1051: Mourning the Death of Code

Scott and Wes tackle your potluck questions, from passing context between Claude Code and Codex to whether AI-generated skills are any good. Plus high-fidelity Figma builds, WebSerial reconnects on an ESP32, AG-UI vs WebMCP, a listener who thinks Syntax is too pro-AI, and Scott’s minimal Pi setup. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! Ask a Potluck Question 01:05 How Do You Pass Context When Switching Coding Agents? dex 06:40 Are AI Generated Skills Even Good? 11:53 Getting AI Agents to Nail High Fidelity Figma Designs 17:45 What Technical Skills Should I Focus On Without a CS Background? 20:50 Be Curious: The Photo Frame Hardware Business Example 25:13 Is Syntax Too Pro-AI? Responding to a Listener’s Criticism 30:55 Brought to you by Sentry.io 31:38 Handling WebSerial Reconnects When Flashing an ESP32 EWatch: a programmable ESP32-S3 smartwatch 34:57 Mourning the Death of Code: Feeling Guilty About Hard Won Skills 41:44 AG-UI vs WebMCP: Two Approaches to Agent Integration 47:12 Scott’s Pi Agent Setup: Start Minimal and Add What You Need omp 51:46 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: Cat6 Ethernet Cables Wes: Wall-mount Boom Arm 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. We've got a Potluck episode for you today. We're going to answer, how do you pass context from one coding agent to another? You're switching from Claude to Codex or anything else, and you have all this valuable information inside of it. How do you pass that from one? Are AI-generated skills even good? What technical skills should I focus on? A couple like questions today. I was so like, I don't know, sad about the future or unsure about the future. Don't worry, we're going to make you feel all better. Focusing on high fidelity websites and UX. So like, this guy gets these really high-quality websites done in Figma, and then he's got to implement them. And like, what is he even doing anymore? Right? And finally,

• 0:40Wes Bos?

  we asked Scott about his Pi setup. If you're starting from scratch with Pi or Pi durable, what do you even do? If you have a question, please submit it. Go to syntax.fm, click on Potluck in the nav bar and submit your question. We will answer it on a future episode. My name is Wes. With me is Scott. Let's get into it.

• 1:05Wes Bos?

  First question we have here, and this was actually, I think, somebody like a spam submission or somebody trying to pump their own thing, because the link that they sent has UTM Source Syntax FM in the URL. So we're not going to mention what it is, because they're obviously trying to do something slimy here. But I did think it was a good question. When you run Claude Code and Codex side by side on different tasks, how do you keep track of what each one is doing and carry the context from one to another? Notes, files, a repo per agent, something else for context? We are the blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to mention who this team is, because they tried to social engineer us. We build, I don't know, they have some crappy assistant that does

• 1:47Wes Bos?

  this for you. But the question essentially is, when you have even multiple conversations, where like, you need to start a second conversation, or you want to, I don't know, you've used up all of your Claude code, and you want to switch over to Codex, or et cetera, et cetera. I even have this as well, where like, I will have a task that I'm like, you know what? I can use one of the cheaper or free models for this thing, but it still does need to understand where I'm coming from. And I have this other long conversation. So the question is like, how do you pass that context on from one to another? Because Claude Code, Codex, they're getting really good at like, understanding what you've done in the past without having to

• 2:28Wes Bos?

  explicitly reference it. But I almost always will say, just like, write these findings to a Markdown file, so that we can pick it on up, or write comments in the code explaining why we've done this. I know people are whining about writing comments and whatnot, but comments are a great way to add context, as long as that doesn't drift from your actual implementation from that. And quite honestly, the past that, these agents are very good at just picking up all of that context from where you are. If there's something that cannot be lost in your chat, when you close it down, then that needs to be logged somewhere, either in the code or in some sort of Markdown file, which is usually the simplest way. I don't know. Scott, do you

• 3:13Wes Bos?

  have any like, memory things that you like to use?

• 3:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So I use something called Dex at dex.rip to kind of keep track of where I'm at. What I like about this, this was made by my boss, actually, David Kramer. And what's nice about this is that like, it saves kind of like, it's project management that's kind of saved into an actual JSON file. So that way, like in query and whatever. So it kind of keeps track of where it is on steps of things. So I just have a general like skill this, or a general like context to say, keep track of what you're doing inside of here. That like, keeps it out of a particular agent's to-do system, because that's the weird thing about these things, is they all tried to build their own to-do systems. And it's like, doesn't that make more sense to be included in the project? Like, something that you could commit,

• 4:00Scott Tolinski?

  something like, even like GitHub issues, but like, something that is like, task management. And then Beads was a project that did that kind, well, did that exactly. But I found this to be much more lightweight. So I tend to use this all the time. But in terms of like, handoff, there are handoff skills. There are a lot of handoff skills that people use that write like a Markdown file in your, in your docs, that like, talk about which files were being worked on, and the context and all that stuff, and give a good thing. The, my biggest beef with handoff files is it always writes into some like, temp directory. And then I have to like, go and give that long temp directory path, or if they write it into the project, then that's just like, one more junk file that's going to get left over. It doesn't get cleaned up automatically. So you have to say, you know, clean this up after you pick it back up. What I

• 4:45Scott Tolinski?

  will do is typically, I'm on top of my agent's usage, and I'm not waiting for it to be like, ooh, you ran out. So if I'm close to running out, I will tell it to write me a handoff, just a handoff prompt. So that's it. Like, something I could just manually copy and paste over. I find that works perfectly fine for me. The bigger your system gets in terms of like, how much more hands-off you're getting, you obviously want this to write to files and have a better system there. But I don't do much other than, hey, write me a quick prompt on which files you're looking at, and the process you are. And then if I have something like Dex that actually is like, individual task-based with details on what it's doing and what files it's at, it doesn't need that context from a handoff anyways. I just say, pick up the next

• 5:30Scott Tolinski?

  task. It goes to the next task. That task has the information about what files you're working on, or what the plan is, or whatever. And it can just pick it up from that directly.

• 5:38Wes Bos?

  Some more thoughts after you said that is, if it's how we are doing something, I will ask the agent to distill that down into a skill, so that the next time we do that thing, it's done in the exact same way. If it is like, keeping track of simply what we need to do, I love using GitHub issues for that, because often when I'm in like, a planning stage, or I need to do a whole bunch of things, I will open up like, a cheap agent and say, just like, these are the things I want to do. Research what needs to be done, and then create a GitHub issue. And then that way, you can tackle them one by one. You can tackle them in parallel. You can have three or four running all at a single time, without you having to worry about,

• 6:19Wes Bos?

  no, everything is stuck in this one conversation. Yeah. And I can't go ahead and do that. And that's great, because you can have 16 pull requests open at once, and then you can have one big boy that'll say, all right, figure out how to merge all these together. And then, if it's just a handoff, like a Markdown document, like you said.

