Building an iPhone app with zero technical skills | Bryce Rattner Keithley

19:44Bryce Rattner Keithley:Don't let your competitors out hire you. MetaView customers close roles 30 % faster. Get started with MetaView today and get your first 100 candidates sourced for free at metaview.ai slash howiai.

20:01Keithley:Okay, so it loaded. Let's pop it open and see how good it did. so it's kind of flawed it didn't do a great job it didn't listen to the hands behind its head it didn't listen to the head down it got one leg in the proper position but it got one leg not in the proper position we're going to try it again we are creating an anthropomorphic leopard in a gym setting the leopard should be wearing exercise clothes and sometimes and this is probably me not knowing anything and summoning the AI gods. Copying and pasting works when we're on a win and starting over sometimes work when you have an L. So I'm just restarting the karma and writing it all over again.

20:46Keithley:This is to match the video because it doesn't do a good job interpreting anything. Both knees should be above hips. Knees should be bent. Feet forward in tabletop position. Both feet off the ground. They should know their characters in the image. Sometimes AI I guess, excited and adds friends for the character. And we just don't need that. We don't want that.

21:04Bryce Rattner Keithley:OK. So just we prompted it once. You copied and pasted your kind of original prompt, made a couple edits, did not give you what you wanted. You say, don't copy and paste. That's just welcoming more of the same. Instead, start it over, rephrase. We added a couple more literal things together in terms of like saying both feet off the ground or both hands behind your head or left and right and just being very precise. and then you're using Gemini to create this image. We'll see if it does a little bit better.

21:35Keithley:We'll see if Gemini does a little bit better. And it's really fascinating. Sometimes we'll get things on the first try. Sometimes it'll take a while. Yesterday we made a cougar and what it got quickly was the cougar. What it didn't get, and I wanted it to do burpees, I wanted the cougar to be all the way forward on the mat And I wrote that a couple of different times. The cougar should be standing all the way to the front edge, left side of the yoga mat. It gave it weights the next time. I didn't want weights, but it kept it in the middle. And so what I then did was I took an image of myself and showed it a different version because we just kind of got stuck.

22:19Keithley:But we eventually got the cougar a little bit further forward. Okay, let's see. Okay. Oh, yay. There's your leopard.

22:28Bryce Rattner Keithley:It's head's not down, but I think we can work with this. Okay, can we pop it up and just show the improvement we got? All right, so both legs up. Tail still looks awkward, but, you know, it's a tail. It has a tail.

22:41Keithley:Its hands are behind its head like we want for crunches. It's in exercise gear. There's no other friends. We love it. Okay, so what is your next step? Here's another actual hiccup about Higgs Field. Sometimes the downloads work well and download what you want. And sometimes it downloads something totally random. Like it might give us a different animal than the one that we created, which is fascinating. So we'll see if it gave us the right one. It did. I saved the animals by name. I saved in a starting positions folder so I can pull them for recall. I give the animal and I give the position that they're in so it's a little bit easier.

23:23Keithley:and then do you want to try and turn this into a video clear yeah okay so then we go to Higgsfield and Higgsfield has it's like an embarrassment of riches in terms of how many options you have and what you can do it can be a little bit overwhelming but in this case I use motion control I use cling three it's under the video option right here so cling three motion control I add the motion so So in this case, we're going to pull my video and this is going to be crunches. We're going to do crunches cut because it's shorter. Fortunately, all of these exercises are not in my living room. And that's what you would see if we didn't have this magic tool.

