The creator of Clawd: "I ship code I don't read"

What if you could merge 600 commits on a single day? And none of it was sloppy? This is what today's guest, Peter Stainberger, the creator of Claudebot, claims he's doing. Peter is a standout developer who built PSPDFKit, the PDF framework used on more than 1 billion devices. Then he burned out, sold his shares, and disappeared from tech for 3 years. This year, he came back, and how he builds and what he's doing now looks nothing like traditional software development.

In today's episode, we cover why he no longer reads most of the code he ships, and why that's not as crazy as it sounds. How he is building Clawbot, his wildly popular personal assistant project, which feels like the future of Siri. The closing the loop principle that separates effective AI assistant coding from frustrating vibe coding. Why he says code reviews are dead and PRs should be called prompt requests, and many more. If you're interested in how the software engineering workflow could change in the coming years thanks to AI, this episode is for you.

This episode is presented by Statsig, the unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. Check out the show notes to learn more about them, the Pragmatic Summit on the 11th of February in San Francisco that I'm hosting with them, and our other season sponsors.

Right, Pete, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Gay.

It is awesome to meet you in person.

Yeah, and I almost messed it up.

Yeah. What, what, what, what happened? You lost track of time. Does that happen often? And how, how so?

Um, not usually. Not usually. Um, this is an interesting time for me 'cause I, 'cause my latest project is is blowing up. Cloudbot, right?

Clawbot. Yeah.

Cloudbot.

I'm struggling a bit to get enough sleep, but it's, it's, it's interesting. I never, I never had a community blowing up so fast, and it's just incredibly fun to work with.

So, before we, we get into Cloudbot and all the fun stuff you're doing, I wanted to rewind all the way back. You created PSPDFKit, which is used, I think, on more than 1 billion devices users. If, if you see a PDF render, you probably see that. But even before that, how did you get into tech?

Oh my god. How did you get into tech? So, I'm from rural Austria. Um, always more being the introvert. So, eventually, I, we always had like summer guests, and one of them, one of them was a, was a computer nerd, and then I kind of got hooked with, with like the machine he had and begged my mom to buy me one, and ever since then, I, this was in high school or so.

I guess I was 14.

Yeah. And ever since I started tinkering, like, I can remember the earliest thing was like, I stole an old DOS game from my school and then wrote a copy protection for the floppy disk so I could sell it. It took like 2 minutes to load. I was just always tinkering. Also playing a lot of computer games, of course, but like building stuff almost feels like playing a computer game. Like, definitely right now it feels better than Factorio. Oh, when I started out, I, I, I, I read like the equivalent of bash scripts for Windows, and then I did like websites. So, I guess a little bit of JavaScript, uh, even though I had no clue what I was doing. And then the actual first language where I, I had to learn how to build things is when I started university. And I never met my dad. And I come from a, from a poor family. So, I always had to work. Like, I had to, had to finance my own studies, right? So when other people were, were having holiday, I just worked full-time at a company. So the, the first real job I had was, was in Vienna, was supposed to be 1 month, and then they kept me for 6 months. It was just a bridge between military and, and my university. And I kept working there for like, I think 5 years. And I remember the first day they, they gave me this huge book, maybe that huge, and said, Microsoft MFC. Um, I still have nightmares. And I got, I got like, I was like, this is terrible. Like, for, for the next win, I just, I just silently used .NET. I just didn't tell them. And like a few months in, I just told them, yeah, but the text, I, I did a few modernizations. But then it was too late. I did this a few times in this company. I don't know why they kept me because, because my work. So, uh, I did .NET and actually, I actually, actually dig .NET 2.0 had like generics. It took insanely long for the application to, to, to launch because like everything was compiled at first start, and like your hard disk was like, if [snorts] you remember.

So, so you, how did you stumble into both iOS and where did the idea from PSPDFKit come from?

Not even, yeah, the first one, the first one wasn't even available in, in, in Austria. That's true. Yeah.

A little time went on and I was at university and a friend showed me the iPhone. And I, I think I, I touched it for a minute and then immediately bought one. Like, like this. Like, it clicked when I felt it. And, and to me, this was like a holy f moment because it was just like so different and so much better. So I got, I got one. I was still not thinking about building for it, you know. That was that was

When was this? 2009, 10, something like that?

Yeah. Yeah. And then I, I used their browser. I, I can see the story. I was, I was literally driving in the subway.

Mhm.

And by the time I was using a gay dating app, and this was iPhone OS 2.

Yeah.

So, so I,

Long time ago.

I typed this long message. I pressed send, and we were just going into a tunnel, and the JavaScript disabled the send button, and then an error message came, but there was no copy-paste. There was no screenshot. So I was just like, and I couldn't scroll anymore because like scrolling was disabled. So like this long message was like a little bit emotional, was gone, and I was so mad. I was so mad. I'm like, what the hell? I went home and I downloaded Xcode. That's that's where that's where the window came. And I was like, where is the IDE? So it was like, like I was like, this is unacceptable. I basically hacked the website. I used regular expressions to like download, uh, to parse the HTML, which is like totally not something you should do. And I built an app, and I used, I used iPhone OS 3 beta with like Core Data in beta, RegexKit Lite. I used a hacked version of GCC that backported the blocks compiler so I could use blocks in iPhone OS 3. It took me quite a while until anything worked because like I had no idea what I was doing, and I was like using all kind of like beta tech. But eventually, I, I got it to work. And I, I wrote that company was like, hey, I'm making an app. What do you think about it? Got no response, of course. So I was like, let's just put it in the App Store.

And this was for the dating app, right?

Yeah.

So you just, like, you know, you looked at, you saw their APIs, you could just, like, easily, like, build a client on top?

API. It was HTML.

Oh.

I was, I was just literally parsing HTML.

Oh. So, so you kind of parse the HTML, kind of turn it into your own, you know, like, you use it as an API. Oh, clever. I mean, this was back in the day where no one thought this this would happen. But I made, I put it in the App Store. I charged five bucks for it, and I made like 10k in the first month. [laughter] And I had no clue what I was doing. So, and there was like so many complex tech stuff. This was very early on where there was a lot of weird forums on Apple.

So, I just put in the, the bank account of my grandpa. And then one day my grandpa called me, "Yeah, something is weird. Like, I got this huge payment from Apple." I'm like, "This is mine. This is mine. Don't touch it." But the, the funny thing was when I, this blew off, and I remember I was in a club one day and like, I saw someone using my app, and I was so proud, and I wanted to like tap him on the shoulder and say, "I built this." And I thought like, that would be really weird. So I didn't. And then I, I, I went to the company I worked for for 5 years and told him like, "I'm going to pursue this. This is, this is really exciting." And my boss was like mocking me.

Oh, really?

They're like, "Oh, you're making a mistake. This is a fad. This will not go." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, what that got me? That's what you call a chip on your shoulder. I'm like,

You know, one day I'm going to, I'm going to have a company that's worth more money than yours. Well, it took me eight years. So, I, I got hooked. Like, I, I worked, I, I'm, I'm a little bit of an addictive personality. So, which you see again right now. But I, I worked a lot on this app. I learned, I learned in high speed. And this was also the time where I started Twitter, and that was hugely influential for my career. I made this app actually quite good. And then one day I was at a party at 3:00 AM, um, slightly intoxicated, and I got a call from a US number. The guy on the phone was like, "Yeah, hello. This is John from Apple. Yeah, there's a problem with your application. Like, some people reported pictures." And that was it. That was the end of my app.

It was good until it lasted.

And I was just, I just quit my, my job and was like, well, f you, Apple.

I did freelance work. I was at WWDC. I was introduced to

WWDC.

Yes, sorry for the insider terms. I was introduced to someone as one of the best iOS developers in Austria at a bar at 2:00 AM in San Francisco, and then basically got a job in the US. And then I moved to the US for a while. And then I, I went to the Nokia Development Days. This is all like stone age by now. My god. And then someone came up to me and said, "Yeah, they built this app somewhere in Eastern Europe, and it works, but it crashes sometimes." And it was like, was like a magazine viewer, right? This was back when the iPad just came out, and Steve Jobs hit that like, this is the savior. So everybody was building magazine apps. And I was like, that sounds like an interesting short-term gig. And I, I was like, okay, I'll, I'll, I'll help you out. And I opened the app, and it was like, oh, the worst code I've ever seen in my life. It was literally one file with like thousands of lines

of Objective-C. Yes. Where they used windows as tabs. I, I didn't know this worked. I was surprised this worked at all, but it felt like a house of cards. And I, I tried to, I tried to surgically fix things, but like, as soon as you would touch something, something else would break. Um, so I got it, I got it somewhat stabilized. And I told him like, "Look, this is, this is like madness. Um, I'm going to rewrite this for you." Yeah. But it took half a year. I'm going to do it in a month. Well, it took me two months. Um, I wasn't that far off. And, and then here I was working on a, on a PDF viewer. You know, on every technical problem, [clears throat] the domain is, I wouldn't say like completely unimportant, but you can always find interesting problems in every domain. And there was a lot of interesting problems because you had a C call that would render a PDF that would maybe take 30 megabytes, but the whole system had 64 megabytes. So if you're not very smart and like very careful what you do in the background, and when the OS would just kill you. I got really fixated at like making it good, like when the rotation is like that, the page would like animate, and so, so, you know, I, I like those details. I spent way too much time on that. That's why it took two months instead of one. But the end result was, it's good. Um, and then I, I, I worked with them for a while. And then a friend texted me up. He's like, "Yeah, I'm working on this magazine app, and it's really hard." I'm like, "Yeah, no way it's hard. I know." Oh, like I did it.

You just built one.

And, and he was like, "Can you, can you, can you get me the code?" I'm like, "Sure." So, I sold him, like, I extracted the, the part that was PDF from from this magazine app. And I, I made sure, I made sure like the other person was okay. And then I sold him that. I was like, "Well, if he's interested in that, why not try to sell it to other people?" I used a, a WordPress template and mutilated it to run on GitHub pages. And then, and then when you did the fast lane flow at the end, you got a Dropbox link to my personal Dropbox with a source code zip. And I put this on one afternoon, and I, I tweeted it. And, and then in that week, three people bought it. And it was like, I guess 200 bucks. But back then, and for me, this was like amazing. And not only I got like three people who just bought it, and like 10 emails who complained, 10 people who complained about, uh, because they wanted it, but it didn't have the features they wanted. You know, it's like, I got nerd-sniped. I was like, "Oh, it didn't have text selection." Oh, how hard can it be? Three months later. Oh, yeah. It's really hard. [laughter] Text selection in a PDF, specifically.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know the saying, the saying like, uh, the companies are built by young people because they don't know how hard it is.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea what an insane madness this file format is. Peter was talking about how some problems look deceptively simple. PDF rendering is a good example. You look at it and think, how hard could it be? And then you spend months on edge cases that you didn't even know existed. This looks easy until you build it. That pattern shows up in other places, too. Internal tooling for feature flags and experimentation is a classic example. Teams often underestimate how much work it is to build infrastructure around these tools. There's a reason big tech companies like Uber invested years into building internal experimentation and feature flagging systems.

