Supper Club × Voice Coding with Pokey Rule

And it's kinda like a giant reg x. Right? So Not every so the commands aren't just literal. Right? So several commands are literal. Right? You know, you can have a command, like so,

And so the community has kind of centralized around a, a set of commands which are universally fairly useful. Okay.

by default. Right? It has no grammar. So the community the community one will have things like, if you say air, it'll type the letter a. That will type the letter b, etcetera. You can say focus Chrome to focus Chrome, the application,

And Oh, okay. Then you could do things like it'll it'll map the keys. Right? So you can say because, like, literally, you can't even type a letter with just talent, So

the,

community grammar.

and a whole bunch of other things. So That's in which and commands that are long so they don't get misrecognized, I had an idea for

the community grammar.

it took me a couple of minutes to realize, oh, she's Amazing guests. We got Pokey Rule on today to talk about voice coding. We did an episode, like, I don't know, maybe about a year ago on voice coding.

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and I'm just coding, and just random stuff keeps popping into my code. I was like, what is going on? Like, a 49b24,

So I guess alright. So so, yeah, I have a couple things to say there. 1 is, Talent voice out of the box ships with no commands.

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scanning stuff, and it's another input. It's just inputting that that text into it. So I can imagine it's kinda similar to that. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a lot like that.

my my daughter was in my office the other day,

and just happen by accident. And so if they go into the community grammar, we try to skew a bit longer because we don't know necessarily whether someone's gonna want them And then trigger them accidentally.

and I was doing some coding, and she came in and grabbed I have a little QR code scanner on a barcode scanner, and she came in and grabbed it. And she loves playing with it. So beep beep beep, Finding anything with a barcode in the room,

the community grammar. So I'm one of the maintainers on the community grammar, And It's like a UX library for building And so Talend script are these files that end in .talon.

your voice coding engine.

and how the art of practicing rather than just, like, moving the cursor around and copy pasting, selecting, and I think that's pretty cool. So,

So That's hilarious.

Nice.

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who you are and what you do? And then and then maybe we'll get into, To like, how did you even end up in the spot where you were trying to code with your voice?

We like to talk, so so it's,

kind of, kind of our thing is talking. So, yeah, I'm interested to see what you can do with your voice here. We're sponsored today by 2 awesome companies. 1st one is the Stack Overflow podcast, your weekly source for conversation with working devs and tech leaders. And Directus,

Right? So it would be like, you know, email Susan, Yeah. Eventually, it caught up with me. I wrote 1 too many line of code and gave myself repetitive strain injury, which is like neck pain sort of, etcetera.

Interesting. Do you ever get into situations where, like, you have a a grammar that is defined whether one that you've defined or someone else has defined And you're triggering it by accident? I just think about, like, you know, using my phone. I'm I'm talking to my wife, and I'm saying a word that sounds vaguely like,

colon,

They are fairly simple, and you basically it's like It's of the form, action, basically.

Susan, and she could just on the left would be email Susan, and on the right, it would be an action that sends an email to this specific person. Right? But many commands are gonna be, like have captures in them like a like a regular expression. Right? So for example, when I said focus chrome,

they got gets accidentally triggered. Is that something you have to deal with?

Really, that's part of a generic capture based command, which is focus and then application. And so then I could say focus Chrome, focus Slack, focus Versus code, etcetera. Right? Have you have you ever gotten into writing your own grammars? Kinda seems like they're they're written in Python. Is is that correct? Do you do you have any knowledge there? So, yes, Writing my own grammars is, pretty much what I do for a living these days. Oh, awesome. Oh, yeah.

So, a company, once I'd been managing for a while, my RSI was doing pretty well, and then I just coded like a madman for about a month, gave myself an RSI flare up.

and then

application, right, if you forget to do that and you're just like you know, someone comes in and you start talking to them, I mean, it's like a like a a family of cats with lasers dancing on your keyboard. I mean, you could surely destroy your whole hard drive.

they are half Python half what's called Talend script.

The definition of this generic application capture, that'll happen in Python.

command,

Gargle?

Gargle or sorry or Yeah. Paluxa or any of those, and then Okay. Okay. That's really neat. Yeah. So so the grammar is basically as a definition, it's basically just mapping Kind of commands to actions. That's that's the point of a grammar? Yep. Exactly.

colon, and then on the right hand side, you define what happens, in that case. Right? So, Pokey, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. How are you doing? Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm doing well. We have sun in London, so I can't complain.

I guess,

So what is that built in? Like like, how do what does that look like? So okay. You you download and you install Talon or you you you set it up. Like, what do you do from there? Do you say, okay.

So, you generally wanna get at least a decent microphone.

let's get into that, like, first part about, What it means to be a developer Welcome to supper club on Syntax. Today, we've got another

a, and so that makes them less likely to fire. There's there's always this constant tension between commands that are short so that you can say them rapidly, but really struggled to get beyond that.

