2139 - How AI Is Supercharging Software Solutions with Tekyz's David Hirschfeld

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1:05With us right now, it's David Hirschfeld. David, you are the founder and CEO at Techies. You're found on the web at techies.com, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. David, it's great to have you. Yeah, thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me. Before we start talking about what you do at Techies, what do you do personally? Like, what do you enjoy doing right now? What are you geeking out on? Okay. So I love to do woodworking, making furniture, things like that, especially bent wood, very artistic, creative stuff. And recently my wife and I went to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, which is the largest show in the world. It's been going on for like 80 years.

1:53Literally it takes over the whole city. It happens. It's about three weeks long. and to give you an example of how big it is the Tucson Convention Center which is a pretty big building is one of 45 or 50 locations where they hold the show and that's not the biggest location by far there's much larger locations than that anyway we went there specifically because in our entryway in our home we moved to San Diego a couple years ago and our entryway we wanted a really dramatic piece that would show up there. So we went there with this idea, we were going to buy one of these big amethyst agates because you can get stuff at great prices there.

2:33And we ended up coming away with these giant Brazilian agate discs that are like an inch and a half thick and weigh about 60 pounds. And so now I've been doing some welding and metalworking to make brackets to hold them without having metal all over the place, right? Yeah. How heavy are they? And hang them. They're about 50 pounds each. Wow. And we have one going above the other like that. And so I just mounted them, finished mounting this morning. Oh, my gosh. Congratulations. So have you been doing much metalworking before this? Nope. Nope. In high school, I had one project that I did. It was a long time ago.

3:19Nope. uh i had never welded anything so rented a welder watched the youtube video you know i'm kind of fearless around this stuff yeah um uh and uh i just channel my inner my inner five-year-old when i start working on these yeah look i i don't know if you're kind of at the same state my kids are older now i have a lot more free time i got company you know i got good people you know so i i got some free time from time to time um but i gotta tell you between youtube and now you know using ai or chat GPT. There, there isn't a job in the house. I mean, I haven't found a job yet around the house or property that has been too intimidating for me.

3:57Like I'm doing my own and I love it. Right. This sounds crazy. I mean, I'm not doing like plumbing, plumbing, but you know, pool plumbing and PVC, uh, just the garage floor with the, um, with the, you know, the, um, the, the, the vinyl or the flooring, the, you know, the covering. So it's got the speckle and the gray, looks fantastic. Woodworking, I have not touched yet. Is that something you started later? Have you always been into woodworking? You know, I, again, high school is where I did it for the first time. I just fell in love with doing these sorts of things, working with my hands, creating something in my mind, getting a picture and then turning it into reality.

4:41So I made a really sophisticated woodworking bench, which I actually used SketchUp, which is a CAD program that most people can learn to use, and created a whole SketchUp CAD program for this woodworking bench. And then I went and built the thing. And it was, you know, but it was my own design. I love, it was just so much fun. It took me a couple months. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. That is so cool. And now you see it every day and you're like, I built that. You know, it's like I could have hired out. I could easily hire it out and probably spent as much money. Right. I learned along the way, you know, but it's like every time I go to the garage now, I'm like, man, I did that.

5:24And it's like it's it's like the Ikea principle with the furniture. Right. When you spend your time, kind of you you you just develop more of a sense of ownership of what you're doing. And it's something like that. That's, you know, we spent months on that. It's really remarkable. David, thank you so much for sharing that. Let's talk a little bit about your work with Techies. Okay, sure. So Techies, I founded 18 years ago. We're a custom software development shop. We work with a lot of startups and scale-ups, workflow automation, everything AI. It's all about basically building and automating your company.

6:05That's what Techies does. Yeah. Well, I can't imagine what you're doing today as of when we're recording this. And again, you may listen to your answer right now six months from now and kind of go, oh, yeah, those were the olden days. Today is the olden days, right? As opposed to, you know, three to six months ago, things are evolving so rapidly around development and what we can do with AI and the speed at which we can bring, you know, such better tested products to market so much faster. Can you just give us, for those of us who are not in this world, can you give us a little behind the scenes view of how life has been changing for you over the past year or two?

