Cloudflare Blocks AI Crawlers × Debugging Local Data × Raising Kids with Healthy Digital Habits and More

Welcome to Syntax. We got a Pollock episode for you today where you bring the questions, we bring the answers. Some really good questions around Cloudflare's new setting to block AI LLMs. So should if you put content on the Internet, should you be blocking LLMs from accessing that? A bunch of local first questions about local databases and syncing data.

Kids' digital hygiene. Should kids be on YouTube? Should they have iPads? AI projects ESLint a portfolio. This guy vibe Node a little too close to the sun and now has has a product that he's selling. Should that go in your portfolio if you didn't really code it? And obfuscating data via an API, That's something you need to do. So let's get on into it.

How's it going today, Scott?

Hey. I'm doing super good. I we were talking about Web Awesome before this recording, and I was telling you that I Web Awesome got into my brain in a very funny way this morning Wes I had to check on Web Awesome.

I kid you Scott, for no reason in particular, I had a dream last night that was like web components? That was like, Wes Awesome is officially, like, complete. And I was like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna just dump Web Awesome and everything Node. Web Awesome, for those who don't know, it's like a collection of web components formerly, like, based off of, like, Shoelace was a collection of web, components. Like UI components, carousel, avatars.

Yeah. AppSum. Tabs.

Modals.

And it's great stuff. I was a a a Kickstarter background on it. But, yeah, I I woke up this morning being like, oh, I can't wait to, check out that Wes Awesome full release. And then I was like, wait a second.

When was I looking at that? I wasn't looking at that. And then it hit me that I was in a dream. This is my life, apparently. I I am going to be using it today, though. I do I I I do, in I think it's neat. So I I'm I'm stoked to actually dive in. It looks like their beta's gotten a little bit further along. How are you doing today, Wes? Did you have any dreams about Wes components?

Did not have any dreams about web components, but I'm a I'm a big fan of of web components. We've talked about this many times. I'm a big fan of using web components. I don't necessarily love writing them myself.

Somebody else can do that. Yeah. Wes it comes to

something like like UI or, obviously, the, MediaChrome video player from Mux is an awesome example of cross browser, implementation.

And that's great because you you can have somebody build a really hard thing, which is a video player that does absolutely everything, and then you just get to use it in React or Vanilla or whatever

framework you wanna use. And I'm a big fan of that approach. Yeah. Same here. Yeah. So let's get into it. Today, we have an awesome potluck episode for y'all, and we can kick off the very first question here from Sam.

How to do customer support in a Local First app? So they're asking really, how do you even consider doing customer support when the data lives locally? So a customer support rep will typically log into a customer's account and view and change their data, but they are only seeing a single customer for up to one hour. Seems like this use case doesn't fit local first, but the alternative is to write a whole new regular back end front pnpm for the BackOffice app.

You could share an agnostic TypeScript library for logic perhaps, but a bit too much work. Right? What do you think? So I I think, Sam might be thinking about this as being like, in our scenario, when we are trying to like, at at where Sam works, when they try to debug someone else's app, they they typically they get access to that that customer maybe, like, through, what do they call that? Like, you spoof it. You log in as a customer. Right? It, but there's a word for it. And I believe it starts with an I, but the only word that's coming to me is improvise, for some reason. You're pretending to be that user, so that way you can experience the app as that user. It's a very common way that that people are able to access this. In fact, I just saw a thread on Twitter the other day where somebody was saying, hey. I just viewed the app as you on Twitter, and your feed looks fine.

So even Twitter can do this, folks, if you're wondering about that. Either way, they're wondering if the data's all living locally in a local first context, how do you even begin to be able to see the app from their perspective given that the data's living locally.

Now so this is interesting, but, ultimately, a lot of these local first style apps do end up syncing to a server, meaning that you should be able to still do the same thing Wes you are masquerading as that user seeing the app with their data.

Yes. That's local first, not entirely local. Right? Correct.

And if it if it was the case that it's local only, you should be able to have enough Wes and robustness in your data that you can, make sure that you're using the app.

Or you're using something like Sentry that is reporting back what's going on or you're having error logs that, tells you what exactly is happening in the application.

So you shouldn't always just need that user's exact data to dial in on any bug. That said, many times in local first, that is syncing. Right? If you're wondering why, like or how people do this in general, I think the best place to look for general concepts would be, like, native iOS apps or native Android apps. Tons of those are using data only on the device, and they're they're debugging them based on, crash analytics. They're debugging them based on, observability, things like Sanity.

Those things to be able to understand where the errors are happening, not necessarily always just impersonating the user.

Impersonating is the I word.

Yes. Impersonating.

That's I just found it on BetterAuth because we talked about this in the BetterAuth thing, and I was like, yeah. I'm looking for it. I'm darting around impersonation session duration.

Wes does those weird nonword recall right there? So that's how you debug this type of thing. You don't always need the user's data. There's a lot of other alternatives to, masquerading or in a I've already lost the word. Yeah.

Improvising.

It's not the right word. Impersonation.

Impersonation.

