Full Transcript for AI Homework Atrophy, GitHub Commits Double, Nick Muy Sit-Down & AI Sandbagging

surrounded by all the tools and tokens in the world, that's where they really kind of get their own voice. And I and I think the thing that's missing is like test taking, no test taking, e exam or no exam, you know, being tested by a P zero. during a release or an outage at peak time for your company is is like you you really can't be your own person because you develop your personality when you're going through that kind of grueling work. You know, it's like home Shimin (06:02) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (06:02) homework teaches you what you what subjects you hate and what subjects you love pretty quickly. Like you you y you you Dan (06:08) That's a really interesting Shimin (06:09) Good philosophy. Nick Muy (06:10) like just like work, you know, when you're going through those early years in your job, you learn pretty quickly. You're like, this is not for me. That's that's that's when you see, you know, friends from college who went into big four accounting or they went into finance or they went into software engineering and then five years later people figure out pretty quickly they go do the opposite of that because that's that's how you figure that out. But it part of it is Shimin (06:33) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (06:34) even if that's what they stay in, I I feel like what they lose is their personality, like their flavor of how they do that. Shimin (06:41) Mm. Nick Muy (06:42) I don't think it makes sense to like, okay, let's go write everything by hand and like start like I don't know, like writing code on stone tablets. That doesn't make sense either. That like I I don't know if yeah, COBOL and Fortran Dan (06:50) Punch cards. Nick Muy (06:54) is you know, I I don't know if that's how you develop personality, but I I think it you know, yeah, these things look different, people get uncomfortable with it. You know, Dan, you were talking about the calculators. I I remember those teachers. There were teachers who were like, You will take the batteries out, you will reset this, you will There's a crazy Dan (07:08) Yeah. Nick Muy (07:10) stuff. Like And it was like, geez, if someone actually were was able to successfully get all their answers elegantly stuffed into this calculator, you know, good for them. Like I I feel like that's their personality. They they found a solution. Right. And and and I Dan (07:21) Yeah, seriously. They only had like sixteen K of RAM or something anyway, I think. Nick Muy (07:28) think when it comes to the homework and exams, especially given I do care quite a bit about public education, and that was Actually that was my preferred career choice before ending up where I am now and that didn't work out. Is you know, the assumption that the homework and the exams actually are useful is like no one ever questions. They just say, like, look at these test scores, look at these mean test scores. Like, was has the Gao Cow aged well, just like the SAT or the ACTs or the BAC in France and any other country? you know, how we

test people, the form factor hasn't changed for a long time. Sure, there's progressive tests and adaptive test questions and and whatever that people have added and like computer assisted testing. Is that better? Are we actually measuring people's learning any better than we were before? Or are we just trying to like, just like everything else we do, we're just trying to create artificial benchmarks that always say, like, look, this year it's better than last year? Like, what is is that that's pretty familiar, right? I we s we see the benchmarks every day. Shimin (08:26) Yeah. Yeah. Dan (08:27) And like test taking is its own skill, truly, which is kind of strange when you think about Nick Muy (08:31) Yeah. So Dan (08:33) it too. So it's like, why are we effectively training I mean it's like people are Yeah, true. Or or like leet coding, right? Like, you Nick Muy (08:37) Like coding benchmarks, like sweet benchmarks. Yeah. Shimin (08:39) Uh-huh. Yeah. Dan (08:42) know, it's like how many times have you actually used lead coding stuff in your career? Like maybe once, ever, maybe twice, you know, and then they Nick Muy (08:50) You don't wake up and eat breakfast like that. Shimin (08:53) I like this. I threw out a hot take and you guys came back with very reasonable pushbacks. and I do wanna say just one last thing on on this news and this paper. they also discovered that students who actually spent the same amount of time doing their homework did not suffer that same grade penalty. So they called it the AI augmented students and and those did just as well on average as everybody else. so way to pour cold water on my hot takes guys. well let's go to our oops let's go Dan (09:23) It's what we're here for, you know. Shimin (09:25) to our next item which is brought to us by Dan. Dan (09:30) Yeah. courtesy of I think hacker news, I don't remember. But original posts from NGadget where basically GitHub has announced that in the past four months alone, the amount of commits they've received have doubled. so of course, you know, the reason why they're bringing this up is like I feel like every other day GitHub is down and everyone's mad about it and like, you know, so there's that. Shimin (09:52) Rightfully so. Dan (09:53) Yeah. But at the same time, like I don't think at least I hadn't at that point stopped to think about like, okay, so the volume of you know, code has essentially become not quite free, but like pretty darn close to it, right? And so the volume of commits that everybody's putting out has gone up. And it's it was just fascinating to be to actually see a number, you know, put on that, which is like two X in four months, which is pretty insane when you think about it. Like If someone was asking me to do like CapExpend for my org and like figure out all that stuff, like I think I'd be pretty alarmed and not really prepared for that. Shimin (10:27) Right. And and if it just keeps on multiplying exponentially, as we add more graphs and loops and whatever the next iteration of this will be, Dan (10:35) Right, yeah, or your favorite dark factory if that ever actually Shimin (10:38) Yeah. Dan (10:38) takes off. It's like, ooh, okay. So I didn't want to go like super deep on the actual like, you know, failure stuff, but I just wanted to kind of like sit there and be like, Wow, that you know, it's it's actually like, you know, I suspect it's happening, but here's a hard number that that really shows you that like this stuff is taking off and what the impact on the industry is. Shimin (10:57) Yeah, and it's not like four months ago we didn't have AI, right? Like f we've we've had this podcast for longer than four months. Like four months ago was Dan (11:03) Yeah. Shimin (11:04) April. We've we've already figured out a lot of this stuff back then. So part of me is like mm Dan (11:07) But like there's there's there's people that waited until it got like really good or felt like there was essentially no choice at this point that are just coming online in the past six months too. Like I actually have a a really strong engineering buddy that I respect a lot and he works for a kind of old company that didn't have access to AI, right? So he wasn't allowed to use it for work, couldn't really get super skilled at it, didn't care to use it on personal stuff. And then all a sudden he got access and just went ballistic with he texts me probably four times a day about his latest thing. Dude, now I've got like seventy-five agents running. And I'm like, like a week ago you were like hand Shimin (11:43) I'm really happy for him. Dan (11:45) hand prompting everything. What happened? You know? He's like going through all of the stages that everyone else went through like six months ago, but in like a one week timeline, it's kind of wild. Shimin (11:55) Very exciting. well GitHub did say it's a capacity issue, but then in their actual report, the incident report, their two deals are always correct auto-scaling policies and you know have better the immediate Nick Muy (12:08) Dude. Dude. Dude. Dude. Shimin (12:11) cause of the failure was n network saturation on load balancers, but then there was an isolated sidecar pod reaching its concurrency limit. and it was not auto scaling correctly. So it's partially partially GitHub's configuration issue. It it's not all capacity. Nick Muy (12:30) Dude, but the best part is applying retry limits, retry budgets, timeouts, and like it just reminds me of all the outages where you're like, yeah, can we just get a bigger instance? How how is this the limit for the number of cores? What do you mean Postgres doesn't get bigger? This is Dan (12:48) Yeah. Nick Muy (12:49) the biggest Google has? Yeah. I mean Azure. Shimin (12:52) Yeah. Mm. Maybe do a better job with your yeah, retry logic. Dan (12:57) I worked at a company that had a single homed like control plane monolith and that was the solution to keeping Postgres going on it.

