Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
"What if we Could?" A podcast exploring this question that drive us. We explore the practical application of artificial intelligence, product design, blockchain & AR/VR, and tech alpha in the service of humans.
@Bitcoinski (00:01.514)
Hey, Kevin, hey, Dave. And hello, everybody. Welcome to The Daily, where we talk about the cool stuff we're working on for about 10 to 20 minutes before we kick off our daily scrums. How are you guys doing today?
Kevin Nuest (00:04.08)
Ayo.
Kevin Nuest (00:16.625)
doing good. Yeah. Happy Friday.
@Bitcoinski (00:17.65)
Yeah, ditto. Man's been a productive one. I don't know about you.
David DeVore (00:19.021)
We're good.
Kevin Nuest (00:22.383)
Yeah. Likewise.
@Bitcoinski (00:24.094)
What have you been cranking on?
Kevin Nuest (00:26.769)
Yeah, they're kind of a couple of different things. you're following up from the, what shared yesterday I was working on, reached out to some, some people around some different grants that we're, we're talking with and, wanted to expand on those ecosystems. So already putting that to, to good use, which is awesome. looking at getting that in our, our CRM, our, our pipe drive CRM as well. And just like making that a really fluid process for how that goes from finding.
new people to talk with that aren't in our sphere yet to being in our central knowledge base effectively, right? We kind of share that across the partners to keep across all the amazing people that we meet and chat with. So I want to make sure that gets pumped right into there super easy. Working on also a draft list of potential partners to invite to be sponsors and partners in our, where we at in the
Let's call it redacted events coming up. And so yeah, really excited about that. Gonna turn that into some outreach invites next week, beginning next week and find some really awesome people to come along with us in a creator's journey there.
@Bitcoinski (01:43.178)
Very cool. Yeah, I mean, we've been using AI for a while now, the five of us, and I like just really in the last, like it's been Xing us, you know, like one, two, three, four, five, six, 10, 100, a thousand. I feel like we're starting to get at that like upper echelon of like near term hockey stick curve. For me, was switching to cursor from VS code.
Kevin Nuest (01:59.483)
you
Kevin Nuest (02:10.65)
Mm.
@Bitcoinski (02:10.994)
same principle, just having that sidekick code of AI figure out like hard and or just menial tasks for me. it's been incredible.
Kevin Nuest (02:22.257)
Yeah. Yeah. It's so interesting to watch. I probably look at every major, like report study that I see come out of call it PWC or others, right. And they, do like a pulse every three months, every quarter, like where's AI being used, who's using it, what percent of the adoption. And it just continues to be at the top of the curve development as number one by far. And it is like, and the adoption is like,
75, 80 % at this point on the last report that I saw. And the power of all of the call it structured training data from all the code written everywhere, right? It's been a giant boost to then turning that into a superpower for devs. Shortly right behind that is marketing teams, Copywriting is one thing, but what I just riffed on is I think a big giant chunk of the other.
brainstorming, coming up with like gathering the list and gathering the what else should I be pursuing and avenues and planning, right? There's a lot a lot of planning and effectively marketing and strategy. And, and so they're always like, right up there. Number two on the list of roles, they're adopting AI. And so that's been pretty, pretty consistent, interesting to watch the, the rapid adoption growth from them as well.
@Bitcoinski (03:46.814)
Yeah, I'm getting less, I mean, same thing when crypto hit me, telling all my friends like the sky is falling, know? And there was a bit of that when AI came out like, we're worthless. And I read a couple articles this past week, just around like permeation of devs. it kind of flip flops of devs are gonna be around for a while and then...
I forget who it was, CEO of Amazon maybe? I don't wanna misspeak here, but I think it was yesterday I saw, there was a leak audio recording where he said the first people to go are gonna be the devs, right? But some, right? think like low tier, tier's not the right word, commoditized products like building a website, no problem, right?
