Dax Raad

Like no one out there is using AI so well that they just like we can't even compete, right?

And we're in the coding agent space.

All our competitors are super into AI.

So you would think in our space there would be like a huge gap, but there just isn't.

yeah so i uh i grew up kind of cliche story i grew up programming as a kid uh my dad was a software engineer so a little bit easier for me to get into than for other people then just started working out of high school uh founded a company thought it was cool though i knew what i was doing looking back in hindsight like wow i didn't know what i was doing at all um that eventually got aqua hired as a small acquire uh and i ended up in like the real tech industry

Bounced around as a consultant, founded a few companies, and then ended up doing open source pretty much the past six years full time.

Yeah, so Minecraft obviously everyone knows what Minecraft is.

And again, this is another cliche story.

You talk to a bunch of people in tech, they have a similar backstory.

There was a modding framework for Minecraft that came out.

I ended up working on the framework itself.

I ended up making a bunch of mods with it.

I found that I liked creating interesting sandboxes.

I played the game a little bit, but I didn't play the game that much.

I had a server that 100 people would play on.

And I would just use these mods to create interesting situations to try to understand how people would behave under certain scenarios.

And I found that fascinating.

But yeah, that required a lot of programming Java stuff.

What's interesting is that community, obviously, I was very new to programming.

uh it was all done over irc a community existed on irc but there was some like very senior very good programmers in there the people there i felt like were people that weren't particularly career motivated they were probably in a comfortable enough situation where they worked like two hours a day and they were talented but they didn't have any like desire to like career chase at all so they funneled it into the minecraft stuff and i got to talk to them and learn from them so