BONUS: We Built 15+ Apps With AI. Here’s What Actually Worked

23:45These guys are just punks. They did it.

23:48Corey Noles:So before you move on from this one, what was the one thing that you struggled the most with this project? And how did you solve it? That's a good question. Honestly, the thing I struggled the most with was getting the tabs how I wanted them. Trying to explain what I wanted. I didn't, and this is the thing you'll run into when you're vibe coding or learning all of this stuff, is that sometimes not knowing the real word for what you want can make things harder than it is. For example, you'd have called these pills. I want some pill style tabs and tags. And instead, I was like those rectangular rounded ones with the corners, the round corners.

24:30And, you know, I just said stupid stuff. But that was a little bit of a nuisance, as was making sure it understood what I wanted out of these numbers in the pacing. And it's still missing. I want my lifetime task number. Like, I want to watch a number get real big and make me feel good about myself and my productivity. as corny as that is but that was no it was probably the biggest and it took talking with it for a minute and it gave me back these square blocks and i was like no i don't want square ones i want round ones i want them to look like just just little pills and in different colors and i want to be able to pick whatever color i want any color in the rainbow so it gave me the wheel uh but overall it wasn't bad this was one of the easiest what i will say is that every app got significantly easier in a few minutes you'll see the one that was my is my nightmare uh but it's really cool.

25:18So we're going to, we'll talk in a minute, but first I want to introduce you to the next one. So before I change screens, I'm always, I'm writing things and I'm trying my best with what we do to be active on social media. I'm not, I read a lot of social, but as far as writing on social, I enjoy it. I do a lot of replying and stuff, but I don't, I have ideas, but I'm busy and I don't have time to jump on them immediately. So what I did is I decided I needed an app where I could drop ideas and kind of formulate them in one place and then come back and tinker later. So I built this, and this is Threadline.

26:02Threadline is me, essentially. I can come in here. It's got an API connected to it. and I can either link I can link to an article or a transcript or just throw in some rough notes maybe an image source and I just type it in here and I'll say let's see that chat GPT hugging face hack was freaky I'm doing really

26:36Corey Noles:simple here for the sake of this and what it's going to do So it's going to save that, and then it's going to make sure it understands what I want from it. So it goes to point. This phase is at clarifying what I mean. And it comes down here, and it pulls out any underlying tension, what's worth preserving here, and what you're really thinking. And the owner is reacting with alarm to a recent hugging face demo of ChatGPT-like behavior, suggesting it's unsettling or freaky. and that is not at all what I was saying with alarm to a recent chat GPT

27:14hack of hugging face suggesting it's unsettling or I'm not going to post this but uh so from there once it says what I want I go down here to draft I have x I have LinkedIn it can do short x posts it can do the same with linkedin so we'll come over here and let's say i want a medium length x post on this make medium drafts now it's writing this but what you should know is i went and pulled my entire logs of all of my social media and dumped them into this thing and then as a spreadsheet i fed it into codex and said i want you to be able to write like this so what it did is uh it read them all and then it wrote 30 tweets that it thought sounded like me and put them in a spreadsheet where i go through and say yes no yes no yes no and on all of the no's i leave notes and say why i would never say that that sounds like ai this is stupid uh and then i feed it back in and it reads those and it comes back with 30 to 50 more and i do that over and over and over and over and over until it gets pretty darn good it's not perfect the truth is I would never use anything out of here just sight unseen.

28:26But what I have been doing is using it just to hold on to a thought for later on. Because, like, I read an article and I was like, dang, I got things to say here. And this lets me listen. So, like, yeah, the ChatGPT hack of Hugging Face was freaky. I don't have a more sophisticated reaction than that yet. Something about seeing a system like ChatGPT involved in compromising a place as prominent as Hugging Face is deeply unsettling.

28:48Corey Noles:This is so much better than any of the writing I try to get ChatGPT to do for me. Also, you should know I'm using Luna, the small one to write. That is why, like, you know, 50 points. Let's actually define that. I spent 23 cents. So this is a good moment to just quickly tell people. So the new GPT model that just came out. So for folks who don't know, when you're working with AI, you use a version called a model. And there are different ones that are released all the time. I'm sure if you follow our newsletter, you're familiar with this. GPT 5.6 is the new one that just came out and they released three different versions, Sol, Terra, and Luna.

29:28Corey Noles:And you can kind of think of them as Luna is the smallest and fastest, Terra is the middle ground, and Sol is the biggest and the most intelligent. And cost goes accordingly. Yes. So smallest, fastest, cheapest is Luna. Middle tier is Terra. Most expensive, slowest, and the smartest is Sol. So when Corey says Sol, Luna, or Terra, that's what he's talking about. Thank you, Grant. I appreciate you clarifying that. I get excited and talk to that. No, same. Likewise. So here's what happens. So say I like this, and I'm going to say, all right, use this draft. It's not going anywhere. This does not post, to be clear.

30:11But what I then do is it says, give Threadline the version you actually used. So after I've gone through and edited and made changes to like, you know, I want to add something here. Then I hit save final version. And it takes that and that goes into my voice rules. And it runs through the changes I've made to the way it's written. And over time, every time it writes a new post, it runs through that list to see the kind of changes I've made. And it should continuously improve to some extent. uh hopefully a whole lot but we'll see but again just like i said with the other app i've got this right here on my iphone and uh i hate this oh that's there we go that's good enough that's good as i can get it but i mean it's right there every feature every function works anything you want to do uh living again in a chat gpt site app and this one will get better as it goes this one isn't one I'm probably going to make available but we may do something with it later if there's an interest it was just to make sure I can hang on to ideas we read so much news in the day and I have thoughts I have things I want to say and this lets me get back to things and do it later so it's been helpful it keeps ideas, it keeps me on track it helps me remember what I've already talked about and what I haven't so that is a fun one now the next one is my bear is what you should know this is uh the one i'm probably the most proud of and it's the most work and it has the farthest to go all at the same time just because

31:53Corey Noles:i miss it um what was the inciting incident and what was the process for creating this one just give me a quick recap of it the inciting incident was me trying to remember an article that i had seen earlier in the day and wanted to wanted to tweet about and i i couldn't and i was like i need to store these somewhere and then i was like well i could do that but i could also just have it in an app where it'll you know hang there and then i was like you know i could just have it kind of read it and pre-draft what i think or i mean tell it what i think and have it sort of pre-draft something where then i go in and i do some cleanup work uh and so far that's that's okay um i haven't and did you create it the same way that you created the last one like exact same plan mode create the card uh and it gave me this nifty little like doorway logo that i like you can't see it probably uh oh that that yeah that thing yeah okay it's hard to tell but then a little door load doorknob logo i'll find those images too once it's grant's turn here and a few and share some so you can see what i'm what i'm talking about when i reference a card uh and this one is live on sites as well this one is live on sites but not to the public yet uh the next The next one very much is live in public.

33:06And this is AI Matrix Map and how it looks now, which is significantly different from the last time Grant saw it. Oh, yeah, this looks cool.

33:16Corey Noles:Give people the TLDR. What is this supposed to be? I'll tell you what this is. Grant and I live neck deep in AI news all day, every single day of the week. You can't keep up with it. There are always new companies. There are always new models. And sometimes it's like, who is that again? Who is that? And I wanted an easy way to see all of the AI companies I could find. So I saw something talking about a matrix map one night, and I was like, that's it. We need an AI matrix map. We can absolutely do this. So I sat down. This was with Vercel. This one started back in December. So it's been a thing in the works.

33:54And by in the works, I mean like I worked on it a little bit, and then I didn't think about it for 60 days. and then i worked on it a little bit and then i didn't think about it for 60 days but but this time it's finally looking like something i'm proud of and uh the idea being suppose you want to know so at its core think of this as like kind of for lack of a better phrase a zoom info for specifically ai the idea being anything you need to know about anything related to the ai space. If you want to know who are the frontier labs and what phase are they at? Some of these are still just research.

34:31Some of these are way over here in deployment and have things out. These are your Anthropics, your Googles, your Metas.

34:39Who's dealing in open weights? Which companies have open weight models? Where can we track them? We've got ones that deal in visual stuff. Black Forest Labs, who just dropped Flux 3 today. Grant, you need to get that in the newsletter. it's fully multimodal

34:52Corey Noles:we got it in a round the horn digest yesterday oh good but that it was coming but yeah I don't know if it made it into the platform it's fully multimodal video audio pictures one model it's pretty sick but we'll look at that later too by the way I just shared the link to this website anyone can access this one Cory will explain how he did that but I shared the link in the chat so you can look at it and currently fully free because I'm looking for feedback and I'm still working on some bugs which I'll show you as we go through here. Yeah, I've got physical AI which are your robotics companies and the companies building the engine for them.

35:31And you can come through here. This will show you the latest changes that have been made to the website. You can come over here and it'll show you like these are like the newest models. It doesn't show you like every new company that's been added but it does show you like the biggest news of the month as far as like what's released and changes things. But you can go into those. You can go into the... Let's say... Who do we want to check out? Let's check out Thinking Machines. They just dropped a new model last week, right?

36:01Corey Noles:Actually, what about Moonshot? Because they're the controversial one who created Kenny V. All right, let's do Moonshot. Moonshot's going to be over here. They're up at the top, if you want to. Moonshot AI. And this will show you, when you go into their company page, you see their name, you see that they're private. They They qualify as a frontier lab in deployment. One of the highest visibility Chinese frontier model companies using Kimi, where they're headquartered when they were founded, a link to their website. This here is going to be very different. It's messy. This is supposed to be pulling in a chart of every known funding round and of any known and reported revenue.

36:41So for a company like Apple, where they're public, this will be very useful. for companies like this that are very quiet and more closed it will not be as useful so i'm trying to figure out some like like a conditional approach to that like if the chart sucks don't show the chart is what i want to say yeah yes yes uh it'll show you related companies like companies that they're in competition with uh down here this is some of the other stuff they're on our daily watch cadence which we'll talk about in a minute their latest move was releasing kimmy k3 on July 16th, 2.8 total trillion parameter model with a 1 million token context window.

37:18Corey Noles:Technical terms that you don't need to know right now. Yes, don't sweat the terms. Yeah, by the way, sorry. We do explain that type of thing in our newsletter. It shows you, you know, like where it sits overall in the AI space, as well as recent news about them and should have. It pulls in neuron articles to go there too, but it wasn't on that one. So you can go through and you can do that. You can also come through here. You can see the changes. If you want to see every company, because we've got 207 companies listed on here right now in seven different categories. And you can just scroll through the whole list however you like.

