

  Totally.

• 12:03Wes Bos?

  To have access to. I don't know what the like gotchas are on that yet. But that's pretty sick.

• 12:08Scott Tolinski?

  And I'm curious about that because I've had a Copilot subscription. Because I am a GitHub star, I get access to the Copilot stuff.

• 12:16Wes Bos?

  Oh, my gosh. Friggin' royalty over here.

• 12:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 12:18Wes Bos?

  I pay for it with my own money.

• 12:20Scott Tolinski?

  I know, and that is why I got the side of the podcast booth all to myself. Because they said, the star needs.

• 12:27Wes Bos?

  He's a star.

• 12:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 12:28Wes Bos?

  Okay, hold on, can we pause a second there? Um, like, quick poll, how many of you got to meet Satya Nadella today?

• 12:35Wes Bos?

  CJ? I did not. No, Scott?

• 12:36Scott Tolinski?

  I did not know either, yes.

• 12:38Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah, I actually got to hang out with, we'll, we'll put the thing over top of the thing. But. Wow. I got a, so Microsoft will like, will email us with these like guests. They have like a PR company. And they'll email us with these guests who are just like, no, we're not having like your, like C-suite, whatever.

• 12:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 12:56Wes Bos?

  Like on here to bullshit about X, Y, and Z. Like, that's not interesting for the people, the actual developers who write code that are listening to this type of thing. So like, who can we get? I was like, how about Satya? And they're like, we're working on it. And I'm like, yeah, right, yeah, right. And then I got like a weird message last night, being like, hey, come to 10 p, 10 a.m. Come to this location.

• 13:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, come to the pier, yeah.

• 13:20Wes Bos?

  And we can, and Satya comes in and just pops out. And, uh, man, that was, that was really cool to meet him. I gave him an internet hat, which you can get in our swag store. And that was, it was a cool experience.

• 13:34Scott Tolinski?

  That's the West mode, though. Anytime they're like, can, uh, can someone so come on? And it's like, how about Zuck? Can we get Zuck? Like, and like, what's this always asking for?

• 13:42Wes Bos?

  My goal is, I want to get Zuck. But like, only ask him about like, coding.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:49Wes Bos?

  I don't give a shit about like, whatever you're working on right now.

• 13:52Scott Tolinski?

  What are your actual thoughts about React JS?

• 13:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Scott Tolinski?

  How do you feel about Next JS?

• 13:55Wes Bos?

  Or just like, um, so Sadia was talking about how like, he used to be a developer, and now like, like the, he still understands development, but it's like, it's, how you develop is, is much different than how he did a long time ago. I was like, can we get him on a CSS battle?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 14:10Wes Bos?

  You know, he vibe off.

• 14:11Scott Tolinski?

  Get a little one.

• 14:12Wes Bos?

  Sadia can vibe with the, the Copilot. Me and Scott will do, like, and CJ will do no AI, and we'll, we'll go head to head.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  That'd be great.

• 14:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Let's make it happen.

• 14:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:24Wes Bos?

  But anyways, you're a GitHub star.

• 14:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I am. And, and, uh, because of that, I don't even know what I was talking about.

• 14:31Wes Bos?

  Uh, we're talking about the free, uh, Codex access.

• 14:34Scott Tolinski?

  So I've been using the Copilot stuff. You can have access to agents, or not agents, you can have access to any of the models with like, I could have Claude, Sonnet, whatever.

• 14:43Wes Bos?

  Yep.

• 14:43Scott Tolinski?

  Via Copilot, not via a Claude subscription.

• 14:46Wes Bos?

  And you could use Copilot CLI instead of Claude code, right?

• 14:51Scott Tolinski?

  But, but I could also, in open code or anywhere else, I'm signing in with Copilot, and then having access to the models. But my understanding of that is that the context windows are all shrunk.

• 15:02Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 15:02Scott Tolinski?

  On that, via Copilot.

• 15:04Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 15:05Scott Tolinski?

  So that's what I'm curious about with, uh, Codex. If you're signing in with Codex, is it, is it the same experience?

• 15:12Wes Bos?

  Is it as good?

• 15:13Scott Tolinski?

  Is it, is it the?

• 15:13Wes Bos?

  Or is it the Walmart version?

• 15:15Scott Tolinski?

  Is it the whole hog?

