// cleaned transcript · Oct 12, 2026
Yasir Malik: the conversation
This is the cleaned publication copy: noise, private topics and figures are removed and marked [redacted]. Line numbers match the original recording transcript.
L1[redacted: TV news bleed before the call, lines 1 to 5]
L6Fred Nix: Hey, what's up, brother?
L7Yasir Malik: Hey, Fred. How are you doing?
L8Fred Nix: Can you hear me?
L9Yasir Malik: Yeah, I can. Am I loud on tape?
L10Fred Nix: Great, man. Where are you from?
L11Yasir Malik: Awesome. I'm in the suburbs of Toronto, so you can say one hour west of Toronto. So what about yourself?
L12Fred Nix: Man, I've been talking to.
L13Yasir Malik: Okay.
L14Fred Nix: Four over in the UK.
L15Yasir Malik: Yeah.
L16Fred Nix: Got Canada in the mix.
L17Yasir Malik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, great initiative. And I think you will end up meeting a lot of interesting folks, so I'm glad that you have the time.
L18[redacted: travel detail (employer hint), lines 18 to 22]
L23Yasir Malik: Fred, I did see your profile and everything, and it was quite interesting. I think you've worked for the big corporations and everything, but now I think you're in an interesting phase of your career.
L24[redacted: private invited group, lines 24 to 33]
L34Yasir Malik: Awesome. Awesome. And who are the I think you've met quite a few people so far with your initiative, right?
L35Yasir Malik: So what kind of people are you meeting? Are they very technical, or are they a bit like me as well, like just a normal user who just got excited about this new OS?
L36Fred Nix: I haven't really talked to gunslingers yet. James over in Singapore was looking at localized hardware. He's an older gentleman, and I say that as a 56-year-old older than me.
L37Fred Nix: And it's pretty interesting things with local. And then you've got, if you know, Zero Xero.
L38Yasir Malik: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
L39Fred Nix: That guy, man.
L40Yasir Malik: Yeah.
L41Fred Nix: And then you got Ryan Hughes, then you got one guy who's on the MT.
L42Yasir Malik: Yeah. Yeah.
L43Fred Nix: On.
L44Yasir Malik: Yeah.
L45Fred Nix: You know, I've been in technology since '95, and I've seen stuff kind of come and go, and I've seen excitement.
L46Yasir Malik: Yeah.
L47Fred Nix: And you know, humans have this thing where whatever the latest thing is, this is the biggest thing ever. And I try to temper what I'm saying with that kind of understanding, but.
L48Yasir Malik: Yeah. Yeah.
L49Fred Nix: Something that encapsulates good spirits, positive attitude, really good technology, and a mixture of all those things. Usually, it's just like when VMware came out, it was amazing, but they're really good.
L50Yasir Malik: Yeah.
L51Fred Nix: Like touch to it. I've been working with Ubuntu and other server Linux for, gosh, two decades.
L52Fred Nix: And.
L53Yasir Malik: Oh, wow.
L54Fred Nix: You know, desktop just never grabbed me. And I'd always keep a Linux laptop like Mac or Ubuntu or.
L55Yasir Malik: Mm-hmm.
L56Fred Nix: What would happen every time is the laptop, since it had a battery, I'd shut the lid and SSH into it and basically make it like a Proxmox server or something. Because the desktop just wasn't it was viable, but it didn't have anything for me to stay on. And the joke always is, this year's the year of the Linux desktop, and I think it could actually be this year, like legitimately.
L57Yasir Malik: I agree. And I'll tell you my story of getting onto Omarchy. I was basically always a Mac and a PC kind of a guy at work, mostly PCs, but actually I just transitioned to Mac at work, and obviously it's miles ahead, whatever Mac is.
L58Yasir Malik: And I know it should have come a long way, but compared to Windows, it's still so much better for developers and whatnot, right? And I do a bit of coding and everything, so anyway.
L59Yasir Malik: So PC, I mean, forget Windows, but I actually my parents live in South Asia, and I go once or twice a year to visit them. I don't have a personal laptop because I work off a Mac mini, so it's like, okay, and what do I do?
L60Yasir Malik: And I used to do a little bit of coding and everything, SQL and all, like I'm into data being a business person. So anyway, so I wanted to have a machine from back home that I could just leave it there and not have to worry about it.
L61Yasir Malik: But the problem was that I didn't want to spend a lot of money. So I went online and I saw this Mac mini server from 2012.
L62Yasir Malik: Because it was a server, it had good RAM and everything, but essentially and I got it for 100 bucks, right? 100 Canadian bucks.
