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From Slop Code to Software Factories
Posted Oct 29, 2026 | Views 5
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Speakers
Dexter Horthy
Founder @ HumanLayer
Hey - I'm Dex, and I'm hacking on safer, more reliable agents at HumanLayer. HumanLayer helps AI builders create agents that feel more like real coworkers - taking them out of ChatGPT-style interfaces and deploying them into Slack, email, or wherever their users already are. Before this, I was working on AI Agents that managed SQL warehouses, and did a long stint at replicated.com helping the world's best software teams deliver Kubernetes apps into customer environments. I've been coding since 17, when I built tools for NASA researchers to navigate the south pole of the moon. Enjoyer of tacos and burpees (not necessarily in that order)
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Demetrios Brinkmann
Chief Happiness Engineer @ MLOps Community
At the moment Demetrios is immersing himself in Machine Learning by interviewing experts from around the world in the weekly MLOps.community meetups. Demetrios is constantly learning and engaging in new activities to get uncomfortable and learn from his mistakes. He tries to bring creativity into every aspect of his life, whether that be analyzing the best paths forward, overcoming obstacles, or building lego houses with his daughter.
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SUMMARY
Two people, one tandem bike, and a lot of near misses along Amsterdam’s canals. Dexter Horthy, CEO and co-founder of HumanLayer and the person who coined “context engineering,” climbs on the back to talk about a problem every AI-heavy engineering team eventually hits: code that runs today that nobody understands three months later.
The ride starts with an old joke from the Claude 3.7 days: ship the slop, it’ll be GPT 7’s problem. That joke is aging badly now that GPT 6 is out and still can’t design clean abstractions. From there it becomes a tour of how agents are actually used right now. Computer use checks in for flights and books government appointments. Two hours of raw footage became a rough but promising product demo through Opus 4.8 and the Palmier MCP while Dex was out for a run. And the best MCP tools turn out to be the ones that mirror what Claude Code and Codex were trained to call.
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CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT
Demetrios: [00:00:00] I thought it was a brilliant idea. Oh, boy.
Dexter Horthy: Oh, boy.
Demetrios: Oh, boy. Oh, boy. It sounded amazing when we were planning this. Keep going. You're power. "Do a tandem podcast," they said. "It'll be fun," they said. Oh, my God.
Dexter Horthy: This
Demetrios: is way
Dexter Horthy: harder than I thought it was gonna be.
Demetrios: All right. Dex is huge. He's gonna look like a fricking giant on the back of this tandem.
Demetrios: Dude, that was... Okay. Well, here we go. Stroopwafels. Canals. Cheese. Tall people. Space cakes. What is more Amsterdam than smoking weed, riding your bike along the canals? Well, today we're doing that with Dex. The only catch is we have one bike for the two of us, and he's gonna tell us all about how he is building software factories at HumanLayer.
Demetrios: Let's do it. Beautiful. Ah.
Demetrios: One, two, three[00:01:00]
Demetrios: Whoa, why are you going that way? Way harder than I thought it was gonna be. I'll see you on the other side. Ah. You're good at it, man So thinking that we were gonna be able to talk about software factories while doing this- Bro, we're gonna have to
Dexter Horthy: just talk about fucking staying alive out here
Demetrios: We're gonna let Davies be the lead support.
Demetrios: We're just following you, dude. All right? We're not-
Dexter Horthy: Oh,
Demetrios: yeah. There
Dexter Horthy: we go ...
Demetrios: gonna freaking coast. Yeah, now we're going.
Dexter Horthy: Okay, so now tell me all about Astra. There was a joke we used to make, uh, when we were coding with, like, Claude 3.7 and Opus 4, and some people would kinda be like, "Yeah, man, I know the code is slop, but, like, by the time it matters-" This is, uh, very mentally intense right now.
Dexter Horthy: Oh. Okay, one, two, three. Three. Go. [00:02:00] Go.
Demetrios: Back on.
Dexter Horthy: All right. We're back
Demetrios: on.
Dexter Horthy: This feels a lot like the first time I rode a regular bike. I know. I- You gotta, like, just- Uh- You gotta just, like, believe.
Demetrios: Yeah. All right, hopefully it's just chill roads from now on- ... and you can tell me about this joke. Let's start over.
Demetrios: We're- 'Cause I completely lost the train of thought on the joke.
Dexter Horthy: I'm glad you picked up that it's a joke. I haven't even, I haven't even gotten half the set up. Do- Uh- Give
Demetrios: it to me again.
Dexter Horthy: So, uh, we used to say this thing when we coded with, like, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Opus 4 back in the day of like, "Yeah, the code's kinda messy, but, like, I'll just not read it."
Demetrios: Yeah. "
Dexter Horthy: And that'll be GPT-7's problem." The, the jo- the impression being like there will someday come a model-
Demetrios: That's good enough ...
Dexter Horthy: that is so good at coding that it'll be able to fix all this bullshit-
Demetrios: Yeah ...
Dexter Horthy: and I should just focus on vibing and getting it right and figuring it out, et cetera.
Demetrios: Yeah, as we, uh...
Demetrios: Can we coast?
Dexter Horthy: [00:03:00] Yeah. Uh, GPT-3.6 just came out and, uh... Or sorry, GPT-6.
Demetrios: Six. Yeah, we've
Dexter Horthy: jumped a few. GPT-6 Astra just came out. It's not that much better at coding. I saw a couple people... I saw-
Demetrios: Which is weird, 'cause they're leaning into that. Like, you've gotta know that that's, like, one of the main use cases.
Dexter Horthy: I mean, it got better.
Dexter Horthy: This actually, I think this is a take from, uh, Martin Casado over at Andreessen. He said basically, like, it got better at some things it used to be bad at, like-
Demetrios: Car on the right
Dexter Horthy: Uh, we're good We're going.
Demetrios: And-
Dexter Horthy: Like it got better at some things it- Let's just coast ... used to be bad at, like Blender and, uh, what is it?
Dexter Horthy: Like, uh, doing Game Slop.
Demetrios: Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: Like Astra can make video games- Oh, yeah ... and it's, like, much better at computer use and stuff like
Demetrios: that. The game engine is actually pretty brutal. That's true. I have seen that. Somebody created a whole, uh, presentation, but instead of creating a PowerPoint, it just said, "Create a game engine," that could then be used for a [00:04:00] presentation.
Demetrios: And so the game was walking through, like, this whole thing.
Dexter Horthy: Like a, a, a room that got the point across?
Demetrios: Yeah. So we are here now, and it hasn't gotten better, so it's still GPT-7's problem.
Dexter Horthy: Well, so that's my take is, like, we're already at six. And from five to six, like, yeah, we got better at things, but we didn't get better at building maintainable software.
