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In this episode, Andrew chats with Adriano Carollo at PSConfEU about community, PowerShell Universal, AI, and what happens when you stop lurking and start talking to people. Adriano shares how PowerShell helped him grow from sysadmin into web apps, automation, and open source-style contribution, while Andrew reflects on learning, AI, and why enthusiasm still matters.   Key Takeaways:  · Community accelerates growth. Adriano came to PSConfEU after hearing Andrew encourage listeners to engage, and the payoff was immediate.  · PowerShell Universal can open unexpected doors. Adriano describes using it daily to learn web development concepts like JavaScript, HTML, and React through PowerShell.  · AI is most useful when it supports learning instead of replacing it. Both Andrew and Adriano talk about using AI for research, syntax help, documentation, and personal workflows while still valuing hands-on problem solving.  Guest Bio:  Adriano Carollo is a Berlin-based system administrator and PowerShell enthusiast who uses PowerShell Universal daily. He is active in the PowerShell Universal Discord community and is exploring automation, web apps, self-hosting, and entrepreneurship.  Resource Links:  PDQ Connect:https://www.pdq.com/pdq-connect/ PowerShell Scanner for PDQ Connect:https://www.pdq.com/blog/the-powershell-scanner-has-arrived-in-pdq-connect/ PowerShell Universal:https://powershelluniversal.com/ PSConfEU:https://psconf.eu/  PDQ Community Discord:https://discord.gg/pdq Adriano C. https://linkedin.com/in/adriano-c-501203213 The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qLYqUF9gD9s

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week, we’re going to follow up on last week’s episode, which was called Gnostic Pentecost, and that was first broadcast on the 6th of June, 2026. I have a lot more examples out of the New Testament of the Bible about Pentecost, and as we learned last week, Pentecost is what we’ve been calling the coming of the Third Order of Powers here in this Gnosticism out of the Tripartite Tractate that I share with you at Gnostic Insights. Here’s a quote from last week’s episode where it says, Jesus stood up and said loudly, ‘if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts, living streams of water will flow.' Now he said this in regard to the spirit whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament, John, Chapter 7, verse 37] And this is speaking of what we call the Holy Spirit, because of course we have spirit. We’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us. That is the First Order of Powers. But Jesus here is talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that has come after Jesus is, glorified. And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living above, just as we will all be living above in a glorified body in the presence of the Father. So I shared that with you last week, and if you haven’t heard last week’s episode, again it’s called Gnostic Pentecost, go back and listen to it, because it’s a deep dive—what we call hermeneutics in theology or philosophy. It’s a deep deconstruction of a couple of very important passages in the Old and New Testament that have to do with the coming of what is called Pentecost. And Pentecost was when the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, came and sat upon the disciples while they were gathered in the upper room after Jesus had left and gone back above. But we’ve been talking about Pentecost all along here at Gnostic Insights as the coming of the Third Order of Powers that is the army of Christ. I’m going to quote a whole lot of New Testament for you today, and I take this out of The New Testament by David Bentley Hart, published by Yale University Press. So let’s start with John 14:16-30, and this is Jesus speaking. ‘And I shall entreat the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, that he may be with you throughout the age.' Now, by the way, when Hart and all translators translate throughout the age, they’re talking about Aeons. The word is Aeons. And so an alternate translation that Hart mentions in the footnote to this passage, throughout the age, can also mean, or until the Aeons come, or until the return to the Aeons. So listen to this again. ‘And I shall entreat the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, that he may be with you throughout the coming of the Aeons.' And of course here at Gnostic Insights and in Gnosticism, we believe that these Aeons are units of consciousness, that they’re parts of the Son, they’re parts of the mind of God. It’s not a measure of time, but a measure of consciousness. Carrying on with John 14:16. ‘The Spirit of Truth, which the cosmos cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows it, you know it because it abides with you and will be within you. I shall not leave you orphans. I am coming to you. Just a little while, and the cosmos no longer sees me, but you see me. Because I live, you too will live. On that day, [and he’s referring to Pentecost, the coming of the Third Order of Powers], you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, that one is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.' Then Judas, not Iscariot, says to him, ‘Lord, what has happened then that you were about to manifest yourself to us and not to the cosmos?' Jesus answered and said to him, ‘if someone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and we’ll make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words, and the word that you hear is not mine, but rather that of the Father who has sent me. These things I’ve spoken to you while remaining with you, but the Advocate, the Spirit, the Holy One, which the Father will send in my name, he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you. Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you. I give to you not as the cosmos gives. Do not let your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. I will no longer speak much with you, but the Archon of the cosmos is coming, and he has no hold in me, but so that the cosmos may know that I love the Father, and that just as the Father has commanded me, so I do.' Now, what Jesus was sharing with the disciples in this passage was that his physical body was about to go away. We know that he was about to be crucified and gone. They don’t exactly understand what’s about to happen because they can’t see the future, but Jesus can. He says, I’m going to go away, but don’t worry, I’m going to send a Spirit called the Advocate, and it will come in my name, and in the name of the Father, and it will advise you. Right now you walk with me physically, and I am outside of you, but when the Advocate comes, it will be inside of you. And here at Gnostic Insights, I describe the coming of the Third Order of Powers as overlaying our Second Order Power. See, it’s like your cells of your body. Imagine that there is another version of you that is perfected, that is cleansed of all illness, or cleansed of all poor cellular replication. We’re making an analogy here between cells and spiritual parts, but right now I’m just talking about cells. So let’s say you’ve got all these kind of little faults in your body that have developed over the years. Now imagine there was a perfected body that slipped right into you, like a sort of like a ghost, the Holy Ghost, overlaying upon your cells that cause your cells to pattern themselves after it. It’s like stepping into your body and overlaying what has been damaged over the years. Well, that is what happens with our spiritual bodies. We are what are called Second Order Powers, and we are made up of various combinations of, I hate to get confusing here for you, but of the First Order Powers. The First Order Powers were the Aeons. The Second Order Powers are all of us living things. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness–the First Order Powers, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represent all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. The Third Order Powers are the perfected Christly powers. We are the fruit of the First Order Powers. Each of us is unique, a unique combination of various First Order Powers, and they make up our body. It’s like the recipe. Each of us has a different recipe. Down here, we manifest that recipe. That is who I am. You have a slightly different recipe, but mainly we’re the same. When the Third Order of Powers come, they overlay upon your unique combination and my unique combination. The Third Order Powers are unique to each one of us because they are made to be in our countenance so that we will recognize them. These perfected Third Order Powers, the army of Christ, steps into our soul, steps into our spirit, and overlays upon our pattern, upon our recipe. That’s what brings us the perfection of the Christ. But it only happens if you ask for it. It only happens when you allow it and you seek it out. Now, at the end of that quote I just read you out of John, he says, peace I leave you, my peace I give to you. I give to you not as the cosmos gives. And you see, the distinction is that the cosmos, that’s our material instantiation. That’s the material part of our bodies. It’s the material world. It’s matter itself. And Jesus is saying that when he gives you something, it’s not the way that the Demiurge gives it to you, with strings, lots of strings. Jesus says, do not let your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. So we’re not supposed to live in a spirit of fear. There’s no need to be afraid. When you trust in the Father, when you trust in the Christ and the Holy Spirit, you are imbued with the most powerful energy that has ever been. It far outweighs the energy of the cosmos, the energy of the material, the energy of the Demiurge, the energy of the archons. It outranks them, it outweighs them, it’s more powerful. And when you allow it to come inside of you, then you have that power within you to overcome the archons, the cosmos, the Demiurge. Jesus says, I will no longer speak much with you, [that is physically, because he’s about to be crucified], for the archon of the cosmos is coming. He’s speaking of the Demiurge in the form of the Roman soldiers that are about to arrest him and put him to death. And he has no hold in me. [So he’s saying that even though the archon of the cosmos is coming, it couldn’t contain him except that Jesus is allowing it.] He has no hold in me, [because Jesus is more powerful, because Jesus embodies the Christ]. He’s the first perfected human to embody the energy of the Third Order Powers. That’s what it means by being fully human and fully God. Jesus says, but so that the cosmos may know that I love the Father, and that just as the Father has commanded me to do so. And what is this commandment of Jesus? Well, that’s described in Matthew 22:37-39—the teaching most often referred to as Jesus’s commandment and what is called the great commandment. And Jesus summarizes God’s law, all of those laws of the Old Testament that the Demiurge had constructed. He summarizes them into two main commands. 1: Love God completely. 2: Two, love others as yourself. And here’s the quote, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your reason. This is the great and first commandment. The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets depend upon these two commandments.' Together, these two are described as the foundation of all the other laws and teachings. Of course, when the Demiurge had this transcribed, he had the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of rules added onto it, because the Demiurge is law-bound, and he can only work through law. But Jesus said, don’t worry about all those little laws that you’ve been burdened with. All you have to know is love your neighbor, and love the Father, love God, and then all the other commandments will take care of themselves, because the power of love will be working through you. The book of John, chapter 15:17-27, puts it this way: ‘These things I command you so that you love one another. If the cosmos hates you, you know that it has hated me before you. If you were of the cosmos, the cosmos would have loved its own. But since you are not of the cosmos, the cosmos therefore hates you. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who has sent me. Whoever hates me also hates my Father. But they have both seen and hated both me and my Father. And thus might the passage written in the law, [and that’s the law of Jehovah, of the Old Testament], be fulfilled.' And here’s what the passage said, ‘When the Advocate comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth who comes forth from the Father, he will testify concerning me. And you too must testify, for you are with me from the beginning.' Now, this from the beginning—that's a Gnostic term, and that was before the material cosmos was created from the Fall. In the Tripartite Tractate, it says that only those things which were from the beginning will continue through eternity. The rest will be disappeared. So, Jesus is saying that the number one command is to love. And he’s also saying that the cosmos will hate you if you do, because the cosmos hates love. Again, from the New Testament book of John, in chapter 16, verses 1 through 15, Jesus says, ‘I’ve spoken these things to you so that you might not be caused to falter. They will make you exiles from the synagogue, [and I add, and the churches and the mosques], and an hour is coming in which everyone who kills you thinks he is offering a service to God. And they will do these things because they have known neither the Father nor me. But I tell you the truth, it is for your own good that I should go away. For if I do not go away, the Advocate, [that is the Holy Spirit, that is the Third Order Powers, that is the army of Christ], surely is not coming to you. But if I go, I shall send him to you. And when he comes, it will prove the cosmos wrong concerning righteousness and concerning judgment, concerning sin.' And by the way, sin means literally to miss the mark, as if you’re shooting an arrow at a target. It’s to miss the bullseye. It means to fail, to fall short, as if your arrow fell short of the bullseye. So that’s what sin is. It’s not a list of naughty things. It simply means to miss the mark. So Jesus is saying, when that one comes, the Spirit of Truth, ‘He will prove the cosmos wrong concerning righteousness and concerning judgment, concerning sin because they do not have faith in me, and concerning righteousness because I am going to the Father and you no longer see me, and concerning judgment because the archon of this cosmos, the Demiurge, has been judged. I still have many things to tell you, but right now you cannot hear them. But when that one comes, the Spirit of Truth, he will guide you on the way to all truth, for he will not speak from himself, but will speak what he hears, and he will announce to you things to come. That one will glorify me because he will receive from what is mine and will announce it to you. All that the Father has is mine. That is why I said that he receives from what is mine and will announce it to you.' Now in this passage, when Jesus is talking about the Spirit of Truth and that it will come to the disciples after he is physically disembodied, it will come to everyone who accepts the coming of the Spirit of truth—that Spirit of truth, that’s gnosis. That is gnosis. That’s all there is to it. It’s not lists of this and lists of that that you have to memorize. It’s not the names of the angels and the names of the archons and the names of the Aeons. It’s not the order of the planets or the astrology. It’s not the secrets of alchemy. Those are not the gnosis of which Jesus is speaking. It doesn’t have to do with having magical powers over the cosmos. The cosmos is the cosmos. This is the kingdom of the Demiurge. This is the kingdom of the archon of the cosmos. This is the valley of death. The Spirit of Truth, the gnosis that comes from above, is all about the Father. It’s about eternity and the ethereal plane. It’s simply about love and the fact that we come from love and that we will return to love and that this down here is mostly delusion. It’s mostly falsehoods. That’s why the Holy Spirit is known as the Spirit of Truth. It’s what combats the Spirit of delusion, the falsity of the deficiency, the falsity of the imitation, as we know it here in Gnosticism. So you see these quotes in the New Testament, they’re all about gnosis. They are Gnostic. It’s just that we are not familiar with them if we are Christians nowadays, because the gnosis was taken out. The true references, the definitions of these phrases, were taken out. That’s why I call this the Gnostic Reformation. I’m literally sitting here attempting to return Christianity to its roots, to what Jesus is teaching here. He’s teaching of the Father above, not the God of this world. Now you’ve heard the Holy Spirit being referred to as the Advocate, which is a legal term. And when Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit, he called it the Advocate. And the Advocate’s role is to teach us, to guide us, to remind us, and to empower us as believers. The Son of Man, whom Jesus was known as, is a messianic title from Daniel 7 of the Old Testament, one of the prophets of the Old Testament. The Son of Man is a title that refers to one who receives authority, kingship, and judgment. He’s the representative human who rules God’s kingdom. So the role of the Messiah, or the Son of Man, is judge, king, mediator of God’s reign. And the Holy Spirit is our Advocate. He’s the defense attorney. So who’s the prosecution? It’s the Accuser, and that is the original word used whenever you see the word Satan referred to. It’s actually the Accuser. So the Accuser is the Demiurge, or one of his chief henchmen, one of his archons, that we call Satan. He’s our prosecutor. It’s its job to make us feel bad, to accuse us of crimes and sins and petty misdeeds, and not being loving enough or not being good enough to even talk to God. But the Holy Spirit is our defense attorney on the other side, who says, of course they’re good enough. Of course you’re fine. If you love me, if you love the Father, all is good. That’s his job. And it’s the job of the Son of Man, the king, to judge. So I’m going to put a little chart in the transcript here of the difference between the Son of Man and the Advocate. The Son of Man is the Messiah, King, Judge. The Advocate is the presence of God within. Role Son of Man (Jesus) Advocate (Spirit) Identity Messiah, King, Judge Presence of God within Mission Establish kingdom, redeem humanity Continue and internalize that work Authority Given dominion over all Acts with Jesus' authority Relationship to believers External presence (historical) Internal presence (ongoing) You see, it’s always within. So this notion that the Third Order Powers comes into us and overlays upon our Second Orderness, that’s not Gnostic hyperbole. That’s not my imagination. It says this in the Bible. It’s the presence of God within. The mission of the Son of Man, of Jesus, was to establish the kingdom here in the cosmos. Because after the Fall, the cosmos was entirely ruled by the Archon of the cosmos. But after the coming of the Son of Man, that is our most perfect human being from above, it is the Son of Man’s job, his mission to establish the kingdom here in the cosmos, to redeem us. And the Advocate’s job is to continue and to internalize that work, to bring it inside of each and every human being on the planet. But it can’t do that without cooperation, without being invited. So this is God outside of us and God inside of us, an internal presence, and it’s ongoing. In Gnostic terms, the ongoing Spirit, the Advocate, that brings the presence of the Son into us is the Third Order of Powers that comes with each of our countenances, or our faces, so that we can recognize the one to whom we pray. That’s a paraphrase out of the Tripartite Tractate, that the Third Order Power, the Christ, comes with the face of everyone who prays for help. It also comes with the face of every  one of the Aeons above, and with the face of the Son of God. So you can see it’s the most powerful thing that exists. The Third Order of Powers replaces our Second Order Power with a renewed and repaired indwelling of Spirit. We can’t rectify our own flaws. Redemption must come from a wiser, greater source. If you could fix yourself, you’d have fixed yourself by now. It’s called pulling yourself up from your own bootstraps. You can’t lift yourself off the ground by pulling up on your shoelaces. You need a more powerful figure from the outside. If they pull up on your shoelaces, they can lift you up from the ground. You see, that’s the expression known as being lifted by your bootstraps. I don’t know if you remember that or not. Anyway, we can’t rectify our own flaws. Redemption must come from a wiser, greater source. The Christ was formed for that very purpose and duty. The Son of Man is our perfected genotype of humanity. Let me repeat John 16, 7 to 11 again. ‘For if I do not go away, the Advocate surely is not coming to you. But if I go, I shall send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the cosmos wrong concerning righteousness and concerning judgment, concerning sin because they do not have faith in me, concerning righteousness because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me, concerning judgment because the archon of this cosmos has been judged.' Do you understand that phrase better now? Now from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 3, verse 18 through 23. ‘Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks to be a wise man in this age, let him become foolish in order to become wise. For the wisdom of this cosmos is folly before God. For it has been written, He catches the wise in their craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the ponderings of the wise that they are vapid. Hence, let no one boast in human beings, for all things are yours, and you the anointed and the anointed gods.' And this bit about appearing foolish in the eyes of the world—I know that when we profess to follow these Gnostic teachings, that people who think themselves so wise, so smart, and so much better than we are, think we’re stupid jerks. We are much reviled for being innocent, for being true believers. But that is how we are to be. We are to believe as children, fully believing with all of our hearts and minds and reason. Don’t hold back because you’re afraid that people are going to think you’re stupid. They’ve always thought that. They mocked Jesus. Of course they’re going to mock you. But the wisdom of this cosmos is folly before God, it says. And it also says that the ponderings of the wise are vapid. Vapid means empty, like vapor. So people that think they’re so darn smart, they’re not. They’re just serving the archon of the cosmos. But it’s folly. It’s foolishness. You can’t take it with you. All that matters is your connection to the Father above, and your love for the Father, and your love for your fellow humans. Not pretending, not professing to be love that arises from hatred, but true love, true righteousness. And when you ask the Third Order Powers to come and help you, to come and redeem you, that’s between you and the Father. That’s between you and the Aeons. That’s between you and the Christ. It doesn’t have to do with some priest, or some minister, or some internet influencer. It’s a private matter. But once you do have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and you’ll know it when it happens, that’s that born-again experience. You’ll be filled with reassurance. You’ll be flooded with love. You’ll know that it happens. And then you will know that you are the anointed, that is, that you belong to Christ, and that you belong to the anointed God, that is, the Father. So in conclusion, from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, verse 38, it says, And Peter said to them, Change your hearts, [and that’s from the hearts of stone to hearts of receptive flesh, like we talked about last week], change your hearts. Let each of you be baptized upon the name of Jesus, the Anointed, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, [that is, the army of the Christ, the Third Order of Powers, sent to battle the archons of this cosmos on your behalf]. God bless us all. Onward and upward. If you would like to contribute to this ongoing work, please use the form below. You are appreciated! 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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week, we’re going to follow up on last week’s episode, which was called Gnostic Pentecost, and that was first broadcast on the 6th of June, 2026. I have a lot more examples out of the New Testament of the Bible about Pentecost, and as we learned last week, Pentecost is what we’ve been calling the coming of the Third Order of Powers here in this Gnosticism out of the Tripartite Tractate that I share with you at Gnostic Insights. Here’s a quote from last week’s episode where it says, Jesus stood up and said loudly, ‘if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts, living streams of water will flow.' Now he said this in regard to the spirit whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament, John, Chapter 7, verse 37] And this is speaking of what we call the Holy Spirit, because of course we have spirit. We’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us. That is the First Order of Powers. But Jesus here is talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that has come after Jesus is, glorified. And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living above, just as we will all be living above in a glorified body in the presence of the Father. So I shared that with you last week, and if you haven’t heard last week’s episode, again it’s called Gnostic Pentecost, go back and listen to it, because it’s a deep dive—what we call hermeneutics in theology or philosophy. It’s a deep deconstruction of a couple of very important passages in the Old and New Testament that have to do with the coming of what is called Pentecost. And Pentecost was when the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, came and sat upon the disciples while they were gathered in the upper room after Jesus had left and gone back above. But we’ve been talking about Pentecost all along here at Gnostic Insights as the coming of the Third Order of Powers that is the army of Christ. I’m going to quote a whole lot of New Testament for you today, and I take this out of The New Testament by David Bentley Hart, published by Yale University Press. So let’s start with John 14:16-30, and this is Jesus speaking. ‘And I shall entreat the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, that he may be with you throughout the age.' Now, by the way, when Hart and all translators translate throughout the age, they’re talking about Aeons. The word is Aeons. And so an alternate translation that Hart mentions in the footnote to this passage, throughout the age, can also mean, or until the Aeons come, or until the return to the Aeons. So listen to this again. ‘And I shall entreat the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, that he may be with you throughout the coming of the Aeons.' And of course here at Gnostic Insights and in Gnosticism, we believe that these Aeons are units of consciousness, that they’re parts of the Son, they’re parts of the mind of God. It’s not a measure of time, but a measure of consciousness. Carrying on with John 14:16. ‘The Spirit of Truth, which the cosmos cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows it, you know it because it abides with you and will be within you. I shall not leave you orphans. I am coming to you. Just a little while, and the cosmos no longer sees me, but you see me. Because I live, you too will live. On that day, [and he’s referring to Pentecost, the coming of the Third Order of Powers], you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, that one is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.' Then Judas, not Iscariot, says to him, ‘Lord, what has happened then that you were about to manifest yourself to us and not to the cosmos?' Jesus answered and said to him, ‘if someone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and we’ll make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words, and the word that you hear is not mine, but rather that of the Father who has sent me. These things I’ve spoken to you while remaining with you, but the Advocate, the Spirit, the Holy One, which the Father will send in my name, he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you. Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you. I give to you not as the cosmos gives. Do not let your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. I will no longer speak much with you, but the Archon of the cosmos is coming, and he has no hold in me, but so that the cosmos may know that I love the Father, and that just as the Father has commanded me, so I do.' Now, what Jesus was sharing with the disciples in this passage was that his physical body was about to go away. We know that he was about to be crucified and gone. They don’t exactly understand what’s about to happen because they can’t see the future, but Jesus can. He says, I’m going to go away, but don’t worry, I’m going to send a Spirit called the Advocate, and it will come in my name, and in the name of the Father, and it will advise you. Right now you walk with me physically, and I am outside of you, but when the Advocate comes, it will be inside of you. And here at Gnostic Insights, I describe the coming of the Third Order of Powers as overlaying our Second Order Power. See, it’s like your cells of your body. Imagine that there is another version of you that is perfected, that is cleansed of all illness, or cleansed of all poor cellular replication. We’re making an analogy here between cells and spiritual parts, but right now I’m just talking about cells. So let’s say you’ve got all these kind of little faults in your body that have developed over the years. Now imagine there was a perfected body that slipped right into you, like a sort of like a ghost, the Holy Ghost, overlaying upon your cells that cause your cells to pattern themselves after it. It’s like stepping into your body and overlaying what has been damaged over the years. Well, that is what happens with our spiritual bodies. We are what are called Second Order Powers, and we are made up of various combinations of, I hate to get confusing here for you, but of the First Order Powers. The First Order Powers were the Aeons. The Second Order Powers are all of us living things. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness–the First Order Powers, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represent all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. The Third Order Powers are the perfected Christly powers. We are the fruit of the First Order Powers. Each of us is unique, a unique combination of various First Order Powers, and they make up our body. It’s like the recipe. Each of us has a different recipe. Down here, we manifest that recipe. That is who I am. You have a slightly different recipe, but mainly we’re the same. When the Third Order of Powers come, they overlay upon your unique combination and my unique combination. The Third Order Powers are unique to each one of us because they are made to be in our countenance so that we will recognize them. These perfected Third Order Powers, the army of Christ, steps into our soul, steps into our spirit, and overlays upon our pattern, upon our recipe. That’s what brings us the perfection of the Christ. But it only happens if you ask for it. It only happens when you allow it and you seek it out. Now, at the end of that quote I just read you out of John, he says, peace I leave you, my peace I give to you. I give to you not as the cosmos gives. And you see, the distinction is that the cosmos, that’s our material instantiation. That’s the material part of our bodies. It’s the material world. It’s matter itself. And Jesus is saying that when he gives you something, it’s not the way that the Demiurge gives it to you, with strings, lots of strings. Jesus says, do not let your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. So we’re not supposed to live in a spirit of fear. There’s no need to be afraid. When you trust in the Father, when you trust in the Christ and the Holy Spirit, you are imbued with the most powerful energy that has ever been. It far outweighs the energy of the cosmos, the energy of the material, the energy of the Demiurge, the energy of the archons. It outranks them, it outweighs them, it’s more powerful. And when you allow it to come inside of you, then you have that power within you to overcome the archons, the cosmos, the Demiurge. Jesus says, I will no longer speak much with you, [that is physically, because he’s about to be crucified], for the archon of the cosmos is coming. He’s speaking of the Demiurge in the form of the Roman soldiers that are about to arrest him and put him to death. And he has no hold in me. [So he’s saying that even though the archon of the cosmos is coming, it couldn’t contain him except that Jesus is allowing it.] He has no hold in me, [because Jesus is more powerful, because Jesus embodies the Christ]. He’s the first perfected human to embody the energy of the Third Order Powers. That’s what it means by being fully human and fully God. Jesus says, but so that the cosmos may know that I love the Father, and that just as the Father has commanded me to do so. And what is this commandment of Jesus? Well, that’s described in Matthew 22:37-39—the teaching most often referred to as Jesus’s commandment and what is called the great commandment. And Jesus summarizes God’s law, all of those laws of the Old Testament that the Demiurge had constructed. He summarizes them into two main commands. 1: Love God completely. 2: Two, love others as yourself. And here’s the quote, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your reason. This is the great and first commandment. The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets depend upon these two commandments.' Together, these two are described as the foundation of all the other laws and teachings. Of course, when the Demiurge had this transcribed, he had the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of rules added onto it, because the Demiurge is law-bound, and he can only work through law. But Jesus said, don’t worry about all those little laws that you’ve been burdened with. All you have to know is love your neighbor, and love the Father, love God, and then all the other commandments will take care of themselves, because the power of love will be working through you. The book of John, chapter 15:17-27, puts it this way: ‘These things I command you so that you love one another. If the cosmos hates you, you know that it has hated me before you. If you were of the cosmos, the cosmos would have loved its own. But since you are not of the cosmos, the cosmos therefore hates you. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who has sent me. Whoever hates me also hates my Father. But they have both seen and hated both me and my Father. And thus might the passage written in the law, [and that’s the law of Jehovah, of the Old Testament], be fulfilled.' And here’s what the passage said, ‘When the Advocate comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth who comes forth from the Father, he will testify concerning me. And you too must testify, for you are with me from the beginning.' Now, this from the beginning—that's a Gnostic term, and that was before the material cosmos was created from the Fall. In the Tripartite Tractate, it says that only those things which were from the beginning will continue through eternity. The rest will be disappeared. So, Jesus is saying that the number one command is to love. And he’s also saying that the cosmos will hate you if you do, because the cosmos hates love. Again, from the New Testament book of John, in chapter 16, verses 1 through 15, Jesus says, ‘I’ve spoken these things to you so that you might not be caused to falter. They will make you exiles from the synagogue, [and I add, and the churches and the mosques], and an hour is coming in which everyone who kills you thinks he is offering a service to God. And they will do these things because they have known neither the Father nor me. But I tell you the truth, it is for your own good that I should go away. For if I do not go away, the Advocate, [that is the Holy Spirit, that is the Third Order Powers, that is the army of Christ], surely is not coming to you. But if I go, I shall send him to you. And when he comes, it will prove the cosmos wrong concerning righteousness and concerning judgment, concerning sin.' And by the way, sin means literally to miss the mark, as if you’re shooting an arrow at a target. It’s to miss the bullseye. It means to fail, to fall short, as if your arrow fell short of the bullseye. So that’s what sin is. It’s not a list of naughty things. It simply means to miss the mark. So Jesus is saying, when that one comes, the Spirit of Truth, ‘He will prove the cosmos wrong concerning righteousness and concerning judgment, concerning sin because they do not have faith in me, and concerning righteousness because I am going to the Father and you no longer see me, and concerning judgment because the archon of this cosmos, the Demiurge, has been judged. I still have many things to tell you, but right now you cannot hear them. But when that one comes, the Spirit of Truth, he will guide you on the way to all truth, for he will not speak from himself, but will speak what he hears, and he will announce to you things to come. That one will glorify me because he will receive from what is mine and will announce it to you. All that the Father has is mine. That is why I said that he receives from what is mine and will announce it to you.' Now in this passage, when Jesus is talking about the Spirit of Truth and that it will come to the disciples after he is physically disembodied, it will come to everyone who accepts the coming of the Spirit of truth—that Spirit of truth, that’s gnosis. That is gnosis. That’s all there is to it. It’s not lists of this and lists of that that you have to memorize. It’s not the names of the angels and the names of the archons and the names of the Aeons. It’s not the order of the planets or the astrology. It’s not the secrets of alchemy. Those are not the gnosis of which Jesus is speaking. It doesn’t have to do with having magical powers over the cosmos. The cosmos is the cosmos. This is the kingdom of the Demiurge. This is the kingdom of the archon of the cosmos. This is the valley of death. The Spirit of Truth, the gnosis that comes from above, is all about the Father. It’s about eternity and the ethereal plane. It’s simply about love and the fact that we come from love and that we will return to love and that this down here is mostly delusion. It’s mostly falsehoods. That’s why the Holy Spirit is known as the Spirit of Truth. It’s what combats the Spirit of delusion, the falsity of the deficiency, the falsity of the imitation, as we know it here in Gnosticism. So you see these quotes in the New Testament, they’re all about gnosis. They are Gnostic. It’s just that we are not familiar with them if we are Christians nowadays, because the gnosis was taken out. The true references, the definitions of these phrases, were taken out. That’s why I call this the Gnostic Reformation. I’m literally sitting here attempting to return Christianity to its roots, to what Jesus is teaching here. He’s teaching of the Father above, not the God of this world. Now you’ve heard the Holy Spirit being referred to as the Advocate, which is a legal term. And when Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit, he called it the Advocate. And the Advocate’s role is to teach us, to guide us, to remind us, and to empower us as believers. The Son of Man, whom Jesus was known as, is a messianic title from Daniel 7 of the Old Testament, one of the prophets of the Old Testament. The Son of Man is a title that refers to one who receives authority, kingship, and judgment. He’s the representative human who rules God’s kingdom. So the role of the Messiah, or the Son of Man, is judge, king, mediator of God’s reign. And the Holy Spirit is our Advocate. He’s the defense attorney. So who’s the prosecution? It’s the Accuser, and that is the original word used whenever you see the word Satan referred to. It’s actually the Accuser. So the Accuser is the Demiurge, or one of his chief henchmen, one of his archons, that we call Satan. He’s our prosecutor. It’s its job to make us feel bad, to accuse us of crimes and sins and petty misdeeds, and not being loving enough or not being good enough to even talk to God. But the Holy Spirit is our defense attorney on the other side, who says, of course they’re good enough. Of course you’re fine. If you love me, if you love the Father, all is good. That’s his job. And it’s the job of the Son of Man, the king, to judge. So I’m going to put a little chart in the transcript here of the difference between the Son of Man and the Advocate. The Son of Man is the Messiah, King, Judge. The Advocate is the presence of God within. Role Son of Man (Jesus) Advocate (Spirit) Identity Messiah, King, Judge Presence of God within Mission Establish kingdom, redeem humanity Continue and internalize that work Authority Given dominion over all Acts with Jesus' authority Relationship to believers External presence (historical) Internal presence (ongoing) You see, it’s always within. So this notion that the Third Order Powers comes into us and overlays upon our Second Orderness, that’s not Gnostic hyperbole. That’s not my imagination. It says this in the Bible. It’s the presence of God within. The mission of the Son of Man, of Jesus, was to establish the kingdom here in the cosmos. Because after the Fall, the cosmos was entirely ruled by the Archon of the cosmos. But after the coming of the Son of Man, that is our most perfect human being from above, it is the Son of Man’s job, his mission to establish the kingdom here in the cosmos, to redeem us. And the Advocate’s job is to continue and to internalize that work, to bring it inside of each and every human being on the planet. But it can’t do that without cooperation, without being invited. So this is God outside of us and God inside of us, an internal presence, and it’s ongoing. In Gnostic terms, the ongoing Spirit, the Advocate, that brings the presence of the Son into us is the Third Order of Powers that comes with each of our countenances, or our faces, so that we can recognize the one to whom we pray. That’s a paraphrase out of the Tripartite Tractate, that the Third Order Power, the Christ, comes with the face of everyone who prays for help. It also comes with the face of every  one of the Aeons above, and with the face of the Son of God. So you can see it’s the most powerful thing that exists. The Third Order of Powers replaces our Second Order Power with a renewed and repaired indwelling of Spirit. We can’t rectify our own flaws. Redemption must come from a wiser, greater source. If you could fix yourself, you’d have fixed yourself by now. It’s called pulling yourself up from your own bootstraps. You can’t lift yourself off the ground by pulling up on your shoelaces. You need a more powerful figure from the outside. If they pull up on your shoelaces, they can lift you up from the ground. You see, that’s the expression known as being lifted by your bootstraps. I don’t know if you remember that or not. Anyway, we can’t rectify our own flaws. Redemption must come from a wiser, greater source. The Christ was formed for that very purpose and duty. The Son of Man is our perfected genotype of humanity. Let me repeat John 16, 7 to 11 again. ‘For if I do not go away, the Advocate surely is not coming to you. But if I go, I shall send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the cosmos wrong concerning righteousness and concerning judgment, concerning sin because they do not have faith in me, concerning righteousness because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me, concerning judgment because the archon of this cosmos has been judged.' Do you understand that phrase better now? Now from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 3, verse 18 through 23. ‘Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks to be a wise man in this age, let him become foolish in order to become wise. For the wisdom of this cosmos is folly before God. For it has been written, He catches the wise in their craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the ponderings of the wise that they are vapid. Hence, let no one boast in human beings, for all things are yours, and you the anointed and the anointed gods.' And this bit about appearing foolish in the eyes of the world—I know that when we profess to follow these Gnostic teachings, that people who think themselves so wise, so smart, and so much better than we are, think we’re stupid jerks. We are much reviled for being innocent, for being true believers. But that is how we are to be. We are to believe as children, fully believing with all of our hearts and minds and reason. Don’t hold back because you’re afraid that people are going to think you’re stupid. They’ve always thought that. They mocked Jesus. Of course they’re going to mock you. But the wisdom of this cosmos is folly before God, it says. And it also says that the ponderings of the wise are vapid. Vapid means empty, like vapor. So people that think they’re so darn smart, they’re not. They’re just serving the archon of the cosmos. But it’s folly. It’s foolishness. You can’t take it with you. All that matters is your connection to the Father above, and your love for the Father, and your love for your fellow humans. Not pretending, not professing to be love that arises from hatred, but true love, true righteousness. And when you ask the Third Order Powers to come and help you, to come and redeem you, that’s between you and the Father. That’s between you and the Aeons. That’s between you and the Christ. It doesn’t have to do with some priest, or some minister, or some internet influencer. It’s a private matter. But once you do have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and you’ll know it when it happens, that’s that born-again experience. You’ll be filled with reassurance. You’ll be flooded with love. You’ll know that it happens. And then you will know that you are the anointed, that is, that you belong to Christ, and that you belong to the anointed God, that is, the Father. So in conclusion, from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, verse 38, it says, And Peter said to them, Change your hearts, [and that’s from the hearts of stone to hearts of receptive flesh, like we talked about last week], change your hearts. Let each of you be baptized upon the name of Jesus, the Anointed, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, [that is, the army of the Christ, the Third Order of Powers, sent to battle the archons of this cosmos on your behalf]. God bless us all. Onward and upward. If you would like to contribute to this ongoing work, please use the form below. You are appreciated! 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Guest Courtney Miller Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes In this episode of Sustain, Richard welcomes back Courtney Miller to unpack her PhD research on one of open source's most overlooked problems: what happens when widely used software is abandoned. Courtney explains why abandonment is not always simple, or even always bad, but can create real risks for the developers and projects that depend on it. From npm package research and downstream impact to Abandabot, AI-assisted tooling, maintainer burnout, and responsible sunsetting, this conversation explores how the open source ecosystem can better understand, detect, and respond when the software we rely on stops being maintained. Press download now! [00:01:28] Courtney explains the focus of her dissertation. [00:02:34] Courtney defines abandonment. [00:03:44] Her ecosystem-wide analysis focused on the npm JavaScript ecosystem, looking specifically at widely used packages. [00:05:23] The first part of the dissertation involved interviews with maintainers who rely on abandoned packages and often lack tools or clear processes for responding. [00:06:31] Courtney describes two types of abandonment: Explicit Notice Abandonment and Activity Based Abandonment. [00:09:27] Courtney explains the third and final chapter called, Designing Abandabot. [00:11:10] Richard raises the point that some software can be “done” and still function fine. Courtney agrees, noting that not all abandonment matters and beyond alerts remediation matters. [00:13:22] The conversation expands into under-resourced and under-maintained projects, which can also become supply chain risks before they are fully abandoned. [00:14:53] Richard brings up the “Whale Fall” idea and Courtney agrees and points to responsible sunsetting as an important research area. [00:17:39] We learn about Courtney's experience bringing AI into the dissertation, especially for building Abandabot's prediction system. [00:20:54] Richard asks whether AI is already making abandonment more common. [00:24:52] Courtney talks about staying grounded in real practitioner problems as the open source and AI landscape changes quickly. [00:26:30] Final Takeaways: Courtney argues that abandonment needs to be addressed now, especially through software composition analysis tools that can help developers understand and respond to real dependency risk. Quotes [00:01:35] “The title of my dissertation is: “Supporting the Sustainable Use of Open Source Software.” [00:07:10] “There is no right answer how to define abandonment.” [00:07:26] “Explicit Notice Abandonment”- where the maintainers of a package publicly express their intent to no longer do so.” [00:07:42] “The other type of abandonment was called “Activity Based Abandonment” -commonly used as a way of identifying abandonment in open source sustainability literature.” [00:08:26] “Out of the widely used packages, around 15% had abandonment issues.” [00:11:38] “Not all abandonment matters. If left pad is abandoned, who cares?” [00:21:35] “Maybe projects never have to die. You can create a fork and maintain it on your own.” Spotlight [00:27:20] Richard's spotlight is the translation feature on iPhone in Books. [00:28:20] Courtney's potlight is her dog, Chanel, and SAFE-MCP. Links SustainOSS podcast@sustainoss.org richard@sustainoss.org SustainOSS Discourse SustainOSS Mastodon SustainOSS Bluesky SustainOSS LinkedIn Open Collective-SustainOSS (Contribute) Richard Littauer Socials Courtney Miller Website Courtney Miller LinkedIn Sustain Podcast-Episode 140: Courtney Miller and Hongbo Fang on Toxicity and Information Flow in Open Source Communities Supporting the Sustainable Use of Open Source Software by Courtney Elta Miller Whale Fall (Andrew Nesbitt blog) Michael Winser LinkedIn SAFE-MCP SustainOSS - AI, FLOSS, and Sustainability Virtual Forum Registration Sponsor CURIOSS Credits Produced by Richard Littauer Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound Special Guest: Courtney Miller.

