Exploring Apple’s Innovation and the Future of Coding

Hey, everyone. I couldn't find my black turtleneck, but it was fun watching the Apple, uh, worldwide Developer Conference, wasn't it? You're watching Text and Gang.

Hi everyone, it's Alan Hummel and welcome here to our Wednesday edition of The Textron Gang. Uh, we've got a great lineup of, of people, gang members to talk with today, as well as some interesting things to talk about. Of course, it was Apple, WDC day on Monday, and we're going to dive into that.

We're gonna talk a little bit about vibe coding for the enterprise. Hey, it's coming at you. And then lastly, we, you know, as usual, our government continues to just churn.

I don't know if it's churn for churn's sake or just, I don't know what it is, but we'll talk about it, some new executive orders regarding cybersecurity. Let me introduce you to our Distinguished Gang member panel today. First of all, I'm happy I, I missed his debut last week.

I was away on vacation, but he, he's no stranger to the Futurum Group. He's no stranger to people in the Chief Technology Officer role. As a matter of fact, he is the Chief Technology advisor, Keith Townsend.

Keith, welcome. I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to have you on here on the show with me and thank you.

Good to be here with you, actually on your own show. Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's, it's good to be back also joining us.

Oh, and by the way, Keith works a ton with the, our friend Steve Foskett over at Tech Field Day, speaking of Tech Field Day. He is a Tech Field Day delegate extraordinaire, as well as a terrific analyst in his own right, really honed in on Cyber, our friend Jack Poer. Hey, Jack, how are you?

Uh, doing great today. Thanks. Pleasure to be here.

I'm wonderful. Thank you. Glad to be back.

I was starting to wonder, was this something I said? No, we, we, you know, you could be on every day if you want. And then lastly, uh, um, you know, our Winter Warrior, one arm Jack there, lefty, the guitar man, he's a Futura analyst.

Mitch Ashley. Hey Mitchell. Just call me Bucky, referring to my shoulder.

Bucky the Winter Soldier. Yeah, I feel like this is A, a, uh, a tech Field Day masquerading as a Textron gang show. Yeah, well then we do have a te distinct tech field day flavor to it, but that's good.

We're all one futur and family, so that's what we're supposed to be doing. Well, I think I've done over 40 full field day events, so Yeah, this is, this is back between me and Jack. We we're, we're representing Field Day pretty well there.

I'm still in the single digit, so I think I'm like an eight or nine, but It's all good. It's all good. Just a quick plug.

You can watch all the tech field days, right on techstrong tv, on our YouTube channel or on the Techstrong TV OTT channel where we've built up a nice collection of field day podcasts and everything else that's on Apple TV and Roku and Amazon as well as, uh, iOS and Google. Anyway, hey guys, speaking of iOS, I don't know what I wouldn't give to see Steve Jobs walk out in a black turtleneck to a live audience and present. I watched the show, I watched it on my Apple TV last night.

It was so slick. I didn't know if I was watching a Disney show or Apple, or, or what it was. I, I'm, I, I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of the whole prerecorded thing.

Um, I don't know. And you, you, you follow this space closely? Yes.

I'm ex Apple as well. Apple is, is, I was a developer designer in Apple education, enterprise marketing. That is when I stopped being a developer.

And when I became a marketer, that is the line of demarcation in my career because, And nothing was ever the same. Nothing was ever the same. I was there as iTunes launched, which will date me pretty hard.

Um, and I remember we used to all wear black turtlenecks and jeans on keynote days. Uh, it was a very special, special experience in my life. I will never forget.

But that being said, I still, I don't look at the company with rose colored glasses. And I suppose that might be why you thought of me for today. I carry a, a Google Pixel.

I also have a, I also have an iPhone I should say. But my primary phone is an Android for that reason. I think this was a very glossy, yet slightly disappointing, uh, announcement.

I mean, some of it made sense, like, let's name the iOS for the years. Great. Okay.

I wasn't really worried. Wasn't really, it just seems like sort of like maybe an internal thing that became external, um, the, the glass, you know, look and feel cool. Um, I think where a lot of people were left wanting was with the I AI bits.

Uh, I think that's where they caught the most flack, because, tell me if I'm wrong here guys, but integrating chat. GPT is not something I think is announcable at this point in the game. I think they're just catching up.

And I, I honestly thought about it this morning. I was like, is Apple essentially a Chachi PT rapper? Is this, is this where we are?

Is this where they are? I mean, they must be Hi. They must be hiding something.

Awesome is all I could think. This felt like, because I've, I've been to some of these events too, actually went to some of the jobs events. 3 update, not a, not a full developer conference event.

Yes. There's a new UI redesigned. Okay.

It looks slick. It actually kinda looks slick. Like the recorded videos look slick, Alan.

Yeah. It, it just, it wasn't, and, and it, you know, I, well, going into it, I was thinking, is Apple gonna resurrect themselves on ai? I kind of doubt it.

