Playing from timestamp
Video starts at 20:49
Channel
Interviewed Person
Malte Ubl
"Suddenly this almost obscure sub-genre of programming where people are like 'it's 500 milliseconds I'm just going to not ship it' suddenly it's 30 seconds."
"I was v0 coding this thing on Sunday and I said, 'Okay, Claude, you have no idea what use workflow is because it came out on Thursday, but here's the docs.'"
"Our strategy is to grow the pie while our pie piece is relatively constant size in proportion to the pie."
"I think about open source as having essentially three business models."
"It literally does not cost anything. You can run compute for an infinite amount of time."
All right, we are here in the remote studio. Thanks again to F.NG for lending us the space with Malta who is CTO of Versell. Welcome. Hey, how's it going? Glad to be here. Did I get it right? I've actually never pronounced it out loud until like just now. Yeah, that was completely perfect. It rhymes with Google. Ah, okay. Uh, so perfect that you uh worked on search at Google and AM and whiz, which like I think still people don't know enough about whiz. It is like no longer a secret, but yeah, you can't use it. So like unless you work at Google in which case you probably know what it is otherwise uh there's no reason to really know.
Anyway, suffice to say that you are responsible for a lot of the web as it is today. So thank you for spending some time with us. You also obviously now uh building the next web as as we say with uh Verscell and we we we can cover framework defined infrastructure. I I think you probably saw I have a I have a lot of interest in self-provisioning runtimes. we can cover v 0ero but here really this part is is recorded right after you did ship AI which uh we're
trying to sort of recap right for the general uh lens space audience who may not be watching Verscell as closely as uh I do or or you do so like so basically just generally what I guess is your message to the broader AI engineer audience on what Verscell is doing with AI? Yeah, I think the the the super high level view is that what we're really trying to do is like we we're like the biggest fan of the AI engineering movement and we are also fans of you know we're not not just like going super hard on on hype and the big ideas and
and talking about things but like being very concrete about like you know agents are very exciting and you can actually build them right and so like I think our entire conference was about both making that easier right and and discovering the right abstractions as we're kind of figuring out what the what people actually want to do, right? Which is emerging as we speak. Then the way Versell always does these things is by building things ourselves, right? And so that is both in terms of products, so agents that are products that you can
purchase from Versell and stuff that we do basically in our back office to make our own operations more efficient. And so this kind of building of apps lets us ground kind of what we do in in that reality. and then and then you know kind of extract the abstractions that we feel are really helpful to to then put that on the road. And I think the the probably most talked about thing that we shipped at the at the conference was our new workflow development kit which really really is just a way to make
writing uh like workflows like very idiomatic as something that just becomes kind of first class. It's something you do every day. You think about it. you know write 15 design docs just because you want one of them. It's just something you do literally every day. I think like since you your audience also more generally like in the think probably like listening to what people talk about. I think that's a lot of talk about our work development kit but also like more generally like what is what are workflows? What are agents? How are they related? Do you use one or the other? I would actually love to talk about that as well. But like um
obviously like in our in our uh conference basically introduce just like what we hope is by far the easiest way to make your you know make your agents something that is easily embeddible into complex workflows and to make those workflows durable, zoomable, streamable and so forth. Yeah, I mean as as listeners might know I have a long history of workflows um at at Temporo. Um and I think what's weird is a lot of people are discovering this for the first time. You don't really learn about this in CS classes. You
don't really learn about this in like boot camps or anything like that because it's not really a unit of compute and storage that is taught. It's kind of like emergent from you know Uber and like Stripe and and everyone else. I don't know if there's a version of this at Google. I mean there is there's a version of this at every single company that has been doing anything in computer since 1950. Yeah. Like but what's not necessarily the case that it has been abstracted in any way, right? But like when I when I run a you
