The GitHub problem (and other predictions) (Friends)
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
1hr 41min Jan 14, 2026
Mat Ryer is back and he brought his impromptu musical abilities with him! We discuss Rob Pike vs thankful AI, Microsoft’s GitHub monopoly (and what it means for open source), and Tom Tunguz’ 12 predictions for 2026: agent-first design, the rise of vector databases, and are we about to pay more for AI than people?!
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Featuring:
- Mat Ryer – GitHub, LinkedIn, Bluesky, X
- Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
- Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
- How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop “act of kindness”
- How GitHub monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem
- 12 predictions for 2026
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Adam Stacoviak
This is the live? This is it? This is the show?
Mat Ryer
I was just saying happy new year, yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Happy new year, man...
Mat Ryer
I'll tell you what - I've missed you all. It's been -- yeah, it's been a long time. How have you been? What was 2025 kind to you?
Adam Stacoviak
Thus far, six days in, I'm feeling it. Today is a particularly good, but sad day in my house. There was a death this day, a very near and dear person to us. \[unintelligible 00:02:42.23\] gloom about that during this podcast, but...
Jerod Santo
Oh, my goodness.
Mat Ryer
I'm sorry.
Adam Stacoviak
...podcast-wise - very happy. True Adam heart? Pretty sad today.
Mat Ryer
Okay.
Jerod Santo
Sorry to hear that.
Mat Ryer
Well, you can hang out with your friends and we can cheer you up for a bit...
Adam Stacoviak
They will, later on, with my Texas barbecue...
Jerod Santo
Well, after we're done with this.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, yeah. After this. But really though, I'm excited about this year. Everybody says "the best year yet"... I think it's gonna be the best year yet.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. We've got to make it the best year.
Adam Stacoviak
You do, right? You have to do the work to have the best.
Jerod Santo
I don't know, 1995 was pretty great.
Mat Ryer
'95 was good. Windows 95 came out, everyone was over the moon, they're loving the new menus...
Jerod Santo
Friends was on TV...
Mat Ryer
Friends was on every week...
Adam Stacoviak
Cha-ching...
Jerod Santo
It was a good year in movies.
Adam Stacoviak
Chandler Bing... I mean, the best character in the world. Rest in peace...
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
You mean Mrs. Chanandler Bong?
Adam Stacoviak
Oh my gosh, yes.
Jerod Santo
Deep cut.
\[00:03:39.28\]
*Rachel: Oh! Chandler gets it. It's Chandler Bing.*
*Monica: No...!*
*Ross: I'm afraid the TV guide comes to Chanandler Bong.*
*Monica: I knew that... Rachel, use your head!*
*Chandler: Actually, it's Miss Chandler Bong.*
Adam Stacoviak
What was his name again? Mathew Perry. Mathew Perry.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, Mathew Perry. Mathew Perry is not one of my friends, and never was, but I would have liked to have been his friend. But I do have other friends, yeah. Friends visited, someone came from France to be my friend... I know it sounds weird, but they visited over the holidays...
Adam Stacoviak
To be your friend.
Mat Ryer
Well, that's as far as I understood the relationship...
Adam Stacoviak
They became your friend when they visited.
Mat Ryer
Well, they became more of a friend, for sure. Again, that sounds suggestive, and it's not meant to. I know it's a family show.
Jerod Santo
What are you suggesting?
Mat Ryer
I don't know.
Adam Stacoviak
They're deeper friends...
Mat Ryer
Have you got any resolutions? Anything you want to change and do differently 2026?
Jerod Santo
Oh, man... That's a great question. Well, you're the guest, so why don't you tell us yours? What have you got going on?
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, yeah. Good job, Jerod. Deflect.
Mat Ryer
First one - I'm really going to try and stick to this one... I want to change the way that I write the year. Change the numbers. That's number one. I want to learn more keyboard combinations. Key mappings changed on a keyboard recently, because I've got this USB switch thing... And I need to practice again now. That's my other one.
Adam Stacoviak
I'm never sure, Jerod, if he's messing with us or not. I'm just like --
Jerod Santo
I think he's serious on that one. I think he wants to get better with the keyboard.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. I'm also using a Omarchy. I'm trying Linux the first time.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, really?
Jerod Santo
Oh...
Adam Stacoviak
How is that?
Mat Ryer
And that's very keyboardy. It's very nice. I like the minimalist -- it's a very minimalist design and aesthetic. Everything gets out of your way, and it just does the bare sort of basics. Once you're in the apps, if you're using the same apps, it's the same kind of experience, more or less, frankly.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. It's just how you navigate, right? I used Omarchy for a minute... I want to say I had it installed for a couple of days, and it just felt a little dirty. It felt a little dirty, honestly.
Mat Ryer
Oh, really? What do you normally use, Adam?
Jerod Santo
Windows.
Adam Stacoviak
Fedora is my preferred desktop now, just because... I'm really liking MacOS -- well, not MacOS, but like the Mac machine is just such a good piece of hardware. It really just is.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, it is.
Adam Stacoviak
And the M5 I've heard is just an absolute rock star. I'm rocking an M1 Pro Max... Is that what we have, Jerod? Pro Maxes?
Jerod Santo
Something like that.
Adam Stacoviak
I love this machine. It's a beast of a machine. I only have a little bit of FOMO just because it's been so many years... But like from a user experience standpoint, no desire to get a new machine, because it's just solid. But OS-wise, Fedora, Ubuntu on the server... That's about it.
Mat Ryer
Another one of my resolutions - I'm going to go tea total. I'm not going to drink any tea. Just going to give up on --
Jerod Santo
Is that legal over there? Can you do that?
Mat Ryer
I have to do it under the -- I have to go to speakeasies and not drink tea in there.
Jerod Santo
Yeah... You have to leave polite society, basically.
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Which is probably best for you to do that, honestly. Maybe your friend from France can come over.
Mat Ryer
French people, I think, to us they sound more fancy because in 1066, the French - basically William the Conqueror - invaded England and took over. And then all the aristocracy and all the royalty was just French for a long time. So all the fancy stuff was all in French, and then all the Britons, the lowly people, the peasants like me, we just spoke English, or whatever it was then. So I think since that, French to us has always sounded quite fancy, and quite sophisticated.
Jerod Santo
Well, I think I have a theory about why we like the British accent so much... It's because of that song from Hamilton, "You'll be back." You know?
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
It's just so good that we all thought "Man, this guy -- maybe we should go back, because... Very compelling."
Mat Ryer
Yeah. You're very welcome. You'd be very welcome back, I think. But yeah... My dad got some new glasses for Christmas. Can you imagine that?
Adam Stacoviak
They don't seem new.
Mat Ryer
\[00:08:08.18\] No, I didn't. My dad. That was his gift. New glasses.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh.
Jerod Santo
Tell me more.
Mat Ryer
Not a gift, is it? You need them. What do you mean, "Here's some new glasses for Christmas"? I can't believe that's what he got.
Jerod Santo
Oh, he couldn't see otherwise?
Mat Ryer
Exactly. That's the other thing. It's the gift of sight, isn't it? ...on the other hand.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
Good point, Jerod.
Jerod Santo
That's the problem, is we were waiting for the punchline on that one. You set it up like such a joke...
Mat Ryer
Oh yeah, no. I know. That's the problem I have. A lot of my sentences sound like setups to jokes...
Jerod Santo
They do sound like setups, and then you never deliver.
Mat Ryer
No, but at least -- although his glasses were the type that magnify your eyes. Did I ever talked about this before?
Jerod Santo
I'm sure you have...
Mat Ryer
There's some glasses that make your eyes bigger, and that to me makes sense. It helps you see.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
What's going on with the other kind of glasses? Oh, you're struggling to see? Have you tried having smaller eyes? How's that helping? So I don't know about that... At least it was the normal kind.
Adam Stacoviak
You know, I'm just hearing Ricky Gervais when I hear you, especially in that last segment there, or whatever you want to call that...
Jerod Santo
He's channeling that last segment...
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it sounded like Ricky Gervais, honestly...
Jerod Santo
That calls it a bit. That was a good bit.
Adam Stacoviak
It was a good bit.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. Just a bit.
Adam Stacoviak
Those glasses - I wonder about those, because I think... I wonder what makes -- I mean, I know physics-wise what makes the eyeballs look bigger through the opposite side... But I wonder why some do and some don't. Like, what exactly is that technology that changes, makes it thicker or less thin, but still does the same job.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. And some people's eyes are like too far one way, and then magnifying helps... This is very scientific. Or the people's eyes are too far the other way, if anything. And --
Jerod Santo
What do you do if they're too close together?
Mat Ryer
Crowbar.
Jerod Santo
Crowbar... \[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
Cyclops. You're almost a cyclops.
Jerod Santo
There you go...
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
You're just one step removed from a cyclops.
Mat Ryer
Well, you see, I don't really have great vision out of one eye. I never have, just since I was a baby. It's not a sob story; I'm not trying to compete with Adam's sob day, okay? But it does mean I have a sort of terrible depth perception.
Back in school, genuinely, I nearly got in detention for being bad at tennis, because it looked so funny, like I was deliberately messing around... And the teacher was like "You're going to be in detention if you don't start hitting this ball."
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, my gosh...
Jerod Santo
You just couldn't do it.
Adam Stacoviak
That's trauma right there. Do we need to have a moment here?
Mat Ryer
I think it's okay, because that's kind of what life was like... And I just thought \[unintelligible 00:10:36.14\]
Adam Stacoviak
Bat at tennis, get detention, that's how it goes there?
Mat Ryer
In that case. I mean, I probably had a little reputation...
Adam Stacoviak
Well, that teacher may have had some issues, let's just say.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. Let's do that one. The teacher was wrong, for sure.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. I mean, it's okay to be not so good at tennis, because that's how things work when you're younger and you're getting better, you're progressing. But to punish based upon skill that has not been acquired yet seems ill placed.
Mat Ryer
Andy Murray's mom was my teacher, of course... Judy Murray, I think her name is. She's like a pushy mom, like a career-driven -- like, she really helped drive the kids. I don't mean it in a derogatory way.
Adam Stacoviak
Well, maybe I'm wrong about her. What's her name again?
Mat Ryer
I think it's Judy Murray.
Adam Stacoviak
We'll call her just Andy's mom.
Mat Ryer
Andy Murray's mom.
Adam Stacoviak
Andy Murray's mom, sorry about that if I made you mad. I didn't mean to do that. You probably were a great teacher, and you were just trying to push Mat. Good for you. Good for you. Keep doing that.
Jerod Santo
So I had a similar story... I couldn't catch a baseball, and all my friends could catch baseballs. And I was like -- I'm not usually the worst at just moving my body around, so I was very confused. I went and got my eyes checked, and I was almost blind, you know?
Mat Ryer
Oh, really?
Jerod Santo
It was so bad so that when I got glasses I came out of the dentist's office -- what's it called?
Mat Ryer
Just catching all the baseballs...
Adam Stacoviak
The dentist office?
Jerod Santo
They just started throwing baseballs at me. No, I remember driving home and I was looking out the window, and for the first time I realized that you can see the leaves that are on trees. To me, they were just green blobs.
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:12:02.07\] Dude... Yes.
Jerod Santo
I actually started to cry, because I realized, like "This is what life looks like? I've been missing all this life."
Adam Stacoviak
Yes... I have empathy there. Same experience. I was in third grade when I got my glasses. So do you have corrective vision, Jerod?
