Lessons Learned and Future Advice

Your summer weekends fill up fast, but Crocs has your back. Road trips, beach days, last minute getaways, whatever's on the agenda, swing by your local store and find your new goat too Try it, style it, make it yours. becausecause the right pair doesn't just show up It shows off Wock out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest croc store today Hey everybody, Brian here. If we have stuck to our schedule, today is our day trip to Mont St Michelle So here is a how I AI episode about how one of our podcast friends created their own Android app to manage their backyard. Enjoy. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now, you can make your voice heard too. Vanguard Investor choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds. whether you hold a Vanguard fund directly or through another brokerage firm All it takes is a few clicks to select your proxy voting preference and be heard on important shareholder topics like executive pay and director elections. Visit vanguard dot com slash investor choice to learn more. It's your shares, it's your voice, it's easy. Vanguard investors own shares of our index funds and those funds own shares in the companies they invest in Vanguard Meting Corporation, distributor Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tch Brew ride home a as always Today We are going to talk to someone that I quote from on the pod all the time U Allison Johnson works at the Verge. I should have looked up the amount of times because I can do that now with AI when I can run through my scripts and see how many times I've quoted from you. But Allison, thanks for coming on the show Oh, thanks for having me So Uh, you I posted a piece a couple of weeks ago that lines up perfectly with this thesis, which is Hey, I did a funny thing with AI, even though I don't know what I did exactly. So first of all, let let's set the table with you're not technical. haveave you done any coding before or anything like that? No, not technical. ennough HTML to get me by. It'd be a little dangerous, yeah, essentially Wking your CMS and stuff like that U Okay, another thing, let me take your temperature on your feeleings about AI or your experience with AI. mayaybe before this project would be a better way to frame it. So like U Are you AI skeptical? Have you played around with it before? Just Generally, what are your thoughts about AI up til now? Um definitely interested and I would say a little you know, more than a little wary. I, you know, my my beat is smartphones for the Verge. I've been hearing Nonstop about AI, how it's going to change how we use our phones, changed our lives for the past at least three years. so it I feel like just now these things are starting to actually ship and there's, you know, stuff thatm I've been hearing about for years is finally working on phones I'm using in my hand. So like it's exciting in that way and I'm interested in seeing how it develops But I have had more than my fair share of like arguing with Gemini about when my flight leaves or what airport I'm flying out of. Um, so like A little tired, I think but you know I think that I did quote if you did this piece maybe a month ago after Google IO, like the ability to You know, Google is letting you essentially, hey, with a prompt, you can create an app to be to put on your Android phone. So is that part of what inspired this project Yeah, definitely. that kind of popped up in the keynote and I was like, o, that's exciting. You know, there's there's no universe in which I can make an Android app without a lot of hand holding and help. So that was really appealing to me and it kind of got the um you know, got my brain working where I was like, what is something I would I would like if I could make an app? I think that's part of what all of this is discovering. I've said this before, but Paul Ford was on a Kafka's pod and he said something along the lines of, well, I have worked with code my whole adult life. So I'm a person that thinks of solving problems with code and it's sort of like Normies like us are discovering may or may not be possible. Okay ennough table setting explain what problem was and then explain how you went down the f coating rabbit ho Yeah. so the problem is my yard. I I live in Seattle area, I have a very modest yard that we sort of inherited from the previous owners of the house we moved into like eight years ago. it's nothing special. There's like some trees and some shrubs and roses and things And when we moved in, I had no idea. I was like, I'd have never touched a pair of gardening shears. donon't know what to do. So we just kind of like left it on autopilot That's not great for trees and shrubs as it turns out. So we had kind of come to a place where we were I was like, I need to fix this. We had all this like landscape rock that was potentially killing all the shrubs Um, so I was I kind of had this like growing list of to dos and I'm still kind of clueless about how to, you know, I can tell when a plant is sick U I'm like there's a lot of flies buzzing around us u Bush all the time, that seems bad. So I kind of I needed some help in like an ongoing way and I needed to organize my to do list so I was like, you know, why not make an app for that? I'm sure the app exists, honestly. But it was a fun kind of like, oh, okay. I started thinking about like I could organize, you know, the plants in different zones in the yard and I could bring in like live weather API and make it kind of like a hub for all the stuff going. Well let me