It is a way to define a grammar, which allows us, you know, what you can say, And And, basically,

and then it has an engine which will listen for things that you've put in your grammar. And then it's a cross platform one of the things that we're we're we try to do is make sure that the commands that go into the community grammar tend to be a little bit longer, Yeah.

which is actually an important component.

like, real world language. So, Cool.

actually just, like, coding with your voice. Like, what do you use to do it, and and how does it even work? Yeah.

a platform or library.

Non keyboard and mouse user experiences.

And, you can you can define a little command. You can say, like, you know, Email

and mostly using,

well, to answer your question, literally, I use a microphone, Yeah.

Here are some commands I wanna do, like move left, move right. Is that what you do? Well so, in Theory, you could, but there is a community grammar.

That's talent. What is that?

I'm using an engine called Talendvoice, The Oh, yeah. Second thing I'll say in that direction is that, if you are like, let's say you know? So there's a way to turn off, And,

like, so smoothly,

So it is completely flexible.

where you were showing example of how you code with your voice. And I've seen a couple people do it over the time, but I've never seen anyone do it,

control library that you can use so that your voice commands actually do things in a cross platform fashion.

and got up to about 70, 75% of my old productivity,

So my wife had seen this, Fundamentally, what defines your grammar. But then if I have something like focus and then I can put an angle brackets,

And so I was like, oh, just give it a shot.

Amazing video. I recommend anyone check it out.

and I guess that's, And so I quit my job in 20 December 2020, we are there's about 6 or 7 of us who are who are active maintainers, and we meet every couple weeks. We do backlog triaging, etcetera.

that's the story of today.

voice coding.

So I started using it, I would say start of 2021,

so then, That can match any application. I guess you focus Chrome, focus, whatever.

I'm originally from California. I've been writing code, Yeah.

and so then

all turns out I hate management.

to start

Had to stop coding for a while in graduate school,

decided I would try to get into Drowse. Is that Like, drows? Yeah.

I, this video of, Emily Shea,

has a way to stay intact without writing code, and,

So my name is Pokey Rule.

almost as long as I can remember.

Some people absolutely love it. I found it wasn't for me.

who are managers, and then I've worked with other people that are totally out to lunch and generally don't understand the whole coding thing as well. But it is a it is a whole Other skill set, especially sometimes I see these Totally. People. They're like they have, like, 8 hours of meetings in a day. And just like, how do you do that? Life. That was my life. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That that's interesting. We've wanted to have a a show on that as well because

So, yeah, it is it is funny how many people that you hear about Getting into management from coding who just

that it is a manager

Oh, man. Oh, man. That's that's crazy. So I I I watched a quick little video you did at this conference. I'll put the link in the show now. I think it's called Bang Bang Con,

I certainly work with a lot of people who I very much enjoy,

of than writing code. Right? So it's like it's just a totally different profession.

Any other profession is basically a way to make things better,

I I you you hear it all. They're very different skills and very different kind of interests. You know? It it's it's a different thing wanting to be a a manager of programmers than it is Being a programmer They're completely different skills. I mean, in some sense, being a manager of programmers is closer to being a manager of

Yeah. And it was pandemic, so they resumed meetings. So I was just like, alright. Enough of this. I'm gonna talk to computers instead of people.

that doesn't vibe with them, or they they do it for a little bit, and then they're just like, man, I gotta get back into what I was doing before just because How How you doing today, Scott? Doing good. Ready to go. Ready to get into some voice coding. We all know as, 2 podcasters here,

Nice.

like, before we go into, I think it it'll sort of frame that discussion better. So you said you prepared some sorta like, something that you're coding this morning? Yeah. So, basically, like, I keep a log of all the commands that I run.

I just pulled up the log. I'm happy to read it off and Pretend like I'm voice coding.

Drink x spawn, paste that.

I I I think about when I'm,

I yeah. It was just Just right before, up to the wire here, I was just hacking on something.

Blue. Purple one. Like You should see the looks I get when I'm in the cafe.

Yeah. Yeah.

Bring blue ink to bat and kick. Chuck line spot.

Bring line spun before oats.

Copy block Foxplex.

So And, And so, usually, what you'll do is you'll download and saw Talon, and then you will clone,

like, aliens were to land on Earth, and you were trying to communicate with them.

So, My yeah.

Disc.

Float state blue find disk.

Let's get you to do an example because, like, I've got a lot of questions about how the actual code works and and how you've implemented it all. I think, like, if people hear That's good. You want to give us a quick little introduction to, Yeah. My

What it's

is the Syntax supper club.

I sure hope you're hungry.

Oh, I'm starving.

so buckle up and grab that old handle because this ride is going to get wild.

This

Wash those hands, pull up a chair, and secure that feed bag, because it's time to listen to Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers. I thought there was gonna be food,

like, ASTs. Tease. I get smart about where your code is Honestly, it sounds like you're speaking not a different language, but, like, if you were to,

And I forget who it was. Somebody was like, you gotta check out, CursorList. It's this new kinda Versus code extension that works with Talon. And I think, like, the the big the big decipherer here is that it works based on,

we're excited to get into that. My name is Wes Bos. I'm a developer from Canada. With me, as always, is mister Scott Talinski.