Because the agents are really good at React. Yes. Yes. And you know what? I will say, I did start a project with FoldKit, and I kinda really liked its output. So, we will see. Yeah. For sure. If you heard it here, folks... You heard it here first. No more svelte for Scott. Yes. Yeah. Well, no. That's not necessarily true.... Just spelled. But I was having problems specifically around state in a large application and FoldKit. Basically, like, we were talking about with, implicit State machines. Yeah. Full kit makes a lot of that less possible. Right. So because of that, you end up getting a lot of those benefits for free just based out of the framework. Okay. Yeah. Let's talk about another programming language, which is, Rust. Oh. Okay. We mentioned Rust. Okay. Rust being great to write is awesome. And Discord just announced that they were moving Discord themselves to Rust and using GPUI to do it. Incredible. Yeah. So there... There's a tweet from, Stanislav. He works at Discord. Yes. He's... Yeah. And he he has a screenshot of his, like, Windows task manager, and Discord Phoenix is the code name, only using 290 megabytes of RAM. And so, I mean, this is... We talked about it on the podcast before. Like, this is the age of everything getting faster and being rewritten with Rust. So I'm here for it. I mean, I know you've used GPUI quite a bit. But I think, like, as long as the app works, all of a sudden, I've got a gig extra RAM to use. I'm here for it. Yes. Folks. So let this be a thing. You just heard that Discord is moving to GPU. I've been talking about GPU UI for months, for many months now. And you heard me talking about FoldKit earlier in about about six months when other people start to catch on. I think FoldKit's gonna be getting some major press here. Just listen to just listen to the pod. Listen to Scott. You'll know what's coming next, basically. Syntax dot FM. We're live every single Monday, folks. Check us out. So how how do you feel about... This is clearly an agentic decision. Right? Discord is one of those apps that opens every sing... Or, like, re, reinstalls itself every single time you open it. Right? There's always an update coming. So, it's also an app that I've never thought was nonperformant. I I subscribe to maybe, like, 40, 50 Discord channels. Yeah. And I've always been surprised How well it handles that. That said, the fact that they were able to rewrite the entire application, Discord, no small application in GPUI, means that, like, man, we can optimize now easily for performance. Definitely. And I mean, you you think about, like, why did it take so long to do this? Like, one of the reasons they were using Electron is because it's cross platform. Yes. Right? They write one app. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. They have a massive user base. Distributed anywhere. Yeah. So Electron is great for that. And, I mean, you've talked about some of the woes of Tari. Yes. Like, it's similar to Electron, but it's gonna be a little bit faster, and it ships with the system WebView. But you run into a lot of potential compatibility issues with, like, WebKit on macOS versus, like, Chrome on Linux. And with Electron, you don't get that. So Yes. I understand why it was Electron for so long. Oh, yeah. And if you were talking Electron versus anything else, Electron still wins for a number. I mean, you can choose your exact, Chrome version with flags, in in Electron. So that... And then... Yes. And then every user gets that. But that's what you also get with GPU UI. Right? You have one one code base with GPU UI, and then you get a cross platform app that is native. It uses native UI elements on on every platform. So now's the time to do it. Like, we saw BUN was rewritten in Rust. Yes. And, there... We talked about it on the pod a few months back. But, Jared had an entire agentic flow of, like, take the existing code based and tests and then gradually port them, gradually Get them passing. I'm not sure if they could do a similar thing with an Electron app in its test because it's very, like, browser focused. But at the same time, agents have gotten really good at, like, taking a large code base and making sense of it in some other language or or reporting it to another... Yeah. I do wonder what that... How how that portability worked with testing and how they're testing infrastructure. Right. Like, did they convert the test? Yeah. I I I really am curious about that. That's really interesting. And on on top of this, anomaly They also re... Released Rune. Have you seen Rune?... Seen Rune. What is this? R u n e, as you typically spell Rune. Rune is their GPUi competitor. Oh, yeah. It is a Rust based GPU framework, and the idea here is, again, that it's going to look nice. And I haven't dove into it beyond just seeing that it was released and that it was a different Rust based framework for GPU, UI work. But... Okay. So they're gonna rebuild. Like, open code desktop. Or I guess they have built open code desktop with this, and now they're releasing it as open source for other people