• 15:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, that's fair.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess, to get the skeptics' take here, like, I'm looking at their blog posts on, uh, Agent HQ, they're calling it, and there is a box for third-party agents. So it would seem that if the third-party, you have like, direct third-party integration, third-party access, you would get the full version of Claude or whatever else. It kind of, I mean, I don't know the details, but it would seem like you would need a subscription for each of those to kind of like, set them up, maybe? But, I don't know, skeptics' take, like, this is, uh, it's cool. I, I think, well, honestly, one of the things that burned me out about AI was, I was trying to build a, an agent dashboard.

• 15:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I feel that.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  And, uh, like, I was coding it up, but I kept running into so many issues, and to- Have a nice polished product and that uses your same subscription and supports all the stuff you like. It's decent. I'm not, I mean, I want to see it. I want to try it out, but it looks cool.

• 16:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, for me too, there's, you end up using this stuff and you go so far in one direction of like, okay, now I'm managing, now I'm managing context. I'm a context engineer. Okay, now I'm getting into, I've hit these issues with agents. I need to be more deterministic. I'm getting into more deterministic workflows and tying in MCP servers with code rather than just like constantly LLM stuff. And you just end up going further and further down this road just to get something that plays nice a little bit. And one thing that I found to be absolutely fascinating with any of this stuff is when CJ released his AI coding rant, the comments, you can tell where people are in that exact same journey based on the comment they leave. Because it's like, I almost want to be like,

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Just wait.

• 16:51Scott Tolinski?

  Just wait like a couple of weeks until you hit this specific issue, which you will. And then you're going to do this to solve it. And then you're going to go down this path. And then you're going to go down this path. And it's almost like pulling that, that one more prompt lever, just in a different way of being like, yeah, okay, maybe this next one is going to actually solve all the issues here. But no, these tools are neat. And you know what? As somebody who did like to use the Copilot, assigning it to Copilot, especially for shit I didn't want to do, like CI stuff. Oh, I want to set up a change sets and like release workflow with change logs. And I honestly, I got better stuff to do in my time than just do that.

• 17:33Scott Tolinski?

  So like telling Copilot, hey, just go knock that out for me and having it do that was really nice. But then there's other times when I'd say, hey, fix this bug and it takes a long time. The feedback loop is really long.

• 17:48Wes Bos?

  That's, that's the biggest one for me is like the feedback loop sucks. And then you need to like, I need to hop it out of the agent into your editor.

• 17:57Scott Tolinski?

  If it fails, you're just like, well, I suppose I'm just going to close this issue and then just do it myself now. Yeah. So that's, that's something I'm really curious about because it was an impressive demo to be like, all right, let's hop into our editor now. Because again, like sometimes you just want the AI to get started.

• 18:10Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Scott Tolinski?

  Sometimes you just want it to do something and fix a bug or whatever and then, you know, move, I can do it. And that's really hard with the previous current. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/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/syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 18:45Wes Bos?

  I think that nobody has figured out the workflow to that yet.

• 18:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Wes Bos?

  And like, that's what a lot of people are thinking. This is the, this is the new workflow. Like, will this be the workflow of like, you, you kick it off? And like, there's also like, you can have multiple custom agents, like one that's really good at, like Kubernetes, one that's really good at test-driven development.

• 19:06Scott Tolinski?

  That to me has been effective. I, I do have agents. I have a Svelte pro agent and that, that's good for Svelte specifically because the API changes. So having an agent that says validate specifically with Svelte MCP.

• 19:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Scott Tolinski?

  Use this specific instructions or use this, that has been way more effective than just yellowing.

• 19:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Well, like, do you have a custom agent instead of an MCP server?

• 19:31Scott Tolinski?

  I have a custom agent that uses the MCP server to do various things. But the agent codes and then it validates the code with the MCP server or it looks up docs. Yeah.

• 19:42Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  So it's like specific instructions for how to use the MCP server that doesn't bloat the context because that one agent has it?

• 19:48Scott Tolinski?

  When to use, yeah, when to use the MCP server, when to, yes.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:52Wes Bos?

  And that, that agent is good at doing certain types of work.

• 19:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, specifically Svelte UI work. Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah. That makes more, that makes a lot of sense because like, especially if you're in like an app that has like backend and frontend and TDD.

• 20:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Wes Bos?

  And. Those might need to be different.

• 20:13Scott Tolinski?

