--- title: To AI Assist or not to AI Assist? slug: to-ai-assist-or-not-to-ai-assist published_at: 2024-11-11 21:36:49 +0000 updated_at: 2024-11-18 21:17:14 +0000 summary: CJ and Colin chat about AI tools and coding environments. Pros and cons, daily workflows, and challenges of various AI-driven coding tools like VS Code, Cursor, and Copilot.We also talk about the broader implications of AI in content generation, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn, and emphasize maintaining a human touch in communication to avoid hollow, AI-generated content.- Avante nvim plugin- Cursor- Github Copilot  description: <div>CJ and Colin chat about AI tools and coding environments. Pros and cons, daily workflows, and challenges of various AI-driven coding tools like VS Code, Cursor, and Copilot.<br><br>We also talk about the broader implications of AI in content generation, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn, and emphasize maintaining a human touch in communication to avoid hollow, AI-generated content.<br><br>- <a href=\"https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim\">Avante nvim plugin</a><br>- <a href=\"https://cursor.com\">Cursor</a><br>- <a href=\"https://github.com/features/copilot\">Github Copilot</a>&nbsp;</div> duration: 2608 keywords: [] author: CJ Avilla co_author: Colin Loretz url: https://www.cjav.dev/podcasts/to-ai-assist-or-not-to-ai-assist embed_url: https://share.transistor.fm/e/688e2e2f share_url: https://share.transistor.fm/s/688e2e2f image_url: podcast_show: Build and Learn type: podcast_episode --- # To AI Assist or not to AI Assist? *Published: November 11, 2024* *Duration: 2608 seconds* *Podcast: Build and Learn* ## Listen [Listen on the web](https://share.transistor.fm/e/688e2e2f) [Share URL](https://share.transistor.fm/s/688e2e2f) ## Show Notes <div>CJ and Colin chat about AI tools and coding environments. Pros and cons, daily workflows, and challenges of various AI-driven coding tools like VS Code, Cursor, and Copilot.<br><br>We also talk about the broader implications of AI in content generation, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn, and emphasize maintaining a human touch in communication to avoid hollow, AI-generated content.<br><br>- <a href="https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim">Avante nvim plugin</a><br>- <a href="https://cursor.com">Cursor</a><br>- <a href="https://github.com/features/copilot">Github Copilot</a>&nbsp;</div> ## Full Transcript CJ: What happens in the desert stays in the desert. How, how was it this time around? Colin: It was good. It usually, yes, what, what happens at Burning Man stays at Burning Man, but it was not, I think what I did this year was not be what most people think of as, as Burning Man, but I think I mostly just needed to go camping. It didn't matter where, and so surprisingly got some of the best sleep I've had. Wasn't out all night. Woke up early, went to yoga and coffee and bloody Marys. And just like that, that was like rinse and repeat every day, which you could just do at home. But you know, being able to just wake up, not have to go to work. Cause it took, took some time off ride your bike, you know, people joke about, Like Burning Man being this like utopia city thing, but it is very unsustainable as, as that, but for a week being able to not just think about going to work, get on a bike, no cars, right. And go ride to the nearest little, this really cool live music yoga thing. And then just kind of see where the day takes you. Like you don't really get to do that very often. So it was a good little time. Not probably what most people think of as Burning Man, but it was, it was just what I needed. CJ: Great way to get away from screens and just like, let your mind reset to just like complete refresh reboot. So are you coming back feeling like really energized and excited? Or was it long enough? Do you want it to be like three weeks, four Colin: Yeah, I'm excited for my next vacation to be somewhere a little bit less survival focused. Because you don't really come back super refreshed when you're dealing with the desert and all of that. But yeah, no, it was good to be away from screens, to not have to have deadlines and Those kinds of things was feeling super good and strong. And then I like bruised a rib or maybe cracked a rib on the last day doing the lead again, the least exciting things possible. But yeah, so a little, little, little ouchy right now, but I think, and I think it's fine and it'll, I'll be back at it soon. CJ: Sounds like a solid year. Things are, yeah, things are busy here. We we just kicked off the school year. So the boys are back in school. They, we just had open house where we got to meet all of the new teachers. And go through kind of like all the processes and what's expected of them for this new year and learning about the new grading systems and whatever, but the kids are super pumped. We asked them at the end of the summer, like, you know, are you looking forward to going back to school? Are you dreading it? And they said of their friends, they're the most excited. They're just like so pumped to be back hanging out with their homies. Their words, not mine. And yeah, I think it's, it's, it's great. We love that being the reaction. So, Colin: Yeah. CJ: It's Colin: I think. You have a pretty good household of general learning and curiosity, so I think, yeah, the kids are going to be alright. CJ: Thank you. Yeah, we were, we're, we're trying hard to set them up for success and, you know, get them get them into position where. It would be very, very challenging for them to fumble the ball, but we'll see how it goes. Colin: Yeah, I mean, you model