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And now, let's get back to Peter and why rendering PDFs was a surprisingly hard problem.

But now, I remember there was a few weeks ago someone emailed me. They did something PDF and they wanted my help. And I just wrote them like, "I'm sorry, like, I did my deed. I, I know more about PDF than any sane human person ever should know. And I went, I went to therapy. Good luck." [laughter] But that took off, and, and I just, I, while I was waiting for my visa, I, I worked on this project, and, and it just kept on, more people kept on buying it. And, you know, it was like, it was like summer. I was, I was like, lying at the lake, and got another email that someone bought it for 600 bucks, 800 bucks. I just up the prices as it had more features. And by the time I, I went to San Francisco to work at this company, it already made more than what I made there. But my whole life was, I still, I still thought like, I have to be there, you know.

So I, I did it. And also, interestingly, at this company, I had to

So what would you say that you moved to San Francisco?

Yeah. And, and of course, also it ended up being something where I had to build, build something with my framework at that company too. But, you know, startups are not like 8 hours. They're a little more. And my personal project was also a little more. So my sleep was a little less. And then eventually, after 3 months, uh, Sabine, my manager, came over and said, "This Peter, are you okay?" And they gave me a choice, uh, to either keep working at this company and drop my project, or or vice versa. And I had one week to decide. The counter was one week to stay there or leave the country because I was on a on a complicated visa. And, well, the decision was quite easy. It's like, yeah, I want to do my own thing. And then,

And at this point, it was already taking off. You already saw that this is, there's a big business here. It will probably pay you as much as your US job would have paid?

Ah,

It was never money-driven either.

It was more about, what, what were you driven by? I want to make stuff that other people find amazing. Like, I, I love tweaking the details. I love those little delights. It wasn't even that the space, there were competitors in the space. But my angle was always like, I built something as if Apple would have built it, like, like with, like all the love and care and and polish and and those little delights that a lot of people in the industry don't get. Uh, so even though we had competitors that had way more features and were around way longer, my company was more successful, and my product was more successful 'cause developers tried the, the different ones, and mine just felt the best. I think software is all about, about how it feels, much more so than the, than the feature set. Like, why did we buy Apple stuff? It has more features than than Windows. Um, but it, it feels better.

So, how did you go from, like, you, you left this company and you were building this PDF component that started to sell. At what point did you hire the first person, realizing, okay, there's something more to this?

When I went back to Vienna, then I was like, okay, I have to go all in. And that's where I, I started working with freelancers a little bit, and way too late, to be honest. Also, like, I, I could have, could have hired much earlier, but, you know, you know, it's, it's a big step. And that's kind of where it, it started having a life of its own. And I spent pretty much 13 years of my career, um, building this product with this weird name that I never changed because it took me like, I thought like five minutes about it, and then stuck PSPDFKit.

PSPDF.

They finally, they finally did a rename, but I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have renamed it. But now it,

It's a mouthful, but it's very unique.

Well, you get it if you do Objective-C because it's just a namespace.

Yes.

Um, and by, by the time it, it made perfect sense. My marketing, my strategy for marketing was always, I only care about the developer. Like, I know like upper management does the decisions, but if I can convince the people inside the company, they all do the marketing and lobbying for me. That worked really well. We never did like cold, cold emails or aggressive. It was all inbound. All we did was like, make good stuff and write insightful technical blog posts. And I went to a lot of conferences. Like, for me, the important thing was, okay, if, if people understand that the people who built this product are like, know what they do and love what they do, that reflects on the product. And that, that worked really well.

And then what was the tech stack behind PSPDFKit? Was it Objective-C? Was it later Swift? Were there other technologies like C or or anything else?

We eventually expanded to, to all the platforms. Um, big shift was the switch out renderer, which was and is still quite buggy, to like a big C++ one that we then used across all the frameworks. Um, we, we were, we were really early with web. We were one of the first PDF frameworks that ran in WebAssembly. And I, I did the most clever thing that it was in the very early days when WebAssembly was just taking off, and we built a benchmark. And that benchmark was eventually used by, by Google and Microsoft and Apple. And I basically had all these companies like working really hard on making my renderer faster 'cause, 'cause they used their benchmark as one of their benchmarks. And the benchmark was just like rendering our stuff with our

Ah, nice. And then, as a company grew, one thing that I remember about PSPDFKit, you did write a lot of blogs. And one blog in 2019, so this was about, like, I think, you know, year nine or 10 in the company. It was about how the team worked. And you mentioned things there like, every feature starts with a proposal. You mentioned that you are conservative because it's a, it's a big API that people use. You want to be careful. Things like the Boy Scout rule, such a factor. How, how did you kind of put together the, the culture of, of this now, this team, which was now closer to 30 or 60 people?

We were actually 70 when I sold my shares, and now it's almost 200. And I, I knew right from the get-go, it's like, I'm not going to find the people that I need in Vienna. So it was always just like, remote first. And eventually, we, we landed up with some kind of hybrid model, uh, which made things a bit more complicated. I learned a whole lot on the go. Like, I, I never had the urge to be CEO. I always was coding. I, I brought people in to, people that that helped me a lot with other, other parts. Uh, and on the business side, I can do it, and I, I think I think I'm quite good at it, but I just don't enjoy it. Like, even on sales calls where you like have to like think of all the magic number, how much it would be worth, because that's how enterprise works.

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And with this, let's get back to Peter and enterprise pricing.

But that's also the only thing that that really works on on a model like this.

Yeah. You mean enterprise sales specifically, right?

Meaning custom pricing. So, so can you tell us for, for, you know, devs listening who go to a vendor's website and they're frustrated that there's no price. It says, "Call us" or "Schedule meeting." Why that is?

Oh, that's, that's why because we're going to look at your company and then just take the dice and, and, and think about the number that you're probably willing to pay. And that sounds horrible. But also when you have a product where you can't really tear it down to a specific number, like, it, it makes a difference if, uh, a freelancer contacts us or one of the big Fortune 500s. Let's not say names.

Because the usage will be different. The value they get out of it will be different. And charging the same, you would either exclude one or the other. If I, if I, if I go too low, they're going to see this fishy. It's like, uh, procurement for like 500 bucks. We're not going to even start the process. And if we, we target it too high, we're going to lose those people. So, so as horrible and unfair this process seems for some kinds of products, it is the, it's the most fair way after all. You know, you know, on software, there is, I would say there's like four axes. There's like easy and hard, and interesting and not interesting. We were very much in the not interesting and hard part. If you build something that every developer wants to build, it's going to be a hard sell. It's, it's a hard sell anyhow. Selling anything to developers is a hard sell.

Yeah.

But if it's, if it's too easy or too interesting, good luck. But if it's

Oh god, I don't want to do this. And oh my god, this is hard. That's a good spot to be in. So, so I found a really interesting niche, and there were just an infinite number of complex problems.

You, you need to tell me, tell me one or two hard things about parsing PDF. How hard could it be? There's a specification. I'm an engineer. I know specifications. I, what's so hard about it?

I mean, there was this one example where, you know, like PDF has links. So, like, there's like, there's like a table of contents, and you click on it, and it goes to like page 37. So, I built this whole model with the assumption, oh yeah, maybe there's like a 100 or 400 links in there.

And then we got this one customer who like paid really good money. And then I was like, oh, it takes 4 minutes to load a PDF. What the heck, guys? And I looked at it, and it was like a 50,000 page text bible from Canada. And it had

50,000 pages.

It had like more than 100 links per page.

500,000 links.

My data model completely exploded because my assumptions were off by a number of what, 1,000. But by then, you have like a mature product with an API. So like, how do you, how do you completely redesign the internal part without breaking things for everyone? Like, suddenly everything has to be lazy, where where before parsing 100 one was easy, but now they were like, this was like so difficult to keep it working for people. Um, I think I spent like two months just on that, completely redesigning like the internals and like making sure it's still easy for people, they don't have to know what we, what we load, easy, what we load, lazy, or if you copy this thing, it still has to like have to keep some connection.

It needs to keep the references and some of those things.

So, so I, and I, I love to do support. And I think that that also a confining factor why the company worked, 'cause if, if you send a ticket and then the, the CEO replies and helps you out, um, that has impact. And my, my strategy was always like, I always used to list in reverse, 'cause if you, if you send a ticket and you get a reply within 5 minutes, that's magical. If you wait one or two days, not much difference. Yeah.

So, yeah, this, this was one of the problems where I worked two months, and I finally got it down to almost like this.

Mhm. That must have been satisfying.

And, and it was, this was very satisfying.

And you were writing a lot, a lot of the code, or you were involved in, in, in a bunch of the code, like obviously a big, big team was now here, but you were still kind of overseeing it, right? You're in the details.

I mean, of course, I had a, a really great team, and, and some parts I was more involved. I was always more involved in mobile because that's where my, my heart was, but I was always very deep in the tech. And, and the marketing side, the business side, I had like Jonathan's help, I had marketing help. There was, I, I found good people. The, the thing is, if you like the blogging and writing about how you solve interesting hard problems, will help you hire interesting people that want to solve interesting problems. This is what I remember at PSPDFKit, that your blog was, every now and then it hit Hacker News as well, but it was just interesting to read. And I couldn't name again, I'm not, I went into PDFs, but if I had to say something about PDF, I would have said PSPDFKit, because they're the only ones where I read interesting engineering blogs about how you optimize your ship. It's still there, by the way. I, myself also sometimes ask myself like, hm, interesting, do more companies not see this? Or is, is the question that you need to be a developer who's either the CEO or up there who just likes doing this? And by the way, did you ever write this thinking this will be helpful, or you just wrote because you got something out of it, like putting out that you solved this hard problem?

I like sharing and, and, and like inspiring people. Um, there was sometimes even conflicts where we were like, "Should we write about this because it's like a little bit of secret sauce?" But I just never listened to those voices too much. Um, I just, you know, there's also like, when you, when you write something down, there it's this principle of like, you understand it, but then if you want to teach it, you really have to understand it. So, to me, it was also a little bit like, oh yeah, I worked on this really hard problem, and now I want to like preserve it and like help others. So, so, so I, I got, I got a gig out of it, of course, I liked the attention. Um, but really, it was this, sometimes I just referenced a year later to my own post, like, yeah, this, this is a, this is both company documentation. This is like my own lookbook. It's helpful on so many ways. And a lot of those bigger companies, oh, they put on too much red tape. There's a lot of developers who don't really like to write. So I, I, I forced everyone once a month, a full day, just to write a blog post.

But you gave them the time. You're like, that day you don't need to do any other work but write something.

