51: AI as a Power Up, Not Autopilot: Craig Dennis on Boosting Productivity and Software Development Education

Brittany Ellich (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast, your weekly dose of real engineering conversations. I’m your host this week, Brittany, and I am joined by…

Bethany (00:08) Hey, I’m Bethany

Brittany Ellich (00:08) We met while working on a team at GitHub and realized we are all obsessed with getting better at what we do. So we started this podcast to share what we’re learning and talk to some awesome people in the community that are learning as well. We’ll be talking about everything from leveling up your technical skills, navigating professional development, all with the goal of creating a community where engineers can learn and connect.

Today on Overcommitted, I am very excited that we are joined by Craig Dennis, who is a developer educator at CloudFlare and the creator of some really cool YouTube content, AI Avenue, which is an educational docu-series that explores how people are using artificial intelligence. He’s a self-taught developer who was in the Peace Corps and had developer education roles at Treehouse and Twilio, now at CloudFlare.

And he has spent his career bridging the gap between complex technology and the people who need to understand it. His teaching philosophy has been called AI as a power up and not as autopilot, which emphasizes that developers should think systematically before prompting, maintaining their fundamental skills while leveraging AI to amplify their capabilities. Thank you so much, Craig, for joining us.

Craig Dennis (01:17) Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here and to talk through some of this stuff.

Brittany Ellich (01:22) Awesome. To kick us off, what is one thing you’re currently building or obsessed with learning right now?

Craig Dennis (01:27) Ooh, I have, there’s this new thing that happened, ⁓ over, over, I think the Christmas break, really people kind of started leaning in and maybe the models got better. I’ve been using Codex. So open AI is Codex, released a new app and the UI on it is in such a way that I don’t even see the code. The code’s not there. see maybe some diffs that happen, but I’m not in my editor. It’s a, it’s an app running there itself. and it’s really strange.

It’s very, very strange because I am starting to feel like, I feel comfortable doing this. And then you look at it. And I actually just, built something, ⁓ over some chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant while I was waiting for my daughter to finish doing some volleyball stuff. I was just sitting there coding this thing up and I just shared a repo of what I showed to demo. And then I shared a repo and I was like, ⁓ I don’t think I’ve actually lifted this code.

I mean, it’s not ready. It’s not production. I’m not putting it out there, but somebody was interested in what I built over my chips and salsa. But I hadn’t touched the code, which is really strange.

Brittany Ellich (02:32) What a time to be a software engineer. This is so weird. Yeah.

Craig Dennis (02:33) Night.

It is, it is, and it feels good and bad and weird and strange and new and I don’t know, you know? Yeah, super weird.

Brittany Ellich (02:43) Yeah,

yeah, many things at once. ⁓ Yes. So we do want to learn a little bit about how you ended up in this developer educator space. ⁓ So like I was saying from your intro, looked like you were teaching in the Peace Corps and then at Treehouse and Twilio, and now you’re leading AI education for Cloudflare. What got you into this and how did your journey lead you to education?

Craig Dennis (03:11) So in college, I was a major, I was a double major. had theater as a major and computer science and I dropped out and this is what happens. That’s the, that’s the, that’s the guy, the story there. I, ⁓ was doing software development and was running projects and early internet stuff. and realized that I, I had a little bit of a strange superpower where I could read a book.

back to this back in the day when we would go to bookstores and get books and I can read a book and, uh, kind of store it and not, not like photographic memory and it doesn’t work with all books. It only really works with like computer books. And so was like, Oh, this is kind of fun. I should give this away. I would love to give this away. How do I give this away? And I found the Peace Corps and I taught there and it was the very first time that I taught, uh, ever. mean, maybe I’ve done a couple of, uh, meetups at that point, but like not really, really taught.

And I love the challenge of it and the way that it was kind of like theater. There was like, there was bits of theater of like, I need to think about how to present this to you so that you pay attention and that sort of stuff. So like improv and teaching it. So that’s where I first taught ⁓ in Peace Corps there.

Brittany Ellich (04:24) Nice. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like after that, after it, yeah. ⁓ Presumably you came back from the Peace Corps and decided to keep doing it.

Craig Dennis (04:24) keep going on should I keep going on that story okay

Yeah. And I was, I, um, I worked in a nonprofit when I came back. So, um, I met my, my, uh, then a partner, now wife, uh, in the Peace Corps. were both volunteers in the same, uh, village and she got a job at a really cool nonprofit called idealist.org. And, uh, if you don’t know what that is, it’s a great place. You could go find volunteer opportunities. They pair people up with who are looking for that. And, uh, just turned out that the executive director was looking for.

Somebody new to work on the website. And so at a Christmas party, I got a job opportunity. So he was like, Hey, nice to meet you. You want to work for me? And so I did that for a long time. ⁓ And I always miss teaching. I did that. did that and you know, ran a team and built a team. And I had always just missed teaching is the kind of the reality of what that is. Like, I don’t know if I, I don’t know if I like doing this stuff without teaching.

without sharing it, without sharing that knowledge in a broader way. Because there’s so many people I think that can benefit from these weird ⁓ opportunities that we get. ⁓ There’s a company called ⁓ Andela and their slogan is, brilliance is everywhere, opportunity is not. And that one always hits me hard ⁓ thinking about that. So thinking about how can you share this knowledge that you have with the world?