PHP Podcast – June 11, 2026 Guest Hosts: Sara Golemon, Elizabeth Barron & Holly Schilling Eric and John are out this week — Sara, Elizabeth, and Holly take over. Here’s what they covered: PHPVerse Recap PHPVerse just wrapped up, and Elizabeth was there in Amsterdam. The format is unusual — all speakers are flown to one location, but the audience is entirely virtual. It was a class act: professional TV crew, studio lighting, and a makeup and hair team on site. Around 2,500–3,000 people watched the live stream. Everything was broadcast as one long block; individual talk segments and possibly the documentary trailer will be cut and released separately. The full stream is available now — the PHP documentary trailer (produced by Jet Breeze, covering 30+ years of PHP history) appears around the 2:24:30 mark. PHP Foundation 2026 Strategy Document Elizabeth and the PHP Foundation released their 2026 strategy document the same day as this recording. The foundation gathered community input across numerous conversations and conferences, synthesized it into findings, and has now published a plan for the rest of the year. Key themes: repositioning PHP’s public perception (which Elizabeth calls a solvable problem), creating six special interest groups, and launching an Onboarding Initiative to build a real on-ramp for new PHP developers. Elizabeth’s view is that the two things giving her the most hope for PHP’s future are the passion and expertise of the community, and how good the language itself has gotten. Visit thephp.foundation to read the full document. The Onboarding Initiative One of the six special interest groups the foundation is launching is specifically focused on bringing new developers into PHP. Goals include creating a true learning path (not just a reference manual that assumes existing knowledge), improving educational resources, and potentially working with the php.net website to improve the first-time experience. Holly made the point that PHP’s barrier to entry is genuinely lower than almost any other language — the Hello World program is 11 characters — but that story isn’t being told outside the PHP bubble. New developers are turning to JavaScript as a first language and running into minified spaghetti instead of something approachable. AI Writing PHP — And PHP as a Second Language Holly built the entire PHP Tek conference app backend in Laravel without writing a single line of code herself — AI-generated throughout, which she reviewed and approved. The code held up to peer review at the conference with only minor style nits. She ran it on PHP 8.3 and used modern standards throughout (one piece of feedback: stop using empty()). The consensus: AI models write good modern PHP because of the vast amount of open source PHP they were trained on. The caveat Sara raised is worth thinking about — how much of that training data is PHP 4-era code and WordPress 3 repositories? Either way, Holly’s case for PHP as a second language is strong: low ceremony, low boilerplate, readable syntax, and it’s a language where you can do something useful in minutes. PHP’s Reputation Problem (and Why It’s Fixable) The group dug into PHP’s perception gap — the mismatch between how good the language actually is and how it’s perceived outside the community. Holly’s experience as a mobile developer who recommends PHP to others: the pushback is immediate (“isn’t that slow?”, “isn’t that dead?”). The benchmarks don’t support that reputation — PHP outperforms Python on most comparable workloads — but data alone doesn’t shift perception. Elizabeth’s point is that this is primarily a storytelling and coordination problem, not a language problem, and that the foundation’s repositioning work is exactly aimed at closing that gap. The community has the passion. It just needs to tell the story outside its own bubble. PHP Polling API RFC Sara walked through the RFC for a new Polling API in PHP (wiki.php.net/rfc/poll_API). The short version: PHP currently has five or six different ways to do I/O multiplexing (watching multiple streams and acting on whichever one is ready first), and which one works depends on the OS, available extensions, and PHP version. The Polling API proposal creates a single, unified interface that abstracts all of that. The immediate beneficiaries are async frameworks like Amp PHP, ReactPHP, and Revolt, which currently have to maintain multiple backend implementations to cover different environments. The bigger picture: this is a building block on the path toward true async PHP, likely contributing to something more complete in PHP 9.0. Most app developers won’t use it directly — but the libraries they depend on will. RFCs are all listed at wiki.php.net/rfc. PHP.net: Do As We Say, Not As We Do Sara, who has contributed to php.net, copped to the state of the codebase: some of it dates to the PHP 3 era, there are functions.inc files, and it is very much “do as we say, not as we do.” The historical reason is that php.net used to rely on community-administered mirrors (r-synced servers running everything from PHP 5.1 to 5.6 simultaneously), so modernizing the code was impossible without controlling the runtime. That’s changed with CDN-based load balancing — they can now control what PHP version runs on php.net — and the code has been getting better. But it’s a slow process. PHP Podcasts Past, Present, and Future Holly asked about the PHP Town Hall podcast (Ben Edmonds and Phil Sturgeon), and the group did a quick tour of PHP podcast history. The PHP Roundtable — originally started by Sammy, taken over by Eric — has produced about three episodes. Sara and producer Joe are planning to take it off Eric’s hands and actually do it properly. And Elizabeth announced that the PHP Foundation is launching a new podcast: tentatively called PHP at Scale, hosted by Ben Marx, focused on telling the stories of organizations pushing PHP to its limits. No launch date yet, but there’s already a queue of interested guests. Next Week’s Show — Moved to Wednesday Sara will be on a boat off the coast of Galicia on Thursday, so next week’s episode is moving to Wednesday. Guests will include Paul Reinheimer and (hopefully) Sean Coase — two veterans from PHP’s podcasting past. Elizabeth is going to try to make it work around the Canadian Grand Prix. Mac Mini M4 for Local LLMs Holly picked up a refurbished Mac Mini M4 (16GB RAM, 512GB storage) specifically to run LLM models locally via Ollama. Apple Silicon is a solid choice for this because the unified memory architecture gives the neural cores access to far more RAM than a discrete GPU setup. Sara is waiting for the M5, which is reportedly not coming until fall — and is already resigned to spending too much on it when it lands. Links from the show: PHP Foundation — 2026 Strategy Document PHP RFC: Polling API PHP RFC Wiki — All RFCs Under Discussion Amp PHP — Async framework ReactPHP — Event-driven async PHP Revolt — Event loop for PHP php.net website source code (github.com/php/web-php) PHP Architect Discord Guest Hosts: Sara Golemon Based in Lisbon, Portugal PHP core contributor; code contributor via the Curl project (which means she technically has code on Mars) Elizabeth Barron Executive Director, PHP Foundation Based in Germany Holly Schilling Primary mobile developer; built the PHP Tek 2026 conference app Based near Chicago, IL Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Note: Next week’s show is on Wednesday (not Thursday) with guests Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coase. Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.11 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Shopify performance specialist Izaac Barratt of Baseline Commerce joins Karl and Taylor for a deep dive into site speed optimization. The conversation covers the full spectrum from LCP and INP fundamentals to the real-world friction of app bloat, AI coding habits, and what actually moves the needle for conversion rates. A must-listen for any theme developer, app developer, or agency working with high-traffic Shopify stores.SponsorThe Support Heroes - https://www.thesupportheroes.com/?utm_source=liquid_weekly&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=sponsorshipsSubscribe to Liquid WeeklyDon't miss out on expert insights and tips—subscribe to Liquid Weekly for more content like this: https://liquidweekly.com/Find Izaac Barratt OnlineLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/izaac-barratt — where he posts performance tips, resources, and his ongoing series on the nine performance fix bucketsBaseline Commerce: baseline-commerce.com — Izaac's site speed optimization consultancyTimestamps01:23 – Intros; welcoming guest Izaac Barrett02:48 – Izaac's origin story: animation, Newgrounds, and e-commerce05:36 – What drew Izaac to performance optimization06:00 – First site speed project: 12 seconds to 2 seconds, conversion doubled10:00 – LCP fundamentals: above-the-fold prioritization and perception18:00 – Preloading, lazy loading, and how to get them wrong20:43 – Liquid's preload tag, sections_index, and reducing JavaScript dependency26:38 – Telling AI to prioritize HTML/Liquid and CSS over JavaScript31:01 – Async vs. defer vs. render-blocking scripts explained35:28 – Apps and performance: identifying problem apps, merchant conversations39:15 – Advice for app developers on loading strategy and user interaction cycles41:42 – INP (Interaction to Next Paint) explained: what it is and why it's hard to fix43:30 – Shopify/research report: 34ms of INP = 3.5% drop in CVR46:06 – How to debug INP: Chrome DevTools performance tab and CrUX data53:20 – Izaac's LinkedIn series: nine buckets of performance fixes56:17 – Dev Changelog1:02:44 – Picks of the WeekDev Changelog- Next-Generation Events — Developer Preview: https://shopify.dev/changelog- ⚠️ Expiring Offline Access Tokens Required for All Public Apps — January 1, 2027: https://shopify.dev/changelog- Shop Minis — March/April 2026 Update: https://shopify.dev/changelog- Customer Account UI — Feature Preview: https://shopify.dev/changelog- App Home as a UI Extension: https://shopify.dev/changelog- llms.txt / agents.md in Shopify Themes: https://shopify.dev/changelogPicks of the WeekKarl:The Dark Journey: The Tragedy of the Donner Party by Allan Eckert – A true history of the ill-fated 1846 wagon party, written by one of Karl's favorite frontier authors; dark but compelling, especially for history enthusiasts. https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Journey-Allan-W-Eckert/dp/1931672539Izaac: Page Speed Impact Estimator fastersite.ai – A tool for estimating the performance gains of removing specific scripts and assets before actually doing the work; great for benchmarking and scoping conversations with clients.Taylor:The Will of the Many by James Islington – A sci-fi novel recommended by Taylor's brother (a bookseller); follows a teenager hiding his royal lineage in a Roman Empire-style society that literally harvests people's will to gain power. Book two also out. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58416951-the-will-of-the-many

Wie hat dir die Folge gefallen?Gut

Dans cet épisode crossover Apple Différemment x Tech Café, on revient sur la WWDC 2026 d'Apple et sur la réception de la conférence. Une première impression de déception puis, avec une lecture plus attentive, Apple a finalement présenté plusieurs évolutions concrètes sur ses appareils.  Me soutenir sur Patreon Me retrouver sur YouTube On discute ensemble sur Discord Les annonces phare sur les OS Finies les séquences par OS, on optimise partout et on nettoie les vitres. Les apps se chargent plus vite, la recherche enfin pertinente et à une vitesse décente, recherche des plus beaux sourires de vos photos et vidéos, planificateur de processeur (CPU) optimisé (y compris anciens iPhone), gestion du JavaScript accélérée, switch wifi / connexion cellulaire Contrôle parental : refonte complète On est en 2026 : IA, agents et vibe coding Siri AI, app dédiée, des promesses mais pas partout (la bêta et l'Apple Watch est notre amie) L'édition de photos se met à niveau (vraiment), la génération d'images aussi Vibe coding de raccourcis ou l'aveu de l'échec du nocode Changement des mots de passe par agent IA 5 nouveaux Apple Foundation Models, : plus complexe et complet qu'il n'y paraît Ce qui sera disponible ou pas Mais aussi… Entre politique et annonces ringardes Des annonces sans les citer : un Mac tactile (dessin dans Notes, pull down to refresh, affichage des bordures des fenêtres pour l'accessibilité), l'iPhone pliant, un MacBook Neo avec 12 Go de RAM Compatibilité des OS : M pour le Mac, comme iOS 26 pour l'iPhone et c'est plus critique sur l'Apple Watch (SE 3, 9, ou Ultra 2 minimum), et quelques iPad abandonnés (il faut au moins un processeur A13 ou plus exactement un A12Z (iPad Pro de 2020) Quelques évolutions dans Notes (format markdown, liens entre les sections) Albums vraiment partagés avec autres OS Râle d'agonie ? Des annonces visionOS (fenêtres courbées, centre de contrôle revus, panoramas d'après vos photos, Siri au regard) Adieu Hidden Bar, les services de création de cartes Pas Apple Divorce acté entre les chargeurs et leurs câbles soudés USB-C en Europe Baisse de prix de l'abonnement Google Gemini AI Plus Les prix des forfaits en France vont-ils augmenter ? La voiture électrique sauve des vies (enfin évite des morts) Jeux vidéo La conclusion du Joy-Con Drift en France Participants Avec Mat Fabrice Neuman Une émission présentée par Guillaume Vendé

Versión  en espagñol: El software se está comiendo al mundo, y esto incluye al mundo científico. En estos días, hacer ciencia requiere también desarrollar software, ya sea usando Python para analizar datos, o construyendo aplicaciones web en JavaScript para compartir modelos computacionales con expertos. Mientras muchos científicos se encargan ellos mismos de estas tareas, otros las delegan a especialistas en desarrollo de software científico. Estos especialistas tienen el título de "ingenieros de software de investigación".En esta edición del podcast, Sofía Miñano y Carlos Gavidia-Calderón, ambos ingenieros de software de investigación trabajando en el Reino Unido, conversan sobre su profesión. Entre otras cosas, comentan:Cómo se puede hacer carrera en ingeniería de software de investigación.Las diferencias que ven entre construir software dentro y fuera de la comunidad científica.Los retos de la ingeniería de software y de la ciencia en Latinoamérica..La comunidad de ingenieros de software y científicos hispanohablantes.LinksSeminario “Charlas RSE en espanol”: https://charlas-rse-espanol.github.io/ Conferencia RSLA 2026: https://rs-latam.org/ ixpantia: https://www.ixpantia.com/en/ Link a la transcripción en español:https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlas-rse-espanol/codeforthought-transcripts/refs/heads/main/20-S11-ES-RSEEspagnol_reviewed_ES.txt Link to the translated transcript in English: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlas-rse-espanol/codeforthought-transcripts/refs/heads/main/20-S11-ES-RSEEspagnol_reviewed_EN.txt Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:Email mailto:peter@code4thought.orgUK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.socialLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Les annonces phare sur les OSFinies les séquences par OS, on optimise partout et on nettoie les vitres. Les apps se chargent plus vite, la recherche enfin pertinente et à une vitesse décente, recherche des plus beaux sourires de vos photos et vidéos, planificateur de processeur (CPU) optimisé (y compris anciens iPhone), gestion du JavaScript accélérée, switch wifi / connexion cellulaireContrôle parental : refonte complèteOn est en 2026 : IA, agents et vibe codingSiri AI, app dédiée, des promesses mais pas partout (la bêta et l'Apple Watch est notre amie)L'édition de photos se met à niveau (vraiment), la génération d'images aussiVibe coding de raccourcis ou l'aveu de l'échec du nocodeChangement des mots de passe par agent IA5 nouveaux Apple Foundation Models, : plus complexe et complet qu'il n'y paraîtCe qui sera disponible ou pasAutres remarques et nouveautés Entre politique et annonces ringardesDes annonces sans les citer : un Mac tactile (dessin dans Notes, pull down to refresh, affichage des bordures des fenêtres pour l'accessibilité), l'iPhone pliant, un MacBook Neo avec 12 Go de RAMCompatibilité des OS : M pour le Mac, comme iOS 26 pour l'iPhone et c'est plus critique sur l'Apple Watch (SE 3, 9, ou Ultra 2 minimum), et quelques iPad abandonnés (il faut au moins un processeur A13 ou plus exactement un A12Z (iPad Pro de 2020)Quelques évolutions dans Notes (format markdown, liens entre les sections)Albums vraiment partagés avec autres OSRâle d'agonie ? Des annonces visionOS (fenêtres courbées, centre de contrôle revus, panoramas d'après vos photos, Siri au regard)En réserveAdieu Hidden Bar, les services de création de cartesDivorce acté entre les chargeurs et leurs câbles soudés USB-C en EuropeBaisse de prix de l'abonnement Google Gemini AI PlusLes prix des forfaits en France vont-ils augmenter ?La voiture électrique sauve des vies (enfin évite des morts)La conclusion du Joy-Con Drift en FranceNos lienshttps://techcafe.fr/https://fabriceneuman.fr/https://profduweb.com

Connect with Salil here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salil-monga/If you're trying to make the jump into AI engineering, join Parsity: https://parsity.io/ai-devSalil Monga had a 4.0 GPA, applied to over 1,000 jobs, and landed three interviews. Not one of the jobs he actually got came from those applications.I sat down with Salil, now CTO of Cupe Connect, to dig into how you actually get hired in a difficult market: warm connections over cold applications, fundamentals over chasing the "golden stack," and why he walked into an interview thinking JavaScript was Java and still walked out with the offer.What we get into:- The 1,000-applications, 3-interviews reality, and why the applications were the wrong game to begin with- How every job he landed came from a professor or a peer, not a job board- Getting emotionally wrecked by applications, and the strategic mindset that fixes it- Using AI to actually learn instead of copy-pasting answers, and how he taught students to do the same- Why there's no golden stack, and how he shipped an iOS app having never built one before- Why fundamentals and problem-solving beat the framework of the month- How LeetCode quietly came back as a hiring filter, and how to treat it like one instead of hating it- Treating interviews as a game of chance you can tilt in your favor with rapport- Cube Connect: his no-algorithm, 50-meter-radius iOS app built to get people talking in real life againSalil is one of the more generous guests I've had on. He literally offered to review resumes and talk shop with anyone who reaches out, so go take him up on it.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week I was listening to one of the radio preachers I like to listen to and I caught a sermon on the Pentecost, and I realized I had at that point a Gnostic insight that Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, when it infused the disciples in the upper room—that is the coming of the Third Order of Powers released by the Christ after his resurrection—that the Third Order Powers are the “anointing of the Holy Spirit.” So quickly, let’s look at the Acts of the Apostles book out of the New Testament, Chapter 2, which is what we now call Pentecost. And when the day arrived that completed the fifty days after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place, and suddenly there came a noise, like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now dwelling in Jerusalem, there were devout Judeans from every nation under the sky, and on the advent of this noise, the multitude gathered and were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying, look, are not all of those who speak Galileans? And how is it that each one of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised? And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, what does this portend? But others, ridiculing them, said, ah, they’re full of sweet new wine. But Peter, standing up along with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them all. Judean men and all of you staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and lend your ears to my words, for these men are not drunk, as you suppose, as it is the third hour of the day. Rather, this is what was declared through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall dream dreams.” [Hart's New Testament] Pentecost by el Greco Now, it’s a much longer passage, and it’s very thrilling and exciting, but we don’t have time today to go into it. Perhaps we’ll speak about this in more depth very soon. But that is the first Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. And I’m going to talk about that today to clear up that confusion, because I’ve always had a bit of a confusion over what we speak of as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us in a Christian manner, or the Holy Spirit coming like tongues of fire in the Pentecost story of the upper room in the book of Acts, yet we all have the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within every cell of our bodies and throughout our entire organism. All of the Second Order powers are infused with the power of God. So what is the Holy Spirit then? And now I understand the distinction between the infusion of the Third Order of Powers and the infusion of the Second Order of Powers. You see, we are Second Order Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are First Order Powers. They have their place Above. We are their fruit. We are their spores. (And I actually ran across a radio preacher, of all things, again last week, saying that the original word for fruit as used in the New Testament is spore. And I’m like, yes, that is exactly what I’ve been saying. So that was another cool Gnostic insight that came by way of a Christian radio preacher. So you can never tell what you’re going to hear on Christian radio.) So, we are the spores of the First Order of Powers. We are their fruit. We are their children. We are the Second Order of Powers, and that is all living things in the cosmos. Everything that moves around, everything that’s soft and squishy, the meat, as I like to say, as opposed to the mud, which is the realm of the Demiurge—the rocks and minerals, the molecules and atoms. But the Third Order of Powers is the army of the Christ. We’ve spoken of that often. We’ve had three recent episodes about the indwelling of the Christ. For example, The Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi from May 29th, 2026, Army of the Christ, May 16th, 2026, and Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge from May 9th, 2026. These all have to do with the coming of the Third Order of Powers. And the coming of the Third Order of Powers didn’t come to Earth until Christ walked the Earth in the form of a human, and that is Jesus the Christ. He’s the only one who has ever claimed that “I and my Father are One.” Jesus is not the same as Buddha. Jesus is not the same as Muhammad or any other prophet. Jesus is not simply a good teacher or an exemplar of morality and ethics. If you think that, as many modern theologians do—the postmodern theologians, the deconstructionists—they have reduced the power of Jesus to that of a prophet or a teacher. And even people I hear, strangely enough, out there on YouTube, claiming that Jesus was a fraud—that there is no such thing as anything that happened in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. That’s an absurdity that is being promulgated by non-believers. If you are a believer in the Father, then you are a believer in the Christ, because Christ was the emissary of the Father to Earth to bring the correcting algorithm, I like to call it, to Earth to patch up our Second Order Power that has been forgotten. We’re born with it. We fully instantiate it within our bodies, but we’ve overlaid it with all kinds of junk, karma and memes from our environment that cloud our gnosis, cloud our ability to perceive the power of the Aeons within us. Christ came, the Third Order of Powers, the army of the Christ, to help us to remember, to remind us of our Second Order power, to remind us of where we come from, to remind us of the Father and the Aeons above. I took notes from the Pentecost sermon I listened to, and I’m going to represent these notes as a Gnostic teaching for you, because once you have the gnosis working in you, once you’ve come to terms with Christ and the Father and the Aeons and the gnosis that you were born with, once you begin to remember your inherent transcendence, then you can read the New Testament with eyes wide open. You can understand the mysteries of the New Testament much better than typical Christians do, because they’re trapped in a formula that is derivative of the early Catholics that had stripped the gnosis out of the Bible in the first place. So we must free ourselves from the doctrine, but not free ourselves of the gnosis. Tricky. The occasion known as Pentecost was when Jesus had been crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then ascended back up above into the Fullness—above the Fullness, because he’s the king of all. And he had promised that he would send a helper—to not worry. He had told his disciples, don’t worry, I’m sending you a helper to help you bring the gnosis to the world, essentially is what he said. This was also promised in the Old Testament. And here I’m going to read you a very important verse out of the Old Testament and translate it for you into Gnostic terms. The verse is Ezekiel 36:24—28, where God promises to cleanse and put a new heart and a new spirit into believers. Now it’s tricky when going all the way back to the Old Testament, because the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, well, it’s pretty much equivalent to the Demiurge. And that’s very dicey, very tricky. The ego of the God of the Old Testament, the ego of Jehovah, is when Jehovah speaks in very egoistic terms about itself and about obedience and the law because, remember, Jehovah is law-bound. The Demiurge doesn’t remember; the Demiurge has forgotten its origins above. When this radio preacher referenced Ezekiel 36, I went to what’s called the online Bible Gateway. That’s a resource you can use. And you type in any phrase or any citation, such as Ezekiel 36:24—28, and it will give you all of the various translations. And you can choose which translation you read or you read them all. Well, since this was a Hebrew exhortation, I decided to use the Orthodox Jewish Bible, which does have a lot of Hebrew in it. So then we have to go into Hebrew translations, but that was a good exercise as well. Oh, to go back and clear up confusion about how to read the Old Testament—if the Old Testament is largely demiurgic, it’s basically when Jehovah is speaking that’s demiurgic. But the prophets were in touch with their gnosis. The prophets were talking to the God Above All Gods. They weren’t talking to Jehovah. They were talking to the God Above All Gods. So their prophecies are coming from above. That seems a pretty simple way to understand it. So the histories are one thing. That’s the histories of the of the Hebrews who were the people of Jehovah. Jehovah was their tribal god. And then there are the prophets who were speaking to the God Above All Gods and giving the Hebrews instructions from the God Above All Gods. These are higher instructions than Jehovah. You see, Jehovah doesn’t remember that it’s a fallen part of an Aeon. Here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about that Aeon as Logos. Many other Gnostics call it Sophia. I prefer Logos. That’s out of the Tripartite Tractate. Logos split apart when he fell and abandoned the chaos down below. And the Demiurge is part of that chaos. So the Demiurge put this world in order, formed the heavens and the Earth in a godlike manner, because he had all the blueprints. He had the remembrance of how things went together, but he didn’t have the remembrance of the Father or the remembrance of his better ascended Self, that being Logos, or the Aeons out of which he fell, the Fullness out of which he came. The Demiurge woke up down here in chaos and remembered that things should not be chaos, wanted them to go back into an orderly manner, had the blueprints of Paradise, essentially, that’s how you can put it, and formed this Earth. But this is an imitation. This is a deficiency of Paradise, and it’s especially deficient because there’s no love here. The minerals do not know love. The mud does not know love. Love doesn’t come from the bottom up, from the Demiurge up, from Jehovah up. Love, consciousness, comes from the God Above All Gods down to us in the form of a Second Order Powers. But we have forgotten, and the Demiurge forgot. So here is a word from one of the prophets who was in touch with the God Above All Gods, giving assurance that salvation would come, that remembrance would come. The Demiurge doesn’t block the prophets because it egotistically thinks that the prophets are speaking of it. You know, the Demiurge takes personally being God, but he’s mistaken in that. He’s a lesser god, the god of this cosmos, but the God Above All Gods is the one who speaks through the prophets. Here’s Ezekiel 36:24—26, from the New King James Version. For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Or as The Orthodox Jewish Bible puts it, A lev chadásh also will I give you, and a ruach chadasháh will I put within you; and I will take away the lev ha-éven (stony heart) out of your basár, and I will give you a lev basár. Now, when it speaks of I will give you a new heart, in Hebrew that is lev chadásh. Lev means inner self, the seat of will and moral character. Chadásh means anew, fresh, renewed, restored. So lev chadásh refers to a renewed inner disposition. A transformed moral center. A recreated will aligned with the Father rather than with stubbornness or idolatry. And when it speaks of and put a new spirit within you, in Hebrew that word, the new spirit, is ruach chadasháh. And it means a new spirit, an awakened pneuma. And pneuma is a Gnostic term. That is the spiritual part of us. Our One Self. So the ruach chadasháh is the spirit. Ruach is spirit, breath, animating force, inner vitality. That’s what it means. Chadasháh means fresh, new, renewed. So in Ezekiel, ruach chadasháh means a new animating principle. A renewed inner drive or spiritual vitality placed within the person. You see where I’m going with this? This is the Third Order of Powers. A new motivating force that empowers obedience and life. This cleansing of a new heart and putting a new spirit within you, ruach chadasháh. It means stripping away the meme shroud is how I generally refer to it in the Simple Explanation. Peeling off all those layers of confusion that obscure our originating Fullness. That’s the filthiness. It’s not the original sin. We aren’t born with original sin. We are born as Second Order Powers, much loved out of the first order powers of the Fullness of God. We forget when we come down here into this material world created by the Demiurge. And then we plug into this culture around us. Think of the media and the social media and all of the lies and confusions that are spread, both purposefully meant to mislead you and confuse you, and just accidentally because people make mistakes and people say the wrong things, even when they think they’re saying the right things. So that’s the filthiness. And the idols— these are the things that you cling to. Generally this narcissistic age we live in is an age of idols, but the idols that we worship aren’t little statues of gods. They are our exercise equipment and our bags of makeup and our, well, of course they can be influencers and they can be movie stars and television actors and musicians and sports figures and politicians. Those can be your idols if you treat them as idols, if you idolize them, if you go all weak in the knees and do anything they say. But we also have our own idols in the form of the things that we cling to and pile up around us that we buy, got to have this, got to have that, got to have this, got to have that. These are idols. So this is a promise to cleanse us from that. In other words, to strip away your meme shroud and let the Fullness shine forth from within you. But it goes beyond that, because it says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And that new heart is the lev chadásh, which is new spirit. And the new heart is lev basár, which literally means in Hebrew, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche. Oh, see, our psyche, that is not our pneuma—that's a Gnostic term as well. We have our pneuma, which is our spiritual Fullness. We have our psyche, which is our psychological aspect—our ego lives there. And we have our hylic, which is the material to which we are bonded in this material world. So this passage promises to put a new heart within us, a lev basár, a soft, receptive psyche; that is to soften our hearts, because they’re hardened by the world and by the memes we cling to. It says, furthermore, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh. And the heart of stone in Hebrew is lev ha-éven, meaning heart of stone, or a hardened psyche. Going to remove that heart of stone, which is very interesting, because of course, I say that the hard rocky places, the stones are demiurgic. That’s the material level, that’s the elemental level. So the heart of stone is the demiurgic heart that we have put inside of us, that we’re bonded to. But this passage wants to turn it into a new heart, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche, as we were originally born with—lev basár. So it says, I will give you that new heart and put a new spirit within you, and take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. The heart of stone, lev ha-éven. And the purifying waters are what do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you. In Hebrew, that was literally mayim tehorím, meaning clean, purifying waters. Jesus spoke of the purifying waters. In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus had sneaked out one night to speak privately with Jesus. He didn’t want anyone to know. And Nicodemus said to Jesus, Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform unless God is within him. And in reply, Jesus said to him, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless someone is born from Above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Jesus replied, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed, because I’ve told you it is necessary for you to be born from Above. [Hart's New Testament] Jesus is speaking of the same water, the water of the spirit, that cleanses us and allows us to be born again from Above. Later on in the book of John, Chapter 7, verse 37, Jesus stood up and said loudly, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts living streams of waters will flow. Now he said this in regard to the spirit, whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament] And this is speaking of the Holy Spirit—what we call the Holy Spirit—because of course we have spirit, we’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us, the First Order of Powers. But he’s talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that comes after Jesus is “glorified.” And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living Above, just as we will all be living Above, in a glorified body, in the presence of the Father. Now, the promise that Jesus referred to—he was quoting out of the Old Testament—something that all of the listeners in his audience already knew. And it’s from Isaiah 12:3 that says, Therefore with joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation. The water that is being drawn is this water that’s being referred to, that we’ve been discussing, out of Ezekiel 36:24—28. That is the living water, the mayim tehorím—the Holy Spirit that bathes us now within and without. We draw the living water of the Third Order Powers into us. This is why accepting the mission of the Christ into your innermost being is essential, because there’s no other way to wash away the memes, the obscurations of the world around us that confuses us and causes us to forget. We’re born with a noble nature. We’re born as Second Order Powers, directly from the Fullness above, but we get lost in the confusion of this world that is created and run by the Demiurge. We forget our ethereal origins. We forget about the Father. We forget about the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The spirit that we’re born with becomes smothered, smothered by the worldly memes we cling to and that cling to us. The living water that comes into our new softened heart can only come when you relinquish the ego that is causing you to hold on tightly to those memes, all those false promises that the world gives. They will not save you. They will not make you happy. They might give you a momentary piece of pleasure when something arrives in the box from Amazon on the front porch, but as soon as you’ve used it, it’s just another thing. But the living water never dies. It’s living waters from the Father flowing all the way downstream through the Son, through the Fullnesses, and only through Christ inside of us can we be washed, baptized from within to loosen the hold. So, the lev chadásh, renew your psychic heart, captures the same teaching that the Tripartite Tractate teaches—that the psyche must be reoriented and made stable. The ruach chadashá, awakening within you the spirit that is from Above, is the same as activating the pneumatic seed, as we say in Gnosticism, not a moral reform. The lev basár, a living heart, soft, able to receive the light, receptive, this is the Tripartite Tractate’s softened, harmonized psyche, that can receive the pneumatic imprint of Christ. And the divine seed will rise within you and rule in peace is what the Tripartite Tractate says of the pneuma ruling through the psyche once integration occurs. So, this is the Gnostic paraphrase then of Ezekiel 36:26—28: I will renew your ego's psychic heart, and I will awaken within you the pneumatic spirit—the One Self that flows from above. I will remove the heart hardened by the archons and the never-ending war, and I will restore your Second Order heart, soft, receptive, and able to receive the light. Through this new heart and new spirit, the divine seed of the Christ within you will rise and rule in peace. That’s just another way we could say the phrase in Ezekiel, in a more Gnostic way. It’s a bath, loosens the hold, washes away those memes, those sins, as the church likes to call it. But it’s more than just your mistakes and your problems. It’s all the stuff that we have around us. That is the job of the Christ, to open our eyes to our original Second Order power, to live within us, to correct our mistakes, to correct our faulty algorithms, to protect us from this demiurgic immersion that we find ourselves in, in this material world. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represents all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. Step aside. Take your ego off the throne. Take the Demiurge off the throne, if you’ve enthroned it. Put down your idols. Push away your possessions, at least long enough to allow the Third Order Powers to come in. Ask the Christ to come in and wash you with the Holy Spirit. Invite the Holy Spirit, the army of the Third Order of Powers, into your organism, literally, and it will cleanse you. It will wash you. Walk in the Spirit of God. Let your eyes be opened to the truth. We’ll talk more about this again. Until then, God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week I was listening to one of the radio preachers I like to listen to and I caught a sermon on the Pentecost, and I realized I had at that point a Gnostic insight that Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, when it infused the disciples in the upper room—that is the coming of the Third Order of Powers released by the Christ after his resurrection—that the Third Order Powers are the “anointing of the Holy Spirit.” So quickly, let’s look at the Acts of the Apostles book out of the New Testament, Chapter 2, which is what we now call Pentecost. And when the day arrived that completed the fifty days after Passover, they were all gathered together in one place, and suddenly there came a noise, like a turbulent wind borne out of the sky, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared before them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest, one each upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them to utter. Now dwelling in Jerusalem, there were devout Judeans from every nation under the sky, and on the advent of this noise, the multitude gathered and were confused, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and astounded, saying, look, are not all of those who speak Galileans? And how is it that each one of us hears his own language, the languages in which we were raised? And all were amazed and entirely at a loss, saying to one another, what does this portend? But others, ridiculing them, said, ah, they’re full of sweet new wine. But Peter, standing up along with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them all. Judean men and all of you staying in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and lend your ears to my words, for these men are not drunk, as you suppose, as it is the third hour of the day. Rather, this is what was declared through the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall happen, says God, that I will pour forth from my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall dream dreams.” [Hart's New Testament] Pentecost by el Greco Now, it’s a much longer passage, and it’s very thrilling and exciting, but we don’t have time today to go into it. Perhaps we’ll speak about this in more depth very soon. But that is the first Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. And I’m going to talk about that today to clear up that confusion, because I’ve always had a bit of a confusion over what we speak of as the Holy Spirit dwelling in us in a Christian manner, or the Holy Spirit coming like tongues of fire in the Pentecost story of the upper room in the book of Acts, yet we all have the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God within every cell of our bodies and throughout our entire organism. All of the Second Order powers are infused with the power of God. So what is the Holy Spirit then? And now I understand the distinction between the infusion of the Third Order of Powers and the infusion of the Second Order of Powers. You see, we are Second Order Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are First Order Powers. They have their place Above. We are their fruit. We are their spores. (And I actually ran across a radio preacher, of all things, again last week, saying that the original word for fruit as used in the New Testament is spore. And I’m like, yes, that is exactly what I’ve been saying. So that was another cool Gnostic insight that came by way of a Christian radio preacher. So you can never tell what you’re going to hear on Christian radio.) So, we are the spores of the First Order of Powers. We are their fruit. We are their children. We are the Second Order of Powers, and that is all living things in the cosmos. Everything that moves around, everything that’s soft and squishy, the meat, as I like to say, as opposed to the mud, which is the realm of the Demiurge—the rocks and minerals, the molecules and atoms. But the Third Order of Powers is the army of the Christ. We’ve spoken of that often. We’ve had three recent episodes about the indwelling of the Christ. For example, The Gnostic Redemption of the Nag Hammadi from May 29th, 2026, Army of the Christ, May 16th, 2026, and Understanding Gnosticism: The Path to Inner Knowledge from May 9th, 2026. These all have to do with the coming of the Third Order of Powers. And the coming of the Third Order of Powers didn’t come to Earth until Christ walked the Earth in the form of a human, and that is Jesus the Christ. He’s the only one who has ever claimed that “I and my Father are One.” Jesus is not the same as Buddha. Jesus is not the same as Muhammad or any other prophet. Jesus is not simply a good teacher or an exemplar of morality and ethics. If you think that, as many modern theologians do—the postmodern theologians, the deconstructionists—they have reduced the power of Jesus to that of a prophet or a teacher. And even people I hear, strangely enough, out there on YouTube, claiming that Jesus was a fraud—that there is no such thing as anything that happened in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. That’s an absurdity that is being promulgated by non-believers. If you are a believer in the Father, then you are a believer in the Christ, because Christ was the emissary of the Father to Earth to bring the correcting algorithm, I like to call it, to Earth to patch up our Second Order Power that has been forgotten. We’re born with it. We fully instantiate it within our bodies, but we’ve overlaid it with all kinds of junk, karma and memes from our environment that cloud our gnosis, cloud our ability to perceive the power of the Aeons within us. Christ came, the Third Order of Powers, the army of the Christ, to help us to remember, to remind us of our Second Order power, to remind us of where we come from, to remind us of the Father and the Aeons above. I took notes from the Pentecost sermon I listened to, and I’m going to represent these notes as a Gnostic teaching for you, because once you have the gnosis working in you, once you’ve come to terms with Christ and the Father and the Aeons and the gnosis that you were born with, once you begin to remember your inherent transcendence, then you can read the New Testament with eyes wide open. You can understand the mysteries of the New Testament much better than typical Christians do, because they’re trapped in a formula that is derivative of the early Catholics that had stripped the gnosis out of the Bible in the first place. So we must free ourselves from the doctrine, but not free ourselves of the gnosis. Tricky. The occasion known as Pentecost was when Jesus had been crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then ascended back up above into the Fullness—above the Fullness, because he’s the king of all. And he had promised that he would send a helper—to not worry. He had told his disciples, don’t worry, I’m sending you a helper to help you bring the gnosis to the world, essentially is what he said. This was also promised in the Old Testament. And here I’m going to read you a very important verse out of the Old Testament and translate it for you into Gnostic terms. The verse is Ezekiel 36:24—28, where God promises to cleanse and put a new heart and a new spirit into believers. Now it’s tricky when going all the way back to the Old Testament, because the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, well, it’s pretty much equivalent to the Demiurge. And that’s very dicey, very tricky. The ego of the God of the Old Testament, the ego of Jehovah, is when Jehovah speaks in very egoistic terms about itself and about obedience and the law because, remember, Jehovah is law-bound. The Demiurge doesn’t remember; the Demiurge has forgotten its origins above. When this radio preacher referenced Ezekiel 36, I went to what’s called the online Bible Gateway. That’s a resource you can use. And you type in any phrase or any citation, such as Ezekiel 36:24—28, and it will give you all of the various translations. And you can choose which translation you read or you read them all. Well, since this was a Hebrew exhortation, I decided to use the Orthodox Jewish Bible, which does have a lot of Hebrew in it. So then we have to go into Hebrew translations, but that was a good exercise as well. Oh, to go back and clear up confusion about how to read the Old Testament—if the Old Testament is largely demiurgic, it’s basically when Jehovah is speaking that’s demiurgic. But the prophets were in touch with their gnosis. The prophets were talking to the God Above All Gods. They weren’t talking to Jehovah. They were talking to the God Above All Gods. So their prophecies are coming from above. That seems a pretty simple way to understand it. So the histories are one thing. That’s the histories of the of the Hebrews who were the people of Jehovah. Jehovah was their tribal god. And then there are the prophets who were speaking to the God Above All Gods and giving the Hebrews instructions from the God Above All Gods. These are higher instructions than Jehovah. You see, Jehovah doesn’t remember that it’s a fallen part of an Aeon. Here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about that Aeon as Logos. Many other Gnostics call it Sophia. I prefer Logos. That’s out of the Tripartite Tractate. Logos split apart when he fell and abandoned the chaos down below. And the Demiurge is part of that chaos. So the Demiurge put this world in order, formed the heavens and the Earth in a godlike manner, because he had all the blueprints. He had the remembrance of how things went together, but he didn’t have the remembrance of the Father or the remembrance of his better ascended Self, that being Logos, or the Aeons out of which he fell, the Fullness out of which he came. The Demiurge woke up down here in chaos and remembered that things should not be chaos, wanted them to go back into an orderly manner, had the blueprints of Paradise, essentially, that’s how you can put it, and formed this Earth. But this is an imitation. This is a deficiency of Paradise, and it’s especially deficient because there’s no love here. The minerals do not know love. The mud does not know love. Love doesn’t come from the bottom up, from the Demiurge up, from Jehovah up. Love, consciousness, comes from the God Above All Gods down to us in the form of a Second Order Powers. But we have forgotten, and the Demiurge forgot. So here is a word from one of the prophets who was in touch with the God Above All Gods, giving assurance that salvation would come, that remembrance would come. The Demiurge doesn’t block the prophets because it egotistically thinks that the prophets are speaking of it. You know, the Demiurge takes personally being God, but he’s mistaken in that. He’s a lesser god, the god of this cosmos, but the God Above All Gods is the one who speaks through the prophets. Here’s Ezekiel 36:24—26, from the New King James Version. For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Or as The Orthodox Jewish Bible puts it, A lev chadásh also will I give you, and a ruach chadasháh will I put within you; and I will take away the lev ha-éven (stony heart) out of your basár, and I will give you a lev basár. Now, when it speaks of I will give you a new heart, in Hebrew that is lev chadásh. Lev means inner self, the seat of will and moral character. Chadásh means anew, fresh, renewed, restored. So lev chadásh refers to a renewed inner disposition. A transformed moral center. A recreated will aligned with the Father rather than with stubbornness or idolatry. And when it speaks of and put a new spirit within you, in Hebrew that word, the new spirit, is ruach chadasháh. And it means a new spirit, an awakened pneuma. And pneuma is a Gnostic term. That is the spiritual part of us. Our One Self. So the ruach chadasháh is the spirit. Ruach is spirit, breath, animating force, inner vitality. That’s what it means. Chadasháh means fresh, new, renewed. So in Ezekiel, ruach chadasháh means a new animating principle. A renewed inner drive or spiritual vitality placed within the person. You see where I’m going with this? This is the Third Order of Powers. A new motivating force that empowers obedience and life. This cleansing of a new heart and putting a new spirit within you, ruach chadasháh. It means stripping away the meme shroud is how I generally refer to it in the Simple Explanation. Peeling off all those layers of confusion that obscure our originating Fullness. That’s the filthiness. It’s not the original sin. We aren’t born with original sin. We are born as Second Order Powers, much loved out of the first order powers of the Fullness of God. We forget when we come down here into this material world created by the Demiurge. And then we plug into this culture around us. Think of the media and the social media and all of the lies and confusions that are spread, both purposefully meant to mislead you and confuse you, and just accidentally because people make mistakes and people say the wrong things, even when they think they’re saying the right things. So that’s the filthiness. And the idols— these are the things that you cling to. Generally this narcissistic age we live in is an age of idols, but the idols that we worship aren’t little statues of gods. They are our exercise equipment and our bags of makeup and our, well, of course they can be influencers and they can be movie stars and television actors and musicians and sports figures and politicians. Those can be your idols if you treat them as idols, if you idolize them, if you go all weak in the knees and do anything they say. But we also have our own idols in the form of the things that we cling to and pile up around us that we buy, got to have this, got to have that, got to have this, got to have that. These are idols. So this is a promise to cleanse us from that. In other words, to strip away your meme shroud and let the Fullness shine forth from within you. But it goes beyond that, because it says, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And that new heart is the lev chadásh, which is new spirit. And the new heart is lev basár, which literally means in Hebrew, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche. Oh, see, our psyche, that is not our pneuma—that's a Gnostic term as well. We have our pneuma, which is our spiritual Fullness. We have our psyche, which is our psychological aspect—our ego lives there. And we have our hylic, which is the material to which we are bonded in this material world. So this passage promises to put a new heart within us, a lev basár, a soft, receptive psyche; that is to soften our hearts, because they’re hardened by the world and by the memes we cling to. It says, furthermore, I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh. And the heart of stone in Hebrew is lev ha-éven, meaning heart of stone, or a hardened psyche. Going to remove that heart of stone, which is very interesting, because of course, I say that the hard rocky places, the stones are demiurgic. That’s the material level, that’s the elemental level. So the heart of stone is the demiurgic heart that we have put inside of us, that we’re bonded to. But this passage wants to turn it into a new heart, a heart of flesh, a soft, receptive psyche, as we were originally born with—lev basár. So it says, I will give you that new heart and put a new spirit within you, and take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. The heart of stone, lev ha-éven. And the purifying waters are what do it. I will sprinkle clean water on you. In Hebrew, that was literally mayim tehorím, meaning clean, purifying waters. Jesus spoke of the purifying waters. In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 3, a Pharisee named Nicodemus had sneaked out one night to speak privately with Jesus. He didn’t want anyone to know. And Nicodemus said to Jesus, Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform unless God is within him. And in reply, Jesus said to him, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless someone is born from Above, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus says to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Jesus replied, Amen, amen, I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed, because I’ve told you it is necessary for you to be born from Above. [Hart's New Testament] Jesus is speaking of the same water, the water of the spirit, that cleanses us and allows us to be born again from Above. Later on in the book of John, Chapter 7, verse 37, Jesus stood up and said loudly, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and let him drink. Whoever has faith in me, just as scripture has said, out of his parts living streams of waters will flow. Now he said this in regard to the spirit, whom those who had faith in him were about to receive, for as yet there was no spirit, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. [Hart's New Testament] And this is speaking of the Holy Spirit—what we call the Holy Spirit—because of course we have spirit, we’re born with spirit, because we have the Fullness of God within us, the First Order of Powers. But he’s talking of the Third Order of Powers, the army of Christ that comes after Jesus is “glorified.” And glorified means risen from the dead, ascended into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses. And glorified means that Jesus is living Above, just as we will all be living Above, in a glorified body, in the presence of the Father. Now, the promise that Jesus referred to—he was quoting out of the Old Testament—something that all of the listeners in his audience already knew. And it’s from Isaiah 12:3 that says, Therefore with joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation. The water that is being drawn is this water that’s being referred to, that we’ve been discussing, out of Ezekiel 36:24—28. That is the living water, the mayim tehorím—the Holy Spirit that bathes us now within and without. We draw the living water of the Third Order Powers into us. This is why accepting the mission of the Christ into your innermost being is essential, because there’s no other way to wash away the memes, the obscurations of the world around us that confuses us and causes us to forget. We’re born with a noble nature. We’re born as Second Order Powers, directly from the Fullness above, but we get lost in the confusion of this world that is created and run by the Demiurge. We forget our ethereal origins. We forget about the Father. We forget about the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The spirit that we’re born with becomes smothered, smothered by the worldly memes we cling to and that cling to us. The living water that comes into our new softened heart can only come when you relinquish the ego that is causing you to hold on tightly to those memes, all those false promises that the world gives. They will not save you. They will not make you happy. They might give you a momentary piece of pleasure when something arrives in the box from Amazon on the front porch, but as soon as you’ve used it, it’s just another thing. But the living water never dies. It’s living waters from the Father flowing all the way downstream through the Son, through the Fullnesses, and only through Christ inside of us can we be washed, baptized from within to loosen the hold. So, the lev chadásh, renew your psychic heart, captures the same teaching that the Tripartite Tractate teaches—that the psyche must be reoriented and made stable. The ruach chadashá, awakening within you the spirit that is from Above, is the same as activating the pneumatic seed, as we say in Gnosticism, not a moral reform. The lev basár, a living heart, soft, able to receive the light, receptive, this is the Tripartite Tractate’s softened, harmonized psyche, that can receive the pneumatic imprint of Christ. And the divine seed will rise within you and rule in peace is what the Tripartite Tractate says of the pneuma ruling through the psyche once integration occurs. So, this is the Gnostic paraphrase then of Ezekiel 36:26—28: I will renew your ego's psychic heart, and I will awaken within you the pneumatic spirit—the One Self that flows from above. I will remove the heart hardened by the archons and the never-ending war, and I will restore your Second Order heart, soft, receptive, and able to receive the light. Through this new heart and new spirit, the divine seed of the Christ within you will rise and rule in peace. That’s just another way we could say the phrase in Ezekiel, in a more Gnostic way. It’s a bath, loosens the hold, washes away those memes, those sins, as the church likes to call it. But it’s more than just your mistakes and your problems. It’s all the stuff that we have around us. That is the job of the Christ, to open our eyes to our original Second Order power, to live within us, to correct our mistakes, to correct our faulty algorithms, to protect us from this demiurgic immersion that we find ourselves in, in this material world. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves the Totality of the Son. The Third Order Powers are the army of the Christ, who represents all of the Powers of the ethereal plane, individually and collectively working for our redemption. Step aside. Take your ego off the throne. Take the Demiurge off the throne, if you’ve enthroned it. Put down your idols. Push away your possessions, at least long enough to allow the Third Order Powers to come in. Ask the Christ to come in and wash you with the Holy Spirit. Invite the Holy Spirit, the army of the Third Order of Powers, into your organism, literally, and it will cleanse you. It will wash you. Walk in the Spirit of God. Let your eyes be opened to the truth. We’ll talk more about this again. Until then, God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

