Forking Cal.com to closed source (Changelog Interviews #685)

What's up, friends? Welcome back. This is The Change Log. What if the majority of open source repos out there, they're already compromised and we just don't know it yet? That is the unsettling theory Pierre Richelson, co-founder of Cow.com, brings to this podcast this week. We dig into how AI has flattened the knowledge graph so a 16 year old can vibe hack a power station as easily as their mom can vibe code an iOS app. Why the reporting culture that has kept open source safe and secure all these years is collapsing. under the AI-generated noise, slop, whatever you want to call it. Count.com's move to fork its own code base and take the sensitive parts private, and the eye-opening reality that shipping $1 of AI tokens for pennies on a dollar, that is now a common startup business model, Lots going on, lots changing. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly.io. Your agents, they need computers. My agents, they need computers. We host everything we do on fly.io. And you should too. Check them out at fly.io. Okay, let's do this. Well, friends, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Coder.com, secure environments where developers and agents work in parallel. And I'm joined by Nicky Pike, field CTO for Coder. Nicky, what is a field CTO?

So I get that question a lot and it's, you know, half the people understand it, half the people don't. So a field CTO, I describe it very simply as we're DevRel for the C-suite. So we provide a bridge between the customer voice, between the C-suite and the managers and the leadership teams of our customers back into our product. And then we go through and we help enable our teams to have the same message to make sure that the message is correct and that we're building on something that people actually want, not just something that we think they want.

okay so we're taking the laptop away from the developer not really though we're putting them in a cloud development environment a secure environment where they can work with their agents in parallel these are blessed environments what's wrong with the laptop

the laptop is the is the trap here and not only because the fact that it could be stolen you could lose it it breaks and you're out of work while you're waiting for a new one but there's also just the consistency that you got

there

we all know developers developers are going to be looking for some of the latest and greatest and if you're not really controlling how they get out

there

That's where you get this. It works on my machine. It doesn't work in production. It doesn't work anywhere else because you don't have that consistency. You don't have that ability to really

standardize what that environment looks like.

And this is a problem not only for new people coming in. You know, the onboarding statement is average, I think, is like four to five weeks for a new employee to really get their local laptop set up and ready to start doing their first time of code. And, you know, the time to first commit is a metric that almost everybody knows. And the reason they can't do that is because there's a lot of tribal knowledge out there. They got to go talk to other developers. What are we using? Where do