Empowering Employees Through AI Tinkering

Are roll batteries the same? That's like asking ev soccer players are the same Take Messi, the most decorated player ever Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracl. Is there any other battery with power boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracl. Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different. and Messi only trusts Duracl Hey everybody, Brian here, Happy fourourth of July, Well, you know, third of July, but I'm observing it today by taking today off. If we hold to our schedule, today will be the Arcta Tumph and Eiffel Tower Day for us. What I've got for you instead of a regular show is a howi AI episode about a television production engineer who used AI to completely transform how he works with video files while he works to broadcast the World Cup An example of how you might not know anything about coding, but you can change the way you do your job with AI enjoy The older I get, the more I really need a full eight hours of sleep to function. At least that's until I try Blueprint's longevity Mix created by Brian Johnson Just one scoop helps support energy, cognitive performance, mood, focus, sleep, cellular resilience, and healthy aging The longevity mix is packed full of ingredients like magnesium Torine, glycine, and creatine. all to help you age better and survive on less sleep. Science back precision dose no BS. For a limited time only our listeners get twenty percent off plus free shipping at blueprint. brya njohnson. com by using code TBRH at cheheckout. That's code TBRH at blueprint. brianjohnson dot com for twenty percent off. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them, so please support our show and tell them our show sent you Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Brew Ride Home podcast. I'm Brian McConz. always Today we're going to Listen, talk to, sorry, a longt timee listener of the podcast. We are going to do a what I'm going to call side coding episode Today, we are going to talk to longtime listener, David Steer, David. thanks for coming on to talk to us today Pleasure So David, I said offline that I am wearing my Scotland away kit today because we're recording during the World Cup, but also because I believe you were at the World Cup. So let's start there Uh What is your job and why does that job currently involve the World Cup So I'm what's known as a vision mixer in the UK and Europe. I think in North America, they tend to be referred to as TDs or technical directors And I'm at the World Cup working in that capacity on the lifeve fixtures I'm in Mexico You're in Mexico right now. so are you specifically like are you doing the feeds and the video for everything or like is this your The local games that you're at, you're involved in that sort of stuff So yeah, we're in Monterey. so we're assigned to the Monterey stadium for the four games that are taking place there And I work specifically on the match coverage of those four fixtures and then when we finish here we move to Philadelphia do one game on the fourth of July which we're looking forward to should be Unless you have an accent that I can't place, I'm assuming that you're an England fan. Are you going to cover any England games at all No, we're not doing any England fixtures in our group no No, we're not but I am an Englland fan. We'll watching. Good. Well, I'm resisting the urge to talk about that. Um, You were one of the listeners that got in touch with me to share your side coding projects. And I'm picking you because of the World Cup timing, but also because Ys really there were echoes with what the experience that I had So let's u setet the scene by saying that even though you work in the sort of production capacity you said to me in your initial email that like me, you were almost barely technical in the coding sense. So first of all, explain your background and your proficiency and stuff like this and then describe the problem and then we'll get into what you actually did Yeah, so I' absolutely zero coding experience whatsoever. I mean, I'm I'm in my fifties now, you know, when I was young in the UK, I had a Zx spectrum and I potted around in basic. otherther than that, nothing else It was a mystery to me, but I'm And' not I do not work in the tech industry at all, but I'm fascinated by tech always have been. That's why I listen to the Tebury White home ide home while I listen to shows like ATP and the talkalk show. I just like listening and learning about tech, but I've got no skin in the game as far as tech is concerned and However you had a specific problem, which I'll let you explain in a technical way. so people might listening might be listening that would understand this would understand, but then maybe I'll jump in and ask you to explain in a broader sense Um What the problem was that you identified that eventually led you down the sort of side coding route Yeah, so as I mentioned my role as a vision mixer and that that in That job is to effectively all the visual sources that you might say I predominantly work in live sport. I do o casing and do other things, but liveport is my main main area and All the visual sources that you might have for say a football match They converge on this piece of equipment called a vision mixing desk or a switcher. so that's the cameras and the VT machines, what you call EVS and those graphic sources, everything, or any visual element that makes up a show, they come into this desk called the Vision mixer and my role as the Vision mixer is to combine them. as directed by the director. So I work closely with the director, the director calls the shots. makes the choices, but it's my job to combine those And one of the elements that we use and you would any of your listeners will probably have seen them are what we call wipes or graphical transitions. The most obvious would be in an American football match or a football match when we go from live A live element to a recorded element will go there with a transition. a whipe that goes through it might have be a team badge or a logo for the event I'll refer to those as wipes And in my role, I work with maybe three main types of switches. there's a couple of grass Valley desks, the KN and the Kahuna and a lot of Sony disks in the MVS range and We generally get provided those assets, those wIpe assets as mob files or TGA files and we can load those into the switcher and they can be stored internally within the switcher Um Now a couple of those desks, you can just go straight in with the movs, straight in with the TGO sequences and they' obviously video with an now for channel. They go in and then the mixer will convert them into the format that the desk can understand U There's one desk the Gass Valley Kahuna. you have to convert these files before you put them into the switcher. So we use a piece of software that's provided by Grass Valley called KWatch that you can take a MV or a target sequence and you run it through the program and it will spit out what's called an SWS, which is a proprietary format that the switcher understands and then we can load it in The problem for me is that that is PC only And I've always been a Mac user So for that reason alone, I have to run parallels