Bret Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…holes there are. And I do think that when you're making a mission critical software system, I don't think it should be English language prompts. I think that is silly because you want the precision of a a programming language. My point was less about that and more about if the actual act of authoring it, like if you. I'll think of some embedded systems do use formal verification. I know it's very common in like security protocols now so that you can, because the importance of correctness is so great. My intellectual exercise is like, why not do that for all software? I mean, probably that's silly just literally to do what we literally do for. These low level security protocols, but the only reason we don't is because it's hard and tedious and hard and tedious are no longer factors. So, like, if I could, I mean, [00:52:00] just think of, like, the silliest app on your phone right now, the idea that that app should be, like, formally verified for its correctness feels laughable right now because, like, God, why would you spend the time on it? But if it's zero costs, like, yeah, I guess so. I mean, it never crashed. That's probably good. You know, why not? I just want to, like, set our bars really high. Like. We should make, software has been amazing. Like there's a Mark Andreessen blog post, software is eating the world. And you know, our whole life is, is mediated digitally. And that's just increasing with AI. And now we'll have our personal agents talking to the agents on the CRO platform and it's agents all the way down, you know, our core infrastructure is running on these digital systems. We now have like, and we've had a shortage of software developers for my entire life. And as a consequence, you know if you look, remember like health care, got healthcare. gov that fiasco security vulnerabilities leading to state actors getting access to critical infrastructure. I'm like. We now have like created this like amazing system that can [00:53:00] like, we can fix this, you know, and I, I just want to, I'm both excited about the productivity gains in the economy, but I just think as software engineers, we should be bolder. Like we should have aspirations to fix these systems so that like in general, as you said, as precise as we want to be in the specification of the system. We can make it work correctly now, and I'm being a little bit hand wavy, and I think we need some systems. I think that's where we should set the bar, especially when so much of our life depends on this critical digital infrastructure. So I'm I'm just like super optimistic about it. But actually, let's go to what you said for a second, which is correct. Specifications. I think this is the most interesting part of A. I. Agents broadly, which is that most specifications are incomplete. So let's go back to our product engineering discussions. s correct. Specifications. I think this is the most interesting part of A. I. Agents broadly, which is that most specifications are incomplete. So let's go back to our product engineering discussions. You're like, okay, here's a P. R. D. Product requirements document and there's it's really detailed mockups and this like when you click this button, it does this and it's like 100 percent you can think of a missing requirement that [00:54:00] document. Let's say you click this button And the internet goes out, what do you do? I don't know if that's in the PRD. It probably isn't, you know, there's, there's always going to be something because like humans are complicated. Right. So what ends up happening is like, I don't know if you can measure it, like what percentage of a product's actual functionality is determined by its code versus the specification, like for a traditional product, Oh, 95%. I mean, a little bit, but a lot of it. So like. Code is the specification. It's actually why if you just look at the history of technology, why open source has won out over specifications, like, you know, for a long time, there was a W3C working group on the HTML specification and then, you know, once web kit became prevalent. The internet evolved a lot faster and it's not the expense of the standards organizations. It just turns out having a committee of people argue is like a lot less efficient than someone checking in code and then all of a sudden you had vector graphics and you had like [00:55:00] all this really cool stuff that, you know, someone who, in the Google maps days, a guy like, God, that would have made my life easier. You know, it's like. SVG support, life would have been a breeze. Try drawing a driving directions line without vector graphics. And so, you know, in general, I think we've gone from these protocols defined in a document to basically open source code that becomes an implicit standard, like systems calls and Linux, like. There is a specification. There is post X as a standard, but like the Colonel is the like, that's what people write against and it's both the documented behavior and all of the undocumented behaviors as well for better for worse. And it's why, you know, Linus and others are so adamant about things like binary compatibility and all that, like this stuff matters. So one of the things that I really think about is like working with agents broadly is how do you, it's. I don't want to say it's easy to specify the guardrails, you know, [00:56:00] but what about all those unspecified behaviors? So so much of like being a software engineer is like, you come to the point where you're like the internet's out and you get back the error code from the call and you got to do something with it. And you know, what percent of the time do you just be like. Yeah, I'm going to do this because it seems reasonable. And what percentage of time do you like write a slack to your PM and be like, what do I do in this case? It's probably more the former than the latter. Otherwise it'd be really fricking inefficient to write software.…

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