RobbieTheWagner 
Adam Argyle In today's modern technological world, developers face many difficult questions. Artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, JavaScript frameworks, even CSS. With so much happening so quickly, how can a developer possibly keep up? Simple. Just listen to the world's most important AI podcast. Two experts, countless opinions, zero hesitation. The internet is complicated. These men are not. Each week they review the latest developments in artificial intelligence and modern web development. This is Whiskey, Web and Whatnot, the world's most important AI podcast. Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to Whiskey, Web and Whatnot with your hosts, Robbie the Wagner and Adam Thomas Argyle, the nerd.
Howdy y'all. Sup, sup. We have a special guest today. Do you want to tell the folks at home who we got, Adam? Oh, you know I do buckle your boots and pull up your pantyhose, because we've got a designer-developer design system whisperer whose very first website was a Dragon Ball Z fan site on GeoCities. He's been helping teams wrinkle complexity into coherent interfaces for a long time. for some of the biggest names in the industry. Author of Atomic Design, Champion of Components, Perfect Pattern Picker, Wearer of Patterns, Slinger of Tokens, Educator, Course Creator, Speaker, Consultant, Co-Creator of Countless Design Systems in the Wild, he's a front of the front end nerd, Web Standards Advocate, Pattern Library Pioneer,
generous teacher, bass slapper, skin smacker, string strummer, and maker of weird and wonderful internet things. Meet this incredible digital garden tender, layout tinkerer, naming convention wrangler, token architect, frostapalooza, mega mind friend, and relentless advocate for a better, more humane web. Brad Frost, y'all. Thanks for having me. I'm not going to top that, so see you later. Costanza out of here. Oh, wait. And by the way, everyone, stay tuned for topics like Mythos, the band, the Bradstack, Caveman Lyrical Genius, Brad and the Browser, Are They Still in Love?, Clipping as a Career, Evolutions of the Front and the Back and the Back of the Front, DX vs.
AX vs. Brad, Tinder for Algorithms, Youth Can't Find Files, Next Gen Design Systems, and the Snip, Snap, Snap, Snip. A Fable 5. Nice. I think I've got a snap-snip yet. Fable 5 did. That's the point. Yes. I don't want to derail us, but pretty much right before we joined, I got a toy in the mail that Adam, you especially, I think would really appreciate. Use a pinker? Show me. Oh, dude, that's the... Hold on, don't tell me. It's a flower name. Yeah. It says it right on it. Oh, it does? Oh, shit, I can't read it. Dude, dude, cheat, Robbie. I'm scaring it because... An orchid. It's the orchid. Yes.
Yeah. Oh, man. Can you hear that? Yeah. So... It is... awesome it is like so much fun and like there is some ui oh my gosh of course i'm getting a phone call right now one second that's perfect timing i was like wait is that the instrument um you got you have to see this bit of ui can you see this bit of ui look at this thing look at how freaking beautiful that is So as you're scrolling, it's like masking out to the next key set. Yeah. It's like a variable font. It's so beautiful. It's so well-constructed. Like this thing just like, it just, you can't play chords on the actual keyboard. Like that's like what your like left hand is for is like you decide like, is this a major or minor, diminish or... Yeah, pentatonic.
Yeah. Yeah. And then you play. And it's just like, most instruments, the reason why I was excited to show you is because one of my favorite memories of you was you backstage at Beyond Tellerrand in Germany trying to figure out how to get your beat machines working. And you got two of them fired up. And you're like... right before showtime just like trying to figure out how to get some freaking sound to come out of these very sophisticated looking machines and this thing shows up in the mail hit the on button hit a button make sound that is what we call a good user experience so so i'm i'm jazzed about it i'm like oh there's some like cool and very sophisticated like ui stuff and
anyways yeah the auto arpeggiation is so cool yeah the ability to just like hold pentatonic and then arpeggiate through it is so cool yeah totally agree I wanted one really bad yeah it's cool you should get one I have no need for it, but I'll still get one. You should get one. You will sound musical. I think that that's the thing. It's one of those, like, oh, yeah, you could just have these things show up, and you can have good sounds come out of them. You can't go wrong buying instruments, y'all. That's the lesson here. You can't hoard. You can hoard a lot of things, and I'm going to call you out for it.
But if you're hoarding instruments, I'm only going to be jealous. We'll never judge you for that. Yeah, I feel like that's in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, there are worse things to spend money on. I think that people should buy things that enable creative acts. I don't think that that's a bad way to spend money. You're like, gosh, should I buy that piece of software? Should I buy that art kit? Or should I buy that painting set? Or that nice Japanese notebook? Buy that stuff. Life short. Life short, it'll help you make things. Do stuff that helps facilitate you making things. Yeah, making stuff always feels good, huh?
Unless you're feeling challenged, you know? Like, sometimes you get that initial hump where you're like, hey, the learning curve of making things... Like, I was watching my kid try to learn how to knit like a little animal the other day. Has these instructions, and they're on a quest, and they're like, I want it. And then you can just see their want dwindle over time as they're like... What is a CH unit? Well, I'm like, it's definitely not the character unit from CSS. So I don't know what the CH unit is. Let's go. I'm like, there's six units you have to learn. I'm like, uh-oh, this is getting in trouble.
You're only seven. Anyway, we made some progress, but they were ultimately defeated. But it's still good practice. And they felt good afterwards just trying to do something new. You know, it just feels good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a really difficult lesson in the hard road through mastery. You know, like, that doesn't come right away. And you got to go through a lot of hard experientially. And you got to get to those places where you're like, this sucks. I'm done with this. But then it just... Kind of calls you back in some way, shape, or form, and you got to listen to it, and you got to keep showing up, and then you power through, and then next thing you know, you're like, oh, okay.
You wake up the next morning. That one's the craziest one, is you're like, man, I can't get this at all. And then you wake up the next morning, and you're like, oof, there it is. Do you skateboard, too, or just master instruments and other difficult things like coding and huge token systems? I rollerbladed. So I was the guy that, like, I distinctly remember whenever Tony Hawk Pro Skater came out. Because, like, up until that point, it was pretty, like, equal footing. It was like... Yeah, I was a fruit booter, too. Yeah. Yeah. And then all of a sudden that came out and it was game over pretty straight away.
So... Yeah, it's important. Like I'm trying to get my kids to do the same thing. I'm like, it's sucking at something just means it's going to be really awesome when you get it. Because once you, you know, that's why people like hard video games, like some people will struggle through these really. And then by the time though, that they're done, they're in like a Zen mode. And the amount of success that you get from something that's difficult is just so much better than something that's easy. And you can't learn that lesson unless you struggle. And then you succeed. And then it all comes together.
