Designing Trust w/ Biz/Dev | Ep. 170

What happens when a designer and a developer walk into a room—12 years deep into building software that actually works? You get real talk on scaling AI, design-infused development, and what it takes to turn "vibe" into viable tech. On this episode of the Biz/Dev podcast, David and Gary reflect on over a decade of collaboration, the magic (and chaos) of building together, and why software shouldn't just function—it should feel right.

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Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Gary: Get that third party to come in and say of course Gary's right and David's wrong, so you gotta do it Gary's way.

[00:00:05] David: Yeah, I'm pretty sure my scorecard is higher than yours, but that's okay. It's

[00:00:10] Gary: It's different. It's different because you have a little bit more power than I do. 

[00:00:18] David: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast Podcast about developing your business.

I'm David Becker, your host, joined Per Usual by Gary Vo. Hello, sir.

[00:00:28] Gary: Hello. And for those who will watch the video, I know there's one person maybe, but the background is different today 'cause you're in a different location. We did not change our branding.

[00:00:40] David: No. I thought this was a cool backdrop. I'm in a coworking space today. 'cause I have a thing tonight. I thought this was neat looking. So little depth. You tell me I gotta have

[00:00:48] Gary: from the seventies.

[00:00:49] David: I'll tell their designers that you said so I'm sure they'll appreciate that This place is like a year old.

[00:00:55] Gary: geometric, felt shapes stuck to a wall. It's 

[00:00:58] David: it's a fancy way to do sound control is what they are.

[00:01:01] Gary: yeah.

[00:01:02] David: They absorb sound in these little boxes of, don't know, acoustic sound. Alright, what are we talking about? We have no guests today, which always makes me sad because that just means I have to talk to you and that always sucks.

[00:01:16] Gary: our guest had a different thing that they had to attend to today that was

[00:01:19] David: That's right. They had a conflict that came up. They will be back.

[00:01:24] Gary: So today it's gonna be just me and you chitchatting and talking about stuff that's happening in our industry that we see with either. New clients or founders or other people that you talk to in the industry when you do your schmoozing.

So first off, we can talk about the fact that the 12 year anniversary of Big Pixel just passed.

[00:01:47] David: It did actually, it was yesterday, officially March 23rd for those who are keeping score 3 23 13. I always thought that was fun. It was just somehow alliterative that it turned out that way. I did not do that on purpose. Lots of threes. We started. 12 years ago, which I was very reflective. It hit me yesterday and I wrote this big long, it turned out way longer than I expected, but the LinkedIn post reflecting every year, I reflect on next year I'll be 13, which I'll probably just skip, because it's bad.

But it was fun.

[00:02:15] Gary: the elevator button. We could just skip.

[00:02:17] David: With a skip it. I think that's so funny. By the way, this has nothing to do with them. They still do that. There are so many buildings that don't have a 13th floor anyway. I get reflective when it comes to our anniversary. It's it's weird to me that we're, and it sounds strange to say, but it's weird.

We're still here because most Es don't last as long.

[00:02:36] Gary: what started out as just you going from consultant to freelancer and then just wanting a name other than your own? That evolved a couple of times and then you settled in. And then once you settled in, I'm sure you didn't really, you were like, let's see where it goes. As long as I can get enough work for, myself.

[00:02:55] David: It was always a rule. I think I've said this before, it was always a rule that I did not wanna be a freelancer. When I went on my own and left my previous employee, I would tell people, 'cause they would always ask 'cause it was just me. And they would ask, are you a freelancer? And I would say, no, I'm just the first employee of my company.

And that was the vibe there. I hate that word. Why is that now in my lexicon Anyway.

[00:03:16] Gary: because vibe coding is

[00:03:18] David: Buy coding makes me agitated, but we can talk about that later if, if we want to. But the idea behind that was I was gonna be the infinite bucket. When you're a freelancer, you have a bucket, you fill your bucket, and then you're done.

