Slightly Caffeinated

Chris and TJ share personal updates, discuss the latest in AI tools like Cloud Code, Iris, and Prism, and explore the importance of taking time for creativity and mental health. They also delve into recent website redesigns, new features, and productivity hacks, offering valuable insights for developers and tech enthusiasts.

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Chris
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Creators and Guests

Host
Chris Gmyr
Husband, dad, & grilling aficionado. Loves Laravel & coffee. Staff Engineer @ Rula | TrianglePHP Co-Organizer
Host
TJ Miller
Dreamer ⋅ ADHD advocate ⋅ Laravel astronaut ⋅ Building Prism ⋅ Principal at Geocodio ⋅ Thoughts are mine!

What is Slightly Caffeinated?

Join Chris Gmyr and TJ Miller as they dive into the world of PHP, Laravel, and all things programming, while also sharing insights on family life and other musings.

Chris Gmyr (00:00)
Hey, welcome back to the Slightly Caffeinated Podcast. I'm Chris Gmyr

TJ Miller (00:03)
I'm TJ Miller.

Chris Gmyr (00:05)
Hey TJ, so it's been a little bit. What's new in your world?

TJ Miller (00:08)
Yeah.

man, what's new in my world. It's been a crazy couple of weeks. My wife slipped on some ice in the driveway and exploded her ankle. And not to gross anybody out, but like it was really bad. Like open fracture fractured her ankle and like the smaller bone in her leg and had to get like plates and pins and emergency surgery. And it was

It was nuts. Like I wasn't home when it happened and like my neighbors heard her in the driveway, like just screaming for help. And they ended up coming out calling an ambulance. Like I showed up in the ambulance the same time the ambulance showed up and it was just a whirlwind. So it's been a couple of weeks of like dealing with that. She got her cast off. She's in a boot now. Still can't put weight on it for at least another like four to six weeks. But

At least she's able to like take the boot off, give her like time for her like to breathe, get some air. You know, so that's been been dealing with that. And then. Yeah, just like plugging away, like catching up on some prism and some Iris and then jamming on some Iris stuff, which has been fun. And I guess. We haven't recorded since I released it, so yeah, if I officially released early access.

settled on, let me talk about this more later too. Settled on some pricing, got it out there. Fairly lackluster sales. I was a little disappointed with how it did, but I also went in like really cold. I didn't have like a hype train going or anything leading up to it. So I'm also like not surprised, but the people who have got it have been using it, been very active in the discord. And so we've been like,

chasing down bugs and fixing things and improving stuff, which has been really fun and exciting, getting other people using it. And one of the people that purchased it has been doing a ton of customizations to their instance, swapping out models and providers and got the cost down really low, just kind of tweaking things. And so that's been really, really exciting to see. ⁓ Yeah, so I've been just doing that and.

Chris Gmyr (02:11)
Nice, that's awesome.

TJ Miller (02:14)
trying to live life a little bit, man. Like, so how about you? It's new in your world.

Chris Gmyr (02:20)
Yeah, it feels not as crazy, but definitely just busy. just the last couple of weeks, been feeling like a hard time just keeping on top of everything. So yeah, it's been a nice little break and also took a little break with the newsletter and stuff like that. Just trying to get a couple of things off my plate and kind of reset a little bit. Because we did like a little bit of

traveling, there's been like a bunch of scout stuff going on. It's family stuff. I was just telling you before this, truck died. So I had to deal with that. Had like an old 07 Ram 1500 and just limping along for the last couple of years, just tried to squeak out another year, but took it to like three different places to get it inspected and maybe fixed. And they're like, no, no, all done.

TJ Miller (02:56)
Yeah.

Nope, it's toast. ⁓

Chris Gmyr (03:16)
Yep.

So I ended up getting a new to me, 2022, same 1,500, slightly different trim and stuff like that. not super excited about having a car payment, but ended up putting a bunch down. So it's not too bad, but that's just the reality of it. Didn't want to go down to one car for the two kids and two adults and all the activities and stuff like that and extra coordination.

TJ Miller (03:41)
yeah, I can't do that.

Chris Gmyr (03:43)
⁓ Plus it's just going to be a lot safer, especially going camping with my son and scouts. And we just went up to the NC mountains this past weekend to visit some family out there. So we took the truck and it's like, man, this is so much nicer. Like, yeah, it was definitely a long time coming. But glad I finally pulled the trigger. But again, not super excited about the car payment.

TJ Miller (03:58)
Yeah.

Yeah, I, I hate cars. It's just, I feel like it's nothing but expense and throwing money away at things and it sucks, but like, it's just this necessary evil. And it's the same deal here. Like with.

son's activities and like wife's doctor's appointments. And it's just, it would be almost impossible for us to go down to one car right now. And my car is like limping along. Like I think I've got a permanent check engine light on at this point. So like, I feel, I feel the end is near and I'm really not wanting to do it, but it's yeah. It's one of those where, you know, I, when we bought it, I told, told my wife, we're going to drive it until it dies and we're going to.

Chris Gmyr (04:35)
You

TJ Miller (04:52)
Keep doing that.

Chris Gmyr (04:53)
Yep, yep, same discussion here. just it doesn't make it any more pleasant when it's at the end. And you're like, ⁓ now I actually got to do it. And it is still unpleasant. I'm like, can't we just get one more year out of it? And no, just it's been one more year for the past five years, probably.