L63Yasir Malik: Got it. The guy had macOS whatever running on it, but as you know, the support has been deprecated.
L64Yasir Malik: There was nothing, and it was running really slow. Anyway, I just and I've been comfortable to at least install Ubuntu and everything.
L65Yasir Malik: I installed Ubuntu, left it back home, and every time I would go visit, that was my machine if I wanted to get printouts, whatever. And then I was supposed to go for two weeks in September, and I saw this video pop up.
L66Yasir Malik: I followed Network Chuck, so I saw the interview that he had. Not the interview, he actually was just going through like, hey, this is what it is, Omarchy.
L67Yasir Malik: And I started seeing a few videos, and I was like, what is it? I saw the video.
L68Yasir Malik: I liked the looks of it. To be honest, the looks were the first thing that got me.
L69Yasir Malik: I was like, ah, okay, that's great. But I also saw like, hey, it gets installed in one minute and whatnot.
L70Yasir Malik: So long story short, I basically downloaded the ISO on a USB, took it with me, and installed it. And I'm telling you, Fred, I was there for two weeks.
L71Yasir Malik: I was hooked. So to your point, that is one OS.
L72Yasir Malik: If you remember, and I'm you're not much older than me. I'm 47.
L73Yasir Malik: My dad, I used to live in Pakistan, but even then, he got us a Commodore 64, right? So if you yeah, yeah, exactly.
L74Yasir Malik: So I remember hooking to a TV, having a manual, typing basic, and whatnot. And I give him credit.
L75Yasir Malik: I actually give him credit for the fact that I got into loving technology because of that. Anyway, so the point is that I long story short, this thing got me hooked on how I used to be when I was a kid, if you remember, right?
L76Fred Nix: You were at so many places.
L77Yasir Malik: Right? So you would actually go on, and you would be like, before you know it, it's 5:00 in the morning. And I'll tell you, the other time when I remember I got hooked on like this was when the internet came to Pakistan, in the mid-90s or whatever, right?
L78Yasir Malik: And we would get passwords for these dial-up services and everything. And exactly, right?
L79Yasir Malik: And we would actually be like my friends, myself, we would be up till 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. I remember my dad used to go to the office and be like, you didn't sleep and whatever.
L80Yasir Malik: I'm just saying that this Omarchy got me hooked on to that bit. And what I also loved was what DHHS has done, where that and again, AI kind of at work also.
L81[redacted: employer]
L82Yasir Malik: But the thing is, with Omarchy, how if, say, for example, this is a 2012 machine, right? Say, for example so Ubuntu, I actually had this problem.
L83Yasir Malik: Ubuntu, I lost my wireless for whatever. Broadcom, something happened with the driver and all, and then I had to hook on Ethernet and whatever.
L84Yasir Malik: I tried doing it through codecs, but obviously, it wasn't great. With Omarchy, any issues that I had, it's AI is built in.
L85Yasir Malik: So I'm seeing in real time. It's basically saying, ah, I'll do this.
L86Yasir Malik: I'll do this. Oh, I fixed Hyperland.
L87Yasir Malik: I was having some issues with monitors and whatever. It's just amazing.
L88Yasir Malik: The final thing I'll say is the bit that I'm a big monitor person, even now. Sometimes my wife, she kids with me.
L89Yasir Malik: She was like, do you need any more monitors? But anyway, I work with a lot of multi-monitor setup.
L90Yasir Malik: With Omarchy, you can work with a single monitor. Yeah, exactly.
L91Yasir Malik: It's very cool, by the way, with your second camera. I need to learn to do that.
L92Yasir Malik: But the point is that with Omarchy, you can just work with a single computer. And I'll tell you, final thing.
L93Yasir Malik: So when I came back to.
L94Fred Nix: No, no, no.
L95Yasir Malik: Okay. Sure. When I came back to Toronto, I actually was like, okay, what do I do?
L96Yasir Malik: I know my Mac mini is an M4, so right now they're working through.
L97Fred Nix: That clutch. We're there.
L98Yasir Malik: Yeah. Exactly. So I was like, okay, but I can't stop learning, right?
L99Yasir Malik: Because I spent like two weeks, and I was off work, so I had a lot of time, late nights, and we just spent that time. So it was like, I don't want this learning to stop.
L100Yasir Malik: I don't want I get back to Omarchy in one, two, three months, and then it's moved on. So I want to continue learning.
L101Yasir Malik: So I God, I'll show it to you. This sorry, if you see this machine.