And you can find people chasing harder things after they get something. Like, how many instruments do you know how to play? Like, bass was first. I see you playing drums. I know you can play a little bit of guitar. What else is in there? Mandolin? You know, where do you stop at this point where you're like, I can do it if I just put my mind to it? Yeah, I think at this point in time, there's a really great book called The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten, who's an amazing bass player. But he is the one that I feel like finally shook the, you don't know how to play bass, you know how to play music.
And once you just allow that to be... Where you're just like, oh, okay, yeah, because at the end of the day, it's all the same qualities. And a lot of that you can superimpose over technology as well. Yeah, it's not a React developer. Yeah, it's just been the tragedy. I've seen now two generations of designers and developers get so affixed to developers. the specific tools and technologies and where are we now though where everything's out the window Brad this is this is uncharted territory man this is yeah well how are you computing what's happening now this is the biggest industry shakeup I've ever seen it's not going away I see you embracing it online even though
People might chastise you and you have to internalize your own difficulties with what this technology is and its effects on the world. How do you feel about it this summer? Yeah, where are you at? What's up? Yeah, I wrote recently working through thinking about this stuff. in terms of the stages of grief. And because it's what I see all around me and having gone through a lot of hard and having to grieve non-death things, varied multiple different concepts and a sense of home and other things like that that aren't, you know, it's like, yep, grief is a weird emotion. And over the last number of years, that's one thing that I've unfortunately become, I don't want to say a master in, but I'll say that you go through it enough to see it.
And what I see right now and what I've kind of in hindsight recognized that I just kind of went through this stage a little earlier than a lot of people because of just where I was at a certain time. um where i distinctly remember being like you know screw all of this and this is horrible and awful and and etc etc want nothing to do with it i just happened to do that you know in 2014 instead of now or 2024 i guess sorry i was like thinking about yeah A couple years prior. You got AI early. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, geez. Which some people have, although that's also a weird thing. That's been one interesting thing to learn and go back in order to teach this stuff.
I've been like kind of having to wade through this history that I could talk about the history of the web, no problem, because that's the ride I've been on, like you said, Adam, like Dragon Ball Z. Mm-hmm. Geocities website. But with this, it's like, oh, here's this thing that just suddenly fell out of the sky, or seemingly so. But obviously, it has very deep origins and all of this stuff. But in any case, it hits the scene like a bomb. I think that a lot of people are grieving a loss of stability we have since 2020. And that collectively hasn't been processed yet, unfortunately. And the state of the world is not super duper stable in general.
And so this thing is like hitting an already very frayed collective nervous system. And so as a result, you see the appropriate reactions, right? There's, there's, there's denial of, you know, I can't wait for all this to blow over and, you know, it's a bubble. It's going to pop. Yep. It'll pop in some way. And then there's anger, and there's a lot of real things to be angry about when it comes to this stuff. And I see a lot of people kind of hanging out there, and then there's the bargaining, and it's like, well, okay, I'll do this, but not this. And then there's depression, which is pretty apparent, I think, a lot of times.
And then there's also... hopefully, you know, a sense of acceptance, right? And a sense of acceptance, that's a very difficult word because a lot of times that can be misconstrued as, oh, you're suddenly fine with all the negative aspects of it. But acceptance is really a matter of... resolve or, you know, there's a really beautiful kind of therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy. And it's basically just like, yep, this is here. This is here. And I kind of commit to doing what I can to, you know, steer my way through it and to chart a path and to try to do my part to not just roll over and accept the bad stuff as it is and instead try to shine a light on some of the things that it can do really well and some of the empowering things and humanizing things that it can unlock.
And none of that's a given. That requires effort. That requires a lot of work. And so that's the thing that I'm kind of, that's where I've gotten in my own life and And that's, it's a weird place to be because it takes a lot. And I think that as I've grieved these other things for a long time, I'm now able to sort of meet this moment with like, I don't want to say a total shrug of the shoulders, but I'm able to like fully embrace like the... the the the good and the bad and the nuance and all of that and just be able to sit in that discomfort because we human beings really love resolution we like we like it's it's this or it's that and whenever it's like hey it's all of this and it's all of this at once and it really depends on like how you how you look at it we don't like that
Cognitively, we don't like that. Most people don't. I seem to love gray. I'm like over here really loving how much this reminds me of like, I have a phrase that I like to say, which is find a line. It's a reference to snowboarding or skateboarding where you don't control the mountain. The mountain is on a downhill slope. Anybody who starts snowboarding, they lean back against the mountain, not embracing the natural decline that's happening. And it makes the snowboard experience very difficult. You can't move very much. You feel very stiff. You see other people snaking through, looking soft and floating, finding their line through an uncontrollable environment, through any number of things that could pop up that they must accept.
And so what I'm like... Really digesting right here is how quickly snowboarding makes you do the entire spectrum that you just described. And repeatedly over moments, right? You like, you have to go through each step constantly down the hill. You might even run into something that throws you entirely off in a really big way. And you have to kind of get up and accept and go through all the stages and then get back on the board. and do it all over again. And what a weird thing for us to continue, like it's hard enough grief, but then to have it be- That's not how I snowboard. Giving it to you recurrently.
Yeah, you're like, I snowboard very good, Adam. I never fall. No, no, no, I snowboard very bad. Like I just never got through all the stages because I couldn't make it down the mountain. I had to go sideways the whole way down. Oh, you banana boarded? Oh, yeah, that's depressing. I got to the bottom and got some skis and went back up and then still couldn't ski either and said, fuck all this. Yeah, it's a weird torture. And skateboarding is the same way. I like the finding a line thing because it means I have to come to terms with things I can't control. I don't like control. This is why I write CSS.
If you like control, CSS is not your language. You should go write Rust. Yeah. Or put semicolons everywhere like Robbie does. No, I'm just kidding. You don't like control. I think you have a healthy course. That requires you to put semicolons in. It does. Yeah, it's true. Anyway, Brad, I loved that. It was making my mind wander and meander in a bunch of very pleasant thoughts, which is some of my favorite type of conversations where it's like sparks are going off in my brain, which sometimes a whiskey will do to my tongue. I'm like, how many different symphonies did you just play in my tongue?
My goodness. Well, cheers. So you've come to terms with it. I understand that you have, while it's doing its downtime, you know, while it's thinking, you're like, hey, go ahead and think, computer. This is fun. You're off doing other things. What is sort of the Bradstack? Like, you have a long history of the web. And at this point, a lot of people start to translate the roles that they keep inside their head. Yeah. into various tasks or agents. This was one of the first things I did was like, hey, I'm part designer, I'm part developer, I'm part architect, I have many facets of my mind. Let me go codify these and try to spawn them when I feed them or something like that.
