Vibe Coding the News - DTNS Weekend

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3:16Welcome to another Daily Tech News Show weekend edition, gratefully provided to you. And thanks for your support of the show. and we are extremely pleased to welcome Bodhi Grimm back onto the show. Welcome, Bodhi. Hello, Tom. Thank you very much for having me on. Thank you, too. We're going to talk about something you did that I think is pretty fascinating. It's something I'd like to try my hand at as well. It's basically vibe coding, but from someone who, no disrespect, but I don't think you set yourself up as a prompt engineer or anything like that, right? Not a prompt engineer, not a vibe coder, just somebody who's like, I'm a single podcaster and anything I can do to automate my system or my process, there's only positives.

4:05Most of the time, only positives. Yeah, yeah. And I think this will be something because of where you're coming from that people in the audience will be able to take a lot away from because it doesn't presuppose that you've been doing this for a long time or you have specialized knowledge of AI or anything like that. But what we're talking about is a news source aggregator, now tailored for your needs, but something that just goes out onto the web, finds news and gathers it for you. Am I explaining that properly? Yeah. So before I, and I still use my original system until I can get all the bugs worked out.

4:43Sure. But what usually happens is I have news articles through RSS coming into a program called Unread. And then from Unread, I triage the articles, and then I will send that to raindrop.io. And there I'll decide, I'll triage it again, and I'll decide what goes in the show and what doesn't and what I want to save for later. And then that's the whole process. Then I export the articles that I end up using for the show into an HTML file. And then I upload that into a Gemini gem, and it creates my show notes and show art and gives me like 10 title suggestions. So this is something, once you've got it working smoothly, it's going to save you some time putting together your show.

5:28Yeah, I think so. I mean... Or it has the potential to anyway, right? Yeah, it definitely has the potential to. And it might not even save the time. What I don't like doing is that sometimes I have to go, like I'm in Unread and then I have to send it to Raindrop. And then from raindrop, I have to go. I would like it to have it in just one place. And if one application actually did this, I would pay for it, hands down, before I did this myself. But it doesn't. So walk us through a little bit about what you've got going on here and how you were able to put it together. What did you have to do to make it work?

6:02Okay. So without going through all of the prompts that I did, first, I signed up for a free account with lovable.ai or lovable.dev, I think it is. And from there, I signed up for a free account. I now have a paid account, but I signed up for a free account. You get like 30 credits. And I was able to build most of this off of 30 credits. I just put in, I was like, hey, I need to draw in all of the news. I kept it very vague. And so Lovable is meant for you to vibe code apps, basically? Is that what the service is? I believe so. It creates websites. Oh, okay. You know, again, this is not, I do a lot with AI in terms of letting it be my collaboration partner, but I don't, like, I wouldn't be able to go into something like Claude and create a vibe code something because I just don't have that knowledge.

6:55Yeah. So you were picking something that's a little narrower, specifically made for apps and websites, but able to use a large language model to do it. Got it. Right. Specific for dummies is what I was trying to accomplish. Yes. So I just wrote a very simple prompt. It says I do an EV podcast. These are the topics, autonomous driving, renewable energy, and EVs. Create a news desk that will bring in those stories. I didn't even give it the stories that I use on a regular basis or the sources I use on a regular basis. and it pretty much hit all of my sources plus gave me a couple extra ones that I was like oh this is really good I didn't even know about but then I defined I had to narrow it down I did find it a little bit more just to use my sources and the ones that I I picked out that it did really well otherwise I was just getting too much garbage so how could you tell what sources it had decided to select?

7:54It showed. So I'm going to show this here. Yeah. So it's just looking at the app while it was running, basically. Is that how you saw it? Yeah. If you look here, and this is over several iterations, but one of the things that it did right away is it would give me who wrote the story. This story I'm highlighting here is not a Tesla app. And then it gives me a link to go to their website to read more about the story. To read the original source, right. But did it have a list of all the sources it was considering or was it just you looking through the feed? No, it just came through with all these cards and it wasn't a lot.

8:31I did have to go redefine it and say, only give me something from the last 14 days. Don't repeat stories if we've already dismissed or saved a story, don't repeat it after that. So there's a little bit of fine tuning, but with 30 credits in about six hours of work, this is what I have. And you've got a very easy to understand interface that it created. That is one thing I've found that LLMs are good at. I used one from DreamHost to do TomMeritt.com. It makes a great interface where I ran into a wall was, okay, but I wanted to do this one specific thing and you're not quite getting it. Did you have any examples of that?

