Gonto:

It's good for Vercel in the sense that they're the small player here. Like it's like David and Goliath still.

Hank:

Yeah, Cloudflare does give way too much heat and attention to them. It's like in terms of like their valuation differences. It's not even like Coke versus Pepsi.

It's it's kind of like Coke versus like Coke versus Shasta or RC Cola. You know, you shouldn't even be giving them, you know, the airtime. 

Today on Code to Market, which you should totally, you know, just you should subscribe to it.

You should probably share the episode. You should probably make a comment. We've got slock forks.

We've got a glaze launch. I actually have no idea what this one is. Gonto is going to tell me.

Hopefully it's not weird or dirty. We've got Zeno. Zeno's complained about not being featured on the pod.

And he's like one of our biggest fans. We got two stuff.

Gonto:

I love Zeno. And we have two stuff from Zeno, not just one. Actually, two stuff from him.

Hank:

You know what? He probably came to the Code to Market summit left inspired. He's doing a good job with the marketing stuff now.

We've got I already mentioned Slop Fork. We've got a couple of cool. We've just got stuff.

Gonto:

Yeah, we have a sick demo that always wins. We have a good job to work on how they've done some shit. And then I want to promote my EA skills on GitHub.

Hank:

Yeah, actually, you should watch at the end of this. Gonto is just going to talk to us about some cool stuff he's been doing. Is it with Cloud Code?

I don't know. You'll tell us. 

Gonto: No, it's with OpenClaw.

Hank: It's with OpenClaw. This is going to be a good one. This is an episode.

So let's get into it. Slop Fork, which, as an aside, I'm loving all the Slop lingo coming up. Slop Cannon, Slop Stack, Slop Fork, Slop Shops, lots of good stuff.

But the Slop Fork came because Cloudflare, ever the enemy of RouchG and the Triangle team at Vercel, they forked Next.js. In fact, one of their former teammates, Steve Faulkner, published the post about it. And it was very much a like put down. It only cost us $1,100 in tokens to clone this thing.

And it's even better now. And it works with Vite. It was v-next.

Gonto:

And they did a whole article also on performance and how much faster. It was so good, the blog post they did. Actually, I liked it.

Yeah.

Hank:

And then, you know, drama ensued. Molta and RouchG are saying, like, now everybody has to protect against Slop Forks. And people are saying, well, I thought, oh, so, OK.

So when you encourage people to use AI with v0 and stuff, it's good. But when people use AI to, like, make their own stuff out of your stuff, it's bad. Like, there's just so much fun drama here.

What did you think? You know, how quickly did you eat your bag of popcorn watching this?

Gonto:

It was so much fun. First of all, I'd start with what I didn't like is that Claireford was too pushy. Like, it was the tweet started with Next.js liberation day. Like, holy shit. Like, you're literally like shotgun and just pointing it at RouchG and shooting, basically. So that, I think, was a bit too much.

But I think they did a good job with the blog post explaining how many tokens, where it's gone and how fast it is. Having said that, I actually think G from Vercel did a better job than Cloudflare. Because what he replied with is critical vulnerabilities.

Like, he sent a tweet first with two critical vulnerabilities, three high and two low. And then there were more and more vulnerabilities that were coming. And his thing was like, look, we just disclosed them and checked them for the greatness of the community.

And the other thing is Cloudflare has to pay them for bug bounty because it's in their, like, manifesto. So RouchG was also, oh, he was asking on Twitter, like, where should we spend our Cloudflare money? Like, what should we do with it?

As they get paid for the vulnerabilities, I thought that was fantastic. Both focusing on vulnerabilities and finding them to show how a slot fork is not as good, but also like pushing on how we use the money. I actually thought it was better for Vercel on how they ended.

Who do you think win the fight?

Hank:

I think it's, I mean, are people actually going to use vNext? I don't know. This is another case where they're fighting in a way where I think they both win.

They're both getting attention. The attention's on them. People have to pick sides.

People dig their heels in more. I don't know that minds are getting changed here. I don't know that anybody's, like, going anywhere.

It's just they're playing the game of attention really well.

Gonto:

I agree with that. And what I'll add to that is I think it actually helps both because I agree nobody changes mind, but there's people who never heard of them, but maybe they do now because of what they did in here. So more people are seeing both of them.