L102Yasir Malik: This machine is basically a Carbon X1. Same thing.
L103Yasir Malik: Got it for [redacted] Canadian bucks. It's a 2021 machine.
L104Yasir Malik: Obviously, businesses, when they run out of it, corporates, they sell it in bulk, and somebody is selling it on Facebook, so got it. It is like compared to my 2012 Mac mini server, this one is running like butter.
L105Yasir Malik: The way I work with like seven, eight desktops, and it's just like amazing. Anyway, so I came and set it up, and that's my second setup.
L106Yasir Malik: And I've heard this on X a lot where people are saying that they don't want to touch their Mac minis anymore or their macOS because they're so used to the Omarchys, right? And the same thing.
L107Yasir Malik: Right now, I am on my Mac talking to you, the reason being that I had not tested Zoom and everything on there. So I was like, okay, I don't want to mess it up and all.
L108Yasir Malik: Exactly. And there are some flakiness.
L109Yasir Malik: My second monitor is becoming an issue, but that's more like, I think, my laptop's thing. But again, as I said, I don't mind.
L110Yasir Malik: I actually clamshell it. I have this super big screen, and I just like I'm happy to work across different desktops and all.
L111Yasir Malik: So yeah, so those are some of the things that really got me hooked on. Another thing, I think, thanks to DHH not that he's the one who came up with Hurdle, but and I saw your project, by the way, I need to install that.
L112Yasir Malik: So I heard about Hurdle through Omarchy's interview with Lex, and I was like, okay, what is Hurdle? And I started looking at it.
L113[redacted: employer and internal tools, lines 113 to 118]
L119Yasir Malik: Yeah, yeah. So that's like so it just changed my way of working. And I'll tell you, Fred, because that's why I love what I'm doing.
L120Yasir Malik: And actually, funny thing, I keep bringing in different things, but my wife and I were having dinner. It's Canadian Thanksgiving, by the way, in Canada.
L121Yasir Malik: It's a day off today. So she was just asking me, what are you thankful for?
L122Yasir Malik: Obviously, she asked me to tell her 10 things I was happy about. Obviously, I had to tell her that I'm happy to be with her and everything.
L123Yasir Malik: But one of the things I said to her was that I'm so glad that I'm living in this day and age where technology is just like moving at the pace it is. And I'm telling you that if I imagine doing my job last year's same time, it was different from what I'm doing.
L124[redacted: employer, internal model names (workflow kept in general terms on the page), lines 124 to 137]
L138Yasir Malik: Obviously, my work is not that complicated, but it's like Fred, I mean, again, I would say I'm really, really glad that I'm living in this time and age. And when I go through X, the amount of honestly, I've given up on X because I found it very toxic and everything, but that was because I was following a lot of politics.
L139Yasir Malik: So I actually curated my feed, and I took all of that stuff away, and I started following these people like DHH and whatever. And I'm addicted to X now because of the fact that did you see yesterday this guy who shared this skill called anatomy?
L140Yasir Malik: Did you try it out? Oh, you sure.
L141Yasir Malik: I'm telling you, Fred, it is like it's anatomy as you write it. What it does is, if you say, hey and he originally wrote it for Claude, but now it's available for codecs as well.
L142Yasir Malik: Just install it, and then say, hey, use the anatomy skill to basically tell me how a coffee machine, how an espresso machine works. Oh, man.
L143Yasir Malik: The animation is just out of the world. See what people are dropping.
L144Fred Nix: You drop a link for me for that?
L145Yasir Malik: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
L146Fred Nix: I'll put a link for you for Sheppard or I don't know how you call it, but it's the tool now.
L147Yasir Malik: That's your tool, right? That's your tool that you came up with? Yes, I saw that yesterday when I was looking at your profile.
L148Yasir Malik: And as I said, I.
L149Fred Nix: I use it all day long, man. It is slick.
L150Yasir Malik: I intend to use it. Just give me a second. I'm trying to find yeah, yeah, here you go.
L151Yasir Malik: I'm just going to drop it.
L152Fred Nix: While you're looking for that, what's your. So when people sign up here, it doesn't correlate back to your X handle. What's your X handle?
L153Yasir Malik: Oh, okay. My X handle give me a second. As I said, I've not been using X for a very long time, but I think it should be ymalik79.
L154Yasir Malik: Can you try that? Oh, or maybe have I changed my handle?
L155Yasir Malik: Give me a second. Sorry.
