Announcing a brand-new podcast: “How I AI” with Claire Vo 🔥

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/25a5c537f1492d53

Today I've got something really special for you.
You may not realize this, but we're living through one of the most extraordinary moments in history.
How we live
How we work and how we build is all changing with the rise of AI.
It's both exciting, but it's also often overwhelming.
Many of us are wondering if we're falling behind.
what we should be paying attention to and what we can safely ignore, and also just how to best use some of these new tools and technologies in our lives and in our work.
That is why I am so unbelievably excited to announce the launch of a new podcast called How I AI with Claire Vaux.
The mission of Claire's New Podcast is to show you how people from all walks of life have figured out how to use AI tools in their day to day life to improve both the quality and efficiency of their work.
What makes this podcast unique?
Is that it's designed to give you highly practical and actionable tips and tricks and workflows that you can copy and start using immediately.
No philosophical debates about the future of humanity or plantification on what might be possible someday.
Each episode is gonna be about thirty minutes, often shorter.
The guest will share one or two specific use cases that they found useful in their work.
And there'll be live screen sharing to show you exactly how they do everything that they describe.
I couldn't imagine a more perfect host for this podcast than Claire Vaux.
Claire is an engineer, a three time chief product officer.
a founder, and on the side has been building her own AI product that's now making six figures.
What I love about Claire is that unlike a lot of people online.
She doesn't just talk about using AI. She lives and breathes it and builds with it and is constantly sharing everything she's learning online.
I can't wait for you to learn from her and from her amazing guests.
This is the first ever new podcast under the Lenny's Podcast Network.
Depending on how this goes, we may add more podcasts down the road.
And just to be clear, nothing changes with Lenny's podcast. This is just more free content coming your way every Monday morning.
If you're building products, leading teams, starting a company,
Or just wanna learn how to actually use AI in your life.
This podcast is for you.
What follows is the first episode of the podcast. If you like what you hear, head on over to how IAI Podcast.
dot com to find future episodes.
And a pro tip.
For the richest experience.
Since there's gonna be a lot of screen sharing and live demos.
You're gonna wanna watch the video version, so definitely check things out on YouTube or on Spotify, which includes video.
Now here is the first episode of How I AI with Claire Bo.
Can you do something that used to take two weeks and two hours? And that's like a 40 times speed increase. So that's kinda like the number that I have in my head generally. Like what's the most optimistic case if you kinda remove all the bottlenecks, something that would take 40 hours would take one hour.
If you're suggesting to us that AI is gonna raise the bar on what's possible to do, you're certainly setting the standard. The majority of human engineering will be removing tech death such that AI engineers can actually ship features.
It's also scary, I think, which is why I think so many people shy away from this stuff is like there is this part why change is uncomfortable is that change can kill you. There's like a fear of change. It's like job security, right? But at the end of the day I think it's sort of also job insecurity.
Hey everyone, welcome to How I AI, a podcast on how AI is transforming how we get things done.
I'm Claire, product leader and AI Obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools.
Today I have an absolute powerhouse guest, ill living.
CEO and founder of Gumron.
If you don't know Gumroad, it's the platform that has helped creators sell over a billion dollars of products directly to their audiences.
Sahel's been at the bleeding edge using AI to transform how companies build products and write code.
Doing everything from open sourcing the entire gumroad repo.
To paying his employees thousands of dollars if they can write more AI powered code than he does.
Today he's gonna show us exactly how he does it.
Let's dive in.
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Hey, so I'm super excited to have you here. And before we dive into the demos, I wanted to call out something that you said.
A couple days ago, which is
Devin, the AI engineering agent, who I also love.
is writing forty one percent of your PRs right now and you expect it to go to eighty percent by
the end of the year. So do you think that's the baseline that we should all be shooting for? Do you think you're way ahead of the curve?
Where should we all be compared to that?
Benchmark that you just said.
I feel like I tell the team constantly like we have a lead.
You know, but
Delete is getting shorter and shorter every every day.
Every week there's a
New model coming out. So
I I would say like by the end of next year I would suspect that like every engineering
Team and any company is
you know, using Cursor and Devon and V Zero and all these tools to ship, you know.
Multiple times faster. And the question is is mostly like how many organization adapt such that those people
can do so, right? Like the bottlenecks are are show up in other places. Like Toby just tweeted about, you know, his
Simplify AI stuff today.
And I think that becomes the question is like how fast can you actually change your organization, your culture.
Especially when you're remote, it's harder to make these big changes across the org to get people to learn new stuff.
Uh to try and fail.
And cross share learnings, you know, all that. All that kind of stuff.
Okay, so we're gonna do it one at a time, which is you're gonna show us how you actually
redesign or build something using these tools. So we'll get your screen up and you can walk us through how you think about things.
Awesome.