'cause they sure haven't led up to it. And they didn't, which, which I think is a good thing that they didn't try to fake it until they make it. 'cause people would just pan 'em more so than, you know, for, for what they did.

But I think there was a lot of kind of random features, you know, so I get, uh, translation to French on my phone instead of in the cloud, and I can do, you know, more chatty pty things. Okay. There, there's some new features, there's helpful things.

But again, it just made me think like, okay, are we in the John Scully days and we need jobs to come back and kind of resurrect Apple? Are we headed that way? I like the way you're using the word resurrect with jobs in the same sentence.

'cause that's pretty Much what it would take at this have to reanimate. But we might have technology. Yeah, we'd, I'd be okay with a hologram.

Yeah. Um, but let's be honest, this is, this was not that different than Google's recent announcements where they just hit us with a milieu of Mm. A lot of features.

50 things that weren't that interesting, but as a whole were packaged as something great, but the differences is this is Apple. So they did it with like a cool, fun vibe. Yeah.

So it's really interesting to see a post jobs apple, which is, you know, over well over multi-trillion dollar company. How do you, how do you still stay innovative but not cannibalize your revenue? It is a very good business.

And what happens when you have a very good business and, uh, you're met with quarterly demands, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know. It's, it's, it is a different apple.

It's funny that, you know, we're, I think part of it is half jokingly, but seriously, you know, Apple's dead, but they make billions of dollars a quarter revenues continued continuing to grow ai, you know, we'll get into the conversation around, you know, how real is a GI and all of that coming along with Apple put out a very provocative paper earlier this week. And so the, the question is, how much AI is enough to continue the insane run rate rate that this business has? And it's as, as technologists, we wanna see 'em put, push the envelope as, uh, and I, I'm not a, I'm not a big Apple investor, and I'd rather see them, you know, you know, give, give me the next, the what, what does Steve Jobs say?

It is a communications device. It's a, uh, internet device. And I forget what the third one thing.

Give me another one of those moments. But, but has Apple really, is it, is it a computer company anymore? Or is it really a media entertainment company?

I haven't looked lately at, you know, the financials, but I'm gonna guess that a majority of the revenue comes from the media and entertainment and the app store and not from hardware and technology design and innovation. And, you know, they're really chasing the majority of their business, which is not innovative. You know, technology innovation.

Well, Look, the opening of the opening of the conference was a plug for the upcoming F1 movie, right? The bra which Will be in theaters Yeah. In the one the 27th.

Yeah. I'm, I'm gonna go, I IPhone sales are 51% Of their revenue. Yeah.

It, it's still computers, but there is a sizable app store media, you know, component to their revenue. But, but here, here's what I'm hearing from you guys. And we've heard it unfortunately since Steve Jobs untimely death.

Where is the innovation in Apple is, you know, if you are an Apple person, and I get this, I have a lot of friends who are Apple fanboy, they get off on the new ui, was the transplant transparent glass, floating glass, whatever they're calling it, you know, that is it, it's pretty liquid glass. Excuse me. No doubt about it.

It's pretty, and if you are an Apple aficionado, that's the kind of stuff, you know, they get off on. Right? Look how pretty it is.

Rounded edges. We went from square edges to rounded. You know, this is a throwback to Johnny Ives.

I was expecting to hear more about what font they were using. They did mention it was the San Francisco font, right? Because it dynamically resizes the clock depending on what background you have.

And they said it was the San Francisco, right? Steve Jobs was fanatical about fonts. That was his thing, right?

Fonts. But where's the, in where's really the innovation here? They, they recapped what they already had in Apple Intelligence and said more coming soon.

But Keith Town said, to your point, they tipped their hand when they released that paper that kind of crapped all over, you know, AI's ability to really reason you could have read that paper and said, don't expect to see anything big on AI from Apple, because they wouldn't have released that academic paper on the heels of, you know, just preceding this event, had they had some big AI news. Yeah. You know, you, you sell what you have on the truck, right?

And Apple on the truck has the iPhone reasonably, or any mobile device reasonably can probably do what, a 7 billion parameter model relatively, uh, within the spec of the machine. And you can do some really interesting stuff with a 7 billion parameter model. Um, I, I think small, large models are the way, but when you're thinking about consumer ai, a 7 billion parameter model just isn't going to get the job done.

It will get the job done when you're talking about industry specific verticals. But, you know, this lack of ability to do the trillion parameter model and needing to outsource capabilities, like my action button on my phone is to chat GTP. So, you know, and that, that tells you kind of where Apple is at wh when, when they're, uh, just by design.

And I, I know folks like Jack, appreciate the security focus of that, but I'm not a security person and I want, you know, I want chat TTP to have all of my data so I can get the best outcome. Well, and and to that point, Keith, in years gone in years past, having something that ran on the phone would be very important. You know, having a doing inference on the phone, right?