Kevin Nuest (04:43.249)
Mm
@Bitcoinski (04:44.234)
when you inch up into harder things, just anecdotally today, and I'll talk about what I was working on, the AI had, it took me, I literally sat there for like 35 minutes just trying to craft one requirement set for it to do something that was really, really complex and very hard to describe.
Kevin Nuest (05:06.267)
Mm
@Bitcoinski (05:07.656)
I'm thinking about it as shapes in my head. It's really hard for me to tell it to do something really ultra complex, even with a cursor's composer, which is really great. So I think, yeah, replace some devs, replace every sort of menial repetitive process, but I still think we're going to be around for a while.
Right. Because ultimately it can do things really well. And maybe if it started from scratch on something, it would be able to pick up and answer its own questions because it would know the context. But it's extremely hard to sort of drop it into something that's broken or ultra complex and have it just reason through it without a whole lot of guidance. And where does that guidance come from? Years of experience. And so I think those in either blue collar.
white collar or even informatics like programming with experience probably are safe for the near to midterm.
Kevin Nuest (06:03.217)
Yeah, I, I, I'd agree. I mean, I picked up a phrase a long time ago and it just pulled it along in my, my career and working with teams and across teams and planning strategy and execution. And it's very simple. It's outcomes over outputs. There's three little words, very simple, hard to execute. Right. And wrapped up in all of that is they're like, so what? So it's like, so what you write another line of code, you write another app. So what, why, what does it do? Where does it go?
David DeVore (06:05.002)
and you know, picking the right way around to do it as well. And we are working hard, and we're trying to find a to do it. Great time, and I'll see you in the next one.
Kevin Nuest (06:32.689)
How's it distributed? What is the customer care? Right? Like all those layers are not yet captured in the GitHub training data that allows cursor and others to go super fast and help you write the app. They don't answer this. what? Right? So that's awesome. That's one of our superpowers is being able to play at all those levels and understand that. And I, for one, would love to spend more and more of my time at that level of answering this. what?
right, and finding the path forward. Because that's not the hard work. That's like, there's still lots of hard work to do, but that's the bottleneck blocker for success, right?
@Bitcoinski (07:15.211)
Yeah, you're like our own version of Socrates on the props team, which is like always asking why, why, why, why? Love that.
I was, I kept cranking on the diamond SDK today and this thing is, it's cool. It's really cool. Like if you look at ERC 2335, the diamond standard, like there's been quite a few implementations out there now on chain. There's not a whole lot of tooling around controlling them, which is hard. It's really hard. And so, so some of the things I've been testing today, like full test suite, a hundred percent coverage, like check, move on.
We have a diamond factory now. And so we can deploy diamond clones from either blank or from a template. like pre -configured for this use case, boom, in one call, right? From deployment to initialization. That's sort of a new take. Usually takes a couple calls to deploy and then you'd want to cut your facets in and you'd want to initialize it. And so maybe a bunch of calls.
And so we've sort of modified the high level diamond outside wrapper to do things like take initial facets and it'll cut it on the fly as you clone it, which is really cool. That drives gas way down for people to use diamonds. So one transaction, it's a clone, so it's not super heavy. All the facet contracts live on chain anyway, so you're not deploying the logic. Usually you're just cutting them in, so really lightweight. And then I got to thinking.
Kevin Nuest (08:37.799)
Nice.
@Bitcoinski (08:53.064)
This is really interesting. How far can I take this? And so the SDK now has, you know, the ability to, to manage your facet catalog. So all this stuff that's on the chain already. So I think like, here's your, here's your menu of all stuff you can install. As you install or uninstall or replace facets, it, tracks all that for us. So we always have a representation of the, the full catalog available. And what is the installed state of this diamond?
which opens up the world for like UX, knowing what is in the diamond, Like what, you know, apply AI, what UI should we generate on the fly for this function, things like that. And then even a little bit further because facet cutting, you know, there's risk, you know? Well.
Kevin Nuest (09:45.031)
We'll have a rest.
