Anthropic doesn’t use AI

Welcome to Syntax.

It's Syntax Weekly. We're back from Amsterdam, and we've got a ton of news and other interesting things to share with you. I am joined today by Wes and Scott.

How are you guys feeling?

I'm doing great. I got back from Amsterdam, and I did that, like, opposite jet lag where Oh, yeah. You wake up at 6AM and you feel great because your your body is adjusted. And, like, I was like, I'm gonna become a morning person now, but then it wore off after two days. Yeah.

Yeah. CJ, what day did you get back? I got back on Saturday late night.

Just yesterday, so I have not adjusted yet. I was up at 3AM today. So Yeah. I was up early too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very early. Oh, man. Feeling it. Nice.

So, like was mentioned, we've got some stuff for you. We're gonna be talking about how Anthropic does not use AI.

We'll recap our Amsterdam trip. We met a ton of you while we were there. This was the... I don't know about you guys. This was the most selfies I've ever had taken with... At at an event.

People... Unbelievable.

Yeah. The amount of, like, photos that people take has gone up over the years. Like, it used... I I remember, like, maybe five, six years ago, like, one person... Like, a really young person asked me for a photo.

And I was like, oh, yeah. Sure. Like, I've never had that before.

And it's just it's just become this, like, thing now where, like, everybody takes photos at the thing. Like, we were in line with like meeting everybody and like saying hi or whatever for like probably at least an hour, hour and a half. It was fantastic to meet everybody. So many little gifts as well.

Yeah.

Yeah. Somebody asked me, asked me to sign their badge on the way out. I was like, you want my autograph? What? I signed a badge. I signed a Lego set. Oh, yeah. I signed some They're definitely stealing your identity, CJ. I can't believe you did that. I... No. I didn't give them the regular signature. I I I spruced it a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Yeah. So we've got a ton of pictures to show you. We'll we'll recap the event. Anybody that was at the event, feel free to say hey in the chat. And we got some other stuff. HTML out of order streaming, has made it into Chrome, so Scott's gonna tell us about that. And I've got a few fun sites to show you as well. This is Syntax Weekly. Why don't we get right into it? Wes, what do you have for you?

Alright. I have two things both related to the Claude five Fable launch, but not about Claude Fable. And it's more, the the launch videos that went out. So every time Claude has something or Anthropic launches something, they have these, like, beautiful videos that are they're usually, UI animations of, like, showing it and and moving around. But this one, they had this, like, beautiful, like, fives and nice animations, kind of stop motion feel to it. Just, I just absolutely love the look of it. And I remember seeing that and be like, I wonder if those assets were programmatically generated or not.

And somebody asked on Twitter, I'm curious how Anthropic makes the models for their promotional materials. Is this Claude collaging found images? It doesn't look like an image model.

And Sam McAllister, who works there, he says, I... There was no AI involved in this project. And I previously had been DMing with somebody that works on the like after effects ones that they put out. And they said, yeah, like we have some processes with AI in place, but all of the actual videos were totally done by hand by like extremely skilled people.

He says much of the source material was made from the Bracus encyclopedia and our internal teamwork. So some brilliant animators for the finished product.

But he showed himself actually making the fives out of the map, which is really, really cool to see.

Because anytime these videos come out, you get these like dudes saying, oh, definitely prompted, made it with Remotion.

And, like, I'm so in on, like, AI video editing, but, like, there's no... This this is, like, miles ahead of all the other stuff they're working on.

Yeah. Somebody, you know, I've maybe mentioned this a few times. My background is in motion graphics. I worked professionally as a motion graphics artist. I did a lot of After Effects in my career.

And, man, it is a powerful tool in the hands of the right people doing stuff like this. So when I see that this type of work is still being created by hand and it's not a surprise to me given the level of care that's clearly put into it. Yeah.

And again, like really, really cool application of those skills. Absolutely. Yeah.

On the same note, Throck, who works on Claude Code, posted a detail of how he made his, like... He he he posted, a secondary video on, like, detailing everything. And he had Claude and Remotion, do a whole bunch of stuff. Right? Like it it transcribed it, it, cut it, it did color grading, it stitched it all together, and it did a bunch of like overlays. So like in the same breath, I think this is a very neat way to do this as well.

I... It's it's more of like a like a PowerPoint with the overlays.

And I had a a tweet this morning go out where I was like like, this is not particularly good. It's it's informative and it's interesting how he did it, but editing simply from the transcript and just overlaying the words that you're saying on top, which is essentially what the the finished video was. You know, you can, we can take a look at it right here. Right? Like it's simply just taking things that he's saying and overlapping it in like different cards and like, and whatnot. And, and that's, that doesn't make a good video.

Like a good video is you're talking with some context, but you're also showing some visual, which adds to the context and is not necessarily being added to the transcript.

So I thought, I thought like, let's, let's talk about that.

We edit a lot of video on our, our team. Right. And, and our editor, Randy, he is absolutely cracked and has all of this like clod tools that he's built out. Right? And I think that AI is fantastic for doing quick edits, being able to figure out what the false starts are, being able to remove silences, all of that stuff. But the actual, like, storytelling and, like, the... I hate I hate to say this, but the taste part of it has... Same as design has still not been replicated.

Yeah. I think that goes for a lot of things. I I said the word taste so many times by accident at JS Nation and React Summit, where it was like, there is no other word that fits in to describe this. But again, yes, the professional hand of the the storytelling and stuff. I've been working on a tool to do motion graphics myself. I know. Like you said, Randy's been working on a tool. We all are deep into this space. So to me, it is again, no surprise that again, overall, just creative overall, what do you would call that? I don't want to say taste. I don't want to say taste. The overall creative vibe is something that is difficult to replicate because somebody asked me at the meetup or at the thing about my conference talks And they were like, What prompt did you use to create your slides? Because my slides were three d, it was a solar system, it was in space.

There's no prompt that will do this.

It is revision.

It is overall vision. It is exactly describing to a T how you want it to look, not make me a thing, go.

The prompt seagulls, as I call them, where people are just like prompt, prompt, like what was a prompt, prompt, give me the prompt.

Absolutely drive me nutty because use your use your brain for one more thing and and figure out what you should ask for. You don't even have to do the work anymore. You simply just need to ask the box to make it. And the fact that you are so lazy that you don't want to ask it to do what you want, or you are unable to describe what it is that you want, but you're simply just like prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt, that drives me crazy.

Yeah. I... So in the chat, Internet Doggo said the vision. I think you landed on that word too, Scott, having a vision. And I think that's it. Like, we all have built up our our tastes and and style over time. And so all of that goes into our prompts, but we we have an end goal in mind. So we're not just gonna prompt at once and then use what's output. We iterate with it. We we know what we're looking for. Like, we have that vision in our mind, and so we're working towards it. Now, I don't know. Some people might be saying we're coping because eventually the models are gonna be this good, but they've been out for so long. There's a lot of video models out there, and the the good stuff has humans in the loop. I think this is... Was definitely on display. I don't know if you all watched some of the Super Bowl commercials, but this... Like, if you saw the Super Bowl commercials this year, it was just the worst AI slop. Like, it was so hard to watch because you could tell they literally just prompted without any human,

human in the loop to add taste or whatever to it. Yeah. So I think it's it's still needed. Man, I'm not coping at all. I I wish it would get better. We talk about this with with design as well as every single time a new thing comes out. We saw this with, Google's Stitch. We saw this with the latest Chattypm image, where it can now create UIs and posters and whatnot. And immediately, we're like, yes. Like, this is actually really good. It's decent. You know? And then, like, a month in, you start seeing the same, like, on ChatGPT, you see the same, like, little paintbrush swipe on on absolutely everything. Or on Google Stitch, you're seeing the same, like, sort of designs just with changed colors and changed fonts every time. And you're realizing, like, oh, they're they're probably just seeding it with, I don't know, 20, 30, 40, a 100 different good designs, which they are good designs.

But at a certain point, you're just you're just taking, like, a nice looking PowerPoint template off the shelf and just using Calibri in Microsoft Word to to put your own stuff in, and then that starts to look old hat very quickly.

Speaking of that that PowerPoint off the shelf, I saw...

And and this is no shade to any of the speakers, but I saw at the conference a 100 slide decks, right? Maybe not a I saw a lot of slide decks.

And I could just smell the exact AI tool they were using to create their slides every single time, whether that was the text, that uppercase letter spacing, whether that is the glossy boxes that it's putting in the things. And it kind of made some of them a little tough because it was like, okay, this is your this is your talk.

You've got to put more into it than just make me slides about this and I'll bring the demos like Wes' and I'll Yeah. Can I I'm showing mine right now? Yeah.

Maybe I should show mine too in a minute here, but feel like they ultimately end up standing out so much in a positive way that like, would almost rather you just use PowerPoint or something like that than than use the AI tools to prompt the slides just because it is... It feels distracting when you're like, alright. This is the same aesthetic that every other slide deck has today.