9:14Surprisingly? No. Really? Okay. Maybe I should switch to a level. I was very tickled. It's not to say that it's perfect, right? Yeah. So for folks who are listening, each story has a card, right? And if multiple outlets are reporting on the same story, it groups them together in a card. So it's able to tell a topic and go, Oh, these are similar. Let me just put them in the same card. Right. But sometimes they're not. And so I had to go in and say, Hey, if I ungroup this, please remember why I ungrouped it. Right. Because it didn't match the story. Yeah. Right. So I also added the ability to rate each article.

9:58And that way later on, it remembers how I rated the articles and then I can hit recommend. So if I didn't want to, there's like 115 stories in my inbox right now, I could just hit recommend and it would just recommend the top five. And it tells me why. I can see this. I mean, for you and me, this is very useful, right? In narrowing down from the sources we trust, what are big stories out there to take a look at and consider. But I could see this being useful for anybody who's like, eh, Google news isn't great. Tech meme is maybe a little, you know, too narrow for me. Uh, I want something that gives me the stories that I'm interested in the, what you've created here, anybody else could create.

10:42And it does that. It learns from, from you, uh, what kind of stuff you want to see now that is a little bit of an echo chamber, but I, you know, for, for, for the purposes that you're using it for that, that's okay, that you, you want it to be the stuff that you want. Did you try to tell it like, make sure to go out and find stuff I wouldn't find? Or did it just kind of do that? Initially I said that, you know, just kind of give me this wide blanket, but I had to, I had to narrow it down because it was just getting too much garbage. Like, uh, if Elon Musk sneezed in Venice, then I would get that story and I don't care.

11:18It was just tangentially related to electric vehicles, but maybe not that story. So you needed to focus in a little more. I could see that. And then how does it work? If you were to use this to produce a podcast, how would you use it? So like I said, I do a podcast on Tesla's, EVs, autonomous driving and renewable energy. And the reason why Tesla and EVs not lumped together is Tesla is the majority of the stories that aren't even now still. So I separate that out for my own show. So I have it so that I can filter for just Tesla stories. Right now I'm having a problem with that. So that's one thing I have to fix is right now it's only filtering Tesla and it's putting it in with EVs.

12:01So that's it. And then, you know, I can say I want another autonomous driving story. So I can put that in or I can say I haven't talked about renewables enough. I want to put that in there. Okay. So you set up those filters as like, you know, try to sort them into those buckets because those are useful buckets for you. Right. And if it's sorted wrong, then I can go in and I can change it and I can say, well, no, this isn't an EV story or whatever. Move it over. Okay. And it remembers, oh, this particular story is an EV story. Whether or not that's going to be helpful in the future, I have no idea.

12:34Yeah. Some of this will require long-term use to really tell if it learns, obviously. Right. And like I sent you, and you're very kind, to take a peek at it. And it's very much solving a problem that I have, right? But I want to encourage people that if this isn't exactly the problem you're having, if you are like 90 % of the way on something, some task that you're doing over and over and over again, give this a try because it might get you the other 10 % or closer to 100%. Yeah. And then, okay, so you get the list of stories. You're wanting to do renewables. Where do you go from there? So I pick a story, and it shows here on my card for this renewable.

13:15It's 88%. It thinks that it will fit my show a score of 88. What that actually means, I have no idea. But the higher the score, the more likely it thinks it's going to fit the show.

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16:37So what I can summarize this in my own voice. This will take a second to do that. I don't find that particularly helpful, but it is kind of neat that it does it. It gives me a hook. It tells me kind of a summary of what happened to the story and why it would be good for my show. And did you just tell it, Kilowatt Podcast, that's my voice, go look at that? No. Okay. So yeah, that's a good point. I uploaded about five or six transcripts of my show. Ah, okay. And I took that over a couple of month period of time. So that way, it was able to get a good grouping of what I talked about. Okay. So then you could summarize that.

17:14You said that's not particularly useful. What's the next step um the next step if i i think this is good enough to go into the show i'll save it for the show and then it moves it into another section it moves it from the inbox to for the show okay and then when i'm ready and i'll i'll curate articles throughout the week so when i'm ready i'll go into um the for the show section and i'll decide which shows are going to go into the or which articles are going to go into the show. And from here, I'll just, you know, basically the articles that I want to use, I'll just hit mark complete. And that puts it into like, I use this article.