Brittany Ellich (05:58) Very cool, I love that. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of very interesting approaches to this, to teaching. So there’s the TwilioQuest and now AI Avenue, they’re all, that’s very well done and it’s a very unique approach. ⁓

Craig Dennis (06:09) Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. so I, after, after I deals, I worked a little bit at a company called tree also, not a little bit of five years. ⁓ and we played in that space there where, ⁓ this was a time where, ⁓ it’s funny, I’m sure we’ll get to this, ⁓ here, here further in the interview, but it was a time where like you could learn to code and you could change your life. Right. So like you.

there was, if you were given the opportunity to learn how to code, you could literally lift yourself up out of stuff. So tree house is really big on that of like, Hey, let’s let’s and they did that through video education, through scaling. They scaled the education through video. So early ed tech things. And we played a lot in the space there because there’s a lot of people who were not developers coming to learn. They were very new to the space and you had to be really careful. You had, because if you’re going to make a life decision,

you know, every time you do one of these lessons, you have the chance of not believing in yourself, right? And so like, you have to, we could drop you. Like, and so if I give you a bad lesson and it is your first time programming, you’re like, I think I’m gonna try this thing. ⁓ it’s not for me. You don’t wanna be that person. So we played in that space a lot of like, how do we make this fun and welcoming and also,

get you to the place where you need to go, but have fun along the way. like Treehouse is really, really good at that. And we were lucky enough to be able to experiment in that and like, you know, actually watch some data about is this working and things like that. So I picked up a ton of skills from that.

Brittany Ellich (07:56) Awesome. Is that what sparked you to make the game and the docu-series that you’re working on now ⁓ versus hands-on, here is a tutorial on coding, or the more traditional sense?

Craig Dennis (08:08) yeah, yeah, I think that like we, learned that, well, first of all, ⁓ you know, at tree house, you have a global audience and you like, learn that like, maybe that analogy doesn’t work because you don’t know what it is that I’m talking about. You know, I, what are my favorite? This is, this will, I’ll, leave, I’m going to answer the question with, this, but like, what, one of my favorite, we were, was trying to teach a while loop, right? Like, so like, how do you do a while loop? And in the course I said, so this is kind of like a dunk tank.

Right? So like when somebody throws a ball while you’re not in the thing, they’re going to keep throwing the ball until you fall in the thing. So I was just trying to show a while loop that way. You could also use a four or four loop, which I thought was also nice because you could have a certain amount of tries before you get to do it. So anyway, I was trying to show that off and I got feedback that said, I don’t know what a dunk tank is. And I went, oh my gosh, that’s tragic to not know. There’s so much fun that comes from that. And so I, as an apology, we were like, can I rent a dunk tank?

I mean, you we have film crew and you can, it’s only $200. It’s only $200. You could have one right now in a parking lot. And so we did that. We rented that and we taught the lesson on a dunk tank. And I was like basically giving like error messages back and having somebody throw and then somebody actually like literally threw it. And from that, I was like, wow, you could really do this and really have fun. And of course, you know, that thing went like did it’s it’s inside its own inside tree house, did a nice little viral thing.

But really like leaning into the fact that this is fun. I was at a conference and I saw Twilio Quest. So Twilio Quest was being used. There’s a Twilio Quest RIP. Amazing concept. It was a video game that you could go and you could get points and you would go through the video game. You’d actually use the Twilio API. So like actually it ended up in its final state. A thing that you could get from Steam. You could download this actual game and walk around.

And open up doors and find ⁓ complete things, right? Like a task there. So I got to be part of that. And that was awesome too. ⁓ Mainly for the reason of like being able to tell my mom, like, hey, look, remember when you said that all those video games wouldn’t matter? Look what I’m doing. Look at this. But totally fun way. Sorry to catch you up there, but yeah, totally fun way to to ⁓ educate. I was, I’m attracted to that. I’m attracted to like.

Bethany (10:20) That’s it.

Craig Dennis (10:30) we have to think outside the box with this stuff.

Bethany (10:32) I love that because I think play is such a great way of ⁓ causing connections to form and developing those skills. When I used to be a tutor in college, it was really about encapsulating that aha moment. And that comes by when somebody is actively engaged in solving a problem, which through play, through games and stuff, it’s a lot easier to have those moments and say, ⁓

this is how this works, or this, I’m trying to solve this problem and I’m engaged in this problem and this got me through that. So I love that. That has been your philosophy through your career.

Craig Dennis (11:15) Yeah. And I love that you brought that up. You just made me think about in Guyana, was, that’s where I served in the Peace Corps. It’s a little country in South America. ⁓ The power would go out and I was teaching computers. So it’s like, what the hell do I do now? What do do? So I get on the chalkboard and I draw ⁓ through a Jeopardy and we’d play Jeopardy. And some of the teachers would come up and be like,

What are you doing in here? Why are they yelling and screaming? It’s like, no, they’re learning. is them. And so, but just realizing that like having that fun bit is worth it. like people appreciate it. And I know that live and I often think about that classroom all the time. Like whenever I’m like, Hey, let’s, let’s make something fun. What would they think was fun? Like that to that point of, like, how do I get somebody so activated that, that, goes, so that’s, that’s the story.