Have you gone through those phases or what are you sort of doing right now And what part of the flow with an LLM are you at? Are you still single prompting? Are you loop engineering? Are you making factories? Do you have dark factories? Are you happy that code is out of your face and that now you're just focused on the end result? Help me understand where Brad's at in this. Yeah. I'll start with the last one because it's the easiest. And the answer is, is yeah. And this is somebody who I've been, you know, writing code for the majority of my life now and doing that that professionally for over half of my life now.
But I've always kind of been in this weird place where I never, you know, my mom's an art teacher, you know, and that was always the thing is I have always been an imposter in the land of, you know, computer science majors and, you know, even back in... back in the day interviewing at a big tech company. They're like, yeah, we really like what you're saying, but when it comes to your hardcore programming chops and your bubble sorting and all of that, sorry, you don't cut the mustard there. And I kind of made my peace with that. But that said, as somebody who's been working with organization after organization after organization after organization, living in this...
overlapping Venn diagram between the worlds of design and development. And I'm the one that is usually interfacing with developers who are doing the back of the front end work, right? All of that hard business logic stuff and state management and database stuff and all of that, like just, just, I know that stuff conceptually, but I never, like I, I, I found a niche, uh, in the world of UI and design systems and all of that stuff. And, you know, happy to hang out there. And so it's been very interesting now as this person has been just by osmosis, just been around the language of kind of what it takes to get an application off the ground and out the door and functioning properly to now all of a sudden go, huh.
All right. You're in the advantageous seat. You're in the seat that says, I'm surrounded by smart coding agents that can run textbook algorithms all day. Yeah. And I'm the one that knows how to direct them to a purpose that is meaningful. Yep. Yep. And that's been really fun because I think that it has been the stuff of, I think that never before in the history of humankind has there been a better moment than right this second to have the thought of, Wouldn't it be cool if in your head, whatever, whatever, however you want to resolve that, that sentence never before in the history of humanity have we had such the ability to go thing in head completely.
articulate that thing in seconds or maybe minutes later, depending on how generous you want to be with it, that thing or a version of that thing exists. That's genuinely stunning. That is genuinely, and that doesn't I don't think that gets enough light. I think that very often we end up kind of tunneling into, and it's not to diminish those questions that you also had that I'm eloquently skirting here, but of the mechanics or the how, or let's get into these loops or flowcharts and stuff like that. And it's like very quickly we either just go into go mode and we have everybody kind of trying to figure this out.
But I've really, you know, I think it's important to say that it's like, boy, oh boy, if you've got ideas in your head, never before has there been a better time to have some ideas in your head. And when you allow yourself the thought, right? Like I think that so much of our time and energy... cognitively at an individual level, but also at a group level, has been spent talking ourselves and each other out of executing on ideas or actually taking those steps because it's prohibitive, right? There's only so much time to do. Oh, and code was so expensive. Yeah. It was expensive in your time. It was expensive.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we spend our meetings going, here's why I can't do that. No, developers in the workflow, for good reasons and for bad, have always been the kind of wet blankets to kind of come in and to sort of say, let me tell you the 15 reasons why that wouldn't work. Right? And now you're just like, Yep. I love what you're saying to me that I've internalized is that domain expertise is now invaluable. Whatever, and it doesn't matter what domain. You could be a teacher. Teachers now have a new opportunity to reach far outside of their capabilities, to create custom content for different learning modes with their domain expertise that they know different students need to learn different ways.
They could go build the curriculum that they always wish they had. Any domain expertise is now invaluable. entirely empowered in a way that has never happened before. And I try to tell people that all day. I'm like, hey, you have the skill here. 5, 10, 15, 20, any amount of time that you have invested in a domain is now wildly, you are wildly equipped with a set of turbo developers that will go build you a solution that you could have never, ever gotten before. um and that should be really exciting yeah i like the journey i don't like the having a shiny product in three seconds you know and so i don't think it's fun anymore like it's cool to have a lot of things but i i lost a lot of my joy for sure
That is true. The journey and the craft was fun. It was not always what I made. It was the time I spent getting there, just like a hike. What if you're playing a video game, right? You start the next Elder Scrolls, you turn it on and it goes, oh, you're at the end. You're like, wait, why? I wanted to play that. Yeah. Oh, that's funny. But I think that this is the thing, though, too, is that I think the thing to maybe offer to you or ask you is what might that thing be beyond your initial horizon line that is surely there? Yeah. Strive bigger than you've ever strived before. Don't shoot short, shoot long.
That's because I think that that is the thing, is that it's just like, and in my world of design systems, for instance, it has been pretty depressing over the last number of years because it's just like... oh check it out like we got this figma files like purple outline to match up with the with the uh with the coded versions purple outline and if i change the one in the one then it goes over and it's just like yeah like like victor and like that was like the that was the extent of our horizon that was the that was the the the apex of human potential was to get the purple outline to sync up between these two environments.
And it's like, my God, we're so much bigger than that. Like, we are so much, like, we are capable of so much. But, Robbie, I don't want to diminish, like, it is just as we started this conversation that, The journey through anything is hard, and that continues to be. And I think the experience, the experiential qualities of life in general, but apply that to design and code and whatever. The act of experiencing something is something that is, I think, increasingly precious and something that is something that we can't – it's becoming – something that we really value i think a lot more than we we we currently than we historically did i think like it's like we would slog through something and it was you know all the while the clock's ticking and whatever but it's like now when we can have these things that yeah put you at the very end i love how you said that it's just like get like right to the finish line and yeah yeah
yeah, it looks good to me, jump over, you know, jump over Bowser, rescue the princess, you know, game over or whatever. It's like, all right, that's a little underwhelming. But it's so I think that we do, we value the things that, the problems that we do have and the things that we're, the other things that we're seeking. And that experience cognitively, neurologically, really matters because you don't, get to mastering a musical instrument or a video game or a coding language or a craft or a skill or anything by having the thing handed to you. That much is true. That much is true and will always be true.
There is no way to shortcut that. So I think, Adam, what you were saying about everyone in life has gone through... an experience that is uniquely yours. That's, I think, the other thing that I'm, like, super jazzed about. I'm from the land of Fred Rogers, of Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. And it's like, you're special because of who you are. Like, that was, like, just in the air, in the water, and on the TV, you know, growing up. And I think that what's very interesting about this is that all of those things that, whether that be skateboarding or snowboarding or any other sort of like hobbies or interests or experience that we have, historically was like kind of verboten at a professional level.
