Matt: Mark Szymanski, welcome back to the WP Minute.
Mark: Uncle Matt, it's always a pleasure to be here.
Thank you so much.
It's been a while, but we're back.
It has
Matt: been a while.
you know, there's, Today's topic, we're gonna be talking, hopefully, a little
bit about, AI, and, my exploration with coding, with AI, like getting
a little bit more serious about it.
I saw you put out a video, I almost trolled you on that video, I'll save that.
for a later conversation.
That's how you put out a video using AI to code a plugin.
So I'm excited to hear more about that.
And of course I'll link it up in the show notes.
but, 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, maybe even more so.
And, 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.
Mark: It's always great.
Always great to chat with you, brother.
yeah, I mean, Well, I just want to say right off the top, I know we were talking
in the green room before this, that you, I've only known you for, I think,
I can't remember what our anniversary is, knowing each other, but it's been
a year or very, just around a year, and you've gone in that time from completely
dis, complete disdain for AI, to now realizing that it's, it's coming, it's,
it's here, 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, I
Matt: feel like a senior developer, but the code output is probably abysmal.
Mark: we definitely need to dig into that.
Yeah, we definitely need to dig into that.
Matt: So let's talk about, sort of giving up the reins to AI and like where, where
my thoughts are, you know, these days, I still think it's just, a really good
assistant right now it is replicating.
So I've been using it.
Claude, I've been using Claude largely over the last, I don't know, six months.
I generally, it's how I shape a lot of my show notes, for the podcast
episodes that I put out really, that's what I use it for mostly.
and, it's been fine for that, right?
It's, it's been okay for that.
these are things that are, you know, low value.
you know, I, I just need concise, I need speed and efficiency and that's where,
you know, Claude and it's recent iteration of, it's, LLM has been really great 3.
5 or whatever it was.
And, and the.
As of this recording.
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, throwing a spreadsheet at
it and asking it certain questions, 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.
For me, and fast forward six months, 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, 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 I don't, 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.
which I think anyone taking it serious, will know that.
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, 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, 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.
does that make sense?
Like, I feel like it's still not there to like, just completely
solve the world's problems.
Mark: That is a really good example of probably where I would say most of the
world is with these tools right now.
I want to make some quick disclaimers and maybe just kind of continue
to set the scene a little bit.
The first disclaimer that I'm gonna make, I think I can speak for both of
us when We say that we don't know how this stuff works technically at all.
we can, we can pseudo describe how it works, right?
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.
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, 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, in, as of November of 2024, Claude Chachi BT Gemini.
There's a ton of other ones obviously out there.
None of them are, this is I think the big part and what you're
kind of describing the beginning.
They're not magic.
They're not mind readers.
They're not, independent like thinkers in any way.
They are literally just assistance for the most part.
The best way that in the way that 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, 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 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, like a few years ago max, so we are extremely early to this.
And, that's why, that's why I'm making some of the content, because
I know this is where it's headed.
Like, we're just going to keep getting crazier with this.
Matt: Yeah, I was having a conversation with my brother.
Who's been using chat GPT, for a little while.
And he uses it much more for, coding stuff.
And I talked to him a couple of weeks ago about this.
And, you know, he was saying like, Hey man, this is, you know, change in the
world, 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 other sites.
and I agree with him.
But I think at the top of this stuff, I feel like we're in the, the housing
bubble, or like, 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, and, inevitably, there'll be some, like,
some major corporation needs to win.
As it always does.
And we're going to 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, I don't use Gemini or anything else really.
But those two are just going to be like, All right, 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?
Or you're just not gonna get all this new cool shit that you're getting now
for 20 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 and can you afford to use it?
I think is is is where we're headed.
It's not gonna be like this commodity like we're like we're
accessing today I mean could be wrong, but that's the way I see it
Mark: Could be, I wish I knew who it was and if I find the video
again, we can link it below.
But there was a video, it was just a short, like a one or two, three
minute video where this guy was saying that around the time that
OpenAI, did they go private or public?
I can't, whatever they did there.
They had like a weird non
Matt: profit at one point.
Yeah.
Sort Mullenweg
Mark: and automatic stuff, like you're just like, what?