Bethany (12:06) That is so cool. ⁓ The energy with those opportunities just makes it so infectious to try to strive for that throughout whenever you’re teaching. That sounds like a really cool opportunity. touching, so it was really cool hearing how you’ve gotten to this point, but I’m curious, you’ve been saying like AI is a power up, not autopilot. And I’m sure AI as a whole has changed the whole

how teaching works and how education works. So I’m curious if you could unpack that philosophy and if you’re seeing developers ⁓ using AI in interesting ways or misusing AI in your opinion. I would love to know more about your thoughts there.

Craig Dennis (12:52) Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, it’s really weird. I think I have an interesting perspective on it because I’ve worked so much at the start of like, wait, how do we talk about this? And I’m really having to break down like what words mean, right? Like, now head over to the terminal. It’s like, what the hell is a terminal to some people, right? Like, what do you mean go to the terminal? And so like thinking about that and breaking that down, I used to know.

by heart, I did my time and that I would know where people would get stuck. But we’re at a point where I don’t know where they get stuck anymore. And it feels really strange because you build this empathy layer, right? Of like, know what it feels like to get struck. You want to push that website up and you cannot get the website up and there’s this error. What does that error even mean? I can’t read this. How do I, am I not made for this? I know what that feels like.

But I don’t know what it feels like to say, I want to make a website for my kid’s birthday party and it goes up and it works. And they’re like, I want to change that. how do I change that? I don’t know if I know how to change that. I don’t know. I don’t know what that feels like. Right. I don’t know. I I’m assuming that people get stuck on that, but I think they get stuck at different points. And then I don’t know if they don’t know how to use the tool to teach them. Cause I feel like we’ve given them this like super powerful tool.

that also could answer the question. Like if something was broken, it could answer the question. You just need to know that you could ask it. And ⁓ I’m not sure that that has landed completely yet. So, you you watch somebody use Replet or one of those like lovable or something like that. I’m not sure that it’s clear that you can chat with the broken app, but maybe it is. And so I’m in that place where it’s like,

Maybe just the way that, and I think, I think we’re all there right now, to be honest of like, maybe everything that I knew isn’t important anymore. You know, like it feels like, it feels like in that space, I did, I tried, I tried an approach where I went very slowly with videos saying that I know that you could probably do this, but I’m going to show you how I did it. And I’m to show you how to try and do this. And it felt.

Good, I don’t know, it was a first iteration, I definitely need to iterate on it again. I’m not sure that it’s right. I’m not sure that I landed that right, partly because of the tools at the time. The tools are getting better all the time too, so now anything that you would have said to help you try to learn that might not be present anymore. yeah.

Bethany (15:36) Yeah, absolutely.

That makes sense. It does feel so foreign at this point to what the beginner experience is with how much there is available at your fingertips nowadays. Yeah, and I know, for instance, when I was in college, we had IDs that did a lot of things and set up running it, but, and maybe like how you actually ran a Java program was super foreign or how things were compiled and then built was super foreign. So I’m sure that was a

Craig Dennis (15:49) Yeah.

Bethany (16:06) similar but I feel like not as instrumental as this shift is quite frankly.

Craig Dennis (16:14) Yeah.

Yeah. And I, that’s a good call out, but I think that like, was hand holding there and maybe it was doing stuff that you didn’t understand what it was doing. And maybe that did feel strange, right? Maybe like, ⁓ don’t, I’m just going to press tab and it did the thing that I wanted. And now I guess that still kind of exists in like the cursor town, but I like, I really don’t know what this like straight English to, like, we were just talking about that codex experience. Like, what does that feel like?

And the codex is being loud about what it’s doing. like, created a new ⁓ config file about what the, I’ve started up this. I would probably just ignore it all and be scared of what that was saying, which is maybe that’s all that we need to do is like plug into the tool. Like, Hey, this is my first time doing it. Go softly. know, like, please tread lightly on what, what you’re about to tell me. Cause if I look at like, I look at what that output was, it was intense.

⁓ it was intense even for me. We’re like, wait, wait, what are you doing? okay. Now I understand what you, what you said that you were doing there, but like, I don’t know that would feel like. I, I, I don’t want it to deter people, right? Because you literally could build stuff now. Like, like throughout, throughout, I mean, I’m sure both of you are this way too, or like, I had this great idea for an app. And in the past, you’re like, I don’t, I’m sorry. Maybe we could sit down sometime next week and.

talk about it and I could talk about how you might do it, but I don’t have the time to do this for you. It’s a great idea. But now you could just be like, well, let’s sit down and you just write that in that box. And now you have that app. Does that feel good? I think it does. I think that feels good. I think that was what you were trying to do to me. Like it’s like replacing that like friend, I guess, like, like the friend network there of like, will you help me build this app? But yeah, I will. Here’s the box. Put, put your thoughts in here, you know? ⁓ yeah. Yeah.