You've made all the money you can make and you're happy, right? Usually you're making a nice living, et cetera, et cetera. But that's the end of your sales process. You have filled your bucket, you're done. My idea was the infinite bucket. I would fill mine, hire someone, fill theirs, hire someone, fill theirs.

It didn't work out that way quite. But that was the idea. And so I worked like that for a while and then slowly but surely got, it's funny, those first few years, and when I talk about the slog, I don't know, have I talked about our slog very much on this? I

[00:04:00] Gary: You've brought up a couple of stories here and there in reference when other, founders or entrepreneurs have talked about their slog, once we explain kinda what we mean

[00:04:09] David: What the slog is. So I tell this story. I've told this story. If you ever heard me give a speech, you have heard this story. 'cause I, this is my story. When we got started, my old company, I. When I left, I thought they were gonna hire me. I know I've said that many times. I thought in my hubris when I, whenever I asked how, why did you start a company?

It was hubris is usually the answer. Pure pride. I thought I was better than other people so I could therefore do it. Not a great thing, but there is a n nugget of truth in every entrepreneur that they think they're doing something better than other people. And you have to have that a little bit

[00:04:45] Gary: You could just call it confidence.

[00:04:48] David: Fair. That's fair. But confidence is not when you think you're better than someone, I'm gonna be honest and be transparent. I thought I was better. So that's pride.

[00:04:56] Gary: Okay, so it's not that you thought you were going to be able to do it, you just thought you should do it because you're better

[00:05:04] David: Yeah. Yeah. Again, naivete is beautiful, but, so I went on my own in my old company. I promised them I would not steal a client. That wasn't how I did things. And 'cause that's very common. Normally what people do when they start their own agency is they'll go and rob some, a couple of clients from their previous employee.

And I was like, I'm not doing that. That's just not my, that's not how I'm gonna do this. And but I told him, Hey, as soon as I update my LinkedIn. People are gonna come to me. 'cause there are some people who've been working with me through my other company and they're gonna wanna continue working with me.

So I warned them, I said, I'm changing my LinkedIn. They said, Hey, give me three days. We'll do our side of it. Okay. Three days. I didn't ask permission, I changed my LinkedIn. I'm done with that fail one. That within that same day a client called me and said, what's up? And I was like, oh, hey, I'm on my own.

And they're like, we don't wanna work with them, we wanna work with you. So I was at a conundrum of how do I. Do this. So I ended up buying them from my old employer and they charged me all of the profit that they were going to make, plus a punitive amount that I was allowed to choose, which

[00:06:06] Gary: That's just

[00:06:06] David: like a very special kind of torture.

So I, in the, my company's three months old and I went, had basically bought a car. Not an actual car, but the debt load of a car that my company and I went and sat with these guys. They were really young, straight outta college, very sharp dudes, but they were young and we're at fire or birds?

No. Is that right? I think that's right. Fire or something. Anyway

[00:06:30] Gary: let the people know that. Yeah, I was gonna say, he's just talking about a restaurant somewhere. Doesn't matter what the name is.

[00:06:36] David: restaurant anyway, but I just remember the booth and everything. Like I see it even now 'cause I've been there since then. And I'm like, guys, this is it. This is my mortgage, this is everything.

I got kids and they're like, we got you. I said, you can't be late. And they're like, no, we got you. So fast forward. So that worked out. Nine months later, we did a great thing. They exited, they did a small exit and they went out and did their own thing. I had not found another client, I started, that was towards the end of the year.

So now we are talking nine months later you're around Christmas time, right? Because I started in March, Christmas time comes along, my wife is getting nervous 'cause I have no work. And so I start making a resume for the first time in a decade or more. I bounced from job to job, so I didn't, I hadn't had a resume

[00:07:17] Gary: So your illustrious career of starting Big Pixel was dependent on one client for nine months.