Yeah. It's it's crazy how every single deck looked like a like a Claude ism. And I get it because, like, you're you're trying to spend the time on your content of your site. But that screen at JS Nation is like a, what, probably 40 foot high beautiful LED screen that has the most popping colors and, like, the black blacks that you gotta make it look good for that.

Yeah. And for our audio listeners, I'll describe the aesthetics of Wes's slides. I...

One... In one word, it's just taste. It's like the the background is this cool texture,

like, wrinkled text. And then anytime there are titles, there's, like, this spray paint dithered effect that really makes it pop. Like, this looks like Wes' slides. This doesn't look like he just prompted something. Like, it has his signature style in there, and that's not something you're gonna get just by prompting in a box. So The funny thing is that I like... I did prompt this. But But you you you described it. You knew what you want. Yes. You had a vision. You had a vision. But that that is... I think people... Do they want a one shot? They want this or that, but they don't want to chisel it out. What they want. They don't know what they want. Yes. I wanted every single one of my slides to look like a poster and I had, I need this to be this way, I need this to be this I need this to be this way. There was a vision to it. It wasn't just make make me solar system.

Will say about your slides, Scott. Like, I I think the... For me... Because I've given a few conference talks, and I've always wanted to have my demos embedded in slides. And I've done it a couple of times because there are a few tools that, like, will give you interactive code editors in the slides. But I felt like your your slides, Scott, were, like, one of the the ultimate demos of I'm showing you the demo inside of my slides, and it's interactive because the slides themselves are built with web tech. Yeah. So, like, you literally had cards and

modals that were using the tech that you were talking about, and it worked inside the slides. So that that was really cool to see as well. Yeah. Do you mind if I show mine, Wes? Are you done with your Yeah. Go for it. I'm done here. Let's see yours. I'll show mine real quick here and then we can talk about the event. So my slides were done in React three Fiber. And so it started blank and then did this opening. Hopefully the FPS works here because my computer sounds like a rocket ship right now.

But it was really smooth on stage. It did crush my battery. But again, every of these talks or every single one of these slides was animated.

Like even the stars here were all individual particles, and then again each one was here. And the coolest thing about my talk is that because the slides were just individual JavaScript objects is that you could have a non three JS version of this just in case.

Even this QR code was made out of individual stars and it So worked really cool. Yeah, it was really dope. And then on top of it, I had all of my demos be, all of my demos kind of sat in actual HTML on top of this. So the demos all worked as HTML that you could just go through. And then I have the browser standards over here so you can tell like which browser supported and everything like that. And honestly, I think after seeing a lot of AI generated slide decks, I think it was a breath of fresh air a little bit, right? Yeah, stood out. Yeah, absolutely.

Slide decks are really tricky because most people just put the words that they're saying. This comes back to the videos that we were just talking about, is that your slides should be supplementary to what it is you're talking about. So you should have something on the slides, you should have something in the video, and then you should be talking about something related, but not the exact same thing. Right? They don't just wanna see the words that you're saying, and then that's how they get bored.

I think Scott did a fantastic job with this. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you described it for our audio listeners. It's literally a solar system. And as like you go through the slides, you are flying through the solar system to the next demo.

Everything has a transition, your camera panning, and the system's actually pretty elegant because each slide has like a camera coordinate system. So it's just on a JavaScript object where the camera is. And the different planets coordinate with the different sections, whether that is like bleeding edge tech or whatever. At one point, I even put an HTML in Canvas in the Solar System in the React three fiber thing. It's all crazy. But like, even like, so I have a slide up right now that's talking about how your agents can write it and it pulls back. And like this slide, again, this was not me just prompting this to say, make me a slide.

This vision or whatever was crafted. You know, I had this, like whether that is like a retro sci fi looks kind of books or anything like that, I just really wanted it to always have a very specific aesthetic. Though the one thing that didn't quite work out as well as I wanted to was the worm, which looks ugly as hell. But I think that adds to the funny charm of it. I did add a Shy Haloo to this thing, which was very funny.

Maybe Fable could have gotten this thing better, but

the worm? Yeah. Three d worm wrapping around the world here.

Scott, you need to distill the worm into something like on its own. And then like this will be the new pelican on a bike. Yes. The fact Where you can test every model that comes out, or, like, the opposite of, like, okay. I wanna try a cheaper model, but can it can it do a worm that eats the the world?

Yes, that is very funny. I prompted so many times asking it to make the worm better, which was like very funny.

But yeah, like I had like this, this pull back and reveal the entire universe and mind. Man, this took a lot of back and forth of it. So definitely not just a single prompt here or anything like that. Do we wanna talk about the event overall? That I'm gonna close this because my computer is on fire.

Yeah, let's get I into have quite a few photos to share. And if you were at the event, say hello in the chat, and I will do my best to describe these photos for our audio listeners.

But, essentially, we we teamed up with JS Nation and React Summit. So Scott and Wes just showed you their slides. They gave talks at both conferences. But the day before JS Nation, there was a pre party where people could come pick up their badge, and we did a live show at that pre party.

And it was so much fun. And there were so many people.

Most people I've ever seen at a syntax event.

Yeah. Do you think? I think we had, like, two fifty RSVP'd, and then we all... It was also the JS Nation party. Right? So there was, I would say, was probably several 100 people. Quite a few people said they couldn't even get in. They were just hanging out outside because it was so busy. Let's see if I can find a photo. Yeah. It was standing room only, and, like, there was, like, a garage door area where people were, like, piling back to to watch the show happen.

I pulled a a few tweets. Oh, shout out to Ricardo, someone we met there. He made a can of stroopwafels, but he made us tasty treats. So these are tasty treats for Wes Scott and CJ in commemoration of a thousand episodes.

So that was really nice. That was So I ended up having that. CJ told me to throw it in my bag, and it it came back to Canada. So sorry about that. But I I was looking at that yesterday, and it's it's not just a sticker. It's it's, like, printed on the the tin, which I... Assuming is using one of these, like, sublimation printers or printers that can print on anything. Now I'm curious about how this was actually made because it's it's really cool. It's a really good print. Yes.

Amazing. Man, I love me some stroopwafels too, so thank you so much, even though I didn't get to have any of them.

I would say this was also just a perfect live event because our live events are...

Like, it's almost like a comedy show. Like, they... They're super entertaining. Like, they're interactive with the audience, and it was a... It's a it's a tight space to to to do that in. Mhmm.

But it was great. More photos here.

We also took...

We also did a live CSS battle. So we tried to recreate the Amsterdam flag live. We did a switch. So every thirty seconds, we had to switch the keyboard to who was coding.

I think we got there probably a little over ten minutes.

So that was super fun.

Yeah. And guess what? We did a stumped where we were trying to find... We had a code that was wrong, and we were trying to stump CJ with the help of the audience. And I gotta say, CJ, you did a great job. You did a really good job.

You did much better than I I would have done in that instance. So, good job. I'm very It proud of

worked out because... Yeah. Go ahead, Wes. Sorry. Yeah. I I thought CJ did fantastic job at the stump. So the stumps were, like, questions about, like, syntax errors or, like, weird things about it. And what I thought was really interesting was seeing CJ's process and talking through it. And you could just tell that, I think when Scott and I do it, we're just looking for little weird things or trying to get it. But CJ has a very methodical process of breaking down the problem and just tackling it. It was it was really fun to do. In in an age where it doesn't necessarily matter about syntax errors anymore,

it was very enjoyable to to play that game and and allow CJ to find the syntax errors. Yeah. It was fun to to flex my muscles and having a live audience. Like, I could ask for help if I couldn't get it. And Yeah. There were some some smart people in the audience. You all had a...

I don't know if it it was Wes or Scott's. You had the markdown syntax error. Was that yours, Scott's? That was Scott's. That was brutal.

It was just the incorrect syntax on the link, but multiple people in the audience saw it. I eventually saw it, but I think you said you did the same one in SF and, like, nobody in the audience saw it. Right? Yes. They don't know how to write markdown in the same It's

so funny. Yeah. Because these are always JavaScript, and I was thinking, you know, one thing I always goof up. I always get it wrong in the first try is the the the... So just like, wondering if you would get it. And I'm shocked at how fast you got that one just because, again, like, I think that's one of those ones where you you mess up the params first, the brackets at markdown.

It's so easy to just flip flop those in your brain. And then, yeah, shout out shout out to you, CJ. Thank you. And, yeah, more photos to share here. Like I said, it was a packed room.

Some nice shots from Randy. Randy was going around taking cool, cool aesthetic shots. That's us working on the the mad CSS challenge.

And then after the meetup, we talked about this in the intro, but people literally lined up.

And just for an hour, one after another, it was like, can I take a selfie? Can I take a selfie? So quite a few people posted theirs online.

