I'm a Builder, Not a Craftsman | Coffee and Open Source

A note on how this article came to be: This recap and the cleanup of the YouTube transcript were completed with AI assistance. The conversation, opinions, stories, and questionable roller coaster enthusiasm are entirely human.

I recently joined Isaac Levin on Coffee and Open Source. We started by talking about roller coasters, which is a perfectly reasonable way to begin any serious technology conversation.

An hour later, we’d covered how I got into programming, why I think of myself as a builder instead of a software craftsman, what happens when you run too many AI agents at once, and whether technology communities survive when nobody cares what language generated the final output.

Light stuff.

You can also find the episode on the Coffee and Open Source website.

What We Covered

• Learning QBasic from DOS for Dummies on my family’s Packard Bell 486
• Why solving business problems clicked harder for me than traditional computer science
• The satisfaction of fixing things yourself, whether it’s software, brakes, woodworking, or the mini-split in my office
• Why I describe myself as a builder, not a software craftsman
• Using Claude, Codex, Copilot, and other agents as part of a real production workflow
• The mental cost of running multiple agents and switching contexts hundreds of times per day
• Why twenty years of experience still matters when an agent writes most of the code
• The state of AI-generated .NET and C#
• How my daily workflow moved away from Rider and traditional IDEs toward agents and pull requests
• Whether AI will flatten language-specific developer communities into one large AI community
• Why the human shipping the software remains responsible for the result

I’m a Builder, Not a Craftsman

One of the ideas I keep coming back to is the difference between being a craftsman and being a builder.

In woodworking, one person might cut every dovetail by hand. Another might use a CNC. They’re both creating something, but they care about different parts of the process.

Software works the same way.

I can handcraft every keyword, variable, and byte. Or I can use the most efficient tool available to solve the customer’s problem. Right now, that tool is often an AI agent.

My clients don’t care whether I personally typed every line. They care whether the software does what they need, whether it’s reliable, and whether I can deliver it at a price that makes business sense.

That’s not an excuse to stop caring about quality. Far from it. It means I spend less time physically entering code and more time defining the problem, providing context, challenging decisions, and verifying the result.

Experience Becomes Context

There’s a fair concern that developers who stop writing code will eventually lose the ability to write code.

They probably will. Skills get rusty when you don’t use them.

But the value of twenty years in software was never just my ability to remember syntax. It’s understanding why a ten-year-old system looks the way it does. It’s knowing the business rules that never made it into a Jira ticket. It’s spotting when a locally reasonable implementation blocks something on the roadmap six months from now.

An agent doesn’t know any of that unless I tell it.

Even a million-token context window can’t contain all the source code, customer history, production data, architectural decisions, and scar tissue that make up a mature system. The agent sees a slice. My job is to understand the larger picture and manage it accordingly.

Honestly, AI has also made me learn more. It proposes approaches I wouldn’t have considered, and I get to decide whether I was ignorant of a useful technique or whether the agent is confidently wrong. Either way, I end up researching something.

More Agents, More Problems

If one agent makes you productive, six agents should make you six times as productive. Right?

No. Not even close.

I’ve told an orchestrator to take an entire Jira board and go to work. Claude implements. Codex reviews. Copilot adds its opinion. The agents iterate, open pull requests, and keep the machinery moving.

Meanwhile, I have fifteen terminal windows open and no idea what half of them are doing.

The limiting factor becomes human context switching. Every time an agent stops and asks for input, I have to remember what problem that terminal was solving, where it is in the process, and what decisions led us there. Do that hundreds of times in a day and you’re fried.

I’ve found that two or three concurrent tasks are about my practical limit. Increasingly, I’m going back to one thing at a time. If the agent needs a few minutes, I can wait just like I used to wait for a build, deployment, or test suite.

Or I can touch grass. Wild concept.

The Tools Are Changing

My old workflow lived in Rider for backend work and VS Code for frontend work. Then Cursor arrived. Today, most of my development happens through Claude or Codex, with the actual review occurring in GitHub pull requests.

I sometimes don’t open an IDE at all.

That transition isn’t comfortable for everyone, especially developers who’ve spent ten or twenty years building a reliable workflow around Visual Studio, Rider, or another mature environment. Many AI-first tools treat .NET and Java as afterthoughts. They lead with the agent and expect the editor to get out of the way.

The generated .NET code has improved immensely, but it still needs context. Models reach for older framework patterns, over-comment simple changes, and produce documentation nobody requested. I use skills to inject the C# conventions and modern .NET approaches I expect.

The tools will improve. Until then, we manage the gaps.

What Happens to Developer Communities?

This was the part of the conversation I found most uncomfortable.

For decades, we’ve built communities around languages, frameworks, and platforms. I’m a .NET person. Other folks identify with Java, Python, Rails, Go, or JavaScript. Conferences and user groups give those communities places to exchange ideas and teach each other.

But what happens when the implementation is one prompt away?

If nobody cares which language sits between the input and output, what happens to the .NET community? What happens to conference sessions that once spent an hour exploring a framework feature the AI can now apply on demand? What happens to open-source maintainers when someone can request a custom replacement for their project?

I don’t think community disappears. I think it changes.

Maybe we organize more around the problems we’re solving and less around the syntax used to solve them. Maybe I’m still “the .NET guy” inside a broader community of builders using every stack imaginable.

That change makes me a little sad. The old communities have given me a career, friendships, and more opportunities than I can count. But technology communities have always evolved along with the technology. This time won’t be different.

The Human Still Owns the Result

The most important point came near the end of the conversation.

I replaced the brakes on my truck. I watched the videos, used the tools, and did the work myself. When I drove onto the road, I was responsible for whether those brakes worked. I couldn’t blame the wrench or the YouTube video if they failed.

AI-generated software is no different.

If customer data leaks, the agent isn’t responsible. If a deployment loses money, the agent doesn’t take the call. If the system hurts someone, “Claude wrote it” isn’t a defense.

I’m still responsible for what reaches production. That means tests, reviews, safeguards, and enough due diligence to know the result is safe. The tool can produce the code. It can’t accept accountability.

AI is the future whether we like it or not. Use it. Learn it. Let it make you faster. But don’t outsource your judgment along with the typing.

And seriously, go outside every now and then.

Coffee and Open Source Transcript

This transcript was generated from YouTube’s AI-based captions and lightly cleaned for readability. There may be errors or inaccuracies. Any mistakes are unintentional.

