00:00:00.25 James Welcome back, everyone, to Merge Conflict 2025. 00:00:05.25 James How many wrapped reports did you have? 00:00:06.46 Frank Get rid of it. 00:00:07.68 James No. Oh, also, I forgot to tell Frank before he got here. 00:00:08.22 Frank Throw it out. 00:00:10.96 James Don't get too close to your mic because then you peek, so stay about that distance and don't yell too loud. and you're going to get excited for this year in review. 00:00:16.31 Frank not allowed to move. You know, it's hard to get excited about 2025, so we'll we'll see. 00:00:19.06 James Don't move. 00:00:22.70 Frank We'll see how excited I get and if I can possibly max out this mic. I thought the AI figured that out. like It takes all your clipping audio and it just says, oh, he's excited and inserts excited voice here. 00:00:33.12 James Yeah. Excited voice. you know How many wrapped things did you unwrap virtually? 00:00:41.12 Frank Oh, I virtually. No, no, no. I had an early Christmas, so um I actually got to unwrap one present tonight. Very nice. 00:00:49.08 James Wow. 00:00:49.73 Frank Yeah. 00:00:49.96 James Wow. 00:00:50.33 Frank So, ah you know, we're going to unwrap a year, which is much more difficult than unwrapping a present. But my gifts have been pretty awesome. I got a cat mug. 00:01:00.68 Frank It's a mug that has pictures of cats on it. 00:01:02.51 James Oh, I like that. 00:01:03.45 Frank Pretty much perfect gift. 00:01:05.03 James That's perfect. you can't You can't get any better. So you might give up now. Why even continue to have any more holidays? 00:01:08.34 Frank Yeah. No more guests. No more unwrapping. 00:01:10.78 James and or yes ah We haven't unwrapped anything yet. 00:01:13.43 Frank What have you been unwrapping? 00:01:14.65 James ah No unwraps at all. 00:01:14.81 Frank Nothing. Okay. 00:01:16.25 James i've been I've been clearing out my closets for holiday donations. 00:01:16.73 Frank sort 00:01:21.25 James I do as many big donations. I have some mega donations this year. I'm very excited to the Goodwill. All good stuff. Computer, the whole computer, the working computer. 00:01:30.42 Frank Ooh. 00:01:30.51 James I reformat. 00:01:30.92 Frank Yeah. 00:01:30.99 James I did take the hard drive because I'm a little like scared, but 00:01:34.30 Frank Oh, I miss disassembling hard drives with you. You know, I can never decide what to take to the PC recycle versus, um, that yeah. And any of those goodwill, whatever. 00:01:44.36 Frank Um, it's a hard choice. 00:01:44.84 James Yeah. 00:01:46.00 Frank Did you just make the decision? Like this is still a good computer. If someone goes by hard drive, is that your rough? 00:01:50.32 James Oh, it's awesome. Awesome. Awesome machine. 00:01:52.54 Frank Okay. 00:01:53.17 James It was one of the review units. 00:01:53.78 Frank Okay. 00:01:54.61 James So just kind of good to go. So, um, Heather's like, why don't you sell it? 00:01:57.40 Frank Are you allowed to do that? Yeah. 00:01:59.42 James Yeah. Yeah. 00:02:00.70 Frank ah Okay. 00:02:00.86 James They send it to me. I give it away. Yeah. 00:02:03.00 Frank Fantastic. 00:02:03.14 James I know. I'm not making money. I'm not making money off of it. I'm not selling. 00:02:05.69 Frank No? 00:02:05.94 James I'm just giving it away. 00:02:06.52 Frank Cool. 00:02:06.74 James So that's tax write off, but you know, um, 00:02:07.64 Frank Well, someone will be lucky. Good. 00:02:11.22 James Um, I, we've not unwrapped anything. I did do a lot of wrapping now, virtually i didn't do any unwrapping in, in like apps, like the, like a lot of my apps, I don't use Spotify. 00:02:21.98 James Google photos does as like a 2025 and review, which is always fun. We always sit down and do that. 00:02:25.58 Frank Oh, right. Yeah. 00:02:26.84 James Uh, my podcast app doesn't unwrapped, but I kind of didn't listen to a lot of podcasts. YouTube hasn't done a wrapped thing. Um, so i don't know. 00:02:35.10 Frank Oh, I got notified for a YouTube one, but I didn't click it because i was afraid of what it would show me. 00:02:35.65 James Hmm. 00:02:41.23 Frank Like, if it's actually using my actual viewing history, I do not want to i do not want to unwrap 2025. That would be embarrassing to myself. 00:02:50.68 James I do not want to know how much YouTube I've watched. 00:02:53.40 Frank No. 00:02:53.52 James You know what i mean? 00:02:54.17 Frank No. 00:02:54.16 James Like, it's like, it's ah like, if you're listening to Spotify or music, that's okay because it's like, it's in the background, right? 00:02:59.13 Frank Yeah. Hmm. 00:03:01.55 James Like, no, like it's an ah unhealthy amount of YouTube that is being sucked into my brains. 00:03:02.66 Frank Yeah. 00:03:05.26 Frank Yeah. You're not working on the house while watching YouTube, though sometimes i actually am. But yeah, you're you're not coding while watching YouTube. Though actually sometimes I am. 00:03:15.53 Frank so But not enough. 00:03:15.51 James Yeah. 00:03:16.93 Frank Not enough for sure. 00:03:18.68 James Well, let's unwrap, uh, and wrap 2025 let's unwrap to unwrap 2025. 00:03:26.77 Frank Let's wrap it up by unwrapping it. 00:03:29.27 James Perfect. Okay. Uh, let's just kick it off plain and simple. Frank. Um, this was a year, uh, 365 days and like some change. 00:03:38.66 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:03:39.54 James And, um, uh, there was a lot of AI, uh, in this year. 00:03:44.76 Frank Oh, boy. I think we covered every ounce of it, too. I think any time there was an AI announcement, we were on top of it. I felt a little bit bad. I say this every time. But do you remember the days when you wouldn't let me talk about AI? 00:03:56.60 Frank Now I'm just like, oh, my God, are we talking about AI again but there were there were some good ones this year. you know, um the Gemini 3 came out and Google finally got a decent network out there. 00:04:06.34 James Yeah. 00:04:09.85 Frank ah um The amazing Claude who everyone worships, Claude 4, came out this year. 00:04:10.16 James Yeah. Yeah. 00:04:15.61 Frank I mean, that's a big deal. ah ah OpenAI did something. I think they're on like a chat GPT-12 or something at this point. I can't even keep up. ah But it was funny. I was actually looking at um AI model usage, like by model. 00:04:31.16 Frank And they're like, GPT-3.5 Turbo is still used a lot. And so you can tell that's the one that set the UI high watermark. But 2025, we got, I think we we we at least raised the bar. If not, you know, lot people just being cheap using the 3.5 turbo. But man, Cloud 4, awesome. Gemini 3, awesome. Chessy BC5, it's okay when I'm not yelling at it. 00:04:58.10 James Yeah, it was a year of models, and I think this will always only continue to accelerate as well. Or maybe it'll plateau. I don't know um you know. It's a balance because, yeah, in the last month or two, GPT and and OpenAI i have released so many GPTs. 00:05:14.66 James They have obviously five. 00:05:15.38 Frank Yeah. 00:05:16.05 James They have 5.1, 5.1 Codex, Maxx. 00:05:19.80 James 5.2 now, they have a 5.1 mini, they have a nano, they have all these things. There's a lot of options out there and and there's more options that are kind of even available in in you know where VS Code Visual Studio people and and there's more than that's even inside of those editors as well. it's a lot It's a lot in that model selector. I know the team has been talking about this quite a lot. um Yes. 00:05:41.94 James Yeah. I mean, it's crazy to think that I started Feedbackflow using Sonnet 4.5 and then that's gone. 00:05:48.89 Frank It's a con. 00:05:49.04 James 3.7, it's gone. 00:05:50.38 Frank Jeez. 00:05:50.34 James 3.7 is also gone. 00:05:50.76 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:05:52.00 James 4 is also gone. Now it's only 4.5. I think you can get 4 still, maybe. 00:05:54.87 Frank simson 00:05:55.58 James um you know You can still get GPT-4.1, which is a great model. and I use that for some very pointed prompts that are there. It was a year of me learning... the personalities and prompting. I think that there was the models, but obviously the tools that we'll talk about have helped me kind of figure out all the stuff that you've been talking about for so long. 00:06:15.29 James I'm like how to actually properly use these tools, how these models thinks their characteristics about them. Um, and there's so many that obviously have come out. you just go to hugging face that we don't even use, right? 00:06:25.77 Frank Yeah. 00:06:26.46 James Like it's crazy. 00:06:26.67 Frank Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like this is the year of DeepSeek. Remember DeepSeek? Like China finally released an awesome model out there. It's not just, you know, USA, go USA. The other countries are coming in like with a force, like some proper good models are coming out of other countries. It's pretty impressive. 00:06:43.96 Frank And then the open source world is just amazing. Facebook added some legalese to all their models that I don't really love, but the open source models are crushing it out there, especially the finely tuned one for specialized list. The new medical models out there, which are designed specifically to... 00:07:02.62 Frank try to hallucinate a little less, you know, when it comes to medicine, it's kind of important. Um, yeah, I didn't mean like, I don't think we've actually plateaued yet, but we definitely decreased the curve. 00:07:13.14 Frank the The wild stuff, man, it's really the wild, wild west out there. I think we started the year still talking about instructions files for doing like coding agents. And we still hadn't totally decided what the word agent meant, but now we know it means everything. 00:07:26.39 Frank Uh, but we started with like instruction files. Then we got, um, 00:07:29.98 James what well Well, we didn't even have agents at the beginning of the year. i was... 00:07:33.40 Frank Oh, geez. Okay. 00:07:34.36 James Yeah, yeah. 00:07:34.72 Frank It's the year of agents then. 00:07:35.22 James oh 00:07:36.00 Frank Yeah. 00:07:36.18 James So Burke and Pierce just got together and I was just editing the VS Code podcast that is now out by the time listen which is VS Code Year in Review. 00:07:36.95 Frank ah listen 00:07:44.60 Frank ah Okay. 00:07:44.66 James And they were saying like it was like in December when Co-Pilot Free happened, December 18th or something. And then I think edits happened like when generally available in like February, which edits was okay. 00:07:51.97 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:07:58.14 James We got add a lot of contacts. It's like point to it gives you recommendations. And then agent mode didn't really land until March or so. 00:08:02.07 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:08:04.34 James It was like late February or early March in preview. 00:08:04.58 Frank Oh wow, God. 00:08:07.50 James It didn't even hit GA until May or something, which is crazy. 00:08:08.30 Frank Shaking my head. 00:08:11.70 James And that was like, yeah, 3.5, I think was the model and 4.1 were like the models. right And we were talking about at the beginning of the year, ah, it doesn't know anything about Swift and it doesn't know anything about modern C-sharp and we got to write all these instruction files. 00:08:20.95 Frank yeah Yeah. 00:08:24.41 James I'm going to do all this stuff. 00:08:25.27 Frank Yeah. 00:08:25.42 James There's no standardization. Like the standardization of the year is coding is crazy because you have agents, you have MCP, now you have um skills that just standardized too. 00:08:32.96 Frank MCP. 00:08:36.34 James It's like, it's wild in general, but you're right. I think that like, it's hard. It's sometimes hard to just look back and be like, Oh, like that was actually just like 10 months ago that that thing happened. 00:08:46.65 Frank Yeah. 00:08:49.43 Frank And not to jump ahead to the grand year of 2026, because we are wrapping up 2025, but I feel like we're not stopping. I feel like there's gonna be at least three more Markdown files we need to write by the end of 2026. And i'm I'm excited to find out what they are. You know, I was just talking to someone today, not tech adjacent, but um they were talking about um ah SpecKit. And like SpecKit is really ah making quite a dent in a lot of like enterprise-y places where... 00:09:19.03 Frank just having like agent files just isn't quite enough and having like individuals working on one thing at a time just isn't enough where you actually want some formality to the process. You want to bring back all that, all that cool 1980s ways of designing software and spec kit is kind of taken off. So I'm pretty sure spec kit didn't exist in 2024. It is a wild, wild west out there. Hmm. 00:09:43.51 James Well, and there was hardly any CLIs, right? 