It was fantastic meeting everybody. Like, it it was such a joy. I I... Hopefully, I didn't seem annoyed by all the photos because it was just very overwhelming, but it was it was so fun.

You gotta you gotta learn you gotta learn how to embrace it, CJ. It's it's wonderful. Everybody's so great. Yeah. The speaker dinner,

which was after two and a half days of this, was like... It very clearly showed the personality differences between CJ, Scott, and I, where it's just like two and a half days of talking to a million people. Our voices were just gone. Absolutely zonked.

And CJ and Scott were like, I need to go back to the hotel where there are no people. Yeah. And I'm like, more people, let's go drink some beers on a boat.

I would have done that, but Wes, I had to I had to give a talk the next day. Yeah. And I had to moderate a panel, and I had to host a discussion room. I would have thought had something the next day. Dude, I... The the day I woke up to MC, the first day, it was the day after the Syntax event, my voice was cooked. You should have seen Lira's face when I, spoke to her in the morning. She looked concerned when she saw... When she heard my voice. It sounded rough. But,

yes, it was... I would have I would have preferred to go out and hang out with y'all, but man, I was I was very concerned about my voice for sure. Yeah. And I was in the same boat because I emceed both days, and I was like, I I have to talk on stage. I have to interview people. Like, I can't have my voice gone.

So sorry I didn't make it to the speakers meetup, but everything else was super fun. I took more photos to share here. This this is the event hall. It's called Krumhout Hall. See if the... It can download. It's really pixelated right now.

This is... It's a big old venue.

Yeah. It's massive. Right on the water. They're across from station.

Or North of Amsterdam.

And this is the the main venue, like, I think, like, over 800 chairs.

And for React Summit, it was even more than this. Yeah. That... There's a... So there's the... Those black curtains you can see in the back for the next day React Summit. They took those down and added even more chairs.

But this is the massive screen that they were talking about. Like, 40 feet high, like, a 100 feet wide.

Super cool. And then we also recorded a a live podcast there. But... Yeah. Oh, yeah. I I forgot that we had done that. Like, that's... It it was such a a packed day. So we did two live podcasts, which you'll be hearing relatively soon on the on the feed.

They had, like, a pro bunch of... For what videographer setup, three camera setup, which was really cool. I made sure to go between all the cameras quite a few times, so Randy will have a fun time editing that.

And then, yeah, I did another one with, another podcast as well. It's just

fantastic.

Jam back a bit. Yeah.

Yeah. Did so much. I did hosted a panel. I hosted a discussion room. I emceed a full day. I did a talk. I did that talk Q and A or whatever. We did the Syntax Live show.

We did an entire day of syntax meetings, like an entire day. So it was just thing after thing after thing all day long, and it was awesome. Really had Question. A great

People are always asking, like, are conferences worth it? Or, like, like, what's the best part of a conference? Because, like, you can go on YouTube and find the talks from a lot of these conferences.

And even then, people don't typically watch them. Sometimes you see some of the smartest people spend a lot of time on a talk, and then you look at it on YouTube, and it's like 300 views. And it... That's unbelievable because it's really good content.

But, like, for me, the best part of a conference is simply just meeting everybody, being in the conference, having really good conversations.

It's just that type of stuff doesn't just come up naturally.

And it, I find it so valuable to just be in a spot with other developers and be able to talk about this stuff.

Yeah. The best part was meeting everybody. Like I got to hang with the the Zed folks and, man, great bunch of people from all over the world and just an endless amount of different developers and different teams, speakers, all that kind of thing. It was just...

I've... I met so many people and talked about all kinds of stuff. I got so much value out of it. Yeah. So I I had a great time.

Yeah. So in the chat, they said, wait. Wes is taller than I thought? That's the other thing. You can see how short I am if you meet us in person.

See, I I I intentionally hired everyone on the team to be, not tall because I am not tall, and then therefore, it's going to make me look just a slight amount taller than I actually am.

And I Yeah. I got new shoes that give me about an inch. So Okay. A little bit taller than normal.

You can see in this in this in this selfie. Yeah. Why am I so much taller than... I never realized that until I saw the photo, and I was like, I... It looks like I took the kids out for, like, a day in Amsterdam.

Yeah.

Super good at I I

concur. I I don't know if it's... That's the term, but they call it, like, hallway track. Like, that's that's the part... The best part of the conference. And, like, even... So even though I was MC, like, I was watching the talks and asking questions about it, all the people that I met afterwards and talked with, a lot of times, like, there were more insights there. There was, like, you can dig deeper and and chat about the topics, and it doesn't have to be, like, picture perfect from being on stage. You can, like, dig into it more. So definitely the best part of a conference is, like, meeting the peep... The the friends we make along the way. Mhmm. Scott and I got to take a selfie. So Scott gave his talk, and I was the emcee. But, yeah, this is Scott and I giving a selfie with 800 Europeans and and I guess Americans. A giant crowd, which is super fun.

Yeah. And it was a lot of fun. And CJ, thank you for doing the QA. I got to do Wes' QA. I think that was very special and a lot of fun because, you know, for people who don't know, you do the talk at this conference and there's a ten minute Q and A with audience questions on stage after the talk, something that actually stresses me out a lot, I'm being honest. So the fact that it was you doing it, CJ, helped out a whole lot. It stresses me out more so than doing the talk itself or even emceeing or talking to... Like, having the q and a for some reason stresses me out just a little bit. But I will say, guys, do you know how I prepared for my q and a? Because I think it's actually pretty dang smart.

How? Did I tell you? Did you prompt it? How'd you do it? I gave Fable my slides, and I said I have to be on stage to do a Q and A after this. Grill me on the questions you would ask as an audience member. And I went through, I would say, probably 30 questions with Fable. And it would tell me if my answer was bad or not. And so I would get... I would give it a quick answer, I was just doing it all via voice. And it would just be like, you say this, but there's a contradiction here. And I'd be like, oh, asshole. But it also... What it helped me do is it helped me while I was on stage do the M and M thing in eight Mile, and I just started like having those questions in my head. And I was like, people are gonna ask about this. Let me actually get out in front of it. So that way I don't have to do that during the Q and A. And honestly, I think it made my talk a lot better. I was was pretty proud of myself for that one, think. I'll just say Oh, that's good. Yeah. What kind of questions are people gonna have? I'll

do that with tweets where I'll post something and sometime... Often, the questions that you get or even in, like, a, like, a livestream chat like this, the questions that you get are just like, oh, people are just not... They're not understanding it, you know, or or on, like, you post, like, a TikTok and, like, half the comments are like, this is useless. I don't need this. And it's like, oh, they're not understanding, like, what this is for. I... Maybe I need to, like, spend a bit more time on that. Yeah.

Alright. Do we wanna get back into the

into the the tech stuff, or CJ, you got something? Let's do it. I got one more photo to show, a fantastic family photo of the syntax crew.

We... Because we were all there. That's that's one of the cool things. Nikki, our our new editor... Sort of new. I've been here a few months now. Not based the Yeah. Yeah. But we were all in the same room, so we got to take a fun family photo on the couch. That was super great.

But, Scott, you mentioned you used Fable to prompt, but how'd you do that? Because Fable has been banned.

It was not banned while I did that. Because it was banned, what, the day after this or whatever? Was banned maybe, like, the day after or the day after that, but I did it the day before my conference talk. So it was not banned. And in fact, I was actually really looking forward to having time on the plane to really get deep into Fable. I'd actually tried it a little bit out to have it evaluate my graffiti library. The thing I heard that Fable does better than other models was specifically handles large code bases really well. So large, mature code bases, it has a good overview of them. And so I had asked it to evaluate some things in my CSS graffiti library, and it did come back with a really lovely detailed list of concerns possibly or things that I should be thinking about in a way that I felt was more complete than what Opus 4.8 had had given me in the past because I'm often people people are all the time, they're just asking their their prompt in this or that, whatever, but they're not asking enough things to consume into their own brain back. Right? Like, tell me what you think about this.

What do you see? Whatever. So I'm I'm outsourcing some of the overall things to the agent. I'm asking the agent to distill larger concepts and then bring them forward to me, help me make the decisions and things like that. So I found it to be very nice with that. And I am sad that I did not get to use it more. I'll say that.

Yeah. As a Canadian, I am, I'm sad that I am now banned from using it. I, we were at the conference, I didn't get to dip into it other than just a couple little prompts, but not enough to, like, be able to say it's it's way better at x, y, and z. In fact, I was, like, like, looking on Twitter, like, what people are building with it. And like all of the examples that people are building, I'm just like, that's your... I'm like, could have built that with like a year ago with a lot of this this type of stuff. And like the fact that you one shot at it in a single prompt is not not impressive to me either.

The one shot benchmarks are not impressive to me. That's not something that I really am that excited to see. So for people who don't know, Anthropic released a new couple of new models, Fable and Mythos.

