mergeconflict519

00:00:00 Speaker: Welcome back everyone to Merge Conflicts, your weekly developer podcast talking about all things in the world of software development. Frank we've switched places. Yeah. You're in your dark room and I'm in your room. Hi, everyone. I'm coming to you from Fort James, uh, on the, on the sea side of America. Yeah. Um, it's it's nice and white here, full of white walls. I miss my wallpaper and my trees and my piano, but it'll do. It'll do as I pretend to be you. We swap places, uh, as we often do. And you just see me here recently. So it's. It's cool that I'm away. You're home. It's a place for you to crash. We're excited about you. And we had a super exciting week. You on the road. But also we had the Xbox showcase and the Nintendo Direct with an Ocarina of Time remake. Claude fable five launched. We fresh off a build, obviously, and we had dub dub DC. Tell me about this Ocarina of Time. Is it is it super HD? Because guess what? Okay, wait. Sorry. Off topic. A long time ago, we talked about the Dark Forces remake remaster of Dark Forces. Finally bought it thirty dollars. I haven't spent that much on a video game in a very long time. I wanted to see it completely disappointed. All they did was double the resolution of the textures. I'm just like, yawn fest, talk about it. Yawn fest. James. So is the Ocarina of Time better than that? Yeah, so this one, from the looks of it, at least, the trailer that they announced and showed today at the Nintendo Direct, it is a complete remaster remake. Re graphics dies from the ground up. And this is kind of, and I don't know if they're going to add new content. There's a new Star Fox coming out on my birthday and it is star, star, star Fox sixty four, but a whole bunch of other things. And it is like it's a brand new game. It is like a visual, stunning masterpiece. And I'm hoping that the Ocarina of Time team is doing the same thing, because Oot has been everywhere. Kind of like you said, up raised a bit, but it is looking like a full reimagination from the ground up. So yet to be seen with just a little trailer. But it does look pretty good. Okay, that's important news. Uh, will the Star Fox sixty four remaster run on a switch? One James no, no, no, of course not. No, no. I will say that the Nintendo Direct quite a lot of games are coming to switch one. But yeah star Fox and Ocarina of Time going to be switch two exclusive. Fine. I see. Um so what's this fable thing? I've never heard of? Fable. Does that have anything to do with mythology? No, it is not fable. The game. It is Claude. Fable five, the fifth version of fable. You just missed. One, two, three, four. Frank. Those are things. Fable one. I played fable one. I didn't play fable two. It's a little confusing name. Apparently this is like from what I'm reading online at least, it seems like it's supposed to be mythos esque or something like that. I don't really, I don't really know. I, I heard it's a nerfed version of mythos, but, but you know what the, the internet uses the word nerf for everything at this point. So it could mean a million things. It could mean like it doesn't allow you to hack the CIA. You know, I don't know what nerfed means in this case, but it's not mythos because no one's allowed to have mythos. We're only allowed to have fable, copyright, trademark, Microsoft and video games. That's true. Lions. Lions had, I think, uh, that was very unclear marketing though. I mean, come on, why not just call it maybe mythos or son of mythos? You know, like fable fables and myths are different things. Anthropic, you know, use your network to tell you what words mean because you know what words have meaning. There you go. Words have meaning. Uh, no, I haven't tried it yet. I do think that it is apparently, um, but not mythos. But it's also, I think it's you can get it as part of Claude, but I think it's only for a little bit. And that's going to be like a p cost only I think I was reading in their thing and it's twice, twice the price of opus. So it's quite expensive. So yeah, prepare your prepare your body and your token. And I guess it's getting bound in vs code also. So we'll see. But I'm sure the price is going to be very high. Um, not bothering. You know what I like small stupid models. That's my jam. Uh, these big, big ones that like solve the world's problems. They're not solving the world's problems, so might as well use the dumb, small, cheap ones. Well, on that point, let's get into WWE and other small models that Apple decided to talk to us about. Uh, well, let's just give it. Give me your Tldr main thoughts of Wwdc. What did you watch? Yeah. First. First keynote. Gotta start with the keynote. Keynote. So full disclosure, I missed the keynote. Day of I was busy. Me too. Not getting wet. Um, so I, I totally missed it, but, um, I watched them all. And you have to start with the keynote. Even though we both agree state of the state of the platforms is where it's at these days, but you have to watch the keynote. I'm. The marketing is important. I like to know what Apple thinks is important and what they think they want to market and all that kind of stuff. So what's important this year, safety for children's stuff that that seems to be the most important thing. Well, listen, it was safety for grandparents. Now you can buy your grandparents an iPhone. And like Mkbhd said, now that all your grandparents have an iPhone, parents got an iPhone. Gotta get those kiddos into it. It's safe for everybody. Get yourself an iPhone. That's the Apple ecosystem. Smart, smart, smart. Super smart. But I can't believe it was twenty five minutes of Aquino. Yeah. That that. Okay. So my, my big first impression was, wow, this is one of those tick years. We both try to use this tick tock analogy from Intel, and neither of us knows how, how the analogy works, but it's the year where nothing happens. So let's just call that a tick year. Um, because ain't nothing happened this year. Uh, all screen iPhone James did that. Was that announced? Um, almost. They did talk. Was it? Yeah. I mean, now your apps you need to design not for form factors. You need to design for any form factor, right. You can the phone, it's like Android Wear. Your apps can be displayed anywhere. You don't know where your apps are going to be. That better be awesome. Okay. But no