Coding with AI For Noobs

Um, but, uh, yeah, this time instead of me leading, I'm just as lost as you are. So this is going to be an interesting conversation, right? Usually I'm here coaching you through something, helping you understand something. I'm just as lost as you are with AI, uh, maybe even more so. And, uh, I'm kind of interested to talk about both of our experiences and maybe what we're, what we're up to with it. If that's cool with you.

It's gonna continue to get a little more interesting. And you've had a chance to look at it a little deeper. And now as you're saying off camera, you're basically a senior developer, you know, so I

Uh, these are things that are, you know, low value. Um, you know, I, I just need concise. I need speed and efficiency. And that's where, you know, Claude and his recent iteration of, uh, Uh, it's, uh, LLM has been really great 3. 5 or whatever it was as of this recording. Um, but anything else that I was trying to have it do on the things that I was looking for, like, I don't know, even analyzing data, um, throwing a spreadsheet at it and asking it certain questions.

Um, and I'd say even like six months ago when I started getting into it, at least with Claude, asking it to code some stuff for me, it just wasn't really working. Um, And fast forward six months, uh, I've made a lot more headway, probably because the tools are getting better. There is one tool that I started to use, which is like literally life changing, uh, which I just discovered over the, over the weekend. But all of this is to say is like.

It still is just doing the things I'm asking it to do, writing words is doing good, writing code seemingly is doing great because the shit that I'm building is working. But it's not really helping me or guiding me if I'm making the right decisions. In other words, there still has to be a layer of human interaction with this stuff.

Uh, which I think anyone taking it serious, uh, will know that, uh, and certainly if you're doing it for your business, like if you're in marketing and I don't know, you're trying to like make blog posts and pages for customers or even write code for your WordPress website. I think at the end of the day, like you're still going to need to know what the hell you're doing and understand the concepts. Right now I'm totally lost with what I'm doing.

I just keep smashing the prompts and it keeps giving me code. I try it. It works, or it doesn't, and then I ask it to do it again, and then I just move on to the next step. It's the worst way of doing it. It's like, totally, uh, unoptimized. I'm burning oil. And, like, I am the world's problem with greenhouse gases right now, because I am making NVIDIA CPUs just, or NVIDIA GPUs just go nuts with the code that I'm trying to write. There's no optimization on my side. Uh, does that make sense?

Like, I feel like it's still not there to, like, just completely solve the world's problems.

It's basically just like they somehow coded something that went across the internet, so to speak, all the language data that we have and basically built kind of like a little bit of a language model. We could think of it as almost like a little working brain, but it doesn't really expand too much on things. I feel like we're maybe getting there, but it doesn't really expand on things. It's really just like.

Uh, uh, a model of data that it can pull from and accurately kind of like, like again, pseudo feel like a person that you're talking to or something like that. It's way better than a Google search, uh, in a lot of ways because it has all that data and it can express it back to you. It's kind of like talking to a person and for people that are completely removed from technology, it's very new and very interesting and very cool.

Once you play with it a little bit, you realize kind of what's going on. You realize some of the limitations and all that sort of stuff, but that's a big disclaimer. The other big disclaimer that I feel like that I can kind of say or set the scene here for, uh, in, as of November of 2024, Claude, ChatGBT, Gemini, there's a ton of other ones obviously out there.

None of them are, this is I think the big part in what you're kind of describing in the beginning, they're not magic, they're not mind readers, they're not, um, independent, like, thinkers in any way, they are literally just Assistance for the most part the best way that in the way that I, I feel like in the last like month or two, I've really like stepped up my prompt engineering or just my utilization of these tools and the mindset change that I had was like This isn't magic.

This is like my If I was like a, a senior marketing director or a senior developer or whatever, this is my junior sitting next to me and I can be like the manager or more of the director and they can do some of the work and they're not going to be able to do the whole work. It's, it's actually kind of funny. I've thought about this many times and I'm like, I haven't, I don't have a extensive background in corporate environment, but it's almost kind of like that.

It can just take the place a little bit of. The less senior devel I'm not, I'm not saying that we should, like, get rid of junior developers and stuff. I'm just saying, like, that's the level of capability that this stuff has, but like you said, you ha it has to be directed by somebody, kind of, currently. It's not really It's not really there yet, at least the way that most people use it. And again, the biggest disclaimer of all is this just started, like let, like a few years ago, max.

