DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling

Welcome to our 2025
year in review episode.

I normally have these in year
episodes where we try to wrap

up what mattered to us this year
and but this year felt different.

I think it's safe to say that we
are consumed all of us by AI agents

everywhere in all of our tools and.

I kind of knew that that would
dominate any retrospect conversation.

So we, we did that even after we
recorded this episode in early December.

The landscape shifted under our feet as
Anthropic release their Opus 4.5, along

with Google's Gemini three days earlier.

And these models caused a lot
of my friends and tech leaders

to spend their holidays, vibe
coding on personal projects.

That were quite easier to
accomplish than with the models

available just three months ago.

So in December, we recorded
this year end episode.

I'm joined by my co-host, Nirmal of AWS,
and we're also joined by our special

guest, Viktor Farcic of Upbound, to
discuss everything we loved and hated

about cloud native and AI in 2025 from
terminal emulators to IDs from CLI agents.

To AI browsers we're breaking down what
worked for us, what flopped, and what's

worth our time and money, and maybe yours.

We kick things off in this episode in
the trenches of the command line where

the battle between Claude Code, OpenCode.

GitHub Copilot and all the
other CLI tools rages on.

And Viktor, you know, he makes
his passionate case for why Claude

Code dominates the terminal space.

While I am mostly focused on GitHub
Copilot, mostly because I'm making courses

on that stuff, and Viktor is concerned
from my mental health about that.

So we talk and discuss the PRs and cons.

Nirmal talks about AWS Kiro
and brings that into the mix.

We don't just talk about CLI tools,
although, you know, that really I feel

like has dominated the last few months of
conversations everywhere on the internet.

we talk about Ghostty and terminals
versus my favorite iTerm and we discuss

warp terminal and how I spent some
months on that and then kind of left it.

we talk all the way up
the stack to IDs and into.

AI browsers and why I am just very
uncomfortable with any AI in my

browser, at least the way that it's
being implemented in all of them

today, and a whole lot of other topics.

So I really hope you enjoyed
this episode with Normal and

Viktor, and let's get into it.

Thanks for being here, everyone.

yeah.

So I'm just glad to see you again, Bret.

It's been a hot minute.

So, excited to kind of get into
this end of the year, but before we

start, just want to remind folks,
all the opinions on the show for me

are my own and not representative
of Amazon Web Services, my employer.

That being said, I am a principal solution
architect at AWS and, we'll probably

going to get into some AWS services today.

Potentially.

Potentially.

Maybe,

maybe.

So, this show is going to be us bringing
on our special guest, Viktor, and we

are going to walk through the best
and worst of AI tech, at least in our,

our views for 2025 and then into 2026.

Viktor, welcome.

Hey, hey, hey.

I have a disclaimer as well.

I'm probably going to say something
ridiculous that is going to offend

people and opinions are mine and
only mine and whatever else people

say in those cases, I don't care.

Yes,

opinions are always mine.

I only say other people's
opinions when they pay me to.

So far, so far no one has, it's
still yours successfully paid me to.

Oh no.

They're always yours and they're great
opinions and that's why people come.

Mm-hmm.

Back and back to hear
us espouse our beliefs.

I

influenced, I am
influenced by money though.

So that's my disclaimer is money
will influence my decisions.

Yes.

which I will mention disclaimers
today, when, when we get into it.

But like, I guess one I should say
is GitHub provides me free Copilot,

so that influenced my decision.

Well wait until we get to
the worst heck of the year.

That's right.

So, the whole point of this game, and
it is a game because we could make,

we could say this like, you, for every
one of these tip picks, we're probably

going to have someone has a, a complete
opposite argument that's is just as valid.

So for whatever I love and whatever
they hate, like someone else is

going to think love and hate is
different and that is perfectly fine.

but I think like in starting in planning
the show, it was, I was realizing

it has been an incredibly long year.

And when I think back to this just the
first quarter, like what we were talking

about, which is, and what we were doing
versus what we're talking about and doing

now is like, it's, to me, it's one of
the fastest paced years in tech of my

career where so many of my tools have,
my behavior in using them has changed.

what we're going to talk about, tools
that we tried to adopt, maybe we had to

roll back, maybe, you know, failures.

everything is up for grabs right now.

I feel like, whether it's terminals or
browsers or IDs or note takers or it's

just, an onslaught of innovation and
I'm kind of here for it, but also like

we all just need to get stuff done.

So I'm excited to hear what you all think.

I ordered, I created a mental list.

Talking about the, so the theme
is it's got to have some sort of

AI related, which is not too hard.

I, I, there's very few tools that don't
have some sort of AI connection anymore.

The first topic, I think, to
get out of the way is CLI tools.

we're going to go to the nerdy
stuff first and maybe like zoom out.

Maybe that's the theme
as we slowly back out.

We'll, we'll end with browsers,
maybe something, more consumer cited.

But, you know, the rest
of the world's all.

Thinking about ChatGPT and Grok
and the consumer side of things.

those of us that are developers
and operators, like we're

more and more in the terminal.

I feel like this was the year
that AiTerminal tools grew up.

I don't know about you, but my first
experience with an AI tool was when iTerm

added, like three years ago, they added a
ChatGPT similar experience in the iTerm,

like in the actual ui, not, not a Shell
CLI, but like in the UI of the terminal.

So it was kind of weird and I
used it for like five seconds.

Five minutes.

And then I was like, this is dumb.

I, I would just rather use a browser.

iTerm definitely needs AI for
their settings because no human

can understand how to computer.

Oh,

I'm so surprised they haven't done that.

Exactly.

Because kind of we give up on
this, humanity gave up on this.

So let's put some ai,
maybe it'll figure it out.

Oh, that is, and whatever it does,
it won't do the worst job than

you will you, you would do, right?

That is, that is gold Viktor, because
I feel so validated that I, I, every

time I open up iTerm settings, I feel
like I've lost my understanding of it.

Like completely every time.

Can I do a, every time I try
to change a font in iTerm, like

I, I don't know where to go.

Can I do a non-AI pick?

Just because we're talking about it?

Yeah, sure.

If it's on, if it's on topic.

Pick ghostty.

It's absolutely awesome, it simply
doesn't do anything special.

Nothing.

There is nothing you say, Hey, this is,
I've never seen something as good as this.

No, it just works.

So what is it?

Explain what what it is

and choose.

It's just a replacement

for iTerm done by Hashimoto.

You know, the Hashi HashiCorp guy?

it's his, pet project, right?

And even if you go to the repo,
it says kind of like, this is my

kind of, don't complain to me.

This is my pet project, right?

So, it's just awesome.

Why, why should I switch to it?

Why?

What's so awesome about it?

That's the thing.

I cannot give you the answer
to that question because there

is nothing special about it.

It's just fes.

I never had any trouble, I never
had issue kind of how to change

the theme, how to, change the font.

It's just simple works.

And that's it.

That's awesome.

I heard it's fast, but I don't
know if that's Yeah, it's lean.

That's true.

It's, it's,

it's, it's main call, main
claim to fame is speed.

like, like rendering speed.

my biggest thing is it, unless it's
been fixed, it doesn't have control

f so I can't search the window.

like a true Unix person's attitude is
you don't get to search the window.

that's not how terminals work.

You have to grep right?

You have to re you have to
put that log into a filter.

I have just used control F for
searching the window for decades

and I, it's like a muscle memory.

But I will switch as soon as
that feature is available.

'cause it is a great terminal.

it is very lean and streamlined.

You know what it is I, what
I love about it is that.

it's built now.

Like iTerm shows its age because it
was built over the last at, I mean,

I was, I've been using it since 2009,
so iTerm's probably 20 years old.

it's got every feature be, you know,
because we didn't have those features, we

didn't have all a true color 15 years ago.

We didn't have the ability to put
italics very easily 15 years ago.

Like, you had to do a lot of hacks to get
italics to even work in your terminal.

So Ghostty just knows all that is
modern and it just works out of the box.

Like there's no special config, it
supports nerd fonts out of the box.

it understands all these
modern terminal concepts.

iTerm just has this horrible history.

It kinda reminds me of,
what's the SSH Windows CLIent?

putty, it reminds me of like
putty or, or old school.