37:57And the good news is you can also filter heavily. You can sort by category, subcategory. You can sort by types of organization. You know, say what you want is a frontier lab that does, I don't know, it's a bad example. Say you want someone in an agentic coding tool that has a code review element that is a private company and in the growth stage. There are three companies. So now what you have here is Augment Code, Code Rabbit, and Codo. And you can then go over here and say, I want to compare those. so you go to the compare screen and you can put in whichever three you want for the sake of simplicity i'm just going to click these top three um uh even though they don't really compare anywhere and you can bring these all up together there's going to be additional features around this because there's going to be a paid element of this at some point or lined out i don't know for sure what that looks like yet i have some ideas and like probably it's some some more features that would be of interest to like, you know, an investor or a reporter or

39:08I don't know, other people like that. I had a list of things in mind the other night, but right now I'm talking too fast and it's all boring.

39:15Corey Noles:Well, let's slow down for a second here because I want to explain. So this is really cool. And as people can see, this is a live link that anyone can join in the chat. So how did you go from your very cool idea like, ooh, we should do an AI matrix map to, hey, you have a website now. This is my favorite story. I was at AWS reInvent meeting with Tom, oh God, Tom, Tom, he was on the show? Tom Okino, Tom Okino. I just shared a link to that. Yes, with Tom Okino from Vercel. And at that moment, I had, you know, I had poked around and looked at code and chat GPT a little bit. I had... We've built some stuff in AI studio.

39:54some little scripts we'd done some things in ai studio but i hadn't like taken the plunge and i went back after that conversation i was so energized after i left tom and and we talked about what it would do and he was telling me about how it you know this is unlocking things you know it's it's it's it's a golden age for idea guys as as altman has said a couple times as well and uh and i just loved that because as a guy who's built a couple of small businesses the thing that is frustrating and what makes this such a powerful thing, and I want to make sure and say this, is if I had an idea to do this five years ago, I've had an idea.

40:35I sketch an idea out on a piece of paper or maybe in a doc or something. Then I figure out who do I need involved in this? Do I need a project manager? Do I need an engineer? I need an engineer to even know what I need to ask an engineer for is the truth in some cases. And you're going to go, you're going to do that. You're going to get on their schedule. You're going to pay them some money to even tell you what you need. Then you're going to go and you're going to try and hire someone. And that's going to take time. It's going to take money. You're going to go through iteration after iteration.

41:05And at the end of all of that and all of those thousands of dollars, you'll have a proof of concept. This lets me go to proof of concept in hours without any help, without any money, without any anything. I feel so enabled by the ability to do this because now instead of having an idea gathering a bunch of people spending a lot of money and deciding then oh that stinks now I can put out I can come up with a proof of concept myself I can put it out and see what people think of it and if people like it then I can go find an engineer then I can go get help then I can put money behind it

41:42Corey Noles:I think the thing is like it's about doing things sustainably right? Like you, you still want to work with an engineer, right? You can kind of have Codex or Cloud Code be your CTO for a little while, but then you do eventually, if it's successful, you want to, you know, if you're making money and you want people, you want to work, we want to work with other people. So you want to bring in those experts at some point to help manage that part. But now you don't need the upfront startup capital to go out and hire that someone before you have even validated that it's a good idea. I can wait till it hits.

42:18Corey Noles:If, why would I want to spend money building an idea that might suck when what I could do is put out an idea. And if it does hit, then hell you can borrow money. If you can say, look, I've got 500 users of this thing already. I need an engineer and eight grand. Yeah. Yeah. And this will still allows people, which we talk about. And I shared a couple of videos in the chat, um, with Ryan Carson, who, who was a guy who's taught a million people how to code the old school way. And we talked to him about this same concept. And this allows people to be able to create niche applications that maybe might not be a VC level outcome or even less than that, but can make a sustainable living for you, the creator, and create a very unique tool that only you, as the unique individual that you are, could think of and be like, I know that there are people who need this, who are like me.

43:11Corey Noles:And so you can create stuff for people like you. And I think that's the greatest use case of this. Am I the only person to this flavor of weird? Probably not. Yeah, so like, for example, Debbie was talking in the chat and she said, you know, she's creating a club and she wants to create an app for that club. So it's like, yes, please do that. Like, that is a great use of these tools. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. Also, if you use this, check it out. I'd love to know your thoughts. There are feedback buttons. There's a way to sign up for updates. There's submit a company or a correction.

43:46I've got a form right here. If you know something is wrong, please let me know. Now, here's the cool part that I didn't say about this yet, and I don't want to let this slip. This is entirely managed by agents. I have agents that each day scan all 270 of these, 207 of these companies, gather any updates on their funding, on their news, on their everything. And it lives locally on my computer and pushes updates to the website. I find out what's changed when I go read it just like you would. That's what's wild. It's like it is extremely hands-off. If I'm working on it, there's something I don't like, or there's a feature we need to change, or I've caught something.

44:21So, like, I very much, I'm seeing it after it's out. And so far, I've trusted it to not make a fool of me. And, oh, let's see. Since I started using codecs, I'm running out of tokens like crazy. I never ran into it. I can't express enough. Make sure you're not just living on like soul high. If you're living on soul extra high, you will mow through them. If you can kind of decide what tasks need what model a little bit and sort of get comfortable bouncing between those, you can save a lot. That's kind of the approach I have. I haven't hit a limit this month and I've put out five of these.

45:00Corey Noles:um it it might also be worth it amber to potentially upgrade to the hundred dollar tier like uh cory is on because it does just give you that much more access but there are ways that you can um like use soul which is the highest one as an orchestrator yeah and the basically the way that you set this up is you have it um update its like its agent.md i think or just tell it to update its memory so that it only it farms out the work to luna or tara depending on how complicated the task is and you could literally say that say like hey whenever you have to actually go and write something farm it out to a sub agent to go do it um and you know just use tara for the more complex stuff use luna for the easier stuff 100 and i've been doing that with fable and it works great and fables the cloud code one uh to answer debbie's question have you discussed how to create agents uh i would actually love cory for you to address how you created agents here because you used a tool called versell uh yes or v0 specifically well versell's not who manages it versell just tell us yeah i used to build it i used for sale to build it originally it uh so i actually claude gave me the plan uh i don't remember which claude which version but because was december did you use versell specifically or v0 or does it i use v0 to build it okay uh and and publish it on versell which is versell is the parent company owns a big hosting corporation v0 is a tool released by versell so i used their building tool which is a really good place if you're a beginner there's not a better place to start in my opinion and uh so it's hosted on there But then I had it go to GitHub, and I now have it managed entirely by Codex.

46:56Yeah, let's talk through that. And Codex was just like, I was like, hey, I want to manage this one on Codex instead of v0, and it just goes and does it. I literally just told it that and made sure my GitHub was connected. Could you explain GitHub for people who don't know? GitHub is a tool used by developers that controls versioning, releasing, and it allows you to stack changes in ways that are very reversible, very visible, and makes it an easy way for other developers to come in and help you with that tool or an easy way for you to port it elsewhere. But ideally, it's your code archive in the cloud is the idea.

47:41And watch a quick GitHub primer. Maybe we'll record one in the next couple of weeks just to help to have one. You have a how to create agents video or live stream that we could share here in the chat too.

47:53Corey Noles:I will do that. But I want to know how you set up these ones. Was it just through Codex? Yeah, just Codex chatting with it. Yeah, I was just like, hey, I want this to be checked every day. I want this to be run through a Notion database. I want this to be, I want it to do this. I want you to check each of them. I want you to update them there. I want a report on how it's done on every change that's been made, emailed to me. And I just tell it, and it's set up its own agents to do it. And it's like, when do you want them to run? So I told it I want them to run, you know, every day at 5 a.m. And again at 4 p.m.

48:31I want you to check every site that is in the list, make sure any verified updates get pushed to production, and tell me when it's finished and what's been made. So it was very easy. I mean, this was absolutely no, like, I'm not grabbing nodes and finding triggers, Grant. This was just, and we talked about this in our prediction episode at the beginning of this year, that really, really soon, building agents is going to be like, hey, I want you to do this thing for me every day at 3. Go. and it's already connected to all of my tools, so it knows. And that's very much how we're operating now. With that said, I have 10 minutes and two apps, and I'm going to get through both of these before we shift gears here because one of these is really cool and one of these is very special to me.

49:20Corey Noles:Could you just clarify really quick? So V0 or Vercel is still hosting the app, so that's how it's live. Vercel is still hosting. Yes. Okay, cool. Codex is communicating with GitHub, And GitHub, like, here's the deal. GitHub can publish direct to Vercel. So Codex updates GitHub. GitHub updates Vercel. Does that make sense? Think of it like a small... And Amber brought up something in the chat, and you're welcome to start pulling up the next thing you want to pull up. Okay. But she mentioned, have you used GitHub with Google AI Studio? Actually, yes. And I don't know if Corey has done this process, But one of the apps I'm going to show you started in AI Studio, connected it to GitHub, and then I took it onto my computer and started working on it with Cloud Code.

50:08Corey Noles:So I recommend that. That's a really great way to start for free, building an application. Excellent. That is a good way. And I like Google AI Studio. We had a lot of fun in there doing all kinds of goofy stuff. Cat Doom. Cat Doom. One of these days we're going to have a releasable version of Cat Doom that we can share with you. It's actually criminal that I haven't made one yet. It really is, Grant. What are you doing with your life? I'm sorry. I'll show you later, I guess. You'll see in a minute. All right, this is on deck. What you should know is that every day of my life, and I hope some of you can relate to this, I get off work and I don't know what's for dinner.

50:48My wife doesn't know what's for dinner. We go downstairs and I'm like, hey, what would you like for dinner? And she goes, I don't know. What would you like? And then I say, I'd like pizza. And she'd go, I don't want that. maybe I want this and I'll say I don't want that and it's this tension thing at the end of every single work day that drives me crazy and what it results in is me at Dairy Queen picking up ooey gooey cheeseburgers and coming home and eating garbage and her doing the same and it's not ideal it's not cheap it's it's unhealthy so we've been working on ways to fix that so here's what I did I spent an hour and a half last Saturday talking to chat GPT voice mode about my diet, about various conditions that I have managed for myself, about what I do and don't like to eat.