24:08Keithley:And then we start find the position that we want. And this was our leopard in the supine position. It lets you choose the scene control. So in this case, we're choosing the image. still loading our video or still loading our image excuse me so just to call out for folks a

24:26Bryce Rattner Keithley:couple things that i noticed if you're not watching on the youtube so bryce took a video of herself doing these crunches with her legs in the tabletop position very good form excellent work my friend and a couple things i noticed is you're i see now why you prompted for the head to be at the left because you don't want the video to be mirror image of the the image and so you put these two image and video side by side they're roughly the same shape of character you're using this cling 3.0 motion control model and then you're saying the image is what's going to control the scene versus the video is going to control the scene because you don't want the videos in your living room you want the videos in 24 hour fitness animal edition correct okay great exactly and then you

25:12Keithley:click generate and you click generate and it does require patience they tend to take quite some time You can tend to do, I can maybe do three or four before it gets overwhelmed. So I might cue some up if I have my videos and my images ready. But it is, you know, go for a walk, do some of your daily hundreds, get a set in. And it will eventually get you your video. Amazing. So we'll let this process and we'll come back and see what we got. Do you want to see some of the past ones while it's working?

25:44Bryce Rattner Keithley:Yeah, let's do it while it's loading.

25:45Keithley:Okay. So there have been a lot of friends that we've made. We have animals and we have mythological creatures for making sure we're getting good coverage. There's a goblin. There's a cat. There's a fox. Flamingo. Some of them I'm able to get on the first try. Some of them take a while. And some of them are just like real, real tricky. I'll show you one that I think demonstrates like how AI can do you wrong. So I wanted to demonstrate swimmers. This is a great postural exercise for us people with desk jobs. Oh, excuse me, supermans. So it's laying down, it's lifting all of its limbs up off the ground.

26:29Keithley:It's using your posture, it's using your glutes, basically your whole back chain. This is what I wanted. This is our genie doing some supermans. But do your hands have to be like that when you use supermans? No, you got a lot of choice. This was just his style. But as you can see, we got real close the first time. I was pretty happy with this, except the feet stayed up. And we don't want people to think that they've got to do this unreasonable exercise the whole time. And sometimes I'll have to get in there and give it some more encouragement, some more literal guidance. so glad the genie's legs should start on the floor and lift up at the same time as they are instead of staying elevated the whole time what i i don't even know if i can describe what i'm

27:19Bryce Rattner Keithley:seeing on screen right now um you just really go to the we'll we'll make sure this is bookmarked in the YouTube so you can see this. I mean, the genie is floating. There is some body part, maybe a foot, maybe something else, just on the ground. And he's doing nosedives into the yoga mat. And so, you know, oh, he's only got one leg. It must be his foot. You can see it kind of floating behind him. Yeah.

27:49Keithley:Very odd. Very odd. Not approachable for us actual humans. No, not at all. We needed to change that.

27:57Bryce Rattner Keithley:Was there one that you did that surprised you how effective it worked? Like an animal you thought it wouldn't really work out and it ended up being pretty high quality?

28:06Keithley:Oh, a million percent. This was my kid's recommendation. They wanted me to make a turtle. And I was like, a turtle feels like not the animal at the gym, first of all. But like the shell would be a bit prohibitive. but like look at our friend doing these cross body stepping presses he's so friendly i mean

28:30Bryce Rattner Keithley:turtles are historically known as ninjas so i'm not surprised that it that's that's true that's true this is maybe its origination even doing curtsy lunges look at this little friend doing

28:41Keithley:curtsy lunges he's got a nice little demeanor he looks approachable and friendly oh bryce you know

28:48Bryce Rattner Keithley:that I do ballet, can you make me turtle ballet? That's for our next installment. Okay, perfect. So let's see if this video is back up and loaded. And again, I can see here, it's taking you one, two, three tries. You're trying to reprompt. Sometimes AI goes real sideways. And were all of these kind of this combination of image and video? They were all the combination of image in video.

29:15Keithley:Yeah. And to your point before, there were times where I tried to get it to perhaps I had an animal in a straight arm plank position and I wanted it to do donkey kicks or something that started in quadruped and it couldn't even adjust the starting position from a mostly the same to the knees down or bare plank hovers where your toes are tucked and you're lifting your knees slightly off of the floor. It even had a hard time interpreting those small changes. And so I tend to get really precise on the starting images as much as possible. And that's been a big unlock in terms of generating the right video that I want.