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Introducing Russell Aaron I didn't learn WordPress at a fancy college or career academy. I graduated from the University of YouTube. My internship was the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Vegas. The rest I learned building mortgage company platforms, working for casinos, inside managed WordPress hosts, and at some of the best WordPress development and support shops on the planet. Show Notes For more on Russell, check out his website: https://russellenvy.com Transcript: Topher DeRosia: All right. Here we go. Hey folks. Russell Aaron: And three, two, one. Topher DeRosia: Hey folks. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, and I’m here with Russell Aaron. I assume I pronounced that right, because it’s not that hard, but you never know. Russell Aaron: You know, so many people call me Aaron. They’ll tag me and they go, “Thanks, Aaron.” And I’m like, “You know, it’s Russell, but it’s cool.” Topher DeRosia: Yeah, nice. All right. Well, I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from you talking about podcasts having the same people on episodes all the time. I thought, “Oh, I gotta have that guy on my podcast.” Because then you can’t go on any other ever again, because then you’ll be that guy. Russell Aaron: Maybe. Topher DeRosia: So, I snooped a little. You live much closer to me than I expected. Have we met? Did we meet at a WordCamp? Russell Aaron: I think we met at WordCamp Ann Arbor one year. Topher DeRosia: Oh, okay. I went to a whole bunch of those. Russell Aaron: Yeah. I think I spoke 2018, something like that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I was probably there. Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: All right. So tell me where you live, what you do, all that kind of stuff. Russell Aaron: I currently reside in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I am just freelancing as of right now. You know, I live in a pretty small town where it’s kind of old school WordPress, if you will. Anyone who is worth their salt keys will remember a day when websites were not responsive or a business has a cousin of a friend of a brother who builds websites and, “Hey, he’s working on it,” and three years later, there’s still no new website. I kind of live in a town where I’m kind of getting back to my grassroots, where I stay up late at night with my insomnia, and I will roll up to a business and I will say, “Your new website can look like this today. If you pay me this much money, I will install it today, and this is your new website.” And it’s got your updated menu, and it’s responsive, and it works on mobile, and we can connect it to AppPresser and make it an app and stuff like that. So I’m kind of reliving the glory days of what I remember WordPress to be. Topher DeRosia: I’m also freelancing right now, sort of by choice, sort of not by choice. Somebody I’m married to would rather I had regular pay and insurance. Russell Aaron: Heard that. Topher DeRosia: Are you in the same boat, or did you do this on purpose? Russell Aaron: I did this on purpose. I was not working for the man, but I was working with some people. I’m over the tiny little granular things that somebody can fire you over. Like they’re watching if your mouse moves or they’re watching if you haven’t logged in. There’s just no more trust, I feel like, in so many cases. And so I know that I can do things better on my own, and I’m going to. Topher DeRosia: I have to admit, I love the freelance life. It is pretty special. Russell Aaron: Right. It’s almost like… what’s that movie? The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where they are making a website and they’re like, “Hey, Spider-Man 3’s on in five minutes. Let’s go watch it.” Like they totally ignore their job and they just go watch this movie now. It’s kind of like that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah. For me, it’s doing stuff with my wife. She has a day job, but it has kind of chaotic hours and not specific days of the week. And so I work when she does, which sometimes is Saturday and Sunday, and then I just don’t on Tuesday and Thursday. That’s pretty great. Russell Aaron: I’m kind of in the same boat. My wife has a wonderful job, and she is with a great group, and she does global advocacy. I mean, she just deals with people that are happy with the product, and she keeps them happy. She does lots of stuff like that. I’m kind of the same thing, where their company is now starting to get into AI, and they have so many questions, and I’m over here building things with AI and doing things like that. So I’m not exactly consulting, but my ideas are going into their company through my wife. Topher DeRosia: My wife works at a grocery store, and they have a cash machine they use in the back office that runs Linux. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow Topher DeRosia: And the IT guys had to come in and do some work on it, and she saw the screen and she’s like, “Oh, is that Linux?” And I’m like, “Who are you, and what do you know?” Super nerd. So what’s your company name? Do you have one, or is it just WP Pro Support? Russell Aaron: WP Pro Support. Topher DeRosia: WP Pro Support. Okay. Do you concentrate more on support, or do you build more? Russell Aaron: I have been doing support since 2011. I formed my very first support company, and I launched it the same day that Shane Sanderson launched Maintainn. My buddy, who you might know, John Hawkins, I was at the Vegas WordPress Meetup Group, and I had the idea in Vegas WordPress Meetup Group where there’s 70 people sitting right here behind me and they all want help. And I was like, “How do I do this?” So I built my first thing where I gave everybody free-for-life support, and they were my test group, if you will. And they helped me work out my bugs and tickets, and they helped me work out how I actually operate and do stuff like that. Then when I launched it, literally that day, John goes, “Wait, have you seen this?” And we had no idea about each other, but we literally launched them the same day. Fast forward three years down the road, I ended up working for Maintainn when it was owned by WebDevStudios. But everything I’ve done in WordPress has been support, whether I’ve worked for a mortgage company, a casino in Vegas, hosting with Liquid Web, doing stuff with NerdPress or AppPresser. Everything I’ve done is support. That’s really where my passion is because I remember what it’s like being a first timer. I think that there is a huge market potential here of people are always going to be new. I don’t care who you are. There’s always somebody new walking in the door, and there has to be a person who will sit down and say, “Come here, I’ll hold your hand.” And I am that person. I always try to look at WordPress from that lens is if a new person is looking at this today, are they going to be happy? Are they going to be confused? And I go from there. So currently today I’m transitioning away from support as we know it, where you write a ticket and then somebody on the other end is like, “Hey, I fixed your site,” or whatever. And I’m transitioning to a new product that I’m working on. So I’m going to be getting away from traditional support, but I’m still going to be doing things in the support space, if that makes sense. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that makes sense. When I first got into WordPress, it was 2010, and custom post types were brand new. Russell Aaron: Right? Topher DeRosia: And I was out of my element with WordPress. I did not know what I was doing, but I did know PHP, and no one else knew post types yet. So when it comes to that, I was on an equal footing, and that was my way in. That was my leverage. I made a lot of money in the early days just building custom post types. Russell Aaron: Custom post types and single-posttype.php or whatever. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: So I was a competent PHP guy who didn’t know WordPress. And I feel like we’re in kind of the same transition space right now with AI, where we have tons of competent WordPressers who don’t really know AI yet. I think there’s a great space for that, teaching our friends, teaching everybody we’ve known for 10 years in WordPress. You know what I mean? Russell Aaron: I do. That’s one of the things that I really love about WordPress is that… let’s take the new 7.0 that just came out, I think it re-leveled the playing field. Before this came out, there were people that were ahead of others when it comes to patterns or blocks or the command palette and stuff like that. But now I think with this, we’re back to an even playing field because every… I mean, not exactly. There’s still some people who know AI a lot better than others, but you’re always five minutes ahead of somebody and five minutes behind somebody else. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. Russell Aaron: But I do think that with 7.0, a new level playing field has come out. And now is the time to start learning, or you got to wait until 7.1 comes out where that new level playing field comes out. But that’s what I love about WordPress is that it continues to happen. Like you said, CPTs. I still love CPTs. I think they’re one of my favorite things. I look at all of these features, you know, page builders, another time when the playing field was leveled again. Now you learn page builders and then shortcodes and then this and then that. I think that’s the one gift that WordPress keeps giving is that you might be out of date six months from now, but then 7.1 comes out and you’re caught right back up. Topher DeRosia: Right. Yeah. And while you’re five minutes ahead, you quick do a WordCamp talk. Russell Aaron: Yes. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: For that long, you know more than other people, right? Russell Aaron: At least it’s on video, right? Topher DeRosia: Right. I was an expert for a minute and a half. Russell Aaron: That was my 15 minutes of fame. Topher DeRosia: What is your WordCamp life like these days? When was the last one you went to? Russell Aaron: The last one I went to was in Vegas, 2018. It was at the Plaza Hotel, which I worked at. When John was putting that together, in Vegas we had a wonderful space, and it was called The Innevation Center, and it was at a data facility called Switch. And they donated so much to us, and we are so grateful to them. And then they kind of had a change in their policy where they weren’t doing things, and then they overpriced how much it would cost to hold events and stuff like that. I was working at a hotel, and so we had this giant convention space, if you will. And so because I was able to pull some strings, we got a great, great discount, all food paid for. I mean, all of it. So that was my last WordCamp. The after party was on top of a pool deck, and there was pickleball courts, and there was a pool, and there was an open bar. I mean, it was rad. That was my last one. I have kids now. My kids are seven and eight and so my WordPress travels have slowed. No, I’m sorry. I take it back. WordCamp US last year was my last one, where we went scorched earth. That’s what I call it. I call it WordCamp scorched earth. Topher DeRosia: I was there for that one. I used to go to a lot every year. Go to- Russell Aaron: Five, six? Topher DeRosia: Five and 10. But since COVID, I think maybe just US every year. It’s weird to just go to one. Russell Aaron: It is. And just US, it’s almost like we used to have what I used to call regional events, where I lived in Vegas, I would hit up WordCamp Orange County, then I’d hit up San Diego, then we’d hit up LA, and then we’d make our way up to Portland, and then maybe if San Francisco did one, and then Phoenix. I did all my regional stuff. And then every once in a while I would venture… I mean, I love WordCamp Minneapolis. Love the people up there. Love so much about that event. Used to do that a lot. What’s the one in Ohio that I used to go to? Topher DeRosia: In the teens, there were five in Ohio. And being in Michigan, I used to just cruise down there. Russell Aaron: It’s a three-hour, three-and-a-half-hour drive, huh? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: About that. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: At the time, I was working for a company that was paying me to go to WordCamps. I had to make the case for each one, but it was a really simple case for all the Ohio ones because I didn’t need a plane ticket. I just drive over there. It’s like five in Ohio. There was Ann Arbor, there was Detroit, there was Grand Rapids, there was Chicago. I mean, there was almost 10 WordCamps within a three-hour drive of me. Russell Aaron: That’s beautiful. Topher DeRosia: It’s just not there anymore. Russell Aaron: I was very fortunate to work for companies like WebDevStudios, where I could tell them, “Hey, I got into WordCamp Minneapolis. I’m going to speak there.” And because I’m speaking there, they would reimburse me X amount of dollars for something, and then they would sponsor the WordCamp, and then they would make a thing out of it. I mean, I was very fortunate in being able to do that. Then I worked with a really great company called NerdPress, and they are a fantastic group of people that do the same thing. And then I ventured out into different straits, and it was very much different. I’ll say that much. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Those are good times. Russell Aaron: It’s almost like… the way that I put it is it’s like we all graduated. We all did our four years of college, we all graduated, and now we went to our temp jobs or we went to our internships. Like the band broke up. Topher DeRosia: Yep. Yeah, it is a lot like that. I have seen generations of WordPressers. There was all the crew before 2010 that were downloading zip files and hacking themes to even get them to run. Then there was after 2010, and custom post types were new and stuff. And then there’s the whole Gutenberg generation that never experienced all that crazy theme stuff. Russell Aaron: I mean, you tell people that child themes were so new that people didn’t even grasp the concept of a child theme, and today it’s so baked in. It’s not even something that people think about. It’s just you install this and the child theme, and it’s a thing. But I remember writing those by hand. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. No kidding. Then to a certain extent, not even having child themes anymore because nothing is stored on the file system. Russell Aaron: I love it. I love it. In my very first WordCamp talk in Vegas 2012, I made a prediction that everything was powered by the theme. Everything used to… I mean, that’s as far as I go back is every template was the same. It was left column, right sidebar, header, and every page, whether you liked it or not, looked like a blog post. And it wasn’t full-width, responsive. I remember a lot of that. And then corporate themes came out, and then cupcake themes came out, then lawn company themes came out, and then the rise of Envato and stuff like that. That’s a good name for a band, The Rise of Envato. Topher DeRosia: I’d go see them. Russell Aaron: But all that stuff comes out. And then you look at it now and it’s like, that seems so far away. I still remember the day that I learned about child themes, and I’ve never forgotten that. And I think, coming back full circle, that’s why I stay in this beginner support space because I’m kind of keeping that nostalgia around, I guess. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. There’s a lot of joy in watching people’s eyes light up when they get it. Russell Aaron: That’s the best part is just telling people what’s possible. When they’re frustrated with something and you go, “Oh, hey, Gravity Forms can do that.” And they’re like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And they can also do… And I just start naming stuff. And I show all 50 extensions that they have and they’re just like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “This starts getting radical when you’re into it.” Topher DeRosia: There’s something I miss from old WordPress that I don’t see in modern WordPress. It might not be a thing. And that is dramatic new styling with a theme the instant you install it. My wife is not a computer person and does not care about computers. She loves design stuff. There was a time we used Winamp. Russell Aaron: Wow. Topher DeRosia: And she loved getting skins for Winamp. And she would download 30 in a day and try them all out. And then when I set her up for the blog the first time and showed her the theme repo on .org, this is in 2011, she would literally spend a day just downloading theme after theme after theme. Russell Aaron: Same way. Topher DeRosia: And you just install it and poof, your site looks amazingly different. These days, I mean, you install something like Kadence or GeneratePress or Ollie or any of them, really, and it’s kind of a blank canvas. Russell Aaron: It’s very minimalist. It’s very minimalist. Topher DeRosia: I miss the ability to say, “I feel like making a change today,” and two minutes later, your site looks completely different because you’re using… Russell Aaron: Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. I mean, I look back at old pictures from when I would host the meetup group in Vegas, and there’s pictures of me talking, and then on the screen behind me is my old site, and it was this old layout. I bought the theme from Envato because I was just fascinated with it. It was everything that I wanted it to look like. But same thing is now when you change your theme from this one to that one, that dark grunge kind of thing is gone, and now you’ve got this bootstrap-looking thing or whatever. I agree with you. I think that comes from my days of being in MySpace. That’s how I got started with all this. So you could change your MySpace template like that, and I think that’s where it comes from, at least for me. Topher DeRosia: I haven’t even looked into it. Can you make a Gutenberg-based blog theme that has a very striking look and just release it? And then, I don’t know, just release a whole bunch of them like in the old days? Theme shops had 35 themes for sale, and they all looked different because they were all totally different themes. Russell Aaron: I remember there was a day on Envato where it was the same theme, it was just rebranded. So it was like theme name 1.0, and it was called Atlas. And then it’s the same theme but in orange, and now it’s 1.2, and it’s called Dungeon or something. And then we have 1.3 again. Same theme, same framework, but each version was named something different. It made that developer look like they had five different products instead of just one over and over. Now you look at something like a page builder, and it’s like, “We’ve got 500 different templates in one thing.” I can’t do that. I think that’s too much for me. Topher DeRosia: It’s like the days of the CSS Zen Garden. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: HTML is the same, CSS changes. Before I used WordPress, I built my own blog system. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Topher DeRosia: It never got super advanced, but I used it for 10 years. One of the things you can do in your HTML is register alternate stylesheets. It’s the same tag, it’s just an alternate word in there. And then in Firefox, at least, you can go under “view Page Style”, and they would all be listed there, and you can just choose different themes. I figured out the JavaScript, even though I didn’t know JavaScript. I figured out the JavaScript to make a little dropdown box in my sidebar so my visitors could say, “Oh, I want to change my theme here.” I never figured out how to do that in WordPress because everything was so tied to style.css. I didn’t know how to make a different one be the main one. But that’s something else I miss in WordPress is the ability to just so dramatically and dynamically change your design because your content is structured so well. Russell Aaron: You know, not only that, but I really liked the websites where there was a demo, and then it gave you a basic username. The username was demo, the password was demo. But then the one thing I never figured out was how every 24 hours the site would just reset. So somebody can go in there and they could do whatever they wanted to do. They could create their own pages. They could create their own blog posts. And for 24 hours, there was a page called Russell’s Awesome. But then after 24 hours, it would just reset. I always thought that was so cool, but I could never figure out how to do that. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. And everybody was editing all at the same time, within that 24-hour period. Russell Aaron: I have since restructured my website. I use the block theme from WebDevStudios. I kind of feel like that’s where I got my education from. I was somebody who kind of dabbled around in WordPress, and then when I went to go work with them for three years, they had a set of standards that I couldn’t even fathom to begin with. But then as we built things and I saw how their machine works, how their business revolves, I was like, “You know, for me, this is the way that I like to do things, is the way that they like to do things.” And so my new website… I mean, not new website, but it’s my new theme, I actually had AI build it for me. I had Claude. I was using… It’s by ThemeIsle. Neve. I was using Neve, one of my favorite themes. Love them. So I was using that, and then my site was kind of all over the place. It was an “I’ll teach you how to do this”. That’s kind of the main focus of my site is I will jump on a call with you, and whatever questions you have, I’ll sit here for five hours with you if you want. I will teach you and until you get it. But then I also had this section about band names that were just… earlier when we were talking about the rise of Envato, you know, like I would have a section on my blog where you could create a new band name and then I had all these random blog posts. And so my website was kind of like this potluck, if you will, just like this random stuff. And I was like, you know, I want to be doing something else. I think my website needs to change. And I have those old blog posts still, but they’re hidden. So now with my new theme, I had AI look at my old site and say, this is what I think we should do. I picked out some colors and over like five days, I had it build me five different HTML pages, like completely different, you know? And then I started giving AI and I said like, “Okay, I want to look like this.” And then I was like, well, okay, I like this and I like this, but I also like this from this other site.” So I started feeding it information and like when the HTML came out, I had 12 different templates. I had my blog posts, I had my archive, but I had everything built in HTML. And the cool thing about the WDS block theme is that it serves everything as an HTML page. So I literally just took AI and said, “Take these HTML pages, bake them into how this theme does it,” and bam, my site came up. I had it done in maybe two days. Topher DeRosia: Wow. Russell Aaron: And then after that, I had it take all of those HTML pages and create me patterns. So now I can go in, and when I go into my full site editor, I can go to patterns, I have all my homepage patterns, my blog patterns, I sliced everything up, and they’re all WordPress native blocks. So I can literally go in and change the coloring on any page I want instead of having to edit the HTML or anything. And now that I have that, I feel this sense of freedom where I’m not worrying about an update coming tomorrow, if my update is gonna break or I don’t have to read a changelog that is not specific anymore. I can’t stress how much I love not having to read changelogs or the lack of changelogs. I mean, I’m fully happy with how things have come out. And over time, I’m gonna keep fine-tuning it, but I’m pretty much where I’m at right now. With all of this new technology that’s come out, I’ve really kind of found my love again for WordPress. I was kind of in a slump where I just wasn’t really doing anything. Now I take my son and we’ll drive down to Louisville, Kentucky. He rides BMX. So while he’s racing, I will literally have Claude Code open on my computer and I will log into the Claude app on my phone and I can keep sitting there having the same conversation. So this new thing that I’m building, I can still do it while I’m sitting there watching him race or while I’m doing something else. I was just like, this is fantastic. And then my wife will drive home and I’ll just sit there and I talk into my phone, I literally put the microphone on and I’ll be like, “You know, I don’t like that. And here’s my thoughts about this.” And you know, my phone dictates all of that and then I send it to my computer through the app and it just keeps spinning things up. Then by the time I get home, I have a new version that I can demo or I have a new version that I can test. I mean, I am just so fascinated by it. Topher DeRosia: That’s cool. Were we at WebDev at the same time? Russel Aaron: I don’t think so. Topher DeRosia: I was there just over three years ago. Russel Aaron: I was there 2015 through 2018. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. I came much later. I was only there for like two months. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Sometimes that’s the way it goes. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. They were gonna get a big contract that hired a bunch of people and two months later didn’t get the contract and let us all go. Russell Aaron: As much as I hate that, that also taught me that the people that do great work or the people that show up every day and are putting in more than they’re getting out, those are usually the people that stay in companies like that. That really changed my work ethic. I used to be somebody who wanted to be not lazy, but I didn’t wanna be pressed for time or having to go, go, go and having to be on all the time. Now, I’m the opposite. Now, I’m like, now that I’ve done that, I kind of earn for that stretch for a little bit. I mean, you were just saying that how you’ve transitioned to where you are. I was watching a Barstool Sports interview with a guy who runs a pizza shop in… it’s either New Jersey or New York. The guy’s only open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And he’s only open nine to six or something like that. And he built that business… well, it’s been in his family for like 60 years or something. He has one of the last original pizza ovens ever. But anyways, the point is, is that he lives at the pizza place, that’s where his entire life is, but he built the business around his life. I’m doing the same thing where if I wanna literally go jump on my bike right now and go for a two-mile ride, I’m gonna go do that. And I don’t have to feel like, hey, you’re not logged in and we’re not tracking your mouse. Like what’s happening? How come you’re not on Slack? You know what I mean? I’m not tied down to that. And I can’t stress that enough of like, that is where I wanna be. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah, it is a good life. We are at about the time to wrap it up. Okay. So I’m gonna do that. Where do you hang out online? Russel Aaron: Where do I hang out online? Topher DeRosia: Are you in any common WordPress Slacks? Russel Aaron: I’m on the main WordPress Slack sometimes. I tend to watch more than I do involve anymore. A long time ago, I used to be very vocal and I used to be not afraid to walk in to a room guns blazing. With the big cultural shift that happened in WordPress, I tend to just sit back now and be more self-reserved. So I post on my website, russellenvy.com. I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve been utilizing Reddit a lot too. I think for me, Reddit is a place where I kind of disagree with the fact that you can hide behind a pseudonym, but I do like the brutal honesty that people will have because they are hiding behind something and they will say, dude, this flat out sucks. Or they’ll be like, Hey, this is great, but it would be cool if, or somebody can be like, “Hey, that already exists. You’re not doing anything new.” I do like that. Because it kind of not puts me in my place, but it shows me either how connected or disconnected I am to what I think I’m doing. And so Reddit is a very great place. I mean, everything is russellenvy.com except for Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it. Topher DeRosia: All right, cool. Russel Aaron: Where do you hang out at? Topher DeRosia: I am in probably 40 slacks, but the vast majority of them, I don’t look at. I’m there so that someone can ping me. I’m in a couple of slacks in India. Okay. I’m in the WordPress Italian community Slack. Russel Aaron: That’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Post status make, of course there’s a hero press Slack. I have my own company Slack, my local meetup has a Slack. There’s just a lot of them. I wouldn’t say I’m super active on any of them. I just occasionally interact with somebody. I use my own company Slack to invite my clients in when we talk there. Russel Aaron: Right. Do you find yourself reading things more than, you know… from the outsider looking in, I post a lot and it looks like I post a lot… I mean, especially on LinkedIn, but I’m always consuming more than I’m posting. Do you find yourself doing that? Like where you’re… maybe not keeping up with the trades anymore, but like, you know… I used to read maybe 1,500 blog posts a week and then… what was that service where you could like save…? I used to have a service where you could save articles and then that way, late at night, I would just read, you know, maybe 10 or 15 of them a night. But now I look at things like Reddit where I see… I just look at somebody who’s going on there and asking for help. Again, it’s a standard WordPress person that, hey, I’m new to this, I don’t know how, and I’m looking at it and I’m just like, how can we make that better? That’s kind of where I’m at these days. Topher DeRosia: I don’t read a whole lot in Slack. It really is for my convenience. I’m pretty active with my RSS reader. I follow a lot of stuff. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Topher DeRosia: Because I don’t wanna go chase it all down all over the internet. So, you know, there’s that. I’m on LinkedIn a fair amount, Facebook a little bit. I’m on Mastodon and Blue Sky mostly just to post stuff. It’s funny, I have more followers… No, let me say it this way. Mastodon, I have the fewest followers, but the most engagement from those followers. Russell Aaron: Isn’t that interesting? Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I’ll post something and I’ll get some favorites or reposts or whatever. Blue Sky, I get almost nothing at all, despite the fact that I have like a thousand followers there. Russell Aaron: But Blue Sky is a community that is fast-moving. I almost compare it to anything Meta has, which is you can post today right now and in three minutes you’re 785 posts down. That’s what I really love about Reddit is that I posted something about this AI team that I’m building that I give away for free on GitHub, and so for like five days, I was the number two post on that subreddit. And the volume that I saw from that. I mean, Reddit really loves human writing. If you go in there, you post something that somewhat seemingly might suggest that you had AI do anything with it, they will just downvote it. But if you write original and you write from the heart and stuff, like your stuff skyrockets there. I’ve learned a lot from Reddit because of that. Topher DeRosia: That’s really cool. Russell Aaron: It’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. All right, well, thanks for chatting with me. Russell Aaron: Thank you for the time. Topher DeRosia: And now you can’t be on anybody else’s podcast. Russell Aaron: I’m actually starting my own, sir. Topher DeRosia: Are you? All right. Russell Aaron: I have, like you said, the reason why we started this is because you saw something from me that says, “I’m tired of the indie circuit,” if you will. I put out a LinkedIn post, I don’t know, maybe a month ago at this point and I asked people if they wanted to be on a show. So I have WP Roundtable. I got that from Kyle Mahler, a person who I love in WordPress more than I can express. One of the best people on the planet, I feel like. I was thinking about starting that up again, because we don’t have WP Watercooler anymore. We don’t have anything like that. That’s kind of where I got my start from. But again, I also identify that that’s kind of the problem is that every Monday or Friday I was on a show and I was one of the people that you would see constantly. And so I was sitting there thinking and I was like, what doesn’t the space have? What kind of show do I wanna watch? Because I don’t watch shows when they come out, do you? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: I always watch them maybe four weeks down the road at like 2:30 in the morning when I have nothing going on. And by that point, the information is almost stale. I mean, the way that anything works these days. And there’s a few that I might watch maybe within 48 hours of coming out, but at this point, there is something… a new idea that myself and… the guy’s actually an automatician. And so it’s actually kind of interesting because we don’t wanna say anything that would put him in a position to where he’s saying something bad about the company he works for, but I’m also the person where I get to say something to the person who works at Automattic to maybe incite some change. So we are working on something like that, but it’s not going to be an interview show. It is not going to be something where you tune it out or you put it on a 2.5 playback speed just to get through it. You know what I mean? And that’s really what the emphasis of my post was about is that so many of the interviews go that way. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Are you familiar with wppodcasts.com? Russell Aaron: Yes. Topher DeRosia: Okay, good. So when you get it started up, submit it there. Russell Aaron: That’s a place. I’m very fascinated by Gary Vaynerchuk. Are you familiar with Gary V? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: I watch something Gary V every day. That guy makes me feel like I’m lazy every single day, but he is also one of the people that says like, “Hey, you’re 40, you’re still just a baby.” A lot of people feel like I should be two kids, a house, marriage, this, that, and because I’m not, I’m behind the ball. And he’s one person that’s like, “Listen, you’re still a kid.” And he’s like, “You’re 40, I’m 40, and you have 10 years until you’re 50.” And even then you’re still so young to where you can generate something again and from 50 to 60, you can now do. That kind of mentality really moved me around. Why I bring that up is, I’m trying not to post on the same places that everybody else is. I wanna find that new venture. Substack is a great one. And they also have a way to release podcast episodes through them. So they can actually be your entire engine. So like you don’t have to host them on different places and stuff like that. So I’m looking for different plays like that. Topher DeRosia: All right, cool. Well, I look forward to hearing about it when it comes out. I’m sure you’ll post on LinkedIn. Russell Aaron: Yes, yeah. Topher DeRosia: All right. All right then, well, I will maybe find you on Slack or Reddit or someplace. Russell Aaron: Slack, Reddit, LinkedIn. Either way, please keep in touch. First of all, it’s great to see somebody familiar in the space. It’s great. I mean, just talking about the old days, I could sit here and do it forever. Topher DeRosia: All right, I’ll see ya. Russell Aaron: Have a good one. Topher DeRosia: All right, so that was the end of the podcast. If you could send me a headshot. And yep, that’s the one. Cool. And any links you want in the liner notes. Russell Aaron: Cool. Topher DeRosia: And two or three sentences about you and what you do and whatnot. Russell Aaron: Cool. I noticed that you… are you trying to revive Hallway Chats? Or is it something that when you just find something interesting, you’re like, hey, I’ll go do that. Topher DeRosia: That’s it right there. Russell Aaron: Okay. Sure, sure. Topher DeRosia: There was a time when it was a weekly podcast and now it’s a whenever I feel like it podcast. Russell Aaron: I love it. I think that’s the biggest reason why I’m trying to do something different is I really dislike watching a podcast. The first thing they do is they come on and they go, “Hey, welcome to WP whatever. Hey, sorry we didn’t post this week. I was bit…” If you are gonna say you’re gonna post every Wednesday at one, that’s on you. But I do not like when things start off with an apology. Like just get to it. Because I’m not watching it Wednesday at one. I mean, unless you’re Joe Rogan, or unless you are somebody who has a huge following that people will watch you live because it’s important. Otherwise, it’s just consumable stuff, you know? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. For years, I posted it Heropress weekly on Wednesday without fail. I would ignore my family to go get it done. Then I was talking to Morton Rand Hendrickson. You know him? Russell Aaron: Uh-huh. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, he’s a huge fan of Heropress. And I said to him, “Do you read every week?” He’s like, “Oh no, not at all.” He’s like, “Oh, I thought you really liked it.” And he said, “Oh, I love it. But I don’t have time to read every week.” Every few months I’ll get depressed about the WordPress community and I’ll go read 10 essays. And then one time I was at WordCamp Ann Arbor, probably the same one you were at and Josepha came to me and said that… she was kind of a sounding board for employees that come to her and said, “Listen, I’ve been working support all day and people suck and I’m depressed and I hate life.” And she would just listen for a while and then at the end they would say, “Okay, I’m gonna go read a bunch of Heropress and I’ll feel better.” And it really changed my perspective of what I was making. I wasn’t making a weekly publication. I was making an archive, a collection to be used as a tool, a library. Russell Aaron: I’m gonna say this poorly, but it’s almost like you are creating a support help hotline where it’s like, if you’re on the verge of blowing up your website, please call this number. We’ll talk you down from it. It’s almost like you’re building that. Topher DeRosia: That’s funny. Russell Aaron: That’s interesting. And then now you’re just selective about it or you’re so far- Topher DeRosia: I’m less aggressive about finding essayists and less insistent that they get it to me by a certain time. Like I would find somebody and say, listen, I need it by Sunday on this date. And they were like, “Okay.” And that worked for a while. Russell Aaron: Oh, before, before. Okay. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. But now I’ll find somebody… No, I don’t go looking as often. Russell Aaron: You’ll maybe find something that somebody wrote and you’ll be like, “Hey, are you interested in doing this?” Topher DeRosia: Yes. And I don’t find people as often. I used to find my people on Twitter and I’m not on there anymore. Russell Aaron: Like by personal choice? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Okay. Topher DeRosia: I just left Twitter. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. You feel like your life improved? Topher DeRosia: Yes and no. Russell Aaron: Okay. Topher DeRosia: I feel the loss of what Twitter was. And it’s not there anymore. It’s just gone. Russell Aaron: Especially around WordCamp and stuff like that. That used to have to be the place that you’d be on, you know? Topher DeRosia: The Twitter I loved doesn’t exist anymore. And so, yeah, I feel that loss. Russell Aaron: I need a t-shirt that says that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Wow. I’m in the process of making a printable store. Printable? Printful. Printful store. Russell Aaron: Cool. Topher DeRosia: With Woo, to make a video with. I need to make a bunch of products. Maybe I’ll make one of those. Russell Aaron: It’s interesting. Wow. You just flat-out left X. Do you feel like with Heropress, it was… and again, this is why I made that post, is that people almost see it like they can make the rounds. And it’s like, well, I haven’t gone there yet. And so they’re gonna submit something to you because they’re gonna get some press out of it. And it’s not so much what’s best for your brand or it’s not best for your website. They just see it as, well, I’m gonna get some exposure there. Do you feel like it used to be that? Topher DeRosia: No. I’ve gotten maybe two or three submissions ever like that. And a couple of them, I was able to say, “No, that’s not what we’re about. It’s this other thing, what Heropress is actually about.” And they’re like, “Oh, well, okay, that’d be great.” And they do that. And maybe one or two people have said, “I built this great company and everyone should come use my company.” Like, no, not so much. Russell Aaron: Interesting. Topher DeRosia: And that’s the end of it. Russell Aaron: I remember back in, I wanna say like 2013, people used to call each other out and be like, why are you giving the same speech at WordCamp Miami, WordCamp Minneapolis, WordCamp San Diego. And that’s kind of where I was at with that same LinkedIn post. It’s like, I really, really enjoy watching Matt Cromwell’s show, but the guy that he just had on also was on Jonathan Denwood and was also on this one. It was also on, I was like, I’ve already seen this. Maybe I get three more percent information that wasn’t in that last, or because Matt knows a little bit more about personal stuff in WordPress or building a business, he might have some more insight there, but it’s like, I’ve already heard this and I’m kind of already over it. And that’s kind of where I was at is you don’t have to just say, I’m gonna do this one and that’s it. But it’s almost like, you’re making yourself not… what’s the word. Not credible because you’re going around and saying the same thing and it’s just, you’re not doing anything different than a blog post could have done. Topher DeRosia: You know what I mean? I don’t feel too bad about repeating WordCamp talks because, especially at small camps, because a lot of people are just gonna go to their local camp and never go to another one. And unless they cruise.tv, they’re not gonna see it. I struggle a little bit with podcasts because I’ve been asked a lot over the last 10 years to come on a podcast and talk about the story of WordPress. And it’s the same story every time, you know? And so, I’ll try to mix it up a little bit, give different information that I’ve never given before, that sort of thing. But it is something I think about and struggle with a little bit. Russell Aaron: What do you struggle with about it? Topher DeRosia: I don’t wanna just say the same thing over and over again. You know, I don’t want people to go, oh, Topher’s on another podcast episode. Oh, I’ve heard this story. I don’t need to be on this episode. Fortunately, it’s been around long enough that I can give a brief synopsis of the beginning and talk about stuff that’s happened in the last couple of years. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: Which is gonna be really different from the podcast episode I was on in 2020. Russell Aaron: You know? Right. Topher DeRosia: It’s an interesting dilemma when you have one story to tell and everybody wants you to tell it. How do you deal with that? Russell Aaron: Well, I’ve noticed that too. It is like, you know, I’ll watch [Insert Famous Name Here], and they have a podcast, and they’re interviewing, again, [Insert Famous Name Here], and that person was also just on That Famous Name and That Famous Name. I actually saw somebody, it’s like almost a year ago, and they were just like, “Do you want me just to say this so your show has this speech in it or are you genuinely asking me?” Because, you know, like you want this story so you can post it on your social media. But I’ve already given that story 15 different times because they wanted it for their own, you know? And it’s almost going that way where I kind of respect it in a way because you don’t want to post other people’s content. But I also feel like I’m tired of saying the same shit over and over again. It’s interesting, man. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that’s a dilemma. Russell Aaron: So you’re just like kicking back and… are you building something for you that you think is gonna scale or are you trying to get away from WordPress? That’s kind of where I’m at right now. Topher DeRosia: Yes and no. I have always wanted to… I’ve always been better with people than code. I’m a life coach. Russell Aaron: Yeah. I did not know that about you. Topher DeRosia: I love talking to the client more than coding. I love helping people learn things. And so those skills could be anywhere in WordPress, but also could be anywhere outside of WordPress. So I’m looking for those jobs and they are not out there. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: So here we are. Russell Aaron: I’m to the point now where my son, he’s eight, but he races BMX, like actual bikes and stuff. And so there’s a college here in Indianapolis and it’s one of the best cycling schools in the country. And there’s like five Olympians that practice every Tuesday and Thursday and they’re right in our back door. These are people that have a great social following, but they don’t post very well. They have a brand name, but they don’t have a website. So I’m noticing that every new space that I go into, it’s kind of like I get to jump back into WordPress again, where it’s like, hey, I just built a website for this BMX track in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s one of the best tracks in the country by everybody that has ever raced in a sport, they all vote that it’s one of the best, but they don’t have a website period. I just went through this where they have a guy, he’s their treasurer and he’s like, “Well, I’m an AI software guy.” And I’m like, “Well, how come you don’t have a website?” And he’s like, “Well…” And I’m like, “Listen, I submitted a new version of a we… literally, I uploaded it to my Russell website or to my Russell Envy site and I just put it in a sub-folder and I was like, “Your website could look like this today.” I was like, “For free. I don’t want anything from you. No free anything.” I was like, “I want to donate this to you because I want to grow the sport.” And the guy’s like, “I wanted to build it and React.” And I’m like, “Well, why didn’t you?” And the guy’s like, “Uh.” And I’m like, “I have free hosting for life from WPEngine.” And I was like, “I won’t charge you guys ever. I will host a site. I have free with AppPresser. I’ll build you guys an app where you guys can send push notifications.” And the guy’s like, “Well, I want to have a lot of control and say over it.” And I was just like, “All right, you know what?” And then I built my own. Now I own a domain all about their BMX track and now they’re calling me going, “We should have went with you.” I’m to the point now where I’m nice. And then it’s just like, “Dude, I’m 10,000 miles over you and I’m going to go this way.” Liquid Web did that to me. Liquid Web brought me in and they were like, “We’re going to…” I was supposed to be the OG stellar WP. They brought me in, I was hiring all my friends and I was bringing in people and we were building something. And then they called me and they were like, “Well, you can either be a level two support person or you could just not work here.” And I was like, “Well, I don’t work here anymore.” And they were like, “Well, wait, hang on.” And I literally hit “click” and I have never logged on since. Topher DeRosia: That’s funny. Russell Aaron: I’m in that same boat where, you know, I don’t have to work for you. You know what I mean? Like, fuck, I’m 40. I should be doing something on my own anyway. I kind of wish I had… what was WP 101? Sean did that for all those years. I wish I would have done that. Or every week, I should have had some YouTube about talking about something and maybe I could have monetized that, but I’m not behind the ball. I let the ball slip is what I feel like. Topher DeRosia: It’s not too late to start. I picked that up when Sean, quit and I’ve got a YouTube channel with a bunch of stuff on it. I published one today. Russell Aaron: Oh wow. It’s just interesting things that you think about, or is it like educational, like tutorials? Topher DeRosia: It’s educational tutorials, but stuff that I find interesting. Like today I made a desktop wallpaper for WordCamp Europe. Russell Aaron: Nice. Topher DeRosia: And I did it by going to their webpage in my browser and using the console to hack the HTML and CSS until it looked like a screen, a wallpaper. Russell Aaron: That’s fucking cool. Topher DeRosia: So I published it right before I’d started talking to you, like minutes before that. And it has three views. Russell Aaron: Woohoo. Topher DeRosia: But a couple of weeks ago I did one called fun and games in the terminal. And it’s how to play Tetris in the terminal and how to make a choo-choo train go across your screen when you type LS wrong. And it has 784 views right now. Russell Aaron: That’s awesome. Topher DeRosia: I did one on how to brighten a photo. I did a series. I’m working on a series called Topher learns how, or I talk to people who know how to do things that I really should know how to do, but don’t. I talked to Scott Kingsley Clark about pods, which has been around forever, but I’ve never used. I talked to Donata about Termageddon, because I know it’s important, but I have stayed away because I don’t understand and it’s scary. Russell Aaron: Termageddon. I’ve never heard that. Topher DeRosia: Oh. You know the little cookie consent things, privacy policies and whatnot? Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: So when you sign up with term again, you pay a surprisingly low monthly fee and they have a human get on the phone with you and talk through your requirements of where you live, your legal stuff. Like, are you in Europe? Are you in California? Where are you? Where are your customers, your viewers? Then you drop in a short code for your privacy code and for the cookies and they keep them up to date based on how the laws change. So you don’t have to pay attention to, Oh, did California make some crazy new law about cookies? What do I need to do to update my site? It’s really, really great. So I did an interview with her. Russell Aaron: $12 a month or $119 a year. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: What is the point of having a privacy policy if you don’t pay extra for limiting your liability? Wow. That’s amazing. Topher DeRosia: It is. Russell Aaron: That’s someone just thinking outside the box. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have a couple of videos where I was given an account at a hosting company that I’ve never used and videoed logging in for the first time and getting to a website. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Just from first login to setting everything up to now you have something production. Wow. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Specifically not reading the docs. Russell Aaron: Oh, just trying to brute force your way through it. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: That’s smart, dude. Topher DeRosia: It’s partly about… well, they may have wonderful docs. It may be super easy to do if you read all the docs. I don’t want to read the docs. Russell Aaron: Me neither. Topher DeRosia: Clickety clickety click, I have a website. So I did GreenGeeks. I did honesthosting.io. I did X cloud. So that’s the kind of stuff I’m doing. Russell Aaron: That’s interesting. That is something that, that Gary V talks about a lot is that it used to have to be where you are this WordPress brand and you do just this and all your videos could only be about that. Anytime you stepped outside the box, people were like, “Why am I watching this?” And today now we’re to finally to where my website would probably actually thrive is it’s so random. It’s just something out of my head and one thing can skyrocket and it’s like hitting the jackpot, you know? That’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Another thing I did is I made a site called topher.how and because I realized I had never really made stuff in my own channel. I’ve been blogging for decades, making videos, WinningWP. I have over a hundred videos on WinningWP. Russell Aaron: WinningWP? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Did you start that when Charlie Sheen started doing Winning? Topher DeRosia: No, no, no, no. But I was thinking, boy, I’d love to have all this stuff on my own website, but I don’t want to go find it all and copy paste posts. And then I realized nearly every place I’ve ever made content has RSS for their authors. Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: And so I found the sites, found my author RSS feed and started piping them into WP all import. And now topher.how has all my content from the last 15 years on a dozen different sites, doesn’t more than a dozen different sites, all my videos, all my posts, everything on wordpress.tv, all that stuff. So it’s kind of a portfolio. Yeah, so you can go to topher.how and see all my stuff. Russell Aaron: That was actually one thing that I was really proud of was that my entire WordPress journey is documented on somebody else’s project. So, like you go to WPwatercooler and my resume, what is great about it is that it is not me who can edit those videos, it is not me who can master them. Those words are there. Those words are me. You want to know my qualifications in WordPress, there’s all my shit. For me, I was like, “That’s actually pretty sick. You know what I mean?” Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Wow. Topher.how. Oh, dude, do you know who Jeffrey Zinn is? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: Oh God. Him and Brandon Dove they have Pixel Jar. Have you ever heard of Pixel Jar? Topher DeRosia: Maybe. Russell Aaron: They’re big West coasters. I’ll tell you that much. He just wrote me, “He literally just said, dude, how do you find the time to write so much on LinkedIn? I enjoy all your stuff, but mostly I’m blown away by the volume.” Topher DeRosia: Nice. Russell Aaron: I’m going to write him back and just tell him the truth. But you know, it’s all thought man. Interesting. Topher, I’ve had a lot of fun. Am I taking up your time? Topher DeRosia: I should get back to work. Russell Aaron: All right, sir. Have a good one. Topher DeRosia: All right. I’ll see ya. Russell Aaron: Bye. Topher DeRosia: Bye.