Demetrios: Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: Uh, we got better at, like, diagnosing bugs, but the fixes to those bugs- Man, just- ... still end up being quite, uh-
Demetrios: We're clear, we're clear, we're clear. Let's shoot the gap.
Dexter Horthy: We got
Demetrios: it. Let's
Dexter Horthy: do it.
Demetrios: Oh, boy. Boom. You gotta lead, bro. You gotta lead because I don't really know where I'm going. Coast it.
Dexter Horthy: Coast it.
Demetrios: Coast it. All right, co-
Dexter Horthy: So anyways, that's, that's the take is, like, yeah, they're better at, like, breaking into systems and diagnosing problems, but they haven't learned how to, like, build good ab- abstractions or- Yeah ... like design code bases in a way that doesn't turn into spaghetti.
Demetrios: I think we're going left here.
Dexter Horthy: [00:05:00] Left here? Left. Let's do it.
Demetrios: And-
Dexter Horthy: Power up the base cannon ...
Demetrios: oh, yeah. And... Yeah, there we go. You, you realize that you being in the back, you have to do, like-
Dexter Horthy: All the
Demetrios: work ... 90% of the work. And me in the front- That's okay ... oh, we're going, uh, yeah. You want me to just
Dexter Horthy: stay straight with these guys?
Demetrios: Uh, I think we wanna go r- right.
Demetrios: Well, straight. That was a close call
Dexter Horthy: Everybody in Amsterdam fucking hates us today. All right. You ready? One, two, three.
Demetrios: Yeah. Oh, fuck. We're, we're starting this. One- One ... two, three You got it?
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We good.
Demetrios: We don't technically-
Dexter Horthy: Oh, we're going left here.
Demetrios: We're going left here.
Dexter Horthy: Oh, we're going left.
Demetrios: All right.
Demetrios: Hard left. Hard left.
Dexter Horthy: Hup.
Demetrios: All right. I love how it's nothing for most people. They're just like, "Fucking tourists."
Dexter Horthy: Yep.
Demetrios: And we're, like, struggling to stay on this damn bike. For us, it's life or death over here. Meanwhile, some guy's got [00:06:00] a couch on his bicycle.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, I saw a guy dropping off a bunch of, like, speaker equipment, and he just had this giant rack on the front- Yeah
Dexter Horthy: like, doing AV stuff.
Demetrios: That, um, Fable 5.1 cannot do yet. That is for sure. So other things Fable 5.1 cannot do-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah ...
Demetrios: are maintain a code base, as you have pointed out. And we're just continuing the slop. But my big question is, if it runs, does it matter?
Dexter Horthy: I mean, I've said this one... This, this has been my drum I've been beating for six months now.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. But, like, it may run today- Well, it- ... and it may run in three months, and then you have hundreds or thousands of users, or millions of users, and then one day you wake up, and you're like, "I haven't read the code in three months-
Demetrios: And why
Dexter Horthy: is it working? ... and something is broken."
Demetrios: Wait,
Dexter Horthy: stop pedaling. And you shout at the bottle, and you just keep pulling the fucking slot machine- Yeah
Dexter Horthy: and it just can't fix it.
Demetrios: And you don't know why. [00:07:00] You're sitting there, and you're like, "What is w-" Oh, I'm gonna st- Oy. Yeah, we
Dexter Horthy: can just coast. Sorry. I forgot we have to be in sync.
Demetrios: Yeah, it's like a fixie. All right, we're good. We're chilling. I think-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, we can keep coasting.
Demetrios: Yeah, we'll coast some more. Whew.
Demetrios: I don't know, man. What's your, what's your coding stack these days?
Dexter Horthy: Well- What's, like, a cool new thing you figured out?
Demetrios: Dude, well, so you know what I am doing a lot is ever since Jason Louie from OpenAI came on the podcast- Yeah ... and told me about computer use- Yeah ... I'm all in on it.
Dexter Horthy: You're just like, "Codex, go check my emails for
Demetrios: me and stuff"?
Demetrios: Dude, I've set up so many beats that it will do, and one of them being, uh... Here, hold on. We gotta stop. One of them is, like, check in on flights for me. Yep. So- Oh, oh.
Dexter Horthy: I got it.
Demetrios: So this morning I flew over here. It's [00:08:00] left. You go
Dexter Horthy: left? You went that way.
Demetrios: Yeah. Why? He told us to turn left. Why would he say that?
Dexter Horthy: All right.
Dexter Horthy: Let's go catch him.
Demetrios: All right.
Dexter Horthy: All right. One, two, three.
Demetrios: Oh, boy.
Dexter Horthy: Sorry. Yeah, you got it, you got it, yeah,
Demetrios: yeah, yeah. And we've got some water. Let's do it. Water feature. There we go. Water
Dexter Horthy: feature.
Demetrios: So Jason Louie came on the podcast, and he told me about how good computer use is. Yeah. And since then, I've just been setting up all these scheduled tasks or recurring tasks- Okay
Demetrios: like going through all of my different emails. And so I don't have a problem with, oh, there's one connector that I can use, and then I can't connect the other five emails I have, or going through all my Slack workspaces, and it's the same thing. Again, have it go through all that stuff. And then the one that's beautiful is when it needs to go and do stuff, the fucking [00:09:00] ability for it to fill out forms-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah
Demetrios: is unmatched. So I don't have to worry about, oh, is it able to get that information from an API?
Dexter Horthy: And- No, 'cause it can just go and do it as if it, just impersonating you.
Demetrios: Yeah, yeah, 'cause it's already... I'm already, like, kinda signed in on the browser. I think we go right here. So- Right? ... let's see if we can... Yeah, let's see if we can-
Dexter Horthy: You said
Demetrios: straight
Demetrios: pull that off. Right, right, right. Right. Oh, boy. Well, we'll go on the road for a minute. We'll go, yeah,
Dexter Horthy: then we'll cut in.
Demetrios: We're getting the hang of it, man. Yeah,
Dexter Horthy: yeah.
Demetrios: It just took a minute.
Dexter Horthy: I think it's also, yeah, when you, when you start and stop pud- pu- pedaling, it's like-
Demetrios: Dude ...
Dexter Horthy: if you slow, if you start slow and end slow- Yeah
Dexter Horthy: then it helps us-
Demetrios: It, it makes it so much harder ... helps us stay in sync better. Because you're going one way, and I'm going another way. Yeah. Is this guy going right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep, yep. We're clear. We're clear. We're clear. And so one thing that I did, uh, that this is full Jason telling me [00:10:00] he set it up, and so I set it up, and it's just so easy to set up.
