I Built an AI Coworker That Runs 90% of My Day

Show Notes

Sterling Chin stopped thinking of AI as a tool and started treating it like a junior employee. Onboarded it with context, corrected its mistakes, and gave it writing rules.

Forty days later, MARVIN was handling 90% of his workday.

In this episode of Chain of Thought, Sterling (Applied AI Engineer and Senior Developer Advocate at Postman) walks through live demos of MARVIN, his personal AI assistant built on Claude Code. From pulling meeting transcripts and updating Jira tickets to drafting blog posts and managing his calendar, MARVIN runs as a full-time AI chief of staff.

We cover:

• How MARVIN bookends Sterling's workday from first login to the end of the day
• Personality, sub-agents, and writing rules that make MARVIN an effective co-worker
• Automating meeting notes to Jira tickets
• Why DIY assistants outperform big tech alternatives
• How Sterling onboarded 12+ colleagues at Postman, including non-technical knowledge workers
• What the compute crunch means for open source AI

Connect with Sterling:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sterlingchin/
• Twitter/X: https://x.com/SilverJaw82
• MARVIN Template: https://github.com/SterlingChin/marvin-template

Connect with Conor:

• Newsletter:⁠ ⁠https://conorbronsdon.substack.com/
• Twitter/X:⁠ https://x.com/ConorBronsdon⁠
• LinkedIn:⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon
• YouTube:⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@ConorBronsdon⁠⁠

🔗 More episodes:⁠⁠ https://chainofthought.show⁠⁠

Timestamps:

(0:00) Intro

(0:28) Meet Sterling Chin and the MARVIN AI Assistant

(9:10) Live Demo: How MARVIN Bookends Your Workday

(16:04) Personality, Sub-Agents, and Writing Rules

(22:00) Automating Meeting Notes to Jira Tickets

(29:30) Why DIY AI Assistants Outperform Big Tech

(40:55) Treat Your AI Like a Junior Employee

(46:41) How to Get Started with MARVIN

(55:36) The Compute Crunch and Open Source Future

Thanks to Galileo — download their free 165-page guide to mastering multi-agent systems at galileo.ai/mastering-multi-agent-systems

What is Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering?

AI is reshaping infrastructure, strategy, and entire industries. Host Conor Bronsdon talks to the engineers, founders, and researchers building breakthrough AI systems about what it actually takes to ship AI in production, where the opportunities lie, and how leaders should think about the strategic bets ahead.

Chain of Thought translates technical depth into actionable insights for builders and decision-makers. New episodes bi-weekly.

Conor Bronsdon is an angel investor in AI and dev tools, Head of Technical Ecosystem at Modular, and previously led growth at AI startups Galileo and LinearB.

FINAL TRANSCRIPT
================
Speakers: Conor Bronsdon, Sterling Chin
Duration: 1:02:01
Total Words: 10904
Generated: 2026-03-03

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[0:00] Conor Bronsdon:
Folks, this episode format is going to be slightly different. If you have feedback, maybe you didn't finish the episode because it wasn't landing with you. Maybe you loved it. We would really, really appreciate hearing from you, whether that's on Substack, LinkedIn, X slash Twitter, Spotify comments, whatever the best way to reach us. There's so many different ways you use your preferred method. We'd love to hear from you so we can keep improving the show and its format.

[0:28] Conor Bronsdon:
Welcome back to Chain of Thought, everyone. I am your host, Connor Bronstein, head of technical ecosystem at Modular. And a quick thank you to our presenting sponsors, Galileo, for helping to make this episode happen. Today, I am joined by Sterling Chen. Sterling is taking us through his creation Marvin, a personal AI assistant that he has built. If you follow him on LinkedIn, where he is quite effusive and interesting, he has shared a lot of great insights already about it. And Sterling's background as an applied AI engineer and senior developer advocate at Postman is really coming to the fore with the directions that he's taken Marvin. And of course, if we're going to talk Marvin, we've got to talk Moltbot or OpenClaw, whatever they're calling it these days. Maybe it'll have changed by the time this episode comes out. Sterling, so great to see you. Super stoked to see Marvin and have you take a first spin.

[1:19] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah, dude, Connor, always good to see you. Thank you so much for having me and this is going to be a lot of fun. I'm really

[1:24] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Oh,

[1:24] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
excited to

[1:25] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
app.

[1:25] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
show off Marvin.

[1:25] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Come on. Of course, man. Of course. I want to do this. Yeah. I have a metaphysical question for you before we dive into the nitty gritty here.

[1:32] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Okay.

[1:32] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
So I said, I'm excited to see Marvin. Should I be saying I'm excited to meet Marvin? Do you think?

[1:40] Sterling Chin:
Yes.

[1:41] Conor Bronsdon:
Oh, okay.

[1:42] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I'll walk you through. I'll show you my personal Marvin. I use him for work, so there's not a lot of things I can show you. I'll give you the soul of him, and we'll have an interaction with him. I'll show you the template that I built that has been open sourced and I'll show you and actually, honestly, I'm happy to talk you through like, hey, what is my process? Because I actually

[2:08] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[2:08] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
just onboarded two more people at Postman onto Marvin. who are non-technical. So these are people who are knowledge workers, non-technical, who are starting to, who have said, hey, look, we know so-and-so is using him. We love, like, they love him. Can you help me on board? And so I'm going through the technical rigor of like, all right, let's get, let's get you using the terminal and cloud code and figure all that stuff. So yeah, I'm happy to, like, there's so many tangents, so many conversations

[2:36] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Oh,

[2:36] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
to have

[2:36] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
okay.

[2:36] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
today.

[2:37] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
My mind is just expanding here. This is great. So, and I love that we're doing this because we have started this series on Chain of Thought where we dive into how are AI assistants and agents being rolled out across various organizations? How are people using them in their day-to-day lives? And obviously, you know, I think Multbot has taken the majority of the attention in the last few weeks as it went mega viral. But

[3:01] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yep.

[3:01] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
like we talked to Andrew Jones at Block about how they're using Goose across technical and non-technical roles throughout Block's organization. Obviously, many of us are spinning up our own MCP servers or building cloud skills to enable ourselves, whether it's in cloud code or elsewhere. But what drove you to decide to build, hey, your own comprehensive personal system, Marvin?

[3:26] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah. Oh, so there's a little bit of a backstory here. So all of last year, right, we got Cloud Code. We're using, we were starting to see what he was capable of. And I imagined using, and with MCP, I imagined using Cloud Code as kind of a personal assistant. I've had this idea for a long time. Like I wrote the, my original, my original brainstorm on him was I think June of last year. Um, but what I realized is like, I started, so I started off by just building a lot of my own integrations. So it was, Hey, I need, like, these were all just my own personal little pieces of software, right? My own, my own SAS products that were just buried

[4:10] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Hey, I need

[4:10] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
or like,

[4:10] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
these metrics every month. Do it for

[4:12] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah. And, and I had all these different pieces of software all lying around on my machine. Right. They were like, Oh, well I need, I have a personal CRM. Like I don't want, I don't need, I don't need a Salesforce. I don't need even an audio.

[4:26] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
me.