interrupt you because again, this is sort of part of if someone's listening and thinking I'm going down this rabbit hle. Did you have all of that stuff in mind when you sat down with like your first prompt or Was it simpler than that? And then as you're prompting you're layering on things, Well, maybe weather and stuff like. How did the process go? Was it Was it fully fleshed out at the beginning or did the process sort of flesh it out as you're doing it? I had kind of a loose collection of things I wanted and not a real solid like framework for how I wanted it to all come together. So I did just like spit a bunch of things out and I used the Google AI stududio because that was the one they talked about it. IO just to get in an app onoing the Android phone super easily Um, so I went in there and I was like B blah blah blah blah, H's all the things I want, weather, helpp me diagnose plants and Um, and just kind of spit it all out and got got a, you know, working preview pretty quickly And The more I played with it, the more I was like, oh, okay, I really needed to think about how like You know, if I'm organizing plants by zones and I have a to do list, do I want those things to tie together in certain ways So I did have to do some backtracking of like Okay, I all of it. Yeah, yeah. ye. Yeah, I had I had to prune Miam a yard app. Well, let me, let me right Or prune your expectations. I think you called it like a list of demands, but Did you experience the thing that, you know is famous where you say to the AI, hey, I think I want to do this Is it possible? And the AI is like, oh yeah, sure Like like what was the experience of the back and forth where it's like, did it help you prune things? Did like How did the AI shape what eventually you build Yeah, it was very I thought there would be a little more back and forth, I guess. I didn't really know. I just sort of like spit a bunch of things out and it was like, great, I'm making an app right now. Here it is Um so I was like, oh, okay, you know, I think if I had sat down and kind of like thought through it a little more ahead of time Um knowing that it was just going to go off like running and make something for me. It would have change the output a little bit. I didn't give it any guidance about like what it should look like, the color scheme and it came back with Just the ugliest app I have Darked. Yeah ye. rightight I was like, you know, let's be a little cheerful. Let's get some little plant leaves in there and things like that Um, so it it was definitely a a learning process and I would like to play with more of these, you know, coding and agent tools just to get a sense of like, Dude, are there some that hold your hand a little bit more because I probably could have used it, you know? So Also like the sense Okaykay, let's start this way. So like you said you wh you You spit out a bunch of things, a listed demands and you had a preview in five minutes What's your feeling then? Are you like, oh, this is simple I didn't realize it's this easy done. And then, as you describe in the piece No you lost an entire day to it. Yeah, it was a real like Oh, that was quick. Yeah. I mean, It hit all the right notes of like, okay, it's got this feature I asked for, this thing and this thing, great. And I was just like, I fixed the color problem. And then I was like, I'll put it on my phone and I'll just go start using it Um, and learned pretty quickly that there was a lot of kind of like testing and troubleshooting that would have come in handy before I'd started like I seem to have lost. Yeah, I mean, the thing it gave me right away, like on the surface level had everything I asked for. I was like, this is great. There was a little tab for, you know a plant doctor diagnosis and all this stuff I was like, cool, I'll just put this on my phone and I'll go ahead and use it. And I would kind of go out in the yard and start like documenting my plans and be like, oh, this thing doesn't really work or there's like I have this way of organizing tasks, but it's not really following the logic or U little things here and there where I was like, oh, this is this is not really. let me ask you a question about that When your company deploys a customer facing AI that misses its mark, who do you think those customers blame? 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Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different, and Messi only trusts Duracl In retrospect now, was that a U problem or an AI problem in the sense that you got fooled by, o, this is so simple, but what you're discovering is that Well, I kind of didn't architect. I didn't give it enough do what I was assuming it was going Yeah, I think it was a me problem, honestly Um, I think Looking back on it now. I'm like, I didn't a crystal clear idea of what I wanted. and What I asked for was really like four apps and one Um So I think, you know, the AI kind of did the best it could with it and came up with this I gave it no structure or anything like that and it came up with all of that Um So Yeah, like huge learning from all this was like Just go in with the simplest idea and be absolutely sure about what you want then and then like build from there. because it it did turn into a whole afternoon And it was nice out too. I was like, o, this stinks sitting in front of my computer just just kind of going back and forth like, okay, well we need to fix this thing now and it's like, oh yeah, sure, got it. And if I'd gone in as like with like one idea, like I want to diagnose the plants in my yard with