Natural Born SaaS Killers  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Databases Built For AI Agents** - Agentic databases simplify agent data by combining vectors, relational data, and conversational history in one engine. - This reduces glue code and avoids managing separate vector DBs and search clusters. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak This is the year we almost break the database. Let me explain. Where do agents actually store their stuff? They've got vectors, relational data, conversational history, embeddings, and they're hammering the database at speeds that humans just never have done before. And most teams are duct taping together a Postgres instance, a vector database, maybe Elasticsearch for search. It's a mess. Our friends at TaggerData looked at this and said, what if the database just understood agents? That's agentic Postgres. It's Postgres built specifically for AI agents, and it combines three things that usually require three separate systems. Native model context, protocol servers, MCP hybrid search, and zero copy forks. The MCP integration is the clever bit. Your agents can actually talk directly to the database. They can query data, introspect schemas, execute SQL without you writing fragile glue code. The database essentially becomes a tool your agent can wield safely. Then there's hybrid search. TaggerData merges vector similarity search with good old keyword search into a SQL query. No separate vector database, no elastic search cluster, semantic and keyword search in one transaction, one engine. Okay, my favorite feature, the forks. Agents can spawn sub-second, zero-copy database clones for isolated testing. This is not a database they can destroy. It's a fork. It's a copy off of your main production database, if you so choose. We're talking a one-terabyte database, fort, in under one second. Your agent can run destructive experiments in a sandbox touching production, and you only pay for the data that actually changes. That's how Copy on Write works. All your agent data, vectors, relational tables, time series metrics, conversational history, lives in one queryable engine. ([Time 0:00:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cc8a285c-416b-46a4-8648-2f5715583188)) - **Name Changes Spark Hype** - Peter Steinberger's Claudebot project renamed multiple times and inspired many to buy Mac Minis for local inference. - Jerod and Adam note the lobster/clam theme and rename confusion around Transcript: Jerod Santo One of the things that have been going on is this Mac mini sale. Oh, dang. We've been selling Mac minis for Apple. It's not us. It's just developers been buying them because of claude bot not to be confused with claude code which i guess was confusing enough that claude bot was renamed for posterity claude bot Was spelled c-l and i think it had to do with him having claws there's like a whole lobster theme behind this thing and i think it was like he had to claws. And so he was a clawed bot. And he got very popular. At which point, Peter Steinberger, who might be coming on the pod at some point. Trying to make it happen. The creator of clawed bot decided to rename everything. Trademark stuff. I can only assume Anthropik hey, please rename this. Because at this point, Claude is pretty well established verbally, audibly, with Anthropic, right? Right. Different spelling doesn't really matter. When you just say the word Claude, everybody thinks about Anthropic. So now it's Moltbot. So Claudebot molted. And why do we care? Well, because it seems like a pretty cool project. And one that has gotten a lot of people excited. I covered it on news this week because it'll do a bunch of stuff for you now. Full confession, I have not set this up. Adam Stacoviak Me either. Not set this up. Gosh darn it. Jerod Santo You know, the list is long, jared you got a list of stuff you want to try don't you ai things to play with man i know i just can't keep up with the things to play with uh i and i want to though i Adam Stacoviak Do want to so that's my excuse at least the ai that actually does things that's right it emails for you it It calendars. ([Time 0:05:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13da1d2e-32c5-4ea0-b79d-3ae6eba645cc)) - **Documentation Drives Adoption** - Read and emulate good docs; Mintlify-powered docs for MoltBot showcase exemplary onboarding and configuration. - Strong documentation accelerates adoption and experimentation. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Everything from like where you can, you know, where you can deploy that. Of course, the Mac mini, like you mentioned, Jared, Docker, Nix, deploying railway, render, North flank, tons of CLI commands in here. So onboarding, configuring, doctoring, dashboarding and installing. Why would you do that? Skills of course. And then one of my favorites, Cron. Like who doesn't love a good Cron job, right? Man. All my Cron jobs get five stars. That's right. You can also have heartbeats, not just Crons, but heartbeats. There's a difference. Very well done documentation. A lot. I mean, this is an exemplary example. Isn't that what that means? Exemplary? It might be redundant, but that's okay. Sorry about that. It makes sense to me. Okay. Follow me here. Exemplary example. I'm leaning into it. You doubled down on it. I'm doubling. Really well done documentation. ([Time 0:12:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a666191b-a1d1-4788-af5d-f113c036dfe0)) - **Weekend Projects Replacing Subscriptions** - Roberto built three macOS apps with zero prior Swift experience to replace $14–$15/month subscriptions. - He open sourced the projects and demonstrated how cheap, focused apps can replace recurring SaaS fees. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Well, uh, I read this post from Roberto sell Bach. Okay. Your app subscription is now my weekend project. Oh, this plays into the death of SaaS. Jerod Santo It does. Your app subscription is my weekend project. Now this is an old trope or meme, I guess, in developer world. It's like the I could build that in a weekend kind of a thing. Except for is it, his point is probably that that's now less false than it used to be. Well, here's some key points. Adam Stacoviak The author with zero Swift or Mac OS experience built three functional apps, dictation, screen recording, and a Markdown editor to replace 14 to $15 a month of subscriptions they had. Now that to me is a really, really interesting new world, Jared. Isn't it? Let me say that again. Zero Swift Mac OS experience. Three apps replaced $15 a month. Jerod Santo I believe it. I'm building a video editor right now. A Mac OS native. I am. I'm just like, you know what? Why not try it? Why not try it? Cause I can spec out a video editor to work just the way I want it. And none of the extra stuff. Of course we use Adobe Premiere and all their tools and it's got so much in there. And it's like, do I need all this? What if I had one that just worked exactly in like my brain works and i just don't need that anymore now can i get there i don't know i'm not sure if it's going to get there so far it opens up Videos it plays them it has all the keyboard shortcuts i want it does markers ins and outs stuff like that but it doesn't actually do like the the rest just like uh an editor for existing Videos like to create clips and stuff And I never would have even considered such a thing because like I don't know Swift and I did write a Mac app probably 15 years ago, which was really Simple in Objective-C and it was called Detours and its entire point was to manage your Etsy hosts for you without going to the command line. So you could like put in more. Detours? It's called Detours, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was cool. It's very cool. And I had to learn a whole bunch of stuff to do that, which was fun. Good side project. Put it out for free. People downloaded it. People liked it. Eventually it actually didn't use Etsy hosts. It used a different Mac native system that does the same thing via an api that apple built which was really cool and that maybe not have to actually like edit that file and get pseudo privileges And stuff and then they deprecated it and so eventually it quit working and i just didn't care enough to to make it work a different way my point is that i had to learn so much and it was so Simple like literally you put it's a table with like two columns, right? The address and then like the redirect spot, just like your Etsy hosts, which is like space delimited stuff. And I learned so much Objective-C to do that and packaging and Xcode and all this. I would never consider to build a video editor, but you know, your Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription is my weekend project, I guess. I mean, there's so much there that Adobe does that this won't do. But man, just the chutzpah, I don't know. What does it give you? It gives you like the freedom to just try. Adam Stacoviak Well, that goes back to Tom Preston Warner's initial phrase around GitHub, which it was a little bit more crass than that permission to F up. Right. Which I think is really interesting that you say that. And I respond with that because look what happened with GitHub, you know, with open source, even, you know, when you have permission to just try things and permission to just create Things and permission to just join communities and permission to fork things, even a lot, a lot of liberty and a lot of agency comes into play. Yeah. And I would say a lot of courage. I think you have to have courage to like bite off more than you can chew when it comes to even a weekend project. You know, like, why would I do that aside from this assistance? Because the depth is so deep and I may not come back the same person. Okay. Right. I might, I might come out a whole new developer and I might not like myself. Okay. Jerod Santo Right. I came back like in square brackets, you know, I was like, Hey, I actually had spaces. No, come on now. I didn't even mind the square brackets after that. I'm like, you know what? Objective C is not too bad. Then I'm like, what are you talking about, Jared? This stuff is atrocious. You just got used to it. You know? That's right. Yeah. So I am with, is it Federico? What's his name? Roberto. Roberto. My bad, Roberto. That's okay. I think it's cool that we now have leverage, so much so, that we're willing to like dip our toe into other pools to see if the water is warm. And save ourselves some money. Save