Yeah, what happened there?
but so, Around that time, somebody was, 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 chat GPT, 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, 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 and 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.
Bing.
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, 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, you know, showed like the, 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.
I, that's when the world's really going to change.
Like, cause everybody's going to see that.
Like when you see robots walking around and things, it's like
literally I robot from that Will Smith movie, that's going to be wild.
But,
Matt: Yeah, it doesn't it.
Yeah, I agree.
And I think we're we're missing this layer right now.
And I want to talk about our experiences like coding in a moment, but we're
missing this like connected layer.
So like, what would AI be really great for?
Well, I want it to look at my to do list.
I want it to prioritize it based on like what I've prioritized in the past.
I want it to, you know, recommend what my next steps are, right.
To improve my productivity, right.
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 then you're just siloed into one.
Mark: Let me stop you there for a second though.
Do you, first question, and then there's a follow up.
Do you think it can't do that right now?
Do you believe that it can't, like from your experience?
Or do you believe that you just don't have the tooling or
you don't, I just don't think
Matt: that I don't think that tooling exists.
Like I don't want to give up my to do list app.
I want it to work with it.
And you know, we've seen some of these things like, I don't know
if folks are just listening, I'll, I'll try to find it and link it
up, but I know Claude launched.
some new experimental thing, I don't think it's generally available yet,
but it'll control your computer to do things like that's getting to the
next level where like, yeah, okay, so now I can tell Claude, Hey, you know,
prune my to do list to open up my email and start responding to that stuff.
But I still think that's so far away.
And then do you really trust.
But back to that human interaction layer, like, do you trust the code
that you're deploying to your server?
Like you're gonna spot check it before you do that.
and are you going to trust it to manage your, your to do list?
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.
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, you know, because of these
efficiencies, 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 anyway, Let's just talk about our experiences with,
with coding and, 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.
It's a, it's more of like a tool for myself, but I want it to operate, as a web
app, 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
gonna get more serious about it.
Let me see if I can figure this stuff out because Claude 3.
5 came out and I heard it was great for coding.
So my first experience is just dump all these thoughts into Claude.
Here's the idea.
Here's what I want you to build.
I had some direction, I asked it a few things because I do have a sort
of a network operating background.
So I was like, let's compare this to running on an AWS stack
versus a CloudFlare stack.
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 end 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, 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, 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.
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 like, yeah, man,
give me more clarity because I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
So it would give me these answers and extend upon it.
But.
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, I could go to three or whatever, whatever it's called.
And then, but the answers were just so vastly different.
the experience was so different.
To like ask it 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.
Mark: No, yeah.
And if you, if you've, if you've tried Claude, I would recommend you take a
look at it, but what Matt's describing there, what you're describing, yeah, it's,
it's entirely, it's entirely like that.
So I made a couple of videos, maybe two months ago at this point where I
was just diving into this concept of literally maybe my first times using
Claude and trying to code when I did that.
I had that exact same experience that you had.
I was like.
What the fuck?
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.
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 main piece.
What I've learned from my second go around with this video that I just posted
today as recording this, it's like an hour and a half long video 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 is me literally.
In Claude, 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 prompt it 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, artifacts, feature things, so you can kinda 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.
That's what I was doing
Matt: too.
I was just, this
Mark: is what I mean.
Like you have to be the senior developer and it's the junior developer.
Like you're still working, you're just guiding it and
it's doing a lot of this stuff.
So that's one, that's one thought in my mind.
we can talk about like, you know, is the code good or not?
I think that if you're doing something relatively ubiquitous, it's going to
be pretty good because it's not, unless it's hallucinating, which I don't know.
Hopefully you can kind of tell maybe sometimes, but I don't know.
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 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 they're, 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.
Because 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, you can create that, your own little
segmented thing there, then now you've added more information to it, kind
of 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 that's been my experience a couple little tips that
i've found so far in my short journey.
Matt: Yeah, I started I Purposely started in a project like when I got
more serious about building this app.
I started in a cloud project and I I I still find it lacking in You
it, especially when you hit, I have to just get better at understanding
like how the, how this stuff works.
