Marcel Pociot on Tinkerwell, Herd & Running AI Agents in Parallel

Next up, we have Marcel. How are you? So, I feel like everybody knows Marcel. This is like the OG hour. We We had Ian and now we have Marcel. So, go ahead and tell everybody your name and everything. Yeah. All right. So, uh my name is Marcel Pio. Um I like to say that I'm the CTO at Beyond Code, which is just a very fancy way of saying that I'm still hands-on coding at our little three people company. And uh yeah, we create software tools for developers which you might have used like Laravel herd uh expose Tinko other stuff along the way. I've been in the community for a while. So yeah. Yes. Yes. Oh, sorry. Uh yeah. The uh so I I met you like man years ago at Laracon, but the thing I love and I'm probably in the minority like everybody loves Larville, but I am the Tinkerwell fan. I love Tinkerwell and it just goes with my like the way I like to develop stuff. I mean I know AI is different now but like for me like I want to go and like test it over here and see if it works and then I come back and bring it to my ID. Um but Tinkerwell like what was the inspiration behind building that app? Uh well the main idea was what I used to do was I would create like like test routes in my web PHP file to then try out I don't know just some code snippets and then I always had to remember to delete those routes and just to try out some things or I would add something to the CLI PHP because running PHP artists and tinker the main issue is that it doesn't hot reload the code. So if you make a code change you would need to restart PHP artist and tinker. So that was the main idea to do stuff locally and then we added SSH support and now I'm mostly using it the way you probably shouldn't do. I'm mostly using it on production servers to I don't know quickly run eloquent queries to inspect like kick off a job things like that. So yeah that's awesome. Uh yeah, the uh my use case is actually cuz you know we're in the media business is we're always making reals and videos and Tinkerwell is if you are making like little screencasts and stuff, Tinkerwell is actually real surprisingly good for explaining code because you can just type in it throws the queries out. It throws everything you know there and it's easy to show the the users. Um so big fan check out Tinkerwell. U we'll we're going to move on. We're just going to go through all the products real quick. Herd, if you haven't tried Herd, it is a way to provision PHP on your Mac uh and everything you need. Um I I kind of like to hear the story behind that one. Like how did that come about? Well, at the same time when Herd became a thing, I was working on native PHP uh together with Simon uh back before Shane became part of that and they did all the crazy mobile stuff. And I was showing to Taylor what we do here like we compile PHP and then ship it on the desktop. That's what it was in the beginning. And Taylor always liked the idea of um there's a Postgress app. I don't know if you know that one. just gives you a Postgress icon, the Post Postgress database, that's it. And he always like liked the idea of having a desktop app that only gives you PHP so that you could run PHP artisan surf. Um, and I like the idea, but I wanted to be like more like valet. So we went from there and then uh that's kind of the origin of how it then became Herd. Yeah. Nice. Nice. So, so Herd um like yeah I I used to use Valet and then Herd came out and I switched and like now I'm just I same way I have an icon for like some service that was installed before I started using Herd. I never uninstalled it. Um and now it's just like every time I see it I'm like I I like Herd because this annoyed me having all these little icons of all these like random little things running just to get a you know a PHP app up and going. Um, and then of and then of course Herd has kind of it's not only does it do the basic like PHP and stuff, you have kind of everything now. You can preview emails, you can do actually go through kind of the the hot like what's the top items it can do that. Um, well I mean of course I think like the biggest feature is that we have the service integration. So it's really integrated that you can quickly spin up a MySQL server or Postgress anything that Laravel provides for uh like Larl Scout. If you use Typescense or Miley search you can quickly spin up a server for that. We have uh like a UI. So if you have like dumps anywhere around your code then it uh shows up in a UI like in a separate window. We have a mail preview. So, we kind of wanted it to integrate everything that we feel like should be in a local dev tool and the the way that we can now control this from one app is really powerful I think in that regard. So, yeah. Perfect. Perfect. All right. So um so your talk you're giving a talk at uh me let me see what time in 4 hours 3 hours and 55 minutes um refactoring to parallel um can you tell the audience why they need to tune in without giving away what you're giving away in your talk well the main idea of my talk is that we're all using like AI agents to some extent some people use it more than others and the main bottle neck for me just quickly became waiting for agents to finish and then they try to work in the same directory and then we have git work trees which kind of tries to solve the problem but there are a couple downsides and in my talk I want to explain what the downsides of git work trees are and provide a way that I think is better to make this work especially for web development where we have like vendor folders node modules so um yeah it's really about well refactoring to parallel to make AI multiple AI agents run at the same time. So, Yep. Gotcha. That's sweet. That's sweet. Um um and then like a just from your personal workflow, like what what's been your AI agents of choice lately? Um do you have ones that you you're finding better value in than others? And like what are those? So for me right now, Opus is my daily driver. So Claude as the daily driver because it is relatively quick to write code and then I use codeex to let it review what Claude wrote. So that's kind of my workflow and if it's a bigger task I use codeex immediately. Codex is a bit slower. It likes to read a lot of code which can be really good but if I just want like I'm using claude for the simplest stuff like change the button color I don't do that myself anymore. I let an agent do it. So, uh, and then claude is just way faster, uh, than codeex, but yep, right now it's claude and codeex, the combination of those. Perfect. I, you just reminded me of something I did the other day. I had an array of like links and, uh, they were just like links to companies and I wanted to add UTM parameters and, you know, it was the same and I all I had to do was copy and paste. I was like, Claude, go add this there. And I'm like, I'm so lazy now. Like, I can't even copy and paste anymore. Yep. All right. So, go ahead. Go ahead. No. Well, that's that's kind of um the way that I I work now. And yeah, and then in my talk, we're also going to uh to launch something um that it will be available for free. I can give away that um where we want to basically give our spin on this whole AI orchestration and then go from there. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, you definitely want to tune in. Um um I've I've I may have seen a early early preview and uh uh it's it's it's something you want to go check out. Uh uh that's all I could say as the news guy that's embargoed. But uh man, I want to, you know, thank you for being part of the community. You know, you've been a staple forever. U y'all create awesome products and you know, love everything you've been doing. Um any any closing words as we depart here? Um, well, closing words I think is really what what Taylor also said in his talk. I feel like even myself, I've been through this whole cycle of we're all doomed. This is the best thing ever. We're all doomed. This is the amazing. And right now, I'm at the peak of okay, this is amazing with AI. And um, I just think with Laravel, we're in a really good spot going into the future with everything we we have set up with the community, with the framework. So, I'm really excited for that. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Sweet. All right. Marcel, I appreciate you greatly. Um, yeah.