⚡ [AIE CODE Preview] Inside Google Labs: Building The Gemini Coding Agent — Jed Borovik, Jules

Jad Borovic, welcome to Lanespace. Yeah, thanks for having me. So we're sitting here at F.Ink's beautiful podcast studios, and we're actually meeting at GitHub Universe. How's it been so far? It's been great. I mean, yeah, the keynote today was awesome. It was fun to see Jules up there a little bit. We have a lot of folks from our team here. Jules is partnering with GitHub for the new Agenda HQ stuff, which we're excited about. and also this is a this is an incredible podcast space so yeah i'm excited to do this here i'm glad for them to to loan us this space uh you are also an emcee for ai engineer code uh that's exciting in new york where you you went to college but you don't live there anymore yeah no i spent a bunch of time in new york you know it's funny um being part of the new york tech scene i actually think it's great having big major conferences there i could think uh so there's a lot obviously that happens on the west coast um but being someone in tech on the east coast it's yeah it's just awesome to have stuff there. So yeah, you mentioned you fly over to SF a lot. And like, what's it, what's the scene like in the East Coast? Like, like, obviously we are pretty new. We're like, this is our first year coming to New York. What else happens in the New York? Like, what are the highlights for you in the New York tech scene? Yeah, I mean, there's so much. There's, you know, obviously a ton of great companies. I think the thing that's interesting about New York is it's such a big city with so much going on, right? And so there's like, you know, tech is a huge part of it, but there's also, you know, so many major issues there whether it's fashion media session finance like it's uh um and somebody's like i think that helps push the tech um and do do all kinds of stuff um but yeah now these coast is a great city the greats you know the the all the schools there's you know all across east coast um a ton of great schools and great students doing all kinds of stuff um so yeah you know i went to school there the hackathon scene there was amazing um really fell in love with tech and programming there. So is there a big NYU hackathon like, like in Stanford with like Cal hacks and stuff? Yeah. So there's a tree hacks. Yeah. There's one that was put on by, this was a while ago, but we're put on by NYU and Columbia. We do to get hack and why. So there's, there's a, there's a bunch of events kind of that we did together. It would bring, you know, people across New York city, students across New York city. And those are super fun. Yeah. So it'd be at the Columbia one, one time and then NYU the next and recycle back and forth. So yeah, a lot of cool stuff was made there. Nice. So you've been at Google for a while, nine years. You worked on a bunch of things, including with Malta, which is also another guest that I'm interviewing today. How do you get into Jules? What's the AI journey? Yeah. So, you know, this is going to sound really cheesy, but I've told the story a couple of times to folks when they're like, oh, how'd you end up doing this? But it is actually very true. So I worked on search for a long time and specifically kind of like news and freshness. And then, you know, when Stable Diffusion came out, that to me was the first like Gen AI mode. I know some people talk about like ChatGPT is like the first thing, but for me, Stable Diffusion, you know, it was a couple months before ChatGPT came out. It was a huge thing. I was following it a ton online and there were two groups of creators having reactions to it. You know, there was one group that was, you know, this is stealing my art. This is stealing everything that's near and dear to me. I hate this. This is ruining my life. And there was another group of artists and creators who were like, oh, this is a tool to create better art. And so I was watching it. It's a new brush. Yeah, exactly. And right around then, I was having conversations with a couple of people who would say things like, you know, if I had a kid in college, I wouldn't recommend they study computer science. I was like, what? why and this was you know long before like jensen hong and people like he'd been saying this kind of stuff i was like well what's well why and it was like oh ai like software is going to change it's going to be so you know who knows if there's gonna be jobs and i was like i love being a software engineer i love programming like and i was like wait this is my stable diffusion moment this is either it's going to take my my art my craft this is a tool to create better art and i was like i definitely know which path i'm taking so i got you know very into to building coding so i was still working on search um but i spent a bunch of time you know making stuff for my own time and playing with things and um and you ultimately tried to find a role that would you know the most exciting role i could find to to do this stuff and that was to join google labs and jewels where we were you know right around then we're starting to build these kind of coding agents at google um and yeah the timing worked out well and uh i joined and yeah it's been it's been awesome can you uh since we're talking about google labs i am actually unclear about where google labs starts and the rest of DeepMind and the rest of Google? Like, what is the org chart layer? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So Labs' mission is to build kind of new, like, innovative products that the rest of Google isn't well-positioned for. Yeah, which we've had, like, the rise of an Opiclm. Exactly, exactly. So Opiclm is maybe the most wide, the most wide. Yeah, and then it's called NanoBanana. I don't know if it's... Yeah, so the thing that's really exciting about Labs is we work incredibly closely with DeepMind. So all the stuff in terms of the, you know, we're building a product, but we work so closely for the model. And, you know, one of the nice things about being at Google is you have this opportunity to really build an end-to-end AI product, right? From like pixels on the page, through the infrastructure, through, you know, the model and the training, all of that loop. So Labs is here to build new products and we're really like a product org, but a true AI product org where we work incredibly closely with, with, you know, DeepMind, but also, you know, other parts of Google, as it makes sense. Yeah. Just on the history of AI coding, I had heard that actually Google had an internal version of Copilot or something like that that was never released. Is that true? What can we say about it? Yeah. So I think there are... Google has published papers in this space for a while. And so, yeah, we have... In Google, we built a lot of our own tools and CIDR, which folks maybe have heard of is our internal IDE. and we've had all kinds of you know capabilities and tools there for a while so yes you know we certainly have had pretty good tools for a while but they were for internal use yeah yeah i think i think it was interesting because like i think the uh one of the hype moments when google started getting into the sort of like lm game like basically when everything rebranded to become gemini and like starting to push out gemini where people are like oh like did you know that google probably like google's entire repo is uh probably about the same size as github and like you know there must be some interesting data in there oh yeah i mean and that's one of the things you know in building a lot of these internal systems you know the the data is incredible yeah especially when it's you know not only is the model and the training in-house but all the data on the usage and whatever so you know we could build really kind of sophisticated sophisticated things there yeah okay so let's let's introduce people to jules on your website says jewels, autonomous, coding agents. We've seen lots of these. They're not octopuses. They're not purple. So you got that going for you. But what really is the core thing you're trying to nail in a very crowded coding agents landscape? So what we think about and what we set out to do back when I joined was like, where are coding agents going to go? And as these models get more and more powerful and sophisticated, what is that experience going to be? And let's build for that future. And so when you think of a really powerful agent that can run for a really long time, doing really complicated things, that's when the products started to take shape for us. So for example, autonomous means it has its own computer. So for Jules, it's the end. Yeah, exactly. So tons of agents that run locally or in your workspace with you while you're coding. But if you want something that's going to run for hours, let's say days, you might want it to have its own environment where it can do its own work. So that's just one of the pieces that's important for kind of this autonomous kind of energy, but it's really like, you know, think about this future where they're incredibly powerful. You can spin up tons of them, right? They're autonomous, but also, you know, we're thinking about what does it mean for it to be ambient, right? Like it's kind of when it has its own infrastructure, its own computer, its own ways to interact with it, how does that start to change what it can do? For example, like we have an API. So people are using it for all kinds of things, triggering it from, you know, when something happens And we saw an example where someone has, they're triggering Jules to do kind of all kinds of updates to their site. And then they have a GitHub action that is going to automatically merge Jules pull requests. So it's just like all kinds of stuff is flowing, really kind of changing how people are able to do stuff. And it's a CLI related just to close that loop. Yeah, CLI. So we also have a CLI, which is, you know, we want to meet developers where they are. And so part of the, you know, an API is like you can trigger from anywhere. But also, you know, when you're working locally, like you want to be able to trigger stuff. So we have the Joule CLI we launched a couple weeks ago, which lets you interact with it. By the time this podcast comes out, we'll be integrated with the Gemini CLI. Yeah, so I was thinking, like, you have a number of CLIs, I'm not sure. Exactly. Okay. So Gemini CLI, all kinds of places where we're going to kind of mix and be able to harness this power, right? Because developers work in all kinds of spots. and so making it easy to have this autonomous, ambient agent that can really do all kinds of work for you. Yeah. What is your journey? When you started out, did you find any assumptions that were quickly challenged when working with Gen.EI and coding agents in general? I guess you're maybe not too unfamiliar with it because Search uses a lot of machine learned, black boxy type things, including BERT, which, you know, was a major update a few years ago. Yeah, so I mean, just fill us in. Like, what is your AI engineering journey? Yeah, totally. So I think one of the things that keeps coming up is like, the model makes such a difference. I mean, maybe it sounds obvious, but it's like the quality of the model really changes like what you're able to do and how you engineer around it. So for example, when we started, this was, you know, with relatively early models of Gemini, we had the agent scaffolding around it was incredibly complex i think one of the things we've seen is scaffolds get simpler and simpler over time as the models get better and in some ways this the scaffolding is almost a crutch for for uh things the the the model struggles with for example like you know really complicated sub-agent systems you know we we've played with that we've experimented with that can you give an example