6:51Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's really changing dramatically. And as a development shop, I look at it like, you know, I'm going to use a surfing metaphor because I live in San Diego. I look at it like learning to surf really big waves. And what I mean by that is you're, you know, a typical development shop can get up and surf on their board in three foot waves. And really, really top shops maybe are surfing 10-foot waves with a lot of confidence. Here's a 100-foot wave coming at all of us. And you're either going to paddle out to it and stand up in your wave and stay on the tip of your board and try to stay ahead of it, or you're just going to be wiped out by it.

7:33So that's how I've looked at it from the very beginning. And we've been paddling out to it the whole time. Uh, we are learning to, uh, we are developing tools and automation between tools so that we can use AI to generate our applications, to generate the test cases, to, to build our deployment pipelines, all of these things. Um, in fact, I just got off a call with my team, with some of the latest benchmarks we have and what, how these tools are working together to be able to accomplish this and where we're at with the process. I want to get to 10 times the level of acceleration for building something.

8:14So if it used to take me 60 days to build an MVP or 90 days, I want it to be six days or nine days to accomplish the same thing with the same or better architecture and better quality, including design. So that's remarkably fast and we're not there yet. We're probably at three weeks from what used to be 60 days. Now we're at 15 or 16 days, which is still a huge improvement. there are very specific areas that we still can't get past, but we think we're close. Anyway, we're pushing the envelope constantly on this. So that's one of the ways it affects us. Then of course, all of our clients are expecting anything that they're doing is almost all AI related now.

9:07Yeah. And so what tools, and again, you don't have to get too nerdy on this or whatever, but what are the tools that you're, you're using? I, I, so I pay attention a lot to kind of the news of what's going on generally in AI, uh, you know, follow some subreddits around it. And so I'm not an active programmer anymore. Um, so I don't, you know, but, but it's really interesting to see just how rapidly innovation is taking place and the technology. I know that Claude is just, is really killing it right now, but there are so many new models that keep coming out. And it's like, you know, the model that was popular 30 days ago is, you know, again, just, just got lapped by something new that comes out.

9:58Do you mind maybe just sharing some of the names that folks may have heard about and, and how that integrates with the work that you do? Yeah, so we stay away from the Chinese models just because we don't know what's going on with the data that they, when we train models using their data, it may be perfectly fine, but there's just enough unknown that we just stay away from them. We're using, we've been using, leaning a lot on OpenAI until literally in the last week or two when we're switching in specifically into this being able to generate applications over to Claude with their MCP model. MCP is a protocol that allows Claude to use other third-party sources that we point it to to pull information in and to contextualize it when it needs information from different services and applications.

11:04We've also used Gemini with their 2.0 Flash system. There's a lot of capabilities with Google and Gemini that are really powerful. And a lot of it depends on are we focusing on some kind of voice interface? Are we focusing on systems interacting together, on workflow automation on on deep research on building a customized verticalized model for like healthcare things like it depends on what we're doing and then we just pull different tools and then different third-party tools um that work with them like a code editor that we're using we've looked at all of them cursor seems to integrate the best with ai right now um better than code pilot which is github's product um um we're looking at we're using a product um called oh i just slipped my mind we were just like oh copy coder which helps us to generate prompts that are specific to um ai co-generation yeah uh um and and all of these being applauded is sort of managing all of these resources dynamically.

12:18And QA as well is probably significantly improved. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Basically generating all the automated test cases for us and automating all of the QA process. Yeah. David, can you talk? Yeah. Can you share maybe a few projects that you've worked on lately? Like what would be so to our friend that's listening right now? And they're wondering, they're like, okay, wow. Obviously, the output at which a client can, you know, the output that they can get for the investment has only improved over time. And so, you know, to someone who's on the fence of whether or not, you know, they should consider hiring a developer to provide some stuff that would be really a huge opportunity in the marketplace.

