Ian Laravel New'd Again!

Speaker 1

You're listening to Mostly Technical, which is brought to you by Larajobs, the official Laravel job board, and Solo, the workspace for your agents and dev stack. And now, Ian and Aaron.

Speaker 2

Hello.

Aaron Francis

Hello, sir. Welcome back to the show. More important than what have you been doing this week is, what has SVIX been doing this week?

Speaker 2

That's what we wanna know.

Aaron Francis

S-V-I-X. In the age where code is cheap, you might be tempted to build webhooks in-house. Don't do that. SVIX, S-V-I-X, has solved all the hard problems about scaling webhooks so you can avoid triaging failed deliveries and incrementally building features. Check them out. We got a, we got a shiny new link here, svix.com/mt-

Speaker 2

Love to see it

Aaron Francis

... which stands for Mostly Technical. Thank you to SVIX for hooking us up with a great new link.

Speaker 2

All right, and we have another pre-roll.

Aaron Francis

Ooh.

Speaker 2

You people supporting the show.

Aaron Francis

We do.

Speaker 2

I love you guys out there. Mailerroo.com, one platform to send, receive, and test emails with great deliverability, EU hosting, and pricing that doesn't punish you for growing. Check them out at mailerroo.com. You know, it's like the kangaroo thing. Ma- Mailroo, kangaroo, that's what you gotta remember.

That same spelling, that same vibe. So thank you to Mailroo for supporting the show. New sponsor, great stuff. All right.

Aaron Francis

Welcome, welcome to the email podcast, man.

Speaker 2

It's all email.

Aaron Francis

I- we gotta get into email. What the hell are we doing?

Speaker 2

Oh, this is why you don't share your wins. See, Jesse's out there sharing his wins. Maybe a bad idea, but that's all right.

Aaron Francis

Oh, man.

Speaker 2

We appreciate you, Jesse.

Aaron Francis

We gotta... We, we need to make products that our listeners will buy. What-

Speaker 2

You-

Aaron Francis

What are we doing?

Speaker 2

You do at least. What about me? What about me?

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I'm an idiot.

Aaron Francis

I don't know what you're doing. You are. I don't know what you're doing, man.

Speaker 2

Like Solo-

Aaron Francis

You're talking about education- ... and governments and healthcare. Come on, dude.

Speaker 2

Stupid. The, uh... Yeah, I feel like Solo, you know, Solo's benefited from the show. That's been, that's, that ties in, pretty close tie-in.

Aaron Francis

Yeah, it's a close tie-in.

Speaker 2

My stuff, Outro, HelpSpot, these are not tie-ins at all.

Aaron Francis

Don't-

Speaker 2

This is my eternal problem

Aaron Francis

... don't put Outro in the my stuff category.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Their, their, Outro does not exist.

Speaker 2

But if it did exist, the show-

Aaron Francis

If it did

Speaker 2

... it, it would be helpful. It's not totally useless, but it's not like email software. Email software is a beautiful, perfect overlap, apparently. Maybe we should start email software-

Aaron Francis

Apparently

Speaker 2

... you and me. What about we do that?

Aaron Francis

I don't wanna do that. I know that I'm supposed to do-

Speaker 2

Mostly-

Aaron Francis

... the hardest thing, but I don't wanna do that.

Speaker 2

Mostlymailer.com, and we, we, we brand it around the show.

Aaron Francis

If, if I did it-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... I would build it on Post Shiba, which is later in the show.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

So we won't, we won't talk about-

Speaker 2

That's allowed.

Aaron Francis

We... That is allowed.

Speaker 2

It's in the terms.

Aaron Francis

That's the whole deal.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

We're good.

Aaron Francis

All right.

Speaker 2

Mostlymailer.com. Let us know if you like that idea.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I'm, I'm still sick.

Aaron Francis

I'm not, I don't, I don't care if you like that idea. I'm not doing it.

Speaker 2

Aaron, I'm still sick, day 10.

Aaron Francis

Of course you are. You're sick all the time.

Speaker 2

I'm a sickly person. So Jamie's still sick too, though, and she's very fit and healthy, so I don't know. This is a bad one.

Aaron Francis

Jamie is, Jamie is salt of the earth-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... good stock.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

I don't know what is going on with you. So if, if Jamie is sick-

Speaker 2

That's bad

Aaron Francis

... I'll allow it, but you being sick-

Speaker 2

Yes

Aaron Francis

... surprises me 0%.

Speaker 2

Oh, man. Yeah, usually she has a cold for, like, a day. She blows her nose three times.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

She's like, "All right, I'm good. Let's keep going." No, this one has her leveled out. So we were supposed to go on a big trip last weekend. No trip.

Aaron Francis

Hate that.

Speaker 2

No nothing. First, first time on a me and her trip in a while. No trip, just at home, boogies, cold, Codon. Did a lot of Codon.

Aaron Francis

Nice Orbing.

Speaker 2

I was Orbing. I was in the Orbs, in the Orbs.

Aaron Francis

All right.

Speaker 2

Uh, coding stuff up.

Aaron Francis

Let, let's, let's just do it. You tweeted, you tweeted a video called Laravel New.

Speaker 2

Uh-huh, uh-huh. It's a great video, Justin Jackson.

Aaron Francis

Great video, great video.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

And the hair on the back of my neck stood up a little bit.

Speaker 2

Oh.

Aaron Francis

I don't know out of fear or excitement, but regardless-

Speaker 2

Mm

Aaron Francis

... I had, I had a guttural reaction to Ian tweeting Laravel New, 'cause there's only one thing-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... that you could be Laravel Newing.

Speaker 2

No, that's not true.

Aaron Francis

Uh it's true.

Speaker 2

Laravel New-

Aaron Francis

Ian-

Speaker 2

... that's how you start a new project

Aaron Francis

... it shook me, it shook me to my core-

Speaker 2

Yeah, mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... that this could be the present reality in which we live.

Speaker 2

Okay. What's that?

Aaron Francis

Ian, what did you Laravel New?

Speaker 2

Well, let's just be clear.

Aaron Francis

Oh, I knew it. I knew it.

Speaker 2

Let's just be clear, there's few things on this earth I like more than typing Laravel New and/or having an Orb type Laravel New. I just... That's a beautiful thing. The little... The stuff's flying down the screen. Things are being installed.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

All the promise, green fields in front of you.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

Blue oceans.

Aaron Francis

Big plans, big plans.

Speaker 2

Whatever all those things are. Just like anything's possible when you Laravel New. All your previous wrongs can be righted-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... when you Laravel New.

Aaron Francis

Jesse is crying and throwing up right now- ... listening to this in the gym. All right, keep going.

Speaker 2

I had to do it. I had to do it.

Aaron Francis

No.

Speaker 2

I had to do it. I had no choice. I had no choice. It's like... Let me explain this to you. I, I've been thinking about how to explain this to you.

Aaron Francis

Yeah, good.

Speaker 2

You got a piece of marble, right? You're a marble guy.

Aaron Francis

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The... No.

Speaker 2

Right?

Aaron Francis

Thanks for putting it in terms I understand.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Okay, keep going.

Speaker 2

Giant piece of marble, right?

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Big old block, right?

Aaron Francis

Yeah, yeah, for sure, definitely.

Speaker 2

Michelangelo style. Big-

Aaron Francis

Oh, yeah

Speaker 2

... 20 feet, 10 feet, 10 feet, big old block, right? You're gonna make something. Okay? You start, you're chiseling.

Aaron Francis

I am

Speaker 2

You're chiseling it, right?

Aaron Francis

I am.

Speaker 2

You're like, "This is what... You have a vision. This is what I'm doing."

Aaron Francis

David was always there, I just had to find him.

Speaker 2

But that's the thing, right? Like, if you go into it as like, "This is preconceived," but then the marble's telling you, "No, no, no. Like, this butt cheek, it's gotta be over this way. It's gotta flow this direction."

Aaron Francis

Could have picked any part, but sure, okay, the butt cheek has to flow.

Speaker 2

His, his peeper has to go this other direction.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

Right?

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

Right?

Aaron Francis

Yeah. Definitely.

Speaker 2

His face, his nose, all these things.

Aaron Francis

There we go.

Speaker 2

It's not just your preconceived. It's the veins in the marble are going a certain way, the texture, right? It's like I have to work with the marble. I can't fight against it.

Aaron Francis

Something you and I-

Speaker 2

I have to go with it

Aaron Francis

... both know is marble working.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

So this is making a lot of sense. Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yes. So I have to go with it. I have to go with the grain-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... of the marble, okay?

Aaron Francis

For sure.

Speaker 2

And I was fighting the grain of what this-

Aaron Francis

You were fighting the grain

Speaker 2

... product wanted to be.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I was trying to make it something it did not wanna be, Aaron.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

And I couldn't have it. I couldn't have it. So-

Aaron Francis

Well

Speaker 2

... we Laravel Nude.

Aaron Francis

It's great-

Speaker 2

Laravel Nude Outshow

Aaron Francis

... it's great content. I will say. It's great content.

Speaker 2

Could, could it have been the cold medicine? Perhaps.

Aaron Francis

Perhaps.

Speaker 2

Perhaps, Aaron. We don't know. We'll never know.

Aaron Francis

I swear the listeners feel like they're stuck in a time loop. They're like, "This is, this is Groundhog Day, the 1990s classic Groundhog Day. Here we are again. It's another February 2nd."

