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In this episode, Donn Felker and Allen explore the evolving landscape of AI, discussing its impact on coding, personal experiences, and the future of software engineering. They share insights on how AI is transforming traditional roles and empowering individuals from non-technical backgrounds to innovate and build new solutions.
Creators and Guests
What is Autonomous?
Two founders, one a seasoned AI engineer, one a non-traditional builder who learned through AI, have unfiltered conversations about building products, using AI as a tool, and pushing limits in work and life. Part technical, part philosophical, part two friends being real.
The show is for ambitious people who want to do more than they think they’re capable of, whether that’s shipping their first product, going deeper technically, or just thinking bigger.
Donn Felker (00:00)
What's up everybody? Welcome to the new show. My name is Don Felker. I'm here with Alan Santamaria. And in this show, we'll be talking about AI in general and all different kinds of stuff. I've known Alan for quite a while as a friend and we are currently working together on a new project. And we've been discussing all different kinds of things regarding AI from just using it from a general purpose to how it's used for coding and learning, even personal therapy and everything.
And we found a lot of these conversations might be a lot really useful to a lot of people. I've written a few blog posts recently on AI that have helped a lot of people. And so we want to just kind of hop on here and talk about some of the things that we're doing. So we're not really sure how long we're going to do this podcast. It might be for one season. It might be two. It might be 10. We'll have to see how everything unfolds. Everything in AI right now is moving at such a speed that it's really difficult to kind of judge how it's going to look even in a month or two. So.
Our show here is really gonna be about us two who are founders of a product that we'll eventually talk about. One is a seasoned AI engineer and software engineer, that's myself, and one is a non-traditional builder who's learned a lot through AI, and that's gonna be Alan. And our plan is really to have unfiltered conversations around building products, using AI as a tool, and just basically pushing the limits in real work and life, in real life.
Part of it's gonna be technical, there'll be parts that are philosophical, there's gonna be some comedy here and there, and in short, it's just really two friends being real discussing this different technology world that we're living in. And occasionally, we might even try to build something live, so we'll have to see how that goes. In short, though, the show is for ambitious people who want to do more than they think they're capable of, whether that's shipping your first product or just going deeper technically or just thinking bigger in general. So we hope you enjoy going on this journey with us.
⁓ With that said, I'll give a little bit of background about myself. Some of you listening or watching, hey, I appreciate you watching if you are. You might have known me from the podcast days of Fragmented. I ran a very popular Android podcast with my previous co-host Kaushik Gopal, and it was an Android developer podcast. So if you're coming from that world and you're looking to pick up some software engineering things in regards to AI, you've come to the right place.
Thanks for joining me along on the journey. My background is mainly in software engineering. I've been doing it for over 25 years now. built many very popular apps out there and I've been writing software, not just mobile, but back end web, et cetera, for a very long time. And AI is just kind of the next thing that has popped up. So that's kind of my real quick elevator pitch. I have a few books out there on the internet if you're interested in checking them out or you can view my website at donfelker.com.
which will include all the links in the show notes. And Alan, for those of the people out there that are not familiar with you, what's your background? How did you get to where you are now? And bring us up to date.
Allen (03:02)
Hey, thanks Don. Wow. ⁓ first podcast here. So I'm to keep this one on rails, try to keep this on rails for us. So yeah, my background is not in the AI space or engineering space. So anyone coming from that world, ⁓ who knows Don will almost certainly not know me. ⁓ I've worked the last couple of years in the gaming industry. So if you're coming from over there and wanted to learn a little bit more about AI or what I've been up to, thanks for, thanks for coming and supporting. Appreciate you. but
a high level, I've worked now in partnerships, sales type roles for the last 10 years. I've worked at consumer tech companies. I've worked at a big enterprise technology sales companies and more recently in gaming and e-sports, which was in huge passion of mine growing up. fought endlessly to get into, into that world. And, ⁓ you know, I've had a great successful career,
while working for one main publisher.