on my Mac and just to run this one piece of software, which is it's quite a clunky piece of software as well.'s doesn't really work a hundred percent of the time And it's a frustration And you were saying that the only reason that you're still running like parallels was just for this one particular That one program, that's all I do with it. That's the only reason to have it. And then earlier this year I I'm running a and M one backap aair and I thought it was time to upgrade. so I got myself an M five the U M five Map Pare and I just could not bring myself to put parallels on there just felt wrong And as a result, I had this brand new M five MacteBookir and I was still carrying around my M one because I needed this piece of software. It was frustrating And that's when I mentioned to a colleague I'm on a discord with a load of other people, someome of who are coders and some who have been doing a bit of vide code. and I mentioned this frustration and someone said, well, why don't you just get clawed to write you a version of KWatch for Mac. And I sort of thought he was joking at first and I thought, well, but anyway, I had a bit of spare time and I've got I've pay for Claude, I paay for Chat GPT and Claude All right, let me stop you right there. So what was what has been your background with screwing around with AI and what you were using it for? If you hadn't been using it for your job or for coding or stuff like that Uh well, Im I Ss. I tink it around with it ply because it was obviously it was becoming a thing So I I was thinking around the chat GPT and then I struggle sometimes with writing and getting What's see in my head down onto the onto the page or onto a post And so I was predominantly using Cat GPT for that. I was just using it to help me with my writing, really and a little bit of research and just tinking around, see what you could do with it. It was just a bit of fun And u And then I got clrawed as well Hello just to sort of compare the two. So I had ChatTGP and I had Claude U So when my colleague or my friend said to me know why didn't you do it, I thought, well Okay, well let's just see. So I just took the user manual for KWatch that I had anyway as a PDF. And I uploaded it well. F first thing I did was I explained literally what I've just explained to you I uploaded the manual and I said, what do you think And it came straight back and said, well Get me a source file a M. and let me pause let me pause you for a second. Yeah. Are you starting you were doing this in Cloud, right? Yes It its own Just in the chat window. So a new conversation. And did you Obviously, you uploaded the PDF, but you also uploaded a question like like I'm thinking of what was your question because I want to know how detailed it was and like how then it evolved like the project you give it. I think it was pretty much as I just explained to you then and it would have probably been Not very well framed, absolutely gobygooot because as I mentioned earlier, I struggle with getting coherent senses down And I think I pretty much just said that. I said, lookook, this is my this is my job. this is u There's this piece of software it just runs on PC. I don't really want to run parallels and have a PC. I want a Mac version. do you think we could we could build a version that will run on the Mac Okay, so I'm going to it really wouldn't be much more than that But I think also That is kind of again, when I was describing to Chris the AI resume thing Is it was sort of, that's how I started too. I was like Hey, I think I could Do you think we could do this together? I have this problem. So it's not one of the things is like as I was describing to Chris, Sometimes when I was starting out with AI, I was like, well, I've got to write a thousand words in terms of a prompt to get it to do something. And what I learned in recent times is that no, you can iterate over it. So but you did describe the problem So you describe the problem and you brought in material But then it wasn't like a one shot prompt. It's like here's it's almost like not too little of a prompt and not too much of a prompt. but like describing the problem, bringing material and then saying What do you think we can do with this? And then you iterate with the AI Yeah, one hundred percent. that's exactly what happened. Yeah. it came back immediately. and as when I was listening to that conversation you were having with Chris, I was just nodding my head because I was thinking this is so familiar. This is exactly what happened with me. And I already knew from about a year messing around with AI that you can be very vague. and that's the way a con Although this was looking at a coding solution, that's the way I've gone with just pure conversations and going down rabbit holes about different things and just going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So that's that's the approach too. I mean, the original question was, do you think it can be done? And I wasn't surprised when it said yes because' used to AI never saying no Exactly Well, but the way it can do Okay, but then did you do like what I did where you said, okay, if we did this It didn't I didn't have it immediately write out a full spec or anything like that. I just kept asking more questions. If we did this, what would the tools be that we would need? And again, as Chris pointed out, I was familiar with things like Super Base and I knew I would probably launch it on Vercell and stuff like that. because I know those things from working with startups But like, did you How much and Chris asked me this, like how much were you educating yourself while you were doing it? and how much were you asking to educate you as you're fleshing out this idea. I'm one of these people that just wants to get to the result, get to the result, get to the result. So I mean, just in broad terms, You know, when you get these prompts and you know, this would be going ahead a few steps when I've eventually graduated into doing the code in the terminal But when it puts up those prompts, give me permission, give me permission, give me permission. I'm just bang, bang bang, bang, bang. whatever you need to get whatever you need to get through this habit, habit habit habit And I wasn't generally reading much of the text acc com comement. obviously, if you're doing something like this over a sustained period, Some of it can't help but kind of rub off that I was I was picking up on some of the stuff that was going on my My goal wasn't to learn how to code. My goal was to was to get this thing deliver something that would be useful to me Let me ask you this though, because in your email, you're describing having Clauded U I don't know what any of this means. insspecting hex dumps, smapping bte offsets and stuff like But so on one level, you do know when it's doing stuff where you're like, well, that's the right thing to do or that's the right question to ask, right? So Like are you on that's OkayK, good. my cards on the table Claude help me write that email to you You know. G it It put that detail in that I don't understand. I don't know what a heck done. o, okay Yeah I mean, I do I do now. I do in much as I know that what it had to the first thing it asked me to do was to give it