Welcome to Pleb Chain Radio, a live show brought to you by Plebs for Plebs, which focuses
on the intersection of Nostra and Bitcoin protocols.
Join QW and Avi as they run down the weekly news and developments, breaking down the current
thing and the future frontier with the foundation of decentralization, the builders, thinkers,
doers and plebs.
All right, we are live.
Welcome, gentle plebs, to the lightning-laced airwaves. It is Friday the 5th of September.
We're in September already, QW. Look at that. And it is episode 128 of Pleb Chain Radio.
It's exactly 4pm on the dot on the East Coast of the United States at the time of recording.
we have a fun show ahead of you today
Alex Gleason, the Gleasonator
also the creator of
Soapbox and Shakespeare
is here to break
all of that down for us
and a reminder folks
if you are listening to the show on Apple or Spotify
first of all thank you for listening
but I would urge you to hit pause
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ad free this show is streamed live on zap.stream and a burgeoning list of Noster clients that
support streaming such as Amethyst, Noster, Fountain and in the recent past QW we had a bit
for Misfire last week with the denial of service attack on Zap.stream. But as of this week for us,
streamed live on Primal as well. I see it, Avi. I see it. We're live. We are live. What's up,
Primal? We made it. That's good to know. Yeah. It is good to know, QW. And you've been paying
attention to Bitcoin and Noster culture in the last week. What have you witnessed?
everyone's a streamer, Avi. Everyone's testing their own stream. I'm seeing a lot of the pop-ups
because I mean, I follow a lot of people. I mean, I got skin in the game with the friend zone,
the social graph. So I mean, just right now there's, well, we got Odell streaming. We got
Walker streaming. We got the grinder doing his gaming. I'm seeing a lot of testing. So it's,
I think everyone's just playing with the new toys, the new shiny toys.
And that's specifically primal users because, you know, there's a good amount of primal users.
So everyone's playing with the shiny toys.
And I'm noticing people like Sergio testing things, the Bitcoin bartender.
It's just great to see.
Obviously, you know, we're seeing that 24-hour stream from Scardust.
it's just it's neat to see everything kind of come together in a smooth fashion so
it's something where people are like hey how do I do that so now they're trying it and I've
noticed a lot of people just watching a silly stream I think everyone just testing the chat
testing the zap just testing the features and that's what I mean like million said I think it
was in Prague Nostra is just one big experiment right now and that's essentially what everyone's
doing. We're experimenting. So it's, it's fun. And looks like we just got a 42 set zap on primal
possibly. So, you know, they're going to be testing while we're, we're, we're talking here,
Avi. And what's more poetic than that beyond Shakespeare, but totally Nostra. That's the
Nostra culture. Just test away. So yeah, that's what, that's what I'm noticing. And dare I say,
Butzikol Avi. I'm not going to go into it, but this week was overtaken by an interesting probiotic
pleb suggestion. So there you go. I'm sorry for saying it.
And what have you got for our sermon today, KW?
Well, you know, experimenting, experimenting, and I've experimented. I've done a little bit
of vibe coding. I'm kind of a, I'm like a Luddite, I feel like is in regards to moving along with AI.
Obviously you were kind of a first mover. You can, and I asked you about AI. I'm like, Hey,
which, which AI should I use for this, that, and you have, you know, you have, you were pretty much
doing it for your job at one time too, at least applying it. So you've kind of been my, my Miyagi
in a way. And I come from a very hands-on service-led industry, construction. It's tough
for me to wrap my, just believe in it, I suppose. But I've tried it. I use it now. I'm starting to
integrate it. I'm starting to use it within our business. So I'm coming around. But when it comes
to this vibe coding, and I see a lot on Nostra because Nostra is a place of experimenting. You
get a lot of people that we appreciate the coders, we appreciate the developers. Are we there yet,
Avi? Are we there yet? Has vibe coding truly arrived or is it a time-consuming bug-filled
experiment? Does the final product equal the cost or is there even a final polished product?
I want to believe anyone could be a coder. I want to believe I am as well.
but if I go to the driving range once, am I now a golfer? And that's one of the big things. It's
like, you know, I'm a coder. I mean, you can be, it's a meme in a way, but I feel like the
development just keeps getting better. It gets better. But at the same time, there's a graveyard
of proof of concepts, essentially, abandoned where riddled with in recent history. I've seen
last one month, you know, you'll see, oh, look at this mini app, this mini app, you try it. And then
the person that developed it's onto the next one. And maybe that's a contagion of how exciting this
is. But I don't see that. I see me using it. And then I'm like, hey, what happened here? What
happened to this bug? And then the person that developed it's onto the next thing. So there's
certainly a problem there. But, you know, I like to think that AI development, just like we've seen
with anything, it will get better and that problem will solve itself. But, you know, is it today?
Are we truly there yet, Avi? I don't think we're truly there yet,
Kitabi. And, you know, we've talked about this a few times on the show. And I expressed the view
that the vast majority of Vibe-coded apps that are coming out now, it's akin to the meme coin
mania, right? You just keep, it's trying to catch attention. Most of them fail. They enter the
graveyard of abandonware.
But there might be one or two that do succeed.
If I'm not mistaken, BitChat was largely Vibe-coded.
BitChat is Jack Dorsey's app.
We've talked about this as well on the last couple of shows.
If I'm not mistaken.
It's a good point, though.
Successful Vibe-coded apps done by actual coders
have a great chance of success, correct?
Well, yes.
They can actually fix things and they understand what's going on.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And I know it's going to help a lot.
So, you know, I want to learn more.
I'm going to be a contrarian in this during this episode because I think Alex, he's got a great mind.
And I think we can talk about this.
So, yeah.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
Welcome to the show, the Gleasonator.
And Alex is actually sending us 100 sats every time we call them the Gleasonator.
Hello, hello. Happy to be here.
I hope I didn't offend you with my contrarian view when we opened the sermon there.
You're about to get glicinated, buddy.
I hope so. And I think there's a lot of people like me that maybe don't understand or maybe can't see the future because we have no experience in the past.
So, you know, I like to take that view and, you know, sprinkle a little fairy dust on it, I suppose.
No, absolutely.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, and you've done a show with Avi.
Avi, did you want to plug your other show while we're here?
Well, you know, it will be an interesting one for folks to listen to.
This is on my AI-focused podcast called Acceleration.
uh it's the sixth episode i think alex we spoke two or three months ago and i think it'll be an
interesting one for folks to listen to because uh it's at this point a historical artifact
we talked about ai developments that are completely out of date as of today uh but uh but alex maybe
we start where we usually do on the show we're just talking a little bit about your journey to
NOSTA and well actually decentralized social media because that's something you've been big in
how did that journey begin and how did that lead you to NOSTA yeah so I want to just say
acceleration is the name of the game right now and I also have so many thoughts about
what has been said that I want to pick apart but in terms of how I got started so you know
back in the day, I always thought I was going to be an artist. And so I was working on creating a
book. And this kind of got me down into this rabbit hole of copyright and open source. And
I ended up realizing my talents were better spent doing programming. But I've always kind of taken
this, you know, artist's point of view on the things that I build. And another big motif, I guess,
of my life has been freedom. You know, seeking freedom and fighting for freedom, not just for
myself, but for other people too. And, and so I've been involved in open source for a really long
time. And I knew that social media is a big area to, for improvement in terms of user freedom.