51:35I'm a picky eater and I talked about the things I will and things I just do not care to like and I don't want to try it. And also the fact that I want to start trying though. I want to try more things. I want to expand my horizons. I want to always know what's for dinner. I want to have grocery lists pre-prepared for me for the week so I know what to go buy and what to have at the house and I I really just wanted a good way to solve that so what it did is it took all of that information put it into a giant context dump that I'm still updating by the day uh as I'm like oh yeah we make those I go and I add them to my this was something you told codex like you like voice dumped into it this was no this was chadgbt voice mode the new voice mode's ridiculous fabulous and uh and it was a two-way so it was like a two-way conversation about well how do you feel about this what do you like uh so it was like it was focusing on nutrition it was focusing on the fact that my wife and i work constantly and we're tired and the biggest blocker between us and cooking dinner is not money it's not a desire to do it it's that we're tired and we just want to sit down so i was like prioritize fast but healthy prioritize uh you know affordable if there are good leftover opportunities I want those factored in which is the first thing it did here so I picked up a couple pounds of pulled pork the other day and it's like you're going to have these for lunch pulled pork sandwiches for two days because they're leftovers and then it wants to know it wants to follow up so I can change it here I can change it to all of these other things that might fit the bill for that you can't see it oh shoot it's got a drop down with a bunch of other meals that I like that pop up when I hit here and I can go

53:17Corey Noles:you can share your full window so I could change it to like oven fried pork chops I could change it to grilled burgers and potatoes it also recommends sides on dinner at least and I can say made it ate out or skipped so it wants to know and at the end of the week it's going to give me a report on how many meals I actually ate versus how many times I opted for something crappy I told it to assume I'm going to eat out three meals in a week so it came down here for, whoa, dinner's now pulled pork. That wasn't the case. But we can also, if we're like, you know what? None of these sound good. It's got a call and audible button.

53:54So anytime we don't agree on dinner, I hit this button and it's like, boom! The best fit. Feeds 4 in 12 minutes. Deerberg's smoked chicken. The fastest pulled pork sandwich. 10 minutes. Chipotle chicken and rice bowl. If we want to go out and it's easy. And then you click, bam! And it'll throw it in here as to what it is and everything. This one's not perfect. It's got a ways to go, but it's getting there. So the cool thing is you can also review your groceries. It'll give you a proposed grocery list for the week. You can go through and mark have it or need it. Like, oh, I already got those. I don't need that.

54:29I don't need that. And then it reconciles it all together for you nice and neat and lets you print a simple... Oh, it's not going to show you this either. Dang it. Gives you a simple printable grocery list that you can spit out and just walk into the store with.

54:44Corey Noles:quick question about this so is this an app or is this a web chat GPT sites what is this? this is one that is this is chat GPT sites right now but it is going to the app store yay with some you know a couple of premium features as an option but not a have to you could absolutely do most of it without it but if you want like anything that requires AI that means I have to pay for the AI there's going to be a thing attached so yeah got to charge for it But otherwise, these are mostly free and just kind of seeing what people like, what I can do that might help people. But one last one in my last four minutes.

55:20OK, you can go.

55:22Corey Noles:You don't have to honor the hour you can go over. I just I want to be respectful of your time to show off your neat toys, too, because yours are badass. I might need a little more time. So that's fine. That's fine. OK. So I bought this new espresso machine. If you if you watch these weekly, you know, this has been an ongoing thing. I drink an absurd amount of lattes. I go out twice a day for my wife and I. We both get one, and we've done this for years. We've spent a shameful amount of money, like just absolutely shameful. So I'm trying. No, I'm not connecting with a software engineer. I'm just having Codex do it.

56:05I signed up as a developer on Apple, and Codex can do the whole thing, which is really sick. and a piece of paper says I'm a developer, whether I am or not.

56:15Corey Noles:Yeah, we should take a little time to walk through that after you. I will. Honestly, that could be a whole thing, like how to go from Codex to the App Store, Cloud Code to the App Store could be a live one week. We will. Because that's a little bit more of a process. Let's cover it at a high level. I think I have some notes on it. If you don't want to, I can talk about it. Can I finish the story I'm on real quick, though? Go ahead. So we've tried and tried and tried to make it at home. We've bought an espresso maker. We've bought coffee makers. We've bought iced coffee. We've bought all these things trying to get to where we can not go to the coffee shop twice a day.

56:52Corey Noles:But the truth of the matter is I want my coffee. And that is that. So what I finally decided to break this habit that's costing us so much money, it's going to have to be better than what we drink out. It's going to have to not just be good enough. It needs to be the right choice because it's what we want. And so we did the math and tallied up just how much we spend on coffee in a month. And then we took that amount of money and went and bought a nice espresso maker and started making espresso at home. So, I wanted to be able to track how quick we could pay off our espresso machine. It's kind of absurdly quick, like tomorrow.

57:46But, so what I did is I wanted to track the amount of money I was saving. is what it really is. I wanted to know, here's what I spent per coffee. Here's what a cup of coffee costs me at home to make. And every time I have a coffee, I want to hit a button. So I made an app called, this is the worst. What Bean Counter does is it tracks the number of coffees I didn't buy, which is right now at 100. Dang it. At 100. That's good. That's good.

58:22Corey Noles:Leave it there. Yeah. Okay. The problem is I can't read it from behind the phone. Well, you can talk us through. You built it. You know the product. You can talk us through. All right. Oh, now I can read. Okay. So, yeah, 100 coffees you didn't buy. 10-day streak, which is actually more like a 24-day streak now, shows that including tax and tip, our lattes were$7.50 each. Cost to make them at home is$1.75. So anytime I have a coffee, I just pop this open. It sends me reminders, too. But I just pop this open, hit log coffee. and log coffee, and it just updates live right there. Then you go down here, and what you're going to see is the amount of money that I haven't spent at a coffee shop.

59:03You're going to see the amount I have spent paying for coffee supplies in the meantime, which is my at-home cost. And then you're going to see my net savings, which is kind of absurd. Then you come over here, and I had it amortize my espresso machine payoff. so like i put the full amount in and every time i hit anything this number goes down you'll see it's at 98 today uh so either tonight's coffee or tomorrow morning's is going to officially

59:33Corey Noles:we will have saved more money than the espresso maker cost wow that is awesome uh you also have achievements uh oops i set it up to make achievements because again i'm a gamified sucker so like there's like you know you saved a hundred dollars you saved five hundred dollars you you bought a hundred coffees you didn't buy a hundred coffees and there's a bunch of those there that are various little you know you can click on them and uh theoretically oh uh saved photos yeah and it'll save it down to your uh to your phone for you so you share it on social

1:00:18and this has been such a fun little app so you've got settings you can go in and you can change whoops let's get it here one more time sorry for blinding everyone so you can change what your coffee costs here you can change what your coffee let's see uh maybe move the finger yeah how you had it before and then tilt it up there we go okay i think up is bad there we go there we go okay so you can change that you can go down and change your goals you don't have to save for your machine you can also set reminders a day so like it dings me at 7 a.m to say hey you didn't log any coffee this morning i'll bet you ate coffee let's get you to that goal cory and i'm just being corny but uh you can also import and export your data the thing to know about this is uh right now this is actually on the Apple app store iOS app store now anybody that wants it can download it I have a similar version coming out for fast food probably by first of the week it's sort of in the waiting process that you go through with Apple that's designed to help you quit going out to eat at night in exchange for some cool savings goal you've set so there's there's a lot to do still but this is very much made to motivate the the unmotivated and uh so you know my hope is it

1:01:44Corey Noles:can you uh can you pull up the app store uh link like if you just start like being counted i sure can and let me guess that's gonna be the one and only one i did not yeah of course it's the one and only one i did not pull up and get ready one second amber was asking amber was asking this earlier in the chat and I do want to talk through this at a high level. So let's say you're like Corey and you have an idea for a mobile app and you want to create one, how do you actually get it into the app store? Well, you have to join this thing called the Apple Developer Program and I believe it costs$99, right Corey?

1:02:24Corey Noles:$99. Yeah. So basically once you join the Apple developer program, you can actually release, you can actually submit the app to the App Store for Apple to review. And the way that that works is kind of at a high level is you create the app record in this thing called App Store Connect. You then build a version of it in this, an Apple's tool called Xcode, and then you upload the build to Xcode, and you use this tool called Test Blight to help you test it out on your phone. And that sounds like a lot of things, but if you literally say, hey, Codex or Cloud Code, I want to join the Apple developer program and submit an app to the App Store, it will walk you through the steps to do that.

1:03:16Corey Noles:And just ask for a step-by-step. Say like, hey, I would like a step-by-step guide to submitting an app to the App Store, and it will totally walk you through that. And if at any point you get confused, to say, hey, go to the website, search the latest docs of the process of how to do this, and give me the most up-to-date information on what field I have to click where. If you get confused, just take screenshots. So take a screenshot of the website and be like, I don't know what to click here. And then it will tell you, oh, click this button and click this dropdown, et cetera, et cetera. And look, Corey did it.

1:03:54Corey Noles:Corey has an app. This is an actual app in the app store. Oh, and I need you to share it, Grant. Oh, yeah. No, I saw it. It showed up. Yeah, but it only showed up in Riverside. It didn't go through to YouTube. No, no, it did. It did? Oh. Yeah, I see it on YouTube. It always says that when I'm in here. Sorry. No, no, no. You're good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, no. I was just going to ask you. Like, you did not know how to make an app before you made this app, right? Absolutely not. No way, shape, or form. Like, as recent as three years ago, I got ripped off for$7 ,000, trying to get someone else to just help me understand the process I needed to build one.

1:04:30Not for me, but to have an engineer go build it. And so this was a big moment for me. It's not perfect. Are there things an engineer would do different? Absolutely there are. However, you know, I took the best efforts I could to make sure it's been through a couple of good code reviews through two different methods. It's been through a security review and patched everything it found. and it's connected through CloudKit, which is essentially just your Apple account. So anything you do is save to the files you already have. I get none of your data. You get none of mine. And it's clean. It's easy.