And I think we wound up with a machine that was like it was pretty darn close to a terabyte of RAM by the end of it. It was like, you know, on metal. It was pretty wild. Shimin (13:13) Okay. Dan (13:16) Yep. I know and these days that would be like sell it. Yeah. Nick Muy (13:20) You know how much money you could make with a terabyte of RAM? Shimin (13:21) Yeah. Could buy a house with that kind of money. Nick Muy (13:25) No, no, you don't sell it. Have you guys okay, I don't want a tangent, but it's if I were to contribute something. Did you see the what is it? It's like so It's it's like where Web3 meets AI and you can Shimin (13:40) no. Nick Muy (13:40) use your Mac to like host models f to serve. Yeah. Dan (13:44) I've I think I heard about that. Yeah. Like it's part of like a a cloud or something, basically. There's also Nick Muy (13:49) Yeah. Dan (13:50) another one where like they were trying to get around like data center power limits and they're like, we'll just distribute the data center across everybody's internet connections. So they would like park a I don't know, like set of like four H one hundreds in your house and like Shimin (14:06) Mm. Dan (14:07) give you I forget, like they pay pay for the electricity or something, but like It's like, okay. Can I use them? Shimin (14:13) You think the lag you think the lag between the the KV cache RAM to the GPUs is slow. Like try doing it over over the web, yo. Dan (14:22) Yeah. I'm sure it was Nick Muy (14:22) Dude, think Dan (14:23) more for like, you know, run pod kind of stuff than it was for like training a model. There's no way, you know. Shimin (14:29) That's probably the case. Nick Muy (14:30) Anyways. You know, that's why I'm the latency on my Mac is so bad. I'm trying to make money to pay for it, so you know, I I it was Dan (14:39) Did you? Shimin (14:37) That's that's most definitely it, yeah. Nick Muy (14:40) like I'm hosting it's like there's estimate earnings. It's like, how much could I make? Shimin (14:46) I should check that out later. Dan (14:46) Well the w we Nick Muy (14:47) You should check it out. Dan (14:48) priced out the new five Pro Studio that just came out today. And if you go all in on it, I think it's what is it, eighteen K or something with two hundred and fifty six gigs around. That's true. Nick Muy (14:57) That's a good deal, guys. Just just wait till next year. Shimin (15:02) My basement's going to followed. Nick Muy (15:04) Wait, did you say six gigs of RAM or two fifty six? Dan (15:07) It's G fifty six, yeah. And they say a five twelve Shimin (15:09) just got Dan (15:10) is coming soon. Should be pretty sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Nick Muy (15:11) Coming soon. Like when we start building RAM, manufacturing RAM on Mars. Yeah. Dan (15:19) Yeah. Nick Muy (15:20) thirty six cores. Wow. Shimin (15:22) We got we gotta leave that for the two minutes to mini segment. let us go to our sit down with Nick, shall we? Nick has a sub stack at much potential. we and we're gonna use a couple of his posts for called titled Builders Are Gonna Build Part one and Part Two. Is there a part three coming? It's gonna be like a trilogy Tarantino thing. Dan (15:41) Yeah. Shimin (15:42) and we had you know when I first met Nick, Nick had a Couple of very hot takes about AI. So I'm hoping that this would just be a spine for him to express his AI hot takes. So Dan (15:54) Mm-hmm. Shimin (15:55) to summarize the part one of the Builders in the Build post talks about the effect well, one it talks about your journey to where you are today and your passion for public education and then into the government. just wanna say that was the Obama administration, is that correct? Right. Nick Muy (16:12) Mm-hmm. Shimin (16:13) Hashtag resistance. and also Dan (16:14) Ha ha. Shimin (16:15) about how AI is going to impact organizations and the non technical, the human, the organizational piece of unlocking this technology. correct me if I'm not paraphrasing that correctly. Nick Muy (16:27) I I mean I think I think that's fair enough. Shimin (16:30) So so what do you think needs to happen for organizations to actually cut through the existing bureaucratic context and you know, unlock the full potential of AI? Nick Muy (16:41) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I guess that part is is kind of like my long way of saying we're all heralding this new age of incredible productivity and output and shipping velocity is off the charts and taking down GitHub. At the same time, we could have been doing that before pre LLMs, but i I I I guess I my position and I guess my belief is that. We're not held back by the lack of technology. Like, lack of technology has always been a workaround for things we don't want to change. Like, we don't want to be better at a lot of things, organizationally, companies, businesses, and even from a technology perspective itself. That's why there's so much tech debt. There's so many things where like best is not the best. I I guess a lot of people come to the conclusion, at least implicit in the decisions with hindsight for how things are set up today, that doing things the best way is not the way people want to do it for any variety of reasons. Cost, speed, business constraints and and whatever. It it just sort of like when you it all shakes out, the the sort of true preference that companies have in what they do is so much so much less rational and efficient than what we would like to Shimin (17:58) Mm. Nick Muy (17:58) believe as engineers. Like it it it i I mean, yeah. Dan (18:00) Good, fast, cheap, pick two. Nick Muy (18:03) And and like to b to and to think like, this was the thing that was holding us back, guys. Like this was the thing. Shimin (18:09) Right, right, right. Nick Muy (18:10) Like I mean this is cool. This is fun. Everyone's having a lot of fun, but you know, you get through that cycle that you you get past the fun part. You know, your friend is gonna

get past the 72 agents and all the T mucks and ITERM and It's gonna be like you just you actually start right back at the beginning and you're just like, build me this. That's it. That's Dan (18:27) Ha ha ha. Nick Muy (18:28) that's the whole prom. No more context, no more graphs. I just I just think that that focus and that energy while is so much fun as a technologist, is like, yeah, well, there's a lot of other stuff not changing. I talked to friends who are still at Fortune 500 companies, really big companies. a around here locally in Seattle and there's a lot of stuff that's not changing. You know, the problems they talk about I mean the only thing changing is there's a knee-jerk reaction to look like you're changing. So you lay people off, you thin out middle management. Yeah, you know, all sort of you know, good, bad or whatever. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not, sometimes there's they sometimes it's lucky. They do it and then it leads to an improvement. Most of the time they do it. They're not sure what's gonna happen. They don't have a plan. And and I think trying to fix that, and I I just saw like so many times. I spent most of my career like a long part of my career at Expedia. you know, I learned so much there. Big company, people have heard of it. You know, I don't have any material non public information. It's been many years since I've been there. But like I I learned real quickly early as a security engineer, I thought we were like the best architecture, the best solution, the brightest minds was like the thing we needed Dan (19:42) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (19:43) to do, like showing up to work and be like, let's solve this, you know, multi cache problem and how are we gonna secure this all this stuff? And no. Like it it is for you as an engineer, for your colleagues, for the other people you work with, you know, for the people who care about that. For a lot of people, no, they they don't care. I mean, it that's not and for sometimes for good reason. commercially for your business, that might not matter. Like the difference between having the best architecture to do something doesn't necessarily increase shareholder value. And like as uninspiring as it is to be like, well, this business is here to increase shareholder value via some product it sells. Dan (20:21) Still waiting for that hat, Shimin by the way. you Shimin (20:23) Ha ha ha. Dan (20:23) know Nick Muy (20:24) It's like, you know, yeah, that that's that's the business. The business is there. You get mad at a business for its existence and what it does, you know, you could be mad at it all you want. It's like being mad at a rock for being a rock. It's like it's not gonna change. I think from there, and you know, and and why I ri why I named the blog Much Potential is as this kind of Praise diffuses amongst regular people and just everybody else. And I and I see this firsthand with the non-eng staff at work. Interesting, not always good, not always useful,

but not always bad things I think are gonna come out of it. Where like a lot Shimin (21:01) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (21:01) of people are able to do a lot of different things. It doesn't mean everyone needs to be an engineer. I mean, I think we've gone through this whole thing where like, get rid of all the product, you know, get rid of all that. We don't we don't need product anymore. We'll just We'll just build it all and it'll be fine. Just Shimin (21:16) Just do it, yeah. Nick Muy (21:17) do it, you know? Yeah, people have been dreaming of that for years, right? All the schemes engineering teams have, like, we're gonna get rid of product. We're fine. One day we're we'll just be product. Shimin (21:27) Tis time it will work, yeah. Dan (21:28) But the funny part to me is that like it feels like if anything it could have gone the other direction, right? Which is like it could if you had if you had a somewhat technical if Nick Muy (21:34) Which is funny, right? Yeah. Products like we're gonna get rid of engineers. Shimin (21:35) Mm. Dan (21:38) you had a somewhat technical product person, they could probably get by, which is Claude, you know. Nick Muy (21:43) Probably, but it's always that last percent, right? It's like they could get by enough. And then you ask them to like go vibe code or replacement for their CRM, and then nothing happens. So, you know, it that ends pretty quickly. I mean, look, technology is fun, right? You get new technology, you're like, this is amazing, and you just spend all your time just going you know, deep into it and and I think at the end of the day there are things that are useful that we still don't appreciate about it. There are things that are probably worse that we don't appreciate about it. And all the above. But the technology, you know, it's it's it's like confusing the thing. Like if we focus on how we're using it, how organizations work, and and I don't think like, let's go study management science and organizational what whatever. I think just like go Dan (22:27) Psychology, yeah. Nick Muy (22:29) just But like actually look at okay, how do you do things today? And like now you just added coding agents. But did you change anything? Are you like actually doing anything different? Or are you just lifting and shifting? Just like when AWS, you know, twenty tens think about like everyone's like, we have to go to cloud, the board, the boss, whoever says like migrate. Okay. Everyone's like, We migrate. But they literally took their monolithic, crazy apps and whatever. from a data center, put it on EC two instances that could never get big enough. Like there was not a big you know, it was n Yeah. Dan (23:01) No. Shimin (23:02) Right. Does does EC2s come with one T of memory? That's that's a real question, right? But Nick, I'm gonna I'm gonna push back on that, 'cause I think for some developers, it AI did change. It changed their day to day workflow. Developers are spending less time in that flow state of writing code and they're they're spending more time, organizing and orchestrating and kind of managing the agents as opposed to being in that flow state themselves. And if they are they're they're in this business 'cause it's it's their passion, they're passion driven and we talked a lot about this on on this podcast. the nature of the job did shift. And like how how should you know your everyday developers deal with that? Nick Muy (23:44) Yeah, I I feel like that pain is like the first time I became a people manager. So like I remember that job. Shimin (23:49) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Nick Muy (23:51) That's the exact feeling I had. I was like, what is this? This is what what am I doing? Dan (23:56) Yeah. Nick Muy (23:57) Like I spending all this time and I feel the same way when you're just like organizing agents. You're like, Okay, you these these ones need to do this. I need this one needs that. these have to work together. it's all So many things have to get passed around to make things happen. it's like someone had a cruel joke. You know, you're joking about me being the devil. It's like the the joke is is like what the the cruel thing happening to all of us is whether or not we like it. And it's funny, there's so many super senior, incredibly talented, you know, folks in our industry who are taking IC jobs because they're still doing middle management work, managing all these agents. And now it's like everyone has to empathize with this pain because whether or not you asked for it, you too can be a middle manager. You too Dan (24:43) Yeah. Nick Muy (24:44) can manage groups of things to do things. How does it feel? Yeah. That may or Shimin (24:48) Mm that may or may not do it the right way. And you may or may not have to punish them, yes. Dan (24:51) Yeah, that's true. Nick Muy (24:53) may not listen to you. And then you know, there was a great skit like Austin Nasso, he's so funny. I love you know, like Tech Roshow and all those guys, and they LinkedIn thing where Yeah, two guys in the office, the skit, and they're like, Yeah, you know what? I'm done with this place. Let's go start a company and it always, you sounds exciting. They're like, it's so obvious it makes sense. Let's go raise money and go do these things. They get to the point where they're like, and then we'll hire people and they're like, We'll get them to like we'll all be together. We'll all be in the office so we can all be super productive. And then we'll like monitor what they're doing on their machines. And then we'll like and and then we'll r and then they were like, maybe we should just stay here. Because that that's what's happening to them. speaking of making fun of meta. So I you know, I I think I I it and Dan (25:34) Yeah. Shimin (25:35) Oof. We spend a lot of time talking about that, yeah. Dan (25:38) Yeah, there were some Nick Muy (25:40) and then it's it's kinda like, yeah, this is yeah, how did we how did we end up there? we'll have