So it's, I don't know, very interesting.

Hank:

Yeah. One thing is, ironically, I think this makes Vercel look even more open source friendly. Not so much because of the way they, like, pushed back, but because of the creation of this term slot fork and what they're talking about, what it's going to do.

What's interesting too is there is this whole side thread with Malta and it was either replying to Steve Faulkner who did the fork and either Dane or Matthew Prince. But, like, Steve, a few days before this happened, he tweeted about, I'm predicting that open source repos are going to start doing testing more privately, blah, blah, blah. And Malta was like, you're subtweeting your future self because you knew that you would do this and force this change.

And that's just like a funny thing. It reminded me of just like all the people making money on prediction markets, you know, because they have the insider info. And like, you can do that with attention too.

You can, like, make predictions about the future that you know you're going to create and creates clout for yourself.

Gonto:

There was also a company, I don't remember which one, that removed the tests from their open source and they were vital. Like, oh, it's the first one. But then they added them back.

It was just a shock for attention. So also a fantastic move on removing and adding just because they got attention from it. But it was just a shock.

It wasn't real. It was all a fascinating attention thing on how they all focused on it. The other thing I'll say is I do think it's better.

It's good for Vercel in the sense that they're the small player here. Like Cloudflare is much bigger than them. And Cloudflare pushes so much on Vercel.

It's like David and Goliath still.

Hank:

Yeah, Cloudflare does give way too much heat and attention to them. It's like like in terms of like their valuation differences, it's not even like Coke versus Pepsi. It's it's kind of like Coke versus I don't know what some small drink like Coke versus Shasta or RC Cola.

You know, you shouldn't even be giving them, you know, the airtime. Yeah, I'm trying to look at which company it was, but we don't have time. We got to keep moving here.

All right.

Gonto:

Let's go to the Glaze launch. So Glaze is the new product from Raycast. I'm a big fan of Raycast.

We've actually talked about them so many times here. And they just shipped a new product called Glaze, which allows you to vibe code desktop apps. So when you want to build a new desktop app that can get that can actually work with your camera, with your notifications, with other applications, with anything, you can vibe code it.

And basically in a couple of hours, you can get a new app running and they will deeply integrate it into their platform on Raycast. We're going to show now a few of these tweets. But what I really like about this is, first of all, they did a really good job on talking on why they built it and why they're going to be so good at this.

They talked about how they built Raycast as the best desktop app, and they took it years to do that. And now they are using all of that knowledge to allow you to vibe code the best desktop app. So that link, I think, was fantastic.

Then they did a really good job of doing some videos and explaining it. And then they got a lot of influencers access to actually try it out before they shipped it. And they got a lot of those influencers like Zach Holman and Dan Holix to just tweet about what they built.

And one guy I saw built like a synthesis machine. Another guy built like an image transformation, but they were all real apps that were very specific to their process. And they got built with Blaze.

So I think they were not only good influencers, but also really good examples on it's an app that only works for me. But still, I was able to build it and work on it. And then finally, I think they did a really good job with the videos as well.

And they ended up being the second result in Hacker News. So I know you're opening the tweets now, Hank. And I know you didn't know all this before.

So what's your take on the Glaze launch?

Hank:

I like it. I do like the tweets. You know, one of them was like a former employee at Raycast, which is always a good thing.

Saying people who leave your company, stay friends with them and keep working with them. These are great. I mean, this is something that's so hard for some reason for dev tool companies to do is to hold back the release and let people test and build and play with it ahead of time.

Exactly. It's really hard for open source I get because open source tech is kind of being built in public. So people see it coming and they see the canaries and stuff.

But if you can do a private beta and tell people, hey, this is our goal of the launch, even offer them like a bounty or a prize, which I don't know if these people got that, but maybe they did. Maybe they just got like a bunch of free credits for a year as a reward. Such a good move.

I like it. Great launch. Hey, look at you bringing a launch to talk about.

Gonto:

See, I just loved it. I thought it was really, really good compared to most others. Let's move again.

Next one is from CEO from Resend and I couldn't find a tweet. So I'm sorry about that, but I'll find it. But and Sino, if you have it, like, please reply to us with a link.