of like a kind of sub-agent that you to abandon? Yeah, we're just basically like you have, you know, you give, you give Jules a coding task to do, and it's going to have different agents for whether it's, you know, making a code edit or handling a sub problem or, you know, doing any kind of action with an integration or, you know, and having like full sub agents for different parts of like a reviewer agent or even like people, sometimes people do these like different personas where you're like, you know, one of the things that cracked me up. It's like, you know, you the product manager agent and then you have the code reviewer agent you know we didn go you know that far But I think a lot of these things aren as in favor I mean certainly people do I don't want to say the agent harness isn't sophisticated. It certainly is. But as the models get better, less is more, especially as it comes to being able to improve through whether it's machine learning or just regular maintenance. I think certainly we've found that you know, we're finding that less is more. I think that, you know, that we were talking about a little bit before we started recording, like the, like RAG, right? And like, you know, and all that stuff. And, you know, it seems like, you know, not just for Jules, but kind of across the industry that like agent-based search, right? Like it's, you know, maintaining embeddings is hard. Getting the chunking right is hard. Like in terms of like the black box aspect you mentioned, And a lot of that is hard to improve upon. Yeah, I would even say it's maybe not even hard so much as it will never be good. Well, tell me more. Why do you say that? Because a chunk that happens to capture the thing you're looking for will fail to capture something else. and so if you only retrieve based on like your embeddings of a chunk like it's it uses very arbitrary boundaries that are drawn like with like some hope of like so the semantics being captured but you could just throw attention at it yeah and you can scale probably much better using grep like totally so i think that's you know that's an example of you know in these these harnesses how like they're simplifying you know yeah well i haven't abandoned it completely because one of the things that we were doing i don't know if you saw the cognition sweet grep work was basically using cement a semantic searcher and chunks in and with embeddings as a tool but it on the same level as the other tools like to wrap and file access and and glop and whatever else other variants you have uh so i think like that yeah i mean that that makes sense like don't abandon it just just don't reify it into like the only way to do things exactly and to be clear like you know this is an area of research we're doing tons of work on um and you know i actually expect you know uh in the coming months we'll we'll be talking about some stuff we're doing here too but it's um it's yeah it's it's not the i feel like when we started it was like rag it was like embedding based rag yeah it was like the thing everyone did and it's interesting to see how it's people ask me for like where are the good code embedding models and you know i pointed them to like a few like chinese ones there's some like nomic was working on one and then like we found we didn't need them yeah exactly exactly very bitter lesson so so so you know i think like that these this like these are good things like i think like when jewels came out it was kind of a preview i i mean like the trusted testers group so i got to see a little bit um and but now it feels like more of a real product yeah what's that transition like uh is there a process within google labs to promote things when you feel like there's some traction Yeah, absolutely. So I think the Google Labs is not, you know, about just experiments, right? So like, you know, no book elements we talk about. It's not very serious. It's incredibly successful. We threw money. That's really, yeah. And for us, IL was kind of a little bit of a turning point. So in May, when we announced Jules, you know, it was like great reception following IL. and that was a real moment of us to like turn this into you know very much a real thing. I mean it's something that we were you know we always intended to. It wasn't ever intended. You know I didn't you know talk about my journey like it was always a goal to build a real product here. And but for us that that was kind of a very key moment very key milestone for us. And so yeah now it's you know it's very much a real thing. You know as mentioned talking before like you know Jules and you know being talked about on the in the GitHub keynote know, it's, yeah, it's certainly here to stay. We're, we're, we're excited to kind of keep building and expanding. Awesome. Let's talk about just like coding and just in general, you're, you're coming to MCD AIE Code Summit. It's going to be your first time at AIE and the MC. What do you want to know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, tell me, why, why would someone want to Yeah, this is, yeah, let's turn it on. Oh boy, this is embarrassing. So, I mean, you know, So fortunately, we're in our third year, fourth year now, and we have a bunch of, you know, prior art. We can just point people to and say, look at our YouTube. You like that? You like this? There's some great talks. You know, I haven't been before, but I've watched the talk. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of good stuff. Yeah. And I'm proud that it features content from all labs. And basically, we are like the, this is a pattern I've seen across my career in terms of like every industry needs its like focal gathering points to just like trade tips and stuff. So I've seen that in JavaScript. I've seen that in cloud native. I've seen that in data engineering. And I was like, probably AI engineering will need something like this. And then also the concurrent thread to this was I went to a bunch of the academic ML conferences, NeurIPS, ICML, Iclear. And a lot of them, like NeurIPS is 40 years old and that hasn't really changed. And it's very focused on academics and PhD students. whereas I think really the transition in AI going from research to industry is that you gradually see a shift, unfortunately less open source, less papers and more products and more startups and closed models and what have you. But people still want to share people still want to hire they want to promote their work so they need a place to do that. You can always do that at your company conferences, obviously IO and like github has github and microsoft has build and ignite but like there usually is one place where it's like the industry neutral thing where everyone is on the same playing field and me the best person with yeah and like honestly some people like that uh you know it's not like you're not going to be treated as like the vip and like you know you can't have to like earn your spot but like when you earn your spot i think like people give that uh that requisite level of attention better uh because you had to yeah so you know let's say i've watched i've watched the videos online i kind of get a sense for speak but what's happening between that for someone who hasn't been before like what goes on other than the talks like oh yeah uh a lot of uh well it's just logistical stuff of like invoicing and like vendor selection and venue selection and like did you know we have like five different pieces of software to like coordinate speaker logistics and booth logistics and borders and av and attendee somewhere ago i'm gonna sit oh yeah sorry but uh yeah what am i gonna what am i gonna yeah yeah so actually uh it's really weird because like as i'm the content guy for aie right i curate the speakers i invite them right and uh but i actually know that the content is like the least important part yeah because all of its films and we're going to edit it and post it for free on youtube anyway but the reason you come is because one you can talk to the speakers but also you can talk to each other and so like the you know i I would say like the hallway track is the most important track. Yeah. And how do you get the most out of the hallway track? What's your guide? Begin of all hallway track. I don't have as collected of thoughts as I should. One, I think if you have some prior history of like what you're interested in and work on. So basically like the best intro to somebody is if they've seen you online before. So they can skip the whole like who the hell are you part and just get into like, well, yeah, I saw you wrote that thing. Like, let me talk to you in person about it. This is both here. um that's way better than like who are you what do you do and and that's and that's like a very cold interaction ideally people come warm or they can come with some clear idea of like here's here's why i'm here here's here's what i'm looking to get out of this uh because if i think if you show up with like no uh real intention or if you're like in and out for uh for your thing and nothing else then you don't have the space and the mental energy for the unstructured serendipitous connections and the thing about ie at least in at least in our scale our sides right now especially for the summits which is the one that you're going to um everyone had to apply to get in yeah uh so usually uh you know our first um summit we had like something like a 10 to 1 applicant to invite ratio invited spots ratio this one's going to be when it went up to like 10 to 16 to 20 something this one's gonna be 23 uh one of the 23 people who yeah yeah so so like Yeah, it's a lot. I think like, and really was trying to filter for people who would be speakers at any other conference. But like they are the top of the field. They're either founders or honestly enterprise buyers of the best companies you can find in New York. uh which you know and that's another reason for this the our new york conference which is we're bringing kind of the best of san francisco or tech to the the finance sector really yeah uh there there is a little bit of media but mostly finance and like yeah that's that's great like i mean i i think so what i'm trying to say i guess is you're there to meet the other people so make time to meet them have a calling card like who are you like like a quick like what who are you What do you do? What can you help with? What are you looking for help for? That kind of intro stuff is really good. Going with friends is really good. Obviously, like we actually offer, for the WorldSphere, we offer bundle discounts. This one, I don't think we do, but just reach out if you need something. But yeah, I mean, like, I think like the idea of getting immersed in the code agent community is really important. And I think maybe the last part I'll bring up is that we themed it for the first time, right? So you used to be, these are just generalists. here's the state of ai the best because we can get at any point in time but now we're really trying to push ourselves to theme everything so we have the best people in code the best people in data sets the best people in rl i want to do a mac interp one that'll be fun cool uh that one that one i'm thinking will be in london because um the people i want to target are in london but yeah i think like when you do a summit it should be focused everyone there should have an agenda of trying to learn what's the state of the art, trying to have off-the-record conversations with their peers, doing the same thing at the other companies. And who knows what could happen? That's the weirdest thing. I organize the thing and I don't even know half the things that go on just because my job is to provide the nexus of people to just connect. Last time we were in New York, there were 13, maybe 15 side events organized by people just like