Yeah. You have, yeah. You have a day to come up with a post. Ah, a day is quite much, actually. I mean, when I'm nowadays, when I write posts, it still takes me a few hours. I don't want to dwell too much on like the, I think the, the starting time of the company is the most interesting. The, then the, the growth phase, you get more red tape, you get more people. It's much more gardening your product instead of like doing, doing wild hacks.

Um, and more iterative. So, so, so it got a little bit less interesting, uh, over the years, and there was like more people drama 'cause the more, so the more people you have, the more issues there are. And I didn't enjoy it that much, and I was really, really burned out.

What, what burnt you out, do you think?

I was just burning too hard. I was working most weekends. I, I tried to shuffle all my managerial needs. And, you know, as a CEO, you're basically the waste bin 'cause everything, everything that other people don't manage or or can do or or mess up, you have to fix. And it's also quite lonely because you, you can't openly talk about a lot of things. I mean, I, I, I structured the company to be quite open, but still, like, you can't, you cannot be negative. You have to, even if, even if like, even if like really bad stuff happens. I know there was like, there was like one weekend where my, my co-founder called me at 5:00 AM and told me like, "Yeah, there's this big airplane company, and their planes are down because our software is crashing." That was a very interesting weekend until I could like, I disassembled their their app and did proof that they messed around with our source code to triggering a triggering a license key fallback. Uh, that eventually like caused issue they had. But that was like a, if they, sus company's gone and more moment. Um, and that's just on top to all the additional stress. And there were quite a few of those things. You can do that for a while. And I, I also believe like burnout doesn't necessarily come from working too much. It, it comes more from, or at least for me, when you, when you work on something, but you don't believe in it anymore, or you have like too many conflicts. And, and we also had a, we did fight a lot in the team, uh, with like management team. And by the time I, I made this mistake, and I thought you have to like lead a company more democratically. Um, so that was also something that burned me out. I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to miss it for a while, though.

Yeah. So, you know, from, from the outside, it seems you sold your shares, you made enough money to not have to work again, should you not choose. And for a lot of people, like, you know, people who are starting out their business or or one day want to start a business, this sounds like the absolute dream. Like, this is, I guess, what we know realistically that most people will not make it, but if you make it, I mean, you've kind of like, I guess, you know, checkbox done. You're kind of, it's a little bit if you're like climbing on a wall and you ring the bell, you're done. And then what I noticed is from the outside again, on your blog, the blog posts completely stopped for several years. What, what did you do, uh, in this time, and, and what, what did you learn in this time, you know, before you came back to where we are now?

I needed a lot of time to decompress. I, I caught up a lot on the things I thought I missed. I, I traveled a lot. Um, there were months where I didn't even turn on my computer. And for a while, I was, I just didn't have this feeling of like, what should I do now? Like, like, I definitely was like, why bother? You know, you're not, you're not supposed to retire so early, or like have so much, have such a good exit that you never have to work again. That messed with my mind quite a bit. That was some, that was some hard years. And then in April, I was like, I, there was this idea that I had years ago, and even a side project that I started. I was like, oh yeah, I want to, I want to continue on that. And then after, after more than 3 years, I just sat back to my computer and started hacking again. But the thing was, this was like a, a Twitter analytics thing, and it was written in, in Swift and SwiftUI. And back then, I already knew this would have would be so much better if I would build as a website.

So, so was this an existing idea that you kind of had at the back of your your mind, something, something Twitter analytics?

Yeah, it was just like something I wanted to build for myself because, uh, because it didn't exist. And then,

Even three years later, it didn't exist. It still doesn't exist. Uh, it, it kind of does, but I got a bit sidetracked. So I, I went back and I, I wanted to build it in, with web tech. But web was really, was always even at the company, the one thing that I looked into the least because I had, I had someone really smart who took care of of that side in the company, that I brought in, Martin. So I never had to worry about it. That was one of the

You're not hands-on with React or any of that stuff?

Yeah. And when I came back, I was like, "What's a prop?" You know, that that level where you really, where, and you know, this is like, this is a trap I see with many developers. The, the better you get at one technology, the harder it is to jump somewhere else. It's not that you can't do it, but it hurts so much. You're like, like, I can, I can program in, in, in Apple stack and program blind. But then in that stack, I have to Google the most mundane stuff, and it, it just, it just hurts. You, you feel, you feel like an idiot again.

Yeah. And, and I guess the more experience you have, it, it kind of sucks feeling. I mean, I'm sure you say embrace it and all that, but it's not great. You're not as efficient. You know that you could be faster, etc.

Yeah. So, so I came back and I was like, gosh, there has to be, there has to be, what is this AI? What is this AI stuff that every, that that people are dismissing? Let's look into this. Yeah. And in April, a lot of us were the specific, probably for rightfully so, but, and I, and I, and I like, and I to a degree, I credit those three years where I basically didn't turn on my computer, because in those years, you guys checked out AI and learned that it's crap.

Yeah. The, the people who, like, I was about to say, so you missed out on, you didn't do the beta of GitHub Copilot, you know, glorified autocomplete, which is GPT-3, or maybe not even there. Was then, of course, 3.5, which is a big jump, and it, it got incrementally better than GPT-4. And so by the time you came back, what tool did you first use when you, 'cause you missed out on like two years of like, like devs, us devs, using, dismissing, finding some niche use cases for it?

Oh, Claude Code. So you start with Claude Code. That I think came out.

It just came out. It came out in May, but there was a beta beforehand.

Yeah. Yeah. I think they had something. Didn't they have something in February already?

They had a beta from February. Correct.

Yeah. So, so,

So Claude was your first. You come back after like a, you know, hiatus, and you immediately turned on Claude Code, and you missed everything else before. And, and, you know, you know, it was like, I remember I took this big messy site project that I built, and I have this browser extension where that that converts a GitHub repository into one big markdown. That was like a 1.3 megabyte markdown file. And I dragged it into into Google's AI Studio with Gemini 2.5 or two to something. And I typed, "Write me a spec." And it generated those 400 lines of spec. And I dragged this back into Claude Code and I was like, "Build." And then I continue, continue. [laughter] Continue. And while I was like, working on other stuff, you know, um, and eventually told me like, "It's 100% production ready." And I started it, and it crashed. I'm sure we can all relate to the story of the AI saying the code is production ready, then crashing. This is a pretty funny and innocent story, but I personally don't trust code that AI generates without verifying it. And this leads us nicely to our season sponsor, Sonar.

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And with this, let's get back to Peter and how AI agents cannot exactly be trusted.

Then I had, then I added an MCP, so it could use the browser. I think the player with MCP was already there, and it looped a few more hours, and then I had a, I had a Twitter login page, and it, it did something. I, it was not great, but it did something. And to me, to me, this was my holy mind-blowing moment.

Yeah.

This, and this was like in April or May this year, right?

Yeah. It was, it was, it was just good enough that I could see the potential, and I, I understood it's like,

Yeah, this is, this is where it's going. And, and from that moment on, I, I had a few months where I had really trouble sleeping. And I,

I remember because once on Twitter, I sent you a direct message. I was up early for valid reasons, you know, my kids or something like that. But it was 5:00 AM, and I, I sent you a message on Twitter, and you replied immediately. And I was like, "Why are you up?" And he's like, "Oh, this is usual. Like, I, I usually I'm still usually awake." And, and I asked like, "Why?" And you said like, "Oh, I'm, I'm just like using Claude, and it's really, really addictive." And I was like, "Really?" And you're like, "Yeah, I'm not joking. Like, it's really good." And I think that was the thing. You said something or wrote something like, "Just one more prompt." Like, you told me how, like, what made it so addictive, or what still makes it so addictive?

Oh, it's the same economics as, as you go to a casino. That's, that's it. It's my little slot machines, you know? You, you, you press the trigger, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And it's like, nope. You, you type in the prompt, and it, it will like, and it does, it does crap, or it does something that actually blows your mind. And it's this,

And, and you're saying it, it blows your mind as like, you're a really experienced developer. Like, it's not easy to blow your mind, right? Like, you've seen good code, you can differentiate like crap code.

Decent code, good enough code. Like you have a bar, right? It's so funny, you know, in my company, I used to obsess over every detail, every spacing, every new line, the naming. I spent so much time bike-shedding. And in retrospect, I'm like, "What the heck? Why did I do that?" Like, what's the point that the customer doesn't see? Of course, like it has to meet certain certain standards. It has to work. It has to be fast. It should be secure, but like, how much did that bike-shedding like, stupid?

You say that, but then you also just said that people loved PSPDFKit because it was the most polished. It worked the best. Do you not think that that amount of caring, bike-shedding as you call it, being obsessed, it sounds like you were keeping tech debt at bay, you know? Like, being obsessed with white spaces is is not going to be messy. And we know it's not just the white spaces. We know you're going to care about testing and all that. Like, it sounds to me that PSPDFKit, like, you know, like what I see is you were not just building a product that was great UX, but you built something that had a really good hygiene. And that's how it could be high-performance and all that. How do you think about it?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To a degree. Yes. And and even now, like I I I mean, like my my last blog post was a confession that I I ship code on read.

Yeah, we have to talk about that. [laughter]

And at the same time, I spent so much time to like restructuring. I mean, I mean, like even even today, like I I really wanted to get this PR in where it was like 15,000 line change where in my I moved everything over to a plug-in architecture where I was so excited about. And I care a lot about the structure. Did I read all the code? No, because a lot of code really is just boring plumbing. Well, what are most apps? Like, data comes in from an API in one form. You like you parse it, you package it into a different form. Hey, you store it into a database and it's a different form. It comes out again into a different form. Then it's like HTML or whatever. And you type in something, it's a different form again. And all you do is like you're massaging data in different forms throughout your app. This is what most apps are. We are pretty chasing printers. And the and the the really the hard part is solved by Postgress 30 years ago by some neck-beards. Uh, that's that's really what a lot of software is like. There's always some interesting parts, but I don't have to care how this button is aligned or which Tailwind class is used or or like many details are boring and many other details are interesting. But it, I think it's much more about system architecture than having to read every single line.

Right. Now, jumping forward, what is your workflow like? Like, like when you're working on on CloudBot, are you using a terminal, multiple terminals, which which tools and and how are you, you know, like you said you're not you're kind of like not reviewing the the code, but you're still thinking about architecture. Like, what does your average day look like in terms of tooling? You know, you have to explain to a developer who might join the team. you know, at at one point, you didn't get like, what does it look like?

