Developing for the iPhone Duo

What's up, everybody? It is time for Syntax Live. It is another Monday. I am back from Switzerland.

It was a long journey back. I am jet lagged. I'm on caffeine. I got Tylenol in my head, and I'm ready to go, everybody.

What's up? My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me, as always, is Wes Bos and CJ. What's up, guys? Stoked to be here. Scott just told us... He's not gonna share it now, but Scott just told us the most insane story, which at some point, you'll have to recount it once you've recovered.

Yes. I mean, can do it. Can do it in this dream. It doesn't matter anytime. I can do it anytime. I can do it later in this dream. Yes. Later in the stream. It's diabolical.

We're gonna have to put a big old trigger warning on that story too. I'll tell you about that later. It's a it was a crazy situation, but I'm safe here, and I'm back. CJ, how's it going, man? It's good. It's good. Our first story today is about React, a new release with React so we can get right into it. CJ, I'm trying to introduce you. I'm trying to get you No. Hey. How you doing? Right into it. No. I need to get you a chance to say hello. Zoomers that are watching this can't handle it. Don't

click away because we're talking about React. React 19.3 was released.

It's now available to install from npm.

And there's a couple of quality of life improvements, honestly, that I kind of just think like, why wasn't it this way from the beginning or why haven't we had this? But it's good that it's finally here. First up, there's finally a view transitions built into React. So there's a view transition component you can pull in. You don't have to install a third party library.

And we've talked about view transitions a lot here on the stream. Essentially, you can have animations between pages, It's built into the browser, you don't have to handle any sort of manual animation. You give things IDs, and then they'll animate into the right spot.

So that's built in. And for components too. It just translates anything to anything. Right? If you just have two components and you just tween them between each Exactly.

So this example here is like a video selector. You can see like it's sliding the videos in and out.

The code for it, there's a couple of hooks they expose as well, such as like start transition and you can add transition type.

And from there, you'll you'll notice there's no code in here that is like a CSS animation. It just has some options. So, like, there's from right, from left, to left, to right. That's all you have to specify, and then it automatically knows when that component's being swapped out that it should use that animation. So it's pretty slick, and now it's built in. Another nice one, of life stuff, is about the DOM. This one actually is super simple, but it used to be that if you're writing, let's say, in Next. Js and you have some server side React code, you would write some code to determine is this component running in the browser or not.

And it's pretty cumbersome. I hate it. Yeah.

Sometimes we even have like a separate component for this to like set the mounting state.

Now there's a use API. So you import browser from ReactOM. You say use browser, invoke it, and that will tell React that this component should only run-in the browser, not during server side rendering.

So pretty simple, but reduces a lot of the weird boilerplate we were doing in a lot of apps. And then one last thing, which I think a lot of people are going to like, is you can now have the context API rendered directly inside of server components.

So it used to be that anytime you had a React context, you'd basically have to create a wrapper component, like a provider component, that had useClient at the top and then use that inside of your server component.

And so it's this whole roundabout, just basic nightmare.

Yeah. It's just a wrapper component. It's like, and you'd have to do this for everything.

Now, finally, you can just import that context directly into a server component, and React is smart enough to know that, hey, that's going be a client side component because it is the context API.

So, yeah, nothing crazy, but these are definitely quality of life improvements that I think everyone's been asking for. Yeah. Those paper cuts in React are the thing that everybody gets so frustrated with because you're like, why the hell is it this way? And the answer to those things often is, well, it's that way because we have this incredibly complex, like, nested suspense driven, you know, where you have to wait for this thing. And there's there's all these gotchas with React suspense where Yeah. The reason behind that is because it's it's complicated. And and we we also see, like, that type of stuff pop up as, I guess, synchronous components happen in other frameworks as well. So it's not just limited to React, but it's just so frustrating. We're like, I feel like I shouldn't have to care about this. So I like when those types of paper cuts are are really doubled down and solved.

Exactly. And everybody

can do the browser APIs and stuff like that in React instead of pretending that they don't exist gives it a thumbs up for me. Yeah. Especially like the the use transition. Yeah. So that's all we got. Check it out. You can install it. I don't think there are any breaking changes, just a lot of fixes. So if you're using React, update to the latest, pull out some of that old code, you should be good to go. Tell your agent that start using view transitions instead of whatever awful

fade it's gonna add to absolutely everything.

Bro. Yeah, you're right. Our guidance is now just write a prompt to make this update.

I'll pass it over to Scott. He's got some news about Pi. Hey,

Pi is my harness choice. Of I don't know what you guys have been rocking, but I've been, like, straight up on Pi for a little bit now, and I've been I've been pining it up unless, of course, I have to use Cloud Code, which I do so against my will. I would prefer to do Pi everything if I could. But Pi has announced something pretty major for them. It's called Radius.

So this is at radius.aarondill.com.

We will link this up in the chat and everything like that. And Radius is a way that, well, one, Pi can be supported financially because it's...

You could think of it as, like, a token reselling, like an open router type of deal. Right? So you would manage your tokens through Pi.

But it does a bit more than just being a token gateway.

It's pretty sick, and it adds a bunch of stuff. So, what does it add? Well, it's a, Pinated gateway. So like I said, a model gateway. Right? It does rewrite tools to reduce large tool outputs and avoid unnecessary input tokens. It provides automatic routing to route each session for the best model to the task, so it does model routing.

It does, web search, image generation, and image description, so via their power radius back tools. So, basically, like, you get access to these types of things directly in PIE just from using radius, and then you can get dashboards.

And one thing I really like about this is the artifacts.

So artifacts, if you haven't been using Claude code... Does does Codex do artifacts as well, guys? I I... I'm not up on it as much. Yeah. They actually host them on Cloudflare.

Okay. So an artifact is something like when you ask your agent maybe, hey, go off and design this or or go show me this or whatever, and it doesn't want to do it inside of your code base. It might make a quick document to show you. Right? Instead of, like, showing you, like, wireframes or something like that, it might generate real designs or Yeah. Just generate an HTML page explaining something a little bit more in-depth than One example one example I've had is, like, explain to me how a,

like, a motor works. Right? And you have, like, the pistons going in and out, and it it just made, like, a... It just mocked up very quickly, just like a little animation out of SVGs and JavaScript. Right? It's way easier to do that than try to give you text or

some other crap in a chat. Right? Yes. HTML is truly a marvel. And so artifacts are amazing that they can be generated. But cool things about artifacts often is that they can be shared amongst your team and stuff like that. So they're usually published to a URL that is not just locally.

In that way, you can share them with people. You could make them public possibly or any of those things. So, small static sites that are shareable artifacts are part of this. Record usage, buzz... Budgets, top ups, and shareable session analytics. So this is definitely more of, a team focused stuff. We use OpenRouter at Sentry, and you can see everybody's usage and and, you know, what models people are using, etcetera. So these are, like, required tools for businesses to have.

But you can get Google Works pace access directly inside of pie as well, which is interesting because this is the type of thing I've always done in something like an OpenClaw or Hermes or people are using, like, Grock Bot, right, or these other agent platforms. But, like, since pie is so make it whatever you wanna make it, oftentimes, I I do just open up pie rather than opening up Hermes to get stuff done because it has access to all of my skills and my system, plus it can code and all this stuff. So having Google Workspace access seems pretty sick.

Does does this so this is like a hosted service from the folks that build pi? Yes. And you would then buy your tokens from them? Yeah, you would replace

OpenRouter in your stack or it would replace... What does OpenCode have? OpenCode has their OpenCode Black or whatever it is called. OpenCode Go. OpenCode Go.

So it would replace That's more those of just like a like a clawed subscription competitor Yes.

This would be more of an open router type of deal. Yeah. Okay. And and there is BYO key too if you wanna bring an API key. I'm setting up my Z dot AI API key. Okay. That's... I was just gonna ask that. That's what I want. So I've been setting up. I got this Dell XPS. I'm running Omaki on it.

And I was like, I gotta set up all my... We've talked about the, like, hole. I gotta set up all my MCP servers again. And, like, there's there's some solutions people are working on that. Right? But then the other one was, like, now I gotta sign into every single dude. I have, like, eight different providers, you know, because I'm trying them all. And now I'm, like, I gotta sign into all of them again. And I was like, where's the, like, can I just sign in on some service and then sign into that service at one point and it just consolidates everything for me? Is that that will do this?

Yeah. I mean, I I would say so. I mean, it's like a gateway for agent models and and stuff like that. But what I I don't think it does is it's not good. You can't be able to sign into your OAuth via this for

codecs or something. Yeah. As I know, I know there are like routers that you can like host yourself or you sign into all of your services and they'll like fall over to them. Yeah. It's pretty big in the like piracy community or like the people who sign up for eight trials.

So... Do know about the piracy community, Wes? Because I did a video on

stolen Chinese tokens, Scott. I know a lot about the piracy community,

the stolen token community. Yeah. I'll mention one. I haven't used it myself, but nine router, you can self host it. You log into all of your things and then you just point your coding agents at it instead of directly at other services. And that will use your OAuth stuff as well? Yeah, you can link OpenAI through the Codex OAuth and Copilot.

