You Can't Kill Chrome

oh oh i heard that oh i heard that uh welcome to comfort zone a podcast all about pushing your hosts well outside of their comfort zone i'm christopher lawley each week normally i'm joined by two incredible co-hosts but this week i'm not sure if riverside caught the pop or not but apparently it's just two old men this week because we'd be creaking and popping yeah uh i made it 108 good episodes without injuring myself while podcasting. And I can't tell if that felt that hurt good or hurt bad.

Well, hopefully the MacStories health insurance plan covers it. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. I, I felt that I, I really hope Riverside caught that and I can leave it in the edit, but if it didn't, that was a, that was a pop and I felt it. Anyways, We have a show to do, and it's not about our creaking, aging bodies. But we got some tiny topics. Let's do them. Yes. The first one is... Should we skip them?

There's nothing big in here, right? There's nothing we need to talk about. I mean, we can. Like, whatever. Okay, let's see what we got. Let's see what we got. Anything interesting, Chris? Let's see here. Let me... I don't have my reading glasses, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to read this. Let's see here. Niléane is screaming at us right now. I believe this first one says Parchment is live. Oh, that's me. Yes, my app. By the time you are listening to this, Parchment is live. At the time of recording, the pre-order is live.

But it'll be out the day before this episode comes out. So, yes, Parchment is live. It's my app. I spent the last two weeks talking about it, so I won't bore you guys again. But if it sounded interesting to you, it is live. It is a flat $5. no subscription no in-app purchase no tracking data none of that stuff it's just there and i'm really proud of it it the actual shipping version should be 1.0.1 because i found um well i'll get

to it in my main topic but yeah it'll it'll be um pretty cool so yeah uh parchment is live i'm pretty excited congratulations thank you it's very exciting when a new one goes out yeah i know i'm really excited like i feel really proud of myself like like kind of like when i first started releasing videos on youtube like you put out a video and i felt very proud of myself for just putting one out and kind of have that feeling again with this so i mean i'm excited that's great congratulations thank you i hope it makes you a millionaire and so you don't leave this podcast but you just have

to worry about this podcast your whole life can be comfort zone look if i become a millionaire I will say we're we are hiring an editor and I will pay for oh yeah that would actually be a great way to uh use the million dollars like like editor that takes care of like all the the post-production stuff so you and I don't have anything to do anymore that would be cool that would sometimes yeah I see these like celebrity podcasters and they just walk into a room they talk for an hour or two or four and then when they then they're done and they just come back a

week later and do it again and they don't worry about anything imagine having a team like that behind you hot take that's not real podcasting if you're not sweating if you're not dealing with css or the uh the content management system or any of that stuff you're not real podcasting if you're not logging into a libsyn dashboard and battling the user interface are you a real podcaster and wondering if that scheduled button is going to release something too early break embargo end up getting you sued. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Anyways. What are you even doing? Anyways, yeah.

So Parchment is live. And yeah, go check it out, please. I would love it. But also understand if it's not for you, too. Totally get it. All right. I, okay. We have something else in there. What? Are we doing a podcast in a podcast? I might have put something in the tiny topics that requires some intro music. The browser podcast. Editor Chris, because my soundboard isn't set up for it at the moment. Oh, okay. Okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Okay, so it's playing right now then. So a whole bunch of stuff happened this week, and I'll get into it in my main topic. But I just wanted to say Atlas, the OpenAI ChatGPT browser, is dead. They killed it. And with that, I think, is the nail in the coffin for agentic browsers. I think that's what you said. Did you say that in our group chat? I think you said that. Did you say that or did Federico say that to me? I had two group chats popping off during the chat GPT stuff. And I don't remember who said what.

Somebody I talked to yesterday said this is the nail in the coffin for agentic browsers. And I agree because stuff like Chrome and even Safari in the developer preview right now, but it'll come to main Safari later on, has MCP. And that just allows any agent to control the browser, not a specific agent that is built, baked into that browser. So, yeah. Yeah. This is one I got wrong. I was convinced that after all this time of Chrome being utterly dominant every single place that's available, that the only person or the only company who could come take the crown to get people to shift browsers.

Because people used to like we had different kings of the hill for a while. Like there was like I'm not going to go all the way to the beginning of time, but there was like Netscape. And then Internet Explorer was you're not going to believe this. Internet Explorer was great for a while. uh and then firefox came and then people went to chrome and chrome has been like the browser for a long time 20 years something like that 20 2007 something like that like like and like the

thing that made chrome i this is just some fun internet history i don't know if you know this or not but the thing that made chrome so great was the fact that it did updates to the browser in the background and now they actually built that the chrome team had built that feature before they had actually built the browser window like because like firefox you would open up firefox and you get this pop-up and be like oh there's a new update you need to click and then you'd have to like install the update and wait for it to install and then you could start doing your browsing

and with chrome it would just install in the background and you'd open it and be like hey it's up to date it was also and it must be said and this is probably my most controversial browser their opinion that when Internet Explorer was, when people started to move to Firefox, it was because Internet Explorer started to really suck and people hated it. And then Firefox started to suck and people hated it. And Chrome, again, had these nice updates. It was way faster. It was way nicer to use. And, you know, for most people, they don't hate Chrome. So it's not driving people away.

