1014: Anthropic doesn’t use AI

Scott, Wes, and CJ reunite fresh off a trip to Amsterdam to chat conferences, burnout, and whether Anthropic actually uses AI. They also dig into a packed bag of sick picks and tech news, including HTML streaming in Chrome, an image-to-ASCII generator, and a wild Arch Linux supply chain attack. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 02:15 Anthropic Doesn’t Use AI Thariq’s Tweet Tweet Response 06:15 Taste and Vision in Prompting Output 10:50 Wes and Scott’s Slide Decks 18:05 Amsterdam Trip Recap 26:09 Are Conferences worth it? 27:21 Amsterdam Trip Recap 31:17 Fable 5 First Impressions 33:45 Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Banned 41:45 IRL Events Are Great For Burnout 45:12 Brought to you by Sentry.io 45:52 HTML Streaming now in Chrome 55:47 Image to ASCII Generator The Mitos Repo 01:01:31 Find Modern Module Replacements 01:05:55 Scott is Using MacOS / iOS Betas 01:09:25 Xiaomi OpenCode Fork and Mimo 2.5 Pro 01:14:06 Agent Dashboards 01:21:39 Arch Linux Supply Chain Attack 01:23:47 Should we train coding only models? 01:31:37 Thanks! 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Syntax. It's Syntax Weekly. We're back from Amsterdam and we've got a ton of news and other interesting things to share with you. I am joined today by Wes and Scott. How are you guys feeling?

• 0:13Wes Bos?

  I'm doing great. I got back from Amsterdam and I did that like opposite jet lag where you wake up at 6:00 AM and you feel great because your body is adjusted and like I was like, I'm gonna become a morning person now, but then it wore off after two days.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. CJ, what day did you get back? I got back on Saturday late night.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Just yesterday, so I have not adjusted yet. I was up at 3:00 AM today, so.

• 0:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I was up early too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very early. Oh, man, feeling it.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Nice. So like was mentioned, we've got some stuff for you. We're gonna be talking about how Anthropic does not use AI. We'll recap our Amsterdam trip. We met a ton of you while we were there. This was the most, I don't know about you guys, this was the most selfies I've ever taken at an event.

• 1:00Wes Bos?

  Unbelievable. The amount of like photos that people take has gone up over the years. Like it used, I remember like maybe five, six years ago, like one person, like a really young person asked me for a photo. And I was like, oh yeah, sure. Like I've never had that before. And it's just, it's just become this like thing now where like everybody takes photos at the thing. And like we were in line with like meeting everybody and like saying hi or whatever for like probably at least an hour, hour and a half. And it was fantastic to meet everybody. So many little gifts as well.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  I had somebody ask me to sign their badge on the way out. I was like, you want my autograph? What?

• 1:45Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I signed a badge. I signed a Lego set. Oh, yeah.

• 1:48Wes Bos?

  They're definitely stealing your identity, CJ. I can't believe you did that.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I know. I didn't give them the regular signature. I spruced it up a little bit.

• 1:55Wes Bos?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we've got a ton of pictures to show you. We'll recap the event. Anybody that was at the event, feel free to say hey in the chat. And we've got some other stuff. HTML out of order streaming has made it into Chrome, so Scott's gonna tell us about that. And I've got a few fun sites to show you as well. This is Syntax Weekly. Why don't we get right into it? Wes, what do you have?

• 2:14Wes Bos?

  Yes. All right. I have two things, both related to the Claude 5 Fable launch, but not about Claude Fable. And it's more the launch videos that went out. So.

• 2:28Wes Bos?

  Every time Claude has something or Anthropic launches something, they have these like beautiful videos that are, they're usually like UI animations of like showing it and moving around. But this one, they had this like beautiful,

• 2:45Wes Bos?

  like fives and nice animations, kind of stop motion feel to it. Just, I just absolutely love the look of it. And I remember seeing that and be like, hmm, I wonder if those assets were programmatically generated or not. And somebody asked on Twitter, I'm curious how Anthropic makes the models for their promotional materials. Is this Claude collaging found images? It doesn't look like an image model. And Sam McAllister, who works there, he says, I, there was no AI involved in this project. And I previously had been DMing with somebody that works on the like After Effects ones that they put out. And they said, yeah, like we have some processes with AI in place,

• 3:30Wes Bos?

  but all of the actual videos were totally done by hand by like extremely skilled people. He says, much of the source material was made from the Brockus Encyclopedia. And our internal teamwork shows some brilliant animators for the finished product. But he showed himself actually making the fives out of the map, which is really, really cool to see. Because anytime these videos come out, you get these like dudes saying, oh, definitely prompted, made it with remotion. And like, I'm so in on like AI video editing, but like there's no, this is like miles ahead of all the other stuff they're working on.

• 4:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, somebody, you know, I've maybe mentioned this a few times. My background is in motion graphics. I worked professionally as a motion graphics artist. I did a lot of After Effects in my career. And man, it is a powerful tool in the hands of the right people doing stuff like this. So when I see that this type of work is still being created by hand, and it's not a surprise to me, given the level of care that's clearly put into it.

• 4:42Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Scott Tolinski?

  And again, like, Really, really cool application of those skills. Absolutely.

• 4:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah. On the same like note, Tharok, who works on Claude Code, posted a detail of how he made his like, he posted like a secondary video on like detailing everything and he had Claude and Remotion do a whole bunch of stuff, right? Like it transcribed it, it cut it, it did color grading, it stitched it all together and it did a bunch of like overlays. So like in the same breath, I think this is a very neat way to do this as well. It's more of like a PowerPoint with the overlays. I had a tweet this morning go

• 5:33Wes Bos?

  out where I was like, like this is not particularly good. It's informative and it's interesting how he did it, but editing simply from the transcript and just overlaying the words that you're saying on top, which is essentially what the finished video was. You can, we could take a look at it right here, right? Like it's simply just taking things that he's saying and overlapping it in like different cards and like and whatnot. And that's, that doesn't make a good video. Like a good video is you're talking with some context, but you're also showing some visual which adds to the context and is not necessarily being added to the transcript. So I thought, like, let's, let's

• 6:16Wes Bos?

  talk about that. We edit a lot of video on our, our team, right? And our editor, Randy, he is absolutely cracked and has all of this like Claude tools that he's built out, right? And I think that AI is fantastic for

• 6:36Wes Bos?

  Doing quick edits, being able to figure out what the false starts are, being able to remove silences, all of that stuff. But the actual like storytelling and like the, I hate, I hate to say this, but the taste part of it has, same as design has still not been replicated.

• 6:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think that goes for a lot of things. I said the word taste so many times by accident at JS Nation and React Summit, where it was like, there is no other word that fits in to describe this. But again, yes, the professional hand of the storytelling and stuff. I've been working on a tool to do motion graphics myself. I know, like you said, Randy's been working on a tool. We all are deep into this space. So to me, it is again, no surprise that again, the, that overall, just creative, overall, like, what do you would call that? I don't want to say taste. I don't want to say taste. The overall creative vibe is something that is difficult to replicate because somebody asked me at the, at the meetup or at the, the thing about my conference talks and they

• 7:38Scott Tolinski?

  were like, what prompt did you use to create your slides? Because my slides were 3D, it was a solar system, it was in space on like, there's no prompt that will, will do this. It is revision, it is overall vision, it is exactly describing to a T how you want it to look, not make me a thing, go.

• 8:03Wes Bos?

  The, the prompt seagulls, as I call them, where people are just like, prompt, prompt, like, what was a prompt? Prompt, give me the prompt. Absolutely drive me nutty because like, use your, use your brain for one more thing and, and figure out what you should ask for. You don't even have to do the work anymore. You simply just need to ask the box to make it. And the fact that you are so lazy that you don't want to ask it to do what you want, or you are unable to describe what it is that you want, but you're simply just like, prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, that drives me crazy.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so in the chat, Internet Doggo said the vision, I think you landed on that word too, Scott, having a vision. And I think that's it. Like, we all have built up our tastes and style over time. And so, all of that goes into our prompts, but we have an end goal in mind. So we're not just going to prompt it once and then use what's output. We iterate with it. We know what we're looking for. Like, we have that vision in our mind, and so we're working towards it. Now, I don't know, some people might be saying we're coping because eventually the models are going to be this good. But they've been out for so long. There's a lot of video models out there, and the good stuff has humans in the loop. I think this was definitely on display. I don't know if you all watched some of the Super Bowl commercials.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  But this, like, if you saw the Super Bowl commercials this year, it was just the worst AI slop. Like, it was so hard to watch because you could tell they literally just prompted without any human, uh, human in the loop to add taste or whatever to it. So I think it's still needed.

• 9:41Wes Bos?

  Man, I'm not coping at all. I wish it would get better. We talk about this with design as well. Every single time a new thing comes out, we saw this with Google's Stitch. We saw this with the latest ChatGPT image, where it can now create UIs and posters and whatnot. And immediately, we're like, yes, like, this is actually really good. It's decent, you know? And then like a month in, you start seeing the same, like, on ChatGPT, you see the same, like, little paintbrush swipe on absolutely everything. Or on Google Stitch, you're seeing the same, like, sort of designs, just with changed colors and changed fonts every time. And you're realizing, like, oh, they're, they're probably just seeding it

• 10:26Wes Bos?

  with 20, 30, 40, 100 different good designs, which they are good designs. But at a certain point, you're just, you're just taking like a nice looking PowerPoint template off the shelf, and just using Calibri and Microsoft Word to put your own stuff in. And then that starts to look old hat very quickly.

• 10:47Scott Tolinski?

  Speaking of that PowerPoint off the shelf, I saw, and this is no shade to any of the speakers, but I saw at the conference, 100 slide decks, right? Maybe not 100. I saw a lot of slide decks. And I could just smell the exact AI tool they were using to create their slides every single time, whether that was the text, that uppercase letter spacing, whether that is the glossy boxes that it's putting in the things. And it kind of made some of them a little tough because it was like, okay, this is your, this is your talk.