and kind of build on that, I think it would have been less like iteration and you know, going out and this thing's not working and every time I updated it, I had to like you know load it to the phone again and kind of start over Right. One of the things that I've learned with my projects is that Number one, I have a greater appreciation for what software engineers do. in that sense where it isn't just like, well, here's an idea, one, two, three Options go It is you kind of have to scope it out and think it through and If you're saying, oh, want the I want the camera to recognize this type of plant or I want you to fetch weather APIs and stuff. You can say that, but then you actually have to think it through more in terms of, okay, what does that mean to fetch an API and specific APIs and things like that? So it's almost like Doing these sorts of things have trained me to think more in a software way. Yeah. ye, it makes me so appreciative of the apps I have on my phone that work really well and it really You know, I I get that thing where I'm like, do I need to pay for another app or another subscription? And it has kind of turned that around where I'm like Oh my God, there's so much work that is required like on an ongoing basis to make these things even functional. So like Yeah. Right. And you're only building for yourself. So imagine you're building something for other people where the users would come back to you and say, Hey, this isn't working. Re Right. Yeah, horrifying. So you describe a scene where like the The AI proactively discovers a bug and like is like debugging it for you and it's saying things like channel is unrecoverably broken and race conditions and all sorts of things that you don't understand. So Talk to me about what you learned about flying blindwear, like you and I don't know what any of that means So to what degree Do you trust the AI to fix things? And then was that ever like a blocker where it's like, I don't know what you're telling me, so I don't know how to fix what you're telling me Yeah. It was a really uncomfortable feeling. I think I'm kind of a type A person where I'm like I want to understand like every all the context and all the steps of what I'm doing. So just just kind of yeah, blindly being like, okay, I clicked on the button to fix the bug and it says it's fixed, like great, I'm gonna to assume that's working there were a couple of instances kind of like that where like something was not working and I would ask Gemini you know, like, What do what do I do here? What's the problem And it would be like, oh, you know, that's a really common that that's like, it called something the final boss. It was like, you know, in that way that it just is like kind of cutsy and chatty. it was like, that's the final boss of deploying your app or something like that. Like don't worry about that. I'm like Do I really do I take that for face value and You kind of just have to 'cause I'm like, I don't know what the alternative is Another thing Another way to think about this because again, you go you and I go out with an idea that we don't really know what we're doing and we're sort of handholding the AI in a way sort of like I describe it as like dealing with a three year old where you're like, No, I want you to do this. No, I really want you to do this. No, I want. But then at the same time, since we don't know what we're doing, we're you're describing the AI having that sort of person at like U at the top of the home screen when you started, it says, weelcome back Gardener. And you didn't write that. The AI writes that, right? So what I'm trying to get at is to what degree do you think what you produced was a collaborative thing where there's the AI sort of personality and decisions in it and how much of it was like you I think it, you know, it did a fair amount of especially around the structure. you know, I wasn't like, I want to tab for this and I want to tab for this. It just kind of built all that. And I think that's you know, I'm sure the information it's trained on and it's sort of understanding of like This is a basic format for this kind of app. you know, it's not reinventing the wheel Every time it spits something like this out which is You know, kind of the the the beauty and the the drawback of using AI. if you use AI for writing, you know, which I don't do. But you know, people who are not writers use them for emails or whatever. It's like you you'll get the right format and you'll get something that is It fits the bill. U it' it's not going to invent anything new or creative or exciting, you know, that kind of creativity comes from you know, a software developer or a writer you know, thinking things through in a different way Um, So it's it's a tool and it's fun. but yeah, I'm like this is a very like beginner kind of app and it was also kind of a mess too. Well, to I want to come back to what the end result was and if you're still using it. But what I have encountered, I agree with you that it's not It's it's AI can't be creative on its own. The degree to which if you understand that times when it's like Oh, that's a good idea. There's something that I did that recently that added a feature without asking me that I was like, oh, yeah, I should and it just proactively did it because I guess in its mind, the thing that I was trying to get it to do, it's like, well, logically it should also have a thumbnail so people can see the result. you know, And I hadn't thought that So what I'm saying is Right. in the same way that you're talking about writing. Um The AI