So we are extremely early to this. And, uh, that's why, that's why I'm making some of the content. Cause I know this is where it's headed. Like, we're just going to keep getting crazier with this.

This is going to be, you know, totally, this is really going to make things weird over the next couple of years of how people are, whatever, just doing anything on the web, whether it's, you know, your search from search to creating content, to writing code, to interacting with those sites. Um, and I agree with him.

But I think at the top of this stuff, uh, I feel like we're in the, um, the housing bubble, uh, or like, uh, a couple of years ago during COVID when like money was free and everyone was just like getting mortgages. It is like 2%, you know, you could do all this stuff and money was just out there. I feel like we're in that mode right now with AI where this stuff is still too cheap, like 20 bucks a month to do what I'm doing. I can't see that sustaining, right?

And I think what we're looking at is in the near future, a lot of these sites either just like constantly ramping up the price like we see with freaking streaming services with everything, right? Because they're burning cash and power literally. Um, and Inevitably, there'll be some like some major corporation needs to win as it always does and we're gonna start to see like the Tightening of like what's available at what cost so the way I see it is all these guys Claude Chat GPT.

It was the only two I really use I don't use Gemini or anything else really but those two are just gonna be like Alright, we're done. Like, the free ride is over, it's either now minimally a hundred bucks a month, two hundred bucks a month, like, what's the pressure point where people will pay up to? Uh, or you're just not gonna get all this new cool shit that you're getting now for twenty bucks a month.

And that's really gonna, that's when things will change, I think dramatically, with like, who has access to what. Like, what is your best AI, and can you afford to use it? Uh, I think is, is where we're headed. It's not gonna be, like, this commodity, like, where, like, where Accessing today. I mean could be wrong, but that's the way I see it

Um, but so Around that time, somebody was, uh, in this video that I saw, like, kind of like, it was, I wish I could remember the argument entirely, but basically they said that they're not worried about basically what you described there, because all, because everybody and their mother, it was so weird how this happens, like, we heard the word AI, we saw ChatGPT, and then basically overnight, everyone started implementing these things, and it's strange how that happens, sometimes it's like you

need one person to just be like, oh, I figured it out, and then somehow, Even though you couldn't figure it out for many years. Now everybody is releasing their thing where they figured it out, I guess just reverse engineering or whatever. But, um, but because we're seeing that and all these things are cheap, they're thinking that everything is just going to continue to be cheap.

Now, again, certainly at certain points, there's going to be more developments and maybe there'll be like more expensive, but then they'll come down in a more commoditized thing. I just don't think that this version of AI is ever really going to be like expensive because it's already cheap and it doesn't do anything. Completely groundbreaking.

Like it's definitely a big shift, but it's not like you can just tell it to do something like, you know, we, we think about, um, I don't know if you've seen, obviously you've heard of Tesla and the cars and everything like that and everything you can do, but those are still like a premium ish product. I don't know if you saw the Tesla bots just like that. They showed like that level of stuff is.

I feel like AI, I don't know, 0, whatever they call it, you know, whatever they're going to dub that, that's going to be the next thing. Once it starts moving into like hardware, I feel like, and physical items that are going to like actually enhance your life, like more physically, rather than just the stuff that we can do digitally, um, that's when the world's really going to change.

Like, because everybody's going to see that, like when you see robots walking around and things, it's like literally iRobot from that Will Smith movie, that's going to be wild. But, um,

Because, you know, getting things done, like, you know, you have this to do list, it's like write the blog posts and you're like, okay, like, where do I start with this? Like, I want smart intelligence to like, look at my list, break it down and then start to prompt me and say, here's what you should do next. Like these are, but it's not gonna, there's no AI to do that. And, and then you're just siloed. Let me stop

So now I can tell Claude, Hey, you know, prune my to do list, open up my email, start responding to that stuff. But I still think that's so far away. And then do you really trust back to that human interaction layer? Like, do you trust the code that you're deploying to your server? Like you're going to spot check it before you do that. Um, And are you going to trust it to manage your, your to do list?

