WEBVTT NOTE Sentence-level transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRfzFJCJ7ZE NOTE One cue per sentence. Cue ids are the line anchors on /transcripts/TRfzFJCJ7ZE.html. A cue ends where the next begins, or 2 s after its last word. s1 00:00:01.309 --> 00:00:03.309 [music] s2 00:00:25.080 --> 00:00:26.600 Hello. s3 00:00:26.600 --> 00:00:38.240 I was at a wedding this weekend and it was in New York and there were a bunch of trendy people there and uh I I told I was talking to someone who I'd never met before and s4 00:00:38.240 --> 00:00:41.600 uh I told him I was prepping for this presentation and he was like, "Oh, that's cool. s5 00:00:41.600 --> 00:00:43.640 Like, what what's the conference about?" s6 00:00:43.640 --> 00:00:46.320 And I said it was about AI engineering. s7 00:00:46.320 --> 00:00:52.880 And I could just see his eyes glaze over and he started like looking behind me to find the next person to talk to. s8 00:00:52.880 --> 00:00:57.800 And I'm it's like so cool to actually be in a room full of people who actually want to hear about this stuff. s9 00:00:57.800 --> 00:01:00.160 So, I I I I'm very excited to be here. s10 00:01:00.160 --> 00:01:02.720 Um I am the co-founder of Conductor. s11 00:01:02.720 --> 00:01:05.440 Um has anyone here used Conductor? s12 00:01:05.440 --> 00:01:06.200 Okay, nice. s13 00:01:06.200 --> 00:01:07.120 Nice. s14 00:01:07.120 --> 00:01:07.920 Okay, cool. s15 00:01:07.920 --> 00:01:15.560 So, uh uh for those who don't know, uh Conductor is a desktop app for managing a team of coding agents all at the same time. s16 00:01:15.560 --> 00:01:24.480 So, instead of having a bunch of terminal windows for your Cloud Codes, your Code Accesses, or your uh whatever uh coding agent, you have one interface to manage them all. s17 00:01:24.480 --> 00:01:31.480 And one of the really cool things about building Conductor has been that I've seen a lot of the best builders up close. s18 00:01:31.480 --> 00:01:37.360 I've like watched their workflow, I've seen how they work, I've seen the things they do do and the things that they avoid doing. s19 00:01:37.360 --> 00:01:44.840 And so, I thought I would compile a bunch of the principles um that I've seen the best engineers use um and give them to you all. s20 00:01:44.840 --> 00:01:48.440 Um so, here's what Conductor looks like. s21 00:01:48.440 --> 00:01:50.560 Uh can you can you guys see this? s22 00:01:50.560 --> 00:01:51.320 Okay, nice. s23 00:01:51.320 --> 00:01:51.680 Okay. s24 00:01:51.680 --> 00:01:53.440 So, here's what Conductor looks like. s25 00:01:53.440 --> 00:02:00.240 Um and here are my principles for being the fastest builder in your organization. s26 00:02:00.240 --> 00:02:05.440 So, let's start with number one, stay near the frontier. s27 00:02:06.080 --> 00:02:11.520 Staying near the frontier means you are always trying the latest things, basically the day they come out. s28 00:02:11.520 --> 00:02:16.280 Uh it means that when uh uh ultra code comes out, you're trying it. s29 00:02:16.280 --> 00:02:21.160 It means that when uh uh slash go comes out, you're giving it a go. s30 00:02:21.160 --> 00:02:25.480 Um it's really important to stay near the frontier um for a few reasons. s31 00:02:25.480 --> 00:02:33.440 Um if you are doing your own startup, then staying near the frontier means that you will um come up with lots of new ideas for what you should actually be building. s32 00:02:33.440 --> 00:02:34.959 Um and this literally happened to us. s33 00:02:34.959 --> 00:02:37.920 We were building a totally different app called Chorus. s34 00:02:37.920 --> 00:02:54.360 Um but we started using We were such power users of cloud code back in February of last year that we uh started building our whole workflow around cloud code, and we started cloning our repo five times, and then we discovered work trees, and then bit by bit we had built conductor as an internal tool. s35 00:02:54.360 --> 00:02:58.320 And we couldn't have figured that out if we uh weren't staying near the frontier. s36 00:02:58.320 --> 00:03:06.000 And if you're not doing a startup, you should be the person at your company who always knows what the latest uh the latest workflows are. s37 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:15.239 Um it used to be that you could just kind of like use your social graph and the information that was important about the best workflows to use would trickle down to you. s38 00:03:15.239 --> 00:03:17.239 But things just like move way too fast now. s39 00:03:17.239 --> 00:03:20.840 You're You're always going