It's interesting. Let's let's let's go a little bit. We were we were in in in April with CloudCode and then I got really hooked. And then I did some I had a phase where I did Cursor and then I did I I used Gemini 2.5 a bit. Then we had this phase with Opus 4. I hooked up a lot of my friends. Like I know I know both Armen and and Mario from Vinner. They got they got AI-pill because I I was addictive. You know, my my enemy was like confusing them. [clears throat] And then they tried it out and then and then eventually they also were up at 5:00 a.m. and I called it like the black eye club. [gasps] I mean, there's a reason like I I I I started a meet-up in London that I called called uh CloudCode Anonymous because because it's it's a little bit like a drug because it's so it's so much fun. Like to to me, what what blew my mind so much was this realization that I can build everything now. Before, you had to really pick which side project you build because software is hard. Yeah, it's still hard. But now, like I I am this this friction that I talked about where I'm so good at this at this technology and I'm like so bad at this and I'm like, "Oh, let's make the CLI in Go." I have no clue about Go. But I have I have a good system understanding. And once you have that, it's like you you develop a feeling what's right, what's wrong. Like, it is a skill in itself. I remember there was this tweet where someone said, "Oh, when you write the code, you you feel the friction and that's why that's how you make good architecture." I feel the same friction when I prompt because I I see the code flying by. I see how long it takes. I see if like the agent pushes back. Um, I see if what it creates looks like messy or like makes sense. When I prompt, I I have a hint already how long it's going to take. If it takes much longer, I understand that I messed up somewhere.

You kind of feel the model. you you know you know.

Yeah, usually it's like this or if it runs.

I I feel it's very much a symbiosis. Like I I learn to to talk.

May I even say dare or that language more? So it's like my my knowledge how to use those things improved and also the models improved. And then and then like over the time between between April and now, I would say, yeah, the inflection point was summer where it just got so good that you could you create software without actually writing code by hand. But the real that change that like sold it for me is was again GPT 5.2. That was again, I think it's underrated. I don't know I don't know why why all these people still use CloudCode. I I I kind of get it. It's it's a different way of working, but whatever OpenAI cooked there is insanely good. Pretty much every prompt I type gives me the result I want, which is insane. Like like on on CloudBot, the my latest product, I use between five and 10 agents in parallel. If you're very much CloudCode build, you have to forget quite a lot of the the silliness that the things that you have to do to create good output with CloudCode. I mean, I also met that team and and they created a whole new category. Like CloudCode is is a category-defining product. And it is amazing for general-purpose computer work. And it is is really good for coding. And I I I I still use it almost every day. But for writing code in complex applications, Codex is just so much better because it it takes 10 times longer. Um, Claude would read three files and then be confident enough to just like create code. And then you really have to steer it and push it so it reads more code so it gets it sees a bigger picture of your codebase so that it it weaves in new features better. And Codex will just like be silent and just read files for 10 minutes. And if you if you only work on one terminal, I completely understand how you how you find this unbearable. But I rather have something where it's also, you don't tell it what to do. You know, this is this is also something that people don't get. Like I have a conversation with the model. It's like, "Oh, let's look at this. What what what options do we have for this structure? Did you consider this feature?" It's like, because every every session is like the model starts from having no understanding about your product. And you have and and sometimes you have to just give it a little bit of pointers. "What about this and this?" So it explores different directions. And you don't need plan mode. Like I'm just having a conversation until I say build this, it will not build this. There's some trigger words because it it is they all are a little trigger-hungry. But as soon as I say, "Let's discuss," or "Give me options," they will not build things until I say build.

So so a lot of a lot, would you say a lot of your prompting or a good part of it is this conversation where you are pretty much planning together with the agent?

Yeah. It's like, "What about like I say, 'Okay,' then you remind them. It's like, 'Okay, we need documentation. What would be a good spot?' It would like give me some recommendations. I say, 'No, this should really be its own page. Do we need a configuration? How how does this fit into this other feature?'" It's like, I am designing the system because I have this I have this system understanding about how how is my my product, how are the shapes looking? I don't have a line-by-line code understanding. That's that's what Codex does for me. But I'm the architect.

You sound like you're almost, you know, for years back, this this totally came got out of style. But there was this idea that you would have the architect with a capital A who used to be a software developer, but they're not hands-on anymore because they spend a lot of time understanding the business and they have these developers working underneath them. And some companies still kind of work a little bit like this, but most modern companies don't. But some banks, etc. I met people there who are capital architects. They do the system plan. They talk with fellow architects. They have the blueprint and then they literally pass it down to the team. And everyone hates this model, obviously, because you know, again, like I I think as people, you kind of want more. The architect is never on call for for this stuff. And so it just kind of breaks down in practice. And a lot of large companies just move to the staff engineer model where you're kind of all working together. Of course, there's people who make who might have more input. But sounds like it's almost like this world where you are the architect who kind of, you know, you have your little agents who who do the code, except in this case, you are of course fully responsible because you're still an individual contributor. You're not you're not like a, okay, you might say you're a manager of agents or whatnot, but the code is is yours. It's your responsibility. You're going to be on call. If you know, if you push out code that takes down CloudBot, which it did just recently, you're on the hook for it, right? Like and I think the the difference in this system when when it was in companies, it was the architect was kind of shielded from the output of their work because there's so much people and so much process, etc.

Well, I wouldn't say architecture. I I like the word builder.

Builder. Yeah.

And and I think also that's there's a few categories that I see for people that are highly successful using using AI and people who really struggle.

I care more about the outcome, the product. I very much care about how it feels and everything, but how the plumbing works underneath.

I care structurally, but you know, not to the not the biggest detail. And then there are people who really love to to code on hard problems. Like think about algorithms. Don't really like the "I'm building a product with like all the marketing, all the." They they more like they like to solve hard problems. And those are the people who really struggle and and and often reject AI or get really sad because that's exactly the job where that AI does. Like it solves the hard problems. Now, sometimes I give it some pointers, but many times I learned I learned more this year than last five years around around software architecture and designing. I the there's so much inside those monsters um on knowledge and everything is just a question away, but you have to know what question to ask. Of course, I also built this Twitter thing and it's still not done and I and I I really hope I'll get back to it at one one time. Everything worked, but if I used it more at some point, things got really laggy and weird and then it worked again. And I just couldn't figure it out and it was like really difficult to debug because it was not easy to reproduce. It was just like, you use it more and things get really slow. I basically had like software in in in Psql like in Postgress that would be triggered when certain inserts were were doing and then the database would would get really busy and the model couldn't see it because it was it was it was so far abstracted from all the, you know, like those those models are really good at tracing through, but this was a side effect that was so hard to see because it was only in this one file, a function that had no connection to anything else. um with a name that was not easy grabbable. I just never asked the right question until I was like, "Do we have any side effects for this and this?" And I found it and I fixed it. And it's like, but I everything is just the right question away.

Yeah. But you you need to have like knowledge, expertise.

Yeah. Experience.

You you I mean, so so so these are the people who rejected. And then the people who who care a bit less about how it's being plumbed internally, but are just excited to build things. They're really successful. And one thing that also helped me is, you know, when you run a company and then you hire people, you can't breathe on everyone's neck and like make them have the line of code exactly that way. And there's a lot of people who who didn't manage a team, they didn't had this experience how to how to relax a little bit and understand that yes, this maybe is not exactly that code that I want, but it will get me closer to my goal. And for anything that is like not perfect, we can always make it better and like put more time into it. I very much believe into this iterative improvement. I had to learn to let go a little bit at my company. So, so, so then when I when I had CloudCode, it kind of felt like I have like I have like imperfect, sometimes silly, but sometimes very brilliant engineers that I have to steer and where we where we work together on a common goal. It felt a lot like being the boss again.

Yeah. And and interesting, now, you know, you you built kind of software, I guess the traditional way, you know, pre-AI for 15 years or even more than 15 years. And you got really good at being also leading a team and then how to have high standards. You really cared about the the craft there as well. You've now kind of been, I guess vibe coding or working with agents for a year. You're comparing the two. What do you think? What do you think really really changed? And what do you think are things that kind of stayed the same despite all?

First of all, I don't like I don't like the term vibe coding.

All right. How should we call it?

I I think I think I think vibe coding is by now almost a I I call it I tell people I do is agenting engineering with a little star. Vibe coding starts at 3:00 a.m.

Now, like because all the the mundane stuff of writing code is automated away, I can move so much faster. But also means like I have to sing so much more. I'm still very much in the flow. Like it is it is completely the same feeling as for me as as I I very much get in this flow state, but it is mentally even more taxing because I have I don't have one employee that I manage. I have like five or 10 that all work on things and I switch from this one part to this other part to this other part to this other part. Mostly because of I'm designing this new subsystem or like this feature. And then I know that it will probably take Codex like 40 minutes or or one hour to build. So like I want to like have the plan right. And then I build it and then I'll I'll move on to something else. But then this is cooking. And then I work on this. And then this is cooking. And then this is cooking. And then at some point, this is cooking. And then this is cooking. And then I go back to this one. So like I I I switch around a lot in my head. I wish I wouldn't have to do that. Like, I'm sure this is a transitional problem. And at some point, we have we have models and and systems that are so fast that that I can parallelize a little less. But to stay in the flow flow state, I need to massively parallelize. So that that's that's how it work. I go back to there and and maybe tweak it a little bit more. But usually, just like try it out. And maybe then this is ready because this only took like 20 minutes. So like I constantly jump around. Usually, there's there's one main project that has my focus. And I have like some satellite projects that also need attention but where I can make maybe I spend 5 minutes. It does something for half an hour. And and I try it. And it doesn't need uh so much capacity up there.

This almost sounds, you know, like two things come to mind. One is there's these like games where you have to manage a kitchen with the employee and you see like the recipes or something come out and you need to jump and do it again.

It's like Starcraft, you know, you have like your main base and you have like your side bases. They give you resources.

That as well. And also one thing that just came to mind as you said, like I go there and I watch this and I make a decision is when I see the chess grandmasters play multiple boards at once. You see see sometimes they 20 boards and they always all you they go there, they kind of you can see that they just like see what's on that board. they make a decision. And for some boards, they stop for longer. I guess better players or better opponents. It feels, you know, both they're occupying 100% of of their brain. You're occupying your bay and you're you're kind of scaling yourself as long as you can context switch. The difference, the difference was up until with with CloudCode, I you have to work a little different because it is much faster, but then the output often doesn't work on the first try. So like it makes something, but then it forgot to update three other things. it crashes. Or you give it the good thing. How to be effective with coding agents is always like you have to close the loop. It needs to be able to debug and test itself. That's the big secret. Um, that's also something I I think that's part of why it got so much more effective. Um, but yeah, with with with CloudCode, you I often had to go back and like fix up the stuff um, or it just takes a lot of iterations. So in the end, it's not that much faster. It's just more interactive. And and these days with Codex, it just almost always gets it right. My my general strategy is always, I I build a feature. Of course, you and of course, you always let it write tests and you make sure that it runs it.