Remember we used to have like x these
old school windows terminal emulators

for Linux and Unix that were like,
you could decide between which formats

of like Unix or X term, or u like all
these different terminal settings.

Like they were just old school stuff.

And Ghostty throws all that away,
says, Hey, you got a, what is it,

a YAML file or TOML or something?

yeah, TOML.

Yeah, it is great.

Nerd phone is, is actually the
reason why I switched to it.

I, I wanted to change the font in my,
iTerm I ended up having to Google for

more than five seconds and I said, no, no.

If I'm going to Google for solution, I'm
going to Google for replacement for iTerm.

That's how it started.

Yeah.

So speaking of terminals,
this is a great segue.

so now you've got Ghostty running.

Super fast, super slick.

Mm-hmm.

what's your favorite AI tool
in the terminal from 2025?

Come on.

Before,

before he answers that, I did want to
mention that if you're interested in

terminals, Bret Fisher dot com, put this
link in Bret Fisher dot com slash shell.

It is my guide.

It was updated this year.

it was actually in the last month.

It's my guide to terminals across OSS
add-ins, plugins, fonts, how to get

italics working if it doesn't work.

what do you use?

Do you use zsh?

Do you need o Oh, my ux?

Do you need Zelig?

Do you like, there's so many.

These are not mostly AI things.

Very few of it's AI related,
but for 10 years now.

I've been keeping this thing up to date.

I updated every couple of years.

It just got updated.

If you're a veteran to terminals,
you've been using 'em for years

and you know you and love your
terminal, you will not need this.

But if you're newer to terminals or
you're learning how to advance your

terminal game, if you care about the
GitHub monospace font, which is my

favorite fonts, a terminal Terminal,
which is a replacement for tux, which

uses session list UDP packets, like
there's so much in here that over the

years of consulting and stuff like that.

So selfish plug.

There you go.

Okay.

What was the question?

Sorry.

Let's back to the question.

So now that we have this awesome
terminal and I can plus one plus a

thousand breadths, shell page, it's what
I use as my guide to set up my shell,

including the awesome demo modes that
you've put in there for you know, I

do a lot of presentations to customers
and on stages and workshops and having

that demo mode so that you're not like
showcasing your whole entire right from

your, from your shell, is really handy.

Okay.

So Viktor?

Mm-hmm.

We've got Ghostty running and I
just installed it while you were

lighting the awesomeness of it.

I've got it up and running and it boot it.

One thing I already like is that
you can resize the window any

way you want, which is amazing.

Yeah.

You can create paints, you can
split planes, you can do everything.

Awesome.

That makes sense.

What is your favorite Ai CLI tool of 2025?

Oh, there is no competition there.

It's Claude Code.

And I will, I dare anybody
when it's terminal based.

Terminal based.

I dare anybody to fight
against it with me.

now the, the note there is that if you're
using Anthropic models, just to be clear,

so if you're looking for something that is
model agnostic, OpenCode is probably the.

Least bad option.

but if you're okay with a
Anthropic or Sorry, not Anthropic,

provider and Anthropic models.

It can work with Bedrock, for example.

That's fine.

Yeah.

now if you're not fond of a
Anthropic models, then we are going

to have another fight afterwards.

Tell us, I mean, I, I don't think I
have a debate about Anthropic models.

I might have a debate about Claude
Code, but what is it about Claude

Code, specifically the terminal
component that just beats the pants,

beats the socks off of anything else?

Have you tried all the, of,
have you tried other tools?

Yeah, I tried OpenCode.

I tried the, what is the charm thingy?

the charm thing.

Yeah.

The, you know, the folks behind Charm
has the, have the Trivy of themselves.

I tried go probably like 10
of them, and I spent, I spent

this a week with each of them.

and first of all, Claude Code just works.

It works, right?

And all the things that you might
need, assuming that you like

terminals, but some people don't.

It's simply there.

So here's a simple example, and
that might have changed, like in

OpenCode, which is my close second.

I cannot see the status of my mcps
kind of, I don't know whether they're,

they're connected and running, right?

Kind of very basic kind
of, you know, table stakes.

Yeah.

I don't want to even discuss the
usefulness of something like that.

Or if I stick with the same
team, I try the Cursor CLI.

And after not being able to configure, MCP
may, it might, things might have changed.

Just to be clear, it's at a time.

I tried it after failing to configure cps.

I, I googled it, went to the site
and it says, oh, it's very easy to

configure CPS in, in cursor, CLI, you
open Cursor IDE configure it there, then

close it and open the CLI and it works.

Right.

Come on.

then, then there are adding features
that nobody else has, right?

You might like, or you might dislike
skills, but skills are there.

can you describe what skills
are, what are, what are those?

Skills are like prompts or a directory
with prompts And scripts and what not.

It's very simple, very, very
similar to slash commands.

The major difference is that, you can
trigger those prompts, let's say, or

commands through chat with your ai.

Right?

So typically we need to
execute slash something, right?

Yeah.

Here you can say model slash

CP slash usage.

Exactly.

And here you can say, hey, I don't
know, like, create a PR, right?

And just as it would trigger MCP, if there
is a description of MCP tool that matches

that it would trigger skill as well.

So think of it like prompts that
have the context or description,

that is loaded as a system prompt so
that AI treats it as a tool as well.

Got it.

So

it can like skills and it's not just.

About itself, right?

It's not just the slash commands to run
Claude Code CLI, it could be anything.

Yeah.

it's a combination of prompts
with an MCP tools, right.

Got it.

And I think it got open source today.

I think the skills maybe I'm,

I heard today that, OpenAI seems
to have implemented skills as well.

Yeah.

so agent skills are open
source as of today, I think.

Open standard.

Open standard.

There we go.

there's a skilled directory, under
Claude dot com slash connectors.

Yeah.

I think is what you're talking about.

Yeah.

And now, you know, Bret,
you need to stop me.

I can, I can go on for 45
minutes now about code.

Well, I, I. It's apparent to me
that you, you fall into a group

of my friends that are such
Claude Code advocates that mm-hmm.

It makes me start to realize that the
real secret in the sauce of whether it's

OpenCode, which I've heard a lot about,
which, but I've never personally used,

is like we've, the internet tends to
focus so much on the model's performance,

but it, I feel like we're at a point
where it matters more about how much of

the tool you're using and your patterns
around how you, whether it's skills or

it's commands or it's, you know, heavily
using the agent's file or whatever that

agent's variation is, because they all
still haven't quite settled on exactly.

Like, not everybody is all
using Agents md. Mm-hmm.

And what if I want a bunch of different
files in different directories?

Like how there, there's
a lot to all of this.

What I would call like automation
and context enhancement stuff,

which is Outside of the model,
sort of independent of the model.

And, there was a lot of talk earlier
in the year, especially first quarter

when I was first discovering like local
models and experimenting with Qwen

and like some of these local things.

And then I realized how inferior they
are to the, to the, to the SaaS models.

So I just stopped using them.

I mean, I, I, I can afford the $20 a
month plans on the internet, so I, I

choose to do that rather than suffer with
the slower for performance local ones.

So you're doing option, not everybody
gets that you're doing option, but

Oh, you're doing it completely wrong.

You can easily avoid $20 or a hundred
dollars a month subscription to

something like on Anthropic, right?

You just need to buy, 20 K hardware
and run the latest model over there.

It'll take its problem solved a year
before it gets obsolete, but it'll

work well for a year and you will,
you will not have to pay subscription.

Yeah.

Not to mention the electricity cost.

Right.

So for the benefit of all that
money gone from your wallet,

you don't have to send your
tokens to the internet.

Yes.

yeah.

to me the takeaway here is whether you
choose, whether you like Gemini or,

and, and to be fair, I'm going to lump
developers into two camps right now.

and that is the ones that get to
choose their tools, which the three

of us, especially Viktor and I, being
a, a little bit more independent than

Nirmal, we get to pick whatever we want.

We get to pay for whatever we want.

and so we get to choose what we like.

Most people in enterprise positions
I talk to do not get that choice.

In fact, I run a DevOps
Guild meetup every month.

We call high fives.

four people.

A whole four, showed up
yesterday, so I surveyed all four.