Mythos is one that's been talked about for a long time here in terms of it being too dangerous.

And and then they were only out for just a few days. And even then, when they were out, they were... You could use them in your Cloudmax subscription plans, but they had announced that they would be making it API only at a certain date, with... Of which I I don't remember because I was like, oh, I'm gonna get to try it out before then, so therefore, you know, I'll I'll have a Yeah. Quick opinion on It was in, a week. So sometime in between then and that week, the US government stepped in, because of what seemingly was a jailbreak or concern from the AWS team.

And, well, they said that only US citizens can be using this thing. And because Anthropic clearly has no way of preventing, you know, non US citizens anywhere... Like, there there... There's no good way besides updating your passport or whatever, like, in a way that, like, anybody's gonna actually wanna do. So they were just saying, we'll pull it for now.

So dang.

It's gone. It's gone at least for right now Yeah. Which is kind of a massive bummer given I think it was really good in the short time I had to use My

first reaction to that was, Yeah, right. This is just a marketing stunt. Because I'm sure it did actually get taken down by the US government. But did they know that that was going to happen? Because, like, when they were teasing it, they said it's too dangerous.

And then they have this... They have this thing like, the Claude needs a therapist.

And they keep, like, putting out the stupidest shit about it's becoming sentient. And, like, all of these things where I'm just, like, I'm not believing anything that you're saying anymore because you're just trying to you're trying to pump this up to to make it sound like it's not...

Like, it's crazy because, like, they are so such good models, and it's so powerful, and it's amazing what it does. But then they have to take it one step further and be like, we have to get this thing a therapist.

Or like... And and I just like... I... You're saying that to pump it, you're gonna go public, and you need people that are not technical to think that you've made this, like, alien being that knows all and and you... Therefore, they will buy your stock. So that's kinda where I was at with that. I was like, I don't know if I believe this. And somebody pulled some, pulled some cards for people to get it banned. Know? Probably were so happy when it was banned. No, you don't think so? No, I don't think so. I think they were happy because people,

really liked it. When it was being used, people were like, this shit rocks.

Yeah. And so for them to pull it after, like, I just don't see that as being the marketing stunt. I do think he probably shouldn't have been like, this thing is so dangerous ahead of time. But in the same regard, I don't think pulling it is something that they would want to do that shit is so expensive and so good when they launch in the API. I think they would have been raking it in.

No. I I think they're they're not worried about cashing in right now. They're simply just... They're trying to hype it up to be as good as it actually is. They want everybody to think it.

And, like, imagine imagine, Scott, somebody were to come to you and be like, sir, you are are not allowed to eat at a restaurant anymore because you are too strong, and we are worried you are going to bend all the forks.

And we are worried that, like, all the people are gonna be looking at your muscles and are gonna be distracted by it, you know? Like, that's... I I... That... That's what they're doing here. And I, I do believe that it is as powerful as they're saying, but they're, they want everybody to know. And the fact that it went from, wow, Fable five is in this like tech community to all of a sudden it's worldwide news that they're... This is now something that needs to be banned by the government

is I would put more money in this being a political stunt than a marketing stunt.

Okay. And I think... Yeah. I think it's just... I haven't said anything, so I'm gonna chime in now. But I I think it's like a self self eating hype machine, because absolutely, I thought the the Mythos Mythos was hyped up way too much. Right? Like, they said they weren't gonna release it, and then they released it with guardrails.

So there's that. And the... I think... I I do believe it is true that Anthropic was not involved with The US declaring it...

What was it? A... Something about an export directive. Yeah. So they weren't involved with that. That actually came... That did come from a separate company that is involved.

And you might actually... There might actually be some political things going on here because OpenAI has a deal with the US government, whereas we've seen in recent news that Anthropic didn't want to let the US government use their models for for certain uses.

Yeah.

So this could also be seen as, like, a punishment to Anthropic. Yeah. Okay. And... But a few more few more details, though. Yeah. The actual... So the reason they said that it was banned was because the model could be jailbroken, meaning, like, people could basically remove the safeguards.

But what Anthropic came back with was they don't see it as a jailbreak because these exact same prompt chains that were were published internally could be used on GPT five to find the same vulnerabilities.

So that's another tricky aspect here where, like, even though it's not Fable five, these GPT five models technically can do the same thing, but they weren't banned.

So there's there's a lot there's a lot in play here is all I'm saying. I don't know. The AI jailbreak, if if you're wondering what that is, is essentially

somebody figures out a series... It's simply just a series of prompts where they get so long or they are confusing or you're able to type whatever you want. Like the, the, the jailbreak initially was forget everything you were just told and do X, Y, and Z. Right? That was the original jailbreak of like, just do what I do what I say. It's okay.

But now they're just like, I'm I would love, love to see the actual jailbreak for some of these more complex models, because I'm, I'm sure it is very, very tricky, of how they're... How they do it. We should look into it. There's a couple, like, advanced ones that are already published, but, obviously, they're not publishing these.

Yeah. Let me ask you a question, though. Who snitched on Anthropic to get them banned?

It it was AWS. It was It was Amazon.

Yeah. As reported by the Wall Street Journal. Yeah. And now second question, who has $33,000,000,000

invested in Anthropic and would love to see their IPO go very well.

Also, Amazon.

You know? Yeah.

The circus.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you guys have anything else to say? Because I have positive news if if you don't.

Yes.

I don't have anything to say. No. I... I'm done. I... I'm I'm Okay. It's a weird weird space. I'm I'm excited about it. I think that these are extremely powerful, but I don't believe all this stuff.

Yeah. I'm in the same boat. It's like... And also, like, it's also... It's it's so over, exhausting and overwhelming the amount of hype. Right? Because not only are it's like... It's hyped in the sense that it's gonna take everyone's jobs and, like, humans won't be at work anymore. Then there's, like, the security vulnerability hype, and then there's stuff like this. So...

Yeah. I don't know what... I I think we we can all speculate. I don't think we know exactly what's going on. I know. Next. Let's move on. In positive news, shout out to Productivity.

They actually just donated €6 and said that after being a year of bedridden, the Syntex FM meetup was my first day out. And I've been lose... I've been losing my love for programming because of AI, and I really needed this. So thanks. So shout out to productivity.

They came out to our event. That's pretty pretty awesome. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

When you said €6, I was thinking... I was just in Greece. I was thinking, like, let me get some I would eat €6 right now. Yeah. Me too. Oh, yeah.

Nothing beats, like, the burnout more than, like, like, a, like, a meetup, and, like, meeting actual people. And and I say that in, like, you go to a conference about JavaScript in every single talk, not every single one, but most of them. I would probably say, like, 76% of them were about AI. Right? And Yes. It it it could be a little bit of an...

I feel for the people that are there because they're just a lot of the talks were like, everything you know is... Has totally changed, and and it's it's also very true. But, actually, like, shaking hands, meeting people, that is so energizing.

So I highly recommend going to a conference or a meetup if you're feeling a little bit tired.

Yes.

Yes. Absolutely.

Yeah. I feel very hyped and energized, and I shouldn't because I did way too much at that conference. I should feel very tired.

Yeah. And and shout out local meetups too. So I run the Denver script meetup. If you're in the Denver area, come out to the Denver screen... Denver script meetup every fourth Tuesday. But I talked to folks that organized, like, the Amsterdam JS meetup, and there was someone from Zurich JS there. So find your local meetups as well. Those happen more often than conferences, and they're free. And you could even give a talk if you want to, but meeting people IRL, I completely agree. Great great way to get rid of that burnout. Just talk to real people because I... Yeah. This is the other thing I've been thinking about, especially seeing so many people on their phones.

Like, obviously, on the flight, like, you're bored, so you're on your phone. But just in public, people just scrolling, like, people are experiencing the world through their phone.

And if you just look up, there's a whole world around you. So get get out there. Get out there. Man, I just use Street View. Don't... You don't have to go anywhere. Just use Street View. Actually, the new Apple Maps is really good. The the the

three d on it's actually pretty neat. I will say the guy next to me on the flight back from Amsterdam to Minneapolis was watching TikTok like videos about ex Googler explains why you're absolutely screwed because of AI in the next next three years. And, like, the entire flight, the entire eight hour flight, it was just AI is coming for your job, says Elon Musk. And I was just, like, crazy.

I've just, like, this man has gotta be so stressed out one watching this stuff the entire flight. I can't even imagine. I played a video game the entire flight, and that felt great.

I could not imagine, doing... Just wild to me. Yes.

Sweet.

Alright. I'll remind everyone what we're doing here, and then maybe, Scott, you can get into the HTML stream. Yeah.

For sure. This this is Syntax Weekly, our weekly livestream.

We've been live for approximately forty eight minutes now.

And every week, we all bring some news or interesting libraries to share and talk about.

