Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S5 Ep04: Embracing AI Revolution with Vibe Coding - A Conversation with Wes Lemos
40 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, the hosts engage in a dynamic conversation with Wes, a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Roll Digital Incorporated. They explore the concept of vibe coding, an AI-driven approach to software development, emphasizing natural language prompts instead of traditional coding. Wes shares practical applications, such as automating scheduling, managing extensive Zoom call logs, and addressing LinkedIn automation challenges. The discussion highlights the immense potential of AI tools like Claude Code and the transformative impact on productivity. Wes also delves into his personal journey with AI, emphasizing the transition and future impact of AI dominance in various industries. Wrapping up, the episode stresses the importance of embracing AI to harness its full potential.
Connect with Wes Lemos and explore further:
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gather our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Dial it In' Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to dial it in a podcast where we talk to fascinating people about marketing sales process improvements and tricks that they use to grow their businesses. Join me Dave Meyer and Trigby Olson of busy web as we bring you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:26
Speaker
Let's ring up another episode.
AI in Job Hunting: Essential Skills?
00:00:31
Speaker
As we were talking about AI, I had a conversation with somebody this morning and the and i asked her, what's your tolerance with AI? And she's, oh yeah, I use it. And I said, okay, because I'm trying to help her find a job. I said, the next thing that you have that people are going to ask you is to demonstrate how much you're using AI is what are you building with AI? And I have a good idea that I'm trying to build. are you and Do you have a good idea you're trying to build? i don Anybody that's relatively serious about ai is playing with it in some capacity on building some things. Absolutely. absolutely Yeah.
00:01:02
Speaker
What I'm trying to figure out how to do, and I've had a smart AI people tell me is, and actually our guest today, he's one of the guys who said, I want to know what you're building. My great idea is, you know how when people send send you their meeting link and here, just book whatever you want. That's not helpful because then I have to open my calendar and then I have to open that meeting link and then I have to compare and contrast. Right.
00:01:25
Speaker
And this is why i have four meetings at one o'clock on a Thursday is because I just say yes to everything. And if I could have AI figure this out for me, then and that would really be the winning strategy. But I haven't gotten there yet.
Sponsor Highlight: DataQuick for HubSpot
00:01:40
Speaker
But the guy we're going to be talking to you today has built some really amazing things using Vibe Coding. So we're going to be talking about Vibe Coding today with him and how he's pivoting his business. But before we do that, do we have a sponsor for your day?
00:01:53
Speaker
We do, Trigvi, and actually I think this is a good one for today. I want to introduce the world to DataQuick, the ultimate tool for HubSpot CRM administrators and data architects. DataQuick seamlessly exports your HubSpot CRM architecture into an interactive, user-friendly map, streamlining data mapping, cleanup, and organization. With DataQuick, you can quickly identify and manage every object, property, and dropdown value in your HubSpot portal, saving valuable time and reducing manual effort. Experience efficient data management and ensure accuracy with dataqui visit DataQuick. Visit dataquick.co to get started today.
00:02:33
Speaker
Thanks, Dave.
Wes's Journey in AI and Vibe Coding
00:02:35
Speaker
Our guest today is my friend, Wes. He's a serial entrepreneur, tech veteran, and CEO of Roll Digital Incorporated, full-service digital marketing and SaaS company based in Folsom, California.
00:02:47
Speaker
With more than two decades of experience building web platforms, marketing tools, and startup ventures, Wes recently turned his focus to the emerging world of Vibe Coding.
00:02:58
Speaker
An AI first approach to software development where natural language prompts rather than traditional code drive product creation. He's passionate about helping teams and founders leverage AI to move faster, reduce friction and build smarter tools.
00:03:13
Speaker
Wes brings a rare mix of practical wisdom, vision for the future of AI-driven development, and real-world stories of what it looks like in code meets conversation. Thanks for joining us, Wes.
00:03:25
Speaker
It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'm glad to be here with you guys. It's been a couple months since we talked, and I know you were right before Thanksgiving. How did the Thanksgiving Reno work for you? Man, time flies. Remember what even happened two days ago, let alone two months ago or something like that. Yeah.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, I've been able to travel a little bit. I just got back from hiking Patagonia. That was something that we did. Wow. Where are the...
00:03:51
Speaker
It wasn't that long ago that I actually associated there's a store and there's actually a location. My buddy had a big birthday and he said that was one of his bucket list things to do and he wanted me to go with him. So it's hard to say no to a buddy like that. And I didn't know what i was signing up for. I don't have hiking shoes. i don't have hiking pants. have nothing.
00:04:07
Speaker
I just went in sneakers and we did, I don't know, 15 miles, 20 miles a day. Yeah. But it was a good experience. Got some good pictures to prove it. maybe here's now who knows Dave, you recently climbed up the North Face and got a really nice jacket I did. And actually, yeah ah members only was the most recent jacket that I've been able to hike. so You know, that they they it's really the pinnacle of fashion to have epaulets on a jacket. That's me, baby.
Exploring LinkedIn Automation with AI
00:04:35
Speaker
Wes, tell the audience, i know we're going to talk about vibe coding, but what's your day job? And you own a fairly substantive company. So tell us about what your day job really is. I've been, like you said, a little bit of a serial entrepreneur. I've always had a team working for me. And whether we're able to build our own projects or other people's projects, I'm having a good time. And about seven years ago, we created a company called Sales Connector.
00:04:57
Speaker
And what that's been my main business, most of my revenue comes from that. We are you could put us in a group of a LinkedIn automation software system. We help people manage LinkedIn accounts better.
00:05:08
Speaker
We have a lot of strategy that's involved in it. I started off building that one and it's built the traditional way. I have a great team of developers that's building that. We have a good team of marketers and salespeople.
00:05:18
Speaker
And then our biggest group is our customer success team. That's a lot of manual handholding to make sure people are successful in that. We'll have my role digital, which is a web design development company. So we take on clients from time to time for that. We have some retainer clients in that space.
00:05:32
Speaker
But then outside of that, you're never like lacking other things to do. So I probably have a dozen projects that I'm pushing forward at the same time outside of the main two companies that I'd say have their sales connector and roll digital.