I really thought chat GPT or OpenAI had a chance to do something and turns out no Chrome still wins yeah yeah I don't know what to say to that other than yeah like you can't kill Chrome I guess until Chrome gets really bad I guess if you come for the king you better not miss anyway so that was the browser podcast I was your temporary host Christopher Lawley subbing in for Niléane

felt weird yeah it did i don't i didn't like it i didn't like it one bit anyways let's pull the ripcord on that uh this week on cozy zone which is our members only show uh you get a whole extra episode of us every single week um some of you may be like whoa that's too much of you no it's not it's really not in fact you should probably even have more of us you should be reading our blogs and our youtube channels and uh you should be uh reading niléane's mastodon feed all the time Anyways, this week on Cozy Zone, Niléane put together a quiz and tested Matt and I's knowledge on Star Wars.

And it doesn't go the way you think it does, but it also goes the way you think it does. And it was fantastic, but I also walked away really mad. I was enraged by this one. It was in a different universe where the coin flipped the other way and just the order changed. now you're giving it away i gotta believe i gotta believe that you can believe that i'm gonna believe that i'm gonna believe i'm just saying i had a chance i had a chance i don't think i don't

no you really didn't uh you really didn't we can go back to the tape but we can i don't know anyways i i'm the star wars guy we all know this look at all the star wars stuff behind me Matt Birchler do we need to do another quiz? no we can find somebody right now to do a quiz I can get Dan Moren on the call right now well maybe not right now but I can get Dan Moren on here and he can quiz us

I feel like he's the equivalent of my Star Wars nerdiness well yes that's fair you're all chasing me which is ultimately I know all nine movie titles I know most of the main characters names there's more than nine movies I know about Darth Plagueis he was wise I'm just saying alright let's get in the main show you're up first

what do you got for us this week what do you got going on over there you've been doing things you've been shaking babies and kissing hands I've been shaking babies and kissing hands absolutely uh i wanted to talk about my app i got jealous of chris talking about his app and i was like i need to get in on this uh but i wanted to talk about quick reads which is my read later service and i'm so happy with this app it is it is the read later app i have wanted

uh and i'm trying to make it the read later app everybody wants but uh even if it's not it's it's it's exactly what i want uh and it is just i've said this before i'll say it again it is so cool to be using a thing on a daily basis and be like i wish this worked a little better and then you can just do it that is the beauty of being having like being a developer who making your own things is like you can just you don't have to wish you don't have to hope someone you

don't have to plead your case with anybody you can just be like yeah be nice if that happened and it just happens it's uh it's very very cool but i wanted to talk about the updates i've been pushing to quick reads because there are some notable updates and if you checked it out when it launched and you were like oh it's missing these things that i really wanted uh those things are there now in most cases. So the number one thing people asked me for early days, especially in the

beta was tags. You're going to do tags. You're going to do good tags. You can have a page with tags. Can I organize my tags? Can I change my tags? Can I bulk update tags? Uh, and my answer was no, cause I hate tags, but then I realized I needed to add that. So I've added that, uh, that was there on day one or day two or three. Uh, but after that request was fulfilled, there's always a, there's always a new thing that everybody wants. The biggest request. Yes. The biggest request after that was newsletters. People wanted the ability to have their

newsletters delivered to quick reads and automatically appear in their reading queue. And now you can, uh, it's for pros pro tier only. Uh, so the basic tier doesn't get this one, but Pro does. And yeah, you just get a QuickReads email address. You can sign up for whatever you want with it. Every email is sent through the same article parser that parses it down, and you get this beautiful way to read your newsletters. And I should also say, if you ever start to get spammed

because these newsletters did bad things with your email, you have the ability to blow it away and start a new one. So you can do that as well. but this works really great it's really nice I've set it up for a couple of my newsletters and it is very nice to just have them magically appear in there I haven't had a chance to do it but this right here got me to or is going to get me to upgrade to the pro tier or the pro tier right? okay

these people in their tiers they gotta name them something else you know and it's like this is the pro and the plus and the max and the and the minimum and the subtraction and the division and the multiplication it's all of these like things all of these things but there's more uh i've also also added rss feeds so you can add your rss feeds it is not an rss reader. It's not meant to replace an RSS reader. But if there's some blogs you follow where you

just know you're going to save everything they write, maybe it's someone like a John Siracusa who writes one to three articles a year. You can just subscribe to his RSS feed and they'll just appear automatically in your reading queue. So great. Lovely. That has proven to be surprisingly popular uh since i launched it uh so yeah that's very nice and when you add a feed you can auto tag them so if you want to auto tag them as something i have mine tagged as rss so that when i see things