hardware, no. No vision, September. No vision. No, no, there was vision. They mentioned it. Did you notice that the the new AI, um, framework doesn't run on vision. They showed every product except for vision. No. There's the. Oh, Siri. Siri AI does. Yes. Siri AI does core AI new. Sorry, but I'm jumping ahead. I'm jumping ahead. I'm jumping ahead. Um, right. So, uh, then I went to, uh, state of the platform, state of the union of the platforms, whatever it's called, had to go there next. Um, because I was mostly interested in, um, whether they made the foundation models smarter or not and will save that as a cliffhanger for when we get to it in the thing. But that's mostly what I was interested in knowing. Yeah. I watched Keynote and State of the Union last night. So was the day of, but late. Uh, and, uh, it was like eleven p m and I might have been nodding off, but I nod off at about anything at about eleven p m. So I don't want to, you know, say, hey, Tim Cook last week, you know, you know, it wasn't maybe my favorite. You know, I think that the, the second part of the keynote, so the first part was really about polish. And they actually spent a lot of time in both the keynote and also in the state of the platform talking about Polish. They made things faster, smoother. It's just going to be just going to be better. Everything's going to be faster. They redesigned liquid glass. They're going to do this stuff. I like stuff for free, faster, smoother, better. Everything runs on the old iPhones. They did it. They figured it out. That's good. Yeah, yeah, they did it. I love it, except for Macs. Yeah. Should we mention the big news there, R.I.P.? R.I.P. Intel Macs. You know, um, my Intel Mac has been just mostly collecting dust, but I like to think it had some utility in my life. Still, it was a very expensive computer, and I wanted to do more than just sit there and collect dust. But now I'm like, you're a permanent dust collector, buddy. I'm not sure what I'm going to do for you. For the first time, the rule in the App Store was, if you had ever released your app for Intel, ever, you had to continue to release it for Intel. So finally, this year, they're removing that rule where you can officially yourself as developers stop supporting Intel. Now, me, in my case, that's never going to happen. A large chunk of my users are on Intel machines. Um, but, you know, maybe three years down the road, I might think about stop building for Intel and stuff like that. And also, I believe new Xcode only runs on ARM also. So, um, good job keeping iPhone backwards compatibility. Terrible job on the Mac side. Intel Macs dead. Gone. Sorry, Intel. We're arm over here now. No. That's true. Yeah, I just installed Xcode. Twenty seven. We'll talk about in a little bit here and download it faster because it's smaller, thirty percent smaller, that's for sure. So they were very proud about it. They're like, hey, it's over. You're dead to me. Like, get out of here. Uh, yeah. Okay. Before we move on though, um, you did mention this is Tim Cook's last, uh, WDC did you were you awake for his heartfelt not goodbye at the end? I was, yeah, I was, I was awake, not goodbye. I thought he was going to say because he didn't actually like, say this is my last one or anything. He just kept talking around the thing that we all knew. He didn't want to come out and say it or anything. Um, but I, I was a little bit sad thinking like, oh yeah, this is your last one, buddy. Yeah. Um, who knows what the new guy. I already forgot his name. It's going to be like next year, but it is sad. Yeah. It'll be, it'll be, uh, it'll be, you know, interesting, I did, I do think that, um, I was also a little kind of emotional there at the end because it was, you know, you see a lot of, you know, these folks like, you know, on stage and especially when you're deep in the ecosystem, you know, um, you know, whether it be, you know, Mac or Windows and Microsoft and Apple and Google, like there's some people that, you know, right? Whether they're the CEO or they're, you know, an engineer on the team, you kind of see these people a year and year and you're like, oh, I know, oh, that's cool. You know, it means a lot. And, uh, similar, like Craig Federighi this year walking, he pulled a book out of James's, uh, just walking and talking. I do appreciate that, Craig. You you got me. Uh, and same thing, like, you know, you're kind of looking and Craig's making jokes and doing the things. And yeah, I think it was, was, was interesting. I do want to note though, one thing that was pretty different this year, uh, including, you know, obviously Tim's last year, but they used a different camera focal point. And I want to call this out because I've called it out in the past, which is they've used the super hyper focused, blurry background that makes it look like you're in a green room because you might be in a green room, super transposing things. And this year they didn't blur the background. Hardly ever. And that was really important because they were outside a lot and they were walking around Apple Park, and I really enjoyed that. You could see the leaves, you know, flutter through the wind. It was it was really real. And I go, wow, like that must have been really hard to do. But I appreciate doing it. Yeah. Um, it made me feel a little bit bad though for anyone. Like, are there people physically at WW DC anymore? Like, because that's what I started wondering is, um, I miss the old days of crowding into the auditorium and seeing the stage and someone tall sits in front of me and then I can't really see the stage and like poking my head around and actually like being in the physical presence of these people. But, um, is there even a physical w WDC anymore? I guess not because Mkbhd said he was there for w WDC. My assumption. Yeah, assumptions is a press junket. Yeah, that's my assumption. It's like set up in a room, watch the keynote and you know, they get hands on. Yeah. So I'm almost more sad about that. And I only realized that this time, like obviously since Covid, like we've been watching these well-produced videos and everything, but, um, it was only this time with, as you say, the them being actually in a physical, real environment. I'm like, oh, they're not actually in an auditorium. That made me a little sad. Oh, well, times