Howie Liu: belief

Transcript context

…Let me follow that thread. So if you go to Airtable.com today, it looks like basically all the other AI app building sites. Now it's just tell me what you want to build. Thoughts on that, as just a thing everyone's starting to do is there... what do you think comes next? Is this... Is it working well? There's clearly an incredible magic to vibe coding and app building with AI. And this is actually a prime illustration in my view of that concept we talked about a second ago, which is as capabilities of these underlying models evolve, the form factor in the product UX also needs to evolve with it. And so the earliest models, like the kind of original ChatGPT, like GPT-3.5 kind of era models were not nearly as smart as the current models. And so you couldn't really ask it to one shot a more complicated chunk of code, or certainly not like a full stack app, and expect it to work. And so the right form factor for leveraging those models in a software creation context was GitHub Copilot, right. It's like auto-complete a few lines of code at a time. But you couldn't chat to it and tell it, "Build me this entire app from scratch." And I think that as the models got better and better, you saw that the new form factors emerge. I think Cursor did a great job of being an early pioneer of this more age agentic way of leveraging the models to do more complex things and generate more larger chunks of code. And now with Composer, you can literally just go into Cursor and build an app from scratch, build me a 3D shooter game from scratch, and just watch it go and create all the files and fill out each file, and then the thing actually runs some of the time. And so to me, this is where the world is going. The models are clearly getting smarter. And if you think about the original vision of Airtable, it was always about democratizing software creation. We just strongly believed that the number of people who use apps far outweighs the number of people who can actually build their own or manipulate apps and harness custom software to their advantage. That sounds very familiar, very familiar these days.…

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