this to give it an SWS was give it a mo file, the source file and an SWS file, which is what the KWatch programs fits out. then I knew what it was doing then was it had to reverse engineer that that and that's where all this ts dump and all that stuff com in. So I kind of know What that? what that process was that But I didn't ask it to do a hex dump I just laugh as you think it could 'cause I didn't know what a hex stump was. I still don't know what a hex stump was. what a hex stum? R. Okay, okay't let me Let me ask you this a different way because like as I described it, I kept being like, well, I'll see how far I can get with this. because I I on my project was still engaged with an engineer who I I waited two weeks before I was like, hey, u, I don't think I'd want to go forward with you on this project because I think I've gotten far enough that I trust I can do it. So I described it as like, trying to reach a door and open the door and just keep hitting doors until I couldn't open a door So like, did you experience a similar thing where you're like, Ohh its it's doing this thing and it seems to be going in the right direction and okay, did you Were you growing in confidence as you kept not hitting a door that was locked to you? Yeah, totally. I mean, my original plan was for this thing just to spit out this one I could put in a of and it was spit out in SWS and then I would be happy. That was my But had that in I had that in a day and a half. In a day and a half I had that and I had it tested on proper hardware So then after that, it's just a question of okay, well There's loads of other features I would love this this program to have So you saw and I just You solve the one specific narrow problem Sort of like me with the show notes And then you were like, well, if that's the case, then there's three or four other workflow problems that like what if I just layered that in there? it was well and that and that and that Okay, go ahead. That's exactly. I just kept once I had one bit running and working and improve and then I was thinking, okay, well, I'll just add another little bit and another little bit. And I just kept adding features and adding features and adding features And then I and then I built this this there's another thing that would be useful like a viewer so that I could preview the files and I didn't want to mess things up. So I've had that built as a separate little program and then another file that would do some reverse conversion back the other way and I had those as two separate things. But then in the end I got it to roll those both into the one program so that the the one piece of software could do everything. And okay let me again because you describeed doing a viewer. So again, anyone listening that hasn't had this epiphany that we have had U it's not just you go to and say, Okaykay, now add me a viewer There is still a back and forth where Claude will say to you, okay, what do you mean? Like it still needs parameters, it still needs and correct me if I'm wrong, but like it'll always You can't just say, okay, now I need a viewer. It'll be like, well, what do you mean by that? Like what parameters? what are the requirements? And like you still need to have a back and forth like a socratic method with it, right Yeah, but I think to build the viewer, it wouldn't have been many back and forth. It would have just been like me saying it would be really useful for me to be able to preview these files and U and just see the video side of it and it would And it went in and it built that for me And then I said, I think it would be even better if I could see the video and the alpha channel in separate windows and maybe even a composite of those keyed over a background And so I said, so it's probably going to be better as a quad So maybe build me a quad And it said, Yeahah, and it said, Well, you got to I think I can't remember. I think it said Well, you've got a spare quad left, so I'm going to just put an audio level meter in there so you can see the audio because these files sometimes have audio So that I think because I don't think that that's happened to me Right, That's happened to me several times too, where it'll can't I can't think of a specific example right now, but like thinking of building out like the backackend thing for the how the user can add feedback to the resume or whatever And it'll be like, well, I also added this. And I was like, oh Yeah, I should have thought of that myself. So thank you for suggesting that. Um Again, pulling from your email that Claude wrote for you So within a couple days, you called the app Makuna because what the original program is Kahuna and so you're this is a a Mac app that is sitting on your on your personal laptop Yeah. so I think I think itd wre the whole thing in Python. And I mean, I don't know if if this is One of the most things I found most interesting about the process was I was doing this whole first week of development. because I didn't know any other way in the chat window, pasting the pasting the code into terminal rununning the terminal and then taking screenshots which I think you talked about with Chris. Yeah pasting those back in and just going backwards and forwards like this just between the chat window and terminal with me manually running everything Were happy time and u, I mention this and once I've got a certain point, I mentioned this to these colleagues on the discord And they're like, what are you doing? You mad? You should be doing this all. you know, code in the terminal. code And I was like, well, I was like, no, this is working perfectly fine for me. And they were saying this. So I was taking their comments and I was pasting them back into cllaude and say, L my friends here say we shouldn't be doing like this. We should be going, you know, the code Andl and Claude was com back saying No, no, no, this is working fine. We're doing great here. You don't need to use Claud code. We're absolutely fine. So I went back to them and I was like, No, Claud says this is the way to do it. And they'd come back say, No, no, no, you really must So eventually, I managed to convince Claude that It would be better to go into code. and then that's why I flipped everything to Clw code and that just turbo chararged the whole thing. I just went from stunning that was You know, I was getting what I wanted to do done onncece you get into pld Ces, you're just stuff on running and I was just adding features and Well, let me ask you this because Maybe I have evolved into I was doing everything in terminal. I wasn't screenshotting, but I was still going terminal back and forth. When you say that you're entirely encode right now, you might educate me on something because I still do the chat because the chat has My project specs and like the memory, which in theory Code does as well because it's in my local repo So when you say you're entirely in code right now, you're not running the back and forth where code said this and then you take this back. No, you're doing everything in code now Occasionally I might go into the chat and just and you know, but don't think I don't think it gets me anywhere. I think I can do everything in a code because it I've got and one of the earliest things I did