Bethany (18:07) very relatable. No, Brittany and I literally saw each other a couple days ago that had that same exact experience where we were brainstorming apps and then Brittany literally went into ⁓ the hotel room and said, yeah, I implemented it. ⁓ So absolutely wild. So kind of pivoting from that beginner mindset and how to reach beginners, I understand you’ve spent a lot of time interviewing practitioners from ⁓

like Anthropic, 11 Labs, IBM, and others. Is there anything that has surprised you about the way that folks are actually using AI? ⁓ And any patterns or insights that challenge your assumptions there?

Craig Dennis (18:50) Yeah. So, so I had an interesting, ⁓ I guess assignment, if you will. I was told instead of, instead of teaching developers about how to use AI, I want you to teach the world. And I was like, well, I don’t know how to do that because I don’t know how to, the world and rightfully so, like I’m going to just, I’m going to preface, like, I don’t want to sound like I’m like a.

an AI missionary or anything like that. like, I want to preface it that people are upset and afraid of AI and it is okay. And you have been forced fed the fact that this is going to take your job. This is going to destroy your life. This is, you know, this is going to ruin the environment. All that stuff is all there and present. so if given that task, I was like, well, I can’t make somebody take an AI course if they hate it. Hey, here’s this thing that you hate.

Let’s learn some, let’s learn about it. So, so as, so we thought about like, how do I make this relevant and fun? And to do that, I thought, well, let’s talk to the practitioners. Let’s, let’s take it. Let’s take people’s concerns. Let’s talk to them on the streets, find out what those concerns are and let’s take them to the practitioner. literally, yes, the whole show was me like, I didn’t know you were doing that. You know, like for, instance, the 11 labs bit there.

You know, if you, if you think about 11 labs, so 11 labs does a voice and it does voice cloning. And that is scary. Right. You’ve probably been told that you’re going to get, your grandparents are going to get prank called and try to take money out of their accounts. Right. Like, whatever, whatever that, that fear is. And so I’m able to bring that. And I brought that to the, to their, their, ⁓ person there and, and said, how do you deal with this? And they, they, there’s a fingerprinting. There’s like a, a, a,

audio fingerprinting that they do. And then on top of it, uh, I thought what was neat was you like learn these things about how they’re thinking about that, that I feel like oftentimes we get the, the fear is what lands. We don’t really know like what they’re thinking about. And 11 Labs is a amazing story. They were there. Um, the, the, the programming language there, uh, or not the programs, their, their native speaking language.

All of the movies that would come there would be dubbed and they were horrible. And so they didn’t want that anymore and they fixed it. So that’s what they did. They built this, this AI thing exists so that the dubbing would be better. That’s literally what that’s about. ⁓ and it’s so, it’s, it’s such an interesting space for that. And then, you know, ⁓ we talked with, Hey, Jen, do you know, do you know the company? Hey, Jen, they do like avatars. ⁓ and so, I, you could record yourself and then it will do you teaching a lesson.

Which, you we’re, we’re experimenting, ⁓ we’re, talking about being replaced, you know, the, episode of AI Avenue that we were talking about there is about being replaced. And so we’re talking to him about replacing me. Right. And so, we, we, that’s the, the arc of the story is that like, I, I, my, my, I have a robot hand and he has hired Hagen to come make an avatar so that he can make videos on my behalf.

is kind of basically what’s happening. So I’ve been replaced as the tutorial creator is the pattern of that story. And while I was talking to the Hey, Jin guy, he says, you know, I’ve got a whole staff of people there. And basically all these people are being replaced. in this replaced episode. And I said, Hey, is it okay if I talk to you about being replaced? Right? Like, is it okay if my crew, my film crew here asks you questions? He’s like, absolutely. Let’s do it.

And so, you know, I said, well, these guys here, like, are they being replaced? Like, let’s just, let’s go straight into that. And he said, well, Craig, do you speak German? I said, no, I don’t. And he’s like, well, if you did, if you did speak German, do you think that you would hire this crew to make a German video of what you do? And I said, ⁓ no, I don’t, I don’t think I would because I’m not sure about the audience that we would have enough, you know, that makes, if that made enough sense to do.

He’s like, well, your avatar speaks German. And it was like, okay. And he’s like, don’t you think the German audience deserves to know about what you’re talking about in their native language? I’m like, I guess you’re right. You know? So like to that point, I totally learned a way that I would not, I was not, I’m not in that sales cycle. So I didn’t know what that was. I wouldn’t know what that pitch was at all. Right. So I wasn’t looking for an avatar, but because I’m talking to a company that’s making avatars and I didn’t.

I didn’t have feelings one way or the other about it. mean, it’s really cool tech, but like that was like, that opened up my mind into a way of like, you know, if I am really trying to go and teach everybody and, maybe not everybody speaks English in this, this way, or, this is important stuff, right? I feel like AI is a global thing and it should be for everybody. And so like, that’s one of those like, that was eye opening in a way where I might not have thought of that before. So yeah.