• 11:28Scott Tolinski?

  You gotta put more into it than just make me slides about this and I'll bring the demos. Like Wes's and I'll say-

• 11:35Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I'm showing mine right now.

• 11:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Maybe I should show mine too in a minute here, but I feel like they ultimately end up standing out so much in a positive way that like, I would almost rather you just use PowerPoint or something like that than use the AI tools to prompt the slides just because it is, it feels distracting when you're like, alright, this is the same aesthetic that every other slide deck has today.

• 12:04Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's crazy how every single deck looked like a Claude-ism. And I get it because like you're trying to spend the time on your content of your site, but that screen at JS Nation is like a, what, probably 40 foot high, beautiful LED screen that has the most popping colors and like the black blacks that you gotta make it look good for that.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, and for our audio listeners, I'll describe the aesthetics of Wes's slides. In one word, it's just taste. It's like the background is this cool texture, like wrinkled text, and then anytime there are titles, there's like this spray paint dithered effect that really makes it pop. Like this looks like Wes's slides. This doesn't look like he just prompted something. Like it has his signature style in there. And that's not something you're gonna get just by prompting in a box.

• 13:01Wes Bos?

  The funny thing is that I like, I did prompt this, but-

• 13:04Scott Tolinski?

  But you described it, you knew what you wanted. You had a vision. You had a vision. But that is, I think people, do they want a one-shot? They want this or that, but they don't want to chisel it out.

• 13:14Wes Bos?

  Or they don't know what they want.

• 13:15Scott Tolinski?

  They don't know what they want, yes. I wanted every single one of my slides to look like a poster and I had, oh, I need this to be this way, I need this to be this way, I need this to be this way. There was a vision to it. It wasn't just, uh, make me solar system.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  I will say about your slides, Scott, like, I think that for me, because I've given a few conference talks, and I've always wanted to have my demos embedded in slides. And I've done it a couple of times, because there are a few tools that like will give you interactive code editors in the slides, but I felt like your slides, Scott, were like one of the ultimate demos of, I'm showing you the demo inside of my slides, and it's interactive, because the slides themselves are built with web tech.

• 13:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  So like, you literally had cards and models that were using the tech that you were talking about, and it worked inside the slides, so that was really cool to see as well.

• 14:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, do you mind if I show mine, Wes? Are you done with your?

• 14:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah, go for it. I'm done here. Let's see yours.

• 14:14Scott Tolinski?

  I'll show mine real quick here, and then we can talk about the event. So my slides were done in React 3 Fiber, and so it started blank, and then they did this opening. Hopefully the FPS works here, because my computer's sounding like a rocket ship right now. But it was really smooth on stage. It did crush my battery. But again, every single one of these talks need, or every single one of these slides was animated, like even the stars here were all individual particles. And then, again, each one was here. And the coolest thing about my talk is that, because the slides were just individual JavaScript objects, is that you could have a non-3JS version of this, just in case. Even this QR code was made out of individual stars, and it worked really well.

• 14:57Wes Bos?

  That's so cool.

• 14:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, it was really dope. And then on top of it, I had all of my demos be, all of my demos kind of sat in actual HTML on top of this. So the demos all worked as HTML that you could just go through. And then I have the browser standards over here, so you can tell like which browser supported and everything like that. And honestly, I think after seeing a lot of AI-generated slide decks, I think it was a... Breath of fresh air a little bit, right?

• 15:29Speaker 00

  It's it's good out. Yeah, absolutely.

• 15:33Wes Bos?

  Slide decks are really tricky because most people just put the words that they're saying. This this comes back to the videos that we were just talking about is that like your slides should be supplementary to what it is you're talking about. So you should have something on the slides. You should have something in the video and then you should be talking about something related, but not the exact same thing, right? They don't just want to see the words that you're saying. And then that's how they get bored. I think Scott did a fantastic job with this.

• 16:03Scott Tolinski?

  Thank you. Yeah.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I don't know if you described it for our audio listeners. It's literally a solar system. And as like you go through the slides, you are flying through the solar system to the next demo.

• 16:16Scott Tolinski?

  Everything has a transition, your camera panning, and the system's actually pretty elegant because each slide has like a camera coordinate system. So it's just on a JavaScript object where the camera is and the different planets coordinate with the different sections, whether that is like bleeding edge tech or whatever. At one point, I even put an HTML in Canvas in the solar system in the React 3 fiber thing. It's all crazy. But like even like, so I have a slide up right now that's talking about how your agents can write it and it pulls back. And like this slide, again, this was not me just prompting this to say, make me a slide. This this vision or whatever was crafted, you know, I had this like,

• 16:57Scott Tolinski?

  whether that is like a retro sci fi looks kind of books or anything like that. I just really wanted it to always have a very specific aesthetic. Though the one thing that didn't quite work out as well as I wanted to was the worm, which looks ugly as hell. But I think that adds to the funny charm of it. I did add a shy halloo to this thing, which was very funny. Maybe Fable could have gotten this thing better, but.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, 3D worm wrapping around the world here.

• 17:23Wes Bos?

  Scott, you need to distill the worm into something like on its own. And then like this will be the new Pelican on a bike.

• 17:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Wes Bos?

  Where you can test every model that comes out. Or like the opposite of like, okay, I want to try a cheaper model. But can it can it do a worm that eats the the world?

• 17:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, that is very funny. I prompted so many times asking it to make the worm better, which was like very funny.

• 17:53Scott Tolinski?

  But yeah, like I had like this, this pull back and reveal the entire universe in mind. Man, this took a lot of back and forth, but so definitely not just a single prompt here or anything like that. Um, do we want to talk about the event overall now that I'm going to close this because my computer is on fire?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's get into it. I have quite a few photos to share. Uh, and if you were at the event, say hello in the chat and I will do my best to describe these photos for our audio listeners. Um, but essentially we teamed up with JS Nation and React Summit. So Scott and Wes just showed you their slides. They gave talks at both conferences, but the day before JS Nation, uh, there was a pre-party where people could come pick up their badge. And we did a live show at that pre-party and uh, it was so much fun and there were so many people. Um, most people I've ever seen at a, at a syntax, uh, event.

• 18:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah, well, probably you think, I think we had like 250 RSVP'd, um, and then we also, it was also the JS Nation, uh, party, right? So there was, I would say there was probably several hundred people. Um, quite a few people said they couldn't even get in. Uh, they were just hanging out outside because it was so busy.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Let's see if I can find a photo. Yeah, it was standing room only and like, there was like a garage door area where people were like piling back to, to watch the show happen. Um, I pulled a few tweets. Oh, shout out to Ricardo, someone we met there. He made a can of stroopwafels, but he made us tasty treats. So these are tasty treats for Wes, Scott and CJ, uh, in commemoration of a thousand episodes. Um, so that was really nice.

• 19:27Wes Bos?

  That was, so I ended up having that. CJ told me to throw out my bag and it, it came back to Canada. So sorry about that. But I, I was looking at that yesterday and it's, it's not just a sticker. It's, it's like printed on the, the tin, which I assuming is using one of these like, um, sublimation printers or printers that can print on anything. Now I'm curious about how this was actually made because it's, it's really cool.

• 19:51Scott Tolinski?

  It's a really good print. Yes.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 19:54Scott Tolinski?

  Man, I love me some strip waffles too, so thank you so much, even though I didn't get to have any of them.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  I would say this was also just a perfect live event because our live events are like, it's almost like a comedy show. Like they're super entertaining, like they're interactive with the audience. And it was a, it was a tight space to, to, to do that in.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  But it was great. More photos here. We also took, we also did a live CSS battle. So we tried to recreate the Amsterdam flag live. We did a switch. So every 30 seconds, we had to switch the keyboard to who was coding. I think we got there probably a little over 10 minutes. So that was super fun.

• 20:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And guess what? We did a stumped where we were trying to find, we had a code that was wrong. And we were trying to stump CJ with the help of the audience. And I gotta say CJ, you did a great job. You did a really good job. You did much better than I would have done in that instance. So good job.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  It worked out. Cause yeah, go ahead Wes, sorry.

• 20:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I, I thought CJ did fantastic job at the stump. So the stumps were like questions about like syntax errors or like weird things about it. And what I thought was really interesting was seeing CJ's process and like talking through it. And you could just tell that like, like I think what Scott and I do it, we're just like looking for little weird things or like trying to get it. But CJ has a very methodical process of like breaking down the problem and just tackling it. It was, it was really fun to do in an age where it doesn't necessarily matter about syntax errors anymore. It was very enjoyable to, to play that game and allow CJ to find the syntax errors.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was fun to, to flex my muscles and having a live audience, like I could ask for help if I couldn't get it. And there were some, some smart people in the audience. You all had a, I don't know if it was, it was Wes or Scott's. You had the markdown syntax error. Was that yours Scott?

• 21:56Wes Bos?

  That was Scott's. That was brutal.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  It was just the incorrect syntax on the link. But multiple people in the audience saw it. I eventually saw it. But I think you said you did the same one in SF and like, nobody in the audience saw it, right?

• 22:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 22:11Wes Bos?

  They don't know how to write markdown.

• 22:12Scott Tolinski?