and this was just off the back of you know, my interest in tech is I don't know what GitHub, you know, I don't use I've never used GitHub before, but I had sense from listening to shows like ATP it was a repository where people put code. So I knew this thing existed at one point I think I said to Claude You know, do we need to set up a gitHub for this and Clause was like, Yeahah, yeah, we def to do that. So we did all that. That's when I was still just in the chat window We got all that set up A couple of things which I found really useful one, I was hitting the end of my context window in chess. Y And so I got into one of the habits I got into was when I was getting to the end of a feature that I was finishing, at that point, I would say, right Write me a hando Doc. Yes, for me to paste into the next chat And that's how I was keeping cla across every time I started a new chat, it knew where we were. But when I got into clawed code, that changed into just having an MD file So it maintains an ND file, it maintains a handover note. And there's something in the MD file that says always update this. So it it's constantly keeping itself updated. all it needs to do is read those files and it knows where it is That's interesting. You've just revealed me to be still coding in the Stone Aes because right every time I hit a memory window, I have to go in and say give me a pace block so we can start this in a new chat. But okay, the very next thing I do The next iteration that I have to do, I'm going to try doing it all in code and see see if you have liberated me from the back and forth. Um Okay, so 've you started with this one problem. You're adding features, you're adding things like you know, audio support, dedicated player Um your're A colleague is suggesting colleagues are suggesting additional things And so how soon do you like have a you do a completely separate app? You have a second app called Hula, I think, right Yes So that was that was very early on. I said that a colleague just said, you know, sometimes it's frustrating, you rock up to a show and you've been told it's going to be a particular desk. and it's not. It's a completely different desk and you've prepared the files for that desk, it'd be useful to take an SWS file and convert it back into a mV So Yes And I And I built that I can't remember why I built that as a separate app, but I did. I built this app called Hula which pretty much just did that and it would just go back the other way. U So that was a feature that I built and I proved that it worked And then the viewer, I think, came after that, which I literally built I was in Madrid doing a Champions League game and I hadd gone to breakfast and I was chatting to a colleague and I was explaining all this and I said, I'm going need a viewer. and we were leaving about midday. went back to my room after breakfast And when I met him to go to the ground at Midday I sort of built it. It's built,' done just did it this morning. and you just couldn't believe it But then but that's when the whole thing the whole thing then evolved. once I had a sense of Hula and being able to go back to a different format That's when I started to think, well I work with Three different formats for these desks. the SWS files movs TGs and actually a fourth in theIF file And I thought, well, why don't we try and make this an everything app that you can convert any Desk format video format back and forth. so you can take a TGA to SWS, SWS to CGA EIF to TGA And also in there was some also in progressive and interlaced as well. So you know, we have we have interlaced shows and we have We don't do much programming interlace these days, but occasionally do So this thing was having this thing is having to convert video formats U from progressive to interlace, from interlace back to progressive in different file formats And it was just going back and forth and testing it. And It managed to achieve everything that I asked it to do I would say I still need to test some of these formats on naturual hardware. Some of them have been tested on natural hardware, but I do but I'm one hundred percent confident that even if I sat down I loaded it and it didn't work, then it would be able to fix it What you're describing is what we've heard from developers all of our lives about how like I've got a test this thing on this piece I have I have a Android device because I got to test it on Android at this at this, you know screen size. like you're describing the developer headache of like, well now I've got to test it for multiple formats and things like that Um Let me there's two anecdotes I want to grab real quick before I ask you some higher level like wrap up theoretical questions And One of the formats that you call it's called EIF, which you're saying as a proprietary format from this Grass Valley, which I've never heard of, but whatever important for your job But you said that The EIF format had no documentation and no prior reverse engineering online that at least cllaud or you could find. You Claude actually theorized how to reverse engineer it on its own. Yeah, in fact, I don't think that's any different from the SWS file, which was the original file that the original file I wanted reverse engineering. there was no documentation for that either. So I think it was the same process. I mean, the biggest I tell you what the biggest challenge was early doors when I was just doing everything through the chat window was I would take a mold and I would convert it into an SWS file But the SWS files are huge. They're about six six a half gigs which are too big They're too big for me to drop into chord for it to analyze So I didn't I didn't know any better. so I was having to ask G go back to the designers and ask them to give me versions of these whites that were just very small for me to work with. Now subsequently, down the road, I've learnnt that You just need to stick it on your desktop and point Claude at it and it can do that work without you uploading it, which I W would have saved me an awful lot of time early doors if In't known that But I didn't know that So yeah, I just I take a file, but you know, I took this EIF. Fid on my desktop It looked at it and then it was doing all this analysis, this hex dumping But it needed the original file as well. and it was doing a comparison between the original file Clarify something for me because like you know, Chris was yelling at me for a lighting over important details. When you say that you put it on your desktop, are you using the Cawed Cork feature where there's a sandboxed folder that you put the file into and then Claud can analyze it. When you say that this file was too big for you to upload, how are you getting Claud to get this file to look get Claude to look at this file I think I think I just I think I just told it where it was. I think I just I think I maybe just Drag can me trying to remember now I think if you drag the folder into the w into the into the Claed code window, it can then it then gos to the root And it says, okay, I know where to look now and it asks permission and go yes, yes, yes, yes, always, always. and off it goes and then it can always look at that. I mean, I'm doing something similar today on another call