Speaker 2

May- maybe it's a cautionary tale. They're like, "Hey, if I... Maybe I don't want that little bit of success I'm aiming for," because maybe this is what happens. Maybe you get old and senile.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

You start building the same project over and over-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... and over, thinking you're making progress-

Aaron Francis

Sure, Grandpa

Speaker 2

... when you're just... Exactly.

Aaron Francis

Let's get you to bed. I'm sure Outshow is gonna ship soon.

Speaker 2

Exactly.

Aaron Francis

Take your medicine.

Speaker 2

Uh, you know what-

Aaron Francis

All right

Speaker 2

... would have made this story so much better? I was, I was busting my ass this weekend. Busting my ass. I had, like, 18 orbs going at once the whole time.

Aaron Francis

Busting your orb's ass, yeah.

Speaker 2

Busting the orbs. I really wanted us to d- produce this show out of the new Outshow, 'cause I feel like that would've been... That would've made you a more of a believer that it was like-

Aaron Francis

And-

Speaker 2

I-

Aaron Francis

... that-

Speaker 2

... I was in the right path

Aaron Francis

... would've, that, yeah, that would've been cool.

Speaker 2

Right?

Aaron Francis

But it didn't happen.

Speaker 2

Workable.

Aaron Francis

That would've been very cool, yeah. You're right.

Speaker 2

No, I wish it could've happened.

Aaron Francis

That would've been better. That would've been better.

Speaker 2

I wish I had a few more hours. Even just a few more hours, I think I could've done it. I was so, so close, but-

Aaron Francis

You've had, you've had 18 months. I'm not sure a few more hours would've saved you.

Speaker 2

No.

Aaron Francis

So-

Speaker 2

But I've only had three days since Laravel Nude, you know?

Aaron Francis

I... On, on the last episode, I told you-

Speaker 2

Yeah. Uh-huh

Aaron Francis

... there's some sort of, uh, emotional hang-up-

Speaker 2

Yes

Aaron Francis

... blocking you-

Speaker 2

That's right

Aaron Francis

... from releasing.

Speaker 2

And I took your advice seriously.

Aaron Francis

Did you... I, I-

Speaker 2

This is more advice.

Aaron Francis

Yes. I, I'm, I'm fine with this.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

So talk me through, what did you dig in, in your heart of hearts?

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

What did you find that was blocking you?

Speaker 2

Yeah. So there's a, there's a variety of things, okay?

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

I think the core of it, there are some secondary things, but I think the core of it is I really want this to be more of a higher end product, okay? I wanted to be able to charge $99 for it, okay?

Aaron Francis

You did. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2

And there, there will be a $99 tier still, but it doesn't wanna be a $99 product.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

That's the reality. Like, it doesn't want to be that.

Aaron Francis

So the butt cheek was try- you were trying to flow the butt cheek the wrong way.

Speaker 2

Yes, exactly.

Aaron Francis

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2

So it doesn't wanna be that, and forcing it was, like, then force... I was putting more features in, 'cause, like, okay, we'll justify the price. And, like, people were telling me stuff they wanted, so I was taking that feedback and be like, "Okay," like-

Aaron Francis

Mm-hmm

Speaker 2

... "Yeah, we'll add a module for this and a module for that."

Aaron Francis

Mm.

Speaker 2

It was getting away from me in terms of scale, right?

Aaron Francis

You never, you never listen to the people.

Speaker 2

I know, I know.

Aaron Francis

That's like your whole, that's your whole thing.

Speaker 2

I know.

Aaron Francis

Okay, go on.

Speaker 2

So, so it was getting too big. It was getting away from me. Um, then that was causing, like, technically some things I didn't like with the cons- the architecture and construction of it. Um, so it... So once I realized this, I was like, "All right." And, and that we've used it for four months. It's like we-

Aaron Francis

We have

Speaker 2

... used it for five months or whatever it's been.

Aaron Francis

And I've consistently-

Speaker 2

There's a lot

Aaron Francis

... told you against my better judgment-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... that it's very good.

Speaker 2

That's fine, but it's not good enough, Aaron.

Aaron Francis

I want to give you a hard time, but I can't because it's good. All right, keep going.

Speaker 2

But here's the thing, there's a lot of features in there we never, ever touch. We don't touch them.

Aaron Francis

Fair.

Speaker 2

Right?

Aaron Francis

Fair.

Speaker 2

And, like, that's all gonna be overhead, that's all gonna be stress, that's all gonna be the two people somewhere using this random thing I built, right? No. I know now what we use all the time and what is important. And even things like, one of the things the last version of Outro had was the Kanban board, big Kanban board, with the idea that if you have a bunch of shows-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... you could move stuff between them. Well, we had two shows, and I never moved one thing between the shows.

Aaron Francis

Rest in peace.

Speaker 2

And these were sh-

Aaron Francis

Neither did I.

Speaker 2

Yeah. RIP Token Town. So and those were two shows that were like, have a fair amount of overlap. These aren't like a movie podcast.

Aaron Francis

They were the same show. That was the problem.

Speaker 2

Same show. Yeah. So it's not like, oh, it's a movie podcast and a food podcast, and like... No, these are two shows that probably shared segments regularly, and I still never moved anything.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

So it's like, all right. Yes, I wanna support multiple shows, but no, I probably don't need to, like, be able to literally drag things between the shows. Like, I'm not gonna drag things enough to make it worth doing that. I'm not gonna move things even between episodes enough to be worth doing that. So, like, you could have a normal little move thing, and you could move stuff once in a while when you need to move it, but you don't need a whole Kanban board, which is crazy complicated.

Did tons of shit.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

It was slow. It was... The whole thing was terrible. So-

Aaron Francis

On this one, I agree.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

I, I bless this decision. Carry on.

Speaker 2

So, uh, I think a lot... I think you'll like the rest of the changes, but it's more just about, like, being honed in. It does The management of the episodes, like you have-

Aaron Francis

Okay

Speaker 2

... an episode with segments, right?

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

There's no more really types of segments. You could put an icon on a segment, but there's not like... Again, we don't, we just go in here and everything's topic, right? It's a-

Aaron Francis

Everything's topic

Speaker 2

... topic and ad reads that came in through the purchase system, which they'll still be that. Those will have their own little icon or whatever, that's fine.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

So it's like everything's just a, just a segment. Whatever. There's a little way to add different icons. If you wanna have some differentiation, you can add an icon to differentiate, but there's not like this whole labeling system that was complicated and all kinds of stuff. So it's like manage the content of the show with also a much improved, uh, editor. So like if you actually use... So I think for bigger shows than ours where they do a lot of prep and writing out of segments and things, it's, it's actually vastly improved for that too because I'm using the

Tip Top editor with like-

Aaron Francis

Yep, very good

Speaker 2

... their cloud thing, and it actually works really well. So like that's all really good. You can, multiple people can be in there and it's all-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... magical. Great. Um, so you got segments, you got email, which was the impetus as we talked about last week for me even wanting this.

Aaron Francis

That we've never had.

Speaker 2

We've never had that. That doesn't even work in the current Outro. That it works now in the new Outro, I think. We'll see. It seems to work.

Aaron Francis

The orb gave you-

Speaker 2

We also have-

Aaron Francis

... irrefutable proof that it works, but we don't know if it works

Speaker 2

We're not 100% sure yet, so we gotta w- actually wire it all up fully, but it's, it, I, it's all wired up. It doesn't, uh... I need to deploy it and just really fully test it. But, um, so we have a mailbag. I was thinking about you on this one. The mailbag also has YouTube comments.

Aaron Francis

Love that.

Speaker 2

So your mailbag-

Aaron Francis

Was about to ask

Speaker 2

... is email-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... and YouTube comments. That's what the mailbag is from day one.

Aaron Francis

That's good.

Speaker 2

And if you're on a paid plan, you can reply. If you're on the free plan-

Aaron Francis

Good

Speaker 2

... I wanted a free plan. The current thing is too crazy for a free plan. Now I have a nice free plan. I think it all logically makes sense. There's free, which is like basically manage your show, and inbound email. So you can have inbound email, but you can't reply unless you're paid, which I think is like a fair, like, kinda cutoff.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

Also like just spammers and stuff. Like, if you let people reply to email, it's just gonna be like a nightmare. So, uh, and you can reply to YouTube comments. Again, in theory, I have to actually check that part, but it seems to, uh, the orb said it works. And, uh, and then so there's mail, there's content, and there is, uh, sponsors, which is simplified.

Got rid of the recurring sponsors. Sorry, Jesse. I'll leave Jesse and the one other recurring sponsor we have, we'll just keep charging them recurringly. But otherwise, you're just gonna go, you're gonna buy your ad reads.

Aaron Francis

You buy a pack.

Speaker 2

You buy a pack, you buy, you will buy as many as you want. You can set how many you wanna let people buy, whatever, fine. Um, you wanna buy 50, go buy 50. Great, you got a year of it. No problem.

Aaron Francis

You should go buy 50, for sure.

Speaker 2

So go buy 50 once this is live. Um, so those are the main... And then there's ideas, which we also don't use, but I feel like it's still some people will get use out of it, of like I just wanna be logging things as I come across them.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

Goes in an idea area. I can move it into shows, whatever. So I think that makes sense to have, too. So those are the modules. Really clean and simple. Tons of little features that the current one has. They're all gone. Um, I mean, it still has a ton of features, but it's just not... I think all the features it has are better. The gopher's better. I did tweet this too, where like the gopher's been updated, and I, I've never seen the AI work this way.