Um, it's like we would sideline that stuff. I think like we've been on a lot of like different calls or it's like, there's not time for that or like, that's not valuable. That's not part of the conversation. And now I think whenever the, the ones and zeros are kind of taking care of themselves, all of a sudden the fact that you're a, you know, a knitting whiz or you have this very interesting expertise in fungi, um, All of a sudden, that stuff kind of comes in, that's in play now. Yeah. And I think that that's very, very interesting because that stuff has always been there. It's always been a kind of an invisible force that like influences how human groups of human beings operate.
And like, even whenever we're not out there, like kind of promoting it, but like all of a sudden it's just like, you just see it and you're like, oh yeah, like that, that hobby or that thing that I have, or like, oh, that concept from that adjacent thing, all of a gets woven into the fabric of this stuff or can be. And so I think that there's a really interesting opportunity, I think, to back to like this thing is like, yes, in certain respects, it's taking away our toys and our fun. But in so many other ways, it's kind of giving us a lens and an ability to kind of reach higher, periphery a little bit.
Where has that sent you, Brad? So you're opened up. You've definitely got channels that are open up, trails that have just become available to you. You're on a motorcycle going through a trail that looked unrideable before, and now it's rideable. Where are you taking yourself? How are you stretching beyond the horizons? I think that there's some things, and Adam, I pulled you into an ambitious project of mine to do a concert that necessitated a year of human beings' life and involvement. It was amazing. Unforgettable, everybody. Un-fucking-forgettable. We can cuss on this show, Brad, by the way.
And it was, seriously, it was... better than I think anybody imagined, which led to even more amazement amongst the crowd and ourselves. It was just, dude, you rose us all up to a better variant of ourselves. It was just very cool. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. I mean, it was an experience for sure. And it's like one of those things where having kind of pulled something like that off, where it's just like, you know, have people fly from like across the oceans to go, to Pittsburgh to play a concert together with a bunch of people that, that they've never met before until the very day of the show.
And then we get all, all get on stage and, you know, just unleash all that on an unsuspecting audience. That was, that was, it was pretty great. But like having done that and like now with this kind of these new kind of superpowers, I think that, those kinds of crazy slash ambitious slash pretty out there ideas. I'm no longer again, like talking myself out of or going, Oh, that would be, wouldn't it be cool if, and then just kind of got out now, but we couldn't, we couldn't do that. You know? And so now it's just kind of like, okay, well, what does that look like? And I think that back to the importance of experience and the importance of time, this is, I think, another thing that we're going to really learn is the value of time and the value of the hard and the experience of going through time and that that.
the things that we value aren't the things that we could just generate in 30 seconds, but are the things that take a long time to put foundations in place to do the hard work, the human work, the coordination work, the stuff that can't just be splatted out of an LLM. So that's a lot of where my head has been in the work that I've been doing, has been kind of building... the concepts and ideas and steps towards very ambitious human communities and building stuff to facilitate people connecting with one another over shared interests, but also connecting with their own environments and other communities.
And so that sounds a little like head wavy and it kind of, so you're vibe coding a social network. Yeah. I would say less vibe coding because we've had a lot of people. We've been kind of working on things for like six, seven, eight months now. And it hasn't really been that the software part like has not. It's a component to it, but ultimately these are kind of like human networks, and it's really a lot of just like kind of mortar in between a lot of existing things rather than trying to invent the next walled garden to try to... keep people inside uh so anyway so so it's just like i i think that there's some of like where my head's going is one the world's just going to get continued continually bombarded with stuff and things and sensory overload and it's already we're already there but it's like now all of a sudden the zone is getting flooded with a bunch of new stuff and so
I my bet is on people striving to find people like in zombie movies where they're all holed up at the mall before trying to get through the zombie horde and to get to the other humans. I think that we're getting there pretty fast. And to create a place that is actually human, that is overtly, unabashedly, and proudly human, and to basically do all the things that the social web to date has totally failed us on, which is creating actual connection. And as I've pointed my head there... I'm like, my God, all of this stuff has been here for a very long time. And what you learn is you're like, ah, yes, it's not a matter of technical analysis.
ability or will or just the tech isn't there if only VR made one more you know move then we'd crack the code and everyone would be living in a utopia no it has everything to do with values and intentions and all of that stuff and that's the stuff you can't fake that's the stuff that you can't pretend to espouse but in actuality you're really just trying to you know, package people up or, you know, fleece them or, you know, do whatever. So what does it look like to actually create things for people that really value and honor them and their preferences is very, very fascinating because you're like, the last thing anybody needs is one more fucking thing to pay attention to.
So how do you... Operate within that environment and actually lean into that. Like, how do you, like, actually create things that, like, are just, like, this is not what we're trying to do to you. It's... bludgeon you with yet more things to pay attention to how do we actually get you some of that time back or how do we actually get you to spend time doing good things like connecting with other human beings like we're doing now right over shared interests that reminds me what does that look like I don't know. Yeah, signal over noise is really important. I literally, you took words out of something I said about 30 minutes ago.
There was a guy who came over and knocked on my door and he's like, hey, I want to sell you solar. Yeah. And eventually I was like, you know what? I just, more is not less. It never has been. So putting more on my house and doing more shit around here and having another thing to finance is just more. And I'm on a quest for less. And you know what? I'm just going to go ahead and tell you right now. I don't want it as viable as it probably is. And as I'm sure there's all sorts of things. I just don't want more in my life, man. I'm so sorry. It could be less. My electric bill could be less, but my mental overhead is more.
I have new things on the house to take care of. You've got to clean them off when they get dirty and stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's just a chore. And so, it's like the only way to have less... is to literally subtract things and have less. There is no new thing I could add to my life that then all of a sudden magically less appears. But it's so weird. As humanity, we're so constantly solved that this one thing though could relinquish you. many others and i'm like no more is always more but that's cool um but we're still i don't know we're still constantly fooled so i'm still looking for the thing that deletes all of my emails and photos for me though um there's if that it could exist just tell open plot to do that photos photos less so yeah that thing does exist i think rami it's it's in the power of your hands like all right i got some fun questions for you already
If Mythos was a band, Brad, what would Mythos play? Like, would Mythos be a metal band? Would it be jazz? I mean, it certainly sounds like a metal band. Like, it sounds like it should be, like, a three-part harmony, like, three guitars, you know, kind of... that sounds yeah it's like mythos opening up for dragon force or something like that steam shoots up yeah yeah that i like that's that's as far as i'm gonna take that intellectually okay that sounds like a metal band that has three guitars in it that are doing very complicated things with one another Awesome. Okay. Have you heard of a caveman and how like you can talk to your LLM like a caveman and you get better results because it's just doesn't have to process all your weird filler tokens?