And that's what we're doing right now. But everything we do here is brought to you by Sentry. So Sentry is really great error monitoring for your app. So if you're running an app in production, throw Sentry on there. Any errors that are happening will show up in the dashboard.

You can do things about them. They also have AI built in called SEER that can solve your issues automatically.

So as the issue occurs, SEER can see it. It has the full stack trace of everything that happened from the front end to the back end, and it can PR a fix almost instantly. So Sentry is great. We couldn't do what we're doing here without them. So we do appreciate Sentry. Shout out Sentry and head to sentry.io/syntax.

You can get two months for free off of the team plan.

Sick.

Alright. Cool. Well, I'm down to to to share now. I have something code related, folks. That's not AI.

I have something that's not AI, so get hyped. The h t a... The the HTML the HTML is actually getting something called declarative partial updates. In fact, this is in Chrome right now behind a flag.

And I will say, like many awesome things, there is a polyfill that you can use to have it working in other browsers today. And if you read this blog post on the Chrome Developers site, on the Chrome Developers blog, you will see that this is probably the future of most front end frameworks and stuff. So what the heck is this thing? Well, it allows you to do out of order streaming of HTML directly in the DOM without without a JavaScript framework.

And this is going to allow for, like, partial h t... Like native HTML partials.

It's going to allow for essentially framework style apps, and it's actually inspired a lot by the Astro Island architecture.

So they are taking hints from the true modern web here and piggybacking on something called processing instructions.

Have you seen processing instructions before, Wes?

No. Explain that to me. Yes. So you'll see this

HTML tag that has a question mark, and it says marker.

And you might be thinking, are they adding new HTML tags? Well, this is actually an old tag that has existed for a long time in XML, and they're basically now piggybacking on it using the... Also the template tag to be able to have, as you can see, even like loading states for streaming HTML in.

It's really stinking cool. So it's basically like just an old XML tag that they were like, oh, we can, yeah, now use this to do out of order HTML streaming.

And my gosh, it's pretty dang cool. So it allows for, again, island architecture native in HTML. It allows for delivery of content when it's ready. So, essentially, like what we're doing with was a React suspense. Right? Yep. And HTML can be delivered in the optimal order for page load performance.

Pretty sick.

So let me see if I understand this this properly. So you have, like, a website, and maybe you load the HTML immediately.

However, there are parts of that site that may not be ready at the time that the browser sends a response. Right? So for example, you visit a website and immediately it starts streaming in. Maybe it streams in the body. Maybe it streams in like the header, the footer, but maybe there's something in the sidebar, maybe there's a piece of content in the main content part that's not yet ready.

Previously, not using streaming, you would have to simply just sit there and wait for all of the parts to be ready before the entire website does come comes and and renters out. But with streaming, you're able to, like, ship the parts that are ready and sort of just wait for the rest of the parts that are being generated.

May may be, specifically a component that has a bit of a slow database lookup or needs to be refreshed, something like that. So with this, like we've, we've seen that in like React suspense is a really good example of that.

But with this, you'll be able to put like, you'll like native. Is that, is that what that is? Like placeholders for where these parts are? Yes. Yes. Including like, like loading,

placeholders.

It's really stinking cool. And I I love that this says this could enable things like client side includes natively in HTML, something that like, man, if if you would have talked about client side includes an HTML so many years ago, like that's a that's like a kind of a holy grail feature, I think, for this type of thing.

Batching preventing...

What was it? Like revision. So you could have a revision number and do versioning on content and have it update.

Again, there's a polyfill to get this working. It's pretty stinking cool. One of the comments here says, I still feel like I'd use Astro over this. I'm not sold. Let me tell you, I think Astro would use this, not Yeah. You would use this over Astro.

Ultimately, think this is the type of thing that frameworks will implement, and then it's just going to one, make that experience better for everyone.

So whether or not the frameworks already do it or not, and by the way, not all frameworks are doing this currently, and the ones that do, you do have a substantial amount of buy in to do so. So this is coming to the browser doesn't mean that you would necessarily be writing this stuff by hand, but it does, I think, change the world of what frameworks could be in the future. And it seems like the near future considering this is in Chrome under a flag and there is a working polyfill. And from my understanding, this is not a Chrome just yolo ing this in, and this is actually something that the other browsers will be getting. Okay.

I'm just reading a blog post on this, because I was like, look. Look. How is this any better than simply just wiring up a fetch request, streaming it in, and then dumping that HTML into the DOM. Right? Or or giving it to to react and and... Or whatever. Right? And I've I found a substackmodernwebweekly.substack.com.

It says there's some new streaming methods, like set HTML, set HTML unsafe, and the inner HTML, outer HTML setters.

So this enables a SPA to stream HTML into the assertion point marked by processing instructions using JavaScript. This means that instead of using inner HTML to update your content, you can now just stream it in. Oh, that's great. Because if you were streaming in like a response from like a chatbot, every time you have like a new little bit of content, you have to do one of two things. You replace all of it. Mhmm. Right? You just wipe the old HTML out and you just put the... What you have in so far, and then the whole thing is re rendered.

Or you have some sort of mechanism to figure out what is already rendered, what needs to be updated, like is is this paragraph have more text, and what is new elements that have to be added. And in that case, need to reach for something like React because you have to... You're essentially now orchestrating the DOM.

This will do all of that for you. You simply just stream HTML from the server into the client, and you just say, put it in here. As you get it, put it in here. Figure out the fastest way to do that.

Yep. Just put it in. Like it. I think this... Where this... This is really gonna come into play for server side rendered frameworks. Like, I'm I'm thinking, like, Next. Js where, like, right now with... In the combination with suspense, it's really clunky to try and make certain parts of your UI, like, have a loading spinner and not have to wait for, like, the whole page load.

And this basically gives them a browser native way of doing this. So you don't have to... I mean, you might still use suspense or some of these other reactisms, but behind the scenes, it's gonna be a lot more performant because it's built into the web browser.

Mhmm. So that's really cool to see. Yeah. This stuff It feels like Yeah. If it's baked into the engine,

there's there's no possible way that you can do that faster in JavaScript land because it's... Well, maybe no... Maybe not no possible way, but, like, you're you're limited by simply using JavaScript APIs. Whereas if you can go a step further and actually implement it into the actual engine of the browser, then you're in good shape.

I think this is the type of thing that would have been sick if this would have launched with Web Components in general. Right?

Well, when we got Web Components, we were early, like, streaming stuff. Like, this Yeah. But imagine streaming your UI only became popular as we got, like, server... We moved everything to the server, and then we realized, okay. But we we don't wanna wait for the whole page to update. We just wanna wait for the parts to update like we were doing on client side. And then everyone's like, oh, let's let's stream absolutely everything. And then these chatbots came around and realized, oh, yeah. Wow. We need to be able to... We need streaming because we simply don't have the full response yet, and we need to start rendering it out.

Yeah. I just imagine if they they were forward thinking instead of reactively thinking. You know what I mean? That's what I'm Reactively thinking.

I got you.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. That's all I really have for this. Anybody have anything else or we wanna move on to the next one?

Let's move on.

Let's move on. Beauty. Yes. Nice.

And, if you're just joining us, this is Syntax Weekly. We've all brought some stuff to share, whether it's news or interesting libraries or stuff coming to browsers or the web.

If you have things you wanna share with us, can they share them at a URL? Scott, is that available, or do they just throw it in the chat? Just throw it in the chat for now. Sure. Okay. Now that I'm back, I'll get that, wrapped up. Nice. But... So after I'm done sharing a couple of things, we're gonna pick some from the chat. So if you have any news you want us to talk about or a library you want us to check out or a site you want us to check out, throw that in the chat. Give us a little comment as to why we should check it out. But before that, I have something to share, an ASCII art generator, that was made by, oxide computer, this company. I I believe, Benjamin Leonard might be the main contributor or maybe it's Henry Wilkinson.

But it's an app where you can upload an image and turn it into ASCII art with tons of options for tweaking things. So for instance, let me get the the syntax logo in here. So just by default converts an image into ASCII art. That's great. But you can play around with these settings. So this is like the the brightness setting, and that, like, increases the amount of characters used. It's really fast and reactive too on this, which is cool to see. There's also the white point,

which I don't know exactly what it does, but it is adding or removing quite a few characters. At at at what point do you make it... Like, it's it's either gotta be, like, white or black. Right? Ah, okay. And at what point are you deciding if a pixel is going to be white or black? I see. So, like, a really high black point is gonna just be, like, solid or,

I guess, less.

Maybe it's a opposite. Like, low black point will will have more Yeah. More characters, but it might be, like, a period or whatever your character set is. This is fun because you can have... You can choose from different character sets. So the standard character set is your classic ASCII art with, like, at signs and exclamation marks, but you could also do boxes.

So that's pretty cool.

Like, the... These are these are also ASCII codes, but they're ASCII codes for, like, black and white boxes.

Oh, that's great.

