In the past, before all of this AI, when people asked what to do to be a good developer, I said, like just have a really high tolerance for frustration.
That's about right.
For me to understand Next or React or some weird CLI, there's nothing fundamental.
So it really is just wasted knowledge.
What defined a developer at its core used to be being able to write, code and understand programming languages, and suddenly that part of being a developer is getting way less important.
Software development will just be a skill, just like with writing.
They're still professional writers but, like all of us, also have to know how to write as part of our job.
Three years ago, our addressable audience was essentially 17 million professional javascript developers and suddenly computers can write code.
An addressable audience for a tool like ours that's everybody that can use spreadsheets today, which is more like 3 billion people.
A year ago we were sitting at around 3 000 signups a day.
Today we're sitting at around 16 000 a day.
We're starting to see those kind of patterns.
Where is this an Agent accessing, or is it a human?
There's also just way more people having fun building crazy stuff.
People building like really cool WebGL games and so on that they could like never managed to build before, and browsers will evolve really dramatically from this.
That originally concept of a user agent on the web is getting real.
You see people like have history with their chat, TPT or cloud and they really have a preference and they don't want to go to like the banks, AI and talk to that.
They just want to interact in that way.
The web as we know it is about to become unrecognizable.
Not because of new protocol or framework, because of who's building it.
For the first time in history, the barrier between I have an idea and I shift working software is collapsing.
Netlify just watched their daily signups jump from 3,000 to 16,000.
The twist?
Most of these new users aren't developers.
They're marketers designers, product managers, people who six months ago, couldn't write a line of code.
Matt Billman saw this coming.
He coined the term agent experience the idea that AI agents are now a core user of every product you build.
But here's where it gets interesting.
While others are building tools that say, we'll be your developer, Matt's making a different bet.
He believes we're not replacing developers, we're creating billions of new ones.
This raises an uncomfortable question.
If anyone can build software, what actually makes you a developer anymore?
The answer might surprise you and has nothing to do with code.
Today, Matt sits down with A16Z general partner Martin Casado to cover why CEOs are suddenly submitting pull requests again, why the dead web theory is backwards and what happens when your son's AI friend needs to open a bank account.
Matt, thanks for joining.
It's good to see you.
So this is Matt Billman, the CEO, founder of Netlify, also creator of the Jamstack.
You know, very well known to be an architect of the web and someone that tracks the trends.
And you were with us a couple months ago, and we were discussing AX and what that means.
And now...
You know, like the space is moving so quickly.
We're a few months on.
And so the point of this is going to be to talk about what we've learned in the last couple of months.
But maybe before that, maybe you can describe what AX is.
Yeah.
And then we'll just kind of get into like kind of what we're learning.
Yeah, I wrote an article about the first article about AX back in January, which is like feels like 10 years ago in AI time now.
I know that's right as the term for agent experience and sort of really thinking about the evolution from user experience as like the term that like really could set a product apart from other products, not just based on a checklist of features but based on like, the experience of like everything around it.
And then our first decade at Netlify of really centering around developer experience.
That's typically been a way to set platforms aside from other platforms, right.
Like by making like lower friction for developers to actually build on them and extend them and use them and so on.
Towards this idea that we suddenly...
All of us that build product have this new persona using the product that's an agent driven by AI.
And that also sort of actually have an experience of the product, right?
Like whatever that means, right?
Like doesn't necessarily mean that there's like some soul behind it or something, right?
But it obviously has some Like.
It's like actually attempting to figure out how to do stuff with our product in an autonomous way, right?
Like.
So suddenly the documentation about our product, the onboarding experience of our product, is no longer just for like a person, it's also for a person asking an agent to do stuff right like, and that that was what i sort of described in this article on.
On agent experience is something that suddenly for us at netlify became like our product, north star, and that i've proposed at the time should be pretty important for anybody building products in the world today.
So listen, I mean you run Netlify, as we mentioned, which is one of the world's largest hosting sites.
So have you seen more agents than humans showing up at these websites?
I feel like there's a lot of stuff going down.
There's like, there's that, but there's also like people are creating websites using agents.
And so I just feel like there's, you know, just a lot to tease out here.
I think, especially in the DevTools space, like I'll say that, like the term AXA have had like outsized adoption in the developer tool space.
And I think that's because, for developer tools, there's this like wild thing happening where, if you take Netlify right, like two years ago, our audience, like our addressable audience, was essentially 17 million professional JavaScript developers right.
Like, And then there's like some adjacent developers that might use it as well.
Right.
Like, but it's like deeply technical product, like based on writing code and shipping it.
Right.
Like, so the like main audience is 17 million people.
Yeah.
And suddenly computers can write code.
And that whole question of like, do you actually need to write code to build software?
That's becoming like, not really.
Right.
Like and you start having an addressable audience for a tool like ours.
That's more like everybody that can use spreadsheets today, which is more like 3 billion people, right?
Like in the distance between 17 million and 3 billion is really, really big, right?
But if you want to reach that large audience, you have to reach them through the agent's they're using to write the code and to build the software right.
So I think that has meant that in the developer tool space, this idea of agent experience is like extra important right now.
And there's like extra attention of it.
That doesn't mean that it's limited to like developer tools.
And I think we'll see it more and more in all products, right?
Like as agents try to interact with anything, but it does mean that specifically in our space, it's like become more something that's like almost essential to actually like reaching your potential as a company.
So from the perspective of...
Now, Levi, it seems like there's two things going on.