So that that's it, Sam. Not too much there. Yeah. I think I think the important thing that you said there is things can break and when it only happens locally on the user's computer. So this this happens even with local storage Wes you write a bit of code and you assume that like, for example, often people will take, like, an object, they'll JSON stringify it, and they'll throw that into local storage. But for some for whatever reason, you throw something into local storage and it doesn't get, stored JS a string properly. Right? It might just be undefined. And then you try JSON parse, the the string of undefined, and then it and then it's broken. Right? So what can happen there? Like, I I've certainly had that on my own website. I'll store the, like, the playback rate and whether or not the user has captions on or off. I'll throw that in local storage. And and you you assume I've I've assumed in the past that those things will always parse out to, like, a Boolean or an object with a with a rate property on it. But for whatever reason, maybe they changed it themselves, maybe you saved it in improperly.

If it's not there, then the the website will break if you don't have error handling in there. So, what you'll wanna do is is, a, catch those exceptions, and then you can send, like, a snapshot of what that data looks like along to in to your century or something like that. And that's, like, the kind of the one, like, scary thing because you can't just, like, refresh.

Your code is assuming something is going to be there, but that's more of a coding problem, not just a local first problem.

Yeah. Totally. Exactly. Question from Will. I'm a freelancer, and I have a few customers have done okay, but not well enough to quit my job, to live off freelancing. I gave up applying for tech jobs over a year ago and decided I needed to build something significant with my skills to build my portfolio.

One of my projects was to build a CRM, I could use for myself with freelancing. One thing followed another, and suddenly, a customer wanted to pay me for my CRM. So, this is very common thing. You you build a product to scratch your own itch and then realize, oh, other people actually want this thing as well.

So suddenly, I went into build fast and break things mode. I used ChatGPT and Claude to help me write it, and now I have a decently early version of a CRM that's working well with the basics, and the customer is happy with the direction that's going. Using AI, I wrote the whole base site in, like, two months, and I've been adding polish for the last three months. It's complex enough. Like, I feel like in times of twenty twenty two, it would have taken me over a year to build it and would have been a significant accomplishment for a solo dev. But this was supposed to be a portfolio project, and now I have an app that's 95% written by AI. And, well, I was just a babysitter and Node reader. In your opinion, is this the world that we live in? Should I use this as a portfolio project? The back end is Python, and I can a 100% go over everything and talk about what it's doing, how and why. The front end is React, and, honestly, there is some JSX components that I know what it is doing and why, but the how is a little sketchy.

I feel like it could be a gotcha moment in an interview. What should I do? So should I be putting this thing as a portfolio product? So the I'm I'm there's two camps that that I'm in here right now. Right? Yeah. First of all, I am so excited that we live in a world where you can build something that you previously could not have have possibly ever done in in a sane amount of time or or even at all, just not having this go. Like, hell, yeah. I love that.

But on on the flip side JS you just generated, like, a whole bunch of of technical debt where you I don't think you should, in good faith, put customer data in something where you have admitted that things are a little bit sketchy. Right? There's Yes. There's been tons of stories. Every week, you hear about a new thing where there's a database has been left open, something gets deleted, there's security issues, there's all this type of stuff. So I think what's gonna happen is that these apps like, I've certainly built my fair share of, like, vibe coded apps, and then I'm frustrated. Like, right right now, I'm I'm working on this LED grid thing with the Wes 32, and I vibed a little bit too hard to a point where I just scrapped so much of it because it was such a mess.

And I I I I felt like I couldn't get out of it. You know? So I just scrapped it and and rewrote rewrote it mostly by myself.

So those things get really hard to maintain. It gets really hard to solve bugs, performance problems. And I I do think AI will get better at those things, but at least right now, it's gonna be a very hard thing. So the question that really wasn't the Wes, but the question was, is should this be a portfolio project? I don't know that this necessarily matters or is not going to matter for much longer because people people are are gonna lie about this stuff regardless. Right? People are already using AI to to do interviews, to be able to nail questions, to to the take home exam is is pretty much a dead thing right now. The the coding assignments, all of these things, honestly, I think Yarn are dead because everybody can spoof them. And it's really hard for people hiring to be able to suss out who's real and and who is not. So if you are looking to get a a job from this type of thing, I would probably say that it was partially done with AI, but I don't know that the portfolio is going to be a huge push unless you can clearly prove that you know exactly what's going on. And and if they were to bring up your code base and say, hey. Explain how x, y, and z, or explain, like, a problem that you hit, or explain how, this React component is is handling drag and drop.

And if if you're not able to do that, like, I think a lot of people are moving back to in person interviews specifically for this because you can suss out the people that don't actually know what they're doing.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That is a whole thing with with AI that I think people who have a long career in programming will will notice much faster than people who don't know what they're doing or have much less time JS that things can appear fine on the surface, but there's can be such a rat's nest of Node brewing if you don't know what's happening. If you're not like, if if you get too much into vibe Node, as you said, like, your weekend at Bernie's, ing it, I think that that's like that that to me is like the you vibe too hard, and now you are weekend at Bernie's. You are Lomax. You are getting, carried around.

You have no idea what's going on in your application, and it's just kind of gotten out of control.

Like, I see that all the time with with apps that people have pushed that are clearly AI, and you you can see it sometimes as like, oh, this is a weird overflow text issue or something on their landing page. Or the purple. Have you heard about the purple problem?