[00:07:24] David: that's where, that is completely right. And then so I start. Here's the faith part. So that next, so January rolls around, I come to find out I had grossly overpaid my taxes. And that is what allowed us to continue. It was enough to support us for three more months and that I, that's what I did.

I paid myself using that tax refund, which was large. I ridiculously overpaid and I. For a company as small as ours was at the time. So that three months, it's not like it magically changed. I got a couple of jobs, but I started marketing. I'm gonna use that in big quotes. Just talking to people I guess is the best way to say it.

But I ended up starting teaching. That's how I paid the bills, is I started teaching code, how to code, what was it was in Ruby. I didn't know Ruby. So every day, the night before, I would learn what I was going to teach and that's how I did it for six months. I was a horrible teacher. I melted those poor people's faces.

Anyway, so that, and then from that point on, once I started teaching, I, while I was teaching, I got my first really big client and the rest is history. We were able to hire and then et cetera, et cetera. When I talk about Slog, man, I've been through it, I've been through it, and everyone has their own story just like that.

And I think those are great stories to tell because it's such a big, rich part of any company, not just ours, but any company to how you got from A to BII would imagine Jeff Bezos has a very similar sloggy story of the first year of Amazon. I bet it. He selling books out of his car or whatever.

I'm sure it's there. I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it's there. I'm sure Bill Gates, all of them.

[00:09:08] Gary: I think also the slog thing is not just a period that starts and then is over, like I think there's multiple quote unquote slogs throughout, the lifespan of any business as it grows and tries to grow and moves on. Especially when you start bringing in. More people, more clients, then there's always gonna be more complex issues to solve, more processes that have to be built.

Like it's almost like a never ending. Okay, we're through that part and now we just turn the switch on and it's all good from here.

[00:09:40] David: well there's good and bad in that. So as the founder, your slog is very personal initially, right? You are it, and it lives and dies based on your grit. Eventually, as I've said a million times, your job as a founder, CEO, is to give away your job. You give away most of that stuff so that fear changes.

Like I remember for years, I would say five plus years, I had no idea what was happening. Three months from now, people would be like, Hey, how's your company? I'm like, great. Right now. Three months, I have no idea. Like literally my contracts were never longer than a few months. Project would last a few months and then I would be like, I don't know what's happening.

Nowadays, it's probably closer to a year, six months to a year. We have clients that we've been with for almost eight, nine years, and they, god willing, they're not going away. But even if they did, it would be a slow draw down. It wouldn't be, Hey, we're leaving tomorrow. Have a nice day. It would be we're gonna slowly roll you off and we would've time to adjust.

That takes off a lot of that so some of that, that immediacy of the slog, that first one that we talk about mostly that's unique, but you always have some precipice. Like we're at the precipice now where we're large enough that it can't be run by a person. We need processes. So we have been spending internally, what, I don't know, 18 months working on processes.

How do we reproduce what we do so that it's more consistent across sales? That one's still squishy, but. Around, project management, around development, around testing, how do we do this? And that has changed everything for us in the last 18 months. It's just so different now. It's not just me flying by the seat of my pants.

I feel like doing this today. It's Carl is our, I don't think we ever mentioned Carl. He's like the hamster wheel underneath the company. He just runs everything. He's brought a lot of that into place.

[00:11:38] Gary: We've mentioned him once or twice, but yeah, I don't think we've given him, as the kids say, his flowers.

[00:11:44] David: So yeah. Anyways, yeah, I now see what happened. You bring up the anniversary, I get all nostalgic and that you get 30 minutes of me rambling. Sorry about that.

[00:11:51] Gary: When we do talk to other, guests and founders and entrepreneurs, whatever, as long as they're honest with us and with our audience, with themselves, really, like everybody has that same similar story. And then I know there's also almost like a, an unspoken test of the first couple of years are like the make or break.

Of what's gonna happen if you're gonna be able to continue from there, or if you have to change or pivot or roll things back. And we've talked to companies that might have had to pivot after the first two or three years, just because they weren't on the right track. And then after they've made that pivot, it just seemed to click and work a little bit better.

