Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
01:37:51 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[01:37:51] S1: That's funny. That's very funny. I like that. That's very funny. Into the heat death of the universe. Wow. [01:37:58] S0: That's funny. Which is a... This is a restatement of, like, there's only two ways to make software, which is you bundle them, you unbundle them. Right. Right. What are you bundling? Is It the things that go together, hopefully. And then maybe over time, people's opinions shift as what goes together, what should not go together. So there is that whole thing, maybe Monaco should be more of a point solution. Maybe Monaco should own everything. Right? And, like, there's the question of, like, in some ways, you're bundling for the the kind of startup segment that you serve. In some ways, you're unbundling from Salesforce because Salesforce... And then that's how you win market share from Salesforce. You unbundle from Salesforce. Mhmm. Mhmm. [01:38:39] S1: That's interesting. Yeah. That's that's an even broader statement. I mean, connecting it to broadly all of vertical AI or... Right now, like, bundling, unbundling. I mean, that's like the whole, like, Craigslist and Airbnb, you know, the the Tinder and all those are separate. Tinder. But, you know, like, a personals, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [01:38:57] S0: Yeah. Never thought it... Never thought thought about it that way. But, yes. And, you know, one one of the things that... So we just shipped the OpenRouter Pod today. Right? And OpenRouter, huge success. [01:39:06] S2: Mhmm.
01:39:06 · S2, Shawn Wang
[01:39:06] S2: Mhmm. [01:39:07] S0: Lots of people tried to build gateways. None of them had success with OpenRouter. OpenRouter only builds gateways. So there's an example of, like, this... They disagree with me that the the the router layer should also do ops because Arize is doing ops and observability and and what have you. And and they... And, like, the MCP gateway, they don't have that. And they they they just... They only handle model routing. And so, like, I I, like, I am... I love being wrong like that because they're like, we are the point solution, and we only do this one thing really, really well. And that's our that's our engineering focus, which is good, but it's also the marketing focus, which is nice. Mhmm.
01:39:43 · Mihail Eric
[01:39:43] S1: I I think the... This becomes... I think that the... What you've described of, like, the one one stop shop for all the things is ideologically what makes sense, but I think what ends up happening in practice, and you know, part of it is probably also marketing, is that, especially when you look at the enterprise, is like this is broadly under infra, like broadly under platform, but then there's separate teams owning different parts of the stack. And I think part of that consolidation at the at the scale of an enterprise, if we're doing MCP portal and gateway, someone has to come together and say, like, now we're... There's a single endpoint that you're hitting for both of these things. And that fundamentally is, like, a hard thing to, you know, get everyone on board with. So oftentimes it's more political and even people problem rather than from a pure software perspective, this makes a ton of sense. But that's not it. Software systems sometimes are bottlenecked by people problems more than pure software.
01:40:30 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:40:30] S0: My framing of this is typically, you know how you ship your org chart? This is... I forget what the name of this principle is. Conway's Law, you ship your org chart, you buy your org chart. Like when you start a startup or you make a tool, who in the company is your... Are you best friends for? And if it's for everyone, it's for no one. That's interesting. That is interesting. So so, like, a conscious part of Latent Space and a... And AIE is, like, okay, there's this category of software engineer that really, really, really cares a lot about AI. Is it gonna make it their day job? Let's only make it for them. Right. Right. Right. Right. [01:41:09] S1: Not a not a bundling of engineering. Never gonna be the dev, everyone. [01:41:13] S0: Yeah. Look, we talk about databases. Yeah. Talk about security, but, like, there's an AI angle to it. Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. We'll see. That makes sense. Cool. Software factory. [01:41:23] S1: One thing I'll just, like, shout out as well, related to the to the point is, I think role of the future that is increasingly important, platform engineer. I think this is, like, a huge one. [01:41:33] S0: You know... Okay. More lore. Temporal, my job before all this, I would have, yeah. So we wanted to own platform engineer. If I hadn't started, yeah, yeah, I would have done platform engineer. Mhmm. Mhmm. Because that is the role that decide... That decides all of this mission critical stuff, and then the kids over in applications can do whatever they want on top of our platform. But but, you know, the big boys do platform.
01:41:33 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[01:41:33] S0: You know... Okay. More lore. Temporal, my job before all this, I would have, yeah. So we wanted to own platform engineer. If I hadn't started, yeah, yeah, I would have done platform engineer. Mhmm. Mhmm. Because that is the role that decide... That decides all of this mission critical stuff, and then the kids over in applications can do whatever they want on top of our platform. But but, you know, the big boys do platform. [01:41:55] S1: Yeah. And I think in the modern day, they own they own cloud, they own dev x, they own security, psych ops. So I think it's it's all of the things. [01:42:02] S0: Like, everything where you can actually, like, lose the company or, like, or make or break, like, yeah, platform guys. And then product guys can do, you know, adjust the CSS. [01:42:14] S1: That's saying, you're starting a fight here. I mean, I'm not the CSS adjuster, but I appreciate everyone. [01:42:22] S2: I mean, it's fun a time. What's the future? I feel like all the guys can adjust all the things.
01:42:22 · S2, Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang
[01:42:22] S2: I mean, it's fun a time. What's the future? I feel like all the guys can adjust all the things. [01:42:27] S1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a few aspects here. Okay, so there's little bit of spillover from the previous week. So yeah, coding agents, big teams, some of the concepts, but then, you know, we'll touch on the software factory. I want people to really start thinking about this world of this machine that builds the machine, and where, if at all, are people still in the loop there. Today, I think the answer is some combination of intent kind of review, or maybe the places, like, intent where you're defining the specs and what needs to be built, and review where you're doing some amount of your own checking of the system. And of course, also... This is, I think, that bottleneck is gonna be loosened up before even the intent piece does, but for now, are the two toe points, I think, in a fully automated system. So yeah, I just wanna get people exposed to that. For one of the USS partners, actually, WARP, they're doing this thing as part of their contribution to the USS program, where they're gonna essentially make a version of WARP that is running for the factory, and students will just be building the factory, contributing to the factory, and keep [01:43:23] S0: it running. Like, work in [01:43:24] S1: our factory. Work in our factory. Exactly. And so that's gonna be one of the ways... And then they're gonna, yeah, find things that they find that are interesting there and pull it back in.