One of them is to what extent are agents making websites?
Yeah.
Using like the bolts or the lovables or the replets or like whatever it is to like generate the website, you know.
And then there's a second one is for a website that's already generated.
Yeah.
To what extent is an agent visiting it, right?
And so how do you think about, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's two parts to it constantly, right?
By the way, is AX both of those or is it?
It's AX.
At Netlify, we actually talk about three kinds of AX relevant to us, right?
It's all AX, right?
But there's like Netlify's AX, right?
Like what is the agent experience of using Netlify, right?
That's like Netlify's AX.
So you're like the website or whatever, yeah.
Totally, right?
Like it's like our CLI can cloud code figure out how to use our CLI.
That's like part of Netlify's AX, right?
Yeah.
Then there's our customers AX.
The stuff that our customers build.
How can we help them make that like, make a really great agent experience?
Assuming they're using agents yeah yeah, but but independently in that right, like if they're building like an e-commerce site, yeah.
What do we need to help them with to make it easy, like now, stripe has a new like payments option to buy directly through chat tpt.
I see what does that mean for people building e-commerce sites and netlifier Like.
What do they actually need to do different to make sure that ChatGPT can also buy their products on behalf of users, right?
Like there's that whole line of talk like stuff, like should we help people charge for crawling like Cloudflare does?
And do people even want that?
And so on, right?
Like that's all in our mind, like the customer ex where, like how do we help our customers do these things?
Yeah.
And then the third side of it is kind of what we call industry AX.
That's like all the protocols and like general standards we have to agree on as an industry.
To make all of these things simpler.
Right.
And that's kind of how we think about it internally.
So we touch all three of those.
And I would say we've done the most work on Netlify's own AX right now.
And that again kind of comes back to just like how massive that change in like the developer world is right now.
But we are obviously also doing a lot of work on helping customers build MCP servers and figure out how to make their sites accessible for agents, or like deciding if a visitor is an agent or a human, and so on.
Do you have any numbers that like are you can highlight on like whatever?
Three years ago, you know, people were not using AI to build sites and now they are.
Like, do you have any, can you give any sense of, like, the extent that...
Where we see it, it's just that shift in, like the mass of people that are suddenly coming in the front door.
It's like that's just the first obvious one where, like a year ago, we were sitting at around 3000 signups a day, which for a developer tool, is like That's a lot.
That's a lot.
That's a lot, yeah.
Today, we're sitting at around 16,000 a day.
Wow.
Right like, do you have a sense of, do you have a sense of where they're coming from?
Like that's, the wildest thing is that it's everywhere.
Right like because, like at first we we started having a whole bunch of these agents sort of directly integrating, with first bolt, done you being like the largest one?
Right like.
Then a whole world of like same, that new builder, io mimics rocket like code made windsurf like, just like all of these different ones, but all of them together it's kind of like a 4 of the signups.
So the rest just happens organically, right?
And we actually Boltnew had used our claim flow, which has become one really common technique for agent experience, this idea that you can let an agent use your product before the human knows the product exists.
And then when the human wants to get involved, they go and claim whatever the agent did and sort of open an account.
And at first Boltnew, which is one of these very consumer-oriented code agents, was using that flow and sending anybody that wanted to really do something with the website over to us.
And then a few months ago we changed to a white label agreement with them, where they are now like fully vertically integrating Netlify and they're like white labeling us and selling it directly to their customers to give like a really integrated vertical experience.
And ironically, you cannot see that change in our signup numbers at all, even if that was like our highest partner right.
Because like the general growth of the space of people building web.
Are they using AI tools?
Are they using like a cursor chat GPT or is it just like people are like decided to make websites?
I don't know for sure.
Right.
Like, because you can't always see what they're building with.
Right.
Like, but I think it would be a weird coincidence that, like a lot more people were like I really like HTML now.
Right.
And I think it's more likely that that that you'll just see that the amount of people building websites, web apps and websites exploding because, like the barrier to entry for doing it is like massively disappearing.
Like you have people today that accidentally create a web app in React, right?
Like you go into it.
All right chat tpt, and you're like prompted the right thing and suddenly it like spins off a canvas and it built you all this stuff and you download it and it's like okay, now where do we put it right like, and we're pretty much like the simplest place to put it right like, and then we have made our tooling really great for all of these sources right like, and we're seeing that and we can see in the personas that come in that suddenly they go from being like developers obviously still ton of developers.
There's also a lot of personas that, like you know, are onboarding, like characterize themselves as like, marketeers or designers or product managers or all these other roles.
So I would expect if AI is driving this, exactly that would happen, which is you go, like... Yeah.
Netlify has always been a very technical tool for developers.
Like, if you're, like, a JavaScript developer, you use, like, a hosting by yourself.
So I would guess...
Probably the clearest indication that AI is doing it is exactly this.
The mix of tactical versus non-technical shifts, for example.
Totally.
And it really shifts.
Are there any rough numbers to that?
Or is it just... Is it still vibes?
It's still vibes.
It's still vibes.
But it's...
I can say the vibes are very strong.
It's noticeable.
Even just talking to our customers, right?
We can see this shift.
We have other things that we can see things like for our co-audience.
We have this functionality called Why Did It Fail?
Where when a build, like when you open a pull request, we run a build and we push that to your site.
When that fails, that's always sort of a point of like okay, now I have to go and debug it and figure out like why, what happened right?
Like, so we put a button in the UI that literally says, why did it fail?