29:56Keithley:Amazing.

29:57Bryce Rattner Keithley:Okay. You ready to see your leopard? I am ready to see my leopard. Show it to me. Let's see how we did. Hey. Hey. You're doing great kids. You're doing great kids.

30:08Keithley:I love you. There's kind of this weird elf before that everyone thought was a human and kept asking me who the human was. And so now we've got a leopard. This is fantastic. I love this so much. And it looks great.

30:18Bryce Rattner Keithley:I mean, things that you can call out, I even think it shows the reflection of the leopard in the mirror back there. So it's pretty funny. Pretty smart. You would never be able to do this before. This is one of those things that I tell people, like, imagine being able to in the past, like you would have to hire, I don't know, what you would do it would just be videos low-res videos of you in your living room really in the horror yeah yeah in the corner and so now you have this like high production value fun leopard doing crunches in appropriate form even looks like it's struggling a little bit little wobble to the to the crunch it looks very natural 10 out of 10 you can do crunches now too

31:04Keithley:You got your inspo. I love it. You got your form.

31:07Bryce Rattner Keithley:Okay. So just to catch people up where we are so far, we have built a full-to-end app in Replit without knowing what we're talking about. Decided to add in custom videos of these exercises by combining a nano-banana image of reference image of an anthropomorphized animal and my friend doing an exercise. So just like a video from your iPhone doing an exercise. you're combining those in Higgs field using the cling model and waiting about five minutes and then you get your video so you have these two things together this looks like a web app but people don't want to pull up web apps when they're doing their exercise so your next step was getting this to the the app store and I will tell you Bryce was asking me for advice on how to do this and I was like girl I am not a mobile developer never have been never will be not my thing don't do consumer enterprise till I die.

32:03Bryce Rattner Keithley:And so I was like, I can't help you. I can't help you. Otherwise, I would. And I think you heard that a lot from friends, right? A couple of months ago when you first started this, like you were asking around how to get this into the app store and what was their response?

32:16Keithley:I started building this in October. And once I realized that I wanted to keep using it every day and to your point, not only do people not want this as a web app, you certainly don't want it to be daily100.replit.app because nobody's going to go there. It was like, okay, well, the holy grail is getting this to being a published app in the app store. And the broad consensus back in the fall was at some point, like, yes, you can do a lot of this in Replit. You can do a lot of this on your own. At some point, you're going to have to have someone technical unblock you and level up to get this in the app store.

32:50And a friend's husband who's technical, I engaged

32:54Keithley:him to basically write me a fairly intensive doc that I could shop around if I wanted to hire a contractor. But as I went through the holidays, as the new models came out in February and I started getting ready to advance the project, it was wild to me because the same technical folks that I was asking, Claire included, it was sort of like, actually with the current models, like you can probably do this yourself. And so I did. Beginner's mindset went into Cloud and was basically, how do I prepare a Replit app for App Store submission? And kept it really broad and gave it the context that I am not technical.

33:37Keithley:I can use Cloud Code, where it was starting, some of what was involved and what do we do next and it gave me I think it was like five pretty meaty items that we were going to have to go through including moving letting go of my replic comfort blanket and moving off of it and ultimately got it ready uh for for app store publishing and so what I would do is I would use Claude original Claude as like my friend in I don't know in the cockpit of like, what are we doing? How are we going to approach this? And it would tell me when to go into Claude Code. Claude Code would write me code. I would bring that back into Claude and say, this is what you told me to have it do.

34:25Keithley:Here's what it did. It would confirm or give me thoughts on it. And then it would tell me to put it into the terminal directly, which was a fascinating and at first terrifying experience. But that was ultimately what I would do. I'd between Claude, Claude Code, Claude and Terminal and really continue. And in fact, I hit my limit like 51 minutes before it reset one day. And then I got 90 % another day, but I was able to stay within my limits generally and did start to outwork it because on a couple of occasions, it would say, you've done a lot today. You can come back tomorrow. I'm like, absolutely not.