to be three to six months behind if you do that. s40 00:03:20.840 --> 00:03:23.120 Um so, it's a very important to stay near the frontier. s41 00:03:23.120 --> 00:03:26.000 And there's an important word here, near. s42 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:38.000 Um there is a danger if you are at the frontier, um you can you can do what uh I call mid-whip miming, where you're spending all of your time working on your workflow and not doing actual work. s43 00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:41.320 And so, internally we've come up uh with a heuristic for this. s44 00:03:41.320 --> 00:03:43.760 Um we call it don't beat the market. s45 00:03:43.760 --> 00:03:45.239 Don't try and beat the market. s46 00:03:45.239 --> 00:03:56.560 Um uh the concept here, like the heuristic you should use when you're you're to decide if you're near the frontier or at the frontier and uh too deep in into s47 00:03:56.560 --> 00:04:02.840 the latest trends is you should ask yourself why isn't this workflow the default? s48 00:04:02.840 --> 00:04:16.359 So for example when Ralph loops were becoming a big thing you should ask yourself like should I spend a ton of time optimizing my workflow to work with Ralph loops s49 00:04:16.359 --> 00:04:29.960 because if Ralph loops work for everyone like if they are the default then you probably should just wait for Anthropic or Open AI or ever to build the workflow into the into the default harness. s50 00:04:29.960 --> 00:04:39.720 You can think of this is sort of like an efficient market hypothesis where unless you have like real alpha you shouldn't be optimizing your workflow too much. s51 00:04:39.720 --> 00:04:48.200 And what I mean by real alpha is like some kind of information about either your users or your code base that the models might not know about. s52 00:04:48.200 --> 00:04:51.960 So an example for us is we it's we're we're a chat app. s53 00:04:51.960 --> 00:05:00.840 We have to render really long chats really quickly and performance is is important to us and so we need to spend a lot of time optimizing our react queries s54 00:05:00.840 --> 00:05:07.440 to render the chats quickly and we're willing to make sacrifices in other parts of our code base to make that happen. s55 00:05:07.440 --> 00:05:16.200 Um So if you have some kind of alpha like some kind of information about the app you're building that the models might not know about then you should put time into the workflow. s56 00:05:16.200 --> 00:05:18.400 Otherwise don't don't midwit meme. s57 00:05:18.400 --> 00:05:24.360 Don't don't be the person who has an amazing Emacs setup but like doesn't actually get stuff done. s58 00:05:24.360 --> 00:05:26.040 Okay three. s59 00:05:26.040 --> 00:05:27.600 Create slop free zones. s60 00:05:27.600 --> 00:05:32.120 So at Conductor we have this term we call a slop free zone. s61 00:05:32.120 --> 00:05:40.560 And a slop free zone is a part of the code base or a part of the app that requires really strict human review. s62 00:05:40.560 --> 00:05:43.280 And we're actually I think a little bit unusual in this way. s63 00:05:43.280 --> 00:05:51.120 I think a lot of people assume that we are uh pure token maxers and we are like ripping through like 30,000 line PRs, but we're actually not. s64 00:05:51.120 --> 00:05:57.080 Um we're actually quite careful with certain parts of our codebase, and then very loose with other parts of our codebase. s65 00:05:57.080 --> 00:06:06.640 Um the reason this is important is because if you are not careful about your slot free zones, your your code your codebase can get in a really tricky spot. s66 00:06:06.640 --> 00:06:07.880 Um and this actually happened to us. s67 00:06:07.880 --> 00:06:13.800 We have We've had to rewrite our whole app like a couple of times because we weren't careful about slot free zones. s68 00:06:13.800 --> 00:06:18.440 Um specifically, we have a uh migrations file. s69 00:06:18.440 --> 00:06:26.680 And uh in our CI uh any change to migrations file requires the AI uh a human to review it. s70 00:06:26.680 --> 00:06:29.800 Um we also assume that anything written in Slack is slot free. s71 00:06:29.800 --> 00:06:30.919 It's It's not written by the AI. s72 00:06:30.919 --> 00:06:32.280 It's written by a human. s73 00:06:32.280 --> 00:06:39.480 All of our docs, um all our cloud MDs, like all our skills, we put a ton of time into making them good. s74 00:06:39.480 --> 00:06:43.880 Um and this is also something I've seen with all the the the best builders up close. s75 00:06:43.880 --> 00:06:48.400 Like they