You click that button and we send like the logs and the code like to an LLM and we give you a diagnosis.
That's awesome.
Then, first we put a button on saying copy this result to an llm right like because like if you want you're in that loop and you want the llm okay it failed go fix it right like and immediately when we put that button in we saw that like 25 of everyone that clicked why did it fail clicked copy to LLM.
Wow.
That's like a pretty big sign of like how much this is like shifting, right?
Like.
And now we just launched this thing called agent runners, where you can like spin up like autonomous runs with cloud code or codecs and so on right,
Like, so now how we have it like just fix it button.
You know, it's been remarkable to me, I will say.
Here's a personal anecdote, which is I developed with Cursor and Evenings for hobby projects.
I've been using NetLove High for years.
Yeah.
Right?
But I never remember all the commands, like whatever.
No, no.
It was super remarkable to me.
It's like the LLMs actually know it.
So I'll be in Cursor and I'll, like you know, want to be like oh, like.
What are the Netlify commands to?
Like you know?
Whatever, deploy this, add this, whatever.
And it actually knows it.
And so I would say, even for the case of professional developers, they're unique.
Using LLMs to debug.
Because I mean, it's just like, there's just so many frameworks and so many tools to know.
And you should, right?
Like I mean, that's one of my big thesis that, like the whole definition of a developer is really going to change, right?
Like where what defined a developer at its core used to be being able to write code and understand programming languages and understand the syntax and like that layer sort of below the visible substrate of things.
And suddenly that part of being a developer is getting way less important.
And potentially going to what's zero importance, right?
And then the other skill set of being a developer, of clarity of thought, of understanding what users actually need you to build, of systems thinking and system design, and so on.
Those elements are suddenly becoming like the main qualifier for like are you actually a really strong developer?
And that also changes the persona, right?
Like there's a lot of personas that were like really, really great at like the puzzle level layer of like low level code and so on.
But that might not be that strong in like the more humanistic layer of like taste and what to build and so on.
Right,
Like, and there's a lot of people that were sort of like cut off fundamentally from development, that are very strong in those layers and that start entering the field.
Interesting.
I'm going to give a counterpoint to that.
I don't know if this writer is not, but like try this on for size.
I started programming in the 90s.
Yeah.
And to program.
You sat down at a computer and you knew a programming language and you wrote the programming language and you had a program.
Yeah.
And so like...
You were just thinking about the logic of the program.
Yeah.
And then, you know, the 2000s, especially late 2000s rolls around in the web.
And then like to be a programmer, it's no longer about writing code.
It's like you have to know frameworks.
And there's nothing fundamental about frameworks.
Yeah.
Like for me to understand Next or React or... Yeah. you know, some weird CLI.
There's nothing fundamental.
So it really is just wasted knowledge.
I'm like, I'm like using space in my brain.
Yeah.
You know, to remember some dumb design decision from like some random person, right?
And so for me it's actually a little bit different.
Which is the nice thing about AI is like all the framework stuff it knows.
I don't have to waste my brain on it.
And I can literally just think about the programming logic, which I think is actually what matters, because you're actually articulating what the program can do.
So it's kind of a similar thing to what you're saying, but I think maybe I'm even abstracting it more.
Like I actually think...
I think code's a very effective way to articulate trade-offs and to articulate what you want something to do.
It actually is, right?
Like English is ambiguous, like, you know, and so it's fine to write code.
I would just say all the framework nonsense is the stuff that we shouldn't like.
We should like not worry about.
And then of course to your point.
There are things where you don't have to describe so low level as code that you can do a high level.
And there's so many aspects that, like we've both like been like hardcore, like our brain has been changed by sitting with stuff like Commodore 64 and like learning memory addresses and just taking for granted that, like every little comment matters.
I remember pokes and pee.
I remember, like, you, like, poke into, like, independent memory.
Like, you're, like, loading.
It was, like, that level, right?
Like, So we also forget how much of a barrier it is, like, just when you start, right?
Like, that whole learning curve of, like, oh, I mistyped one character and now nothing works, right?
Right, right, right, right.
And I think we underestimate like, how big of a difference it makes when all of that is sort of no longer a barrier, right.
Like where Hey like.
Even if you leave out like a character here and there like, the logic still holds right.
Like the logic is still sound, right?
Like, so suddenly you just need to start practicing that ability to reason with with, with logic, and to understand like the system.
And it's really fascinating, I think, to see some of these people who, Like I, see sort of two journeys right.
Like I see people like us that are starting to learn how to work with AI and coming from the world we come from.
Yeah.
And I see these people that come from like the completely opposite apart and start learning to build software without that journey that we went through.
And it's so interesting to see that interplay they have with the AI then, right?
Because that becomes the sort of constant iteration one that's just like, why does this do this?
It becomes basically an educational tool.
No, no, no.
That's exactly right.
It's like...
It's like the AI not only does, but also teaches you how to do it.
You learn the fundamentals that way.
No, I absolutely have seen the same thing.
Can I move the conversation a little bit, which is so we've kind of been working kind of out towards the user.
We've talked about, like you know, Netlify itself, you know, using AI, and then how it's a good target for AI.
You know, as you go towards the user, we're actually seeing the browser itself seem to evolve right.
There's like new browsers, AI level browsers.
Are you starting to see impact from that or is that still kind of on the come?
It's a good I think it's still more on to come than like something that's like very real right now.
You see it in like the access patterns, right?