Um, and then on, on a new, uh, fan loyalty product, which was pretty exciting, uh, over the last year. Um, more recently I've, I've taken a serious interest in AI, uh, as a technology and, and, and what I can do with it. Um, you know, when I first found out about AI, it was really just about generating like silly mean pictures, uh, and sending them to my friends. Uh, or, or even, you know, in, the work Slack channels,
Donn Felker (04:20)
Yeah.
Allen (04:26)
know, I've taken that interest now well past just like talking to a machine and ⁓ started to develop my own apps and I can, I actually still can't believe I'm able to do it. It just feels like I've been given this super power built on the backs of like engineers like yourself, Don.
And it's, incredible. ⁓ We're working on, mentioned that we're working on a new project. I think it's really exciting. We could talk about it at some point, but in general, ⁓ I just think that more people should know about the tools that are available to them. And ⁓ that's, that's a big, a big reason why I was interested in doing this podcast and excited to be here today.
Donn Felker (05:08)
Awesome. Yeah, I think it's interesting for folks that are coming from a non-technical background and how you have got into the point of developing because for a lot of people that don't know, Alan and I have known each other for a while. We basically met at the gym and just became good friends from that point forward. And we would be at the gym and I would be discussing something and maybe something, building something of the AI. And he would say, I wish I could do this. And maybe I would mention a tool or he would say, Hey, what about this other type of tool?
And over the time, he just really dove in and just started building things with the, you know, these web based builders out there to integrate multiple different services together. You with the first thing that you built, I remember you talking to me about a app for ⁓ sharing music. What was the problem that you were trying to solve there? And how did you put it together? Like, I remember you coming to me at the gym, being like, dude, I built this thing. It's crazy. I've been up all night working on it.
Allen (06:05)
Yeah. Yeah. You know what? It's like, I had all these problems that I was waiting for other companies to solve. And after just a little bit of experimentation, I was just like, maybe I can start to do it myself and see if it works, see what's available. And, you know, up until that point, I mean, I had understood an API and, and,
Donn Felker (06:19)
Mm-hmm.
Allen (06:27)
I like at least fundamentally, I knew what an API was and how it worked, but I didn't know how it worked on a backend. Like what an engineer did with an API to actually gain access to, to another platform. And, ⁓ so to your question, the, the music service that I built was a simple solution to, send people links all the time, to, different songs and whether it's on Spotify or Apple and
We have all these different links in a group chat. And it's like, no one's looking at the music because, know, to, to click a Spotify link, if I'm an Apple user is like, you know, it's taken me to a platform that I use natively. And I might, I more than likely they're just not doing it. And it was kind of killing the whole, ⁓ what I love to do is just sharing music. Yeah. So like what I went, ⁓ and did was just started to investigate. All right. How do I create a platform that when I share a link, it just shares for.
Donn Felker (07:13)
the sharing.
Allen (07:24)
a link for every music service that's in the group. and then furthermore, when, when that link is shared, like, how could I just have it added to a playlist for everybody's music service in the group? And, you know, that seems pretty complicated. If you're not an engineer, if you're not somebody's building something like that, like how do you, where would you even start with that? You know, like, so I'll tell you where I started in Google Gemini. I just asked Gemini a question. said, Hey, this is the problem I'm having.
Donn Felker (07:41)
Yeah, how do you connect it all together,
Allen (07:53)
Can you help me build something? And it did. And I gotta be honest, man. Like there were points in the process where I was like, there's no way it's going to be able to keep up with my line of questioning or there's no way that it's going to want to continue this. It's just going to be like, Alan, I've had enough of this shit. Like you have no idea what you're doing. Like just stop and like, leave me alone. But like LLMs don't do that.
Donn Felker (08:05)
Yeah.