But Sino tweeted the other day on how he was trying to use Resend with his open clock and he couldn't because Resend had captcha. And now every website have these captchas from either Cloudflare, Vercel, as we're talking about them, or Google. And it's really hard for the AI bots to just sign in.

Some of them can be tricked, like the Google one where you can use caps or whatever to pay a human, but others cannot. So what Sino was talking about was because he was trying to configure open clock with Resend using a one password vault that he couldn't, he ended up removing the captcha from his service entirely. So now basically he can get some DDoS, but the bots can also do it.

And I think it's an interesting point on what will happen with agents trying to log in to DevTools. Like, will we allow captchas? Will we change captchas so that some bots can use it and some bots cannot?

Will we be okay with DDoS? Will we find a solution? How will it work?

Just thought it was a fantastic tweet because it was on the time of everybody using open clock. It was at a time that everybody felt that problem. And it got so many retweets and so many likes because he had empathy with the other people.

So it wasn't all the change that I really liked, but rather how he actually understood his users, he understood they were trying open clock and he understood that this would be something that they would relate with.

Hank:

Sweet. Wow. Too bad he couldn't find the tweet.

I don't have much else to add on that.

Gonto:

Tell us about the next one from Sino otherwise.

Hank:

Yeah, we did have another one. I like this one where he starts with a quote from like his would-be customers. I want to try Resend, but I don't want to rewrite all my code.

We've been hearing this a lot. So we built Resend.com slash migrate. And then he's got like two steps works with all this stuff powered by Claude Opus.

And then he's got a nice little 30 second video talking about this. This is great. He's directly addressing something that people have told him and overcoming that objection.

He's tweeting it out to everybody so that this can be corrected. It's really easy to try. This is a good pattern that, you know, I think I can learn from and like start to do more in the marketing.

I do is just think, OK, what are the direct objections? What's some content we can do to overcome that direct objection and remove it completely so that no one can ever say that to us again?

Gonto:

But what I like about this is that it wasn't just content. Like I've done a lot of these migrate from your competition posts. I've done some in Vercel.

I've done some in Auth0, etc. And it's like a step by step guide on how you do it. But they went one step ahead, which is what I like.

Like this is actually not a content. It's what I would call like a content product because it's a small tool that you can use. Because you can actually paste your code that uses it and it will change it for you.

It would be even better if I could, I don't know, put some GitHub links or stuff like that and they would send the PR for me after I give access. But I think this idea of it's not just content, but it's actually a tool that I can come in. And once I see it works for one project, I can just come back and migrate every project.

It makes it so much better because it's a content I just go once I do it and that's it. But with something like this, maybe I come here very often because if I see it works, I would try it with all of my products that have MailChimp or something else to move to recent. So they fucked, they made it into a product I think was great.

And the other thing I like is redevelopers really like when we can try things with code and we can use it. And I think they actually nailed it on that, that it's not just content. And it follows this idea of show, don't tell.

They literally show me how I change their code. They don't tell me how to change it. And I think it's extremely smart.

Hank:

Yeah. And this is something that is more possible now today than ever is to give people tools or skills or MCPs or things to help them move faster and to remove this pain and friction. Migration is one of the top pains of coding.

And we saw, was it Intuit where their stock tanked after Anthropic posted this huge guide on how easy it is now to migrate COBOL to Java. And that's like a huge part of like Intuit's business. Was it Intuit or IBM?

One of those old ones. I think it was IBM. I think it was IBM.

Just crazy. So good job, Zeno. Good job, Resend team.

Gonto:

Let's move to the next one. We're doing rapid fire today. Next one is yours since the demo was from a company you consult with.

Hank:

That's right. OK, so yeah, Taylor was texting me over the weekend before he got on stage at Larry Kanyu and he's like, OK, at the end of my keynote, I'm going to trigger a live error in my app, which will fire a Nightwatch webhook, which Nightwatch is the monitoring platform by Laravel. And then he's showcasing this little local code healing service that he has in Nightwatch.

And then there will be like a fixed push to a preview environment, which is another thing he was demoing. So he's demoing a Nightwatch local code healing service and a preview environment. And then he has OpenClaw hosted on a Forge VPS, a Laravel VPS.