Like where you suddenly see, like all of these sites being accessed by all kinds of different agents in in, in all kinds of different ways that are different than human access patterns, right.
Like, and I, that comes from browsers and from tools like cloud code and so on, right?
Like, we've like one thing thing that BondJS just came up with and everybody, like us included, are copying now is this idea of like for their documentation side use content negotiation.
So when cloud code asks for a page, instead of sending the HTML, respond directly with the markdown so it uses less tokens to like, interpret it right like oh, I see, I see, I see that makes a lot of sense.
So we're starting to see those kind of patterns where we actually start, like in practice building, like content negotiation where like, is this an agent accessing or is it a human accessing?
And maybe we should do different things, right.
Like, and I think those are sort of early signs of what will happen when even the browser starts being like that and starts like having AI inside that sometimes it's the human viewing and sometimes it's the AI in the browser.
Yeah.
So based on this, is your mental model that most AI is working with a human?
Or is your mental model that these things become more diverse over time?
Because the browser question to me assumes there's a human behind the browser in tandem with an AI.
Where like the purely agentic one, maybe there isn't a human so tightly in the loop.
Yeah.
I think it's pretty obvious that we...
That in the beginning of this journey, it was all sort of very human in the loop, right?
And I think there will always be a large set of human in the loop interactions, right?
And especially the browser, I think, will generally be very experience-oriented, right?
Like I'm going somewhere and I'm experiencing something.
So maybe you have this assistant that helps you with everything, but it's still like very in the loop.
But it's also very obvious that especially these building blocks around actually like, strangely enough, like the code agents in the CLI, like Cloud Code Codex Gemini CLI, like those are sort of churning out to be really strong generalist agents right.
Like because they live in that like CLI space right where they can do anything you can do in a computer pretty easily, right?
Like, and they can write code so they can even write their own tools to do new things and so on.
And they are kind of like really being able to do longer and longer stretches of just like uninterrupted work, where you give them some tasks and they just try to solve it right.
Like.
So I think I had one of these CLI tools where I'm like, I was just trying to be like okay, I'm going to make it to a full game.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a test that'll test if the game works.
And then I'm going to have it just keep iterating on it until it passes the test.
And it ran for a few hours and it cost me $10,000.
I won't tell you.
For those that are watching, be careful.
I was like, whoops.
It's wild.
Yeah.
But I think, I mean, just to your question, right?
Like, I think we'll see both, right?
Like, I do think that we are on this cusp of seeing more and more like truly autonomous agents.
Hopefully they're still always doing things because some humans, As opposed to like actually having true agency and like the robotic takeover.
Hopefully, it's still like long task, but some human was like, hey, go do this thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you think about?
Like I mean, you talked a bit about it in the content negotiation, but do you actually think about the economics and how they're shifting as a result of all of this stuff?
Because it does feel like spend is very different in the world of agents.
It really is about tokens.
It's less about like compute African storage.
Everybody is repricing, right?
Yeah.
We've launched new pricing for the same reason, right?
Like I think everybody is starting to build credit models in some form, right?
It seems to me, so I remember the shift from perpetual to like recurring.
I remember that, right?
It feels like we're going from like a recurring to like a usage based on this.
And is your experience the same?
It's the same, I would say.
I think all of us are also looking for ways to make it more outcome-based rather than pure usage-based right.
Like in finding, trying to find ways because, like often, the usage of the agency, that's like a weird thing with usage-based right.
Like that often you have very little control over what Like is this question.
I asked the agent As long or as short as it was.
Right?
Like, is it going to use a lot of tokens?
Is it going to be $100 or $20?
I don't really know.
It's going to be $10,000.
And is this game worth $10,000 or $10, right?
So I think a lot of us are also trying to figure out what those elements of value are.
That sounds very tough to me.
And it's really tough.
So I think in reality, everybody's kind of like used space right now, right?
But I think at the same time It's not impossible that over time, even if it's tough, we start getting better at figuring out elements that feel more aligned to values than just pure token usage, which feels pretty like one out of your control and not super aligned in the sense like if I could do the same thing for you in like five tokens, you would probably prefer it.
Yeah, yeah.
It would probably pay me more to do it really fast in five tokens than to do it really slow with like 10 million tokens right,
Are you using agents and operations now?
We are using some internally, but...
Not enough, I would say.
But we are using some like.
We are using some like, I think especially our developer organization have built custom agents for all kinds of stuff like linear integration and management there and things like keeping up with what's happening in Nextjs so we can keep doing the right framework adapters and so on.
Right,
We've built a lot of that kind of internal tooling.
For me.
I'm just very interested in like right now today, not science fiction, like where do agents apply right?
Clearly, they're a great productivity tool.
Clearly, they can do longer running tasks.
Clearly, there's like basic stuff that they're pretty good at.
Like, for example, if I'm like, I don't know, convert from this language to this language.
They're good at these kind of like, you know, well-scoped, well-defined tasks.
Yeah.
They seem less good at like... ongoing operations where you've got to be correct.
And these are kind of these complex spaces and so forth.
And so... Yeah.
I think in the end, in a lot of those...
I mean obviously, the kind of agent we're like the highest highest, highest adopters of is the coding agents ourselves as well, right?
We're even like something like agent runners.
We built like we're now building a lot of the product with those agents, right?
Have you found that to actually increase feature velocity?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We can see like yeah yeah, like when people get good at it, it starts really increasing the velocity with which you can build stuff.
