Host: Okay, we're here in the AI engineer Europe podcast booth with Matt Pocock of AI Hero.

Matt Pocock: Hey man, how you doing? Good, man. It's nice to be in your neck of the woods for once.

Host: Yeah. You do a lot of SF stuff, but nice so nice that you come to London.

Matt Pocock: Yeah.

Host: How do we stack up versus your other London event experiences?

Matt Pocock: It's the worst I've ever been to.

Host: By far the worst. Absolutely astonishing. Astonishing location, great stuff.

Host: You and I first connected when you were about to start your sort of creator journey and your developer journey. You started total TypeScript, which did very well. And then now you're running AI Hero. You're just about to finish a Claude code course.

Matt Pocock: Yep. I run courses in two-week cohorts these days because AI moves so quickly. Hard to release a self-paced course and guarantee updates forever. And so yeah, on the last couple days of a two-week course. It's wonderful.

Host: Does that mean that the Claude code source leaked just as you started?

Matt Pocock: Yeah.

Host: How was that? What what what did what what did you

Matt Pocock: Well, I'm cursed, you see, because I did a course on AI SDK and it was based on AI SDK V4. On day two of the course, they announced AI SDK V5, right? A huge breaking change. Um and this time, I think day two of the course, they released the 1 million context window or maybe just before the course started. And yeah, now the Claude code source has leaked. But fortunately, the course is not really about Claude code. I noticed that when I was building it. It's mostly about engineering software fundamentals and that's I mean, that's the talk I'm giving here, too. It's kind of what I'm focused on now is going back to these old texts, figuring out what's good and translating that into the AI era.

Host: Yeah. So people can see the talk. You did a workshop as well. You're one of the I had three people do a double session where, you know, because you're a big London figure, I wanted to make sure that we have enough exposure to to to things. And I think often times conferences are afraid to double down on speakers. But I think I have a particular thesis that YouTubers make particularly good conference speakers because you speak all the time for a living. And

Host: I don't know. Do you do you cringe when I call you a YouTuber? Is that a vanity?

Matt Pocock: Right. I mean, like I mean, my agency is I'm a teacher, I really try there's a whole category of YouTubers that I don't really try to interact with or try to be, which is the pundit, right? I'm not I'm not a guy who's trying to predict the future. I'm just trying to teach You don't you don't change your favorite idea every two week two weeks. Exactly. Like some some other YouTubers. Exactly. I mean, that stuff does do really well,

Host: What are the fundamentals that you hold dearly to?

Matt Pocock: I mean, I'll kind of re- run my talk a little bit now, which is like

Host: >> little preview. People can find it on online.

Matt Pocock: The theory is that there's this idea that code doesn't matter anymore, right? We're in an era where you don't really need to think about the code or hold the code in mind when you're building applications because you can just use a description in English and use the AI as a kind of compiler to turn that into code. You don't need to care about the code, it's just a compile target. And I think that every time I tried that, every time I tried to ignore the code, I would just end up with a this terrible mess. And so in kind of trying to better the compiler and improve the compiler, I went back to the old classic text, you know, like extreme programming and pragmatic programmer and philosophy of software design and DDD, all that stuff. And what I found there was just, oh, I can just take these and just put them into my prompts, you know? And I started going deeper and going deeper and going deeper and realizing oh, okay, there's actually there's so much more here than I realized and that everything that we were doing for humans really works with AI, too. And actually keeping the code in mind and being really intentional about what you're building, not necessarily reviewing everything, but still keeping a sort of understanding of the architecture and the modules, especially, it really yields dividends because if you have a code base that's easy to change for humans, it's going to be easy for AI to change, too. And it's going to mean that you can work a lot faster because a code base that's difficult to change for humans is is going to be even worse for AI.

Host: Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the concept of a narrow waist. I don't know if you've heard about this thing.

Matt Pocock: It comes from old internet architecture philosophy. You've heard about maybe layer 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. The narrow waist is layers three and four, where basically TCP IP and HTTP have mostly dominated and there no other alternatives effectively apart from web sockets. Mhm. And I think introducing narrow waist in the code base allows you to contain slop, right? You can say, I don't care what goes on in here, but what goes in is defined by me, what goes out is defined by me. Do whatever you want inside.

Host: Yes. And so

Matt Pocock: some there's some equivalents of this in my mind of this and the former decompositions of MVC. People call it model view controller. Today I call it model view claw. I view this a lot in in terms of how I run AIE as well. AIE is now a nine-person business. Everyone has different parts of the elephant and I have to make sure that everyone sort of uh comes together and like produces a conference where nobody notices the the the the rough edges down under under the hood. And so part of it is yes, I I run the website. I run the speakers, I run the content. But everything has to flow from me down to, okay, well, what AV do you need? What hotels do you need? What you know, other other sort of accommodations do you need? And there's a huge coordination issue.