Sign in with all of your providers. I would love to do that in this. Yeah. I would love to sign in with all my OAuth stuff. The the big bummer, obviously, is Claude. I still really like Fable as far as models go. Like, I still really like using that. So I end up having to SIM link all my settings and stuff across my computers or or, you know, and, like, have, like, a a sync process across my computers. But the... I have found that this... The stinking login process of everything is such a major PIA where I I use it on my Mac. It asked me to log in. I use it on my Mac Mini. It's like, oh, now you gotta log in again. I'm like, ugh. Because it's probably just seeing that... Or you're using it from two different a p... Or API... IPs. So it's like, you know,

doesn't want you to do that. I I find it to be a tremendous pain in the butt. If somebody can solve that, I will be setting that up. So you said it was what, CJ? Nine router. I think I'm gonna install this because, yeah, I I typically do all my dev on this machine, but then I have, like, a... Actually, I have a Synology where I initially installed Claude on the Synology, but then I... I've since switched to not having to install it on every machine and just using a herder and and telling it to SSH into and then Yes. Kind of talk back and forth. That's a much better approach.

Yes. And herder had a big update too that we'll be talking about later in the show. This rewrite rules is is pretty sick. Every model virtual built in or custom owns its effective context rewriting pipeline.

Rewriting can compact repetitive tool results, strip terminal formatting, add context, or redact known secret patterns.

So, basically, it's it's stepping in there to do stuff,

whatever You you want it to would need Radius for this. And I guess to be clear, is it just a hosted service, or

can you also get access to these rewrite rules in your regular Pi instance, or do you have to get a subscription? Or So Pi being as flexible as it is, you can set this kind of stuff up with plug ins and with customizing Pi. Pi is so extendable that you could do probably all of this with extensions. I think the key here, CJ, is that it is a turnkey setup version of this where you don't have to get into installing

plug ins and everything. It's like Yeah. This is not... You give us money. And we're gonna make your experience better. Yeah. That makes sense because, like, PI has always been, up to this point, like an open source tool. Like, you you build it, like, you start start it up yourself, then you hack on it, extend it yourself.

But it's missing that kind of polished experience that you would get even, like, with open code that, like, comes built in with a a web browser. Okay. That's making more sense now because it's it's, like, it's how they're gonna try to make money at least building this thing instead of having it just as open source. Yeah. And Pyrules, you know, I'm a huge fan of it, and I run a very minimal Py setup. I only have a couple of extension

installed. It's funny when I asked this on Twitter, I asked what extensions are you using for PI, and I got so many responses. And every single time I tried an extension, whether that is like, here's one that has, you know, five different sub agents that all have a various task. And then I would ask to do a prompt, and that would come back, like, an hour later. And it's, like, still sending its whatever agent on it. And, know, it was always making my experience worth whether or not it was a better output or not. So I I don't run that much stuff. I do run PI Auto Research occasionally, so I have that installed.

I think I have a... I think that's pretty much... Man, what else am I running on this thing? I don't know. I I don't think I'm running that much else in my PI. So, yeah, pretty minimal setup over here, and it's nice.

Yes. Cool. But that's all I got here for pie. I'll talk a little bit about the herder stuff after we get into some iPhone Duo.

Yes. Alright. I wanna talk about iPhone Duo partially of, like, what do we think in terms of it as, like, iPhone users? And and more importantly, what do we think about it in terms of being web developers? And and, like, what does it look like for building websites on this foldable phone? So let's start just talking about our thoughts on iPhone Duo in general. Love it. Think it's cool.

Explain more. Well, so I've been dying to... I know CJ is the only one of the three of us that's owned a foldable phone.

So, you know, so he has different thoughts there than... No, Apple guys are not interested in anything that... Oh, that's so cool.

Yeah.

Well, I I don't... Yeah. Well, okay. So I've been wanting a foldable phone forever because they've been around for it. And I... The one thing that I hate is the dialogue around that where it's everybody's like, why would you need this? Why... And and I just knew. I knew deep down the moment Apple releases a foldable iPhone of everyone's gonna be like, foldable phones were always awesome.

Even though that's like the classic thing. Right? Same thing happened with big phones. Why would you ever want a phone that's bigger than my thumbnail? Well, okay. Here it is.

I I I love the idea of the iPhone Duo and the thing I think that Apple nailed that... Nailed it more than anything else by waiting, by doing the classic Apple waiting and doing a better thing is the form factor of this thing is the perfect darn dimensions. The passport shape of it, it's so smart that I cannot believe that they were the ones... Like, because everybody else started releasing their passport shaped one the moment that it was leaked, that Apple's was going to be like that. And we know how that goes.

That shape of it makes so much sense to me. And I'm dying. I'm dying to get one. I'm not going to because I just gave Apple a ton of money for my Mac studio.

I cannot justify it. My wife said no.

So I will not be getting one. I kind of like the idea of having something that's a bit smaller.

And then when you need it, you can crack it open for a much larger experience. Like CJ, what what do you... When do you crack yours open?

Well, so I use the... So this is the Pixel nine Pro Fold. I used it for about eight months.

And the killer feature for me was I hate browsing websites that were not meant for mobile.

And, like, they leave off features, and I'm always switching to desktop mode in Firefox. And so, like, the the ability to literally just open my phone, I instantly have a desktop experience, then I don't have to, like, go to my laptop to do the thing I wanted to do. That was, like, the main thing I used it for. It's also really great for working in terminals. So, like, if you do, like, halfway open, you can have your your terminal on the top and, like, typing on the bottom. Because, like, using any sort of terminal app on a regular phone is not enough screen real estate. Yeah.

So there's that. It's also an amazing e reader, so you pop it open, it's the size of a Kindle.

So yeah, all of that, but I actually stopped using it beginning of this year because it's it's too heavy, number one.

It... Like, I used it most of the time in regular phone mode, so I ended up just getting a Pixel 10 to replace it. Mhmm. And then the other thing, which the iPhone fixes, is the aspect ratio. So your your main screen is the size of a phone, but, like, a little bit thinner. So you're actually working with less screen real estate than, like, a regular Pixel 10 or Pixel nine.

And then when you open it, the aspect ratio... Like, if you were to play a 16 by nine video, there's these giant black bars on the top and the bottom. Yeah. And what's the point? Yeah. Yeah. So it's like you can't even experience the full thing when you have the device open. And so what the iPhone Duo got right is it's the same aspect ratio for when it's folded and when it's open. I think it's like a little more or a little less than sixteen:nine, but that means when you're watching a full screen video with it open, it takes up almost the entire screen. I will say Samsung did release their passport size foldable, like, less than a month ago.

So people have been working on it.

Yeah. But Apple... It revealed that Apple's was going to be like this over, like, a year and a half ago plus. Okay. Yeah. So I mean, it's been in the rumor mill that this is going to... In fact, people even had, like, printable dimensions of the exact Yeah. Like, the case manufacturers

leak.

Those are early now. You could get you could get a three d printed one on Bamboo Labs West over a year ago.

But what I'll say, like, I'm... So I'm not even an iPhone user, and I'm excited about this because just watching all of the the little UI, UX details for the OS that they seem to really have gotten right that you don't really get... Like, Android, like, the most... I mean, I haven't used it, again, since, like, the beginning of the year, but, like, the most you get is, like, the app icons come across the bottom as, a little dock Yeah. When you open it. But the... If you look at all of the info on the iPhone Duo, like, they... They've switched around the UI. There's all these quality of life things for, like, camera mode and different things to do with the inside screen and the outside screens. So I feel like, just like you were saying, Scott, they took everything that's happened, learned from their mistakes, and then are releasing, like, a much more polished version of it. So I I do think, like, regular iPhone users, most of them that I've talked to, like, hate this thing. But if you're if you're someone that enjoys screen real estate, if you're a, like, a... If you're a dev, I think you're gonna like the you're gonna like the Fold, especially with all the stuff that they've done with it. Yeah. Is is... So is this for power users? Because so many like

like, I don't I don't know any power computer users that use an iPad. Right? You have your phone. And then when you need to do something that is, like, not frustratingly slow, you move to your your desktop.

And Yeah. We've talked for years about like a...

Like iPad coding. Will iPad coding ever be a thing? And and it kinda is now that you... We have AI and you need less of like a like a rig for it. So I'm curious if, like, people who are into that type of stuff will go... Will reach for something like this and it will be a little bit more of a productivity machine.

Yeah, I think so. I think this... I think you're exactly right. Like, I have an iPad, but, like, I never use it for coding or anything like that. But I did use my Fold for coding because, again, I could bring up my terminal, I could do, like, remote coding from it or remote prompting. And it's it's portable. I think I think that's the other thing. Like it fits in your pocket, whereas like an iPad, you have to have a bag with you. Like, it's it's like you might as well reach for a laptop if you're gonna if you're gonna do that. But with the iPhone Duo or with a foldable phone Yeah. It's kind of all you need. So, yeah, I I think power users are gonna be the first to adopt it, I think everyone else is gonna see how cool it is, and then you'll get, like, the average users potentially using it as well. Yeah. Yeah. I'm interested. I'm interested.

In fact, like, yeah, I was looking in at like trade in prices and stuff like, oh, how much can I how much can I get a trade in? Oh, yes. Yes.

I'll wait for version two and then I'll get it. But it'll get they'll have like the version or whatever. But let's talk about actually coding for this type of thing. Right. Because I initially I saw like everybody bellyaching, oh, another screen size I have to support. Like, we haven't had responsive design. Right. Right. For fifteen years. Okay.