L156Yasir Malik: Let's see. If I go to my profile and ALIK79, do you get that or you don't?
L157Yasir Malik: Okay.
L158Fred Nix: I did a recap for all the conversations I have, and I want to make sure I got the right guy.
L159Yasir Malik: Yeah, yeah. Okay. But yeah, take a look at anatomy.
L160Yasir Malik: I'm sure you would love. But all I'm saying is, this is why I love I know Discord is great as well, but again, as I said, I think for tech folks like you, you guys are a lot into Discord.
L161Yasir Malik: I'm finding it a bit overwhelming where it just keeps going on and on and on.
L162Fred Nix: So hard to like Discord, and I just can't I think it's my age. It's just too much. It's overwhelming.
L163Fred Nix: It's just too much.
L164Yasir Malik: Same for me. Same for me. And that's why I'm loving X, because X is like a good mix of now, when I'm looking at X, it's got somebody has put a graphic, and this is how anatomy, somebody has put a video, and it's showing.
L165Yasir Malik: And I was like, oh, this looks cool. Let me go take a look at that.
L166Yasir Malik: So yeah, it's just amazing. So the amount of stuff that I'm discovering again, as I said, I'm not a technical guy, but what I'm doing is.
L167Fred Nix: I don't agree with that. You're saying a lot of code words that makes sense.
L168[redacted: employer, lines 168 to 172]
L173Yasir Malik: As they say, it's a rabbit hole with YouTube and whatever, because now my feed is all of these good things. And I was like what I was saying was that now I follow a lot of people who go through GitHub repos that are basically making waves, right?
L174Yasir Malik: So I go in, and I was like, oh, I actually like that. All I have to do is to drop it into Codex and basically say, hey, this is a repo.
L175Yasir Malik: Build me something similar. And yeah, so that's why even my wife I mean, I've been sleeping.
L176Yasir Malik: I have to go to office at 8:00 in the morning, but I usually am sleeping like 3:00 in the morning, which I know isn't healthy, but it's just as I said, I've never been addicted as much as I was in my early years when this technology, like internet or whatever, was coming around. So yeah.
L177Fred Nix: So I want to make sure this. You started on Commodore 64, and tell me the steps that you took all the way to right here.
L178Yasir Malik: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So again, as I said, I think this is 1988, '89. I think that's when my dad got us the Commodore 64.
L179Yasir Malik: Again, I'm not a genius programmer or whatever, but I think I did get exposure to basic. I used to write.
L180Yasir Malik: The manual had a few basic codes and everything. Did that.
L181Yasir Malik: To be honest, just like any kid, I used it more for games rather than anything else. But again, I think that exposure, early exposure, is important.
L182Yasir Malik: So then I went on to then we kind of transitioned to having I remember, was it a 486? Yes, it was a 486.
L183Yasir Malik: Then I remember we got a Pentium. Then my dad's office used to have these Macintosh, so I kind of got exposed to Macintosh, knew it as the premium ones.
L184Yasir Malik: And then, yeah, just carried on having computers, but mostly on the PC side, because obviously, Macintosh and everything was very expensive, especially living in a country like Pakistan. So then eventually moved on to continued having, I think, PCs.
L185Yasir Malik: I'm an engineer, so not a software engineer, but a robotics engineer. So obviously, used computers, PCs for that.
L186Yasir Malik: Did my MBA. There also, it was pretty much PCs.
L187Yasir Malik: I think once I got into my first job, somewhere around 2004 or '05, started getting into Macs. And I'll tell you, I think one organization I need to give credit for is Amazon, because when I joined Amazon again, I was on the business side, not on the technical side, not on the engineering side.
L188Yasir Malik: But Amazon had that culture, right? It was more of a tech company rather than a retail company.
L189Yasir Malik: So I think I stopped learning in 2004, I'll be very honest, in a sense that I did my MBA, got into a good job. I used to work for an oil and gas company.
L190Yasir Malik: Didn't have much of a motivation to learn. I think when I joined Amazon, that was where I realized that I had stopped growing as an individual.
L191Yasir Malik: And I was seeing these people who were much younger than me who were basically writing codes in Visual Basic. And sorry, it wasn't Visual Basic.
L192Yasir Malik: It was VBE. It's Visual Basic, but VBA codes in Excel.
L193Yasir Malik: So yeah, and they were pulling data from the servers and kind of building these dashboards. And because I was in operations, so that was helping how they were monitoring the shift and everything.
L194Yasir Malik: And I was like, okay. And I used to go to them.