Uh, you know, I, I don't know, but that, but yeah, I mean, once it gets incorporated into that layer, yeah, I mean, I think productivity will, we're going to see a few years of like, wow, this is immense productivity. Um, but then what are the next few years after that look like where. You know, it's starting to do things for you and you're like, holy shit. Like, do I get paid the same, uh, you know, because of these efficiencies? I, you know, I don't know.

It's, that's why, you know, again, shout out to my brother. I think he's looking at it going, things are going to get weird, but, um, let's just talk about our experiences with, with coding and, um, I'll start. So I, I have this idea for this web app and it's not even like something I'm making generally available. Let's say.

It's more of like a tool for myself, um, but I want it to operate, uh, as a web app, um, one, because I want the challenge, but two, like, there's other ways that I can extend it and do some other things. But anyway, the point is, I was just like, all right, I'm going to get more serious about it. Let me see if I can figure this stuff out because Clawd 3. 5 came out and I heard it was great for coding. So my first experience is Clawd. Here's the idea. Here's what I want you to build.

Uh, I had some direction. Uh, I asked it a few things cause I do have a sort of a, uh, uh, network operating background. So I was like, let's compare this to running on an AWS stack versus, uh, a CloudFlare stack. Uh, I've heard some great things about CloudFlare's efficiencies. I just don't know if it's as mature. So I asked it to like compare and contrast some of this stuff and I ended up going to CloudFlare. Path because I just didn't want to use AWS for this.

I don't even know if that's the right thing So that's problem. Number one. I'm asking AI to like give me advantages of Both of these technical stacks. It said, you know cloudflare is the most efficient. Okay, you know, so great So I decided to go with that and then I just started dumping the ideas and like just hammering it with Like the questions and what I need it to do and the first major lesson that I learned was these interfaces You know you go to Whatever it is, claude. ai, chat.

openai, um, com. These interfaces, you just dump stuff into it, and it is just like this huge pool that you're just throwing stuff into. And what I found with Claude was, I just started burning all of the tokens. I'm a pro 20 bucks a month user, but I would reach my limit. Uh, In like an hour of asking it questions and having it code for me. So I found myself talking to it and the answers it was giving me. It was like, ah, it's like, it's guiding me.

It's like saying, here's what you should do next. And then it would prompt me and say, well, you know, do you want to extend these features? Do you want more clarity? Like do you want, and I'd be talking to it and like, yeah, man, give me more clarity. Cause I don't know what the hell I'm doing. So it would give me these answers.

And extend upon it, it was just so much so fast that I was burning the, the, the tokens and then it would just say, Hey, you can't use 3. 5 until whatever, 2 PM, you know, it'd be like a four, three or four hour window and I'd have to like shut my laptop and be like, fuck, I can't talk to this thing anymore, right? But I could go to three or whatever, whatever it's called and that, but the answers were just so vastly different. Um, the experience was so different.

To like ask a code and it didn't know like where it left off with my other conversation. So that was super frustrating. But the first lesson I learned was you still have to be dialed in. Otherwise you're just at least with Claude anyway, you're going to burn through those tokens, you know, just asking a zillion questions and having it talk to you. If that makes sense.

Uh, I, I have all these questions still. And like, I, I can't do this until tomorrow or whatever. I'm not sure if there's a way around that. I don't know if you can buy more tokens. Um, one piece of one thought there though, is that whatever you're spending to get that information, you absolutely would have spent way more money trying to get somebody to do it for you. Like, sure. So, I mean, just to keep that in perspective, but I, but again, it's, it's, your point is completely taken.

Like that's kind of annoying where we're at right now. I do think it's probably a bit of. Again, where we're at right now, so to speak with again, being extremely early, but the fact that you can do it, you know, we could stick on that and that's like the, the main piece. What I've learned from my second go around with this video that I just, uh, posted today, uh, as of recording this, it's like an hour and a half long video and, and I did it, and I did it specifically in two ways.

The first part of it was just kind of me explaining what I was doing and the finished product and then the back half hour or whatever. As me literally. like playing around building it. So there's a, there's a bunch of little gold nuggets in there, but a couple of the ones that I found was if you're going to do this, you have to realize like you have to continuously get better at being a prompt engineer. You have to understand that, like, you have to give it all that information.