in my queue and i'm like how the heck did that get there i didn't save that i know where it came from so that's cool and then this is the one this one is probably out by the time this episode airs this is a new feature um so i you want to save links right you want to read them but you don't always want to read them sometimes they're just links to things you want to get back to i get this a lot when i come across like developer tools or like uh npm packages for things that i

may want to use in my projects and i don't want to read those pages they're github links or they're like developer showcase pages uh so they're not to read but i do want to save them so do i save them to reminders or like things or do i get like a raindrop subscription as well to go along what do i do and so i was like here's what you do uh quick reads either now or soon has or will have a to-dos section

where you can save links as to-dos rather than articles. Yes! And so this saves them. Structurally, they are just articles because for backwards compatibility and support for my own app to make sure I don't break things, they're just articles with different tags. You can see how it works in the API. But basically, they present on a second view in the interface, whether it's the app or the web interface. And they have nice

little circles that you can check off. There's a delightful animation that plays and everything. And it's just very fun. So I have a new to do section for saving the things that aren't for reading, but you do want to save for later. And you don't really know what to do with them. And with these, you can actually give them a title as well. So it'll automatically pull the website title. But if it's like, download this when you get home, you can title it, download this when you get home. So I'm very excited about that. And I don't think any of the other kind of read later apps out there have something like this.

So I think this is relatively new. You either have to kind of like force it and like it's kind of janky. or you have to use something like raindrop.io, which then you lose the read it later, nice layout section that you have in quick reads. So that's fantastic. Thank you. This is something that I wanted, but I didn't bother asking you because I didn't think you would do it. I didn't think I would do it either. I really wanted to focus on the reading experience. I think you asked about this early on. You were like,

is this going to be a full raindrop replacement? And I was like, no, I cannot do that. I cannot do, I'm not going to store archives of websites or anything for folks. That's going to eat up so much storage, and that's going to add cost, and it's a whole diversion. But I kept finding myself in the situation where I was saving these things that weren't articles, and I didn't know what the heck to do with them. And so I just solved my own problem, I guess. Nice. Is this a pro tier feature as well,

or is this uh all the tiers i think it's all the tiers all the tiers okay um and i'll rapid fire through the rest because the to-dos are the big newsletters rss and to-dos are kind of the big ones uh but i will not be stopped there are more features so i also added uh after there's a reader suggestion so user uh kind of emailed me and was like hey did you know that feedbin and some of these other like services let you do custom share options where you can just like they've got like

you're reading feedbin you have an article pulled up they have a native send to instapaper send to whatever but they also have a custom option and so if you have a url that you can pass in a url to you can add custom ones and so i created a save from anywhere feature which basically just lets you in a service like Feedbin, enter a quickreads URL with their URL variable as a part of it. And that will make it so that if you're in the Feedbin interface, you can have a native save to quickreads button. I should just reach out to them

and say you should add support for me. But in the meantime, you can just do that. And it works great. And you can use it in other places such as iOS shortcuts, which may become relevant later in this episode. there's been a few updates as well just quality of life things you can upload pdfs this was the thing i found myself needing and was like shoot i should add pdfs and so it does ocr on those and pulls all the text so it's searchable it does not do any sort of reflow of the the data in the pdf

you're just going to see the pdf but uh it's searchable and all that stuff so that's there uh i've updated social posts so from day one you've if you save a post from mastodon bluesky threads or even x uh it will parse them nicely and uh save them lovely i also do some logic there where if the post has a link in it i kind of assume you want to save the link that's what you are saving and so i'll actually save the link as well as a later thing nice that's a nice touch

yeah um you could there's also a way to connect your uh mastodon and bluesky account so when you bookmark a uh post it will automatically pull that in to your reading queue um and they also threads if there's threads with like 20 posts it turns them into just one article for you and the final feature that is for me is called preload audio because i listen to so many articles That's my favorite way to read. I read them in the web app and on the iOS app,

but I also like to listen while I'm walking the dog or doing a workout. And one of the issues you can run into is that it takes a while to generate audio. It doesn't take long to download it. It takes a while to generate it. And so I've tried to make it as low latency as possible by chunking the text and everything. So it's kind of doing a bunch of jobs in order. but that's still not enough sometimes and so what i've added is in the web ui only so far if you click on an article you can go to a preload audio option which will generate the audio for you

so that when you're ready to listen to it it's already there and you don't need to wait for the text to speech provider to generate it so these are all little things that i did for myself and uh i hope other people like but yeah quite a few things have been added to the service uh since then i didn't even talk about i redesigned the highlights page uh the tags are delightful um yeah urine reading has gotten more features slowly fantastic this this is everything i want