are changing. We got fables now. We don't need reality. Well, let's talk about some of the stuff. UI stuff, uh, liquid glass tweaking, toolbars, updating, subtle tweaks. They're refining, as they like to say. So good. They, uh, they couldn't decide whether it should be opaque or transparent. So they put a setting in. Now all the users can debate whether it should be opaque or transparent. As Joel Spolsky said, every setting you see is an argument that was unresolved. That's true. That's so good. That's so good. Yeah. Uh. It's cute. It's great. Make sure we test all our apps with absolutely clear, uh, liquid glass and absolutely opaque liquid glass because they shouldn't change too much. But I do want to note on the Mac side, um, they changed toolbars again. Yeah. It wouldn't be a year unless they changed how toolbars look and behave on Mac. So already, uh, make sure you get my app clean room and so you can install yet another operating system on it. So you can test your toolbars in yet another variation of Mac OS to see how it's behaving this year for the greater good, I would say. The toolbar up top. I always kind of disliked the complete trans hovering effect. It seems to work better on iPhone, but on the Mac it just seems cluttered. So I'll see if this impacts anything. It's a clear delineation, which I appreciate. The flyout also is getting merged in, and that's kind of nice because it is kind of wasted space over there. So I do appreciate that a little bit. Yeah. And I'm actually not complaining too much than it is just another, uh, column or row in the matrix to support, but I don't think they ever should have integrated the toolbar. I miss the old title bar with a toolbar with a content area. Yeah, sorry, but the nice thing about Macs is that they're easy to use. And I think putting all three of those things in the same area has just been a little bit disastrous. It looks good on paper, it looks good on slides, but in practice, in practice, if they were three different things. Yeah, no I agree. Um. All right. Well let's get to Safari. That's a browser I don't use. What's new. What's new. Um, there was one feature that I think I kind of like, and I kind of want to use. It's called notify me. And so they laced AI throughout all this. Obviously you can't have a keynote without AI everywhere these days, but they had a cool AI feature that I haven't seen anyone else do. And correct me if I'm wrong, but if you go to a web page and you go to this web page all the time, but you're waiting for one little thing to change on that web page, or like maybe someone to post something to that web page. You can, in natural language say, hey, notify me when, uh, the whatever the shopping cart goes to, the price goes to two dollars, or when James posts or when this page changes or something like that. Basically you're building a little background web scraper that with natural language, your vibe, coding a little web scraper that continuously checks a web page to see if something happens on it. And I'm like, that's clever. That's clever. James. I, I don't know if I'm going to use this feature. I'm going to try to use this feature. I'm going to try hard to use this feature because there are those weird times where there's just a web page, you check from time to time to see if something has happened. It'd be fun to just be notified if that thing has happened. So I don't know. It's a weird, it's a weird feature, like who's going to use this? But I'm going to try. I could see it. For example, you know, we have an amphitheater in town, like maybe a concert venue. Like maybe when a new concert pops up in a specific artist, right? Just notify me. Right. Maybe when there's a new podcast, a merge conflict or frank post a video and you'll get notified in YouTube. But if you're on your desktop, give me a little notification. Wow. Interesting. That could be kind of cool. Yeah, I thought it was. Yeah, just one of those. Like Finally, someone's. It's better than the stupid. Like I ordered a pizza or a plane ride to Argentina. Like I'm just getting tired of those AI demos like this. Like seems like something I could actually use. I don't need that many pizzas. And then there was something silly about grouping your tabs together. I keep a clean tab environment in my browsing experience, and I don't believe in this merging everything into one tab. I don't merge my notifications. I don't merge anything I don't on windows. That's the first setting I turn off is like merge all my app thingers into one little tile. I hate merging, I think merging is bad. Um, but for you people out there, Miguel Ding, um, who I know refuses to close any tabs, I know this is probably a good feature for you, James. They're going to use AI to make your bad habits tolerable, something, I don't know. I didn't pay attention to this part. Well, local AI, it's locally done. So that's good. You know, I don't know. I don't have that many tabs. I guess I do. Who knows. I don't know, I don't need you to do that. It's fine. I never keep them open that long. But I have seen people that do have a bajillion tabs. It's very unnecessary. However, I don't think grouping them together is going to solve their problem. So I just want to say their problem is they have too many tabs open. Now they're going to open more tabs because they are all in groups. Exactly. I thought that was fascinating. The password change in passwords app. I don't know, you're opening a little safari is a weird one. They are just web scraping left and right. I remember I used to love web scraping. Everyone's like, that's illegal, Frank. You shouldn't be. You shouldn't be scripting people's websites. That's bad news Bears. I don't like it. Capturing you and all that stuff. Uh, so I stopped, but like, I love that Apple's just like, hey, well, we're vibe coding stuff. We might as well vibe code a bunch of web scrapers. Yeah. Changing your password, having an AI change your password on some sites in the background. What could go wrong? Oh, I don't know that I could change it to something I never know. And passwords could not save my password like it does fifty percent of the time. Um, I put yikes by this note because a, I want it because I reuse the same password for roughly twenty years. No, one don't don't look for it. No one looked for that password. Frank one