Or on the mobile device with modern connectivity, are we really disconnected enough that we can't leverage inference in the cloud? Right. And, and in fact, I, you know, part of the issue is the performance of inference in the cloud may actually be better than performance on your phone.

And even with latency, you might, you might still have a better user experience running off the cloud, But are we saying they didn't do this for security concerns? 'cause I don't, I don't know if that's necessarily true. No, I think authors, I'll, I'll be honest, you know what I think of the whole chat GPT Apple relationship is, it reminds me of when they used Intel chips, right?

They never used Intel chips, then they went to Intel chips because Intel had something they didn't have, and they used it just long enough until they had their own silicon again, Right? And their end of lifeing, their end of lifeing updates for those chips now, Which is amazing because if I would've bought a Intel, uh, Mac Pro, uh, just a couple of years ago with these monster Zion chips and 192 gig of ram or 512 gigabytes of ram, and I can't update to the latest OS today, I'd be pretty disappointed that was 10,000 on a debt on a workstation. And I can't give the latest os just a few years later, would be frustrating.

Yep. It Is. I mean, they were the masters of planned obsolescence.

Yeah, they, Yeah. But I was just gonna say that this is not the first time Apple's pulled this trick, right? This is, this is Apple 1 0 1 stuff.

Hey, you know, and that was always a difference. Microsoft bent over backwards and twisted into a pretzel for backwards compatibility. Apple, not so much.

That was never their game. Actually. I think it's the opposite game as they really want you to always be on the latest and greatest hardware, and they're forcing you to upgrade rather than doing that.

You know, you, you call it planned obsolescence. I call it planned revisionism, right? It's planned upgrades.

Although whenever I travel with my de laptop as opposed to my MacBook, and I take a photo during a conference, and then I look towards my Dell laptop and I'm like, wait, where's the image? So I can tweet it out and put more detail around it. Functionally, I gotta tell you, I'm on the, I'm on that train because from a productivity for, for a creator and from a productivity perspective, that combination is, is Killer.

Well, that kind of closed system between hardware and software enables those kind of features, which are very handy. I agree with you. Uh, you know, the, I think the question is now it isn't, what did they announce yesterday or the day before?

It's what's gonna happen next? Are we gonna see some something credible in terms of AI coming out later in the year when they do phone announcements and things like that? Or set some something down the road?

Are we gonna be in this kind of, um, nuclear winner waiting for waiting, waiting for things to clear before we see some AI coming, or true AI coming out of Apple? Um, I don't know. It, it seems like they're, they're battling on a lot of fronts, battling tariffs and where things are manufactured.

They're trying to catch up on ai. They're, they're not in a good place right now, making tons of money. Wait, Mitch, you know what this right here is?

That's the smallest violin in the world playing hearts and flowers for poor dear old Apple who makes billions of dollars a quarter, let you know, let, let's not quite throw dirt on their, their grave yet right now To keep, yeah, I can predict, I can predict Apple AI announcements for around the iPhone, whatever the next iPhone is. I bought, I didn't buy my latest iPhone because of their AI announcements from last year. I bought it because the camera's better and I create video content.

So, you know, that the, and I'm very happy with that. I bought it for that integration. The, but I am very much looking at Android machines, uh, sim similar to you.

And I'm looking at, you know, I, I will probably go out and buy a, uh, some type of Android device. And I think Apple needs to worry about this as the tech consumer that I am, the functionality that I want out of my mobile AI experience, apple is not providing it. Android is, and it is that important to me, someone who's fully in the Android, in the Apple ecosystem, that I'm willing to at least for now, get a second device that, that satisfies my AI needs.

It's done. Absolutely. And the last thing I wanna say on this is the Apple xr, apple Vision Pro was very exciting to me at the time.

As someone who's spent some time in that industry, and they really have an answer to what's happening next, other than maybe there's a stripped down headset, maybe it's whatever, you know, whatever. I mean, the headset gave my friend black eyes. Like it really was, there was a swing and a miss there, right?

But all they announced in that realm at South by Southwest this year was, Hey, we've got Metallica full length movie. It's an xr. So I have to wonder if the whole virtual augmented reality, uh, move for them is gonna be content.

I, I, I don't know that it's gonna be hardware. I don't think they can compete in that realm. The Oculus, all these other headsets are, you know, the vibe.

They're, they're, they're cheaper and better already. They were so late. And I would hate to see that happen with ai.

It really would. However, being the last AI is not a bad thing because you're learning from everybody else, Right? Especially right in, in a market that's as fast moving.

But that being, so Dan, you just described the real conundrum with Apple, which is where is the next big thing? It's not the AR goggles, okay. Um, the watch, and it's some nice watch features, but is it wearables?

Is it some other sort of wearable, not a watch? Is it, I mean, what, what can they do to the phone? Keith, to your point, they could every, every iteration of the phone and the Galaxy as well, they improve the, you know, the, the lenses and so forth, the, the technology.