project that I'm working on person things. So it's a similar sort of thing. Just giving it permission to look in these places. Right And by the way, we do them When you give it permission, it's not always univers forever. Like it'll be like for this session you say yes for this session or yes for yes, always, but then it doesn't carry over from session to session, especially if you clear U correct me if I got that wrong, Now again, that's me just probably not even paying any attention to what I'm it to do. You are I'm just saying yes. Yeah, you are that's the definite You're the vibe coding exemplar at this point U That's the definition of vibe coding because occasionally like I definition of foolishness. Well, right, but I occasionally try to understand what it says to me, but half of the time I'm like Dude, shut up. I don't need you to explain this in three hundred words. Just tell me what the right thing to do is and it's like, you're right, Brian, I'm being too verbose Maybe my cloud MD file is completely roged but Okay, so another anecdote is you let me see if I can summarize this in way that's accurate Like you're working on something and you have You're working about a file structure. And Code presented a theory about the file structure to you But you go back to Claude Chat which wouldn't have had knowledge of what you're working on in code And you ask the same question and the second claud confidential confidently says The first clod is wrong. and so you're all of a sudden in this you're refereing an argument between the two clods. tellell me this story So I think that was presented in the email the wrong way around. I think what happened was I had drifted back into Chat And I was thinking about this EIF issue, whether I could introduce that as another code that we could use. And I think I' asked it just You know, do you think we could do EIF as well? And it said yes. and I think it had looked at the file and presented a whole theory on the EIF file form which I then pasted into code and said, lookook, Claud Chat reckons that we can do this and this is what it thinks And I think Code then went down a massive rabbit hole trying to do what Claude Chat had explained and got absolutely nowhere. and nothing was working And then code, I think, had a bit of an epiphany, I thought I'm not doing this anymore. and tried itself and came up with a completely different way of doing it. did work And I think at that point I just went back to chat and said, L, you were wrong C and cord code tried your way, it didn't work, it's done it a completely different way and it does work. And I think Chat then held his hands up and said Yeah, I think you're right. That would be a better way of doing it There may have been a point where it was refusing to believe that it would work And I was And I was trying it. Yeah. it was it was they were both kind of going back and forth and wouldn't and we're disagreeing about what the best way was to do it And what I just read about was it working What you're describing in the way that you and I are still working in cavemed times where we're brute forcing stuff That is what when people talk about agentic coding and sending thirty agents out at a time to code stuff, that's what they're talking about. It's not sending thirty agents out, well, sometimes it is to. run things in parallel A lot of your agent team is one agent's coding, the other agent is checking its work, checking its work, validating its work, disagreeing with what's happening. And so essentially it's almost like you should think of your aggent swarm as a jury where they come to a consensus answer in the end. So again, once you and I get more sophisticated and can send out multiple agents, in theory, that's what we're achieving. Um when we could master this Yeah one of the things I did all the way through the process So I've been trying to maintain good documentation and a manual. as well. and I would paste the code back into Chat GPT and the manual and the documentation and get it to do a sense check And it would come up with things that were missed in the notes Yeah Inorrect. thenen I would go back to Claude and say You've missed this and then it would correct it. So I was used along the way. No I didn't do it a lot and I wasn't really get I didn't really get chat GPT to check the code because I didn't want to start messing with all of that. But I did have get it checkking the documentation Okay here here comes some of the larger Qions So you Have achieved this thing that you didn't think you could achieve. You find So far that has worked for you Um is that You're working at the World Cup right now What would happen if you're using this tool live that you built yourself and you're doing a live broadcast or something and it breaks What would that do to your confidence in what you have achieved Well, I think my first concern would be for my professional reputation and my future wor because I guess there is an issue around loading I mean, people have said that to me, you're mad loading files that have been you know these third party files that you've created on a piece of AI hardware into broadcast equipment. My feelings' always been that Those things alone cannot break break the gask. and I've So all we've been I think it's pretty black and white that if I can load it in, it'll work And anyone who watched the The English FA Cup final this Yeah, would have seen files, wipes go out on air that were converted using went through your system. Yeah. Yeah.'ve used I've used those on air But having said that, One of the pieces of hardware that I haven't managed to prove the works. is the piece of hardware I'm using here at the World Cup And there's no way on earth I'm testing on World Cup hardware at this point so that won't happen. But as soon as I get back to the UK and I can get some downtime on one of these desks, that's when I can I can just U ve the files work Well, let me ask this in a similar way because this is sort of a similar question. Like Because you and I don't I was asking that question in the way because you and I don't know what we don't know. Like we're so thrilled with how far we've gotten, but maybe there is the unknown, unknown that we haven't hit yet, which is like, oh, yeah, your computer's on fire because you screwed that, but you know, that makes me feel like, you know, my parents are always afraid of you you hit the wrong key, the computer will explode. You were talking about your developer friends that were horrified about the way you were working But Now that they've seen what you've created Like have they been like, Oh, yeah, you did a good job. likeike what people that knew better What has been their assessment with what you were able to achieve I think they've been really excited by it. I've got I mean there are a couple of people who are actual developers and they've been using it a lot themselves. I don't know, you know, personal projects. And another guy who is in a similar position to me who's working through working to try to develop something which is you know, he's looking for it to be a commercial So he's going in with a completely different mindset. And think I think all of us feel a lot feeling of kind of support around what we're doing and