• 6:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I mean, I agree with all that. One thing I have noticed, though, and I want to get your thoughts on this, you're getting my thoughts on something, I'm going to get in your thoughts on something. AI-created skills, kind of tough for me. I don't, I don't know if I have like, AI-created skills that I like very much. And I actually saw some report recently about AI-created skills are less effective. So I've been meaning to, and this is actually a whole nother, let me do another sidebar, a whole nother conversation, once you have multiple machines. So once I have this machine and this machine, and they have different skills, and I have them all tracked in a Git repo, it still gets out of sync, or whatever. Then you have global context files and stuff like that, what's in what. So like, I've been meaning

• 7:18Scott Tolinski?

  to really deeply prune all of that stuff. Sometimes I feel like the skills and default context I have are causing more problems than they're worth. And that like, skills, like many skills, could be distilled into scripts. And then some things obviously are not like, script-based, they're like, you know, taste-based or agentic-based stuff that obviously makes more sense in a skill. But sometimes a skill, something that like, is created by an agent to be a skill, could be just a straight-up script.

• 7:49Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I find that when I have talked back and forth with the agent for an hour or two, and you're like, I can't lose this. Like, we figured it out, you know? Like, we're there, this is how I want to do it. I need to like, be able to reproduce this thing. That's at a point where you ask it to throw it into a skill. And I wouldn't say that's like, an agent-based skill. But if you're just like, coming from brand-new and say, hey, make me a skill that does X, Y, and Z, it's going to add a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff in there. So if I look at the last skill I made, which was the photo frame, so this was a skill on how to triage all of the pull requests and issues that we were getting in the photo frame dashboard.

• 8:31Wes Bos?

  Because what, what happened is that we had hundreds of people at the exact same time submitting their logs and their issues about their photo frame and their chips, and how they got around, and how they got access, right? So like, I'm not, there's no chance I'm going to read all of that by hand, or by eye. What are we doing? That, reading it by hand?

• 8:52Scott Tolinski?

  Reading it by, you got Braille skills that I didn't know about?

• 8:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah. So what I did is, I just kind of like, was like, all right, we need to open up a new one. We need to process all of these. And then it just asked me as many questions as you have about how to handle these things. And we went through a couple, and I said, ah, we don't need that. Or, no, we're not, we're not having people, like, a lot of people are trying to like, pull requests, like, entire frameworks that they've added, you know? And like, no, that's not what this is. You know, you can start your own project, you can make your own GitHub repo. We're not adding every feature under the sun here. We're just trying to log how to do this type of thing. So I went back and forth, put that into a skill, that skill included. Like, I think a lot of people don't realize this, like, your skill

• 9:36Wes Bos?

  can be many, many scripts. And in fact, many of my skills are more heavy on the script side than they are on the, the English Markdown side. So I think agent-created skills are totally fine, but you have to like, you have to be careful with them, that you don't go overboard, because all the time you see people complaining about Claude doing X, Y, or Z. And it's because they have no idea, like, what is even being pumped into there. And then often you'll say, oh, I didn't realize I had, I had like, the 18 different skills loaded into the thing, and it's just doing what I told it.

• 10:12Scott Tolinski?

  And sometimes conflicting, too. Yeah. Sometimes getting in, sometimes, you know, I typically write Svelte for everything, but I was like, working on some project that was just scripts. I mean, it's just scripts, and there's no UI for it at all. And my agent's like, all right, here's the plan. We're going to build this, we're going to build this with SvelteKit, and this and that. I'm just like, I didn't mention SvelteKit. And then I'm like, ah, the, I put it in global context at some point in my life, and I just forgot about it.

• 10:39Wes Bos?

  The global skills, man, such a gift and a curse. I have that same with the agent browser. Love agent browser. It can spin up a browser anytime it wants, and it can take screenshots and, and puppeteer the whole thing. But sometimes I'm writing something, it's like, well, I will construct 4,000 tests and run them all through agent browser, and it's so slow. And, and it uses so many tokens, and you have to like, pull it back. So it's, yeah. That's what, one thing I really like about open code is it clearly shows you on the sidebar. Which MCPs you have, and I kind of wish I also showed you which skills you have, because I would love to just be able to like turn them on and off per chat.

• 11:20Wes Bos?

  I'm sure you can, but it's just, it's, it's too much of a pain in the butt so that I don't do it.

• 11:25Scott Tolinski?

  Maybe I need to get into a flow when I'm creating a new project. I'm choosing the skills specifically for that project that I would like, and then get rid of global skills entirely. Like that feels like maybe, oh, I don't want a skill for that. What I want is a script for that. Hey, run, what do you want to do? Okay, I want to pick this one, this one, this one, this one. Okay. Otherwise, I don't want any of these dumb skills getting in the way, because sometimes they do be getting in the way. Yeah, I, very interesting idea I just had there. I'm sure somebody else has already done that. So we'll, we'll check it out. All right, next question here from Weigart from the Netherlands. Hi, guys. I get designs from clients, mostly in Figma. My job is to translate these into working websites. Since most of my clients are designers or design agencies, high design fidelity is important to them. So that's what I specialize in over the years.

• 12:10Scott Tolinski?

  In the age of AI, I feel like that very specialism is holding me back. I can now source almost all dev work to agents, but the central thing I'm being paid to do, and also the most time consuming part of my work, high fidelity design translation, is something that agents still kind of suck at. Yeah, yeah. What is your experience in this area? Do you have any tips? How do you get agents to write CSS like I would do it? And do you have any model you'd recommend for this type of work? Man, I typically lean on any anthropic models. Anytime you're doing any kind of visual, anything, I just find they, they have better idea of the way something looks. Now, whether or not that holds true when you're like deep fidelity of design and not designing itself in the agent is maybe a different story, but I tend to lean on the anthropic models anyways, because I just prefer to work that way.

• 12:54Scott Tolinski?