ourselves some time. Save ourselves some pain. Adam Stacoviak I think he actually may have replaced more money than this. Now I'm looking at the details here. How many subscriptions did he replace well i'm looking at the details here and i wanted to say this one part because this is the part that i really enjoyed about his post he says in the past I used to use loom which i like loom and if you go to loom.com i think you might like them too and they're they're cool right they change things they put a little video recorder in your mac Menu and it's like screen sharing for for sharing like captured to share right to document to share to i've used it in sales scenarios where i want to introduce myself to somebody or i Want to share an idea and rather than the meeting i just tell them the five minute version of what i'm trying to convey skip the meetings, look at the person, you know, and then you can respond In email or with your own video. We can go back and forth if you want to, which we've never done that, but I've used Loom before and had and received value from it. Now I did question the cost because I didn't use it enough to make it worth it. But the value I got when I did use it was great. So it's one of those things where it's like high value, but not frequent enough to make it be like, oh yeah, I should pay for this. So he says, I used to use Loom, which costs 15 bucks a month. And so after creating Jabber, which is what he created, I got excited and vibe coded real, which was the Loom version of it. Simple demo recorder. It's of course, source on GitHub. ([Time 0:21:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/17d05fec-385d-42a8-84ce-2eabe5505392)) - **Audit And Replace Small SaaS** - Audit your SaaS usage and ask whether a small, bespoke tool could replace recurring costs. - Try building a focused replacement as a weekend project before renewing expensive subscriptions. Transcript: Jerod Santo And they're going to apply that inside their personal lives. They're also going to apply that at their work and look at all those subscriptions they have for their business and say, can we run this business a little bit leaner? Do we need all this? Can we build something ourselves? The cost of building your own is coming down. Could that lead to the death of SaaS, the death of software as a subscription? Well, this might be the nail in the coffin right here. Adam Stacoviak Let me read this to you. One more verbatim from Roberto. All right. Can't skip these words. These are good words. I quote, all of these $10 per month apps are suddenly a weekend project for me. I am an engineer, but I have never written a single Mac OS application. I have never even read Swift code in my life. And yet I can now get an app up and running in a couple of hours. This is crazy. I concur, my friend. I concur. This is crazy. So what do you want to say about the death of SAS? ([Time 0:28:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ae8b892d-d65a-45a8-bc44-6a9519d6e13e)) - **Building TunerD To Kill Personal SaaS** - Adam built tunerD to inspect and free Mac memory using local AI prompts and safe dry-run defaults. - The tool streams human-friendly diagnostics and requires explicit execution for destructive actions. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak So I was going to call it Mac tuner. You remember this, Jared? Mac tuner. Mac tuner. Jerod Santo Okay. So clean my Mac. Adam Stacoviak Yeah. So I got frustrated and it was not because of the cost. It was because the, I guess it was kind of cost, RAM costs. Right. So here it is eating up my RAM and I'm like, you know, I'm hitting swap and stuff like that. I'm like, gosh, do I really need, you know, this thing running all the time? And so I was like, I wonder if I can, if I can vibe code a better version of this. Cause I mean, it's just scripts. You know, it is a pretty UI on scripts. I'm like, really, what I want to do is maintain my Mac. And so I was going to call it Mac tuner, which was still cool. I've, I've since changed the name because I'm more nerdy than that. I want it to sound like a system service. So it's called tuner D. T U-n d tuner d tuner d and let me tell you one one of my favorite features is in here is this is that you do tuner d this is a cli tuner d okay memory dash dash ai what do you think that does jared It's gonna tell you how much memory your ais are using man it doesn't even tell me in like a table or a dashboard it's a one-liner call out to clod because i have it installed and cloud code As a matter of fact and haiku so it's super fast like it's almost instant that's how fast it is and instead of waiting for the whole entire thing to like be done and then print it to the screen, It streams it. It looks cool. So rather than like me reading this table about how my memory is, now I'm reading words that are crafted just for me in real time based on what I'm doing here. And it's like, hey, your system's doing great. A little overloaded here and there. Think about Dropbox is always one of the culprits. Oh man. That's what we got a vibe code, a new Dropbox. Jerod Santo Amen. That should be our next project. I kind of feel bad celebrating this. Okay. I really do. Adam Stacoviak I kind of feel bad celebrating this. I did a