35:07Keithley:we're going on to the next one. And so I was able to go, I took about 25 or 30 hours in one weekend and just cranked through it, but ultimately got it into the app store on the second try.

35:19Bryce Rattner Keithley:Yeah. So just for folks, and I love this workflow again, because it's like beginner's mindset, right? You were just like, plain old Claude, OG Claude is very accessible to me and not scary. So I'm going to ask OG Claude to give me a plan. And again, like, let's go back to plan mode. I need a plan. Give me a step by step. And I love the honesty of like, I'm not technical. So like, let's not pretend I am. Give me the step by step. I'm going to work with CloudCode. And then you would give us steps to CloudCode. So you almost have like a product manager or a technical architect in Cloud. Then you had like your software engineer in CloudCode.

35:57Bryce Rattner Keithley:And then they both said, you know, we don't have the ultimate permissions here. So you need to step in and do these specific things in the terminal. And then you went to, I asked you the other day, I was like, are you in test flight? And you're like, yeah, I was in test flight. And so now it's in the app store. You got it approved. It's ready to go.

36:16Keithley:It's ready to go. Yep. I had some pretty low hanging fruit from my first submission. That was mostly user error. Yeah. But yeah, we're live and in the app store.

36:25Bryce Rattner Keithley:What was the user feedback or the feedback? Do you remember? Yes.

36:29Keithley:So there were three things. One, and of course, I just took it all. I copied it and pasted it from Apple's feedback into Claude and was like, we did not achieve full publishing. Here's what it said. The first one was like, oh, it looks like you checked the wrong box on parental. You're like child proofing something. And so I was like, this is the box to check. I probably went back to it and was like, you need to clarify further where that is and what to do. The second one was definitely user error because it does use your phone number to log in. And because it needs to be compatible with iPad, I needed to add sign in with Apple, which I had done, but I never tested it.

37:12Keithley:And so that was my bad. It didn't work. And so I needed to troubleshoot that and make sure that sign with Apple worked. And then you need to have a way to delete it. So I needed a button where you could delete your app. And so I added a button to be able to delete your account. And she's not lying, folks. It's right here on the App Store.

37:33Bryce Rattner Keithley:She truly beat me. This makes me very mad. I am a little bit of competitive. I'm a competitive side goater. This is super impressive. So again, for folks who never thought they could do this. And, you know, we've had people on the show who are like pseudo-technical, like product backgrounds. And it's just what I love about this moment is really people are unconstrained by execution and they can take a good idea that adds value to them and build it and make it real and not just make it real, make it production ready, which I think is super impressive. So, Bryce, before we get you out of here, I'm going to ask you a couple lightning round questions and then we'll get you going.

38:16Bryce Rattner Keithley:So in your day job, you think a lot about talent, teams, and leadership. And I'm just curious, your thoughts reflecting on this exercise, which has brought you much closer to the builder side of things. What are things that are top of mind for you about how to hire and how to be hireable in this moment?

38:39Keithley:Yeah, it's really interesting. Interesting. I've personally always gravitated towards and appreciated environments where the best idea wins. Right. It's not only certain people have the best ideas or certain functions can have the best ideas. But I think in this day and age, the attitude that different skills and different ideas are going to come from everywhere. and it's table stakes to cross-pollinate and have both like the humility and the curiosity to work with others in ways that you haven't before. I think people that get, dare I say, territorial or constrained by what they used to do or what other people used to do are going to struggle with relevance and playing nicely in the sandbox and instead trying to zoom out and consider people can contribute in ways that they haven't before and being both ready for that from other people and keen to do that and bring that attitude to other places as well, I think is necessary.

39:53Keithley:It requires, there's a lot of adaptation. In fact, I feel like there's an opportunity for me to adapt because for a lot of the things where my job or my function is changing, it's still a nice to have. I think there's other functions where it's table stakes. And I have friends who especially do technical recruiting who have seen that when there's resistance to seeing technical problems in a new way is where folks really struggle. So for an engineer to come in to a technical interview and focus only on finding a working solution fastest, it misses the point because the robots can find a working solution faster than they can.