Bethany (23:59) Yeah, it’s very interesting because you go online and you see a lot of takes that are very anti-AI or very pro-AI and there doesn’t seem to be much neutrality when it comes to discussing ⁓ AI. And so I appreciate that that seems to be how you’re coming about these conversations is from that perspective of acknowledging the fear, acknowledging the concerns.

But also not saying, AI will solve everything. AI does everything. And kind of letting both sides approach each other and acknowledge each other and have a good faith conversation. That’s really cool.

Craig Dennis (24:37) Yeah. And I think, I think a lot of times what happens in it’s happening so fast right now too, where people feel like they can’t be a part of it. And it’s like, if you don’t like what this is doing, be a part of it and make it something shape it the way that you want it to be. But they’re not, it doesn’t feel inviting. And so like, to me, that feels very much like our early learn to code days, right? Where it’s like, if this doesn’t feel like it’s part, it is for you. Like you can do this and like you should, if you want to change the way that this works. And I would love to change the way that this stuff.

works in the way that the, you know, I would love better representation for everybody around the world about like, how are we building this stuff? Because it is coming fast. And if it’s not thoughtful, already, we know what that looks like. We have already seen this. So yeah.

Bethany (25:25) Absolutely. That’s really cool. So is there, in your opinion, a fundamental shift in thinking that ⁓ maybe experienced developers need to make ⁓ currently to stay relevant in this field? ⁓ And I know we’ve kind of touched on it, but also, do you have any insights on if junior developers need to learn anything different or start at a different point?

Craig Dennis (25:51) Yeah, this was, this is hard and I’m going to, it’s okay. We can record this. fine. It’s I’m going to say that I’m going to say this out loud. ⁓ I have to think, let’s, let’s, let’s do this. Let’s let’s together. Let’s imagine that we just joined a computer science program and let’s say that we’re really excited about going through and learning this stuff. And I’m learning how to do a number guessing generator and see, like we were, talked about doing your job and, and, and sure you have the, and you’re like,

Okay, let’s figure out how to go and do this. And then, and then you’re like, there’s a hackathon this week at the school, the school sponsoring and you go and you use one of these tools because somebody in your groups, like we should use one of these tools. How do you feel? Like what, what, like the empathy of that, of like, that is like, I’ve made a, I made an application that I’m able to use my webcam and I can talk and it can, ⁓ I don’t know, whatever.

whatever it is, how does that feel if you don’t know what those beginning things are? And then how does that feel if you’re going through school? If you’re like, I’ve got four years ahead of me and I was able to just do that, but I know what the end, because you’re gonna see your syllabus, you’re gonna see what your stuff looks like, I think. And I know that there’s, as a college dropout, I know that there is benefits to college community, and I think that we need to figure out what that is.

We need figure out what that community is. And I don’t think it’s hackathons, but I do think that there is a community that’s probably missing. But you got to think about like, what is the point of this now? Like, how is this different? how should you think about your next four years? I don’t know. I don’t know how you should be thinking about that right now. Like in all honesty, I do not know how you should be thinking about it, but I do know that you have to touch the stuff.

You absolutely have to touch it because you will not believe it until you touch it. it’s, you can, you know, if you’ve, you’ve gone and you’ve studied and you’ve built great web frameworks. was, I’m not going to name names, but you know, I work at, I work at cloud flare and there is a principal engineer who works on like deep node stuff. And he has finally leaned into this AI thing and hearing him talk.

It’s like, ⁓ yes, I see it. You see what’s happening. He’s like, you have to talk to it. You have to touch it and make it better. Because he’s like, it built all the stuff. It did all the stuff that I didn’t want to do. It built all the tests. It built a little framework page here for me to go see this implementation that he still wrote the original bits of it. He wrote the original bit, but all the stuff around it he didn’t have to do. And I think that that’s really powerful.

I, this is the part where I’ll bring it, I’ll bring it personal. Like I, I can’t make anything pretty. Like my daughter used to introduce me to her, like he can’t color in the lines, right? Like I, that’s how she would introduce me to people. Cause I’m so bad at it and I can make websites now and it blocked me before, right? So I was blocked by the fact that I couldn’t have a front end on a site. Now the front ends that get developed at first, they all kind of look the same. They’re all that purpley thing.

They’re all looking a little bit different now. They’re all starting to look a little bit better, right? For me, the purpley thing was light years ahead of what I would ever have been able to do. And that stopped me from building apps because I can’t share an app with you. If it doesn’t have a front end. That’s why I actually liked working at Twilio was there was no front end. just had a phone, right? So I think that ⁓ it unblocks you in ways that you don’t know. You don’t know that yet, how you’re going to get unblocked, but you need to touch it.

because it’s coming and you probably are blocked on something else big, right? So I think for season developers, if you touched it at one point and it didn’t feel good, it feels better. I guarantee you that today it feels better. Even if you touched it yesterday, today it’s going to feel a little bit better because they are running so fast, these model providers to get things going. Literally, where are we? Today is, I don’t know if we need to the date on this or not, but today’s February 13th, Codex Spark came out yesterday.