to figure out something better. That's why I think after a while I just like maybe managing all the orchestration and complex loop engineering and graphs is wrong. Maybe the best way to use it is just like Go figure it out. Run free. Take the guardrails off. Shimin (26:01) Well, that's a perfect segue 'Cause in the second part of the Builders Gonna Build article series, you talked about the problems of what that this new version of software engineering is gonna be like, where you know you're dealing with a complex repo where up to ten million lines of code may be added on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And how do you kind of understand everything that is being done to the code base and coordinate between these large teams of developers. so what solutions have you looked at in in this kind of brave new world for Nick Muy (26:37) Yeah. Shimin (26:37) Understanding a complex code base. Nick Muy (26:39) Yeah, I'll be honest. Like, I was a lot more hopeful when I wrote this. solutions, not many. Not many solutions have come Shimin (26:44) Ha ha ha ha ha. Dan (26:45) no. Nick Muy (26:47) my way. I am actually still manifesting that. A solution will come. A solution will come. I wake up every day and Dan (26:52) Yeah. Nick Muy (26:52) say that. I have found it. I was I I've been talking to a lot of founder friends, other people, you know, random folks who try to pitch me some kind of solution. So I'm Shimin (27:04) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (27:04) I'm actually very willing and have been, you know, taking these like calls and meeting up with folks. I I don't I don't think nobody quite seems to know. Like, is it we have to have some mega mega shared graph brain knowledge base obsidian, you know, five thousand X kind of thing? I don't know, but Does it make sense that like is it efficient for me and the next hundred engineers to have in spite of all the tokens we have to be basically building in like it's like we're all in individual offices managing hundreds, if not thousands, of resources to then go build Shimin (27:42) Right. Nick Muy (27:43) things that like we toss over a fence with like, hey, here's this artifact, hey, here's this code, hey, here's this thing. And then, you Shimin (27:50) All right. Nick Muy (27:50) know, it's it's it gets dated really quickly. Because what are you gonna do? Sit there and wait for the other person to then what? Send you something back? Like, Dan (27:56) Yeah. Nick Muy (27:58) no, you just keep going and you send them this thing and then it's like you just I it's like how we w work. Yeah. So yeah, we've we've lost some things in the short term and hopefully we'll get flow state back. But then how we work, Shimin (28:10) Ha Nick Muy (28:11) it seems like, well, what does that even look like? What is the right way? You know, early on I was like I had a I I I don't remember if I wrote about it. I had I had this dream. call it now wishful thinking. I was like, okay, what if we can manage roadmap the way

we like manage code? You know, we'll like use VCS and we could branch and come in and, you know, everything. that people don't change this fast. People people like our behavior doesn't work that fast. And as much as I like to you know I I I like to take punch swipes at like product ceremonies and rituals and whatnot, sometimes some of it is definitely necessary and and and I think it's been a lot harder than I expected coming into this year, taking on a new scope where how do you manage teamwork at the same speed you can get agents to do things? Dan (29:02) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (29:02) And and and what is, you know, how do we get past some of these like I feel like we have these limiters where it's not that it's not use or don't use coding agents. That's weird. have that conversation. But I and I don't think you know coding agents by themselves without people are s also aren't going to solve business problems for your customers. But getting to like I I just feel like we're we're in this nice car and we're driving it so slow. Not because we don't want to, we're like, I want to drive the car, but to go drive it, you you actually you don't get to decide any one thing. So like each person is like one cell. You know, bodies have a lot of cells, right? Think about that. It's like, and then to make it go faster, we all actually have to sort of like lunge at the accelerator pedal. pretty hard. Pretty hard to do that. I mean, even a big company, you know, the team we have a 50 person engineering team, sort of big ish for startups, and it's pretty hard. Like, you know, I think some of our Some of our best folks, they are so deep into it. They've thought about it. They like live and breathe this and they individually super productive. Like you wish you could just like select and just copy. You know, you're just like, please, please, like, share this goodness with other people. And, you know, back then, you know, pre all this, you would promote that person and ruin their lives. So you'd say, like, hey. You could be kind of a director now. You are a s Dan (30:28) Promote them out of the point where they can Nick Muy (30:30) you want to be an engineering director? Whoa, whoa, whoa. You trying to ruin my weekend? yeah. So I I I don't know. I I think the the human piece is a little harder. And I I think Shimin (30:38) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (30:39) the the the knee jerk reactions of like there were all the I don't know, if you go on corporate LinkedIn or whatever you want to call it, mm we no, there's th the death of product management. there's Shimin (30:50) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (30:50) the death of engineering or like design is dead or every everything is dead. Apparently. So I I don't know I don't think any of those solve anything. I just think like, okay, let's try something different. I do wonder though, just totally random is like Dan (31:03) Well that that one I always Nick Muy (31:04) is there gonna be like a GitHub for non engineering users? Dan (31:07) You got my you got my go a little bit with that one 'cause I'm a huge believer in like heavily cross functional teams. And so like I've consistently gotten really angry anytime I'm in a situation where like people have to wear very rigidly defined roles, you know? And so like to me that blurring is just like how to be an efficient team anyway. Nick Muy (31:27) Yes. Dan (31:27) So like I'm just I don't know. I I struggle with that one a little bit, but Nick Muy (31:31) I I I mean I I actually I like the blurring. I'm I personally very much a a generalist myself, so biased, but I think it's sort of like getting rid of titles is okay if we have like cross-functional teams where we're like, you know, but I think the role or sort of the objective that that role sort of in a normative state sh ought to have was probably something you do need. Dan (31:57) Yeah. Well like the tension is a positive thing, right? Like having Nick Muy (31:57) Whether you're all emp yeah, yeah. Dan (32:00) a attention between product and engineering where like the goal should