And so that's why I was really excited when I started seeing solutions like Mastodon come out,
because I'm like, oh, wow, you know, this is maybe the solution to the problem.
So I jumped into that and I started just building stuff on it.
I created Soapbox, which at the time was a fork of Mastodon.
But now really today it's more the name of our organization than anything.
But that word, Soapbox, has meant different things throughout the years.
But then I went on from there to become the head of engineering at Truth Social,
which is a crazy twist of events.
I still can't believe that happened.
And it feels like a dream to me when I think back on it now.
And that was just a crazy timing situation where I was in the right place at the right time, I guess, or the wrong place, depending on what your perspective is on political matters.
But it was a really big opportunity for me.
And so I was happy to help, especially because I didn't think that Donald Trump should have been banned off of Twitter.
even though I don support his policies in other ways that just my point point of view as a principled like freedom advocate So yeah so I helped build Truth Social
I eventually quit when I realized that our visions were not aligned anymore because I really still wanted to do open source decentralized freedom tech.
And it was clear to me that that's not what they wanted to do.
They wanted to do a conservative hug box where they get to control, you know, speech of their political opponents.
So once I realized that that's what was happening, which is probably obvious to anyone else looking in on this thing, then I'm like, all right, I'm out.
And so from there, I had been doing stuff in ActivityPub and the Fediverse and Mastodon.
But as I was changing that part of my life and career, I decided that now would be the best time to jump into Noster.
and so the first thing I did was I built a bridge between ActivityPub and Noster which I know that
Avi and many other people on Noster hates but I think that I think that it's been a great success
in many ways because it has shown that when you have two decentralized systems that they can be
linked together in a permissionless way and and the only reason a person would dislike this is
because of like culture clash between these, you know, these differing groups. Um, so that was
sort of my first foray into it. And then I, I started developing more Noster software and
eventually led down the path of building stuff with AI. Um, because of, I mean, it got to a point
where I just couldn't ignore the acceleration anymore. Um, and so I'm like, all right, I got
to embrace this or die uh and i at first it was a little bit of doom and gloom about it but but
then as i started building stuff on i'm like you know this is actually really fun um and so my some
of my most recent work involves mk stack stack cli and shakespeare and so when we talked last time i
i think stacks was released but shakespeare was not released now shakespeare.diy is a thing
And I'm working on a second version of it currently that I'm really excited to tell you guys about.
So that's basically it. That's my whole life story up until up until here.
Let me know what. Yeah, go ahead.
I want to pull the string on that true social because I agree with you.
It was not about, you know, it wasn't about believing in a person's point of view.
It was believing his freedom of speech and how truth social came about was,
was really people were getting censored or taken down on X or social media platforms around the main ones.
And then you had these pop-up ones like Parler, Gab.
Gab got inundated.
You couldn't even use the thing because there were so many people going there and maybe it was getting attacked.
Parler, that was an amazing thing because it was getting, I think Amazon Web Service took down Parler.
Exactly.
So it was this technology.
I mean, it wasn't just one person.
It exposed the fragility of the internet.
Exactly.
And I don't think, and how much these conglomerates or these corporations were actually working, meshed with the government.
And I think that's just going to be what we're going to see in the EU.
We're going to see around the world if you don't continue to have these other options keep popping up.
And it was funny because all of a sudden Truth came out and, you know, it was a president of the United States.
So somewhere along the line, he was a little bit more untouchable when it came to that.
I don't know.
But why do you think, and we don't have to get into it, maybe just a quick reason, but why do you think Gab and Parler didn't work out but Truth did?
I'm not sure the truth worked out.
I don't think it's working out, but I'm saying it was actually functional, right?
Because everything else was getting just blown up.
Or maybe it was a little bit of the Elon purchase.
Because I was involved.
Yeah.
Well played.
All right.
Well, we don't need to go into that.
It was just when you started talking about that, I was like, you know, that was all cause and effect.
And it was interesting times.
I can say that.
I actually want to pull on the thread a little.
not on the truth part, but what you said, Alex, about the fragility of the internet. I don't think
people were fully exposed or were exposed to the full fragility of the internet, because what they
saw with, you know, in early 2021, when all of this was going down, was just one layer of fragility,
which is, oh, wow, Amazon, it's not just that a person can be banned from a platform, a new
platform can pop up and Amazon can ban them. But there are other layers of censorship that can
happen in the internet, such as, we didn't see this, but potentially the App Store level, right?
Google and Apple could have delisted the app if Amazon didn't. And then even let's say Amazon or
Azure or whoever the storage provider is, they didn't block them, the App Store didn't block
then there's still the DNS level risk, right?
So there are multiple layers of fragility.
So given that, Alex,
do you think we can have a true censorship resistant
communications medium?
I mean, I think Noster is a pretty good bet
because it's not really using the existing infrastructure
the way it's intended to be used, right?
And that's an interesting thing about new technologies
is we're like building and building upon
these things that have been done in the past, but not necessarily in the way that they were
intended to be used. And that's when I think that things can get really powerful. So on Noster,
DNS, that's a potential layer that can be threatened, right? But since the actual data
that people are sending over the Noster network is content addressable, it can be uploaded to any
number of relays on different URLs. So like if a relay gets shut down on like a DNS level,
it's like probably recoverable. Probably that data already exists on a different relay on a
different URL or that relay operator can just spin up a new URL. So I think because it is like
sort of designed and built in a way that's not, wasn't using things in ways that they weren't
necessarily intended to be used originally.
That we're sort of operating within this system to the degree that we have to in order to
be accessible at all to the outside world.
But the design of it is in a fairly censorship resistant way.
So do you think you could have, so let's say all three of those layers clamped down,
DNS level, App Store level, and server level.
What would the Nostra's path be in that scenario?
Well, App Store level, you can get around that by just publishing PWA on the web.
You can get around that by just creating new apps under different names and different organizations that essentially do the same thing.
But the App Store situation is really bad.
I feel like people are voting for this every time they are, you know, buying and using an iPhone.
And Android is really not that much better.
But we need people to be, like, saying, no, maybe this is unrealistic.
I think everyone should just install Graphene OS.
I know that this is unrealistic.
But I wish that people would do a little bit more in their day-to-day.
Is it really that hard to not use centralized social media platforms?
And so if people aren't even willing to do that,
then I'm willing to blame them a little bit
for the things that are harder for them to control too.
But what were the other layers?
DNS, App Store, and then what was the last one you mentioned?
Well, just the storage and compute layer, right?
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.
Oh, right.
Hosting providers.
So I currently have a server rack in my living room.
And I think that people have just not been creative enough in their ways that they can work around web hosting limitations.
Because you definitely can.
Right.
So local hosting, progressive web apps, and then...
Just run your own server, Avi.
Come on, bro.
You got to get the purity stack going.
So were there lessons from truth that led to Soapbox?
I mean, really, what brought you to Soapbox?
What was your grand – what was the big instigation?
So it was because I really liked –
It's taken multiple forms, correct?
So maybe talk about the name itself.
So it's because I really liked Mastodon, but I felt like Mastodon was doing it wrong.
And they have these cookie cutter Mastodon sites that all say Mastodon, and they're trying to make it like it's all one platform from a branding and marketing perspective.