Demetrios: What did you do? Any time you see... So I have, like, a recurring task that goes through my email, and any time it sees an email from a flight company- Yep ... like a Lufthansa, it just goes, and it grabs my boarding pass. So if it says, like, "Your check-in is ready," it'll go, and it'll fill out the form, and it'll grab my boarding pass.
Demetrios: And so now, this morning when I came here, it was beautiful because I forgot to check in as I do, and when I was looking for the email, I didn't find the email that said, "Hey, it's time to check in." I found my actual, like, boarding pass in my email.
Dexter Horthy: Nice.
Demetrios: So those are- ... the moments where you're like, "Damn, that is just making my life so much more simple."
Demetrios: And I did the same... I've said this again with, like, I did it with a bunch of German legal stuff. So me having to set up appointments with the government- Yeah ... I just [00:11:00] have it go and do that.
Dexter Horthy: Like, for your LLC or whatever?
Demetrios: Yeah. Or- Or just, like, uh- ... whatever you're trying ... I had to get a-
Dexter Horthy: Sorry.
Demetrios: Oop. Slow. I had to get a, um- What did I have to get?
Demetrios: Yeah, we can coast. We can cruise. Just cruise it. Yeah, I had to get my license renewed. Okay. And so I just had it set up, set me up an appointment to get my license renewed, which was beautiful because all I got was, "Hey, your appointment is on this day. Here's your number, and, like, bring these documents." And then it created a calendar invite-
Dexter Horthy: Watch out
Demetrios: and I was good
Dexter Horthy: So the cool thing I had, uh, I was actually out of Fable credits.
Demetrios: Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: And I wanted to do it with the Claude model.
Demetrios: All right.
Dexter Horthy: Uh, so I ended up using Opus 4.8, which means I can't wait to see what happens when we throw Astra at it- Uh-huh ... or whatever. Uh, but I've like, I've been procrastinating making this demo of HumanLayer.
Demetrios: Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: And it's kinda hard to demo 'cause all the cool shit we do is, like, very collaborative.
Demetrios: Mm-hmm.
Dexter Horthy: It's like... [00:12:00] So, like, to do a good demo, I need to be in the middle of demoing and then be like- And now check- ... "Hey, Kyle- Yeah ... come comment on this thing," or like-
Demetrios: Uh-huh ... "
Dexter Horthy: Come, like, co-prompt this session with me."
Dexter Horthy: So it's like, it's like a two-person demo. Yeah. And so I recorded all the footage I needed, but it's like-
Demetrios: To
Dexter Horthy: edit
Demetrios: it
Dexter Horthy: and put together ... there's a... Watch out to the left.
Demetrios: All right. Hold on. We- There's a- We got a right too, so.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. There's, like, a ton of downtime. Uh, and I'm like, I don't wanna go read through all this stuff and, like, throw it in DaVinci or whatever and like-
Demetrios: Yeah, and then have to-
Dexter Horthy: Try to put it back together.
Demetrios: Yo.
Dexter Horthy: So I hooked up, uh, there's this new editor called Palmier.
Demetrios: Uh-huh.
Dexter Horthy: Uh, it's some YC company, but it's basically like DaVinci Resolve but with an MCP.
Demetrios: Beautiful. And it's- Which DaVinci just set up their MCP, by the
Dexter Horthy: way. Oh, do they have an MCP now?
Demetrios: Yeah, which I, I'm very excited to try and just
Dexter Horthy: to see. I- whenever I see non-tech company or, like, non-startup-y tech companies- Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: Tryna- ... try to make MCPs, like-
Demetrios: Yeah ...
Dexter Horthy: the first three versions of them are always really weird.
Demetrios: Yeah. Yeah, it [00:13:00] does get- It's
Dexter Horthy: like, oh- ... a little
Demetrios: wonky.
Dexter Horthy: You need someone who's, like, super AI pilled and has used 1,000 MCPs-
Demetrios: Mm-hmm ...
Dexter Horthy: and knows exactly what makes a good one, otherwise I'm...
Demetrios: Do kind of have to have, like, eval your MCPs, don't you?
Demetrios: That is a, a thing that... 'Cause there's a lot of MCPs out there. There's not a lot of good MCP servers.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, it's, I mean, 'cause you just like to design a good... It's like, uh, you know, Coda Hale has this bit, it's like, "Just like an ax must fit the human hand to be useful, software must fit the human mind to be useful."
Demetrios: Oh.
Dexter Horthy: And
Demetrios: like- But it's not a human mind, is it?
Dexter Horthy: Exactly. That's the weirdest part. So there's, like, another take of this, which is like, MCPs must fit the agent mind to be useful. And, like, if you don't know how agents think and, like, what kind of tools they're good at calling and not good at calling, then it's unlikely you're gonna nail the MCP on the first try.
Demetrios: Yeah. Yeah, that's one thing that I've seen folks doing, is the whole like, "Oh, how [00:14:00] can we make the tool calling more reliable on these MCP servers?" And so you have this stuff like tool search, but there's almost like this next layer that you need, which is tool recommending, because you're like, "Oh, hey- I need to have this, this person match with these tools.
Demetrios: They always call... They really like this type of a thing. But anyway, I'm getting off track. What did you do with-
Dexter Horthy: Well, and, uh, just one more thought on that is, like, I, I also think there's a lot to be said for, like, months and months and millions of dollars of compute being spent to RL the model on a specific tool set.
Demetrios: Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: Like, for Claude Code, it's a lot of the coding tools. And so it's like, I know we built several harnesses internally. We go, like, keep, like, building them and then, like, throwing them out and rebuilding them-
Demetrios: Really?
Dexter Horthy: That's something else you- ... as we, like, learn about the problem space.
Demetrios: Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: But every- the thing we do in all of them is, like, if it's a Claude model, we make all the tools that are, like, mirror [00:15:00] things in Claude Code look exactly the same as if it's running in Claude Code.
Demetrios: So that you don't have any issues
Dexter Horthy: later. So that, like... Well, you just take advantage of the, you know, again, like, millions of dollars- Yeah ... and months of RL training that the labs are doing to teach these models to be really, really good-
Demetrios: At
Dexter Horthy: doing it a certain way ...
Demetrios: at the built-in tools. Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: And, like, Codex is different.
Dexter Horthy: The Codex edit tool is, like, this patch thing that does everything.
Demetrios: Uh-huh.
Dexter Horthy: And if you try to give Codex the, like, old string, new string patch tool that you get in Claude Code, it's just way worse at using it. And so it's like, how can you design your tools to look like what the model is RL'd to use? And the way you do that is you look at, like, okay, in the Frontier Lab, like, flagship harness, how are the tools exposed to the model?
Demetrios: Then we can have that reliability, and we can know, like, uh, is it gonna work? Well, there's a higher probability chance it will because-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah ...