17:57It's actually in the show. Like I wrote, I wrote notes and everything and I put it in the show and then complete is it removes it from the, for the show section. And it's just waiting there to be exported into an HTML file. So this is a funnel that you're doing. You get a list of all the stories. You mark the ones that you think, okay, I might want to have that in the show. That gives you a narrower list that you look at and say, okay, out of these 12 I marked, I'm going to use these six for the show. Then those are marked as complete. And where do those go? The ones that you're actually going to use for the show?

18:32Okay, so I'll export an HTML file. So if you press export HTML, that's just the things that have been marked complete? Yeah. So I don't think there's anything in, it'll just, it'll basically show the article title, the article link, and then it gives, I think it adds a little bit extra that we don't need there, but I don't want to screw anything up and it doesn't affect anything bad. So just leave it alone. Okay. And then I go into Gemini and I, and I have one of these for open AI for chat GPT as well. Okay, so you've exported an HTML file from your complete list. Right. And then you go to Gemini, and I'm guessing you're going to upload that HTML into the Gemini?

19:18Yes. So all of my shows, once I've done recording, I put them in Auphonic. Auphonic creates a bunch of other things, but one of the things that it creates is a transcript for me. So I upload the transcript and I upload the articles into a show notes generator that I built. It's called the Jim in Gemini. and when that is complete i don't know it says use microphone here let's see i could tell you're recording a podcast and it wants i guess so i just say you know start the notes make the notes and it will give me a description of what the show is based off the transcripts it'll give me all of the shows all the other podcasts that i do and links to that in the 918 digital website and then will give me a list of the articles um and then it gives me 10 show suggestions gotcha so show title suggestions yes yes so you can see here are the six or so articles that i used for this particular example and then here are 10 suggestions sometimes they're great sometimes they're not yeah so it's sometimes i actually have to use my brain but once i pick one let's just say sometimes i find that title suggestions from an LLM aren't what I use, but they give me an idea.

20:36Right. And I'm like, Oh, that's, that's an interesting perspective. Let me, let me play on that myself. And it, it kind of gets my brain moving a little better. Yeah. This is, this is 99 % of how I use AI is I need something, I need somebody to bounce stuff off of. And while I have folks in my life, you being one, for instance, I can say, hey, what do you think of this? It's not always practical at two o 'clock in the morning to be like, do you like this title, Tom? Sure. I mean, you can, I just may not answer because I'll be sound asleep, right? Right, right. So the next step is once I have my show notes, I choose my title.

21:16And then I am very big into like 1970s and 80s retro cartoons. I try to have most of my show art not look because you can have with when you talk about EVs, renewable energy and autonomous driving, sometimes you can have some post-apocalyptic show art. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Yeah. So I try to keep it nice and fun in comic book kind of. And I love actually this show art that just came up here. Yeah, it's very much ripped from a comic I would bought at Owens Typewriter Company in 1978. Right. I bet you the gum would be dry and crunchy. Definitely. So the Lovable app is helping you select the news and it's really just exporting the links that then go into the gem and the gem is taking those and incorporating them into everything else that you've already been doing.

22:07Yes. Okay. Got it. And that gives you the description it gives you the transcript it gives you the um the album art as well um where do you go next with the gem then uh nowhere this is it uh sometimes yeah so if i do one if oh it gave me another one too we got two for one if i did a this is the 16 by 9 version um it creates two but if i if i if i had an interview like you and i sat down for an interview tom i will put uh I will create the YouTube show art. I never put people. People can be problematic in these. And I've had it happen one time where people are like, what the heck is going on here?

22:51And I was like, oh, I didn't even recognize that was a problem. So I took it down. So people will never show up in my show art. Even me, I'm not going to put anybody in the show art. But, um, yeah, the only, the only difference is I do a 16 by nine if an, and an actual video podcast on YouTube, if we recorded something. Gotcha. Gotcha. Uh, yeah, this, this is really going to save time. I can tell, uh, this doesn't replace any people. It just replaces time you would have taken to do all this manually. I'm guessing. Yeah. It's, and you know, it does, it does save time. But for me, so I have two jobs.

23:31I have two podcasts that I'm doing on a regular basis. I have children. I have all these other things that I'm doing. I don't have the mental capacity to be sharp at all of these things. So it takes some of the cognitive load off, which is really important for me. For me, AI doing my homework, it's not something that I would like to use it for. Like I have a lot of brain disease in my family. I would like to use my brain as much as possible to keep it healthy. Yeah. But I also recognize at two o 'clock in the morning, I'm not going to get the best title out of my brain. And which is oftentimes when I'm posting stuff, um, because I got all these other things going on.