that, right, in terms of like, you're always trying new things, and From computer stuff to let's see if we can make maple syrup to, you know, whatever. Right. So I think that that's that natural curiosity. It rubs off on people. It's good. CJ: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I never thought about it that way. Speaking of natural curiosity, have you seen, I know we actually, we talked about this a little bit, the cursor. ai editor. Are you, is that like your daily driver or what? Yeah. Like kind of, what are you using most, most of the time now to write code? Colin: So it is not my daily driver. I have not asked and I'm not sure if we're allowed to use it at work. So We already, we have copilot as part of GitHub enterprise. So I imagine the answer is probably not, we're not allowed to use it. And just because I think like there's a lot of protections built into GitHub enterprise and copilot with like enterprise code and things like that. So for cursor is on my personal machine and VS code and copilot is on my work machine. CJ: Got it. Okay. Yeah. It seems like, well, given that cursor is a fork of VS code, it feels like a pretty safe thing to add. It's kind of just like an extension on top of it. It seems But yeah, like that extension I'm sure has a certain limitations in terms of, or as a, as a giant company, you would probably want to like enforce certain restrictions around just adding extensions sort of willy nilly. Colin: Yeah, I think Copilot has some rules around like what can be trained and what can't and things like that. That's enforced at the enterprise level So the org controls a little bit more. I don't think cursor is quite there yet Then maybe they are and so you do have to have another Payment plan with cursor right you have to do a subscription with them and all of that So are you using it as your daily driver? CJ: so I am not yet, but I have. I, I started to get FOMO. I was like, I'm in Vim over here and I've got co pilot working fine. But when I, I started, I started to see like a couple of screencasts where people were building like entire features where it's like adding and or editing like multiple files in a repo instead of just kind of like auto completing as you're typing. And I was like, I want that, that, that seems. Like, it seems like another step change in productivity. And so I started like kind of re setting and refreshing and like going out on this exploratory research expedition to try to figure out what is going to be the daily driver for the end of 2024 and going into 2025. And so I downloaded installed cursor was playing around with it. Kraftwerk is not a giant corporate organization. And so we're much more comfortable kind of like just seeing what tools work and make us most effective. And so installed it index, the code base, and was kind of like messing around with some basic features, which I thought were pretty. Pretty decent, but like any of this like chat GPT or AI stuff, like some, some, some of the output was wrong or like just needed to be nudged like several times in the right direction. I'm like, is this actually making us faster? So I tried cursor for like a week and a half and then went and I found this. Plugin, it was on Hacker News, Avante. Neovim and we'll drop a, drop links to it in the resources, but I started exploring like, what would it look like to have the same kind of these or like similar features in Neovim. And so the things beyond like type to complete that I was excited about was like highlight a block of code and. Have that refactored for you. So just say like, change this block of code to do X. Another thing was like implement this whole feature. And then the last one was like chat with my code. And so I was finding that I was copying and pasting like many, like entire code files and pasting them into either chat, GPT or Claude, and then asking questions like, how would you. Like find the memory leak in this Ruby thing, or how would you optimize this query or, you know, things like that, that needed the context of several different files. And so one of the nice things about cursor was that you can at mention files. And it'll like include that in the context in order to like, give you either like chat with it or give you edit recommendations. So I wanted that inside of Avante and it turns out that Avante doesn't have the app mentioning thing yet. And also it was. In order to get it set up and working as expected, I had to like change the mind, Vim plugin manager and like a whole bunch of other stuff. So yeah, so I'm just, I'm still very much in like the exploratory phase for what the next daily driver is going to be including VS code, including cursor, including a whole bunch of stuff. So I don't know. Yeah. Colin: had mixed success with it knowing like recent files. This is not, this is more co pilot. Like sometimes it's like, oh, you want to do this? I'm like, that's awesome. But then like another minute later and it's like, Back to being dumb. And so I don't know if there's like literally like, Oh, it's keeping the file you're on in context. And then maybe the last file by default cursor felt like it had a bigger context window, but also was indexed on the actual code, like in copilot. I might try to use a symbol from another file and it just doesn't know about it. Which is also like most IDEs should just have that like it's not you don't need AI for that if it's especially if it's like a static language or something but I think we mentioned it but like what I have found is that Cursor and Rails has been fairly insane like for me just and this is Out of the box. I'm sure that there's going to be more and maybe cursors like just