And also it increases the capacity of like a really strong engineer to both go do some really hard focused work but just spin off a bunch of like the easy stuff along the way and get it done right.
Like.
But what I was saying there is that I still think we are more in the line of using that to build programs that does stuff when it's like automations, rather than having like agents automate stuff because it becomes like weirdly unpredictable right.
And in the end, once you know what to automate, it's like simpler to write the code.
To actually automate it.
To actually automate it, right?
I totally agree.
But I think the fact that like, it's so much cheaper to write automations changes that like, you start building a lot of automations and potentially you start building a lot of apps and automations instead of, like buying a lot of software.
So this is a bit of an aside, but it just reminded me of something.
So, you know, Max Buechermann, the Airflow, you know, Superset guy.
So like... hardcore open source developer has a company called preset.
Um, and he was telling me he's like you know, the most amazing thing with these, with these coding agents, is I've only worked on open source right now.
I'm working on a large open source.
This project has been around for a long time.
So all the agents know it.
Yeah.
We're doing kind of front end JavaScript stuff, which they're all really good at.
Yeah.
You know.
So like I feel like, and then all of the the engineers in the company are like pretty senior.
Yeah.
So it's like, she's like, so it's like, we all woke up and we were like superheroes.
It was like you know, and so like you've got these senior engineers that are using these coding models like junior engineers on an open source code base.
And, you know, the velocity is 10x, right?
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
But I also compare it to.
I mean, I work with companies where they're doing pretty new stuff and it's not front end and it's kind of still experimental and maybe they've got more junior developers or whatever.
And I feel like the velocity hasn't increased at all.
So I would assume like, at least in the case of Netlify, like you are doing, a lot of JavaScript, a lot of front end, a lot of web.
I mean, I would think that it's probably pretty amenable to these models or... And I mean...
But I will say that people that get good at them start using them for things across the stack, right.
And I see that, right?
You can get them to where I go.
More senior developers or more... More senior developers, right?
That's correct.
I think, especially when the deeper you go in the stack, the more you need to really be like kind of an architect, right?
Like to get... these kind of agents to do the right stuff, right?
Like, and then the higher up you go in the stack, the more you can now be like.
Just jump in and do it without like, without any development background.
Yeah.
It's kind of a fun time, right?
It's really fun.
Are you coding?
I'm like, so I kind of made it like around the same time I wrote the AX article.
Yeah.
Like a little before that I kind of started making it my personal mission that like I want to learn how to be a really good developer again.
I would say I'm a pretty strong developer, right?
Yeah, of course.
I build, like, the back and the front and everything, right?
Like, for the first version, like, everything.
Like, from the C++ to the CSS, right?
Like, everything.
Yeah, yeah.
But I sort of started saying, like I want to make it my mission to become an equally good developer without writing any code myself.
Yeah.
And ideally without looking at code.
Wow.
You still need to do that, right?
But I kind of like started to make it my mission.
And in the beginning, it was very frustrating.
And now I think it's really fun.
Really?
And now I do a lot of pull requests.
They're probably annoying.
Are you submitting PRs?
I'm doing that.
Wait, but you haven't looked at the code?
I mean okay, when I do PRs to our actual code bases, I do go and look at the code, because I've learned the hard way that otherwise the team does and they shout at me.
So...
So now I go and look at the code first and tell PlotCode to fix it before I open the pull request.
A lot of that has like we launched this new agent, run a product and a lot of that has like informed it, because I wanted to make sure that you could actually do the whole like cycle of iteration before you open a pull request, versus like the GitHub integrations where you ask, like PlotCode to do something and then you get a pull request.
You never knew like to actually do something useful, right.
Like.
But I do find that once you start changing that whole mentality to just work through the context, engineering and the prompts and the systems thinking and guiding this model, it's pretty remarkable what you can get it to do.
And there's definitely some cases where... So it's funny.
There's some cases where I've built something where realistically...
If I had the time to just sit time with a code editor in an uninterrupted stretch and write the code, I would have written it faster and probably better.
But As a CEO, I definitely don't have that time, right?
And in this case, I could still build it.
But just by like spinning up this async run, checking in between meetings, like where did it go?
What did it do?
Let me give it some feedback and do another iteration and so on, right?
Like, so suddenly you can work in that way and it's a lot of fun.
I mean, I was just, you know, I kind of work on these home projects and I was actually using uh, like the cursor cli and i was at dinner.
I was curious i was doing so.
I was like a vc at a dinner, like talking about deals.
I'm checking out my coding agents.
I've totally been like in the same situation and, and it's funny, i've noticed like Every founder CEO with a technical background I talk to now are doing pull requests again.
Yeah, I know.
It's awesome.
It's just really funny.
I literally think it's a framework issue.
If coding was simpler, like it used to be, everybody would still be coding, but you just have to learn too many different things.
And so it's really remarkable.
Do you ascribe to that?
AI is going to kind of usher in the dead what's called the dead web theory where it's like it's only going to be agents talking to websites, and you know there's no longer a UI issue.
I get it.
Like, I get it, but like, I don't, I really don't believe in it.
Like, and I don't see it.
I see the opposite happening now, right?
Like in some, everything is happening at the same time, right?
Like.
So you have a lot of slop generated that like other agents consume, and you have, like Like lots of LinkedIn that's just like chat, tippity and so on, right.
Like probably people are asking chat tippity to summarize it from it in some way.
I think the cliche is like to sound fancy.
I use AI to create something big and then to read it.