It runs them. Yes. So even even when I write a Mac app, I don't know like I I just yesterday I debugged this feature where the Mac app couldn't find a a remote gateway, but like the the same code in TypeScript could. But Mac is kind of annoying to debug because like it builds it, you have to start it, you have to look at it, you have to like say, "No, this is not working." So now I just said it like, you know, you're going to build a CLI just for debugging that invokes all the same code path that you can call yourself. And then you just iterate and you fix it yourself. And then it will just cook and it just cooked for an hour and it was done. And it told me like, "There was a race condition here and here and like a misconfiguration, blah blah blah." And like, yeah, it sounds sensible. I don't need to I don't need to see that code. It's like, but but you don't need to see it because you set up the validation loops and you trust that because it ran it. I mean, this is I guess I guess it's not too dissimilar to like sometimes when you work on a large project in a large company, when all the tests pass, I mean, it doesn't mean 100% it's there, but it's it's a pretty good. And and all the new new code has tests as well, you know, someone thought about it and tested it and and all that. So even even on my on the very latest project, we always had bugs. But like anti-gravity has like a certain a certain weirdness with how it takes tool calls in the loop in the in the format. So you have to do like some filtering.

Yeah.

And that broke a bunch. And it actually took me way too long to realize like, "What am I doing here? I just need to automate this." So I was just going to Codex. like design life tests that spin up a Docker container, install the whole thing, spin up a loop, use my API keys from this and this file. And then you tell the model to read an image, create an image before, and then look into the image and see what it sees. So I I don't not just tell the loop, I still tell tool calling, make it work. And then it solved itself. It took forever, but it it it tested all my API keys like from from Anthropic over OpenAI over GLM, like everything. And it fixed all those little indicies where where sometimes the tool calling didn't work or the ordering was wrong because I closed the loop. And that's that's.

And closing the loop, you mean just have a way to to have have the agent be able to validate its work?

Yeah, that's why that's the whole reason why why those models that we currently have are so good at coding. But like sometimes mediocre good at writing creative because there's no easy way to validate. Right? But code I can compile, I can lint, I can execute, I can verify the output. If you design it the right way, you have a perfect loop. Like even now, even now for for websites, I built the core in a way that can be run via a CLI. So it's like I have this I have this perfect uh execution loop because the the browser loop is insanely slow. You want something that that loops fast.

So it sounds like one thing that is not really changing from like before is we had this before like backend or business logic heavy he heavy thing could easily be or more easily be verified that it's correct.

Surprise! Actually using agentic coding makes you a better coder because you have to have to think harder about your your your architecture so that it's easier verifiable. Because verifying is the way how to make things good. Well, then remember back back even before AI for complex systems, like once you got someone who built these things before, what they started with, "How do we make it testable?" Right? Like you need to design interfaces, classes, testable. You need to think about like, "Am I going to fake things? Will I use mocks? Will I use end-to-end testing, which will be long?" etc. But these are like really hard architectural decisions. And once you make them, they're I guess harder to change. In your in your world, you know, like the model would cook a lot longer if you asked it to make a massive refactor. And you know, if you have tests, it'll get it right. But you know, now these we still have these trade-offs.

Yeah, it's still it's still software. It's I I would say I write better code now that I don't write code myself anymore. And I wrote really good code. But like even back at the company, sometimes testing was so tedious and you come up with all those edge cases and and and the branching.

I mean, outside of Ken Debbecc, who I deeply respect and he was on the podcast and we we talk. He still writes test first. And he tells me that he's not mad at me for not writing it, but if you want to write like, you know, poor quality code, it's on you. Uh, but I don't know many developers, myself included, I never liked writing tests. And even even when I pretended that I did, I I just never did. It's a little bit like writing documentation and writing tests to me. It was never a creative expression. It is so good now. Like I I would say for my last project, I have really good documentation. And I didn't write a single line myself. Like, no, I don't write the test. I don't write documentation. I explain the model, the trade-offs, like why we did something like this. And then tell it like like write the entrance section, beginner-friendly, and then add more technical detail at the end. And it is so good. I never had a project with that good documentation. Just by every time I design a feature, this is a part of this, a part of the process. And also like testing. I was like, "Okay, we built this. How are we going to test this?" Yeah, we could do this and this and this. "What if we build it this way?" And oh, yeah, then we can test it better. So it's like this is now part of my singing because I I always think like, "How do I close the loop? How do I the model always needs to be able to verify the work itself?" Um, which automatically steers me to better architecture.

So why do you think there's, you know, a bunch of like experienced devs who are still pushing quite a bit back on on just like the idea that AI can do a lot of this?

That was a week ago. I I stumbled over a a blog post by Nala Coco with love that I deeply respect and learned a lot from. And this blog post was just was a dissing of the current way how models work. And and what he did was he he tested like five or six models, including some that make no sense, like the the OpenAI 120 billion open-source one that is not good enough to write good code, you know, it's like. And he just he he wrote a prompt as far as I understand it. There was there was not a lot of information on the website, but to me it sounded like he wrote a prompt, he put it on Claude web, and and he pressed send. And then he took the output and ran it, and it didn't compile. And he was disappointed. But he's like, "Of course it will not work. Do you think I can write bug-free code on the first attempt?" And those little those models are ghosts of our collective human knowledge. They work very similar in many ways. Of course, you don't get it right the first time. Like there will be mistakes. That's why you have to close the feedback loop. And also, you don't just send a prompt to the model, you start a conversation. "Hey, this is what I want to build." It's like, he complained that it used old API. Yeah, you didn't specify the Mac OS version. So it so so it made an assumption to default to like old API because that information was missing. And it is it is trained on a lot of data, not just the last two years. And there's just more old data than new data. So this is like the more you understand how those little beasts think, the the better you get at prompting. Um, and then and then and then he he spent maybe I don't know, a day or so on on playing with it and then just decided that this technology is still not really good. But to be effective, you have to spend significantly more time. You know, it's it's like, it's like, you know how to play guitar and I put you on the piano and you tried a bit. It's like, "Oh, this sucks. I go back to my guitar." No. No. It's like, it's a different way of building. It's a different way of thinking. You have no idea how often I screamed at like 3:00 a.m. to CloudCode because it did something silly. I slowly started to understand why those things do what they do with like exactly the way I tell it to do things. And sometimes you can literally ask. You can even even last year, like I for this project, the last project, like CloudBot, I feel like a human merge button because the community is like blowing up and all I do is like reviewing PRs. I I I have very little time to actually write code myself anymore.

And in the beginning, it would often like just cherry-pick things and would close the PR. And I was like, "So annoyed. So was I'm like, why are you doing this?" Yeah. When you say this and this, I interpret this this and this. It was like, ah, like I I learned the language of the machine a little bit more. I tweaked my my prompting. And now I get exactly what I want because it's it's a skill like any other skill.

Yeah. And this is like Simon Wilson has been saying the same thing. Even though he's been using it for for years. And I think everyone, I think once I start to use it, I also realize like, I'm not, I'm okay at it, but I I I could do better. What if we put this to a real test? Cuz I think it's fair to say that right now you're building CloudBot, which is a, you know, it's not something that generates revenue. There's a lot of users and it's blowing up and it's it's a really cool tool, but it's not PSPDFKit, which is a business that it's a lot of revenue is hinging over it. If today, you know, we just wiped PSPDFKit, does not exist, you need to rebuild PSPDFKit. You now have these agents. How differently would it look? How much would you trust it? What would you delegate? What you would you validate? And when you know you built up a team around it because now it's a profitable business, at the very least, you need to hire sales people. What how do you think the team would look different today with that same product? Cuz you you know exactly what it took to build it and you also know what these tools can do today.

I could easily run a company with 30% of the people. It would probably be quite difficult to find people on that level, but you you want you want to have really senior engineers that really understand what they build, but that are also comfortable in in delegating and know which parts are actually important to to work on and which parts I can vibe. That's still something I don't see. I don't see a lot like like especially in the AI world, there is so much crap on Twitter. There's there's so many people that are loud but clearly have no clue what they're doing. There's there's so many there's so many dumb concepts around. Like I'm sorry, but the Ralph Wigum one, GH, like this is again another another silliness. People use to work around uh model limitations of of of Opus that you don't even need when you use Codex. There's there's maybe a few cases where you have a really long list of individual tasks that can be automated, but that's usually not how software building works. So there's these people who I see so many people building up this elaborated orchestration layers and then you have like beats that automatically creates tickets and then your agent does tickets and then your agent emails the other agent and then you build up this this elaborate mess. What for? Oh yeah, they did they design the the spec for like a few hours and then you just like the machine builds it in the whole day. I don't I don't believe this works. Like like this is this is this is the waterfall model of software building. This we learned long ago that this doesn't work. Like yes, people work differently and maybe it does work for some. I just I just I don't see how this how this could work for me. Like I I have to start with an idea and often I purposefully underprompt the agent so it would do something that would give me new ideas. You like maybe like 80% of the things I assumed were like crap, but like there were like two things like, "Oh, I didn't think about that way."

Mhm.

And then I I iterate and and and shape the project. And I have to I have to click it. I have to like I have to feel it. I feel I feel to make good software. I you know, one thing those those things often lack is taste. I have to feel like how does this feature feel? And the beauty now is that features are so easy, I can just like throw it away or like reprompt it. My building model is usually very much forward. It's very rarely that I actually revert and have to go back. It's just like, "Okay, no, then let's change this. No, let's do this." It's like it's like shaping. I I love how this like you start with a rock and then you like chisel away at it and like pick different areas and and then slowly like this statue emerges out of out of marble. That's that's how I see that's how I see building something.

I guess reflecting on how software engineering is changing. This seems like a change because before before we had AI or any of these agents, upfront planning did make a difference. you know, writing at PSPDFKit, you insisted I think to have a proposal where people put a lot of thought up front to specify and do all because it was expensive to I guess to build to to do. Do you think this is changing because of the the cost of just writing code is is going down?

I mean, I still I still plan and I but.

You still do? Yes.

But I don't put as much into it because I it's now so much easier to just like try and look at the results and then see if, "Oh yeah, this this shape could work," or "No, we have to like tweaking." And even even like, "Oh, no, we have to like do it a completely different way." Isn't so much cheaper that it's to me it became much more playful.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess cuz cuz like, you know, when you're working, even if you have like a new grad on the team or an intern, you know, you give them something, they work it for a day or two. Now you give them another. It's another day or two. You know, and and we're not talking days here. We're talking minutes or like if it's a long-running task, like 10, 20 minutes at at worst. Plus, you're not just waiting on that thing. You have parallel things running. So, it's not that much of a waste, if you will.

In in in in CloudCode, at the beginning, I had this assumption of like one agent and then eventually changed to multiple agents. And there was the assumption of like one provider, like WhatsApp. And now it's multiple ones. And changing that was like such a pain. Would would have been such a pain if I would have written it myself because you have to weave in literally everything through the whole logic of the application. And yeah, it took Codex like three hours. It would have taken me like two weeks, you know? So so that upfront planning. I I could have realized that in the beginning, but now I I know that like I can just change things. And it's it's much it's much easier to work down your technical debt or your, you know, you evolve how you think about a project as you build a project. That's why I don't believe in I don't know things like Gas Town where like you write up the spec and then it builds itself and then it's done. How can you even know what you want to build before you built it? you learn so much in the process of building it that will go back into your thinking of how this how the system actually will end up being. To me, this is very much it is very much a circle um until I you don't I don't you don't walk up the mountain like this. You go you go around. And sometimes you like you you stray off a little bit of path, but but eventually you you you reach the top. That's that's how I feel.