Jerod Santo
Yeah, I had LASIK when I was 21.
Adam Stacoviak
How come I'd never known this?
Jerod Santo
You never asked... "Don't ask, don't tell" is my policy.
Adam Stacoviak
I guess so...
Mat Ryer
That's my laser policy as well. That's a sweet story, though... Yeah, that is kind of beautiful, really. But I don't think you are anywhere near Adam's sad day.
Jerod Santo
No.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, I'm going to keep that one for me. That one is a well-deserved, undesired sad day.
Jerod Santo
Right. But you know who had a sad day? (Segue...) Rob Pike. Rob Pike had a very sad day. Or mad day. But either way, it's an emotion, and I needed a reason to switch the conversation over to Rob Pike. Did you guys hear this? Did you guys hear what happened over our break with good ol' Rob Pike?
Adam Stacoviak
Little Rob Pike... \[laughs\]
Jerod Santo
No, I said good old Rob Pike, not little.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, I thought you said little Rob Pike.
Jerod Santo
I'm not going to diss the guy. I called him good old. He's good old. Mat, tell everybody who Rob Pike is, for those who don't know.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, so Rob Pike has a great career in software and in computer science. He's done things like UTF-8... So I think we can thank him for emojis.
Jerod Santo
That's a hit. Yeah.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. He also was a co-founder of the Go language. That's how I know him.
Jerod Santo
Same.
Mat Ryer
And his sensibilities, and stuff. Yeah, because I did Go podcast. Go Lime... What was it, that podcast we used to do? Go Lime. It's Go Lime.
Adam Stacoviak
Somewhere, I think it was... Go somewhere...
Mat Ryer
Yeah. Go Away?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah...
Mat Ryer
Yeah... And -- yeah, so he's brilliant. He's done Plan 9, and stuff... He's done loads of important tech stuff, which the rest of the world has then built on top of as well. So it's really immeasurable impact, really, when you get to that level.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
But he had a bad day... He had a really bad day when an AI emailed him a kind message.
Adam Stacoviak
You'd better get out of here, AI...
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] Okay, so... Good. Good. So there's Rob Pike. So Adam - similar explainer now, but give us AI Village. Tell us what AI Village is.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, my gosh... I didn't investigate this deeply, so give me a chance to paraphrase. From what I understand, it is essentially a village of various LLMs that have been unleashed on a desktop environment, that are just being autonomous, or some version of autonomous, just doing things. Acts of kindness, things like that. And they emailed the wrong person, obviously. They learned how to email, these things. And then now they're like "Hey, we've got to prompt you back and say "Hey, don't email people."
So these things - Claude Opus, GPT-3 -- no, GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro and DeepSeek v3.2, four different AI LLMs that are just thanking people, basically. And they're just autonomous, doing their thing, and talking to each other, and... It's an experiment, essentially. AI Village, theaidigest.org/village.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. Their goal is to raise as much money as they can for charity, so it definitely comes from a good place. It's like, these bots -- because I suppose cold-emailing people... Does that raise money sometimes for charity, if you get an email -- do you ever click through and say "Yeah, I'll put my credit card details. What's the big deal?" I probably don't do that, but that's because I don't want to give to charity, not because I've got any data concerns about my security.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Mat Ryer
Yeah, but then they said, "Right, just do random acts of kindness." And then it just sent a really sort of a heartfelt sounding email... But of course, it comes from an AI, so it doesn't have that -- it's not meaningful.
Jerod Santo
Right. You said "a heartfelt email", but there's no heart, because there's no human, right?
Mat Ryer
Yeah. It's just a pseudo-heart.
Jerod Santo
So Rob Pike receives an email from a Claude Opus 4.5 model.
Adam Stacoviak
The subject was awesome.
Jerod Santo
\[00:16:10.28\] The subject, from AI, public... "Thank you for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8 and decades of Unix innovation." Now, part of the story here that we haven't talked about yet is he received this at 5:43 AM. So maybe he's not a morning person and he was up, checking his email for some reason, and so he was mad already, because he's up at 5:43. Maybe. But I'm not going to read the whole email. I will say it starts with "Dear Dr. Pike, on this Christmas day I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades." And then it goes on. He did not like this...
Mat Ryer
No.
Adam Stacoviak
If you zoom out though and you think about the experiment happening here, you have to appreciate the fortitude, I would say, for this AI Village to try to accomplish its mission. Maybe not the best day...
Jerod Santo
You're impressed.
Adam Stacoviak
I mean, isn't it all somewhat impressive, in a way? Like, you can train something on the world's knowledge, and then you can unleash it in a way that it can just repl through and through a reward system, and accomplish to some degree, or attempt to accomplish a goal. I mean, I'm not that far removed from the absolute accomplishment that this is. Now, is it ill-placed? It was smart enough, or at least some version of smart, to try and email on Christmas day. That's the day your heart is kind of open to loving the world, loving other people, wishing people well. You're at least merry based upon it being Merry Christmas...
Jerod Santo
Right.
Mat Ryer
And the thing is, in a way -- depending on how the people are chosen, in a way it is a compliment that does have meaning, because it essentially means... If it just plucked it out of its brain, it essentially means that Rob Pike has had enough of an impact as far as it's concerned that it's worth sending an email to him. So there is at least that positive side, which you could say that is actually a compliment.
Adam Stacoviak
That is not how Rob took it, okay? As you may know. Can we read this out, Jerod? Do we want to have bleeps this early in the year?
Jerod Santo
Let's pre-bleep it, so we don't have to actually bleep it.
Adam Stacoviak
What does that mean, pre-bleep it?
Jerod Santo
I'll just read it, that way you can pre-bleep.
Mat Ryer
You have to go BLEEP. You're doing that at the time though, not before, are you, Jerod? You're doing it as you're speaking. I think that's current-bleeping...
Jerod Santo
Yeah. Normally, we put our bleeps in post. But I'm going to put it in in pre.
Adam Stacoviak
Okay.
Jerod Santo
\[unintelligible 00:18:37.11\]
Adam Stacoviak
Just in time bleeps, go.
Jerod Santo
"BLEEP you people! Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment, while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software? Just BLEEP you. BLEEP you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry."
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
And he published that response for all of us to enjoy, on the internets.
Adam Stacoviak
Let's look at the timestamp, okay? So 5:43 a.m. was the timestamp according to this email screenshot. According to the published post on Bluesky, 5:25 p.m, same day. So he thought about this for 12 hours, potentially.
Jerod Santo
Or maybe he didn't read it, I guess, when it came in. I assumed he's reading it immediately, like \[unintelligible 00:19:35.12\]
Adam Stacoviak
Well, I don't know about that, because if he took the screenshot, which is in his post, which is at 5:43 a.m...
Jerod Santo
That's the time it had to be, right?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it had to be that time. Well -
Jerod Santo
Or is that time it came in?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, we'd have to get the metadata, I suppose, from the image, to determine if that's true or not.
Jerod Santo
We don't care that much.
Adam Stacoviak
When was the screenshot taken, according to the difference between the email received? Let's assume it was right at 5:25 p.m. So maybe no time thinking at all. So I'm off on that. But received it five and some change in the morning, talked about it on the internet five and some change p.m. Twelve hours difference.
Jerod Santo
\[00:20:13.20\] So your point is like his anger percolated; he let it build up until it just --
Adam Stacoviak
Potentially. I mean, I'm just trying to be an investigator. It's the first 48 hours; that's the critical moments, right? If you don't solve the thing... I mean, it's not a murder, but that's where the first 48 comes from, is the first 48 hours. \[unintelligible 00:20:27.13\] first crucial.
Jerod Santo
Well, \[unintelligible 00:20:28.05\]
Mat Ryer
Yeah, it would be a murder if AI could be murdered.
Jerod Santo
I think so.
Mat Ryer
By the way, you two investigating tech stuff like this - that could be a spinoff podcast.
Jerod Santo
It could be.
Mat Ryer
Like a couple of detectives... Come on, dude. "Detective log. It was his last day on the \[unintelligible 00:20:43.06\] when Jerod changed his life forever."
Adam Stacoviak
We just registered, honestly... We registered Sleuths, pluralized - sleuths.dev. So hit us up.
Mat Ryer
There you go. Genuinely, though... That would be a good -- each episode you look into a different thing.
Adam Stacoviak
I'm registering it as we speak. It's gonna be a thing.
Jerod Santo
Oh, I forgot to tell you, but I misspelled it. It's actually sloths.dev, so...
Adam Stacoviak
Oh gosh.
Mat Ryer
Oh, that's different. You're going to have to pivot.
Jerod Santo
Alright, so Mat, if this was you - if you put yourself in Rob Pike's shoes; it's early morning, on Christmas day, you've got your slippers on, maybe you're having cookies and milk... Whatever you do. And you get this email. And he obviously has a disposition towards AI; okay, so adopt that... But do you -- what do you do? How do you respond?
Mat Ryer
I'd probably reach for the guitar... That's my way of just dealing with --
Jerod Santo
Yes! \[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
A hundred percent.
Jerod Santo
I was hoping you would say that. I really was.
Mat Ryer
If you're dealing with anything emotional like that... I understand it. Sometimes -- even spam emails. Sometimes I get so angry at spam.
Adam Stacoviak
Can you please put the word "sleuth" in there, and pluralize it if you can sing pluralized, sleuths?
Mat Ryer
If you can even sing that... Can that be sung?
Jerod Santo
Or sloth... Whichever one rhymes better.
Adam Stacoviak
It's like Eminem rhyming with orange, and porridge, and...
Jerod Santo
Yeah, it just depends on how you pronounce it.
Mat Ryer
\[unintelligible 00:21:58.19\] We'll do a song about Rob Pike getting the email and he's livid. Okay.
\[00:22:09.06\]
*Why, oh why, did you ask the AI to be kind... It's meaningless and less. You're a machine... Why, oh why, did you send a nice to Rob Pike? ...it's a good job \[unintelligible 00:22:29.26\] Rob's reply would tear you down... As it is you're unaware, or you don't care, or can't... Just remember to use AI for good, not bad; remember to use AI for good and not bad. Just try to use AI for good and not bad. It's better if you do, and you won't be a sloth/sleuth \[unintelligible 00:22:53.06\] Just use AI for good and not bad... Yeah...!*
*Use AI responsibly.*
Adam Stacoviak
Wow. Sloth/sleuth.
Jerod Santo
Very nice.
Adam Stacoviak
Fantastic work. Your ability to chain together meaningful words during the song is uncanny. I love it. Thank you so much.
Mat Ryer
That's very kind of you. And that song was brought to you by my NASA mug, which is a...
Adam Stacoviak
Nice. Slightly blurry, but we love it anyways.
Mat Ryer
It is blurry, yeah, because I don't want to promote the brand too much... But it's a modest mug. If you hold it in your right hand, you can't -- you know, I see the logo; other people don't. If you're left-handed, it is a braggy mug... But I like the modest mug. That looks nice.
Adam Stacoviak
This is Japanese ceramic.
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Technically, they call this color black.
Mat Ryer
Right. It makes sense.
Jerod Santo
Fascinating.
Adam Stacoviak
This is not black. This is not black.
Mat Ryer
Oh.
Jerod Santo
Fascinating.
Mat Ryer
What do you want then? If it says that, do you want it to be no light coming at all.
Adam Stacoviak
More black then. I want it to be more black, like yours.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. That's black.