13:07Can you share maybe some examples of projects that are like really in your sweet Spot, like where you really excel at? I can give you a bunch of different examples. Sweet Spot, we build all kinds of sophisticated applications for a lot of different business verticals. Just because we've been doing this for so long, we have a lot of experience in a lot of different verticals, law enforcement, healthcare, finance, just a lot of real estate, or we've done multiple projects in those areas, as well as manufacturing and inventory management logistics. So, but I'll give you, I'll give you a couple examples, recent examples.

13:52So healthcare, and this is a project we actually took over for another, from another development, a big US development firm, just because the client was unhappy with how it was going and they were looking for a change. This was a year and a half ago when we took this one over and it was, basically a voice nurse. So, um, an AI nurse that will reach out and call patients based on, um, particular needs that they have, like, because they, they're, they've been really bad at, at taking or their medication or filling their prescriptions. And in, and this would be in conjunction with like a Medicaid contract where the person that's been given a prescription and has not filled the prescription, which you can see that, that it's not been filled because of online services to the prescribing systems, then reaches out to that person and reminding them that they need to fill it because if they don't, then they'll end up in the emergency room, which costs the state a fortune, right?

14:58And then calls the person and reminds them why they need to take it and gives them the ability to ask any question they want. And this is a very natural sounding conversation too uh where you can um ask the nurse uh the voice nurse questions and she's really empathetic and you can interrupt her and she'll stop and wait to hear what you have to say and then now respond in total context things like that or you might have a wearable device and um and and the ai system notices that you got a potential condition that may be acute that needs intervention, a nurse calls and says, I noticed that your heart rate spiked and because of your health condition, I think we might need intervener.

15:47Schedule something with a physician. Can you tell me how are you feeling? Did you notice that you had symptoms? Having a conversation and then the nurse say, okay, I think maybe it makes sense to schedule you with a clinician and now she's scheduled somebody or gets a real nurse on the phone immediately and let me pass it over to a nurse who can continue the intake process or whatever the right protocol is and we build that AI system to work that way but the thing that makes it so amazing is how natural the communication is with this AI nurse on the phone and how smart they are because they know your medical history inside and out.

16:31They know, um, uh, the, the nurse knows she knows, um, a lot about medicine and she has clear boundaries that she's not going to go beyond in terms of what she can say and suggest and do. That's one example. That's helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, um, uh, I can give you an example of an app that we just built really fast. One of the things that we need because we've got this big network of referral partners that we are constantly trying to build on. But there hasn't been good software on the market to manage this referral partner network. Usually use a CRM, but the CRMs fall short in terms of just managing a referral partner network.

17:18Affiliate marketing is for mass sales, and this is more of a personal relationships with referral partners. So, so we decided to build our own referral partner network, uh, software for managing this. And, uh, um, that's a project that we just today launching the first version of it. Um, that's a product that would have taken us roughly three, 10 weeks to 12 weeks to build the first version. Um, we used, this is one of the tools we're using to benchmark AI code generation capabilities and figure out all of the standard operating procedures and protocols for doing this and still building a scalable system with microservices architecture and automatic deployment, automatic testing.

18:06Anyway, we are less than, a little under three and a half weeks to get the first version out instead of three months. That's amazing. That's amazing. To our friend that's listening, I would imagine you probably have plenty of exploratory conversations where people maybe have ideas. I want to just really put a call out to our friend that might be listening here. Talk with people. Be very careful about getting all of your software ideas from AI. uh ai tends to be exceptionally sycophantic it thinks all of your ideas are brilliant it thinks you can do everything and anything under the moon um and it's just the way that the vast majority of the llms are written right now um you really should talk to a human who has been there done that uh david you've been doing this for a while you got about 18 years just to techies under your belt You've seen a lot of projects out the door.

19:12And what I would encourage someone to do, the exploratory calls are really helpful. Do you mind maybe just sharing like when you have an initial call with someone, like what you typically talk about? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And the first thing I always ask people is, would you like me to send you a mutual NDA? because I don't want anybody to feel like they're sharing their valuable secrets with me without some legal document to protect them. So just know that that's, I'll lead with that. Not everybody cares about the NDA, but I don't want them to have to ask me to send it. I always lead with that.