@Bitcoinski (09:47.558)
risk in the sense of you could have the same function name across a bunch of different facets in your catalog, like the props catalog, right? And so if you try to add one that already exists, it'd probably fail on chain. But more so if you look through some of the standards of the ERC itself, usually you're combining your cuts into type. So like you'll have a transaction, wanna add these three things.
But I also need to remove this fourth thing. traditionally, that's two calls, right? My add call and then my remove call. And so we can do those in the same transaction. And so the really interesting part is essentially anything that represents a contract, even a standard or a utility like multi -call.
from Open Zeppelin. That's an installable facet for us now, including at the diamond level. So that means is, the tests have been building, they deploy with like a base ERC 1155 and ownership facet and multicall.
And when you install multicall optionally, the diamond becomes multicall ready. And so what we can do in one transaction is add, remove, and replace any quantity of facets across any number of facet contracts that are available. So I want to use this transfer with ERC20 distribution.
Kevin Nuest (11:21.127)
Nice.
@Bitcoinski (11:27.354)
function, I wanna use this signature driven mint function, there are two different facets, bring them both in, all one call through multi call. And then consuming the diamond. So being able to, across all these facets, there's lots of functions to call. You can call all of them in one transaction, which is really slick. And it's all abstract in the SDK, so it makes it like super dummy proof, right? Literally like a line of code to do something really, really complex.
Kevin Nuest (11:50.194)
Mm
@Bitcoinski (11:53.93)
So this is really exciting. I'm pretty stoked about it.
Kevin Nuest (11:58.845)
That's awesome. Like what's a good...
I want to say like a good parallel mental model for people that haven't developed in smart contracts yet at this point and on blockchain, right? It feels like, to throw out some things. feels like we say, we say diamonds and diamond factory. And what we're talking about is like this container application that then references different functions from different places, different microservices. Good fats. It's almost be considered like microservices in that.
historic microservice or, know, org design, for example, but then also, like you just said, you went a step further in the outer, basically saying I can, you can pull in anything from any open source as well and pull that in and it put that into the application into the diamond. it is a, this like solidified, it more solidified, more inspectable thing that's on chain compared to.
traditional application that may also be calling microservices, right? And that kind of a similar pattern, but you can't inspect it and you can't, typically in the same way or the version of it and have the trustless confidence that there's nothing that's going to change between those pieces. So I'm sure I kind of build other mental models too for, because we're elbow deep in it, right? So we say diamond diamond pattern.
cut a facet makes sense to us at the same time. How do you, how do you see this paralleling shifting other developer brains to, to a new pattern potentially then it comes along. when, all worlds collide, right. When we're talking like blockchain and an application are really one in the same and it's all the same design space. Is this the new paradigm that people talk about or is it going to be separate and we're like, no, no, you do that over there on AWS and
Kevin Nuest (14:01.361)
You're building the TrapWeb2 app where you're over here cutting diamonds in the future.
@Bitcoinski (14:07.454)
Yeah, I mean, if you recall back to when we started talking about this diamond concept a while back, well, let me start with an anecdote, right? So I think the first question was like, how do you describe this to people? And I was racking my brain there trying to think of one. The only thing I could land on was like your car and auto zone for some reason.
your car has all kinds of components on it. Rear view mirrors and seats and tires and whatever, right? So you drive your car to AutoZone and you're like, I need a new steering wheel. I
They got like 10 of them. They probably have a hundred of them, maybe a thousand if you go to Amazon, right? There's lots of steering wheels. which one, so we have to replace the steering wheel we have and add in the new steering wheel. We need to make sure we remember what kind of steering wheel we have on it in case maybe later we wanna do like, get one of those little things you put on it that helps you turn the wheel, little leg dial thingy, handle. Yeah, so.
Kevin Nuest (15:10.525)
Absolutely. Meanwhile, those for sure.
