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 Clairvaux.
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 pontification on what might be possible someday. Each episode is going to be about 30 minutes often shorter, the guest will share one or two specific use cases that they found useful in their work.
and they'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 Vo. 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
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can you do something that used to take two weeks in two hours and that's like a 40 times speed increase so that's kind of like the number that i have in my head generally like what's the most optimistic case if you kind of remove all the bottlenecks something that would take 40 hours would take one hour
to us that AI is going to raise the bar on what's possible to do. You are certainly setting the standard. The majority of human engineering will be removing tech debt such that AI engineers can actually shift features. It's also scary, I think, which is why I think
people shy away from this stuff is like there is this part of 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, Sahil Lavingia, CEO and founder of Gumroad. 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. Sahil'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 going to show us exactly how he does it. Let's dive in. Thank you. Thank you. in-class products. Interpret unifies all customer conversations in real time. From gong recordings to Zendesk tickets,
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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 41% of your PRs right now, and you expect it to go to 80% 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 the lead is getting shorter and shorter every day. Every week there's a new model coming out. So I would say like by the end of next year, I would suspect that like every engineering team in any company is, you know, using Cursor and Devon and V0 and all these tools to ship, you know. multiple times faster and the question is is mostly like how the organization adapt such that those people
can do so, right? Like the bottlenecks are show up in other places. Like Toki just tweeted about, you know, his Samplify 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, to try and fail and cross-share learnings, all that kind of stuff.
Okay, so we're going to do it one at a time, which is you're going to 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, so I think 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 solving customer problems. And with this product that we build, it's called Flexile.
And you can think of it like a store deal, 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, 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 we'll then do a mock there'll be some back and forth and then it'll go to like next week on monday it'll go to an engineer
they may have some questions that goes back to the designer and by the time it ships you know it 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 in two hours
And that's like a 40 times speed increase. So that's kind of like the number that I have in my head generally, like what's like the most optimistic case. If you kind of remove all the bottlenecks, something that would take 40 hours would take one hour. And that's. 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 uh
saying, oh, it's so terrible, but there's always room to improve. And even on this one screen, which is the contractor invitation page, There's already a couple things that I noticed that aren't big enough to 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 date picker is kind of 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 chat 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 deb and i would you know it's it doesn't really really need that much scoping it's kind of just like replace date widget you know date picker in contractor invitation screen
with Shad C and Daypicker, we might as well. I mean, the cool thing with Devon is you can like that 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 picker from the browser native you know input to shads yeah import if required i've never actually used this button but again this is a good example like even somebody 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 rich text like this like you can just type into it and you could type in like next monday i think resend at a cool demo like this where they have more like a natural language. Something like this. And you could type in. Yeah. In one hour tomorrow at 9am. These sorts of things. 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 devon do multiple versions and then we can take a look at how far it got on them But this is kind of how I would generally work is I would just take these forms and say like, you know, build. this form so you're you're putting into v0 you know use this form using the very descriptive great requirements magical
And then you're going to use V0 to get a prototype? Yeah. So generally my flow is V0, Devon. Cursor? is probably how I would say it. Like, generally, V0 is my prototyping tool of choice. And once I have a really good prototype that I'm happy with, Then I go to Devon, and if Devon sort of fails to completely finish, then I open it up in cursor. Though I think last week, Devon launched this pairing mode where you can actually like...
jump in. And so 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. Just getting your developer environment set up, your end variables.
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 any new engineer to get started whether or not ai so you have v0 in theory going there it goes yeah okay so you have v0 going on building you a prototype I have a question here which is, you know, you mentioned shadcn as your component library.
Was that driven by, you know, using these AI tools and, you know, those component libraries being out of the box? Or was that something you were looking at before? Yeah, it was a huge reason to switch and try to adopt a lot of these tools. And I think 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 tailwind chatty and stuff. So if you're not using those sorts of tools, you're not going to get the value. Like trying to ship something like this with rails in the back end and hot wire or whatnot in the front end. It just doesn't exist. You would have to spend all your time.
just getting this to work, you know, some jQuery calendar thing, you think, you know, that's how gumroad was for a long time. One of the things I wonder is if 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 compared to those who are maybe using some of these libraries and technologies natively. I actually think that the majority of human engineering will be removing tech debt such that AI engineers can actually shift features. Basically, designers will be shifting features because if you think about it, what are they doing? They are thinking about what the feature should do.