40:44Keithley:And if they're not recognizing, hey, in this equation, the human role has shifted, I need to step back and consider my role as well as the full suite of tools and understand that my role as a technical expert is broader and different than it was six months, a year ago. That gap, I think, is only going to be greater and more challenging. And so that willingness to almost be open to outcome and unattached to what was and recognize that what got me here won't necessarily get me there. But also that, at least for now, there's still a lot of opportunity, I think, to preserve humanity and maximize impact when you're willing to see things differently than you did before.

41:32Bryce Rattner Keithley:I love that. And I think that's a real challenge that needs to be put out to everybody in this moment is your roles are fundamentally changing and the skills you need are changing. And that's OK. I think there's still value to bring into an organization, to a team. But the sooner you face that things are different now, the better. Bryce, my second question is, I know you read or listen a lot to books. In this moment in AI, has there been a book that you've read recently or one that you just have in your pocket from, you know, the before times that you think is really relevant for folks right now as we're navigating this different sort of moment in our careers?

42:09Keithley:If you haven't read What Got You Here Won't Get You There or How Women Rise, which is kind of the sister book to that, it's a good reminder. Not everything is in the title, but it's really the premise that, like, yes, you should trade on your strengths and the things that have been positively reinforced to date. And also, definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. And so your willingness to believe in yourself and scale to the next altitude is really your opportunity. I did listen to A Whole New Mind. It's the book by Dan Pink, which actually came out in 2014 and I think is really ahead of its time, but talks about the benefits of an and thinking of both left brain and right brain thinking.

42:58Keithley:And again, this is it's old now. And the way he's talking about automation and acceleration and abundance was was is interesting and right. And I think it's only more true. But I really think, especially as computers can do more left brain thinking, there's an opportunity and a lot of inspiration for seizing and maximizing humanity with right brain thinking that they talk about. That's pretty powerful.

43:28Bryce Rattner Keithley:I love that. We'll link to those books in the show notes, but a lot of good recommendations here. And then my last question I ask everybody on the show, which is when AI is not listening, when you are getting that weird genie foot floating below your Superman genie, what is your kind of like prompting technique? Do you yell? Do you bribe?

43:51Keithley:I am a true Dale Carnegie enthusiast. And I feel like I've built a lot of my career on how to win friends and influence people. And I would be lying if I didn't acknowledge that it is sometimes cathartic to put down my Dale Carnegie and not win friends and influence people with the robots and just be angry. So sometimes I do raise my typing. However, and I will say I have been inspired and somewhat compelled by some of your guests that have talked about karma with the robots, that I have strengthened some of my perspective and opinions on my role and how to humanize or not. And so I do try and be more measured and decent and prepare myself for continued robot evolution.

44:44Keithley:So I try to be decent and firm when needed and also keep my position of power. I love that.

44:52Bryce Rattner Keithley:And then, you know, two other things that we saw is you just try to be hyper literal and the screenshot is your friend.

44:59Keithley:The screenshot? Yes. Try new things, right? It's like add more details. If it didn't get it right, how can I be literally, how can I be any more precise about what I want? That might work. Reset. I'm an 80s baby, so refresh or rewrite if I need to. And then try something new. Like maybe I'll draw the progress circle and take a physical picture or capture a screenshot of my starting position and like just see if that prompts the robots any differently. I love it.

45:27Bryce Rattner Keithley:Well, Bryce, this has been really, really just a fun episode. I think very accessible for folks.

45:32Keithley:Now, where can we find you and how can we be helpful? Certainly, yes. I run a firm called Great Team Partners. We take a team building approach to startup scaling. We work with mostly seed through Series B companies on how to grow strategically and with talent density. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on GitHub at BRKBot. And you can, of course, find me on the leaders board of Daily Hundreds in the App Store. Thanks for coming. This was super fun. Thanks so much, Claire.