So the, it was a universal, a hundred
percent of those four all said, I

like this, but I use this because
it's what my company pays for.

And that might be that they paid a lot of
them just use GitHub and copilot because

that's what their company pays for.

They would talk about, like, my
last job paid for cursor, so we all

use that, but my new job doesn't.

and the same with models, right?

Like models and ides, they pay.

so I would say that a lot of people like.

Your, maybe your choices aren't as
infinite as Viktor's in, in mine, but,

if they aren't, then your, your angle
of attack is to learn the crap out of

that tool so that you can take advantage
of all of its specialty features.

Because I think that's just as good as I,
I was worried about, Gemini for a second.

Like, Gemini comes out, oh,
everybody's telling me it's awesome.

So I switched to the Gemini,
CLI, and I switch everything.

and then I'm like, you know what I mean?

I've lost all my, a lot of my advantages.

So why do I care about the
little edge it's given me?

Because in five minutes and there's going
to be a new Claude model that's going to

upend it, and I can just stick with one,
maybe one CLI and just wait for the model.

Like, anyway, that's my theory,

you know?

I think that the quality of
models, when they're released,

they're overhyped to begin with.

Yeah.

But also that people forget that
it's not only about models, right.

you can easily have a combination.

And I, I'm inventing now, so
don't take this as me saying it.

Kind of, you can say that, Hey,
Gemini three as a model works

better than something else.

But then Gemini three with Gemini
CLI, is still inferior to, let's

say Claude Code with, Sonnet.

Right?

Right.

I, I would go as far as to say that Claude
Code with Haiku is better combination

than, than the one I mentioned earlier.

Right.

not because models are better
or worse, but because it's a

combination of things, right?

Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah.

I mean, I agree.

I think it's about what is actually
enhancing your productivity

and getting out of your way.

so there is a floor to the model, right?

So like you were talking about
using some of the local models.

If you're getting.

Crap tokens back and it's
taking you minutes to get some

output from your local model.

That's the floor, right?

Like, like these foundational
models from Anthropic or, you

know, DeepSeek or others, Gemini.

they're going to beat the pants
off of what you can probably run

on your local machine for general,
like, just a general statement.

maybe specific models for
specific tasks that you're doing

of course could be much better.

But general statement, there's
a floor to the model quality.

But back to what Viktor just said, and
I could, I'm in in violent agreement

with that, the tooling around that.

Like we just talked about
skills for two seconds.

That seems like.

A very valuable thing to get out
of your way to get the most out of

the model that you have access to.

And so even if you had access to
Gemini but the tooling doesn't

help you get out, you know, get the
most out of it, then like, does it

really matter how good the model is?

I don't think so.

Yeah, exactly.

yeah, and I think that's really where
people kind of get hung up right

now is like chasing that incremental
quality of the model versus the

patterns of using these tools.

And the orientation of these
tools toward productivity.

Right.

And I, it seems like Viktor, like what
is it about Claude Code that matches your

brain, your mental model of like how you
want to work with a model to enhance,

like development or whatever you, you
know, what tasks you're doing with it.

there are two answers to that.

First would be how, you know,
or question that you should have

asked first is terminal versus IDE.

because I think that without entering
into what is better, because it'll

depend, but they change the way
how we operate those things, right.

Aren't you using both in some kind of way?

I am using both but separately.

Okay.

so I do have, IDE open that serves
similar purpose, like Vim to be honest.

but I might occasionally open a file.

Literally command p
open a file, that's it.

No, not even three structure
or anything like that.

But in my case, I feel much
more comfortable with terminals

simply because what they do is.

I treat it almost like a person, right?

I talk to it.

I, I don't need other distractions, right?

I, I, I don't need the list of files.

I don't need, to be
clicking here and there.

I don't want to click any buttons
and I don't want to spend time

learning all the shortcuts.

it's, it's simply there.

And I think that it would be in
a very similar question, like if

I would ask you, forget about AI
for a second, or agents, right?

Do you use terminal separately from your
IDE or do you use terminal inside IDE?

And there is no wrong answer there, right?

But I'm, I'm, I'm a separate terminal guy.

simply, it somehow feels better.

and, I'm used to never touch the mouse.

Or it's not, never touch the mouse,
but I rarely touch the mouse, right?

it just feels so much easier, more
intuitive, and so on and so forth.

Now, I'm not saying that
those features don't exist.

When you use agent in IDE,
it just somehow feels better.

it's about feelings.

I don't know how to, there
are some cases where I cannot

give you tangible measurement.

oh, I'm 20% more pro productive
in Claude Code than, than in, I

don't know, Cursor or whatever

You hear.

We heard it here first.

Viktor is 20% more
productive with Claude Code.

by the way, Eric Smalling's opinion,

My favorite tooling is whatever Viktor's
last show is about, then I forget

about it and just use Claude Code.

So his default is Claude Code, but he's
willing to try whatever Viktor suggests.

Yeah.

It sounds like the winner
here is the term CLI.

Winner is Ghostty plus
Claude Code or OpenCode.

I'm So if you can't use Claude Code,
'cause maybe your company doesn't

pay for, Anthropic models, then maybe
your backup plan is to use OpenCode.

I don't know this for a fact, but my
assumption is as much hype as I hear

from open source terminal shell advocates
about OpenCode, I assume it's good enough

to be competitive with like Gemini,
CLI or copilot, CLI or name me another

model, CLI that just comes from Yeah,

OpenCode is, or Codex CLI, in opinion
better than any other OpenCode is

the top the best, in my opinion.

Terminal based agent you can imagine.

Except Claude Code that is
in a different category.

So it's kind of like, you know, we
cannot compare soccer and basketball

kind of like there, or first and
second league of soccer or whatever.

Kind of, if you exclude Claude Code
a go with do and code, it's awesome.

Absolutely awesome as long as you
don't compare it with Claude Code.

So, so Bret, what's your
favorite AI CLI tool?

well, I'm basically
agreeing with all that.

I feel like I started the year at
iTerm, I ended the year in iTerm,

I'm not going to debate Ghostty.

I really just have one feature, muscle
memory thing with the Control F and

they had some other issues with that
were minor issues in the ui, but those

have all been fixed throughout the year.

so I keep it installed.

I switch back and forth every once
in a while to see, and Ghostty is

fine until I immediately need to
search something on, like when I'm

doing serious work at the shell.

Probably not in my AI CLI, I'm just
in the shell and I want to search now.

I will say I did, if you, if you
watch videos or the live streams

of us over the year, you will
hear me for like three months.

Not shut up about Warp Terminal
2.0 when that was released in June.

That made waves and I gave another shot.

'cause I did, I gave Warp 1.0 some time.

It wasn't like it was around for
years, it was fast, because I think

they were doing rust and claiming
it was faster than other terminals.

It was fast, but it feels like
a young person's tool because

I am 30 years of muscle memory
into how pseudo terminals work.

And it is the opposite of that.

And I appreciate their revising
and they talk about it.

They're re-envisioning the CLI, what does
a terminal, what does a shell behave like?

And the problem is, is the
advantages don't for me outweigh

the muscle memory and the efficiency
of what I've already done.

So, because I know, you know ZSH
idioms, I know shell shortcuts.

I know all the little,
you know the control.

SI know you know how
to command completion.

I know all these things.

And Warp throws all that out
the window and says, no, no.

Rethink everything.

and it does make more sense if you
don't know the history of how terminals

have, I've always had to work since
green screens in the seventies, of

which, that's where I came from, right?

Like, maybe not the seventies, but I
was using, my first job in the US Navy

was managing green screens and trouble,
and I actually had to repair them.

So I think that my old school muscle
memory is actually preventing me from

enjoying Warp terminal two better.

for me warp two would be
great if you're young.

If you're learning terminals now, and you
just want to try something new and fresh.

Great idea.

Give it a shot.

The one thing that broke
it for me was that.

The reason I had to leave Warp was
because command completion for them is

they break all ZSH command completion.

So the only way it works in Warp
is they have to add manually c

command completion for each tool,
which to me, one isn't sustainable.

Like there's a, there's a
thousand tools, and two, I don't

live strictly in a dev world.

I live more in a DevOps and ops world.