Maybe it's out there somewhere. But how... I think it's gonna be interesting. We'll see if people hate it or like it. But you give the gopher something to do, it goes away. Just like a real gopher. You say, "Hey, Timmy, get over here. Go get me coffee." Timmy goes away and comes back with a coffee. So that's how the new gopher works.

Aaron Francis

You don't talk to Timmy.

Speaker 2

There's no conversation. Yes, you don't talk to Timmy. He's the gopher.

Aaron Francis

Timmy is beneath you.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

He's a gopher.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

He's Kenneth from 30 Rock.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

You don't wanna talk to him.

Speaker 2

Exactly.

Aaron Francis

Just bring me a sandwich. I get it.

Speaker 2

This is my point. So there's no conversation view anymore. You tell the gopher to do something, it disappears. He's got a little spinny orb thing that spins, which he had before. And, uh, and then he comes back at some point with a toast, and he says, "Hey, I added that segment," or, "I read that article, and here's a summary," or, "The capital of France is Paris." Or whatever you asked him, he just comes back with the answer, and that's, that's the gopher.

So...

Aaron Francis

I do like that model.

Speaker 2

That's it. Okay.

Aaron Francis

I don't wanna-

Speaker 2

You like all this stuff

Aaron Francis

... I don't wanna, I don't wanna talk to a showrunner. I just need you to add these segments.

Speaker 2

And everybody's got... If you wanna have a conversation with the show, then there's MCP. Go ahead, use MCP-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... and have a conversation with the show. That's fine. If you're that person, that's the solution for you there. Um, so I think it's gonna be okay.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

But I did have a question, but I, but before I get to my question for you-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... thoughts on what I've said so far?

Aaron Francis

Um, if you hold, if you hold the history of outro.fm out-

Speaker 2

Yes. Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... and we just don't consider it-

Speaker 2

Don't consider it

Aaron Francis

... we cast it as far as the east is from the west.

Speaker 2

There you go. We Laravel nude, we clean slate.

Aaron Francis

We, we choose to not remember b- by our powerful brains. We decide, "I will not remember this," then I think-

Speaker 2

Yes

Aaron Francis

... it's a good idea.

Speaker 2

All right.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Let's go.

Aaron Francis

Yeah, history, history aside, the fact that we are stuck in a time loop aside, I think making it simpler, making it exactly what we need and we use-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... um, and removing all of the emotional baggage is a great idea.

Speaker 2

All right.

Aaron Francis

The proof, however, will be in the pudding.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

The pudding of it online. You need to put it online for people to use.

Speaker 2

Oh.

Aaron Francis

That is the pudding.

Speaker 2

The worst part, though.

Aaron Francis

I know, but we can't keep doing this. We just- ... Ian, we can't keep meeting this way.

Speaker 2

I feel like I should be laying down for this.

Aaron Francis

We, we have, we have to ship it.

Speaker 2

Mm.

Aaron Francis

And have it shippable.

Speaker 2

Somebody had that as like their tagline. It is shippable-ish.

Aaron Francis

We must ship. It's shippable.

Speaker 2

I have a whole shtick where I say never ship though, you know? And if I ship-

Aaron Francis

I know

Speaker 2

... I'm gonna be ruining my thing.

Aaron Francis

But we must be reborn, Ian. You can, you can have a new shtick.

Speaker 2

Oh, really? Interesting.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I do think, uh, like- Well, all right, that'll be in my questions.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

But yes, I will... I, all right, we're clean slate. We're sunk cost. There's no... Right? We're, we're leaving behind our sunk costs, and so you like it. I got the thumbs up from you. That was my main thing.

Aaron Francis

Yes. Thumbs up from me. Uh, somewhat provisionally-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... that this is, this is a, uh, this is a contingent thumbs up, contingent upon putting it online.

Speaker 2

Here's what we're gonna do, and this is kind of crazy. I don't even like that I'm doing this.

Aaron Francis

Great. I love it then.

Speaker 2

You and me will be working in it next Monday. That's phase one.

Aaron Francis

Great. Great.

Speaker 2

That's my commitment. Now, I'm going to the World Series in between, which we'll talk about in a minute. But in between that-

Aaron Francis

Great

Speaker 2

... and then I will get this online.

Aaron Francis

You can orb-

Speaker 2

And you and me-

Aaron Francis

You can orb from the cheap seats. It does not matter. Get it.

Speaker 2

I'll be at the World Series with million-dollar tickets orbing.

Aaron Francis

Orbing, yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Who cares? Baseball is mostly resting anyway.

Speaker 2

That's true.

Aaron Francis

Just, let's just orb it out into existence.

Speaker 2

Be like, "Tyler, let me know. If anything happens, just elbow me, and-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... I'll look up." But otherwise I'm gonna be orbing.

Aaron Francis

Set a, set a timer for every, like, four minutes repeating, that way you can, you can, you know, focus on the action every fourth minute- ... uh, which is how baseball works.

Speaker 2

Exactly.

Aaron Francis

And then at the other, the other three minutes and 50 seconds-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... you can be orbing, and then you can look up, and you can see a pitch, and everybody's like, "Oh, wow, we should talk about it for a while. We should walk around. We should pat each other's butts." All right, back to orbs.

Speaker 2

Ah. Yes.

Aaron Francis

Then you can go back. Yeah.

Speaker 2

That's my plan. So next-

Aaron Francis

Okay

Speaker 2

... Monday, you and me, we're in Outro, and shortly thereafter, more people in Outro.

Aaron Francis

This is where I lose confidence. This is where my, my-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... my, uh, belief meter goes down-

Speaker 2

Mm

Aaron Francis

... a little bit.

Speaker 2

I can't blame you.

Aaron Francis

Shortly thereafter.

Speaker 2

I can't blame you for that.

Aaron Francis

Shortly thereafter.

Speaker 2

I can't blame you. Um, I don't even have any comeback for that 'cause, uh-

Aaron Francis

Yeah. There's just-

Speaker 2

... I think that's fair. I think that's fair.

Aaron Francis

It would, it wouldn't be-

Speaker 2

That's all right

Aaron Francis

... it wouldn't be worth the time to have a comeback, honestly.

Speaker 2

All right. I don't want this segment to take up the whole show, but I got a couple-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... questions for you. Before that, let me do, let me just s- mention one more of our, of our great sponsors called TypeSense, open source, lightning fast search engine for your site or app, natively integrated with Laravel Scout. Check them out at typesense.org. All your AI stuff, you need searching, you need all those things, you grab TypeSense, you hook it into Laravel Scout.

It's all magical. Check them out. Typesense.org. Okay. So I need Aaron advice.

Aaron Francis

I love-

Speaker 2

'Cause you always give real good advice

Aaron Francis

... giving advice.

Speaker 2

I love your advice.

Aaron Francis

I love giving advice.

Speaker 2

You give good advice. So I've two main, uh, things.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

One is, uh, pricing. It's like, it's, uh, kind of the same thing. It's like pricing and sort of tier stuff, but, like, I was gonna do free. I feel like I have to have a free.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

Right? Free. I was gonna do $19 and $99.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

But I fricking hate $19. I just... It's so little money. So I'm at $29.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

$29 and $99. And what you get, just obviously this is a big list of things, but the main thing is, like, get all the AI stuff. You get replying to comments. You get the inbound-

Aaron Francis

What, you-

Speaker 2

... and outbound on YouTube.

Aaron Francis

This stuff you're listing, where do you get that?

Speaker 2

At the first paid tier.

Aaron Francis

What tier? First paid tier.

Speaker 2

29.

Aaron Francis

29 you get-

Speaker 2

29.

Aaron Francis

Okay. You get AI.

Speaker 2

Basically at $29-

Aaron Francis

You get outbound email

Speaker 2

... you basically get everything.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

The main difference is you get a few more limit, higher limits on the 99 with the idea of, like, all the limits at the 29 are, like, you run a normal podcast, you will never hit these limits.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

But if you run a daily podcast and you need 31 episodes a month, like, okay, that's, like, the $99 tier. Or you do some crazy shit and you want, like, 200 segments in an episode, that's the $99 tier. Or the main thing, sponsorships, $99 tier. And sponsorships no longer...

'Cause Stripe is freaking terrible, and I can't deal with it, the support of it all. So now $99 tier gets you sponsorships. You p- and we take no percentage. The, you just use your own Stripe account. You, like, OAuth it over. That's it. That's the whole thing. There's no-

Aaron Francis

Cool

Speaker 2

... nothing else. So, uh-

Aaron Francis

Feels like a emotional blocker that has been removed.

Speaker 2

That's a huge emotional blocker.

Aaron Francis

I do, I do like that.

Speaker 2

The Stripe Connect thing-

Aaron Francis

Yeah, it's a mess

Speaker 2

... everybody, everybody likes Stripe. Stripe is a disaster.

Aaron Francis

It's a mess.

Speaker 2

Stripe is worse than, like, uh, Salesforce. Like, Stripe is practically unusable in every single aspect of it. Like, it does your charges, and it doesn't make mistakes, which is the core thing, which is great. Everything else about Stripe is freaking terrible.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

So, um, yeah. So I was like, I, "This isn't worth it." Like, how many shows... Also, I just feel like it's also one of those weird things where, like, the shows that would ever use sponsorships are not... Like, the really big shows will never use sponsorships because they have their own sponsor organization. They got sales people-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... all kinds of stuff. Like, they're not using this little thing. So it's mostly gonna be for small-time shows, like us and smaller most likely, basically. So it's, like, 99 bucks. You keep all the money. My, my 5% fee was not gonna be that much money anyway.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

So, like, keep it simpler. All that stuff's cleaner.