can't write the script for you, but like if you pro it and say give me thirty good ideas, maybe one or two of those are things that you hadn't thought of. And so this is just my own personal thesis, but curious for your take on it, where the creativity of the AI is around the edges. And so that if you go into a project knowing that, then you don't have to take everything. You just only have to take the good bits when it you surfaces something that's good Yeah, totally. there's like a Eespecially in writing, you can get kind of a blind spot or I'm not aware of the you know, phrases I use a lot. and I think there is room for it's helpful to have a tool like that that can be like Okay, I read your argument. you didn't consider this or this might bere you're overusing this phrase. You know, I u donon't use a ton of AI in my work that way, but I see the appeal of it where I could be you know, before I send a draft off to an editor kind of be like, Am I missing anything here? And and that's where I think it really could come in handy for 's like this Um They Tell me about how this app actually ended up because I think it was good at certain things like like Diagnosing this is a plant and this is what the problem is with it. Like what how did How did it end up? Are you still using it? and what are the bits that actually worked in the bits that you're like, well, that was a fail Um It still exists. It's on I had to Switch phones. I had to switch over to IOS for work reasons. And so it's still on like a motorola razor, but I haven't touched it in a bit But the thing I did find the most useful was the plant diagnosis and it was like take a picture of a plant in the yard, upload it. It would give me a whole kind of diagnosis, but then underneath that, it would have like action items. like First you need to do this and then clear out the p needles in the middle of the shrub And it would add those things to my little to do list in the app. I was like, that's actually kind of all I need, you know just distill this stuff because I would have a lot of conversations with Gemini, like, I'm noticing this in the art or what is a good idea? you know, how do I go about doing this thing? Those are kind of like dispersed and I would be, you know, chatting on the phone with it or at my computer typing. It was nice to have that kind of like all in one place and very easily like distilled into like, here are the next three things you need to do Right, because I think you say at some point you're like, this could have just been a Gemini chat, right? Yeah But again, and you know it's a pejorative to say that certain apps or even startups are just wrappers around what the AI does. But at the same time, like that's kind of useful. likeike you're describing, if you can take it out in the real world in in the moment that the use case matters because in the end That's what software is is like there's the compute underneath and then just sort of like to the wrapping in the UI and the UX that you put around it So like Um Again, thinking of this like now as like, oh, this is what software engineers think about all the time Um When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify get everything you need to grow the way you want All the way Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your chihingings from every channel, Ride in one spot. and turn real time reporting into big time opportunities Take your business to a whole new level Switch to Shopify Start your free trial today Was it more useful for you to have this AI out in the real world, even if you could have just ran back in the house and had a Geminite ch Yeah, I think it was and I I think there is something about, especially with the yard project where its it's a lot of back and forth and it's a lot of I go out in the yard and I do something and I'm cutting back, you know weeds and I notice something Yeah I'm like, a, I didn't see that before. This kind of changes things and I would ask about it. There's it is just a lot of in the moment and kind of like comombining my observations and what I'm like literally like seeing and feeling and smelling you know, AI can't do and and combining it with like kind of an ongoing dialogue of like not We're not chatting about everything in the whole wide world. you know? There's something about having that wrapper of like, this is the gardening app. the focus, right. Yeah, yeah. and just being able to feed that stuff in there. Um and and getting out what I needed in a in a format that was really helpful because I can't be going through like, Log chat logs, you know, rightight one I'm outside and it's eighty degrees and yeah A few final questions, starting with U wereere you successful in getting the rhotodendrum back? likeike what's the what's the state of the yard after this project? It is improving. It's definitely better I I'm like embarrassed at how bad this rhododundron looks. It looks like a Tim Burton's wrote a denton plan right now. but it's coming back.'m And then there's, you know There's new leaves on that. We're taking up this like horrible landscape fabric and rock. If anybody needs some landscape rock in the Ger Seattle area, please get in touch with me Um, but it's like Then I uncover new problems. I'm like, there's Aphids on this rhododendron now. what do I do about that? So it is You know, I think gardeners understand this and I'm learning it in real time And you know, in software developers too iss like you're never done. You just Right. now you need the two point one one version where you're adding in the