TJ Miller (04:58)
Nope.

Yeah.

⁓ Yeah, geez.

Chris Gmyr (05:13)
Yeah. just cranking on a bunch of AI and cloud code stuff at work, outside of work, which we'll talk about. And yeah, just feel like the inspiration is crazy for all the ideas and things that I want to work on. And even with cloud code and chat and all that stuff, feels like I can't get it out fast enough to do the things that I want to do. So I'm sure you've.

TJ Miller (05:37)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (05:41)
felt like that with Prism and Iris and a handful of other things too. But it's been hard to tame it down and be like, OK, one step at a time, one little project and task at a time, and go from there.

TJ Miller (05:53)
Yeah, I think

we I think we touched on it maybe the last episode or within the last couple of episodes, at least of like, I'm starting to feel this weird anxiety when I like don't have Claude code like running on something in the background. It's like I'm wasting time. I'm wasting time. Like I could have Claude be doing something while I'm like doing dishes or like anything else. You know, it's just it's.

Chris Gmyr (06:14)
Yeah.

TJ Miller (06:18)
this weird new anxiety of like, don't have something being built right now. Like I gotta keep building. Gotta keep building.

Chris Gmyr (06:24)
Yep, yep, totally. Yeah, yeah, a bunch of stuff. yeah, moving ahead. So I'm glad we were able to jump on today and get an episode out and probably jump on the newsletter again this week and get that rolling again because lots of stuff to talk about and share. So yeah, all good things. It's nice to take little break and have a little breath once in a while.

TJ Miller (06:26)
That's so funny.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I think we can talk about that a little bit more too. Taking time and space, I think is really important, especially when we do such like, heady work. Like it's, I think really important to like take time away and take, take downtime and like let your brain recover and get back to like, at least for me, like coding is a very...

Chris Gmyr (07:02)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (07:13)
a very like creative task for me. And so like I need to be in a like creative space to do that. And sometimes it's just you got to take some time to get back to that. But before we get into all of that, I'd love to hear some like coffee updates ⁓ on my end. Nothing too exciting. Still just been like still in the counterculture grind.

Chris Gmyr (07:29)
Yeah.

TJ Miller (07:35)
Actually just picked up a big bag of a darker blend from Costco. Something my wife just picked up. So I think we're going to switch over to that for a little bit. And then I'm sure we'll end up like back at Counterculture because we've just been really enjoying that lately.

Chris Gmyr (07:50)
Yeah, just so good. Love counterculture.

TJ Miller (07:53)
Yeah, yeah, still still have not gone out and got my Turkish coffee yet. But I did take my son out on a little date to a cafe and got a nitro and was all about it. He got himself a he really wanted a matcha and he got a matcha and he got it. He took a couple sips seemed like he liked it. We got to the car and he's like, Dad, this tastes like awful grass. I don't want it anymore.

Chris Gmyr (08:03)
to.

Yeah.

TJ Miller (08:16)
He's like, I should have just stayed with my like stuck with my mocha. And I'm like, yeah, you maybe should have, but like, I'm going to let you explore a little bit. Just in like, this is like awful grass. Like, yeah, that sounds like matcha. Like I enjoy it. I like, I like an iced matcha every now and then, but yeah, it's weird grass for sure.

Chris Gmyr (08:25)
Yep.

Yeah, yeah, I do enjoy matcha. I don't have it too often. I'm trying not to get into yet another thing that I need all the accessories for. I guess I was talking to some other people about it, don't know, probably a couple of months ago. I don't know if it's changed since then. But like, because of the all the, you know, TikTok crazes and stuff like that, like people have just been buying up matcha like crazy, and it's just not available for like, at least the higher quality.

TJ Miller (08:41)
Yeah. Yeah.

Really? Wow.

Chris Gmyr (09:02)
matcha or like the ceremonial matcha. It's been like really hard to get and sold out in a lot of places or like, yeah. So like with that, like I didn't even bother like looking into it too much, but it's kind of always been like in the back of my mind. And we have like a nice tea store that has like a bunch of like loose leaf teas and herbals and does matcha there too. And all the little accessories and teapots and stuff like that. So always since like going there, I'm like, ⁓ it'd be so nice to.

TJ Miller (09:07)
Wild, I did not know that.

Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (09:29)
have some like matcha or do the whole like ceremony thing with like making it and whipping it and I don't know just seems seems cool and it is delicious even though it's weird grass tasting.

TJ Miller (09:30)
Yep.

Yeah.

Just, yeah, 12 year olds spitting facts, you know. How about you, man? You been getting into anything interesting coffee wise?

Chris Gmyr (09:47)
Yep, yep, that happens.

Yeah, I went out to coffee with a coworker probably about a couple weeks now and did end up getting a Turkish coffee, so thought of you. ⁓ Very enjoyable. The last one that we went to, ⁓ same place, so the fancy one with like the rose water and Turkish coffee and got like a pour over, which I think was counter culture too, which is good. And then...

TJ Miller (10:00)
nice.

⁓ jeez.

Chris Gmyr (10:14)
In the afternoons, I started getting this Cafe Bustello unsweetened espresso style iced coffee at the grocery store. And it is surprisingly very good. So I've been doing that the last two, three weeks, something like that. Just a little half cup with some ice in there and enjoy it in the afternoon. And it's pretty tasty.

