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Cassidy Williams was too funny to be a developer so she was banished to the island of misfit devs called DevRel. Along the way she found a passion for memes and dreams and mechanical keyboards. No Oxford commas required. We start 2026 off strong with a few predictions, a medium amount of jokes, and a lot of AI.
Subscribe to her hilarious newsletter at cassidoo.co
Subscribe to her hilarious newsletter at cassidoo.co
Creators and Guests
What is Fork Around And Find Out?
Fork Around and Find Out is your downtime from uptime. Your break from the pager, and a chance to learn from expert’s successes and failures. We cover state-of-the-art, legacy practices for building, running, and maintaining software and systems.
Welcome to Fork Around and Find Out, the podcast about building, running, and maintaining software and systems. Hello everyone and happy new year from Fork Around and Find Out. I am Justin Garrison and with me today as always is Autumn Nash. How's it going, Autumn? Good, but don't lie, it's still December. That's just going to air. Hey, hey, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's January. You're ruining the fun. Let's just like we're trying to survive the last few days of 2025. Okay, like let us know what it's like on the other side. Please everyone drop a comment and tell us what it's like. Did you make it? Like is it better? The bar is on the floor. Let's be real. 2020, but I want to say it can't be worse, but man, I'm always surprised. Justin, Justin, you just gave us a curse. Take it back right now. You blamed all of our families. Why? But we're starting the year off strong because today we got Cassidy Williams on the show. Cassidy is a senior director of developer advocacy at GitHub. Man, there's a lot of Ds in that phrase. Fancy. You have the best tagline here on the front of your website that you say, I like to make memes and dreams and software. And not only is that a great combination, but also you avoid the whole problem of should I have an Oxford comma or not by just throwing extra ands in that sentence. And that's wonderful. Yeah. And so no one will ever question any word I ever say. Yeah, you know, it doesn't matter. She's like, I just add ands and it's fine. But I think that's what's best about your context, your content, though. Like it breeds your personality. Like some people make like the content they make about developers and tech. Like, and it's so boring. You know what I mean? Like, I love that we're professionals and we're doing a job. But like, what makes me want to watch your video versus somebody else's video? And yours are like absolutely hilarious. Like half the time. I'm just like, there's one tear. I'm dying and I'm like reposting it. I'm like, Cassidy understands my life. What's that one video that you posted, like you reposted it, but it was from like a year ago. I forget, but I posted it and I was like still accurate. Like it's like one of the like. Usually it's just pain and then laughing at the pain. So it could be literally anything. That's I feel like that's what gets you through being an engineer. You just like laugh at the pain and then other people laugh with you. And then it helps your imposter syndrome to realize it's not just you and you don't just suck. We all suck together. Right. And if you laugh at it and everybody's laughing at pain, then maybe the pain will go away. That's wishful thinking. I'm always like, but there's hope. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe. But on top of your great videos, you also have a wonderful newsletter with jokes that even make me cringe sometimes, which is lovely because I think they're the cherry on top of a wonderful newsletter and a prolific writer on your blog. You're going through a whole daily December blog post, right? Yeah. Blog vent. It is. I always go in so optimistic and then like I'm like halfway through December now and I'm like, I am grasping for straws of topics. Well, and since this is January now, how did it go for you? It was incredible. Which, OK, first of all, let's unpack this. For one, I think cringe should be the new word for all things good, because I love people that will unabashedly be themselves and hilarious. But it just like I love the jokes. But also, how do you out cringe Justin? Because he is like king of the dad jokes. Like he like dad jokes are so bad. You really out joke Justin? I'm not a real dad. I'm a faux pas. Oh my God, I love you. And I think we're done with the podcast, right? January 26th, we're off to a good start. This is Mike Drop. Thank you all for coming. Subscribe at Casadoo.co. That's it. That's why I'm here. So tell us, tell us how you got into from your traditionally a software developer or you were doing software development into developer advocacy. What did that look like for you? What have you been doing throughout your career? Obviously hilarious. I mean, it was just like you can't you can't be a software developer with this sense of humor. So you had to go do something else. I just had to figure out how can I, you know, force this upon people? No, I request jokes weren't happening. You're like she's actually got a personality and people skills. Oh, no. What are we going to do? Honestly, my entire career has been just like a dev rel sandwich where I actually. So it kind of goes back to college where when I got into college, they had like asked if I could speak to high school students about majoring in computer science and stuff like that. And I liked it. And I was just like, I wonder if there's roles where I can talk in addition to code. I don't know. And I just continued on with my life. But then there was a point my senior year, I was going to a lot of different hackathons and I'm going to just go through this part fast because it's kind of silly how obnoxious it is. But here's what happened. I was going to a lot of hackathons. One of the hackathons was a hackathon on an airplane or as a flight from San Francisco to London. And we had to build something. And my team ended up winning and we had to speak at the United Nations about our project. And in that process, I was also doing other hackathons until the United Nations talk, and I ended up interviewing at Venmo at the time. And that was my first job out of college where they asked me to do both software engineering and dev advocacy. And it was early in the industry at that time. And so I was just kind of doing both roles, figuring out what it would look like for the company at the time. And then I kind of bounced between advocacy and engineering, depending on the role for the rest of my career. There's so much to unpack there. First of all, there's a hackathon on an airplane. Also, you spoke at the United Nations and you did this before your first college job. Like, way to be an overachiever. Also, I love this for you. Thanks. Yeah, no, it was it was a whirlwind of just lots of things happening at once. And yeah, there is a lot to unpack there. But long story short, hackathons and meeting a lot of people led to me eventually going into advocacy because I saw people at these hackathons. And who were representing companies and stuff. And I was like, wait, this is your job. You can just help people code. That's so fun. And so, again, it wasn't like as much of a full time job back when I was about to enter the industry. And so my initial roles were combos of advocacy and engineering and then went all into engineering, then went all into advocacy and back and forth for almost every role. How did you find roles that were both advocacy and engineering? It was the kind of thing where so I started at Venmo. Venmo was my first job out of school. And at the time, Venmo was owned by a company called Braintree. And then PayPal bought Braintree and Venmo right around when I was joining. And the PayPal split