um, yeah. Frank one two three. Um, it'd be nice if that password were changed on a bunch of sites, but I'm not sure I'd trust it. I just don't trust it. Yeah, I mean, an ideal, an ideal world would be not just if, hey, this password has been compromised or it's weak. What if and if Apple took it further, they would say, hey, every thirty days, we'll rotate every single password for you. That'd be wild. I have so many passwords and I don't even know which ones are valid anymore. So good luck with that Apple. Yeah, I guess they have access to my emails and other stuff, all those good things. But it's interesting because it is kind of like they're vibing stuff. And you know, you talked about the notify me, but they also have this extensions with vibes. And this is actually, I think this is cooler than notify me because I don't really want to create too many extensions. But if you want to create an extension, like I want this button to be here or I want this thing to be here. For example, if I'm in, uh, Streamyard, it'd be cool to have an extension that mirrors and floats the window like a cannon. Zencaster to put you on my teleprompter. I can now just tell Safari I would like for you to do this thing, and then it will vibe code on the fly in extension, that will do the thing. Yeah, that. Okay, that's pretty cool. Somehow I missed that part in the. That's pretty neat. I hope more apps do that like super smart. So now I'm thinking like in my own apps, what would I need to do to enable that? I would have to have an extension mechanism based on a scripting language that people could vibe code against. Um, you might have to revisit this topic. How do we, uh, how do we add this to all our apps? MM. Well they added it to shortcuts because you can vibe. You can vibe with words, your shortcuts that's vibing with words. This is good because shortcuts. Good good good thought impossible to do anything with like because you open it and like, hey, there's eight thousand actions you can take. And then you close the app because you're like, no, that's way too many actions. How could I possibly do anything? Now you just tell it what you want to do. I don't know if it's going to be useful. Um, I'm still daily shocked at how little I use shortcuts because I feel like I'm the kind of person that could use them. So maybe this will finally get me to use shortcuts. I'm definitely going to give it a try. Um, I would love a lot more things to be automatic on my phone. And so it'd be nice to not have to sort through all those things. I am curious though, like if you, if you think about shortcuts from like the MCP perspective, like as tools, like it has a database of tools like that's going to flood its contacts, because there are so many of these actions that shortcuts can take. I'm curious to see how that actually works in practice. Um, but definitely worth trying. I'd say I'm vaguely excited about that feature. Well, we'll talk about some of this stuff because I'm pretty sure I won't have any of this stuff on my iPhone fourteen, because I'm pretty sure it's only newer iPhones. So we will see, but maybe Heather can try them. We'll see. So a lot of this stuff, I think what you're alluding to is, um, a lot of the Apple intelligence stuff, they're very unclear, like which parts require local and which parts could just use their, um, secure cloud compute platform. Thinger. Um, I'm curious which ones are actually local only and which ones will shout out to a server. And my iPhone fourteen doesn't even have Apple intelligence at all. No intelligence, zero intelligence. It's it's basically a dumb phone. Zero intelligence in it. Now my max do. However, as we now know, our Mac and minis are not going to get a bunch of the goodies, which really disappoints me because they're m1's. But our MacBook minis, our Mac Minis Pro M4 are barely going to scrape by, barely going to scrape by one year on the new stuff, because they did talk a lot about AI stuff, and they first talked a lot about the integrations with Siri, where the actions are so important. Pretty much their recommendation for every single app developer is index all of your data in spotlight search, give Apple all of your data, and then additionally make every aspect of your app highly accessible through actions. And then your application will be AI native. Maybe we'll see. I need to watch the actual, um, dub dub presentation on this, but on the parts that I saw, like you can declare a data model, but you don't have full control over the schema. You still have to like fit your app's data into their own kind of schemas, their predefined schemas. Yeah. And then you can have intents, but then your app has to fit into their predefined intents. And this is the road Apple keeps going down and it's exhausting. Like just let us write Mcpe servers for our apps. This isn't rocket science. Apple like we have a pattern. People like the pattern. It's an easy pattern. You've implemented the pattern yourself in Xcode. Like let's just go down this path. I don't like these predefined schema things. Did you see like, so they kept this. This year's example app was an origami. No, I hated it. Okay. But for this feature, for this Siri integration of AI. Oh yeah. They turned the origami app is all of a sudden like a messaging app. Why is it a messaging app? Because that's the only schema that seems to work well with Siri AI. That's the only demo that they could come up with. Like, how do we order a pizza? Oh no, we don't have to order a pizza. John's going to bring a pizza over. I'm like, God, they still got ordering pizza into this stupid demo. That's my one pet peeve. I hate it when they have ordering pizza. They're so close. They're like, well, we could call up Domino's and. But they didn't expose their order pizza API so we could ask John to do it. No. The order to an origami app. Okay. It's just it's the most contrived thing I've ever seen. I love you, Apple, but my God, this is this is this is a rough one. Apparently, Heather said there was also another one that were talking about paper. Everything was paper themed. There's like a whole paper theme analogy where all they did was make pun jokes about paper. And I was like, oh no. Anyways, the origami app is completely fine. It looks like they vibe coded it out. It's. Whatever. You know, it's not about the