So I have a lot more, I think I
have a lot more command line tools

than a typical dev might have.

You know, like, think of all the, all the,
the, the Kubernetes terminal tools we have

and all that stuff, and those don't have
command completion and warp, which means

I'm forced to use two terminals because I,
I, I totally depend on command completion.

AI command completion doesn't really
work well for a lot of those tools yet.

And so then I have to go the, and then
the minute I have to have my old terminal

and the new terminal up, I want to throw
one away and I throw away the new one.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, so.

That

defeats the whole entire purpose.

Yeah.

Viktor, it's not

that Warp's bad, it's just very, it's
in a very competitive landscape and I, I

don't know that it has the edge it needs
to sustain itself, but good luck to them.

I'm excited for their product.

Viktor, go.

So I want to push back on your comment.

If you're young, I feel
completely opposite opinion.

Okay.

If you're young, that's the reason not to
use it, because then you will never learn.

Mm-hmm.

You'll learn when it doesn't work anymore.

Kind of, you'll learn it basic.

There are some

basics that you need to know, no
matter which technology we use,

no matter how we operate, the real
systems are not running work terminal.

Kind of like you will not know
what to do when something happens.

Yeah.

Please don't.

Okay.

Now, if you're older, said, okay, I did
my dues, I, I want to switch to something

more productive and Warp works for you.

Great.

Amazing.

Do it.

But not at the expense of never
figuring out how to actually work.

I mean, that's fundamental Yeah.

To all of these tools, right?

I mean, this is, yeah.

This is the essence of, of the challenge
that college professors are going through

right now with their courses, right?

Like all these tools just do, and
they hide what they're doing if you

don't, and they're wrong, right?

Yeah.

And so, there's a cliff here for, with
all these things where regardless of

Claude code or, or Warp or Copilot,
you do have to take them a moment

to understand what it's doing.

And I'm, I'm assuming y'all are,
are you all running your AI tools

in terminal, in YOLO mode where
they just have rampant authority to

run any script or modify any file?

Never.

No, never.

I'm seeing listen to the container.

Not unless it's in a container,
but I don't normally develop

do it in a container yet.

Kyle Quest, by the way, is
pointing out that war's really

great for shell stuff with DevOps.

He likes it and ha and does the
agent stuff and container tasking.

Correct?

I do agree.

I love that it has native notifications
and that it has a little panel

that you can keep track of.

All the agents working in the background.

that is neat stuff, but it's not enough of
advantage over a typical multi-terminal.

Like I'm an iTerm with three different
windows and five different tabs and like

I've, I've got my setup, I've got my
process there and it was to revise myself.

I completely agree with
everything Viktor said.

It does not, subs warp is not a
replacement for learning other.

Foundational shell tooling.

For me, it was about, mostly about
iTerms like the way that I open tabs

and shells and windows and I, I actually
use, you know, command I to label

terminals and I colorize them and I do
all sorts of things and I have different

profiles and all that stuff you're
complaining about in the settings.

I really heavily use all that stuff 'cause
I've been using it for over 15 years.

So it's that part.

That's why it's going to be hard for me
to shift a Ghostty or whatever because

I will lose a lot of my preferences.

And the way that I, the way that
I use the graphic interface of

the iTerm that more so than warp.

And warp is just, I feel like too,
too young it has its set way, it's

very opinionated and you, it's
hard to deviate outside of that.

And that's what is hard for me
to really commit to long term.

So

to me it doesn't feel like
terminal, to be honest.

Yeah, it feels like IDE, and
nothing against IDEs here.

Right.

But it doesn't feel like terminal.

Kind of like I have problem with,
with wasted space over there.

I don't see the information I need
because everything occupies so much space.

Yeah.

The default format isn't compact.

That's an's a setting, but it's like,
it's not as good as Yeah, exactly.

It's, it's very opinionated in a way
that it's going for readability, not

density of, of content, which can then
mean your screens don't show as much.

And that also was frustrating for me.

I will put in a mention of goose.

Like, goose to me was better for
people that aren't quite developers.

Like maybe they're developer adjacent,
like maybe they're people that have

developers in their team, but they
hear about all this agent stuff,

but they're maybe not CLI people.

And so they can manage
multiple agents through a GUI.

But they don't need to look at, they
don't need to stare at code, but maybe

they need something other than five
different ChatGPT windows open, you

know, they need something like that.

And that's where I feel like
Goose might have an edge anyway.

Normal.

Tell us what your, what your PIX are.

yeah, so I'm going to pick, and this
is, you know, my opinion, I'm going to

go a little bit different and say, AWS
kiro for both the CLI, formerly known as

Amazon QCLI, or QCLI and, the Kiro IDE.

not that it's, necessarily like, you
know, the best thing since sliced

bread, but the idea for the CLI,
it's just, I enjoy working with it.

It has those slash commands.

It.

Gets your MCP, it's just
like straightforward.

And for the operations of EKS clusters,
AWS environments, it, comes with some

of those MCP servers if you want out
of the box, for AWS documentation

for the work I do and the, and the
customers I support, it has been

great to just be a better operator.

And also, you know, I have to understand
what my, what my customers are doing

and how they're using our tools.

And so I live in, in that world.

Of course, it helps that it's
available to me as an employee.

I do enjoy Claude Code a lot and
I. I wish there was like this.

I think we'll get there.

But all these cons, like,
there's like little pieces of

different tools that I've used.

I used Cline earlier this year.

Love that a lot.

and especially to be able to dig in to
some of the details in its thinking.

but out of all these tools, Claude
Code has a lot of paradigms and then

Kiro IDE has like the spec driven
development, the idea of really thinking

through how you're going to use the
tool and the project management.

And it feels much more like how you
would actually use this in an enterprise.

and also it's, or it orients you toward
being successful with the output of

these LLMs, which I really appreciate.

And we can get into
spec-driven development and

all that a little bit more.

At some point in the future, I wish all
of these things, like all the awesome

bits from all these tools would just
be in one, and there would be just

like some kind of, there, this wouldn't
even be a debate anymore because we've

just like settled on how these tools
work and it's, it gets out of your way.

But for me, you know, at at Reinvent,
I, I helped host a hackathon on a bus

where a, I think 50 developers were
using Kiro to build apps in six hours.

and they didn't really run into many
issues, with random teams of people.

They just met getting
together and building an app.

And I think that's the power of
like, the spec driven development.

but I'm excited to see
where these tools go.

I'm of course, hedging my bets here.

I'm excited to see where these
tools go when they're bridging.

The age agentic, non-deterministic
components of, these tools

with the deterministic normal
code that we're writing.

and to me, like the SPECT driven
development, there's another

paradigm, A-I-D-L-C where you're
planning through, you're thinking

through, what the project's going
to be, you're, you're going through

it at, in a task orientation, makes
sense in terms of bridging that.

And also, I think we're going
to start seeing a little bit

more formal verification or
formal methods of verifying what

the output of these tools are.

Are what you asked for.

And if you go the spec driven development
route, you have a framework for being able

to take advantage of that in the future.

So that's my answer.

so, when you say Kiro IDE, that's web?

No.

So there's a Kiro IDE, it's called
Kiro and it's its own thing.

And then there's Kiro, CLI, which
is the, it used to be called QCLI,

but it was rebranded to Kiro.

Is Kiro IDE just a another vs.

Clone a VS.

Code clone?

Yes, but it's, there's some.

M modifications to it for sure.

Yeah, it looks pretty, it looks heavily

modified, but yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

By the way, my pick was actually, my
pick isn't what everyone else should use.

It's the picks were like, what
I'm using and then what I'm using

in right now is Copilot CLI.

So, okay.

and it's not because I chose
it over Claude Code because

I thought it was better.

It's because it's what is free for me.

And it is, I'm influenced by
money and it, I do like that it's

integrated with VS Code's IDE.

So I can have the conver, I can
start a conversation in the CL,

I continue that conversation with
the context in the IDE and then go

back to the CLI like, I like that.

so I do that a lot, but that's just

me.

Can I, can I make a
suggestion to you, Bret?

Can you open a GoFundMe?

create a GoFundMe.

I pay for Claude code.

I pay $20 a month for Claude code.