And I thought, no, that's wrong.
Actually, we should be targeting different communities of people with a custom brand.
And so it started out literally as a fork of Mastodon, and then the technology stack has evolved over time to be broken up into a bunch of different pieces and be operable on many different types of architectures.
But the vision of it was just like, hey, build your own social network and have it be connected to this decentralized internet, this future of the web.
So that was really the initial idea.
and and i think now with ai it actually is still the same fundamental idea of hey build your own
thing and have it be connected with you know this decentralized web with shakespeare um it's just
that you know in prior in previous version of soapbox you have like a theme uh customizer user
interface and you'd have a color color swatches that you can click and you can click and drag
to change from like green to a blue to a yellow,
and you can upload a custom logo.
And that was really the best we could do
in terms of user level customization.
But now I'm seeing a potential future
where we don't even need a user interface like that
to customize a website anymore.
It's just a text field.
And then you tell the AI exactly
what type of customizations you want
and what type of website you want.
and then it can just create that on the spot for you
and create something completely custom
beyond what we could ever do
with buttons and toggles and sliders
in like a customizer UI.
So I'm still really excited about this idea
of building social platforms
catered towards specific communities or groups
and Shakespeare is just a new way of doing that And then there was Ditto at one point right Alex
Ditto is still around.
Ditto is like the main way that I interact with Noster.
And so Ditto is the idea of kind of just taking all of the work that I had built on Mastodon
and on the Fediverse and transferring that to Noster.
So it's the same user experience as the user experience of people running their own social platforms on their own domain name and, you know, customizing it for a particular audience.
But it's still, you know, toggles and sliders and color pickers.
And I think that this idea is going to just be something that becomes lost in history once you can prompt an AI.
And so I, you know, switching over to developing on Shakespeare has kind of taken me a step back in a way from where I was with Ditto because I had this like really polished product.
But I'm trying to get sort of back there to where people are able to build these really polished products.
And it seems like we've actually come very far with it a lot more than you might expect.
so after that then alex you got and we're building up the timeline here getting to shakespeare but
you got involved in the and other stuff collective uh which led to uh stacks and mk stack so what
for folks who are unfamiliar what is the and other stuff collective and what is happening with it
today? Yeah. So it's, it's a group of people, um, involving, uh, me, Rabble, Callie, Jeff,
uh, Jack, Liz. Um, and, and we're just trying to sort of approach how to make Noster win from a
different angle than we were doing before. And so it's sort of like, you know, this consortium,
I guess, of people where we're kind of touching base more often on what each other are doing
and trying to collaborate as much as we can so that we can share resources
and ultimately try to make Noster win.
and your involvement in that consortium or collective or what you will is leading the ai
pillar right correct so so uh mine is the communities pillar and the way i perceive
of it is that there there is this connection and overlap between communities and ai
to where my community's vision is something that would be fulfilled through AI tooling.
Did you check into Rabble this week, what he was doing for the collective?
What do you mean?
Oh, last I saw he was wearing a cat blow-up outfit at Broadway.
Oh, yeah, that's awesome.
Maybe he'd be on the community pillar too there.
Nice.
Sorry to interject, Avi.
No, no, that was good.
So as part of that, then, Alex, you worked on Stacks and MKStack.
Could you give a simple overview of what Stacks is and what MKStack is?
Sure.
So Stacks is the idea that we can make an AI able to create an application with a much higher level of performance.
And by performance, I mean quality of the output, not necessarily speed.
Probably it's going to take, you know, 10 minutes to develop an initial version of an application in any case.
But when you don't use a stack, if you just go raw on like an empty directory in like an AI coding tool, your results may vary.
And the idea of stacks is that we, like a developer, will have an idea of a particular architecture that they want, a particular programming language, a particular paradigm with some desired output, right?
So in the case of MKStack, the desired output is a Noster web client that people can access by visiting a URL in a web browser.
And so that stack is one that involves Node.js, NPM, package.json, React, Tailwind CSS, Vite, ViteSt, and sort of connecting all of those pieces together in a template.
template that has, it's a template, it's a folder full of files that already have, you know, some
code in place, but not a fully functioning application, just enough code to where an LLM
can look at it and kind of say, okay, I understand what's going on here. This looks like, you know,
projects I've seen in my training data. And then most importantly, there's an agents.md file,
which is a big file that contains a bunch of context information for the llm to train it to
do things in the in the best way so the way that comes about is first we start with these just these
files and we have no agents.md file right and that's our initial version of our stack and then
i iterate upon this by by typing a prompt as you know i clone the stack i type a prompt it may be
build me a site like twitter on noster build me a site like instagram on noster build me a noster
badges site these types of prompts and then i'll just see what did the llm do wrong if anything
um and if if there's anything that i felt like it did wrong or could be improved
then i have it go and add information to the agents.md file clarifying how to do this thing
in a correct way. So like, for example, querying data from Nostra relays, right? At first,
there wasn't really any guidance in the agents file of how to do that. And so it wouldn't do it
correctly. So I added, you know, little pieces of code in there to abstract it as much as possible
to create minimal surface area for the LLM to where the LLM only has to care about calling a
particular function and then in the agents.md file we just say we have a section called querying
noster data and then we we have code examples saying here's how you can how you can import and
call this function in order to get noster data and so now when people run this stack and then they say
build me a site like like twitter on noster it has the information it needs for how to actually
query a feed of people that you follow because it it just has that little bit of information so
is this iterative process of having a basically a project template and a context file and then
and then trying different prompts with it seeing what it gets stuck on and then improving that
context file and and the end result is something that is both generalized in in a sense and
specialized in a sense. It's specialized in the actual stack sense of these are the technologies
that are being used for this particular purpose, right? A Nostra Web Client. But it's also
generalized in a sense that because this is an LLM, you can build any type of Nostra Web Client
that you want to build. And so that's stacks in a nutshell. So agents.md sounds like a living,
breathing context file.
Exactly.
Now, is that within the context of a given project,
or is that once it's updated,
is it available to anyone trying to build on MKStack?
So it's within the context of a specific project.
So once you clone an MK,
once you clone MKStack into your own project,
it copies that agents.md file,
and it also gives you the opportunity
to add and update it as well.
Because you're kind of taking a snapshot of the current version of MKStack at that particular time, including all of the files it references.
And so the context file has to be congruent with the files that are on there as well.
So there's no way to upgrade your MKStack to like a newer version of MKStack because that's just not how it works, right?
If there's improvements that we've made, ways that you can get updates to them are to say to the LLM, hey, go look at this MKStack thing and see if there's anything valuable that could be added in here.
Or just vibe it again.
Use the same prompts that you used before and just vibe it again.
So MKStack is a NOSTA-focused stack.
you can have non-NOSTA focus stacks as well, correct?
Absolutely, anything.
Now, are there examples of people?
I know there was one when we last spoke, Alex.
Was it a treasure hunt or geocaching?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, treasures.
Treasures.2 is a really fun one.
So that's an MKStack app made by Chad.
And I really like this one
because this is like for so many reasons.
um you know you could say it's pretty busy doesn't it in what way uh where are you have
you been rummaging the fields geocaching yes yes you're right yes it's had me busy traveling the
world and looking for good spots to plant you know little boxes of toys that's essentially what
geocaches geocaches are is you you like find a good spot to put a little box of toys and then
whoever finds it later they're supposed to take a toy and leave a toy um and so it's just this
great opportunity to go outside right because you could say that one of the biggest problems
with social media is the outrage uh culture and this is literally like taking the power of
computers and then gearing it towards people touching grass um and and that's something that
I love about it.