Mazen and Robin welcome Gant Laborde of Infinite Red to discuss AI Triforce, a practical framework for AI-powered software teams. They explore agentic coding, governance, testing, code quality, and emerging engineering roles that help teams move faster with AI while maintaining scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability.   Show Notes AI Triforce announcement   Connect With Us! Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde Robin Heinze: @robinheinze Mazen Chami: @mazenchami React Native Radio: @ReactNativeRdio   This episode is brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is a premier mobile app consultancy, especially focused on Expo and React Native, located fully remote in the US. We're a team of 30 with highly experienced mobile app developers and have been doing this for over a decade. We are also one of the first development teams to adopt agentic coding in a way that keeps high quality standards and aren't afraid to do things the old school way if we need to. If you're looking for mobile app or React Native or Expo expertise for your next project, hit us up at infinite.red/radio.

PHP Podcast – June 4, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: PHP Tek 2027 — New Dates, Bold New Format Mark your calendars: PHP Tek 2027 is happening April 27–29 in Chicago, and Eric and John are shaking things up. Rather than a straight three-day PHP conference, next year gets three tracks — two of which are familiar PHP-focused content, and a third specialty track that rotates each day: one day of JavaScript, one day of DevOps, and one day of Laravel. The Laravel track is specifically focused on how developers actually use the framework day-to-day, not a product pitch. Single-day passes will be available, so if you’re only coming for the DevOps or JS day, you’re covered. One important heads-up: there’s a big convention happening at a venue nearby in Rosemont, so the hotel block could sell out faster than usual. When they open reservations, don’t wait. Holly the Elephant Is Going Fast The PHP Architect conference elephant, named Holly, is now available at store.phparch.com, and demand has been remarkable. Eric woke up one morning to a flood of orders and genuinely couldn’t figure out what happened. The warning from last year applies here: people said they’d grab Tony later, and now Tony is gone forever. Holly ships June 17th for most orders, but if you’ve already ordered, it’s likely on its way. Get yours while you can. PHP Tek TV Is Doing Something Different This Year In past years, conference talk videos would get edited and uploaded weeks (or months) after the event. This year, John is doing things differently: the raw, unedited recordings are going up now, with timestamps in the description so you can jump straight to specific talks — some rooms recorded a seven-hour continuous feed and just left it running. The clean edited versions are still coming (a video editor friend in the UK is on it), but if you want to see a talk right now, the raw version is there. Audio quality varies by room, but it’s watchable. Immich — A Self-Hosted Google Photos That Actually Works John has been running Immich, a self-hosted photo management platform, in a Docker container for about a month and loves it. It does facial recognition, GPS tagging, and auto-uploads from his phone — essentially everything he cares about in Google Photos, without handing his photos to Google or Apple. He’s now planning to use it as the PHP Architect conference photo library, centralizing all the Tech photos in one browsable, shareable place. It’s fully open source, with no licensing cost, and an optional donation tier. If you’re sick of paying ever-increasing storage bills to big tech companies, this is worth a look. Ben Ramsey’s PHP Tek Homecoming Article Is Free to Read The May issue of PHP Architect magazine is now available to digital subscribers, and this month’s free article is Ben Ramsey’s piece on the PHP Tek homecoming experience. Eric reached out to Ben last minute and he delivered. If you’ve never subscribed, this is a low-barrier way to see what the magazine is like. Head to phparch.com, grab the free article, and if you like what you see, subscriptions are not expensive. John Is Resurrecting a Legacy Laravel App — With Claude’s Help John has been grinding away on a Laravel 6 app that was a passion project years ago and has now been revived as an actual client project. Using Claude to methodically baby-step through each version upgrade — starting with writing tests to establish a baseline — he’s worked up through the major Laravel versions. The turning point came when he hit the version where the old event sourcing package (Prooph) was clearly on its way out, and the decision was made to migrate to Verbs, Nuno Maduro’s Laravel-native event sourcing package. John’s now looking forward to it. He’s also accidentally been burning tokens on the company Anthropic account (not his personal account), which Eric caught live on air. They are going to talk about it after the show. Eric’s Mystery Side Project Is Almost Ready — If DNS Would Cooperate Eric teased a new side project last week and intended to reveal it this week, but he’s stuck waiting on DNS propagation. The domain was registered with DigitalOcean DNS already in use by a previous owner, so Eric moved it to Cloudflare — only to discover there may be a conflict because the previous owner was also on Cloudflare. The result: the name servers are stuck on old values. John’s live suggestion was to move it to Route 53, and Eric was immediately sold. The project is almost ready to show the world, DNS gods willing. Meta’s AI Support Bot Got Socially Engineered Eric shared a video demonstrating how someone prompt-injected Meta’s AI customer support bot into sending a verification code to an attacker-controlled email address — and then using that code to add the email to an account, enabling a full password reset and account takeover. The irony: Meta is the company behind Llama and has some of the deepest AI expertise on the planet, and they still shipped a support bot with permissions it shouldn’t have. Eric’s point was pointed: you can fire a human employee who gets social engineered, which creates accountability throughout the team. An AI has no such incentive structure. Crowbarring AI into account-modification workflows without appropriate guardrails is just asking for this. The PHP Foundation Now Publishes Board Meeting Minutes Eric discovered that the PHP Foundation has started publishing their board meeting minutes in a public GitHub repository. Nothing earth-shattering yet, but seeing who attended, what was discussed, and what decisions are being made gives the community a real window into how the foundation operates at scale. It also helps explain something Eric and John have always found interesting: why PHP stalled so hard between versions 5 and 7. There was no foundation, no financial backing, just volunteer hours. Now there’s a paid staff and governance structure — and the minutes show exactly how complex running something at PHP’s scale actually is. The PHP Foundation Has a Dedicated Security Team Now Speaking of the Foundation, it now has a dedicated security team — a sign of how seriously the supply chain attack problem has gotten. AI tools are being deployed by black hat actors to find vulnerabilities in open source projects at a scale that wasn’t possible before. PHP is not just another open source project; it underpins a massive slice of the web, and companies depend on it staying secure. Having a team specifically focused on this is the right call, even if it’s a sobering reminder of where the threat landscape is heading. Moat — Nuno’s GitHub Security Auditing Tool Nuno Maduro (of Laravel fame) quietly shipped a tool called Moat that audits your GitHub presence for security gaps. Install it globally via Brew or Composer, point it at your GitHub org, a specific repo, or even a specific branch, and it gives you a report on where your security posture could be improved. It’s read-only — it won’t change anything — and it’s explicit that it is not a security certification. Eric wants to use it to audit the PHP Architect organization’s repos, many of which haven’t been touched in years. Think of it as a fast, opinionated triage tool, not a replacement for a real security audit. Links from the show: PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29 PHP Architect Store — Holly the Elephant Immich — Self-Hosted Photo Management PHP Architect Magazine Verbs — Laravel Event Sourcing by Thunk Moat — GitHub Security Auditing by Nuno Maduro PHP Foundation on GitHub PHP Architect Discord Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.

ClickFix is a fast-growing social engineering technique appearing in malware campaigns, compromised websites, fake CAPTCHA prompts, and browser verification scams. In this episode Tyler Moffitt explains how attackers compromise legitimate sites by exploiting unpatched CMS or plugins, inject malicious JavaScript, and then trick visitors into “verifying” by opening Run/PowerShell and pasting a preloaded command that downloads malware, leading to info stealers and potentially ransomware. ClickFix is effective because it leverages trusted brands, bypasses traditional phishing defenses, scales via high-traffic sites, and is increasingly polished through AI. They connect this to the shrinking “patch window,” emphasizing rapid patching, reducing internet exposure, monitoring website integrity, updating user training to avoid pasting commands, and layering defenses like EDR/MDR and DNS filtering.As featured on Million Podcasts' Best 100 Cybersecurity Podcasts  Top 50 Chief Information Security Officer CISO Podcasts Top 70 Security Hacking PodcastsThis list is the most comprehensive ranking of Cyber Security Podcasts online and we are honoured to feature amongst the best!Follow or subscribe to the show on your preferred podcast platform.Share the show with others in the cybersecurity world.Get in touch via reimaginingcyber@gmail.com

PHP Podcast – May 28, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Links from the show: PHP barely avoided disaster – YouTube CVE-2026-45793: Anatomy of a 14-Hour PHP Supply-Chain Near-Miss · graycoreio/github-actions-magento2 · Discussion #261 · GitHub An Update on Composer & Packagist Supply Chain Security PHP Tek: A Homecoming by Ben Ramsey Tek Roundup – Roave Speaking at PHP Tek 2026! #tech – YouTube PHP Tek is behind us, the ballroom is cleaned up, and we’re back to talk about all of it. Here’s what we covered: RIP Archie Bot After a long fight to keep him alive, Eric has officially retired Archie — the Discord bot built on OpenClaw that handled team standups, monitored PHP Architect’s Twitter/X group for join requests, and did a surprising amount of background work for the consulting team. When Anthropic shut down the OpenClaw API, Eric tried every model and service he could find to bring Archie back to form, but nothing got him all the way there. After a month of “almost working,” the call was made. He’s dead. Eric hasn’t ruled out revisiting it eventually — maybe with Claude Cowork — but for now, the bot is gone and the starting-soon link in Discord is broken because of it. Reviving a Six-Year-Old Codebase A client PHP Architect Consulting worked with from 2018 to 2021 has come back. The project — a reimagining of their app — was killed off when COVID hit and the CEO couldn’t align with the team’s vision. The last commit was six years ago. Now the client wants to bring it back, and Eric is spending the next few days analyzing what it’ll take to get it running again. Outdated packages, an old PHP version, and the general entropy of time are all on the checklist. Eric has genuine affection for this codebase — it was one of the first projects where he felt like the team was truly operating as a team, not just as an extension of him. Now it’s time to dust it off. Partner Spotlight: PHP Score → Our CVEs The PHP Score sponsor read may be getting a refresh — the folks at Artisan Build, who built PHP Score, have a new product they’re excited about: ourCVEs.com. It monitors your codebase’s Composer and NPM packages — and optionally your servers via a lightweight agent — for exposure to open CVEs, and alerts you when something needs attention. Pricing is generous: free forever for open source projects, $17/month for solo devs, $83/month for teams (or $1,000/year), with server monitoring scaling at $1 per server above 50. Ed from Artisan Build was at PHP Tek and made a strong impression. Go check it out at ourcves.com. How PHP Barely Avoided a Supply Chain Disaster Brent Roose released a 22-minute video covering a near-miss in the PHP ecosystem involving GitHub and Composer. The short version: GitHub changed their token format and briefly released it before Composer was ready to handle it. Composer was logging the token when the format check failed — meaning GitHub tokens were ending up in CI logs. In GitHub Actions, depending on how your action is configured, that container (and its token) might stick around for a while, giving an attacker a window to act. An alert developer caught the issue, used Claude to help research it, then did responsible disclosure — contacting the Composer maintainers and reaching out to Taylor Otwell, Vincent Pontier, and others in the ecosystem to disable their actions until the fix was in place. Update your Composer. GitHub rolled back the new token format but won’t keep it rolled back forever. Packagist MFA and Account Security Following up on the supply chain theme: Nils and Igor (Composer/Packagist maintainers) released a blog post on what they’re doing to improve supply chain security. The immediate ask for anyone publishing packages is to enable MFA on your Packagist account — it’s not required yet, but it will be. Eric went to check his own account, found MFA was already on, but noticed his username was still “diegodev” and he was using an old email. While updating it, he noted that Packagist didn’t require him to re-authenticate or confirm the change via the old email — a gap worth flagging if you have popular packages and someone ever gets into your session. PHP Tek 2026 Recap — The Good PHP Tek 2026 in Chicago is done, and despite everything (see below), the team is proud of how it went. Some highlights: Holly (CodeLorax) built a conference mobile app from scratch, released on both Google Play and the Apple App Store within 24 hours of the conference opening. The app let attendees build their own schedule, detected conflicting talk selections, sent push notifications when talks moved rooms, and even included a vendor lead-scanning feature where vendors could scan attendee QR codes to capture contacts. It was a genuine game-changer for the event. Eric and John named the conference elephant after Holly in appreciation — she also changed a trailer tire during setup, which sealed the deal. Clayton Kendall sponsored and produced the conference shirts and bags on an extremely tight timeline — shirts two weeks out, bags just one week before the event. Both were a hit. Attendees at the conference were getting questions about the rainbow PHP Architect shirt in particular. A job fair ran for the first time, with four companies represented. One hiring manager showed up even though they already had 1,400 applicants — because they knew that conference attendees are exactly the kind of motivated, self-improving developers they want. Attendees got to ask questions directly, including the real-world stuff like remote vs. office. Eric would love feedback on how to make it better next year. JS Tech debuted as a fourth track alongside the three PHP tracks, bringing in fresh faces from the JavaScript community. Eric came away energized by the cross-pollination — different people, different approaches to similar problems. Ben Ramsey and James Tickham (Rove) both wrote great blog posts about the conference. Ben’s will be featured in the magazine. Diana Pham also put together a video recap. Links in the show notes. PHP Tek 2026 Recap — The Incident On Monday during final setup, a hotel employee had a medical incident while walking through the main ballroom — leaving a trail that required hazmat-suited cleanup crews and forced the team to quarantine the ballroom, the hallway leading to it, and the adjacent bathroom. The person is okay and was back at the hotel by Friday, which was a relief. But in the moment, nobody knew what was happening or how long the room would be unavailable. The team had to rebuild the entire conference footprint overnight. The keynote moved, the JS Tech track went into the quiet room, vendors moved to the atrium, and the hotel staff — to their enormous credit — cleared their own furniture and accommodated every ask without complaint. Attendees were equally patient; once they understood the situation, there was no drama, just “tell us where to go.” The incident also took out the streaming setup for day one, compounding an already-difficult start. The solution that eventually worked — plugging the Ethernet into a hub before the streaming equipment — wasn’t tried until day three. Eric is mad at himself for thinking of it and not doing it sooner. PHP Tek 2027 — Save the Date (TBD) Planning for next year is already underway. The current target is April 2027 — away from the May timing that caused Eric to miss two of his kid’s band performances this year. Nothing is locked yet, but they’re working through venue and date options and hope to have an announcement soon. Links from the show: ourCVEs.com — Daily security audit on autopilot PHPScore — Technical debt monitoring for PHP Brent Roose — “How PHP Barely Avoided Disaster” (YouTube) Packagist — Enable MFA on your account PHP Architect Discord PHP Architect Merch Store PHP Architect YouTube Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.05.28 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Chris, Andrew, and David kick things off with a detour through Dungeon Crawler Carl, Rails World tickets, and conference travel before diving into developer tooling, package manager security, and the latest Ruby ecosystem updates. The conversation covers everything from Hotwire-style UI patterns and pnpm/Corepack setup to Jeff Dickey's new package manager, the RubyGems malicious package attack, Ruby 4.0.4, Shopify's Rubydex, Claude/Codex chatter, and the increasingly strange future of AI agents and delivery robots. Hit download now to hear more! LinksJudoscale- Remote Ruby listener giftDungeon Crawler Carl Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG + UnstoppableMaciej Mensfeld XAubeJeff Dickey Xen.devThe Hacker News- RubyGems Suspends New Signups After Hundreds of Malicious Packages Are UploadedOne engine, many tools—Introducing Rubydex (Rails at Scale)Ruby 4.0.4 ReleasedFrontend Masters Workshop with Chris Oliver: Getting Started with RailsHoneybadgerHoneybadger is an application health monitoring tool built by developers for developers.JudoscaleMake your deployments bulletproof with autoscaling that just works.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Chris Oliver X/TwitterAndrew Mason X/TwitterJason Charnes X/Twitter