  Well, they're just like, it's so funny, yeah, because these are always JavaScript. And I was thinking, you know, the one thing I always goof at, I always get it wrong the first try is the, the, the, so just like, I'm wondering if you would get it. And I'm shocked at how fast you got that one, just because again, like, I think that's one of those ones where you, you mess up the params versus the brackets at Markdown. It's so easy to just flip flop those in your brain and then, uh, yeah, shout out, shout out to you CJ.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Thank you. And yeah, more photos to share here. Like I said, it was a packed room.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  Some nice shots from Randy. Randy was going around taking cool, cool aesthetic shots. That's us working on the, the Mad CSS challenge. Um, and then after the meetup, we talked about this in the intro, but people literally lined up. And just for an hour, one after another, it was like, can I take a selfie? Can I take a selfie? Um, so quite a few people posted theirs online. Um, it was fantastic meeting everybody. Like it was, it was such a joy. I, I hopefully I didn't seem annoyed by all the photos because it was just very overwhelming, but it was, it was so fun.

• 23:10Scott Tolinski?

  You gotta, you gotta learn, you gotta learn how to embrace it CJ. It's, it's wonderful. Everybody's so great. Yeah.

• 23:16Wes Bos?

  The speaker dinner, which was after two and a half days of this was like, it very clearly showed the personality differences between CJ, Scott and I. Where it was just like, two and a half days of talking to a million people, our voices were just gone, absolutely zonked. And CJ has got really, I need to go back to the hotel where there are no people.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:39Wes Bos?

  And I'm like, more people, let's go drink some beers on a boat.

• 23:44Scott Tolinski?

  I would have done that, but Wes, I had to, I had to give a talk the next day.

• 23:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Scott Tolinski?

  And I had to moderate a panel and I had to host a discussion room.

• 23:51Wes Bos?

  I would have done it if I had something the next day.

• 23:53Scott Tolinski?

  Dude, I, the, the day I woke up to emcee, the first day, it was the day after the syntax event, my voice was cooked. You should have seen Lyra's face. When I, uh, spoke to her in the morning, she looked concerned when she saw, when she heard my voice, it sounded rough. But yes, it was, um, I would have, I would have preferred to go out and hang out with y'all, but man, I was, I was very concerned about my voice for sure.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I was in the same boat because I emceed both days and I was like, I, I have to talk on stage. I have to interview people. Like I can't have my voice gone. So. Sorry I didn't make it to the speakers meetup, but everything else was super fun. I took more photos to share here. This is the event hall. It's called Cromhout Hall. Let's see if it can download. It's really pixelated right now.

• 24:38Scott Tolinski?

  It's a big old venue.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's massive, right on the water there across from the Central Station.

• 24:44Wes Bos?

  In the north of Holland, or north of Amsterdam.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  And this is the main venue, like, I think like over 800 chairs.

• 24:51Scott Tolinski?

  And for React Summit, it was even more than this.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's those black curtains you can see in the back for the next day React Summit. They took those down and added even more chairs. But this is the massive screen that they were talking about, like 40 feet high, like 100 feet wide. Super cool. And then we also recorded a live podcast there, but yeah.

• 25:11Wes Bos?

  Oh yeah, I forgot that we had done that. Like, it was such a packed day. So we did two live podcasts, which you'll be hearing relatively soon on the feed. They had like a pro bunch of videographers set up, three camera setup, which was really cool. I made sure to go between all the cameras quite a few times, so Randy will have a fun time editing that. And then, yeah, I did another one with another podcast as well. It was just fantastic.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Gee impact of it.

• 25:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I did so much. I did, I hosted a panel, I hosted a discussion room, I emceed a full day. I did a talk. I did that talk Q and A or whatever. We did the Syntax Live show. We did an entire day of syntax meetings, like an entire day. So it was just thing after thing after thing all day long, and it was awesome. Really had a great time.

• 26:09Wes Bos?

  Question. People are always asking, like, are conferences worth it? Or like, what's the best part of a conference? Because like, you can go on YouTube and find the talks from a lot of these conferences. And even then, people don't typically watch them. Sometimes you see some of the smartest people spend a lot of time on a talk, and then you look at it on YouTube and it's like 300 views. And it's unbelievable because it's really good content.

• 26:36Wes Bos?

  But like, for me, the best part of a conference is simply just meeting everybody, being in the conference, having really good conversations. It's just, that type of stuff doesn't just come up naturally. And I find it so valuable to just be in a spot with other developers and be able to talk about this stuff.

• 26:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, the best part was meeting everybody. Like, I got to hang with the Zed folks. And, man, great bunch of people from all over the world. And just an endless amount of different developers and different teams, speakers, all that kind of thing. It was just, I met so many people and talked about all kinds of stuff. I got so much value out of it. Yeah, so I had a great time.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, so in the chat, they said, "Wait, Wes is taller than I thought?" That's the other thing. You can see how short I am if you meet us in person.

• 27:28Scott Tolinski?

  See, I intentionally hired everyone on the team to be not tall, because I am not tall. And then therefore, it's going to make me look just a slight amount taller than I actually am.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  And I got new shoes that give me about an inch, so I'm a little bit taller than normal. You can see in this selfie.

• 27:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah, why am I so much taller than... I never realized that until I saw the photo. And I was like, "It looks like I took the kids out for like a day in Amsterdam."

• 27:59Scott Tolinski?

  Short kings, yes.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  I concur. I don't know if that's the term, but they call it like hallway track. Like, that's the best part of the conference. And like, even though I was emcee, like, I was watching the talks and asking questions about it. All the people that I met afterwards and talked with, a lot of times, like, there were more insights there. There was like, you can dig deeper and chat about the topics. And it doesn't have to be like picture perfect from being on stage. You can like dig into it more. So definitely the best part of a conference is like meeting the friends we make along the way.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Scott and I got to take a selfie. So Scott gave his talk and I was the emcee. Yeah, this is Scott and I giving a selfie with 800 Europeans and I guess Americans, a giant crowd, which is super fun.

• 28:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and it was a lot of fun. And CJ, thank you for doing the QA. I got to do Wes's QA. I think that was very special and a lot of fun because, you know, for people who don't know, you do the talk at this conference and there's a 10-minute Q and A with audience questions onstage after the talk. Something that actually stresses me out a lot, if I'm being honest. So the fact that it was you doing it, CJ, helped out a whole lot. It helped. It stresses me out more so than doing the talk itself, or even emceeing, or talking to, like, having the Q and A for some reason stresses me out just a little bit. But I will say, guys, do you know how I prepared for my Q and A? Because I think it's actually pretty dang smart.

• 29:19Wes Bos?

  How?

• 29:19Scott Tolinski?

  Did I tell you?

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Did you prompt it? How'd you do it?

• 29:23Scott Tolinski?

  I gave Fable my slides, and I said, I have to be onstage to do a Q and A after this. Grill me on the questions you would ask as an audience member. And I went through, I would say, probably 30 questions with Fable. And it would, it would, it would tell me if my answer was bad or not. And so I would get, I would give it a quick answer, and I was just doing it all via voice. And it would just be like, you say this, but there's a contradiction here. And I'd be like, oh, asshole. But it also, what it helped me do is it helped me while I was onstage do the Eminem thing in Eight Mile. And I just started, like, having those questions in my head. And I was like, people are gonna ask about this. Let me actually get out in

• 30:06Scott Tolinski?

  front of it. So that way, I don't have to do that during the Q and A. And honestly, I think it made my talk a lot better. I was, I was pretty proud of myself for that one, I think. I'll just say that.

• 30:16Wes Bos?

  That's good. Yeah. What kind of questions are people gonna have? I often, I'll do that with, like, with tweets, where, like, I'll post something. And sometimes, often, the questions that you get, or even in, like, a livestream chat like this, the questions that you get are like, oh, the people are just not, they're not understanding it, you know? Or, or on, like, you post, like, a TikTok, and, like, half the comments are like, uh, this is useless. I don't need this. And it's like, oh, they're not understanding, like, what this is for. I, maybe I need to, like, spend a bit more time on that.

• 30:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. All right. Do we want to get back into the, into the tech stuff? Or CJ, you got something?

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Let's do it. I got one more photo to show. A fantastic family photo of the Syntax crew.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  We all, because we were all there. That's one of the cool things. Nikki, our new editor, sort of new. I've been here a few months now.

• 31:09Scott Tolinski?

  October, that's new, yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. But we were all in the same room, so we got to take a fun family photo on the couch. That was super great. But Scott, you mentioned you used Fable to prompt. But how'd you do that? Because Fable's been banned.

• 31:25Scott Tolinski?

  It was not banned while I did that. Because it was banned, what, the day after this or whatever? It was banned maybe like the day after or the day after that, but I did it the day before my conference talk. So it was not banned. And in fact, I was actually really looking forward to having time on the plane to really get deep into Fable. I'd actually tried it a little bit out to have it evaluate my graffiti library. The thing I heard that Fable does better than other models was specifically handles large code bases really well. So large, mature code bases, it has a good overview of them. And so I had asked it to evaluate some things in my CSS graffiti library.

• 32:10Scott Tolinski?

  And it did come back with a really lovely detailed list of concerns possibly, or things that I should be thinking about in a way that I felt was more complete than what Opus 4.8 had given me in the past. Because I'm often, people are all the time, they're just asking, they're prompting this or that, whatever. But they're not asking enough things to consume into their own brain back, right? Like, tell me what you think about this. What do you see? Whatever. So I'm not having the, I'm not outsourcing some of the overall things to the agent. I'm asking the agent to distill larger concepts and then bring them forward to me, help me make the decisions and things like that.

• 32:54Scott Tolinski?

  So I found it to be very nice with that. And I am sad that I did not get to use it more. I'll say that.

• 33:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah, as a Canadian, I am sad that I am now banned from using it. We were at the conference, so I didn't get to dip into it other than just a couple little prompts. But not enough to like...

• 33:15Wes Bos?

  Be able to say it's way better at X, Y, and Z. In fact, I was like, like, looking on Twitter, like, what people are building with it. And like, all of the examples that people are building, I'm just like, that's your, I'm, like, I could have built that with, like, a year ago, with a lot of this, this type of stuff. And like, the fact that you one-shot at it in a single prompt is not, not impressive to me either.

