Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
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?
01:33:19 · Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric, S2
[01:33:19] S0: Maybe they'll they'll just jump to cursorize, I guess. Is is that what you're saying? [01:33:21] S1: Well, exactly. Because I'm like, otherwise, then then you basically cannibalize cursor. Like, if if in a limit, what you're saying is GrockBot is the cursor, then you don't even need, like, a cursor if all under the hood is just becoming... It's the same team? So they... Maybe? [01:33:31] S0: Right now, don't care. But, yeah, it's all Growup. But... Yeah. Yeah. [01:33:35] S1: I I I buy that... I mean, I do accept that even things that seem outwardly just, like, nontechnical use cases under the hood are technical, can be, like, written and and designed and loaded in code. Like that, that much is absolutely true, right? The question is just more like, is a developer, is that their single point of entry? [01:33:52] S0: I think [01:33:52] S2: it's not even developer, right? Like you think of a regular person doing marketing that is using Claude code or just Claude in the app now is working in a code base that they would never know, never touch, but there's a code base manager. I think Cloud Tag is a good one for a background agents. It's a big way Anthropic works and you know, they make it. You should see [01:34:14] S1: how they work. Yeah. Take a shot. [01:34:17] S0: Okay. AI Native team. We've talked a lot about these topics of gateway. We just put a routing episode out today and MCP portal. I would say MCP portal is like the least established [01:34:28] S2: on MCPs.
01:34:28 · S2, Shawn Wang, Mihail Eric
[01:34:28] S2: on MCPs. [01:34:29] S0: I'm bullish on MCPs. It's there's not bullish or bearish. It's just is. It's just is a part of the landscape now. Right? [01:34:35] S1: Yeah. [01:34:36] S2: MCP That's a statement. There was a whole MCP is so bad. MCP is dead. People people like Extreme. MCP portals [01:34:43] S0: is an unproven business. I I thought about starting one. I actually pitched a guy in topic on on potentially starting one, and then I lost interest. I was interested in a lot a lot of things. But, like, what... What's what's in there? [01:34:55] S1: So, okay. So what I'm thinking here is if this is if this is the week design... More kind of geared toward scaling this out to, like, what happens when you take some principles... And a lot of this was informed by, like, the conversation I had with folks that were, you know, leading AI native teams AI native teams at, at respective companies. And so here, I think that something at MCP portal really becomes interesting once you're at a certain scale, where you effectively have to have a single point of entry to do things like governance, security, auditing, cost optimization. And so, you know, I... I'd be curious to hear what you see as the future or maybe lack thereof of something like this, but it to me is... And it's... If you believe in, like, an open router or, you know, some place... Like, a single point of entry for for many things to happen and connect to and be effectively, you know, governed, I feel like there's a world where this also can easily exist.