00:09:43.63 Frank Hmm. 00:09:45.67 James I mean, now there's a CLI every other week. There's a new VS Code fork every other day. 00:09:52.70 Frank Yeah. 00:09:52.63 James ah And 00:09:55.16 Frank Google has three of them, I think. 00:09:57.85 James they released three yesterday. 00:09:58.52 Frank I think bonuses are directly equipped to VS Code forks, yeah. 00:09:59.21 James um You know, I think... 00:10:03.22 James for example and and know And at the same time, like you know the core of VS Code like is evolving too. right We got WorkTree support, which we talked about. 00:10:11.58 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:10:14.06 James There's a lot of improvements in the overall like terminal and like how it integrates and IntelliSense inside of it. obviously Languages have updated and all these other things, extension support, new APIs in general. 00:10:25.30 James But obviously the whole code editor has really evolved as well. i mean i mean ol of Not only is all of VS Code open source, but all of like GitHub Copilot inside of VS Code is open source too. 00:10:28.79 Frank Yeah. 00:10:34.95 James like That also happened this year and it just only came out like a year ago. bananas think about, but 00:10:39.67 Frank Yeah. 00:10:40.34 James is bananas to think about but at the same time like it's been so much fun this year to kind of evolve with the ide's uh and just the ecosystem around it i think like everyone's trying to do their own spin you think of kiro which is like very much a plan and spec driven first thing right and then like Cursor's doing its thing, and then you got anti-gravity doing its thing. 00:10:48.57 Frank yeah 00:10:55.79 Frank Sure. 00:11:01.62 Frank Yeah. Mm-hmm. 00:11:02.30 James You got Zed trying to do its thing. 00:11:03.99 Frank and and 00:11:04.42 James or you you know and I could list off five other ones. and The CLIs, they're all trying to do their own things. With the CLI, how much can you do? 00:11:10.39 Frank yeah 00:11:10.38 James right oh now you can I think now I saw like oh Gemini, there's extensions. You can have it like watch your browser and take screenshots. Just put it in ninety you know what i mean just i you it's It's really funny, but it's cool to see how how people adopted things at different times. 00:11:25.99 James I think you and i different cadences, similar time, Hanselman, different times than me, but only because of different tools as well. and Then it's crazy to think about the things that that we couldn't do well at the beginning of the year to things that are exceptional now. 00:11:40.84 Frank Yeah. 00:11:42.70 James and I think as a developer, There hasn't been a tool. I think of this AI stuff as a tool in my toolbox. I'm in charge of how much or how little I use of it. I use a lot of it um now. 00:11:54.90 James But that being said, like um I've never seen a year in which my tools have evolved and become so good so fast and added more tools to their tools in that period of time, in under a year. 00:12:03.45 Frank Yeah. 00:12:08.98 James like There's no way. 00:12:09.62 Frank Yeah. 00:12:09.82 James like You couldn't say, oh, the core of any almost any editor out there in one year, like completely transformed how I wrote all of my code and shipped code and helped me write, you know, 10 X, a hundred X, the code that I wrote the year before that just never happened. 00:12:22.97 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:12:26.03 Frank Okay. No, definitely not. And even even the small things have changed. Like um we were using basically the IntelliSense user interface to talk into these models. So set aside the agents and the chat window and all the cool asynchronous stuff and assigning PRs to co-pilot. 00:12:47.77 Frank Love that stuff. But just to like the simple editor action of, what do they call it, next edit or do a next edit with the tab key instead of it just being the IntelliSense style of where you're typing a little bit and it auto completes that line. 00:12:55.26 James Mm-hmm. 00:13:04.18 Frank ah This year 2025, we all got the next edit completion or whatever the heck that silly thing is called, where basically you just kind of sit there and hit tab, tab, tab until it stops offering you something. You move your cursor a little bit, tab, tab, tab, move the cursor a little bit. What does the AI think about these lines? Oh, tab, tab, tab. and I'll take some of those next edits. Please give me some more next edits. So I like that. ah And by the way, Ryder finally got next edit support. 00:13:29.69 Frank ah So I'm happy that that ah user interface has actually advanced because um the code completion was good. 00:13:29.68 James Nice. 00:13:38.08 Frank we all We all knew how to use it. It was very intuitive. it It worked out beautifully. I give full credit to the designers of it. But you could always tell like, this line completion thing, it's it's not quite right for this AI editing. 00:13:50.86 Frank We need something more sophisticated. And we're probably not at the pinnacle of that user interface right now, but I think the next edit process kind of mantra, whatever ah whatever, user interface is light years ahead of what we had in 2024. Mm-hmm. Yeah. 00:14:05.96 James Oh, 100%. I think and it'll only continue to improve too. And different editors and different extensions are really evolving quickly in the space. That's why Cursor got you know really popular with the tab, tab, tab. 00:14:18.07 James I think agents and the agent modes are streamlining, becoming a lot of similar parts. And I think those distinguishing fat features of I'm in my code, i'm I'm doing my thing, I'm debugging, I'm planning, I'm designing. 00:14:29.34 James like Those are can i really define some things in general. 00:14:29.94 Frank Yeah. And, 00:14:33.98 James But no, I totally agree. Yeah, I totally agree. 00:14:36.86 Frank And I've been traveling for the holidays, so I'm pulling what I call a James and just taking out my phone and assigning PRs to the co-pilots. And it's just fun. you know I feel like a proper boss for the very first time in my life because you know I could never really fully afford employees and all that stuff. So now I feel like I'm actually a boss. I'm like, do this work, sir, and I'm going to code review you. And i'm like, oh, that's too much code. Okay, I approve. But... 00:15:02.71 Frank I really took a page out of your book and tried to do more stuff asynchronously. asynchronously Like, am I standing on a line? Can I type out a little issue here and assign it to Copilot? 00:15:13.25 Frank Yes, I can. And so I shall. So that's been a great... 00:15:15.69 James Yeah. 00:15:18.26 Frank i'm not even sure if it makes me like a 10 X engineer. I don't know what it makes me, but it just feels good to be like, Oh, there is that nagging little feature in my head. And I'm not going to be able to sit down in the, in front of a computer for three days. Let's at least have an AI take a whack at it first. 00:15:33.56 James Yeah, exactly. It may not be perfect, it may not be what you want. Maybe it is, and that's awesome. It gets you you know off the ground running. 00:15:38.18 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:15:39.93 James And yeah, I've been super impressed specifically how I code more asynchronously because for me, one thing that I think is really nice is if I have an app idea, 00:15:51.80 James or I have a feature idea, i can take five minutes, either craft up a nice issue or just come up with a nice paragraph or a few sentences, assign it off and i just get back to my life. And you know, after work, right? It's like, like you're saying, like, I'm, you know, I don't want to bust out my laptop and start coding, you know, necessarily like in the airport and doing stuff, but I can draft it. And then when I'm ready, I can pull it down, review it or better yet, maybe I have a staging environment and I just, there it is, you know, that's what, that's how I did feedback flow a lot was, 00:16:20.89 James cool, just go for it. signed so many things at Copilot. I was talking to Tim Rogers on the last Let It Cook and he works in the cloud agent. And I was like, yeah I actually got a survey from internal, which is like, hey, you're one of the most, you know, 00:16:35.99 James people that use the most cloud, I don't know anymore, but early days, I was just a believer. 00:16:39.75 Frank That's fun. 00:16:40.43 James I was a firm believer. 00:16:41.15 Frank Uh-huh. 00:16:41.75 James i was like, this this is the way. And the the integrations in VS code to see them, pull them down. i did this video, I'm probably gonna redo it, but where i you now can pick a model. So you can say, know, what Sonnet 4.5, Opus or Codex. 00:16:56.60 James um I had it generate like three different revisions with three different models. And I said, look how easy, like can can go into VS code, open it, open it, open it, run it, boom, boom, boom, boom. 00:17:01.61 Frank Fun. 00:17:04.67 Frank Yeah. 00:17:05.04 James hot reloads with node.js and just kind of goes, um, which I think is crazy, but no, it's been super good. 00:17:08.18 Frank Yeah. 00:17:11.45 James I mean, we got visual studio 2026 this year, which was like super infused with stuff. I was just doing tons of Maui work today. updating all these modules sit down at 10 and it's just like really cool to see that come a long way, especially like with some of the new profiling agents and debug agents. 00:17:26.03 James I think that it's, It's wild to think that, yeah, none of this have existed really last year. And yet I don't think I can go back. 00:17:38.42 James Like, I think i'm i've I've been all in, but there's no going back. 00:17:40.21 Frank No. 00:17:41.70 James It's like the first time you got IntelliCode and tell us, well, there's no going back from this. 00:17:43.99 Frank Yeah. 00:17:45.34 James It's just so good. 00:17:45.82 Frank No. 00:17:45.90 James Why would I ever not do this? 00:17:48.92 Frank Yeah, I have nothing to add to that. That's the problem. Yeah, you you know it's transformational when if someone took it away from you, would you be upset? Yes, I would be. 00:17:56.51 James Yeah. 00:17:57.01 Frank Because, and me, I still like hand crafting the code. I'm still, i write artists art is artisanal code. 00:18:04.38 James His and all. Yes. 00:18:06.56 Frank There's that human touch, a little bit of Frank in every line of code. um But my God, and i would don't don't you dare take away my assistant or even threaten to take away my assistant. And please don't tell the salespeople these companies because I would pay an ungodly amount of money at this point. 00:18:21.48 Frank I'm so glad that they're still kind of relatively vaguely cheap other than the fact that you have to pay for 12 different models now. um Because, yeah, it's been transformational enough that I'm just... 00:18:33.01 Frank No, no, not going back. I'm curious what we said in 2024. I'll have to go back to the year in review for 2024. Were we fully convinced? I feel like we probably both were. 00:18:44.29 Frank We're both technologists, but I feel like this year, like really put the nail in the coffin. I am not going backwards. ah Yeah, I mean, I need this thing to help me write issues and all that. 00:18:50.33 James Yeah. 00:18:53.34 James I didn't. We should have went back to the 2024 recap. 00:18:56.76 Frank consistent 00:18:57.58 James That was bad on us. We should have definitely done that. 00:18:59.74 Frank ah 00:18:59.66 James I'm going to now. going listen to it this week and then we can we can we can re-review that to see if it came to fruition. 00:19:01.18 Frank ah Yeah. Yeah. 00:19:06.36 Frank Yeah. 00:19:08.22 James um No, I think you're right. i mean, and to the point of this is how I look at my year of AI coding is, is I wrote more code than I ever have in a single year. i wrote more apps than I have in a single year. Now, a lot of those apps are small. They're personal apps or apps that maybe be some developers or a few other people would find nifty, like my wife, maybe. um And I think that's okay. I like, I love apps on demand. I think that that is, 00:19:35.70 James um that's going to be a new bigger trend, the biggest trend. 00:19:39.17 Frank yeah yeah 00:19:39.15 James I think the replets of the world and and and you know what Spark was trying to do and a lot of these other, like not just they're not low code, but they're like, hey, we're going to help you build an app and do a thing. I think and generate the code is really like kind of a future. 00:19:51.47 James I think there'll be apps inside of apps and all these other um neat things. Hopefully, actually, creation of these apps for myself are easier and faster than ever because I love spinning up little things that help me get it done. 00:20:02.90 James like I was just tracking my donations. and Right now i'm doing inside of a note. you know notes, the notes app. 00:20:06.97 Frank Yeah, why not? Sure. 00:20:09.27 James like The notes app, I make a table. I can't even be like, calculate the sum of this table. like Come on. 00:20:14.61 Frank Yeah. 00:20:15.29 James you know But if I was doing it correct, I'd probably actually make a little app for myself. 