00:38:23 · Khe Hy
[00:38:23] S2: Matt, has your view I know early in the skills shift, you were a very big supporter of Skill Creator. I think I saw a tweet from you recently that is maybe more skeptical of Skill Creator. I know personally that I've pushed people to use Skill Creator. I use it all the time. And now it's these, like, overbuilt... Someone even asked me, Do you think they're overbuilding them to just, like, subconsciously have you use more tokens? I'm like, Dude, I just need you to print one number, and you wrote me a book.
00:38:58 · Matt Stockton
[00:38:58] S1: This kind of ties to a more general view I have here, is that these models are amazing, right? Like, you can type things in and get things back, and they're great, right? But there is this weird kind of like dopamine hit of like just getting things coming out of the machine to the point of like, sometimes, like, you know, you're not reading things that you should be reading. So clearly, you shouldn't say like, Go create me a skill that does a memo, and then just say, Okay, this skill's done, right? Like, there's a lot of value, I think, from like stepping away from these tools, like, and just opening a notepad on your system and, like, writing down what you want, like typing words or describing what you want. I think that is the failure mode is that, like, you don't actually spend the time to read what these things are producing, whether it be the skills themselves or some meta instructions that you're using. But it's a balance, right? I think, you know, I'm assuming that the companies have spent a bunch of time on these Skill Creator skills such that they produce the shape of output that does best in their system. But yeah, like you got to spend the time to make sure that what you're using is like what you actually intend to use.
00:40:17 · Brett Caughran
[00:40:17] S0: And the hill climber mode is the sort of mindset is so valuable. I've sort of thought about it as like the red pen phase, because I feel like the natural impulse of Wall Street users with these tools, as you run an earnings preview, you get it back and you're just like, Oh, this is awful. Right? Rather than saying, Okay, this isn't great, but how can I red pen this and give feedback back into the model to go back in and change the skill and do that two or three or four? I even find myself sort of having to nudge myself to hill climb with that red pen mode. Like you're just not going to get there right out of the box. Like the first shot is almost never going to be ideally how you want. Ideally how you want. One example I give is LLMs think that goodwill impairments are really, really scary things for companies. Like you can't buy the stock because there's going to be a goodwill impairment coming, which is just an accounting thing. So you get that back. You have to be like, no, don't. Never in the future cite goodwill impairment as a key risk to a company that's more of an accounting dynamic rather than a fundamental fundamental dynamics. There's a lot of these different debugging things that you have to go through to to get these things to speak your language.
00:41:38 · Matt Stockton, Brett Caughran
[00:41:38] S1: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think another thing that that's interesting too is, you know, these models are ultimately, they're good at, you know, distilling text, they're good at writing code to produce things. But they're ultimately nondeterministic, right? Like, they are nondeterministic machines, right? And so if you're trying to solve a problem that requires determinism, or is a calculation, like, sometimes it's better to just write the code or do it somewhere else. So like, you definitely... I mean, LLMs, this is a tool, right? And so like, you can't... For some of the things you're trying to do, maybe it's not the right tool for the job. And just like always having that in mind too is like, it's something that you can use in your broader workflow, but it's not always the thing you need to reach for everything. [00:42:31] S0: Matt, how do you see the tool stack evolving? I mean, there's sort of been this debate on using actual agents like OpenClaw and Ermes. I've seen more and more of my friends sort of shift from building in Claude Co. To actually using Claude Co. Work, for lean on the consistency of the harness. So it feels like there's a little bit of a trend of abstraction into the super apps. Here's your perspective on that and where you see things going over. Where do you think what do you see as like the current trend and where do you see things going in that regard?
00:43:09 · Matt Stockton
[00:43:09] S1: Yeah, yeah. Admittedly, I never got into the OpenCLAR or Hermes thing. Like my tools that I use on a day to day basis are basically ClawdCode and Codecs. I think that tools like Codecs, have made incredible progress in the last six months to be much more accessible to a wider and more general audience, folks that aren't doing code. Mean, it's unfortunate that Claude Code is named Claude Code because people are like, Okay, I don't code, I don't need that. But for the longest time, before co work came out, I was trying to get people that are technical enough to use it, but are not coders to use the thing, right? Because I think the big breakthrough there is like, you got to use the tools that have access to your file system and can use the operating system tools. Like, that's clear to me. You shouldn't be using ChatGPT in the browser. And I think Codex and CoWork, they're going to continue to make that user experience work for a wide audience. So I think they will kind of consume a lot of the workflows and kind of like that's where you operate, right? That's where you do your work. It's it's amazing how many data sources and tools kind of plug into that ecosystem now. So my gut is that will continue to happen. It is still feels very early, though, because, I mean, you know, we're obviously in the rabbit hole. Like, I don't know how many what percent of people doing work out there is actually using Codecs? Probably less than 1%, maybe. I don't know. But I do think eventually, my view is that that category of tool is going to kind of subsume a lot, a lot of work. People will be spending a lot of time in that type of tool.
00:45:08 · Khe Hy
[00:45:08] S2: I'll jump in as someone who probably burned like thirty hours on OpenCLaw. I think the, the, and then I stopped once they took away the subsidy. And once I had to actually pay for my Opus calls, I was like, woah, this is not worth $50 a day. But one thing that I have observed particularly on Codec. So, so why did I like OpenClaw? It removed two key frictions for me. One was it's just nice to be able to text from your phone. Like, I think that's really until you actually do it, you're like, well, could just open app and chat. Like, no, no, no. Like, we live inside our messaging app, so there's just something so powerful about the lack of friction, which I really miss. I use it a lot less because I got rid of the texting thing. The second is cron jobs and for non non nerds, which is just scheduled tasks, which this is for another podcast, but like for something that seems so simple is like deceptively hard to do. They break, you don't, there's no way to track them and so on. And OpenClaw made cron jobs really easy. And, but now, with Codecs, the Codecs, don't if either of you have used Codecs on your mobile phone. It is an amazing experience. It literally maps to what you would see on, on coda, on your desktop. So, so you can run full codex from your desktop, unlike Claude CoWork, which has dispatch, which is kind of just weird. It just, I don't get it. It doesn't work for me. So that'd be one. And then the automations are really, really good as well. So again, you can have an interface to like, show me all my scheduled tasks is actually quite easy to the point that I didn't buy a Mac mini, I did set up an old Mac as, like, an always on server for OpenCLaw. And I'm actually in the process of converting that into an always on codex so that when I'm traveling, I can still talk to my codex instance because my machine will be on 20 fourseven. So it's effectively gonna become like a local server serving codex that I can talk through through iPhone gateway. That, like I'm this close this weekend. I should get it done and it's going to be awesome. Yeah. So a very simple one. Again, I start with a lot of personal agent things. So I have an agent, it's still rough, that basically can schedule calendar meetings for me. And so it has delegated access to my calendar.