Yeah, I mean that's why I think the the coolest thing about
all this AI stuff is that you get to spend more time doing
What.
you really enjoy, which to me and I think you as well, like
like solving customer problems and for this product that we build is called Flexile.
And it's uh, you know, you can think of it like a like us ordeal, but built specifically for the way that we run the business, which is like hiring a bunch of people, a lot of project based, a lot of hourly based, monthly retainers, all sorts of different
types of people remote, in person, full time.
Let them choose their equity split.
uh manage your cap table, all of that stuff and like the same
Product?
And
one of the reasons I love AI is that I can basically just use the product and instead of running into some issue
And being like, Hey engineer, can you go solve this? And then spending all this time like writing up a spec.
You know, then putting that into you know
sending that to a designer, that designer will then do like tomorrow or the next day it will then do a m a mock. There'll be some back and forth and then it'll go to like the next week on Monday. It'll go to an engineer.
They may have some questions that goes back to the desire and by the time it ships, you know, and makes it to production, even for something like relatively trivial. You know, it's been two weeks or something, right? And so like can you do something that used to take two weeks and two hours
And that's like a forty times speed increase. So that's kinda like the number that I have in my head generally, like what's like the most optimistic.
case if you kinda remove all the bottlenecks, something it that would take forty eight hours would take one hour.
And thus.
Pretty awesome. So even in this form, like pretty simple. And I built the software so I'm like you know, I'm not like a
Uh
saying oh it's so terrible, but there's always room to to to improve and even on this one screen, which is the the contract or invitation
Page.
There's like already a couple of things that I noticed that like aren't big enough to like really ask someone to do. Everyone's busy, they have their own stuff that they're working on.
But there are like a few things that I noticed. Like for example
The day picker is kinda terrible.
Yeah. Like it just uses like the you know, the native date picker. It's not humanized, you know, you can't type in like next Monday or this Monday or have like a nice date picker, you know, if you go to like Shad CN.
And this is the beauty of open source is you know, and the why AI is so good is there's a lot of open source. You get like a nice state picker like this, right? It's like nicely humanized and you can do all sorts of cool stuff. So that's like one thing I noticed.
That I think is like a really good candidate.
For this, I would go straight to Devin. I would you know it's it's it doesn't really re really need that much scoping. It's kind of just like replaced eight widget.
You know, date picker in contractor invitation screen.
with the chat CNA figure, we might as well. I mean the cool thing with Devin is you can like
But do that.
While you do other stuff, so there's there's no risk really.
So I can
Select the flexile repo and you know, say for this specific page, like update the date the occurred.
From the browser native.
You know, input.
Two shads. Yeah. Import.
If requiring.
I've never actually used this button, but
Again, and this is a good example, like even someone who's using this stuff, like you have to constantly like
Up your game.
To learn more.
You know, basically I think this should be really like a a rich text.
Like this, like you can just type into it and you could type in like next Monday, I think recend.
at a cool demo like this where they have more like a natural language
Something like this.
And he could type in
Yeah. In one hour tomorrow at nine A. M. These sorts of things. Um
Or Slack actually has something similar.
Where if you go into a canvas.
You know, this is our roadmap if you type in like Thursday, right? This is kind of like
What I think would be
Really cool. So I think this is also like I'm gonna have Devin do multiple versions and then we can take a look at how far gone on my own.
But
This is kinda how I would generally work is I would just take
These forms.
And say like you know, build.
Yes.
Or
You're you're putting into V zero, you know, use this form using the very descriptive great requirements.
Magical.
No.
And then you're gonna use V zero to get
A prototype?
Yeah. So generally my flow is
V zero.
Devin.
Cursor.
Is probably how I would say it. Like generally I V zero is my
Prototyping tool of choice.
And
Uh once I have like a really good prototype that I'm happy with.
Then I I go to Devin and if Devin sort of
fails to completely finish, then I open it up in cursor, though I d I think
Last week.
Devin launched this pairing mode where you can actually like
Jump in.
I haven't really experimented with them.
Yet.
But that's presumably I would use something like that going forward where I could actually just jump in and fix the changes. The nice thing is Devon actually runs. You know, one of the most annoying things about being a developer is just getting set up.
You know, just getting your admin your your developer environment set up, your and variables.
local host. One of the tips I have for engineering organizations that are large, which is if you can make your environment easy to set up for AI, it's probably a lot easier to set up for
New hires, so it pays off to sort of use that as a
testing ground for um
How easy your
It is for n any new engineer to get started, whether or not
AI. So
You have V Zero in theory going there it goes. Yeah. Okay, so you have V Zero going on building you a prototype.
I have a question here, which is, you know, you mentioned Shad CN as your component library.
Was that driven by
you know, using these AI tools and
you know, those those component libraries being out of the box, or was that something you were looking at before?
Yeah, it's it was a huge reason.
to switch and try to adopt a lot of these tools. Both I and I think it's it's one reason that I think many people haven't really
It hasn't clicked, I guess. The AI stuff. They're like, Oh, I tried it, it didn't really work.