Where it's just using the same purple color or what? You just like, you ask AI to make any website, and it's it's always purple. It's and, I think a lot of that comes from, like, the Tailwind examples.

But it's very hard to make it not build a website that either looks like Bootstrap or is very, very purple.

I can spot those those layouts a mile away too. And and, like, you can tell if something if someone has no experience because they'll push stuff live, and it's just like, yeah. You got it done, but at what cost? So there's an important thing to know is if you are going to be using these tools and you want it to be a portfolio project, you can use AI still, but you gotta baby it. You gotta monitor it very closely. You gotta be like, you have to act as that code reviewer and know exactly what's happening. The thing that I Node the most in my own work when I use agents or anything like that is, like, they'll slightly add some CSS here that might already exist here, and that CSS drift or that duplicating that,

repeating yourself. The worst. Yeah. Yeah. I I had a problem recently where it does fallback. You tell it to do something differently, and it keeps the old code around.

Totally. And then it just it says, okay. Well, if that doesn't work, we'll fall back to that. And then and then and before you know it, you've got

so much of this just spaghetti code that you it's very hard to maintain. Yeah. Or even bad UI choices. Look. Let's make this a Node or something like that. So Yeah. You have to keep a a close eye on it. The CSS drift is a big one. The the duplication is a big one. And to me, like, being on top of those things is what takes it from being I dumped out some, you know, slop to Yeah. This is something that I I I created with the help of AI, not,

AI created while I I babysat it kind of, you know, makes it work. From a business point of view, I I think it's it's kinda awesome because, like, what you did JS, essentially, you just found product market fit for something that you may not have been able to do. And and now maybe maybe this is JS a potential business where you'll go down the Node, and, obviously, there'll be a bit of pain of of this thing that you gotta clean up, but people are gonna be paying you. Maybe you can start actually, like, rebuilding it and doing it properly and potentially even hire someone at one point. So

that's pretty cool. Cleanup is not impossible either. Cleanup by hand? Yeah. If you wanna add it to your portfolio, I would clean it up. You know? Mhmm. Because I'm gonna judge your portfolio by the quality of the code. And if you don't know what's happening and I look at that and I see these are a lot of crazy choices being made in this thing, then I'm going to assume, you don't know what you're doing.

And that's not going to look good on you even if, like, I use the app, and I'm like, oh, this is kinda neat. I go in the code. I'm like, what the hell? To me, that that would, look poorly upon you. Even if it's like a like an open source project as well. Like, if you throw that thing up on GitHub,

somebody JS, someone would be able to, like, look, at the issues and all of the commit history and and see, were you just adding, adding, adding, adding features? Or was there like, is there some commits where it's simply just like like the, oh, I've forgotten await here or, like, some very simple some of those times are those very simple fixes where it took you half an hour to figure out or an hour to figure it out, and it was just a a little tweak.

Do you know what's also wild too is I think there's a class of developer, and I wanna say I don't even know if I'm calling these people developers. They're, like, more of, like, the maker type of Vercel. And you're not a maker, but, like, the serial hacker? The indie hacker type Yeah. Who's gonna say, who cares as long as it works? I'm using it, and it works. It's got users. Well, folks, it matters. You know? Code quality matters. Security matters. All these things matter. And, you know, for matters for long term, it matters for the reputation of your work. It matters for the reputation of your company. Next thing you know, you're pushing on an app that has, some sort of security hole that leaks sensitive information, perhaps, like, what, driver's license photos of all of the users of your dating app like that one happened. So you never know. You you it matters, folks. And don't let these indie hacker types who are just all about, wanting to sell their book about how I made $10,000 by, shoving some slop into the App Store. Don't let those folks influence you.

Next question from e. I'd love to hear Scott's take on ESLint DB and how it stacks up to other Local First DBs. I just built a prototype with it and love it, but I wanna know the pros and cons compared to others such as Deno or Electric.

Instant DB instantly made me pretty stoked when I use it because I got a lot done very quickly with Instant DB. And people who have used something like Firebase or those types of things Wes it does a lot for you will really like Instant DB. It's got real time stuff. It it felt like, oh, this is, like, very meatier, like, in terms of how easy it is to get up and running. The thing about Instant DB is that they're new, and when you are saying I'm going to use Instant DB, what you're saying is I'm going to bet. I'm placing a bet that Instant DB will be around as long as my project will be around. So if your project is just something you're hacking together or whatever, hey. Instant DB JS probably gonna be there.

How how long is ESLint gonna be DB gonna be around? Does what happens if they they don't get enough paying customers? It's, you know, $30 a month. What happens if that doesn't happen? And then they shut down.

Then you gotta figure out my entire app is engineered around this paid service that exists in the cloud.

Now I have heard that you can host your own Instant DB. There are no docs for that. I just checked somewhat recently. So if that's changed, it's changed to very recently.

I've been told that it's possible, but you have to figure it out yourself.

So there's that.

Maybe there would be a a community of people kind of self hosting this thing at that ESLint, but the big concern is that their funding runs out. They don't hit their targets.