one step change towards this, like whatever the next thing is, but be anything that has lots of conventions, it seems to do really well. When you get into JavaScript land, I'm sure it does fine. But when you can put files anywhere and you can do things any way, it's a little bit less, there's less patterns to follow. And like, when you think of these things as predicting the next best thing, it makes a lot of sense that Rails conventions, you know, all of that. And who are we kidding, most apps are doing the same thing in different steps, different ways, different buckets of content and different, you know, buckets of views and things like that. So Yeah, it is funny when everyone's like, Oh, this is going to revolutionize. It's like, we, we don't really do like the services that apps and things enable are usually really cool. But like the tech itself is not rocket science. Like we are not doing crazy things over here. We're putting dibs on the pages. So like, yeah, it can handle. Doing dibs on pages like does, does that mean it's going to replace us? I don't think so. We still got to kind of figure out what we want those dibs to do and what the, we want them to represent and the services it's, it's app enabled services for a lot of things, right? Like what you guys are doing is literally a service that's enabled by tech. CJ: It's funny. Cause like probably. Most apps out there are going to have like some form of authentication, right? And like the way that you implement authentication is going to, if you like squint your eyes a little bit, look 90 percent the same for every single rails application out there, right? Especially if it's using device. And so if you go to auto complete, like. Some method in authentication controller that follows the same patterns and uses the same naming conventions, like the chances that it's going to end up just spitting out what someone else already did, you know, 9, 000 other times, like is pretty high. And so yeah, I think the convention, the convention based like the strong conventions inside of rails, definitely. Is a huge, huge reason why I think these tools will be successful when paired with rails and yeah, fully, fully aligned. Like this is it's going to make it so much faster just because it's so much more predictable the way that you, you build rails apps. I do wonder the same thing about Python. I feel like because there's so many ways to do the same thing in Ruby, you know, the innumerable. Module in Ruby has just like a bajillion methods and all of them could be implemented with each or, you know, it's like a while loop or something. And so like, because there's so many ways to do it with Ruby, maybe that makes it a little tougher versus Python where there's like, okay, you can do this in two ways, pick, pick, or you can use a four loop or you can use a list comprehension. And that's it. Like, that's kind of like all you get for, Colin: Yeah. CJ: In, in some languages, like the the. The, just like the surface area of the methods in the standard library is so much smaller that I wonder if like autocomplete will work better for general things that are outside of web development. But yeah, like when working within rails, following the rails patterns, you know, you open up a controller. There's seven actions. They're always like putting the instance variable, the same spot, the same way, saving it, checking if it's saved. If so respond this way. If not respond this other way, set your flash message, you know, like kind of the stuff that you would get from a scaffold, which actually probably that's probably also another big part of it, right? Like the scaffold itself is generating code. That is the same for everybody with just like different names. So Colin: Well, and I'm not familiar and I've been wondering whether or not it makes sense. Like, are these models just trained on all data, right? Cloud and things like that. But could you have a model that is specifically trained on Ruby? And rails and more so than just seeing lots of copies of GitHub and projects, right? Like, like we talked about the campfire project that was supposed to be this like ideal rails out from 37 signals, right? If it was trained specifically on that, what would it? Nudge you towards, right? There might be 10 ways to do something in Ruby, but because we've trained it on these, like, ideal these ideal apps or these ideal methods, or this is more memory performant, or this is this is the preferred pagination or preferred monetization, authentication, whatever those things are. It'd be really interesting to have a model that's specifically trained for web development and for performance and things like that. I don't think that any of these are doing that even cursor. I saw, and I'll try to find it and share it, but some prompts examples where people have these things where it's like, I want you to be as terse as possible. I don't want you to explain what you're doing to me. I want you to just give me the answer. And like making it so that even the prompting is is more custom and more and more quick in cursor, you can define a lot of settings. And so people are starting to share their cursor settings page, which I think is making it a little bit viral to where people's like, this is what my cursor setup is very much similar to how people have VS code extensions and things like that. So Yeah, it'd be very interesting to see, like, I think my knowledge of LLMs is just outside, like, just at the door of like, is it enough to not to be trained on everything? Or does it make it more unique? Because how I guess, has it changed how you work with documentation at all? CJ: I think. Colin: This is a loaded