It's not that good. It makes a lot of mistakes. It's you know, basically it's faster for me to do it than to have AI do it.
And I find that that's like a lot of it is just like AI is
good at certain things, it's really good at front end, it's really good at React. It's really good at
So if you're not using those sorts of tools.
you're not gonna get the value. Like trying to ship something like this
with like rails in the back r back end and like
hot wire or whatnot in the front end. Like it these just it just doesn't exist. Like you you would have to spend all your time
Just getting this to work, you know, some jQuery calendar thingy thing, you know, that's how Gumroad was for a long time.
One of the things I wonder is if
you know, engineering leaders will decide on
particular transitions or migrations to make just to power this stuff so that their teams can move.
a little bit faster because they're just seeing themselves
be left so far behind um
compared to those who are maybe using some of these these libraries and technologies.
Natively.
I I actually think that like the majority of human engineering will be
removing tech debt such that
AI engineers can actually
Shift features.
Basically like designers will be shipping features.
'Cause if you think about it, what are they doing, right? They are
Thinking about what the future should do.
And then engineers are just basically setting up the groundwork, the framework.
the defaults, the standards, the linting, the CI pipeline, the infrastructure, the dev setup, such that designers actually are more and more capable over time of like basically taking their idea.
Like
If you were a designer, you you know, you would like just design this part, you know, you'd design this, but you wouldn't design like all the little interactions in here, right? Like you would just design like the Because it would just take too too long.
Oh, you wouldn't even
Consider it.
For example,
You have a designer and they like didn't consider it mobile.
Okay, so you got this design. Let's take a look at it.
Yeah.
Looks pretty good.
It has the magical date.
Creation which is type.
There you go. Type a
A magical day and it works. So it's not just the design, it's the functionality.
And you said the next step for you from V zero is into Devon. So how does that transition work? What are you doing?
Yeah, normally I would have a few back and forths here. You know, you could spend like three or four prompts, like 10, 20 minutes, like really nailing like the interaction, right? You may say like
You know, add a d at a at a clear button or you know, when you hit delete it should actually delete. And this stuff will get only faster and faster and faster.
But once you know, once you're happy with what you have, normally I would take like the final prompt
And I would just paste that into Devon.
You know, and I would basically do similar to what I was doing before.
Yeah. And I can see Devin doing its thing.
Having lots of fun.
And I could start a new Devin.
And
Basically do that, right? So like on here.
On this
Page.
And you reuse the exact same part.
Build this form.
Yeah, it's often I mean sometimes if I'm going back and forth and I learn stuff, like I'm like
For example, this. Yep.
I may just add here, you know.
Like all the these are kinda like learnings where I could it's basically I'm like, Oh, my spec could have been better.
Like this these are things the human engineer also would have maybe not done.
You know, like I basically just kinda go back and forth and like build basically I'm like
The the Vzer was kinda clarifying my spec.
In a way.
Do you use any of the code?
From B Zero?
Sometimes I do. Like sometimes I'll take this and just use this command.
And if I put this and I went into cursor.
Uh if I had cursor open on something. If I say I had it open on this, for example, I would just go to terminal and I would just paste this right in.
And it would

Uh this is f for a different repo so it doesn't have shots the end, but it would basically like s you know, slot that file in and then I could reference the file and then
And uh
You can also, I believe, just like
You know, you could you could uh
You could uh share it.
And you could literally like
Just give the f the URL effectively. Right.
Like this.
Yeah, you could just say like you know, mimic.
Maybe this, right.
You know, and you could say more things, you know.
For example, I noticed that like in this thing, like
I probably don't want the date.
to change in line. I like this parentheses is kinda weird. I'd probably add like a little note.
You know, so
I'd be like it.
Uh putting
The date in the paranormal.

Is kinda weird.
But and below.
the input as
Uh no.
Yeah.
I love putting it.

I don't know what this does, but for some reason.
I f if I feel like I'm vibing with this person, like they know what I mean when I say no. I mean like
Slightly smaller font size, like grey, you know, like no.
Like I feel like a designer would get it.
So, you know, this is kinda like what I would give uh to Devin and
And then it would it would, you know, run off and and do its thing. It's it'll wake up and
It'll do all these things. All but all the stuff that I would basically do. Right, open for shirt, get the thing.
find find the files that need to get changes. But I personally one of the things I think is really
really important is spending more time in V zero. Like I think many people just like
They do a first pass and they basically I think MVPs are no longer enough. Like you can actually spend like
Ten, twenty, thirty, forty minutes here.
If you know that Devon is gonna be able to execute, like sometimes you don't wanna spend too much time here because it just creates work for the engineer, right? Like oh now I have to think about this and that and this and all these like
Little bit that would make the customer feel really good.
uh the user experience would go up but the developer experience would go down, right?