dinners, meetups, whatever, around the summit. And we encourage it. We post it. We just want people to meet up. Yeah. I was going to ask, is there a whole like off menu set of events happening? Like how do people know? They organize it Honestly if you not scared of strangers you should organize your own Like a little dinner We leave all the evenings open So just organize a dinner or a meetup Focus on your thing We have people doing only voice. So if you want to do voice, great. If you want to do code review agents as a small subset of generalist coding agents, do that. And I think you'll find it. Or you can do AI in finance, AI in bio, whatever. whatever the particular sector might be. And I think like that is honestly the highest signal way to get a bunch of people who really resonate with your thing to meet and have like high bandwidth conversations. Yeah, yeah. Are you going to do the autonomous coding agent dinner? Well, no. My job is to float. Yeah, my job is to handshake, ask how everyone's doing, fight fires. So I tend to just leave myself open until, you know, the end. but yeah it will be it'll be a sprint it's it's it's always a mad rush because i then i have to do my own talk uh and uh i don't know yet i think um so far so like the last time i did this summit i was talking about how this year had to like develop as the year of agents and like it's really played out a lot obviously now you know the trendy thing is to say it's no it's not just the year it's a decade of agents but like um this year i think agents really took off and most people got it right like the consensus was correct you don't have to be too spicy or counter consensus to say like if you worked on an agent you're probably a lot better off you probably made a lot of progress this year um and maybe you can tell me how it feels on the jewels point of things i didn't see myself at the start as you're joining an agent company and i ended up doing that and but like i've gone so agent pill to the point where like people come to me with startup ideas for infra companies they're like what if we made a agent framework so that other people couldn't build agents i'm like well don't you just build agents yourself bro like there are a lot of frameworks yeah frameworks and infra companies and all these guys are just like they're good developers with no conviction whatsoever in what they want to build they don't know what customer they want they're just like we want to build developer tools so that's where we feel comfortable but honestly it's not that hard to actually take a stand and be full stack and verticalize in some particular agent field that you want because guess what they like the the business and the economics are are you know aligned that way and i'm not saying that you cannot make it as an infra company there's some fantastic infra companies that are sponsors and like that i admire and you know i would invest in myself it's just that comparatively those are a lot harder and like agent companies seem like they're shooting fish in a barrel they seem like they're ramping up in AR a lot faster and it seemed like the margins are better so why not yeah so i mean i think for us it's certainly been you're the agent like as the models you know what you're talking about what is let's build tools for where things are going and as the models get better i think it just becomes clearer and clearer that agents are super powerful you know like we have um uh you were talking about like before high context and management so all that stuff's important like we have people we had this is a funny story we we store some data for a session but it only lasts, we only store it for 30 days. And so after 30 days, your session becomes locked. And when the first user first started hitting that, they were upset. We were like, there's no way anyone's going to be using a single session for 30 days. Like, maybe we're doing a single track of work for 30 days. But just like how powerful that could be. So yeah, how do you compress context when you run into it? Yeah, so we have, I mean, I can't talk too much about it, but we, you know, we do a lot of the standard things and there's also, you know, we're developing a bunch of stuff. It's an active area of research for us. Yeah. I think like, you know, just, just, I'm not asking you for how exactly Jules does it. There's just a number of approaches, right? And you just have to pick one because you can't just use up your 2 million token context window. Is it 2 million? It is up to 2 million. Especially for coding agents. Cause like, you know, like you're reading files, like it's so you're, you're running commands with huge outputs. Like, you know, I think coding agents are a really interesting area, both product wise and the impact they're having, but also for research. they really push the limits of you know what other domains are you running an agent for 30 days and what other domains um are you accumulating so much context and so many turns and um so it's uh yeah it's coding agents are i think kind of a special spot of like super interesting product impact research yeah i see i see the m folks drop the auto compaction for a handoff mechanic which was pioneered by the agents sdk which is basically the subagents pattern where like you spin up a subject and do a thing you don't need all their context that sub-retion is doing and then you can sort of come back to the main thread totally yep you have to be of so yeah it's a uh a good pattern uh it also has this challenge is like how do you make sure enough stuff you know information is going back and forth but that's the part you know this summarization is a pattern um you know like kind of externalizing some of that context whether it's like writing it to you know like a note kind of thing is a common pattern so yeah there's there's tons of things uh tons of things to try and do yeah yeah i mean and one thing i do want to get more