Host: It's just everywhere. And I don't even feel like it's really programming anymore. It's just systems in how you set up systems. Yeah.

Matt Pocock: This I mean, what you said there about the idea of having self-contained boxes within within any system actually, but let's use a code base as an example. It's a fascinating idea and John Osterhout in his book Philosophy of Software Design talks about this. It's this idea of deep modules basically, a large amount of functionality with a simple interface. Kind of ports and adapters, right? Like you have a port that talks to other ports, etc. And you're totally right in that when you have a code base or a system design like this, you can design the interface, be very intentional about that, and be a human sitting there and understanding it, but then delegate the implementation, delegate the stuff that's going on inside. And that's how I've used AI best for coding. I imagine for what you're doing, putting it into an org, that would work great, too.

Host: Yeah. I see it both ends, right? I I also, you know, consult for condition and Devin at a Goldman Sachs is very, very different when you have tens of thousands of engineers.

Matt Pocock: And it's a beautiful thing that to see. You mentioned domain-driven design, DDD. I am one of those people that I guess old enough to to have had that. We have actually a DDD talk yesterday or one of the workshops from IKEA. Do you think it's catching on? Do you think it's important enough that I should be featuring it more?

Host: I think it's a very appealing concept for architects and people who work with large systems. Most people will never have encountered it in their software journey if they started more recently. I don't know.

Matt Pocock: Yeah. It's a fascinating idea because what DDD is is a set of like I'm not like a DDD expert. This is something I'm encountering relatively new. But what you have with DDD is a set of building blocks and a set of practices that all fit together. And so you what you have there, because it's been going around so long, it's kind of in the latent space of these um uh these models already is if you say, you don't need to invent this whole new set of terms, you can just bolt on this framework, this system that's very, very flexible, very composable, and allows you to build systems in this way. And because of that, it's very attractive. And so using a pre-built kind of framework for talking to the model and having the model understand exactly what you're saying because it understands, that just feels right. And because it's so focused on um outputs already and aligning the code with language, that's what DDD is. Essentially, you're trying to kind of create a unified domain model so that the way I think about it now is that so that the AI and you are speaking the same language.

Host: That's so true. That is so, so useful.

Matt Pocock: So to make that concrete, I have a skill um I have a set of skills in mattpocock/skills, which got insanely popular. It has like 13,000 stars or something. And one of those skills is ubiquitous language skill. Ubiquitous language is essentially a concept where you create a document which essentially defines the terms of what you're talking about. And when you let's say you're a client and I'm a guy building a system for you, when I say um a mole, for instance, we might be talking about a health application where we're investigating moles or we might be talking about spies or something where we need to understand what a mole is in that context, you know? Or the animal.

Host: You keep the document you keep the skill

Matt Pocock: open? I keep I mean, it generates a markdown file that sits in my repo and I just keep that open, look at it all the time. So we're thinking along the same lines.

Host: And does it go in your agents.md Claude.md or is that literally just for your human reference?

Matt Pocock: I keep a reference to it in agents.md. I'm very nervous about putting too much in yeah. But it knows it's there if it needs to see anything, but mostly when it's doing searches within the repo, when it's exploring, it'll use those terms and search for those terms and the the document comes up.

Host: Yeah. Just just more broadly on AI trends, I I I think you have been really good at explaining and teaching things. How do you do what you do? Your your videos uh do so well.

Matt Pocock: I think the British accent doesn't hurt.

Host: Yeah.

Matt Pocock: >> [laughter] >> But I think you're also like you're normally amazing on Twitter. And like you know, as much as people say I'm good at it, I'm not compared to what you do.

Host: Well, I mean

Matt Pocock: I don't really understand it, first of all. What I do know is that I spent 6 years as a voice coach before I became a developer. And what I noticed when I became a developer is I would I would you know, I started from the bottom really. I was working as a junior going up to mid, senior, blah. And the ability to communicate always just felt like a ridiculous overpowered skill that I had in my locker that no one else had. And I think what I've chosen to do over the last couple of years is really narrow my focus. Again, I'm not trying to be a pundit, right? I'm just trying to teach stuff. And so that means I need to divide my time between learning the stuff and figuring out the right phrases to use about it. This is why again going back to these texts is so useful cuz I have all of these models now that I can use to explain things to people. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why I'm so good at it. Mostly I don't feel good at it. Mostly I feel like I just see the things to improve.

Host: >> maybe you can walk us through maybe the Cloud Code workshop or something else that you did. What goes into preparing something like that, right? Like what what is the research process and what do you throw out?