But if you don't AI is gonna be implementing all of that stuff and they're gonna do it at a like a very high level of conscientiousness.
You might say, Oh, by the way, redesign it to like have this or like you know, different roles, for example, right? Like
Different roles.
Have different amounts.
So a preview in the drop down.
You know, so one may be like two hundred an hour, one may be like two
Paper project.
Et cetera, you know.

Two hundred fifty K a year.
Just for fun, I might say like one may even.
have multiple pay rates because I've been exploring this idea generally.
And I think
Part of the beauty of not doing it yourself is to
Happy accidents.
Take your
Your spec and actually do a benefit with it, then.
Then you would have.
Uh and so yeah, that's kinda how I use it and then I I generally
If you're hosted, you know, depending on the projects uh
Our newer projects are all next Jazz post on Versea, so they'll even give you
Yep.
like a preview branch, right? Where and I lo I mostly love doing front end stuff with with Dev and actually now with they have this pairing thing I could actually go in and like
Run Rails console and like check the back end stuff too.
Uh
But you know, with preview branches like uh
I love making changes to antiwork dot com. Yeah.
Because I can test them.
Almost immediately. Right. I can be like
you know, let's say a new person joined the company.
You know.
I can just say, Hey, add this person who joined the company. This is their motto. By the way.
Yeah. Pick a fun icon that matches for them.
Like I didn't pick any of these icons.
I would not have made myself a king.
For example.
I just said like I basically just asked everyone in Slack, like, Tell me if you want it to link anywhere.
And what your
what what you want your you know, your your slogan to be.
And then I asked Devin to actually do it and pick an icon for each person.
That brings me to something I was thinking about, which is
When you were in V Zero and you were asking it to add on features, I was playing the product manager in my brain and I was thinking, Oh, in past lives people would say
No, that's scope creep. We're just focused on the date picker, or we're just focused on
Updating this component. We can't
kind of scope creep and add more and more features. And what I think I think is interesting, I'm curious your point of view.
Is
You can really start to go to the edges of some great user experience and it's less about
How much time will this take? Or is it too complicated? It's more about what's actually gonna work and be be useful.
Yeah, totally. And like I often like I mean, maybe this annoys some people at the company.
But like as I'm doing V zero stuff, like on other things, I'll be I'll like go into the issue and be like
Uh let's see if I have one here. Like
I wanted to improve the
Multiple periods per role, as I mentioned, right? Like this is a and I I'll you know, I'll be like
I'll just go in here and be like
Yeah, like this one I had I was like doing something with Gusto and I kinda liked it.
You know, and I was like
Yeah I turn on this.
And it's just free. People can ignore it if they want, but it's like free design research, you know.
Uh so all of a sudden they have an example of this.
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You know, I see you as an individual
Being able to
add this and fix that and update, you know, the the home page and all those things and use Devon sort of asynchronously.
I'm curious how you've made this work.
at the team level. Like what are the actual
operational pieces that have to be in place for this to not
degrade into chaos and then
What about just culture makes this work for you all?
Yeah, I mean, first off, it's not easy.
Change is uncomfortable.
Right.
Uh
It requires work and energy and biologically I feel like we are
Trying to save our energy all the time.
So you have to you know, you have to motivate people, you have to make it exciting, you know, there's a reason like
Colleges and c classes are
In person, right? Like there's a
It's like fun to
train together. You know, it's easier to go to the gym.
In a gym than like at home in your bedroom. Right. Part of it is doing it myself too, you know, like if your manager or your annoying boss is telling you to do something.
It's different than like leading from the front a little bit.
I often do like screen shares. Actually like I recorded these videos.
And I recorded this one with uh Josh Pickford on YouTube, which is like three hours long.
And I basically did it because I wanted to
I was like, this isn't you know, I got a lot of views actually. Like I will I
That's how important I felt it was.
Not just for me, but for everybody, but I was like basically recorded it for the team. I had my team in mind as I was doing it. Like check out how cool it is. Like
Imagine once we switch to tailwind, like how fast we can, you know, do this kind of thing and like how
Yeah,
Sort of is
Part of that bringing the energy. We also financially motivated people. So there's a couple of times here, I'll find you an example of a Devin competition we did.
So we did this competition.
Where we did thirty th uh.
thirty three thousand dollars uh split amongst whomever opens and merges more Devin PRs than me over the course of May.
So
Yeah, it's a kind of a fun way to like motivate people to learn. It's time bound.
Uh
And I actually did pretty well. Let's uh see the results. So I got I got fourth.
I opened uh twenty seven PRs with Devin.
And then three people beat me.
So
It's uh and I you know, I do a lot of easy wins, you know, so like good props to the all the engineers who
Who who did it. But yeah, I this is all my all my Devin PR. A lot of people are like, There's no way you use Devon, like you're making it up, you're just trying to like go viral or whatever. I'm like, Not really. Like I'm just trying to like help people
I didn't know that was so controversial.