Aaron Francis

And, and honestly doing pure no, like, no rake on it, bigger-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... bigger companies might actually use it.

Speaker 2

That's true too. That gives them-

Aaron Francis

Like 'cause-

Speaker 2

... it gives them the option

Aaron Francis

... 'cause Stripe can still take ACH payments. Um-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... and so they may, you know, they may hook up their Stripe and have some people pay through the site-

Speaker 2

That's an excellent point

Aaron Francis

... and some people pay-

Speaker 2

Yes

Aaron Francis

... through ACH and then just manually backfill. Um-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... so I, I like this altogether.

Speaker 2

Or they just use it even internally as, like, this is how we put ads-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... into the shows, but, like-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... whatever. So yes, it gives them that option. You can manually build ads. So if you deal with the money outside, that's fine. You can just manually put the ads in. Um, yeah. Uh, so, so that's kind of that. $29 pretty much gets you everything unless you're Sort of a fringe case, and then-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... there's a $99 plan. So what do you think about that?

Aaron Francis

Um, I think it's directionally correct. I like most of it.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

I think, I think I would probably simplify it just a little bit-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... and say on the $29 tier, you can do, pick a number, six episodes a month, eight episodes a month, something like that.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I think it's even more than that already, yeah. 10 or something.

Aaron Francis

I wouldn't do any sort of segment-

Speaker 2

Limit

Aaron Francis

... cap.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

Because segments are just a... I mean, episodes-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... are row in the database, but segments are even more so just a row in the database.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

I would, because if you cap the episodes at, like, eight, then you can capture people with multiple shows maybe-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... if they do multiple weekly.

Speaker 2

Well, it's per show.

Aaron Francis

And then-

Speaker 2

Don't forget, it's per show. Pricing is per show.

Aaron Francis

Pricing is per show.

Speaker 2

Yes, per show.

Aaron Francis

So it's $29 per show.

Speaker 2

Per show.

Aaron Francis

Oh.

Speaker 2

If, I mean, you could, I guess, run multiple out of one. Like, I'm not gonna, like, stop you, but it's gonna be a little bit-

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

It... You're not gonna e- It's gonna be a little weird. Some things probably won't work. Like y- like the mailbag would be weird unless all your shows go to one-

Aaron Francis

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Speaker 2

... address or something.

Aaron Francis

Yeah. Okay. Hold on. Well, this is interesting. $29 per show versus $29 with an episode, a global episode cap. Hmm. Okay, yeah, I like it.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

I think it's fine.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

Uh, I would remove the segment cap, keep the episode cap-

Speaker 2

Oh, got it

Aaron Francis

... and keep, uh, sponsorships in the $99 tier. That's... Yep, I think that's exactly how I would do it. I don't think segment cap makes any sense. I think outbound email behind payment makes a lot of sense, and I think if you're going to make money off of your show, then $99 makes sense as well.

Speaker 2

What do you think about no AI on the free tier?

Aaron Francis

Fine.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

What do you, what do you think about... This is maybe more contentious. What do you think about no MCP on the free tier?

Aaron Francis

Hmm. Don't like it.

Speaker 2

I thought you might say that. Right now-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... there's no MCP on the free tier. Could it be... I guess it could be, be maybe a restricted MCP?

Aaron Francis

Nope. I think it should be totally free MCP.

Speaker 2

Okay. Mm.

Aaron Francis

Because if you're doing, if you're doing free tier-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... the plan is, the plan is adoption, distribution.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

Right?

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

So you're already playing in the, "I need to get more people to use this."

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

I think the most useful thing these days is having an MCP so that I can rip my agents-

Speaker 2

You can get it going

Aaron Francis

... on whatever I'm using.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's true.

Aaron Francis

So you do that. You get them-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... using the product, and then they bump into, "I can't respond to emails." Uh, "All right. Well, I guess I'll, I'll pay for it." Um-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... so I don't, I don't- ... I don't like the gating of using-

Speaker 2

MCP is too core

Aaron Francis

... my own tokens. Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Like, if I'm, if I'm gonna use my own tokens, I'm either gonna do it via browser control or MCP.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

So you're not stopping me.

Speaker 2

That's true.

Aaron Francis

So let... Just give me the MCP.

Speaker 2

Okay. MCP back in the free. Obviously, it'd be restricted. Like, you can't send the email through it if you don't have the pro plan, whatever.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

That makes sense. No segment limit. Where, where do you stand? I don't know if we ever talked about this. Where do you stand? 'Cause I, I hit this stuff all the time. Where do you stand on no limit, quote unquote? Because, like, I think there should be some type of, like, protection for the system limit. Like, you don't need 400,000 segments. Like, your MCP goes crazy, right?

Aaron Francis

Oh, yeah. That's fine. Yeah.

Speaker 2

So, like, what do you usually do in that scenario? Like, what's your it's an out there limit? For something like segments, which you know-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... okay, normal show has 10 or 15. Maybe somebody who does a ton of planning has 50 or 35-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... or something like that. Like, what's your, like, "Okay, something's gone terribly wrong. I'm just capping that to limit the damage"?

Aaron Francis

Yeah, I would put a circuit breaker on it that's just like-

Speaker 2

Like 1,000, 2,000 or something like that

Aaron Francis

... nobody can have more than 250 segments. It's not a tier thing.

Speaker 2

Interesting. Yeah.

Aaron Francis

It's not a paid thing. It's like, why in the world would you ever need this?

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

And if you do, you should do something different. Uh, email me, I guess. But yeah, I think that, I think, like, uh, basically validation limits, those are great.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

I think that's fine.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

So I, I would cap it at, at 250 or-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... even 100, honestly.

Speaker 2

Okay. Yeah. All right. All right, that makes sense. Cool. Um, yeah, I know that people have weird use cases. Like, even 100 could be low. I could see it in the sense of, like, I'm doing an interview show. It's one of these Lex Fridman. I got, I got four hours to fill.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I might have 50 questions plus other stuff, whatever. So, all right. Couple hundred seems reasonable.

Aaron Francis

Couple hundred seems fine.

Speaker 2

Um, okay. I mean, I'm... And I feel really good about it. Like, everything's just, like, lining up. It's all cooking. It all feels mm. I don't know if it's gonna make any money. I'm still very dubious on that.

Aaron Francis

That's fine.

Speaker 2

I enjoy it now. I enjoy the free th- version I feel like makes sense. The, like, usability of everything is higher. I'm very excited.

Aaron Francis

Let's get it in the hands- ... of somebody else.

Speaker 2

Maybe it's just for us, Aaron.

Aaron Francis

It's not.

Speaker 2

Maybe it's just our little thing that we have together.

Aaron Francis

If it's just for us... If it's just for us, what are we doing? This, this-

Speaker 2

We're, we're just having a good time. We're orbiting.

Aaron Francis

We're not. We're having, we're... The good time is- ... by shipping and making money.

Speaker 2

Oh.

Aaron Francis

Everything, everything else is just-

Speaker 2

Oh

Aaron Francis

... like the journey, and it's very... Everyone knows the journey is pointless. It's only about the destination.

Speaker 2

It's all about the destination.

Aaron Francis

That's well-trod in-

Speaker 2

Oh

Aaron Francis

... philosophical history.

Speaker 2

Interesting. See, this is like, uh, I don't know. This is, it's so interesting 'cause I always loved building things, but I hated the coding part, and now I get to, I just build stuff without the coding part. It's so great. I love it.

Aaron Francis

There's just so few things left that are still attainable for humans, and one of them- ... is shipping the thing.

Speaker 2

Oh. All right, I'm considering it. We will use it-

Aaron Francis

All right

Speaker 2

... next week. We'll get your feedback.

Aaron Francis

Okay.

Speaker 2

We'll see. You might think it sucks, and then I'm not gonna wanna ship it.

Aaron Francis

I-- Whatever I think of it, I'm gonna say, "Yeah, it's amazing. You should ship it."

Speaker 2

No, don't lie to me.

Aaron Francis

No. It's a, it's a-

Speaker 2

Don't lie to me, Jerry

Aaron Francis

... uh, it's a, it's a white lie, which, uh-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... are also disallowed, but we'll-

Speaker 2

Mm

Aaron Francis

... we'll bend the rules for the content just-

Speaker 2

Okay. Yeah

Aaron Francis

... a little bit, you know? Unbelievable.

Speaker 2

Uh, is there anything you want while I'm in here in the mix again? Is there anything outro needs that you're like, "Boy, I wish I had that"?

Aaron Francis

Just the mailbag. That's it.

Speaker 2

The mailbag. Okay.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

This is the only screen I look at, which is the- ... Monday, October 19th, 2026-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... episode rundown. That is-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... literally the only screen I-

Speaker 2

Right

Aaron Francis

... ever look at.

Speaker 2

This is why it had to get redone, Aaron. This is exactly why, 'cause this is-

Aaron Francis

That's fine

Speaker 2

... a screen that needs to be optimized, and everything else is second.

Aaron Francis

I don't even know what a task is, a pre-task and a post-task.

Speaker 2

Ah, yeah.

Aaron Francis

I have no idea what that is. I don't-

Speaker 2

Yeah, it's a whole thing

Aaron Francis

... I've, I've never once used the back channel. I have no idea-

Speaker 2

I know

Aaron Francis

... what that's for. Don't need it.

