Copilot Kills Cursor? Reacting to Github Universe Keynote

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we got a live one for you. Well, kinda live. Here we are. Me and Scott in the person. We don't get to see each other all that often. We are here at GitHub Universe.

Pretty exciting that we, a whole bunch of announcements today, so the the plan is that we're gonna go through a bunch of the announcements of GitHub Universe, most of them surrounding Versus Code, and whatnot. And, we're also we got plans Node guests coming in as well to to talk about what's been going on, but

welcome welcome, Scott. Can I welcome you? How's it going? You can welcome me. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. It's been a busy couple of days. Yeah. Right? Yeah. We've been here, even today just walking around. There's a lot of people here. I heard, like, 3,000 plus people.

The scale of some of these conferences just just absolutely blows my mind. So we saw a me and me and Randy went out back because we wanted to look at all the gear, and they had a pallet. I'm not lying, probably a 150 boxes for WiFi access points. It means, like, they've I'm I'm just looking around everywhere of, like, what the gear is just to set this place up, and it takes a while.

Yeah. Yeah. We're just talking to the audio guy about, cameras over Ethernet, or or microphones over Ethernet. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're here to talk about GitHub universe. Oh, let's start with Syntax meetup. We had Syntax meetup. So we're in San Francisco. We're, like, let's do a meetup. We went to Bare Bottle Brewing. Yeah. At the Salesforce

Yarn? It was like a Salesforce Yarn. What a weird city, man. It was a Yarn, yeah, right outside the Salesforce tower. It was a park on top of a building. Yeah.

Man, in the the foliage in there. It was cool. I don't know if you noticed. There Wes, like, different sections where different parts of the park had different types of trees, all kind of, like, correlated in different sections. Yes. I was noticing that. But, no, a lot of people came out, and, you know, we had a a just a great time getting to meet everybody. So if you came out, thanks for showing up and It was one of those, like,

I had met a bunch of people that I've known online for 10, 15 Yarn. And you see some old friends. You meet a whole bunch of really neat new people. Met all the folks from Node assistant, which was really cool, and, like, we're gonna try having them on because, like, they're doing some really cool stuff. Yeah. Even, like, Jason Langsdorff, I felt like I've I've known him for so long. Yeah. So just Yeah. Even for some time. Met him in person? I'm like, oh, man. We've never been in the the same room before. Yeah. Hey. What's up? Yeah. I know. So thanks everybody for coming out to the meetup. That was super fun. We're going to be doing more of them, so so stay tuned. Also, let us know what city you want us to come to because Hey. We'll come to. You know? Live in Grand Rapids or, Wes talked about it. Oddly enough, Grand Rapids is the one that Scott a joke. I kinda wanna go to Grand Rapids. Yeah. Dayton, Ohio JS also another kinda cool cool city. I'm gonna check off Ohio. I'm saying sorry, Ohio folks. We're not coming there. No. An Arbor, Michigan. We can go to An Arbor, Michigan. Yeah. Michigan JS. Just to give you, Michigan is the Canada of the US, so I'm in.

Alright. So this conference,

AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, absolutely

freaking everything is AI at this conference, and it's it's almost overwhelming, to a point where it's like we did the little upstairs, there's all these, like, vendors The tour. The booths, everyone's got the Bos, and stuff, and, like,

it's every single person, like, we're AI for dog walking, and we're AI for absolutely everything. AI for everything. And I and I think the like, some of these services too, not to poo poo any of the companies here, but, like, you could look at some of these. And we were saying, like, it feels like at any moment, GitHub or somebody could just, like, snap their fingers and They're out of business. They're out of business. They're donezo. Just because, as we'll talk about later in this episode with the the keynote of all the things yeah. The all of the things announced. Yeah.

Man, it does feel like GitHub is more prime than anybody else to Yeah. Just kinda step in and, you know, they what do they call it? Like Appling a company? What JS the word? The word is called,

Sherlock. Sherlock. Yeah. So before Totally. OSX or Mac OS had a, launcher, there's this thing called Sherlock, and like like like Raycast that we use now. Right? Yeah. Or Alfred. And Alfred. Yeah. And somebody told me the other day, I never got it that Alfred was called that because

Sherlock. Ben Vinegar says that. Yeah. Yeah. And,

I don't read books, but I assume that's something to do with the book. I don't know.

Bos understand. Wes he said that, I was like,

yeah. I don't at at first, I was thinking you they got mustaches or something, but I actually do not know what the connection between Sherlock and Alfred is. But, anyways, yeah. The whole the term Sherlock means a bigger company comes and and and does you away because it's you're just a feature Totally. In their product. So this conference was from from GitHub. Obviously, GitHub is owned by Microsoft.

Lots of AI stuff happening. So let's talk about, like, some of the stuff that they announced. Probably the the biggest one that everyone's really excited about is that you can now use alternative models on GitHub Copilot Yep. In Versus Node, meaning that you don't just have to use OpenAI.

Everybody's absolutely loving Claude, and then you can also use Gemini

as well. Let's take a step there. When you write or when you go to an LLM to talk code, you're talking shop with an LLM,

are you who who are you going for first? Are you you calling up Claude? I'm defaulting to Claude. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it feels like it's the best. Yeah. You know? And

I Even after the even after the gpt four o stuff, or even the new any of the new chat gpt additions, I still find Claude to work the best Yeah. The most often. And they even it's it's so funny. I don't know. Like, they have to get they they currently all of the LLMs have the the Sony problem of naming things, where, like, the Sony WXM zero zero whatever, you know, they need to just settle on a nice naming structure. You thought Chatt GPT had it with GPT 3.53, you know, Chatt GPT 4, and it's, like, oh, four o. Yeah. What's the deal there? And then Claude is Claude, Sanity, Claude Haiku, Claude 3.5, and I get that they're different. Right? Yeah. Those different types of models have the different names, but they released an update to Claude, and it's still Claude 3.5. Yeah. What's, like What's the deal there? Just give me just make it at least 3.8

or something, you know? Plus also, like, it's like a full time job caring about these things as well. Like, literally, this is my job. Yeah. And I feel like, oh, there's a lot to to sort of figure out. But I think, like, one thing kinda take away from all this is the LLMs are table stakes. You don't see a lot of people aside from these massive companies making their own models. Totally.