consensus about is what is the best because i don't think i've read any papers yeah about which uh methods compare better yeah it's also like as models change like the answers change a little bit too yeah yeah claude you probably know claude externalizes too much yeah yeah yeah uh how much does your work actually like i feel like i switched back to jules mode yeah Yeah, we're flowing here. Well, I mean, like, you know, how much does the work inform the model creation, right? Like, at the end of the day, like, you obviously are a very big consumer of Gemini models, but also you are not the only consumer and they have other priorities than you. Yeah, totally, totally. I mean, I think we're lucky in kind of how we're positioned. We have very close relationships with DeepMind. So we have, and, you know, coding agents are an important area. Like, let's be honest, right? Like, for any kind of company building models, like you can see it in all the labs like coding agents are important coding capabilities are really important yeah my my og image of the aie code uh i i wrote something obnoxious like code is the first spark of agi yeah which is like probably true totally yeah uh it's important from a kind of agi perspective it's important from a dollars perspective it's important for all of it so it's um i think we're in a really lucky position yeah we have uh we're able to have a lot of kind of good collaboration and yeah but both ways you know like all kinds of capabilities that are being developed yeah and you know it's interesting it's it's a whole host of things right because you know in terms of like agi and the capability of things it's also like computer use models and browser use models and so it's it's a you know models that output code but it's also the whole suite of you know things that you want an intelligent agent to be able to do um so it's multimodal. It's all kinds of stuff that goes into it. What would you want to find out from your peers at other coding agent companies? Because you're going to meet all of them, basically. I think one thing, and I don't think of this as a zero-sum thing. I think this is really like there's this tide that's going to lift all of our boats. We're inventing a new way to do our art, and how to create good art as a software engineer. And so what does that look like? And how does that feel? What is that, you know, what is the experience we want to create? I think as people working in AI, sometimes we don't do a good enough job describing this beautiful future we're creating. I mean, I know like, you know, like the CEOs and heads of these labs have started like, you know, writing their think pieces on this, but right, you know, for software engineers, like what is this beautiful future we're creating? And like, you know, I think there's like, one, it's inspiring. It makes it, you know, maybe less scary for people. who are who are thinking about these tools but also like you know if we can't articulate it and think about it it's less likely we'll get there right so like what is this you know great place we want to create like writing software is so hard like it's so many companies it's such a especially like big companies it becomes so challenging to manage a code base and create um and and what can we do to make you know being a software engineer absolutely incredible experience what are these you know how do you want to interact with your model how do you how are you doing things locally versus in the cloud and how does that interop and um so i think like as an industry we're trying to like you know which is changing like we're inviting in some ways inventing and there's this movement to you know change how we do our art um and yeah the more you know the better we can create this experience like we all we all win to some degree um so uh yeah i think that'd be one thing where it's like yeah yeah the local to cloud sync is um the most contentious or important i guess topic for a lot of people i wonder if we'll ever get like some kind of interop thing probably not but uh mac and dream tell me more about what was your dream what's your dream flow here i don't know uh start with juicy ally end up in devon i don't know oh you're not between age it's probably it's probably meaningless but no but like i'm not actually serious about it but like traffic to me all centric well so uh i think codex or is it quad code cloud code web can do this teleport yep where they just basically dump like the entire history and you can pick it up in cloud code on on your desktop and probably that's the right move yeah maybe there's there's some more sort of elegant things but they were first so like why not uh and like and actually maybe the the maybe the real thing is maybe it's not the conversation maybe you don't need to teleport if the unit of if the artifact that you pass back and forth is the linear ticket or the github pr right so you don't need the full json uh you don't need the full chat history you just need to pick up where other people left off because that's how humans do it right right right i don't i don't transfer my brain state to you i just tell you what it did yeah and then you know if i didn't if i forgot to say something you find out eventually right right you say like the cloud agent like dumps some kind of summary onto the ticket or whatever kind of it needs to pass on to the next in slack or yeah linear and whatever yeah yeah that's interesting i think we have there there are some patterns emerging to like ide cli cloud right like these are the pieces. VS Code extension. VS Code, yeah. You guys don't have it. There's a the surface area is like standardizing it feels a little bit and how these things interop, how you can kind of make this great experience with all of those. I think it's really interesting. Yeah, I think like, and then the other point, I just want to backtrack a little bit to something else you