  I've been doing this because we have a site designed for the new syntax website, which has been in progress for a long time. And one thing that I got a lot of value out of was the Figma MCP, which gotta make sure you're using the right harness, because they only let you use some harnesses with the Figma MCP. That's a little bit of a rant. But with the Figma MCP, it can get the values directly from your Figma files. So it's not like measuring things. It's getting the values from them. It can read your design system. It can pull all that stuff. So if the design systems are deeply designed inside of Figma, the Figma MCP connection pulls the values out. Then you can have like a visual checking process in the agent, agent browser, any of these things. You can check it at different browser sizes to make sure that things look correct,

• 13:37Scott Tolinski?

  the values are correct, and that therefore you're adding in these validation and verification steps.

• 13:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Man, in, like, right now, we saw in the video where Randy, the producer, went up against me in like trying to recreate this button. And Randy just fed it the video of the button and it, it pooped out the exact button. And then we looked at the code and the code was actually awful, bad for performance, but it absolutely nailed it. So tips here, Opus 5.5 and Fable and Astra are all excellent at like visual inputs. So just make sure you're using one of those models if you really care about like the high fidelity. He's probably also talking here about how, how, like the interaction of a lot of this stuff

• 14:27Wes Bos?

  really just sucks at the UI. And in that case, you just kind of need to go and work on your like lower level primitives. As to like, these are the things that need to be done. These are how we do things. That's both in, in code examples and as well as in like an agent's MD or a skill that you're building so that your agent knows exactly how you want things to be done. And then also, I think you just have to like go slower with these things. Like the interaction in the, of UX and UI design has not been cracked by a lot of these models or any, I would say, as, as far as say, like any of these models, they're not very good at the interaction. So you just need to go a little bit slower and be that like human in the loop.

• 15:10Wes Bos?

  Because as you said, like, if that's not you, then, then like you, you pretty much don't have a job here. As if your entire job is just taking the Figma document and outputting it into a high fidelity. Like, they're gonna figure out pretty soon that they don't need you for that type of thing. But if you really spend the time on that, the subtle interaction, just getting rid of all the crappy sloppy interface.

• 15:34Scott Tolinski?

  The care.

• 15:35Wes Bos?

  And figuring out, and like, like that, quite honestly, that is going to be your job, is how do I build something and direct these agents in a way so that I can get the output as if I, I were building it? And like, we had that with the code, I don't know, for probably at least a year or two years now of like, yes, this is code I would have written. We said that many times on this podcast. So like, how do you get this thing to, yes, this is interaction, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, all of these things that I would have written myself?

• 16:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah, part of that too lines up with, like, in the same thing, like you said with code, how you get that trust that the agent's gonna write stuff that's good and whatever? And some of that comes from your validation and verification processes and like how you're doing that, whether that is, again, feeding visual images back in there, but also like, yeah, accessibility checks, all those types of things that like lead to better code in like more deterministic, but also still, you know, agentic flows. So that's something that I, I've invested a lot of time in. And it's funny, this goes back to the last answer when you were saying like, sometimes the verification or the scripting process at the end of, you know, when it's like, uh, working can take forever. That's the one thing I'm looking forward to with my new beefy computer,

• 16:50Scott Tolinski?

  is that it's actually going to be able to run all of the tons and tons of actual verification scripts that I have running on some of my projects, better than this Mac Mini. Because sometimes if I'm working on more than one project at once, I have like something that's taking screenshots and doing this and that, and the computer just gets like locked up.

• 17:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that thing just fires up. I have not heard my, like, I've had my laptop for five years now. I, I don't think I heard the fan once in the like, until, until the last year. I hear it all the time. And it's because it's spinning up a thousand little agent browsers, taking screenshots, rendering out 3D, checking them again. You know, it's quite a bit. So that's an interesting thing to talk about in terms of the compute is, it's not just about, yeah, being able to run your own models locally, but it's about being able to like run your verification as fast as possible as well.

• 17:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's gonna be crazy.

• 17:45Wes Bos?

  Next question from not your traditional CS developer. In this AI fueled era for developers, what do you suggest people do to develop technical expertise to be better to embrace AI as a tool and become less expendable in this job market? Especially for developers who do not have a traditional computer science background, no algorithm classes or theory classes taken? Yes. This is the question that, we've probably had this question 100 times over the last year or so. People are like, like, what, what do I focus on right now? Right? Like, do I, do I double down and learn a lot about like algorithms and get it? And the mathematicians might tell you, no. Because they, AI is getting really good at that as well.

• 18:28Wes Bos?

  So I, I think it's really important to understand that it's no longer enough to say, how do we use this tech to do what we have done previously? If you, if you're looking at this and be like, this was my job, and now I'm going to do my job faster with this piece of stuff. It's, it's not going to cut it, because anybody's gonna be able to do that type of thing. I, I think if you are looking at this industry right now and like, how do I stay relevant? There's a couple of questions you need to ask yourself. And the first one is, how can I apply this new technology either to my industry or to new industries? So the people that I see that are doing super well right now

• 19:09Wes Bos?

  are the ones that are trying to figure out, okay, now that we have this magic genie in a bottle, what can, what can we use this for? What, what could we, what problems do we previously have? Or how do we apply this to our industry? So I'll give, I'll give you one example, right? Pattern drafting, right? Like, my wife is a fashion designer. She sews, she buys patterns online, cuts them out, et cetera, et cetera. And a huge portion of that industry is people who design these things and, and make these patterns so they, they fit perfectly, right? And, and there's like this new software called Clo 3D that's coming out and there, that people use to like design clothing. And it's a kind of all 3D.

• 19:53Wes Bos?

  And you can get the 2D pattern that you can cut the fabric out and sew it together. It's, it's pretty nifty, right? So obviously, in my mind goes to, well, can, can AI make patterns? You know, can, can you build something like, like with, maybe even with web MCP? Can you make like a T-shirt and then say, ah, make the neck a little bit shorter, make the arms a bit longer, et cetera, et cetera, right? Or body scan myself and figure out what the perfect T would be for me? There's a lot of people in this, like, not a lot, but there's some people in this space right now being like, how can we apply this new tech to, to pattern drafting?

• 20:35Wes Bos?

  And, and that's a really interesting place to be for someone is like you're, like yourself, the person who's asking this question is like, how do I figure out what new industry or my existing industry, the problems that we can solve inside of that? And the other one is just to like, be curious about how things work. So like, I keep, I keep going back to this like photo frame that he did. If you didn't see it, I, I took a photo frame and I hacked it so that you can run a web browser or like Rust code or a custom Android app on it. And it's a touchscreen. It's just $50, right? It's, it's really cool. Go to the syntax YouTube channel and watch the video on it, because.