They get pulled. They shut down. And now all of a sudden, you're like, what do I do? Where with something like Xero, it sits in front of a normal ass Postgres database.

Zero stops being developed.

Well, one, you could just continue to use the latest version of it.

Two, if you wanna move off of it, you don't have to export or manage your data, put it into a new database or something. You just have your Postgres database, and you own that. So to me, you have to weigh, you know, is the ease of use and, of that kind of stuff worth it? Now like I said, I really liked it when I used it, but it depends on you know, I was just building a demo with it and and you know? Just something to think. Not that instant is bad. It's great. But, yeah, that's what you have to to think about.

This next one's really interesting. It's about, kids and and being on computers. So my fiance and I are expecting our firstborn this November. Congratulations.

It'll be a while before he's touching devices and LLMs.

It's a while to me that we're even talking about kids touching LLMs.

But I was curious to hear what has worked for your families when it comes to digital hygiene. How do you teach them about devices as tools versus toys or manage screen time and network controls? What vibe do you and your partners come up with? What worked or definitely did not work? Man, I could I could talk about this all day because I was certainly wrong about a lot of stuff. It's a constant battle. So all of our kids have have iPads, and they they love going on their iPads, but it's it's a constant battle. First of all, I've I've said in the past how much I like my kids watching, like, interesting YouTube videos.

Very wrong about that. YouTube is awful. Awful. Awful. Awful. It is so bad. There what happens is you we we gave them, like, the YouTube Kids app, and you're like, yeah. You can watch, like, a thing on, like, how to build x, y, or z. And then before you know it, you just there's, like, these, like, Russian kids playing with toys and these, obviously, parents just milking their children for these videos. And then there's, like, these crazy YouTube shorts that are, like, meant to just control their brains on Yeah. And they're just it there's so much awful stuff on YouTube to a point where we're like, nope. None. None of it. We can watch Mark Rober on the big TV.

Yep. And then that's it. You know? Because it it just it starts getting away from you. And then before you know it, they're watching just, like, the most awful, like, brain rot YouTube stuff out there, and I absolutely hate it. So that Yeah. Apple's Apple has a screen time on their app, which is also awful.

It's bad. Do not think that anybody at Apple has kids because the management the management around Uh-huh. What they can access, which apps they have, what Wes the the being able to Dude. To show you what websites someone can visit, it's literally a list of domain names.

That's it. There's no other tools, and it's on your iPhone, like, buried nine levels deep. And it drives me nuts how awful the screen time

is. Yeah. I found I couldn't even get the kids to be able to turn on Netflix with their kid profile if they had, like, parental controls on. I I I was, like, searching everywhere. I'm like, how do I get this so they can watch Netflix kids while they're on the airplane

if I have the parental control setting? And it was like, you just can't. You gotta turn it all off. Look. Yeah. Yeah. Who who's the that it's just rage turned it off or, like, the the ability to install an app and then the ads. Do you know? I think I'm gonna turn on the, like, DNS level ad blocking. What's that called? Pie hole. Yeah. I need to do that. Yeah. What happens is they have these games, and then there's there's, like, ads in the games, which I understand because, like, some of these games are, like like like, $40 a month or whatever. So some of the the free ones Wes can watch. But then they put ads that are games, and they let the kids start playing the game in the ad.

And then it's like, we gotta download this thing. This is awesome. Motorbikes driving over Sanity hills. And then they're like, we I want this. And then and then you're like, oh, well, maybe that's a kind of a cool one, then you download it. And then there's just aggressive Yarn tactics trying to get you to buy the app for, like, $79 a month for for this. So I would say be block everything by default and just permissively add in things, and don't don't just be like, whatever. It's it's probably fine because it's it's none of it is is fine. They've got their whole lives to to go on the Internet and and to watch all of this stuff, but I just I'm so exhausted with trying to have to manage this stuff and be able to, like, let things through and and whatnot. It's it's a pain in the butt. So I would say if I were to go back, I I don't Node sure if I would buy an iPad if if if we went back. An iPad or an iPod? An iPad. You know? I don't I don't know if I would if I would give them those No. For it's like, part of it is awesome. It's nice. They just chill, and they play games together. They they play Roblox.

And make sure you turn off all the chat and everything like that. And I and I think it's fine, but then there's games inside of Roblox that are called killing people with poop, and then we're like, you can't play that game inside Roblox. You have to play Wes to impress, and that one is okay. But then, like, those other ones are not fine. Then it's just like, why do I have to spend all of my time managing this? Like, every single thing like, and I understand they're my kids. I have I have to manage it. But there's just every single time you give them something, you realize, oh, shoot. There's a whole world inside of this Roblox with all this awful stuff in there, and now we gotta make sure that you're not my kid was driving buses into trains.

You know? Don't do that. Yeah. You know what? We've avoided Roblox, and, I don't think my kid even knows what it is, thankfully. He's probably gonna find out about it at school someday. But, yeah. No. I here's how the iPads work in our house.

We have one which is my old, old iPad that lives in an up cabinet they can't get to.

And when they want to use it, it's typically or when they get to use it, it's typically, like, on airplanes.

Or, like, right now, my son got invited to, go to the theme Yarn, and so our daughter's really bummed out.