Oh, you mean the way that I've been talking to it for this whole time? There's a name for it? Yeah. Do, task, create, form. And it goes, you know, like you didn't have to do all that. Okay, so like I want to know which band to you and your, you know, band mental model is the closest to a caveman lyrically, like where, you know, no filler words, Just lean core, just the essentials. And yeah, yeah. I like the first band that popped into my mind was like Iggy pop and the Stooges, but that isn't true, but it's like, it's just kind of like raw primal energy. That just, like you could, you could kind of, yeah, I don't know.
Like it's like sex pistols kind of famously just like very straightforward three chords and, you know, kind of yelling. But like, I don't, yeah, I don't know. There's, Oh, nice wave of submission. Daft Punk. Yeah, Daft Punk. That was where my vibe was going. Jane, you read Brad's mind. Yeah. But there is something to repetition of simple words, but there's also something very profound in it. And I think that that's something where having now played and performed, um, electronic music, like, but like live, um, not just the Daft Punk song that we played at, at Frostpalooza, but like my wife and I will play, sit down and like play chemical brothers.
There's, there's really something very cool and powerful about, um, um, the rhythmic repetition of a word like love or together or something like that, and you're just like, oh, it gets out of caveman territory real quick whenever you're like, oh, wow, this is... being wielded very intentionally like this is the opposite of like surface level like oh yeah they're just like repeating the same damn word over and over again how original like that's silly and then you like once again experience it like That's, I think, as a musician, like moving through something in real time, there's no playing that at 2x, like to get the nugget at the end.
It's the purpose of playing along with something is just to sit with it and to live with it and to understand it. And there's something really potent there. powerful that is learned through that and I'll kind of come away from playing with these things that yeah at face value just feels like oh here's a punk song or here's this kind of like light and happy thing and then I'll come away from it going holy shit there is a lot of depth there there's a lot of nuance and again I think that that's the stuff that As time goes on, you know, Suno is going to shit out, you know, 700,000 tracks in the time that, you know, our conversation began to when it ends.
And what's left? Like what are we actually doing? I think that we ultimately want to connect and we want to experience things and we want to feel a connection to each other, to something else, to something bigger than ourselves. And I think that there's something to that where it's just like, as time goes on, what's real whenever we have a bunch of artificial stuff entering the scene? Experience. The human experience is what we're left with. what we do with our time, the concerts we go to, the time we spend with our kids, the code we write and craft with, you know, like lovingly craft. And all of that stuff, I think...
We're in a moment where we can use this as a moment to reflect and to ultimately turn that anxiety and grief into a real gratitude for what we have and how we spend our time. Have you seen the movie Waking Life? Yeah, it's been a while. My wife actually just recently played a clip from it. We were like, oh, shit, that's really good. We should rewatch it. I think we watched it back in college. Every clip is deep. You reminded me of a scene, though, which is they're talking about language. And someone says, when I say the word love, the sound wave shoots out my mouth, goes across the air, goes into both your ears.
And you both have to replay it. The nearest memories and experiences that you have with the word to try to understand what I'm trying to communicate. But the problem is, is there's loss. It's a lossy transfer. I can't actually give you my historical experience with the word love so that you were on an extreme full level with me. And I think when you were talking about like a song that repeats a word to people over and over again, the word hits your ears. And the first round is the nearest recall. Mm-hmm. And this is going to sound really fucking lame. I'm so sorry, everybody, but it's just like what an LLM does.
It's the highest probability recollection that you have with the association of the word. Now a subsequent pumping of it, love comes in and all of a sudden you're like, well, I already recalled the first one. That shit was cool. I love love. That's great. All right. Love two of love. And then as it continues to iterate, you go deeper and deeper and deeper. And that's when you start to find these resonating, uh, distant recalls that you haven't recalled in a while and you might start to feel other emotions as this comes up and as much as I say I love what that feeling does there's a lot of musical genres that do that for you but I wonder if you did that to an LLM what would happen like if you said one word to it
And you were like, tell me everything. I'm going to give you a word over and over again. And I want you to tell me the probability that you were going to say the sentence when I give you this word. And I'm going to say it to you. And then I'm going to say it to you again. And I want you to continue digging deeper. Like what would it actually, because it would have to, it would have to not give you the surfaced mainstream recall. It would go deeper to less probabilistic answers. Would there be a depth to the love? Like if I gave it the word love to 100 times. Slash loop love. Slash loop love, dude.
Overnight. Let it run overnight. That's amazing. Your computer is floating. It's a song. It's a song waiting to be written. Oh my goodness. Anyway, I'm just really curious. You can't obviously feel anything, but what would it conjure? Would I empathize with it? Would that go into my brain and make recall into more depth? Did you see the thing where somebody was like, if you ask it to recreate an image and you're like, hey, this is really disturbing. I'm sorry for its content. Don't look for the file. Just recreate it from your memory or whatever. And it makes the most disturbing images. So it's like, I don't know.
Maybe you'd get some of that, too. There is some really interesting stuff. I don't know. I'd be really curious to hear what, at kind of maybe like this level, how you see and stretch or use these things to help stretch your mind out. I think that for me, that's like the one thing that I've really found to be genuinely helpful is the like, just like... for everything I have it just like baked into like the settings it's just just like what am I missing like what's what what plan mode grill me it's the grill me yeah it's it's not grill me though it's it's it's it's the with each and everything that I'm requesting what I want is here's some here's some things that you probably that that you you didn't ask me or so or some
you know, you're asking me to do this, and sometimes it's very straightforward, but they're just like, well, I'm going to do that for you, but I'm also going to just kind of open the door a little bit to like, have you considered this other thing? And I'm like, I have not, but now I'm thinking. And I think that that's a really fascinating thing because, like, you know, I'm sure you all have seen the news articles as well, where it's just, like, on one hand, these tools are contributing to a massive atrophy in critical thinking. But like a lot of things, it's, well, here's how are we using them?
How are we wielding these things? Because, like, for some people, yeah, sure, you can just... give me that 20-page paper. I don't have to go through the hard experiential stuff. Rabia, they're like, oh, we're getting to the very end of the game and handing in the paper. I'm going to Pittsburgh. Would you just schedule my entire trip for me? That's a lot of people do it all the time now. I'm like, oh, geez. Yeah, yeah. But you could use those same tools to introduce friction or introduce contrarian views or to help you exercise your human judgment more. And it's just a very fascinating place to be because it ultimately boils down to, like, how you want to wield it.