They've been able to go on further and further now. So the processes and stuff that we are coming up with now, they're not exactly a pivot, but I think it's just us adjusting to the longevity that we've actually been given. 

[00:12:43] David: If you're trying to recreate something consistently, you have to have a process. 'cause people are not consistent. Some people are more consistent than others, but people are people right. People make mistakes, people get confused, whatever. It's just they're, especially when you're talking about founders in particular, founders are generally a visionary type.

That's their brain style, and that does not end well. They're not detailed typically. Again, this is I'm making somewhat generalizations, but they're not the type who really detail oriented, so they're just flying. They're just, I have an idea, I'm gonna run with it. That idea didn't work. And it can cause whiplash for the people who aren't like that, 'cause visionaries.

There are a small group of people in this world. The people who do things are super detailed. They're called integrators. At least when you're doing EEO s we talked about that before. But integrators are actually, interestingly enough, they're rarer than visionaries. When you talk about the personality and the brain style of an integrator that is rarer than the visionary. 

[00:13:53] AD: BigPixel builds world class custom software and amazing apps. Our team of pros puts passion into every one of our projects. Our design infused development leans heavily on delivering a great experience for our clients and their clients. From startups to enterprises, we can help craft your ideas into real world products that help your business do better business. 

[00:14:21] Gary: Our clients change, our clients' needs change, and the technology in which we use to build those products for our clients changes faster than any of that.

[00:14:31] David: Yep.

[00:14:32] Gary: Integrating these new technologies and, the hype bus with everything that comes out,

[00:14:37] David: crypto.

[00:14:38] Gary: The reality, let's just say the promises versus the reality of the output of these, hype train technologies,

Stuff like that, like all that, it changes constantly, especially AI. But so we also have to morph into, I guess not just the company that builds the technology for our clients, but ones who tell 'em what they can and can't have, or what they should or should not do with the technology based on their business needs. how would you approach. Let's say there's a small company that thinks AI is out there. So I'll go to this big pixel dev shop custom software and say, you know what? All I need you guys to do is use AI to plug me into, this thing, to build me an app real quick. How cheap is that? How fast can you do it?

[00:15:26] David: Yeah, that's the same guy who asked me to rebuild Facebook. 'cause it's already been done before.

[00:15:31] Gary: Yeah. 

[00:15:31] David: Um, 

[00:15:32] Gary: it's already there, dude. Just open the inspect code, copy and paste it, and change the name.

[00:15:37] David: man. Yeah, they've given you a roadmap. That's a true story, by the way. Anyway. What you just described is that vibe coding thing. Which I circulated.

Eric Boggs who was on our podcast a while ago. And if you haven't listened to it, that's a wonderful episode. 'cause I'm a huge fan of his. He runs a company called Rev Boss, but he's run several. He's very successful. He had this long thing, he started Vibe Coding, which if you don't know what that is, that's okay.

What Vibe coding is basically going to an AI chat bot and telling them what to do and not having to code and just having it write all the code and you just prompt and prompt until you get something. You have to be somewhat technical to even get that far. But, and he, of course is, but what he said was, here's how this boil down his, his, he had a little post, he's I believe with AI, those V ones are gonna be easier than ever. Exactly what you're talking about. The client who comes in and says, Hey, just use AI. It should take five minutes. There is some truth to that now, but I. You can get to a V one where you've got a 50 or a hundred users and it seems like it's working, but it's a good enough to show around and to get some ideas.

Is this a real company or not? It's good. Great. Like an MVP, old school, MVP, but he says V two is going to be much harder to build because AI, if the most practical example I've been able to give is you, if as anybody, if you're listening to this, if imagine you go to AI and you ask it to make you a picture.

Maybe a picture of a dog with a bird on its back. Whatever. And you're like, oh, I like that dog, but I wanna change the bird. And AI says, oh, here's an entirely new image.