So we're like, alright. We'll give you some iPad time. We'll give you some Nintendo Switch time, whatever, as a way to, you know, make you feel like you're getting to do something special.

But for the iPads for us, we pretty much, like, turn them into media consumption devices only, like watching Netflix or there's PBS games or, like, a handful of games on them. But Yeah. They are distinctly, like, very kid games or educational games, which, they can't install anything, so that's why they exist. And our kids have taken up if they're gonna play video games, it's on the Nintendo Switch. And that's great because he can't install anything. He can't buy anything.

He can't access the Internet on it, but he can play Pokemon, and my daughter can play Mario Sanity. And you don't have to worry about that. I mean, it's Mario. You don't have to worry about Mario, playing games where they're killing people with poop or, you know, violence or that kind of thing. And the and the they'll go nuts. Same thing with Netflix. Netflix is so much easier

than YouTube because it's like like, there's lots of really good stuff on there. My kids watch, like, baking competitions and stuff.

Yes. It's all kids stuff. And and So and and so as long as I can keep them in that lane, it works for me. And so I there was a a moment where our kids were, like, really, like, latched onto YouTube kids, and they found out how to install the app on the TV.

And, like, I would delete the app. They would come downstairs early in the morning and reinstall the app and then turn on YouTube. And I'm just like I Samsung's not giving me the tools to be able to prevent Node from installing stuff, so we just had to have a real big talk with them. It's like you know? And luckily, they they've they've kept with it. But, yeah, it is this is the tough part. So for for me, it's like the Internet usage with them is, like, kind of currently very media consumption, playing games, and learning things. And, otherwise, they just don't get access to any of it. And, yeah, it's working out for us right now, but we're getting to the ages where our son is learning how to use an actual laptop, and he is good at typing. And,

you wanna have those tools, but at the same time, you know, it's a tough step. Yeah. You want them to be able to to create things. You want them to build the research. You want them to look it up. Like, my daughter asked the other day, like like, how do porta potties get cleaned? I was like, yeah. Let's look it up. Let's watch a video. There's, like, a TikToker, the porta potty prince on TikTok. Oh, wow. And he just, like, detailed ESLint interesting stuff, you Node? And, like, I grew up with unfettered access to the Internet. And look me now. Didn't know. Look at me now. You know? I didn't. No. Okay. Well, let me know. But, like locked me into dial up. I owe my career to that. You know? I I owe so much of my life because I was a curious kid that wanted to know how stuff work, and I had access to absolutely everything that I wanted. And, like, I I I even think that about the iPads JS, like, this this thing is just not as good of a creation tool as, like, a desktop computer JS, but, like, the kids don't seem to wanna go on it. We have, like, a whole desktop computer. They don't seem to wanna go on that as well. And I want them to build stuff. I want them to research stuff, but it's it's a it's a delicate balance. Yeah. You know what, you know what the the other app my my son has on the iPad other than media consumption stuff? It's Bamboo. Bamboo Labs. Oh, man.

He could three d print whatever he wants, and I'm fine with that. I showed him he goes down there, and he changes all the filaments. He knows how to do it all. He can get four of them set up and print his Pokemon or whatever he wants to print. But yeah. I was like, that's okay.

I gave them access to Maker World to to be able to search for Yep.

The things there. And then I also gave them access to, Shapr3D.

And they have they have the iPad Vercel, and and they're learning how to, like, make make they're doing the tutorials and whatnot, and and those are those are kinda fun. And we're also dipping in one of my daughters did a, like, a coding camp, and she's like, I really like this. Is this what you do? I was like, yes. I've been I like, I've been waiting for this moment. People always ask me, how do you teach kids to code? And I think we're finally there Wes we're starting to dip into kids wanting to to learn how to code stuff. So we're we're going through all the apps right now trying to figure out, like you know, there's, like, Scratch, but it's, like, a little bit too babyish for her. She wants something a little she's like, no. I wanna actually see the Node. But then, like, she can't write the code directly. So there's a delicate balance. Tweet me your tips or email me your tips about kids Node because I think I'm about to get into that. Yeah. Interesting. I,

I I Node Landon do his three d project in Fusion. So,

that was That's great.

Yeah. He used the mouse. I made him use it. I'm like, I'm not touching the computer, but I will help you with the math. Yeah. I will tell you what to do, but you're doing it.

Either way, digital dad, it's a tough one out there. I'll tell you that. My one more tip is iMovie.

We give our kids

Oh, to make movies?

Yeah. We we do not put a limit on iMovie or the camera. And that means that if they're ever bored, they are allowed to make movies. And they'll they'll, like, they'll make hilarious things, you know, and they they do all the sounds. And Wes go to YouTube and download, like, the, what is it, the SpongeBob three minutes later or, like, the Of course. You know, just all the meme sounds. Like, I make sure that they have all the meme sounds, and then they make these hilarious videos, and they can send them to their friends.

I love it. Alright. Next question from Bloom.

Related to a question from a potluck question last week about AI being the primary way people browse the web and what that means for the original creators and their revenue. Yes.

