Eno Reyes

We, we had no point wanting to build autocomplete or wanted to build an IDE, uh,

From the beginning, it was droids, fully autonomous systems.

Our mission when we first started and to this day is to bring autonomy to software engineering.

And so we built out the first droid prototype.

It was a Slack bot that you could chat with and it would work on its own and come back to you.

And this is in 2023.

And so basically, no one had seen this sort of fully autonomous interaction form factor yet.

But along the way, there were a ton of lessons.

I think we were way too early with that vision of software development and interaction, both because the models weren't necessarily strong enough to do the breadth of tasks you wanted to do and required a bunch of harnessing, but also because people weren't used to that interaction pattern.

It was surprising to us after like six to seven months, we got to this point where customers would say to us, you know, it's actually like working pretty consistently, but we're not really sure how to teach people how to use this interaction pattern.

And that made us realize that we needed to meet people a little bit closer to where they are.

And so then it evolved a couple of times to the current form factor that it has today.

Yeah, totally.

And I think that it actually goes back a bit further.

My first sort of foray into deep learning and LLMs was in a research lab in undergrad that focused on computational models of cognition.

And basically, the thought process there was, you know, you want to be able to look at different ways that fMRI, EEG, brain activity interacts and see if you can model algorithmically

or with deep learning, how those interactions might play out.

Not to say we know exactly what's happening in the brain, but just to say, you know, we can actually imitate some input-output algorithm that clearly the brain is also executing.

And so there's some insight there, even if it's not the same thing.

And I found that to be, like, a really interesting idea.