00:05 Welcome everybody to another edition of Coffee and Open Source, a place to meet new friends, have some great conversations, and maybe learn something along the way. I’m your host, Isaac Levin. If you’re enjoying the conversation, you’ll be sure to like, subscribe, and follow wherever you’re watching or listening. Also, if you or somebody you know like to come on the show and have a chat with me, you can find me on whatever social media platform that you’re on. And more than likely, my handle is IsaacR11, but if you have any curiosity of all the different places I am, if you go to

00:06 IsaacR11.com, you can see a list of them. With that out of the way, I’m looking forward to the chat. We were chatting about roller coasters, for God’s sake, before we got started. Um my guest is Kevin Griffin. I I’m looking forward to having a chat with you. Do you want to say hello and introduce yourself? Uh sure. Uh hi everyone, I’m Kevin Griffin. Uh long-time Microsoft MVP. Uh I’m a consultant, been specifically in the .NET Azure space for as long as I can remember. Um I’m also currently the acting CTO for a company called Shows on Sale. Um we build tools for ticket brokers, and uh so if you’ve ever bought a ticket off of StubHub, I probably helped with that transaction at one point. Um so yeah, that that’s me in a nutshell. And I love roller coasters, I can talk about them all day. No, let’s not talk coa- let’s just talk coasters. Yeah, well I mean, well we could probably talk a little bit of both. We’ll talk about the thrill the thrill of each. Um I’m looking forward to this chat for a few reasons, but I’d like to get started

00:07 with, you know, how it got started for you. Like when did you realize that technology was something that you ended up choosing as a career? Yeah. When uh I was a kid, and we were talking about this pre-show, like we’re both near the same age. Um like I remember when computers weren’t a thing in the house, and I remember being around 10 years old, and my my parents going out to get the the computer. Like we went to Circuit City, and we bought a it was a Packard Bell 486. Uh it did have a CD-ROM. So it was new fancy. Uh brought that home, and I wasn’t allowed to touch it, because it was a very expensive machine and my parents didn’t want to risk me doing something dumb on it that they couldn’t fix. Um and my the Navy brat so my dad was deploying every every now and then. He I remember very specifically like he went on a deployment and when the cat’s away, the

00:08 the mouse will play. And I picked up a book on it was DOS for Dummies. And yeah, being a kid and all you had back then was books because there was no internet yet or at least nothing that we would define as internet. And I flipped through it and I was just going chapter to chapter and I got this section on QBasic. I was like, “Oh, there’s a programming language built in your computer and you didn’t even know it.” Um and like just typed in a couple commands, like, “Oh my gosh, I can tell the computer how to do things.” And this was a completely foreign idea to me and uh I remember very specifically going into school, going to library back when you did that, and getting every book I could on just programming and and learning as much as I could. And that just sort of developed into like uh just a passion of all right, I want to tell the computer how to do things. And back then the public school system didn’t know how to help kids like us

00:09 where uh they the best I had was a math teacher who knew a little bit of programming. And it wasn’t really until high school that I got in and was able to do more hands-on stuff. Uh easily aced all the computer science classes in high school. And said, “All right, I really want to do this for a living. This is great.” And went to college for it, hated college. Like I was not built for college, but you know, I got my degree. It’s over there on the couch. Sure. Uh not even hanging on the wall. But yeah, just uh decided I really like telling computer what to do. And as I got older, that turned into I can use the computer to help people and businesses solve problems and do a lot of unique and interesting things with it. And that’s kind of where we are today where it’s I’m I’m still doing that. Uh and yeah, that hasn’t changed. Um I just

00:10 enjoy telling the computer what to do. And even though I might not be writing the code directly anymore, I’m telling the AI what I want the code to do. I’m still building things and producing uh software. Yeah, I mean I I think it’s it’s very fascinating. Like I think that I relate to you a little bit about the college thing specifically where it’s like I didn’t directly correlate like what am I learning to like how I’m going to like have a job that makes money, right? Like so I was in computer science and I switched to like information systems, right? And when I went to information systems, I I started I actually got it cuz I’m like, “Oh, you’re taking technology as a tool to solve a business problem.” Cuz that’s all I really cared about. Like I didn’t ever really care about you know, uh if like like you know, what the what the logarithm of time for a particular thing was or you know, I wasn’t interested about uh you know, the network stack. I wasn’t interested in these things. Yeah. What I was interested in is like, “Okay, like how

00:11 can I like some company needs a developer to do something? And how do I do that? So like the the curriculum at my like the business school which was for information systems was you know, system design. So you like learn doing stuff in UML and like database design. And there were some web stuff. And I was like And once I started doing that, I’m like, “Oh, this makes much more sense than like learning how to program an ATM in computer science class.” Yeah. Right? Um yeah, I mean So do you think that the the solving business thing or solving problems has like been the thing that you’ve always kind of grappled to like your entire life? Like have you always like seen problems and figured out like how to fix them pretty quickly? Yeah, um I’m just by nature a handy person. Like I love tinkering on things. Um so talking about business information systems in college. So I minored in information systems. I 100% agree that

00:12 was the moment in school where I got it. Like I enjoyed those classes immensely. Um the I do I like looking at something broken and wanting to know how to fix it or at least coming up with a process that fix it. And it doesn’t matter if that’s software or we were talking about working on old cars. Like I I do most of my own work around the house. Like if something’s broken um I never want to actually have to be reliant on someone else to fix that. Like I it’s like all right, I’m a I’m a smart guy. I can figure this out. And I do 99% of the of my own maintenance on everything. Whether or not that’s the financially smart or time smart thing to do, I I just enjoy it. It’s uh I do a lot of woodworking on the side. At least I try to. Um I do electronics tinkering here and there. I just enjoy fixing things. And the that was the benefit of doing and having a business mindset was there’s a

00:13 lot of things broken in business and there or there’s a lot of improvements that you can make. You just need to be the smart one to go in and go, oh, well, what if we just did this, this, and this? And that would save you 40 hours a month. And that turns into money and it turns out businesses like money. So any suggestion you can make that make a process faster or more cost efficient usually a win. Yeah, I I I 100% agree. I also think too, like there’s just something like it it it cannot be described how satisfying it is to do something yourself. Right? Yeah. Um like, you know, the idea of, you know, taking a block of wood and turning it into like I I picked up woodworking recently and I made like a little bird like based on like a kit and I was like, “Look at my little ugly bird that I did myself.” And my kid is like, “That doesn’t look like a bird.” I’m like, “It looks like a bird to me, dammit.” Um but it’s like one of those things where you know, and I think with software specifically, like we are so

00:14 immune to failure. Like we we put up with failure constantly and I and I believe this and I’ve said this a thousand times because the payoff is worth it. The dopamine hit, the adrenaline [clears throat] hit of like, you know, your build works, the website works, the button works, like all the things, right? We are able to put up with things not working like 99% of the time. Because the payoff is so good. And I think that works with like other areas of life, too. Like, you know, I I am not as handy as you. Um I can do some things, but obviously I can’t that like there’s also probably something like, you know, the financial piece aside, it’s like, “Okay, I did this thing.” Right? I fixed, I don’t know. I need to replace the alternator on my truck. I did that, right? Like, instead of having to go pay somebody because let’s be real, like it’s not financially sound to like go and pay a dealership or whoever to do small work on your vehicle anyway.

