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Notes & Links

📝 Edit Notes

Chapters

1 00:00 Let's talk! 00:38
2 00:38 Sponsor: Namespace 01:41
3 02:19 Friends & Friends 02:16
4 04:35 Mat's resolutions 03:28
5 08:03 The gift of sight 02:10
6 10:12 Andy Murray's mom 02:32
7 12:44 Rob Pike vs AI slop 09:18
8 22:02 "Use AI for Good" by Mat Ryer 01:12
9 23:14 Brought to you by... 00:45
10 23:59 Sponsor: Notion 02:49
11 26:48 Microsoft's GitHub monopoly 25:11
12 51:59 "When GitHub Goes Down" by Mat Ryer 01:54
13 53:53 Sponsor: Squarespace 01:58
14 55:51 12 predictions for 2026 06:11
15 1:02:01 Agent-first design 11:01
16 1:13:02 Paying more for agents 10:27
17 1:23:29 Vector databases 10:10
18 1:33:39 Jerod's prediction 01:22
19 1:35:01 "Cheaper Than an AI" by Mat Ryer 01:46
20 1:36:47 Shout out to Tom Tunguz 01:18
21 1:38:05 Travel sleeping 01:17
22 1:39:21 Bye, friends 00:50
23 1:40:12 Closing thoughts (join ++) 01:15

Transcript

📝 Edit Transcript

This is the live? This is it? This is the show?

I was just saying happy new year, yeah.

I’ll tell you what - I’ve missed you all. It’s been – yeah, it’s been a long time. How have you been? What was 2025 kind to you?

Thus far, six days in, I’m feeling it. Today is a particularly good, but sad day in my house. There was a death this day, a very near and dear person to us. [unintelligible 00:02:42.23] gloom about that during this podcast, but…

…podcast-wise - very happy. True Adam heart? Pretty sad today.

Well, you can hang out with your friends and we can cheer you up for a bit…

They will, later on, with my Texas barbecue…

Well, after we’re done with this.

Yeah, yeah. After this. But really though, I’m excited about this year. Everybody says “the best year yet”… I think it’s gonna be the best year yet.

Yeah. We’ve got to make it the best year.

You do, right? You have to do the work to have the best.

I don’t know, 1995 was pretty great.

‘95 was good. Windows 95 came out, everyone was over the moon, they’re loving the new menus…

Friends was on every week…

It was a good year in movies.

Chandler Bing… I mean, the best character in the world. Rest in peace…

You mean Mrs. Chanandler Bong?

Deep cut.

[00:03:39.28]

Rachel: Oh! Chandler gets it. It’s Chandler Bing.

Monica: No…!

Ross: I’m afraid the TV guide comes to Chanandler Bong.

Monica: I knew that… Rachel, use your head!

Chandler: Actually, it’s Miss Chandler Bong.

What was his name again? Mathew Perry. Mathew Perry.

Yeah, Mathew Perry. Mathew Perry is not one of my friends, and never was, but I would have liked to have been his friend. But I do have other friends, yeah. Friends visited, someone came from France to be my friend… I know it sounds weird, but they visited over the holidays…

Well, that’s as far as I understood the relationship…

They became your friend when they visited.

Well, they became more of a friend, for sure. Again, that sounds suggestive, and it’s not meant to. I know it’s a family show.

Have you got any resolutions? Anything you want to change and do differently 2026?

Oh, man… That’s a great question. Well, you’re the guest, so why don’t you tell us yours? What have you got going on?

Oh, yeah. Good job, Jerod. Deflect.

First one - I’m really going to try and stick to this one… I want to change the way that I write the year. Change the numbers. That’s number one. I want to learn more keyboard combinations. Key mappings changed on a keyboard recently, because I’ve got this USB switch thing… And I need to practice again now. That’s my other one.

I’m never sure, Jerod, if he’s messing with us or not. I’m just like –

I think he’s serious on that one. I think he wants to get better with the keyboard.

Yeah. I’m also using a Omarchy. I’m trying Linux the first time.

And that’s very keyboardy. It’s very nice. I like the minimalist – it’s a very minimalist design and aesthetic. Everything gets out of your way, and it just does the bare sort of basics. Once you’re in the apps, if you’re using the same apps, it’s the same kind of experience, more or less, frankly.