But it's just a little bit different because you can have the front and then you open it up and you have two things.

And there are there has been two major efforts in like the standards world to try and support these devices. Right. There's there's been a CSS, proposal or it looks like this is actually going along, which is the vertical viewport, sorry, the viewport segment API, which will allow you to target a viewport that has more than one segment, meaning that like you have something that is folded, or or is that kind of split down the middle. So that's that's the first one. And the other one is like the device posture API, which is, is this is this currently folded? Is it is it partially folded? Is it is it not? Is it totally flat? Right? Like, in which way are you using this type of thing? And we already have that for landscape and portrait, but, like, imagine you could extend your media queries or your content queries or container queries a little further into this thing is like a burger right now or it's open.

It's it's half folded. Now Is it a hot dog or is it a burger? Hot dog or a burger. Now these two things.

Awesome.

But there has been zero zero. I went all morning searching through.

I went through all of WebKit, their GitHub looking for commits. Usually with this type of stuff, can find commits on the WebKit GitHub of like, oh, it looks like Apple starting to support this type of thing. Absolutely nothing related to either of these two APIs from Safari.

And if you go to WebKit has a page on their website called standards positions where they they basically say, we support this, we do not support this, etcetera. They have not chimed in at all on either of the viewport or the device posture APIs, which is a little bit concerning there.

Yeah. And they did the same thing with the Vision Pro. When the Vision Pro launched, they, like, only half ass supported the WebXVR, like XR, WebXR APIs.

Same thing. It's like Apple's like, let's release a device, and then maybe we'll even consider thinking about supporting the modern web on that device, which sucks and it's classic Apple.

One thing is Jen Simmons. We've had her on the podcast before.

She asked as a web designer developer, what questions have you... Do you have about the iPhone Duo? She asked that, what, five days ago.

And everybody asks, like, are you gonna support these APIs? And she has not replied to any of them. I don't know if that's because she was just fishing for questions, and she's working on some... Blog post or something like that. Hopefully, we will see a webkit.org has an excellent blog on their CSS if you ever want to know what's going on.

And hopefully she's working on, like, a post of, like, here is how you tackle it. I hope the answer to this is Safari is an app and that app is going to be on one of the sides or or full size. You you do not get control over this. I really hope that's not the not the case.

Yeah. That would be a huge bummer to not support But the

I do think, like, out out the gate, we already support... Like, have responsive websites. They they work on smaller screen sizes and larger screen sizes. So Yeah. That's majority the of the experiences we need, just look better when the screen is wider.

I don't know how many things would actually want to do something if the device is folded halfway

you know, like more more or, than they felt like experiences. Yeah. Just think about like like Twitter. Right? If you have Twitter open, you would want to put maybe two columns on each of the panes. You would want to know if the person's device is cracked in the middle and they are currently have it folded over rather than having this, like, weird text that wraps around.

Yeah. And I guess it is fifty fifty and you will probably have hacks of being able to detect it. But if there's APIs that are there, why do you want the hacks? You know, I mean, for me, it's like this view... The viewport segments API seems like such a obvious thing to implement here. Because, again, like whether or not it's cracked and stuff, yeah, that stuff would be fun to be able to play around with those APIs, do some really creative things. Like, the iPhone is a place for creativity.

I mean, when when the App Store first launched and people were were making apps that you could drink a beer out of, Like, I mean, people were doing stuff with sensors and stuff, but the fact that they limit those APIs on the web has always been a major problem. And, like, I wanna be able to have an app that it... That makes accordion sounds when I play with the hinge so that my phone breaks earlier, but I wanna be able to do that on the web.

Yeah. But I think to your point, I do think even just a two column layout is enough because the size of the screen doesn't change as you fold it or unfold it.

So if you just split the viewport down the middle, you can still have that.

It's Yeah. It's a different experience, though, because, like, two column layout, you swipe it, and both columns go up and down. There's there's many cases where you have... You literally have two screens, and you want one of them to to slide and the other one to to not be in there. I think it's it's a different experience than just like, oh, here's two columns. We think that you maybe have an iPhone or you have it wide enough, you know? Because otherwise, we would we would see iPad websites that are just two columns, and and you can scroll them individually. Or, like, you typically don't get that. Right? And I think that this is a little bit different.

Yeah. I do think that, well, maybe people will start building, like... Because, again, like, can build a website with two columns that scroll independently. Like, we we have the technology. Yes. Yeah. But I think it comes down to people realizing that that's a better user experience if you have a wider device.

Because the same thing could work on an iPad or could work on desktop.

I hope they add these APIs, but I don't think it's the end of the world if they don't because websites will continue to work.

I guess they're kind of forcing you to build a native app if you really want to tap into those features. That's a

Yeah. Good

Yeah. I I also think that Apple doesn't necessarily know what the UX for a lot of the stuff is. They have a really great website that is like, get ready for the iPhone Duo. And they have a bunch of videos on, like, how to design and how to layout thing here. Go, like, strike a pose with adaptive layouts on iPhone Duo. Right? So they they've they've thought about it.

But I don't know if they're like, you you have to see how people use it at the end of the day. I think that they are a little hesitant to, like, standardize on something when, like, in reality, we haven't seen anybody outside of, like, a couple Android CJs use these things, you know?

Yeah.

It is a big space. I'll mention, like, the... I was looking at the developer docs for Samsung, and they have entire, like, pages and UI guidance on working with phones that fold.

So, like, work has been done, but I think having the iPhone also have a foldable will will only accelerate that because there'll be more people that want to develop for foldables now. So...

But... Oh, yeah. I agree. Yeah.

Xcode, what, 27.1 is supposed to come out later this month, they're saying.

And the the rumor on Reddit right now is they usually come out on Monday. So if it comes out today, that means we'll have the foldable simulator.

And my my last piece of hope is, like, they're like, psych, we were we're supporting both of these things, but we didn't wanna, like, publicly push it to Safari because then it would kinda give us a way that we're releasing a foldable. I guess that's possible. You know? Yeah.

True.

Honestly, that's it. I I I put my money on that. They didn't wanna release it to the world because if Safari hasn't done it publicly, then people would know even more. Okay. I'm putting my money on they don't care about the web. That's what I'm putting my money on. Think that... Unfortunately. I I did ask on Blue Sky,

has Apple ever kept CSS features under wrap until after the product announcement? And Nathan says, for Vision Pro, they had the benefit of being announced at WWDC ahead of time, so any web kit related features could be announced at the same time. I'm not aware. Yeah. I'm I'm not aware either of any features that were sort of held back

before announcements because it's not a lot of time. This thing comes out in, what, like a month. Yeah. So I mean, with the Vision Pro stuff, the the WebXR stuff, I I know this because I use these APIs in it. They they weren't supported until, like, vision vision OS, like, the second or even third version because for a while, you had to go into Safari and enable them with a flag. So, I mean, even on the release of the device, they weren't there. And then after the first couple updates, you had to enable them with a flag. And it was like, yeah. I mean, this is the point of the device.

You know? Yeah.

Yes. Alright. Well, let's keep it moving then. IPhone Duo, I can't wait to see one in person. Maybe I will someday.

I have phone duo duo two. Duo two duo. Yeah. GitHub Universe. I bet a lot of people are gonna have the duo there. Like, the... Because it's in October. Right? So Yes. All the devs all the devs will be there. Your duo. Show me your duo. Yes. Show me your duo. Okay. We are gonna be in GitHub universe, folks. You can check us out there. We're gonna be doing a meetup too.

I don't have the... What's the link for that bad boy?

Syntax.fm/meetup.

Syntax.fm/meetup.

Check it out. We are gonna be there doing a awesome meetup at this really cool venue that we have done the past couple of years. It's a blast. Bare bottle brewing co.

Bare bottle brewing.

It's outdoors. It's awesome. So come check us out. Check out the meetup link, and then sign up. See us there. It's gonna be a ton of fun. Alright. Next story. What do we got, guys?

Talking about Tailwind.

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on the team plan. CJ, can I just say before you talk about Tailwind, Tailwind is absolutely cooked? It's been roasted by Stylex. It is gone. It is dead. No one will ever use it again because Stylex is here. And that's really funny that you mentioned that because, like, that potentially could have thwarted this acquisition. Maybe

not that much.

If you hadn't heard, Tailwind was acquired by Shopify. So the title is Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify.

I don't really have any other news other than that. I mean, I think for the longest time, Tailwind has been a library that most people are using. Like, AI just poops out Tailwind all day. They also had, what was it, Tailwind UI, which is more of a paid product and it's basically how they were trying to make money in some way.

There was a lot of chatter around just being an open source library when AI was taking off, because something like Tailwind UI didn't make as much sense to pay for anymore when you could just prompt AI to build out those components for you.

So their monetization strategy has always been up in the air.

But now they are officially employees of Shopify, so they don't have to worry about making money in that way.

I don't know what this means for Tailwind itself. Like, are we going to see more features locked behind a paywall? Maybe not. I we've seen Shopify... No.

No. It's just like a good steward for open source. In a time where an open source project cannot make money, like, they they were... It it was a great arrangement that they previously had, which was they make a bunch of money selling, their different products, and then you... The the world gets an open source library for it as well. And then that arrangement doesn't work anymore.