Allen (08:17)
They're relentless. And it's like one of the most amazing experiences. They're a true collaborator in whatever you want to do. so Gemini not only helped me to write my first lines of code for this app, but it walked me through the process of like bringing it to market. It's a working product. I built something. I showed it to my friends. Nobody believed I actually built it. ⁓ and I still questioned whether or not I built it. You know what I mean? Like that's part of what I want to talk to you about is like,
Donn Felker (08:18)
Mm-hmm.
Allen (08:45)
Did I actually build it? You know, I think I did.
Donn Felker (08:47)
Yeah. Well, I remember you. Yeah, we went to the gym
and you were telling me like this thing works. I built it and I looked at you and I said, man, you've been bitten by the bug now. Like you have it. Like you're finally building these things. And I think it's important for people that you mentioned this when you in your intro that like you're not technical. You're not an engineer. You don't have that background. And so.
Allen (08:56)
Yeah
Donn Felker (09:08)
for you, like it was helping write code and you kind of had to copy and paste some things around and you ran into some errors, but you, from my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong, took those errors or whatever you were working with and just communicated it back with the LLM or Gemini and it just kind of helped you implement it. Is that right?
Allen (09:25)
Yeah. Well, let me, let me clarify my background a little bit more. So I do have experience working with product and engineering teams. So I'm very well versed in like, all right. How can I communicate this in a way so that an engineer might understand what the actual problem is? Like everything still has to be very clear. I think one of the, one of the big things in learning how to use an LM is learning how to ask the right questions. And then also LM's 10, like they're getting better at it. But when I built the music app, it still wasn't to the point where
Donn Felker (09:47)
Absolutely.
Allen (09:54)
It would remember its own mistakes. So you still have to take, you still have to invest a lot of intention into what the LLM is sending to you. And so that if it starts to recreate the same mistake, you have to learn how to fix it and tell you like, Hey, we've been through this before. You know what I mean? And then the other part of it is like knowing relevant information to send back to the LLM. Like, Hey, this is why I think it's not working. like, Hey, that's it'll actually tell you like, Hey, I think that's a really good fine. Like let's investigate that. ⁓
Donn Felker (10:09)
Mm-mm.
Allen (10:23)
Yeah. So I think having, having some of that prior knowledge, having, what I would say is like a beginner intermediate knowledge in JavaScript and Python, so I can read through the script and know approximately what it's doing and try to identify errors ahead of time before the LLM starts taking us down a deep rabbit hole. Those sorts, those sorts of skills still help a lot, but I mean, I gotta be honest. Like when I look at the body of work that was created, I mean, the LLM did a lot of work.
I'm not, I'm not doing all too much. I'm, I'm, I'm on the hands. I'm like a second filter just to, just to keep, ⁓ almost like a sanity check on what's happening. It's just like, it's, it's incredible. It's, it's, it's absolutely incredible. I mean, that was one, that was my first app that I built. My second app was ⁓ way more involved. was pulling information, historical information from a, from the Yahoo fantasy, ⁓ API. ⁓
Donn Felker (11:20)
okay.
Allen (11:21)
Which, which also required like OAuth sign in for, for, me to use the app. So there was like a whole other thing I had to learn how to do. Yeah. I was like, what the hell is like, know what OAuth is, but like, again, you know, what does this look like on the backend? Like how am I working with this? Yeah. And so we're pulling all this information from, from Yahoo into a database and then connecting it to an LLM to like, you know, run queries basically on like historical data for your fantasy league.
Donn Felker (11:26)
You had to learn that.
How does it work? Yeah.
Allen (11:50)
I thought this would be my superpower in my fantasy league, I still didn't finish inside the top five. So it is what it is. It's cool concept. I don't know if it actually helps you with fantasy, but it's, fun.
Donn Felker (12:01)
That's cool. I mean, I want to get back to the original question that you had too. Like you felt that, I actually build this thing? And that was something that you would want to discuss here today. So what were you thinking in that regard? Like, what do you mean? Did you feel like you built it or what questions did you have in general?