• 21:13Scott Tolinski?

  Well worth your time.

• 21:14Wes Bos?

  Yeah, well worth your time. It totally blew up, like something like five, 6,000 people went and bought a photo frame and have been doing stuff like this. And it was really interesting to me to see how different people approach this type of thing. You know, like, like a lot, some people very quickly said, doesn't work. Sending it back, piece of garbage, doesn't work, you know? And then other people are like pushing, like some guy got Omarchi running on it and other people figured out different methods to, to, to do this. And I was like, that just shows like the. The tenacity of some people of being able to figure out now that we have this piece of tech,

• 21:55Wes Bos?

  what can we do with it? And I want to share this one example, just as like a, like a perfect example of somebody who's like, I wonder if there's something here. So he's like, really enjoyed, he sent me a DM. He said, it's okay if I share this, really enjoyed your post. I whipped up a business called Daywell and had Krokpot negotiate with a Chinese manufacturer to order 250 units. That's 250 of these like photo frames.

• 22:16Scott Tolinski?

  Whoa.

• 22:16Wes Bos?

  I got 23 pre-orders overnight, whipped up some ads with 11 labs and magic patterns. Honestly, love your content, blah, blah, blah, blah. So like, it goes on to say, for background, I'm a commercial real estate broker in Atlanta. Never had a computer science background, always loved hardware and wish I could hack things. This whole world is amazing. Glad I find your content, et cetera, et cetera. So basically what he's done here, and I don't condone this like, entire AI-driven business. I think there's, there's probably a couple little things you can exploit here and there, but these types of things will, will dry up. But the fact that he saw this, no prior experience and was thinking, hmm, can I whip up some interface for this? Cause this is what we really want. Can I

• 23:01Wes Bos?

  figure out a manufacturer? By the way, he got the $50 photo frames for 17 bucks a pop, which is just shows how cheap they actually are to build. And, and can I run ads for this type of thing? So like, those are the questions you should be asking and not, can I build a business with this? That's just what this guy did.

• 23:19Scott Tolinski?

  Can I scam some people? Yeah.

• 23:21Wes Bos?

  Exactly. What else is there that I can use this type of stuff for? You know, you should be looking at this technology and not just saying, okay, can I build a SaaS with it? Can I recreate Photoshop with it? Those are cool, but you gotta be saying like, what else can we do? What other industries are there? What are things that I previously would have never have done, which is building a hardware product when you are a real estate developer and, and sort of take that and run with it. So I thought that was a great example.

• 23:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Just because you have tenacity to push through and try something, right? Rather than just be like, oh, lol, it doesn't work. Okay.

• 24:01Wes Bos?

  It sucks. Yeah. No good. Like you're not, you're not getting anywhere if you have that, that attitude towards these types of things. You, you have to, unfortunately, you have to work hard and, and you can't just type in the box, expect everything to work. I guess this guy just did type in the box though.

• 24:18Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Well, to some extent, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I a hundred percent agree. I don't really have too much to add on top of what you said there. But again, yeah, I know there, the AI is swallowing up much more than one or two industries here. But my dad went to school and was doing like technical drafting, like he was, he's an engineer and he was doing technical drafting. Imagine you, you get really good at a skill like that, which is drawing, you know, parts and then cab comes along. You know, it's like, oh, this is like, my whole thing is now wrapped up in a thousand other skills. And so I think about that a lot. And you know, the amount of like transition he would have had to undergo to, you know, stay on top of engineering in that time. So just the transition, it's all, all feeling weird for people.

• 25:02Wes Bos?

  It's true. And it's hard. Like we, we feel for you. We feel for everybody who's, who's having these questions right now.

• 25:08Scott Tolinski?

  I feel the same way. Yes.

• 25:10Wes Bos?

  Yes. Yeah. But keep at it.

• 25:12Scott Tolinski?

  Keep at it. Yes. Next question from Said, hi syntax team, a long time listener here. I'm a heavy hearted, I'm heavy-hearted to say this, but I think syntax being a corporate property is finally starting to take its toll. Oh no. I've resisted accepting this fact for a long time, but your last potluck put the final nail in the coffin. Two points.

• 25:34Wes Bos?

  We're done.

• 25:36Scott Tolinski?

  We're done. Uh, this is a spooky story right here. Two points in particular rubbed me the wrong way. One, you claimed many people's livelihoods, pension investments, et cetera, are tied to AI companies. And wishing for AI to collapse is wishing bad for innocent, ordinary people. You said that writing code by hand is a thing of the past, unless someone wanted to be artsy and handcraft their code. Okay. We did say those things.

• 26:07Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 26:08Scott Tolinski?

  I think part of this is, is, yeah, I mean, Wes, you might have some more formed thoughts on, on this in general.

• 26:15Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Well, let's, let's do first one. The first one is like, you claim many people's livelihoods are tied to AI. That's true. There's so much investment, which is therefore in, in people's pensions is in these data centers and whatnot. And we didn't say that they were good. In fact, we got some really good DMs from people explaining to us how the water works in, in these types of things, because nobody seems to actually understand. It was, it was very well thought out, but like, I think that is true. It's as, as much as I don't want this to be true, there are many extremely large companies that are very highly leveraged in making sure that this AI thing pans out. And if it doesn't,

• 26:59Wes Bos?

  then those things are going to spiral and it, it might happen. Yeah. I'm not saying that it, it wouldn't, but unfortunately, what that means is if this stuff were, if, if it were, the bubble were to pop, then not the entire economy, but a good chunk of the economy will go with it.

• 27:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, I don't, it, it does feel like and that things have progressed so fast. So like, I just don't, I don't feel like, like if the AI industry collapsed, I mean, the, the dot com bubble collapsing too. I think after the dot com bubble collapsed, it's not like computers went away or the internet went away.

• 27:42Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Scott Tolinski?

  But there were a lot of people who, just innocent, ordinary people who got, lost their jobs from stuff like that. So.

• 27:49Wes Bos?

  Yeah. And to be clear, I, I also don't see how it is going to pan out of like the amount of money that is being poured into all of this stuff, even just the amount of money that's poured into people right now. You're seeing a lot of people switch jobs right now. And, and if you heard like some of the figures that these people are getting, it's unbelievable how much money that these big companies are, are spending right now, just to try to like win it. And I do not understand, and I'm just, just a lowly developer here, but I do not understand how a, somebody spending like a $100 a month plan or $200 a month plan for power users is going to convert to

• 28:33Wes Bos?

  like that, making that much money. So I'm, I'm just saying here that, that comment was simply just like, this is how a lot of it is working. And we linked to the YouTube video, but I, I also am a little bit afraid of it as well. But point two here, writing code by hand is a thing of the past unless somebody wanted to be artsy. I believe we said handcrafted artisanal.