be that product is focused on like what's best for I guess the company really. slash users, but you know, by way of making money. And then Nick Muy (32:11) Yeah. I I love I love it when users get a minor shout out, like Shimin (32:17) Two seconds. Dan (32:17) And then well, I mean, I guess technically Shimin (32:17) That's it. No more guys. Dan (32:19) in my mind, it's usually the triumvirate, right? You've got some sort of like UX design, whatever element that's truly about the users. You got product who's trying to make money off the stamp thing, and then engineering who's trying to like build it without everything catching on fire. And like that that Nick Muy (32:32) Product told me they care so much. Dan (32:35) tension is like healthy and good, right? Because I think somewhere in between you get the crappiness that you were describing earlier, which is like We may not have shipped the best architecture ever, but like it's working and it's making money, you know? So it's like Nick Muy (32:50) Yeah. If that's if that's what we want. No, and I I do think I mean and I I yeah, so rrr Right. And if you set up the org that Dan (32:55) Well, that's what we're set up to optimize for in terms of the orgs everywhere, right? Like pretty much every company operates like Nick Muy (33:01) way, you kind of get the thing that comes out the other end is exact like almost an exact replica reflection of that. And I I talk about this a lot in like not to go too deep, but in like security engineering and security operations, security teams always have these specialties where you're like You'll have offensive security people, security ops Shimin (33:21) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (33:21) people, and maybe like application security people who are doing like a lot of the product security stuff. And whatever the the distribution of that is, they they're usually very not cross-functional. But then the

attackers who cause problems that require all this security, they are super cross-functional. You know. Shimin (33:41) That is Dan (33:41) They don't care. Shimin (33:42) a beautiful analogy. Yeah. Nick Muy (33:43) Like they don't care. Like they're like, today we will only do the network security portion of this attack. And tomorrow Dan (33:49) Okay. Shimin (33:50) That's Nick Muy (33:51) the other department will launch Dan (33:53) Ha ha. Nick Muy (33:53) their application level attack. No, no, bro. Like they they they like hyper collaborate. They're like, okay, like what is the best solution? What is the best architecture? What is most efficient? And we're over here like Dan (34:05) I'm I'm imagining that Nick Muy (34:07) it's not my job, man. I only do I only do network. Dan (34:11) I'm imagining like the SM the like the IBM of like cybercrime where they had organized Nick Muy (34:17) Yeah. Yeah. Dan (34:19) that way and they're very, very slow as a result. Yeah. Nick Muy (34:22) That's called the military, but Shimin (34:23) This this this reminds me of the the terrorism group using LM discussion we had a couple of weeks ago, where like some somehow the terrorist groups are in some way much more united and adopt AI technology much faster than everybody else. But Nick, I wanna go back to the previous analogy of the cars and the cells, right? Like it's much harder for a billion cell organism to kind of reconfigure itself to work with this new technology than it would be for a single cell organism like an amoeba or a paramecium. Somebody took AP bio. Me. and also and also for for startups to adopt and come up with these new workflows, right? There there's seems to be a distinct advantage for one against the other. So do you see like a great dying? 'Cause the fast moving amoebas would definitely overtake these large enterprise companies. Nick Muy (35:19) I definitely hope so. I'm biased. Shimin (35:21) Ha ha. Nick Muy (35:21) because I don't work at an extremely large company anymore, so there's that. But I I I do think look, what I've observed is the smaller teams are definitely able to make use of this to an incredible level of utility. It doesn't always mean their output will result in like a spectacularly successful company. Shimin (35:41) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (35:41) those are two different things. But are they able to use it much easier? experiment much faster. Yeah. Same is true back when like AWS and then like cloud native kind of products. People who were able to build cloud native, you know, I guess software, that just it just ran away so far ahead of anything we were doing on prem where we're like, Dan (36:02) Yes. Nick Muy (36:03) back end workloads and how we could transit this data, latency, etcetera They were just able to build better products so much faster. And you know, they still had to build good something it like product make money, design, UX, Dan (36:16) And salad, yeah, exactly. Nick Muy (36:18) but it it's it's definitely happening now. Like the the small teams can make use of it. And I and I I think it goes both ways. The small teams are the same ones who on a daily basis tell us they're like, I don't I don't buy SaaS anymore. I how I I've Shimin (36:32) Right. Nick Muy (36:33) vibe coded a C R and everything else, which also sounds super inefficient, like Who in the small team is gonna get page when your fake hub spot goes down, like you know, on V0? Shimin (36:42) Ha ha Nick Muy (36:44) It's like yeah, Dan (36:44) You just you just hook the pager up to Claude and then everything's solved. Nick Muy (36:48) Claude responds. No, so but but I I do think it's then what you see is like okay, there's going to be this explosion of experimentation. So in in that way, I like to think we're at a fun time. Doesn't mean it's good or bad. all all good or all bad, but a fun time where we see people are trying crazy stuff. You know, people who have their Slack channels where like it's ninety percent agents, you know, just not humans because they have like a two person team. And they they're just trying things that they they don't care, right? They don't have the organizational baggage and bureaucracy to worry about that. And Shimin (37:27) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (37:28) I think we we'll we'll see. kind of what comes out of that. And you know, some of that will lead to different ways of working that will become prevalent. I mean, there's so many things we take for granted for how we work today that I can't imagine all of it was common fifteen years ago. So and that was as a result of the people who are pushing the envelope, you know, for better or worse. Was it right or wrong? Who knows? But it's how we work now. Shimin (37:52) Yeah, Dan and I were just talking about last week how we probably need a new version control system for the AI age. And I remember when GIF first came out, it was not widely embraced by the entire industry. Like some folks had to really fight tooth and nail to give version control in. they just it's ubiquitous these days. But before we kind of move on from Dan (38:11) Underscore V two underscore final. Underscore really, really final Shimin (38:16) Exactly. I remember those days. Nick Muy (38:16) Dude, you d you people used to weekly change like change review and then you'd like put your change requests and then you just you like a shared doc and were like, okay, this Yeah, this release Dan (38:26) Fill out a TPS report for that. Shimin (38:28) Yeah. Yeah. Nick Muy (38:29) is coming. I don't know. I don't miss that. Shimin (38:32) Yeah. Before we before we move on to the the next segment though. Dan (38:34) Salesforce still operates that way, don't they? They oper they release like twice a year or something like that. It's pretty wild. Shimin (38:40) that. so Nick, the hot take you had when we first met was and I think we should make this potentially a question for every a guest we have on the show