You have to ask it to ask you questions, like prompted to ask you questions and particularly one at a time too. So you can just like kind of have a conversation. There's a little bit of stuff in there about like, you know, saving tokens and all that. The first time I did it, this is a really big one. The first time I did it, when it'll give you, let's say you're just making a simple WordPress plugin, so it codes a bunch of stuff for you.

It outputs the files and the nice little art, uh, artifacts feature things. So you can kind of see it and everything like that. You can download the files, you can save them into your, on your computer directories and all that. If you ask it to change something or it has to rewrite it, what it, I think what it does on purpose is only gives you part of the file back because I think that's just less tokens. It doesn't want you to rewrite everything.

I was telling it, no, I don't, I want you to rewrite the whole thing for me so I can just copy and paste it. Not really a good idea because you're going to burn a shit ton more tokens. Yeah, that's what I was doing

You definitely probably want to get the shit vetted, let me just say that, but The one other piece of it is you mentioned where you're just kind of dumping everything into a pool. The one cool thing that I've found with Claude is it has a projects feature. I don't know what plan it's on or whatever, but that kind of like where we're, where we're not at yet.

And kind of, they're kind of not there is think about like these LLMs of having like a big language model that they've scraped the internet and looked through all the data and everything like that. Okay. That's the whole LLM. What I want though, and I've tried this and I haven't like put it, I haven't made a video or anything too much yet. What I want to do is the LLM doesn't know what I want in this project or maybe like about me or my business or whatever.

The secondary piece of this, and people have been doing this on like, if you've ever seen somebody do like a personal AI chat bot where they basically recreate themselves so people can ask questions and answer like there, you need to, what we all should be doing. This is a really good piece of content actually that I should write, but we all were like building our Facebook pages or our LinkedIn's or our websites or our blogs.

What we need to be doing now is like building our own personal LLM where it's like everything about us so at any point like we could call in or somebody else could call into that and like get the answer. Cause that is like, I feel like maybe 75 area of where we need to go with some of this stuff. Because then, if you can do that, and you can create that, your own little segmented thing there, then now you've added more information to it, kinda like how you're doing, right?

Like you threw all that information in there, and if you could silo that, you could always come back to that. I know they do it in the chat formats, but the projects thing is a separate thing. You could always come back to that and you could always continue that that piece of it. So a lot of stuff there, but Um, that's been my experience a couple little tips that i've found so far in my short journey.

Um, You start that chat, you start, you know, going down the road of like, okay, build me this, this script. And, um, I'm building something again, runs on CloudFlare. CloudFlare has workers, which is, I don't know, the way that I understand it, the way that I've always perceived it as is like a serverless code architecture. Basically I can run tiny, tiny, tiny little operating systems that will run these, these scripts. Uh, these commands.

So I have to build this big script that does all these API endpoints and routes and connections and all this other stuff. And if I'm chatting with it, 3. 5 SONNET, I'm improving it. I'm adding API endpoints. I'm testing it. I'm building it, deploying it. And then I run out of tokens. And it's okay. You can't talk to me until four o'clock.

I can't like back out to the pro like air quotes back out to the projects folder and then pick up on it with like version, uh, you know, LLM 3. 0 and say, okay, let's reference this file that we've been building over here with 3. 5 and now like, let's continue building this. It just, it has no idea. On how to do that, unless I'm just maybe not prompting it well enough.

I mean, it creates the artifact, you see it, this is getting like really inside baseball here, but if you use Claude, folks who are listening, use Claude, you know what I'm talking about. You have like, the previous files that it's created in the project that you can click on at any time and see, even with a name, because it gives it a name, or you can actually tell it, give it this name, uh, and you try to reference it, it still has no freaking idea.

Which is one of like that most aggravating things for me unless I unless their projects don't work the same as I thought they did Or it just simply has no idea because the 3. 5 stuff was way more advanced like that Let me backtrack if you're asking 3. 5 to code something for you It is literally like having somebody sit alongside of you and talk to you Like, it explains everything. It asks you what you want to do next. Suggests things that you should be doing, you know, next.

Uh, for like features. You're like, oh shit, I never even thought about that feature. And you're like, wow, this is amazing. And then as soon as you go to like three, It's like, the baseline one, It's just like, here's the code. It doesn't say anything else. And it's just like, shit man, what the hell happened? You were so nice to me in this other chat. And now we got nothing. Um, it's vastly different.