app. It's about the intents that you give access to. Through the, the. But I did notice that they're like, well, what if we just were to ask Siri to send a message through the app? And then we attach a photo from the app, and then we send it in the app, and now you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong, Apple. You're doing it wrong. No, that's not the idea. And it's all because they don't let you define an actual schema like the Siri demo should have been, how do I fold a crane? And then Siri could have been like, I will access your origami app and show you the instructions for folding a cute little crane. Yeah, that wasn't the demo. It's not the demo for a reason because it doesn't support that. Yeah, it'd be really interesting how much and how open it is. And Mkbhd was talking about this like, wow, you know, is it going to know about my WhatsApp stuff? Can it access my, can it do my, can it reach into my gmail? Can it do that? Messaging apps, it's probably going to be great. Probably. By the way, I'm announcing I circuit is now a messaging app. I'm just going to create a full social network inside I circuit so you can use Siri AI with it. Talking of I circuit, I don't know if you know, but they reinvented the entire documents API. So good luck with that. Yes. Thanks, James. I noticed that too. It's actually okay. We're so excited. For one developer, Frank Kruger. We are reinventing the documents API. Everything you thought you knew about documents API. It's gone, so get ready. Swift only. Thanks, Apple. Also. Like. Listen, Frank, it's never been easier. Just ask your AI agent to port your code and it will do it. They literally said that they're like, it's never been a better time, twenty years convincing you that our, our nice sandboxing and document abstraction model is really good. This year, we're throwing it out. We're just giving you raw file access because you know what? We're done. We're done. We got nothing else. We can't think of anything else to give you. Okay, well, the series stuff seems fine. I don't use Siri, but maybe I will. Who knows? It's a chatbot. It's a thing. It is. There's local models. The old one, old and busted. New local model seems rad. It has image processing. And then also, what's that? Probably a gamma because they said they've partnered with Google. So this is I'm curious if it's actually a gamma. Um, I hope people actually decode it. Yeah, I'll be interested. But there is also the private cloud compute. What they said is that there's Apple foundational models, Gemini models, and they jammed them together into found gem models, you know, and then there's also this private cloud compute, which is similar to how iCloud works, right? iCloud just works on GCP. So and it's private cloud, all these things. So they can run requests. And then they also kind of sandbox that. So if it needs to make a web request, it can poke out, do a web request, bring it back in, do the compute, do the thing. Um, that's all fine and dandy, I don't know, looks fine, looks okay. I think this is actually for me, this is a very important thing. So, um, Foundation models has been there forever. It only allowed you forever. One whole year. Um, it allowed you access to the, the one terrible model that's on the phone. Anyone? We've discussed it a lot. Every time we try to build something with it, we hit dead ends pretty fast because it's just not a smart enough model. So there are two big upgrades. Are there making that model better? Good local model better good. Like it. But most importantly, um, small developers, if you have fewer than two million downloads, you can access a bigger model. They didn't say how big it is. So I'm guessing it's in the thirty billion to maybe three hundred billion parameter range that would. Who knows? Who knows? They're not going to tell us for sure, but we can access it for free. So it is a server backed one. It's not local, but it is on their secure magic apple. Uh, no one pays anything. Um, hopefully your information is secure, but this is a big deal because small developers like myself who who are trying to build advanced AI features a huge stumbling block has been, how do I charge people for those? Because I have to pay for them. In the end, if I start rolling out a token or keys and all that kind of stuff. So I think this is actually kind of a big deal. Um, even if it's not a huge model, even if it's not a fable mythos model, if it's bigger than a normal local model, it's a big deal because my experience is these thirty billion parameter models are really good. Yeah. So even if it's just that even if it's only a thirty billion parameter model, Um, that is far better than what I what's capable right now with the local models and it's essentially free. So if you're an app developer and you want to start putting AI features into your apps and you need something smarter than the local ones, or you want to support janky old, I phone fourteen or something like that. We can start using, um, this private cloud compute thing. So I'm actually really excited for it. No, I think it was really nice. I'm fascinated how that works out as, as far as like how long until they start charging us per token? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. And like, what are the, what are the limitations? What are the rate limits? What are the things going to be? I feel like this is primed for abuse. So I'm really fascinated to see how this works out. I could use it for the podcast app, right? It's just me. I would love to be able to just use it and see what it is. I am very fascinated. I did like that. It was very, very easy to switch from a local model to a cloud model. Just one line of code, so I could try that out in my podcast app, for example. Now I'm also curious what if I'm in development? I haven't published the app. AM I able to still test it in some sort of sandbox with my dev account? I'm also curious there because that seems like free AI compute on my local machine remotely. I believe you can. Um, because we'll get into another announcement. Um, Apple, the great GUI company has released a command line app. James fm CLI foundation models command line interface. All you have to do is install macOS twenty seven. For some reason, the command line app is not available on iPhone. Go figure. Um, but it comes in the box. A