Very Important Agents  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: Very Important Agents - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/4a623a66-abde-4f0b-96b0-9b26de3d9282 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Databases Must Be Agent-Friendly** - Tiger Data pitched Agentec Postgres as a database built specifically for AI agents with native search and instant zero-copy forks. - Nick framed agents as the new developers that call, retrieve, parallelize, and expect different database behavior than humans. Transcript: Jerod Santo Well, friends, Agentic Postgres is here. And it's from our friends over at Tiger Data. This is the very first database built for agents, and it's built to let you build faster. You know, a fun side note is 80% of Clodd was built with AI. Over a year ago, 25% of Google's code was AI generated. It's safe to say that now it's probably close to 100%. Most people I talk to, most developers I talk to right now, almost all their code is being generated. That's a different world. Here's the deal. Agents are the new developers. They don't click. They don't scroll. They call. They retrieve. They parallelize. They plug in your infrastructure to places you need it to perform, but your database is probably still thinking about humans only because that's kind of where Postgres is at. Taggart Data's philosophy is that when your agents need to spin up sandboxes, run migrations, query huge volumes of vector and text data, well, normal Postgres, it might choke. And so they fix that. Here's where we're at right now. Agentec Postgres delivers these three big leaps, native search and retrieval, instant zero copy forks, and MCP server, plus your CLI, plus a cool free tier. ([Time 0:00:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ca0fe032-7eaf-4467-b28c-cbfd41a64150)) - **Vision Pro Coffee Shop Moment** - Nick worked from a coffee shop wearing an Apple Vision Pro and described the strange Zoom avatar experience. - He bought the new Vision Pro terabyte model on release day in San Francisco despite limited stock and cost. Transcript: Nick Nisi Before coming home to record this fantastic show with y'all, I was at a coffee shop wearing my vision pro working at a coffee shop. At a coffee shop. You're that guy. I'm that guy and proud to be it. You're the Vim. You're the very important man with this very important Vision Pro on his face. Jerod Santo Now, Jared, had I known this information prior to the invitation, I would have considered rescinding. Just rescind that. I mean, we could do it right now. Oh, no. Just like a five-minute episode. All right, y'all. This is the show. That's it. Sorry, guys. Nick dropped the ball. ([Time 0:05:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1b806dc-c975-45db-895c-7523b64512e0)) - **Anthropic + Bun: Focus On AI Tooling** - Anthropic acquired Bun while keeping it open-source and MIT-licensed and promised continued public development. - The acquisition aims to accelerate Bun for AI coding tools like Claude Code and make runtimes faster and smaller. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Three, two, one. Bun is being bi-anthropic. Yes. Oh, you didn't say it. You're waiting for me. Nick Nisi I said bun. I didn't know if you were going to say Anthropic or Bun, so I was trying to match. I know. That was good. Adam Stacoviak So Anthropic, the corporation behind such products as Claude and Claude Code. I'm not sure what else they got going for them. Claude for Chrome. Okay. We might talk about that later. That'll come up later for sure. I think they use Bun. I think Claude is like written in Bun style JavaScript stuff. I guess, is there a Bun style? I'm far enough away from Bun at this point. I've interviewed Jared a couple of times, but it's been a few years that I can't remember how different it is from Node. Is it Node compatible? I think so. Okay. So it's like, take your Node code and run it faster with some other stuff they added over. Anyways, I'm flaunting my ignorance here. But I'm pretty sure that Claude code is written in Bunn and then Anthropic because they're flush with all this investor money, I assume. Like raising billions and billions of dollars and they're like we're gonna buy it bun and uh bun said yes which i think is what i would say if i was running bun wouldn't you guys i mean they're Jerod Santo Probably getting a bunch of money so that's a bunch of baloney that sounds uh bun-tastic i don't know what to think oh why not i mean it's exciting right but what ([Time 0:10:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8ed6295e-5514-49e1-bf3c-b1cc39f08a6e)) - **People Leave Platforms Over Trust, Not UX** - Projects and communities are moving off GitHub for governance and trust reasons, not because the UX is unfamiliar. - GitHub's erosion is driven by neglect, bloat, and unpopular changes like pervasive Copilot integration. Transcript: Jerod Santo I've heard of this. I didn't give it much attention. Adam Stacoviak And so you're saying that Git recently moved? No, I'm saying Zig. The Zig programming language. Zig program. Okay, my bad. Not Git itself. Yeah, my bad. Zig then. So Zig moved from GitHub to Codeberg. And what they said, Andrew Kelly, who's the founder, founder, sorry, the creator of the programming language. I guess he's also founded it, but different communities there. What he said is that the only thing or what I read out of his post is like the main thing that he's going to experience pain moving away from is GitHub sponsors. Because that's how they have received a lot of the recurring donations and have allowed the programming language to flourish over the years. And so now they're moving off that and they're trying to find out how to get their donators to move with them without losing a bunch of money. And so that's what their main concern. So there's your, there's your moat. GitHub is apparently sponsors, also they'll just completely ignore right yeah that's all i could do on that one man long sigh uh you know we've