147: It's Orbin' Time  🔗 **Source:** [147: It's Orbin' Time](https://share.snipd.com/episode/9ef344d4-2fa1-4f00-a03f-c383d950483d) ## Highlights - **Aaron’s Formula For A Memorable Wedding Toast** - Aaron gave an impromptu wedding toast built around Steve’s tendency to undersell himself. - He turned funny stories about Steve into a sincere appeal for Jess to become Steve’s hype person. Transcript: Aaron Francis I crushed it. Alright, so here's my unifying theory on wedding toasts. Yes. Most people do it wrong first of all yes i think most most people including many at this wedding did it wrong they okay i like how we're stomping on the wedding here yeah oh yeah yeah yeah But not on steve and jess just on just on some uh maybe predominantly some of steve's buddies like some of his bro friends um which you know very common to have a bunch of dudes get up there And kind of, you know, talk about ex-girlfriends. Ian Landsman You're like, whoa, brother. That's kind of happened at my wedding. My best man gave a bad speed. It's not bad. Let's not do that. Yeah. It wasn't in that regard, but it was still not a little uncouth at points. I was like, I don't know. Aaron Francis So here's my foolproof strategy for a good wedding toast. Ian Landsman We're getting into it now. We're getting into it. Aaron Francis Okay. This is refined over many, many years of giving toasts and listening to both good and predominantly bad toasts. Yes. Here's the easy formula. Okay. You pick some characteristic, some character quality, some trait about a detail about either of the people. So in my case, I talked mostly about Steve. Right. Start with a very funny, lighthearted, jokey story about, and then you take that character quality and move into a very serious, like heartwarming, uh, affirmational type thing. Right. So you start like in, in this case with Steve, I started with, um, you know, I introduced myself, uh, talked about a little bit of like how Steve and I know each other, how we work together, And then started talking about how Steve undersells everything that he does. Right. So I told some stories about, you know, delivering, delivering, you know, a video, a landing page or whatever, shooting a commercial, whatever. Steve always thinks everything he does is terrible. But everything Steve does is the best thing I've ever seen in my life. And, you know, all the all the friends and the parents are like, yes, that is Steve. A hundred percent. That's totally Steve. You know, I'm telling jokes about I'll be on the phone with him and he's like, oh, yeah, I'm building a house. And I'm like, what? You're doing what now? And, you know, people are like, yeah, that's classic Steve. And so the kind of like underlying thing is Steve undersells everything. He doesn't believe anything he does is great. And then the turn is, but he never undersold Jess. I knew immediately. Oh, look at this guy. When he started telling me about Jess, he never downplayed it. He never undersold Jess. I knew when he started talking about you, Jess, that this was the real deal. And I said some things to Jess about the nice things that Steve had said. Right. And then I end with, you know, I've been Steve's hype man for a long time, and I'm going to continue to do it. But, Jess, I need your help. You have to be his hype person too, because Steve can do anything, but sometimes he undersells it, but he never undersold you. Here's to Steve and Jess, you know? Wow, I'm going to cry right here. I'm going to cry right here. You just got to find, you got to find the one thing that can be both funny and endearing or soulful. Ian Landsman Man, you pulled that out of your butt in a minute. Yep, in a minute. Aaron Francis Another good one is loyalty, especially if it's like one of your idiot friends from childhood where he like stuck by you when you were doing something incredibly stupid and like you Got in trouble, but he never sold you out. And then you flip that into gonna be a loyal husband and father and you've got a good one. Like that's an easy one. Cause you get to tell a lot of fun, like idiot stories about him sticking by your side and then flip it to he's going to stick by your side. So that's the formula. That is the formula. You start funny. You end sincere with the one quality all the way through. Ian Landsman Did you steal this from Wedding Crashers? Have you seen Wedding Crashers? No. You haven't seen Wedding Crashers? No, no. Aaron Francis I've seen Wedding Crashers. I didn't steal it. This is all original. Ian Landsman Wow. I mean, people are learning shit on the podcast today. That is gold, baby. That is gold. Yes, okay. So I assume it went well, people were cheering, standing ovation. Aaron Francis Oh, yeah. Yeah. Everybody loved it. It was great. Ian Landsman To me, the key part is that's amazing that you hooked the wife in. You found the way to hook the wife in. Yeah, you have to. But it's like you. I mean, I don't know. Have you ever even met her? Aaron Francis I assume you may never. I've met her in person once or twice. So, yeah, I don't know her very well. But, yeah, you don't know her well, yeah. So, good job. Ian Landsman I believe in you. But that seems even, even for the powers of Aaron Francis, that does seem really like you nailed it. Aaron Francis I had to reach deep, and it worked great. And I also got to drop a George Bushism that I think was lost on everybody. Said, when I heard she was a Southern girl, just like me, and I don't think anybody except Steve got it, but it was great. ([Time 0:10:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/78b59c06-c6b8-4c58-b121-4df49da657cc)) - **Ian’s County Fair Cost $100 In Three Minutes** - Ian found the county fair expensive, overheated, crowded, and disappointing despite his children enjoying the animals and rides. - Games cost $10 for three darts, while the best food was an $8 plain milkshake. Transcript: Ian Landsman All right. So I went to the county fair. Ah, condolences. Aaron Francis How was it? Ian Landsman County fair yesterday. It was terrible, but it was also kind of okay. You know, it was like in the end, the kids had a good time and whatever. But like, it's so much worse on every level than I remember. We haven't done much since the kids were little. We went, we took them like they sat on the tractor. They pet a cow. We left. It was, you know, whatever. It was fine. This is a little more like the kids are doing the scary rides. We're actually there for multiple meals. That was like all day. Horrifying. Woo, baby. Aaron Francis Not great. It's not great. At least it's expensive though.. At least it's expensive. Ian Landsman Dude. The game where you throw the arrow, the darts at the balloon. I know. $10 for one round. I know. $10 for three darts. $10. We spent $100 in literally under three minutes. Of course you did. Across games. It was crazy. Aaron Francis Yeah. The food's all 30 bucks. No, the fair sucks. I'm sorry. The fair is as bad as Disney World. No, what? Ian Landsman I'm leaving. Aaron Francis I'm leaving the show. No, that is 100% accurate. And I dare you to find a hole in my life. Ian Landsman Blaspheme! That is 100% correct. I thought you were a religious man. Don't blaspheme on this show, Aaron. Don't blaspheme. Aaron Francis I do not worship Walt Disney, okay? Ian Landsman Disney is goaded. Okay? Disney is goaded. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Let's stay focused on county pharaohs, which are indeed terrible. Disney's amazing. It's in the pantheon. We're We're not going to talk about Disney. Okay. County fair. Here's, I will say one good thing about the county fair. So back in the old days, the rides were actually like made of tinfoil. It was like you could see, there was just like one bolt holding this big swinging thing together you know and it was like whoa they pulled into the parking lot eight minutes ago and now You're riding on it yeah yeah so i would say like some of these rides at least diff like the thickness of the steel was improved it looked just a little more i don't know if they got sued enough I don't know our steel. Yeah, like it looked a little more real than they did in the past. There were more bolts and the hydraulics were like a big, thick hydraulic thing, not just like something that looks like it came off a car and they put it on this ride. Aaron Francis And you and I are experts on hydraulics. So I take your opinion as fast. Ian Landsman Yeah, I at least want a big look at this make me feel like it looks like it's going to hold up. You know, the old ones didn't even try to like trick you into thinking it was reliable. It's like you just like how many people are going to die at this fair? It's like, you know, between one and 10, right? Like, but it seems like they're putting a little effort into safety, which I appreciated. But yeah, man, I don't know. Like the food, my biggest issue, I know you're going to steal all the money. That's fine. You're going to steal all my money. I'm agreeing to that when I come here. Fine. But the food is inedible. Like it's just actually like cool, like pig slop. Like they should be over at the pink pen feeding it to them. Instead, they're feeding it to us for $30 a hamburger. And it's and you're slopping it it up. It's so bad, the food. So that was my biggest beef. Aaron Francis Do they deep fry everything at your fairs? Everything's deep fried. Ian Landsman It's all deep fried. And then you're trying to find a booth that doesn't look like it's just the one that travels with the carnies. You don't want the booth that goes with the carnies. That's the worst. Aaron Francis You want a local artisan who's come out to hawk their wares. Ian Landsman Yeah, exactly. And I feel like when I was a kid, there was at least a handful of those. Like now there's like one. It's like the one booth that's the local guy. And everybody else is the carnies. It's all carny slop. Man, I don't know. The people there are rough. It's a rough crowd. It's a rough crowd. It's a rough crowd. Yeah. It's a rough crowd at the county fair. So I don't know. In the end, it was just my daughter and her friend and me and Jamie. And we were often with the horses and the cows and things. And they're into the horses and the animals and stuff. So that part was cool. Like, it's cool. I got to chill with the goats and cows and things. But, yeah, I mean, we waited, like, 25 minutes online for the 4-H milkshake, which was the best thing I ate, but still was just literally, like, a very plain milkshake. It's just some vanilla ice cream and some milk. Like, that's it. That's nothing fancy. For $8, you don't get anything fancy. You get a very plain milkshake. ([Time 0:17:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d1ca6f69-dd3b-43ad-9100-ae639cafb111)) - **Why County Fairs Feel Like Expensive Traps** - County fairs convert money into confusing tickets, charge heavily for mediocre food, and make winning games feel like a burden. - Ian argues the experience could improve substantially without much additional spending. Transcript: Aaron Francis And then... The fair is always, at least here, it's always incredibly hot. And then you get in there, and everything costs some unknown number of tickets, which is you convert your real money into funny money. And then you're like, oh, this is only 40 tickets. You're like, wait a second. Is that $60? What is happening? And then the food is like, we'll have stuff like deep fried cookie dough. That's what it is. Everything's deep fried cookie dough. I can't handle it. And then the rides are all rickety and expensive. And then you're walking into these like vendor booths or vendor halls where it's all this weird stuff. The only cool thing is like I can imagine my kids liking the car show and like the animal, like the they do some, you know, exhibitions of animals and stuff. I could I could them liking that. But the rest of it, I'm like, this is so hot and expensive and dirty. I don't know. I can't get behind it. Ian Landsman Yeah. And then, like, even they're tricking you all the time. Like, we got this. It looked like a quasi-local thing. It was like pierogies. Look at that pierogies. Now, to me, a pierogi is supposed to be sauteed in a pan. I'm aware that you could fry them. But, like they're not to be fried, especially deep fried. So we get it and they're deep fried and they're like hard as a rock and they're just disgusting. It's like, well, what are we doing here? Like the whole thing. Yeah, we did look out. It wasn't crazy hot. Normally it is crazy hot, which makes 10 times more unbearable. But it was actually, you know, it was reasonable. It was like 80 or something. It was hot, but it wasn't like we weren't cooking out there. So that was all right. So I don't know. It just feels like there's a world where like you could upgrade this without even like spending much more money. And it would be a lot better. But I don't know. Maybe it's just not for me. Aaron Francis No, it's not for you. It's just really not. I even remember as a kid, we had fair day, and I remember going to the fair, and I'm like, I don't really want to do this. What are we doing here? Ian Landsman Yeah. And then it's like, even if you win something, you play the stupid game, you win, and you're punished for winning. Because, like, we won this stupid snake. Now somebody has to hold the snake. Like, every time somebody goes on a ride, can you hold this stupid snake? Can you hold the snake? You don't have to hold the snake, right? And if you win something big, now you have a big thing you have to hold and, like, all that stuff. Embarrassing. Yeah. The games have also gotten, like, there was this basketball one where, like, they're just, like, it's just, like, almost rude. Like, obviously, the games are all fixed, and you can't really win them very easily. But it's like, if you would hit the hoop of this basketball game and the hoop was like made of jello, like it would just like rubberize and bounce all around. It's like, you can't, you couldn't hit the rim and ever get it. Like you have to not hit the rim, which I get. But in the old days it was like, it was a real rim, but it was just small. But now it's like, no, it's this weirdo thing where you can't possibly win. It's impossible, like, to do it, and that's just it. We're just taking your $20, and we're laughing all the way to the carny bank, and that's it. Yep. I don't know. Anyway. Hate the fare. Hate the fare. ([Time 0:22:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71dd081f-0ce7-4bd0-89d4-056489510e0f)) - **Standardize On Tools Even When They’re Imperfect** - Aaron uses Notion for durable collaboration while avoiding its automation and agent features. - Laravel Holdings standardizes on Notion, Linear, Google Workspace, and Slack because consistency matters more than personal tool preferences. Transcript: Ian Landsman Notion we want to double back to notion you put in here notion question mark oh no no no sir i did forget but you reminded me via the power outro that notion exists and i'm not letting you Aaron Francis Get away with it so let's go give me the notion details there's not a lot of notion details i've found it uh in fact there are too many i've found it i've found it useful in some regards and Uh the marketing team continues to delete things in notion so i'm very happy, very happy with our use of notion. The ways I found it useful are, um, engineers putting their draft blog posts in there. And so then I can go in and I can go in and edit them or someone else on the team can go edit them. Um, and then writing up like basically like pitches. Like, hey, we might want to sponsor this event. Here's the cost. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's why it's an experiment or here's why it's a sure thing. And then bringing that into Slack and saying like, hey, I've just written up this thing on this event and it's in Notion. Go comment if you have feedback. And so that takes it that takes it out of uh you know 50 100 message slack threads and puts it into a durable place where we can like keep track of it over a few days as we're as we're commenting So all of those things i have found useful i have still uh i've still shied away from any sort of like, definitely any sort of notion built in automation. I'm just not doing it. It's a scam. I'm not doing it. No freaking way. I don't use their built in agents. It's a scam. I'm not doing it. Uh, I'll connect, I'll connect codex via MCP to Notion to help me, because the interface is just unusable. The organization is unusable. And so I'll ask my codex, what the hell? Why is this shown up here and not over there? And it's like, well, actually, a page is a page. It's under a page under this page. And I'm like, where are folders? And they're like, well, folders don't exist. So Notion has served useful for collaboration on durable documents. It's like a worse Google Docs for us, basically. Ian Landsman I mean, ultimately, you need somewhere to write stuff, right? You do. You absolutely do. Right. Now, you guys, I presume, are you a Google Workspace team in Laravel Inc. World? Aaron Francis We do have Google Workspace. That's where all of our meetings. Like your Gmail and stuff. So we have Gmail, Drive, and then all of our meetings are on Google Meet with the automatic transcription, which turns out to be very useful. But for most durable documentation, everything stays in Notion. And I'm fine with that because I want it all in one place. And I don't want stuff scattered across Drive and Notion and whatever else people decide to use. And so I am very much like, these are the tools that Laravel has chosen and we're going to use them. We may like, it may not have been our first choice, but we can make these tools work for us. And I think we are like, we're making, we're making Notion and Linear work for us. I don't even think Taylor likes Linear that much, but like this is, this is the way that this hundred person organization communicates right and it would be it would be unwise and disrespectful To come in and be like ah our team's gonna use something different i just think that's a silly yeah like that's not a hill worth dying on no not at all and so my focus has just been what what 10 of each of these tools do we need to use? Ian Landsman And how can I disable the other 90% I was going to literally bring up linear because I feel like they are the same thing in a lot of ways. I probably like linear better than ([Time 0:27:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7536b8a7-9b39-47a2-b5aa-3b2602314049)) - **AI Cannot Easily Break Organizational Moats** - AI weakens software’s technical moat but not the organizational adoption, processes, integrations, and social connections surrounding it. - Replacing a tool risks widespread disruption for a modest efficiency gain, so companies rationally tolerate imperfect software. Transcript: Ian Landsman Well, we'll go real time on this, because this morning there was this tweet going around, which was annoying me, that I tweeted back at, which was like, you know, there's no more moats, And AI removes every moat, basically. And I'm just like, this is the stupidest shit I've ever heard. Like, because it's like, this is like, apparently I think it's like some VC guys that they don't even understand how like moats even operated to begin with. Like it was never about the software, like the very little software is like, you can't replace it in a week of dedicated effort. And most software you can replace in a day of dedicated effort. Like it's never been about the like, oh, we physically can't move from this one. It's all about the like people and the processes and the interconnections of things and the physical document somewhere that someone enters into this system. And now if you change it, you have to change this whole big organization's, everything about it, procedures they have, all this stuff, train everybody. People, stakeholders inside don't want it changed. Now you're fighting with that. Like it's a whole thing that's not nothing to do with the AI and the AI isn't going to solve most of it. It might help with some bits of it a little bit, but like there's a lot of it that's nothing to do with the AI. And yeah, I just don't think, I don't think any of that's true. Even at the AI labs, right? Like the AI is the most replaceable commodity ever. Like I could just take my prompt and I could throw it over there. But there's still, the big companies that are like, we signed up for Claude for four years. They're not just moving to open AI because they heard on Twitter that like it's 10% better. Like, no, nobody's even having that conversation. Like, so it's very weird. Aaron Francis But yeah, I saw the no moat discussion floating around and I opted to not click on any of those tweets because I don't want to be involved in that discussion. But I agree. The moat is definitely, there is definitely still a moat in organizational adoption. That's why everyone uses Slack because everyone uses Slack. And so you can add any other company as an external connection. It's like if you're doing an integration or you're doing like a conference together or a sponsorship deal, everybody's already on Slack. So Jack Dorsey's like we're gonna make slack for agents and i'm like great is every company over there can i connect can i connect to literally any like silicon valley company like you Know you know laravel cloud and planet scale work closely together so we have a shared channel is that possible on your new agent slack thing no of course not so there's definitely still Ian Landsman Moat that's definitely the best kind of like everybody uses it so we use it right we use it like in linear and notion like don't have the actual connection there but something like slack Is like super duper locked in because it's not just oh everybody uses slack so we use slack it's like everybody uses slack so we have shared channels so now we leave, now we have to fix all That. It's impossible. Technically, it's not impossible. Technically, you can do it, but you don't want to do it. You're not going to have the effort and time. It's a social network. Yeah, it's all that stuff. You don't want to deal with all that. I think every, not every, but lots of devs out there, especially the Twitter devs, they just think companies go around wanting to replace software just for the fun of replacing software. But really, they don't ever think about software and they have whatever they're trying to do is what they think about. So if you're a car dealership, you're selling cars or you're a manufacturer, you're