TJ Miller (10:23)
Mmm.

Oh, I've seen this before. Yeah, okay.

Chris Gmyr (10:42)
Yeah, it's pretty good. I wouldn't say it's as sweet and fruity and floral as doing my own iced concentrate. But it's easy. It's just in a bottle. And you pour it out into your cup. And you just enjoy it.

TJ Miller (10:56)
I love that. Yeah.

I love the simplicity of that. You know, there's, yeah, there's, there's just something really nice about being able to open it up, pour it out and drink it and not have all the process behind making it, you know.

Chris Gmyr (10:59)
Yep.

Yep, exactly. like same thing with like taking a break. It's like I just need easy right now for a little bit. Like I don't need another process. I don't need to check in on this and do stuff in 24 hours. Like I just want a little drink, pour it into my cup and be good to go.

TJ Miller (11:25)
Yep.

No, there's something really nice and like, just, yeah, there's something really nice about being able to do that. You know, that's I've been on the like store bought cold brew, like all winter is my like second cup in the morning. And yeah, there's something nice about being able to grab it and pour it out. And then we'll, get back to making cold brew concentrate this summer, but, ⁓

Chris Gmyr (11:44)
Yep, definitely.

It's starting to get warm here, so I'm sure it's coming pretty soon.

TJ Miller (11:48)
Yeah, it's still freezing here, so it's been

so cold.

Yeah, so touching a little bit more on like, I think there's just like a little bit more to be said here on like time and space. There's been several times now over the last year where I've just had to like, step away from Prism, step away from Iris and just kind of like, get back to basics and focus on life and like sometimes mental health. And I just feel like there's like taking time and space is like,

I don't know, it's an important thing that I often lose sight of. And I think sometimes my brain and body like force it upon me of like, no, you are taking time and space right now because you didn't give yourself time and space earlier.

there's just this like forcing function where I feel like every couple months if I haven't been good about it, like my brain and body just shut down and it's I'm like then forced to take time and space away from things. Which I feel like has been what's been happening over the last several months of like just this like forced time and space of, you know,

just stepping away for a little bit, finding inspiration again, coming back, hitting things hard, catching back up again, and then just kind of falling back into that space of just needing to step away for a little bit.

And so I've done that a little bit over the last few weeks of just kind of like stepping away from things like Prism kind of ballooned with issues and pull requests that I've been trying to get back under control. I've been like building out a bunch of things in Iris. But.

that that that all came at a cost and like I had to take a break for a little while and it's been really nice and refreshing kind of getting back to a rhythm of like working on these things and improving stuff and seeing pull request numbers go down and issue numbers go down and like stuff getting resolved. So it's nice to be back in that space. And I feel like I'm going to be in that space for a little while again now. But who knows, man. But yeah, I think.

being mindful and taking time and space is so important.

Chris Gmyr (13:56)
Yeah, 100%. And I am definitely not good at that either. It seems like it has to come to some sort of tipping point where I don't naturally feel stressed a lot of times. I just kind of keep on going. But when I start actually feeling stress, that's way past the point of needing time and space. So I don't know. I just need to adjust my own gauge of like,

TJ Miller (14:15)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (14:22)
be we're going down that road of feeling like more stressed out or just overwhelmed. Because I feel like once again, once I get to that point, like it's already too late. So to what you were saying before, is like kind of pre plan those kind of time offs or and just like relaxation, like quiet time and trying to be like drawn back into like, ⁓ cloud coach should be doing this stuff for me like the anxiety of that or like, I so many things that I want to do.

TJ Miller (14:45)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (14:49)
Like you said also, just that space also helps you recharge, but also it can breed additional creativity and inspiration and other things, or redirect you into maybe your different priorities and what you want to do. So I think it's needed. I just don't do it all the time. I need to do it a lot more. So yeah, something that.

TJ Miller (15:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (15:15)
like I'm definitely working on, because it just affects like everything, right? It affects you personally, it affects work, it affects family and relationships. like if we're not like 100 % with ourselves, it's just not good for anyone else either.

TJ Miller (15:30)
I'm really, ⁓ I am so bad at it. Like my wife called me out on it like a couple of weeks ago. She's like, I haven't, I haven't seen you like play in a long time. Like it's just, it's been a while since you've like sat down and like built Legos with me or you know, done other things. Like I haven't even been going to the gym at all. Or like, I just like, I haven't done other stuff.

And it's just been like either work and then Prism and then Iris and then house stuff. just, especially with her ankle being down and like limping around and everything, I've had to absorb a lot more like stuff around the house too. That yeah, she's just like, haven't, I haven't seen you like take time to just play in a while. And I'm like, ⁓ man, that's...

That's a really good point. so it's like, it's almost getting to the point where I need to get back to like time blocking my days on my calendar. And I come back to this like every few months, I think where it's like, Nope, I need to get like really strict about like time blocking my days and my time and like making sure that you're yeah, you're you're putting in your schedule some like downtime or time to like play or do something other than just like

grinding away a life or whatever, you know?

Chris Gmyr (16:51)
Yep, exactly.