00:20:15.93 Frank Yeah. 00:20:18.92 James and Then I would do you do you know something where i take photos and it calculates everything. it would just be way better. and and It would be better because it would be like, what is this? Oh, there's a QR code. 00:20:30.55 James You know, barcode on it. Let me look up what the retail value would be. 00:20:32.84 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:20:32.79 James It would just figure some stuff out in the past. It'd be better. But you know, I think those apps on demand are good, but I've also made the biggest large production apps in in my life. 00:20:36.87 Frank Yeah. 00:20:42.42 James Uh, feedback flow is one of the biggest apps that I've ever created personally and published onto the internet by myself. 00:20:42.59 Frank Hmm. yeah 00:20:50.51 James I'd say that all the other apps that display a number are relatively small. ah And then, you know you think about it, I made ah the skiing app and I have the the the the Cadence app and I've done some Animal Crossing app. That was kind of okay. 00:21:05.30 James But this app is is quite complex, quite large. it's It's using AI. It was built with AI. It's ah a web application, which I'm not super comfortable with. 00:21:11.04 Frank Yeah. Mm-hmm. 00:21:14.33 James It uses databases. It uses functions. It uses... email services, it's calling in into tons of APIs, it's using staging environments, has user accounts as an API, as an MCP server, has all these things. 00:21:28.12 James And that was all generated with AI, which is which is crazy to think about. And then I just today to the app store published TrimTally, which is a 100% generated TrimTally.app. Yep. 00:21:41.18 James Yeah. T-R-I-M-T-A-L-L-Y.app. 00:21:41.78 Frank Shipped it. Congratulations. 00:21:43.70 James I shipped it, shipped it out there. 00:21:44.77 Frank Oh. 00:21:44.98 James The website was built with Copilot and it's 100%. 00:21:49.30 James an application written. I actually get it. It's fun. Cause I can, I'm actually looking at the code and I can actually read the code and and edit the code. If I want to, I don't want to, i will, I will have it do it for me, but I'm actively reviewing the code reviews a lot faster now, but it's written a hundred percent in a programming language that I don't know that I can read. 00:21:59.33 Frank Don't want to. 00:22:08.34 James And, um, other APIs that I'm not super familiar with, which is all Swift six, Swift UI and Swift data. These are things I'm not super familiar with. However, they're not super uncommon either. Like. 00:22:18.25 Frank Yeah. 00:22:18.39 James you know how many ways of doing a button is a button and making a UI. 00:22:21.49 Frank Yeah. 00:22:21.75 James But there's some things I'm learning and and it's really, really fun. I felt by building this app, I was at Heather's holiday party for our company recently. 00:22:32.68 James and i was talking to their iOS development team, which are Swift developers. And I felt like I could have a great conversation about them, about this app, about the things that they're doing, all this other stuff. 00:22:38.52 Frank Mm. 00:22:41.44 James I just thought it was so cool that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to do that. And I wouldn't have even thought about doing it, right? Because it have took way too long to learn, to spin up and and use tools like Xcode that I didn't want to use, where I built this all in VS code. 00:22:56.03 James And that is something to me as a learning journey, is studying. Am I going to build Swift apps for the rest of my life? No. But I'm now able to, if I want to spin up something really quick, I'm excited. 00:23:02.20 Frank okay Yeah. 00:23:06.68 James I spun up a new Maui app today and it's going to, I'm putting it through the paces as well because that's my bread and butter that I love. But I thought it was so cool just to to do it and and live through it and experiment with it. 00:23:18.94 James um And I could have never dreamed about doing that, you know, and having the same life work balance that I had before. 00:23:22.59 Frank Yeah. 00:23:25.54 James Yeah. 00:23:27.16 Frank Yeah, and it's's it's funny because um I have that phrase, what is it? um The Cobbler's children have no shoes or something like that. As programmers, because we know how much work is actually in like a good quality app, oftentimes I don't think we even start apps because we're like, oh, golly gee whiz, it's going to be so much work to actually get this thing done. 00:23:34.88 James Totally. 00:23:46.73 Frank And I think that the the AIs have really helped me to like get over that first little hurdle, like just get something down on paper that you can go back and edit and refine and all that stuff. 00:23:47.06 James totally 00:23:58.73 Frank But, you know, those little small apps, Instead of writing like a little Python script or a little script that just runs in the command line, I'm just like, oh, no, blast me out a full GUI app. 00:24:10.65 Frank You know, but but let's start there. And I was always physically capable of it, but it's it's an energy thing. 00:24:12.65 James Oh, yeah. 00:24:17.46 Frank And this is doing a lot of that grunt work and just getting the thing out there. And so i myself, I've been really inspired by you, inspired by all ah everyone doing everything to just, oh, if I have a silly little idea, it costs me so very little now to just prototype that idea and just get something rough down and decide, like play with it a little. 00:24:39.88 Frank Like, oh, okay, is this worth continuing to work on or not? I'll say like, i haven't taken the next step of like, really improving my business, like 10xing my profits. I'll be honest, I haven't done that yet. um But I feel like this is the first step to doing that, of like clearing those roadblocks, clearing those mental hurdles to get over and getting more apps out there and being willing to take on more maintenance burdens, as we always said, because now I know i can rely on something to help me with some of those maintenance burdens of making sure everything's updated with the latest.NET version and latest ah Swift version and whatever they feel like breaking this year. 00:25:16.95 James I mean, I'll tell you this much. I had this because it's kind of really quiet right now this week and and next week. So this is we're recording right before Christmas and then this come out the you know week of New Year's. 00:25:28.02 James But this week, the week of Christmas, the week of New Year's is very quiet at at Microsoft. 00:25:31.81 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:25:32.46 James There's only have two two of my reports that are are there. So we had cool, super chill. We talked about travel and life and stuff on our team call. 00:25:37.39 Frank Mm-hmm. oh 00:25:39.64 James It was fun, which is great. I mean, I do. We we have fun team calls when everyone's there, but it's quite fun. And um one of the activities I wanted to take on is we have all these Microsoft Learn training courses and myself and Matt Sokup and a few others maintain the Maui ones. 00:25:56.98 James And every year after new.NET release, if we're good, we do it before, but this year is after. 00:26:01.91 Frank it since instance since 00:26:02.46 James It's normally after because that's how we do it. ah we update it to the latest version. And that requires updating tons of documentation and markdown files, going through all these things. It updates a bunch of sample references and things like that. 00:26:16.41 James And the Maui team did something awesome this year. And I love this trend, which is they made an instruction file. It could be ah a skill or a prompt, which is migrating.NET Maui from.NET 9 to.NET 10. 00:26:28.44 James nine to done it ten applications so what i did is today i went into every single repo including all the learned documentation then every your sample repo and i said let's give it the same prompt for all the code samples like please update this from.net you know to.net 10 and then use this reference guide as what you need to change but blah blah blah and then in the the main markdowns i said please update this but blah blah blah if you need references of things that have changed but blah blah i'll do this 00:26:36.73 Frank Cool. 00:26:55.42 James And this used to take me about like a week to do because it's a lot of code. It's it's updating. It's changing. It's running all of them, doing all the things. And I had them all done in under an hour. ah because it just updated all of them and then for some things i wasn't sure about i was like oh i've approved this other pull request of the sample go reference the sample to update the documentation on this bingo bango and um it's like dude this is the way like it i don't think i'll ever go back because that saved me so much time is always and when i say an hour 00:27:05.76 Frank Yeah. Feels good. 00:27:22.04 Frank Yeah. 00:27:28.86 James It was an hour of it doing stuff and stuff like that. and Then maybe another hour or two of pulling down the repos, making sure they all built so it's totally good to go. If I was better, I'd be like, oh, and then do a GitHub action that like pulls it and builds it. 00:27:38.01 Frank sure sure 00:27:39.06 James That's what I should have done. but Even those little things, which is like the maintenance burden, right 00:27:45.79 Frank yeah mhm 00:27:45.85 James Super streamlined, 100%. So i've been I've been pleased because I have noticed that you've been upping your game a little bit more as far as apps and things that coming out. I know you don't share them all with me, but I have noticed. 00:28:00.79 James ah So I'm not going to take any credit for that. don't want get a big head of myself. 00:28:04.17 Frank Ah, no, no. 00:28:04.39 James But i think i like to think I like to think that our conversations right of of this podcast and and being in it, maybe because... 00:28:06.00 Frank We'll give you no credit, in fact. 00:28:11.06 Frank Yeah. 00:28:15.29 James you know I talk about it every freaking day. 00:28:18.52 Frank Yeah. 00:28:18.75 James In the beginning of the year, yeah like you know Microsoft this year is ah is a whirlwind. you know There was lots of ups and downs and and reorgs and layouts and all this other stuff that was in the news. 00:28:27.83 Frank Yeah. 00:28:29.40 James But one one of the biggest things is at the beginning of the year, I really talked to my team. I said, I really think that you know I want to focus on the core community of.NET and and of Playwright and ah and of of Java and then all these you know Python, all the core communities. But I really want us to kind of pivot how we think about community and advocacy and really hunker down and get on board with AI for app development and putting AI into apps. 00:28:56.12 James um So I challenged the team to really put Copilot through its paces and really think about how we're doing all this. And then obviously I've gotten really close to the VS Code team and Mads on the team now is really close to the Visual Studio team or close to the Visual Studio team, obviously close to the.NET team and all these things that we're doing. 00:29:12.60 James But it just, like on the podcast, I talk about the stuff that I'm interested in and you you talk about the stuff you're interested in and and the stuff that we're doing. And yeah, I'm doing it at work, but it is because like I really believe in it. And i I really think that it's great tool to take advantage of as much or as little. I think um one of the biggest things I did, I pulled down some source code that you gave me of an app that I won't talk about. 00:29:39.38 James And the first thing I did is I started asking questions about the code base. Are you using this? 00:29:42.78 Frank Okay. 00:29:43.24 James Are you using that? What are you doing this? Are you doing that? right i think it's how is this um you How is this implemented? Give me a breakdown of how that's implemented. ah Can you tell me why was it why but why would they implement this? 00:29:53.38 James why What are other approaches to take? and um That's been very enlightening, I think. ah by by By exploring code, prompting code, I think it's made me a better user of chatbots as well, like in non-coding scenarios. 00:30:08.88 James like I use Copilot a lot. I'm a company man, right so Microsoft Copilot. 00:30:11.82 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:30:12.86 James um I sent you Copal link, you sent me a chat GPT link earlier. 