1:05:10There are no ads. There may be something at some point. I don't know what. I don't know if it's a pro mode or something. And it may be that I'm the only person on earth who had the bizarre desire to traffic it. but uh you know it is what it is yeah no so my hope is that you know somebody finds it fun and enjoys it and in the meantime i'm drinking the best coffee i've drank in my life i i really am i am now like here's the great thing i was spending so much drinking out grant that i'm now buying like snobby snobby coffee off the internet from like from like cities and stuff and having it shipped to me and drinking like the best beans in san francisco or portland and all of this stuff and uh and i'm doing it for like you know 10 cents on the dollar 20 cents on the dollar for what i was the other way yeah no this is awesome and it's so cool that you're able

1:06:03Corey Noles:to do this what's on a flag i don't think you said it you actually asked codex to just submit the screenshots for you right like you didn't even i didn't ask it is what you should know codex opened up the iphone simulator in xcode and uh took its own screenshots all of these codex did every bit of that i mean it wrote all the copy it prepared everything it did the whole upload i mean like i very much went in and had to go through it certain steps and work with it like it wasn't just a go you know it and it did a really good job of coming back and being like now this is a legal disclaimer core you should go be the one to read this and make sure you agree here's my recommendation based on what I've seen.

1:06:48So it'd give me a recommendation and tell me, go check it out. Uh, and, uh, I really appreciated that because it stops me from doing something stupid. I don't even know I've done a hot question.

1:07:00Corey Noles:I don't know if you have an answer to this. What's the process for the play store? Have you, have you submitted to the play store? No idea. It's on my list. Uh, if you can hang on for a month or so, I will figure out and navigate that. Honestly, at some point, I think it would be fun in what we're doing. As much as people are playing with this stuff, I think it would be a good idea for us to have a how to navigate the App Store and how to navigate the Play Store kind of video. Let's do that. That's next on our roadmap, I think, to do that. Maybe not next on our roadmap. I need to learn to use the other one first.

1:07:34Unless you've done the Play Store. I haven't, though. I guess I also need to go acquire an Android phone. because I'm going to need to test it.

1:07:42Corey Noles:You can do it with simulators. Pro tip, you have to own a Mac to submit an app to the App Store. Ah, this is a good point. John, Amber, for folks who are literally trying to submit an app, listen to this. And here's my advice. If you don't want to pay the Apple tax, I asked Codex, and Codex said what I would do is I would go get an M1 that's got, you know, at least three or four OS updates left in it before it's going to be irrelevant. Get the hottest RAM you can get, get the hottest stuff. And I spent$400 and got an Apple M1 from 2021, 2020. And it's like 16 gig of RAM, but it guaranteed it would run the version of Xcode I need and that it's several up the list from what's being deprecated over the years.

1:08:33so uh you know for what a good mac laptop costs the truth is it was just it was the right deal for me because i have a ton of computers i don't need i can't justify buying a brand new mac right now so uh but used ones can be had and can be had right you just you've got to make sure it's an m1 to be able to run tahoe if it can't run tahoe or newer you won't be able to submit to the app store oh a good truck from olympia coffee brush i'm looking i got it on my list i ordered in uh stumptown founders i ordered verve out of santa cruz uh i've got a couple of local st louis breweries that i'm trying sump coffee and uh string bean coffee company is a good one i really like what they make so i'm i'm yeah we're just we're just trying everything like we've never done that you know going to a coffee shop we're probably getting the cheapest thing they can buy in 50-pound bags anyway.

1:09:27So it's been a major step up.

1:09:31Corey Noles:All right, I'm going to pull up my computer here. Now, if going all the way through the app store is very intimidating for you, here's what we recommend. We actually recommend you don't start with trying to make a full end-to-end mobile app, right? Actually, what you should probably start with is something really simple. And one of the things that I started with, and Corey has an example of this, I'm going to ask him to share while I pull up my screen, is a Chrome extension. Now, if you use a different browser other than Chrome, this might not be applicable, but I'm sure other browsers have extension tools as well.

1:10:12Corey Noles:But when you use Google Chrome to view the web, you are able to add extensions that help you access the web when you are, sorry, to help you, you know, run little like side projects on your web browser. And Corey, if you could take it away while I pull my screen up, this would be great. You can go ahead and share that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what happened is it won't show the extension. I got to share the whole screen, I think. entire screen. That's going to go this one, go over here, blow that up. Share. All right. And what you'll see here is, like this is one called Tab Crusher. I don't know if you, like me, leave way too many tabs open in Chrome all day and it eats your RAM to death.

1:11:04I gamified crushing tabs. This guy, I don't know if you can tell, but he looks like a tab, but he's really a monster.

1:11:12Corey Noles:This tracks my lifetime tabs crushed and the lifetime amount of RAM saved. It's based on assuming 120 megabytes of RAM per tab. It's ideally catching duplicates, but I finally added in the ability to collect old tabs, like tabs you've had open for a week and haven't, three days and haven't touched, as well as all tabs. And I go through here and I just click away and close all kinds of them. uh it comes with uh some various milestone achievements mixed in like uh crush sessions uh so i'm two away from crushing crushing 50 times as well as 50 gigabytes saved so it's pretty easy it's pretty simple runs it runs light and uh yeah i did that one that's on the app store which i'll share a link to in a minute it's in our runner show doc and this one here which was quote gobbler I just needed a way, I've always got things I leave open because I'm like I want to go back to that later and there's something that caught my eye so I can select text select a piece of text on any page go up here and hit gobble and it gobbles it just like this I love your creativity man, it's so funny I also have for trash it says spit it out spit it in the trash amazing, and what is this character?

1:12:35Corey Noles:What is this little character? Oh, he's the little monster. In the bottom right corner. Yeah, that's so cool. He's the gobbler, Grant. Hang on. Did Codex make that? Codex made the character in everything. Wow. That's cool. It's pretty ridiculous. Local first. Nothing leaves Chrome. So this lives only in... This is publicly available and lives only in your personal Chrome extension. No data goes to me. No data goes anywhere else. It just lives in your Chrome with where your web history already is anyway. By the way, I highly recommend if you use Chrome extensions like the other people have made and you don't trust the developer, you should just recreate it.

1:13:17Corey Noles:And then you control it. You're not giving your data to some random dude. Like, you should definitely recreate Chrome extensions you use, in my opinion. And you can, you know, I got a little bite out of the quote mark. You can pack your leftovers. You can spit it out. And you got your little monster. You know, there's no reason. there's no reason helpful tools can't be fun yeah i love it i love it so why why do i recommend this i recommend this because it was the first way that i actually built anything with software engineering so um the very first thing that i built using chat gpt back in like 2022 2023 right like this thing couldn't even format json correctly at this point right and i was trying to make a chrome extension for a problem that I have a lot which is I want to I have a word and I want a different word and I want to just be able to like very quickly skim through a bunch of them I don't want to open up a thesaurus I just want to skim through a bunch of synonyms right that's fine it's it's not up yet and so I wanted to create an application to do that and so I had chat to PT help me literally write the code and at this point it is so easy like and back in the day I had to like open up VS Code which this is too much detail but I had to open up a code editor I had to make all the files I had to put the code in the files if there was an error I had to send it back to chat GPT now you can just literally go to Codex or sorry you go to chat GPT or Claude Co-Work and you can say hey make me a Chrome extension that does XYZ and it will package it up for you.

1:14:54Corey Noles:And the only thing you have to do is go to the little puzzle piece for extensions and go to manage extensions, turn on developer mode, and you can have that on, which is a little toggle in the top right hand corner. And then you can actually just upload it. And it's the easiest way to create useful software. And it's a really good starter project if you want to start with that.

1:15:23Excellent. This is exciting. Are you ready, Grant?

1:15:26Corey Noles:I think I am. I'm just going to do one more thing over here and then I can pull my stuff up. Do you want to kind of like to give a wrap up of your advice for how to get started? Yeah. You know, my advice to get started is is learn to think a little different. When you have an idea that annoys you instead of or a thing that you want or you need instead of thinking. I can go buy that ask yourself if you could do it yourself and and even if it sounds ridiculous go ask anyway I can't stress the number of times I've had ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini tackle something I was reasonably sure it wouldn't do worth a crap and it'd do a fantastic job lots of times.

1:16:23Quite good.

1:16:27But, you know, you can absolutely do it any way you want. Think outside the box. Think about what would I want in it if I did this myself? Well, how would I want it to work? What would I want it to look like? How would I want it to function? What things would I need it to do? Do I want it to be able to save to my phone? Do I want it to be able to sync to Slack? Do I want it to be able to, you know, dance the Macarena. It can do whatever you want. You just have to, you know, think as much as you can up front about what you want. Go plan. And you'd be amazed at the end of a single planning session in 10 minutes.

1:17:06You'll be amazed at where you're at and what you have. And I can't stress enough. This isn't what I went to school for. This is very much a thing I've just learned via doing this. Like I regularly take my code and I can't recommend this enough, by the way, take your code and your app, go into chat GPT and ask it, or just ask Codex directly or Claude Code. Hey, how does this work? How is this built? Show me the code and what I'm seeing and show me what in here you did, what you did and why you did. Explain the decisions you made, any, any logic, because it's important you understand how your code works, even if you could not go create work code.

1:17:47I think understanding, you know, your dependencies and that, oh, there's things like troubleshooting problems, even if the truth is Codex is going to troubleshoot your problems pretty well anyhow. But yeah, just give it a try. This is the best thing I can say is, you know, rip off the Band-Aid and do the thing. You can do it. If I can do it, Grant can do it. You can do it too. I'm confident. If you're here and care that much enough to be listening to this conversation, you're fine. You got this. And hit us up. If you have questions, comments, you can always reach us on Twitter. You can reach us on LinkedIn sometimes as well, email.

1:18:32If we get questions, we do our best to answer all of them.

1:18:37Corey Noles:Okay, that was a great I think that was perfect. Shout out in the chat if anyone has any questions so far. I know we've been trying to answer them as we go. We're going to go ahead and go. I think we're I think we're current. Okay.

1:18:54The neuron is required reading for my Foundations of Gen AI course. Oh, I love that Amber.

1:19:04and El Valverde. I am absolutely going to order a bag of this coffee. It sounds great. I've got it up in a window already. And chocolate caramel and berries is my jam. I like mediums to darks. And I like, you know, the savory stuff. I'm not too into, you know, this one tastes like plums. That's not a thing I'm interested in.

1:19:26Corey Noles:Okay. All right. Off to Grant. I'm going to pass it over. All right. Let me just rip the bandaid off and just start doing this. You got it. Okay. So I'm trying to figure out what I want to share first because I have some desktop apps. Whatever you are comfortable with, my friend. Okay. Could you take my screen down for a minute? Let me hit the share button, get it queued up, and then you can pull it up. Perfect.