Obviously, Hugging Face has, like, a 1000000 models on it, and people are making smaller models. But these massive models that people are building tools for, they're not building their own models anymore. They are building tools on top of them, and the the sauce comes from not having your model, but the sauce comes from how do you provide the data to the LLM in such a way that it actually understands it, and, maybe it's multi step. And then also, like, what's the UX for actually using these things. Right? Yeah. Chat is one of them, but as we're seeing with Cursor, Cursor uses OpenAI or Claude or any of these models, and the killer feature of Cursor is the is the UI. It's the way you interact with it. There's a and and there's a lot of killer features of Cursor that are Yeah. Are now probably no longer,

unique to to Cursor. We'll get into in in just a bit. But I do think it's interesting that this is essentially a Microsoft conference. Right? And you kind of get the the I mean, by all accounts, Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI.

Right? Yeah. So for them to open it up and say, you know what? You can use Gemini. You can use Claude. That does feel like a, actually, like a positive step. I mean, given, like, Apple. Right? Do you think Apple JS a company, if they were doing this, would ever be like, you know Node? We can't you can use these other things that are not That's a good question. Part of our ecosystem. No. Apple would not. They you would say, we're locking you in because that's the way we make all the money. So I feel like that's positive. Company that I think they realize, like, at the end of the day,

your entry into this whole ecosystem is via this tooling. Yeah. Right? If they, eventually, you wanna deploy your app to Azure or buy a copy of Microsoft Word or whatever JS going on, The entry point to that is is is a lot of it, for for developers at least, is is coding. Right? And if it's not good, people are just gonna go flip to something else, and then you've lost the the top of the funnel on that, And all of a sudden, they're they're deploying to Google Cloud instead of Azure. Yeah. Right. Especially if you're launching a lot of the stuff that they did launch.

I think the message would be Yeah. Oh, I'm still gonna use Claude because Claude lets me use

Anthropic. Claude lets me use the model of my choice. You mean Cursor? Cursor. Yeah. Yes. Claude. Cursor. Claude is the model from Anthropic. Scott of words. But so let's talk about that. Their big announcement, Cassie Williams came up and and did the keynote, was that, at least the big announcement for Versus Node was all most of the features, I won't say all because there's we'll talk about which ones are missing, but most of the features that everybody's like, man, cursor, so much better.

A lot of them have been now brought back into to Versus Node, which we we kinda knew this was coming. Right? Being, like, oh, yeah. Cursor is so much better. We've set it ourselves. It's amazing.

I use Cursor full time. Me too. I've been using Cursor for about two and a half weeks full time now. Yeah. It's better, but you gotta think, well, you know, they're gonna come along and just, oh, we can we'll just do that as Wes, you Node? We make the editor, and we also, a lot of these features that announced have such a tight integration with GitHub, where the whole dev flow is not just open up the editor, and write the code, the whole dev flow is is part of GitHub. Right? You have code reviews, and and all that good stuff, so You're you're you're bought ESLint GitHub. We're all bought into GitHub. I mean, I think there's people who are on Bitbucket. There's people who are on,

you know, what is it? GitLab. GitLab. Yeah. We're we're mostly all bought in all bought in to GitHub. So for GitHub to come out and let's start actually with the features. The first one being multi file editing. So for the l l m to be able to edit multi files at once, touch them, whatever we Node to do, is one of the things that a lot of people use for cursor. Now I will say, this is not the feature I use very much in cursor. No. No. Let's talk about that. Trust it, really. I think that's the problem for me. I have low trust here. Yeah. It's great because if you wanna refactor something

with multiple files, like, let's say say for example, you have, something that updates, something in your database. Right? And you have, like, a field. You're like, name, age, weight, and then you wanted to add another field. Sometimes that's gonna be, okay, well, you have to add a field to your schema, you have to add a field to your updater, function that updates the model, and you gotta add something to your front end code that adds the the input and the handler, maybe a set state function, and there's there's all of that. Right? And that might be 6 or 7 different files, and being able to say, hey, can you add an additional field to this, and it knows kind of where to touch the the things.

That that's a that's a really great feature. I like it. And it it do you trust it or not? It's sometimes, it it doesn't work very good. Well, I feel like on my part I feel like on my part, it's a skill issue. Yeah. I feel like I haven't unlocked that workflow for myself.

Because by all accounts, the people who really like it seem to think that that's, like and it's 1. If you look at this list of features that they added, it's the number 1 first one on the list. Yeah. Meaning, like, they feel like that's very important. Editing. Yeah. And also Wes you ask it to make something, it can now create multiple files for you as well, which is is pretty cool. And it it has this thing called intent detection, meaning that it will try to figure out which parts of your code

need to be sent to the LLM. So you say, alright, this form here needs a new pnpm. Mhmm.

Between the AI and probably it crawls your dependency tree. Yeah. It will figure out, okay, Wes, I need to include these functions in the prompt. And, like, that's the killer feature, JS you can't just give it your entire code base. Mhmm. You have to give it the parts of the code base that you think are important

so that I can can then update it. Can you tell if I my intent is for this code to work? Yes. That is how I I start I start my my, my sessions. I I my intention is that this code will work. Yeah. Okay. So we also mentioned multi models or multi multi model selection JS in you can choose the model that you're going to use. There's also listed as a repo indexing, which is again a feature that Cursor uses Wes it's going to index your repo and put that into context.