from like a read it later service like you like i'm gonna go cancel my raindrop.io and like i'm going all in on quick reads this is this is everything i want because i like raindrop.io but its app is not great. Like it is not a great app experience. I think they're much more focused on the web than they are like apps. And I miss having like a read it later style page where like the article is loaded in there and stuff like that. And I actually, I know when you originally launched this, I said I wasn't a big like text to speech blog person,

but I had an article the other day that I was, I was walking Riley and I was like, man, I would have loved to have been able to read this article while walking Riley. And I was like, wait a second. I could have. Yeah, there you go. It's a thing. Walking the dog. That is your podcast time. That is your text-to-speech time. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, she has all of her shots now, so I can finally start doing big walks with her and stuff. Except she's a golden retriever,

so when she gets to the point where she's done, She just stops and lays down, and I have to carry her the rest of the way. Yeah. And she's almost 40 pounds now. That's not fun. Mine does that, too, in the heat. But he's 11 pounds. A little easier. Yeah. Well, this is fantastic. Congratulations. This is some big updates here. I'm glad to see this stuff is here, and this is fantastic. Yeah.

And thank you for mentioning it when you were featured in Installer a few weeks ago. Yes. I definitely saw a bump after that, and then the newsletters and RSS feeds led to a second bump. So I guess if you give the people what they want, they will come. Yeah. I mean, I've basically implemented every feature request in Parchment, except Niléane's make the orange theme the default. Now that's just out of spite. I'm kidding, Niléane. I'm kidding. I do feel the people want the blue theme as the default. No one's written in to tell me otherwise.

so okay let me open up my alt account and uh get the feedback flowing all right all right well i have a classic all the small things uh topic for you i i got like a few like i got a bunch of little grab bag items uh and i'm rapid fire through some of these and then some of these i think we can we'll probably have a discussion on but the first is uh there was a final cut pro update uh was it this week no it was by the time you're listening to this it would have been last week okay whatever

it doesn't matter um i really get hung up on that like that really breaks my brain you really do i think you need to you need to just like eject this from your brain i can't really seems to break you i can't it's just yeah it breaks me i can't do anyways anyway there's a couple of new features in final cut that i think are really interesting there's now proper live captions so previously they had support for like closed captions, but it was like baked into the video. You couldn't change the font. You couldn't change anything about it. They were not good. Now they have proper live

captions that you see on like TikTok or Instagram or something like that, where it's going through and giving you proper captions. You can change the font. You can change the size. You can change the animation style. You can change the timing. You can change just about everything related to it. They're really good. They're on the Mac and the iPad, which I appreciate. A Mac-only feature is there's now auto-masking. So if you're color grading and you're like, hey, I'm filming a person and they're standing in front of a car,

but the person is lit correctly, but the car is not and the car is a little too dark. You can auto-mask the car now and you can light it up and it'll create a mask around that car for every single frame of that clip. So if the car is moving, that mask moves with it, which is really nice. Or if you want to do the person, the person moves with it. It's a really nice feature. That's something I know. I wish they would bring these features to the iPad as well. It really shows that Apple does think of the Final Cut Pro for the iPad as Final Cut Lite and not Final Cut Pro. Yeah.

It does. It kills me a little bit. It's like Final Cut Express. Back when there was Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express. That's actually a really good way of putting it, which is a bummer. But yeah. As someone who learned on Final Cut Express. Same. That's fine. You know, it's fine. But yeah. But that's really cool. The auto-caption thing is really, really nice. Because I remember I don't really have a use for that myself with the sort of stuff that I make.

like i was kind of interested in it and then when i saw how it was initially implemented where like you said it was just like here it is yeah it was closed captions as well like classic tv closed captions kind of thing yeah but now it's like the stylized stuff that you get in like those apps like like captions is that what yeah or there's some app everybody uses uh capcut capcut okay that's CapCut or the Instagram edits app or even like the TikTok app or something like that. Yeah. So yeah,

that's pretty. There's some other stuff in there as well. There's some logic changes. They're also baking Pixelmator Pro into the apps a little bit better so that way you can take a frame right from Final Cut and send it to Pixelmator Pro so you can do thumbnails and stuff like that. Kind of cool. Oh, interesting. Okay. The other big thing that happened this week is OpenAI released GPT 5.6. And this was kind of what I was talking about.

I was in a group chat with John and Federico yesterday, and we were playing around with it. And it's very impressive. Sorry, Niléane, we're going to talk about AI stuff for a bit. But it is insane. So there's three tiers of it now. There is Sol, Terra, and Luna. And I hate the names because I always have to stop and think about them for a second. But Sol is the Sun. Terra is Earth. Luna is the Moon. And so Sun is the biggest, most complex, like, goes the hardest one.

Terra is supposed to be about the same as GPT 5.5, but about half the cost. And Luna is supposed to be the fastest and cheapest model they've ever done, while still being pretty, like, pretty good. Like, it's pretty good. I have found myself just pretty much using Sol for development stuff and Luna for like everyday tasks and stuff like that. And like that seems to be a good balance so it doesn't eat up my usage. But going into it, I knew it was going to be released on Thursday. And I've been working on Parchment.