The new AIEWF website is live! CFPs close in 2 days and we will run our first New Engineer Orientation this weekend, get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets!One of the central tensions in the agents industry is that even while there are major decacorn agent labs like Sierra, Decagon, Notion and Cursor being built up, it is also true that it has never been easier to DIY agents, with a plethora of agent frameworks like LangGraph and Pydantic and Flue, and managed agents from Anthropic and Gemini and Amazon. There has been a wave of companies building their own background agents from Shopify to Stripe to Paradigm to Razorpay, and even Cognition's friends Ramp have built their own coding agent with other friend Modal.You'd think Cognition might feel a bit threatened, but they're not - even after all this, they were way oversubscribed for the $1B Series D they just announced:Walden Yan, coiner of context engineering and Chief Product Officer/Cofounder of Cognition, invited OpenInspect's Cole Murray to talk about why the Devin is in the Details.Full conversation live on the pod today: In retrospect, async agents were the most AGI pilled bet you could make in 2024 - the models weren't good enough yet to vibecode, and people didn't trust AI enough to let it rip, nobody (including early Cognition) was sure about the form factors. Now it is obvious:* The first wave of AI coding tools made the developer faster but remain heavily in the loop. Copilor and Cursor's tab autocomplete are prime examples However, the workflow was still heavily centered around and bottlenecked by the developer's local workflow: a developer in an IDE, watching the model, accepting or rejecting changes, and pushing code one interaction at a time.* The second wave was local agents: Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor's agents pane: first one and increasingly many terminals all running concurrently.* The current Age of Async Agents points to a different future focused more on agent orchestration which drives end-to-end development.According to previous guest Steve Yegge, there are finer-grained 8 levels to agent adoption, but we have collapsed it into three.As Cursor's Michael Truell put it in The third era of AI software development:Cursor is no longer primarily about writing code. It is about helping developers build the factory that creates their software. This factory is made up of fleets of agents that they interact with as teammates: providing initial direction, equipping them with the tools to work independently, and reviewing their work.The agent should not sit solely inside the developer's flow. It should be setup to work in the background so that you can give it a task, a repo, a machine, a shell, a browser, tests, memory, and review loops to go do the work somewhere else.In less than a year, the sentiment has shifted from avoiding multi-agent systems:to suggesting approaches that actually work:From coining “context engineering” to building the infrastructure behind Devin's 7x PR growth and jump from 16% to 80% of commits across Cognition repos, Walden Yan has had a front-row seat to the background-agent shift. In this episode, Cognition co-founder and CPO Walden Yan joins swyx alongside Cole Murray, creator of OpenInspect, to unpack why everyone is building their own Devin, what changed after the December 2025 model inflection, and why “spec to pull request” is now becoming a real production workflow.We go deep on the architecture of background agents: harness-in-the-box vs out-of-the-box, why Devin separates the “brain” from the machine, why repo setup is still one of the hardest problems, why Docker is not always enough, and how full VMs, snapshots, scoped secrets, GitHub bots, Slack integrations, and video-based testing all fit together. Walden and Cole also dig into memory, MCP limitations, multi-agent orchestration, AI code review, SRE auto-triage, PMs shipping code from Slack, Windsurf 2.0, hybrid frontier/sub-frontier systems, and the real failure mode of uncontrolled vibe coding: your codebase regressing to your worst engineer.And as agents eat software… and software eats the world… you can draw the conclusion on what is next:We discuss:* Why the engineering world is waking up to background agents and cloud agents* The December 2025 model inflection that made spec-to-PR workflows practical* Devin's 7x merged PR growth and rise from 16% to 80% of commits* Why Cole built OpenInspect as an open-source background-agent system* The economics of $20/seat agent products and why monetization is tricky* What Cognition actually sells beyond Devin: infra, onboarding, integrations, and adoption* Harness in the box vs out of the box, and why architecture matters* Why Devin separates the brain from the machine for security and permissions* Repo setup, scoped secrets, Docker Compose, and agent-ready dev environments* Why full VMs matter when agents need to run real applications and test them* Android, macOS, Windows, nested virtualization, and machine-specific agent work* Why testing is much harder than “computer use”* Screenshots, video verification, and the “I know it works” merge moment* GitHub UX, Devin Review, AI reviewers, and agents responding to PR comments* Why MCP alone is not enough for first-class Slack and enterprise integrations* Memory, Knowledge, skills, Claude.md, and why retrieval is still unsolved* Devin's auto-generated memories and the challenge of memory pruning* Always-on agents as permanent PMs for issues, tickets, and product areas* Sub-agents, meta-Devin management, and what multi-agent systems actually add* Why pure auto-merge vibe coding breaks down after about two weeks* AI code smells, lint rules, reward hacking, and Semgrep for agent-written code* GitAI, inline context, and preserving the “why” behind code changes* Local testing, mock servers, older codebases, and preparing companies for agents* Windsurf 2.0 and the handoff between local foreground agents and cloud background agents* SRE auto-triage, support workflows, and agents as first responders* PMs, marketing, and non-engineers creating pull requests from Slack* AI agent budgets, $1k-$5k per engineer spend, and hybrid frontier/sub-frontier systems* The rise of autonomous coding factories and who Cognition is hiringWalden Yan* X: https://x.com/walden_yan* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waldenyan/Cole Murray* X: https://x.com/_colemurray* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colemurray/* OpenInspect / Background Agents: https://github.com/ColeMurray/background-agentsTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:43 Why Everyone Is Building Their Own Devin00:01:57 Devin's 2025 Ramp: 7x PR Growth and 80% of Commits00:03:49 OpenInspect and the Rise of Open-Source Background Agents00:07:59 What Cognition Actually Sells Beyond Devin00:09:56 Background Agent Architecture: Harness In vs Out of the Box00:12:08 Separating the Brain from the Machine00:14:07 Repo Setup, Secrets, Docker, and Full VMs00:19:13 Why Testing Is Harder Than Computer Use00:22:40 Video Verification and the “I Know It Works” Merge Moment00:23:19 GitHub UX, Devin Review, and AI Code Review00:25:42 MCP, Slack, and Enterprise Agent Integrations00:28:59 Memory, Knowledge, and Always-On Agents00:36:16 Sub-Agents, Multi-Agent Orchestration, and Meta-Devin00:43:55 Vibe Coding, Auto-Merge, and Codebase Decay00:48:38 Agent Infra, VPCs, Cloud Providers, and Fast VM Restore00:52:25 AI Code Smells, Reward Hacking, and Code Review Systems00:56:10 Making Codebases Agent-Ready00:58:30 Windsurf 2.0 and the Local-to-Cloud Agent Handoff01:01:15 SRE Auto-Triage, PMs Shipping Code, and Agent Use Cases01:04:32 Agent Budgets, Hybrid Models, and Autonomous Coding Factories01:06:51 Hiring at Cognition and OpenInspect Consulting01:07:45 OutroTranscriptIntroduction: Walden Yan, Cole Murray, and Context EngineeringSwyx [00:00:00]: All right, we're in the studio with Walden Yan, co-founder of Cognition, CPO.Walden [00:00:08]: Happy to be here.Swyx [00:00:09]: Which is a cool title. And coiner of context engineering.Walden [00:00:15]: Although I think there are many people who'd used the terms in various ways beforehand, but I did find that people, both internally and externally, enjoyed the upgrade from prompt engineering or model wrapping into maybe a more thoughtful way to build agents.Swyx [00:00:33]: For those who haven't caught up on that, I have on screen the Don't Build Multi-Agents post, which you should go read on and we might refer to, and Cole Murray, who created OpenInspect.Cole [00:00:43]: Great to be here.Swyx [00:00:43]: So let's talk about it. Everyone is building their own Devins. What's going on?The December Shift: From Handholding Models to Autonomous PRsCole [00:00:51]: So I think the engineering world is waking up to this idea of background agents, cloud agents, whatever you'd like to call it. And I think we saw a shift around the December timeframe of 2025, where the models Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2, they reached a capability where we moved away from handholding the model and being able to actually more or less autonomously drive the model. And what I mean by that is that we could pretty much go from a specification to a completed pull request, assuming the spec was good enough, with very little friction. And that paradigm alone, I think, changed a lot of how we interact with agents, and opened this world where background agents became more practical.Swyx [00:01:41]: I think for Cole, everyone experienced this in December, but I feel like there was just this increasing ramp, right? There was this moment which was, I think, Sonnet 3.7, where, You guys rewrote Devin in one night or something. So describe 2025 or how it felt from your side.Walden [00:02:01]: In retrospect, we always thought it was ramping up, but then even now, over the last three, four months from today, it's been ramping up even faster. So it's almost funny to be talking about how, big of a leap Sonnet 3.7 was, and honestly, a lot of it was stripping out parts of Devin that were no longer needed with that jump in of intelligence. But I also just think that a lot of the recent leaps, especially, you look at, models like Opus and the latest GPT models, they are reaching levels of autonomy where people are actually finding that they actually can just be hands-off. And people who were once debating, “Oh, do I need to be in the weeds with my model in the IDE? Can I just completely move it off into the cloud?” That's a more serious conversation, and we've seen that in all of our growth charts. Internally there's this funny graph where our usage has, of PRs, our merged PRs, has grown 7X since I forget what it was called.Swyx [00:02:57]: I think Dev, maybe tweeted that. Yes.Walden [00:03:01]: it grew like 7X over, the last, I think it was, two months, three months, something like that. And then you see our engineering headcount growth. It's, gone up by, 10% or something.Swyx [00:03:11]: We were, we were afraid To release this. So this is Devin commit percentages on all Devin repos, was 16% in January and now 80% in March.Walden [00:03:25]: It's a big shift right now. And so it makes sense that a lot of people are now thinking about, buying Devin, but also maybe, trying to build their own and there's Lots of I have a lot of fun building Devin, so I can see why other people would want to build their own cloud agents as well. Matt, well, maybe it's good to hear, what initially inspired you to try to build OpenInspect?OpenInspect: Ramp, Cloud Agents, and Open SourceCole [00:03:49]: OpenInspect came about, through primarily my clients observing how they were using tools like Claude, OpenAI's Codex at the time, and seeing some of the friction that they were having with it. Primarily the Claude was being used through Slack, and a big issue they ran into was that the sessions that were launched were specific to whoever called it via Slack. And so if a PM was the one who invoked the session and they would then go to pass context to engineering can't see the session. And that in itself was a deal breaker because the PM, “Hey, engineering, can you jump in?” But there's nothing to jump in on unless they're copy-pasting out or the single response that came back. And so seeing some of these problems, I had built a similar architecture internally, just to experiment with, test out different ideas as this trend of moving off of localhost was starting to become, And as Ramp released their blog post, I had a lot of the pieces for this already in place, and just thought it would be funny to, see what Claude could do just purely from the blog post. And on my X account, there's actually a thread of where I live tweeted, going through thisCole [00:05:14]: comparing GPT and Claude as both of them are going through it.Swyx [00:05:17]: On the announcement thing or something else?Cole [00:05:19]: right after it got released. We can put it in the show notes. Yeah, it was helpful that I had already knew how to verify the system. I knew what I was looking for. I think Ramp did a great job of really illustrating, the technical aspects of how to build something. It was much more than just like, “Hey, we built a great system.” It was, “And here's how you can build it too.” And so, I resonated a lot with that, just with the problems that I was already seeing, and I thought that, looking around, I didn't really see anything in the open source community that, met this type of system. I think there's a lot that run, in localhost like Superset, Conductor, and many others.But nothing that was actually running in the cloud. And so, I built it, and I thought it was interesting to just open source it and allow anyone to then have a foundation that they can mix and match on top of.The Business of Background Agents: Open Source vs. DevinSwyx [00:06:16]: So literally after Devin was launched was, there was OpenDevin Which became All Hands. I don't know if you tried that orWalden [00:06:22]: I was going to say, one of the things that interested me a lot with OpenInspect was, you didn't try to go make it then something you monetize. There are a lot of, I think, these open source projects would then go and really try to, raise VSwyx [00:06:36]: That's why no OpenDevin. Yeah.Walden [00:06:38]: yeah, and how did you think about that? I thought that was very interesting.Cole [00:06:44]: I thought, and just what I had seen across my clients, was that having a background agent system is going to become a critical infrastructure within their company. And so because of that, I think that I wanted to open source it so that they could fork it and put in whatever customization they wanted. To that question though, I get asked all, “Oh, are you going to raise? Are you going to turn this into a service?”Walden [00:07:08]: I'm sure you've gotten offers.Cole [00:07:09]: but primarily I don't want to do that for a few reasons. One, I think that I don't want to compete for, $20 a seat. I think that is just a really difficult business. I think it's very easy to copy the main pieces of it. Again, I built this fairly quickly. And I think because you are not owning, I guess, the entire stack, it's hard to monetize. You have money being made at the sandbox layer with Daytona, E2b, many other players. You have money being made at the model layer. And you sit in this weird in-between gray area where what are you actually selling? You're selling, I guess, the infrastructure. You're selling, the integrations maybe.Swyx [00:07:55]: let's ask the guy. What are you What are you selling?Walden [00:07:59]: Well, yeah, there's multiple layers to this in practice, and actually it's funny you mentioned the infrastructure, ‘cause when we got started building Devin as well, we had to go figure out how to make the infrastructure as well because,Swyx [00:08:10]: You had to build this two years before everyone else,?Swyx [00:08:15]: Including, the model sideWalden [00:08:17]: It was not, it was not very polished at the start, when we just built it off of raw VMs from cloud providers like EC2, the boot up time was so slow, I think, And especially then, turning off the machines, saving them, and then to be able to bring them back up again when the, when you want Devin to wake up again later. It would just be out cold for like 10 minutes because that's just how long these systems took. They were not built for this repeated down and up usage. And so we actually had to go do all of that. And as a result now, one thing we offer when we go and sell Devin to people is, you don't have to worry about all the compute side of things. We'll make it work. We'll make it work in your cloud if you want it to. But aside from the product, and I want to go into the agents and the tuning of the intelligence part later, but I think a big part of what we do at Cognition as well is to just make sure that your company learns and uses and adopts these coding agents. ‘Cause I think for especially the largest enterprises in the world, you find that there is a lot of people who want to move over to using AI for their day-to-day workloads. But because of the way projects are planned, because, not everyone is literate in using AI in these ways, having a team of engineers who can actually go in and onboard you, set up all the integrations you need, the automations you need to really get to that level of, leverage with AI, is super helpful. And so We do that. We show thought partners to the customers that we work with as well.Swyx [00:09:56]: So let's talk about, architectural stuff. I think that's always, that is something that was the topic of conversation between the two of you. Is this, the mental model that you want to start with or something else? I'll just leave the floor open to you guys.Agent Architecture: Harness in the Box vs. Out of the BoxCole [00:10:11]: I think, maybe we can start here as just a general what are the pieces of a background agent system. And then maybe we can go into some of the nuances of, Decisions that you can make.Swyx [00:10:22]: But I guess I also Like, what, maybe what Walden is saying is the agent is like in this open code box, I guess. Right? This is infra, and then there's, that's the agent. And you had this discussion about whether you put the agent in here or in Out externally. Can you tease that out?Cole [00:10:39]: In a background agent systems, you have a decision to make of where the agent is actually going to run. This is typically described as the harness in the box or out of the box. With running the agent in the box, you're making some trade-offs by doing that. The negative trade-off you're making is primarily security. Because the agent is running in that box, unless you otherwise design it, all of your secrets need to go into that box as well. And given the nature of AI, it can be unpredictable, and you could very easily end up accidentally exfilling your secrets, or other unintended behavior. Now, the out of the box is the idea that we are going to have the actual agent running not directly in the sandbox, and we will have, quote-unquote, the brain of the agent running in some type of worker, control plane. That sandbox then is going to serve as the hands where the brain is basically operating and making tool calls into that environment to manipulate it. I guess other trade-off that you're making between the two systems is that, in my opinion, running it out of the box is much more complex because, you have state that has to be managed, whereas if you're running it in the box, all of the state of that agent is actually in the box, and yes, it's you could persist it elsewhere, but it's all localized and you have less concerns to worry about.Walden [00:12:08]: I think a lot of that, what you mentioned, is why we actually from the start built Devin to what we called separate the brain from the machine. The other thing that this allows you to do is reuse any existing infrastructure you have for dev boxes Perhaps. And so you don't have to worry as much about making a new type of dev box that has all the dependencies the brain needs, as you mentioned, the secrets the brain needs as well. One thing that we've seen some customers run into is, you have a GitHub app and you want Devin, your agent, whatever, be able to interact with GitHub through this application, but then you have different users with different actual permissions. If they are all interacting through the same GitHub app and there's no actual, separation between the system that decides, what it does and the actual secrets on the machine, then you run into an issue where, okay, it's hard to do the separation. But in practice, with Devin, it's much easier because we just say whatever you put on the machine, that is, the scope of basically what the user is free to do, what the agent is free to do. So only put the most scoped secrets on that machine, and then the brain is fully not accessible from the machine. So you don't have to worry about messing with the, any of the most secure parts of the brain if the user is free to do whatever they want with the machine.Swyx [00:13:31]: I was going to just bring, I have this, chart from OpenAI, where I don't know if this is, in the box, out of the box. That is something that they do use to describe it. And then also recently Anthropic did, managed agentsSwyx [00:13:44]: Which is, this is their thing. I don't know. It's all, it's all variations of the same pattern, right?Cole [00:13:49]: So this would be out of the box.Swyx [00:13:51]: Which, is preferable for them because it's less work?Cole [00:13:56]: I would say it's more work.Swyx [00:13:58]: It's more work?Cole [00:13:58]: But it, in my opinion, it is the better architecture of the two. It's just, you're taking on a bit of complexity by doing that.Repo Setup, Docker, and VM-Based Development EnvironmentsWalden [00:14:07]: One thing I've not seen a lot of other players do well is how do you manage what's actually on the box? And this can be complex for many reasons. Let's say you have a big repository that's changing and updating a lot with changing dependencies. How do you make sure that the working environment of the agent actually stays up to date, has all the credentials it needs to, let's say, run the app and test it, and all the things you want your autonomousSwyx [00:14:34]: So a repo setup.Walden [00:14:35]: Exactly. So in, internally At Cognition, we call this repo setup.Cole [00:14:39]: The hardest part ofWalden [00:14:40]: It's been a perennial problem since the start of the company, of how do we help people get this set up? Because not everyone just has, working cloud environments working out of the box. And do you find this to be a common problem withSwyx [00:14:53]: How do you solve it?Walden [00:14:53]: Your clients?Cole [00:14:54]: This is a very common problem, and through my consulting, this is a lot of what I help teams do. A lot of teams don't really have great developer environment setups, if any. A lot of the times it's, “Go talk to Bob and get the secrets,” and that obviously doesn't work when the agent needs to actually set this up. And so a lot of that, most teams are using Docker Compose or some type of microservices. And so for theSwyx [00:15:19]: Even in prod?Cole [00:15:20]: Not in prod. With the OpenInspect, you are using this primarily to interact, and make code changes. There is other use cases, but you can hook, whether through CLI, MCPs, other tools, you can then hook that into your production systems primarily for, SRE type use cases. But you are not, necessarily, trying to test your prod internal microservice through the system.Walden [00:15:48]: And you mentioned Docker Compose. I think one direction we saw some of our friends take early on was, using Docker containers as the level of abstraction for their models. There's lots of reasons, I think, why Docker containers are not great. One thing is, Docker container's not really a true security boundary, for one. But the other is, if you are running real applications, a lot of times those applications use Docker, and then you have to think about Docker in Docker, which is, really weird. And so I think part of, the really hard challenge of getting VMs to work, why did we do that? Well, it was because we realized that you actually needed, full VMs to be able to do these types of things. And especially nowadays where there's actually value in running the application and clicking around and sending you screen recordings of these things. The value just, keeps adding on top of that. But it is a decision I see people run into when they try to build their own systems, is, “Oh, do we, in addition to this, do we put the agent in the machine or out of the machine? Do we use Docker? Do we use something else?” What do you recommend people nowadays?Cole [00:16:57]: I think Docker is a good solution for maybe not running the agent, but running your infrastructure, because that is more or less the same setup your engineers are probably already using. If they're not, then I don't know what they're using. But they're probably already using Docker Compose.Swyx [00:17:14]: I've always had a small candle for web containers. I don't know if you guys have tried them before.Swyx [00:17:19]: To me, they were, supposed to be like Docker Light.Cole [00:17:22]: Is it?Swyx [00:17:22]: I don't know.Cole [00:17:22]: No, I haven't tried it. But yeah, I think any environment that you've set up that is a good experience for your developer naturally lends itself to being easy to set up for the agent. And once you figure out that local developer story, you've more or less solved the agent in a sandbox, environment setup. OpenInspect does have hooks as well, where you can, run a setup SH script that will pre-install everything. You can then pre-snapshot that build so it starts instantly, and then there is a second hook to actually then, restore the state of the sandbox when it comes back. And so you can already have all of those microservices running and basically get the same experience that you would on your machine within the sandbox.Testing Agents: Computer Use, Screenshots, and Real App WorkflowsWalden [00:18:08]: Another thing that we've been thinking a lot about is like Different VM service offerings. Have you had customers where they needed like macOS specific VMs or like Windows specificWalden [00:18:20]: VMs?Walden [00:18:22]: There are like many technologies in the world that only work on specific types of machines, right? If you're building a.NET application that has to run on Windows or like, maybe more commonly if you want to build iOS or macOS Does that workSwyx [00:18:32]: Does Commission supportSwyx [00:18:33]: Choices like that?Walden [00:18:35]: The fundamental architecture we do, because we do the separation, it does support, but the actual work in progress is happening right now on these. Another thing that we've actually recently added support now for, it's in beta, is doing Android development. To do that, we needed to support, I think, nested virtualization within our machines because the VM itself is like a, is a virtualized Firecracker instance, and then you had to then run another Android emulator inside. And there's like weird performance issues that like, it, which is why it's like still in beta. We have to think through these problems, but it unlocks a lot for anyone who wants to do Android development.Swyx [00:19:13]: I was trying to find like a reference video for the testing thing. I couldn't find it, but I think you worked on the testing, capability. Why call it testing and not like computer use or I don't know, it's, what's the general Category of problem?Walden [00:19:26]: I think that when people think about the ability of an AI to run your app and test it, I think they actually over-index on the computer use part of it because computer use in my mind is the literal, okay, you want what button you want to click. Can you emit the right coordinates to go click that button? I think testing is actually a really interesting likeWalden [00:19:48]: Problem-solving, challenge for these AIs because if you wanted to do arbitrary testing, imagine you make a change that spans the frontend and the backend, maybe, even some other like even more deeply nested service. To actually test that change, we have to reason through what-- how do you first run these applications to orchestrate with each other with the right version of the code? Then, okay, how do I trigger the feature or how do I make the thing actually happen? And this can get arbitrarily hard, maybe you have to be an admin. Maybe a certain thing has to be feature flagged on. Maybe, you have to like run two sessions and then send us a very specific word into one of them to trigger a specific behavior. And figuring out how do you do that requires a lot of code base context, requires, a lot of orchestration that we've specifically done. And in some cases, we found that you actually, no one frontier model can actually do this full end-to-end task itself.Walden [00:20:42]: We've seen cases where we actually had to orchestrate different frontier models together to solve this problem together. That is where we spend most of our time when we think about this testing problem, not so much the computer use part. Computer use for what it's worth has gotten a lot better with recent models and it's made that part of the job certainly easier.Swyx [00:20:58]: Especially with like even 4.7, that they released yesterday, apparently like way better in terms of the vision stuff, which is going to be encompassing computer use.Walden [00:21:08]: Having evals for all these as well is something that like takes a while to build up. And having the evals be right is tricky as well. Do you ever see like, clients who are building their own agents have to start standing up evals to make sure things don't regress?Swyx [00:21:25]: Not so much evals in the traditional sense, but specific to the testing part that has just gone in. I just added support for screenshots And in theory you can also do video. I need to put in a plugin to do that. But they do show up natively, and it was a very heavily requested feature, especially after Cursor's recording came out. I think that was very enlightening for everyone of like, “Oh, this is a very good feature to actually have.”, I think with Devin you guys have had this for a while.Swyx [00:21:57]: Oh, yeah. See how screenshots work. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything, super and not obvious. It's like once what feature to build, you can just prompt it and it Will mostly work.Walden [00:22:09]: I think to Walden's point, though, the computer use is a subset of the larger testing problem, and I think that's very specific to the code base that you're working and it's not something that, out of the box that you could just solve it. The-- you do need the code base context to actually know how to test it. And I think in the case of a background agent system, you fortunately do have that code base locally that what is changing and could then inspect it and use that to drive the model.Swyx [00:22:40]: For those who haven't seen it before, this is an example of how it works. You, after the PR is done, you click testing approved, and then it sends you back a video. What I really like is that it labels, It's very small here, but it actually labels what it's testing. And then it-- and then you actually see the cursor and everything. So I don't know, yeah, the engineering in this, just Whatever you want to show. ‘cause this is like, this is one of those like, oh, few of the AGI moments, right? ‘cause Once I look at this, I actually don't I wish I can just merge inside Of Slack instead of going to GitHub ‘cause I don't need to see the code. I know it works.Walden [00:23:19]: Maybe a new feature in Cursor. Yeah, the annotations at the bottom was also a big difference for me when I, when I added those.Swyx [00:23:27]: It's just like, what am I looking at? What are you trying to demonstrate?Walden [00:23:30]: Exactly. There's a surprisingly long tail of small details that ends up making a big difference for this end metric of like how fast do you actually merge the code in. One experience that we spent a lot of time tuning early on was what is the right experience on GitHub for these tools. Because I think, most tools out there when you build the agent, you'll think about, oh, it'll create the PR for you. We try to take that a step further and say, “Oh, what if we actually made sure you could interact Devin, with direct Devin directly on GitHub?” And so we made sure that you can comment on GitHub, and Devin would actually receive those comments and address them back. But there's actually quite a bit of tuning you have to do here because you can imagine that actually like-We recently have Devin Review, for example. Devin Review will post comments on his own PR And then Devin has to then goGitHub Workflows: Devin Review, Comments, and PR AutomationSwyx [00:24:23]: He answers his own comments, which is Really loopy. So like, yeah, I like that it just updates here that it's, that I have commented But usually it's just me saying like, “Hey, merged, fix any merge conflicts.”Walden [00:24:37]: The, so when Devin fixes his own comments, you might be scared that, oh, maybe I'll infinite loop. But we've put a lot of work into making sure it doesn't, both by making sure that the comments are high signal, but also that the agent is thoughtful about what comments it immediately goes and tries to fix, and what comments it's like, “Wait a second, I think you're wrong.” Actually, that's one of my favorite moments is when Devin tells me that I'm wrong, when I try to get it to do something different. But tuning that behavior, actually makes a big difference in terms of how useful the actual GitHub experience is.Cole [00:25:06]: I think to touch on that as well, I think having the AI reviewer integrated into the system is a critical part of this background system. OpenInspect does have that. It has a GitHub code reviewer that you can control the prompt. It does do comments as well. It doesn't do them automatically yet. The capability is there, but it's not fully used.Swyx [00:25:27]: So you have to ask for it?Cole [00:25:28]: you do, yeah. You can tag it on GitHub, and then whatever you named your, GitHub bot, it will then follow up on it. It will then, if you have merge conflicts or whatever you have asked it to resolve, it will then resolve it, but it doesn't do it automatically yet.Integrations: Slack, MCP, and First-Party Agent InterfacesWalden [00:25:42]: Well, I'm curious, what is, the most common thing that people end up requesting, that they still need on top of OpenInspect when you help them go implement it?Cole [00:25:52]: I think a lot of it comes down to actually integrating it into the company. It's one thing to have the background agent system set up, but if it isn't actually integrated into your larger ecosystem, it isn't that useful. It is useful to be able to kick off sessions, but what we really want to be able to do is hook it into all of our other systems, whether that is the production database with read-only credentials, the logs, a Confluence or internal knowledge-based system. I think that is where I see the huge leap for companies, and that can be a challenge for companies as well who are maybe not familiar with exactly how to approach it, especially if they're in environments that have more compliance type things where, access control can be pretty big and how do you deliberately think about these problems, I find to be, one of the problems that comes with a system like this.Walden [00:26:46]: The thing we found is So, MCPs, obviously it has been like this, really big explosion of, oh, you can go, integrate it with all these different things. But to actually get the integration right and the and get the right experience, oftentimes we found that we had to go build our own ad hoc things. I think Slack is a great example of this. You could give your agent a Slack MCP and okay, it can post messages back to you on Slack. But we actually use Devin like a coworker in Slack, and that's how it's been built from the ground up. But to do that, you actually need to, support webhooks that come back, right? And then Devin has to respond in a natural way and then hopefully don't spam your threads too much and annoy the people in your company. So you got to tune that experience just right. Especially when there's a lot of back and forths, we find that we actually have to go beyond the simple MCP integrations in these places.Swyx [00:27:39]: I just pulled up the MCP marketplace. I know this is a Fair amount of work. Is the answer to eventually take first party control of all the top MCPs? Is that theWalden [00:27:48]: I would love a world where you could have something that's more expressive than MCP. That, goes both ways, not just a set of tools, but a proper system that interacts back and lets it Have the right experience with all these interfaces.Swyx [00:28:03]: So there actually is sampling in the MCP spec, but nobody Uses it, right?Walden [00:28:07]: And so I think that's the other part is, actually we found that when the MCP spec starts to get too complicated, it starts to lose its original promise of Being like a simple one-step connect. Now then we have to go figure out how to support all these different variations of things and It starts to look a lot like just building the first party integrations in a lot of these cases now.Cole [00:28:29]: I think it matters, too, how critical it is to your company, right? If this is something that nearly every session is going through, it probably makes sense to own it so that you can make optimizations on top of it Versus just whatever is off the shelf.Swyx [00:28:43]: Awesome. Other than MCPs, what else, sorry, well, I don't know if that's Narrowing in too much on, integrations. But what else? What other elements of building OpenInspect or Devin that you guys really sink on?Memory and Knowledge: What Agents Should RememberCole [00:28:59]: I think, a problem that comes up very frequently is this idea of memories or knowledge base.Swyx [00:29:05]: Oh, boy. How do you solve it?Cole [00:29:08]: so not solved yet, is the short answer.Cole [00:29:11]: it's something, there's a open issue for it, someone asking about it.Swyx [00:29:16]: There's, I, D Wiki hasn't indexed anything about memory yet.Cole [00:29:20]: how I'm seeing it solved across my clients is primarily through skills. I find that skills can be a good gap within that or updating Claude MD, but I think memory as a whole is a pretty unsolved problem, and it is why I've been hesitant to add it. I think there is parts of memory and that can be addressed, but I think as a whole it's a very difficult retrieval problem.Swyx [00:29:44]: Oh my God. RAMP didn't write anything about memory? I see zero search results.Walden [00:29:50]: No. Memory can be quite tricky to get right because it's the retrieval, but also the generation of the memories that can be really tricky. You don't want it to just like Remember very specific details.Swyx [00:29:59]: Walk us through the Devin memory journey because I know there's been a journey.Walden [00:30:03]: the first version of memory that like stuck around for a while was A system we have called Knowledge. And the idea was we wanted it to pick up things over time and not need the user to be proactive about teaching Devin things. So, okay, any time you remind Devin, “Wait, no, that's not quite the way you're supposed to use Git”Like, we actually want Devin to say, “Hey, do you want me to actually just remember this for the future?” And for you to just basically quickly approve or reject and for it to build up over time. ‘Cause I find that, 95%, I think, or some crazy stat like that of the memories that Devin has are all through these auto-generated things. Very few people actually just want to sit down and write big docs on Here's how you're supposed to work with the technology, et cetera. The generation and the retrieval has been something that we've been trying to tune a lot over the years. Generation, you don't want it to remember something like, if you asked one time to like, “Oh, please open as a draft PR,” you don't want to be like, “Oh, everyone forever now should get their PRs as draft PRs.” But you do want some, conveyor. Maybe you want to say like, “Oh, Cole generally likes, things to be created as draft PRs.” Same with retrieval, if you have thousands of these memories, how do you actually make sure they're retrieved at the right time? And that can be quite tricky to do right without exploding the context with a bunch of useful yeah, useless information. Surprising amount of just, eval work to just make sure that, memory is, remains a reliable system as new models come and go.Cole [00:31:31]: Do you have anything that you could share on, memory pruning? And like the temporal aspect of memory?Swyx [00:31:36]: Deleting and forgetting?Walden [00:31:39]: The, today, the, So the things they could do is it could edit memories. And so if your memory used to say like, “Oh, Cole likes to open everything as like a draft PR,” then you can imagine, “No, don't do that.” And then it'll say, “Oh, do you want me to update the memory to be Cole now want everything as, open PRs?” I think that at the same time we don't know if this is going to be the final version of the system. Whatever we have here will probably, translate into the new system that we'll be coming up with. But I think one big difference between two years ago and today is these agents are really good at using anything that resembles a file system natively. And so part of us are, is thinking, “Oh, should we rebuild memories to feel more like a file system that we let the agent navigate on its own?” That's been an interesting exploration. Also similar ideas in the scale space.Swyx [00:32:35]: I am pulling up OpenClaude's memory thing right now. So memory, OpenClaude has like this like daily memory journal thing, right? And you can I mean, that is a file system you can grep through and is a source of truth. I don't know if it's the best. It's probably super noisy, but at least, if you lose something you can discover it or you can apply some, forgetting algorithm to, more ancient memories that don't get recalled again or something. I don't know.Walden [00:33:01]: One thing we've been trying to do to push the boundaries of how you use agents at your company is letting an agent basically have a very similar file, a memory.md or something, and just like be your permanent PM for a specific set of issues maybe. So we have like some Slack channels internally, maybe a Slack channel dedicated to, a specific product like DeepWiki maybe. And you can imagine that, or you want a Devin that never stops, it's just always awake, but it has this like memory dock that it can just maintain for itself about, okay, what are like the number one priorities of what we have to fix and prioritize? Who is responsible for some upcoming work? Maybe they'll even Devin will even tag you on some recurring basis. And so it's been an interesting move to see, okay, how can we actually use Devin for more than just engineering? Can we actually upstream above the engineering process and maybe it's just Devin creating tickets, which then maybe some humans do, but then maybe other Devins do.Swyx [00:34:00]: One of my more fun automations is go research competitors and just suggest stuff to me on a weekly basis. That's the automation. I can't find it right now, but basically it just like, “Look at competitors and suggest things.” “And here are three things that you've suggested that I don't want any more of,” and you just stick that in the prompts. But like I wish actually So for like when I, for example, when I reject a PR, I wish that it updated memory so that I can then just not have to go up, go back and update the scheduled, sync, but anyway, feature request.Walden [00:34:31]: what? We might change it soon. I guess OpenInspect, in the time you've been around, has there been anything you tried to implement but then you had to like undo and like do a different way?OpenInspect Architecture: Webhooks, Control Planes, and Agent StateCole [00:34:41]: Nothing yet, but something that is on my mind. The initial way that I built it was that each of the integrations lives as its own package. And so you have The Slack bot, which is what's handling the webhooks, and then is basically interacting with the control plane. As I'm seeing the system starting to be more integrated, specifically with the GitHub bot integration, I'm considering bringing that all into the central control plane because especially now I want to start, And a request that I'm getting is the ability to monitor, the actual, pull requests being merged, as well as just tracking ofSwyx [00:35:19]: What do I have open?Cole [00:35:21]: What do I have open? How many of these are getting merged? How many comments are showing up? To just understand the health of the system. And so in the case of a GitHub app, you only have one webhook. And so then it's a question of do I put that webhook in that GitHub bot package? That's weird. It doesn't really make sense to live there because that package is more for like the code reviewer. Or do I like centralize it? So that's something that's on my mind of, making that decision. I think the other one we touched on earlier is the harness in the box versus out of the box. I think long term the architecture will eventually come back out of the box. Some of the newer tools that I've added are calling back into the control plane so that you don't have the secrets in the sandbox. And so I think long term I probably will pull the actual, agent out of the box, but I think for now it's fine.Subagents and Multi-Agent Systems: When Parallelism Helps or HurtsSwyx [00:36:16]: Just, a quick question on pulling the agent out of the box. I'm One thing I'm very bullish on this year is agents calling other agents or spawning sub-agents or Whatever you want to call it. Does that make it harder or easier? I can't tell. Because if the harness is in the box, you can just spin up more boxes. If the harness is outside the box, then you're, it's less easy because you are, you have a unicorn pet of a, of a harness that's, living outside the box.Cole [00:36:45]: In theory it would be the same way, right? Whether, one agent has launched many, sub-sessions within it, OpenInspect, for example, can launch sub-sessions and actually create other environments and then monitor them. In the case where it is out of the box, that would basically just be an additional session that's running. And so that session is also running outside of the box. It's running in your worker plane, wherever you're running this. And then you really just have to think about how does your top level agent then interact with it. I do think it can be more complex, just ‘cause again, you have now a more difficult architecture. But I think if you figured it out once, it's probably fine.Swyx [00:37:26]: Well, then I'm just, throwing it open to you in terms of, I call this like meta Devin management. Which is like the, Devin's calling Devins or Devin scheduling Devins or querying trajectories or anything like that. What have you built or unshipped, anything?Cole [00:37:46]: I think one of the surprising things we've seen is that a lot of the ways that, these, separate agents work with each other, and you want them to, parallelize their work, has still mostly followed the same manager sub-agents regime. And a lot of people I think are excited about this world where you have swarms of agents that, talk with each other all over the place. We've actually given Devin an MCP so they can just go arbitrarily message other Devins And create new Devins, et cetera. But I guess, it somehow creates, a really chaotic world in that sense. And so we've still found that most practical use on a day-to-day basis has been one single Devin.Cole [00:38:33]: Figuring out how to segregate the work and get, have other Devins work on it in, a relatively isolated sense, each with their own boxes Not sharing machines, so there's, a very little room for conflict is the regime that you have to create today.Swyx [00:38:50]: I'll call out, the experiments from Cursor, right? This is Wilson Lin's work on Single agent to multi-agent, and you're obviously famously on the side of don't build multi-agent. But they went through the whole thing, only to arrive at, this Which is exactly what Devin has, I think.Cole [00:39:08]: I think there will be a revision to that post at some point AboutSwyx [00:39:12]: Tell us about itCole [00:39:12]: I think multi-agents were very much not at all possible a year ago. You do see more multi-agent experiments today, but you can argue, are they really multi-agents, or are they just just, tool calls,? There are people who, will create sub-agents to go look for XYZ file, XYZ implementation. Has really nice context management benefits because all of the tool calls and tokens that it spends then get collapsed back to just the answer for the main agent. There's a lot of benefits to doing this. We basically have Devin do this with Deep Bookie, make a call out to Deep Bookie, give you back the results, but that feels like a tool call,? It's not like these, two collaborators actually talking back with each, back and forth with each other. But I think the thing that gives me the most bullishness that multi-agents might actually be possible is actually what I said earlier about Devin will actually sometimes tell me I'm wrong and push back, and I think that demonstrates a level of maturity and communication today that makes a multi-agent world possible. One, can two agents who have seen different information come back to each other and actually figure out who is right, what is the correct implementation? They're not just, yes men. Claude, I guess is like, used to just say, what is it? “You're right,” or,Swyx [00:40:25]: “You're absolutely right.”Cole [00:40:26]: “You're absolutely right.” Yeah.Swyx [00:40:28]: The Have you seen, did you seeCole [00:40:29]: The age is overSwyx [00:40:30]: The Codex app troll in Topic? This is the Codex app. Inside of Settings, there's a little, there's a little Easter egg, right? So if you go to, the Themes or Appearance, right? There's all these, color codes, and the top is absolutely, and it's the Topic's colors. Which is such a troll. Anyway.Model Behavior: Pushback, Adversarial Prompts, and Agent SkepticismCole [00:40:53]: I love that Easter egg. Did you discover that yourself?Swyx [00:40:54]: No, it was, someone was, tweeting about it And I was like, I was like, “Is this true?” Because, sometimes people just tweet stuff to, get a rise out of you. But yeah, there you go, in Topic colors.Cole [00:41:06]: Yeah. So yeah, we're out of this regime where, it just says you're absolutely right, and they can have real conversations and real back and forths.Swyx [00:41:13]: You can prompt it as well to be more adversarial or whatever. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that, I mean, to me, that is more intelligence, right? That is not just something that's, a dumb tool, it's actually pushing back on you I think. Yeah.Cole [00:41:24]: when you mentioned, of course, the blog posts. There was one blog they had where they fed a swarm of agents together and built a browser.Swyx [00:41:34]: That was I think that was the one.Cole [00:41:36]: You can have, likeSwyx [00:41:37]: I think it's the same oneCole [00:41:37]: Creation of it. We found a surprising success of, don't do a swarm or anything, just have one Devin, it does its own context management. Just let it keep running for a while and give it some crazy tasks. I think we asked it to, rebuild, a Windows OS system. And it managed to do it just like, going on for long enough. It'sSwyx [00:41:55]: Was this Andrew's thing?Cole [00:41:58]: there were lots of demos that we ended up not posting, ‘cause at some point we'd just be posting way too much a bunch of, Demos. But I love that because it shows that I think the multi-agent thing still has, a bit of exciting sexiness to it, which is maybe still beyond still, the actual delta it adds to the capabilities of these systems. But it's absolutely the future. I think we're heading in that direction and we can see the progress being made there already.Swyx [00:42:25]: If I were to, make one super minor pushback because I don't feel that confident about it yetCole [00:42:33]: Go for itSwyx [00:42:33]: But I've had Ryan Lopopolo from OpenAI on the pod And he's a super slop cannon, right? Oh my God, that's my coding agent being done. I downloaded this, Peon Ping. I don't know if you guys have heard this. It takes like-, sound packs from popular games like, Command and Conquer and Warcraft, and then it plays it whenever it's done. And so it's like, “Work,” or whatever, “At your command,” or something. Anyway, what I got from the Cursor code base and from Ryan's thing was that there's a slop cannon approach where you try to loosen the single agent's, bottleneck, and I feel like that is, probably an, a very important thing to try to figure out. I don't think anyone's, really solved it. Because then you just have more reviewer slop on top of the agent slop To try to wrangle it all. Ryan will probably very strongly object that I say that he hasn't solved it, but he thinks he's He thinks he's completely solved it. But I think it's still I think it's, very important, ‘cause, that is a bottleneck, right? I feel Devin is slow sometimes Because I'm like, well, yeah, this is very readable and very sensible, but also it is slower than it could be if I just, I want a button to just say, “Just ramp this up 1,000 next parallel, in parallel and just, see what happens,”? And I don't know if that's, feasible at some point in the future.Code Review, Entropy, and AI SlopWalden [00:43:55]: I And we've also run experiments internally where we've basically tried to build entire products, true products that we knew we would eventually ship, but for now, let's try to see if we can do it just by purely, vibe coding on top of each other, auto merge, no code review at all. And then there's this benchmark of how many weeks can you go onto this for Before you say, “We have the trashiest code base.”Walden [00:44:18]: “Let's actually rewrite it from scratch.”Swyx [00:44:19]: Start a new factory, yeah. What'd you find?Walden [00:44:21]: I think we found that the state-of-the-art in December was you can probably, run this for about two weeks. By the end of those two weeks, you'd find that, hey, you want to, change the color of a button. Well, it turns out this button is implemented in, 10 different places, and they, have All these different variations, and oh, you forgot one of them, and actually it's a slightly different color in one spot. And you're like, “Okay, this is too much to work with. Let's actually try to do code review at the same time.” And make sure that we're on top of our software, actually cleaning it up a bit And making sure it's done in a scalable way.Cole [00:44:54]: I think building on that, the idea of, you don't have to look at code, I think is generally a bad idea. And the meme that I have for thatWalden [00:45:03]: What timeline, all right, is Do you think that statement will be true on?Cole [00:45:06]: I think probably for a while it'll be true that you should continue to look at your code. A problem that I see a lot of teams run into that I work with who are embracing AI native, AI first coding, is The meme that I have is that your code base regresses to your worst engineer, because that engineer who is, very gung-ho about AI and is not auditing their code, their pattern starts cementing into the code, and now the AI is referencing their patterns. And so now their if/else block that, is 20 if/elses back and forth, the AI is seeing that as the pattern of how things are done and starts to then exponentially grow this slop. And I find to your point, a pretty good approach to that is having scheduled cleanup, whether by humans or through systems, that are looking for duplication. They then address that. You'll end up with like 12 helpers for how to format a date. And you need to address that, because otherwise it will continue to sprawl.Swyx [00:46:09]: Within balance, I think it's fine to have some duplication, and then sometimes To have garbage collection, right? Yeah. The What I've been, talking about with a lot of engineering leaders is that you want to be very strict about the boundaries between modules, and it's your job as an architect, as a CTO, whatever, to say like, “Okay, here's the hard contract between you guys and you guys. Whatever you do inside this black box is your business. You do whatever. But between these guys, let's be, really damn clear, and any movement must be signed off by a human or me,” or. Then, and like that's that. I don't know if you have any other modifications or advice.Walden [00:46:44]: Well, I guess generally on the topic of, where humans can be useful, I found that ‘cause, some of these, really deep infra problems, sometimes just having a human that just has, really deep expertise can make a big difference. I've actually seen this come into play when actually building agents. So we've had a few friends now, try building their own coding agents, and I think one same problem that I recurringly heard a lot of them run into was this problem of like, “Oh, Grep is really slow on our agents' machines.” And so a lot of them, I assume because they're using AI and they themselves don't have, super deep infra background knowledge, say, “Okay, we're going to go build our own custom Grep index. It's going to be really fast,” and use that as a way around this problem. When we ran into this problem About like, maybe like a year and a half ago when we were, in the early days of building Devin, we obviously didn't have AI then. We just asked our, how to, how to do this. You can just swap out a new Grep index, so.Infrastructure Details: Grep, File Systems, and SandboxesSwyx [00:47:45]: What do you mean you hand-coded Devin? What?Walden [00:47:48]: It's like, can you believe we hand-wrote this code? And we had, our infra people who are really amazing, they were looking into it and they're like, “Oh, what? We realized that actually the root cause of this problem is actually super simple, but like fine-grain detail,” which is that a lot of these virtual machines actually underlying them don't use real file systems. They use these, network file systems where things are actually cached over the network actually in S3. So when you're Grepping, you're actually making network calls Every time you're doing these things, and that's why Grep is extremely slow on these machines. And so again, goes back to, what is all of the crazy infra work that we had to do to actually get these machines working. If you try to do this yourself, there are tons of small details like this, and so we had to eventually go swap out that network file system. ButSwyx [00:48:35]: I think there's a write-up about it, right? Silas did one about the virtual file system.Walden [00:48:38]: Oh, that was a whole other thing. TheSwyx [00:48:39]: Oh, that's a different thingWalden [00:48:40]: The BlockDev file storage formatSwyx [00:48:42]: I'll bring it upWalden [00:48:42]: Which is, a file system format that we built so that the VMs could be spun up and down very quickly. Basically, the intuition behind this is-Imagine you have, a terabyte of disk, and your agent only, wrote, a hundred lines of code on top of that disk. How long does it, say, take to, save and re-bring up that disk? And most systems, because you're not optimizing for this case, it's just, on the order of a terabyte of work because you have to Save all of that and bring it back up. In our system, we try to build a file system that incrementally builds on top of each other. So every time you save and bring the machine back up, you're only doing work that is proportional to effectively the diff in the file system. And so this, shaves off a lot of time in the boot-up process of Devin. I think we This is actually now outdated. We have a newer system inside of Devin. But yeah, there's a lot of tiny details you have to get right here to actually get the day-to-day experience of Devin to be good.Swyx [00:49:39]: It's, not technically agents, but it is agent infra, and when you sell an agent as a company, you sell agent plus agent infra.Walden [00:49:46]: At least the way we do it be And the other The nice thing about having the agent infra being done together is, you We get to deploy Devin in whatever environment we want now. We don't need to wait for some underlying infra provider to also go and support VPC or on-prem or FedGovCloud, for instance. So we can actually go and figure out, okay, since we own the infrastructure, how can we get that set up for you?Cloud Providers: Modal, Daytona, and Enterprise SandboxesSwyx [00:50:12]: Whereas you're Cloudflare dependent.Cole [00:50:15]: so Cloudflare runs the control plane. The sandboxes, Modal is supported. A contributor just added Daytona. E2B is on the roadmap, and I think there's an abstraction in place that if any contributor wants to add a new provider, they can add that in.Walden [00:50:32]: Well, what are, How are the customers you work with Do they generally try to then go set up a contract with another one of these third-party providers? Do they try to do the VMs in-house?Cole [00:50:44]: most of them I see using Modal. I think Modal has a greatWalden [00:50:48]: Shout out Modal.Swyx [00:50:48]: Shout out Modal.Cole [00:50:50]: I think Modal has a great offering. It captures all of the sandbox pieces you need, snapshots being a pretty big piece of that, and given that they also offer GPUs, I think it's a pretty nice offering as a whole.Swyx [00:51:04]: no debate there.Walden [00:51:07]: Modal is great, especially, I think their container offering is, the most natural, and so especially if you are willing to, forego, the full VM requirements Modal is, a really vast place you can spin something up on.Swyx [00:51:20]: Is there a point So Modal's very Python, and I feel like most workload, has really shifted to JavaScript. I don't know if you guys Get the same feeling. So, okay, when I started Landspace and IE and all these things, I was like 50/50 Python and JS, right? That's roughly. I think that's wrong now. I think JS has won. I don't know if you guys Like, I Maybe I'm overstating it, and maybe for cognition, there's, C# and Java and what have you. But for, new greenfield apps, do you feel that Do you get that sense? Does it matter?Cole [00:51:52]: I think that most of the libraries that I see in this space are Python native first, especially in theCole [00:51:58]: Observability space. That said, I think that there is a pretty big appeal of having your entire system in one language. Especially when you have both your frontend and backend communicating, you can have one central type Which is very nice.Swyx [00:52:11]: That's my case against Modal, which is Then you have to run JS. You can run JS inside Modal. It's just, one extra step That, isn't native to the runtime. I don't know ifWalden [00:52:22]: I don't knowSwyx [00:52:23]: Reviews. Do you have numbers? I don't know.Walden [00:52:25]: the one thing I don't like about Python is whenever AI, whenever it writes Python, it always does, the weirdest patterns, andSwyx [00:52:32]: Oh, because it's, mixing two and three or what?Walden [00:52:34]: I think it's something mixing two and three, yeah. The I don't know if you see this. It always tries to do, has attribute on objects as likeCole [00:52:41]: Oh, my God.Walden [00:52:41]: But it's like But that you shouldn't be doing that. It should error if there wasSwyx [00:52:45]: Because it's training on library code?Cole [00:52:47]: I think it's more of, likeCole [00:52:48]: From what I've seen, it's more of, a reward hacking mechanism where it doesn't want to basicallyWalden [00:52:54]: It'll never error.Cole [00:52:54]: It doesn't want the code to fail. And so it Even when it knows it has the attribute, it'll call getattr on a, and for a lot of my clients who have moved towards more autonomous coding, we've put that in as a lint rule That if you do getattr, your pull request is going to fail.Slop Signatures: Comments, Backwards Compatibility, and TypesSwyx [00:53:12]: Ooh, this is a fun topic. Can you tell me more about this? What else is a sign of AI coding that you have to put guards in?Walden [00:53:21]: So we were talking just before this about Opus 4.7. One of the things this new model likes to do is it writes lots of comments. Not like, it'll, comment every line, but it'll write, paragraph, PRDs, on top of every function. But I will say, to its credit, these aren't slop, descriptions like they were before. “Oh, here's what this function does.” It's like, “Oh, here's actually the r