19:55Then when we started an exploratory call, it's basically, I want them to tell me a little bit about themselves as a person. I want them to tell me about their idea at a very high level. And then I want to know the genesis of the idea. Where did it come from? What was their motivation? How did they come up with this idea? Did it come from a problem that they were struggling with personally? Did it come from just a cool idea they had or a shortfall that they see in a market, not necessarily one that they struggle with, but one that they feel confident has a big opportunity. then I always want to know, what have you done to research the market in terms of competitive products that already do this?

20:36What do you know about the market? Just to understand, I'm not trying to challenge anybody, but I want to help make sure, help them understand the very basic things, if they haven't thought about this, that they should probably go and do. I don't want to take a project with somebody when there's all kinds of competitors on the market, and this problem's already been solved really well, and they just didn't realize it. If they've got a better solution and they already know about all that, that's great. But I want to feel like when somebody comes to work with me, they're getting a partner that's going to work hard to help them be successful, not just a software developer who's looking to bill them hourly for the next X years until they run out of money.

21:22And then we dig into the requirements of the system. what the first version needs to look like, what the big vision is, what the business rules are, as much of the requirements as we can get. Then we'll typically go back, put together a requirements document if they don't already have one, which most people don't. Sometimes they have five bullets on a napkin and we'll turn that into a full-blown requirements document with all of the functionality that we understand based on the conversations we've had with you. And then we send it back to you so that you can review this and make sure that whatever's in there is correct, add the things you need to add, remove the things that you think are put there incorrectly and change whatever you want.

22:08Once we have that, then we put together a very detailed estimate. And I know it's more detailed than most software companies because I speak to lots of other software contracting CEOs out there. And they all, none of them do estimates to the level of detail we do. It's a costly process for us to do it, but we feel that it's important because we want to be accurate. Our estimates are accurate. We deliver typically within 10 % of what we estimate on an average and sometimes even better. So we work really hard to be very detailed in those estimates. And then that gives you all the tools you need.

22:48And it's broken down by module with costs to each of the modules, very often 50, 60 line items in there. And you can turn on and off any item you want for the first version of the product to fit it within your budget and make a decision. And you can take that estimate and go to another software developer if you want to use somebody else to do it. And none of this costs you anything. This is, we consider a cost of sale and it's our way of proving that we're the right company to work with. Yeah. And this is by God, to our friend that's listening, please go the route that David is talking about as opposed to other horror stories I've heard when if you're feeling like you're going to just ideate everything and project manage everything and just go hire some folks on maybe a particular platform or so forth, buyer beware.

23:37I've unfortunately seen a lot of stuff. Because David, I think what you're talking about is really making sure that this is a good idea, right? And that we're being very realistic about what our asks are. There are a lot of people out there that are happy to take your money. It's just a really bad idea. And they're not going to tell you that. So a little bit of personal editorializing in there from days long past, thankfully. Yeah, sure. And I won't tell somebody their idea is a bad idea. because honestly, I don't know. No matter what my, and I've been wrong. In fact, one of my most, this was 11, 12 years ago, a Broadway producer choreographer came to me, wanted to build a system to basically do the work that he did, what's called a stage Bible, where they basically do all of the production of the play on paper first, right?

24:35And they end up with like 2 ,000, 3000 page tome that represents each page represents every either 30 or 60 seconds of the play. And it shows the staging and where the actors are at that. And also the score or the script on the other side. And he wanted to turn this into an iPad app when the iPad was really pretty new. And I, and I asked him, this is the last time I did, by the way, I asked him, I said, are you sure you want to do this because this is going to be an expensive product to build. And, and I'm not sure that you can recoup your investment. How big is this market, right? Broadway producer, choreographer, anyway, he wanted to go forward with it.

25:16He ended up being one of my most successful customers. I've learned a lot since then about, about some of the things that make somebody really successful, right? In terms of, yeah. Yeah. And I didn't mean to talk about viability and that sort of thing. Obviously, there's other people that need to be involved, but at least you're asking the questions, which I think is really important, which is likely not going to come when you're just hiring someone independently. David Hirschfeld, your website is techies.com, T-E-K-Y-Z. It's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for this. Thank you, Josh.

25:50I really appreciate it.

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