Speaker 2

Do you hide that stuff-

Aaron Francis

Don't want it

Speaker 2

... or no? I, I do hide that stuff.

Aaron Francis

No, it's just open.

Speaker 2

You leave it open? There's a little toggle there. You can hide it.

Aaron Francis

Oh, show sidebar. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 2

Yeah. I, I hide it.

Aaron Francis

Insane that the-

Speaker 2

I hide those things I don't, that I don't use

Aaron Francis

... insane, by the way, that the show sidebar has a spinning indicator. That should all be client-side UI. That is-- That's crazy to me.

Speaker 2

Oh, yeah, it does have a little spinner. I think that... Yeah, maybe it's saving back to the thing. Yeah. There is some little... Livewire has a couple little things that are weird in some of these situations, as we've talked about, but that, that happens fast, so I'm okay with that. But-

Aaron Francis

Should happen instantly

Speaker 2

... I'm not okay with tasks I've never used once. Um, I'm not okay with-

Aaron Francis

Never used once

Speaker 2

... back channel. I've used w- I used it once with Dave, I think, on the, uh, Token Town RRP.

Aaron Francis

RRP.

Speaker 2

But, um, all right. Okay. So that's outro. That's Laravel new. What do you got going on?

Aaron Francis

I got-

Speaker 2

What do you got going on?

Aaron Francis

... a lot going on.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

The first thing I have going on is Bento, the email-

Speaker 2

Oh

Aaron Francis

... marketing and CRM platform built for the AI era. Send your product marketing and transactional emails with Bento, and check out their new transactional email pricing with rates as low as nine cents per thousand emails. Check them out at bentonow.com. Now, do not be confused, dear listener.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

This next one is from the same person but for a different use case. I'm talking about-

Speaker 2

Mm

Aaron Francis

... of course, Post Shiba. You've heard us talk about Bento four seconds ago. Jesse is working on Post Shiba, the transactional email platform that powers Bento's amazing delivery rates. Password resets, logins, receipts, et cetera, the emails your users are sitting there refreshing their inbox for.

He's currently gathering interest. You can join the waitlist at postshiba.com. So the difference here is if you're running a singular SaaS application and you just want, you just wanna plug in emails, I'm gonna say Bento. If you are building something where your users need to send emails with their own domains, branding, all of that stuff, I'm gonna say Post Shiba.

So we're talking about two different layers of the stack. Depending on what you are building, you will check out one or the other. Thank you to Jesse and his many products that he has shipped for sponsoring the show.

Speaker 2

He's a real shipper, that guy.

Aaron Francis

That guy.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

That freaking guy.

Speaker 2

Outro is built on Post Shiba.

Aaron Francis

There you go.

Speaker 2

Because, uh, primarily because I need the inbound. I don't wanna deal with inbound. I don't wanna think-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... about inbound. I just want something to web hook me some inbound stuff, and Post Shiba does the inbound. So it is, uh, all your email will flow through Post Shiba when you sign up for outro.fm.

Aaron Francis

All right, last outro thing, and I hate to be optimistic UI guy-

Speaker 2

Mm

Aaron Francis

... but everything here has gotta be faster.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

I click on a, I click on a... I read the ad, and it takes fully a second and a half to, to refresh.

Speaker 2

Yes. This is a thing I could not get. I tried everything in Livewire. I just couldn't get it perfect. There is... I mean, you can do, you could, like, fake the optimistic UI. I've talked to Cale about this. I feel like there's a place in, in Livewire for, like, it to have an officially supported, optimistic UI thing.

Aaron Francis

Gotta do it.

Speaker 2

I don't know what that means.

Aaron Francis

Gotta do it.

Speaker 2

But, like, I feel like that would be a very useful addition for these little interactions. Um-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... so yeah. So that should all be live. There's also some other things that were just architected, making my life very difficult for no reason, and I don't even think it helped us. Like, when we had Token Town, uh, we would use the segment timers. So it's like-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... okay, we want each segment to be four minutes, five minutes, whatever it was. And in current outro, it's like anyone, there could be three, four of us in there, whatever, anyone can stop and start the timer. And this creates a lot of architectural headache of, like, messages flying around and what people see. And then, like, there's also a lot of just, like... I'm not usually a big believer in web apps having a lot of race conditions, but this actually has a lot of race conditions because, like, all right, the segment's over.

We all three of us know the segment's over. All three of us go to push the segments over thing and are now, like, things are popping back into reality and, like, all that stuff.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

With the messages, they'll have to travel around the Earth and blah, blah. So now a new one, it's like whoever starts the go on air, they control the timer. And-

Aaron Francis

Yeah, that's reasonable

Speaker 2

... yeah, so it's like th-there is a way for you to take it from them if you want to take it from them. But otherwise, you are the one controlling the, the show in terms of that. Um, now one thing I have to figure out, I think the orbs l- still let you do this, and I don't know what the right answer is, so I can't blame the orbs. But let me get your take on this very quickly. Right now, you can still mark segments as done But the person controlling the episode is controlling the timers.

So like there could be some weird stuff in there. I guess if somebody marks a, a segment as done, even if it's not the person controlling the timer, it should still actually stop the timer and progress. Or do you think they shouldn't be allowed to mark things as done?

Aaron Francis

F- frankly, I think everyone should be allowed to do everything-

Speaker 2

Hmm

Aaron Francis

... and you should handle it, uh, idempotently. Um, so if like-

Speaker 2

Hmm. I, I-

Aaron Francis

... I click it-

Speaker 2

That is very-

Aaron Francis

... and then a second later-

Speaker 2

... it's all weird stuff

Aaron Francis

... you click it, and then a second later Dave clicks it-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... the, the final two should n- be basically no ops. Basically saying-

Speaker 2

Well, maybe I'll try that again

Aaron Francis

... "Well, this is already, this is already marked as completed, so this is-

Speaker 2

Hmm

Aaron Francis

... this is a no op 200 okay or whatever."

Speaker 2

Yes, the completed does work that way. The timer though, there was some... There's weirder stuff around the timer, which I don't... I'd have to dig back into it more. But just starting and stopping, but the timer has like n- everybody's time has to be synchronized, like really accurately, and there's like... I don't know. It's that never really worked right. But maybe let me give it another shot.

I got the smarter models now, smarter than me.

Aaron Francis

You got the smarter models.

Speaker 2

Let me see if I can figure out what you got.

Aaron Francis

You got, you got, you got the word idempotency-

Speaker 2

Oh, that's a good one

Aaron Francis

... so just give that, just give that to the models-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... and say, "I need it to be idempotent." So-

Speaker 2

Nah, I gotta use irrefutable now. Thor's-

Aaron Francis

Irrefutable

Speaker 2

... has me on irrefutable, and-

Aaron Francis

Idempotent

Speaker 2

... idempotent.

Aaron Francis

Um, let's talk about Solo for a second.

Speaker 2

Yay. It's, it's, it's side project day here on the show.

Aaron Francis

It's side project day.

Speaker 2

Okay, what do you got?

Aaron Francis

Solo Linux is done.

Speaker 2

Woo. That's been a long time coming here now, so-

Aaron Francis

It has. It has

Speaker 2

... any-

Aaron Francis

So-

Speaker 2

... anything, uh, tricky or just like time wise?

Aaron Francis

Everything tricky.

Speaker 2

Or... Okay. Okay.

Aaron Francis

Um, so we're currently-

Speaker 2

That sounds right

Aaron Francis

... living in the golden age of resets, right? So T-Bo-

Speaker 2

That's true

Aaron Francis

... is just like slamming the button, and I intend to use, uh... I, I don't, I don't, I don't lament that tokens are gonna g- are trying to get you hooked. I don't care.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

If you're gonna hand me a bunch of money- ... I'm going to take it and spend it knowing full well in the future you may stop handing me money.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

That's fine. I will use the money that you hand me.

Speaker 2

Isn't it annoying how he's doing it though? Like-

Aaron Francis

It's so annoying

Speaker 2

... like just give me the banged reset. The reset that comes randomly-

Aaron Francis

Oh, yeah. That, yeah

Speaker 2

... it's like I don't wanna go down to zero, and then you don't give me another reset for a week, and now I literally have noth- no tokens.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

So it's a little weird, but yeah.

Aaron Francis

It is, it is a little weird, which is why I'm just gripping and ripping as much as I can. Just, just let her, let her ride. Um-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... so I've been doing a lot of, I've been doing a lot of, a lot of background work.

Speaker 2

Big chunky stuff.

Aaron Francis

Right?

Speaker 2

Chunky things.

Aaron Francis

So I'll, I'll kick something off-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... and then check on it many hours later, right?

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

'Cause I got a job to do.

Speaker 2

You do.

Aaron Francis

So it's mostly morning and night queuing stuff up, um, and then just prodding it and being like, "Hey, keep going, keep going."

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

So Solo Linux is done. It's packaged. It's been smoke tested. Like I can launch it-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... and I can use it on Omachi-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... um, which is spelled Omachi. So I can use it, I can use it on these Linux machines.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

It actually works. So now I just flip the switch on the website.

Speaker 2

Oh.

Aaron Francis

I just flip it and I say, "Download it." The only thing, well, one of the things that is not done, freaking Linux, man.

Speaker 2

Mm.

Aaron Francis

Freaking Linux. Um-

Speaker 2

Yeah. I like that though

Aaron Francis

... I have to like repackage it for Nix, which is apparently pretty popular.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

Um-

Speaker 2

Never heard of it. Okay

Aaron Francis

... but I have an app-

Speaker 2

Just another build?

