Samee Siddiqui is the CoFounder and CEO of Atlas.

In this Quick Hit, we review Atlas and their new ChatGPT tool for writing smart contracts. Atlas is self-described as the fastest way to build on Ethereum, L2s, and any EVM chain. Samee gives us a live demo and talks about why it's so crucial that we radically lower the barrier to building protocols and dApps with tooling like Atlas.

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Topics Covered

00:00 - Intro
06:49 - Background on Samee
08:30 - State of tooling for dApp developers
14:00 - Overview and demo of Atlas suite
18:47 - Feedback on Atlas tooling
22:00 - Productivity gain from Atlas
24:13 - Atlas for auditing code
26:13 - How to get started with Atlas
28:06 - Closing

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Guest Links

Samee on Twitter
https://twitter.com/sameebuilds

Atlas on Twitter
https://twitter.com/atlas_zk

Learn about Atlas
https://www.atlaszk.com/

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🙏 The Edge Podcast is produced by 4RC Labs. If you're a DeFi/Web3 builder, contact our team at: https://fourthrevolution.capital/

All opinions expressed by hosts and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and not necessarily those of Fourth Revolution Capital. Podcast guests and 4RC may have positions in the assets or other matters discussed in this podcast. DeFi Dad was a seed investor in Atlas in 2022. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Do your own research.

We need to radically lower the barrier for building protocols and dApps.

If we get that number up, then everything else can follow.

And if you don't get that number up, then all of the vision of what blockchains can do is basically pointless because developers basically start this virtuous cycle.

They build the apps, apps get users, users get money in the ecosystem, and the flywheel spins.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Edge podcast.

I'm DeFi Dad from Fourth Revolution Capital, and I'm here with my friend and co-host from 4RC Nomadic.

Today's show is a shorter episode we do called Quick Hits, where we spotlight new DeFi and Web3 projects.

In this episode, we'll cover a new developer tool live in public beta that's sure to be a hit with L2 developers called Atlas.

Atlas is self-described as quote the fastest way to build on Ethereum.

While L2s are growing quickly, a bottleneck for new development of protocols and dApps can be tooling to support those developers.

Atlas enables developers to deploy on any L2 in just a few clicks, including Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll, Polygon, ZK-Sync Era, and more.

We'll also cover their popular chat GPT-like plugin that allows developers to instantly

Scratch with their integrated Solidity AI without any download or setup.

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All right, in just a moment, we'll introduce Sami Siddiqui, the founder and CEO of Atlas.

Sami is a software engineer and DApp developer, having previously worked on multiple startups in Web3, which ultimately inspired him to build Atlas, a story that we'll talk all about in the next few minutes.

So Sami, why don't we just start with the easy stuff.

So I was an engineer just working in Silicon Valley.

And I think philosophically the thing that got me excited was I felt like there wasn't a lot of companies like building important things anymore.

And like I wanted to join an industry that was actually changing rapidly and making impact in the world.

And after diving deeper into the space, you realize that this is the only space that actually allows you to reprogram the world in ways that you think are interesting.

So like the banking infrastructure, the way governments work, the way companies work, all these things you kind of take for granted.

But in crypto, you actually learn that, hey, all of these things, you'll have to work this way.

Governments and companies and banks don't have to work this way.

You can actually reprogram how all of these things work because this is a new tool for coordination.

That's a very rare opportunity where this like new computing platform comes out in your lifetime and that it can like fundamentally reorganize society.

So it seemed like I would be really silly to not join in on this and build something in space.

Sami, the next question that I wanted to kind of talk through was more about the state of tooling for developers that are working in Web3.

But I feel like actually the more natural way to talk through that is, can you tell your story about, you know, the founding of Atlas?

Because obviously there was sort of like an epiphany that you had as you were working on Dapps that, hey, I should build Atlas because I need this as a developer.

So anyways, if you could tell us that story.

I think also useful context here is that I'm not just like a random developer.

So my entire career, I've basically been building developer tools, actually, in the web to world.

They used to build like JavaScript tooling for making like iPhone and Android apps.

I was building tooling for like monitoring all of their infrastructure systems.

And then I went to Flexport and I was working on like a platform for automating their shipment process.

So I was basically working on like products for developers at all these companies.

And then when I moved into web 3, I was building a couple of products like a social network, a game, things like this.

And I realized that all of these like when you build something for yourself in the Web 2 world, you use a lot of tools off the shelf.

You might use something like AWS or you might use some other tooling.

And Basically everything you have to build from scratch, there's very, very few things you can actually take off the shelf.

And the things that you can take off the shelf are usually very old and very difficult to use tools.

And so we realized, hey, this is pretty annoying.