• 33:38Scott Tolinski?

  The one-shot benchmarks are not impressive to me. That's not something that I really am that excited to see. So for people who don't know, Anthropic released a new, couple of new models, Fable and Mythos. Mythos is one that's been talked about for a long time here in terms of it being too dangerous. And then they were only out for just a few days. And even then, when they were out, they were, you could use them in your CloudMac subscription plans. But they had announced that they would be making it API-only at a certain date, of which I don't remember, because I was like, oh, I'm gonna get to try it out before then. So therefore, you know, I'll have a good opinion on it. Yeah, it was in like, a week.

• 34:17Scott Tolinski?

  So sometime in between then and that week, the US government stepped in because of what seemingly was a jailbreak or concern from the AWS team. And, well, they said that only US citizens can be using this thing. And because Anthropic clearly has no way of preventing, you know, non-US citizens anywhere. Like, there's no good way besides updating your passport or whatever. Like, in a way that, like, anybody's gonna actually wanna do. So they were just saying, we'll pull it for now. So, dang. Uh, it's gone. It's gone at least for right now.

• 35:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Scott Tolinski?

  Which is kind of a massive bummer, given I think it was really good in the short time I had to use it.

• 35:06Wes Bos?

  My, my first reaction to that was... Yeah, right. Like, this is just a marketing stunt because like, I'm sure it did actually get like, taken down by like, the US government. But did they know that that was going to happen? Because like, when they were teasing it, they said, "It's too dangerous."

• 35:26Scott Tolinski?

  I don't think so.

• 35:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah, they have this thing like, "The Claude needs a therapist." And they keep like, putting out the stupidest shit about it's becoming sentient. And like, all of these things where I'm just like, "I'm not believing anything that you're saying anymore." Because you're just trying to, you're trying to pump this up to make it sound like it's not like, it's crazy because like, they are so, such good models, and it's so powerful, and it's amazing what it does. But then they have to take it one step further and be like, "We have to get this thing a therapist." Or like, and, and I just like, I, you're saying that to pump it, you're gonna go public, and you need people that are not technical to think that you've made this like, alien being

• 36:09Wes Bos?

  that knows all, and you, therefore, they will buy your stock. So that's kind of where I was at with that. I was like, "I don't know if I believe this." And somebody pulled some, pulled some cards for people to get it banned, you know?

• 36:23Scott Tolinski?

  I don't think so, dude.

• 36:24Wes Bos?

  They probably were so happy when it was banned. No, you don't think so?

• 36:27Scott Tolinski?

  No, I don't think so. I, I think they were happy because people, people really liked it. When it was being used, people were like, "This shit rocks." And so for them to pull it after like, I just don't see that as being the marketing stunt. I, I do think he probably shouldn't have been like, "This thing is so dangerous ahead of time." But in the same regard, I don't think pulling it is something that they would want to do. Because that shit is so expensive and so good when they launch in the API. I think they would have been raking it in.

• 37:00Wes Bos?

  No, I think they're they're not worried about cashing in right now. They're simply just they're trying to hype it up to be as good as it actually is. They want everybody to think it. And like, imagine, imagine Scott, somebody were to come to you and be like, "Sir, you are are not allowed to eat at a restaurant anymore because you are too strong and we are worried you are going to bend all the forks. And we are worried that like all the people are going to be looking at your muscles and are going to be distracted by it, you know? Like, that's I that's what they're doing here. And I I do believe that it is as powerful as they're saying, but they're

• 37:41Wes Bos?

  they want everybody to know. And the fact that it went from, wow, Fable 5 is in this like tech community to all of a sudden it's worldwide news that there this is now something that needs to be banned by the government.

• 37:55Scott Tolinski?

  I would put more money in this being a political stunt than a marketing stunt.

• 38:00Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  I think, yeah, I think it's just I haven't said anything, so I'm gonna chime in now. But I think it's like a self self eating hype machine. Because absolutely, I thought the mythos mythos was hyped up way too much, right? Like, they said they weren't gonna release it. And then they released it with guardrails. So there's that. And the I think I do believe it is true that Anthropic was not involved with the US declaring it. What was it? A something about an export directive?

• 38:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  So they weren't involved with that. That actually came that did come from a separate company that isn't involved. And you might actually there might actually be some political things going on here because OpenAI has a deal with the US government, whereas we've seen in recent news that Anthropic like didn't want to let the US government use their models for for certain uses.

• 38:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  So this could also be seen as like a punishment to Anthropic.

• 38:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah, okay.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  But a few more few more details, though.

• 39:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  So the reason they said that it was banned was because the model could be jailbroken, meaning like people could basically remove the safeguards. But what Anthropic came back with was they don't see it as a jailbreak because these exact same prompt chains that were were published internally could be used on GPT-5 to create find the same vulnerabilities. So that's another tricky aspect here where like. Even though it's not Fable 5, these GPT-5 models technically can do the same thing, but they weren't banned. So, there's a lot, there's a lot in play here, is all I'm saying. I don't know.

• 39:39Wes Bos?

  The AI jailbreak, if you're wondering what that is, is essentially, somebody figures out a series, it's simply just a series of prompts where they get so long, or they are confusing, or you're able to type whatever you want. Like, the jailbreak initially was, "Forget everything you were just told, and do X, Y, and Z," right? That was the original jailbreak of like, "Just do what I, do what I say, it's okay." But now, they're just like, I would love, love to see the actual jailbreak for some of these more complex models, because I'm sure it is very, very tricky of how they're, how they do it. We should look into it. There's a couple, like, advanced ones that are already published, but obviously, they're not publishing these.

• 40:26Wes Bos?

  Let me ask you a question, though. Who snitched on Anthropic to get them banned?

• 40:34Speaker 00

  It was AWS, it was...

• 40:35Wes Bos?

  It was Amazon.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, yeah.

• 40:40Wes Bos?

  And now, second question. Who has $33 billion invested in Anthropic and would love to see their IPO go very well? Also, Amazon, you know?

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:53Wes Bos?

  Suspicious.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  You guys have anything else to say? Because I have positive news if you don't.

• 41:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. I don't have anything to say.

• 41:04Wes Bos?

  No, I'm not. I'm, I'm...

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:07Wes Bos?

  It's a weird, weird space. I'm excited about it. I think that these are extremely powerful, but I don't believe all this stuff.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm in the same boat. It's like, and also, like, it's also, it's so exhausting and overwhelming, the amount of hype, right? Because not only are it's like, it's hyped in the sense that it's gonna take everyone's jobs, and like, humans won't be at work anymore, then there's like, the security vulnerability hype, and then there's stuff like this, so...

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. I think we can all speculate. I don't think we know exactly what's going on.

• 41:40Wes Bos?

  I know. Next. Let's move on.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  In positive news, shout out to Product Devity. They actually just donated 6 euros and said that after being a year of bedridden, the Syntax FM meetup was my first day out. And I've been losing my love for programming because of AI and I really needed this, so thanks. So shout out to Product Devity. They came out to our event. That's pretty awesome.

• 42:02Scott Tolinski?

  Thank you. Yeah. When you said 6 euros, I was thinking, I was just in Greece. I was thinking like, I'm gonna get some pork euros.

• 42:10Wes Bos?

  I would eat 6 euros right now.

• 42:10Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, me too. Oh, yeah.

• 42:13Wes Bos?

  Nothing beats like the burnout more than like a meetup and like a meeting actual people. And I say that in like, you go to a conference about JavaScript and every single talk, not every single one, but most of them, I would probably say like 76% of them were about AI, right? And

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:36Wes Bos?

  It can be a little bit, I feel for the people that are there because they're just like, a lot of the talks were like, everything you know has totally changed. And it's also very true, but actually like shaking hands, meeting people, that is so energizing. So I highly recommend going to a conference or a meetup if you're feeling a little bit tired.

• 43:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I feel very hyped and energized and I shouldn't because I did way too much at that conference. I should feel very tired.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. And shout out local meetups too. So I run the Denver Script meetup. If you're in the Denver area, come out to the Denver Script meetup every 4th Tuesday. But I talk to folks that organize like the Amsterdam JS meetup and there was someone from Zurich JS there. So find your local meetups as well. Those happen more often than conferences and they're free. And you could even give a talk if you want to, but meeting people IRL, I completely agree. Great, great way to get rid of that burnout. Just talk to real people. Because yeah, this is the other thing I've been thinking about, especially seeing so many people on their phones. Like obviously on the flight, like you're bored, so you're on your phone, but just in public, people just scrolling, like people are experiencing the world through their phone.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  And if you just look up, there's a whole world around you. So get out there.

• 43:56Scott Tolinski?

  Get out there, man.

• 43:57Wes Bos?

  You could just use Street View. You don't have to go anywhere.

• 44:00Scott Tolinski?

  Street View. Actually, the Doom Apple Maps is really good. The 3D on it's actually pretty neat. I will say, the guy next to me on the flight back from Amsterdam to Minneapolis was watching TikTok-like videos about ex-Gugler explains why you're absolutely screwed because of AI in the next three years. Like, the entire flight, the entire eight-hour flight, it was just, "AI is coming for your job," says Elon Musk. And I was just like, crazy. I was just like, this man has got to be so stressed out, one, watching this stuff. The entire flight? I can't even imagine. I played a video game the entire flight, and that felt great.

• 44:46Scott Tolinski?

  I could not imagine. Just wild to me, yes.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Sweet. Alright, I'll remind everyone what we're doing here, and then maybe Scott, you can get into the HTML streaming.