00:15 Right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um I and we’re living in such an information age, too, where if you don’t know how to do it, you’re probably one YouTube video away from getting enough information. Uh my uh this past weekend I replaced the mini split in my office um AC unit. So, uh Now, I’m not a HVAC guy, but I can watch a YouTube video and I did most of the work and the tools I didn’t have, I could actually go just borrow for free from uh, different place here in town. Like, there’s so much just the the tools and the knowledge are all accessible that there’s no reason to not do it other than just you just don’t want to, which I think it’s completely fair. Uh, you don’t have the time. Um, you’d rather trade money, so it’s more efficient for you to pay someone to come do it and get it done in an hour than me spending probably the

00:16 better part of a day doing it. Um, the uh, there is something being paying for expertise that just come take care of it a job. Um, I but I do get the satisfaction of it is nice and cool in my office right now and I did that Yeah. not someone else. And in 10 years I’ll In 10 years when it breaks, I know how to replace it. I’ll just Yeah. replace it again. Yeah. I I yeah, I replaced the brakes on my car a couple of months ago and same thing. Like, I was I got it I had most I had most of the tools and I got the rest of them. Uh, I watched a video. The only thing that was very annoying is that like the guy in the video has probably done brakes 5 million times, so it was like a 10-minute video and it took me the better part of an hour for each tire. So, like, but you know, the the feeling when the car brakes work and like, you know, it just there’s just like there’s nothing really to better to describe it. It’s like, “Oh, like you feel like” and this is this is very probably somewhat

00:17 offensive. Like, you feel like a real man, Yeah. right? And not to say that people that aren’t that don’t identify as men can’t do these things, but like you like at least in in your core as as me as like, “Oh, I like” It’s like going to a monster truck show. Like, there’s no There’s nothing more like aggressive adrenaline-filled than that. And there’s nothing more fulfilling than being able to just say, “Oh, this thing, I fixed it with my own two hands.” I can’t remember what the cliche phrase is. Like, “I molded you with my own hands.” or whatever. Um But, anyway, with that, you know, and we talked a little You talked to me mentioned AI at the beginning, right? How How do you rectify How do you square the circle with you know, the fact that you love solving problems and you love getting your hands dirty and now you’re just prompting? And I know that it it For a lot of people, it’s Well, the the agent or the LLM is now a tool.

00:18 Before, it was an IDE and programming languages and all these other things, right? And we’ve just gone up the stack a little bit. Um But, how do you feel about the idea? It’s like, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, “Hey, Kevin, I need an app that does this.” you’re more than likely not going to like write more than five lines of code yourself by hand. Yeah. Um I I think the way I I kind of push back on this is maybe at my core, I’m not a software craftsman, right? Like, I don’t like to and be an analogy going back to woodworking. Like, there’s woodworking uh there’s people with the hand tools and they’re doing hand-cut dovetails on on boxes and they’re very into the crafts of building something with their hands. But, then there’s people who are just knocking stuff out on CNCs. And they’re both woodworking, but one’s using a more automated device to do the work and someone’s doing all the work by hand. Uh software is very much the same

00:19 thing. It’s uh I could be the hand-crafted every bite molded from my fingertips into the keyboard to produce this software. Or am I just a builder who wants to build things and I’ll use the most efficient tool for the job, and at the moment the most efficient tool for that job is using an AI agent um where I could instruct it on the problem, how I think the problem should be solved if I even want to go that deep, and then reviewing and going, “Does it solve the problem?” If it checks those boxes, then awesome. I did the thing I needed to get done. Um if that’s for a paying clients, like the more I I’m more likely to get more work if I’m just able to knock things out. And um they’re they don’t care if I hand crafted every Sure. every keyword, uh every variable. Uh they just care, “Does it do the thing

00:20 I need it to do?” And at the end of the day, it’s like, “All right, I could I could do more work in a day, or I could do the same work faster, and then I have time for other activities.” Um the I did a trip with my son 2 3 weeks ago. Uh they had a camp and I went to ride roller coasters one day while my agents were doing the work for me. And I was monitoring the progress on my phone. Uh but the work was still getting done, and I was enjoying another hobby at the same time. Um and it was still I still do a you know, 20% review of everything it builds. Uh we still have tests in place. Like we we have all the infrastructure to make sure we don’t accidentally blow blow something up. Um but that’s that’s the previous 15 20 years of experience talking. Like I know how to set up those systems. I’m not a person just coming and go, “Oh, let’s build the thing. Oh, you mean you’re

00:21 supposed to put a password on your database? Oh, dang.” What didn’t mean to leak all that PII. Um But yeah, that’s the kind of roundabout way and is I’m more of a I’m a builder, I’m not a craftsman. Yeah. And uh I just want to get stuff done. I want to solve problems. And right now the best tool for that is the agent. And if it wasn’t, I’d go back to whatever the next best tool was. You know, I feel the same way. I also feel too like to use your kind of anecdote of like I’ve been doing this like I have 15 years of history to be able to know what the right thing is. And I think it’s important to Yeah. occasionally to remind yourself that these agents that are not deterministic, right? Like they don’t understand the concept of I need to do a good job or uh I need to make sure the tests pass unless they’re instructed to, right? And one of the things that I have I struggle with it’s like

00:22 you know, at some point in time like I will lose the craft of coding. Yeah. Right? Like, you know, it you don’t have to be separated for something for that long to start to get very rusty, right? And there’s going to be one point there’s going to be a point in time in the future where if somebody for whatever reason like asked me to do something and they said, “Oh, you can’t use AI.” I will struggle, right? But then there’s a push back where it’s like, “Well, why would I not be able to use like an interview sort of thing? Like why would I not be able to use AI? I’m going to use AI for the job.” Um do you have you kind of made peace with that? That like the Kevin that got to this day, this the the 20 years of Kevin isn’t useless, but is history. It’s no longer current. It I’m perfectly okay with that. Um I think the real benefit now is going into