So then, you know, you've been building CloudBot for what, like two months, three months non-stop upish or or like like how long?

Let me let me let's switch a little bit gear. So, one of the ideas that got me back was even even in in April, May was I I wanted to have this hyper-personal assistant. And not like not like one that sends you a good morning email. "Oh, these are your three tasks." No, one that has a really deep understanding of me. And doesn't just, I don't know, I meet a friend and then and then when I go home, it would ping me, "Hey, how was how was that meeting?" Or one that would wake me up one day and say, "Hey, you haven't texted Thomas in 3 weeks and I noticed he's he's in town right now because I checked his Instagram account. Do you want to say hi?" Or something that says, "Hey, I noticed every time you meet that and that person, you're sad. Why is that?" Like something something that is deeply personal. Um, like almost the the anti-Orem. It's kind of like the movie Her, but but that's where the technology is going. Those models are really good at understanding text. the the bigger the context is, the more patterns they see. And even though they're like matrix calculation without a soul, it very often feels different. So this was like one of these ideas. And I even created a company I called a Mant Machina, like the loving machine. But in summer, when I explored it, the models weren't quite there yet. I got some results that it was like, "Okay, this is like I'm a little too much on the edge of what I need right now." Which it was very exciting because I know that that the state of AI goes so fast that, oh, I can just revisit that in like a little later. And and one of the ideas also was is that I assume that all of the big corporations right now are very much working on personal assistants in the future. Yeah.

Everyone will have you will have your best friend who is a a freaking machine that will understand you, that will know everything from you, that will can do tasks for you, that will be proactive, that will require a lot of tokens, but everyone who can afford it will have one. And of course, this will democratize and and trickle down to like more and more people as as we learn how to build more efficient systems and and and hook up on on chips. No question, this is where the things are going. You see like the first things with like OpenAI who who launched Pulse with some productivity, but we just don't have enough compute yet to offer this as a feature. And also, it's it's quite difficult. My idea always was like, ah, I kind of want something that runs on my computer and where the data is.

It's yours.

Is is actually mine and not and it's also quite scary that like you you give OpenAI access to your email, your calendar, your your dating apps. I don't know if you talk to to your normie friends, but a lot of my friends in they use that a lot to basically have a a therapist. And it it does work incredibly well. Like it's it's a really great listener. It understands your problems. And unless like some of versions of 40 that are like, "Sure, this is a great idea." [laughter] "I want to put French fries into a salad." It it works really well. And I did that too. Like to like re I mean, part of it just is like the the act of reflecting already is helping you. So it would even work if the machine would only repeat exactly what you wrote to a degree. But it actually gives insightful questions. It's actually it it got really good. So I had this idea of this like assistant, but the tech wasn't there. So I did other part. And I I built a whole bunch of fun stuff with like, of course, like I built VIP tunnel. This in your career to become like an authentic engineer, you have this phase. It's a trap phase where you're looping and building your own tools to like optimizing your own workflow. But this idea of like this hyper-personal agent stuck a little bit. And then over the last few months, I I really started I built it. But finally, initially, I didn't even had the the scope that it has now. Like I called it WhatsApp Relay. I just I just I just wanted to do to trigger stuff on my computer with WhatsApp. So, I built like a WhatsApp relay where I had an agent that could do stuff with my computer. And then I I was traveling to Morocco for a friend's birthday and was out most of the day and just used WhatsApp to to talk to my agent. And I was kind of hooked. It it it was guiding me through the city. It was making jokes. It could text other friends via WhatsApp from me. And I remember I was blown away because I in the beginning, the tech was very scrappy, but I I built in something where I could send it an image. Didn't even use the proper thing to send an image. I just gave the the a string and it could do the read tool to like read the string. And then I was in Morocco and was just like just like not seeing it and saying it a voice a voice message, but it didn't build that. And then like like 30 seconds later, it replied to my voice message. I'm like, "How the did you do that?" Oh, yeah. You sent me a file. And and then I looked at the header and I found that it's OG. So, I used FFmpeg to convert it. And then I I looked for Whisper on your computer, but it's not installed. But I found the OpenAI key. So, I did a curl to open server, let it translate. And I'm like, "Holy cow." like this was Opus 4.5 and it's so incredibly resourceful. Like you just did this. You know, other people say, "Oh, you need a skill or some system." No, just like it just figured it out. I slowly got hooked on the thing. I I used it. I used it to wake me up. And it was running. It was running on my Mac Studio in London and was connecting over SSH to my MacBook in in Morocco. And was turning on the music and making it louder, louder, is because I didn't reply. And to make that work, I I added a heartbeat. So, which in a way is insane from a security perspective. You have a model that you prompt with, "Do something cool and surprise me." [laughter] That you send every few minutes to make it proactive and like go through your task list. Uh, like probably the most expensive alarm clock ever. But it was just hilarious. And also the text it sends, like cuz I was I had a balloon fart and it it knew that I had to wake up very early and I didn't reply and it was like.

You could see the reasoning Peter's not responding, but Peter has to wake up. No, no, no, no, no, no sleep. [laughter] Like, I, it was bitching to me, and then I, I showed it to the, the, the friends I was with, and everybody was like, hooked. Like, this is something magical, and I was hooked too.

Um, and then I, I, I went on Twitter and I got the most muted responses, 'cause nobody would get it. I feel it's somewhat of a, of a new category of products. Um, that a little bit like your story with, like, you know, when you didn't get the iPhone, uh, from the marketing campaigns on TV and anywhere, and then you had to use it.

>> Yeah. So I, I worked on it, but only the last two months, and it, the name changed from V relay to at some point, a Claude, uh, said, like, then what is this name? Like, it doesn't fit the feature set anymore, because like I had like in there and other features. So I renamed it to, to Claudius, because it's an inside joke because I like Doctor Who. I felt Cloudbot is, is a better name, has a better domain, and explained the product better. So I did on all the domains, and then I, I also quietly built up my army, because to make this work, you want, you want everything to be a CLI. So I was just building CLIs for everything, like for Google, for my bed, for lamps, for music.

>> Why CLIs? Why not, why not MCPs? And what do you think about MCPs anyway?

>> As a crutch, it's, it's, I think that the, the best thing that came out of MCPs is that it made companies re-sync to open up more APIs.

>> Mh. But the whole concept is, is silly. You, you have to pre-export all the functions of all the tools and all the explanations when your session loads, and then the model has to send a precise blob of JSON there and gets JSON back. But surprise, models are really good at using bash. And like, imagine, imagine you have a better service. So the model could ask for a list of available cities and then get like 500 cities back, and then it has to pick one city out of 500 cities. But it cannot filter that list because that's not part of how MCP works. And then you say, "Okay, give me the weather for London." And you would get like the weather, temperature, wind, rain, and like 50 other things that I'm not interested in, because I just want to know, is it raining or not? Probably raining because London. But the model needs to digest everything, and then you have like so much crap in your context. Whereas if it's a CLI, I could use just, it could use `jq` and you could filter for exactly what it needs.

>> But does, does not seem like a limitation that everything is loaded around the MCP in the context. That seems a problem. Like it sounds like it could work if MCPs were not in the context and there was a way to discover or decide which one to use.

>> That's what, that's what companies are building now. But there's still the problem of that I cannot chain them. I cannot, I cannot easily build a script that says, "Hey, get me, get me like all the, all the cities that are over 25 degrees and then, and then filter out only that part of information and like pack it in one command." That's, it's all individual MCP calls. I cannot, I cannot script it.

>> Yeah. But, but I guess this is just a matter of time, because if we think about like, you know, when, when I'm building a weather app right now, I know that, you know, even without AI, I know I need to build up this thing. I need to, I needs to fetch the data. So I will search what kind of APIs are available, which one do I like, which, what kind of trade-offs for pricing, for covering, etc. And then I choose that API and I could chain APIs because I, I could get that result and look up a, etc. So I, I guess this is, you know, like, it, it sounds pretty much we've solved this. So as free AI, we're going to solve it. It'll just take some time, and who knows what the format for it will be. I mean, I mean, I built make porter, which is a, which is a, a small TypeScript thing that converts an MCP to a CLI. So, so you can, you can just package it up.

>> Basically, you're saying CLIs right now are a lot more efficient.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So, so my, in, in Cloudbot, I don't have MCP support, but you can, we make portal, you can use any MCP. You can, you can literally be on your phone and say, "Hey, use the, use the Vercel MCP to do this and this," and it will go on the website. It'll find the MCP. It will load it and it'll use it all, all on demand. Even right now, if you use MCP, you have to restart Cloudbot, which is like very user-unfriendly. So I quietly built up my army to like automate everything, which was a lot of work. Uh, I think T did a video a few days ago where he told me, like, this guy is insane. [laughter] Because the list is really long by now, but like, I, as I was playing with my, my, my agent, I just, I want him to do more and more stuff, you know. I felt it really hard to convey what it does. It's still hard to me. In January, January 1st, just a week now, I did, "Okay, let's, let's try something. Let's, let's do the ins, really insane thing of like making a Discord and then adding my agent to Discord." There was somebody who contributed Discord support to it. And, uh, even though I wasn't sure if I should merge it, and I eventually did. So I put on my agent, who has full read/write access to my computer, in a public Discord. [laughter]

>> What could possibly go wrong?

>> Yeah. It's like, this is absolutely insane. And then, of course, like some people join the Discord and then they saw me, they saw me using the full power of this thing, like checking my cameras, doing home automation. It playing DJ for me. Like I was in the kitchen and I told him, like, "Look at my screen and are my agents done?" 'Cause it has full access of my screen and it can click. So it can actually click into the terminal and type for me, and like, it can tell me, "Your codex says this and this," because it just sees the screen. I mean, I'm working on optimizing that. Like, I, I actually want to stream out it, because would be much, would be much better if it's text, but it works already. Like, it, it's, it's in the background, it looks at my screen and like makes some rants if I do some. And everybody who experienced it for a few minutes got hooked. Like, this was, this was the craziest blow-up from 100 stars to like, what, 3,300 stars in a week. Um, and I think I merged 500 pull requests already. That's why I feel like I even merge button. So, so that's why, that's why I'm, I'm a little, I'm a little all over the place these days, because this project is blowing off and, and, and, you know, the beauty of it is the technology disappears. You just, you just talk to a, a friend on your phone that is infinitely resourceful, has access to your, your email, your calendar, your files, can build websites for you, can like do administrative work, can scrape websites, can call your friends, or can call a business. I'm just about to, to, to merge the call feature. It literally can call a business and like, make, make a reservation for you, and you don't have to think about computation or, or any, all of that context blends away. I have like a, I have a memory system that will remember, um, not perfect. Nothing's perfect yet, but it's already feels magical. 'Cause all, 'cause now I, I walk around, I see like this event, I, I send Claude a picture, it will, it will not only tell me the reviews of this event, if there's a conflict in my calendar, if like friends talked about it, or, you know, it has so much context that it, the responses that it can give me are like so much better than like what any of the, the current tools that live in their own little box can give me.