And I was like, okay, I want to test this. I want to see if it actually is that different from 5.5. So the morning 5.6 came out, before it was out, I prompted 5.5 with like this, like two paragraphs of like basically TLDR, find bugs, security, and performance issues. But like it was a little more detailed than that. And 5.5 came back with nothing. It was like, nope, you're good. I was like, wow, okay, that's weird, interesting. And I had been kind of doing that along the way throughout Parchment.

So it's not entirely like surprising, but I was a little surprised I didn't find anything. 5.6 came out I turned on Sol I turned it up to the maximum and it came back with 8 critical bugs and 8 performance bugs so I just let it go at it I let it fix those and then let me tell you something, the app feels so much snappier afterwards you might even think it's Safari but yeah I was very impressed with 5.6, hang on one second Sorry about that.

I knocked the power brick out that is keeping my camera on. Yeah. Keep that looked at. Yeah, that's a little important. I also took 5.6 and I pointed it at Balance Audio. Now, Balance Audio is the first native Mac app that I made. And because it was the first native Mac app that I made, I made a lot of mistakes with it as well. Because there was a lot of stuff I just didn't know. So I pointed it at it, and it basically came back and said,

yeah, this sucks. Let me fix this for you. It was just under 30 minutes. It was like 29 minutes and like 40-something seconds. And it basically rebuilt it. It went through like 2,400. It deleted 2,400 lines of code. No, I'm sorry. I got this backwards. It deleted 1,900 lines of code and added 2,400 lines of code. And it just completely cleaned up the app. And it is so much faster and so much smoother now. And is a much better native Mac citizen.

So I was very impressed with this. I've been burning through tokens like nobody's business. Luckily, they keep giving me resets. So I'm like, yay. But anyway, so I'm really impressed with 5.6. I think it's a really good model. I'm not some AI researcher or like influencer or something like that. I'm not going to sit here and tell you all the benchmarks and stuff like that. But for my use cases, it's very impressive. And I'm very impressed by it. That being said, OpenAI is still not a great company. And I don't like Sam Altman. So, yes, I'm very conflicted.

I have major issues with all of this stuff. And I don't know how to resolve that. I really don't. I can't bury my head in the sand from it. But I also am... I don't know. I don't know. I feel bad for using it but I'm still using it so I don't know I don't know nice well I have not used any of the new chat I don't use chat GPT almost ever so this is all weird to me although I heard they updated their Mac app and people

hate it I'm sure we'll get to that I think it is notable and interesting that they have adopted the opus sonnet haiku naming structure that anthropic has had for a while uh interesting um but i do think you hit on an interesting thing uh which is in a world where we lean heavily on these ai coding agents to help us uh make software

because we are so early in it and it changed and it is getting notably better and i think this is a thing that like if you use these chatbots as chatbots then they maybe feel like they're kind of not changing much and they're kind of just whatever it's been the same and honestly i think like the luna and like haiku models and even apple's like basically their on device model is good enough for a lot of things people do with AI, but these high-end models in coding tasks, specifically with coding harnesses like Claude Code, like OpenCode, like Codex, they're worlds better,

like remarkably better than they were a year ago and six months ago even. And so if you are experiencing that, you may be looking at other people who are like, what's the big deal? And be like what are you talking about it's enormous what these things can do now um and it's just i think we live in different realities where we're not using the same things but i digress um i'm going through some of this with my quick reviews app which was my first app i released a year and a half ago uh and that app was built with uh cursor and sonnet 3.5 oh geez so a lot of the stuff there

is it was a very different development process back then and like it was much more like write a function that does this oh god you crashed everything here's how to fix it like it was a very different world yeah like right now we're like i've had the same experience where i've like said here's the functionality here's what i needed to do and it will like look at the code base and like say okay here's how it works here's how i think it should work let's ask some clarifying questions and then it goes and works for an hour and a half and then it's done like it is very very different um but i am going through the quick reads or quick reviews uh source code and like figuring

out how to make it better and uh i'm doing this with fable 5 uh and it is it it is a very good partner in figuring out how to make uh this stuff better so i'm working on a 3.0 of that um because like you said uh it looks at the code and it's like whoa buddy what happened here uh it was functional and it worked and it's like it's fine but uh yeah now they can do much more and they can be cleaner um i don't know if you ever ran into this when um you've been building in codex one of

the things that was a huge issue like last year was you would like do all these coding changes and it would stick all the changes in one file so xcode would yell at you and say yes um what is what is this i can't uh um you know i can't do this i can't do this thing within a reasonable amount of time simplify the code or something yep yep yep um i got that all the time so that that's what happened with balance audio is when i because so balance audio i didn't write any code