And then engineers are just basically setting up the groundwork, the framework. the defaults, the standards, the LinkedIn, the CI pipeline, the infrastructure, the dev setup, such that designers actually are more and more capable over time of basically taking their idea.
if you were a designer you you know you would like just design this part you know you design this but you wouldn't design like all the little interactions in here right like you would just design like like that because it would just take too too long or you wouldn't even consider it because you didn't For example, often you have a designer and they didn't consider it mobile. Okay, so you got this design. Let's take a look at it. It looks pretty good.
It has the magical date creation, which is type... a magical date and it works. So it's not just the design, it's the functionality. And you said the next step for you from V0 was into Devon. So how does that transition work? What are you doing? You know, 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 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. And I can see Devon doing its thing. having lots of fun. And I could start a new Devon and basically do that, right? So like on here.
on this page. And you reuse the exact same prompt. And then I would go here, 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 although these are kind of like learnings where i could it's basically i'm like oh my spec could have been better like this these are things that human engineer also would have maybe not done you know like i basically just kind of go back and forth and like build basically i'm like The V0 is kind of clarifying my SPAC in a way. Do you use any of the code from V0?
Sometimes I do. Like sometimes I'll take this and just use this command. And if I put this and I went into cursor. If I had cursor open on something, if 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 put in this component.
uh this is for a different repo so it doesn't have chats yet but it would basically like you know slot that file in and then i could reference the file and 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 URL effectively, right? Like this. And you could just say like, you know, mimic.
You know, you can say more things, you know, for example, I noticed that like in this thing, like, I probably don't want the date. the change in line, like this parentheses is kind of weird, I'd probably add like a little note, you know, so I'd be like putting the date in parentheses. is kind of weird. Put it below the input as a note.
yeah i love putting it i don't know what this does but for some reason i 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 gray you know like no like i feel like a designer would get it so you know this is kind of like what i would give uh to devon and And then it would run off and do its thing. It'll wake up. It'll do all these things, all the stuff that I would basically do, right? Open cursor, get the thing.
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 v0. Like I think many people just like, they do a first pass and basically I think MVPs are no longer enough. Like you can actually spend like
10, 20, 30, 40 minutes here, if you know that Devon is going to be able to execute, like sometimes you don't want to spend too much time here because it just creates work for the engineer, right? You're like, oh, now I have to think about this and that and this and like all these like little bits that would make the customer feel really good.
the user experience would go up, but the developer experience would go down, right? But if you know an AI is going to be implementing all of that stuff and they're going to do it at 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? Different roles have different amounts.
show a preview in the drop down you know so one may be like 200 an hour one may be like two a per project etc you know one may be 250k 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 the happy accidents. Like AI may just take your spec and actually do a better with it than you would have.
uh and so yeah that's kind of 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.js posted on Vercel, so they'll even give you, like, a preview branch, right? And I mostly love doing front-end stuff with Dev, and actually now 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 I love making changes to antiwork.com. Yep. Because I can test them almost immediately. I can be like, let's say a new person joined the company. I can just say, hey, add this person who joined the company. This is their motto. By the way, 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, I basically just asked everyone in Slack, tell me if you want it to link anywhere. and what you want 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 V0 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 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 going to work and 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 VZERO stuff, like on other things, I'll be, I'll like go into the issue and be like, Let's see if I have one here. I want it to improve.
multiple periods per rule, as I mentioned, right? Like this is, and I'll, you know, I'll be like, i'll just go in here and be like you know like this one i had i was like doing something with gusto and i kind of liked it you know and i was like did 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 So all of a sudden they have an example of this.
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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? It requires work and energy and biologically I feel like we're 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 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 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 Josh Pigford on YouTube, which is like three hours long. And I basically did it because I wanted to... I was like, this is, you know, got a lot of views actually. Yeah.
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
you know it sort of is part of that bringing the energy we also financially motivated people so there's a couple times here i'll find you example of a devon competition we did so we did this competition where we did 30 33 000 uh split amongst whomever opens and merges more devon prs than me over the course of may so you know 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 see the results. So I got fourth.
I opened 27 PRs with Devin and then three people beat me. I do a lot of easy wins, props to all the engineers. who who did it but yeah i this is all my all my devin pr is a lot of people like there's no way you use devin 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 be more productive i didn't know that was controversial But, you know, there's like a lot of small things like remove this part of the homepage.
There's this like recap that we do in Slack that's generated by AI that recaps like everything that shipped last week. And so I said, hey, Devin, could you, you know, like, for example, these two things don't really need to be here because there's nothing under them, right? so i just said hey at devon 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 backend. The frontend hasn't shipped yet. So like make sure, you know, the update, the AI prompt that we're using for this, which by the way, I've never seen. Like I haven't, I just, I just know that there's an AI prompt that's, you know, involved. And, you know, that's actually what this one is, right? So it found the Slack Weekly, you know, recap, and it, you know, it made these changes and it created this PR. So we can actually go in and see this PR.