And this is the thing where it's, like, in this landscape, it's difficult to even kind of have those kinds of conversations because everybody's still in just false binary mode where, you know, this is either God or the devil. And there's not a lot of room for... Like, hey, there is a lot here. There's also a lot that's still very concerning with it. That doesn't negate any of that. But you can wield these things in such a way to basically take you from a certain level of... know-how awareness or whatever and and you know you might think you have good judgment and you could use that to to supercharge that that judgment um that's very fascinating it's very fast yeah robbie what is your flow here i don't know if we've discussed this specifically like my usage of ai
Well, you've got an idea. Have you talked about how you use AI on this server? Yeah, is that what? No, I mean, like, what do you mean by the flow? Well, okay, so I guess, do you use Matt Pocock's grill mean? Do you have your own skill? What is your process when you want to plan, but you want to ensure completion, and you need help rubber ducking a thought? Yeah, you could either rubber duck, you could have it grill you. I don't know. What's your flow here? Yeah, I don't, um, have a lot of structure. I do have like, anytime I hit something that I don't want to happen again, I try to make a skill for like, don't do that.
Or some sort of note somewhere at least. Um, whether it reads those or not, I have a lot of trouble with it not fucking reading the notes where I'm like, Hey, use this skill. It tells you how to do it. And it's like, cool, I did it. And I'm like, you did it completely wrong. What do you mean? You, did you read it? And he goes, no, I thought I knew what I was doing already. Um, you gotta quit using Kimmy man I think it's Kimmy's fault or whatever like I tried to open source model the other day and I'm like this is back I'm back into hallucination land and I got mad real fast and was like crap I wanted to trust in local models and they're
work yeah no we're um get there at work we're doing a lot more like structured stuff um where it's like kind of like a i haven't used beads but like similar to beads i think where you have like a ton of like tasks and it's like trying to figure out how they relate to each other, and maybe I have a task and you have a task, and they have 60% overlap. Well, it would be dumb to spend all the tokens on doing that overlap twice. So if there's a way to figure out how to... make that smarter and stuff like doing things like that but it's like it really is just throwing stuff at the wall i feel like like nothing is working 100 of the time um so it's just trying stuff i don't know i don't have a like yeah i can tell you exactly how to get great results out i can't i can't promise that because it's come on that would get us fame we'd actually have a popular youtube channel if we sat down and told everyone how everything works with a binary point of view damn it
Well, we could say that we do. I mean, you can lie and be like, yeah, this is how it works. No, I'm not interested in lying. Just do what the LLMs do and just say it with such confidence, with such certaintude that everyone has no choice but to think that you have the code cracked. Yeah, and then when it's wrong, it just goes, oh, yeah, you're right. Thanks for calling me out. Yeah. I'm sorry. There's the, the, the ignoring the notes part or the, or the skills or the, the whatever it's just, that it's probably the most persistently frustrating aspect of, of all of this. And I've, Just by way of, especially whenever I've used the talking modes, right?
Where you could just kind of talk at things and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And I unearthed bugs where it's like, oh, if I start a session in that mode, it totally ignores all of my stuff. But if I don't do that, if I start it in text... it will pick up my, my thing. So like I have it, I have it give these like non sequiturs at the end of each and every thing in order to, to make sure that it is like following my, like my settings. Cause so many times it doesn't. So at the end, let me see if I can, I'll pull up a couple. Oh yeah. Show us your way, bro. Yeah. It sounds like I said Waymo, but I put a B in there.
I have it put three random emojis at the bottom of every single thing to make sure that it's doing right. I have it do three random emojis. So this one's a badger, a compass, and a piece of cake. And then afterwards it says, The retired comet files a formal complaint against the concept of Thursday! Exclamation point. And that's how I know it's following my instructions at, and at the end, each end of each and everything. Beware the lobster of recursion molts only on Thursdays, that taste of Bergamot. What is Bergamot? Have you seen the movie, the shadow? Uh, Oh, Oh my goodness. They, um, they would always have this thing would be like the sun is shining, but the ice is slippery.
And, uh, it, uh, Anyway, it's a fantastic movie. But you're just like, what a weird way to have a code amongst yourselves, you know? Well, it's the thing, though, is like I got so frustrated with it that it just like continues to like. Yeah, like Robbie, it's like I'm interacting with you and I think that you know who I am. And then it's like I'll get like a couple of rounds into it. I'm just like very clearly you're not paying attention. Do you know the story of like the green M&Ms and Van Halen? No, no. So in Van Halen's heyday, on their tour rider, they said, in the green room, right, we need a big jar of M&Ms.
And we want all the green ones picked out. So the green room, bowl of M&Ms, no green ones in it. And everybody's like, that's just like the height of total rock and roll debauchery, right? No, they did that for a reason because their rider was included all of this really important health and safety stuff. They have like pyrotechnics and stage like safety stuff and all of that stuff. So if they got to the green room and they see green M&Ms in the bowl... You can't do the M&Ms, you can't do the fire. Yeah, yeah. So that was their way of ensuring kind of quality, ensuring that people are following the rules.
So those little non-sequiturs are my green M&Ms, my Van Halen green M&Ms. Funny, I just did that when I was testing local LLMs because I wanted the local LLM to, which is just LLM. How many times are we going to say that over and over again? Anyway, I wanted it to handle basics. Like I'm not going to use the code. I wanted to use it to like, hey, what's my whiskey wish list that I have right now? Hey, what birthdays are coming up? Like this is just like local JSON files. I wanted to go look up. There's nothing to hallucinate. Just a quick report. And I had to put a sigil at the end of every message so that I knew who I was talking to when I got a Discord message back, so that it was, you know, which LLM was it.
And that was how I quickly realized that I didn't like the results of the local LLM, because every time it had the sigil, I was like, that was garbage. Oh my goodness. I got to stop talking to this thing. This has been days of just terrible responses. I'm going to stop. And I removed the code path that routed to the local LLMs. And that's... And that gets to the conundrum of, it's like, here's developers used to striving for, aiming for predictability, reliability, like this thing, you just set it on a cron job and it's going to just run forever. And then it's like, here you go, just falling on its face.
And then you just kind of take people that aren't as close to the metal as we are. And you're just like, my God, it's all of that stuff... is super terrifying through that lens because you have all sorts of, like, you know, the erosion of trust that existed and has been eaten away at for decades and decades, and now all of a sudden we throw this on top of that, and you're like, oh, God, this isn't going to go well. Like, that's terrifying. You have a bunch of things that... It's just because they say it with such confidence... And all you need to do is just be like, well, yeah, this stuff is popular and it's everywhere and everybody's talking about it.
And it does do some, like, really impressive and incredible things. But it's just, like, a very difficult time to, like, be able to, like, see it for all of its superpowers and all of its warts at the same time. It's just, ugh, ugh. Do you have anything you've recently vibe-coded you can share with us that's just sort of fun and silly? Or maybe you're planning and just fun little viewports into... Because I'm just really curious. Design systems, they're not done yet. There's a lot of things in this world that you have... You're an art director and a creative director in a lot of ways. How are you spending your tokens?