question. But CJ: yeah, loaded question. I think I, hmm, when it comes to like standard library or like core library documentation for rails, I will just like ask the LLM questions, but if it comes to like a question about a third party, then I will look at the docs for the third party, but I fully expect that. Docs will follow Stripe's pattern of like ask the docs or something like that, which will come soon. But I also wonder, like, you, when you load your your repo, it could theoretically go out and index and, Get all the docs from like, you know, the GitHub repo for, yeah, for all your dependencies and then just be like, okay, now you're fully in your IDE. And if you have a question you're like, you're doing ask the docs, but like the docs are behind a rag model. That's like, I dunno, just like right there in your IDE. I do. Yeah. I'm at the same point where I'm like right on the edge of like, how could we train the models. A little better so that they match the stack that we're using. So that it's like even, even more advanced. And yeah, sometimes it'll recommend actually very often, chat GPT will recommend stuff for rails that is out of date. And I'll be like, no, no, no, it doesn't work that way anymore. Remember like now we're in Ruby three and it looks like this. And then it's like, oh yeah, you're right. Like now, now it does work like that. And so, yeah, there's, there's like probably tons of outdated apps that are following outdated patterns that it's trained on. So like, how do you. Yeah. How do you make it work? For yeah, modern rails development. I don't know the answer, but I did finally go back and listen to that full podcast with Lex Friedman and Peter levels. And one of the most interesting parts of it was Peter talking about how he how every single person who uploaded photos to photo AI, he was training a model specific to that person with their photos that they uploaded. And I'm like, Oh, I wonder if that's how, you know, if you wanted to do. Something where like you're, you take a base model, that's an open source base model about code and then train it on some like rails app repos that you pick. Maybe you just go find like 10, you know, these are the ideal rails repos. Maybe you buy them from Colin: And the docs, CJ: Yeah. And the docs. Yeah, Colin: docs, the, and like, cause I don't want Python, right? I only want Ruby and Rails. So like go super specific and hopefully it cuts down on hallucinations and things like that. CJ: totally. How are you thinking about it with regard to writing the docs? Colin: Yeah, so we can talk about this because I've been playing with a vendor and we're not using them right now, and we didn't build it ourselves. So I feel like we're gonna talk about it. But we have I have trained a model on our docs on our open API spec on our Zen desk help center articles that are public and on our GitHub issues. And it's Shockingly good. Like it, it, it, it's not pulling in all these other things. I think with discord specifically, we ran into this thing where most of the code samples out there are for discord JS. And so if you don't prompt that you want to You know, do like, I want to build a bot and I want to do it in pure like HTTP. I just want to use fetch and I don't want to use any libraries. You have to constantly prompt it to stop using discord. js because there's just so much content out there. They've done really good job of doing guides. Our docs don't have a lot of code samples cause they're meant to be. like the more implementation docs that other developers will use for their libraries and things. And so it was cool to see, like, based on just the docs and the, the spec itself, like it was able to understand and, and, and know what, what, what I was trying to do. And I like that idea of, like, it, it, it's still, you still need content. to train it on. And I knew it was getting it from the docs. So like writing the docs is very important still. Otherwise there wouldn't be any food for it to consume and then come back and say, Oh, I've learned how this thing works. Right. Cause just the open API spec is just the end points. So it's not going to be able, like even with descriptions and field names and stuff, it's not going to be able to like figure out the pros around that. At least not that I'm aware of, right? It's like, if this has been trained on all rest APIs and specifically ours, then it could be pretty interesting because you're like, oh, this is OAuth, right? At the end of the day, this is how OAuth works. And then you could even probably detect if someone is doing something a little bit different, like, oh, they have a special flavor of this OAuth that, you know, kind of breaks tradition and this is how you use it. So I've been trying to think about like, whether or not it makes sense To even put a search box or like an AI prompt box on the homepage of our docs. We have an onsite this week and I'm going to throw that out as a, just a fun brainstorm. But we also have a hack week later this year, so maybe, maybe I'll save it for that and just build it. CJ: That sounds like a fun project. It, it sounds like, well, one of the things that is falling out of like reading the docs too, is just like discovery of new features. And this is, I don't know, I guess like it's coming up for me when I'm thinking about all of these different tools and editors, like, how do you even know? What is possible when the features that are coming out for these editor tools are coming out so fast. And so like one problem I remember having with building buckets is that the stripe. API and the features that they would support would change and I wouldn't know about it. And I'm like, I don't