Aaron Francis

Yeah. It's another, I don't know.

Speaker 2

Flavor of Linux?

Aaron Francis

Yeah. Distro.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

Give me a break.

Speaker 2

Distro. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Francis

Use a real computer. Sorry to the Linux people. Um, so I need to repackage it for-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... Nix OS.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

But it works on, um... I forget. I think I actually published it to the site without having it live, which, you know, that's fine.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Um, yeah. X84, x8664. I don't know what any of those things mean. Um- ... but it works on, uh, it works on Arch. It works on Ubuntu and I think a few others, uh, given-

Speaker 2

And Omachi, right? It works on Omachi.

Aaron Francis

And, yeah. Which is-

Speaker 2

Yep

Aaron Francis

... which is an Arch flavor.

Speaker 2

Oh, is that an Arch flavor?

Aaron Francis

Um-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... uh, because it's, it's packaged right now as an app image. So I have to do a separate-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... packaging step for the Nix flakes, um-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm. Nix flakes

Aaron Francis

... but I'm not gonna hold it, I'm not... Yeah, it's so stupid. I'm not gonna hold it up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna flip it live today and see if people start downloading it, and it'll be, it's gonna be... We'll, we'll have to go on a bug, bug squash run-

Speaker 2

Mm

Aaron Francis

... when people actually start using it on all these goofy machines.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Um, I hope my disdain for Linux isn't showing.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Um-

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

I hope I'm being-

Speaker 2

I love your customers

Aaron Francis

... I hope I'm being subtle about it.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Yeah. Um, you guys are great.

Speaker 2

I think that Linux is great too though.

Aaron Francis

Buy my thing.

Speaker 2

Linux to me feels like, I mean, on the one hand they don't really love to pay for things, but on the other hand I feel like it's totally the Solo, like I wanna control everything.

Aaron Francis

Yes.

Speaker 2

I wanna run everything.

Aaron Francis

For sure.

Speaker 2

I wanna install everything. I want everything here.

Aaron Francis

Which is why I love them so much.

Speaker 2

Yes. I wanna be-

Aaron Francis

Exactly

Speaker 2

... in full control of every little minute atom of my environment. Great. Solo is the perfect tool for that-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... on your Linux environment. You're gonna learn to love the Linux, guys. Because you learn-

Aaron Francis

Learn to love the Linux

Speaker 2

... w- we should talk about this in a little bit. I don't wanna interrupt right now, but Linux is, uh, Linus' email there was so good.

Aaron Francis

Yes.

Speaker 2

So I wanna talk about that a bit.

Aaron Francis

Linus of Linux had a good le email.

Speaker 2

Yes. Linus of Linux. Yes.

Aaron Francis

Um, so Linux is done. Um-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... along the way-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... we have expanded our ambition. Well, we have, we've caught up, the code has caught up to the original ambition-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... to be quite honest with you.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

So now, because, because this is truly because of the unlimited tokens. If you guys aren't spending unlimited tokens- ... while the sun is shining, which is-

Speaker 2

You do. You have to

Aaron Francis

... you know, the phrase-

Speaker 2

You have to try

Aaron Francis

... spend the tokens while the sun shines.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

What are you doing?

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Spend all of the tokens. Um, so I've got this running on-- I've got this, you know, building on a separate machine, so it's not clogging up my day-to-day computer. But, um-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... what I've had, what I've had it ripping on, Solo Linux is one. The other is, um, Headless Solo.

Speaker 2

Okay. Uh, you've talked about this before. I th-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... I have to say, I don't even understand what the hell this is, so you're gonna have to go through it with me.

Aaron Francis

So you know Orbs. You've heard of-

Speaker 2

I know Orbs

Aaron Francis

... you've heard of ampcodes.com.

Speaker 2

I-- Orbs are plugged into me like The Matrix. They're like this.

Aaron Francis

I know. I know.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

So now, uh, imagine you had a VPS somewhere, you had five Macs in your closet, whatever.

Speaker 2

Okay. Okay. Yep.

Aaron Francis

And you wanted, you wanted all that heavy work to be happening on those other machines-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... but you wanted the nice UI and the ability to, like, type into the terminal or the chat or whatever on your local machine, and then it just goes off and does stuff on other machines, right?

Speaker 2

Okay. Okay.

Aaron Francis

So we're talking about, we're talking about a peer-to-peer network here.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

Very similar-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... very similar to something like a, a Tailscale, where, like-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... you bring machines into this trusted mesh, and then they-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... can talk to each other.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

We're-- We got it. We're there.

Speaker 2

We're doing it? We, we... It exists?

Aaron Francis

We've-- It exists. I have-

Speaker 2

Ooh, wow, that's crazy

Aaron Francis

... I have Solo running, um-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... and I can, I can pull up two... You can pull up two headed versions if you want.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

So you can have GUI on both machines, and I can type into one terminal, and it appears on the other terminal.

Speaker 2

Oh, boy.

Aaron Francis

So the other machines can run headed or headless, which is, uh-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... a big, you know, a, a big reason for getting Linux working is because you might have lots of, like... You might have lots of VPSes or little Linux boxes or something, where you-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... wanna do all your agentic development, right?

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

And now you can put Solo over there, and you can put Solo here, and you can put Solo everywhere, and you can just have your projects everywhere, and all from your local machine. You can just be controlling it. And then you can, of course, close your local laptop-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... because Solo is actually running on the other machines, it's just connected-

Speaker 2

Hmm

Aaron Francis

... to this one.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

So-

Speaker 2

I like this

Aaron Francis

... I've got the, I've got the peer-to-peer relay working.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

So it, it does a, it does a small registration through a durable object-

Speaker 2

Okay

Aaron Francis

... and you exchange, basically you exchange keys. You have to trust a machine from a machine that's already trusted to keep everything-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... inside your network.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

Um, and then they connect peer to peer.

Speaker 2

Wow.

Aaron Francis

And so all of your traffic, all of your traffic does not flow through me, which is great for privacy. I don't care about privacy. Some people do, but-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... it's great for infrastructure for me.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

I don't-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... I don't want, I don't want-

Speaker 2

Dude, that's amazing. That's amazing

Aaron Francis

... Open Code as an example.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

I don't want people's traffic. I don't want your keys.

Speaker 2

No.

Aaron Francis

I don't want your traffic.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

I don't want anything, in fact.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

So it does a small, like, um, it does a small, like, uh, ticket exchange, and then it goes peer to peer after that.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

Um, so that is going excellent.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

That also, this is all downstream of, um, all that work I did back in the day of the terminal stuff-

Speaker 2

Oh, mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... and, like, the canonical operations, getting everything kind of, like, architected quite right.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

This has also opened, uh, Solo Mobile.

Speaker 2

Okay. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

Aaron Francis

And so I, I have on, I think it's on... This is crazy. I don't know what machine it's on. I think it's on the Mac Studio.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

Um, 'cause this machine I'm on is, like, uh, an old version of macOS, and that one is, like, Tahoe or something.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

So on the Mac Studio right now, I could swipe my desktop over, and I could see the iPhone simulator and Solo desktop GUI. And I can type in the iPhone, and it s- keystroke for keystroke types into Solo desktop GUI.

Speaker 2

Wow. Oh, nice.

Aaron Francis

So now in the same, in the same, like, peer-to-peer relay register device thing-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... you basically, you pair a new node.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

Um, and then you can access all of your nodes from Solo Mobile. And you can see, you can see agents, terminals, commands. I haven't gotten to, like, scratch pads and to-dos, and I don't know if I will, in fact. Um, but you can do all of it from a mobile device.

Speaker 2

And so that's like... So there's like... That's just a h- that's just the head with no body, effectively-

Aaron Francis

Yes

Speaker 2

... right? Like, the mobile-

Aaron Francis

Correct

Speaker 2

... obviously can't execute anything

Aaron Francis

... nothing run, no agents run-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... on your mobile, yeah.

Speaker 2

And then you could have... So you could have... Does the desktop version offer you that same, like... I guess you could just run as... I mean, obviously it has the capability to do the other stuff, but it's so just purely, I run nothing local. It's just all just the head-

Aaron Francis

Yes

Speaker 2

... on the Mac. Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Yes.

Speaker 2

And then I could have remote whatever, obviously VMs or physical-

Aaron Francis

Yep. Mm-hmm

Speaker 2

... Mac Studios, whatever.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

Wow. That's crazy.

Aaron Francis

I know.

Speaker 2

You are doing the hardest thing.

Aaron Francis

I will succeed because I am insane. That is, that is exactly right.

Speaker 2

Oh, man. So I guess, what's our ETA on this?

Aaron Francis

Um, ETA on this is probably, is probably another month, I think.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

For both.

Speaker 2

Where are the, where are the competitors on this? Like, what's that, like, Pod? You know, like, what is it?

Aaron Francis

Obviously Amp is probably the biggest-

Speaker 2

I mean Amp, I guess-

Aaron Francis

... and best

Speaker 2

... but Amp to me is a little different. It's a little different than what you're trying to do to me.

Aaron Francis

Yeah. This is- This is all... I don't know if this is like more neck beardy or what, um, but this is all like machines you own. Now-

Speaker 2

Right, exactly

Aaron Francis

... there is, there is a future where Sprites.dev becomes my cloud-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... you know, machine provider, and you can just-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... spin up cloud machines from Solo. There-- That is like-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... that's in the scratch pads as research-

Speaker 2

It makes sense

Aaron Francis

... content. Um-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... I don't, I don't know where the others are. I try not to pay too close attention to the others-

Speaker 2

Mm

Aaron Francis

... um, and just kinda do my own thing. I'm certain that Conductor or, uh, Herder or Seema-

Speaker 2

Mm.