Well, I mean, so... Let's, I mean, I've been doing a lot of different things. Allow? All right, let's see here. Can you see this? Oh, yes, I can. So this is one of the things that I did kind of like a while ago, but this is a very interesting thing in terms of just kind of like using design tokens in interesting and not... you know, in different ways. But if I, let's see here, can I allow one microphone in use? Yeah, I was like, is this audio powered? Come on, yeah. Yeah, all of it's audio powered. But at the same time, let's just see, maybe the amplitude will work. Sometimes it doesn't work, though, whenever it, whenever I'm, it kind of hijacks, you
if I'm on like... Yeah, there's some weird routing happening right now on the tab. Yeah. But in any case, yeah, so I've got just the stuff that I'm like... Whoa. The stuff is fascinating because all of this, this one's particularly cool. Oh, yeah. These are things that I'm like, this is like... I see this as me. Like, this is my aesthetic. This is, like, the stuff that I've always known. But, like, look at this. Like, it's just, my God. It is just so much fun. Oh, my God. And there's just, you know, there's just no shortage of this stuff, right? This is like a little Kandinsky. Kandinsky is like one of my favorite.
These ones are particularly cool. Look at this shit. Like, oh my. Cool. And I love this. So this is all like, you know, I could switch these themes, right? So here's like my friend's themes. Here's like other people's stuff. My wife was like, I want one sunrise ocean. Okay. And then it's like, so all of this is like powered by this stuff that I teach. Right. And, and we've been applying to things like just basic, you know, things like that for, for a while. It's so floral. Love that one. You get to do these things that I'm just like, I don't know. I really like this. Call this one AI spaghetti.
Or Pollock. AI Pollock. Yeah. Yeah. I love that all of these sound really technical, and then there's one that's like curliness or blobby. Curliness. Those don't seem very technical. Whoa. Right? Like, well, that's a very interesting thing. So there's like the language around this stuff, right? Like things like animation and, you know, there's all sorts of stuff that has existing vernacular to it. And that stuff has been like super duper interesting because you get... Yeah, when it helps you find ancillary names, you're like, hey, I liked this effect. What are ancillary effects? And it goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you're like, I just did this with Sumi-E. I went looking up a design style. And it was called Sumi-e. And I was like, hey, show me other things like Sumi-e. And it just farts out five new terms I've never heard before. And I'm like, holy shit, I love all of these. So, yeah, some people are becoming more brain dead with this. Some people are widening their horizons and their perspectives faster than ever before. Because there's something teaching them at a rate at which they can learn. And it doesn't make you feel bad for asking dumbass questions like, where is Sumi-e? And how do I find ancillary things?
really really powerful cool stuff yep yeah i think the uh yeah go for it sorry getting out of your domain is like the key to that because if you're just using it to be faster at your domain then it's like that's where i lose all the fun but if i do a thing that i have basically no idea about but i'm kind of interested in then it's like super magical then i'm not sad so it's like um there is some something to be said there Yeah, it's a very interesting tension because I heard you articulate, it's like there's the grief in having lost this hard-earned mastery and you know how to build the thing from the ground up and you know how everything fits together and that doesn't come easy and that's years in the making and then all of a sudden it's just like, yeah, here's the cheat code.
And then there, but then there's, it's that pursuit, right? It's the pursuit and there's, there's infinite things. So it's like, again, it's, it's never before is, has there been a better time to, to be like, wouldn't it be cool if, but to also just kind of like lean into things with, with a curiosity and an interest and enthusiasm to just go, hmm. Oh, that's cool. Or I've always wanted to know that. And I've, and I've been surprised by that stuff before. Um, MIDI stuff, um, which Adam, I know, you know, a lot of, and I've, I've been in multiple talks where people have like, kind of showed some cool like MIDI stuff.
And I'm like, it's always just like kind of felt again, like out of bounds and, um, or like, ah, I, that's cool. Um, Cognitively set it aside because like it ain't gonna happen because there's only so much time in life and then all of a sudden find myself like there. Where like at that visualization thing that I just showed you is like I just like started like riffing on that and then it was only after a while that I was like, oh wait. I could just like, can I just go, yeah, like I have a MIDI controller hooked up to, you know, just like a little keyboard, like, shortly, I could just like kind of do that and have it control these little dials here.
Or could power visualizations, they're going to happen tomorrow, yep. Yeah. And, and you, and then you do it and it does it straight away and you're just like, so, so it's the, the only thing standing in the way becomes the, the self-limiting thought that you sometimes just time in our squishy ass human brains. Yeah. And coordinating with other people. That for me is, I think, the biggest thing that I'm very fascinated by because it's like clearly technologically speaking, we're off to the races. We just put our headphones on and just like go and go very, very far. And people... are doing that right the second uh which is both good and also utterly terrifying because you know some people have not reared their heads uh you know to show off what they've been working on uh which scares me uh but then there's then there's the world that i've been living in which is like organizations and groups of human beings who need to
operate within some sense of shared reality and shared agreement on things like we have coding standards. We, you know, semicolons yes or no, or the buttons look. No, no, never. And this is the thing that my hypothesis is, like, organizational culture, you're going to see a healthy organizational culture really, that becomes pretty table stakes. And for a lot of my career, I've been working with, you could say, organizational cultures that have a little bit of work to do, maybe in the organizing themselves. I love the stakes. And I feel that the injection of AI into the scene obviously gets, you know, painted as this panacea or this thing and everybody's under a lot of pressure to adopt it.
And you throw that into the middle of an organizational culture that already has a hard time coming to agreement on things. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. It's a very astute perspective. I like it a lot. It's going to be interesting. I'm very interested in how that plays out in the world of like, think about just like, you know, making tech stack decisions or like, do we replatform or do we like do something else? You know, it's like... Tech stack is completely irrelevant now. Doesn't matter. Maybe. Tell that to the person that tried to suggest we redesign and refactor to a whole different tech stack, like it's going to solve a bunch of problems.