Yeah, so I think Treasures is going to
solve social media.
Walk us through how Treasures
would work. Let's say I join.
So do you
want to find, do you want
to go on an adventure and find
a treasure that exists, or do you
want to be a creator and
create your own treasure?
Let's just say it's me and my son, and we're
going to go chase some treasures.
Okay. So there's a map and you're going to zoom in on this map to nearby where you live.
And then you going to see markers of treasure chests on the map near where you live hopefully And if you don see any then this is your call to action to put one there
so that the next person who searches can find one.
And so, you know, we have GPS coordinates, longitude and latitude,
and you basically just navigate to where that location is of that particular treasure that you want to find.
But also, you can click on those little treasure icons and it'll show you a preview of what the location looks like, a description of the treasure from the author, you know, find logs where people will go and they'll say like, oh, I found this or I didn't find this.
And, you know, basically a review system for each of these geocaches.
So it's pretty cool.
You can just use it, you know, as a way to kind of go on an adventure without necessarily needing to spend money.
you know because like like do you ever feel like i wish i want to go like i want to go do something
but all there is is like the grocery store or like you know walmart or whatever uh like society is
built in this way to where you have to spend money to do anything fun or entertaining and
this is just like an excuse to just go on an adventure there's some pretty solid people
watching at Walmart though. Let's be real. Well, put a treasure behind a Walmart then.
I don't know if I want to go behind the Walmart. Oh man, but no, no, good point. So like if someone
like Avi who might live in a rural, not very dense pop populated area, he can put his little
town on the map just by authoring treasures, huh?
Yep, exactly.
And I feel like this is a good example of an app that would not have been developed if
it wasn't for AI and LLM-generated code.
It's built with MKStack, and it is a maintained, high-quality application.
So I'm really excited about it.
It's a great use case for MKStack and for AI.
These are the types of things that anyone can build now if they just have the best idea.
Because, you know, I think that there are a lot of things that people are building that they're just experimenting with.
And accelerationism is the word, right?
Like earlier in the discussion, we were talking about this idea of people building these apps and abandoning them.
But I think that that's more of a benefit than anything.
like now we have the opportunity for people to create apps that they abandon and it allows us to
get very fast feedback of what is good and what's not good about this app and maybe it's maybe it's
right to abandon it um you know but but like we just wouldn't have had the opportunity to even
create that in the first place previously without ai um and so treasures is just an example of one
that sticks because it's a really good idea for numerous reasons. And the implementation is really
good too. So that was Stacks and MKStack. And then that's where, when you and I last spoke, Alex,
the clock stopped. Since then, obviously, a lot has happened. There's been an evolution
to Shakespeare. Do you want to talk about that? So you had Stacks and MKStack.
what was the lead up to Shakespeare from there?
Sure.
So Stacks CLI is a terminal application,
which means you have to open the terminal of your computer
and you have to type in a scary text prompt
that probably most people in the world aren't going to be using.
This is more if you're a developer.
But it always has been the vision to make this something
that empowers regular people.
And, you know, there are other applications like Bolt v0, Lovable, that we wanted to – and those are all like anti-freedom subscription-based proprietary closed platforms.
But the UX is really great.
So Stacks is like a first sort of pass at seeing can we do this?
Can we make high-quality AI-generated apps but do it in a command line?
Whereas Shakespeare is the same or very similar experience to Stacks, but done through a graphical web interface.
And Shakespeare is at shakespeare.diy.
The version that's there right now is called Act 1.
uh it has a particular architecture that involves the uh communication with a server a server which
is running in my living room um and so the like network requests and stuff are running off of my
server and i am currently working on an act two of shakespeare which is a different architecture
i think i'm maybe getting ahead of myself a little bit but um the basic idea of shakespeare is
is that regular people can develop Nostra apps with AI.
So you're saying when I developed my Hashman game on MKStacks,
I should have been using Shakespeare?
Because my story is I used it.
I made like a little Pac-Man mining themed app or game.
and I kind of, I think I ruined it like three quarters of the way through. I didn't know what
the hell to do after that. So I started like telling the computer to back it up to when it,
you know, to a certain, you know, prompt. You were using MK stack? Yeah. And you're using it
through the command line. Yeah. Well, no, well, I was telling it. So it wasn't Shakespeare though.
So it wasn't MK stack. Wasn't, I was just telling it a game. I mean, I was like $130 deep into this
thing. Cause it was like, I was running credits. The bigger it got, the more I was like just simple
task. It was, it was, it was taking a little longer. Uh, and I'm like, all right. And then I,
I was like excited. And then I was like, Oh, and then I went back to being excited again.
It was an interesting thing, but I felt like I was a little bit lost, but maybe I should have
been using Shakespeare. Uh, but it just came out at the time. So it wasn't fully working properly.
So I just went to the next thing. So I guess my question is, if someone like me just wants to try things out, you recommend going to Shakespeare, Shakespeare versus MKStack.
If you have zero coding, zero computer background, what do you recommend?
Yes, but to be honest, I'm not sure that it would have made your experience better in that case.
If you're comfortable enough using a terminal, I think that Stack CLI is still the best way to do it.
um, which maybe is not the best thing for me to say from like a marketing perspective, but
like right now that Shakespeare as it is, is geared towards people who are like, have a phobia
of the terminal. Um, and in terms of just like the project getting bigger and getting out of control,
um, it's a known issue. And it, I actually don't think it's a limitation of the LLM. I think it's
a limitation of the design of the tools right now. And like, it's a thing that we're trying
to push the boundaries on and figure out how to improve and just haven't exactly solved that yet.
So like, it's not necessarily going to be opening eyes going to come around the corner and make such
a more powerful LLM. It's going to do this. It's like, I'm going to figure out how to rewire the
internals of, of stack CLI or Shakespeare by extension to make those problems be less noticeable
and to deal with larger code bases more effectively.
So it's a big engineering technical challenge.
I think that, like, I personally am as far at the forefront of it
as I could be right now in terms of, like, what everybody else is doing.
And we're all just kind of trying to figure out right now
what are the next steps in order to make this process be more efficient,
more cost-effective, more productive, and have better outcomes.
But if I play Hashman right now, is it actually the server in your living room?
So the server in my living room is what produced it.
Okay.
It's also what serves it.
But the design of the stack is to produce HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
And so the majority of that code is, well, all of that code actually is just being executed in your browser on the client side once it gets downloaded.
But yes, it gets downloaded from the server in my living room.
And then once it's on your browser, your browser is executing all of that code.
Alex, you know, when we spoke, we were in the, from an AI model standpoint itself, right?
Forget the tooling around it for a second.
We were in the throes of a pure acceleration in June.
like models were just, you know, the next version was, you know, above and beyond anything imaginable
with the previous version, right? We'd gone from opening eyes 01 to 03 and there was 04, 04 mini
had come out just around then. Google Gemini 2.5 was crushing it. Claude Sonnet 4.0 had come out
just around then and it was you the the acceleration was palpable do you feel in the last three months
or so we've hit a bit of a plateau because that's you know the jump the jump from march or you know
from february to june and then june to september it feels a lot less i agree i think gpt5 highlighted
that a lot because they were like calling it the manhattan project like altman was saying oh my god
this is going to destroy the human race and stuff.