[4:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I just want a personal CRM. So I'm like, Hey, I need to talk to Connor. It automatically pulls up like, where's Connor? What's he doing? And so I started building all these small integrations, and these are all individual pieces of like software that just existed. Then 4.6 came out. I'm sorry, four or five came out. Sorry. I should say Opus four or five came out in November and I found myself at Christmas at the holidays. Like I'm off for the last two weeks of the year and I'm just sitting on my, sitting on my butt doing nothing. Like for the first time, like, like, okay, now I can actually think about these things. And it's ironic that. Like open claw or like it was Claude Claude bought and mult bought now open claw, like,

[5:14] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I'm sincerely losing track.

[5:15] Sterling Chin:
I know it's open cloth for now until open AI like Susan or, or whatever, but like I, so I found myself just sitting at my desk or sitting, sitting at the house with the kids running around. And I, and I grabbed my laptop and I thought I'm going to brainstorm. Like I know how good four or five really is. I think there's something more that I could do with this and over the What really changed for me was the understanding that AI, LLMs, they use, they love structured content, structured data. So I've been a huge proponent of, I mean, if you see me on LinkedIn, I might, I have had posts where I might learn Markdown. Markdown is like Markdown was the key unlock for me that I went, Oh, something is here.

[6:05] Conor Bronsdon:
I think I write more in Markdown today than anything else just because I'm trying to enable agents to work on my behalf or I'm trying to structure information to go into an LLM for easy retrieval.

[6:16] Sterling Chin:
Yeah. I mean, I've, I've, I mean, if you've used Obsidian, yeah. And these, these are all things like I've been storing, you know, ideas in Markdown files on my machine. And so then it all kind of came together. I realized that if I could, like with 4.5 being as powerful as it was, knowing how good Markdown was and how token efficient Markdown is, and I thought, I bet you, I can build a, I bet you, I can build something here. And so out over the course of like three or four hours, I'm just sitting up here in my office and I put together like the first iteration of what Marvin was. And it was, and it was never meant to share externally. This was just. I don't know, no one else is doing this. I haven't seen it. I'm going to build it for myself. So I'm built it very purposeful for myself. Um, and he had, I said, Hey, I want you to have an attitude like you're Marvin. So Marvin, I'm a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy fan. So that's where Marvin comes in. Uh, he's a sardonic, sarcastic, pessimistic, all knowing robot. And it kind of worked. Um, so I built Marvin and said, OK, I've got all these other pieces of software that I've built. Like, let's analyze each one of them one by one. And can we bring this in and can I do something with it? So I built this was before agent teams came out. This was before plugins and all that. So. I built a skills,

[7:44] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
it was not proprietary, but I built a directory on my machine or directory in Marvin called skills. And that skills like, if I do this, this is the procedure, this is the workflow that we typically do. Like I've heard from mentors in the past, if you do anything twice, automate it. If you do something twice, automate it. So I thought, okay, let's start kind of cataloging a lot of my workflows. And I started doing this in Markdown with Cloud Code, like just back and forth, like brainstorming with me. And again, before I knew it, by the end of the holiday break, I came in to Jan, was it 5th when we were all coming back to the office? and I put Marvin to the test in a real-world environment. I've got Google Projects. I didn't even use MCP. These were all hard-coded because I'd already built a lot of these integrations on my own with the APIs that existed. So it was just, let's just build it and let's see what happened. After the first week, I went back and looked at what I accomplished. So let me, let me give you actually, um, I'm going to, well, Connor, I'm going to let you drive a little bit. When do you want me to show off Marvin? Like, like the,

[9:05] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Let's

[9:05] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
like

[9:05] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
kick

[9:05] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
how

[9:05] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
it off right

[9:06] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
he

[9:06] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
now, man.

[9:06] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
sits. Okay.

[9:07] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
You could do it the whole time and I'd be stoked.

[9:08] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Okay, so the idea of Marvin is that you bookend your day, okay? So I'm gonna, I'll share my screen. I bookend my day, I start my day with Marvin and I say, hey, there's a slash command called slash start. Again, this is before plugins, this is before all the stuff that, it's like, I know I could make custom slash commands. So I made a custom slash command that says slash start, that would kick off a series of, a series of bash commands that would go get my work email, it would go get my calendar, it would go get, like I have a state tree, a state file that keeps where I'm currently at at any given time. and then throughout the day I do my work and then at the end of the day I type slash end. I have a slash end command inside of Marvin.

[9:59] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
So Marvin's just running the whole time through air work

[10:01] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Marvin's

[10:01] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
day.

[10:01] Sterling Chin:
running all day. Like he, I mean, at this point he now runs. 90 plus percent of my day. Like I'm in Marvin. I don't like there, there are times where I, I don't even respond in Slack. I say, Hey, Bonnie or say, you know, Bonnie just sent me a Slack message. Can you respond? And he will spin up like playwright. He'll go in, send my,

[10:21] Conor Bronsdon:
Hmm.

[10:22] Sterling Chin:
send Bonnie a response in my, on my behalf. And I haven't done anything. I'm like sitting here, like I'm working. So let me show you Marvin. I keep talking about this. So the Marvin, you know what? I'm going to share my entire screen because I didn't go back and forth.

[10:40] Conor Bronsdon:
And as you're doing this,

[10:42] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[10:42] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I think an interesting point here is that it's not just you using Marvin in your workplace anymore either. It's spread

[10:47] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
No,

[10:48] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
to

[10:48] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
it

[10:48] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
your coworkers.

[10:49] Sterling Chin:
has spread to my coworkers. I've, um, I have a, we have a Marvin. So it started off with one of my colleagues using him. So, uh, yeah. Um, one of my colleagues was starting to use him. Uh, she's like, Hey, I really like what you're doing. I was like kind of bragging about it. And at the end of the first week, by the way, this is where it comes. This is where I realized I had something is at the end of the first week, I looked at my report and I had accomplished 190 line items. Like, like if you look on the screen now, you can see the screen, right?

[11:24] Conor Bronsdon:
Yeah.

[11:24] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Okay, so I have on the right side here, I have my reports. And these reports right here on the right are my weekend reports. And it takes every session that I've done. So I track days are a session, and it takes the last five sessions, smartly, it looks at it and then says, okay, now it's going to compress that into one larger end of week report. And when I looked at my first week, my first week report, I had accomplished 190 something line items. And I went, I just finished in one week, what really normally takes me a month.

[12:05] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
And

[12:06] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
And that's when it kind of hit me. So with Marvin, I'm in the terminal here. I have on the right side here. This is one of my favorite things to do is

[12:17] Conor Bronsdon:
so an important point here is that you're leveraging Cloud Code to then run Marvin.

[12:22] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah, so Cloud Code is the harness underneath the hood. Like, it's the engine that runs Marvin. Marvin is not, and that's the thing with a lot of these, like OpenClaw with everything, a lot of it is still under the hood. It's just one of the, it's Codex, it's Gemini CLI, it's Cloud Code. That's just the engine that's running everything, but what you build around it is what matters. So yeah, so to answer your question earlier, I've got over a dozen of my colleagues were using them, including

[12:58] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Oh.