But if you start a chat, let's say with 3.
5, sonnet, I believe is what it's called.
Yeah.
Sonnet.
which is there at this point, they're most advanced, that is
accessible to average users.
You start that chat, you start, you know, going down the road of like, okay, build
me this, this script and, 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.
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 saw on it, 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, 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.
Or 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 and 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 the name, because it gives it a name, or you can actually tell it, give
it this name, and you try to reference it, it still has no freaking idea.
Which is one of like the 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 the, 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, 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.
it's vastly different.
And, 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.
let's see if I can pull it up really quick.
There's instructions I think you can set.
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'd 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.
You know, 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 these sections.
And I'm like, fuck, I don't even know, where do I find this section,
you know, where the hell is that at?
So, I'm trying to say, look, 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.
Mark: Yeah, I mean, again, I've had similar things, and it probably, it
sounds like what you're trying to achieve is probably more, more robust and more
advanced than what I was trying to achieve in that video, specifically.
But really, that was like building a I think that maybe had maybe seven files,
eight files or something like that.
so I'm not sure if there's more, if there's more to it, but I mean, if you
have more functionality than your files are just getting bigger, it's more tokens.
It's more decisions.
It's more features.
It's all that sort of stuff.
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
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, CPT and Gemini to certain cases.
Like I have a laundry list of things now, just the past two months that I've
used this stuff for that has actually made a difference, I would All of my
workflows and my just thought processes and the way that I work on things.
Matt: let me just wrap up on some of this coding stuff.
Cause the, so then, so what happened next is like, here's the things I don't know.
I'm way out of my league on, on, on what I'm coding, right?
It's, it's pure JavaScript, you know?
I mean, I'm actually, I can understand some of it now, right?
Because I've literally been neck deep in it and it's actually a great education
process, sort of like reminds me of.
learning WordPress all over again, which is cool, but way out of my league
in terms of like what it's developing.
So I found, an app called cursor.
Have you run into this?
I've
Mark: heard of it.
I haven't used it yet
Matt: because when I was coding, like when I initially started this
project, I'm like, I got to start like a whole local development environment.
I haven't done that in years.
And when I did it for WordPress, WordPress is so easy.
Like it's so, you know, I guess it's the good and bad of
WordPress because it's so archaic.
It's my SQL, PHP and HTML, right?
And CSS and of course now JavaScript, but the essence of it is like you can get a
local environment up pretty damn easy.
Whereas with like this stuff.
Yeah, 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.
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?
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 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, 48 hours of like trying to just figure out how to deploy this to cloud
flare is the problem with cloud flare.
I don't know.
Is a problem with my code probably.
Right.
So there's all this stuff happening.
And, 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 directly with Claude.
And the magic is it's not your tokens.
It's their tokens.
So I could 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, you know, give me another update.
And that has solved it dramatically.
And basically what it has stopped, what it has allowed me to do is in, in cursor.
Now this is 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 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.
It's 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 prompting.
I'm coding.
This is the way that I see it is.
I'm the guy with the idea.
We're working together on this.
It's a partnership.
me, Claude, and, and Cursor.
And I finally got to a point where I've, I've launched the app.
It's the very basic iterations of it are, are working.
but Cursor is really the thing that made me, you know, turn the, turn
the corner, which has allowed me to.
Now I use, so instead of like, working with like some of like the real inside,
like if a big issue comes up, right, like, 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 got this tiny
little window, literally, 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 it was, 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, 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 going to be funny.
Okay.
All I have to say is WordPress is in trouble.
Mark: Oh, WordPress is in trouble.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
man, people are gonna be so mad about this.
no,
Matt: it does help me really appreciate.
Like what wordpress has like really like even like I'm looking at it now, and
I'm like holy shit There's a lot of like legacy stuff here, and I can understand
why people who are on the cutting edge look at wordpress and go That's a joke
like look at that dinosaur over there, but at the same time as an end user Like,
imagine trying to do, like, imagine, Oh yeah, AI's gonna change all this stuff.
You can just make your own WordPress.
Ain't gonna happen.
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.
Mark: I got a lot of thoughts.
The first one I have to say, though, is that I didn't realize
it, It took less than a year.