for that like i didn't write i just i was like we're gonna let codex do its thing like it was a pretty simple app it like i talked about it's a front end for ffmpeg like it's not like it's there's really not much to it uh it wrote everything in a single dot swift file it put everything in it yeah and when i when i put 5.6 on that it went why is it like this okay hang on we're gonna fix this and that's that's a big thing that i did um one thing i do want to point out so i talked about how it found eight critical bugs and eight performance bugs in parchment um those were like

what it came back with was really niche stuff like it was very specific like workflow like if you do this this this and this okay the app is gonna crash or if you do this this this uh like it like one thing it found was like if you use the apple pencil and you draw and you draw over this area a certain amount of times it's gonna end up duplicating this thing and it's It's going to cause all these weird issues. It's something that I would have never been able to figure out on my own. I think Marco Arment just talked about how he pointed Claude at Overcast and was like, I've had these bugs for years.

I can't find them. And Claude came back and was like, yep, nope, found them. Here you go. Here's the fixes. Here's how you do it. So I think these are really great assistant tools. Parchment, for me, I still feel like I am the primary developer of Parchment, whereas Balance Audio, Codex was the primary developer. I feel like I'm the primary developer of Parchment, and Codex is my assistant here. And I think that's probably the healthy way of doing it, but I feel like you might disagree with me.

I don't disagree with you. I've had a thought that I feel stronger about, which is that all coding languages are abstractions. Like, at the end of the day, it's ones and zeros flipping back and forth. And we have, there's like, that's like binary. There's machine code that kind of tries to abstract it a little bit. There's like C, there's C++, there's Objective-C, there's Swift. Like all of these things are abstracting more and more of it away so that you can write more human, readable, easy to learn and understand code.

And I kind of think that even though it's non-deterministic, like working with these coding agents is kind of just a new level of abstraction on top of it. yeah like if you're if you're vibe coding where you just like have a chat window on like one side and you just have the web app loaded and you have no idea what's going on maybe that's not exactly the same thing but like i feel very much like a real regular developer when i'm working with these things yeah so for me like i have codex open but i also have xcode open and i i'm i'm working in both

um so i i i you know i i'm not trying to gatekeep or tell people what they are they're not i That's more just like kind of my gut feeling. Like, like I said, like balance audio. I don't feel like I'm the developer of it. I feel like I just natural language didn't put my way through that thing. Yeah. And that's fine because that wasn't, that's not an app that's going to be sold or like, like if you join my Patreon, you get access to it. But like, it's not something like it was, it was really just a tool for me because I had a problem.

I think my bigger thing is if you think this is not development, then you just don't think development exists anymore. Because I think this is what's going to. Yes. This is not, I think, a flash in the pan. I think this is what development looks like. Yes. It's just like when we move from punch cards. Like that was before our time. but like there was a time in human history where development meant you took paper and you punched

holes in the card yeah and that's that's that's how you told the computer what to do yeah it wasn't too long ago that ios developers uh had to manage their own memory and uh release it on like you know uh swift abstracts a ton as well um yeah i think uh i think we this i think this is a new era of of abstraction. And I will say another thing, one of the reasons why you are so like locked into codex and I'm so locked into Claude Code is that while the LLMs are randomizers, whatever, uh,

they are very consistent in how they behave. So I know when I enter something into Claude Code, I know what it's going to do. It's very dependable. And that, that was another reason I've talked about why I switched to codex a while ago, cause I was using Claude for a long time. But when I started doing development i felt like the way i spoke to codex it understood me better than the way i spoke to claude does that make any sense okay it makes total sense i i've used codex a couple times and i'm like what are you doing buddy that's not what i would do yeah so um yeah uh it's not that it's

worse like obviously five six especially is sounds like a great model but um yeah it's uh it's weird we live in interesting times yeah it is yeah um i do want to briefly chat about the new chat gpt app so they basically they took the codex app and the chat gpt app they um put them in a room they put on some wow wow wow wow wow music and then like nine months later out came this new chat gpt

app which is codex and chat gpt and one and people are having a field day over it i don't get it i freaking love it i love it i heard it makes the it makes the chat there so the chat is no the chat is there it's just it's um it's not the primary focus it's it's like a little popover window which i think makes total sense okay let's let's big picture this for a second google and apple are going to take the main user ai field like you're gonna have built in

be able to query AI stuff in your OS that you're using, whether you're using iOS, Mac OS, Android, the Chrome OS, or like whatever they're doing on Chromebooks or stuff over there. There is going to be system-level chatbots that you can just chat with and ask questions and get returns. So companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and stuff like that, they are going to lose that base right there of like the normal people of like hey, what are the restaurants around me?

I'm staying in this hotel. I need stuff that's in walking distance, that kind of stuff. They're going to lose that base right there. What they're going to keep is all the people that are focused on productivity and coding. So the fact that the app is shifting more towards the productivity and coding side thing, I think makes sense to me. Chat is still there. There's a keyboard shortcut. You can hit command option N and you can just type in, you can chat with it. It's great. It's still there. It's great for asking those one-off questions and things like that.