said, which is like what the thick pieces that CEOs and stuff do. I think there a lot of question about the impact that coding has on the software engineer industry in general the humans Do we end up do we stop hiring juniors altogether Is it actually increasing productivity or do you just feel like you increasing productivity I don know if you have any take on that stuff Yeah, it's only so. I mean, I, it's something we spent a lot, I spent a lot of time talking and thinking about with folks. And I also spend time talking to people at companies and, you know, I think sometimes working on these tools, it's interesting to see, it's not as like diffused, this technology isn't as diffused across software engineers as I sometimes expect, right? There's plenty of places that I think are not really using AI a ton. A lot of companies, a lot of software engineers aren't. That being said, I'm very kind of excited about what the future of software engineers are. Could you imagine going back to not having these tools? No. That sounds horrible, right? And so that's one aspect of it. I also think, you know, I don't really buy this like, you know, that we're not going to hire more software engineers story. I think like for a few reasons. I mean, this is an example that often comes up, but is it like kind of the elasticity of the demand for software? Yeah, Jevin's paradox. Exactly. And, you know, like a lot of the cases sometimes come up as you look at like farming, right? And so, you know, there was a time in America where like the vast, vast majority of Americans were farmers, right? And then technology happens and today it's like less than 1%. Yeah. And that's one example. But the flip side of that is, you know, electricity, which like as that gets cheaper and cheaper, where people just consume more and more and more electricity. And with food, there's only so much food we're going to eat. There's an inelastic demand for that, whereas electricity, very elastic demand. It seems like software keeps getting better and better. The ability, we're creating more and more software from obviously punch cards through to where we are today is remarkably different in terms of how you're able to create software. So much more software is being made. And software just keeps becoming more and more of our GDP. right? Like it's, it's a, um, so I'm, I'm, I'm bullish on kind of the, the amount of software we'll be able to create, how it will be created. I think there's also something here about, you know, as, as an engineer, being able to be more productive, like encourages more investment in people building software, right? If it's, you know, the job of a software engineer can now, you know, they can do 50% more, a hundred percent more, 10 X more, um, like justifying investment dollars into projects like dramatically changes right and so um uh yeah i'm i'm i'm bullish on this idea that that is actually going to be great for software both for your ability to kind of do our craft or art but also just what it means for the number of companies and the amount that's made and the quality of it and what we're able to do with it so uh yeah yeah rose colored glasses take Rose-colored glasses, indeed. Yeah, I have this take on the different kinds of work. Like, we're splitting up the different kinds of software work. And there's a lot of commoditized work that we used to spend a lot of time on. And now we can basically entirely delegate to agents. And then that leads us ideally for more strategic, important, novel, high-risk, whatever, work, deep-focus work. that is something I posted here on the semi-async value of death, where basically you kind of need to, on the extreme end, you can delegate to async agents, which jewels, cloud code, whatever. But then over here, you kind of need the sort of deep involvement in understanding the code base and not vibe coding, whatever the opposite of it is. Actually, that's my talk, which is, I've been thinking about this. So I tweeted out this phrase, because I think I feel it's in the air that like the term vibe coding was obviously coined by Andre and he's super influential in February and like people have just come to kind of use it as a blank check to just YOLO on prompts and stuff and create the worst code imaginable and like leave other people to clean it up yeah so I think like people are kind of at their limits with this like it was probably maxed out in terms of popularity but we don't have yet what's next so my talk is really challenging every attendee every speaker to come up with like what is the aspirational good version of vibe coding that we can actually trust yeah what is it well like the punchline right now what is it i i mean uh the current leading candidate is agentic coding which is what darmesh shah who's like i don't know if you know who darmesh is he's he's pretty good track history when he's naming things uh it's just too many syllables i don't think it just has the it doesn't have the joy that that vibe coding invokes which i think people want but then people also want care and craft and like reliability and all that stuff that but if we don't have the term i could describe it maybe we don't have to catch this phrase for it but what is what is what does it look like even if we don't have the phrase that yeah it's a great question um i well we have some speakers who are going to be pitching spectrum and development that you have to really be thoughtful and effectively write a prd i think the and i think like that is obviously correct in terms of like basically it's just a glorified prompt but a very very very good one and models are tuned to follow your prompt for good and for worse if you prompt sloppily you're going to get slop so a spec sounds good i think i don't know how often it'll be followed in practice because effectively what that transitions us to is a waterfall development approach where you spend three days writing a 