Google just stood on stage at I/O 2026 and named pet care by name. Starting this summer, Google's AI agent will call your business on a client's behalf to check availability and pricing — and the businesses it can't read won't make the list. This episode breaks down what changed, the 7.22-word stat that just broke traditional SEO, the six-rule blog structure AI actually cites, the four places your reviews need to live, and the four things every pet business owner needs to do this week before the rollout hits. Timestamps [0:00] — Welcome + the CC story from February (the strainer in action) [3:00] — Why AI literacy is the new business literacy [4:30] — Google I/O: the biggest change to Search in 25 years [6:00] — The 7.22-word stat that just broke traditional SEO [8:30] — AI Mode hits one billion users — what that means for your visibility [10:30] — The new game: ranking vs. being citable [13:30] — The first 100 words rule + the brochure problem [16:00] — The 6-rule blog structure AI will actually cite [20:00] — Why Google Analytics is lying to you (and where to look instead) [22:30] — The Google quote: pet care named by name [25:30] — What it looks like when Google's AI agent calls your business [27:30] — Daily Brief + Gemini Spark for pet business owners [30:30] — Four things you can do this week (with the 4-place reviews framework) [33:30] — Close + Keep jumping In This Episode You'll Discover Why Google named pet care — by name, on stage — at I/O 2026, and what's actually rolling out this summer The 7.22-word AI search stat (and what your clients are actually typing into Google now) The 6-rule blog structure that gets your pet business cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode The 4 places your reviews need to live — and why having them only on Google looks suspicious to AI Why Google Analytics is hiding your AI traffic — and where the real fingerprints live Four things every pet business owner needs to do this week before the summer rollout About This Episode Bella Vasta — founder of Jump Consulting and host of Bella in Your Business — sits down to break down everything Google announced at I/O 2026, the biggest developer event of the year. Bella translates the keynote into pet-business plain English: what changed in Search, why the average AI Mode query is now 7.22 words instead of 4, the six-rule blog structure that AI engines actually cite, the four places your reviews need to live for AI to trust you, what it means that Google named pet care by name as one of the first categories its AI agent will call on behalf of clients, and exactly what business owners need to do this summer to stay in the conversation. She also closes the loop on a Google Labs experiment she flagged for The Jumpers community back in February — and now lives on the keynote stage. Resources Mentioned in This Episode Ep 428: ChatGPT Is Not Google Ep 433: 13 AI Pet Sitting Business Mindset Shifts Ep 421: Why AI Will Save Your Pet Business The AI Brain: The One File That Makes Every AI Sound Like You Google I/O 2026 keynote recap (Google blog) Book a website + AI visibility session with Bella Connect with Bella Website Sessions with Bella The Jumpers Mastermind Subscribe to Bella in Your Business Bella's Website Find Bella on Instagram + Facebook ? search Bella Vasta Frequently Asked Questions Q1: Is Google's AI really going to call my pet business? Yes. At Google I/O on May 19, 2026, Google announced that AI Mode will start performing tasks on behalf of users — including making reservations, booking appointments, and getting quotes. They named three industries to start: home services, beauty, and pet care. The agent will call businesses, check availability and pricing, and bring the results back to the searcher. Rollout begins in the United States this summer. Q2: What is the difference between SEO and AIO (AI Optimization)? SEO is about ranking — getting your page to the top of the blue-link results so a human clicks. AIO is about being citable — making sure an AI engine like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode can read your website, understand what you do, and confidently recommend you when someone asks. Old SEO chased the click. AIO is about being in the answer itself. Both still matter, but AIO is now the gate. Q3: Why is my pet care business invisible on Google AI Mode? Most pet care websites read like a brochure — vague phrases like 'passionate care for your beloved pets' or 'tailored services for your pet's unique needs.' AI engines cannot cite that language because it does not answer a specific question. To show up in AI Mode, your pages need specific facts in the first 100 words: city, zip codes, services, prices, availability, and what kind of pets you specialize in. Specific. Real. Answerable. Q4: Why doesn't my Google Analytics show AI traffic? Google Analytics runs on JavaScript. The crawlers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode do not execute JavaScript, so they never trigger your Analytics tracking. That means even when AI bots visit your site every single day, your Analytics dashboard shows nothing. The only place AI bot visits show up is in your server logs. Ask your web host or developer for access to your raw server logs — that is where the AI fingerprints live. Q5: How long is the average AI Mode search now? According to Google's own one-year AI Mode data published in May 2026, the average AI Mode query is 7.22 words — almost double the average traditional Google search at 4 words. The top words used to begin an AI Mode search are What, How, I, Is, and Can. The top action words inside the search are find, information, identify, explain, and summarize. Pet care clients are no longer typing 'pet sitter Phoenix' — they are typing full conversational questions, which is why brochure-style websites built around three-word keywords are losing visibility fast. Q6: How do I structure a pet care blog so AI will cite it? Six rules. One — make your headline a question a real client would type. Two — answer that question in the first 100 words with a specific number, city, or service. Three — make every H2 heading a question too. Four — add an FAQ block with six to ten real Q&As and FAQ schema markup. Five — internally link to one other blog on your site and link back from it. Six — include an author bio with credentials, photo, years in business, and service area. That signals E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust) — what AI engines look for when deciding what to cite. Q7: Where should I put my pet business reviews so AI can find them? Four places. Place one — your Google Business Profile (the floor). Place two — embedded on your website as real text (not screenshots), on a dedicated Reviews page AND on every service page, with schema markup. Place three — woven into your FAQ answers so reviews function as proof inside your actual responses. Place four — cross-platform on Yelp, Nextdoor, Facebook, and Bark, because AI engines look for citation consistency. A pet business with 300 reviews on Google and zero anywhere else looks suspicious to AI. The one with reviews distributed across four platforms looks like a real business. Q8: What are the four things every pet business owner needs to do this week? First, be your own client — open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode and search 'best pet sitter in [your city].' See whether you appear. Second, read your homepage like an AI would and audit the first 100 words for specifics: city, services, prices, availability. Third, lock down your Google Business Profile — hours, phone number, services, service area, photos. Fourth, distribute your reviews across the four places listed above so AI sees you consistently cited as a real business. Full Episode Transcript You guys, on February 26th, I was inside my mastermind with the jumpers and I was talking about this tiny little what they call Google Labs, right? It's an experiment that they were doing. It's called CC. And CC was this email feature that it was so cool because every morning it would read your Gmail and your calendar and then hand you a prioritized summary of your day. What was urgent, what was next, all in one place with links to go to it. So now you're not having to read through your emails and your ? appointments and requests and things that had deadlines and not know it it just it was amazing. I was fired up and I told all my jumpers that like they all needed to be on it right now. And the response was also excitement, and other people signed up for it too. Some people had to get on the wait list because There was a wait list for it, but it was a really cool thing. And since February, I personally have been doing it. Now let's fast forward to May 19th, which you're gonna hear a lot about today. Google stood on a stage at their biggest developer conference of the year and announced it to the world. It was a new name. It was built into their Gemini app on the keynote stage in front of a billion people. And guys, this is exactly what I do. I take this stuff. That is out there, that is overwhelming, that is just like there's so much that you become paralyzed. And I put it through a strainer. I decide what is actually gonna be important to you, the small business owner. I distill it and I give it straight to you. That's exactly what I did. Okay. And I filter out the noise. I bring you the things that actually matter before they matter, before the headlines, before everyone else gets on top of it. That's what I've been doing since 2023, okay? And today's no different because AI literacy is the new business literacy. And if you're listening to this, you are one of the special people in the small business world that wants to learn and wants to know. You're not one of the ones that are sticking your head in the sand or paralyzed by fear. Do you have fear? Probably.

This interview was recorded for GOTO State of the Art in March 2026.https://gotopia.techBen Evans - Senior Principal SW Engineer at Red Hat & Co-Author of "Optimizing Cloud Native Java" & many more BooksRead the full transcription of this interview here:https://gotopia.tech/articles/439RESOURCESBenhttps://mastodon.social/@kittylysthttps://bsky.app/profile/ogkittylyst.bsky.socialhttps://github.com/kittylysthttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kittylysthttps://www.kittylyst.comLinkshttps://newrelic.com/resources/report/2024-state-of-the-java-ecosystemhttps://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-25https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/hackerbot-claw-github-actions-exploitationhttps://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agentshttps://openjdk.org/jeps/8305968https://openjdk.org/jeps/353https://openjdk.org/jeps/416https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-ffmhttps://openjdk.org/jeps/8350458https://openjdk.org/jeps/8303099DESCRIPTIONIn this GOTO State of the Art, Java Champion & Red Hat Senior Principal SW Engineer Ben Evans delivers a sweeping, data-driven audit of Java's health in 2026 — and the picture is far healthier than the tech press would have you believe. Server-side Java workloads have roughly doubled in the last 7 years, developer wages are stable (unlike JavaScript, which is heading south), Java has been in the top 4 programming languages for 12 consecutive years, and the entire cloud-native infrastructure stack — Kafka, Cassandra, Spark, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak — runs on it. The real insight is mathematical: explosive growth of a small language base is still dwarfed by modest growth of Java's enormous installed base. Java isn't dying; it's just not shiny enough to get clicks.The meat of the talk is a masterclass in Java's architecture and roadmap. Ben unpacks the fundamental tension between dynamism (the JVM's Lisp-and-Smalltalk-heritage runtime) and integrity (modern security demands that restrict unchecked internal API access), before walking through the near and far future: Project Valhalla's value types (the most fundamental change to Java ever — bigger than generics or lambdas), the Vector API waiting on Valhalla to land, nullability markers, ahead-of-time compilation, and beyond that, type classes and Project Babylon.His honest take on AI tooling is sharp: great for greenfield, genuinely poor at architectural reasoning and version-specific code, and only a real productivity multiplier for teams who already have solid engineering practices. Oh, and it's a wolf in sheep's clothing — the JVM's dynamism makes it way closer to Lisp than to C++, and Java's philosophy of "boring done right" turns out to be an excellent foundation for AI-era enterprise software.RECOMMENDED BOOKSBen Evans & Jim Gough • Optimizing Cloud Native Java • https://amzn.to/41nivD9Ben Evans, Jason Clark & David Flanagan • Java in a Nutshell • https://amzn.to/43FDoMABlueskyInstagramLinkedInFacebookCHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUSJoin this channel to get early access to videos & other perks:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/joinLooking for a unique learning experience?Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.techSUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted daily!

React Native is an open source framework developed by Meta that allows engineers to build mobile applications for both iOS and Android using a single JavaScript codebase. The framework bridges the gap between web development and native mobile, which lets teams ship to both platforms simultaneously without sacrificing the look and feel of a truly The post React Native at Scale appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Alex Nahas is 28 years old and has already initiated a W3C web standard. Working as a backend engineer at Amazon, he ran into a problem most enterprises face: MCP requires OAuth, but most enterprise infrastructure runs on SAML. His solution was elegant: run the MCP server in client-side JavaScript, letting AI agents use the browser's existing authentication context rather than rebuilding auth from scratch. What started as an internal tool became an open source project, then a viral Hacker News post published while under anesthesia, and ultimately an invitation from Google and Microsoft to help shape WebMCP as an official web standard. In this episode, Alex and Tobi explore what WebMCP actually is, why the browser is the most underestimated sandbox in AI development, and what the agentic web might look like two years from now. Topics covered: What MCP actually is and why it's just an RPC framework at its core Why OAuth is a dealbreaker for most enterprise infrastructure How WebMCP lets AI agents operate within existing browser authentication The Hacker News post that started it all, and why Alex doesn't remember posting it How Chrome is natively building WebMCP support The chicken-and-egg problem of standard adoption Real-time bidding for agents and what it means for digital advertising Why agents don't need their own identity Where the agentic web is headed in the next two years

React Native is an open source framework developed by Meta that allows engineers to build mobile applications for both iOS and Android using a single JavaScript codebase. The framework bridges the gap between web development and native mobile, which lets teams ship to both platforms simultaneously without sacrificing the look and feel of a truly The post React Native at Scale appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Is Google deliberately obscuring its AI search mechanics to protect its 20-year monopoly? In this episode of Digital Marketing From The Coalface, we dive into the smoke and mirrors of the latest Google AI guidelines, which frustratingly claim that nothing has actually changed. We also explore the widening divide between building websites for human journeys versus AI machine crawlers, and try to bridge the gap between marketing strategy and web engineering as we discuss why older, structurally simple websites might perform perfectly fine, while modern JavaScript-heavy, lazy-loading pages can be entirely invisible to AI agents. We also unpack the shift toward headless CMS to resist the heavy load of AI crawlers and deliver lightning-fast web pages, and we contrast human-centric design, which prioritises branding and UI, with agent-centric design that demands clear structure, entities, and metadata. Finally, we cover the topic of deep integration between CRM and Google Ads to track meaningful B2B conversions. The reality of keeping up with AI search is an exhausting marathon, but endurance is key.