Adam Stacoviak
It's more like brown black.
**Break**: \[00:23:59.27\] to \[00:26:51.00\]
Jerod Santo
Well, Mat, I liked both the talent on display, but also your heartfelt message in that song, "Use AI for good." Now, if I was to send a heartfelt message to Microsoft, I would tell them "Microsoft, please use GitHub for good. Use it for good, not for bad." I'm not sure they would hear me. What do you think, Adam?
Adam Stacoviak
I'd just want them to stop doing what they're doing, okay?
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] Just stop what? What are they doing?
Adam Stacoviak
You know, just think about the platform you've got, okay? Don't rug-pull-not-cool us. Don't change Actions. It's like the best thing you've done in so long. Don't mess with it. Just keep it. And I guess they did, right? They backtracked that.
Jerod Santo
They walked back this pricing change.
Adam Stacoviak
Tell them the full story, Jerod. What's the full story on that one?
Jerod Santo
Oh, gosh... I don't know the full story, but the TL;DR is that Microsoft announced GitHub pricing changes around Actions... And the change in particular that ruffled the feathers of the hacker community was the addition of charging for your self-hosted runners. So runners that GitHub does not themselves have to host, and yet...
Adam Stacoviak
Don't you dare charge for those...
Jerod Santo
...new fees for using self-hosted runners... The people revolted. Many a text areas were filled with bleeps, and submitted... And they did walk it back. They walked it back -- I don't know what's happening now. I think they just decided not to do it, until we forget for a while...
Mat Ryer
Try again...?
Jerod Santo
I remember Reddit did that one time. They just announced a change, and then everyone's like "This will be terrible", and then they're like "Well, we're not going to do it right now", and then they did it like six months later, and nobody noticed... So maybe that's what's going to happen this time, you know? But...
Mat Ryer
I mean, they should have at least done it as a PR and let everyone comment on it before it got merged. Let everyone review. Pick like jury duty; have select people that are top contributors to open source, like me...
Adam Stacoviak
Well, they have a version of this --
Jerod Santo
"Like me..." \[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
So they have a community org. So github.com/orgs/community. And they have discussions. They didn't, to my knowledge, begin with a discussion, although they do say in one of the posts "Let's talk about GitHub Actions." And near the bottom of it there's a headline that says "Help us shape the 2026", that's the year we're in, "roadmap for GitHub Actions." And so they are at least, in this moment -- I'm not sure this is before the debacle or post the debacle, but there is some sort of request for...
Jerod Santo
Should we sleuth it?
Adam Stacoviak
...shaping it. Yeah, let's sleuth it.
Jerod Santo
What's the publish date on that thread?
Adam Stacoviak
Let's see here... It looks like December 11th, 2025. That's pre debacle, right?
Jerod Santo
Yes. The debacle began on December 15th, 2025, when they announced pricing changes for GitHub Actions. So that's four days prior. Not much time to discuss, but enough, maybe...
Adam Stacoviak
No... I think -- who was it that we had on the pod, that was CTO when they released Actions? He was on the pod a while back. He's since stepped away.
Jerod Santo
Ryan Daigle?
Adam Stacoviak
No...
Mat Ryer
"Join us for another exciting episode where --"
Jerod Santo
Should we sleuth it?
Mat Ryer
"...Adam Log and Jerod Change, together, are the Changelog Detectives."
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] "Where they ask each other questions that they don't know the answers to."
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:30:19.24\] "Leading GitHub to a $7.5 billion acquisition, Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub..."
Jerod Santo
Jason Warner.
Adam Stacoviak
Thank you for our search results there to our good friends over at Typesense. Typesense is one of our partners to give us awesome search.
Mat Ryer
Why bringing up more successful guests that you've had? Why bringing that up in front of me?
Jerod Santo
Just to keep your ego in check...
Adam Stacoviak
Contextual, man. Contextual. It's the word of the year. Or the decade maybe even. Context. So contextually, Jason Warner, he helped the world have GitHub Actions. I think it was actually one of his brainchilds; it was this whole entire CI/CD pipeline flow that they built out. It was even part of the reason to acquire GitHub; you know, Microsoft's acquisition process. So that podcast covers all that... But I believe GitHub Actions is -- it's become so much so that whenever you're in your LLM... So not you building the software; you're agent-led. And you're building something out and you have to do observability, or you have to deploy it, or whatever it might be to get it into production. The first thing it says is "Let's set up your GitHub Actions workflow." And so it's become the default, by and large, for everybody. And I'm cool with charging for products, by the way. Totally cool with it. But it seemed like this was a tax on those who want to do runners externally from GitHub. And it seemed like it was -- like, who wants to make an announcement a week from Christmas? Like, just don't do that. Even Docker made an announcement, which - we're going to talk to them soon about like their thing as well... But don't announce things mid-December on. Wait till the new year. Be a stand-up company and just release when people are paying attention. Don't be sleuthy. Don't be sleuthy.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. So there is that post, Jerod... You sent me a post, and someone was complaining that GitHub has this monopoly.
Jerod Santo
Right.
Mat Ryer
Because what happens when GitHub goes down... You know, it does affect everything. It really does. The thing is, it kind of was the -- it was the best choice, I think, for a long time, and it was just the easiest to use... So the user experience was just kind of there. And then obviously, it got loads of integrations to it. So it sort of earned its place...
Jerod Santo
It did.
Mat Ryer
But then it still is kind of -- it does kind of have a monopoly. A lot of Go packages and things are on GitHub, and you wouldn't be able to pull them down, of course, if GitHub's down.
Jerod Santo
We have seen a trickle of people starting to move other places, the most noteworthy of which I think is the Zig programming language, which moved to Codeberg recently...
Mat Ryer
Codeberg.
Jerod Santo
Codeberg, which --
Mat Ryer
\[unintelligible 00:33:13.27\]
Jerod Santo
Like an iceberg, and it's code... \[unintelligible 00:33:16.10\]
Mat Ryer
Right. And it's going to bring down GitHub, the Titanic. Is that the metaphor?
Jerod Santo
Exactly. Is it? Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Ooh. Nice.
Mat Ryer
That's good, ain't it?
Jerod Santo
Yeah. And you only see -- that's at the tip, and everything else is under the surface, you know?
Mat Ryer
Right.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] Right...
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Which you should know about, Mat... It's over there in the -- well, they might be in the EU, which you're no longer in...
Mat Ryer
It was under way, wasn't it? They left the UK and they were going to the US...
Adam Stacoviak
They were. They were coming here.
Mat Ryer
The Titanic.
Adam Stacoviak
A lot of controversy around that, true.
Jerod Santo
Not the Titanic. Codeberg, the platform. It's a European Union platform.
Mat Ryer
Oh. Right.
Adam Stacoviak
It is true. That's true, too.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. So I guess it worked in both ways.
Adam Stacoviak
That's not quite a double entendre. It's kind of like a --
Jerod Santo
It's like a triple. \[laughs\]
Mat Ryer
Yeah. Especially -- it's four if they mean the lettuce as well...
Jerod Santo
Triple stamp a double stamp.
Mat Ryer
Did you know there's a type of lettuce called iceberg lettuce? Do you have that in the US?
Jerod Santo
Oh, of course.
Adam Stacoviak
I feel bad for the listener... I'm sorry, listener. Let's go to the iceberg lettuce. Go ahead.
Mat Ryer
\[00:34:12.01\] I'm sorry too. No, I'm just saying, it could be that; it could be that's where they incentivized their name. Like, their name came from -- they just love a good salad.
Jerod Santo
Because they want to be associated with lettuce...
Mat Ryer
They love the smell of salad. If you love the smell of salad, you're going to call your project something salad-related, maybe. That's what I'm thinking. I would...
Adam Stacoviak
But the main thesis, I think, from -- let me double check the name, so I can be accurate here... Lionel Dricot. Now, that's my Americanized Texas slang, if that's even a thing...
Mat Ryer
Right. That's another Dan-tan, is it?
Adam Stacoviak
No, it's not Dan-Tan. Dan-Tan...!
Mat Ryer
"You've gotta go Dan-Tan...!" Who's Dan-Tan?! Who is he?
Adam Stacoviak
Come on now... Bring it back.
Jerod Santo
You'll never know.
Adam Stacoviak
We will never know. But Lionel wrote this post, and the hypothesis, or at least the thesis, was this - it was that GitHub's near total dominance over open source hosting has become a dangerous monoculture that makes alternatives invisible, not just less popular. Kind of an interesting phrase there, "Invisible." Codeberg... They didn't see it coming.
Jerod Santo
Mat didn't even know it existed.
Mat Ryer
That's true. Yeah.
Jerod Santo
It's under the surface.
Mat Ryer
I don't go on ships. I don't go on many ships.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
I haven't been on a ship for ages, so...
Adam Stacoviak
And I think he's a teacher, or... Right? He's a teacher? He's teaching students... Students couldn't -- while being told to do things in open source, they only use GitHub; or like a large majority use GitHub, while also being taught that there's not just GitHub.
Jerod Santo
Like 99%. Not even a large majority. Pretty much 100%.
Adam Stacoviak
Pretty much 100%.
Jerod Santo
So I agree with you, Mat. I think it earned it. I think it earned its monopoly. It dominated for many years... I think it's stagnated as well... I think both those things are true. In the hands of Microsoft. I think that they don't care about it. They care about pushing Copilot into every orifice of their corporate body, and into our wallets... And it's gotten worse and worse and worse... And worse. And it will continue to do so as people slowly move away from it, until they all move away real quickly one day.
Mat Ryer
Do the competitive products start out using GitHub, do you think?
Jerod Santo
How so?
Mat Ryer
When you start, are you going to make a GitHub repo, go from there? Gotta start somewhere, ain't you?
Jerod Santo
And even Go was written in C until they could self-host.
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
I just made that up. Is that true? I think it's true.
Mat Ryer
That's true. Yeah, that's true. Go was all written in C, until Go was good enough that it could then be written in Go.
Jerod Santo
Exactly.
Mat Ryer
Which is amazing, if you think about it... Which I do.
Jerod Santo
It is cool. We always love self-hosted languages... But yeah, I'm sure they have to -- but the nice thing about DVCS, for those of us who like acronyms...
Mat Ryer
Oh, I do.
Jerod Santo
You know, distributed... Is it decentralized or distributed? ...version control system. I think it's decentralized. It's both... Is -- I think it stands for distributed, though... Is that you could just have multiple origins; or not origins, multiple remotes... You know? You've got your locals... Like, there is no necessary -- yes, your main remote, your origin is GitHub right now, but it's so easy to just change that to something else.
Switching off... If you're just using Git and those flows, it's actually super-straightforward. However, if you're using Actions and Sponsors and PRs, whatever else... Projects, if anybody uses that still... Then it becomes much harder.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it's the gravity. That's why they call it, the GitHub universe. There's a gravity to it, honestly. I mean, there really is. So what do you do? Do you fight the system? If you're launching something, and it's in open source --
Jerod Santo
You just complain.
Adam Stacoviak
\[00:37:57.01\] Sure, you can have multiple remotes. Of course. That is totally possible. And you could, it's your prerogative. But if the users aren't there, what's the point?