[12:59] Sterling Chin:
two heads of departments who said, oh, we love it. So much so that I heard from someone that someone on the security team was like, hey, are we worried about this? And they said, no, we've already approved Cloud Code. This is not doing anything above and beyond. This is not an open claw. This is not like taking over your Mac. This is just Marvin in a very clearly defined space.

[13:26] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
which I think is really smart because it enables it to actually be leveraged from a workplace much more easily than like

[13:32] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yes.

[13:33] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I will not get to have open claw on my Mac anytime soon.

[13:37] Sterling Chin:
Never. Like, you'll never have it. And that's the reality of all of this. But with Marvin, the way I've built it is when you onboard with Marvin, you do the clone. I mean, you get cloned the repo down, but then on the onboarding, he actually makes a copy of himself on your machine, wherever you want him to be. Now that is then the location where all work is done after that. So there is a complete separation between the template Marvin that is right, like, this is the template Marvin.

[14:13] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Congrats

[14:13] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
When

[14:14] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
on almost

[14:14] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
when

[14:14] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
900 stars, by the way, excited to see where

[14:16] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I

[14:16] Conor Bronsdon:
it

[14:16] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
know,

[14:16] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
is when this comes out.

[14:17] Sterling Chin:
This is three weeks. After the first week, after the first 24 hours of posting on Reddit about him, I had like 150. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. This is gonna be great. And it's just continually grown and more and more people are

[14:31] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Is

[14:31] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
using

[14:31] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Marvin

[14:31] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
him, so.

[14:31] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
the one posting on Reddit or are you the one posting on Reddit?

[14:34] Sterling Chin:
I posted on Reddit, Marvin helped.

[14:37] Conor Bronsdon:
Okay.

[14:38] Sterling Chin:
So, oh, actually, this is where, Connor, you and I are like, I'm just jumping around, because there's so many cool things. I know. There's so many cool things to talk about with him. So Marvin is, again, it's primarily he runs on Cloud Code. He can run on Codex and he can run on Gemini CLI if you want. But I use him. I use Cloud Max for work. He is primarily in Markdown and he has a lot of skills. So actually, one of the things that I do is I use Mac Whisperer or Mac Whisperer. Let me show you. This is the product. You can find it. I'm paying for the pro account. I don't know who the developer of it is, but it's freaking amazing because I have on my machine, I just have a hot button and I can talk to Marvin in real time. So

[15:34] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I don't know, smart.

[15:35] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
hey Marvin, I am actually on a podcast right now and I want to show off like what you are, but I also need to protect like proprietary stuff for work. So I'm right now I'm showing the I want to show the personality. So I'm looking at the cloud MD file. I'm going to pull up the personality stuff and then I also want to show some other things. Is there anything you would like to tell or say to the audience that do introduce yourself?

[16:04] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
So that's my talk to text or speech to text. And then. Like

[16:09] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Marvin is booping

[16:10] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I

[16:10] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
right now within

[16:11] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
he's

[16:11] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Claude.

[16:11] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
booping.

[16:12] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[16:12] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Oh, and if I actually start him up, I don't know if I shared audio on this, but I also gave Marvin a voice, um, a literal voice using 11 labs. Okay, here we go. So fine. So Marvin is fun because Marvin stands for manages appointments, reads various important notifications, named after the paranoid robot. I built him originally as my chief of staff. A few things. He's not a chatbot. He's built entirely on cloud code with custom commands and agents. No fancy framework, just markdowns, files, bash scripts, and stubbornness. Um, I remember things between conversations. So this is the, this is the problem that we're trying to solve, right? This is the problem that, that we were, that I went after. It's like, I'm tired of having to restart a whole new conversation with Claude. Every time I open up, like

[17:02] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Right. Like I can

[17:03] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I.

[17:03] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
somewhat solve it with project memory if I, if I just do a lot of things in a project, but it doesn't really fully solve the problem.

[17:09] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah, it doesn't. And so I think it's ridiculous. So I went with the goal of like, I wanna remember context of what we done in the past. I wanna remember like from session to session, what have we done? By the way, at any given time, I have like two or three versions, instances of Marvin running at the same time. And that's a whole nother story for a whole nother time. But all right, so on the right hand side here is the cloud.md file. This is when you start up Cloud. This is basically like the system prompt, right? So we talk about all these things. I have my personal things, my work. What I do is I keep my work people here. And I use this as key context, right? So people I talk about on a regular basis at work, very specifically, because this is my Marvin for work. It's like, hey, Quintin, he's my boss. Oh, well, I'm You know, so anytime I talk about Quentin, it knows, like Marvin remembers who he is and says, so

[18:11] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
It's

[18:11] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I don't

[18:11] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
called

[18:11] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
have

[18:11] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
the reference

[18:11] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
to remember.

[18:11] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
in mind. Yeah.

[18:12] Sterling Chin:
Yes. Okay. So Marvin behaves. This is the one thing. Um, he surfaces what I need to know. He's proactive by default. Uh, he helps maintain continuity. But then one thing I love is the personality and he has sardonic wit. He's direct and unfiltered. So I swear freely and Marvin can too, when it, when it sees fit. Um, he's not sycophantic. So I skipped the great questions bullshit. This was Marvin writing for himself. So just answer. Um, and important. He's like, he's not a yes man. So when we're making decisions, the goal is we're going to brainstorm together. That is the big key. And then the last one is my favorite is Marvin, don't overdo it. Marvin is helpful first, personality second. This is actually something I had to add later on, because

[19:04] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
It's

[19:05] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
he was over indexing on sarcastic,

[19:08] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
trying

[19:08] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
and

[19:08] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
to be

[19:08] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
it was

[19:08] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
a personality

[19:08] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
kind of Yeah,

[19:09] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
hire.

[19:10] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
it was kind of pissing me off. So I said, dude, too much. I need you to be helpful first and less sarcastic. So he actually wrote this himself. It's like, oh, this is who I am. But when there's an opportunity for a dry comment or well-placed, can I swear on this on the pod? All right. When there's an opportunity for a dry comment or a well-placed for fuck's sake, take it. And I'll tell you, dude, this man, this man, I say, like I am, I am like turning him into human. He has sworn at me when he's made mistakes, and it is hilarious. I love it. So the other thing that I've got, I built in here is my, let me see, my content agent. And so these are subagents. If you're not familiar with it, subagents are here. If you look at it, let me see where I have. So I have a couple things there. Here's some absolute rules.

[20:09] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Never

[20:09] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I got

[20:09] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
use em

[20:10] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
tired

[20:10] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
dashes.

[20:10] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
of

[20:10] Conor Bronsdon:
Good call.

[20:11] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
get rid of the em dashes replaced with commas,

[20:13] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Yeah. Can

[20:13] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
periods,

[20:13] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I just

[20:14] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
colons.

[20:14] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
sidebar momentarily and say, like, I hate

[20:15] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yes.

[20:16] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
that we are at this point because they are very useful, but it just is what it is. And

[20:22] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
It

[20:22] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
today,

[20:22] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
is.