off from eBay. There was a lot of like shifts and stuff. And so they were kind of like combination making up the role at Venmo, but also changing tides and stuff. And so that's why it was kind of a combo role because they needed someone to speak to developers and use the Venmo API at the time. But it was also shifting. And because of all of my work in the New York City tech scene at the time, that's where I was living. I eventually when enough changes were happening because of that buyout and PayPal splitting off from eBay and stuff, I ended up going to a startup that basically wanted me to do the exact same thing. And it was called Clarify, working in AI at the time. And that was also a combo role where I was doing advocacy and engineering on the product, where because it was a startup that was less than 20 people, I was just kind of fulfilling the needs. I was also getting tired and I also wanted to move away from New York City. And so I moved to Seattle and worked for a creative agency for a while. And that was just straight engineering. And so I was coding for clients, doing some engineering management. And that was my role. And I liked it a lot, but I ended up missing talking to developers. And so from there, I went to and that agency ended up being bought and doesn't exist anymore. And I went to Amazon after that. And that was full advocacy. And it was advocacy for the Echo. I'm not going to say her name because she's behind me and she'll hear me, the Echo. And it was fun, but without getting too into the weeds. The culture didn't really fit with what I wanted to do and I didn't love it. And so I ended up going to CodePen after that. And that was a full engineering role. And I loved working on CodePen and just working on a product that I was using so regularly. And I loved CodePen, but I started to miss that speaking to developers aspect again. And so eventually after CodePen, I went and taught React full time. And so I went to a small company called React Training where that team eventually made remix, but was maintaining React router and a bunch of other stuff. And so I was teaching coding full time, doing corporate workshops, public workshops, and it was awesome traveling a ton. And that was through the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020. And so people weren't doing remote workshops and talks as much as much at the time. The world has changed a whole lot in the past five, six years with regards to that. And so React Training, we ended up having to just kind of... Everybody had to part ways because the business wasn't going to survive that for a long time. And from there, I went to Netlify, did advocacy there for a while. And working in developer advocacy at Netlify was really fun because it was working on this platform, the glory days of the Jamstack and helping developers build web dev and build web products better, which was very fun. Eventually I burnt out hardcore and took a little break. And I ended up doing some part time work, working at remote.com a little bit, working for some VCs and advising startups for a while. And then eventually I went to another startup that I was advising and I got really close with the team and it was called Contenda. And that startup was so fun. We were building a bunch of AI products before ChatGPD came out and then ChatGPD came out. And we had a lot of different pivots and stuff kind of fitting in there. And honestly, after enough pivots, we got hired and we were like, okay, Contenda has been very fun, but it's really hard to sustain a business. And so then I consulted for a little while and ended up at GitHub. So that's a much longer tapestry of what my career has been. But it really has been a sandwich of developing and advocacy and developing and advocacy. Do you think in the year 2026 that AI and coding assistants has ruined what hackathons used to be? Whoa, what a deep question. I was just like right off the bat, because I used to love hackathons, but I loved it because of the team aspect of you had to get an expert from every little piece that had some experience in different things. And I would come in and like, oh, I'm the systems expert or architecture. You get your front end expert, your DBA, whatever. And you had to work as a team really, really closely, really quickly. And I'm sure that that plane ride was a team of a handful of people that you all sat next to each other. And you just threw files back. I don't know what the network situation was on the plane. We were literally on an airplane without Wi-Fi. USB sticks, no Wi-Fi. Just like, here you go. Here's the next file. But now in the age of 2026 and in Claude and all these other code assistants and co-pilot, it's individuals that are like, I will do this part and I will figure it out with my co-pilot and you do that part. And now it's more about divvying up the work than the camaraderie and teamwork, right? I've never really thought of it that way. I feel like there's aspects of that where. I don't know, I feel like in a lot of my really early hackathon days when I was still learning and a really early career developer, so much of my time was spent just like reading docs and trying to learn a new technology. And now if I do a hackathon, like, for example, I did the GitHub game off recently that it's more like I spent more time figuring out what I wanted to build. And then I didn't have like AI write it for me. I just kind of used it as my tool as I was building my project together. And so you're right, it was less about the camaraderie, but it was also more about like the final product rather than the let's throw code into a thing until something. Works so it might be. I don't know if it ruins the hackathon vibe, but it definitely changes it. And the reason I always went to hackathons was to network with people, right? It was like, hey, I want to maybe I don't have a team or I have two people. We need two more or something like that. And it was always about meeting people and networking. I don't feel like it's that way anymore. I haven't been to a hackathon for a while, but just the vibe I feel like is going more towards like what CTF are like CTFs capture the flags are usually individuals. That are like, I'm going to hack in this box, get all my points, and it's sometimes it's teams, but more often than not, it's a single person. That's like, I know how to use all these tools. I'm just going to see how much I can hack and they get some notoriety because they got they won or whatever. They learn some stuff, but I don't feel like it's the same thing anymore. I don't know if I agree. I feel like I put on a lot of hackathons and I do a lot of hackathons. And I think like I'm usually very critical of AI. Like, I try to hold like an honest perception of it. And now that I use it every day, like, I don't really think that AI has changed any camaraderie or networking of anything. I think it almost like this is going to be a wild take. But I think that we're going to finally, when all this kind of gets more mature, we're finally going to see the difference between developers who could just code. Like, I think for a long time, we put up with people who could just code. That was all they were good at. They were good at the technical part and nobody wanted to put up with him or deal with him. But you had to hold on to this one dude because he was really good at being technical. He was always a dude. Yeah. So like you've got now... It's an equalizer. Yes, to me now, like just how we like the joke that we made about like how Cassidy had an actual personality and people skills. Like, I think that it's going to be really interesting because it's transforming who we are as developers. Like, I don't think being a developer five years ago and what being a developer five years from now is going to be the same thing. I like to use it to like make proof of