But then it ended up being so disappointing to many people.
And yeah,
I mean,
it's hard to know.
I don't know what they know.
I don't have any insider info on what like the big AI giants are doing behind
closed doors.
But what it certainly seems like on the outside and what my intuition is,
is that the LLM side is plateauing.
And that kind of makes me happy in a way because I feel like,
okay, maybe we have time here.
Like we're not going to just go straight into like apocalypse from this.
People are going to have time to adapt to what's going on here.
It's going to keep being fun.
Preparation time for apocalypse.
Yeah.
It's not going to ruin what I'm doing.
And I,
and maybe this is just a cope.
I don't know,
but I feel like the AI tooling is where,
where it is right now,
because this is where you can,
make most of the progress.
And the way I envision it is like the LLM is a brain,
but it's only part of a brain.
I'm not sure which part of the brain it is.
It's maybe small pieces of parts of a brain.
Um, but it doesn't have memories in order to give it memories.
You have to build just regular code, not some crazy, fancy, like, you know, tensor, uh,
machine learning stuff, just regular code, um, to give it memories.
You can, you can give it a body.
I mean, you can put it in a robot.
You can give it tools to, to see, to walk, to, you know, articulate parts of its body.
And those are all just regular code things that essentially wrap this LLM core brain.
So we can expand the brain itself with code.
We can give it a body with code.
The body doesn't necessarily have to be physical.
The body can be virtual too, right?
It can extend into computer systems, into infrastructure, into applications like Stack CLI and like Shakespeare.
Like, Shakespeare is essentially giving a body to this core brain of this LLM.
And I think that right now, at least, this is where we're seeing the most rapid progress and innovation is not on the core brain LLM side.
It's on building the body for the brain.
You know, I tend to agree with that, at least at this particular point in time, Alex.
I reserve the right to change my mind because of the acceleration.
Yeah, exactly.
but if that is true that's kind of disappointing because i remember when
open ai released the full o3 model uh right not the o3 mini but the full i think that was sometime
in april or may and it was just this otherworldly experience just like is how is this possible
how is this level of deep research possible how is this level of reasoning possible and then
And I think that was the peak of AI models, right?
The full O3.
And GPT-5 is, honestly, even on thinking mode,
is not as good as O3 was in April, in my mind.
I agree.
So a little disappointing.
You know, it's not, I mean, from a real world standpoint,
I mean, I'm in a family business.
We've been around for 68 years.
we're very slow movers one thing I'm seeing a lot because I basically built our website
I do I get all the the referrals from the website and I'm starting to see a lot of
where who referred you and it's grok or chat gpt and I'm starting to see those in the real world
which is kind of like because you talk to anybody at work you're like you know about ai they look at
you like well at least in my work they have no idea what I'm talking about but you're starting
to see this kind of happening, people are actually using it. Google's getting kind of removed from it
all. And I think it's great. I want to get on top of it. But I can see a world in 10 years
where everyone's just saying grok. Or if you go on Twitter right now, everything is at grok. What's
this mean? At grok. I mean, we start to lose our mind a little bit, our at least critical thinking,
where we just completely just turn it over to AI.
But at the same time, as a business,
I want to make sure AI knows that I'm the person to talk to.
I want them to send them over my way.
So I'm trying to kind of figure that out,
how to develop my SEO, develop my website
to kind of cater to these robots, I suppose,
because I see the trend building.
So just my real world, you know,
The real world adoption is not here yet, but we're starting to see it kind of sprinkle in.
It's interesting.
I do think Google is in trouble.
And I think they know that they're in trouble too, which is why they're investing so much in AI solutions and in Gemini.
But yeah, web search is not going to be the same anymore.
Yeah.
If you don't have the description right at the top, the AI response, you're going to be left behind.
And if you can't control that AI response, I mean, people pay good money to be at the top.
But if above that is the AI response and it's actually a good response, I don't know.
You can't pay for that.
Yeah, it worries me too because I do a lot of contributions that are not within the mainstream.
For example, I have chosen to host the vast majority of code that I have written on GitLab instead of GitHub.
And that's because GitLab fits with my ethos of open source.
But I wonder, like, am I limiting the spread of, like, my coding style and my, like, libraries that I've developed here by not putting them on GitHub?
Because the LLMs are probably scanning GitHub and maybe not scanning GitLab.
And there's lots of things like this where it's...
Yeah, I've looked into that because I'm trying to figure out where are they pulling all this from.
and you kind of have to be there. It's like another way of like, I got to,
I got to be in that little honeypot of information.
It's like bullying people into centralization and also bullying like
conservatism to some degree, because there's, there's even things like,
I think it's slowing the adoption of,
of new technologies because the AI is trained on the last version of the
technology. And previously, you know,
humans would just learn the new version and upgrade everything. Now,
like there's now that things are going to be maintained by AIs humans don't care as much
about developer experience because if the AI is fine developing it then it's kind of okay if the
code is a little bit messy so so like there is there's definitely some like tech stack stagnation
that is that is happening this kind of a problem where I I think for all of the acceleration AI is
doing, it's also slowing certain things down. And speaking of the buggy coded apps,
is there any concerns or cautions about the rise in vibe coded apps?
From a security standpoint? I mean, just from any standpoint, yeah, but security as well.
What was that app with all the girls on it that apparently was vibe coded?
i mean my my perception of it is like it's like self-driving cars almost to where like yeah there
there's a genuine fear here i get it but like if you just look at traffic accidents the vast
majority of them are caused by humans being stupid behind the wheel and like it's really bad when
there is a malfunction that like is a you know an obvious bug in a self-driving car that should
have been avoided that maybe a human wouldn't have done that but still overall when you look
at it statistically it's just way more likely that a human is going to crash a car than a computer
and and so i think in in a lot of cases we're seeing the same for for ai generated code like
yes maybe maybe now there's people who are writing code who wouldn't have been writing
code before and just due to the sheer volume of code being generated that wasn't generated before
we're seeing more incidences of it but i bet if you would look at it on the scale of like a
percentage wise and i don't have any evidence of this i'm just you know saying my speculation
which is yeah it's just that i i would guess that you would see that there is less security
incidents because ai is very good at figuring out like you know identifying tiny little problems
that a human wouldn't necessarily be able to see or you know humans get tired um you know and like
we have we have many different responsibilities uh potentially families like we only so many hours
in the day and and ai just doesn't care about that so like it'll find your your little tiny sql
injection vulnerability um that you know that you you missed yeah i'll tell you what
yeah go ahead kw okay uh i was just gonna i mean you mentioned autonomous vehicles one almost ran
me off the road i'm in phoenix we have tons of waymos they're all over my neighborhood
one almost ran me off the road one night and i'm like what the hell so i tried to call waymo and
It's just robots.
They're just, I can't even talk to anybody.
So like the liability, it's a weird feeling when no one's accountable, but a robot, you
know what I mean?
It's just really weird.
Well, I'm not going to stand for Waymo or try to like defend big tech corporations, but
I've had humans, you know, drive me off the road too.
Yeah.