[20:23] Conor Bronsdon:
you know,

[20:23] Sterling Chin:
You're right. Well, so think about that. Like I

[20:26] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
three

[20:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
get

[20:27] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
years

[20:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
on

[20:27] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
ago,

[20:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Reddit.

[20:27] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
love and em dash.

[20:29] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah. Well, and, and we've gotten to the point where we, like, I get onto Reddit or I get onto like any one of the subreddits, like AI, like AI agents, cloud builders. Like there's so many subreddits I follow and even on LinkedIn and I can read someone's post and I go, that was written by Marv. Like that was

[20:45] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Oh,

[20:46] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
written

[20:46] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I

[20:46] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
by

[20:46] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
mean,

[20:46] Sterling Chin:
AI.

[20:46] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
the

[20:47] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Like,

[20:47] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
thing for

[20:47] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
you

[20:47] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
me

[20:47] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
know,

[20:47] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
is like

[20:47] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
this.

[20:48] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
anytime I'm on like Twitter or Blue Sky or LinkedIn or any social platform, Reddit, it's that it's the not it's the not X, it's Y pattern.

[20:56] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yes.

[20:56] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
That one's driving me insane lately.

[20:57] Sterling Chin:
I can't stand it. So I was very

[20:59] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
And

[20:59] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
clear. It's like,

[21:00] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I use it occasionally,

[21:00] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
don't

[21:01] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I

[21:01] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
use.

[21:01] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
will admit, like like I use it all the time, so sometimes I leave

[21:03] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[21:03] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
it in, you know.

[21:04] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah. Well, there's, there's a point to have some of it, right? Like I use AI to draft. I mean, I'll show you some of my, some of my, my blog posts that I've drafted. Like I've, they, they get in there and, and I've used these in the past myself, but we leave over indexed on them. And so

[21:19] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
It's completely over indexed. Yeah, it's

[21:21] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
yeah.

[21:21] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
become a crush.

[21:23] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
So yeah, so here's, here is like, so my sub-agents that does all of it is like, these are the absolute

[21:30] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Basically

[21:30] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
styles.

[21:30] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
a brand guide here.

[21:32] Sterling Chin:
Yeah, exactly. And yeah, don't overfill or remove or replace with specific language, like very, really just actually like, these are not how I necessarily speak. So yeah, let's see, what else?

[21:49] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Well, OK, I have to ask.

[21:51] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I'll

[21:51] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
So.

[21:51] Sterling Chin:
pause here, cause I keep talking.

[21:53] Conor Bronsdon:
No, I have like a million questions come out. This is this is why I was saying this is Sterling before we started recording, but like typically I have a prep call with a guest. You know, we talk about like let's structure the conversation and I kind of glanced at the Marvin repo and I was like, I'm just going to talk to Sterling. There's a lot of stuff in here, so let me just keep asking questions here. So one note taking and note consumption. So how do you deal like you're obviously doing great job setting it up with success here, but. When Marvin, like I'll say like one of my and I think many people's biggest use cases for AI is simply like transcribing our meetings and

[22:28] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yes.

[22:29] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
creating synthesized notes. I have a million, I have a huge notion space where I have all this transcribed notes. I am often synthesizing those for project knowledge documents that turn into structured docs that get fed into Cloud for drafting things like strategy docs, et cetera, or just providing context to different projects. How are you automating, organizing, and ensuring that Marvin remembers notes?

[22:57] Sterling Chin:
Yeah. So for work, we, we use granola and I don't know if you've heard of that. That's

[23:04] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I'm familiar with Grinnell. I use it for personal work.

[23:06] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
yeah, we use it. I mean, we, we've had like otter, you've had like, like other note-taking things come up. So I use granola. We use granola for work. Here's the crazy thing is I did this with one of my colleagues. Granola doesn't have an API. And at the time of recording, they still don't have an API. They said they're releasing an MCP server. I haven't used it. But so we use Granola to transcribe meetings. I asked Marvin, I said, I mean, really, this is cloud code. I said, hey, I have an application on my machine called Granola that they like, we're approved to use it. But anytime I'm in a meeting, I need to save these notes. I need the transcription and I need the notes. And I need to figure out how to get this into Marvin here. So when I work on things, I'm not having to go from, because Connor, what you said is like, you copy and paste from one place, you go into notion, and then you copy paste that back into, like, open, like Claude, like the desktop and like, hey, we're gonna do all this work like that copy pasting shouldn't happen. So Marvin went and solved that for me and he said, Oh, I see what it is because you're already logged in and we're on the machine and you're approved for this. I'm very security focused. Um, it's one of the reasons why I don't

[24:31] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I

[24:31] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
like

[24:32] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
think

[24:32] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
open

[24:32] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
it's a

[24:32] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
claw.

[24:32] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
huge gap for any folks. So I love that you're

[24:34] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah,

[24:34] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
thinking with

[24:34] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
it's

[24:34] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
that

[24:34] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
like,

[24:35] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
forward.

[24:35] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I'm like, I'm already approved for this. So what can we do here? And so Marvin went out looked at granola said, Hey, I found the application, I see where everything is what's happening, what ends up happening is under the sun or under the hood, he explained it, he goes, I can actually capture this and retro build an API for it. And so he did it. So now I literally go

[24:56] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Okay.

[24:56] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
in and say, hey, I just got out of a meeting. Can you pull the notes? And Marvin will immediately pull those notes for me. He built that API for me, pulled it in. And this is the integration that changed for one of my colleagues. I'm going to call her out by name. Her name is Liv. She was the first adopter of Marvin at Postman. She said that she got out of a meeting. Oh, we had Atlassian connected, so there's Jira and Confluence already there. That MCP server is a fantastic MCP server. No notes. I use that MCP server for Marvin now, but I got her set up and she got out of a meeting. And decisions were made in that meeting about a major EPIC that's going on. Like she's working on EPIC and she said, she told Marvin, hey, we added the granola integration. She said, Marvin, go pull the last notes and we made some decisions and I need to update the EPIC. And that Epic had like six, like, I don't know, 15, 20 juror tickets that were associated with it with different people who were all responsible for something on it. And she let Marvin, she, she, she pulled the transcript. Marvin pulled the transcript, saw what needed to be done, went and updated every juror ticket that was there and did it all for her and did it all accurately. I mean, she was still human in the loop. She said, yeah, that looks good. Did it update it. Her, her, what she said was, and I quote, it's like, I did Marvin accomplished in 30 minutes. What normally takes me over four hours. And that to me was that's a knowledge worker who's non-technical. Like she's not a developer. I'm like, that's when I thought I'm like, Marvin's got something like there's the ability here as a knowledge worker to build this type of thing. So that's so yeah. So what you were talking about is like, Hey, granola. He's a great one. I know that anything that's got an API, I mean, hell, APIs are like it. And I work at Postman and I, and I'm on the API. Great. I I'm on the API train. I've been on the API train forever. APIs are powering AI right now. And the best eight, like if you don't have a good API, sorry, no one's going to use your product. Granola, like I retro built an API for Granola and it works. And that integration is like, now I just, again, I go in and say, hey, pull my last meeting. What were the decisions we made? Now, the cool thing with this is because I have my current state with Marvin. When I talk, I say, hey, here's my last meeting. I don't even tell him what happened. I said, what happened? Is there anything I need to do after this meeting? And he will go and say, okay, here's all the action items from it. I'm gonna put this on your to-do list. And that task list is in a current state file. That current state just gives me. So when I say, hey, what do I need to work on now? Marvin comes in and says, Hey, you've already done all these three things. Now let's let's focus on this next thing. So at the beginning of my day, when you run slash start on Marvin, there's a there's a slash command there. He bookends he's he pulls in my personal email, he or sorry, he pulls in my work email, he pulls in my a work calendar. He pulls in all my Jira tickets. He pulls in everything that I need. And then we have a stand up every morning. I treat him like a junior assistant. He is not an AI to be told what to do. He is, this is a standup. So then we go back and forth for 10 minutes. It's like, Hey, uh, actually over the overnight, I got some Slack messages from some of my team in India. I, you know, let's update this. And then by the time I'm done with my standup with him, I've got a, I know exactly what I'm going to do for that day. And then the other, the other cool thing is I said, all right, now schedule my day. So he'll go and he'll like block out. So if, if any of my colleagues are watching and you see that my day is completely blocked out, it's because of Marvin. It's like,