concepts for things, but it's like to make different versions and to kind of like troubleshoot it and get it to test things and then go right the actual thing. Like, I don't know if I think it almost puts more... Where I hope it will allow for more people that have both the technical skills, the networking and the people skills and the ability to teach. Like, because we're going to have to change the way that we teach junior developers and bring people into the fold because they're like, like Stack Overflow. Like Stack Overflow is not even going to get the same amount of information it used to get, right? Like, there's a whole new way of trying to figure out how to be a developer because you have... Like, it's just going to write this code for you, but how do you know if it's good or not? Like, how do you... Like, we're going to be forced to have to like really teach junior engineers. And I think it's going to like be a very like interesting pivot on how we do that and how senior engineers are going to have to be better at like teaching and building those relationships. So I think it's actually going to be the opposite where there's more emphasis on people. Well, if it's done right, you know, we could always do it the wrong way. If we don't fumble it. If we don't like completely fumble the bag, I think that like I honestly think that's going to be the differentiator. One, it's going to be the people that take in the most data of the code written because we're not going to have those free open areas to be like, hey, did you have this problem? Because people are going to ask like, you know, AI now. And the people, whatever big company or little company, whatever that figures out how to utilize AI in the right way to teach people and not completely like fumble their pipeline and really make good developers who can use it. But aren't like cut off by it. I think that's going to be the huge differentiator. I think that too. And sorry to interrupt you, Justin. First of all, I do still see like student hackathons, the people at MLH and all of their stuff there. They're doing such great networking events for students and early career people. So I do think that the hackathon spirit of networking is still alive. I think the lack of collaboration and stuff is more a sign of like society than AI. I'm sure AI doesn't help, but I also think society is weird, particularly now. That's a good word for it. Yeah, that's weird. But I also, I like what you mentioned, Autumn, when it comes to like the content that's being put out now. I think this is where like the revival of blogs that I'm seeing and like people leaning into RSS feeds and newsletters is really interesting. And I hope that we see more of that because people are going away from centralized platforms like the Twitters of the world and stuff, because they're just like, well, if it goes away, where's all of my content? It's on your spaces that you create. And this isn't everyone, but I feel like that's a trend I'm starting to see as people starting to create their content and communities in places that are more portable. I feel like it's almost going to be like almost democratizing, but not in the way that it might seem like. I think it's going to be interesting because the people like the Cassities and Justin who like to play around with things and try things. And like your curiosity is never going to go away. Your big personalities are never going to go away, but now they shine through even more because people are just putting out AI slop that has no personality. So now like you being funny is even more of a differentiator. The fact that you can both do the technical and be a really good teacher and make that interesting to me. I think that honestly, like we're a bunch of nerds. We've made friends on the Internet without having to be in person for a long time. And I think it's going to make the Internet cool again. You know, like you're just like, look at this weird thing I hacked together or, you know, like just, I don't know, like I hate dealing with DNS and AI can do that part for me while I do the cool colors and like the other cool thing. You know, I mean, to your point of the AI piece is is a tool to write the code, right? Like if I was going into any hackathon for myself, like I was never I never considered myself a coder. I was like, I will set up the infrastructure so that you can run your code, do whatever. And now I can participate in the code writing pieces of it because I have a tool that generally does that. But back to what Cassidy was saying before, like I used to also read all the docs. And that's how I know when things work or they don't work, when the AI says, oh, you should be able to do this. Like, no, no, no, that's not in the API spec. That is not a field that is available. We have to do a different way. Right. Like you still have to have that one notch lower understanding of what you're doing to be able to do it in any successful way. But I think my my ultimate question is, what does that notion of I have a tool that writes the code for me and possibly even reads the docs better than than a human coder? Comprehend it. What happens to DevRel? Right. Because DevRel was the person that had to take all the docs and give them the pieces that they cared about. And then they could go write the code. But now I have a tool that does both those sides. So is DevRel's job just to be funny? All right. Like the things that the humor side of the AI that's not good at. I think like we are far from that. Maybe someday I'm going to be just like, remember when I didn't worry about my job. Ha ha ha. But like the number of AI written blog posts that I've been asked to review, not even just like the ones that coworkers send me. I mean, like, in general, people will ask me to review blog posts. I'm just like, I can tell an AI wrote this because it's terrible. Like I I'm personally not worried about that level of content creation. It might speed things up where I love tools like Descript, for example, where it uses AI to very quickly get a transcript and to make edits. If you like remove a word and it'll cut something or using AI to auto add captions or something. I think that there's things that AI does for you, but there's still things that. I know an AI couldn't do the product demos that I do, and not because that not because the AI tools are bad and not because I'm perfect, but because there's still a level of human quality that is needed for now, for the next. I also think the human relation part to it, you know what I mean? You understand what other humans find, not just funny, because I don't want to like, I think we have to be careful to not reduce Cassie to just being funny, right? But it's more than that. Like, like, you know, we were talking about laughing about the bad times, like when things go wrong. It's not just so much about being funny, but like you can then identify with all those developers. I feel your pain. This happens to me, too. Like, and I think that, like, AI is good for a lot of things. But to me, it's like an IDE or, you know, like Photoshop or just the different things that we have already been using to enhance the world. Like, it's really bad at some things. It's really good at some things. You have to know that just to use it, right? Like, there's so many like, they're just double different levels of abstraction. Like Photoshop didn't stop people from being photographers. You know what I mean? Like, it didn't stop people from having cool, unique ways of creating like a drama or a story with photos, you know? So like, I don't know. I think that that's when we know AI really has the relevance when we get through the like pretending it will do everybody's job. And like, it almost shows what we're good at. Like, I don't think the way that you use your videos to like show the empathy and relation that