But where, what, what can they, what's, what's the next big thing for them, Alan? That's been the question really. Since just Steve Jobs died, unfortunately.

Exactly. That's been the question that was sort of test miss test. Are they gonna be able to continue to Innovate?

And Now I, I will tell you, they've innovated on silicon, right? I will tell you true, some of our video team here just got the new Apple, uh, M four Ultra Studios. They're hot, they're hot machines.

What he used to do on his M1 took like four hours or six hours. Now it's done in one hour on that M four Ultra. So, you know, I don't think they, let's not make it all negative.

They've done a great job innovating on the silicon. So, so Alan, let's, let's think about the sort of the elephant in the room, which is Johnny Ivey's departure and going over to, you know, uh, AI and to develop AI products. And I just recently acquired, um, an AI based pin for doing a live meeting recording, right?

So it does, uh, records at a meeting and then does a transcription plus an AI summary. And I found that very helpful because it allows me to immerse myself in the meeting and not focus on actually taking notes so I can have a hundred percent attention on what I'm doing. And that's sort of a, you know, that functionality could be built into a phone or could be built into some other device you have and, and, you know, and that maybe that's the direction Johnny Ivy's going with great industrial design and yada, yada, yada.

Maybe it's not. But those are the areas where AI can be really useful. And it seems like right now, either Apple's taking a wait, you see approach, or they're swinging at the fences and failing with whatever they're doing is, you know, they put a lot of effort into bringing AI in the chips on the phone, but then a no vision maybe for what's they're gonna do with that AI capability.

I think that's the disappointing part. I think combining the two ideas, the m series of processors are flat, amazing. I bought my then video editor one, three years ago, and he still has an M1 and he's still completely happy with it.

Uh, three years later, incredible innovation. Uh, I run alama on my M two Mac Pro, and it is for local development and insing fine, which I can't say that about my latest deal with an Intel arc processor. The, the, that is I, the ecosystem is there.

Uh, so there's a lot of promising, uh, from the app, apples innovation around silicon and abil ability to put GPUs on system, on chips, extended battery life. There's a lot of good stuff going there, but not enough to, uh, keep folks like us happy. We want, we're pushing them, I think fa harder and faster than what we would have in the past.

So let me postulate one thing here, and then we'll move on to our next segment. Someone mentioned it earlier, I'm not sure who, these are very interesting times for Apple. They're under a ton of pressure.

Tim Cook is not a typical sort of Trump guy, right? He's he's not for a lot of reasons, and I'll leave it at that, they're under a lot of pressure where, you know, whether they can produce these iPhones in India, they certainly producing them in China isn't a great thing. Big tech, you know, with the must Trump split, who knows how that's gonna go.

This may be a time where the smart money at Apple, and there's a lot of smart people at Apple still, no doubt. Say, you know what? Let's just keep our head down.

Let's not try to rise above the crowd and become a target. We'll keep making our billions and keep that multi-trillion dollar, you know, uh, shareholder group happy. And let's just tread water and see which way the wind blows here, right?

And, and that might, and, and that might be the right strategy for, for interesting times that we live in. I think it's, I agree completely. And I think Apple, under Steve Jobs taught us that computers could be magic, tech can be magic.

And I think that we have come to expect that from them. And I think that's why it's so easy to get upset with them when they have announcements like this, because you're, you've been trained to expect magic. Yes.

And this is a time we could use it, and there's a time when there's magic elsewhere. We're seeing it with deep seek and other, you know, the rise of these companies overnight. And so it feels like they should be at the forefront here, but maybe that's just not where they are anymore.

No, I think they're keeping their head low. I think there's something to be said for that. Alan, keep your head low.

You know, don't turkey's a get shot. The one they raise their Head above the law. That's exactly it.

Yep. It's an old saying from our friend in Nebraska. Here you go.

All right, Bucky, let's take a break here on Textron Gang. We're gonna come back and we're gonna talk Vibe coding, extreme Coding Two Enterprise, I don't know, you're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone.

And we're back here at Techstrong Gang. com written by none other than Keith Townsend about, uh, scaling vibe coding in enterprise it, a CTO's guide in navigating Architectural Complexity, product management and governance. Hey, throwing all that out, is Vibe coding an enterprise tool?

Is that what you're trying to say, Keith? Or what are, what are we talking about here? So whether or not it's an enterprise tool or not is, you know, kind of going back to our previous conversation.

I remember when the iPhone first hidden, I was managing mobile devices in the enterprise, and I question, is the iPhone a mobile is, uh, uh, enterprise mobile device and early iPhone through one through three was the answer to that question was no. Did that stop employees from bringing in iPhones and forcing my hand as the IT director to start supporting iPhones? No, it did not.

So we can ask the question, is Vibe coding the Enterprise IT tool? Uh, no, not today. I think generally speaking, not in the sense that we've looked at it from, you know, if we look at like the nominal sense of vibe coding, uh, me and Mitch did a podcast last week with, uh, E Eric Beke, our CTO of RUM group, and he reminded us that Vibe coding did not, you know, mean what it means today to give someone like me who's not a developer, these tools to develop, but for, uh, seasoned developers to use it.