• 28:55Scott Tolinski?

  With love. Yes. We used to say that all the time for, for not using off the shelf stuff.

• 29:02Wes Bos?

  Yes. Heart, handcrafted artisanal. And unfortunately, I think that is, is true as well. Like I, I wouldn't say all of my code is, is AI-generated these days. I certainly have to hop in there and, and do quite a bit of stuff, especially for a lot of the UI interaction stuff that worries, but I do believe that that was a, a fair point as well. But he, he goes on to say, he's like, given the controversy around the whole AI industry, I would say the responsible approach for the most popular web dev should be neutral, if not slightly on the defensive side. I, Said, I don't think you get to tell me how we feel about this type of stuff. And in fact, like I'm, I feel like I'm a fairly balanced guy on this podcast.

• 29:43Wes Bos?

  And I feel like I have a decent take and I'm able to change my mind when, when people will message me and say, hey, you, you weren't right about that. I don't, I disagree. Sometimes people have much better informing opinions there, but I'm not going to intentionally just take a, a side, a defensive side on this because we, we have to be. I'm, I'm, I'm trying to spit it as straight as we can here.

• 30:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And I also think the thing, you know, obviously you all get defensive about stuff because I'm a sensitive guy. But the syntax being a corporate property is finally starting to take its toll. I want to say, we have complete creative control and complete ownership over syntax. The only thing that Sentry has ever said to us is talk about Sentry less because you're saying Sentry too much. They, they are so incredibly hands-off and supportive. They give us a budget. They give us no direction whatsoever, other than opportunity to try things and to get good people on the team. So any change that you've seen in syntax is coming from Wes and I, I mean, in the team overall, it's not, not, it's like,

• 30:47Scott Tolinski?

  this isn't, this isn't a corporate thing.

• 30:50Wes Bos?

  No, I don't.

• 30:51Scott Tolinski?

  I understand why you'd feel that way, but yeah.

• 30:55Wes Bos?

  Anyways, you should check out Sentry though.

• 30:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Wes Bos?

  Sentry.io forward slash syntax, right? You should check out Sentry, see her, let your issues fix themselves. They will find the root cause and you can, at 2:00 AM in the morning, it'll submit a pull request. So the thing will be fixed. You wake up, your, your code has been self-healed. So, thank you, Said, for the, the opportunity to, to plug Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax.

• 31:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And I do be feeling a little bit like Garth in Wayne's World right now because I'm saying that and I'm wearing a Sentry t-shirt. I took this, I took off my Sentry sweatshirt to, to reveal a Sentry t-shirt. So I understand, but they're just a really cool company and they help us do the cool stuff. So shout out Sentry, yes. Okay.

• 31:38Wes Bos?

  Evan Wills says, how do you handle reconnects in web serial? I thought this was a really cool question. So I'm building a browser IDE that compiles firmware for an ESP32 smartwatch. But essentially it's taking a tiny little ESP32 microcontroller and, and popping that into a screen vibration motor color display and making kind of like a DIY smartwatch, which I think a lot of people would be interested in.

• 32:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Wes Bos?

  It flashes over web serial. Your episode 628 with Nick Herr on JavaScript and the ESP is partly why I'm asking you. When the S3 resets into a bootloader, the connection can drop and come back. Yeah. So when, when you put a new firmware on the ESP32, it has to go into a special mode, which can then accept the new firmware and then it will boot right back up again. The problem with that is every time you connect to something on web serial in the browser, you get the stupid little pop-up where you have to like select it. It's the same thing like, you know, when you have to select your webcam from the dropdown? There's no way to automatically reconnect to that type of thing. So what are your options here?

• 32:49Wes Bos?

  A, you would have to like, this is why a lot of people go Electron. It's like, you still want to use the tech, but you, you want a different experience? You'd have to ship like a custom browser that just automatically reconnects without the, the security thing of web serial popping up every single time. The other option is you can simply just run this, tell the users to run this type of thing in, in the terminal, make, make a desktop app that somebody can download. It's so nice to do web serial in the browser because then you can just reconnect to that thing. Or you, you could probably solve this with UX as well. But the nice thing about doing this flashing stuff in the terminal is like, like I've

• 33:30Wes Bos?

  got a badge right here that you can connect to over USB. And I just have that thing plugged in all day long and it's just constantly throwing new firmwares on it.

• 33:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yep.

• 33:41Wes Bos?

  Running logs on it, checking, oh, what's, what, what is the shape of data that comes off of this sensor? And that's just not possible in the, in the browser. So web serial is more just for like, I want to flash this thing quickly. But if you're just like constantly iterating on something, I probably would look at some desktop app or like a CLI too.

• 34:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, I, Wes, my, my prompt boy, which is my ESP 32 S3 device with the screen on it, I, I had to really quickly take it apart. It's such a tight unit. It got really hot while I was working on it, like a very concerningly hot. And so I was like, I have all these little screws and I'm like, I gotta get this thing open, you know, it wasn't plugged in even anymore. So yeah, yeah, that was a lot of fun. A little concerned for a minute.

• 34:32Wes Bos?

  Probably, yeah. I've, I've made a few of them very hot and it's usually a short of some, something is shorted to the wrong pin and you're sending voltage in the wrong way.

• 34:43Scott Tolinski?

  Pinched or something.

• 34:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's probably what it was. And unfortunately, I've, you have, sometimes you have to chuck those in the bucket because they're, they're pooched.

• 34:52Scott Tolinski?

  Chuck it in the bucket.

• 34:53Wes Bos?

  Yep. Chuck it in the bucket.

• 34:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, sir. All right. Next one from Reyna. I'm a long time listener of Syntax from Vancouver, Canada. Oh, welcome. I've been really loved, I want to go to Vancouver. That sounds like so much fun.

• 35:06Wes Bos?

  Never been to Vancouver.

• 35:07Scott Tolinski?

  That's crazy. You're from Canada though. I mean, you're right there.

• 35:11Wes Bos?

  Traveling inside of Canada is very expensive, so it's just not something we do.

• 35:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. That'd be cool though. I feel like, yeah, I'm closer to Vancouver than you are. From the very first episode, oh, thank you. And have grown as a developer alongside the podcast. Going from not understanding what React was to building full stack production applications, you guys have been a source of invaluable information. I also bought courses from both Scott and Wes. Well, thank you.