other people like you understand what other people are going through. Like, I don't think AI could ever do that. There's do either of you know the game Go? I know of the game Go. I've never played it, but I know it. Yeah, I love Go. I play Go every day. It's a really, really fun game you can play online. It's great. Alpha Go came out in like 2017 or something, and it was a whole big thing, kind of like IBM's Watson beat chess master and Alpha Go was Google's version of beating a Go master. And it's interesting to see how much the game Go has changed because of that. Where I again, I played a lot. I was a part of a study on like, did AI ruin your enjoyment of the game? And pretty much everybody said no, they still like playing Go, even though an AI could probably beat them. But what's interesting about the games that we saw and the things that that you can see when Alpha Go has played is it comes up with moves that you've never seen before. I took a couple Go lessons where a teacher was saying like, oh, in this situation you want to go here. And I was like, why? And she said, interestingly, nobody did this for about two or three hundred years. This was actually the correct move. But when Alpha Go made this move, everyone was like, why would you do that? Silly AI, this is ridiculous. And then like 20 moves later, they're like, wait, what? And it changed the game literally. We're like, people are just like, now we know you should definitely go there. And it provided new insights that the people and players didn't see because kind of like that. There's a Grace Hopper quote, the most dangerous phrase in the languages. We've always done it this way. I think there's a lot of that in humanity and stuff. We are habitual creatures and this is getting very deep and philosophical. But I think very similarly, AI is going to change the way we see things and the way we do things. But that doesn't necessarily mean it takes away from not only our enjoyment of the work, but how we do the work and the work that needs to be done. And there's it's not just our industry, right? Like every industry is grappling with what is happening with something that can create stuff that only people used to be able to write, like difficult things like the music. Music industry is just like exploding right now. Right. Like there's just like we don't know what a what a demo is anymore, because this AI company can crank out a million years of demos in a day. And it's just like, well, what do we do with that? Like, this is not impossible. It's not possible for a human because we have finite time. And my enjoyment of things like music and short form video, when I see so many videos, like, you know what, I just don't want to be on this platform anymore. Like, I don't want to be. I don't want to see the AI slop. I don't know. No one else put effort into this. And I think the the effort and knowing that someone cared enough to spend their time on it is sometimes why I care. Right. There's someone like I'm practicing go or whatever to get up to a human level, to get better as a player. And it doesn't even matter if you're the best in the world. Right. Like I watch my kids play sports and I'm like, hey, if everyone's at the same level, it's still enjoyable. Right. They're not good players, but they all kind of suck in their own way. And it's fun to watch because it's it's it's actually great seeing a hackathon when everyone sucks in the same ways. Right. Like if there's one team in there that's, you know, professional software developers and like, well, I don't care because they're going to win the hackathon every time. No, no, no. I want to level the playing fields and I want to know they have fun. They're learning something and the effort is the same. But if they're all using it equally, aren't they still doing it at the same level? You know what I mean? Like if they're all like, because. I don't know, like, you know what I mean, like if they're all coming in and they're building something and they're using it to help them find different ways to do it, like we don't know that they're all using it to write it the same way. You know what I mean? From my experience, the people that come in that are good at hackathons are the ones that know you can do something that someone else doesn't know. Right. It's like if you if you can prompt the AI and say, oh, I actually know this Linux subsystem or I know that API or I know like these electronics, whatever it is, like I know this piece better than anyone else here, then I know what it's capable of. So I can prompt the AI to help me get to the edges of how it's used. And that's where I usually see people succeed is when they reach some edge of their own understanding to be able to implement it in a certain way. You ever seen a bunch of college kids use AI, though? It's very interesting. No, no, but honestly, like it's like it's like when you give. The reason why I say this is because I really like going to schools and teaching little kids about like technology. Their brains are so malleable, right? Like they have they they have not yet learned the constraints of like adulthood, rooting or fun. And the way that they look at like how to solve problems is very different. Like now we have to be super careful that we don't kill their creativity and curiosity, right? But I think that goes in like the education of it. You know what I mean? Like I don't I don't seriously like I did you see that thing about a bunch of game developers talking about how their CEO said that they're using AI for all their proof of concepts? And then that artist was like, no, we're not like use it to explore a couple of ideas. And then I go draw it the way that I have always done it, you know? And I think like like I was writing like just something that I was going to use for something else next week, and I wrote it three different ways. And then I had it tested on a bunch of things, which would have took me forever. But that just made like work. Like, for instance, you were talking about content, but like, what if it's not all AI content generated? But what if I take a bunch of content of my kids in my life and sometimes I get AI to help me edit it? So the editing process is half the time, right? Like, I think there's still ways that like we're almost going to more appreciate. Like when you see like the cool like remixes on TikTok, like, cool. It's new music. Like there's one of Sleep Token and Christmas. And I was like, this is the best thing I've ever heard. But honestly, like, am I going to not listen to Sleep Token because that? No way. Like in. And it's a good thing because you have familiarity with what it, you know, you you have a connection to the other thing it's remixing. And you're like, oh, this has a different vibe of nostalgia. Have you ever heard just regular AI stuff? Like that there's no relation of that. There's no aspect. Yeah, there's no color. Yes. It's like if you looked at member, like it's like if you took the this is going to be weird because I love photography and I used to do design. But if you took all of the like color out of the world and everything was black and white, and I don't mean the beautiful depth of the back black and white, but like if you did it, like you just pulled it out. That's it's not the same thing as if you if you did black and white and like an artistic way. And it's not the same thing as the world in color, right? Like it's just kind of like a sad version of it. Like and I think that human relation is it right? Like the human relation in music, the human relation of what Cassidy, because she's gone back and forth to being a developer and she's and like Devreel and she teaches and she goes to these hackathons. She has a different relation, even the way that you talk about things when you're super like into like you'll come up with a book and you'll be