1:19:59I was hoping I clicked the right grant

1:20:08Corey Noles:it's funny actually I'm competing with Claude who's controlling my screen right now which that's a whole other can of worms we don't really want to get into okay there we go let's shut that off for the moment all right so

1:20:27So let's go ahead and pull up my two things.

1:20:45Okay.

1:20:49Corey Noles:I'm ready when you are, Corey Alright Do I need to let you back in? Uh, yes If you just pull it up, it should be showing Uh, it is not showing Hang on This is peculiar It kicked me out I think maybe because Claude was taking over my computer Which can happen so okay waiting for you to let me in there you go you're in all right

1:21:34okay so for folks who don't know um what i have here is i have a website that i

1:21:45Corey Noles:created and this is a personal website for all my different projects i just finally got up the guts to actually post this um recently and so it's pretty pretty basic and the way that i got here i'm actually going to give you a tour of my building with apps um my journey and and uh i'll I'll kind of share the process. So down at the bottom here, or once you scroll down, essentially I have a couple of projects that I've been working on lately. And I can walk through these because these are essentially the ones that I, how I kind of started though they're not in order. So one of the first things that I did, as I mentioned, is I first started by trying to build a simple Chrome extension.

1:22:35Corey Noles:And somebody asked in the chat, how did you make the Chrome extension? Well, basically, the process back in the day was very complicated. Today, it's literally, you just ask, hey, make me a Chrome extension for this. And you have to do this process where I can walk through very quickly. In the little puzzle piece in the corner here, you click this puzzle on Chrome, and then you go to manage extensions. And once you're there, you toggle on this thing called developer mode. And then there's a button that says load unpacked. So once Codex gives you a Chrome extension that you've created, you just click load unpacked and you load it up to your bar and then you can pin it.

1:23:17Corey Noles:And that's what this little pin button. So under the manic extensions, you can basically go there and pin the thing that you've created and then you can always access it. So I have two that I use personally where I can just copy, you know, the open tabs that I have as Markdown so I can send them to an agent that the agent can review, etc, etc. So I first created a Chrome extension, which was great. But then I wanted to work with AI as AI got more sophisticated to actually work with an application on my computer. And so that's when I created or I worked with a Godot MCP server that somebody had created.

1:23:58Corey Noles:And I and basically for people who don't know, Godot is a video game tool. You know, you can. like a creation creation tool right exactly you can so you can create your own video games and so i created this godot mcp to essentially or i what i did is i actually copied someone else's godot mcp that they created and i started playing with that first and then i realized i was like hey wait a minute this can't actually do what i want it to do i want it to write the actual like scripts that i like to make the code work i wanted it to be able to edit and play around with the actual godot mcd itself so i what i did is i copied the github that was open i then added stuff to it and then i made my own what's called a fork of it so the first product i created is a chrome extension then the second thing i did is i actually made a personal clone of another piece of software that someone else created as open source and so that was the original process so number one i made a very simple thing.

1:24:59Corey Noles:Number two, I then cloned somebody else's thing and then added scripts onto it, which I think is another good process that people can adapt. Like essentially, hey, I have this thing that I like. It's open source. Let me play around with adding features to it to get comfortable building with AI. Then that brings us to a little tool called AI Studio. and I love your background grant that's sick it's just like some generic thing and AI studio was the first like true uh I guess like builder studio that I found was really effective so people somebody in the chat mentioned lovable some people in the chat mentioned um you know we talked about v0 which is great but AI studio is great because it's from google it's where you can test building with all of their free or not their free their models that they provide but it's a free service where you can prototype essentially anything that you want um and you know if you've seen some of our live streams before we had logan kilpatrick on we prototypes type stuff live and um these are just some examples of things that other people have built on here but the way that i approached it is i was like okay i want to build my own thing and so i would there's a lot of stuff on here piece of piece of junk that doesn't work the first thing but essentially what i did is i i would come in here and i would make example um scripts so let's see gemini pros that's a good one uh i would make uh example apps i mean for things that i wish existed and i was like let me see if gemini can do it and the reason i recommend starting with ai studio is if you're building anything that involves ai agents on the back end or uh calling what's called apis and uh google makes that really simple sets all that stuff up for you it's like so automatic so um yeah particularly if it's apis in the google system like if you need gmail or you need youtube or google search that stuff's very very just interlocked already.

1:27:17Corey Noles:Yeah. I guess it's migrating me over to something, but... Well, it's changed. It's changed a bit. As you can see, it's been a minute since I really was using this prototype. March 13th was the last thing that I worked on. Was that last year? No, 2026. Oh, I thought it said 25. I was like, oh, wow. It has been a minute. This one's not as good as the other one, but one of the first problems that I had was I was like, gosh, I hate writing with AI inside these tools. It's very terrible. So I was like, how do I create an experience that actually works? So I said, write me a story about Google Gemini.

1:27:59Corey Noles:And essentially what I did is I created a sidebar here with like, so that I can have a chat with an agent inside a document where I can edit stuff. And then here, I said, all right, what if I want to change this and I want to change this too? Expand on this.

1:28:22Corey Noles:So what's happening is Google AI Studio has set it up so that the application that I built works automatically with Google Agents. And what's great about this is that I don't have to try and figure out how to connect to those Google Agents myself. it just automatically does it on the back end. So I can give on the left-hand side over here, I can give AI Studio feedback on what I would like it to change. And then on the right-hand side here, I can test the application that I actually built. And the reason why I'm sharing all this with you is because number one, AI Studio is a great prototyping tool.

1:28:58Corey Noles:Number two, it was a way for me to quickly validate whether or not what I wanted to do could actually work. And I wanted to make it a very seamless writing experience with agents. I wanted to be able to make inline edits and I wanted to be able to hyperlink and do all this stuff that agent tools are a little bit better at now, but before they weren't perfect. So this is great. When you have something in AI Studio, like how do you actually publish this, right? How do you actually get this to the point where other people can use it? So someone says, if you try out your idea on AI Studio, is it protected or is it public?

1:29:34Corey Noles:AI Studio, it's a good question I forget the exact rules with it now but they do train on the ideas that you put in here and you might be able to turn off settings to do that so if you're worried about like hey you know this is a great idea and I don't want Google to steal it for example you might want to start in a different tool this is more for like does this thing this idea I have even work? Like, can I even create a simple version of this that is, like, safe to use? Good for mock-ups, good for things of that nature. If you want to create something that's more protected, make sure that you're on the ChatGPT or Claude business account.

1:30:19Corey Noles:Make sure you have a business agreement with them and make sure that you turn off, you're not going to share your information with others. And we talk about that a little bit more in depth in some of our other streams, but that's a good rule of thumb. I would start with Chai2BT for that one. Or Claude, depending on what your preference is. So, okay. In my case, I wasn't worried about copyright or anything like that. So I did it in AI Studio. And I, in this case, I went to settings and GitHub. And the very first thing I did is I connected this or the current version, not this one, to my GitHub account.

1:31:03Corey Noles:And as Corey talked about earlier, GitHub is basically just like Google Drive for code. It's a simple way to explain it. It saves all of your code on the cloud so that you can write your code, version it, keep track of what changes you made. You can always go back to previous changes and you set the visibility to private and you keep your repo, you name the repo, which is the place that you save your code. And then all of a sudden now, any tool that you connect GitHub to, you can then work with the same code. So you can start in AI Studio. You don't have to stay there. And you're not meant to stay there.

1:31:42Corey Noles:It's more of a prototyping tool. Now you can take this to Cloud Code, to Codex, to Google. Or deploy it directly onto Google Cloud even from there if you want it. It isn't always an idea. That's right. yeah and and um that is that is definitely a simple way to do it but if you want to control your own destiny let's say you don't have to publish it directly from here and i don't know if they still let you do this which is interesting um you used to be able to download it i'm not sure where that is anymore Oh, no. Share.

1:32:25Corey Noles:Yeah, I don't know if you can download the code anymore. TBD on that. But that's why you share it to GitHub. So if you don't have a GitHub account, you want to create a GitHub account, connect whatever you build in AI Studio to GitHub, and then you can take it anywhere else. Yes. So all of that to say, that turned into this application I made here called FlowState. And FlowState basically is like the next iteration of this tool. And it's like a local writing tool. You can bring any agent that you want to it. So in this case, I have Kimmy K2 hooked up here. But you can use Gemini. You can use a lot of other agents.

1:33:06And it just helps you write with AI on your computer.

1:33:12Corey Noles:I love it. And started in AI Studio and brought it to GitHub. And then I said, make this, you know, executable that I could then, you know, run on my computer as an application. I remember when you... Any questions?

1:33:31Yeah.

1:33:32Corey Noles:And I, you know, I'm not saying that this is like a perfect application or anything like that. It's just, hey, I have a problem that I'm trying to solve. Yeah. How do I solve it? You know, how do I create a local writing application? That's the whole mindset, I think, right there, Grant. Yeah. is I got a problem. How can I solve this? Yeah, you can throw money at it and pay for someone else's. But the truth is, I'm finding that this way, much like with the espresso, what I'm getting is better. It's catered to me. It feels a little bespoke. Yeah. And I won't get too much into the weeds of how this works.

1:34:08Corey Noles:If you're interested, we can talk about it. But basically, it's just a simple, simple tool to work with an agent on the sidebar here. kind of like the demo that I showed you before. And I can just, where is the agent window?

1:34:26I can send feedback to it, et cetera, et cetera.

1:34:31Corey Noles:So, oh yeah, this little guy. Once I turn on the agent, I can deploy an agent anywhere. And it's set up with my writer tool. and then I have hot prompts saved, styles, et cetera. I like the critic. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It's a good idea. So that was the next, I would say, application that I did, complete end-to-end. So first step was Chrome extension and published that just locally. You can share it to the Chrome extension store, which Corey can talk more about that. The Chrome extensions I make are only for me. um then uh then i did i port some or clone somebody else's server and i started making changes to it and then i prototyped an application in a free tool like ai studio you could use chatwt or cloud code to prototype as well ai studio is nice because it shows you the visual on the sidebar um cloud code and chatwt now both do that so they're both helpful at that now.

1:35:37Corey Noles:And then I took that code, added it to GitHub, brought it to my desktop, and then I created an application out of it. Now, another tool, let's see, for the interest of time, I'm going to go straight to two different things. The first one is when I wanted to create a website like my personal website i wanted to find out who is the best website editor uh or like who's the best website host for that process and i did a lot of research i tried to figure out you know who who's not gonna you know cost me as the most amount of money yeah you know who's gonna give me the most amount of flexibility features etc etc and i landed on Cloudflare.