But yeah, there's like a lot of small things like remove this part of the home page.
There's this like recap that we do in Slack that's generated by AI uh that recaps like everything that shipped last week.
And so I said, Hey Devin
Could you you know, is it like for example, these two things don't really need to be here.
Because there's nothing under them, right?
So I said, Hey, Devin, like could you like you know only show the products that actually have shipments and like hide the other ones? And also like
Some of these aren't really shipments.
Like this one is only the back end. The front end hasn't shipped yet to like make sure, you know, the pr update the AI prompt that we're using for this.
Which by the way I've never seen. Like I just I just know that there's an AI prompt that's you know
Involved.
And you know, it'll and that's actually what this uh what this one is, right? So
it found the Slack weekly, you know, recap and it
It uh you know, it it it made
these changes and they created this PR. So we can actually go in and see this PR.
And we can uh confirm my my suspicion or not, which is oh, turns out there is a prompt.
Focus primarily on shipments, feature improvements, and bug fixes, right? Prioritize these categories.
And then it also did something here.
Uh
Which is if we looked, it did this. It added a filter, so you know, basically only the projects that
Have more than one.
The thing that I would critique about myself is that ideally we would have a test and maybe there is a test that I don't know about. So this is when the human would come in. I don't normally just hit merge on these things.
Yeah, I would normally
Send this to somebody else and be like, Hey
I
Did my best shot at this. And you could see here for the slack recap don't include party management, so uh
And then I I pasted uh pasted this uh the link to the to the update.
You know, I would normally like say hey uh
Oh.
And you make sure.
Yes.
What
Good to you.
And if there are any tests that mean updating.
And personally I think this is way better that like someone has done most of the work for you. And basically I think humans will start the process. I think of it like flying a plane, like humans will
Take off, decide where to go.
And land typically, you know, do QA in the in this context.
But you know, not actually build uh
write all this code, right? Like look up like for example, you know, like
Dot filter.
Versus dot.
Trim or dot.
Or do you know like
Every language is different, right? But overall I know rough amount of software architecture.
That like this is
Yeah, this is the right solution.
Right, to this
problem. You're just adding a simple filter that
Removes the things and
Ideally there would be a test, so I would have even higher confidence that that this uh that this has done what it what it should, you know.
One thing I was gonna call out on the code you just wrote w showed was
I find that
These AI engineering tools are pretty good engineering citizens in that they're
Code is well commented.
They call out what you know, those little bit document doc strings and things like that that make it easier to parse some of those
Those changes. Okay, so this is what we
Kicked off with.
It's
The native date picker replaced.
With the Shadien one.
Yeah.
core problem I have here, which I guess
Yeah.
Is I need to make sure it works.
Okay, so you're showing the time lapse of Devin here, which is basically
Um
screen recording of every single step along the way. Right now you're in the
In the terminal and the IDE. So you can actually replay
Step by step how Devin got all this code done.
It looks like it has in here.
You know, reasoning and thought and planning.
Exactly.
And then the part that I'm looking for, and hopefully did it.
Is that it would run
It would run the app locally and it often does this, but sometimes if you have a complex app and we just open source this so that it may have like broken.
Uh but it would actually run the browser.
In its little local box and then it would test it. So let me ask it to do that.
And it's awake, so it should pretty quickly start doing
Doing that and it's this is Devin right here. Devin box.
Mr. Diamond.
Uh and also we can s watch it on this one, right? It's uh
It's doing its its little thing.
Because I had used magical it in quotes, it presumed that I wanted to call it magical.
And you can see we actually open sourced it recently, so it's I always working on an old repo, which is my guess of why it's not.
Fourteen, exactly right.
Um
So there are there are two.
Things I decided. So you know, replace.
This input the standard input with the type date with this mu component. That's definitely
Correct.
And then it uh
created this uh this component.

It it uh replaces it. So the thing that looks wrong here is it doesn't feel it doesn't look like there's any AI magic. So some it's sort of
Making which maybe it doesn't need to. Maybe it's smart enough to know if I just type in
Today, tomorrow, or yesterday, but
You know, it pr this probably wouldn't work if I said like three Sundays from now, but maybe that's fine. Maybe that's not actually
what anyone would would really do. This maybe even is a good example of something that to your point, like I think AI has really good hygiene, engineer hygiene.
Where it
Is on a on a micro level, like it's a better engineer.
than human engineer would be.
So you have
Have to spend more time on like the architecture and like the planning aspect of it, making sure your execution is correct, like calling in magical date picker maybe is not the correct
Right.
I would probably call it
natural language day picker or something like that,'cause magical doesn't really
give you any insight into what's magical about it. Uh
But besides that my guess is like this code this parcel
Natural language.
Uh is actually like probably really
Really robust. Really good.
Oh.
Even this magical look look, check out the math on this guy, you know, like whoa.