You can ask the models questions about your code Bos specifically. Yeah. And you can reference,

like, a function. Yeah. I'm using the function at, and you can rest you can reference a function name, or you can reference an pnpm, or a CSS selector, or or a entire file in the chat window, you Node. Like, there's there's there's a couple ways you can sort of approach writing code with these elements. Part of it is just the tabbing, and part of it is the ESLint chat, but then the other one is that, alright, I'm doing something bigger here. You open up the chat window on the side, and you can you can craft a bit of a a bigger prompt. Yeah. There's also 2. I think this one is one of the things I'm most excited about

JS the Copilot instructions, where you can give it a Copilot instructions. I believe in cursors, cursor rules. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. And what's what's fun actually about this is I don't know if you experience this, but there's a website that we'll we'll link in the show notes. I don't have it handy right now. That is just a repository of cursor rules.

And if you're building an x, y, and z site, you can filter. I'm building a Svelte 5 Svelte kit site, and somebody's already written a template of a cursor rules file for you. Yeah. Node wonder, because I have not seen what the instruction files look like yet. I would have to imagine

they're extremely similar to what a cursor rules file is. Yeah. It's just giving you some examples of you what you will put in a cursor rules. Oh, man. Let me even let me pull up Show hacker news, cursor rules directory.

You're an expert in TypeScript in React Expo mobile UI. Write concise technical TypeScript.

Use functional declarative.

Prefer iteration and modularization over duplication.

Yeah. Use descriptive variables. Okay. So these are just like your your, like, preferences when you're you're building something, you Node. Like, a simple very simple one is prefer types over interfaces.

Correct.

Yeah. And and actually, that is is the type of thing that I really like, because I do happen to be kind of particular about things a lot. And I I'm sure most most people are. Right? Oh, I'm looking for the one that I have inside of the I I made a Svelte five branch for our syntax site. Yeah. But it Wes, essentially, you are a Svelte five app. Here's the links to this Svelte five documentation.

Here are the links to the SvelteKit documentation.

We prefer, classes instead of functions for Svelte Scott. We prefer this instead of this. Here's what we're doing for styles. Here's here's all of our CSS variables and what they're used for. Mhmm. And you're just you're getting you're giving it that context. And I found it to to be so handy in terms of the code that ends up being up. Comments

in Canadian slang, where It's like comments in yeah. Yeah. Heavily comment the code base or do not

do not code base or sorry. Do not comment at all. Yeah. Outside yeah. Cursor directory, that that site is is so good, and I found a lot of different rules there that I I what I do is I don't use any of these specifically out of the Bos. Yeah. But I do use them as a a starting place to then delete and tweak and whatever.

I I find it to be very helpful. So it will be interesting to see if it is just essentially a file like this with instructions Yep. And have it function just the same. I would imagine it is given

how these things will function. The the one thing and we're gonna ask Harold when he comes in about this JS they did not announce the, sort of the, my favorite feature of Cursor, which is the multiple line suggestions. Mhmm. So in Cursor, when you you're just just you're just sitting there, you're not writing anything, it will scan your code, and it will find pieces that are inconsistent or, have syntax issues, or, for example, if you did all caps for 3 of them, and then the next one you did lowercase, it will try to suggest it for you, and it it will suggest edits that are multiple lines and on different lines, so you could be editing 3 or 4 different lines at once. And that's part of why Cursor had to fork Versus Node because that UI is just not part of Versus Code at all.

So that was not announced at all.

You gotta think that they're they're working on that because that's the

I think that that's my favorite feature, is it not? What's what's yours? It does kinda feel like it's the type of thing that would just show up, and you'd be like, oh, they didn't mention it, but here it is. You know? You think so? Well, I mean, if you look at this list of features, it kind of like Cursors' entire list of features. I watched the the whole demo like a hawk looking for that, and I didn't see it. There Wes they do do the

the editing. So it's called, multi file edit. No. Not multi file. It's basically prompt edits Wes you can say, edit this file, and when it does propose the changes, it overlays them in the green Yes. For new stuff, and the red for stuff that's gonna be deleted, but it as you're typing, you know, you usually get ghost Wes. Yeah. The cursor multiple ESLint, and and multiple edits at once, where you just hit tab, tab, tab, and cursor will also try to guess where your cursor will go next. Yeah. And it works great. I like it a lot. You know what it works so great for, especially when you

you have something that maybe you're refactoring, and you're you've all of a sudden made a change somewhere. Yeah. And you wanna make that same change across several different parts of the code Bos, or not even code base, several different parts of the file, but even several different parts of, like, actual structure and code. Yeah. Things that aren't you can't do find and replace for. Things that are not directly connected. You can't rename symbol.

And let's say I copy and paste some code. Right? I got it off the Internet.

I paste this code and it's in camel case. I want this code to be in snake case, but it's my entire code Bos. Right? Because I'm a, weird guy. And I start changing 1 variable to be snake case. Cursor will just tell me it will just guess. It'll say, oh, you want all these other ones to be in snake case too? I got you. Hit tap. Yeah. Alright. Got it. So for me, that's the thing I use the most. But, yeah, like you said, just being able to, like, have it know exactly what you're going to do next. Yeah. I I was joking that my my coding lately has just been hitting the tab key because it, like once it understands what you're trying to do, it can really take it from there in a lot of way. I mean, not not completely. It's not building this stuff. But it's, like,

shocking.

And and I know people Yarn, like, oh, the AI is too hyped. Like, this is not hyped up. It's I honestly think that this is the way that the future of code will look, if not even more. And it's such it just feels good. And it's, again, it's not an LLM. They're using the same LLMs as us. It's the it's the way that you interact

with the LLM, and it just feels very natural as someone who is used to using a Versus Node to edit code. Yeah. To me, it feels like auto complete for your brain. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's faster for me because I I know what I'm trying to do. I know what I'm trying to I know what I'm about to type, but just simply the act of typing it actually takes more time than you'd, you know, you you kind of expect. They're also listed on the the the features for Copilot for Versus Node JS code a code review feature. Yeah. Did you catch what that was? Because I did not catch what that was.