Matt Pocock: Yeah. Let's say we have an explore and exploit phase, right? Where where I'm figuring out what this workshop might look like. My most recent course took about 2 months to put together. It's about I don't know, 4 and 1/2 hours of very tightly edited video, but lots and lots of exercises, lots and lots of stuff in there, about 100 different units, let's say. So let's say you I figure out exact like I start from scratch. What would be interesting to show, what's interesting in this environment, what's what's my angle here? And I just make a ton of stuff inside an Obsidian vault. So tons of ideas, essentially a zettelkasten, if you've ever heard of that approach. And these loose notes then kind of sort of start coagulating into a plan. And I have actually a custom application that I've built for planning this stuff, too. So this means that I can then start seeing sections, start seeing groupings of information that I want to see. From there, I prioritize each individual lesson, work out how important it is to the running of the course. P1, P2, P3. I then record all the P1s mostly, and then that's the course, essentially. Cuz most loads of stuff gets left on the cutting room floor cuz I just can't fit it in or it has various concerns and things. So that approach and developing this idea that each lesson should only teach one thing, each lesson should depend and the dependencies between all the knowledge should be super clear, and you should always challenge people without overwhelming them. And this is I suppose just instincts I build up over a long time of doing this.

Host: Yeah. Do you feel any changes in how people learn? Because there's a lot of you can just ask a brock. You can ask ChatGPT. I don't know. This this is a I guess a more broader education concept, right? Of like do you give people more exercises?

Matt Pocock: You can teach people three things. You can teach them knowledge, and you do that through lectures, right? This is how things work, these are the terms. You can teach them skills. You this is how to do it. Try doing it with an interactive exercise. Or you can teach them wisdom. And wisdom is the hardest. How do you teach wisdom? For me, that's been doing discussions, small group discussions in workshops is kind of the recommended approach. But wisdom is something that is really hard to get. And actually working with AI is something you can can sort of get to wisdom a little bit by talking to AI. You've never really been able to able to have that with any kind of learning mechanism before, you know? Books are mostly knowledge-based. You know, there's a little bit of wisdom you can glean from them, but you've got to do a bit of work on your own to get there. But what I've noticed is the more I lean into the kind of AI experimental stuff, the more it actually turns people off my materials. I'm finding that actually a

Host: >> Give me the lectures, yes. Yeah, what

Matt Pocock: still works for most people today. Most people just still want to learn a traditional way, and I'm totally fine with this sort of The you know, back when there was the creator economy wave, Maven was all about the interactive discussions, and then it turns out that people just want lectures. And they they maybe a bit of homework, but a lot of them don't even do the homework.

Host: That's right.

Matt Pocock: >> [laughter] >> Yeah. And I So what you're saying is that I've arrived at the ultimate form factor, which is just just lectures.

Host: >> [laughter]

Matt Pocock: I mean, I I'm very careful with my stuff to really force people to do the work, essentially. Even in my TypeScript stuff, I would structure it so that people would have almost you'd essentially just be thrust into a problem and have to solve it on your own. I would give you the knowledge afterwards. And that approach has felt pretty good, really.

Host: Yeah. So yeah.

Matt Pocock: Something I've noticed when I started AI engineer, I was pretty conscious about it being 50% Python, 50% TypeScript. I would say that's changed. I think this year is the year that TypeScript overtook Python in the GitHub survey. And um I didn't really foresee that coming. I think that Python is somewhat more expressive, especially in useful in the back end. And TypeScript has the TypeScript dependency issues that we've always had in TypeScript. I don't know. I I think like do do you think TypeScript is winning? I mean, you you

Host: >> would be biased to say yes. >> Of course. And my echo chamber is 100% TypeScript. 100% TypeScript. And again, no punditry. I like I'm not a pundit. I

Matt Pocock: mean, what you have with TypeScript is this incredibly rich ecosystem of frameworks and tools and extraordinary And you have the

Host: Versel Next.js and the Cloudflare Next.js. Exactly, right? I'm not I'm I'm taking the piss. But you know, you you so you can't overlook TypeScript in any conversation, you know, when it comes to building applications. And that just seems like everyone who's building this stuff, everyone who's building chat applications, is mostly doing it. If you're concerned about UX, you're concerned about shipping great stuff, you're mostly doing it in TypeScript. At least, that's what I see.

Matt Pocock: Yeah, yeah. I I I think it could be that TypeScript is going to win AI engineering, and that's something that I haven't anticipated or seen or I don't even know how to sort of position around this. Because it it I think it really does mean a lot of different things for what frameworks I choose to promote or bet on in in in my line of work.

Host: Yeah, it is interesting. Any other topics in AI that you're particularly captivated by? You know, you're you're finishing up your Cloud Code exploration, what's next?