Pretty simple, but like how long would it you know, how many times would you have to tweak it to like, Oh, I you know, like
I got it wrong, this like fancy ad days.
function like it's pretty uh
Pretty clever how it's doing how it's doing that.
find index. It's getting all you know, it's basically figuring out like when you type next Monday, it's like three days and you're adding the days to get to the right.
Right day in the calendar and it's parsing the day based on it's like
That's like this would be like a
Yeah. Two years ago that it would be like that.
So impressive for like this can be almost like an engineering challenge, you know?
Like I would hire an engine based on this, which is
Now they would just go to Chad GPT and be like
And
Yeah, it would it would it would work. So what you could do is to go back to the V zero if you really wanted to enhance this.
You know, you could just sort of take this component.
And they're actually working on a way to like embed it a you know, bring a component back into Vzer. And then you can like iterate on it.
And the UX like a designer could even do that with V0 and then you could then
Pull it back in.
Uh
to the code base. So you could kind of like
Do a lot of this like
Customer.
Focus iteration, you know.
Uh on the uh
Yeah.
Wizzywig way, basically, like Dreamweaver, you know. Uh
Versus like
Like in code, I mean like this
You have to think so hard to understand like what how do you improve the user experience.
looking at this, right? The amount of like brain power and it just hurts my head.
What I think about is imagine that an engineer took this and went
A week away and came back and said, Here, I built your magical natural language.
you know, date picker and you said, No, that's not really what I want.
It feels like such an expensive
iteration to throw out that cone and do something new. Whereas you you can iterate that on that
You know, in a couple of minutes or a couple of hours over and over and
not feel like you're wasting, you know, time and expense and people's honestly people's like motivation and energy. I think about that a lot as well.
Yeah, if you if you spend two weeks on something and you're you know, your annoying CEO is like
No.
Mm.
That's not what I meant. It's like
You know, and then you gotta spend you gotta go for a
Long walk in a coffee bag before you're back to work, right? So
Uh it's so much better to like really spend time
Yeah, before you know.
Yeah, I just leaned in. So we got a redesign from V Zero on this new employee inboard onboarding, and not only did it get new features, but you got
A beautiful update on the
um date picker with some suggested common time frames.
In there.
Yeah, this is super smart. Like and all I did by the way I just said build a really dope
natural language day picker for an HR product onboarding form. So probably the critical piece is like H R.
Right. So it n it's like building it in the context of
the problem you're trying to solve, which is, you know, if you're if you're
If you're building like a
like a party planning tool, you probably have like
Christmas.
Whatever, but you know, but in this case, uh
Yeah, next Monday in two weeks. You know, probably it's gonna be next Monday. That's my guess is that is the most common, you know?
But you could say actually we're you know, we're we're based in uh uh you know, a country in which like we week work weeks start on Sundays or Tuesdays and boom. You know, and you could
Do all sorts of
Interesting things. Or we're in a you know, a place in which our date you know, we put the day before the month or whatever.
And so yeah, just uh
It's just uh
Yeah, just a great opportunity to like really push the envelope and just like
really f spend more time. Even I love this. I put the first name and last name next to each other.
So you can read it out nicely.
So we just watch you
Ship in a new component.
build a magical and now dope
date picker for your employee onboarding tool.
You've shown us how to get this done across your org and you prove that you're at least in the top five people shipping.
PR's the DM.
Or with David at
at the company.
Oh, by the way, this is merged.
We got emerged.
So
It looks like a made no mistakes.
So yeah, next week it'll be better.
Like think about that would have been like, you know.
At least twenty four hours, so that's like a nice ten epsil speed increase.
This is a lot about
engineering at Gum Road and you said
You know, forty one percent of your peers are being written by Devin, you're writing code.
You who what org is AI coming for next? Where the
Eighty percent of the work you think is gonna be started by
Agents.
I mean I think you could see you know, if you think about what are the orgs that exist, you know, it's like design
Product, engineering, customer support, sales, marketing.
And I really
I don't know. I actually was probably more optimistic on like full automation. I don't think we're gonna really get there for a long time. There's just always like a higher level abstraction that you get to operate at.
So you know, there will be, for example, like I think there's a lot more marketing automation that could happen in terms of like suggested tweets, like
You know, it could just watch what's happening in GitHub. It could like suggest
Hey, this thing we we you know, we have a
A
content framework we should host about this feature. Right. Right now I notice myself having to like, you know, say hey
this thing shipped in GitHub, by the way, only half of it shipped, only the back end. There's still all this nuance that I think.
Yeah, marketing could get like a lot more efficient.
Sales too, I think. Like for example, there are all these people who sign up
You know, they show up in our database, basically, right?
Uh and they're just emails.
Right, you go to Flexile, you sign up.
But there's I think a lot more uh automation, you know, if someone signs up to Flexile with like Sile and New York Times dot com, you know, you could
Sort of queue up an email to them.