to use. Yes. That app that we talked about last week... Oh, man. Hex. Hex. Yeah. I got Dex. I got Rex. I got Hex. I got all these different apps on my, thing. But, that was built in Roon, and Okay. They were touting some of the abilities to have it look nice and fit in and, have good UI across all platforms. Right. And and make it See to do so. So this is another one to keep your eye on if you are wondering about making cross platform apps performant with Rust. But obviously, you get into the web space with some of these, and then you're you're what? You're rendering on a canvas, and you're not using DOM elements at that point. So it... It's not... You know what? The... There's all these different write once deploy anywhere solutions, whether it's, like, React Native translating it and then React Native web translating it back to web. Or any of that or taking web and rendering it as a web view in a phone or whatever. And there's Flutter is another one. There's Flutter. The Flutter folks are very, they will let us know if we forget Flutter again because I think there's too many times we've forgotten Flutter. The... But there... Where there hasn't necessarily been is truly the right once deploy anywhere and have that actually be native everywhere in a way that's effortless. I think the closest that we've gotten with this besides Flutter is, like, the React Native. React Native web world. But React Native is a a tough a tough platform, and we're seeing people move off of it all the time. Right? Yeah. I mean, again, I I never thought I'd see the day, but it's like you like, again, the reason Electron was so popular is, like, web devs already knew it, made it super... And also made it super simple to be cross platform. But now if the agent's writing the code and its performant, why not? Why not native? Why not? Yeah. Why not? Yeah. No. Totally agree with that. I I think there was Actually, there was another one that I just saw somebody talk about that was the right ones to play everywhere. And I'm trying to pull it up, but I cannot... It it just was announced, like, twelve hours ago. Was it is it Rust based? Or... Oh, CJ, that's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. Kevin, I don't know. There's too many things. There's too many dang things released all the time. Let it sit there. Maybe it'll come to you. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Cool. Okay. Cool. Let's get into some questions. We only get a ton of questions over here at Syntax. So I wanna dive into some questions that are coming in across the Web development and the development ecosystem overall. So we had a number of these questions come in. First one that we had come in was, how are y'all feeling about brain rot in big tech? Do we think software engineers at big companies are losing their skills without knowing it? And I kinda talked about this in my talk today. I did a talk today where at AI engineer... I... Obviously, people are losing their skills. In fact, in my survey that I did, I think it was, like, sixty seven percent of People listed that they feel like their skills are diminishing since using AI. But I think the bigger question isn't, do... Are we... Are our skills in coding diminishing? The bigger question is, does that matter? Yes. Right. I mean, again, I'm, like, biting my tongue on stuff I've said in the past. Like, our skill sets are shifting. Yes. They're shifting. They really are. And, like, you you talked about, like, lamenting or... And you you maybe didn't even think about it that much. But if you've been in this space long Like, things change and things move fast, especially if you're in the web dev space. Like, new APIs, new browsers, browsers get deprecated. And so if you ever had to, implement something for Internet Explorer six, there is no reason for you to know how to do that anymore. It is, like, no longer a thing. Yeah. And so it's gradually becoming, well, what is... What should our expertise be now? Like, what what what... Like, if it's not programming, then are are we now, orchestrators? Are we now, like, tech leads? So I I do see us moving more and more towards that. At at the same time, like, in order to be a really good architect or tech lead, you kind of need to know how things work under the hood to be able to come up with good decisions and have good guidance on things. The agents will still do whatever the hell they want. Right. I mean... And I found that with the the tool that I'm working on right now, like, it does whatever it wants, but then I I reign it back in. I'm like, hey, we need to be a little bit more performant over here, or we need to share code a little bit more. And I know that because I Myself have worked in large code bases. So so, like, those kind of skills, like, definitely translate. In terms of where the brain rot is happening, like, I think it's at multiple levels, though, because a lot of it comes from management. Like, management is like, use AI, move fast, and then developers are having to stay caught up, and then they're burning out. And so now they can't even worry about, do they still know how to code? Mhmm. So it's happening, but it's all, I think, part of this big shift of, like, where where do we... Where are we going? Where are we headed? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The... Okay. So, a thing I will say, and I said this during my talk. So, I will say there are things that I used to do in web development. I used to I used to know every browser hack for Internet Explorer five, Internet Explorer six, and I haven't had to use... I used to be able to write Angular components by hand. Yeah. Me too. I haven't had to do this in so long that my brain... And it has Feed in those skills. So, like, does that matter anymore? It doesn't matter. I don't have to produce a website for Internet Explorer five ever again. Right. So those skills are gone. And, some of those things you can lament and you can mourn the loss of those skills. But at the end of the day, things have shifted. Right. And so, yeah, they've shifted, and I think it more... It it becomes what should be important. Like, I I absolutely don't think it should be. We are just prompters. Just prompt, prompt, prompt. There's has to be some thought behind that Yes. And that's where the skills are shifting to. And so I do agree that there is actually brain rot in that gray area. Oh, yeah. Like, people are like, all I do is prompt now. I don't actually have to worry about... I think you still need... If you wanna have a good product, if you wanna have a good team, you should still care about those things. So... Well, yeah. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it it is looking for a simple solution at the end of the day. Because what we saw, especially with the, the rise of Vibe coding, was that people were just hucking all kinds of stuff Knows what into their their browser. And you say, oh, who cares? The app works fine. It gets a decent lighthouse scores, and then you look at it, and the entire DOM is duplicated twice. Once for desktop and once for mobile, and you're just like, what are we doing here? You know? That that stuff still matters for sure. It still matters. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Alright. Let's... Next question here. Just... Could you say a few words about what vibe coding actually means in 2026? As a middle level developer, I see most, if not all others Using AI as it's impossible to compete without it. But for many, vibe coded is now a slur. Mhmm. Yeah. Sometimes unfairly thrown at handwritten projects, projects with AI by experienced devs and fairly non coders and with expensive models. So Yes. Vibe coding, is it a bad term? Is it a loaded term? What is it... What does it mean in 2026? Is it a dead term? What... What's up with that? I mean, my my initial gut reaction to the term was, like, it's it's a very specific Kind of AI coding where you don't care about the code. Yes. It's all about the vibes. But the coding that I've been doing lately, like, I I would call it vibe coding because I'm... AI is writing all of the code. Yes. But, again, like I talked about earlier, I'm still making all of these decisions. I'm still orchestrating it. I'm still, engineering it, AI engineering. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I am still... Like, you still have to... So, yeah, I I don't... I wouldn't call what I'm doing with the tool that I'm building vibe coding. I would call it AI assist Engineering. But I do see, like, vibe coding being thrown around as a slur. Like, you can just... You... Somebody post their app and, like, oh, that was vibe coded. Yeah. Don't care about it. So it's tricky because it's... There's a... It's a tough line to walk, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. It it is funny because it does seem like there's a group of people with... If anything had AI had a hand in it at any point, it's labeled as Vibe coated slop or whatever, toss it in the bin, which I think anybody who's been using any of the models In a modern context, like, modernism, like, the past, you know, two weeks. Yeah. Who who knows in this industry anymore? Right? Anybody who's been using models in that regard knows that, like, hey, things have shifted, and the models have gotten better. So I don't know. Yeah. To me, like, there has... Like, the language doesn't, like, kinda bugs me a little bit that people get so hung up on the terms or whatever. Right. But I understand why they exist. What I don't get is, like, the insistence of throwing Everything out just because AI is used. That said, there are some things when you have clear tells of AI that are bad Yeah. Like, that that will show a lack of care, show a lack of taste, show a lack of control over what you're doing. And those those types of things, I I think, stand out in a way that really turns people off instantly. I would not tell you how many YouTube videos I turn on these days, and I get, like, two minutes into it. I'm like, oh, this is This is a Claude script. Toss this. I... I'm done with this. They're reading from Claude. Their animations were generated