L195Yasir Malik: And I don't like being dependent on someone. So then I said, okay, you know what?
L196Yasir Malik: I'll learn it myself. So that's where that journey started, where I started doing VBA and whatever.
L197Yasir Malik: Then I got into this role where SQL was needed, and I didn't know SQL. And I was open with the hiring manager, and she was like, yeah, it's a bonus if you know it.
L198Yasir Malik: So that's where I started learning SQL. And once I started learning SQL, and this was a very data-heavy role.
L199Yasir Malik: This was like Amazon Flex. I'm not sure if you know about it, but basically where normal people just go to a delivery station, and they basically deliver for Amazon in their cars and everything.
L200Yasir Malik: So I was running that program for Amazon here in Canada. So obviously, it was a wealth of data, right?
L201Yasir Malik: And so I started learning SQL, but then also, we used to work with very smart data scientists and everything. So I started getting into that, but nowhere close to being a data scientist, but I wanted to understand that field.
L202Yasir Malik: So I started learning Python, started learning data analytic techniques, like libraries within Python and everything. But again, what was even though I learned that, and again, I think, as I said, that learning journey has not stopped, and I love that learning.
L203Yasir Malik: But I think it was when you're working full-time, I don't have kids, so that's kind of an advantage where in the evening after dinner and all, I got time for a lot of this stuff, which some of my friends don't. So kind of an advantage, but I'm limited by how much I can learn, right?
L204Yasir Malik: If I have to learn a new language and whatever. And I think that's where my learning has also kind of quadrupled or I would say maybe 10 times what it used to be a few years ago because I've got these tools, right?
L205Yasir Malik: Now, earlier, if I was learning a language, I was learning Python because that was the easiest language to learn. But right now, I don't even know what is the difference between Rust and Ruby on Rail and whatever.
L206Yasir Malik: As I said, I'm not a technical guy.
L207Fred Nix: Oh, does it matter? Does it matter?
L208Yasir Malik: It doesn't. It doesn't. But all I'm saying is, earlier, I was limiting myself because I could only do Python, right?
L209Yasir Malik: But now, with a white coding tool, I can say, hey, can you do this better in any other language? And I don't really care.
L210Yasir Malik: It can go use Ruby. It can use Ruby on Rails.
L211Yasir Malik: I'm not a tech guy who's in, I know, these kind of discussions that people have. Oh, Ruby on Rails has this problem.
L212Yasir Malik: I know there are some whatever. I'm not even interested in those controversies and everything that people get into.
L213[redacted: employer, lines 213 to 219]
L220Yasir Malik: Again, as I said, I don't know what CSS is. I don't know all those Node.js and.
L221Yasir Malik: I do see it. And sometimes if I'm curious, I do ask the white coding tool to say, hey, can you tell me why did you do this and why did you feel that this particular language or whatever I don't even know the right word, the library or whatever you used, why did you use it?
L222Yasir Malik: And sometimes, if I had the time, I would find out. But again, to your point, I don't care.
L223Fred Nix: This is one of the this is a fun one, man. Just hearing your whole arc. You got a whole story through the whole process.
L224Fred Nix: What a time to be alive that we.
L225Yasir Malik: Absolutely.
L226Fred Nix: I almost wish I was born 20 years later so that I'll get to see the AGI and get to see all that stuff. But it's really amazing to see. I remember back when there was no computers at all.
L227Fred Nix: I remember when they came out, and I was maybe 14 years old. And just to see where it's progressed now.
L228Fred Nix: And it's fun to be in the industry. I'm an old fart, and it's interesting to I'm hanging in there.
L229Fred Nix: And I'll tell you, I do this stuff 12, 15 hours a day, and I feel behind. I feel like I don't know crap.
L230Yasir Malik: Oh, yeah.
L231Fred Nix: It's too fast.
L232Yasir Malik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. And I think what it brings out is there are some very, very smart people.
L233Yasir Malik: And you can tell, right, when you listen to people like DHH and others, and you're like, okay, these guys are really, really sharp up here. Exactly.
L234Yasir Malik: And I mean, again, I'm not that exposed. You're getting exposed to those people, right?
L235Yasir Malik: Like the ones that you said. This OSX or OS0 or whatever you're talking about.
L236Yasir Malik: I saw his podcast with DHH. And again, I could tell the guy is super smart.
L237Yasir Malik: So to catch up with those guys, sometimes it becomes very difficult. But I'll tell you, Fred, I had a few hobbies that I actually gave up on because so I'll tell you two things.