And that OpenClaw calls him on his phone on stage and he puts it on speakerphone and it's like, hi, I'm OpenClaw from your Laravel Forge VPS calling to tell you about PR15, which is a bug fix. Do you want to merge it? Here's what it does.

And he just says, yeah. And it's like, OK, I'll merge it. Hangs up, refreshes the page and the fix is live.

So that already was awesome. And then I just put out a note because I was like, that was so ballsy. And then what's his face?

The creator of OpenClaw quote tweeted that and got it even more attention. So there's a lot of lessons packed in here. One, like, cool.

First off, you can do really cool, ballsy demos and your audience will love it. And it's integrating really old tech. You know, it's integrating VPSs with OpenClaw voice calls to merge stuff with your voice.

Gonto:

And I think people value the voice to try a demo. Like there's so many people who don't have the balls, like who don't want to try a demo live. I think trying a demo live and actually making it work and connecting so many different services like he did is amazing.

Hank:

Yeah. And then finding ways to leverage that into more attention, you know, online. We're obviously going to clip this thing to no end and that'll do well on YouTube shorts and so on.

But a lot of people's imaginations were expanded. That's something we've talked about before. Like great dev rel is just expanding people's imagination for what's possible.

And yeah, that's what a great demo does, too.

Gonto:

I think it wasn't just a great demo. What I like about it is, number one, they combine multiple services. Number two, it works.

And again, they were bold enough to actually try the demo. Number three, they used a new tech that is trendy, that everybody's using. And because it was used in a very creative way, the creator of that tech also retweeted it, giving even more exposure.

So this idea of connecting what you want to show to something that is the current thing also helps so much.

Hank:

Yeah. OK, another thing from Taylor Alwell is actually from WorkOS. So this is just a smart thing by WorkOS.

They saw the announcement that it was the first anniversary of the Laravel Cloud product. So they just sent him some cupcakes. And then, of course, he tweeted about it and was like, oh, thanks, WorkOS.

Like, that's pretty cheap. That's a pretty cheap way to get, you know, it wasn't a huge tweet, but, you know, eight or ten thousand views. A couple hundred likes.

That's just good. And it's, you know, good. Like, Laravel's using WorkOS in some ways.

Like, it's just good partnership, customer retention, all that jazz. So that was another highlight we had from the week.

Gonto:

I learned a lot of those in the past, where typically we do them based on customer things. So, for example, I don't know, at Auth0 we ended up doing it when somebody got their first million users who were active or something like that. And something we did do, for example, I was a specialist.

We sent something that was huge so that when you send it to an enterprise and it's huge, they have to share it with other teams. So it also creates awareness of your product with other teams. So I remember when it was like the one million prize, we sent a cake that was for 55 people.

It was like literally a huge cake. So it's like, OK, this team will not eat it fully. So you need to share it with other teams.

And they were like, OK, who got you this cake? And it was part of the conversation. And it was a good way to try to drive expansion, not just retention inside some of these companies.

Hank:

Yeah, over gift to get the cross sell. I like that.

Gonto:

Exactly. But in general, I think on expansion and retention, focusing on customer things that happen and sending something real so that people talk about it in person and remember about you. And also they value what they have done.

It's great because it helps internally, but also like externally to share in social. Yeah.

Hank:

The last thing is you've been working on the AI stuff. And these are like as a preamble. I mean, we've all got to learn this.

I've got to learn this. So I'm excited to you know, this is what we said almost exactly a year ago. It's one of our goals was to actually start using AI.

So tell us about it.

Gonto:

I'm obsessed with OpenClaw. Like people talk that it's hype. Like it's not hype.

That's the main thing I can say. Like before this, I liked AI, but I just used it for questions. Now I actually feel it's really good.

So I actually ended up fighting my EA and replacing her with OpenClaw. And I replaced her basically with five main skills and crumbs that I created. And going back to my roots, I decided to open source them on GitHub.

But basically the skills that I created is my OpenClaw now when I start my day, it will review all of the calls that I have and it will check what email context is there. Who introduced me to them if it's the first call? What did we chat about on the previous meeting based on Granola?

What are the things that I should keep in focus? What did we say we were going to chat about? And gives me that summary for every call I'm going to have.