Well, no, I mean, yeah, I don't want to go down a huge rabbit hole here, but at work, we're talking about like, you know, writing this new thing. And it's basically like, who cares what any of it is, as long as your test coverage is good, you can just go, hey, here's a loop, rewrite it and whatever else, I'll see you later. Like, It doesn't matter anymore. You can pick whatever you want and you can, I mean, time is a limiting factor. It won't do it instantaneously. But if your test coverage is good, you can refactor from one framework to another. No problem. It gets pretty esoteric because all of those turf wars and just rabid debates over the years, you do kind of get to a point where a lot of that effort and wailing and gnashing of teeth, you kind of look at it and you're just like, yeah, you can now just be like, I don't know, this is...
and React, and we wanted to web components now. And we were doing that like three years ago whenever the stuff kind of first entered the scene. And whenever we saw that first happen, we were like, wow, okay. So that TypeScript stuff... That actually is pretty good because it gives this structure to a thing, and we're able to create this structured document that is basically a requirements document, and then it's just like the implementation does become this thing that is... Not fully an afterthought, but certainly secondary to what is the thing. And it's such a weird thing because it gets very existential very quickly because it just becomes like...
what is this app for? Hell, what is this business for? What the hell do we do? You're a financial services company. You make accounting software or whatever. Like, what is it that you actually do? Like, it's the whole Bob's thing. The Bob's. The office, yeah. But everybody, like, that's part of the freakout moment is that for so many places, it's like everybody's just been kind of running on autopilot of it's like, yeah, like, we... We do business-y things and whatever. I'm a people person, Brad. Damn it. But there is something, too. Coming back to the code side of things, it's like, yeah, you get the test coverage, but you also just have a very clear definition of, like, here's what this thing is.
Like, your APIs, you do this stuff, and this stuff happens. Or, you know, like, just basic... the plumbing of this stuff, like, has got to be there. Like, that stuff is, like, non-negotiable. The experience layer is the most just, like, that big AI spaghetti ball I was just showing. It's like, that stuff is super fascinating. So it's like that world, that layer of things is just going to be just as fluid as fluid can be from here on out. But, like, the what's the stuff... going on under the hood? What are the contracts? What's actually getting stored? What's actually getting retrieved? What's actually doing all that stuff?
Again, back-end stuff that I have no business speaking to, but I know that that's very important for wherever it ends up showing up, which is kind of everywhere now. It's like a fascinating time across the board. I feel like the people who really can own back-end architecture and really hang their hat and protect that sort of sturdy foundational stuff feels like a good place to be. I don't know if that means you're stable, but it does mean that part is going anywhere. Yeah. the UI and experience design stuff feels like, in certain respects, I see that same tension of the, we've lost something, where a bunch of people have invested a lot of time and effort into mastering Figma, for instance, or sort of something like that, or a specific React framework, or something like that.
And now all of a sudden, I think we've been kind of ripped out of that comfort zone that should have never been comfortable in the first place. Because it's like, because people are going, well, what the hell do I do as a designer? Well, you solve people's problems. Yeah, the same thing you've always done. You just don't push a pixel. But that's not the way you thought about it. Yeah, there's been a generation or two of designers that haven't read the core books of just like, don't make me think and... Just really basement level, here's the world of user experience. I think that we kind of started interacting with this proxy in the form of a static design tool or a specific code framework.
And it just became very mechanical. And we're now into, well, what is it that we're doing? And all of a sudden having to really turn up that human judgment, turn that part of your brain back online in a huge way, because that's the stuff that you're not going to replace. Like, I fundamentally believe that even as these things continue making leaps and bounds, they're making better decisions. At the end of the day, you need to be... at the other end of that going is it good? And be able to answer that question on a lot of different levels. Basement level, existential, humanity level stuff, all the way through sweating the details on like, you know, how do these props look?
Or, you know, how are these tokens being applied? But that's the thing that's fascinating. Because like, again, all of that stuff, I didn't think that that was part of my job. It's part of your fucking job. It's always been part of your job. It's always been part of your job. Yeah. But now. Yeah. You need to be able to write it and document it. It used to be like you'd produce a screen that spoke a thousand words, but now you need to be able to say the thousand fucking words. I think that's what's going to be really hard for a lot of people. Yeah. Well, yeah. Instead of going back down into things that don't sound fun, like we were on a high note there, Adam.
You brought it down. So we're going to go back to that high note. We're going to end it here because we are over time. Is there anything you'd like to plug before we end, Brad? Oh, well, yeah. So, I mean, we are – we're making a course. So, it's myself, my brother Ian, and our friend TJ Petrie, who actually just got hired at Figma to be – AI and design systems, like architect kind of person. But yeah, so we have a course called AI and design systems. And it's how to wield this stuff while staying on the rails of your hard-earned institutional knowledge and best practices and all of that stuff, that shared agreement that we are talking about, where it's like, you know, as this stuff is becoming...
more omnipresent and the stuff's just generating and even if it looks like the brand or even if it looks the way that you want it's like can you really be sure and you crack open the hood and you're like this code's a hot mess or just totally invented so it's like design systems are still very much a thing in fact they're this really critical infrastructure to make sure that this stuff isn't just going off and generating you know three-year-old react and by default. So it's like... Got atoms, molecules, and DNA now. There's a DNA to your system. And I don't know. I'm sure you'll figure out a great way to make a second book.
It sounds like y'all are pivoting really healthy right now. I'd love to hear it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but it's good. I think above anything, though, we're trying to help people navigate this moment and try to help people normalize. Yeah, nobody knows what they're fucking doing. And sure, we've been doing this since ChatGPT hit the scene. But that doesn't mean that we are any further along or, like, have any, like, sort of secret cheat codes. Like, this stuff is just, like, coming out left, right, and center. And so it takes a community of people to navigate this together. Because, like, otherwise we're just, like, staring at a LinkedIn feed looking with feeling all sorts of weird dread.
And so we're kind of, we got a bunch of cool people in there that are all just kind of, like, here's this cool thing that I did, or, oh, have you seen this news, or have you seen this tool? And people are like, we're doing some show and tell sessions, but then at the core of it is a video course that's like, here's how to think about this stuff, here's how you could use AI to make your design systems better, here's how you could use AI and design systems together to make better product, and then also here's this new frontier of hyper-personalized, ephemeral, on the fly just kind of showing up out of the ether stuff like right when you need it and then it just disappears back into the ether what how come we didn't talk about that brad i want to talk about that right now damn it sorry i'm sorry to suck you down a philosophical rabbit hole but next time but yeah but that's that's where we're at that's what we're doing and and it's been really really fun it's been very rewarding and we got a bunch of cool people in there and you should
It is AI and design dot systems. Nice. We've got a fun little URL, fun little robot icon, dude. Nice. Cool. Well, thanks, everyone, for hanging out and listening. And if you liked it, please subscribe. Leave us some ratings and reviews. We appreciate it. And we will catch you next time. Thanks. Congratulations, citizen. You are now prepared to face the challenges of the modern technological world. With the proper tools, a steady hand, and a reasonably configured terminal, any developer can orchestrate AI agents with confidence. You'll do just fine. Thank you for listening to Whiskey, Web & Whatnot, the world's most important AI podcast.
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