  And then you move it out of custom instructions because then I like, I can tell it, these are the like, no, maybe not like these are the general things that I'm using, but these are the syntaxes that I would prefer to have or the do not ever write my CSS. And if you do, and like, just delete yourself from my computer.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:32Scott Tolinski?

  You are not good at this.

• 20:33Wes Bos?

  Uh, what else we got here? Plan mode. This is something that Kiro launched. When did you do your video on Kiro?

• 20:40Scott Tolinski?

  No, plan mode is more like.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Like Claude plan?

• 20:43Scott Tolinski?

  Plan mode is more like Claude plan mode, that less than Kiro.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  So it's not specs, it's just plans?

• 20:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Wes Bos?

  Okay, it's not spec driven development?

• 20:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, because when I saw that, the first thing I thought of, and I was gonna tweet, oh, this, this Kiro.

• 20:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, but it's not because they, they actually did add like to-dos in VS Code. But I found that, no offense to the VS Code team, because I know that that was like a much wanted feature. I have found that those to be largely just decoration and kind of useless. Where in Kiro, it's more like, here's the specs, here's the steps, let's dial in on this one thing and we can tackle this as a thing. But this plan mode that they announced is not that. This plan mode is definitely like a going back and forth with the agent before you begin any work.

• 21:29Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 21:30Scott Tolinski?

  And which can be, in my mind, the most effective way to work. Because you can get a lot of these issues worked out ahead of time that it might just start going off on the wrong path.

• 21:39Wes Bos?

  Like what kinds of stuff? Like, like tech choices or what?

• 21:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for instance, when I was, I was working on an analytics thing for us and I have all this CSV data. And it was like, for me, that's like an interesting way to work with AI. Because I personally, like taking in CSV data, like I can give it the CSV data structure and say, uh, just build me like a parse and a database that fits into this structure. And we can, you know, scoop this all up with Papa Parse or whatever that CSV is. And I want to use temporal for this. And it came back and said, okay, here's what we're gonna do. And we're gonna use this temporal polyfill. And that's, I know, I know the temporal polyfills, there's multiple.

• 22:18Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Scott Tolinski?

  That's the wrong one. So I can go back and forth and be like. Using the old.

• 22:22Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 22:23Scott Tolinski?

  You're using the old polyfill.

• 22:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah, rather than like, doing it.

• 22:26Scott Tolinski?

  After it's already implemented.

• 22:28Wes Bos?

  After the fact, and trying to have to rip it out and.

• 22:29Scott Tolinski?

  Right.

• 22:30Wes Bos?

  Use like, an old version, or like.

• 22:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 22:32Wes Bos?

  Old version of Zod. Like, what are the other ones that happened?

• 22:35Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:35Wes Bos?

  Tailwind 3, it always uses instead of 4.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  For me, it's using NPM instead of PNP.

• 22:40Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Scott Tolinski?

  Bro, you know what I'm using, like. Do you see an NPM lock file in here? You can see the PNP lock, you can see it.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I got to the point where I wasn't coding anything without a plan. Even if, like, so even if I was using VS code that didn't have plan mode, I would prompt it to create plan.md. So now that it's integrated, that's, that's pretty sweet, but they are like, really late to the game.

• 23:02Scott Tolinski?

  Really late to, yes.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Cause Cursor's had it, and then, oh, well, I mean, Claude, obviously first, and then Cursor added it. They added their to-dos, not the greatest. I've had issues with to-dos inside of Cursor, like, it forgets that the to-dos are even there.

• 23:15Scott Tolinski?

  Cursor has to-dos too?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:17Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. Yeah, I feel like Kira's the only one who's figured out to-dos, but it's. It's like a whole ass thing that you're agreeing to, it's not just to-dos, it's the whole spec-driven effort. And that's like, that's a different box that you're opening. But you are right, everybody else and their grandmother had a plan mode before this.

• 23:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Scott Tolinski?

  Um, but that said, I do use it, it's one of the things I use constantly in Claude code, um, so, yeah.

• 23:40Wes Bos?

  Here's a question, Cursor rolled this out a couple of months ago, now they have, is, is being able to fire off an agent from Slack?

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Hmm, yeah.

• 23:48Scott Tolinski?

  I don't get it.

• 23:48Wes Bos?

  Is that useful?

• 23:49Scott Tolinski?