• 44:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  This is Syntax Weekly, our weekly livestream. We've been live for approximately 48 minutes now. And every week, we all bring some news or interesting libraries to share and talk about. And that's what we're doing right now. But everything we do here is brought to you by Sentry. So Sentry is really great error monitoring for your app. So if you're running an app in production, throw Sentry on there. Any errors that are happening will show up in the dashboard. You can do things about them. They also have AI built in called Seer that can solve your issues automatically. So as the issue occurs, Seer can see it. It has the full stack trace of everything that happened from the front end to the back end, and it can PR a fix almost instantly.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  So Sentry is great. We couldn't do what we're doing here without them, so we do appreciate Sentry. Shout out Sentry. And head to sentry.io/synthesis. You can get two months for free off of the team plan.

• 45:51Scott Tolinski?

  Sick.

• 45:53Scott Tolinski?

  Alright, cool. Well, I'm down to share now. I have something code related, folks, that's not AI. I have something that's not AI, so get hyped. The HTML, the HTML is actually getting something called declarative partial updates. In fact, this is in Chrome right now behind a flag. And I will say, like many awesome things, there is a polyfill that you can use to have it working in other browsers today. And if you read this blog post on the Chrome Developers site, on the Chrome Developers blog, you will see that this is probably the future of most front-end frameworks and stuff. So what the heck is this thing?

• 46:34Scott Tolinski?

  Well, it allows you to do out-of-order streaming of HTML directly in the DOM without a JavaScript framework. And this is going to allow for like partial HTML, like native HTML partials. It's going to allow for essentially framework-style apps. And it's actually inspired a lot by the Astro Island architecture. So they are taking hints from the true modern web here and piggybacking on something called processing instructions. Have you seen processing instructions before, Wes?

• 47:15Wes Bos?

  No, explain that to me.

• 47:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, so you'll see this HTML tag that has a question mark and it says "marker", and you might be thinking, "Are they adding new HTML tags?" Well, this is actually an old tag that has existed for a long time in XML, and they're basically now piggybacking on it using also the template tag to be able to have, as you can see, even like loading states for streaming HTML in. It's really thinking cool. So it's basically like just an old XML tag that they were like, "Oh, we can now use this to do out-of-order HTML streaming." And my gosh, it's pretty dang cool.

• 48:00Scott Tolinski?

  So it allows for, again, island architecture native in HTML. It allows for delivery of content when it's ready. So essentially like what we're doing with, what was it, React suspense, right? And HTML can be delivered in the optimal order for page load performance. Pretty sick.

• 48:19Wes Bos?

  So let me see if I understand this this properly. So you have like a website and maybe you load the HTML immediately. However, there are parts of that site that may not be ready at the time that the browser sends a response, right? So for example, you you visit a website and immediately it starts streaming in. Maybe it streams in the body. Maybe it streams in like like the header, the footer, but maybe there's something in the sidebar. Maybe there's a piece of content in the the main content part that's not yet ready. Previously, not using streaming, you would have to simply just sit there and wait for

• 49:02Wes Bos?

  all of the parts to be ready before the entire website does come comes and renders out. But with streaming, you're able to like ship the parts that are ready and sort of just wait for the rest of the parts that are being generated, right? It may be specifically a component that has a bit of a slow database lookup or needs to be refreshed, something like that. So with this, like we've we've seen that in like React suspense is a really good example of that. But with this, you'll be able to put like you'll like native. Is that is that what that is like placeholders for where these parts are?

• 49:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, including like like loading placeholders. It's really stinking cool. And I love that this says this could enable things like client side includes natively in HTML, something that like, man, if you would have talked about client side includes in HTML so many years ago, like that's a that's like a kind of a holy grail feature, I think, for this type of thing. Batching, preventing, what was it, like revision? So you could have a revision number and do versioning on content and have it update. Again, there's a polyfill to get this working. It's pretty stinking cool. One of the comments here says, I still feel like I'd use Astro over this.

• 50:23Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not sold. Let me tell you. I think Astro would use this, not you would use this over Astro. Ultimately, I think this is the type of thing that frameworks will implement. And then it's just going to, one, make that experience better for everyone. So whether or not the frameworks already do it or not, and by the way, not all frameworks are doing this currently. And the ones that do, you have a substantial amount of buy-in to do so. So this is coming to the browser doesn't mean that you would necessarily be writing this stuff by hand. But it does, I think, change the world of what frameworks could be in the future.

• 51:04Scott Tolinski?

  And it seems like the near future, considering this is in Chrome, under a flag, and there is a working polyfill. And from my understanding, this is not a Chrome just YOLO-ing this in. And this is actually something that the other browsers will be getting.

• 51:18Wes Bos?

  Okay, I'm just reading a blog post on this because I was like, how is this any better than simply just wiring up a fetch request, streaming it in, and then dumping that HTML into the DOM, right? Or giving it to React or whatever, right? And I found a Substack, modernwebweekly.substack.com. Says there's some new streaming methods, like SetHTML, SetHTMLUnsafe, and the inner HTML, outer HTML setters. So this enables a SPA to stream HTML into the assertion point marked by processing instructions using JavaScript.

• 52:02Wes Bos?

  This means that instead of using inner HTML to update your content, you can now just stream it in. Oh, that's great, because if you were streaming in like a response from like a chatbot,

• 52:15Wes Bos?

  every time you have like a new, a new little bit of content, you have to do one of two things. You replace all of it, right? You just wipe the old HTML out and you just put the, what you have in so far. And then the whole thing is re-rendered. Or you have some sort of mechanism to figure out what is already rendered, what needs to be updated, like, is this paragraph have more text? And what is new elements that have to be added? And in that case, you need to reach for something like React, because you have to, you're essentially now orchestrating the DOM. This will do all of that for you. You simply just stream HTML from... The server into the client and you just say, put it in here. As you get it, put it in here. Figure out the fastest way to do that.

• 53:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, just put it in.

• 53:01Wes Bos?

  Like it.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  I think this, where this, this is really going to come into play for server side rendered frameworks. Like I'm, I'm thinking like next JS where like right now with, in combination with suspense, it's really clunky to try and make certain parts of your UI like have a loading spinner and not have to wait for like the whole page load. And this basically gives them a browser native way of doing this. So you don't have to, I mean, you might still use suspense or some of these other reactisms, but behind the scenes, it's going to be a lot more performant because it's built into the web browser.

• 53:35Wes Bos?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Um, so that's really cool to see.

• 53:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah, this stuff that it's, if it's baked into the engine, there's, there's no possible way that you can do that faster in JavaScript land because it's, well, maybe no, maybe not no possible way, but like you're, you're limited by simply using JavaScript APIs. Whereas if you can go a step further and actually implement it into the actual engine of the browser, then you're in good shape.

• 54:02Scott Tolinski?

  I think this is the type of thing that would have been sick if this would have launched with web components in general, right?

• 54:09Wes Bos?

  Uh, well, when we got web components, when we were really like streaming stuff like this, yeah, but imagine if streaming or UI only became popular as we got, uh, like server, we moved everything to the server and then we've realized, okay, but we, we don't want to wait for the whole page to update. We just want to wait for the parts to update like we were doing on client side. And then everyone's like, oh, let's, let's stream absolutely everything. And then these chat bots came around and realized, oh yeah, wow, we need to be able to, we need streaming because we simply don't have the full response yet. Um, and we need to start rendering it out.

• 54:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I just imagine if they, they were forward thinking instead of reactively thinking, you know what I mean? That's what I'm.

• 54:53Wes Bos?

  Reactively thinking, I got you.

• 54:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's all I really have for this. Anybody have anything else or we want to move on to the next one?

• 55:03Wes Bos?

  Let's move on.

• 55:04Scott Tolinski?

  Let's move on, beauty. Yes.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Nice. And if you're just joining us, this is Syntax Weekly. We've all brought some stuff to share, whether it's news, or interesting libraries, or stuff coming to browsers or the web. If you have things you want to share with us, can they share them out of URL, Scott? Is that available? Or do they just throw it in the chat?

• 55:28Scott Tolinski?

  Just throw it in the chat for now. Now that I'm back, I'll get that wrapped up.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Nice. But so after I'm done sharing a couple of things, we're going to pick some from the chat. So if you have any news you want us to talk about, or a library you want us to check out, or a site you want us to check out, throw that in the chat. Give us a little comment as to why we should check it out. But before that, I have something to share. An ASCII art generator that was made by Oxide Computer, this company. I believe Benjamin Leonard might be the main contributor, or maybe it's Henry Wilkinson.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  But it's an app where you can upload an image and turn it into ASCII art with tons of options for tweaking things. So for instance, let me get the Syntax logo in here. So just by default, converts an image into ASCII art. That's great. But you can play around with these settings. So this is like the brightness setting, and that like increases the amount of characters used. It's really fast and reactive, too, on this, which is cool to see. There's also the white point, which I don't know exactly what it does, but it is adding or removing quite a few characters.

• 56:36Wes Bos?

  At what point do you make it? Like, it's either got to be like white or black, right?

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Ah, okay.

• 56:43Wes Bos?

  And at what point are you deciding if a pixel is going to be white or black?

• 56:48Speaker 00

  I see. So like a really high black point is going to just be like solid, or I guess, less?

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Maybe it's the opposite, like low black point will have more characters, but it might be like a period or whatever your character set is. This is fun because you can choose from different character sets. So the standard character set is your classic ASCII art with like at signs and exclamation marks. But you could also do boxes, so that's pretty cool. Like, these are also ASCII codes, but they're ASCII codes for like black and white boxes.

• 57:21Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, that's great.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  And then the color mapping you can change to be based on hue. That completely blinks it out, or saturation. But brightness seems to be the way to go for this particular logo. And then there's also a color set. That is what colors it uses to convert. So it's pretty fun. You can upload any image. I tried with like some actual images, like this is the photo of the whole Syntax Crew on the couch. And if I adjust the settings here, it'll start to come through that this is like a photo of people and not just like a blob of text. Let's see.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  This really should be used for like logos. You can imagine like the, even like the OpenCode logo or all of these, or like even the Claude logo. A lot of these terminal UI apps have like an ASCII-based logo. So this could be a way to design it and then turn it into ASCII.