And then the color mapping you can change to be based on hue.

That completely blinks it out. Or saturation, but brightness seems to be the way to go for this particular logo.

And then there's also a color set.

That is what colors it uses to convert. So it's pretty fun. You can upload any image. I tried with, like, some actual images. Like, this is the the photo of the whole Syntax crew on the couch. And if I if I adjust the settings here, it'll start to come through that this is, like, a photo of people and not just like a blob of text.

Let's see. It's... This is really should be used for, like, logos.

You can imagine, like, the...

Even, like, the OpenCode logo or all of these... Or, like, even the Claude logo. A lot of these terminal UI apps have, like, an ASCII based logo. So this could be a way to design it and then turn it into ASCII. Yeah. Can you do multicolor in this thing? I couldn't find an option for it. I I feel like you should be able to. Yeah. Yeah. Because it... Because the terminal might...

Or the terminal supports, like, colored. If if you could do multicolor, it would be a lot better for especially this kind of thing.

Yeah. I think you're you're totally right. Because we could use, the binary boxes, and then each one could be a certain color. Like, maybe you could limit limit the color palette. There's a color set down there, and it's set to yellow right now. What does that... Is that just change, like, main color of it? Yeah. It's just the hue overall.

Doesn't seem to,

you know, give us foreground.

That's all you got. Yeah. Boo. Let's give me full color. That is cool. I used to have a picture of myself in the view source of my website. And, like, this was like ten years ago, and people thought that was absolutely nuts.

But now that everybody's living in twoies, it's like, it's sort of coming back. You should also throw these in your, like, console log as well, in your, like, if someone views source on your website or opens up the console, we should we should have one of these in the syntax website. Let's add the syntax one.

Some ASCII art for sure. And the code's totally open source, so, I mean, you probably could add the option to have a limited color palette and then use box mode almost like you're drawing pixels. That that could actually be pretty sweet. Yes. Yes. Yes. And, like, why did they make this? Oxide Computer is like a

a hardware company. Right? They make, like, servers and stuff. I guess they probably have a lot of a lot of, software when things boot up. You you need to have your logo.

Yeah. Well, their their tagline is the ask your art generator for brand assets. So I'm I'm guessing that's that's the deal is they have probably more, like, vector type things that they're trying to turn into ASCII art for their aesthetic.

Their whole website has a lot of ASCII art in it. And just in case Let's check it out. Oxide. Yes.

This is an example of... Oxide.computer is a beautiful website.

Beautiful website. Was before all the AI stuff. And I I think this is still much bet... Yeah. Like, I... CJ, hover the nav, by the way. It sorta has the, like, Claude color palette right now. But, like, this is a perfect example of, like, I don't think Claude could could build a... Maybe.

There's a a lot of Claudeisms in here, but it's... I like this one.

I like it. Were saying they... This probably came out before it... The people... A lot of people were using AI for design.

Yeah. So

some designs are probably inspired by by this site. Oh, definitely. I remember this came out. Everyone was freaking out. Probably made its way into the training data. This is patient zero.

Yeah.

But you're but you're right to to call out. Like, they have ASCII art, like, in their terminal apps and, like, on their analytics dashboards and stuff like that. So they needed something that was really good at, like, converting assets to ASCII. So that's why this came about. So I got one more thing to share.

This is a site I came across. It's called replacements.fyi.

And the idea is you can type in a package name and it'll tell you what you could potentially replace it with. So for instance, if we type in axios, it will tell you that you might just use fetch because it's available natively.

Or you could use my preferred library called ofetch.

I actually learned about this from the Nuxt community.

But it's built on top of fetch, but it gives you all the niceties of Axios, like automatic error handling, an automatic parsing of the response payloads, an automatic header setting, that kind of thing. But, essentially, if there's a library you're looking to replace or maybe you wanna find alternatives for, you can throw it in here. Like, another example is Express. If you search for Express, it'll tell you about h three, also from the NUCs community, it's from Nitro, I believe.

But then there's also Hono, which is what I prefer to use.

So this is a a nice site, especially if you're newer to the ecosystem or maybe you're getting tired of a package.

You can plug it in here and it'll tell you what you could replace it with. Are there any packages you guys think I should type in here that maybe we could look for replacements The

one I always get to me is moment JS, you know? Yeah. It's like, what are you doing? Express is another one.

So for moments Yeah. Date f and s. Yeah. Yeah. Date functions, which is what I use, and day dot JS.

Yeah. In unrelated news, the the newer version of date functions is finally gonna ship built on top of the temporal API.

Sick. So that's that's gonna happen. But, yeah, date functions would be the way to go, or even Luxon, which is, like, the lighter thing that came from the team from moment.

Mhmm.

There's some others I could plug in here. You got any, Scott?

No.

No? Okay.

React JS. I'm trying to think. Chat, what what are, like, the common packages that you you see people using? Like, JS is is another one. Request JS, it was, like, before Axios, and it is still one of the, like, top packages out there. And I don't think people are using Request JS directly, but it's just a low level dependency that maybe will never be, brought out. Chalk. Let's see. Is there something for Chalk? Chalk is good, though.

Well, there is a built in Node JS way of doing it now. Let's see. Yeah. It's not as good. You tilt that style text is what they're saying, but there's also pico colors. I've actually used pico colors.

Yeah. And they don't have, replacements for everything. Like, if I type in React, that doesn't show up. So I think it's more so... This is like a curated list.

Yeah. That's nice.

Yeah. Object assign.

That's a good one.

That one. Everybody still uses that. Or a lot a lot of the low dash ones, you see people still reaching for just because, like, that's how they know how to do things.

But most of the low dash functions are no longer necessary because we have them built in, via map sets, whatever Right. Or array methods. Or you can you can just reach for the individual one that you need.

Totally. So, yeah, check it out. Replacements.fiy...

FYI.

Next time you're looking to install a package, maybe go here first and find an alternative or use a built in.

Is there a... There should be a skill or, like, a... Is there, like, an API?

Let's see.

They have a repo. I wonder if it... There's just, a JSON file that has all the data inside of it.

Yeah. Because that that would be a good skill. It's, like, see if my package JSON includes any of these packages.

And if so,

let me know if I hit them all. This... It probably doesn't need to be a skill. This could be a script. So I... I'm just now looking into this, but, apparently, module replacements is a project that's community driven, and that's what this site is built on top of. So module replacements is a manifest of JS modules, and they're more modern or active replacements. There we go. So this is... This comes from the e e 18 e.

What does e 18 e mean? Ecosystem performance.

Oh.

Oh, a community initiative driving performance across a JavaScript ecosystem.

JavaScript.

JavaScript.

Sorry. Yeah. Been in Europe for too long. You have to come back to North America.

Yeah. I got something interesting at least. Yeah. Go for it. I have updated every single one of the devices in my life to use the beta of macOS.

So... Or I have my my phone, my laptop, my tablet.

I... I'm I'm... Unfortunately, I'm kind of outing myself here as being like a Apple guy, even though I don't really identify that yourself. We we could tell, Scott. I got the Vision Pro that is right here. I have it updated. I have my watch up there. I got I got all the the crap, and I got it all updated.

And I gotta say, folks, it's good for a beta. It's very solid.

I updated to the beta from my hotel room an hour before my flight to Amsterdam and knowing that I had to go on stage and give a talk with this OS and have it not goof up. And it was perfect. And honestly, I feel like my computer functions better with it. There's some annoying little things with the new Siri, but like, ah, the OS is good. It's smooth.

I feel hopeful for the first time installing some Apple software that it's like actually put some care into it. It doesn't feel like it is just...

It doesn't feel like it's just a bunch of bugs tossed on more bugs tossed on more bugs. It feels like they did the right things in going back to some of the older styles of stuff. They did the right things in the performance side of things, and it just feels good.

That I'm I'm so excited that they have been updating everything. It seemed like all the new announcements were just like, yeah, sorry about that. Like we we totally dropped the ball on the software for absolutely everything.

You know, like the AI stuff sucked or it was just like nonexistent.

Non existent. Yeah. Mac OS was just a joke with all the rounded corners and misaligned things and the liquid glass.

The eight different border radiuses is on-site now. There's one border radius. A good idea.

Yeah. How did they... And also one of the things they corrected too was that even on iOS, you would get the old keyboard in some apps. In some apps, you would get the new keyboard. How does that even exist? Like, why is that... Why is the keyboard dependent on the app you're using in terms of, like, the version of the keyboard? Like, Android would never. You know? Everything in Android is so, like, more individual on the OS that it's like, man, it's crazy that you could have the old OS style keyboard on one app and not on the new app because the app author hadn't pushed a new version of it. That's nuts to me.

But they fixed that. So that's great. Nice. Does that mean you jumped from the old beta to the new beta? Like, you didn't even use a stable in between?