  Not for me, I don't give a shit about that. That, to me, is like, the lowest totem pole for me, I don't care.

• 23:54Wes Bos?

  Or you're talking back and forth in Slack about a feature, and then you just, you @co-pilot and say, "Go, go build this thing."

• 24:01Scott Tolinski?

  I, I think that is useful to some people, and I think it's very useful to some people. But for me personally, I'm never, ever gonna, I'm never even gonna.

• 24:11Wes Bos?

  It seems like if you're gonna fix something, or, or do some sort of feature, there should be like, a little barrier. Clicking a button?

• 24:19Scott Tolinski?

  For, for me, it's like, yeah, yeah, if I'm gonna do that type of flow, I'm gonna go to a GitHub issue. Okay, that's a good place to start.

• 24:25Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Scott Tolinski?

  Or even like, a linear task, even though we don't use linear, but I would go to something like that. Long before I would ever go to Slack, which.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:34Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  I completely agree. I think like, yeah, so you go where your, where the work is happening. So in GitHub or in your, your planning tool or Kanban board. Cause I mean, like Slack, sure, it would have the context of the conversation, but that likely needs to be a little bit more formalized before you send an agent off to start working on it. So, I don't know. It's not useful for me.

• 24:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Wes Bos?

  Maybe, like, I, I can imagine, like, if something were to roll in, in one of your Slacks, you know, you're monitoring something.

• 24:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Wes Bos?

  And it comes in.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:00Wes Bos?

  And it's auto.

• 25:01Scott Tolinski?

  I just don't use Slack like that. I use.

• 25:04Wes Bos?

  Me neither.

• 25:05Scott Tolinski?

  GitHub for, for a lot of that. And Sentry. I use Sentry at Sentry.io.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Coupon code Daisy Tree for two months for free.

• 25:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I use, I, that comes in and seriously, I mean, it does though. And I, I get my errors in there and I, I.

• 25:18Wes Bos?

  Air logs?

• 25:19Scott Tolinski?

  I get my logs. I click the little buttons and then, and it tells me how to fix my problems and I do. And that to me seems more like what I, what I would use that for. Like, uh, you know, where the issue is happening, where, where the code is.

• 25:32Wes Bos?

  Here's another feature. I'm curious what, and I think a lot of people are gonna hate is they have a Copilot Metrics Dashboard.

• 25:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Wes Bos?

  For, so if you have an organization, say you have a thousand developers, um, there's now a dashboard to see, uh, who's using it and, or not, maybe who's using it or like.

• 25:50Scott Tolinski?

  How.

• 25:50Wes Bos?

  How many.

• 25:51Scott Tolinski?

  How they're using it, yeah.

• 25:52Wes Bos?

  And like, I have heard from so many people in the last three months of like, I have a, a manager that is so heavy-handed AI.

• 26:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Wes Bos?

  I say like, you should not be writing a line of code, like, like that far.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 26:05Wes Bos?

  Pilled. And now.

• 26:08Scott Tolinski?

  Isn't it weird how it's always managers who are pushing that?

• 26:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's not. And as, as, as much as we love this stuff, I don't think that that's the, the move, but I, I think people are, are curious to see like, oh, we're spending all of this money on a, on a subscription. It's more of like a corporate enterprise feature. They wanna be able to manage their spend and see how much people are using it.

• 26:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I think it's, I think it's.

• 26:31Wes Bos?

  Is it gonna snitch on people not using it though?

• 26:33Speaker 02

  I think it is. I'm looking at the screenshot here. It's got agent adoption. So the, the screenshot says 2,400 of 3,000 active users. And so I I've talked to people where like part of their development plan and part of their promotion plan is how much AI are you using? Like they have a quota for like, they have to be using like 90% of their code pushed with AI or like it. So yes, they're definitely going to use it to call people out.

• 26:58Scott Tolinski?

  CJ, I'm getting a little concerned. I've noticed that your AI usage is hovering around 5% for this month.

• 27:04Wes Bos?

  Are you alright?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  I'm gonna write an agent to pretend to use all my AI.

• 27:07Wes Bos?

  Like it's like a mouse jiggler for using AI.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  And I've I've built I have built I have built multiple mouse jigglers like like work.js. Fire it off, it just spins the mouse and then yeah, so.

• 27:18Scott Tolinski?

  That is very funny. Yeah, you could just have a trash repo that is just constantly pushing.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Spinning, yeah.