• 35:35Wes Bos?

  Oh, man, laying it on thick, Reyna.

• 35:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. My question is, I have spent many years building an internal React web application that runs our entire family business. Over the last few months, I've really ramped up coding with AI, currently using Claude Code in VS Code. While this has allowed me to work through massive backlog of things, I've always wanted to add in the app, I find myself reading less and less of the code and in some cases not fully understanding it either.

• 36:00Wes Bos?

  Oh, my gosh, don't tell Said.

• 36:02Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, no.

• 36:05Scott Tolinski?

  As the features I want to become more and more advanced, while on one hand, I'm solving very real business problems quickly, on the other hand, I'm starting to realize that writing the code wasn't really something I fully enjoyed. I was always, it was always the end product that I looked forward to. I doubt I would start a new project if I wasn't able to use AI. Luckily, because I had to learn things the hard way, I understand enough about programming, system architecture, UX, UI design. My question is, how do you guys feel about this new paradigm of building? I don't mind AI doing the work. I know I can do myself, but I feel weirdly guilty about replacing the hard-won learnings with AI. Man, I feel this all the time. I think about this all the dang time.

• 36:48Scott Tolinski?

  But in the same regard, you will not believe how much I learned about building websites for Internet Explorer 5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7. You would not believe all of those things that I spent time and energy into learning that I do not ever have to think about again. Like how many of those, those tools and techniques, like sliding doors?

• 37:09Wes Bos?

  I know, I know where all the semicolons go, all the commas.

• 37:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Wes Bos?

  I know all the syntax.

• 37:16Scott Tolinski?

  I, I, I know like what, three different clear fixes? I know all that stuff, but there's so many of those things that I, I spent real hard earned time having to understand and learn and then like became invalidated with other things and frameworks that I spent, even, even learning React, right? Over the course of React, you've had to learn like 18 different ways of doing things in React. So things come and go like this. So I wouldn't feel guilty about it, but I, I, I understand what you're saying and I lament the, the skills that I've worked really hard for. And I've had to actually like learn that you like need to like kind of mourn some of this and like really truly like understand that you put time and effort into this stuff.

• 37:57Scott Tolinski?

  And I, I, I think you can't look back on it too much as like looking back because you're not going to be looking forward. And unfortunately, in this world and industry, you have no other option other than to look forward right now. So if, if you're enjoying the work more now, don't feel bad about it. Yeah, don't feel bad about it.

• 38:20Wes Bos?

  This is also always the case with, with these things is that, like I saw this quite a bit because I, I sold courses to tens of thousands of people, including Reyna, is that, yes, a very, very explicit brag there. But what I would see is that like half the people and like even when we did like in person, half the people were like, didn't care about the code. The code was just a means to an end and they just wanted to make the product because they had it. And then other people, like we very deeply cared about the code.

• 38:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yep.

• 38:54Wes Bos?

  And, and like that, I, I'm probably in, in both of those camps, right? Like I was very excited about actually what we're building, the problems that we were solving, but I also got really excited about new CSS syntax, you know? New media query, that was so exciting to me. And a lot, not all of that is gone, but a, a, a good chunk of that is, is going away. But I think you said it, said it well yourself here is I, I understand enough about programming, systems, architecture, UI, UX, design, right? Like a lot of those things. None of those things are going away. Knowing where to put the semicolon is simply going away. But like caring about the architecture of the programming, the, the interface, all of that type of stuff.

• 39:38Wes Bos?

  You still need to certainly care quite a bit about those. Also, like if you're the type of person that is just excited about the end product, like the, the real estate agent that we just showed earlier, excited about the, the end product here, right? That's good. And we're probably just seeing a little bit of a shift in terms of like, who is getting, is going to be very good in this industry. We also see it with all the old timers. Like I have been in this industry long enough that when I first started coding, I was like alongside a lot of like the early people at, at Shopify and a lot of these different companies.

• 40:17Wes Bos?

  And you're seeing a lot of those people who are, they sort of phased out of the code into the management, into the upper C suite. And you're seeing them get back to the code now because they're able to do it. They're able to just prompt a way to want, and they are very good at product design and product market fit and all of those types of things. So I think we will see a bit of a shift in terms of who is really good in this industry. And the people that really cared about the code and not so much about the end product, maybe we'll have to switch what, what it is that they're excited about. Or they could just start making their own harness. That's what everybody else seems to be doing.

• 40:57Scott Tolinski?

  Right. You build your tooling, which I really love to do. I love to build my own tooling, but you know what? For me, it was something I always like really emphasized in teaching anyways, is that like people don't care about the, uh, the people don't care about the, the tech as much and not, not everybody, right? But like when you're first starting especially, right? You just care about like the ability to make things.

• 41:18Wes Bos?

  The output. That's what gets you excited, right?

• 41:20Scott Tolinski?

  The output. Yes. Yeah. You, and so like when you were attempting to learn things, you put intention behind that where like you're not just building it to do app. You're building an app for your mom because she needs it for these reasons, right? Your motivation is completely different. So yeah, getting into your motivation. And it seems like you have the right motivation to excel in this new world, which is constantly changing. Next one here is from Davelo Papa. Have you heard about AG UI for agent integration? No, I haven't. This sounds like an ad. You recently made an episode about Web MCP. It seems like they are trying to do the same thing with totally different approaches. What is your take?

• 42:03Scott Tolinski?

  AG, you, Wes, you know about AG UI with A, okay, here's Microsoft dot learn. Oh no.

• 42:10Wes Bos?

  No. Well, maybe that's it. AG UI, not to be confused with A2 UI.

• 42:19Wes Bos?

  So this is a interaction layer from the folks that do Copilot Kit, not to be confused with Google Copilot.

• 42:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. The Copilot Kit things confuses me.

• 42:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah, they need to change that name. Unfortunately, that's Copilot is kind of, Microsoft owns Copilot, you know? You can't, can't do that. But yeah, so let's talk about this space really quickly, right? So you have your application and then you have an agent, right? And in order for your agent to communicate with your application or to use your application, there are many different ways, right? There is computer use where an agent can simply just use the browser. There is MCP, which is you set up like kind of a headless look at, and you can call tools back and forth and get the raw data out of it, right?

• 43:08Wes Bos?