put an unusual amount of time into the cloud MD or their skill files. s76 00:06:48.400 --> 00:06:58.680 Um and I I think like another way that I've thought about this is like if you had a new intern that was joining your company, and you had the opportunity s77 00:06:58.680 --> 00:07:03.200 to like whisper something in their ear every time they started working. s78 00:07:03.200 --> 00:07:06.600 Like every day, anytime they sat down, you could like whisper something in their ear. s79 00:07:06.600 --> 00:07:10.160 You would probably put a lot of thought into like what it is that you're whispering in their ear. s80 00:07:10.160 --> 00:07:13.480 And this is what the cloud MD or agent's MD is. s81 00:07:13.480 --> 00:07:17.800 It's like information that gets loaded into the agent's context every time they start working. s82 00:07:17.800 --> 00:07:22.760 Um and so you probably want to put a lot of thought into into those. s83 00:07:22.760 --> 00:07:25.080 Um okay, four. s84 00:07:25.080 --> 00:07:26.760 Feed the beast. s85 00:07:26.760 --> 00:07:34.040 Uh at Conductor, we have a uh internal tool we call the Conductor Internal Agent. s86 00:07:34.040 --> 00:07:38.720 Um and it is uh we also also known as the CIA. s87 00:07:38.720 --> 00:07:46.280 And the CIA is basically like the the uh centralized database of everything that's happening in the organization. s88 00:07:46.280 --> 00:07:50.280 So, anytime a new Slack message gets sent, the CIA picks it up. s89 00:07:50.280 --> 00:07:56.880 The CIA agent will see that a new message sent Slack, it will pick it up, and it will save it to a Postgres uh uh table. s90 00:07:56.880 --> 00:08:00.440 Anytime a user has a bug request in Discord, the same thing happens. s91 00:08:00.440 --> 00:08:05.440 Anytime we have a meeting, we are recording it, uh and it goes into the CIA. s92 00:08:05.440 --> 00:08:18.880 Um we call this feed the beast because you you want to for if your agents to be effective uh in your company, you want them to have as much information and as much context as they can have about the way you guys specifically work. s93 00:08:18.880 --> 00:08:25.040 And the best way to do that is by having a centralized place for all of the information to go. s94 00:08:25.040 --> 00:08:28.280 Uh I think this this tweet sums it up pretty well. s95 00:08:28.280 --> 00:08:40.080 Uh uh It's really effective to just put everything in a database and then give your agent a SQL tool and let it handle uh uh handle the rest. s96 00:08:40.800 --> 00:08:41.840 Okay. s97 00:08:41.840 --> 00:08:45.440 Next is free-range agents. s98 00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:49.520 Give your agents a lot of space to play. s99 00:08:49.520 --> 00:09:01.920 Give them Give them a sandbox where they that won't get killed, where they can explore your code base, where they can work on really hard tasks, where they can they know that they're not going to get shut down when you close your laptop lid. s100 00:09:01.920 --> 00:09:06.520 Uh Give them Give them opportunities to create more of themselves. s101 00:09:06.520 --> 00:09:11.520 Um Give them ways uh to collaborate with other agents and other humans. s102 00:09:11.520 --> 00:09:23.720 Um I think what's really in- interesting about free-range agents and like this this concept and why this is important is the models are getting better, and they are able to run for much longer, s103 00:09:23.720 --> 00:09:25.520 and there're going to be many more of them. s104 00:09:25.520 --> 00:09:34.520 And so, if they are confined to your laptop, then the they're not going to be nearly as effective as uh as if they are free roaming. s105 00:09:34.520 --> 00:09:44.960 Um The other thing that's important here is that once you give them a a sandbox to play in that isn't confined to your laptop, there's a bunch of really cool stuff that you can build on top. s106 00:09:44.960 --> 00:09:52.680 Um and we have built some of those things into Conductor and I I'll give you a quick glimpse into into some of those cool things. s107 00:09:52.680 --> 00:09:58.320 So, this is Conductor. s108 00:09:58.320 --> 00:10:00.200 I'm going to make it a bit bigger. s109 00:10:00.200 --> 00:10:10.000 Um and this is actually a new version of Conductor that is uh coming out this week and it is centered around collaboration in the cloud. s110 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:14.200 And so, the the the thing I said was you need a a sandbox for agents to play. s111 00:10:14.200 --> 00:10:15.760 You need a free-range agent. s112 00:10:15.760 --> 00:10:25.600 