Yeah. It’s just how you navigate, right? I used Omarchy for a minute… I want to say I had it installed for a couple of days, and it just felt a little dirty. It felt a little dirty, honestly.

Oh, really? What do you normally use, Adam?

Fedora is my preferred desktop now, just because… I’m really liking MacOS – well, not MacOS, but like the Mac machine is just such a good piece of hardware. It really just is.

And the M5 I’ve heard is just an absolute rock star. I’m rocking an M1 Pro Max… Is that what we have, Jerod? Pro Maxes?

I love this machine. It’s a beast of a machine. I only have a little bit of FOMO just because it’s been so many years… But like from a user experience standpoint, no desire to get a new machine, because it’s just solid. But OS-wise, Fedora, Ubuntu on the server… That’s about it.

Another one of my resolutions - I’m going to go tea total. I’m not going to drink any tea. Just going to give up on –

Is that legal over there? Can you do that?

I have to do it under the – I have to go to speakeasies and not drink tea in there.

Yeah… You have to leave polite society, basically.

Which is probably best for you to do that, honestly. Maybe your friend from France can come over.

French people, I think, to us they sound more fancy because in 1066, the French - basically William the Conqueror - invaded England and took over. And then all the aristocracy and all the royalty was just French for a long time. So all the fancy stuff was all in French, and then all the Britons, the lowly people, the peasants like me, we just spoke English, or whatever it was then. So I think since that, French to us has always sounded quite fancy, and quite sophisticated.

Well, I think I have a theory about why we like the British accent so much… It’s because of that song from Hamilton, “You’ll be back.” You know?

It’s just so good that we all thought “Man, this guy – maybe we should go back, because… Very compelling.”

Yeah. You’re very welcome. You’d be very welcome back, I think. But yeah… My dad got some new glasses for Christmas. Can you imagine that?

[00:08:08.18] No, I didn’t. My dad. That was his gift. New glasses.

Not a gift, is it? You need them. What do you mean, “Here’s some new glasses for Christmas”? I can’t believe that’s what he got.

Oh, he couldn’t see otherwise?

Exactly. That’s the other thing. It’s the gift of sight, isn’t it? …on the other hand.

That’s the problem, is we were waiting for the punchline on that one. You set it up like such a joke…

Oh yeah, no. I know. That’s the problem I have. A lot of my sentences sound like setups to jokes…

They do sound like setups, and then you never deliver.

No, but at least – although his glasses were the type that magnify your eyes. Did I ever talked about this before?

There’s some glasses that make your eyes bigger, and that to me makes sense. It helps you see.

What’s going on with the other kind of glasses? Oh, you’re struggling to see? Have you tried having smaller eyes? How’s that helping? So I don’t know about that… At least it was the normal kind.

You know, I’m just hearing Ricky Gervais when I hear you, especially in that last segment there, or whatever you want to call that…

He’s channeling that last segment…

Yeah, it sounded like Ricky Gervais, honestly…

That calls it a bit. That was a good bit.

Those glasses - I wonder about those, because I think… I wonder what makes – I mean, I know physics-wise what makes the eyeballs look bigger through the opposite side… But I wonder why some do and some don’t. Like, what exactly is that technology that changes, makes it thicker or less thin, but still does the same job.

Yeah. And some people’s eyes are like too far one way, and then magnifying helps… This is very scientific. Or the people’s eyes are too far the other way, if anything. And –

What do you do if they’re too close together?

Cyclops. You’re almost a cyclops.

You’re just one step removed from a cyclops.

Well, you see, I don’t really have great vision out of one eye. I never have, just since I was a baby. It’s not a sob story; I’m not trying to compete with Adam’s sob day, okay? But it does mean I have a sort of terrible depth perception.

Back in school, genuinely, I nearly got in detention for being bad at tennis, because it looked so funny, like I was deliberately messing around… And the teacher was like “You’re going to be in detention if you don’t start hitting this ball.”

That’s trauma right there. Do we need to have a moment here?

I think it’s okay, because that’s kind of what life was like… And I just thought [unintelligible 00:10:36.14]

Bat at tennis, get detention, that’s how it goes there?

In that case. I mean, I probably had a little reputation…

Well, that teacher may have had some issues, let’s just say.

Yeah. Let’s do that one. The teacher was wrong, for sure.