  There's Web MCP, which is you have your existing website, but you can also register those tools as an MCP. And then you can do things like you can use the website yourself, but you can also tell your agent to say, hey, log these five expenses in, in my invoicing software, right? And then there's this whole other world of generative UI, which is you are talking back and forth to maybe an MCP. But instead of getting back just raw data, you also are getting back like UI that would be probably integrated inside of your chat, right? That's what MCP UI or MCP apps, the whole, that whole idea is, right?

• 43:53Wes Bos?

  And all of this stuff is just constantly changing and, and what people are using is, is constantly moving as well. But that's kind of like the space right now. And AG UI is sort of a layer in between your application, whether it's a website, whether it's an iPhone app, desktop application, and your actual agent. And it, it sort of does like back and forth. It has one really interesting thing that Web MCP doesn't have, which is it's all event based. Meaning that like when something happens in your application, it then can be triggered. Whereas like Web MCP simply just like, you can, you can visit the website. You can ask for a list of items. You can ask to update an item, right? You're just doing tool calls back and forth.

• 44:38Wes Bos?

  And that might change in Web MCP, but that's kind of an interesting point, part of AG UI. AG UI is developed by the Copilot Kit folks and Copilot Kit is one of the ways that you can consume the agent data and then turn that into actual UI. So we're talking about like generative UI. We're talking about you're chatting in chat GPT and then you have like an inlined UI. Maybe it's like, like a restaurant that you want to book, or maybe it's some to do items that you want to check off, a shopping list, et cetera.

• 45:17Wes Bos?

  One of the ways that you can consume the AG UI data is via rendering out some HTML. So AG UI seems to have certainly has some, some big momentum before them. It's very actively developed. They seem to really know what they're doing. I don't really care if Web MCP wins over this, or even if they are a total overlap between the thing. I'm just excited to see more things of, of being able to use applications agentically.

• 45:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. You know what? It is very funny. So I built Web MCP into my video app and stuff like that. And then I was chatting with my own personal agent and it was, it suggested creating an animation in my video app. And I was like, can you do that? And it's like, I'll connect over Web MCP. And then it just made it connected over my Web MCP and, and gave me like a prototype of something. And I was just like, man, Web MCP rules. I, it's, it rules because it's built into the browser and, and I don't know. To me, it just feels like easy to adopt if that's the case, but I haven't seen this before. And now I'm on their website. It's just crazy how much stuff has just shown up, all these new things.

• 46:30Wes Bos?

  All of them. And it's, it's also like, I think the hardest part for a lot of these things is just being able to explain what these things are. Like I guarantee I'm going to get a DMs from the people at this company after this goes, goes live. I mean, like you didn't really totally explain it all that well, you know? And it just has to fit perfectly into it. But I'm, I'm pretty excited about Web MCP as well, although I do wonder about the whole events thing. Because if you want to say, hey, when something changes on this website, you, I, I think right now you have to sort of pull for that type of thing. Whereas being, we've learned in programming, event based programming is very good.

• 47:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yes. All right. Next question here from Anan. Amazing content. Can you do a pie setup video, how you use it and full flow?

• 47:18Wes Bos?

  Yes. I, I put this one in there because I, I don't want you to tell us your full flow and do a whole video here. But I'm, I'm curious, like Scott, if you were starting absolutely from scratch, either with pie or, or like pie durable, like making your own agent. Like what's your, what's your process for that?

• 47:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Well, I think the number one process that like you should think about, especially getting into something like pie, is that what a lot of people find is that less is more. What's so enticing about pie is that you can extend it to do whatever your heart's content. And you go to the packages and there's this massive catalog of packages promising you all kinds of stuff. And some of them are very good and are super necessary. And others are, are less necessary and some might even, you know, hinder things. Like recently there was some evals and benchmarking around different harnesses.

• 48:15Scott Tolinski?

  And just stock pie scored better than OMP, which is basically pie, uh, which is, what is it? Oh, my pie. What is OMP? Uh, OMP dot SH. Well, I mean, what is like, oh, my ZSH? Is that what it stands for?

• 48:31Wes Bos?

  Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, my ZSH. Oh, my pie.

• 48:33Scott Tolinski?

  So that's the same thing is OMP and oh God, OMP's got the coolest website, bro. It's got the coolest website. They actually have a really good terminal called TURN that I got access to that is sick. There's a lot to like here. And what there is, is that this is just a collection of really tuned and, and picked out pie extensions. But I want to say that like the, the thing to get into with pie is to not install too much too quickly. Install things as you need them or want them or want to try them out and experience it with them or without them. Because I've gone through the flow of having a lot of stuff and a little stuff installed. And right now I don't have very much installed in terms of like my pie setup.

• 49:16Scott Tolinski?

  But if there are things you want to accomplish, you can install them. For instance, there was no good Web MCP one, so I just made a Web MCP extension for my, my pie agent. And like, it was super easy, worked no problem. And, and like in general, I needed an MCP extension before, but now MCP is baked in anyway. So I would say start minimal, only add what you need to add and don't, don't go nuts unless you like find yourself like really needing extra stuff here and there. Cause yeah, I, I think that like too oftentimes we, we want to like get too in the weeds of like really customizing when the minimal setup is, is very good. Yeah.

• 49:54Wes Bos?

  Yes. And that kind of goes back to some of the previous questions we had is like, like what should I focus on? Like a lot of, a lot of people are like, hmm, maybe I should like figure out how to like rice out my system absolutely perfectly. But in some cases, you don't need to. I think you still do need to for a lot of the UI stuff we're talking about, but that might not be the case in the future.

• 50:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I, you know what? My, my Pi durable setup, Wes, has gotten a little bit more rice out, but even then it's not extensions because it's just like you, you're connecting tools and making it all custom. I recently, the best thing I did in my Pi durable setup, which Pi durable is essentially like, it's a durable agent where it's writing everything to essentially like a list of what it's doing at any given point. So.

• 50:41Wes Bos?

  It's kind of like, like a skeleton for building your own agent, right?

• 50:44Scott Tolinski?

  It's a skeleton for building your own agent. Yes. It's a skeleton for building your agent where like Pi is like, you know, an extendable harness. This is like an extendable agent type of deal. And one thing that I did with my UI that I have going that powers my, my picture frame, of course, obviously, but my whole family's like agentic stuff is I added a little like little tool that you can highlight part of the UI. It pops open a little window. This is by no means novel. Other people have made this, but you just highlight a part of it. You just say what's wrong with it and it sends the DOM, it sends the component, it sends the, the route, and then my little thing off to an agent to fix it. My God, that little bit has been so

• 51:28Scott Tolinski?

  nice. And then it, it just fires up a durable chat. I can just go in and chat if I want to go back and forth with it. For the most part, it just fixes things. But yeah, that, that's pretty much my setup. My, my, my Pi durable has been getting more use than my Pi lately, but I use them both. Yes.