[00:17:14] Gary: I got a pretty good metaphor for this that just popped into my head, and it's tech related. It's like 3D printing.

[00:17:20] David: Oh, so VV one. Here's the thing. You build the schematic or whatever saying, an AutoCAD like programmer, an online browser app that just lets you put shapes and stuff together and.

[00:17:33] Gary: Once you hit print, you print that first version, but it's all just one piece.

So it looks good, it gets the idea across. It's a prototype, but it, when you're saying, okay, V two, we need to make some changes, you have to rebuild everything

[00:17:46] David: Never start over again.

[00:17:47] Gary: You can't just take V one and start adding to it or multiplying it or making adjustments.

You have to start completely over. And I think with this vibe coding thing, getting to V one, yeah, it'll get you there fast, but. If it works and it's getting the job done, and you're somewhat technical enough to understand that the expansion from there on might require you to go back and look at how the structure was started in the first place.

[00:18:11] David: Yeah, a good example of that, and I think that's a. Analogy. 'cause if you go one step further, if you're really good at 3D printing, what you'll notice is someone who really knows what they're doing. Again, AKA us right? If we were in

[00:18:23] Gary: They'll

[00:18:24] David: don't do the single piece, right?

[00:18:26] Gary: they'll do modular. Yeah.

[00:18:27] David: And they put it all together.

Which you can get amazing results on that, but the first guy is always doing one solid piece, right? What you like A good example is. A database, right? This, I'm gonna try to go not too wonky here, but you have a database, right? And normally there's a pool of connections that you can have.

And you build this pool concept one time. It lives in the bottom of your app. It's in deep down in the code, and it, and you have one place where everything that needs to connect to the database goes to, grabs the same kind of pool. And they grab one of the instances and they go. If you're doing AI. And you build the user screen, it's probably, and again, I'm not an expert of the vibe coding, but it's not thinking between screen A and screen B.

It's that screen A is a complete app, and screen B is a complete app, so it's gonna do the whole thing. And they're not sharing, right? There's no sharing of code, there's no any of that, right? It's just, it's gonna do what it does. And it does this in a monolithic fashion, not thinking of security. And again, if you're, the better you are at AI, the more you can. Make it handle some of this stuff. But again, if you're doing this value code and you don't know what you're doing you're building the single 3D model. And I think that when they come to us, they're like, man, I've got this business idea. I've got this prototype out here. I'm ready for V2 They're gonna be surprised that we have to throw that all away or most of it because it's not built in a way that's scalable.

It's not secure necessarily. And now the question is, can AI get around that? Yes, but I think it's still gonna require a very technical person to say, AI, I want you to build the security layer here. I want you to build the data layer over here. I want the UI to be this. You know what I'm saying? They're still using AI to build things, but it requires understanding software at such a level.

You're a developer anyways. And we're doing some of that internally, right? We use these code, these tools too. Now it's not writing the entire apps for us, but it is helping us code and we're directing it. We've talked about that before. Cursor is one, one we've married pretty hard right now. But it's a paradigm shift for sure. 

[00:20:28] Gary: One other thing we can approach to how we handle situations with the changing technology and also how we would handle, say that V two you spoke about comes to us as a new project from a client. So they already have kind of a V one. It's already shown that it's got promise. You've already told them we need to start over because.

What they have is not exactly scalable. What do you think the challenges are and how do you think we would approach recreating V one into a better V two from two different perspectives? Your perspective being more technical, more development, and my perspective being more on the design, the UI side of it.

[00:21:10] David: More useless. Yeah, I got you. No, I would actually challenge. You're welcome. I would challenge that because I don't think you can do one without the other. I know I give you grief, but we always start with design. I. There's a reason our slogan is designed infuse development, right? It is. It is what we do differently than almost every other dev shop that I know of, and I know a lot of them, we just do it differently.