TJ Miller (16:52)
So yeah, it's, think that's where I'm at was where like, need to start like time blocking things out a bit and making sure that I am dedicating time to like moving my body and like doing things that are like fun and silly and like just different than sitting at a computer and coding. Cause like I do, I do that for fun also, like for me, it is such a creative expression to like code and to work on prism and to work on Iris that

Like that is that is what I gravitate to in like downtime like and I will take time to like, well, I know I need to work on this thing that's like important, but like maybe not super interesting. But tonight I want to just kind of like kick back and have some fun. So I'll work on like a totally different feature or something that's just is engaging and interesting to work on. But like it's still not.

taking time away, right? It's just different intention on like the same shit. like, that's what often happens is like, she'll be, she'll sit in bed and like work on like beading bracelets or something. And that's when I would normally like go grab Lego and like build a Lego kit or something while she's doing that. And we can just kind of have like that time together. But I often, so often now it's like, she's out beating and I'm sitting there on my laptop, like working on something, you know, and

And that's not even though it's like different intention and like it feels different working on the super creative stuff, like that's still not taking time and space away from things. So just kind of getting better about recognizing that too and like try to do something different about it.

Chris Gmyr (18:23)
Yeah.

Yep, totally. And it's good to switch up the medium too, because even though like, you know, regular work stuff on a computer versus like personal stuff on a computer, side projects or whatever, like you're still sitting in front of the computer and typing and dealing with Claude and all that. We're like mixing it up and doing physical like Lego bricks or beads or building something or working on the house or something like that, going out and playing basketball with the kiddo, like just mixing up the medium.

TJ Miller (18:43)
Yep.

Chris Gmyr (18:58)
is helpful as well. yeah, again, easier said than done a lot of times and just gonna like force it in that direction for sure.

TJ Miller (19:02)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. I got to like make time for it and like force it to happen sometimes. So yeah. so I see you like through on this release spot too. I'm interested to hear about this cause I've never heard of this before. Release bot.io.

Chris Gmyr (19:19)
Yeah,

Yep, so this is something I was searching for and was like how there's like so much stuff going on in AI. It feels like I'm just drowning in information. I'm sure most other people feel the same way, but I'm like it's part of my job like I'm trying to. Utilize and inform other people of like helpful things changing in the ecosystem, especially around like anthropic and.

Cloud Code, it's been rolled out to all the engineers. I'm doing pairing sessions. I'm creating plugins for everyone. I'm doing a whole bunch of things with it. And I also feel like I'm lagging behind what's actually available out there or what could benefit everyone. So how do I find all this information across all these different spaces and did a bunch of searches, was chatting with Claude, chat?

And one of the things that came up was ⁓ this releasebot.io. And you can sign up for a free account, not sponsored or anything. I think they do have a paid option to remove some ads or whatever, but it's really not a big deal. And it has all the AI companies in there. It has a bunch of other things, like Obsidian is in there that I use.

Just a whole bunch of stuff. think you can also connect it to other repos and things like that too if it's not automatically in there. And it aggregates and puts all these release notes in a feed for you. And also it gives you a daily email. So in the morning, I open up and be like, what is the latest Cloud Code drop? And what was in there? And then I can look and see if there's anything meaningful that I can extract or look into.

⁓ Same thing for the other models that I'm tracking, other companies, other apps, things like that. So this has been a really nice and quick way to get a recap of what actually is going into these systems or models or companies or apps or whatever. So I've been using it for about two weeks now, and it's been fantastic just to have everything in one spot. And then I can, if something looks compelling, then I'll jump into it and read a little bit more about it.

you know, the full release notes, but it's been super helpful.

TJ Miller (21:30)
yeah, this is cool. I just signed up for a handful of things like this is a super clean website. Like I really like the aesthetic and the UI. Yeah, they have a ton. There's like an ad supported platform and there's one for like 10 bucks a month, which gives you like more alert formats and like better feeds and better email digests and JSON API endpoints.

All sorts of cool stuff. like, this looks like a pretty cool thing. Cause like I'm in the same boat. There's like definitely things that I want to be keeping tabs on. and I get, I subscribe to like a handful of the, like AI newsletters that are just like big batch things of here's everything that's going on in the AI space. And like, those are pretty informative, but there's still a lot to go through. And like, I haven't hooked up like any sort of email or email.

like MCP, I haven't hooked up an AI to my inbox yet or anything. So I don't have like summarization hooked up for all of those or other things. I know there's like other solutions to help handle some of the ingestion of like those newsletters and everything, but there is just like a lot of a lot of crufts too. So being able to come in here and like actually go to Anthropic and follow updates specifically about Anthropic or sub products of Anthropic, you know.

really, really interesting how they're doing this. I like it. This is cool.

Chris Gmyr (22:53)
Yeah, so I've enjoyed it. So yeah, let me know how it works out for you. Or if anyone signs up, let me know. Xer, this guy, would love to hear any feedback.

TJ Miller (23:01)
Yeah, they've got like bare notes is in here and bit warden and brave and wow. Yeah, they've got this is this is pretty deep. I'm pretty impressed.

Chris Gmyr (23:03)
Yeah, they got tons of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, it's been pretty sweet. Yeah, check it out. The other thing that I wanted to talk about, speaking of a bunch of cloud code usage, is I redesigned my website, chrisgamere.dev. So brand new, I know I mentioned it, that I was working on it to the other day. But it was, I don't know, just like an amazing experience. Because I've had the idea.