And um, So what I started to do it too is like, yes, I started to, as I understood the limitations I was running up against, I started, you know, making the requests a little bit smaller and then in the, I forget what it's called. Uh, let's see if I can pull it up really quick. There's instructions. I think you can say, I think it's called instructions. Yeah. Set custom instructions for the project. So in the upper right hand corner in the project, it says, how should Claude respond?

I said that. I profiled myself, and I said, Before writing a lot of code, please explain quickly what you'll be doing before, before I can confirm, or so I can confirm. Right, so basically, don't burn those credits. Or tokens by writing a shitload of code. Tell me what you're going to do first and then I'll approve it. And even that didn't work all the time. It did when I asked it bigger things and it would like bullet point some features it might do.

Um, you know, uh, it, you know, it would ask me, it was, it was like hit or miss with that. And I have another one in the instructions that says when writing code, please use good inline documentation. I'm a beginner level developer. It helps me find the areas you need me to update because what was happening was it would suggest those changes to the code.

Like you said instead of like writing out 800 lines of code every single time which was a complete list of the file It would say just update these sections and I'm like, I don't even know where do I find this section? Yeah, where the hell is that at? So I'm trying to say like like really document this and help me understand where it needs to go later on So again hit or miss with that. I wish it was a little bit a little bit better

Um, so I'm not sure if there's more, if there's more to it, but I mean, if you have more functionality, then the files are just getting bigger, it's more tokens, it's more decisions, it's more features, it's all that sort of stuff. Um, but I mean, I don't know, I'm, I'm bullish on it to this point. Cause I think it's pretty incredible what we can do so far.

But all of the feedback that you're giving, I'm sure, like a lot of other people have like had, and like, I don't know, the thing, the thing with this is the part that confuses me the most is how you actually make something like this better.

Like, like I, I've, I've, I mean, if we want to go off topic of coding, I don't know if you have more on the coding stuff specifically, but just like other use cases, I've actually found a ton of ways that I've used like Claude specifically and a chat, GPT and Gemini to certain cases, like.

I have a laundry list of things now just in the past two months that I've used this stuff for that has actually made a difference, I would say, in all of my workflows and my just thought processes and the way that I work on things.

Um, which is cool, but way out of my league in terms of like what it's developing. So I found, uh, an app called cursor. Have you run into this? I've

Whereas with like this stuff. You know, package installers, NPM install, like you're building all this stuff, then you have to deploy it. You have to do all of this stuff to get this thing going, and then what are you coding in? So I've, okay, hey, hey Claude, what's everyone using for coding, right? And they're like, oh, VS code. It's okay.

So I started using VS code, and then my mind is blowing up because I'm like, fine, man, I don't even know how to say, like, then I just feel way out of my league because I'm like, this thing isn't set up right. I don't even know if I'm optimized right. Am I doing this correctly? Um, and then I started hitting that wall of Claude. Now over the weekend, I started making a lot of headway. Things were working. I built my, what's known as the Cloudflare Worker, and it was working.

And I could send data to these APIs, it would talk to other APIs, and send me the information back that I needed. I was like, okay, I'm making, making headway. And then I was like, okay, now I need to make this a front end because I can't just do everything through the terminal. I need to be able to manage this in a web browser. And that's when the freaking wheels fell off because I was just like, Hey Claude, build me a react app that connects up to all these APIs. I can do this stuff.

And it was just. It was just a shit storm. I mean, I just 48 hours of like trying to just figure out how to deploy this to cloudflare is the problem with cloudflare. I don't know is a problem with my code probably. Right. So there's all this stuff happening. And, um, I found cursor and I don't even remember how I found it. I think I was like, I need to find an alternative to vs code because I just felt like, I'm, I just using the wrong tool. Like, I just can't do this stuff anymore.

And then I found Cursor, and Cursor integrates with Cursor. Directly with Claude and the magic is it's not your tokens. It's their tokens So I can just freaking pound away at this thing and just be like, here's the 900 lines. Look at it Tell me what's wrong. All right, give me the update.

Here's another 900 lines like give you know, give me another update And that has solved it dramatically and basically what it has stopped and what it has allowed me to do is in, in cursor, now this is, you know, anyone who's like a proper dev is like freaking out flipping tables right now, but I ask it to do something, it shows me the code like I was doing in my Claude web browser and instead of me copying and pasting it into the file, you just say, apply it and it writes it.