1:36:30So this website that you're looking at now was created entirely with coding agents,

1:36:34Corey Noles:and it's hosted on Cloudflare. And I actually recommend this to anyone who wants to host their own website and is comfortable going into ChatGPT or Codex or something like that and just asking it for help setting that up. And in fact, Cloudflare has a bunch of API... What's the simplest way to put this cloudflare has plugins that you can use with cloud code uh they might it might also work with chat dbt that helps you do a lot of that process so you can just literally be in your coding agent like uh update my website yeah yeah literally yeah so let's see where i go to plugins here

1:37:19Corey Noles:I sometimes forget where everything is. Well, for example, I'm in this chat here, and I can just backslash Cloudflare, and wha-bam, all of the different tools are here. What was that? I can always say, say that again. What was that? Wha-bam. That was my favorite. Wha-bam.

1:37:41Corey Noles:Or you can just literally chat and say, hey, use the Cloudflare tool to fix this, right? Yeah. So that is how I'm hosting this website right now. It's called a Cloudflare worker. And, you know, the easiest way to explain it up, I would say it's best for tiny tools, lightweight web apps, simple APIs, if you want to host simple APIs. And it's cheap-ass and easy to connect to GitHub. So here's the thing. So once you have your tool that you've created in AI Studio and you connect it to GitHub, you can then connect it directly to Cloudflare and with your coding agent say, hey, publish this to Cloudflare.

1:38:24Corey Noles:You can buy a domain from Cloudflare for like$5,$10, something like that. So then you actually own the actual domain name. So in this case, for my personal website, I own this website name. And then you can say, let's make an update and let's ship it. And what happens is the coding agent will send it directly to the changes to GitHub, and GitHub is connected to Cloudflare. And once it changes on GitHub and GitHub updates, Cloudflare will update automatically. So I could ship a change to my website right now, and it will automatically update. And I'm going to do that. So where was I?

1:39:06One of these chats.

1:39:10Corey Noles:Okay, this one. Okay, let's do it. Okay, I'm excited. You don't even know what it is. It's just like, let's go ahead and update this directly to GitHub right now. So what I'm using right now is I'm using Cloud Code. And Cloud Code is a coding agent like ChatGPT's Codex, or what I just showed you with AI Studio. But there's two different versions. Both great tools, in my opinion, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, there's two different versions you can use. There's a local one and a cloud-based one. but the local still is cloud. It's just that it works with the files local on your computer. But the cloud, your AI is on the cloud.

1:39:48Corey Noles:Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you still send files over, which is why you need the business agreement with them to protect it. And if you want to change the settings so that they don't train on your chats, go to privacy and you turn off help improve our AI models. So you see this? Turn that off. unless you wish to give them your data and help improve their ai models which you can you're welcome to do that but you know for john's purposes you don't really want to be doing that yeah um any questions on this i know i kind of rambled a bit i was a little nervous to be honest that's okay not normally nervous i normally don't roll out these things in public yeah grant would you mind talking a little you don't have to show it off if you don't want would you mind talking a little about squirrel yes i will so i know you say squirrel world but i'm calling it squirrel because it's a fun word yeah so i i will definitely talk about that if you if you want to host a website i think cloudflare workers is great but let's say you want to host something a little more complicated like debbie i don't know if she's still in the chat earlier she said man i want to make a you know a club for people um yeah you know probably that means some sort of like social network or or some sort of you know networking messaging way to manage users it's going to have users and it's going to have a database that means you're going to need to have a database hosted somewhere so you can't just host a website um and you know be able to keep track of all of these users you need what's called a database and the service that i use for that is called railway and railway you know hosts basically a server that i have put uh like in my case a video game on and it has a database uh attached to that video game code so that it keeps track of all of the people who join this game and manages all that for me alongside CloudCode.

1:41:58Corey Noles:So I've written all the codes. And it's essentially a smaller approach to like an AWS or an Azure, right? Same idea. Exactly, yeah. So people, that's probably too technical for a lot of people here. You might have heard of any bigger ones is why I wanted to mention it. Like you might be aware of names. This is like that, but simpler. Exactly. So if you want to host anything where you're going to be keeping track of user state or email addresses and passwords, you want something with a lot of security attached to it, Cloudflare definitely has that. But what I did is I have a main homepage that's set up for this game that I'm about to show off.

1:42:35Corey Noles:And then I have a database attached to it on the back end that keeps track of all the users and et cetera, et cetera. I just want to take a second to say that having played this game, it is so much. Don't hype it up too much. It is. Grant's like, slow down, Corey. Slow down. it is uh i found it to be delightful and uh honestly i played with grant and our good friend cal one night for two or three hours well probably three hours by the time you and i quit and uh it was so much fun uh we ran around and we we killed things with our squirrels my squirrel had a pink my squirrel was pink with like a mohawk if i could find the picture i'd Sure.

1:43:16Yeah.

1:43:17Corey Noles:So let me talk through the process of this. So I just mentioned, so I have a database hooked up to this. So that means that anyone is able to create a character on here and they can come and play. And the way that this started was I was testing out Fable 5 and I wanted to see what Fable 5 could do. And in the process of, I don't know, like literally saying in the corner on the right hand side, like in a tab that I forgot about, I was like, oh, go make like a 3D isomorphic. you know, dungeon crawler about squirrels. And it created the very first pass of this on its own. And then I've been iterating on it ever since.

1:43:54Corey Noles:And now Corey won't shut up about it. And here we are. Wait a minute. This is kind of cool. But basically the way that I hosted this is so I, you know, started in a Cloud Code session. So I opened up Cloud Code. Was this Fable? And I created a new tab. Yeah, this is Fable down here. And I first created a plan. and I was like okay we're gonna create a plan how would you um create a 3d isomorphic dungeon crawler without squirrels and then it comes up with the plan then I turned on auto mode and auto mode is helpful because it helps you skip all of the permissions that you normally would go through and you're not sure what the hell you're signing up for when you go through it and it only gives you the permissions that are really important for you to know so this is what the creators of CloudCub recommends you use.

1:44:40Corey Noles:You recommend use it with auto mode. And I use local so that it can create the code locally on my computer. So for someone like John, who's maybe a little bit more nervous about giving his ideas to a tool like AI Studio, you can use local mode here. And that way, at least the code itself, the files are on your computer. Then I connected it to GitHub, as we talked about before. By the way, in Codex, that same mode is called approve for me, where it's like it only adds for actions that could be unsafe. Right. And then so if you go to customize and I think my one is, oh yeah, down here, you would connect it to GitHub.

1:45:24Corey Noles:So under connectors, we talk all about this in another session, so I'm not going to spend time on this. here's all the cloudflare ones i was talking about github integration you would connect it here so that you can anytime you edit code locally on your computer you can send it to github and save it so that it's you know safe if for example somebody or like the agent messes up and it deletes something it's like okay well you have a version of it on your on your cloud you can always roll back to so that's the work process there i created the version then i went to github then i made a website for Squirreled on Cloudflare.

1:46:00Corey Noles:So I literally just asked the agent, I was like, help me set up on Cloudflare. I did all the research, I found out Cloudflare is the one I wanted, help me set this up on Cloudflare. Set up the website for me. Then I went to this website called Railway, and Railway is where I set up my database and my server. So the reason that anyone can go to play free in browser and go to play.squirrel.com and play this is because well turns out it's hosted on railway and now anyone can come here and play it so that's so awesome show you okay and so here's the game early so literally if anyone wants to join you can go to play.squirrel.com play like Corey you can join this right now that's what I'm doing

1:46:56Corey Noles:and you can come on here oh wait I do and it's like a fun little game that is hosted online made entirely with AI and my feedback and my friends feedback who played it and said it was fun it is very fun yeah so the way that you do this is you start in fable or you know cloud code codex whatever you have it create a plan you turn on auto mode you have it start putting the plan together once the plan is ready as a non-engineer what you're going to say is you're going to say okay explain to me exactly how this works in non-engineering terms so that I understand exactly what you're going to do. And then have it back and forth with it.

1:47:47Corey Noles:Ask questions like, why did you do it this way? What does this mean? Hey, I would like you to do it like this, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if that's too intimidating to you, I have another tool that I think is actually a good way to start. And that's claw.ai slash design. And we talked about this a bit in the last stream, but this is a fun way to go straight to just the front end of like the website so for example here right this is play.squirrel.com but if i just went to squirrels.com uh i created this website entirely in claw design so i just said like hey make me a website for this game that and i uh connected my github once again as you can see github is like the source of truth that you want to have all of your information in so that you can share that to any tool and you can work with the same code base on any other tool.

1:48:39Corey Noles:And it went ahead and mocked up the website. And I can literally show you the chat. Sorry, I got stuck running around and squirreled. Are you on? Oh, T-squirrel spin. Oh, yeah. Amazing. What's up? There's Corey. What up? We're playing live right now. Like, y 'all, I did not know how to do this a year ago, two years ago. Like, it's a lot of me. How insane is that? Yes. Oh, by the way, I added tail flips, tail attacks. I need acorns. I need acorns. I just nearly got killed by a field mouse. Yeah. But this is the website. This is literally, like, you can see it's pretty much exactly as Claude created it here.

1:49:24Corey Noles:And essentially what I said, I said, let me zoom in, check out the scrolled repo in my GitHub and make me a launch website for it. That's literally all I said. So, you know, Fable created the first version of it, and then I could take that and then take it into Cloud Design and make a whole launch website for it. Another example, let's say you wanted to start with something directly in the, like, from scratch, right? Like, let's say you're Debbie or you're John and you have an app idea and you want to create an app or a website. And you are maybe intimidated by Cloud Code. You're like, what the heck is this thing?

1:50:02Corey Noles:I don't know what it's saying to me. Just come to Claude Design and say, design a web page. In our case, we have existing IP here. So I said, design a web page for Neuron AI newsletter. Literally all I said. And then it mocked up this website for me. And now I can come in here and I can make edits. I can make tweaks. I can say, hey, change this asset, change this. I can give comments. So I can comment on like change this to say, Debbie's Clubhouse or whatever it is. And you can basically just come in and start iterating on. You don't have to worry about all the backend code and how it works. You can just focus on the front end and the design.