Design is the cornerstone of all of our stuff. We build upon our designs, and when someone comes to us and they're like this is great, but now I need to be too. We're gonna start from a design perspective and that creative perspective. 'cause I need to get their ideas out of their head into something they understand.

No one understands what we do on the technical side, right? What? That's black magic and alchemy. It's unapproachable and scary and intimidating. That's what, if you're not technical, that's all those things. But design is visual. Humans are visual. So when I show you a screen or you show them a screen, I don't have anything to do with it anymore.

When you show them a screen, they immediately get it. It's it, everyone gets it. 'cause this is finally they're seeing what's in and you do a good job of walking them through it after getting their preferences and whatever, that it's not, we're rarely way off. You know what I'm saying? That's not what I had in mind.

You suck. We don't have that problem generally. But I think that allows them to, and then from there we can glom on, that's a word there from your design into the technical realm.

[00:22:38] Gary: Yeah.

[00:22:39] David: And I think one of the things that, that works so well with us is we've, this is very true. There have been many times when we'll have a third party into one of mine and Gary's strategy sessions, and they leave that shellshocked because we just rip into each other because we're used to it. We've done this forever and we're used to it. 'cause we know at the end of the day what's gonna come out on the other side's gonna be better. But sometimes the process of getting to that better gets pretty ugly and it never gets truly insulting, but it's pretty rough.

And it, we've had this several times. We're like, whoa, that was something I was like, yeah, but look what we get. It's pretty cool. 

[00:23:20] Gary: I think it's just a matter of we're approaching trying to solve the same problem with. Using two different complete mindsets of who we're solving for in some cases. I think when we get into the nitty gritty of actually building, like, all right, we've specked it out. We know what they want. They've seen, the wire frames and we're putting things together.

We're starting to build screens, and we're coming up on issues that we might need to, solve or go around or oh, we didn't really think of this screen, or This is now gonna change to this process, but. Sometimes I feel like the mindset you approach these problems with is more of, okay, I understand the problem.

How are we gonna solve this? Meaning how are we gonna build this? What can we do? What technically can we build to make, process A meet up with process B to get the answer to there? And what's the quickest and easiest way that we could build this together? My approach is completely different. My approach is it's not what the client wants.

It's not what you want, it's actually what the client's user wants. So it's three levels deeper of me trying to look at the same. I don't really care how you build it. I just know that the easiest thing for me as the user to go from here to there and see what I wanna see and be able to access the information and then make changes and go back.

Is this way, it just seems to make more sense, and that's typically a pattern people would recognize. So then we have to meet in the middle somewhere, or at least. 

Get that third party to come in and say of course Gary's right and David's wrong, so you gotta do it Gary's way.

[00:24:59] David: Yeah, I'm pretty sure my scorecard is higher than yours, but that's okay. It's

[00:25:04] Gary: It's different. It's different because you have a little bit more power than I do.

[00:25:09] David: Yeah it's not quite fair. I abuse my authority for sure. No, and that's specific to us, but I guess what I would take outta this from, the larger thing to take outta that, I think conflict is something most people try to avoid. And I am one of those people, I do not like true conflict.

But I do think that having differing opinions and diversity, however you wanna say that is so powerful. Our apps are better because we give people freedom to argue.

It comes 

[00:25:41] Gary: arguments are not conflict in their original form.

[00:25:45] David: I

[00:25:45] Gary: become

conflict when either party chooses not to listen.

[00:25:51] David: well, and it doesn't respect the other side. I think when that, when you lose that respect. As long as it comes from a place of respect, who cares? Let 'em go.

[00:25:59] Gary: The other thing is also people in their specific roles know their roles to the point where if there is an argument about how good they are at their role. That's different than how good they are at actually producing from that role. You know what I mean? So during any of these, they're basically just constructive criticisms from two different angles.

They're not really arguments, but it's like you said, it's like challenging each other's mind on why do you think that's the best approach when there's also this approach and then going back and forth? So if there's someone that's just stuck in the we're doing it this way because I've been doing it this way.