know if there's a way to like subscribe to changes for certain pages or subscribe to, you know, I want to be alerted so that I know that my problem is fixed or like the product gap is, is filled in order to like retry or like, you know, be open to trying something again. And so what I was surprised by is like the last time I used VS code with and then they had like chat with your code and the paint brushes type things. But I feel like there's actually like full patterns that have started to fall out of continue. dev. And now they're built into copilot. So you can do like command I and command K and command L to like chat with or edit or like suggest refactorings. And, One of the problems I'm seeing is like this, it's just coming out so fast that I don't even know like which of these editors is the best right now, or like which features I want, because I don't even know like what's possible. And so I think there's a, there's a huge opportunity right now for dev rel, specifically in the like Editor and tool space to show people how to leverage these things to get like crazy fast at building. And there was a tick tock I watched recently where someone was talking about, like, find, find a couple of friends who are like playing around with AI and just pair with them on random stuff. Like how are they organizing their email? How are they, you know, writing up a doc or, you know, using Excel or doing SQL queries or whatever. Like, just try to like, Try to pair and cross pollinate with the different tools that people are using because they're coming out so fast. And there's so many of them that it's impossible to stay on top of. So other than the, the like features that I've suggested for editing, like, are there other things that you're using or like other ways that you're using this stuff, whether it's like writing docs or code, like, Colin: Yeah. I, so I have been looking for, and I'll put this out there if anyone knows of one, but I might, I was going to go build it and then I discovered the API doesn't exist anymore. So I put my docs into Grammarly. For some reason, Grammarly does not play nice with VS code. And I even had the desktop app. Grammarly, I mean, has been doing AI, they, before LLM, right? They've been doing. Grammar and all this stuff, but what I really do want and I think a lot of engineers could benefit from having like a true grammarly VS code extension and they killed their developer platform. Like it's just gone. You go to there and the API has been shut down. They do not let anyone. And I'm assuming, I don't know if it was similar to like when Twitter like crapped all over their developer platform or what, but like it felt like they got rid of their developer advocates and. And maybe you're only just doing partnerships or something. But there are not very many good models for that and or plugins. Like there's like a latex one that kind of it's like, Hey, this word is a double extra word. But Grammarly is really good at being like trying to teach you around passive and active voice and things like that. So I've been using it, but I've been literally writing my docs and then copy and pasting them into Grammarly because even the overlay, like Mac app isn't catching my stuff like it does when I put it into their UI. So that that's a big one. Like I'm, I'm finding that it is making me a better writer. There's a, there's a big drama going on right now with NaNoWriMo, which is the November national national writing month where they were basically saying that AI generation is okay for you to write your novel. And they're also pushing their own. LLM tool. And so a lot of the tweets were really funny where they're like, Oh my God, I'm, it's not even November and I'm done with my novel. I can't wait to read it. Right. So it's, I, I don't, when you think about what we're generating with these things, I like to still think like we could generate, Everything on the, that we could possibly think of, but like why, right? If no one's going to read it or if it's not going to bring value or if it's not worth our time, like then it's probably also not worth the energy and, and all of the other, you know, expense that comes with generating these things. For me, I still want to write it. And then I want to maybe take a pass and use it as a learning opportunity. And now I'm going to stop writing that way if it's like, Oh, stop using passive voice. Use active here. Sometimes in technical docs, it's not always obvious. Like, it's not like writing an essay. It's like you keep using this word over here and you, it isn't what you think it means. Or you know, especially when you're talking about APIs and things like that. Yeah. The one that, though, it was a funny one, eh, it's actually not important, but Yeah, so copy is a big one. When you were talking about training it on specific things, we mostly are focused on generating code, but I would almost be interested to like have an IDE where you're like running your app in it. And it's watching all the requests and all of the execution. And it's like aware of your app itself. And it's like, hey, this code over here, like is not good. Like every time you do this thing, we're making five trips to the database. Like, the AI can understand that so there's almost this, like, once the code's running, this pager duty monitoring thing, where it's like, don't just optimize the code path, but also understand that, like, the executions are taking really long, and you're, you have no index on a database, right, that, on a table that you really should have. Mm hmm. CJ: It's like the scout APM performance monitoring metrics. But like, yeah, interpreted by your, that would be amazing. Like