Demetrios: it just fits in with the schema that we- Yeah ... you know has been
Dexter Horthy: hours. Yeah, the model [00:16:00] just is like, no, it's just- Yeah ... it wants to call things in that way.
Demetrios: Yeah,
Dexter Horthy: it's been r- it's been, like-
Demetrios: We can cross and then go left.
Dexter Horthy: Okay, we'll cross and go left.
Demetrios: And the thing that I was... I think we're clear. Oh, rarely is it this easy, huh? But Boom Nailed it Well done. So the- Dude, I
Dexter Horthy: love this town. Okay. I freaking love Amsterdam so much
Demetrios: And when it's sunny and you're on a bike, it's even better. Oh, here it is. We can stop here, throw the bike here in this parking spot.
Demetrios: Beautifully done.
Dexter Horthy: Oh, we made it, dude.
Demetrios: Fuck that. We
Dexter Horthy: survived.
Demetrios: Was a little bit more intense than I thought it was gonna be. I wasn't expecting so much out of it. We'll try and grab this spot- Okay ... in front over there maybe. Okay. Or just... We can- We can get
Dexter Horthy: two chairs
Demetrios: Yeah ... we can figure
Dexter Horthy: it out.
Demetrios: Should be simple.
Dexter Horthy: I don't know, I saw something on Twitter which was, like, the post was like, "He'll climb this until it's professional quality." Mm. It was like a prompt someone gave to something, and so, like, I gave it all this raw [00:17:00] footage of just me using... It was like hour- not hours, but like at least two hours of footage to make like a one minute or two- Mm
Dexter Horthy: minute demo. Uh, and so I was like, "Here's the outline of the demo I wanna make. Here's a bunch of footage in a folder. Like, go make contact sheets of it, of like, you know, every two seconds, like, so you can see w- in, in one big, in one image, like token efficiently- Ooh ... you can see what happens in every clip."
Dexter Horthy: That's sick. "And then zoom in on the parts that you care about. And then here's an ElevenLabs key. And, like, basically make me a story." And paste in the
Demetrios: voiceover?
Dexter Horthy: So I was like, I'm gonna do the final voiceover, but I'm like, "I wanna hear how you think this goes, and, like, help you, like, time it, like, and pace it exactly to, like, where things are happening."
Dexter Horthy: Yep. And, uh, anyways. And
Demetrios: this is with 4.8?
Dexter Horthy: This is Opus 4.8. You did Opus 4.8. Not even like a super dope model, right? Yeah. Uh, I mean, Opus 4.8 is pretty damn good.
Demetrios: Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: Uh, before, up until Opus 4.8, I was a 4.5 guy. I didn't, I was not big- Really? You
Demetrios: didn't go to the 4.6 version? I
Dexter Horthy: was- I mean, I tried it a little bit.
Dexter Horthy: I tried 4.7, was, like, super spazzy. [00:18:00] 4.7, yeah. 4.8 was, like... It was good at the kind of things that I use Claud. Like, if I'm doing like, like, deep, deep, like, architecture coding, or even on the front end doing stuff that is like data plumbing and stuff. Turn, turn around. Look behind
Dexter Horthy: you. Oh, that's funny 'cause yeah, 'cause he could hear us. Yeah. Um, data plumbing stuff I will always just use, like, Codex, uh- Okay ... pretty much en- entirely.
Demetrios: Isn't it funny how we've like, we have our likes and dislikes for the different models? Like, oh, if we're doing data plumbing, we'll go to one model. Yeah.
Demetrios: If we're doing... Whenever I'm doing any kind of brainstorming, I'm always Claude with... And usually, uh, it's Fable if I can, like, to, with the superpowers skill.
Dexter Horthy: Okay.
Demetrios: And just because I've come to like that one the most.
Dexter Horthy: Okay.
Demetrios: Who knows if it's actually the best?
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: Right? But it's like most familiar.
Dexter Horthy: Well, it's, it's less about what is [00:19:00] perfect and more like what do you have good intuition for and, like, what do you...
Dexter Horthy: It takes time to learn how to use these things. Yeah.
Demetrios: Yeah, and some of them you just get so frustrated with because you have to, as you said, like steer it in ways that you're like, "Why are you doing it that way?" And maybe it is actually okay to go that way, it's just not how you would necessarily do it, and so you're out of your depths quicker.
Demetrios: And then you're like, "Actually, I like this other model because it does it m- closer to the way that I would want it to do."
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. I usually tell people, like, don't waste time, like, min-maxing across Claude and Codex and Cursor. Yeah. Like, don't try to, uh- Like, it's really... Build a really deep intuition on one model- Yeah
Dexter Horthy: and then maybe you can start bringing in other ones. But if you're just constantly switching, you're never gonna kinda get to know any single one, and you're never gonna, like, know its strengths or be able to really depend on it.
Demetrios: Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: You know, like, have a good idea of, like, what's gonna happen when you say a thing.
Dexter Horthy: Um, but anyways, yeah. So we're using Opus 4.8. I was like, "Make the contact [00:20:00] sheets, then make me a storyboard." It was like HTML doc with, like, two or three screenshots and the exact words that go in the talk track. Mm-hmm. And then two or three screenshots and, like, for each beat, and there's, like, you know, 10 beats in this one-minute video.
Dexter Horthy: Um, maybe like six. Uh, and then I was like, cool, I did a little bit of iteration on the storyboard, and then I'm like, "I'm going out for a run for an hour." Like- Yeah ... and I just put it in a loop of, like, he'll climb this- Make it better ... until it's professional quality. Yeah. Compact. He'll climb it. I just, like, queued up, like, 10 messages for it to just keep working while I was out for an hour.
Dexter Horthy: I came back, and, like, the demo was, like, low-key... Like, it sucks. Like, it's, it's, it's very slop. Yeah. But, like, I was impressed- No ... with what it could do. It's like, it's not exactly what I would've shipped, but I was like, this is, like, good enough- Yeah ... that I'm just gonna start recording my screen while I'm working- Yeah
Dexter Horthy: knowing that, like, and- You can
Demetrios: find gems.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. And I gave it, I also gave it, uh, a, like- Mm ... a speech-to-text key so it can see what I'm talking about while it's on screen. Oh. And so it's like, yeah, it's slow, it's inefficient. I've never, like, sit there and work back and forth. Yeah. But now I kind of have [00:21:00] my, like, you know, AFK workflow of, like, here's all the stuff.
Dexter Horthy: Go make me a storyboard, and then I go away- Yeah ... and do other stuff. And then I come back to the storyboard, I'm like, "Cool, here's... Let's make these changes. Cool. Go make the video," and then we, like, iterate from there.