[29:09] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Marvin's

[29:09] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
no, I

[29:09] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
fault.

[29:09] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
don't want.

[29:10] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[29:10] Sterling Chin:
Yeah. I don't want to be bothered. It's like, I love my co my, I love my colleagues, but I'm like, I don't want to be bothered when I'm trying to focus on building something. So he, he goes and blocks out my time. He's all right, here's everything. And he's like, I think you can do all these within this given time and we go work on it. So it's. It's way too much fun. Dude. Marvin is like these personal assistants. And I think with here's here's not really a hot take, but What we've seen in the first two months of the year, and we're two months into this, right? Like I built Marvin almost two months ago. Open Claw was iterated on and really kind of took off about two months ago. These personal assistants are doing what we've always wanted them to do that no one else is doing. Like, like OpenAI can't do it. Anthropic can't do it. There, there is a level of integration that and customization that, that the reason why we're thirsting after this is because this is AI applied in real time. The fact that I now have OpenClaw and I do, I do have OpenClaw on a Mac mini. I did buy into that. I'm sorry. Like I

[30:25] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I

[30:25] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
bought a

[30:25] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
almost,

[30:25] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Mac mini.

[30:25] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I almost bought a Mac money just for it. I was at Costco and I was like, Ooh,

[30:29] Sterling Chin:
Actually, and I'm going to tell you this, we're going to have a hard time with, with compute by the end of this year. I think like the open claw thing is,

[30:37] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
it's happening.

[30:37] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
is I think it's the tip of the iceberg. I don't think this is a going away. Um, and if it doesn't go away, then we need to figure out like the computes there. So I bought a Mac mini purposely knowing that I need a Mac. I need to compute just to run on my own if I can't get it. Like, I went to the Apple store down here and they sold out of all of, like, within, like, I'm in the Bay Area, right? So within a, like the entirety of the Bay Area, every base level Mac mini was sold out. That's not going away. Like we're, we're not, we're, so I, I, anyways, but these AI assistants are like Marvin, open claw, like these, these assistants are doing what AI was meant to do and open like four, six, five, three that came out. These all unlocked an even greater like need for these, like for these tools, like, In 4.6, I write

[31:43] Sterling Chin:
blog posts and I write a lot of code.

[31:47] Conor Bronsdon:
Thanks to Galileo for sponsoring this episode. Their new 165-page comprehensive guide to mastering multi-agent systems is freely available on their website at galileo.ai and provides you the lens you need to understand when multi-agent systems add value versus single-agent approaches, how to design them efficiently, and how to build reliable systems that work in production. Download it for free at the link in the show description to discover how to continuously improve for your AI agents, identify and avoid common coordination pitfalls, master context engineering for agent collaboration, measure performance with multi-agent metrics, and much more. Do you have something that's kind of on your to-do list that you could take us through with Marvin?

[32:36] Sterling Chin:
Yeah, actually, let's do it.

[32:37] Conor Bronsdon:
In the meantime, I'll also note that as Sterling's doing this, I am looking through the repo and I'm going like, oh, OK, I see a couple of connections I would need to build to try this out. So you might get a PR from, well, from Cloud Code. It's kind of from me, probably from

[32:51] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Hey,

[32:51] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Cloud Code more than anything else later today.

[32:53] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
it works. I mean, I've had, dude, after the, at the first, within the first 24 hours, I had two, I had two people who submitted PRs for Marvin. And again, that's when I knew something was going to happen. Like I knew something was working.

[33:07] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Yeah,

[33:08] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Okay.

[33:08] Conor Bronsdon:
I see. As of right now, there's no linear integration set up, and I was like, oh, we use linear in Modular, so if I'm going to really take advantage of this, I have to go port this to linear, so it

[33:18] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
It's

[33:18] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
should

[33:18] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
true.

[33:18] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
be easy.

[33:19] Sterling Chin:
All right. So, uh, let's do this. I'm going to actually just kind of walk you through my process. So my process is that I typically just record it. Like I go onto my, if I'm on a walk, I go and I record a train of thought and I just record myself talking. And then I go back to Marvin and I say, Hey, I need, like, I just wrote, talked a lot about a lot of random stuff. Can you put this into an outline? I want to make this a post. This is a perfect example. Um, and draft of a blog posts where I was on a walk and I was talking about AI for normies. And I, I was listening to the AI daily brief. I was listening to Navy Jones, two of my favorite podcasts. And I was listening to him. I was like, really the goal of AI is like you and I are adopters, right? We're technical. We love these things, but. How do we make AI useful for the normal person? And I think that's the unlock that we're trying to get to. And right now, I don't see OpenAI or Cloud actually being able to do that. It's still, like, Cloud is still limited. They're all still limited within a text box. I mean, Cloud Code is getting there, but my sister's not going to use Cloud Code. She's a stay-at-home mom. So I wrote this outline here. So AI for Normal is what my sister taught me about the real AI gap. The problem, the content is written by tech people for tech people. The real gap isn't technical. And so this was an outline that I'd worked on in the past. And I broke this off after I was working on another one. But what I'm going to do here, I'm going to drag that in here and say, okay.

[35:15] Sterling Chin:
Hey Marv, so I want to work on this outline for the AI for Normies blog post. So one of the things that I really like about it, I think everything works. Right now the outline actually fits for what we're doing. Can we do a real quick first draft of this and see what it would do? I want to keep this, the target audience of this is going to be non-technical users. But, so like my sister who is non-technical will be the target audience for this. But I want to also make it so that those who are in the tech industry will see why this is so important.

[36:05] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[36:06] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
And Marvin is taking us through its thought process. It's starting to jump in on the sidebar here.