selling widgets. You don't give a shit about the software. So you're thinking about it when you're forced to think about it and then you're making a decision and you're not changing that decision unless you really, really have to. Aaron Francis That's me with notion. People would get into my replies and like, hey, I built a better product. And I'm like, I bet you did. I actually believe that you did. There's 0% chance I'm going to change. Like literally 0% chance. Like I don't, I don't have the social capital right this exactly jinx i don't have the social capital and i don't have the social will like it's just i got a lot of stuff i got to do for laravel Holdings incorporated and switching from notion to your new vibe coded thing like is below last on my list. Way below last. That does not move the corporate needle whatsoever. And my job is to increase shareholder value. That does not help me increase shareholder value. Ian Landsman And people, they love, I think it's the nature of like developers and businessy VC types tend to be very optimistic type people and like seeing what's possible. But it's like, so they underestimate the downside risk. It's like, okay, we're going to switch from notion this other thing. The upside is we're 5% more efficient. The downside is it screws everything up. It sucks. We have to re-replace it again. We have all these meetings and it's like costing us time. It's costing us money. People are pissed at me. Like there's a huge amount of downside. Maybe it goes great and none of that happens and you get 5% more efficient. Or maybe it goes bad and it's 50% worse for you. And you're the new guy who just came in and made a big problem for literally no reason. And now people are mad at you. Like there's no upside to that. It's managerial yak shaving to switch tools like that. Yes, exactly. So I think these things are very interesting. ([Time 0:35:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c836c978-fcb3-468a-9275-4ce0e9a23bfe)) - **Solo Adds Workspaces And Reliable Agent Resumption** - Solo’s major release added workspaces, resumable agent sessions, command-palette navigation, and specialized attention views. - Workspaces let users isolate projects and open multiple Solo windows, while stored UUIDs make crash recovery nearly effortless. Transcript: Aaron Francis Huge. This one's been cooking for a while. This one's been cooking for two months. So this is the new release of Solo. It is, you know, your agent workspace. It's very good. Soloterm.com. And this is the new feature packed release. So I released it on Saturday from my cozy, you know, hotel room, hotel bedroom. I was laying on the bed. It was awesome. Love being in a hotel. And finally was like, all right, this is we got to we got to do this now. So I packaged it up. I'd been obviously testing it for two months, but I had been I like code freeze was testing it for like three or four days didn't see found a few things that i want to fix moving forward but Didn't find any showstoppers or anything like that um so the new solo big big story is it has workspaces now which i cannot live without i don't know how i ever lived without them I love Ian Landsman Those kind of features when you nail it. Oh, it was so obvious. Aaron Francis How did we do it without before this? Yes. So now if you have like, maybe you've got multiple work projects and multiple side projects and maybe a few consulting projects, you can put all of those in different workspaces, which Just basically is a lightweight container to scope down the UI. So you're only seeing certain projects at a time. Now, you can also pop a workspace out into a new solo window. So you can do two solos side by side or on a vertical monitor like I have. You can do two up and have like, you can have your, you know your side projects that are on their five day goal-seeking thing and then your work projects where you're like working back And forth with them more closely uh so that that's a big one i think the other big quality of life improvement uh for me that i don't know how i lived without i lived in fear until I built this Feature, is now after you send, like after you open an agent and send your very first message, Solo will capture the unique UUID for resumption. So it used to be that you could control C to quit the agent and then it would spit out the UUID to resume like flawed or codex would and solo would capture that UUID that was spit out kind of Helpful impossible to discover but now you get a visual indicator that says this session is like we've got the UUID and so if your computer crashes if you want to hard quit, like if you Want to hard quit solo without even paying attention to what agents are still running, you can. Because then when you launch it again, you can just go and hit resume and it picks up that UUID is stored in the database. And so it'll just start that session fresh through the provider. No magic on my side except here's the you you would go start again so that part is incredibly nice and then the palette the the command palette which is like the central nervous system Of the whole thing um which i never have used by the way oh dude you have to use the command palette the command palette is uh the command k is now the universal entry point. It used to just be command K would like allow you to execute actions, but now it lets you jump around and execute actions. And then every time you open the palette, you see the little subtle tab strip of all the other palettes that are available. So that would be like, you know, if a terminal or two or three need your attention, there's a special palette for that. You can hit command shift E and it will only show you the terminals that are waiting on your input. You can do, you can do command T to open new agents or terminals. You can do command shift P to do your prompt templates. And now all of those are visible in like in every palette. So hopefully the discoverability of those sub palettes or specialized palettes goes up. ([Time 0:42:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2e689817-772b-4d85-b329-924e0101290a)) - **Solo Becomes A More Mature Agent Workspace** - Solo’s performance work reduced CPU and memory usage, including fixing animated spinners that overloaded WebKit. - Aaron sees the product nearing feature completeness while still enjoying it as a pressure-free technical side project. Transcript: Aaron Francis And then just so much work, so many codex goal-seeking sessions doing performance improvements. And so CPU and memory is way, way down, including some weird web kit stuff that like the animated spinners were actually crushing the web kit CPU. It's like, God dang it. So all of that has been fixed. And so terminal continues to be hardened, fewer, you know, fewer bugs on the Terminal side. So very, very proud of this. This has been two months coming. And part of the reason is I was trying to release this before Laracon. I was like, I'm going to I'm going to get this out before Laracon. And that way, like, you know, I have a little bit of a grace period where people aren't looking for new things that was a month ago um but as i was testing the workspaces more and more things Just kept popping up because solo's always been a single window paradigm and moving to a dual window paradigm or in many you could pop open infinitely many if you wanted. I wouldn't do that. That obviously exposes a lot of new edge cases where it's like, oh, you were storing this piece of data in WebKit local storage. Like we have