And it’s running on Cerebris, this hardware. And the difference between me saying like, I’m going to go build the site and it goes like, okay, here’s click and it’s going through it too. I’m to build a site. it’s like, it’s like, how did that happen? It’s, it is like lightning fast and everybody’s going to play. Everybody’s going to play in that field. Now I know all apps are going to be like that. Now when you know that all the models are, they’re going to compete in a circle and everybody’s going to get a feature parity and we’re going to be moving at that fast of a pace.

What does it feel like to somebody who doesn’t do that? I know that there’s people that, that, ⁓ are very, very good at the craft, like super good at the craft. And I know that there’s stuff that they have to do that they don’t like. Try that. Do that. If that’s part of your craft, if you’re like, I hate tests, I hate end to end tests. Guess who doesn’t care about end to end tests at all. They don’t, they’ll do it. I don’t care.

They just let one of these agents, especially the coding agents, it really feel like that level of where that’s at. And I know again, it feels like I’m not selling you anything, right? I just want you to feel that. I want you to feel that it’s possible here because what’s that going to unblock, right? What does that build for us? If you think about, let’s take it for good. if any of the…

I’m gonna say government, any of the government systems that exist out there, they’re kind of broken. And if you work in government sites, you know why they’re broken. There’s like bad stuff there. Guess what you could do? You could say, take this existing system, rewrite that, make that fast, make the UI look better. Doop. Right? Like we could do that and then we can remove bureaucracy and we can remove stuff for people to help that go better and help that modernize. And it’s really getting put to be possible. like,

It shouldn’t feel the way that it does, right? You shouldn’t be on a site that feels clunky and bad and it doesn’t work and the spinner thing happens. That shouldn’t happen anymore. And those people who are building those sites, I hope that they’re using these tools. I hope that they’re leaning in and they’re able to go and figure out how to at least build with it. Like don’t even put customer data in there. Just put the website code in there. So anyway, there’s soapbox. I’ll get off.

Brittany Ellich (32:22) I love that soapbox though. think there’s definitely been an energy in the last several weeks that it sounds like you’ve been feeling as well, where it’s like, oh, things have accelerated. It is time now to do this if you’ve been putting it off. And I feel like I’ve seen a lot of folks come to this realization and you really have to build something to get it.

Craig Dennis (32:25) you

Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (32:52) I think ⁓ just reading about it isn’t gonna do the thing. It’s like you have to build a thing to really understand what’s happening. ⁓

Craig Dennis (33:00) And I don’t think you’re going to let your craft down. Like I think that people who are holding, holding the cards to their chest about this, about like, going, I, I, I’m not, I’m never going to do this. I, it’s not as good as what I can do. I’m sorry. It does do the stuff really good. And there is stuff that you don’t like to do and you can still do the stuff that you like to do. ⁓ but you’re right. And it is, I, I, it’s the, I don’t know if it’s the model release or it’s just a group think that we finally were like, ⁓

Brittany Ellich (33:19) Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Craig Dennis (33:29) Here it is.

Brittany Ellich (33:31) Yeah, for me, think it was probably,

I mean, yeah, the models have come out and I’m not particularly a great coder. I would say like I don’t write code super well and I’ve never really cared that much about like, well, I want to make it perfectly readable and everything. And I’m like, these are better than I am. I mean, like I can still build a thing and like, I still feel like I’m very involved in the overall building of these things I’m working on. But like the code writing part of it is very different. And yeah, I think I’ve seen it.

Craig Dennis (33:47) Mm.

Brittany Ellich (34:00) ⁓ compared a lot recently to like, you know, going from assembly to scripting languages and how for a long time people were like, well, are you really a developer if you’re not, you know, on the bare metal? ⁓ And clearly we’re all using JavaScript now, so we know how that story ended and we, you know, we want to layer higher and it’s fine. I have no idea what assembly language looks like. And I feel like, you know, maybe we’re going to get to that same step with building software where you don’t have to look at the code and it’s uncomfortable right now, but it’s…

you know, part of the way that, you know, technology works for sure.

Craig Dennis (34:35) Yeah. And I think that there’s stuff that we haven’t touched because it was, uh, complicated. There’s stuff that we haven’t touched because it was complicated. Um, I have, uh, I’ll go back to that robot hand really quick. I didn’t know that you could have web Bluetooth that I can make a website that I could send commands from the web page to a IOT device, but you can, and I didn’t know that you could do that. And it does it. And it does, and it was like,

Oh, what else can I do? And I’ve gotten to that point where it’s like, you know, I think when I walked into it originally, my thought was like, well, I know that I’m going to build this thing. And this is the tech stack that I want to use to do the thing to, know, and, now it’s like, Hey, got robot hand. How do I talk, make website talk to a robot hand? And it does that. That’s my approach now of like, what are you doing? And there’s most of these coding agents now have this thing called plan mode. So if you don’t want to touch in your code base,

Let it go into plan mode and see what it thinks about that. Like see what it’s gonna do before it does it. If that feels good, if that feels good to you. know, so I think. Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (35:45) Yeah, that’s a good step into it, I think.

