Laura Burkhauser: preference

Transcript context

…I think the main thing they could learn is just like that you could do this at all. Not necessarily the quality with which I've with which I've done it so far. But. Okay, so this is, I think this is really interesting, and it does kind of get at, in some ways, some of the biggest questions about the future of software and even just the future of knowledge, or how is all this going to work? I, so as an early user of the Descript API and the Underlord API is really the core of that, I think it's a really interesting pattern that you guys have gone with so far where the tool is smart, right? It is, I am not, with the Descript API, I am not even afforded the ability to do like very specific, fully deterministic edits to a project. Instead, like I'm prompting Underlord and it's doing the thing. And so I can prompt it very specifically, but there's always this kind of translation layer. It works pretty well in what I've experienced so far. I'm new to it like everyone else. And I think this is kind of, in one way, like the only way maybe it feels like for software companies to have any sort of defensibility because you got to have some smarts inside your kind of periphery, right? That seems like it's got to be a core principle. At the same time, there are times where I'm like, I just kind of want to make sure I'm doing exactly what I want to do. And then there's also personalization, like my Claude code universe is ever growing and has tremendous amounts of context and access to every podcast I've done and also ones where I've guested, where it's not even in my Descript account, it just has like a broader world of and broader view of me. So how do you see that? And then I'm also thinking Finn too, I'm sure you've been following this pretty closely, like they have opened up, Intercom has opened up their customer service model to other companies to build their own, you know, competitors to Finn using the same intelligence. Benedict Evans, all software revolutions are either bundling or unbundling. What are you, how do you think this is all going to get bundled or unbundled or rebundled? Where are the lines going to get drawn? Where should personalization live? Like, where is all this going? Please de-confuse me as much as possible. Yeah, I can't. And I think anyone who tells you that they can is lying to you, probably for self-satisfying reasons. But what I would say is, I think that Descript currently, and my job is to make sure for the foreseeable future can give you a better experience if you are using Underlord and all of the context that we have about you in Descript. And it's just going to get more and more powerful as we build in personalization and drive level understanding. And so I think that is likely to be the primary way that you do video editing within Descript. Because we just, if you do it that way, not only do we think because of the way that the agent coordinates within Descript and understands the capital D, capital M Descript model and how everything in the app is set up, like we have important context in the Underlord layer where you're just going to have a better time than if you're asking Claude to coordinate across a bunch of tools. But the other thing that gets you is like if you're doing everything in Descript and that guarantees that when which for most people will be true, you inevitably need to go in and do the last 10% yourself before you're really comfortable hitting publish. You're going to be able to go into Descript and we will have access to all of the discrete things that have been done so that you can undo them, change them. They're not just flat files that have sort of been put in there and it's like, do you want to edit this thing that's fundamentally uneditable? And you're like, no, this isn't helpful. So I think like that's our vision. However, we do think that it is important to break out some of our tools and make them generally accessible. Things like the transcript like ought to just be callable in a deterministic way without having to go through Underlord. And there may be additional tools that it might be nice, like you don't need a ton of context to be successful with them, where I think we may want to think about distributing those just as deterministic tools and giving access to Claude. But when it comes to like really orchestrating like multiple types of media, doing visual edits, setting things up like a layout, like things like that, I just generally think you're going to have a better time. That's true today and because of all of the work that we're doing with the agent, I think is going to be true long into the future. Yeah. Yeah. I like the framework of my job is to make sure you have a better time using our thing than using Claude code. That is going to be a, that's going to be a challenge.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.