Allen (12:18)
⁓ in, in, my mind, like, I don't know at which point I can actually call myself an engineer and, know, I'm looking at engineers and I pulled a post yesterday, something that started getting going viral, ⁓ on X and I think I should read it. ⁓ it's, relevant and. I just want to know, like, at what point can I actually feel comfortable in saying like, Hey, I've engineered these things. I've built these things. And I think.
Donn Felker (12:25)
Mm-hmm.
Allen (12:48)
The reality of this, and you could speak more to this as an actual developer is that the landscape is shifting and that engineering as a capability doesn't seem to be gated any longer by thousands of hours, you know, in texts and learning code. And I think that's a good thing from my perspective. That's a good thing. ⁓ I feel like I'm able to kind of paint my dreams now in code and that, that feels like incredible.
And I think that people who are willing to step outside of their comfort zone and, maybe they have an expertise in pharma or maybe they have an expertise in law or, or, or some, some different vertical or industry where not a lot of people are using AI or they are using AI to just ask simple questions, but they're not using AI to build. I think that this is going to empower them, ⁓ and, give them a lot of credibility and, and, and a lot of.
room to grow in the space that they're in. How do you feel?
Donn Felker (13:50)
Yeah.
No, I completely agree. The whole landscape of everything is shifting completely. And I see it from the things that you've done. I'm even seeing it from, I work at a coworking place and I showed one of the, there's a photographer there and showed him some of the tools that are out there and kind of gave him some basics. He has zero developer background. Doesn't really, it doesn't understand a line of code.
And he was able to, with one of the online tools, able to basically create the platform that he has always needed for managing his photography business. He manages a bunch of photographers. And he was able to get it to the point where he's like, could have never even imagined I could get something here. And so we're seeing that from that perspective. And so the line does become blurred of like, is he an engineer? I don't.
I wouldn't call him an engineer. He's more of a product person that now has the tools at his disposal to create a usable prototype that's really useful. But there's also another thing to keep in mind here is that the LLMs are just getting better and better. And as we, this statement is valid from every time you say it. And that is, this is the worst it's ever going to be. It's just going to keep getting better. If you told me... ⁓
I don't know, probably eight months ago, nine months ago that I would be using an LLM to write almost all of my code. If not all of it, I wouldn't have believed you at all. But here I am where I barely have written any code in a few months. I mean, look at me wrong. I have written some, but almost all of it is AI assisted. And then I'm really in there reviewing code all the time. And I think that distinction becomes from, are you an engineer or not? Becomes when you take that knowledge,
of an existing engineering career and you can apply it to using these tools. So you might build something and I'll go look at it and I was like, okay, well, I wonder how it's gonna handle this scenario or what happens when it gets to scale? Is this gonna fall apart? Can it handle that load? Was it designed for that? Most likely not. And it's not your fault. It's just because, hey, you asked the LLM to do X and it gave you X. It did exactly what you wanted.
And then I think a lot of engineers have to take a different stance now. Like, all right, we're building something. Are we building this to be scalable? Are we building this to be maintainable? Are we building this? Yeah, I start asking more business questions and kind of think about where is the next step of everything going to go. For me, I ultimately see, ⁓ I don't feel that ⁓ vibe coding is cheating. I think it's just the next iteration of how we do things.
Though I do know a lot of people who do feel that way that they do feel that it's cheating and they refuse to work with it or they say it's 100 % slop. It does generate slop sometimes. It does get confused. Like you said, it does forget things and that's a topic of context window, which we'll talk about in another episode. That's a topic of the agents.md file and the rules files and we'll talk about all that eventually. But once you learn how to use all these things, there's that movie. You remember the Disney movie like the ⁓
the sorcerer's something from Mickey was like the sorcerer, remember that one? And he's like, it was a Fantasia where he's like directing all like the mops around and he's a magician, right? That image is what pops into my head with these AI agents because that's how I feel. feel like Mickey Mouse whipping up a wand and I have a bunch of agents and I do all have three to eight running at all times doing various different bits of work for me. And I can do things that I've never been able to do before.