[36:13] Sterling Chin:
All right, so you'll see that he spawned the content agent. So that is my content agent. That's the one that I showed you earlier that is very clear about like, this is a, you know, you're not doing AI slop. So now anytime I write something, It goes immediately through my content agent and it does that first pass for me. So a couple of my other posts that I've done. I did the future of AI work. This was my horse manure. If you haven't read that one, that was one of my favorite ones. It's about like why horse manure and AI have What do they have in common? And that one, you can see I had five drafts of this with articles that I pulled. But now I'm also finding, even after this, I only go through one or two drafts before I'm good to go. So I think this AI for Normies is a perfect example. This sub-agent will build it for me, the draft's done, or he's writing it right now, and

[37:23] Sterling Chin:
But see, I mean.

[37:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah, so I mean, here we are, we're at where we've done this. I mean, this

[37:31] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[37:31] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
was like, this is a good first draft. Let me take a look. So he's going to come back and tell me. Draft is done, saved. Let me pull it up so you can see. I mean, so Marvin is like, if I didn't have Cursor open, Marvin would pull it up. And this is the thing that I love about Marvin and why I built him the way I did. I'm going to have to go back and read this draft eventually, right? That's on the right-hand side. But on the left-hand side, Marvin came back and gave me that summary. He goes, all right, I wrote it. Here's what you've got. Like, I had this conversation, well, with Marvin this morning. The reality is, is like, we want Marvin. The problem with Google and the problem with Alexa. So I'm like, you go and you've got, you Google Alexa or Google Nest and you've got your Alexa apps at home. And you're like, you know, say, hey, Alexa, do this. And it will read the entirety of the thing for you. But that's not what a coworker does, right? So Connor, if you and I are coworkers, I came to you and say, hey, can you draft this blog post for me? Or hey, what happened with that blog post? And you say, Hey, I've drafted it. Here's the TLDR. Here's what the blog post is. And that's what Marvin does right here. Marvin is. It's about 1600 words. Here's what you've got hook with my sister's question, content problem, AI discourse excludes normal people. So he walks through and he talks about the horseman or callback, the CTA sisters texts as a closer, the dual audience works. So as if. Oh, and then there's that one flag, right? What flag on line 17

[39:14] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Uh, yeah.

[39:14] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
has a not not this because I'm going to zoom in like I realize I'm on my big screen.

[39:24] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Not

[39:24] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Not

[39:24] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
X, but

[39:24] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
this,

[39:24] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Y crutch

[39:25] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
not X, but

[39:25] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
that we talked

[39:26] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Y structure.

[39:26] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
about, you know?

[39:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
But that's borderline on the contrastive crutch rule. Could rework if it bugs you. So let me go back and look at it. That question stopped me cold. I work in tech. Yeah, I don't like that. You know what?

[39:41] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Yeah, it's a little too much.

[39:45] Sterling Chin:
Yeah, line 17, that is too, that's just too much.

[39:50] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I'd

[39:50] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Can

[39:50] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
almost

[39:50] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
you rework

[39:50] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
argue you

[39:51] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
that?

[39:51] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
could just, sorry I didn't mean to cut off your Marvin comms, you could just cut the not because I isn't useful to her line sentence entirely. I think it works without that.

[40:00] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I do too. But let's see what

[40:02] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Let's

[40:02] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
he

[40:02] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
see

[40:02] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
does.

[40:02] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
what it does.

[40:06] Conor Bronsdon:
Okay, so Marvin's running your calendar. It's helping you understand day to day what you're working

[40:11] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Mm-hmm.

[40:11] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
on. It's giving you content drafts. Uh, what are some of their tasks are using for our two? Obviously we're still we're still running through this example, but I'm curious to understand like what else

[40:19] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[40:20] Conor Bronsdon:
updating linear or upgero tickets.

[40:23] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Oh, gosh. I mean, I haven't even opened Jira. Okay. Do you want to, I'm going to stop

[40:29] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Be

[40:29] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
sharing

[40:29] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
still

[40:29] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
my

[40:29] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
my

[40:29] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
screen.

[40:29] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
beating heart. Yeah.

[40:31] Sterling Chin:
Let me, let me stop sharing my screen and let me, let me give you my hot take on this. Again, I was, I had a conversation with Jira or with Marvin this morning. Um, I think traditionally UI is dead. UI right now is for humans and I don't like it where it it's a human construct. It's good for us, but dude, I haven't been in Jira in three weeks.

[40:55] Sterling Chin:
Marvin's making all the Jira tickets for me. He knows what he, so something to, something to note. And this is something I I've told everyone who's onboarded with Marvin so far. Treat Marvin like a junior assistant or a junior engineer. I'm a software engineer. So treat him like a junior engineer. We hire someone new. Connor, how you hire, you hire a junior, you hire a junior on your team. What is their onboarding time?

[41:23] Conor Bronsdon:
Oh, man, depends on the role, obviously. But I mean, I wouldn't expect major impact from them in the first two months, realistically.

[41:33] Sterling Chin:
So yeah, most, most companies give you a 90 day grace period. And depending on the role, I, there are times where I'm like, you're not going to be helpful for probably six months.

[41:45] Conor Bronsdon:
Yeah, there, there's at least for break even as far as like

[41:49] Sterling Chin:
Yeah.

[41:49] Conor Bronsdon:
the time put in by the team and the manager to really get that person up and running. If you're more general, if you're more junior, I should say, yeah, it's, it's going to be a few months probably. And I mean, what you see with managers too, where the break even on impact can take too long for an org. And often that's where managers fail and kind of lose trust if they don't accelerate things early on.

[42:15] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah, you're exactly right. And I 100% agree with you. So when you're onboarding with Marvin, when I tell people when you're using him, treat him like a, treat him like you're onboarding a new colleague. So my Marvin now is vastly different, like than when I started with him in January on January 5th. he's adopted he's adapted he has evolved he is now much better so when i so i give him feedback um so like one of the things i was i was going to mention with jira is I say, I started off with, Hey, go get my JIRA tickets. Marvin, like what JIRA tickets? There's like, if I go into JIRA, if I go into Atlassian, there are thousands of JIRA tickets. Some are, some are not even required by me, but I need to be watching them. So what I do with Marvin and what I recommend users do is I go to Confluence and I go to my Confluence space and I say, and I share the full link to the Confluence space. I go to my Kanban board and I share the full link in my Kanban board. And then I, and I go back to Marvin and say, here is my, here is the, my personal space that I work out of. Here's the DevRel workspace in, in Confluence that I work out of. Here's my Kanban board in Jira that I work out of. That gives Marvin, just as if you're like, assume Connor, you've got a colleague. We're back in the office and you've got a junior and you're showing them your screen. You're going to walk them to the screen. You're not

[43:52] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
And

[43:52] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
going

[43:52] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
then

[43:52] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
to

[43:52] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
it'd

[43:52] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
say

[43:52] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
be

[43:52] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
exactly.

[43:52] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
like, here are the docs, go read it, please. You like, make sure you understand what's going on. Yeah. Take some time to go through.