00:23 a problem space. Like uh so I’m working I I work with this company Shows on Sale and we have 20 years of history. Like I understand the industry, I understand the business. Um I was well, basically working on a system that I hand-built over uh a 10-year period and then years before that, I maintained an old system. And there’s so much knowledge that comes from how the system got to what it is today that now like when I prompt the agent, it’s me giving it the context of what I’ve been doing over the past years and telling it, I now need you to add this one thing and this is how I would do it. And then it’s also like having two or three more Kevins to kind of argue with me because so many decisions I made back then were because I was working in a in a box just by myself and I didn’t have a colleague to kind of riff ideas off of with that had their own experiences. And

00:24 now the AI would go, “Kevin, all right, I understand I understand your problem, I understand your proposed solution. I’m going to push back again and I’m going to offer an alternative and you tell me if you think this is a good idea and I’ve actually think I’ve learned more from working with the AI because I’m introduced to to ideas and techniques that I would not have normally done previously. Um it’s it’s like going to the conferences and watching YouTube videos. You watch someone do something that you know that you think you know very well and then they do one little thing differently, you go, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t even know you could do that.” And you now have a new technique in your toolbox. Um I feel like that with AI every single day. It’s I just learned something new and uh and I’m just a natural skeptic sometimes. Like I’ll learn something new and go, “Well, is it did I not know that just because I was ignorant or is it wrong? Is I then

00:25 then I got to research and I learned something else new along the way. Um so I think AI has I I think I was getting burnt out before AI. Like I was just kind of done with the the daily just listening the code. All right, production’s running, everyone’s happy. Now AI is like, “Ooh, I can just iterate on all dumb ideas I have very quickly and I can throw them away if they’re crap. I can put them in the production if they’re working the way they’re supposed to.” Um and I have a team of folks I work with and they’re all doing the same thing and we’re like all just iterating so much faster than we would ever iterated before. It’s kind of it’s exhausting actually, but it’s very exciting at the same time. Exhausting and exciting at the same time. That’s a pretty pretty good way to phrase it. I think one of the things too that I at least I’m struggling with and I’d love to get your thoughts is like we have done everything in software into this point in a in a um

00:26 a synchronous world. Right? Like, you know, we plan, we code, we review, we test, we ship, right? Yep. So it’s it’s so guaranteed that even somebody made a little logo, right? And now you’re talking about agents, not agent, right? So like I understand the idea of agent replaces Isaac. But replacing is whatever. That’s the choice word. That’s the word I’m using. Agent replaces Isaac, but it’s really agents with an S, so multiple. And the idea of how do I effectively wrap my head around there are three or four things that are running. Now I’ll have separate tasks and they’re all committing differently and they’re all looking at and they’re doing pull and they’re doing all these things, right? Like they they quote unquote you know, group of individuals would do. But they’re all I to you essentially. Yeah.

00:27 Have you been able to effectively pay attention when you have multiple agents running? Cuz that’s what I’m struggling with today. It’s like I’m really I’m struggling with the idea where it’s like if it’s one agent running, two agents running, okay. Yeah. Three, I immediately I’m like there’s too much going on here. I And then to go back to what you’re saying about the review thing, I get I’ll I will never review some of this stuff because it’s just too much. Yeah. I I definitely I have a limit of two or three tasks, concurrent tasks at any time that I’ve I’ve done dumb things where I’ve started a sprint and we use Jira for all of our task tracking and I’ll say I have an orchestrator. I’ll say, “Just go do the whole board for me.” And it spawns half a dozen more different tasks, all picking up different tickets and they go they start iterating on the tickets and

00:28 it’s like, “All right, Claude does the implementation then Codex does the review and then we throw it up in a pull request and then Copilot gets its two cents in and then Claude, you know, iterates and just go around and round round.” And I lose track very easily of all the work being done. And that is just mentally exhausting where at the end of the day um I’m wrapping up and it’s like I am I am fried because I have probably switched context no less than 500 times that day. Just jumping from one task to another. Like I’ll watch the terminal windows and if something stops spinning it’s like, “Oh, it’s waiting for my input. Let me switch to that tab.” And then first thing I do is ask myself what was this tab even for? Like what problem are we solving in this tab? Because I have 15 of them and I actually don’t know what each tab is doing, but they’re all doing something. And

00:29 and then sometimes I’ll complicate it more where I’ll do cross client work. So I have a couple small clients I do a couple hours for a month and I’ll open another set of terminals just for that client. Like you two just go iterate on on an issue, make me some money while I’m over here working on just regular day job stuff. And halfway through the day I’ll switch back my I don’t even remember what these agents were working on. Um so it’s it’s definitely a problem and I don’t know a solution to it. Uh I’ve I’ve told a lot of the folks on my team like I’m going back to really just doing one thing at a time. Even if I have to sit there and wait for the agent to do the work. It’s no different than me typing and then waiting for compilation or waiting for a deployment to a test environment. It’s or waiting for test to run. Uh I’m just going to take this moment to not think about anything [laughter] else. And that and Reddit and Twitter and you know Blue Sky are all for it like

00:30 I don’t spend nearly enough time on those platforms because the agents are keeping all my attention. I mean I think that’s healthy. I think being on the internet too long so being chronically online is not a good thing. I think too the you made an interesting point about like you don’t know what they’re doing. And I’ve started to sort of build this that’s like do I even care what they’re doing? Yeah. Because all I care about is what they give me at the end. Right? Yeah. You know, because of the fact that they’re going to go off and do No, these things are going to go off and do whatever these things think is the right approach to, you know, solve the problem that we give them. Yep. Uh do I care about the way they got there? I I think AI purists would say no. Um I think

00:31 I’m still enough of a craftsman where I say I do care a little bit. More or less because I have I have a road map that I know I’m eventually going to get to. And I know like the task I’m working on right now, if it’s solved in the way that the AI solving it, I might not be able to easily implement other parts of my road map. Um so I might need to push back and say, you know, don’t uh you know, don’t hard code this. Like put it in a database because we’re going to need to add more data. And uh I’ve had to tell the AI I’m like, it’s not on my sprint right now, but just go casually look at this other ticket and change your uh change your direction because we’re going to have to do this future work later. Um the I really have to remember the AI has a very limited context. And even though we have like million million token windows, that still cannot fit

00:32 all the source code, 10 years of knowledge, all the data in our databases, all of our customers, how we expect every customer to use it. It’s still looking at a very small s- uh sub slice of the the total picture. So, it is a little bit on me to be responsible manager of the agent to say, “You’re doing good work, but I need you to tweak this uh a little bit. Um I’m actually working on a set of issues right now where I gave the agent more uh there could be a little bit more flexible in its decision and implementation and I’m realizing there were you know, a couple dozen gaps that I just missed and I I missed it, too. So, the limited review that I did, I missed all these things and now we’re having to go back and fix all these issues um which actually like I don’t know it is it saving me time? Like