50-page document and then you kick off the agent. That doesn't seem right. So obviously I have some bias here because Cognition has from the start believed in interactive planning where you kick off a thing, you get some feedback, then you're like, oh, that's not what I meant. Let me correct myself because I don't know what I wanted when I started. So you work with the machine to discover what you wanted. The machine works with you to either get you what you wanted or show you the errors of your ways and then you correct it from there. Yeah, I mean, one thing we talk about, which is very old, is what you're thinking is like, there are kind of like two problems as these things happen. One is like, how do you specify what you want? And the other one is, how do you verify that what you got is what you're thinking? Yeah. And so, yeah, whether it's, you know, specifying through a spec or this like, you know, interactive plan or whatever it is, but then, yeah. And then on the flip side, with the vibe coding thing is, you might specify, but you never come back and verify. and you're like you're it's more hands off the wheel like maybe i'll click around the app a little bit and see how it works but it's i'm not really engaged with the code so how do you yeah how are you verifying and making sure that it's you know to my knowledge you guys don't emphasize tests that much right it's not like you volunteer to write my tests yeah i mean it depends like we um if there are tests in your code base um it's right it's right out of the picture here and jules will run your test feed exactly exactly so um but it's not like it's not like you know after everything, everything must have a matching test to the prompt that was mentioned, you know. That would be the extreme of what we mentioned. I don't know if people always want that. I mean, maybe it'd be helpful to do that to kind of show that it was right. But let's say I don't write tests in my code base. Like, I want to merge that pull request that is introducing tests just for this one thing. Like, you know, I think in some ways the engineer should be able to control what kind of outputs they want. Yeah. If it helps and they want it, you know, absolutely. And then do you think there's other innovations on specifying apart from just chat oh totally totally um i mean agents md yeah i mean uh spectrum development i think is in this this category i think um one of these is like multimodal right like you know if i'm going to show you a bug on our website like do i want to come and like type it with words to describe it or am i going to point yeah the picture yeah um And so, you know, with Jules, you can upload images now. But, you know, kind of more, you know, we have certain ways we communicate as humans that are easier in certain situations. But let's bring that to our engagement with the agents. So of all people, I expect you guys to be best at this because Gemini has video understanding. I want to submit a video because some things I do cannot be screenshots. It's more about the behavior of things appearing and disappear. Yeah, I mean, I would love that if you guys did it. because no one has it yet. I know. I would love it too. I'll tag you a little bit. On my side, the version of that that we're exploring is computer use. Yeah. Computer use was kind of introduced by Anthropic and then OpenAI did their toy with Operator and now Agent Mode in Atlas. I don't know if you guys have done anything super splashy on computer use. But anyway, it's coming back. I can feel it. Yeah. I think, yeah, definitely. And it ties into, you know it ties into coding agents it ties into just you know using ai systems in general but basically your vm now needs to render a ui or browser and then you need to let the agent click around in it absolutely and you need to have precision and speed and cost and like you know affordable cost yep it's a lot it's yeah no these is i mean what can i split punch are so fun there's just so much to build there's so much you know i think also the software you're working in this space like i think one of the reasons we you know you see so many companies in this space is partly like it's just so fun like there's so many things to build there's so many tools um that seem like you know fun sci-fi like there's it brings up a demo of what i've worked on it's clicking around and i can see a video of it or i can even take over and use it like so uh yeah it's yeah awesome okay so just moving towards wrapping up if people run into you at aie uh they've you know they heard your your pitch on jewels yeah what else should they also talk to you about like well you know What can you help with versus what are you looking for? Anyone should feel free to come up and talk to me at any point. You're obviously very interested in anyone who's doing stuff with coding agents or someone who's using coding agents in interesting ways. I'm always curious about workflows people have with their data agents, whereas whether it's, hey, I'm using this tool in this way and I've configured this crazy thing. I always love hearing how people are using it. I also love hearing people who are having bad times with it. Actually, maybe they're not coming to this conference, But, you know, I've tried all these tools and I don't like them. I don't use them. And here's why. So, you know, I'm totally open for any side of the, all the way from, you know, full AI pill and coding AI lovers to people who hate it. As far as what I'm looking for, you know, I think, you know, really just going to kind of connect and meet people. I think, you know, we are always hiring. So like, you know, anyone who's, you know, interested in working on this stuff, I'm always happy to talk. but yeah really just kind of you know meeting people spending time geeking out on this stuff yeah there'll be lots of geeking out yeah uh all right thanks for your time looking forward yeah same