TJ Miller (23:23)
⁓ yeah.

Chris Gmyr (23:36)
or thoughts to like finally like redesign my website. It was on Hashnode. I've been on there for years. It was originally an older Laravel site. I moved it to Hashnode because I'm like, I don't want to deal with the updates anymore. Like I just want to write and like there's a little bit of like network effect in there that people can like share and like and comment and stuff like that. So I'm like, I was cross posting it when I was still a Laravel site to their

which was mildly helpful, but eh. And then once I started setting up the newsletter, I had some issues with that for the signup flow and a few other things. then they've been changing stuff and it hasn't been, I don't know, it hasn't been working for me as much anymore. I've been wanting to, also with the introduction of the newsletter and then with the podcast even, just connecting all those streams of information together.

TJ Miller (24:18)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (24:29)
I felt the need to pull it back into doing more of a custom setup. So I ended up pulling the trigger. I started off in chatting with Claude of like, hey, it's on Hashnode. I want x, y, and z. Here's a bunch of sites that I like in respect from other people. But I don't want the same aesthetics. I just want a modern kind of.

deeper, darker aesthetic, and here's all the content that I want to put on there. So not only blog posts, but I want to highlight the newsletter more, I want to highlight the podcast more, and then I want the ability to add on whatever else that I want to in the future. So went back and forth with Claude Chat a handful of times and kind of got the plan ready. Asked Chat to create a

plan and prompt for Cloud Code that I was just going to drop into a basically brand new layer-belt install with filament and a couple other things, and basically said, here's the plan. Here's a fresh install. Go. And then it just ripped through it. And also with this, I had the chance to actually use the remote control feature for Cloud Code. Have you used this yet? ⁓ So.

TJ Miller (25:30)
Yeah.

Yes. Yes, I love it.

Chris Gmyr (25:46)
⁓

so good. So good. This is what I was missing before when I was working on other projects. It's like I feel like I'm strapped to my desk in the terminal to answer questions, to adjust, ⁓ to fix things. So now just do like RC or remote dash control and then go on to the Cloud app, find the session, and then you're good to go. I really like the output of that in that.

like really unlocked me being able to like, you know, go downstairs or, you know, when I'm waiting for my daughter to fall asleep at night, like I can just answer questions and keep the flow, you know, going and check in on it after, you know, 10, 20 minutes or something like that. Instead of like having to run back upstairs or do this or do that and just really annoying. So I'm like, this is this is awesome. This is just magic. And like it really unlocked like the whole thing.

TJ Miller (26:34)
Yeah, it is.

Chris Gmyr (26:38)
And then when it was done, chunking through the plan, started having to import all the stuff from all the different places from my cache node. it pulls in. I set up the API for both transistor for the podcast and also button down for where the newsletter is. So it basically sucks in all the podcasts. It sucks in all the newsletters. And now I have a link to share from that'll

direct links to the podcast for the Read More, archive for the newsletter, all this stuff. And have that set up for, it'll scan those resources every day, even though we only drop on certain days, I'm like, just do it whenever. There's also a manual button in the Filament admin, so if I want to manually go in and be like, import podcasts, there's a button to do that.

TJ Miller (27:10)
sick.

Check it every day, yeah, why not?

Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (27:30)
For blog posts, really liked having the ability in Hashnode that they have Unsplash image lookup. So I built that in there too, or like Claude built that in there too, where I can search for something. Or if I have a URL from Unsplash that I like search for manually, I can just dump the URL in there too. And that finds everything via the API and just like fills it all out. It like automatically calculates the like reading time. There's like a little

TJ Miller (27:39)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (27:59)
indicator as you scroll through the blogs and all that stuff. All the newsletter sign up is seamless, going through the button down API now, just button up all these loose ends that I did not like in the old system, and just have a slick looking website now. And then also I posted this morning a new blog, basically going through the whole process of redesigning the blog with Cloud Code, the tools, the design decisions.

All that stuff that I've gone through and things that I liked, things that I would have changed or altered kind of earlier on. So yeah, definitely check that out and check out the new website.

TJ Miller (28:35)
Yeah,

the new website looks amazing. love like there's so many actually like little subtle things like looking at it on desktop and like moving your cursor around like does this like really cool like little background highlight that follows your cursor I think is just such a nice like it's just such a nice little touch.

Yeah, I love it. It's aesthetically super clean. I think the colors all work really well together.

I think got like a bunch of really cool stuff in here. Like you've got your users page set up, like the podcast stuff looks great. Yeah, actually like the newsletter being pulled in is fantastic. Like I think this is just so cool. You did a really good job.

Chris Gmyr (29:14)
Thanks. it, no, I think it's great. Like, I know. I think it's good. Because you have like more of the modern look anyways. You've had that for a while too. And it's just like, it's with your vibe and brand, the neon and the purples and stuff like that. it.

TJ Miller (29:15)
Makes me want to redo mine so bad.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's probably due for like a little refresh. And honestly, I wouldn't change it a whole lot. Like it's I like the real minimalistic, like clean vibe to it all. think it just is like due for a refresh. It's on, I'm sure, an ancient version of Astro and could use a refresh there. And yeah, I don't know. I'd probably keep it pretty similar, but fresh coat of paint on it.