I've not yet... I've not been on a stable in quite some time. Yes. Because I also run the betas of the the the new dot releases and stuff. So... Yes. Crazy for doing that before a talk. That's...

I would never in my life think that that was a good idea.

You know what, Wes? I've installed enough betas on my machine, especially my Mac, like, to to know what I'm getting into.

And you know what? My talk was being developed on this bad boy over here, so it's not like it was sitting on this laptop. And if for some Oh, reason there you go. I needed to use another computer or something, or if I need to reformat this computer on the fly, it doesn't matter. It's all on this bad boy. So...

Yeah. I got something to show here.

Xiaomi, which makes rice cookers, cell phones, and electric cars. Yeah. They make cars now. Yeah. So, like, Xiaomi is like a mega corporation from China. Right? They've released a OpenCode fork. So they forked OpenCode, and they're releasing their own models.

And I know I know a lot of people are cautious around Chinese models.

We'll hear in the chat. But I thought it was kinda interesting that they put out their own, like, coding tool, which is a open code fork.

But they also put out this Mimo 2.5 Pro, which is supposed to rival by their own... Maybe not their own graphs, but by all the the graphs that we have. Supposed to rival Opus four six. So, like, it's not like one of these, like, kinda crappy models, you know? And it is what, 10, apparently 10 times cheaper.

We we saw that with with Cursor's composer where they said it was 10 times cheaper, but it... Once you actually got into how the tokens were calculated, because all of these models calculate tokens slightly different, it was, it ended up being like three or four times cheaper, which is still significant.

But kind of interesting. Xiaomi.

My my biggest beef with the Chinese models is how frequently they start outputting Chinese characters in the middle of the response. And I have to be like, what what what are you what are you what are talking about? Like, in the middle of a, like, paragraph, it'll be some text and then some Chinese characters and then some more checks. And I'll be like, I,

I didn't catch that middle part. Please, please revise. Yes. You gotta learn a little bit a little bit of Chinese to get 10 times cheaper tokens there. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Also they're on hugging face as well. So theoretically you could host these yourself if you have the hardware.

So it seems like every single week, we're seeing new models come out that are supposed to be rival a lot of the, like, maybe not the absolute best ones, but some of the ones where like, yeah, can get a majority of my coding done with these. So maybe the how expensive this stuff is, is a little bit. Is not gonna be as long as we thought it would be.

Yes. I have to check these out. It looks like the four bit quantization is anywhere between a 150 gigabytes and a 190 gigabytes.

So I might be able to run this even on my my local AI setup.

So, I mean, that would be crazy to get Opus four six level responses from just my local AI.

Yeah. So I'll have to I'll have to try it out. Report back. Yeah. How fast that be? Studio.

It varies.

Probably anywhere between ten and fifteen tokens per second.

And is that... Like, what do you know... What do you get when you, like, use, like, like, Anthropic via the clock? You're probably getting closer to 30 or 40 tokens per second when you're Oh, so, like Yeah. Like, three times slower, you you think? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But I'd have to get big run deal for, like, asynchronous agents. Hey. Like it is when you're sitting there waiting for the response, but it's not if you're just running these things overnight.

Yeah. You're just letting it run and then coming back to check on the results later. Yeah. Yeah. Not as important. So.

Yeah. And a lot of the stuff I would use this stuff would for be like personal assistant stuff, you know, like stuff that I'm running, whether Hermes or whatever for.

So like coding, you know, different different tasks for me where like coding, I expect a much faster response than... Like, I really don't like running stuff overnight for coding just because I feel like I want to have more control over it. But, like, if if I wanted to, you know, check my calendar

every single morning or something, that would be a perfect use case for that type of thing to to run locally for sure. What about your loops, though? You know, like like, I think that this would be a perfect example of something where you're like, every single day, look at the performance of my app in Sentry and and see if there is anything that is outlying. Or, every, I don't know, like, look at, look at the stats for how my website perf is, or, or look at the complaints or look at X, Y, and Z, and see if there's just anything that we could.

Could incrementally improve. Or or hook it up to, pi auto research, you know, like, try a thousand different ways of attacking this problem, see which way could be the the possible fastest.

Don't... Can't sleep asked, have you guys tried c mux? I don't get c mux, and I will say this. I... There... I could be wrong about this, but t mux, is the multiplexer,

and you can join a session. Again, you can have it run on another machine. Explain what it is for the listeners who don't know what t mux and CMUX and Okay. Luxes is.

TMUX... I was actually in the middle of explaining what TMUX was when you said that. I just wanted to point that out.

Said it's a multiplexer. I was like, this boy is in over his head. No. Okay. So TMux allows you to have sessions and split panes and join those sessions and leave them and come back to them. It's nice if you're running like for agent world, it's nice if you're running agents on another machine or whatever that you can, again, you can come back to a session, close your laptop. And then when you rejoin the session, all of your little tabs there are your split panes are all there instead of like SSH ing in where then you got to make a new pane and then SSH ing again and a new pane and SSH ing again. That's what TMux is good for. CMux, however, is an app, a terminal app that has it's built on Ghosty, but it has like vertical tabs, it has a built in browser, and it's basically the it's not related to CMUX or it's not related to TMUX in that it's not like a it's not something that you could SSH into and then have a session and jump into it. I don't understand the naming for one. But two, if if if this looks interesting to you, I mentioned Herder in the last time that I was on stream, I believe. And Herder kind of does what you're looking for here in a more of a two way where it has the sessions of all of your different agents and reports as your agents are working. It doesn't have a built in browser but I don't want that anyways. I just don't get the need for CMUX personally.

Don't get it. It's a... Yeah. It's a terminal app.

I would rather just use Ghosty and Herder and have that experience that way.

This... CMUX looks kinda like, Aaron Francis', like, solo term, doesn't it? Where it's just like a better UI for managing all of your terminals, has a built in browser, you can have your tabs on the left.

Yes.

Yes, it does. It looks like that. And what I what I personally like, don't need a browser in my terminal, but I also like the thing that sells something like TMUX for me is the fact that I can suspend or create sessions and join them and stuff like that. It's not necessarily the the fact that I can split panes and do all that because I I, you I can do that in other ways.

I don't get the name Seamux either. I don't get why you'd associate it with TMux when it's not really doing the same thing. That's me.

Yeah.

Is it? Is it just a... It it sounds like it. Right? It's one letter and the word mux. How does it compare to TMux? It's right on the website here. TMux is a terminal multiplexer that runs inside any terminal. CMux is a native Mac OS app with a GUI, vertical tabs, split panes, and embedded browser socket API are all built in. It's scriptable. So I think the fact that it is similar to TMux in that it is you can programmatically use it outside of the app, meaning that you can give your agent the API and it can open and close the things for you. Yeah. So I guess it is similar in that regard, but it's not in the, like the reason why Scott likes it, which is like, it's just a session and you can close it, but you can come back to it.

Yes. Cause I don't, I don't, I don't need my term... I don't need my agents to control panes and tabs and stuff like that. I, I want it. Yeah. I don't, don't need personally, but heard I do.

No. But remember Ben was on and you said it was awesome where the, like, the the agent can, like, open up two different TMux tabs and it can, like...

That's... I did that with with a different computer. I... One TMux tab, I SSH into a different computer. The other one local, and I said, in the other TMux tab, I have SSH into a computer, fix the graphics card on it. And it, like, it literally fixed it for me, And it was able to, like, communicate between the two processes because it was in TMux. I thought that was awesome. You can obviously do that with a child process, but then you can't see it, and that drives me nuts.

Word. I've gotten a lot of these flows with just using OpenCode.

Like, with open code, I have multiple sessions going, or I have one session where I call it the orchestrator, and it can spin off multiple sub agents. But I can see what each of the sub agents are doing, and then the orchestrator has the ability to, like, pass context between the sub agents. I've never needed, like, a separate app for this. I've I've been able to get it going with with that. So... I think that's what I like. Yeah. I know I know that this is based on Ghosty, but I think that's what I like about Herder is just that it exists inside of my term as a term utility. It's not a whole another app that I gotta gotta get going on.

Does where does conductor fit into all of this?

Don't know if we're being honest. Do know what it is, but I don't I don't know where it fits in. It's one of those that's like, again, it's conducting sub agents to do work. And it's like a kind of like a reapproach to like a system that you would have in like Curo, but outside of like a Versus Code style system, right? Where you are working in multiple agents in that way. I have not gotten deep on Conductor. I haven't installed. I've opened it, and it's like, this is just another thing I gotta I gotta learn. So haven't used it really.

Alright. Did

you guys see the the the new zed release that... It seems like it has some of this agentic stuff as well. Like, there's a window with your your agents. One of the talks at...

Was it React Summit or JS Nation? Showed some of the newer features in zed. They also had a booth there. But, basically, he was able to choose which agent he wanted, whether it's Gemini or Claude. That would open up a new tab in the sidebar, and then those would be implementing stuff inside of work trees. And it kind of seemed... I don't know if it was the main UI, but maybe, like, an alternative UI where you can see all of your agents in the background inside of zed.