@Bitcoinski (15:15.666)
I don't know if that's a great analogy, but this notion of the car is the diamond, right? And we're like really heavy in aftermarket. We're constantly pimping this thing out and changing stuff out and always upgrading it all the time for something that's better. Back to the first thought, if you remember when we first started talking about this diamond, I was really excited by this future premise of it essentially being configurable software that's unstoppable.
You know, think of it as unstoppable back end contracts on chain. Any front end can live anywhere. You know, the cheapest of cheapest hosting in the world, even free on IPFS to support an interface, this interact with the chain. This is beautiful. This is a beautiful evolution of humanity and capex and op ex in a business that's technical, right?
Kevin Nuest (15:48.754)
Mm
@Bitcoinski (16:13.354)
Well, now, this is the underpinning. And we haven't talked about going after this, but this is obvious. A no -code software engine that can't be stopped, and it can't be censored, and it's always online 100 % of the time was 0 % downtime all the time. It requires $0 in OPEX to run because it's requester pays.
Kevin Nuest (16:32.519)
Mm.
@Bitcoinski (16:37.726)
That's really interesting. If you're a CIO or CTO and you're thinking about how to invest in the near future, the next couple of years, this is it. Turn all your servers off, all of them. What do you spend a year? What if we could drive that literally to zero? And actually have this notion of extensibility and upgradability beyond just our proxy paradigm we've been doing forever, right? Like replace the whole contract with this other contract.
Well, like that doesn't really represent traditional software engineering, right? Where you just need to make a small upgrade or feature change. You're focusing on that small feature versus having to rewrite the whole thing every time. And so that doesn't work at scale, but now I think it could. I'm not saying we're there today, but I think if we had nothing else going on and we stayed heads down on this and had a little capital behind us, we could build, think an absolutely fucking world shattering approach to software development with, this notion.
Kevin Nuest (17:36.785)
Yeah. A ton of head space for a ton of really interesting things. Like both sides of the equation from, yeah. Put your CTO hat on now and say, what do we do in paying all of these, these servers? Let's flip this around. It opens up new business models and, and approaches, right. A ton, a ton, a ton, ton of the web today assumes a lot of things and ultimately servers are paid.
for buy, yeah, SaaS subscriptions, but a ton of advertising as well, a ton of user data being sold, for example. So it's like, what if it's not that? What if it is put on the requester and value is created that they would pay instead of paying with their data. it whole not like, it's not, it's not a new concept to say that, but it's a new concept to like break that back open and get away from that from the last 20 plus 30 years, right? Like, man, we've been entrenched in the ad.
@Bitcoinski (18:32.831)
Yeah.
Kevin Nuest (18:36.701)
to drive web free web for 30 years. This is a long time. And then the other side from a consumer side, I think it's also a really prussian point right now builder side too, that one of our thesis is there's, you know, as builders, there will continue to be more and more and more software and more and more and more specific solutions or custom tailored solutions, or it's like really niche solutions to different problems, right? And
I would say right now we see a lot of it's happening. It's happening in front of our eyes right now. And we think it's going to accelerate, right? But it's already happening. And from my perspective already, there is a trust issue, not just the change management issue or a like an oxygen paying attention, a mind space issue, which is true. You can only absorb so many new tools and things, right?
Like that's, that's an issue, but it's say you're like, I have a problem. I need a tool to solve this problem. I found the tool. I think solves the problem really well that I value, but I don't want to switch to it because I don't know if it's going to exist. In one month, two months, six months. Like, I just don't want to go through the change management of that and risk it that it's going to be gone. But if it's an unstoppable machine, like you're calling out, it's like, here is the application. This is here to use until the end of time.
If you pay for it, all you gotta do is pay for it. And you can use it till the end of time and it's there and available. And it may get updated by the core team that wrote it. It may end up becoming some form of a public gig where other people update as well, or it may not. And you get to keep paying and using this tool until the end of time, until you decide you want to switch to something else. I think that's going to be really pivotal to driving the adoption of all the niche solutions that we're going to keep seeing. Cause there's just going to be too high of a risk that
these little SaaS solutions are gonna get turned off. And people will get burnt once or twice by it and they'll stop. They'll wait. They'll go back to the big dogs again, right? We'll be back to the suite of mediocre tools driven by, I'm not gonna name names, but you know who they are. Out there building mediocrity, spread across, know, spreading their peanut butter tooth end, right?