Yeah. So it's cool that Shopify can sort of step in and say, like, kinda need this for the web, you know? Yeah. So we will be stewards of that. They did the same thing with the React Router and Remix and whatnot. Exactly. Yeah. So, like, they... We already know that they can steward an open source project and, like, not ruin it and give them... Give those developers the resources they need to make it happen.

So yeah, Tailwind CSS, join Shopify. The reason Stylex was interesting because we published a podcast about Stylex coming out, and this was right around the time when there were conversations about Tailwind being acquired. I think news about Stylex was like, well, do we need to acquire Tailwind if something like Stylex exists? I don't know. It happened. We're happy for them. Congrats to Adam and team. So I have one more Shopify story really quick, because this is from their blog.

But they mentioned that native is now the future of mobile at Shopify. So Shopify has, like, a seller native app, just various native apps for interacting with the Shopify ecosystem.

And they're actually moving from React Native to native Swift for iOS and native Kotlin for Android.

And this whole blog post basically talks about why.

And they also built some tools to help them. What was this thing called? Yeah, They have a whole section on, like, preventing slop in the code base.

But they created this tool called Helix where they could basically port the React Native screens gradually to native, and Helix would the agent compare side by side to make sure they almost had like a pixel perfect match for migration.

So yeah, another story about how rewriting from scratch isn't the end of the world anymore. And with the the use of agents, you can do something like this.

And it I mean, it used to be that, like, something like React Native, you write the code once, it runs on both devices. If you're not doing any sort of, like, directly native features, it's great. But the moment you have to do native, now you also have to support the native modules for both phones.

And so they're migrating. So fascinating to see.

I don't know if you all have experience with React Native or if you do the same.

Couple of... Conversation comes up all the time.

This was probably ten years ago where Airbnb moved from React Native to native. And everybody said, See, see, see. And then, like, every single conference talk would use that as a quote and etcetera, etcetera.

But I don't know. It's a...

It's one person's experience. It doesn't invalidate all of React Native. Then it it doesn't...

It it may have just been a skill issue, may have been their own setup, but it it may have been also very valid.

Yeah. I get Everyone is valid. Yes, Wes.

Everyone worked. They all have their own reasons for doing this. And I trust they have an engineering team that isn't just prompting everything and using the advice of the prompting.

So they made a technical decision to do this, and I'm sure they have all their reasons to do it.

The... One of the best apps that I use, or or maybe not necessarily best, but one of the fastest apps that I use is the the Tesla app to, like, unlock your car. Right? You open the app, and you need to press the button to pop the trunk. And that needs to be as fast as possible because I'm not sitting there waiting for the app to load before I press the button. It needs to work as soon as possible.

And that's a React Native application. Right? There's just plenty of excellent React Native applications out there. So it it can be done very well. Yes.

I I will say I was... Well, I am working on my podcast app, which is an expo React Native app.

And it hasn't been the most fun. I kinda wish in the day of agents that I wish I would have just done, hey, use Swift instead because it's been a bit of a pain.

I don't know. Yeah. I'm new to the ecosystem. Like, I've never built any big apps with React Native. I've done, like, bug fixes when I was working at a consultancy and then, like, tried to spin up, like, to do apps. But I am building a puzzle app with React Native, and the builds are so slow. Obviously, I could look into it, but, like, sometimes the builds take ten minutes just to get me in a working Android app that I can test out directly without dev mode.

And so that's not great. And then recently, I've been working on just like a companion Android app for my watch, which I'm writing some firmware for. And I did that just directly in Android, no React Native. It builds in like two minutes.

It works well. So I don't know. It's probably just I'm not used to the ecosystem. I could be doing something better. But there are a lot of dependencies it all adds in when you're using Expo and that whole stack. Yeah.

I don't know if... Is Swift any better, though? I think that we're very spoiled as web developers to get this amazing, like, starts in thirty milliseconds, hot reloaded absolutely everywhere, deploy in, like, in thirty seconds.

And

even... I think for me, the thing, though, the issues were, like, trying to get things to look system cohesive Oh, yeah. With, like, the liquid glass stuff, especially, or, like, oh, I need the top bar colors and bottom bar colors or the the new modern stuff to be the exact way I want it. And it's absolutely a skill issue. I'm not a React Native expert. Although at one point, I did do a ton of React Native, and I released a full course on it, but that was, like, eight years ago. So... Yeah. Yeah.

I've been left behind in that world.

You have anything for us, Scott? Yes.

Herder has won one. They raised $6,000,000 in their hiring. So Herder is turning from a little tooie to a company here real quick. And somewhat recently, they launched plug in support, but one of the bigger updates they just had...

Man, they're almost at a million installs here. That's pretty cool. Herder, if you don't know, is a way to run your sessions for your AI agents. People often say just use TMux, just use this or that, whatever.

But Herder manages it all in a really nice and easy way, including even the SSH stuff, including letting you know when your agents are done, giving you niceties, like select to copy and keyboard and mouse support. Yes.

All of these things or at least most of these things are available in TMX as well, but this does it all in one nice little package. And the agent letting you know when your agents are finished and stuff like this stuff is all very, very good. It's a wonderful little thing. In fact, I actually wonder why theirs looks better than mine. Mine doesn't look this good for some reason. I gotta I gotta look into that. Like, the spacing on mine doesn't line up. Either way, the update that they had just announced, which is particularly important to me, allows you to connect all of your machines in one herder instance. So before what I was doing since I have herder running on my Mac Mini, I got it running on my desktop here. I would have to have two different tabs in my term, which would then have the agents that are running on my MacBook and the agents that are running on my Mini, and they're just separate herder processes.

Now what you can do is you can add a machine directly to your Kerber instance here as a remote machine.

And what happens is that they all just show up in one herder instance. This is all really tiny. Let's see if I can bump this up here.

So you can see I have my mini and my local all side by side here in one herder instance.

And it's over the remote on the network via my tail scale network just via SSH. So it was painless to set up. I just ran one command, the machine add command, and all it did is just popped it right in here. And next thing you know, I have my mini and my local side by side. No more double herder here. So gotta love this big big fan of this project. And are you guys using you guys are using herder. Right? But are you using, like, any extensions or anything? Or are you getting crazy with it? The only thing I use with herder is the skill, which is like

pop open a new pain below or open a new tab and do X, Y and Z. And I absolutely love that because I hate it. Like the the simplest thing of, start the dev server and it just, like, starts it in the background and you have no you can't view it. And they're like, oh, I need to look at the logs and then you got to start your own and then the port is running. You got to kill it. And it's annoying. You know, it's so much nicer. We can just say, like, pop open a new one below or even like if you're doing any of this, like hardware, like ESP 32 development, you can just say like, all right, do all of your builds and deploys in a secondary pane that is below or fire up another open code instance. You know, you can like, I am the conductor and fire up three or four different instances and do whatever. Like, was working on my Oh Mashi, and I... There's like like three or four plug ins that I wanted to work on. Right? And simultaneously.

So I had like one, like, mama go in. And I said, like every single time I ask for a new feature, open up a new herder pane, open up a new open code instance, and and go ahead and build it. And then everything will sort of come back to you as the conductor.

Yeah, I did that.

And I told pi to use an open up, pains and I did it very sloppily. I did it with an agent just saying, hey, just have this thing open. And what happened was, pie decided to... Or whatever agent I was running at that point decided to just open up, like, 100 different, herder pain. So there was just, like, multiplying it when when crazy, doing all kinds of stupid things.

Wes, I I noticed something here on the herder page. Randy, can you toss over to the screen? It says, now new to the herd.

You see that one too?

Oh, yeah.

Sent me a DM about that.

Somebody ported the Cobalt two to herder, which is crazy because I thought that it already looked decent in my

my theme, but maybe I'm wrong about that. How many times you open up a website like this or any website and you see Wes's name somewhere on the website for either somebody him saying something about it or

what about what a guy. Somebody commented. This seems similar to Mitchell Hashimoto's super logical.

We talked about this last week, but Super Logical doesn't aim to be to replace, like, the herder, which is the orchestration layer for all of your agents. It it just aims to be like a TMX alternative.

And I think the idea with SuperLogical is something like Hurter could come along and use that as their multiplexing layer.

And that's great because, like, the one thing I I hate in, like, Hurter and OpenCode and all these things right now is, like, the scrolling is absolutely awful, you know? Like, you scroll too far and it's like, oh, everything's gone. And, I much prefer the native scrolling in, like, a desktop application, but I prefer the experience in terminal. I just keep going over the same thing every single time as I'm unhappy with everything.

And I've tried them all. Yeah.

Of course. Yes. Yes. Yes. I got something for you. Homebrew seven.

Homebrew is the CLI for installing applications on Mac and Windows. So it's great because previously you'd have to, like, run, bake, build commands and do all this obnoxious stuff. And for the last probably as long as I've had a Mac, probably 15, you just brew install something and it can install it in there. Now they've released version seven, which a couple of important things, right? Vulnerability checks and advisory database. That's really good because if one thing about homebrew is it aggressively updates for you by default, which is so frustrating. I hate it so much because you you brew install one thing and it's like, oh, you want to install this one little tool so you can get on with your job? How about we update every app on your computer that you've ever wanted to install? Every version of Python you've ever tried? Let's update it. It's so obnoxious.