00:30:15.29 Frank Yeah. 00:30:16.30 James But just because um that that's you know it's included in my M365 account, and I've been really thinking about how do i prompt this AI and give it like you challenging kind of challenging things? 00:30:29.98 James How do i make it worse work more than just a Google search? You know what and i mean? Sometimes it's a Google search, but the thing I did recently was um 00:30:34.18 Frank Yeah. 00:30:38.04 James And then I'm going show up. I kind of geeking out a little bit because um we're reviewing this legal. 00:30:42.62 Frank It's been a fun year. 00:30:43.74 James It's been fine. 00:30:43.90 Frank Yeah. 00:30:44.14 James We were reviewing this legal contract. 00:30:44.44 Frank Oh, yeah. 00:30:46.96 James I'm not going to say for what or what reasons we're reviewing this legal contract. And there was a paragraph section XL and which must be like, i don't know, what is that? 00:30:57.02 Frank Was it literally an X? 00:30:57.25 James like Yeah, like Roman numeral X. 00:30:59.41 Frank That's, that's, that's, oh, okay. Okay. I was like, that's confidence inspiring. 00:31:04.04 James Yeah. And it was super like legal jargon. So I took a photo of of the contract and I said, can you describe in layman terms like what the heck this is saying? 00:31:08.95 Frank Yeah. 00:31:14.58 James It laid it out. And I was like, that's good, but can you give me an example? 00:31:15.63 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:31:18.52 James like Give me a scenario. 00:31:19.05 Frank Ah. 00:31:19.96 James And it's like, oh, here's the scenario. 00:31:21.03 Frank Ah. 00:31:21.88 James And I was like, oh wow, that's great, right? And then I did another one, which was we were in the studio for AI Dev Days, and Ross came up to me. he's like He was looking at this box, this candy box, and he's like he's like, I'm allergic to peanuts, and I just don't know if there's peanuts in here because it's all in Korean. 00:31:37.94 James And he's like i'm like and and i was like I was like, let me take a photo. 00:31:38.68 Frank Oh no. Yeah. 00:31:42.27 James So I took a photo, and I sent it to Copilot, and i was like, what is in this thing? Are there any nuts in it? 00:31:47.18 Frank Peanut or not. Yeah. 00:31:48.25 James and And it broke it down and it was like's in it and it's like, no, there's no peanuts in it. However, specifically, there is a quote on the box and it's like, here's what it says. So you can verify it. And then it says that there is made in a facility that may have traces of peanuts and but blah, blah, blah, blah. 00:32:02.09 James Right. 00:32:02.28 Frank Oh, okay. 00:32:02.45 James So it really broke it down. I was like, now Ross, you got to trust the a i but the AI says, 00:32:07.26 Frank Yeah. 00:32:09.13 James I know and and we've all used the translate apps you know and they're okay, but I was like, that's pretty good if that's the case. 00:32:12.24 Frank Yeah. 00:32:14.90 James you know So I think the technology's come so far. 00:32:15.34 Frank Yeah. 00:32:17.82 James I've been really impressed, Frank. i've been really impressed. 00:32:21.59 Frank Yeah, and it's it's not just, I like what you said about using the AIs in apps also, because I'm pretty sure that was my 2025 goal. 00:32:32.66 Frank And I'm going to push it to 2026 is to have more AI in my apps. 00:32:37.18 James Yeah. 00:32:37.46 Frank Because 2025 is kind of cool. Apple announced and released... a neural network, an LLM, maybe an SLM um if you're using Microsoft's parlance, ah that runs on millions and millions of devices out there that apps can tap into. I think you and I have both gotten our feet wet and it gets a little bit depressing how dumb some of these SLMs can be. But it's nice to know that that's the future that we're all working toward. Because if an LLM is powerful, then of course having one that's local and private and secure, and that you can really, as app developers, focus on and use 00:33:16.41 Frank for free and rely on and then upsell people to make some more profits ah is really powerful. 00:33:17.77 James Mm-hmm. 00:33:24.98 Frank And I'm hoping that that will be transformative. I don't think it was in 2025, to be blunt and honest. um I think most people are still just using AI services. GPT 3.5 Turbo it seems to be still used quite a bit in third party apps and all that kind of stuff. 00:33:41.21 Frank But 2025, you can't deny that there are millions and millions of devices out there now that can run ah local language models right on the device. And I have and will continue to be excited for that future and believe it's a necessary component to this whole big puzzle of things that we're doing. So not only are we getting coding agents, I think that as coders, we should be using more LLMs out there. 00:34:07.03 James I totally agree. i obviously dabbled this year with Feedbackflow and doing some relatively simplistic stuff. 00:34:09.98 Frank excuse 00:34:14.44 James I've integrated into systems with MCP servers, obviously, but I agree. I don't feel like I've done enough. I haven't done like any orchestration. haven't built like agents. i haven't really explored some of the stuff that's in. you know Obviously, Foundry would be what I'm using for Microsoft for this stuff and Azure services. 00:34:33.40 James um But yeah, I haven't really gone deep on it and that's the part that I want to go deeper on to be honest with you. And I want to understand you know vectorizing internet because in in feedback flow I've thought about it. I have all this data, I have this. it's like Wow, it would be really cool if, for example, somebody puts this data up and then they could query they could rag over it, they could do whatever. 00:34:57.32 James You could do a lot with it. 00:34:57.86 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 00:34:58.64 James And I just haven't really gone down that route at all of going further than I have a system prompt, I have give me some results back. and that real-time flow with data that's really important, i think is the next step. 00:35:11.73 James And then beyond that, it is like it is the kind of the ah autonomous agents, right? I'm big into automation, but I'm not really big yet into the the agent part where the i'm called agents are calling agents and doing stuff. 00:35:24.37 James I'm excited to get into that and I just need to find the use case that kind of unlocks it in my brain. right I think that's the thing. 00:35:29.85 Frank Yeah. 00:35:30.74 James right Now, the local models, I agree. Once I did feedback flow, I go, okay, I understand this. I understand I can give it some data. can give it a prompt and get back. and To your point, with the podcast app that I built with the Apple Intelligence APIs, I was very impressed with it. 00:35:45.78 James until we ran into all those limitations of the context windows. 00:35:49.05 Frank yeah 00:35:50.02 James However, this year i learned all about context windows, Frank, and that is something I didn't necessarily know last year. So now I know a whole lot more about context windows and vectorization of data. 00:35:59.03 Frank And knowing his power. 00:36:00.69 James Yes, knowing is power, yes. 00:36:03.58 Frank So should we move into 2026 or is there anything else that we want to say about 2025 on ai related or maybe even more AI related? 00:36:12.50 James Yes, I do. 00:36:12.89 Frank Who knows what else? 00:36:14.07 James I do want to talk about more and then we'll get into at the very end, uh, 2026. I want to talk about a little bit about my Nintendo switch. 00:36:20.82 Frank Ooh, I love Switch Talk. 00:36:21.43 James Uh, 00:36:22.06 Frank Nintendo Talk, Nintendo Hour. Okay. So is it still large? Yeah. Or has it gotten smaller? 00:36:30.04 James It's a well, that is a great question, Frank. It is still large. I recently was just holding my Switch OLED and I go, wow, this is small. 00:36:43.13 James ah 00:36:43.70 Frank i but Okay, here's here's the question. Is the Switch OLED small or is the Switch too large? ah Switch numeral too large. Okay. 00:36:54.97 James I think that the Switch 2 is large. 00:36:59.96 Frank As of now. 00:36:59.96 James ah Now, it's ah it's not it's not as big as e steam yeah it's not as big as a Steam deck. 00:37:02.26 Frank not Not too, too large, but... 00:37:05.79 James Don't don't get crazy. 00:37:06.39 Frank No. 00:37:06.79 James um Nothing could be. 00:37:07.48 Frank this 00:37:08.79 James um 00:37:09.43 Frank Impossible to hold. 00:37:10.42 James But I did travel to Japan with my Switch 2. And while the battery obviously is not as good as this first Switch, you know it's two to three hours based on the game. 00:37:20.57 James you know I was able to plug in It didn't die on me any time, even on the long player rides. you know I have a plug there. It's not a huge deal. Having the plug on top, that's a huge deal. two two There's two USB-Cs on it, so you can really go to town, top or bottom. 00:37:34.04 James um I've played handheld nearly exclusively, though. I am a handheld person at heart um in the most recent years and even the DS years. 00:37:45.51 Frank Oh, 00:37:45.43 James This year, I think with my Switch 2, I think it is probably one of the like I think with the Switch, one, it was the best console probably that I've ever used for how I use consoles. 00:37:58.61 Frank cool. 00:38:00.01 James It's not necessarily the most powerful. right I'm not trying to put it up against the PS5s and the Xbox Series Xs of the world. 00:38:04.83 Frank Yeah. 00:38:04.93 James They're custom-built PCs. But for me as a Nintendo person and being able to transport and play games and do things, mean, Heather and I were just sitting out on the coast. 00:38:16.93 James I opened up Jackbox games, just set it there on the table. We've played Jackbox. We play Mario. You know mean? No, we don't have a or anything. 00:38:25.02 Frank Yeah. 00:38:25.73 James Boom. We're good to go. 00:38:26.39 Frank and 00:38:26.73 James We're on the middle woods, you know, on a train in Japan. And I'm just playing, you know, um, Kirby or Donkey Kong Bonanza. I think that it's really good. I think this year the games, I think have been all good, really good. Like the games from Nintendo, the updates have been really good to the existing games. The online service is really good. 00:38:47.22 James The game chat where you can just like dial a friend up and see their screen playing is really fun. um um I've beat games. I beat Donkey Kong. I beat Kirby fully, yeah which is good. 00:38:58.53 Frank Oh wow. 00:38:59.59 James I don't usually do that. 00:39:00.18 Frank Crazy. 00:39:00.67 James I've played a lot of Mario Kart. I'm getting ready to beat Metroid. I'm booting it up, and that's my holiday hack is being that. It's a very good device. um It's not a... 00:39:13.34 James revolutionary device because the switch one was a revolutionary device is an evolutionary device. That being said, uh, if you do find a switch to for 450 bucks, there's some out there now for four 50 with Mario cart. 00:39:27.46 James That's steel. 00:39:27.95 Frank Ooh. 00:39:28.79 James Um, think best buy has them, uh, maybe online. Um, it's, it's a steel, it does a great deal. 00:39:35.56 Frank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 00:39:35.97 James Cause that is, that means it's a $370, $380 console with a game. and that $70 game is a good game and it's it's great. So I'm really happy. 00:39:46.30 James I think Nintendo knocked it out the park. I think the thing with the Switch One is unlike the OLED. So I've had the Switch, the original Switch and the Switch OLED where they made design updates to it. 00:40:01.56 James um This one is such more refinement, takes so many q takes takeaways. I think with the Switch One, It was always like, wow, this is amazing. But there was compromise. The kickstand wasn't that great. The rails were a little bit, uh, the screen wasn't maybe one hundred percent. And then the switch OLED came out and you're like, wow, this is amazing. This is like, probably this is all this other stuff. 00:40:20.39 Frank Okay. 00:40:20.41 James It got a nice kickstand. 00:40:20.66 Frank Hmm. 00:40:21.65 James It got some other updates, some other colors and stuff. 00:40:22.46 Frank okay 00:40:24.92 James And i think with this switch too, I'm not really seeing too much that I'm like, I have to have like a bigger update. Like I don't, there are people that are like the old, you gotta have an OLED OLED is the only way. 00:40:39.13 James Eh, potato, potato. ah If it was OLED, it'd be more expensive. i think the display is just great. I think I'm not like, I need every hertz, I need every FPS, above blah, blah, blah. 00:40:51.22 James But it's smooth, it's great, the games load fast, um good games, good eShop, good online support. good counsel good solid counsel very happy with it played it more this year than i have played my switch in the last like you know two or three years for sure it feels it feels like i'm playing it about the same amount as i played the switch one the first year i got that which i was very very excited about in general so six month review i'm very happy with it um 00:41:14.01 Frank Okay. 00:41:25.66 James And yeah, it's a really, really nice machine, really refined. And I think that the price point is good and worth your money. That's what I would say. 00:41:33.72 Frank easy 00:41:34.42 James um 00:41:34.82 Frank Fantastic. 