We're talking in a context of giving the tool to people like me and recreating the mess that we had in the early two thousands of Lotus Notes, creating real tools with this low-code, no-code capability that that delivers legit business, um, value, but creates this nightmare for CTOs. If you remember needing to either maintain Lotus Notes databases, the landscape, or needing to migrate off of Lotus Notes, if you're that old, uh, uh, you, you should probably check your, uh, cholesterol one. And then two, the, uh, you remember the pain of bringing in these low-code no-code tools.

And even if you've done recently RPA or uh, rapto, what the, the, these new low-code no-code tools, you have this challenge of how you maintain all of this new code that are, that's really supporting legit business processes that become mission critical. So first of all, I gotta tell you, Keith, I helped take a company public that was built on hosted Lotus Notes and we were doing that customer, customer. Uh, and not only that, I will tell you Microsoft paid us $10 million to try to build a similar platform on top of exchange that would allow you to build those simple apps that everyone was using on top of Lotus Notes, right?

And, and we couldn't do it. 'cause Exchange, believe it or not, just wasn't as solid under the covers as Notes was As somebody who had the support exchange. Five, five, a hundred percent there.

Uh, it just was not, Lotus Notes was funny. Longhead simple. The, the, the, the design that client server architecture for Lotus Notes was rock solid replication, just simply a lot of, of it was just really, it lend itself to the type of capabilities that you could do.

So, you know, imagine from a workflow perspective, you can take your, you're an executive and you're on a flight and you need to reconcile some invoices, whatever the business process you do, you replicated your Lotus Notes database offline to your local machine. You made the changes on flight. Well then when you connected back to you replicate, uh, it, uh, back, uh, to the, uh, to the data center connectivity, it replicated the changes up.

So this was, you know, early two thousands before we had, you know, these modern React apps where, you know, you expect to do on the server side, amazingly simple technology that enabled the business via coding or the concept is the same thing. I can just go to cursor AI and write really complex software without knowing how to code. And if that scares you, it probably should because users are doing it and they are, uh, uh, as I've, uh, kind of talked, talked through what the application I wrote, the CTO scanner, that, that, that was the, you know, that's the, the premise of, to be able to write, you know, pretty extensive code that uses open AI to triage RSS fees and blog posts and then create reports and then, you know, accelerate my ability to disseminate data.

Well, first of all, personal point of privilege. I'm having some serious Lotus Notes, PTSD. So you guys need to like back off a little bit here.

I took over, I took over some really bad situations. Not that I don't like it, but anyway, uh, first of all, Keith, fantastic article, but more importantly, I love what you did here, which is go on one of those journeys of trying something, in this case, vibe, coding, learning a lot from it, sharing it with us, you know, via LinkedIn and social and writing these articles and all of that. So you're a master at the kind of that storytelling journey and sharing that.

So appreciate that very much. I, I think the, the point is here, you, you, one of the things you that you came, came to, I think Tom, if I'm correct, is there's really two paths we're talking about around agentic or AI based development. There's the professional developer, like people that, this is my job, that's what I do.

I write code, and then there's the end user, we might call 'em citizen developers and to your po tho those two things kind of need to invol evolve in their own ways. And, and you can, you can see that today because when we talk about agentic or AI IDs to throw a bunch of, uh, acronyms at us, the, the, the, whether it's cursor or it's using copilot inside of, you know, visual Studio or whatever, visual code Studio, it, it's, it's a hybrid interface. One side is your AI stuff that you're chatting with it and you're giving it a command.

You're looking at its output, the other side's code and stuff being generated. And generally they fall this kind of hybrid architecture. That's not something an end user's gonna gonna connect with.

And even Firebase that you used, you know, from Google, relatively new, or I guess it's, it's, it's a new version of a technology they acquired. It's still that model. So vibe coating today is really for professional developers.

Not that it can't be used, but when I see articles about, you know, the CEO built an app, you know, using Cursor or built whatever, um, I don't think it's the same kind of app, even the quality of an app we would've built with Lotus Notes in the day that was made to be able to do that. And I think we're gonna have to evolve that technology along with the professional Developer. Well, look, there's a parallel here to the low-code no-code stuff, right?

If you speak to the low-code, no-code vendors, automation Anywhere, it's RPA, um, some of the others, they, they tend to, they tend to develop their product for two different audiences. One is what we used to call the citizen developer. And some people get freaky when you say that now, but you know, the non-pro developer, Keith, great example.

Technically proficient person, but not a professional developer. And then you have low-code, no-code kind of tools for the professional developer that sort of 10 x their, their productivity. And I think, I think with Vibe coding, it's the same thing.