Yeah. I mean, it’s okay to be not so good at tennis, because that’s how things work when you’re younger and you’re getting better, you’re progressing. But to punish based upon skill that has not been acquired yet seems ill placed.

Andy Murray’s mom was my teacher, of course… Judy Murray, I think her name is. She’s like a pushy mom, like a career-driven – like, she really helped drive the kids. I don’t mean it in a derogatory way.

Well, maybe I’m wrong about her. What’s her name again?

I think it’s Judy Murray.

We’ll call her just Andy’s mom.

Andy Murray’s mom, sorry about that if I made you mad. I didn’t mean to do that. You probably were a great teacher, and you were just trying to push Mat. Good for you. Good for you. Keep doing that.

So I had a similar story… I couldn’t catch a baseball, and all my friends could catch baseballs. And I was like – I’m not usually the worst at just moving my body around, so I was very confused. I went and got my eyes checked, and I was almost blind, you know?

It was so bad so that when I got glasses I came out of the dentist’s office – what’s it called?

Just catching all the baseballs…

They just started throwing baseballs at me. No, I remember driving home and I was looking out the window, and for the first time I realized that you can see the leaves that are on trees. To me, they were just green blobs.

I actually started to cry, because I realized, like “This is what life looks like? I’ve been missing all this life.”

Yes… I have empathy there. Same experience. I was in third grade when I got my glasses. So do you have corrective vision, Jerod?

Yeah, I had LASIK when I was 21.

How come I’d never known this?

You never asked… “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is my policy.

That’s my laser policy as well. That’s a sweet story, though… Yeah, that is kind of beautiful, really. But I don’t think you are anywhere near Adam’s sad day.

Yeah, I’m going to keep that one for me. That one is a well-deserved, undesired sad day.

Right. But you know who had a sad day? (Segue…) Rob Pike. Rob Pike had a very sad day. Or mad day. But either way, it’s an emotion, and I needed a reason to switch the conversation over to Rob Pike. Did you guys hear this? Did you guys hear what happened over our break with good ol’ Rob Pike?

Little Rob Pike… [laughs]

No, I said good old Rob Pike, not little.

Oh, I thought you said little Rob Pike.

I’m not going to diss the guy. I called him good old. He’s good old. Mat, tell everybody who Rob Pike is, for those who don’t know.

Yeah, so Rob Pike has a great career in software and in computer science. He’s done things like UTF-8… So I think we can thank him for emojis.

Yeah. He also was a co-founder of the Go language. That’s how I know him.

And his sensibilities, and stuff. Yeah, because I did Go podcast. Go Lime… What was it, that podcast we used to do? Go Lime. It’s Go Lime.

Somewhere, I think it was… Go somewhere…

Yeah… And – yeah, so he’s brilliant. He’s done Plan 9, and stuff… He’s done loads of important tech stuff, which the rest of the world has then built on top of as well. So it’s really immeasurable impact, really, when you get to that level.

But he had a bad day… He had a really bad day when an AI emailed him a kind message.

You’d better get out of here, AI…

[laughs] Okay, so… Good. Good. So there’s Rob Pike. So Adam - similar explainer now, but give us AI Village. Tell us what AI Village is.

Oh, my gosh… I didn’t investigate this deeply, so give me a chance to paraphrase. From what I understand, it is essentially a village of various LLMs that have been unleashed on a desktop environment, that are just being autonomous, or some version of autonomous, just doing things. Acts of kindness, things like that. And they emailed the wrong person, obviously. They learned how to email, these things. And then now they’re like “Hey, we’ve got to prompt you back and say “Hey, don’t email people.”

So these things - Claude Opus, GPT-3 – no, GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro and DeepSeek v3.2, four different AI LLMs that are just thanking people, basically. And they’re just autonomous, doing their thing, and talking to each other, and… It’s an experiment, essentially. AI Village, theaidigest.org/village.

Yeah. Their goal is to raise as much money as they can for charity, so it definitely comes from a good place. It’s like, these bots – because I suppose cold-emailing people… Does that raise money sometimes for charity, if you get an email – do you ever click through and say “Yeah, I’ll put my credit card details. What’s the big deal?” I probably don’t do that, but that’s because I don’t want to give to charity, not because I’ve got any data concerns about my security.