[43:59] Sterling Chin:
So that's exactly what's happening here. Like I just onboard Marvin like you would any other colleague. So I show him, here's all the docs, here's where everything's at, here's what I do, go read through it, and so you can get context on what my focus is and that. So then... Marvin, when I started working with Jira, Marvin would pull some of my tickets and then I'd say, that's wrong. That's right. And then he would say, okay, I've remembered this. I'll do it better next time. Um, let me give you a really funny case, uh, system or what happened a couple of weeks ago. So, um, For Postman, I run meetups. I run all of our meetups in the San Francisco area called Agents and APIs. And I'm using Marvin to help me track all my JIRA tickets, make sure that everything works as needed. And works like I make sure the juror tickets are updated or he he manages juror tickets. He makes sure that we've hit all of our checkboxes. Helps you track like, hey, have you have you ordered swag? Hey, have you ordered food? Have you done, you know, done all these things? And. Right before the last meetup, I said, Hey, um, Heidi and James are doing security for the meetup. Those are the security guards at Postman and our security guards and receptionists. And Marvin didn't know that context. So he went and said, oh, well, he said, Heidi and James are speaking about security. And so he updated his jacket. He went and updated my slide deck. He did all the things that I would have wanted to do. And then I explained, dude, you're wrong. they are the security guards, they're not speaking. So he then said, I'm so sorry, I fucked up. And then he went and had to redo and he went back into the juror ticket.

[45:56] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
That's a junior

[45:57] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Like,

[45:57] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
mistake right there. Yeah.

[45:58] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
that's a, it is, it's a junior mistake. Am I mad at it? No, I think it's hilarious. Has he made that same mistake again? No. A junior, a good, a good junior would not make that same mistake twice.

[46:12] Conor Bronsdon:
Yeah.

[46:13] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Marvin is a good junior. Now he's at the point now where I'm like, I, again, I use him all day, every day. I've, I would now say he's like immediate, like a, a mid-level he's not senior or staff or principal, but he's really up there where at the point where like, I trust him to do a lot more stuff that

[46:31] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
You're what,

[46:31] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I just

[46:31] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
40,

[46:31] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
don't

[46:32] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]

[46:32] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
want to do.

[46:32] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
days in right now. So that's, that's

[46:34] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[46:34] Conor Bronsdon:
really good a growth director right there.

[46:37] Sterling Chin:
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing.

[46:41] Conor Bronsdon:
If I'm listening and I'm excited, I think Marvin could be what I need at work, or maybe I just need it to help me out in my day to day. How do I get started?

[46:53] Sterling Chin:
Okay. This is where, this is where it's really hard. If you're a technical person, if you're a software engineer and you're around these things, you should have no problem getting them set up. If you're non-technical, this is where it's going to, this is where there's going to be a pretty wide gap of capability or of knowledge. You need a terminal, you need cloud code, you need some type of ID, so cursor, VS code, windsurf, any anti-gravity, and then that's it. You need those three things. But again, if you're not a software engineer, I onboarded two more non-technical people this morning onto Marvin. There never have been software engineers. One's an English major. I had to go and say, OK, well, we need to go download iTerm. Now we need to go to Homebrew. And they're looking at this going, Homebrew looks super sketchy. As a non-technical person, it looks super sketch. So I'm like, no, go down. You're going to install Homebrew. You've got to install Node. You've got to install, like, you've got to do the, you know, brew, install, cask, cloud code. You've got to do all those things. They look super intimidating. That's, that's the gap that we have in the industry right now is knowledge workers are, and I know like Claude and topic was trying to do that with co-work, um, in, in their app. It's okay. I tried it. It's not nearly as good as Marvin. And like. Marvin is better and OpenClaw is better. These community built ones are just significantly better than what they have, but they're trying to accomplish that. So if you want to use Marvin, he can go to the repo. I'll show the link with it, but just look up Sterling Chin and then Marvin template. You can find it on GitHub. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Reddit, I'm on Twitter, you can always ping me there. And then honestly, so the cool thing with the onboarding is that onboarding with Marvin, you clone the repo down and you open up, you clone it, you get in the terminal, you CD into the repo, and then all you do is say, help me set up Marvin. And then Claude Code will read through, cause I built, I purposely built this package to be for non-technical people. So I have, again, I have two department heads at Postman who are using Marvin right now, um, who are non-technical. So he walks you through, he's like, what's your name? Where do you work? What's your job title? He goes through, it's like, what are your, what are your personal goals or your work goals? That is a very personal thing because for me, my Marvin, he knows that I want to do 10,000 steps a day. So

[49:45] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Love

[49:45] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
after an hour

[49:46] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
that

[49:46] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
or

[49:46] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Hey

[49:46] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
so of working with him, he will literally say, Sterling, it's time to get off your ass and go touch grass. So then I'm like, Aye aye, Captain. So I get up, I walk out, I go, I go walk around the block and I come back up. It's like, Hey, don't forget to drink your water. I mean, I'm drinking my, I'm drinking my water here. So, yeah. But he'll walk you through everything. The onboarding is meant to be non-intrusive, very comfortable for you to do. He'll ask you your work goals, what you're tracking against. And then he'll walk you through kind of an onboarding. He's like, here are the commands that you need to do. You need start, you need end, there is an update. And so like I mentioned at the beginning, you bookend your days, you start, you run, start at the beginning of the day, that kind of pulls in the context from the previous day, gives you everything you need to know. Throughout the day, you can run the slash update command. And that slash update command will take a will give you everything that you've done in that session in that little bit of that small session. So we're, we're knowledge workers, we're software engineers, we're working on one thing, and then we go to the next. So when I'm done with one thing, when I'm like, I've, this is all I've done, this is all I need to do for the day, I don't need to finish this, I just need to get this blog post done, I would then type actually, you know what, I'm just gonna do this, I'm just gonna share my screen and you're gonna watch me do this while we're here. I do my slash start, but then I'm gonna go slash update here.

[51:24] Sterling Chin:
So what happens now is Marvin's gonna go look in and he's going to my sessions. He's gonna see that I don't have a session for the 13th. So if you look down here, he just added the 13th session. Sessions for, oh gosh, I realized it's Friday the 13th. And then he says, checkpointed. So now I've got a checkpoint. So now I'm confident here that if, again, if I run out of context, I can clear the context here, or you can compress it, because you know you've only got 200,000.

[52:02] Sterling Chin:
So here, I can finish this all up, and it's okay. Now let's go work on the next thing. So now he's got me in the, it's beginning of afternoon. I'm on a podcast. Introduce Marvin to the audience. Drafted A for Normie's blog post. Fixed contrastive clutch and draft has been saved. So now if I were to go do something.

[52:30] Sterling Chin:
Yesterday, actually. Hey Marv, yesterday I was working on a plugin for Cloud Code for Postman. Can you give me a quick overview of what we accomplished yesterday?