Hmm. Right in the file Right. So I'm just like oh, yeah all day man. Like I just said yes. Yes. Yes. Yes Like this is all the code I want And I finally got to a point where now I'm not using react anymore I'm using another framework called svelte, which is like a pure JavaScript play on it supposed to be more efficient. Yada Yada, I don't know. I'm like watching YouTube videos while I'm coding. I am you're not coding I'm coding, man. You're

Um, so instead of like, uh, working with like some of like the real inside, like if a big issue comes up, right, like, um, I'm talking about and I'm, I'm asking it to like help me style the front end. So instead of doing that even in cursor, because you've got this tiny little window, literally, um, I'll, I'll start asking chat GPT and Claude what their recommendations are. So now it's like, I have two different people in front of me. You know, big, big question, right? Like a big question.

Like what should I use tailwind or should I use like some other CSS framework, whatever, and I'll, I'll ask them both, see what the answers are. And then I'll aggregate that and then bring that into a cursor and be like, okay, here's where I think I should be going with this. What do you think? It'll give me the answer and man, I'm a, I'm a single person enterprise is what I am. Okay. I'm going to be launching so many apps, dude. It's not even gonna be funny.

Okay. All I have to say is WordPress is in trouble.

Uh, I mean, not anytime soon, and not to what you can do with WordPress, but it does also make me appreciate, like, what we have as, like, this little bottled up application that is WordPress.

We know what stuff does, but we've never sat for eight hours, multiple times per week, per day, per year to like actually develop software or anything like that. We know enough to be dangerous. And now with Claw, we know enough to be really dangerous. So I'm wondering. If we're that camp, so to speak, like we're that archetype and we're see this and we're like, Oh shit, we could like build our own apps and stuff like that, or like our own plugins.

And it's like, we know the dangers kind of, if we're being honest with ourselves, but we're trying it. Cause it's interesting. We're trying to learn. I wonder if software developers, the other archetype, if they look at these things and they're leveraging, I wonder if like that, that, that, what you just described there with like Claude and cursor, I don't know this enough, and I'm sure there's.

Videos and people doing this stuff, but I don't know if our, our software developers, you would think that if, if you put that into a software developer's hands, like the co pilot from GitHub or, you know, whatever, or whatever, whatever the, well, there's tons of them now. If you gave that to somebody like, are they just like flying at like Mock 10 now. Yeah. I think that's

Da, da da, and, and they're off to the races. Yeah. Um.

I, they, uh, from all the stuff that I've been watching and listening to people talk about how like amazing cursor is, is because it has like this auto complete feature, which if you know what you're doing speeds it up like that 10 X level where you can start, like if you know the code, you can start writing the code. And then it'll start auto completing the code it thinks is gonna come next.

Like, uh, it's, uh, It's there, but I don't know, you know, it's got an encryption class for like the API keys, but like other than that, like I have no idea what holes you could poke in this thing or anything like that. So I would always just say exercise caution there, but it is pretty incredible what we're able to do.

And seemingly in such a short time from when we went from like pretty much everything being like hand coded, so to speak, to now, you know, we have, you know, We can get so much further so much faster us and people doing this professionally. It's, it's pretty, it's pretty insane.

So let me think of a bunch of different ways. The first way this is like, again, some of these are like small wins because they're not like groundbreaking things, but they're really like, actually pretty awesome. Like if you stack them all up, first thing is, okay, so we record YouTube videos. I'm not going to do it in order. Cause I can't remember off the top of my head, but I'll just go from thinking about these. The first one is like, we record YouTube videos, right?

And I like to put chapters in all my YouTube videos. I was literally doing this. Like I would watch the whole video back and put the chapters in. I don't have to fucking do that anymore. Like I, I upload the video. I wait, maybe, sometimes it's right away depending on the length of the video. I took that whole hour and a half script. In ChatGPT, I tried to do this with ChatGPT but a while ago it's, it's not as good.

Claude is way better with like pasting things in and maybe it's just the new model now, like more, it can just understand more. So I, I upload the video. I go to the bottom, show transcript. I copy that whole thing with the timestamps in it. I paste that into Claude and I say, Hey, Give me YouTube chapters, one liners for it, just like formatted perfectly, and just give me chapters for these videos.