I I either caught it in there or in the so they also have this thing called GitHub workspaces, which is is still wait listed. But the the idea is that there's coding, but then there's also, like, pull requests and code review, and there's all these, like, things around it. And, like, the a very basic example is somebody submits a pull request Yeah. And you go, that's good, but I'm gonna change this one thing. Right? And, maybe you can edit it online, or or maybe you have to pull it locally and and make a bit of an edit, but, like, like, imagine you could write a prompt, but, like, this is a good pull request, but,

modify it to use camel case or something like that. So or or code review, you know? Like, just send sending a pull request. That demo in work spaces, which, like, to me, that seemed like extremely handy. Yeah. Because when you get into a code review, the thing that I hate is then pulling that code. Like, I I almost all the time end up making edits directly in the GitHub editor, which is, like Yeah. Not my So well, here's a question.

When you're doing a code review, say I've I added a bunch of features to the Syntax website, I submit a pull request, and I say, Scott, can you review this for me? It's obviously bad. Do you like that?

In Copilot, or do you do that in Versus Code? I do. I'm sorry. Do you do that in GitHub or in Versus Code? It's it's a matter of how extensive the work needs to be. Yeah. If it's if it's changing a couple things or adding a comment or whatever. I mean, if it's, like, if it's 10, 20 lines of code, I'll do it directly in GitHub Yeah. Every time. Yeah. I yeah. I I'm

also doing more and more in Versus Node, because I I realized, like, a lot of people do all their version control. They do all their pull requests. They do all their code reviews. You can add comments on certain lines. The comments show up, like, in line Mhmm. On it, and it's it's a very nice experience. It's also because, like, I'm In Versus Code. Yeah. Yeah. Right inside of Versus Code. So I'm assuming

that Wait. How does it do that? It's amazing. So it's in Versus Code. Is it a a plug in, or is it just part of Versus Code? I don't know.

You have to use a GitHub plug in of Versus Node, man. I've been in yeah. I don't know. GitHub pull requests is the plug in. It's a plug in. And I don't know if it comes installed by default or not, but when you somebody sends a pull request, you can go through the entire pull request, and it'll show you what has changed, and you can write comments right in line. Wow. But then you get all of your you can hover over top and see your TypeScript, you're just comfortable in your editor. So I'm assuming that means that they have taken a step further where you can now prompt,

the code review Interesting. For edits as well. Yeah. So I don't have GitHub pull Wes installed. It looks like there's a pre release package you can install. You must have installed this because I have not seen this.

I mean, unless it's a part of the official GitHub extension itself, which, you know, I I see there being 25,000,000

downloads. So everybody's using this. Except for me. Yeah. Yeah.

It's pretty, really snowing. Node around since 2018. I feel like I've been using it for for quite a while, and I I only found out it because I've been forcing myself to try do all of Git inside of Versus Code. Feel like I should. So folks out there,

I have just learned about it. I'm the, 2 the 25th ESLint zero zero whatever 1 millionth person to to figure this out. So wow. Clearly, learn something every day. Yeah.

Well, here's the question. Does it exist in Cursor? Yeah. That's honestly why I mean, I love Cursor, but I don't think that they're gonna be able to kick it given that daddy to Versus Node is

GitHub. Git daddy. Which yeah. Or I don't know. Who's the daddy? Is Microsoft the daddy? Yeah. Git yeah. But Get I mean, GitHub is Git daddy now. I think that is, after this this very

tight integration.

Yeah.

But it's it's also good to see GitHub investing so much in this, like, code development flow. So I think a lot of us were they literally renamed themselves to an AI company. Totally. You know, like, if you go to github.com

Well, who well who didn't rename themselves to be an AI company? I think that's what we learned from a lot of the vendors here is, everybody has renamed themselves to be a AI company lately.

Yeah. The if it was on the GitHub Twitter. What are they what is their thing? The AI powered developer platform.

That's pretty ambitious That's ambitious. To especially for such an established business business like GitHub to, like, hey, we're doing the AI thing. Like, I understand a lot of these startups upstairs are doing that because their initial product didn't didn't pan out. And Copilot was just initially just some experiment. I mean, it is crazy how often that happens. I mean, granted, each company probably has

a a 1000000000 terrible internal experiments that never, you know, come up to anything. But, like, the fact that Copilot can now become the identity in that that sort of way, just like Gmail for a while became, like, the Google identity.

Yeah. Yeah. It's and so GitHub Next is the, like, arm of GitHub that just tries wacky stuff. And Yeah. Sometimes it doesn't pan out, but you gotta I I I wonder who what other, like, companies? Like, what what what does Google's experiment look like? They've done I mean, Gmail Wes an experiment. Node. Yeah. But, like like, Node, is there Google wave.

Google Wave. Something that was not 50 years ago.

Yeah. Node. I I mean, who knows? But do they do they have that? They must. They must. You know? Like, I even I met people at the meetup yesterday that are, like, VC company, and they just have developers on staff to build these ideas. Yeah. Because they're just, like, Wes, this guy has an idea. We got we got devs. Let's try it. Yes. An unreleased feature of YouTube that Travis is working on. Yep. I'm not gonna talk about it here. They might have to kill you. What is it? No. Tell me. I'm I'll tell you know Node Sanity will beep it. Yeah. I Node.

But it's funny because I think it's something that will be here in no time, I I'm not gonna What is it? What feature is it? It's just a YouTube it's a YouTube feature. Damn can you DM me it? Yeah. I'll DM it to you. Right now. Wes don't wanna be on the screen, though.