Allen (17:05)
⁓ antasia.
Yeah, yeah, Fantasia, it's a classic.
Donn Felker (17:30)
at a speed that I've never been able to do them before. So I think the landscape is just changing. And I think it's a good thing, like you said, because now instead of having to spend my time kind of bolting together small little test products or whatever for product people or whatever, they can kind of get something working. And then I can take that, throw that into an agent and then make it scalable or, you know, tie up the loose ends or anything of that nature.
Allen (17:54)
Yeah, dude, the things that you've told me you're building are absolutely incredible. And the fact that you can have basically these little helpers throughout your day, could 10X your workload and ⁓ probably uncover new paths to doing things through these tools that you didn't even know existed. If I had to assume that that might be the case, it's just, yeah, we're definitely living in different times. ⁓ And the path to learning has just changed significantly. You know, it's no longer about reading online, ⁓
you know, or I'm sorry, reading online reading in a text remember books, remember carry it like books around. These kids that have carry books, my daughters will never have to carry books. ⁓ Anyway, yes, it's it's it's way more guided. I saw a post the other day on X, a guy was saying that he canceled his Duolingo membership. And he was saying that the reason he did it was because he didn't feel like he was getting the learning experience through the platform anymore. He could do better with
Donn Felker (18:28)
Yeah. yeah.
No, my no there.
Okay.
Allen (18:52)
prompts in his LLM of choice, whatever that was going to be. And I was like, that's interesting. It kind of dug in the comments and yeah, everyone, everyone seemed to agree. And I haven't, I haven't tried it, but I realized is that like, I'm doing this already with coding languages. You know what I mean? Like this is how I'm teaching myself how to build these apps is through LLMs. And it makes perfect sense. know, previous to this, you were talking about like,
Donn Felker (18:55)
Mm-hmm.
Allen (19:18)
Microsoft beginner classes to learn Python or JavaScript. And those are really helpful. I think they were still like foundational. I really do believe in, you know, going through the coursework and taking the tests. think there's validity in that. ⁓ but having that, ⁓ like real time companion to bounce questions off of, and it can also provide you with, you know, tests as well as.
Donn Felker (19:43)
learning aspect is interesting because I do feel that there's a lot of values still learning how to write software properly because once you do that, then you can kind of see the code in the matrix really, because something might work, but you'll look at it like that is wrong. And I see this all the time when I'm doing something, I'll see the LLM write code and I'll review it before I commit it. And I'll say like, ⁓ it's repeating these five values in all these different files. And then I'll let the LLM know. So, hey, you're repeating this, this and this, need to extract this.
Allen (19:54)
Yeah.
Donn Felker (20:12)
this out into a common function or a common place to get these values. So if we need to change it, it's in one place. And then LLM, like you said, is very agreeable. Usually like, you're absolutely right. And then it goes off and does that. So I do think there's value in learning. And I think that's one of the distinctions between a non-engineer and someone who wants to be an engineer is understanding the core fundamentals of how
software has built the right and the wrong way to do it. But you can use LLMs to help get you there as well. So I think it's a great tool to get started, augment yourself. And in fact, one of the things that I wrote is a prompt. I think I shared that in our prompt library tool that we'll talk about. It's a software engineering tutor. And you basically drop the prompt into any LLM and it basically says, what do you want to learn today?