L238Yasir Malik: One, I was a lot into motorcycling. And again, living in Canada, we get like six months and whatever.
L239Yasir Malik: You just come down to the US and all. This is the first year in my wife sometimes jokes, that is the only thing that wakes me up at 5:00 in the morning, right?
L240Yasir Malik: Because I loved it. This is the first season where I've done only one ride, and that's it, because I was so much into this stuff.
L241Yasir Malik: I'm up till 3:00 in the morning. When would I wake up to go and do those?
L242Yasir Malik: And I don't regret it because, again, I think what we are going through is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of a chance. Exactly.
L243Fred Nix: They call it AI Vampire.
L244Yasir Malik: AI Vampire. Okay. Why do they say that?
L245Yasir Malik: Sorry.
L246Fred Nix: They call it AI Vampire because you're just up all the hours of the night.
L247Yasir Malik: Oh, got it. Got it. Got it.
L248Yasir Malik: I understand now. And the other thing is, I always wanted to be a recreational pilot.
L249Yasir Malik: And I did some training initially before COVID. And then COVID came, so I couldn't do my more flying and everything.
L250Yasir Malik: And then I kind of, last year, made this pledge that I would sit through the Canadian winter, prepare for my private pilot exam, at least do the ground test, and so then I can just do the Rs whenever. And I was really on a good path to do it by this March or April.
L251Yasir Malik: And then I took this decision. I had this conversation with my wife, and I was like, you know what?
L252Yasir Malik: I can do either one of the things. Either I can really, really spend my time in learning this AI stuff, or I kind of protect my future in a sense that if I know something I'm 47, not exactly a spring chicken, at least with learning this, maybe I will protect myself.
L253Yasir Malik: This pilot thing is not going to change, right? The way you train for a pilot is not going to change much between what it was exactly 10 years ago versus what it will be, say, if I take it up in another three years, right?
L254Yasir Malik: So all I'm saying is, and I don't have regrets. These are the two main things that I told you about that I kind of gave up on because I wanted to spend time.
L255Yasir Malik: And I think I need to check myself because waking up till 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and then because there's always so much to do. I go through, and X is obviously contributing to it.
L256Yasir Malik: I see all of these things. And I'm like, oh, you know what?
L257Yasir Malik: I need to test this out. I need to make this.
L258Yasir Malik: There's so many things that you could build. So yeah, just loving it.
L259Yasir Malik: I just don't feel there are enough hours in a day. That's my only complaint.
L260Fred Nix: I know the AI side as well as I do. More often than everybody at the grocery store, but you put me in a room of experts, and I'm learning from them. What I really don't know about is the robotics side.
L261[redacted: views on jobs, automation and humanoids (private at his request), lines 261 to 363]
L364Yasir Malik: I do have a question for you, though. And I know you've been building tools and everything.
L365[redacted: work restrictions]
L366Yasir Malik: You heard of both on my Mac. I use it on my Omarchy also has the whole setup.
L367Yasir Malik: Question is, what are your coding tools? How has your journey been in terms of from an AI perspective?
L368Yasir Malik: How do you categorize all the major labs and everything? What have you experimented with?
L369Yasir Malik: And what models are your go-to? What are your backups?
L370Yasir Malik: What are the ones you kind of it's like, nah, I'll stay away.
L371Fred Nix: So currently, I have Claude and Anthropic. I've got ChatGPT Codex. I've got Grok.
L372Fred Nix: I've got another one from cheapinference.com where you can just you can use them all through one LLM, rather.
L373Yasir Malik: Yeah.
L374Fred Nix: I picked up Claude Code probably within a week when version 0.001 came out, and it was very rudimentary. And it just blew me away. I think I was using it to move files around, just very and the reason for that was my brain had not unlocked.
L375Fred Nix: And I see this a lot in new users, and you're certainly not a new user. But they do the very basic stuff because it takes time for people to use AI and to stretch out.
L376Fred Nix: So people that use AI at the beginning, they just repeat the things that they know how to do and watch it do those things. And it unlocked a thing where you can tell it to do your idea that you have no idea how to do.
L377Fred Nix: But what I teach newcomers is all you have to be able to do is to explain what you want and tell if you like it or you don't like it.
L378Yasir Malik: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
L379Fred Nix: So exactly January 8th at 2:00 AM, it occurred to me to start more or less, and there's people that agree or disagree with this, but to start humanizing my Larry Claude Code.
L380Fred Nix: And at that time, each directory that you started Claude Code in was a completely brand new session.