• 58:25Scott Tolinski?

  Can you do multi-color in this thing?

• 58:27Speaker 00

  I couldn't find an option for it. I feel like you should be able to.

• 58:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 58:32Wes Bos?

  Yeah, because the terminal supports like colored ASCII, right?

• 58:37Scott Tolinski?

  If you could do multi-color, it would be a lot better for especially this kind of thing.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  I think you're totally right because we could use the binary boxes and then each one could be a certain color, like maybe you could limit the color palette.

• 58:51Scott Tolinski?

  There's a color set down there and it's set to yellow right now. What does that, is that just change like the main color of it?

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just the hue overall. Doesn't seem to.

• 59:03Wes Bos?

  Background and foreground, that's all you got.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:05Scott Tolinski?

  Boo. Let's give me full color.

• 59:08Wes Bos?

  That is cool. I used to have a picture of myself in the view source of my website and like, this was like 10 years ago and people thought that was absolutely nuts. But now that everybody's living in 2's, it's like, it's sort of coming back. You should also throw these in your like console log as well. In your, like if someone views source on your website or opens up the console, we should, we should have one of these in the syntax website. Let's add the syntax one.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  Some ASCII art for sure. And the code's totally open source. So, I mean, you probably could add the option to have a limited color palette and then use box mode, almost like you're drawing pixels. That could actually be pretty sweet.

• 59:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 59:52Wes Bos?

  And like, why did they make this? Oxide Computer is like a, like a hardware company, right? They make like servers and stuff. I guess they probably have a lot of, a lot of software when things boot up. You need to have your logo.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, their, their tagline is the ASCII art generator for brand assets. So I'm, I'm guessing that's, that's the deal is they have probably more like vector type things that they're trying to turn into ASCII art for their aesthetic.

• 1:00:21Scott Tolinski?

  Their whole website has a lot of ASCII art in it and just in case.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Let's check it out. Oxide dot computer.

• 1:00:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 1:00:28Wes Bos?

  This is an example of Oxide dot computer is a beautiful website.

• 1:00:34Scott Tolinski?

  Beautiful website.

• 1:00:35Wes Bos?

  This was before all the AI stuff and

• 1:00:39Wes Bos?

  I, I think this is still much better. Yeah. Like

• 1:00:42Scott Tolinski?

  CJ Harper, the NAF, by the way.

• 1:00:43Wes Bos?

  It sort of has the like Claude color palette right now, but like this is a perfect example of like, I don't think Claude could, could build a, ah, maybe. There's a lot of Claudeisms in here, but it's, I like this one.

• 1:01:00Scott Tolinski?

  I like it.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  Saying they, this probably came out before the people, a lot of people were using AI for design.

• 1:01:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  So

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  some designs are probably inspired by, by this site.

• 1:01:10Wes Bos?

  Oh, definitely. I remember this came out. Everyone was freaking out. Probably made its way into the training data. This is patient zero.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  But you're right to call out, like, they have ASCII art, like, in their terminal apps and, like, on their analytics dashboards and stuff like that. So they needed something that was really good at, like, converting assets to ASCII. So that's why this came about. So I got one more thing to share. This is a site I came across. It's called replacements.fyi. And the idea is you can type in a package name, and it'll tell you what you could potentially replace it with. So for instance, if we type in Axios, it will tell you that you might just use fetch because it's available natively. Or you could use my preferred library called ovetch. I actually learned about this from the Nux community. But it's built on top of fetch, but it gives you all the niceties of Axios,

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  like, automatic error handling, and automatic parsing of the response payloads, and automatic header setting, that kind of thing. But essentially, if there's a library you're looking to replace, or maybe you want to find alternatives for, you can throw it in here. Like, another example is Express. If you search for Express, it'll tell you about h3. Also, from the Nux community, it's from Nitro, I believe. But then there's also Hono, which is what I prefer to use. So this is a nice site, especially if you're newer to the ecosystem, or maybe you're getting tired of a package. You can plug it in here, and it'll tell you what you could replace it with. Are there any packages you guys think I should type in here that maybe we could look for replacements for?

• 1:02:42Wes Bos?

  The one that always gets me is Moment.js, you know?

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Wes Bos?

  It's like, what are you doing? Express is another one.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  So for Moment...

• 1:02:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, date functions, yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, date functions, which is what I use, and day.js. Yeah, in unrelated news, the newer version of date functions is finally gonna ship built on top of the Temporal API.

• 1:03:03Scott Tolinski?

  Sick.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  So that's gonna happen. But yeah, date functions would be the way to go. Or even Luxon, which is like the lighter thing that came from the team from Moment.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  There's some others I could plug in here. You got any, Scott?

• 1:03:16Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  No? Okay.

• 1:03:18Scott Tolinski?

  React JS.

• 1:03:20Wes Bos?

  I'm trying to think. Chat, what are like the common packages that you see people using? Like Request JS is another one. Request JS, it was like before Axios, and it is still one of the like top packages out there. And I don't think people are using Request JS directly, but it's just a low-level dependency that maybe will never be brought out. Chalk. Let's see, is there something for chalk? Chalk is good, though.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Well, there is a built-in Node JS way of doing it now. Let's see.

• 1:03:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's not as good.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  Util dot style text is what they're saying, but there's also Pico colors. I've actually used Pico colors.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they don't have replacements for everything. Like if I type in React, that doesn't show up. So I think it's more so, this is like a curated list.

• 1:04:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's nice.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Wes Bos?

  Object assign, that's a good one. That one, everybody still use that. Or a lot of the low-dash ones, you see people still reaching for it just because like that's how they know how to do things. But most of the low-dash functions are no longer necessary because we have them built in via map, sets, whatever,

• 1:04:35Wes Bos?

  or array methods. Or you can just reach for the individual one that you need.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  Totally. So yeah, check it out. Replacements dot FYI, next time you're looking to install a package, maybe go here first and find an alternative or use a built-in.

• 1:04:51Wes Bos?

  Is there, there should be a skill? Or like a, is there like an API?

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Let's see. They have a repo. I wonder if there's just like a JSON file that has all the data inside of it.

• 1:05:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah, because that would be a good skill is like, see if my package JSON includes any of these packages. And if so, let me know if I hit them all. It probably doesn't need to be a skill. This could be a script.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  So I'm just now looking into this, but apparently Module Replacements is a project that's community-driven, and that's what this site is built on top of. So Module Replacements is a manifest of JS modules and they're more modern or active replacements.

• 1:05:29Wes Bos?

  There we go.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  This is, this comes from the E18E.

• 1:05:37Wes Bos?

  What does E18E mean? Ecosystem Performance. Oh, a community initiative driving performance across a JavaScript ecosystem.

• 1:05:47Scott Tolinski?

  JavaScript.

• 1:05:48Wes Bos?

  JavaScript. Sorry, been in Europe for too long. Need to come back to North America.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Scott Tolinski?

  I've got something interesting at least, yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  Go for it.

• 1:05:58Scott Tolinski?

  I have updated every single one of the devices in my life to use the beta of macOS. So, or I have my, my phone, my laptop, my tablet. I'm, I'm unfortunately, I'm kind of outing myself here as being like a Apple guy, even though I don't really identify that way.

• 1:06:20Wes Bos?

  We could tell Scott.

• 1:06:21Scott Tolinski?

  I got the Vision Pro that is right here. I have it updated. I have my watch updated. I got, I got all the crap and I got it all updated. And I gotta say, folks, it's good for a beta. It's very solid. I updated to the beta from my hotel room an hour before my flight to Amsterdam. And knowing that I had to go on stage and give a talk with this OS and have it not goof up. And it was perfect. And honestly, I feel like my computer functions better with it. There's some annoying little things with the new Siri, but like, ah, the OS is good. It's smooth. I feel hopeful for the first time installing some Apple software that it's like, actually, put some care into it.

• 1:07:06Scott Tolinski?

  It doesn't feel like it is just, it doesn't feel like it's just a bunch of bugs tossed on more bugs tossed on more bugs. It feels like they did the right things in going back to some of the older styles of stuff. They did the right things in the performance side of things and it just feels good.

• 1:07:28Wes Bos?

  That, I'm, I'm so excited that they have been updating everything. It seemed like all the new announcements were just like, yeah, sorry about that. Like, we, we totally dropped the ball on the software for absolutely everything, you know, like the AI stuff sucked, or it was just like non-existent.

• 1:07:45Scott Tolinski?

  Non-existent, yeah.

• 1:07:46Wes Bos?

  The macOS was just a, a joke with all the rounded corners and misaligned things and the, the liquid glass.

• 1:07:54Scott Tolinski?

  The eight different border radiuses and stuff now, there's one border radius.

• 1:07:57Wes Bos?

  Who thought that was a good idea?

• 1:08:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. How did they, and also, one of the things I corrected too, was that even on iOS, you would get the old keyboard in some apps, in some apps you would get the new keyboard. How does that even exist? Like, why is that? Why is the keyboard dependent on the app you're using in terms of like the version of the keyboard? Like Android would never, you know? Everything in Android is so like, more individual on the OS that it's like, man, it's crazy that you could have the old OS-style keyboard on one app and not on the new app because the app author hadn't pushed a new version of it. That's nuts to me. But they fixed that, so, that's great.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  Nice. Does that mean you jumped from the old beta to the new beta? Like, you didn't even use a stable in between?

• 1:08:45Scott Tolinski?

  I've not, yeah, I've not, not a stable in quite some time, yes, because I also run the betas of the, uh, the, uh, the new dot releases and stuff, so yes.

• 1:08:52Wes Bos?

  You're crazy for doing that before a talk. That's, I would never in my life think that that was a good idea.