1:50:45Corey Noles:And I think that's a really fun way to get started with a project. Very similar to AI Studio where you just want to go from what's in here to something that exists on here. And then you can iterate on it, right? And you're probably thinking too hard. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, here's a great example. So, funny enough, they don't have the microphone on Cloud Design, but you can go into the microphone here, and you can just start rambling and say, like, here's my app idea. Like, I, you know, want to make a club for people in my community. you know i wanted to you know make sure that you know everyone can log in and have their own email and password and that that password is safe um i want to set it up with like these different club houses and you know i want to make it very easy for people to post and i don't really know what i'm doing i'm a non-engineer so i'm going to need your help with setting that up uh and you know i want to be able to host it on cloudflare and i want to host my database either on cloudflare or on railway but you tell me what is better for me um my budget is roughly this a month so you know let's be cost conscious here.

1:51:59Corey Noles:Don't recommend me the moon. And also I would love if you could, you know, walk me through step-by-step the process of, you know, what you're building and how you're creating it and help me understand how you're approaching it and you're thinking about it so that we can both learn together. And, you know, I'm a non-engineer. I think I've said that, but I really need you to hold my hand through this process, but, you know, let's get technical let's actually do it let's you know i want to have a working prototype by the end of this session and whatever you want to say there and then you hit accept and then you can either send that directly in the chat wherever you started or you can take it to claude design and you can drop it literally there yeah and then what's going to happen is claude isn't going to just immediately jump into building the thing instead what it's going to do is it's going to ask you a series of questions to help better understand what you're looking for and as you can see here I'm getting asked a series of questions.

1:52:56Corey Noles:What kind of community is this for? You can answer hobby groups, my neighborhood, local community. Name two to four real clubs you'd expect on day one. You know, soccer, we love FIFA. What can people post? Text updates, photos, events. How do people join clubhouses, request to join, you know, whatever you want to do here you can also just pick decide for me and it'll decide for you and uh we go ahead and hit continue i didn't give it nearly enough information so i have no idea what it's going to create but what's great about this is once it has something here that you can download you have a lot of different or sorry once it has something here that's actually front-end code that's designed you can then hit share and you can either publish it as an artifact um when you can actually publish it you know similarly to how you can publish with chat to pt sites um you can also uh download it as a pdf as a zip file um or or even a powerpoint if you're making presentations project your html though would let you go and let claude code take it over and make deeper changes if you wanted exactly so what you could do here and this is literally what i did with squirreled um where did it go oh it would be over here but i the that code that i showed you before for the the website like even this like i created this in claude design and then i just downloaded that zip file that i just showed you took it to claude code and i said hey implement this like spin this up for me like let's like let's let's create the back end for this for this code um that this code file and it doesn't like that's what's crazy about this it's insane yeah it really is and it's increasingly insane every month yeah uh what can be done you want to show we're getting a little close on time looks like we still have a few people though you have a uh do you want to go through another or uh i think that's probably good um There's one that I'm working on right now that's called Orchestrator.

1:55:07Corey Noles:And essentially this is trying to be like a Slack, a way to manage your chats with AI, but in a Slack thread format. Like Slack for agent? Yeah, it's a little bit over designed right now, I think. But let's say, Corey and Grant live test. and then I can say like, hey, Claude, what's up? And basically that's going to start a Claude code session and I've got the floating chat over here that can move around and let's say like, are you fully operational? Probably not. It's okay. Because it's a live test, you know? But there's a lot of different views. Like I've created a lot of stuff that I'm playing around with and who knows, you know, it seems like it's not, not working, but, uh, something I'd like to keep working on it.

1:56:12That's right. And, you know, if you're working on stuff like this, I, I'd also like to recommend checking out the neuron Academy. Just a few weeks ago, we launched a new educational platform designed to, for people starting at beginner and moving forward, you know, kind of, kind of, we've built out the base and, and it's going to continue building on top of it for a good long while, the neuronacademy.com. We'd love for you to come try it out and let us know what you think. Hopefully it'd be a lot of help is the idea. And it's very much intended for like people who aren't in a coding background.

1:56:53Like the idea is, is like learning AI for normal people. You know, people who are at work and their boss is telling them, use more AI all the time. And you're like, what does that even mean? This is for you. And, and it's, it's set up in a way to, no matter where your beginning is, you have a good place to start. And, and we'll be building on top of that for years and years to come. We hope so. I hope as you go check it out. Grant over there popping around on the field mice.

1:57:28Corey Noles:Grant, zoom in and show him your squirrel. Squirrely. Actually, the thing I'm working on with this right now is I'm trying to build an in-game map editor so I can place things. You know, this is an admin account. We got a question, Grant. uh what is the difference in the out go ahead what's the difference in the outcome of creating your app in a desktop or terminal versus in something like cursor Okay, let's think of this. Desktop versus something like cursor. That's a good question. I mean, in outcome, I think you could go either way you want. I mean, as long as you're, you know, making sure you've made, you know, safe decisions to the best of your ability, you know, always run through a code review.

1:58:25I can't stress that enough because I've never said do a code review and it not found two or three. Usually one big thing and a handful of little small ones is what is found. So, you know, as long as you're doing a code review, running a security review, making sure that you've done it as safe as you can,

1:58:47I don't think there's that big of a difference, but I'm not going to answer that.

1:58:52Corey Noles:There really is no difference in outcome, I would say. Perhaps there's difference in capabilities. So what are the different capabilities that you can do in Cursor versus you can do in Cloud Code? Like the nice things about Cloud Code is, let me do my squirreled chat over here for a second. So, you know, in Cloud Code, it gives you a preview version. I'm sure Cursor does this now, right? But, you know, you can run the game in the preview right here so you can test it, play it out. Also, you know, if you're using Cloud Models, you know, the people who use Cloud Models the most, you know, are Cloud engineers.

1:59:30Corey Noles:And so they're building Claude to work a certain way. But yeah, I mean, frankly, you can use any agent, what we call these is agentic coding tool. You can use any agentic coding tool to start creating your code. It's just what your preference is. I don't think there's really, people are very opinionated on this. And I'm new to the engineering community, but engineers have been opinionated about software and setups and code stacks forever, right? And they are very tribal about it. So just like as a guy who worked with writers for years, writers are very finicky. They like their tools. They have their ways.

2:00:09They'll stand and die in favor of the Oxford comma or something. Engineers are very, very much like that. Everybody has their ways, their preferences, the ways they like to approach problems, the dependencies they like to use because they know them, they trust them, and they know that this is going to be around.

2:00:31Corey Noles:Like this is, by the way, this is the ChatTBT app. This is Codex. This is another option. I think on my computer, I have all of them. I have Cursor. I have Factory. I have, I think, Windsurf's gone, but now it's Devon. Like there's all these different ones that you can use. I would say just try the one, like test them all on a project and go with the one that you find the easiest to work with. I like Factory. I don't talk about them enough either. We've had them on before. Their co-founder CTO, Ino Reyes, has been on, and he's a really nice guy. They're a young company that just blasted like a rocket out of nowhere as kind of a cursor alternative, a frontier lab alternative where, of course, you can use any model you want.

2:01:21and it's a great tool. They're all becoming increasingly great tools. I think find what you like. If you're a person who likes to switch between Claude and Codex models, I mean, between Claude and OpenAI, oh, Anthropic and OpenAI models. If you like to switch between those, it's worth at least considering, you know, a factory, a cursor or something like that because with those, you can access both models together.

2:01:51Corey Noles:I personally find, like, this might look kind of intimidating. Where'd it go? This might look kind of intimidating to you, like this whole setup right here. Like, they have all these, like, you know, sessions and pull requests and blah, blah, blah. What is all this stuff? We do have an intro to Claude Code class on our Neuron Academy, by the way. So if you're interested in that, we talk all about that. Yes. and i dropped a recent uh grant's beginner's guide into the chat a few minutes ago as well we got a question here that i think is important code review before or during the setup yes that's that's my answer i usually do it a few times uh i may not have to do it a few times but usually what i'll do is at the first draft i'll do it because i'm of the belief that if you catch a problem early.

2:02:39It's going to fix easier and cleaner. I always wind up doing it again somewhere in the middle just to make sure. And then it's the last thing I do before sending. Yeah.

2:02:53Corey Noles:Yeah, I think that's the right call. And you can ask it in the initial plan. I think it's very important to have a back and forth before you start building anything. Unless you're doing a mock-up on AI Studio and it's, you know, you're just kind of iterating and messing around, you know, if you're going to this one here, Codex or Cloud Code, just ask a question to be like, like, did you consider, you know, make sure you consider security and, you know, like, let's make this as secure as possible and think about this robustly from that perspective. And what you need to say is, listen, I'm brand new to this and I don't know what the hell I'm doing just say that it's absolutely okay uh and it will it will make sure that you know what you're doing they both do a really good job of better than they used to of kind of trying to help educate protect you from yourself a little bit um but i i can't recommend it enough go build some build something fun it can be you know if you got a hobby something you love go build something related to that as a test and just, you know, I like squirreled grants hobby is squirrels.

2:03:58Yeah. Yeah.

2:04:00Corey Noles:You know, um, but, uh, another thing I would recommend, which we haven't said yet, but I think is helpful. Have the end goal in mind. So when you start a project, like tell, tell the agent, Hey, I actually want this to be, I want this to be on desktop. I want this to be on mobile. I want this to be a web app. like i'm gonna monetize this at some point yeah yeah like i engineer it with all of those things in mind because the more that you think ahead and you and you try to think about like okay what is the end state that i want this to be in the better that the agent can then work backwards and say okay maybe you need to make this an electron app maybe you need to make this a atari app whatever it is you don't even need to know what those things are you can just like say like okay cool sounds good and i just will frequently ask it i'll be like are you sure that you're engineering this so that it's going to work with all these different applications are you sure that you know make sure that you look at the code base and then it's going to work for this xyz feature and um just be constantly checking in with it and reminding it what your goals are and um have it save its work like have it save its they kind of do this automatically but have it like you know let's make a plan for this new feature that we're going to implement and then let's review that and review that as a code um review that for security reasons etc etc I agree.

2:05:20We got another question from Sabrina here. If you were to build a phone app, would you go with Codex, Work, Terminal, based on your experience? If it's me, it's probably Codex and Codex in the app. It's simple. It's a really friendly interface, in my opinion. Most everything is pretty self-explanatory. with the exception of, like, if you get into the settings and you start wondering about forks and trees and some of that, like, you know, it's worth saying, take a screenshot of what you don't understand in the features and say, tell me what all of these are, and it'll walk you through them really good.

