Shadowing Practice: Why Flutter matters more in the AI world with Flutter co-founder, Eric Seidel - Learn English Speaking with Video

Hey everybody, Andrew from the Flutter team here and I'm joined by, let's see, co -founder of the Flutter Project,

founder of Shorebird, and declared this morning the godfather of Flutter, Eric Seidel.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this to you before, one of the things I liked a lot about working with you

when you were at the Flutter team is that you were always focused on a problem.

You were always productively annoyed about something And that's why you would go off and build a thing.

Like with Flutter, you were annoyed that everybody was writing their apps more than once.

Yeah.

And then you're like, just that's dumb.

Like no one should do that.

You shouldn't have to do that.

That's why we built Flutter.

And so that has also been a similar process for Shorebird though, right?

And so can you talk a little bit about the problem

that you're annoyed by and then how you've constructed Shorebird to sort of, you know, fix that problem?

So there was a problem that annoyed me at Google, which was that Google is incredibly capable.

So many amazing engineers there, so much money to fund these things.

But at any large organization, right, there's countervailing incentives.

And there was lots of things that we built at Google that we could never ship.

There are multiple code push over the air update solutions at Google

that will never see the light of day because it just doesn't make sense to.

Like at Google, for example, Android, the way you update Android apps is via the Play Store.

And so if we added a way to, say, code push through the Play Store, well, would it support iOS?

And the Play Store isn't on iOS.

Right.

So it's like, it's not, there's no malice.

It's just the incentives never aligned with the customers we were serving, right? because at Google,

there's hundreds if not thousands of engineers using Dart, which is awesome.

But there's millions in the outside world.

And I wanted to build a company that cared first and foremost about those millions.

So let's get into your talk that you did here today as well.

So you opened the show today, the keynote for Friday, which was about Flutter in the age of AI, which will be available on YouTube.

not on this channel, but on the FlutterCon channel.

But can you talk a little bit about what you spoke about this morning

and what you've been seeing just sort of in the community overall?

Yeah, so the talk broke down into three sections, sort of the one -minute summary, right?

So the first was I wanted to level set a little bit about AI.

I think there's a lot of hype, a lot of puffery, a lot of confusion about like, are all jobs gone tomorrow?

No, not all jobs are gone tomorrow, right?

So I wanted to level set about what AI was good or bad at.

We talked a bit about that.

But I want to talk about what that affects Flutter today, how Flutter works in this world that is now AI,

that now we're all suddenly using agents to write things.

And I think the first change there that I led with was that you don't have a thousand new teammates.

You just have these agents, they're not really human, but they will take any mistake

that you've made in your code base and multiply it a thousand times.

And so just how to think about that, how to prepare for that.

And then the third section was really about sort of what's coming and how we see.

And I talked mostly about how it what it means for us, right?

Are we Android engineers?

Are we iOS engineers?

Are we something else?

As now, you know, any one of us can type into Gemini and spit out any language we want.

And these models know the deep dark details of RecyclerView or mock message loop much better than I ever will.

And so like that part of my job is gone.

And I have a new part of my job or a different part of my job, which is, you know, being responsible, architecting, having taste, you know,

for these models that do so much of the grunt work that I used to worry about.

Is that also shifting how you work at Shorebird in your current engineering work there?

Absolutely.

So Shorebird, we use agents of all stripes all the time.

I will say they still struggle, all of these agents struggle at the size and complexity of the Dart VM or the Flutter engine, Flutter.

You're doing very specific work, at least some of the time, right?

Like you're doing things that no one else is doing.

Yeah, no, at Shorebird, we have a full fork of Flutter.

And that's important, again, go back to aligning with our customers.

It's important that for all those many users of Flutter outside of Google, that we never say to them,

oh, we can't fix that that's outside of our responsibility.

No, no, no, we're responsible for the whole thing.

We deliver them our flavor of Flutter, and when they have a problem with it, they come to us.

But yeah, so we do some very difficult work in Flutter and Dart, but these agents are amazing at lots of little things, and we do use multiple agents in parallel.

We use agents for triaging bugs sometimes.

So yeah, they're changing all of our jobs, And I think they're also changing our identities in a sense.

Yeah.

And I think we, as a community of developers, don't even have the words for that yet.

That's something I think about a lot.

You know, how do you...

Because the community that surrounds Flutter has always been the thing that made Flutter fun.

Like, I liked using Flutter, I like building things, but I like building things with people and seeing what they build and sharing and stuff like that.

And it is interesting to watch how that has shifted a little bit

when the minutiae of the code

and saving someone like 10 lines of code every hour

or something like that by writing a really well -made package with a really great interface.

Sure.

That suddenly, it's not that it doesn't matter, but it's not a thing we talk about nearly as much as we might have in the past.

Yeah.

I think to your point about how Flutter is a community, right?

That is one thing I love, right?

Yeah, you know, we're Flutter developers, but like I think a lot of us came from Android first

or iOS first and like we've already gone through

that transition in ourselves and with our teams

but I think a lot of the industry is now facing of oh I can write in all these things

but it means that maybe now I'm not just an iOS developer

or just an Android developer yeah you know I again we don't have the words yet

but I'm a product developer you know I'm a Flutter developer.

Yep.

And we get to come to the Flutter community

and be surrounded by all these other people who are trying to write for people, not for platforms.

And also want to spend their days doing something else other

than writing another identical copy in a different language for a slightly different black box.

Yeah, which suddenly feels like copying Cuneiform or something, or like scribing things to make copies or something like that.

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Yeah.

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And so again, I think that the Flutter community, these Flutter teams have already gone through that transition.