L381Fred Nix: Just like ChatGPT in the early days, every session is stupid and brand new. So I started working on how do I make it where it can understand across all my conversations?
L382Fred Nix: Moving to things like one of my first tricks that everybody does now that I don't want to say I invented it, but was one of the early adopters was tying my Claude Code directory, the .claude in my home directory to a GitHub repo and having it replicate up to automatically. And that did two things.
L383Fred Nix: Number one, it protected my code. So even today, I call him Larry.
L384Fred Nix: Even today, he's still in that same GitHub repo. And what that does is if I lose my laptop or whatever, I still have all of the conversations.
L385Yasir Malik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good one.
L386Fred Nix: When you commit information and a commit to ChatGPT, you usually change the colors of the CSX sheet or whatever. I saw pretty early in that there's almost no limit to the size of the comment window. You can put a lot of data in there.
L387Fred Nix: You can put it around different pieces of when you commit pushes, there's different places that you can put code, that you can put description, that you can put tags. And I told Larry to just fill it up.
L388Fred Nix: So every time we have a conversation, he encapsulates the conversation, uses Fabric to kind of do a summary of the entire conversation, does a long commit statement about what the conversation was about, and then puts it into my Git repo with all that information, time and date stamp, topic, entire conversation. And so then the next thing was I trained him.
L389Fred Nix: I'm like, if I ask you a question and you don't know the answer, the very first thing you do, are you familiar with the program GH, which allows you to operate GitHub remotely from the command line?
L390Yasir Malik: Yeah. Yeah, I use it.
L391Fred Nix: Fantastic. So I taught it, instead of saying, I don't know, run a GH grep command against the summary topics to find the topic and bring it back to me. So immediately, just like on day two, just 12X the memory because all the sessions knew that they could look up into the Git.
L392Fred Nix: And it's a private repo. They can look up into the private repo.
L393Fred Nix: So every one of my sessions now in Claude still pushes up to the same repo, but it has a tree structure about when it happened, what it's connected to. And it kind of does an obsidian map, kind of, where it links all the different conversations and the different topics and comes at it from 12 different ways.
L394Fred Nix: And then it started looking at and a lot of these things that I came up with, and I was not the only one. There was a lot of other people that were doing the same things.
L395Fred Nix: The next thing was to work on recall. And so every single AI does memory perfectly.
L396Fred Nix: So it writes down everything that it needs to write down. The issue isn't memory.
L397Fred Nix: The issue is recalling the right information at the right context, the right time for the right project. So it made some big breakthroughs through there.
L398Fred Nix: And then the next piece was, before it automatically did it, I wrote code to have Claude within itself, at that time, Opus or even Sonnet before that, to have it step down to an LLM model and use the one that is the lowest model that has the capability to do the job. And I'm not going to do that now because it'll do it for you, but back then.
L399Fred Nix: So what was interesting is all the different pieces and parts that I coded for to kind of fix. Problems.
L400Fred Nix: What happens is about a month later, not from looking at me or not from what I'm doing, but they figure that same thing out and just add it to the product. So I've got Larry that has forever memory and can talk about and I keep track.
L401Fred Nix: I think I'm in 17,000 conversations now. I can ask him a question about any of it.
L402Fred Nix: And the interesting thing, when I work on a project and I'll say, we're doing this type of code, he'll go, hey, that's almost the same type of input as the project we worked on three months ago. Let me go look at that code and pull it together.
L403Fred Nix: So now what I do when I work on a project is my workflow kind of is I open up Herder on my machine that keeps all my dev work. And then interestingly enough, I do a make CD, and then I'll type like omarchy.login.x dot.
L404Fred Nix: And I just be very descriptive long about the directory because I've got the lazy search when you do a CD to find anything. So I don't have to remember the exact directory.
L405Fred Nix: And this is when I don't really know what I'm going to name the project yet. So then I go into Herder and I open that session there.
L406Fred Nix: So Herder automatically forever keeps my projects and keeps it tied to the directory so I don't have to remember which directory it is. And then as the project progresses, I'll rename the Herder title to whatever the project name is, but keep the directory, the long name of exactly what it does.
L407Fred Nix: So I'll take her in about five minutes if you'll give him five minutes.
L408[redacted: background audio]
L409Fred Nix: Okay. Well, thank you for doing that. So the next thing is, you know the term prior art?
L410Yasir Malik: No, I don't.
L411Fred Nix: Prior art means you've got an idea to make a project, and instead of building it yourself, go out on GitHub and find people that have kind of already done it.
L412Yasir Malik: Oh, okay.
