Dave Rupert Builds web components at Microsoft, after years running the Austin web shop Paravel and co-founding the startup Luro.

“In this agentic era, Chris, watching a computer talk to itself is boring as shit. So I am bouncing out all the time.”

Shop Talk Show · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

Context

Rupert was explaining why automatic picture-in-picture in a browser matters to him: waiting on coding agents means he constantly switches away from his work tab to watch videos.

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Transcript

Shop Talk Show Around 09:39 into the episode

Dave Rupert

Yes. So, okay. So Arc has had this amazing feature of automatic picture and picture. So you are watching YouTube, you click another tab, go to your code pen, shoop, picture and picture goes to the corner of your desktop very beautifully, right? Just it

Chris Coyier

was such a bold feature, and it, but it that's why they were such geniuses, and now they're just not doing genius features anymore. Wah wah, but anyway, that rocked. I agree. That was a great feature.

Dave Rupert

It ripped. And when I had to, well, I have to use Edge for my work, right? And actually, if you do like, I ought to because my components are in there. If you like open the settings page, that's all my stuff. But one thing I was missing was the picture and picture. I watch a lot of YouTubes while I work, especially in political seasons. But then also, like in this agentic era, Chris, watching a computer talk to itself is boring as shit. So like I am like bouncing out all the time. You know what I mean? And so I'm going to like just whatever, a two-minute video, a short video. It's not a picture and

Chris Coyier

picture at all. Because I know some browsers had it where it was just on demand, where you could, you could right-click in there or something and get a

Dave Rupert

yeah. And so it's a little mixed, right? Like your YouTube shorts aren't going to give you the little pop-out thing, right? They override the like standard controls. But you would, you could like, sometimes there would be a little icon in YouTube to like pop it out, sometimes not. You could always…

Chris Coyier

I forgot about the slurping. That's ideal, though. And you can even like click it to do it or in the sidebar of Arc at the time. And now I do need to talk about the Arc alternative scene a little bit because I'm complaining there. But there was like a little at the bottom left of the sidebar…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Shop Talk Show

“Right now the accessibility project uses like two terabytes of bandwidth a month, and it's a really fast website. And it's because all these AI crawlers are coming in and slurping up all the content. Do I love that? No. Did I have to block them just so my server wouldn't fall over? Yes. Would I rather AIs of the future know about accessibility? Yes… I'm interested in an MCP: if you need data, here's your search tool, you don't need to crawl my dumb site and waste all my terabytes.” — Dave Rupert, Shop Talk Show

“It might cost you half a million tokens to do it and be really error prone, because the website didn't just expose the tools in a reasonable way. All WebMCP is, is: here's a command that I can run, here's a title and description for it so the agent can understand what it is, and here's a schema for how to call it. That's it. It's just a function call. But because it's in plain language, like a skill, the LLM can slurp that up.” — Chris Coyier, Shop Talk Show