00:41:35.86 James Yes, I would. 00:41:36.21 Frank You completed Donkey Kong. God, I haven't completed a game in forever. I should try that sometime. 00:41:39.86 James Yeah. 00:41:41.43 Frank Okay. 00:41:41.69 James That was that was my my New Year's resolution was when the Switch 2 comes out, you know don't buy a new game. until you've completed the game that you're playing. 00:41:54.53 Frank Wow. Yeah. 00:41:55.60 James right Now, I'm not saying that i did that, but I did reduce the amount of games that I was buying until I beat the games. 00:41:56.49 Frank Cool. 00:42:00.44 Frank You didn't... At 00:42:06.13 James I did. 00:42:06.26 Frank least he had some guilt, right? 00:42:08.49 James like I had Kirby, but I was like, I'm not starting Kirby until I did it. 00:42:11.32 Frank Okay. 00:42:11.66 James and Then it was funny because I beat Kirby. and then i It gives you a percentage. I was at 70, and I booted up Metroid, got 30 minutes in. I said, no, no, no. I don't feel like I'm far enough along. 00:42:21.70 James So I looked up all these guys and now I'm at like 90%, which I feel very good about in Kirby, which is basically like you did it all. 00:42:25.14 Frank Okay. 00:42:27.46 James I'm not going to grind for every little thing, but then I'm like now against our Metroid. 00:42:27.67 Frank Okay. No, no. 00:42:31.66 James Right. So I feel really good about that. 00:42:32.24 Frank Okay. Yeah. 00:42:33.62 James Feel good about that. Yeah. 00:42:35.64 Frank All right. 00:42:35.55 James So no. 00:42:36.38 Frank Sounds like a good console. um 00:42:38.20 James ah Yeah, it's good. 00:42:39.80 Frank I still think about getting a so Switch 1 now that the Switch 2 is wrong because now they're cheaper. 00:42:39.83 James Well, let's talk about, 00:42:45.24 James I could if you can find I can send you one. I could send you a Switch Lite or something depending how you want to play. 00:42:47.51 Frank her 00:42:50.08 James I want to talk about Apple a little bit. We talked a little bit about ah this. We actually got an entirely new redesigned iOS and Mac OS. That happened this year. 00:42:59.54 Frank Oh. Oh, yeah. Look, I have such mixed feelings about, I believe you're talking about liquid glass. um I have so many mixed feelings. 00:43:08.73 James So liquid. It's so liquid. So glass. 00:43:11.96 Frank Is it? Yeah. 00:43:13.02 James Yeah. Mm-hmm. 00:43:14.46 Frank I think um overall, who doesn't like a pixel refresh? It's kind of cool. ah new New shininess definitely has a lot of shiny. They they put a little specular highlight on pretty much everything. Too many things one might say even. 00:43:29.37 Frank um And it's caused me to have to redesign all my apps. Thanks, Apple. Yeah. But I do feel like it's a little bit of a sad year for Apple because it wasn't a, as the kids say, a UX improvement. 00:43:41.44 Frank It was a pixels improvement. Yeah, they made some of the buttons bigger. i get it. It's not that big of a change. um In fact, I find some of the some of the glass buttons a little bit hard to press for whatever reason. 00:43:53.12 Frank And they moved some things around and made some things so big that you can't even read the title of apps anymore. 00:43:53.34 James Mm-hmm. 00:43:59.90 Frank Yeah. So I feel like my mixed feelings on liquid glass, liquid glass in review is I do appreciate the shininess. I think I've gotten used to the glass look now and other things look flat and a little bit dull to me. 00:44:14.26 Frank But in retrospect, I'm... a little bit sad because I feel like Apple has lost a little bit of the the human interface part. Like, did you forget that humans are interacting with this thing? 00:44:23.33 James Mm-hmm. 00:44:25.73 Frank And it's got to be humans first and like easy touch first. I bought the iPhone 17 Pro, gloat. But... I kind of hate it because there's literally no surface on the device I can touch without some stupid app starting. 00:44:40.92 Frank There's secret buttons all over the thing. Every pixel on the lock screen is hot now. And so you touch any part of the lock screen and it's going to do something. The amount of times I've had this camera like burning a hole in my pocket because the LED is on is numerous. 00:44:56.76 Frank And by numerous, I mean really numerous. And so... um I don't know where you were going with the liquid glass, but I just want to say that's my year-end review. I appreciate the shiny, but I think Apple has taken a step backwards and you human interface design, sadly. 00:45:14.87 James Yeah, it's fascinating. I released this new app, Trim Tally, exclusively with Liquid Glass and exclusively for iOS 26. 00:45:20.40 Frank Ooh, yeah. 00:45:24.12 James um Wow. Yeah, I would say I'm indifferent on it. I i i feel like now that it's here, i just want every app just to be Liquid Glass so I don't get different keyboards and I don't get different UX and my tabs all work the same in searches on the bottom and all this other stuff. 00:45:29.54 Frank Hmm. 00:45:35.14 Frank Sure. Mm-hmm. 00:45:41.91 James um But yeah, I don't necessarily like love it. i don't necessarily hate it. um It's like pretty mid. ah and then i do agree that it does seem to often get in the way, especially have a smaller work phone, which is my iPhone SE. And yeah, things are all up in the way all the time and weird. 00:46:02.01 James and oddly enough, something that I've never had happen before happened to me. was we were out I was out taking photos of Millie. a day or two ago. 00:46:13.40 James And i i I had to ask Heather, how do I take a portrait photo? I couldn't figure it out. 00:46:20.65 Frank Oh my God. the camera app has just been a complete regression. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt you. This is just a complete regression. do Just, just, ah yeah. 00:46:28.22 James I couldn't figure it out. 00:46:31.32 Frank I don't know who, do they do user studies there? I don't know who they found for their user studies that thought this was a good idea. I don't know. 00:46:39.51 James She told me how to do it. 00:46:39.80 Frank what What can I even say? i don't know. Every time i want to switch modes anymore, i i don't know if it's a touch thing or what. Like mentally, I know there's something I need to slide. 00:46:49.86 Frank And so I go and slide on everything and nothing slides. And so then I'm like, maybe it's broke. 00:46:54.17 James yeah 00:46:54.70 Frank And then I shake it a little and then try to slide again. I'm like, I know it has portrait mode in there somewhere. Remember action mode? 00:47:01.08 James Somewhere. 00:47:02.58 Frank Who knows the how to even activate action mode anymore? 00:47:05.24 James That's a mystery. 00:47:05.42 Frank And and and ah the one thing that you can press brings up like nine different widgets of settings I don't care to ever change. 00:47:13.43 James I don't even know if they're all icons. 00:47:13.58 Frank I'm like, no, just 00:47:15.63 James i don't even know they do. 00:47:17.59 Frank they're the most useless icons on the planet. 00:47:17.59 James yeah 00:47:19.41 Frank Like they're trying to make a Snapchat or something from 1990. 00:47:23.80 Frank I guess Snapchat didn't come out in 1990, but it was like a 2010s app. Like, oh, I don't know. I don't know who their users studying over there, but they are not me. 00:47:29.10 James It's like, yeah, it's because it's because like when you open the app, right, it's like only photos and videos and you have to tap on it. And then, yeah, you have to slide, but then it's not like it's kind of like bla doing stuff and you open the thing. 00:47:41.82 Frank You have to tap it first before you slide it or something. 00:47:42.33 James I'm like, it's super weird. i I don't even know what these means. Like do a thing. i know I'll get used to it over time, but it's like maybe. 00:47:50.23 Frank Maybe. I just stopped taking photos because every button on my phone seems to turn on the photos app. So I'm just like, I'm so over it. I don't even want to take a photo anymore. 00:48:01.12 James Oh, God. I like that. Like, that's the solution. Like, just don't take any photos or anything like that. part that's so That's why you got, like, the most great, the greatest phone is because. 00:48:09.18 Frank Look, you'll know I've hit my peak brain limit when I start vibe coding a camera app. If Frank releases a camera app, you know I've just lost it. I've gone completely insane. I swore to myself in 2008 I wouldn't write a camera app. If I release a camera app in 2026, you know I'm just full bonkers at that point. 00:48:29.13 James Oh my gosh, that's great. I love it. um Yeah, i i i do i think the challenge that Liquid Glass has, and I see it a lot on the Mac, is that it isn't very good on the Mac. 00:48:41.91 James And it's really toolbars. I think that toolbars took a big regression this year on on Mac and on iOS a little bit too. it's ah They're a little bit more convoluted than ever in general and and say what you will about windows my favorite operating system um i think it's pretty good so yep 00:48:57.98 Frank 00:49:02.34 Frank I'm going to one-up you, though. I'm going to just say toolbars and UIs in 2025 have regressed. I think they're just worse. 00:49:09.69 James o 00:49:11.36 Frank I'm just going to put it out there. The other day you were explaining how WorkTrees worked to me on the podcast live, so make sure you listen to last week's episode or the previous week, and you're like, click the button with three dots. 00:49:19.27 James yep 00:49:23.38 Frank I'm like, James, there are literally seven buttons with three dots on the screen. Like every UI designers just loves three dots. 00:49:27.93 James Yes. 00:49:32.60 Frank And you know what happens if you put more than two toolbar buttons on a liquid glass interface? Oh, it puts three dots up there. 00:49:38.79 James That's... 00:49:39.40 Frank So I'm going to say 2025 is the year of ellipsis. 00:49:39.74 James yeah. 00:49:43.36 Frank It's just the year of the ellipsis and it's just everywhere. 00:49:44.22 James Ugh. 00:49:46.52 Frank And I can't wait for that anti-pattern to just go away. 00:49:47.00 James No. 00:49:49.85 James I don't want... I don't want it anymore. It's funny because as an Android developer, that we were like the three dot crew, right? Like Apple was like, no, three dots. And Android's like, three dots, so many menus, right? Let's do it. You got all the options. Overflow everything. Oh, 00:50:09.37 Frank i but I was at Walmart and the the stupid machine rang up my thing for the wrong price. So that the clerk had to come by and they enter their, their super secret passcode or whatever. And you know what it showed three dots. 00:50:20.86 Frank And then they could click the three dots and get into like the admin console. 00:50:21.56 James my God. 00:50:24.50 Frank I thought, Oh yeah. yeah They even put the three dots in front of you guys. Yeah. 00:50:29.05 James Three dots everywhere. wow so So crazy. um One thing is about a year ago about this time we got our new Mac minis. 00:50:36.76 Frank Oh, yes. I wanted to say yes so you you You just did your awesome Switch review. I didn't really get too much fancy hardware this year, but I did get my Mac Mini, and I continue to love it. That's tiny little computer. Especially, I think a while ago you asked me, do do I regret it after um the studio came out a few months after? 00:50:57.94 Frank I was at the store. Do you know how big the studio is? 00:51:00.87 James It's big. 00:51:01.05 Frank It's giant. It's as big as a PC desktop. So I am very happy to have my tiny, tiny, itsy bitsy little Mac mini that is stupidly powerful that if I ever want to, which I haven't bothered to ever do this, but. 00:51:14.14 Frank I could unplug a few plugs and just throw it in my backpack if I wanted to. Because it's so tiny and minuscule. Who cares? Like, honestly, for for this trip, I probably should have just packed my desktop computer in my luggage. 00:51:26.30 James Yeah. 00:51:26.90 Frank Because it's tiny. Who cares? i 00:51:29.07 James Yeah. 00:51:29.75 Frank Right now, I'm regretting not doing that. 00:51:29.75 James Travel. 00:51:31.44 Frank Yeah. 00:51:31.70 James travel travel monitor. Like i have a USB-C monitor. 