literally that's a giant problem we're trying to solve is like, how do we drive down memory consumption? And I am going in copying and pasting and like, why the hell is this making so many allocations? And yeah, like it's just looking at scout APM. And then going in the code, copying a bunch of code that scout told me is, is like, you know, the culprit pasting it in Claude, hoping that Claude gives me something that is like maybe a thread of a, an idea of where to go. So interesting. Colin: but it's almost like a little like by bug, like, like, just, just hang out and watch this. And then you tell me what you see, CJ: totally, Colin: this is the true AI assistant. Like, I don't actually don't care about writing the code as much as that, right? Like, reaching out and doing an integration, like send this to Stripe, send this to this, pull this in here, talk to the database. CJ: totally. So one of the, I was just like digging through settings today. This is a great example where it's like. They need developer advocates to go and like talk about how this stuff like is what's coming out and what's new. But I was digging through the cursor settings. And if you go into beta, they have something it's, it's in the beta tab, but it's marked alpha and it's called AI review. And it's supposed to use chat GPT to scan your current PR diff for books. Colin: Mm CJ: So it's going to like look and see if it can find a bug in your, in your PR like. That's great. That's a, that's a cool idea. So yeah, tell you before you commit something that you've got a bug. But yeah, I don't know. I coming back to your point about authoring and like wanting to have grammarly built into VS code, it might be interesting to have like a, an LSP or something like that's based on technical writing or based on kind of like different flavors of writing. And it goes through and like helps you update. Are you mostly authoring and Markdown or like, are you, you're right. Okay. Yeah. Colin: Yeah, mostly markdown. So yeah, I'll even send it with all the markdown tags and everything because I'm not going to go clean them out and then put them back in so I'll just say like, what is wrong with this and it does it pretty well, but I would love to have it in place. But if you've used the grammarly UI, I can also understand how hard that would be in VS code because they do. They like highlight everything in different colors and show you like, This many weird grammar things you should think about. This is passive. This is, and then they like make you upgrade to get the, like, we recommend different words and you don't get to know what they are unless you pay. So I can understand that they're trying to probably create a moat in this world of all the AI things that like you probably could pull off a DIY grammarly on your own and like an afternoon. So. CJ: Yeah. So for work, we're reading We've been doing these book clubs. I love these book clubs. They're that's like how we read the unreasonable hospitality. And so the one we're going through now is called smart brevity. And it's by, I think it's, yeah, it's by the people who made Axios and Politico but the idea is about trying to like, be very clear with your communication. And several of the chapters are basically sales pitches for Axios HQ, which is their like smart brevity AI. Whatever thing that tries to re word chunks of text into their recommended framework and in order to be like more yeah, more concise and brief, which I think is definitely relevant for technical writing, especially when you're trying to like organize thoughts and be. Very direct and concise, especially for working with impatient, discerning developers. I, the book is great. It's got a bunch of tips and tricks, but yeah, I would say several of the chapters are just like pitching this smart brevity thing, but it definitely comes to mind that in order to communicate effectively, we're going to have this embedded. You know, like LLM tools embedded in every single input box that we encounter. And so how do we make it the best, smoothest experience ever? Whether you're writing a doc or you're writing, you know, a new feature for an application. And yeah, like the, the IDEs have all this built in to highlight stuff, different colors, or show you warnings or show you different things. Maybe the limitation for Grammarly was like, how do we make people pay for this? But Colin: I mean, they've been around for a while, so it probably was. I think we knew someone at Grandmama. I might have to reach out and find out what the deal was. I think we know a devrel that was there. The smart brevity thing reminds me of like the opposite of what we're seeing with the generated copy. Cause like apparently kids can't, and are only writing essays by using this now. And so I had a friend who was applying to YC and they sent, had me read over their answers. And I was like, this just feels icky. Like, did you use AI on this? Like, this doesn't feel like a human talking to a human. And. I think too many people are using it as that crutch. Like, the Grammarly one is really good at not doing that. And I actually would be curious to take some purely generated chat GPT and just drop it into Grammarly to see what Grammarly says about it. Because I think somewhere along the line people thought that putting in 20 to 5 words was a good thing, right? Like you're in college and you need to pad that essay to get to your word count. That's one thing, but we just, I don't think people want to be talked to with these like very weird, strange just like slightly off word choice where like, yeah, maybe that was technically correct, but like, we don't talk like that. And when I was training