It took a week for you to be completely bullish on AI and be
like literally a senior developer.
That's amazing.
I don't know if anybody's ever done that in a week.
I'm gonna quickly go
Matt: back to the CEO level in a moment, but I'm just like,
you know, once I figure it out.
Smart, smart.
Mark: Yeah.
Yeah, the one random question that I have that I don't know if we can really
answer, but it would be good to get other people from the community to
answer this is, We are not developers.
I wouldn't classify myself.
I don't think you'd classify yourself as developers, right?
Like we know code here and there, just from being around, 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 seeing 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 because that's
Matt: where the biggest wins are for sure.
Yeah.
Mark: You know what I mean?
So it's like, the thing is, it's not like only we have these
tools, they have the tools too.
So they're not in trouble or anything like that.
I don't think that by any means.
and they still know what they're doing.
So it's like they can go faster and they know what they're doing.
So it's like, if they run into the problems that you're having
and I'm having, then it's like, Oh, I know exactly what to do.
Boom, boom, boom.
I know exactly what to tell it to do, dah, dah, dah.
And, and they're off to the races.
Yeah.
Matt: I think that's where cursor is supposed to really win.
I'm using it from a, I'm using it from.
like it's chat features I feel like are supposed to be just an
assist literally, whereas I'm using it to code the whole thing.
They, 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 going to come next.
Mark: Oh wow.
Matt: So.
I don't even know what I'm doing, so I'm asking it to write stuff for me, and then
that's what I'm, that's how I'm using it.
Whereas like, man, if you know what you're doing, this thing is, you know, puts
you on Mach 10, and then if you really have a question, then you can ask AI.
So, yeah, like, it really helps that kind of person for sure.
Mark: Yeah, I mean, just in general with the coding stuff, I love that
these tools are available, it's awesome that they're available to anybody.
I'm sure some people are going to be like, Well, you shouldn't
be coding your own stuff.
It's like, I mean, I don't know if you want to play around
and you understand the risks.
Like, in that video I say, like, I'll give you guys this code, but
do not, do not hold me liable.
Like, this is your own, you know, use it your own risk.
Like, it's, 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, we can get so much further so much faster.
Us and people doing this professionally.
It's, it's pretty, it's pretty insane.
Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
So how, what other areas are you using it in outside of content or coding?
Mark: Yeah.
So the other area would be like, so we're not coders, right?
Like we said, but we are content creators.
And I think that like you and I are probably similar,
we're similar in that realm.
So it's like, we know ways and we know the hangups and the limitations that creating
content, like of creating content.
Right.
We don't really know the software side.
So if we switch to this content side, it's like.
How, how, how, how can we possibly speed this up?
So I'm going to 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.
And ChatGPT, I tried to do this with ChatGPT, but a
while ago, 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 for how it wants to do.
That saves a shit ton of time, if you were gonna 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 could 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 a X cause it, cause I think Grok uses flux, which
is probably like one of the best image generator generative things now, one
of them 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, and it's, I don't know.
Matt: Yeah, I mean, as an assist, it definitely helps.
it still hasn't ever really knocked it out of the park for
me for, for titles and stuff.
I think it's still very baseline, but it does bring in, Like a different
perspective and what I'll do is like ask like here's my here's the type of viewer.
I'm hoping to To watch this video Whatever.
It might be freelancer WordPress beginner or whatever It might be the keyword is
and then like what would appeal to them 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 our keywords for this Yeah, all that stuff you know,
works great for the chapters, because I use Descript, Descript just has
chapters, a chapter thing built right in.
So you just click it and it's still all AI chat GPT driven.
But, you know, I've always found it to be a little bit more accurate because
it has the whole video file, and it just, whatever, just does a better job.
but, yeah, often I'll use, I'll use that and I use whisper AI as a, I
think it only runs on Mac though.
so Whisper AI, or Whisper Transcription is what it's called.
on Mac.
It's a Mac app.
And, you can just drop in your video or, MP3 file, or 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.
I'll use that from time to time.
Mark: Yeah, the other thing I try to do, if you haven't done it,
As much recently as I take the transcription because it's not great.