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal GCP AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. Jake Cooper, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero. Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts.For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor.Today, Railway has raised $124m and is growing very fast. A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week. Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with 70% margins funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.From rebuilding Railway's network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own bare metal data centers, Jake Cooper is trying to build a new cloud for an agent-native world. In this episode, Railway's founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just “Heroku but newer,” what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, and static cloud resources may be heading for a rewrite.We go deep on Railway's infrastructure stack: own-metal data centers, three-month cloud payback periods, cloud bursting, data center debt, Railpack, Nixpacks, Temporal, feature flags, Central Station, content-addressable filesystems, agent-safe production forks, and why the CLI may become more important than the canvas in an agent world. Jake also shares the founder journey behind Railway, how the company survived losing $500K/month, why it now serves millions of users with only 35 people, and why he believes the pull request is dying.We discuss:* How Railway went from a slow six-year grind to adding 100,000 users a week* How Railway thinks about agents as the next dominant software species* Why agents need version control, observability, compute, storage, and orchestration at 1000x scale* The economics of Railway's own-metal data centers and three-month payback* How Railway uses cloud bursting while scaling its own infrastructure* Why data center debt can be a better tool than venture debt for infra startups* Central Station, Railway's internal system for clustering customer feedback and incidents* Why responsible disclosure and over-communication matter for platforms* Why feature flags, progressive rollouts, and shadow traffic are essential for agents* Temporal's strengths, pain points, and why workflows matter for agents* Railpack, Nixpacks, Nix, and lazy-loaded content-addressable filesystems* Why “cattle, not pets” may change if you can clone the pets* Why Railway is building a new cloud from scratch instead of copying hyperscalers* The solo founder path, focus, writing, and how Jake thinks about company buildingRailway:* Website: https://railway.com/* X: https://x.com/RailwayJake Cooper:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejakecooper/* X: https://x.com/JustJakeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction: What Is Railway?00:02:07 Jake's Path to Railway00:06:13 Railway's Six-Year Growth Story00:08:52 Rebuilding the Business After the Free Tier00:11:17 Agents as the Next Software Platform00:13:29 Railway's Infrastructure Philosophy00:15:42 Bare Metal, Cloud Economics, and the Compute Crunch00:17:22 Cloud Bursting and Five-Cloud Networking00:20:20 Data Center Debt and Infra Financing00:23:31 Data Centers in Space00:25:24 What Agents Need From Infrastructure00:28:24 CLIs, Canvas, and Agent-Native UX00:35:15 Central Station, Incidents, and Responsible Disclosure00:40:30 Safe Rollouts, SRE Agents, and Production Forks00:45:00 AI SRE, Specs, Code, and Tests00:48:24 Self-Replicating Infrastructure and the New Serverless00:53:18 Heroku, Temporal, and Workflow Engines01:04:07 Railpack, Nixpacks, and Lazy-Loaded Filesystems01:06:01 Coding Agents, Token Spend, and Roadmap Acceleration01:10:56 The Pull Request Is Dying01:12:28 Feature Flags and the Agent-Era SDLC01:16:15 Cattle, Pets, and Cloning Machines01:19:29 Solo Founder Lessons01:24:12 Focus, GPUs, and Building a New Cloud01:28:20 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.Swyx [00:00:10]: Hey, hey, hey. Today we're in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway.Alessio [00:00:14]: Conductor of Railway.Swyx [00:00:15]: Conductor at Railway. Yeah.Alessio [00:00:16]: Choo-choo.Swyx [00:00:17]: Do you actually have that anywhere, like on your business card?Jake [00:00:20]: We call some of our volunteer moderators conductors. I don't have a business card. We're not that big yet. At some point I will. I got handed a nice business card from the Supermicro folks, and I was like, “Damn, this is pretty official.”Swyx [00:00:30]: Business cards are coming back.Jake [00:00:32]: They're cool. They're hip. The conductor thing is good. We're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. Some people think it's super cringe and say, “You don't need a name for people internally.” Some people want to call each other something. We still don't have a really good one.Jake [00:00:55]: We've got New Railcrews, Trainiacs. Nothing has stuck yet.Swyx [00:01:00]: I like Trainiac. Trainiac sounds good. Railwayians. For those who don't know, what is Railway? Let's give people a crisp definition up front.Jake [00:01:09]: Railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You go to the canvas, or you talk with Claude, and you say, “Deploy a Postgres instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code,” and you're off to the races.Swyx [00:01:22]: You've got a nice animation on the landing page.Jake [00:01:24]: Thank you. None of my work, by the way. They don't let me touch the design stuff anymore.Jake [00:01:25]: We want to make it trivially easy not just to deploy things, but to evolve applications over time. Most tooling right now stacks entropy on top of entropy: Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible scripts, and all these other things. If we can version all of your software and keep track of all the changes, then we can make it trivial to clone environments, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of production data, get copies of any services, make changes, validate them, and collapse them back in without reproducing everything across a staging environment.The Railway Origin Story: From Uber Systems to a New CloudSwyx [00:02:07]: I was looking at your background: Bloomberg, Uber. Nothing immediately stands out as, “This guy is going to found the next great platform as a service.” What prepared you for Railway?Jake [00:02:21]: It was curiosity to keep going deeper. I started out on front-end stuff, working on Wolfram Mathematica and porting it over. Then I briefly moved to Bloomberg, then toward Uber and distributed systems, taking the Jump Bikes systems and moving them to a distributed system built on top of Cadence, the pre-Temporal Temporal.Swyx [00:02:44]: Which, by the way, I'm happy to talk about, pros and cons.Jake [00:02:48]: Totally.Swyx [00:02:51]: But let's do the Railway story.Jake [00:02:52]: It has been a continual step of wanting an experience. Whether it's walking up to a bike, unlocking it, and having it work frictionlessly, or something else, the depth required to make that happen follows from the experience. A lot of the work I do, and a lot of the team does, is in service of that experience. We fundamentally don't care how deep we have to go. We will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to get the experience.Jake [00:03:17]: I don't have a physics PhD. I did an EECS degree. It has always been about figuring out the next step: how do we get there? That's what led to starting Railway for that experience and then moving all the way to bare metal data centers. I was adding patches to the kernel this week to get the experience there because I can see how much better it can be.Swyx [00:03:49]: Other patches to the Linux kernel this week?Jake [00:03:51]: Yeah. Not upstream. Our fork.Swyx [00:03:52]: That's a flex. Railpack? No, this is different. This is the OS on top of Railpack?Jake [00:03:57]: No, this is an actual kernel patch. It's always literally: what do we have to do to get that experience? Then figure it out. Anything is figureoutable.Swyx [00:04:10]: Would you send the patch upstream, or does it not fit other use cases?Jake [00:04:13]: Maybe. We have to work out the experience internally. It has to do with the storage layer we're building for some of the agentic stuff. Maybe it'll be useful upstream, but it's deeply useful for us internally.Open Source, Forks, and Non-Deterministic VersioningSwyx [00:04:29]: You mentioned open source before. How do you think about starting from open source, and then coding agents letting you do a lot more from forks of it?Jake [00:04:38]: GitHub's original sin is that it's almost a series of broken pointers. You have this thing, then you clone it, and now you've lost the whole upstream. How do we make it trivial for people to modify really small pieces of it?Jake [00:04:51]: We think of Git in a discrete sense: I've either made a change and merged upstream, or I haven't. What would it look like if it were percentage-based, a little more non-deterministic, or a stream of changes that users traverse as a percentage rolled out in general and then rolled all the way up?Jake [00:05:13]: We have the open-source kickback program and let you deploy templates because we want to make it trivial for people to version these shards over time. It solves a large problem around authentication, authorization, and security. NPM has a way to define, “Don't take any new packages.” The ideal end state is that you roll out progressively to users with the minimum impact zone and continue rolling up. JPMorgan should probably be the last one on the patch line, for all our sakes, because our money and livelihoods are there.Jake [00:05:53]: It's okay if Johnny Vibe Coder gets a broken patch because there's so much entropy in the system that the rubber has to meet the road at some point. You have to test at varying levels.The Long Grind: First Users, Free Tier, and Making the Business WorkSwyx [00:06:13]: I wanted to pull up this glorious chart, which is your usage or number of daily signups?Jake [00:06:22]: Daily signups, I think.Swyx [00:06:24]: You started six years ago. It was a slow grind, and now you're on a rocket ship. You say, “Don't doubt your fight and don't quit.” Maybe pick out certain points that were key inflections for the company.Jake [00:06:40]: At the start, it's about getting your first 100 users, hell or high water. We had a website and a support link. The support link was the Discord channel. I had notifications on with two monitors: the monitor I was working on and the other monitor with Discord. If anybody came in, I was immediately like, “Hey, how's it going?” It was rare, so getting those first 100 users to come back was the start.Jake [00:07:14]: Then you build a consultancy factory because users want all these things. You have to go back to the board and ask, “What is the actual product offering I want to build on top of this?”Jake [00:07:28]: VCs want charts that always go up and to the right, but in reality you don't necessarily want charts that look like that. For us, there have been periods of expansion where we add features to test use cases, and periods of compaction where we ask, “If the experience we have is good, how do we make it significantly better?” Maybe we strip out features that don't fit our ICP anymore.Jake [00:07:57]: The boom from 2022 to 2023 came from the free tier. Everybody under the sun was using it.Swyx [00:08:09]: A lot of Reddit bots and Discord bots.Jake [00:08:12]: And crypto miners. When you build an open product on the internet where anybody can sign up, the internet is a horrible place with so many things. You go through periods of asking, “How do I reach as many people as possible?” Then, “How do I fit the exact use case for the people who really matter and are really excited about this specific thing?”Jake [00:08:39]: Then there was a two-year period of making the actual business work. During the free-tier era, we were losing about half a million dollars a month.Swyx [00:08:59]: On a $20 million bank account.Jake [00:09:02]: On a $20 million bank account with maybe $50,000 a month in revenue. That's a horrible business. I don't know how anybody invested. But you have to go through it and say, “We have an experience people love, but the business has to work.”Jake [00:09:17]: There are two schools of thought. You can run the horrible business all the way up with bad margins, or you can go back and make it work. We've always wanted a super lean team. We're 35 people right now. It's very small.Swyx [00:09:36]: Supporting three million already?Jake [00:09:38]: Yeah. We're adding 100,000 users a week right now, so it's growing fast. We don't want to add headcount for the sake of headcount or throw bodies at problems. We want to build systems. It's hard to build systems during expansion because you're adding things to the system because people are asking for them or things are breaking.Jake [00:10:00]: We had to cut off the free users for a little while, rebuild the business, and make sure it worked. We want to reach as many people as possible because software is important. It's become difficult to create things in the physical world, so it's important to make it easy for people to build in the virtual world and have access to creation. But there are legs to that journey.Jake [00:10:30]: You can see divots in the charts. If you follow between 2025 and 2026, it's either summer or winter. People go on holiday with family.Swyx [00:10:50]: It affects that much?Jake [00:10:51]: Yeah. It's kind of B2C and kind of B2B. People are shipping constantly, then they stop. Our activation curve now shows more people activating on weekdays because we have more business users, so it smooths out over time.Agents as the New Interface to DeploymentSwyx [00:11:17]: Was there a point where you started prioritizing AI development or agent development?Jake [00:11:24]: We've prioritized agentic as a top-of-funnel thing. Over the last six months, we've deeply prioritized agentic as a mechanism to build and deploy things because we believe the curve is so steep and that is how people will build and deploy software.Jake [00:11:42]: It almost fundamentally doesn't matter whether this is dot-com or not because we're all on the internet anyway. If agents are going to deploy a bunch of things and we hit an inference wall at some point, we'll fix those problems. The dominant species over the next 10 years is that we've moved from assembly to C to C++ to JavaScript to words. You're going to need to close that loop.Swyx [00:12:13]: When you say this is dot-com, did you mean buying the domain, or the general case?Jake [00:12:17]: I mean the dot-com era, when companies had a huge run-up because people understood the internet was important. Then they hit bottlenecks, fundamental laws of physics, math didn't work, and everybody came back down to earth. But it didn't matter because the internet became so impactful. If you operate on a long enough time horizon, you should build these things anyway because you can see where it's going.Jake [00:12:45]: That's where I think a lot of agent stuff is. You get to a point where you're running thousands of agents in parallel. What is the inference cost? What is the compute cost? How do you make that efficient? How do you coordinate all this? We have issues coordinating humans; we don't even have good tooling for that. Now we have to figure out how to get agents to coordinate, safely version changes, and know when to raise their hand for someone to intervene. Otherwise it becomes an interrupt factory.Railway's Infrastructure Thesis: Network, Compute, Storage, and MetalSwyx [00:13:19]: Let's go right into the technical side. What are the core infrastructure or architectural beliefs of Railway that allow you to do what you do?Jake [00:13:29]: The primitives matter a lot for us. We need network, compute, storage, and orchestration around it. You need control over a lot of those things. We've talked a lot about how we don't really use Kubernetes because we want higher-order control to place workloads in very specific places.Jake [00:13:48]: The reason is that you have to be very efficient with agents: memory reuse and all these other things, or you're going to massively blow up your cost structure. Being able to rack and stack your own servers and build your own metal unlocks performance and cost. Experiences where you're running 1,000 agents in parallel are not massively cost prohibitive.Jake [00:14:13]: Token use and compute use are blowing up. Over time, those things have to get a lot more efficient. You can get a lot of margin to make those experiences solid by building your own metal. That's all in service of offering a differentiated experience to as many people as humanly possible.Swyx [00:14:51]: You have a data center in Singapore.Jake [00:14:53]: Yeah. We have two in every other region now. In Singapore, we're adding a second one in Q3.Swyx [00:14:58]: What's it like? I've never built a data center. Do you go to Equinix and say, “I want some slots?”Jake [00:15:05]: Yeah. Equinix. You basically go and say, “I want power and I want a cage.” They say, “Great, here's what it's going to be.” You rent the cage for a period of time, fill it with racks and servers, and hook up internet to it. That's all the pieces.Swyx [00:15:36]: Then you handle everything else.Jake [00:15:37]: You handle everything else.Swyx [00:15:39]: What's the math versus clouds doing it for you?Jake [00:15:43]: If we rented in the cloud, our payback period when we go to metal is about three months.Swyx [00:15:50]: Which is crazy.Jake [00:15:51]: It's nuts. That's four years of depreciated hardware. You're going to see a lot of this compute crunch because hyperscalers are buying up a lot of stuff. We're working directly with OEMs, resellers, and people building these machines: Supermicro, Dell, and others.Jake [00:16:11]: Upstream, there's a bunch of supply pressure. When we raised our last round, between deploying capital for servers and now, the amount of money we've raised is less than the amount of money we have in the bank plus the value of the servers because the servers have appreciated as RAM has gone up. It's nuts how valuable hardware has become.Jake [00:16:50]: If you look at hyperscalers, they deployed around $80 billion of capital expenditures this year, and next year will be more. That's a massive infrastructure build-out. You look at that and think it's crazy that they're spending way more than the Manhattan Project. But if every person is going to run dozens or hundreds of agents in parallel, you have no conceptual idea how much compute is required to make that experience happen, even if you're deeply efficient and sharing resources. And that doesn't even count inference.Swyx [00:17:22]: How do you plan the build-out? The growth chart is so vertical. Are you usually at 100% utilization as soon as racks are live? How far ahead are you planning?Jake [00:17:33]: We still maintain cloud presence for bursting. We work with AWS, GCP, and a few other clouds. We can rent, and then the moment we get space or power, we compact those workloads off the cloud. We started on the clouds, then built a system to migrate to our own metal. There's nothing that says you can't continually do that again, and that's exactly what we do. We never want to be compute constrained.Jake [00:18:09]: At the start of the year, we actually became compute constrained because one upstream provider wasn't able to give us quota at the rate we needed, and the hardware was slower. I spent a weekend rebuilding our entire network overlay so we could straddle five clouds: Oracle, AWS, ourselves, GCP, and one other one. We can do more than that now.Jake [00:18:38]: We got into a spot where we were trying to pack instances tight because we couldn't get enough compute. That led to a few reliability issues, which are now past us. I made a tweet pointing out that it's becoming harder and harder to acquire compute at the rate these models need to acquire compute. We got bit by it.Swyx [00:19:15]: How do you think about pricing knowing you might not have your own metal available at all times? Are you pricing assuming you need extra margin if you end up going into the cloud?Jake [00:19:26]: Because we've built out our metal data centers, our margins on metal are around 70%. We can deeply subsidize the cloud business if we want to scale at a reasonable rate. We have a few levers: metal, which makes the margins; cloud burst; debt to buy servers; and venture capital. It's an interesting operational problem: how much cash do we have, how much should we raise, how quickly can we deploy it, and can we scale revenue as quickly as we scale compute?Jake [00:20:05]: If we continue making it trivially easy for people to build and deploy, then the faster we close that loop and the more operationally excellent we are with capital, the faster the business can scale. It's almost a straight linear deployment rate.Financing Infrastructure: Hardware Debt, VC, and Operational LeverageSwyx [00:20:20]: I think infra startups raising debt is a tool people don't utilize enough or know enough about. What can you tell us about that? Is it secured against your CPUs?Jake [00:20:32]: It's secured against our hardware.Swyx [00:20:37]: What rates do you get? Who are the lenders?Jake [00:20:39]: We pay prime plus a spread, and we can refinance any of the debt as rates go down. The terms are pretty good. The unfortunate thing is that Twitter has no nuance, so people say, “Venture debt bad.” But as with all things, there are specific tools and areas where you can be deliberate instead of using one tool as a hammer. Venture capital is not the hammer for everything. You have to explore and figure out what works.Swyx [00:21:12]: VC is usually the most expensive financing you can get.Jake [00:21:15]: Yeah. I also think people think about VC incorrectly from a capital-raising perspective. Most people think, “How do I raise as much money as possible from whoever is probably the best I can get at that time?” That's close to right, but what we've tried to do is figure out what unfair advantage we can buy with that equity.Jake [00:21:34]: It's the most expensive equity you're going to give away at that point in time, assuming the company keeps getting better. How do you use it to work with someone stellar who complements you? In the seed stage, I had never started a company. Ray Tonsing had good advice, and I could text him all the time. He was really fast. Awesome.Jake [00:22:01]: Then with John and Erica at Unusual, they said, “You roughly know what you're doing building a product. We'll mostly leave you alone and be available for advice.” Amazing. Then we got to Series A and the business was an operational tire fire because we didn't know how to scale a business. Work with Erica, and Jordan is over at Redpoint, so bonus.Jake [00:22:28]: Now we've raised from TQ and FPV as we're moving into enterprises. Every step of the way, we've asked: who can we partner with at this specific time to unlock the next section of the journey? I don't know enterprise sales. As an engineer, I can eyeball what features we might need, and we have wonderful people internally who can help. But you want boardroom dynamics where everyone is aligned and asking, “How do we win this?” instead of bickering about strategy.Data Centers in Space and the Physics of ComputeSwyx [00:23:31]: You had a tweet about data centers in space. Why no data centers in space?Jake [00:23:37]: It's not “no data centers in space.” My hot take is that I think it is solvable. I've just never seen anybody solve it.Swyx [00:23:49]: You said, “How are you going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum?” You're making a physics claim.Jake [00:23:55]: I haven't seen anybody prove how you're going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means nobody has brought it up yet.Swyx [00:24:05]: Astrophage.Jake [00:24:06]: I don't know what that is.Swyx [00:24:07]: The Martian thing. Okay, you're very logical.Jake [00:24:09]: It could work. A lot of people are putting the cart before the horse. They say, “We're going to put data centers in space.” Okay, but how? “We have time to figure it out.” It's like in The Martian where they ask how they're going to intercept something and say, “We'll figure it out.”Swyx [00:24:36]: Making a bet on human invention is weird because you blind trust that it can be solved. But with physics, there are first-principles bounds you can put on it. Maybe not. Maybe you're asking to travel time or break a fundamental thermodynamic law.Jake [00:24:57]: I don't know how VCs do this either. How do you know what's not possible and a grift versus what's possible but sounds completely insane? “We're going to put data centers in space.” Coin flip as to which it is, and I guess you'll know in 10 years. That's one cycle.What Agents Need: Versioning, Observability, and 1,000x ScaleSwyx [00:25:23]: Moving back to agents. The branching, fast spin-up, and orchestration you do feels like pre-work that happened to be exactly what agents want. What do agents want differently than humans?Jake [00:25:37]: They want the ability to version things. It's not that different; it materializes slightly differently. Agents want a way to test changes incrementally. Engineers have feature flags. Is there a reason agents can't use feature flags? I don't think so.Jake [00:25:54]: They want version control. Can we use Git or not Git? That one is up in the air. I think something outside Git will emerge for how we version these things over time. They need observability. You need to query what happened, when it happened, which steps failed, traces, logs, metrics, and all the rest. They need network, compute, and storage. They need to write files, save files, iterate on files, and snapshot file systems.Jake [00:26:25]: A lot of what humans needed is in line with what agents need. Branching and forking are not different; we're just moving 1,000 times quicker. It can look like you need something massively different, but what you need is something massively better than what existed. You need orchestration massively better than Kubernetes. You need networking probably better than Envoy. It goes all the way down the stack.Jake [00:26:55]: If the workload profile doesn't change so much as it gets massively compressed because you need thousands of these things, what assumptions change? etcd is going to melt. You need to replace it with something. You can go all the way down the stack and say, “That part has to change, that part has to change, and that part has to change.”Jake [00:27:19]: The interesting thing about the super-exponential curve is that you have to build systems where you can rip out those parts at any time because a new bottleneck might emerge. You get good at parallel agents, and a different part of the system breaks. So it's similar to what humans needed, but at 1,000x scale.Jake [00:27:55]: How do you do code review in the age of agents?Swyx [00:28:00]: You throw more agents at it.Jake [00:28:01]: You don't. But then who reviews for CVEs and all these other things?Swyx [00:28:07]: More agents.Jake [00:28:08]: And that's how we hit the inference wall. You can continually throw agents at the problem, but I think there's a limit to the number of agents you can throw at a problem.CLI, Agent Handles, and Closing the LoopSwyx [00:28:24]: You already had a CLI before it was cool. How is the shape of what you're exposing changing, if at all?Jake [00:28:28]: CLIs have always been cool. The CLI changes because we think about how to give Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, or any model a handhold.Jake [00:28:50]: A CLI is a single command: deploy, get logs, and so on. Things that were prohibitively annoying to humans are not annoying to agents. They're nice. If I handed you a CLI with 40 arguments and 600 flags, you'd think, “I'm never going to use all of this.” But if you hand it to an agent, it says, “This is excellent. I have so many handles to work with.”Jake [00:29:24]: If you're going to expose things to agents that way, you want as many handles as possible where they can get information, query dynamic information, and close the loop quickly. Most problems right now are about how to close the loop as quickly as possible. Where does the agent get stuck, and how can you remove that?Jake [00:29:49]: Telemetry is important. If you can tell where the agent gets stuck from the CLI and say, “12% of people deviate from the happy path because of this, and now I add this argument and drive it down to 2%,” you massively increase the rate of loop closure.Jake [00:30:03]: That's how we think about not just the CLI, but every point in the dashboard. It's a user journey: I hear about Railway. I get something deployed. I get my first green build or aha moment. I see an endpoint, logs, whatever. Then I iterate. The iteration loop is indefinite. The user wants to deploy a new thing, a Postgres instance, change code, and keep iterating.Jake [00:30:36]: If you focus on the iteration loops and what's blocking them from closing quickly, one thing we say internally is: you never want to be waiting on compute anymore. You always want to be waiting on intelligence. If you're waiting on compute, there's a bottleneck that needs to be destroyed because eventually that bottleneck becomes so large that another workflow emerges to change it.Jake [00:31:04]: We've built a product where you push code, build it, and so on. But I fundamentally believe the push-pull loop is going away. We'll get to a point where you make a small change in production, that change is versioned across your infrastructure, you're working alongside copy-on-write versions of your database and infrastructure, and then you merge it in and it's instantaneously live. That's the holy grail of loops. The push-pull-rebuild thing is a point of friction that we're removing entirely.Canvas as Output: Dashboards, Context Anchors, and HyperstructuresSwyx [00:31:43]: It's incredibly fast. If anyone hasn't tried it, that fast feedback is great. My hot take is that Railway was famous for its canvas, which visualizes your infrastructure and lets you manipulate it visually. But that was for humans. For the next phase of growth, Railway CLI is more important than canvas.Jake [00:32:05]: The canvas is funny because it's a mechanism to show changes over time. You're right that previously we used it a lot as an input. Moving forward, its goal is more like an output. You would go to the canvas, make changes, see them, and watch your infrastructure evolve. Now agents have access to the CLI and can make those changes. So the canvas becomes an output: what information does the human need at this moment to make suitable decisions about control requests? Do I approve this or not?Jake [00:32:57]: It also has to be an anchor for your context, a port in the storm. Think of it like layers in a file system. You start with a project, then drill down into services, then into a function or code, because you want to represent the entire thing not just in your head, but in the canvas. Other people can share that representation, think on the same wavelength, and move quickly.Jake [00:33:33]: A lot of organizations get in trouble as they scale because all the context lives in someone's head. “How does this microservice work?” “I have no idea; go ask this person.” Then you have whole categories of products built around context discovery. A lot of that melts away if you have a solid hierarchy and can infinitely nest services, code, context, and everything else all the way down. That's what lets you build these structures over time.Jake [00:34:18]: It's also what lets us build what I've called hyperstructures: things that are way bigger. You look at the Golden Gate Bridge and ask, “How did we build that?” There's a meme that we lost the technology. To some extent, yes, because the coordination that built those things evolved and changed. We lost some of the art of building structure as we jammed everything into Slack.Swyx [00:34:52]: But you jam everything in Discord.Jake [00:34:53]: Same point. It doesn't matter. It's message passing and interrupts, message passing and interrupts.Swyx [00:35:00]: So you're arguing there should be something better and more structured than Slack?Jake [00:35:04]: Yeah. For sure. I think Slack is awful, and Discord is awful too.Central Station: Context Routing, Support, and Incident ClustersSwyx [00:35:09]: This is the equivalent of my mom test. What have you done that has your solution to this?Jake [00:35:15]: Internally, we've built a tool called Central Station that aggregates all the context from our users. Every piece of feedback, every customer support item, everything gets aggregated into clusters. If an incident is brewing, we can determine how many users are affected and break off a discussion based on that.Jake [00:35:40]: That is more helpful than long-running channels where you're trying to decide which channel to put something in. If you can dynamically aggregate information and dynamically route it to the right person based on context, it works better. We know internally that these four people are close to networking. If we see a networking thing, we can drill it down to those four people. If it's with this part, we can look at the commits. This is no longer a manual process internally.Jake [00:36:13]: If you go to station or help.railway.com, that's why we built it. We wanted to scale with a massive amount of leverage by aggregating feedback.Swyx [00:36:27]: This is built in-house?Jake [00:36:28]: Yep.Swyx [00:36:29]: I remember helping out on this one with Angelo in 2023. You scale a lot with a very small team.Jake [00:36:38]: Yeah. We're about 10 times bigger now.Swyx [00:36:40]: You have your full developer code here? Very cool.Jake [00:36:44]: If you go to railway.com/stats, we expose this as a pub-sub-able thing. It's all real-time metrics. There's a way to get it as JSON somewhere if you care.Jake [00:37:01]: We're big on trying to build everything in public and talk about what we're working on. We've had issues in the past, and we'll say, “Here's how we're fixing these things.” We've gotten compliments and flak for incident reports. We're always trying to make them better and talk with people.Incidents, Disclosure, and Progressive RolloutsSwyx [00:37:20]: You had a big one recently. I liked that it was scoped to 3,000. You presumably used Central Station. Talk through what happened and how you address it internally as a team.Jake [00:37:38]: Internally, this one really sucked. It had to do with an upstream provider that didn't do the behavior it said it documented, which is unfortunate given they wrote the RFC for how the behavior should work. We rolled those things out, and Central Station caught it initially when a couple users said caches weren't invalidating. We turned it off immediately.Jake [00:38:03]: When you roll out to a large user base of three million people, you get a lot of disparate behaviors. We tested in staging and had tests, but we hit an edge case. We've hardened those systems, and now we can make that better. But it was a tough one.Swyx [00:38:39]: I always wonder how private disclosure is supposed to work if people find an issue. Are they supposed to contact you first? When you run a platform, these things will happen. What channels should people pursue to quietly resolve it before it becomes a bigger incident?Jake [00:38:59]: There's responsible disclosure. We err on the side of over-disclosing and letting you know something is wrong versus having your provider gaslight you. We've erred on sharing those things more publicly, even if they impact a small subset of users. That's a decision we've made internally. We have four values. One is honor. The honorable thing is to notify people to the widest degree at which they may have been affected or there was an issue, and then confront it head-on: why did it happen, what can we do better?Swyx [00:39:45]: Not the whole user base. That's because of incremental rollouts and other things?Jake [00:39:50]: Yeah. Progressive rollouts.Swyx [00:39:54]: That should be the norm at all large platforms.Jake [00:39:58]: It should. A variety of companies do this. There's the quote that Meta runs 10,000 different versions of Meta. To our earlier point about agents, they need the same thing. They need shadow traffic and all these other things. We've built so much ceremony around production being sacred that we need to make it trivially easy to test different behaviors in a safe environment. Then you can make mistakes in a safe environment.Safe AI SRE: Customer Agents, Forked Environments, and Production ParityAlessio [00:40:30]: Do you see a world where these things get automatically caught, not necessarily by your agent, but by your customer's agent? The cache invalidation issue seems easy to check if you know to look for it.Jake [00:40:44]: It's hard because to determine it, we almost need to hook into your observability infrastructure. That's why we have the template loop on the platform: so you can roll things out progressively. You can roll out to Johnny Vibe Coder initially, or push a shard that someone consumes at their own leisure. Or you can roll it out over weeks: 0.1% of people, 1% of people, early adopters, then all the way up. That's the non-deterministic version control we talked about earlier.Jake [00:41:30]: I believe that's where most things should go, because most companies end up building staged rollout systems in-house. It's the same thing built again and again at every company. There's a massive opportunity to consolidate developer debt.Alessio [00:41:45]: You should have a free tier. Model providers give free tokens if you let them use the data. You could give free compute if someone is the number-one shard that goes out and lets you plug into their observability.Jake [00:41:55]: We do that. That's why we talked about the impact on 3,000 people. We start with lower-impact people. Larger companies on the platform are last to receive those rollouts so they have a version of the platform that's deeply stable.Alessio [00:42:16]: I have three services, so I'm sure I get the first rollout. You can nuke my thing at any time. There are all these SRE agent companies. Observability people also want agents that fix upstream problems. You have your own agent in the canvas now. How do you see that playing out?Jake [00:42:39]: It's the stacking entropy problem. If you don't have primitives to make iteration in production safe, it becomes difficult. If you're an observability provider saying, “Here's the fix to this error,” assume 80% are good and make sense. But in the last 20% long tail of complex issues, if you let somebody stamp it, you create an opportunity for an incident.Jake [00:43:08]: That's why forked environments are important. People have staging, but it always drifts from production. You need primitives, workflows, and experience built first-party on the platform so you can fork any service at any point in time.Jake [00:43:33]: I think of the canvas as a sheet of transparency paper. The agent is a little guy you push up into the canvas. It should say, “I need to copy that service and that service so I can test these two things.” It gets a read-only copy of production. Anything that's PII gets marked as a transform when we clone the database, create a copy-on-write version, or read from it. Then the agent makes changes and asks, “Does this actually work?” as close to production as possible.Jake [00:44:22]: That's how close you have to be, or you get massive drift. The system becomes unstable. You see this with massive systems built on Docker for local, Kubernetes for production, and a specific thing for something else. That complexity slows developers and becomes unstable at scale, making it hard to iterate. We want to compress that way down and say, “As close to prod as possible is where we want to be.”From AISRE Skeptic to Agent BelieverSwyx [00:45:00]: I was texting Erica for questions, and she says you were originally not a believer in AISRE. Have you come around on it?Jake [00:45:10]: I flipped, but I'm still not a believer in AISRE if you don't have the primitives to make it safe. If you unleash AISRE on production infrastructure without safe primitives for copying volumes and making sure things are fine, it's going to nuke your production database. It's not a matter of if, but when. I'm a big believer in making those loops safe.Jake [00:45:33]: I was a deep AI skeptic until 2023. In 2024, I thought, “Maybe I can roughly make this thing do it.” In 2025, I thought, “Now I can hold this.” Over winter break, everybody came back saying, “It's almost impossible to hold this.”Swyx [00:46:01]: Did you see this on the Claude docs? CloudBot? OpenCloud?Jake [00:46:06]: It's gotten to a point where it's harder to hold it wrong than to hold it right. There's a scene in Avengers where Vision picks up Thor's hammer and says it's terribly well-balanced. It self-balances and works well. I'm a deep believer at this point that this will be the dominant species: assembly, C, C++, JavaScript, words.Swyx [00:46:35]: It feels like a big jump.Jake [00:46:37]: It is. But it's not like you abandon CPU-based discrete logic and move straight to fuzzy logic. You need both. Your skills should call code or applications or some static structure. You can use skills to distill what the procedure should be or how the code should act.Jake [00:47:02]: I'm coming to a thesis: you need three points. You need a clear spec defining the system, the code, and the tests. When you say it out loud, if you've been in engineering long enough, you're like, “Of course. That's an RFC, tests, and code.” But they all matter. Having them together lets them reinforce each other: the spec and tests match, but the code doesn't, so reconcile it. Or the tests and code match but the spec doesn't, so reconcile that. That's the iteration loop.Jake [00:47:41]: That's why you're seeing people talk about software factories, docs, and reconciliation. Some of that is architectural astronomy if you don't implement it, but that loop is where most things will end up.Swyx [00:48:07]: For listeners, we've been talking about this on the pod for three years: the holy trinity of specs and tests. Itamar Friedman from Qodo is the reference if people want to look it up.Self-Modifying Infrastructure and the End of Push-Pull-RebuildSwyx [00:48:18]: One thing I want to mention on the OpenCloud idea is self-modification. I don't know how Railway would support it, but I have my OpenClaw, and I just tell it it has the Railway CLI and can do whatever. In theory, whatever capabilities or new infra it needs, it can call the Railway CLI, provision it, and add it to itself. The agent can modify its own infra.Jake [00:48:45]: It's nuts. I have a loop set up where you put the Railway CLI on top of something that runs on Railway. You're authenticated as whatever the current box is, and you can make any changes to it. Then you call Railway deploy, and it deploys itself.Jake [00:49:04]: It's like: “I need to spin up this instance of this environment. I already exist in this environment. Excellent, I have access to a Postgres instance now.” That's where we want to go with agentic, self-replicating infrastructure. That's your loop: iterate in production. You continue making changes. If it works, merge it upstream. If it doesn't, throw it away.Jake [00:49:37]: How do you make throwaway copies trivial to spin up and super cheap? The era of “I have an AWS instance with four vCPU and 16 gigs of RAM” is going to get destroyed. If you do that for agents, you need a thousand of those machines. It's prohibitively expensive compared with what we've spent a ton of time figuring out: the atomic unit of deploy, whether you call it isolates, sandboxes, or something else. Only pay for what you use, spin up instantaneously, and close the loop as quickly as possible.Jake [00:50:15]: If the system can self-replicate safely and say, “This is my environment, I'm making these changes,” it can come back with, “Does this look good? This is a new state of infrastructure given this prompt. I think I've solved it.” Then you go back and say, “Actually, it looks different.” It does the loop again. Then you say, “Cool. Apply.”Swyx [00:50:38]: That's retroactively obvious, which is the most useful kind. Any other comments on agent deployment on Railway?Jake [00:50:51]: It's getting better every day. I'm on X or Twitter. You can always yell at me about the parts not working as well as they should, because plenty of things should work way better.The New Serverless: Stateful, Long-Running, Pay-for-What-You-Use LinuxSwyx [00:51:04]: At this stage, when people want massively or embarrassingly parallel compute, they usually talk serverless. I feel like there's a new serverless compared to the previous five years of serverless. You're in that new bucket. Do you have comparisons or philosophical differences you want to call out?Jake [00:51:31]: It's somewhere in between. It's the ability to run stateful, long-running workflows or executions.Swyx [00:51:42]: Vercel has Fluid Compute, Cloudflare has some container thing, Google has App Runner and others.Jake [00:51:55]: That's where everything is roughly going, and it's why we've been working on this for six years. We believe users need access to a computer: a box that speaks Linux. They need to deploy what they want. Other systems change the surface area of what you can build. For us, users need a computer and need to deploy anything they truly want. That's why we've focused on the primitives: network, compute, storage. If we give you those and expose them so you can run things indefinitely, that's where we believe it's going.Jake [00:52:43]: Twitter has no nuance, so everyone says “servers” or “serverless.” It's always somewhere in the middle: I want to run it for a long time, but I don't want to provision the resource statically or pay for things I'm not using. That's been our thesis from day one: pay only for what you use, run it indefinitely, and it is full Linux.Swyx [00:53:12]: That's why I like the naming of Fluid. It's fluid. Flexible.Heroku, Focus, and Carrying the Torch Without Becoming the PastSwyx [00:53:18]: Another milestone is the Heroku official deprecation. You're one of the presumptive new Herokus. “New Heroku” has been a category for as long as I've been in developer tooling. It's finally happening. What was that like? Any behind-the-scenes of, “This is the moment”?Jake [00:53:42]: You have people where you're like, “You were running stuff on here? You, as this company?” It's crazy that names you would know are running on it and now coming to us saying, “We want to move a lot of this off.”Swyx [00:54:00]: Any behind-the-scenes on why Salesforce let Heroku stagnate?Jake [00:54:05]: I can only guess. It's hard when it's not your business. Salesforce's business is to build a great CRM. That's their focus. Then you acquire a compute business as an offshoot. A lot of early Meta people talk about focus. Boz has a write-up about how in the early days of Meta they had no money, so they were forced to focus. Then they turned on the money tree and had no reason not to split their focus.Jake [00:54:52]: But that dilutes your product. You get offshoots where you ask, “Is this the focus of the business?” If it's not core, it languishes. A lot of companies get in trouble when they split focus because they're fighting a multi-front war, not just externally but internally for alignment. Where are we going? What are we doing? What is our purpose?Jake [00:55:24]: If you're Salesforce-built and mission-driven, you want to work on Salesforce. Heroku is off to the side. It's not core to the business. Getting resources, budget, focus, and alignment internally becomes hard. It was a matter of time.Swyx [00:56:06]: Kudos for them to call it out instead of leaving it unknown.Jake [00:56:12]: Their release was a little odd. They called it out, but they didn't say they were shutting it down. Behind the scenes, I think they issued messages to people saying they should close accounts and that they were going to deprecate and remove things over time.Jake [00:56:30]: It's crazy because some of my first deployment experiences were on Heroku. You start with dragging things into an FTP server, then you try to get a deploy working, and then it's Heroku. It was the on-ramp for us. But the wheel turns. New things emerge. We're happy to carry the torch for a lot of that. But we don't want to be the new Heroku. We want to be the way people build and deploy software, and ultimately the way people monetize software over time.Swyx [00:57:19]: It's still a big crown to be the new Heroku. There are 50 companies that fought for that.Jake [00:57:23]: Everybody is holding some portion of it. We're happy to support people and companies. The platform works differently. The game loop is similar, but we've been dogmatic about where these things are going: primitives, agents, fan-out. Some things fit; some workflows need to change. We have an approximation of Heroku pipelines with the environment system. It's exciting. We've got a ton of people we can support, and it's growing a lot.Temporal, Workflow Engines, and State MachinesSwyx [00:58:12]: I have one more technical question about Temporal. I've sold my shares. You're a power user and one of our earliest customers. I met you through Temporal. You built on Temporal. You have complaints. This may be the most neutral and informed conversation anyone will hear about Temporal without someone working at the company.Jake [00:58:39]: That's fair. I've used Temporal for almost 10 years because of Cadence at Uber.Swyx [00:58:52]: Give people a sense of what Cadence was at Uber.Jake [00:58:57]: Cadence was the precursor to Temporal. It powers trip actions, rides, when you rent a Jump bike or scooter or car. You're running workflows for a period of time and saying, “This ride will run indefinitely until it finishes.” You attach information: you paused in this zone, so add this charge to the bill. When you end the trip, the workflow is done. That experience was powered by Cadence at the time.Swyx [00:59:34]: I used to say it's like programming the entire user journey top-down as one function.Jake [00:59:39]: It's a powerful idea and important. It's also important for the next phase of the agentic journey. You want an agent to do a specific task, be complete or incomplete on that task, and move on to the next thing. You need a way to manage workflows dynamically.Jake [00:59:59]: Temporal was always great in theory, and great when you got it working the way you wanted in production. But it required you to model the entire journey in your head. If you didn't, you could cause issues where replaying the state of the workflow causes non-determinism.Swyx [01:00:25]: Because it works on deterministic workflow history.Jake [01:00:28]: Exactly. I describe it as a jet engine. If you know how to operate it and run it, it's great. But you can't hand it to people trying to build complicated things if they don't have the whole state in their head.Jake [01:00:48]: We run our whole deployment pipeline on top of it. That's a reasonably complicated workflow: pre-commit hooks, signaling, queuing, and all the rest. We ran into the same thing at Uber. As you express a large workflow, it gets more complicated, with more states in the state machine that you have to map back to the workflow.Swyx [01:01:15]: It's a lot of ifs.Jake [01:01:16]: Exactly. At Uber, we built a system for doing the state machine and testing it. We've started to build some of those things here because it's grown heavily. It's not quite love-hate. When it works well, it works super well. But if someone who doesn't have full context puts something into the system that invalidates state or causes non-determinism, or spins off a ton of activities, you have to keep track of underlying SRE knobs like activity slots. Those should scale with memory, vCPU, and so on. It becomes a bear to scale.Swyx [01:02:10]: You need a capable sysadmin running things behind the scenes. If you moved off, what would you do?Jake [01:02:19]: We'd build our own workflow engine. We have a few internally that we've worked on.Swyx [01:02:27]: This is one of those classes of things you typically wouldn't vibe code, but I'm wondering if you can.Jake [01:02:33]: I still don't think you should vibe code it. You still want to run decent tests to make sure it works.Swyx [01:02:39]: Timo didn't invent that from scratch either. There are libraries you can run. On top of that, it's just a state machine that you have to map out. Ultimately, you define the instructions you want and run them through a state machine.Jake [01:03:00]: It's very doable. Workflow stuff is interesting. Restate is doing neat stuff here.Swyx [01:03:10]: You're tied into JavaScript. Are you a JavaScript maxi?Jake [01:03:13]: Internally, we have TypeScript, Rust, and Go. We don't add more languages. Actually, we have a little C because we write BPF code and hooks. But those are the languages.Swyx [01:03:28]: Is this for sidecars?Jake [01:03:32]: No. It's for the networking stack, volumes, and things like that. We use TypeScript a lot because it powers the dashboard, but we're moving a lot of workflow stuff off the dashboard stack and into the infrastructure stack.Railpack, Nixpacks, and Content-Addressable FilesystemsSwyx [01:04:00]: Cool. Any other technical infrastructure stuff? Railpacks?Jake [01:04:07]: We built an engine for determining dependencies based on source code. It's called Railpack. We built the first version, Nixpacks, on top of Nix, and then we moved.Swyx [01:04:17]: People have been trying to get me to adopt Nix and NixOS for four years. Is it ever going to be a thing?Jake [01:04:23]: I don't know. We're excited about it, but it has pain points. Think of it as a stack of versioned binaries at specific slices in time. If you want version X and version Y, you bloat the package space, which blows up image size and makes real-world workloads difficult.Swyx [01:04:53]: But you content-address it and cache it. In theory, there are optimizations.Jake [01:05:00]: In theory, yes. But with a large enough user base and disparate enough machines, you run into a problem Meta described in the XFAAS paper, their internal serverless system. It becomes difficult at scale unless you break out specific runtimes.Jake [01:05:24]: We didn't want to do that because we wanted to truly allow you to deploy anything. That was our initial thing with Nix. But we've moved toward interesting work around content-addressable file systems that can lazy-load anything from any point and page it into memory.Swyx [01:05:48]: Amazing.Jake [01:05:49]: The future is very bright. It's crazy, and it's going to be nuts.Coding Agent Spend, Roadmaps, and Token ROISwyx [01:05:54]: Founder journey stuff?Alessio [01:05:56]: Your cloud usage: you tweeted you're going to spend $300K this month?Jake [01:06:01]: I think we got to $200K.Alessio [01:06:02]: Coding agents?Jake [01:06:03]: Yeah.Swyx [01:06:04]: Across the company?Alessio [01:06:05]: You only have 35 people, so I'm sure they're not all spending $10K a month. What's the distribution?Jake [01:06:10]: I think I'm at about $25K. We have power users all the way down. We came back from winter break, and I basically said, “If you're writing code by hand, you're doing this wrong.” The tools are good enough now that you can move extremely quickly. There are issues and pain points, but you should be reviewing the code you are writing instead of writing it by hand.Jake [01:06:40]: Architectural patterns matter more now than ever, but you shouldn't spend your time generating code you would write. If you know how to write it, ask the agent to write it and reconcile it until it looks like you would have written it yourself.Jake [01:06:58]: People misconstrue my propensity to push people toward agents as connected to our growth and some reliability bumps. They're not necessarily related. The tools are good enough to move extremely quickly and build things way larger than you could before.Jake [01:07:19]: To the earlier point about cooling data centers in space: I don't know. But with software, you can ask, “How would I build block storage from scratch? How would I do these things?” I have ideas because I have history and have read papers. Let me work them out and build massive test benches with thousands of tests, because those are now free to author. If you're not using AI systems to speed-run your roadmap and reconcile your existing system onto the future, you're missing a large point of what's happening.Alessio [01:08:12]: What's the path to spending $3 million a month? Is it bound by ideas and things customers can absorb?Jake [01:08:19]: For most companies, it's bound by deployment at this point. That's why we've seen a massive boom in users and companies, from Fortune 50s down, asking how to get developers to move faster. You'll probably hit your CFO before any technical limits because they'll look at the eye-watering amount of money spent on tokens. Inference costs have to come down, but we're inference constrained now. There will be price discovery around what makes sense for an org to adopt.Jake [01:09:06]: I think you'll end up with the F1 driver concept. If someone is really adept at these things, it makes sense to put them in a $3 million car. If they're not, it probably doesn't make sense. You'll take a few people and say, “You can drive the F1 car. We need to go in this direction. Figure out if it works and prototype it.”Jake [01:09:33]: We've done some of that and vastly accelerated our roadmap. We thought we'd ship something in a few years; now we can probably ship it in a few months because we validated it and don't have to build it incrementally. We can skip steps and move toward our vision.Alessio [01:09:58]: A lot of people are realizing the roadmap doesn't always have a business impact, so they say tokens are too expensive. But if your roadmap were built to make more money by the time you built it, you'd have token pricing for it, the same way you do with sales. You'd spend a billion dollars on sales if you knew you would get $2 billion of revenue.Jake [01:10:19]: Exactly. A naive way to measure this is the percentage of tokens that end up in production. If you can measure impact because those tokens end up in production, that's awesome. But the burden of proof will rise. Internally, we have a growing number of pull requests that haven't merged. The question becomes: how do you get this into production? It's about how quickly you can build and deploy software, which is exciting because that's our whole thing.The SDLC Shift: Prompt Requests, Feature Flags, and Safe RolloutsSwyx [01:10:56]: The SDLC is changing. One thesis is that the pull request is dying. It's going to be the prompt request. Beyond that, code review is also kind of dying if you have all the other systems in place. What else is changing about the SDLC?Jake [01:11:19]: The AISRE and the tools to make it happen. AISRE is pie-in-the-sky aspirational. What does it take to get an AISRE? What tools do you need to build?Swyx [01:11:32]: You should expose your tooling to customers at some point. The Central Station command center.Jake [01:11:39]: We have it for template maintainers. Template maintainers can deploy and maintain templates, and they get feedback. We're going to expose those things incrementally.Swyx [01:11:51]: Clustering around incidents. Everyone has a version of that, but I don't think anyone has solved it.Jake [01:11:56]: I won't say we've solved it internally, but it's gotten so good that we can see incidents forming pretty quickly. At some point, those will be things either someone else builds or we build. We've always built things purpose-built for us. If it makes sense to make it useful for users, monetize it, or turn that loop into a profit center instead of a cost center, we want to do that.Jake [01:12:28]: Pull request is definitely dying.Swyx [01:12:29]: Do you do first-party feature flagging and incremental rollout stuff?Jake [01:12:34]: We have a feature-flagging engine we built internally and will eventually roll out.Swyx [01:12:38]: I don't see it as a user. How come you didn't give us what you have?Jake [01:12:43]: We have to beta test it. We care a lot about the quality of the things. There's plenty we've used internally that doesn't make it all the way through the journey because it fails. It works for one service but not multiple services. We'd have to build it for multiple services and know that if we released it, we'd rebuild it again and again. Some things are worth that, but many inform the roadmap.Jake [01:13:18]: We don't want to dilute the experience by saying, “This works, but only for this service,” unless it's a core initiative. Over the next few months, we'll roll out things that work for a single service, then multiple services, then multiple services across the environment. You have to be deliberate. Otherwise you create broken disparate experiences and support load because people ask how to use the feature.Jake [01:13:52]: It's the earlier expansion and compaction pattern. You expand the company to get features, then compact and smooth them out so the experience is stellar. You told me in the hallway, “It's gotten so much better.” Internally we're saying, “This part really sucks. We need to make it significantly better.”Swyx [01:14:11]: I can attest to that over the last three years watching you build Railway. For listeners, feature flagging is a huge part of Uber culture. So much so that they have too many feature flags and another thing to remove feature flags. Facebook has Gatekeeper. Agents are going to need this. It's fundamental to incremental rollouts. OpenAI acquired Statsig. GPT-5 is routing and flagging through different models.Jake [01:14:56]: It's super important. If the software development lifecycle is going to change because we're doing things 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times more concurrently, what becomes important at scale?Jake [01:15:16]: Before I started Railway, I built a feature-flagging product and tried to sell it. It was an easier version of LaunchDarkly. I ran into a problem: anyone small enough to adopt your technology doesn't care about feature flags, and anyone large enough to need feature flags needs so much scale that you have to build out all the infrastructure. I scrapped it.Jake [01:15:42]: But what is old is new again. Companies are trying to move quickly, but you can't YOLO a vibe-coded thing straight into production. You need to say, “Here's my blast radius, my impact, and I want to shadow it for these users.” Feature flags. You're going to need the tools larger companies built to maintain their structures. Everything gets compressed by 1,000x so everybody can build those structures quickly.Jake [01:16:07]: That's exactly where we are: compressing the software development lifecycle, then expanding it and adding more new things.Cattle, Pets, and Clonable InfrastructureSwyx [01:16:15]: Another term that comes to mind for newer developers is “cattle, not pets.” People treat production like a pet. It has a name. You baby it and keep it alive. With cattle, you can mass farm, roll out, portion parts out, and kill them.Jake [01:16:37]: I think that might change. You can move toward having pets as long as you have a cloning machine for your pets.Swyx [01:16:52]: Yeah.Jake [01:16:52]: If you can snapshot every single thing at every frame, it doesn't matter if something gets obliterated because you have a snapshot of it. The things we've built right now are designed to block changes from the hermetically sealed DevOps line. You have to write a Dockerfile because you nee

Feeling overwhelmed by all the new AI coding tools for React Native development? In this episode, Robin and Mazen talk through how they're actually using tools like Claude, Cursor, and Expo Agent to build React Native apps faster. They share real-world AI coding workflows, lessons learned from building AI-assisted mobile apps, and why React Native still matters in an AI-driven development world.   Show Notes Robin's meme about Redux on X (featuring Mazen) Mobile PR Reviewer on GitHub Matt Pocock's AI Skills for Real Engineers   Ask us anything!  We'll be recording a very special AMA episode of RNR in the future! Ask us anything by replying on our X, Bluesky, or LinkedIn posts.   Connect With Us! Robin Heinze: @robinheinze Mazen Chami: @mazenchami React Native Radio: @ReactNativeRdio   This episode is brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is a premier mobile app consultancy, especially focused on Expo and React Native, located fully remote in the US. We're a team of 30 with highly experienced mobile app developers and have been doing this for over a decade. We are also one of the first development teams to adopt agentic coding in a way that keeps high quality standards and aren't afraid to do things the old school way if we need to. If you're looking for mobile app or React Native or Expo expertise for your next project, hit us up at infinite.red/radio.