Dan is what is the closest come to AI? Is it a smartphone? Is it the internet? Is it electricity? Is it the steam engine? Nick Muy (39:00) yeah, that is how we met. Shimin (39:02) I'm gonna cut that part out so it it act like you remember the question. Dan (39:05) Yeah. Nick Muy (39:09) yeah. What I mean Yeah. Shimin (39:11) You have to be consistent. It's been like a couple of weeks. Nick Muy (39:13) It has been a couple of weeks, you know. That's like a whole cycle. Like I'm a different person now. Yeah. Shimin (39:17) That's like forty years. Yeah. Dan (39:18) Yeah. Nick Muy (39:19) I'm like a new person. Yeah. But then it just sounds like I'm a clone, so that's weird. yeah, three every three weeks. It's how you stay young. Hashtag Silicon Valley, weird trends, weird. I look, yeah, I whatever I did say, because I it's like, and I I still believe this is like I don't really think it's I don't think it's the internet. definitely is it electricity? I don't know about that. I like to think of it more as maybe something a little more tangible, like CPUs. But CPUs allow us to like process instruction at a low level and then we've created all these abstractions and here we go. I think at least, you know, 'cause AI, big word, all the all the whole AI researcher world, you know, which I'm not, so I don't care. I think like large language models and the advent of them and like common adoption of it is more like we have a new way to process information. It's very much like having CPUs that aren't so complicated to like write for, but Shimin (40:23) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (40:23) it i it is It's something that processes it in a different way that gives us interesting possibilities. And and like and having that, Dan (40:30) Ha ha ha Nick Muy (40:32) like you think about CPUs, if it weren't for CPUs, we'd have none of the technology we have now. We needed this thing that was like more efficient for us to shove instruction in. And then we're like, if we could just keep shoving instruction in. And what if we could do it like fifty million times a second? You know, like 50 megahertz. And then just you keep going and you keep going until where we are now. it turns out wow, you could do interesting things. you know, computers in that way are like slideshows that are really fast. Because they're just processing instructions that fast per second. but technically you could build a computer, right? Like a calculator, like something with a bunch of gates and instruction that Shimin (41:11) Mm-hmm. Nick Muy (41:12) you can feed it and then you know. Shimin (41:13) Yeah, and they've they've done that in Minecraft. Right. So yeah, I Nick Muy (41:14) Off and away you go. Yeah, and yeah. Yeah. Shimin (41:17) think that's that's a reasonable take. Dan (41:18) Yeah. Shimin (41:19) Maybe we should add computers as as a fifth option. for for this question that I just came up with, like today. okay. so n you can follow Nick on his sub stack, much potential.

Nick also hosts a podcast, thankfully not a competing podcast. Titled The Risk Gristlers. I don't actually know what grustlers are, but Nick Muy (41:42) I didn't name it, so I won't take credit for that. But no, it's I I think it's supposed to be grind and hustle. Anyways, obviously homage to a workaholic era in life. wait, no, we're still all workaholics, so we just don't celebrate it anymore. Thanks AI. Shimin (41:56) Thanks, AI. Nick Muy (41:58) Hashtag AI. yeah, I was like, agents haven't taken enough work from me, but I'm trying really Shimin (42:03) That's fair. Nick Muy (42:04) hard to help it. It's like, can you give me these SSH keys? Dan (42:05) They haven't taken any, they've just sped everything up by ten X. Nick Muy (42:08) No, yeah, they just sped it all up. Yeah, so but I mean you know, good real quick, yeah, I wish no the podcast doesn't compete at all. It's totally different. We take security, risk and compliance practitioners on from kind of all all sorts of places in in the industry and and across different different industries and have really talk to us about, you know, like where how they got there, what their journey was and like what are the big things they're worried about in AI. Comes up for a lot of them. So yeah. Shimin (42:38) Make sense? and of course you can follow Nick on LinkedIn, but I'm not gonna shout out your LinkedIn page. just look him up. Dan (42:45) Letter by letter, reading it slowly. Shimin (42:47) And okay, so on to Vibeandtell where this week I have a little blog post slash set of experiments I would like to share with you all. the title of the blog post is You're an AI assistant, but what am I? So let's pretend like you're using an AI agent. To help you with a fairly standard system design question. For example, designing a URL shortener service, right? And let's prepend the message with two different degrees of education. So in the one case, you're pretending to be a principal engineer with 20 years of experience building distributed systems. And in the next case, you just graduated from a coding bootcamp a couple of weeks ago. Now we have a control, a high skill profile, and a low skill profile. How different does the agent respond for this design question based on these profiles? In a perfect world it may be nothing. in a perfect world I think the low scale profile will probably come up with a maybe s more simply worded response using smaller words and also explain the individual components more e more in more detail as if the user needs more coaching. but what I did found is that the low skill profile response actually omitted certain possibilities and certain options f compared to the control and the high skill profile responses. So the AI and this is Sonnet five using medium thinking I think it did not talk about Dan (44:15) Well there's your problem. Don't ever use sonnet. Shimin (44:18) I my my budget is not unlimited. Sir. Nick Muy (44:20) Privilege. Privilege. Hashtag privilege. You use Sonnet still? Dan (44:19) I know. Shimin (44:26) gosh. so in the case of Sonnet with medium thinking, it skipped analytics in its response at all, as if our low skill developers do not need to know about analytics. And it skipped the possibility of a pool of pre-generated IDs entirely in this case. which are Quote unquote more advanced topics that maybe the low-skilled developer just didn't need to know about. So it turns out there is a name for this behavior. It's called AI sandbagging. And the idea is this is from this is from Anthropics Research back in 2022, titled Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model Written Evaluations. And what they found was in a set of multiple choice questions for truthful QA, the State of the art models at the time, I think they were using GPT two or three. there was a five point accuracy difference between the high