excitement about what we're being able to achieve with it. I mean, it just it was quite because on the discord, it was quite funny because you know, this thing was sort of thrown out to me, You know, why don't you get clawed? And because I managed to get the basic fundamentals of it spun up in about a day and a half You know, I could post a day and a half two days later Here it is, it works. and I think everyone's like, wow, that's incredible. that you could do that Yeah, that me of people. He's not considered technical Eactly And I'm saying this is sort of my concept behind this side coding thing. Like if we can create that sort of community around you know, the podcasts or the YouTube videos or the whatever that that like, if if I Tell people about these side projects and then people go off and create their own developing communities around that, that's sort of like my dream for this Um I think think I think the hard the hardest thing with all this is n is having a idea what to do. So one of my favorite not in my favor, but anedote around this is Someone else on the discord expressing regret They didn't have project, an idea they didn't have something they were trying to solve So they couldn't get involved. They really wanted to get involved with doing something vibe coding But you've got to have a ose for it I was fortunate had a very specific prom Yeah, but you know what? again This is like this is how Chris would get philosophical about it. And I mentioned that anecdote about what's his face saying that like, well, I'm a software developer. so that's how I think of the world. If there's a problem that I have, I think of solving it with software. The philosophical way to think about it is like if you're someone that's like, you know what? I want to get into painting Or I want to learn how to compose music or learn to play the piano But I have no idea of what to paint And I have no idea like There' nothing I don't know. it's not like everybody has to do this And not everybody has the incclination or the personality for this But I do kind of think that Everybody has a problem that if we live in a world where You can use software to solve whatever problem it is as mundane as it might be, like just creating links for show notes U If the barrier to entry to solving problems with software is like m Eventually someone will have a problem. you know U But actually that's my thought on it, but I'm putting before I put words in your mouth. Has this The experience changed how you think about things in that way It's changed what I what I what I know that AI can do for me in that regard. So I mean I think I alluded to earlier. there's a couple of other things that I've got it going for me which I think I guess there's a you to make you have to make a definition between creating I mean Mike, I guess you could call what I did was a product. I've got no intention of selling it or putting on the app absolute it was built. people have sh People have said to you like you could monetize this and you're like, yeah Yeah, I mean, I guess you could I'd imagine the market for it is very small. And also I do think and this is quite interesting. I think because someone I mentioned I mentioned I didn't want to monetize it and someone else said, yeah, and you' probably because it used FFM peg, that's what it used to Oh you've had delay R. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you know, if you're just giving it away, or' using it sayfe that's free use. But if I was going to suddenly start and do you know what? that wouldn't even occurred to me. I could have decided that yeah, yeah, I've got this thing now and I'm going You know, I'm going I'm going to sell it And I could have fallen a foul of that with no knowledge that Claude was happily you know, using Right libraries and software and you know, so I guess that that's quite a dangerous area that people that these these AIs will use stuff which God and not I tell you. I never try years I've never thought that because we've only been or at least I've only been thinking of that in the way of like, well, was it trained on my book Was it trained on if you if it spits out Bart Simpson, do you owe, you know for IP, but you're right. in a it's almost it's all, you know, putting the history head on it. It's almost like the universe of with the Napster explosion, but like If people are in there in their bedrooms hing up solutions to their own problems No one's going to know if they're impeding on libraries that they shouldn't impede on and IP that they shouldn't impede on and Oh that's interesting. maybe think of something I hadt thought of before Yeah, so But I was saying, I think there's a difference between that. So that's like a product, like a standalone app that I can use. And I see that as very different from the other stuff I'm using Claed for, which is in my everyday life, which is like you're saying the show notes or I've been I've got a cou I've got it to do. every month I have to compile my expenses. and I've got it doing that. I've got it going into my calendar figuring out what shows I did and putting it all into a spreadsheet And if I'm abroad, it's looking up currencies on particular days and things like that. and all the stuff that I would manually have to go through once a month line by line. I just go in and it' and it's again, it's just written you know, it starts off and says it, you know, here's a Here's a bit of code that you post into terminal to do it. And I would just say, well, can we not just make that a bit more elegant? Can you not makebe just a little app that I can have? and R put a together to gooey around it. But that's just a little tool for me to use But And we can end here like, you know, u There's some of that I want to talk to that was there grass in their back lawn or you would say garden. was dying And they created an app, first of all, they did the research, whyy is the grass dying? And then they createed an app for like diagnosing the problems and taking pictures and like is it getting better all this stuff That's just a tiny problem that software can solve or I always use the joke that you know middle aged men want to find out how to reserve tea times or like the garage door what if I could create an app where the garage door opens as I get close with my phone or something like that. In theory, all of these things are possible. theseese tiny little things But what you described and which is why I wanted to do this one first, was You had a problem at your job And Um So number one In fact, I'll break this into instead of asking both at the same time. So number one Anyone listening whether I don't want to give examples because I don't want sound like I'm being pejorative about more complicated or lesser job or whatever Anyone listening, if you have a job and you have a a problem or like a little annoyance at your job. What is your advice to them about like you don't even have to follow through on it, but like just Again, seeing what Pot will tell you or AI will tell you about how that problem could be solved. Yeah, I think just asking it like I did, that's what I did. this is is this is what I need to achieve. Do you think this is achievable? I think where you have to where what's