fist pump and everything. Okay. For the audio listeners. I fist pumped. Okay. Jerod Santo You can't hear those i fist pumped well gosh there's a there's a business sass i guess it also is personal because before business we had our personal dropbox and so yeah there you go and I pay annually i think but you know that's a form of monthly that's a big software as a service for both individuals and teams making tons of money, sitting there, not really doing much That I can see outside of the box. You know, that's right. Like it's there now. I will tell you, let me tell you what it's what it's doing here. What's the last Dropbox feature that they added where you're like, oh, that's cool. I've been waiting for that. I can't think of one. So the coolest feature they added probably in the last 10 years was Selective Sync. Adam Stacoviak That was a big deal. Tune or D memory dash dash A. Oh, gosh, this is so beautiful. I love this. I love vibe code. I'm just kidding. I'm not going to say it. I can't go there. I can't say it. It's just too not nice. Can you share it so we can see it? Yeah, I'll screen share this. Jerod Santo Oh, my goodness. Did you know the original Dropbox Selective Sync 1.0 came out in 2010? That's crazy. Adam Stacoviak That's 16 years ago. Okay. Do you see this, Jared? Jerod Santo Yes. Adam Sokoviak at AS-MBp that's right i assume that's your initials and your macbook pro and it's an m1 that's right okay all right your naming conventions prepare for this tuner d that's Adam Stacoviak It okay let's see it analyzing haiku oh you says a panel just fine that's cool look at this oh that it's it's mad about granola they're running too if you keep chrome it just yelled about Dropbox the formatting is a little weird here in this smaller screen though what's going on here okay there we go you've got it bigger than that yeah yeah so maybe some some touches and Some feelies on that one there now it's not upset about let's run it and see if we get a new result here. Why? Cause it, was it complaining about Dropbox? It just complained about it and I cleared it to do this demo. There you go. There you go. Now it's upset about Dropbox again. See, it's like, if you want the single biggest quick win, quit Granola. I don't even know why it's running. And Dropbox 1.1 GB. That's RAM. Is granola and what's it doing or granola is uh what is granola granola like records it helps you with your meetings it takes your meeting notes for you gotcha but like if i after this call Jerod Santo It's gonna be like man jared was really on fire today maybe so great takes and hilarious even when you're not actively syncing look at this 2.4 gigs consumed zero downside or zero downside In that case yeah but then you could also do what can you do tuner d memory release or whatever, like free it. You know, see that now, see, now you get the whole dashboard. Adam Stacoviak Would you see that down there? Now it's printing out down there too, but you get the full on dashboard. Look at this heavy Google Chrome. Always like, look at these guys, these culprits here. Adobe CC, not even using it right now. Come on. Jerod Santo Dash, dash, kill. You can just kill the stuff, you know? Adam Stacoviak Well, I don't do that because it's going to knock you out of our session. Jerod Santo Don't do it. It'll kill you. Adam Stacoviak I haven't done this yet. So there is, let's see what the dash help says. Are you sure you want to do this? Let's see here. We got some cleaning we could do. Execute? That's the word you chose? Jerod Santo Dash dash execute? I'm just reading your docs. It says, scroll down slightly. Apps uninstall Slack dash, dash execute. Yeah. Adam Stacoviak Well, the reason why is I didn't want this thing to be, especially with uninstallations, I didn't want it to be like accidentally uninstalling Slack or something like that. I want it to be safe to run initially. And rather than running like dash in for a, or a dry run dash dash dry run, I wanted to actually make it so it was explicit. So some of these installations are like system, you know, issue stuff where you had, you know, you had to do dash dash execute. So if you want to install something, you have to be explicit and put the slice your neck off situation here. Jerod Santo Yeah, it seems like a more like a guillotine scenario. I think I would advise like dash dash seriously. I wrote that copy. Adam Stacoviak Mac OS system tuning toolkit. ([Time 0:33:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/174e99d1-20cc-4f88-a0aa-844d821a96ae)) - **Bespoke Tools Threaten Niche SaaS** - The rise of easy bespoke tools means some SaaS with narrow feature sets face disruption. - Large, complex platforms remain hard to replace, but many niche subscriptions become viable weekend projects. Transcript: Jerod Santo That's going to work. Well, you could Malt bought it. You could Malt bought it. You got heartbeat checks in there, which is that. So I'm of two minds. There are two hearts of this where like I get excited and I'm thinking like power to the people to build their own stuff and save money. And then on the other side, it's like, yeah, but I also have all these other people who've been building these software services and built lives and careers and hired a bunch of people