So that's obnoxious, but it's also a security issue because, like, if if one bad thing gets gets leaked, then we're out. So there's built in vulnerability checking in Homebrew seven, stronger sandboxing,

native Mac OS app. Oh, that's interesting. Yes. Like a GUI? Yes. Don't know if I need that or not. Maybe. I don't need it. Now that I got Raycast, I do it in Raycast, but it's nice that it exists. There is, like, the whole homebrew CASK ecosystem where you can install, like, desktop apps. GUI apps. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I found a third party one a while back. It was almost like an app store, but you just install the apps from Homebrew Casks. So I'm wondering if this is a native I haven't looked at it yet. I wonder if it's a native or an officially supported thing or way to install casks.

I wouldn't mind a GUI for it, actually, because I know I have so much garbage that I've brew installed over the years. Same. I just can't wait to get a new computer because I wanna start again. And, like, I don't know I don't know what... What's in there. And I I I am always running out of space. And I know there's probably some weird, like, font conversion thing that I brew installed six years ago that I I don't need anymore. So I got to figure out how to get rid of those.

I know there's ways to do that inside of homebrew, but a nice gooey of being like, hey, here are some things. Yeah. What's on my computer right now? Yes. Yeah. That's actually one thing. I'm sorry to keep being the matchy guy, but when you update matchy, it removes all of the unused, things that are, like, like, orphaned. Right? It's like, oh, here you you have these things installed, but you're not using them anywhere on your system. Nothing is linked to it. You want us to clean it up for you? And sometimes I say yes because that's nice. Speaking of a clean it up

I'll say. Can I talk about my Azure JS No?

It just made it. So

it works on every Linux... Every every every Linux distro does that automatically. I'll just... Okay. Continue, Scott.

No. No. No. Please. I love this. I love this. CJ, please go back to your folding Android phone. Us Mac guys are excited because we just learned about Linux.

Okay. Great. I'll let it I'll let it be. I I actually do love how many people,

like, respond to any of the things that we do. It's like, Mac, I learned about Linux. I was like, brother, I've been running Linux since when you were in diapers,

brother. Some... Yeah. Somebody sent me the worst burn ever on Twitter the other day. They said that I was a Heroku deployer.

As a way to, like...

I mean, like, these guys who just deployed a Heroku are learning about Linux now. I'm like, please, I've been managing my own servers for like fifteen years. I had Digital Ocean when it was $5.

You know? Yes. Yes. Yes. Get out of When was that media temple? I had a VPS on media temple. Yes. Me too. I bought a static IP on Media Temple. Get

out of I installed SSLs with Komodo, whatever. Yes.

I had the lock on my website.

That's right. But that was a pretty good burn, though. I was a pretty good burn. Appreciate that. Yeah. Heroku was kinda cool when it came out, though, least aesthetically.

I never understood why it was so expensive, but I did think it was cool. Very cool. Easy. Same thing as same as Vercel, man. People are willing to pay for the ease of use. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And good design.

Cool.

What do we want to get into, guys? I was I was gonna talk about my Zurich thing, but we can talk about this personal agent thing you got pulled up. CJ, what do you want to get into?

Sure. I I just wanna mention it and see if you guys have any thoughts on it. So this was announced by Meta. It's called Muse. It's their new personal AI agent.

And this kind of brings almost like a Open Claw type thing to the average Facebook user. So it's like every person that signs up basically gets their own little computer, little VM in the cloud that can do things in the background.

And so you you talked about Grokvot a couple streams back, Wes, and this this feels like that, but a bit more, like, polished in terms of, like, UI and integrations.

And it also kind of feel... Like, I don't use Facebook, but my parents do. They're the only people I know that use Facebook. But it kind of seems like the play to get the nontechnical people into AI agents and so forth, and also maybe a play by Meta to make themselves more relevant again. Yeah. Don't Did you guys see the announcement about it?

I did. It's... It... This is exactly what we need to get nontechnical people, into agents. So I'll I'll give you an example. Yesterday, I have... I've got a Grock bot running on my email that every single time an email from my kids' teachers or from the kids' school or from anything comes in, which is...

We... I have four kids. We we get several emails a day where you have to, like, read through it, they have these awful PDFs that you gotta, like, parse through, and they have all this clip art everywhere, and it's it's it's a lot. So, yeah, I brought... I I made a Grock bot, which it will... Every single time the email comes in, it will parse out all of the needed information.

It will save any of the photos, which is another thing. They always put, like, photos of our children in these, like, PDFs.

And I'm like, I wanna save that, but it's in a PDF.

So it will, like, break them out of the PDF and save them into my Google Photos.

And so yesterday, wife is like, alright, we need to we need to practice spelling. I just spent half an hour making a word search or a crossword for our kids with their things. And she's like, that was a lot of work. And then one of our other kids says, I also would like a crossword.

And my mom's like, oh, I don't know. I don't have time to make a second one. And I just open my phone and go make a word search and a crossword out of both of our kids' spelling tests.

Boom. Three minutes later, crossword, word search for all of the kids' spelling words and printed them off. My wife is like, Holy crap. She's like, That just worked? And that was the first time that she understood that I can't believe that you can just do that. And then she came to me later and she says, It knew that the spelling words were in a different PDF on Google Drive and we actually have the words for the whole year. So it knew how to parse it out just and get this week's. It knew what this week is. I'm like, yeah, it's really good. Right? And that was the moment for her to be like, oh, yeah, that this is really cool. And I think, like, like, who else has a bigger collection of normies

than Facebook? Right? That's it's gonna be that's gonna be huge for them. Now, that all seems fine for them, but could not be me. I ain't running.

No.

Zetter or Zetterberg.

I'm almost called Zetterberg. I'm talking about the Detroit Red Wings folks.

I got I got the Detroit Red Wings on the brain because they own trained Dylan Larkin.

Talk hockey folks. Yes. No. I I I can't. I cannot bring myself to that. I can barely feel like I can even, like, run Instagram and feel happy about it.

I I don't know. I'm I'm of the the you know, you just see that message from Mark Zuckerberg a long time ago. It says, people just trust me, dumb f's. You know, it's like, oh, yeah. He's not he's not like a fundamentally different person. So I don't I don't know. Now, though. He's cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's really cool, man. I I just...

Like, fine. That's fine. This is cool that it exists. It's not gonna be me. I'm not running it. That's for sure. So... Hey. I'll I'll do whatever. I'll my nerd stuff. I'll I'll be here in my nerd stuff. Yeah. But I...

Ahead. Sorry. No. Well, I was just gonna say, like, I I haven't used... I never used Clodbot or OpenClaw or any of the newer ones. Like, I'm still resistant to give AI access to all of my data and all of my apps.

Yeah. I'm working working on my own personal assistant that tries to really lock things away and create friction around getting access to my email or doing things for me. Because I'm not denying the usefulness of being able to read my email and tell me what's relevant or find an email from five years ago that has what I'm talking about right now, that's all very useful.

But when you hook it up just directly to the Gmail API, there are potential prompt injections. And if it's full access to the API, it could send emails or send your data to attackers or whatever else.

And so every... Not to mention giving advertising companies

access to everything, you know? I

mean, if you've an LG TV in the house, they already listen to you. So Jesus. Which is yeah, which is why, like, I'm building my own personal assistant for our home that is more locked down, it's more purpose built.

And I don't think I'd ever release it as a product, like maybe, but like that, because I also feel like my needs are more niche. Like, I don't have any smart home stuff that talks to the cloud. Everything smart for home I have is purely inside of my house. So I've never been someone that wanted to have my stuff associated with my personal home and everything else in the cloud or owned by someone else. So,

yeah, it's not for me, but the ideas are cool. I don't know. I'm curious to see what happens when the normies get access to agents. Because it hasn't gone well giving normies access to, like, regular AI.

At least the stuff that you see, you know, like all the awful posters that are getting cranked out, all I the got thoughts about that. Even, like like, CBC, Canada Broadcasting Corporation, their TikTok, you can... There's this one anchor, and she's clearly using AI to write her scripts, and it drives me nuts.

And and everybody's just gobbling it up and and not not recognizing it. And it... I don't know if I should be irked by that or not, but I feel like I've I've ruined a lot of that stuff for myself. And I don't know what's gonna happen when they get access to this agentic stuff looping. Right. I mean, that's what I'm also worried about because, like, the

especially the feed on Facebook is just filled with AI slop videos and AI posts.

A lot of normies can't tell the difference between, like, a human post and, like, an AI generated post. Yeah. And so you give you give all of them access to their own personal agent VM, and it's it's gonna not be great.

Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. I hope... Hopefully, Facebook will stop some of the the abuse, you know, of these types of things.

But we'll see.

Yeah. We'll see. Yes. I I do see... So, yeah, Derek commented, the first use case that really did it for me was my son's daycare, post a bunch of photos, downloading them one by one from the app was total pain. Now Hermes automatically hits the API every day. That's great.

I don't know if you need a personal agent for that. Like, I would, like, spin up a one off script to do it. But... That's the way... Yes. No. Can't write a script for that. It's... Like, they're like... Oh, yeah. If it's, like, perfectly in the same app every single time. But I went and I said, through the last seven years of my emails from my kids' schools and download all the photos. Sometimes the photos were in Google Photos. Sometimes they were in attached.

Sometimes they were in PDFs that needed to be blown up and and saved.

Sometimes they were on just like...

In like random, like websites that they linked off to that they made with Google sites. There's so many possible permutations of where these photos live.