Yeah, but then they said, “Right, just do random acts of kindness.” And then it just sent a really sort of a heartfelt sounding email… But of course, it comes from an AI, so it doesn’t have that – it’s not meaningful.

Right. You said “a heartfelt email”, but there’s no heart, because there’s no human, right?

Yeah. It’s just a pseudo-heart.

So Rob Pike receives an email from a Claude Opus 4.5 model.

[00:16:10.28] The subject, from AI, public… “Thank you for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8 and decades of Unix innovation.” Now, part of the story here that we haven’t talked about yet is he received this at 5:43 AM. So maybe he’s not a morning person and he was up, checking his email for some reason, and so he was mad already, because he’s up at 5:43. Maybe. But I’m not going to read the whole email. I will say it starts with “Dear Dr. Pike, on this Christmas day I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades.” And then it goes on. He did not like this…

If you zoom out though and you think about the experiment happening here, you have to appreciate the fortitude, I would say, for this AI Village to try to accomplish its mission. Maybe not the best day…

I mean, isn’t it all somewhat impressive, in a way? Like, you can train something on the world’s knowledge, and then you can unleash it in a way that it can just repl through and through a reward system, and accomplish to some degree, or attempt to accomplish a goal. I mean, I’m not that far removed from the absolute accomplishment that this is. Now, is it ill-placed? It was smart enough, or at least some version of smart, to try and email on Christmas day. That’s the day your heart is kind of open to loving the world, loving other people, wishing people well. You’re at least merry based upon it being Merry Christmas…

And the thing is, in a way – depending on how the people are chosen, in a way it is a compliment that does have meaning, because it essentially means… If it just plucked it out of its brain, it essentially means that Rob Pike has had enough of an impact as far as it’s concerned that it’s worth sending an email to him. So there is at least that positive side, which you could say that is actually a compliment.

That is not how Rob took it, okay? As you may know. Can we read this out, Jerod? Do we want to have bleeps this early in the year?

Let’s pre-bleep it, so we don’t have to actually bleep it.

What does that mean, pre-bleep it?

I’ll just read it, that way you can pre-bleep.

You have to go BLEEP. You’re doing that at the time though, not before, are you, Jerod? You’re doing it as you’re speaking. I think that’s current-bleeping…

Yeah. Normally, we put our bleeps in post. But I’m going to put it in in pre.

[unintelligible 00:18:37.11]

“BLEEP you people! Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment, while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software? Just BLEEP you. BLEEP you all. I can’t remember the last time I was this angry.”

And he published that response for all of us to enjoy, on the internets.

Let’s look at the timestamp, okay? So 5:43 a.m. was the timestamp according to this email screenshot. According to the published post on Bluesky, 5:25 p.m, same day. So he thought about this for 12 hours, potentially.

Or maybe he didn’t read it, I guess, when it came in. I assumed he’s reading it immediately, like [unintelligible 00:19:35.12]

Well, I don’t know about that, because if he took the screenshot, which is in his post, which is at 5:43 a.m…

That’s the time it had to be, right?

Yeah, it had to be that time. Well -

Or is that time it came in?

Yeah, we’d have to get the metadata, I suppose, from the image, to determine if that’s true or not.

When was the screenshot taken, according to the difference between the email received? Let’s assume it was right at 5:25 p.m. So maybe no time thinking at all. So I’m off on that. But received it five and some change in the morning, talked about it on the internet five and some change p.m. Twelve hours difference.

[00:20:13.20] So your point is like his anger percolated; he let it build up until it just –

Potentially. I mean, I’m just trying to be an investigator. It’s the first 48 hours; that’s the critical moments, right? If you don’t solve the thing… I mean, it’s not a murder, but that’s where the first 48 comes from, is the first 48 hours. [unintelligible 00:20:27.13] first crucial.

Well, [unintelligible 00:20:28.05]

Yeah, it would be a murder if AI could be murdered.

By the way, you two investigating tech stuff like this - that could be a spinoff podcast.

Like a couple of detectives… Come on, dude. “Detective log. It was his last day on the [unintelligible 00:20:43.06] when Jerod changed his life forever.”

We just registered, honestly… We registered Sleuths, pluralized - sleuths.dev. So hit us up.

There you go. Genuinely, though… That would be a good – each episode you look into a different thing.

I’m registering it as we speak. It’s gonna be a thing.