[52:50] Sterling Chin:
So what Marvin's doing, he's going back and he's going to be reading two files. Realistically, he's reading the 12th here and he's reading my current state. And so here it is. He says, yesterday was a big day. Here's the quick rundown, bid shift. It's like what we got built. We've built the full PRD written for the Postman plugin. There's eight commands, three skills and one agent. I did QA testing, 455 out of the 472 QA checks passed, 10 fixes have been applied. We shipped nine clean commits, still open to do from yesterday. So now I've got this. It's like, Marvin knows. Like, hey, where did we end up yesterday? A lot of times when you, when you're in a, when you're in a situation where you're on a team, you're a software engineer, you are a knowledge worker, you start your day and you're like, you have, you spend the first hour of your day wondering, okay, what did we do yesterday? What is the, what, what do I need to, what did I finish, where did I finish off last day, yesterday? And how do I, what do I need to do to pick up from this? So in this case, what I could do is say, hey, Marv, let's pick up from where we left yesterday. I did do the end-to-end results, or I did do the end-to-end tests for him. I tested it in a separate session. It worked out really, really well. But I do need to make the GIF demo, and we do need to work on the Marketplace listing.

[54:28] Sterling Chin:
And That's just, this is how I interact with Marvin. And so yeah, to do. So after this, after you and I are done here, I am literally gonna go and I'm gonna record, you know, GIFs. We're building this. So hopefully by the time this is released, right?

[54:49] Sterling Chin:
You know, this plugin, our official Postman plugin is ready to go. So.

[54:55] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Awesome. Sterling, thanks for this walkthrough of Marvin. It's been a ton of fun meeting you, Marvin, if you're still listening. And yeah, really enjoyed the conversation, Sterling. Always great catching up with you. I thought it was particularly insightful when you brought up earlier this idea that You know, the compute crunch that we have all been worrying about, despite the insane CAPEX coming out of the top hyperscalers to build out more data centers, build out more compute, besides discussion of data centers in space and much more, it's coming. We're all buying Mac minis when we're on the cutting edge of this, or at least to mess around with at a minimum.

[55:35] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[55:36] Conor Bronsdon:
Given this idea of the compute crunch, and I'll say, talking to many compute partners today, it's a lot harder to get nodes than it has been at certain times. This is a big issue. What else are you expecting as the proliferation of agents spreads across the world? And I think outside of software development, what else are you expecting to see?

[56:02] Sterling Chin:
we are really good at adapting. So here's what I expect. We're going to have a compute crunch. And I think out of necessity, that's going to force us to start to work, really work on small language models. So I would love to see open source models come out that are small, they can run on a Mac Mini. quickly, right? I can run a llama, I mean, I could run, you know, llama, I could run, you know, Kimmy too, and I could run all of these on the Mac Mini as it is, but it's slow. And the reason why we're constrained, the reason why I use Cloud Code as a harness for Marvin is because I can't run a local model on my machine that is fast enough that will, that meets the requirements that I have. I would love to see, so with the compute crunch that's happening, I think that's inevitably gonna force the open source world to really say, okay, now, like, I'm also looking at Mistral. I'm looking at them as hopefully the standard bearer that they can come in. I love Meta, or I used to like Llama. It's

[57:12] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
last

[57:12] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
not

[57:13] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
couple

[57:13] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
for me anymore.

[57:13] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
iterations have been.

[57:15] Sterling Chin:
Yeah,

[57:16] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Yeah,

[57:16] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
so

[57:16] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
if

[57:16] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
I'm

[57:16] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
you're

[57:16] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
looking

[57:16] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
a meta

[57:16] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
at,

[57:16] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
person listening to this, you want to come defend llama on the podcast, please send us your spokesperson. We'll happy to talk to them.

[57:23] Sterling Chin:
Yeah, but I'm hoping Mistral, like I want to see some small language models come in that we could run like these coding agents that like a cloud code clone that can run on a machine. That I think is that is going to happen this year. I think knowing that the compute is so constrained, even at the foundation, like at the leaders of the foundation models, the next iteration has got to be a small model. That's what I like to see eventually. I want it on my phone. Now, the reason why I use OpenClaw, and again, I have OpenClaw in with no relation to anything that I'm doing for work. It is on my own personal hobby stuff. The reason why I have OpenClaw running on my own machine, on my own Mac mini is because I can connect to them over my phone. Now, the cool thing with that is that I gave an instance of Marvin to my wife, And so she's talking to Marvin. So we have, we're using one of the apps, chat apps. I have a shared conversation for a finance Marvin. That's me and my wife in a financial advisor version of Marvin that I have. She has her own version of Marvin that I've given her that is like sandboxed. It's like, no, she could only use, Like she can, she can actually write code. She's not a developer, but she can push to this repo. And I've given the permissions to do that. And I said, only this person I've, I've added a bunch of security measures, but like she has her own version of the Marvin and how she's using it. And that's a really cool. That's that's cool. But. that's still having an API that's connected all the things. Long term, I want, I want something on my phone that is like, I have a model on my phone, that is my own personal agent. So open source, open source has got to win. I don't want to, I, as much as I love Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini, and I have a lot of, I have a lot of respect for their teams over there. I think the end of the day, I really want for personal stuff, I want an open source to win.

[59:38] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
I love it. That's a great call to action. And I think it's something that I know the team over at Modular is very excited about, but it's our open source push. I know a lot of folks are working on this on their individual time. I think it's going to happen. There's going to be closed sections because people want to make money. But broadly, the infrastructure for AI has to be open source in order to let this have the impact that we want it to in a positive way and limit the downsides because there are downsides.

[1:00:09] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Yeah.

[1:00:09] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
Sterling, thank you so much for this fantastic conversation. Thank you for thinking about security on this. You've given me at least three PR ideas for Marvin that I will be going to play with Cloud Code on the rest of the afternoon. Great chatting with

[1:00:22] Sterling Chin:
Connor, it's always good to see you, and I'm always happy to come back. And

[1:00:26] Conor Bronsdon:
you. Yeah, definitely.

[1:00:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
on

[1:00:27] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
We'll have to have an

[1:00:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
the

[1:00:27] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
update

[1:00:27] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
last

[1:00:28] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
once you go viral again. So,

[1:00:29] Sterling Chin: [OVERLAP]
Well,

[1:00:29] Conor Bronsdon: [OVERLAP]
yeah.

[1:00:30] Sterling Chin:
I was gonna say, on a final note, I do have a couple big structural changes for Marvin that I've been working on, that on my open clause, on my Mac Mini I've been working on. I think it's gonna be a really big update, and I'm doing it internally with a couple people that use Marvin. I'm testing it out with them and seeing, hey, does this actually work? So that's coming, and I'm going to hint at something. I'm joining a hackathon over the weekend, and I think I've got some more stuff coming.

[1:01:11] Conor Bronsdon:
Okay, so what I'm hearing is by the time I'm actually done editing this thing and ready to get it out, I'm gonna have to call you and be like, no, no, no, you gotta get back on 50 more minutes. Just, like, give me the update.

[1:01:21] Sterling Chin:
Maybe.

[1:01:21] Conor Bronsdon:
So

[1:01:22] Sterling Chin:
Love it.

[1:01:22] Conor Bronsdon:
Sterling, good luck with the hackathon. Super excited to see the results of that. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, let us know. Or if you think we missed something, or this format isn't quite landing with you, I would love to hear that as well. I know we're experimenting a bit, so we're hoping these Builder First conversations are something folks are having a lot of fun with. But if they need to be structured differently, we would love that feedback. Sterling, thanks for coming on. It's been a pleasure, and hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

[1:01:49] Sterling Chin:
You as well. Thanks for having me.