There's so much focus on customer support. We even built our own customer support product.
with AI, which is great. You know, you can you can talk to AI and it'll help you out. But this is all like
Reactive.
Yeah.
Well
What if I'm just browsing the page?
And
You know, it it knows that I I'm in New York for my IP, you know, and you can wave at me and you know, it can be like, Hey, what's up?
I was in New York. It's kinda cold out there. It's kinda rainy, you know.
And you'd be like, Oh yeah, it is it is raining in New York.
Why
Do you care?
And you can have a conversation. And
Mm
You know, like well, you know, it's kinda nice to be able to like talk about.
The problems customers are facing.
So yeah, I mean there's there's I think sales like making it more making support more about sales, making it more proactive.
I think making design more about product, making engineering more about architecture.
You know, I think there's always going to be more and more stuff to do.
I may maybe even like like like prioritization. I think I spent a lot of my time, like, you know, for example, like going through
GitHub and saying, Okay, we have all these tasks. We have like twenty seven things, like what do we build first?
And right now it's like in my head. Basically I've seen all these things go live, or maybe even a better example more people would relate to would be Gumroad.
You know, we have this big roadmap.
And
You know, I
Basically the I think I'm pretty good at this, but the reason I'm good at this is because I've seen every single thing ship.
And so I kind of ha can very quickly
sort of be like, Okay, this is this is, you know, gonna generate like you know, maybe
A hundred to two hundred thousand dollars in value for creators, creator earnings. This will probably generate like
Three hundred, four hundred K.
But then I have to also put on my engineering hat and say, Okay, this is gonna take like forty hours of an engineer's time. This is gonna take
Three hundred hours of and you know, and like do all this
math which you can go to business school learn about bite and like all these things.
And I could totally imagine, like, you know
A button here that's like a magical rank, right? And then it just like
sort of goes through and maybe you should actually know that the because you you missed out this fact it's actually much harder to ship or
We don't yet use shadow and so actually you're underestimating this.
And it could like reprioritize it, right? And you could do all sorts of interesting things. That's like a huge
I mean, think about how many people at these large companies especially like they're spending so much of their time on strategy, quote unquote, which is really just prioritization.
Right. And
What we do is we just email all creators.
And we just put together a list of things.
And
I just we just sent this Google Doc to like
our top two hundred creators.
In twenty twenty four.
And we kinda like rank this based on what they wanted from us.'Cause it turns out like they're the ones
Paying our bills, right?
And we started shipping it.
Uh and imagine AI could
take all it in all that data. I mean all their sales volume we have access to, right, in our database.
And you can somehow kind of like
Get a good.
good sense of like, okay, what what feedback should we be listening to?
And
You know, you can imagine like you just hit a button that says like
Yeah.
A sign to Devin. You know.
And then boom, it's done. I mean that's another weird thing though, right? It's like well
If d if AI gets so good, why do you need to do everything.
Why why what's the point in prioritization? Prioritization is a function of like limited resources.
So that's a whole thing. It's like I th I really I mean, I would love to be in a place where I come to the office and I have no idea what's gonna happen. Like I have no idea what we should even be building and we spend time as a team
like thinking about like what should we build. Like we go like there's not there's no issues in Git in in Git.
Yep.
Because every issue is is solved.
So
You know, it's cleared we're in in box zero.
And so it's like okay, well what do we do?
And then we s sit around and talk and pontificate and
Eat lunch and
You know, we really have to think hard about like
Yeah. We should do something totally radical.
Like open source the whole thing, you know.
Like things that uh like an AI probably wouldn't suggest that. It wouldn't be in the
in the next token prediction or even in the reasoning models or like, okay, we should do really advanced content customization options. Okay, like what what is that? Okay, let's go design and v0 watch that and do a lot of research.
You know, I think research
is obviously gonna get a lot better with
With AI.
But still humans have to go.
Talk to people.
Ask them questions, user research, design research.
Um market research.
Uh
I think sales will always be important. I think marketing, like
I
think marketing will be one of those things where like the average marketing like AI will get so good at marketing that like
the level of what's interesting to a human.
Like kinda like the you know that meme of the Saratoga Springs guy drinking the water and d whatever, obviously like
Putting banana on his face. Like to me, that's like a sign of how good AI is.
that like that level of content production is now necessary.
To go viral.
Like that it's insane. I can't imagine like how long that you took to make.
It just it's it's so funny, like it's so thoughtful and so many funny different little
Like Easter eggs. Yeah, you know.
And I think that like that's kind of what will need to happen, is just like you have to like up the game.
More and more and more. Like you know, right now artists can post like a painting on Instagram and people will be like Oh amazing painting.
Like in five years it's gonna be like
You need to like post the frickin' movie.
It's like that's just what people will expect. Like, hey, we just want to see your like thirty minute sci fi movie that you did.
And that's just like for free, sorry.