What do you think of Cloudflare's announcement on July 1 about blocking AI crawlers by default? It's basically a setting in Cloudflare that you then have to go in and turn on to allow AI crawlers to crawl your your stuff.

No. Hold on. Let's let's stop it right there. This is not on by default.

I thought it was on Okay. Sorry. There was a couple people on Twitter that said it was on by default for theirs, and I'm not sure what came of that. I think that was a mistake, but it is not turned on by default for all accounts. I went into my own account because I was like, I think I I think I want AI.

Man, I got the stuff.

Misinformationed

there. I got, man. But that's the problem JS that, like, these these people on Twitter will just post that because it, like, it does Node exist. Right? And then you get the whole, like, the I don't know. All these companies hate each other, so all of them are retweeting it being like, CloudFlare JS blocking your your site by default. Yeah. That yeah.

That's a genre I'm getting a little tired of is the, the, CEO flaming each other on Twitter.

Yeah. Maybe it's just grumpy me. Yeah.

No. No. That's that's very there's it's very Wes say it. It's very evident that Vercel and Cloudflare had a breaking up over the past year because they were used to be very work together. Lots of Cloudflare products were in in Vercel and whatnot.

And then about a year ago, it seems like Vercel, it was like, we're gonna do this all of ourselves, and then there's lots of lots of flame wars between them all.

Yeah. Node. Thanks. So what do we think about Cloudflare's announcement about being able to block AI crawlers? And so, like you said, it is apparently not by default as this, comment and my assumption says.

So what do we think about it? I guess it changes if it's not by default.

If it's not by default, then my opinion on this changes, which I honestly don't know if I have an informed, intelligent, deep opinion on this. For me, I get it from both perspectives.

I, as somebody who has spent a lot of time creating YouTube videos, creating my own content that I've worked really, really hard to make over my entire career, would be extremely bummed out if an LLM has all of a sudden scooped up everything that I've ever said and then use that. But that said, I don't know if there's anything that we can do to generally stop that from happening.

So on that podcast she's referring to, I asked I said, you know who I want to get their opinion on this? And I said, I wanna hear about Chris Coyier. Right. What he thought, because he built his entire career writing stuff and putting it out there. Right? And he actually wrote a blog post in response to me asking, like, what are his thoughts on on AI and content creators.

And I'll I'll link to a blog post because I think it was really well informed. But one of the things he said is I'll it'll stop when there's no longer any incentive to do so, which is referring to creating content.

But those incentives are various. Money is one of them. That was a partial motivator for me. Being able to support myself and my family partially through advertising content was important, but I also found it to be fun and mentally rewarding. Like, it gave my life purpose. Even if the money wanes, those incentives may endure for many. And that that's a a really good point JS that, like, I love this stuff, obviously, because I can I can make money doing it? But, like, I didn't I didn't get into this stuff because of the money. I I got into I want to share because I'm excited about it, you know, and it's really fun to be able to share, and other people can can enjoy that content. You know? Like, I post bazillion TikToks, and I don't make a dime from them. Yeah. And I I do that because I I I literally love showing people

about this type of stuff. I I first made my very first YouTube video on Drupal because I was pissed off that I was in an IRC channel and talking to somebody, and, I was like, why is this happening? And they're like, oh, you just need to do it like this. I'm like, where's the documentation for like that? Well, there isn't any. And I said, the how are people supposed to know this? Like, they gotta go to IRC to figure this out? Like, what's the deal? What's the deal? Yeah.

I wanna help other people. He says, as long as they're incentive to create technical content, people will, and AI will continue to train on it. That does frame it as an adversarial relationship, which is a bummer.

Go read this. I think that that was really interesting. I think that you certainly should have just like you should be able to block search engines from accessing your site, you should also be able to block AIs from accessing your content.

There's a whole another camp of of people who think that this is a stupid idea because why would like, it's like blocking search engines. You want AIs to know about your content so that they can they can send it. And I think that that's more if you're asking a business, like, what Mhmm. Coding podcast should I should I be reading Vercel, like, I just spent $20,000 researching x, y, and z, and now it just ESLint it all up and and summarized it. So I think it's a great thing that you can be able to block it. Will I turn it on? I don't think I will, because at the end of the day, I just love being able to to share this type of stuff. And as as a user, I certainly love when an LLM can slurp all this stuff up and give me the thing without having to read somebody's life story.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. There there's different classification. I think my opinion on it definitely, will waver into the territory of somebody who simultaneously, wants it and doesn't want it at the same time for various reasons. And, unfortunately, I think it just depends on the, the problem that I find myself in and, how how I'm feeling in that particular day.