But if, if someone vibe coded something and it actually just, just accidentally stole
your data and spread it all over the world, you're like, sorry, bro, it was vibe coded.
But humans do that too. I get what you're saying though. It's a different feeling when it's a robot.
It's a different feeling. Yeah.
Well, there's also, and you mentioned percentage, Alex, and I think I tend to agree with that. Again, I don't have the stats to back it. It's probably a very low percentage of these apps that have vulnerabilities. But I don't think the percentage is the entire picture. It's also severity.
you could have a tiny percentage
of
wipecoded apps that have vulnerabilities
but the vulnerability itself could be incredibly
severe and so this ties
back to the human
part of this as well
part of me worries
that
while wipecoding
is phenomenal for
existing developers
because it 10x is 100x is their
productivity and we've seen this
we've seen testaments to this
but it also seems to it can possibly light a fire uh to the fuel of the dunning kruger effect
in non-developers who suddenly see a little app that you know a couple of prompts somehow
miraculously work and now they think they're developers and they start building financial
infrastructure or health infrastructure right dealing with personal data and that
maybe there hasn been a severe incident yet but that just given human nature and the Dunning effect I don know I kind of see the opposite as being true with that If anything it product managers who their normal job is to just go and boss people around without knowing how to code at all are kind of fucking around and finding out right now
Because they're like, you know, going and typing something in to an AI and then realizing all of the implications of what their request actually entails when they didn't realize that before.
And so once surfacing that and making it so people can see like, oh, actually, this involves this and this and this and this.
And you didn't you didn't realize that before. I think like it helps people who are incompetent maybe become a little bit more competent than they were previously.
well that is the optimistic case right that you people realize how little they know
when they start vibe coding um but it is but i think the the converse is also possible people
assume that they're geniuses now because they got a they got clawed to you know build them a little
game or whatever it is and and then the next thing they do is they build a banking app
hey man it wasn't a little game avi it was a huge game
massive idea huge breaking don't build a banking app kid i'm begging you
uh no i wasn't talking about your game i was just you know make a general statement but here's an
here's another thing and this i ran into and i'm semi-technical i've written handwritten code back
in the day and I spent a lot of time on, even before MK, in fact, I was vibe coding before the
term became popular parlance, right? You know, using replet and those things. And so that was
maybe starting December of last year, all the way up to maybe two or three months ago. And the thing
that eventually made me slow down is I was just burning money. It was, yes, when you get it to
work, it's great. But as you start ramping up the complexity, you start running into debug loops,
the doom loops. And before you know it, and I was using things like Routster and
PPQ, where you're actually spending sats on this. And I was just watching those sats evaporate.
You know, I went through a week stretch when I was spending 50, 60 bucks a day.
and so that made me hit the pause button.
Is that something that you're thinking about, Alex?
Like how do we make this more sustainable?
Yeah, so there's a few things
that I've been thinking about with that.
So one is that I know that in Staxon and Shakespeare right now,
it's not optimized.
There are ways to optimize that I've kind of been noticing
as I've been building this stuff.
And it's things like, you know,
just compressing the context window at certain points
within the flow of messages.
Because what you're paying for most of the time
is the input tokens.
And that can get expensive really fast,
especially on big projects.
The other thing is just the cost of the model itself.
And for that, we can thank China for creating open source models that are extremely efficient, energy efficient.
And their situation there is very interesting right now because they have unlimited energy access, essentially, compared to us.
But they have a chip shortage.
So they're kind of being driven to create more efficient LLMs.
LLMs. And the way they're doing it is with a mixture of expert models, where in the current
American models, there are these giant monoliths that if you ask it a question about cooking advice,
it has to activate all of the world's knowledge to answer your question about cooking advice.
Whereas in the mixture of expert models, it has a gate that will decide that you're asking it
about cooking and then it'll route you to its cooking like internals where they train what they
call experts on particular topics and then they combine responses from multiple experts and so
this actually has a very real uh you know consequence on um on the cpu gpu resource usage
result so designing models in a more efficient way is a huge one also designing the tools in a
different way is a huge one. And they're both areas that I'm exploring and that I think the
world is exploring right now. Is this 4D chess by Trump, Alex, that he's squeezing China with the
export restrictions, forcing them to innovate on the edges, basically, with scraps, with five-year-old
chips? I don't know that Trump is capable of thinking beyond 2D or 1D, but it certainly seems
like that in the output.
It's 8D
checkers, guys. Come on.
The other issue is, I mean,
you know, Claude
4.0, I think there's
4.1 now, right? Both on
Sonnet and Opus, and those are probably the best
coding models out there.
Prohibitively expensive.
Yeah, because
there are those...
Go ahead.
It's the monolith model.
so a model that i would really recommend looking into is glm by zai um and that is a mixture of
extra experts model out of china maybe be careful what you type into it but then again
like american models you have the same privacy concerns typing stuff into it so
um glm won't write you a story about tiananmen square and uh you know american models have their
own restrictions, but it's like 20 times cheaper using GLM, and it's really, really good at coding.
It has some occasional hiccups in its infrastructure because it seems like they're
struggling to scale to the demand. But aside from that, it's a really great model I would
highly recommend if Claude is too expensive. Well, here's the other issue with American models.
And thank you for that, by the way, Alex, GLM. I think folks who've been struggling paying the
builds with Claude, I should certainly look into that.
DeepSea Carbon isn't that terrible either, right?
Another mixture of experts model.
I don't know.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Well, this is just a small detail,
but for people using OpenRouter,
for open source models specifically,
there are different providers, right?
When it's an open source model, anyone can provide it.
And I noticed that some providers actually return lower quality results for the same model when you're using OpenRouter.
And OpenRouter will just randomly route you to any of these providers without concern of the quality of the output.
So yes, DeepSeq R1 from provider A can actually have inferior results to DeepSeq R1 from provider B.
Just a thing to note.
That's interesting.
Maybe it's because Provider A is using their own computer infrastructure and it's not up to scratch.
Could be, yeah.
Yeah, and the configuration of it matters a lot too, apparently.
So they'll misconfigure it and then it'll have an impact on the result.
Got it.
But you mentioned OpenRata and that was sort of leading into my other question, which is, I mean, American models, yeah, maybe they're more powerful.
they're certainly more expensive, but they have, if you're using them for these coding apps,
you have to get API access and to get direct API access, either from Anthropic or from OpenAI
or from anywhere else, it's a full rectal exam, right? You have to take a photograph of yourself,
hold your license. It's the second time we've discussed rectal things, Avi.
I'm starting to trend here.
So this is, the difference is you were using it literally, Kedabi.
This is a metaphor.
And it's terrible.
So then you have something like OpenRouter, which in theory,
well, actually you have KYC with OpenRouter as well.
But you can then use something like Routester
that kind of sits in the middle of you and OpenRouter.
PPQ is the same, right?
So those are no KYC.
You can pay in Bitcoin or in eCash in the case of Routester.
and then they route through OpenRouter,
which, so you're arbitraging the KYC stuff
that OpenRouter would do,
or if you're going direct to the model providers,
they would do.