Aaron Francis

So I'm, I'm certain that some of those have this already.

Speaker 2

Right. Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

Um, but I try, I just try not to look at it.

Speaker 2

Yeah. That's what I do too.

Aaron Francis

I, I don't, I don't wanna get, I don't wanna get poisoned, and also it's kinda depressing to be like-

Speaker 2

Right, yeah. Go ahead

Aaron Francis

... oh, this open source thing has like- ... 4,000 contributors, and I'm a guy-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... with a job and four kids. And so I just mined-

Speaker 2

Not a bunch of tokens

Aaron Francis

... I mined a bunch of tokens. I mind, I mind my own business for the most part.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

Um, but if I am any indication, and I have to be-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... I am, I have to be my own best customer here. Um, I'm already finding it incredibly, incredibly useful.

Speaker 2

It's so good to be not on your host machine. The host machine-

Aaron Francis

It is

Speaker 2

... is such a barrier. Yeah. You gotta get off-

Aaron Francis

It is

Speaker 2

... the host machine. So that is great. Wow, this is gonna be huge. I feel like-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... you gotta, um, you gotta market this, you know?

Aaron Francis

I know.

Speaker 2

I feel this needs a release, like a, like an event.

Aaron Francis

It does.

Speaker 2

It needs more than just like a, "Now it's available." Like the Linux-

Aaron Francis

I know

Speaker 2

... I think is fine to do that way. But like, I feel like this, this, this is big. This is like-

Aaron Francis

I know

Speaker 2

... wire up your own stuff, run a million agents at once 'cause you don't have to worry about your resources. You don't have-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... to worry about security. You don't have to worry about... You wanna use browser stuff, great. Like put it on some other machine.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

I think there's a lot to talk about with this one.

Aaron Francis

There, there's, there's a lot to talk about. And while the tokens are ripping-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... we've also been ripping on, uh, another thing that is a-

Speaker 2

Oh, okay

Aaron Francis

... about, I wanna say about 95 to 97% done.

Speaker 2

I'm looking at the list of topics, and I don't see any new things.

Aaron Francis

It's-

Speaker 2

So this is-

Aaron Francis

No, it's not, it's not on here.

Speaker 2

This is something. It's a surprise.

Aaron Francis

You can, you can check off those two 'cause this is a surprise.

Speaker 2

Okay. All right. We're moving on to something new. All right.

Aaron Francis

The third surprise-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... is, um, GUI chats instead of chewies, instead of, uh, CLI. So-

Speaker 2

Oh

Aaron Francis

... you know how-

Speaker 2

Like a chat interface?

Aaron Francis

Yeah. You know how, um-

Speaker 2

Right

Aaron Francis

... Codex desktop, Claude desktop, Claude web, all of that is just-

Speaker 2

Right

Aaron Francis

... like normal HTML chat. Um-

Speaker 2

Yep

Aaron Francis

... I've got it. I cracked it. You can actually... You can switch from terminal to GUI-

Speaker 2

There you go

Aaron Francis

... and back to terminal and back to GUI, and the conversation stays. It just picks right back up.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

So if you're one of these people that's like, "You know, I actually prefer-- I don't wanna work in the terminal."

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

Great. Now you've got a beautiful chat interface with bubbles, and you can click on things-

Speaker 2

Ooh, all the stuff. Yep

Aaron Francis

... like you're used to from computers. Um, and so there's a, there are a few adapters I've put in place. One is, one's Claude code, one's Codex, and then the other is, um, whatever they call it, ACP agent protocol, whatever. Um-

Speaker 2

I don't know about it

Aaron Francis

... many of these others live behind like an ACP standardized server.

Speaker 2

Okay. Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

So now Codex, Claude, Antigravity, Muse, AMP, and maybe I did Kimmy. Um, you can als-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... with all of those, you can either start in the terminal, start in the GUI, or swap. And your conversations-

Speaker 2

Wow

Aaron Francis

... your conversations stay alive. You still get permissions prompts. You can pick models. You can do the whole thing in-

Speaker 2

Swapping is interesting.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I don't know. They-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... they, I guess we might not know, but I'm curious. I don't know if any of the other ones do swapping. I don't think I've ever seen swapping. Maybe I've never looked-

Aaron Francis

I don't know

Speaker 2

... but.

Aaron Francis

Wouldn't know. Haven't looked. Um-

Speaker 2

Wouldn't know. Yes, but I, but I like that. That's intriguing. Okay.

Aaron Francis

And so I think what is, what is interesting, um-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... to harken back to Jesse Bentley is the terminal is the hardest part for sure-

Speaker 2

Right. Yeah

Aaron Francis

... bar none, without exception. Doing this chat was-- It took me-

Speaker 2

Right

Aaron Francis

... two or three days.

Speaker 2

Right. It's a challenge, yeah.

Aaron Francis

Which I didn't-- It took me two or three minutes 'cause the agents were just doing it.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

But the actual, the actual performant terminal that can be both obviously streamed, you know, from Rust to your front end, but then streamed across a peer relay-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... with small, with small patches. That part, as we know, as we have covered exhaustively on this show- ... was a nightmare.

Speaker 2

That was a big one.

Aaron Francis

And so, you know, I do remember talking to the Conductor guy, and he was like, "Oh yeah, we've got a terminal mode, but it's really terrible 'cause we just use xterm." And I'm like, "Yeah-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... it probably is really terrible." And so now inside of Solo, you've got, you've got everything. So you need to drop out and go to just a raw blank terminal to do some stuff.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

You can. You need to fire up a, a terminal agent that's not supported by any of the ACP protocols. You can. It totally works. Um, so I do feel like I, maybe for, maybe for market share went the wrong way, but for like technical moat went the right way, and I did the-

Speaker 2

Well-

Aaron Francis

... I did the hardest thing first.

Speaker 2

This makes me a little sad, uh, because of what I'm about to say, but maybe I'm wrong. But in the old days, you could extract that part, and that part would be the business. Like that part-

Aaron Francis

Yeah. I know

Speaker 2

... is like, I licensed this to Anthropic.

Aaron Francis

I know.

Speaker 2

I licensed this to Conductor. Like the, I did all the hard work to figure out all the stupid bullshit, and like they're just gonna-

Aaron Francis

I know

Speaker 2

... pay me 50 grand a year to use this n- module that makes everything magical with their terminal stuff. I don't know if anybody wants to pay for that anymore, unfortunately.

Aaron Francis

Nobody wants to pay for that.

Speaker 2

But

Aaron Francis

Nope. There's no money in software, Ian

Speaker 2

Well, there is money in software, but I don't know about that type of thing. Everybody thinks they can just do it themselves. It could be interesting to just put a page up about it. No price, but like, "I built this perfect term-" Have the, uh, you got the tokens, have them just put up a page on the site that says, "The core is available for licensing. Contact us," and all the details about what it does and how it does it and how, all the problems it solves.

Aaron Francis

That's interesting.

Speaker 2

I think that there's no downside to that. Maybe somebody's gonna come along and buy up the whole thing, or maybe somebody's gonna come along and license it 'cause, hey, Anthropic's got 50 grand if it made their stuff better or whatever.

Aaron Francis

You think so? You think they have that much money?

Speaker 2

I think they have a few bucks kicking around. I, Anthropic wouldn't-

Aaron Francis

Ah

Speaker 2

... actually do it, I don't think, but-

Aaron Francis

Nah, they wouldn't

Speaker 2

... there's a bunch of other competitors that might. Conductors got 50 grand kicking around.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

8 billion other AI chat interface-y terminal things, right?

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

Most of them have 50 grand kicking around, or 10 grand or whatever. Who knows? What do you care?

Aaron Francis

50.

Speaker 2

Like-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... 50 would be a nice number. I think 50 you would, like, definitely just do it, right? And like-

Aaron Francis

For sure.

Speaker 2

Yeah, so-

Aaron Francis

Here's, here's the repo. Let your agents look at whatever you want.

Speaker 2

You can actually, you got everything. Yeah. So, I don't know. You never know. There's something there. I'd, I'd put it out there. Why not?

Aaron Francis

That's not crazy, actually. Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

Um, that, that is in fact worth considering because it is like... I mean, it, it's not even just like, oh, this is technically better. It's like, no, this, this works.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

If you use X, if you use X Term, you are, it, one-

Speaker 2

Yeah. It doesn't work

Aaron Francis

... it just doesn't work.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

Like, it's not, it's not made for, first-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... first of all, it's not made for these long-running chats that last forever.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

And second of all, there's just literally no way to do distributed X Term in a good way-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... because X Term wants to be the whole terminal, where mine is just a dumb renderer with a centralized smart terminal, so...

Speaker 2

I mean, I could, I could be wrong, and this is smart guy stuff, uh, but is it... I think, like, this is kinda what the Ghosty guy's building, right? Like, where it's like distributed-

Aaron Francis

I actually don't know what he's doing with the new-

Speaker 2

I know. I, he's kind of disappeared, but-

Aaron Francis

... multiplex everything

Speaker 2

... yeah.

Aaron Francis

I, I, I actually don't quite understand-

Speaker 2

Okay. Maybe that's not the thing

Aaron Francis

... what he's doing, so I can't speak to it very intelligently.