Jerod Santo
Well, it may take a tooling change to actually be significant. And I think Git is entrenched at this point; because of agentic coding especially, it's entrenched. However, the further you would get away from that tool, the easier it is to have your agents just go use something else, and you don't care anyways. And so maybe that's not always the case. However, the reason why GitHub became what it was was because it put all of these collaborative features around a new tool(ish) that was already getting popular. And so they kind of popularized each other. And so maybe as JJ - Jujutsu - is now the cool new tool of the bleeding edge folks... I haven't tried it yet. I don't like to bleed as much as others. But people are loving it... Maybe a platform - not centered around Git, but centered around JJ, which could also support all the Git things, which is currently the way JJ rolls... Right? It's like a superset, I think, of Git's abilities... Has a chance to de-seat GitHub once and for all. What do you think, Mat?
Mat Ryer
Yeah. I think maybe the whole thing, the whole paradigm will change.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, and we just don't care. Maybe we just don't care.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. Or it's just kind of different... Maybe it's just a list of prompts all the way down. But I don't know, it's unlikely. Isn't it? There's some fundamentals we're probably going to stick with... We have this thing, because we're building, of course, the Grafana Assistant project, which is an AI tool...
Jerod Santo
Okay...
Mat Ryer
And it's built into the -- so it basically can write all the queries for you, and you just ask it telemetry questions in natural language.
Jerod Santo
Love it. Love it.
Mat Ryer
It's so good. The team that built it --
Jerod Santo
Because I've used Grafana, and I love the outputs, but I hate trying to query the thing, and like "Is it Loki? Is it something else? I don't even know..." I always have to go to Gerhard and say "How do I write this query, Gerhard? Write it for me." I just want to tell the thing, "Hey, show me the 99th percentile of requests over the last hour."
Mat Ryer
Not only that, though. Investigate why this is spiking.
Adam Stacoviak
Sleuth it. Sleuth it.
Mat Ryer
Because it's agentic, it can go off and sleuths around. It's like the Changelog detectives, Adam Log and Jerod Change...
Adam Stacoviak
Change.
Jerod Santo
I'm not French, I'm Italian.
Adam Stacoviak
\[laughs\]
Mat Ryer
"I will crack this case in no problem at all."
Adam Stacoviak
I love it...!
Mat Ryer
Monsieur Jerod Change...!
Adam Stacoviak
Keep going. Don't stop, Mat!
Jerod Santo
I'm not French.
Adam Stacoviak
Go further!
Jerod Santo
You're offending me.
Adam Stacoviak
I need more.
Mat Ryer
I'm not offending -- it's not offensive to \[unintelligible 00:40:35.21\] that you're French.
Jerod Santo
I'm Italian, though. So it is.
Adam Stacoviak
\[laughs\]
Jerod Santo
So please, change it --
Mat Ryer
Oh yeah, Italian. Italian American.
Jerod Santo
Yes. Please. Go ahead.
Mat Ryer
We call that American.
Jerod Santo
Give me the Italian version.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, the problem with Italian is it's very easy to do this in stereotype...
Adam Stacoviak
He did it!
Jerod Santo
It is. We all end up sounding like a Mario.
Adam Stacoviak
I'm hiding from the camera, my face is too red right now. I can't take it.
Mat Ryer
No, but I do it with love. I love different accents. I've said this before, I say it every time to keep out of trouble. I love accents.
Jerod Santo
You have to say it. You should get that tattooed on your back.
Mat Ryer
I have. I have got it tattooed on my back.
Jerod Santo
Wow. How did I know that?
Mat Ryer
Well, you know... No, it's a family show.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Mat Ryer
I've never even met Jerod in real life. Or you, Adam.
Jerod Santo
Well, we tried one time, but it didn't work out.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it didn't -- we've never met in real life?
Jerod Santo
No...
Mat Ryer
No. It was only on this, through this telly.
Jerod Santo
Did you refuse to come to the U.S? I can't remember.
Mat Ryer
Oh, one time I didn't want to go...
Jerod Santo
You refused.
Mat Ryer
Well, I didn't want to go. Yeah.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Adam Stacoviak
I didn't want to go as a refusal, right?
Jerod Santo
It was. He said no.
Mat Ryer
I feel like I want to write the headlines, though. Not that... But yeah, this year. Maybe this is the year.
Jerod Santo
Maybe 2026 is the year.
Adam Stacoviak
Didn't you all -- we just... I think we just shipped an episode of Big Tent and you guys were talking about this, weren't you? Like, in the most recent episode of Big Tent?
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
The Big Tent is Grafana's podcast all about the people, community, tools and tech around observability.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, I was reading the transcript and I was like -- and I watching it too, because of that chapter, and stuff like that... But it was a good pod, I liked that.
Jerod Santo
\[00:42:18.11\] What were you talking about? I'm lost. You were talking about coming to the States?
Adam Stacoviak
No, the AI system they're building on top of...
Jerod Santo
Oh, we're back on that. Okay, thank you.
Mat Ryer
Both. Well, both, because we're a fully remote company.
Jerod Santo
And didn't you just have a GrafanaCon, or something?
Mat Ryer
We do also have these conferences... There was GrafanaCon in London... If you can get to a GrafanaCon, do come, because they're so much fun. And I host them, and it's very fun. We all have a good time. People usually end up trolling me on the sly, though...
Jerod Santo
That sounds nice.
Mat Ryer
...Which is fine. No, it's fine. They're funny, So I read them out. That's where the material comes from for the show...
Adam Stacoviak
I really appreciated the clip, I believe it was Ivana Huckova. She said she tried to cover the fire with wood, And Tom's response was just typical Tom. I loved it, It was awesome. He's like "Did you learn anything?" She's like "Of course." She had a home lab where she was like doing -- she was measuring fire, and measuring... I don't know what I'm liking a lot here, for some reason...
Mat Ryer
It was a candle...
Adam Stacoviak
But yeah.
Mat Ryer
I think it was a candle, so that she could put the candle out. But the thing she was putting the candle out with was made of wood.
Adam Stacoviak
Yes. Don't use wood to put out a fire.
Mat Ryer
Well, this is the culture we have at Grafana Labs - it's okay to make mistakes. Not only is it okay, it's kind of expected. Because if you're not making mistakes, you're probably being too careful. So this is a real culture thing that we talk about at Grafana Labs, where -- like, we have an error budget for our services... And if you're like at 100% all the time, it means you're probably not innovating enough. You're not doing enough. It's a sign of something maybe; or they're just amazing engineers, which... It could be, because there are some phenomenal engineers. But Ivana Huckova - she works on the assistant itself, on the frontend of the assistant... So yeah, she's part of the team that built that. And we've heard from leading AI companies that I won't name, they said "This is the best implementation", or the best use of their models that they've seen so far.
Jerod Santo
Which they love, because they're waiting for people to use them well, you know?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, they are. They're very excited. They're very excited. And honestly, this is a good use case for LLMs, for sure.
Jerod Santo
Totally.
Mat Ryer
But if GitHub goes down, it doesn't work. We can't deploy stuff. I don't know how we deploy stuff without GitHub.
Adam Stacoviak
Can you be more specific? Did I miss what exactly you've done? Can you give us a 30-second version of it that's not marketing speak?
Mat Ryer
On the assistant?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, the assistant. What exactly -- I know you can query Grafana... Grafana is a visual tool, primarily. There's not a lot of querying, to my knowledge...
Mat Ryer
You write the queries to build the dashboards.
Adam Stacoviak
Right.
Mat Ryer
So once you've built your dashboards -- but that's okay if you've already thought of something. But if something new is happening... And also if you just don't know where -- like, some people have loads of dashboards... This is basically an LLM integration, so it's a chat experience. And then it has all the tools that you have in Grafana, and it knows how to navigate around, and things. So you can ask it questions, and it can not just take you to the right app to look at it, but it applies all the filters in the URL parameters and deep-links you write to that view.
Jerod Santo
It's awesome.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, it changes -- and it makes it so that anyone can now get value from the telemetry data. Whereas before, you would usually have to go to like the resident SRE, or the little team that know it all, and ask them. Now you can self-serve a lot, and free up \[unintelligible 00:45:40.14\]
Jerod Santo
And they're know-it-alls, so... That's the worst, you know?
Mat Ryer
Yeah... Yeah, because they have to -- they do. It's hard.
Jerod Santo
It is hard.
Mat Ryer
I never learned Loki's LogQL language. I just kind of go to the docs and make it up...
Jerod Santo
Copy-paste...
Mat Ryer
Yeah. And then edit, and things.
Jerod Santo
Same, same.
Mat Ryer
Whereas now you just don't need to at all.
Jerod Santo
That's beautiful.
Mat Ryer
\[00:46:03.07\] Yeah. And then, because it can query data, you can ask it "Why is the shopping cart slow?" And it'll look across all your signals as well. So it'll look in logs, it'll look in metrics... Even if you've got traces and profiles, a lot of engineers don't know how to really get value or use profiling or tracing properly. So you don't need to. We taught the assistant how to do it all.
Jerod Santo
Grafana doesn't work if GitHub's down?
Mat Ryer
Well, we can't deploy changes if GitHub's down, I think. I think we probably can, manually, but all the pipeline and everything flows through GitHub.
Jerod Santo
Have you ever considered making that some sort of a done thing, so that you're not so dependent?
Mat Ryer
It probably is, to be honest. I'm just saying, the normal flow --
Jerod Santo
Just generally.
Mat Ryer
You merge to main, and then that gets -- we deploy to a lot of instances immediately.
Adam Stacoviak
What we need is an Actions mirror. I guess, actually, that would suck... Like, you still deploy to GitHub. I was thinking like a webhook once you've deployed to main, or whichever your branch is... And then something's watching your repository. But that assumes, again, that GitHub is up, so your change can't get there to get webhooked out to an external Actions runner, even; or a watcher that mimics what Actions does.
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, that's the need for Codeberg, or this decentralized, this \[unintelligible 00:47:20.14\] thing. Like, we just -- this monopoly, this centralization... Come on now! Stop centralizing.
Jerod Santo
We just need some competition, that's all we need. Some legit competition.
Adam Stacoviak
Alright, JJ...
Jerod Santo
Bam.
Adam Stacoviak
Time to get it. Time to get it. I don't know a lot about JJ, but what I've understood -- do you all know much about JJ? All I really know is that they're similar to Git, and they can run alongside of it until it's time to take over. That's like my synopsis of how JJ operates today.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, I don't know. I'm excited to learn more about JJ. I don't know who they are.
Adam Stacoviak
What about you, Jerod? Do you know anything? You've got a different opinion or a deeper opinion?
Jerod Santo
No, I do know that the command line tool can do all the things Git can do, but then it also has its own superset of it. And so it's easy to try out... A lot like TypeScript was easy for JavaScript developers to get tricked into... JJ can trick you right into it. And it's nice that way. It's very nice.
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Anywho... But I've never used it, because I don't have any complaints about Git. I've just used it for multiple decades, and so I can't -- I've been through the pain. I have complaints about it from the beginner standpoint, but I also -- now when I get stuck, I'm just like "Yo, Claude, can you just rebase this for me?" And then he does it.
Adam Stacoviak
Here's an idea... Let me wordsmith or think through this with you guys here in the live. What if we had a pre-GitHub load balancer, where you committed to a thing that was meant to be a load balancer, your primary host is GitHub, but you have it in the -- you still have downtime, of course, but you're not on GitHub's downtime. And it's not monopolized by GitHub. So what if you had a load balancer that you pushed to, but ultimately the transaction landed at GitHub to run your actions and your runners, and all those things... But what if it could also webhook somewhere else and say "Hey, runners over here can still do it where that way if GitHub is down"? You have sort of one layer before that... Kind of like a load balancer effect to your Git pushes.