But basically, the way to think about it is your productivity and coding stuff is file first, and that's the kind of thing, whereas just asking chat questions is web first, so that's just kind of like off to the side a smaller thing. I love it. I think people just need to get used to it. I think the whole people don't like change, and they just like, what do you mean? I downloaded it and I'm like, this makes sense to me immediately. I get it. The one thing that's not there right now is the chat GPT projects feature.

Codex projects are there, but the chat GPT projects, which is also like cloud projects, those aren't there right now. But apparently somebody from OpenAI said those are coming. So, yeah. Interesting. Okay. Like I said, I haven't used it, but I have not heard a single person say they like it. Outside of developers. If you're a developer who used Codex already, it seems like you like it. But I guess the feeling I've gotten from folks is that, oh, you're making us all use the developer app now.

See, I have a feeling that the people that are just using ChatGPT, regular ChatGPT, are probably using it on the web and not using it in the app. Well, this is the thing as well. This is, I think we overestimate how many people use Mac apps. I have done so much user research over the years, And I am, I was, this was a thing that really shocked me. Everyone uses everything in Chrome. That's, that's what, that's kind of what I, like when I'm looking at this, I'm like, I'm like, I have a feeling a majority of the people, like they have user data.

They know what accounts are touching chat, GPT codex, touching both one or the other. Like they know. And I have a feeling there. They see that like, if you are just using chat, GPT, you're just using it in the web. but anyways we should probably move on to the challenge yes oh one thing really quick i mean i have one more thing in the document and i'm going to like 30 seconds on this there's going to be a link in the show notes to something called open knowledge this is a new text editor this is a

text editor that basically combines terminal together so think obsidian but also you have Claude code or codex in the terminal at the same time, all in the same window. So, for example, if you're using Obsidian, I pointed it at my Obsidian vault, I can sit there and write in all of my markdown text files, but also I can be like, hey, go through and summarize all of the features in iOS 27 about widgets, and it'll go through all of my notes, just the stuff in my vault, and it'll pull all that stuff, and it'll

come back with all of the widget features in iOS 27. Kind of cool if you're into that. And it's free, so check it out. Interesting. Yeah, I found it yesterday. I thought it was kind of interesting. But, yeah, we should get to the challenge. Oh, boy. So what was your challenge, Chris? My challenge was build a shortcut with only the feature describe a shortcut, which is an iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27 feature. Would you like to go first? I feel like I just did a lot of talking. So would you like to go first? I can go first.

uh it doesn't keep a history does it what do you mean doesn't uh like a history of what you asked it to do it doesn't look oh i don't think so so uh i have been partially successful and this might just be a beta issue it probably is so i have created a shortcut called save web page to standby quick reads whoa and it is a simple little shortcut that uses that new

save anywhere uh url i talked about that you can use in apps like feedbin and made it so made a shortcut that takes in a safari website it finds the url and it sends it over to quick reads now this is stupid because it is totally unnecessary uh the quick reads app has a share extension that just shares it and it works better than this so you should just use that but if for whatever reason you need uh i just wanted to see if it could do it like can it um understand what i'm asking it to do

and i know it can't use third-party apps yet so i was like what can i do that's just with the apple stuff uh and it worked uh it did a good job uh the only thing it didn't get right and even after i asked it a couple times to fix it it didn't so i just went in and fixed it myself uh it was against the challenge well here's well you'll you'll hear in a moment why it doesn't didn't matter uh the shortcut input they're like where you can select like what can like images videos uh it would

just always select all of them yeah i would not specify it would not let me specify uh just like web pages so i had to do that manually uh the ultimate problem and this might just be an ios 27 issue is that it never showed up as an option to share so i don't know uh what i did wrong but uh oh i probably need to do something to like say to show it in the share sheet that's probably what you might have to add the yeah because i think that's an action now okay

so i could not for the life of me figure out how to get this to show up in uh safari itself yeah i think that's i'll play around and see if i can get it to do it but uh that was the one thing that bummed me out is i actually oh show in the share sheet yeah it's just yeah yeah and if i do it now now it does show and it works i get the annoying pop-up that says would you like to allow this always allow which doesn't remember always allow nice okay it functions

so it works i did great i did cheat a little i guess all right so i did well okay so i started off was like okay i'm just gonna tell it so this was the thing at WWDC we were all trying to get it to do and we couldn't get it to do so I was like I'm gonna do it this time I'm on beta 3 I bet you I can do it I was trying to get it to make a clipboard manager uh even though on iOS and iPadOS you would still have to manually add stuff would not do it it would like nope out it would try like one of the times it was like I will save

your clipboard history to a notes document and then when you would try and go and get it it would it would come up with a little pop-up it said go into Apple Notes and look at this notes document and just copy it out of here. I'm like, no, this is not right. So that didn't work. So I was like, you know what? You know what other shortcut everyone tried to make when shortcuts first came out was a morning summary shortcut. Everyone had a morning summary shortcut, including this guy. So I was like, you know what? I'll get it to do it. And it did a really good job right off the first prompt of doing it. It pulled all the reminders that were due today,

all my calendar events, and the weather. I did follow up with it because what it did on the first go is it just put it all in like a giant word wall like it was just like one paragraph no line breaks no nothing it's like this is unreadable so i told it i was like okay put everything in a list form use emojis to break up the sections and stuff like that much more readable and then i also did follow up and told it to always include specific weather like the current temperature, high, low, and air quality, I believe. Yeah. And it's been working great ever since then.