No, no,

no, no.

You did.

Wait, I didn't finish.

I mean, I think you need GoFundMe hand
fund me because I think that people will

churn in because you definitely need
money to pay a psychologist after all the

drama you were experiencing this year.

Right.

So I used copilot, CLI with, yeah.

Okay.

When you ignite term, I said,
okay, you know, things happen,

but then you added copilot.

CLI cannot.

Definitely that trauma, it's too
far needs to be, it's too far.

It needs to be resolved because it'll
count you for the rest of your life.

So.

So it's a quick advice, express

cry for help, professional, professional.

So we're going to have a private therapy
session where Viktor is going to walk me

through my horrible Copilot experience and
why Claude Code is so much better at it.

But that is too long for this
podcast, so don't take my advice.

I'm just saying it's what I
stuck with the most this year

over all the things I tried.

I played, I tried codex when suddenly,
you know, whatever 5.0 came out.

Everyone was like, oh, Codex,
Codex CLI, blah, blah, blah.

I tried that.

Like, but I'm using very basics.

I'm not using all the features and
throwing, you know, I'm not using

the latest functionality in there.

So I, I understand.

I'm not necessarily code
course, target course

you're using basics because you
cannot find features in iTerm

and compiler doesn't have them.

So of course you are fair,

all.

So, before's, before we turn this into
the only thing we talked about with CLI

tools, I'm going to change subjects on us.

we touched on ides, so visual editors.

Yes.

Another topic.

We've got tons of them.

Almost every CLI has a companion IDE.

I feel like at this
point, maybe not Gemini.

I don't know what Well, Google has
oh yeah, windsurf now, now, right?

Gravity.

Oh, no.

Anti-gravity.

Gravity.

Who's got windsurf now?

No

anti

windsurf.

Google.

Google.

Also, he has

people from Windsurf, not windsurf.

Windsurf turned is turning
into, well, we think like the

winds surf's team is building
antigravity or something like that.

So who knows?

I tried that for five minutes and
went Yeah, it's like all the others.

So,

yeah.

I kind of already answered
that, but I would say Kiro.

I am productive with it.

I like the spec driven development.

I'll say that again.

we should have another show, Bret,
on like these paradigms, like

A-I-D-D-L-C spectrum development.

I like, it's, it's just straightforward.

it's easy to get started and use.

and I just watched a bunch of
developers in a time constrained

manner be very productive with it.

I can't say a percentage of productivity
with it, but you know, that's a good test.

and I'm biased because, I get it
for free from AWS as an employee.

Alright, so you're saying Kiro.

so by the way, with Kiro, CLI,
you would be using what terminal

before you just installed Ghostty.

What was before Ghostty?

Just, just terminal?

iTerm.

iTerm.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean,

I won't, I will refrain
Frain from saying it.

'cause it sounds like you're
going to be a convert to Ghostty.

So, yeah,

I am.

I have Ghostty running now
for, what, 20 minutes and it's.

The, I'm already thinking
I'm going to like it.

It is, it is definitely the one
for you if you're not Mac too,

because like iTerm is only Mac.

and true.

You know, so you're,

and if you don't have high
expectations feature wise, just

to be fully transparent, right.

You will not get iTerm
fanciness or anything like that.

It's just a terminal.

Yeah.

I don't, I don't think I take
advantage of all the iTerm fanciness

because it's hard to take advantage
of all of it to understand it.

Back to what you were saying, Viktor,

I have plenty of developer friends.

Yeah.

I have plenty of developer
friends that are terminal people,

that are Mac terminal people.

So like when I see them running
terminal, I lose my shit.

Ghostty is for them, right?

Because it's, it's definitely faster than
the, my understanding is it's definitely

faster than Mac terminal and it has
a lot of much nicer built in themes.

The ones that are built into the
Mac terminal, are mostly garbage.

so yeah, it does it, and it supports,
like you said, it supports nerd fonts.

One of the best things to come
out of terminals is nerd fonts

in many years, so it's great.

Viktor, what is your IDE of choice?

I, I'm not sure that
you've me mentioned it.

None.

None.

Ooh, I, so I, I do have, IDE open, all
the time and I, the only thing that I

do in that IDE is command P to start
typing the file that I want to open.

Open it if I want to
check it in more detail.

Right.

I use it for that exclusively.

I don't use IDE for anything else.

I'm not saying that they're bad, just
can, terminal based agency is very spent.

Almost all my time,
occasionally look at the file.

So if I, whichever choice I would
give you, I cannot justify this

that is looking at the file is
better in one over the other.

Right.

So I'm not against them,
just I don't use them.

So this half of the year,
this half of the year.

So, so what if you needed to like

rename the top of the read Me.

Would you use like Neo Vim, I mean,
you're in the shell, would you just

use like a, a Vim variant or like, I
mean, if you needed a one line edit,

you wouldn't ask an AI to do that.

Right?

would you just open up VS Code for that?

Would, do you, would
you use Cursor for that?

No.

First of all.

I would just say I to do it.

Let's start with that.

so you're having a AI edit,

one line changes.

Okay.

See, I, I can't get it to be that
precise, so I'm faster than the

AI when I need to change one line.

So, look,

I can seriously issue throughout my
life that I'm like speaking with people,

and now all of a sudden that's okay
because they don't talk back to me.

I'm always right.

Kind of like, and I want,
I want more of that.

So you

like, you like your
terminal to be sycophantic.

Yeah.

No.

So actually what I do is that in, in
my terminal in ghost, I have different

types, for different projects.

Sometimes I work in multiple
projects at the same time, which

is badness, but bear with me.

And each of those top has
two pains up and down.

one pane is Claude Code, another
one is just pure terminal.

When I need to do those things,
like vi going back to your

question, And Bret, change one line.

Yeah, I would use vi, right?

Execute some command.

Still do it.

So I just switch up, go up and down, or
full screen if I need only one of those

panes and that, that's my workflow.

All right.

I'm, I'm putting nine and
I don't recommend it to

everybody, just to be clear.

Kind of, I just freaky that, that's all.

Yeah.

Well, and you know, like,
it, it's a purist approach.

and I sympathize or, or align with that
because there are days where I'm like,

I don't want anything on my screen.

I just want a giant terminal window.

And I don't want to leave
this terminal window.

So if I'm editing something,
it's going to be in Neovim.

which, you know, I go
back and forth between VS.

Code and Neovim, Kyle Quest.

And Chad is asking about anyone using Zed.

I have Zed open right now.

It, I've used it as a text note taker,
like it is, I'm actually tracking

our show notes with it right now.

it's super fast.

It replaced my sublime.

text editor, sublime Text, which
that replaced whatever was before VS.

Code.

The Adam editor.

So Zed is my go-to random
editor of, of text.

But I do see a lot of people using Zed,
full time, especially in the Go world.

They, they tend to like
Zed as a Golang editor, but

Zed is awesome.

If I would be using it, I would
be using Zed to be honest.

If I would bad installing it,
I had it for quite some time.

What is really, and I suspect that
next year will be the year of Zed,

because what makes Zed special,
forget about AI for a second, right?

Is that it is IDE that is built
or being built for collaboration.

That's its main strength, right?

And the more we are adopting
AI agents, what not.

The more I can see how that can be a
competitive advantage of Zed, right?

Mm-hmm.

Because you can argue, hey, how much do
I collaborate with others in my daily

workflow and how much I work alone?

But now that we are moving up to
different degrees to to agents,

I think that collaboration is
happening now all the time.

So if something is designed for
collaboration, that makes perfect

sense, even though it might not be
the type of collaboration, how it was

envisioned from the very start of that.

That's a, that's a good take.

I like it.

Yeah.

I've actually been

sad I wasn't in a team to use Zed
because when they first came out and

that was one of the first features was
like automatic GitHub login, automatic

collaboration with other people.

And I was like, I can't get to
really use any of these features

'cause I'm not like pair programming.

Or you can

do that with Bret.

You can do that with me.

Okay.

Just hit me up.

Okay, normal.

And I can, we'll, a z session

sometime, maybe we should,
should go online and see.

We should see how many people live
can join our Zed hacking session.

We'll be Z

friends, we'll be Z friends.