like, hey, I just read this new book. And I'm like, I would have never read that book if you didn't give me that. No, honestly, like the other day, he he was so excited about something. And I was like, oh, I've been having the worst tech week, you know, like I've just said, like, oh, like I don't like, do I even like the stuff anymore? And he's so excited about it. It makes me excited about it again. You know, like, I don't think that you could kill that. Like and I do think that it's true. There's times where I look at a post, I'm just like, if you couldn't bother to write this post, I'm not going to be bothered to read it. Like I like when it comes to things like writing and music and videos and stuff, if it's all AI, you can tell. I don't want all of it. I don't want it. I don't want to hear that. If you're using it to like better something, maybe. But if it's just all of that and you gave nothing, I don't want it. I think like AI is a somewhat decent editor. It's a terrible writer. I think it's a decent outliner. I don't want it to fill in the blanks like. And I think that that's that's where some of the gaps are. But I feel like we're also in such early days that society is learning that. Like you can't it's not a silver bullet for so many things. And I think that like that that is a big part of my job now is figuring out, like how do we communicate that? Like, for example, we had GitHub. We're building GitHub Copilot. There's all of these different tools you can use. Smart autocomplete chat agents, all these things where they are genuinely helpful. We don't want to replace developers. We don't want to take the enjoyment out of coding and creating and stuff. But we also know that we can help accelerate certain aspects of the process. How do we communicate that and educate people in the way that will better them rather than make them feel nervous or gross about it? Not just that, but just as a developer who's been using Copilot, like it's so different using like an agent in VS code verse using like the ask version of it or using it in a browser or using GitHub Copilot CLI, by the way, GitHub Copilot CLI is fire. Like it is so different. It's so wild. I've only used it a little bit, but it's so amazing. It is a game changer in difference between that and using in the VS code, I think, because it separates it for me and it can go like, I can give it very like direct like instructions and it'll build something and then I'll go and do my own. Like, you know, it keeps it separate, but I don't know. I just think that like we're still figuring it out. And I think that it's almost like with our buying power, we're also going to make a lot of these decisions. Yeah. Right. Like if you don't buy AI music, they're going to stop making it. You know what I mean? So like. Yeah, I think one of the best benefits we have to AI in 2025 has been that it's really expensive for the people running it, right? Like they actually have to put a bunch of investment in. And some of that is offset by VC and government funds and whatever. It can't be forever. Right. At some point, you get that Uber tipping point. Yeah. Where all your rides are no longer VC funded and you're like, oh, how much does this ride actually cost? Like, I don't think so. I don't think that's where it's going to get interesting because it is good at some coding projects. Right. So I think that it'll be worth spending the money to keep that part around. But when everyone's like, please get rid of the AI music and we don't want you to write anything or like we have. We've had auto correct and Grammarly and all kind of stuff for forever. Like, I think those things people will have to use them and like more sparsely because they won't be free and they won't be cheap. So you'll use them where they actually. You're going to pay for the things that you actually get benefit from. Exactly. And hopefully it's not just people paying to not think anymore because I think there's a lot of value in thinking. And I think that's why it's been free for so long too, though, because if they if they like get you at that carrot, right, where they're like, try this and also forget how to write things and forget how to think. And then you're reliant on exactly, which is why I play devil's advocate with my kids about all this stuff. And I'm like, well, what do you think about that? And I like it's always about that critical thinking. Socratic questioning. Because it's like I think that's the part that like nobody could ever replace your curiosity, either of you two. That is what makes you who you are. There's no AI that could be your personality or curiosity. And I don't think that we're going to lose that as long as we're cognitive of that being a tool. You know what I mean? I think you I think you hit on something that. AI and dev rel, to many extent, like the thing that is valuable out of it is getting someone else excited. It is to inspire someone to go do the thing that was difficult, right? Because those things are difficult tasks. Like if you say here's a blank ID, go make a web page. Most people will be like, I don't know where to start. Right. Like even back. Oh, my God, that's what it helps me with with ADHD, like deer in the headlights. Like I get so overwhelmed. And then all of a sudden, AI has broken it into like all these different ways. And it's done it. And I'm like, I don't really like the way you did it. But I like this part. But in this part, yes. And then I'm like, oh, this is horrible. Dude, it's like I get deer in the headlights. I'll procrastinate. Like, you know what I mean? Like, but that's not even new, right? Because we've been doing that, like Ruby on Rails, right? Like templates out the whole website. That's what I'm saying. And it's just like, yeah, it's all this information. It's just the hype cycle. And getting people excited and enough to say like, hey, this might be difficult, but you have to figure out some of these things. I don't know if I showed you, Autumn, I vibe coded like an app called Where to Watch It. Did you see it? Oh, wait, one more thing before we move on really quick. Your video about Kubernetes, you used a container, water, and some other stuff. And like before this, like you're the only person, like before scale, before this was, you're the only person I knew that did Kubernetes, right? And I just didn't understand them. I was like, OK, it's a container. And the way that you related it to like real life objects, if an AI has never played with water and whatever, like, yeah, they can relate it to something and they can give it to you. But they're not, they've never been a human that held that water that did those things. So like nobody could ever reinvent the way that you used a random water and other things to tell that story. Like it's how you tell the story when you got your like glasses and you could see like different like colors all of a sudden. Like it's your, you get curious about a subject, you get all excited. You go out into the world and do something with it. And then you share it with everyone because that's your personality. And then everybody else is excited about it. Well, yeah, getting excited, like the color. I've been colorblind my entire life and I've only been able to see more colors for the last two years. But the way that you did that changed my like way that we do it. We went to, when we went to do awesome, when I still worked at AWS, we had different cards. We picked the cards differently because I wouldn't have considered colorblindness before then. And then I was like, oh crap, we have to be careful. What if someone can't see these? Yeah. Yeah. And like that, that has given me different excitement to go experience more things because I know what's possible that I can see more shades of red now. And in those contexts, like, oh, cool. Now I know where my next limit is. Like I