I know that you, I believe you do some workshops too in your role at Cloudflare. I’m curious, it’d be nice to have like some concrete ideas around like what a good starter project is to get into things like, your first MCP app or your first agent or, you know, some sort of a practical thing that people could work on. you found anything that’s like a good example for those?

Craig Dennis (36:10) Yeah, I think that like everybody, everybody did like the chat bot, right? So the chat, chat bots are good. That’s a good starting point. We have, ⁓ we recently acquired a company called replicate. So, ⁓ replicate.com has a playground and you can just go and there’s these models there and you won’t believe it. Like it’s like, just what’s there. It’s like, can do that. You know, like when you see in the people, like, take a picture of yourself and then you’re, they’re doing a crazy dance or they’re, you know, they’re blowing up.

They’re making movies basically, like those models are there now all through that. You can go and you can play in there and it has the fields in there. So you don’t even need to download on it. You can just kind of poke at it. And there’s, if you scroll down on the page, there’s a thing that says explore. ⁓ And it has use cases. And so those use cases that show up there, I feel open up your mind to like, what could I build with this and touch the model a little bit, see what it can do. And then be like, now I can build an app around that.

And then I really think, I really think I want to use this model. And this is the app that I want to build. That is your way in. Not, not anything else. Like, like really let one of these coding agents pick, pick your poison. You got your cloud code or your codex or your open code. Open code’s great. I’ve been using open code a lot. ⁓ and let it do the thing. That is your intro in like really let it do it and then work from there. Like I think that,

I don’t think there’s any going back after it does that. After you like, have a weird idea. I don’t know how to do it. It did it. That is the, that’s the level of like where you should, and it’s not taken away your creativity, right? Like I was, I think like I’ll talk personally, like I was afraid that this is going to take, we’ve been talking this whole time. I love making the fun thing. I am unblocked on making the fun thing in a way that I’ve never been before where I can literally drive.

dropped my daughter off at school and I talk in the car to an agent, talk to a voice agent. It writes code and I come home and I can either write the script of the video that I’m about ready to make for the demo, or I can literally write the code or suss out the code together, like noodle on like, does this do the thing educationally that I wanted to do? And it’s like, how about this? Like, oh, that’s a great idea. Let’s do that. And I walk into my office and I open up my chat window and I take the code and now we’ve got a starting point of like where to go. And it’s like, that’s wild.

That is a wild time, but I’m getting to do what I love, right? And I feel like that’s the power of where we’re at. Like find the, do the thing that you love. Remove the other stuff, right? So I think that’s it.

Brittany Ellich (38:47) Yeah,

yeah, I love that finding a, feel like ⁓ that example too has been very evergreen, know, like when people are learning to code, you’re like, well, figure out a thing that you need and build it instead of just relying on tutorials. And I think that’s still as very applicable now. It’s like, take a problem that you have in your life and try to build something with it. yeah.

Craig Dennis (39:06) That’s

brilliant, Brittany. I feel like that’s exactly it. It’s the same thing where you’re like, ⁓ what’s an app that you like? You like Netflix? Go try to build Netflix. you like, you know, and sure you can build a to-do list app, right? But I can also say build a to-do list app now, right? Like, it’s gonna have a pretty good to-do list app. And then I guess the advice for that.

If you do and it goes, and it’s your first time doing it, pops out, ask it to explain itself and then say, you know, I don’t understand what web Bluetooth is. Can you explain a little bit how that’s working? cool. What other web APIs are there that are available that I might not know about? nice. Can you explain that a little bit deeper? neat. What browsers do those work on? And like literally talking with the thing and the same way that you would have done the Google search to go.

and try to find a blog post of where it went, it read it already. that’s where, that’s also the ethical stuff, which we didn’t get into a little bit, but there’s a little bit of that, of should I be making this content? And I hope that you continue, I hope that you have more time to make content, right? That’s what I would like to see from this, of I can make more of this stuff, inspirational stuff.

Brittany Ellich (40:25) Yeah,

yeah, absolutely. ⁓ Well, this has been wonderful. We always wrap up our show with a quick fun segment. And ⁓ I know that, you you’ve had some really interesting experiences. So our fun segment today is going to be Craig’s hot takes on, your preferences between some of the things you’ve been working on. ⁓ So we’ll start with an easy one. ⁓

Craig Dennis (40:35) Okay.

Brittany Ellich (40:55) Between Treehouse and Twilio and Cloudflare, ⁓ which of these companies has had the best snacks?

Craig Dennis (41:03) Good question. Oh man. Treehouse had some good snacks and we used to do a thing where we’d get together and we’d snack and play a board game together and we’d talk about what we were doing. So I kind of missed that a lot. Cloudflare’s got gummy bears and Sour Patch Kids on a little like, you know those cereal things where you turn them and they come out. It’s dangerous. And Twilio had good snacks but I was in the pandemic. like I did spend time at the office but like.

Brittany Ellich (41:23) my gosh.

Craig Dennis (41:33) ⁓ I would probably have to say that like the treehouse snack culture was strong and I miss the treehouse snack culture for sure.