00:51:33.94 Frank Yeah. 00:51:34.34 James Just boom, done. 00:51:35.00 Frank Oh, yeah. 00:51:35.22 James You know what I mean? And then you're easy peasy. 00:51:37.12 Frank Right? 00:51:37.50 James If they were better, i bet you could with your iPad. You should be able to get an HDMI. know did one way. 00:51:43.59 Frank Right? 00:51:44.45 James It'd be cool to be able to plug in an iPad and it's a monitor for your Mac somehow, like just on the road, right? 00:51:48.57 Frank Oh, it can do that. It can do that. 00:51:49.92 James Oh. 00:51:50.13 Frank I don't know if you're required to have a normal monitor too, but the iPad can definitely act as a external monitor. 00:51:55.39 James Oh, be cool if it could be solo mode. I like that. 00:51:57.50 Frank Yeah. I don't know if it can do that. 00:51:59.58 James Um, yeah, I agree. I mostly the switch was the biggest hardware I got this year. that was the only hardware I got this year. 00:52:06.94 Frank ah 00:52:06.90 James um 00:52:08.15 Frank I want to join the 2010s and also say just ah slightly unrelated, but I got into e-bikes this year. 00:52:08.82 James mean 00:52:13.79 Frank Turns out e-bikes, fun. ah Highly we recommended. if you haven't tried e-bikes yet, don't be like me. Try them out. They're great. 00:52:22.52 James ah heather Heather has one. They're super good. She has me ride it on occasion. ah but Also, last year i got like a an E scooter for Heather as well. 00:52:26.26 Frank ah 00:52:33.62 Frank Oh, cool. since instance instance instance Yeah. 00:52:34.84 James And they are dangerous. 00:52:36.20 Frank They'll seem a little dangerous to me, but I like e-bikes. 00:52:39.18 James Yes, wear a helmet. 00:52:41.27 Frank And I'm a one-wheel rider and scooters seem dangerous. 00:52:41.21 James But 00:52:44.92 James I, I, you know, I, do the limes around Seattle, I'll take and I'll scoot around and those, you don't have a helmet on that's super unsafe. 00:52:45.22 Frank All 00:52:49.92 James And i'm like, oh, that's not great. 00:52:50.06 Frank right, exactly. 00:52:51.78 James Uh, but, uh, if you have and all the equipment's up there, they're pretty good. 00:52:52.01 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:52:55.08 James We have like a little segue one. It's pretty cool. 00:52:58.01 Frank Mm-hmm. 00:52:58.03 James Uh, it is something, there's some joy, you know, and the one that Heather has a pedal assist, right. But you also has a lever, so you can super boost if you want. 00:53:05.77 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 00:53:08.24 James There's something to be said when you're going up a hill. like you know what i could be not doing right now pedaling up the cell and you just go ah 00:53:17.01 Frank Getting my heartbeat up to 130, 140. yeah, Fixie, at you, yeah. 00:53:20.57 James we were We were going going out with Heather. It was me, Heather, and our friend Stephanie, and we were riding, and and they both have e-bikes. And I have my single fixed gear, and we're going up this big hill. 00:53:32.38 Frank oh yeah fixy look at you yeah 00:53:33.82 James And yeah, I know, I know. And they're like, oh like, use those. or Get those quads working. and like, I am. Trust me. 00:53:39.70 Frank Yeah. 00:53:39.78 James I i am. And they're just like, da-da-da-da-da. um but but it's cool i like the the es the e assist ones that you can do on demand so how they're like just kind of low all the time she actually want to pedal but then when she wants to like yeah let's go or or if she wants to you know if i'm ahead and she wants to catch up um uh biggest surprises favorites biggest disappointments of the year 2025 got frank 00:53:51.67 Frank Yep. 00:54:03.03 Frank um We haven't achieved world peace. I don't know what's taken humanity so long. Can we just stop murdering each other? That'd be nice. So I guess that's my biggest disappointment. It's not even my biggest disappointment because you can see it coming from a mile away. But I think that's my biggest sadness. But someday, someday we'll get there. 00:54:21.37 Frank ah yeah 00:54:23.10 James Wow, heavy. 00:54:23.99 Frank i Yeah, heavy. Sorry, didn't mean to go there. But you you asked for the truth and I gave you the truth. Yeah. It was um no huge surprises this year. I mean, there's there's always the chaos of the world. I didn't expect a tariff war. I didn't expect the LA fires. did Do we expect any of that kind of stuff? So those those are my biggest disappointments, mostly disappointed in humanity and Mother Nature. 00:54:47.59 Frank We'll go through that. stop Stop burning down our forest, Mother Nature. 00:54:52.76 James yeah uh this year up up down here down here in in oregon we had a better year but yes there's many many a fires many of things um biggest biggest disappointments biggest surprises i would say mac os 26 is my biggest tech disappointment of the year i think it's a bad OS update iOS 26 is okay. It's fine. 00:55:17.05 James think Mac Mac OS 26 is my big disappointment of the year. 00:55:22.46 Frank Yeah, okay. 00:55:24.13 James I think one of my biggest surprises is Heather got the iPhone 17 approach. You also have 8x zoom. That might be my biggest surprise. 00:55:33.67 Frank Oh yeah, that is awesome actually. 00:55:35.04 James 8x zoom. That's a good one. 00:55:36.38 Frank Yeah. 00:55:37.02 James I do believe that I no longer actually, there's not almost a reason for me to bring my Canon camera with me anymore. It's not ah you know, unless I got a crazy big lens or something on it, I do have a nice one. 00:55:48.54 James But at this point, I'm like, is it beneficial to take up space in my bag compared to just using Heather's 8x zoom? Now I'm yelling, I'm like, 8x that, eightx it, 8x it. 00:55:59.24 James She's like, she's like no. She's like, okay. 00:56:02.04 Frank yeah 00:56:02.00 James But like i i'll take I'll have her phone. I'll take photos of Amelia. I'm like really zoomed in. 00:56:06.08 Frank Zoom in. 00:56:06.00 James I'm like really c close, like super zoomed. I think that's good. 00:56:08.36 Frank Yeah. 00:56:10.07 James think that was my biggest surprise of like a feature that i I didn't know I wanted, but but now I do want. 00:56:13.42 Frank Okay. 00:56:14.91 James So there's that. 00:56:16.04 Frank Well, you just inspired me. I do have to give a positive one. And it's it's a little esoteric, everyone, so I apologize. But this I do have a tech one. I did not expect Apple to implement A, web GPU across the board on all devices, and B, implement... 00:56:27.38 James Hmm. 00:56:31.54 Frank Web GPU being able to do Web XR, augmented reality and virtual reality. Actually, they only implemented the virtual reality side. 00:56:36.60 James Ah. 00:56:38.58 Frank They didn't do the augmented reality side. ah As app developers, you won't guess, but I still love writing web apps. And the the web is a very important place. And Web GPU is so much better than WebGL. And I've written many big libraries with Web GPU. I really love Web GPU. 00:56:57.11 Frank See also my my my torch implementation in WebGPU. And i as the biggest surprise, because Apple drags its, whatever it can drag, whatever it can drag, it will drag. 00:57:11.14 Frank And I did not expect them to implement WebGPU across the board on all their devices and in their Mac 26s. See, there's a good thing in Mac OS 26, James. 00:57:22.34 Frank And I especially didn't but expect them to implement it on my beloved Vision Pro. 00:57:22.39 James so okay 00:57:29.37 Frank So it's it's nice that Apple has really adopted that standard, especially in this AI world. See, everything ties back to AI. 00:57:39.38 Frank We need good GPU software interfaces to the GPU. And WebGPU is by far not perfect, but it's it's very good. Much better than WebGio. 00:57:50.38 James Dude, you have my biggest, one of my biggest favorites and also least favorites, pass keys. 00:58:01.94 Frank Oh, yeah yeah. Yeah. It's a real mixed emotion thing, huh? When it works, awesome. 00:58:05.82 James It really gets me. 00:58:06.62 Frank How does it work? God knows. What do I do if something gets lost? Who knows? But it's great when they work. 00:58:12.78 James It's a mystery. It's great when they work. The downside that I will pull up is it's like the year of QR code scanning for entering websites again. 00:58:24.22 Frank Oh, my God. yeah 00:58:25.79 James It's just, oh, just just literally when I was signing up for my switch to like the signup process, you must honestly scan like 18 different bar, like barcodes. 00:58:31.54 Frank Yeah. 00:58:34.49 James I was just, I'm, I'm testing this test device. And um'm I'm rebooting it. I just scanned eight QR codes in the matter of the last 10 minutes to sign into like 18 different services. It's just like QR codes are like the hot thing. 00:58:45.48 Frank Hilarious. 00:58:47.62 James You know what I mean? I'm just like, dude, I don't want all this stuff. 00:58:49.21 Frank Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's it's funny how technology works. I remember I was still in college in the year of 2004. No one, don't don't look at your calendars to figure out how old I am. 00:59:02.39 Frank um And I remember reading an IEEE spectrum. These are professionals saying Bluetooth is dead. Bluetooth is going nowhere. It's dead. It's a stupid standard. It's garbage. Throw it out. There's better stuff out there. Who knows what, but there's better stuff out there. And I remember reading Bluetooth is dead. I'm like, all these smart people are saying Bluetooth is dead. And it's funny. I was designing like a Bluetooth system at the time. So I'm just like, oh no, am I, am I just dumb and gullible? 00:59:29.18 Frank Little did I know that that was like, 00:59:29.11 James I'm obsolete. 00:59:31.45 Frank the The breakout moment of Bluetooth, that was the bottom of the hockey stick curve for Bluetooth. Now, literally everything is Bluetooth, whether it should be or not. It's Bluetooth. And and then like the same exact thing happened with QR codes. I remember reading from from very smart people saying QR codes are a failed technology. No one's using them. No one's adopting them. They're just garbage. And now everything is a QR code, whether it should be or not. Everything is a QR code. And I just love it. I love being in technology long enough to see all these naysayers say, oh, that technology is garbage, just because it doesn't get super mass adoption within the first three years. So I go, it's garbage. It's gone. And then to see it just hockey stick curve up. 01:00:15.00 James It is Pat pass keys for days all over the place. Oh, another one of my favorites. Apple passwords. This is the most righteous update of the year. 01:00:26.17 James i know it's not necessarily new. 01:00:26.74 Frank The app itself, right? 01:00:27.86 James The app itself. But. 01:00:29.98 Frank Not having to go into Safari preferences to find my passwords is pretty nice. 01:00:34.58 James It is absolutely the best. And then additionally, the ah friends and family sharing that you can do. So Heather and I have shared. So like whenever she needs a password to like utility company or bank or whatever, I just add it to our shared group and boom, it's there. And the two-factor auth codes are all just there. And that's fun to share as well. 01:00:55.03 James ah it's it's almost it just It's just like the best way of doing it. I love it. So that has been a game changer in my in my personal opinion, for like favorite thing that's out there. 01:01:05.91 Frank Yeah, that's cool. 01:01:05.96 James The other favorite thing. um Active noise canceling headphones are at superb quality at rock bottom prices. The CMF, it's great company. It's a sub brand of nothing. 01:01:23.67 James These are the CMF A2A Pros. They're to on amazon Spectacular, great earbuds. 01:01:34.52 James I don't know about like, know, if I was doing a podcast with them or whatever, but the active noise canceling for like airplanes and just general superb. They're not going to be like a boy you a Bose, like quiet, whatever, even Apple, but you know, they're $20. 01:01:49.58 Frank Okay. 01:01:51.08 James But compared to the headphones that I was buying five years ago for 20 bucks, 01:01:56.00 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 01:01:57.02 James The technology has come so far. It's just very, very impressive in general. um So big shout out to whoever figured that out. I'm looking around, Frank. 01:02:07.05 James What else do I got to talk about? Favorites, least favorites. Oh, I did a lot of cloud game streaming this year on Xbox Game Pass. 01:02:15.30 Frank Oh, it's huge. 01:02:16.70 James Yep, it's good. 01:02:16.82 Frank It's huge. i bet I've been hanging out with some kids and they're just cloud streaming everything. I don't know where games come from anymore. 01:02:21.60 James Wow. 01:02:23.33 Frank i don't know where the pixels come from. It's just there. They're playing it. Who knows? 