I'm obviously the one who knows how to do it this way, and then I'm just gonna keep going down this, path of me doing it this way that doesn't lead anywhere productive for everybody else. That's we wanna actually change that way.

Okay, so after spilling some inside guts that we probably shouldn't have, and then talking about years of big pixel and everything changing in our industry, I. Where do you see, like you ask our guests or you ask our guests, where do you see Big Pixel in five years?

[00:27:07] David: That's an interesting question right now because of AI. Our, I could talk forever about how I think so much about AI as hype and is not true what is being said by Sam Altman and all those people. But what is a hundred percent true is software development is changing dramatically. Our job every day is changing.

We are using more tools now than we ever have, and our goal is to get faster this year using AI tools. The fear I have is that AI is going to change us so dramatically that we won't be recognizable. That's my fear. There's there's quotes and stuff that, oh, 90% of all codes are gonna be written by AI.

Is that true? I. Probably not at least in the short term, but I know I'm off the rails there, but it really does affect what we look like in five years. I would imagine what we look like in five years is we are much more strategic. We as coding is going to often be done by a bot. The typing will be done by a bot.

And I joke with my team, like some of our devs really don't wanna embrace. They've been doing this a very long time, 20 plus years. They don't wanna change how they're doing this stuff. And

[00:28:19] Gary: spend less time typing. More time thinking.

[00:28:22] David: Yeah. My challenge them is did you join, did you become a developer to be a typist or just problem solve?

Because I can take away the typing so that all you're doing is problem solving, but that changes how we do our jobs very dramatically. And so the thing that's at the core of what we do that is the most human, is the strategy. Someone comes to us. How do I make the a, an app that's gonna be great and it's gonna be appeal to my customers and it's going to do what I need to do.

I don't know how to get there. That's that strategy. So I would imagine a lot of our value goes leaned harder into that. But I don't know. Five years ago we were much smaller, right? But we were largely doing the same thing we're doing now

[00:29:01] Gary: I would 

[00:29:02] David: in five years. I don't think we'll be doing the same thing we're doing now.

Not pivot, just I think our industry will have changed underneath us so much that our day-to-day job will be different.

[00:29:11] Gary: Yeah. I think maybe we'll be doing the same thing from a, a high level of what

[00:29:16] David: Yeah. Product

[00:29:16] Gary: but the process of how we create these, products or whatever is gonna change. But also I had a thought and I think it just, oh, when you were saying that. You ask the devs, did you become a developer to type or to solve problems?

I think now also, it used to be where you had to be a specialist in a certain language, right? I think that's pretty much out the window now for developers. It's not like you have to be a specialist in just one language. You could be a specialist in. Like, all right, maybe not a specialist, but say if you're a specialist in one or two languages, you still have access to unquote specialists in all the other languages through AI.

You know what I mean?

[00:29:58] David: Yes and no. I think I'm gonna challenge that because I think

[00:30:03] Gary: I'm not a developer, so I'm just, this is what I'm assuming is that you'd be able to, 'cause I know that even when I need small little Java script stuff, I wouldn't even know that it needed to be Java script stuff. If I'm working on a webpage or whatever. But if I ask AI, how do you do this?

It'll say here's a script for that. And then here's also how you could do it with HTML and CSS or here's, you could do it with both of 'em combined. And there's this way.

[00:30:28] David: I would not be. But there, there's so much to coding now that's not actually coding. And I think it's a lot like an NFL team. It used to be that you'd play offense and defense 50 years ago. You, and now everything is specialized, right? I have a guy who only returns punts. I have a guy who only holds the football fork field goal, right?

That's all he does. I think developers are going to get more specialized in what they're very good at, because AI is going to take care of the easy stuff.

Thank you everybody for joining us for this rambling episode between me and Gary. Hopefully it was in enlightening in some way. Hope you learned something. We will be back next week with a guest.