You told me what it was. Yeah. Well, either way, I do think that those types of things are coming out of Google's Vercel, but maybe it's less moonshottty than it was before, or maybe we're just not hearing about it. Because the

the YouTube rollout for 3 minute shorts is, like, 8 stages Yeah. Of so they're they're increasing YouTube shorts from 90 seconds to, like, 3 minutes long. Yeah. And the rollout for it is you upload them now, and maybe in the future we'll we'll classify them as shorts, and they have this huge blog post, which is 4 stages of rollout Jeez. Into 2025 to increase the max length Wes a I have this. YouTube video, and it's just like, is that the state of and it's clear that it's not a technical limitation.

You know? Yeah. It's got a problem with Google. It's probably internal. Statement. How long is this video? If it's less than 60 seconds, and if it has the 16

9 by 16 ratio, it's a Scott. And TikTok, all all of a sudden, like, TikToks will be, like, yeah, your TikToks can be 34 minutes now, who cares? You know, I mean, it's just, like, random one day, that's wild. I uploaded a 13 minute TikTok, and it got 1,800,000

views. Which makes no sense to you. Watched the whole thing. Yeah. Like, it tells you, like, 0.2% of people have watched the whole thing. Again, no one's sitting there watching a 13 minute video, but they pushed it to so many people because Wow. They're trying to beat YouTube.

Okay. Let's let's keep moving here. So we talked about GitHub Copilot for Versus Code. There's also the the GitHub, marketplace.

Yes. And this is where you can add models. I, you know, I I did not get into the building at this point. Yeah. I was not here yet. So the idea here is that there's all these models out there,

that are you've got the the Llama one from Facebook. Lamma? There's Mistral.

There's all these different models that are good at different things. Right? Mhmm.

And in order to to try them out, there's this massive company called Hugging Face, and Hugging Face is literally the GitHub for AI.

And it's kinda like, wow, shouldn't GitHub have been the GitHub for AI models? Okay. Oh, is this so is this is this This is not entirely what Sure.

Hugging Face is huge, but the idea here is that they have playground. Mhmm. So what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to grab these models, run some queries against it. Vercel has a pro an AI playground, which is very much like this. Okay. So maybe Vercel Vercel's AI playground JS really good. You can see, like, 6 models at once, and you can see the differences between them all, but what the what this is, you can look at all the different models, and you can run them in parallel, and you can kinda just, like, before I download this, like, 32 gig model and go ahead and use it, and I'm assuming, the thing is, like, oh, we wanna use this model. I don't know how you actually use it, but I'm assuming it it all goes back to Azure, you know? At the end of the day, servers.

Azure. Yeah.

They didn't say the word Azure at all. But I feel like that yeah. If they if if the word Azure pops up in here, then we get a little little scared. Have you ever used the Azure dashboard? I don't I've used the the Azure dashboard for Vercel things, and it is

it's a scary place. Deploying a v s I so I have a v s code plug in, and getting that thing published is a That's what I'm saying. Pain in the butt. Yeah. I mean, whether it's that or anything Yeah.

I what is it with these companies? Whether it's AWS or Google's is awesome too.

Or Azure. My CloudFlare is just amazing. I don't know how to API key from CloudFlare today. I just clicked, I want an API key, and it showed up. I almost forget that Cloudflare is even in that same Yeah. World because it the the dashboard

is so light years ahead, and it's light years ahead just by not being pure dog shit. Yeah. Like, that is It's it's it's a hard thing because

you need control over everything. You Node? AWS, you need you need users, and those need to be in groups, and you need to say, well, this person can read this thing, and they can spin up droplets, but they can't delete a droplet, and it's it's so complex, and you some there's complex approvals, you know? Yeah. I need a Google Maps API key that needs to go through somebody, and, like, enterprise is a is a whole another

ballgame, but it's you require special people to, like, click those buttons. Right? I wonder if I wonder if a little bit of it too is that this is, like, a very engineer heavy place. Yeah. And, like, are they putting their designers or their UX engineers to develop these dashboards? Or, like, they're just, like, oh, the engineers will figure it out. You know? They'll That's a good question. Search for what they need and get there. They don't need they don't need the,

the the easy path. Yeah. Wes on. I'll say it's why it's why companies like Vercel are are are popular. Obviously, there's other features, but Yeah. Yeah. It's it's hard, man. Make it easy. Hard to click those buttons. Yeah. I agree. So okay. So this marketplace seems dope. You can run them in player,

parallel. You can try them out, and it's available to all users well past the time you're listening to this episode. So you can go and try this out. Pretty cool. I I I did not know that this was coming. Let's talk about, Copilot workspace.

Yeah. This is not something I I talked a little bit about it. It's not something I have access to just yet, and Node totally sure I understand where it is, but I feel like they're trying to push more of the software development onto to GitHub with this, which is like, obviously Node reviews and pull requests are part of that, but editing the files and whatnot

are them as well. I should be able to have access to this. I am We're at GitHubStar, dear. Star after all. Yes. I they did make me wait in the wait ESLint like everyone else.

You're gonna be a little button to jump ahead in line.

Yeah. I don't know. It it is funny as I I I say that, like, tongue in cheek, but as a GitHub star, you usually do get access to a lot of stuff like this a little bit early in the Wes, and I probably could if I I pushed it. But Yeah. Yeah. I'm interested in that. There were some really interesting things with the Copilot workspace that they announced. Like, one of the things was, like, developing a plan. I have a plan. I need to do this. I have a GitHub issue. This is a thing I would like to do. Yeah. And it develops a whole kind of checklist and then goes through the checklist. Oh, okay. And then edits multiple files to complete it. I highly recommend checking out the interface for this, of which we will put in the show notes. You can go to the the the marketing site. But I thought this was maybe the most impressive demo today because it it what it did is it took, I have a problem. Yep. And it broke it down into steps like a human would have, and then it just worked on solving those steps. Like, alright. What do I gotta do? What do I you know, it's like it really made me be like, yeah. This is is solving the problem exactly how I might approach it, which feels different than just hitting tab to auto complete a bunch of Node. You know? And I also think, like,

the whole, like, like, actions, GitHub actions on on something, wouldn't it be sick if those were written in plain text versus Plain Node, pnpm, text, actions. Yeah. You gotta think a lot about, like, check for security issues or check for for common mistakes that are happening. Really, you could create a whole set of these linting tasks. I'd like, I'm I'm kinda worried to say linting because it's Mhmm. Linting is so structured based on, like, the file tree, but things that require a bit more human attention Yeah.