command line app comes in the box on Mac OS. Mac OS being, of course, the GUI platform. Yeah, it comes with a command line app. Now, um, this is full infiltration of the hacker ethos. It's terrible. Um, it's rotten to its core, but it's still kind of cool that we are getting, um, this weird command line interface that really is. It's basically copying what everyone's doing these days, creating fancy little terminal UIs and gives you access to the foundation models. So as far as I could tell, there was very little log in. I think it's just using your they kept saying if your iCloud plus. And I can never remember how much iCloud plus costs, but if you're in the iCloud plus territory, I believe you just get some rate limited amount of tokens constantly because it seemed like I obviously, I haven't gotten this thing installed yet, so I'll report back next week when I do get it installed. But, um, it looks like it's just included for now. Yeah, it'd be super, super interested to see how that works out because I'd love to love to try it out right now. You know, I have like ten bucks that I've just been slowly burning with open AI. And I would like to, I could probably use the new local model on this machine, but again, not on my Mac. So I'll buy a new Mac. Thanks, Apple. Uh, or maybe I won't. Maybe I just won't. You know, that's another maybe just over it, but I would like then I could at least at minimum, I could have a toggle to say use local model versus use cloud model. And then that would work. And that should work just fine on any Mac or iPhone. But that's the interesting part is what's stopping Apple if they're using the cloud compute on my phone. Like couldn't they just use it on my phone? Like just the cloud one? That's what I, I'm hoping you can. That's my hope. Oh, that'd be cool. Because yeah, because I've been wanting to put this AI feature into eye circa forever. I've coded it. It's done. The problem is the local model's just not smart enough to run it. So I have my own tricks to use, um, server backed models and they work great. But, um, I hadn't figured out a pricing mechanism. So now that they're basically I can just use Apple's. I will do that and see if it's good enough. Yeah. For example, it does unlock a lot of new possibilities and apps like even my cadence, right? I have a few thousand downloads or whatever, ten thousand downloads, twenty thousand downloads. But I could, for example, do an analysis of the month. I could like take all the data and run an analysis on it. Right? And then it could take all the data. I have all the stuff in the database and then back out and give recommendations for an AI summary for how your month went. That could be kind of cool. Yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah. Um, I think it's a little bit of a, you know, it's subsidized, obviously, so I'm a little worried about what it's going to be like in a few years down the road. But YOLO, let's just, let's just add these features and we'll, we'll see how it goes down the road. And all the things that we're talking about here are part of a new pack for developers, which is core AI, not the division that I work at at Microsoft called core AI. Um, but there is a core space AI. Ours is core AI, one word are trademark registered Microsoft Corporation. Got it. Okay, so that added a space in there for core AI. There's a new framework to access a bunch of stuff. Everything we've been talking about has actually been foundation models. Um, so core AI is a separate way to run. If you're a weirdo like me and you train your own models and you want to put your own models onto the device or someone else's models, you know, maybe you found a model on GitHub, then you use core AI for that. James, I joke, every year Apple releases yet another framework for executing AI models on device. And this is this year's new framework for doing. Oh, okay. Okay, I was confused. I'm so sorry, listeners, because there are two in here. You're right. Um, that is the foundation model API which we're using today. And obviously they've upgraded it in this version. The core AI is the new stuff, the new AI framework. Oh yeah. There's there's a lot of confusion. There's also this language model, protocol, Swift package thing. They also they, they announced quite a few, like very in the same realm stuff. Now, I will say this, when they put up all the machine learning and this and diagrams, I may have, you know, started coding on, on my machine. No, I was, I was, I was like, let me go back over and ask something. You did mention something like, yeah, they created a plugin mechanism in foundation models. So, um, if you want to use server models that aren't their models, then there is a plugin mechanism, which, uh, makes me a little bit sad because I was working on a library called Swift Intelligence, which basically had all these features which did all this. Um, and they beat me to it. So, but mine doesn't require iOS twenty seven, you know, just saying, but, um, it's a, it's a good upgrade. Um, and it's, it's neat that they have that plug in model. I, I kind of wish they had figured out a way to do it without the plug in model. Like I know everyone just uses the open AI API standard, but I know that one's not perfect because the way people handle thinking and reasoning is different with all of those. And even OpenAI doesn't promote their own endpoint anymore. It's all confusing. But anyway, they created a plug in mechanism. If you want to access some random neural network out there, you can through the plugin system. I feel like I need to go write a few of these plugins. Probably, probably. Yeah, I was interested. I need to dive deeper into the core AI. Um, additional sessions. No, no, no, look there. There's two types of people in the world, those who train neural networks and those who don't. And there's only about three people out there who train neural networks. I'm one of them. And I've only released one app where I've actually had to use the low level, like put your own network onto this device. Because let me be clear, I think my joke didn't get through just enough. Every year, Apple releases a new framework for running neural networks on device. And it's driving me a little bonkers because next year they're going to replace core AI with another one. It's just going to happen. Like