But here's something else that I've observed over the years, and I a hundred percent believe on this. Many technologies such as vibe coding don't come to the enterprise by knocking on the front door or ringing the doorbell. They get, they come in through the cell or the back door through the backpack, through the backpack, right?

That's a good way of putting it, Mitch, I saw it happen with Open Source. I saw it happen with wifi, right? I remember going to a, I think it was Fort Carson, Mitch out in Colorado, right?

With the doum from Fort Carson. I said, what are you doing for wifi security? And he says, we don't have wifi security problems, we don't allow wifi.

And as he's saying that, I'm seeing people unplug their WP and throwing them under the desk, you know, and then soon as he passes, they plug it back in. You know, the same thing with open source. All of a sudden, what happened to all that Unix?

It's all Linux, right? Same thing with the cloud, the whole shadow IT thing. How the hell did we get all this stuff on Amazon?

I put it on my credit card. So, so Al and I'll, I'll, I'll step in here and say at, at one time I were the head of a professional developer. And, um, you know, a software development tool is a software development tool.

And if you're an old guy, uh, like me, sometimes adapting to new tools is easy. Sometimes it isn't. Uh, I was responsible for dragging Novell kicking and screaming from X 86 assembly into modern compiled languages because the developer sent network of network did not believe that a compiler could generate fa code that would run faster, would be better than they could.

Um, so, you know, and that was still can't, you know, go play in front of your own house, right? But so, so I look, I look at Vibe in one Sense Sense. I look at Vibe coding as another tool, like a compiler.

It's gonna accelerate your work. Um, if you are a professional developer, you just have to understand the tool and its limitations, just like you have to do any other tool and its limitations, right? And if you accept AI generated code without reviewing it, understanding exactly what that code is doing, uh, particularly on the security side, you are opening yourselves up for a world of hurt in a sometime in the future.

net or any of these other low-code, no-code environments, have a, uh, have a platform and an environment that brings with IT security and takes care of the basics so that you don't have to do that. So you can focus on automating a workflow in one form or another, rather than worrying about how you add, how do you have a user login, or how do you do security? Or do you, you know, how do you connect to the internet and all of those other concerns that we have, the platform takes care of it for you.

But I don't believe today, and I could be wrong, but does Vibe Coding actually provide that type of platform and take care of the basic concerns for you? Y yeah, so Jack, you're, you're hitting kind of the, the cliff that I came to when it came to using via coding in my role. And I don't mind the term citizen developer because, you know, whatever, but, uh, I got to a point where I wanted to have refactored the application from a Python.

What was, we essentially started out as a Python, uh, script and had evolved. Our good friend Steven Foss said, Hey Keith, it would be great if you put a web interface in front of this. And that sent me down this horrible journey of needing to create a backend, uh, the, and then, you know, it went from a simple, uh, Python flash based architecture to me now needing to look at React.

And now I'm bringing in Firebase because there's all these backend decisions that you have to make, and you could easily go down this route, route route of saying, okay, I'll, I'll deploy a Kubernetes cluster for a, uh, for a, uh, a scanner that's meant to run on my laptop. So it is, and when you're not a knowledgeable developer, if you're not a knowledge, you can be a knowledgeable front end developer and just not know backend stuff. Like, I want to use Google authentication for this.

I want to use, uh, some type of, you know, what am I gonna use per persistent storage? How am I gonna secure that persistent storage? All of these decisions that you have to make on the backend, there's no plat those, there's no given platform out the gate for Vibe coders.

If you're knowledgeable and you say, oh, I can use Heroku, I can use Firebase, I can use all of these past platforms to make these decisions for me. And they're still decisions that need to be made that's beyond the skillset a of a non-developer. So you're saying we're gonna have citizen Kubernetes, is that what we're gonna have?

No, you're you both that some bad is the name Vibe coding Mitch? Yeah, no, you're, you're both are are spot on on this point. Uh, there are two parallel paths.

Um, uh, different Keith, Keith Kirkpatrick and I are analyst at Futurum and I are working on a project together of talking to the, the low-code, no-code vendors about their path of how they are, uh, moving to a vibe, coding or whatever you want to call it. But they're introducing AI driven capability for building apps. And to your point, Jack, it's very much, I have a platform that we do these things.

I have constructs of, here's a, whatever we're gonna call it a method or a, a connection thing or some functionality that that's packaged in a, in a piece of capability that they put together in the UI that they used to build the applications. That's a different way of coding, if you wanna think of that. You can call it coding still.

That's a different way of constructing software. And there are a lot of things that come with it. The security that comes with it, the backend connection to the data, whatever it might be.

You still may have to work with a professional developer IT person to get some of those other things done with you, but you could do most of it yourself. And so they're, they're taking a different path. 'cause they've gotta preserve that customer base and their skills as they move into more AI based development or driven development.

Software development is different for software developers. They're using development tools there. There's a reason why the code window sits right beside the AI window.