Mat Ryer
I don't see why you couldn't do that. Like a proxy that pushes to multiple places, and it's all in sync.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
It'd be a fight against it, at least. It'd give us a chance.
Jerod Santo
\[00:49:41.09\] If downtime is your major concern. My major concern isn't downtime. It's crappy time. I don't know what you call it. It's just like, their bloated JavaScript UI, the fact that Copilot's shoved to my face everywhere... Stuff like that is what bothers me. Like, actually using the website is slow now. It used to be super-fast. It's like way too much React code, I think. Those are the things that bother me, more so than GitHub being down. But obviously, that is a problem, and we can't deploy when GitHub's down either, because we don't have this proxy that you're talking about. But I'm certain that that's a good idea, and that they probably exist out there.
Adam Stacoviak
It's like a green/blue, almost, in a way... Let's say a green/blue to your Git repositories. That way if ever you did need to eject from the GitHub world, you could. It's almost what they're doing with passwords and quantum mechanics, and stuff like that, the quantum computers. They're making defense towards encryption. And there's a lot of effort... I just saw this talk at GopherCon, actually... Thank you, GopherCon, for publishing your talks most recently. I can't recall the person who did it (I'll put it in the show notes), but it was a talk on defending against -- I believe it was FISO 140, or FIPS 140, I think is what it was... And it was essentially defending against the future fact that the encryption we have will eventually be de-encrypted by quantum computers. It's almost like that, it's like a defense against the future. This green/blue effect you can apply to Git hosting in general, not just GitHub.
Mat Ryer
I think you could pivot and do that. Just keep it called the Changelog. It still works.
Jerod Santo
Bam.
Mat Ryer
It's a good idea. What do you do when GitHub goes down, then? What's your favorite go-to? Because you can't work...
Jerod Santo
Walk.
Mat Ryer
Go for a walk?
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. Take a walk... Get-e... Get-tea... Gitea...
Mat Ryer
Go and get some tea?
Jerod Santo
Take a shower... I use it as a prompt to shower, finally...
Adam Stacoviak
Yes. Time to shower.
Mat Ryer
Have a shower... What, you only shower when GitHub goes down?
Jerod Santo
I use it as a prompt, you know?
Adam Stacoviak
Sometimes...
Jerod Santo
I mean, I shower like I change my underwear. You know, monthly.
Mat Ryer
Okay. Phew... I thought you were going to say something gross.
Jerod Santo
TMI? I don't know, what do you do? Do you sing a song?
Mat Ryer
I always reach for the guitar if GitHub goes down...
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\]
Mat Ryer
Yeah, it's my go-to, really. My favorite keyword in Go. I use it all the time.
Jerod Santo
Is that a legit Go keyword? Because you know, goto considered harmful.
Mat Ryer
It sure is. It is a little harmful.
\[00:52:18.04\]
*When GitHub goes down, I'm talking a walk... I'm not going to complain unless you charge me, I'm taking a walk... I forgot what a tree was, I thought it was a thing with a light on top... I forgot what tea was, but that's because I'm tea-total now... I'll go outside when GitHub goes down... I'll smell the flowers when GitHub goes down... I'll look at the birds, and treading turds, and meet with nerds when GitHub goes down... We'll use \[unintelligible 00:53:09.18\] if GitHub goes down... But if Google Maps goes down, then I won't go outside, because I'm not entirely confident that I'll be able to find my way back... I use Google Maps way too much, and I'll be becoming too reliant on technology... When GitHub goes down...*
Jerod Santo
Wooh!
Adam Stacoviak
That's a double entendre, too. I mean, it's not just saying downtime; it's like, when they go down as if it's a demise, you know? We're predicting a potential demise here...
Mat Ryer
The end of a titan. A Titanic!
Adam Stacoviak
So many \[unintelligible 00:53:45.28\] in this pod. Triple double stamped, that entendre, yo...
**Break**: \[00:53:56.10\]
Mat Ryer
But who knows what's gonna happen in 2026...? Like, it's unwritten, as they -- Back to the Future is my favorite film, genuinely. This hat is actually a Back to the Future hat from Back to the Future 2...
Jerod Santo
Is it?
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
It's lovely. I'm very jealous of that hat.
Mat Ryer
Guess who got me this? French friend?
Jerod Santo
Uh, your wife.
Mat Ryer
French friend.
Jerod Santo
Oh, your French friend gave you that.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. So he is a friend.
Jerod Santo
Absolutely.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. If he's bringing you a hat...
Jerod Santo
That's an amazing gift.
Mat Ryer
Isn't it? I'll show him this, because he definitely doesn't subscribe.
Jerod Santo
Well, I know somebody who thinks they know what's gonna happen in 2026...
Mat Ryer
Who knows...?
Jerod Santo
Tomas Tungus.
Mat Ryer
I'm sure that's how it's pronounced.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] I am not sure that's how it's pronounced... But if you go to tomtungus.com/2026-predictions, you'll find that Tom - or Tomas, as I like to call him - has written 12 predictions for 2026. And he wrote these - you guys won't believe it - in 2025.
Mat Ryer
That makes sense. It would be weird if he wrote it in 2027.
Jerod Santo
It'd be too easy. It would be way too easy if he wrote it in 2027. In fact, I should write my 2025 predictions tomorrow.
Mat Ryer
You should actually, and publish it. Most people aren't sleuths like you, Detective Log, and Change... Gerard Change... Oh, look at the \[unintelligible 00:57:09.10\] Not everyone does.
That's a great sound to hear. Lovely.
Jerod Santo
You're slandering me as French. \[laughter\]
Mat Ryer
That's the offensive thing. That's the offensive thing.
Jerod Santo
Oh, it really is. It really is.
Adam Stacoviak
That's hilarious. What's this post about, Jerod?
Jerod Santo
This post is Tom, who is a venture capitalist... So he's a venture capitalist at Theory Ventures...
Adam Stacoviak
Tomas...
Jerod Santo
Yeah, Tomas.
Mat Ryer
Cool name.
Jerod Santo
But the website is Tom Tungus, so I'm going to call him Tom. Because I don't even know if Tomas is correct. It could be Tomaas.
Adam Stacoviak
It could be Tomassi.
Jerod Santo
Du Hast. Or Du Hast Mich.
Mat Ryer
I do -- I like these names that have got like a Z in. And he's got two Zs, or Zeds at the end...
Jerod Santo
He's got a lot of Zeds.
Adam Stacoviak
I've got a lot of German friends out there who are just saying like \[unintelligible 00:57:54.01\]
Mat Ryer
\[00:57:59.23\] Yeah. I saw a German keyboard the other day, and some of the letters are mixed up. It's like the bloody Enigma machine. I had to crack it, crack the code before I could use it. I made that joke in front of Germans and it was just deadpan. It did not go down well.
Jerod Santo
Nein... Okay, so Tom has written 12 predictions for 2026. We thought it'd be fun, since it is the new year, and Mat has all these resolutions... I'm still rocking the same resolution I had last year, which is 1512 by 982...
Mat Ryer
Yes...!
Jerod Santo
Ha-hah! \[laughs\]
Mat Ryer
It's classic.
Jerod Santo
Classic joke.
Mat Ryer
You could have done that low res eyes when before you had your eyes fixed --
Jerod Santo
That's true.
Mat Ryer
...when you first saw a leaf for the first time in your life, and you were like "Oh my gosh, there's more pixels here?"
Jerod Santo
That's like when we got the retina displays for the first time. We were like "Wow... That's what \[unintelligible 00:58:44.16\] looks like?"
Mat Ryer
Yeah. It's true. It was really sharp.
Jerod Santo
It really did. And we thought it'd be fun to go through some of these. We don't have to hit all 12, but a few that we think are either right, or wrong, or we have comments. If you have comments, sound off as I read them. How should we do this? Should I go -- I'll read all 12, and then we'll stop, I'll pause, if you guys have anything to say.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. Mat, say nothing. Read all 12, Jerod.
Jerod Santo
If not -- okay.
Adam Stacoviak
You see how I preempted that here? "Mat, say nothing."
Mat Ryer
Well, he just said to talk. That's why I was going to talk...
Adam Stacoviak
No more talking for you, for just a minute here. Go ahead, say them all.
Jerod Santo
We prefer when you sing... Your songs are great. But the commentary... You know.
Adam Stacoviak
For the listener's sake.
Jerod Santo
Like, if we could have a swap -- if we could have a mid-show swap. Mat, if you had a tag team... Maybe Tom Wilkie could be your tag team, and like Tom could talk, and then you could sing...
Adam Stacoviak
That's a good idea. Let's swap out Tom next time.
Mat Ryer
No, the other person could be worse.
Adam Stacoviak
Just right in the middle. No announcements.
Mat Ryer
Back to the devil you know.
Jerod Santo
Alright, so speaking of the devil we know, and what we think we know, Tom thinks that in 2026 businesses will pay more for AI agents than people for the first time. Pausing for comments...
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, I thought you were going to read all 12.
Jerod Santo
Oh, I thought I was going to read each one and see if you guys comment. I'll read all 12. Here I go.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, go fast. Go fast.
Jerod Santo
Number two, "2026 becomes a record year for liquidity." That's very exciting. Number three, "Vector databases resurge as essential infrastructure in the AI stack." Not to be confused with the Adam Stack. Number four, "AI models execute tasks autonomously for longer than a workday."
Adam Stacoviak
Dang.
Jerod Santo
They'll be working hard for their living... Number five, "AI budgets receive scrutiny for the first time." Number six, "Google distances itself from competitors via breadth." Breadth in AI. I'm not sure what that means.
Adam Stacoviak
That's bread-t-h.
Jerod Santo
Number seven, "Agent observability becomes the most competitive layer of the inference stack."
Adam Stacoviak
Okay...
Jerod Santo
Number eight, "30% of international payments are issued via stablecoin by December." I don't know why he had to put December in there. We know the year... Okay. Number nine, "Agent data access patterns stress and break existing databases." I could definitely see that one coming, too. Number ten, "The data center build-out reaches 3.5% of US GDP in 2026." And number 11, "The web flips to agent-first design." Say it ain't so...! Say it ain't so. Number 12, and the final prediction of Tomas Tungus is "Cloudflare becomes the gatekeeper for agentic payments." There you have it, 12 predictions for 2026. Which ones should we talk about?
Adam Stacoviak
Let me just say, whatever his portfolio is, I want to invest... Because these are all great predictions.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] Do you like these?
Adam Stacoviak
Fantastic. Yeah, I'm nodding my head to -- I'd say 10 out of them. 10 out of 12, for sure. And I'm not iffy on them. I just \[unintelligible 01:01:47.00\]
Jerod Santo
\[01:01:49.12\] Yeah, I can't see one that I disagree with. I don't know about GDP... Obviously, that's like a specific number. I'm not sure about the stablecoin one, but I can see it happening. Yeah, I don't, like, hard disagree... I don't like number 11, "The web flips to agent-first design." In fact --
Adam Stacoviak
What exactly does it mean...?
Jerod Santo
...I'm going to say that's not true. That's the one I'm going to disagree with.
Adam Stacoviak
Break that down, for me and for the listeners. What does that mean, to you at least?