Is that, so are you seeing,
or actually, can you even track the usage
on Shakespeare and MKStack,
which provider they're using,
whether they're using Routes to PPQ or just direct API?
so um on the current version of shakespeare uh all of the ai traffic is going through the server
in my living room and that is hooked up to open router on my end so i have an open router api key
in there and so that's where all the traffic is going and in the new version of shakespeare that
i'm currently working on that is very experimental um the user's browser connects directly to third
party AI providers. So you would essentially go and get an API key from like OpenAI or Anthropic
or whatever. And then you could install multiple keys inside of your Shakespeare client and then
use that to access models across any provider. And in that case, we wouldn't be able to figure
out which models people are using. It's a more privacy friendly, like offline centric approach
in the newer version.
But the people themselves would have to KYC
if they are going direct to Anthropic.
Yeah, so I feel like I've heard of this happening,
but I'm not sure that I've ever had to do that.
Yeah, I believe my wife was telling me
she had to do it on OpenAI,
of scanning her face 360 degrees and stuff.
It crazy But the Chinese providers don care about this So if you want to go with GLM and you want it to be 20 times cheaper and you don want to scan your face you can you can certainly do that
um i believe that ppq is not an open router uh proxy i believe they are a proxy directly to the
upstream providers which is very difficult to do um i at one point i was trying to build like an
open router alternative and i kind of just gave up on it because like instead i just make it so
that the user configures their keys directly with the provider because these ai big ai companies
like anthropic just don't want to work with with you um they'll just ignore it and you can't expect
them to do anything different so uh i really hate anthropic i i i dislike open router a lot although
I dislike them a little bit less after realizing what they deal with.
I mainly dislike that they have the word open in their name,
despite being closed source, similar to open AI.
Yeah, closed source and full KYC.
Yeah, exactly.
But, you know, I'm feeling a little bit more bullish on the idea of local LLMs
than I was, you know, three months ago.
it's unfortunately to run something like glm you still need an upfront cost of about a million
dollars just in graphics cards and then once you have your million dollars worth of graphics cards
then you need the actual server infrastructure and electricity to put them into computers and
run them. But we're seeing a lot of advancements in the realm of Ollama, as well as things like
Web LLM that allow you to run tiny little models inside of a web browser. And even now, newer phones
are starting to ship with LLMs built into the phone. And Google and Apple are creating specialized
hardware to allow this to be possible to you can run these little models offline and they're not
bad they're maybe not going to be like excellent coding models but i'm really excited for for the
use case of moderation specific specifically like imagine you're in a noster client and you want to
say i don't want to see this particular type of of speech i don't want to see any of this bitcoin
stuff anymore right like our best thing we have right now is to just block keywords but imagine
that you could just have a prompt to say, don't show me any of this Bitcoin crap. And then your
posts all get run through a local LLM on your phone. And it is actually powerful enough to
filter that out for you or spam or like, you know, whatever else it is. If you're like a liberal,
maybe you don't want hate speech. You can, you can feel free to define that however you want in
your own personal terms. And I think that this is something that could, you know, fix a lot of
problems for people using Noster. So I think the future is bright for people who care about freedom
and want to use AI. And at the same time, you know, I've always kind of had an enemy
as I've been building stuff in this, you know, fighting for freedom, right? In decentralized
open source space. And in the past, it has been big tech companies like Google and Facebook and
Twitter. And now that they're being eclipsed by these AI giants, I think that our biggest enemy
is open AI, Anthropic, to some smaller degree, open router. And so what I'm looking forward to
most is just being able to use local models, being able to do things on your own machine,
for users to have as much control as possible over that experience and then be able to
essentially to build things that can destabilize the social order,
which is the most fun use case for AI-generated apps, in my opinion. Maybe we can overthrow some
regimes. Well, I think we will run into computational reality. And I think we're
already seeing that, Alex, which is we were, I would say, maybe September of last year to about
June of this year, we were in the golden age of venture capital subsidized compute, which is how
we were able to, we were able to get these top of the line models from open air, anthropic, and
what have you at relatively cheap prices i think reality is going to catch up the the vc subsidies
are going to go away and we'll have to pay the true cost of electricity for these things
which if it if and if that is the case and i if you're an individual running local infrastructure
you're doing that anyway there's no one subsidizing you there's no sugar daddy vc who's
paying your bills. And I wonder if that will hamper some of the things that you're talking
about, which I think is the ideal world, right? We do want to disrupt the social order with
decentralized these individual nodes running their own compute and so on. But I also fear that
reality, economic reality, right? Thermodynamic reality will catch up.
Yeah, I think we're in a bubble for sure. But I think when it bursts, it's going to disproportionately affect the big AI companies like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI. And so that's why it's important to start trying to find solutions now for open source and especially locally runnable models.
yeah well i have another pet peeve or or actually recent grievance with vipe coded
apps alex and and that's this which it's ui saturation uh and you'd mentioned this earlier
on right that and this is not not particularly about mk stack i i ran into this when i was using
replet late last year and early this year is the ui the front-end frameworks that they all use
ShadCN, Tailwind CSS, and it's all the same, right?
Essentially the same set of libraries
that they're using to generate the components,
generate the layout of these apps.
All of these apps are looking the same now.
And with more Vibe-coded apps,
you're saturated with almost identical UIs.
Yes, you can toggle dark mode
to make it look slightly different,
but the icons look the same and so on.
Do you see that changing anytime soon
that we'll have more variability in these user interfaces?
Yeah, so I have a few thoughts on that.
In one sense, I think that that's a win more than anything.
Like we've just over the years figured out
what the best user interfaces look like.
I mean, there have been people arguing
since the beginning of the web
that HTML is supposed to be semantic
and that maybe we don't even need styles.
Maybe it should be like an operating system UI kit
where you put elements
and then the browser decides how to display those elements.
And obviously, as an artist, you know, there's, I also see the point of view that we should
have unique and creative websites.
But I don't think every website needs to be unique and creative.
I think it kind of depends on whether what is being built is more of an application or
more of, you know, a creative project.
And sometimes there's both.
And definitely, you know, there can be room to have both in the same site or in the same project.
But I don't really think it's a limitation of like Tailwinds, ShadCN.
I have seen LLMs be able to just write custom style sheets that sort of make those types of sites look a lot more unique and interesting.
Especially lovable right now.
I hate to shill them in any way because they're like my biggest competitor,
but they have figured out like, like, for example,
if I go in and I say, build me a spooky website, it's going to have like,
you know, uh, sort of suns,
Halloween type of sunset with like, um,
orange sky and creepy trees poking into it and like a custom font being
selected. And it's got like pumpkins and stuff. And, and so, you know,
they're advancing into that territory right now.
That's where Lovable has grown in the past,
you know, three, six months or whatever.
The way that I have grown MKStack is not in that way.
For me, it's been more about making sure
that a Nostra application can actually connect to Nostra
and do Nostra things for real.
So that rather than it just being like a demo site,
it's something that's functional.
But the fact that they are able to do it right now
proves to me that it's doable.
And so it's something to look into on the tooling side.
I'm not worried about it, basically, is the gist of that.
Cool.
So you mentioned Shakespeare 2.0.
What can we expect there?
So this is a complete overhaul of the architecture of Shakespeare.
In Shakespeare 1, which is what's currently on Shakespeare.diy,
in many ways, I consider that to be a success.
People have been able to build all kinds of stuff with it, including people who may not have thought that they could do it.
People who are not programmers.
But there's also been a number of bugs that have been difficult to overcome in that system.