00:33 Sure. I I assume it is cuz I I don’t know if I hand-rolled all this code if I’d still have these problems or I would just be responsible for fixing my own crap code. Um but yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s just it’s all exhausting. What do they say in season 1 of True Detective? I don’t know if you’ve seen that show or not. They they say the the the the the the phrase that is like carried on from that show is like time is a flat circle, right? Whereas like how much time are you spending versus how much time are you saving? Right? Yeah. I think I think it’s it really depends on what your comfort level is of trusting the output, right? Um I think, too and I’m just going to say this, like I think there are certain types of developers that I guess more are are more AI-friendly than not AI-friendly, right? You know, and I think, you know, for what it’s worth, for people who

00:34 don’t know, Kevin and myself were like both active in the .NET community. Um so, .NET has been around for a long time, almost 25 years. And uh there are other languages that are “newer” and whose communities are more AI-friendly because they don’t have the baggage of 25 years of building software a particular way. Do you think that .NET and communities like .NET or Java or some of these older sort of enterprise equal and equal languages or frameworks, do you think they are friendly to AI or do you think that AI makes it more complicated? I don’t think it’s as friendly as it could be, uh primarily cuz I don’t think a lot of these models were trained on heavy like .NET or Java code. Uh they

00:35 were probably trained on some of these uh newer languages. Uh but it’s there’s definitely something you can you can work around. Like I have skills that are specifically for injecting .NET, C#, convention. And the way I expect code be written, uh it is immensely better now than it was I don’t know, let’s go back a year and a half, 2 years ago yeah, when we were copying and pasting code in the ChatGPT and going, you know, add a add a method for me and or I need a class that does XYZ and it would come back with code that didn’t compile at all. And we are much better than we were. And I think we just need more we need more training uh in the system. Um I I correct a lot of things in or I used to correct a lot of things in agent generated like .NET. Uh just where

00:36 it’s like, oh, I know there’s a better way to do this. And a lot of times it’s all training context. Like if I’m building on .NET 10 and it’s doing things the way I would have done it in say like .NET uh 6. So you go, hey, there’s completely new structures that you can use and injections. Like you’re just you just don’t know about any of this cuz it wasn’t in your training data. Um and as soon as you mention something it goes, “Oh, let me go look that up.” And it’s oh, “Oh, you’re absolutely right. I I was seeing all this context. Um so as these models get bigger and better and better, I I think a lot of that’s going to eventually get just come down to style. Um like I’m kind of pure. So I like one class per file. I like everything I like comments but not too many comments. Um I don’t know about your all’s agents, but like my agent loves to write a book in a in a comment block. And sometimes I

00:37 have to say, “Why are you writing a 15-line comment for one line of code change?” Um and it goes, “Oh, Kevin, you’re right. Let me Let me cut back on this.” Or like summary or like summary markdowns. It’s like, “Do I really need Do I need you to create like three markdown files when I asked you to like add a feature for something?” But I interrupt you. Exactly. No, you’re absolutely right. It’s um so I have not done enough in other languages. Uh I actually I take that back. Like it does all of its scripting and stuff in Python. It seems most trained on Python, which I think makes sense and is what I’ve heard from um from others. So whenever it does scripting stuff, even though I’m working primarily in PowerShell, uh it will write a Python script because it can do that most quickly and most efficiently. And it does it solves the same problem. And these are scripts I’m not going to go look at it. So Yeah. uh so like knock yourself out. If it’s something I’m going to run and manage, I might ask it to rewrite it in uh

00:38 PowerShell, just something that’s that’s helpful to me. Um but yeah, the the .NET stuff has been getting better. Uh I don’t think it’s as good as it could be, but that’s fine. Um it’s I’ll keep giving it my training data every day I work with it. Sure. Sure. What about the What about the workflow, though? Because I think that if you’re a, you know, .NET developer, you’ve probably used the same set of tools for the last 10 years. Yeah. Yes, there’s new been new versions of the tools and maybe some enhancements of those tools, but you’ve used more or less the same couple of tools for your entire professional career if you’ve been just a .NET developer. So, when you see like a a cursor or a replit or you know, the GitHub app or you know, what other other tools that exist that are like AI first tools? Do you immediately go, “Ah, I don’t know about that.”? Like I I struggle with it. Like um

00:39 like I use cursor a little bit because I just I’m trying to be more AI friendly like we’ve been talking about. Yeah. And when I open up cursor for the first time, it opens up an agent view. And I don’t want that. I want the IDE to open up first. And it’s just like little things like that. And I imagine there’s a setting that I can set, but I was like, “Why by default are you giving me the agent view?” And it makes me angry. Like like irrationally angry. I want to like stomp like a little like a like a toddler having a tantrum. It’s like, “Don’t put the AI directly into my face. Let me choose to use the AI.” So, like my workflow is changing and I’m not happy with it. Yeah. Uh So, the way my workflow has changed is I used to be have everything everything .NET was in Rider. I’d have Rider open all the time. I’d have two or three versions of Rider uh running different projects. Um and that was for all my back end work. And then front end I’d have VS Code open. And then uh I remember when Cursor dropped, I was

00:40 probably one of the first people that paid for an annual subscription to Cursor. I’m like, “If I’m going to use VS Code anyway, let me use let me use Cursor flavor of VS Code.” Mhm. And I went deep in the Cursor early on and got to the point actually where I stopped opening Rider. Actually, no, I take that back. I had Rider open, but all it was for was for running the .NET project. All right, I would have Cursor make a change and I would jump over to Rider to run it because you can’t use the dev kit in in Cursor. Um and now I’m at the point where like I use Claude primarily and code act secondary. Uh I don’t even open Cursor anymore. Like most of my code editing is actually in like GitHub pull requests. Like I’ll do all the work local, have the agent, and then if I actually want to look at what changed and make comments, I’ll submit a pull request and I’ll comment on my own on quote my own code. And then I’ll have

00:41 Claude or whatever go back and read my comments and I have the conversation with the agent and the agent always has the context of what’s going on. Uh and I don’t I don’t jump applications anymore. Um now Cursor’s gotten so much better like I I I’d say it’s since I bought them or whatever space X bought them. Um there’s just a lot in there and I still pay for the inner subscription, but I’ll load it up and I’ll do secondary or tertiary reviews on it um because you I get access to models I wouldn’t normally pay for. Uh and it’s been insanely useful. And but really it’s my default text editor that just happens to have all these AI tools built into it. Um so I don’t even have VS Code anymore. That’s that’s gone off my system. Uh so if I needed to edit immediately, it’s in notepad. And then if I need a little bit of syntax highlighting or whatnot, it’s in Cursor. Uh but like I haven’t opened