just i just don't even know i guess they Jerod Santo Need a head of product on it that just cares deeply and won't stop or leave And they just don't have that. I think Devin, she had different ideas. Who else was it? We knew that worked there. Jessica, but I can't remember her last name. Lord. She was there for a bit. She came on the pod when she first joined GitHub with that role. I did say pod. And then since then, I'm not sure who's been in charge of it. Adam Stacoviak I don't think anyone's in charge of it. Nick Nisi I mean, yeah, they don't even have a CEO, right? Like, no, they don't. Adam Stacoviak What's going on over there? ([Time 0:29:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dbe4df19-c36d-4a10-aeae-dd616a352b26)) - **Kid Cried Over AI Stunt Video** - Nick made an Sora video of himself crashing a motorcycle to prank his mom and showed it to his six-year-old who then cried. - He learned to be careful showing hyper-real AI videos to kids because they may not distinguish fiction from reality. Transcript: Nick Nisi I download them no i do not show them to my kids i made that mistake okay specifically do not show them to your kids i have a six-year and I made a video of me crashing a motorcycle. And I was going to send it to my mom as like, you know, could I trick her into thinking I got a motorcycle or something? ([Time 0:39:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e0a72e19-de1f-456d-b554-955e7f84412b)) - **Package Agent Skills As Installable Modules** - Publish reusable agent 'skills' or marketplace repos so you can pick, share, and version agent behaviors instead of scattering dotfiles. - Use clear names and marketplace manifests so others can install and customize your agents. Transcript: Nick Nisi And then you can like install all of these plugins from me that are like agents or commands or whatever and it's just a way for me to like move them out of my dot files and into a a way that you Adam Stacoviak Can pick and choose which ones that you actually want and play around with it what are some of the skills you may find there yeah do you have any nunchuck skills any go hunting skills i've Nick Nisi Been talking a lot with uh with chris bone skull bone skull hiller i almost said bone skill because he's bone skills that'd be a good rebrand yeah we've been going back and forth on this Because he's he's digging really into this as well is he digging into this oh yeah okay um and the like one that that's really good is uh i have a code simplifier one that like, after we get Something working, this just goes through and it tries to like, in a way, de-slopify the code. So it's going to remove the comments that no human would actually write. It's going to simplify things. It's going to look for things, but it's, it's going to do it, uh, like around the vision that it shouldn't break the exit like the things that work right now it should just clean the code Adam Stacoviak Up right and so that's like a great thing to run so i just told my claw to do that at times now but does your skill have like details about how you want that to happen is that what the skill is In there yeah instead of saying like hey do a pass and just clean everything up like it actually has details okay and how do you trigger that then i just it's set up as an agent a subagent Nick Nisi So it'll like kick off its own context window and go so i just say ask agent code simplifier to simplify this code or something like that can't you give it a cooler name than that like why Adam Stacoviak Are you gonna call it agent code simplifier can you like agent X or something, you know? Nick Nisi Well, because it's in my marketplace now, it's like at Nick Neasy colon essentials slash. I don't know. Like, yeah, it's a whole thing now. But you could call it whatever you want. You could take it and copy it and call it whatever you want. That's a cool one. ([Time 0:48:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eb0525d3-29ff-4e1d-9f71-b20f2647c837)) - **Team-Of-One With Many AI Instances** - Nick operates as a team-of-one but runs up to 14 Cloud Code instances concurrently and manages them with tmux. - He built a tmux dashboard to monitor Claude statuses and track projects waiting on AI responses. Transcript: Nick Nisi Currently a team of one uh so I make up for that by having a up to, I think I've had up to 14 cloud code instances running simultaneously. And I use Tmux to manage it all. I built like a little Tmux floating window dashboard that I can pop up and it shows me like, you know, this project is waiting on a response for me. This project's done. And like, it shows me the Claude status of each one. Adam Stacoviak Do you ever feel like you're babysitting? Yes. Nick Nisi Constantly. Adam Stacoviak Yes. Constantly. I bet. ([Time 0:53:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7566062b-fb13-43e2-abe6-4583f75b88d4)) - **Chat UIs Could Replace Traditional Browsers** - Browsers are struggling to find their role as LLMs embed UIs and render web content inside chat interfaces. - Nick thinks the future could be chat-driven UIs that render third-party pages inline instead of navigating to sites. Transcript: Nick Nisi I think that this might be like a canary in the coal mine of where this is heading in that everything sucks. All the browsers suck right now. And it's like when I think about other tools that are out there, like, like chat GPT's, um, whatever they call MCP. Um, but like, you know, MCP tools and there's an MCP UI project that will like, will take, it's a tool that will render a UI for you, uh, in your, your window. So like you can, you can have a chat and like the, the perfect example I have is like, you're talking to chat GPT and like you tell it to find you an apartment in San Francisco with two bedrooms Within walking distance of wherever. And it will, and under this budget and it like loads like a Zillow page in there, a Zillow map. And you can move around the map right in your chat window. You didn't go to Zillow.com. It's like