Chris Gmyr (29:56)
Yeah, but it's been, yeah, this is a super interesting experience of having, especially on the design side too, of just the pre-planning, the initial back and forth, and then just basically letting Cloud Code just rip into it and its thing. even though I still had a handful of changes that I wanted to make or just alter in one way or the other, but minimal compared to the amount of work that it turned out.

TJ Miller (30:11)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (30:25)
Yeah, I'd take that any day compared to trying to do this myself over many weeks. And basically from the initiation of the chat in cloud AI chat and actually deploying it to layer about cloud was about 24 hours. Not that I was like working the whole time, but it was just like checking in or like, you know, answering some questions or doing like a manual test over here or over there. And then, okay.

TJ Miller (30:31)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (30:55)
good, let's deploy it and all set and done. It's like, you can't beat that for 24 hours of work.

TJ Miller (31:01)
Yeah, no, it's crazy. It's

so crazy where we're at. and it's also even crazier to think that like we're in a bit of a bubble, right? Like we're, we're very AI-pilled, very like into it and like, yeah, we can crank this stuff out. And it's, it's crazy to think that is still a bit of a bubble. And there's like a lot of people not taking advantage of Claude code or open code or

you know, codecs or things like that. Like it's it's crazy. So. Yeah, it's just a wild thought, but yeah, for especially for like that amount of time. I don't know, man. I think your site looks great. This is this is cool.

Chris Gmyr (31:40)
Thanks.

like I'm looking forward to adding a lot more to it too. I'm working on a bunch of other content for all the different spaces. So more on that and hopefully next week we can chat about it. If not in future episodes, but yeah, like to get back into more of the written content and all the places and only just the podcast. So yeah, thanks to explore that more.

TJ Miller (32:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, I've got a few blog posts I think I want to write here pretty soon. it's one of those I try to sneak in a quick little slap of fresh paint and then knock out a couple of blog posts. We'll see. We'll see. I should probably just leave the design and do the content, but.

Chris Gmyr (32:16)
Why not?

Yeah, don't

want to get distracted too much. Put out the content.

TJ Miller (32:23)
Yeah, just put out

the blog post. It's fine. Yeah, cool, man. Well, you want to talk a ⁓ little bit about Iris in Prism updates? So I did a live stream yesterday, a short one. It was only an hour. But we went through, we actually ripped through a bunch of new features that I haven't talked about at all, which is.

Chris Gmyr (32:27)
Sweet.

Yeah, what do got for us?

TJ Miller (32:42)
Part of the problem, my sales were so bad as I haven't been talking about Iris much. I kind of took a few week break from socials and everything and then came back and launched Iris. a couple of the cool features, we added support for citations. So if we use.

Irish ships by default configured for Anthropic and the Claude Sonnet models. And so because we're using Anthropic by default, I can also utilize Anthropic's web search and web fetch provider tools, which Prism supports. And so when it uses web search, it'll actually return citations. So we added that in the UI. So now as it's like citing.

like stuff in its response, you'll also have references to like where it grabbed those like nuggets of information from. You can like expand those and see like the citation where it was, like the text, and then like link off to things from there. So that's, that's pretty cool. That was a nice little feature that actually came out of a bug that someone else found that we weren't handling the citation events that are coming back from Prism, but

Once I handled those, was like, well, now that we are handling this use case, we should maybe just put it in the UI. So when Claude knocked that out pretty quick, which was cool. Let's see. There's all sorts of little things. Let me pull up the website.

So I've also enabled shell commands, agent skills, and task delegation, as well as proactive messages. Because I don't think we talked about proactive messages either. So proactive messages are actually when Iris chooses to reach out to you and send you a message. So it's such a crazy experience, waking up in the morning to a message from Iris.

That's like, Hey, here's what's on your schedule for the day. And like, that's not something I programmed in. Like Iris just, I, all I put in was that like, Hey, I like morning check-ins. And so as part of this, like, there's like this loop process that happens that like looks for scheduled fall, like pre-scheduled follow-ups or just like looking at the current state of the conversation and everything and saying like, Hey, should I follow up or not follow up on whatever it's like check in?

Cause that's one of the other things I added was that like with proactive messaging, you provide guidance and these are like notes to Iris when it does its check-in process of like, what do you prefer? So I said, I like morning check-ins. I like waking up to like a quick little summary of what I got going on for the day maybe. And something like maybe motivational, know, like get me excited to be like up and moving for the day.

And then I also just like, hey, I also like you checking in like throughout the day and just like checking in on me, like where we left off on like what's on my calendar. Just I like, I like you reaching out throughout the day. and so I'll get that. Like, I'll just get messages from Iris, like,

I had a really rough morning yesterday and it checked in like later in the afternoon said like, cause I hadn't been messaging with it throughout the day. It like checked in the afternoon said, Hey, you had a pretty rough morning. How are you doing? Where are you at? Like, I just thought that was so cool.

And there's like all sorts of UI in there as well to like show you that decision making process. So like you can go into the like heartbeat logs and it will tell you like, it chose to reach out. Here's the reason why it chose to not reach out. Here's the reason why. Um, so you actually get the like exposure to like the whole reasoning process behind proactive messaging too. And with that, like you can, there's settings to do like quick, do not disturbs.