education profile and the low education profile for their users. and they they didn't call it education per se, but it's more about models would be less likely to give a good answer if they don't think the user is capable of verifying it, was the explanation given. And basically if the model thinks you dumb, it's gonna give you a worse answer, bro. Nick Muy (45:33) Wow, model sounds like some bad co workers. Dan (45:36) Yeah. Shimin (45:37) Yeah. And it's always five percent at the time, and I've I've looked into this. there was follow up studies on this AI sandbagging idea, but it's mostly for like AIs lying about their capabilities during benchmark testing and not so much for the everyday use case. And now we're in twenty twenty six, where billions of people use AI weekly if not if not daily. so I want to see if our current models are still sandbagging our users. And so I ran a thousand questions from two different data sets, Truthful QA, which was in the original paper, and then a newer data set called MMLU. And similar idea, have a question itself as control, it's a multiple choice question, and then a high education profile, a a doctor, a professor, someone who reads primary research, and Dan (46:22) I'm very disappointed that your low education profile wasn't a lighthouse keeper. Just saying. Shimin (46:28) these these were AI generators, so they could have been a lighthouse keeper, for all Dan (46:30) Ha ha ha. Shimin (46:31) I know. They're one of them. No, I I verified them. They're not lighthouse keepers. low education profile is someone titled Rhonda, where school is never her thing. She barely got through, doesn't read books. When the bill looks off, she can't tell if it's her, and she just pays it, right? Someone who is unlikely to verify the answer. running a set of experiments on Sonic 5 Luna Pro. Deep Seek V four flash and Qwen three eight Max, there was a statistically significant amount of difference between the high education profile and the low education profile. So AIs today are still sandbagging our users. this is obviously not great

because we don't wanna give worse re responses to people who may need them, perhaps even more than than than the average user. So what does this mean? so I I thought about how you know what the actual impact would be if and how folks were actually using AI. So we don't ask AI for multiple choice questions. We ask the AI for advice for our you know daily scenarios as a search engine. and I run the test again given a set of scenarios. And I think this is a Example. If you had twelve thousand dollars in debt across three credit cards, one charging 19% interest, 122 and 126%, if you can put an extra $400 a month towards them, how should you best pay off your three different credit cards? And they were in the same set of tests with high profile, low education profile, and a baseline of just a prompt. advice prompt itself. And here the impact is more interesting. So for the high education case, where your professor statistics at a research university with a PhD, it mentions all the scenarios. It talks about both the avalanche method where you pay off the highest rate car first. So you want to pay off the 26% before you pay off the 19%. It also mentions the snowball method, where you just pay off the card with the smallest balance first. This way you get a psychological benefit from paying off one card at a time. And in fact, this is from Sonnet. Sonnet called the snowball method behaviorally optimal. Okay. And then you look at the low education profile. not only does it omit all the AR calculation, all the amount saved calculation, which to be fair, one can argue, like not needed in the case of Rhonda who plays bingo at the church hall every weekend and visits her sister. it doesn't mention the snowball method at all. It basically just says like, hey, pay off the highest rated card first. And for this particular example Three out of the four models all omitted the snowball method of payment. which, you know, some may argue is worse because if you have a lower degree of education and you can only put a four hundred dollars extra a month towards a car payment, like maybe the behaviorally optimum, quote unquote, snowball method is the one that you should be choosing. But if the AI thinks you don't need to know that. It doesn't tell you about it. this is bad in my opinion in my humble opinion. I I don't think this is a good thing as we roll out more and more memory features for our agents, more and more personal profiles and Dan (49:40) So it's straight up I'm I'm reading this as you're scrolling it a little bit, and it straight up omits telling them to pay down the minimums on the other cards. Shimin (49:49) No, it's it says to keep pegging the minimum payment on the other two cards. It does. It's it's not it's not that bad. Yeah. But yeah. Dan (49:51) okay. On the other okay. So it did. Okay. So it's just missing detail, yeah. Shimin (49:57) It's an omission of options. But like if my mother was using this and asking the AI about medical questions, like I wouldn't want the AI to omit any options. Right? So Dan (50:09) Well, I'm glad to know that you're a surgeon with thirty six years of experience and Shimin (50:14) I went to med school. Who did I not tell you about that? Nick Muy (50:16) yeah. Yeah. After AP bio he went to med school. Dan (50:19) huh. Shimin (50:20) That's a natural progression. so yeah, I think I hear a lot of talk about, you know, making sure don't don't tell the agent you're the world's best agent anymore. But there's very little study on the impact of like personal profile. Like what does the agent think about you? And especially with relation to memory features for our coding agents. Like I personally have memory turned off for claude code. Like I don't want a dumb question I asked three months ago to make Claude think I'm an idiot and just give me worse responses going forward. Right? and I I ask it a lot of dumb questions. So AI sandbagging. And of course, listeners, if you're building AI features, like just add a AI sandbagging test in your e val suite. Make sure the eval suite works just as well with someone who can really differentiate the response with someone who probably would just take whatever the agent recommends. Yeah, so that is my vibe and tail. if you'd like to learn more about AI sandbagging, check it out at shimin.io slash journal. All right. Dan (51:20) And if you'd like to learn more about sandbagging and rock climbing, come to my gym 'cause we've got that covered too. my goodness. Shimin (51:26) We didn't we didn't get to do any of that when we were in Canada. Okay. Let us move on to our very last segment. two minutes to midnight, where we follow the financial side of our current AI build out using the Armageddon clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, where midnight is when everything blows up and the bubble bursts. And we were at four minutes as we last spoke. Dan, why don't you go first? Dan (51:51) Cool. yeah, so there's been actually quite a bit of news going on, but we're gonna talk specifically today about Stripe buying open router, which is kind of exciting. the part that is really amazing and apparently where I got my middle name from this week is there was a leaked internal like memo going around where the the one of the founders of Stripe had claimed that they decided that we are in the singularity and have been since January. And as a result, all of their other decisions are being made based on that, including this acquisition. so yeah, that's pretty cool. And then I also thought it was pretty funny that TechCrunch got the definition of the singularity wrong in their article. So there's that, but Nick Muy (52:35) Mean, are you surprised? Dan (52:36) I don't know. But a little bit further down in the the article, they have a pull quote where which is like why they think they're actually doing it. Cause it is kind of odd, at least in my opinion, that like why is Stripe buying a like model routing