And then I can even say, hey, get a little more detailed if it doesn't give me enough, or how I want it to do. And that saves a shit ton of time if you were going to sit there and watch all of that. And that's just a small win, like I said. So there's that. You already mentioned things like explaining. You could, you could even say, I literally just tried this with the last couple of videos. Let's stick on that just from the transcript. It knows everything your video is about, right?

And it's an expert at YouTube if you tell it it's an expert at YouTube. So you can get the subtitles from that. I'm sorry. You can get the chapters from that. You can tell it, give me 10 really good titles for this video. Based on just your knowledge of YouTube. So, and then I'm not saying like copy and paste that part. Like I just need the ideas cause I'm not creative enough to think of the ideas. So like, give me the titles. I even experimented with this.

I said, you already mentioned the description and stuff like that. So you could obviously get that. But the, I even experimented with, Hey, I know you for Claude. I know you can't, I know you can't generate images. Okay. And we can talk about images. Cause that's like kind of another modal of this piece. That's good and bad. Very hit or miss more than text. I know you can't generate images, Claude.

But can you prompt some, another tool to generate a really good thumbnail for this, or at least give me some ideas and stuff like that, or what a good thumbnail would be. It does it. It doesn't do it great. Cause then I copied that. I took it over to Grok on X cause it, cause I think Grok uses flux, which is probably like one of the best image generator generative things now.

And I put it over there and it didn't give me great stuff, but it gave me something that like, you know, maybe would spark a little bit, you know what I mean? But like even with text, you can kind of get some ideas for imagery and things. So those are just some of the ways like in YouTube that I've sped up and at least gave myself way more ideas for things because, you know, Those things are hard to come up with on your own. I mean, yeah, I mean,

And I, and I use that as like ideation, you know, and other, like, like other words, you know, like what are other words I can use that are, are keywords for this? Um, yeah, all of that stuff, uh, you know, works great. For the chapters, uh, because I use DS script. Um, D Descrip just has chapters, a chapter thing built right in. So you just click it and it's still all ai Yeah. Chat, GPT driven.

But, um, you know, I've always found it to be a little bit more accurate because it has the whole video file, uh, and it just, whatever, just does a better job. Um, but, uh, yeah, often I'll use, uh, I'll use that and I use Whisper AI as a. I think it only runs on Mac, though. Uh, so Whisper AI, or Whisper Transcription is what it's called, uh, on Mac.

It's a Mac app, and, um, you can just drop in your video or, um, MP3 file, or any, any file, any media file, and ask it to transcribe it and then run the same commands on it. It's just like a local app. Um, I'll use that from time to time.

Um, I'm not even sure as we move forward, if that's even going to be completely necessary, because it's probably going to just, you know, somehow get. You know, SEO juice and ranking and any sort of index ability from like the actual words in the YouTube video at this point, but that's just another random thing. Um, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of trying to think of anything else that I've, that I've tried to do. I just literally hate making thumbnails.

So I'm waiting for a really good thumbnail thing. I've explored, explored some GPTs, custom GPTs for that. Um, but, uh, Yeah, I don't know. This is all kind of like very interesting and slightly kind of concerning at the same time. Cause like at some point, you know, I mean, I don't know if you've, I don't know if you've experimented with 11 labs and any sort of, uh, image or not, not image, but like voice, like you can very, very soon we're gonna be able to just like make our own stuff.

Like, let's just generate our own things just from all of the, the voice data we have of ourselves, the video data we have of ourselves, and then all of the, any LLM stuff that we've. Put together. So it's going to, it is going to get weird. Um, I'm just hoping it doesn't get weird super soon or we could at least capitalize on it. Um, it's a lot of stuff.

And in order to do all of that, I would have either needed to hire a developer or find a plugin that did it. So I think for very niche things like that, you're definitely probably very well off doing that. I'm thinking of if you do like an analysis on like the ROI of doing something like that, just even personal ROI, like nothing's going to come along and like fix that right away. I would love to have a larger conversation on like where this is all going.

Cause I don't like, I love WordPress and I love websites, but I don't think we're going to be on websites for the rest of our lives necessarily. I think there's going to be some more to that just in like the different ways that we operate with things because to go back to. If you think about like the Google search era versus now the AI prompting era, I don't know about you, but there have been times very recently where I have not gone to Google.