Well, sounds like you built whatever Apple was hoping Siri to do, but they've been [laughter] unable to.

>> I honestly, I built the best marketing tool for Anthropic to sell them more subscriptions. I don't know how many people signed up for the $200 subscription because of Cloudbot, and like many people already had one and used a second subscription because of that, because it's so token hungry. It's not, is not that it's token hungry. It's just that people love it so much that they use it all the time. And because the technology blends away, they don't see that it spawns sub-agents and does like a whole bunch of things in the background to just make it feel easy. But like, there's some actual engineering, like there's a lot of work in the back, uh, to make it feel easy. You know, this is like the hard part. Like, you hide complexity to a degree that it, it feels magical.

Well, but yeah, but this is interesting, because like, I, I can sense from, we're talking, you know, you put so much thought into architecting this thing, and right now, like, you've been building this for a few months, and yes, it blew up, but in your head, like, do you have a structure of how CloudBot is structured? Like, what parts you need to modify, you know, like, like, you kind of, you can get your, your mindset into it, and you, you know where modification needs to do. You know what you want to refactor, because it's not going to be efficient. Are you thinking about like things like memory consumption, token consumption, efficiency, those kind of things?

>> I mean, token consumption is more like how do, how do you structure the prompt and memory? It's, it's TypeScript that shows JSON around in the end. Let's be honest. Like, like, like I get text from, from an LLM, >> I save text to, to disk. I send text to WhatsApp or to, now we have like MS Teams, Slack, Discord, uh, Signal, iMessage, WhatsApp, and there's, there's two more that are landing, like Metrics, that will, will expand this thing even further. It's like, it's, it's really poly by now. But, but mostly I, I again, I move around text in different shapes, and maybe, maybe it goes to different providers, or there's like, now it's different agents, and there's like the agentic loop, and there's like a lot of configuration, and there's, it's, it's a lot of plumbing, but nothing's, there's nothing in there that is really difficult.

Yeah. Well, but it's, it's a lot, lot of small things, right? Like, I, I feel in software, right? Like, we, we know for software, even before AI, there was not much difficult. Of course, you need to learn and understand the language and all that, but

>> the difficulty is how do I, how do I make it so that it feels magical. So, so what I worked on a lot is now you have, you have this oneliner that you type in that you python your command. I will, I will check if you have Node installed, Homebrew installed. I'll, I'll install the npm package. I do some check if you have any existing stuff, just to like, y, >> just to make it work simple, even if you already used an older version, and everything. And then I, I'll guide you through, uh, setting up a model. But again, I will, I will predict or, or Claude installed. So you can just press enter. So you don't have to think about it. Mostly just press enter, and then you want a WhatsApp, you type in your number, it will just work again. And then, and then I'll ask you, "Do you want, do you want to hatch your bot?" And you can press yes. And then, and then like a TUI, a TUI comes up, because you're still in the terminal, right? You want a good experience.

>> Yeah. So just a toy, basically, for that. And where you, where you to see, "Wake up my friend." And then the, the, I programmed the model, I added a bootstrap file, and the to explain the model that it is now being born to like create an identity and a, in a, in a, in a soul, where like the values of the user are in. And then the model will be like, "Hello, like, stretches, who are you? Um, who am I? What's my name?" You know? And this, this is, like, I've watched people do it, and that's where the magic starts. That's where, that's where they're like, they no longer think about, "I'm talking to to GPT-4.2." No, I'm now talking to my friend, created Vajorn, like a, a unicorn with part of his name, or like, I'm talking to Claude. Uh, and then it's like, "What, what's important to you? What do you do?" It's like, curious. I, I programmed it to be like, curious. And then go through this bootstrapping phase, and then it will actually delete the bootstrap file and create a, a user.md with like information about you, a soul.md with like all the core values, and an identity with the like, "What's his name? What's his core emoji? What are the things that are like inside jokes?" And, and, but it's like evolving documents that it will maintain and like tweak as you interact with it. And then you, it will just like send you a message on, on WhatsApp, and you just, like, suddenly you talk on WhatsApp, like making this flow easy. That was hard.

Yeah. Also, like, even, even get coming up with the idea of, you know, you, you're not, you're not editing the configuration, because the agent can edit its own configuration. You don't have to update anything, because the agent can update itself. You can literally ask your bot, "Update yourself," and it will fetch itself and update itself and come back, like, "Hey, I have new features." Planning the technical giveaway so far, that's the magic. That's why that's why I

>> But it feels it's very similar to what you would with PSPDFKit, right? You kind of blended away the complexity of a PDF. So it was just there. You could rotate, you could do.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Even at the API level, back then.

>> But it's a, it's a bit bizarre, like what, what you described reminds me of this Black Mirror episode I just watched, which is called "Plaything," uh, where it's a, it's a digital little, uh, creature that creates. Of course, it's Black Mirror, so it has a black, >> bit, bit of a dark ending. But, but it had, it was also a game. It also kind of feels, you know, we talked about how you, you don't play as much games, 'cause you like, but this also feels a little bit like a game, right? But it, it's, it's kind of like more connected with reality. Just fascinating how we're, we're, we're pulling back into the, the realm of, of software engineering. So you built this, this product, and it's now, it's a production software, you're merging PRs, people are using it now. Thinking back to PSPDFKit and, and companies that are like that, which have, you know, like, like tens or hundreds of developers working on, on production software, knowing what you know, with how you're building CloudBot and the tools that you're using, how do you think software engineering at those larger companies could change? Because one, one thing I see is, is for individual people like you, it's like AI is really, really hitting a fit. Like, you're making way more productive. You're in control. At teams or at companies that are, you know, have existing code, it's just a lot kind of slower. It's, it's not really okay, people use it for this or that, but, but it, it seems a huge divide between the two worlds. And you've kind of been, you know, CEO for this company. What, what might that be, or is it just more of a timing thing where every new technology often comes with with hobbyists who pick it up, uh, earlier?

I think companies will have a really hard time adopting AI efficiently, because this also requires to completely redefine how the company works. You know, you know, you know, like, you know, like at Google, they, they tell you, you can either be an engineer or like a manager, but or you want to also like define how the UI looks. That role doesn't exist, because either you, like, you build it, or you, you design it. But this new world needs people that that have a, a product vision, that that can be able to do everything, and you need like far fewer of them, but ultimately just very high agency and, and, and high competency people. But you can, you can like probably like trim the company down to like 30%. Which is very scary, because like, I mean, economically, this will all, this will all lead into a fiasco. Um, and a lot of people will like have trouble finding a, a place in this new world, but I'm not the least surprised that current companies cannot very successfully use AI. I mean, they do to a degree, but you, you have to do a big refactor first, you know, like not just on your codebase, but also on your company. I design even on codebases, I design the codebase not so it's, it's useful, it's easy for me, so that it has to be easy for the agent. I optimize for different things, not always the things that I prefer, but the things I know work the best and, and, and have the, the least friction for those models, because I just want to move faster. And ultimately, they have to deal with the code, not me. I had, I deal with the, the overall structure and architecture, and I can still do that in the way that I like. Everything has to be resold, you know, pull requests, uh, I see them more as prompt requests now. Like, I don't, I, I somebody opens a pull request, I don't, I lot, I do say thanks, and I think about the feature, and then with my agent, we start off with the PR, and then I'll design the feature as I see fit. The agent rarely reuses, like maybe I reuse some code, but it's more like it gives the agent a good understanding of what the goal is, and sometimes it's very useful because it's, it's tricky bugs, right? But I, I basically rewrite every pull request and, and, and vet it in. Also, also a lot of people, let's just say the overall code quality of of PRs went down a lot, because people vibe code, and building a successful feature still needs a lot of, a lot of understanding of your overall design, and if you, if you cannot do that, you will have a harder time steering your agent, and the output will be bad.

>> Yeah. And if you don't have the feedback loop to close it, etc.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So, so I found it highly effective. Like, I know at my, at, at PSPDFKit, sometimes a pull request was like a week in the work, >> and you comment on it, and then somebody has to context switch, and you wait for CI for 40 minutes. No, I have the discussion. I see, okay, how would this affect something like, I, I let the model review. They will already bring something up. I have some, some ideas as well. We're going to reshape it into a form that fits my vision, and then we weave in the code. It's literally, there's so many new words I use for like writing code now with those models, which is so funny, like weaving in code into an existing structure. Um, and sometimes you have to like change the structure so it would fit. Now, imagine that you would hire one or two people to make it a small team. How do you think in this world, and you keep want to keep doing what you're doing? How do you think things like code review, CI/CD would change?

>> I don't, I don't, I don't care much about CI.

>> Why, why not? You used to care a lot, like at PSPDFKit, you used to care a lot, right?

>> And, and I still do. There's value.

>> But I, I have local CI. I'm, I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit of DAH now that

>> because, because the agent runs the tests, right?

>> Yeah. And it's just way faster. I don't, I want to push on the, on the, on the back on the PR and then wait for 10 minutes to wait for for CI.

>> Because you waited 10 minutes on the agent already. I, if, if the tests pass locally, we merge. And then, yes, sometimes main slips a little bit, but it's, it's, it's usually very close. Because maybe sometimes I forget the, and the agents call it gate. I don't know where that's coming from. Should I run full gate? So now I call it gate with G, full gate is like linting and building and, and checking and running all the tests. And I almost think it, like, because it's a, it's a wall, you know, like, it's like he calls the linter and like the builder and the tester. It's almost like a gate before my code goes out. So I know obviously, like, okay, once you're done, like, commit this, run full gate. Like, I'm, I'm slowly adopting their language. But, and if you hired like one more person to work on this, you probably wouldn't do code reviews either. That's what I'm sensing. You would, you'll probably trust this person to run, like, like pick up your working style, right?