from Claude. But then there there was no follow-up. Right? There was no editing. There was no tweaking, making it their own. Yeah. And and and the script from Claude really kinda bugs me too. Not that it Claude's the problem. The script from AI bugs me. Because when you can see somebody reading a script that they didn't have any hand in creating, it's just... You... It it feels like why am I bothering to care about this if you didn't care about this? Right. You know? Yeah. Definitely. Yes. Okay. So we're gonna play a quick little game here. Let's do a game, CJ. Okay. I'm ready. Okay. Folks, we're gonna be doing a game. So if anybody walks by, they wanna play in this game, please join in. If not, it's just gonna be CJ. That's all good. We're gonna be playing guess which AI model made this. You can join at any given time. You can join in the middle of the game. Let's see if you can do it. We got a few of these up here. So, CJ, are you ready? Let's do it. Okay. Audience, if you are out there, you Want to play. Scan this QR code. You can join at any given time. We're gonna open this up with the very first one here. Oh, brother. I lost my WiFi. Okay. Let's open this bad button up. Oh, I see it. Okay. So it's, it's slowly loading. Which button is Opus 5.5? Alright. Which of these buttons did Opus 5.5 make? Okay. So option a, I see, like, the green gradient, decent font choices. And then option b has a bunch of extra stuff. Top and bottom. I'm gonna go with a. Opus did a. You think Opus did a? Okay. Yes. Really? You're wrong. Opus did b. And, the a was actually Grok 4.6. Oh, good grok. It's got some interesting, font choices. And it doesn't have any... Yeah. Alright. You asked them for a button, and they gave you three, like, tag lines below it. Yes. It gave you Like, that's... I don't have that experience with the opening. And this one is kind of similar. So which of these is Sonnet four five? Okay. Sonnet four five. If this is a year old, a year ago Yes. Again, the the prompt was asking for a button. So, I mean, again, I'm gonna go with b because I think Sonnet... Wasn't Sonnet that decent back then? Sonnet four five. Yeah. Okay. Let's see, CJ. You're going with b. B. K. I am horrible. Oh, no. I I am... No. I'm horrible at... No. No. I... Sonic four five was in fact the one that... Okay. And the other one was Gemini three one, which did a pretty decent dot... Pretty decent job. Yeah. Learning that, I'd I'd like other models, I guess. Yes. Yes. Yes. Folks, you can join at any time. If you're walking by, we're playing... Guess which model made this? So the prompt for this one, was also a button. We asked this to make a button. Which of these did Muse Wonder one point o make? I haven't used Muse Wonder at all. It's got the name wonder in it. I'm gonna go with b. Yes. It looks one... It looks wondrous. Is that a word? Two models also kinda failed. The, the prompt of a single button. Yes. We need a button here. And one of them has this awful, overflow issue. So let's let's read. Oh, yeah. Yes. Muse. Nice. Muse decided to make a whole ass card for this instead of a a button. So alright. Next one here. Which one of these flyers did Opus four five make? Four five. Again, so four... Not five five. Four five, which is, like, eight or nine months old. Ten months. Sold at this point. This is four five. Yes. I mean, I kind of associate, like, the really decent backgrounds and font choices with the newer ones. So I'm gonna say... But there's a lot of emoji... There's emojis in both of them. Four five. There is emoji. Yeah. This is hard. Okay. I'm gonna go I'm gonna go b. Oh, four five did b. You're gonna say four five is b. Okay. Four five Months ago. I don't remember. Is b. Yes. Okay. Sweet. The a was, of course, five Five. So quite a bit better. Yeah. Yeah. The emojis are certainly a tell of an era. Right? Right. Very a tell of an era. Folks, you can join at any time if you wanna play. We got the next one here. Which one of these flyers did Grok 4.6 do? Okay. We learned a little bit about Grok earlier. Are they still loading for you? They loaded? Oh, they they loaded. Okay. There we go. Again, so this one has emojis. I wanna think, like, Grok sets themself apart so they don't use emojis. I'm gonna go with a. Grok 46 is a. You're gonna say it's a. Yeah. Okay. Which one of these did grok 4.6 make? And it was a yes. I got three right. Yes. The other one was Sonnet four five, which you can tell from '20 two here, Sonnet be loving those emojis for sure. It's just emojis. Yeah. It's a it's a tell at this point. It's those emojis. Yes. Alright. The next one here is these two flyers. Which one of these did Gemini 3.1 do? Gemini three one. That's the late... That's the latest one. That's modern Gemini. Like, I would I would hope it was b because a looks very basic. I'm gonna go with b. Gemini with b. CJ is saying b. The votes are coming in. And, yeah. He's got a bunch of emojis. Which one did Gemini three one... Do Gemini use emojis? I don't know. I don't use Gemini. Oh, my god. Okay. Apparently, Gemini uses all these emojis. Yeah. Sadly. Get your stuff together, Gemini. This is a frontier model. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Muse Blender actually did a little bit better of a job than Last one we saw here. So... Okay. Yeah. Okay. Next up, we got some inboxes. Oh. So these ones are a little bit tighter. They're a little bit harder to see. Which one of these did Gemini three one did? It's gotta be a. Like, b has either ChatGPT or Claude. Like, it feels like chat g p t isms on the right, the, like, the font choices. So I'm gonna go with a. Gemini did a. K. You think Gemini did a, and Gemini Oh, Groc. Did a. Groc four six did b. Yeah. And that'd be looking like that'd be looking like last year's Opus or something, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could have told me that was Opus four or five or six. I would. I would. Thank you. Alright. Next one. Which one of these is Opus five five? A or b? I'll say, this is modern Opus, but again, both of these have tons of emojis. Both of them have emojis. Yes. We thought the emojis were gone. No. I I wanna say A. No. I'm gonna go b. Opus did b. Okay. CJ says that Opus did b, folks. Just a gut feeling. I don't know what to say.... Feeling. Which one is which? And, actually, what do you think... Let me even... What do you think option a is? Some some model I've never used. I'll say that. Looks like you're right on both. So muse wonder did option a and opus. Five five did option b. So you were right on that one. Cool. Okay. Let's see. We Got one more here for you folks. Which one of these was SONNET four five? Again, SONNET four five is ten months ago at this point. This is a toss-up because they're both pretty bland. There's emojis on the right. I'm gonna go with, like... AI was using a ton of emojis, like, a year ago. I'm gonna go with b. Okay. You're gonna say b. Yeah. What do you think, option a is? May I hold you to that? Gemini. Gemini. Okay. So Oh. Option b was Right. Sonnet four five, and, option a was Opus Wow. Four five. So these... Those models were out at the same time. Yes. And then... I mean, the the one on the left was, like, very bland. Like Yes. No character, I guess. I mean, how much character are you doing in an email box? I guess I need some character. I... And and my... What was it? Google inbox was my favorite email app of all time. Nice. Sick. Alright. Well, that's it for which LLM was this. Next, get back and we also have Audience questions in here. So next question was going to be, now that no one uses Google as a search term anymore, will the word Google stop being a verb? No one is saying, let me Google that. If search isn't a thing anymore, how is Google gonna stay in business? Listen. Google... Like, we are... Like, most people using Google now use the AI answers. Right? The AI overviews. So, I think that term is still there. Like, that verb is still there. Like, let me Google it. And then they don't look at the results. They just look at AI answer. Yes. I use... I still say Google, and I don't use Google. I use DuckDuckGo. So, like Yeah. It's gonna be a while before I shake it as a verb. I don't know. What about you? Yeah. What is it gonna take? A whole generation before Google is gone as a term, when people are gonna be gonna be that that I... IOS computer, that I... IOS commercial. Like, what's a computer? Like, what's a Google? Yeah. I I mean, I don't know. I I don't really say Google anyways as a verb. So I think it... I think it's mostly done. And I've heard people say Let me GPT that. So that's, like, the new verb. Yeah. People people actually... I have been hearing that Yeah. In the wild, like, at the airport and stuff like that. And and not in California's airport, in, in Denver's airport. Yeah. Probably get time for one more. Yeah. Okay. So we got one more one more question in here. Which one do you wanna pick, CJ? You got a question you wanna pick in particular? We got one about WebMCP. We got about, Let's do the let's do the one about apps, because this is this is very relevant. Like, anybody Trying to build something right now. Yes. So why release an app? Yeah. Okay. So this question came in, and it says, we used to build apps for ourselves and then release them to the world in the hope that someone may find them useful. And then maybe develop a reputation and make a few dollars. Why release an app nowadays though? When if it's any good, there's gonna be 100 slop cones within a week, and it'll all get lost in the wire. Yeah. Yeah. My initial thoughts are, like, if you actually put Care and thought into it and don't just, like, vibe code and then throw up a link to a GitHub repo or whatever else. Like, people are gonna care. Like, the... When people become a, like, actual user of an app and, come back to it, I think it's because they they know that there was care put into it. Right? Like like, it's a nice user experience. Or, like... So right now, I'm working on a developer tool. It's not exactly like this, but I put so much effort into the docs and so much effort into making sure that people understood what this