And we started working on the infrastructure product, which is like roll ups as a service.

So it's, it would kind of be like similar to how in, if you want to make a website or web server, you would use cloud infrastructure provider like AWF.

And you could like spin up your own blockchain.

But the, the, we had the same problem that every layer 2 and every blockchain has right now, which is that it's cool if you have infrastructure, but there's actually basically no blockchain developers in the entire world right now.

There's about 30, 000 full-time blockchain developers in the whole world.

And so what happened is like all of these chains like Ethereum, ZK-SYNC, Polygon, Scroll, like every chain you ever heard of, they're all fighting over these 30, 000 developers.

And So there's certainly not enough developers to go around to build on all these chains.

So we were basically facing the same problem as like a roll up product where like, this is going to be important at some point, but there's not enough developers that exist.

So it actually seemed like, okay, the core problem here is like, we need to just increase this top line number of how many developers are building things in blockchain.

And then if we get that number up, then everything else can follow.

So that's kind of like the meta thought process.

So we basically our goal is how we need to like radically lower the barrier of entry for for building protocols and dApps.

So we built this like all in 1 IDE where you can say, hey, write me this smart contract, like walks you through with AI and iterate on it and then press the button and deploy.

So that was kind of the original goal was like, how can we increase the number of developers and how can we make it as easy as possible to actually start building?

So if I'm a developer on ZK-Sync era or Polygon or

Arbitrum, is the issue more of a lack of tooling or is it a limitation of options?

I mean, their Tools exist, but they're basically just very rudimentary, and they're, you have to, they're hard to use, they're rudimentary, and then they still require you to learn a lot of deep domain knowledge that you as a new developer might not find relevant, or might just not be even that relevant.

It might just be you're learning some random things about this specific tool.

The main tools people use right now for building Dapps or protocols are Hardhat, Foundry and Remix.

It's like a JavaScript command line tool.

It's powerful, but it's like a Rust CLI tool and kind of hard to use.

And then Remix is this like a theory of foundation in browser IDE.

Most people write their first smart contract in this, but then they like quickly graduate because it has very limited power.

So you kind of have these 2 ends of the spectrum where you have like easier to use but not very powerful and then powerful but very difficult to use.

And so we just tried to make like how can you make it easy to use, but also have like all the powerful features of these powerful tools?

a few things that you mentioned earlier just on growing the amount of developers in the space, but then also making it easier for them to develop and then build their dApps easier and deploy them on all these L2s.

I think like, even myself, I think I've underestimated kind of the power and the need for this tooling.

And it seems like there's just been a big disconnect in the space.

On that note, like why don't we dive into the Atlas product suite and you can kind of go over what you've been building.

It's basically like, I don't know if you guys have ever used IDE, but you it's it's kind of an all-in-one suite where I can come I can go from I have an idea to building and deploying the staff on any network all in 1 tool.

So it's basically like I can say hey write me this contract I can I can test it out and then I can deploy it?

If you want, I can actually give you a quick demo on that on the website right now.

You can click Create to create a new project, or you can import something from a template from GitHub.

Let's just call this Hello World project.

We have a couple of templates, as I said, where you can get something from GitHub and you can create it.

And so now you just get dropped into this IDE.

This is the, I don't know if you guys have read Solidity code, but this is basically like a Hello World contract that just increments this stored integer on this contract.

So just to kind of give an idea of how easy this is to use, all we have to do to actually start interacting with this contract now is hit run.

And this actually deploys to like a virtual blockchain that's running in your browser.

And you can now actually call the functions on this contract.

And we can like, basically test this contract in real time.

So this this speeds up your development and iteration loop a lot when you're building something, because you could actually see what is actually happening when I call these functions, and is it doing what I think it's going to be doing.

So I think that by itself is pretty cool.

But where it really gets exciting is using Copilot.

So the flow of what it means to actually develop has kind of changed now.

We are going to be building things first with AI and then kind of just tuning it based on what it spits out.

So let's ask it to write me a decentralized Twitter.

Have a function that gets all tweets for a user and let me post a tweet.

So we can basically use this to generate a lot of code that otherwise we'd have to write from scratch.

And that's really powerful now because we can iterate much, much faster, right?

You can 90% of the code that would have been boilerplate before is written for you and I can use my time as a solidity developer now on just really making sure that my custom logic is sound and that I understand every line of code that's coming here.

So this is essentially like prompt to code.

This is almost like a chat GPT-like, but for a Solidity dev, like a little companion helping you write Solidity.

And the cool thing here is like, this has context of what you're doing.

So it knows about your project and knows about this contract that's got written.

So if you want to say like, hey, can you write me a test for this contract?

Or, hey, can you analyze this contract for security vulnerabilities?