Matt Pocock: Well, I think this has been the most successful course I've ever done. So like for the last 18 months I've been trying to figure out my positioning, trying to work out where I fit. I even sort of That idea of sort of TypeScript coming and eating Python is something that I was betting on for a little bit. I even made a TypeScript eval's framework called Everlight.

Host: I I didn't see that, yeah.

Matt Pocock: Yeah, which is sort of stalled in its development and stuff. But you know, people are not really interested in eval's, you know, you like eval's are not sexy. Like no one's excited to do eval's these days, right?

Host: >> We have many many people who would disagree here.

Matt Pocock: >> [laughter] >> I mean, from everyone I've talked to in the content I produce on it, it doesn't go anywhere. At least people are not kind of into it yet, I think. Um in terms of where I'm going next, uh I think that I think that the coding agents kind of debate is sort of ending, really. Like they're mostly coagulating toward a similar approach, which is you know, Firebase systems, a simple set of tools. And I think I'm interested in expanding into that kind of area and looking at how to make a course that potentially like does all the agents at once, possibly. And sort of trying to build frameworks and build methods of uh you know, software factories that are kind of independent of the agent that you're using. So a kind of at. And I think that coming up for the next couple of maybe the next few months, let's say. I'm not a not a clairvoyant. That the inversion of control is going to be really important, where you put more control in the hands of the developer

Host: >> and less in the harness. Yeah. Um Oh. I thought the developer wants less control, not more. Is that not true?

Matt Pocock: I think there's a trade-off, right? Because if you're using Cloud Code, let's say, and until recently you couldn't see Cloud Code internals, right? You sort of had a there was a sense of a box around Cloud Code that you didn't need to look inside. And that's comforting, right? Because you just sort of go, "Okay, what what does the harness want me to do? Let's lean in its direction. Let's not worry too much about what's inside." And what you get is you get ease of use, but you lose observability. You lose the ability to kind of control what's going on and tweak what's going on. And there's that trade-off is really interesting to me because let's say we look at Pi instead, which is composed out of tiny little primitives that you totally build up from the ground. Now, what that means if you're able to use Pi really well is you have total control over the system and you can observe all the parts of the system. But then you have more stuff to maintain, stuff to care about, stuff that can go wrong, and it's all up to you. So that trade-off is something I'm interested in exploring next, for sure.

Host: Yeah, I think it's very interesting all the these these developments. I think the world needs more like teachers like yourself. I have been also asked to do more stuff like that on on my podcast, and a lot of people are trying to also just like get out get more productive with the AI. And I wonder how to do that well. I think you're obviously more focused on engineering and programming and software engineering. But there's a there's equivalents of like more generalists that want to know, okay, well, how do I live my life more efficiently just in general? How do I run my team and my company more efficiently?

Matt Pocock: Totally. It seems like Obsidian is like kind of winning there, weirdly.

Host: Mhm. They're four people.

Matt Pocock: >> [laughter] >> Really? They're really that small? Four people? Wow, I didn't know that. They they they recently posted a job for a fifth person and that thing got 9 million views because everyone was like, what do you mean you you you've done this with four people?

主持人: 真是太疯狂了。我从没听说过。哇。

Matt Pocock: 我不知道。这意味着我们现在作为软件工程师所做的事情，我们似乎比其他人都领先一步，因为我们能够在一个 AI 确实能产生高质量内容的领域工作。所以，我正在做的是，我正在与我的……我正在写我的技能集，我正在思考如何将它们抽出来，在我的日常生活中使用它们？例如，我从 Claude Code 中取出什么，然后放进……

主持人: 立即查看你的技能。

Matt Pocock: 是的，mattpocock/skills。其中有一个叫做“grill me”。它基本上只有三个……嗯，句子那么长。好吧。它基本上是让 AI 无情地采访你，对吧？直到你达成一个共同的想法。我相信每个人都……嗯……用过或用过这种技术。我意识到我在各种领域都需要这项技能。任何我想让 AI 与我保持一致的领域，我想达成一个共享的理解，我想让它……嗯，可能甚至……人为地……嗯，质疑它自己的假设，质疑我的假设，直到我们达成一个共享的设计理念。我用它来做各种各样的事情，生成文档，做很多很多这样的事情。所以我认为，我越是将它们分解成独立的、可组合的部分，它们在软件工程之外就越有用。

主持人: 是的。这就像 20 个问题游戏等等。

结论

Matt Pocock: 嗯，好了，这太棒了。很高兴能再次聊聊。我也想把 Lisp 的听众介绍给你。嗯，我认为解释 AI 和保持最新状态的工作永远不会结束。所以，嗯，很高兴有朋友……嗯……也从 JavaScript 转向了 AI。

主持人: 绝对。这是一段有趣的旅程。是的。今天还在继续。好的。

Matt Pocock: 谢谢你。很好。

主持人: [笑声]