• 1:08:59Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, you know what, Wes? I've installed enough betas on my machine, especially my mat, like, to know what I'm getting into. And, you know what? My talk was being developed on this bad boy over here, so it's not like it was sitting on this laptop and if for some reason I needed to use another computer or something, or if I needed to reformat this computer on the fly, it doesn't matter. It's all on this bad boy, uh, so. Yeah.

• 1:09:27Wes Bos?

  I got something to show here. Xiaomi, which makes rice cookers, cell phones and electric cars.

• 1:09:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they make cars now, yeah.

• 1:09:37Wes Bos?

  So like Xiaomi is like a mega corporation from China, right? They've released a open code fork. So they forked open code and they're releasing their own models. And I know, I know a lot of people are cautious around Chinese models. We'll hear in the chat, but I thought it's kind of interesting that they put out their own like coding tool, which is the open code fork. But they also put out this Mimo 2.5 Pro, which is supposed to rival by their own, maybe not their own graphs, but by all the graphs that we have, supposed to rival Opus 4.6.

• 1:10:19Wes Bos?

  So like, it's not like one of these like kind of crappy models, you know? And it is, what, 10, apparently 10 times cheaper? We saw that with, with Cursor's Composer where they said it was 10 times cheaper, but it, once you actually got into how the tokens were calculated, because all these models calculate tokens slightly different, it was, it ended up being like three or four times cheaper, which is still significant. But heck, I'm interesting, Xiaomi.

• 1:10:51Scott Tolinski?

  My, my biggest beef with the Chinese models is how frequently they start outputting Chinese characters in the middle of the response. And I have to be like, what, what, what are you, what are you, what are you talking about? Like in the middle of a like paragraph, it'll be some text and then some Chinese characters and then some more checks. And I'll be like, huh, I, I didn't catch that middle part. Please, uh, please revise. Yes.

• 1:11:10Wes Bos?

  You gotta learn a little bit of, a little bit of Chinese to get 10 times cheaper tokens there.

• 1:11:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:11:16Wes Bos?

  But also they're on Hugging Face as well. So theoretically you could host these yourself if you have the hardware. So it seems like every single week, we're seeing new models come out that are supposed to be rival a lot of the like, maybe not the absolute best ones, but some of the ones where like, yeah, I can get a majority of my coding done with these. So maybe the how expensive this stuff is, is a little bit, is not going to be as long as we thought it would be.

• 1:11:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  I'll have to check these out. It looks like the 4-bit quantization is anywhere between 150 gigabytes and 190 gigabytes. So I might be able to run this even on my local AI setup.

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  So I mean, that would be crazy to get OPUS 4.6 level responses from just my local AI.

• 1:12:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  So I'll have to try it out, report back.

• 1:12:10Scott Tolinski?

  Patiently waiting for this new Mac Studio.

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  It varies, probably anywhere between 10, 15 tokens per second.

• 1:12:21Wes Bos?

  And is that like, what do you, what do you get when you like, use like, like Anthropic via Claude?

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  You're probably getting closer to 30 or 40 tokens per second when you're.

• 1:12:30Wes Bos?

  Oh, so like, like three times slower, you think?

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I'd have to.

• 1:12:35Wes Bos?

  So that's probably not a big deal for like asynchronous agents, hey? Like it is when you're sitting there waiting for the response, but it's not if you're just running these things overnight.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're just letting it run and then coming back to check on the results later.

• 1:12:49Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, not as important, so.

• 1:12:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And a lot of the stuff I would use this stuff would for be like personal assistant stuff, you know, like stuff that I'm running, whether Hermes or whatever for. So like, coding, you know, different, different tasks for me where like coding, I expect a much faster response than like, I really don't like running stuff overnight for coding just because I feel like I want to have more control over it. But like, if I wanted to, you know, check my calendar every single morning or something, that would be a perfect use case for that type of thing to run locally, for sure.

• 1:13:25Wes Bos?

  What about your loops though? You know, like, like, I think that this would be a perfect example of something where you're like, every single day, look at the performance of my app in Sentry and see if there is anything that is outlying or. Every, I don't know, like, look at, look at the stats for how my website perf is, or, or look at the complaints, or look at X, Y, and Z, and see if there's just anything that we could, could incrementally improve, or, or hook it up to Pi Auto Research, you know? Like, try a thousand different ways of attacking this problem, see which way could be the, the possible fastest.

• 1:14:07Scott Tolinski?

  Don't, Can't Sleep asked, have you guys tried C-Mux? I don't get C-Mux, and I will say this, I, I could be wrong about this, but T-Mux is the multiplexer, and you can join a session, again, you can have it run on another machine.

• 1:14:22Wes Bos?

  Explain what it is for the listeners who don't know what T-Mux and C-Mux and Lux is.

• 1:14:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, T-Mux, I was actually in the middle of explaining what T-Mux was when you said that. I just wanted to point that out.

• 1:14:35Wes Bos?

  You said it's a multiplexer, I was like, this boy is in over his head?

• 1:14:38Scott Tolinski?

  No, okay, so, T-Mux allows you to have sessions and split panes, and join those sessions, and leave them, and come back to them. It's nice if you're running, like, if, for Agent World, it's nice if you're running agents on another machine, or whatever, that you can, again, you can come back to a session, close your laptop, and then, when you rejoin the session, all of your little tabs there are, are, are your, your split panes are all there. Instead of like SSHing in, where then you gotta make a new pane, and then SSH and again, and a new pane, and SSH and again. That's what T-Mux is good for. C-Mux, however, is an app, a terminal app, that has, it's built on Ghosty, but it has like, vertical tabs, it has a built-in browser, and it's basically the,

• 1:15:23Scott Tolinski?

  it, it's not related to C-Mux, or, it's not related to T-Mux in that it's not like a, it's not something that you could SSH into, and then have a session and jump into it. So I don't understand the naming, for one. But two, if, if, if this looks interesting to you, I mentioned Herder in the last time that I was on stream, I believe, and Herder kind of does what you're looking for here, in a more of a two-y way, where- It has the sessions of all of your different agents and reports as your agents are working. It doesn't have a built in browser, but I don't want that anyways. I just don't get the need for C M U X personally. I don't, I don't get it. It's a, yeah, it's a terminal app.

• 1:16:06Scott Tolinski?

  I would rather just use Ghosty and Herder and have that experience that way.

• 1:16:11Wes Bos?

  This C M U X looks kind of like Aaron Francis's like solo term, doesn't it? Where it's just like a better UI for managing all of your terminals. Has a built in browser. You can have your tabs on the left.

• 1:16:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, it does. It looks like that. And what I, what I personally, like, I don't need a browser in my, my terminal. But I also like, the thing that sells something like T M U X for me is the fact that I can

• 1:16:43Scott Tolinski?

  suspend and or create sessions and join them and stuff like that. It's not necessarily the, the fact that I can split panes and do all that. Cause I, you know, I can do that in other ways.

• 1:16:54Scott Tolinski?

  I don't get the name C M U X either. I don't get why you'd associate it with T M U X when it's not really doing the same thing. That's me.

• 1:17:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Is it, is it, it, it sounds like it, right? It's one letter and the word M U X. How does it compare to T M U X? It's right on the website here. T M U X is a terminal multiplexer that runs inside any terminal. C M U X is a native Mac OS app with a GUI, vertical tabs, split panes, an embedded browser, a socket API are all built in. It's scriptable. So I think the, the fact that it, it is similar to T M U X in that it is, you can programmatically use it outside of the app, meaning that you can give your agent the API and it can open and close the, the things for you. So I guess it is similar in that regard, but it's not in the, like, the reason why Scott

• 1:17:41Wes Bos?

  likes it, which is like, it's just a session and you can close it, but you can come back to it.

• 1:17:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, because I don't, I don't, I don't need my term, I don't need my agents to control pains and tabs and stuff like that. I want it, yeah, I don't, I don't need personally, but Herder-

• 1:17:56Wes Bos?

  I do.

• 1:17:57Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 1:17:58Wes Bos?

  Remember Ben was on and you said it was awesome, where the, like, the, the agent can like, open up two different TMUX tabs and it can like, I did that with, with a different computer. I, one TMUX tab, I SSH into a different computer, the other one, local, and I said, "In the other TMUX tab, I have SSH into a computer, fix the graphics card on it." And it like, it literally fixed it for me, and it was able to like, communicate between the two processes because it was in TMUX. I thought that was awesome. You can obviously do that with a child process, but then you can't see it, and that drives me nuts.

• 1:18:37Scott Tolinski?

  Word.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  I've gotten a lot of these flows with just using open code. Like, with open code, I have multiple sessions going, or I have one session where I call it the orchestrator, and it can spin off multiple subagents, but I can see what each of the subagents are doing, and then the orchestrator has the ability to like, pass context between the subagents. I've never needed like, a separate app for this. I've been able to get it going with that, so.

• 1:18:59Scott Tolinski?

  I think that's what I like, yeah. I know, I know that this is based on Ghosty, but I think that's what I like about Herder, is just that it exists inside of my term as a term utility. It's not a whole nother app that I gotta, gotta get going on.

• 1:19:11Wes Bos?

  Where does Conductor fit into all of this?

• 1:19:17Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know, if we're being honest. I do know what it is, but I don't, I don't know where it fits in. It's one of those that's like, again, it's conducting subagents to do work, and it's, it's like a, kind of like a reapproach to, like, a system that you would have in like, Kuro, but outside of like, a VS code style system, right, where you are working in multiple agents in that way. I have not gotten deep on Conductor. I haven't installed, I've opened it, and it's like, this is just another thing I gotta, I gotta learn, so, haven't used it really.

• 1:19:47Wes Bos?

  Alright.

• 1:19:48Speaker 00

  Did you guys see the new Zed release? It seems like it has some of this agentic stuff as well. Like there's a window with your agents. One of the talks at, was it React Summit or JS Nation?