durable SQL Lite, but some things are stored in the local storage because it doesn't need to be persisted. But then if you have two instances of WebKit, ne'er the twain shall meet. And so we had to move some stuff to like bubbling up events so other windows could listen. We had to move some stuff from ephemeral storage down to durable storage so that every window would get that sort of stuff. So like I, the last one that I found was I changed a hotkey because I was like, I kind of want to remap this hotkey to that. And it worked in one window and not the other. And I was like, God dang it. Shoot. And those were stored durably, but the update wasn't broadcast everywhere. And so it was just broadcast to that one web view. So the other web view didn't even know about it. Um, but yeah, I feel really, really happy with it. I'm very proud of it. And of course, you know, development slowed down quite a bit and I, we can talk about, I've moved to a lot more goal sessions and long running stuff just cause I have, you know, a job I have To do. Um, but I'm still like, I'm still very happy. Like I love, I love working on it. In fact, I like working on it more now because it's just fun. Like it's just fun. It's an actual side project. It's an actual side project with no pressure. And so like when I go home or like when I'm on the flight back on Sunday, it's like Sunday afternoon. I've got some, I got a little bit of wifi, not a lot. And I'm like, what if we just dream a little bit? Let's poke around. And it's just way more fun than feeling like this has to put food on my family. So I'm having a freaking blast. That's that's all I can say. Ian Landsman I feel like you're getting close to sort of, uh, like feature complete in the sense of like the big picture features. Like help spot is similar in the sense of like, there's tons of stuff we can add to help spot. They're like live chat and Facebook and like all this stuff. You could, you can infinitely add stuff to any piece of software, but like the core promise of like, Hey, you deal with email support, like Helpspot kind of does that. And Solo to me is starting to approach that, like you work on projects with AI locally. You might have multiple projects going on. You need the correct organization for that. You need the correct, like, like to me the resume one's really big because I almost never shut things down separately. Yeah. And the workspaces too, because, like, I would always have, like, three or four or five different things. And, like, them all together gets this big, long list. It gets kind of a little wonky. Yeah. So, like, now you could have separate windows. And then if you're that kind of power user, like, when you shut down, you don't want to go into every single agent and be like, shut down, shut down, shut down. You just want to be like, oh, I'm shutting the whole thing down. Or obviously crashes and stuff where it shuts down and you didn't intend it to. So it's like you could resume through the agent before, but it's like where you had to like go into their resume command and scroll through a giant list of crap and like put it back in the Aaron Francis Spot you had. And is like your first message. And so it's like, hey, are you connected to the solo MCP? That's the first message. And they're like, I have no idea where this session went. I don't know if this is the right session or not. Ian Landsman Yeah. Right. Exactly. All those things. So it was in practice, I only ever resumed if it was like really critical and I was like in the middle of something and I really need to get it back. But otherwise it would just be like a bunch of fresh agents and then now I have all these empty agents sitting there. So the resume will be very nice because it's like, yeah, whatever, you crash, whatever happens, everything's right back where you left it. You just have the little button. Solo takes care of it for you. So yeah, I mean, I feel like that's really good that these things are converging, like giving, you know, your time's a little tighter and then I'm sure you have a lot of big other ideas You want to work on. But at the same time, like for its core value proposition, I feel like you're pretty close to like what it needs to be without getting into like whole new big areas, which I'm sure you have Ideas for. But like, it works good. People are using it. You can organize fully. You can organize a bunch of ([Time 0:46:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d9a625b3-470e-4895-8b5d-264ebf46cd66)) - **Why Ian Finally Went All In On Orbs** - Ian adopted AMP Orbs because remote, isolated VMs remove laptop security risks and make team handoffs easier. - Each Orb includes the agent runtime, project setup scripts, web portals, and isolated sub-Orbs for clean testing. Transcript: Ian Landsman Well, first of all, I do think it's all going to be consumed by the labs probably, but I waited for the lab to consume this and it didn't consume. So they're not building the stuff I want. I got to get, you know how I felt about this the whole time. I've talked about this for a year now. I don't want to do this stuff on my machine. Solo is great. And if you want to do stuff on your machine, you should use Solo, but I don't want to do stuff on my machine. I don't want the security risk. I don't want the performance hit. I don't want to leave my laptop open. My laptop, I want to be able to update when there's an update for some security thing. And I want it to be like, no, because I had this thing running. I just want, if I mess up something, I just want to blow it away completely. I don't want to have conflicting things in the database and whatever. So I was like, I'm just going to try the Orban. And actually, it was Matt Stenson, our CTO. We had been talking about this. He was the first one to go in and actually try the Orban. He was the first Orber. And this is the other thing, too. It's like, in the context of a company, there's things I want to be able to share more easily without the, like, necessarily, like, pull down this and push this up and set this up this way And blah, blah, blah. And then you still can't see the thread I had with the AI and blah, blah, blah. It's like, I want to be able to pass you a whole thread that's a thread that's connected to a bunch of stuff on a running server with the AI chat with it. And like, now you take it over. We go back and forth or whatever. So, all right. So he tried it first. He got the project set up for HelpSpot. This is mostly HelpSpot stuff, although I do have outro in there now too. You know, the orb sets itself up. You say, hey, orb, you know, install this repo, do this thing, figure out how to install this app. It goes through and figures out how to install it. You tweak it, whatever. Aaron Francis So just a little high-level context. Orbs are fundamentally VMs from AMP, which is my favorite coding harness. And I say fundamentally VMs because they've layered a lot of UX and DX on top of it. Does that set the stage appropriately? Ian Landsman I think that's right. And I mean, the thing is, like, you know, it's not just the VM with your app, but it's also like the codex is on there. Aaron Francis Right. Ian Landsman The AMP runtime been like set up for you everything's on yeah i guess they're using amp technically on there and then whatever they're putting whatever keys in place they need and blah Blah but everything is on the server it's like your personal like your desktop machine but it's entirely over there so any apps you need it'll install anything