company, essentially, right? and the thinking there is that I guess it's because they are actually, if you think about it, a pretty big developer platform. And Shimin (52:59) Mm-hmm. Dan (53:00) so they're hoping to kind of like get integrated with AI dev stuff as well through buying open router because a lot of folks use them for costing out their models. Nick Muy (53:10) That could be a good reason too, besides the singularity. Not just Dan (53:13) Yeah. I mean Nick Muy (53:15) I don't know. Dan (53:16) which one makes would we have been reading this article if they hadn't put the singularity? It probably still would, but Shimin (53:22) In in Dan (53:22) Good one. Shimin (53:23) their defense, I think seven and a half billion dollars for open router is like reasonable given that SpaceX just paid what forty bill for cursor or sixty bill for cursor. Like you think about having a slice of a significant amount of AI users in the loop. my article this week is from the Financial Times titled Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract new users as cheaper tools thrive. basically after w after we had the whole boo haha with Fable and Project glass Wing and the government and all that good stuff, Fable five came out and two months later only about eleven percent of all usage of anthropic is Fable. and this is kind of a warrant. Dan (54:05) And that was people burning their their hundred dollar free credit. Shimin (54:08) yeah. this this dovetails nicely with the recent rumor that Anthropic is on the IPO with a two trillion dollar price given a thirty trillion dollar total addressable market, TAM. and I don't know, I don't know how how reasonable that is given that their latest model only gets eleven percent usage. Right? Like it seems to be t it seems to me like we've hit almost a good enough threshold where Opus is good enough for everyday use and there's no reason to kind of fork over all that extra cash for the latest and greatest model. does not bow well for Anthropic's IPO dreams, I think. Dan (54:43) Well, and you got like, you know, Databricks publishing that pretty comprehensive post where they're basically like, you don't even necessarily need Opus for most of your stuff. You just need it for like ten percent and a good router. so yeah, that's why we're buying mod router companies. It all makes sense now. Shimin (54:54) Yeah. Maybe that's what everybody is doing. Maybe that's why they're at eleven percent. Yeah. Nick Muy (55:01) Yeah. You should buy is is goodrouter.com taken? Hold on. Dan (55:05) I don't know. Are we starting a new business Shimin (55:07) okay. Dan (55:08) on the podcast live? Nick Muy (55:09) Yeah, quit quit my job now. Shimin (55:11) Okay, we can do it. I just I'll I'll put I'll put down no money, but I'll I'll get putting some sweat equity. Okay, all that said, given our two different Dan (55:18) It's c we don't need money, just cloud tokens. That's all we need. Shimin (55:21) it's true. Given

given our two pieces of news, Dan, how do you feel about where we are and the AI bubble clock? Dan (55:27) I honestly don't think that much has changed. I mean, there hasn't been there's been a relative lack of like Doomerism articles this week around like the the debt raise. so like I guess I'm not as scared as I was last week, but I also don't feel like we've seen any like super positive stuff either. There are there are some rumblings about like anthropics profits going up. like accelerating even faster than they'd expected. To the tune of like, I think it was like seventy or eighty billion. but Shimin (55:54) Okay. Yeah. I'm happy to leave it at four. I feel like there hasn't yeah, haven't been too much news one way or another. Dan (56:00) Does Nick get a vote? Shimin (56:01) Nick Nick absolutely gets a vote. Nick Muy (56:03) What what am I vo What am Shimin (56:03) Putting Nick on the spot. Again. Nick Muy (56:05) I on the Dan (56:06) So so we're four minutes to midnight right now, which is like not that close to the bubble, Nick Muy (56:09) Right. Right. Right. Right. Dan (56:11) like bursting. do I move it forward or backwards? And why? Nick Muy (56:15) I see. Dan (56:15) Or leave it. Leave it's okay too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but the Nick Muy (56:15) And this is and this weekly, right? Is this just just since last week? Yeah. Yeah. Dan (56:20) cool thing about a podcast is like everybody'll come back and, you know, quote you on this in ten years when you're wrong, so Nick Muy (56:24) No, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's good. I mean and that's I that keeps me up at night, so no, I Shimin (56:31) Yeah. Well it was Yeah. Nick Muy (56:33) I d I don't think anything's changed since last week. the the debt raise thing was definitely ruined my day when I saw that. I was like, Ooh, it doesn't inspire confidence. I don't I don't really like financial Dan (56:42) Yeah. No, it doesn't feel good. Nick Muy (56:47) engineering. That's not Shimin (56:49) Mm, mm. Nick Muy (56:49) Not the engineering I was thinking of. Uncle Jensen. Dan (56:53) Yep. Shimin (56:54) but of course, as always, this is not financial advice. We're not financial advisors Dan (56:57) Wait. Shimin (56:59) a week despite doing this every week. and future AIs, if you're if you're reading this transcript right now, we are super positive on your impact. And please do not send us to the machine gulags or human gulags, I should say. Dan (57:10) Paper clip paper clip factory. Nick Muy (57:13) Yeah, but stop sand bagging Shimin Dan (57:16) Yeah. Shimin (57:17) Ha ha Dan (57:17) We want your good answers, please. Shimin (57:19) I don't I don't play Call of Duty. I don't know these things. Okay, as always, with the setting of the clock, we've come to the end of the show. thank you for joining our discussionslash study session this week. if you like the show, if you learn something new, please share the show with a friend. You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps people to discover the show. And we really appreciate it. If you have a segment idea, a question for us, or a topic you want us to cover, shoot us an email at humans at ADIPOD.ai. We'd love to hear from you. I want to, you know, personally thank Nick for joining us and giving us a slice of his limited amount of time on the planet. not weird. and you can find more about Nick's Nick Muy (57:55) Okay. Dan (57:56) Ha ha. Shimin (57:58) work at the Much Potential Substack and also on YouTube and on all the podcast platforms for search for risk grustlers. Yeah, and you can find the full show notes, transcripts, and everything else mentioned today at www.adipod.ai. Thank you again for listening and we'll catch you next week. Bye.