And that's just one thing. And AI is so good at being able to just like adapt to whatever it is that they're using. You know, I didn't say, all right, here, here's what you do if it's if it's happening here or figure out how to reverse engineer the API. It's like, no, it's like in some cases it will use an API. Some cases it'll just fire up a browser and save them. Some cases it will download them and split them up. And then also, there was all this clip art, you know, like it downloaded, like, I think 4,000 photos, but about a thousand of them were clip art. And like, I don't want like a cupcake dot png because it was someone's birthday. So, like, I just... Just ripped through it and figured out which ones were clipart.

Yeah. I I I get that. And I'm not saying write the script from scratch. I'm just saying, like, why wouldn't you use OpenCode or Claw or something like that to build these things out? Why do you need a an agent like Open Claw or Hermes?

Guess that's my point. Hermes is really just a harness with a bunch Hermes of is essentially a harness with memory. Like, that is really it. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think there's there's much of a difference other than they have, like, Zapier in... Integrated with it, so you can hook up your Google Calendar or your, like, weird CRM from your work.

Yes.

Word. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. I'm still not gonna use it, but okay. Yeah. Tell

tell us about Switzerland, Scott. What's... Tell us all. Oh, yes. The Switzerland, man. I gotta say shout out to everyone in Switzerland, everyone that went to... Everyone. Every person in Switzerland. Shout out to y'all.

Switzerland was dope. I went to Zurich JS, and we spent some time in Zermatt and, Grindelwald.

Before that, we got to do some hiking. We got to go to all kinds of cool stuff. And the conference was awesome. This is their first time throwing their conference and man, the lineup was really great. Daniel Rose talk was awesome. He had like a live emoji during the the talk so you could go on your phone and react to it. So the entire time he's speaking, there's just emoji.

Oh, that's cool. It was really fun. Great idea. Yes.

It was just great. Yeah. Kevin Powell was there. It was great to meet him. Tejas, obviously, was just, you know, as as dynamic as ever. So the conference was awesome, man. I had a great time at this conference.

And, oh, actually, you know what? I've been thinking about why open source my slides. I wanna show my slides for a second. Folks, my slides were awesome.

I'm just gonna say that right now. I made some sick slides, and I wanna share them with you. In the last talk I did, where was that at at in Amsterdam at reaction that I did some three JS style slides, and I brought my three JS style slides back again, but I I tricked everybody. So I had this whole thing going where, obviously, they... You know, it looks like a term, but they're... They look like slides. Right? I mean, these just look like slides or whatever.

And then at this point, it, like, kinda bubbles up. I got my charts. This is all interactive.

And I got a little little quotes from the the stuff. And then after I get to a certain point here, you'll see I have this grand reveal. Wait. I even have a slot machine in here, which is pretty sick.

God.

It's crazy. Either way, at some point, it pulls back and the whole time you've been watching inside a computer monitor. And this is a little diorama here.

And it's...

Man, It was just so cool. People didn't people did not see it coming. And I think it really got people talking about this. And then you go back in here and it eventually pulls back out and you're in an office building.

Man, I I... Did you what did you model these in? Or is this this three or did you... Do you use, like, blender or something?

So this is using react three fiber and three JS.

I modeled everything inside of initially inside of just using react three fiber just... And and then that looked like terrible.

So then I had it create the the files directly. And then eventually, to get them looking way better, I connected Blender MCP to it. And I got Blender MCP set up, so this is all... They were all made better by Blender MCP and Astra eventually. But initially, it was, like, not in Blender. And and once I did move it to Blender, they got a lot better. Yeah.

Yeah. It's so cool. It's, fun. When you do a talk, you have to have something good to look at. Right? Because, like, they're listening to you. But if you just have text on a slide, you know, I always try to have just, like, looping demos on my slides while I'm talking about something because this gives you something to look at, and the audience really likes that. But this is just next level. Gotta have some razzle dazzle. And if we can do this now,

man, it it was just like a a really neat, neat thing, I think, to to do. And and this conference was just such an awesome place. So I had a great time at this conference, but what I wanna talk about now is what happened on my way home from the conference, if that's okay with you guys. Trigger warning. Yeah. Trigger warning. If if you're sensitive to... If you're eating right now, probably mute the stream. You can skip forward, like, thirty, forty seconds or you can pause it.

Guys, we we were on a plane that was delayed and delayed and then we got on the plane, they made us wait like two hours before it took off. We were on a plane that should have been like ten hours on the plane for twelve and halfway through the flight back from Zurich to Chicago, My son got trapped between the two drink carts, and he had to...

He got sick, and he got sick all over the aisle in the airplane mid flight of an international flight. I felt so bad for him.

He was clearly exhausted, and everybody was so mad at us, obviously.

And you just feel so bad. It was it was it was horrific.

So I cannot recommend.

In the seats, did they have the, like No. Potions They did it. Bags? They didn't... No. They didn't. The planes are gone. The puke... They're gone. Are almost entirely gone. I don't see them that often anymore. Guys, I would blame it on the flight then. Yeah. Like, anybody getting mad at you, like, what could you do? He's blocked by the carts. You don't have a bag. Yeah. We we saw the full we saw the full, like,

awfulness of people being just, like... I mean, obviously, it sucks for everybody. Right? But, like, he got totally stuck. And and he tried. It was, like, he could have made it. He got... Mean, I felt so bad for him. And then,

gosh. How far into your twelve hour flight was this? About 50% of the way through. Yes.

My god. Are awful.

Yes. It was awful. You you felt awful for him.

It's like he wasn't fazed. He was like, okay. You know, it's fine. Whatever. But, you know, we were just, like, feeling really bad. And then we get to the gate at our transfer in Chicago, and we decide to take it easy and have a really light snack because we hadn't eaten in a long time. And, you know, we had some water, and he loses it again everywhere in the line, like, that people have to wait to get onto the plane. Every single person getting on or off that plane had to walk through it because they did not clean it up after, like, an hour in Chicago.

It was crazy.

And then, like, my wife covered. Felt terrible for her. I felt so bad. We ended up knocking on the flight and just went into a hotel. I felt so bad. It was it was just like a mess. And people... Every single person in the entire section of the airport's talking about you. It was crazy. I walked back to go tell the people we weren't getting on the plane, and some guy says, that's the guy. Like, loudly enough that I could hear it. That's

the puker. Get him. Get him. That

was just... It was just the worst. So really long, really, really long trip home.

But little guy's feeling a lot better. He's back at school today.

And...

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I can't recommend the airport at the... Or the hotel at the Chicago Airport, by the way. That airport is on notice. It looks bad.

I'm pretty sure I've stayed at that one. Chicago is, like, layover cancellation city.

Yes. I had to stay over there, unfortunately, a few times. By the way, that was yesterday, or or I got back yesterday and the day before is when all this stuff went down. We were washing our clothes in the sink at the hotel, or at least my wife was because we did not have a change of clothes.

So... Yes.

That is gross.

It was gross. Sorry, folks. That's the end of my story, but the conference was awesome and great people. I can't wait for the next Zerk JS.

Nice. I hear this static all of a sudden.

What... Yeah. What do you what do you have there, Wes?... Static.

What are you what are you talking about?

You hear my static?

What? Yes.

What are you holding on to? What is that? Let me show you this, guys. This guy. This This This is the Mike FX. Mike FX. Mike FX. We've suddenly gone into next head room or something territory. Let me let me switch back to a regular microphone, but I'll tell you about this. It's really cool.

Alright. I'm back to my regular mic, but this is really cool. So this is teenage engineering.

They make, like, cool stuff. Scott, how would you describe teenage engineering?

Teenage engineering.

Well, you know, they're designed... Audio equipment with nice design. Yeah. Yeah. They have synthesizers, MCP......

Famous for their o p one.

And then this is the o p one field that I have. But they make great little little custom synths in the... With an emphasis on design and, like, boutique kind of stuff. They're wonderful in terms of, like, their aesthetics, in terms of their overall hardware quality.

Their biggest downsides with most teenage engineering things is that they are too expensive.

Yeah. Yeah. But this is the coolest little keyboard, and I I use this way more than I use anything else for making music. So... It's really cool. So I saw this on their website, which is the mic effects. And essentially, what it is is it's just a regular, 3.5 millimeter jack that you plug in. But on the microphone itself, if you if you visualize it, it's like a trucker microphone where you, like, have a... On on the side, you have, like, a little paddle that you can push in. And then there's three buttons on the side. And what you can do with that is you can program in your own effects.

It's just a little raspberry pie in there, and there's a JSON file when you plug it in via USB C and you can, like, stack all the effects. I could do, like, I could make my voice higher or lower and, you can shake it because there's an accelerometer into it. It... You can tell how far you've pushed in the side little button.

It's a it's a pretty cool little toy.

I bought it because it was, like, very hackable.

And since getting it, I've looked into it. Like, there's... People have, like, built custom firmwares and everything for it because it's just a little Raspberry Pi Pico inside, which is similar to, like, a ESP 32.

It's a Pico in there. Interesting.

Yeah. Nice.

Yes.

Very nice. That's cool. I just... I don't need any additional teenage engineering gear because I have too much of it already.

Do you think... I think the m... MPC too, Scott? I don't... Well, yeah, they're they're...

I I have the k o two right here. Okay. Yes. This is the first one I got. It was a good entry level one because the pricing was actually reasonable on it. Yeah. I got this because I didn't wanna spend the money on the o p one f, but then they did a big sale on it, I just had to have it.

