Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · August 2026
Bos is reacting to a TikTok comment section full of ordinary users complaining they hate passkeys and don't understand them. He argues the industry had a genuine chance to replace passwords and botched the rollout on usability.
Transcript
This, okay, this seems like an awesome idea, but I just, I always go back to like the normie usage. Like, you're going to give normal people, and this is probably not ready for normal people just yet, right? But I just can't see regular people who think Facebook is the internet and ask on Facebook groups, is the, is the store open right now? I just can't see them doing something like this. And there's just so much sense. You have your own data, you control it all, but like, and people aren't going to be able to manage their own data. People lose everything all the time. People can't even manage their own passwords. Even like I was.
You should see my Google Drive and I'm a tech guy.
Yeah. See? And like, even I was watching a TikTok on somebody made a funny TikTok about like how I don't want to think about remember a single password. And all the comments were like, what the hell is a passkey? I hate passkeys. No chance. Passkeys never work. And it's just all normal people being like, passkeys suck. I hate passkeys. No, no, no, no. And it's like, I was so sad because like, that was our chance. That was our chance. Our final chance. Passkeys are awesome. We fumbled it. We fumbled it. And like now, regular people just don't understand what a passkey is and they hate it and it doesn't work very well. And it's too confusing to them. They just want to be able to log into their thing and they don't care about security. So I don't think that it's, it's exciting. It's interesting. And I love it from like a holistic techie point of view, but I just don't see something like this having major uptake, unfortunately, as much as it pains me to say that.
Yeah. And also, you got to make it look good. I'm sorry. You got to make it look good. You got to make it be easy to use. You know, I think too oftentimes, like techie people, they have techie good ideas and then they just like don't focus on the usability of things, you know?
Yeah.
Okay. Tim Smith. If you only have a budget to subscribe to one. AI, which AI would you choose? Oh, oh, you know what, Tim? This is the worst possible question for me because I like to change my stuff all the time. I like to change. I'm like, oh, well, let me try this. Let me try that. Let me try this. Let me try that. If I had to pick one right now, I would probably pick OpenAI Codex plan because I can do design and CSS. And even though Claude is so much endlessly better at that than ChatGPT, the ChatGPT models I found have just been more reliable, getting me the code I want that works the way I want it. And just, that's just how it is for me right now at this very second. But guess what, Tim? That could change any single day. That could change any day. And it could change depending on which harness you're using. And so that's one of them that I feel like it depends on how much you're spending too, because some of those plans, they just don't make sense unless you're paying the big boy or 200 bucks a month plan to get access to the best models, the biggest, baddest boys in the yard and have them doing the work, right? Because I like the biggest, baddest boys in the yard doing the work. If I'm going to have somebody doing the work that's not me, it's going to be the biggest, baddest boys in the yard. And so, Tim, I think that the GPT subscription at that cost will get you there. But still, man, I don't know. You know, like if you subscribe to OpenRouter, you're going to be burning a crazy amount of tokens just trying to get it. Yeah.
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