And we can confirm my suspicion or not, which is, oh, turns out there is a prompt. focused primarily on shipments feature improvements and bug fixes right prioritize these categories and then it also did something here
which is, if we looked, it did this. It added a filter, so 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 you know 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 project names. And then I pasted this, the link to the update. You know, I would normally like say, hey, oh, can you make sure this?
good to you and if there are any tests that need 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 this context. But, you know, not actually build, write all this code, right? Like look up like, for example, you know, like dot filter.
versus dot trim or dot clean or you know like every language is different right but overall i know rough amount of software architecture that like this is you know 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 this uh that this has done what it what it should you know
One thing I was going to call out on the code you just showed was I find that these AI engineering tools are pretty good engineering citizens and that they're... code is well commented they call out what you know there's a 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
the native date picker replaced with the shad cn one yeah so the core problem i have here which i guess uh is i need to make sure it works Okay, so you're showing the time lapse of Devon here, which is basically a 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 it did it 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
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. Run the browser. And it's awake, so it should pretty quickly start doing that. And this is Devin right here, Devin Box. And also we can watch it on this one, right?
It's doing its little thing. So because I had used magical in quotes, it presumed that I wanted to call it magical. And you can see, we actually open sourced it recently. So it's working on an old repo, which is my guess of why it's not. working exactly right. So now there are two things I decided to replace this input the standard input with the type date with this new component that's definitely correct and then it uh created this uh this component where it
goes through and it replaces it. So the thing that looks wrong here is it doesn't look like there's any AI magic. So 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
This probably wouldn't work if I said three Sundays from now, but maybe that's fine. Maybe that's not actually... what anyone would really do this maybe even as 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 to spend more time on the architecture and the planning aspect of it, making sure your execution is correct, like calling it magical date picker. Maybe it's not the correct approach. I would probably call it natural language day picker or something like that because magical doesn't really give you any insight into what's magical about it.
But besides that, my guess is like this code, this natural language is actually like probably really, really robust, really good. Even this magical look, like 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 add days function like it's pretty uh
It's pretty clever how it's doing that. Find index, it's basically figuring out 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 database and it's like that's like this would be like a you know two years ago this would be like a so impressive for like, this would be almost like an engineering challenge, you know, like I would hire an engineer based on this, which is
Now they would just go to ChatGPT and be like, and it would work. So what you could do is to go back to the v0 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, you know, bring a component back into V0 and then you could 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 in a WYSIWYG way, basically, like Dreamweaver, you know, 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, day picker and you said, no, that's not really what I want. It feels like such an expensive iteration to throw out that code and do something new. Whereas you, you can iterate that on that.
you know, in a couple minutes or a couple 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 spend two weeks on something and your annoying CEO is like, nope, that's not what I meant. It's like...
You know, and then you got to spend you got to go for a long walk in a coffee bag before you're back to work. Right. So. It's so much better to really spend time here before. Yeah, I just leaned in. So we got a redesign from V0 on this new employee onboarding. And not only did it get new features, but you got... A beautiful update on the date picker with some suggested common timeframes in there. Yeah, this is super smart. 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 HR. Right. So 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'd probably have like Christmas or, you know, like. whatever, but in this case...
Yeah, next Monday in two weeks. You know, probably it's going to 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 a, you know, a country in which like we work, we 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 just
Yeah, just a great opportunity to like really push the envelope and just like really 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. ship in a new component, build a magical and now dope date picker for your employee onboarding tool.
You showed us how to get this done across your org, and you proved that you're at least in the top five people shipping PRs with Devin at the company. Oh, by the way, this is merged. We did it. We got it merged. So it looks like it made no mistake. so yeah next week it'll be better like think about that would have been like you know
at least 24 hours. So that's like a nice 10x speed increase. This is a lot about engineering at Gumroad. And you said, you know, 41% of your peers are being written by Dev and you're writing code. What org is AI coming for next for the 80% of the work you think is going to 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 going to 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 you know we have a
content framework we should post about this feature right right now i noticed 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 you know 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 and they're just emails
But there's, I think, a lot more automation. You know, if someone signs up to Flexile with like Sohail and New York Times.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 you know well what if i'm just browsing the page And, you know, it knows that 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 kind of cold out there it's kind of raining 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 you know you're like well you know it's kind of 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 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 spend 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 27 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, I think I'm pretty good at this, but the reason I'm good at this is because I've seen every single thing shit. And so I can very quickly sort of be like, okay, this is going to generate maybe $100,000 to $200,000 in value for creators, creator earnings. This will probably generate like...