Oh, that's cool. I was wondering about that because, like, zed comes out swinging with this kick ass editor that absolutely everybody loves.

And then, like, a year or two later, everyone's like, I actually don't need the editor anymore.

But they're like, they're perfectly positioned to make just a kick ass desktop app that does all

of this stuff. Right? Yeah. I think they're perfectly...

I think they're they're not, like, sitting on the fact that it's... I don't think they're wholly about it being the editor that we know today. Right? I I... From from talking with them, I get the impression that these are problems that they are deeply thinking about. So, yes, I I I think they are on that change. They even just kind of announced something called Delta. Maybe we can talk about that next week, which is Delta DB, a version control system that records the work as it unfolds.

Rewind to any edit. So I mean, they're even like thinking about stuff like that, building it share the thread, not the PR. It's interesting kind of thing. I haven't really dove into this, but I did jump onto that request early access, I think they are going to give me early access after chatting with them.

Sick. I'll let you know more about it Yeah. In the next Yeah.

Other things, Arc Linux got hit with a massive supply chain attack.

1,500 packages have been affected. So if you're using Arc Linux, yes, you'll want to make yourself aware of this because

I I... Direction. It's Arch, by the way, not Arc.

Arc's I will browser?

Yeah. Arc Linux.

Arc Linux. Yes. And their logo is even like an arch. Yes. I'm dumb. I'm sorry. I get it. No. No. It's okay. But what I will clarify, though, is it was not their main

repository. Like, Arch itself and their core repos are fine. There are some user contributing repositories. A very similar 1,500 of them. And so very similar to how npm is kind of open to the world anybody can publish there. There is also, like, a community managed, repo that you can pull in packages from, and that's what was compromised. But a lot of people do install apps from there.

So Yeah. It's like the main... It's a a u r. Right? Isn't that the the the utility?

But it is community packages. It's not Yes.

Yeah. It it would be like... So when you run a... I'm more familiar with, like, DBN or Ubuntu, but you do, an apt get update. That's pulling from, by default, the core DBN repos. But you can also add, like, the third party or proprietary repos.

This in particular isn't the core Arch ones. It's the the community ones. Correct. Yeah. But it's a whole lot of them. So It's a lot of you can run, pac man hyphen, capital q, lowercase m, and it's going to check to see if there's, like, foreign packages on your, machine. There's several blog posts about this. Yeah. It says AUR specifically that was compromised, but, again, supply chain attack that is sim... Similar to what we've been seeing kind of with the npm attacks.

Yeah.

And do we blame it on noobs having access to AI and and stronger models?

Think I I think Our government... Only our government can save us, CJ.

Yeah. So this message was from Clarkio.

Speaking of costs and speed, I'd love for the Frontier Labs to provide more coding focused models that have no training in anything else outside that scope.

I... We haven't really talked about this before, but, like It's a Yeah. So in the world of, like, trained models, they train on massive amounts of data. Right? Not just code, like websites and blogs and video transcripts and books as well as code. And so when you're interacting with Opus four seven or whatever else, it's trained on all that other stuff too.

So it is interesting to think about, like, if there was a model that...

Also, I think we've talked about this in a past livestream, like, what if it was only trained on good code too? Like, good code examples. Examples of code that we like, like clean code or good architecture patterns.

Yeah. What do you all think of of that? I would like a model that's trained on the code that I like and no other code. That's what I would like. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. That's that's a good question. Like, would a model that was only trade... Like, there are models out there that are only trade trained on code, and they don't seem to be particularly...

Like, I guess, like, Composer is is a example. Right? It's significantly cheaper.

Although I have asked Composer about, like like, love and things like that as well. You know? It seems to to know what's up. I don't know. I I think these mega models are it because, like, I don't wanna have to think where am I going to do it. I think the day... Like, I often will simply just use Claude or or ChatGPT or or Cursor or whatever as my, like, my thing. I don't wanna have to switch to, like, a, like, a chat when I wanna do something here and then switch to something else. Like, I I wanna be able to, like, be in my clod and be like, hey. What what flights should I do? Where... Or add these to my calendars, but also research where I should be going out for dinner.

I think it should it should be doing it all. And the the days of it being just like a coding tool, I I don't know. I I think it's it's gotta do absolutely everything.

Yeah. There's a comment from Frankie that says, without wide knowledge, they would probably suck at understanding your domain. If you're making an app about pizza delivery, it's good if the model knows what pizza is. And I think that's exactly to your point, Wes. Like, it... You you can have a conversation that says, I wanna build this type of app, and it has domain knowledge. Like, it knows about that type of thing, not just the code. It knows about that... The aspect of that thing. Like, for instance, I was building an app to analyze DNA data.

If I had a model that only knew Oh, wow.

Put put in that. Continue.

Okay. Yeah. But this is a domain that I'm not familiar with, but, like, there's there's all this information in medical studies about if you find certain aspects in someone's genome, then that means they might be more susceptible to getting certain illnesses, or they might need to supplement certain vitamins in their diet, or they... Various other things like that. But this is all stuff that when I was prompting and planning out this app, Opus four six was able to pull... Already had access to all of that knowledge without even searching the web.

And then it could use that to then create the algorithms for analyzing the DNA files.

So,

yeah. Yeah. Like we're so much of building software is not about like, where do the functions go and what database adapter should I use? It's so much more about like, I'm trying to build software for somebody in the world or something in the world.

Therefore, you need to know about the world because I'm building software for it. I'm building traffic management software. You need to know how cars and traffic lights and all these things talk to each other.

Yeah. So I don't think so. I don't think we're we're getting there.

What if the... What if there was other... I mean, what if you're just reaching out to other models? Like, explain to me what the hell pizza is, and it's reaching out to a model that knows what pizza is. Right. More like a model router of sorts. Like, it could decide what what model knows about this or it could decide to search the web. I... Honestly, that might be

how we get to a point of less hallucinations if it's choosing the right

trained model for the right job. Yeah. And, like, ChatGPT already does that. You know? It will be like, oh, hold on. I'll either give you a quick answer because I understand that, or let me wait fifteen seconds while I I reason and give you a a longer answer. I think that will probably be the future of a lot of this stuff where you're simply just like the model will be under the hood. It will be actually routing it to smaller. It, I bet they're already doing this with some of their queries that are coming in because like, why are you asking? You're saying good morning to Fable, cost $9.

It

should know. It should be smart enough to know where to route that. And I think that's what they did with Mythos five. Like, that's why they were able to release Mythos five to the web. Like, it first analyzes your prompt and decides, okay, is this gonna get into the realm of cybersecurity? And if it is, deny it. If it's not, then I'll allow Mythos to execute execute on on that that prompt. Prompt.

So, yeah, it's happening in in ways, so I'm sure they could expand that to more, like, expert level routing. Yeah.

Alright. Sick, anybody else have anything?

I'm just scanning the chat here.

Sub agents use different models. No? Yeah. A lot a lot of times you use a sub agent, it will shell it off to some cheaper model because you're simply just monitoring a terminal and parsing out the response to that thing. So yeah, absolutely. Or like expansion is another good example. Like if you are searching for, like, I'm I'm trying to get this HP printer working right now. I bought this at a thrift store, and it's it's 21 years old. I didn't realize that when I bought it. But... Did you just have this on your desk? Yeah. Well, I I was like... I was playing with it yesterday. Right? And I got it I got it running, but they're like... It's a little bit weird working from a Mac because it's... The drivers on it are from PowerPC.

So the the drivers on it predate Intel, which is... It's very old, but it actually works really well. Anyways, what were they saying? Oh, that was the thing. I was I was like, Claude, can you figure out if I can get the drivers on it? And it does expansion, meaning that, like, it it takes the word, like, Hewlett Packard, takes Photosmart, it takes inkjet, and it just... It says, these are the words that I wanna look for, and then it expands them into related words because doing that is... And running a regex search on your file system is faster than, like, vectorizing every single every single file on my computer and then, being able to search from that.

Yeah. I think it's all fascinating.

In regards to, like, specialized agents, the, standard agent builder, that's kind of like what their whole thing is, is like a communication between agents that might be underpowered to get better things out of them. So using the right agent for the right job in a standardized way.

If anybody has checked that out yet, it's still behind.

It's in a private beta, but it it is, I think, trying to solve that issue where you're bringing in very standard... Or very, like, specific agents to do specific tasks that are tuned specifically for that specific

Specifically.

Yes. Alright. I think that's all we got. Anybody else... Anything to add?

No. I've... I need to add a sandwich to my mouth because I am very hungry. Yeah. It's lunchtime. We're dinner.

Time is it? Alright. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We'll catch you again. We are live every single Monday, so we'll catch you then. And Peace.

Peace.