You use AI to summarize it.
But that's also just way more people having fun building crazy stuff, and there's a lot of that out there now.
And there's people building like really cool, like WebGL games and so on that they could like just never managed to build before and like there's so much going on that I think that theory just under like there's so many of these theories i think that just underestimates like humans and like i will say i personally have visited more new websites yeah yeah, in the last six months and probably the five years prior, just because there's so much more cool stuff.
I'm like i've kind of reduced everything to like a handful of sites that i check every morning in the last five years.
Yeah, and now there's always something new and it's like Yeah, I think it's totally true.
I mean, I also see it as just a general moment of, like people building way more stuff than they did before right,
Like, and I still see, and way more people building, right?
And that's again, back to that idea of like, it becomes more accessible to be a developer.
We open up, like for so long we've taken for granted that like Again, if you're sort of really generous, go beyond JavaScript and so on right,
Like, let's say, what would you say is like 100 million professional developers in the world?
Maybe even less?
I mean, we always estimate 60, roughly.
It's probably more than that.
If you're really generous, you say like 100 million, right?
Out of like, what, 8 billion people or something like that, right?
That's like a really, really small part of humankind, and every other human can only use software that those developer builds for them, right?
And that's like such a constraint on that part, right?
And to me, when that constraint goes away, We're just going to have a lot like unimaginable amount of more software, right?
Like, yeah, maybe some of it will be bad, but there'll also be a lot more good stuff.
The future is going to be weirder, wilder, and more wonderful than we could imagine.
This is an aside, but it's an adjacency, which is I really love that 3JS is having a moment.
Yeah, yeah, me too, me too.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
So, for those listening, 3JS is a JavaScript library for 3D and it's always just been kind of this yeah, you know like, why would you use the web for 3d?
Yeah, you know like, you know, like you didn't have like a you know, and now there's just full-on like games being written, multiplayer games being written, really high quality graphics, like did you see that one recently was like yeah, the small planet, the tiny planet yeah yeah, it was like so amazing and just like, And I probably wasn't even using AI, but like it is.
It is a time now that I do think that
Precisely.
And it'll get encoded into like the, the, the language models will train on it.
They'll figure it out.
And you'll start seeing people just like being able to just like spin something like that up.
That's why I say, and you were there too, because we're old but, like I mean, this does remind me of the early days of the web.
It really does.
You just never know what to expect.
There's this whole creative element, which has nothing to do with business.
Nobody to be sass.
It's like kind of random kind of, you know, and it's a cool time to be in the industry.
It's really cool.
And I think, Like for me, it also reminds me just like in a much, in small scale.
And when I started Netlify and like... When was that?
So I started working on it in like 2013, right?
Like, and then we launched out of private beta in March 2015.
And back then, a front end developers was like, they were seen as like a pseudo developer, right?
Like it was like someone that took a Photoshop file, sliced it up and then handed it to a real developer that would implement it into something working right.
Like that was a front-end developer.
And part of like the mission back then was like hey, if we give them like the right tool chain, these front-end developers will go crazy and they will just build the whole thing right.
Like if we just separate all that backend stuff for them and like that was like the Jamstack idea, right?
I remember your early pitch where you were like...
Best for static sites.
Maybe you'll see a little bit of dynamic.
Seriously.
Like, you can use it for static websites.
And then, like, now, look at it now.
Everything, right?
Everything.
Like, everything is built using this.
Everything is built using on it, right?
And these front-end developers are obviously...
The mainstream developers, right?
There's like no question now, right?
And that's just like the same moment, I think we are with this schism where like, there's still this notion of like oh, these vibe coders, they'll still need like a real developer to come like, And we will give them the tools and we will just see, like this massive But I will say like the hardcore developers, also became full stack JavaScript developer.
It wasn't like, you know, like everybody just kind of shifted over that.
And I think it will be the same again, right?
Everybody has to like take that next leap, but it will be a much, much bigger pool.
And it'll probably also be a different shift where, like Today, you're kind of like either a developer or not to some degree right.
Of course, there's some VCs that develop software.
In general, right?
Like people that are like developers, like hired with the title developer, and that's what they do, right.
And I think that's the other shift that like I think software development will just be a skill.
Yeah, I agree.
And there will still like, just like with writing, there's still professional writers, but like all of us also have to know how to write as part of our jobs.
Yeah, same thing with like, yeah.
Development will become like that, right?
Like there'll be a level of it that you're just expected to be able to do in lots of different jobs.
And then there'll still be some expert developers that are like only doing that, but it'll be the minority, I think.
Bring us a bit into the future.
So where do you think this?
So I mean just actually try and maybe catch up the conversation a little bit, which is or summarize the conversation is.
Last time we talked about this it was a little bit speculative.
You've seen actually a dramatic increase in users.
Clearly we're seeing We've also seen like, after that, so many companies start focusing on the X right.
Yeah, right.
And as I said, especially the developer tool space, right?
Like where I think everybody has just seen, okay, we have to go in this direction, right?
Like Bessemer had the updated version of like the developer tool loss, and the first one was AX right.
Like it's like recent, it's like an example and there's so many like from Superbase to like Neon, like everybody is like super focused on, like we've got to work with these agents so we don't really matter, right.
But then also in spaces like like the CEO of HubSpot.
He's really like geared HubSpot towards like we need to just be really great for these agents to work with right.
Like, and that's going to be the interface to much of our data and automations and everything like that, right.
Like and you're starting to see.