Demetrios: It makes me think that it could pull out the gems, and it could give you insights that you don't necessarily realize are there- Yeah
Demetrios: sometimes where it's like, "Oh, hey, this is happening," and you didn't even realize, "Hey, that's a novel thing. Wow, okay. Cool. I should talk about that more." Yeah, the next- Because you're so in the weeds that you don't see the forest from the trees, you know?
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. Um, yeah, being able to take... Like, I mean, peop- the, the, like, extract cool clips from a podcast AI has kinda been around for a while.
Demetrios: Which I've never found one that is so good that I'm like, "Wow, I gotta pay for this."
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: I tried a lot of them, and it's, ah, not quite there yet, but these
Dexter Horthy: are the times- Well, but now I can run this from my [00:22:00] Claude, which means I can own all the preferences. Yeah. I can own the Claude MD. Yeah. I can write the skills myself, which has always been the, like...
Dexter Horthy: I know a lot of people are saying this, like, "I don't wanna use your agent."
Demetrios: Yeah. "
Dexter Horthy: I wanna use my agent- I wanna use my own agent ... and, like, point at your MCPs. Don't ship me a, like, mediocre agent when I have the world's best harness- Yeah ... at my fingertips."
Demetrios: Yeah, and my preference harness, right? Like, what I like.
Demetrios: But then again, it goes back to the whole thing with if I'm using your MCP, and is it going to be able to do that? Is your MCP any good? It
Dexter Horthy: has to be good. Yeah, the MCPs have to be good. But it's like instead of investing time in, like, learning how to do- sandboxes and running agents and like do multi-tenant agent cloud or whatever the hell it is.
Dexter Horthy: It's like just build really, really good tools for my agent to use Yeah.
Demetrios: Well, and that's one thing that I've been thinking about, especially when it comes to browser use and how if you think about how we used to build software and create software, it was very much because somebody was not happy with how things were being done and they would [00:23:00] think, "Man, this is a pain.
Demetrios: Like, I think it could be better."
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: And then they would build that world that they envisioned.
Dexter Horthy: Okay.
Demetrios: But now if agents, especially browser agents, are doing it, you don't have that pain.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, I
Demetrios: don't care. The pain is, it's in a different place. It's not-
Dexter Horthy: As long as the browser agent doesn't get lost and is li- like constantly texting me like, "Hey, I need to go log into this page" or whatever.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, or, "
Demetrios: Is this okay?" I-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: So then you're not having... You can have shitty software out there, but it's not going to be like, "Oh, we need to reinvent this software in a way that is going to revolutionize things" because if the browsing agent, again, if it does it, then why do you need new software?
Dexter Horthy: I mean, do you...
Dexter Horthy: Okay, so here's my question: Do you think, like, browser agents are a band-aid? Like, do you think the future is everyone's just gonna have MCPs and agent tools and browser agents is just, like, you know, for the next two or five or 10 years that it takes us to get there? It, it's
Demetrios: gonna take us a while
Dexter Horthy: to get there.
Dexter Horthy: It's gonna take a long time, but do you think, do you think we'll always have [00:24:00] websites or do you think in the future I'm just gonna talk to Claude- Yeah ... or Codex or whatever?
Demetrios: It's the gateway to the machine, of course, whether it's local or... The, like, you're just gonna talk to the chat box. And whether or not it is doing things through the browser or it's doing things through the MCP or the APIs, whatever it may be, that's kind of like implementation detail that I don't necessarily wanna have to care about.
Demetrios: It's just gonna happen, right? Like, oh, it tries first with an MCP, it's not able to do it. Cool. Like, is there an API? Is there a public API? Do I need to pay for the API? Because that's another thing with browser use, like, you don't have to pay for it anymore in a way- Right ... but you also can't get the speed that you used to with APIs.
Dexter Horthy: So- Yeah, you can't get the speed, and also, like, will all those websites actually still be profitable if, like- Yeah ... they were making money off of ads and the agent sees the ads and doesn't care?
Demetrios: Like, that or think about, and I've been talking to a lot of folks about this, [00:25:00] if my agent now doesn't care about you're upselling me on the e-commerce store.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: And all of the stuff that we've built for humans over the last 20 years to fully get the most out of their sessions-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah ...
Demetrios: now the agents, they just blow right by that.
Dexter Horthy: They just- I mean, my agent has tried to upsell me before. Really? It's been like, oh, I was on this site, like, while y- shopping. It was, I was pu- testing a workflow of like, "Cool, send me the pictures of this thing I'm shopping for," and then I pick the one I like, and it's like, "Hey, by the way, if you buy like two more things, you get free shipping.
Dexter Horthy: Do you wanna do that?" And I was just like-
Demetrios: Did you
Dexter Horthy: just- The same answer I always give, which is no. Uh, but like- You turn it
Demetrios: back down again.
Dexter Horthy: But the agent did, like the upsell did transfer from, from the agent, from, from the website through the agent to me. Yeah. Like, I did, I got the pitch again, which I was like Yeah, that's probably still gonna be a thing
Demetrios: Yeah, that's true.
Demetrios: Or there's gonna be different sneaky ways that it can come through with the agent. But I mean, if you said to the agent, "No, and don't ever do that"-
Dexter Horthy: Beautiful ...
Demetrios: awesome [00:26:00] Okay Excellent
Dexter Horthy: Bye, man.
Demetrios: Thank you. This is my favorite cafe.
Dexter Horthy: Dude, I love a good pour over.
Demetrios: So the other thing, though, 'cause I, I really like think about this a lot with the browser use or the computer use in general.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: Do we have it now and then later everything's MCP and API? Or is it always... Because I just don't see the German government in my little small-ass town adopting MCP anytime soon. So to fill out forms and stuff Uh, okay. Maybe it's- It's true ... in 10 years. Like you said, maybe it's like they don't do it now, just like not everyone had a Facebook page back in the day, but then everybody had to go and get one when Facebook- Yeah
Demetrios: was the one spot that you had to be.
Dexter Horthy: Well, in the States in, like, 20- it was, like, 2012 or something, it was a really big deal when we got healthcare.gov. It was like, "Oh, you can now go get [00:27:00] your government benefits on the internet." On the website. "You don't have to go fill out a form. You don't have to send in a letter."
Dexter Horthy: It was, like, a huge deal. So it'll probably have something like that- Yeah ... which is, like, you know, gov MCP or whatever it is. But again, I don't know when it's gonna come, right? Yeah. Like, it was in the, in the US, it was, you know, 12 years after the, like, World Wide Web became, like, oh, this is the future of the economy and information and communication.