I mean, maybe Descript already does this, but the transcript
isn't great from YouTube.
like it's the words, but it's not formatted well.
So like the idea would be to take that text and put it on your website.
So you could index that text.
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.
yeah, there's a, there's a lot of trying to think of anything else
that I've, that I've tried to, 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.
but, Yeah, I don't know this is all kind of like very interesting and
slightly kind of concerning at the same time because 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 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 the Video data we have of ourselves and then all the
any LLM stuff that we've put together So it's gonna it is gonna get weird.
I'm just hoping it doesn't get weird super soon or we could at least
capitalize on it It's a lot of stuff.
Matt: So are you still gonna build out that that plug in and
continue like making plugins?
For like sites that you're building out like what's the
future for developing plugins?
Mark: I mean, so that one specifically was, I was trying to
create a automated via the YouTube API, just like automatically
know when I'm live on my website.
And I just created like custom it's an, it checks the YouTube API.
It says, are you live or not?
It gives a couple pieces of data that it pulls in, like the YouTube URL.
And stuff like that.
And then it, it can, it integrates specifically with bricks to like use
all those things with dynamic tags and conditions works great, perfect.
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,
because 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 quad 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, 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, this is one of the things I don't
like about quad 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, cause
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.
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah.
it's, it's certainly.
you know, some, it's many different ways, you know, to, to use it.
I was also thinking too, like while I was.
Using cursor, I'd be like, man, if I could just talk to this thing, which
it probably even has, I don't, I don't know if I could just like talk to this
and, and explain what I, what I want.
but I still have a lot of like uncertainty on, you know, what,
what the answers are going to be.
even from a, you know, I don't know.
I like to see a ton of options.
I don't mind sifting through it as long as that the options I have are, are, are
close to, you know, giving me the answer.
You know, argue if Google even still does that anymore.
I don't know.
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, only because Kevin Rose, from Dignation, he has, he's, 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, if you were on his email list.
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 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.
I mean, it's a cool interface, and I'm sure it's like, if I was doing more, it
would give me some feedback, better stuff.
But once again, I'm just like, I'm not, I haven't tapped in to
the full potential of this stuff.
you know, effectively, I feel like I'm just getting started,
but that's where that is.
Mark: we're all just getting started, Matt.
You know, it's kind of early.
I'll just getting started
Matt: and we're all just on the way out all at the same time.
Mark: You know, I, that is a larger, larger topic.
and I don't, I'm sure this has already happened though, kind of in history
and waves, obviously not AI related, but again, like with so many other
things, I think we're just going to have to continue to, I think that if
we're talking about this now, we are perhaps potentially the best position.
So I'm trying to get more people, you know, like just from this type of content,
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 You know continue to
try to innovate and do other things.
So I don't know.
It's going to be interesting though.
Regardless.
Yeah, we'll see what we'll see what the future holds with With all of this.
It's
Matt: the WP Minute.
The WP Minute dot com slash subscribe.
Still not powered by AI yet.
Yet.
Yes.
Maybe.
Someday.
hit that hit that newsletter.
I've I think I mentioned this to you a couple weeks ago.
I switched over to ConvertKit.
It's going to be kit.
Is it, has it already?
Excuse me.
Sorry.
It's just, it's just kit now.
That's right.
It's just kit, kit.
com.
one, because this is a semi tangent to what we're talking about today, but,
you know, everything that happened with WordPress and, 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?
and yeah, I was running on MailChimp for a while.
It was fine.
I never really loved like making the newsletters there but I switched to 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 I was like, yeah, you know i'll use it.
We got a new add on for it for gravity forms You and so far, so good.
consolidated two MailChimp accounts.
It was a little bit of a pain in the neck.
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 consolidate into one and it flagged a bunch of stuff.
but crafting the templates there.
Much easier, 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?
Mark: just trying to double, triple, quadruple down on content on YouTube.
You can just go to mjs.
bio.
You can sign up for my newsletter.
All my social links and everything like that are there.
Just trying to provide as much value as possible to you guys.
So appreciate it.
Matt: Awesome stuff.
Thanks for watching everybody.
See you.
Or you'll hear us in the next episode.