Revolutionizing Software with Vibe Coding
00:05:45
Speaker
What are you comfortable talking about the project you showed me? Yeah, totally. hundred percent. but Tell Dave, what are you building now? All right. So the one that I've been putting a lot of effort into, the one that I shared with you, there is a like voice AI is a trend, right? We're seeing like a lot of growth in that space and also vibe coding like we're talking about here. I feel like that's definitely the way of the future. And I'm 100 percent on board. I'm trying to learn it as best I can. As soon as a new release comes out, I'm the day of I'm trying to learn exactly what it does and how to implement it and what difference it's going to make.
00:06:19
Speaker
um So i in about two months, pretty much 100% solo was able to build a pretty significant platform that does inbound, outbound calling. You can register numbers through Twilio. You can put your Twilio credentials into it.
00:06:34
Speaker
It does emails, texting. It does calls, inbound, outbound. And it can connect to enrichment services, databases. goes on and on. And there's several features in there.
00:06:45
Speaker
that I feel like are things that I haven't seen in other places, but that's ah as a kind of a person in the space. So many times when someone says, i am an entrepreneur, I'm building something that no one else has done. Roll your eyes usually. Right. you go Okay. Yeah. That's what they say. That's what they all say.
00:07:01
Speaker
And so I hate being in that position now saying the same thing. I'm doing some things that no one else has done before, but I feel like there's a lot of things that we're building that haven't been done before, but, and it's not because i'm like extra intelligent at all. But I feel like now with the tools that we have, there's things that you could have just imagined before now that you can ask the tool to build.
00:07:19
Speaker
And surprisingly, the tool figures it out Like Cloud Code, Codex, Gemini, they're brilliant machines right now. And you just start bouncing ideas around with it and let it start building. And then you start tweaking. All sudden you have something that you haven't seen before.
00:07:34
Speaker
I could talk for a long time, so you're going to have to pause You're doing great. I don't want to reveal the idea until you're ready to monetize it, but what prompted you to come up with the idea build what you built?
Challenges in AI-Driven LinkedIn Engagement
00:07:49
Speaker
So we had started building something like this years ago and we tried a couple of times, but we never were able to make a whole lot of traction in this space. So in the LinkedIn automation space, like a common scenario that we have is we'll help people connect to thousands of new people, right?
00:08:04
Speaker
and What but happens oftentimes if you connect to a thousand people, 2000 people, 5000 people, we do our best inside of LinkedIn to help you start conversations with those people. That's kind of part of my day job. Right.
00:08:15
Speaker
And we've learned lots of tactics. If I walk in and try to pitch you something, you're probably not going to respond to me to, you know, mar but if I ask you a really good question that's personalized about you, that kind of strokes your ego a little bit.
00:08:27
Speaker
the response rate goes up. But even at best, we're looking 60, 70% response rate. There's a ah large percentage of people that never talk to you inside LinkedIn. yeah but Yeah, we do have their phone numbers though.
00:08:40
Speaker
And I'm thinking like, okay, would there be a way that I could actually call the 5,000 people that I connected to on LinkedIn that I've never actually, they don't seem like they want to engage inside of LinkedIn's platform with me. They did click accept, but they haven't done anything else.
00:08:53
Speaker
I've never understood that because I will get people who will send me an invite and then never talk to me again. Did you a baseball card for you? Did you collect me and did you get some sort of reward for that?
00:09:06
Speaker
I actually had, ah this is way back in the beginning years of LinkedIn, but I had a friend who walked into a networking meeting and proudly announced, I have 3,500 LinkedIn connections. And then he sat back down. That was something interesting. I was like, oh, okay, great. And was like, I don't know what that means. Yay. Yeah. So I think that's probably a little bit of that where people are trying to do something, but it's interesting, the tech that you're teasing into, and it seems like you're trying to make LinkedIn actually work a little better. And that's how it goes. Cause it LinkedIn is actually notorious for being hard to play with though. So I'm assuming there's a lot of workarounds that you've had to work for that too. Yeah.
Wes's Coding Background and AI Evolution
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You have to be creative. I think that's something that I've always enjoyed in my career. and Instead of going down just like the very common path, but it as soon as someone says, okay, this, I don't think we can do this. Then I get excited. Okay, let me see what I can do to build this. Like, how can I make that happen?
00:10:07
Speaker
And those are the challenges that get me most excited. That make me stay up late at night. Make me wake up early in the morning. Can we build something that hasn't been built so I can... If I look through my career, look at the different projects we've built over time, there's several that fall into that space of just projects that probably most people would have said, okay, there's no API documents for this. We can't do it.
00:10:27
Speaker
And it's actually, okay, I get excited. this That means that we can pave a new road that hasn't been done. There's new opportunity here. So i I want to give people the idea the framework on how to start VibeCoding on their own. So you had a good idea and you said, what made you say, hey, I'm going to use AI to code this?
00:10:44
Speaker
All right, I'll go back a little bit because if our goal is like to get your audience excited about VOD coding, I'm 100% all for that. I really think that all of them should get into that space. I think there's three stages of using AI, and this is common to some, but like one is when you do something once for yourself. like You have a poorly written email, you want it better, you go to ChatGPT, hey, make this better, and you go, oh, great, it saves some time.
00:11:05
Speaker
That's one kind of solution once. And people use AI mostly like that. They solve something one at a time. Two is when you make something that actually can solve, let's say, your same problem many times over just for yourself. Okay, I'm i'm building a I don't know, a module or something, a little script that when I upload this, it fixes it for me.
00:11:22
Speaker
And then three is when you build it where the world can use it, right? Is where you can build a product out of me. And I want to encourage people to go through that process. Try to think... not just something you can fix for yourself, but build something that actually, if you can, it's a challenge, right? Where you people, other people, everybody, like a thousand people could use the same thing, might as well, right? If you're solving it for yourself, solve it for
Vibe Coding and AI Integration
00:11:43
Speaker
more people.