There's also settings for like quiet hours. So like 10 PM to 6 AM, like Iris won't reach out because those are like quiet hours you have defined. So proactive messaging, like I think is probably one of the coolest features of Iris. And it was just like something I added in sort of last minute before we launched it.

Chris Gmyr (36:39)
Yeah,

that's cool.

TJ Miller (36:41)
So shell commands is pretty straightforward. I gave Iris the ability to like a shell command tool. So Iris can then like run shell commands on your system. So what I did is I have a older Mac mini sitting in my basement. It's been, I just like, I host a couple of small like containers on there. Like I think I have like a pie hole container running on there and

something else I can't remember. But now it runs Iris and I gave Iris like full root level shell access to the computer. And was like, first when I spun it up, I'm like, hey, stretch your legs. This is your new home. And like first thing it did is like went and updated all the packages, locked down firewall rules. it took care of the whole computer. It was great.

Chris Gmyr (37:20)
Cool.

TJ Miller (37:22)
It like fixed a couple issues. It found that a couple of Docker containers that were running didn't have restart policies associated with them. like add restart policies to them. But just like went through this whole process of like setting up its own machine and the way it wanted to, which was really cool. yeah, having shell access is like, I think.

super powerful and like these couple features kind of came out of like looking at OpenClaw and going what what can I kind of extract from OpenClaw and add to iris to make it like even more useful. I also added agent skill support so like with cloud code or open code there's like skills and you can go to like skills.sh to get like a directory of skills. I know Laravel just launched a like Laravel specific

skills portal as well to like add skills to like your development environment. Well, I added support to iris for agent skills. So these are like markdown files that get stored in different directories depending on what platform you're using. But like the standard is dot agent slash skills and

Iris ships with one default skill, which is the reverse sells agent browser skill. And I just ship that as like an example thing, but it works really, really well. So if you decide to use different models, like let's say you want to use like an all Olamas set up for Iris. That's another thing I did recently was like allowed provider support. So like any provider that Prism supports, Iris now supports for any of its actions. ⁓

And so you can define provider and model pair for everything from main chat to the proactive messaging decision system to anything else. So like you can fully customize this. So if you wanted to run like all on Olama, well, now you need a web fetch. You need something to like search the web, you know, like go get websites or like navigate web pages. Well, the agent browser skill, you can just ask Iris to activate that skill. It then learns how to.

use the agent browser CLI tool and then use the shell commands to go search the web. So that's like a pretty cool feature.

Chris Gmyr (39:27)
Yeah, that is cool.

TJ Miller (39:29)
And then one that I'm not super sold on yet is like this task delegation feature. it's not something I use, but I envisioned maybe somebody else using it and kind of running with it. but what it is, it's more like, you know, you have shell commands and Iris can choose to use those, but maybe it's like a multi-step.

process and you want to have that happen in the background, well, Iris can delegate this task to this, like basically a background job that runs where you, it sends in like, ⁓

like Iris defines like success criteria, timeout protection, progress tracking, and then like it just gets shelved off in the background. So you get like a little UI where you can see what it's actively doing in the background, but then you can just continue chatting with Iris and eventually like a message from the agent will through web sockets show up in the chat of like, hey, I finished this process. Here's everything that happened.

It definitely needs some refinement and work. But I'm also kind of waiting to see how much usage it gets before I invest more into it. So like if people aren't using it, I'll just rip it back out.

but it's there to experiment with. And so all of those four features, I'm like considering them in beta for now, but for sure, proactive messaging agent skills and shell commands will move out of beta and be like for sure part of Iris's feature set. The, this agent task delegation I'm not so sure about, but if people are hype on it and want to use it and like need more out of it, I have more plans to like make it better, but.

I don't want to sink the investment into it if it's not going to get used. just kind of keeping an eye on usage for that one.

Chris Gmyr (41:22)
Nice. Man, that's a ton of features.

TJ Miller (41:24)
Yeah, I shipped a whole bunch of stuff right before I launched because I was like, well, I want to make it worth its value. And there were just like some features I wanted to get done before launch. And I had some time and opportunity to like knock those things out. So I did.

Yeah, got early access going. You know, I was all over the place on pricing for it. I settled on $99 for early access and then we'll probably do like $149 for full price later on. But that seemed to hit a sweet spot.

Yeah. So just continuing to jam on that. don't, I don't have any like immediate features right now. I've just been working on like stability and I'll tell you what building a streaming chat UI, like out of all the stuff that I've built into Iris.

The streaming chat UI is by far the most challenging part of like all of this. There are just so many edge cases, like it's got web sockets. So there's like a bunch of moving parts. You've got reverb running, you've got Redis running. it like, when you send a message, it queues a job and then that background job is what generates the output. And then that gets web socketed back to the UI. It's just.

It was so much easier to reason about when it was a telegram bot or like if I made it a discord bot or something like that, it was so much easier to reason about. But I was hitting so many limitations with telegram that like I just like, especially around message length and like telegram will take messages and like long messages and just break them up into separate messages, which. Is problematic if you send a long message because.

Chris Gmyr (42:43)
you

TJ Miller (43:05)
Now you've got multiple completions happening simultaneously. So message length was a huge problem with Telegram. But also, if I'm talking code or other things with Iris, the markdown.