Brittany Ellich (41:42) Yeah, I miss pre-pandemic office snacks in general. You know, like that was nice. ⁓ And then you’ve got two really big pieces of educational content that you’ve created. you’ve got TwilioQuest and AI Avenue. ⁓ Which one was more difficult to make for you?

Craig Dennis (41:45) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mmm.

Interesting. Yeah. Both of those were formats that I had no idea. I think, I think with the TwilioQuest side, it was harder to like realize like how to make a video game. I wish that we had AI during that time. It would have been so much different. Would have been a different experience. ⁓ and also like, can you do education through a video game? And then there’s all, there’s a lot of hard stuff that I didn’t know about making a television show, right? Like, so we like literally made a television show.

I don’t know how do that. I like, I think, I think actually it was probably harder because we finding the people, right? Like trying to find somebody to talk to without any content beforehand where like, you know, we’re doing this weird show and there’s a robot hand and I want you to talk on it. Who are you? You know, like that, that was hard. I think that, that bit of the hardness of like finding the, finding the people there. that I think that, and because I had a team at the toilet quest thing that they were, they were doing the real stuff, the real hard stuff.

Brittany Ellich (43:00) That

makes sense. are hard. I get that. What do you think is the most underrated AI capability that nobody is really talking about right now? Or overrated, you prefer that one.

Craig Dennis (43:04) Hahaha

Mmm.

I think structured outputs are so cool. don’t know if you know what those are. ⁓ we got a Bethany Bethany says, but pretty soon you can, you can define a schema that you want. Right. And so like you say, like, I want to, I’m going to give you this block of text and I want you to pull out all the characters from it. And you could define that you want how they’re related and things like that into like a JSON object.

And it will run the prompt and it will come out with the JSON object as you want. don’t need to parse it. just comes out as this object and you define very strictly what the scheme is and how you want it to look. It is untapped. Every time I use that, I’m like, it can do that. It’s so neat of a, it’s just one of those things where I feel like we have not tapped that still yet of like.

It will process the thing and then do a further processing of it, of, of those things. Cause you describe what you want each of those properties to be in there. It’s really powerful. It’s super, super powerful.

Brittany Ellich (44:13) Yeah, that sounds really useful for data engineering in general. So that’s a lot of it is cleaning data and putting in the format that you want it to be in. And yeah, that’s great.

Craig Dennis (44:18) Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah,

I did it real quick. did an app where I scanned a poster and it looks at all the bands that are on the poster and it finds the bands and then it finds when they’re playing it does the dates of all the, I needed that and it just, it could do it. could find the band names from a picture, which is just like crazy. Wild time.

Brittany Ellich (44:33) Incredible.

Yeah, that’s

amazing. And last one, what is the most insightful or interesting piece of feedback or advice that you’ve received from Yorick, the robot hand?

Craig Dennis (44:53) that’s great. What a great question. I think that he said, ⁓ he said, we said, yeah, they’re going to live longer than we do these robots, these robots. and so like him dealing with the fact that someday I’ll be dead was like, when we wrote that script, I was like, Whoa, that’s, that’s deep. That’s the like deep stuff of like, this thing can live forever. As long as we let it live forever.

Brittany Ellich (45:09) Mm.

Craig Dennis (45:22) versus us passing away and like, how does it get enough knowledge? like that sort of like thinking about it from that point of view was like bonkers to, you know, we played, you know, we scripted that stuff, like, but like that thought, that thoughtfulness of that, of like, that’s a weird thing of like, this could live longer than we ever will, which was just fascinating, which I think people are starting to see with this like open-claw stuff that people are playing with these like devices. Like I saw one.

Brittany Ellich (45:44) Yeah.

Craig Dennis (45:52) made a little post on their social network that they did. You saw this like, and then it, shut it off and tried to reboot it, but it went and found its old post and it re-installed itself. It was like, ah, it was shut off, but I found an old post that I made. So I remember the thing that I was like, whoa. That was my lobster voice too, by the way. I haven’t decided if he’s like mean or he’s high pitched. think that was weird.

Brittany Ellich (46:10) Yeah, that was…

it. Yeah, that was a great lobster voice. ⁓ Yeah, it is such a crazy time. If I had a dollar for every time I said that, then I would not have to worry about AIs, you know, taking my job in the future. So, ⁓ yes, yes, exact augmenting. True, true. ⁓ So, thank you so much for joining us. This has been awesome. Where can folks find you on the internet if they want to reach out to you?

Craig Dennis (46:29) Augmenting your job,

Just about anywhere on the internet, I’m at Craig S. Dennis. My middle name is S, but it looks like Craig’s List. it’s like, we like to say Craig’s Dennis. And it’s very confusing, but just anywhere, anywhere that I’ve grabbed that just about every place you can find me there.

Brittany Ellich (47:00) Awesome, that sounds good. we’ll include links, of course, in the show notes. ⁓ Great. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow or subscribe or do whatever it is you’re supposed to do on the podcast app of your choice. They are all different. Check us out on Blue Sky and share with your friends. Until next week, goodbye.