loading that and helping you find it right in the chat there. And then you can have a contextual conversation around that. I feel like that's where things could be going. And like the browsers just not figuring out like where they belong in this is indicative of that being the future. ([Time 1:03:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6e0b8d9d-4c05-455d-b15b-6bbab59c403a)) - **Automate PR Triage Into One Inbox** - Automate repetitive inbox triage by routing GitHub emails to an LLM summarizer and then into your task manager. - Use shortcuts to summarize PRs and create review tasks so you only act on one unified inbox. Transcript: Nick Nisi Is a ton of power in there right now because specifically they have a bubble that you can drag in. That is send this input to chat GPT. Here's a prompt, get some output and do stuff with it. And you can have triggers and the triggers can be like when a mail message comes in. And so I just set one up to where whenever a mail message comes in from GitHub and it has a PR number or an issue number in the subject, it takes that message, it to chatGBT, summarizes it, Gets the link out of it, and then it creates a new to-do, make sure that a to-do doesn't exist already, and sends it to OmniFocus to put it in my inbox so that I only have one inbox to check For those things. Adam Stacoviak I'm questioning if you actually do any work for WorkOS at this point. I was just over here thinking, this guy's a really sophisticated code monkey. I mean, look, he's just taking PRs right out of the email, going right into my to-do list. Just send it to me. I'm going to put it right into my to-do list. Nick Nisi I send them to Claude Code for Web, and Claude makes a PR. That's the next step of it. ([Time 1:13:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc962115-2cc2-446e-a2d5-24909c961ef7)) - **More Output, Less Handwritten Code** - AI will let you produce more output while writing fewer lines of code; involvement shifts from typing to orchestration. - Nick predicts developers will write less code but produce more software next year. Transcript: Nick Nisi Yeah um i think that like the code the code that we're writing is if you're still writing a lot of code, you're going to write less next year. I think that that's a given at this point. Uh, I think there's more, you're going to produce more, but you're going to write less. You're going to be involved less in the day to day minutia of the code. Uh, there's ways around that to be as productive, I think. Like one thing, I don't know. You asked for a prediction. I guess that's my prediction. ([Time 1:27:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d3a60d79-9d6f-4c9a-8726-d8cedb7dbfc6)) - **Control AI With Output Styles** - When using AI to generate code, define output styles that make the model stub minutiae and ask you for core decisions. - Review and own AI-produced commits so your reputation remains attached to quality code. Transcript: Nick Nisi Yeah um i think that like the code the code that we're writing is if you're still writing a lot of code, you're going to write less next year. I think that that's a given at this point. Uh, I think there's more, you're going to produce more, but you're going to write less. You're going to be involved less in the day to day minutia of the code. Uh, there's ways around that to be as productive, I think. Like one thing, I don't know. You asked for a prediction. I guess that's my prediction. Can I give you a recommendation of something to try? Jerod Santo You can do what you want. Nick Nisi All right. So I'm talking about Claude code because that's the one that I use the most. But you could probably do this with the other ones. But Claude has this thing called output styles that they deprecated. And then they got pushback on that. And so they undeprecated it. And so it's still here, at least for right now. But it's a way to change the system prompt a little bit so that you can tell it exactly how you want it to respond to you. And it ships with two examples. One of them is explanatory where it'll like give you like a little insight bubbles about why it's making a decision that it made or whatever. And the other one is learning. And that learning one is specifically for, you know, I want to go learn the go programming language. And so when you have that enabled, it's going to optimize for you to fill out like some of the more like, Oh, it'd be good for you to learn how to do loops in go. So I'm going to stub out this method and you're going to fill it in. And it'll like give you prompts and tell you how to, how to do it in like code comments. And then you can, it'll pause there and have you do it, but you can ask questions before moving on. You can tweak that. You can make it in as many output styles as you want, but you can tweak that and you can tweak it to be more of like a business logic-y one. I forgot what I exactly call mine. It's like, yeah, I can't remember what I call it. Basically fill out the minutia of the code, like stub out this method, add the getters and setters and all that stuff that is boring, you know, just get the work done work, have it do that. But then like the core business logic stuff, pause and let me do that. And we'll talk about it and walk through it together. And you can even do most of it maybe, but like that way you're more involved in what the code is actually doing. You're stopping to take part and participate because otherwise the code is just scrolling by you. And then, you know, already like in the past, you know, six months go by and I have no idea what code I wrote six months ago that I have to go debug. It's like that week to week now with all of this code. So if you're not keeping yourself involved in it, then you don't really have a solid footing mentally on what code is passing by you and that your name is being attached to because it's Still your name on the commit. ([Time 1:27:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/308bff64-7bcd-4482-8007-d1e10fbff9c9))