That'd be a a interesting use case for for that type of thing. Okay. So here's all the stuff that the next iteration of Copilot Workspaces can do. It can brainstorm a feature.

It can even suggest questions or ask for options.

It can generate a plan, like I said. And then you can edit these steps by hand. So it's like when you when it generates a plan, it creates this checklist for you type of interface. Yeah. And then you can modify that before it even starts getting into code. So it is letting the hand of the developer step in there and modify this. And then it can create revisions. It can build and repair.

Oh, okay. And then guess what? It is going to be used, as we've talked about a bit, in pull requests for doing code reviews. Right? So instead of having to go to your editor, you could just pop it open in GitHub workspaces.

You could have it, you know, you create your code review, and, potentially, just simply by creating the code review, it completes the modifications needed

to satisfy that. I I think this is probably their their tool for building an entire app because, eventually,

part of that plan will be here is here's what I wanna build. And that is it. I mean, right now, it like that PR feature JS like, oh, here's what's wrong. Alright. Let me hold on a second. Let me make a plan and get that for you. Yeah. Alright. How's this plan look, chief? Alright. It's good. Let's go. You know? LGMT.

LGMT.

Yeah. Looks good to me. Let's get that money. Let's get that money. Yeah. Yeah. GitHub's responding to me. Let's get that money, Nick. Oh, man.

And then I think what was the last thing that they announced? Spark.

Spark. GitHub Spark, which is their text to code. Basically, you've seen Vercel's v zero, v zero. Explain to the audience. Node Sanity came out with it is the idea is that you can say, build me a Spotify application that does x, y, and z, and it will come up with the whole interface for it, or build a course platform dashboard along with the Node. Js server code that when it can go back and forth to it. And they're getting pretty good at the very least for version 0, you know, for being able to just generate an idea very quickly. Yeah. V Deno for those of you who,

didn't catch that. It's named v zero because it's like, we're gonna create the version 0 of your your work, whatever you're working on, and then you can take it from there. Not a tool that I I use myself. No. I I I think that it will start to become

a bit more popular. Yeah. The v zero was pretty heavily focused on ShadCn and React, but, that's not the case anymore. And then Is that not the case? About a week ago. No. No. You can use a lot more with it now. And then about a week and a half ago, Stackblitz came out with Bolt, Bolt dot new. Yes. You should check that out. And that one is great because it's it's it works with all the frameworks in TypeScript, and it's pretty heavily, like, us, like, our audience generated. Right? You build me a Pnpm. Js app, build me a, SvelteKit app with server JavaScript that does x, y, and z, and it will scaffold it on out. So those are pretty cool, but again, the Stackblitz had a really good tweet about it. They just showed, like, the The matrix guy. Matrix guy dodging a bullet. You gotta think, like, they they probably knew that this was coming if they launched it a week week and a half ago. Oh, right. To get out of in front of it. To get out in front of it. Yeah. So, but again, it's just so they they announced their own version of this, which is is pretty Sanity.

And the again, the killer feature is that it could be integrated with GitHub and

immediately just get going from there. So Yeah. Again, we'll have to try it. It's not out just yet. So Yeah. So to be to be very clear, GitHub Spark is a natural language tool for building apps. Yes. You tell it what you want, it builds it. What I thought was interesting about this is that it gave you iteration settings Wes you could tell it how you would like to iterate on it. But in the settings, in an actual UI, you could tell it things like, oh, I want the border radius to be more or less. I want the theme color to be this. Go back and forth. I want this scale to be larger or smaller.

And I thought that was an interesting kind of, like, no code, low code, UI tool for iterating on something you didn't even write in the 1st place. Yeah. Like, it's a little crazy. The,

the GitHub Spark has says GitHub Spark subscribes to the UNIX philosophy Mhmm.

Where software can be unapologetic about doing one thing and one thing well, specifically as you want. So micro apps doesn't refer to the size of the apps, but rather the size and its intended feature complexity,

which is a very nice way to say, we this doesn't work on building more complex stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Their demo was a a tic tac toe game with a hippo and a duck. Yeah. Which honestly, hey, that's fun. If I wanted to build something like that for my kid or something, it would be nice not to have to, like, actually code that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So you you can build out something. I think the one thing, though, that Vercel has got them on this is that

the Versal ones look good because they got ShadCN on it, and some of these demos they were putting out were

a little funky looking. To me, that's a coat of paint thing, and let me tell you what. I think the only time that I want a tool like this to determine the aesthetic of my stuff is when I don't have an existing aesthetic. I don't have an existing design system. I don't have an existing CSS code Bos. If I do, I have built this entire code base up. We ESLint all this money on a design system, our own CSS, whatever. You have the whole look of this thing down, and then it spits you out some generic looking Vercel component, and you're just gonna toss that into your app. I don't want that. I want a completely unstyled

But I I think at that point, then you move to to Copilot, and say, add this feature to my existing code Bos, not I'm building this thing from scratch.

Yeah. Like, I don't think it's a, oh, let's build this and then migrate it into our app. It's, I have an idea for something I wanna build.