tool was. Some TL. See. And what it could do... And, like, a lot of people are just like, they build the tool and then, like, let AI write the read me and don't put any thought into it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's still space for it, but you have to care. Yeah. Like, because you'll just be one more app in the sea of apps that everybody just slopped together. So I think care is what it comes down to. Yeah. Care is what it comes down to. I think the the perfect example of this Yeah. Is Rex, the Rex terminal. My gosh. The Rex terminal... The hex or Rex? Rex. Rex. Okay. Rex. Yeah. Rex is the terminal. Hex is the, voice Voice voice... And then, Dex is the issue tracker. My gosh. Okay. So Rex is an app that's built with a lot of care. And you can tell it's built with a lot of care, because everything, even the little notification that says you have an update, is beautiful. It's it's, like, got a marquee. It's designed well. And it is like thought and care is put into every Tiny corner of this application. And when you have things like that and you compare it to a slopped alternative, it makes it very clear that the people who are putting the care into it are still going to get, attention. They're still going to get users, and they're still going to get downloads. There is people who are making a lot of money building small developer tools these days, releasing them to an audience of people who like their work, and then still have Pay for that stuff. Right. So you do hear everybody saying they're they're all vibe coding their own personal software these days. I am too. Trust me. There's all kinds of stuff I'm vibe coding, as personal software these days as well. But the cream still rises to the top. So... I agree. A 100%. Yes. CJ, what are we at for time here? I mean, I think, technically, we're at our limit. So... Okay. Folks, this has been it from AIE. We're in San Francisco. It's gonna be a great conference here. My name is Scott Talinski. This is CJ And worse syntax. Ace. Picture a pull request. It changes a schema in one of our data pipelines. It goes green in CI. The tests pass. The linter is happy, and everything about it looks green. So is it safe to urge? Because a change like this can still break something downstream. Maybe it blows a freshness SLA, or maybe it breaks a consumer three teams away who never saw it coming. Or maybe it exposes data that never supposed to be reachable. That gap between CI past and this change was actually safe is the gap my team has to close every day. Hello, everyone. I'm Chaitas. I'm an engineer on the data platform team at Robinhood. I design and build the distributed data ingestion and processing frameworks behind our data lake, the ones teams across the company rely on to make decisions with data. Notice the title of this talk. The bots in it are the ones opening the pull requests. And as you will see, the ones reviewing them as well. Today, I want to show you how we answer that question when the PRs are coming in faster than any of us can read them. So here's the problem in one sentence. Pull requests to our production data pipelines now arrive at machine speed, but reviewing them safely still runs at human speed. First, a quick word on the scope of this talk because it shapes everything else in this talk. AI coding assistants have made pull requests cheap to open. A new query, a schema change, or an access grant now takes just a few minutes. And an assistant can open pull requests far faster than any team of humans ever could. The PRs I'm talking about today are the PRs toward data pipelines, like schema changes, pipeline code, configuration changes, and grants that give someone access to data. Data platform is the team that owns reviewing that kind of PR. So when those PRs pile up, they pile up on us. And the reviewer I'm about to describe is a We built to handle them. So the people who feel this are a small group, the engineers who carry the context to say what is safe to merge into production and everyone who is waiting on them. So why is this a problem? AI open PRs just keep arriving. And to be fair, the safety net we already had works. CI checks, together with the human review, have always caught a lot of Field bugs, like broken code, inefficient queries, and risks, like downstream breakage or sensitive data leaks. But the human half only works at the human speed and only with the context a person happens to carry in their head. Who reads this table? How big is it? And how sensitive is the data in it? The PRs are coming in at the machine speed, but the number of people who understand what is safe to merge into a production data pipeline did not grow at all. That's the mismatch. The queue builds up in front of the few people with the context, and that's where things start to slip. So the problem we set out to solve was this, build a PR reviewer using AI that can keep up with the speed at which PRs are being opened. So here's the whole answer before we get into the details. Three duties, three owners. Scripts prove what can be proven.