the docs on it, it was pretty good. I don't know that it was necessarily answering in the style of our, the writing of our docs, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was because it felt like the docs, it didn't feel like this other thing came in and was like, you must proceed this way and use caution and code passionately. Like there's always these like weird words where they're like, like, Oh, you're gonna have so much fun doing this. I was like, no one is going to be like, Oh, I, I sent this email passionately. It's like, that was the wrong word there. CJ: Yeah. Colin: yeah. CJ: Yeah. Just, yeah. Figuring out the training data set. That's not just like the entire opus of the internet as your input is important. And so like, yeah. Training on other. Material that's similar to what you want to create is like super important. I was just Googling like, what are the open source models that you would use to rebuild Grammarly? And it looks like there are several from like Mistral and others that you could take and yeah, mess around with. So yeah, I don't know. I definitely. That feels like the next step in, in my learning at least is like, how do we take a model and then like, not just fine tune it, but like adjust it to make it do a very specific job, much better. So, I, let's Colin: think that's where everyone's trying to get general purpose AI, right? They want general intelligence, but turns out that's hard. It's ethically fraught versus having your own like thing, right? Like, honestly, even if you just had your own personal AI, that was like followed you, like literally knew all the things you've ever done in all of your companies. You know, the, the, a very specific set of skills that you've developed over a long career. And. Then you, it, it's like just able to pull up things and it knows like, yeah, it, what would CJ do? Right. And not necessarily anticipate and do it for you, but help you along the way. It's, it's your, it's your exo suit. Yeah. Are you using anything else, like in, like you mentioned email and some other things. Are you using AI in other parts of, of your day-to-Day, or is it just code? CJ: embeddings for just like a lot of semantic search type stuff. For features I've been using tools like or function calling for generating content for a couple of things. But yeah, like day to day, a lot of it is just like, the, or like the most impactful stuff is definitely editing for code. We added that feature that's just like type to complete for our sales team to do customer engagement based on like the full customer context. That's been running now for like a month. And I looked and it's quite expensive. Every single time we're making a call, we're sending like a pretty giant prompt because it embeds like the full list of frequently asked questions and previous conversation and all the history of that customer. And so it, yeah, I think we'll have to get more creative with that eventually, but try to think of other, other use cases playing around, there was like that teal draw. Tool where you could kind of like enter stuff. Yeah, I mean, I guess music just like Descript for editing, like yeah. I tried generating some like music tracks for backgrounds. So yeah, things, I guess, like on the next, definitely like the next frontier is like, how do you make it, Specialized to you. Many good examples of that. Like, how do you train stable, a stable diffusion model that looks, that can generate photos that look like you, how can you train an 11 labs voice model, or like, how can you train a voice model that sounds like you, how can you train something to write a blog post? That sounds like you wrote it. How do you train something that it's just Ruby and rails? So yeah, that, that definitely feels like The next rabbit hole worth jumping down. So, Mm. Colin: Yeah, I've been thinking about, I don't know how to put the words around it yet, but there's this, like, those are all aids in creating something at the end of the day that someone wants to listen to or wants to watch or wants to learn from. CJ: Mm. Colin: feels like a dumping ground of just AI generated garbage right now. But, like, there's a person specifically that I have in mind that has been doing these, like, CJ: Mm. Colin: they're definitely, I think, prompts. that they asked for like, Hey, give me some prompts that I can answer as LinkedIn posts. They're like thought leadership posts. Right. But they, so then they like do this, like waxing philosophical, like fucking question. We're getting our first leap in there. And then they generate an image with grok and it's like, okay, so you just created like this most, like lowest common denominator milk toast, like thing for people to consume. I had to unfollow them because I'm like, every time this pops up, it's like, It's a waste of my time. It's like literally no value. Some thought leadership in entrepreneurship or startups or we'll save founder mode, startup mode or whatever manager mode for another day. But like no adding to the conversation whatsoever. And then the image that you generated was this like, you know, guy in a field with five, you know, with five extra fingers. And it's just not, what anyone needed. Like, so, and everyone's doing it on LinkedIn. They're probably doing it on Twitter. You have probably had people who are like, Oh, I'll be your copywriter and they're going and generating a bunch of things and you know, sending you a bill for it. So that stuff that I'm just like trying to wrestle with, you know, is it just like that stuff? And people are going to ignore it, or is it really going to, you know, be something that we have to like, maybe it's just a fad. Cause