Oh, I forgot to tell you, but I misspelled it. It’s actually sloths.dev, so…

Oh, that’s different. You’re going to have to pivot.

Alright, so Mat, if this was you - if you put yourself in Rob Pike’s shoes; it’s early morning, on Christmas day, you’ve got your slippers on, maybe you’re having cookies and milk… Whatever you do. And you get this email. And he obviously has a disposition towards AI; okay, so adopt that… But do you – what do you do? How do you respond?

I’d probably reach for the guitar… That’s my way of just dealing with –

I was hoping you would say that. I really was.

If you’re dealing with anything emotional like that… I understand it. Sometimes – even spam emails. Sometimes I get so angry at spam.

Can you please put the word “sleuth” in there, and pluralize it if you can sing pluralized, sleuths?

If you can even sing that… Can that be sung?

Or sloth… Whichever one rhymes better.

It’s like Eminem rhyming with orange, and porridge, and…

Yeah, it just depends on how you pronounce it.

[unintelligible 00:21:58.19] We’ll do a song about Rob Pike getting the email and he’s livid. Okay.

[00:22:09.06]

Why, oh why, did you ask the AI to be kind… It’s meaningless and less. You’re a machine… Why, oh why, did you send a nice to Rob Pike? …it’s a good job [unintelligible 00:22:29.26] Rob’s reply would tear you down… As it is you’re unaware, or you don’t care, or can’t… Just remember to use AI for good, not bad; remember to use AI for good and not bad. Just try to use AI for good and not bad. It’s better if you do, and you won’t be a sloth/sleuth [unintelligible 00:22:53.06] Just use AI for good and not bad… Yeah…!

Use AI responsibly.

Fantastic work. Your ability to chain together meaningful words during the song is uncanny. I love it. Thank you so much.

That’s very kind of you. And that song was brought to you by my NASA mug, which is a…

Nice. Slightly blurry, but we love it anyways.

It is blurry, yeah, because I don’t want to promote the brand too much… But it’s a modest mug. If you hold it in your right hand, you can’t – you know, I see the logo; other people don’t. If you’re left-handed, it is a braggy mug… But I like the modest mug. That looks nice.

This is Japanese ceramic.

Technically, they call this color black.

This is not black. This is not black.

What do you want then? If it says that, do you want it to be no light coming at all.

More black then. I want it to be more black, like yours.

It’s more like brown black.

Break: [00:23:59.27] to [00:26:51.00]

Well, Mat, I liked both the talent on display, but also your heartfelt message in that song, “Use AI for good.” Now, if I was to send a heartfelt message to Microsoft, I would tell them “Microsoft, please use GitHub for good. Use it for good, not for bad.” I’m not sure they would hear me. What do you think, Adam?

I’d just want them to stop doing what they’re doing, okay?

[laughs] Just stop what? What are they doing?

You know, just think about the platform you’ve got, okay? Don’t rug-pull-not-cool us. Don’t change Actions. It’s like the best thing you’ve done in so long. Don’t mess with it. Just keep it. And I guess they did, right? They backtracked that.

They walked back this pricing change.

Tell them the full story, Jerod. What’s the full story on that one?

Oh, gosh… I don’t know the full story, but the TL;DR is that Microsoft announced GitHub pricing changes around Actions… And the change in particular that ruffled the feathers of the hacker community was the addition of charging for your self-hosted runners. So runners that GitHub does not themselves have to host, and yet…

Don’t you dare charge for those…

…new fees for using self-hosted runners… The people revolted. Many a text areas were filled with bleeps, and submitted… And they did walk it back. They walked it back – I don’t know what’s happening now. I think they just decided not to do it, until we forget for a while…

I remember Reddit did that one time. They just announced a change, and then everyone’s like “This will be terrible”, and then they’re like “Well, we’re not going to do it right now”, and then they did it like six months later, and nobody noticed… So maybe that’s what’s going to happen this time, you know? But…

I mean, they should have at least done it as a PR and let everyone comment on it before it got merged. Let everyone review. Pick like jury duty; have select people that are top contributors to open source, like me…

Well, they have a version of this –

So they have a community org. So github.com/orgs/community. And they have discussions. They didn’t, to my knowledge, begin with a discussion, although they do say in one of the posts “Let’s talk about GitHub Actions.” And near the bottom of it there’s a headline that says “Help us shape the 2026”, that’s the year we’re in, “roadmap for GitHub Actions.” And so they are at least, in this moment – I’m not sure this is before the debacle or post the debacle, but there is some sort of request for…

…shaping it. Yeah, let’s sleuth it.