The...

Another hardware news. I'm gonna try to always do cool hardware stuff on this thing is What a decoration. Yes. Yeah. If... Randy, show my screen. Three Conf had, like, Three JS had a had a conference.

And their badges, which conference badges that are cool are are a thing now, We're like like a little circle screen, a couple buttons on it. I'm assuming it's some ESP 32, like, similar to the ones that CJ and I have right now that you can sort of, like, hack on.

But I thought, a, the design, immaculate, super cool Yeah. But also, like, a really fun thing to have for attendees to sort of hack on it.

Yeah. It's very cool.

The whole, like, three d... It feels like a three d printed case around a circular screen, but it's, like, done nicely, and there's, like, physical buttons on it. And people's names are...

I don't know if they're printed, but they almost look like three d on the badge itself. How did they make this many of them? I think I

think this is resin. I think what they do with the... This is they have, like, a little eyedropper of resin, and you drop it on the letters. And then you cure it, and it gives it that kind of beveled smooth look. You can clearly tell it's three d printed right here, because there's some supports they didn't scratch out.

That must've taken a while to do by hand for every Oh, yeah. They probably were cranky. It's... I don't know. Probably a couple 100 people at the conference.

You could probably print six

at a time. But, yeah, that probably took took one. I'm making that little prop boy, and then the buttons don't come for free. You gotta Yeah. Get those on the board somehow. I'm curious. Is there, like, a custom board hooked up to these buttons?

Like, maybe they they even, like, did a custom PCB for it because, like, why they have be able to click them? Right? Somebody's gotta crack one open. Yeah.

So we'll crack one open. Yes. In terms of hardware badges, I like this one because, like... I mean, it's probably hackable, but it's also... Like we're at the point where it's cheap enough to do something like this. You don't have to be a hacker conference or whatever else.

And it's kind of built for people that aren't necessarily going to hack on it later. The whole idea was you get two badges close to each other and it pairs. It's like a conversation starter. Oh. So, like, that's a That's cute.

Yeah. So it's a cool way to also, like, meet people at the conf as well.

It is very cool. I think it's great. Think it's great. Yes. I love this kind of stuff.

Yes. I could never... AI could never imagine something that cool.

Yes. You have to have the idea. It could help, but you have to have the idea first. Totally. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Other news, there's this post called, don't let anyone take away your big box of cables.

And so there was a post on Blue Sky from Tyler Gaugh that says, I just dug to the bottom of my big box of cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They've been in the bottom for ten plus years. So when are you ever gonna use it? Was today. Don't let everyone don't ever let anyone take away your big box of cables.

And then this blog post quotes it, and they actually printed out that Blue Sky post and taped it to their big box of cables at their house. But I agree. I mean, I've had that scenario, like, maybe twice. And and, yeah, it was, like, six years later, I was like, oh, I had this weird charger, but I wanna use this device again, and it's in the box. I probably have a 100 USB C. I have, like, a 100 micro USB, a 100 mini USB. Like, mini USB and micro USB, I probably could get rid of and just have one at this point. But I don't know. You guys have a big a big box of cables as well? Man. Yeah. I have the most... Here. Can I move my camera here? Randy, put me up.

I don't know if this is a good idea, but... We're going IRL mode. Here we I can't point my camera. There we go. I have, like... I probably have 20 shoe boxes of cables, and they're so perfectly organized Mhmm. Into, like, USB C, old USB C audio. Like, this morning, I needed a little, what, 3.5 mil jack, and I just went right for my audio box and put it in there. I have absolutely everything. I had a friend panicking one Sunday night. They needed, like, a old, like, 12 year old MacBook to VGA.

Yeah.

Had a big presentation the next morning, and I was like, I got it. I got you. And they gave me, like, a whole case of beer for it. It's... I'm

that person. I... Yeah. I am too. Me too. I I I got little bins.

Like, I I can't find... I'm trying to find them on Amazon because they're cheap little bins, like, really little ones, like, almost the size of a shoebox, plastic bags with a lid. And I did a print labels on all of them, and I just have them all stacked up in my basement. And, again, every single thing is labeled. If I need a FireWire 400 cable or a FireWire 800 cable, I got it. Absolutely. I use those. Those are like shoe boxes, right? Wes, I have the six find that Home Depot. They go on sale for like a buck 50. You got wait till they're on sale at Home Depot. Super cheap. And buy a million of them. Yep. And you gotta be able... They gotta be clear because... And they gotta have the clear lid as well. They sometimes have white lids, but then you can be able to look underneath

and find exactly that, oh, look at it. I need five volt LEDs.

Baby, do I have it? I don't even have to open them. I use my label printer, and so I got nice little labels on them. Oh, yeah. Like a gravestone for obsolete cables.

Yes. But I just chicken scratch it. Yes.

Nice.

Guys, can I talk about aerospace? Yes. Do it. Okay. Aerospace is not new. Aerospace has existed for a decent amount of time. It's a tiling manager for Mac OS and all these people talking about Omari this, Omari that.

I I can't reasonably move to Omari full time given our workflows and all that stuff. There's one thing that really drives me nuts about macOS is the latency for everything.

You do expose.

You do this. You do that. You do tiling. Every single thing in macOS has some major latency. And people who have not used, like, Arch Linux or CatchyOS or people who have not used something other than Windows or macOS do not know just how stinking fast it is to open up Windows, to go between things. And it's not just like an animations thing. Like, a little bit of a rant. Every time you look into this stuff, it's like people are just like, oh, just turn on use reduced motion and turn off transparency and everything's fine. It's not. It doesn't get rid of the latency.

It doesn't... It... It's like a system wide thing. And my computer's beefy. It's got 64 gigabytes of RAM.

It's pretty good. But one thing I I wanted to have was something that felt snappier.

And so I've been really getting into making my computer feel more like a Linux or an Omari type of deal. So I started using aerospace, which is just simply a tiling manager that, again, will automatically behave like Hyperland in terms of, like, tiling up your stuff really nice. But it also does like spaces as well. So instead of using the built in Mac OS spaces, I have the workspaces that I can toggle between.

And then I use something called sketchy bar. So sketchy bar kind of replaces the top bar entirely. So unlike something like...

What's the one that hides at bartender or whatever ice? I just have the macOS feature to hide it automatically. So if I need all this stuff, I just mouse up to it. And then if I don't, it's the minimal one that just shows my apps and my workspaces.

Then I used a better touch tool to swipe between the two and look at how instant that is. It feels like Linux. It's so fast. I'm swiping between with three finger swipe.

And then I thought, you know, the one thing that I'm missing with all of this is that I I really like the three finger gesture up to show all of my windows Yeah. Which is painfully slow sometimes. And it's gotta do it with an exact one to one animation when I really... I just want see it all, see it, you know, whatever. What do I got going on? So I built something called AeroPeak.

Aero Peak is a...

The AI wrote this. It's an expose companion for aerospace. So this works with aerospace in my setup. And look at that. Boom.

Oh, that's great. Boom. I I built that for a monkey, and I got roasted. Everybody's like, you're missing the point. You're missing the point of tiling window manager. I was like, I have landed I have landed commits in aerospace.

I've I used it for, a month, and it's awesome. I ended up getting rid of aerospace because it doesn't work well for resizing windows for recording.

Yes.

But

that's why I ditched it. But maybe that has changed because that was probably two years ago. Yeah. So let me tell you what I've done with aerospace in general there. There's been a whole bunch for me. And what I've realized is that I hated aerospace until I decided and found out that AI agents are good at aerospace configs.

So now I just have my agent work on my aerospace config to get it snappy, to get it fast, to get it doing what I want it to do. I say I don't wanna do this. It does it. Whatever. And, again, like, if you wanna click around and use the mouse, you got that. You can see which apps are running in the top here with my sketchy bar. And the the sketchy bar just as nice. I I mean, I like it. And again, this expose was the only thing I was missing. I put an agent on it. It said build me an expose clone for, aerospace, and it did it.... The menu bar? Like, are there not apps in the menu bar that you need? Because, like, sketchy bar. If you need the menu bar, you just hover up top here. It's there. Okay. It pee... Peaks down. Okay. Yeah. Peaks down nice and easy. So if I need it, it's there. But, you know, for the most part, like, I'm not staring at... Like, why do I need to stare at the menu bar? I mostly just wanna see which workspaces are where. And all the keyboard commands are very, so I wanna move something to another space. It's, like, really easy to move to another space or whatever. If I wanna move this one to space three, check out space three. Now I got a lot of stuff in space three, space five, let's do it. I mean, it's just fast, and it feels way better than the...

I I... Like, norm... Normie people could not possibly use this. But after using o o... O mark... Omarquee omarquee...

Monkey. Yes. OMonkey.

Oh, Monkey. Oh, after using Oh, Monkey for a bit. Yes. I I I gotta say it's sick.

I'm a big fan of this.

So... It looks dope. I had looked into doing something like this in the past, but I'm just stuck in my ways of, like, I use Rectangle to put apps where I want them, left half, right half, full screen center.

I don't know if I could get used to Windows automatically just being their size and me not being able to adjust them because that's kind of what you get with the Hyperland or Tyler. It's like it puts it where it's gonna put it, and it, like, stacks them sideways or stacks them up.