Build it for me. I just think that is my problem with the v Deno stuff, is that it all just looks so

Oh, yeah. Well stale. Well, now you can,

you can use you can tell it not to use Yeah. Use ChatZen. You can tell it ChatZen's not the problem. I think it's, like, the default coat of paint on everything. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. Because ChatZen is is more about how it works and functions. Yeah. So not and no shade about that, because I think that that stuff is all pretty amazing. Every single

UI library that comes with a default looking, the way that it looks, has this problem because, like, Material UI had this JS Material UI is just a good way to write components and modules, and they can look like what ever you want. Yeah. But most people will just use what it looks like out of the box. Right? And, like, we talked to the home assistant guys the other day about I was like, man, Material UI just looks tired. And he's like, they're they they ripped Material UI out of Home Assistant. Did they? Okay. Because it does yeah. Home Assistant does have very

old material look to parts of it. Yeah. You know? It's gone. The

it's not out. It's out in, like, 2 days they said, but it looks it looks it still looks a little material, but it's much cleaner, and I'm assuming it is much easier

to now theme it to I have themed Node assistant rather extensively as I want to do.

And it wasn't that bad before, but it certainly wasn't,

like, I don't know, ideal. Because there was they have CSS variables in there and everything already. A lot of CSS variables in there. About the new version, though. Wes we'll have them on to talk about that. Okay. We got the big announcements. Yeah. Let's get

final thoughts here, Wes. Okay. So final thoughts. I got some questions for you. Big questions. Alright.

Do any of these features pull you away from Cursor today?

I think without the tabbing, multiple ESLint tabbing completion, no.

But I'm very happy to see that they obviously are are watching that and say, yeah. We actually need that. Yeah. And it could potentially be be better. Right? They created the the Node assistant Totally. I think. Like, they might have been the first one. They're the one that got everybody on it, so they clearly have ideas as to how to approach these things, and and maybe they have some some even better ideas as to what the UI should should look like with this. Because the UI in Cursor does feel a little tacked on. Even though it it feels nice to use Mhmm. Aesthetically, it does feel a little tacked on. Like, it not quite Yeah. Well, that that's the other question I I think JS, what does the future of coding look like? Do we take our editor and tack on AI, or do we rethink

everything, which I think is what Workspaces is? I think Workspaces Bos Workspace. Workspace. Okay. That's big question number 1. Yeah.

Big question number 2 here.

What products do you think are in trouble from this? V Deno. Okay? Do you think v zero or any of Vercel's Playground or any of their kind of additional offerings Yeah. Do you think they sweat it all from seeing this?

Scott as a major hit to the company, because, obviously, they have more things going for that. They sweated about it at some ESLint, also because people are paying for

GitHub already. They're paying for GitHub already. Their code's already there. Do you know what they say? I I don't know if you know about this. In in hockey, because you the I'm having to explain hockey to a Canadian. Yeah. In in hockey, they're often talking about if somebody wants to take less money, or take more like, okay, they're going to be traded somewhere. I'm going to trade you to Toronto, but I'm playing for Detroit right now. Yeah. And Toronto JS going to pay you $2,000,000 more a year.

They might turn that down because hockey players notoriously like to stay where all their stuff is. My stuff's here. I'm not leaving. Right? Yeah. So, like, what about that? It like, my Node all my stuff's here. Yeah. Why am I gonna go move it somewhere else or use something that's ESLint somewhere else? If if all my stuff's here, I'm just gonna use the the tools that are right here. So someone on Twitter

was like, oh, it's too late. Cursor already won. I was, like, calm down. We're, like, three and a half weeks, and everybody freaking out about Cursor. And then the best reply to that is you severely underestimate enterprise, which Totally. Walking around this conference, man.

Enterprise is something else. Something else. Yeah. So it's it's hard.

And, like, I I'm sure the other thing is, like, these smaller companies can move faster. Vercel has excellent taste and They got taste. Some of the smartest minds in this. So They got taste. They got minds. Yeah. And honestly, it comes down to, is this better? Because you Mhmm. You look at the reason why we all moved to Cursor is because it like, they both technically do the same thing. Sure. But it's way better. It feels better. The Node suggestions are better. All of the stuff is better, and people just say, I it's just better. So you're they're telling us here, yeah, we have these features now, but let's try it, you Node, because, again, the sauce of this is how how do you put these these bits together

and provide that to the the LLM. Alright. I'm putting a stake in the ground. We'll do a hasty treat on this in 1 month, And it is Copilot or GitHub universe new features Vercel Cursor 1 month later.

What is the fallout? Has it changed our workflow? Yeah. How is it different? Have things changed at all? Because, again, yeah, I I moved entirely over to cursor, but mostly just because, again, you can import all your settings. It's basically the same editor. Yeah. You know, it's not like learning a whole new thing, and it had additional features. Now those additional features all come to to Versus Node, pnpm, hell, let's Node back. Yeah.

Yeah. I wonder if curse are sweating from this. Oh, guarantee. But you also have to think, like, they knew that this was coming.

You know? And I was like, you're everybody,

they knew that this was coming. Do you think there's, like,

oh, well, that's fine.

You know? Yeah. So I'm a little worried about, like, at at what point does Versus Code start releasing features that are not open source, so that Cursor can't get them? Yeah. We'll see. But, anyways, I'm happy for all this competition. Everything's getting awesome. Everything JS great. Some stuff is scary, but I'm I'm really happy that we have something like Cursor, which is gives them a kick in the pants to make this stuff even better. And it's just I'm just the just a happy guy sitting here enjoying it all. Just a happy guy sitting here enjoying it all. Yeah.

By the way, I wanted to talk about this before we we move off of this. Oh, yeah. We got these badges at at GitHub Vercel. And, yes, I I there's a lot of cameras in this room. For people who don't know, we're in a you're covering I bet the camera can't even put this on. Sorry. I covered your camera. Okay. Yeah. Either way, these things are are what? They're a little circuit board. There's a a Raspberry Pi processor on them, an ARM processor.