still can't see everything, but I can actually see sunsets better now. Right? Like those sorts of things are using those tools to get excited about doing something else. And that's where I think AI and DevRel fits where the human aspect of DevRel is really to inspire, to tell people about some things that maybe they didn't know existed, to explain something in a way that is more relatable, that wouldn't be, you know, next word predicted, but be able to go through like a different surprise of a human aspect of how this stuff works. But like I was saying, like I, I, I've, I've coded this thing just because I was starting from, I wanted to do it for a while. It was an idea that I heard someone else have on a podcast. I'm like, oh, that sounds like fun. I wish I could do that. Right. But it would take me a long time to do it. I was like, I just have limited time and it still took me time to build. But I was watching a movie while I was doing it. Right. Like this isn't something that like, it's not making money. It's not something that's like, so I just wanted to get to the point of how much would it cost me as an individual who knows some of this stuff, do it. Right. And so far I think I'm like $60 in AI credits in, in a $25 domain. And that's it. Right. So it's like, I'm still under a hundred dollars, which is great because it's taken me a few evenings of, Hey, like the app mostly works. Is it secure? Absolutely not. Right. Like I don't, there's no, no oddity in this, but it works for me. And I feel like that, I feel like the thing that we're seeing a lot and I think will be an interesting trend. And I say, we, as in like just my team at GitHub is people are building personal tools so much more because they can kind of vibe it out. And, and I've used so many of my domain names and like dusty side projects on my pile purely because like you said, I, I'm able to get started and I'm able to, to be just like, okay, you know what? I just want this app to exist for me so I can have this tool. I'm not going to worry about how it's built. I'm not going to worry about anything. I want the actual final product and I'm able to just do it. Sometimes it just stays in a private repo and it truly is just for me, but it works. And that part has been great. That's still the energy of the side project, the hackathons, but it's just a different aspect of coming like to it, you know? And I think the, one of the the thesis or the reason this podcast exists is to help people understand the long-term maintenance of software and decisions you make. How does that explosion of I can make any tool I want affect people in a year when what does that turn into in six months or whatever? Like, yeah, I can just let a domain expire. Maybe I don't care about it anymore, but I feel like we are so far outpacing anything we've ever done before and we have no people trained or understanding how any of this is going to be maintained in even a year from now. I honestly think that's going to be a learning process. Just like teaching junior developers, like we're going to have to figure it out. It's, it's really hard to maintain something that you didn't write 4,000 lines later. Right. And I think that that's where we need to keep beating the drum as an industry that it's not just about senior devs. We need to like still level up the people who are early in their careers because those people are the future senior devs. And again, the roles are probably going to be looking different in a year, two years, five years. We don't know what it's going to look like, but we need people to continue to enter the industry and learn, even though it's particularly weird and challenging right now with all of these tools coming up. It's such a weird place to be in. Like, I feel like you don't even know what you're shooting for when you are thinking about promotions because you're like, what does that even look like right now? Yeah, it's also tough. Go ahead. Weird thing that I was thinking of when we were talking about paying kind of like to be able to do a little bit more. Like I got advice from a GM when I was like first a software engineer at AWS and I was like, how do you like balance being like a good parent and showing up to all your kids' stuff and like being a good spouse and like still like kicking butt at your career? Like how do you do all that? And he told me that he contracts out the stuff that he doesn't want to do. So like Instacart and like getting someone to like clean your house once a month or those kinds of things. And it's kind of funny because sometimes I almost think that's what people, that would be the cool thing of AI, getting it to do the things that we don't want to do or to make our lives easier so we could get a little bit more time with our like side projects or we can get like do things faster because I think that's what we should use it for, you know, to buy you a little bit of time for the fun things. I just wanted to do my laundry and my dishes. Oh my, I would pay so much money. I want this. If you want a VC that like that would make so much money, like do you, do you, I have three kids, Cassidy. My laundry pile haunts my dreams. I only have two and it's endless. It's endless. The amount I would give a hood rat money, like I would give so much money. But actually though, like I keep seeing like people saying we're working on a robot that can fold your laundry, but the video's AI. And I'm just like, okay, that's not real. Make it real. I'm begging you. Because I can find out where the socks go because those little socks cost just as much as regular size socks. And I just want to know like how, like, like, and like, just like if you just somebody could just do the annoying things, like manage where my kids controllers went and like where they lost it or like do laundry or someone. This is the future we want. Can it nag you? Like I'm going to start an app that nags my children and it's like an AI that's like, you haven't taken a shower yet. Your stuff's blown the floor. Like I'm going to just get like. That's a good vibe coded app idea. I swear to God, don't play with me. I'm going to go get see if they still have Amazon deep seat cameras and be like, no, there's still stuff on the floor in your room. So I don't have to get off my butt and walk upstairs and tell them that there's still stuff on the room six times. You know, I just got to start up. And I think about like when was the washing machine, the clothes washer invented, right? Like that was a huge game changer for so many people to be able to automate their work and to do the thing that they didn't want to do anymore. Right. Like that was absolutely just even like a dishwasher clothes. I always talk about like this is this is the original agent in my house. Right. Like this is the agent that originally like set it all off of like it does stuff for me when I don't have to do it. And I just set a timer and yeah, I have to change it still. And I have to fold the clothes. But you know, most of the work is already like I don't have to bring it a basket, go down somewhere. That's why I think it's hilarious. Like there's a disconnect between like the products people want. Right. And the executives who are like farming these ideas, like I just want to know what they go into like meetings with PowerPoints on because I'm like, there are moms that would pay you so much money. Like even not even just moms, like there's so many real life ways that we could you can't see our faces, but if you could see my face right now, the money I would pay you to do some of the boring like monotonous crap that I have to do every day. If you could just like, there's so many cool and nobody like there's this whole market of how AI could make our lives like easier. And they keep giving us stuff that nobody asked for. And I'm like, listen to AI music. I want you to fold a