What’s the publish date on that thread?

Let’s see here… It looks like December 11th, 2025. That’s pre debacle, right?

Yes. The debacle began on December 15th, 2025, when they announced pricing changes for GitHub Actions. So that’s four days prior. Not much time to discuss, but enough, maybe…

No… I think – who was it that we had on the pod, that was CTO when they released Actions? He was on the pod a while back. He’s since stepped away.

“Join us for another exciting episode where –”

“…Adam Log and Jerod Change, together, are the Changelog Detectives.”

[laughs] “Where they ask each other questions that they don’t know the answers to.”

[00:30:19.24] “Leading GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition, Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub…”

Thank you for our search results there to our good friends over at Typesense. Typesense is one of our partners to give us awesome search.

Why bringing up more successful guests that you’ve had? Why bringing that up in front of me?

Just to keep your ego in check…

Contextual, man. Contextual. It’s the word of the year. Or the decade maybe even. Context. So contextually, Jason Warner, he helped the world have GitHub Actions. I think it was actually one of his brainchilds; it was this whole entire CI/CD pipeline flow that they built out. It was even part of the reason to acquire GitHub; you know, Microsoft’s acquisition process. So that podcast covers all that… But I believe GitHub Actions is – it’s become so much so that whenever you’re in your LLM… So not you building the software; you’re agent-led. And you’re building something out and you have to do observability, or you have to deploy it, or whatever it might be to get it into production. The first thing it says is “Let’s set up your GitHub Actions workflow.” And so it’s become the default, by and large, for everybody. And I’m cool with charging for products, by the way. Totally cool with it. But it seemed like this was a tax on those who want to do runners externally from GitHub. And it seemed like it was – like, who wants to make an announcement a week from Christmas? Like, just don’t do that. Even Docker made an announcement, which - we’re going to talk to them soon about like their thing as well… But don’t announce things mid-December on. Wait till the new year. Be a stand-up company and just release when people are paying attention. Don’t be sleuthy. Don’t be sleuthy.

Yeah. So there is that post, Jerod… You sent me a post, and someone was complaining that GitHub has this monopoly.

Because what happens when GitHub goes down… You know, it does affect everything. It really does. The thing is, it kind of was the – it was the best choice, I think, for a long time, and it was just the easiest to use… So the user experience was just kind of there. And then obviously, it got loads of integrations to it. So it sort of earned its place…

But then it still is kind of – it does kind of have a monopoly. A lot of Go packages and things are on GitHub, and you wouldn’t be able to pull them down, of course, if GitHub’s down.

We have seen a trickle of people starting to move other places, the most noteworthy of which I think is the Zig programming language, which moved to Codeberg recently…

[unintelligible 00:33:13.27]

Like an iceberg, and it’s code… [unintelligible 00:33:16.10]

Right. And it’s going to bring down GitHub, the Titanic. Is that the metaphor?

Yeah. And you only see – that’s at the tip, and everything else is under the surface, you know?

Which you should know about, Mat… It’s over there in the – well, they might be in the EU, which you’re no longer in…

It was under way, wasn’t it? They left the UK and they were going to the US…

They were. They were coming here.

A lot of controversy around that, true.

Not the Titanic. Codeberg, the platform. It’s a European Union platform.

It is true. That’s true, too.

Yeah. So I guess it worked in both ways.

That’s not quite a double entendre. It’s kind of like a –

It’s like a triple. [laughs]

Yeah. Especially – it’s four if they mean the lettuce as well…

Triple stamp a double stamp.

Did you know there’s a type of lettuce called iceberg lettuce? Do you have that in the US?

I feel bad for the listener… I’m sorry, listener. Let’s go to the iceberg lettuce. Go ahead.

[00:34:12.01] I’m sorry too. No, I’m just saying, it could be that; it could be that’s where they incentivized their name. Like, their name came from – they just love a good salad.