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  Showed some of the newer features in Zed. They also had a booth there. But basically, he was able to choose which agent he wanted, whether it's Gemini or Claude. That one opened up a new tab in the sidebar. And then those would be implementing stuff inside of work trees. And it kind of seemed, I don't know if it was the main UI, but there's maybe like an alternative UI where you can see all of your agents in the background inside of Zed.

• 1:20:24Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's cool. I was wondering about that because like Zed comes out swinging with this kick-ass editor that absolutely everybody loves. And then like, a year or two later, everyone's like, "I actually don't need the editor anymore." But they're like, they're perfectly positioned to make just a kick-ass desktop app that does all of this stuff, right?

• 1:20:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think they're perfectly, I think they're not like sitting on the fact that it's, I don't think they're wholly about it being the editor that we know today, right? I, from talking with them, I get the impression that these are problems that they are deeply thinking about. So, yes, I, I think they are on that change. They even just kind of announced something called Delta. Maybe we can talk about that next week, which is "Delta DB, a version control system that records the work as it unfolds. Rewind to any edit." So I mean, they're even like thinking about stuff like that, building it into "Share the thread, not the PR." It's interesting kind of thing. I haven't really dove into this, but I did jump onto that request early access.

• 1:21:31Scott Tolinski?

  And I think they are going to give me early access after chatting with them, so.

• 1:21:35Wes Bos?

  Sick.

• 1:21:36Scott Tolinski?

  I'll let you know more about it in the next one.

• 1:21:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Um, other things. Um, Arc Linux got hit with a massive supply chain attack. 1,500 packages have been affected. So if you're using Arc Linux, uh, yes, you'll want to make yourself aware of this because

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  It's Arch, by the way, not Arc. Also, I will say-

• 1:22:00Wes Bos?

  Arch the browser?

• 1:22:02Scott Tolinski?

  Arc Linux.

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  Arc Linux.

• 1:22:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, and their logo is even like an arch. Yes, I'm dumb. I'm sorry. I get it.

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  No, no, it's okay. But what I will clarify, though, is it was not their main repository. Like, Arch itself and their core repos are fine. There are some user contributing repositories.

• 1:22:21Scott Tolinski?

  1500 of them.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  And so, very similar to how NPM is kind of open to the world, anybody can publish there. There is also like a community managed repo that you can pull in packages from, and that's what was compromised. But a lot of people do install apps from there, so...

• 1:22:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's like the main, it's AUR, right? Isn't that the utility?

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  But it is community packages. It's not the...

• 1:22:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it would be like, so when you run a... I'm more familiar with like Debian or Ubuntu, but you do like an apt-get update. That's pulling from, by default, the core Debian repos. But you can also add like the third-party or proprietary repos. This in particular isn't the core Arch ones. It's the community ones.

• 1:23:07Scott Tolinski?

  Correct. Yeah, but it's a whole lot of them, so...

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  It's a lot, yes.

• 1:23:10Scott Tolinski?

  You can run pacman hyphen capital Q lowercase m, and it's going to check to see if there's like foreign packages on your machine. There's several blog posts about this. Yes, it's AUR specifically that was compromised. But again, supply chain attack that is similar to what we've been seeing kind of with the NPM attacks.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. And do we blame it on noobs having access to AI and stronger models? I think so.

• 1:23:42Scott Tolinski?

  Only our government can save us, CJ.

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this message was from Clarkio. "Speaking of cost and speed, I'd love for the Frontier Labs to provide more coding-focused models that have no training in anything else outside that scope."

• 1:23:58Speaker 00

  We haven't really talked about this before, but like... Yeah, so in the world of like trained models, they train on massive amounts of data, right? Not just code, like websites and blogs and video transcripts and books as well as code. And so when you're interacting with Opus 4.7 or whatever else, it's trained on all that other stuff, too. So it is interesting to think about, like, if there was a model that also, I think we've talked about this in a past livestream, like, what if it was only trained on good code, too, like, good code examples, examples of code that we like, like, clean code or good architecture patterns. Yeah, what do you all think of that?

• 1:24:34Scott Tolinski?

  I would like a model that's trained on the code that I like and no other code. That's what I would like.

• 1:24:40Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's a good question. Like, would a model that was only trade, like, there are models out there that are only trade trained on code, and they don't seem to be particularly, like, I guess, like, Composer is an example, right? It's significantly cheaper. Although I have asked Composer about, like, like, love and things like that as well, you know, it seems to know what's up. I don't know. I think these mega models are it, because, like, I don't want to have to think, where am I going to do it? I think the day, like, I often will simply just use Claude or ChatGPT or Cursor or whatever as my, like, my thing.

• 1:25:23Wes Bos?

  I don't want to have to switch to, like, a chat when I want to do something here and then switch to something else. Like, I want to be able to, like, be in my Claude and be like, hey, what flights should I do? Or add these to my calendars, but also research where I should be going out for dinner. I think it should be doing it all. And the days of it being just like a coding tool, I don't know. I think it's got to do absolutely everything.

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a comment from Frankie that says, "Without wide knowledge, they would probably suck at understanding your domain. If you're making an app about pizza delivery, it's good if the model knows what pizza is." And I think that's exactly to your point, Wes. Like, you can have a conversation that says, "I want to build this type of app." And it has domain knowledge. Like, it knows about that type of thing, not just the code. It knows about the aspect of that thing. Like, for instance, I was building an app to analyze DNA data. And if I had a model that only knew...

• 1:26:23Wes Bos?

  Hold on. Put it in that. Continue.

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  Okay, but this is a domain that I'm not familiar with, but like, there's all this information in medical studies about, if you find certain aspects in someone's genome, then that means they might be more susceptible to getting certain illnesses, or they might need to supplement certain vitamins in their diet, or they... various other things like that. But this is all stuff that, when I was prompting and planning out this app, Opus 4.6 was able to pull... already had access to all of that knowledge without even searching the web. And then it could use that to then create the algorithms for analyzing the DNA files. So, yeah.

• 1:27:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah, like, so much of building software is not about, like, where do the functions go? And what database adapter should it use? It's so much more about, like, "I'm trying to build software for somebody in the world," or "something in the world." Therefore, you need to know about the world, because I'm building software for... I'm building traffic management software. You need to know how cars and traffic lights and all these things talk to each other.

• 1:27:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Wes Bos?

  So, I don't think so. I don't think we're getting there.

• 1:27:42Scott Tolinski?

  What if there was other... I mean, what if you're just reaching out to other models? Like, "Explain to me what the hell pizza is," and it's reaching out to a model that knows what pizza is?

• 1:27:51Speaker 00

  Right. We're like a model router of sorts. Like, it could decide what model knows about this, or it could decide to search the web. Honestly, that might be how we get to a point of less hallucinations, if it's choosing the right... Trained model for the right job.

• 1:28:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah, and like chat GPT already does that, you know, it will be like, oh, hold on, I'll either give you a quick answer because I understand that, or let me wait 15 seconds while I reason and give you a longer answer. I think that will probably be the future of a lot of the stuff where you're simply just like, the model will be under the hood, it will be actually routing it to smaller. I bet they're already doing this with some of their queries that are coming in, because like, why are you asking, you're saying good morning to Fable, cost $9. It should know, it should be smart enough to know where to route that.

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  And I think that's what they did with Mythos 5, like, that's why they were able to release Mythos 5 to the web, like, it first analyzes your prompt and decides, okay, is this going to get into the realm of cybersecurity? And if it is, deny it. If it's not, then I'll allow Mythos to execute on that prompt. So, yeah, it's happening in ways, so I'm sure they could expand that to more like expert level routing.

• 1:29:10Wes Bos?

  All right, Zek, anybody else have anything?

• 1:29:15Wes Bos?

  I'm just scanning the chat here.

• 1:29:23Wes Bos?

  Subagents use different models, no? Yeah, a lot, a lot of times you use a subagent, it will shell it off to some cheaper model, because you're simply just monitoring a terminal and parsing out the response to that thing. So yeah, absolutely. Or like, expansion is another good example. Like, if you are searching for, like, I'm, I'm trying to get this HP printer working right now, I bought this at a thrift store, and it's, it's 21 years old. I didn't realize that when I bought it, but. You just have this on your desk? Yeah, well, I was like, I was playing with it yesterday, right? And I got it, I got it running, but the like, it's a little bit weird working from a Mac, because it's,

• 1:30:07Wes Bos?

  the drivers on it are from Power PC, so the, the drivers on it predate Intel, which is, it's very. Old, but it actually works really well. Anyways, what was I saying? Oh, that was the thing. I was, I was like, Claude, can you figure out if I can get the drivers on it? And it does expansion, meaning that like it, it takes the word like Hewlett Packard, it takes Photosmart, it takes Inkjet, and it just, it says, these are the words that I want to look for. And then it expands them into related words because doing that is, and running a RegEx search on your file system is faster than like vectorizing every single, every single file on my computer and then being able to search from that.

• 1:30:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think it's all fascinating. In regards to like specialized agents, the standard agent builder, that's kind of like what their whole thing is, is like a communication between agents that might be underpowered to get better things out of them. So using the right agent for the right job in a standardized way. If anybody has checked that out yet, it's still behind, it's in a private beta, but it is, I think, trying to solve that issue where you're bringing in very standard or very like specific agents to do specific tasks that are tuned specifically for that specific.

• 1:31:32Wes Bos?

  Specifically.

• 1:31:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 1:31:34Wes Bos?

  All right. I think that's all we got. Anybody else, anything to add?

• 1:31:38Scott Tolinski?

  No, I have, I need to add a sandwich to my mouth because I am very hungry.

• 1:31:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's one time.

• 1:31:43Wes Bos?

  Right on. All right. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. We'll catch you again. We are live every single Monday. So we'll catch you then and. Peace.

• 1:31:53Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.