you want you get your isolated Space. So it installs whatever you want, installs itself, installs AMP, makes its connection to OpenAI, however it does that magic. And then, yes, it's a VM. And, yeah, they're cool. Like, you could spin up a bunch of them. So it's got a pretty nice UI from AMP code where you log into. You manage all the orbs from there. Each one has like a threat. I mean, we've all seen this before. It's like a pretty standard chat agent sidebar of stuff happening, except all the stuff on the sidebar happening is each one in their own server. So it's all totally isolated. And the orbs can open suborbs. So you can say, hey, or spin up sub orbs to run tests or checks or whatever. If you want the totally fresh space. Aaron Francis And those are on discrete VMs as well. Ian Landsman Right. Which is huge because like a lot of times you tell you to do a sub agent, as we've all done now many times, but the sub agent is still playing in the same sandbox as where you just worked. So now the sandbox that the sub agent is playing in is totally fresh and it can just pull down the branch with the thing it's supposed to check and it's got a totally clean slate to do that. It spins up a new database, it reseeds it, blah, blah, it's all totally fresh. Aaron Francis How much did Matt, like, so you get this orb that is nicely configured with AMP and portals and whatever. Then where do you do the, here's how you set up the database, here's how you start the web server. How is that part accomplished? Ian Landsman Yeah, so right in the beginning, when you first set up a new project, it gets like a setup, startup, teardown, resume kind of scripts. Committed to the repo. You could build yourself, committed to the repo, and you could set that up yourself. They recommend that you just have the orb do it itself so that it could be checking if things actually got set up and then it sets it up, then you commit it. So new orbs then just pull that down and go off of that as the setup. And yeah, I mean, some of the other magic where it's not just a VM too is like you get the portals, like you mentioned, which is basically just a link to your app running. So if you're doing a web-based application, which is where this seemed by far the most useful. You know, that was the other thing, like all these other set up your own VM stuff, like that part gets funky, either it doesn't exist. Like on the lab ones, I think there's no, like you can't get a url or at least not easily of like i want to just see my app fully running natively normally so you can get that um so you could Just be in your browser looking at the changes they inject a little thing where you can comment on it and like say look at this element fix it whenever i haven't even used that yet um that Part's probably one of the rougher ends in that, like, they have a bunch of weird networking stuff to make it all secure, but it kind of slows it down a little bit. So whatever. But this is all pretty new, so they're working on that. But I like it so far. We'll see, you know. ([Time 0:56:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/353d1cc7-f967-4b4e-9e3f-3efe1af6862a)) - **Orb Architecture Beats Its Confusing AI Branding** - Ian thinks Orb networking and isolated architecture matter more than AMP’s confusing Oracle and Librarian branding. - Aaron values the Librarian for researching repositories and returning useful answers without making Codex clone everything locally. Transcript: Ian Landsman Yeah, so I mean, to me, the coding harness parts of AMP are the worst parts, and I think that they should get rid of all of it. Because I think it's like all down. I think the orbs are the most interesting thing. I mean, there's a million coding harnesses, so it's another coding harness, okay. And to me, it's all downside for them. Because like even now, when you start the orb, like it's injecting the oracle and the librarian, which is like their kind of meta stuff they put on it. Right. But first of all, it's weird stuff. Like when you pick a high mode for your orb, because then when you start the orb, you say, do I want to use like low, medium, high level of strength? Aaron Francis Wow, when you start the orb. So it really is tied thread to orb very closely. Yes. Ian Landsman So the orb is starting at sole extra high or soul medium or soul light or whatever. So, okay. But like it gives you this little screen. It's like, okay, it's like, this is really weird to me. If you're on the high, it's going to use soul extra high as the agent, but the oracle is going to be soul high instead of soul extra high. So the Oracle, the thing called the Oracle is dumber than the thing doing the implementation, which makes no sense to me. So already you're like iffy, you're like, this is weird. I don't know. And to me, it's just all downside because if everything goes well, you're going to be great. Soul is awesome. Soul did a great job. If something screws up, you're like, well, was that the Oracle set it? Did the Oracle do something weird? When I use this in myself locally, it doesn't do weird stuff. But now the librarian and the Oracle, like, I just think the Oracle and the librarian will never get any credit. And they will often take the blame. Yeah. As like, this is different from when I just use Soul on my own. And so. Aaron Francis Counterpoint, though, is they built their own harness, all of that cool orb stuff you talked about is either possible or at the very least much easier. So like they can, like for everything that I do, I have to basically find hooks into the various harnesses. Right. And sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But with them, they can seed the system prompt a lot more easily to say, you are running in an orb, you have these affordances. And so I can see, maybe I can see their harness getting thinner and thinner, but I think it's still profitable for them to have a harness where they can control the system prompt, the tools, All of that kind of in like a first party way. Cause I mean, the number of adapters I have for these different agents is obscene. Oh, yeah. I totally agree with that. So I get it from that perspective. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Ian Landsman I'm not stating at that level of architecture. To me, it's just more of the higher level of like, I don't want to think about the Oracle. I don't want to think about the librarian. I don't know what they do. I don't know why they're there. Like, I don't think they should even market on that stuff. Like, that's like trying to outplay the model providers. I don't think you're going to outplay them i don't think it really is that believable that these things are improving it that much over you know each generation just gets better like I i rather than spending the marketing effort and just literally the confusion in the interface of like what is the oracle why do i want it why do i care like there's not really any explanation There. So I guess your choice would be to put explanation. I just think it's not even worth it. Like, I just want the orb. Obviously, you might have your own, technically, you have your own harness, so you can do all kinds of magic. Totally down with that. But I just think from a, like, user perspective, I don't care about those things at all. I just want my orbs to work well. They should just hide the model the Oracle is using. Aaron Francis Like, if they believe that the Oracle works best and fastest and most efficient on GPT high versus your orb on extra high, fine. That