I think now with like chat TPT shopping, like integration, you'll start seeing everybody in the e-commerce space be like okay, how do we really deal with this?
And so on.
Right,
So I think it's also become a really tangible industry.
Really tangible changing the behavior.
I mean CEOs submitting PRs, like change, development changing, like the type of users going to the site, like all of these things.
Like do you have like a bit of a more science fiction-y kind of prognostication for where things go?
Or do you think now it's, Can you clearly see the next few years from here?
I think everybody... I don't think anybody can right now, right?
I think we're definitely in this wild space where what's clear is that everything is changing so fast.
I have paths I believe in, right?
The trends I believe in and things I think will definitely happen, right?
And as I said, I think...
I do think we are going to this like world where software is much more of a thing that that's not built by, like this small, relatively speaking, really small part of humanity for all the rest of humanity, and where software is something much more malleable and that everybody can like sort of like, do stuff on.
And I think that also means that, like code as we know it today is, it's going to be much more of a niche thing that's not really very involved in, like the daily process of software, which will change the infrastructure around software building a lot.
Right like, because everything is so code centric right now, like things like GitHub and pull requests and so on, right like.
All of that, I think, is going to evolve to like a level of abstraction where it's much more about understanding, like the outcome of what the agents do and the iteration with those agents, and like introspecting and so on.
I think browsers will evolve really dramatically from this and we'll have much more of like that originally concept of a user agent on the web is getting real right.
Like we're going to have, like all of these different ways of consuming the web, where some looks somewhat like the browser now and some really doesn't.
A lot of things that's held us like, that's made it really challenging to build like very visual or UI driven experience and so on, are going to be solved.
Like, for example, all of the accessibility constraints, right?
Like they're going to not really matter because like, What would you prefer?
Like trying to access my e-commerce through a screen reader or just through chat, TPT and voice mode right.
Listen, I think about this all the time which it feels like the consumption layer is changing right.
So like my son loves to chat with AI friends.
And when my son's 15, when my son becomes 18, to get a bank account like, is he going to go to some shitty sass bank website or is it going to come through this?
Yeah.
Which also kind of begs the question is, like you know, like the web was never super conversational based.
It was more UI based.
And so does that shift?
Is the consumption layer going to include AI going forward?
Like Yeah, I think the consumption layer is definitely going to include AI and a lot of things are going to happen inside agents that people even have.
I think people will also.
That's another reason I think AX is important versus a company that thinks they will build.
You'll go to their website and they will build an agent.
But probably the consumption layer is going to become AI and then the AI consumes the traditional web.
Precisely, because I don't think you... I think you will...
Like already now you see people like have history with their chat, TPT or cloud and they really have a preference right.
Like, and they don't want to go to like the banks and talk to that, right?
Like they just want to interact in that way.
So I think a lot of that will be really driven by like agents you interact with.
And then I think like, at the same time, i think the application layer is going to be a whole new part of the web right, like where, where a lot of interaction and, like you, like seeing what's happening, and like that whole concept of being able to build something and put in a url and everybody can use it and interact with it and can be like collaborative and so on.
Like i think that's still such a strong underpinning of the web that now that everybody can build more of it, like we also, just at the same time, like we're going to see less of like the traditional bank website, but we're going to see much more like interesting stuff.
Yeah.
I think it's so remarkable, the affinity between users and their, to your point, like their AIs.
Yeah.
And it's not just memory.
Like a lot of people are like, well, you have the chat history of memory.
It's not that.
Did you see like the outcry and the move from GPT-4 to 5?
Yeah.
They're like, oh, Yeah.
It was so much better that it turns out that just meant it was more friendly.
Yeah.
You just got used to this.
And so I think it's pretty clear that there's going to be a pretty serious attachment.
Totally.
And they're going to want to like actually filter the web through that.
So, you know, something that occurs to me is that there's two kinds of approach here.
So some of the tools that I use, it's like they kind of do the work for me, which maybe, as an old developer, I don't quite like, because I like to have the creativity.
I like to be very involved.
And one thing that I've actually really appreciated I mean philosophically, about kind of what Netlify is doing, and I just want your thoughts about this is like I get to use whatever tools I want and like I get to be the developer and like how do you view this?
As it plays out like.
Is this actually a philosophical distinction that's real, or am I making that up?
No, no, I think it's real.
And I think there's two really different mindsets on it, right?
Like there is that mindset of like building tools that claim to be like, we are now your developer.
And like, you don't need developers anymore because like the AI is your developer.
It's like you're outsourced.
Right, like you're outsourced.
Our approach has really been like you are now a developer.
Right.
Like whether it's to our existing developer base or whether it's to all of these new people that come in and start this journey.
Right.
Like it's really like OK, if you want to go on this journey, you're now a developer and you have to learn things and you have to understand, like what happened, like how, how software is built.
Right.
Like code is like a little part of it.
Right.
Like but if you want to like talk to a database, you have to like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just like some element of like what's happening in the world.
And you have to know that to be able to collaborate with these AI agents.
And it's not like You're not going to get success if your expectation is that you just go, prompt them, build me XYZ app and they will do perfect, right.
Like you're going to be successful if you're willing to learn how to develop software in a world where these agents able to multiply your abilities to write code, to do all kinds of stuff, but still have to take the direction from someone right like and i think that's what sort of underpins our whole approach to this and our whole philosophy this idea that we are like helping billions of people become developers and take part in this practice of building software, and not that it's like Everybody is just a consumer now.