And so, you'll notice that each workspace has a little cloud icon at the top and I can click it and get information about the sandbox that the agent is running in. s113 00:10:25.600 --> 00:10:30.480 Um and what's what's awesome about this is I can close my laptop and the agents are going to keep running. s114 00:10:30.480 --> 00:10:37.280 Up up until basically this week, every uh every task in Conductor was built on a get work tree, but now they're in a cloud sandbox. s115 00:10:37.280 --> 00:10:38.960 They are free-range agents. s116 00:10:38.960 --> 00:10:46.280 But what's also really cool um that you can that we can build on top of uh cloud is collaboration. s117 00:10:46.280 --> 00:10:49.720 So, you'll see here, I'll make this even bigger. s118 00:10:49.720 --> 00:10:51.000 That's me. s119 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:53.680 And here are a list of the things that I am working on. s120 00:10:53.680 --> 00:10:56.400 And you can see that I am in the Conductor org. s121 00:10:56.400 --> 00:11:01.480 But if I scroll down, I can see what Cadence is working on. s122 00:11:01.480 --> 00:11:04.160 I can see what Lewis is working on. s123 00:11:04.160 --> 00:11:09.200 I can see what Tywan is working on and I can I can I can see that I can see Jackson's face pop up there. s124 00:11:09.200 --> 00:11:12.560 I can click in and see what he's working on in real time. s125 00:11:12.560 --> 00:11:21.960 Um and I think collaboration is the the one one of the most important new concepts uh in these tools that no one is really talking about right now. s126 00:11:21.960 --> 00:11:30.040 Um collaboration is important because uh not only as not only it is it true that all great things are built with teams of people. s127 00:11:30.040 --> 00:11:31.280 Like they're not built by individuals. s128 00:11:31.280 --> 00:11:32.960 They're they're built by teams. s129 00:11:32.960 --> 00:11:40.960 Um but also as the models get better, um as we've seen this with the two days of Fable, you can get a lot more ambitious with the kinds of things you're building. s130 00:11:40.960 --> 00:11:45.160 And if you're getting more ambitious, you're going to need more people and more agents to work on those things. s131 00:11:45.160 --> 00:11:51.160 So, I'm going to go into an uh a workspace that Caden is working on. s132 00:11:51.160 --> 00:11:57.360 Uh this one, and I'm going to say um I can review the changes that he's made. s133 00:11:57.360 --> 00:12:09.560 Um I'll make this a little smaller, and this looks fine, but I'm just going to say uh can we actually use tabs, not spaces? s134 00:12:10.760 --> 00:12:19.240 And Caden should be able to see that message happen in real time, and he can actually chat in the workspace as well. s135 00:12:19.240 --> 00:12:22.280 So, we can see here that he's typing. s136 00:12:22.280 --> 00:12:24.960 So, I see Caden is typing. s137 00:12:24.960 --> 00:12:27.480 Let's see what he says. s138 00:12:31.720 --> 00:12:34.560 Seems like he's typing a lot. s139 00:12:37.200 --> 00:12:40.000 Okay, maybe he stopped typing. s140 00:12:45.600 --> 00:12:47.120 I'll give him a second to take a look at it. s141 00:12:47.120 --> 00:12:54.160 But, the point is we can now have collaborative workspaces that are shared in real time with people on our team. s142 00:12:54.160 --> 00:12:58.040 Um Okay, he's typing again. s143 00:13:01.839 --> 00:13:02.680 Okay, come back. s144 00:13:02.680 --> 00:13:04.760 The agents have escaped. s145 00:13:04.760 --> 00:13:05.880 All right. s146 00:13:05.880 --> 00:13:11.200 So, I'm really excited about this, and we're rolling this out to all conductor users this week. s147 00:13:11.200 --> 00:13:18.560 Um I think I think collaboration is going to be one of the most important one of the most important new interface changes this year. s148 00:13:18.560 --> 00:13:27.840 Um the other really cool thing about cloud is that um and giving it the agents the free-range sandbox is that we can give the agents APIs to spawn themselves. s149 00:13:27.840 --> 00:13:32.400 So, I have here a uh I'll bring up my open claw. s150 00:13:32.400 --> 00:13:36.280 Uh this is my open claw called Lord Crandon. s151 00:13:36.280 --> 00:13:44.120 And you can see that it has I don't know how how well you can see this text, but it has access to a conductor API. s152 00:13:44.120 --> 00:13:56.440 And so, from my phone or from my Telegram or from really or from Slack or wherever I am, I can say, "Hi, can you create a new workspace for me that makes s153 00:13:56.440 --> 00:14:00.400 Yeah, makes all the buttons