As any power user of it probably knows.
And it has also made me question whether this architecture makes sense for the kind of organization that we are.
Because we are not a VC funded company like Lovable that can have staff engineers monitoring the production server infrastructure 24-7, making sure that there's no bugs in that.
And I feel like to be really fair to the open source community and to people who want to use this thing the best user experience is going to be one that I can deploy and I don necessarily have to be constantly checking and babysitting it to make sure it not going to go down
And so this new architecture is one in which all of the files of your code are actually stored inside of your browser storage.
the end goal is that you will push your code to Noster Git servers.
This is something that Dan Conway Dev has been working on
that I'm really excited about.
It's permissionless Noster Git servers.
All you need is a Noster identity,
and then you can just instantly push code to what is essentially a Git relay.
and so in a way a bigger picture of what this can do is to be a replacement for github in the ai
age so that's something i'm really excited about is people being able to share projects
none of the code would be hosted on my server anymore it would be hosted in the user's browser
and then if they want to synchronize it with their other devices they would push it to nostril
get relays and then clone it back down on their other devices the user's browser connects directly
to remote AI services rather than to my thing that intercepts them so that they can decide
which AI service they want to use.
They can switch between providers.
They can use multiple providers at once.
It's really just all about user freedom and control and open source and making something
that I know that even if I'm not constantly maintaining it, that's still going to continue
to be useful to people because essentially the code is running on their own computer and on their
own device. And so I think that if I can get some of these last pieces working, which have been a
very difficult technical challenge, then I think people are going to like and appreciate this
version of Shakespeare a lot more. And it's going to be a lot more fun for us to build upon because
it's going to be one code base and sort of split out into these smaller ones that have to negotiate
The complexity will be lower in areas that are important, even though it'll be higher in areas that will result in users having freedom.
And so, yeah, I'm excited about it.
Just trying to overcome some of the technical hurdles because we're really pushing the limits of what has been possible for web browsers to do ever.
And nobody else is doing this.
Like Lovable, V0, they're all keeping your files.
They're doing everything on their servers.
Nobody is trying to do AI completely in the browser.
And so I think it would be a huge win for user freedom and just for AI in general.
That sounds exciting, Alex.
When can we expect Shakespeare 2.0?
It's hard to say.
I thought that it would be done by now already.
But there were some parts that I thought were going to be so hard,
And then they turned out to be easy.
And right now I'm really stuck on making type checking work.
And so I have a person that I have asked to help me.
And, you know, hopefully between us, we'll figure something out.
But it's in experimental territory.
A couple of weeks, maybe, I hope.
I heard a problem, Asabi.
So let's see here, two weeks.
Stay tuned.
You heard it here first.
September 19th, Shakespeare 2.0.
Oh, my God.
I'm going to build a little chain countdown where I take a little.
It may be.
I'm racing.
Every day.
I'm racing every day.
I know people want it.
Our team really wants it so they can move forward on marketing it and stuff.
So I'm really trying as hard as I possibly can to get it out as fast as possible.
It's just I'm moving mountains over here.
What's up, Avi?
No, I was saying that.
You were saying something.
Every time we have a developer as our guest,
we ask them their favorite question.
When?
That's what we do.
Yeah.
Huge break.
Sue.
You heard it here first.
Sue is always the answer.
In construction, it's always,
we can start in two weeks.
That's our motto.
Great.
what else are you working on Alex anything outside of Shakespeare else
um not in particular that's kind of the thing yeah well Chad is working on treasures and well
you've been you've been hiding treasures I've been hiding treasures yeah the proof of work
action there out on the real world connecting the universe with the real real world I made a
number of vibe coded apps um noster hub is one that i thought is really cool that's kind of what
inspired me to start doing get stuff on noster um and yeah a lot of people are just making really
cool stuff um you know chad who created treasures is pretty prolific he's done a few other things i
really am excited about uh another one he he's made a magic the gathering themed noster site
where people can go and they can build Magic the Gathering decks
and share them on Noster and comment on them and stuff.
I think that's super cool and could be grown in a lot of ways.
And also that's a huge example of communities for me.
And so these are the types of things I would love to see people building more
is unique social experiences that are catered to a particular niche.
And my hope is that these types of things are what's going to make Noster win.
Are you a Magic the Gathering enjoyer?
Absolutely.
I'm a green-red player, personally.
Okay.
I still got my black deck from 1993, I think.
Nice.
Oh, man.
It's funny because Magic the Gathering, I think, is the one game that comes up the most in our show, randomly.
Between, like, Lynn Alden, Druid.
uh we he wasn't he actually built a bitcoin magic the gathering game that's going to be
releasing soon uh it's just interesting uh is your app on no straps.com i'll go ahead um
so it's called surveil uh let me make sure i get the right domain surveil surveilled up cards
that's how you can find magic the gathering on no stir uh but but yeah when you're playing magic
the gathering you're essentially executing a program in your head which is really interesting
like it's been proven that magic the gathering is turing complete and so i think it's very
appealing to programmers for that reason because when you're playing magic you're essentially
creating a state on the board and then you're you're triggering actions that have interactions
with other cards on the board which then make the state become changed again and so it's a
constantly just changing state um and and in terms of bitcoin i've seen some really interesting ones
like people using a stack of magic the gathering cards is a is a mnemonic uh key and and so like
because these cards have unique names they just mapped uh magic the gathering card names to the
like bip 32 is that is that the right one uh language uh dictionary so there's really interesting
overlaps and interactions with this game.
But yeah, this is the type of stuff I want to see.
Yeah.
Magic the Gathering and then StarCraft.
The two.
The big two that I hear.
We need more gaming on Noster.
I'd love to battle Pokemon over Noster.
That's another vibe-coded app idea I kind of have in the back of my head.
Upload your Pokemon from your Game Boy into Noster and then battle them.
I think it could be a lot of fun.
So scan your real world card and it transitions to a digital form.
There you go.
NFT.
Where were we, Avi?
What happened?
So, yeah, anything else?
Any call to action for listeners?
Try it.
I mean, Shakespeare.diy, that's a good place to start.
if you want to try vibe coding something.
Stack CLI is another one.
If you're comfortable in the terminal,
that's what I would recommend right now.
And just build stuff.
I feel like we're in a new renaissance of the internet.
And what matters most right now is ideas.
And all of these vibe coded apps
that people have abandoned,
it's great that we now have the ability to do it.
It's just that they either weren't the best idea
or they weren't the best prompt of that idea.
So that's my call to action is let's make NOSTER win by trying our ideas.
And always give the NOSTER devs, the Shakespeare team feedback
because we're in building mode.
I think that's one of the biggest things in our NOSTER community
is always speak up if you want a feature and maybe it'll be heard.
So, well, thank you very much, Alex.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you, guys.
Listener of your, the Gleasonator.
So it was nice to have a backseat on some of the AI talk that you and Avi shared.
And I appreciate you.
Thank you for your time.
And anything else, Avi?
No, thank you, Alex.
As always, good chatting with you.
I think we managed to avoid a lot of the topics that we discussed last time.
So this is good.
I agree.
Always moving, Bobby.
The technology is way beyond what you talked about last time.
Thank you, everyone, for tuning in to Pleb Chain Radio.
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Until next week, gentle plebs, farewell.
Goodbye.