they always say, this is the final one. We're done. We're done. This is this is the one to use. Last year it was ML. The year before that it was MPs graph. The year before that it was MPs n n graph. The year before that it was. ML, cloud, ML whatever. Who cares? There's so many of them you can't even keep track. Um, there was BNSF. I can't even remember all their names. There's so many of them. James. So I'm excited that they've released yet another way to execute models on device. At the same time. I'm just so burnt out. Apple just it pick pick a three year segment in all of eternity where you just stick to one API and then maybe we could build something good. But if you change the API every year, we can't build anything good. That's just how it is. This could be the one. Yeah, right. It's core. It's in the name. So core to core AI two comes out. Yeah. There you go. All right. Well let's talk about, um, anything else in the AI realm before we jump into Xcode and simulator stuff and things that, you know, coding aspect that actually changes for us. No, I think, I think we nailed it, but I really am excited for the, um, the personal cloud compute AI is always better than pay for AI. No, this one, this one. This was the part of the developer keynote that I was most excited about and paid the most attention to, because I was like, this is something I could actually use. Um, right now I use Xcode as a debug tool. So I hit debug and I go. And that being said, they now expose our MCP tools. So I probably need to do that at all. In fact, I can just debug stuff from VS code. So I don't really need to use Xcode at all, but it's there if I need it. But, you know, I do think they're really making a major play here with Xcode and Swift. Like, I do think that this is a, I have many thoughts internally, but I'm not going to talk about them on this podcast right now until I process them further. But they are making a very big play on Swift everywhere. Xcode is the thing. Swift is the thing. Just do the thing. And I do feel like they invested really deeply, or at least deeper in Xcode in the ecosystem. And they're showing up as a serious player or more serious, at least, than they were compared to their counterparts in the market. You know, everything that's being done in VS and VS code and cursor and IntelliJ and all those other Ides and code editors have been in this world for a long time, and Xcode is now doing more. So they obviously have Claude and OpenAI integration with API keys, and they also have Gemini integration. Now they've integrated more MCP support, so they've added support for more MCP built in out of the box with GitHub and Figma. I'm still unclear if there's a marketplace or configuration. It doesn't seem like it, I don't know. Um, but the thing that we both just tested and we did just get working, which I'm very excited for, is that they decided, um, that they were going to be more open. They said, hey, there's more tools out there that could power their AI. So so for example, you can install GitHub copilot for Xcode, and it's a standalone app that ties in and has agent mode and can hook into the MCP and do stuff. But if you want to use the native integration inside of Xcode, you have to use whatever Apple tells you to use. Now, if you prefer different harnesses, different CLI harnesses that are out there, you may want to use those. And there's actually a solution for this, which is called the agent client protocol, which I believe was OpenAI originally. And now it's like a community standardization, like MCP, like skills, like all these. And what it does is it's a protocol that both client and tool. So IDE and CLI in this case basically implement that allows them to communicate kind of like these models, right? There's a OpenAI like thing. So what that means is that you can go in and add an agent. You can say GitHub copilot, you give it the path to copilot argument dash dash ACP. I'm gonna have a video out on my YouTube. I'm going to do it right after this podcast because Frank and I got it working. Actually, Frank got it working first. If you don't know where your copilot is, you do. Which copilot? Which space copilot, that's which, not where, which or whatever it is. It's where I think it's where. Yeah. So you do that where I did type where you type twitch, which is so funny. It tells us who we are down to our core. And when you start a new chat, you can select GitHub copilot and it will use the stuff. Now there's a bunch of limitations. It doesn't know about slash commands. It doesn't know about model changing. You got to change those things kind of in the CLI, it's a little funky, but if you're already a subscriber to that service, you want to use the harness, which means you get all of the integrations that Apple is doing, then it's right there for you, for it knows how to do all the building and all the stuff that it would need to do and talk to the agent. Yeah, this is super cool. You had to teach me what an ACP was today because I didn't know these were a thing. Um, I knew all the clis had some way to kind of control them from the outside, but I didn't know that that had been standardized into a protocol. And this is a really smart play by Apple because, um, especially with everyone moving to like funky CLI things that aren't even Ides, like what is an IDE anymore? At least Apple saying, okay, we got an IDE. It's a good idea. Um, pros and cons, but it's a good idea. And we want to take advantage of all this new stuff coming in, and it's too hard for us to keep churning our IDE. So instead we'll just talk this standardized protocol smart on their side. So I assume all the little ones too, like what are people using? Like open code is one of the little ones. Um, uh, pi pi claw, maybe whatever it's called. Um, there's lots of these like, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of these little harnesses out there. So it's just smart and it's neat because yeah, totally got it to work. It's the worst UI ever for setting this up. Good luck everyone. I everyone go watch James's video once it's out so that you know how to do this. Um, but like, it totally worked. Uh, a few features kind of disappeared. It's not easy to select your models. It's not easy to select like the thinking mode. So they have some UI improvements to make along the way, but