And I wrote the prompt because I wanted to learn how to do matrices math again, because I had forgot it from college. And then what it did is it said, all right, cool. You want to learn this. What language would you like to use? I'm like, I want to do it in Python. It's like, OK, cool. And it starts off from the level of like, you don't know anything. And it says, hey, do you have the tools installed? And it walked me through the whole process. So it was a great ⁓ tool to help learn things and to kind of wrap up this thought.
you know, around learning language. It's something I've actually started to do is to figure out how I can learn language with this. Like, what's the 80 20 of learning, you know, Spanish? What does that look like? What can I pick up that will give me the biggest benefit? But even in a real world scenario that I'm experiencing in this very moment right now, my son is in a transition between two different schools ⁓ and he's going to a different high school. But this other high school doesn't start their semester until like a week and a half from now. So he is like on an extended Christmas break.
and I wanted him to have work to do. And so I knew he's a freshman. I like, I know kind of where the freshman work is at. I went into the LLM and said, I want you to generate me a lesson plan with kind of these, you know, in English, writing, math, geography, and some life skills stuff. And I want to make sure there's, you know, 60 to 90 minutes of work done per day. ⁓ Help me generate a lesson plan for 15 days. And it generated it, generated, actually it generated code to generate it for me.
and then it generated PDFs. Now every morning I wake up, I print the PDFs, staple them together. I'm like, all right, here's your homework you have to do before you start your video games or whatever. And it's legit.
Allen (22:38)
I was going to say
you're a great dad, but you know, bro, just wanted to play some video games.
Donn Felker (22:42)
Yeah,
so I told him, you can get it done in like 15, 20 minutes, but if you draw it out, it's going to take you two hours. But yeah, it's amazing how much learning can be done with this stuff.
Allen (22:49)
Yeah, no, that's awesome. That's that's incredible. You could do that.
Yeah. ⁓ I was going to try and create a segue to disguise posts because I wanted to get your thoughts on it. And I think there's a lot of devs out there who might feel similarly, ⁓ this got a lot of attention this week. this is from big Duke on X and I'll share my screen so you could see the post.
Donn Felker (23:01)
Yeah.
⁓
yeah.
Allen (23:18)
And so he says, I'm not sure if other developers feel like this, but I feel kind of depressed. Like everyone else I've been using Claude code for a while. It's not even a recent thing. And it's incredible. I've never found coding more fun. The stuff you can do the speed you can do it at now is absolutely insane. And I'm using it to ship a lot and solve customer problems faster. So all around it's a win. But at the same time, the skill I spent 10,000 hours on getting good at programming, you know, this thing that I've spent most of my life.
getting good at is becoming a full commodity extremely quickly. And as fun as it is, and as much as I like using the tools, there's something disheartening about the thing you spent most of your life getting good at now being mostly useless. I know you have really strong feelings on this and we started touching them and I know you spoke to engineers about this very topic, but you what do you want to say to them?
Donn Felker (24:10)
I would say that I completely understand where this person's coming from because I've felt that exact same thing, especially with AI. For me, and I think I've mentioned this to you, for me, I see AI as almost like this monster that's chasing me right now. And I'm consistently looking back at it, trying to run ahead of it as fast as possible.
A lot of people ask me, like, you think software engineering is dead? I don't think it's dead. I just think it's changing its form. Just like you said, you've built your own tools. Okay, you don't need me for that anymore, but maybe you need me to take it to the next level or maybe you need to help you get it deployed. But eventually AI is going to be able to do a lot of that too. So I think a lot of the things that this person's feeling regarding like, I'm not even like disdain, but the sadness around
investing so much time and then eventually having it erase is valid. ⁓ But at the same token, I've felt this way before AI. And in a situation, to give a perfect example, programming languages change very fast and technology moves very fast. And there was times back in 2000s where I learned some technology and would spend days, weeks, months, years working on it.
and then a brand new thing would come out and would just make that completely obsolete. Like I still have that stuff memorized here. I can still tell you how to write VB script and all kinds of crap that used to run classic ASP sites. Nobody does that anymore, but it's still there. So it did get invalidated by new technology. Again, the bummer here is that this is completely wiping out.
a lot of the stuff we're doing. I think the thing that we have to worry about is now is like, where do we see new people coming into the industry? Because if you give AI to someone like me who has a lot of experience and it's like giving me superpowers, like it gives you superpowers. It's like, it gives me insane superpowers because now I can just, the things I've always wanted to do in my head, I can do them simultaneously because I know what they need to do. But people who are entering the industry, it's very difficult because they don't have that experience.
