Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
01:27:30 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[01:27:30] S1: Right. [01:27:30] S0: Obviously, many, like, great players in in in that field, but it's it's a tough tough industry, I think. And so, like, the the best time... But I think it's not controversial. Best time for any security company is when a high profile incident just happened. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Obviously. Right? Like, then, obviously, you're gonna sell a bunch of security. Totally. Yeah. So so I I think I think that's a fair thing. Like, people you... People should be aware. People should know the the basic mitigation... Mitigations. I do think, like, code scanning is important, but, like, I I just wanna give people the the idea that, like, oh, no. Models introduce bugs that you wouldn't make as a human. And, like, if you're you're not checking those bugs [01:28:08] S2: It's it's not even that they make bugs, it's that you have less awareness of what's being written. Right? Like when [01:28:14] S0: Yeah. Because you know you review everything. [01:28:16] S2: Yeah. Forget bugs. Models are pretty good. They'll have on average, I would say less bugs. The problem is also that you don't even know what you're putting out. Like Yeah. There's a lot of that. [01:28:29] S1: Yeah. And that's it. Think we're do top of mitigations and and like the... And there's sort of a combination of security and and c herdy as part of code review as well. Right? I mean, think this is like, doing those checks, I think, is important. Yeah.
01:28:29 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[01:28:29] S1: Yeah. And that's it. Think we're do top of mitigations and and like the... And there's sort of a combination of security and and c herdy as part of code review as well. Right? I mean, think this is like, doing those checks, I think, is important. Yeah. [01:28:38] S0: So so I think maybe I would say one more thing here or or just check your... Check-in... Check my intuition on on this thing Yeah. Is that not all parts of the code base are created equal. The parts of the code base where security is very important is data storage [01:28:54] S1: Mhmm. Yep. [01:28:55] S0: And billing. So let's call it that data billing [01:28:59] S1: auth, [01:29:00] S0: and auth is obviously related to all those things. And those are basically don't Vibe code, and then everything else go go nuts. [01:29:08] S1: Yeah. Right? I think that's absolutely right. [01:29:09] S0: That's absolutely right. And and it's really funny how, like, okay. Well, if you don't know what the difference between auth n and auth z is, please learn it. [01:29:17] S2: Mhmm. [01:29:17] S0: And then, you know, if you if you don't know... If you have never looked at AWS IAM which you have, please learn it. Like, this... Like, these are basic, like, conceptual things to understand that you can prompt for. You know, once you have the language, you can prompt for it. If you don't have the language, you're fucked.
01:29:17 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[01:29:17] S0: And then, you know, if you if you don't know... If you have never looked at AWS IAM which you have, please learn it. Like, this... Like, these are basic, like, conceptual things to understand that you can prompt for. You know, once you have the language, you can prompt for it. If you don't have the language, you're fucked. [01:29:32] S1: Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. To an extent, I would even extend that to, like, just general, like, certain certain, like, cloud platform of things. Right? Mean, was the... Forget which company got... Had that huge incident where, like, it was just like a DNS issue that brought down... Was it? Do you remember this? Was it... DNS [01:29:46] S0: issues? Yeah. [01:29:49] S1: Know. I know. Was, like, a particularly prominent one. Was it... [01:29:52] S2: There have also been many prominent DNS issues. [01:29:58] S0: List them off. It's always DNS. It's always DNS. Yeah. So DNS is more of like a reliability uptime. [01:30:03] S1: Sure. [01:30:03] S0: Sure. You know, security, I think people are like, oh, yeah. Did you lose money? Did you leak customer information? [01:30:08] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That... I would... Yeah. Probably put that above that for sure. Only DNS because of uptime. Yeah. General uptime. Yeah. SLAs and stuff. [01:30:15] S0: Background agents. Now you got your buddy from Qualify here. But, mean, your guests aren't necessarily correlated with that week. Right?