Sounds good.

There we go.

AI

browsers.

Ooh, thumbs up, thumbs down.

And if it's thumbs up, which one.

Go Viktor down.

he's thumbs downing all AI browsers, which
I'm also thumbs downing all AI browsers.

Wait,

so Bret, okay, I've got to call you out.

This has been a running meme in our
show with you for years now, where we

almost had not a single show where you
did not mention ARC browser, right?

It was like, I love ARC browser.

You, you were like an unpaid spokesperson
Super Bowl ad for the ARC browser.

What happened?

What's going on?

It is not an AI browser.

It has AI features,

right?

So, okay, so what does that mean?

Like, I'm not a, I'm still
running Firefox and, and Chrome.

So yeah.

what is the difference?

What, what is an ai?

Because you're.

You're like our, you're
like our, our baseline.

You're like the normal
dev pre 2023 or 2022.

and, and Viktor chime in here real quick.

the difference between ARC and an AI
browser, which is why they changed

and made a new browser that was not
arc, is ARC has AI functionality that

I love, like it'll rename downloads
to a more, it'll look at the file

contents and then rename the file name
to something that's not tax rebate.

Document PDF 0 0 1 2 2 1 1 under
underscore five, like it'll rename it

to Bret's tax return, whatever, right?

it has other little AI features like it
will auto name, it'll rename the tab.

To what it thinks that page
is about versus what they will

call that tab from the website.

Right.

It'll do all that sort of stuff.

It'll automatically combine
different tabs into folders if

you want to organize things.

So it'll, it'll sub, it'll create groups
and groupings based on the contents, but

I can't talk to an AI about a website.

Got it.

So it's like a browser.

Oh, so, so those, that's
not an AI browser.

What you're talking about is
using AI features to make a

normal browser more useful.

Right.

Essentially that's what they started with.

Yeah.

Okay.

Go

Viktor.

No, I, I don't know what would be a
definition, but I see a browsers as being,

you know, it's a similar like MCP where
AI can use tools so you give it Right.

Okay.

Similar kind of basically AI can use
your browser to do things for you.

does doesn't

work,

right?

ai browser definition.

It has control of the URL bar from
an AI prompt and likely can see the

complete and it can see the complete
dom and it can control the window.

So we can create new tabs, it can
delete tabs, it can read the page, it

can summarize the page, it can change,
it can decide what websites you go to.

It can open up five pages at once.

That's an AI browser in my definition.

Got it.

So for example, if I'm building an app in
Kiro and I want to, it's like a web app

and I use like a playwright MCP server

mm-hmm.

That will like open up a headless browser
or whatever it is and click buttons and

you know, test that website as q and
a is that playwright MCP a AI browser?

It feels like that, I mean, it's
probably not okay, but feels like that?

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

Basically, AI can do
stuff using a browser.

So is it a browser with just a
really good API that is attached

to an agent that knows that API?

Well, you have you have an AI dropdown
for Gemini in your, Chrome browser.

Do you not use that

normal?

I, I don't, mostly because

security, I, I

mean, sure.

Yeah.

Well, I feel that there are
two major use cases over there.

One is that, use AI to make
sense of the, of some information

that is available online.

You know, that's the example
that you brought from mentioning,

oh, I have seven tabs open and I
want sum this, stuff like that.

Right.

And the other one is to do things for
you, like, Hey, I want to book a flight.

Ah, the first one, I feel I don't
need a special browser for that.

That's what, you know, ChatGPT,
Gemini and all this stuff.

Yeah.

I get a place where I type something
and I get the answer kind of like,

I'm not sure why I need a browser
for that instead as opposed to a tab.

Right.

does the same thing now, if somebody
would ever convince me that AI can

book a flight that matches what I
really need, and that would take less

time than if I do it myself, I will
adopt AI browsers that same moment.

but at the same time, like what
you're talking about, like for

example, booking a flight, that's
just a stop gap between just because

the flight, the Air Airline website
doesn't have any API at some point.

You, I mean, you could go into a terminal
and say, Hey, I want to book a flight.

And if the airline had a good API and an
MCP or an agent, then it doesn't matter.

Like it's so the, the AI browser in
those use cases, it's just a stopgap

until there's like better integration.

Maybe

now we are talking, now we are
coming to the crux of it, I think

because you both put thumbs down

on AI browsers and I don't know why.

Well, yeah, let's, yeah, let's,
let's clar, let's clarify our why.

My why Security nightmare.

Everyone keeps jail breaking them.

They will eventually, we will
have announcements of major.

Problems We've already seen that
they're incorrectly buying things.

They're not buying the correct things.

They're, when they shop for
you, they're screwing up.

They, right.

They're the fact that an AI can see
everything I'm doing online, including

every password I'm putting in, and
like, it is a security nightmare

and there's no way around it.

And I don't know how
we're going to solve that.

So until people just pretend that
it's all fine and ignore security,

which is what maybe people that
are using today are doing, like

the DIA browser, which is the Arc's
replacement from the browser company.

I mean, these things, there's
no way to keep them safe.

I don't know how we would ever do it
in our current con and at least in

the current world of AI and MCP and
everything else that we're living.

So

it sounds like to me, like if I, if I
was a scam artist or someone designing

phishing, th this is like a Yeah.

Dream.

You can jailbreak, this
is a dream come true.

Yeah.

You can jailbreak them and

people keep doing it.

Yeah.

I would get someone to
download these browsers.

And then you're off to the
races essentially, right?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Actually, I, I, I don't
even understand what they're

trying to solve, to be honest.

And why browser?

Why not APIs that al you just
mentioned kind of, basically, right.

If you want, let's say that I want
you to find me five top options for a

flight to Whenev wherever, whenever.

Right?

Right.

why would browser AI browsers do it for me
if no GT is perfectly capable of doing it?

Yeah.

I want, I want the unless API
to find, unless I wanted to.

Yeah.

Unless I wanted to book it for, for me.

Right.

Kind of like, Hey, here's my
password and user and here's

my credit card, do it for me.

And I, I already have enough trouble
trusting, those that are, should

be trusted, like Amazon with that.

Right Now, I'm not trusting with my
credit card number, some malware.

Right.

So, and that, that's not the scammer.

Right.

And that's not like the main.

Friction point, like purchasing,
click this, like purchasing the

ticket isn't the major part of
finding an, finding a flight.

Yeah.

It's the finding the flight.

That's the major part.

It's not like the credit card
information and your, you know, like

your passport IDE and your profile.

that's a solved problem.

Yeah.

Right.

Exactly.

And so to me, I would love, like, you
know, a, a direct MCP feed into the Sabre

API and like Google Flights and Flight
Aware and you know, kayak or whatever

those tools are, and they should just
return JSON with all the prices and

schedule information and call it a day.

Right.

Like,

but the key here I think is that.

the services like Gemini and, open ai,
open AI and whatnot, they're already

capable of doing that without my browser.

That's the point, I think.

Yeah.

Right.

Kind of like you're perfectly
capable of finding that flight.

Why do you navigate my browser to do it?

Yep.

I think it's just a way for the
AI companies to lock you in.

I mean, it's no different than Google
owning Chrome and I, I feel like it's

just another lock in play and I don't,
I do have hope for the Zen browser.

I do have hope for the Zen browser.

It's not an AI browser.

it's taking all of the ARC features,
putting 'em on top of Firefox.

I really wish it wasn't Firefox, but
it's got the Firefox Mozilla engine.

but it, it feels a lot like arc. There's
someone in chat who's like, yeah.

but ARC is no longer actively developed.

ARC is being maintained.

There's a difference.

I'm perfectly fine with
ARC's existing functionality.

I don't like a couple of the bugs.

It has like, especially window
management bug that it has on Mac.

But everything else in it has
performed great for me for years now.

So I don't need new features
or features expanded.

I just need it to stay stable and secure.

And they've been doing that with regular
weekly chromium updates all year long.

So kudos to them for shelving a
product, but keeping it safe for the

existing users that still use it.

I bet you they still got a half a
million daily users on the, on the

browser that they've shelved, they've
probably got more daily users on it

than they do on the, on the DIA browser.

My, I'm guessing, but until
we have like something Arc

replacement, which is probably then.