They don't know, they have not made those mistakes in the past. AI says this is the right way to do it. Trust becomes inherent. Like, oh, AI told me that's the way to do it. AI hallucinates all the time. So you have to, start becoming more of like a, almost like a detective for some of the code. And one of the things I often do is say, hey, cite your sources or tell me where you found this. And then if something just doesn't look right or doesn't feel right, I'll actually have to go look it up to actually prove that it's right or wrong. And sometimes that can take time.
Overall, this person's 100 % right. It's fun. I have never had more fun coding since when I started. The speed at which, like you said, that you can do it at is the same. I'm shipping a ton. So yes, it's a big win, but it is kind of disheartening knowing that potentially my industry might make a shift. And so I have ideas which we can discuss about like, how do you mitigate that? But I'll call it and I'll leave it there.
Let you ask questions.
Allen (27:20)
Yeah, I was just wondering and I have my own thoughts about this, but I want to get your perspective. Like how does the traditional developer role in a company now evolve?
Donn Felker (27:30)
This is still out for debate heavily in the industry. ⁓
We have, if we look at technology as a whole, technology is created by humans. New programming languages are created by humans. So lot of that new stuff that we develop, I think will still continue to be developed by humans. In my opinion, AI does not have great creativity and does not invent things, though that's arguable with some podcasts I've seen. But in general, my experience, it does not invent a lot of these things. So we still have a lot of that new software engineering ⁓ things that get implemented.
⁓ So it's evolving in the fact that the way in which we work is completely changing. So we are now relying heavily on these agents to get things done and basically be almost like full-time code reviewers. So you have to still have that fundamental understanding, but your time of actually sitting down to write line by line code.
I think is probably going to be in the past very soon.
Allen (28:39)
I agree. ⁓ you know, my perspective outsider looking in to this, this sort of function, ⁓ I just, and, and, and this is probably true in every sense of every role in a company at this point. think anyone who is currently performing a marketing role or a sales role needs to learn how to adopt new skills and become more of a Swiss army knife.
I think a lot of people, lot of companies traditionally are looking for people who perform one function really, really well. And I understand that I've run into this argument multiple times when even looking for a job. like, Hey, listen, Alan, you're great at XYZ. Like really just want to guide it does X. think Swiss army knives become more important in the world of AI. And the reason for that is because you have to be a little bit of a hybrid technical person to utilize these new tools.
Donn Felker (29:07)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Allen (29:36)
So you can't just be a sales guy anymore and go into a room. Um, uh, or if you, if you want it, for instance, like if you want to scale your, your sales pipeline, think of all the new tools that are available to you to help you to, do something like that. Uh, and if you're not utilizing that, like who's going to be the quick riser in the company, the guy that's, know, picking up the phone and hammering calls, uh, or sending out cold emails the way that we've done for, you know, 40 years or more, or the guy that's leveraging somebody is like,
new GTM platforms are building their own automations to do this type of stuff.
Donn Felker (30:09)
What does GTM mean for those who don't know?
Allen (30:11)
go to market motions. ⁓ or I'm sorry, go to go to market, but like go to market motions. So, ⁓ there's a lot of things that fall under this umbrella. ⁓ we won't get into it today, but, ⁓ yeah. Speaking specifically about the sales motion. ⁓ and go on, sorry. No, as they say, and on the developer side, ⁓ I think that traditionally, and, and, and feel free to push back on this. Developers have been that person that.
Donn Felker (30:13)
Okay.
Yeah, one of the things... Go ahead, sorry. Go ahead, good.
Allen (30:39)
are a bit more isolated and heads down and they like doing the work that they do because they enjoy it. They enjoy the feeling of solving puzzles and building. But the personality archetype of an engineer or a developer is going change. And I think they might find more success or find that they still have, or they have this immense amount of value if they were to adopt
Donn Felker (30:50)
Yes.