00:42 Rider in months. Um I still have it. I think I need to update it, but not I’m not opening it every day. It’s all Claude to pull request. Do you think it’s good like you mentioned notepad? Do you think it’s good that you use notepad? I’m I’m is it that’s a joke, right? Like I mean it it’s it cuz I learned like the first time I ever built a web page, I did it in notepad. Yeah. Right? Um and I remember it being awful. And then you get introduced to other tools like Adobe Dreamweaver or front page or whatever you’re like, oh, this is so much better. And then you find out those tools suck for certain reasons and then you’re using other tools, right? Yeah. Those tools, even though they’re annoying, are immensely times better than just typing text into an open box, right? Um and that’s and the reason why I bring up the notepad thing is because that’s what we’re doing. Like if you want to plainly think about

00:43 it, like yeah, we can add files or add attachments or reference sections of code or whatever, but we’re just typing into a a fancy version of notepad. Right? There’s no intellisense, there’s no code completion, there’s no uh Roslyn analyzers, there’s none of those things. It’s just typing. Yep. I I like biggest reason I will use notepad um at all is it’s still the fastest loading app on the machine. So if I just need to get into a text file and make a tweak or write down something, it’s notepad. Oh, yeah. Even though like in Windows 11 they’ve capped notepad so badly, like that that also doesn’t load as quickly as you want it to anymore. Um Cursor is my secondary and it’s specifically for what you were saying, like I need syntax highlighting, I want to be able to to read the code like I would have read the code years ago. Like I need I need a

00:44 little bit of that context. Um but yeah, I’m not it is a fancy notepad at that point, like you said. Cuz I’m not running the application from it. I’m running the application all from Actually, that’s why I don’t load Rider, is I can just have Claude start the app for me in a background shell. Everything works. And actually, if the compilation fails for any reason, Claude just comes in and goes, “Let me fix that for you.” And it fixes its own issues, and then the the application eventually starts. Um This is going to sound really gross, and I apologize for everybody, but I work at JetBrains. And you were talking about Cursor and not having great .NET support. So, the ReSharper plugin for Cursor now has like full C# support. Oh, does it? Okay. Yes. Yeah, it was announced a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. So, anyway, yeah, for people that are listening, they’re like, “Oh, you’re just a corporate shill.” Sorry. Well,

00:45 it’s a I just I find it very, very fascinating because if you think about some of these tools, like .NET and Java and some of the more enterprise languages are a afterthought, a complete afterthought. Yeah. Because the expectation is like, why would you do this? Like, if you Why would you build a .NET app today in the year of our Lord 2026? Like, everything should be written in React, right? And I mean, even like that and that’s kind of the point I was making about the workflows earlier, is that the workflows for some of these new AI-friendly tools, they are built in a way that is not accessible to people that have been writing code a specific way for a long time. And I know that’s the goal, right? But it’s still like, the transition is very painful for somebody going, “I use Rider or Visual Studio, and then I do this, and now I’m using this other tool that doesn’t have any of the support that I need. Also, it wants to force me down this path of like only using prompts.” It’s just It’s a painful transition, right?

00:46 Yeah, it is. Um and I would Yeah, I didn’t know that JetBrains had a plugin for for cursor. So, I actually I’m going to go look that up as soon as we’re done. Um it’s [sighs] There have been a number of times that I’m not feel kind of bad for admitting this. Like where I’ve had the I’ve had to prompt a one line of code change just because I was too lazy to go open the editor. And um it’s like I need you to change this. I need you to change that. And it literally would have been faster for me to open the editor to make the change. But I’m like, well, then the the agent will have the context of my my line of code change and um But I think that comes I don’t know if it’s a tooling It’s not a tooling issue. It’s a I’m just being lazy. And I don’t want to have a I don’t want to open another thing. Um but

00:47 yeah. Also, I think And this is this is probably an unhealthy personality trait that I have. It’s also nice to like kind of tell the thing it did something wrong. Yeah. Right? It’s like It’s like this button should be rounded and the background should be blah blah blah. Okay, I’m sorry. And then it gives you it does the change, but the change isn’t exactly what I want. Actually, you didn’t do what I wanted to Like you And I know we’re not supposed to anthropomorphize these things. We’re not supposed to treat them like people, but it’s very much it’s very satisfying. Because you would never yell You would never talk to a person the same way you talk to these things. Right? Like you would get fired. No one would want to be friends with you. Like And so, it’s just it is somewhat satisfying to just kind of beat up the agent a little bit. Talk down to it. Do all the things, right? The Yeah. We always say, you know, when the the AIs take over, they’re going to be they’re going to go after the mean ones first and there’s been a number of times where I’ve I’ve typed into the prompt

00:48 and I’m like, “What the hell were you thinking doing this? Like, what is wrong with you?” And it goes it always has the same response for me as well. It It says, you know, “Yeah, I’m sorry.” or “That’s fair.” Like, that’s a fair pushback. I’m like, “Just Just go fix it.” Um and the the issue I’m running into is with all the new uh models like Claude doesn’t like doing anything anymore where it it’s classifier kitchen and goes, “I’m not going to do that because that doesn’t seem safe.” I’m like, “I just I’m I’m asking you to read from a database.” Like, um the we we haven’t talked anything about like processes or skills or anything like that, but I have a whole set of skills specifically around how to safely read data from databases without uh putting too much in the context and like letting the agent do a lot of the work for me uh without giving too much up. And that all used to work so well until this dumb classifier, sorry, getting in the way and saying, “Well, I’m not going to do that, Kevin, cuz that doesn’t seem

00:49 safe. I might see someone’s first name.” And I’m like, “I don’t care if you see that name. It’s all dev data anyway. Just go read the database.” Um And the solution to all this stuff is like, “Here, I’m going to give you a script. Go run this command for me.” And but it gives it gives me the wrong command. And then I’m like, “That didn’t work.” And they’re like, “Well, here’s a different command.” And eventually I have to say, “Just effing do it.” And it turns out that is the unlock for going around the classifier because it comes Oh, okay. Yeah, I’ll take care of it. And then it all works great. Yeah, I I did a similar thing. I was using I can’t remember if I was using uh Codex or Claude, I can’t remember, but I I basically like I got a whole bunch like I I have like all of my family’s photos like saved on a hard drive, right? And I’ve and I’ve gone through like Google Drive to OneDrive to Amazon Drive and like I don’t know if there’s duplicates. So, I was like, “Okay, let me uh like I want to like I created a skill. I’m like, I basically go through

00:50 this for any folder, just go through here and check if there’s duplicates and whatever, right? And I want to test it with like a hard-coded like file path. It’s like, “Can’t do that. Looks like it’s an unsafe file path. I don’t know what’s in there. Don’t want to go there. Sorry.” And I’m like, “Why not?” And I think I actually said, “Why not?” And it was like, “Well, I because of the fact that that that folder might not exist, that folder might not be a folder that you want me to look in for duplicates.” And I’m like, “I gave it to you, though. I gave it to you.” And I’m not the one to think that I am like the all all-knowing benevolent dictator, right? But at the same time, if I ask you to do something, you should damn well do it, right? Exactly. I am the commander of this Yeah. Do as I say. What is it What is uh What does Moana say to Maui? Like, uh I You will board my ship. You will do the things like just be very direct in what you are telling the thing to do.