Zen still got some little limitations
in corks that I'm not quite ready

to leave a completely for it yet.

I don't know about Viktor if you're
trying something else besides Arc or

if you're No, I'm back, back to Chrome

just because I have no patience now to,
to, know, I fair, I'd like to go back

to your previous question, kind of what
they're doing that, the many vendors

have a real problem and that's, that
they don't control the platform, right?

You cannot really do real
business, because Apple controls

your mobile phones, right?

they say what you can and cannot do.

Google controls your
browsing experience Chrome.

Right?

if you don't control those things, you
cannot really go as far as you want.

And I'm a hundred percent sure
convinced that that's why.

they're releasing those browsers
because if you are convinced to switch

from the platform, core platform
that you are already using to theirs,

then they can do the stuff they would
normally, wouldn't be able to do.

Right.

That's the game.

Not because you benefit, I
cannot imagine the reason.

Why would you use open AI
browser, whatever it's called.

Is it come or something?

I don't know.

It makes no sense except when you look at
it from that perspective, that kind of, if

we manage to convince you to switch to our
platform, then we are talking business.

That that's the whole game.

Yeah.

That's my conspiracy theory.

Theory,

yeah.

I don't think it's a conspiracy.

I mean that's just, that's like a
classic vertical integration play, right?

Like,

I think that Arc will go down
as like one of the major.

sad stories of tech, of a fantastic
product with an upward trajectory and a

clear potential market for people to pay.

I wish they would've, they
made the same mistake.

Docker did.

They didn't charge early enough.

No, they still don't charge.

There was no opport.

I would've paid them money for
years, five, 10 bucks a month

for access to those AI features.

Like, but you and five others?

Well, maybe, but they could
have expanded that market.

Okay.

10. 10. Okay.

Don't fight me on that.

Let it be 10.

Yeah.

But, they, and they could have explored
additional third party, you know, like

additional functionality that, and,
you know, they probably could have

done like everyone else and said, here,
we'll give you access to the models

for our, you know, we'll be the gateway
and we'll take a cut off the top like

everyone else is doing with the IDEs.

But the, the crazy part to me, Arc
died because of Silicon Valley.

it died because of VCs.

VCs need their money back and there
wasn't a clear path to a $500 million

annual run rate kind of thing.

So they couldn't figure out how to
monetize it in a way that they could've

figured out how to monetize it.

If they had a 10 or less people team
and they just needed to make 10 million

a year or something, but they couldn't
figure out how to monetize it at scale,

which is the problem with VC money.

So now they've got to make another
terrible browser that's, that's not

going to make them that 5 billion either.

Without VC money, they couldn't
have made those movies that

cost like Hollywood production.

Yeah, well, they might be right, by
the way, they might get bought by

another company for a billion dollars,
just like, well, they already did.

They got bought.

So they want, that's their thing.

Like they got bought, I keep forgetting.

They got bought, by Atlas, Atlassian.

So they made their money.

The VCs got paid back, presumably.

And so to me, like I kind of wish that
maybe because they've already been

bought, maybe the DIA features will
just be added to Arc. I don't know.

Or maybe they'll add the ARC features
to DIA and I can turn off the AI.

I'm not really sure, but at some point
the AI browsers are like, it's a question

of how much will Chrome have to compete
with the AI browsers and are we going

to get a worse chrome in the future?

Like, are we going to get a Chrome.

That we all learn to hate because
it's AI first and we don't want it,

and we just want to turn off the AI.

I've already got friends that work in
the AI space that are like websites.

Could be, remember how SEO hackers
used to put little tiny texts in a, in

a font at the bottom of the page that
would seed the search engines with

information to help them their rankings.

And they would put it in small fonts
with the same color as the background

so that the human couldn't see it.

But the, well, the same thing is going
to be happening with ai, where we're

going to end up with jail breaking
texts at the bottom of your website.

That would, that if I land
on your website, now you're

controlling my browser.

And, I, right now there's seems to be
no one that's able to avoid that attack.

which is a pretty basic attack.

Same with like, you know, MCP pony and,
and a lot of these things that we're,

We're seeing is it's not, anyway, we
could talk about browsers forever.

last, last call.

Wild card, like what other AI tool
did you try and throw away this year?

Or you tried and you adopted?

It could be a SaaS, it could be like,

I use a notion AI more
than I did a year ago.

they keep iterating and
making it better, better.

So now my notion AI can, search
all of my stuff in a very.

Nervous.

I like it has access to my email and
my documents and my go, my GitHub

and it has access to everything
and it is a little concerning.

I just hope their security
team's great because it has

a lot of access to my stuff.

The only thing it doesn't have access to
is my passwords and my browser history.

That's about the only thing
it doesn't have at this point.

But the AI is great.

It can do crazy things like,
Hey, can you tell me where in

2025 did I interact with Nirmal?

And it will find all the pages and,
and it'll summarize conversations.

It'll say You were on
this many shows with him.

You had these, this, these different
email conversations with him.

You have these documents
that you shared with Nirmal.

Like it, it does all
that in five seconds and.

That for me when I can't find
where, where did I put that thing?

Is it a Google Doc?

Is it a notion page like that has
fundamentally, for me this year

changed the behavior of the way I
work, and it's a hotkey now in Mac.

So I can just hit Command K and
search everything in Notion, or ask

the AI questions about my notion and
my Google Docs and all of it all at

once, and I, I do have to pay for it.

It turns out that when Notion
announced, they were doing a, a stock

thing with their employees on Monday,
they announced this, they kind of

gave away the fact that 50% of their
revenue is now AI, the cost of the,

AI plans on top of the regular plans.

So they have successfully monetized
AI so that now basically a majority

of their customers are now paying.

Double what they used to pay in order
to have access to the AI on top of

the Notion features, which I think is
a, a huge win for a, a non-AI company

to add AI functionality as a feature
center and to be able to actually

show a lot of profit from that.

I think it's a pretty cool thing for them.

So that's my pick.

I'll throw it in Wild cards.

Anyone else got one?

It can be Dev, it could be nine devs.

You want to

go first?

No.

Go for it.

Go for it, Viktor.

Okay,

so, you said yeah, what you picked,
and what you abandoned, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I, I already answered
what the abandoned there is.

Id none.

I, I was a VS.

Code cursor user all, all the way.

And that's what I abandoned, right?

now the pick Code Rabbit MCP.

Okay.

That's absolutely amazing, right?

'cause I love the idea of,
you know, I create a PR.

I get review as, in parallel or
without the human review, right?

I get review and Code Rabbit reviews
are absolutely amazing, right?

Not going to try to compare them now,
but the reason why I say MCP is because

I don't have to leave Claude Code.

I don't have to go to GitHub
PR to see what it did and then

copy and paste it back to Claude
Code to say, can you fix this?

And so on and so forth.

I just say, create a PR go.

I go and fetch coffee or something
like that, few minutes later.

Okay.

What are the issues?

tell me what are the issues and let's
sso, let's pick which ones to resolve.

And I continue my workflow right in, in
my agent, whichever I'm using, right?

so, it's absolutely amazing that
it's happening outside of Claude

Code, but still works in IT
or cursor whatever key, right?

Whatever you're using.

So Code Rabbit MCP specifically,
absolutely amazing.

All right.

I haven't tried it yet, and I've been
mostly focused on building some GitHub

courses this year, and I've been mo mostly
focused on the GitHub functionality.

And I, I've been very curious to,
to see some of these sort of, GitHub

workflow automation tools outside
of GitHub and see how superior

they are to the native offerings.

So Code Rabbit just jumped
to the top of my list.

I envy you, man.

I really envy you because you're so
used to, to copilot that now you're

going to enjoy so much, all the other
things, and your body is so low now.

Maybe that's the secret to life.

Yeah, exactly.

Expectations, low expectations.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Low expectations.

There we go.

That's funny.

Yeah.

You, you, you've been working
your whole life in mainframe.

Let me introduce you to cloud, right,

Bret, you got to open up Copilot and
say, how can I raise my expectations

on AI tools?

What,

what tools are better
than you, Mr. Copilot?

that would actually be a great test.

I'm going to ask, KIRO, CLI like what?