shirt. Or like just do something annoying, like go fill out my kids forms. You know what I mean? Like go fill out all their field trip forms and all the like emergency contact update forms and stuff. You don't want the AI to have that data though. Like that's the other. Can I run it locally? They have all the data. Have you seen the stuff the government's doing? That ship sailed. Okay. Go fill out the forms. I don't even care. That's actually kind of filling out the forms. So that's a good idea if you got like a pen plotter and then you just AI to fill it out. Take something off my plate. That's annoying. I swear to God, the money that people because we're all like millennials are working like 8 million jobs right now. We're trying to be present parents. We're trying to like heal the trauma that happened. We're all trying to go to therapy, work six jobs, make sour dough. Like, bro, if you take something off my plate, I would pay you obscene amounts of money. Like that one. This is an ADHD problem. Look, I got a new printer. I got another one. You have two 3D printers now? This is your problem. Shut up, Justin. What if somebody did some of the adult stuff? Like I have more time than you did stuff. The problem you have is not saying no. And that is like, if you want to outsource saying no to things, just text me. Have you been talking to my therapist? Shut up, Justin. God. Come on, man. I thought we were friends. Anyway, I would, I just gave me some project ideas and I want that. I'm going to go write an app that nags my children and scans their room. Thanks. Yeah, no, I think I think that'd be neat. But yeah, that'd be like, get your shoes off the floor. Let's see your house just have motion sensors in every room with cameras. That's like your control. You didn't wait a camera to go over in my pantry and be like, put the Nutella snacks down, put them down. You're on your third Pringles. Leave it alone and go get some carrots. Some of these are actually very feasible. I grow up. My mind is like, oh, I could do that. Like I'm about to have IOT devices everywhere. My children are going to be so annoyed at me. That I'm haunted. They're going to be like, we live in LA, but there's there's such like those kids that like their mom talks about cybersecurity too much and they're going to be like, and it's stealing your data. And that's a bad idea because what if it gets hacked by a malicious actor? And they're going to be like, I live in like a data like prison and like, I want you to stop. This is locally hosted home assistant with local AI models running on a Raspberry Pi through pie hole or whatever. Just keep listing it off. Just scare people away. We got down the nerd rabbit hole. I'm about to build so much hood rat stuff from my house over Christmas break. It sounds so good though. And then when this airs in January, you'll be like, yeah, I did do all of that. That's the real test. Yeah. Mid-January when this lands. For you. Co-pilot agent will be working very hard. Okay. Can you make a mom? Like, what if you made an AI agent that was like the other mom, like the mom that just nagged them about us? This is how they come up with those chats that like speak for certain characters and avatars that we got to, we got to make a little less dystopian. Damn it. It was a little Terminator. Wasn't it? Like, yeah, this is, this is where the rabbit hole goes. You got to read. Okay. You're right. You're right. We've come up with all these ideas in, in whatever 30 minutes we were talking. What is, what does 2026 look like? Where do we think this is going? What is everyone else going to be doing? What are all the other crazy ideas that's in 2026? Someone's going to throw millions of dollars and say, yeah, that's the thing. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to be folding a shirt. That's not what I think it is. I don't think this is going to be the time where they throw millions of dollars. I think this is going to be the time that they realized they wasted millions of dollars. This is the reckoning 2026. Like they've just lit money on fire. I don't know. I think the runway is a little bit longer. Like they are burning it very fast. The runway is long. I, I, I'll be curious to see like, what, yeah, first of all, the, the VCs, the people spending money on this, are they going to crack down or are they going to? What's the pivot though? What now that they've decided like gardeners come out and they said 98% of products aren't making money. Like what's the pivot? How are they now going to start picking the next thing to invest in? It'd be cool if they listened to their users. Um, but we'll see, we'll see what happens. Like we've been doing this long enough that we know they don't do that. Okay. Like first of all, listening to users, seeing like what people are actually using, which, which tools are going to like bubble to the top and be like the ones that last and which tools are going to be like, okay, that was a good try. We're done. And I also, I genuinely think that what we're going to see in 2026 is again, more personal tools. And I'm hoping to see a lot more like personal blogs and websites, making a comeback, a lot of like decentralized portable things that people can take from platform to platform as like social media is changing. The algorithms are changing. All these things are changing. People building on their own setups more. I feel like I see that as a trend coming. I don't know if it'll come in full force or if it's in my like indie hacker bubble, but that's, that's what I feel like I'm seeing. Do you have any advice for, I don't know, future Cassavies out there who are wanting to start that blog or, cause it's daunting, like writing regularly. It is, but also you have more in your brain than you think. I literally, The internet is harsh critics. Like how do you deal with all the critics? Yeah. And yet people don't listen to you as much as you think. And so I think you're on, you are your own harshest critic a lot of the times. And there have been so many times where I'm talking to someone where they're just like, oh, well that course already exists. There's content on this that already exists, but there's rarely content that exists that speaks the way you speak. And the way you speak is a special way, which, which sounds like very sunshine and daisies, but it's true where you never know if your voice is going to be the thing that helps someone understand something better or helps someone learn better, change their perspective better. Inspire them to do something else, right? Like that's the, yeah. Try. Yeah. That's really true though. And a blog post doesn't have to be an intimidating thing. This is just going to turn into me telling people they should blog more, but like some of the best blogs I've read, I've read are like a paragraph long, but it's like a really good insight. And I'm just like, wait, that was good. I need to bookmark this. I need to remember this. I have tried for so long to tell people like, don't put a thread of, of multiple posts or tweets or whatever, write a three paragraph blog post, right? Like it's going to, it's going to exist longer. You'll be able to link it better. The link will exist. Yeah. How do you like, one of the things that I always tell people is make it a habit, figure out when it fits in your time that says, Hey, I'm inspired to do this now. Not only like, do I have the energy to do it. I have the ability to do it. And a lot of times people are like, I'm on my phone and I can't type out a blog post. And I'm like, yeah, that's kind of hard for a little while. You could do it with like medium or ghost or something like that, but it's, it's still difficult to say like, Oh, I have the ability and inspiration to write something right now. Right. How do you act on that? I think that is building a habit as a result of the workflows