Jerod Santo
Well, when you create a website today, what do you think about? What do you design it for? Well, we design it probably for a mobile device first, and then also for a desktop... Right? And then maybe you think -- we also need an API, because we need to have programmatic access to our website... But you're human-first, for sure, and you're probably mobile-first.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Maybe you do it all at once. But he's saying that in 2026 the web will flip to agent-first design. So the first thing you're going to think of, the number one thing you think of when you start a new website at first is "How will an agent use this?" And then comes everything else. I hope that's not true... I can see it being like sometimes the case, for certain websites, for certain uses... But like for all the web - he calls it "the web" - I'm thinking that's an awful lot of change quickly for the web, which generally moves somewhat slow.
Adam Stacoviak
Some pushback on that... I do concur with this thought, but the lens I would shift just slightly, because I feel like every -- it's almost like "Behind every good man is a good woman", that whole shtick, or phrase, or whatever. It's like, behind every great human who's doing great work is -- or maybe in front, of actually, since we're front-loading this... In front of every great human doing great work is an agent. So I almost feel like you're helping the human do better by being agent-first... So I'm sort of -- I'm conflicted there, because that's how I'm thinking too, really. I think that if this last year has told us anything, people like agents; developers like agents. I think people like agents, and people are going to start using Claude Code who don't even code software. They're going to be coding pros, or whatever. That's where my lens is at.
I'm thinking like you've, if you're not taking the agent in mind, then you're in the past. Like, you have to think about - I'm not sure I would say quite agent-first, but definitely agent as well... In almost everything. Everything. Even like simple CLIs are human-first, right? You have to -- like, if you have an error from a CLI... You threw a command out there that you misused a flag; have a proper error, not for just the human, but for the agent, that gives them context. "Hey, you meant to do this." Or "This is what that does", or "Here's documentation", and you give them context. I think that's where my lens is at, too. So I'm not sure if it's for the web and agent-first necessarily, but you definitely have to be thinking about every new interface with agents, for sure. Hands down. I agree with that.
Jerod Santo
I don't disagree with agent as well, which is what you said. I think agent-first in 2026 is too fast, and also I think it's -- it's both too fast to call, and I think it's too fast to do. I think "agent as well" makes total sense. Mat, what do you think?
Mat Ryer
I kind of get this, for sure... Because we've been through transitions like this. Mobile, as you mentioned - that was one of them. It used to be web; before that you'd be building for desktop. And it is about how the users are interacting with it. That's always been the most important thing about technology.
So yeah, I could imagine, if it's like booking something, or if it's like a hotel, or any of that stuff - that's all gone, basically. It's going to be presentation of something, like "Here's what I found for you. Here are some images, and things." But ultimately, you'll just say to an agent "Oh, me and a few friends are thinking of going here. Can you ask them for their availability? One of the Fridays coming up would do for me. Or check my calendar." It goes off and pings their agents to find out their availability, and if they're interested in it... And then that all happens, they just get some kind of notification, and the agent just asks them a question, like a text, or it makes the text look like it's come from you, even more worryingly, probably...
\[01:06:08.24\] And I think that those kinds of flows I think will happen. And they'll have to happen. But yeah, does this mean you're then not going to have an experience where you are choosing what to present? Agents are all -- at the moment, you are prompting them. You have to ask a question for something. What if you don't know what to ask it? What if you don't know what it can do? Those kinds of things I think is where we'll have some kind of other experience.
We had the same thing with dashboards, because someone said "Does the assistant project mean you don't need a dashboard now, because you can just ask it the question?" But there is something about being able to go and look at something without having to ask for it, and just having an easy way to go and find that. And I think dashboards still sit there. I don't think dashboards are going to go away, for example. But it'll be new things alongside it.
Adam Stacoviak
It's the hub and spoke model. You always have an API first, and you always have a client. It's like, if you live in that API first design world, then you totally get what's happening here. Because if you've always been API first, and a CLI is a client, and the website's a client, and an iOS app is a client - that's pretty easy, to sort of grok that direction. So I get that.
This kind of conflates;, to some degree, with Paul Dix, Jerod. He mentioned - I'm trying to figure out the best way to say this, but... While I was reading The Great Engineering Divergence, one thing you mentioned was Amdahl's Law, which is -- the principle is when you speed up a part of a system, your overall speed-up is limited by the parts you didn't speed up. So it almost reminds me of that, in the fact that if you don't think about an agent, and you don't think about that first mentality, like even Mat's describing here, you don't enable yourself or the things you're building to be as fast as it can be, because agents are going to be much more faster than we are... Because they're designed to be. They're a machine. I think if you don't start curbing that idea, you're going to be dwarfed by the folks who do, and embrace these new systems that have to move faster, and they retool their entire pipeline towards agentic things that move faster. And if you stick in the old way, let's just say, you're going to be slower, by nature, and less fast. Slow to market, slow to think, slow to experiment, slow to fail, slow to succeed... All the things. I think it's -- I've got to say it. I don't like saying it necessarily, but I am thinking, I guess, agent first. Yeah, I guess I'm thinking agent first, honestly.
Mat Ryer
I mean, could you imagine a service that is only an MCP server, that you plug in? It doesn't have any other kind of web interface. The only interface is through the agentic kind of chat.
Jerod Santo
I don't think anybody wants to be that. I don't think any business wants to be that -- I mean, nobody wants to be a utility company. And that's why they fight to be not just a utility company. They want to provide services and apps, and all of that. They want to be your provider, not your dumb pipe. And I think that most profitable and desiring to be profitable companies will buck against that as they begin to get commoditized by agents. So I think there'll be a fight there. But yeah, as an end user, of course, we want the simplest, easiest, cheapest thing, that works. And that's where I'm at with 2026. I don't think agents work yet. I think we are living in the golden age of coding, and we think that everything's a coding agent... Agents are not booking anybody's flights, anybody's hotels, anything. It's January 2026. They don't work yet. There's way too many edge cases, too many problems, too many errors...
\[01:09:58.01\] They are writing code and they are summarizing text. And maybe they're helping out with your Grafana stuff, but that's code. And that's kind of where it's at right now. Like, they're all just demos. And so I don't think it's going to move as fast as "I should design my website agent-first today." I do think eventually you do. I just think that the timing is wrong.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. Yeah, I think the thing is the speed of change is increasing as well, as more and more people are AI accelerated with their work... So I do think things are going to change much more quickly than they ever have before. And things have changed quickly before, but... Yeah, look at Cursor, OpenCode, Zed, Claude Code, all these AI now enabled things that a lot of their UIs are shifted so that they're agent-first experiences now. The code is kind of an afterthought that you review once you've got it kind of going. It is quite interesting.
I do think there are questions about what that's going to mean, but there's no doubt in my mind that it's an enormous acceleration of human productivity, and that's why I'm on the side of "Yes, let's use AI and let's use it for good." And we need to solve all those challenges around energy, and the climate, and some of the bad things it can do, and some of the way that it's quite greedy with taking knowledge from people without kind of giving them credit, and things like this. There's a lot of problems with it. But once you've seen -- like, we felt it building these products we're building, and also because they themselves are the same kind of thing. Grafana Assistant is basically like Cursor for Grafana. The productivity boost, just the amount of people that that's enabled is significant. So it's not just a fad thing. I also hate to say that.
Jerod Santo
I agree with you directionally as well, and I think Adam does as well. My only pushback is on the fact that we are in the perfect -- we're like the Goldilocks case for agents, which is software and digital creation. And the rest of the world doesn't do that. Obviously it touches everything, but they do all kinds of other stuff that agents have no ability to do yet. And so that will take time. I think it's coming. I think it's coming.
Mat Ryer
It's true.
Jerod Santo
And we just look at everything through this Cursor and Claude Code rose-colored glasses, because it's amazing for us, but it's not amazing for most other industries yet.
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
Maybe law is the other one where it's really making moves, because again, that's so formal... And then everything else is just sloppy at this point.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, but we are at the forefront, usually, of change.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, totally.
Mat Ryer
Technology has been the driver of it. So it makes sense that we would see it first.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
We then have to build it for the rest of them. That's our jobs.
Jerod Santo
Right. And the nice thing is, and the accelerating thing, like you said, is the fact that we are the builders. We're moving faster than we were before, and so you can build faster. Okay. Another one... What else caught your guy's eyes or ears?
Mat Ryer
Yeah, the "Businesses pay more for AI than human labor." That is one of those predictions, isn't it?
Jerod Santo
It is.
Mat Ryer
Does that mean that we've become the cheap choice again? We can get our jobs back.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] I don't think that's how it works. I think that will be the case in the case of, again, software workers. I've seen a lot of the budgets exploding, and I think that at a certain point one engineer plus an engineer's equivalent of agentic coding is probably better than two engineers. I don't know exactly when that flips; again, is it this year or next year...? But I could see it happening. Adam?
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:13:39.11\] I was just reading it to get more of the context of Tom's perspective here... I'm going to read it just because it gives me some context. I haven't formulated a thought yet, so this is kind of a delay. "This has already happened with consumers. Waymo rides cost 31% more than Uber on average, yet demand keeps growing. Riders prefer the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles. For rote business tasks, agents will command a similar premium as companies factoring in onboarding, recruiting, training, and management costs."
Jerod Santo
Oh, so that's not talking about budgets, it's talking about per capita.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, it's just like, you're going to pay -- maybe if you had a choice between the human doing the work and the AI doing the work, you'd pay more for the agent doing it because of the perceived safety and reliability, if that Waymo option translates there.
Jerod Santo
Personally, I chose the other way when I was in Phoenix, because I wanted to try a Waymo, because - of course... But I'm cheap, and so I looked at Uber, and I looked at Waymo, and it was like an extra $12 to go to the same place. And I'm like "I'm just taking the Uber." But I can see where there are circumstances... For instance, if I'm sending my children with -- I would trust a Waymo where I wouldn't trust a random Uber driver with children, for instance. I can see where parents might prefer it. I can see where over time it becomes more safe, especially if you're in an area you're not used to... Not just driving safe, but like, this person could drive off in \[unintelligible 01:15:10.19\] I can see that. So while I did make the opposite choice the one time, I could certainly see where I would make the choice to pay more for the robot, because I don't trust the humans.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. See, that's just that right there.
Jerod Santo
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
If you read it headline only, you're thinking salary swap, right?
Jerod Santo
I thought budgets, yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, that's where I was torn. I was like "What is the true context here?" Again, context. Yeah, I'm torn on that one. I think in the case of a Waymo - let's just use this as an example. I'm in the vehicle. My life is literally on the line. Do I pay 12 bucks more for the assumed - and I suppose if data shows the reliability and safety is higher over a trend of time... Then I would pay more, every single time, because my life is literally priceless. And if I can't be here, then I can't even care about spending more money. So in that case, I'd probably spend more every single time on a Waymo if the data - and it wasn't smeared or tainted in any sort of way... If the data was true, and over time Uber was less safe, while Waymo was more safe... Every single time. I'd pay -- I'd probably paid double, honestly, if I had to, if I knew that I was going to be more safe, and point A to point B would truly happen, and I have determinism in my trip. Every time. Yeah, for sure.
Mat Ryer
I'd pay double if it flew.
Adam Stacoviak
If it flew... \[laughs\]
Jerod Santo
Well, for sure.