IDE what AI IDs it would

recommend.

Right.

What do

you recommend, right?

are these biased?

I don't think that it is.

I think it's just going right to sonnet
or whatever, you know, whatever model

it's connected to, but it's still,

it's still trained on user,
you know, on public data.

So it has all the Reddit
posts and all those things.

I'm not sure how much it, even the
authors of models can avoid that.

Yeah.

So I'm bringing that up because, this
is like a burgeoning field, right?

Which is the AI optimization, right?

We have search engine optimization.

This is the wild card.

This is one of the wildcard answers.

Okay.

So we have search engine
optimization, right?

Like how to make your results show up.

we're already there and we're going
to continue to have to understand how

to make sure our stuff shows up in.

M responses in models.

And so like, you know, we, you know,
how does Bret Fisher's and Nirmal

Mehta's Agentic DevOps fm podcast,
show up when you ask Claude Code?

Hey, I'd like to listen to a
podcast that tells me more about

how to use agents for DevOps.

and that whole entire field is
very nascent and burgeoning.

there's no major tools
right now that I know of.

I haven't done any digging,
major digging into that.

But, right now it's even hard to
understand what percentage of people

are discovering your, you know,
your blog post, your podcast, your

content through ChatGPT, through
Claude, through Perplexity and that

visibility and tools that will help.

Bring that visibility to light are going
to be the one part of the future for sure.

you don't have a particular product there.

I don't have, I don't have a product
there, but it's a product category

and it's something to kind of keep an
eye on because it's the other side of

what we've been talking about, right?

Like if we're using all these tools
in the terminal, in Claude Code,

they're being influenced by something
to give you that response, right?

There's an opinion there and how
they deform opinion that's going

to be optimized in the future.

and it's something, so that's what I,
when I asked you about AI browsers,

I thought that's where this, that
conversation was going to go.

And I'm kind of surprised that
wasn't part of the response I

got from y'all because to me.

The idea behind like an AI browser
would be to then sell the influence,

on the other side of the market to
that person that's using that browser.

Right?

Like, if that makes any sense.

Yeah.

So there maybe what you're talking about,
like, so a two friends of mine, have

a company, a startup called No Atoa,
and they do what you're talking about

in terms of like helping marketers.

It's, it's a tool for marketers, right?

For people that care about SEO and
they help you understand what your

brand is doing in the different
models and the different chat bots

and, how that correlates to your
old school Google, SEO search stuff.

And, they give a pretty great, email.

It's not quite weekly, but you
can also, you can just get all

this at Noah to, but, yeah.

I wonder what ad blocking in the
future is going to look like.

can, would an ad blocker be like,
unbias the response from an LLM future?

So we have

ads now showing up in go.

Like they just wrote, had a whole email
about this like last week or something.

Was the, that ad showing up in the chat?

Chat bots now?

Mm-hmm.

That, that's already happening.

And Google was first as they should be.

ChatGPT is next.

They're planning on it.

and so the problem is, the big problem
here for me is that it's one thing when

you're just searching the internet,
but people don't treat chatbots

like they treat the internet search.

Like people are having therapy
sessions in the chat bot.

Can you imagine having a therapy talking
about some deeply personal topics

and then you see an ad for whatever.

you know, some prescription drug like
in the middle of the chat response

because that's kind of how it's showing
up is like, Hey, here's my opinion.

But also did you know about, like that's
super cringey and it may backfire.

So I'm guessing that that's part of the
reason why maybe we don't see ads yet.

'cause it seems like it's been
taking a long time for, so

are we going to have in, you know,
in, in this IDE of the future, is it

going to, there's, is there going to
be a banner that says, why don't you go

grab a Red Bull while I fix your code?

kind of thing?

Or are there going to be comments in
the code about like, you know, this

would be a lot easier if you used X, Y,
Z service instead of Java or something.

You know, like, is that
where we're headed to?

We are, but that's partly our fault.

And this goes back to the
conversation about Arc browser, right?

We are so used never to pay for anything.

Yeah.

Right.

Yep.

People don't want to pay for, for open ai.

I mean, professionals like
we are, we are paying, right?

But a normal person is
not, is not paying for it.

just as normal person would
never pay for a browser, right.

And if we insist on getting
everything for free, what's the va?

What's the only VE left for those
companies to finance themselves?

Well, selling you Red Bull.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kind of.

We need somehow to change as
people are customs to kind of,

Hey, I'm going to pay for this.

Do you remember the day that Gmail showed
up and announced ads next to your emails

and how everyone was up in arms for the
invasion into privacy of them reading

our email, which they were already doing.

They were all already doing it, reading
our email, and then providing ads next

to them, Th that was 20, 20 years ago.

And that's completely normal now.

Like it's totally normalized to
have ads right next to my email

about what was in that email.

Nobody makes a mention of it.

It's fine.

This is the next wave, right?

This is the next wave.

Is it You're having private conversations
about personal topics, healthcare

topics, interesting, whatever.

And you're going to have ads and
you're, and people are going to have

to just start to get, be okay with it.

And Yeah.

And well, the rumor right now is
that, ChatGPT, even on the, or Claude

or whoever it was, that even on the
$200 plans, you're going to see ads,

like everyone's going to get ads.

Because one of the arguments, one
of the problems with ads is if you

can pay for ads to go away, you're
the best customers are the ones

that are paying from the go away.

So when you're an ad seller, you
really want the best customer.

You want to be able to sell those
customers, which is why you could

never get rid of ads in Facebook.

'cause you, you know, anyway,

I, I'm not sure that
Anthropic will do that.

Maybe to some extent, but not much simply
because the approach that Anthropic takes

compared to open AI from the business
perspective is very, very, very different.

Right?

Sure.

Yeah.

Anthropic is an enterprise based company.

They're selling to enterprises.

That's the revenue stream, right?

Open AI is trying to be end
user type of service company.

Right?

B2B, like your mom and pop Yeah.

My, my parents type of users, right.

Or my daughter or whatever.

so they will definitely do ads because
their users don't pay Anthropic.

I mean, I know my company's paying for it.

many companies are paying for
it, and if they're not paying for

a Anthropic, they're paying for
Amazon or for, Azure or something.

Right.

And I, I don't think
that ads would fly there.

Yeah.

So that was my hot take.

kind of just like something to look
out for is, Is like the wild card.

if you'll take it, it's not a real tool.

I'm not sure

what to write.

'cause our lists are mostly tool lists,
so I don't know what to add there.

But,

ad block, LM Unbias ad blocking
tool of the future can now reduce

it to two words.

Yeah.

oh.

Like, LM Block.

A SEO.

Yeah.

There we go.

L lm ad block, anti anti AI
SEO or something like that.

but yes.

Well, I've, we we're, I
think we're at the end here.

Yeah.

We, we could keep going
on tooling forever.

but I will leave this here 'cause I
feel like this is a really good list

and any of these topics could have
become, became their whole hour.

Yes.

I. So thank you so much for being here.

This was our Christmas episode.

I don't even have Christmas
music like I usually do.

I usually have the room
set up in Christmas.

This was a minimal Christmas year,
but, thank you both for being here.

And you can find Viktor on
YouTube at, at DevOps Toolkit.

And Nirmal is on LinkedIn.

And all of this stuff will
be in the description below,

So, thank you both for both being
here and we will see you again in

the new year with more live streams.

And before we leave, I just
wanted to thank all the viewers,

listeners, supporters that we've
had over this past year, and years.

Bret and I can't do this without you.

Please tell your friends, family,
colleagues, Random people that you

meet on the street, the people that
you see at conferences about both

of our podcasts, our live stream.

I thoroughly enjoy the conversations
that we have in the chat.

It seems awesome to get to, to
see from everyone what y'all

are doing, your questions.

And, we want to make sure that we
can continue to do this in 2026.

So, check out our Agentic DevOps podcast,
the one that we launched this year.

We'll probably be having way more
conversations about it next year as

all these tools, maybe this list of
tools will be completely different

in six months, probably, possibly.

Yes.

And like, and subscribe
and all those things.

if you didn't know, I'm making
courses, links below into description.

See you soon.

Bye everybody.

Bye.

Cheers.