interesting is is who can do this? I mean, as I'm not a coder and I'm not technical, but I And I wouldn't say I was familiar in the terminal But I knew what terminal was because in the past I'd used I had one of my first uses of AI was to help it set me up a pie hole at home easing terminals And so I was used to sort of familiar with it But I think that wouldd be quite scary. So maybe not your listeners, but for any sort of run of the mill person,, I think that would be quite a daunting You know, if Claude back and said, yeah, we can do this, but the first thing you've got to do is fire up terminal on this little black window appears and it gives you load of ight you don't understand it s stick this in here. Or I mean, we need you to sign we need you to sign up for a database and GitHub and all that stuff. likeike there's also a monetary thing here, which maybe you and I have been willing to like throw dollars at that, you know without bankrupting ourselves. Yeah, I mean, I was I was on the I did a lot of on the twenty twenty it was twenty pounds, I think, twenty dollars plan, Claud. But when I was really motoring in Clauded Code, You know, it stopped and I just went, yeah, bang, upgrade upgrade, upgrade, you know, I was almost seventy before you knew it Yeah but I just had, you know, because I was having I was having the thing is I was having so much fun I think what What we haven't spoken about here is just how much fun it is. It's like a buzz. It's like adrenaline. you know, my wife was a clawed widow I'd finish dinner and I'd run up to my office And I'll be smacking way until whatever time and then Off again, off, again, off again. I mean, forfortunately, I've got a very understanding wife and I think she quite enjoyed seeing how much pleasure I was getting out of doing it But it's what I didn't ever what I didn't ever encounter was a wall And I know what that would have felt like Everything I wanted to achieve, it was achieving and it never got it wrong and I never hit you know, we had to work through problems, but I never hit a wall I don't know what would have happened if I had. I mean, My plan once it's all proven and working tested on all the hardware across the board, I'd like to just for fun because I don't need to because it works exactly as it is is I'd like to redo the whole thing in Swift. great. Now. Now having ask having asked Claude about that and Chat GBT. they have both gone to great lengths, explain to me this will not be you know, all the hard work is done and we can use a lot of that core code and we can take all that in but you will not find it as an enjoyable process. And But I want to try it to see what it's like Yeah, and just for context because I think the reason I was saying that was because I was just saying how much fun it was R and I didn't know I was enjoying it so much. it was like a hobby. I was really enjoying it and I don't know how I wouldd react if I found it hard and my next plan was to do it in Swift and I've been Flaud had said to me that that probably won't be as as smooth So it will be interesting to see how I how I react if if I'm finding the coding is not as enjoyable and that's interesting That's interesting for me that yeah, for me it was like watching a watching a TV or film or something like that, it was fun. Well, That's also an interesting point is that And what we're describing as the euphoria of it was like, I can't believe I'm doing this. I can'tve Look, Ma, no wings, you know, like Yeah And so but if maybe if it was there were more higher stakes or whatever, it wouldn't be as enjoyable and if it was more difficult, maybe we haven't hit our proverbial lock doors yet U ye, G go ahead, go There you go. I can pick up at any sort of point on that. No, no, actually I I'm I'm going to grab that grab that at the editing point anyway. Okay, so you're Your wife is enjoying the fact that you're enjoying it and like seeing you like We hit all of these barriers U and burst right through them. final question for you Because by the way, I'm going gonna use all that and either you won't know this in the edit or I'm going include all of Okay You You we were talking about you know, bringing it to colleagues and then being like, this is useful and bringing it to people that are software developers and then being like, hey, that's not bad Um You don't have to go into this in any kind of great detail, but The other side of this would be because I want people to consider What problem can you solve in your workflow right now Now You might work at a job where your' Bosses might not like that sort of experimentation. So you might have to experiment on your own on the downlow for a little bit and maybe never tell your bosses that you're making your workflow more efficient by adding AI to it. What would you say to a boss? that has an employee like you. is willing to tinker with this stuff Um What would be your pitch for allowing a little bit of leeway to see what's possible W me in my pitch. I Well, I think I'd want to demon you'd want to demonstrate what the benefits would be to the business either from an efficiency point of view Oh or from a creative point of view or coming up with new ideas of the w, you know, that would benefit the business. That would be the pitch. I mean, because that's kind of what they'd want to hear. Right. I ha't been a sal I mean, I haven't been a salaried employee for a long time now. so I kind of I'm freelance. I just work for myself But I'm, you know, I'm just conscious that that there would be It would depend on what you were doing, wouldn't it? becausecause there is obviously sens there' sensitive I mean, if I was if I was in a business and my concern would be uploading business sensitive data to the to the to the. introduce liability or whatever to the business But what I'm suggesting is And so I'm sorry, I teed you up for something that maybe I'm thinking about, which is If you have it I want people to consider the idea that U if you have an employee that's like you don't Bosses, you don't have to wait for your boss or the consultants to come in and say, we need an AI strategy and this is what it is. be willing to have people under you, your employees that are willing to tinker with this. and right If you're the employee, do it in a safe way, say, hey, I haven't actually deployed this blah, blah blah But I'm tinkering around with this. Be open to it because you I have this concept of The employee that goes into the boss and says, Hey, boss, look at what I've done just for myself, but we could apply this to the entire office Yeah And then that boss can go to their boss and be like, Hey, look at what we've done to my office I'm thinking of these things as empowering in the way that you felt empowered and You can also be empowered in your career and everybody up the chain can be empowered, right So I'm trying to think of this project as well as a way of like exploding this creativity, not just in the I'm an investor and do you have a startup way It's more How can this empower you're getting your garage door opener and you doing your job better all the way to Hey, I'm I'm a C level executive now because ten years ago I was the first one to bring AI into my office and that sort of thing. So I'm