It's because you'll look at the output to see if you like the output. You believe it. And in your experience, Keith, of Yeah, but there's a whole bunch of other stuff I have to take care of to really build and deploy an app and, and your, your app, you know, you didn't take on building a massive enterprise app.

You took on kind of a practical good example of what does it take to build an app. So when you had all those decisions to, to make, so it's, right now it's two different paths. Maybe they converge someday, but I don't see them intersecting anytime soon.

But, but here's, let me give you a shims law for this one. Shimmy's Law, you know, we used to think about internet time, right? Time crunch that the internet brought on.

We, we, we live in an AI time crunch now, right? And, and so look, it was just two months ago, three months. When did you first hear the term vibe coding with ai?

Was it three months ago, four months ago? It was in, it was Invented in January. It wasn't that long ago when we first started talking about it, it was a bit of a joke.

Hey man, feel the vibes. You know, we were doing that hippie dippy weatherman thing. Yeah.

And no one thought you could do anything with it because AI turns out crappy code. They said, and now here we are having a, a legitimate discussion about what we're gonna see at the enterprise level with Vibe code from January to June. Where are we gonna be in December?

Well, so it's, it's that internet time that always bothers me in that from a professional for professional coders there, and I've maintained this for years, that one of the reasons we don't have good security in our applications is because professional coders are compensated on feature functionality and schedule, and they're not compensated on building secure apps. And this vibe coding and the desire to move fast, you know, uh, go fast and break things means go fast, break things in the security sense more than anything else. And until developers are compensated on building secure applications and the tool support building secure applications, we're gonna have a, you know, we keep, me and Mitch and others successfully employed for many, many years talking about the lack of security in every application that comes out.

You know what, I used to think that way too, right? Then I got a seven step program, because here, here's the deal guys. Have any of you ever met a developer who raises their hand and says, I like producing s****y quality code.

I don't really care about security, I don't care about quality, I don't have pride. You're right, Jack. The compensation is keyed into how many lines of code they develop, how fast they got stuff that's releasable.

But I think with the advent of DevOps and DevSecOps, the, we don't call it security per se, we call it quality, but the advent of quality code that has fewer bugs, fewer security issues, is something that developers take pride in and that organizations are moving forward with in terms of saying, that's the code we want, right? Because it's a lot cheaper for us to fix it there than later on. It's a lot better for us if we have better quality.

We gotta, maybe it's the testing has gotta improve, but I think we've done a good job where we no longer are in the world where, where we can say, developers don't give a crap about security or quality. They do. I, I, I, I don't, it's not that they don't give a crap about it, but it's that because of how companies operate, given a choice between taking longer to add or to validate the security or meeting schedule and adding new features, they tend to be forced into adding new features and meeting schedule and not to focusing on how do I validate the security?

And it's not a developer issue, it's a, it's a, it's A system. It's a system and a compensation that value it's cost relevant values completing, you know, like I said, schedules and functionality over security. And so my, you know, my concern is that vibe coating reinforces that issue of accelerating the schedule and doesn't be.

And because this is all LLM based, it's non-deterministic. So it's not easy to, to gen repeatedly generate high quality, high security code. Let me ask you a question though.

Can we get another bite at the Apple by somehow making vibe coding develop more secure code? Maybe we could build something into the model there, Keith. So vibe coding can create, uh, and if you're thinking about vibe coding from like putting it in the professional's hands, vibe coding absolutely can result in more secure code.

Both talking to every Eric that key who uses five coding in his everyday software development, um, uh, lifecycle. I talked to Brian Lau, who's a principal, uh, engineer, or, uh, principal architect, software architect at AWS. They're creating hundreds of unit tests to test their code.

So, and that's from using quote unquote Vibe coding to do this. So they're able to test their software more than they could be than before, than when they were using Vibe coding. So this is an example, are we thinking about these tools?

So, you know, we uplevel to the CTO conversation, are we thinking about these tools the right way? Are we using it to accelerate our processes to, uh, uh, write more secure code to improve our CICD processes so that these unit tests are created automatically and then are testing our code and, and putting more rigor to the, to the process? So these are, you know, things that were just, again, the term was just coined in January to both you and Mitch's point that we are in a place that we're not quite sure where we should be using via coding in our software development lifecycle.

Whether or not we should be getting, giving these tools directly to, uh, end users or if we should be using this to improve our own software development, um, processes. I seem to remember this conversation happening a long time ago in the late nineties, early two thousands, and we called it Extreme Coding. It was a, it was a predecessor to Agile, but the difference was that it was focused on teamwork, para programming, and rigorous adherence to standards.

It was all about a team doing things and think about how many developers it took to do what it takes to do one today, right? But the similarity to me, to vibe coding is the sort of excitement and the way people talk about it, you know, that it's like, we're not just coding. It's a vibe.

It's a, there's a buzz to it, and it's like we're doing more than just coding here, guys. We're extreme coding. And so I remember it being used because I was working in startups then, and I was a developer then.