One thing I'm I am curious about is, like, what does the cost of these things look like? Because you you do you ask ChatGPT one thing, it slurps up 50 websites. You know? And and if that happens you look at any stats. You look at stats to a website So you're talking about your bandwidth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bandwidth or compute, all of that type of stuff Wes it it will simply just it's it gets more expensive as as you do. Look at NPM. Look at any graph on NPM. It's like they've all doubled in the last year or so. You know? GitHub's footing the bill for for downloading all of that that type of stuff. It's it's costing somebody at some point to do this type of stuff. Your database reads your compute, your if you're not caching a page, it it can get expensive. So, like and and then think about video and whatnot as they're they're slurping up the video. Like, this is costing real people real money. And it's I don't know if it's significant yet, but I I think we'll probably get to a point where

it is significant. And is does is there any benefit to that? It is weird how the AI companies, they kind of, like, bypass all these IP laws. They kinda bypass. They're just putting the bill on other people for all kinds of stuff, and this is just like we're all like, yeah. You know? This is how it is. Like

yeah. Very weird to me. I I I even asked, Adam Wathan that. I'm like, how does it feel to have like, he wrote Tailwind, and all these LLMs are cranking out Tailwind code all day long, making billions of dollars or or making millions at least of dollars being able to generate it. Right? And then he did something he created. And that that's that's open source in general, I Wes. But it I would feel a little bit cheesed.

Be like, hey. Can I just have, like, like, a 1,000,000,000 for making this thing that every LLM does?

Yeah. Could you just hook me up? Like Yeah. Just Just a I Node cool bill. Yeah. To for sure. Yeah. I always thought about that. It's like, oh, man. It'd be really cool if anybody that you ever did something nice for, then they ended up getting ultra wealthy at some ESLint, warp just to, like, send you a check for, here's just a million bucks. I got enough of them. I'm like Yeah. Yeah. I'll take it. Thank you. That'd be great. Pretty sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Next question from John Ray. What is your view on source code and public back end API data obfuscation? Is JavaScript minification sufficient, or should I also add a code? I'm not sure what he means there. Regarding the back end API, suppose I run a food recipe website with no user login Wes the front end fetches the data directly from the back end API. Should I obfuscate or otherwise protect my data, return from the API, and worry that other consumers will essentially steal my data? What are the best practices in this scenario? Yeah. This is this is a tricky one because you run an API with data, and you you do that for your own website or for people who who who pay you to have access to it. But anybody can pop open dev tools and and reverse engineer. I've got plenty of videos on how to do that. I've done it myself quite a bit. And some websites don't want you doing that because they don't want you simply just scraping all of their data or using their APIs in your own application. Right? Twitter is aggressive super aggressive against that, although I got around it. And, Instagram, very, very aggressive again. Oh, I got around that one as well. But, like, it's a constant cat and mouse game, both because of of the data, but also because of, like if they're, like, writable APIs, people use those to spam, unfortunately.

It's it's really hard. So I would probably say don't do it until it becomes a problem, until you realize, oh, somebody is is actually using it using this API without my my permission or LLM is using it to slurp up all of the recipes and and put it into their own. What can you do? You essentially need to just create, like, session tokens, where Wes somebody tries to view something, the token has to come along with it. And in order to get a session token, you have to, like, load the page properly. So Mhmm. Often, if you'll try to, like even accessing, like like, JPEGs or something that live on, like, an AWS bucket, you have to first get like, load the page, and then that sends off a request to get a token, and then the token comes back. So you have to make it a multi step thing in order for for someone to get it. Data obfuscation on an API, I don't know that you could do that because it's you'd have to de obfuscate it on the client,

and the client code is going to be visible. Yeah. Public. The the problem is, John, is that if anybody wants to slurp, they're gonna slurp. I mean, you can't stop the slurp JS really what's is is the problem. So if yeah.

Slurp slurp, you can't stop it. I mean, if anybody wants to do that, they're going to. So can you protect your data? Yeah. You can try, but there's Node. There if it's if it's, available on the Internet, publicly, it is available.

Yeah.

Brian from Little Rock. Will y'all ever bring back portfolio critiques? We used to do something called a syntax highlight Wes we would critique your website, and we stopped doing it because, a, it sucks on audio. Like, you can't see what we're talking about. And, b, it just kinda got repetitive, I think, you know, kind of the the same thing. People will still send me their portfolios, and I don't mind doing a quick little, hey. This looks good. Or if there's, like, things that are, like, very clearly pointing out, like, kinda cringey or, like, huge red flags, I'll I'll throw TypeScript recorder on for two seconds and be like, hey. You you should you should change this. What do you think? I I I I think they weren't very good.

I think we should now that we're on video, we should at least do one in once a year or something, but I don't think we need to do them regularly.

So will Wes bring them back? I think we should do one again sometime, but I don't think it needs to be a regular segment or anything Mhmm. For the reasons that you mentioned. Also, a do a massive portion of our audience still listens only on audio. So that would It would be a YouTube only video if we did it. But, also, I I much prefer doing, like,

check out this cool thing that somebody did. I think that those are really interesting. You know? Go through a whole bunch of websites and find little tidbits of neat CSS techniques or performance things. Those are those are kinda fun to do.

Yeah.

And perhaps it would work well as a live stream. I I was on a a live stream doing resume, resume grading and stuff like that, and I think that worked really well. So, you know, maybe that's the type of thing that would work well for her. Alright. That's the potluck. Please keep the questions coming. Go to syntax.fm.

In the URL bar, there's or in the nav, there's something that says potluck queues. Hit that button and fill out your potluck Wes. Send it to us. We'll answer it on upcoming episode.

Let's move into the next section, which is sick picks and shameless plugs. You got a sick pick for me today? I have a sick pick for you, Wes. I

I've jumped into the world that might many will call it premature world of Wi Fi seven.