good on them for plugging in, for recognizing that the ecosystem is moving faster than they can possibly keep up. So they just create this release hatch of being able to talk to these other harnesses, give it a thumbs up. And I know they're not the first ID to do this. So I haven't really investigated, uh, ACP support at all until now because I feel like this is pretty, pretty decent. And I do have Xcode twenty seven does not need to run on Mac OS twenty seven. You can run it. I installed it right now in Xcode, and the beta pops up bingo Bango and it downloaded a bunch of stuff and it just shows up. Um, yeah. So it's pretty decent in that regard. So it does seem as though you do have a plan mode. So it does seem like there is a plan mode in general, but I assuming that what's happening here is that it's just Apple has decided that for plan mode, they are like implementing their own system prompt that they are then sending down to the ACP. I guess I don't know, I don't know either because like the advantage to ACP to me is that you're using the other tools prompts. So I don't love the idea. Like one of my big disappointments when you showed this to me, I tried running a bunch of slash commands, uh, through it and it doesn't seem like slash commands are working. Um, I don't know if that's a limitation of the protocol or Apple's implementation of it or what the deal is there. But, um, yeah, just more, as I say in every podcast, living in the wild, wild West, this is just another reflection of that. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think that's interesting. So it's there you know I think they're making a big play. They do have the new chat is also full screen. That's also very different. Um you know, they're really making a big play. There's a big button, a big chat button. Um, it's deeply integrated into the tools, tests and docs and Swift. It's grounded in Swift, you know, so I think that there's a lot of fascination for me of what they're doing here and how that's going to play out. So it's pretty good. But I think the biggest thing for me as a developer today, besides some of this stuff, is actually how I test my stuff. I'm really curious here because Apple did talk a lot about screen mirroring and going bigger. They're kind of hinting at some changes and they decided to kill the simulator. It's gone. Oh dang. Rest in peace. Geez. Rip my soul right out. Uh, yeah. Everyone, you're required to buy devices now. No more simulation. Is that what you're saying? That's correct. No, no, no, there's a hub for your devices. The device hub. Oh, good. Another thing to figure out how to run. To lose all my devices in and to organize all my stuff in. No, the hub is cool. I haven't played with it too much, but, um, looks like it's just simulator two point zero where they just make things a little bit easier. I'm going to miss all the cute little skins they used to put on each little device and all that stuff. But in the hub, you can resize your screen. As you said earlier in the podcast, all our apps can be any size now, so you better, better test all the different sizes. And it combines the simulator with real devices. And this is what I think twenty twenty later, half of twenty twenty six and twenty twenty seven are going to be is what everyone's calling like closing the loop where you're not just writing code, you're writing code, running it on the device, the agents can visualize, you know, whatever receive images from the device and then debug itself. I think that that closing of the loop is the next big wave that I sadly haven't done too much in, because I haven't I don't have good enough tools to close that loop myself yet, but I should be focused on also. And I think we should all be focused on. This is a part where the web developers have been ahead of all the all of us native developers for a while now, and I think it's good for Apple to Apple as the provider of the one of the biggest native platforms out there to help us all try to close this loop and get these screenshots into the networks. Yeah. It's true. I'm interested in, um, I'm interested in it. See how it, how it goes. Uh, we'll see. Yeah. So it's a UI thing, you know, I'm, I'm curious because like I have years of experience with simulator. I know how it works. I. I know it's all these little foibles, but times have change. We'll see. Hopefully they didn't code the whole thing. Hopefully it's a little bit stable. We'll see. Well, that was your Wwdc so far. I mean, we'll watch some more. We'll give some more insight. But from a high level there, dude, there's some cool things in there. Like we talked about the foundation models I'm the most excited about, you know, and obviously that powers a lot of the other AI stuff that we're talking about. So I'm excited there. I'm a little bit bummed that it is. Some of these new local models are really for newer and newer devices with twelve gigs of RAM. Uh, but you know, the cloud stuff seems really nice. And the Xcode stuff, I'm excited to try out a little bit more. Yeah. Yep. Um, I'm sticking with what I said. It's still kind of a, a tick year because, um, the OS itself really hasn't changed much. I mean, they're changing the liquid glass effect, but nothing fundamental is changing, which as app developers, not the worst. It means we can all relax this year and refine our own UIs and polish. Do take a note from Apple. This is a polish and refinement year. Uh. No need to change how every button renders. This year we can all relax a little bit. That's good. Uh, the only sad part is it just. It's a little disappointing because you want whiz bang awesomeness every year. And no, no whiz bang awesomeness this year. Just a lot of AI catch up on there. Yeah, just a lot of AI catch up, that is for sure. So yeah, we'll see how it goes. Well, go catch the sunset. I think you have like two minutes left, so go do that. Let us know what you thought at Wwdc. Go to merge conflict dot fm. And of course go to our YouTube forward slash YouTube dot com forward slash merge conflict FM. That's where you'll find us. We'll put links in the show notes, of course, but that's going to do it for this, hopefully not too snoozy merge conflict. So until next week, I'm James Montemagno and I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for watching and listening. Peace.