00:11:43
Speaker
i Gosh, i I started coding back when I was in college and that kind of gave me a little bit of an edge because I was coding on terminal screens back then. And so just, yeah, little cursor screen, you SSH into the server and you do some like bash commands and you write some code. um I never did like engineering stuff in college, but this was just a hobby of mine.
00:12:05
Speaker
But back when I was in college, I was using library computers. I didn't have my own machine, but by the time I was 19, i I did well and I had a business and I think we landed like a $3 million dollars deal when I was still in college.
00:12:19
Speaker
And I went on to hire 50 employees and I had a pretty big business running throughout my whole college career up until September 2001, where that all crashed. Yeah. So what, for our listeners who are under the age of 40, what Wes is talking about is when you used to go to college, was pretty rare to have a computer in your room. So you'd have to go to a computer lab, which was a lot of computers in one place.
00:12:46
Speaker
And you'd log into a system and use it use a computer that way. ah And that was my first two years of college was I went, i had to go to the computer lab. Yeah. And then the second two years I had my own computer cause I was cool and special.
00:13:00
Speaker
And I even had a, I, a dedicated line in my room. I paid extra for it. Whoa. Yeah. You're one of the cool kids. Yeah. I was. Yeah. And I had, i had the Washington post delivered every day and the, the sports writers, my senior year of college were Michael Wilbon, Shirley Povich and Malcolm Gladwell.
00:13:22
Speaker
So My daily reader back for those, for those listeners under the age of 40, a newspaper is something that is, it's a website that's printed out and then deliver it to your door every day. But.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. So Maxi, I'm off tangent again. Dave was telling me I shouldn't do that anymore. and Andy is texting our producer. From an early age, I knew like building stuff on the internet was like pretty cool and important, but I noticed my speed of being able to build back then was pretty slow and nominal. Like I could write some lines of code and it could do some things.
00:13:59
Speaker
And when I and ended up hiring really good coders early on, and In all my career, I've always said, you find a good coder, they're worth their weight in gold. You know, that's because they can make things happen.
00:14:10
Speaker
Other people can add elements to the business, but a coder can actually take your idea that doesn't exist and turn it into something that's there that people can use. And so i I think ever since I was like 19 years old, I've always had a staff of engineers working for me in different capacities.
00:14:25
Speaker
And, but now with the Advent tools right now, the one that's definitely like head and shoulders better than the other ones is CloudCode. don't know if you guys use CloudCode at all. I've played with Gemini mostly, but I haven't actually dug in hard on the CloudCode part.
00:14:39
Speaker
Is it like a pro service that you have to add on or is the free version, can you start coding right in it? You can code, I think you might need the $20 a month version. i'm definitely using Pro the Max or whatever one that they have up there.
00:14:53
Speaker
But if you want to tiptoe into it, Google has a really good one called ai Studios. If you haven't used that one already, I would just, that's a fun one to play with. So just yesterday I was in a demo and I was trying to show it off to somebody and I'm like, I do this all the time now in my demos because it's almost like a magic trick. You can just tell somebody like, okay, what's an idea you have?
00:15:13
Speaker
You just throw that to AI and then you stay talking for five minutes. You go back and you click on a link and it's there. It's the whole thing is done already. Like at least a really nice first draft of what they were thinking of. And so we made like a really fun, competitive Tetris game just in less than 60 seconds.
00:15:28
Speaker
from all the code scratch, never seen before version of Tetris, just exists there. The advantage of ai Studios, Google one, is that it it doesn't require you to set up your own server. Like it's all built in on Google architecture.
00:15:43
Speaker
But if you can get over the hurdle of knowing how to set up a little VPS by yourself, um It did. VPS virtual private server? There we are. So let's unpack that because that's where I, this is where I get lost. so what explain what a VPS is.
00:16:00
Speaker
Okay. And um this is fun because I don't think I've explained it this level too many times. So please ask questions. I want to make as well. We're good at being the lowest common denominator. Yeah.
00:16:11
Speaker
Because most of us are using AI in a browser right now, right? You go to chatgpt.com, you type in a question and that's how you're interacting with it. It exists in this random place. It's not yours. It's theirs. It's this little kind of area in there, right?
00:16:25
Speaker
You can actually take like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Crock. You can install it locally on your computer and you can do that through their terminal. So CLI stands for command line interface.
00:16:37
Speaker
Mm-hmm. All of those have command line interface installations of them. And you just you just do a Google on like, how do I install Claude CLI? How do i install ChatGPT CLI, Gemini CLI?
00:16:49
Speaker
And it'll walk through some commands of what to do. You run that on your machine. And now I have in the background, just like today, this is something I did half an hour before I got on this call. I'm supposed to send out all my tax documents for all my like employees, right? And I have one long PDF that has all the W-2s and 1099s for everyone in there.
00:17:06
Speaker
I just went to Claude that lives on my computer. I dropped the PDF in there and I said, okay, could you split this up into single pages for each one of my employees? Could you find their name on that? Mm-hmm. name them appropriately, and just organize it in new folder in my downloads draw and area.
00:17:21
Speaker
And so it did that, I zipped it, I sent it to my executive assistant, and it's all gonna get sent out to people like that. Once it's living on your personal computer, it has access to all the files that are on your computer, right?
00:17:33
Speaker
which is a huge advantage over just using it and on a browser. Because now it's on my computer, I can say things like, hey, go through my downloads folder. There's three image files that I had before. I want you to turn those into, i don't know, an HTML file where I can show it to more people. Or i want you to go through my Excel documents. I want you to find the five Excel documents that are from this, and I want you to put them together into one big report.
00:17:58
Speaker
And talk to it like that. Like, it you can be like... very sloppy in how you communicate with AI and AI will do a good job back Ken. And does that have challenges or concerns with the training data and pulling out or because it's on your computer, it's not necessarily sharing that information? Like, of course, your employees' payroll information, you wouldn't want to just load into the free version of ChatGPT.