@Bitcoinski (20:56.862)
Yeah, I mean, you touched on a couple of things there, it's a beyond kind of what we're wrapping on. You know, you think about traditional software, traditional platforms and the notion of an organization and your data and your operational apps and so on. And you know, the trad world is hub and spoke. Right. So you're the org in the middle and you may have a
a vendor partner that sort of provides the backbone of that thing. be cloud, could be a enterprise platform like a Salesforce or something. But then there's this wide, huge, massive ecosystem of plugins, right? Those plugins aren't in, plugged in to those things. They're point to point connections, right?
I don't think I can think of a single example of where any org I know allowed a third party to actually inject code into their code base. It doesn't work in trad software. There may be some outliers of funky stuff. So it's not the norm, but in this new model, you get sort of get away from integration.
Kevin Nuest (22:10.022)
is not the norm.
@Bitcoinski (22:18.054)
Everything by definition on chain is already integrated So these facets whether the I build them or you build them for your own diamond or somebody in the third in a third party built them They are embedded
into the solution. So think of the diamond as that big software platform. They are literally embedded into the stack. That's a totally different paradigm. And to your point, once it is proven to work, so I've installed these facets and there's a nice test runner that checks everything, like, yep, this is good to go.
That will literally run forever without breaking. It would be impossible for it to break in its current state. It's always valid in that current state. You would only change if there was a new approach to something that's better. Maybe there was a bug in a FASA, you want to replace it, but in general, if it works now, it will work in perpetuity forever.
including the embedded modules that somebody else over here built in open source and put on chain and you just took a 20 cent, let's say ETHL1, a 20 cent transaction to install it. That's insane.
And if that person goes out of business, your software still works forever.
Kevin Nuest (23:41.391)
I think this triggered in my brain too. What if it, yeah. So what if that piece of software gets abandoned by the core team that built it and it's still just working forever. And there are people that are building plugins for it. They continue to adapt it and add value. they're, they're literally injecting that into the experience. It's integrated into it. There's, there's a, there's a path in a world and a monetization that opens up for.
abandoned software like never before where it doesn't require an acquisition of somebody's IP and like migrating servers and users and profiles and stuff. go, no, I'm going to, I'm just going to build like the rest of the stuff and the additional stuff and the maintenance stuff that needs to happen for this piece of software, inject that in there. And now it's the arbitrage of all of a sudden, like you take over a, a air quotes, dead code base and take over the users and acquire the users as the primary.
like owner and monetization of those users because you're giving them the value and you're giving them the future that they needed. That's like super interesting of like, what does that mean to arbitrage away audiences like that, especially like abandoned code bases? Like we can think of lots of apps that have died in the past that we use collectively over the last 30 years that we wish still existed or some version of it or like.
@Bitcoinski (25:05.224)
Yo, do you remember the Yo app? That was my favorite app of all time. Just one button that said Yo and you can just send a Yo to people. Ugh.
Kevin Nuest (25:10.525)
Very sophisticated apps like that. I mean that could be in Slack. Why didn't Slack grab that, the yo audience right along and you've got a face of an audience, right?
@Bitcoinski (25:24.042)
I remember old colleague Tommy, me and him saw that app and every time we saw it, he was like, yo. So yeah, good week.
Kevin Nuest (25:33.885)
We opened our minds here on a Friday before the weekend for sure.
@Bitcoinski (25:39.804)
That's right. Cool, you wanna leave it there? Let's do it. Hope you have a great weekend. I guess I'll see you two minutes on the other call. See you, everybody. Bye.
Kevin Nuest (25:43.889)
Yeah, let's wrap it.
See ya.
All right, later.