L413Fred Nix: When I come up with a new idea, I'll start the project, create the directory, open up the Herder. And then my first thing is to ask it to I'm kind of thinking about this, and I'll say, do not start coding yet. I'm kind of thinking about this.
L414Fred Nix: Go find the top three most popular GitHub projects that are kind of doing the same thing. And sometimes it'll be three of them.
L415Fred Nix: Sometimes it'll be 15 because I'll say, I want a little piece of that, a little piece of that. And then I clone all those projects into the root of that one project.
L416Fred Nix: So then I go in and I go, I want you to use the database from here, the way the project over there thinks about. And so I tell Larry to go cherry-pick all the best parts of those open-source things and make my project.
L417Fred Nix: And so the effect of that is, and it becomes mine because it's very specialized in what I want. But here's the coolest part.
L418Fred Nix: The coolest part is I keep those forks. So when Upstream makes additional changes or modification and improvements to the code that I'm using, it automatically merges them.
L419Fred Nix: So Larry's always getting smarter in the sense that the GitHub repositories get better. So that's one layer.
L420Yasir Malik: Got it.
L421Fred Nix: He gets better when I buy him a new I've got an i9 with 64 cores, 64 gig of RAM, 4 terabyte hard drive. So that's his body. He gets better in the body.
L422Fred Nix: His mind gets better when the GitHub repos get better. And then his soul gets better when the LLMs, whatever Fable 6.0 comes out.
L423Fred Nix: So at all layers of those pieces, you've got mind, body, and soul all being upgraded. So what I'm really monotonously focused on now, and I think that you're in the same boat, is my work environment is badass.
L424Fred Nix: I've got everything I want. I've got the monitors all mounted.
L425Fred Nix: I've got a 49-inch up here and I can turn. And I focus on very expensive keyboards that are exactly what I want.
L426Fred Nix: And so from the chair to my fingertips and making sure that I take care of my fingers, to my body showering, to the keyboard that I care about, to the body of the best computer I can get, to the best operating system, to the best harness. So I think about it in terms of from the very start, where do I place my feet?
L427Fred Nix: I choose my environment, everything, to the chair, to my fingers, to the keyboard. The entire stack, I'm optimizing.
L428Fred Nix: So I don't just think about one piece of using the best harness. I think about every day I want to improve the entire stack all the way across.
L429Fred Nix: And when I sleep better, I do better, and I shower, and I feel better, and I've got the air on. And all these things in my environment that I have, like this is above me, I keep these.
L430Fred Nix: These are the things that and part of my life and art. And so I think I'm rambling at this point, but you get the idea.
L431Fred Nix: I'm really talking to folks about, don't just make sure you got a hot computer. Take care of yourself and exercise and spend money on the right keyboards for you, whatever that is.
L432Yasir Malik: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
L433Fred Nix: Just think about your entire workflow. It's not just the tech. It's all the things that help you do your job better.
L434Yasir Malik: Yeah. Very interesting point just on the keyboard because I recently I mean, again, it's not about what keyboard. I recently got a new fee, and I love the fact that obviously, I love the feel and everything, but the key mapping is like and that is a new fee, NUPHY, and they're node 100.
L435Yasir Malik: And I took it for my office because I got a complaint. I used to have this Keychron, this one that you're seeing.
L436Yasir Malik: This was in the office, but it was too noisy. Yeah, I think you've got a Keychron as well, right?
L437Fred Nix: Exactly right.
L438Yasir Malik: Yeah. Plus, I also got this on Marketplace, which is this is just a numpad. But then it's got these yeah.
L439Yasir Malik: No, this is just a numpad, but yours is, I think, is it the Stream Deck?
L440Fred Nix: Yeah, it's the Stream Deck. And I've.
L441Yasir Malik: But to your point, Fred, because it's like now that I'm using Herder, actually, I want to program these keys, the function ones, because it's like, okay, take me to this window. I don't want to be pressing the control B and the P and the N. I just want one button, take me to the next pane or whatever.
L442Yasir Malik: So absolutely. I know we're at time.
L443[redacted: private request and private remarks, lines 443 to 469]
L470Yasir Malik: Awesome. Thank you, sir. Have a good day, Fred, and I'll see you.
L471Fred Nix: I'll say so long. Goodbye because I want to see you online, okay?
L472Yasir Malik: For sure. Thank you. Take care.
L473Yasir Malik: Bye-bye.
L474Fred Nix: Bye-bye.
L475Yasir Malik: Thanks. Bye.