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This week in home building news! Catch up with Az and a colourful array of guests, to hear about who's killing it, who's innovating, and who's getting into strife in the world of new home construction.
Az (00:00)
Quick question, where did all the prompt engineers go? Two years ago it was gonna be the six, seven figure job of the future. You had blokes on Instagram and LinkedIn with courses everywhere talking about how to prompt chat properly, how to prompt Claude properly. They even called themselves the AI Whisperers. And then a new breed came along, the ones with the Mac Minis.
There were people that were genuinely out there selling Mac Minis to run all your agent modes. Mac mini sales went through the roof. Everyone was building their own little agents right next to the drop saw. And now the only thing those Mac Minis are doing are playing Spotify. And it wasn't because AI is a fad. It's because all of that stuff is now built right into the platforms that you are paying for and you may only be using 10% of.
So today we're going to take you through a few things, four things actually, that will probably help your week. No, I actually know will help your week, and I would have a shot at implementing them this week because we love to do this for you on a Monday, give you something that you can have a look at for the week. So we've got a lot to talk about, and I better get into it.
Now the first thing we're going to talk about is in reference to those little Mac mini things where everyone was building agents, and it is called agent mode. So agent mode.
Is basically like you can go and tell your platform ChatGPT or Claude is what I'm going talk about today. And they actually have it built in. So in Claude, it's called co-work. In ChatGPT, it's called agent mode. And you can give it a job with files and all, and it'll go away and complete it in a bit of time with multiple steps from start to finish. And here's one that we've talked to a few builders out there about, and that's your spec versus quote check. So before you sign your next contract.
Especially if it's a fixed price contract, drop in the architect spec, end your quote, and ask it one question and ask it to produce a file or spreadsheet or something that it can output for you, which is what is in the spec that isn't priced in my quote. And that's it. That's the question. Get it to put it out in a bit of a summary doc. you can get it to do an email out to whoever it needs to go to. You can put it in a spreadsheet.
And it'll go away and do it. Because we all know the spec could be 90 pages, your estimate is flat out, and somewhere in between 14 grand worth of stuff will never get priced, and you only find out 18 weeks into the build. and the same move works in reverse on tenders. Rank these three by risk to me, their payment terms, liquidated damages, anything unusual buried in these conditions.
Give me a spreadsheet, give me a summary, give me something that I can distribute to my team to make sure we're making the right decision here. It is just like that. It'll go away and do those things for you in multiple steps and then produce multiple things for you. So that's the first thing, and that is agent mode. And we use it here at the Good Builder, and it is pretty cool. And speaking of something else we use at The Good Builder, this is one that I particularly love, and it is called Schedule Tasks.
And just like the way it sounds, on both ChatGPT and Claude, you can tell AI to run a job on repeat. So one example for me is at 5 a.m. every morning, I've got a scheduled task that goes out and it collects all the major media outlet news in regard to construction. And we go and sift through it and see what is actually of importance to you guys and how we can shape it.
To make sure that you get the right information and education out of it. the other thing that it can do is check drives. So, for example, if we have a new podcast that drops into a drive, we can get it to write a bit of a summary about us and some of the key points that we might find interesting and ask that guest about. So there's a whole heap of things that you can do. The other cool thing that we do, and I think would be a really good one for you out there, is
We run a scheduled task at Monday at 6 a.m. every morning, or at least I do, which is around checking the DAs in the local council areas that we want to have a look at. So every morning, well, every Monday at 6 a.m., it goes and opens up, finds all the DAs, and then puts it in a spreadsheet for me without me actually putting it in there every week. So it is a very cool feature scheduled task, and I'm sure there's a lot.
That it can do for you out there. The third one, which is really cool and I've seen in action, and I've done a little bit on the socials. We'll put a bunch of this on socials, is image and video generation. And pretty much all of them can do it now and do it really well. There's a whole segment on Claude called Claude Design, and that is freaking amazing. And I might talk about that in another episode. But for now, you can image and video generate to your heart's content.
in a scarily good fashion now on both platforms.
good example is that you're sitting at the kitchen table with your future clients and you're talking about Skillion and Gable Roofs and they can't picture it. So you put in the design they've chosen or they like and you show them the two variations if you don't have a render of it. It does a scarily good job. And I've tried it on several of you builders out there. I will not put them out in public, but you can do some pretty amazing things in regards to that. Now the other hard rule is don't
Put AI generated images out as your finished work, not on the feed, not on the website, not fake completed project shots. Use it practically, use it as examples. You can use it to show example designs and things like that. I think people are very, very attuned and and used to that, but I wouldn't use it to produce finished work and kind of pay it off as your own. That's one thing.
Because it's all about trust and people can tell. People are pretty good at it. So images and video and the video is pretty wild, especially there's another platform you probably know of, which you see all over Google anyway when you do a Google search and match Gemini, and they do some pretty cool videos. So when I'm having a bit of fun on the good builder socials,
You'll see some of my Gemini generated videos when I'm having a bit of fun there. So they are quite cool. Now, the fourth thing which ties it really all together, and something that the prompt engineers didn't really like because you do one step and it will kind of help you out with all of that is memories and projects. Now, you set it up once, it'll sound like you forever, or do whatever it needs to do forever.
And what it is is both platforms can now remember your business between conversations and let you set up projects, which is basically a folder. You'll see them in the sidebar on the left-hand sidebar of both Claude and ChatGPT, where you can load all your standard stuff in, and every conversation in it already knows your business and what it's meant to do. So it could be a client comms project, for example, that you set up.
You chuck in the five emails that you've actually written. one about delivering a delay, one about chasing a payment, one about handling a complaint, and a couple of really good ones around responding to some really cool feedback. Now every draft that comes out of that project will be exactly like your branch would speak. And you can use it and add people in.
So if you have multiple people across your team and they don't know what to really put into an email, this can help structure how you respond to a client and make sure that the responses are always on the mark every single time.
The other thing you can do, and a very simple one, and I know we've spoken about it before, but you could put together a social media project folder where you just dump in what happened for the week and it can spit out multiple posts that sound like you,
That are really highly engaging and that you don't have to pay about $3,000 per month for an agency to do. And combined with the design stuff there, you can get the tiles designed as well. And that is why we're kind of showing you these four elements of AI today. All right. Well, they are the four things, as I said, that you can now do in AI pretty much for your subscription.
That are gonna help you greatly. We're gonna put up a few videos on social to show you how to use all four and do articles as we always do. We hope this has been really helpful for you. So, for all of you out there that are using Mac minis as paperweights, pick one of
these little segments of the platforms we talked about today. Try it, see how it works for you. And if you've got any questions, always come back to us here at The Good Builder. We're always happy to help. And we hope you have a great start to the week.
We've got another huge week coming on. So stay tuned. We're always trying to deliver the best stuff to you and share this round to a trade, to a builder, to a supplier, to anyone that you might think it's helpful. We are passionate about getting our news out there. Thank you for listening and we'll catch you later in the week.