Then as soon as the calls end, it basically reviews the calls and creates to-dos for me on my to-do app so that I get them done. It saves time on my calendar to get them done and then drafts emails for me in my voice when I promised that I was going to make an intro or do something. Every time I get an email, if it's an easy email, like I get an intro, I get like a congratulations or something, it will auto-draft and auto-reply to some of these things as well.

And then daily I get a digest that tells me like what emails I have in answers, what things I have to do, what I have missed and stuff like that. I share them all. My main thing here is if you are a DevTools marketer and you're helping all of these companies in this new AI wave, you have to be using AI.

This is an excuse for me to learn AI and also like it's good I have like a AI EA. But the good thing is I learned about it, I used it, and I feel the experience of so many people who are starting to use some of these AI things. And I think if you do developer marketing, you have to dive deep into AI to really understand how to work with them.

Hank:

I agree. So, I mean, where's your open cloud? Did you put it on a Mac mini or an old machine or?

Gonto:

Yeah, I'm too cheap to buy a Mac mini. So I actually have the cheapest BPS that exists, which is Hetzner. And it was funny because it was $4 a month, but now they got so many people from OpenCloud that they just sent an email and they are increasing their prices.

They gave an excuse that it's a RAM, but now it's actually going to be like $5.50, I think, which is still pretty good. But yeah, I have it on my Hetzner BPS, all locked basically, so no other people can access it.

Hank:

Okay, so you've got it on Hetzner, which if they raise prices that high, Laravel BPS might be cheaper than them now. I'm going to have to check that out. We might have to do a campaign.

You should check. By the way, I won't share the numbers, but we're not even pushing Laravel, but the growth was staggering. Like people are...

It's all OpenCloud. There's so much OpenCloud. And I'm sure Taylor's demo is only going to drive that more.

Okay, so you've got it on a VPS. I mean, have OpenCloud write a tutorial. I'm the only one who's written on our blog on codemarket.fm. I think you owe us a blog post, like a guide on how to do this.

Gonto:

My tutorial is already on GitHub. So if you go to github.com slash mgonto slash executive assistant skills, you'll see it has like docs. It has like a setup.md and then a chrome.md, and it has actually a step-by-step guide on how to implement it, how to use it, and what are the things that you have to fix.

Hank:

What are the security risks with OpenCloud? That's been my hesitation. It's like, isn't this thing scary?

Gonto:

I think like access to the VPS or to WhatsApp, very hard in this sense, because like my WhatsApp, it's like an allow list and I have to pair it and allow it. On the VPS, I can only access with Tailscale, so I have to steal my machine to be able to access it. The main risk I think with this is prompt injection.

It's like if somebody can get to talk to it somehow through Slack, for example, I have it in Slack and they can do a prompt injection to force it to give data. That's the biggest risk, but I don't know. I don't care.

I'm not that scared.

Hank:

Okay. Well, now you've just shouted out to the world. So you better do a little penetration testing on your email on prompt injection and make sure you have some special skills for that.

I don't, but I should. Yeah. Wow.

The future is wild. 2026 is the year where everything changes. I mean, at one of the companies I'm working with, they use Devon from Cognition.

And I mean, I'll just say I'm working, I'm doing some work at Cognition. That's no secret. And I pointed out a bug in a Slack channel and somebody, they didn't even like reply to me.

They just said, at Devon fix this. And less than 30 seconds later, there was a PR for the fix. And then the only bottleneck was like a human final review, which was pretty quick, but they're using it for so many things.

And there's just so many, I don't know. 2026 is the year I think we all see workflows actually really change.

Gonto:

I'm already seeing it with OpenClaw and my OpenClaw is improving every day. So I'm very bullish on how AI will change our lives. And yeah, I know, like I tweeted about this and I knew that the tweet would work once I started to get haters on like, but what will happen when they replace you instead of your EA?

And when you start getting the hate, that's when you know the tweet is going to do well.

Hank:

I was an early, early investor in that tweet. I didn't see how well it did, but it was good.

Gonto:

But anyway, thank you all for coming. Let us know, please, on Twitter or to Hank on LinkedIn if you want, how you feel the episode went. Do you like the rapid fire?

Do you prefer us to focus on two topics? Like what do you want? And also, as Hank said in the beginning, subscribe, comment and do all of that.

If you do that, we'll post more often. If not, we'll just go on vacations more often because you don't like us. But peace.

Thank you all.