00:51 Um I mean, also too, what I find is very fascinating about this to point in time in technology, especially around AI, is that the community is is very like split into two factions, where it’s like, “I see the value here, but I still like doing the work that I’m doing.” And then there’s the you know, the the people that are like, “I’ve built a cluster of agents to manage my entire life, and all I do is I sit and I look at my screen and watch the text fly by.” And you know, I I have a feeling I know what camp you’re in, but it’s like [clears throat] do you think the idea uh as some of these like alternate realities as some of these like very very pro AI folks live in, do you think those are ever going to be attainable for the mass population of people that work in tech? Same one time so is Do you think Do you think that we will ever get to the point where the

00:52 experiments or machinations that these more like AI truthers Yeah. live? Do you think that that is accessible or reachable for most of the people in tech at some point? I think eventually. I think we’re eventually going to get to that point. Um I I do realize that a lot of us live in a AI bubble. Like I am I’m not bleeding edge by any means. I’m very cutting edge at at least when it comes to terms of AI and I still talk to people who aren’t allowed to use AI. Um they’re like and they don’t care enough to experiment with AI on their own. Um there’s still a good percentage of the tech world who’s not using AI at any capacity. Um but like my wife and kids and my mother-in-law like all know about ChatGPT and they’re using it for for different types of problems and almost have everyone to a point where they ask

00:53 ChatGPT before they ask me um about about something. Um so I do think it’s a it’s a matter of time. Like I think eventually we’re all going to have the agent in our pocket like our whenever Apple figures out the best way, right, to make Siri useful, um we’re all going to have like our own little agent in our pocket where I can have a conversation with it like I would with ChatGPT or Claude and it’s going to do all the amazing things I want it to do. Um like I I think eventually we’ll get to that point. Um And also we have to figure out our token situation. Like are we ever going to have to pay for tokens directly or are we Do I get the The reason I can do what I do is cuz I pay for the subscription and I use I burn tokens like they’re going out of style. Um across two subscription two three I have three subscriptions. Um the two to Claude and one to Codex. Um

00:54 Oh, then I have cursor I have four subscriptions. And yeah, like when we’re not burning tokens like our lives depend on it. Um I think it’ll become way more um open for everyone. So, yeah, just a matter of time. I think we’ll get there. I just I can’t tell you. Also, 2 years ago I would have told you, “What’s AI?” Like, “Oh, aren’t you know, chat GPT is fun. I’ve used that a couple times. It didn’t know how to do basic math.” And now it’s like passing the bar exam, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think for for some tasks like the lift is so simple, right? I think where [clears throat] I struggle with and we talked about this a little bit earlier is like doing all the stuff at the same time and doing it as effectively as like a group of people. And yeah, yes, I understand that 18 months ago none of this stuff was really viable and now we’re here, right? Um But I worry I worry about like how the community changes. Like, you know, cuz

00:55 right now and whether this is good or bad or indifferent, I don’t really know, but it’s like we have a .NET community, there’s a Java community, there’s people that love microservice architecture, there’s people that love gaming, there’s people that like there’s all these different areas of tech, right? And every area of tech has a community. My worry is that in some point in time is there going to be future where like there isn’t all these different communities because we don’t care about the language anymore. We don’t care about the frameworks. We don’t care about the architecture. We just care about input output and AI in the middle. I I do fear that’s probably what’s going to happen. Um Yeah, like submitting to like conferences, right? Coming up with useful topics. This used to be a lot easier before AI because you could just pick any little thing in a language or framework or or platform and you could do a 60-minute talk on it. And you would be new and cutting edge and you would blow everyone’s mind. Now, like how many

00:56 of these conversations could just be done with Well, tell the AI to go set up a uh a a bicep script and deploy an Azure uh Kubernetes cluster and like there’s nothing What’s there left to teach? What there left to learn? You just tell the AI what to do. Yeah. Um it’s Yeah, like in in the .NET community like what how you know, how does .NET get better, right? If we’re all telling the AIs what to do, who’s who’s kind of leading the charge on what what new exciting things can .NET do? Um and this goes for any language, right? Uh who’s who’s commanding that? Uh like .NET open source, I’d be super fearful if I was a if I was a contributor to a open source project right now. Um I’d be super fearful if I was trying to monetize an open source project right now because all these open source projects are literally one prompt away from being

00:57 completely copied and Fair. unnecessary. Um It’s not good for the community, but you know, again, if we’re just builders and we need to get stuff done, like don’t um it it’s everything’s one prompt away. So, I don’t anyone really cares at that point. Yeah, I mean I it’s it’s funny because I I I do think there will be pushback. My my my honest take on it is that there will be pushback to the consolidation of interests. I think that there will be pushback there. I don’t know what that pushback looks like, but I just have a hard time believing that somebody that has been a dominant developer for 25 years, all of the sudden going into work one day, I’m no longer a dominant developer. I am an AI engineer or whatever it is, right? Like I I refuse like especially at scale, I do not believe that’s a thing. Um especially like like you’re mentioning about some companies just say no to AI.