Demetrios: But my big question is, would that necessity be there to create the MCP if browser use can already do it? That's where I'm, I'm going to. I know you're going to, like, hey, everything's moving towards MCPs- Yeah ... because it's obviously the better way of doing it. But if you don't have that catalyst because it can be done already-
Dexter Horthy: Oh, it's beautiful.
Dexter Horthy: Thank you.
Demetrios: Oh, nice.
Dexter Horthy: It's okay. Thank you. We're, we're very thirsty. We'll figure out how to drink it all. Get some water. Yeah, I mean, the, the question is, like, will... If, uh, 'cause today websites are great because they serve a dual purpose. It's for humans, and agents can now [00:28:00] use them reasonably well- Yeah ... versus, like, if, if there is no reason to have a human-facing site, then why not just make it as easy as possible?
Demetrios: Yeah, everything's headless, but that is easy for things built today. But I feel like anything that is, A, doesn't have a huge tech team behind it-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah ...
Demetrios: and B, doesn't really see the need in it and they're not, like, fully convinced anyway, when are we gonna get to that point where those folks switch over to fully headless?
Demetrios: Just your product is your MCP server, which is wild to think. Yeah. Uh, your, your product is not anything more than how your MCP server can then leverage, like, MCP apps to create a better experience inside of my
Dexter Horthy: chatbot. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you basically, like, become some... You either become, like, an MCP over a system of record or an MCP that is interfaced to something in the real world.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. Or it's, like, moving physical [00:29:00] goods to my location- Yeah ... or something like th- or, like, booking me a hotel or whatever it is.
Demetrios: I've tried really hard to have the experiences so far on doing everything I can with browser use, right? Yeah. One is just booking out things like, uh, "Hey, let me book some museum visit."
Demetrios: I was just in Tokyo. Yeah. And I booked a bunch of museum visits, and that was fine. Like, anything with a form- Well, it sounds
Dexter Horthy: great ...
Demetrios: I j- I literally, my mind switched when Jason said, "I never fill out forms anymore."
Dexter Horthy: Codex, go do this for me ...
Demetrios: from then on, it was, "Oh my God, if I'm ever finding myself filling out a form, I'm doing it wrong.
Demetrios: I need to figure out ways to make it where my chat is my command center." And one thing that I did that a few friends thought was kinda novel, so I bet you've been doing this for ages, [00:30:00] is you get your daily briefing- Which is not that novel ... whatever. It checks all of your emails, all your Slacks, all your
Demetrios: I have it check WhatsApp and Telegram and Signal, and then I also have it check YouTube to see how we're performing there.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: So it'll give me... And it can do that with browser use. Again, like, it can look at your YouTube analytics-
Dexter Horthy: Yep ...
Demetrios: and check all of that. And so the way that I respond to it is I don't then go, "Oh, Dex sent me this email.
Demetrios: I should go and respond in Gmail." I just turn on WhisperFlow, and then I say, "Okay, respond to Dex and say blah, blah, blah- Yeah ... and then do this,"
Dexter Horthy: and I track that down. This is, uh, one of the best workflows that I've found, whether it's, like, reading a plan of what an agent wants to write in terms of code or whether it's like, "Hey, look, like, here's a giant report of stuff."
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. You just turn on WhisperFlow, think out loud as you're reading through it- Mm-hmm ... and then, like, send it to the model and boom.
Demetrios: Yeah. And it comes back. If, if you need to iterate a few times, you can. One other thing that I've been really enjoying, and I have been talking to a lot of people about this again, [00:31:00] the Codex app-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah,
Demetrios: the desktop app
Demetrios: when you're using ... Yeah, the desktop app. Sometimes it will give you back a response that is a card that you can edit in-app, like in the chat. So in its response. I've
Dexter Horthy: seen that. Uh, the last time I tried it it was super buggy.
Demetrios: So
Dexter Horthy: it's not- I tried to edit it and it sent the email- Oh, shit ... and I was like, "No.
Dexter Horthy: Dude." There are 80 engineers on this project.
Demetrios: Oh. Yeah. Oh. Just on the desktop app.
Dexter Horthy: Anyways, I have a buddy who works on Codex desktop now, so I send him all my bug reports.
Demetrios: Yeah, that's good. Yeah, that's ... As you should. Yeah. As you should. So I think they fixed that because ... But what I don't understand is why they don't have it come up more.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: And the editability of the chat or the responses from the models is a nice UI pattern that I wanna see more and more.
Dexter Horthy: You don't ... You're, you're ... You would rather just edit it in line than just be like change it to be like this?
Demetrios: [00:32:00] Well, sometimes it's, it's a few words that I wanna change.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, so you don't wanna be like copy the thing, paste it in, and then paste the other thing- Exactly
Dexter Horthy: you wanna change it to. It's
Demetrios: easier just to say, like, "Delete that whole sentence there," by deleting it- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ... as opposed to, yeah, doing that workflow. And so that got me thinking, "Well, why don't we have-" Document editing inside of our chats, and why don't we have, like you just showed me, more commenting abilities- Yeah
Demetrios: inside of our chats? Why don't we have- This is the- What about Notion drag and dropping text blocks?
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: Or Notion, like, being able to call a database inline?
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. This is, this is the next feature I want from my, like, silly video production pipeline is I want... Palmira doesn't have this today, but I wanna be able to comment on the timeline.
Dexter Horthy: Mm. Like, whatever, there's always something that you're working on- That's true ... whether it's the code or a plan- Yeah ... or an email. Like, you want a really high [00:33:00] bandwidth way to just be like, "This timestamp-" Yeah ... "here's my comment," without having to say, "At this time you did this, and here's what was happening, and here's how I want it."
Dexter Horthy: It's just like make this-
Demetrios: Frame.io does that-
Dexter Horthy: Exactly ...
Demetrios: but it's for... Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Demetrios: It's for other humans. Yeah. And you want it so that it's an agent that can just know, "Hey, right here-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah ...
Demetrios: take that part out
Dexter Horthy: or do this." I mean, what I'll probably end up doing if Palmira doesn't ship comments on the timeline is I will probably be like, "Cool, now upload it to Fra-..."
Dexter Horthy: Like, the workflow is like, okay, when it's done, do an export and upload it to Frame, and I'll comment on that and then pull the Frame comments.
Demetrios: And we... Oh, yeah.
Dexter Horthy: Like, I think, I think, like, the... I mean, this was kind of, like, early days of HumanLayer. Like, the, the super broad idea was, like, how do we give really high bandwidth, high quality, like, review interface?
Dexter Horthy: And part of it was like the model should text me when it needs help, but also, like, I should be able to click a link and interact, whether it's, like, data labeling and I wanna, like, approve or, or deny it, or whether it's a classification or it's an email to send or whatever it is. Like, all those things kind of benefit from, like, purpose-built UIs for the task at hand.