I have gotten an Amazon Eero router that is a Wi Fi seven mesh router, and there's a whole bunch of them, of various different sizes on Amazon for whatever you need. And I got this for many reasons. My current routers were fine, but my Ethernet was pretty slow throughout my house in general.

I do have enough Wi Fi seven based devices that I thought it would improve my life, and it was on a big time sale when I got it.

And I, have Scott to say that I was very cautious about the Amazon Aero router, given that you have a lot of people being like, alright. They're trying to nickel and dime you with this. There JS, like, gives you access to pie hole like functionality. I could roll my own, so it's like it doesn't bother me. None of the paid feature like, all of the paid features are stuff that would be nice to have in the app, but none of them are things that I'm, like, dying to have Wes I feel like that I need to pay for the app for some reason.

So, yeah, some people will be turned off by that. But as far as routers go, I was able to set up this router and change my entire setup while my father-in-law sat, like, right next to me in about fifteen minutes. And I was so shocked because when you're dealing with especially, like, fiber and fiber networks, when you're dealing with the whatever those, they lock down the routers. I forgot what the codes are. You need certain codes and stuff. I was just as shocked at how easily, one, I was able to get everything all linked up so that the router could be authorized with my fiber provider.

But, two, all my settings just came in automatically. This the app is really super good. And as somebody who's been using a Amplify based system, the app is so much better.

And I was just so like, man, this is actually what's up. That's what's up right here JS is this app Wes super good. So I'm happy to report that the speeds are tremendously fast.

The Wi Fi seven, the

distance it travels is crazy fast. Really? Or crazy large. Can you get? Because I've I've got Wi Fi six, and I never hit anywhere close to what they're telling me you can get on Wi Fi six.

Yeah. On Wi Fi well, with the Wi Fi seven router, I was getting, 700 up and down over Wi Fi. Fast. Holy smokes. Pretty much anywhere in my house, it extends out into my office a lot better.

Yeah. You can get faster than that. When I, I when I get the next iPhone, I should be able to get, like, 900 or gigabit on my phone via Wi Fi. That's nuts.

Man.

Wes were running into issues with our Wi Fi six mesh where there were so many dead spots in our house, and I was like, okay. I either gotta get another Wi Fi router. But, also, the the routers that we had didn't support wired backhaul.

So, that was a huge pain in the butt, and these ones support wired backhaul. Oh, so it's just it's just mesh. Right? Yeah. So you can have, essentially, like, a wired mesh, instead of a wireless mesh as well. And, man, it it's it's it was a great experience. So someone who's very cautious about buying something like this that's owned by Amazon for some you know, for this type of thing, it's been a really nice experience, and it's removed, like, all of the pain points I've had in Wi Fi in my house. So, yeah, I I did a lot of research on on, Wi Fi seven routers, and, nothing really brought the amount of features that the Aero ones did. So That's great. I'm going to sick pick a

plastic welder. This thing is fantastic. So if you've ever had something that is plastic and it cracks, you probably have done the whole, like, try to superglue it back together and then it just immediately cracks or, like, you you can epoxy it and Yeah. It it never works properly. Right? So I got this thing that it was, like, $30 or something, and it takes my DEWALT batteries. I don't have it right now because my dad took it because he had a whole bunch of stuff he needed to fix as well. But the what the way that it works is it's a little, like, gun, and there's two prongs. And you get these little staples that are, like, squiggly. I'll have, the editor throw up a photo of it right now.

I just linked to a a tweet I have. And then you just you turn it on, and it immediately gets super hot. You press it into the plastic, and then you let go and you pull it out. And then there's this, like, this, like, plastic staple embedded in the plastic, and it works so well. We had a, a plastic wheelbarrow that had a massive crack on the bottom, and I put, like, eight of them all along. And it it's been holding up all summer. And then we had the bins in our fridge have cracked, and, like, you can't buy these bins anywhere. You know? You have to, like, go through the like, you go to, like, these websites and they're almost $700 for a bin. Buy a new fridge. You know? Couldn't find them anywhere, not even for $700. So I just plastic welded the whole thing back together. It's it's more of like a plastic stapler, and then you can get a an attachment for it that is, like, kind of like a soldering iron smoothing tip Yeah. That you can you can put plastic over top. So you can also make it watertight if you need to. Man, it's it's been a game changer just for, you know, kids kids stuff. Plastic crap always breaks.

It always breaks. How does your brain feel after using it? You,

you just Oh, yeah. Yeah. You should not breathe the I guess it it depends on, like, the kind of plastic it JS. You know? Same thing with the three d printer as well. Yeah. Some plastic is is fine, but, like, Scott of it. Like, a Scott of it is ABS, and that stuff stinks. So, yeah, I don't know. Don't breathe it in. Just Yeah.

Breathe.

I love it. Cool. Well, that's all we got for you today, folks. I hope you enjoyed this one.

You can join us on Wednesday for part two of this, dare I say I don't I don't ever use the word epic, so I don't wanna start right now. This awesome potluckathon where we have two incredible potluck episodes back to back for you. Let us know what you think about that stuff, and we will catch you in the next one.

Peace.