24:16So having something that I can bounce ideas off of, uh, that gives good suggestions most of the time, uh, and does a lot of kind of the heavy lifting allows me to concentrate on the more important aspects of my shows. I'm Jake Stouck, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English and it's built.

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25:53tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55 % off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com slash acast. Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash acast. Rules and restrictions may apply. Now, real quick, if we can go back to lovable, I think a few people may be wondering like, okay, you said you put in a prompt that said, go collect a bunch of resources for me. How many follow-up prompts did you have to do to say, well, I also need it to go into categories and I also need it to be able to export as HTML. And I need to have this three-stage thing where I can market for the show and then market complete.

26:40And that means it gets exported. Was that easy? Was it hard? I think that's where people probably get a little daunted It's like, how much do I need to know to be able to make that work? Or was it just rather logical for you to say like, oh, I see it now. I want it to also do this. So if I'm counting right, it's about 17 different prompts from start to finish. Yeah. And it is small, right? These are just small. Like you can see here on May 9th, I wrote two sentences. And actually, that's just one sentence. I'm not putting in like this big, complicated prompt. prompt, I'm making small changes because then I want to go and verify that that change worked and then didn't mess something else up.

27:26But I think we can all agree that 17 prompts isn't a lot. No. In the course of a chat, I mean, it might sound like a lot if you've never done this before, but frankly, that's less than an hour for sure. Obviously, build in time to look at it and play around and then go back and reprompt. I think what I'd like to do at this point, Now that people kind of wrap their head around what you did, how you're using it, can you read that original prompt back to us again? Oh, for sure. So people can hear like where it started. It's probably different than what I said it was. So it says, I have a podcast called Kilowatt.

28:02I need an app that finds me the most interesting electric vehicle, renewable energy, and autonomous driving stories, and then summarizes those stories so I can decide which ones to use on the show. So it'd be great if it would be great. My writing's not so great. It'd be great if the summaries were in my voice. I attach transcripts to the prompt so that you can learn my voice. And I attach three different transcripts. Right in the original prompt. Okay. Yeah. And then everything else was refining from there. Was it pretty close to the mark, that first generation? It was from what we have now is probably 80 % of the way there.

28:39That's amazing. It could have been even more higher than that. Well, Bodhi, this is really useful, I think, in multiple ways. I think it's practical for people who are doing similar things or want a similar thing, whether it's for a podcast or just for your own information. I think it's useful. But I also think if people aren't necessarily using these kinds of tools to kind of see how they work, see how you used them as someone who, again, like me, is not an expert in AI, but can sit down and try a tool out like this and combine it with another one, it's pretty easy for someone to get started and play around with.

29:21Yes, 100%. And I would normally share this with everybody, but it's also something I'm trying to use in my workflow. So I don't want people going in and removing things and rating stuff that's not going to. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, I get that. No, there's a, there's a feature called remix. And I just learned about this right before we got on. So, um, email me Bodie at 918 digital.com. That's B O D I E. And I'll, I'll figure out how to share the remix. And if, you know, I can share it without, uh, with you as well. So you can put it in the show notes, but they can take what I built and then they can import it into what they're doing and they can make any changes they want.

30:03It doesn't give you the exact prompts that I put in. And I don't know if that's a safety thing or what exactly, but it gives you close enough so you can kind of learn and play with it as you go. And does it affect your instance at all? So that's cool. Not even a little bit. Yeah. Well, thank you, Bodie. Appreciate that, man. We'll make sure to put that info in the show notes as well. Anything else you want to let people know before we wrap up? Well, I think I've promoted kilowatt quite a bit. If I, my daughter has a YouTube channel and she, her, one of her first videos, like 300 and plus thousand videos.

30:43And it's about the nature of work. It's very thoughtful and nerdy and, you know, being, feeling like you're benefiting from work. So if you're interested in that kind of thing, she brought me on as a producer because she, she got this massive, I think she has 400 ,000 views now and over 10 ,000 subscribers or So she brought me on to produce for her. But if you just look up Sierra LeDuc, that's L-A-D-U-K-E on YouTube, you'll see one of her videos. It's really good. I'm super proud of her. And really the only reason to promote this is because I just am super proud of her. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's awesome.

31:21Sierra LeDuc, like Duke University, L-A-D-U-K-E. Yes. Fantastic. Well, Bodhi, thank you again so much, man. I appreciate you sharing this with us all. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Tom. Appreciate it. And thank you for supporting the show. Patreon.com slash DTNS. That makes it possible for us to not only do the show, but, you know, sit down and do extra stuff like this. So keep the support coming and we will talk to you with the regular old daily news. Talk to you then.

31:49The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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