that you have. And I think that, and this is actually a course I used to teach. And I kind of want to like, I did it in person and I want to record it of just like developing workflows for yourself. Because I think a lot of times when we try to start a habit and fail at it, we get discouraged when we miss a day or something. It's because we haven't built a system for doing it with as low overhead as possible. We build up this huge system where it's like, I'm going to create blogs and it's going to follow this perfect template, or I'm going to, I'm going to make sure everything follows a specific formula every single time without starting significantly smaller than you plan. And then like add more over time as you get comfortable spreading, spreading out the work and making it so that that workflow builds up to, oh, this last piece is easy. Because I did a bunch of little work leading up to it. And that's, I mean, I think a lot of people, a lot of people fail at personal websites and blogs because every time they want to write something, they have to redesign it. Exactly. Oh, and I've been a victim of that. But then they're like, use a template and just start reading. And I've even my newsletter, I've been writing my newsletter now for eight years, almost nine years now. And it's a consistent thing I do every single week. And it's been, how do you keep it interesting? I don't know. But like, but what I do is, is over time, I have a template that I always follow throughout the week. I have different links and I have different tools where, for example, I'm not paid by any of these tools. This is just what I use. Raindrop is a bookmarking tool that's cross-platform. It has browser extensions. This has phone things. Whenever I read an article that I think is good, I bookmark it in Raindrop and it's all just in a put in newsletter folder. And then when I'm writing my newsletter, I just pull from that. Whenever I do something where I'm just like, oh, this could be good for the newsletter, I write it in like a scratch note that I can then put in the newsletter later. Whenever I see a funny joke, I'm like, ooh, we will add that to the newsletter sometime. And so I have a workflow where even though it still takes time to write the whole newsletter every single week, it's yeah, it's spread out. And I've developed enough workflows where I have the exact same formula that I follow that works well, even if I'm having a tough week, because it's kind of just- You know, it's funny. To take it all back full circle, I think that's the thing that the things that AI will be good at is adding to people's workflows so they can be more efficient. I don't think it's ever going to be- Less context switching. Yeah. Yes. And I feel like that's the best part is when it's not making you switch contexts as much, but you're still recording that or putting it away or organizing that thing in the background. I think that's when it's going to be very- I had a similar workflow with my newsletter that I stopped doing because the workflow started to get difficult. But Pocket went away, which was my place to bookmark and find my things and make those notes. And then when Pocket wasn't there, I never really replaced it. I was just like, oh, all the workflows are gone now. And I use Pocket for years for so many things. I just had a habit of every Sunday I sat down and read my Pocket queue. And it was a great workflow because I was like, oh, I don't have to read this during the week. I don't have to keep the tab open because I know Sunday night I'll have some time and I'm just going to go read it. And now that hasn't been there. And I feel like I'm missing a big part of that, what used to be easy workflow now is hard to say, where was that link? What was that thing I was trying to do? All that stuff gets more difficult. Yeah. Try Raindrop. It's nice. I have no idea. I have never tried. I was looking for a while to get something that was self-hostable so I could own the data, which then was like redesigning my blog. And it just ended up being like this big wrong comparison. That's the danger. I actually just wrote about a blog post where I was talking about photo backup, where I was going into such a rabbit hole of like, I want to use open source this, that way I can self-host that, do all these different things. And then I found an open source hosted solution that gets the job done. And I'm using that. And then eventually I'll upgrade to something else, but one thing at a time. And I feel like, yeah, accepting those intermediate steps is hard, but helps with those habits and workflows. That's actually really true because I feel like that's what gets, like we were just talking about when you get overwhelmed and you don't actually start, like that's the basis of so many things. Like I feel like my GitHub pages website has been in shambles for like seven months. Maybe I should use Copilot on that. Like, can you fix this so I can get to the point I can actually add things? Like, yeah. My blog is open source. You can use that template if you want. Sweet. I might take you up on that. Because I just need an easy template. So I can actually post stuff. Get started. That's really cool that you did an open source template. Like I think it's rad that you can tell that you genuinely enjoy all this and you're like always willing to like share. Like I like following you on Blue Sky because you're always like, and then I did this cool thing and it's never like gatekeeping. Thanks. I do that because I think it's important to pay it forward. Where enough people provided resources for me as I was learning and growing and doing things that I would rather give things away that be just like, and this is mine. It's good to learn from all these things. Plus then my future self learns from it too because I can't tell you how many times I've Googled something and my own blog post comes up. That's awesome. Right. Yeah. Right for yourself. Right. The thing that you learned, write it down because you will find it later. And that's my favorite thing about community work is the playing it forward aspect because when people are like, I worked so hard, which we do work hard, don't get me wrong, but like, I don't think anybody would be there or be around or be successful without other people. Like I'm always super appreciative of all the people that have helped me. Yeah. It matters. Well, thank you so much, Cassidy. Yeah, this has been a lot of fun. I think we kind of went all over the place, which was great, but also- That's the best rabbit hole ever. We went from like laundry to like Terminator and like, I'm going to write some apps. When this comes out, Autumn, we're going to ping you again. And we'll say, everyone send Autumn a message and say, ask her if she did it when this episode comes out. That's a lot of accountability, Justin. But hey, maybe that's what you need. Maybe that's what you need. Probably it is. Like Justin will be like, did you do this thing for the podcast? Did you do that? And I'm like, Justin's- I was like, it's bad when I'm making Justin be the adult here. That's, yeah, it's fun. Cassidy, where should people find you on the internet? You can find me at Cassidy, C-A-S-S-I-D-O-O on most things. Cassidy.co is my website. Or you could Google Cassidy Williams. There's a Scooby Doo character named Cassidy Williams. And so I'm not her, but I'm the other one. Does AI ever confuse that? Is that a problem? Yeah, actually, no. She's really ruined my SEO, but that's okay. Also, I love your name, Cassidy. That's like the most adorable thing. And you have it everywhere. Yeah, my mom made it up. She used to do like, how do you do Cassidy? And it's just stuck. Oh, perfect. Oh, that's adorable. It was already cute. And then you made it cuter. All right. Thank you everyone for listening and we will talk to you again next month. Bye.