Allen (31:06)
some, some, some skills in the sales world, you know, the sales engineer role is, is every single company I see right now is hiring, especially in tech, in AI looking for field sales, engineers, sales engineers. so people with your credibility and, knowledge on, ⁓ but somebody who can also go out and, and sell the solution. And I think that those types of people will do really well to say, to say the least.
Donn Felker (31:33)
I agree.
I really like that the Swiss Army knife analogy and that's something that Naval Ravikant has said, I believe it's something like specialization is for insects and he gets a lot of flack for it because there's a lot of people, especially in the tech world who specialize in, and I've specialized especially with andriod for years, but.
A lot of developers will specialize in a technology and spend their whole life really developing that. And that really leaves them subject to replaceability with a lot of these agents, unfortunately. And one of the things that I've always said about myself is that I don't really care what the tool is I'm using, as long as it's the right tool for the right job. I see myself more as a builder. And I think that's where a lot of people need to move in that regard is kind of phase one, move more to a builder mentality. But then if you really want to succeed, have to do what you're saying, actually.
is you have to adopt some additional skills. You have to be able to communicate with other people in your organization, outside of your organization. You have to be able to market and sell. And this goes back to kind of the core root thing that...
we've been saying in the software as a service world for a long time is it building the actual product itself is only about 25 to 30, maybe 35 % of the problem. Like, okay, that's a problem. And that's even far less now with AI. The remaining 60 to 70 % of the problem is sales and marketing. Because you can build something and just because you build it doesn't mean people are going to come. You have to be able to get out there and get in front of people. Will cold calling and cold emailing still be a valid form of communication?
networking and making sales, of course it will. But there's so many other things out there, like you said now, that are also popping up. They're gonna be creating a whole new wave of way to sell and market and everything. And if you can learn about some of these things, communicate well as an engineer, your options, like you said, are really endless because now you can hop into various different roles and solve various different problems that other people might not be able to.
Allen (33:34)
No, 100 % agreed.
Donn Felker (33:38)
Well, man, I think that kind of brings us to time. We're trying to keep our shows here ⁓ under the 40 minute mark because we don't want to, we're not trying to pull a Joe Rogan here and be out for three hours. So.
Allen (33:47)
Not in week one. It's gonna be disaster.
I gotta learn how to talk before I get to two hours.
Donn Felker (33:53)
you're doing great. So we got so many topics we're going to end up talking about such as things like MCP servers, prompting, like I said, context windows, how we're using AI in the products that we're building or how we're using it for personal reasons, et cetera. So I want to say thank you for everyone who was listening and watching the first episode. And Alan, I'll let you close it out with any words you have.
Allen (34:16)
⁓ yeah, just to echo what Donna said, I really appreciate everyone who showed up to listen today. ⁓ this is something that we're, we feel like can bring a lot of good into the world, through just talking about these types of conversations and specifically to people who, ⁓ don't know that these types of, ⁓ tools are available to them. ⁓ people who are interested in AI, but just want to take that next step and don't know which way to go. I think we'll cover a lot of that.
Donn Felker (34:44)
Mm-hmm.
Allen (34:45)
And we hope to appeal to those who are already building professionally with AI and other developer tools. ⁓ Don is an incredible resource of knowledge and he's helped me a lot to get to the point where I am. I think that being able to share that knowledge at scale through a platform like this is what... ⁓
what this is, you know, it's what it's the greatest benefit of podcast in my opinion. thanks for showing up.
Donn Felker (35:17)
Definitely agree. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a really benefit to a lot of people out there to kind of see the deep technical side from me and then kind of get the more the business and the marketing approach and just kind of the general here's how I'm seeing it from someone who is not as you know, a very deep career engineer. So I think there's gonna be a lot of value kind of getting both sides of the picture because I think people can relate to both sides in one way or another.
All right, everybody, thanks for watching. We'll catch you next time.