And helped them make a career of themselves and they're now threatened obviously you can't stop the system once it's moving but this is why people are talking about the death of SaaS. And I think mostly this conversation has been going on around recent stock market moves because the SaaS bundle of stocks have all been trending downward over the last six months. We talk about Adobe. We talk about Atlassian. We talk about Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, DocuSign, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Go ahead and find your SaaS ETF and you'll find all the tickers who seem to be trending down. And not just with your typical market movements. I mean, that's what people are saying is like, this seems like a sector that is losing value and that can be concerning. And also a sector that needs to maybe find itself on the other side of the AI wave and, and hope, and some will find it through and others won't. Your thoughts? Adam Stacoviak I think there's some that, uh, I'm actually on drwealth.com right now. I just Googled quickly SAS bundle stock. Thank you for that new phrase in my lexicon, Jared. I didn't think of that phrase. I'm down with it. Keyworded it for you. Yeah. Zoom. I'm not sure who would vibe code a Zoom. Yeah. I'm not sure if you can vibe code a Zoom. Maybe you could, but there's a lot there. There's a lot going on there. Could you vibe code a DocuSign? I think signatures in the case of everyday folks is so free. Like I know Dropbox has it. And DocuSign might even have a free version. But once you get into that market where you for sure need to have like daily signatures, you're not going to vibe code a DocuSign. There's too much legality in there. I don't think you would at least. Not in 26, maybe 27, 28. Shopify, would you vibe code away at Shopify? I mean, that's maybe for your individual self. Rails, you got Rails, right? That's what Shopify is. So on an individual level, you could do that. But would you replace the entire platform? I don't think you could do that with a vibe code. Jerod Santo Could you vibe code Cloudflare away maybe in parts i don't look at cloudflare so much as a sass as it is like in for internet infrastructure maybe it's in the bundle there parts of it yeah Adam Stacoviak For sure cloudflare twilio would you would you vibe code twilio away i'd vibe code on it not away yeah what if find another, you know, base layer that's just cheap and doesn't just has Jerod Santo An API or just an MCP server, you know, all the extra stuff they built around it is where the money is. Yeah. I mean, I think probably you got CTOs and their CFO looking at this sort of strange new world and saying, well, who, what are our biggest subscriptions? And they're like, well, we spend $300,000 a year on DocuSign. Like, I just made the number up. Adam Stacoviak No, no. I'm, I'm, yeah. You're the guy. I said, I'm responding. Exactly. I'm the responder. Jerod Santo I'm like, what? Yeah. Like, could we, do we need all of those features? No, we don't. What part of DocuSign do we use? That's right. And then they list out like the four things that we do. Maybe we do them a lot. And then like, you know, can you put two engineers on that for two weeks and see what they can come up with? Two days, Jared. Two days. I'm being generous. A weekend. Weekend project for two devs. That's right. Or one dev and two clods. Or a dev, a clod and a molt, you know? And see what they can do. I feel like lots of people are doing that and are going to continue to do that more and more as these tools become more capable. And I do feel like we've crossed the threshold where capability is now viability. I mean, they're very useful now. It's not just the promise. It's the delivery. Are there problems? Yes. Is it a hundred percent amazing? No. Do you still need to know stuff? Absolutely. Like all those caveats aside, there's real value here and it's starting to be realized and it's going to change things. Adam Stacoviak I wonder if it's back to the days of service providers versus software as a service what if we're in the day of bespoke software for me because how much sass like you just said with docusign When we start to examine and audit what ([Time 0:41:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8b7b7cff-6afc-4898-be74-f4d1b6adeb80)) - **Just-In-Time Personal Interfaces** - AI enables just-in-time, personalized interfaces and data views that replace clunky vendor UIs. - Jerod used Claude to fetch and render years of his utility data into a one-off HTML report in minutes. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Product marketer who has never touched a thing, vibe codes for the most part. And maybe you have a couple engineers sort of like making these things are legitimate and secure and the things that really matter to the business like that's one thing that the Damien Tanner and I talked about he was saying how he was evaluating a CRM tool and they actually used it for a bit I forget which one he said they use I think he may have said it earlier I'm not sure If he did and he questioned he's like gosh I don't really get a lot of value. They make me go to this web front end. That's not really for me in this dashboard. That's not really helpful, but I do need to keep track of these things. And so he said, he just riffed for like four minutes into like text to speech and YOLO'd, whatever that was. And out the other end came this CRM they're now using. We speculated on that conversation like what if we're in the era of just in time just for me interfaces and it's not really the death of sass necessarily it's like maybe it's always ill Placed or misplaced or we still need the api maybe we still need some things from it but the UI layer is for the, I think, I think Damien said this, I'm going to say it too. The dumb, slow humans. Like you don't need that for a fast AI. You don't need that web UI. You need an API, maybe a CLI, maybe an MCP server. If you're, if that's not a bad word around here, you know, gosh, MCP, check yourself. You know, that's, that's what his speculation was, was this world, like just in time interfaces just for me, bespoke. Jerod Santo I can see that being the case. If you think about it, what we're doing today, which is like, and which we've been doing for a couple of years now, which is like, I don't write SQL anymore. And Matt Reier doesn't have to build his Grafana dashboards anymore. And the honeycomb thing writes its own stuff. You describe what you want. Like that's kind of a first iteration of a bespoke interface based on demand. Like a SQL query is that it's just a hardcore nerdy one, right? Like I want to see all the sales where this amount was less than this amount. And then like, make sure you don't include the ones from Australia, but then do that. And like, you tell it that, and it builds you that query and it shows you that data. And that is a bespoke one-off ad hoc interface to the information based on a human's desires. And as the tools get more tools to build with, it was very simple to say, I actually did this recently. Here's a good personal example. I went into my OPPD account, which is Omaha Public Power District. That's our local energy partner. And they provide, I think it's like 12, that's more than 12. I think it's like 18 months of your history in this like wonky UI that's a single page app that was built by some low-end dev you know who just got hired or whatever intern project and I'm Looking at like the URL and I want more information than that and I want a better chart than that but I'm because I want to know like how am I doing now versus you know previous years and so I can tell from their API calls because I'm a nerd so I open up the thing and I'm like, yeah, they're just like, they're paginating this collection and it's just the UI that's limited. And the UI stinks. And I'm like, all I gotta do is give that to Claude and say, look, this, here's my cookies. Here's the API calls. Just see how many months you can actually go back then build me an html page that has a chart that provides like monthly yearly comparisons like all the things that i want to see and like Seven minutes later i was looking at five years of data what yeah i was looking at my whole history on my own website running from inside my browser that's just sitting on my desktop, an HTML file. Just in time bespoke for me. And that was cool. And then I was like, you know what? I love that. I'm done with it. You know, like I don't need it anymore. I can open it up whenever I want. It's historical data, so it's not going to change. I can look at that. And then next year when they have more data, I can go ahead and just rerun the things. They grab the latest and throw it in there. And that is, I think, more and more and more of that's going to happen. So I think he's onto something. ([Time 0:46:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9f01a1c7-085e-48d2-9407-3cb7d18216b8)) - **AI Told A Family Trip Bedtime Story** - Jerod used Claude to craft a 20-minute, highly specific bedtime story about a family trip that felt eerily accurate. - The story pulled from his prompts and chat history to recreate trip details and captivated his son. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Let me share one really uncanny story that I think was just really wild. We took this trip in October to Pennsylvania because I'm from Pennsylvania originally. And we had this, you know, we ended up getting the stomach flu, which made the trip kind of suck really bad. I'll spray those details because they get kind of gory. But it was fun. It was a cabin in the woods in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Beautiful. Like this area is beautiful. It's the fall time, autumn time. And it's when the leaves are turning and so they were just beginning to turn and so like this is beautiful mountain air you know just amazing magical and i think we i had done some planning With my clots of my wife uses chat i use clod she now uses chat and clod i still just use Claude because I'm biased. Anyways, that's a different, different concern. But because it knew I planned this trip and what we were doing, maybe it didn't even know all this, but I asked it because I tell my son's stories at bedtime. And I said, well, you know, rather than me make up this story about our trip, because we want to reflect back on where we had been. We love to like reflect back on our fun times, the good old days, which was basically yesterday. And, and I had Claude make up