Кирилл Мокевнин – сооснователь онлайн-школы программирования «Хекслет», разработчик с почти двадцатилетним стажем, амбассадор организованного программирования и автор одноимённых YouTube- и Telegram-каналов. Он работал с Ruby on Rails ещё в коммерческой разработке, вокруг Rails строился сам Хекслет, и во многом на рельсах формировался его инженерный опыт. Rails много раз хоронили, но он почему-то продолжает жить. В него коммитят, вокруг него остаются большие продукты, он по-прежнему очень быстро закрывает типовые веб-задачи и даёт то самое ощущение, что один человек может сделать приложение от и до. Разбираем главные идеи рельсов: convention over configuration, ActiveRecord, миграции, серверную шаблонизацию, jobs, очереди и готовую инфраструктуру. Отдельно обсуждаем тёмную сторону этой философии: магию, метапрограммирование, динамически сгенерированные методы, колбэки в моделях, before_validation, жирные модели и боль больших проектов. А ещё – Sorbet, Tapioca и то, почему Кирилл со временем стал больше ценить типизацию, кодогенерацию и более «деревянный» код. Не обходим стороной фронтенд в рельсах: Hotwire, Inertia, React, TypeScript и вечный спор о том, где не писать JavaScript действительно полезно, а где превращается в тупиковую ветку. Ну и конечно обсуждаем главное: кому Rails вообще нужен сегодня. Почему его рано списывать, в каких продуктах он всё ещё даёт огромную скорость, а где лучше честно выбрать другой стек. Также ждем вас, ваши лайки, репосты и комменты в мессенджерах и соцсетях! YouTube-канал: youtube.com/@PodlodkaDeepDive Telegram-чат: t.me/podlodka Telegram-канал: t.me/podlodkanews Twitter-аккаунт: twitter.com/PodcastPodlodka Ведущие в выпуске: Андрей Смирнов, Женя Кателла Полезные ссылки: YouTube-канал Кирилла https://youtube.com/@mokevnin Курсы по ИИ от Хекслета https://ru.hexlet.io/courses_artificial-intelligence Исходники https://github.com/hexlet-basics/hexlet-basics

Here is Debbie in her own words.With over 15 years experience in Frontend development I have worked as a Tech Lead and consultant for many important clients with various technologies and often with a strong focus on performance. I have lead teams both in house and remotely as well as giving workshops and training. I have many years of experience as a mentor for online learning platforms, Treehouse and OpenClassrooms and am a teacher at Vue School as well as Jamstack Explorers, and I am a writer for Ultimate Courses.I am a Platform Engineer – Applied AI at Zephyr Cloud, Google Developer Expert in web technologies, Nuxt Ambassador, and am a former Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in developer technologies, Media Developer Expert and GitHub Star Alumni.I have a special love for JavaScript frameworks especially Vue.js and Nuxt.js and am now focused on testing especially end to end testing with Playwright. I have a Frontend and FullStack Tech Degree and am Microsoft certified. I am an international speaker, and have spoken at many meet-ups and conferences worldwide on many continents including Antarctica.I am Irish but live in Mallorca, Spain and when I am not writing code and studying new technologies you can find me doing all sorts of sports from running, cycling and skiing, body combat and of course Taekwondo as I am a 4th degree black belt.You can find Debbie on the following sites:BlueskyBlogLinkedInGitHubYouTubeXPLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCASTSpotifyApple PodcastsYouTube MusicAmazon MusicRSS FeedYou can check out more episodes of Coffee and Open Source on https://www.coffeeandopensource.comCoffee and Open Source is hosted by Isaac Levin

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Fellow Eric Allman, a foundational figure of the early Internet as the developer of Sendmail and its precursor Delivermail (for the original ARPANET) in the late 1970s at UC Berkeley. Sendmail is the mail transfer agent that powered a large portion of global email infrastructure through the formative years of the network and helped shape how messages move across the web. Allman is also an ACM Distinguished Engineer and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014. The conversation explores the origins of Internet email, the messy realities of building software that must operate at planetary scale, and what lessons today's engineers can learn from the systems and design decisions that quietly underpin modern computing. Eric shares his work at UC Berkeley spanning a variety of domains, from user interfaces to neural networks. He and Scott touch on current AI capabilities, including their personal experiments in assistive coding with current models such as Claude, and discuss into the programming languages Python, C#, TypeScript, and JavaScript. Eric also shares candid thoughts on letting go of computing after retirement.

We are significantly closer to movie Her than we were just 6 months ago.Most coverage reads Google's last six months as a string of independent product updates. They aren't. Read together, they're the whole agentic-web stack closing one component at a time. Tuesday's Gemini Intelligence on Android announcement named the keystone - the first OS-level web-agent integration any company has built. Chrome auto-browse lands on Pixel 10 and Galaxy S26 in late June.This episode walks through the six-month assembly (Chrome auto-browse, AppFunctions, AI Mode in Chrome, "Ask Google", web.dev agent-friendly guidance, Gemma 4 + Gemini Nano 4, UCP, A2A, Gemini Intelligence Android, DeepMind AI Pointer), the durability question I can't fully answer yet (five-year moat or six-month head start before Apple closes it), and the audit any website needs to pass once an agent can operate it on a user's phone.Timestamps:00:00 - 10 Google moves in six months04:53 - Walking the six-month assembly, January through this week06:51 - The full stack: action, agent-to-app, transaction, identity, distribution, input09:01 - Late June: what changes for a salon owner with a booking website10:32 - The durability question: Apple's six-month gap, not a five-year moat15:47 - Machine-First Architecture: three visitor classes you have to design for16:19 - Google's seven rules. nohacks.co passed six. Tailwind 4 broke one.17:32 - The test you can run today: disable JavaScript, try to complete a booking20:53 - A few days to fix it. The cost of waiting is unknown.Weekly breakdown of how the agent-web is assembling, every Wednesday: https://nohacks.co/subscribeThe Machine-First Architecture framework: https://machinefirstarchitecture.comSources mentioned in this episode:DeepMind AI Pointer (May 13): https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/Gemini Intelligence Android (May 12): https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/gemini-intelligence/Chrome auto-browse preview (January): https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/gemini-3-auto-browse/AppFunctions for Android (February): https://developer.android.com/ai/appfunctionsGoogle web.dev - "Build agent-friendly websites" (April): https://web.dev/articles/agent-friendly-websitesUniversal Commerce Protocol: https://ucp.dev/Related reading on No Hacks:Selling to AI: The Complete Guide to Agentic Commerce - https://nohacks.co/blog/agentic-commerceGoogle's Agent-Friendly Checklist Has 7 Rules. Tailwind v4 Breaks One. - https://nohacks.co/blog/google-agent-friendly-checklistAmazon v. Perplexity: The CFAA Case That Decides Whether AI Agents Can Visit Your Website - https://nohacks.co/blog/amazon-perplexity-cfaa-agent-visitor-rightsNo Hacks is a podcast about web performance, technical SEO, and the agentic web. Hosted by Slobodan "Sani" Manic.

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Tyler Cloutier, founder of Clockwork Labs and creator of SpaceTimeDB. They explore how SpaceTimeDB functions as more than just a database—it's essentially a distributed operating system that merges server logic with data storage, enabling real-time applications and time-travel capabilities. The conversation ranges from the technical architecture of databases and operating systems to the philosophy of distributed systems, touching on everything from Unix and Linux to how SpaceTimeDB could revolutionize AI-generated software deployment. Tyler explains how their system reduces the complexity of building real-time applications, makes deployment simpler for both humans and AI agents, and why games like their MMORPG BitCraft Online drove them to create this new infrastructure. They also discuss the future of the internet, the role of bots in gaming, and how SpaceTimeDB fits into the broader landscape of cloud computing alongside tools like Cloudflare, Vercel, and Docker. For more information, visit spacetimedb.com or check out Clockwork Labs on GitHub and Twitter.Timestamps00:00 Stewart introduces Tyler Cloutier, founder of Clockwork Labs, discussing the origin of SpaceTimeDB's name inspired by Einstein's theory and its time travel capabilities that store all operations indefinitely05:00 Tyler explains SpaceTimeDB as more of an operating system than a database, using tables instead of file systems while running code in a sandboxed environment with full atomic properties10:00 Discussion of how SpaceTimeDB replaces both Node.js and Postgres by merging web server and database functionality, eliminating separate deployment concerns15:00 Tyler explains JavaScript execution through Chrome's V8 engine and JIT compiling, leading to Node.js creation for server-side JavaScript development20:00 Explanation of stateless web servers versus stateful game servers, and why games require in-memory state management for real-time performance25:00 Tyler introduces reducers and real-time subscriptions, questioning why more applications aren't real-time when state changes should update immediately30:00 Discussion of Facebook as essentially a text-based MMO, comparing social media architecture to game server requirements and the need for unified systems35:00 Tyler explains ACID properties in databases: atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable, using game item trading examples40:00 Comparing SpaceTimeDB to smart contract systems without cryptocurrency or global consensus, positioning it as a smart database with centralized trust45:00 Tyler reveals SpaceTimeDB uses 43% fewer tokens than Postgres for AI-generated applications, making it valuable for vibe coding platforms50:00 Conversation shifts to bots in games and proof-of-human concepts, with Tyler proposing biometric systems and discussing potential in-person gaming applications55:00 Closing discussion about tracking AI-driven traffic through UTM parameters and finding SpaceTimeDB at spacetimedb.comKey Insights1. SpaceTimeDB is fundamentally a database that runs application code directly inside it, combining what traditionally required separate systems like Postgres and Node.js. Users compile their application logic into WebAssembly or JavaScript and upload it to run within the database itself. This architecture provides high performance because the entire server backend operates inside the database environment. The system also features time travel capabilities, storing every operation and change to data persistently and indefinitely, allowing users to set application state back to any earlier point in time. This makes SpaceTimeDB more accurately described as an operating system rather than just a database, where the abstraction is that everything is a table rather than a file.2. The inspiration for SpaceTimeDB came from building BitCraft Online, an MMORPG where all players exist in a single persistent world and rebuild civilization together. Traditional MMO backends required complex custom solutions to handle real-time state, with game servers storing state in memory and periodically writing to databases. This complexity existed because games cannot afford the latency of constantly delegating to distant databases like traditional web applications can. SpaceTimeDB solved this by making the database fast enough to handle real-time requirements directly, eliminating the need for separate game servers. This same performance advantage that benefits games also applies to web applications, which is why SpaceTimeDB evolved from a game-specific tool to a general-purpose platform.3. SpaceTimeDB functions as a distributed operating system where each database acts like a process in an actor model system, similar to Erlang or Scala Akka. Databases can send messages to other databases and be spawned across a cluster for horizontal scaling. This represents an overlay operating system running on top of Linux rather than competing with it, providing a distributed abstraction across many machines while Linux handles device drivers and hardware support. The vision is for the cloud to function as a single enormous computer running one operating system, where developers simply publish their programs without managing separate services, deployment, routing, networking, or persistence infrastructure.4. The real-time capabilities of SpaceTimeDB address a fundamental limitation in how most web applications work today. Traditional web servers are stateless, delegating all state to databases and accepting network round-trip latency for each request, which is why users often must refresh pages to see updates. SpaceTimeDB allows queries to be subscribed to, maintaining open connections that stream changes whenever query results update. This makes applications like Discord, Facebook, or banking systems naturally real-time without requiring page refreshes. The historical accident that more things are not real-time represents a problem SpaceTimeDB solves by unifying the web world with the game world's real-time requirements.5. SpaceTimeDB implements ACID properties—Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, and Durable—ensuring database operations are reliable and safe. Atomic means operations either fully happen or not at all, preventing issues like item duplication in games when trading between players. Consistent means declared invariants like unique usernames are always enforced. Isolated means concurrent operations do not interfere with each other. Durable means changes persist even if computers restart, with varying levels from in-memory on one machine to disk storage across multiple geographic locations. These properties are managed through reducers, functions inspired by React Redux that fold changes into application state incrementally.6. For AI and large language models, SpaceTimeDB offers significant advantages in building and deploying applications. Testing showed that creating applications with SpaceTimeDB uses 43% fewer tokens compared to Postgres implementations, costs less, has fewer bugs, and is easier to extend. This matters because the primary cost for vibe coding platforms is tokens. As more software gets written in the next twelve months than ever before, there is insufficient focus on infrastructure required to run all this AI-generated software. SpaceTimeDB positions itself as ideal for LLMs to target because of its simplified deployment model where developers just publish code and the system handles everything behind the scenes.7. SpaceTimeDB can be understood as a smart contract system without cryptocurrency or global decentralized consensus. Like blockchain smart contracts, it executes code with atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable properties, but avoids the expense and slowness of requiring all computers worldwide to agree on everything. Instead, it offers centralized trust where users trust Clockwork Labs not to modify deployed contracts, rather than the trustless but extremely costly blockchain approach. This makes it functionally similar to Cloudflare's durable objects but with full relational database capabilities. The system exists before the networking layer where Cloudflare operates, handling deployment, server, and database functions while Cloudflare could provide DDoS protection in front of it.

Daniel Williams stops by to chat with Mazen and Robin! We dig into Storybook 10's leaner bundle, the 10.3 MCP server unlocking AI agent workflows, what Chromatic is cooking up for visual regression testing in React Native, and his work on Repack.   Show Notes Storybook announcement on X How to Cleanly Swap Between React Native Storybook 10 and Your App Storybook website Agent Device: iOS & Android Automation for AI Agents React Native Porto Meetup X   Connect With Us! Daniel Williams: @Danny_H_W Robin Heinze: @robinheinze Mazen Chami: @mazenchami React Native Radio: @ReactNativeRdio   This episode is brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is an expert React Native consultancy located in the USA. With over a decade of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter, core React Native contributors, creators of Ignite and Reactotron, and much, much more), Infinite Red is the best choice for helping you build and deploy your next React Native app.

PHP Podcast – May 7, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: PHP Tek Is 11 Days Away — And Everyone Is Stressed The conference countdown is real: 11 days, 10 hours, and a handful of seconds on the clock. John’s travel plans hinge entirely on little league baseball — if his team wins their Tuesday playoff game, he coaches the Saturday game, then bolts for the airport. If they lose Tuesday, he’s sad but gets to Chicago earlier. Meanwhile, Eric is grinding through the PHP Tek TV redesign, trying to wire up the SessionIze API for schedule imports instead of doing it all manually from a CSV, and sending the design team a novel’s worth of badge and signage requests. Holly’s conference app now has notifications working: select a talk, and if Eric or John move it around, you’ll get pinged. Keynote and lunch notifications are also on the table for attendees who can never find the room. Conference Stress Dreams: The Motorcycle Gunman Edition John woke up mid-dream to his wife opening the blinds for the school run — and the dream he was pulled from was genuinely unhinged. He was in an Uber waiting for Uber Eats to arrive at an intersection when a motorcyclist pulled up behind them, got off, shot out the tire, then came to John’s door and started shooting at the lock to get in. The Uber app had briefly flashed the word “threat” on the map. John laid the seat back as far as it would go. The driver just stood there. Then the blinds opened and it was just a Thursday morning. John’s verdict: it’s conference stress. Hard to argue with that. JS Tek — An Honest Conversation John decided to say the quiet part out loud: JS Tek hasn’t brought in the JavaScript community the way they hoped. The PHP world is unusual in paying for speaker travel and hotel rooms; Joe in Discord confirmed this barely happens outside PHP, and somebody speaking at a Ruby/Rails conference once told Eric they not only weren’t reimbursed for travel — they had to buy their own conference ticket. Eric’s takeaway: the JS track itself is a great idea for PHP developers, but trying to recruit an entirely new community into the fold didn’t work out. Next year’s structure will probably look different. The PHP 7-to-8 Upgrade That Failed Three Times Eric’s consulting team has been struggling with a client upgrade from PHP 7 to 8 — unusual, because they’ve done this many times and know the pitfalls. After three failed attempts, a deep dive revealed the culprit: an abandoned Laravel Shift branch left behind by a previous developer who had started an upgrade and walked away, with missing config files baked right into the inherited codebase. The fix wasn’t just another attempt — it was getting the management team to produce a proper testing playbook, and more importantly, actually getting trained on the application. The team had been fixing bugs in code they’d never seen working correctly. Today they finally got that training session, and Eric says the excitement and “ah-ha” moments from his developers made it clear this should have happened much sooner. The Database on the Same Server Problem A related discovery from the same client: the database lives on the same machine as the application. Every upgrade means shutting the app down, exporting the database, migrating it somewhere else, and starting over. Eric’s head doesn’t compute why this is still the case in 2026. Even a second machine designated as a database server would be a massive improvement. In a moment of uncomfortable honesty, Eric also admitted that PHP Architect’s own conference site has the same setup — Forge makes it so easy to throw a database on the same box that you just don’t think about it, until you do. Laravel Shift, Laravel Cloud, and the Pre-Check Tool The conversation circled back to Laravel Shift — JMAC’s automated upgrade tool — which Eric notes has become less essential as Laravel’s upgrade paths have smoothed out considerably compared to the wild west of early Laravel development. But Shift is still out there and still useful. More interestingly, JMAC has a new free Shift specifically for Laravel Cloud readiness: run it against your app and it’ll tell you whether your application is compatible with Laravel Cloud’s serverless model, flag any system commands that won’t be available, and help you understand what services you’d need. Laravel Cloud itself is Taylor’s “don’t worry about servers” deployment platform, and if you’re not a sysops person, having a Shift that holds your hand through the setup could be the difference between trying it and not. PHP Internals Made Readable — Externals and PHP RFC Watch Eric plugged two tools for following what’s happening in PHP core. The first is externals.io — a much more readable front-end for the PHP internals mailing list, with search, read-tracking, and threaded discussions. The second is a newer discovery: php-rfc.watch, which focuses purely on RFCs, showing what’s active, what’s been voted on, and how the votes broke down. It’s more of a quick-glance dashboard than a full discussion forum. Eric also highlighted a specific RFC from Ben Ramsey: a proposal to update the PHP license, accompanied by a detailed blog post called “PHP License Simplified” that walks through the history and rationale. If you’ve ever been curious about why license choice matters (especially at the enterprise level where legal teams block open source based on license type), Ben’s post is worth the read. NeoVim’s Flash Plugin — Used Wrong for Years Eric has been using Flash.nvim, a NeoVim navigation plugin, for years. He recently discovered he had been using it completely incorrectly the entire time. He thought he understood what it did. He did not. A YouTube video explaining the plugin properly (titled something like “How to Jump Anywhere Instantly in NeoVim”) revealed that what he’d been doing was essentially pressing the wrong keybinding and stumbling through a fraction of the plugin’s actual functionality. This sent the conversation into a longer Vim origin story: Eric learned Vim because he was flying around the country installing Cyborg firewalls on remote servers and Vi was just there. John picked it up at an enterprise job and never thought about alternatives until he saw a developer using MacVim to write Rails and had his mind blown. The core message: you can use a tool for decades and still be using it wrong, and that’s okay — but watch the tutorial. Eric Doesn’t Know How Old He Is Eric has been confidently telling people for a full year that he’s 55. His wife Bek has known for some time that this is not correct. The moment of reckoning came when Eric asked Alexa: “If I was born in 1969, how old would I be now?” Alexa hedged on the birthday thing but confirmed the range. Bek stepped in. Alexa, a full 30-60 seconds later, stepped back in and confirmed: “Your birthday’s May 8th, you’re turning 57.” Eric is apparently going directly from 55 to 57, having skipped 56 entirely. He also noted at the Padres game with his wife that their Costco membership is older than a 13-year-old kid they saw on the Jumbotron, and that it could legally babysit him. John is turning 50 this year. Everyone is fine. Links from the show: externals.io — PHP Internals Discussion Reader PHP RFC Watch — Track Active PHP RFCs Ben Ramsey: PHP License Simplified Laravel Shift — Automated Laravel Upgrade Tool Laravel Cloud How to Jump Anywhere Instantly in NeoVim (Flash.nvim Tutorial) PHP Tek 2026 — Chicago PHP Architect Store PHP Architect Discord Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.05.07 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Sally Lait joins Robby Russell on Maintainable to explore software maintainability through a different lens… not just code quality, but how teams work together over time. Sally is a fractional technology leader and advisor with more than two decades in the industry. You can follow her on LinkedIn or Mastodon. They start with a familiar question: what makes software well maintained? Structure and standards matter, but Sally shifts the focus to signals around the edges… documentation, onboarding speed, knowledge sharing, and especially how confident people feel making changes. That confidence becomes the thread throughout the conversation. Teams with high confidence move faster and adapt more easily. Teams with low confidence hesitate, avoid parts of the system, and struggle to make progress… regardless of what the code looks like. Robby and Sally also dig into why maintenance work often struggles to get traction. It rarely speaks for itself. Leaders need to connect it to outcomes the business already cares about… risk, hiring, delivery speed, and long-term sustainability. Sally references a LeadDev panel she moderated on why maintenance still feels “stuck in 2015”: Why Software Maintenance Is Stuck in 2015. They also discuss modernizing legacy systems and moving away from long-standing in-house software… work that is rarely just technical. It requires trust, clear communication, and navigating the emotional attachment teams have to what they've built. The episode closes with advice for engineers joining older codebases: stay curious, build relationships early, and use onboarding gaps as opportunities to improve things for the next person. Episode Highlights [00:01:02] What Makes Software Maintainable: Technical quality matters, but cultural signals often tell the deeper story. [00:05:45] Why Progress Still Feels Slow: Even with improvements, teams can feel stuck due to perception gaps. [00:07:30] Communicating Small Wins: Lack of visibility into incremental progress impacts morale and confidence. [00:12:40] Influencing Without Manipulating: Maintenance work needs to be framed in business terms. [00:16:00] Technical Debt as a Hiring Problem: Outdated systems affect recruiting and retention. [00:20:22] Modernizing a Siloed System: Unlocking legacy data required both technical and organizational change. [00:26:55] Building Trust for Change: Surprise proposals fail… alignment takes time. [00:32:39] Letting Go of “Our Baby”: Replacing systems involves emotional and cultural dynamics. [00:46:25] Joining an Older Codebase: Practical advice for onboarding and building confidence quickly. Resources Mentioned Sally Lait Sally Lait on LinkedIn Sally Lait on Mastodon Why Software Maintenance Is Stuck in 2015 (LeadDev Panel) Lara Hogan The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor Sally's Reading & Reviews Site Thanks to Our Sponsors! Your test coverage says 90%, but that might be misleading. Undercover CI looks at your Ruby pull requests and shows you which parts of your changes weren't tested- not just overall coverage, but what changed and what got missed, down to the method level. Visit undercover-ci.com and use code MAINTAINABLE for 15% off your first billing cycle. Free for public repos. Private repos with unlimited users also available. Turn hours of debugging into just minutes! AppSignal is a performance monitoring and error-tracking tool designed for Ruby, Elixir, Python, Node.js, Javascript, and other frameworks. It offers six powerful features with one simple interface, providing developers with real-time insights into the performance and health of web applications. Keep your coding cool and error-free, one line at a time! Use the code maintainable to get a 10% discount for your first year. Check them out! Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

Will Sentance, educator and co-founder of Codesmith, joins SE Radio's Adi Narayan to discuss the evolution of JavaScript and modern best practices. They begin with JavaScript's origins as a simple scripting language and its growth into the backbone of modern web development, highlighting the core theme of the "don't break the web" constraint. The requirement that JavaScript must remain backward-compatible has shaped everything from naming decisions (e.g., flat instead of flatten) to the introduction of Symbols as a collision-safe way to extend objects. Will explains how the TC39 group uses the open-source community as a filtration system, absorbing user land patterns (like those from Lodash or Moment) into the standard library only once demand is proven. The upcoming Temporal API is highlighted as a major win for native date/time handling. On the engine side, Will discusses the shift toward monomorphic object shapes in the V8 JavaScript engine for better just-in-time (JIT) compiler performance, and how developers can now write more engine-aware code. The conversation also touches on LLMs in coding: Will's view is that AI tools are useful but risk atrophying developers' under-the-hood understanding, which remains essential for debugging complex, production-scale systems.

The word for "support" – תמיכה – is used widely in Hebrew, mainly in the context of tech support. The verb is לתמוך. Guy has a special message at the end of the show related to this. Curious? Have a listen and click below. Hear the All-Hebrew Episode on Patreon   New Words and Expressions: Hu tamach – He supported – הוא תמך Litmoch be-mishehu/be-mashehu – To support someone or something – לתמוך במישהו/במשהו "Hu dei tamach ba-proyekt" – He kinda supported the project – הוא די תמך בפרוייקט "Be'otam mikrim she-hadafdefan lo tomech be JavaScript" – In those cases where the browser does not support JavaScript – באותם מקרים שהדפדפן לא תומך בג'אווה סקריפט Ha-tomech – The support person – התומך Tmicha – Support – תמיכה Hem natu lo tmicha – They supported him – הם נתנו לו תמיכה "Tmicha mishpachtit" (Archaic) – Family support/allowance – תמיכה משפחתית Titkasher la-tmicha – Call support – תתקשר לתמיכה Tmicha kaspit – Financial support – תמיכה כספית Tmicha me-rachok – Remote support – תמיכה מרחוק Tmicha nafshit – Mental support – תמיכה נפשית Tmicha rigshit – Emotional support – תמיכה רגשית Kvutsat tmicha – A support group – קבוצת תמיכה "Plus tmicha" – Plus support – פלוס תמיכה Nitmach – Supported – נתמך Lehitamech – To be supported – להיתמך   Playlist and Clips: Corinne Alal – Ha-taasiya Ha-abirit (lyrics)  Tomech be-Java Script Lahakat Ha-nachal – Dina Barzilai (lyrics) Ep. no. 94HEB about Tmicha technit, technical support

We Like Shooting - Ep 660 This episode of We Like Shooting is brought to you by: Midwest Industries (Code: WLSISLIFE) Die Free Co. (Code: WLSISLIFE) Bowers Group (Code: WLS) Otis Technology (Code: WELIKESHOOTING15) Flatline Fiber Co (Code: WLS15) Text Dear WLS or Reviews +1 743 500 2171  Public   Show Titles   GOA GOALS Aug 1-2 in Iowa. https://goals.goa.org/ GunCon.net Tickets on sale now. Use code AGENCY171 Gear Chat [Ruger] RXM The Ruger RXM is a striker-fired pistol designed with a grip angle similar to the 1911 for natural point of aim, featuring a polymer frame developed in collaboration with Magpul. It incorporates a modular FCI (fire control insert) system allowing frame swaps without a new background check and is compatible with Gen 3 Glock parts, holsters, sights, and lights. Reliability testing showed 800 rounds fired without failures, with suppressor-height tritium night sights and direct optic mounting for RMR, DPP, or RMSC footprints. Cost: MSRP $539 / Street ~$438 Special: FCI (fire control insert) system for modularity enabling frame swaps Note Ruger RXM Review [Hi-Point] Hush-Point 30 The Hush-Point 30 is a lightweight, modern suppressor designed for .30-caliber centerfire rifles like the AR-15, available in titanium and Inconel models. It features advanced flow-through technology that directs gas away from the shooter to reduce over-gassing in direct-impingement systems. The suppressor is HUB compatible and includes 1/2×28 and 5/8×24 threads for .223 and 300 Blackout calibers.0 Availability: Shipping now. Available at Guns.com (titanium: https://www.guns.com/silencers/p/hi-point-hush-point-30-ti?i=654780, Inconel: https://www.guns.com/silencers/p/hi-point-hush-point-30-inconel?i=654767).0 Cost: MSRP: Inconel $822.88, titanium $846.81.0 Special: Advanced flow-through technology that vents gas forward to reduce over-gassing, especially for direct-impingement systems; HUB compatible; includes 1/2×28 and 5/8×24 threads.0 [Inland Manufacturing] Model 1910 The Inland Manufacturing Model 1910 is a suppressor for the M1 Carbine platform, replicating the original Maxim Silencer design with modern internals. It features a monoblock monocore construction that allows easy servicing without removal from the barrel, even for cleaning, and includes an offset bore. Compatible with .30 caliber and .357/9mm calibers, it provides a throwback to early 20th-century suppressor technology patented by Hiram Percy Maxim. Availability: Shown at NRAAM 2026; available at Guns.com (https://www.guns.com/silencers?product.manufacturer=INLAND%20MANUFACTURING) Special: Monoblock monocore design with offset bore; can be cleaned without removing from barrel Note (Nick) Bus Built Projects [RevoMag] RevoMag (Nick) The RevoMag is a revolver reloading device designed to be faster than a speedstrip and more concealable than a traditional speedloader. It features a polymer magazine-style body with a reversible pocket clip, compatible with calibers such as .38 Special, .357 Magnum, and .327 Magnum. Proudly made in the USA for everyday carry and personal protection. Special: Magazine-style reload with squeeze-to-release mechanism and reversible pocket clip68 Bullet Points Gun Fights No one stepped into the arena this week. The Agency Brief Agency Update “The government looked at a piece of plastic on the back of a rifle, panicked, and spent ten years proving that gun control is a complete myth.” THE INTEL (THE STORY) The Play-by-Play: 1989 Catalyst: The Stockton school shooting gives gun control groups their emotional leverage. The media pivots away from the shooter's massive rap sheet to demonize the “evil” semi-auto rifle. What the Media Lied About: They flat-out lied that military machine guns were flooding the streets. Anti-gun activist Josh Sugarmann explicitly published this strategy: exploit the public's confusion between semi-autos and fully automatic weapons to manufacture outrage. The Architects: Bill Clinton needed a “tough on crime” headline. Sen. Dianne Feinstein drafted the ban, later admitting her true goal on 60 Minutes: “If I could have gotten 51 votes… for an outright ban… Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in; I would have done it.” What It Actually Did: Banned 19 specific firearms and semi-autos equipped with two or more “scary” cosmetic features (bayonet lugs, flash suppressors, folding stocks, pistol grips). It also capped new magazines at 10 rounds. The Backroom Deals: Democrats didn't have the votes for a permanent ban. They negotiated a 10-year sunset clause and grandfathered in millions of existing firearms, gambling they could just expand it later. The Workaround: The industry adapted overnight. Manufacturers removed the banned cosmetic plastic and sold functionally identical rifles. Congress literally regulated aesthetics. 2004 Sunset: The ban expires. An official, DOJ-funded study by Christopher Koper concludes the ban did absolutely nothing to reduce gun violence. The Reality Check (Hidden Incentives): Conditioning the Public: This was a psychological op to condition Americans to accept the government banning entire categories of firearms based purely on Hollywood aesthetics. Incrementalism: Lawmakers knew a total gun ban wouldn't fly, so they established the “feature test” as a foothold for future, broader bans. The True Target: The feature ban was mostly temporary political theater; starving the civilian market of standard-capacity magazines was their real long-term objective. Market Impact: They hoped shifting regulations would bankrupt the tactical firearms market with compliance red tape. Instead, they inadvertently birthed the massive modern AR-15 industry. THE 2A ANGLE (LEGAL & IMPACT) The Threat: The '94 ban is the exact blueprint tyrannical blue states (CA, NY, IL, WA) use today to terrorize FFLs and castrate standard rifles. They took a proven federal failure and turned it into permanent state-level law. For modern FFLs, this means SKU-by-SKU compliance nightmares, massive inventory risks, and the constant threat of a new federal ban—which, next time, likely won't include a grandfathering clause. Bruen Test: Text: The Second Amendment protects “arms.” Semi-auto centerfire rifles and standard capacity magazines are plainly protected arms. History & Tradition: There is zero founding-era analogue for restricting arms based on ergonomic grips or muzzle devices. The Founders didn't ban repeating arms when they emerged. Heller / McDonald Check: Arms “in common use for lawful purposes” are fundamentally protected. With over 24 million AR-15s in civilian hands right now, they undeniably satisfy the common use standard. Banning them violates the core of Heller. Bruen kills the feature-test dead; rogue appellate courts are simply playing games to delay the inevitable. Regulatory Creep: The Expanding Ratchet: The feature test is a backdoor trap. It started with bayonet lugs and flash hiders, then moved to pistol braces, threaded barrels, and parts kits. Fluid Definitions: Current AWB proposals name over 200 firearms and reduce the threshold to just one aesthetic feature. The Handgun Endgame: Once society accepts that a semi-auto action plus a detachable mag equals a “weapon of war,” your daily-carry Glock 19 or P365 is logically next. Agency Update 94-04 AWB coming next? WLS is Lifestyle Note Secret Service LPVO Drip Imgur Image yYOLY0f The provided URL points to an Imgur page at https://imgur.com/yYOLY0f. Page content indicates JavaScript is disabled, preventing access to the image or any details. No firearms, cultural elements, or product information is accessible or stated. The Alley Not Stated The webpage is a news article about an Oakland County man charged in a deadly shooting of a teen burglar. It mentions a generic ‘9mm' firearm used by the man in self-defense context, with no manufacturer or model name specified. No technical gear details matching the required format are explicitly provided. Going Ballistic ATF NFA Division: Over 1 Million Forms Processed in 2026, 6 Million Suppressors Registered (Savage) The ATF's National Firearms Act (NFA) Division processed over 1 million NFA forms in the first four months of 2026, surpassing previous annual totals due to the elimination of the $200 tax stamp for suppressors and short-barreled firearms effective January 1, 2026. Over half of these were Form 4 applications for suppressor transfers, with nearly 6 million suppressors now registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR) as of April 2026. This marks a historic surge, with 2026 registrations rivaling decades of prior accumulation. The Gist: National (United States): ATF NFA Division and National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR); applies nationwide to NFA items like suppressors and short-barreled firearms. Impact: Elimination of $200 tax stamp for suppressors and short-barreled firearms effective January 1, 2026, caused surge in processing (over 1 million forms in first 4 months of 2026 vs. 1.37 million in all of 2024); over 5.99 million suppressors registered as of April 10, 2026. Bottom Line: Historic surge in NFA adoption post-tax elimination, with 2026 early-year forms exceeding prior annual records and suppressor registrations rivaling 76 years (1934-2010) of prior totals. Post-Bruen Gun Rights Cases: Wolford v. Lopez, United States v. Mitchell, United States v. Hemani, Viramontes v. Cook County, and Roberts v. ATF (Savage) The article details several post-Bruen Supreme Court and lower court cases challenging restrictions on public carry, prohibited-person statutes under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), AR-15 bans, and NFA registration requirements....