is why I pay you to be the tastemaker and the builder. But don't tell me you've downgraded my Oracle because then I'm like, no, use the big dog. And maybe the big dog is wrong and AMP knows that, but like hide that from me, you know? Ian Landsman I just think though, it's just a whole other subsystem that you as the user have no control over. And sometimes it just goes off to the librarian. It just goes off to the Oracle. You don't know why. Aaron Francis By the way, the librarian. Ian Landsman I just think it's like, you don't have any control. It feels like this magical thing, but I don't ever feel the upside magic. I feel like I only feel the downside magic. Aaron Francis No way. I use AMP locally. I don't use Orbs. And I always feel the upside magic in the Oracle and the librarian. Yes. The librarian in particular is just gold. Well, the librarian, I guess, is probably a little simpler. Especially when I'm doing a lot of like terminal work, I'm like, hey, go find all the open source terminals. Go look at Ghosty. Go look at Xterm. How the hell am I supposed to do this? And instead of Codex being like, let me clone down these repos and look through them, the Oracle does something. I have no idea what it does, but the Oracle does some, or in this case, I'm sorry, the librarian. The librarian does something and it comes back with answers. And that's all I really want. So I will abide no librarian down talk. I think it's amazing. That's more of a special purpose tool, I suppose. Ian Landsman Although again, it's not ever explained anywhere. And sometimes you just see like the librarians doing something. You're like, well, who the hell is that? Yeah. What the heck is this thing? Like if I hadn't been talking to you this whole time for a year about this, I would have no idea what the librarian is. I'd be like, what is the librarian? How did it get in here? What the hell is it doing? Like, I don't know. I just don't know if like however good these things are, if they're like good enough to be worth the confusion. When to me, the like thing that's awesome is the orb networking and architecture. And that's the thing that's worth like going and talking about on the internet and being like, you should try this thing because it's cool. So I don't know. ([Time 1:02:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a0c8c8e9-06e2-4219-8f6c-de4acb317c04)) - **Automate Travel Rewards Without Ignoring Credential Risk** - Aaron is using AwardWallet and AI to organize travel rewards instead of maintaining scattered loyalty accounts manually. - Ian warns that aggregators may require credentials, creating a centralized security risk even when the service is trustworthy. Transcript: Aaron Francis Something you will be very happy to hear is that I've started down the road of getting my credit cards and hotels sorted out. We got them! So I realized I'm going to be traveling a lot more with this job. Having the Air Canada experience where chat helped me, you know, use EU against EU, kind of opened my eyes to this whole underworld of points maxing so let's go here here's my current Strategy um i'm still in the research phase first of all okay i'm in the catalog phase ai's off working on it yeah i do um and so i have signed up for Award Wallet, which is like a basically A plaid for awards programs. And fun side note, I used to work at a travel technology company that did this. You send in, you send, you forward in all your emails and we would parse them and make trips out of them and report back for compliance reasons and reimbursement reasons and all of that Stuff. And so I was familiar with award wallet, but I hadn't thought about it in like 12 years. Right. And so I signed up for award wallet, which lets me put in all of my loyalty accounts, whether that's airline, hotel or credit card. And then it will manage the, it manages the like updating of the points and stuff like that, and then provides an API in front of it. So I started with ChatGPT locally, just automating the browser, but that is just so finicky all the time. So I put it behind an API um and now i'm in the process of trying to figure out uh like credit card offers i should be signing up for and what should we use what should we use on amazon versus Groceries versus travel and i've come to the conclusion well i came to this conclusion 20 years ago i'm not going to manage all that i don't want to keep a spreadsheet of like, hey, babe, When you go to the grocery store, make sure you split up the groceries and the durable dry goods. You don't have to go that crazy. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. Yeah. But thanks to the neon gods, I can do, and we lost my camera, I can do a lot of that with just the ai so now the ai can tell me hey use these cards here or like put this card on file at amazon and When you travel and you book airlines use this card yes um so i'm moving that direction i've seen you tweeting about forex at aws so am i headed am i headed right direction? What do I need to know? Ian Landsman The local stuff here, when you and the wife are out shopping, I think you can just keep it super simple. Amex Gold. That's what you want to use. Is that different than Amex Gold? Or is that the same thing? It's the same thing. You get Forex points on groceries, Forex points on restaurants. That's like the main, I think you get 4X on gas, maybe even, I'm not sure about that. So that's like you're, you are in the physical world buying stuff, just Amex Gold. Just do that. Okay. And then the online stuff, yes, you can be a little more finicky because it's like, well, I'm just logging this, I'm just putting this card on file with this place. Right. And that's just where it stays forever. So fine, you just do whatever you want there. Award wallet, I have to look at this. I haven't looked at this in a while, but the problem I have with the award wallet and their type things is that you have to give them, they are not making an API connection to American Express. You are giving them your login and they are logging in for you, which to me, for the business account and stuff is a little bit scary to like let them wander around there. Aaron Francis Got to get over the security thing, man. Ian Landsman Yeah, so that's the point. I wish I could do that because I have like, yeah, stuff all over the place and I try to keep it in a spreadsheet. And it's more like once every six months I go through and just log into everything and update the accounts. But yeah, I would prefer to do it. I wonder if American Express has like a user class you can give it that like doesn't have much permissions or something like that, you know? Aaron Francis No, you don't need to worry about that. It's the same as Plaid. No, it's not the same as Plaid. It's Tiller HQ. Like at some level, all of these aggregators are basically scrapers. That's true. If a Ward wallet spent a single point of someone's rewards, they would just go out of business. So I'm fine doing it this way. Ian Landsman What are you worried about? Because they can just log into your Amex and do anything. Like anything. They could close the account. They could steal all your money. ([Time 1:10:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dbcb177f-9461-4930-8c63-56da75888cf2)) - **Build A Credit Card Strategy Around Travel** - Ian recommends Amex Gold for groceries and restaurants, then Amex Platinum for airport lounges and point-rebate benefits. - He advises applying for cards one at a time and waiting for the strongest available signup