this story. And I, you know, similar to Damien, I just voiced in their dictation, push the microphone button. Hey, Claude, you know, do this, that, this story went, went to Pennsylvania. Here's where we're at. This is zip code. Kind of give us some, some context and details that it can use to come up with some, you know, some kind of realistic version of it. This thing told us a story. I swear it was there with us, dude. Like that's how good the story was. So it retold this hike story we did at Ohio Powell. It's about a four mile hike what we saw the landmarks we saw the bridge we crossed like where we stopped at where we got the ice cream from like dude like it knew these things it retold us Where i swear it was there with us that's how good the story was like that is wild that's not a nap that's just entertain me stuff right yeah so what what did you have the voice mode on the Jerod Santo Entire time or something how did it know everything where you went oh that's because i told it in the oh you gave it my prompt was just detailed got you i think it had some chat history too Adam Stacoviak It may have pulled from but i was like are we gonna go to this cabin or that cabin it wasn't like playing this whole trip for me i think it may have had some data in our chat history potentially But my prompt to it was like we went to ohio powell give me an ohio powell story where took this hike and i told the loop we took and so it knew the loop it knew the place where we'd go get the Ice cream and knew the different stops we'd take it like horseshoe falls and stuff like that and so because it knew all that or it could go and find it and research it quickly it just did And it gave me a 20-minute story to read to my son and it was the first time i'd read to him like a story where he didn't fall asleep during the story because he was gripped by the realism of It being our story he's like dad did it just tell us what we did? I'm like, it basically did, son. It basically did. It was so close to being our story. ([Time 0:54:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/451888be-8403-443a-bb4b-8182f5b9edfe)) - **AI Audio As An Accessible Alternative** - AI-generated 'podcasts' and audio summaries can make technical content more accessible when reading isn't practical. - Hosts warn AI content should be transparent and avoid pretending to be humans. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Notebook LM is pretty wild. Jerod Santo Coming for our job, man, the podcasting. Adam Stacoviak You know what? I had this different take on it because what's the easiest way to describe it? Like I was learning some stuff, and there's not a lot of content on some of the things I'm trying to learn. And so rather than that, I will kind of like have this session with Claude and I'll tell it to summarize it for me. And I'll shove that into notebook LM. It'll create a podcast. Now it's not that great. It's not that great of a podcast, but it- Yeah, I listened to one. It will still do the audible version of the information, but- Right. It's kind of, I think that the future of whatever it is will be better. Current iteration, good enough. I see the value. Jerod Santo So I'm mostly kidding when I say they're coming for our job. I think it's silly they call it a podcast when literally it just means two people talking. Right. But I mean, I guess that's what a lot of podcasts are, you know, two people talking. Yeah. So here we are. But, and I was kind of offended because the way it opened up was like, they're talking about what they had for lunch and stuff. And I'm like, I know neither one of you had lunch. Like I understand it would be valuable. And yeah, that's obviously just one example. It was the example that Google was using at the time. So I feel like it was fair judgment, but it makes sense if you have like a hairy topic or a boring topic, hearing two people talk about it back and forth is easier to consume and more enjoyable To consume than like sitting there and reading or even having an LM summarized for you. So I do see the value there. I think it's silly to call that a podcast, but I think it's probably the closest approximation to what people expect from a podcast. So I get it. ([Time 0:58:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1d6ab75a-ac8b-4427-b78e-ef8d119f66be)) - **SRE Skills Are The New Differentiator** - As creation becomes easier, operating and securing software (SRE) grows in importance. - Maintaining uptime, security, and reproducibility becomes the core competitive skill. Transcript: Jerod Santo And I wasn't sure exactly what you meant by service providers, but the post was the future of software engineering is SRE. And his entire point, I think that was Swizzik Teller, his point was that as the creation of software becomes easier and easier and features and ideas and implementation get less important, What gets more important is the ability to maintain, secure, and operate that which has been created over a long period of time. And I think that kind of dovetails into your point about service providers. And I wondered if I was picking up what you're putting down or if I was misreading what you were saying. Adam Stacoviak Yeah, I think this is similar because I was saying, you know, you