00:18:23
Speaker
So it'd be a lot more secure on your desktop. Yeah. I think we all have our tolerances with like risk. Sure. Yeah. on this one i ah My risk tolerance is pretty I don't want to keep my mind as much. I you can figure if these big companies have malicious intents, we're all screwed no matter what. Like the amount of data that we try to hide data from them, the data is still out there everywhere. If they want to get it, they can do it. If they wanted to go through my computer and steal all my passwords and send it off, to they could do it. But they're never going to get to a trillion dollar company if they're doing nefarious efforts. Like they're...
00:18:59
Speaker
My heart feels like they're aligned in the right direction. Like they're trying to do the best that they can with the data they have. So I'm going to advocate for them. No,
AI in Daily Tasks: Practical Applications
00:19:07
Speaker
no. I'll bring a lot of sensitive documents into tools. but yeah Is having it on your computer different than loading it up over the normal channels though?
00:19:20
Speaker
Or is it mostly just faster? it It gives it access to more things. Let's say like, for example, at every meeting I have, so this is another project that I just did this morning too. I'm doing projects all the time. Now that I have this, like I'm equipped with this new tool, the things that that I can accomplish are significantly greater than things I could have done before. So I've done probably 5,000 Zoom calls, like at least, maybe even 6,000, 7,000 Zoom calls because i that's part of my job with my sales connector approach. I'm meeting people on LinkedIn, having these one-hour meetings.
00:19:51
Speaker
My memory is nowhere near what it was when I was in my 20s at this point. If somebody asked me like, yesterday, who'd you talk to? What was that all about? just It's a fog in my brain at this point, right?
00:20:02
Speaker
But one thing that I do, a habit that I have is in every meeting, at least for one second, I'll just do a quick screenshot commit. So I have a picture of their face that lands on my desktop somewhere, but it's messy and sloppy. So I have a folder that has, think it's like 40 gigabytes of photos just from just over the years. And I just asked to go through all those files.
00:20:21
Speaker
I want you, anyone that has a picture, I want you to take those those ones, put them separately in a different folder. And I want you to organize it in a paginated HTML file where I can see pictures of every person that I've had meetings with.
00:20:31
Speaker
And it just sorted that for me now, right? So I went through like years. Now my job is I'm gonna tell it to just go, okay, I want you to be able to like, I can delete the ones i don't really care about. i don't wanna be able to organize the ones I do care about.
00:20:43
Speaker
Cause I wanna go back like in the last like year. And sometimes our memory doesn't it works different. I don't know what triggers you guys, like I'm a visual guy. If I see somebody's face and I see their smile, I go, wait a minute. Yeah, he's a guy I really wanna talk.
00:20:55
Speaker
And so I'm gonna build a little tool around being able to do that. The fun thing with AI too, and this is something like, I taught my 18 year old kid how to vibe code just in the last month. He had no interest in it, none at all. Like he like he kept on rolling his eyes and I talked about AI to him. He goes, that's your thing, dad. It's not as cool as, but now every day we're vibe coding for a couple hours together.
00:21:16
Speaker
And he's building things that I wouldn't have even imagined being able to be built. Not imagined, say, one of the things that he built already that exists, and it he calls it Trip Buddy. He has his friends, maybe there's 10 of them, and they're planning on doing something two weeks from now. Maybe let's say they go like three weeks or during spring break, they want to do something. But no one takes initiative as to what needs to be done. They're all kind of like, maybe we could do something, maybe not. I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. And he struggles. And then the spring break comes and goes and nothing happened, right?
00:21:45
Speaker
So he makes a thread on texting, adds Trip Buddy to it, which has a phone number with Twilio. um Trip Buddy comes in, hey, I'm here to help you guys plan this event. I know you guys are thinking like, I'm going start reaching out to each individually. And I'm going also go back to the group. And I'm going to be chatting with you guys to see if I can help make this happen.
00:22:01
Speaker
And it has a really good conversation with each person that's in that thread. Gets to know what their budget is, what their dates are, what their preferences are. It consolidates all that information. and then it goes and it makes three solid proposals and a nice little HTML page where everyone can say, okay, here's the best options based on everyone's availability, their price, their budget, which one makes, you know, this is what it's going to cost. This is how it's all going to go down.
00:22:23
Speaker
And he did this by himself without me doing hard. Like I'd say the amount of input that I gave him might've been like less than five minutes. It's almost nothing. And he's never coded a line in his life. Okay. That's wild.
00:22:35
Speaker
What I think is so fascinating is, The execution arm is one thing, but who would come up with an idea like that? What I really need AI for is I need AI to pull together all my friends to synthesize ah an actual response on what to do.
00:22:50
Speaker
And it's it's a completely amazing idea. okay But but what I'm fascinated about in the world of AI is how does how do people have what really grinds my gears dot dot dot, here's a solution to that problem.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah. And in the beginning of this call, you mentioned like the idea of having, let's say, instead of someone sending you a calendar link, and then you having to think through, what do I do? Like, how do I compare this to mine? And I'm booking three meetings at the same time because I'm overbooking myself. That's an easy solve with ai Once you cross this hump, and I've seen this happen to several people, okay?
00:23:24
Speaker
You start building a few things and you start learning. You don't even have to know how to do it. You have this kind of like super, like you have Iron Man in your back behind you, let's say. And with Iron Man behind you and you have a problem in front of you, you don't know how you're going to solve that problem.
00:23:39
Speaker
But you smile at the problem at this point. Because you're like, hey don't worry. I got Iron Man in my back pocket here. We can tackle almost anything. The idea is like, what other idea can I come up with? Bring on these ideas. So...
00:23:50
Speaker
you wanted to, I've been building things with Raspberry Pi units. That's one of my new business models. Sure. Yeah. So I have downstairs on my little dining room table, I think I have 300 of these little Raspberry Pi.
00:24:01
Speaker
Excellent. brena um And so we built the business already and I'm already getting orders for it. It's called My Proxy Box. It's a Raspberry Pi unit that we converted into. It does three main functions to it. It does, it makes a proxy that's inside your house.
00:24:16
Speaker
For people that know it, this is valuable. For people that don't geek out, it's gonna be like, this doesn't really make sense as to why this is important. But it lets you run any kind of automated service anywhere and it runs it through your home IP address.