I'm not going to use this because I have something in Codex that I use this for that's a lot more detailed and a lot more powerful. And that's the thing that kind of worries me about shortcuts is I have something in Codex that not only gives me all of this information, calendar events, reminders, weather, things like that it also goes through my email and finds important messages goes through the messages app finds important messages it goes through and finds like five to ten articles that from the last 24 hours it does a lot more that shortcuts just can't do and i'm like kind of worried

apple is behind the game on this no not not that they are they are behind the game i'm not worried that they might be. They are behind. Hmm. Well, nice. That's fun. Yeah. Did you cheat at all? No. No. I didn't. I literally would just do the follow-up and hit run, and I'd be like, okay, yeah, that worked. And I ran it a couple of times throughout the week. Okay. I actually am curious. I'm going to look at it. Let's look at it right now. We have a couple minutes, so let's look at it. I haven't looked at the editor,

so I've just been using the... Okay, so it starts with find calendar events, then does find reminder, get weather, get temperature, get high, get low, get air quality. Then it uses the Apple intelligence use cloud model option to basically summarize. That's interesting because it doesn't need to do that. It could have just put all that information in a text deal, a text action, and done that. It doesn't need to use that, but I guess that it does. Oh, okay, I see what it does.

So it says, basically, it uses the cloud model. It says, summarize my day based on calendar events, reminders, weather, current temperature. And then it says, please format the summary as an outline with headings. Use emojis to symbolize different sections. So that's funny. Because it does that, you could get different results every single time that you do that. I didn't take screenshots, so I don't know if I was getting different results. I wasn't paying that close of attention. I assumed it would have been using the text action and laying all that information out, but it doesn't. Interesting. But then the last one is show results.

So it shows that. All right. Hmm. Interesting. All right. Well, that was that challenge. What do you got for us to do this week? So my challenge is use one of your co-host's apps and make a feature suggestion. Ooh. Love this. Love this. Ideally one that'll make them a million dollars. can we tell Niléane to put in

Codex and Claude? No! tell Niléane to put in Grok and TinyStart a more cursed combination she's gonna be so mad oh boy oh I'm kidding I'm kidding I wouldn't do that I wouldn't do that the co-host doesn't have to follow it they could totally ignore it but uh you know we all like to do some dev work so give us something fun to do okay I like this I like this a lot okay cool

alright well that brings us to the end of the show and I have an end of the show question specifically for you Matt is Max Verstappen going to leave Red Bull there's a lot of rumors going around that he's talking to some other teams and that like he might be signing with McLaren even though everyone is publicly denying it there's a lot of rumors going around you know what they say where there's smoke there's uh papaya well obviously on an infinite time scale yes he will leave red bull uh i mean okay 40 years old

okay before the start of next season will he be at red bull let's let's put it that let's rephrase it before the start of the next formula one season and by start i mean obviously like testing and stuff like that. Like by the start of the season, will he still be at Red Bull? Okay. So I was going to say on an infinite time scale, 100%. Heat, death of the universe, he's gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On a two to three year time scale, I would say like 80% chance he goes somewhere else. But by next season...

Because his contract clause, so he has a clause in his contract that he's able to leave if he isn't second in the World Drivers' Championship by a certain point. We just passed that. He is not second. He's not even close to second. Yeah. Okay. F1 using my... He's number seven right now in the World Drivers' Championship. That's tough. Yeah. For, I mean, let's be real. The best driver on the grid at the moment. Seventh is rough. Yeah. Okay.

I'd give it, oh, I mean, it feels like a cop-out. I feel like it's a coin flip. I would say he will still be with Red Bull at the start of next season. I'm saying he's gone. I'm saying next season he is not at Red Bull. I mean, he seems pretty upset. He is. He's mad. He is. Did you see the footage of him after the race this last weekend? just like run past Laurent Mekies. He was just like,

nope, don't want to talk to you. Yeah, he was... Laurent Mekies ran after him. That's not good. Yeah, he's... Yeah, all right. Well, that brings us to the show. Thank you all so much for listening. Thank you for MacStories for having us. We're MacStories Podcast after all. Go check out all the writings and other podcasts. I can't speak anymore, so that's a good place to wrap up. Have a great day.