can have the product manager and not saying that product managers can't or even product marketers can't be developers. They totally can be. But by and large, they're usually not. They're usually adjacent. And they're usually going to be vibe coding because they're not steeped in Swift or steeped in something or other. And they're certainly not going to be steeped in security. They may have security theory, but not be really that deep. Whereas the engineer is super steeped in it, usually, especially in a shift left scenario so i think the one you're referring to is the future of software engineering is sre yeah you Know reading this i do agree with that because if you run your if you build some of these things for yourself if you vibe code your own sasses let's say and you kill some stuff that is in your Life. Likely in today's world, 2026, you're going to be engineering or engineering adjacent, not like two or three steps to Kevin Bacon away from software developer. Likely. Yeah. And then you're gonna be responsible for keeping that thing up or turning it into a reproducible product that you can conjure or call upon when it makes sense. Maybe you make an iOS app. Maybe you do something else. Maybe you make a web page. Either way, you're going to be responsible for some version of uptime. So, yeah, in that case, that does apply. ([Time 1:03:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b46babe9-17ac-4587-8ba3-597a6ca7425f)) - **Be An Open, Reliable API Provider** - If you offer an API, be generous: provide reliable, well-documented access and avoid tight rate limits that block developers. - Treat your product as infrastructure so others can build bespoke layers on top of it. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Yeah, I think this is similar because I was saying, you know, you can have the product manager and not saying that product managers can't or even product marketers can't be developers. They totally can be. But by and large, they're usually not. They're usually adjacent. And they're usually going to be vibe coding because they're not steeped in Swift or steeped in something or other. And they're certainly not going to be steeped in security. They may have security theory, but not be really that deep. Whereas the engineer is super steeped in it, usually, especially in a shift left scenario so i think the one you're referring to is the future of software engineering is sre yeah you Know reading this i do agree with that because if you run your if you build some of these things for yourself if you vibe code your own sasses let's say and you kill some stuff that is in your Life. Likely in today's world, 2026, you're going to be engineering or engineering adjacent, not like two or three steps to Kevin Bacon away from software developer. Likely. Yeah. And then you're gonna be responsible for keeping that thing up or turning it into a reproducible product that you can conjure or call upon when it makes sense. Maybe you make an iOS app. Maybe you do something else. Maybe you make a web page. Either way, you're going to be responsible for some version of uptime. So, yeah, in that case, that does apply. What I meant by a service provider is this. There are businesses out there that the large part of their secret sauce is somebody else's and their data trapped in somebody else's sass. And if they could just find a service provider, an engineer, a software developer to go and build their special thing for them, Well, now they take back control. Maybe they free up $15,000, $30,000 a year in would-be SaaS expenditures. And it's not because the SaaS isn't good enough. It's because it's not just in time and bespoke enough. I think there's a lot of use cases out there where there's people using SaaS because that's the only option. It's not delivered in a box anymore. It's only delivered as a service via the wire, via HTTP. And not many of them are leveraging APIs. In fact, most don't even know what an API is, but I do and you do, Jared. And what if there was a bunch of Adam and Jared's out there that's like, you know what, I'm going to go help my neighbor who runs this cool business that spends way too much on SAS, build Their own thing and now have their own secret sauce and have that thing locked down. Then you get into the SRE land. Cause you got to keep that thing up and you know this, right? Right. Heroku days, right? You got to keep it up. You got fly, you got render, you got Heroku, you got Railway, you got all these hosting providers. Or even if you got crazy, went out to Hesner, got your own box, dialed it in, you know, put it in the cloud, boom, shaka. You got your own box, you got your own GP, you got your own CP, you got your own RAM, you got your own disk, whatever. And you know what you want. But the service provider, I think this coming future, there's a lot of value to capture in the place where you got people out there spending way too much on SaaS because they have no other Choice. And it's a dang shame because they're giving all that data to one, two or three service providers, providers, that really don't care about them because they're not in the community. ([Time 1:04:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/98dc00b3-8568-480f-9946-fd4d20fcfcf8))