01:02:27.58 James It's happening. 01:02:27.77 Frank so 01:02:28.25 James Yeah, I got my Switch and that's it. My Xbox games, I just stream right on my Mac. What a day. yeah that' that That's crazy. That's crazy. i was playing I was playing Age of Empires. 01:02:40.77 James think Age of Empires streaming from Xbox to my Mac, playing with my Mac mouse and keyboard. What? That didn't even make any sense. But where is this game even coming from? What is happening? 01:02:52.34 James ah It's a wild... 01:02:52.57 Frank Yeah. 01:02:53.94 James it's a wild Crazy universe. And I absolutely love it so much. I think it's just so neat just in general. 01:02:58.74 Frank and 01:03:00.94 James So, um yeah. 01:03:04.31 Frank And then the last props, I don't think it's 2025, but the framework laptop. I don't actually personally own one, but I have been rocking my friends for the last few days. And nothing brings out the nerdy kid side of you, like picking through hard work. Ooh, maybe I should upgrade the motherboard. Maybe I should upgrade the RAM. No, don't upgrade the RAM. It's too expensive now. Maybe I should upgrade this or upgrade that or something like that. um I think the, um I don't even want to like promote it as a big thing, but I've just been enjoying the joy of the framework laptop because laptops aren't one of those things you can really customize. So it's fun that there's this new laptop top out there that everyone's having fun customizing and being really nerdy with. 01:03:46.68 James So frame.work is the is yeah URL. I was just there today. Yeah. 01:03:51.82 Frank Oh, yeah. 01:03:52.63 James yeah And now I had something in my cart and I decided not to buy it. um as As many people may know, I love-hate relationship with my Mac Mini. 01:04:05.62 James I love it. So small. So cute. But I just can't gel with it. I was talking to Tim from the GitHub team because he has, like, i think a Mac 2 or Mac Mini, and we were talking about ultra he's got an ultra wide. And talking about my dismay of Mac OS. I'm struggling. 01:04:23.06 James He gave me some tips to use Raycast and a few other apps to try some things out. But I almost broke down today. And I said, should I buy a framework desktop PC? 01:04:30.89 Frank Oh. 01:04:36.21 Frank Ooh, desktop. OK. 01:04:37.34 James Yeah. the I got laptops, ah but they're small. 01:04:40.62 Frank Yeah. 01:04:42.93 James They're cute. They're customizable. And i could probably get one that's like way more powerful than maybe of my Mac. Well, maybe not more powerful, but you know really, really up there for a good... 01:04:51.64 Frank Yeah. 01:04:54.66 James you bri I mean, I could get a Max, which is whatever the Ryzen is, whatever it is. It's got... 01:05:02.78 Frank Thread ripping left and right. That's a 01:05:04.86 James It's got 128 gigs of RAM. for $2,000. 01:05:09.08 Frank lot of RAM. That's lot of RAM. 01:05:11.54 James I could get a two terabyte hard drive in it. I could get another two terabyte hard drive in it. Of course, bring my own. I get some tricked out awesome fan, some cable management. 01:05:18.51 Frank Mm-hmm. 01:05:23.09 James We're talking 2,500 bucks. And I'm like, this is almost too good. It's so cute. um Do I want this? 01:05:27.51 Frank ha 01:05:28.74 James You know what I mean? And get all the little tiles, little customization. 01:05:29.92 Frank Yeah, 01:05:31.14 James I thought about it, but I wasn't sure if it was like something I'd use every single day or not because had my Mac Mini. 01:05:35.36 Frank it's tough. Yeah. 01:05:36.82 James um So maybe the next gen one I'll get. 01:05:37.23 Frank Yep. 01:05:38.70 James But I mean, I agree. I love that somebody is doing it. And to the point that I'm like, yeah, right now in the market, I love the Surface devices that are out there, like the sort the new Surface laptop. But for a desktop PC, I don't got one from Microsoft. 01:05:51.94 Frank Yep. 01:05:52.58 James And I've looked around and there's some really good little tiny NUCs out there and things like that. but It's not necessarily there. So I was like, this is pretty cool one. I like it. um Next year might be the year that we talk a lot more about our friends over at Valve, our other Washington-based company. 01:06:02.21 Frank Yeah. 01:06:07.06 Frank Yeah. I hope we're talking about them. They better ship. 01:06:10.57 James I'll see. i i'm ah there's been i'm um I'm excited and worried all at the same time. So we'll see out what what happens there. 01:06:16.19 Frank Yeah. 01:06:17.34 James Let's talk about one thing before we talk about 2026. Maybe we won't even talk about 2026. Who knows? But we'll do a little light prediction. But any fun favorite a travel you did this year, Frank? 01:06:28.50 Frank Travel this year? You're going to make me actually review the year and remember? Yes, I did actually go on a really fun trip. I went with my buddy to Japan, James, and it was year. 01:06:38.03 James That was this year. 01:06:38.62 Frank I know. it was this year i know This was a really long year. 01:06:39.70 James oh my God. so 01:06:43.69 Frank we all got a little grayer, i think. 01:06:44.41 James Oh. 01:06:47.31 James That's crazy, dude. That's crazy. 01:06:49.46 Frank you ah So I had a very fun trip. It was, this is the real mind blowing one. We went to Japan 20 years ago together and this was a 20 year anniversary trip. 01:06:59.71 Frank So this is my first time doing a 20 year anniversary trip. I'm afraid that I'm that old now that I even can do a 20 year anniversary trip. ah But it was super fun to like, just be, you know, we're the same people, but you're different people. And to go like, 01:07:16.22 Frank You know, I was such an inexperienced traveler when I did it that first time. And now I feel like I'm a pro. And so it was fun to see, like, can a pro handle it? And I still made all the same mistakes I made as an amateur. 01:07:27.40 Frank So it was a real fun experience for me. And it's a beautiful country. I think we both appreciate Japan. So that that was my travel highlight for the year. My fun Japan trip with my buddy. 01:07:39.90 James Nice. Well, you went to Japan, so I couldn't you know not go. So I also went to Japan, but ah 01:07:44.33 Frank Oh, you son of a... 01:07:48.07 James we both went to Japan. I don't think we've ever gone to the same country in the same year ever, so that's kind of crazy. 01:07:52.62 Frank Yeah, it's funny. 01:07:54.68 James ah And I forgot when we bought the tickets. it might have been it was after you had definitely booked yours, but and and you might not have gone yet because we had a really cheap deal on it. 01:08:00.93 Frank Okay. 01:08:03.86 James But my favorite trip, there's two. There's the Japan trip, which you know you and I have talked about, which... um i i'm excited to go back but we also went to iceland in february just right before you went to japan and that trip was so cool because we got to do both in japan and in iceland we did a lot of hot springs which were big hot springs and sauna people and the ones in iceland the outdoor the fjords the geothermal i was in japan also geothermal two countries geothermal 01:08:14.74 Frank Oh yeah, crazy. 01:08:24.41 Frank Nice. 01:08:35.29 James just wild, the outdoor, just breathtaking views. Cause we went in the middle of winter. You couldn't really go so far, but we got to see some beautiful luscious things. really really awesome so that was really a highlight um it was even january i forget when whenever we went i was crazy that was definitely up there obviously japan trip was awesome the nintendo museum uh maybe one of of the highlights of of things i've done in a long time but uh yeah iceland so cool uh 2026 frank what you got for me buddy 01:09:00.45 Frank Cool. 01:09:07.13 Frank I just have one question for you, James. What goes up must come down. We spent like at least 30 minutes talking about AI and how awesome AI is. Is this the year the bubble pops or not? I have my own opinion, but I want to hear yours first. 01:09:22.65 James Now, no, I think that there's a long runway still. I think that there is a year in which I do kind of like we were talking about earlier. I think there's so much runway for people to actually figure out how to use this technology in their applications and fuse things. 01:09:37.91 James I still think that we have come a long way just on some general generation. So image generation, video generation, um integrating that into tooling, ah things that we use on a daily basis. 01:09:45.44 Frank Yeah. 01:09:50.22 James I want it to almost be synonymous where you know in PowerPoint, in Word, when I'm drafting things up, like there's a lot of things that can get better there. um And I think even with coding, there's a long ways to go about how we how you create these user interfaces to be flexible based on how different developers are coding, right? And and how they use these tools, it's quite complex task and a lot of different people are doing it different ways. 01:10:16.17 James It'll be interesting. I think the year will be um fascinating as far as like the hyperscalers is what they like to call them. So the the big the big companies, the chip providers, like what's going to happen with memory, what's going to happen with power consumption, what's going to happen with GPUs in the upcoming year. 01:10:27.00 Frank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ss 01:10:38.68 James But I still feel like, you know, it's still early on. It feels like it's really advanced because it's advanced so quickly. But I do think there's a lot of runway for this stuff to really... 01:10:58.36 James help you sort of streamline a lot of bits and pieces of your day more. We talked about it before, you know, as far as emails and drafting and things like that, like what I really want stuff to do is give me, you know, overviews, draft some responses, do some things, you know, I want to be human in the loop. 01:11:05.44 Frank Mm-hmm. 01:11:17.61 James I want to be in control, but Are there things that can really help in that automation aspect to help me focus more on my life, for example? And and maybe those things are are pieces of features that get built into the operating system, that get built into the phone, that are taking advantage of small language models and things like that. I was just using Copilot inside of Notebook. 01:11:40.12 James or Notepad. And just in Notepad, I was drafting something up. I was like, yeah, i got to rewrite this. And it just like did it, right? Just kind of like the Apple writing tools. 01:11:46.84 Frank Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 01:11:47.52 James It's there. Now the Apple writing tools, oh, perfect. You know what I mean? Taking photos. So I think there's a lot of runway for these things. The question is, will the chatbots and the CLIs, and the coders, will they all start to feel the same? Will they be different? Like, how is this going to be? Is the races for models? Like, have we gone? But I still think there's a lot of opportunity to play around with that. And I think for developers, there's a lot of opportunity for us to really improve our applications with some of this core piece of technology if we're not taking advantage of it at all. 01:12:20.44 James um And even the apps that I created this year, it's not necessarily taking advantage of a lot of this stuff, but could be in the future, right? I could, in Trim Tally, I could use Apple Intelligence, for example, and be like, give me a routine based on this and that, and give me some information. 01:12:35.05 James it's all on device. Like, 01:12:36.67 Frank Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 01:12:36.85 James did The app's all about security and privatization and like that's a great use case and I didn't even think of it. 01:12:37.09 Frank Mm-hmm. 01:12:41.45 James like That's a great you know pro feature that I could just give and gives them a little you know diet plan or gives them ah whatever. Just here's a add a survey and then it bumps something out. so To me, the hardest part of creating software is you don't know what you don't know. 01:12:57.56 James and you don't know until you use it, right? And that's hard. We're in this space where a lot of things are brand new. Like we've known UI frameworks. Maybe there's a new one, but there's still like a UI framework. We know APIs. We know databases. There's a huge new toolkit that's evolving quickly, right? So when do you want to... 01:13:13.14 James um actually adopted into your system so i think that's a fascinating um space to be in so i'm excited to see where it goes and i still think that some of the foundation is is still new and evolving quickly too so i think there's a lot of runway for this for for a long time i think it's going to be here for a long time with us i think i'm not sure like you asked me like maybe it'll 01:13:40.15 James I'm not sure if it's gonna calm down. You know what I mean? I think people it's moving so fast, it's doing this. 01:13:43.10 Frank Yeah. 01:13:45.72 James I think ah do believe that some people believe that, oh, maybe this year, and next year, it's gonna calm down a little bit because the models are kinda flattening out. I'm not sure if that's true or not, to be honest with you. It might be longer. 