• 27:25Scott Tolinski?

  CJ, your AI score has improved by 95% this quarter.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm loving it. I'm just so much AI. AI is so great.

• 27:32Wes Bos?

  You could build like a like an MCP that just like retypes all of the code that you did by hand.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  It's like a constant feedback loop.

• 27:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:39Wes Bos?

  Alright, that's gonna be a thing in no time. Jiggler JS or something.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a paid service to keep your AI usage up, for sure.

• 27:50Scott Tolinski?

  Syntax, we patent that. That's ours. Don't touch it.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Don't take it. Don't take it.

• 27:54Scott Tolinski?

  You know, another thing they they announced was effortless MCP integration. This is actually something that had been inside of VS Code already. So this is a VS Code feature, being able to install MCP servers from the extensions market.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  It's cool. I like I when I one of the issues I also had with trying to work with AI is finding decent MCP servers. And like all the directory websites, so many times the MCP servers listed were just like spam.

• 28:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  So if this is like officially sanctioned, or you can see the number of downloads, they also potentially like with VS Code extensions, there's like a publisher name.

• 28:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  So you could be more sure that the MCP server you're installing is more legit. I like that.

• 28:30Wes Bos?

  I think it has to happen that somebody needs to be able to like, as much as we hate like a like a governing hand. Is that like if one of these MCP servers goes rogue, that somebody needs to be able to pull the plug on it. And like Chrome does that for extensions.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:46Wes Bos?

  VS Code does a good job of that with their VS Code system. In fact, I met a guy. At the meetup yesterday who forked my Cobalt 2 theme and he called it Cobalt 3. And he said he got, he's like, I got like 3 million downloads, like it got really popular. And then he got an email the other day, like they pulled it.

• 29:04Scott Tolinski?

  Oh.

• 29:04Wes Bos?

  Because they said it was too close to my theme. I didn't complain or anything like that.

• 29:09Scott Tolinski?

  Well, you got forked and they pulled it?

• 29:12Wes Bos?

  And it's so funny because I was like, yeah, I kind of was cheesed when I see like people would like fork it and make Cobalt 2 better.

• 29:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Wes Bos?

  Because you can, you don't need to fork a theme to change it. You just, you put your own personal changes on top of it. But then I realized like it's called Cobalt 2 because I've, I forked Cobalt.

• 29:28Scott Tolinski?

  Cobalt 1?

• 29:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Scott Tolinski?

  The original.

• 29:30Wes Bos?

  So I can't get mad. Yeah, the original one, so.

• 29:34Scott Tolinski?

  No. Yeah.

• 29:36Wes Bos?

  That's allowed. So I, I think that that, that is fine. Hopefully they add integrations for more stuff. Right now it's just like, it's just VS Code, but like I want to be able to click it and it's install in like Claude Chat or. Yeah. Obviously Cursor, but I don't know if they'll ever.

• 29:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what? MCP servers were one of those things that I felt like a little bit of, okay, now I got to install it these ways or do all this stuff. And for some, you just get used to it and then it's fine. So I don't know. I used to want a UI for this and now I maybe don't care as much. I would love if they were to add my CSS MCP to this because that's a, yeah.

• 30:11Wes Bos?

  No, I think discoverability is a, a big problem.

• 30:14Scott Tolinski?

  It's a, it's a discoverability. Yeah, absolutely. I'm talking more about like the install management process. The Sentry MCP server in here, top tier MCP server right there. Yeah. Sentry mentioned on stage a couple of times. That was pretty sick.

• 30:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah, the Sentry stuff was, was up right front with all of it, which was really cool to see.

• 30:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. It's so funny working for a, a company now and being like, feeling like pride in that. Man, yeah.

• 30:38Wes Bos?

  That's my boy! Hell yeah!

• 30:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Like three years ago I would have been like, oh, okay, cool.

• 30:45Wes Bos?

  That's my seer.

• 30:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Wes Bos?

  Fixing the bugs.

• 30:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So all in all, announcements, you know, I feel like these are all good things. They're all, I didn't feel personally like. Blown away by anything, but I do, I do appreciate everything they added.

• 31:01Wes Bos?

  I think we're past the, the place in AI now where there's like this like jaw dropping model or this amazing tool that does that. And it's, it's all just about like, how do we fit this into our workflow?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:15Wes Bos?