Or, hey, I like this contract, but can you add this function to do this?

like easily add back and forth between the 2 windows.

So as far as like, how did you train this copilot?

Like, is this like, some sort of off the shelf API?

Is this something that you've trained on the Atlas side of things?

Like, have you trained this AI on Solidity code?

Or how did, like, where did this come from?

So it turns out GPT-4 is pretty good at Solidity by default.

You can do some clever prompt engineering to pass in like whatever relevant context you want, slash, tell it to do Solidity things.

But in general, the longer term plan here is like, this should clearly be a custom model.

And Solidity is actually very well designed for making a custom LLM because 1, all the code is open source.

2, you know what is high quality code versus what has been hacked, etc.

And so we're planning on actually training custom model with not just validity code, but we now have a bunch of data of these chats that people are doing.

And this is how they actually fine tune things like chat dbt, where they use custom data set in addition to actual real people interacting with a chat agent to make a new chatbot.

Sami, have you gotten any feedback on any of this that you can share so far with?

So any sort of feedback to highlight from developers who are using this?

I mean, the, I mean, the number 1 thing by far is just like the speed of iteration and the speed of getting something out the door is like night and day difference between any other product on the market.

So like you, I mean you guys saw how simple it is.

I didn't go through deploying to a live network.

But like, you can literally have an idea and deploy to Ethereum mainnet in like 1 minute.

So that's like, just a huge, a huge delta.

I think as the block starting to build more complex apps, which we're starting to see now, it's less of like, oh, I'm shipping my thing to mainnet in 1 minute.

And it's more that, hey, I'm able to iterate much more quickly on what the design of my app or what functions I want or what contracts I have.

And I can understand the code and like, change it much, much more quickly because I basically have this agent that I can go back and forth with.

And so the majority of time is really spent on what is my unique, like, value add and adding to this protocol versus, hey, what is the syntax of solidity?

How can I, is this thing going to run properly?

You're focusing much more on the higher order bits there.

What I'm hearing here, Sami, is DeFi dad and I might have a chance to become Solidity devs once and for all.

I still don't know if this would even help us get there.

We might even need a little more heavy lifting.

We've lowered the barrier of entry that anyone now can become a developer, right?

You don't, that's actually the end goal is that you shouldn't need to like understand a lot of random syntax.

In the ideal world like Solidity is actually, again there's a bunch of like very audited code that's battle tested.

So for a lot of applications in the future, you should just be able to say, hey, I want this in like plain English and it should be able to pull very like battle tested on bitcode and build whatever you want for you.

So yeah, I think it's like you guys should become you should be able to become developers and you already can.

I mean, if you go to the website, you can deploy a lot of simple things already.

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Okay, so I know you say it speeds things up, but Can you, are you able to quantify that at all?

Like, obviously there's more complex things you can do and I know it helps for iterations, but like if you were to say like, is this like a 5X increase?

I think it 1, 1 depends on what you're building because there's with any like creator tooling that uses AI to like augment your ability.

There's like this long tail of use cases where if you're making very very custom like low level code for example, it becomes like increasingly not that useful.

And then if you're making things that a lot of people have done, it's really, really useful.

And then there's this middle that you gradually drop off, depending on how custom your use case is.

So I would say for probably 50% of people what they're making is like fairly standard if not more.

This is like a 99% increase if you're talking about like the first time you've ever used because you literally don't need to know anything about Solidity or download anything.

Don't even need to understand how a command line works.

You literally go to the website and can deploy anywhere and automatically verify everything.

So that's like by far away, like I would say 90 to 99%.

My first smart contract, it took me like many, many hours to deploy.

So if you take compare 1 minute to many hours, it's like, again, night and day difference.

If you're trying to build like some very highly optimized solidity code where you need to like use assembly or something like this, this is going to be pretty, I mean, the best thing it can do is basically maybe analyze code for you.

But it's not going to be very good at like, if you say, hey, generate me assembly to do the same.

It's not going to be nearly as good as probably someone who's a low-level protocol developer.

But over time, this is going to be increasingly not true.

As there's more and more code written in Solidity for whatever the use case is, the dataset increases, And there's more of that code, more of the use cases move toward this like, it has been done before, AI model can help generate it, as opposed to this is novel code that no one's ever written before.

And so obviously this helps in the creation aspect of developing and solidity, but how do you foresee this working and kind of like the audit aspect?

I mean, I guess you wouldn't want this to be like your end-all be-all check, but I'd imagine like this is super helpful for picking up little errors and maybe things like that.

Yeah, no auditing right now is also kind of a huge headache, right?

See all DeFi Dad transcripts on Youtube

Atlas: ChatGPT for Smart Contracts