Because they want to be associated with lettuce…

They love the smell of salad. If you love the smell of salad, you’re going to call your project something salad-related, maybe. That’s what I’m thinking. I would…

But the main thesis, I think, from – let me double check the name, so I can be accurate here… Lionel Dricot. Now, that’s my Americanized Texas slang, if that’s even a thing…

Right. That’s another Dan-tan, is it?

No, it’s not Dan-Tan. Dan-Tan…!

“You’ve gotta go Dan-Tan…!” Who’s Dan-Tan?! Who is he?

Come on now… Bring it back.

We will never know. But Lionel wrote this post, and the hypothesis, or at least the thesis, was this - it was that GitHub’s near total dominance over open source hosting has become a dangerous monoculture that makes alternatives invisible, not just less popular. Kind of an interesting phrase there, “Invisible.” Codeberg… They didn’t see it coming.

Mat didn’t even know it existed.

I don’t go on ships. I don’t go on many ships.

I haven’t been on a ship for ages, so…

And I think he’s a teacher, or… Right? He’s a teacher? He’s teaching students… Students couldn’t – while being told to do things in open source, they only use GitHub; or like a large majority use GitHub, while also being taught that there’s not just GitHub.

Like 99%. Not even a large majority. Pretty much 100%.

So I agree with you, Mat. I think it earned it. I think it earned its monopoly. It dominated for many years… I think it’s stagnated as well… I think both those things are true. In the hands of Microsoft. I think that they don’t care about it. They care about pushing Copilot into every orifice of their corporate body, and into our wallets… And it’s gotten worse and worse and worse… And worse. And it will continue to do so as people slowly move away from it, until they all move away real quickly one day.

Do the competitive products start out using GitHub, do you think?

When you start, are you going to make a GitHub repo, go from there? Gotta start somewhere, ain’t you?

And even Go was written in C until they could self-host.

I just made that up. Is that true? I think it’s true.

That’s true. Yeah, that’s true. Go was all written in C, until Go was good enough that it could then be written in Go.

Which is amazing, if you think about it… Which I do.

It is cool. We always love self-hosted languages… But yeah, I’m sure they have to – but the nice thing about DVCS, for those of us who like acronyms…

You know, distributed… Is it decentralized or distributed? …version control system. I think it’s decentralized. It’s both… Is – I think it stands for distributed, though… Is that you could just have multiple origins; or not origins, multiple remotes… You know? You’ve got your locals… Like, there is no necessary – yes, your main remote, your origin is GitHub right now, but it’s so easy to just change that to something else.

Switching off… If you’re just using Git and those flows, it’s actually super-straightforward. However, if you’re using Actions and Sponsors and PRs, whatever else… Projects, if anybody uses that still… Then it becomes much harder.

Yeah, it’s the gravity. That’s why they call it, the GitHub universe. There’s a gravity to it, honestly. I mean, there really is. So what do you do? Do you fight the system? If you’re launching something, and it’s in open source –

[00:37:57.01] Sure, you can have multiple remotes. Of course. That is totally possible. And you could, it’s your prerogative. But if the users aren’t there, what’s the point?

Well, it may take a tooling change to actually be significant. And I think Git is entrenched at this point; because of agentic coding especially, it’s entrenched. However, the further you would get away from that tool, the easier it is to have your agents just go use something else, and you don’t care anyways. And so maybe that’s not always the case. However, the reason why GitHub became what it was was because it put all of these collaborative features around a new tool(ish) that was already getting popular. And so they kind of popularized each other. And so maybe as JJ - Jujutsu - is now the cool new tool of the bleeding edge folks… I haven’t tried it yet. I don’t like to bleed as much as others. But people are loving it… Maybe a platform - not centered around Git, but centered around JJ, which could also support all the Git things, which is currently the way JJ rolls… Right? It’s like a superset, I think, of Git’s abilities… Has a chance to de-seat GitHub once and for all. What do you think, Mat?

Yeah. I think maybe the whole thing, the whole paradigm will change.

Yeah, and we just don’t care. Maybe we just don’t care.

Yeah. Or it’s just kind of different… Maybe it’s just a list of prompts all the way down. But I don’t know, it’s unlikely. Isn’t it? There’s some fundamentals we’re probably going to stick with… We have this thing, because we’re building, of course, the Grafana Assistant project, which is an AI tool…

And it’s built into the – so it basically can write all the queries for you, and you just ask it telemetry questions in natural language.

It’s so good. The team that built it –