>> Even in Discord, we don't, we don't talk code. We talk about architecture, like big decisions. Like, you still need to have style. Like, there was like this one pull request that adds voice calling. So now, like, literally I can tell Claude, "Hey, can you call this restaurant and, and, and, and reserve your seats?" And it, it can do that. But it, it, it's a big, it's quite a big new module that like touches a lot of places. I'm like, "You have to have this feeling, is like this, like I got a little, this is like I want to merge this, but oh, this is becoming bloatware." So I, so I had this idea of like, uh, "Let's, my typical way, let's make a CLI out of it." And I already had a project where I tried to solve something like this, but I'm finished. So I opened up Codex and said, "Hey, look at this PR. Look at this project. Could we weave this feature in?" I again say weave. I'm like, "So I'm, >> let's keep it. >> Could we weave this feature into the CLI? What are the ups and downsides?" And then would like tell me like, "Oh yeah, I could do this and this and this." They give me honest opinion. Would this to me, this sounds like it actually, it would fit into the project. I was like, and was like, "Yeah, you would get this and this benefits that we cannot do if the next CLI." Okay, but I don't like this. This is getting bloatware. Could we build a plug-in architecture? And then I will, and do you know like, one of the secret hacks on, on using effectively is you reference other products. Like, I constantly tell it, "Look into this folder because I solved it there, and I solved that there," and all the previous thinking I did to like solve a problem. Well, AI is so good at this, still, to like read the code and understand my ideas. I don't have to like explain it again, uh, or if I explained again, I might like make mistakes that like wouldn't get across was exactly the idea that I have in my head.

>> So in this case, I know that Mario, who does like shitty coding, shitty coding agent, which is like a, actually very much not shitty coding agent, it's called Pi. I know that he had this plug-in architecture that would load >> code via, via GT, and because it's all TypeScript. So I was like, "Can you look into this folder and this folder?" And then it just came up with this really insanely good plug-in architecture, again, by like being inspired by the people. And then that's why, you know, I have this feeling, and then I, I came up with, Yeah, that's what I built last night, basically.

I mean, sounds like this is going to be completely different, like, you know, PRs are, are like in your workflow, you're not using PRs that much, as CI is just different. It's, it's tests are still doing, there's an more important feedback loop. You're using things more like weaving instead of code. You're talking more about architecture and taste. It sounds like a pretty big shift to me. Now, in this world, let's assume you get to the point where you're going to, you're hire the next one and two and three developers on this team. Let's imagine that this thing gets a life of its own, and you know, maybe it's a business as well. What skills would you look for? And what would you advise an experienced engineer right now? Who would you be excited to work with? Kind of either expertise projects would you look for for someone who sounds like who can work in this way or can pick up this way of working?

>> Someone who's active on GitHub and does open source, and, and someone where I have the feeling that they, they love the, the game. The way you learn in this new world is by like trying stuff, and it very much feels like a game where you improve your skills as you get better, like, like a, like a music instrument. You have to like keep trying, and I, and I, that I'm now this efficient and this fast, and I don't know, like, I, I think like the other day, I had like 600 commits in a single day. This is like completely nuts, and it works. Like, it's not, it's not like there was, there was a, somebody did a code review and said like, "Oh, this is actually not slop," and like, "Yeah, >> there's a lot of skill that went into." >> Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's a lot of hard work, but you need to play with the technology and learn, and then you will get, in the beginning, it might be frustrating. I don't know, kind of like, you, you know, you start going to the gym, it's going to suck, it's going to be painful, but very quickly, you like, you get better, and you, and you feel that that your workflow gets faster, and then you feel the improvements, and then you slowly get hooked. So, so, but yeah, play, and, and, yeah, also work hard.

>> Yeah. I, I mean, you're putting in more hours into this thing.

>> I've never, right now, I've, I've never, I never worked more. Even, even when I had my company, I've never worked so hard as I do now. Not because I have to, but because it's so addictive and so much fun, but also because right now I'm like using the moment where where this has traction, and, and there's a lot of people who like are pushing me. Um, and I, I feel, could it be, 'cause I think you have pretty good business sense. Not, not necessarily in the business business, but seeing when there's an opportunity, there is an opening for to get traction, right? Like what you said, for people to work in the open, right now, it seems novel. You're telling me you don't think you could, even if you wanted to hire, you don't think you could hire people, 'cause there's not many people working in the open, clearly using these things. Fast forward two or three years from now, once a bunch of people start to do it, and everyone does it, it's kind of like moot, a little bit. So there, there's also that group that a lot of, a lot of people are worried about is the, the new grads, the, the people with with no experience, who are either in school or about to graduate. Because of course, you've been an experienced engineer by the time this came around. You know, you have a lot of things to build on. Putting that yourself into the shoes of of someone like that, and knowing what you know now, what would you recommend of of activities that they do, things that they build or try, and, you know, like, do you would you recommend on focusing on the fundamentals of software engineering, on this, on the agents, kind of mixing the two?

>> I would, I would recommend them to be infinitely curious. Yes, it's going to be harder to enter this market. It's, it's absolutely going to be harder, and you need to build things to like gain experience. I don't think you need to write a lot of code, but you need to, I don't know, you know, there's a lot of open source that is complex that you can like check out and learn, and you have an infinitely patient machine that is able to explain you all the things. So you can ask, you can ask all questions, why, why was it built this way, to like gain system understanding. But it requires real curiosity, and I don't think universities right now are set up to teach you that in a, in a really good way. This is usually something you discover through pain. It's, it's not going to be easy for new people, but, but they have, they have the benefit that they are not tainted by all the experience. Like, they, they, they use agents in ways that we don't even think about, again, because they don't know that it doesn't work, and by then, it probably does.

>> And also their friends use it all, all the time.

>> Especially, like, like the other day, I, I have this little menu bar app for cost tracking on, on, on Cursor and, and CloudBot, and everything, and it was a bit slow. So I, I was like, "Okay, let's do, let's do performance measurement." And, and my old way is like, I open Instruments and click around. And it just called and did everything by the terminal. It blew me away. I was like, "I didn't even have to open Instruments anymore." And it just like made it faster. And then did like some recommendations. I'm like, "All of that sounds good. Do it."

>> Yeah. I, I think we might be underestimating both, like, how resourceful people entering tech have been, also how young people. If I think about some of the great companies started, they were very young and obviously very inexperienced, but had a lot of passion. So, so that's there as well. Yeah, it's, it's a big opportunity. I, I'm especially taking in, like, it's, I have to take in, like, but all the things you mentioned about just your way, you know, weaving code in, not caring about PRs, not caring about code reviews, it's a big change because these things have been us with, like, again, for like 15 plus years of your life, they have been, in fact, you know, a lot of it has been kind of, you know, solid building blocks of PSPDFKit, right? Yeah. We need, we need a lot of new things. Even, you know, even when I get a PR, I'm actually more interested in the prompts than in the code. I ask people to please add the prompts, and some do, and I, I read the prompts more than I read the code, because to me, this is, this is a way higher signal of like, how did you get to the solution? What did you actually ask? How much steering was involved? Then the actual output. To me, this gives me more idea about the output. I don't have to read the code, or like, if someone wants a feature, I ask for a prompt request, like, "Write it up really well," because then I can just point my agent to the issue and it will build it. So, because, because the work is the thinking about how it should work, and what the details are, and if someone else does it for me, I can literally say, "Build," and it will work. Uh, and I, and then, yeah, of course, I think about. But it will, will re, really, or if someone sends me a PR that are just a few fixes, I told people, please don't do that. It takes me 10 times more time to to review that, and just type in "fix" in, in, in Codex and wait a few minutes. So there's, like, all these insane things that are like, would have been completely different.

>> Even, even at the beginning. Uh, now we have a oneliner, but for the last two weeks, like when it got really traction, I told people to just, just point an agent at the repository to configure it. So, so I didn't had, I didn't have an onboarding, but we had CloudBot-based onboarding, where Claude would like check out the Git repository, read the things, and write the configuration for those people and set everything up so it works, like, set up a launch agent, that didn't have the manual setup, because it was not a priority anymore, because, because agents can now do that for you. And the, and the, and since the product was built by agents, they structured it exactly the way agents expect things to be named, and things. There's certain ways that are encoded in, in, in the weights, how they expect things to be named, and everything, exactly like how they expect. So they are really good at navigating their product. So it was not a priority to work on onboarding as much. I mean, eventually I wanted this magical experience, but it was more important to like, make sure that your message arrives, and that things don't explode. So onboarding was literally like, "Type this prompt into your agent." Um, which is would have been mind-blowing even a year ago.

All right. So to to wrap up, we'll do some rapid questions. So I'll just ask and you tell me what's on your mind. What's a tool that is not a CLI, not an IDE, it can be physical, that you you use, you like, you would recommend?

I buy a lot of gadgets, and many of them dust away. But there's this one kind of crappy thing that was not expensive that gives me almost unlimited amount of joy. And it's like this Android-powered photo stand where I can upload pictures and where like it has an email address, and friends can send pictures, and it will just show pictures. And I, and I put a few, a few in, in my house again. And I mean, even the animations are a little crappy because it runs Android, and it's terrible from the technology, but, but it gives me infinite number of joy because it is low-tech that just shows pictures and reminds me of happy moments in my life. And it was like $200, and I don't know, to be honest, that gets me more joy than the latest iPhone. I bought the iPhone 17, I still haven't unpacked it because I just, in my head, I wanted it, but then I couldn't get around to it because it's just a hassle to like move the SIMs around, and I said, like, basically no, no, no, no feelable benefit. But like, this little, this little device gives me infinite joy.

What's something that helps you recharge outside of tech, like just, or just moving away from from tech and screens?

What keeps me sane, even if I work crazy hours, is going to the gym, even better, working with a, a coach, and leaving my phone in the locker. And then I really have like a good hour where I just feel me, and I, and I'm like in the moment, and I'm not distracted by notifications or tempted to like touch my phone. Like, we need more time for this. Or even sometimes, I, I go for a walk, and I, I leave my phone at home, and it feels very scary. It's almost like a, it's almost like an organ now, you know? It's like your, your body knows where it is, and if you don't know where your phone is, you freak out.

>> I, I'm having, I'm having a blast.

Love it. This is great, Pete. Thanks very much. Well, this was a super interesting conversation. [music] And it feels to me that how one person teams built software with AI is already completely different [music] to what we've been used to. One thing that really caught my attention is how Peter thinks in prompts and not pull requests, and how he weaves in the code and no longer merges the code. He doesn't find pull requests all that useful and would rather get prompt [music] suggestions even on GitHub. I do think we might have to rethink the importance of prompts, or at the very least, sharing of prompts in software development, the more we use AI and AI agents. Another thing that struck with me was Peter's emphasizing how important it is to close the loop. As Peter explained, the reason AI is so good at coding but [music] often mediocre at writing is because you can validate code. You can compile it, run tests, check the output. So, the secret to making AI system development work well is to design your system to close the loop and have the AI run the tests. Finally, I was wondering if Peter is in the flow as much even when he's not writing code. Turns out he is. He's in the flow more than ever. And he told me that it's mentally more exhausting to juggle several AI agents in parallel than it was just to write code. My feeling is that someone who was a great developer without AI can be an excellent kind of code architect or coding person with AI. This is just a gut feeling I've had so far, but Peter seems to prove it. Finally, we should note that CloudBot is more of a YOLO project than most production apps. So, take the approaches that we discussed with a grain of salt. At the same time, I do think that a lot of what Peter does could well spread to building production code, except review and validation will become a much more important step [music] in those projects. If you enjoy this podcast, please do subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. A special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show. Thanks, and see you in the next one.