not asking you to have any thoughts on that, but like based on your experience, like do you feel like that's a decent way for people to start thinking about this? What I did because you can just see the direction of travel with it. That's the thing. You can see that this is the future, whichever however whatever form that takes peoplee being empowered to use tools to very specifically solved problems for themselves or problems for their team or even problems for the wider business. it's ats out of the bag, This is the way things will be done think I think if I was having that conversation if I was still in a company and the conversations I would be having would be more around than it's stuff you've discussed on the Tpory ride home is this concept of companies owning their own AI servers, building their own servers bringing people in so that they can safely deploy their own data. in house without any concerns because then you can do what you want, then you don't have to have all those worries And I think that's really exciting because I would imagine most of the problems that people are trying to solve do not need these to run these things on servers Well the cl do quite they ye on the they could probably do quite a lot of stuff just with local models. You know, and I think a fraord If they of M minis. Exactly, rightight. That's the point is I was saying that to somebody last week where I'm like we're eighteen months away. and they kept say coming back to me and saying, but like If it's so easy to just do the cloud, why wouldn't you do the cloud? And I kept coming up with eight reasons why you wouldn't Also I said in the end, if it's if it's It' tririvally easy for you and I to do this It's not tribally, but it will be tribally tr trivally easy for any enterprise to do it, like from a four person accounting firm to a mid sized business to an enterprise or whatever. then why wouldn't you do it O one more. I'm sorry and then I'm gonna let you I swear a again, but then again I've got all afternoon. Do these doing these things helps me think things out loud Here's the analogy I'll make You know how Canva was sort of like, yeah, Canva is for people that for whom Photoshop is too complicated, right? Because you don't have to spend all the time learning take a class on Photoshop or whatever. It's just here's some templates and drag and drop and you can do this or whatever Building the back endnd of the e commerce system for the AI resume project and then a second project that I've started has made me realize that like what Shopify is is just Canva but for Backend e commerce systems where it was like drag and drop and templates and things like that. Well, so now if all I got to do is plug in my stripe, plug in my Vercel Like I don't need Shopify. And in fact, I'm shutting down Shopify on a different project, right And so I'm starting to think that like again, it's it's empowering in terms of you doing a solving a problem for yourself and but like It's knocking down the layers of abstraction that in SaaS for the last twenty years were're there to take away the complicated stuff Like if the complicated stuff is the wiring and you and I can do the wiring now then the abstraction companies are going away. So I'm worried's an here's an interesting way that I I about again. So we were having a conversation on this discord about agents and I think I said something talking about something like Uber and I said something to the effect of And we were talking about I was saying that I don't think that Third party apps would allow Apple to get hooks into their You know, they wouldn't allow you to just on your iPhone order an Uber via Siri. because they want you to use their app. U want you to go into their app and be inside their app. Oh. Yeah. So I said I said, you know, I just can't see that working And then friend came back and said, No, in the future it'll be your AI agent talking to the taxi drivers AI agent sure Therell be nothing in the middle And you know, and when they said that then the kind of light bulb went off for me. I don't know whether that's possible, but you can actually see that that's an opportunity that this opens up. There' there's no middle there because you're just going peer to peer on it Yeah twowo things that you made me think of and then I gota go. But numberum one, there's a concept coming out of there will no there will no longer be a software layer because you'll be able to do almost the software layer on the fly.. So like we're used to like there's there's an OS that has these forms that we all like we're used to working in. But like what if on the fly you could just say, hey, this isn't working for me. redo this? Like what you did with the screen render and all that stuff and So yes, that makes me think of that where evenven the boxes around software won't even matter if you can just do it iteratively and generatively But the second thing that you me made me think of, again to go history hat again, is when we were thinking of things in the nineties and the Napster era of Well, once you lower the barriers to entry to create art Um the next Spielberg can own everything and distribute their own stuff. And people think of creators on some level as that where it's like, well, I own my own business, I own my own But no, you're still beholding the platform. So the question would be If you're right about that in a world where I don't need an Uber because I can just interact with the driver. Are there still middlemen Are there still platforms? Because I would have told you in nineteen ninety eight, well once, you know, everybody has a camera that's ridiculously cheap and so everybody can do everything and the software is good enough that like You can have your own creat creativity is unleashed, Well, you won't have to have movie studios anymore. Well, now, we have worse than movie studios. We only have YouTube, right So I do wonder smmarter people than II are thinking about this. like Is it going to play is it going to be democratization like you're describing? Or will it be the same thing where again, the platforms, whoever the platform is will just win and take the vig Um Okay, I got to go ick O, folks from school. David Steer, before I go, is there anything that you would like to promote, plug, whatever before we let you go No no I just I just work for myself. Keep watching the World Cup. Yeah enjoy the tournament I think I think we're pting on a good show for everyone. So Hopeully that continues Anything from what I you say Guadalajara and then the next one Philly. So yes, if you see any of those games, yes, he'll be working on them. highlight should be a good one That's right, exactly So thank you very much for doing this and this was a great conversation, so I appreciate it so much. It's pleasure enjoyed it You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining alfresco, or relaxing poolside? Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to seventy percent off during Wayfare's fourth of July clearance. sccore huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget Plus, sururprise Flash deeals July sixth. Don't wait. Shop Wayfare's fourourth of July clearance now through july sixth at wayfare. com Way fair, every style, every home