blue." s154 00:14:00.400 --> 00:14:07.880 And so, I'll I'll text that to Lord Crandon, and Lord Crandon has access to the conductor API and so can kick off work itself. s155 00:14:07.880 --> 00:14:12.240 Um So, let's see what it does here. s156 00:14:15.920 --> 00:14:17.760 Okay, so just created the workspace. s157 00:14:17.760 --> 00:14:19.280 The agent is on it. s158 00:14:19.280 --> 00:14:29.200 And then I can go into my conductor while I'm out and about, but it's still setting up the workspace, and it will do work for me while I am gone. s159 00:14:29.200 --> 00:14:36.600 So, I'm pretty excited about all the all the cool things you can build on top of of free range agents. s160 00:14:38.760 --> 00:14:40.360 Okay. s161 00:14:40.360 --> 00:14:48.000 The final principle that I want to talk about today and the title of this talk is orchestras, not factories. s162 00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:52.120 The whole like talk track today is about software factories. s163 00:14:52.120 --> 00:14:55.920 And I honestly kind of hate the term. s164 00:14:55.920 --> 00:15:00.720 I think it's the wrong way of thinking about these new tools that are emerging. s165 00:15:00.720 --> 00:15:05.040 I think like when I think of a factory, I think of automation. s166 00:15:05.040 --> 00:15:13.120 And I think of like there's a lot of amazing things about automation and like it makes our lives more efficient, and we can like create more of everything. s167 00:15:13.120 --> 00:15:17.320 But I don't want the future to be built around factories. s168 00:15:17.320 --> 00:15:20.520 I want the future to I want to feel like a human. s169 00:15:20.520 --> 00:15:22.040 I want to like be in the flow. s170 00:15:22.040 --> 00:15:34.080 I want to be like in front of an orchestra like waving my baton and we're and like I wave it this way and this this team of agents starts working and then this intermingling of humans and agents starts working as I go here. s171 00:15:34.080 --> 00:15:38.560 And I can when I want to I can zoom in on the details, but most of the time I can zoom out. s172 00:15:38.560 --> 00:15:50.080 And I don't think the future should be we are like managing swarms of agents and we are like factory line managers like pushing buttons getting the agents to like pump out the next feature. s173 00:15:50.080 --> 00:15:56.280 Like we can we can we tried this like 10 years ago with the term feature feature factories and it just doesn't work. s174 00:15:56.280 --> 00:15:59.960 Like I want my software to feel human and crafted. s175 00:15:59.960 --> 00:16:02.480 I want to feel like a human at the center of it all. s176 00:16:02.480 --> 00:16:09.080 And I think because we're all building these tools we actually have a responsibility to make the tools great for humans. s177 00:16:09.080 --> 00:16:18.920 I think it's really important to like use the words that make us feel excited and like feel feel capable and feel like we're in the flow and having fun. s178 00:16:18.920 --> 00:16:24.240 And so I don't think the future is is is something like this. s179 00:16:24.240 --> 00:16:27.920 I don't want to be I don't want to be in in my dark factory. s180 00:16:27.920 --> 00:16:29.240 I don't want to be a line manager. s181 00:16:29.240 --> 00:16:31.880 I want to feel like this. s182 00:16:31.880 --> 00:16:32.760 I want to be in the flow. s183 00:16:32.760 --> 00:16:33.720 I want to be having fun. s184 00:16:33.720 --> 00:16:35.040 I want to be crafting things. s185 00:16:35.040 --> 00:16:42.520 I want to feel like I'm Steve Jobs designing the Mac with a team of amazing humans and AI agents all in the same place. s186 00:16:42.520 --> 00:16:46.520 Like I want to feel like I'm in an orchestra. s187 00:16:46.520 --> 00:16:52.400 So here are my principles for for being the best builder in your organization. s188 00:16:52.400 --> 00:16:54.000 Stay near the frontier. s189 00:16:54.000 --> 00:16:55.839 Don't try and beat the market. s190 00:16:55.839 --> 00:16:57.440 Create slop free zones. s191 00:16:57.440 --> 00:16:58.839 Feed the beast. s192 00:16:58.839 --> 00:17:04.839 Free range agents and think about orchestras not factories. s193 00:17:05.199 --> 00:17:07.480 Came up with this handy acronym for for remembering it. s194 00:17:07.480 --> 00:17:08.880 Stickfo. s195 00:17:08.880 --> 00:17:09.199 All right. s196 00:17:09.199 --> 00:17:11.439 So thanks thanks a ton for for having me. s197 00:17:11.439 --> 00:17:12.280 I'll be around. s198 00:17:12.280 --> 00:17:17.000 Feel free to ask questions and I'll see you on the internet.