I like resizing my windows. Yeah. You really gotta buy into it. You do. Which is sometimes frustrating. It's just recording for me that it kills me because I'm... I also like a lot of these tiling window managers are, like, not well suited for multi displays. You can use them with multi displays, but, like, the whole ideal and idea and methodology just works so well when you have one big ass display.

Yeah. I did I did assign spaces six through 10 or six through zero, I should say, on my other one and then one through five. Because it's like, when am I gonna need more than five spaces on one monitor? And then when I unplug all 10 of them, just show up on this one. So that seemed to be a nice little fix for me in terms of the multi display stuff. And I gotta say, it's feeling really snappy, guys. Better touch tool coming in clutch here. Touch tool is the best. Yes.

It... It's it's been really nice. And I'm just trying to disable as much Mac OS slop as I can because, like, stage manager, come on. Like, do we need that? Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't use any of that stuff except... Turn it all off. Yeah. The three finger swipe between

spaces if I'm...

I I almost... I don't use spaces when I'm, like, on my desktop, but when I'm on my laptop, I use them like crazy because there's not enough space.

Yeah. I I... I'm I'm on patrol to eliminate slowdowns from this Mac system. So now that I got an agent in Astra, I'm just telling, like, you know, let's start let's start adding some tracing or I would not like just observability into what's going on in the system or what's causing the slowdown.

I've... It it found like a NFS. Is NFS the the drive mounting thing? Either way, found, like, a stuck drive mounting thing that was just, like, running, slowing my system down and stuff. So I'm just, like... Yeah.

I'm on I'm on crush mode right now to get some of this performance better on this thing. You you know what I need? I need to watch somebody

who's actually using this stuff for real work. Because so many of the, like, demos... Like, I was... I've been trying to, like, get into the O Munchie.

And I... Like, everyone's like, well, you just have your browser in one space, and you have your terminal in the next, and then that's it. And it... And, I have, like, 20 apps open at once. Like, you know, yeah, there's video editing and photo editing and and Figma and chat. Like, I I have a lot more stuff open, and I I aggressively close stuff. But, like, my life is not as simple where I have a terminal, a text editor, and a browser open all day long, and and that's it. So I just wanna, like, show me a video where somebody is actually using this stuff for their day to day work rather than just demoing it as, like, here's what you can do. It's really neat.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, got a new backpack. Do you guys wanna see it? See it. Backpack. Oh, you got rid of the...

What's the...

Oh, what is this? What is it? It's by Nomadix.

And I got it because I was before going on this trip, I was feeling like I was feeling like my backpack was heavy, and it doesn't fit under the seat very well on an airplane. And I'm like, you know what? I just want something that is lighter, and this thing is in, like, the hiking kind of ultralight world.

And

it is very nice. There's an infinite amount of compartments to it. And there's side laptop sleeve spots and stuff.

And it was just... It was very, nice. There's even, like, a microfiber glasses pocket inside of here. So, like, this is all microfiber lined for glasses.

And then I I was able to fit so much stuff in here, and it did not weigh, like, anything.

I really like this backpack. I'll link it up. I... I'm a I'm a big fan. I wish they could give me some money for saying this, but, you know... Scott and I had... We both have the Peak Design Everyday 30 liter, which is like every

tech bro in their life owns this backpack.

And it's an awesome backpack, but it is heavy.

And I'm starting to feel that, like, when I'm going when I go traveling with my Peak Design, like, you throw the laptop in my back.

16 inch laptop, too big. I'm going 14 next time. You know, everything is too heavy. I'm getting old.

I want I want everything to be much lighter. I'm I'm I'm thinking about them. Like, what would be I've had this peak design backpack for probably almost nine years, I bet. Like, it's it's awesome, but it's just a bit too heavy. And it's starting to starting to fray. And I'm wondering,

what's the next backpack that I get? This was exactly me. And I was just, like, feeling it. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna go on this big, long trip throughout Switzerland, etcetera. And it's like, I'm gonna be carrying this thing around. Maybe I'm gonna be going hiking with it or something.

Yeah.

Here. I'll I'll post the link to it. Have it in other colors, folks. But... Yeah. No. I I I got I got marketed to this backpack, and I was like, let me check out some reviews, and people said it was really nice, and it's like one of those, like, high strength materials and stuff. So... Yes.

I've got one last thing here that's pretty funny.

This was posted on Hacker News, but it... The title is Claude. Change the add to cart button to blue.

And if you go to opus5.dev, this is basically like an opus five simulator. So the the the title says make the add to cart button blue. Don't... Do not let clot change anything else. You click let's go, and you have to say what is your first prompt. Should it be make the add to cart button blue? Should it be could you change the add to cart button to to blue? Just that one. Or turn add to cart blue, don't touch anything else? So you choose one, and then you see, like, a simulated Claude thinking.

And I played around with this for a while, and it just goes off the rails. Like, the first thing it does usually is it makes every button blue, and then you have to give, like, a follow-up prompt, like, well, no. I only wanted that button to be blue. And then it, like, says that it's, like, spinning up agents to determine how it should make that button blue.

I just thought this was a really great tongue in cheek way of talking about Opus and how eager it gets to do things right, but then also, like, not do things right. Yeah. This is not real, though. Right? Because I saw this and I was like,

it's killing me. Right?

Yeah. It's not prompting... No. It's it's it's... There's like this... Almost like a slot machine where after you give an answer, it it picks how it's going to respond. And it's like, one one honest caveat.

And, like, I split the check into eight different agents and direct consumers. We have 23 agents total bounded to the color path.

I don't know about you, but this has been my experience with Opus as well.

Think part of people saying Opus five is so good or even GPT-six Astra is so good is it runs so many tools and it just keeps going and going and going to try to get to, like, what you asked it. And if you're watching it, it's actually very aggravating to see how much it does that is useless or it shouldn't be doing.

If leave it in the background, sure, you come back twenty minutes later and it did what you wanted it to do. But how it got there usually is pretty ridiculous.

So I don't know. That's been my experience with it. But the site is hilarious because it just gives the most Claude like responses.

It's so true, though. I think on Friday, we had an issue on the Syntax website where the metadata for our podcast is done in, like, YAML.

And one of the podcast episodes had a capital H on it, and that caused it to stop deploying to our website. Right? And, like, first of all, it should be typed. It should probably be TypeScript. And second of all, that was missed in our validation step. You know, like when we send a pull request for something, it should check, hey, are all the keys in here? It did check for the keys, but it checked... It didn't check for capital h hosts. It should be lowercase. So such a silly stupid thing. But it happened after, what, 1,400 episodes. It happened once. So I prompted, hey, like, let's let's add this to validation so that if somebody mistypes or or does a capital H on hosts, that that was my example, then we don't do it. So what does it do? It goes into the validation. It goes into the importing logic, adds in a use case for capital H hosts. So it checks if it's host or if it has a capital H host and then it goes in into the import and adds that as well. Then it adds like acceptance tests for that. I'm like, no, none of it. Like, what are we going to add? We can add an if statement for every single possible miss type of this type of thing. Like, no, we should say if this is an incorrect key, then just throw an error and we'll fix it. Right. But it like... It's like, I will fix it for you in case somebody has it at capital h. We will account for that and it will just work. You know, it's a it's a yes, man all day long. Right? It's a yes, man. I think we got a a yes, man situation.

Yeah.

So if you get far enough on this website, it gets to the point where it makes the button a gradient. And then it's like, I didn't know what color blue you wanted. So just let me know on this gradient, is it the left, the middle, or the right? And so, like, you choose from the gradient, and then it...

But also it changed the cancel button to be black now. I don't know. I'm deep in the hole of, like, multiple prompts here to try to get this button blue.

But... Yeah. Yes. This is the world we live in. AGI is here. Yeah. Yes.

I got one more thing that's not AI related if we wanna talk about Yes.

The creator of Obsidian has released their markdown turns data turns data into markdown that is actually used within Obsidian. So this is their markdown rendering library that is used in Obsidian. It's called... Actually, it's called knap. I believe I'm not joking. The creator of it did say you pronounce the k and not nap, which come on, folks. Can we... Could you give me something that's not dumb to say for once? It is just nap...

Knap here. So the idea here is that it is a templating language that outputs markdown, which feels... Oh my gosh. How many days have we gone where somebody has,

like, messed with the markdown spec again?

Well, this is being this is being used in and it has been being used in Obsidian. So this is just made available. So this is the thing that powers Obsidian.

But, yes, again, it it is... It basically template in markdown out and data goes in with your template.

And somebody did make a translation that can output this. You know, remember that... What was it called? Copermark? Somebody did make a Copermark nap so you could take nap and output it as React or Svelte or View or any of that stuff as well. So as it... As far as templating languages go, honestly, it looks nice. I like a good templating language myself. Liquid.

I hate liquid so much. No. Thanks. Yeah.

I like it.

Am I gonna use this hoop? Probably not. I I don't know. But it's used in Obsidian, so it's not like it's one of those things that's just gonna be here and gone tomorrow. Yeah. It's not like a a vibe coded templating language. It's obsolete.

Yeah. So if you're looking for a templating language to output markdown, check out knap.app or .md. Knap.md.

Yes.

Cool.

Alright. Anything else? Should we wrap it up?

Let's wrap it up. I got some Thai food sitting right here. I'm just been staring at for about an hour. So thanks everybody for tuning in. We'll catch you later. Peace.

Peace.