aphid and insect. Y section. ye. Yes Um Okay, these are more philosophical, but from this experience after doing this. If you had to come down on one side, is it like oh crap We're on the verge of anyone can build software now or Did this experience kind of expose for you the limits of that where we might be far away from that Yeah, I went in kind of With that feeling of like It was a little bit of conflict where I was like, could I just be paying a subscription for a gardening app that exists? Am I doing some kind of weird shortcut by you know, prompting my own version of it And I did come out of it feeling a little more settled with like I am not going to like surelock my way out of subscription apps like anytime soon. you know, I have a handful of of payaid apps that I love and I rely on. and I'm like That's not going anywhere. you know, somethinghing simple maybe or something like very specific that I want. I had this app that like um checks if it's Tichoama, which is this like annual like peach event at our fancy grocery store. And I was like, is it Pach O Rama yet? And it tells me yes or no U I like fun stuff like that I think I will continue to play with Um, but I'm I for one am just going to pay the subscriptions when I need some when it's like something I'm going to need on an ongoing basis that is pretty complex, like taking care of the yard Definitely that's not going anywhere. If you had something else car trouble or I don't know We're going to build a back deck or something. You're not going to reach for the AI for one of those projects, att least, you know, hey, we don't know what the next model is going to be like, but Basically you're This taught you like I'm not it's not quite for me yet Yeah, yeah, and it's The way I've been using it, you know, because does this replace like We would otherwise just hire a landscaper or someone to like a professional to come over. It's It's sort of like the thing that helps fill in the gaps You know, it's almost like you see you see a doctor once a year then you you would get little funny things and you're like checking on them like, is this something I should talk to the doctor about? And You know, for better and worse, but I think people are using AI in that kind of like fill in the gaps way U ' sort of using it in my life of like Okay, I think there's a problem here. I'm trying to understand exactly what it is. When do I call in a professional? Can I use the right words to describe it when I call a professional That's where it's been most successful for me and it deffinitely hasn't. We still have like free guy coming. like the big trees, I'm not I'm not going to let Gemini take those. That's that's a professional's job. Okay, final one. let's assume that someone hears this episode this july fourth weekend and does have a project or something like that. and They're like, you know what I'm going to give it a try to Based on your experience, if someone was going to Uh takeake a shot Uh, what? Do you know now that you wish what would you tell them to do that you didn't do when you went down this reinole Yeah, I think like scope is everything. just having like doing some of that work ahead of time of like, what do I really need out of this? What is the problem I'm solving in recognizing where AI is going to be full there and where where you need to bring the like, you know, here's how it's structured. here's how I want things to work with each other and keeping it simple, I think is u is the key to a decent vibe coded app and But you know, it was fun. like never in my life would I be like, I made a piece of software, you know? So it it's it's cool. Its it's a thing to tinker with deffinitely and can can help you out if wielded correctly Yeah, twoo things that have come up in just the first few episodes we've done on this is like if you you work with the AI first to create the scope of work and like the spec. And like say, you know, like in Claud and like you make a markdown file that's like Work with me to make the master spec and then the entire project comes back to that Yeah. But the other thing that Ive found useful is to ask the AI What am I missing here? Like if you just say, here are my four parameters, it'll just do that Right But if you say, here are my four parameters, Uh, like, uh What am I missing Like give me a pre mortem of like why where the gaps are, why this would fail and stuff like that. And then so like what I'm saying is U It's not just giving the AI commands. you can ask the AI to help figure it out with you Yeah. In the same way that like sometimes when I want to design a new feature, I literally say to it Hey, give me a prompt to give back to you that would actually make this feature better than like the three sentences I've given you and stuff like that. Yeah AI keeps I have to keep reminding myself of that because I think I with my type A, personality try to get in there and like micromanage and be like, okay, I'm going to tell the AI exactly what I need in this scenario. And it's often more useful if you take that step backwards and kind of be like, here's what I'm trying to achieve, you know, rather than going down like here's what I want you to do to achieve the thing. And it's surprising how often That is helpful aggreed Uh, well, again, u, glad your garden is at least improving. Maybe this fourth of July, you'll have some more time to work on it and maybe folks listening will be doing something crazy with AI on their fourth weekend. Thanks Allison for coming on and sharing that story with us. thanks so much for having me