I've gone to like a chat GPT or a Claude because I want I don't want to go search for an answer anymore. I want the answer to kind of like come to me and I don't mean like I'm just going to take the answer. It's like it has all that information. So we can explain it to you in a way that you're actually asking particularly for. I don't know. I'm sure you've done this. Like you go and you have a very specific problem.

So then you have to search Google and you have to go through like 10 links to find like maybe what the answer is. But with now, it's like it does that step for you in a lot of ways. And the other big thing that I do, and this is one of the things I don't like about cloud just yet, but I'm sure they're going to have it. I love chat GPT and Gemini, which is Google's for the conversational, because you know, I hate text and this is a lot of reading that we're doing so far.

So like, I'll like actually have a conversation with it and I'll be like, Hey, what do you think about this topic? Like I'll do this in preparation for like, You know, any sort of podcasting debate, like live topics, like, hey, you know, like, what do you think about, like, open source? Do you think that's a good thing, a bad thing, or whatever?

You can kind of, like, get a lot of ideas and a lot of different things that you would have had to go read, like, a bunch of different people's opinions. But now it, it's aggregated all that and it's just thrown in at you. I'm not saying just take it as face value. I'm saying like you can almost do like a little mock conversation or mock debate, debate with these things. And then you can do it from both sides too.

And then you have all the perspectives and then you can create your own perspective. And then you could, you know, go into the content or the, or the show or whatever with that. I mean, I've literally done that before just because of the ease of that. Like it's just, I'm just talking to my phone. Like it's, it's so easy.

I like to see a ton of options. I don't mind sifting through it as long as that the options I have are, you know, Are are close to you know, giving me the answer, you know, argue if google even still does that anymore.

I don't know Um, but I don't mind like sifting through that through that stuff, but I totally get it like just give me the answer I signed up for Uh only because Kevin rose, uh from dignation He has he's uh, I guess an advisor or his the vc firm that he works for is invested in perplexity And you could get a free year Of Perplexity Pro, uh, if you were on his email list.

Um, I've heard a lot of people talk about it, like, oh, it's like, you know, search results and all this stuff, and like, that's supposed to think, be the thing that really crushes Google. You know, I did it for, for this project that I'm working on. I mean, it didn't really give me anything that Claude and ChatGPT wasn't already giving me. And I mean, it's a cool interface, and I'm sure it's like, if I was doing more, it would give me some, you know, better stuff.

But once again, I'm just like, I, I, I'm, I'm not, I haven't tapped in to the full potential of this stuff. Uh, cause you know, effectively, I feel like I'm just getting started, but that's where that is. Uh,

So I'm trying to get more people, you know, like just from this type of content, if we can get more people think about this and understanding that it's real, the hope would be that we can continue to leverage it for as much as we need to leverage it.

And then we could continue to evolve and adapt to obviously fill in the gaps that like this thing, you know, these types of things are going to do, like we could, there's always going to be a reason to, um, continue to try to innovate and do other things. So, um, I don't know. It's going to be interesting though, regardless. Yeah. We'll see what, uh, we'll see what the future holds with, with all of this.

Um, one, because this is a semi tangent to what we're talking about today, but, um, you know, everything that happened with WordPress and, um, just my, I've always had this feeling anyway, but like everything, especially with like WordPress and understanding, like who, Where you're doing your business like who owns that business that you're doing business with Um, and yeah, I was running on mailchimp for a while. It was fine.

I never really loved like making the newsletters there uh, but I switched to uh kit because I Had nathan on the show many many years ago and he'll dm me every once in a while to ask a couple questions And uh, I was like, yeah, you know i'll use it. We got a new add on for it for gravity forms You Uh, and so far, so good. Uh, consolidated two MailChimp accounts. It was a little bit of a pain in the neck. Uh, because it flagged me for like, where did you get these users from?

And it's like, well, I merged two, I had two different lists. My mat report list and my WP minute list. And I was always mailing both. So I just consolidated into one and it flagged a bunch of stuff. Um, but crafting the templates there. Much easier, uh, happier about that. So if you do receive the email and you have any feedback, hit reply on the next email that I send, let me know what you think. Mark, what about you? What are you, what are you up to? Where can folks find you?