That's what
That's what our Dova you know, that's what's happened to our our Dope immune system.
Or we can spend like a whole day talking about like how do we get better at recommending products on Gum or is there a totally different kind of
you know, ex recommendation experience. That's like much more AI driven and much more natural language than just like
A marketplace of you know feed of products.
Where you can it can remember things about your your tastes, your preferences.
You know, it can learn from you.
We're launching a community feature. Pretty excited about this next uh later this week, which is pretty big, but we yeah, this is
Tons of
Yeah.
I mean
Who knows? I mean, it's exciting. It's also scary, I think, which is why I think so many people shy away from this stuff. It's like there is this like part of
Part of why change is uncomfortable is that like
Change can kill you, you know, like there's like a fear
of change. Like you know, it's it's like job security, right? It's but at the end of the day, I think it's sort of also job insecurity.
Like.
We don't know if like what we do will continue to be valuable. I can say for sure, if you're if you're suggesting to us that AI is gonna raise the bar on what's possible to do, you are
Certainly setting the standard, I think.
You're showing an entirely new way for teams to build.
you're showing the entire new way for a leader to show up and actually contribute to the work product of the company, which we think is really
inspirational. And then I think you're also showing look, you just have to go learn these things and try things and
you know, you're gonna get in a loop, but
over time you can actually become one of these.
leaders that's that's on the leading edge as opposed to the lagging edge. So I I think it's
Great. And I think you're setting the standard for how
E P D orgs are gonna operate in the future if not if not companies. So we're gonna
We're gonna wrap up with a quick lightning round.
Two questions.
If you could encourage people to learn just one of all
All your toys here you just showed, just one that you think is the highest impact, which one would it be?
V zero, honestly.
May it's a bias, I think,'cause I spend so much time in product. I think of our more of an engineer. I think cursors agent mode is pretty crazy.
I think if you're like a CEO of a company
I think Devin is like the most impressive, like the fact that you can just be in Slack and just talk to it.
And it will
It will do this.
is crazy. So I think a lot of it depends on like your role in the you know, what you value and what you think is the most important. But V0, I think it's just like the lowest hanging fruit. I think everyone is kind of familiar with Figma.
And I think a lot of people think that like, you know
Okay, now people no one questions that AI can code even though a year ago people were like
say, oh, it can't code or whatever. But now people are like, Oh, it can't design. It doesn't have taste, you know. And so it's just like really, you know, like design a really
Nice onboarding wizard for a bank, you know. And like watch it do a better UI for a bank than any bank has. You know?
So I think that this is like something I is just e anyone can do. A kid could like
have fun with this. So I would say, Yeah, I'd probably dominate V Zero. And then you know the cool thing about V Zero is it shows you what's possible.
And so then if you want to execute on it, then you have to like
Or and all the other.
all the other tools. Uh the other nice thing about V Zero is that it comes with a URL.
So you could build like a tic-tac-toe and send it to your friend and
Play tic tac toe.
Which is a kind of a nice you know, rep later bolt on new or lovable, like they there there's just so many.
We've talked a lot about how you are setting up incentives like bounties to get people to use AI or learn AI.
But how do you get AI to do what you want? So I found that everybody has their own tactic.
Like they're mean
They offer money
What is your
strategy for getting AI to listen to you when it's in a little bit of a loop.
I mean honestly capital letters. Not in like a mean way, hopefully. Hopefully it doesn't take it the wrong way.
But I just think it's like
It is
You know, kind of like
It's kinda old school, I guess. You know, you have like
Literally like lowercase and uppercase and like
It's just a really easy way of saying like
This part is really important. Like please do not ignore this specific part.
There's another hack that I love called Etcetera.
So if you want
A list of things.
You you can name like two of them.
And then just say et cetera. And it will
Often like
Riff. It's really fun to just like be like
It's kind of like a test, you know. It's like you've come up with two or three, but you need ten.
It's it's kind of a nice way of of letting letting it like be more more more more creative. So
Well, this has been incredible, and we have to wrap by showing you have not only redesigned your own product, but you've taken on the baking industry by generating
A onboarding for a neo bank, apparently, here.
Uh, in in V zero. I really appreciate you giving us a real look at how you're building with AI, both as an individual as a t and as a team. I think you're
definitely gonna inspire tons of people to rethink how they show up at work and
I think if you folks are gonna be looking over their sh shoulder, thinking that you're about to
lap them once or twice on some of um on some of this building. So thank you so much for the time. Where can people find you and how can
They be helpful to you.
Yeah, you can find me on on on Twitter slash X. Um my handle is at S H L.
Uh
And helpful. I don't know, just uh any time you use
See something I've said that you disagree with or think of my thoughts can be improved upon. Just uh
Reply, let me know, DM me.
I'm always looking to uh
get feedback and uh improve my improve my thinking. So uh I I just appreciate everyone tuning in and excited to see what everyone builds.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
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