01:14:00.31 Frank Okay. Yep. I don't think there's actually too much merge conflict here, sadly. 01:14:03.99 James Okay. 01:14:04.74 Frank I like controversy. But um ah I will say AI is the one thing that's infamous for bubbles popping. 01:14:13.62 James Yeah. 01:14:13.94 Frank It happened in the 50s, 60s. It happened in the 80s, 90s. It will happen again. But all I think that we have proven that the technology has value. 01:14:26.39 Frank So I think the bubble popping is going to be a little more surprising than, say, the dot-com burst. Because the dot-com bubble burst, but we still have the internet. And if anything, we have a much bigger internet than ever anyone could have imagined in 2001. 01:14:42.17 Frank So the bubble popping doesn't mean the technology goes away. It just means that you can't start an AI business and get a billion dollars in cash from a no someone who doesn't know anything. 01:14:53.56 James Yeah. 01:14:53.68 Frank Or you can't just put AI on your resume and then get Insta hired for $250 million dollars by Mark Zuckerberg. 01:14:53.68 James Yeah. 01:15:00.44 Frank So I think that bubble will pop. I don't think it'll be overly dramatic, though. um Because I think the technology has, there are people who are not programmers who still love AI models. And there is another segment of the world that they're still on the plagiarism thing, where they still think all AIs do is plagiarize works. you're like, it' it's not what it does, but okay, fine. If that helps you understand it, fine. 01:15:26.49 Frank um And so they're still stuck in that part. Like they still have to transcend. They they have so many more ah hurdles to get over in their comprehension of the AI. 01:15:31.55 James Thank you. 01:15:35.81 Frank i think we're going to have a beautiful run up with all that kind of stuff. And so I think it will burst in the next two, three, four years, but it's not next year. 01:15:46.36 Frank No. we're We're still, we're full steam ahead. The Wild Wild West is going to continue to be wild for at least 2026 is my guess. ah Prove me wrong, anyone. But I feel like there's still going a lot of money flowing around at the end of 2026. 01:16:00.85 James I do believe there's a lot of money on the sidelines, as people like to to call it. it's It's lingering around. And and i and I think the the market, too, it's not a financial podcast. I'm not a financial advisor. 01:16:13.46 James And Tom Lee, I trust. But besides that, think... am you know i think And I kind of always think the beginning of the year is always a little volatile. And so it's always fascinating. It's like policy and change and things like that in the new year. So I'll kind of see what happens there. 01:16:28.95 James think there's a lot of, yeah, a lot of cash on the sidelines. The economy's interesting. The economy is not the star stock market, by the way. Like if you read this stuff, like that's not, it's not how it works. Um, like, 01:16:40.85 James that's part of the economy and shows some stuff. It's not the economy. I hate when you watch shows and we're like, well, the economy is doing great because the stock market's doing great. Like, nope, that's not not accurate. 01:16:48.79 Frank ah 01:16:49.97 James Nope, not accurate. 01:16:51.40 Frank It's actually the price of Doritos. 01:16:51.45 James um 01:16:52.84 Frank That's how I judge the economy. 01:16:53.18 James Yeah, that's correct. 01:16:54.00 Frank How much did Doritos cost? 01:16:56.38 James Correct. How many bags are the reviews? Is that iPhone? Cost. um 01:17:00.76 Frank Yeah. 01:17:01.46 James And yeah, i think there's a lot of runway. I think there's a lot of learning and a lot of cash that these VCs are gonna like pump into these. um businesses will be really fascinating i do think it's probably gonna start to be a little bit harder for people to get money um unless and i don't think the interest rates are going to drop dramatically um that's for sure but no not next year um so it'll be an interesting time here's a good question for you foldable iphones frank krueger foldable iphone you we got the iphone and 01:17:24.18 Frank Not next year. 01:17:31.04 Frank Oh God, stop it. Please just, you just put a dagger right through my heart. 01:17:35.86 James We got the iPhone Air. We got the iPhone Air. So the next, are there gonna two of them? 01:17:39.06 Frank I saw 01:17:43.07 Frank Look, all I'll say is I hope. That would be nice. And I've seen the rumors. just Just do it, Apple. What is your problem? Do some innovation. i'll just I'm going to answer your question with a statement. 01:17:57.56 Frank I guess that's how you do answer questions. ah Do something with the iPhone, Apple, that doesn't involve adding another stupid camera to it. I love your 8x Zoom. It's fun. You know, it's it's good to see blurry backlit pictures of birds. 01:18:07.87 James Thank you. 01:18:11.30 Frank Love them. um But please do something with the phone. Do something with UX. Like, that company, I love Apple, but they have really stagnated. 01:18:22.47 Frank the last few years. So will it be a foldable phone? It gosh darn well better be. But I'd be ah i'd be open to um a phone with two displays. This is the one I want. I want a display on the front and a display on the back. Why is there a back of the phone? I don't know. 01:18:37.05 Frank it It should work both ways. What's the difference? You know, like I don't even need foldable. I don't need it to be that big. don't care. um Maybe I could, you know, have a little keyboard shoot out of it like it's 2004. 01:18:50.50 Frank That'd be cool. 01:18:50.62 James Yeah. 01:18:53.02 Frank um Just do something with the iPhone, Apple. So my prediction is Apple will not do anything with the iPhone. And at the end of 2026, I'll be saying Apple do something with the iPhone. 01:19:03.54 James Are we going to get HomePod screen thingy? Is that happening? 01:19:09.40 Frank No. 01:19:10.17 James it's not happening. 01:19:10.65 Frank No, i fear I fear all the people that worked on that ended up working on Vision. And then Vision got sideswiped by ai And then everyone got thrown over to working on AI. 01:19:16.63 James Hmm. 01:19:23.03 Frank And Apple is nothing if not slow. So will it be 2026? No. ah Maybe in a few years, though. ah They are due for, if Siri ever grows in intelligence, 01:19:36.57 Frank they would be remiss not to release a new home device. There, there is, I'm, I'm still rocking the Jeff Bezos dingus cause it's pretty good. I would be happy to replace it with a Tim Cook dingus, but there, there, there isn't one out there and HomeKit doesn't work well. 01:19:49.75 James I would, yeah, I would as well. No. 01:19:54.93 Frank So I would love it to happen. i feel like they need to invest a lot more money and, um ah just make more deals with small manufacturers and make it actually happen. 01:20:08.22 James Yeah. A lot of my IOT devices and cameras, uh, unfortunately dropped home kit support, um, fully just cause they're like, man, not worth it. Blah, blah, blah. Some, some do have it on some of their devices, but not all their devices. 01:20:19.42 James So it's like a really mixed bag, which is a shame ah because the the cameras and stuff that I do use inside of it are pretty good. It's like pretty solid in general. 01:20:26.34 Frank I'm sure. Yeah. 01:20:26.99 James Yeah. 01:20:27.93 Frank Yeah. 01:20:28.28 James Um, 01:20:28.65 Frank Yeah. So no Siri dingus. 01:20:30.65 James I think for no serious thing. ah yeah I don't know if we'll get a full. I don't know if they'll be have enough courage to to do it this this year or not. 01:20:43.30 James But it'll be interesting. 01:20:45.18 Frank Do you think there ever will be? I'll even flip the question on you. Will there ever be a foldable iPhone? 01:20:49.82 James Yes, no. 01:20:51.00 Frank Okay. 01:20:51.48 James Yes, no. 01:20:51.96 Frank Yes, no. ah 01:20:55.98 James dude I don't really know. ah There's just, it's like, is it worth, is it worth it for them to take that risk? 01:21:06.78 James Even in general, the foldable devices now, they're not like selling gangbusters, right? So it's almost to Apple. 01:21:10.96 Frank Right. 01:21:12.92 James It's like, if it's not selling X number, it's not worth doing, you know, and that is a hard place to be. 01:21:18.64 Frank Right. 01:21:21.37 James So the question i would prompt you because they did do it is will the vision pro be here at the end of the year? 01:21:21.95 Frank Yeah. 01:21:29.05 Frank Be here. Yes. Yes. um 01:21:32.30 James It's on sale. You can buy one. Okay. 01:21:35.06 Frank Yeah. Only because they just released a new model and they're going to have to clear the inventory. for it Now, will there be one after that model? I don't know. I think there will be one in the future. 01:21:44.44 James Okay. 01:21:46.81 Frank And I hope that they're working on a lighter one and a simpler one. 01:21:46.81 James Hmm. 01:21:50.14 Frank I think that's what every Vision Pro person actually wants. 01:21:50.20 James Yeah. 01:21:53.34 Frank um Is it 2026? Probably not. 01:21:57.28 James Visionaire. I think that I think they want the Visionaire. 01:21:58.94 Frank Visionaire, yeah. 01:22:00.85 James It's in the vision. 01:22:01.16 Frank Oh, God, you could even spell it like a French person. 01:22:03.03 James Yeah. 01:22:03.50 Frank Oh, God, it'd be awesome. 01:22:04.30 James Visionaire. 01:22:05.23 Frank Yeah. 01:22:06.06 James Well, because ah one device category that did Excel this year were wearable glasses. 01:22:16.41 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 01:22:17.30 James The metas, there's a bunch of other ones that just connect up and do whatever is. 01:22:17.70 Frank They're rocking it. 01:22:21.72 Frank lot of small manufacturers are doing it now. 01:22:23.16 James Mm hmm. Mm hmm. 01:22:24.15 Frank that's that's That's when you know it's a good tech. When someone without all the resources of Apple and Google say, hey, we'll we'll throw some into this market. See what happens. 01:22:33.37 James Yeah. 01:22:34.56 Frank Yeah. 01:22:34.52 James And a there's use cases for some of the core tech and vision pro such as the monitor mirroring and the privacy part of it. 01:22:48.28 James You know some good examples are being on a plane and not worrying what's on your screen because you're just typing, you know, out into the ethers that can be as big as you want or not worrying about what people are watching or seeing or doing um in those public spaces. 01:22:52.04 Frank Mm-hmm. 01:22:55.35 Frank Yeah. 01:23:04.22 James that you're not necessarily like walking around and doing stuff, but um I'm at a coffee shop and I'm coding and I'm doing stuff and i don't have to worry about people accidentally seeing a Teams chat or whatever. you know I think that there's some there's some niceties to that that that that they could really take advantage of. 01:23:12.61 Frank Yeah. Yeah. yeah 01:23:18.55 James That would be super nice. Yeah. Let's hope and let's see, but that's going to do it for 2025. People have a safe, happy holiday, and we will see you in 2026. 01:23:30.63 James As always, Frank is an honor and privilege to tell the podcast and deliver over 490. 01:23:34.36 Frank Mhm. 01:23:36.28 James these delectable episodes uh it's been it's been been a joy um i know people are trying to kill the podcast name uh at the end of the year but we're going to hold strong as a podcast you can also if you want to watch our show podcast show you can go to youtube.com slash merge conflict fm at merge conflict fm and find us there you can see our beautiful faces that's it that's as much production as we do because we have full-time jobs And that's all the time that we have to give you. 01:23:36.84 Frank Wow. 01:23:42.36 Frank Yeah. 01:23:51.67 Frank ah 01:24:04.34 James But thank you, all of our amazing listeners that maybe stuck with us since the beginning or through the year through any time at all. We appreciate it We are coming up on 3 million downloads of the pod. 01:24:15.64 James um 01:24:15.83 Frank Oh my God. 01:24:16.79 James Just on audio, if you were to combine that with video, we'd already be over that hump, which is cool. But thank you all so much for hanging with us. It's been a joy and an honor. 01:24:27.16 James So until next time, I'm James Montemagno. 01:24:30.39 Frank And I'm Frank Kruger. Thanks for watching and listening. 01:24:33.72 James Peace.