300, 400K, but then I have to also put on my engineering hat and say, okay, this is going to take like 40 hours of an engineer's time. This is going to take 300 hours of an, you know, and like do all this math, which you can go to business school, learn about Byte and like all these things.
And I could totally imagine like, you know, a button here that's like magical rank, right? And then it just like sort of goes through and maybe you should actually know that because you missed out this fact, it's actually much harder to ship or... we don't yet use chatsy 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 we just sent this Google Doc to like... our top 200 creators in 2024.
And we kind of like ranked this based on what they wanted from us because it turns out like they're the ones paying our bills. Right. And we started shipping it 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 get a good sense of, okay, what feedback should we be listening to? And you can imagine you just hit a button that says, assigned to Devin.
And then boom, it's done. I mean, that's another weird thing, though, right? It's like, well, if AI gets so good, why do you need to do everything? What's the point of prioritization? Prioritization is a function of limited resources. So that's a whole thing. I would love to be in a place where I come into the office and I have no idea what's going to happen. 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 got like, there's nothing, there's no issues in Get Up. Because every issue is solved.
you know it's cleared we're at inbox zero and so it's like okay well what do we do and then we sit around and talk and pontificate and eat lunch and you know we really have to think hard about like oh we should do something totally radical like open source the whole thing you know like things that 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 V zero, watch that and do a lot of research. You know, I think research. is obviously going to get a lot better with AI, but still humans have to go talk to people, ask them questions, user research, design research, market research.
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 kind of like the, you know, that meme of the Saratoga Springs guy drinking the water and 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 video took to make It's so funny, it's so thoughtful, and so many funny little Easter eggs. And I think that's what will need to happen. You have to up the game.
more and more and more like you know right now artists can post like a painting on instagram and people be like oh amazing painting but like in five years it's going to be like you need to like post the freaking movie it's like that's just what people will expect like hey we just want to see your like 30 minute sci-fi movie that you did and that's just like for free sorry
it's just like that's what that's what our dope you know that's what's happening to our our dopamine system or we can spend like a whole day talking about like how do we get better at recommending products on gumroad is there a totally different kind of recommendation experience that's much more AI-driven and much more natural language than just a marketplace of feed of products. where you can remember things about your tastes, your preferences.
we're launching a community feature pretty excited about this next uh later this week which is pretty big but we you know there's just 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 but at the end of the day i think it's sort of also job insecurity like We don't know if what we do will continue to be valuable. I can say for sure, if you're suggesting to us that AI is going to 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 an entirely new way for a leader to show up and actually contribute to the work product of the company, which I think is really... 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 going to get in a loop. But over time, you can actually become one of these.
leaders that's on the leading edge as opposed to the lagging edge. So I think it's great. And I think you're setting the standard for how. EPD orgs are going to operate in the future, if not companies. So we're going to 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?
i mean it's a bias i think because i spend so much time in product i think of our more of an engineer i think cursor's agent mode is pretty crazy i think if you're like a ceo of a company I think Devon is like the most impressive, like the fact that you can just be in Slack and just talk to it and it will do this.
is crazy so i think a lot of it depends on like your role and 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 fucma
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, we can't code or whatever. But now people are like, oh, we can't design. It doesn't have taste, you know? And so it's just like really, you know, like design 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 anyone can do. Like a kid could like. have fun with this so i would say yeah i'd probably nominate v0 and then you know the cool thing about v0 is it shows you what's possible And so then if you want to execute on it, then you have to learn all the other tools. The other nice thing about v0 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 repliator bolt.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 kind of 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 etc. so if you want a list of things you you can name like two of them and then just say etc and it will often like riff it's really fun to just like be like is kind of like a test you know it's like you've come up with two or three but you need 10.
It's kind of a nice way of letting it be more creative. 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 neobank, apparently, here. In V0, I really appreciate you giving us a real look at how you're building with AI, both as an individual and as a team. I think you're... Definitely going to inspire tons of people to rethink how they show up at work.
I think a few folks are going to be looking over their shoulder thinking that you're about to lap them once or twice 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 Twitter slash X. My handle is at SHL. and helpful I don't know just anytime you see something I've said that you disagree with or think of my thoughts could be improved upon just
reply, let me know, DM me. I'm always looking to get feedback and improve my thinking. So I just appreciate everyone tuning in and I'm excited to see what everyone builds. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.