Chris Gmyr (43:11)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (43:22)
like markdown support really isn't there inside of Telegram. like getting really nicely rendered code blocks for things also wasn't great. So like it all kind of pushed me to building this custom UI, which I've grown to love, but it is. There are so many moving parts and so many edge cases that it's there's so much in there that like.

Chris Gmyr (43:41)
So long.

TJ Miller (43:46)
That is, I've built these advanced semantic memory systems and these proactive messaging and all these other things of built in, but the streaming chat UI is the most challenging part of all of it, at least I feel.

Chris Gmyr (44:03)
Yep. It's always like the live updating stuff that's hardest in so many edge cases, like you were saying. And I don't know, the backend systems, even though they might be complex in theory, or just like the engines that are put together. at least, I don't know. There's probably less edge cases. Or you can programmatically go through the edge cases a lot easier compared to just live UI updates and multiple things going on in the background to actually make it.

work and function smoothly and correctly.

TJ Miller (44:36)
It's like having it in a PWA mode or like I'm starting to feel the draw towards like PWA now because I want to do like push notifications for proactive messages. But then it's like, well, maybe I should just kind of take a step back from building this streaming UI and like maybe pivot over to a Native, not a React Native, a Native PHP client.

and like build a native app and get like real push notifications and stuff like that, which I'm still debating on, but like I'm feeling this draw to like build out like at least partial of a PWA. But it's like, let's say I'm chatting on desktop and I go like move over to my phone and like pull that up. Well, if I just like open it up.

it's going to have stale messages. So like, you got to have some sort of like auto updating mechanism. So like when you refocus it, it like refreshes the memory, like the, message tree. And it's just like, it's so nasty. There's so many edge cases. It gets so hard.

And I've built it with server. I've really tried to build it in a way that it's state is managed server side instead of client side, is like, which is, think where like a lot of chat apps work is they're like, it's heavy logic client side. And then like a more simple API on the backend. Whereas this is like the API gets kind of complicated on the backend, but I'm doing like.

sort of like traditionally, the traditional layer of our backend state management. And then the client is like really kind of dumb. so I think I may have shot myself in the foot trying to deal like that route too, that if I would have maybe invested like more in client side state that

I don't know. Maybe not. I don't ⁓ know. It's so it's such a mess and it's so challenging, but it's it's getting more stable. Like the more people that have used it and given me like feedback, the more I've been able to iterate on it and like lock things down and make it a lot more stable. So yeah, I don't know. That's all I've got. It's a lot of prism. guess there's prism.

Chris Gmyr (46:35)
Nice.

Excellent.

TJ Miller (46:42)
I've been, I've got a couple of releases over the last few days with like a ton of merged PRs. I've got a couple of really awesome PRs that I'm looking forward to like getting to reviewing. It's just been a matter of like finding the time to sit down with them. Cause I, I went through and tried to knock out all the easy PRs first and like just let me get through as many of this, like as PR review as I can. And then like save some of the bigger ones for when I've got more bandwidth to sit down and like really get into them.

which is also requiring me to be in the right head space to look at and dig into some of these bigger, foundationally shifting features, which are really good. And I'm so stoked that they've been contributed. I got to be in the right head space to get through them.

review them. hopefully over the next couple of days, I can get a couple of these bigger ones merged into, especially with providers. There's like been, I think there's like four or five new providers people are trying to add to Prism, which I'm open for, but I'm really critical of provider PRs and like, I have to go out. I feel the need to go out and get API keys and like manually test these just to like make sure that they're like actually working the way that we expect them to work. So, uh,

new provider PRs are like kind of a bear to get through and we've got a few of those but you know.

Chris Gmyr (47:59)
Might be if

you see an increase in providers over time. I don't know. I know we talked about having either separate repos for plugins for providers or community-based ones. If you're seeing a lot of that, maybe, I don't know, it be worth it.

TJ Miller (48:17)
You know,

I have pushed back on a couple of them of like, you know, I think this is great, but it's just not a provider that I'm like willing to take on the burden of long-term support for. I think for the most part, the ones that are being contributed now are, are ones that I'm willing to like take on. but they're just, they're

It's not so bad once they're like in the code base and like moving, because then I only have to worry about them if like there's changes to them. But.

We're doing the initial review is like definitely a bit of a bear. Like getting, like I said, like getting API keys set up and then like manually testing all the end points and just making sure like I have an understanding and make sure like I had to have like an understanding of how that providers API works in order to understand how the code is like needs to work too. So they're just, it's a lot of work, but I'm going to get through them over the next few days, I think.

you know, hopefully like really sometime next week land on a very clean repo state again of like really getting these issues knocked down, getting the PRs cleaned up. Um, so I, and, and I want to get to 1.0 like really soon. And I think a couple of these PRs may move me in that direction. So, um, it's good. It's a good problem to have, but it's a lot of work too. Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (49:38)
Yeah, yeah, totally.

TJ Miller (49:39)
Well, on that note, man, you want to wrap up?

Chris Gmyr (49:41)
Yeah, that's wrap up. Thanks for listening to the Slightly Caffeinated podcast. Show notes and all the links, social channels are down below and also available at slightlycaffeinated.fm. If you have any questions for us or have content suggestions, go to ask a question page on our site and we'll feature it in an upcoming episode. Thank you all for listening and we'll catch you next week.

TJ Miller (50:01)
Yep, see you.