00:24:28
Speaker
okay So that's like incredibly valuable. So let's say if you use an email service or a LinkedIn automation service or anything, that typically those run on a cloud IP, right? yeah and And those services can quickly identify that's not really you doing it. You're probably doing some kind of like third-party automation to you get it
Raspberry Pi and My Proxy Box
00:24:44
Speaker
done.
00:24:44
Speaker
And that's just how the industry has always been. But with one of these boxes in your house, you can run it as if it was another computer inside your own house. So that's one of the things that the next one it does, it's a VPN device. A VPN means that, so if you're anywhere else in the world, you can have your own computer and your phone show up as if you're in your house still.
00:25:03
Speaker
um When I was in Buenos Aires, there was a guy from London and they only have, maybe this isn't the best use case for this, but like you only have a limited amount of vacation days and they track you based on your IP address if you're in your house or not.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yep. no And with one of these boxes, you can be maybe at your neighbor's house in their backyard, having a good time, having a good conversation. But when you're still working, you're working as if you were in your own house. or You can be anywhere. So when I was in Mexico for a little while, just a couple weeks ago, Netflix blocks certain shows to show up on their thing. And I get the exact same access as I would have as if it was in my house.
00:25:40
Speaker
but and then you I want to rewind one second. The Raspberry Pi, it's basically just a little microcomputer. And they're incredibly cheap on on the in the grand scheme of things. but And they're intensely codable.
00:25:52
Speaker
right So you can just load things up onto them through input. You just need a USB. And you can code onto them whatever you want. And I would assume that you're Vibe coding into that, right where you're just asking your ai tool of choice, OK, I need to do this with my Raspberry Pi, so give me the code to do this.
00:26:11
Speaker
Yeah. The thing, like i I compare it to coding with these AI agents is similar to like bowling with bumpers. Like i and I think because you can always get to say when I bowl and I have my daughter who's 13, she's great. But when she puts bumpers on there and I don't like, we're competitive now. Like it doesn't matter how good I am because she can bump 20 times and still get a strike and I can go straight and get a strike and then still the same outcome at the end. And that's one thing you learn that you get over that hill because you do something wrong. Ah, I try to install something and it broke. Like that's very normal. If you're trying to install any of these CLI items on your computer, ah almost 100% guarantee i never had it work easily. It never worked the first time that I tried. I just take the output of whatever my terminal says and I drop it back in the chat GPT say, hey, what what should I do next? And they go, oh, it doesn't look like you have the home brew.
00:27:02
Speaker
package installed on your computer we're going to go ahead and try to download that first and then we're going to do this command to download it and then i do that command and it didn't work and then i goes oh it looks like you don't even have this on your computer let me install this then we can do this to install that and it just keeps on giving you the next step and you follow along one step at a time and before long you get the strike just like anyone else um And once you learn, like you don't really even have to know how to do it. You just you you just go back and forth and back and forth and you get it done.
00:27:31
Speaker
I went to Burning Man last year and Burning Man, like an interesting story there too, right? Oh yeah, thank you. was there We're going to keep this on task. But one of the things I really wanted to do, my vision was, i go you don't have internet when you're there, right? And I go, it'd be fun.
00:27:44
Speaker
I'm like... a I'm a brewing extrovert. I'm not really, but I want to be an extrovert. And like, okay, how do I talk to like hundreds of people while i'm here at Burning Because there's so many fascinating people, right?
00:27:54
Speaker
I made an app that has like 12 different kind of games, but they're more like conversation opener games. And they all can be used offline and they all can be used on your iPhone. So you don't need and an internet on there.
00:28:07
Speaker
And honestly, I think they're really cool and really good. And I built it all in a week. Have I ever made an iPhone app before? Never. But am I even one bit worried about can I build an iPhone app? No. Like I can feel completely confident that I could build a very competitive, solid iPhone app that thousands of people could use.
00:28:25
Speaker
Not because I know how to do it, but it's because of now I know how to basically use the bumper game a pocket kind of thing. Wes, one of the things that i'm I'm feeling that you're really good at and i want to get for our listeners is you're really good at just asking the right questions to the tool and trusting results. If someone wanted to get started, if they have an idea like a lightning middle of the night or in your shower idea,
00:28:53
Speaker
what would you start to say? Or, you know, what, because we talked about, okay, you want to have like probably a terminal. I heard you see Twilio a couple of times for specific things. Like what's that?
Setup for Vibe Coding Success
00:29:05
Speaker
that fun Yeah. So what's like the basic tool set and like, how would you even start? Do you literally just open up chat GPT and say, I want to code X or I have an idea and help me code Y how does that work?
00:29:21
Speaker
So what once you have the setup already set up and installed, we didn't get the GPS part of it. yeah but So installing it on your computer gives you an advantage that you can go through any file on your computer. But if I build something beautiful on my computer, let's say build an airplane 3D emulator or something on my computer, I can see it, you can't see it. wanna host it on the internet somewhere.
00:29:42
Speaker
And that's kind of like you go to GoDaddy, you get a domain, and then you set up a website. That's I think most people kind of understand that concept. The advantage of a dedicated server or a virtual private server is you have what they call root access.
00:29:55
Speaker
Sure. And with root, you can install whatever you want to. You can change anything on the server. And that's, I don't know, least from my understanding, that's what you need to do to install all these codecs and the tools on there, these CLI tools. Sure.
00:30:06
Speaker
So I use OVH, people use Ionis, there's different tools out like I pay $4 a month. You get yourself a really good virtual private server. at ogi That's a secret there. Just go for it.
00:30:17
Speaker
I love it. Yeah. If you pay $20 for ChadCBT, you can install Codex, which is our CLI thing. And immediately you can start building them like amazing websites. Like you can build web projects and tools and that everybody can see.
00:30:31
Speaker
So if I had an idea tonight, like right now I'll log into one of my servers, I'll run up Codex or Claude, And then once I'm clawed, going, the way to talk to AI, and this is what I do, and I don't know if I'm right or wrong on these things.