01:30:15 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:30:15] S0: Background agents. Now you got your buddy from Qualify here. But, mean, your guests aren't necessarily correlated with that week. Right? [01:30:21] S1: Yeah. No. I mean, like, the 09/01 was a little bit of scheduling thing where I've thrown in, you know, Elad and and Amjad. I guess, Amjad is is definitely week nine. Elad, I was trying to get him at the end, but I think it was just timing wise, couldn't work So, it yeah, it's a bit of a weird one where I don't... I guess I'm not lecturing at all week nine, but but we're coming back to those topics in week 10. So it's a little bit staggered in a in a bit of a bizarre way there. But, yeah, week eight, Rajesh, who has been leading a lot of, like, the infra stuff at, kind of CloudInfra, DevX, and and beyond at Cloudflare, which, as I earlier said, was... I think they're doing a great job here, and definitely their adoption for a company of their size and a public company of their size is is fantastic. And then their content, think, is also really good. I mean, this is fundamentally about all the ways you can use, like, asynchronous background agents. I think I'm also gonna spend quite a bit of time talking about, you know, the Stripe minions, the Spotify, I forget the name of their version of this, the ramp inspects, the, you know, things of that nature that I think are all kind of showing what does it look like when you scale this out. [01:31:19] S0: Contact Instinct? Grokbots? [01:31:22] S1: Yes. Manus? Yeah. I mean, I guess less on consumer, more on, like, you know, software teams using them at scale.
01:31:22 · Mihail Eric, Shawn Wang, S2
[01:31:22] S1: Yes. Manus? Yeah. I mean, I guess less on consumer, more on, like, you know, software teams using them at scale. [01:31:31] S0: They're all coding ages under the hood. It's true. [01:31:33] S2: Everything is a coding agent. [01:31:34] S0: Yeah. Like, Grokbot is one of those interesting things where, like, it's very very much presented as consumer y. It's it's Grok under... It's, you know, it's it's cursor under the hood. [01:31:44] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [01:31:44] S0: Yeah. It's the cursor team. It's... [01:31:45] S1: No. No. For sure. Like, so I I I... I've seen the, like, know, cursor working in in the, like, the dot dot dots, but but but they are not... Don't they have, like, a code base integration. Right? They do? Okay. I used that. I've only been using it for, like, OpenTable reservations. [01:31:57] S0: Exactly. Okay. Which... I think that's the point of [01:32:00] S1: what they're trying to do. I see. Yeah. As in, like? [01:32:03] S0: They're trying to be like, well, you can use it for consumer stuff, but here's the extra power if you know how to use it well, because it's actually crushed under the hood. [01:32:12] S2: I think this goes to all coding agents, right? Like Claude Code, Cloud Design, people using Codex, not knowing they're using Codex, right? A random code interpreter window pops up and you're just asking ChatGPT a question at some level there's coding agent under the hood, right?
01:32:12 · S2, Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:32:12] S2: I think this goes to all coding agents, right? Like Claude Code, Cloud Design, people using Codex, not knowing they're using Codex, right? A random code interpreter window pops up and you're just asking ChatGPT a question at some level there's coding agent under the hood, right? [01:32:29] S0: Yeah. So I'll give you another sort of practical example. So I I run all my SEO and AEO inside of Codex, and it has a code base, even though, like, a traditional marketer would just check the address or something. Yeah. Because I write all these scripts for doing all the... All sorts of crazy stuff. Sure. And and also I need to store data, and also I need to visual... Visualize data. And, like, pretty soon you go... Like, as long as you're doing anything on an ongoing basis that has, like, maybe a lot of steps or a lot of data, you need a code base. [01:32:58] S1: That is an interesting take. [01:33:01] S2: I think models also like building codebases. [01:33:04] S0: No. But that could be a temporary thing. [01:33:06] S1: Right? Guess maybe my my point is more on the interface. Right? Like, will... Are you going to so far... Like, are you gonna go so far to say that a Grokbot will have a place where, like, the power user will be able to see the code under the hood? Is that... Or is it... Well, there is a computer. [01:33:19] S0: Maybe they'll they'll just jump to cursorize, I guess. Is is that what you're saying?