The Ledger, every show

“So I think to some degree, the SaaSpocalypse is greatly exaggerated.”

“At least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”

“I do have a general sort of maybe issue with vibe coding in the sense of, I don't feel like the quality of software has increased all that much in the last 12 months. I think the, maybe the amount of software has, but it's very, very hard to find software that…”

“I think the only way that you can actually get to understanding agent loops is if you build them in the material that they're made of, which is currently code.”

“I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engi…”

“And that to me, I think is very absent right now from most of the discourse in software, which is, it's all about how many tokens can we spend and how many features can we ship? I'm like, okay, but where's the engineering part? And the engineering part is the,…”

“I suspect that software will go more back into the nineties of general tools, word processor, spreadsheet, FileMaker Pro that kind of thing, but those will still be as a service. And then you'll still have specialized tools around security and so on”

“I think for a lot of knowledge work tasks, probably sometime we'll get to good enough. And once you get to good enough, then you can optimize other things. Like they run locally, they're cheaper, they're faster.”

“My take, it's very clear, at least empirically that models are getting better at coding at some exponential rate, right? And I don't think that's changing. Now I'm not that impressed with the progress in any other domain. It tends to be like, I don't think the…”

“In my past life I worked at Heroku and like Kubernetes was much more successful than Heroku. Even though I think from a user experience perspective, it was much worse, but the Delta was Heroku was saying, Hey, we're going to replace your ops team. And Kubernet…”

“If I really look at the truly great products, they all have one tiny core that is so exceptionally good.”

“Dario is that she wasn't, oh, he wasn't just lucky once at OpenAI. He did the same thing twice and it was successful twice.”

“My take is that we already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work. And I don't exclude my job from it, but if you really look about at what do we actually need to live and like to be content, it is a lot less than we've built this hierarchy. A…”

“Inclusivity isn't always all that great. I think I very much believe in small group theory. Like I think the world is run by group chats of eight people or fewer. And so sometimes it's great to be exclusive.”

“I think if we're not careful, we will lose specialists.”

“I think the first 10% of every project are now free. That's how I would describe it. So there is no point for most things to, for example, write a, I don't know. I, the thing is, has changed. I've never really been great at this, but like, there's no point in …”

“On one hand, I do see like sort of a drop in usage of Figma in some designers at Notion.”

“I do suspect in six to 12 months from now, a lot of companies are going to actually start asking questions around RRI, and I think that will be an uncomfortable conversation for a lot of folks.”

“I think there's a real danger in sort of making the token spend the metric to like boast about, which is the same as when people boast about how many lines of code they've written in a day.”

“And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. And I encourage them to use the tweets because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, Oh, I understand more of the su…”

“If the cost of software and creating software and encoding business practices in code, and like, I just literally mean the old, like software, one point no kind of code. Then if that cost is very much going to zero, we will just have a lot more of it. And so I…”

“All agents are also like, if you look at all the harnesses, whether it's the open source ones or the ones from the model companies ours as well they all resemble a coding agent now.”

“I don't think the labs are exempt from this. Like I love their tools. It's great. Like I love, I live in the CLIs, but a regression like every two weeks. Of like a thing that was fixed like three weeks before, and they still can't render a TUI at, I don't know…”

“It's so funny to say that, but like when younger people in Silicon Valley right now, I think that Silicon Valley is uncharacteristically full of people who don't actually love computers.”

“I think you're actually way better off if you work incredibly hard by the, until from like, 18 to 25 or whatever, like that's the way to go. Like you should work a lot, right? And then later you can work a little less”

“Just carefully look at how everything around you is made up by people that are no smarter than you, and realize that probably in the span of six to nine months, you can, for most things around you, figure out how to make it from scratch. And therefore you have…”

“Which essentially is, I mean, the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here. You have to feel the AI. To some degree.”

“Now we have the same designers and PMs also just contributing to the production code base to a lesser degree, of course, but like you can see where the trend is headed”

“And the biggest through line I've found is making. I think if you tinker and if you make things, Then you are now on this treadmill of just creating And then you're like, oh, it's actually not that hard to learn how to make that chair in my office, or let me t…”

“I think the main thing that Dieter Rams points out there is it should be a thing that's useful and a good way to figure out how something is useful is if you can change it and tweak it.”

“Why do code review tools, automatic code review tools not work that well? I think there's actually a subtle thing, which is you push your code publicly to, or publicly within the organization or your team. And then a thing roasts your code and tells you How te…”

“If I had to describe what taste actually means, it's you're able to run. This is such a nerdy way of describing it. You're able to run a virtual machine in your head. Where given an idea, you can predict for a certain in-group whether they're going to like it …”

“The designers that I think have, at least in software design, high taste are the ones that both have side projects that they build, where they're responsible of the full thing end to end. And they're also always tinkering with some new app.”

“And then the other thing that I find happens very frequently in larger organizations is that people sort of turn off the brain when they're reviewing their own products from a, I'm a user, is this a good experience? And they're more like, I'm a employee of thi…”

“And I found that when people make landing pages, first of all, their writing skills just like deteriorate immediately because they want to sound clever and like marketing speak comes out of their mouth. And I'm like, wait, that's not how you would explain it t…”

“The first version of the Notion editor was terrible. Like there was like no, it was all blocks. You couldn't even select between two blocks, but it turns out it didn't matter. And so I think that is like just working diligently on the wrong thing for way too l…”

“Executives love creating fake legibility for themselves because we don't like noise as humans, right? We want the signal, but there's often less signal in it than one might think.”

“In a previous life, I led design and product at GitHub and GitHub designers before LLMs contributed to GitHub. I think in the top contributors to GitHub itself, like, 10% were designers.”

“Notion is dabbling in it as well. I use dabbling right now, but obviously at some point we might become more serious about it.”

“The week that we were going to get a term sheet from True Ventures, Notion pivoted from website building to document collaboration, and so True Ventures was like, hey, sorry, we have a conflict, and we're like, yep, no, no worries.”