Things Dave Rupert Has Said on Podcasts

“I don't need a comment that reminds me about a bug that happened once.” — Dave Rupert, Shop Talk Show

Rupert and Chris Coyier were trading ideas for agent skills that enforce their own taste, and Rupert wanted one that hates verbose AI comments. He is describing a specific failure mode: agents annotating code with the story of the commit — the bug they just found, why they changed the line. His objection is that the bug is transient and the comment outlives it in the codebase.

Shop Talk Show · 2026-09-07 Permalink → Listen →

Shop Talk Show Around 32:24 into the episode

Dave Rupert

can talk to each other now where they couldn't before. Kind of good. You have

Chris Coyier

…You're a really grumpy pull request reviewer. You kind of like nitpick a bunch of dumb shit, don't you, Doug? But anyway, yeah, everyone, you know, try my Doug skill. It's, it's, I should really release that. I got like, what, a week or something until this comes up. Yeah. Try my Doug. I want like

Dave Rupert

a like a Charlie or something. And Charlie hates overly verbose AI comments. You know what? I worry about some code bases where they're just letting AI rip. Some of these agents, they leave the most. Giant robust comments in there, and they're comments that are like about the commit you're about to do. They're like, Oh, I changed this because you know, there was a little bug here, and then I fixed the bug. You're like, the bug doesn't matter. The bug is super transient in the lifetime of this app. I don't need a comment that reminds me about a bug that happened once. And now I worry people just commit that, they just roll it. And then the code races are full of garbage.

Chris Coyier

I can I give you a skill recommendation. I think I got this from Ben Huang, right? Uh, Ben Codeson. Uh, it's the uh, I have ADHD skill, and what it does is it's which I don't know how I feel about like telling a model about like my conditions or disabilities or whatever. Like, I don't feel great…

Dave Rupert

or is this in the skill?

Chris Coyier

Make visible, make wins visible. Like, what, what is the benefit here? And then, matter of fact errors, like just say what's wrong. Uh, cap list, surviving items, no preambles, no recaps, no closers, just talk. Like, just nice, it's pretty good for that, which

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“What if Notion had a fonts dropdown like Microsoft Word? I think they'd be half as successful as a company. I really do.” — Dave Rupert, Shop Talk Show

Rupert and Chris Coyier were talking about screen recording tools and the danger of shipping too many features to walk back. Rupert's example is Notion, whose refusal to let users pick fonts or arbitrary colours he reads as guardrails rather than a limitation. His follow-on line is that people have bad taste in documents.

Shop Talk Show · 2026-08-24 Permalink → Listen →

Shop Talk Show Around 54:48 into the episode

Dave Rupert

…when you edit in screen flow, it pretends like it's a timeline view, but there is not, you can't like drag other stuff in there and whatever. It's still pretty limited. But sometimes an app like this has to be really, they have to choose really, I don't know, be careful about the features. Yeah,

Chris Coyier

you have to, you have to be careful, right? Like you just can't do, yeah, if you do too much, you just get way in over your head. And then, yeah, and then you can't walk back features. I mean, I think

Dave Rupert

of little things like, what if this is such a, it's been stuck in my head forever. What if Notion had a fonts dropdown like Microsoft Word? I think they'd be half as successful as a company. I really do. Or if they had just a color pattern. Picker for documents instead of just like the seven colors they support or whatever. They've always been really strict about this is what a document looks like in Notion, and it's pretty freaking limited. And I think that helps them tremendously. It's like the stuff that they don't allow you to do is guardrails that is really helpful. You know, like maybe that's overstated to some degree, but man, people have bad taste in documents and they would make a bunch of terrible documents and people would know that they are terrible and nobody would use it.

Chris Coyier

Yeah, yeah. It's what I feel like there's something, you know, it's like you're not defined by what you do. You're like defined by what you say no to, right? It's like the stuff you say no to. I thought

Dave Rupert

Jim Nielsen was calling out people because you called it out in a blog post and then he linked to your blog post and said more people should blog about that. Talk about the stuff that you didn't ship.

Chris Coyier

Yeah, just talk. I would love to have like a, I wish there, I wish you could more, you know, there's client stuff and secret stuff, but man, like,

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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