I know people were generating images with mid journey for a long time. And then they're like, cool. There's only so many times we can do like pictures of your cat around space. Right. Before we start to try to use it for other things. I don't use a lot of image generation stuff just because it's like, I don't have It's not good usually like if I want I need art I need to go jump into figma and make some illustrations and stuff or work with a designer and have them make something from scratch because so that's that's been rolling around and I'm just like now that I see it I just unfollow or hide it or whatever but have you seen any of this stuff? CJ: Yeah, totally. And just, I think it was yesterday or today. I got a pop up from LinkedIn that said, you can, you know, Do do premium for 30 days or something and in the pitch for premium, it now says AI writing assistance and whatever. And so I'm like, I wonder if that's where it's coming from is like, maybe LinkedIn has some feature that's like actually making it so that people can more easily create that kind of content. And it also comes to mind too, that like, we've been trained that putting a picture in your post will make your post more likely to like get attention. And so if people don't have a good picture, they're just making shit up with like, you know, or they're, yeah, they're generating it. And Colin: Yeah, but it's like shovelware, like they're just putting stuff out to, to try to build their brand or whatever. And it's like, you're just building this one. Like you did not do anything of talent or skill, which I do think that there is going to be this diff of people who can and people who have to prompt for sure. Like it's going to happen. And if you're an engineer out there, you're relying on these tools, make sure you can still do it without it, because I'm pretty sure Pretty sure that like when we do interviews, we do not allow you to use AI in your interviews. So if you are coming out of a bootcamp and you used AI to get through your bootcamp, turn it off, make sure you do it. I think you and I both are used to like doing the same thing over and over again until it just becomes a thing we can do. Right? Like we're prompting ourselves into like, all right, build this, build it again, delete it, build it again. until you really know it. And it's okay if you don't need to touch that for a long time to come back to it and refresh or ask chatgbt to prompt you on like, how do you do that again? Like, most people don't do a lot every day and couldn't rebuild it from scratch. And that's okay. But knowing how it works is a good idea. CJ: Yeah. Definitely. From using Cursor and saying like, generate this feature for me. And having it only work like one in three ish, I don't know, maybe, maybe the hit rate is one in three where it generates something. I'm like, yeah. Like, let's accept that. That seems legit. That makes me a little bit nervous for people who are like, I don't really know how to code, but I built this thing 'cause I used Cursor and, you know, I, I just prompted my way through it. I'm like, yeah, cool. Like, Colin: one to accept? CJ: Exactly. Yeah. They're just like, that looks good. You know, maybe they try to run it and they're like, I ran into an error. Copy paste the error. Oh yeah, you're right. Change it to this thing. And then you end up with in the same way that it's not fun to read AI generated text. It probably will be very hard to maintain an AI generated application. And so I dunno, there there's, I don't want to poo it too much. Cause I guess like, if you are using it as a way to like build a business and you don't actually care about the underlying tech, that's cool. Right. Colin: It is, yeah. And I think that's, Josh Pickford and some others have been having that conversation of there's definitely some purists who are thinking of coding as craft versus coding as a result. And Josh wants what's on the other side of the code. The code allows him to build a business, to build a family, you know, a life for his family. Yes, he wants it to be good code. Yes, whatever. But he's not going to be over here fighting some like language semantic wars because he wants to ship a product and make number go up, right? That's, that's his goal. And he wants to solve problems, right? He builds lots of apps to solve his problems. He makes those solutions. People want them. He charges for them. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the code was, right? As long as it works. So, CJ: Yeah, I think that was like the big takeaway from the Peter levels argument too, is like, he's using PHP and jQuery. That's what he knew. And like, Colin: react people are so angry. CJ: yeah, I mean, yeah, that's, I don't know, it's, it's funny to think about, but yeah, trying to keep a laser focus on growing the business or yeah, growing your own sidekick or your own sidekick, growing your own side hustle. Like all of that is really Yeah. It doesn't really matter what, what the code looks like. If people are just looking at the interface, so Colin: Cool. Should we leave it there? CJ: Yeah, totally. If you want to check out the links to the resources for stuff we chatted about today, head over to build and learn. dev and yeah, we'll catch you next time. Colin: Bye friends. All audio, artwork, episode descriptions and notes are property of CJ Avilla, Colin Loretz, for Build and Learn, and published with permission by Transistor, Inc. [**Broadcast by**](https://transistor.fm "Broadcast by Transistor.fm") --- [Back to all podcasts](https://www.cjav.dev/podcasts) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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