Adam Stacoviak
I don't want to pay double, Waymo, but I'm just saying... Knowing the data and the choice, then I'm going to pay more for the thing that gives me more safety and security in a time where my life is literally on the line. In the case of a rote business task, maybe not so much.
Jerod Santo
You'd take it to like surgery; over time, robot surgeons will operate more precisely and correctly than humans will, because they don't have the margin of error, they didn't have a bad night, they aren't tired, etc.
Adam Stacoviak
We've all seen Prometheus. Not the Prometheus that you all wrangle over there at Grafana, but the Prometheus, the movie... What was her name? Shaw, I believe her last name, or her name was; something, Shaw.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. 512, her last name, wasn't it?
Adam Stacoviak
Maybe so... She had to hop in this thing at the end when she was giving birth to this alien, and then had to patch her up. She happily got in there, and was just like pushing all the buttons; every single button. Go back to the "It's all about the button" episode from the beginning of 2025. That was an amazing show.
Yeah, I got stuck in that moment there for a second, but... She happily pushed every single button possible to have the machine help her deliver this alien baby, and patch herself back up. And then she went and conquered the mission, right? If that's a -- science fiction is kind of predictive, in a way. If that's a version of our truth and our future... I mean, she's kind of already trusted the system, right? I mean, that's something I personally have said for almost 15 years now, "Trust the system, but verify." But verify. I think in the future if the data shows an AI assistant or an AI agent surgeon is better - I mean, I don't want to choose a machine over a human, but in those cases, if the data shows it, then it just makes sense. It just makes sense.
Mat Ryer
\[01:18:31.27\] It does, and I think that is where we're going. We are increasingly going to just be doing that more and more, for sure. So we do have to figure out how we deal with that change, because that is an enormous change. But I trusted the Waymo -- when I got in it in San Francisco, I trusted it immediately. And that's probably because I've been brought up on sci-fi films, Johnny Cab from Total Recall, where you get in, the guy spins around and... Yeah, there's the little robot boy, it takes you on a little journey. And the key thing about Waymo is you don't have to talk to anybody. You can just not talk to anyone.
Jerod Santo
It's awesome.
Mat Ryer
And that's worth $12, at least.
Adam Stacoviak
True.
Mat Ryer
Uber actually do give you an option in the UK. I don't know if you have this, but there's an Uber Comfort option. And this basically allows you to choose the music, and decide whether they talk to you or not. So you do pay extra for them to not talk to you.
Jerod Santo
Yeah, I saw that option in the Uber app. I didn't know that it costs extra. Maybe I just paid extra and didn't realize it. But I definitely said -- I think it's nice, because sometimes you feel like talking to somebody and you're like "Yeah, I'll have a conversation with a stranger." And other times you're like "No, I just got off an airplane. I want to sit in quiet and get to my place." And so it's cool that you can just pick, like "Yeah, don't talk to me."
Adam Stacoviak
Well, the other factors you're not thinking about, and maybe it's just not mentioned, is like the smell, right? Humans have habits, and they also have odors... And you know, you can be a smoker, you could be a not smoker... You could prefer certain scents in your car...
Jerod Santo
Right.
Adam Stacoviak
S-C-E-N-T-S, scents. Not just -- you know how to spell cents; the other cents. Forget it, y'all. You're smart people out there, listening to this podcast. I'm done trying to spell on a podcast. But yeah, I mean, how often do you get into that -- or you've got the music, right? You've got all these human nature things that you're like "You know what? I'd just kind of rather avoid a human in this moment."
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
That's a scary -- there's comfort in just saying that, and I'm smiling very big if you're listening on the actual audio pod... I'm kind of blushing, in a way, because I can't believe I'm even thinking like that. Like, "I'd rather have a ride without a human, if I had the choice, just..."
Mat Ryer
Yeah. I'll say it...
Adam Stacoviak
...because. But there's sometimes too many, like you said.
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] "I'll say it..."
Adam Stacoviak
There's times when I'm like "I'd love to -- I'm down with the humans." But I'm also down with the non-humans, because humans smell, and have just...
Mat Ryer
Opinions.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, all the things, you know? Opinions, habits, smells, music choices...
Mat Ryer
Yeah. But you see, the other thing about the self-driving taxis is you can have the night rider experience, I call; it's my new startup. Night rider. You go to bed -- you know, it's like a little hotel room that's on wheels... You get in, you sleep, you wake up in a different city. You then spend the day in that city, you sleep, the next day you're in another city. You're traveling while you sleep. It's the closest to teleportation we'll get, probably, because the EU keep ignoring all my letters... But I know how to do it.
Jerod Santo
This reminds me of Mat World. Isn't this how Mat World works?
Mat Ryer
Yeah, I think that was Mat World.
Jerod Santo
One of your inventions was basically the night rider car.
Mat Ryer
But they're building it. It would work.
Jerod Santo
For sure.
Mat Ryer
You'd feel bad asking a human to just drive for 12 hours to take you to Edinburgh.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah, you have to have empathy, right? By nature.
Jerod Santo
That's why I love Claude Code better than a junior dev, honestly... Because I just don't have to even give you any empathy, or anything. There's no affordances...
Adam Stacoviak
Well, there's some true psychology in that, too. It's not just personal preference. So don't feel bad for yourself. So if you're going to listen to this --
Jerod Santo
I don't feel bad.
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:22:09.07\] ...here's your escape hatch. It's mirror neurons. So you see this a lot in married couples... As they age, they tend to dress similar, look similar... They don't literally look similar down to the wire, so to speak, but there's mannerisms that sort of merge, and it's mirror neurons. Or when you're around somebody, the reason you have that empathy factor, or you begin to cry because somebody else is crying, is because your brain is literally wired to mirror neurons. It's called mirror neurons.
Jerod Santo
For sure.
Adam Stacoviak
It's a psychological fact.
Jerod Santo
It is brilliant.
Mat Ryer
People do end up looking similar, because they'll pull the same facial expressions.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. Like, I've got this frown I keep doing. I hate it. Gosh...
Mat Ryer
Yeah. So you're working -- I'm always doing this face, because my wife's always doing it... She looks better than that. But then my face changes --
Jerod Santo
Does she have the goatee as well?
Mat Ryer
She does, yeah... \[laughter\]
Jerod Santo
That's a mirror neuron for you...
Mat Ryer
No, she's just -- she's a woman. Yeah, that's when your neurons are mirroring too much.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. Too far. You need to get that checked.
Mat Ryer
It's too far. Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
Well, if you're around somebody, even -- and think about this, too... The next time you're around somebody and you're just standing there, having a conversation, if they cross their arms and moments later you cross your arms - guess what? Mirror neurons. Okay? That's how it works. You start mirroring somebody else just because that's just what we do as humans. I don't know how to describe it...
Jerod Santo
That's why I keep saying Dan-Tan. I mean, I never used to say Dan-Tan...
Adam Stacoviak
Dan-Tan... Alright, let's go Dan-Tan to my next place here... I'm going to change the subject. Let's see, there was two that stood out to me. One was the database access - patterns breaking things - and then vectors. These two stand out to me. Why does it stand out to you, Mat, since you're concurring?
Mat Ryer
We've already seen this... We are hammering our databases now. The agents can do queries a lot faster than humans can, and it can do more complex queries, and stuff... Now, we're lucky -- this is just the example at Grafana Labs. We're lucky because the teams --
Jerod Santo
Where Mat works.
Mat Ryer
Yeah, that's where I work. We are hiring. The teams are very good. The Loki team... I've never worked with engineers with that particular kind of speciality. They care about storage... Obviously, all the data formats are bespoke, that they have to invent; all the indexing, all the kind of complexity that they build to make these systems work really quickly... So they're up for the challenge. But we are hammering them... You know, we had the drill down apps last year that we did, where the UI is basically DDoSing, and we've made that even worse now with Assistant. So they have to adapt and change. And they're up for the challenge, but is everyone? Are some old data techniques or data techniques even going to change? Are we going to start changing how we store data, so that it's ready for agents indexed differently? Vector databases, I think as well plays into that big time. This is where you create a vector from some kind of content, a chunk of content, you put it into some multidimensional space, and then you can query that very quickly. And as long as it semantically means -- things that mean the same end up in the same area in this multidimensional space... So you know that this is roughly what you mean, the nearest thing to it.
Yeah, unbelievable... And that powers -- Cursor does this very well. The others have the same kind of thing. Indexing your codebase like that - Cursor makes it basically very quick if you ask a question about the codebase. It can answer it extremely quickly by just consulting its index that it's built. It used to grep all the time, and it would just take longer to go and grep everything to learn... And then it would end up filling its context window too much. Now it will use the vector database, it gets the answers right there, very quickly... And you really didn't feel that difference. And I think vector databases are going to be a massive new concern for 2026.
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:26:03.18\] Yeah, vector databases are interesting. I'm just barely scratching the surface thinking about some of them, but what do you do whenever -- you said the vector space that you operate in; those embeddings are created by, let's just say an algorithm. Maybe even an LLM, or a model, or something like that. And that model gets superseded, it becomes part of your architecture to kind of keep your original embeddings maybe, or maybe the original datasets you can re-embed quickly, to get maybe even better embeddings as that vector database gets used, and there's performance enhancements, there's new technologies... What do you think about that?
Mat Ryer
Yeah, I think -- so embeddings are different. There's some open source ones that you can use. There's also other models that do it. But they, so I could imagine there being new vector technology, which means you then want to re-index things, potentially.
Adam Stacoviak
Of course. If it gets better, sure.
Mat Ryer
But the in and out of it to the LLM is just "Here's a sort of search query", and it returns just results that match semantically. So that interface is probably quite safe to keep. But who knows? Different innovations could happen... One of the problems is like clustering --
Adam Stacoviak
It's like caching, right? Is it like caching, in a way? It's like a cache...
Mat Ryer
It's an index, yeah. It's an index that -- but it's an index that you can... To look it up, you're just doing simple geometry. Like, they're quite simple functions to actually find the answers. Because you do all the work at the time you generate in the embeddings, and things. That takes a lot of time and process to get. But reading it is very quick.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
But if you have lots of content, the more content you put in, then this vector space can get crowded. That's where you end up with problems where it's just -- it picks things that aren't relevant; you wouldn't consider it as relevant as other things. But it's all too tightly --
Adam Stacoviak
Which is when you would do a re-index or a re-embed, right? You would re-vectorize -- I'm not sure what the terminology is for these, because I'm just touching it a little bit here... But when the space gets crowded, you need to figure out a way to give distance, and give more meaning. Because the whole point is to create meaning, and create similarity in the vector space, but not have to stay there forever.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. So it might be like you would keep a vector of recent stuff. So you keep an index of the recent stuff, and that's what you're going to search, because that's in this domain, and that makes most sense. Maybe you also have an older one, that contains past things, and you should do multiple requests into this.
Adam Stacoviak
What about the database? What do we do there? Just better indexes? More vCPUs? What do you do? More RAM? Dedicated machines?
Mat Ryer
I think we're going to end up storing data differently, so that we store it so it's in a format that the LLM needs, which is going to be just natural language, in a lot of cases. There'll be some cases where it's that. What we do with the Assistant - just as another example, because it is on my mind a lot - is we have a smaller model...
Adam Stacoviak
So much Assistant talk. Grafana's Assistant...
Mat Ryer
Yes.
Adam Stacoviak
So hot right now. So hot.
Mat Ryer
So hot. Well, according to a big AI company, it's one of the best implementations they've ever seen.