2:06:03You know, all these tools are now very built to teach you about them.

2:06:08Corey Noles:You can also tell it, like, if it gives you an answer that you don't understand, be like, I'm sorry, I don't understand what the hell you're saying. Yes, I've said it. Yeah, and it will go in and it will be like, okay, let me break that down. Yes, exactly. Well, Grant, this has been a lot of fun today, going through our various toys. We'll have to do this periodically because I foresee a future with many, many more of these. I'm sort of in hooked on it like a drug mode right now. And, you know, I think my next step is there's a couple of these I want to get onto the App Store. Like I want to finish Better Spent, which you didn't see today, but you will one day soon.

2:06:51I want to finish Circleback, which is intentionally named one of those funny corporate phrases because I had to. No, don't apologize for the question, Sabrina. We are glad you are here. We're glad you asked. The truth is, you know, we're learning a lot of this, too, as we go. So like, like, please don't think any of this is like we are seasoned years long experts.

2:07:17Corey Noles:Like, because people who are legit at this will probably tell us 100 things we did wrong. But the point is, we have something and you can have something too. And you can get it from what's up here, you know, not just onto the screen, but in a place where other people can use it. And then, you know, if you find that people are interested in it and it's doing well, then you can bring on and, you know, actually turn it into a real business. And I think that's the right way to go about it. It is. It is. And that's kind of why I've been like with each of these. I've been like, if I ever wanted to monetize this, how would I do that?

2:07:51I've been asking that question kind of in the beginning and having it as part of the initial plan. Like, like I don't want to right now. Right now, I want to see if I'm the only person who cares to use this. but at some point I will. I've got one coming that's going to have a pro version next week. That's better spent. So just as a little heads up, basically it is a stepped-up version of Bean Counter designed to help people quit eating out every night. You can set savings targets, like I have Trip to Dublin saved in mine, and skipping meals out in exchange for something else. You can set different savings.

2:08:27You can set different things you want to skip. The idea is to make it easier to break a bad habit and in exchange for turning either that time or that money into something that fulfills you, hopefully. You know, and we'll see. I think that's great.

2:08:47Corey Noles:I like your ideas because I feel like my ideas are always like way too ambitious. And yours are like, let me do one thing really, really well. I want to do one thing. Great. Let me reinvent Claude code, but as Slack. Oh, it doesn't work? Yeah, because like, yeah,

2:09:08Corey Noles:you should probably, you know, like 18 of the world's best engineers built it. Yeah. So you can you can go you can try both approaches. But if you're serious about trying to get something that other people can use, start simple. I want to double down on what you just said in the comments there that for code reviews, use the highest intelligence possible. That's very much like when I talk about trying to make sure you have the right task for the job. Like if I'm using a lesser model, it's because I'm convinced two models ago that was already pretty solved. Like like it's really good at at this part of that.

2:09:51but things like planning things like you know maybe uploading to the iTunes iOS store things that have consequences that's a good place to make sure you're spending your money where accuracy really really matters you know

2:10:11Corey Noles:yeah I've also been you know one thing to do is like take a look at X and Twitter where a lot of the engineers who are building with this stuff share ideas because for example i put together this plan here and you know i asked it to explain it to me i was explaining our rules for forming out work and you know it basically goes through and it says okay fables the primary driver for hard design for taste critical work orchestration etc use opus for well specced out builds for planning reviews etc like i have it like i this is all something that i told it was like hey just save this to your memory uh and follow this anytime yeah so anytime I start a new chat now I have like this one folder where I start all my projects in and then I have it go off to other projects and I love that yeah I love that I built a skill I'm trying to find it now uh earlier this year model policy skill now this is back when gpt 5.2 was around but you could really easily drop this and tell something to update it i'm gonna grab you a link i'll drop it in the chat if you want to share your screen as well you can if it's helpful i i built this when uh open claw was new the first time i had that 840 million token weekend i uh that was or whatever it was i was like ah and uh and i and i this it essentially built out this model policy that's like reserve premium models for where work quality differences materially change outcomes use strong mid-tier models for agentic synthesis and multi-step tasks use the cheapest for procedural deterministic or monitoring work like if you're going to a website and collecting articles you don't need the magic intelligence in the sky you need the medium intelligence or the lower intelligence you know uh so it's very tied out to tier one two and three tasks with selection rule grade triggers uh this is like i said and this was built specifically for my open claw so it was gpt 5.2 as my big monster model when it was the big monster model uh mercury 2 for agentic worse horse to workhorse stuff because it was cheap and lightning fast so it cut down on the latency and open claw for me and gpt 5 nano for operational plumbing and honestly there are still things i use five nano for uh just because it's small it's fast if it's just retrieving stuff and and you know uh it's plenty and it's pennies on the dollar compared to everything else with the exception of mercury 2 mercury 2 is affordable buddy it is uh i mean it's like five dollars a million output or something or remember uh but but it makes everything else look like a ripoff and i think they've got something new cooking up too i saw a couple of interviews this week so i'm going to look into that because i i like the guys we had stefano armand who is a cs professor at stanford in san francisco area and we had him on a couple of times this year and he's kind of the guy behind mercury he wrote the early papers that created diffusion uh you know he he knows his stuff yeah and uh and he's also just just a very nice guy very smart and um and he really believes in that so if you're ever interested in diffusion models and i read something about diffusion models in a notification on my phone earlier so there might be something there um but um yeah yeah we We haven't done any research of the day.

2:13:56Corey Noles:I looked at no news. Anything could have happened right now. Yeah. But I guess for me to wrap up, I started experimenting with this stuff just for fun to make little tools that would help me do things that I really wanted to do, like the synonym Chrome extension. And then slowly but surely, I upped my confidence to build other things. But the reason I've kept at it is because I thought like, hey, to continue writing this newsletter, I have to actually use these tools and know what the heck I'm talking about, right? Yeah, especially the ones you're going to be talking about every third day, you know.

2:14:37Exactly.

2:14:39Corey Noles:But then I have just gotten so addicted to building things. I mean, if you could have told from my website that has like 15 different or I think I have like 11 projects on it. You have even more than I realize. You have like seven or eight different projects that you've built um yeah and i have a couple that are now defunct you know right yeah i mean you saw some of mine don't work so it's just one of those things where it's like i just have fallen in love with building them and i think you know i'm not trying to turn any of this into a business i'm just doing it all for fun but but i would take mailbox money i would i would take any money if i could figure out a way that's my idea is like i get this fantasy vision of like mailbox money that just arrives while i'm you know checking the mail and drinking coffee passive income yeah yeah but i i just think this is such an empowering um way of the future like i think everyone will build their own like if you have a business or if you're a solo entrepreneur like you should have your own website like you can make one like today like you could follow like maybe like you know we'll put this together in a step-by-step playbook as well uh that goes with this article but you could y 'all you can have at least a personal website by tomorrow if you don't have one like my dinner yeah but like in an hour like this is this is easy stuff um uh like my friend i helped my friend set up a a website with cloud fair cloud flare pages and he's not an engineer, he's just a writer, but he has been just iterating on it and he's made such a cool website, way cooler than mine.

2:16:17Corey Noles:Mine, I did a couple iterations on it, I'm working on a V2. But he's just all obsessed with it. He's just a writer, but he's using Codex and he goes directly to GitHub and then that updates on Cloudflare and he can just iterate. GitHub took me a long time to get the hang of. Yeah, I agree. It's intimidating at first. It is intimidating and confusing. and like you go into a repo and you don't always know even what to do like what do i download what do i click can i run this i do you know so it's easy to be intimidated but uh as we always say take a link go ask your ai you know what to do no like everything that we've learned make it run it everything that we've learned we've just done it and then like so like okay show me how to do this and then you get to the step where you're stuck and then you take a screenshot you're like this doesn't match what you said and then it like course corrects and yeah just ask a question that's it's that it really is that easy most of the time well everyone grant thank you man this has been an absolute blast i enjoyed seeing all your all your toys and seeing how how you're making progress and uh it was fun to get to show a couple of mine off that i'm excited about too and i hope that if you're here you learned a little something and if not you were at least entertained or had fun and uh we will be back theoretically next thursday so uh i don't know what we're talking about yet but we will let you know when we do make sure you check out yesterday's uh podcast that dropped as well we had an interview with matthias umberoth is that right yes uh yes from inner logic uh dealing with autonomous surgical arms and stuff uh really neat conversation.

2:18:00I wasn't there. Grant did that one. And it was, it was, it was a really good chat. I enjoyed watching it and he's a neat guy. Uh, Matthias, Grant's not neat at all.

2:18:09Corey Noles:No, I'm complete trash human. Sorry. So you have to put up with me, but, um, so RBT cat said in the chat, GitHub is not for a newbie. We're trying to make it for newbies. We're trying to empower newbies to use this tool. Fun fact, someone should make GitHub for newbies. Like that would be like like that would crush it in today's age um but we should have someone maybe that's our next project or maybe we do a collab um but we should have someone from github on to explain it to people for beginners because i agree it's not it's not for everybody well no it is for everybody it is easy all you have to do is get it set it up and then have the agent help you manage it it is that easy once yeah i don't upload anything like like that's just handled i mean i still i get in there and i check things and i make sure and uh but as far as like actual management of it most of that's not me if i'm in there i'm looking at other people's stuff most likely um well we'll we'll get we had scott hanselman on last month uh who who was pretty big at uh at github for a while but i may reach out and see if we can't get somebody github for a live stream next month or something.

2:19:24That'd be a good one. Like a couple of those things, it's just like, you just need to understand this. Let's just have the conversation. And then we can always share that link when someone asks. We've always got it there as a, here you go, this will get you. I agree.

2:19:37Corey Noles:GitHub and app publishing. Those are the two big ones we need to do. Those are the two big ones, yeah. Yeah, we may hit the Apple App Store episode soon. We can do that. Well, everyone, please like, subscribe, check out all the things. go visit theneuronacademy.com sign up for Robotics Insider our new sister newsletter and otherwise just have a wonderful week go build something cool and come tell us about it maybe we'll stick in the newsletter or something we almost always try to do that if it's ready for prime time we will almost always share it if you reach out let us know team at theneurondaily.com especially if you built something after watching these videos let us know yeah we want to know we want to be helpful I'll let you wrap I'm sorry oh you're alright alright well thank you everyone we appreciate every one of you and we're grateful that you spent some of your Thursday afternoon with us we will see you next time on the Neuron farewell for now humans bye bye