There is a E Ink screen, and I had Jan from Nike, put my little,

hack my little Syntex logo on here. I can I I can tell you? I go to the grocery store every day, and I look at these things. And I They have these at your grocery store? Yeah. These e ink displays are every price tag in almost every store in Canada. Are you living in the future? I'm sorry. They're not have that in the in the It's driving me crazy, because you know what they can do? They can jack the price

up on an hourly basis. How about the thing? They detect Yeah. You walk closer, and it looks at your bank account, and then, like, oh, here comes, big money boss. Let's,

duh. Yeah. Honestly, like, I'm I'm kinda or or even just, like, oh, it's it's before Thanksgiving. Let's increase every price in the store 10%. Yeah. You know? Or, oh, we get a little bit of a rush on Saturday mornings. Let's let's earn a little bit. Or, like, oh, man. This product is selling really hot. Surge pricing. Immediately change it. And, like, previously, you had to get every everybody in the room to go put, like, price tags on everything, and you can update the price of every item in your store immediately.

Yeah. It's kinda Scott. But I'm always curious how the tech works, beyond the doom of, grocery prices. Sure. But it's it's apparently it's a full Raspberry Pi on here, very hackable.

A badger.

I am going to

get something running on here. I'm very excited about this. Yeah. It's cool. It's got USB c in here, which is how they

you connect it. There's a little, packing assistive technology. If you're a real one, you use the, TX RX ports. Yeah. Who's got one of those sitting around, I do. We did a whole episode on, yes,

30 twos. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Nobody's got, like, alligator clips or whatever. Yeah. Who brought their their alligator clips to yeah. This JS really cool. Overall, conference has been amazing, though.

It's been a different experience. I'm used to dev conference. Yeah. All the talks are by developers building things, interesting projects. This is a different beast. Yeah.

But there's a a big energy here, and it's been a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool. Enjoy it, and appreciate your help for having us out. Yeah. Alright. Let's wrap this thing up. We'll talk about sick picks. Do you have sick pick for me? I got a sick pick, and, honestly, I think you might have the same sick pick. Alright. This is, this is something that we both experienced this week. This is a a perfect SF GitHub Vercel sick pick. Was it, oh,

someone pooping on the street? Oh, no. Not that person from this coast. Honestly,

you know what? I think that is something we both experienced at different times here, but, Node, not not that. You know? My sick pick is the Waymo.

Oh, yeah. Self driving taxi. Self driving taxi. Let me tell you. I got in the Waymo. I pushed the button on my phone. It unlocks. I get in, and it's like, hello, Scott. And then you you push the go button. And then you know what? Nobody says another word to you until you're at your destination.

And I'm I'm just antisocial enough that, like, that to me is a killer feature. I don't wanna talk to the to to somebody, when I'm I'm going somewhere. Oh, yeah? I just wanna pull up my phone and stare at my phone until I get there. Oh, man.

It's wild. I so I took 2 of them. I've taken 3 now, so I'm just I'm obsessed. Yeah. I don't know if this is the right word. The juxtaposition of a self driving car pulling up as a man is relieving himself on the street makes the city unbelievable to me.

But it's so it's so cool. It's so good. It's like you're, like, oh, self driving Yarn. I'm not sure if it's gonna, like, run off a cliff. Like, 2 minutes in, you're, like, oh, yeah. This feels this feels good, and, like, I I have a Tesla with the self driving in it, and it's The self driving. This is way better. Yeah. This is way better. So smooth with all the things. It's pretty aggressive.

It's just aggressive enough. It's really nice. Yeah. Feels good. I I Node. I had people messaging me. Were you scared to be in the self driving car? And the answer is after, like, 10 seconds in it, you're, like, I'm I'm very cool. I'm cool as cucumber in this thing. It is a really impressive experience. Yeah. Not only just the app, the software, the the cars are what? Jaguar I Paces. Yeah.

Every everything just felt great. So we pulled over, and as we pulled over, there was a bike lane, and some guy on a motor or Scott, moped, something like that, was in the bike lane flying. And I was just about to open the door, and it goes, heads up. There's a motorcycle on your right. And I he went, and I was like, this thing, I under is I think I trust computers a lot because the thing can look both ways at an intersection. I can't. Yeah. You know? You have the eyes in front like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, I'm still, obviously, like, oh, I don't know if I trust a computer to do this type of stuff, but

statistically, it's it's pretty good. So stopped for a chihuahua in front of me, and that's a little chihuahua. Node Granted, you would expect it to stop for a chihuahua. Yeah. But still, it's,

the whole experience was crazy. Shows you the, like, cars in the intersection, but, like, there was we were at, like, a weird, like, fork in the road intersection, and there was a car probably Oh. 200 meters away, and it it had a blinker on. And I could hardly see that there was a blinker on,

and it was, like, just showed us in the model. Blink, blink, blink. So Let me tell you the scariest thing for me, the most impressive thing was there was a stop where I had a stop sign Yep. And then the other one was a a drive through, but then there was a big ass truck parked here, blocking, so that the other lane, if going one way, could just fly through. Right? And so the Waymo kinda creeps forward, and I'm thinking, it's not gonna be able to see around this truck, and the car's gonna fly through and t bone me. Right? It creeps forward. Yeah. And it just must have gotten far enough forward that it could see around it, and then when also has Yeah. Has all the sensors, so it can bounce, like, LIDAR under things. Ugh. So it can see,

like, it can it can see through things. Right? Because it can bounce the signals,

underneath cars and and kinda see around, which is Impressive experience. Cameras can do. Yeah. Yeah. I was I was very I I left it being like, yeah. Get me one of these on my Christmas list. Yeah.

No. I'll get one when they're, like I'll get one from a junkyard and, like, be one of those YouTube videos. I'm rebuilding a a wrecked Waymo.

I'm gonna build a black box for the inside of mine and just see me on the black box. Alright. Well, that's my sick pick too, and, that was super fun. So if you ever come to a city that has a Waymo,

give it a shot. It's, kind of a fun experience. It's a fun experience for sure. Cool. Alright. Well, that's all we got for you. Peace. Thanks.