00:30:45
Speaker
I really talk to AI much like I'm talking to a passionate friend of mine or something like that. So like a prompt might be like, okay, I need you to build a website and it's got to be impressive. It's really got to have all the details of some of the things I'm thinking about, but I want you to use your creativity to come up with even ideas that are beyond things that anything had been thought before. I want you to impress. I want this to award-winning.
00:31:05
Speaker
I want you to think of all the details. I want you to use like a lot of micro interactions. I want you to have this long page with lots of listings, but all of them well thought through a lot of interaction of components throughout the website.
00:31:16
Speaker
I want you to think of a design that no one's seen before. So I'm talking exactly like that. um I built a tool and this is free for anyone who's listened to this one too. And it's not even trying to promote it really, but it's called Vibescribe.me. Okay. It puts a little microphone on your computer and it's a Mac app for now. That's because I just use a Mac and you press the little microphone recording button and it will record whatever you're saying. And then when you press it to stop it, it turns it into a cut and paste text that's ready in your clipboard.
00:31:43
Speaker
So I'll drop that into my codex or my Claude and it will take that. The difference between Claude and Kodax, so those the two main ones I use. Kodax is ChatGPT and Claude is dysanthropic.
00:31:56
Speaker
If you use them both side by side, and I used to be, and I still am a big ChatGPT fan. like i I love all these big companies. I love that they're pushing frontier models, but Claude is like nicer. It'll say, Wes, that's a brilliant idea. I love it. Like, I see what you're doing. i see the idea of what you're getting here. Let me go ahead and create this award winnings. And it takes my words and makes me feel like it empowers me because it's encouraging me. It says it acknowledges what I said, but it reframes it.
00:32:21
Speaker
I'm going to break this down into parts. I'm going to put these things together. I'm going to make the hero section and a stats section or the feature section. And then it explains a little bit. And then when it gives me what it's done,
00:32:32
Speaker
It gives me an outline of everything that it did. And then I just check on the website and there it is. And if I don't like it, I press my little record button in Vibescribe. And and i just say, okay, this looks really good, but I really don't like the purples. There's way too much purple on this website.
00:32:46
Speaker
And I think that the hero section is not responsive enough and it doesn't look really good on my mobile. And I'll talk, talk and I'll hit record and I'll throw it at it. am Is this all making sense? yeah yeah I'm taking due to milks.
00:32:58
Speaker
yeah And then with the nice thing about it, if you had a room of vacuum cleaner that could vacuum your house for you, right? And then someone like looks at your house and it's perfectly vacuumed. They go like, how long did it take you to vacuum your house?
00:33:11
Speaker
What's the answer to that question? Because someone might ask me, how long did it take you to make the website? I didn't really do it. Like i prompted it and I walk ah sat back for 10 minutes and then it was done, but it's not. So when usually what I do then, this is when my ADHD brain kicks in, I'll have three or four screens open at the same time.
00:33:30
Speaker
So I'll tell one to do it. It takes about five minutes, 10 minutes to do it If you get these coding agents to do 20 minutes of work at a time for you, It's probably doing what a regular engineer would do in a week or two weeks in 20 minutes.
00:33:41
Speaker
The amount of code that it can push out and it's tens of thousands of lines. the The voice agent one that I talked about. so anyone can check that one out too. It's on tivai.com.
00:33:53
Speaker
Tiv.ai, got it? to yeah Text integrations and voice, ai.com. That probably has, I think right now we're sitting at almost 500,000 lines of code already in there. I asked Chad CBT, like how long would it take a regular coder to develop a code that's this big? Just do your best calculations.
00:34:09
Speaker
And it said about 12 years for a year level. coder to be able to come up with to write this much coherent code about 12 years it's really like as fast as you can have ideas you can really build things and i just a good place to start if you don't want to like a is aistudios.google or gemina com i think it's aist.google yeah That one's easy, but I would recommend strongly try to go use installing these command line interface agents, like on your computer. And once you kind of get the hang of that, and then try to put it in the cloud.
00:34:42
Speaker
Anthropic released a product just two days ago called Cowork. And basically, They're trying to bridge this gap of, because terminal is, to some people, it's a little scary, right? Because you can't use a mouse. You can't just, you have to just use keyboard commands. It's basically like going back to the 1980s to use computers again, right?
AI's Evolving Role: Future Prospects
00:35:00
Speaker
um It doesn't bother me because I'm age appropriate for that. But people that are just born with like mouses and clicks and click colorful buttons and stuff like that, it doesn't have any of that.
00:35:11
Speaker
So they built Cowork, which is basically the exact same thing as their Claude CLI agent, but it's built in a little bit nicer view. Like it's a you you can click around to drag and drop things let's and do some things in there.
00:35:23
Speaker
I haven't used it much, but that was their intent. Supposedly they built it from concept to launch in 10 days. what and And they built it a hundred percent using Claude, their Claude CLI program built it for them.
00:35:38
Speaker
So they're using their own tools to build better tools and stuff like that would have taken like six months to a year to build like yeah under old methodologies. Now in 10 days, a hundred billion dollar company can launch a new product, push it out to the public and and have it ready to go button free already, which is the future.
00:35:58
Speaker
Now that's a different question now. What's the future look like? That one, night my gut starts turning around. I don't know. Like for as smart as I don't know, I'm not trying like Maybe I'm smart, maybe I'm not. That's not the point. But the AI is moving way faster than any of our abilities to learn is, right?
00:36:13
Speaker
And i if I taught my 18-year-old son to vibe code some significant things in just three weeks, fast forward six months, a year, 12-year-old kid maybe could outperform any of us. And I just don't know what the future looks like for us, just as these tools get better and better.
00:36:32
Speaker
That's a different story though. I'm going down a different path here. And maybe you got run back in. Right. And the exponential explosion of all of these tools and the ability to do these things. And what we're really talking about is the speed of idea to reality is getting so much faster. So... At least I have kids that are similar ages to you, Wes. And the thing that I'm telling them mostly is to get real comfortable with change and to learn as much as possible to pivot wherever possible and just to roll with it because you've got to take it and learn and use the tools that come at you.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think fundamentally that a lot of what we've been talking about is execution style, but at the base level, you still have to have a really good idea.