Demetrios: Yeah. [00:34:00] Yeah. Exactly. And that is one other piece that I've been thinking about, which is context is that. Context is just as much about, oh, this means this in this organization- Yeah ... and it is- Also, when I present this thing to Dex, I present it with this UI-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah ...
Demetrios: because it makes his job much easier. It gets him from point A to point B faster.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: That is also context.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, and like the, the default of most agents, I mean, this is why I, like I'm, I struggle with chat and I think we need something richer is like people have been complaining for months about like Fable just info dumps- Oh, God ... an entire wall of garbage- Yeah ... and you're like- Give me something better.
Dexter Horthy: This was the skill we did- Show, yeah, show- The open source skill that we just published ... what was it? Show me? Yeah, show me. Yeah,
Demetrios: show me is
Dexter Horthy: beautiful. It's just like I ain't reading all that. Yeah. Like, make it more visual, and it's like-
Demetrios: Or bro.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. It's
Demetrios: the same thing. Yeah. It's just like, come on, man.
Dexter Horthy: What are the, what are the things we can do to like maximize the bandwidth of human, bo- both in terms [00:35:00] of like the volume of information that can be transferred, but also like how do we make it use the parts of your brain that are like not...
Dexter Horthy: that don't require a lot of energy, right? Mm-hmm. Like, if I ask you, I- this is an old like Code of Hail talk that I recommend to everybody, but it's just like if I ask you what's three plus six, you don't like decide to add three and six. Just you, the number nine jumps into your head. But if I ask you to multiply two three-digit numbers, like- You got it
Dexter Horthy: your pupils dilate- Oh, yeah ... and your adrenaline flows and you're like, let me focus on this shit. I need a piece of paper. Yeah Like, yeah, if you try to do it in your head, and then it's like... And also like you're exhausted at the end. And so it's like how can we, how can we, how can we make things, like how can we optimize the way our tools communicate to humans in a way that like uses the parts of your brain that don't require effort?
Demetrios: Do you feel like that is as much of understanding the whole end-to-end, or maybe not even end-to-end, just the next step and then letting the model optimize for how it presents it? Or, [00:36:00] uh, you, it's a back and forth between how the model presents it and how you say you want it, because- You're
Dexter Horthy: talking about like-
Demetrios: Well, I'll give you an example.
Demetrios: So we do the daily agentic newsletter, and the way that we create that newsletter is we have 10 different agents scouring all the different spots- Yeah ... whether it's Reddit or X or just top news sources, and it will bring us back 100 different things that are happening today. Yeah. So it's like a personalized newsfeed.
Demetrios: What you could do is say, "Okay, well, I've got these 100 different pieces. Now, the end state is I wanna get them into a newsletter with a little blurb, and then I wanna comment on why I find this important."
Dexter Horthy: Yep.
Demetrios: So
Dexter Horthy: I would- And are you gonna do all 100 or do you also have to kind of narrow it down?
Demetrios: No, you- yeah, exactly.
Demetrios: You... Just five.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. Okay.
Demetrios: We do five every day, and so you take those and you say, "These five [00:37:00] are the ones that I want in there." Then again, this is why I come back to the context is also can I create a GUI that will make it as easy as possible for me to just say, "I want this, this, and this," and say that these things...
Demetrios: Here, give me the one or two-sentence blurb. And then my blurb is- The automated ... yeah, my blurb is, is this part. So you've got, like, the overview blurb, and then you've got why I feel like it's important, the human take.
Dexter Horthy: And then you wanna be able to tag that up and make changes. Yeah. Either edit it directly or put comments on it or- Yeah
Demetrios: yeah. Yep. So the first part, the first step is I need to take all of these 100 and I need to whittle it down to five that I like, and then from those five, they need to go into the newsletter sending software.
Dexter Horthy: Yep.
Demetrios: It takes a few iterations, but you know, like, all right, here's the whole workflow Potentially there's a world where I'm copy and pasting this one, and then I'm h- adding the link to it, and then I'm [00:38:00] putting it into the newsletter writing software, and that's really cumbersome.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: Or you build out that context again. You connect these two sources where I've got all of the different agent's feedback that... Or the articles, I should say. Yeah. I've got all the articles, and I can just say select, and then boom, it gets piped in. And it's in my s- my newsletter software already. And then I can just go, and it also has the two-sentence blurb, and it's hyperlinked- Yeah
Demetrios: with UTM parameters or whatever. Yeah. Like, all that stuff is pretty basic table stakes for a newsletter-sending software. Yep. And then I just go in and I add my take at the bottom. So what I'm trying to say is that whole end-to-end type of workflow- Yeah ... I had to get better and better at, but I also have to know how to present it to me, like you're saying, so that three plus six is nine, and I just go, "Boom, I like that.
Demetrios: Ooh, that's cool." Yeah. "That's novel. Boom." Yeah. "That one's in there."
Dexter Horthy: You don't have to, like, squint your eyes and be [00:39:00] like, "Uh, what is this?" Yeah. "I don't know what it is." How
Demetrios: do I figure it out? "Now, now let me copy and paste it into here, and let me try and, like, think of something novel to say because I'm really trying to understand it."
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: So there's that, but then again, what I keep coming back to is does that even matter if we get good enough at the chat being the interface?
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: I'm not going to have a software that sends emails. Yeah. I'm not going to have a software where I coagulate all this data. I'm just going to have the chat.
Dexter Horthy: The chat's gonna have little mini apps in there, and some of them are just created on demand by- Yeah ... the agent and...
Demetrios: So that, that's kind of where we are right now, is we have these softwares that we've, we've put as stopgaps.
Dexter Horthy: Yep.
Demetrios: And if you do something enough times, it's repetitive enough, you have this workflow that you're comfortable with, and you can optimize the workflow-
Dexter Horthy: Yep
Demetrios: and plug in the human where it needs to plug in. [00:40:00] However- How long will we need that for?
Dexter Horthy: Right, exactly. How much of this stuff? And it's like, okay, cool, there's always this tension between, like, how do I solve problems today- Yeah ... versus, like, what is worth building? Like, how much effort am I willing to put in if I think there's a 30% chance that this will be not relevant in a year or two years?
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. Or a 10% chance in four years, or whatever, whatever the, like, probability curve is.
Demetrios: Well, how do you... Because HumanLayer is very much in the blood bath space of- Yeah ... building. Yeah. And everybody's building in the coding space because it is the, up until now, the most lucrative
Dexter Horthy: Well, and it's the, it's the one with the best like, like just like problem, like solution fit basically.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah, yeah. It's like it actually, uh- It works really well ... it works well. Uh, I think actually like what, what we've learned a lot of in the last couple months working with like, we work mostly with larger companies, so like our, our like ballpark is like at least 100 engineers. Mm-hmm. But most of the [00:41:00] teams we work with have like more than 300.