And I remember it being used as sort of a way to like, put guardrails on for certain developers that maybe weren't as good, or maybe there was an issue with performance or language barrier, whatever it was, they were coupled together with teams. And I can see this happening with Vibe coding. I can see it being used as almost like a guardrail of, well, check this, check this.

It's gonna be like a babysitter in, in a way. But I, I mean, it just, to me conceptually is, is so fun. It's not really the same, but just this sort of buzz about it that we're doing something new and really we're, it Is the future, the productivity's there.

All right guys. We are, we are extremely late on this segment though, so I gotta pull the plug on it. If you wanna read it.

Mitch mentioned great article by Keith. com. Go check it out.

We're gonna take a quick break. We're coming back for a C block. It looks like we've got some new executive orders, undoing some security stuff.

Jack, I'm sure has some opinions on it. You're watching techron Gang, Discover Techron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT, leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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It's gonna wrap up with our C block for today, and that is a couple of, uh, a new executive order came out of the White House. I guess it wasn't signed by a robed, but anyway, uh, this one takes aim at some previous policies and executive orders. I dunno if any of 'em were congressional actual laws under, uh, the Obama and, uh, Biden administrations around some site, uh, cybersecurity regs and, and some enforcement around hacking and especially around elections and stuff like that.

Jack, what's your take on it? Well, I think, uh, you know, this is not a brand new order. It's really just tweaking the, uh, the previous orders and, you know, the last order that came out was by the Biden administration, but it was just four days before he left office.

Um, so I'm sure it was long in the making, but it, it was sort of like, let's throw this out there and, you know, at the very last minute. So I think that sort of raised a few eyebrows. This executive order appears to tweak some of those things in there, one of which is related to digital IDs.

And given the Trump administration's focus on illegal immigrants, there's a desire to ensure that, uh, digital IDs aren't being used, you know, aren't being encouraged to be used by people who are, aren't legal residents of the country. Um, so that was one area. And then another area had to do with reducing, um, essentially the administrative burden by removing the, uh, requirements to go through the whole, um, sec uh, process of documenting that you go through a secure software development process.

And I, I, I tend to look at that one as similar to the old ISO 9,001, um, documentation requirements when IO 9,001 originally came out, um, it was touted as something that increased your reliability and your quality of production, but really all it was was documenting that you had a process, process could be absolutely horrible and could be, hey, if, you know, Joe Blow puts his, you know, tongue on the battery and sees if the battery's turned, not, if it is, it goes out the door if it doesn't, you know, so the bat, the, the quality, the, the process didn't have to be good. You just had to have a documentation for it. And I think right now, that's where we are with a lot of the, um, requirements by the government on software security.

And so I'd like to see us really focus in more on producing, understanding what it means rather than just documenting our existing processes. So for me, the big thing was around the, uh, removing sort of sanctions and teeth from non nation state threats. So certainly, right?

We need to be vigilant from Russian, Chinese, north Korean, Iran, whoever the enemy of the day is threats. But we need to be equally vigilant about any threats to the integrity of our electoral system, to the functioning of our government critical infrastructures and so forth. I think when you start saying we have one set of rules, if it's coming from a nation state versus not a nation state, that that's nonsense because the nation states generally, when they make these sort of attacks, they're not flying flags, right?

The PRC has groups in Beijing that, you know, they're not officially government, but there, there's a wink and a and a handshake, and there are groups that do these kind of things. Same thing for Russia. So, and you know, and, and when sometimes we have a hard time, it's more speculation than fact about how much support certain groups do get from a particular nation state.

Here. Here's my concern about it, Alan, is that given it's tied to not all, but, but in part election security, we all know that's a highly charged political issue. It could derail the focus on cybersecurity in other areas while were these maturations around, you know, is the next election secure or not?

And did we do the right things, whether we knew what the right things to do or not, when really there are, are, are other areas that equally, if not more need attention. So it, it in some ways, to me was just a way that this could become even more, um, Chris Krebs kind of situation, politically charging, you know, cybersecurity around the election part of it and masking over issues in other areas. Well, Speaking of our friend Chris Krebs, Mitch, that was my initial take on this, was this simply undertaken just to poke Biden and Obama at re error regulation.

I think that may have been part of the motivation, but there's also another way to look at it, which is a number of cybersecurity researchers doing valid research to understand the lack of security and the security issues in some of our tools and applications. And government services could be caught up and treated as nation state actors and treat. And this does provide the government more flexibility to separate out semi legitimate or legitimate activities from illegitimate activities and not bring the hammer down.

Yep. Guys, I need to pull the plug on this. I apologize.

Keith, Jack and Mitch, it was a great discussion. Today, we, we come back to the eo, we'll see how that plays out, but we're at the, we're at time. Thank you all.

Thank you for watching. Stay tuned for Text Drunk tv. We've got a full text Drunk TV schedule following.

Until next time, this is Alan Shimo for the Gang. We're out.