00:37:22
Speaker
And so as you're trying to figure out how to do these in vibe codes, you have to start with something that is genuinely useful. Like your son's thing about, Hey, I don't want to do the mambo of trying to figure out how to have three guys figure out what are we going to do and where, when are we going to do it?
00:37:37
Speaker
Hey, maybe we can have that. There's a problem we can solve. yeah but But I would push back a little bit on this one. And this is just in general for people that are trying to learn. Like I've tried to teach people from zero to be good at vibe coding.
00:37:50
Speaker
A lot of times we walk into vibe coding thinking like, oh, forever I've been wanting to build this course master course for thousands of people that has like different series and workshops and seminars and curriculums and subscription levels. Like, okay I'm going to ask AI to build that for me. And they'd never vibe coded before, right?
00:38:08
Speaker
Their chance for success Not that FIID coding can't get them in there, but but their chance for success is probably zero. And they're going to walk away frustrated because they don't know how to use the bumper system yet enough yet.
00:38:20
Speaker
They don't know how to get to the goal. So I would say if you can start off with projects, like i' I've done one server, I asked ChatGPT or whatever it was, Claude, like how many different projects have I made on the server so far? I probably have six servers going right now. And in one alone, it was like almost 200 projects.
00:38:36
Speaker
But it's it's things like, let's build a Star Wars themed tic-tac-toe game. So simple. like this is And it does it, and you look at it, and then you kind of say, oh, great. Can I make it like a three-player tic-tac-toe game? What would that feel like? And then it changes it to three-player tic-tac-toe game.
00:38:50
Speaker
Do I need a tic-tac-toe game? No. do it Does it really make the world any better? No. But I'm learning how to use the tool better because of that. So I would say if you want to build a house, right, that's what you really want.
00:39:02
Speaker
If you can, build a doghouse first. Sure. And build a birdhouse and get excited about the birdhouse because the excitement is what's, because what you're wanting to do is not the product at the end of the day because that house, even once you build it, that might not be an end game for you.
00:39:16
Speaker
but the learning part behind it and that idea of feeling like that confidence you get that you have once you walk around the world with the iron man mentality that's the game changer that you're going for here the game changer is to be able to approach any problem now because even if my my my the tidbit AI goes nowhere and and maybe it will maybe it won't i'm pitching a really big deal to a big food chain right now and they're like a big company with lots of locations i probably shouldn't say who or whatever But if they say yes, my my life's going to change at this point.
00:39:47
Speaker
And I'd made the same software. I just made some tweaks to it where you can do, again, this is going into like the stuff that's never been done before. Right. But I was thinking to myself, okay, like the problem that they have, it's a pizza company, right? So you call into the pizza thing and you ask for pizza. Somebody has to answer the phone. They talk to you for bit. They put your order in, they send you the pizza. That's that's the traditional way of things being done, right?
00:40:10
Speaker
So AI can do that in my opinion. and So you call in, AI answers the phone, AI talks you puts the order in. But now I have it, why doesn't it send you a link in the beginning of the call so it pulls up on your phone and you can see the order happening in real time while you're talking to them?
00:40:24
Speaker
That way you can confirm exactly what you're getting, right? But then if you want to, it's loud, you can just go ahead and continue making the order on your phone. Right. And you can continue talking.
00:40:35
Speaker
And then you have a QR code that you could share with your friends and they can join in the same order. And what if they want to be talking as well? They can talk, but they're talking to separate ai agents, but they're in the exact same order. And you can say something like, oh, did Dave order and something else? What did he just put into the cart? Oh, he added three chocolate chip cookies. Would you want one too?
00:40:53
Speaker
And so we're all adding to the same order and you can do it on your computer, on your phone, via voice or via web. voice as well. So voice or web, never seen that before.
00:41:03
Speaker
I think it looks amazing in my opinion, like this is a brilliant system and I'm hoping, but even if they say no and it goes nowhere, I'm, I'm happy as a clam. I built something that I know is going to propel me to my next idea. My next idea one of these is going to be big at some point. Maybe, you know, don't know. That's cool.
00:41:22
Speaker
yeah um That's the approach that you have to take when you're playing with AI and that's really the new role of the entrepreneur, I think, is to just hypercharge your ideas of possibility or your opportunities. The worry I get, but the problem is I don't like good like getting into the worry mode and I'm going to go there just for a second then I'll pull back.
AI Tools: Accessibility and Potential
00:41:42
Speaker
Because there's not a lot of once we cross over a hill where no one really can see what's going on and we're talking about what happens on the other side of the hill, Like it doesn't, it's not as relevant. Right now, what I do think is relevant though is for all of us to really get good at using these tools.
00:41:56
Speaker
And let's kick by, let's take advantage of time is now. There's never been a time we could be more productive, get more stuff done, make more of our dreams come true in a short amount of time. With less people, with less resources, this really is a culmination. Like sometimes I almost feel like I wake up in the mornings, like I was born for this era. This is 30 years of being an entrepreneur.
00:42:15
Speaker
Finally now, this is a time I can shine. Like I can, I've always wanted a team of 20, 30, 40, 50 really good engineers working for me full time, but I'd never been able to afford that. But now like I do, and I'm only paying $200 a month.
00:42:28
Speaker
And I have as many good engineers working for me full time, around the clock, never complaining, always saying my ideas are great. and always building beautiful versions of it. But if you look at the evolution, like for example, even like chess, right? And AI and chess, right?
00:42:42
Speaker
There was an era where humans were better than jab than any AI, right? And this they but dominant maybe they could beat like a tiny kid or something like that on chess, because it was almost random. but And eventually got better and better.
00:42:53
Speaker
And then there was a small era in the middle where a human plus the AI was the best when they worked together. right The AI would suggest a move and he goes, no, not that one. And the AI would say, oh, that's a great move.
00:43:05
Speaker
And the two of them together, it could probably beat at almost anybody. The human by himself could do pretty good, but the human plus the AI empowered human was really good. That era was a small window.