Dexter Horthy: Wow. And a handful of seed stage companies that love our, love it, whatever, they're just like, you know, fans. But, uh, what we're finding more and more of is like every, every principal engineer inside every company is kind of going on the journey of like building their own personal software factory. Yeah.
Dexter Horthy: Uh, and then like a lot... And then there's like, well, the CTO wants background agents, and they want the like Ramp inspect or like whatever all these like companies are bragging about this stuff. They ruined- Everybody wants to be able to do that ...
Demetrios: yeah, Ramp ruined so many fucking software engineers'-
Demetrios: roadmaps.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: Because of that damn X post that they put out.
Dexter Horthy: Yep. Like... Everyone's just like, "Oh my God, we need to be like Ramp. We need to be like Brex. We need to be like Work OS," whatever it is. Exactly. And so what we've actually found is like ha- having a full stack IDE is like, it's very useful as like a starting point.
Dexter Horthy: Mm-hmm. And it's like, it's nice in terms of a bridge of like, cool, people are used to sitting on their computer and talking to an agent and writing code or writing code in an IDE or whatever it is, and then everything after that is the [00:42:00] same. The, you, when it's done, you make the pull request, and like maybe there's agentic review over there, but like basically the interface between the developer and the rest of their team and the production system is kind of the same.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. But then what actually I think what, what, what the industry needs is like these more like, there's parts of building your own software factory that you should absolutely own, especially like defining your dev environment and how the code runs and things like this. Um, but there's parts of it that are very much I would, I call like undifferentiated overhead of like- Sure
Dexter Horthy: cool, I have an agent running in a container somewhere, a sand- sandbox or whatever it is. We picked a stack for this and we can, we have it running. How do I stream messages in and out of that, right? Like, how do I hook that up to Slack or a custom UI or whatever it is, show what the agent is doing, let the user do approvals and send messages in?
Dexter Horthy: Uh, how do I, how do I like st- when the agent is editing code, how do I take that diff and make it available to the team so that I don't have to wait for a pull request?
Demetrios: These are just like paper cuts basically.
Dexter Horthy: [00:43:00] It's, it's small things and it's- Yeah ... like, it's very easy to vibe it out, but doing it in like a scalable way that's super real time, it like actually ends up being a...
Dexter Horthy: This is like, it's not even like, you don't even see it in our product, but we spend so much time building this sync engine so that like when you're running it locally, you're actually like, your UI is talking to a cloud, is talking to a demon running on your laptop, and you, for you it feels real time.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. And you can run that demon anywhere. And so like we spend so much time making that sync experience. We're building on the Electric SQL and Durable Streams- Nice ... and all this kind of like next gen real time streaming tech. And, uh- It's, it's surprising how much that, like, it's just a little bit unwieldy, but doing it in a very effective way where you deal, like, client registration, long polling, all the, all this, like, stuff that has been, like, kind of solved, but operating it is hard.
Dexter Horthy: And so it's like, there's this idea of like, "Cool, can we give people building blocks that let them kind of like build [00:44:00] this parts of the software factory that they should own-" Mm-hmm ... and like get really like skip all the bullshit of like dealing with, you know what I mean, of dealing with all this like sync infrastructure and stuff?
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: It's, it's death by a thousand cuts. Yeah. You have all of this stuff that you're doing, and especially what you were talking about, if you're at a certain scale-
Dexter Horthy: Yeah ...
Demetrios: then somebody's has to do it. You ha- If you're in an enterprise, you for sure are going to be getting architecture reviews.
Dexter Horthy: Yep.
Demetrios: And it's somebody who is saying, "We can't do that because we need all of these things."
Dexter Horthy: Yep.
Demetrios: And you go, "Ah, yeah. Well, our agent actually we'll, we'll get to that, I guess."
Dexter Horthy: Yeah.
Demetrios: But it's, nobody actually wants to do that.
Dexter Horthy: Well, and it's like the people building these things, like, they have day jobs. It's like you- Mm-hmm ... you do the skunkworks project of like, "Cool, I built the software factory," and like, "Oh, we have 30 users.
Dexter Horthy: Now we have 50 users." Yeah. "And people are running a bunch of work through the, through this background agent system I built." And then people have feature requests. Mm-hmm. And it's like, do you want your job to become like maintaining this like side project you vibe [00:45:00] coded, or do you want to do your day job?
Dexter Horthy: Or like which, which parts of it are worth investing in, right? Yeah. Same with GitHub actions. Like, in GitHub actions you define how is the, like, language runtime set up, how are the tests run, but you don't build the thing that captures the logs. You don't build the scheduler. You don't build the thing that like catches a web- Yeah
Dexter Horthy: hook from GitHub- You enjoy- ... and launches the work ...
Demetrios: the fruits of somebody else's labor. That
Dexter Horthy: is so true. Exactly. There's like, it's like the overhead of building a CI s- GitHub action's got the interface really, really well of like, hey, you build this YAML format, you commit it to your repo. I mean, Circle and Travis had this too.
Dexter Horthy: Yeah. But like basically that idea of like the hard, boring, annoying, not sexy part of this is, is the like wiring everything together and, you know, running things on demand and all of this. Uh, and that is, that is the part that like I think, I think we want to be solving and like we've built the product to be like, cool, you, you Voltron it all together and you get this desktop IDE thing that you don't have to think about, but then you can like take the pieces.
Dexter Horthy: There's like vertical slices through that you can like, "Oh, I just want artifacts. I just want when the agent writes a, a plan file, I want that to be available [00:46:00] to everyone on my team. I wanna get a Slack message that it was written. I want people to be able to comment, and I want to be easy to get those comments back to the agent."
Demetrios: No reefer Oh, Amsterdam. Just in case, one more. Does that go... Uh, just in case. Hopefully you're marking the ones you like. Bro, just by the way, we should rent one of those boats sometime, and we should do a podcast on it. Well, today we're gonna do just that with Dex. The only catch is... I think I heard that fucking...
Demetrios: You probably heard it. That's hilarious. All right. Let's try again. Fucking sneeze.
Dexter Horthy: The sneeze made me break.
Demetrios: Need to ring some bells. Don't let any of these pedestrians in the way.
Dexter Horthy: Centraal Station.
Demetrios: So many damn bricks. Doing some acid. Are we hot? Come on, let's do it. Come on, let's get into it. Come on, let's get into it.
Demetrios: Let's do it. Come on, let's go do it. Come on. I feel like we got it. You [00:47:00] feel like we got it?
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