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And that's a superpower that they have, that we have in this AI transition, where we've already figured that out and can help the rest of our organization,

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can help the rest of our industry, figure out what it means to design a team and an organization

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and ways of building products that are around people and products rather than platform.

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We were talking earlier about the expansion that you're seeing in Flutter's use in enterprise.

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Like, here at FlutterCon, there's a Flutter at scale track.

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We have folks from all these different companies.

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You know, Geico is here.

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Universal is here.

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A whole bunch of folks are here.

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Can you talk a little bit about that and some of the ways that you see people, you know, big teams doing big things with Flutter?

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Yeah.

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So, Flutter has been popular for a very long time.

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Popularity has been very global.

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And so for those of us who live here in the US, where Flutter has been less popular than some other parts of the world, it's been sort of funny.

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Yeah, it's a weird little inversion to be a part of.

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We think of ourselves as having this great tech scene, and we do obviously, but like you fly to Europe, you fly to India, you fly to Brazil or whatever, and oh my god, you're just swimming in Flutter developers.

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Here in the US it's been less.

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But now we're seeing this big enterprise transition in the US market, where enterprise after enterprise is doing these big, so like, you know, Geico talked some about that.

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LG has talked about their transition.

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Universal has talked about their transition.

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You know, SoFi talked about their rewrite, how they saved 60 % in terms of total mass of code,

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which has allowed them to accelerate in this AI era.

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And so it's just, it's happening, finally, you know, at the big enterprise level in the US.

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And while Europe and India and stuff may have already done a lot of enterprise transition, that's novel here, or it feels novel.

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It was really interesting to see some of the folks there to benefiting from having so many other, you used to talk to one CTO at a time, it felt like.

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And now we're starting to see panels where they're talking about having identified the same problems

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that you run into once you get that big, and swapping solutions and stuff like that, which is really cool.

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Yeah, there's one thing that was super cool about this FlutterCon, right?

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Like we've always had all sorts of industry, you know, come to FlutterCon,

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but this time in particular there's just so many big US enterprises and so we had a whole bunch of panels

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with big US enterprises and it I don't know if it's the Spider -Man meme or whatever, but it's like there was so much like oh yeah We had to solve that problem,

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and we had to solve that problem.

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And I think that I just don't know that there are as many forums as we,

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I guess, need for these large enterprises all undergoing these Flutter transitions.

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I think to go back to our earlier point about AI, I think the value of Flutter is changing.

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I think for a really long time, Flutter has been adopted for developer experience because it had a really great developer experience.

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Once you started using it as an engineer and a coder, you didn't want to stop.

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You're like, oh, I'm so much faster.

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This is so much easier.

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And the later fundamentals sort of played out.

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Like once you'd adopted it, these large teams would say, oh my goodness, they made us three times as productive.

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We saw that play out a bunch of times at Google.

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And now I think people are able to access these fundamentals so much quicker because the transition time is so much shorter.

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The risk of doing a transition is so much smaller.

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I think that these LMs, these AIs, are just they're reducing the barrier to moving between technologies.

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And it's allowing technologies like Flutter with really good fundamentals.

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It's not that there aren't other nice ways to write mobile, but they're like locked to a platform.

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Where they sit on top of somebody else's, you know, widgets or whatever.

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And with Flutter, you as a developer have almost full control from the screen to the GPU and everything in between.

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And so you can express your brand so completely.

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And it's built on a system, Dart, that has scaled so strongly at Google to millions and millions of lines of code, to hundreds and thousands of engineers.

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And so now that it's scaling to hundreds or thousands of agents at companies that are very large, but maybe not Google scale,

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It gets to shine so much for different reasons and in some ways so much faster than it's before.

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I did want to ask you, here at an event, getting together with everybody, what's something surprising or super interesting that you have run into?

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I think I'd go back to, I'm just surprised by all the many, many ways that people are using Clutter.

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We were just trying to solve problems for Google right as Google needed a cross -platform solution

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that had you know both portability

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and quality right previously you had to compromise on one of the two right but

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so I you know people talking about putting Flutter in space

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putting Flutter in airplanes using Flutter to manage you know farms

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and fleets of you know pigs

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and whatnot we talked to the hog rancher yeah I mean

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it's just It's wild to see people using Flutter on all sorts of different shapes and sizes and screens.

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It's just great.

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We actually had someone submit a question.

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We invited people to submit questions for some of the interviewees to answer.

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We've got one for you, which I'm going to read right now.

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Cool.

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With AI -assisted development becoming more common,

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how do you see Flutter developers balancing AI tools with strong fundamentals and architecture decisions and writing maintainable production -level code?

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You know, so as as the agents come in more

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and more as the layer of abstraction of it Kind of we've heard

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that term before the layer of abstraction is going up a little bit

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and where we spend our attention changes How do you see that balance shifting?

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It's funny.

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I think that the strong fundamentals Actually matter so much more now

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Because so much more a larger percentage of our job is

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Responsible for architecture and taste and direction these agents are very good at tasks.

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You ask them to do a thing, they will blast through any barrier

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and they will do the thing or they will at least confidently proclaim that it is done.

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They'll reach a point of certainty about whether they've done the thing or not.

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Correct.

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But you are responsible then for the architecture and the longer term thinking.

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And so I think that the fundamentals matter so much more now.

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Well, thank you so much, Eric, for being here with us at FlutterCon and for doing this interview.

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I really appreciate it and we'll see you all next time.

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Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: Why Flutter matters more in the AI world with Flutter co-founder, Eric Seidel - Learn English Speaking with Video

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