From open source hits to OpenAI (Changelog Interviews #682)

What's up? Welcome back. This is the changelog. I'm Adam Stachowiak and today I'm joined by Max Wilber talking about the long road from open source to open AI. Max has shipped a ton of open source. He helped build Spectrum with the spec.fm crew, sold a GraphQL CDN after realizing he captured almost the entire market. He helped Shopify ship Horizon in six months. And now he works on the ChatGPT plugin directory and the app platform. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at Fly.io. That is the home of changelog.com. Learn more 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 dev rel 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.

OK, 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 we get our dependencies? Are we getting them from public? Are we getting them from private repositories? But there's also the security and the supply chain aspect of this. When you have local machines out there, look at like the Shai Halud, you know, that virus that went out not long ago. This was a compromise of the NPM public repositories. They went and downloaded things. NPM did what it did. Next thing you know, you're compromised. But when you use something