bonuses. Transcript: Ian Landsman Anyway, the other thing you mentioned, well, first of all, I'm glad you're getting on board. Because, yes, with the amount of traveling you're going to be doing, you got a max. First of all, your employer is paying for you to get these points. That's what I'm saying. And you get to keep the points. So right there, you're looking nice. That's nice. Aaron Francis I know. I told Jennifer as we were walking through the airport yesterday, I told her that I've got my AIs churning on what is the best way, ethically, for us, the family, to benefit off of all of My work travel. And, you know, the rules are at Laravel, you book, you book, there are obviously like guidelines, but you book your travel with your credit card and then you get reimbursed. And so if that's the case, I will, I will stay within the guidelines and I will also, I will also try to build up my awards accounts because why wouldn't I? Oh yeah. Ian Landsman If you're doing it that way, the awards points are definitely yours. They are 100% yours. So that's fantastic. Yeah. And even other types, like obviously when you fly, you're getting those points or whatever. Those are kind of minimal compared to the credit card points. But yes, you got to plan your order right. You don't have a lot of credit cards, it sounds like. So you got to get, you want to maximize your deals. Yeah. You got to maximize your deals. It's very finicky. So like if you, obviously as you get into this you can have the ai checking whatever there's several big sites for like who's got the big offer right now right and you they are serving different Offers to different people so if you know the top offers 250 000 points don't sign up when it says 150. Go into new browser windows. Play all the games. Do VPN and change your location. Whatever you got to do to make it show you the 250,000 point one. That's a huge difference. It's like $4,000 or whatever. You want the biggest bonus you get up front. Then just start using the right cards in the right places. This will help you a little bit. You don't have a lot of server expense, unfortunately, but for me or my AWS bills, like eight grand a month or whatever, forever, they, AWS, the American Express gold would do 4X points, But not for AWS because American Express was the official credit card of Amazon. So if you wanted bonus stuff, you were supposed to use the Amazon American Express. But the problem is that's cashback. Cashback is freaking worthless. Never do cashback. Cashback's terrible. So I would not do that. And I, whatever, I did some other things. Won't go into it all. But now American Express got kicked out of Amazon and its U.S. Bank or something took over and so now the AWS is 4X points, 4X points. I love that. 32,000 points every month just flying into my account just for that one bill alone. So very nice change. Yeah, so check that out. It's on any two categories. It's not just server stuff. So it's like advertising, a bunch of different things. So yeah, American Express Gold Business Forex Point setup is super good. So you're going to want to use that for your business stuff for the most part. It's especially good if you just have one or two big categories if you're more like even it's less good but i mean it's still better than nothing but yeah i may have to look into this this Amex gold because this this is looking pretty appealing and then you're going to want um amex platinum as well um yeah you're gonna need that why do i need two amex cards two you need like Four but we're just gonna start you slowly all amex yeah for different things but listen so because you're personal and business right two different things there but the amex platinum You want because that gets you the good centurion lounges that gets you Delta lounges as well. So yeah, so just for the lounges, plus it gets you, the really big perk is once you build up your points, then it gets you the thing where you get 30, when you buy a trip with points, fully With points, you get 35% of the points back on a selected airline. So you set like a base airline that you normally fly. So that's a huge kickback that you don't want want to miss out on so yeah lord you need some of this stuff you gotta play the game ask the ai about it i gotta turn my agents loose on this because This is too much for me to you don't want to sign up all at once you want to like right you want to get your bonuses whatever so do one at a time but uh yeah the platinum is it is pretty good you Do get your money it is expensive now. It's like $800 a year or something. Yeah. $800 a year. But you do get the money back for sure. Even if you don't really optimize, you'll get a lot of the money back. And if you optimize, you get way more than your money back. So you can make it work. ([Time 1:16:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/df45b280-476b-44e7-95b5-17bbed26b3ce)) - **Aaron’s Great Illustrated Classics Reading Guide** - Aaron’s children are reading Great Illustrated Classics, but Cinderella uses vocabulary and print better suited to older children. - He recommends Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, and Tom Sawyer for younger readers. Transcript: Aaron Francis I want to give you one last update on the great illustrated classics, the books. Okay. So we've moved on to, uh, Cinderella and other stories. I think that's what this one is called. Um, avoid Cinderella and other stories. Oh, that book is no good. Um, yeah, it's called Cinderella and other stories. It's no good. Um, it is not, it has not been, it's not age appropriate. Not in, not in content, just in vocabulary. I'm having to translate on the fly because this one wasn't fully rewritten for kids. And so it still has a lot of these really esoteric words. And the print is a lot smaller. It's a lot. Oh, dude. So last night, so Cinderella and Other Stories is actually only the first chapter Cinderella, and then all the other stories are the rest of it. So we finished Cinderella, and I'm not moving on to like Jack the Giant Killer, which I don't know that story, but that's the next one. Jack and the Beanstalk? That's what I thought, but this is Jack the Giant Killer. Okay, all right. So we're not moving on to that one, and we moved on to Peter Pan, which is fully rewritten. And so Peter Pan, Peter Pan so far is great, but great illustrated classics, Cinderella, other stories, save that for when they're like seven, eight, nine. So far, Peter Pan, Jungle Book, and what's the other one we read? Tom Sawyer. Those are all Aaron approved. Ian Landsman So that's my update. And you're moving on to what was the new one? You got a new one, though. Peter Pan is the new one. You already had that, though, right? Yeah. Aaron Francis Yeah, I ordered two new ones because my son said he wanted a boy book, and my daughter said she wanted a girl book. And so we did Cinderella and Peter Pan. So we're getting Peter Pan now. Ian Landsman You haven't bought new ones from that point though. No, these are the new ones. So we have four total now. Aaron Francis Two we finished. Okay. Gotta try Magic Treehouse. Ian Landsman I know. Words will be appropriate. There's 150 of them so you can be bored out of your mind when you're on 32. The same story over and over. Over and over. Yep. Okay. I like that. Let's do it. Go out there, buy your five-year Peter Pan. Peter Pan, not Cinderella. Illustrated Classics. And we'll go from there. ([Time 1:24:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb9b238a-ed94-42ed-b82a-133bc3e43dd1))