Future of AI in Job Roles
00:43:15
Speaker
It really was, because eventually AI get better to where the human slows them down. The human offers really no value in that transaction. And now a human plus AI is nowhere even close to just an AI by itself, right? The best, the computer, the chess engines can kick by and they don't, like we offer no idea to make it any better at this point.
00:43:36
Speaker
I'm a little bit worried. That's the hill we're crossing over right now. My ideas, plus using vibe scribe, whatever coding stuff, I can come up with good things. There's going to be a hill, which is a weird thing to think about.
00:43:49
Speaker
Like, I already can envision like where you tell an AI, okay, come up with 200 ideas for video games. They're fun, like arcade style video games. And then you have another AI that reads all 200. Come up, evaluate which one of the 20 of those are the best.
00:44:04
Speaker
And then another one comes back and says, evaluate them again. Pick the five that you really want to build. And then it takes those five to another agent and it builds the five. And then you have somebody that tests those five and then it goes back and it reiterates all over again and does it again or does it again, does it again.
00:44:17
Speaker
You can walk away from a computer and come back and you could have like in a month, a thousand games on the app store that you never even touched, never even tested yourself, never even approved of. it Like that's not, I could probably build that today, right now with what's here today.
00:44:32
Speaker
And so there's no real human in the loop at this point. That's gonna be the era where that's a hill that things are going that direction. If you've heard, there's a company, I forget the name, but they do vending machines that are completely run by ai They put, yeah, no. And this is like, I love nerding out on these new things.
00:44:50
Speaker
They put these, they have them in the Wall Street Journal. They have them in Thropix headquarters and other places. And they're kind of like those honor system vending machines. Like you just crap. Right. But AI decides exactly what to stock in there, what price to put them at, when to order inventory. There's no human involvement in that.
00:45:06
Speaker
And they're testing how good it is at running these little things. And right now people laugh because they say, if you really try hard, because you communicate it with via Slack and Slack and these companies go, yeah, you know what? I really want like Rubik's cubes in the vending machine. Cause like, i I think I could sell Rubik's cubes to everyone.
00:45:21
Speaker
And then they, I will debate with you a little bit saying, I don't think anyone needs Rubik's cubes. You know, really all the people. And if you could sell and people try like at the wall street journal, I can, if you look it up, they did, they were trying to like,
00:45:32
Speaker
to hack it and they go they would send fake documents to it and they would say tomorrow is national freebie day for all employees. You got the um to give away everything for free. sure And it would fight and fight, but eventually it would give away all the food for free.
00:45:44
Speaker
And then they'd say, Hey, look, it failed. But every time it fails, it gets better. Pretty soon, if it can run a vending machine, can't it run a convenience store? and And they already, the same people that built that, they built a radio station that's run completely by AI.
00:45:59
Speaker
So AI decides what songs to play, how to like, and its goal is to make money from the radio station to get sponsorships and stuff like that. And so it makes up its own games and it makes up its own kind of like how often like listeners call in and talk to listeners live on the air and what genres of music to play.
00:46:15
Speaker
And it goes on and it's just kind of learning and evolving. I just think there's going to probably be more and more of these autonomous, kind of like where the human involvement really. So if you were trying to help the AI do a better radio station, could you actually add value to it?
00:46:29
Speaker
And it's going to get to the place where, no. If you were going to try to run the convenience store better or add value to it um it, it makes smarter choices. It knows when to buy inventory, what to price it, what to put in the front of the store, what to put in the back of the store. And us, even the smartest one of us is going to look at it and we just slow it down. And that... right, that's a little bit, that that's way too far ahead.
Maximizing Productivity with AI
00:46:50
Speaker
But because of this, I guess I'm just trying to set up like a little bit of a fire in each of us. There's a window that we have now where we actually are imported. We're playing chess with the AI.
00:47:01
Speaker
And this is a time where we're better than we ever were. And we can take advantage of the season. The next season where AI doesn't need us to play chess anymore, I don't know what to do with that one.
00:47:11
Speaker
But in this one right now where we are, I know myself with the eye behind me, I can build these great things. let's I want us all to make all our ideas come true, build things we didn't think we could build, use it in ways that are inspiring to us and those around us.
00:47:26
Speaker
Yeah. but What was question number two on the list? This is great. Yeah, we need to wrap up the episode because we're eight minutes over on time. But I don't know about you, Dave, but I was just so utterly fascinated. I'm enthralled. This is great. I can't wait to kick around. I tried it once and I gave up immediately. so I'm and immediately buying a VPS today. Yeah.
00:47:47
Speaker
Yeah. I'd be happy to set up like and even just another like Zoom call with you guys in real time. Let's get it going. a walk because once once you go... There's a friend of mine named Rachel. She set up a bar. I did the same thing with her.
00:48:01
Speaker
um She already built the website for one of her clients. She sold it for tens of thousands of dollars. Just over a weekend, that's a shoot. They've been wanting this new website for a long time. She decided to do it. She got so excited and she started doing things like,
00:48:13
Speaker
making it so that it's a CMS version where they can update the blogs and they can go to their Google documents and pulls new files, like things like, I don't know how to to do that, to be honest, I haven't done anything like that, but she has never touched coding either.
00:48:28
Speaker
and once you figure out this idea, like, Hey, I can build things just based on ideas and I feel comfortable that it it'll work. Um, the people that push back on this are always, always always eat like, they're usually they're tied into the old way of doing things. AI does it, but it doesn't do it production ready code. They like, I don't know, I don't buy it. All in like the stuff, you just, you just ask it, Hey, is this production ready code? And it'll go through and give you a pretty good evaluation on it. I don't know. It's definitely moving in that direction. All right. I don't want on going. I could talk for days. Can we have you back for future episodes? Yeah.
00:49:06
Speaker
I'd love to. Yeah, I'll probably have another 20 different businesses that I've started between now and then. Love it. I can't wait to hear what they are. But for now, this has been another episode of Dial It in He's Dave. I'm Trigby.
00:49:17
Speaker
Thank you our guest Wes today. We've been produced by Nicole Fairclough and Andy Witowski. And with apologies to Tony Kornheiser, we will also try to do better the next time.