• 51:45Wes Bos?

  Beautiful. All right, let's move into sick pick. I got a sick pick for you today. And this is probably not for everybody, but I have lights and all kinds of stuff in my office and I have these stupid little tripods that they, they go on and they get in the way. I trip over them all the time. They're, they're very tippy because they're not super high quality. You know, they're not like, like those high end C stands that you would get. So what I did is I found these brackets that you can wall mount and they are amazing because I can wall mount all my lights. You can wall mount, if you've got like a camera or something like that, you can, you can mount it on that and basically just swing them wherever you want. And the

• 52:28Wes Bos?

  most important part is that they're, they don't take up any floor space and I can walk under them as they go high enough in my office. So just a major upgrade to this, the like kind of craziness that is an office that has to have like, you got lights and cameras and all that, all that crap in your office.

• 52:47Scott Tolinski?

  I think you have action too. You have lights and cameras.

• 52:50Wes Bos?

  Lights, camera, action. Yes. So this is the one I got. It's from newer, which is one of those like Amazon photography brands that is, puts out pretty decent stuff.

• 53:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. One of my newer LED panels is slowly going. Like I'd say like 50% of the, the nodes are out, but I've had it for ages now. So, um, so what is that called exactly? You would say it's a, a bracket?

• 53:17Wes Bos?

  It's called a, a boom arm. The photography stuff is really weird, man. Just trying to search for what you want. I figured out like, I didn't know what the little stick was that lights can screw onto. And I figured out it's called a baby pin, which is baby pin, very odd thing. The photography world is, man, talk about having like gear acquisition syndrome. Every time I need something for my cameras, I'm like, oh man, there's a lot of cool stuff.

• 53:47Scott Tolinski?

  There's a lot of cool stuff. I really wanted to get a giant horizontal like bar on my ceiling.

• 53:54Wes Bos?

  Oh yeah, like a whole rig.

• 53:56Scott Tolinski?

  When I was at the Microsoft studios, they, it was like they had a, like a grid on top. And I was just like, oh, this is so cool. A grid. I want the grid. Um, but obviously that's very, very expensive. This thing's cheaper than I was expecting for how heavy duty it looks.

• 54:11Wes Bos?

  Forty, 50 bucks? Yeah.

• 54:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. You can get a newer, uh, horizontal boom arm for 36 bucks. And then I would just need to find some way to attach that. And then I could have my, uh, cause the ones I were looking at were much more expensive than this unnecessarily on B and H. So, yes.

• 54:28Wes Bos?

  That's good. I was also looking at the, the poles that you like twist and like,

• 54:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Wes Bos?

  they're like friction fit. Those are really nice too, because then the floor space, all they take is just like a pole instead of a whole tripod.

• 54:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Wes Bos?

  But I couldn't find any that were like a reasonable price. And I almost went and bought those like drywaller poles that they used to like hold up sheets, but they were so ugly. And it's kind of, I, I opted for this and I'm very happy I did.

• 54:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Wes Bos?

  I bought a second one. So I have two lights. Yeah. Tension stuff, especially with kids, you know, someone tries to like swing on it.

• 55:03Scott Tolinski?

  You got, you got two of these nice lights?

• 55:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Scott Tolinski?

  Or do you have different ones?

• 55:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah. The Amaran 150Cs. So I've got my main one lighting me up. And then I have, hold on, I can, let me turn it off just to show you. I have like at the backlight, it's, you can hardly see it right now, but it just kind of fills out the back. I could turn it up too. Woo.

• 55:25Scott Tolinski?

  These Amaran lights are so sick. I, I love this thing. I have one, uh, one light over there that is like, kind of like a fill. And this is like my key right here, which is my Amaran. And then I have one down here that's a backlight and these ones are just like cheap LED flat panels that are really harsh on your face. So I don't point them at my face, but.

• 55:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Scott Tolinski?

  And then I got some, some poles. I got a couple of poles in here that are purple and blue to give us some color lighting. So much fun. I'm going to sick pick something that's also a lot of fun. And that is a mono price, uh, ultra thin ethernet cable. They come in all kinds of different colors to match your stuff. I got them for my rack and, uh, they come in, this is, you know, like the, the smallest, uh, size, one of them.

• 56:09Wes Bos?

  It's like a tiny little, like a, a five inch.

• 56:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 56:12Wes Bos?

  A patch cable.

• 56:13Scott Tolinski?

  But you can get this same cable up to 50 feet. So this same cable has all kinds of different sizes. But let me just tell you, if you're an aesthetics person, if you're like, ooh, I gotta have my ethernet cables be looking the same and they gotta be looking good. My God. I mean, one, the cable, one, the cable is so thin and it's not like your big old chunky ethernet cable. It's so thin and beautiful. I love this little cable. Um, and I think they look great.

• 56:44Wes Bos?

  Trust it too. Cause like, Amazon is full of like, uh, CAT 19 ethernet cable. And it's like, you can't trust that stuff, you know? It's full of aluminum wiring. Mono price is very reputable.

• 56:55Scott Tolinski?

  Mono price. Great. Yeah. So man, these things are good. I'm actually going to get a few more of them to like just standardize. Cause I have like the rest of my rack, like the front of my rack now has all these on the front, but like the, the backend of it is all like 18 different looking ethernet cables that I've had from over the course of my life.

• 57:13Wes Bos?

  I made all my own ethernet cables for my rack and it looks awful. Cause it's just this blue. And then I got these like orange jackets for it. And I just, I want to go all, all new, but I can't justify it. No one cares.

• 57:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Wes Bos?

  For yours, you see it all the time. Mine, mine is just in the utility room at our house.

• 57:32Scott Tolinski?

  They make these in blue, Wes.

• 57:35Wes Bos?

  I don't want blue though. Blue is ugly.

• 57:37Scott Tolinski?

  Okay. Well, they make them in red or yellow or what?

• 57:41Wes Bos?

  Awesome.

• 57:42Scott Tolinski?

  All right. Sick. Well, that's all I got.

• 57:44Wes Bos?

  All right. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. Please send us your questions. Go to syntax.fm. In the navigation, there is a potluck button. Click it, submit our question and we'll answer on a future episode.

• 57:55Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.