  How is it getting faster? Is the DX is really good? And then of course, like all the, the enterprise tools of like, I have 5,000 developers. How do we roll this out to, to so that everyone can use it efficiently?

• 31:30Scott Tolinski?

  How do we make sure that they're using AI as much as we would like them to?

• 31:33Wes Bos?

  Exactly.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, so a lot, a lot of interesting stuff, but I think we kind of hinted at it. It's, it's honestly just, it feels boring. It feels like, it's like, it's nothing new. It's stuff that other people have already done, not that innovative. So AI skeptic take, it's fine. It's getting better. And if, and if you're already using VS Code, great, because you have a lot more features now than we have in all these other tools. But otherwise, yeah, it's fine. That's, that's AI skeptic take. It's fine.

• 32:00Scott Tolinski?

  And now it's time for the AI skeptic round.

• 32:03Wes Bos?

  I'm, I'm pretty excited about it because like, like as much as I love and like I'm, I'll say this as like a primarily cursor user in the last probably eight months, the software dev still happens on GitHub, you know? And I'm, I'm cheering for GitHub because I want like GitHub is an awesome place and

• 32:20Scott Tolinski?

  Because you want Satya on the podcast.

• 32:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah. I will kiss no asses except for Satya. But the fact that the software dev happens on GitHub and these tools are going to need to be integrated into GitHub at some point. And the fact that this is happening and we're, we're working on workflows, I think is, is overall good. So stoked about it.

• 32:48Scott Tolinski?

  So yeah, I, I would say my thoughts are somewhat similar to both of yours, even though your thoughts were opposing. I, I do feel like.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Right in the middle.

• 32:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Wes Bos?

  It's playing both sides. The sunny meme right now.

• 32:59Scott Tolinski?

  No, exactly. No, I, I agree with you, Wes, and like GitHub is where the stuff happens and GitHub is still just always innovating, right?

• 33:09Scott Tolinski?

  GitHub could have easily become Bitbucket and just like been someplace, you stash your code. And GitHub has never been that. They've always been pushing it. Bitbucket, I wonder if they've even added labels yet. Do you remember? There was like a thing, there was like an issue on Bitbucket for like 10 years, like can you add labels? Like, it could have easily turned into something like that.

• 33:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Scott Tolinski?

  But instead, they've always been bringing new stuff. And so for me, I like you, Wes, I am rooting for it because I have such a fondness for GitHub overall and GitHub proper. I think the stuff that they are adding are things that needed to be here. There was nothing in this announcement that shot my socks across the room, but in the same regard, I'm gonna use all this stuff.

• 33:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Scott Tolinski?

  So, yeah, I'm happy. Simultaneously, nothing crazy, happy that it's here.

• 34:05Wes Bos?

  I hope that like what GitHub did for software development over the last 15 years.

• 34:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Wes Bos?

  Is also what they do for AI development. I don't know if that is true now that they're a mega corporation owned by Microsoft, but I hope.

• 34:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and it's like an institution and they've done so much good stuff. And man, I love the improvements that GitHub brings all the time.

• 34:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah, and they just hired Jared Palmer, who, we've had him on the podcast in the past. We've, he was a great, created Formic and then he created Turbo.

• 34:38Scott Tolinski?

  Repo.

• 34:39Wes Bos?

  And then he created V0 at Vercel, if you've heard of it. And then he recently just joined Microsoft and he's just been like, just been on Twitter being like, hey, what can we fix about GitHub? People have been like whining about laggy diffs and like, like performance issues on GitHub and all of these things. And it's gotten even worse as I'm sure a lot of their edge has been pulled off to work on AI stuff. And he's like, seems to be fixing a lot of it and he gives a shit about performance, obviously.

• 35:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no. I love it when a talented hire gets brought in anywhere.

• 35:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah, shake it up.

• 35:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yep. What's the ETA between when you think GitHub's gonna add the what will you build today, uh, search box on there?

• 35:23Wes Bos?

  When will GitHub.com be a vibe coding? Yeah. Input tool? Yeah.

• 35:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 35:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah. What will you build today?

• 35:31Scott Tolinski?

  No, I'm stoked to give a lot of this stuff a try. So shout out to GitHub team for constantly shipping and yeah.

• 35:38Wes Bos?

  All right. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Thanks, everybody who came out to the meetup. Peace.