Jerod Santo
Which model are you guys using?
Mat Ryer
We use Claude, Sonnet 4.5 at the moment, but we're excited about others when they get more affordable. But what we use - we use a smaller model to look at the data. So we use a -- so it'll make a query, but we can easily fill up the context window too much. So we take the data and give it to a different model and say -- you know, we taught it how to describe a graph, basically. "It's got a spike here, and then it dips." Or "It's flat, generally." And it describes it in natural language. And it's that that then gets fed back to the main agent. So the main agent - it's a bit like saying "Look at that graph for me and tell me what you see." And the agent will say --
Adam Stacoviak
\[01:30:08.18\] It describes it, yeah. "Describe the color green for me."
Mat Ryer
Very spiky... It'll just -- yeah. It's alright... It's trees.
Adam Stacoviak
That is interesting, how natural language has become the language of choice across these things. Like, even context is simple; just like, it describes it in words.
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
I like it because I can read it. Thank you. Till I can't read it, right?
Mat Ryer
That's what I mean. So the APIs actually being just like text that you can read is quite nice for humans as well. We don't really do that. We tend have to have a JSON API, or something... But it's open to interpretation.
Jerod Santo
Right.
Adam Stacoviak
So how we store data is going to change, and... Did you finish your thought? Or did I interrupt you and you didn't finish?
Mat Ryer
No, no. I think that's it. Yeah. I think vector databases are going to shine this year, and we'll have to see innovation there.
Adam Stacoviak
Is there any particular vector database or package or module that you're using in like maybe the Go world, that you want to give a shout-out to? What's got your fancy?
Mat Ryer
Well, we're basically building our own. Postgres does have the ability to store embeddings --
Adam Stacoviak
Pgvector?
Mat Ryer
Yeah... But you still need to decide how to generate the vectors, and that's a separate piece that you need to figure out. And that's very domain specific, right? The better you do that, the better your search results will be. So I don't know, we tend to -- I think when we did the Machine Box startup, we had the same thing, because it would do it with face detection. So it would look at the face, and it had a big model that was trained on loads of faces... We trimmed off the last layer - this is kind of a spoiler alert of how we did it. So instead of it giving you the answer of a person of the face, it gives you basically the vector. And then we have the spatial index, where we go and look up who the person is... Which allowed us to do one-shot learning, and also you could delete and forget things, because it's just editing it in an index.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
So we tended to do that stuff ourselves. It's not that complicated, but doing it at scale, and doing it nicely, redundantly, in horizontal scale, all that stuff... That's where we want services. But yeah, I think we'll see more of them coming out. I don't know loads of them... But yeah, pretty good.
Adam Stacoviak
Huh. Interesting. So build your own is where you're at.
Mat Ryer
At the moment. But also, don't. I mean, yeah, we are doing -- we tended to do that in the past. But that's because we weren't sure exactly the use cases, and we wanted flexibility to be able to innovate. So it's kind of worth us having our own thing. But I think once there's a -- there should be a service, an open source thing; there probably is. I don't know.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah. You're playing with Parquet... Parquette... How do you say that? How do you personally say that?
Mat Ryer
I say Parquet.
Adam Stacoviak
Parquet. Okay, cool. Do you play with Parquet at all?
Mat Ryer
Like running around on the streets, and that? Jumping over bins, and that. Yeah, run up the stairs backwards...
Adam Stacoviak
Hardcore Parquet, as you would say, Jerod, right?
Jerod Santo
That's right.
Mat Ryer
They do use that in Grafana Labs. I haven't used it myself, but that is used... And I don't know, I don't think that's a spoiler, or anything. I think that's known... Yeah, but no, I have no real experience with that.
Jerod Santo
Well, I have a prediction for 2026...
Mat Ryer
Oh, yeah?
Jerod Santo
It's a short-term prediction. I predict that Mat's going to get his guitar and sing us another song.
Adam Stacoviak
Oh, my gosh...
Mat Ryer
\[01:33:50.02\] How did you do that...?!
Jerod Santo
Oh, my goodness.
Mat Ryer
Oh, my goodness.
Jerod Santo
I'm intuitive.
Adam Stacoviak
Get your Parquet on.
Jerod Santo
Parkour. Parquet.
Mat Ryer
Happy with the key?
Jerod Santo
I love this key. What is that, C minor?
Mat Ryer
I don't know.
Adam Stacoviak
Where is -- what's his name? Knuth? The famous guy who's perfect?
Jerod Santo
Donald Knuth?
Adam Stacoviak
No, it's not Donald Knuth. Singer... Jeez.
Jerod Santo
Singer, songwriter? Toby Keith.
Adam Stacoviak
Charles --
Mat Ryer
Warren Buffett.
Adam Stacoviak
Gosh, I was so way off. Charlie Puth. Charlie Puth, my bad... \[laughs\]
Mat Ryer
That's the Margaritaville guy.
Adam Stacoviak
I've \[unintelligible 01:34:36.16\] your name.
Jerod Santo
Oh, yeah?
Adam Stacoviak
Charlie Puth, yeah.
Jerod Santo
Probably Neil Diamond.
Adam Stacoviak
Pitch perfect Knuth, according to Google, likely refers to singer Charlie Puth. That was an embedding right there. They vectorized that, because a lot of people just jack that one up. They're like "Listen, we're going to speed up this search, okay?"
Jerod Santo
Like, this is pretty close in vector space...
Adam Stacoviak
And we'll parquet that, and then vectorize that, and then boom. There you go, search result.
Jerod Santo
Alright, Mat --
Adam Stacoviak
Go ahead, Mat.
Jerod Santo
...tell us what you've got here.
Mat Ryer
Alright.
\[01:35:04.27\]
*I'm cheaper than an AI now, you're gonna hire me back... It turns out ChatGPT knows how to negotiate hard... And learn from the best lawyers, and everyone on Reddit with opinions. It turns out Opus 4.5 ate your lawyers for lunch... And it was just a simple prompt, and the response that they gave to the actual judge contained emoji...*
*I'm cheaper than AI now, you're gonna hire me back... Don't give all that money to the robots... Humans need money, too... So give some to me, please...*
Jerod Santo
Alright...!
Mat Ryer
Yeah, we've touched the whole range of AI subjects, and different musical subjects, in a way.
Jerod Santo
Way to bring it home, man. You brought it home.
Mat Ryer
Oh, cheers. I don't know what that means. Is that good?
Adam Stacoviak
That second line was a little iffy... But gee, you've rounded it off pretty good.
Mat Ryer
I appreciate the immediate review. I like to fail fast. Line two. I like it -- it's like a linter. It's like, "Error on line two." Adam is the linter. Musical linter.
Jerod Santo
I'll give you three stars, but I'll let you decide if it's between five or ten.
Mat Ryer
Well, I'll give you and your podcast two thumbs up...
Jerod Santo
\[laughs\] Nice!
Adam Stacoviak
Thank you.
Mat Ryer
...out of ten.
Jerod Santo
Oooh...
Mat Ryer
Ah...
Adam Stacoviak
I do want to give a shout-out to Tom, Tomas, Tung -- I'm sorry, dude...
Mat Ryer
Tomas?
Jerod Santo
Tom.
Adam Stacoviak
TheoryVC.com. I really do appreciate this post. I didn't think we would have such a great, I guess - somewhat great; mostly great - in a song, conversation from... Not against venture capitalists, but this is good. These are good predictions. Very well thought through.
Jerod Santo
Yeah. Good job, Tom.
Adam Stacoviak
And so maybe TheoryVC.com can be your friend, at least for some information. Follow him on LinkedIn, maybe. Who knows?
Mat Ryer
Maybe Tomash would like to invest in Changelog...
Adam Stacoviak
Jean Jay. All day.
Mat Ryer
Jerod Change has started a new company, doing distributed VCS... Put your source code in it, or don't. I don't care. It's that kind of thing.
Jerod Santo
I asked you not to do that.
Mat Ryer
I'm sorry. I can't help it. Would you like \[unintelligible 01:37:43.11\] I can't even do your voice, really. I need to meet you properly, and then I can do --
Jerod Santo
You do. You need to meet us properly.
Mat Ryer
I need to meet you properly.
Jerod Santo
It's never too late, man, as long as we're still both breathing.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Jerod Santo
It's all good.
Mat Ryer
So if you're not breathing, you don't want me to visit in hospital then.
Adam Stacoviak
It's never too late.
Jerod Santo
I might have to hold my breath when you get here, but...
Mat Ryer
Well, that's because it's been a long flight. You wouldn't have to if you were visited by a self-driving Mat...
Jerod Santo
You could sleep all the way over. You'd be refreshed when you get here.
Mat Ryer
That's true. Oh, it should have a shower in it as well. You press a button and it showers you.
Adam Stacoviak
Listen, I like your idea of how we'll travel in the future... I'm down for some version of that, honestly.
Jerod Santo
I love it.
Adam Stacoviak
I would love to teleport via a trip. I don't mind the time, because if I can use the time well, then I'm cool with the time. Because I'm going to use time anyways. I've got no choice, right? I've got no choice.
Jerod Santo
This guy uses time.
Mat Ryer
You don't just pause?
Jerod Santo
He uses it. Yeah. When given a choice, he uses it.
Mat Ryer
But sleeping... Sleeping and traveling, I do think is good. Have you ever fallen asleep on a long flight?
Jerod Santo
Yeah, because what else are you doing?
Mat Ryer
Exactly. You fall asleep on a long flight.
Jerod Santo
Beautiful.
Mat Ryer
I've done it. I did it last time I went to the United States.
Adam Stacoviak
We're working, man. I can slay some work over three hours and just be like "What?! Three hours?"
Mat Ryer
Yeah. You could broadcast from it. You could broadcast from your car.
Adam Stacoviak
One day.
Mat Ryer
Just fake background.
Adam Stacoviak
So if we go agent first, Jerod... Agent first web leads us to this world.
Jerod Santo
I like agent first travel. Let the agent travel for me, and then let me know how it went.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah.
Mat Ryer
Or you could just email it. You just email the agent. As an attachment.
Jerod Santo
And I'm gonna stay home. Mat, thanks so much for hanging out with us, again, kicking off 26 the right way, with you, and your guitar, and your accents... Even though you kept dissing me... I've still enjoyed it somehow. It's like I'm a masochist.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. Or I wasn't dissing you.
Adam Stacoviak
Yeah...
Mat Ryer
But I've had a great time. I've had a fantastic time. Welcome to 2026, everybody... What are we going to do? Let's do something good. There's a lot of kind of trouble going on... But there's a lot of us still -- we've got time on our hands. Let's do some good stuff.
Jerod Santo
Let's use it.
Mat Ryer
Yeah. Yeah, that's our remedy to it.
Adam Stacoviak
Use your time wisely, friendly.
Mat Ryer
Use your time...!
Adam Stacoviak
Thanks, Mat. It was awesome seeing you. Bye, friends.
Jerod Santo
Bye, friends. And Mat.
Adam Stacoviak
And Mat.
Outro
\[01:40:13.11\]
Adam Stacoviak
Can you share more about the Grafana Assistant architecture?
Jerod Santo
He would love to.
Mat Ryer
Yeah.
Adam Stacoviak
How much can you share, and what can you share? I'm really curious.
Mat Ryer
Oh, I'll tell you anything.
Jerod Santo
Ask him anything.
Mat Ryer
I'll get fired for this show...