00:58 Um Yeah. I also think that it is essential for us to continue to live on as humans if we have community. And if And if these things become like if we’re all centered around one singular community, which is AI, like, you know, the robot overlords is like a thing. Right? Um So, I think that they’re like, you know, and you kind of already see it. Like a lot of people are are kind of up in arms about the cost of AI and obviously like the data center thing and and all these other sort of things that um come into play. But it’s just it’s fascinating to me because tech has always been about like solving problems and and finding community. That’s how I’ve always Like I I’ve never really been hung up on like the abstract things about tech. But without the ability to like have community, like it’s not interesting to me. Really, it isn’t. Like I can I can go solve problems somewhere else. Um

00:59 the money’s nice, but if I don’t really have the community, I don’t know how much I really will enjoy being in tech. I Yeah. I’ve said before, like, maybe I’ll just go take up another trade. Sure. [laughter] Um Yeah, you don’t you don’t already have all the skills. You could be a mechanic. You could be a You could be a woodworker. Yeah. But the But the problem is like even in like the dominant communities and the people I talk to, the conversation ultimately always comes back around to AI. Like it’s not It’s not like, “Oh, did you see the new thing they added in .NET 11?” And like we I don’t have those conversations with anyone anymore. It’s always like, “Oh, what you know, what’s your async stack?” And um “Hey, I’m trying out this skill.” Or “Have you seen this MCP server?” Um And that’s a very like I don’t know if the community’s going to go away or the community’s just going to change. So, it might not be we’re super niched in .NET like like we had been, but now it’s the you know, we’re the AI crew and maybe the we’re

01:00 the the part of the crew that uses .NET. Um I’m in a a small business group with um you know, a couple dozen entrepreneurs and I’m the .NET guy in the in the crew. Everyone else is Rails or Go or um you know, everything in between. And I still I have a community with them on a a different set of topics. Um but I’m also the .NET guy if anyone ever runs across a .NET problem. Um yeah, I think yeah, the community’s just going to change. I don’t think it’s going to be the way it used to be, which you know, is sad, but Oh, yeah. I mean I think also there will still always be a want for people to actually write code. Like I don’t mean it as a full-time job. I think there’s you know, there will be always a group of individuals that are like, “You know what? I know that I could probably have, you know, Claude write

01:01 this for me in 8 seconds, but if I if I can do it in an hour, I’ll do it in an hour.” Yeah. There isn’t as much of a time constraint in for in some particular cases. And I understand that you know, your world the will of our employers, but at the same time especially when, you know, you think about every time you hit enter it costs money. Like, you know, there’ll be opportunities in the future where it’s like, do I want to waste money with writing writing this method? Yeah. Yeah, is it worth my time? Yeah. Or Is it Is it worth Yeah, is it worth my time or is it worth my company’s money? More than likely it’ll be my company’s money, but unless you’re paying for the subscription yourself, maybe not, right? Uh and another thought is I was listening to a uh to another podcast and they were talking about the um like retro game community. Sure. And like one of the things that a lot of these folks have done is they’ve poured

01:02 years and years and years into taking old retro video games and making them so they run on modern hardware. Yeah. And taking something like a an old like Nintendo 64 game and you can actually do a lot of the work so it can run on a a modern PC. And what this community’s finding is sorry, with AI you could actually take any retro game and the AI could build a compilable version of it Yeah. in a couple hours and you could say, oh, you wanted to play Donkey Kong on your on your PC? Boom, now you can. Yeah. And uh there’s still the purists out there going, no, you have to you know, spend five years going through every byte to figure out how this should compile on modern hardware. When there’s other people who just say, you know, I I just want to play Donkey Kong. Yeah. And or uh I want to play Mario Kart. Uh

01:03 I just want to do that and I don’t care how I get to the end result. Um I could just tell the the machine to do the thing and it’ll do the thing. Um So, what we might get out of this are you know, one community is going to turn into multiple communities. Um very niche communities that all care about solving a problem very specific way for a very specific reason. Um Well, I mean the future the future is definitely up in the air. That’s that’s what I think. And I just looked at the time and I’m like, “Oh, it’s been an hour.” Um this has been great, Kevin. It’s um you know, it’s funny you you mentioned like, you know, you have conversations with people at conferences or whatever and like it’s all about AI. Well, I can tell you this somebody that that has a podcast, every conversation about AI. I talk to people that are in Java, I talk to people that are in Python, I talk to people in JavaScript. It’s all about AI. And sometimes I feel like is is the conversation about AI is am I just having the same conversation 18

01:04 different times, but with like diff but what I’ve what I’ve rationalized or what I’ve come come to grips with is everybody’s got a very strong opinion on how this works in their life. And uh it was great to kind of hear how you have been able to be more effective, but also not lose that craftsmanship that you were talking about, which I think is really important. Yeah. I mean, in the end, this is the moral of the story, I am still responsible for what goes into production. It doesn’t matter what tool I’m I’m using. Um the same way like if I’m changing the brakes on my truck, I’m responsible for if those brakes work or not when I get out onto the road. Yeah. Exactly. So, and because of that responsibility, I am going to do the due diligence necessary to make sure that what I’m putting out there is safe, whether or not I’m hand rolling the code or I’m asking the agent to write the code for me.

01:05 Um because if you know, if data leaks, if people lose money, I’m ultimately responsible for that, not the agent. If the agent uh what’s thing? Because the computer can’t be held accountable, it shouldn’t make decisions. Um, uh, we really need to remember that. Like, I I think everyone should do a little bit of due diligence checking what the AIs do. Um, because we are ultimately responsible for it. And until we can blame the computer and it takes responsibility, um, yep. I don’t even want to touch that. If the computer can accept failure and accept response and then take responsibility, I don’t think we need to be around anymore. Um, Yeah. but again, this has been great, Kevin. And for folks that, uh, you maybe you’re not following Kevin already, uh, there’s a couple different places. Uh, consult with Griff is a good place. consultwithgriff.com. That’s a a website where you can get to know a little bit more about him. There’ll be some links to some other social media handles and places you can find information about

01:06 him in the show notes. Um, before we sign off, my friend, do you have any parting words? Uh, AI is the future, whether you like it or not. All right, sure. yep. You know, throw away all your other other convictions and don’t forget to touch grass every now and then. Yeah. Yeah. Um, w- you can sit at your desk from 8:00 to 5:00 and not think about anything other than the agents, but go outside every now and then. It’s very important. It’s very, very important. Yeah. Especially when it’s nice outside. Even when it’s not nice outside, it’s nice to touch grass. Yeah. Um, th- and again, thanks again for this. And thanks for the folks that were listening in live and the folks that are listening or watching in the future. My name is Isaac Levin. This has been Coffee and Open Source. And if you like this episode, like it, share it, do all the things with it, cuz it I would love to, you know, do this more and get more feedback and figure out what sort of people I like to chat with. Um, so, I hope you have a great day. And for my friend Kevin, you know, enjoy the rest. Take care.

01:07 Thank you, Isaac.

For more on practical AI use, read how Claude helped with my Microsoft MVP renewal. You can also check out my earlier conversation about tech communities and AI on the Fervent Four podcast and my discussion of using AI to close gaps in production test coverage.

If you’re experimenting with agents in your own workflow, hit me up on X, Bluesky, or LinkedIn. I’d love to hear where you’re finding the line between useful automation and complete mental overload.