This is an aside.
But I wonder if you have the same experience that I do, which is I find that like using AI as someone who's been developing for a long time is like an exercise in abdicating opinions.
Because these models do dazzling things, but it's not always the dazzling thing that I would expect it to be right.
It's almost like I've got to let go of expectations because I can articulate I want this and it'll do that, but I would have done it quite differently.
Yeah.
Do you have the same experience of like you kind of have to like let go and then B?
Do you think this is just something because we've been developing and like that will just not be an issue as a new set of developers shows up?
I mean, maybe that's why all founder CEOs is now programming with agents, because it's like we've already gone through that in a way.
Like you started hiring these developers and you asked them like do this thing.
And they come back with this thing.
That's like pretty cool, but it's like I would have done like why did you do it that way?
I love that.
You're almost like reclaiming power.
That's so funny.
Kind of already got used to that, right?
Like, so now I can just do it in a closed loop with an agent that don't actually get angry at you.
And you're like, no, change it to my agent.
So, but.
There's definitely something to it, right?
Like that you have to work at that level of like, it's not exact, like it's not exact, right?
But you have to be really good at articulating what is it that matters, right?
Like, and what is it you actually care about?
And what is it that the agent can just make up?
Because like, that's fine.
Like as long as it works, right?
Like and it feels very different than like.
It's a very different feel than the traditional sort of part of really like centering yourself, like figuring out exactly in your head, like how should this software be put together, and so on.
And you need to sort of like out of that step, have like just a really clear idea of like what is the flow that really matters?
What is like the part of this software I really care about?
And then what is the part that like fill in the blanks?
So one of the consistent things in this conversation we've had is the system should not Be the developer for you.
Like the user, you know, accessibility should be the developers.
But now that's not just the subset of professional developers.
It can be anyone.
Yeah.
So maybe let's just end on this.
For those that are listening to this who are not professional developers, that want to enter this like, what would you recommend to them as far as like, where places to start?
Like how to get going?
Maybe things to read?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so ironically, I think...
It's harder for me to guide that journey than someone from that space, right?
Like, but people I see going on that journey, right?
Like I see them start with like tools like Bolt or RebelEd or whatever.
And then I see them jump very quickly from like... Did you say Bolt?
Bolt.new, right?
Yeah, yeah.
We have like, for example, like we just had like... Bolt's great, by the way.
I love Bolt.
I love it, right?
And we just had this launch event where one of our challenges... Silly challenge, right?
But we wanted an event and all of our team was building the product.
So it was like, who's going to build the event site?
So I told the team...
This guy that's like a customer success manager, that's his background.
And like you go into LinkedIn, right?
Like no sort of technical background or anything, but he had been like super active in the Bolt community and he's just become really good at prompting Bolt right.
Like, and he was tweeting at me with like a redesign of Netlify he made in Bolt.
And it was like really cool.
Wow.
Like, let's just ask him to make the event page.
No.
And he just prompted the event page entirely in Bolt.
That's so cool.
And the event is over now, but the page is probably still at netlify.com slash deploy, right?
And I think it's like a really like.
I think it's like it was a very high performing event page for us.
It's like one of the highest performing event pages we've had in the last four years.
Right?
Like, and, And he has just, like, he has really learned a skillset, right?
Like, it's not, I could not go, I'll admit, I can't go prompt Bolt to make that event pitch.
Like but he's really built that skillset and he's just built it by being like really curious and then looking at all the things he likes, right.
Like, here's like a site I think is really cool.
It has that pattern.
I'm going to tell Bolt like, look at this site and make replicate this pattern and then combine it with this other pattern, right?
Like, And I think a lot of the people that start now starts with that kind of sort of remixing, right.
And just like, how can I just like remix something?
And then the people, like then some of them start just going deeper, right?
Like they start using plot code and cursor and play around and they go directly to Netlify and they start like learning how more of the software work and they interrogate the models constantly.
Like they don't just take the outcome for granted right, like they keep interrogating like why did you do that?
And like, how did you build that, and try to actually like use curiosity to understand, and those people are really learning fast.
I do think this is a really important uh point to make.
That everybody should know is so i work with many of these ai companies.
Yeah, and they have, you know, whether it's in a creative domain or a co-domain or a technical domain.
They have users that don't come from those domains, yeah and um, And they still have to work hard right.
So it's not like labor is being removed.
Like it's still the best people work the hardest.
They work the hard.
The best people still spend the most amount of time, right?
It's just like the product is different in this time.
And so for those of you that are interested I do think you know and to use these AI tools, just realize that you know like it's.
It is magic in that it gives you a result, but it is not magic in that you still have to put in the time and the effort to learn it.
But they're great learning tools to produce great outputs.
And so it's funny because, like in in the past, before all of this ai, when people asked what to do to be a good developer, i said like just have a really high tolerance for frustration.
That's about right.
Because you're just constantly going to do things in the beginning that it doesn't work and it breaks and so on, right?
And I think it's still not... I'm not sure it's any different.
Exactly, that's my point, right?
I think it's kind of the same, right?
It's like that part of it's probably still the same.
You're still going to be just like, okay, it didn't work, but I'm going to try again, right?
And it broke and I'm going to try again and I'm going to figure out how it works, and you've got to just have that kind of tenacity of just keep going.
Amazing.
On that note, I think this is a great place to end.
Thank you so much for showing up.
That was a lot of fun.
That was really fun.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening.
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