Speaker 2

Yeah. All right. Well, regardless, uh, there is going to likely be... Uh, you can imagine other types of systems too. Like, we're just on the, like, yes, what the developers want, tools for developers. But, like, some point there's gonna be other AI tools that do all kinds of other things for other industries, and you can imagine this type of thing maybe be... Hey, maybe this is a tool that is, like, runs your robots in your factory.

Aaron Francis

Sure.

Speaker 2

And, like, you need a way to have these long-running conversations-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... with the robots and whatever. You have a control panel over there, and you got the robot itself. You got mobile phone to control the robots and whatever. Like, you could imagine scenarios where you have different things that, where a terminal that is performant in this way-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... is gonna be super useful, so.

Aaron Francis

Performant and distributed I think is a pretty good, is a pretty good angle.

Speaker 2

Yes. Yes, and a- amongst companies that are not cutting edge AI, we believe we could build everything. Like, that's the whole, that's, uh, my whole shtick, right? It's like, yes, I understand, like, Anthropic's not gonna buy this, whatever, fine. But, like, there's all these other companies that do stuff where this could be useful and they're just, they don't wanna build this. Like, they just wanna build the robot interface 'cause they're dealing with the robots.

Aaron Francis

Right.

Speaker 2

They don't wanna deal with let's reinvent for the 100th time how to do this protocol and whatever, all the stuff. So, I would put that website up there, and maybe it's not gonna be... Maybe it's two years from now, right? Like, we're still so early.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

You know, nobody gets how early. It's, like, so insanely early that nobody else even is thinking about this stuff hardly. So, like, you know, you get a couple years out, get more, um-

Aaron Francis

Get, yeah, put it out there. Let, let Google marinate on it.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

And then, yeah.

Speaker 2

Get in the AI so that when they're, when they're like, "How do I do this? I got this crazy scenario," right? You, Chris Cholewa's first is like, "Oh, Solo Term-"

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... "offers this as a product," right? Like, just be out there. Probably with a bunch of technical docs about this would be interesting-

Aaron Francis

Yeah

Speaker 2

... of like-

Aaron Francis

For sure

Speaker 2

... but the AI gets that in there, so it's like when people start asking around about this, you start coming up in those questions 'cause that's gonna be quite specific type knowledge, I would think, that there's not gonna be-

Aaron Francis

And, and, uh

Speaker 2

... that many sources for.

Aaron Francis

A Solo, a Solo terminal versus X Term JS comparison page.

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that would be awesome.

Aaron Francis

For sure.

Speaker 2

Yep. So, I like this idea. This is a good one. Get, you got-

Aaron Francis

This, this is not crazy

Speaker 2

... you got all the credits. They're hitting the reset for you just like the, the way they do.

Aaron Francis

They're hitting the reset for me. What, what am I supposed to do except spend them?

Speaker 2

Exactly.

Aaron Francis

There's no honor. There's no honor in-

Speaker 2

No

Aaron Francis

... ending the week with tokens to spare.

Speaker 2

What are you using? What are you... See, you, you're working on some big chunky stuff, but, like, when you just know you're gonna... 'Cause, like, Fridays, like, they always reset on Friday-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... 'cause they got nobody using it over the weekend. So it's like Friday you're getting 100% reset, oh-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... every, every week. So, what are you doing with your tokens when you just don't have... Like, you already got stuff. You got agents doing all your big chunky stuff.

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

You just have extra tokens. What are you, what are you doing right now with your extra tokens?

Aaron Francis

Building new 3D models of things.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Aaron Francis

Like, in, in the office being like-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... "Hey, just look over literally everything we've done and clean it up." And then also-

Speaker 2

Yep

Aaron Francis

... potentially, like, I wanna build a, you know, a charging wall.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

Model that out.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

Take as much time as you need.

Speaker 2

Right.

Aaron Francis

Um, there is still the, uh, the fantasy novel that-

Speaker 2

Oh, right

Aaron Francis

... well, it's, it's turned into seven novels and an encyclopedia. So, uh, just don't worry about it. It's, it's fine. Uh-

Speaker 2

This could be your biggest thing. I, I'm pretty jazzed about this. I'm excited for this.

Aaron Francis

I am. I cannot tell you how jazzed about this I am.

Speaker 2

Oh, my gosh.

Aaron Francis

So freaking jazzed. Last night, you know, of course, I got in bed at 9:00 'cause I'm a sleepy guy.

Speaker 2

Right. I saw you tweet that.

Aaron Francis

Yep. I put my headphones in 'cause I sleep with headphones on-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... as most people do. Um-

Speaker 2

Normal stuff

Aaron Francis

... so I put my AirPods in.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

I fired up, uh, Claude on my phone.

Speaker 2

Yep.

Aaron Francis

I Gave it a handoff document of the whole, like, you know, the whole world-

Speaker 2

The world, yep. Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... basically. The canon, the canon of the world.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

What I'm doing is I'm building up so much canonical, like, structure of-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... I have a whole SQLite database that has tens of thousands of facts about the world. To make sure, to make sure that we can span 2,000 years without, like-

Speaker 2

Right

Aaron Francis

... having discrepancies, right?

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

So I've got this whole canonical world, uh, this whole canonical database of facts, family lineages, when things happened in what regions-

Speaker 2

Yep

Aaron Francis

... et cetera. Um, and then I've got... I'm starting to have prose, you know, be written. Actually, last night I had, uh, the first... You know, we're going through like what are the turning points, what is the drama, what is the blah, blah, blah. Great.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

Now write it, compare it with all these other agents, typeset it into something, typeset it into a PDF, 'cause I'm gonna get it printed at FedEx Kinkos, and I'm gonna read it and mark it up and... So I've got-

Speaker 2

Oh, my gosh

Aaron Francis

... I've got, I've got the first one just totally done. So I-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... I, I told my, uh, I told my computer agent, my computer Claude, "Write me a giant markdown handoff document explaining kind of everything that's going on. I wanna go to Voice Claude and just talk about it."

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

Unfortunately, if you do remote control from your machine, you can't then do voice mode, um-

Speaker 2

Oh, got it

Aaron Francis

... on your phone. So it couldn't-

Speaker 2

Right

Aaron Francis

... like call back home to Solo and be like, "Read these files on disk."

Speaker 2

There you go.

Aaron Francis

So I had it compile a handoff, gave the handoff to the voice agent. Then I'm laying in bed, AirPods in, eye mask on-

Speaker 2

You're cooking

Aaron Francis

... chili pad on. You know, I'm cool.

Speaker 2

You're cooking.

Aaron Francis

I'm calm. I'm collected.

Speaker 2

Oh, you're cooling. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Aaron Francis

Uh, and I start talking and I'm like, "Hey, you know the canonical world, you know, you know the s- like the facts, you know the storylines. Let's do some vignettes. Give me, give me five minutes on this person." And it tells me a five-minute story. And I'm like, "That's fantastic. What a great story."

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Aaron Francis

"Great, give me five minutes on this conflict." Boom, gives me, talks in my ear. I'm just laying down and it's just telling me these stories. And the best, like the best thing about it is I just want to inhabit the world. And so that's good, that's a good sign.

Speaker 2

I love this.

Aaron Francis

Like, I want, I want to know what happens when the last bell rings. Like, I wanna know that.

Speaker 2

I feel like this... So there's two thoughts I have. One is that, like, nobody's ever been able to release, like all these universes, whether it's Tolkien, whether it's Sanderson, whatever, like they obviously build up. They, the author has the idea in their head-

Aaron Francis

Sure

Speaker 2

... but they just physically can't write. Like even Sanderson can't write fast enough to like, still takes a decade till the universe starts to really form.

Aaron Francis

Right.

Speaker 2

Right? And then whatever. So we do have this modern era where you could release a universe all at once-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... which is sort of interesting. But I even wonder if it's just like a new form of something. Forget the book-

Aaron Francis

I know

Speaker 2

... notebooks. Like you have all this, the data, you're just selling the universe, and then stories are created out of it by the AI.

Aaron Francis

I, trust me, I have thought about this where-

Speaker 2

Yeah, there's something there

Aaron Francis

... where basically I provide some sort of, you know, web experience-

Speaker 2

Yeah, mobile f- mobile app

Aaron Francis

... with some sort of agent, and it's-

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm

Aaron Francis

... basically like unlimited fan fiction that is canonical-

Speaker 2

Yeah

Aaron Francis

... or at least lives in the canonical world, and you can invent side stories, you know?

Speaker 2

Yes.

Aaron Francis

And I'll-

Speaker 2

Yeah, I think-

Aaron Francis

I'll keep, I'll keep the facts

Speaker 2

... seeding some main stories would be interesting, right?

Aaron Francis

Yep.

Speaker 2

But like, but if, if people come up with really good ones that they love, they could share-

Aaron Francis

Share

Speaker 2

... having like a share mechanism.

Aaron Francis

I know.

Speaker 2

So it's like, oh, here's a thing. When, when the people who love the world just agree this is canonical, it just becomes canonical.

Aaron Francis

It just becomes canonical.

Speaker 2

Like through some voting process-

Aaron Francis

Yep

Speaker 2

... or whatever, like-

Aaron Francis

And it gets rolled back into the canonical database-

Speaker 2

Yes

Aaron Francis

... of facts. I know.

Speaker 2

Forget books. This is the new generation of some- a thing.

Aaron Francis

This is, this is like-

Speaker 2

Whatever this, this doesn't even have a name

Aaron Francis

... MMORPG but for literature, you know?

Speaker 2

Yeah. Right, exactly.